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Canadian Oxford Dictionary 2nd Edition
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Access to other web-based reference materials

The editor in me shudders at the title, but I’m not above blatantly asking for approval. It almost feels like one of those awkward high school moments. . .

Yes, I have joined Technorati.    

I recently discovered that some of my posts have been picked up by Technorati so I figured that I better “ride the wave”. Please make me feel popular and fave me. All the cool kids are doing it. Really.

I even faved myself, but Jake Seliger did it first, so I thought it would be okay. Oh no – I just went and gave you more authority Jake!

In February, I attended a seminar called “Blogs, podcasts and online syndication” delivered by Dean Owen of BRASS Media through the Alberta Business Link. The Business Link is a not-for-profit business support service provided by the government. They have lots of resources available to entrepreneurs and have a fabulous service called the “Guest Advisor Program”.

I quite like the seminars the Business Link broadcasts through their videoconferencing system. I have attended quite a few of these sessions and find that most of the material is pretty basic, but can be a nice introduction to a wide variety of topics. In fact, their portfolio of offerings has gotten better over the past year. An added incentive is that most of the seminars are free – and you just can’t beat that value!

Sometimes it is difficult to take the time to learn new things when there are a million other things clamouring for your attention. Of course, it is hard to justify going to a course when you aren’t sure if you will actually learn anything – shaking off cynicism can be tough. Keeping in mind Parkinson’s Law, (I’ll paraphrase: ‘work will expand to fill all the time available’) I am trying hard to schedule learning, marketing and exercise commitments into my schedule to ensure that I make time for these important things in my life. A few years ago I decided that I would apply a rule of thumb: if I learnt one new thing per hour from a course or training session then it wasn’t a waste of my time. If I learned two new things in total, the course was a great investment of my time.

But, back to the blogging seminar. . . I learned much more than two things! So – success! In fact, I learned some new words: splogging and flogging. I suppose that I won’t run across these regularly in my writing, but since they explain phenomena in the blogoverse, I thought that I would share them with you:

Splogging: is a term describing blog plagiarists. Sometimes this activity is also called blog scraping. The worst offenders take someone else’s content and re-post it and then earn advertising revenue based on visits to the stolen content. Of course there are degrees of scraping, but basically I have learned that it is naughty blogger behaviour. There are some companies/sites that have automated tools to do this – which expands the problem very quickly.

Flogging: an internet term that describes a fake blog, where a ghostwriter or marketing firm is hired to create content as a marketing tool and misrepresents the voice by pretending to be someone else. See The Consumerist’s article ‘Sony’s PSP blog flog revealed’.

In addition to learning a little bit more about blogging and podcasting from the seminar, I have started to become very interested in the implications of web 2.0 on science teaching, research and commercialization. I think this might become a recurring topic – once I find the time.

A colleague’s email sent me off to visit the Neatorama store this morning. It has all sorts of trinkets and other junk, but by far my favourite set of products are the science t-shirts:

“Support bacteria! It’s the only culture that some people have.”

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”

And another set of t-shirts that had me laughing out loud are the “Scientists do it . . .” series:

“Chemists do it in an excited state”

“Seismologists make the earth move”

You get the idea. I am kind of a geek for science humour and puns. If you’ve got them, send them to me and make my day!

Since my previous post, I have been thinking a lot about perspective and perception. An article by Steven Wiley, “The Problem of Perception”* in the recent issue of The Scientist* made me want to explore this further. Call it thinking out loud, because I don’t claim to be an expert.

Wiley describes his experience of how scientific controversies arise from differences in how researchers interpret data. He states:

“In science, we do not gather facts. We make observations. Our interpretation of observations is only as good as our assumptions and conceptual frameworks.”

I would take this further and state that this isn’t true only in science. It is a human trait to apply our personal paradigm and the information available to interpret the situation at hand. But, what if we don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle? Obviously, our analysis and actions end up being flawed.

One of my mentors had a mantra: “Take the information available, make the best decision you can, and fix it later. It is more important to be agile than accurate in business.” He didn’t mean that we should always make mistakes, but he understood that in order to act quickly, we would occasionally have to make decisions based on a partial view of the situation. This would necessarily lead to the occasional error in judgment; however, since we moved rapidly, the negative effect of an error would be mitigated by our response to correct it.

Therein lies the crux of the challenge – recognizing the error in observation and interpretation.

Most people are entrenched in their opinion and are unable to recognize or appreciate a differing position. It is all about perspective. Whether it is boss vs. employee or graduate student vs. professor, each individual has a different perspective of the situation and generates an opinion of the other without knowing all of the information. Even if they knew everything, which in many human resource situations they do not, how they interpret the information they have colours their reality and impacts how they perceive the outcome.

I have experienced this first hand. Once upon a time I worked for an early stage company that was going through its death throes. I was in a unique position where the staff perceived me as ‘one of them’ and I also worked with the management team as an observer. I got to see the quintessential childhood game of telephone (AKA Chinese whispers) – how a message gets distorted through gossip and misinterpretation. In this situation, the staff did not have all of the information available to the management team and made assumptions about the state of the company and the security of their jobs based on their perception of events. After the company was defunct, I talked to many people outside the company and learned a great deal about external factors and how others perceived the sequence of events. This opened my eyes to seeing a scenario from many different perspectives.

In science, as with everything, there are several sides to an argument – your side, my side, and the truth (which might include your perspective, my perspective, a combination of the two, or something entirely new).

Be willing to consider the alternatives and you might learn something new.

*Current articles from The Scientist are available with a free registration