Researchers are beginning to key into the movement too, not just as users, but also as active investigators of the dynamics and utility of these new technologies as they emerge and grow. One of the amazing effects of these social networking sites is the wealth of data they can provide, and now scientists are taking advantage of the huge amount of public content from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even Wikipedia to answer all kinds of new questions.

For example, investigators showed that Twitter is a useful tool for tracking H1N1 here and here; that content disputes in Wikipedia reflect geopolitical instability; and that virtual social networks can create collective emotional states.

Today, we added to this growing body of work with a report of a Twitter-based “hedonometer” that can be used to quantify the societal happiness of large populations. The authors used an amazing library of 46 billion words from nearly 4.6 billion tweets posted over almost three years by over 63 million unique users – a collection that would have been essentially impossible to obtain without the Twitter-verse.

The paper reports various trends in happiness – people are happier on the weekend, and the word “Christmas” is associated with high happiness levels, as opposed to “flu” and “Iraq,” which rank at the bottom – but the real advancement of the paper is its quantitative approach to the huge Twitter-based dataset. While scientists now have access to these huge datasets, they must first face the challenge of classifying and organizing the huge amounts of social information so they can conduct meaningful research into areas that have not previously been explored.

Image courtesy of La Fabrique de Blogs

We’d like share with you their stories as examples of how three scientists at very different places in their careers use social networking tools to gain influence in their field.

Dr. Heather Piwowar (Postdoctoral Research Associate at Duke University, co-funded by DataONE, NESCent, and Dryad)

Courtesy of H. Piwowar

In the world of scientometrics, there are few young researchers these days making as many waves as Dr. Heather Piwowar. How do I know that? As a fellow junior researcher interested in scientometrics, I’ve found that there’s no better way to receive up-to-the-minute recommendations on interesting white papers, insider’s information on invitation-only conferences like #scifoo, and thought-provoking observations than by following Heather on two online services where I already spend a lot of time: Twitter and Google Reader.

What’s notable about Dr. Piwowar’s use of social media is that she very rarely indulges in self-promotion. Rather, she uses social media to engage other researchers: “Tweeting, blogging, friendfeeding, creating public Mendeley groups, etc. helps me find and be found by some of the most enthusiastic, engaged people in my area.  I learn what they think, what they are working on, and sometimes a bit about who they are.  They get to know me and what I do.  As a result, I do better work and my work gets more exposure.”

Piwowar also points out that social media, as an engagement and networking strategy, is strong in two areas where traditional forms of academic feedback are weak: timeliness and connecting far-flung researchers.

She notes, “Data finds data then people find people” is really true… when you start sharing information about your research passions and seeking other shared info relevant to your work, all of a sudden you find new groups of people who are about the same things you do.  Some of them turn into collaborators, and a few into friends.

Time well spent, no doubt about it.”

Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Mendeley

Dr. Alistair Dove (Senior Scientist at the Georgia Aquarium Research Center)

Courtesy of A. Dove

Dr. Alistair Dove, a Senior Scientist at Georgia Aquarium Research Center—the world’s largest aquarium—is what could be called a “trust agent,” imparting insights into his deep-sea research via Twitter and his blog, Deep Sea News, while engaging the public in science.

Dove explains, “If you have, say, a thousand followers on Twitter, that’s like talking to a large auditorium every time you tweet something about your science: a powerful tool indeed.  A direct line like that means the scientist can ensure that their science is accurately portrayed and that they have an opportunity to share with the public the personal passion that drives them to science in the first place.” A great side effect of all this communication with the public? If you do it well, recognition of your name and your contributions to research will increase among your colleagues, as well.

[Facebook and Twitter] are legitimate, powerful communication tools and scientific funding agencies want to see that you are considering them (and Apps, and Google Earth and all the other tools) as part of the plan for sharing science with the public.  Social media can help you get funded, help popularise your work, and help educate, entertain and inform the public, and I reckon that’s what it’s all about.

Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter

Dr. Jonathan Eisen

I believe in making it easy for people to find information and stories and such.

Courtesy of J. Eisen

Eisen explains, “I emailed the paper to a few contacts who are reporters (Carl Zimmer, for example) and told them I would be posting more information about the story behind the paper on my blog.  Then I wrote the detailed background story on my blog and when the paper came out of its embargo, I made the blog post live and then emailed a bunch of people the link to the paper and the blog post.”

He continues, “I posted these links to Facebook and twitter and my blog too — and since I have been working to build up my social networks for many years this at least got the message out to a few people.   One of those fortunately was PZ Myers, who writes the Pharyngula blog, and he posted a little discussion of how I had avoided a press release and that generated enormous web attention.  This, along with the article in the Scientist and on Carl Zimmer’s blog, was enough to get some attention around the web.  I think this helped convince others to write about it, including The Economist, which wrote a story for their online and print editions.”

Eisen’s experience shows that having a well-cultivated and engaged circle of social media friends and followers can help expand the impact of your work, even if you don’t follow traditional routes to publicize it.

Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Mendeley

If you are interested in learning more about how to collaborate and spread your own scientific messages using social media, check out the following links:

• How scientists can reach out with social media, by Jennifer Rohn
• Social Media for Scientists Part 1: It’s Our Job, by Christie Wilcox
• Top Twitter Tips for Academics, by Mark Reed and Anna Evely

In the paper, Epigenetic Predictor of Age, researchers from UCLA discovered that they could predict someone’s age using the DNA from their saliva.  There were many articles written on the paper. Some of these media outlets included Time, 80 beats, and CNET.

Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts received coverage from the BBC, The Body Odd, and US News & World Reports.

The paper, Coordinated Movements Prevent Jamming in an Emperor Penguin Huddle, by Daniel Zitterbart et al., received media coverage from The New York Times, News for Your Neurons and LiveScience.

The paper, A National and International Analysis of Changing Forest Density was covered by Xinhua, Press TV, and Reuters.

The New York Times, Health Pop, and Healthland wrote pieces on the paper, Trends over 5 Decades in U.S. Occupation-Related Physical Activity and Their Associations with Obesity.

Propagation of Respiratory Aerosols by the Vuvuzela was covered in Wired’s Playbook, BBC, and Seattle Post Intelligencer (sports blog).

The Advantage of Standing Up to Fight and the Evolution of Habitual Bipedalism in Hominins received coverage from Gene Expression, io9, MSN, and Science a GoGo.

Size and Usage Patterns of Private TB Drug Markets in the High Burden Countries was covered by The Times of India, The Economic Times, and TopNews.

The BBC, Times of India, and AFP covered Effectiveness of Action in India to Reduce Exposure of Gyps Vultures to the Toxic Veterinary Drug Diclofenac.

The paper, Common Functional Correlates of Head-Strike Behavior in the Pachycephalosaur Stegoceras validum (Ornithischia, Dinosauria) and Combative Artiodactyls, received media coverage from News for Your Neurons, CBC, and The Guardian.

As 2010 comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to recognize all of the hard work, effort and dedication of our peer-reviewers.  Since our launch in 2006, our peer reviewers (now over 35,000) have played a vital role in PLoS ONE’s publication process and our authors and Academic Editors have benefited from their invaluable contributions. It is truly amazing that we have gone from 9,000 reviewers from launch – end 2008 to the current figure, just 2 years later, of 35,000!

In previous years, we tried to thank all peer reviewers by name however, in 2010 alone we benefited from the input of over 18,000 peer reviewers, and so it has become unfeasible to thank them all by name.

Our peer reviewers are from all over the world and we understand that they take time out of their busy schedules to volunteer, often times anonymously, to evaluate the research submitted to PLoS ONE.  Without them, we would not be as successful as we are today and we thank them for improving the quality of our authors’ research, as well as, helping us make 2010 a record breaking year.   Many thanks again and we look forward to another wonderful year!

Photo via Flickr / ©woodleywonderworks

The paper, Experimental ‘Jet Lag’ Inhibits Adult Neurogenesis and Produces Long-Term Cognitive Deficits in Female Hamsters, received media coverage from: Science 2.0, Time, The Globe and Mail, The Times of India, The Daily Mail, The Mercury News and AFP.

Associations between Dopamine D4 Receptor Gene Variation with Both Infidelity and Sexual Promiscuity received coverage from: LiveScience, Gawker, WebMD, MSNBC, Fox News, Time, Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Jezebel and Business Week.

On the Size and Flight Diversity of Giant Pterosaurs, the Use of Birds as Pterosaur Analogues and Comments on Pterosaur Flightlessness was covered by Sify, BBC News, io9, AOL News, 80 Beats and The Press Association.

Red Orbit, Sify, Our Amazing Planet, 80 Beats and The Hindustan Times covered the paper, First Investigation of the Microbiology of the Deepest Layer of Ocean Crust. The image above is Figure 3 of this manuscript.

On the Perception of Religious Group Membership from Faces was covered by Phased.

Brian Mossop wrote about an article called Infant Motor Development Predicts Sports Participation at Age 14 Years: Northern Finland Birth Cohort of 1966. His article can be read in Slate Magazine.

Ontogeny of numerical abilities in fish received coverage from NeuroDojo.

Cooperation, Norms, and Revolutions: A Unified Game-Theoretical Approach received coverage from Brian Blogger.

Patients Present Earlier and Survival Has Improved, but Pre-ART Attrition Is High in a Six-Year HIV Cohort Data from Ethiopia was written about in the blog International Health Research.

First-Borns Carry a Higher Metabolic Risk in Early Adulthood: Evidence from a Prospective Cohort Study received coverage from Global Change.

Vision Impairs the Abilities of Bats to Avoid Colliding with Stationary Obstacles was covered by Now Hear This.

Re-Evaluation of Sinocastor (Rodentia: Castoridae) with Implications on the Origin of Modern Beavers received coverage from: The Open Source Paleontologist. Andrew Farke also interviewed, Josh Samuels, one of the authors on the paper.  That interview can be found here.

Genomic Runs of Homozygosity Record Population History and Consanguinity was covered by Gene Expression.

Janet Kwasniak wrote about Rhythms of Consciousness: Binocular Rivalry Reveals Large-Scale Oscillatory Network Dynamics Mediating Visual Perception in her blog Thoughts on Thoughts.

Behaviour and Physiology: The Thermal Strategy of Leatherback Turtles was covered by Byte Size Biology.

Michael Long wrote about Crenarchaeal Biofilm Formation under Extreme Conditions in Phased.

And this month, the winner is Bjoern Brembs. He starts his post like this:

Use it or lose it, they say. The saying holds not only for muscle fitness, but also for the brain. The Romans already knew that ‘mens sana in corpore sano‘ and today we know that both physical and mental fitness, exercise and training can stave off many signs of aging. Even debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease can be delayed, or at least their symptoms reduced by staying physically and mentally fit and active. I recently handled a manuscript in my function as Academic Editor for the journal PLoS One, which suggests that the analogy goes even further.

Yes, several of our Academic Editors are bloggers and, in their function as editors, they get to know manuscripts really well: reading several versions, reading reviews and communicating with authors and reviewers, so it is not surprising that their blog posts, when they write about papers they handle, are of exceptional quality. And I cannot discriminate against them just because they are a part of our “inner circle”, can I? I want to see more of them blog about papers they like or handle in PLoS ONE.

The article that Bjoern wrote about (and connected to his own from a couple of years ago) is this one:

Endogenous Human Brain Dynamics Recover Slowly Following Cognitive Effort by Anna Barnes, Edward T. Bullmore and John Suckling, all from the Brain Mapping Unit, Behavioural & Clinical Neurosciences Institute, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom:

Background

In functional magnetic resonance imaging, the brain’s response to experimental manipulation is almost always assumed to be independent of endogenous oscillations. To test this, we addressed the possible interaction between cognitive task performance and endogenous fMRI oscillations in an experiment designed to answer two questions: 1) Does performance of a cognitively effortful task significantly change fractal scaling properties of fMRI time series compared to their values before task performance? 2) If so, can we relate the extent of task-related perturbation to the difficulty of the task?

Methodology/Principal Findings

Using a novel continuous acquisition “rest-task-rest” design, we found that endogenous dynamics tended to recover their pre-task parameter values relatively slowly, over the course of several minutes, following completion of one of two versions of the n-back working memory task and that the rate of recovery was slower following completion of the more demanding (n = 2) version of the task.

Conclusion/Significance

This result supports the model that endogenous low frequency oscillatory dynamics are relevant to the brain’s response to exogenous stimulation. Moreover, it suggests that large-scale neurocognitive systems measured using fMRI, like the heart and other physiological systems subjected to external demands for enhanced performance, can take a considerable period of time to return to a stable baseline state.

Congratulations both to Bjoern and to the authors of the article. I have notified the winners and their prizes are on the way. I hope you read Bjoerns’s post and post a comment of your own, and then go to the article itself to read it and post comments, notes and ratings there as well.

The conference was initially conceived as an opportunity for local North Carolina scientists, bloggers and teachers to meet and discuss how the online world can be used for furthering the aims of science communication and education. But the world did not allow us to keep it small and local – participants arrived from all over the USA and abroad and the sessions covered many other aspects of the use of Web in science. Over the past three years, the conference grew in size and strength, with session leaders and participants coming from all corners of the USA, from Canada, the UK, Sweden, Finland, Serbia, Italy, Germany, South Africa and Brazil. The early behind-the-scenes communications indicate that next year we may have people coming from New Zealand, Antarctica and even outer space!

Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, teachers, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers, elected officials, university administrators, enterpreneurs and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science.

Understandably, some of the issues dear to PLoS such as Open Access publishing, scientific metrics, and Web 2.0 approaches to networking and information-sharing, have been front and center at our conferences. Thus, unsurprisingly, PLoS has been involved in helping or sponsoring the event every year. Apart from myself, as well as several members of the PLoS ONE editorial board, participants in the conference in the past included Liz Allen (Director of Marketing and Communications – see an interview about her experience), former managing editor of PLoS Biology Hemai Parthasarathy and PLoS ONE managing editor Peter Binfield. We expect a continued involvement and we hope that other members of PLoS community – editorial board members, authors and readers – will also consider attending this exciting and edifying meeting.

So, please join us for this three-day event to explore science on the Web. To get a better understanding of the conference, please check out the blog and media coverage of the 2007 conference. See what we did at the 2008 conference and check the blog and media coverage. Look around the ScienceOnline’09 wiki and the blog and media coverage of the 2009 meeting. Interviews with a number of participants at the 2008 conference are here and with participants of the 2009 conference here.

• Please take a minute to register (if you were registered last year, use that password) for the wiki.
• Log in and add ideas for the program at this page.
• The registration for the conference itself will open in late Fall 2009. Sign up here to receive advance notice about registration and other conference updates. (Note: Conference registration is not the same as member registration for editing this wiki, or vice versa – they are two different platforms. To contribute your ideas to this planning wiki, please go to the blue strip on the top of the wiki page and register.)
• If you or your organization are interested in becoming a Sponsor, or helping in other ways, please contact us at info@scienceonline2010.com
• Keep informed about the organization of the conference at the News and Updates page.
• Keep up with the blog and media coverage here.
• This is a collaborative and community conference — we need you to participate now to help us make this a successful, fun and educational event. Please volunteer to help.
• This is a conference to explore new ways in communicating scientific exploration. Our conference addresses a variety of issues and perspectives on science communication, including science literacy, the popularization of science, science in classrooms and in homes, debunking pseudoscience, using blogs as tools for presenting scientific research, writing about science, health and medicine and even using the Web to conduct research. In addition to being an internationally known hub of scientific and biomedical research and education, North Carolina has numerous science blogs written by a wide variety of people – see this listing of Science bloggers located in North Carolina.
• If twittering, use the hashtag: #scio10 (use the same tag on other services, e.g., Flickr, YouTube, etc.). Many sessions will also be livestreamed and/or recorded for virtual participation.
• Join the conversation in the FriendFeed room.
• Join the Facebook event (this helps us with estimating the number and composition of potential participants)
• Help us spread the word: in person, by phone or e-mail, on social networks and on blogs and websites. If online, please use our Promo materials.

I was somewhat surprised to see how few of those 48 posts were about Ida, considering how many posts about this fossil were written this month – I am assuming that some of the people were not sending their posts to ResearchBlogging.org (or trackbacks to the paper itself, where a healthy scientific debate is occurring in the comments).

Anyway, I was very happy with the last month’s crop of posts – pretty much every one of the 48 entries could have won. And the decision was really difficult. But after mulling over it for a while, and then sleeping over it, I finally decided – my Pick for Blog of the Month for May 2009 is….drumroll, please:

Christie Wilcox of Observations of a Nerd for the post Size does matter!

Christie’s post discusses a recent article Larger than Life: Humans’ Nonverbal Status Cues Alter Perceived Size by Marsh AA, Yu HH, Schechter JC and Blair RJR. Here is the abstract:

Background

Social dominance and physical size are closely linked. Nonverbal dominance displays in many non-human species are known to increase the displayer’s apparent size. Humans also employ a variety of nonverbal cues that increase apparent status, but it is not yet known whether these cues function via a similar mechanism: by increasing the displayer’s apparent size.

Methodology/Principal Finding

We generated stimuli in which actors displayed high status, neutral, or low status cues that were drawn from the findings of a recent meta-analysis. We then conducted four studies that indicated that nonverbal cues that increase apparent status do so by increasing the perceived size of the displayer. Experiment 1 demonstrated that nonverbal status cues affect perceivers’ judgments of physical size. The results of Experiment 2 showed that altering simple perceptual cues can affect judgments of both size and perceived status. Experiment 3 used objective measurements to demonstrate that status cues change targets’ apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver, and Experiment 4 showed that changes in perceived size mediate changes in perceived status, and that the cue most associated with this phenomenon is postural openness.

Conclusions/Significance

We conclude that nonverbal cues associated with social dominance also affect the perceived size of the displayer. This suggests that certain nonverbal dominance cues in humans may function as they do in other species: by creating the appearance of changes in physical size.

Christie writes:

What they found was that, unanimously across the board, people that looked taller were perceived as more dominant. Even the same actor in the exact same pose, with simply a change in the background to make him look shorter, looked less dominant. But even more amazingly, the status implied by the posture an actor took, whether sitting or standing, affected how tall they appeared to the participants. Actors in authoritative status poses were judged to be on average an inch taller and 5 lbs heavier than when they were in submissive ones, whether sitting or standing.

Part of the effect, the researchers found, is due to silhouettes. When we’re in certain poses, we look like we take up more space – literally. By analyzing the pixels in a 2d manner of different poses, the researchers found that we, in effect, are larger when we’re in dominant positions. As the authors explain, “Although the targets’ actual size did not vary across poses, in the sense that their actual height and weight were unchanged, the targets’ apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver varied significantly.”

Congratulations both to Christie and to the authors of the article. I have notified the winners and their prizes are on the way. I hope you read Christie’s post and post a comment of your own, and then go to the article itself to read it and post comments, notes and ratings there as well. And don’t forget to send trackbacks to the article when you blog about it, and to make sure that your post is aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org to be eligible for the next month’s prize.

I was somewhat surprised to see how few of those 48 posts were about Ida, considering how many posts about this fossil were written this month – I am assuming that some of the people were not sending their posts to ResearchBlogging.org (or trackbacks to the paper itself, where a healthy scientific debate is occurring in the comments).

Anyway, I was very happy with the last month’s crop of posts – pretty much every one of the 48 entries could have won. And the decision was really difficult. But after mulling over it for a while, and then sleeping over it, I finally decided – my Pick for Blog of the Month for May 2009 is….drumroll, please:

Christie Wilcox of Observations of a Nerd for the post Size does matter!

Christie’s post discusses a recent article Larger than Life: Humans’ Nonverbal Status Cues Alter Perceived Size by Marsh AA, Yu HH, Schechter JC and Blair RJR. Here is the abstract:

Background

Social dominance and physical size are closely linked. Nonverbal dominance displays in many non-human species are known to increase the displayer’s apparent size. Humans also employ a variety of nonverbal cues that increase apparent status, but it is not yet known whether these cues function via a similar mechanism: by increasing the displayer’s apparent size.

Methodology/Principal Finding

We generated stimuli in which actors displayed high status, neutral, or low status cues that were drawn from the findings of a recent meta-analysis. We then conducted four studies that indicated that nonverbal cues that increase apparent status do so by increasing the perceived size of the displayer. Experiment 1 demonstrated that nonverbal status cues affect perceivers’ judgments of physical size. The results of Experiment 2 showed that altering simple perceptual cues can affect judgments of both size and perceived status. Experiment 3 used objective measurements to demonstrate that status cues change targets’ apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver, and Experiment 4 showed that changes in perceived size mediate changes in perceived status, and that the cue most associated with this phenomenon is postural openness.

Conclusions/Significance

We conclude that nonverbal cues associated with social dominance also affect the perceived size of the displayer. This suggests that certain nonverbal dominance cues in humans may function as they do in other species: by creating the appearance of changes in physical size.

Christie writes:

What they found was that, unanimously across the board, people that looked taller were perceived as more dominant. Even the same actor in the exact same pose, with simply a change in the background to make him look shorter, looked less dominant. But even more amazingly, the status implied by the posture an actor took, whether sitting or standing, affected how tall they appeared to the participants. Actors in authoritative status poses were judged to be on average an inch taller and 5 lbs heavier than when they were in submissive ones, whether sitting or standing.

Part of the effect, the researchers found, is due to silhouettes. When we’re in certain poses, we look like we take up more space – literally. By analyzing the pixels in a 2d manner of different poses, the researchers found that we, in effect, are larger when we’re in dominant positions. As the authors explain, “Although the targets’ actual size did not vary across poses, in the sense that their actual height and weight were unchanged, the targets’ apparent size in the two-dimensional plane visible to a perceiver varied significantly.”

Congratulations both to Christie and to the authors of the article. I have notified the winners and their prizes are on the way. I hope you read Christie’s post and post a comment of your own, and then go to the article itself to read it and post comments, notes and ratings there as well. And don’t forget to send trackbacks to the article when you blog about it, and to make sure that your post is aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org to be eligible for the next month’s prize.

Here’s what he said as he tried to explain the significance of this to us earlier today:

“We knew for at least a century that most plants, fungi and animals had clocks. We knew since the 1990s that some bacteria have clocks. With this PLoS ONE paper we now know that at least one species of Archaea has a clock – quite exciting, methinks. All three Big Domains Of Life are now covered!”

It was with some disappointment that he learned that we wouldn’t be letting him enter this post into the “blog pick of the month” competition, since he is the most influential judge! However, it is a very worthwhile post and that is why we are featuring it here and hope you also enjoy it.

Photo taken by Steve Grosbois’, reproduced courtesy of Creative Commons Copyright.