Nerdy Science Blog

The Inoculated Mind just shared a new Malaysia Biotechnology Blog, namely Malaysia4Biotech.

I’m glad to see that there are more science related blogs in Malaysia blogosphere.  The blog is consisted of three authors, who are Mahaletchumy Arujanan, Joel William and KC Liew from Malaysian Biotechnology Information Centre (MABIC).

Why Blog On Biotechnology?

However, we are lagging behind many nations which seriously points out that the current efforts put into this area are insufficient or ineffective. Many constraints and hurdles are faced by those involved in the biotechnology sector. Lack of funding, grants, expertise, pool of skilled workers, experience in commercialization, collaboration between scientists and the industry, and commitments from venture capital and bankers are some of the glaring constraints and hurdles faced. This is coupled with the anti-technology movement spearheaded by activists, environmentalists and consumer groups. Sentiments such as anti-technology, globalization, and monopolization by certain multinational companies have been planted into the minds of the general public.

Although there are not much posts have been published at that blog, I read all of the posts and I found it easy to read.  No jargons are used and the articles are good.

Would you demand your lab members have their own blog? Rosie Redfield, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, had all her lab members to have a blog.

Anyway, it turns out that Rosie makes it a requirement for her lab members to maintain a blog. This was primarily to act as an appendum lab book, and a place to reflect on the experiments carried out recently.

I would love to see every lab members have a blog, but when it comes to the matter of competitors, I don’t think much researchers would write much about their researches before they get their articles published. As some scientists said, why help your competitors?

(link)

When youzi and I decided to start this blog, our aim was making everyone love science as we do (other way of speaking it, we’re creating our own future competitors) and also sharing knowledge among ourselves as we’re from different fields (and most of the time we write things not related to our fields). We try not to use jargon in writing articles, and also write things in a humorous and interesting style (according to us). We also have some very intellectually stimulating posts here, but just once in a while when we’re really in a nerdy mode.

I’m not sure how this tool determines the readability of a blog, maybe it’s judging from the words and grammars (we do have poor language background and we’re trying our best to fix it). There are two other authors for this blog beside us, which are lalafish and matthuan, but they never post a single post before. I bet they forget their password.

It’s not an easy job to convert a journal article to something which is readable by everyone. I truly salute science journalists, but please don’t write things about dinosaurs only.

(link [via][pic])