ScienceOnline2011!

This post is so long overdue, but I really wanted to blog about my second year attending the ScienceOnline (un)conference held in Research Triangle Park, NC. Even though I attended the conference last year as well, this year managed to top even my glowing review of 2010's event.

The main difference between this year and last year for me was that I was able to participate in some of the pre-conference festivities this time around. Thursday night was a presentation by the organizers of the conference, Bora and Anton, using the awesome Prezi software. I always feel like ScienceOnline is one of the most high tech and fun conferences, and discovering Prezi as an alternative to Powerpoint slides was a great example of this. I want to use Prezi when I give my thesis defense to show up everybody else! You can check out the presentation here, which included the embedded video featured at the end of my interview with David Kroll. The Prezi presentation was followed by the keynote speaker, Robert Krulwich of Radiolab fame. It was so incredibly strange to hear what is usually a disembodied radio voice coming from an actual...well, body. I was in nerdgirl heaven because I. LOVE. RADIOLAB. After Krulwich's speech I got on stage with David Kroll and did a live performance of "Minister of the Ether" at the open mike. It was so much fun to play bass on a song with someone I'd just interviewed for SwM, and who has been so helpful and kind to everyone around him. David Kroll actually got a community service award Thursday night too.

Of course, at such a tech-savvy conference, this moment was immortalized on Twitter.

Friday morning brought lab tours and a beer and book reception. The lab tour I chose was a guided tour of the Record exhibit in the Nasher Museum, but I'm just going to gloss over that in favor of gushing about the book and beer reception. Get this: you walk into the door. You are handed a square package wrapped in brown paper. You open it. It's a book. Free. For you. You are overcome with joy. You walk to the bar to get a beer. You order. You try to pay. The bartender tells you, no, it is free. Authors are getting up on stage and reading from their books. You wonder what you did to deserve such merriment. And then, you are mingling, holding your free book and your free beer, and you run into your nerdgirl idol, the keynote speaker from last night, Mr. Robert Krulwich. And you have a five minute conversation with him. And then you go home and die happy. That was totally what happened, minus the dying part. But I was still super happy and even more impressed with the planning of it all.

Saturday and Sunday were the days of the actual conference. I really liked the format of the pre-conference events because by the time the actual conference rolled around I had already met lots of interesting people and felt a little more connected with everybody there. I attended panels on mostly on blogging to a general audience and blog networks. I met people whose writing I'd admired but had previously only known on the internet. Bonds were forged and learning was aquired. There is already tons of great blog coverage of the conference, so I won't get into specifics here, but suffice it to say I learned and gained a lot from interacting with all the people around me. I learned things about how to communicate science more effectively in my posts, and I felt a sense of unity that inspired me to get more involved in connecting with others in the science blogosphere. Getting some invaluable face time with others who believe in the same causes that I do was endlessly rewarding.


At the end of the conference I had met some amazing people, gained several new twitter followers and blogs to read, and had many new ideas to think about and incorporate.

Joseph Hewitt's amazing rendering of yours truly.

Oh, and I gained a comic book with my likeness drawn onto it.

I'll definitely be back next year!

SciMuses: All Your Science

Dr. Lu Lubenstein and Z-Man form the two halves of the guitar-drum duo called All Your Science. While many bands choose names that refer to science without necessarily being made up of scientists, Z and Lu prove the exception to that unspoken rule by being involved in scientific and technological fields. It was a pleasure to get the opportunity to sit down with them both to talk to them about their scientific and musical lives.

All Your Science formed almost three years ago when Lu and Z met at the local Durham Bike Co-op. “All I remember is that he tried to fix my tire and it blew up in my face,” Lu related with a laugh. After that incident they started playing music together and decided on the name All Your Science as a nod to their mutual scientific careers and the ancient internet meme all your base are belong to us.

Any readers that attended the DiVE into Alcohol lab tour at Duke as part of the ScienceOnline2010 conference might have noticed the Z-Man behind the controls of the huge Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) 3D virtual reality stimulator. As a computer scientist holding a bachelors and masters degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Z maintains and writes code for the 3D stimulator. The main types of 3D projects that Z programs are for psychologists who want to create a virtual stimulation of feared objects such as snakes in order to help people overcome their personal phobias. However, one of the smaller projects Z works on involves creating virtual reality musical instruments. He described the experience as using a controller that virtually projects a wand or stick to hit the keys of the virtual instrument. Z appreciates the opportunity to use both sets of skills in his work. “It's one of those things where I am able to overlap some of my knowledge about musical instruments and virtual reality.”

Z had an extensive background in music as well and computer science when he moved to Durham to work with the DiVE stimulator. In high school, he played organ in a ska band, and played in various rock bands throughout college. He usually played rock with others, but also started making avant-garde noise music on his own. He was doing mostly avant-garde solo projects before he met Lu and formed All Your Science. His noise background gets incorporated into their songs at times. “Lu always tries to get me to work [noise elements] into our albums," he said. "Like 'do something that makes it sound crazy!'” Their first album has a song that reflects this, entitled appropriately and simply, "Noise."

Lu and Z seemed to have parallel lives when getting into playing music in high school. While Z was wearing suits and playing the organ in a ska band, Lu was wearing ties and playing guitar in a duo girl punk band called Tomboys. When Lu went to Virginia Tech to study biology and chemistry, her drummer from Tomboys came with her to study engineering. When that band dissolved, she kept playing with another girl band throughout her time in college, graduation, and subsequent move to Washington DC to work at the National Institute of Health. She spent two years at the NIH working in the ovarian oncology unit, using proteomics to look for a drug for use in future clinical trials. She then started her studies at UNC - Chapel Hill for a Ph.D. in pharmacology with a focus on cancer research. While playing in All Your Science, she studied science and recently earned her doctorate. She is set to start a postdoc at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York where she will be working directly with doctors and patients to find new drugs that may work well for ovarian and breast cancers. Lu explained that there isn't nearly as much funding for the study of ovarian cancers as there is for breast cancer, and this combined with the fact that she had a family member with the disease makes her very passionate about her work. She looks forward to seeing a more direct effect of her research through her work at Sloan-Kettering."I just love what I do because it's so rewarding,” she said. “Even though it's frustrating at times, it's easy to get through because I love it.”

When asked about what it's like performing research and performing in a band, Lu piped up. “It's nice. You can go to the lab and you can work all day on complex problems and then you can come home and get some of this built up stress out through playing music. It's so much fun because we don't do it as a profession. We just do it for fun so there's really no pressure on it.” The band records all their albums at home themselves and burns their own CDs for each show. Z spoke of the ease of modern recording software as being helpful to producing decent sound for their records. “As easy as it is, I still think you have to be a little computer savvy to do home recording,” Z said, citing his computer skills.

The new EP from All Your Science was recorded 4 track style and is mostly instrumental. There are more than just guitar and drums on the EP since both members of the band added additional instruments as overdubs on many of the tracks. The EP will be released at a house party that doubles as a final show and farewell party, as Lu leaves soon afterward to start her postdoc in New York. But is this the last All Your Science show ever?

"We keep talking that if we can get the right set up that we're gonna reform to do the tour of Japan," Z said. "But we're still keeping that as kind of a rumor. And we're gonna have to have enough interest from the fans." Since Lu recently gave a talk on her Ph.D. thesis in Japan, they should have no trouble drumming up some support for any future tours in the country.


All Your Science releases their last EP and plays their final show this Saturday, August 28th, at 602 Maplewood Ave in Durham, North Carolina. RSVP to the facebook event here. Thanks to the band for sitting down and talking with me!

ScienceOnline 2010: A great experience!

After a long hiatus from blogging, I am back, and inspired by the awesomeness that is the ScienceOnline2010 conference here in Research Triangle Park, NC.

I've been an occasional lurker of ScienceBlogs.com for a few years now, and reading the informative, insightful, and entertaining posts of the bloggers there is what originally inspired me to start up Science with Moxie. I'm also very interested in the intersection between science, popular culture, and policy, so once I found out that many of the scientists/bloggers/writers/journalists that I've admired over the years were going to be in attendance right in my backyard (less than 15 minutes from my house!) I jumped at the chance to attend.

The conference definitely did not disappoint. There were a couple workshops on the Friday before that I attended on blogging and on podcasting. I was sitting in the second workshop on podcasting waiting for it to begin and trying to do my best impression of the lurking I do while browsing science blogs online when one of the wonderful creators of the conference, Bora Zivkovic, came up to me and greeted me by name. It was completely awesome and kind of surprising considering that I'd only interacted with him through Twitter. That first burst of friendliness was a great representation of the overall spirit of the conference. It seemed that little steps were taken at very turn to ensure a pleasant and fun experience, including a tasty locally grown lunch from two of my favorites, Saladelia's and Locopops.

It was a little surreal to spot all the faces that I've only seen in pixelated photos on the side of blogs or at the top of e-articles. I think the most OMGZ NERD FAMOUS person I recognized there was Mr. Carl Zimmer of New York Times and NPR fame. I didn't take the opportunity to talk to him because it was enough to bask in the radiance of his nerd rays from afar.

The sessions were spectacular. I attended a few that were really helpful in gaining perspective on career options in the broad fields covered by the conference. Actually, one of the most exciting things was the sheer diversity of the professions present at the conference. I got to mingle with authors, journalists, scientists, professors, educators, lawyers, bloggers, and people involved in the entertainment media. I don't think I've ever come across a conference so teeming with energy and excitement about new media, technology, and the places that it can take us as a society. The whole experience was extremely positive, and inspired me to keep typing away at this lil' ol' blog.

P.S. You can view some shots from the conference in the video below. I make a cameo at 4:25!