Outreach
drorzel | April 18, 2013A couple of days ago, Alom Shaha posted on the new Physics Focus blog (by the way, there's a new Physics Focus blog...) about his dissatisfaction with some popular books:
I recently read a popular science book on a topic that I felt I needed to learn more about. The book was well written, ideas were clearly explained, and I finished the book knowing a lot more about the history of the subject than beforehand. However, I don’t feel I understand the key ideas in the book any better. I won’t mention the name of the book or the author because this post isn’t really about that specific book. It’s…
drorzel | April 4, 2013Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It's basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, with a few updates to the slides that don't require a new upload to SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel
The pitch that I make, if you don't want to flip through the slides, is that communicating to a…
drorzel | March 25, 2013Kind of short notice, but if you're in the appropriate bits of Ohio, you might be interested to know that I'm giving two talks at Wright State this Thursday. At 11am, I'm doing the Physics Department Colloquium in 202 Oelman Hall, "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Social Media Can Help":
Budget cuts and funding instability are a constant source of anxiety for professional scientists, and public uncertainty about science threatens to derail critical policy actions in areas like climate change and public health. I will argue that these…
drorzel | March 21, 2013Yesterday's big post on why I think people should embrace scientific thinking in a more conscious way than they do already (because my claim is that most people already use scientific thinking, they're just not aware that they're doing it) is clearly a kind of explanation of the reason behind my next book, but what about the previous two? How does teaching people about modern physics through imaginary conversations with my dog serve the general goal of getting people to think more scientifically?
The following is a bit of a retcon-- after all, the proximate cause of my writing those books was…
drorzel | February 26, 2013Over in Twitter-land, Ben Lillie of the Story Collider asked an interesting question, which sparked some discussion that he's Storified on a Tumblr blog (just in case the date stamp wasn't enough to mark this as 2013...). The original question was:
Partly I’m wondering if there is a reason to have an event series for “other scientists,” but also wondering about the bigger question: is there something about being a scientist that makes it easier to understand other bits of science? I suspect the answer is “a bit,” but really want to know specifically what one could say to scientists they…
drorzel | May 29, 2012In which I talk about why it is that particle physics and cosmology are so over-represented in popular physics, and why my own books contribute to that.
[The too-short excerpts on the new front page are beyond my ability to change, so I'll be doing Victorian-style "In which..." summaries at the start of posts as a work-around, so a casual visitor has some idea what a psot is about before clicking through.]
One of the maddening things about the recent upgrade of the ScienceBlogs back end has been that a lot of things have been posted during that time that I wanted to respond to. Near the top…
drorzel | April 12, 2012I'm re-instituting the quota system for the moment-- no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress-- but I'll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today:
Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this…
drorzel | August 30, 2011I get a lot of publicist-generated email these days, asking me to promote something or another on the blog. Most of these I ignore-- far too many of them are for right-wing political candidates-- but I got one a little while back promoting a program airing tonight, called Project Shiphunt, which included a link to watch a preview of the show. And since I needed stuff to watch on my laptop while SteelyKid falls asleep, I checked it out, and it's pretty good.
As the title suggests, it's a show about finding a sunken ship. Specifically, finding a sunken ship in Lake Huron, that went down a…
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC:
It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society.
It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…
drorzel | August 9, 2011An angle I had hoped to get to in last week's broader impacts post, but didn't have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0:
Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists into schools and hopefully inspire students with what they do. The goal, of course, is to get kids interested in pursuing careers in scientific fields, by showing them just how cool science is.
But I wonder - no matter how well meaning, how much do these…
drorzel | August 4, 2011I didn't pay that much attention to the mini-controversy over the NSF's proposed revision of its grant evaluation criteria when they were first released, because I was working on the book. I was asked to say something about it yesterday, though, and having gone to the trouble, I might as well say something on the blog, too.
The main source of complaint is the "Broader Impacts" section of the grant, a category that has always been sort of nebulous, but which the new standards attempt to clarify:
Collectively, NSF projects should help to advance a broad set of important national goals,…
drorzel | August 2, 2011Over Twitter, somebody pointed to this article on astronomy outreach (free PDF from that link), which argues that everybody else should stop trying to be Brian Cox:
I've known Brian for years and worked with him before his celebrity status went supernova. I would love to say "I told you so" to all the TV commissioning editors who rejected my suggestions to use him as a presenter. I suspect Brian fnds it as ironic as I do that TV companies now regularly put out adverts looking for "the next Brian Cox".
As much as I love Brian's work, I don't think we need any more like him at the moment.…
drorzel | July 27, 2011For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he's on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful things going on in astronomy these days, so they can write better stories about astronomical objects and ideas, and reach a wider audience through fiction. This year's workshop just ended, and Brotherton has links to some of the presentations, and blogs about it from the attendees.
I really like this…
drorzel | July 6, 2011Today's Links Dump came late because I was at the meeting of the APS's Committee on Informing the Public. We apologize for the inconvenience, but I was too busy acquiring this critically important scientific data:
What is that, you ask? It's this:
That's the Superman roller coaster at the Six Flags America park outside of DC, which is where we're meeting this time. Lots of amusement parks do Physics Days as outreach programs, so we did the Physics Day thing ourselves, wearing ugly blue vests holding accelerometers on the major rides. Of course, the vest-mounted accelerometer I was wearing…
drorzel | May 25, 2011I learned today that the National Georgraphic Channel video I mentioned last week has actually already aired on the network. It was last week's episode of the series "Naked Science," titled Living in a Parallel Universe.
I haven't seen it, obviously, but it's running again, tomorrow (the 26th), at 4pm (Eastern (US) time). Set your DVR accordingly.
(I'm also very pleased to have learned of the air date via email from Alan Guth...)
drorzel | April 12, 2011I'm in last-minute-revision mode here, made mroe frantic by the fact that SteelyKid developed a fever yesterday, and had to be kept home from day care. I did want to pop in to note that I will be giving the Natural Science and Mathematics Colloquium at St. Mary's College in Maryland tomorrow, Wednesday the 13th. This will be the "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, described for the colloquium announcement as:
Quantum physics, the science of extremely small things like atoms and subatomic particles, is one of the best tested theories in the history of science, and also one…
drorzel | April 7, 2011A few weeks ago, I gave a talk based on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the University of Toledo's Saturday Morning Science program. At that time, their local PBS affiliate recorded the talk, for use on their very nice streaming video site, Knowledgestream.org. My talk is now up, and the video is hopefully embedded below:
I haven't listened to the entire thing, but I watched the first 10-15 minutes, and it's pretty good. the sound is coming from a microphone on my shirt, so you can't really hear any of the audience reaction (I got some good laughs in appropriate places), and in places…
drorzel | March 18, 2011Just a quick reminder that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk (same basic one from Tuesday night) as part of the Saturday Morning Science program (pdf) at the University of Toledo tomorrow, Saturday the 19th. The talk will be at 9:30, with breakfast beforehand. If you're in the vicinity, stop by and hear about some cool physics. My cold is starting to improve slightly, so I should be audible, and I've added at least one Ohio-related joke to the talk, so you don't want to miss that.
In only vaguely related news-- indeed, it's probably only of active…
drorzel | March 10, 2011A few more comments on the scientific thinking thing, because it's generated a bunch of comments. As usual, some of them are good points, and some of them have completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. so let's take another crack at it.
While the post was worded somewhat strongly, I'm not really trying to stake out a position diametrically opposed to what Neil DeGrasse Tyson said. In fact, I suspect we agree more than we disagee. We certainly share the same broad goal, namely to see more people thinking more scientifically more often. The difference is really a question of emphasis.…
drorzel | January 17, 2011Part of this past weekend's meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for "mini-grants" of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn't be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI's of the proposals we decided to fund will be notified soon), but there was one issue that came up again and again that I think is appropriate for the blog, which is what should be considered as a successful effort, particularly in the online world.
A large number of the proposals we were considering had "new media" components…