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Went down the Twitter rabbit hole! Who's Who on Science Twitter and Who Counts, at PLOS Blogs. It walks through a recent study about this - I wrote a comment on PubMed Commons too: it's a great example of the impact of selection bias. And a bonus if you're on Twitter: data on how many followers people have (74% have up to 1,000). Thanks to Adam Dunn and Paige Newman for pulling those out of Twitter for me.

When I started systematically working on under-represented scientists from history on Wikipedia, I didn't realize that this would mean I would spend a lot of time learning about civil rights activists and lynching, too. Why is a story for later. But as I point out in my second Missing Scientists' Faces blog post this month, some people you can't just pass by and move on to look for more scientists. Another Missing Scientists' Face post: more historic photos surface, and the value of senior scientists' photos of their colleagues.

Here a new Wikipedia page for the amazing suffragist and anti-lynching activist, Nellie Griswold Francis (1874-1969), who wrote and lobbied into legislation Minnesota's Anti-Lynching Bill in 1921. The story of her and her husband, William T. Francis, involve singing, Ku Klux Klan burning crosses on the lawn, a grandmother who was a Congressman's slave, meetings with W.E.B. DuBois, Minnesota's first black diplomat - and contributing to the downfall of a government in Liberia. Yet between them, all there was on Wikipedia was a few sketchy paras on him.

In other news: Could science's reform movement be used against it politically? I'm one of the people Ed Yong interviewed on this: in The Atlantic. And by Julia Belluz in Vox, on combatting misinformation and why this has dominated my life for decades.

A forgotten pioneering African-American physicist & correcting the record: the month's first roundup of photos at Missing Scientists' Faces. The second one: a rare picture of the first African-American woman to gain a PhD in a natural science, mathematicians, and some more non-scientists of color, too.

And Mary Elliott Hill (b 1907), likely the first African-American woman to get a master's degree in chemistry: new Wikipedia page. Other new pages:

  • Pilar Thomas, tribal lawyer, and member of the Pascua Yaqui tribe of Arizona;
  • Georgia Caldwell Smith (1909-1961), Spelman College head of mathematics, and one of the first African-American women to gain degrees in mathematics, as well as a PhD awarded posthumously (she died from cancer after her dissertation);
  • Louise Nixon Sutton (1925-2006), another of the first group of African-American women to gain PhDs in mathematics - and the first one conferred to an African-American woman by New York University.
  • Thyrsa Frazier Svager (1930-1999), another of the first group of African-American women to gain PhDs in mathematics - she and her husband saved one of their professorial salaries to invest towards a legacy for scholarships for African-American and other minority students.

Debunking Advice Debunked: post at Absolutely Maybe. Correcting misinformation is something so important, you would think we would really be on top of how to do it, wouldn't you? Sigh!

 

 

 

 

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