I do not like what Twitter has become. Yet much as I’d like to wash my hands of the platform, this is easier said than done. As someone who’s work involves communicating and engaging across boundaries, Twitter, for all its flaws, is somewhere I still need to be — even though this sucks sometimes!
With this in mind, I thought I’d try something new and develop a set of personal Twitter “rules of thumb” to help me stay sane and productive on the platform and, quite frankly, help me navigate the fine line between Twitter burnout, and acting like a Twitter jerk!
One of the consequences of working from home during the coronavirus lockdown has been the installation of a spanking new black glass dry erase board in my home office (aka the spare bedroom).
As someone who can’t think without a dry erase board, it was only a matter of time before I cracked and put one in. And just to be different, I thought why not go for a fancy glass one, and a bunch of fluorescent gel pens to boot.
For the past few months, a 2014 Risk Bites video on nanoscale silver has been getting hundreds of views a day — up from 30 – 50 views per day pre-coronavirus. Yet between May 7 – May 9, views from YouTube searches dropped from over 200 per day to zero.
Has the video somehow been blacklisted by YouTube?
A frame from the first of the 2009 Nano Cubes visualizations showing the relationship between number, surface area and mass
Those nano-geeks amongst you with long memories may remember that, back in 2009, I played around with a couple of visualizations of the relationship between particle number, surface area, and mass. Those of you with even longer memories may recall that the origins of these visualizations goes all the way back to 2002.
As I was digging through some old files this morning, I came across my original work here, and was caught off-guard by a wave of nostalgia.
Back in the early 2000’s I was working on ways of measuring the surface area of collections of nanoparticles, and giving an increasing number of talks about how particle surface area, number and mass are related.
The challenge was that, at the time, the standard way of assessing health impact from exposure to airborne particles was to measure the mass concentration of material depositing in the lungs. Yet research was beginning to show that, for fine particles, health impact was potentially associated with the surface area, or even the number, of inhaled particles.
This was a problem, as at the nanoscale, this would potentially lead to mass concentration measurements dangerously underestimating the risks of airborne nanomaterials.
At the time, I was using the platform Mathematica for a lot of my modeling work, and decided to play around with it to see if I could come up with a simple visualization of the relationship between particle number, surface area and mass.
Here, I should say that Mathematica — at least at the time — was a powerful but gnarly math platform that no sane person would use to create complex animations. But that didn’t stop me relishing the challenge, and so I started to play around.
The first iteration — from March 2002 according to my archives – was a video visualization of a cube being progressively split four times:
This was a good start, but it lacked any quantitative information. So the next iteration was to add information on the number, surface area and mass of the cubes:
A few years ago, I developed and ran a couple of workshops for scientists on how to create simple but effective whiteboard-style videos, using little more than a smartphone, tripod and computer.
At the time, I produced a series of training modules to accompany the workshops. I’ve just posted these on this website as a resource for anyone who’s interested in creating effective science communication videos, and is looking for some guidance.
There are eight modules and an overview – it’s worth starting with the overview, but you can jump straight to the different modules here:
