Correlations

Some big news:

As I said in the previous post, there’s more to the new WIRED Science TV show on PBS than just the TV show. The website is going to be full of quite a lot of additional material, starting next Wednesday. There’ll be show episodes, extensions of some of the segments, extra links to expand upon the stories, materials for schools, and so forth. But there’s also something else in the works. There’ll be a dedicated blog for the show, and it is called “Correlations”.

Correlations is a new group science blog, with bloggers of a range of interests. It will be connected to the show in many ways, but will expand well beyond the show into aspects of science and technology of all sorts, according to the tastes of the bloggers involved. There’ll be all sorts of interesting material, from serious stuff to fun stuff, and points in between. I think that it’s a great combination of bloggers (the team was assembled by Leighton Woodhouse, of KCET – we had a great conversation about the whole business of science blogging and science bloggers back during the Summer) and I’m quite excited to see how it goes. Who are they? Well, here’s the list:

Joe Brown, who covers technology at Wired magazine and Wired.com. He’ll be doing posts on the latest gadgets, the benefits and perils of technology, and other tech-related thoughts. He’s our most direct Wired magazine connection.

Damon Gambuto, a writer for the TV show WIRED Science. He’ll be giving us a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the creative process behind putting the show together, and I imagine getting ideas and suggestions and feedback from viewers.

Tamsin Gray of the blog Frozen Cheese. Frozen, because she’s an Antarctic Meteorologist, and she’s based at the Halley research station in Antarctica! She’ll actually be blogging from down there, I understand, on a range of topics from life as a scientist in the field to the broader science issues.

Sheril Kirshenbaum of the blog The Intersection. She’s a marine biologist, with special interest in climate science. She’ll be talking about the science as well as her take on science policy issues, which is always interesting, since she has first hand experience from working in the corridors of power in Washington.

Tara Smith of Aetiology and The Panda’s Thumb. Her focus is epidemiology. As you can see from her blog, she’ll be writing a lot about health, disease, and issues concerning science and the public in general.

Michael Tobis of Only in it for the Gold. His focus is also climate science. He comes at it from a different angle than Tamsin or Sheril (who are in turn also looking at different aspects), and does a lot of the climate modeling that must be tacked by computers. He also blogs about a wider range of other topics too.

Ziya Tong, one of the presenters of the show. She’s not got a blog (that I know of) but her website and bio is here. She might be well known to some of you from the show Zed, in Canada. She’ll be blogging about a variety of topics.

… and there’s also your friendly neighbourhood host of this blog. Yes, I’ll be part of the team too, sprinkling in a fair bit of physics here and there, along with my take on broader science issues, science and society… you know. I’ll also try to talk about things from the show (since it looks like it might be something I’ll actually make time to watch!), and I’ve spoken to Ziya about maybe teaming up to do some fun field trip type reports around LA. Sounds good in principle – we’ll see if we can work out time to make that happen.

Of course, none of us bloggers will be letting up on the work we do on our home blogs, so don’t worry – Asymptotia and all the other blogs are going to be carrying on as normal, perhaps enhanced a bit by some cross-posting to the new group blog.

[Update: Sheril and Tara have done posts on their blogs about this here and here. Update: So has Michael.]

So come over there and say hi once we’re up running (I’ll let you know the direct link when it’s ready – we go live on the 3rd of October, the same day of the show), and of course – watch the show!

-cvj