The #CharityDigital tweets

Note, this page may take a moment to fully load.

This event took place in London the other night - I didn't know anything about it until it was well underway as I'm not a 'Head of Digital' but once I got wind of it I enjoyed reading the tweets. I've captured them using Chirpstory.com (it lets you grab 50 tweets at a time and there are fewer than 100 tweets here so it was a pretty quick process for harvesting them) and then used the embed code that is generated for each Chirpstory.

These are also in chronological order (again, one click) and I've kept in the RTs though they can be quickly removed. Towards the end - ie nearest in time to now - the blogposts start appearing as the event's ended and people post a few hours later with their reflections.

The event was co-hosted by CharityComms and CogApp.

Tuning fork therapy - it's not very likely is it?

Update: 25 November 2019
Apparently Marie Kondo (of joy-sparking decluttering fame) has started selling her own range of products, including a miniature tuning fork with a crystal. For $75. The tuning fork alone is $50 and emits a frequency of 4kHz (4,096 Hz) which, according to the Classic FM article pondering the baffling existence of this product, is "about the pitch of the highest note on a piano (C8)."

Update: 15 August 2012
I've noticed a few blog hits coming in along the lines of "does tuning fork therapy work" and "what is tuning fork therapy?". Just to be absolutely clear - it's a made-up therapy and does absolutely nothing of use whatever. I'm sure it will be fun and pleasant to listen to / play with tuning forks but anyone telling you they can use vibrational medicine to 'locate health problems' and then 'correct them' is (a) mistaken and (b) possibly breaking trading laws by making claims about health and diagnosis. There are no such things as chakras, or 'energy blocks'. Reiki is also fanciful nonsense but a kindly chat to someone can sometimes make you feel better anyway so if you want to waste your money, go ahead :)

---

Tuning forks are great fun and I don't believe there's a person alive who, if they meet one, isn't tempted to whack it on the nearest hard surface and then hold it next to their ear as the vibrating sound decays. You can get ones that are set at different pitches and growing up in a musical household meant I got to play with them fairly regularly. If you don't have one to hand here are some online tuning forks.

Recently there was an advert for a Sunday newspaper which went round the country and got different people to sing "The sun'll come out tomorrow...". I thought this advert could have done with more tuning forks because all the clips were sung at different pitches. Probably it was meant to indicate some homely charm or British eccentricity... but a tuning fork would have sorted that out.

Meanwhile tuning forks have cropped up in this advert I recently saw, for tuning fork therapy with bonus reiki.

I've cut out the contact details but the text reads:

Vibrational Medicine
Our bodies resonate biomagnetic frequencies

Vibrational medicine is a Sound Therapy
using tuning forks to locate health problems
and correct them with the right frequency.
It is effective at cleaning static energy,
releasing energetic blocks, balancing chakras,
healing specific problems.

REIKI

Light-touch or no-touch therapy
channeling UNIVERSAL LIFE FORCE ENERGY
into the body to enable healing
physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Reiki will bring awareness to where problems lie,
and why they are there.

While this is nonsense I did wonder how tuning forks might be used in real medicine, for example I know that they're to be found in clock mechanisms so possibly they feature in some way. No idea what though.

Update 3 June 2014
I've found an example of tuning forks being used to diagnose broken bones http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2681212/

"During a field evaluation, a tuning fork and stethoscope can be useful in evaluating potential fractures. However, this method should only be used in conjunction with a thorough assessment and sound clinical judgment."

COMMENTS ARE MOSTLY CLOSED ON THIS ENTRY.  Unless they're really comical. So far they've been mostly tedious.

Science communication jobs in Europe - where to find info?

The ScicommJobs Posterous blog and accompanying Twitter feed occasionally has a job that's outside of the UK but mostly they're in London / UK because that's where I live and so that's what I tend to hear about or look for.

Is anyone doing a project that's similar to mine but in different countries around the world? I'd be keen to link up our respective scicomm jobs blogs in some sort of networking fashion.

Anyway I've been asked by someone from outside the UK where they can hear about jobs that are specifically in Europe. Do you have some helpful suggestions to add to mine?

1. Pick a country you like the look of and make a note of their scientific institutions, universities, museums, industries, government bodies etc and investigate their vacancies pages. That's pretty much what I began doing here: Science Communication Vacancies Pages.

2. Find out where jobs are advertised (eg newspapers, jobs sites, mailing lists that cover a particular geographic area). This will also help you find out more resources for (1).

3. Embassies might be a useful resource although to be honest I don't really know how they work. If you are French and want to work in Italy then I wonder if the Italian Embassy in France can help you - perhaps not with finding you a science communication job but certainly with practicalities. We also have the British Council which promotes British talent and expertise around the world. I'm assuming there are equivalents for other countries, in different countries. 

So... if you wanted to work in science communications in a European country - where would you start to get an idea of the scicomm landscape there?

"Accuracy, Completeness, and Transparency in health research reporting" Fw: EQUATOR Scientific Symposium 11-12 October 2012

This came to the Critical Appraisal Skills mailing list on Jiscmail which is a low volume discussion list the purpose of which I'm sure you can easily guess :) Jo ACT now: Accuracy, Completeness, and Transparency in health research reporting 11 - 12 October 2012; Freiburg, Germany     We would like to invite you to the scientific symposium and 4th EQUATOR Annual Lecture organised by the EQUATOR Network and the German Cochrane Centre.   The symposium will be of great interest to health research scientists and clinicians, journal editors and peer reviewers, reporting guideline developers, publishers, research funders and other professionals involved in research education, research governance and the publication of medical research.   The focus of the meeting is: Highlight critical issues in health research reporting and its wider consequences Present key findings from relevant scientific research; topics include: Reporting quality of research studies in all areas of medicine Common problems in research reporting (e.g. publication bias, selective reporting, inconsistencies between protocol and publication, misinterpretation of research findings) Impact and consequences of poor reporting on systematic reviews and clinical guidelines, clinical practice and patients' care Development of robust reporting guidelines Increasing awareness and knowledge of principles of rigorous research reporting and available guidelines Implementation of reporting guidelines in journals, and by research and funding organisations Development and delivery of educational and training programmes on research reporting Discuss potential solutions for improvement of health research literature and share experiences     To make sure you do not miss the event please email equatormeeting@cochrane.de to register your interest. When the call for abstracts and registration opens we will contact you directly.   More information is available on the EQUATOR Network website http://www.equator-network.org/.

What is all this crap Google adds to my search URLs?

I am a habitual URL hacker* - tinkering with the bits in a web address to try and find a page that I want. For example if I'm on website.com/section/interestingpage.html I might prune off the bit at the end and see if there's anything at website.com/section - it's often brought up loads of great stuff (not always, sometimes you don't get permission to view intermediate bits).

Whenever I run a search on Google and share the results with someone else I've noticed that I always paste the results URL into notepad and clip off all the stuff at the end that appears to be completely irrelevant to the search. I've only just started noticing that I do this although I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. I do it for everything though - if I'm sharing a link to an article on a news site and it has a bit at the end that mentions the referrer link (something like utm=twitter I think) then I prune that out too. I'm not exactly sure why, unless it turns out that I'm a purist and only want to share the minimum of alphanumerics needed to direct someone to the right page on a site.

The URL clipping itself is the work of seconds as I always have a notepad document open for that sort of thing and use keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste and Alt+Tab to ping into the notepad window.

I've just searched on my work website for info about 'diabetes networks' using this exact search:
site:www.diabetes.org.uk "diabetes networks" - the site: bit means it just searches within our website and the bit in "" marks means it searches that exact phrase.

Wanting to send the results to someone else I copy the URL from the address bar and, as always, note with surprise the random string added to the end - what is all this guff that Google adds to my search string?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.diabetes.org.uk+%22diabetes+networks%22&oq=site%3Awww.diabetes.org.uk+%22diabetes+networks%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=337562l337562l0l337807l1l1l0l0l0l0l87l87l1l1l0&gs_l=serp.3...337562l337562l0l337807l1l1l0l0l0l0l87l87l1l1l0.frgbld.


The URL above contains a duplicate of the search string (in dark red) and a whole load of apparently non-contributing filler (in green).

Deleting all of that pares it back to this much smaller web address: https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.diabetes.org.uk+%22diabetes+networks%22 - which works fine. The %22 is the way web addresses render ", so you need to keep those (%3A = : - the colon between site and www).

The aqi / aql / gs_sm stuff is occasionally useful - if you click on the image search for example, you're given in return an address that looks a bit like this and removing these bits of text from the URL just resets it to the regular web search (meaning if you send the amended link to someone else they'll just see the regular results, not the image results).

But what do all those numbers and letters in green mean?

*solely for benign purposes!