Scientist/layperson relations
jstemwedel | October 6, 2008The past couple years in California have been scary ones for academic researchers who conduct research with animals (as well as for their neighbors), what with firebombs, home invasions, significant intentional damage to their properties and threats to their safety.
In response to a ratcheting up of attacks from animals rights groups, universities have lobbied for the Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28.
As described in Inside Higher Ed:
The law is part of a campaign, including litigation against animal liberation groups…
jstemwedel | October 3, 2008
Americans for Medical Progress has produced a new DVD titled Veterinarians - Speaking for Research. (You can get your own free copy at the Americans for Medical Progress website.)
You might consider this DVD a follow-up of their previous DVD, Physicians - Speaking for Research (reviewed here). However, the two are pretty different, perhaps suggesting some differences not only in the intended audiences for the DVDs (veterinarians vs. physicians) but also in the concerns of the segments of the public each set of professionals is likely to encounter.
In this post, I'll first discuss…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2008One of the reasons non-scientists see science as at all valuable is that scientific research may result in useful medical treatments. And one of the aspects of science that seems elusive to non-scientists is just how long it can take scientific research to bring those useful medical treatments about.
In the 5 September 2008 issue of Science, Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, George A. Alexiou, Theodore C. Gouvias, and John P. A. Ioannidis [1] present research that examines just how long it has taken to get from initial discoveries to medical interventions.
Contopoulos-Ioannidis et al.…
jstemwedel | October 1, 2008Paul A. Offit, M.D., Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. Columbia University Press, 2008.
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure examines the ways that uncertainties about autism's causes have played out in the spheres of medical treatment, liability lawsuits, political hearings, and media coverage. Offit's introduction describes the lay of the land in 1916, as polio epidemics raged. That lay of the land, with public fear and willingness to pursue strange, expensive, and dangerous treatments, evokes a…
jstemwedel | September 29, 2008In the 12 September, 2008 issue of Science, there is a brief article titled "Do We Need 'Synthetic Bioethics'?" [1]. The authors, Hastings Center ethicists Erik Parens, Josephine Johnston, and Jacob Moses, answer: no.
Parens et al. note the proliferation of subdisciplines of bioethics: gen-ethics (focused on ethical issues around the Human Genome Project), neuro-ethics, nano-ethics, and soon, potentially, synthetic bioethics (to grapple with ethical issues raised by synthetic biology).
Emerging areas of scientific research raise new technical and theoretical questions. To the extent that…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2008Stories about the honeybee crisis and colony collapse disorder (CCD) keep turning up in the news (at least here in California, where we grow so many big cash crops like almonds that rely on honeybees to pollinate them). But it turns out that getting to the bottom of CCD is made more difficult by the the gaps in biologists' knowledge about the wild bee populations. (A lot of the bees pollinating food crops are commercially kept rather than wild.)
But, as reported in an article in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist [1], the Great Sunflower Project is enlisting the efforts…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2008The congresscritter in question being Sherwood Boehlert, who represented New York's 24th Congressional district (1983-2007), and chaired the House Science Committee (2001-2007). Boehlert offers this advice in a video called "Speaking for Science: Bringing Your Message to Policymakers," available for download from the American Chemical Society website.*
The video presents two scenarios in which a group of scientists meets with their Congressional representative (who happens to be a member of the House Science Committee, played by Boehlert). As you might guess, the idea is to contrast the…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2008There's a neat article [1] in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist (although sadly, this particular article seems not to be online) in which Brian Hayes discusses the Monty Hall problem and people's strong resistance to the official solution to it.
Now, folks like Jason have discussed the actual puzzle about probabilities in great detail (on numerous occasions). It's a cool problem, I believe the official solution, and I'm not personally inclined to raise skeptical doubts about it. What I really like about Hayes's article is how he connects it to the larger ongoing…
jstemwedel | September 16, 2008In a post last week, I mentioned a set of standards put forward by Carol Henry (a consultant and former vice president for industry performance programs at the American Chemistry Council), who says they would improve the credibility of industry-funded research.
But why does industry-funded research have a credibility problem in the first place? Aren't industry scientists (or academic scientists whose research is supported by money from industry) first and foremost scientists, committed to the project of building accurate and reliable knowledge about the world? As scientists, aren't they…
jstemwedel | September 16, 2008... but the questions that they were answering!
Regular readers will know (from these posts, among others) that I think the extent to which presidential candidates have gotten right with science (or with reliable advisers on same) is important information for voters to have.
Indeed, I was hoping to get some nourishing information (building an informed electorate and healthy democracy with 12 vitamins and minerals!) when I checked out Obama's and McCain's answers to the Science Debate 2008 questions. And, while it is possible to glean information about McCain's and Obama's attitudes toward…
jstemwedel | September 8, 2008Back in July, Science ran an interesting news article about an on again, off again clinical trial of chelation therapy in the treatment of autistic children. I found the story fascinating because it highlights some of the challenges in setting up ethical research with human subjects -- not to mention some of the challenges inherent in trying to help humans to make good decisions grounded in the best available scientific knowledge.
From the Science article:
Believing that mercury in vaccines triggers autism, thousands of parents, often at the advice of their physicians, have given their…
jstemwedel | July 27, 2008Reading the comments on my post and Chad's post about the different societal attitudes towards humanities and arts and math and science (especially in terms of what "basic" knowledge a well-educated person ought to have), I get the feeling that some interesting assumptions are at play. Since I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, I'm just going to lay out some of the hypotheses that have occurred to me as I've read through these discussions:
Math and science are objectively harder (and/or require greater intelligence to learn) than humanities and arts.
While math and science do not…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2008Today Chad has an interesting post about attitudes among academics toward math and science versus the humanities and arts. The general attitude Chad sees on display in his academic milieu is that a gappy knowledge of art history or music or literature is something to be embarrassed about, but when it comes to innumeracy or scientific ignorance, intellectuals have no shame.
Chad writes:
Intellectuals and academics are just assumed to have some background knowledge of the arts, and not knowing those things can count against you. Ignorance of math and science is no obstacle, though. I have…
jstemwedel | July 18, 2008In the aftermath of Sizzle Tuesday, Orac wrote a post posing a challenge to the science communicators:
How would you deal with antivaccinationism? What "frames" would you use to combat the likes of Jenny McCarthy?
In the comments on Orac's post, Matthew C. Nisbet turned up:
The anti-vaccine movement is a perfect issue to examine how framing has shaped communication dynamics and public opinion; and how various groups have brought framing strategies to bear in the policy debate.
I personally haven't had time to do research on the topic. ...
To understand and to make recommendations about…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2008I have misgivings about wading into Crackergate -- indeed, even about dipping my toe into the edge of the pool (which is all I'm promising here) -- but here goes.
First, let me commend the thoughtful posts by Mark Chu-Carroll and John Wilkins on the issue. If you haven't read them yet, read them now. (If you've already read them, read them again.)
Next, let me set forth the disclaimers that I'd hope would be obvious:
Issuing death threats (or threats to do bodily harm to a person, or to his family) is wrong. It's inexcusable (and I suspect in many jurisdictions it's also illegal).…
jstemwedel | July 14, 2008Randy Olson's newest film, Sizzle, bears the subtitle, "a global warming comedy". To my mind, it delivered neither the laughs nor the engagement with the issue of global warming that it promised. Maybe this is just a sign that I fall outside the bounds of Olson's intended audience, but perhaps the biggest question this movie left me with was who precisely Olson is trying to reach with Sizzle.
The film starts out presenting itself almost as Olson's own follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth; Olson notes that he liked Al Gore's movie a lot but wondered where all the scientists were. He…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2008Via Crooked Timber, I see that philosopher Simon Blackburn would like to dispel some myths. (He does this in the inaugural article of a Times Higher Education series "in which academics range beyond their area of expertise".) Of the ten myths Blackburn identifies for busting, the one that caught my attention was "the myth of the scientist":
This claims that there is an expertise, science, and that people who are good at it deserve a lot of attention. This is almost wholly false. There is no such thing as a scientist, and it is a shame that William Whewell, a rather patchy philosopher (…
jstemwedel | April 21, 2008In the aftermath of a pretty enthusiastic pile-on to a claim that Expelled! had a successful first week of release, Chris Mooney calls for "serious introspection about the massive communication crisis we're facing in the science world".
You know I'm always up for introspection.
Indeed, regular readers have been very patient with my labored attempts to get clear on the whole "framing" thing. While I'm not prepared to advertise myself as any kind of expert on framing, I finally think I know what questions I'd like to ask of the people with framing expertise to try to sort out the ongoing slug-…
jstemwedel | April 15, 2008I heard a piece by David Kestenbaum on NPR's "Morning Edition" that hasn't been sitting right with me. You, dear readers, get to help me figure out what's bugging me about the story, a profile of 16-year-old climate skeptic Kristen Byrnes.
Here are some details about Kristen Byrnes from the story:
"I don't remember how old I was when I started getting into global warming," Kristen says. "In middle school I remember everyone was like: 'Global warming! The world is going to end!' Stuff like that ... so I never really believed in it." ...
[S]he has a quality scientists try to cultivate: she is…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2008I haven't given up yet. You know I'm still looking for more clarity on the basic premises of framing. I tried to work out what does and does not fall within the framing strategy in a flowcharted example and (again) came away with a bunch of unanswered questions.
This round, I'm going to look at an example from the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (a link to the PDF given here. I'll confess that I'm still confused, but I think I'm getting closer to identifying precisely what I'm confused about.
Here's what Nisbet and Scheufele say in The Scientist article about communication…