communication
jstemwedel | November 8, 2006The 110th Congress has been elected. Whether it's the crowd you voted for or not, there's quite a lot of talk now about a new direction, a new civility, possibly even a new pony (but I might not have heard that last part right).
So, given that the Congresspersons will be looking for our votes again in another two years (along with a third of the Senators), this seems like a good time for the people (i.e., you all) to put together an agenda for these elected representatives of ours. To streamline things a bit, and in keeping with the overarching themes of this weblog, let's restrict the wish…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2006Chad Orzel has an excellent post up about good ways to use PowerPoint for a presentation. In a similar vein, I'd like to offer some reasons for academics in disciplines (like philosophy) in which it is the convention to read papers to each other at professional meetings to consider breaking with tradition and not just reading the papers they are presenting.
First, for those of you in science-y fields puzzling over that last sentence: Yes, a great many philosophers really do go places and read their papers to other philosophers. Yes, when I saw it the first time, coming to philosophy via…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2006There is a bunch of interesting stuff to read on the subject of teaching, learning, and being part of an academic department right now. Here are a few links I think deserve your attention:
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study (PDF) whose results suggest that married grad students may do better than single grad students at completing their Ph.D.s, publishing while in school, and landing tenure-track jobs. Interestingly, the advantage is greater for married male graduate students than for married female graduate students, and domestic partnership seem to confer less advantage here than…
jstemwedel | October 20, 2006It's the time of year when the mailbox starts filling up with catalogues. At the Free-Ride house, many of these are catalogues featuring "educational" toys and games. Now, some of these toys and games are actually pretty cool. Others, to my mind, are worse than mere wastes of money.
For your consideration, three "science" kits targeted at girls:
Archimedes got scientific insight from a bathtub, but he wasn't required to wear eye-makeup to do it.
Spa Science
The kit offers itself as a way "to cultivate a girl's interest in science" through the making of "beauty products like an oatmeal…
jstemwedel | October 9, 2006I'm blaming the folks at Three Bulls! for the post that incited this one. Indeed, I started my descent into what is clearly a delusional plan in a comment there.
The short version: Pinko Punko was disturbed at how very little actual communication of content was involved in a presumably science-centered media frenzy. The "journalists" in question neither sought actual informative content from scientists (let alone striving to understand that content), nor passed on anything like it to their viewers. To those of us who expect journalism to communicate actual content (or at least try to),…
jstemwedel | October 9, 2006In a post months and months ago, I wrote the following*:
I've heard vague claims that there are some cultures in which "plagiarism" as defined by U.S. standards is not viewed as an ethical breach at all, and that this may explain some instances of plagiarism among scientists and science students working in the U.S. after receiving their foundational educational experiences in such cultures. To my readers oversees: Is there any truth to these claims? (I'm suspicious, at least in part because of an incident I know of at my school where a student from country X, caught plagiarising, asserted, "…
jstemwedel | September 27, 2006I can't remember a time I have had a more severe jones for a spinach salad than the last few days. The perfect balance of crisp and earthy and creamy, whose eating would be not merely a mechanical refueling of my body, but a transcendant experience -- is that too much to ask?
Well, during a spinach-borne outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 it is. But, while I dream of spinach (and grade papers), I'm thinking of how information (or lack of information) about our foods plays a role in our ability to make choices about what to eat.
I was already hungry for spinach when I caught an update on the…
jstemwedel | August 16, 2006David at The World's Fair has posed another, "Ask a ScienceBlogger, Sort Of" question:
Essentially, as scientific types who tend to analyse, over-analyse, supra-analyse things, and who like to categorize and follow empirical trends, I'm interesting in hearing what you think it is that sparks these viral outbursts of information outreach? This question (and apologies for its convolution) also relates directly to your role as a blogger, where the assumption is that you revel in increased traffic, and are kind of looking for these tricks anyway. I guess, I'm just interested in hearing a…
jstemwedel | August 3, 2006At the request of femalechemist, I'm going to revisit the Sames/Sezen controversy. You'll recall that Dalibor Sames, a professor at Columbia University, retracted seven papers on which he was senior author. Bengu Sezen, also an author on each of the retracted papers and a graduate of the Sames lab, performed the experiments in question.
Sames says he retracted the papers because the current members of his lab could not reproduce the original findings. Sezen says that the experiments reported worked for her and for other experimenters in the Sames lab. Moreover, she says that Sames did not…
jstemwedel | August 1, 2006It was another full day at the BCCE, starting with an excellent plenary address by Peter Atkins (who wrote my p-chem text, plus dozens of other books) and David Harpp (of the Office of Science and Society). Each of them spoke about the best ways to talk about science with people who are not scientists, science teachers, or science students. Some highlights after the jump.
Atkins, it turns out, is not just a scientist and author, but also an accomplished artist. So, it's probably not surprising that he sees the most promising route for spreading chemical understanding as a visual route. A…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2006This morning, I finished making the slides for a talk I'm giving at the BCCE at Purdue next week. (Any of you chemists or chemical educators in the audience planning on being there?) I feel very proud of myself for having the slides written and ready to use days before I even board the plane. I'm even sufficiently enthusiastic that I may just start writing a paper-version of the content I'll be giving in my talk.
That brings me to my question for academics and others who work in the media of "paper" and "presentation":
Which do you typically write first?
Do you write a paper first and…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2006One of the things that happens when I lay out a problem (say, the difficulties for scientists in communicating with non-scientists about scientific matters) is that my excellent commenters remind me not to stop there. They press me for a solution.
I started, in my earlier post, to gesture toward an answer to the question of how to improve communication between scientists and non-scientists:
... because non-scientists count on scientists as a source of reliable knowledge on a whole range of issues, non-scientists have a stake in improving communication with scientists. This means part of the…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2006Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon put up a post about gender essentialism that starts by citing this post at Mixing Memory on how people's representations of homosexuality affect their attitudes toward homosexuality. Because Chris's post cited my two posts (initially sparked by Jessica's post at Feministing), I came in for some criticism from Greensmile in this comment at Pandagon. As I believed these criticisms to be based on a misunderstanding of my position, I responded. Greensmile then was kind enough to read my posts and to respond that we seem to be having "the most violent agreement",…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2006While I hope this hurricane season is a lot less eventful than the last one, it's always good to be ready. To that end, I'm brushing off (and bringing together here) two "classic" posts from the 2005 hurricane season.
As we look to the scientists to tell us what nature may have in store for us, we need to remember how scientists think about uncertainties -- and especially, how important it is to a scientist to avoid going with predictions that have a decent chance of being false. Being wrong may seem almost as bad to the scientist as being under 10 feet of water.
Meanwhile, the scientists…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2006The other day I was chatting with one of my contacts within the world of journalism, who told me about attending a conference aimed at getting reporters more access to scientists. The conference actually collected a good number of working scientists who came to speak with the reporters (not just to present them information, but to answer questions at length). And, the reporters got the opportunity to see research as it was being conducted (e.g., to be in the field with scientists to watch their data collection, rather than just to hear the conclusions drawn at the end of the process). It…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2006I just got back from a 75 minute ethics seminar for summer researchers (mostly undergraduates) at a large local center of scientific research. While it was pretty hard to distill the important points on ethical research to just over an hour, I can't tell you how happy I am that they're even including ethics training in this program.
Anyway, one of the students asked a really good question, which I thought I'd share:
Let's say you discover that a published result is irreproducible. Who do you tell?
My answer after the jump.
First, of course you want to make sure you've done all the things…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2006Following up from yesterday's post about how knowledge about the biological basis for X doesn't tell us whether X is to be valued or pathologized, I need to put a few more points (including some questions) on the table.
First, in the comments thread to the Feministing post that prompted my post, a common (and frustrating) misunderstanding of claims from evolutionary biology has reared its head:
I wouldn't put the clitoris in the same catagory as the male nipple by any means. The clitoris is not a by-product, and by the way neither is sex. And "liking sex that does not result in reproduction…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2006I was thinking some more about the Paul Root Wolpe commentary on how scientists avoid thinking about ethics, partly because Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair wonders why ethics makes scientists more protective of their individuality than, say, the peer-review system or other bits of institutional scientific furniture do.
My sense is that at least part of what's going on here is that scientists feel like ethics are being imposed on them from without. Worse, the people exhorting scientists to take ethics seriously often seem to take a finger-wagging approach. And this, I suspect, makes it…
jstemwedel | June 23, 2006It's no surprise that the scientific and medical research in which the public tends to show the most interest is the research that is somehow connected to practical issues, like living longer and healthier lives. Scientists who depend on public monies to support their investigations have gotten pretty good at painting the "so what" for their findings.
The problem, of course, is that the "so what" painted for a non-scientific audience is frequently oversimplified, glossing over a lot of the complexities that the scientists deal with daily. It's hard to cram complexities into a sound bite.…
jstemwedel | June 8, 2006This week, the National Review Online's media blogger revealed the secret identity of dKos blogger Armando, who says that this unwanted decloaking probably means he will no longer blog.
While I'm not heavy into the political end of the blogosphere (until someone can provide me with more than 24 hours per day), Armando's story resonates with me because one of my favorite science bloggers, BotanicalGirl, had to stop blogging when members of her department became aware of her blog. So I've been thinking a lot about blogging anonymously versus blogging under one's own name, not just in terms of…