Berkeley Science Review

Spectrum

Three members of The Berkeley Science Review (Editor-in-chief Sebastien Lounis, Web Editor Adam Hill, and BSR Author Lindsay Glesener) talk about the printed Review and the digital blog. They describe how the BSR has changed their view of science.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next.

Speaker 2: Mm hmm. [inaudible].

Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. In today's interview, Rick Karnofsky talks with three contributors to the Berkeley Science Review. The review is a student run by annual magazine that publishes in fallen spring. The review is also started, a blog that publishes four times a week to augment [00:01:00] the magazine. Our guests, our blog editor, Adam Hill, editor in chief Sebastian Lunas and author Lindsey Glasner. They talk about how it all gets done and what it means to them to do it. Here is Rick with the interview. First of all, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for why don't you introduce yourself

Speaker 4: then what you do for the BSR and also what your research here at cal says. Hi, my name is Sebastian Lunas. I'm the editor in chief of the Berkeley Science Review and I'm also a fifth [00:01:30] year phd student in the graduate group in Applied Science and technology. At UC Berkeley. I do my research at the molecular foundry up at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Delia Milan's group and focus on studying nanocrystals of transparent conducting oxides. Great.

Speaker 1: Uh, my name is Lindsey and I'm a writer for the BSR in the upcoming issue. I'm a graduate student in the physics department with a little bit of luck. I'll be graduating this December getting my phd and I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory [00:02:00] for Dr Bob Lynne. We build instruments that go on rockets, balloons and satellites to look at the solar system and sometimes things outside the solar system.

Speaker 5: Yes sir. Right. For the blog. Is that right? I will be, yes. Okay. My name is Adam Hill. I am the editor of the PSR blog and we sort of work in tandem with the magazine to both keep people aware of the BSR in between issues and also to independently promote science and issues of [00:02:30] science education. Great. And your research here at cal? I am in Charles Harris's group in chemistry where I use ultra fast lasers to look at the dynamics of organic metallic catalysts. Okay. So can someone tell me a little bit about the Berkeley Science Review?

Speaker 4: I'll take that one. So the Berkeley Science review is UC Berkeley is General Interest Science magazine. It's written, edited, produced entirely by UC Berkeley graduate students and it comes out twice a year. Basically the goal [00:03:00] of highlighting and showcasing and the cutting edge research that's going on at Berkeley, as well as taking a look at UC Berkeley science community and science history and doing so in a way that is accessible to a general audience. So it's not a technical publication, it's not a peer reviewed journal, it's a a general interest science magazine and it's written with the aim of being able to be picked up by anyone on campus and get an exciting look at what's going on at Berkeley. Part of the mission is also to help train editors and authors [00:03:30] through the process of putting together a professional level publication. And we're able to do that because we only publish two issues a year. So it gives us sort of a six month cycle to actually spend some time and work out really high quality content for the magazine as well as a really visually appealing layout. How long has the Berkeley Science Review been around? The science review was started in 2001 man, it's been producing two issues a year since then, so we're, we're going on 23rd issue coming out [00:04:00] this fall has a blog band active for that of the block's been around since

Speaker 5: 2010 and a gold team was responsible for starting the blog since then. I think it has grown significantly in scope and readership. And how do you attract readers to both the magazine and and the blog for the blog in particular, we found that social media is one of the best routes to getting significant readership.

Speaker 4: In terms of the magazine, I guess to answers, we generally just print as many as we can [00:04:30] and get them all over campus. And what's your approximate circulation? That we typically print between two to 3000 copies per issue and we distribute those across campus and then to a couple of local organizations and coffee shops around campus. Then we have a small number of subscribers, but we sort of know based on the fact that our magazine sort of disappear very quickly that we are getting a significant on our readership, but we're actually conducting a readership survey this fall to sort of get a better idea of how people actually come across the magazine, how many people are reading it, what their sort of [00:05:00] demographic makeup is, and we've also been trying to do a better job over the last year or so of integrating our magazine content with the blog.

Speaker 5: And where should people look for that survey?

Speaker 4: The magazine will have a prompt in it probably on the inside of the front cover with the link to the survey. We don't want people that haven't read the magazine to be filling out the survey and skewing our results. So if you do pick up the magazine interview. Yeah, exactly. If you do pick up the magazine, [00:05:30] please fill out the survey and let us know who you are. We're very interested and we'd love to hear from you. Lindsey, how did you come to volunteer as a writer? Yeah, my history with the Berkeley Science review is very short. Up until last spring, I was one of those people who would pick up the magazine when I sighed in the places on campus, but I also saw a call for pitches that was advertised to a lot of the departments. I think the particular place I saw, it was graduate student mailing

Speaker 1: list in the physics department [00:06:00] and it offered the opportunity to pitch a story for the Berkeley Science Review. And I thought, well, I've got something interesting to write about. So I sent in a pitch and it was accepted. And what was your pitch? The idea for my story was inspired by my phd project, which is a project to put solar, observing x-ray instruments on a NASA rocket. And I thought it might be interesting not only from a scientific perspective, but there's also a bit of a humanist aspect to the story because I thought [00:06:30] people might want to know about what it's like to build one of these experiments and what it's like to go to a launch facility and an actually launched the rocket and once I got a little deeper into the topic, another thing that came into it was Berkeley's long history of building experiments like these. It really goes back to the beginnings of NASA, the whole thing developed together. And so that aspect kind of started taking over the story and became very important to it.

Speaker 4: And then from there you just decided to volunteer to write for the blog [00:07:00] as well or,

Speaker 1: well I think we've decided that it would be organic to have some blog entries as well because this is a project that is going to launch with any luck on November 2nd so without the timing would be appropriate to have a story about the project and then to have updates on did it launch, what's happening with the project throughout the fall.

Speaker 4: This is sort of an example of how we're trying to really integrate the magazine and the web content where it's where it's organic to do so. We figured since it was an ongoing project, [00:07:30] it was a perfect opportunity to sort of transition people right from reading the magazine to reading posts on the blog and sort of integrate those two. Oh, that's great. And it's also worth mentioning that I think there's a significant cross section of the readership who don't necessarily encounter the magazine on campus, but who do read it on our website that said science review.berkeley.edu and do you have your entire back catalog online? We do. We're in the process of fully introducing the very earliest issues as actual searchable texts right [00:08:00] now their catalog in sort of a reader format where you can read them that way, but we're sort of moving towards making them more indexable and more accessible.

Speaker 4: And is Lindsay's volunteer story typical? Do you normally draw authors from your readership? I would say her story is typical in that she received an email through somebody, one of the departmental email lists and that's how we do a lot of our outreach for authors. Uh, we have our own active email list that we reach out to when we do a call for pitches, but we also spray them out through the departments [00:08:30] and I would say most of our authors come from that outreach effort. A good proportion of them have read the magazine before. We've been making an effort this year to also get in touch with a lot of the first year students on campus. A lot of our writers are more senior Phd Students, but I think there's also a huge opportunity for first year Grad students that aren't bogged down their research to get involved.

Speaker 6: [inaudible] this [00:09:00] is spectrum on k a LX Berkeley. Today's guests are from the Berkeley Science Review and it's Gluck.

Speaker 1: How was writing for the BSR different or similar to writing for other publications? It's very challenging. I've spent the last six years getting used to scientific writing for publications or for my colleagues, and it was surprisingly [00:09:30] difficult for me to write for the BSR. I imagine that sort of a common story because it's a broader audience or, yeah, when we're writing for scientific publications, we use very specialized language with carefully chosen words that are really specific, but they're meant for people who already know what those words mean and are very comfortable hearing them and using them. I think when you're writing for a broader audience, you have to choose your words just as carefully or maybe even more so, but you [00:10:00] have to focus less on being so specific and accurate and more on whether the words will be understood and whether they'll be interesting.

Speaker 1: Usually when I'm writing a scientific article, I don't need to worry about it being interesting. Hopefully. Interesting enough to site, I shouldn't mention that. In the magazine we have, I serve a number of different formats, so we have a number of different lengths of articles ranging from short little snapshots that are three or 400 words, two feature-length articles like the one that Lindsey wrote, which are typically two [00:10:30] to 4,000 words, sometimes even slightly longer. And so Lindsay jumped in as a first time author with, with one of the features with which I think are quite challenging. I think she did a great job. It was definitely a big barrier to getting started. When I first sat down to try to put some of my ideas on paper, I found it extremely challenging. After things had gotten rolling and I got feedback from the editors, which was very helpful.

Speaker 1: Then it became a lot easier. Can you describe that editorial process a little bit more? Well, let's see. So we go through several drafts. So before [00:11:00] the first draft I had met with the first editor for my story. His name is Alexis and she and I had talked about our ideas for the story, which directions we thought it should take, kind of what topics we wanted to put together for the first draft and then I wrote that first draft and that was the one that for me was really challenging to get something down on paper. Then after sending that to her, she circulated it amongst some of the other editors and several of them gave me feedback on it, give me ideas, [00:11:30] pointed out which parts of the draft they thought were interesting, which ones needed more development or just weren't as relevant and then working from that and building it into a second draft is where I got a lot more inspired and writing. It became much easier at that point. It was definitely a fun article to write, although it was difficult because in order to write it, I got to delve a bit into the history of the laboratory. I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory and conduct [00:12:00] interviews with people who are around for some particular pieces of that history. So I don't want to make it sound like writing this article was a huge ordeal that I hated. It was actually a lot of fun. It was just putting the words on paper that I found very difficult at the beginning.

Speaker 5: Did you find yourself interviewing a lot of faculty members who you might not have otherwise been interacting with for the piece?

Speaker 1: I didn't interview anybody that I didn't know already. Ours tends to be a very intimate community where people know [00:12:30] each other, but I did have conversations with people that I probably wouldn't have talked with otherwise. So a couple of the people that I interviewed were people that I know quite well and have had conversations with before or maybe work with. And some of them were people I knew of but hadn't really ever had a chance to chat with them. And so hearing their stories about building rocket experiments when they were students was very interesting.

Speaker 5: Did want to comment on that because I do find that, [00:13:00] uh, both in the case of the blog and the magazine itself, I think one of the best parts of both is the part that gets people out there and talking with scientists either in their field or tangentially related fields with whom they might never otherwise be interacting. It's very easy to get stuck in this little world of your advisor, the couple of students with whom you work on your project, you know, maybe a couple of friends who you see for beer each week. But beyond that, a scientist world can get very [00:13:30] narrow if you're not being proactive in avoiding that. And I think that both the blog and the magazine can really open new experiences to people who are writers and editors in terms of interacting with people in other disciplines or with people of significantly different ages within their own discipline who they might never have otherwise met.

Speaker 1: On that note, I also wanted to say a couple of things that had occurred to me too. If you were talking and I wanted to talk about the [00:14:00] value of writing for the BSR for the authors as well as getting information out there for the public. I think this is a really useful thing for the authors who write for both the magazine in the blog in two aspects. I was thinking first about my personal experience and at the stage I'm at in my graduate student career, which is hopefully near the end, you get very zoned in on one particular subject. You kind of managed to convince yourself that this is the only thing in the world that matters [00:14:30] and you spend all your time on that and you can get a little burnt out on that. So for me at the time I started writing for the BSR, it was great to kind of force me to open up my mind a little bit and put my own project in the context of its historical perspective and also the perspective of the community.

Speaker 1: It was a great way for me remind myself that there are connections to the community and that I'm not working in this kind of void. This black box down in the basement at the lab. The other thing I was [00:15:00] thinking when you mentioned how you're trying to get a lot of first year authors involved is that that could be really influential for them in choosing a thesis group. I know in the physics department it can be a little bit daunting because you have so many choices of which research group to work with, which particular topic to specialize in and I think a lot of first year physics students are just a little bit lost in that vast parameter space. So by writing for the BSR, I think that would probably encourage them [00:15:30] to find a whisper something they're interested in and start talking to people about it and I could definitely see that leading to them choosing that group to do their thesis work with

Speaker 6: [inaudible].

Speaker 4: Today's guests on spectrum are Adam Hill, Sebastian Lewis and Lindsay Glasner from the Berkeley Science Review

Speaker 6: [inaudible].

Speaker 4: [00:16:00] So the print publication is free? Yes. Is your entire budget from cal or do you get outside contributions? We do get quite a bit of funding from cow to the graduate assembly, which provides us with quite a bit of funding and then we also work with our printer. They have a relationship with an advertising agency who then in turn provide the suite of ads that are relevant to a science oriented publication that we are able then to put into our magazine. And how is the editorial stuff [00:16:30] selected each year or each issue or however frequently you guys change things up? It's basically whenever someone decides to leave and we put out a call for applications for the editorial staff, so most editors stay on for two to four issues, which is good because it helps with institutional memory and you get people that are more experienced that are able to coach.

Speaker 4: The more junior editors talked about authors and editors. What about art? I mean the BSR is usually a very beautiful publication. [00:17:00] Sure. Where does that all come from? The layout staff. The BSR is sort of the unsung hero of the magazine and one of the most exciting experiences as an author and as an editor is about halfway through the process. We have a meeting with our layout staff where they first show us the designs they've come up with for various articles in the magazine and working with just the words for for quite some time. And then coming in and seeing it actually displayed in a magazine format that looks incredibly professional and is very well designed is incredibly exciting. So the way it works for the magazine is we [00:17:30] have a team of about 10 layout editors and an art director. We don't require the layout editors to come in with an experience. This is sort of another one of the examples of how the BSR is able to take people that are excited about learning about how to do layout, how many to do design and because of the timescale of the magazine,

Speaker 5: it gives people enough time to learn those tools and working in an interactive team where they're going to get a lot of feedback on what they're doing and how it looks. And end up with a really amazing product. [00:18:00] What's that editorial process for the blog? Look back, we published four times a week with a crew of about a dozen authors at the moment, so we'll tend to go about a month between publications for an individual author and they'll come to me with some sort of idea. Can I write about pesticides in farming and California is efforts to insist on labeling GMO foods or something like that? You know, I'll say absolutely and the, the main interaction that I have at the [00:18:30] early stage of the process is regulating tone. Actually they're coming at it from the right viewpoint and coming at it from a balanced viewpoint where what they'll have at the end of writing this reporting more than opinion, although we also do have a category for opinion, but I like to try to avoid any ambiguity between the two.

Speaker 5: Sure. I think that's an issue that a lot of blogs face is that it can be difficult to separate the editorial standpoint of the blog. Ours is basically scientists' cool from the editorial [00:19:00] standpoint of the individual authors, which can often be very specific and very passionate. Then I'll often not have particularly significant amounts of feedback or interaction with the authors until just a couple of days before their blog is scheduled to go up at which point we'll start hashing things together and seeing it in the digital format is a great way to really get a feel for how a blog post is going to come together part because you can't necessarily know how a blog reads till things like hyperlinks are in place. [00:19:30] Then we'll tend to hang it back and forth making changes when things are going well. We wrap up about the night before the blog post goes up and then the next morning we'll send it up and relate it. To your point earlier about, um, how the BSR has helped you as a researcher have a little bit more breadth than you might as a Grad student. Do you see it changing how you go forward after you leave cows, start your postdoc or whatever?

Speaker 1: I think it wouldn't lead me to make decisions differently [00:20:00] after I graduate. Otherwise I don't exactly know what's on their highs and yet for me, but it gives me a little more inspiration about my field. So in that aspect, I suppose it could have a really powerful effect because the decision that I'll be faced with when I graduate is decision that many of us are faced with when we finished our PhDs, which is do you want to stay in academia? Do you want to switch to an engineering job where you can potentially make a lot more money and have a lot more say in where you live, who you work for, that sort of deal. [00:20:30] So inspiring students at a point in their graduate career at which they're about to make that decision, I think is a really good thing. So reminding them of some of the inspiring and motivating things about the field they're in could help to keep them there. The other interesting issue whenever we have anyone involved in science

Speaker 7: outreach who are themselves scientists on the areas, how they see the rest of the scientific community looking at their science outreach. So I think Brad Vojtech who was on the show earlier talked about this tweet [00:21:00] of Damocles. You're always waiting until your outreach efforts like sabotage your actual career in some way. Did you have any reservations before for writing to our broader audience?

Speaker 1: I would say personally, no. I didn't have any reservations about it. I think that there is a sort of pervasive fear about that in the scientific community. Like if you do too much scientific outreach then people will think that maybe you're not serious about the thing that you're actually working on. And I think that's mostly false. I hope that [00:21:30] people don't actually have that view, but I would say that pretty common. Certainly an anxiety that people have. Yeah, I think so. And there probably is some reason for it as well. I would not want to do scientific outreach to the point where I was not putting out scientific publications because especially as a woman, you want to make sure that people know you can do the work as well as do the outreach about it. I think that some of the barriers between people doing scientific research and doing scientific [00:22:00] outreach are starting to come down a bit.

Speaker 1: At my laboratory we're starting to see more and more people who are working both on hard science and doing outreach as well. In particular, a friend of mine is now splitting her time, roughly 50 50 between those two things. And so she's hired by both departments at our lab. So I think any stigma about those things or at least starting to to come down and be resolved. So what should people interested in volunteering for the BSR do? [00:22:30] They should contact us by email, I think is typically the best route for both. So the email address for the Berkeley science if you blog is science review [e-mail] and for the magazine or for the BSR as an organization in general. It's the science review@gmaildotcomishouldalsomentionthatmostoftheinformationabouthowtogetinvolveddesirewebsiteatsciencereviewdotberkeley.edu well Lindsey, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Cool at all. [00:23:00] Well, thank you both for joining. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of [00:23:30] the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Here are Lisa kind of itch Renee Rao and Rick [inaudible] with the calendar. They should both space and science center is starting their next season of night school tonight on third Friday of the month

Speaker 7: from seven to 11:00 PM Chabot opens their doors to adults 21 years in over with drinks, music, planetarium shows, telescope viewings and more. Number admission is $5 and general admission is $12 [00:24:00] visit www.chabotspace.org for more information. That's c h a, B o t space dot o r g. Remote

Speaker 8: islands have been heralded as natural labs with some spectacular cases of rapid evolution in proliferation of species on November 17th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 science at cal presents professor Rosemary Gillespie, director of the ESIC Museum of entomology [00:24:30] at UC Berkeley. She will address one of the most puzzling features of the high diversity of species on remote islands with her lecture entitled vagrant and Variability Evolution on remote islands. Science at cal is a series of free science lectures aimed at general audiences. On November 20th a museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley will host a lecture by a university scientist, sue sumo Tomia, who will lead presentations on current research practice talks and discussions on topics [00:25:00] of paleontological interest. Coffee and snacks will be available. The lecture will be held in 1101 of the valley life sciences building on the UC Berkeley campus from 11 to 12:00 PM the new and wildly successful nerd night. East Bay will be held on Tuesday, November 27th at the Stork Club, 2130 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, doors open at 7:00 PM and the three lectures begin at 8:00 PM you must be 21 and the emission is $8. [00:25:30] Join Calyx DJ eye on the prize and hosts in Davis and Rick Karnofsky for this scientific salon in Oakland Uptown district,

Speaker 7: the Stanford Linear National Accelerator Laboratory. Slack is celebrating their 50th anniversary on Wednesday, November 28th at 7:00 PM in the Oshman family JCC Cultural Arts Center located in Jessica Lynn, Sal Townsquare at three nine two one Fabian way in Palo Alto. [00:26:00] The Commonwealth Club presents the event that is $5 for students, $10 for members and $15 for all others. Nobel Prize winner and director of Meredith's, Burton Richter and scientist Norbert Holt comp. We'll discuss how the accelerator has made cutting edge advancements from particle to astrophysics, advanced energy science and more. Sac has discovered two fundamental particles prove that protons are made of corks and shown how DNA directs protein fabrication. For [00:26:30] more on this event. Visit Commonwealth club.org now two news stories with Rennie Rao and Rick Karnofsky Science Daily has recently summarized an article by researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology published in nature materials on a novel way of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen associate professor of material science and engineering. Abner Rothschild noted that their method of trapping light and the ultra thin films of ferric [00:27:00] oxide is the first of its kind. These rust films are about 5,000 times thinner than standard office paper and are inexpensive, stable in water, non-toxic and can oxidize water without being oxidized to get around poor transport properties. The team uses resonance, light trapping indifference between forward and backward propagating waves enhances the light absorption in quarter wave or in some cases deeper sub wavelength [00:27:30] films amplifying the intensity close to the surface, allowing charged carriers created by the light to reach the surface and oxidize water. This is a promising step into harvesting solar energy and storing it as hydrogen.

Speaker 8: UC Berkeley's greater good science center has launched an interactive, shareable online gratitude journal through November. People in the campus community are invited to participate in the cal gratitude challenge by keeping a two week online [00:28:00] gratitude journal. The website was made both to conduct research and educate people about the powers of gratitude in their lives both before and after a 14 day period. Participants are asked to fill out surveys intended to measure traits like resilience, attachment tendencies, and happiest the projects designers are hoping for around a thousand participants. The website is [e-mail] that's t h n. X, the number four [00:28:30] [inaudible] dot org

Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music or during the show is by Los Donna David from his album folk and acoustic released under creative Commons license 3.0 [00:29:00] attribution. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is [e-mail] [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

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