New York, New York

I’m going to be in New York in a few days, and Lab Waste – my film about lab waste – will be there a month later.

Next Monday, Columbia University is hosting a panel discussion about women in academia with blogs. I’m there representing science, as all three other bloggers are from the humanities and social sciences. There are some obvious differences between the areas: Science graduate students are treated as employees in a lab, and that puts a whole different pressure on blogging that people in other fields may not feel until they get to the assistant professor stage.

And then there’s the whole secrecy of data that you can’t blog about, but that might be a factor in other fields as well. I guess you can’t really blog your whole interpretation of Immanuel Kant if that is your philosophy dissertation, but I don’t know, for example, if scooping papers is an issue in a field like English, and I hope to find out next week. And do other areas of academia have conferences about blogging, or is that just us nerds?

It’s going to be interesting, and you should come if you’re in NYC.

Then, next month, on October 20th, my little film Lab Waste is part of the shorts program at the Imagine Science Film Festival, also in New York. I don’t think I’ll be there, as I can’t really justify paying for another trip when I am living off my savings account these months. But again, if you’re there, you should go check it out!

It’s on the day called “Quirky Science Shorts” in the program. All these words have been used to describe me, so it’s easy to remember.