Author: San Diego Science Writers

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Reclaim the networks

By Niko Komin

Last November, coincidentally a couple of days after Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, SANDSWA met in a local brewery and the question came up: should we stay on Twitter or should we go? If we do leave, where would we go? We didn’t delve into alternatives but it kept nagging me.

Mastodon had already been on my radar—first as a little child when I saw beautiful illustrations of the extinct Mammoth species by Czech illustrator Zdeněk Burian, and later, in 2017, when I learned about the alternative microblogging service named after this creature on the German technology news site Heise. I had already signed up some time ago, but I was using an alias and I wasn’t even posting, just like how I started on the bird site. About a week after our meeting at the brewery I decided to use Mastodon and finally made a new account with my real name. Why?

“Herd of Mammoths in Ice and Snow” by Zdeněk Burian in the 1962 edition of Weltall Erde Mensch , a book that fed my interest in science since early childhood.
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‘On revision’: editing tips from a scholarly writing instructor

By Kate Jirik

Want to stump a scientist? Skip the technical zingers and ask this instead: Who among your peers do you admire for their writing ability? Whose scientific papers would you read no matter the subject?

Cue the crickets.

Science doesn’t work that way, does it? Researchers typically read for information and new knowledge, rather than style. Professional success as a scientist means advancing hypotheses, publishing evidence, and engaging peers in debate to evolve a field of study. So it makes sense that scholars think of themselves (and one another) as investigators — thinkers who write — rather than writers.

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