Chronicles from Hurricane Country

On January 18, 2012

2012-01-17T12:21:00.002-05:00

Several sites (including reddit, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Failblog and the rest of the Cheezburger Network, and BoingBoing) are blacking out tomorrow. I will be off social media.

Here's why:

SOPA blockout countdown clock (with link to "Stop SOPA, The Essentials Summary And Bill Text" via @YourAnonNews and video "A call to action for webmasters around the world"

"The day the internet fought back: Anonymous, SOPA & the Battle for Free Speech" (some language NSFW)

"SOPA Blackout Set For January 18th: Here’s All The Info" (WebProNews)

A Matter of Narrative

2012-01-07T20:43:00.003-05:00

This tweet from Bora Zivkovic brought my attention to Sam McNerney's post on the dangers of storytelling, specifically in pop psychology books.

1. Simplify, simplify!

Humans are cognitively driven to simplify, McNerney writes. "This cognitive tendency is a good thing most of the time – it helps us understand and organize the world. The byproduct, however, is a naïve conception of the world that tends to be too simple."

McNerney continues, "The more accurate picture is that life is a 'mess' and psychology -- neuroscience to a larger extent -- is still relatively young in its endeavors. Experts and enthusiasts know this, but the headlines on CNN.com and some tweets within the psychology twittersphere suggest that most do not; they still try to sum up how human behavior works with a sound bit."

I agree, and would further point out that many news outlets try to sum up just about everything with a sound bit. Pop psych is no outlier in this.

However, pop psych is a watered-down version of the science of psychology, which is part of the larger scientific research corpus (in an era when the standing of social science within that corpus could become endangered; but that's another issue).

And, while pop psych tends to oversimplify by trimming away the messy bits, research suggests that this trimming away does not make pop psychology -- or its more formalized progenitur, psychology -- an outlier within the larger scientific corpus, either. It just simplifies using simpler, lay language.

How might peer-reviewed scientific research as a whole engage in simplification, and thereby fall into its own narrative traps? Through its suggested bias against negative results, for one.

2. The Rest of the Iceberg

"Journals don’t have policies against publishing negative results," wrote Curt Rice, who directs research and development at Norway's University of Tromsø. "The World Association of Medical Editors states, on the contrary, that 'studies with negative results … should receive equal consideration.' At the same time, there is research suggesting that statistically significant results increase the chance of publication, thereby lowering the odds that negative results get into print."

Negative results are experimental failures. They can also represent experimental screw-ups. They are by their very nature messy. But they are also valuable learning tools in several ways, and in ways that can impact multiple audiences: scientists, science students, and laypeople.

David Eaves, an advisor to several governments on open data, pointed his readers to this blog kept by microbiologist Rosie Redfield. Redfield is trying to replicate research results.

Eaves wrote, "Here is someone literally walking through their thought processes in a thorough, readable way. Can you imagine anything more helpful for a student or young scientist? And the posts! Wonderfully detailed walk throughs of what has been tried, progress made and set backs uncovered. And what about the candor! The admission of error and the attempts to figure out what went wrong."

This is not typical in science; Redfield's reporting was so unusual that Nature had named her one of the top ten science newsmakers of 2011. It led Eaves to ask, "Why isn't this the norm?"

(Eaves added that the type of dialogue Redfield created needed to appear in every field, not just in science but also in nonprofits and in business.)

One might argue that statistically significant results make for the better story. They simplify outcomes. Within the narrative of experimental design and implementation, statistically significant results become a "sound bit."

Replication is itself an issue when it comes to the scientific narrative, particularly with respect to the social sciences. (See, for example, this Science News article, which itself delves into the oftentimes messy world of statistics. Non-subscribers can read UC-Berkeley lecturer emeritus Juliet Shaffer's quote about replication here.)

In short, negative results are not sexy. Replication of results is not sexy, either, as framed in our current scientific narrative. Ultimately, that framing ties into funding. In my lay opinion, negative results and replication can be just as sexy as the "breakthroughs" that become disproportionately represented, particularly in the popular media. (I say "lay opinion" here because I am not in the trenches and my knowledge is limited. Feedback invited.)

It is no surprise that the media focuses on breakthroughs, according to metallurgist and science communications student Magdaline Lum. Or that "constantly reporting 'breakthroughs' raises unrealistic expectations," according to Darren Saunders, who leads the cancer research program at Australia's Garvan Institute.

And even the breakthrough stories are simplified. The bigger ones eclipse much more frequent, smaller accomplishments.

Overemphasizing big-ticket-item breakthroughs leads to a further misconception. According to Jonathan Haskel, an economics professor at London's Imperial College, the disproportionate air time paid to big breakthroughs has engendered a belief that science takes decades to realize a return on investment. Haskel's study of 30 years of science funding in Britain indicated otherwise.

"Everybody said to us, the trouble with science spending...is it takes 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, to get an outcome," he told Robyn Williams in an interview for ABC Radio's "The Science Show." "When we looked at the data, we found that was not the case, actually. We got quite a strong correlation between that substantial increase in spending and productivity growth about two years later. Which is rather faster than many of the stories that you hear about in the papers."

The papers talk about outer space or particular biological drugs, Haskel added. But those are only a small subset of science research as a whole.

The overemphasis on bigger and bigger breakthroughs, coupled with the de-emphasizing of negative results and certain replication studies, creates an illusion of superhuman perfection and reinforces the expectation thereof. And in my opinion, the popular media is not entirely responsible for this perception.

Changing the narrative -- adding the "mess" to science storytelling -- can help shatter a mythos of the unattainable.

3. When The Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary

"There is a misconception that to do research, you have to give up the ordinary pleasures of life: seeing friends, going to movies, having children."

Agora's Abby Tabor wrote about the importance of sharing information with the general public, not only about how scientists worked, but about how they lived their daily lives.

Biophysicist Federica Migliardo of the University of Messina told Tabor that young people viewed scientists as gods. "They imagine [scientists] live on Olympus, that we are geniuses, and that it would be impossible to reach our goals," Migliardo said. Girls especially labored under this misconception.

When one considers the human drive toward simplification, equating scientists with gods and geniuses is, in my opinion, the product of a current narrative existing within science, that at best de-emphasizes and at worst censors the failures and setbacks that are a natural and expected part of research. The popular media, already geared toward oversimplification, can only amplify the pre-existing bias. That bias has become well-entrenched via funding incentives and disincentives that are largely beyond the control of the scientists themselves.

Marie-Claire Shanahan, Associate Professor of Science Education at the University of Alberta, had experienced her own version of the "gods and geniuses" mythos when she asked, "Who is the traditional right type of person for science?"

"Traditional" was the definitive term. It conjured up the idea of repetition, an at-times blind adherence to a particular action or idea, the fallback of, "It’s just always been that way."

Traditions were designed to be taken for granted.

Traditions are simplifiers. In his essay on pop psychology, McNerney decried the tendency of pop psych books to "reduce human cognition into a monism -- 'go with your gut', 'think things through' or 'don't trust your intuition.'"

Here's another one: "[R]eal science students don't need to participate in science class because they should know the right answers already."

And: "[T]here’s more rules to follow than room for creativity" in science.

That's what Shanahan's students had told her.

It turned out there were traditional ways of thinking about science and about scientists, both in education and in popular culture.

Shanahan began to better understand why one young woman, whom she thought would make an excellent science student, had insisted she wasn't cut out for it. "She was curious, outspoken, creative in her scientific thinking and when she found a question interesting she would pursue it endlessly until she was satisfied." The topics they had bandied about had ranged from climate change to DNA replication.

The student had shocked Shanahan by saying she wasn't scientist material.

Those misconceptions ranged across demographics, from urban to suburban to rural, public to private to technical schools, whose teachers varied widely in their educational experience and in their approach. Despite all those differences, a common stereotype arose about what made a good science student.

"Even when individual teachers do innovative and inspiring things, these ideas are still embedded in lab practices, such as the 'right answer' style lab reports," Shanahan wrote.

What's more, students showing real scientific curiosity could be penalized for stepping out of those "traditional" bounds. They could even be discouraged from pursuing scientific interests, either vocationally or avocationally, to which they were actually well-suited.

Pop psychology is not an outlier here, when it comes to engendering misconceptions through oversimplification -- specifically, through spinning the messy parts away from storytelling. On the contrary. Within the broader discourse in certain scientific circles, it fits right in.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Year-End Writin' Round-Up

2011-12-29T20:51:00.003-05:00

Herewith, my 2011 writing retrospective!

January
I was unable to snag a spot at Science Online (registration filled up within 45 minutes of opening), so I drowned my sorrows in poems. That is, science poems -- one per day in January, each written in a different form and each taking its cue from a science-based article. They became Poetic Variables, a self-published chapbook that doubles as a primer on forms ranging from Abecedarian to Villanelle.

Among those poems, "The Ballad of Big Bug Ranch" was referenced in An Inordinate Fondness #12 and Girl Meets Bug, while "Scent and Sensibility" garnered mention in Neurodojo and a link in Carnival of the Blue.

On Jan. 5 I joined fellow panelists John Foster and David Roth to talk about "The Heart of Poetic Expression...Learning to Romance Words" at a meeting of the Tampa Writers Alliance. Thanks to Chris Coad Taylor and to the TWA for a spirited discussion on the different poetic forms, the relationship between poetry and fiction, and more.

I spoke to the Crystal River Women's Club on Jan. 19. I usually gear my presentations toward writers, but in this case I spoke mainly to readers. My talk focused on how I became a writer, why I write what I do, what inspires me, and how my life experience has shaped my creative output in its various forms. My bottom lines: (a) Follow your passion, and (b) Nothing is wasted. Thanks to the club and to Pat Rada for inviting me.

The month closed out with the Inverness Book Festival on Jan. 29. This inaugural event occurred in the Old Courthouse Historical Museum. Thanks to festival coordinators Sandra Koonce, the GFWC Woman's Club of Inverness, and the Citrus County Historical Society. Ten percent of sales were donated to the club.

In January I also began contacting judges for the Florida State Poets Association's 2011 Contests. My activities as this year's contest chair would take me through the FSPA awards ceremony in October and beyond.

I also began my first full calendar year on the Broad Universe Motherboard, working with some terrific women to further BU's mission of promoting, encouraging, honoring, and celebrating women writers and editors in science fiction, fantasy, horror and other speculative genres.

February
My guest post "What's Your Journey?" appeared on Lakisha Spletzer's Indie Author How-To. Thanks to Kisha for the invitation! The post takes much of its material from the talk I gave to the Crystal River Women's Club in January.

Two of my reviews went live at PsychCentral, Simon LeVay's, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation and Kathryn Hansen's, Brain Over Binge.

On Feb. 15 my quatrain won the Darwin Day contest at Glendon Mellow's blog "The Flying Trilobite." You can read the quatrain and view my prize (a print of Glendon's extraordinary art) here.

On Feb. 18 I attended and donated a book package to the inaugural "Love Your Library" evening to benefit the Citrus County Library. Thanks to Flossie Benton Rogers and to the volunteers behind the event, which came complete with wine-tasting, food, live jazz from the Citrus Jazz Society, silent auction, and more.

On Feb. 23 I enjoyed a fabulous lunch and great company at the Kings Bay Rotary Club and gave my talk "A Gaggle of Muses: Creativity for Fun and Sometimes Profit."

March
On March 19 I joined fellow panelists Loretta C. Rogers and Joyce Elson Moore, with written contributions from Dylan Newton, for the Citrus County Library's Cold Read/Critique. This was the third and last session in the library's annual NaNoWriMo series (see October). Flossie Benton Rogers was emcee and reader. Thanks to our audience of writers for their submissions and for their openness to critique. Ten percent of sales at this and the library's other events are donated to the library.

April
My sonnets "In Development" and "Manipulations" appeared in in The Open Laboratory 2010: The Best of Science Writing on the Web. You can access all the science blog posts that make up the anthology. My poems had first appeared as part of my science-sonnet-a-day project for April 2010.

The WyoPoets newsletter reprinted my article "Social Networking and the Found Poem" in its April 2011 issue (.pdf).

I began emailing my Deviations newsletter (which you can receive by signing up at the Deviations website). The newsletter generally, though not always, follows a six-part format: (1) Deviations news (anything related to my series), (2) Other writing, (3) Writing-related activities (e.g., events, reviews, etc.), (4) Behind the scenes at Deviations (my process in writing the series), (5) A day in the life (some personal tidbits), and (6) Feedback (an invitation to respond!). Issues go out at or near the end of the month and back issues are available.

I also began guest-editing the "Interplay" section of Star*Line's 4th Qtr. 2011 issue.

June
Following preparations in May, I released Second Covenant, the sixth and concluding volume to my Deviations series. I also posted this alternate site for accessing free downloads, because the traffic to my site exceeded my bandwidth allowance. David Roth gave Second Covenant five out of five stars at the Examiner.

My poem "The Last Dragon Slayer" appeared in Mythic Delirium #24. Here's Alexandra Seidel's review of the issue at Fantastique Unfettered and Tori Truslow's review at Sabotage.

I joined Catherine Lundoff, Racheline Maltese, Cecilia Tan, JoSelle Vanderhooft, and host Trisha Wooldridge on the June GLBTQ podcast of Broadly Speaking, presented by Broad Universe. We discussed GLBTQ fiction, publishing, and activism.

I also got a nice nod from Jo Walton in her recap of the 1985 Hugo nominees for Tor. I had been a John W. Campbell Award finalist that year. (The Campbell Award, given to the best new SF writer of the year, is not a Hugo but is part of the Hugo Awards ceremony.)

July
My alternate downloads site came in handy after the Deviations site received 1,179 visits in a single day. A fraction of those visits (327 over the weekend of July 9-10) had come from Free Kindle Books and Tips, which had profiled the series.

I also assembled a Deviations Omnibus CD, which (along with the original paperback edition of Covenant) was accepted to several special collections around the world.

My poem "Far From the Pleasure Garden" appeared in A Sea of Alone: Poems For Alfred Hitchcock (Dark Scribe Press).

The WyoPoets newsletter reprinted my article "The Many Shades of Dark Poetry" in its Mid-Summer issue. The first part is contained here; the conclusion is here (.pdf).

On July 30 I joined Lakisha Spletzer for a publishing workshop at the Lakes Region Library in Inverness, FL. Kisha both coordinated and recorded the event: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

August
Two more of my reviews went live at PsychCentral, Clark McCauley's and Sophia Moskalenko's Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us; and Loren A. Olson's Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight

My submission to William Gurstelle's "Practical Pyromaniac Clerihew Contest" received a Special Mention. It joins a collection of fire- and science-related poems.

September
My story "Visitations" appeared in Jack-o'-Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy (Raven Electrick Ink).

My poem "Shrine to the Disconnected" appeared in Dreams & Nightmares #90.

Thanks to Amber at Niteblade for this contributor interview.

And to Ao Bibliophile for letting me do this guest post as "Mistress of Science Fiction & Dark Fantasy."

On Sept. 24 I joined global events Moving Planet and 100 Thousand Poets for Change simultaneously, by posting 24 climate change-related sonnets in 24 hours, midnight to midnight Eastern time. My index contains live links to each poem and corresponding news article(s).

October
My guest post "Science With Heart: Connecting with your crowdfunders through the language of emotion" appeared on the #SciFund blog. Back in August I had begun following #SciFund and collecting data in preparation for NaNoWriMo (see November).

I attended the Florida State Poets Association's annual convention in Orlando on Oct. 14-16, where I emceed the awards ceremony for FSPA's annual contests. Among other exercises, the convention also yielded this poem during a workshop given by Gianna Russo of YellowJacket Press. My poem "No Need for the Alarm" received second prize in the Convention Poem Contest (not to be confused with the regular FSPA contests) and appeared in Of Poets and Poetry.

On Oct. 19 I joined fellow panelists Loretta Rogers, Dylan Newton, and Flossie Benton Rogers at the Citrus County Library's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Kickoff. My presentation dealt with decision points in writing. The Kickoff is the first of the library's three-part NaNoWriMo series.

On Oct. 21-23 I attended Necronomicon 30. My panels included "What Has Social Media Done for You Lately?", "Three or More (on writing book series)," "Intro to Writing Poetry" (which I moderated), "The Liquid State of Publishing" (ditto), and "Connecting Science Fiction with Poetry & Song." When not at panels, I could be found at my Author Alley table. Thanks again to K.L. Nappier and her husband Richard for hosting me over the weekend!

You can hear me read "All Creatures Great and Small" at this year's Science Fiction Poetry Association Halloween Poetry Reading. The poem had originally appeared in the March-April 1988 issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction.

November
I participated in my first NaNoWriMo as a nonfiction "rebel." About 250,000 "NaNo" participants set out to write a 50,000-word manuscript in 30 days (I crossed that threshold on Nov. 28). Rather than write a novel, I performed realtime coverage of the #SciFund Challenge, which ran parallel to NaNo and then some. Here's a quick tour of how I blogged my process.

On Nov. 16 I squeaked in as the Citrus County Library's NaNoWriMo Write-In began winding down. I had been scheduled to present at that event, but my dying car battery had other ideas. Was still able to participate in the closing Q&A session.

I also snagged first-runner-up status in Bug Girl's Ribald Tales of Entomology Limerick Contest.

December
My review of Ted Cascio's and Leonard Martin's House and Psychology: Humanity is Overrated went live on PsychCentral.

Deviations: Covenant was featured on the blog Cows of Doom (!)

I continued to draft A Grand Experiment: Tracking the #SciFund Challenge, finishing the "realtime narrative" portion on Dec. 29. It's still a preliminary draft and needs a lot of work, and I need to write up a section devoted to #SciFund's 49 projects. The section weighs in at 72,115 words and contains 1,486 footnotes. Most of the footnotes reference tweets, which provided the bulk of the story's dialogue. Here's a sample chapter.

You can view the complete table of contents for Star*Line 34(4), including my "Interplay" section. That includes live links to my two Editor's Choice poems. I've written about my editorial process for this section, including the relationship between my vision of the "Interplay" theme and poets' interpretations of it. Greg Beatty's "The Physics of Age and Baseball" completely matched my original idea of the theme in its elegant melding of disparate elements. So, too, Matthew Richards' "Ravel: An Etymology", both for its use of language and for an emotional kick that affected me on a deeply personal level.

Thanks again to Marge Simon for her steadfast editorship of Star*Line, and a hearty Welcome and Congratulations to F.J. Bergmann, who is taking over the editorial reins in addition to her duties as SFPA Webmaster.

Finally, inspired by Bug Girl's post of an Entomological Carol by Jim Richmond, coupled with some research on roaches by Dr. Coby Schal et al. -- and feeling holiday-season-post-NaNo-still-#SciFund punchy -- I concocted an entomological carol of my own. My "Parcoblatta lata Wonderland" got picked up by Scicurious/Friday Weird Science (guest-blogged by Bug Girl). My video performance is currently in the works. Stay tuned!

And 2011 isn't over yet! I might come up with something more before New Year's. Who knows?

Plans for 2012?

I don't make New Year's resolutions, writing-wise or otherwise. But I do create a dedication statement, as in, "I dedicate myself to the following for 2012."

The bulk of that statement remains unchanged from year to year. Write daily (doesn't matter what, just do it). Do healthy things (eat right, exercise, get enough sleep; at least, that's the plan). Keep connected to people (both in person and online). Work on specific projects if I've got 'em (I've got 'em). Researching and submitting to markets are also on the list.

This year has been notable for much that I haven't posted here. That changes my game plan a bit. My goals for 2012 include improving my presence online. I need to make more use of my accounts on Google+ and Twitter, along with my Facebook fan page. I need to bump up my involvement in the forums I'm on. I need to leave more comments hither and yon and aim for greater overall interaction, especially since my life has become somewhat insular.

Living each day to the fullest and giving thanks are also permanent residents on the list. And this quote from St. Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591): "If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark."

Thank you all for being there and for stopping by! May 2012 be a year of good health and happiness, creativity and compassion. Keep on keepin' on.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

A Squirrely Christmas

2011-12-25T21:29:00.002-05:00

On the first day of Christmas, we brought unto its end:
seven days of worries,
six bulbs-a-bright'ning,
five more flick'RING!,
four dimming lamps,
three wires chewed,
two outlets dead,
and a six-splitter shorting with a POP!

First, many thanks go to Larry the Circuit Detective, both for his awesome website and for his guidance. I have never futzed around with electrical wiring, so I am a complete novice when it comes to this sort of thing. My idea of using electrical tape is to stick it in an art project.

Second, I deeply appreciate the helpful folks at Progress Energy who were there for us on Christmas Day, including Beverly who took my call, and the-techs-whose-names-I-wish-I'd gotten, so I could thank them properly for coming out to our place less than an hour after I'd spoken with Beverly.

Our electrical adventure began a week ago, on December 19, when my desk lamp started flickering -- not much, but enough to get my attention. I thought it was odd that my fluorescent bulb was having trouble, considering that the lamp was fairly new.

Then, around 2 a.m. on December 20, I heard a loud POP! And lost power to my lamp and computer -- and the bedroom -- and the hallway light.

And I smelled burnt electrical insulation.

Yikes.

The power we still had kept browning out. I had visions of having to get the whole house rewired (it turns 32 next year). If it didn't burn down first. Turning main power off and back on at the circuit box didn't help matters.

Conditions were not quite as bad as feared. The smell was traced to a 16-year-old surge suppressor that had given up the ghost. Once that was unplugged, I was able to reset the circuit breaker that I couldn't budge before, restoring the power we had lost.

But our lights kept flickering, especially when our fridge -- also turning 32 -- began a new cycle. The best the microwave could do was give me lukewarm coffee, even at its highest setting. I looked up electricians, then got a recommendation because most of them were unknowns as far as the Better Business Bureau was concerned.

We also looked at fridge models. Ours had begun making clickety-ratchety sounds after the short. It didn't sound happy at all. Would it die before Christmas? Would we have to brave the holiday shopping throng for a new one while our frozen vegetables wept? How long would delivery take?

If our home wiring was on the fritz, would it kill a new fridge? How long would a rewiring job take, especially given the holidays? What order should we do things in? We had spent the better part of a day doing fridge research and narrowing down our choices and alternates, before deciding that maybe we didn't want to chance sticking a new appliance on what could be a dicey electrical system.

I forget what I Googled -- probably "home wiring" or some such -- but it brought me to Larry Dimock's site. After reading the site's background info on home wiring I scooted over to his electrical fire, safety, and electrical myths sections. They pretty much eased my fears about the house going up in smoke.

Then I found his Weird Light Behavior page, and that seemed to fit. Because we had a whole lotta weirdness goin' on.

We had begun turning our fridge off for several hours at a time, to give it a rest from its labors. Maybe it was the main culprit for draining down the system. With the fridge off, I had moved the microwave to an outlet controlled by a different circuit. The microwave worked fine, but the lights brightened when I turned it on, then dimmed again when it was off.

I moved the microwave back to its old outlet. It behaved well there, too (no longer making lukewarm coffee), but even with the fridge off, the lights still dimmed -- the opposite effect of what I'd gotten at the other outlet. The outlets were on different circuits, but those circuits both carried 20 amps.

Okay, I thought: one circuit made lights brighten and the other circuit made them dim when the microwave was on. Even more curious: most of the lights that brightened and dimmed were themselves on a different circuit still.

And then -- at the same outlet where the lights had dimmed, now (and with the fridge turned on) the microwave made the lights brighten when it was turned on! But then the lights dimmed. And when the microwave was done, the lights brightened again -- but they were not as bright as they had been when the microwave first went on.

Say what? (It had to do with load distribution.)

Add in a couple of outlets that worked intermittently (they were a longer-term issue), for good measure.

According to Larry's Weird Light Behavior page, our flickering/dimming/brightening problem was likely an issue for the power company, not an electrician.

I'd been keeping an Electrical Problem Log (I've presented only a portion of the weirdness here). Mary and I had surveyed the house several years ago, so we knew which circuit controlled what. I had photographed our circuit box, annotated the photos with numbers and amp figures, and added a key that listed everything out. Now I took a graphic layout of the house, added all the electrical outlet locations, and labeled them according to which circuit they were on.

Then I took advantage of Larry's $15 e-mail consulting, filled out his advice request form, and sent him an 836-word description of the problem, along with a 556-word "possibly related items" addendum. In between, I asked, "Does this fall under the 'weird light behavior' -- e.g., something requiring a call to the power company? (Open main or open neutral?)"

I heard back from him early on Christmas morning. Open neutral was the likely culprit.

(I was jumping like a kid inside: I guessed right! Geek props for me! Yaaay!)

But I wanted to take action before something else blew. An open neutral can do nasty things to electronics.

There were ways to approach the power company, to make sure they took all the steps to chase down the problem. As it turned out in my particular case, all the tech had to do was eyeball the power pole for about a second, before he said, "Squirrel chewed that off."

I couldn't even tell what that was.

Mary wondered if the squirrel had been going after vegetation, since that pole (and more) has been invaded by both skunkvine and Virginia creeper. I passed her question on to the tech.

"Nope," he said. "They go after the aluminum."

He showed me an "H-block," which for the life of me I have been unable to find doing a Google search (using "block," "clamp," "connector," "housing," "power supply," "electrical," "hardware," etc., in various permutations). Here's my primitive edge-on depiction (just imagine shallow serrations on the hole edges). I'd guess it measures roughly 2 x 2 x 1 inches:

In the wild, squirrels chew on hard objects, like bone, to care for their teeth. Like a beaver, a squirrel's teeth don't stop growing, so they need ways to file them down. Wood won't do the trick because it's too soft.

In neighborhoods like mine, that means the squirrels go after aluminum.

The tech pointed to a chain link fence across the street. "The aluminum ties that hold that fence together? They chew those down, too."

In the course of chewing the H-block, our squirrel also chewed through the "open neutral" wire. Make that wires: half the wire leading to our house, half the wire leading to a neighbor's house, and half the wire feeding the other two. The neutral is non-lethal when chomped.

"If you have deer horns in your yard, they chew on that," the tech said.

I asked, "Is it a good idea for me to get deer horns, to keep the squirrels away from the wires?"

"If you do, you'll have half the neighborhood squirrels coming here."

Guess I won't get deer horns, then.

He and his colleague fixed the problem in about ten minutes, and our electrical performance is back to what it had been before Dec. 19. Fridge is happy, lamps are steady, microwave is well-behaved. For now, it seems, our home wiring system is fine, and nothing needs replacing except the dead surge suppressor.

Merry Christmas to all,
and to all a good bite.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Entomological Sing-Along

2011-12-19T18:25:00.004-05:00

I follow both the AAAS EurekAlert and Bug Girl on Twitter. Today, the first got my alliteration wheels turning. The second steered them.

First, EurekAlert's "Cockroach hookup signal could benefit endangered woodpecker" landed me at the North Carolina State University newsroom, where I read about Dr. Coby Schal's work on cockroach pheromones. Specifically, the pheromones for a wood cockroach with the Latin name Parcoblatta lata.

I love that name. The roach, probably not so much (though I have had my bouts of fascination with the critters).

And I thought it was cool that an insect viewed as a pest could also have a beneficial function, and for an endangered species at that.

A bit later I came across Bug Girl's tweet to her Entomological Carol. It gave me my own Eureka! moment. Her reproduction of Jim Richmond's parody of the Christmas Song put the holiday music bug (as it were) in my ear.

This is not the first time Bug Girl's blog has inspired me. While I was caught up in NaNoWriMo, I was oblivious to the fact that I had actually been awarded first runner-up status in her Ribald Tales of Entomology Limerick Contest. (Grin)

And so, without further ado:

Parcoblatta lata Wonderland
(to the tune of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland")

Roaches stink, are you smellin'?
Pheromones, they're a-tellin'.
So succulent-sweet, what woodpeckers eat.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

Dr. Schal took a reading.
Found the compounds for breeding
By using some gas as roaches chased ass.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

Nuclear magnetic resonating
Let him know what turned a suitor on.
Then he synthesized a mix for baiting
And watched the males all falling for the con.

Now his sexy solution
Tells about evolution:
Viagra for some, for others it's dumb.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

(Instrumental)

People say the lata's a home-wrecker,
But the bugs are happy in the wood,
'Til they're chomped by red-cockaded pecker
Who wants a lata latté in the 'hood.

Synthesized, it's a winner.
"Go get laid, then be dinner!"
That pheromone blend helps avian friend.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.
Parcoblatta lata wonderland.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Observations From the Peanut Gallery

2011-12-16T02:17:00.002-05:00

My tweet (boxed in red): "Congrats & Well Done to ALL #SciFund participants; thanks to ALL funders & promoters! IMHO Where you began --> How far you've come = Awesome"

As "Dr. Zen" Faulkes put it just a few minutes ago, "There will be much more analysis of the #SciFund challenge in the days and months to come. It was a social experiment, and we are all scientists, after all."

And indeed, there's already been "a quick and dirty analysis" done by Jaime Ashander.

There will be number crunching. There will be variables, and various reactions across the spectrum, not least the hairpin turn that comes when a highly intense undertaking screeches to a halt. For at least a couple of people, that hairpin turn is about to zoom off in the direction of preparing a presentation for next month's Science Online conference.

In any event, in one form or another, there's a lot of processing yet to occur. On my end, I've got a lot of raw data yet to assemble. This month has also seen more trips to specialists as part of my caregiving, which for us means long drives and other forms of time away from my own writing project. Be that as it may, I've given myself the deadline of having a rough version of the realtime narrative section drafted before the New Year -- especially since I think we're done with doctor visits until January.

Right now the glow of adrenalin is settling on where #SciFund is. I want to show a bit of where #SciFund was, when the past 45 days were still largely unknown territory. Below is Chapter 2 from my work in progress (I write as a layperson, for a lay audience). I've translated my footnotes into live links.

Chapter 2: What Is Science Crowdfunding, and Why Do It?

Crowdfunding is not charity, but an exchange. The person pursuing funding is offering a good or a service, just as the individual in an office or a store does, or someone offering a product online. Rather than being used to buy a finished product, the funds aid the act of creation. Instead of approaching a granting organization or venture capitalists, the funding-seeker uses social media to approach the general public.

Crowdfunding is traditionally associated with the arts. Three weeks before the #SciFund site launched on RocketHub, Kickstarter announced that it had hit its one millionth backer. Of its 10,395 successful projects reported in July, 29.9 percent had been in music and 29.3 percent in film and video. Percentages had dropped significantly after that, with technology, the closest category to science, weighing in at 1.4 percent, rounded up. The only category with a lower ranking had been fashion.

So why were scientists joining artists in seeking help from the general public?

"There were some citizens of Detroit, a couple of months back, who said, 'You know what Detroit needs? We need a big metal statue of RoboCop in Detroit. That's going to make everything better!'"

Jai Ranganathan stood before an audience at the Open Science Summit in Mountain View, CA. No, not stood. He worked the stage, dressed in gunmetal gray, pacing before a many-times-larger-than-life screen and chopping his hand through the air.

"So, what did they do? They went to a site called Kickstarter. And they put up this proposal for saying, 'Hey, we want to put this big metal statue of RoboCop in Detroit. It's going to turn everything around.' And they got almost three thousand people to kick in almost $70,000. Fifty dollars here, hundred dollars there. Three dollars there."

Some scientists had tried crowdfunding. For the most part, they hadn't succeeded. And one of the reasons they hadn't succeeded, Ranganathan said, was because they'd worked in isolation.

And they couldn't talk to people. Even conservation biologists, who spent most of their waking hours (and some sleeping ones) out in the world, had a tough time communicating with the general public, as Jai had learned when he had spoken with one on a podcast.

It had given him an idea.

"We thought, let's try something different," he told the crowd in Mountain View. "Let's try something with no budget whatsoever and no time whatsoever. That's going to work much better."

With public funding for science hovering around 20 percent and "a wide red swath of the country still in denial over evolution and climate change," what did they have to lose?

Kevin Fomalont, a Neuroscience PhD student at Emory University, studies depression and is investigating the contributions of early life stress to the development of mental illness, not just neurologically but as an illness of the whole body. He is one of the #SciFund forty-niners.

"Right now I am glad to have a job," he wrote, shortly after #SciFund launched, "but it remains difficult to fund our laboratory's small projects that do not fit well into a federal grant. All scientists are struggling with the stagnation in federal funding for research."

Scientists had already approached private companies, foundations, and individual benefactors for help, he added. In an era of slashed funding and controversy over scientific theory and practice, crowdfunding had become the next logical step.

Kristina Killgrove pointed out the Catch-22 in science funding. "[Y]ou need to have a research project to get a job," she wrote, "but you need the academic affiliation a job provides you to apply for grant funding for your project." She couldn't apply for large grants because she didn't have a permanent affiliation. What's more, her field, anthropology, was not a "hard" science, and was thus less likely to be funded.

Crowdfunding couldn't replace traditional means of raising money for scientific projects, she added. But, if successful, it could catch the attention of traditional funders. Writing a proposal for a large grant took time and energy away from actual scientific work. If a bid was unsuccessful, she said, "you’re back at square one, and have to spend more time applying for money."

But crowdfunding for science was about more than just money. It was even about more than the pursuit of knowledge, including knowledge regarded by the general public with a mixture of fascination, bewilderment, and, at times, fear.

"The real purpose of the #SciFund Challenge is to engage scientists with general audiences," Ranganathan said, in an interview with #SciFund participant Holly Menninger the day the challenge launched. "I think there is a big problem in the U.S. and the world today, which is that I feel that science is really disconnected from the general public."

Scientific research and scientists are well regarded by most Americans, according to a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center. The survey, which measured public opinion on religion and science in the U.S., indicated that 84 percent of respondents viewed science as having a mostly positive impact on society. The same favorable answer was given by 80 percent of people who attended religious services at least once a week.

A 2011 study on Public Attitudes to Science, conducted in the United Kingdom, showed that 79 percent of people felt that, “on the whole, science will make our lives easier,” while 54 percent believed that, “the benefits of science are greater than any harmful effect.”

But 51 percent claimed that they received too little information about science. "Many are still concerned about what scientists choose to do 'behind closed doors,'" reported Ipsos MORI and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which had conducted the survey in association with the British Science Association.

The #SciFund Challenge sought to open those doors. Every posted project and video offered the general public a glimpse into the scientific process, in plain English terms. The scientists asking for help were not stereotyped, anonymous figures in white lab coats. They each had a name, a face, a history, and a passion.

They dressed in tees (sometimes under their white lab coats) and bluejeans -- and, when rappelling to a forest canopy, hardhats. Or they wore kitten heels and a strapless dress, even when those clothes were packed beside "explosive looking" camo-colored boxes holding steel camera traps. Or they wore a baseball cap and layers beneath a field coat, to look for algae in a half-frozen pond.

And when not doing scientific research, they could be found playing guitar in a band, or scrapbooking. They posted photographs of a flower or a sunrise on Flickr. They tweeted about cleaning their apartment.

Like the artists dominating the crowdfunding arena, these scientists loved their work. It's why marine ecologist Jarrett Byrnes was passionate about counting fish "while in a thick wetsuit, sucking air through a regulator, getting thrown about by big waves, with sand and grit swirling in front of [his] face," a task he classified as "Really hard." He sought funds to get just a bit more data, so that he could better understand how life was changing in the ocean's kelp forests. (Byrnes wasn't just a #SciFund cofounder. He was also a client.) It's why cancer researcher and music teacher Marisa Alonso Nuñez had spent her first #SciFund Saturday -- both day and night -- in the lab with her colleagues, grooving on classical music, while being frustrated by the microscopic bits of genes that were getting in the way of the molecular building blocks she tried to line up.

The scientists engaged in #SciFund responded not only to uncertainty and fear in the general public, but also to institutionalized worries from within. "[T]here's no particular reason to talk to regular people," Ranganathan pointed out, adding that the opposite was often true. "[I]f you do, maybe you feel you would be misconstrued. Maybe your fellow scientists will just look down upon you for some unknown reason…. But imagine a world where scientists were rewarded for talking to the general public by getting money from them. That changes all the incentives."

While important, the money was not his primary focus. "The main purpose is to communicate excitement about science," he said. "That's the point."

"I’ve had an online presence for years," "Bone Girl" Kristina Killgrove wrote, "but I’ve never directly engaged the public in my research. Joining the #SciFund Challenge seemed the perfect way to do this – to bring my research to the people who are most interested in it and to convince them to become stakeholders in the process of science."

For many of the forty-niners, this challenge was also about learning a new skill set. From the beginning of his crowdfunding experiment, Jai Ranganathan had laid his "hidden agenda" squarely on the line: "[Y]ou can’t raise money from broad audiences, unless you can speak to them in an engaging way (in regular language) about why your research matters….get scientists back out into the public sphere with the communication skills they’ll need to influence the public."

*

Prof. Matthew Hirschey at Duke University was skeptical early on. "Would [scientists] rather spend a week writing a grant for $50,000 or $500,000? How about a month of crowdsourcing for funding? For $1000??? I doubt it."

Writing on August 2, five days after the #SciFund Challenge was first announced, Hirschey also cautioned that the general public was not equipped to evaluate the rigor of funding proposals and could thus "weaken the grant making process." On the solicitation side, he pointed out that "scientists are not always good at 'selling' their science," despite his observation that "Most scientists aren't afraid of engaging with the public, and welcome opportunities to do so."

#SciFund's founders and participants who had signed up early were unperturbed. Skepticism was a hallmark of science, and as such invited the testing of assumptions. Ranganathan's responses to Hirschey included addressing his concern that the general public could not evaluate the rigor of proposals.

"Peer review happens," Ranganathan wrote, "just not in the way that most scientists are used to." He added that physicists had a place to post their work for public peer review -- arXiv.org -- before they submitted those papers to scholarly journals.

Not long before #SciFund launched, an item in arXiv had made big news in the popular press. The press had focused on the finding itself, not on its early disclosure. Lay audiences might not have known that evidence suggesting the existence of a faster-than-light neutrino had initially been posted on arXiv.org for the purpose of getting peer-review responses and a good reality check. It had -- to the tune of more than 80 papers.

"I can imagine a very similar system for crowdfunding for science, where projects to be funded are posted and review happens after they are posted," Ranganathan wrote. "Does that infrastructure exist now? No. But I think that it will quickly emerge if science crowdfunding takes off, which is the point of the #SciFund Challenge."

Miriam Goldstein knew what it was like to feel the pinch. A doctoral student at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and a writer at Deep Sea News, she had "made scientific equipment by combining salvaged parts, scrap lumber from Home Depot, and rubber tie-downs." She expressed her faith in the #SciFund Challenge shortly after its announcement, and backed that faith up by contributing some of the funding, herself.

But in addition to peer review and other concerns, the idea of crowdfunding science was not without some controversy. One might view the #SciFund Challenge as an experiment not only in raising money, but also in going outside the influence of U.S. policymakers and directly engaging (and gauging) the public's opinion of science and scientists in a way that the polls could not: with their own hard cash.

Brian Romans, an assistant professor of geoscience at Virginia Tech, cautioned against a potential backlash. "[I]t would be a shame if the excitement around the concept and anecdotes of success of crowd-funding led to continued erosion of ‘traditional’ funding because the powers-that-be decide science can find money elsewhere."

Raising money to hire an assistant in her work with Asian elephants, #SciFund participant Shermin de Silva echoed Romans' concern when, eleven days after launch, #SciFund celebrated its second fully-funded project. "Some worry that crowdfunding, if at all successful, might serve as an unwitting argument for privatizing this funding even further," she wrote.

And public -- government -- funding comes with conditions that private funding can circumvent. Cian Dawson, who worked in science and environmental education reform and who holds a masters degree in geophysics, maintained that "[P]ublic funding of science in the public interest … results in public data. Private funding too easily leads to proprietary data and information." She added that while crowdfunding could work for smaller, quick-turnaround projects, hard-to-fund longer, big-ticket items didn't seem well-suited to the practice.

"Dr. Zen" Faulkes, using #SciFund to raise money for his crayfish studies, addressed that difference in focus. "Big science is a wonderful thing," he wrote on the #SciFund blog. "But we need new ways to fund small science." He argued that traditional funding agencies "are almost invariably set up to handle large amounts of money." They want not only accountability for those big bucks; they want a track record.

Trying to establish that track record through funding smaller projects didn't fit into a big-ticket proposal framework. Faulkes added, "There are many projects where a few bucks here and there will grease a lot of wheels."

Although not the be-all and end-all of a new era in science funding, it seemed as though the #SciFund crowdfunding model could fill a niche that had remained largely unexplored.

Some science projects had been crowdfunded successfully prior to #SciFund, notably the Quail Diaries, posted on Kickstarter by biologists Jennifer D. Calkins and Jennifer M. Gee. Jai Ranganathan used their project as the prime example, "being perhaps the first to actually raise cash for their research via crowdfunding."

Calkins and Gee had also caught the attention of Thomas Lin at The New York Times, who wrote, "As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue."

How, then, did #SciFund differ from those earlier projects? Sheer force of numbers. Never before had crowdfunding occurred as a networked group effort among dozens of scientists. According to Ranganathan, to date, "It is the biggest crowdfunding for science venture in the U.S. by far. In fact, we have more projects up right now than all other crowdfunding for science efforts in the U.S. combined."

Or, as he had told the crowd in Mountain View, ten days before launch, "The key thing here is that even though each scientist is going to be crowdfunding for their own project, no scientist is alone…. Because if you are alone as a scientist and say, 'Hey, you, you have to learn how to do all these things in order to create a video presentation. You have to be able to translate your science to the general public,' forget it. Impossible, for someone doing it alone."

Possible -- and wonderful -- if you're part of a tribe. Which is how I began to view the forty-niners as their community blossomed.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

#SciFund Countdown Primer!

2011-12-13T22:01:00.002-05:00

Quick, before they're gone! The #SciFund Challenge ends on Thursday. Here, then, is a primer. If you see something you like, go check it out! I've funded a number of these and may kick in more before it ends.

I'm listing these in alphabetical order by researcher or organization name. Color coding: Green = fully funded. Purple=75% or more funded (I update my spreadsheet around midnight Eastern time; last update was at the cusp between Dec. 12-13). Brown= 50-74.99% funded Blue=25-49.99% funded. Red= <25% funded. Monies go to the researchers even if they don't meet their goal (RocketHub takes a slightly bigger cut for those), and even incomplete funding can accomplish great stuff. For example, Jarrett Byrnes has enough funding for one day's dive so far; Shermin deSilva has enough funding to pay a single assistant for a full year.

In other words, this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Anything and everything makes a difference.

Herewith, then -- a group I've come to think of as "the forty-niners":

Eric Abelson: Does the act of looking change what we see? Abelson is trying to determine whether camera traps themselves alter the behavior of, say, skittish mule deer. And, since camera traps are our way of "reading" animal behavior and counting their numbers in the wild, what are the implications for our own data and wildlife conservation practices? (I look at this as kind of a Hawthorne Study in the wild.)

Rebecca R Achterman: Athlete's foot in worms? Turns out that some worms are very similar to human skin when it comes to diseases like athlete's foot, ringworm, and other skin ailments. Studying the effect of disease-causing fungi on the worms can give us insights into a whole host of skin infections.

Erin Ashe: Dolphinpalooza. Co-founder of the nonprofit Oceans Initiative, Erin Ashe takes to the high seas with her dog Wishart (dolphin spotter/sniffer/listener), to follow the Pacific white-sided dolphin. She's been studying and photographing this population to see how the dolphins interact with other species. Her non-invasive techniques (photography and statistics) track the dolphins through time to assess whether they are declining or endangered.

Eric Basham: Magnetic Nerve Stimulator Prototype. Basham wants to study the effects of electromagnetic pulses on a worm, because that could teach him more about the human brain. His modest budget is earmarked for worm bed and board and a few electronic components. Instead of a large-scale magnetic stimulator that runs into the tens of thousands of dollars, the parts Basham is looking for have price tags in the single- and two-digit range. Furthermore, whatever he builds, he will share as open source.

Jeffrey Bodwin: Pennies instead of petroleum! Bodwin wants to liberate cellulose from all parts of a plant for ethanol production instead of from just the kernel. His work is aimed toward chemically opening plant fibers and freeing their energy reserves. (Bodwin also created this Google map showing where all the forty-niners are.)

Timothy Bonebrake: Urban Butterfly Blues. Bonebrake has watched an estimated ten butterfly species go extinct in Griffith Park. He wants to know why, and he wants to know how to help save the butterflies that remain, not least because butterflies are environmental and health indicators. His study of the park involves citizen science in collaboration with schools and museums. (He also takes school kids on cool field trips.) And he posts pictures, like this lone duskywing near the end of its season.

Jarrett Byrnes: Hey! Did you miss that fish?! Byrnes has a treasure trove of data that spans 30 years, but he needs to calibrate it. The data, once calibrated, can show how the Channel Islands kelp forest has been changing, letting researchers get a better handle on environmental and other effects. Byrnes wants to fund a couple of dives that will get him the missing data links that will let him do that calibration. In addition to his own research, Byrnes also helped fund an aquarium to bring the ocean to disadvantaged schoolchildren in Utah.

Jessica Carilli: Corals and Climate Change. Carilli studies human impacts on coastal ecosystems. She's looking partiularly at heat stress: what lets some corals live while others die, the best places for corals to survive, and what humans can do to help corals survive. She also took some time out from preparing her #SciFund proposal to give birth to her son, who makes a three-days-late prenatal cameo in her video. He also attends her lectures.

Katelyn Cavanaugh: Learner Control in Online Training Programs. Cavanaugh wants to know what goes on when people control their own rate of learning in online training programs. Some studies show that learning improves when learners take control, while other studies show that learning suffers. Cavanaugh is investigating individual decision-making processes, using crowdsourcing to recruit her study participants.

Center for Conservation Biology: Preserving wildlife to benefit farmers. The Center wants to know if forests can support the native predators of crop pests. Researchers are tracking bird and bat species that are predators of a pest called the coffee berry borer. Farmers can conceivably preserve the habitats of these predators, which then help keep agricultural pests in check. Rather than taking an either/or approach to farms versus wilderness, the two could work in concert to benefit both farmers and wildlife.

Scott Chamberlain: Evolution in Agriculture. There is much more species diversity in natural landsapes than in agricultural ones, but what does this mean? Diversity offers more protections against pests, for one thing. Chamberlain is looking into how these differences drive plant evolution, by studying native sunflowers near or far from agricultural crops, and the role that pollinators play in both those types of environments. Pollinators and seed predators both influence the evolution of flower traits. Chamberlain is also studying the evolution of agricultural weeds.

Chip Cochran: The Yin-Yang World of Venom. Cochran chases down southwestern speckled rattlesnakes to collect blood and venom samples. Across their range, this species exhibits different markings and possible differences in venom. Cochran's work examines the toxins within these venoms, for the purpose of designing better anti-venom and for potential use in drug therapies.

Shermin deSilva: Helping elephants and people coexist. DeSilva has spent six years studying around 600 Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. Not only is she breaking new ground in studying a largely unexamined species, but she is also taking a holistic approach to looking at how elephants and farmers affect each other. Check out EFECT's Facebook page.

Zen Faulkes: Doctor Zen and the Amazon Crayfish. "Dr. Zen" wants to come to Florida to gather up some slough crayfish, close cousins to "Amazon" marbled crayfish, so that he can study their evolutionary differences in addition to one very obvious one: slough crayfish reproduce sexually while marbled crayfish clone themselves. What he learns could possibly help stem the tide of the invasive marbled crayfish. Faulkes also curates a #SciFund Twitter feed, had reviewed every #SciFund proposal before it went live, and has put together some awesome videos (like #SciFund Super Team-Up and Kitten or Crayfish?, not to mention a Dancing Yeti Crabs playlist).

Kevin Fomalont: Depression -- an Illness of the Whole Body. Fomalont studies depression and is investigating the contributions of early life stress to the development of mental illness, not just neurologically but as an illness of the whole body. Mental illness runs in his family, so this is a personal as well as a professional quest. Drawing from the new and integrative field of psychoneuroimmunology, Fomalont's research is taking him to St. Petersburg, Russia, for rare international collaboration with Russian neuroscience researchers.

Robin Freeman: Tracking the migration of the Atlantic Puffin. Individual puffins take different migration routes, but those individual routes remain fairly constant over time. Freeman wants to learn what effect environmental change is having on those routes over the long term.

John Gust: Send John to the Jungle! Gust is seeking support for his travel to the Yucatan's Yalahau region, to retrieve and study its artifacts. Yalahau's nineteenth century industrial activities had made global impacts. Plus, Gust could potentially solve the murder of Robert Stephens, the last owner of an old rum distillery.

Elizabeth Hadly: Species in peril. Hadly's team is studying species at risk of losing their genetic diversity. Such diversity is key to species survival. The team is monitoring populations and sequencing the DNA of pikas and tuco-tucos, Costa Rican bats and birds, and rainforest frogs. (This just crossed the 50% funded mark!)

Kalani Kirk Hausman: STEMulate Learning! Hausman discovered the power of supercomputing on a budget, and he wants to spread that power and frugality throughout the American public educational system. An offshoot of his "Scrap-heap Supercomputing" workshops, this DIY lab would link computer nodes together in concert with projects like the World Community Grid's "Discover Clean Water" and "Cure for Childhood Cancer." Hausman himself devotes hundreds of hours of otherwise idle computer time to these projects. He also curates several #SciFund digests, such as this one at Scoop.it.

Steve Herbert: Domesticating algae for the 21st century. Herbert studies Chlamydomonas, an alga that may lie at the center of a new "green revolution" in biofuels. Herbert wants to see if genetic help from a related alga called Volvox could help "Chlamy" cells stick together for easier harvesting. It would be like picking up a slice of bread instead of one crumb at a time.

Matthew Hutchins: Methods of artifically aging red wine. Hutchins is looking to separate fact from fiction, comparing more than half a dozen methods of artifically aging red wine to see if any have any effect. These methods range from flowing the wine through an electric field to soaking it in toasted oak chips, to subjecting it to various gadgets.

Diane A Kelly: Force of Duck: Measuring explosive erection. Kelly has teamed up with biologist Patty Brennan to study the biomechanics of an evolutionary arms race (well, genital race) between male and female ducks. They want to know whether copulatory forces drive the evolution of reproductive structures. (If you've ever wondered whether a duck's penis can shatter a silicone tube, watch the video.) (This just reached the 50% mark!)

Debi Kilb: Every Blip Counts -- Low Cost Seismic Sensors. Kilb wants to turn every computer into a seismic recording device, because increasing earthquake understanding might help seismologists predict them better. Her fundraising would support developing a game to educate children and expand her network of users.

Kristina Killgrove: Ancient Rome DNA Project. Killgrove has already been studying the isotopes in ancient Roman bones that tell her how members of Rome's underclass had lived and died. Her groundbreaking research has already shed light on the heretofore invisible men, women, and children who had immigrated to Rome. Now she wants to study the DNA of Rome's "99%" to see where they all came from.

Matthew Leslie: Why is this dolphin's fin on backwards? Leslie is studying a species of spinner dolphin in which adult males sport dorsal fins classified as "wacky" or "funky," depending on which authority you consult. He wants to conduct flow tank studies to see if the odd "backwards" fin makes a difference in the dolphin's swimming capabilities and, by extension, its desirability as a mate. His video includes a shot of an X-29 experimental fighter plane with drag-reducing, backward-looking wings. If that sort of thing worked for planes, why not for cetaceans?

Levi Lewis: Saving Hawaii's Coral Reefs. Building upon research that examined the effects of pollution and overfishing in Maui, Lewis has organized a team of chemists, biologists and resource managers to explore the effects of water quality and herbivory on coral reef development. His team is looking at over eight sites along leeward Maui. (This project has just passed the 25% mark!)

Lopez et al.: Culture of Climate Change in French Polynesia. At the national level, French Polynesia has recently begun planning for how it will cope with the effects of climate change. Yet little is known about how local people in French Polynesia experience climate change on a daily basis, and how they're already coping with and responding to environmental fluctuations. An interdisciplinary team is studying how environmental change is affecting subsistence fishing and agriculture, tourism, aquaculture, fresh water availability, human health, and cultural identity.

Kelly Lyons: What's That Weed? Lyons is creating a pocket field guide to urban plants. Her original publication will be made for the city of San Antonio, but will serve as a template for other regions. In addition to high-quality macro photographs, Lyons' guide will contain general information and fascinating facts for each species. Her photos will be of two types, those dedicated to recognizing plants in the field and those dedicated to the more botanical understanding of the species and their relatives.

Jorge Mederos: Can we save Collserola National Park? The forest canopy plays a big role in ecosystem function and in regulating climate, but almost nothing is known about the tree canopy throughout Spain and Portugal. Mederos is studying insect species in the canopy of Collserola National Park, an Edenic forest surrounded by urban sprawl outside Barcelona. (This project has just passed the 25% mark!)

Daniel Mietchen and Fabiana Kubke: Transforming the way we publish research. Taking their cue from Beethoven, who said, "There should be only one repository of art in the world, to which the artist would donate his works in order to take what he would need," Mietchen and Kubke apply that principle to research. They want to make thousands of scholarly articles easily accessible -- to anyone -- by creating and maintaining a central repository.

Melia Nafus: The Secretive Life of the Desert Tortoise. Agassiz's desert tortoise is found only in the Southwestern deserts of North America, and it is in rapid decline. The desert tortoise is also difficult to study. It spends most of its time in burrows and is well camouflaged outside those burrows. Nafus wants to track tortoise populations with the help of radio transmitters. By knowing more about the tortoise's preferred habitat, better decisions can be made with respect to urban expansion and solar energy facilities.

Marisa Alonso Nuñez, Cancer? Yeast has answers. Nuñez is studying the effects on one of cancer's major players, a protein called Polo Kinase. Why yeast? Because the neat thing about Polo Kinase is that it ranges throughout the evolutionary spectrum from yeast to humans, and yeast is much easier to study.

Lindsey Peavey: Turtles in the Deep. Peavey wants to fill the knowledge gap that exists concerning olive ridley turtles. Studies of these turtles have concentrated on females nesting on beaches. Peavey wants to study these turtles in the open ocean, where they spend most of their time. That will allow her to study both sexes and all ages, to see how they are foraging and otherwise utilizing their habitat. This knowledge can then help the fishing industry be more effective in catching more of its target species and avoid the bycatch of turtles.

Bree Putnam Squirrel-Snake Face Off!Putnam wants to know why ground squirrels harass rattlesnakes for no apparent reason, particularly using a behavior called tail-flagging. Tail-flagging creates an infrared signal that rattlesnakes are specially equipped to detect. Putnam is using a mechanical squirrel to collect data on rattler behavior.

Yoav Ram: The Evolution of Stress-Induced Hypermutation. Ram's mathematical models on how bacteria react to stress show where conventional wisdom may have gone astray, and may explain why bacteria become antibiotic-resistant so quickly. Their mutations and evolution may also have implications for cancer treatment. Funds will help him travel from Israel to next year's Population Genetics Group meeting in Nottingham.

Aditya Rao: C-Cilia in Motion! Rao is studying Chlamydomonas cilia (hairs), which are a lot like the cilia occurring throughout the human body. Those little whips are so important than when something goes awry in one, some awful diseases happen. He wants to know how things go wrong, so that maybe some day they can be made to go right. (This project just reached 25%!)

Jennifer Schmitt: Smart Delivery. Schmitt wants to use Tanzania's vast network of cell phones and a Facebook-like social network to help transport vaccines to Tanzania's remotest villages, when and where they're needed. She's looking at the infrastructure already in place: Tanzania's people in motion. All they need, Schmitt says, is "extra room in their backpack, on their bike, in their trunk, on their mule, or elsewhere for transporting a small cooler of vaccines." They know where all the potholes and muddy ditches are, and they can navigate them better than traditional vaccine delivery trucks encountering the same ruts and yawning, washed-out chasms.

School Of Ants: School of Ants. Ants pollinate plants, disperse seeds, and eat insect pests. The School of Ants is a citizen science project that maps different ant populations that live in urban areas, particularly around homes and schools. In addition to discovering new species, the School of Ants tracks shifts in ant populations as their landscape is altered by urbanization and a changing climate.

Serengeti Lion Project: Serengeti Live. The Serengeti Lion Project spans 45 years. More than 200 camera traps capture images of the Serengeti's large carnivores, to study how these predators coexist; those cameras currently generate a million photographs a year. Researchers wait months for friends and colleagues to fly home from Tanzania with flash drives. They're looking for a way to transmit photos by satellite, not just to the University of Minnesota but to the public.

Allison Styring: Mapping a Bornean Soundscape. Bornean rainforests are some of the most diverse forests on the planet. Not only are Bornean forests incredibly rich and poorly understood, but they're also under threat. Styring wants to record and map the sounds of hundreds of animal species living in these forests, ranging from ground to canopy, to better understand how they communicate, and to share the sounds with both the public and the scientific community.

Marisa Tellez: Alien vs. Predator. Tellez is studying the relationship between crocodilian species and their parasites, which have co-evolved over hundreds of millions of years. As a result, crocs have evolved the strongest immune system in the world. This bond between croc and parasite could possibly be beneficial, helping crocodilians adapt to changing environments. But the parasites fall victim to water pollution -- and without them, a croc's immune system could be compromised. This parasite-host relationship also has implications for human health and the relationship we have with our own parasites.

Susan Tsang: Bats in peril: flying foxes past and present. Tsang studies the flying fox, which does not use sonar. She wants to learn how these fruit bats relate to other bat species, but more than half of all flying fox species are endangered. By sequencing DNA from museum collections, Tsang can study those connections and the bats' genetic histories.

Luis Valledor: Chlamystress. The alga Chlamydomonas is good biofuel material, among other things, like a source of electricity and biomass heat. It produces even more when it's stressed. Luis Valledor studies "Chlamy" stress responses, which include making more material that can be refined into energy. More than just watching what they do, he wants to know how they do it. And since green slime hasn't yet become a Special of the Day at dining establishments, farming this alga sidesteps the debate over whether to use more popular crops (and valuable agricultural land) for food or for fuel.

Walter Weare: Artificial Photosynthesis at NCSU. Weare wants to collect and store solar energy, but not in a battery. Liquid fuel is much more energy-dense and thus weighs much less than a battery does. Weare is looking for a way to absorb the energy of light and then transfer it to a catalyst for making fuel.

Kelly Weinersmith: Support Zombie Research!. Weinersmith is studying fish behavior under the influence of parasites that reside in its brain. The parasites change the fish's brain chemistry in order to get the fish to behave in a way that's beneficial to the parasite -- like attracting a predatory bird. Since the parasite lives out its next life cycle in the gut of the bird, it wants the infected fish to be eaten.

Ross Whippo: Behold, the power of Seagrass! Whippo is studying the role of seagrass in the seagrass meadows of British Columbia. Those limp clumps on the beach are powerhouses of food, shelter, and photosynthetic energy, and are interconnected with many species throughout the ecosystem. Whippo wants to understand them better and figure out why they are declining.

The Wild Life Team: The Wild Life of our Homes. The Wild Life Team is collecting data from citizen scientists on the microbial life that is all around us but invisible. Their study includes genetic analysis of these life forms. They want to gain a better understanding of the species living with us and on us in different types of homes and environments, and hope to expand their reach into places with more extreme climates. They also want to study the impacts of climate change, both through short-term readings and "long-term ecological research houses."

Andi Wolfe: Cats Nails: A parasitic plant of South Africa. Wolfe is studying a South African plant whose health speaks for that of an entire ecosystem. Cats Nails takes all of its nutrients and water from the roots of other plants, and it is found in ecosystems that have been mostly preserved from human interference. The presence of Cats Nails means that an ecosystem is in relatively good shape. Wolfe's lab group is studying the plant's basic biology and the ways in which it relates to different species.

Lee Worden: Mathematics of Direct Democracy. Can the ways in which people work together to make decisions be charted mathematically? Can models be used to learn how we can best solve shared problems? Worden wants to know what works, not just within movements like Spain's Real Democracy movement, Greece's dimokratia movement, and Occupy Wall Street, but in the workplace and within the scientific process.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

From the "Say What?" Department

2011-12-08T21:54:00.002-05:00

The above tweet is from Kristina Killgrove, whose Ancient Roman DNA Project is part of the #SciFund Challenge. The Challenge runs for only one more week! Go there and check out some awesome science! And while you're there, you can maybe drop in a little gelt, nu? (I.e., money) They've got great swag for Chanumas-Chrismakah-Saturnalia-Kwanzaa-Boxing Day-whateverileftout.

But failing pacemakers and Hava Nagila I don't know from, so I came up with a little something. And if you go out and it's chilly, wear a sweater or a coat, you shouldn't catch cold. And a hat. And have a little bite first, you shouldn't starve...

Yiddish Pacemaker Song
to the tune of "Hava Nagila"*

My poor pacemaker,
My poor pacemaker,
My poor pacemaker's
Bupkis tonight.

My poor pacemaker,
My poor pacemaker,
My poor pacemaker's
Not working right.

Heartbeat's meshugenah.
Ferklempt meshugenah.
Plotzing meshugenah.
Oy vay, revive!

Kvetching meshugenah.
Retching meshugenah.
Fetching the ambulance --
Keep me alive!

Oy! Oy!
Ken-a-ho-ra!
This little tchotchke gives me tsuris.
Call the mishpocheh, I've got tsuris.
Get a nice doctor, where the cure is.
Not a shlimazel, I've got tsuris!

Give it a potch!
Give it a potch!
Give my ticker chicken soup!

Yiddish references, in order of appearance

Bupkis: absolutely nothing; nothing of value (Source: Wiktionary)
Meshugenah: crazy (Source: Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish. NY: Pocket Books, 1968)
Ferklempt: choked up; overwhelmed (Source: Fact Monster)
Plotz: to burst (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)
Oy vay: oh, pain (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)
Kvetch: complain (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)
Oy: an all-purpose ejaculation to express anything from trivial delight to abysmal woe (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)
Kenahora: a magical phrase used to ward off the evil eye (Source: The Joys of Yiddish; I use an alternate spelling that's not in the book)
Tchotchke: a trinket (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)
Mishpocheh: family (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)
Shlimazel: a chronically unlucky person (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)
Potch: a smack (Source: The Joys of Yiddish)

* Disclaimer: The original "Hava Nagila" is sung in Hebrew, not Yiddish. But I grew up with Mickey Katz records.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Variations on a Theme: Notes on Editorial Process

2011-12-03T14:16:00.002-05:00

I've got some other writing-associated activities going on while I continue to follow and chronicle the #SciFund Challenge. For one, my guest-edited section of Star*Line (journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association) is forthcoming.

Last December, Star*Line editor Marge Simon invited me to guest-edit half of the journal's 4th Qtr. issue for 2011. It would not be the first time I edited Star*Line -- I had done so from 1986-1988 -- but it would be the first time I edited according to a particular theme, which I was free to choose. It would also be the first time I edited to fill a finite space (i.e., without a backlog of poems to save for future use). That in itself introduced a completely different dynamic to my editorial process.

First, I want to again thank Marge, and to thank everyone who submitted. I received 226 poems from a total of 75 poets before the end of my reading period. From that richness, I gathered 26 poems to fit onto 20 pages.

I had to make some tough decisions. And, to some degree, they were different types of decisions because this was a one-shot. "Interplay" (I describe the theme below) thus became a voyage of discovery for me.

I offer these process notes in case insights into my editing process prove helpful. To be clear: I cannot speak for any editor other than myself. In the final analysis, everything boils down to individual taste and idiosyncracy, including mine. Especially if you are new to submitting and are reading this: Do not be discouraged by rejection. Keep trying. As many times as you may have heard that advice, the notes that follow will, I hope, give you concrete reasons to take that oft-repeated chestnut to heart.

1. Editorial Interplay

A submission gets accepted or rejected for all sorts of reasons, and issues of craft comprise only one portion of that. In hindsight, my list of issues to consider went like this:

1. Craft. How does the poem read? Is it well-structured and evocative? How well are the words used?

2. Adherence to the theme. This gets interesting, because the theme itself contains several levels. There's
(a) My vision of the theme when I wrote it;
(b) Interpretations of the theme by the poets who submitted;
(c) The dynamic of the two and how they interact; and
(d) The theme as carried by the poems not only in and of themselves, but in concert.

3. Tone. This relates to how a poem is evocative (is it funny, sad, clever, pensive, wondrous, etc.?), but it also relates to the dynamic movement within the section as a whole. When I performed my final cut, I looked not only at the poems individually, but at how they blended with each other.

4. Space. As you can see from my submissions call below, my preferred length was up to 75 lines. The longest poem I accepted came to 67 lines -- 74 if you count spaces between stanzas, plus lines for the title and the poet's name (all considerations for purposes of layout and space availability). In a sense, this exercise resembled packing for a long trip: too many floor-length coats in my suitcase would have meant leaving my pants behind.

5. Range. I've rejected poems that I liked. Especially if you are new to submitting, go back and re-read that sentence. Although frustrating to the poet (and also to this editor), this is ultimately good news. If this were not a one-shot, I'd have accepted those poems and set them aside for future use. My decisions on what to accept hinged in part on providing both variety and continuity.

6. Blend and Arc. More than anything, this demonstrates how the editing process is really a collaboration between editor and poets. "Blend" relates to both range and tone, while "Arc" relates to the dynamics of the section as a whole. This dimension didn't come into play until I began to actually assemble the section, determining poem order and seeing how the poems would fit on the pages. It caused me to re-evaluate some of my earlier selections, swapping one poem for another. It also provided some surprises, because a poem can read one way when considered in isolation, and another way when considered within the context of the surrounding work.

7. Pure, unadulterated subjectivity. Something might grab me; something might not. This element came into play particularly early on. But even this element can be overridden during later reads, especially with respect to Blend and Arc.

There are as many editorial processes as there are editors. Your results may differ.

2. Interplay Mechanics

My reading period extended from March 20 through May 31, 2011, with the following call for submissions:

"I'm interested in poems that explore the interplay of opposites -- not a 'point/counterpoint' type of dichotomy, but the ways in which contradictory elements influence and infuse each other. For example, not science versus religion, but the dance between the two. Not hero versus villain, but the meeting of flawed hero and noble villain. Subject matter can range across technology, philosophy, personality, nature, myth, borders, and beyond. I'm looking for interstices, common ground, shades of gray. All speculative genres, poetic forms, and mixtures thereof will be considered. I'll also look at simultaneous submissions (let me know if you're sending one) and previously published work (include publication history). Preferred length is up to 75 lines; poems longer than that will be a tougher sell."

I have what is now a ten-page printout of what I called my "process sheet." That table has four columns: poet's name, submission title (one line per poem), accepted or rejected, and comments. The 226 poems fall into 14 marked "Yes," 29 marked "Maybe," and 183 marked "No." Those had been the standings before I made my final cut.

I can point to a "No" that became a "Maybe" and then a "Yes." I can point to a "Yes" that became a "No." I can point to a "No" that became a "Maybe" and that then reverted back to being a "No." I can point to a pair of poems by the same person in which I personally preferred A over B, but where I chose B because of Blend and Arc. In other words, the impact of other people's poems also influenced my decisions.

That also explains how a "No" became a "Yes," but not entirely. I'd read the submissions at least half a dozen times. At least two poems grew on me, one of them enough, and in concert with the other factors above, to make that leap.

Every time a poem became a "Yes" or a "Maybe" I included its line count on the sheet. I transferred my info to an Excel spreadsheet, so that I could have a running tally of total lines, given the space I had to work with. (The spreadsheet also included word counts, for figuring out payment.) Dealing with a one-shot made me take a much longer and harder look than I otherwise would have if I'd had the luxury of setting poems aside for future use.

Almost all the submissions came via email; I printed those out. As I assigned and re-assigned categories, I placed the poems into piles. But it wasn't until I actually began ordering them that my choices solidified.

Here the Interplay section took on a life of its own. It developed an arc much like a story arc, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. (These correspond to what I call subsections.) And some surprising things happened. For example, I had two poems that I wanted to use, but at first glance I thought they might be too similar. Through most of my reads I felt I'd have to choose one over the other. Within the arc, however, they seemed more to play off and complement each other. The first poem introduced a change in tone while carrying forward a particular subsection. The second poem then served as a bridge to another subsection.

Another pair of poems fared differently. My first choice fit a subsection but would have added more weight to it than I wanted, while my second choice blended well with a different subsection. That led me to choose a poem over one that I would have accepted instead under different circumstances.

Some of the nicest surprises came from poems that worked especially well when placed one after the other, making them into companion pieces. That cross-poem interplay added layers of meaning for me, and in one case bumped a poem up to a "Yes."

In the final analysis, all the machinations above were geared to my sensibilities, including the ways in which I chose to be influenced one way or another. Here's the final order for the Interplay section:

1. Greg Beatty: The Physics of Age & Baseball
2. Geoff Landis: subsume
3. Robert Frazier: A Break During Temporal Distortion
4. Kurt MacPhearson: Europa's Stoic Stance
5. Sophia Rhei (trans. by Lawrence Schimel): The Golden Ring
6. Terrie Relf: Hypatia
7. Mitchell Hart: Cosmoritus
8. Elizabeth Barrette: Astronauts and Angels
9. Marcus Ewert: No one could have guessed…
10. William John Watkins: How Fallen Angels Spend Their Golden Years
11. Alison Stone: IV. The Emperor
12. Matthew Richards: Ravel: An Etymology
13. Holly Day: The Orchard
14. Charlotte Hussey: Tree (for HD)
15. Ken Poyner: Workman's Creed
16. Sandra Lindow: Identity
17. F.J. Bergmann: Multi-tasking
18. Gail Wickman: How Martha Saved Her Life & Marriage
19. Noel Sloboda: Shuffling Off
20. Robert Borski: Kitchen Carcharodon
21. Roy Bayfield: Talking to Sim Man
22. Karen Newman: An Absence of Superheroes
23. Alexandra Seidel: Puppet Minds
24. Matthew Richards: Lullaby for Ununoctium
25. Penelope Cottier: Heliocentric
26. Melissa Frederick: Self-Assembled Universe

(To my knowledge, the "HD" dedication in Charlotte Hussey's "Tree" does not refer to Holly Day, author of the preceding poem "The Orchard.")

Again, I'd like to thank Marge Simon for inviting me to edit, and to all the volunteers working behind the scenes to get Star*Line out there: Robert Frazier for layout, F.J. Bergmann for updating the webpage, Deborah Flores for paying contributors, and Deborah Kolodji for getting everything out in the mail.

The Star*Line page at the SFPA site offers the TOCs and Editor's Choice poems of past issues. Also, check out SFPA's e-zine Eye to the Telescope and our Halloween poetry reading page.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

My NaNo in a Nutshell

2011-11-29T05:36:00.002-05:00

A quick tour/index of my journey during NaNoWriMo:

1. Nov. 1, NaNoWriMo Meets the #SciFund Challenge: I lay out my plans for doing my first NaNoWriMo as a nonfiction "rebel," following the #SciFund Challenge as it unfolds in realtime.

2. Nov. 2, It's Official: A NaNoWriMo Crazy Person Lives Here: How reality blew my initial project concept out of the water, and the joys of finding a new direction to take with the writing as I find new connections in the material.

3. Nov. 4, Behind the Scenes Chez NaNoVille: How I've prepared for following #SciFund in realtime by being a data geek, using Dipity, OneNote, Access, and especially Twitter to collect and manage my material.

4. Nov. 5, Crouching Typist, Hidden Toddler: My ecstatic obsession with my own project, plus an example of how I bridge the #SciFund projects to each other. For example, "Serengeti Live," Eric Abelson's "Does the act of looking change what we see?", and Jennifer Schmitt's "Smart Delivery".

5. Nov. 6, A Tale of Two Narratives: My "Michael writing" versus my "Archie writing" styles -- how NaNo for me is like "All in the Family" (based on the scene "A Sock And A Sock And A Shoe And A Shoe").

6. Nov. 8, Quick Takes and Observations: The obligatory "NaNo lifestyle" details: food, drink, music, dress, etc. -- plus profiles of the "Chlamy Trifecta": the #SciFund projects of Steve Herbert's "Domesticating algae for the 21st century", Luis Valledor's "Chlamystress", and Aditya Rao's "C-Cilia in Motion!".

7. Nov. 11, Process Notes: Beneath the Surface: How I collect and process my data, with special focus on Andi Wolfe's project on Cats Nails.

8. Nov. 16, Sleepy Tweets Edition: My modem begins its decline, slowing my data-gathering down. In the meantime I write about Twitter's role in my project, with special focus on Kalani Kirk Hausman's "STEMulate Learning" project on distributed computing.

9. Nov. 17, Change in Strategy: I revise my data collection method in the wake of a dying/dead modem. Also includes an example of what can happen in a #SciFund day.

10. Nov. 22, The Best of Both Worlds: How my writing project is like collage and assemblage, as I gather #SciFund-related pieces from the Web to create a narrative puzzle.

11. Nov. 25, Science Santa!: On the importance of #SciFund, plus a tour through some of the project swag.

12. Nov. 28, The Next Phase: After a marathon writing session to crest 50,000 words, my NaNo phase is completed, but my work is far from done. Here are the details.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNo Update: The Next Phase

2011-11-28T23:52:00.002-05:00

I've been validated!

After a roughly 26-hour writing marathon at the end of a fevered-pace weekend (with a 2,900-word count average over the past six days) , I have crossed the NaNoWriMo finish line. Word count by their validator: 50,255 words. According to my Word program, the total is 51,649, a 1,394-word discrepancy. I'll bet it's the footnotes.

I have a lot of footnotes.

According to my Word program, I had crossed the NaNo finish line about 5-1/2 hours earlier than the site's reckoning. What with NaNo's pace, the draft is already very rough, and that roughness doesn't compare with what I had slapped together in those last hours.

My NaNo is effectively over, but my work is far from done. How far?

1. The #SciFund Challenge runs through December 15, and I will continue to cover it in realtime. The #SciFund story -- part of what attracted me to this project is because #SciFund is a story -- is more than the event itself. It's more than a fabulous community of scientists who have bonded with each other -- and with non-scientists -- around the globe, in a way that transforms everyone involved (including me!).

The event has added a new layer to already-existing discussions concerning crowdfunding in general, science funding in general (both within the US and internationally), open access to research, and the state of science, period. And I'm just touching on the main points.

I am personally fascinated -- awed, frankly -- by the interplay of layers I'm seeing. By the way in which the human interest stories of individuals are getting folded into something very, very big that is happening across monetary, academic, technical, and political landscapes. And by the way those relatively tiny but powerful human interest stories are affecting those massive landscapes. It has literally taken my breath away.

That's the kind of material that is part of my ongoing process of discovery. The scope of my project has shifted from what I had first envisioned, much the way in which the dorsal fin shifts on the male spinner dolphins that Matthew Leslie is studying, where it's hypothesized that one edge of the fin grows while the other edge stops growing. When I had started this writing, I had expected to grow one "edge" of the story, but another "edge" has been growing instead, with #SciFund remaining the central focus.

2. I am also dealing with the laws of physics (or at least the laws of coffee-saturated biology). My breaking the 50,000-word barrier doesn't mean that I am up to date in assembling the data I've been collecting. My draft narrative currently runs through November 23. That means I've got five days of #SciFund-related events that I haven't even touched yet, beyond grabbing info off the Web. Before my six-day frenzy I had been running a good ten days behind. And I know I'm missing a lot that's out there, including conceptually. When the #SciFund experiment ends its crowdfunding phase on Dec. 15, I will still likely have days worth of data to process. And that's just for the realtime narrative part.

3. I have concentrated on Archie-writing rather than Michael-writing. Put another way, I have concentrated on the realtime narrative material rather than on material devoted solely to the projects themselves. Those project narratives are important to the draft, but they can be done later because the material there is relatively static. The realtime narrative is dynamic, meaning that it can get away from me if I don't keep up with it.

That still leaves me with a lot to write. However, it's material that will wait for me.

4. Good old-fashioned editing. My draft is slapdash. It's like an underpainting, with basic shapes and colors and the relationships established between forms and angles. It's missing a lot of nuance. It likely contains unnecessary repetitions and some gaping holes. And the narrative itself is choppy, with edges that need smoothing, and bridges that I need to build between sections.

All that said, watching this amazing event unfold has been and continues to be a privilege. (Want to be a Science Santa? Here's a taste!)

Meanwhile, I've had my five-hour nap following my writing marathon. I've lived the "NaNo lifestyle": holed up at home, not getting dressed, eating out of cans, and watching with increasing alarm the level in my one remaining coffee bag decrease. I have not yet seen the movie The Road to Perdition, but I had found Thomas Newman's gorgeous score, which had fueled my last-push marathon after I had spent Sunday night listening to Hearts of Space.

There are errands in my near future. And a shower. Not in that order.

And then -- back to the story.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNo Update: Science Santa!

2011-11-25T04:14:00.002-05:00

My NaNoWriMo word count reached 39,260 as Thanksgiving ticked over into Black Friday. Almost up to par.

And my Rocket Hub dashboard shows that I've funded four #SciFund projects, but there are more. The discrepancy has to do with my credit card company putting a freeze on my account because, well, they weren't used to seeing me click on the same kind of button that many times. So far as I know, that end of it has been resolved. Once the rest follows, I'll resume my holiday shopping!

Really, go check out the projects. If you want to inspire someone's scientific curiosity, here's your chance to touch base with researchers working on the front lines, doing innovative stuff. And as much as I love the companies from which I've bought things like our little Astroscan telescope, or the gyroscope I photographed for my chapbook of science poems, those things are mass-produced, ready-made products.

They're neat and all that, but they're not personal.

Every thank-you written on a postcard -- from places like St. Petersburg (in Russia, not Florida!) or South Africa or French Polynesia or Tel-Aviv -- or on a Gingko leaf (as Goethe used to do, when writing to his close friends) -- is unique. Every sample of data -- an autographed copy of a notebook page or handwritten mathematics from the research or handwritten field notes -- is a small piece in a grand adventure.

Want a paperweight or jewelry made from a cast-off crayfish claw? How about an alligator foot mold? Or a personalized Roman skull card? How about a bottle of wine that you can't get in any liquor store? Or a T-shirt print in high-res, living color of two algae in flagrante delicto? (Look at this picture; it's gorgeous. If you didn't know ahead of time, would you know what it was? Need a good guessing game for the holidays?) How about a unique DNA sequence from an animal being studied in the field? How about having a specimen named after you?

How about unique, woodturned art made by the scientist? Or a replica of models used in flow tank studies? How about stationery made from elephant poo? Or an acknowledgement in a presentation? Or a personalized kit for doing your own experiment? (Acknowledgements, copies of the research, and special access to progress reports are shared by several projects. Several high-end gifts include personal presentations and field tours.)

Holiday stress wearing you out? There's a virtual rainforest experience for that.

The swag is great in and of itself and there's something for every budget (I haven't covered all the projects here, not even close), but that's just one layer of the magic.

Back in December 2006, I had volunteered at a paleontological dig here in Florida, called the Tapir Challenge. Part 4 of my 4-part report is here, with a photo of the sea urchin spine I'd found. It had nothing to do with what we were looking for, but I was told that the quarry where we worked was full of them.

Then I was told I could take it home with me. And then I was told that it was probably 30 to 40 million years old. I was holding it in the palm of my hand. (Never mind that I had burned much older fossil fuels to get to the dig site. That was different.)

If someone my age gets all goose-pimply from that, imagine what a kid would feel. Now imagine a kid holding a souvenir from fresh, spanking, brand new science in the making, from a researcher who's breaking new ground.

But what about scientific inquiries that come to dead ends, as many do?

I could bust open a mess of incandescent light bulbs and pull out a filament like the one that had finally worked for Edison. I think of all the incandescent light bulbs in the world, especially prior to the changeover to fluorescents.

But what about the filament designs that didn't work? How common are those light bulbs now? Moreover, those filaments had been Edison's teachers. So had his early inventions, including his vote-recording machine, a disaster for being too far ahead of its time. When he lost the faith of his investors and his own funding was in peril, those failures had driven him on.

That makes them magic, too. Regardless of an experiment's outcome, it advances knowledge. That makes it pioneering work.

Speaking of thank-you letters from scientists...

Oh, wait -- Edison was a success by then. How about this one?

It reads, "Your favor of the 19th was duly received. The megaphone is not yet completed and I am quite unable to say when it will be as at present I am busily engaged on the electric light."

Who knew?

Who knows?

Want a taste of what Edison's passion and dogged determination felt like in the face of unknowns and uncertainties?

Here's your chance.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNo Update: The Best of Both Worlds

2011-11-22T02:35:00.002-05:00

Heading out of Day 21 of both NaNoWriMo and the #SciFund Challenge, my word count stands at a rather pretty 33,399. I had dropped behind the desired NaNo pace during my days of modem slowdown-death.

I'm still behind par. My daily word count currently averages 1,590 rather than the 1,667 intended to produce a 50,000-word opus by month's end.

I'm not worried. First, because meeting the 50,000-word goal by the end of November 30 is the NaNo thing to do, but it's not crucial. Second, while some other writers may be celebrating their post-NaNo collapse on December 1, I'll still be going strong. I'll still be on the #SciFund timetable, which goes through December 15.

Third, because for me it's not a question of word count. It's a question of processing all the data that comes in. I'm still catching up on that end.

And fourth, because I'm not really the author here.

You heard me.

I'm the assembler.

When I talk about "the best of both worlds," I don't refer to NaNo and #SciFund. I refer to two of my creative activities: writing and mixed-media art, specifically collage and assemblage.

Back in the early "aughts" -- roughly 2000 through 2003 -- I wasn't writing, at least not for submission. I was working steady multiple shifts and my brain was too fried for worldbuilding. I saved my creative sanity by picking up odd things -- shells, broken crockery, dropped pigeon feathers, pieces of broken mirror off the sidewalk -- and fiddling with them, to make them juxtapose with each other in interesting ways.

Put another way, I was playing. Like this:

This piece, "Totem," is made from a folding closet door that measured 1x7 feet. The door had been left on the curb for trash and had a hole seemingly kicked into it. I turned the door upside-down and transformed the hole into a bird's nest, housing three paper pulp baby birds in a combination of white pigeon fluff and shed cat fur. Mama bird is a pulp sculpture stuck with adult pigeon feathers. The mirror pieces in the sun/moon combination came from the curb as well.

The rest is sculpted pulp made from more than a ream's worth of discarded office paper that I mixed with gesso and then painted. I had built thick "branches" up from the wood, whacking them with a plastic knife to create the rough texture of bark. (I took this photo before my "good camera" days. It's lacking in detail and doesn't show the piece's true three-dimensionality.)

A friend and neighbor had told me that whenever she visited the cafe where this piece was on exhibit, her toddler son went over to the sculpture and kissed the lizard. (Best compliment for my artwork I've ever gotten.) I subsequently made him his own lizard and then gave "Totem" to his mother before Mary and I moved to Florida -- whose high heat and humidity discourages this kind of sculpting. Pulped paper mixed with gesso is heaven on earth for mold.

So, what does this have to do with my NaNo project and with having the best of both worlds?

One, I'm writing, which is something I'm passionate about. And two, I'm doing the writing equivalent of collecting interesting things and putting them together in what I hope are interesting ways.

In a way, it's like what Aditya Rao is doing with his Chlamydomonas cilia. Each cilium -- think of it as a microscopic hair -- has more than three thousand genetic puzzle pieces. Rao is studying how two very important pieces fit together.

In his puzzle, the pieces have to fit just right or nasty diseases can occur.

In my puzzle -- some of whose pieces come from his project -- I get to make up where the pieces go. I get to play with their shapes a little bit, the way I've done with my mixed-media art. In my puzzle, the pieces are ready-made, but the puzzle itself isn't. Because I'm the one making the puzzle.

In my mixed-media days, I took regular walks to Dorchester Bay in Boston and combed the beach for puzzle pieces like broken ceramic and glass worn smooth by the sea. Or I patrolled my neighborhood the night before trash day. Honestly, Dorchester had awesome trash.

These days, I turn my computer on and comb the Web for #SciFund puzzle pieces. I collect a bunch of them, just as I had filled my tote bag with a bunch of stuff from the beach or from the curb back in Dorchester.

And then I cull. What fits? What doesn't fit? What two pieces need a verbal bridge to connect them? What do I set aside for later? What new development gets a little line inserted earlier in the draft as a bit of foreshadowing? What gets left behind as redundant-redundant? What do I use to shift from one tone to another? What do I earmark as "needs more data?" What do I highlight, to see if any follow-up occurs?

Much of what I do is not actual writing. It's moving the pieces around. The writing part comes in shaping and connecting, and in the occasional commentary, when I feel the need to put in my own two shekels.

Seen in another way, this project is like putting together a found poem. Except that it's a found book. And the book is still being written. Not by me, but by dozens of people.

I'm just the one combing the beach.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNo Update: Change in Strategy

2011-11-17T20:07:00.002-05:00

The idea behind National Novel Writing Month is to write at breakneck speed. That idea is based on the assumption that writers have done their version of advance preparation, whether that means constructing a novel outline, scribbling notes, and/or doing whatever research they think is required (and inserting placeholders during NaNo when they realize they need to do more research).

For a nonfiction "rebel" like me, the Web is invaluable to my project.

For someone like me, who is following and chronicling the #SciFund Challenge, an event occurring parallel to NaNo in realtime, the Web is my project.

And when my Internet connection sloooooooows dooooooown, I get cranky.

I've done the usual fixes. Reboot. Cold start. Turning the router off and then back on. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've had three days of that now.

Normally I've been grabbing URLs and catching up with them when I can. (See, for example, this entry.) That doesn't work too well these days, especially after around 5:30 p.m. That's when I notice my connection slowing down. I've started writing this entry at around 5:45: my way of multi-tasking while I wait for a page to load.

By the time midnight rolls around, that wait -- which has grown over the preceding hours -- can be agonizing. Eventually I have to just give up and get some sleep.

So I've shifted gears. I perform my own freelance work on flex-time, which I love, and which allows me to do things like spend "normal" working hours -- when my connection functions at a nice clip -- gathering my data. And this time, I'm not stopping at URLs.

I'm cutting and pasting text and saving pages as .pdf and .txt files. With a vengeance.

Right now I've got one file open where I'm revisiting previously-saved URLs and fleshing out their info. I've got another file open where I'm grabbing and annotating new info that pops up -- for as long as it's poppin' and not stallin'.

Today's news includes the latest coverage of the #SciFund Challenge in Scientific American -- specifically, Rose Eveleth's article "To Study Backward-Finned Dolphin, Researcher Sources Crowds for Cash: One researcher's quest to understand some funky fins taps a new crowdsourcing model to funding his project". Researcher Matt Leslie (take a look at his project here!) is studying an evolutionary oddity: the dorsal fin in a specific type of dolphin faces "backward." He wants to know why.

If you're interested in aeronautics and studies of drag, you'll find his work intriguing. Leslie's video also includes a shot of an X-29 experimental fighter plane, whose wings look -- backward. If you think of dolphins as flying rather than swimming through the water, that odd fin starts to make sense. So do some weird flukes that aren't -- well, flukes.

But eyeballing and hypothesizing aren't enough. Leslie needs to do some drag studies, using a flow tank as a kind of watery wind tunnel. And for that, he needs some funds.

That's just one of today's items, taken in isolation. But I'm also interested in the interplay of what happens across the #SciFund spectrum simultaneously.

November 11 is a great example of that spectrum. Not only was Kristina Killgrove's Roman DNA study (which became fully funded that day) covered by Ed Yong in CNN and by Alex Knapp in Forbes (along with getting other coverage), but #SciFund itself got a boost from Kevin Zelnio, writing in Scientific American. That same day, the Minnesota Daily News, "The independent news source of the University of Minnesota area," covered the #SciFund project "Serengeti Live."

That same day, #SciFund participant Daniel Mietchen blogged about what needs to be fixed in science funding. Discussion on the web revived Mark Changizi's August 2010 article on biases against certain types of grant proposals. And #SciFund participant Shermin deSilva's guest post at the #SciFund blog relayed her candid observations and concerns about science crowdfunding.

Meanwhile, "Dr. Zen" Faulkes was interviewed on Episode 6 of "The Weekly Weinersmith" about his study of "Amazon crayfish." Amazon as in female clones. Crayfish as in invasive. Talk about your real-life "clone wars" (or listen to him talk about them!) -- along with zombie shrimp and some really cool evolutionary questions.

In the middle of all that excitement, crocodilian researcher Marisa Tellez discovered a new parasite species. She's studying the relationship -- millions of years in the making -- between the American alligator and its parasites. That bond may have given the alligator its formidable immune system, and might now be affected by environmental changes.

That discovery was also tweeted on November 11 -- the day after Tellez had gotten a boost from her alma mater. Which alma mater? Her high school. The place that displays her jersey in its auditorium.

(You can also learn more about Marisa Tellez -- a.k.a. "The Latina Crocodile Hunter" -- in today's edition of Hispanically Speaking News.)

My slow connection yesterday fairly sent my word count crashing through the floor, and I've spent the better part of today gathering material that I can access from my hard drive. And I've backed it all up onto my flash drive. You'd better believe I'm ready to write.

Because when I get cranky, I go for the gusto.

Update, Nov. 18: My modem has now been replaced. So far, so good!

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNo Update, Sleepy Tweets Edition

2011-11-16T03:15:00.002-05:00

Could be my machine, could be my Internet connection out here. Or it could be Twitter that's slow. But if it is Twitter, then it's also a bunch of other websites I've been trying to access these past two days. *sigh*

That's cramped my style some, but it hasn't stopped me. My earlier posted word count on NaNoWriMo was 26,092 -- slightly better than NaNo's "average" expected pace of 1,667 words per day.

Why am I paying attention to Twitter while I'm doing NaNo? There's a reason the #SciFund Challenge comes with a built-in hashtag. It's got an awesome Twitter feed. Just search Twitter on #SciFund and you'll see what I mean.

Want another awesome feed? Search on #ls_chat and follow a discussion of #SciFund at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, 1 p.m. Eastern Time on November 16.

I wish I had a clone (not for the first time!), because I'll be speaking at the Citrus County Library's "Write-In," which occurs at 1-4 p.m. Eastern that day. Maybe I can sneak a peek at the #ls_chat Q&A.

So, what am I learning from Twitter these days? For one thing, I'm learning that Kalani Kirk Hausman, whose #SciFund project aims to create a do-it-yourself laboratory for teaching STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in neighborhood schools, curates a #SciFund digest on Scoop.it.

But let me back up for a minute. Why a DIY lab?

Hausman conducts "Scrap-heap Supercomputing" workshops using surplus university equipment. These workshops have inspired middle-school through college-level students, who get hands-on experience in working to solve global issues -- like cures for childhood diseases and cancer, and the search for clean water resources and clean energy technologies.

(I'm going to get back to that "clean water resources" bit in a moment.)

Why supercomputing? Because the power of those combined surplus machines "contributed more than 4 years worth of computing power in barely 3 months total time" toward solving those problems. That's what a lot of surplus computers, hooked together, can do.

Too bad the university surplus, which must be "disposed of properly," can't be transferred directly to the schools.

That's where Hausman's project comes in.

He's found a way to hook together "nodes" -- very basic computer modules that anyone can grab off the shelf -- together, to make them into powerful machines. He's got free open-source software to go with them. Add in downloadable instructions and you've got a STEM lab, constructed for a fraction of the ready-made cost, that's accessible to teachers everywhere.

That could inject a dose of global competitiveness right into your own back yard.

I've learned on Twitter that, in addition to spearheading this project, Hausman curates the #SciFund Scoop.it digest, which pulls all sorts of #SciFund-relevant materials from the Web.

He also gets on the Twitter horn and tweets those links about the array of individual #SciFund projects and about online coverage of them. One link, one tweet at a time. Day after day.

That's dozens of tweets.

He's trying to raise a lot of money (compared to the other projects) for his DIY STEM lab (Don't take my word for it; go see!). And his project needs a boost. It needs a lot of boosts.

One of the things that makes RocketHub different from Kickstarter is that funds raised go to the projects, whether they meet their goal or not. It's just that the commissions differ.

In addition to promoting his own work, Hausman is using his energies to promote everyone else's fine work. One tweet doesn't take long, but he's been making a lot of tweets, on behalf of a lot of people.

But that's not all. That "clean water resources" bit I was talking about?

When Hausman isn't tweeting about #SciFund or about other great things, he posts the occasional statement that he's donated CPU time to the World Community Grid and its Computing for Clean Water project. The WCG isn't part of #SciFund -- it's another crowdsourced project. Computing for Clean Water seeks "more efficient and lower-cost methods for producing clean water." The site amasses and uses idle time from all the computers entered into the program.

Hausman can donate over 150 hours to WCG in a single week. Without slowing down his tweets at all.

Although not directly part of #SciFund, WCG served as part of the inspiration for Hausman's DIY STEM lab. His computer nodes function in a similar way. He's also planning age-appropriate lessons that will tie class work to WCG initiatives, like Computing for Clean Water.

Another thing I learned from Twitter is that back on November 6 -- which also happened to be the day the first #SciFund project became fully funded (three more have followed, so far!) -- the North Texas Science Education Network gave #SciFund a shout-out. Not only that, but they placed the #SciFund logo on their home page, beside logos for the Texas Nature Challenge and the National Lab Network. NLN connects K-12 teachers with STEM professionals to facilitate hands-on learning.

It fits right in with what Hausman, who's also in Texas, wants to do with his computer nodes.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNo Process Notes: Beneath the Surface

2011-11-11T12:44:00.002-05:00

My draft word count at the end of yesterday was 17,789 -- right on track for a NaNoWriMo pace of a 1,667-word average per day.

My days have gone thusly:

1. Data collection. #SciFund unfolds in vivo, with new developments daily and at a breakneck pace. It is breathtaking to watch.

2. Data rasslin' -- organizing that data into a narrative. These past couple of days I've been doing that for the period leading up to the #SciFund launch, while collecting and annotating the news that comes to me in realtime.

Have a look at the #SciFund blog for project profiles and updates. And at #SciFund participant blogs, like that of Roman DNA expert Kristina Killgrove, who today is being covered in Forbes and CNN. Plus, you can read her review of the TV series Bones.

And there are stories behind the stories. Go to Andi Wolfe's Flickr photostream, where each morning she posts her gorgeous picture of the day -- like this intricate macro, taken in July and uploaded yesterday; or the flower vendor uploaded today.

Wolfe's #SciFund project is the study of Cats Nails (Hyobanche) in South Africa. Why the name Cats Nails? "That's because of the way the style curves out of the flower tube to resemble a cat's claw," she says in her video.

Cats Nails can't make its own food, so it taps into the roots of other plants. Within its pretty pink flowers is genetic information that will tell Wolfe how well its host plants are doing. She is, in effect, studying the equivalent of a canary in a coal mine for an entire ecosystem.

So it was awesome when the Cats Nails project and more #SciFund research made national news in the Netherlands. And it was a little bizarre when it got carried by I Want Information Now About Cats -- a website whose videos include a dog that gets along with cats, a trip to Amsterdam (accompanying music: a song by the group Cats & Dogs), and a Bobcat hydraulic motor component service repair shop. That site's filter is about as good as mine. :-)

While Wolfe thanks her funders, she also thanks "all our veterans for all their hard work and sacrifice." And when Cats Nails doesn't command her immediate attention, the history-making orbital maneuvers by astronaut Bruce McCandless with his nitrogen jet propelled backpack does. (Want to see a jaw-dropping image? Here's what she linked to.)

That's just a taste of what I've been seeing this week. I feel thrilled and privileged to get a glimpse of the people behind the projects.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNoWriMo Quick Takes and Observations

2011-11-08T21:30:00.002-05:00

A glimpse into the NaNo lifestyle, with a sample size of one:

1. NaNoWriMo foods: canned tuna (eaten straight out of the can or microwaved with cheddar and hot sauce); garbanzos (mixed with oil and vinegar, garlic, and paprika); ready-made garlic Caesar salads from the supermarket (on sale!); an occasional Clif Bar (chocolate brownie or chocolate chip); spinach (frozen or canned, microwaved with cheddar and hot sauce); broccoli (frozen, eaten alone or microwaved with -- wait for it -- cheddar and hot sauce); WASA multi-grain crispbread; plain yogurt with honey and muesli.

2. NaNoWriMo beverages: coffee! More coffee! New, just bought and tried Kahlua Mocha coffee! Which smells awesome and tastes -- not quite as good as it smells. But a little honey really perks it up. And a little shot of Drambuie last night made it into a really nice kind of Mexican-Irish-Scots coffee. And, when not drinking coffee -- homemade lemonade.

3. The Drambuie had been sitting in my little drink cup for a good 48 hours first, left over from a nip. Alcohol and writing don't mix for me (my hat's off to you, Papa Hemingway). But to fall asleep when my brain wants to stay up and play but I really can't because my eyes are melting down my face? It doesn't take much booze to send me to bed.

4. At times, translation site Babel Fish can be almost as funny as Damn You Auto Correct.

5. NaNoWriMo music: none while I'm writing (sometimes music is muse fuel for me, especially when I write fiction. In this case it's distracting). But in-between I've glommed onto Parov Stelar's "Catgroove" (and TakeSomeCrime's moves!) and Caravan Palace's "Clash" (still great moves from TSC, though I think his "Catgroove" interpretation tells a more solid story).

6. NaNoWriMo dress code: sexy black thermal underwear. Hey, even in Florida it's November. And pretty orange print fleece slipper socks.

Today's #SciFund featured project is "C-Cilia in Motion!!" by Aditya Rao, a great example of science storytelling that features a single-celled organism doing the breast stroke. There's more to it than that; go see!

One reason this project catches my eye is because it's one in the #SciFund "Chlamy" Trifecta: three different ways in which a little alga called Chlamydomonas gets studied in the lab. This tiny plant has amazing versatility. It's like a living, microscopic Swiss Army Knife.

You've got Steve Herbert's "Domesticating algae for the 21st century" in which, with the help of a cousin named Volvox (no relation to Zardoz), "Chlamy" cells might become better able to stick together for easier harvesting. It would be like picking up a slice of bread instead of one crumb at a time.

Why harvest? "Chlamy" is good biofuel material, among other things, like a source of electricity and biomass heat. It produces even more when it's pestered. Luis Valledor gives the little dears a tough time and studies their stress responses, which include making more material that can be refined into energy. More than just watching what they do, he wants to know how they do it. And since green slime hasn't yet become a Special of the Day at dining establishments, farming this alga sidesteps the debate over whether to use more popular crops (and valuable agricultural land) for food or for fuel.

Then there's Rao, who turned to "Chlamy" after working with a menagerie ranging from elephants down to fruit flies. The alga's single cell still isn't small enough for him. He's studying its cilia (those swimming hairs), which are a lot like the cilia occurring throughout the human body. Those little whips are so important than when something goes awry in one, some awful diseases happen. He wants to know how things go wrong, so that maybe some day they can be made to go right. Check out his project page, which also offers a T-shirt printed with a beautiful, full-color picture of "Chlamy" porn.

And the outreach doesn't stop there! Tune in to developments at the Social Media for Scientists workshop (today and tomorrow) run by #SciFund founders Byrnes and Ranganathan.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

A Tale of Two Narratives

2011-11-06T21:15:00.001-05:00

Archie: Don't you know that the whole world puts on a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe?

The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write a lot and write it fast. To send your censor packing. Editing comes later. Craft comes later. Just git 'er done.

That's just the kind of thing that gives me the willies.

Some writers spit their first drafts out like melon seeds, then sit and polish those seeds into pearls. Some, like me, sit and polish a paragraph, then sit and polish the next paragraph, then go back and sit and re-polish because now I've got two paragraphs that have to be polished together, then move to the third paragraph to sit and polish, then go back to the first two paragraphs...

Wait. Let me try that again. See, it's like this:

I grew up watching All in the Family. In a classic scene from the series, A Sock And A Sock And A Shoe And A Shoe, Archie Bunker and Michael 'Meathead' Stivic debate the fine points of getting dressed. As Archie talks about the fishing trip they're about to take, Michael puts a sock on his left foot. Then he grabs a boot and starts putting that on his left foot.

Archie: Hold it, hold it. Hold it! What are you doin' here?

Michael: What?

Archie: What about the other foot?

(Michael shows Archie his bare right foot.)

Archie: There ain't no sock on it.

Michael: I'll get to it.

Archie: Don't you know that the whole world puts on a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe?

Michael: I like to take care of one foot at a time!

Archie: That's the dumbest thing I ever heard, you know that?

Michael: It's just as quick my way.

Archie: Wait a minute, that ain't the point, you see what I -- (Grabs the sock Michael starts to put on.) Don't keep doing it, listen to me! Suppose there is a fire in the house, and you got to run for your life. Your way, all you got on is one shoe and a sock. My way, you got on a sock and a sock. You see? You're even.

Michael: Suppose it's raining or snowing outside. Your way, with a sock on each foot, my feet would get wet. My way, with a sock and a shoe on one foot, I can hop around and stay dry.

Archie: I think you been hoppin' around on your head. (Michael takes his sock back from Archie to put it on his right foot. Archie grabs it.) Wait a minute. Wait a -- listen to me! Supposin' the other sock's got a hole in it.

Michael: It doesn't have a hole in it.

Archie: I said supposin' it's got a hole.

Michael: All right, suppose it has a hole.

Archie: All right, it's got a hole in it. So, you ain't got another matchin' pair, so what are you gonna do? Your way, you gotta take off a whole shoe and a sock. My way, all you gotta do is take off one sock.

Michael: All right, if it'll make you happy I'll start all over again. (Reaches to take his boot off.)

Archie: No, no, no! You're halfway through! Now, jeez, get on with it, we're in a hurry! (Heads for the door, turns back.) You can start doing it the right way tomorrow morning. And do it that way for the rest of your life!

When it comes to writing drafts, I'm like Michael. I like to take care of one thing at a time.

But in the writing I'm doing for NaNo, I tackle one part of it like Michael, and I tackle another part of it like Archie.

I'm like Michael when I write about the #SciFund projects themselves, trying to weave their stories into a greater whole. I respond to the material already out there and incorporate more from outside the proposals. I look for connections and spend time shaping the narrative.

But I'm also writing about events occurring and that have occurred day to day, from Jarrett Byrnes's inaugural blog post "The #SciFund Challenge: A Call to (virtual) Arms", through the sign-ups, the formation of a community, the learning of new skill sets, the push toward launch, the launch itself, and the adventure that continues even as I type. (Congratulations to Kelly Weinersmith, whose project on zombie fish was the first to reach its funding goal!)

And there I'm Archie, throwing on a pair of socks and running shoeless through a fire. The only difference is, I love the sparks. But I've got to type fast or I'll burn to a crisp. I write spontaneously, throw words up on the screen, free associate, free write in streams of consciousness. I write phrases in shorthand, meant to be expanded on later. I toss in bracketed placeholders, reminding myself to insert a detail from my haphazard collection of links or look something up on the Web. It is by far and away the sloppiest writing I've ever done.

But that's what NaNo is for. And that's why December is called NaNoEdMo: National Novel Editing Month. (Or, in some circles, NaNoFiMo, National Novel Finishing Month.)

The two styles play off each other. After an intense session of Michael-writing, I can turn to the Archie portion of my draft and get all loosey-goosey. And when that makes me feel discombobulated, I can hunker down and become Michael again.

In between, I get onto Twitter and watch those pretty rocket flames.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Crouching Typist, Hidden Toddler

2011-11-05T23:42:00.003-04:00

It's 10 p.m. on NaNoWriMo Day 5, my word count is 8,398, and I am On Pace! NaNo's goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days, or an average of 1,667 words per day. That means 8,335 words in five days.

I've just squeezed by that total, by a margin of 63 words.

Earlier Mary and I took our two-mile round-trip post office walk, which is significant because this is her first big walk since her toe surgery eight days ago. She had "mummified" her toe (her word) in bandages, but was able to wear a closed shoe. These past couple of days she's left the bandages off, to let the wound breathe.

She had suggested the walk, which meant I had to tear myself away from the computer. That's a good thing -- I'd just written a section and my brain felt like mush. But I didn't wanna go!

As she started suiting up to head outside a thought struck me. "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." I sprinted back to the studio, woke my computer up, and clicked on my OneNote page where I write reminders to myself. I had just drafted a piece about the "Serengeti Live" project. They've been doing things in Tanzania. They've got 230 camera traps taking millions of photos of big cats and other predators, like the hyenas that ate the cameras before the project got new cameras in heavy steel housing. (Want to read some fabulous adventure writing? Go see field researcher Ali Swanson's blog.)

I'd just bridged that project with another one working with camera traps -- only, that project, Eric Abelson's "Does the act of looking change what we see?", is investigating whether camera traps alter the behavior of the animals whose images they're trying to capture. Like nervous mule deer.

I don't look at the #SciFund projects as separate entities. I look for what connects them, common themes, the way one can look at the same thing from different angles. "Serengeti Live" is raising funds to establish a remote Internet connection so that photos of wildlife can be viewed in as close to realtime as possible, without the long waits for data to be loaded into flash drives, spirited out of the Serengeti, and carried back to the States by a friend or a colleague who just happens to be traveling on a plane that day. They need better data management to help them in their work toward better conservation and wildlife management. Just as Abelson's work is also geared toward better conservation and wildlife management, because how can you accurately count animals if they're fleeing camera traps that might emit electronic signals humans can't perceive?

But I was thinking about Tanzania. The "Smart Delivery" project was also in Tanzania, right?

Open my Access file. Click on the link. Watch the Web page pop up. Shout, "Yes!" Scribble another note to myself. Send the computer back into sleep mode. Emerge from my studio grinning like a fool.

Mary asked me, "What was that all about?"

I explained as we walked toward the post office. Jennifer Schmitt's "Smart Delivery" project hopes to be a far more efficient, far less costly way to deliver childhood vaccines to Tanzania's most remote villages. Not by using the traditional delivery trucks the nonprofits use, but by letting small coolers of vaccines hitchhike rides in backpacks, on mules, in car trunks, with Tanzania's people who are on the move and going in that direction anyway. The big nonprofit trucks get sent out irregularly because they're dependent on outside funding, and they are no match for rutted, washed-out roads. But Tanzania's citizens deal daily with that terrain. They know how to move on it. And they carry cell phones.

I wouldn't learn this until after we got home, but Tanzania is awash in cell phones. According to this 2005 BBC article by Simon Hancock, "Some 97 percent of Tanzanians say they can access a mobile phone." And the cell phone networks are everywhere, ranging out into the remotest villages and onto the slopes of Kilimanjaro. Cell phones are how Tanzania -- and the rest of Africa -- have been closing the digital divide.

Now, six years after that article appeared, Schmitt's project wants to use that home-grown network and hire Tanzania's people to deliver vaccines as they traverse their regular routes.

I couldn't help but imagine two people experiencing a chance encounter on a remote dirt road. One carries childhood vaccines to a tiny Tanzanian village. The other has a pocket full of flash drives holding images pulled from camera traps in the Serengeti.

(Though ideally the "Serengeti Live" Internet connection would be up and running by then.)

Out on our residential neighborhood street, Mary asked me, "How is this pace for you?"

I said, "I'm fine. Keep to what you're comfortable with." I thought, You're healing from toe surgery, for heaven's sake! I don't want you to fall! while my inner toddler wanted to grab and drag her by the hand, chanting Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

We took our time. We breathed in fresh, crisp air -- a little too crisp for Mary, who wished she'd worn a scarf against the wind. We admired the oranges on a neighbor's tree. We watched a pink sunset.

Mary, who was starting to feel tired, asked me if my energy level was okay.

"I'm full of adrenalin," I told her. "I'm a three year old right now."

She downed a Power Bar at the post office. We had dinner at Hungry Howie's -- antipasto for her, chicken salad for me. Popped into Winn-Dixie because I was about to run out of coffee. Inside I was jumping up and down, up and down, up and down.

And then we got home, and I all but careened toward the studio.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Behind the Scenes Chez NaNoVille

2011-11-04T15:27:00.003-04:00

Over at the NaNoWriMo forums, mstrom from Vancouver asked, "Anyone else find memoir (or other rebel) writing easier than regular Nano so far?"

I don't have any past NaNo experience to go by, but I know that the way I write fiction is far different from the way I write nonfiction. I think I'd go nuts trying to do regular NaNo.

What's the difference? In my fiction I create from scratch. Here, I'm grabbing hold of information already out there and organizing it, injecting my own spin and my own reactions. When I write fiction I'm like a method actor, struggling to get inside my characters' heads. Here, I'm more like a reporter, still massaging the material at hand, but that means I have ready-made material at hand to massage.

I'm doing research and data collection, but that's different from world-building, which also involves research and data collection, followed by sheer invention. The same goes for story arc. Writing fiction means I'm conscious of my story arc, and I have at least some idea of how to get from Point A to Point B -- though admittedly, my characters often have other ideas and then I have to recalibrate. In my nonfiction NaNo project, the story arc is happening in vivo, and I'm just tagging along for the virtual ride.

Right now, at least, my writing is all about compilation, organization, and commentary. And as such, my preparation was considerably different than if I had prepared to write a novel.

I first learned about the #SciFund Challenge thanks to a tweet in the middle of August from science "blogfather" Bora Zivkovic. (If you have an interest in science, follow this guy.) Ever since then, Twitter has been my main go-to source for #SciFund, not just for its micro-comments but for its article links.

Here's a screen shot from this morning:

All three tweets shown here are from scientists thanking citizen funders. There's been a lot of that lately, which is not only a happy thing, it's also a plot point. These tweets are like video stills that create a moving picture over time. They are snapshots of the story I'm working to develop.

Fabiana Kubke's tweet relates to Daniel Mietchen's project, "Beethoven's open repository of research." Taking his lead from Beethoven, who said, "There should be only one repository of art in the world, to which the artist would donate his works in order to take what he would need," Mietchen applies that principle to research. He wants to make thousands of scholarly articles easily accessible -- to anyone -- by creating and maintaining a central repository. This is open science, a way in which scientific developments are shared with the world in realtime. It's a new approach toward collaboration and transparency.

Erin Ashe is thanking funders of her project, Dolphinpalooza. She tracks Pacific white-sided dolphins, setting out in a little boat with her dog, who is her able assistant and dolphin detector. Co-founder of Oceans Initiative, Ashe is seeking funds to help her keep working in the field, using non-invasive photo identification and statistical research to learn whether those dolphins are declining, endangered, or in good shape, and how well they and humans are coexisting on the water.

Yoav Ram needs to get to a conference to present his findings on how bacteria react to stress. His mathematical models show where conventional wisdom may have gone astray, and may explain why bacteria become antibiotic-resistant so quickly. Their mutations and evolution may also have implications for cancer treatment. Funds will help him travel from Israel to next year's Population Genetics Group meeting in Nottingham.

But what was happening before #SciFund started getting attention from sites like BoingBoing?

In the beginning I started listing my various collected links on Dipity, a free site that generates timelines complete with live links. That seemed to me a pretty cool organizational tool.

This screen shot shows the timeline roughly ten days before #SciFund's launch on RocketHub. Most of the links are to tweets made by #SciFund participants, who at that time were engaged in 28-hour days (by my estimation) preparing their proposals and videos for upload.

But there are other links in there, too. Like a tweet from The Journal Lab, which helps researchers collaborate and work with published papers more easily. "Crowdfunding is becoming key in the arts, could it become key in science?" they tweeted, adding, "Do we have crowds?!?"

While the scientists involved were sweating over their presentations and gaining a pre-launch audience -- that #oss2011 hashtag on the timeline at bottom right points to this year's Open Science Summit, where #SciFund co-founder Jai Ranganathan wowed the crowd -- I could feel that pre-launch tension building. Would this thing work? Were enough funders out there?

Is there suspense in this nonfiction tale? Heck, yeah! If I were writing fiction, I'd have to figure out where and how to build that tension, creating it out of whole cloth. Here, those on the front line are doing it for me. I just need to organize the data.

Dipity seemed a perfect vehicle, and I love the timeline concept. Except that, at least on my computer, it is glacially slow.

When I realized that impracticality, I turned to its List mode and started doing screen captures, which I assembled in MS Paint.

Unlike the timeline bubbles, Dipity's List mode shows the full listing, including the cross-references I included: who replied to whom, who retweeted whom. Yes, I was over-preparing, but only because doing so is far better than under-preparing. It's why raw data is called raw data -- because that's how I felt after wrestling with Dipity.

I wasn't the only frustrated person out there. At the bottom of the screen capture is Marisa Alonso Nuñez, who was having a devil of at time uploading her first-ever video, for her project "Cancer? Yeast has answers." She needs funding to get the antibodies that will let her study the effects on one of cancer's major players, a protein called Polo Kinase. Why yeast? Because the neat thing about Polo Kinase is that it ranges throughout the evolutionary spectrum from yeast to humans, and yeast is much easier to study. (Watch her video. She makes a great analogy that transforms biology into a travelogue.)

Meanwhile, Dr. Zen tweets that he has to raise his game. Sitting in my studio, I get to eavesdrop on the friendly competition and mutual inspiration that goes on in the days leading up to launch. I get to have fun being a nosy parker. If you missed my plug for Dr. Zen's Amazon (a.k.a. marbled) crayfish adventure in my prior entry, go see! He needs travel funds to pursue its cousin, the slough crayfish. His mission: find ways to control an invasive species that clones itself.

It makes sense that Jorge Mederos, cheering the others on in his tweet, is at the top of the screen capture, considering the time he spends up in the tree canopy outside Barcelona. His project, "Can we save Collserola Natural Park?", examines the stresses on "an 85 square kilometer island of nature surrounded by urban sprawl." Funds will help him track environmental data and study insects threatening the trees in this isolated Eden, in the hopes of restoring balance.

Farther back in the timeline, preparations for #SciFund were just starting to heat up. This screen shot dates to mid-September, when Bora hosted Jai over at Scientific American's "The Network Central" blog. On September 19, New Scientist posted an encore of Becky Oskin's August 17 article, "The road less traveled," renaming it "Research funding: creative ways to fill the coffers," with a nod toward #SciFund.

September was Jai's month for blog tours. His promotion of #SciFund, then still open for sign-ups, kept popping up on the Web.

One of those sign-ups was Elizabeth Hadly, who tweets at the bottom of the screen shot, "I'll try it!" If you missed my plug last entry for her lab's "Species in Peril," go see! Her team needs funds to monitor species at risk of losing their genetic diversity, which helps them adapt to a changing environment.

While great for preserving tweets and cross-references where I can access the text easily, Paint doesn't allow for live links. But OneNote does.

I've got a lot of live links to tweets. (And blog entries. And articles.) And after I gave up on Dipity, I started selectively annotating them (in black type):

Once all the projects went live and I could finally read about them, I started making thematic connections that I want to play with. This OneNote page holds reminders to myself.

The page also contains embedded links to files on my computer: an Access database file and a Word file. The Word file contains catch-all bits of draft and is one of many text files I'm working on for this project. Here's the Access file:

This database lists all the participants, the names and URLs of their projects, associated websites, and several other, largely empty fields that I may not need quite as much, given the info that the others contain. Together, this Access file and OneNote comprise my NaNo Central. They let me call up files and websites at a glance. In the Access file, to the right of the project names, is a column affording me direct access to my text files.

I'm also tracking the fundraising, entering each day's data around midnight, give or take a half hour or so:

This is also to help me figure out where to send rocket fuel. Part of me wants to help boost each project. Another part wants to concentrate more on those projects whose funding lags behind.

I've had a couple of episodes where I've had to chase down my files, because anchoring them in OneNote and Access puts updated versions in exotic subdirectories, rather than in the subdirectory where I want them to be. After a couple of scares ("But I saved it! Where'd it go?") I'm still learning how to navigate a system I haven't fully grokked yet.

Thank goodness for backups.

Or, to quote Alison Bechdel's character Mo, "Does 'anal-retentive' have a hyphen?"

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

It's Official: A NaNoWriMo Crazy Person Lives Here

2011-11-02T21:36:00.002-04:00

I'm capturing raw data on the fly!

(Butterfly net image courtesy of eNasco; housefly image courtesy of
Wikipedia; paper pile courtesy of Your Action Business Coaches)

There's a reason NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It implies that participants have done their background research and at least some plotting in advance and are ready to settle in, chained to their chairs, and -- well, do this:

(Nike slogan and background courtesy of Steven Kovar's blog; writing hand courtesy of Miguel Helft's May 30, 2007, New York Times article on pen computing; Underwood courtesy of The Classic Typewriter Page; Reliance Luggable Loo® courtesy of Campmor; toilet paper courtesy of The Lorem Ipsum Bracelet.)

Being a nonfiction rebel is a whole 'nother matter.

Being a nonfiction rebel chronicling new developments as they unfold each day is a real whole 'nother matter!

The new information that is being generated even as I type and that I have yet to mine from the Web not only keeps me on my toes; it helps drive the narrative. And it makes me look at my initial, rough (very, very rough) flowchart of the structure I intended to use and giggle -- in a rather maniacal, somewhat scary way.

Here's what I had planned out, back in September, using these components (taken from my notes):

1. The #SciFund project pool itself. That would be the section yet to be created at RocketHub (how early did I do the flowchart shown below? The text inside it says Kickstarter), in which the scientists involved present their work and solicit backing. That would be the easiest information to access (once it's available).

2. Secondary sources for each project: press coverage, prior research, general background.

3. Tangential sources: related material, not necessarily background material.

4. Human interest angle, either with respect to the scientists themselves and/or with respect to their work and the implications thereof.

5 and 6. Original creative interpretations. Those could include my own interpretations (for example, similar to the science poems I've done) as well as references to other people's interpretations, whatever those may be.

Bwaaaahahahahaha!

It occurred to me, rather quickly, that this would likely mean writing in 30 days something that would rival the Oxford English Dictionary in volume. Which in turn could have led to my mumbling, "Shoot me now."

But instead something really neat started happening.

I'm approaching NaNo completely bass-ackward, but I'm already a rebel so why not? This first week of the month I'm devoting about 70 percent toward capturing raw data on the fly (see instructional graphic above). And I'm scribbling narrative notes that are just slightly more coherent than this primate voice in my head that keeps going Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!

The data gathering is time- and labor-intensive, but well worth it in my long-run scheme of things. For one thing, I'm still working my way down the #SciFund project list and transcribing all the project videos, because they have terrific material!

Do you want cute? Get a load of the Atlantic puffins that Robin Freeman is tracking. Or the tuco-tuco now living in the shadow of a volcanic eruption, one of several "Species in Peril" being studied by Stanford University's Hadly Lab. That video (with additional cute species!) also does a terrific takeoff on 60 Minutes -- or, in this case, 180 Seconds -- with PhD students/news anchors Melissa Kemp and Jeremy Hsu.

Want sheer adventure? Tune into "Dr. Zen" Faulkes's quest for the Amazon crayfish and peek into a history of scientific exploration that would make Indiana Jones proud. (Indiana Jones fans: Watch this.) I won't tell you where this video gave me my laugh-out-loud moment; go see it for yourself.

"I will do my best to appear to be menaced by snakes," Faulkes writes on his project page. Can't wait for that? Go over to Chip Cochran's venomous reptile hangout at Loma Linda University, where he studies deadly venom in his quest for anti-venom and therapeutic drug potential. He's on camera holding southwestern speckled rattlesnakes on two hooked poles, one with each arm. He wants to explore the potential differences in venom between the snake from Arizona and the one from California. He's so at ease with these lethal reptiles that as he lifts each pole in turn I think of a dessert waiter offering diners their choice of cheesecake or Boston cream pie.

I'll have more about what catches my eye as I gather information (tweets! blogs!). One thing that excites me is that although these are separate #SciFund projects, they are related on several levels. Camaraderie is one: these researchers have connected and bonded across the world (see?), and the #SciFund Challenge strikes me as one collective expedition into new territory for all involved. The #SciFund site on RocketHub is their exploratory vessel in which they are all co-travellers.

Another level -- one that I am just beginning to see and want to explore in my writing for NaNo -- has to do with certain thematic connections among the different projects. Like energy derived from plants. Go to Jeffrey Bodwin's quest to free cellulose from all parts of a plant and you're looking at the potential for vastly improving the generation of biofuels. Then go to Walter Weare's work on artificial photosynthesis, which seeks to mimic what those plants do, with the ultimate goal of creating biofuel without the bio part. Two chemists are approaching the same basic problem, using different strategies. I love that.

Or take DNA. When I think of DNA I see this:

But when Kristina Killgrove sees it, she's teasing it out of the skeletons of long-forgotten Roman slaves from two millennia ago, to learn about how they lived and where they came from.

And when the Center for Conservation Biology's researchers see it, they're teasing it out of feces to identify which birds and bats prey on insect pests like the coffee berry borer, in their quest to understand how wildlife and farmers can benefit each other in the present day.

But wait! There's more!

But you'll have to wait for it, until I blog again.

Because I have to chase after more raw data and scribble more notes.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

NaNoWriMo Meets the #SciFund Challenge

2011-11-01T04:33:00.001-04:00

Large view

National Novel Writing Month -- NaNoWriMo -- occurs November 1 through November 30. Its goal for participants: write 50,000 words in 30 days.

For several years, I've been a local author panelist in the three-part NaNoWriMo series presented by the Citrus County Library System. But I have not myself participated in NaNo.

Until now. And I am participating not as a novelist, but as a nonfiction NaNoWriMo "rebel."

This year also marks the inauguration of the #SciFund Challenge, which runs parallel to NaNoWriMo. From November 1 through December 15, 240 scientists are engaging in a crowdfunding experiment, seeking support for 49 projects. We're not talking NSF grants here; in some cases, donations can be as small as a dollar.

And those donations come with rewards. Want a specimen named after you? (Donate $20 to Jessica Carilli's project on corals and climate change.) Want a way cool bottle of wine for the holidays? (Donate $15 to Matthew Hutchins' Mythbusters-like investigation on ways to artificially age red wine.) Want a chance to see transmitted images of wildlife, possibly even before the researchers do? (Donate $10 to the Serengeti Lion Project's "Serengeti Live.")

Even smaller donations can get you public thanks and exclusive email updates -- a ringside seat to scientific discovery. How ringside? For as little as a dollar you can receive access to data and digital photos of Walter Weare's lab working on the creation of artificial photosynthesis to convert light into fuel.

Other projects offer souvenirs like T-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets, postcards, bumper stickers, and more. Larger-ticket rewards include an exclusive video chat, original artwork, autographed maps, and personal tours of research sites.

I've been following the #SciFund Challenge since mid-August, reading blog posts that had begun with Jarrett Byrnes's July 29 entry, "The #SciFund Challenge: A Call to (virtual) Arms." I've been following tweets, and -- thanks to co-founder Jai Ranganathan -- have contributed this guest post.

Even #SciFund's cool logo was itself crowdsourced, through a contest held at 99designs. You can find all the #SciFund projects here on RocketHub. Not only do they look awesome, but they've all been Jai approved!

What will I write for NaNoWriMo? I'm neither a science blogger nor a journalist, but I have some publishing creds that include science poetry and science fiction in places like Asimov's. I'm not a scientist, but I hold a master of science degree. Call me a science fan. I'm interested not only in the projects themselves, but in the journeys being undertaken by people who have banded together across the globe, designing their crowdfunding pitches, including videos, in less than a month. Some have learned new outreach skills on the fly. They are all bringing science to the public in a way seldom seen -- and never before seen in such a team effort among many.

I also expect to contribute some "rocket fuel" here and there, as I tag along and scribble, cheering them on.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Written in response to Sunday Scribblings prompt #289: You Are Here.

Poem written a half hour's drive from Occupy Orlando
(a quick-write exercise at the FSPA convention)

Every day our largest medallion rises
and its light sparkles
off "Cash For Gold."

The signs, the banners, the clowns sporting sandwich boards
dancing on the street corner. The flyers,
the window decals, clustered yellow
like a thousand suns. "Cash For Gold,"
bright inks cutting the humid mornings
into pieces of eight, pieces of 16, 32, 64,
the laws of diminishing returns, tiny bites,
a cloud of mosquitos drawing blood.

But the protesters down the road
ignore the insects
as the sun climbs higher
and the police move in.* "Cash For Gold"
continues to shine, next to the Dollar Store,
across the street from the soup kitchen,
beside the real estate office
with its lists of foreclosures.

And the gold, gold, gold sun rises.
And we exhale in the heat,
inhale the darkness,

and, climbing out of the abyss,
begin to carry different signs.

--------------------------------

* According to the Occupy Orlando Facebook page, yesterday's march was calm and without police action. The night before I traveled to Orlando, I had followed livestreams and videos showing arrests taking place in other Occupy locations.

--------------------------------

I had wanted to be in two places at once -- the Florida State Poets Association convention, where I had an all-day schedule as this year's contest chair -- and Occupy Orlando, located just a few miles from the convention. Orlando is a two-hour drive from home.

In addition to her keynote address, Gianna Russo of YellowJacket Press conducted a workshop entitled, "A Breath of Fresh Air -- Poetry of the Outdoors." Touching on more than "nature poetry," the workshop explored ways in which nature is used as a vehicle to express something else, as a frame containing the true meaning of a poem.

Gianna Russo. Read her bio here.

She began with a pure nature poem, Judith Harris's "Mockingbird." Russo followed with her own "Daybreak, Cape Canaveral," which contrasted the nature of old Florida with the Florida of NASA and of Disney.

Lynda Hull's "Insect Life of Florida" became the vehicle for an on-the-spot writing exercise.

Gianna told us to choose five words from Hull's work and use them in a poem of our own. Even before I chose my words -- "clustered yellow," "humid mornings," and "mosquitos," my poem had begun writing itself, emerging as you see it above in about ten minutes.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Calls of Science and The Wild

2011-10-09T20:54:00.002-04:00

Squirrel kits inside our storm shutters

This entry is written to fit Sunday Scribblings prompt #288: The Call.

Call of Science

As I wrote here, I'm following the progress of the #SciFund Challenge. In all, 240 scientists have answered the call to participate in this science crowdfunding experiment.

Artists and graphic designers! -- The #SciFund Challenge logo contest (cash prize) will be active for the next couple of days.

You can also read my guest post at the #SciFund blog. My post contains writing tips to help scientists connect with non-scientists while pitching their projects. I write from the perspective of a hybrid: I have a master of science in psychology, but I am not a scientist per se. (I like to think of myself as a science fan.)

Call of The Wild

A family of squirrels has taken up residence inside one of our storm shutters. Their nest is tucked between aluminum slats mounted on tracks and one of the windows in my studio. Normally the window is covered with a shade, but I can hear them knocking about. Last night I decided to say hello. The action in the first video starts about 20 seconds in.

Today I increased my camera's zoom a bit. The three kits have their Alvin, Simon, and Theodore moment at around the 3:12 mark in the second video.

According to the blog Squirrel Pest Control Guide for Beginners in its section "Caring for Infant Squirrels (Kits)", three kits (at minimum) are the typical number to which a female squirrel gives birth. They depend on her entirely for their first 75 days of life.

I believe the mother is still with these little ones. Their actual nest is to the right of frame in the videos.

I'm currently taking a laissez-faire approach. The fact that they're nesting in an area made of aluminum and stucco-painted concrete (plus metal window screen with glass behind) means they're away from material that could be more easily damaged. At least, that's my theory. I'm not treating them as pets (i.e., I'm not feeding them), just letting them have their space and enjoying a couple of photo ops. Otherwise, my window shade stays down.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Fermilab

2011-09-30T18:34:00.001-04:00

My poem "Fermilab" (published under my then-married name) had appeared in the Nov./Dec. 1981 issue of Star*Line, journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I post it now in connection with Devin Powell's article "Last Words" in the Sept. 24, 2011 Science News and Prof. Mark Lancaster's article "Tevatron collider falls silent today after 26 years of smash hits" in the Sept. 30, 2011 Guardian.

The Tevatron, the atom-smasher at Fermilab, closed today. It has been superseded by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva.

My visit to Fermilab in 1980 had inspired the poem. Karen Jollie provided the illustration.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

October Preview and News Bits

2011-09-29T17:17:00.002-04:00

I've got three Florida-based events next month. Please stop by and say hello if you're in the area!

1. Florida State Poets Association convention (Oct. 14-16, at the Orlando Marriott, Lake Mary), where as contest chair I will emcee this year's awards ceremony.

2. NaNoWriMo Kickoff at the Lakes Region Library in Inverness (Oct. 19, 3:30-6:30 p.m.), where I'll be a panelist along with Loretta Rogers, Dylan Newton, and Flossie Benton Rogers.

3. Necronomicon 30 (Oct. 21-23 at the Hilton Bayfront in St. Petersburg). In addition to my usual table on Author Alley, you can find me on five panels this year:

a. "What Has Social Media Done for You Lately?"
b. "Three or More (writing book series)"
c. "Intro to Writing Poetry" (moderating)
d. "The Liquid State of Publishing" (moderating)
e. "Connecting Science Fiction with Poetry & Song."

Thanks to Ao Bibliophile for having me as a guest blogger! (And thanks to KamJos, who commented, "I love love love the Deviations series!")

Thanks also to kgilr7, who answered the question, "What are the best non-classic free ebooks you've read?" (posted on Reddit by SmoSays) with, "The Deviations series by Elissa Malcohn. There are seven books in the series and each one of them is absolutely amazing. She also is pretty nice and responds back if you write to her."

(There was a time when I thought I'd have to break Bloodlines into two volumes, making seven overall. The series count is actually six books.)

My article "The Many Shades of Dark Poetry" is now posted as a .pdf in the mid-summer 2011 WyoPoets newsletter, on pg. 4 and pg. 5.

Also live (though not yet available for embedding) is Part 3 of the publishing workshop I gave with Lakisha Spletzer back in July. Thanks again to Kisha for setting up, recording, and posting this event!

The Publeconomist had this to say about my review of Dr. Loren Olson's book: "Check out the recent review of Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight, A Psychiatrist’s Own Story on PsychCentral. Elissa Malcohn wrote a beautiful and detailed review of the book. Definitely one of the better that I’ve read." The blog is written by Anthony DiFiore at inGroup Press, which had also published Finally Out.

Tim Lieder, editor of She Nailed A Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror, is calling for submissions to his second Bible-themed anthology, tentatively titled King David & The Spiders from Mars: More Tales of Biblical Terror. He writes that "this will be a Bible-themed horror anthology specifically based on The Book of Samuel. Some of my favorite stories from the first anthology were David centered including Elissa Malcohn's 'Judgement at Naioth' and Christi Krug's 'As If Favorites of Their God.'"

Finally, I want to give a shout-out to The SciFund Challenge, spearheaded by biologists Dr. Jai Ranganathan and Dr. Jarrett Byrnes. As of this writing, 150 scientists (no, wait, that was less than 12 hours ago; it's now 172!) have signed onto this crowdfunding project, which goes into full swing on November 1. The sign-up period closes on October 1.

As Ranganathan wrote back on August 2, "What if scientists were rewarded for communicating with the general public? What if scientists could raise a large portion of their research budget directly from the public, through a crowdfunding campaign?"

A project like #SciFund is much more than a fund-raising exercise. It's a way for scientists to learn and use communications skills that in turn help laypeople like me understand the benefits of what they're doing. A bit like this awesome film, "I'm A Scientist" by Stephen Curry (runs about a half hour).

Also, check out this adorable song by cosmology research fellow Andrew Pontzen about the purported faster-than-light neutrino.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poems: Index

2011-09-24T23:05:00.003-04:00

Climate Change Poem 24

2011-09-24T23:00:00.001-04:00

Phaon Crescent butterfly, August 2007

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 24 takes its cue from "Extra, Extra: Getting a Headstart on Oktoberfest, and Kickstarting Green Ideas" (Meg Campbell, Torontoist, Sept. 19, 2011).

Climate of Invention

From ways to see that traffic idles less,
To contests for the greenest balcony,
Toronto's ClimateSpark may well impress.
Its social venture challenge strategy

Calls citizens, non-profits to combine
And innovate a climate-saving plan
That has a sound financial bottom line.
The public votes on which suggestion can

Advance. Perhaps compressed air power train
Or zoo-fueled biogas will strike the mood.
An app for finding parking without pain.
An urban carbon neutral neighborhood.

Investment, loans, and grants will be the prize.
The object is to revolutionize.

Audio (1:12):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Sierra Club.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 23

2011-09-24T22:00:00.001-04:00

Minnows, June 2009

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 23 takes its cue from "Deep oceans may mask global warming" (Sarah Kellett, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sept. 19, 2011).

Depth Perception

If global warming energies abound,
Then why do we still wrap ourselves in wool?
U.S. and Aussie scientists have found
That surface temperatures may well be cool

Because the sea absorbs that excess heat.
The warming cycle just appears to slow.
A decade-long hiatus could repeat,
But temperatures keep climbing down below.

And if the simulations prove correct,
Eighteen percent is the expected rise,
When up above, a countering effect
Appears like a La Niña in disguise.

The ocean's circulation is the key
That might unlock this deeper mystery.

Audio (1:11):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Ecosystem Marketplace, "a leading source of news, data, and analytics on markets and payments for ecosystem services."
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 22

2011-09-24T21:00:00.001-04:00

Mushroom, July 2011

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 22 takes its cue from "Common fungi spreading as climate changes" (Richard Gray, The Telegraph, Sept. 18, 2011).

Notes from the Underground

The British forests hold a mystery,
As once restricted fungi farther spread.
A mushroom might have joined a single tree,
But now likes several types of wood instead.

The jelly ear has started to expand
Its taste past elder branches, and is found
On twenty added plants throughout the land.
And elsewhere, under mulch against the ground,

The butter cap has switched from oak to beech.
The chanterelle has moved from beech to birch.
Fly agaric as well extends its reach.
Does changing climate make those fungi search

Beyond established boundaries of old?
Their doubled growing season breaks the mold.

Audio (1:12):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Greenpeace
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 21

2011-09-24T20:00:00.001-04:00

Virgin palm, May 2006

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 21 takes its cue from "Climate Change Transforms Namibian Landscape" (Mark Dunphy, Irish Weather Online, Sept. 19, 2011).

Green Desert

Namibia, a land of sand and mud
Is suddenly awash in verdant pools.
For earlier this year, a mega-flood
Transformed the landscape. River water rules,

For even though the rains stopped months ago,
The flow continues, now for weeks on end.
A storm in June had dropped a field of snow
Where heat and dust would normally extend.

The sediment the current carries through,
En route to its rare meeting with the sea,
Has isotopes that could provide a clue
To how unusual the silt might be.

For has it traveled from its normal source?
Or have we now a brand new watercourse?

Audio (1:07):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Green EcoCommunities, a resource for eco-friendly communities.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 20

2011-09-24T19:00:00.001-04:00

Holly berries, December 2005

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 20 takes its cue from "Climate change hits coffee industry" (Business Daily, Sept. 18, 2011).

Buzz Kill

Once, coffee was a major Kenyan crop,
A money-maker out on the exchange.
But last year its production faced a drop.
In fact, within the coffee-growing range,

Most zones are not expected to sustain
The bean, attacked by insects and disease.
Nairobi scientists can now explain
That rising temperatures allow with ease

The coffee berry borer and the thrip.
More farmers switch their land to real estate,
Abandoning that caffeinated sip.
East Africa is not alone. The fate

Of parts of South America look grim,
Capacity for dark roast growing dim.

Audio (1:07):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Guardian Environment Network, "news and comment from the world's best environment sites."
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 19

2011-09-24T18:00:00.001-04:00

Orchid, February 2007

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 19 takes its cue from "Conservatively speaking, the climate threat is real" (Misha Schubert, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 18, 2011).

Environmental Conservatives

Debate on climate change is sometimes framed
As liberal against conservative.
That rift is not as deep as some have claimed.
More leaders say that something's got to give,

Like Cameron (1) and Merkel (2), Sarkozy (3),
And Reinfeldt (4), Rasmussen (5), and Lee Myung-bak (6),
A bit from Abbot (7), more so from John Key (8).
They're looking at a race against the clock

And all are said to be at center-right
Of politics. And yet, they can agree
With leftward-leaning folks, without a fight,
That carbon must be cut. Across the sea,

Some North Americans seem out of phase
With cautions that their global neighbors raise.

(1) Prime Minister, UK
(2) Chancellor, Germany
(3) President, French Republic
(4) Prime Minister, Sweden
(5) Former Prime Minister, Denmark
(6) President, South Korea
(7) Opposition Leader, Australia
(8) Prime Minister, New Zealand

Audio (1:15):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Clean Techies, serving the clean technology community.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 18

2011-09-24T17:00:00.001-04:00

Grapes, September 2009

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 18 takes its cue from "Climate change improves champagne" (Ben Barnier, GlobalPost, Sept. 16, 2011).

Toast

French vintners raise their fluted glasses high
To celebrate a harvest rather strange.
The best champagnes a connoisseur can buy
Are rendered better still from climate change.

Those grapes had once developed in the fall,
But warmer summers speed maturity,
With high school students answering the call
To pick before their term begins. And oui,

It's been about two centuries since last
Those golden grapes were ready on the vine
This early. But they shouldn't age too fast.
More heat could turn their sweetness into brine.

And other wines may fare less well, you know.
It's hotter in the region of Bordeaux.

Audio (1:09):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
GreenBiz , helping companies integrate environmental responsibility into their business practices.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 17

2011-09-24T16:00:00.002-04:00

Hundreds of miles from Hurricane Rita, October 2005

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 17 takes its cue from "Expert says climate change caused flooding in Sindh" (M. Waqar Bhatti, International News, Sept. 18, 2011).

Pendulum

For twelve months, Sindh had not a drop of rain,
But now the Pakistani province floods,
A vast monsoon that makes it hard to drain.
They're not accustomed to these streams and mud

That drenched a region, dropping in four weeks
What normally it gets across five years.
The weather's hit unprecedented peaks.
A pattern of intensity appears,

With frequency increased for these events.
And though disaster workers can prepare,
Conditions test the best of management.
These new extremes affect how millions fare,

Revealing what a changing climate brings:
A pendulum that's making wider swings.

Audio (1:15):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Forests and Climate Change, "an online resource for collaborative knowledge sharing about the science, policy and people involved in the global debate over how to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation."
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 16

2011-09-24T15:00:00.001-04:00

Volunteer cherry tree, July 2011

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 16 takes its cue from "Receding Sea Ice Chases Walruses to Alaska Coast" (Wynne Parry, LiveScience, Sept. 16, 2011).

Waiting Room

When twenty thousand walruses or more
Had made their exodus from Chukchi Sea,
They settled on a north Alaskan shore.
Their offbeat movements caused perplexity,

For normally they camp upon the ice
That settles near a continental shelf.
That shallow water offers them a slice
Of dining habitat, which in itself

Yields clams and snails and worms on which to feed.
The promised ice has simply stayed away.
On land, they face the risk of a stampede
If startled. Noisy planes are kept at bay.

Their mass migration patterns fluctuate
While for their frozen home of old, they wait.

Audio (1:12):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Environmental Defense Fund
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 15

2011-09-24T14:00:00.001-04:00

Century plant bud stalk, April 2008

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 15 takes its cue from "World's Dams Unprepared for Climate Change Conditions" (Julia Pyper and ClimateWire, Scientific American, Sept. 16, 2011).

Flow and Flexibility

The Hoover Dam was built when water flowed,
Was not designed for an extended drought.
Now retrofits support diminished load.
Thirty percent is where it's leveled out.

A rigid planning model starts to fail
When change outpaces methods of design
That draw from weather's past degree and scale.
What's worse, its cost is nowhere near benign.

The ruin of habitats, endangered loans,
The long-extended brownouts in Nepal
Are signs that hydropower needs to hone
Its building strategy, consider all

Scenarios, perhaps be multi-stage.
To build with nature in this fluid age.

Audio (1:18):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
The Nature Conservancy
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 14

2011-09-24T13:00:00.001-04:00

Snag, June 2006

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 14 takes its cue from "'Snowmaggedon'? Nope. Just the Opposite" (Jessica Marshall, Discovery News, Sept. 16, 2011).

Dueling Extremes

The past two winters may have seemed too cold:
The twenty-first and thirty-fourth extreme.
But warmth extremes were also to behold,
And those placed twelfth and fourth in that same scheme,

Which measured, back to nineteen-forty-eight,
The winters in the northern hemisphere.
And though Snowpocalypse was given weight,
The coldest means that no snow should appear.

The North Atlantic Oscillation brought
Cold weather as a natural affair,
And should have made us colder, but for naught.
The true extremes expected were not there.

What made the news were days of ice and sleet,
But winter's strongest showing was its heat.

Audio (1:15):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Blue Channel 24, journalism specializing in environmental issues, ecology and conservation
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 13

2011-09-24T12:00:00.001-04:00

Seed fluff, March 2007

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 13 takes its cue from "Computer modelling shows release of carbon into atmosphere" (Cordis, Sept. 15, 2011).

Feedback Loop

Our warming climate brings with it a cost
That extra vegetation can't decrease,
For locked within the planet's permafrost
Is CO2 that melting would release.

The early models lessened this effect,
But they did not account for frozen soil
That those in higher latitudes expect.
And though part of our flora's mortal coil

Includes carbon dioxide taken in,
There's so much carbon left to decompose
Into the atmosphere, it would begin
A process that the flora cannot close:

More greenhouse gas to further complicate
And make this warming trend accelerate.

Audio (1:05):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Terra Cycle, "creating national recycling systems for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste."
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 12

2011-09-24T11:00:00.001-04:00

Spiderweb, December 2008

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 12 takes its cue from "New Report Issued by the Center for Food Safety and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Foundation Highlights Critical Links Among Food Security, Climate Change, Human Rights, and the Economy" (Center for Food Safety, Sept. 15, 2011).

The Wheel of Life

No issue is an island. Climate change
Has impacts on economies and food.
But often, as our policies arrange,
Connections are not fully understood

That link our livelihoods with human rights,
Migration, poverty, and so much more.
To keep big-picture thinking in our sights
Might mitigate the ravages of war.

Root causes need our focus. Otherwise,
The benefits from best intentions cease.
Where economic growth is on the rise,
We still have witnessed hunger rates increase.

A new report now weaves these many threads
In hopes to guide us through the times ahead.

Audio (1:12):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Living On Earth, the weekly environmental news and information program distributed by Public Radio International.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 11

2011-09-24T10:00:00.001-04:00

Framed fog, December 2008

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 11 takes its cue from "Arctic ice melts to second-lowest level, says study" (Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters, Sept. 15, 2011).

Dwindling Expectations

U.S. and German satellites both show
Decreases in amounts of Arctic ice.
Two-thousand-seven marked a record low.
Preliminary data now suffice,

But news from Bremen says that record broke
This month, with water patches taking hold.
The U.S. sees a slightly lesser soak,
But both agree the Arctic is less cold,

With warmest temperatures the past five years.
And though the second-lowest ice extent
(In U.S. terms) perhaps less bleak appears,
It still foretells a harsh predicament.

For Arctic ice today is more dispersed,
And thus more prone to melt and vanish first.

Audio (1:14):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
National Resources Defense Council
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 10

2011-09-24T09:00:00.002-04:00

Rainbow Springs, March 2006

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 10 takes its cue from "Climate change tests Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness" (Florence Poblete-Enriquez, UN News and Media Radio, Sept. 16, 2011).

A Measure of Happiness

Hard cash no longer makes the world go 'round
As indices of nations once implied.
Bhutan has measured progress and has found
That nine dimensions form a useful guide.

They factor happiness in this array.
Well-being, time use, culture also rank.
But global warming threatens them today.
A glacial lake prepares to burst its banks

And inundate the villagers below.
Bhutan depends on glaciers. As they melt
The Himalayan valleys feel the blow
Of what the warmer temperatures have dealt.

Bhutan, which shows the world another way,
Now works to cope with changes of today.

Audio (1:10):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Earth911, "a privately owned, for-profit company that specializes in providing consumers with accessible and actionable recycling information across the country."
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Climate Change Poem 9

2011-09-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

African iris, April 2007

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.

2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.

I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.

The poem for Hour 9 takes its cue from "Funding Cities' Efforts to Beat Back the Tide of Climate Change" (David Weinberger, New Deal 2.0, Sept. 16, 2011).

Change Agents

As life on Earth evolved, its adaptation
Helped decide which creatures carried on.
Now cities take that tack, as does each nation
Partnered in a global marathon

To craft a framework focused on sustaining
Ports of trade and coastal urban centers.
To keep ahead of water levels gaining
Calls for dialogue. Investment. Mentors.

Preparing on this scale can overwhelm
Municipalities of every kind.
The UNCSD* will try to helm
A way to fund a meeting of the minds.

Adaptability in all things Geo:
That will be the hope next year in Rio.

* UN Conference on Sustainable Development, to be held next June in Rio de Janeiro.

Audio (1:10):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
Green Energy News.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.