communication
jstemwedel | December 7, 2007Signs are not the boss of me (or of you), but they often convey useful information. For example, this sign reminds of us of responsibilities that come with being a dog owner (or dog guardian, depending on your jurisdiction):
You'll notice that the sign advising you to clean up after your pet actually dispenses biodegradable gloves with which you can scoop the poop. This is a sign doing everything it can to help you follow its directions.
Other signs are more focused on our safety than on getting us to behave responsibly towards others in our shared public spaces. For instance, this sign…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2007A comment on ScienceWoman's post (concerning, among other things, how her students tend to call her Mrs. ScienceWoman and her male colleagues Dr. MaleColleague), got me thinking about the norms around addressing faculty that prevailed at my undergraduate institution and whether, if they still prevail, they're worth abolishing.
The commenter wrote:
No one I know (just graduated college) would ever dare address a professor by Mr. or Mrs.... As far as I'm concerned, those titles are related to marital status--which has nothing to do with education or as a sign of respect... Addressing a female…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2007Likely, the throbbing mass of humanity at my university knows at least a little more than it did before last week, owing to an article in the student newspaper about the institutional animal care and use committee. (It was a front-page article, so the chances that it attracted eyeballs was reasonably good.)
A few things that jumped out at me:
The very existence of an IACUC is treated as news.
It seems to be a big surprise that university researchers (and physiology professors) don't just order mice like they do whiteboard markers -- maybe because most of the students (and, perhaps, a…
jstemwedel | November 15, 2007The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the "Google model" for disseminating information.
Baum writes:
I did a Yahoo search on "information wants to be free." The first hit returned was for Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia; according to it, the phrase was first pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand was quoted as saying: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because…
laelaps | November 1, 2007A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending one of the Science Communication Consortium's (SCC) panel discussions on communicating science (moderated by blogger Kate of The Anterior Commissure), and for those who missed the last one another discussion is fast approaching. On November 15th the SCC will host Dr. Lee Silver (Princeton - Molecular Biology), Dr. Gavin Schmidt (Goddard Institute for Space Studies - Climatology), and Dr. Wendy Chung (Columbia - Clinical and Molecular Genetics) at Rockefellar University in NYC to present their ideas on effectively communicating controversial…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2007At the upcoming North Carolina Science Blogging Conference on January 19, 2008, I'll be leading a discussion on the ethics of science blogging (not about blogging about ethics in science). If you attend the conference (and if you're not sucked in by one of the other attractive discussions scheduled for the same time-slot), you'll be able to take part in the conversation in real time.
But even if you won't be able to come to North Carolina for the conference, you can help set the agenda for our discussion by editing the wiki page for the session.
Here's what I've posted to get things going:…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2007
It has seemed to me for some time now that the landscape of news and information sources has changed since the end of the last century. Anecdotally, I seem to know an awful lot of people who rely primarily on online sources (both online versions of traditional newspapers and magazines and blogs with journalistic leanings that provide solidly researched articles and deep analysis) for their news. But I also seem to know some people who automatically equate information on the internet with the nutty website of a paranoid guy in the cellar.
And it's really hard to assume that the people I…
jstemwedel | September 4, 2007Since scientist-on-scientist communication is a longstanding topic of interest in these parts, I wanted to point out a recent (August 13, 2007) article in Chemical & Engineering News (behind a paywall, but definitely worth locating a library with a subscription) that offers tips for writing journal articles. It's quite a substantial article, drawing on advice from "dozens of scientists and engineers around the world in academia, industry, and government" -- which is to say, the people who read and write journal articles as part of their jobs.
It goes without saying that this crowd has…
jstemwedel | August 31, 2007On Stranger Fruit, there's a response by historian of science Naomi Oreskes to recent criticisms of her 2004 paper in Science discussing the consensus position regarding anthropogenic climate change. While the whole trajectory of these sorts of "engagements" is interesting in its way -- attacks on claims that weren't made, critiques of methodologies that weren't used, and so forth -- the part of Oreskes' response that jumped out at me had to do with the kinds of issues on which scientists focus when they're talking to each other in the peer-reviewed literature:
In the original AAAS talk on…
jstemwedel | August 29, 2007Even though I've been frightfully busy this week, I've been following the news about the launch of PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). I first saw it discussed in this post by Peter Suber, after which numerous ScienceBloggers piled on. If you have some time (and a cup of coffee), read Bora's comprehensive run-down of the blogosphere's reaction.
If you're in a hurry, here are three reasons I think PRISM's plans to "save" scientists and the public from Open Access are a bad idea.
While the PRISM website claims that a consequence of more Open Access…
jstemwedel | August 28, 2007This is a follow-up, of a sort, to the previous post on why serious discussions (as opposed to shouting matches or PR campaigns) about the use of animals in research seem to be so difficult to have. One of the contentious issues that keeps coming up in the comments is how (if at all) such discussions ought to deal with prior bad acts that may not be representative of what's happened since, or even of the actions of most of the scientific community at the time of those prior bad acts.
My sense, however, is that the real issue is who we think we can engage in a serious reasoned dialogue with…
jstemwedel | August 24, 2007 The other day I received a DVD made by Americans for Medical Progress called Physicians - Speaking for Research. (They indicate on their site that the DVDs are free for the asking.)
This is a DVD aimed at physicians, rather than at research scientists or the general public. However, the aim of the DVD is to help physicians to be better at communicating with the general public (primarily their patients, but also their family members and neighbors) about the role animal research has played in medical advances upon which we depend today, and the continued importance animal research will…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2007In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers' assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers' real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae.
Maybe philosophy's to blame, but I think there's a deep and interesting question here.
Mark writes:
It's quite an odd experience in its way; between our blogs, and our back-channel forums, we've become a tight-knit community, and the people there were my friends, even though I'd never seen them before.
And yet, as is clear from Mark's blogger-specific observations, there are ways in which a…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2007As I mentioned in my last post, I was sucked out of the blogosphere for much of last week by the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) 2007 Summer Symposium .
I did not live-blog the conference. I did use overheads. Why, other than being a tremendous Luddite, would I use overheads?
One big issue that has me using overheads rather than PowerPoint presentations is time. As many conferences are, this one was scheduled within an inch of its life. Each speaker had 20 minutes to talk and 5 minutes at the end for questions and answers. Indeed, if the previous speaker…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2007Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about the recent decline of peer reviewed papers authored by professors in top five economics departments in high profile economics journals. A paper by MIT economics professor Glenn Ellison, "Is Peer Review in Decline?," considers possible explanations for this decline, and the Inside Higher ed article looks at the possible impacts of this shift.
The alternative threatening the peer reviewed journals here is the web, since scholars can post their papers directly to their websites (or blogs) rather than letting them languish with pokey referees. But I…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2007
The average American's lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it's socially acceptable to plead ignorance. Adults leave the house without even a cocktail-party grasp of the basics they presumably learned in middle school and high school science classes, and the prospects of herding them back into a science classroom to give it another go seem pretty remote.
Natalie Angier's new…
jstemwedel | July 12, 2007Following up on the earlier discussions of intentional unclarity and bad writing in scientific papers, I thought this might be a good opportunity to consider an oft-cited article on scientific papers, P.B. Medawar's "Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?" [1] He answers that question in the affirmative only three paragraphs in:
The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.
Medawar's major complaint has to do with the "orthodox form" and the story it tells about how scientific knowledge is produced.…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2007In his book A Short Guide to Writing About Science [1], David Porush suggests that the mindset useful for doing science isn't always the best mindset for communicating science. (It's more than a suggestion, actually -- the second chapter of the book is titled "Why Good Scientific Thinking Can Lead to Bad Science Writing.") Since it's connected to our prior discussion of ambiguous scientific writing, let's have a look at Porush's diagnosis of bad science writing and the ways he thinks it could be better.
Porush notes that most people learn to write scientific papers by reading a whole mess of…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2007Regular readers know I frequently suggest the community of science would be better off if its institutional contexts favored more collaboration and less competition. (I'm not the only one.) So I wanted to mention a project, OpenWetWare that's trying to move biology in that direction.
The project "is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering." Its website is a wiki where members can contribute information about crucial experimental materials (and how to make them), experimental…
jstemwedel | July 10, 2007Those of you who have ever brought a piece of scientific research to completion -- a process which almost always includes publishing your results -- have probably run into lists like this one that spell out the meanings of phrases commonly used in scientific papers. Included are such classics as:
"It has long been known"
I don't know the original reference.
and
"Typical results are shown"
Either means the only results are shown or the best results are shown.
and
"A trend is evident"
Okay, a trend does seem apparent to me, but no statistical analysis in the world will support it.
I'm…