I’m overhauling my two sites again, and have decided to move my longer, more thoughtful posts to the alandove.com domain. This site will now host my personal blog, which will contain the sorts of things other people put on social media: photos, projects, and other updates about what I’ve been up to besides work. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for The Turbid Plaque, please point your feed reader to my other site.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had the privilege of speaking to a big group of K-12 science teachers recently. One of the many interesting conversations I had at that meeting was with Kelly Melendez-Loaiza, who teaches at Mansfield High School in the southeastern part of Massachusetts. She’s one of a few teachers who have decided to tackle our current misinformation pandemic head-on, by inoculating kids against the threat.

Different types of journalism have different challenges. In investigative journalism, the reporting is hard but the writing is (relatively) easy; once you’ve finally wrung the facts out of folks who didn’t want the truth brought to light, all you really have to do is state what you found. Science journalism is the other way around: the reporting is usually pretty easy, but the writing can be extremely hard. Scientists love to talk about their work.

Continuing the theme of my previous post, and on the heels of my own departure from the little blue bird app, here are some ideas for things to try if you, too have decided you’ve had enough of that Twit. 1. Enjoy your newfound free time As someone who’s acquired and kicked a few tech addictions over the years, I have some experience with one of the major side-effects of leaving a platform: free time.

This is a lightly edited version of a keynote presentation I gave on 26 October 2022 at the Massachusetts Science Education Leadership Association meeting in Marlborough, MA. Thanks again to Liz Baker for inviting me, and the whole group for being such wonderful hosts. I really like the theme of this conference, “developing intelligent consumers of science.” I’m not normally a big fan of the term “consumers,” but in this case I think it makes sense.

When I started my journalism career 25 years ago, I had some major worries: how to expand my client list, how to keep paying the rent, whether I was even qualified to be doing this kind of work. Amid those existential concerns, seemingly minor issues of file organization didn’t even register. My workflow then was expedient, but not sustainable. I did all of my writing in a semi-legitimately acquired copy of Microsoft Word, saved the files on my Mac Powerbook in whatever folders seemed convenient at the time, and didn’t think the concept of an archive was relevant to my life.

Among the many press releases I get, some of my favorites are the unintentionally hilarious ones from specialized equipment supplier Seward, makers of the Stomacher series of sample preparation machines. To be clear, these are extremely useful pieces of equipment for anyone studying food microbiology or digestive tract pathogens. It’s just that, well, a mechanical stomach is pretty damn funny to think about. In their latest release, Seward invites laboratories worldwide to take the new Stomacher 3500 autoclavable bag for a free test drive.