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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."
"Recent years have seen increasing encouragement by research institutions and funding bodies for scientists to actively engage with the public, who ultimately finance their work. Animal behaviour as a discipline possesses several features, including its inherent accessibility and appeal to the public, that may help it occupy a particularly successful niche within these developments. It has also established a repertoire of quantitative behavioural methodologies that can be used to document the public's responses to engagement initiatives. This kind of assessment is becoming increasingly important considering the enormous effort now being put into public engagement projects, whose effects are more often assumed than demonstrated. Here we report our first attempts to quantify relevant aspects of the behaviour of a sample of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who pass through the ‘Living Links to Human Evolution Research Centre’ in Edinburgh Zoo. This University research centre actively encourages the public to view ongoing primate research and associated science engagement activities. Focal follows of visitors and scan sampling showed substantial ‘dwell times’ in the Centre by common zoo standards and the addition of new engagement elements in a second year was accompanied by significantly increased overall dwell times, tripling for the most committed two thirds of visitors. Larger groups of visitors were found to spend more time in the Centre than smaller ones. Viewing live, active science was the most effective activity, shown to be enhanced by novel presentations of carefully constructed explanatory materials. The findings emphasise the importance and potential of zoos as public engagement centres for the biological sciences."
"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."
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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.
"But while I certainly want academic history to continue valuing clear, non-technical prose, I also think we should try to have a more realistic sense of who we reach and how we reach them. The myth of accessible academic history has its costs as well as its benefits.
To begin with, the myth of accessibility can devalue some of what academic historians do uniquely well. We produce knowledge about the past regardless of whether there is a mass market for the knowledge we produce. And since I don't believe that the mass market does a good job of determining what's worth knowing, I think we ought to moderate our polemics against specialization. Many good ideas--even ideas that eventually have a profound impact on broad, public conversations--start in abstruse corners of academic work. Think, for example, of Kuhn and the idea of a "paradigm shift.""
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In this regard, it's interesting to compare the academic discipline of history to such disciplines as English and philosophy. There's actually huge popular interest in cultural criticism and philosophy, as the existence of E! (the cable network and website) and the voluminous "philosophy" section in any bookstore attest. But academic English scholars and academic philosophers understand themselves as doing something fundamentally different from, respectively, E! and the Deepak Chopra-heavy "philosophy" section of most bookstores. Academic historians, on the other hand, tend to see a variation of our own craft when we look at the History Channel or the New York Times Best Seller List.
And yet, this myth of the accessibility of academic history is, in many ways, a very productive one. As I've already said, I value readability. And though few academic historians are writing books for audiences much beyond our subdisciplines, let alone beyond the academy, the notion that one should write as if one were addressing a literate, general audience helps historians counteract the tendency of academic discourses to get ever more abstruse and hermetic. At least when I was in graduate school, many other disciplines seemed on occasion to put a positive value on their own abstruseness, presenting it as a sign of technical sophistication (e.g. philosophy and economics) or even their explicit opposition to negative values that they associated with readable texts
"In his article "Professional Boredom" in the March 2012 issue of Perspectives on History, AHA President William Cronon discussed what it means to be a "professional historian" and advocated for history writing that's engaging and accessible to a broad audience. His article generated numerous insightful responses and discussions online, and today we highlight a few."
"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."
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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.”
"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 comes in part from the numerous popular-science books that have been written on the topic over the years. This episode in the Physics World books podcast series looks at the popularity of quantum mechanics in science writing"
"I can see why people worry if and how science media can clearly communicate scientific knowledge, but it should also open up questions about how science is made and what we want to do with it too. Here’s my final question: how can science media more effectively discuss commercial interests of science, rather than just being constrained by them?"
"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"
"An analysis of 36 years' worth of polling data indicates that confidence in science as an institution has steadily declined among Americans who consider themselves conservatives, while confidence levels have been at steadier levels for other ideological groups."
The Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) is a grassroots effort linking universities, scientific societies, science centers and museums, government agencies, advocacy groups, media, educators, businesses, and industry in a peer network
"We are a charitable trust that equips people to make sense of scientific and medical claims in public discussion."
"regular event with the Biochemical Society exploring science online. Last week, we had one on science and hobbies, a combination that doesn't need the web to come about, but is arguably facilitated by it. I know the word 'hobby' seemed a bit off-puttingly folksy for some, but I wanted to capture the difference between doing or talking about science for a living, and doing/ talking about science in one's spare time. Fully aware that this divide isn't clear cut, I thought the topic would generate debate. I think it did."
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What counts as value in citizen science? One of the audience members gave the example of a crowd-sourced citizen research project run by their university, where they realised that it would have been cheaper just to employ a single professional to do the work, largely because it all had to be checked by an expert anyway. One response was that this argument relies largely on the idea that the outcome being funded is purely research. If it is engagement too (and you count citizen involvement as engagement, not just free labour), then maybe it’s a false comparison.
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Do we need to consider the ethics of citizen science? In many ways, this follows on from above. If a citizen research project could have just employed a professional academic, are they robbing someone of a job? One of the reasons science became professionalised was to allow people who were not independently wealthy make a living from it. We have seen similar tensions around journalism and music. We might equally ask whether citizen science projects like those run by the Zooniverse simply exploit their members for free labour
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