Today was the first day I finally had a chance to attend some sessions in the morning. But that was after I missed a couple of presentations as I had to run to Radio Shack to get a new external harddrive. We’ve recorded so much interview footage that the drive I had with me just didn’t have enough space.
At AGU I dropped walked in the session Climate Literacy: Culture of Science AND Broader Impacts Done Well (ED31H) just before the start of the presentation Integrating Explicit Learning about the Culture of Science into the Pre-Service Teacher Curriculum through Readings and Reflections presented by Anne Egger.
Unfortunately it was another long day for me working in the interview room. I didn’t even have any lunch today so packed full was my schedule with interviews and getting footage for videos.
Though I did again meet a lot of great scientists and had a lot of fun. I did have a short chat with Lauren Kurtz the executive director of the Climate Science Defense Fund. I highly recommend you visit them at room 264 in Moscone South if you’re in need of legal advice. Something that is sadly often too needed in the current climate debate with all the attacks from climate science deniers.
For the first day I don’t have a lot to report about the happenings at AGU 2014. Unfortunately I spent the entire morning in an interview room and during the afternoon I was at Berkeley for another interview. Though I did catch a few tidbits in the hallways about interesting talks that happened at AGU.
The first one I heard about was Frontier’s Of Geophysics Lecture, Presented by Jeffrey Sachs. I’ll be watching it myself via the virtual options AGU offers when I’m back home.
Another interesting presentation that I missed was Richard Alley talking about abrupt climate change tipping points. I heard that there wasn’t anything new in the talk but that Richard Alley made it a great talk.
The coming days I’ll be at the AGU Fall Meeting. For those that aren’t familiar with it there’s a good introduction on the AGU’s website: With nearly 24,000 attendees, the AGU Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world. Now in its 47th year, the AGU Fall Meeting is the best place to present your…
Since June nothing happened on this website aside from me responding to comments. It wasn’t because I was busy at work, or the other usual time sinks were demanding my time and energy (that’s just the norm). No, it was because I was working on other projects. One of these was building the website for the podcast About a World…
Anyone who frequents my website regularly, and has either participated in the comment sections or read them, knows I have a very strict moderation policy. I have some very clearly stated rules for conduct, violate those and I will intervene. To me it doesn’t matter if you’re a friend, colleague, opponent, a regular, or just someone passing by. The rules I have for participating on this website get applied equally. There are even clearly stated appeal rules just in case I made a mistake with my moderation.
I already mentioned before that most commenters like the environment that I create with my strict moderation policy. It’s because of those rules that you can freely discuss the merits of what I wrote without the vitriol and derailing of discussions that’s so common. I’ve seen commenters defend my rules as they see what I do and how different my comment sections are because of that.
Continue reading Freedom Of Speech, Censorship, And Moderation
The past couple of weeks my website wasn’t exactly stable with it often going offline for a couple of minutes. It wasn’t uncommon that my website wasn’t reachable for half an hour or more. To resolve these issues I had a chat today with my hosting company and my website was going down thanks to DDoS attacks. Although these weren’t…
Technically migrating the content to Real Sceptic was already done on the 21st of last month. And on the 27th the domain settings for SkepticTV were changed so that skeptictv.net now points to this website. That day marked the official end of SkepticTV.
One step of the migration I didn’t execute, which was migrating email and WordPress subscribers to Real Sceptic. This turned out to be a bit of a hassle and I wouldn’t be able to migrate all the subscribers. Considering there were just a few subscribers I decided not to do this.
Continue reading SkepticTV Content Migration Is Complete
After a good run of almost 3 years SkepticTV will sadly cease to exist (I was the broadcast technician for them). The past 3 years were extremely fun and eventful with our show, the many guests we’ve had, and us appearing as guests on other shows. We also made a difference through the fundraisers we held.
But unfortunately a lot of us had trouble finding the time for keeping the show, website, and our social media accounts running. It takes a lot more time to run a 2 hour live show about scepticism than most people realize. Most of us also have their our own projects, jobs, education, and other real life obligations competing for time. As it wasn’t fair to burden those that still had some time with the sole responsibility to keep SkepticTV running the decision was made to discontinue the show.
This week there was again a distinct lack of updates on my website. Partly because I was sick for a couple of days the previous week, and partly because I had a busy week at work. But mostly because I was spending my time working on an update for the theme I use for this website.
Like the last time that I announced a theme update it means that something significant has changed. With the 2.0.7 update it was about the changes I made to the available pages and their impact on this website. For my visitors this was an important update as those pages contain for example the rules of conduct for this website. Versions 2.0.8 through 2.0.12 didn’t get a mention as they were small point releases that either fixed a small issue or changed something minor.
However, with version 2.1 a few things have changed significantly. Most of it you won’t notice but there are three big changes that influence how you interact with this website.