#sciwrite

[earthstory]

Would you like to write for The Earth Story?

We are currently recruiting for enthusiastic new volunteer writers for the TES Facebook page and blog. Do you think you have what it takes?

You don’t need a science degree or experience in writing, but what you do need is a heap of enthusiasm, ideas, patience and time.

We are looking for individuals who are passionate about the Earth Sciences, be it Geology, Oceanography, Meteorology, Environmental Science or any other branch of science that tells the story of Earth. You will be joining a team of fellow enthusiasts and we promise to make you feel at home!

Writing for TES is fun and rewarding, but it is hard work- so to be part of this team you need to fit these criteria:

•Write concisely and clearly, making sure that information is engaging and in your own words and make reference to other work where appropriate.

•Here at TES we endeavour to show due respect to all the talented people who capture the beauty of the world around us through a camera lens. So, new admins will need to source suitable pictures that are within the public domain, covered by fair use (such as press photos) or gain permission from photographers for use in their posts.

•Have time; think clearly about this. We require a minimum of three posts per week from our writers in order to keep the page going, but the more posts, the better. This is harder to achieve that you would think. You will need to find a way to integrate it into the rest of your life.

If you are interested in joining our team, please message the TES Facebook page and we will get back to you. We will be asking each person to submit a sample post on a topic of their choosing- so get thinking!

Thank you all for reading; we look forward to your posts and to adding members to our team.

-The Earth Story.

Image credit: Joachim Schlichting

[metacogs]

5 things I've learned about science writing

It's hard to believe that I'm wrapping up my third week at Slate! It feels like I've been here in DC forever. For those of you who don't know me in real life, my writing gig this summer is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Mass Media Fellowship, which places students majoring in sciences at media outlets around the country. I feel incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity to turn my science writing hobby into my day job, if only for the summer.

Besides blogging and writing for student publications, I walked into Slate with no formal science writing training. Maybe it's because Slate is wonderfully laid back, or because my editor, Laura, is a fantastic mentor who has allowed me creative space while also giving great feedback, but the transition has been smooth. Here are a few things I've had to get used to:

1. Enjoy interviews. My first day on the job, I was incredibly nervous about calling sources on the phone. What if they call me out for not knowing about their subject of expertise? What if I sound stupid? And then I realized - they don't care if you sound stupid. They actually seem kind of relieved when you sound stupid, because it means they can relax and explain things to you that they've known for years. It's kind of like how people say that snakes are more afraid of you than you are of them -- if anything, it's way harder for the interviewer, because they're doing most of the talking to give you info while you're just taking it in. After my first week, I became a lot more comfortable with picking up the phone, and calling people has become one of my favorite things about this job.

2. Instantaneous email responses. As a grad student, I email profs and end up waiting a week or more for a response. As a journalist, I email profs and get a reply in 2-5 minutes. It's kind of magical. And it's not only profs - everyone I've contacted has been incredibly generous with their time and knowledge.

3. People have weird taste. Maybe this is a skill that comes with more experience, but I have been terrible at anticipating which topics will resonate with people. At this point, my most-read article is about 50,000-year-old poop. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

4. There's so much stuff to write about. Before the summer started, I was hoarding story ideas. Maybe this is a result of my academic training, but I was afraid that someone would scoop me! It turns out this was totally unnecessary. There have been so many fun new research studies that have come out recently that I've barely looked at my list of ideas (with the exception of this piece about "WEIRD" kids in developmental psych studies, which I've thinking about for years). Plus, lots of news outlets cover the same study, and that's perfectly ok. You can always take a different angle on it to make your piece distinct from others. In fact, I now enjoy it when other outlets cover the same news, because reading NYT's or Wired's take on the same topics I write on has encouraged me to re-examine my writing.

5. DON'T READ THE COMMENTS. DON'T FEED THE TROLLS. I made the mistake earlier today of reading the top few comments on something I wrote. There were some lovely insults levied at me, as well as some discussion about my life in which commenters used their Google-fu skills to read up about me. Someone on Twitter also pointed out to me that a fairly well-known scientist called the points I made in a piece last week "idiotic", which was kind of fun. I practically live on the internet and am totally desensitized to seeing insults about other people, but it feels weird to be the subject of it now.

[arganka]

Salah satu course yang penting di program HTI adalah scientific writing, mengapa? karena tulisan di bidang akademik merupakan salah satu medium untuk menyebarkan pengetahuan dan ide yang kita dapatkan.

Course ini sangat bermanfaat untuk saya khususnya, karena kurangnya background pada riset di bidang HTI, terlebih lagi reporting (ya, simplenya thesis, paper, journal, dll hanya laporan dari pekerjaan kita). Lebih untungnya lagi course ini ditawarkan (atau diwajibkan lebih tepatnya) pada awal2 kuliah.

Outcome dari course ini sangat simple, membuat research proposal. Kita bisa mengambil ide apa saja yang terkait dengan bidang yang diminati. Research proposal ini tidak harus FIX menjadi topik thesis nanti. Karena itu mahasiswa tidak perlu was-was dan bisa menikmati proses penulisan research proposal tersebut.

Project/riset yang baik penting, tapi pembuatan laporan yang baik dapat menambah nilai dari pekerjaan yang kita lakukan; bisa dimengerti oleh teman2 seperjuangan, masyarakat luas, dan dikembangkan oleh orang lain.

Mungkinkah course seperti ini ditawarkan pada mahasiswa sarjana pada tahun2 pertama?

[52hertz]

via edelweiss mag, translated from french to english by google

In twenty years of stalking, nobody has ever seen the whale 52 Hz . Yet we hear. Its cry sounds, if it were here and there in the depths of the North Pacific, off the coast of British Columbia. The whale launches calls, pushes his melodies for hours, and nobody replied. For other whales sing on lower frequencies between 12Hz and 25Hz. To his peers, singing our lonely specimen is thus not a song, it's just noise. It is nothing at all. And when we know that the whale song, it's usually a love call, we imagine the whale 52 Hz single forever and we all inevitably returned. While music bands wrote songs for him ( The Loneliest Whale in the World of Dalmatian Rex, Doreen the Whale , Kate Micucci, The Loneliest Creature on Earth , Laura Ann Bates). The Germans Agnieszka Jurek and Thies Schwarz devoted a book for children ( 52 Hertz Wal ). The filmmaker Joshua Zeman is doing a film about the animal. Artist Mike Ambs and devoted a blog called The Loneliest Mix where you can listen to variations on this song supposed épleuré.

Some think 52 Hz is an unexpected hybrid between a blue whale and fin whale. Others believe that the whale has learned the wrong language, it is a linguistic mutant, stuck between two different dialects - as the whale does not even sing in the same way as it comes from the Atlantic or Pacific ... Recorded for the first time by oceanographer Bill Watkins in 1989, singing since wanders up and down in the ocean, always alone, recorded by hydrophones placed once at sea by the U.S. Navy to detect submarines Soviet and more or less sold to civilians since the end of the Cold War. Blog MIT SciWrite of the Public Library of Science has just relaunched the quest It keeps track ..