Looking Ahead to SCW18’s “How I Scicomm” Panel What does it mean to be a science communicator in 2018?

After my short post on what to leave out of a conference talk, here are few more positive thoughts on what to include , based on some of the SVPCA talks that really stayed with me. First, Graeme Lloyd’s talk in the macroevolution symposium did a great job of explaining very complex concepts well (different ways of mapping morphospace onto phylogeny). It was a necessarily difficult talk to follow, and I did get lost a few times.

I deliberately left a lot of things out of the poster I presented at SVPCA: an abstract (who needs repetition?), institutional logos (who cares?), references (no-one’s going to follow them up that couldn’t find what they need in other ways), headings (all the text was in figure captions) and generally as much text as I could omit without compromising clarity.

This is very belated, but back in the summer of 2014 I was approached to write a bunch of sections — all of them to do with dinosaurs, naturally — in the book Evolution: The Whole Story . I did seven group overviews (Dinosauria overview, prosauropods, sauropods, stegosaurs, ankylosaurs, marginocephalians, and hadrosaurs), having managed to hand the theropod work over to Darren.

It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend. To get this out of the way: it’s always a bad thing when legal threats make information quietly disappear;

This one is for journalists and other popularizers of science. I see a lot of people writing that “scientists believe” this or that, when talking about hadrons or hadrosaurs or other phenomena grounded in evidence. Pet peeve: believing is what people do in the absence of evidence, or despite evidence.

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As a long-standing proponent of preprints, it bothers me that of all PeerJ’s preprints, by far the one that has had the most attention is Terrell et al. (2016)’s Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men.

I was a bit disappointed to hear David Attenborough on BBC Radio 4 this morning, while trailing a forthcoming documentary, telling the interviewing that you can determine the mass of an extinct animal by measuring the circumference of its femur.

A couple of weeks ago, Mike sent me a link to this interview with ecologist James O’Hanlon, who made this poster (borrowed from this post on O’Hanlon’s blog): {.size-large .wp-image-11671 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11671” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/04/13/how-conveniently-can-you-package-your-results/ohanlon-et-al-isbeposter/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/ohanlon-et-al-isbeposter.jpg”