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"Lovelock, who introduced the Gaia Hypothesis describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected.

"The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," Lovelock told MSNBC.com in an interview.

While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening"

interview climate-change global-warming environment media celebrity expertise elites controversy

"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."

science communication public-understanding public meetings controversy consensus community

When most people hear “NPR,” they think Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Robert Siegel, and for some on the far right, all that is wrong with the mainstream liberal media. But beneath the veneer of the "Minnesota nice," a simmering battle has been waged, and in the balance hangs NPR’s future and perhaps even its soul—as either a nonpartisan defender of in-depth journalism or a target of the partisan sniping of the sound-bite era. David Margolick explores how NPR’s management managed to squander the advantages of the national dole, deep-pocketed donors, a roster of top-notch reporters, and the loyalty of legions of devoted Click and Clack fans—and whether it can recover from the annus horribilis of 2011.

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"Some states have introduced education standards requiring teachers to defend the denial of man-made global warming. A national watchdog group says it will start monitoring classrooms."

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"What I have in mind right now is that in the first half the students will investigate what I would call “big narratives” about the underlying causes of political and social debate about climate change, and build up what I’ve imagined as a series of flow charts built around each of these big narratives. Each week in the first part of the course, I want all of students to participate in a scavenger hunt looking for what they consider to be influential, successful or intriguing examples of a particular narrative: books, online discussions, organizations, political campaigns, advertisements, and so on. "

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2011 - report on annual poll of moral acceptability by Gallup.

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Although people are quite aware of global warming, their beliefs about it may be malleable; specifically, their beliefs may be constructed in response to questions about global warming. Beliefs may reflect irrelevant but salient information, such as the current day’s temperature. This replacement of a more complex, less easily accessed judgment with a simple, more accessible one is known as attribute substitution. In three studies, we asked residents of the United States and Australia to report their opinions about global warming and whether the temperature on the day of the study was warmer or cooler than usual. Respondents who thought that day was warmer than usual believed more in and had greater concern about global warming than did respondents who thought that day was colder than usual. They also donated more money to a global-warming charity if they thought that day seemed warmer than usual. We used instrumental variable regression to rule out some alternative explanations.

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"Scientists, their allies, and opponents engage in struggles not just over what is true, but who may validate, access, and engage contentious knowledge. Viewed through the metaphor of theater, science is always performed for an audience, and that audience is constructed strategically and with consequence. Insights from theater studies, the public understanding of science, and literature on boundary work and framing contribute to a proposal for a framework to explore the construction of audiences during scientific controversy, consisting of three parameters: history, composition, and role. Applying this framework to the controversy over the presence of genetically modified maize in Mexico demonstrates how multiple and contested audiences form during a scientific controversy. Different scientific “productions” construct distinct or overlapping audiences; audiences constructed at one time become “easy recruits” for later stages of the controversy; and the various roles cast for different audiences showcase strategies for building scientific power and reflect assumptions about the capacity for publics to participate in the governance and production of science. "

science communication controversy theater performance audience public-understanding

"What do scholars offer present politics? Does it depend on the discipline - sociology vs. history vs. chemistry - and, within disciplines, on sub-fields? Amongst historians, does a US historian like Cronon have more to offer than, say, a medievalist? Does it matter *where you live* (Cronon's made much of his place-based identity), or *what you know* (e.g. for the sake of comparison), or *how you think* (pattern recognition, textual analysis, &c.)?

Possibly all of these questions matter. What I want to figure out is (1) what Cronon thinks he has to offer as a "Scholar Citizen" (which is *not* the same as a "Citizen Scholar," the analogue of the "Citizen Scientist"), and (2) how this relates to the relationship between "scholarship" and "citizenship" (or politics)."

public scholar scholarship intellectual history discipline politics public-sphere academia university controversy

"This ongoing popular distrust of banks and bankers, however, seems not to be shared by many of the economic historians we look to for leadership on these issues, and who often treat historical bankers with respect verging on reverence. As a result, the stories of American banking that find there way into mainstream history often treat the objectives and goals of bankers as economically sound and politically neutral, even when they acknowledge popular dissent.
"

history economics banking controversy

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"Throughout his career — for instance in his classic short piece ‘The Study of Geography’ — Boas made a distinction between not between the ‘natural sciences’ and the ‘interpretive sciences’ but rather between generalizing sciences (which study things that happen over and over again, like gravity) and the ‘historical sciences’ (which study things which happen just once in history, like the Battle of Hastings). "

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science anthropology definition boundary-policing self-definition controversy academic fields

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By now, most are familiar with the controversy surrounding Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg and the claims made in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist.

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Tracking links to the recent Barabasi paper in Nature that tracked peoples movements via cell phone.

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Tracking links to the recent Barabasi paper in Nature that tracked peoples movements via cell phone.

privacy online mobile-phone research controversy ethics