communication
jstemwedel | May 1, 2008This post is standing in for a lecture and class discussion that would be happening today if I knew how to be in two places at once. (Welcome Phil. 133 students! Make yourselves at home in the comments, and feel free to use a pseudonym if you'd rather not comment under your real name.)
The topic at hand is the way relationships in research groups influence the kind of science that comes out of those groups, as well as the understanding the members of the group have of what it means to do good science. Our jumping off point is an article by Vivian Weil and Robert Arzbaecher titled "…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2008On April Fool's Day, our local Socrates Café had an interesting discussion around the question of what makes something funny. One observation that came up repeatedly was that most jokes seem aimed at particular audiences -- at people who share particular assumptions, experiences, and contexts with the person telling the joke. The expectation is that those "in the know" will recognize what's funny, and that those who don't see the humor are failing to find the funny because they're not in possession of the crucial knowledge or insight held by those in the in-group. Moreover, the person…
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 17, 2008Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, can we talk about pseudonymous blogging?
Dr. Free-Ride: Haven't you already written a bunch of posts about that?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Yeah, but the blogosphere seems to be discussing it again.
Dr. Free-Ride: You know I only work on Fridays, right?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Get your pseudonymous butt in gear and help me have a proper dialogue!
Dr. Free-Ride: Dude, how are we supposed to have a dialogue about this? I'm you. You have yourself a monologue.
Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, you were a pseudonymous blogger for a whole year! That's experience you can draw on.
Dr. Free-…
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 14, 2008At DrugMonkey, PhysioProf explores the rules of engagement between grad students in journal club and seminar presentations (building off of interesting explorations of this question from A Lady Scientist, Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde, and Acmegirl -- all of which you should click through to read in their entirety). I'm late to the party, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the balance here between the intellectual aspects and the human aspects of questioning within the tribe of science.
PhysioProf starts with A Lady Scientist's sense that grad students have a duty to watch each other's…
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…
jstemwedel | April 5, 2008You'll remember that I tried to work out precisely what was being claimed in the premises behind framing set out by Chris Mooney. At the end of this exercise, I was left with the hunch that one's optimal communication strategy -- and how much scientific detail it will require -- might depend an awful lot on what kind of message you're trying to get across to your audience, to the point where trying to generalize about framing doesn't seem very helpful. At least, it's not helpful to me as I'm still trying to understand the strategy.
So, I'm hopeful that those who are hip to the framing thing…
jstemwedel | April 2, 2008Chris Mooney lays out the argument behind "framing". I give my thoughts, item by item.
1. We have long-running politicized science controversies on subjects like evolution and climate change, with separate polarized camps and the repeated use and misuse of complex scientific information in the arguments.
I'm not sure it's fair to characterize the controversies alluded to as "scientific" controversies. It's easier to make a case for scientific disagreement around climate change (at least, in terms of precisely how much human activity contributes, where the tipping point is, what exactly we…
jstemwedel | March 30, 2008In light of all the recent discussion about the "framing" of the Expelled! expulsion, it occurs to me that maybe part of the reason that the argument seems so unproductive is that the parties involved haven't really agreed on what, exactly, they're trying to communicate to the public at large.
Here's my suggestion for a message worth communicating clearly: science isn't politics.
The community of scientists is not like an organized political party. There isn't a Ministry of Information. When things are working as scientists think they should, all the voices are heard -- and each person…
jstemwedel | March 26, 2008For those who have been following the activities of "animal rights" activists, including their attacks of the homes of researchers -- and the reticence of the public in the face of such violent attacks -- a recent Commentary in Biological Psychiatry [1] will be of interest. In it, a number of scientists call on their scientific peers to actively engage in dialogue with the public about what scientific research with animals actually involves and why it is important.
From the commentary:
The attacks are horribly misguided. It is impossible to reconcile the willingness of these terrorists to…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2008Maybe you heard the news that PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins went to a screening of the documentary Expelled! in Minneapolis, except that, because he was recognized, PZ Myers was barred from the screening (despite having signed up ahead of time like the other attendees). Here's the New York Times story, and Greg Laden has collected roughly a bajillion links to blog posts in the aftermath of the incident. The big debate seems to be whether Myers ought to have brought attention to the fact that he was barred from the screening, or whether he should have just gotten a haircut at the mall to pass…
jstemwedel | March 4, 2008Abel Pharmboy and Drugmonkey are having a conversation that I wish I could approach completely abstractly, about what parents ought to be telling their kids about drugs (whether legal or illegal) and their use. (Also, Page 3.14 has a reader's poll about whether teens can be scared off illegal drugs. Poll results will be published in the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap newsletter, for which you can sign up here.)
Of course, having two kids who are not yet teens but don't seem to be getting any younger, the issue doesn't feel abstract at all. The clock is ticking.
Here's what is currently…
edyong | February 28, 2008
Chimpanzees may not be able to recite Hamlet or giving rousing speeches but there is no doubt that they are excellent communicators. They exchange a wide variety of sophisticated calls and gestures that carry meaning and can be tailored to different audiences.
The sophistication of chimp communication doesn't stop there. Jared Taglialatela from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center has found that chimp signals and human speech are both strongly influenced by the same area in the left half of the brain - a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).
In humans, the left IFG is home…
jstemwedel | February 16, 2008
Allegra Goodman's novel Intuition was published in 2006, and although I heard very good things about it, I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't chase down a copy to read it. Finally, last November, my department chair lent me her copy, insistent that I had to read it when I got a chance -- not for any academic purpose, but to do something nice for myself. Between semesters, I finally got a chance to read it.
I have a really good department chair.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I think that part of why I enjoyed it so much is that I came to the book without having read…
jstemwedel | February 11, 2008I'm passing on information about a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation for graduate students. The program, organized by the University of Montana Center for Ethics, is called Debating Science 2008, and here's how it's described on the announcement:
We are looking for graduate students who are inspired by their own research, but who are also interested in exploring the social, political, and philosophical context of that work, and who are committed to sharing science with nonscientists, in a genuine hope for a better world...
To solve the toughest problems of the modern…
jstemwedel | February 7, 2008In my earlier post, I described the feeling I had as I started my graduate training in chemistry that there was a huge pile of knowledge I would need to acquire to make the transition from science student to grown-up scientist. I should make it clear (in response to JSinger's comment that I seemed to be reserving the "grown-up" designation for principal investigators) that the student versus grown-up chasm was one that I thought of primarily in terms of how much I felt I'd have to learn by the time the Ph.D. hit my hand in order not to feel like a total impostor representing myself as a…
jstemwedel | February 6, 2008You may have been following the saga of intelligent design proponent Casey Luskin's use of the ResearchBlogging.org "Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research" icon in a way that didn't conform to the official guidelines for its use.
The short description on ResearchBlogging's mission says:
Research Blogging helps you locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers use our icon to identify their thoughtful posts about serious research, and those posts are collected here for easy reference.
The guidelines for using the spiffy icon include registering with…
jstemwedel | January 23, 2008Maybe you saw the story in the New York Times about new research that may show that ingesting too much caffeine while pregnant increases the chances of miscarriage. And, if you're like me, one of the first things you did was try to track down the actual research paper discussed in the newspaper article.
If so, I hope you've had better luck than I have.
The New York Times article (dated January 20 -- that was a Sunday) describes the research as "to be published Monday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology" and identifies "the lead author of the study" as De-Kun Li. Writing…
jstemwedel | January 23, 2008One of the things that came out of the discussion of the ethics of blogging about science at the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference was a clear sense that we don't yet have general agreement about what kinds of ethics should guide science blogging -- in part, because we haven't come to an agreement about just what kind of activity science blogging is.
Is science blogging more like journalism or the scholarly activities of scientists reporting their findings to their peers? Is it education or punditry? Is it a profession or a hobby?
Different bloggers (and different blog readers) seem to…