TAKING THE SUMMER OFF

I have been busy traveling with my new LLC (Center for Emerging Technologies). Got a few contracts and we are doing well as a consultancy. Still working on our NIRT which is due to lapse in 2011. Most recently we submitted articles for Nanotechnology Law and Business and another to Nanotoxicology (out of UK). The first article will appear in the Summer issue and examines (critically) the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies consumer product inventory. The second is the first data from the Delphi we completed under the NIRT. My students and I are working on six more articles and we expect at least two from each of our NIRT subawards - Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Carolina. I submitted a NUE proposal for the next two years and am pending. I am also on a U19 NIH grant proposal that is pending and a P48 NIH Superfund grant as well.

While I have been approached to write another book on Nanotechnology, I haven't pull the trigger on that. I am also attempting to rewrite a piece I wrote for Nature Nanotechnology but the reviewer were all over the map with recommendations (some of which were totally off base) and given the length restrictions attempting to accommodate this recommendations is nearly impossible. So, beyond the six articles and the work on my new book on FEAR I am a bit overwhelmed.

I will be at the 4S (social science of science) Conference in Tokyo in August. I will be speaking at the Nano-dialogue meeting at the Free University of Amsterdam in September and have two papers for a NCA ARST (rhetoric of science and tech) meeting in San Francisco in November and a SRA(risk) meeting in Salt Lake in December. In addition, I am teaching a CRD 893 class in Social Media in the fall and CRD 790 Issues in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media and COM 562 Communication and Social Change in the spring. Pending grant may affect some of this.

We did manage a hire to work with PCOST (Public Communication of Science and Technology). Dr. Andrew Binder from U Wisconsin will join us as an assistant professor in communication and will be associate director of PCOST. I expect a small team of doctoral and masters students to work with me as well.

So.... we will take a few months off and re-examine the state of this blog. I would like to broaden the subject field. Let me know what you think.