Communicating science to the public

Some people would say this is great, wonderful communication of science. Others would say it's... something else. I think that, at least, the report speaks for itself.

Sex talk wins 'science idol' competition

A Serbian molecular biologist has beaten off competition from around the world to win International FameLab, a kind of Pop Idol of science.

Mirko Djordjevic, final year student in molecular-biology in the Department for Applied Genetics and Evolution at the University of Belgrade did the most with his three-minute spot to wow the judges at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival on Saturday night.

Mirko's talk on the ins and outs of sexual selection made a fun comparison of the mating habits of humans and dogs, and saw him belt out an excerpt of the Bloodhound Gang song: "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals. So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."

Prof Kathy Sykes, one of the judges, said: "Mirko really stood out, as he gave a stunning presentation and was able to communicate a complex concept to the general public with ease."

I thought it would be kind of interesting to actually see and hear the winning performance, as well as others. So I went looking for something on YouTube. The good news is I found it! The less good news is that it's (apparently) in Serbian. Oh well, you can still almost figure out some of what they're saying:



People who don't like science, and who don't know Serbian, may claim this isn't less clear than other talks on science they've heard.

Perhaps in a few days some of this will be available in English. If anyone finds it, please leave a note in the comments.

Science-less in Seattle

Here's another sad tale about the decline of science journalism, along with the rest of investigative journalism in general. This one's from Chris Mooney, about fellow science journalist Tom Paulson:

Science-less in Seattle

Over time, however, Paulson noticed a change at the Post Intelligencer. His editors, he says, grew less interested in stories that were “too complicated or in depth.” Paulson wanted to really dig into covering the Seattle-based Gates Foundation and its work on global health, but he was instead pushed into writing what he labels “entertainment science” stories. The science of chocolate. Back-in-time research. That kind of thing.

And here's the punchline, at the end of the article:

In a science-centered age, we’re becoming a society that lacks a professional and impartial means of informing its citizenry about science—and it’s happening one journalist at a time.

Read some of the comments to the article also, such as:

So, the disenfranchisement of science is news to Center for American Progress? Certainly it isn’t to ex-science writers and editors, myself included. As a culture, we’ve gone back centuries already, with astrology columns a factor in newspaper sales and breathless, one-paragraph sound bites illustrated with file footage substituting for real journalism in broadcast news.

As I have hinted before, and I'll surely amplify as time goes on, I see the possibility of new channels for communicating about science to the public. That's part of what the Science and Reason Network is about. If this topic interests you (and why would you be reading this post if not?), please look into the network.

Science journalism and the public understanding of science

I didn't have much to say about the results of last year's U. S. elections, except for this. After all, this is mainly a blog about science rather than politics.

However, politics is never that far off stage. There has been abundant evidence since the elections that, politically speaking, things are definitely looking up for science in the U. S. I don't think I need to take time now to enumerate the details.

Nevertheless, while science is in a much better place politically now, it is still in a very awkward place socially, as I went into somewhat here.

As further illustration of the theme of the social and economic problems that science is now faced with, let me offer just a few references, with special emphasis on problems besetting science journalism and the conflicts between bloggers and "real" science journalists:

Scientists & Science Journalism in the age of Blogging

A science blogger makes some observations, and provides an abundance of links, on the controversy that erupted last December on the news that CNN had axed its entire science team.

Science journalism: Supplanting the old media?

Science journalism is in decline; science blogging is growing fast. But can the one replace the other, asks Geoff Brumfiel.

Review: The Open Laboratory: The best science writing on blogs 2008

A very mainstream media publication, NewScientist, uses the occasion of (what was purported to be) a book review – on a collection of highly rated science blogging – to slam bloggers ("While newspapers may indeed have an abysmal track record when it comes to reporting on science, many blogs out there are far worse.") – rather than to review the book. (Talk about examples of "responsible" and "objective" journalism.)

On science blogging and mainstream science writing...

In response to the previous travesty, a journalist/blogger offers a responsible, even-handed view of science writing in the blogs vs. the mainstream media.

Adumbrating a theme we'll take up later, regarding the death of the newspaper industry, there's this:

A tired "solution" to the newspaper dilemma

Some reasons, but hardly the only ones, why the newspaper industry is failing.

And let's not forget that all this is really about a problem that's larger and more important than the demise of a bad business model or a technologically obsolescent industry:

American Adults Flunk Basic Science

A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test.

There's no time to discuss those items in detail right now. Read them if you want some background. I'll come back to the problems of newspapers and science journalism in general, but first some reflections on the overall importance, which is rather ambiguous, of science in our society. The problem is larger than journalism – it encompasses our educational system too.

On the one hand, many scientific activities are generally well-regarded and well-respected – even admired. That list includes, just to give a few examples, space exploration, the science and technology underlying computers and other electronic technology, and many aspects of scientific medicine.

But on the other hand, there are many problems as well. There are significant amounts of skepticism regarding climate science and the risks of global warming. The science of evolution by natural selection is under constant attack for purely ideological reasons. Many people are distrustful of, or even hostile to, various parts of scientific medicine, and instead place their faith in unproven, or even untested, forms of "alternative" medicine.

In addition, economic problems are hastening the demise of traditional forms of journalism that in the past have provided the public with generally accurate and essential information about scientific matters that affect the public welfare. Science journalism that remains appears, at least to some observers, to be increasingly shallow and superficial.

And if all that weren't enough, there are serious questions about the adequacy of the quantity and quality of instruction in public elementary and secondary schools. Although public school teachers of science and mathematics generally continue to do their best under difficult circumstances, they often face an uphill struggle against cuts to educational budgets, the meddling of ideological interest groups that want to control or limit the teaching of subjects like evolution, and the difficulties of keeping up with the robust growth of scientific knowledge.

All this is occurring at a time when strength in public understanding of science is needed more than ever in order to cope with serious problems such as climate change, new and possible epidemic diseases, depletion of natural resources like water and energy sources in a world of rapid population growth, side-effects of pollution and environmental damage caused by increasing use of technology by this same growing population, the existential threats posed by proliferation of rapidly evolving "weapons of mass destruction", and the emergence of new kinds "weapons" aimed not at people but at global information and financial infrastructure.

There's a lot to be worried about these days. But at the same time, we are still in the early stages of development of new, powerful information and communication technologies – the Internet, wireless communication services, and cheap, portable devices to receive, digest, and store a flood of electronic information "content".

And on top of that, biotechnology may, at long last, be ripening to the point where developments of new ways to protect and enhance health and longevity are close at hand. Among the possibilities are stem cell therapies, new kinds of vaccines and antibiotics, "personalized" medicine, and effective treatments for devastating diseases like cancer, deadly endemic and pandemic infections, heart disease, and diabetes. But there are important public policy issues in this as well – especially how to make it widely available without further inflating the already hefty amount of gross domestic product allocated to health care.

All this is to say that "public understanding of science" is at least as important as ever. Yet two of the main institutions that should be responsible for building and maintaining this understanding are deeply troubled.

I don't have the answers, of course, but now let me return to a narrower issue – the collapse of the newspaper industry – that very well serves as a metaphor for the larger problem

Regarding the fate of newspapers, and probably other forms of communication printed on paper (i. e. journals), consider this essay of Clay Shirky (with thanks to Digby):

[O]rganizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. ...

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Shirky is talking about technologically driven "revolutions" in the ways of society. The change that the distribution of scientific information is undergoing is one of these revolutions. And about revolutions he says:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

There's a lot of debate going on right now – as far as people interested in and involved with science are concerned – over more than just the fate of science journalists who rely on print media for a living. There's debate over exactly how the results of scientific research is recorded and communicated to other scientists, let alone to the general public.

Here's Shirky again, speaking of newspapers but applicable to much else besides:

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. ...

[T]here is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time.

Perhaps, in these revolutionary, transitional times, when old, accustomed ways are breaking down, people who are earnestly concerned about such things as science and "public understanding" of science will have to take matters into their own hands.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Tags: science journalism, science blogging

Scientists and magicians

In the U. S. and many other places around the world, attitudes towards science are decidedly ambiguous.

This shows up in many different ways. During the last election, for example, various issues, about which science has much to say, were matters of contention. Global warming and climate change provide one example. Many issues related to sex and reproductive biology, including sex education and contraception, yield other examples. And of course, tangentially related to those issues was the embryonic stem cells issue. Then there's the matter of the need for protection of biodiversity and endangered species. Finally, opponents of evolution were afraid to make it a serious campaign issue, yet one of the presidential candidates was notably evasive on the question of how evolution should be taught in schools.

To the relief of most people who value science, the election turned out well:

Obama to restore science to its rightful place (1/20/09)

So, the 44th president of the United States has spoken. And what he said will please many supporters of science. Likewise, without explicitly mentioning the environment, president Barack Obama made it clear in his inaugural address today that the US needs to tackle global warming and switch to renewable sources of energy.

The speech will also please internationalists who feel that the US has lost touch with the rest of the world. Significantly for a US president, but less surprising given his African heritage, Obama called on Americans to reach out to and help the world's poorest citizens, clearly referring to the humanitarian and agricultural crises in parts of Africa.

But the nod to open science will be most welcome, given the political and ideological interference of his predecessor, who obstructed stem cell research and only grudgingly accepted that humans are driving climate change.

"We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost," said Obama.

(That, of course, received widespread attention. Other reactions: here, here, here, here.)

There are several factors at work under the covers that help explain the political opposition to relatively straightforward science. Religious factors, obviously, play some part. Also economic factors, especially in cases where scientific considerations (related to the economics of energy production, and various public health issues, related to tobacco usage, for example) are in conflict with powerful economic interests.

So, what do magicians have to do with any of this?

Well, I've been re-reading Shakespeare's The Tempest, because I've also been re-watching Peter Greenaway's film adaptation, Prospero's Books.

Prospero, the protagonist, is the former Duke of Milan, who has been overthrown by his treacherous brother and exiled to a remote island. He's also a powerful magician, whose enrapture with intellectual pursuits rather than statecraft led to his overthrow.

Prospero can also be seen as a scientist of his era. Greenaway's film elevates the books to a starring role, acknowledged in the title. But this follows Shakespeare, who has Prospero explain how a sympathetic man of Naples (which city was the enemy of Prospero's Milan) furnished the deposed duke upon his exile with many of life's necessities – including books:

Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

Greenaway links Prospero's books and his magic with more modern science. The books deal not only with occult arts (as was frequently the association in Elizabethan times), but more scientific topics like natural history, anatomy, and (especially) water.

In linking magic and science through the character of Prospero, however, Shakespeare was hardly alone among notables of Western literature. A recent (May 2008) essay by Philip Ball in Nature touched upon this theme. (Unfortunately, access to the article requires a subscription, but I'll quote a little.)

The topic at hand was the widespread panic last year, among nonscientists, but somewhat legitimized by journalistic sensationalism, that operation of the Large Hadron Collider could lead to the destruction of the universe. (How's that for human hubris?) Ball connects this hysteria with traditional literary associations between scientists and diabolical forces:

Of myths and men (5/2/08)

When physicists dismiss as a myth the charge that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will trigger a process that might destroy the world, they are closer to the truth than they realize.

In common parlance, a myth has come to denote a story that isn’t true, but in fact it is a story that is 'psychologically true'. A myth is not a false story but an archetypal one. And the archetype for this current bout of scare stories is obvious: the Faust myth, in which an hubristic individual unleashes forces he or she cannot control.

Fictional characters Ball mentions as being associated with intellectual overreaching include not only Faust, but also Dr. Frankenstein:

In part, the appeal of these stories is simply the frisson of an eschatological tale, the currency of endless disaster movies. But it is also noteworthy that these are human-made apocalypses, triggered by the heedless quest for knowledge about the Universe.

This is the template that became attached to the Faust legend. Initially a folk tale about an itinerant charlatan with roots that stretch back to the Bible, the Faust story was later blended with the myth of Prometheus, who paid a harsh price for daring to challenge the gods because of his thirst for knowledge. Goethe’s Faust embodied this fusion, and Mary Shelley popularized it in Frankenstein, which she explicitly subtitled ‘Or The Modern Prometheus’. Roslynn Haynes, a professor of English literature, has explored how the Faust myth shaped a common view of the scientist as an arrogant seeker of dangerous and powerful knowledge.

Many other mythological figures could be mentioned, such as Prometheus. Roslynn Haynes' book, titled From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature is, unfortunately, out of print.

However, a slightly more recent book by Christopher Toumey – Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in American Life – is still in print, and makes the connection between the diabolical-mad-scientist stereotype and social and political attitudes towards science in the U. S. (and elsewhere).

Other sterotypical mad scientists that Toumey mentions include Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll, H. G. Wells' Dr. Moreau, and Ian Fleming's Dr. No (and Ernst Stavro Blofeld as well, I might add).

Does this hoary literary mythology of mad scientists influence public attitudes towards science? Like Philip Ball, I rather suspect the answer is yes, definitely. We see this all the time in the public hysteria surrounding biotechnology and "genetically modified organisms" and "frankenfoods", as the hysterics like to call them. There's also the ridiculousness over the resistance of the public to the possibility of food from cloned animals, even milk from cloned cows. (See here for an example.)

Now, apparently, this hysteria has spread to nanotechnology as well. There are, to be sure, legitimate concerns about health aspects of some current nanotechnology products. These certainly need to be carefully studied – and that is happening, due to the proper concern of many people who haven't forgotten all the major public health problems of a few pharmaceuticals (e. g. Thalidomide, Fen-phen (see here)) – not to mention things like tobacco and asbestos, which are problematical yet hardly products of modern science.

However, the objections to biotechnology are not only based on public health, but on "moral" issues as well (especially with respect to stem cells, cloning, chimeras, etc.) And we're seeing the same thing happen with nanotechnology – which some now think is also a "moral" issue:

For Nanotechnology, Religion In U.S. Dictates A Wary View (12/7/08)

When it comes to the world of the very, very small — nanotechnology — Americans have a big problem: Nano and its capacity to alter the fundamentals of nature, it seems, are failing the moral litmus test of religion.

In a report published Dec. 7 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, survey results from the United States and Europe reveal a sharp contrast in the perception that nanotechnology is morally acceptable. Those views, according to the report, correlate directly with aggregate levels of religious views in each country surveyed.

In the United States and a few European countries where religion plays a larger role in everyday life, notably Italy, Austria and Ireland, nanotechnology and its potential to alter living organisms or even inspire synthetic life is perceived as less morally acceptable. In more secular European societies, such as those in France and Germany, individuals are much less likely to view nanotechnology through the prism of religion and find it ethically suspect.

But it's about more than nanotechnology. It's about attitudes towards science in general:

The survey findings, says Scheufele, are important not only because they reveal the paradox of citizens of one of the world's elite technological societies taking a dim view of the implications of a particular technology, but also because they begin to expose broader negative public attitudes toward science when people filter their views through religion.

"What we captured is nanospecific, but it is also representative of a larger attitude toward science and technology," Scheufele says. "It raises a big question: What's really going on in our public discourse where science and religion often clash?"

I'll come back to this aspect of things another time.

Tags: biotechnology, nanotechnology

U.S. science education lags, study finds

U.S. science education lags, study finds

Science education in U.S. elementary and middle schools is overly broad and superficial, according to a government report issued on Thursday that also faults science curricula for assuming children are simplistic thinkers.

"All children have basic reasoning skills, personal knowledge of the natural world, and curiosity that teachers can build on to achieve proficiency in science," said the report from the National Research Council, one of the National Academies.

Part of the problem is that state and national learning standards for students in elementary and middle schools require children to memorize often-disconnected scientific facts, the report said.

Hoo boy. I feel a rant coming on. About what's wrong with U. S. science education.

I guess I could write a book on this, but I'll try to be briefer than that, since I don't have the time tonight and since I expect many people who read science blogs have given this much thought and have detailed opinions on this. (Many are probably, in fact, science teachers at some level.)

Basic premise: science education in the U. S. sucks, and indeed a large part of the educational system sucks. (Some earlier comments on this are here.)

Deficiences in U. S. science education are often noted in connection with the notorious failure of many in the U. S. public to either understand or accept the science of evolution. For instance, this post from Cosmic Variance discusses a study published recently in Science about how the U. S. was almost dead last in a comparative study with 32 European countries in the percentage of respondents surveyed who agreed with the assertion that “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”

I have no problem with the teaching of facts, not even "often-disconnected facts". Facts make up the basic stuff of science. Kids need to learn all kinds of basic facts -- from important chemical elements, to classifications of animals, to standard parts of living cells. Definitions of key scientific terms also need to be learned. I realize that science teachers struggle even to get kids to learn such facts.

But of course, learning facts isn't enough. Learning how the facts and definitions are related in coherent general theories is also important. I'm not going to try to suggest how to improve the teaching of facts, definitions, and theories. That would take much too long, and I'm certainly no expert on teaching.

Rather than get into the tactics of teaching science, I want to just make some points about strategy.

First, teachers have to arouse curiosity in their students. Because curiosity is, in my opinion, what drives the whole scientific enterprise. Other things like practical applicability of scientific knowledge are useful byproducts, but certainly not primary motivators to students (and people in general) for learning and doing science. If a student isn't really curious to understand how an amazing thing such as a living cell (for example) works, the chances of learning much about it go way down.

Second, teachers have to educate students about some basic thinking skills -- what is sometimes called "critical thinking", including basic logic, "scientific method", and so forth. This is necessary in order for students to understand why some kinds of plausible theories are better, while others are just not even "scientific".

Third, teachers have to convey to students why science is important. This is a matter of philosophy (axiology, to be precise), because the importance of science has to be compared with that of various other endeavors that people undertake -- from raising a family to the "fine arts" to ... whatever. Doing this is, of course, a tall order, as it entails having some grounding in philosophical traditions of our culture (and of the cultures of others).

Thinking about this philosophical angle, I have to wonder whether there's not a basic problem in the intellectual culture of the U. S. that impedes the teaching of science. It seems quite likely to me that there is too much emphasis in U. S. traditions on "pragmatism" and the glorification of "what works" -- as opposed to other things that satisfy human aesthetic senses and curiosity. What I'm talking about here is part of what people such as (for instance) the American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about in his book Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

This kind of cultural tradition certainly has not made it impossible for U. S. scientists to have become extremely successful at discovering and creating basic (as well as applied) science over the past century. Instead, the effect of U. S. cultural tradition is manifested -- I would suggest -- in the lagging results of science education among the general public.

If there's any merit to this suggestion, the outlook for actually making much improvement in U. S. science teaching is not especially promising, at least on a time scale measured in units less than decades.

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Additional information:

On Not Becoming a Scientist - ScienceNOW article

Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 - the actual NRC report

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Tags: education, science teaching