Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
The world's first peer-reviewed video journal gives scientists a better way to show others how to replicate experiments.
In many cases, our views of reality are not based on personal experience. We find politicians personable or despicable, even though we have never met them in person. And we feel intimately familiar with landmarks in foreign countries even though we have never visited them. For many of us, the same is true for scientists working in a lab. We have mental images of how they act or what they look like, even though few of us have never been in a lab watching a scientist at work. The tricky part: Many of those images may have little to do with reality.
"Comprehensive yet accessible, this key Handbook provides an up-to-date overview of the fast growing and increasingly important area of ‘public communication of science and technology’, from both research and practical perspectives."
"The recent analysis published in JAMA reviewed the success of ClinicalTrials.gov in two time periods – 2004-2007 and 2007-2010. The findings are rather troubling if you want your studies to meet the highest possible standards — between 2007 and 2010, only 48% of eligible trials were registered before patient enrollment had commenced. Granted, this was up from 33% in the earlier period, but it’s still the minority. The majority (52%) were registered after patient enrollment had started.
This means that most clinical trials are being registered after it’s theoretically possible that investigators have had a chance to peek at early data and tweak the enrollment criteria to generate a “better” trial."
"Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed on the usual suspects — inadequate funding, misconduct, political interference, an illiterate public. Their cause is bias, and the threat they pose goes to the heart of research."
"The increasing popularity of media multitasking is frequently reported in national surveys while laboratory research consistently confirms that multitasking impairs task performance. This study explores this apparent contradiction. Using dynamic panel analysis of time series data collected from college students across 4 weeks, this study examines dynamic reciprocal impacts of media multitasking, needs (emotional, cognitive, social, and habitual), and corresponding gratifications. Consistent with the laboratory research, cognitive needs are not satisfied by media multitasking even though they drive media multitasking in the first place. Instead, emotional gratifications are obtained despite not being actively sought. This helps explain why people increasingly multitask at the cost of cognitive needs. Importantly, this study provides evidence of the dynamic persistence of media multitasking behavior."
"Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination. "
"Skeumorphism is about communcating and reinforcing feelings – getting an application to become a memorable experience, not just a tool. It’s about communicating the purpose of a UI, not only the functions it enables."
"Public meetings and consensus conferences seem to be the tool du jour for many government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Agriculture. Designed to give the public a voice in policy decisions, they can, in some cases, provide valuable insights into the local public’s views and opinions on certain issues. But they can also have disastrous consequences when used as a policy-making tool designed to tap public opinion more broadly. And the likelihood of failure is particularly high when debates emerge in a community about if and where to build controversial facilities for storing nuclear waste or conducting research on potentially deadly biological pathogens."
-
But, if not through public meetings, how can policymakers achieve a consent-based approach while conforming to democratic ideals, particularly for controversial scientific issues? Our recommendation would be to focus more time and resources on pro-active, systematic assessments of public opinion that gives an equal voice to all members of the community. Decisions like this with tremendous societal and political impacts should not be left only to those with strong views who are willing to make the most noise at a public meeting.
Like Paulo Nuin said, the future of scientific blogging is what it has always been. It’s just writing. It’s always just been writing. That’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that how we find what we want to read is changing radically…again. That’s where the next big thing is. If someone figures out please tell me. I promise I’ll link to you.
"The dominant way of thinking about the role of science journalists historically was to view them as translators, or transmitters, of information. Now, however, a powerful metaphor for understanding their work as science critics is to see them as cartographers and guides, mapping scientific knowledge for readers, showing them paths through vast amounts of information, evaluating and pointing out the most important stops along the way."
-
The contemporary science journalist, we found, is now working at the confluence of three cultural trends. First, their traditional historical role as the privileged disseminators of scientific information has been undercut by the emergence a new science media ecosystem in which scientific journals, institutions and individuals are producing original science content directly for non-specialist audiences. As a result, journalists are no longer the primary source of breaking news about science. Consequently, they need additional ways to attract readers and maintain their professional identity.
Second, the traditional ‘scoop’ culture of journalism is being supplemented by other forms of journalistic authority, what journalism scholar Donald Matheson, in an academic article on online journalism trends in New Media & Society, called “knowing more, knowing better, knowing more comprehensively and knowing in as much depth or extent as readers would wish.” To do this, science journalists need to provide expert interpretation of scientific knowledge, operating similarly to art critics as they evaluate — rather than just describe — scientific findings.
And, thirdly, the economic changes in the news industry has meant that science reporters are increasingly working as freelancers, the working life of many split between a portfolio of journalism, teaching, convening science-related events and writing books. For example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Deborah Blum said the industry-wide move to freelancing has driven changing perceptions of what a science reporter is and does. She said in an interview for our paper: “A science journalist wears a lot of hats, the way I do… I write books, I do magazine articles, I teach - [this] is much more the 21st century version of a journalist.”
"SIGDOC is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC). Until 2003, SIGDOC focused on documentation for hardware and software. With the shift in focus from systems to computer documentation to the design of communication, SIGDOC has better positioned itself to emphasize the potentials, practices, and problems of multiple kinds of communication technologies, such as Web applications, user interfaces, and online and print documentation."
"The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language?
The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures - historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion - increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back.
Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly."
-
Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. So subcultures have historically relied on their obscurity, illegibility and unimportance to ensure autonomy and security.
The very existence of a subculture is only known to neighboring subcultures. This limited local visibility suggests that the world of subcultures is not a matrix, but a web. Classic Rock fans can tell Punk Rock apart from other kinds. It all sounds the same to a non Rock-fan. Imperceptible distinctions that make no difference in the larger scheme of things.
Under abnormal circumstances, when seditious sentiments are brewing in the subcultural web, the zero-sum game of power swings in its favor, causing a reaction from the class-culture matrix: increased and more visible action by the hidden institutional order to restore the balance.
When slums start to seethe, the secret police gets going in not-very-secret ways.
If the slums win, subversive subcultures become institutionalized, and displaced ones turn into subcultures. If the slums lose, things stay roughly the same. Either way, the scheme of social organization remains the same: a balance of power between an institutional class-culture matrix and a subcultural web.
-
The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions.
And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. You don’t have to go to a specific neighborhood, in specific clothes, and drop specific references. You can sit at your desk, dress any way you want, and fake your way into any subculture. Long enough to sell a whole lot of shoes.
It will not take long for businesses and politicians to completely master this game.
The outcome is inevitable. Subcultures will be comprehensively tamed. Institutional sociopaths within the class-culture matrix are now in a position to detect and take control of subcultures before they even come into existence. This will lead on to control over the very inception of subcultures.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
"However, from talking to numerous faculty members and academics from a variety of institutions, it has become clear to me that a central problem remains: none of these extra-curricular activities matter when a job search committee determines which graduate student to invite for an interview, and they do not matter for tenure. These facts make it subtly clear that, as a whole, the modern American academy expresses a keen indifference toward the relationship between academic knowledge and the public interest/public good"
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in communic...
-
Web 2 point 0
Items: 252 | Visits: 115
Created by: Deborah Goodman
-
English Resources
A list of resources for Engl...
Items: 167 | Visits: 259
Created by: Dianne Krause
-
Communication Arts
Items: 168 | Visits: 99
Created by: Stephanie Affield
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo