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Serpentine
2014-05-04, 12:52 AM
Next week I have to give a presentation for a class called Presenting Science. I have to give an introduction to three online science sources (blogs, websites, apps, podcasts, video channels, etc), and an evaluation of one of them. Which should I do? So far I'm thinking:

Cracked (http://www.cracked.com/humor-science.html)
XKCD's What If? blog (http://what-if.xkcd.com/)
Peacockspiderman on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/Peacockspiderman)
Foldit (https://fold.it/portal/)
This Week In Science (http://www.twis.org/)
TalkOrigins (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/)
ASAPScience on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/AsapSCIENCE/videos)

So what do you think? Which two should I mention, and which one should I do an in-depth (well, for 4 minutes) evaluation of? Alternatively, do you have a truly incredible (or heck, crap - I can always tear it apart) sciencey online source I should do, particularly an app or something else a bit out of the usual?
I think I'm leaning towards using Cracked for the evaluation, and talking about FoldIt. But ionno.

Lord Torath
2014-05-04, 10:47 AM
I'm always a fan of Bad Astronomy (http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html) by Phil Plait.

Radar
2014-05-04, 01:59 PM
Personaly, from the ones mentioned I would do a more in-depth evaluation of Foldit - there is much more to say about it, then about a site that simply posts articles, however funny and intriguing they might be.

One of the most interesting aspects of crowd computing is that people are more interested in things, when they can meaningfuly contribute something themseles. So you have an interesting relationship between full-time scientists and bystanders, which you can explore. Projects like Galaxy Zoo have menaged to build whole online communities around themselves and led to many intersting discoveries thanks to the sheer ammount of people involved.

From fairly obvious and serious sources, there is Nature and Science - both of those have lots of solid news articles about latest discoveries. As for those more into entertainment, I'm mostly out of the loop. You probably should look into PhD TV (http://phdcomics.com/tv/shows.php). If anything, it's fun and educational.