Posts tagged as:

Engagement

Scientist just wants to have fun – a compendium of mindless games for the holiday season!

December 22, 2009

Brain-candy for the intellectually incapacitated.
To help the brain cells recuperate from over-exertion (and quite possibly over-indulgence) this Holiday season, here’s a short compendium of mindless games – the sort of things scientists and others indulge in when they think no-one’s looking!

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Completing the circle: Coupling science & technology outputs to inputs

December 7, 2009

Part 9 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century
Writing about completing the circle of science and technology policy at the start of the Copenhagen climate summit seems particularly fitting.  Although the climate change context was far from my mind when I started this series, it stands as a stark reminder [...]

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Researchers are real people too – thoughts on interviewing scientists

November 29, 2009

Andréia Azevedo Soares has just posted an excellent blog on how to interview scientists over at YS Journal – an on-line journal written, edited and published by students.  The piece is aimed specifically at students from 12 to 20 years old who are engaged with the Young Scientists Journal project from around the world, and [...]

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Science: So what? – So what?

November 27, 2009

I sat down this morning to write a light-hearted blog about the UK government’s “Science: So what? So everything” campaign.  The angle was going to be:
Why write about this when people want to read about this?
But the more I dug around, the more apparent it became that this is an initiative that seems to have [...]

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Riding the wave: Rethinking science & technology policy

October 15, 2009

Part 8 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century
Much to my embarrassment, I’ve just realized that it was over four months ago that I wrote the previous blog in this series – a series that was supposed to evolve over just a few weeks!  Most inconveniently, other priorities ended up [...]

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So you’re curious about nanotechnology…

September 28, 2009

Curious, concerned or just plain confused about nanotechnology?  The new website Nano & Me might be just what you are looking for.

Funded in part by the UK department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and developed by the Responsible Nano Forum, Nano & Me is aimed at providing clear and balanced information on an emerging [...]

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Experiments in science engagement – the exquisite corpse!

July 14, 2009

Tim Jones has just posted a video of a new science engagement technique he’s working on over at his blog Zoonomian.  I was so impressed with the result that I asked his permission to post it here also.
Before explaining what this is, take a look at the video – it’s ten minutes long, but well [...]

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Engaging the public on nanotechnology

July 7, 2009

Following up on my last post – Geoengineering the planet with nanotechnology ice-cream? – here’s a short video Zoe Papadopoulou and colleagues put together on The Cloud Project from my visit in June:

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Geoengineering the planet with nanotechnology ice-cream?

July 5, 2009

Scientists and engineers have their moments. But it they are hard pressed to beat art students when it comes to sheer audacious creativity.
Earlier this year I received an email so intriguing I couldn’t help but follow up on it. The email was from Zoe Papadopoulou, an MA student at the Royal College of [...]

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Culture clash: Take the 2-second two-cultures poll

April 28, 2009

A 2-second distraction in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of CP Snow’s Two Cultures lecture:  Take the two-cultures poll (below), and see how your answer aligns with those from others:

(If you can’t see the poll, click here)
Now you’ve pressed the button and seen the results, here’s the background:
On May 7th 1959, the scientist, politician [...]

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Nanotechnology in motion: the good, the bad and the.. just plain weird?

April 25, 2009

How many good nanotech videos have you come across?  Chances are, you’ll be struggling to name more than one of two.  But over the past few weeks there have been a few posted on the web that are worth watching.  These three in particular mesh together rather nicely to tell a story of nanotechnology’s potential, [...]

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Twitter: changing your perspective on reality, 140 characters at a time

April 14, 2009

13 “Twits” Who Will Change Your Perspective on Reality
Back in the days when Twitter was a mere slip of a social media service—around four months ago by my reckoning—it was a byword for meaningless web-chatter and banal exchanges.  But the service is growing up rapidly —not only in the number of users (which is skyrocketing, [...]

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Sing a song of nanotechnology

February 26, 2009

Explaining nanotechnology to people is tough—as anyone working in the field will tell you.  Clever stuff that’s too small to see with the naked eye doesn’t slot easily into most people’s human-scale view of the world.  So it’s not surprising that many non-experts (and even some “experts”) end up with a rather mangled idea of [...]

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In space, no one can hear you scream – unless you’re in a sci-flick!

February 16, 2009

If you want to annoy a scientist, show them a movie that gets the little details wrong—like the fact that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, or biologists always have a box of Kim Wipes within arms-reach.
If you want to annoy anyone else, put them in the same room with the scientist!
Scientists love to pick [...]

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Five more good books

December 31, 2008

Science gone right, science gone wrong, science gone social, science gone political—it’s all here in five off-beat book recommendations to kick off 2009.  Ranging from Darwin’s Origin of Species to Sir Terry Pratchett’s Nation, the one thing I think I can guarantee is that you will struggle to find an odder bunch of literary bed-fellows!  [...]

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Emerging science and technology at 700 characters per day – how was it for you?

December 13, 2008

The pains and pleasures of tweeting science and technology innovation, 140 characters at a time.
Five days, 539 words and 3,447 characters later, the Twitter experiment is over. Did I succeed in communicating on emerging science and technology in 700 characters a day?  I’m not sure.  The whole exercise was harder than I expected.  Trying to [...]

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2020 Science – looking forward with clarity

September 21, 2008

I’m sitting here putting the finishing touches to 2020science.org—a new science blog—and having the latest in a long stream of panic attacks: What on earth am I doing? Who wants to read yet another tedious list of personal musings, what makes me think I have anything interesting to say, and where did I get the [...]

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Of jellybeans and buckyballs…

April 13, 2008

Here’s a small diversion for a slow Sunday afternoon:  Take sixty jellybeans and ninety cocktail sticks, and try to construct a model of a buckyball—a carbon-60 molecule.  It’s tricky, but not impossible.
Constructing a candy buckminster fullerene is one of ten nano “experiments” in a new nanotechnology education kit from nanobits. Designed to enthuse and inform [...]

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Nanotechnologies of humility

November 11, 2007

Some nanotechnology events should come with a health warning, perhaps along the lines of: “This meeting could seriously alter your perspective”.  Because nanotechnology crosses such diverse areas of interest and expertise, there is a danger of being exposed to ideas that are radically different from your own.  And where exposure occurs, “infection” becomes an issue.

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