I was amazed today to see a piece in Cell about whether scientists should twitter. In it David Bradley compares his twitter following to that of two celebrity tweeters, ‘Richard Dawkins has almost 25,000 followers on his Twitter feed; the actor Ashton Kutcher has 3.8 million‘.

I wrote very excitedly about the appearance of @richard_dawkins back in 2008. I thought that his appearance on twitter would legitimise the medium for scientists and encourage others to experiment with it.  Unfortunately, I got a stock publicity comment on the blog from ‘dawkins’ and it was shown to be an imposter. So I checked back from the Cell article today and I was rather surprised to see that the account was still alive and had such a big following (25,879). I assume that this is the account to which David refers, since it has just over 25,000 followers. Interestingly @richarddawkins has almost as many followers (17,680). The latter links to richarddawkins.net the former to Richarddawkins.com. Neither twitter account has a ring of authenticity to it, no conversation, just broadcast. Both could easily be simple ways to make a lot of money on amazon click through ads, but my money is on @richarddawkins as the legitimate source (richard_dawkins follows some suspect peeps and as much as we would all like to see Dawkins following The Official Jesus, and God, I can’t quite see it happening).

So, two accounts, neither embracing twitter in any way other broadcasting.  What a shame and a wasted opportunity to engage.

credit: flickr S.S.K.

My better half is a lecturer in bioinformatics and tries very hard to fit his bench research along all the other things he has to do as a lecturer. About a year ago, he started to use a campus learning objects wiki within our VLE, Blackboard, as an electronic version of his lab book. Much of the data that he produces comes in electronic format (DNA sequences, digital photos of gels, phosphor images for autoradiography), so it seemed daft to be printing these out to put in a paper lab book. He opened the lab wiki with the following reasoning:

He has used this system with undergraduate and postgraduate project students working in the lab, and we are writing up these experiences as a short communication for a journal. As part of the background research for this, I sent a brief email to our staff in the School of Biological Sciences to see if there was anyone else experimenting in this way. There was  a range of interest from a wide variety of staff. It appears this is a topic that people are thinking about more and more and a potential research area for the future.

A couple of comments were:

‘I’m looking at openwetware‘

one colleague said he kept everything electronically but didn’t use a specific system to link everything together. He raised the thorny issue of proof of ownership/ authorship for patent applications and storage (large images at 1 GB a time).

iDaily diary though the colleague that paid for this did point it that it did not transform his notebook practice (I guess if you aren’t good a keeping notes anyway, going electronic probably won’t help!)

on twitter, a colleague said they used DEVONthink (Mac only) which allows the insertion of images (include editable PDFd LaTex equations)

This is an interesting area and one which I’m sure we will come back to, not just as a project for the more effective supervision of students, but as a tool for assisting research scientists to bring their practices for recording data into line with the already innovative generation of that data.

I have been trying to convince my better half that I am not just frittering my time away using twitter but doing something useful. He doesn’t seem to believe that anyone of any real intelligence would use such a medium. Salvation came when last night (via my twitter network of course) I discovered that Richard Dawkins joined twitter. Over the last 48 hours, the growth in the people following him has been amazing. The two shots below were taken just over 24 hours apart. I will wait and see what his reaction to twitter is, he certainly isn’t having a conversation just yet, but it is early days….

update: following a busy weekend, the followers have gone through the roof and I am pleased to report that Dawkins does appear to conversing in good trivial twitter style, and some more serious stuff too.