Reinvention

It's going to be a little untidy here at DNS while I mess around with the layout, finally populate that scrawny sidebar over there and, most importantly, set a few rules about what this blog is and isn't going to be about. Yep, we're talkin' discipline. And it's not even New Year's Day yet.

Speaking of reinvention, don't miss Richard Grant's play-by-play account of transitioning from science to, well, not science. I'm not entirely clear yet what Richard's new gig is but whatever it is, if these posts are any indication, he's going to shine:

• On Being at the Centre of the Universe
• In which I watch the Watchmen, and land a new job
• On leaping out of the void

And in case you're wondering why he's talking about leaping out of a void, you might do well to take in Jennifer Rohn's April 2007 excellent post on leaping into one.

Moving to Science Friday & vote for new blog name

In January I met Talia Page and Ann Marie Cunningham of Talking Science at the Science Blogging Conference in North Carolina, and they invited me to write for Science Friday Blogs (the site is currently being re-vamped to be way more blogolicious).

I've always loved Science Friday--Ira Flatow's calming tones and fascinating guests used to help get me through Friday afternoon fruit fly ovary dissections in grad school--and I admire their ambitions, so I consider it a real honour to be asked to blog with them.

You can probably tell from my patchy posting here that Data Not Shown has been something of an experiment. I wasn't sure when I started it how many posts I'd end up wanting to write that weren't appropriate for The Beagle Project Blog, and I think the answer has turned out to be a resounding "not many".

So. I'm closing up shop here at Data Not Shown and re-inventing myself a little bit for the new Science Friday blog. I think part of the reason I didn't get really jazzed about Data Not Shown is that it didn't have a coherent and succinct theme. Thus my aims for the new blog are:

1. to post regularly if not as often as I do on the Beagle Project Blog, say, once a week to start.
2. to write themed series' of posts, for example a weekly biology and/or evolution glossary entry, a series of interviews with scientists I admire, or maybe even a series of video podcasts from the lab and other parts of the Natural History Museum.

I am also thinking of re-naming the blog. Please use the poll on the upper right side of this page to let me know what name you like best.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to seeing you over at SciFri blogs!

Coming soon: data not shown

If you're reading this you probably just clicked over from the Beagle Project Blog. Welcome to Data Not Shown, a new blog that I created because, much as I love blogging for the Beagle, I wanted a new outlet for posts that 1) have nothing to do with the Beagle and/or 2) contain personal opinion that I wouldn't want to foist onto the other Beagle Projecteers.

As is traditional in first posts, I am now going to explain the title of my blog. "Data not shown" is a commonly used parenthetical statement in scientific research papers. It means "we did the experiment but we're not showing you the data, so you'll simply have to take our word for it", and it is usually employed for one or more of the following reasons:

1. The data are reliable but so eyewateringly boring and predictable that they would just clutter an otherwise riveting manuscript.

2. The data are reliable but very, very unpretty.

3. The data are both interesting and pretty, but we just had so much of it (blush) that we had to make difficult decisions to meet the journal's word and/or page limit (this is less relevant now in the era of online supplementary material ...oh dear, am I showing my age?).

4. We didn't do the experiment, but are willing to stake our reputations on the outcome should someone actually "repeat" it.

Here's an example of "data not shown" in a paper that I wrote, used for a combination of reasons 1 and 3 above:


It is important not to confuse "data not shown" with other, related parentheticals such as "unpublished data" (we are going to milk another paper out of this baby) or "personal communication" (our collaborator/competitor let it slip at the conference mixer).

For this blog, "data not shown" should be interpreted in its broadest sense, to mean everything that goes on in science (and life) that doesn't get published (that is, except here). I hope this wider net will keep the blog from being eyewateringly boring. After all, who except the most die-hard masochist wants to read a bunch of posts that say things like "ventral Ras clones had no effect on pipe-lacZ expression"?

Oh, and I might occasionally show some data. Hopefully the universe won't implode when I do.

More soon, but for now best get back over to the Beagle Project Blog and while you're at it why not donate or buy something from one of our shops.