How to succeed on Reddit - write for scienceblogs.com

There are lots and lots of science sites out there doing similar things - LiveScience.com, Scienceblog.com, Scienceblogs.com, Sciam.com,physorg.com,ScientificBlogging.com, ScienceDaily.com. Except for ScienceDaily ( though I love those guys), they all do some original content and which one you prefer to read really comes down to where you fall on the political spectrum as much as the tone of the publication. I help out on ScientificBlogging.com on occasion, mostly because I have a friend who is over there, and basically I help by distilling news releases into articles and making sure the pictures are pretty. I haven't written any original articles yet, though a lot of people do. At some point when I write articles more regularly, I will do that too because it's probably the most politically neutral of the science sites. You don't have rants against religious people or certain political parties as part of their editorial or "what sells" policy. This is a special case though, so I am writing today. I am just publishing this on my site because it has nothing to do with any of the science sites and I don't want it to reflect on scientificblogging.com, who basically seem to be interested in creating the non-agenda driven site everyone claims to want. Ordinarily I would tell anyone who is trying to get the word out about science writing that Reddit is the way to go. In my opinion ( and it's just that ) Digg is more for technology and Reddit is more for science. It turns out Reddit may not be a friend to science articles if you place articles from the wrong science sites. Digg has ( or had ) a bury brigade, groups of malicious users who kept content off the front page by voting it down and voting their own things up. I am not sure what they get out of that since Digg doesn't seem to award prizes or pay money for the people with the most popular articles. Actually, I don't understand a lot of about Digg but I assumed that Reddit, being a more scientific readership, was also more mature. I got an email yesterday from another volunteer editor at scientificblogging discussing why his articles never showed up on Reddit. I assumed it was a mistake. When I went to his profile it showed them. But then I submitted one and it never showed up either. It's in my profile as submitted, it just never makes it to the main page. I don't know a lot of about the mechanics of Reddit but I started looking around and found my rating: -18. Now why would I have a - 18? It's not like I put up advertising or post my own articles. I could even understand being 0 if no one liked what I put there but instead I am effectively buried before any of my posted articles get seen. They do not exist to anyone except me. I found the common denominator and wrote my friend back and told him I had probably submitted too many for scientificblogging, around 15 over the last three months, so it looked like self-promotion. He didn't seem to like that, since he had submitted only 4 articles and his content never showed up either, so he did a search and sent me the results. Searching on ScienceDaily.com has about what you'd expect for the premiere science news release aggregator. Lots of posted articles from many different people. Searching on scienceblogs gave him an entirely different result. Scienceblogs had a few different people over the last year but one stood out even under the quick search: Wow. That grrlscientist person really loves scienceblogs. So he searched on her name and found not only does she love scienceblogs, she submits them exclusively ( or not, how much time would you spend searching after the first 25 are all from the same site? ) Then he highlighted the URL of the scienceblogs sites she submits and all of them are in the form: http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/ - every single one. So she is writing the articles on scienceblogs, submitting them to Reddit herself, and has 600 Karma ( the Reddit measure of popularity ) for doing so. How is that not self-promotion or spam but I have -18 for submitting 5 articles per month ( out of 500 written each month ) from one site? For submitting less than two dozen news articles, not even stuff I wrote, the same things you find on ScienceDaily or anywhere else that does news releases, I have -18 Karma. A scienceblogs writer is using Reddit as their personal PR organ and has over 600. Reddit is not a big company, I assume, though they got a lot of money for what they do, and it may be that their Terms of Service are not carved in stone. It may also be that they don't have an automatic mechanism to recognize self-promotion. If they do have an automatic mechanism to detect self-promotion, it would surely have caught someone from scienceblogs violating it so flagrantly. It may be that Reddit has its own version of the Digg bury brigade. I doubt ScienceDaily has any grudges against ScientificBlogging, since they are 10X the readership and aren't in the original content business, so it probably isn't them. Likewise, LiveScience isn't worried about anyone small. On the other hand, Scienceblogs seems to think they invented the concept of science and blogging, even though scienceblog.com and lots of others were around before them. About scientificblogging.com, one of their people wrote: wordmunger Jan 30th 2007 - "I don't think we need to worry about it as competition -- it's a poor imitation of ScienceBlogs. It hurts my eyes just to look at it." Scientificblogging.com doesn't do tirades against Republicans so it is truly not a competitor, it does news, original content from some pretty famous writers and allows science writers to host their own blogs on the site. That's 0 for 3 in comparison to scienceblogs, unless you consider fame for political polemics the scientific kind. Heck, some people over there even think they invented putting social news site submissions below their articles, a real revolutionary concept in 2007: Tim Murtaugh Jan 30th 2007 - "Dude -- they stole my icons to Digg, Newsvine, etc." Yes, they think that they invented both science writing and the little icons that social news sites provide to make it easier for readers. I wonder if scienceblogs people think they invented Drupal also? Again, it would seem unlikely Reddit is doing this as any kind of formal policy. Favoritism of any kind in the democracy of social news will get you killed by your readers. Or will it? The obvious test is to post content from a different site and see if it shows up. So he did. Here is how it looked a few hours later: Yes, it's right there. It immediately got 2 down votes, so maybe the Reddit bury brigade hates USA Today or marks anyone who posts science content from scientificblogging.com for termination. But the scientificblogging.com posts still are nowhere to be found. Only in the personal prefs part of the submitter. So ScientificBlogging.com posts are magically prohibited from even showing up but an author on scienceblogs doing blatant self-promotion has 3 up in the span of 2 hours without being marked or anyone thinking that is out of the ordinary. If this gets published at all, it's because Reddit support never responded to the email questions about what constitutes spam and self-promotion. If it is published I am going to have someone put it up on Digg because I know on Digg it has at least a fair chance of being seen. It's unlikely you will find that on Reddit any time soon.

Who Funds The Global Warming Consensus?

Read about it here.

Retailers Complain About Global Warming Christmas

Retailers are calling it the Coat Crisis of 2006, a fashion fiasco measured in racks of unsold fur-lined shearlings at Saks Fifth Avenue and down puffer jackets at Bloomingdale’s. Balmy temperatures on the East Coast, with average highs this holiday season 15 degrees warmer than last year, have been disastrous for sales of all kinds of cold-weather clothing, from cashmere caps to wool scarves. What seemed like a meteorological aberration — the coatless, hatless, gloveless morning commute in Washington, New York and Boston — is starting to feel like the new normal, encouraging consumers to splurge on a flat-screen television instead of a peacoat. The glut of winter wear has sent a chill through the executive suites of major retailers, who count on big profits from coats in the crucial holiday shopping season. They are even starting to grumble about the first “global warming Christmas.” So like farmers praying for rain, merchants have begun scanning weather forecasts, hoping for a sudden drop in temperature to lift their sales. “At first, you start to chuckle in the morning when it’s 50 degrees, then you start to snicker and then you start to curse,” said Rick Weinstein, director of sales and marketing at Searle, a Manhattan retailer that supplies coats to high-end department stores. Read the rest here.

Global Warming Solutions: Markets, taxes, or nothing at all?

Assume man-made global warming is a big, bad problem. Let's try some thought experiments concerning what, if anything, should be done about it. One "solution" might be recognizing, at least, that there is nothing to be done about it. One might argue that for the sake of lifting billions of poor people out of abject poverty humanity must continue to burn cheap oil and coal to fuel economic growth in this century. One unavoidable side effect is that this will increase the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus boost global average temperatures by between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. People three generations hence will just have to adapt to this increase. Fortunately because of the wealth produced by burning fossil fuels, average incomes will have increased about sevenfold and so they will have the resources to do so. In addition, wealth may enable them to develop new low pollution energy technologies. But let's further assume that that it turns out that most people prudentially prefer to leave a cooler planet to their posterity. What to do then? In that case, one proposed "solution" is a global carbon market. This is the idea behind the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) established to meet its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Countries set a limit on how much carbon dioxide they will emit and then allocate permits to emitters. The permits can be bought and sold among emitters. Those that can cheaply abate their emissions will do so and have some permits leftover. The cheap abaters can then sell their extra permits to other emitters who have a harder time reducing their emissions. Thus a market in pollution permits finds the cheapest way to cut emissions. The advantage of creating a carbon market is that it allows for the setting an overall specific limit on carbon emissions. For example, some scientists argue that it will be necessary to cut humanity's carbon emissions by 70 percent in order to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Once carbon has a price, it boosts the prices that people pay for electricity and gasoline. Read the rest of the article here.

Open peer review a bust for NATURE

Back in the summer, we reported that Nature, perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal on the planet, was experimenting with open peer review (OPR). Instead of simply assigning manuscripts to a set of anonymous reviewers, Nature offered the authors the opportunity to also have their work posted on a publicly accessible site that provided a mechanism for making comments on the text. The editors would then combine the peer reviewers' recommendations with the public comments when making decisions regarding whether to publish the work or to require additional revisions. Nature ran a trial of this system (details are available as a FAQ) from the beginning of June until the end of September, and followed up on it with surveys of authors and editors. Their resulting analysis makes it clear that, at least as structured, OPR went nowhere. Out of nearly 1,400 manuscripts chosen for review during that period, only five percent of the authors agreed to have theirs subjected to OPR. Those 71 manuscripts elicited a grand total of 92 comments; nearly half received no comments at all, and over half of the comments were directed at eight individual papers. Read the rest of the article here.

Climate Change vs Mother Nature: Scientists reveal that bears have stopped hibernating

Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world. In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep. Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, slowing their body rhythms to a minimum and drawing on stored resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. The barely breathing creatures can lose up to 40 per cent of their body weight before warmer springtime weather rouses them back to life. But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera - which have a slightly different genetic identity from bear populations elsewhere in the world - have remained active throughout recent winters, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation (La Fundación Oso Pardo - FOP) said yesterday. Read the rest of the article here.

These Aren't The Scientific Results You Want To Publish

In today's environmental news of the bizarre, Al Gore rushed to a rally in Berkeley, California. ``I'm here to change peoples' minds on the climate crisis and to support Prop 87,'' Gore called to a group of reporters after he emerged from the ``100 miles per gallon'' Toyota Prius that brought him to a noontime rally in a sun-drenched park behind Berkeley's City Hall. What did he leave out of his environmental zeal? The fact that the three motorcycles, two limousines and Dodge Ram 1500 light duty truck in his motorcade emitted enough noxious fumes for a regular working stiff to drive back and forth to his job for three weeks. Prop. 87 is an additional tax on California gas production - already the highest in America - so that California poor people can subsidize research on alternative fuels everywhere else in the world. It's kind of like the Queen Of Holland owning a vineyard in Tuscany and getting a government subsidy paid for by Italy's working poor, only funnier. Elsewhere, Newsweek admitted it was wrong about global cooling in the 1970s but is sure they are right about global warming today. Sayeth Newsweek, "In April, 1975 ... NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster" and then says, "More than 30 years later, that little story is still being quoted regularly—as recently as last month on the floor of the Senate by Republican Sen. James Inhofe, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the self-proclaimed scourge of climate alarmists" Their contention is that this article was small and insignificant so it shouldn't be used as evidence that they are clueless today. Except, no Newsweek reporter ever had an original thought in their entire lives. They were writing about this after it was well-established hysteria and TIME had already done the same article. Sorry, NEWSWEEK. I doubt your reporters are all that much better now. If you say the sun will shine tomorrow, I am bringing an umbrella.

How You Know America Rules The Science World

A few years ago Nobel Peace Prize Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge awarded a prize to America's fourth most useless President of the 20th century, Jimmy Carter, and declared the prize "must also be seen as criticism of the line the U.S. administration has taken on Iraq ... a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States." In other words, we will give a prize to ineffectual Americans because we're more about politics than peace. Communist darling of the left Joseph Stalin being a nominee while Ghandi never got one at all tells you all you need to know about the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Now it seems the curse is inflicting the hard sciences also. Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford was awarded the prize in chemistry for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins. Important stuff, you say? Well, sure, but so are lots of things in chemistry. Kornberg stands out because understanding the process is key to using stem cells to treat disease. George Bush made it possible for federal funding of stem cell research but he objected, as did many, when some scientists want to use that federal money for things other than embryonic stem cell lines derived from embryos that had already been destroyed. This was a call to war for political activists ( and a few scientists ) who felt that a stem cell is a stem cell. Most scientists long ago conceded that the difference in actual research value is minor but the political community is using the shifting target of this science to make a case against a politician they do not like. Now the Nobel Committee is doing the same in chemistry. No one will be as stupid as Berge and come out and admit it. Plus, I bet on George Whitesides to win this for his work on Self-Assembly and I lost 5 bucks so I'm a little extra cranky.