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Recently, I mentioned the benefits of Twitter in an email conversation with the career service office of my alma, Nicholas School of the Environment. Surprisingly, they reprinted my words in their weekly email newsletters to current students. Here’s an excerpt:
There are a number of companies and people who post job links on Twitter. Even if a student is not an avid user, simply following a few sources could pay off. Not to mention it’s a great way to stay on top of new ideas and information in a particular field/network.
Additionally, Twitter has been a great networking tool for me. It opens you to greater networks than Facebook, because the Twitter service is so inherently public that people don’t mind being connected (in fact most take pride in a long list of followers); versus on Facebook where one is more reticent to open your personal life to strangers, and versus LinkedIn where you have to have existing professional connections to be introduced.
At the same time, simply “tweeting” intelligent thoughts and useful news, and “retweeting” useful news from other users could garner you attention, especially from people in the same field. You gain a foot in the door of that network, and it’s been a great ice breaker for me at conferences to say “Hi, we’ve not met in person, but I follow you on Twitter/we’ve traded messages on Twitter.” It’s a great way to talk to people you would otherwise have no business of talking to.
True enough, for a basic primer?
What are some of your thoughts on how social media facilitates scholarly and professional networking in the sciences? Aside from, of course, the now-famous examples such as that of @BoraZ…
Here’s the latest YouTube promo I created for North Carolina Sea Grant’s Coastwatch magazine. I took the photos and the film footage in November 2009 at Duke University’s Sarah Duke Gardens, during a community supported fisheries (CSF) delivery organized by Walking Fish CSF. I produced the clip in iMovie and wrote the script.
The clip promotes my feature story about the rise of CSFs, which you can read here.
And yes, I did say “sea mullet.” As @patriclane cheekily writes, “They don’t have mullets. They don’t have any hair style at all. I’m confused.”
Responses here and here, or look up the species on FishBase.
Investigative journalism is essentially a public good, argues Jay Hamilton, a Duke University media professor. Private citizens pay little to nothing to read news online, while gaining all the benefits reaped from the improved government policy or environmental cleanup resulting from the big break.
Great for the public, bad for the news publisher that spent thousands of dollars in reporter salaries (and potentially lawyer fees). Thus the decline of local investigatory journalism.
To this, Hamilton and other scholars have suggested running newspapers as nonprofits (see also here and here). Hamilton, who is the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, was featured on Duke’s “Online Office Hours” webinar series this past Friday.
During the live Q&A, Hamilton also mentioned the “lowprofit” business model of forming low-profit limited liability corporations, or L3C for short. I was intrigued.
Science journalism is suffering the same, if not worse, extinction trends. The impact of quality science news — connecting citizens to their local natural phenomena, improved purchasing decisions through increased science literacy — are more subtle and more easily dismissed as expendable. One way to keep reporters paid and science coverage alive, then, might be to create a L3C science news service funded by investors kind to the science outreach mission.
But if a L3C model is used for investigatory or specialty journalism such as science news, how can conflict of interest issues be avoided, with regards to funding sources?
I posed this dilemma to Hamilton. My question appears at the 34:33 mark:
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Visitors to the DiVE exhibit can walk around 3D human cell models and move molecules around with a red virtual wand. Photo by Ben Young Landis.
James Cameron, meet Dave Zielinski. He has a cooler toy than you do.
Cameron stuck some 3D glasses on you so you can sit and watch the fantastic, virtual world of Avatar. But Zielinski can do one better — he can take you inside a virtual world, let you walk in it and around it, and let you grab and move its objects around.
Dave Zielinski. Image courtesy of David Zielinski.
Zielinski is a software engineer and exhibit driver at the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE), a million-dollar, nine-and-a-half-foot tall cubical room at Duke University that transforms into a virtual reality sandbox. Researchers come to the DiVE with computer models of brains, molecules, or just about anything, which Zielinski uploads into the room. Once he activates these virtual objects, they eerily hover inside this glowing cave, allowing researchers to visualize and manipulate them from entirely new angles, free from gravity.
Imagine building a house of cards, but all your cards are floating in thin air, waiting for you to move them into place. You still have to wear 3D glasses to see this effect, but that’s what the DiVE can let you do.
Christine Adamczyk of Duke explains the DiVE controls. Photo by Ben Young Landis.
And Zielinski gets paid to operate this powerful tool every day.
“It’s like my dream job,” says Zielinski, who has a master’s degree in computer science.
There are only three other such facilities in the U.S., and their uses aren’t limited to playing with fancy models. Recently, Zielinski and his DiVE colleagues helped behavioral psychologists study human reactions to fear. Test subjects sat in a virtual room projected by the DiVE, and a virtual snake would jump out in surprise. Sensors then detected the electrical activity of the person’s skin, which helps measure the degree of instinctive fear responses.
A bit safer than throwing a real snake at a person to scare them.
DiVE has educational value as well. Medical students use it to visualize the human brain. Another program helps high school students understand metabolism, by letting them drag and move atoms to simulate chemical reactions in three-dimensional space.
It’s a page out of science fiction, like the holodecks portrayed on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the 3D objects themselves are sometimes created in Hollywood software such as Maya, used to help create games and movies like, well, Avatar.
So with virtual worlds and million-dollar, cutting edge technology in the palms of his hands, what would Zielinski play with if he could design anything for the DiVE?
