Two years ago, I wrote a piece about ten things that inspired me to become a scientist. One of those was my high school teacher.  We never kept in touch, but through the miracle of the web, that post eventually came to his attention, and we connected again.

The other day he unearthed a photo harking back to the year we overlapped at Pilgrim Upper School and emailed it to me – bringing memories flooding back:

The occasion was Mr Tranquada’s – Tim’s – last day teaching us, as he prepared to move on to another appointment.  As a class of 14 year olds we were gutted, and bought the only gift we thought suitable for such a great physics teacher – a Newton’s Cradle.

You can get a sense of how inspirational Mr Tranquada was by looking at the comments on the back of the photo – remember, this was a physics class:

Tim moved from Bedford in the UK to teach in Milton Keynes in 1981, and then on to Chelmsford in Essex.  From there he became a National Strategy Secondary Science Consultant for Essex – a job he says really enjoyed and during which he felt that he was giving something back to the system through supporting Schools and their Science Teachers.  He is currently enjoying his retirement!

It really was a blast from the past seeing the photo and the comments, and remembering what it was like being young and inspired.

But what really got the nostalgia flowing – I was the student who took that photo, thirty years ago.

Cross-posted at ForumBlog.org – the World Economic Forum blog

My high school physics teacher used to tell me there’s no such think as a dumb question.  It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me through my professional career as a scientist.  But it’s a philosophy that might be just about to come back and bite me.

This year at Davos, a number of sessions are including formal “challengers” – people officially sanctioned to pose those dumb questions everyone else is thinking, but are too afraid to ask.  And guess what – I’m one of this years’ challengers.

I will be challenging some of the best and brightest minds in the business as they talk about the science agenda for 2011. Stating their case will be Francis Collins – Director of the National Institutes of Health and famed for his leadership of the Human Genome Project; Rolf Heuer – Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN); Ray Johnson – Senior Vice President and CTO of Lockheed Martin; and Christopher Viebacher – CEO of Sanofi-Aventis.

These are people who know their stuff, and will undoubtedly present a compelling and inspiring case for science and technology that leaves few opportunities for probing questions.

As if that wasn’t enough, this is my community.  I’m one of them.  But by challenging them, I risk setting myself apart as a trouble-maker, a contrarian, or worse – a Luddite!

Yet the role of challenger is a vital one.  Because without sober reflection, it’s all too easy for experts to become disconnected from the broader context in which their work has relevance.  And more often than not, it’s those “dumb” questions – the ones no-one dares ask – that most effectively help re-ground the conversation in reality.

So despite some trepidation, I’m looking forward to being the middle man here, and challenging four very smart people to think critically about what their work means in a broader social, economic and political context.

Will I pull it off and still be able to show my face in public?  I hope so.  Because when it comes to science in particular, it is vital that we learn to more effectively integrate the awe-inspiring stuff in the lab into everyday stuff that changes lives.

And the first step to better integration is to ask the right questions – no matter how dumb they might seem.

Dan Sarewitz has a rather provocative commentary in Nature this morning, where he suggests that proposals to increase basic research may be good politics, but questionable policy.

The headline alone is probably enough to get some science-advocates’ blood boiling, whether they go on to read the piece or not: “Double trouble? To throw cash at science is a mistake” does nothing if not throw down the gauntlet to an already sensitive science community.

Beyond the provoking banner, Dan raises  serious if uncomfortable issues – there must come a point where investment in science is balanced within a much broader social context, and the consequences of not allocating funds elsewhere are weighed against the benefits of supporting research – especially blue skies research.  But reading the piece reminded me of an associated debate which seems to get rather less air time – the personal responsibility that comes with government research funding.

It’s an inescapable fact that, for every dollar, pound or Euro that governments invest in research, someone, somewhere is getting less money to spend on what they think is important.  In some cases, re-allocations may have minor social consequences.  In others, reduced spending elsewhere in favor of science may be profound impacts on the lives of individuals – especially those at the margins of society.

This delicate and never-perfect balance of limited resources between competing needs is at the heart of policy making.  Resource allocation is never simple, always contentious and more often than not a compromise between equally worthy needs.  But this means that in a socially responsive society, every hard-won government dollar comes with a burden of responsibility – to use it as effectively as possible to improve the lives of the the people who the government was elected to serve.

Which means that government-funded researchers should be probably be asking themselves (repeatedly): “How does my work benefit the society that is supporting it?”  Or, of they are brave, “Are people suffering because government dollars are supporting my research rather than going elsewhere?  And if so, what should I do about this?”

The answers may be as metaphysical as “my research provides insight into the nature of reality” to as broad as “the new knowledge I generate enriches the human experience” or as practical as “my work will help cure cancer.”  But the important thing surely is to ask the questions – and to act on the answers that come back.

I’m an ardent supporter of government-funded science, and I strongly believe (I use the word advisedly) that basic research is critical.  But it is not a right.  Every hard-earned dollar spent on research is a dollar less for someone else to do some good with.  Which means that we need to be prepared as scientists to ask the hard questions, and to grapple with uncomfortable answers.

If we do, the result will surely be science that plays a stronger, more integrated role within society – irrespective of absolute funding levels.

With apologies to Chris Mooney, and all the many scientists that really do get the need to listen to people.  And also with a rather large tongue in my cheek:

Dear Mr Mooney,

I’ve been way too busy this week doing important sciency stuff to engage with the trivialities of the popular press.  But this morning I stumbled across your protestations in last Sunday’s Washington Post. You know – the ones about scientists not listening enough to the public?

Choke? I’m still trying to remove bits of masticated Cheerios from my polyester labcoat!

Mr. Mooney, which planet are you on?!  Haven’t you realized yet that the public are just a bunch of raving loonies, obsessed with their own views and impervious to reason? What on earth would justify me listening to their misinformed and irrelevant bleating?

You see Mr. Mooney, what you don’t seem to get is that most of the public don’t think like right-minded people. They’re irrational.  They’re emotional.  And they seem to think that there’s more to how they live their lives than science!

And some of them, Mr. Mooney, some of them are denialists!

And this is what really gets my goat Mr. Mooney.  No matter how much I try and tell these people what’s right, they still insist on holding onto their wrong-headed beliefs.  Not only do they deny my superior intellect – they dare to question the evidence that’s sitting there in front of their face.  Even when I shove it up their noses Mr. Mooney, they just don’t get it!

Now don’t get me wrong Mr. Mooney, I don’t expect everyone to be a scientist like me.  But the public should at least be able to grasp how science works.  Then they might just start listening to me.  Me, Mr. Mooney, me.  Because through hard work and intellectual rigor, I actually have something worthwhile to say.

But I am a reasonable man Mr. Mooney.  And so I thought I would at least give your naive and misguided ideas a go.  So after cleaning up the Cheerios and milk spattered across my Washington Post, I grabbed myself a member of the public and tried listening to them.

As I suspected, it was a disaster.

Accosting the first person I came across, I asked them a few simple questions:

Me:  What’s the second law of thermodynamics?

Member of the public: Err, um…

Me: Okay, forget that.  How do airplanes fly?

Member of the public:  Err, excuse me, could you just loosen your grip a little…

Me:  Come on come on, I’m trying to listen to you – say something intelligent. Please!  Why don’t you accept evolution?  Why do you believe vaccines cause autism in children? Why don’t you understand simple statistics?  Why are you so stupid?

Member of the public:  Get your hands off me now, or see me in court!

You see what I mean Mr. Mooney? There’s no reasoning with these people!  Listen to them?  I’d rather listen to a lamp post.

What we need is more members of the public listening to us. Us Mr. Mooney.  We need to go out and meet them on their own turf – in their bars, in their cafes, in their places of worship – and tell them what’s what.

Now you may think that I’m being a little arrogant here Mr. Mooney.  But I’m really not.  You see, you probably don’t understand this, not being a real scientist yourself, but scientists change their ideas all the time if the evidence is compelling.  I admit it – If the evidence doesn’t fit, I’ll be the first to change my views.  So you see Mr. Mooney, I’m actually quite humble. I can live with the thought of loosing a slanging match against a worthy opponent – no problem.

It’s just that the public aren’t a worthy opponent – never have been, never will be.

So you see Mr. Mooney, listening to the public is a very, very bad idea.  Science isn’t a democracy.  You can’t decide what’s right and what’s not by popular vote!  No, science is about searching for truth and debunking myths (my truths and your myths – naturally).

Okay, so maybe things get a little more complicated when it comes to how science is used.  But then surely Mr. Mooney, the public should leave the difficult decisions to people who know what they are doing – in other words, us scientist.

Imagine where we’d be if we started listened to what people wanted instead of just giving them what they needed.  It’s enough to bring on another choking fit!

Yours knowledgeably,

A concerned scientist.

Joking aside, Chris Mooney’s article on scientists’ understanding of “the public” – which draws on four workshops organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and which provided the inspiration for the Washington Post piece – is well worth reading if you suspect that a more enlightened perspective on science and society is warranted.

Note:  This blog was promoted in part by a rather robust reaction to Chris Mooney’s Washington Post piece in parts of the blogosphere.  For a rather more nuanced set of responses from people that have some experience in this area, it’s worth checking out Andrew Revkin’s post on the Dot Earth blog form last week.

]]> http://2020science.org/2010/07/04/scientist-listen-to-the-public-surely-youre-joking-mr-mooney/feed/ 24 http://2020science.org/2010/06/19/welcome-to-real-science/ http://2020science.org/2010/06/19/welcome-to-real-science/#comments Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:24:07 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=3348

The way science is taught, the way it’s portrayed on TV and in the press, he way it’s promoted by science-advocates and science bloggers, often seems to adhere to a rather pompous and hubristic view of science as the ultimate bastion of truth and certainty.  So it’s been rather refreshing this week to see a group of real-world scientists shattering this image in the on-line event I’m A  Scientist, Get Me Out Of Here!

For those of you that haven’t been following this, I’m A Scientist is a two-week UK-based event where up to 8000 teenagers quiz 100 scientists on any and every subject under the sun, before they decide who is worthy of a £500 prize in support of science communication.  It’s an inspired event that puts students in charge of the conversation – and one that I am privileged to a part of this time round.

Half way in, the event has been intense – with over 100 live chats between scientists and classes of students, and literally thousands of questions and answers (scientists in the Cancer Zone – just one of twenty zones – have received over 700 questions from students so far!).

But what has struck me more than anything perhaps has been the honesty and humility of the scientists taking part.

Maybe it’s responding to kids that brings out the honesty (I know I have made a rule of answering questions as openly and as honestly as possible – because you don’t mess around with kids).  Maybe it’s that this is a bunch of real-world scientists, rather than the vocal minority that people are usually exposed to.  But the lack of science romanticism here has been eye-opening.

From subjects spanning global warming to evolution, and religion to animal testing, I’ve repeatedly seen participants lay out their honest opinions – even if they don’t match exactly with established opinion  The responses have not always clean and homogeneous and “politically correct” – sometimes even the science behind them isn’t as robust as some would like.

But this is how real scientists perceive their work, the world, and their place in it.

In other words, the answers to questions emerging on I’m A Scientist are probably a good reflection what the science community is actually like, rather than what we would sometimes like to think it is like.

I suspect the value of this honesty and humility is immense.  Clearly, it provides the students taking part in I’m A Scientist with a realistic view of what science is really like – and probably a more believable and attractive one than some idealized vision of the scientific endeavor.  I also think it is proving liberating to the scientists involved – providing them the opportunity to explore and express their honest perspective on things.

But just as importantly – the event is leading to a unique resource documenting what scientists really think – not just what they think they should think.

In the long run, this may be an incredibly important added-value within what is already an extremely high-value initiative.

Edit 6/19/10 – I meant to note above that many of these thoughts were sparked off by this blog from I’m A Scientist participant Tom Hartley earlier this week.

A guest blog by Sophia Collins, producer of the on-line teen science event “I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here!”

“itz hometime but we want to stay and ask questions”

These are the words of a 14 year old student, at a school in inner-city London. The school has some of the poorest academic results in the school district, well below the national average. And yet a classroom science activity had the students so gripped that when the bell went for the end of the school day, they insisted on staying for another 15 minutes to ask more questions.

The students were having an MSN-style online chat with some scientists. They’d started with fairly simple questions, ‘How long have you been a scientist?’ and ‘Why is the sky blue?’. But then something happens – the immediacy of the chat format, the inventiveness of teenage brains, the unexpected experience of a grown-up seriously answering their questions – and the chat starts getting richer. You can see the ideas bouncing off each other and going in all directions. By the end of the chat this class had moved from a question about whether science could ever stop aging, to discussing what the world would be like if people didn’t die.

And there were all sorts of other random conversations along the way. Everything from favourite pop stars, to how blood circulates, to what it feels like if another scientist scoops your work. After another chat, one of my staff (a usually cynical young man) brought a tear to my eye by declaring it was “an honour to be associated with the event”.  When I asked why, he said, “The kids are so excited, and they are asking questions I know I’ve never asked or even thought of…”

Live chats like this are part of the event I run, I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here!, which Andrew blogged so kindly about a couple of weeks ago. We were blown away the first time students insisted on staying after their lesson finished, “when normally they’ve got their coats on before the bell has finished ringing” as one teacher told us. After a while though we started taking it for granted, it happened so often.

As well as these live chats, students submit questions for the scientists to answer on our website. This gives an opportunity to go into more depth, and extend the conversation over days Feel free to have a browse, if you don’t mind getting distracted for the next couple of hours. We’re constantly amused, intrigued and impressed by the questions students ask, from “What is it about humans that led to us inventing science?” to “Do you think that robots will ever rule the earth?”.

One scientist told me that this was “the most science-related fun I’ve had in ages,” while a teacher emailed to tell me her class was splitting into fan clubs for the different scientists, “with the sort of devotion they’ve only had for pop stars up until now.”

Teenagers are notoriously the worst audience to engage, so what is it that gets this response from them? I’ve spent years working on this event format, and naturally I’ve got a few theories.

Doing it online makes it less intimidating and more intimate.

Before you all write in and complain, I’m not saying we should do away with face-to-face. I think that can be a great way of getting kids engaging with scientists. But do you remember people coming in to school to give talks when you were a teenager?

Who put their hands up to ask questions at the end? Usually, the clever kids who can think of questions the teacher will approve of. And possibly the naughty ones who want to be cheeky.

I’ll tell you who didn’t. Not the shy students. Not the ones who got lost five minutes into the talk and really would have liked to ask what the guy was actually talking about. Not the ordinary middling students who can’t think of a smart question but desperately want to know if it’s scary sometimes being a policemen or where astronauts go to pee. Doing it online makes it much easier for kids to ask the questions they actually want to ask, and then they can start getting interested.

Teenagers are actually desperate for the chance to talk to grown ups.

For many kids the only adults they ever get to talk to are their parents and their teachers. They are on the cusp of the big scary adult world, they really don’t know what it’s going to be like and they want people to answer their questions!

Once they realise these real live scientists are actually going to do this, those questions about the adult world start pouring out. “Do you get on with the people you work with?”, “Do you ever get bored at work?”, “How did you decide what to study at University?”.

I also think sometimes they can’t quite believe they’ll be able to pull off being a grown up (I’m 38, and I still have that doubt…). And becoming a scientist? Way too intimidating! Lots of teenagers are convinced that scientists are all Einstein-like geniuses, so they couldn’t become one themselves. When they realise, as one girl put it, that “scientists are just like normal people!” it’s a revelation. The scientists talk about their holidays, their pets, their favourite jokes and suddenly students can see that these are people like them, and they could grow up and be a scientist too.

And lastly, the true secret weapon…

Giving students some power engages them much more deeply.

The scientists are competing for a prize of £500 ($770) to communicate their work and the students are voting who gets it.

This makes the young people feel that they are being taken seriously, for once. Don’t we all get turned off things if we aren’t listened to and feel we don’t have a say? No-one wants to be lectured at, but that is what happens to teenagers all the time.

But it’s not just that they feel less ignored; giving students a vote and some money to allocate makes everything real – it’s not just an essay or a classroom debate about science ethics. It’s not an academic exercise. We’re saying, here’s some actual money – who do you think should get it?

To answer that question for themselves, students have to really think.  And they raise all sorts of issues: How can we know what the outcome of research will be? How can we weigh one kind of knowledge against another? Imagine you had a medical advance that would save a small number of lives, how could you possibly weigh that against a different medical advance that improved the lives of a much bigger number of people? These are thorny issues in science funding and teenagers engage with them, because they are actually being asked to decide.

I’m not pretending that all the teenagers cast their vote for the highest of reasons. Some will vote for the scientist who likes the same band as them. Or whose joke made them laugh. Or who’s got the nicest photo. But I’m prepared to bet they still do that having thought more about complex science and society issues than they were probably going to otherwise. And it leaves them with a sense that these issues are something it’s possible for them to have a say about, so it’s worth them thinking about them.

We need a populace who can engage with science and engage in discussions about science. There are decisions that have to be made as a society, not by experts behind closed doors. Students who’ve cast their vote in I’m a Scientist feel that science is a thing they are part of. And that makes all the difference.

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I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here! was run in the UK for two weeks between March 15-26.  Around 1,400 teenagers in 70 schools around the UK participated, probing and evaluating the work of 25 scientists through on-line questions, answers and chats.  The next event in the UK is scheduled for June 14 – 25 2010. The event is kindly funded by medical research charity the Wellcome Trust, to promote public engagement with biomedicine. For more information on how to participate as a scientist, check here.  For teachers, further information (including Creative Commons teaching resources which anyone can use) can be found here.

Sophia Collins is producer of the on-line teen science event “I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here!” and its sister event, “I’m a Councillor, Get me out of Here!” which gets teenagers engaged with local politics. Her background was in science communication, mainly in TV science shows, before getting involved with I’m a Councillor in 2004.

The website “I’m a Scientist – Get me out of here” should come with a government warning – something along the lines of “Visiting this site could seriously disrupt your professional, social and personal live while altering your perceptions on getting kids hooked on science – proceed with extreme caution.”  In fact I would probably say that, unless you are immune to addiction, have no sense of humor or couldn’t give a toss about science, just don’t go there – it’s not worth the risk!

Frivolity aside, I’m a Scientist... is a brilliant concept. For two weeks between March 15-26, around 2000 teenagers in 70 schools around the UK are probing and evaluating the work of 25 scientists through on-line questions, answers and chats.  And one by one they are voting out or “evicting” their least favorite “contestants” – leaving five winners who walk away with a £500 prize – think X-factor, Big Brother or American Idol for scientists, and you begin to get the picture!

Participating kids are free to ask the scientists anything – and I mean anything – as long as it doesn’t contravene the House Rules.  Which means that they clearly have the upper hand here.  But this also breaks down barriers, encourages dialogue, and leads to very effective engagement (for the scientists as well as the kids).  Recent questions have ranged from the bizarre to the deep, including:

• Do you like green eggs and ham? (Both love and cringe at the response given!)
• Pirates of Ninjas?
• Have you ever regretted choosing a career in science or maths? and if so why? when?
• What is the most interesting thing you have ever done?
• What colour is a chameleaon sitting on a mirror? and
• Does the Fibonacci sequence and the golden rectangle appear in genetics? (as it is generally everywhere in nature)

This is only a small smattering of the hundreds of conversations going on – previous warnings aside, I would seriously recommend you check these and others out if you are at all interested in enthusing, educating and engaging kids on science.  The beauty of the event is that, while it is primarily for the participants, anyone can poke around and take a look at what’s going on!

But the questions and answers are only part of the event’s success.  The evictions – hard as they may be on the unlucky scientists – make the thing all the more addictive.  This aspect of I’m a Scientist is clearly grabbing the kids’ attention and pulling them in big-time.  But it’s also holding the scientists’ feet to the fire, and helping them hone their skills as communicators – a perfect win-win!

This particular event finishes on March 26 – so you need to move fast if you want to see it in action.  The first evictions were yesterday, and between now and Friday there will be one set of eviction per day, leaving the winners as the last scientists standing on Friday afternoon.

But be warned – it could seriously alter your perceptions of how to get kids hooked on science!

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For more information on I’m a Scientist check out http://imascientist.org.uk/more-info

The event is split up into five zones.  Follow the links to see recent questions in the Brain Zone, the Genes Zone, the Helium Zone, the Hydrogen Zone and the Lithium Zone

If you liked this – and what’s not to like? – the next I’m a Scientist event in the UK is scheduled for June 14 – 25.

A year or so ago, there was a challenge circling round the blogging community to write on a subject you know nothing about.  It’s a little late, but I think this blog quite possibly qualifies as my contribution.

Earlier this year I rather foolishly agreed to rise to a challenge set me on the 2020 Science Facebook page by Jasmine Andrews: Write a blog about science and sexuality.

Now I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that I know nothing about sex.  But lets be honest here: When it comes to the finer points of sex and sexuality, I’m male, I’ve lived a sheltered life, and I’m a scientist! Actually, I don’t think the first and last points count, but you get the idea.

Nevertheless, a promise is a promise, so without further ado, here is the first (and quite possibly the last) 2020 Science blog on sex, sexuality and science.

Approaching this blog, I was immediately faced with a dilemma – not only is this an area well outside my expertise (not to mention, comfort zone), but the links between science and sexuality are convoluted and complex to say the least.  It’s not that there is a lack of material – a quick Google search on “Science” and “Sexuality” throws up literally millions of links, including one to The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.  But a cursory glance suggests this “literature” is dominated by the science of sexuality rather than how science impacts on sexuality.

It’s this second question that intrigues me.  There’s been a lot of research carried out into the biology, physiology and psychology of sex and sexuality, and this has led to a greater understanding of us as individuals as well as us as a society. It has also led to some rather ill-informed – barbaric even – actions in the past, as people have tried to use science to justify suppressing or otherwise controlling sexuality. But how about the secondary impacts of science and technology on sexuality?  Have advances in scientific knowledge and technology innovation changed more generally our perceptions and realizations of ourselves as sexual beings?

I’m sure this has been written about extensively somewhere.  But in the spirit of the challenge set me, I thought I would try and think through this question for myself.

Being quite literally a novice here, I thought I would start by trying to conceptualize – from my limited understanding – how sexuality, sex, society and science might relate to each other.  This is what I ended up with:

A rather simple representation of how sex, sexuality and science might be related

What intrigued me in sketching out this “model” was what affects the dynamic between sex and sexuality – both for individuals and within social groups.  The result is more a model of my own thought processes – so no guarantees that it is either accurate or meaningful.  But it did help me begin to tease out how advances in science and technology might impact on sex and sexuality.

The model is built around four core subjects: Sex – the physical interaction between two people (and no, I’m not going to define what does or doesn’t constitute “sex”); sexuality – how people experience and express themselves as sexual beings; the individual person; and the social group they are a part of.

The dynamic between these four subjects is complex, and is influenced by a number of inter-related drivers.  In this model I included four drivers that seemed to make sense in terms of the four subjects, but I’m sure there are others:

• Procreation is fairly self-explanatory: passing on genetic material to the next generation (or, in the vernacular, “making babies”).
• Bonding refers to the emotional as well as physical bonds that are created and reinforced through sex.
• Control reflects how sex is used to establish, define and enforce relationships between people and within social groups – either subtly or overtly.  And
• Fulfillment is a bit of a ragbag of emotional, psychological and physiological drivers associated with, amongst other things, pleasure, contentment, comfort, security and release.

Surrounding the subjects and drivers are three influencing factors: society, religion and science.  Society and religion are two obvious factors – each having a well-established if not necessarily well-understood influence on sex and sexuality.  The third – science, – represents how advances in science understanding and  technology innovation potentially influence sex and sexuality.

The model laid out above sets the scene for exploring how science might impact on sexuality.  But to be useful, it needs to be flexed a little.

By weighting the influencing factors and drivers by their relative significance within society, the resulting impact on the four subjects might be explored.  Looking back to a hypothetical science-poor society for instance, the model might look something like this:

Exploring social-sexual dynamics in a science-poor society

Here we have a scenario where the influence of society and religion – through social and religious norms and expectations – exert far greater influence than science on the subjects and drivers within the model.  Assuming that society and religion emphasize social stability and sustainability, their influence over the drivers can be represented by larger or smaller circles of effect.  In this case the procreation driver is heavily emphasized (sustainability), while the fulfillment driver is de-emphasized (of secondary importance to procreation and social stability).  Bonding is emphasized where it strengthens social cohesion, and control is kept in check, ensuring that a social hierarchy is maintained, but not over-strained.

The result is a depiction of a society that is focused on the good of the group and sex as an act, rather than the individual and sexuality.

OK so it’s just a naive and crude model.  But nevertheless this particular assessment does lead to a picture that resonates with how sex and sexuality have been positioned within some societies in the past.

So having checked that the model makes some sort of sense, what happens if we ramp up the influence of science?  We might get something like this:

Exploring social-sexual dynamics in a science-rich society

Here, the influence of society and religion have been decreased and science’s influence increased, reflecting a situation similar to the modern day – at least in some parts of the world.

The impact on this shift of influence on the four drivers is somewhat speculative, but interesting nevertheless.  First, the significance of procreation is decreased – we’ve seen clearly over the past few decades how increasingly effective contraceptives have decoupled sex from procreation.  Correspondingly, fulfillment is increased.  This is a response in part to the decoupling of sex and procreation enabled by advances in science and technology.  But it is also driven by a greater understanding of the biology, physiology and psychology of sex that science has enabled, which opens the door wider to understanding the roles of sex and sexuality in living a fulfilled life.  The bonding driver is also increased slightly, as science and technology both inform and better-enable the use of sex as a means of strengthening interpersonal relationships.

Then there is control.  I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that advances in science and technology are somewhat ambivalent  factors when it comes to how sex is used to establish, define and enforce relationships and hierarchies.  Given the biological and psychological drive to procreate and social complexities surrounding sex, I suspect that sex and sexuality will always have potential to be used to control, manipulate and intimidate others – it’s hard to imagine science changing this (I’m not an optimist when it comes to scientific enlightenment leading to better people!).  Where science could have an indirect impact though is in decreasing the influence of social and religious norms on the control driver.  By lowering the influence of these constraints, advances in science and technology could potentially lead to an increase in how sex is used to exert control over people.

This is all highly speculative.  But following the assessment through shows a relative increase in the influence of science over social and religious norms as emphasizing the individual over the group, and sexuality over sex.

Of course, this could all be groundless bar-psychology.  But a shift in emphasis to sexuality rather than just sex, and the individual rather than the the social group, does align crudely with trends in western society.

Whether this is because of an increasing influence of science is rather conjectural.  In reality, there will be a number of intertwined influencing factors – including changing social and religious norms.

The bottom line is that it’s possible to make a plausible association between general advances in science and technology and changes in personal and social perceptions of sex and sexuality.  But to take these associations and the model they are built on too seriously would be foolish, to say the least.

After all, what do I know?  I’m just a novice!

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Note: Despite the somewhat frivolous tone of this piece, there is some serious thought behind it.  Nevertheless, the model above is a long way from being  a strong one.  In finishing the piece off, the positioning of the control driver has been bugging me for instance – I’m not convinced of its placement in the “individual” and “sex” quadrant.  Clearly, there is room for “Science and sexuality 2.0!”

It’s a week for significant science reports.  Following hot on the heels of the UK Expert Group on Science and Trust’s report on Monday comes what could well be a seminal work on science in 21st century Britain from the Royal Society.  In “The scientific century: securing our future prosperity” a distinguished panel of experts takes on Britain’s role in the knowledge economy, and lays out a strong set of recommendations and actions to underpin the country’s leadership in science and technology.

This is far too important and weighty a document to summarize and review after only a brief reading.  So at this point I will content myself with simply laying out the key recommendations.  I would however encourage anyone with the slightest interest in science’s role in the 21st century – whether from Britain or elsewhere – to read this report closely and take its recommendations seriously.  It’s possibly the most significant assessment of how to develop coherent, responsive and sustainable science policies since the US National Academies published “Rising above the gathering Storm” in 2007.

Recommendation1: Put science and innovation at the heart of a strategy for long-term economic growth

• Create a new long-term framework for science and innovation committing to increased expenditure
• Outline spending plans over a 15 year period (2011 – 2026)
• Prioritise investment in scientific capital – including infrastructure and skills
• Expand the R&D Tax Credit

Recommendation 2: Prioritise investment in excellent people

• Direct a greater proportion of Research Council funding to investigator-led research
• Increase the length and quality of UK PhD training
• Support transferable skills training for researchers
• increase the number of postdoctoral fellowships

Recommendation 3: Strengthen Government’s use of science

• Review strategic science spending by Government departments
• Expand the Small Business Research Initiative to support innovative procurement
• Provide Department Chief Scientific Advisers with greater resources
• Appoint a Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Treasury

Recommendation 4:  Reinforce the UK’s position as a hub for global science and innovation

• Extend the geographic reach  of the UK Science and Innovation Network
• Increase support for mechanisms, such as the Science Bridges scheme, which link UK research groups with partners overseas
• Incentivise more of the world’s best scientists to remain in, or relocate to, the UK
• improve visa conditions for visiting scientists and researchers to the UK

Recommendation 5: Better align science and innovation with global challenges

• Create strong global challenge research programmes, led by RCUK, to align scientific, commercial and public interests
• Reform research funding and assessment to support and reward interdisciplinary research
• Use public and stakeholder dialogue ti help identify and shape these challenges
• Ringfence departmental contributions to priority research areas

Recommendation 6:  Revitalise science and mathematics education

• Provide incentives to recruit, retain and attract teachers back to science subjects
• Commit to increasing the numbers of primary teachers with science expertise
• Establish new expert groups to advise on the development of  science and mathematics  curricula and qualifications

One final word:  The figures used in the report are well worth checking out – they are a model in presenting complex information in a compelling way.

The report “The scientific century: securing our future prosperity” can be downloaded from http://royalsociety.org/the-scientific-century/

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!

The selection rules here were simple: Anything that didn’t hold my attention for more than 5 seconds, required a double-digit IQ, or was associated with “learning goals,” was ditched faster than a game of Klingon Scrabble.

Of course, you’re expected to pooh pooh the resulting collection to friends and colleagues as being nothing but mindless drivel – got to keep the side up after all!  But when you’re alone, check out the games.  Believe me, your over-exerted brain cells will thank you!

Happy Holidays

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Science Crossword

I thought I’d start with at least a pretense of intellectual stimulation with this science crossword.  Pretense is the keyword here – this isn’t quite Times Crossword territory.  Which is a relief, as completing it is straightforward, even if most of your brain is still off partying elsewhere.

If you enjoyed this, there are fifteen other science crosswords to keep you amused ScienceCrossword.com

Levers

Here’s a deceptively engaging bit of fun from VectorPark.  Just build a mobile from the pieces provided.  Each time you get the thing to balance, you get another piece to add – how far can you get?  Like all games from VectorPark, it’s up to you to discover the rules by trial and error.  Or you could just sit and watch your mobile twist and turn on the screen – my recommendation after a heavy Holiday meal!

Monkey Lander

You know the slogan “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master?”  At least half of it applies to Monkey Lander.  The mission is simple – steer Monkey’s ship to collect the fruit (then get Monkey safely to the landing pad).  The science-ish twist? – some of the more obvious laws of physics (and rocket-propelled monkeys) apply.

Science Fiction WordSearch

Another option for people who prefer words to spaceship-flying monkeys.  There are four scifi-themed word searches in all here.  None of them are too taxing – which is quite alright by me.

Spider

Some more fun from VectorPark.  I’m not entirely sure what is supposed to happen here, apart from a six-legged dog/bird hybrid eagerly following a spider around the screen – maybe I just haven’t played with it for long enough.  If you find out, let me know.

Neave Vote

I really struggled to decide what to include in this compendium from Paul Neave – there’s so much great stuff on his website (thanks to @Alessandro on Twitter for the recommendation).  But this tickled me – it’s the perfect antidote for anyone who takes on-line polls too seriously!

Windosill

Back to VectorPark for the next game.  This is another game of discovery – no rules; just a mouse, a screen, and a bizarrely elegant world.  Then it’s up to you.  The first couple of levels are free (if you can work out how to move on from the opening screen), but to play the full game, it’ll cost you $3!

A hint – follow the car.

Gravity Launch

Gravity Launch almost didn’t make it into the mindless game compendium – it teeters on the edge of being too educational.  But despite this obvious flaw, it’s still a lot of fun – and simple too.  Just adjust the rocket’s thrust and takeoff angle, and try to dock with an increasingly complex array of space stations.  Thanks to @science_4_all on Twitter for bringing this one to my attention.

The Eyeballing Game

I thought I’d throw this one in for engineers… and other obsessive-compulsives. How well can you complete each pattern, just by “eyeballing” it?  Harder than you think – especially if you’re a little worse for wear!

Feed the Head

Finally, I thought I would leave the most bizarre game to last – and no surprises that once again it’s from VectorPark.  Feed the Head is a Pythonesque piece of trippy weirdness that will either have you hooked, or doing physical damage to your computer in frustration.  If you think there’s a danger of this, best stick to flying monkeys. This is another game of discovery – follow the mouse, and see where it leads…

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End Note

Okay, so I have a confession to make.  Despite my aims of embracing the trivial and avoiding learning experiences at all costs, these games have a little more in common with science and technology than might be immediately apparent.  With a couple of exceptions, there’s a discovery and prediction theme going on here that reflects how science tends to work, not to mention some rather cool physically-realistic modeling.  But don’t let that distract you from enjoying the games for what they are – (relatively) mindless fun!

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 Andréia – an established journalist herself – cautions that it might not be of much use to professional journalists and science writers.  But I suspect that anyone on the giving or receiving end of science-related interviews will find the piece informative.

In writing the blog, Andréia corresponded with a number of scientists about their experiences being interviewed, including me.  Having send her copious off the cuff notes, I thought it might be worth-while posting them here – if only so you can see how a good writer separates the wheat from the chaff in such situations

Andréia was interested in my thoughts on being interviewed as a scientist and someone who writes and talks to people about science.  This is what I emailed her (edited superficially from the original, where I became grammatically challenged in the heat of the moment).  Remember, these thoughts are aimed at students between 12 – 20 years old, rather than established writers:

Over the past few years I’ve been interviewed by many journalists – mainly over the phone, but sometimes face to face, and occasionally for TV and Radio.  In most cases the experience – and the results – have been positive.  Perhaps most importantly, the experiences have helped me understand how best to work with journalists as a scientist.  But they have also given me some insight into how journalists can get the most out of scientists when talking with them.

I’ve always found that interviews go best when the interviewer is prepared – when they have read up on the subject, when they know who I am and what my expertise is, and when they have a clear sense of the information they are interested in.  The worst interviews are fishing expeditions – where the journalist doesn’t seem to know why they are talking to me, and they are simply fishing for information they might use as the basis of a story.

I find a prepared journalist instills confidence in me, and helps me to convey what I want to say clearly and effectively.  They don’t need to be experts in the subject.  In fact I see it as an important role of the interviewer to ask the sort of questions their readers would want to ask – even if they seem scientifically simple and naive (there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but ignorant questions are another matter).  But it helps if they know where they are going with the interview.

I don’t find small-talk helps at the beginning of an interview – I have better things to do than talk about the weather usually!  But starting with straight-forward questions does help.   I often find that I am providing my clearest answers at the end of an interview, because this is when I have relaxed sufficiently to start communicating well with the interviewer.  Some simple warm-up questions help speed up this process.

The questions I dread are the open-ended ones: “what is nanotechnology?” is a perfect example of a question that potentially ends up with me rambling, because I don’t know how much information the interviewer wants.  Of course, as a person used to being interviewed, I should have stock answers to such questions – but I’m not that disciplined!  This is actually an important point – the clearer it is what the interviewer is looking for, the easier it is to provide clear answers.

Some of my richest conversations with journalists have come from what is usually the last formal question – “is there anything else you think is important, or that you would like to add?” – this is an open-ended question at the end of the interview that is okay to ask.  What I find at this point is that I start to chat more informally with the interviewer about things that weren’t covered in their questions, or things that I think might be relevant – including emphasizing and clarifying things that I have said previously.  And as a result, occasionally I say something that hits a chord with the interviewer, and we spend several more minutes exploring something that wasn’t in the original interview plan, but nevertheless finds its way into the final piece.

Ending interviews politely and keeping in touch with the interviewee is always important.  It’s always good to be informed personally when the piece is published – whether or not you have been quoted.  On occasions, I’ve had journalists send me the piece and explain why my comments haven’t appeared.  This can sometimes be a bit of an ego blow, but it does raise my respect for these journalists.  It also helps cement a longer lasting relationship.  Developing a working relationship with scientists you may use as a source multiple times seems extremely important.  It provides you with a list of sources that you are confident in, and who trust you.

This question of trust is critical, and it is mutually beneficial.  A scientist is more likely to speak to a journalist that they have had good experiences with, and who does a good job in representing their work.  This trust is built on how the interview goes, feedback after the interview, and the quality of the piece that is published.

When I see myself quoted in a piece, I first check that the quote reflects what I was trying to say – I’m not too worried about the minute details, but the broad sense of the quote and the context are important to me (I have colleagues who think very differently on this, but I always assume that in synthesizing and summarizing the science, some of the detail and scientific accuracy will be lost.  This doesn’t bother me – as long as the science is not wrong, or that the implications of the quotes are inaccurate or inappropriate).  If I am uncomfortable with the quote, I first check back to thinking whether the fault lies with me – did I express myself poorly?  Most times, I am the one who could have done better.  If I feel that the journalist has represented my work and my point of view poorly, I might send them a polite message noting this – although I usually acknowledge that I could have done better in expressing myself.  On very rare occasions, I might say something in public if I feel the article is dangerously misleading – but this is an extremely rare occurrence.  More often thought I just let it go – but I don’t tend to work repeatedly with journalists who do not do a good job of representing what I say.

That said, most journalists I have worked with are genuinely interested in feedback on their pieces – especially on whether they got the science right.  Asking for feedback builds trust with sources – even if you write the occasional piece that isn’t perfect!

This is something of an aside, but there are a number of media advisors working with scientists who suggest scientists ask to check stories prior to publication.  I’m not sure where this advice is coming from, but it seems naive, inappropriate and unfeasible in many cases to me.  There are publications that will come back and fact-check the science, and even check that quotes are correct.  But very few publications will allow sources editorial control over articles – and rightly so.  However, young journalists should be prepared for scientists to think that they can somehow check over the work before publication – and work out how to politely decline!

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 lost its way – and in need of more than a cheap quip about substance (ab)use…

The “Science: So what? So everything” campaign was launched with a flourish by the British government Department for Business Innovation and Skills last January.  It was aimed at engaging people in science, and shaking off the perception of science as being elitist.  A string of celebrities – including Terry Pratchett, Bill Bryson and David Attenborough – put their weight behind the campaign as Prime Minister Gordon Brown kicked it off.

According to the British Science Association,

A key aim of the campaign is to reach and spark interest in science among a wider audience, dispelling the myth that science is too difficult or out of bounds for all but scientists. The involvement of well-known figures from the media and popular culture will help to convey this message. As well the help of celebrities, the campaign has enlisted the support of UK research councils, learned societies and other government departments and hopes to extend its reach with the involvement of business and other organisations outside the world of science.

So what has happened since then?

I ask because British Science Minister Lord Drayson as just embarked on a review of the campaign.  As he announced on Twitter earlier this week:

I’m afraid as a scientist I don’t fit into Lord Drayson’s target audience here.  But his tweet – and some of the responses to it – did drive me back to the Science: So What? campaign to see what was going on.

And I must confess, what I found was a little disappointing.

The “campaign” (more about those inverted commas in a second) revolves around the Science: So what? So everything website.  This is a slick website – it’s attractive, it’s neatly laid out, it draws you in to a series of articles that are related to science.

But it’s a website, not a campaign!

In fact, the more I browsed, the clearer it was that the Science: So what? website is little more than a mediocre popular science portal, with a hint of government science evangelism about it.  I’m not even sure I would have known that this was the hub of a campaign if it hadn’t been for Lord Drayson’s tweet, and archived news coverage of the launch (the original BIS press release isn’t available by the way as far as I can tell – links like the one here lead to dead ends).

If this is a campaign, where’s the action plan?  Where are the deliverables and the indicators of success?  More to the point, where are all those celebrities who were brought in to launch it – and the accompanying publicity machine?

So let’s forget about the “campaign” for a moment, and just look at the website.

The website is certainly visually attractive and functionally smooth.  But does it succeed in reaching out to an audience and engaging people – does it, in the words of mjrobbins, “add value?”

I’m not sure it does.  There are a ton of great science websites and blogs out there – most of them offering far more in the way of reader-oriented content.  If you want information on the latest science news, to be titillated and entertained by science and technology, or to to be enlightened by the view from the lab bench, you are spoilt for choice.  So why would anyone visit – and re-visit – Science: So what?

I’m struggling with this.  It’s not that the content is bad.  It’s just that there’s equally good or better stuff elsewhere.  The articles are limited compared to what you get at New Scientist, the BBC or Discover Magazine (for instance).  There is no community here – a key driver of site visits and loyalty (where are the links, the guest articles, the commentaries, the controversial discussions?).  The “events” page seems rather limited in scope. There’s a DIY Science page with three (three!) articles on it, two of them discussing that old chestnut of putting Menots mints in coke.  And the “get involved” page – judging by the number of comments received – hasn’t inspired many to actually get involved.

I don’t really want to diss Science: So what? – it’s a laudable effort to address a very real issue, and the website is trying to make a dent within a tough web space.  And at the end of the day it is an experiment in using new media to reach out on science.  Tim Jones, who publishes the science and technology blog Zoonomian, wrote “I can also see this is something of a sandbox for experiment, so deserves to be cut some slack” on the Science: So what? metablog.

But he also points out the need for review and decision-making on the website, and highlights a number of areas requiring attention.

Looking at where Science: So what? doesn’t hit the mark for me, and where it might do better, two issues scream out.

The first deals with engaging people.  Despite trying to move away from an old-school science communication framework, it still seems to set out to inform rather than engage.  It smacks of messages that someone thinks people should be reading, rather than content that people want to read.  In other words, despite efforts to move away from this rather outdated stance, it’s “preachy.”

Take the opening paragraph on the “about” page:

In the UK, many of us don’t value science as much as we should, but it lives beneath the surface of everything we touch and taste. It’s the key to our prosperity, one of the driving forces of our economy, and it creates thousands of jobs that keep Britain at the leading edge.

This is about telling readers what’s good for them, not asking them what they think.  Okay so it’s a message that I and many scientists have a lot of sympathy for.  But as a first step to pulling people in? I’m not sure I would be so brave as to use it!  The art of selling is knowing what your customers want, not telling them what they should want – something that seems to be missing here.

Of course, I may be wrong and Science: So what? may be thronging with visitors.

I haven’t seen any web stats for the site so it’s hard to speak with any authority here.  About the only indicator of engagement I do have is a post that links directly back to 2020 Science.  As far as I can tell, I have only had one referral from Science: So what? since that post was published (Tim Jones had a similar experience with the link to his blog).  Contrast this to a link to 2020 Science posted in the comments on P.Z Myer’s blog Pharyngula on November 15 – from which I had 148 referrals in ten days.

This is a dubious comparison in many ways, but it does beg the question why an associate professor at the University of Minnesota seems to be engaging people on science far more effectively that the UK government.

Then, there is the problem of this being a government website.

Think about it.  Where’s the first place you would turn to for broad, unbiased, eclectic, entertaining and educating information on science.  The government?  Not me!  If there’s one thing you can guarantee with a government site is that there will be a constraining agenda behind it – and why would I elect to have my science input filtered by an organization I know is trying to feed me specific information for a predetermined purpose?

This brings me back to where I started – my “Why write about this when people want to read about this?” question.  Engagement is partly about building communities that can have the conversations they want – which is why there’s been considerable chatter on the web today about LilWizz’s piece, but nothing as far as I’m aware on the Science: So what? article.

It’s hard to imagine Science: So what? posting pieces about feeding new-borns opium draughts.  Yet without this freedom to truly engage, it’s even harder to imagine Science: So what? reaching out to the audience it so desperately wants to.

So what’s the answer?  I’m not sure I  have any great answers, but here are four things that BIS might think about:

• Develop a strategic, multi-faceted and transparent campaign to establish science as an integral part of British society, with the web site being just one component of this.
• Make key celebrities, scientists, communicators and organizations central pillars of the campaign.
• Support bloggers, producers, broadcasters and other communicators in developing networks and communities around science and technology – without heavy-handed government interference.
• Further develop efforts to engage people in science and technology – enabling them to be an active part of the process, rather than passive bystanders.

Much more is needed than this if science and technology are to be developed and used effectively within society.  But it’s a start.

When the Science: So what? So everything campaign was launched, Pallab Ghosh wrote on the BBC website

Without a sustained long-term plan, however, there’s a risk that any momentum this latest campaign generates will be lost and go the way of previous attempts to turn the public’s obvious admiration of science into something that’s a part of their daily lives.

Sadly, his crystal ball seemed to be working pretty well that day.  Nevertheless, integrating science into society remains an important issue.  The UK government started well with the Science: So What? campaign.  Maybe it’s now time to get out of the sandpit, and start to build something more concrete.

But don’t take my word for it – check out Science: So what? So everything for yourself.  Talk about it on the Science: So What? metablog.  And don’t forget to get back to the ever-accessible Lord Drayson on Twitter with your thoughts and ideas.

Back in July I wrote a short blog about Tim Jones’ Exquisite Corpse of Science project – an innovative project to explore what people think about science and it’s place in their lives and society, through the medium of drawing and film.  Four months on, I though it was worth a quick update.

One of the most striking aspects of Tim’s original work was a nine-minute movie, exploring three people’s perspective on science through drawing (you can see the movie here).  Since its release, the movie has been picked up by two science film festivals – the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City, and the Serbian Science Film Festival, where it is scheduled to be screened in December.

Pretty impressive – but understandable once you’ve seen the movie.

In the meantime, Tim is building a mosaic of exquisite corpse submissions from anyone motivated to put sharpie to paper. This is well worth exploring – there’s surprising depth to some of the submissions so far.  But there’s also plenty of room for new tiles to be added.

So if you’re passionate about science and have a few minutes spare, don’t procrastinate – put your thoughts on paper, and send the result to Tim (instructions here).  You don’t have to be an artist (as I shamelessly demonstrate here) – just someone with something to say on what science means to you.

As scientists, how we love to rail against the incompetence of the media.  As self-proclaimed keepers of the truth, we decry – usually rather vocally – the misinterpretation and misuse of our precious studies.  And as we commiserate together on the injustices of the world, we inevitably get to thinking that if only journalists could see the world as we do and get that down in writing (or on tape), things would be so much better.

Except, it isn’t always the journalists who are to blame for how science is portrayed in the media!

Take this case that landed in my metaphorical in-tray this morning for instance:

Yesterday, Texas A&M University put out a news item with the title “Technology may cool the laptop.” The piece starts:

Does your laptop sometimes get so hot that it can almost be used to fry eggs? New technology may help cool it and give information technology a unique twist, says Jairo Sinova, a Texas A&M University physics professor.

Aided by a short video, Professor Sinova, a co-author on the research being referred to, notes that

Laptops are getting increasingly powerful, but as their sizes are getting smaller they are heating up, so how to deal with excessive heat becomes a headache… “Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop,” he adds. “This also wastes a considerable amount of energy.”

This is an important issue, although I suspect that the vision of melting laptops goes a little far.  But it gets you wondering what this amazing new breakthrough is that is going to prevent those embarrassing laptop melt-downs and inadvertent griddle emulations.  The answer? The Spin Injection Hall Effect, or SIHE – a relatively recently discovered phenomenon that results in electrons with different “spin” in a semiconductor leading to a measurable magnetic field.

The paper that the Texas A&M University news item refers to is “Spin-injection Hall effect in a planar photovoltaic cell” in the journal Nature Physics.  It appears in the September edition of the journal.  It’s an interesting and scientifically sound paper.  It describes work where an experimental semiconductor device is used to show that the Spin Injection Hall Effect can in principle be used to encode information in the spin state of electrons, then “read” that information back.

It is research that could be useful to new ways of transmitting and storing information in the future.

But keeping laptops cool?  Hardly!  And certainly not imminently.

So what’s going on here?  How do we get from some pretty esoteric research on electron spin to preventing “laptop-burn?”

The most generous explanation is that, in one possible future, this science could underpin technologies that lead to lower energy microprocessors, and that this is what the researchers latched on to in an attempt to make their work relevant to a broad audience. But this is an incredibly huge leap.  It’s the scientific equivalent of playing the lottery – speculation in the extreme.  There’s a small chance that the science might lead, through a long chain of events, to microprocessors 12 – 50 years down the line that are faster and more efficient.  But making your MacBook Pro run cooler?  Give me a break!

Another explanation is that Texas A&M wanted to sex the research up – raising their profile at the expense of informed science reporting.

Or maybe someone just got hold of the wrong end of the stick – or the wrong stick entirely.

I’m not sure which of these is closer to the truth.  But what is clear is that this type of misrepresentation of the science at source is not uncommon, and it is highly damaging to understanding of and engagement in science within society.

In this case, the assumptions and speculations behind the laptop claims weren’t clarified, and little attempt was made to distinguish between the science and the fantasies it inspired.  As a result, media outlets that picked up on the story simply propagated the misinformation – including Science Daily.  And as many readers would not have access to the original paper, they would not have the means to test the claims being made.

If research institutions misrepresent the science they are involved in, what hope is there for informed science coverage in the media?  And more importantly, how on earth are people to get an informed sense of emerging science and technology, and engage in a meaningful dialogue on its development and implementation?

I’m all for imagining where different avenues of research might lead.  But fantasizing about future applications as if they are just around the corner is naive at best, and just plain cynical at worst.  And the sad thing is, it ends up further disengaging people from the process of science and technology innovation – robbing them of the ability to participate effectively in a science and technology-driven society.

Effective science coverage in the media is under threat, and there many factors at play here.  But surely this makes it even more important that scientists and research institutions don’t simply add to the problem.  I’m probably being a little unfair picking on Texas A&M here – they aren’t the only ones feeding the media with questionable material.  But it seems that if the science community is serious about good science reporting, it needs to get its own house in order before pointing too many fingers at others.

After all, journalists and others reporting on science and technology are only as good as their sources.  Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how hot or cold the laptop is running!

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/10/30/do-scientists-encourage-misleading-media-coverage/feed/ 32 http://2020science.org/2009/10/14/do-peer-review-journals-need-a-media-code-of-conduct/ http://2020science.org/2009/10/14/do-peer-review-journals-need-a-media-code-of-conduct/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:40:46 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2317

Since when did peer review journals start to put press hits before published data?

Scientific peer review journals are a cornerstone of modern science – providing an authoritative repository of scientific discovery that researchers and others can examine, test and build upon.  Publication in peer review journals is the primary route by which new science is made available to people, and the “gold standard” against which science coverage in the media is evaluated.

Yet over the past couple of months, I’ve come across two cases where journals were more interested in publicity than publication – releasing information to the media and the public on forthcoming publications before the papers were generally available.  The result is media coverage that cannot be validated against the original research, and a dangerous shift in authority from scientists to journalists and press officers…

This cannot be good for balanced science reporting!

Back in August, the European Respiratory Journal sent out an embargoed press release on a potentially high profile paper associating nanoparticle exposure to seven cases of severe lung disease and two deaths in China.  When the embargo was lifted, the study was covered in the media (including a suite of articles on 2020 Science) – but the paper remained unpublished.

Concerned that this story was being driven by the journal’s press office and journalists, with readers and researchers having no way to check the facts and assess the study for themselves, I contacted the press office.  This is what I said in an email to them:

…I have written about the paper on my blog at http://2020science.org, and have been concerned that the link to the paper is still not live. As well as putting me (and journalists who have also linked to the paper) in an awkward position, it prevents the scientific community from evaluating the paper for themselves.

I will be posting a blog on this apparent disconnect on my blog very shortly. But before I do, I wanted to check whether the ERJ will in fact be posting the paper on-line asap. I also wanted to provide you with the chance to comment on the time delay between the press release and posting the article, before I say something in public.

Unfortunately, I was specifically asked not to quote the reply I got back from the journal.  However, the gist of it was that journalists could access the paper, and the journal would respond more directly to my question… when they had time.

(And believe me, I fully appreciate the irony of not providing the original reply here in a post about not having access to source information!).

The good news in this case is that the journal did respond to my emails and eventually published the paper on-line – but only after pressure had been applied.

Then this morning I received notification of another paper which was preceded by its press release.  Here’s the opening of the Eurekalert press release that was posted by Inderscience Publishers – publishers of the International Journal of Nanotechnology:

Nanotech protection

Current safety equipment may not be adequate for nanoprotection

Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Nanotechnology, Canadian engineers suggest that research is needed into the risks associated with the growing field of nanotechnology manufacture so that appropriate protective equipment can be developed urgently.

Followed by

Dolez and colleagues suggest that as this area of manufacturing grows it would be prudent to develop adequate workplace protection sooner, rather than later. Indeed, those workers most likely to be exposed to nanomaterials will be working in cleaning, bagging and formulation activities as well as surface functionalisation of nanoparticles.

This is a potentially important paper – it questions the adequacy of current safety equipment when working with engineered nanomaterials, and concludes that more work is needed to ensure safe workplaces.

But if you want to know what the authors base their conclusions on, you’ll have to wait – unless you are a journalist that is, in which case you can request a pre-publication copy of the paper.

I emailed the journal this morning to find out when the paper will be available to non-journalists (including scientists and interested members of the public).  The answer?

The issue should be published on 1 December 2009.

In other words, the only information most people will have access to on this study for the next six weeks will come from the journal’s press office, and from science writers!

These aren’t isolated cases.  It seems that, in the push to survive the digital revolution, some peer review journals are putting publicity ahead of integrity – encouraging science reporting that cannot be verified against the source, and preventing readers from assessing the validity of the studies they read about.

At a time when the soundness of science coverage in old and new media is already under scrutiny, surely this type of behavior is tantamount to the scientific community shooting itself in the foot!

Not every journal is guilty of playing the publicity card.  But to prevent the bad players from giving science reporting a bad name, perhaps it’s time for a peer review journal code of conduct that establishes principles of responsible behavior.  Amongst those principles, I would suggest a commitment to the integrity of the scientific process, and an agreement not to put out  media “teasers” ahead of publications.

The alternative is the spectacle of a once-respected tradition dissolving into disrespect, while further compromising the already-tenuous authority of science reporting.

And this cannot be good for science, or the society it aims to serve.

Postscript

I should be clear that I have no beef with embargoed press releases that are sent out ahead of a publication – as long as the respective paper is made generally available at the same time as the embargo is lifted.  This approach – used by some journals – gives journalists the opportunity to digest new research and write informed pieces, without the pressure of being scooped by less thorough colleagues. And in many cases it strengthens the integrity of science reporting.  What is unconscionable in my opinion though is issuing a statement or lifting a press release embargo without publishing the original study.  This can surely only be a cynical move to increase publicity for the journal, rather than disseminating the science.

How exactly did I get hooked on science?  It’s not something I’ve thought about too much before. But an invitation to discuss how to inspire the next generation of scientists, technologists and engineers next week has got me thinking…

Next Monday (Sept 7) I’m taking part in a discussion on science role models, as part of the British Science Festival – hosted by the UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).  It’s shaping up to be a fascinating event, and certainly not one to miss (you can sign up for it here) – not least because it is happening in the virtual world of Second Life (a first for me).  The discussion will be delving into what inspires people to get into science, technology, engineering and mathematics – and how those of us already hooked can help to inspire others.

I don’t want to give too much away before Monday – although I can reveal that the great Dr. Karen James of Twitter, Mashable and The Beagle Project fame will be a co-panelist, and that the event will be the place to be between 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM London time on Monday.

However, to limber myself up for the big event (while providing something of a teaser), I thought I would delve into my own past and revisit some of the inspirations that led to me becoming a scientist.

So without further do (apart to apologize for cultural references that may not make sense to all readers), here are ten inspirations from my youth that got me hooked on science:

1.  My father. I know it’s a bit of a cliché – for which I apologize – but looking back, my father undoubtedly played a major role in sparking my interest in science.  He was a technician for most of his working life – starting off in TV’s, moving on to nuclear power with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and later on working as a lab tech in a sports science department.  He was fascinated by science and technology and what it can be used for (still is), and his spirit of inquiry, questioning and investigation rubbed off – big time.  He also taught me the value of a good technician – without which most scientists would be marginally less productive than a two legged horse.

2.  A defunct radio. When I was around four, someone kindly provided my preschool with a large old fashioned radio – with large Bakelite knobs, impressive dials, and valves (or “tubes” as Americans quaintly refer to them).  It didn’t work, but I was absolutely convinced that I could fix it; and spent hours fiddling around in its innards with a screwdriver.  I failed (nothing to do with my age I’m sure – the previous donors had given us a real dud!), but the experience was the beginning of a long love affair with anything electrical.

3.  My first home chemistry kit. I can’t remember what was in that first kit or even who made it.  What I do remember is being able to replenish it from the local chemist – something that you can’t do these days sadly – and  “augmenting” it with exotic new additions. Irresistible

4.  DIY Science books. Where would I be without local libraries?  Not where I am now I suspect!  I used to devour books on science experiments for the home.  The experiments often didn’t work, I must confess (good training for later days).  But armed with an arsenal of basic household supplies, a good tome from the local library, and my augmented chemistry kit, I was in kid-heaven.

5.  Jacques Cousteau. I still remember the feeling of anticipation – sitting in front of the TV in my pajamas, way after my proper bed time, waiting for the latest nautical adventure from Cousteau and his crew.  Looking back, it was the sense of discovery that had me glued to the set on these rare occasions – I wanted to be informed and inspired, not entertained.

6.  “Teach Yourself Atomic Physics.” I owe so much to this little book (possibly by James Moncur Valentine – I can’t be sure) – which must have gone out of print decades ago.  It was my father’s, but I purloined it and poured over it for hours on end, trying to understand the mysteries of the universe.  I even started to tell people I was going to be a nuclear physicist when I grew up (I was rather young at the time).  I only achieved half of my childhood dream (the physicist bit) – but that was in part because of this book.

7.  Judith Hann. Actually, I would include many of the old Tomorrow’s World team – Raymond Baxter, Michael Rodd, Bob Symes and a number of others. The program had its critics, and in later years tried too hard to grab fleeting attentions – becoming rather shallow.  But as a child growing up, Judith and the others were an inspiration.

8.  Doctor Who. Okay so this one took me by surprise as well – was I really inspired by an individualistic fictitious character with an authority complex?  Looking back, I think I was.  I have a sneaking suspicion – never articulated until the confessional of this blog, that I wanted to be just like John Pertwee or Tom Baker – using science and superior intellect to save the world while cocking a snoot at the establishment.  Come to think about it, I suspect I still do…

9.  Isaac Asimov. There are a number of science-realistic fiction writers I could insert here: Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, H. G. Wells – I read them all.  And while many (not all) of them fell short of writing good “literature,” they nevertheless set my mind ablaze with new ideas and new possibilities.  If this was what science was about – I wanted in!

10.  Mr. Tranquada. Mr. Tranquada (I think I have the name right – it was a long time ago) was a high school physics teacher I had for one year only. I had two other physics teachers at high school who were less than inspirational – although the pot-smoking hippie brought an interesting flavor to the subject, until he got busted!  But the year I had Mr Tranquada was a revelation.  He wasn’t flash.  He didn’t strain to entertain.  And he could be a real sarky so and so.  But when he taught, it was as if he opened a window into a universe of full of new ideas – and the more I experienced, the more I wanted.  He also taught me that there’s no such thing as a stupid question – one of the more important lessons of my youth.

These weren’t my only inspirations that led to me becoming a scientist – but they are amongst the more prominent ones.  Interestingly, there weren’t too many traditional role models there (unless you count Doctor Who of course…)  The people who attracted me were those who expanded my knowledge and understanding – it was what they offered that hooked me, not who they were.  I wonder whether this is just a personal predilection, or whether it hints at something more universal.

Finally, as I compiled this list, I was intrigued by the things that didn’t get me hooked on science as a youth.  Here are just three:

1. My careers advisor. Mr. Barlow was his name.  I asked him once what it took to become a research scientist.  His answer: “You don’t want to do that!”

2.  Dead people. I’m sorry to admit it, but dead scientists just didn’t do it for me.  Things are a little different now. But then, given Newton or an apple, I’d go for the apple.

3. Carl Sagan. Okay, so I may be the only scientist of my generation to admit to not being inspired by the great Carl.  Not having a TV when Cosmos was shown in the UK may have something to do with this   But it just goes to show that you don’t always need a superstar to get someone hooked on science.

Well, that’s the introspective retrospective over.  If you have your own thoughts and ideas on how to hook people on science, join us on Monday -  in the flesh if you are at the British Science Festival, or via Second Life if you are not – details here.

See you there.

Following on from yesterday’s update on my quest to track science influence on Twitter, I’ve posted a bubble-chart of the August “influence stats” for all 523 scientwists in David Bradley’s list over at Many Eyes.

Using the chart, you can quickly explore the number of followers, secondary followers, social capital and a handful of other Twitter stats on the scientwists.

The chart draws on data that Mike Chelen kindly compiled using Twinfluence.

So how do you navigate around these bubble charts, and what do they show?  Here’s a quick tutorial.  (for the adventurous, you can dive straight in here)…

Getting started

First, open this link to the bubble chart at Many Eyes.  The chart on the screen shows “bubbles” representing the number of followers each scientwist has.

Open the bubble chart at Many Eyes, and select "username" from the Color menu

From the “Color” menu at the bottom right of the screen, select “Username”

The screen will now look like the screenshot above, with the scientwists listed to the left of the screen.

Finding specific scientwists

To highlight a particular scientwist, either select them from the list to the left of the screen, or type their name in the search box:

Use the menu on the left or the search box to find specific scientwists

Placing the mouse over the scientwists bubble provides more information on the information being displayed.

To get back to the normal display, either click in the white space surrounding the bubble chart, or clear the search box and hit “Enter”

Showing the number of friends each scientwist has

From the “Bubble Size” menu (bottom left) select “friends_count”.  The bubble chart now shows bubbles with areas that represent the number of people each scientwist is following.  To see the data associated with any bubble, simply position the mouse over it.

To see how many people each scientwist is following, select "friend_count" from the Bubble Size menu

Showing second order followers, social capital, and other stats

Simply select the information you want to see from the Bubble Size menu.  As well as second order followers and social capital, there are a few stats that Twinfluence provides.

Choose the info you are interested in from the Bubble Size menu

Why the bubble charts?

As well as being visually attractive (I’m revealing my shallowness here), the bubble charts at Many Eyes have a couple of advantages in displaying data like these:

• Because the data are represented in two dimensions (area) rather than one (bar height, for instance) it’s a lot easier to compare large and small numbers.  for instance, @guardiantech has over 200 times more followers than @2020science.  On a linear plot, you wouldn’t be able to see @2020science – using the bubbles, where area represents the data – you can see both scientwists together.
• As the bubbles are displayed in two dimensions, it becomes easier to spot interesting patterns and associations.

And finally…

These data were collected by @MikeChelen using an API he wrote specifically to gather large amounts of information from Twinfluence.  And while we’ve used this technique here to look at scientwists, I suspect that it could also be used to great effect to examine other groups of twitter users.

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/08/24/visualizing_scientwists_aug09/feed/ 0 http://2020science.org/2009/08/23/science-influence-on-twitter-august-update/ http://2020science.org/2009/08/23/science-influence-on-twitter-august-update/#comments Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:38:25 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2066

It’s the middle of August, and time for my regular two-monthly update on science tweep influence on Twitter.

Back in April I posted data on three indicators of “influence” for ~400 science-focused Twitter users – based on David Bradley’s list of “Scientific Twitter Friends.” This is the third update of the indicators – the second was back in June.  This time round, Mike Chelen (@MikeChelen) was kind enough to put together an application that grabbed the data directly from Twinfluence.

As usual, I’ve posted the data on Many Eyes to allow you to play around with it, and get a better feel for how these indicators vary with person and time.  This time round though, there are separate bubble charts for primary followers, second order followers and social capital (follow the links, and select the data for August – the charts default to the April data).  If you get lost, check out the screencast on navigating the bubble charts in the June update.

Not a whole lot has changed since June.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus number of followers (horizontal). Watch out for the logarithmic x-axis!

The modal number of followers per SciTweep has dropped a little, but overall the distribution of followers per SciTweep hasn’t shifted too much.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus number of secondary followers (horizontal). Watch out for the logarithmic x-axis!

Perhaps the most obvious change is in the distribution of secondary followers amongst SciTweeps.  This has shifted to the right slightly overall, but there are fewer SciTweeps with large numbers of secondary followers.  Either some tweeps with mega-followings have been dropping SciTweeps from the people they follow, or the figures reflect a re-alignment within Twitter that has impacted the data.  Either way, my number of second order followers was hit badly over the past couple of months!

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus social capital (horizontal). Watch the logarithmic x-axis!

The range of SciTweep social capital values has narrowed over the past couple of months – more people with a higher social capital, but fewer with a mega-high social capital.

And that’s pretty much it for now.  The plan is to have another update in October, although I may also ask for suggestions on a better way to track SciTweep influence over the long term – including thoughts on putting together a more representative group of tweeps to follow.

Notes:

The data shown here are derived using Twinfluence.  The August data were collected by Mike Chelen.

Where the number of second order followers topped out on Twinfluence, it was capped at 20,000,000 in April, and 30,000,000 in June.

My thanks to David Bradley for compiling the list of “Scientific Twitter Friends” in the first place.  This is largely a self-selected list of science-types on Twitter, and in no way represents the full scientific community there.  But it does provide a highly useful cohort of people who profess to have a science-perspective, and can be tracked over time.  This series of analyses uses the list as it stood mid-April.  To preserve the group, I haven’t added new SciTweeps from David’s list.

A quick word on the plots:  These are a rather crude way of presenting the data, but provide a good qualitative indication of distributions and trends.  The number of science Tweeps represented by each step in the plots represents the Tweeps with primary followers, secondart followers or social capital lying within the range of the step.  As the horizontal axis uses a logarithmic scale, the range of values covered by the steps increases dramatically going from left to right.  As the data are roughly logarithmically distributed, this makes visualizing, comparing and analyzing the numbers easier.  But care should be taken when interpreting the plots, given the logarithmically compressed horizontal axis.  In particular, modal values are dependent in part on the use of a log-axis, and would be different if the data were plotted with a linear horizontal axis.

Reviewing Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

My name is Andrew, and I am scientifically illiterate.

Just thought I’d get that off my chest!

And before you protest too much, I do have some pretty convincing evidence.  Math makes my head ache.   I cannot recite the Earth’s geological timeline from memory.  And there’s a one in ten chance that I’ll stumble over pronouncing terms like artemisinin and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.

The problem lies of course with what is understood by “scientific illiteracy” rather than my abilities—at least I hope that’s the case.

The idea that modern society only works if it is based on a common understanding, appreciation and use of science has been around for a while.  It seems to make sense – in a society that is increasingly dependent on science, widespread scientific ignorance is likely to lead to non-democratic leadership by a scientific elite, or ill-informed (but democratic) decisions that are ultimately destructive.

The solution would seem to be to replace scientific ignorance with scientific literacy.  Get everyone thinking and acting like scientists, and the world will surely be a better place.

Unfortunately, this perspective turns out to be rather naïve.  Dividing the world into scientific illiterates and literates devalues the many other skill sets and perspectives that contribute to healthy decision-making within society.  It also encourages an over-simplistic approach to the challenges of critical thinking and evidence-based decision making—namely that educating people more about science will result in them making the “right” decisions.  And it has a tendency to lead to scientific literacy being measured in ways that have little bearing on a person’s ability to make informed decisions…

Over the past decade or so, scholars and policy makers have come to realize that more sophisticated approaches are needed if science-informed, yet democratic, decisions are to be made by people.  As a result, rather than talk about scientific literacy, discussions now tend to revolve around the ideas of dialogue and engagement – empowering people in a complex society to make personal and group decisions that are ultimately constructive.

So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to review Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s new book “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”

Fortunately, it didn’t take much reading to convince me that their perspective is rather more sophisticated than the book’s title suggests. Unscientific America is a laudable attempt to tackle science’s place in American society in an easily accessible way.  Highly readable, largely enjoyable, occasionally infuriating, the book takes on the challenge of how to empower members of society to make the best use of science.

There was a lot that I liked about the book – and a lot that resonated with my own views.  But there were also points where I felt the book fell short of what it could be.

Despite the book’s rather sensationalist subtitle, Mooney and Kirshenbaum do a good job of placing scientific illiteracy in a modern context.  Chapter 2 on “rethinking the problem of scientific illiteracy” provides an accessible overview of current thinking – and does it reasonably well.  The notion of a “public” that will make the “right” decisions if only they are sufficiently well educated – the so-called deficit model – is introduced, examined, then carefully put aside.  The problem, Mooney and Kirshenbaum point out, is that the deficit model can all too easily be used to exempt scientists from the responsibility of ensuring their work is an integral part of the society they belong to:

“It’s an educational problem, they say, or a problem with the media (which doesn’t cover science accurately or pay it enough attention), and then they go back to their labs.”

But rather than discard the term “scientific illiteracy,” Mooney and Kirshenbaum prefer to redefine it, in their words “getting past issues of finger-pointing and buck-passing and the misconception that our problems can be reduced to what non-scientists say in response to survey questions.”

Their solution: emphasize an aspect of scientific literacy that stresses citizens’ awareness of the importance of science to politics, policy, and a collective future.

This makes a lot of sense, and is in many ways the lynchpin of the book.  But I do have my reservations over their adherence to the idea of scientific literacy.

When scholars began to realize that the deficit model wasn’t particularly helpful to integrating science and society (for a multitude of reasons), they began to move away from talking about “science literacy” and towards talking about developing dialogues and engaging people in making science-informed decisions.  These approaches complement broader discussions on the roles of critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making; integrating science into a more holistic perspective of modern society.

Having established the central focus of the book, Mooney and Kirshenbaum present their ideas in a series of connected essays.  From a distance, the structure makes sense.  Chapters 1 and 2 set out the challenge as seen by the authors.  Chapters 3 and 4 continue on to fill in the historical background – how American culture’s apparently strained relationship with science got to where it is now.  Chapters 5 – 8 then deal with specific issues that highlight the current state of play—science in the media, science and popular entertainment, science and religion, and science and politics.  Finally, chapters 9 and 10 begin to explore possible solutions to the “problem” of scientific illiteracy – culminating in a short conclusion that attempts to pull everything together.

Some of these chapters are a good and informative read.  I was enjoying myself immensely up to chapter 8.  But then I felt that the book began to run out of steam.  Repeatedly, I found myself intrigued by questions set up by Chris and Sheril, then disappointed by a lack of resolution.  In an attempt to try and keep things simple I suspect they ended glossing over a lot of things (see my comments below on the book’s endnotes). But in the latter chapters I was increasingly aware of a lack of depth behind the points being made.

A good example is “Bruising their religion”—the chapter on science, religion and the “new atheists.”  This particular chapter has ruffled plenty of feathers throughout the blogosphere already, and I don’t intend to ruffle more by adding my two cents worth to Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s perspective.  But I do want to highlight the intellectual letdown that I felt when reading the chapter – something that I experienced with increasing frequency as I progressed toward the end of the book.

In this chapter, Mooney and Kirshenbaum roundly criticize vocal and intellectually aggressive proponents of atheism—a crowd that will stop at little it seems to denigrate religious beliefs and humiliate those who adhere to them.  They argue that the crude combative and even ignorant tactics employed by people like PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins do more to undermine scientific literacy than they do to support it.

This makes sense—intellectual bullying doesn’t often have pride of place in communications manuals!

Mooney and Kirshenbaum then state that the divide between science and religion is a false one, and the two are not mutually exclusive.  But they give no concrete evidence for this, beyond citing a handful of scientists who held (or hold) religious views.

The result is a reader who is left high and dry.  I wanted to know how science and religion may be reconciled, and why the preaching of the new atheists is intellectually as well as socially suspect.  But what I got was little more than opinion and unsubstantiated statements.

The following chapters in the book suffer from a similar glossing over of arguments—although perhaps not to the same extent as this chapter.  And as a result, I was left feeling frustrated at the lack of substance in what I was reading.

Unscientific America culminates in a six-page conclusion titled “A new mission for American Science.”  Reaching this point, I was full of expectations—this was where the meat would be (I thought), where I would finally learn how science illiteracy threatens our future, and what the answers are.

In the event, I found it a bit of a let down.  While I had enjoyed the book – which is only 132 pages long if you discount the extensive endnotes – I felt that I hadn’t been convinced that scientific illiteracy does indeed threaten America’s future.  And as for the solution to this apparently looming problem, everything seemed to lead up to Mooney and Kirshenbaum proposing that the responsibility for integrating science into society lies with scientists. After all the buildup, this seemed a little too easy.

To be fair, it’s an important conclusion.  If science is to be integrated into society, scientists as a group need to be a part of that society rather than apart from it.  It’s something that we are still a long way from achieving, but I would argue it is essential if future decisions are to help rather than hinder social development.

And to be honest, Mooney and Kirshenbaum do a good job of bringing this need to a broad audience.

But I can’t help feeling that Unscientific America falls short of what it could have been.  Mooney and Kirshenbaum clearly have a political and ideological bias that ends up being woven through the book, and at the end of the day this weakens its authority for me.  The Bush administration’s “war on science” for instance is cited repeatedly as hindering science literacy over the past 8 years, and Mooney and Kirshenbaum stress the need to move on from “an administration widely denounced for a disdain of science unprecedented in modern American history.”  Indeed, Chris Mooney has written about this in his previous book—The Republican War On Science.

Yet framing a book on science in such a strong political light is likely to alienate some readers, and will lead to diminished authority over time.

On top of this, I feel that Mooney and Kirshenbaum never quite succeeded in making a watertight case for why scientific illiteracy threatens our future—leading to the central premise of the book coming across as ideological rather than a persuasively argued and clearly defined challenge.

And that brings me back to the issue of scientific illiteracy.  From where I sit, it seems to be a phrase fraught with problems—it reinforces an “us” and “them” mentality, it has the potential to create arbitrary and often meaningless divisions.  And, to be frank, it gets some people’s backs up.  Joking aside, I could well be labeled “scientifically illiterate” under some measures of literacy.  Yet I think I have been somewhat successful in my career as a scientist, policy advisor and communicator.   So I struggle with a book so overtly focused on scientific illiteracy.  Mooney and Kirshenbaum have done a good job of framing scientific illiteracy in a sophisticated and accessible way.  But in the long run, I wonder whether the book would have had greater authority and a longer shelf life if it had made the break from dated concepts, and fully embraced the need for dialogue and engagement when integrating science into society.

So to wrap up – should you read this book?  Absolutely.  But read it forewarned.  Understand where the authors are coming from.  Accept that in 132 pages of writing for a general audience you won’t be taken on a deep and intellectually challenging journey.  And don’t hesitate to chapter-hop – I particularly liked chapter 2!

And above all, enjoy it – whether you agree with Mooney and Kirshenbaum or not, they are entertaining and talented writers, and Unscientific America is an enjoyable—and not too taxing—read.

Endnotes

About the endnotes in Unscientific America

Although Unscientific America only stretches to 132 pages it is complemented by 66 pages of endnotes, comprising citations and additional comments.  I’m not a great fan of this format—especially as the endnotes aren’t cited on the pages they relate to.  But it is an extensive resource for those who are interested in delving further into the points Chris and Sheril make.

I do have a problem though where there is extensive commentary included in the endnotes.  While reading the book, you have no idea whether a particular idea or comment is fleshed out later on, unless you keep one finger in the endnotes. This is not a comfortable way to read a book!  I understand why the book is published this way – it keeps things simple for readers (I almost wrote “scientifically illiterate readers” – slapped wrists for that!).  But it isn’t half a pain for anyone seriously interested in what the authors are trying to say.

It’s far better, in my opinion, to ensure that the relevant stuff is incorporated into the main text, not sequestered away where no-one will read it.

More on science and society

Many people have studied the complex interplay between science and society, and reams of work—from the scholarly to the popular—has been written on the subject.  To get a good feel for current thinking, I would recommend “What can we learn from 25 years of PUS survey research? Liberating and expanding the agenda” by Martin Bauer, Nick Allum and Steve Miller [PDF, 116 KB].  Also check out Matthew Nisbet’s blog, Framing Science, and the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School.

And a final comment…

Since it was released several weeks ago, Unscientific America has been the subject of a number of reviews.  Although I’ve caught some of the chatter surrounding these, I have made a conscious effort not to read them before writing my own rather belated piece.  So hopefully these thoughts are mine, and not simply a regurgitation of other people’s ideas.

Now to see whether what I’ve written is completely out of step with the rest of the blogging world…

The internet is littered with videos of science lectures and science talks – witness the recently posted “100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists” for instance.  But it’s not easy to sift through the tedious, the impenetrable and the down right boring, to arrive at a core of science talks that really are worth watching.

One source that consistently comes up trumps thought is TED (standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design) – an incredible organization bringing innovative thinkers together to spark off “ideas worth spreading.” It’s no surprise that many of the BestCollegesOnline.com 100 lectures are, in fact, TED talks.

TED speakers are challenges to “give the talk of their lives”  in 18 minutes or less – and to deliver it in front of a crowd of celebrities, thought-leaders, and others who have little time for waffle and obfuscation.  The result is some truly inspirational talks from some of the world’s leading scientists and science communicators – many of which are freely available online.

But now potential viewers are faced with another problem – where to start amidst such great audiovisual riches?

In an attempt to help out, I’ve just posted a new guest blog over on Mashable that picks out “5 TED Talks on Science That Will Blow Your Mind” – 5 of my favorite talks, that also come together to tell a roughly coherent story.  I had a little help from some great Twitter followers in picking these – more of that at the end of this post.

Rather than re-list the five videos here, it’s easier to pop over to the Mashable blog where they can be viewed directly (although to whet your appetite, they star Margaret Wertheim, Craig Venter, Penelope Boston, Brian Cox and Sir Martin Reese).

What I did want to do though is to include a couple of great TED science talks here that didn’t quite make the cut – a 2020 Science bonus if you like.

The first comes from astronomer Clifford Stoll, and is a study in channeling ADD…  It’s not actually (although you’ll see what I mean when you watch the video) – rather, Clifford gives an incredibly energetic and deeply personal perspective on science and learning.  It’s also highly entertaining:

The second bonus TED talk comes from physicist Stephen Hawking, tackling the origin of the universe and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  The contrast between Hawkins’ and Stoll’s deliveries couldn’t be starker.  Yet Hawkins’ razor-sharp clarity of thought makes this video compelling viewing:

These are just a taster – catch the rest of the recommendations at Mashable.com

Acknowledgements

When I started to put the Mashable blog together, I asked my faithful Twitter followers for their recommendations on great science videos.  I got some great suggestions in return – some appearing here and on Mashable, some stashed away for another day.  My thanks in particular to @WordsAbtNumbers, @LizRobillard, @aBigHairySpider, @thegovier, @physicus, @bookhling, @tswaterman, @classroomtools, @ettagirl, @mactavish, @SteveHeggie, @pondenperson and @ruthseeley – I owe you one!

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/07/22/ted-talks-science/feed/ 0 http://2020science.org/2009/07/18/anything-i-can-do-you-can-do-better/ http://2020science.org/2009/07/18/anything-i-can-do-you-can-do-better/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:30:57 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=1959

Art makes a mockery of experts and empowers the marginalized. At least that’s how I feel at the moment!

Having broadcast the news of Tim Jones’ fabulous Exquisite Corpse of Science project, I thought it only fitting that I do what I’ve been telling everyone else to do, and get out my Sharpie.  And here’s the result:

My entry for the Exquisite Corpse of Science project - don't laugh!

(For the uninitiated, the idea is to get as many people as possible to draw what they think is important about science and submit these to Tim – who will then stitch them together into one large mosaic).

This has been a lesson in humility for me – I may know a thing or two about science, but I’m hopeless when it comes to expressing this through drawings.

Yet it’s precisely because of my artistic deficiencies that I thought it worthwhile posting my rather crude contribution here – if this is the best I can come up with, think what someone with a good eye and uninhibited imagination could do!

Just to prove the point, this is what my twelve year old son came up with:

My son's entry for the Exquisite Corpse of Science project - vsibly superior!

Tim’s Exquisite Corpse of Science concept is intriguing precisely because it humbles people who think they know stuff while empowering those who know they don’t – and in doing so it reduces many of the barriers to effective science engagement.

It’s also a lot of fun – once you’ve chilled out a bit and realized that there’s no such thing as a bad drawing here!

So now you know how low the bar is, grab your pen and pad and get drawing (details on what to do here).  The more people who contribute, the better the end result will be!

End Notes.

Something I did try here was to record an audio commentary while drawing the pictures – I got my son to do the same.  This is a lot more work than simply doing the drawing (although Tim is accepting accompanying audio files) – but the end result did help make sense of some otherwise rather obscure doodlings.

These are the results.  Alex’s first…

Then mine…

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/07/18/anything-i-can-do-you-can-do-better/feed/ 4 http://2020science.org/2009/07/15/biggest-science-art-project/ http://2020science.org/2009/07/15/biggest-science-art-project/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:27:32 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=1948

Okay, so there may be a dash of hyperbole there, but following up on the success of his Exquisite Corpse of Science project (see my previous post), Tim Jones is hatching an ambitious plan to create the world’s largest interconnected montage of drawings representing peoples’ impressions of, aspirations for and concerns about science.

The plan is really simple – and it involves you!

Simply send a sketch of what science means to you to Tim at corpse@communicatescience.com, and he will do the rest.

There are some simple rules:

1.  Draw – in your own style and without getting hung up on technical or artistic ability – what you think is important about science

2.  Anyone can participate – young, old, scientists, science drop-outs, stay at home mums (or dads), janitors, Nobel prize winners, even economists – everyone is welcome.

3.  The picture should be connected to points roughly one and two thirds of the way along the edge of the page (each side and top to bottom) – allowing your doodlings to be connected to every one else’s.  If this sounds confusing, take a look at the example below.

4.  The picture should be square.  It can either be drawn free hand and scanned, or drawn directly on the computer.  Either way, it should be 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels large when finished.

5.  The final compressed file is smaller than 500 KB.

6.  You should sign your art work

7.  And if you want – feel free to add an audio commentary.

More details can be found on Tim’s blog – which I would encourage you to read – together with some really good explanations on what on earth all this is about!  I’d especially recommend watching the video at the end of the page.

Any questions – pop over to Tim Jones’ blog Zoonomian and post it in the comments section here.

And while I (and Tim) are probably being a little tongue in cheek about this being the biggest science-art project in history, with enough submissions it could be.  So be a part of history, and get drawing!!

[Update 7/22/07 - check out my entry here, then feel inspired to grab a pen and produce something better - it won't be hard ]

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 worth watching in its entirety:

The Exquisite Corpse of Science from Tim Jones on Vimeo…

Tim and colleagues adapted the Exquisite Corpse techniques developed by the Surrealist movement to mesh together drawings of what four very different people thought about science and its impact and relevance.  He describes the process here.

I love the result.  It has an openness and honesty that draws you in, and provides far more insight into what each of the contributors are thinking than interviews alone would.  And the end result is visually stunning.

It also engages  viewers as well as participants in thinking about science from their perspective, as they see it visualized through the eyes of others.

It just goes to show that, sometimes, effective science and engagement just needs a Sharpie [felt tip pen to any Brits reading this], a drawing pad, and a bit of imagination!

[If, as me, you liked this - spread the word.  It would be great to see what others do with the technique]

Just a quick post (at least, as far as the text goes). Last week, I had the pleasure of appearing on Twit TV’s Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour with Kristen Sanford and Leo Laporte. The conversation covered nanotechnology from every conceivable angle. I should have known with Leo’s opening question – asking what I thought of Eric Drexler’s ideas – that we were in for a fun ride!

As Kiki and Leo managed to get in a whole bunch of questions about what nanotech is (and isn’t), where and how it’s being used, what’s so great about it, and what some of the possible barriers to it’s development are, I thought it worth posting the show here.

I should warn you, it’s long, running just shy of 70 minutes. The full show can be streamed below. But for anyone who wants to fast forward through the boring bits or watch it at their leisure, it can also be downloaded here. [Quicktime, 199 MB]

The show was recorded by the folks at On Demand Twit Video, and is reproduced here under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada Creatives Commons license:

Back in April I posted data on three indicators of “influence” for ~400 science-focused Twitter users – based on David Bradley’s list of “Scientific Twitter Friends.” Intrigued to see how these Tweeps’ influence evolves over time, I will be updating these data periodically.

In this first update (aided and abetted by @ruthseeley – thanks Ruth!), the overall number of followers (both primary and secondary) of the SciTweep cohort has increased over the past two months – as would be expected given increasing interest in Twitter.  There is the slightest hint of an increase in overall Social Capital. But this is marginal, suggesting that SciTweeps are not deviating substantially from Twitter-wide trends in increasing followers.

These data are available on Many Eyes to play around with (see the screencast below for tips on how to mess around with the bubble chart).  You can even download the original data here and dive deeper into it…

The dataset is reasonably large and no doubt holds a multitude of insights for those dedicated to mining it (although with only two date points, it is still lacking in depth).  But rather than go into deep analysis here, I thought I would restrain myself and simply focus on the distribution of the three indicators amongst the group, and changes over the past two months. (Details on the three indicators of “influence” are covered in the April SciTweet blog).

In looking at these figures, please bear in mind that the group of ~400 Tweeps is one of convenience – it does not represent all current science Tweeps, and indeed overlooks some key figures in the Twitter community.  But for the purpose of following a group of science-focused Twitter users over time, it serves its purpose well.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus number of followers (horizontal). Watch out for the logarithmic x-axis!

Looking at SciTweep followers, there has been a shift in the modal number of followers from 133 in April to 422 in June – although these figures are approximate given the step-size used.  Clearly though, there’s been an increase in the number of people following most of our SciTweets.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus number of secondary followers (horizontal). Watch out for the logarithmic x-axis!

There has been an overall increase in secondary followers over the past two months, although not sufficient to lead to a definite increase in modal value in the plot above.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus social capital (horizontal). Watch the logarithmic x-axis!

The social capital distribution has barely shifted over the past two months.  As this is based on the ratio of a SciTweep’s secondary to primary followers, it provides a measure of how the SciTweeps are faring compared to the rest of Twitterdom.  A significant shift to the left or right would suggest the cohort of science Tweets loosing or gaining influence compared to other Tweeps.  Given the similarity between the two distributions above though, it seems that the SciTweeps are holding their own, but not showing appreciably different changes in influence compared to other tweeps.

Finally, I thought it worth posting a quick screencast of how to navigate round the bubble charts on Many Eyes.  Enjoy:

Update 6/23/09:  Bubble Charts updated with correct data for @maverickny (formerly – and erroneously – listed as @maverick_NY)

Notes:

The data shown here are derived using Twinfluence.

Where the number of second order followers topped out on Twinfluence, it was capped at 30,000,000

My thanks to David Bradley for compiling the list of “Scientific Twitter Friends” in the first place.  This is largely a self-selected list of science-types on Twitter, and in no way represents the full scientific community there.  But it does provide a highly useful cohort of people who profess to have a science-perspective, and can be tracked over time.  This series of analyses uses the list as it stood mid-April.

A quick word on the plots:  These are a rather crude way of presenting the data, but provide a good qualitative indication of distributions and trends.  The number of science Tweeps represented by each step in the plots represents the Tweeps with primary followers, secondart followers or social capital lying within the range of the step.  As the horizontal axis uses a logarithmic scale, the range of values covered by the steps increases dramatically going from left to right.  As the data are roughly logarithmically distributed, this makes visualizing, comparing and analyzing the numbers easier.  But care should be taken when interpreting the plots, given the logarithmically compressed horizontal axis.  In particular, modal values are dependent in part on the use of a log-axis, and would be different if the data were plotted with a linear horizontal axis.

And finally, many thanks to @ruthseeley for help in running SciTweeps through Twinfluence – a finger-numbing task!

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/06/23/science-influence-on-twitter-june-update/feed/ 16 http://2020science.org/2009/06/03/to-tweet-or-not-to-tweet/ http://2020science.org/2009/06/03/to-tweet-or-not-to-tweet/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:58:55 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=1696

Should live tweeting and blogging from scientific meetings be controlled?

Back in May, Daniel MacArthur – a researcher and blogger – wrote a number of on-the-spot blogs on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Biology of Genomes meeting.  By all accounts a number of people were tweeting and blogging from the meeting.  But Daniel had the misfortune to come under scrutiny from Genomeweb – a web-based news service – because of his actions. As ScienceInsider reported yesterday, Genomeweb complained to the conference organizers that Daniel was reporting from the meeting without having to abide by the rules governing professional journalists attending the conference.  As a result, the rules are being changed – according to ScienceInsider, the meeting’s registration form will be revised “such that all participants will agree that if they are going to blog or twitter results, they need to let CSHL know in advance and get the presenter’s okay.”

Judging by discussions on the web today, the story has hit a nerve.  More importantly, it has raised a thorny issue that really needs to be tackled as the way people communicate changes: 

What’s OK and what’s not when you’re at a scientific meeting?

As a blogger and Twitter user, as well as a regular speaker at scientific meetings, it’s a question that is directly relevant to me.  Reading the discussions today and talking with people on Twitter about the issue, I was forced to think a little more carefully about how I make decisions on when to tweet or blog, and when not to…

I do have my own set of rather fuzzy internal guidelines, but I’ve never attempted anything as formal as writing them down.  However, given the rising significance of this issue, I thought it might be worth thinking through them a little more systematically.

I’m still trying to work out what the appropriate boundaries are here, so what you are getting is more my current thought processes than any definitive answers – think of it as live -logging from my brain.  As a consequence, I could well change my mind – completely – at some future date.  But this is where I am at the moment.

First off, it’s worth thinking about why people blog or tweet, what the purpose of scientific meetings is, and the role of the established media at these meetings.

Blogging and tweeting: Are bloggers and tweeps citizen-journalists?  I don’t think we are on the whole.  Certainly, some people use blogs and Twitter to report on events.  But many others simply use the media as a way of communicating their own thoughts, observations and reactions to others. This is not journalism.

My own stuff is a mix of expert opinion, observations on stuff that grabs my interest, and occasionally factual information that I think others will be interested in.  I don’t “report” – I’m not a reporter, and I couldn’t hope to do it with nearly the skill of someone having the appropriate training.

There is a potential problem though when social media commentators – which is what a lot of us are I guess – are treated as reporters, and the stuff we write is judged accordingly.  However, placing the same code of ethics and restrictions on bloggers and Twitter users as professional journalists makes little sense – the problem is not one of what is being written as how it is being read.  Rather, new solutions are needed to the new challenges raused by social media.

Scientific meetings: Scientific meetings come in all shapes and sizes.  Some are invitation only; others are open and accessible to anyone.  Some are designed to hash out areas of uncertainty between experts; others to present results to a broad audience.  Some are held to expose research to rigorous peer review; others to establish scientific authority.  Acceptable reporting practices will undoubtedly differ from meeting to meeting.  I would be very surprised if anyone thought that live-tweeting from a private meeting was acceptable.  But a running commentary on a public keynote given by established expert would be a very different matter in my eyes.

Scientific meetings and the media: Once upon a time, scientific conferences were predominantly about exchanging and examining new information with your peers – at least, they were in my field of research.  Reporters just weren’t a part of the equation.  Now, major conferences tend to be a media-fest – with the scientific community clamoring to have their messages and stories heard by all and sundry.  There’s tremendous pressure to “sell” studies to the media – to work out what might appeal to a broad readership, then dress it up so it’s as attractive as possible.  If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the press releases and media coverage surrounding something like an American Chemical Society meeting.

As a result there is a tendency – at some conferences at least – for presentations to be less about peer to peer review and discussion, and more about broad dissemination and promotion.  In this context, people want their work to be communicated in the media – but on their terms.  In other words, they love the media when they feel they are on control, but get antsy if they feel that control slipping.

Trying to pull this together, it seems clear that as social media stretches and challenges the established way of doing things, there’s going to have to be some adjustment on both sides.  I think it’s fair to say that there are probably boundaries to appropriate live-tweeting and blogging that still need to be hashed out.  But conference organizers and speakers also need to adapt to changing circumstances.  And I don’t think that this means treating citizen commentators as journalists.  But I do think that, among other things, it means shedding attitudes that treat the media – social or otherwise – as something to be controlled and used, rather than worked in partnership with.

Which brings me to how I approach tweeting and blogging.  I’ve live-tweeted from meetings in the past, as well as blogged on meetings.  I have also made conscious decisions not to comment in any form on meetings on occasions.  I don’t think I have got it right in every case.  But I haven’t had too many complaints either.  So how do I determine what I do and don’t do?

Here’s a first stab at trying to describe my decision-making process:

In general: Irrespective of the setting, I tend to ask whether the information being presented is confidential, whether it is sensitive in any way, and whether others would benefit from reading about it on Twitter or 2020science. There has been at least one occasion where I decided not to live-tweet from a public meeting because I thought it would embarrass the speakers unnecessarily.  There have been other occasions where I have live tweeted to provide people not at the meeting a sense of what someone is saying, as they say it.

This only applies to formal presentations and public comments.  Publicly commenting on private conversations is absolutely out as far as I’m concerned, and I will only write about side conversations the person I’m talking to knows my intentions beforehand.

Invitation-only meetings: Definitely no live tweeting, and no blogging unless express permission is given.

Meetings with clearly stated reporting limitations: Generally, no live tweeting, and abiding by the rules when it comes to blogging.

Expert presentation & discussion of non-peer reviewed data. If the aim of the meeting is to seriously assess and discuss someone’s unpublished research, I would hesitate to live tweet.  I might blog – but only if it seemed appropriate given the state and significance of the research.

Open conferences (i.e. anyone who pays can attend) where researchers are reviewing the state of knowledge, presenting published data, or clearly think they are the bees knees and everyone should know it. These I see as fair game for live tweeting and blogging – without the permission of the speaker.

Public meetings, where anyone can attend and there is no entrance fee. Open season as far as tweeting and blogging go.

I will probably modify these with time and experience – it’s a first stab after all.  But I think it’s a necessary one.  Widespread communication through social media is a reality, it is challenging how things are done, and a new equilibrium needs to be found between those providing information and those using and distributing it.  The danger is that without some honest soul-searching by everyone involved, the new equilibrium could be more detrimental than beneficial.

And on a final note, Daniel MacArthur wrote a very gracious yet insightful response to Genomeweb’s concerns – evidence (if you needed it) that serious commentations are committed to getting this right, for everyone’s benefit.

At least, vote for your favorite science blog post!  Voting is now open on the the 171 (yes – 171!) blog posts nominated for this year’s Quark award for science – being run by 3 Quarks Daily…

This is a great opportunity to support quality science blogging.  But you’ll need to hurry to get your say in, as the poll closes on June 7th – with the top 20 contenders being posted on the 3QD site on June 8th.

Links to the 171 nominees are listed here – this in itself is a great list of science blogs, and is worth perusing whether or not you cast your vote.  But of course, the aim is to get as many people as possible to identify their favorite piece of science writing from the past 12 months.

So please do add your voice to those who have already voted – there’s something to suite every taste in the list.  There are even a couple of 2020 Science posts there – should you feel the desire to express your appreciation

Cheers!

[Note: polling has now ended.  The shortlist of blogs selected is posted here]

Science bloggers sometimes have a tough time being heard through the incessant chatter and endless distractions endemic to the web. Which is a shame, as there is a wealth of top-knotch writing out there to be digested and enjoyed, if only more people knew about it.  The good news is that a new award from the folks at 3 Quarks Daily could help raise awareness of some of the best writing out there.

On Monday, 3 Quarks Daily announced The Quarks – four annual prizes for blog posts in the areas of science, arts & literature, politics, and philosophy.  The prizes will be awarded four times a year on the two solstices and equinoxes, starting with the science prize on June 21, and ending with the philosophy prize on March 10.

This is where you come in.  Nominations for the science blog prize opened May 24th, and close June 1st. If you want to support quality science blogging, simply post the link to a blog you want to nominate in the comments here.  But make sure you do so before June 1st…

The rules are simple:  Anything written between May 24 2008 and now is eligible for nomination.

Between June 1st and June 8th, you will have the chance to vote for your favorite nominations.

Then on June 21st, Stephen Pinker will select the winning entry from six finalists.

This is a great way to raise the profile of science blogging.  But it does depend on people nominating blogs and – more importantly – voting.  So please don’t be shy, and add your suggestions to the list of nominations.

If you are unsure where to begin, check out the science blogs listed to the right of this page.  Science writer Carl Zimmer has even simplified your task by listing some of his favorite posts on his blog The Loom.

And if, by some whim, you feel like nominating something from 2020 Science but want some inspiration, here are seven of my favorite posts from the last year:

Synthetic biology, ethics and the hacker culture

Geoengineering: Does it need a dose of geoethics?

Darwin, evolution, and the genesis of intelligent design

Science, society and the Second Enlightenment

Blogging the demise of science journalism

Cultural smokescreens

The long shout

Whatever you do though, make sure you nominate a science blog post from someone – and then vote!

Thanks

In the long run, does art trump science?

Lateral communication—sending information from point to point around the world—is so fast and efficient these days that we tend to take it for granted.  But how good are we at passing information forward in time—what you might call longitudinal communication?  If we wanted to send a message to our kids’ kids’ kids, how well would we do?

If it seems a strange question, blame it on the excess of “culture” I was exposed to at last week’s meetings marking the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures Lecture.

Both meetings I attended—one in Cambridge MA and the other at the New York Academy of Science—were marvelously enjoyable and stimulating.  But there was one idea in particular that intrigued me, prompted by a talk by Harvard University’s Peter Galison:  If you wanted to convey something to people living 100, 1000 or even 10,000 years into the future, how would you do it?

Of course it depends on the type of information we’re talking about here—I’ll get to that in a minute.  But let’s focus on the storage media first.  100 years out, information stored on digital media might—just might—survive.  1000 years out, and you begin to fall back on older technologies—writing on durable surfaces for instance.  But 10,000 years out?  Even if you could encode information in a format that would survive that long, how would you ensure the people reading it could understand it?

Think about this for a moment.  You send an email today.  Will it still be round in a year’s time?  Assume it’s archived somewhere—will that archive still be intact 10 years from now?  100 years down the line, there’s a pretty high chance that the media on which the email was stored will have failed—digital storage has a limited lifetime.  What are the chances that someone has faithfully transferred the message to new media on a regular basis?  In 1000 years, the chances of the data and the software to read it still being available are pretty slim.  And in 10,000 years, it’s hard to imagine anything as ephemeral as digital data surviving intact.

Putting aside the irony that the information age could end up leaving a gaping hole in the historic records as digital documents replace more durable written ones, this rather trivial example does illustrate the difficulties in passing meaningful information forward through successive generations.

So back to the original question—if you have something important you want to pass on hundreds or thousands of years into the future, how do you do it?  Sticking with the media for the moment, one partial solution is to use more durable media.  Flash memory lasts a year or so.  DVD’s will last for several years before degrading.  Archival paper lasts tens or even hundreds of years.  Parchment can last even longer.  And stone—if protected—can retain information for millennia.

You can see a pattern emerging here—the more recent the media, the more quickly it fails.  At the rate we’re going, we’ll be loosing information as fast as we generate it in 50 years’ time—leading to Kurzweil-like singularity event that ends up with civilization collapsing rather than emerging into a brave new world.  I’m being facetious, but you can see the problem.

This is only half the issue though.  The flip side is how information is read and interpreted.  We have information etched in stone from millennia ago, but getting a handle on what was intended is not easy.  And understanding the meaning behind the information is harder still.

If information is to be transmitted a long way into the future, it must be accompanied with some means to interpret it.

So what’s the answer here?

The first part of it, I think, is to work out what sort of information we are talking about—what exactly is it we might want people to know 10,000 years down the line?  Let me be bold and suggest that it is stuff like how to stay healthy; how to craft societies that work; how to ensure people have access to food, water, heat and shelter; how to understand what it means to be human.  I don’t think that preserving the blueprints for the latest iPod will be that high on the agenda.

Once the type of information is known, the means to capture that information and pass it on in a durable manner need to be found.

This is exactly the challenge faced by a group of people back in the 1990’s and brings me back to Peter Galison’s talk.  In 1974, the US Atomic Energy Commission chose an ancient salt bed 26 miles east of Carlsbad for exploratory work in the search for an underground radioactive waste repository site—somewhere to dispose of defense-related transuranic radioactive waste.  In 1999 the first shipments of waste arrived at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP for short—the vanguard of a program that is scheduled to continue for some years to come.

As the site was being developed, it was clear that the task of preventing unnecessary exposure to the material being buried would require some imaginative cross-generational communication.  The target point was 10,000 years into the future—a little under half the half-life of plutonium-239.  The challenge: design markers that would warn people of the dangers buried within the site, and deter them from releasing the harmful material, that could transcend changes in environment, culture and technology for the next 10 millennia.

The recommendations of the groups tasked with designing appropriate markers make interesting reading (excerpts can be accessed here).  The design criteria they arrived at included the following:

• The design of the whole site itself is to be a major source of meaning, acting as a framework for other levels of communication, reinforcing and being reinforced by those other levels in a system of communication. The message that we believe can be communicated non-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a “natural language,” … Put into words, it would communicate something like the following:
  • This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
  • Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
  • This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
  • What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
  • The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
  • The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
  • The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
  • The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
  • The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
• All physical site interventions and markings must be understood as communicating a message. It is not enough to know that this is a place of importance and danger…you must know that the place itself is a message, that it contains messages, and is part of a system of messages, and is a system with redundance.
• Redundancy of message communication is important to message survivability. Redundancy should be achieved through: (a) a high frequency of message locations, permitting some to be lost; (b) making direct and physical links among message levels, that is “co-presentation” of messages; and (c) multiple and mutually reinforcing modes of communication…
• While the system of marking should strongly embody the principles of redundancy, at the same time the methods of achieving redundancy should be carefully designed to maintain message clarity. Redundancy should not be achieved at the expense of clarity.
• The method of site-marking must be very powerful to distinguish this place from all other types of places, so that the future must pay attention to this site. The place’s physical structure should strongly suggest enhanced attention to itself and to its sub-elements. To achieve this, the volume of human effort used to make and mark this place must be understood as massive, emphasizing its importance to us. The site’s constructions must be seen as an effort at the scale of a grand and committed culture, far beyond what a group or sect or organization could do.

The resulting proposed markers are intriguing, as can be seen in these two conceptual examples:

Forbidding Blocks, view 2 (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi)

Menacing Earthworks, view 1 (concept and art by Michael Brill)

And with this we arrive at the key point here—to communicate a message across millennia, the group resorted to durable forms that captured and conceptualized what they wanted to convey.

In other words, when it came to the “long shout,” art was considered more important than science or technology in the long run.

Now I don’t want to get too carried away with this.  But I do think there is an important message here that will be blindingly obvious to historians and archeologists—in the long run, the arts, religion, cultural traditions, mythologies and the like provide the more durable route to preserving socially and culturally significant information.

Of course this doesn’t denigrate science and technology in any way.  Science and technology are essential in underpinning future prosperity and quality of life, and there are many powerful synergisms between science and non-science.  But it does stress the importance of looking beyond science and technology if we want to preserve information that is important to society over long timescales.

At this point, anyone with half a brain will be lambasting me for my naivety—this has all been recognized for thousands of years.  But here’s the crux of the issue:  Apart from Peter’s talk, there was little discussion on the importance of non science-based disciplines in last week’s Two Cultures meetings.  On the contrary, there was a sense from many quarters that science is all that matters, and “the arts” are a sometimes useful but otherwise superficial decoration—something to be enjoyed; something to help promote science, but otherwise not that important.

This seems dangerously short-sighted.  OK so science and technology are needed to help maintain and improve a world where there is less disease, where people have access to food, water and shelter, where we have the freedom and tools to better understand what it is to be human.  But in the long run this knowledge will most likely fade, unless we find a way of transmitting the essence of it to future generations.

And the only way we know how to do that at present is through the “arts”—something that probably shouldn’t be forgotten in a science and technology-obsessed world.

End Notes

I dislike posting such a superficial article about such an important and deeply explored subject, but that is the nature of blogging unfortunately.  Suffice to say these are simply my poorly informed musings on a subject that grabbed my attention at an academic workshop.  There are complex questions about how science and technology enable “art” (used in a very broad sense of the word) that aren’t addressed.  Neither is the distinction between cultural transmission of technology as distinct from science explored.  And then there is the whole question of whether today’s society is poised to transcend a dependence on art, tradition, religion etc, or whether we are as deluded as previous great civilizations no doubt were.

These will all have to wait for another day though!

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/05/13/the-long-shout/feed/ 15 http://2020science.org/2009/05/06/cultural-smokescreens/ http://2020science.org/2009/05/06/cultural-smokescreens/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 20:59:20 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=1401

50 years on, have we missed the point of C.P. Snow’s “Two-cultures?”

50 years ago, long before Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme,” the British scientist, public figure and novelist Charles Percy Snow planted an idea into the collective consciousness that has since grown to have a profound influence on science and the arts in Western society. Sadly, it wasn’t the idea he necessarily wanted to plant. So while the relevance of Snow’s “two cultures”—representing the divide between the scientific and literary elite of the day—has been debated and deconstructed ad infinitum over the intervening decades, Snow’s real passion—tackling material poverty through science and technology—has largely been ignored…

In 1963, Snow wrote a follow-on piece to the 1959 lecture.  In “Two cultures: A second look” C.P. Snow addressed the concerns of his many critics.  But he also took the opportunity to clarify and expand on what he was trying to convey four years earlier.  Freed from the constraints of crafting a short and somewhat simple public lecture, he wrote compellingly on science’s place in society, and the absolute necessity of using it for the social good—something he only saw the cultural divides around him obstructing.

In the opening sections of the 1963 essay Snow addresses his critics directly, which he does with humility and wit.  But by section five he begins to get to the heart of his true passion for science and technology:

“We cannot know as much as we should about the social conditions all over the world.  But we can know, we do know, two most important things.  First we can meet the harsh facts of the flesh, on the level where all of us are, or should be, one.  We know that the vast majority, perhaps two-thirds, of our fellow men are living in the immediate presence of illness and premature death; their expectation of life is half of ours, most are under-nourished, many are near to starving, many starve.  Each of these lives is afflicted by suffering, different from that which is intrinsic in the individual condition.  But this suffering is unnecessary and can be lifted.  This is the second important thing which we know—or, if we don’t know it, there is no excuse or absolution for us.”

Snow acknowledged that there is more to the human condition than mere material needs.  But he argued that this does not release us from the obligation to address those needs—his “hard facts of the flesh”—nor the fact that science and technology provide the means to do this.  He pushes this point home:

“We cannot avoid the realization that applied science has made it possible to remove unnecessary suffering from a billion individual human lives—to remove suffering of a kind, which, in our own privileged society, we have largely forgotten, suffering so elementary that it is not genteel to mention it.”

This gets to the very heart of the essay, and the intended thrust of the 1959 lecture.  So much so that he admits “Before I wrote the [1959] lecture I thought of calling it “The Rich and the Poor”, and I rather wish that I hadn’t changed my mind.”

From here, Snow begins to tackle the myth of the “ennobling” nature of suffering—the idea that suffering strengthens a person, and to interfere in the “natural order” of “master and man” is to do those who suffer a disservice.  Snow is ruthless in his attack on those supporting this position—many of them, in his eyes, amongst the comfortably off cultural elite “who have climbed one step up and are hanging on by their fingernails.”

Just as ruthlessly, he exposes the romantic myth of life being better before science and technology shook things up. Quoting J.H. Plumb he writes:

“No one in his sense would choose to have been born in a previous age unless he could be certain that he would have been born into a prosperous family, that he would have enjoyed extremely good health, and that he could have accepted stoically the death of the majority of his children.”

Rather, he writes

“It seems to me better that people should live rather than die: that they shouldn’t be hungry: that they shouldn’t have to watch their children die.”

From Snow’s perspective, attempts to justify the status quo and look back at “better times” were misguided and divisive, often reflecting the attitudes of the wealthy who could afford to romanticize suffering.  Rather, the solution he saw to satisfying society’s material needs was—and had to be in his eyes—science.  Without the scientific revolution, the only alternative was a divided society where a suffering majority supported an affluent minority—a concept Snow clearly found abhorrent.

And as a consequence, anything which impeded the successful development and implementation of science in society needed to be addressed head-on.

In 1959, Snow saw the chasm between the scientific and intellectual elite as one such impediment.  It was a problem unique (from his perspective) to the British establishment, and arose from an education system that inhibited understanding between these worlds and, as a consequence, weakened the ability of science to be used for the social good. This was the thinking behind the public lecture he delivered on May 7 1959 in Cambridge England.

Fifty years on, a lot has changed.  Approaches to education are different.  There is extensive and productive cross-talk between the science and the arts.  And national and global cultures have evolved.  Yet the central problem Snow faced remains: we live in a world divided into the rich and the poor; where the majority of people don’t have access to necessary material needs—food, water, shelter, medical treatment; where science and technology are increasingly able to bridge this divide, if only they were used effectively.  The unfortunate irony is that, by using the two cultures as a light to illuminate the problems facing society, Snow ended up creating a smokescreen that has, if anything, helped to obscure them.

The reality is that Snow’s 1959 lecture and 1963 essay are even more relevant now than they were 50 years ago—not because of the culture issues they address, but because in a society that is increasingly dependent on science and technology, we still haven’t got a good grasp on how to use them to make life better for the poor as well as the rich.

Sadly, the two cultures meme is a powerful one—witness the editorials, publications and events surrounding this 50th anniversary of the 1959 lecture.  But perhaps now’s time to put it aside and start talking about what’s really important, not just what we think is important.  Because if you look forward through the next 50 years, we have some pretty large global challenges rolling our way that aren’t going to be solved by talking about cultural differences alone.

This is by way of a quick follow-on to yesterday’s post on the number of people on Twitter  following science-focused users.  As was pointed out, just logging the number of followers someone has on twitter is a poor indicator of either success or influence.  So, spurred into action, here is a rather more sophisticated analysis of the “influence” of the tweeps in David Bradley’s list of “Scientific Twitter Friends:”

This is not the clearest graphic – even if you click on it to open a larger version – so you might like to play around with the the original.  A limited interactive version showing social capital second order followers is also included below. As in the previous post, they are based on data visualization routines on the Many Eyes website…

Earlier today, David Bradley over at ScienceBase announced that his growing list of “Scientific Twitter Friends” has hit the 400 mark.  Given the recent explosion in Twitter use, I was intrigued to see how these science-types are faring in the brave new world of on-line communication, 140 characters at a time.

This is a bubble chart of David’s science “tweeps,” courtesy of the Many Eyes website (click on the image to play with the original, or see the interactive version below) – the area of each bubble represents the number of users followers for a particular tweep…

It’s not a particularly sophisticated analysis – number of followers is a very crude measure of success or impact on Twitter.  But it does give an indication of where Twitter users with a science-bent stand.  as you would expect, there are plenty of tweeps with modest followings – the mean number of followers is 528 from this particular analysis.  That is a drop in the ocean compared to some of the celebrity power-users now populating Twitter.  But it does represent a respectable foundation for a science-based social network.  And as can be seen, there are a a number of users here who have followers in the four and five digits.

One of the reasons for carrying out this exercise – apart from looking for any excuse to do some real work – was to get a feel for how science information is beginning to flow between different communities and users on the web.  This is just one data-point – a lot more work is needed before the importance of social media to science communication becomes clearer.  But it does at least suggest that scientists and science writers are beginning to embrace new social media.

This can only be good news for science – it might actually mean that people generating and using information begin talking to one another at long last!

Notes:

For this analysis, I knocked out any users with no followers, and two tweeps with excessively high followings (@guardiantech and @Astronautics) – so they didn’t unduly bias the assessment.

And here’s the interactive version of the bubble plot:

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, especially amongst the middle-aged apparently), but also in the quality and relevance of “tweets” posted by users.

There are a growing number of people on Twitter who genuinely challenge and engage others—in science and technology, as much as in other areas.  These “tweeps” (or “twits” as my wife prefers—which I hope is no reflection on my own “twittering”) are helping mesh together a web people from all walks who are more interested in discussing the latest science and technology—and its implications—than what Britney Spears had for breakfast.

Over at mashable.com, I’ve just posted a list of “13 “Twits” Who Will Change Your Perspective on Reality.” If you are still trying to work out what on earth Twitter’s about, or are looking for some stimulating science and technology-related company in the “Twitterverse,” check these “twits” out.

It’s an eclectic list and includes somebody who’s been dead and buried a good few years, and someone else who doesn’t post on science and technology tweets, but whom I enjoy reading anyway!  The common thread though is that they all post stuff that makes you think—even the dead guy. (Especially the dead guy, actually).

Of course, the list is hopelessly incomplete.  So please feel free to add anyone that should have been there but isn’t—either in the comments here, or over on Mashable.

And happy tweeting!

EndNotes

Sadly, I became an avid “twit” after the rather naive Emerging science and technology at 700 characters per day experiment back in December.  I can now be found adding my banalities into the mix of relative profundities on Twitter as @2020science.  Or if you prefer, you can read them in the sidebar of this blog!

My thanks to Ruth Seeley for being such an honest and proficient editor on the Mashable blog, and to Lon S. Cohen who gave me the idea in the first place – although he probably didn’t realize it at the time!  They can both be found on Twitter as @ruthseeley and @obilon

Part 3 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

I’m fascinated by the power of communication.  The idea that someone’s perceptions and actions can be changed by information received through sight, sound or touch, is rather profound.  Even more so is the idea that, through exchanging information and ideas, people can influence and change the course of whole societies.

Communication—my third “C” in this series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century—is powerful.  It always has been.  But rapid changes in how we communicate with each other are rewriting the rules on how that power is manifest.  And no-where are these changes as significant as in the development and use of new science and technology.

I’m not going to write extensively about how modern communications are changing the world here—there are a thousand and one commentators discussing the emergence of the Flat Earth, globalization, Web X.0 and other ramifications of living in an increasingly connected world.  But I do want to establish how communication is a critical factor influencing the future development and use of science and technology. Because when combined with the other two “C’s”—Coupling and Control—new challenges arise that are going to be tough to handle from a 20th century perspective.

In broad terms, the changing face of global communications is affecting science and technology in three ways:

First, advances in modern communication are revolutionizing “peer-peer” and “peer-lay” information exchange. Twenty years ago, rooting out scientific information was a physical adventure.  I remember cycling between libraries, chasing up reference trails, lugging weighty tomes around while wandering along seemingly endless shelves of books.  I could get quite nostalgic about time spent surrounded by piles of journals in musty Cambridge libraries.  Nowadays of course nothing is further than the click of a mouse away.  And it’s not just journals—the internet is flooded with a wealth of information which is richer than could ever be imagined 20 years ago.  Researchers have access to vast arrays of new information in their own field, as well as new findings in other disciplines.  The result is a cross-fertilization that is driving the generation of new scientific knowledge and technology innovation at an unprecedented rate.

But the same information is also available to non-experts—the “lay public.”  Now, anyone can in principle access in-depth information on the latest scientific breakthroughs.  And where they might struggle with esoteric science, there are a growing number of resources that translate and repackage the knowledge into more manageable chunks.  As a consequence, science and technology are being democratized.

It’s still a relatively select community that is benefiting from this increasing access to information.  But the day is quite possibly coming when the current intellectual hierarchies will begin to crumble, and a new science and technology order will emerge.

Secondly, advances in modern communication are revolutionizing the exchange of ideas. Ideas propagate along lines of communication and change individuals and groups who come into contact with them.  In the past, geographical and technological barriers have limited the growth and influence of ideas around the world.  But with the advent of Web 2.0 and whatever comes next, traditional barriers are being blown away.  And as a result, new ideas are spreading and potentially changing how people think and behave faster and more unpredictably than ever before.

This new interconnectedness will have profound implications on global society.  And this will include a clear impact on science and technology—one that we are already seeing.  Through advances in global communication, individuals and groups will form opinions and ideas on emerging science and technology as new knowledge and abilities are developed.  In effect, the old intellectual command and control model is disappearing.  Which means that the debate over how science is done, what areas of science are pursued, and which new technologies are developed (and how) is now very public, and very global.  And there is no guarantee that the participants will have the same understanding of or respect for hard data as the people generating them.

This global exchange of ideas leads into the third way in which advances in communication will affect science and technology: Decentralization. Advancing communication is empowering citizens to influence the course of science and technology in ways that transcend traditional boundaries.  If a group of people decide they don’t like a new technology, it’s relatively easy for them to mobilize and hinder the progress of that technology.  It happened with genetically modified organisms, and there have been concerns that it could happen in other areas like nanotechnology or synthetic biology (for example).  And with this increasing decentralized influence, scientists can scream and shout until they are blue in the face about the authority of hard data—if people don’t want something, it ain’t going to happen.

Which means that if science and technology are to be used wisely and beneficially over the next century, this new communication landscape needs to be understood and navigated.

In the original lecture on which this series is based, I used two examples to illustrate the implications of rapidly evolving global communication—one rather trivial, the other slightly less so.

First, I wanted to illustrate the rapidity with which communication networks are growing around the world, and how information and ideas propagate along these.  I chose Twitter, and one particular user; the British comedian and raconteur Stephen Fry—this is the trivial example.

The growth of interest in Twitter has been phenomenal, and only matched by the growth in stature of users like Stephen Fry (or to use his Twitter persona, @stephenfry).  For the uninitiated, Twitter builds on text messaging by allowing users to send messages of 140 characters or less to other users.  Any message you post can be read by anyone else, although it is delivered directly to your “followers.”  And likewise, any message posted by someone you “follow” is delivered directly to you.  You can then (if you so choose) decide to redirect—or “ReTweet”—that message to your own followers.

In this way a complex web of rapid global communication is established.

Four weeks ago when I was preparing to speak in Oxford, @stephenfry had the fifth highest following on Twitter—with around 280,000 followers.  It’s a testament to the growth of the medium that now—just four weeks later—he is 22nd in the popularity stakes (with 380,000 followers).  But the ranking is not important.  Think, for a moment, of the reach @stephenfry has if he comes up with a bright idea and posts it on Twitter.  380,000 people will receive and (hopefully) read this new nugget of information.  Some of them will pass it on—especially if it’s a good one.  And some of these will pass it on in turn, perhaps embellishing the idea.  The result is a web of nodes and connections that favor the propagation and evolution of ideas over a potentially vast number of people.

The top-subscribed Twitter user is currently @cnnbrk (breaking news from CNN) with 820,000 followers—more than the circulation of a small newspaper and climbing by over 12,000 followers a day.  Just imagine the reach of ideas propagated through this network, especially as they get picked up and pass on by other power users.

Twitter is just one example of how people are interacting through the web and information and ideas are propagating in ways that are completely alien to how the world worked a few years ago.  But there’s another side to this.  A flood of information with inadequate filtering and interpretation is simply noise, and becomes more ineffective the more of it there is.  For the communication revolution to go anywhere, there need to be new ways of handing the mass of information we are exposed to.

Not surprisingly, this is happening.  The second example here is just one of many where new innovations are helping to assimilate this flood of data.  It comes from Pranav Mistry in Patti Maes’ group at the MIT Media Lab, and is part of the Sixth Sense project:

[For a fuller explanation of what you are seeing, check out Patti Maes’ TED video]

What you see is an attempt to contextualize the mass of data available over the web, by using complex information collection, processing, retrieval and presentation.  The system comprises a video camera, projector and web-enabled phone, worn by the user.  By integrating all three components, the wearer can now interact with the web in a very intuitive and context-specific manner—almost as if there was an additional sense reaching out into cyber space.

Using interactive systems like this—which I guarantee are going to become very sophisticated very fast—the door is opened to exchanging information, ideas and influence between real and virtual communities around the globe in ways which will have a profound impact on how we live our lives.  This combination of information and interactive processing is perhaps what makes this “C” such a powerful agent for change when it comes to science and technology.  But powerful as it is, the influence of communication is enhanced significantly by the third “C”—Control.

Over the next few posts, I’ll be exploring this idea of control in more depth.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Coupling: Actions and consequences in a shrinking world

Next: Control: Gaining mastery over the world at the finest level

[Updated 4/8/09 - slide of MIT Sixth Sense system added]

Part 2 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

In the previous post in this series I introduced the idea of the three “C’s:” Coupling Communication and Control—three factors that together challenge conventional ideas on how science and technology are best developed and used within society.  Following on from that introduction, I want to focus more closely on the first of these: Coupling.

I haven’t actually got much to say here that is new or unfamiliar—most of the new stuff will probably come when I reach the third “C”—Control.  In fact, the concepts buried in the idea of coupling are somewhat obvious.  But that doesn’t make them any less significant.

Very simply, coupling refers to the interconnectedness between society’s actions and global environmental re-actions…

Up until recently, it was assumed that the world was so large, and humanity so small, that whatever we did would simply be absorbed by the Earth.  Oceans, the atmosphere, the planet, were so massive that at worst our actions would cause minor blips in the system, which would dissipate over time.

We now know that this is not the case.  There is a complex dynamic between people and the Earth that has existed for millennia.  But this coupling wasn’t  apparent while the global population was relatively low and resource demands less excessive.

In the past, the lag between human actions and environmental reactions tended to be long and resulting changes gradual. This is no longer the case.  The global population will hit 7 billion people in a few years—fifty years ago it was less than half this.  And resource demands per capita have rocketed while supplies have not, meaning that today’s 6 billion people are stressing the system to a far greater extent than a mere doubling of the population would suggest.

The result is a closer coupling between out actions and the Earth’s reactions than ever before in the history of humanity.  The current implications of this ever-closer coupling are clear, and include all the usual suspects:  Increasing global pollution, acidification of the oceans, rising CO2 levels, global warming.

This coupling is getting stronger, the time lag between actions and responses is getting shorter, and the challenges of predicting and responding to society-induced changes are getting increasingly complex.

And because we are part of the system, these global changes are in turn affecting us—coupling works both ways.

Basic physics provides a simple illustration of this.  I was in two minds about showing the video below because, lets face it, its less than polished (you’ll see what I mean if you watch it).  But it does illustrate the coupling issue rather neatly—as long as the analogy isn’t stretched too far.

Coupled oscillators as an illustration of coupling between society and the Earth

What you see are a pair of coupled oscillators—cobbled together from garden twine and two Orangina bottles.  Together, they demonstrate a physics phenomenon where energy is transferred back and forth between two identical oscillating systems—pendulums in this case.

The experiment starts off with just one of the pendulums swinging.  The second seems to barely move, no matter what the first does.  But over time, the second pendulum begins to be affected by the first one, and starts to oscillate with ever-larger swings.  Then as the second pendulum gets into its stride, it begins in turn to drive the first one.  And so the cycle goes.

The analogy to humanity and the Earth is obvious.  Our actions have seemed inconsequential in the past, but they inevitably lead to environmental re-actions.  These in turn end up impacting back on us.  The analogy does fall apart rather quickly if pushed too far.  But it’s a useful reminder that there is two-way feedback between our actions and the environment we live in, and that over time our actions come back to haunt us unless we proceed with care.

This coupling is cumulative, it is non-linear, and it is increasing rapidly as our demands on the planet grow.  Which means that the consequences of what we do, and the global impacts of those consequences, are becoming harder to predict and control.

Managing this coupling will take all of our skill, and will not be possible without significant advances in science and technology.  Which is why no discussion of science and technology and their role in society can afford to neglect it.

But the story doesn’t end there.  Growing global demands are strengthening the coupling between people and the planet.  But other factors are also playing into this complex relationship; magnifying the challenges emerging in an already serious situation.  One of these factors is the rapid evolution of global communications systems, which is shaking up how information and ideas flow around the globe.

This virtual coupling between people will be the focus of the next post in this series.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Science, technology and the three “C’s:” Communication, Coupling and Control

Next: Communication: Science and technology in a connected world

This week’s edition of Nature includes a thought provoking piece by Geoff Brumfiel on the decline of mainstream science journalism and the rise of science blogging.  The big question: Can one replace the other?  It’s a sobering read: Blumfiel paints a picture of old media in crisis—science coverage in the mainstream media is being cut back; talented journalists are leaving or being laid off; and those left behind are having to produce with less time and fewer resources.  But what I found equally worrying was the hint of an attitude from the growing science blogging community—that the professional science “hacks” can’t hack it; that they misundersand the science and misrepresent the stories; and more often than not they simply regurgitate what they are fed in the interests of time and efficiency.

As a scientist who works closely with journalists and also runs a science blog, the erosion of traditional science journalism worries me.  With the shift from science reporting in the mainstream media to science blogging, loads of people are writing stuff, loads or people are reading it, but I’m not convinced that a whole lot of effective communication is taking place.

Scientists who write well are a precious commodity, but they don’t necessarily have the skill and perspective to either place what they write about in a broader social context, or to communicate to a broad audience.  The result (in many cases—not all) is cozy on-line cliques where science-aficionados pat each other on the back while readers who are desperate for accessible, relevant, contextualized information are starved.

Science blogs have an essential role to play in communication and information exchange.  I wouldn’t write myself if I didn’t believe that.  But I have no illusions about my output matching the relevance and accessibility of that from a professional journalist.  Instead, my stuff hopefully provides a personal perspective on emerging technology and society that complements the mainstream media.

It’s fashionable for scientists and bloggers alike to trash mainstream science reporting.  But we do it at our peril.  Most scientists (I count myself here) are lousy communicators outside their immediate field, and one of the dangers of the web is that it seduces people into thinking otherwise.  Rather, we need to make sure that professional communicators are given the opportunities and resources they need to get information to people that can really benefit from it, not just to the cliques and easy targets.

Charles Darwin has a lot to answer for.  He saw the world with new eyes, fundamentally changed our understanding of nature, and upset a lot of people in the process.  200 years after his birth, Darwin’s work underpins modern biology.  His findings still challenge, stimulate and—amazingly—offend people the world over.  And his discoveries continue to teach us a lesson we are only now beginning to appreciate fully—that life is plastic; that it can change and adapt, and can therefore be manipulated and controlled.

It’s this last point I want to write about on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth.  Because as well as possibly marking another critical step in humanity’s history, it also contains a delicious irony—but more on that in a moment…

Manipulating living organisms isn’t new—people have been doing it through selective breeding for thousands of years.  But until Darwin’s time, it wasn’t clear what the underlying principles were, and how far selective breeding could be pushed.

Darwin’s genius was that he recognized that plants and animals have an ability to adapt to their environment and to pass these adaptations on to subsequent generations, and that over time these adaptations through natural selection can lead to profound changes.

Yet while Darwin recognized that living things are constantly changing and adapting, he wasn’t able to elucidate the mechanisms underlying this adaptability.  It was only when Crick/Watson/Franklin discovered the structure of DNA that things began to get really interesting.  The combined knowledge that living things can change, and that the key to that change is a sequence of molecules embedded in all living cells, was powerfully transformative.

As science and technology progressed through the 20th century, this understanding led to genetic engineering—extracting sequences of DNA from one organism and transplanting them into another, to create plants and animals with new features and abilities.  But this was—and still is—crude stuff.  Granted, modern genetic modification is pretty sophisticated and has produced some important products (along with plenty of vocal opposition).  But in absolute terms, it hasn’t progressed much beyond the equivalent of crafting fine jewelry while wearing boxing gloves.

All this is changing though.  And it’s changing because of two developments that are transforming how scientists manipulate the genetic code that determines the form and function of all living things.

The first development is DNA sequencing.  The ability to read the sequence of base-pairs that make up DNA has been around for a while, but it’s getting faster and more accurate by the day.  The first “working draft” of the human genome took 13 years to compile, and was completed in 2001.  Six years later, the first sequencing of an individual’s genome for under $1 million was completed—and it took a mere 2 months.  And currently, there are companies speculating that by the year 2013, they will be able to read a person’s complete DNA sequence in the time it takes to boil an egg—three minutes!

This in itself is impressive.  But it’s not the most important aspect of DNA sequencing.  What is most significant is the transformation of biological information—information stored and used in the physical/biological world—to digital information.  Because as soon as the full genetic information of an organism is in the digital world, it can be manipulated, re-written, and even debugged, with an ease and speed that would be impossible in the physical world.  What is more, you can have 10, 100, 1000+ people working on the same “code” in parallel, working out how to change it to achieve specific ends.

But this development would be a mere intellectual diversion if it wasn’t for something else: the ability to construct DNA sequences, and splice them back into living organisms.  The cost and ease with which DNA sequences can be synthesized is crashing.  Have a sequence of base pairs on your computer you want as actual strands of DNA?  Simply email it off to one of many companies, pay a few hundred dollars, and receive the physical molecules in the mail a few days later—what could be simpler?

This synthesis step completes the loop—it enables scientists to upload genetic information into the digital world, change it, then download it back into a physical organism.

Just as Darwin’s work transformed how we perceive biology, this new digital biology will transform what we do with it.

Think about it.  We are on the brink of being able to transfer the instruction set of something that’s living into computer code, change that instruction set—even write a completely new instruction set—then transfer it back into something that’s alive.  In means that the metaphorical boxing gloves are off as far as genetic engineering goes.  It means that what we can achieve will be limited only by our imagination and understanding of how biology works.  It means that, at some point soon, we will be able to design and create from scratch new life.

To get a sense of the scale of this development, consider for a moment how digital special effects have transformed movies—where the physically improbable can be made to look real.  Now imagine being able to do this in real life—not just in a two-dimensional facsimile on a movie screen.  There may be a dash of hyperbole in the analogy—but not a whole lot I suspect.

And this is where we get to that rather delicious irony I mentioned earlier.

One of the big objections to a Darwinian world-view currently in vogue is the idea of irreducible complexity.  The argument goes something like this: Certain bits of biology are so complex, that they couldn’t possibly have evolved.  Therefore they must have been intentionally designed by an intelligent being.  Ergo, there must be a creator behind life as we know it, and evolution is simply an illusion.

Ignoring the fact that this argument sounds more like something out of a Douglas Adams novel than an inquiring mind, this line of reasoning leads to the theory of Intelligent Design—the idea that some parts of biology at least must have been designed rather than being the product of evolution.

The irony of course is that scientists are now close to being able to intelligently design biological systems and living organisms.  But in this case, the designers are human, not deities or some super-intelligent race of beings.

This, naturally begs the question: If a thousand years from now (after scientists have designed the most intricate of organisms, society has subsequently collapsed and reformed, and humanity’s “institutional memory” has become a little cloudy) future scientists look closely at the organisms that surround them, how will they be able to distinguish between what has evolved naturally, and what has been intentionally designed?

A tricky question.

But here’s one plausible answer:  Scientists, being scientists, are bound to insert their own hallmark into new designer bugs—a “designed by X” sequence that will allow anyone in the know to distinguish between what is natural, and what is not.  We’ve already seen this with the first fully synthesized genome of a bacterium—where Craig Venter’s team inserted watermark DNA sequences.  The sequence of amino acids expressed by these sequences spelled out “CRAIGVENTER” amongst other things—leaving you in no doubt whose brains were behind the bug.

OK, so there will need to be some fancy biology to prevent future watermarks being corrupted through mutations.  But it’s a pretty safe bet that future intelligently designed organisms will carry some form of identity tag, care of their makers.

But if this is the case it makes you wonder whether, if the Intelligence Design advocates are right, we all have a designer tag buried deep within our DNA already—a sort of “GOD WAS HERE” watermark.  Perhaps this is what the ID folks should be concentrating on, rather than the intellectually barren idea of irreducible complexity.

Perhaps they already are!

Back to reality though.  Shifting biology between the physical world and the digital domain will likely lead to changes as profound and transformative as those instigated by Darwin 150 years ago.  If the past is anything to go by, we could be in for an exciting ride.  Molecular-level control over genetic information raises as many concerns and questions as it does opportunities. If we learn (as a society) how to use our new-found knowledge and abilities wisely, this is clearly a science and technology that could make many peoples’ lives significantly better.  On the other hand, it will challenge some people’s notions of what life is, and the boundaries within which humans should operate.

Either way, this “synthetic biology” marks a turning point between natural selection-driven biology, and engineered biology—it is, quite legitimately, the genesis of intelligent design!

What better way to mark the bicentenary of the man who thought the unthinkable, and changed the world.

______________________________________

Postscript

While this is a somewhat tongue in cheek article about evolution, biotechnology and synthetic biology, the central idea – that of uploading genetic information into the digital domain, then back down into living organisms – is a profoundly important one.  And here I must acknowledge that the significance of this loop first struck me while watching a video of Drew Endy speak at MIND 08.  The idea wasn’t central to Drew’s lecture, but it certainly caught my attention enough to think it through a little further.

I should also add that there are a multitude of definitions of synthetic biology.  What I have presented here is what I find helpful in differentiating what is new and transformative in this fast-moving field.  But it isn’t the only way of looking at what is happening.  Others will talk about applying the principles of engineering to biology, or even about creating completely artificial forms of life – all are equally valid perspecives on synthetic biology.

I’ve been sitting here for over half an hour, trying to work out how to start this blog in an engaging and witty way, but have failed miserably—it’s been a long day!  Instead, let me come straight to the point, because it’s quite a simple one—please read Sir Robert Winston’s article “Why turning out brilliant scientists isn’t enough” in this week’s New Scientist.  It’s one of the clearest and most compelling commentaries on the need for scientists to listen to and engage with members of the public that I have read for some time.

OK, I guess I should say a little more—that is after all a rather terse opening paragraph!

As anyone living in the UK will tell you, Sir Robert is a highly regarded popularizer of science. .. Professor of science and society and emeritus professor of fertility studies at Imperial College London, he has a rare ability to convey complex ideas with clarity and enthusiasm.  But he also understands that scientists need to learn to listen to people—to enter a two-way dialogue with members of society who are impacted by their work.

Sir Robert notes early on in the New Scientist article that prior to an influential House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology enquiry in 1999, “many believed that for people to trust more in the value of science, it would be enough for scientists simply to educate the public.”  This is the so-called deficit model—the idea that the more you educate people, the more likely they are to make reasonable decisions—defined rather loosely as the same decisions you would make!

This is now generally recognized as being a bad model—people make decisions based on a range of values, and knowledge plays only a part in the process.  Which is why Sir Robert points out that “These days it is widely understood that fostering public engagement – rather than just mere public understanding – is of key importance.”

Sadly, I’m not convinced that this message has reached everyone that needs to hear it, which is why this article is a must-read for anyone working in science or science policy.

Sir Robert writes,

“Most scientific research in the UK is paid for by the taxpayer, and when technologies have a negative impact the consequences can be profound for everyone. The scientific knowledge we pursue is public property. We scientists have a duty not merely to tell people what we are doing (a skill not taught as well as it should be in most universities), but also to listen to people’s fears and hopes and respond to them, even when we feel their antagonism to be ill-founded. Being open in this way has been shown to have real advantages.”

In particular, he cites the ScienceWise project, set up by Kathy Sykes at the University of Bristol in the UK.

The article continues,

“A two-way dialogue – communication in the fullest sense – seems more likely than a one-way lecture to lead to a maturing of views and resolution of conflict. It can help scientists to accept that some public concerns may be justified, and that recognising them can improve their science; and it makes the public aware of the good intentions of scientists. If we show that we care about the ethical implications of our work, people are likely to be more sympathetic.”

Richard Jones’ recent article on nanotechnology, science and public engagement in the UK supports Sir Robert’s assertion that dialogue is a much more constructive and valuable process than well-based consultations and opinion-polls (and, I might add, public lectures).

Unfortunately, there are still pockets of intellectual elitism within science, and approaches to “public engagement” that smack of hubris rather than humility.  I’m constantly astounded by how many well-meaning scientists still believe that public engagement is just about communicating their knowledge to people, without that essential step of listening and reponding.  I’ve heard fellow scientists say that their work is too complex for people to understand.  This is probably true in many cases. Yet most people are quite capable of understanding the implications of science and technology in their lives, even if they struggle with understanding the science and technology itself.  And lets be honest, an expert is only an expert in their own narrow field—outside of it, they tend to be as dumb as the rest of us!

Practicing science is a privilege.  As scientists we are accountable to the society that supports us.  And we have an obligation to listen to and work with the people whom our work affects, as well as translating the science in ways that is accessible, informative and enriching.

But to achieve this more integrated relationship between science and society will take some work.  As Sir Robert’s points out, “turning out brilliant scientists isn’t enough.” We also need to turn out brilliant scientists who can engage effectively with others.

_________________

Update, Feb 6 2009. Having re-read the original post, I’ve added in a few very minor editorial corrections.  I also thought it worth linking to the following recent posts that address the role of science in society:

A “manifesto” for socially-relevant science and technology (Dec 24 2008)
Nanotechnology, science and public engagement—lessons from the UK (Jan 13 2009)
Revisiting the Civic Scientist (Feb 1 2009)

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/02/05/thank-goodness-for-sir-robert/feed/ 4 http://2020science.org/2009/01/27/welcome-to-the-new-look-2020-science/ http://2020science.org/2009/01/27/welcome-to-the-new-look-2020-science/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:57:19 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=812

If you are a regular visitor to 2020 Science, you may have noticed some changes creeping into the site in recent days.  The content’s still the same—a clear perspective on developing science and technology responsibly, with an emphasis on nanotechnology and synthetic biology (and anything else that piques my interest).  But hopefully the new layout and format make reading it a more pleasurable and productive experience.

If you don’t like the changes, blame Ruth Seeley at No Spin PR—she’s the one who is sucking me into putting the blog on a more professional footing!

Actually, that’s not at all fair—Ruth is helping develop a social networking strategy for 2020 Science (and doing a great job of it), and the changes have been prompted in part by the need to move the site to a new web host as we begin implementing the strategy.  And so far, the changes enabled by the move are rather exciting.  Not only does the website now look substantially better, but I can actually start playing around with WordPress plug-ins—geek heaven!

I’ll be refining the site further over the coming weeks, but in the meantime here’s a quick rundown on the more significant changes you should check out:

Quick access to nanotechnology and synthetic biology posts. Simply clicking on the relevant tab in the page header will take you to all blog posts on that subject.

Subscribe button. Actually, you’ve always been able to subscribe to 2020 Science, but this is such a neat feature I thought a reminder was due.  And the button now takes you to Feedburner, to make life even easier.

Twitter feed. This is where recent 2020 Science “Tweets” are posted (do other Twitter users cringe as much as I do at the terminology here?) – check this column out for breaking news and comment on emerging science and technology, and beyond–it’s usually updated several times a day.

Top Notes. Stuff that I think is worth highlighting—expect the content to change frequently.

Lots of lovely links. Now broken down into what are hopefully helpful categories, this is a growing list of links to other blogs and websites that I enjoy reading and find useful – located towards the bottom of the right hand sidebar.

“Share this” button. If you like a blog post, please share it with your friends—it’s now as easy as pie with the neat ShareThis link on each entry.

Technorati button. If you like 2020 Science, it’s now easy to add it to your Technorati favorites – simply click the button in the sidebar.

Resources tab. In the header—this is where you can find links to lectures I’ve given, stuff I’ve published, and media articles where I’ve been quoted.  Probably not interesting for most people, but the stuff’s there, just in case.

That’s pretty much it for the moment.  Next blog: back to the business of writing about “important” stuff.

Enjoy.

(And please don’t forget to comment!)

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!  Hope you enjoy them, and have a happy new year!

A new year, a new leaf—time for five more eclectic (some might say eccentric) book recommendations to see you through the hangover and into a brighter future.

As in the previous five good books blog, I’ve eschewed the conventional to provide as unusual a potpourri of literary delights as you will find anywhere.  And as before, I’ve tried to inject a little method into the madness—spot it if you can!

I should first apologize because this was supposed to be a quick blog, rushed off before the New Years festivities began in earnest.  But it turned into a veritable “slow blog!”

So for those of you impatient to read the recommendations and move on, here they are:

• On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
• The Two Cultures, by C. P. Snow
• Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham
• Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee
• Nation, by Sir Terry Pratchett

But please do read on, and discover the why behind the what… Here then, is my retrospective-prospective reading list for a technologically-enlightened 2009—enjoy!

In the number one slot: On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. How could it be anything else?  Perhaps one of the most influential books to have been written over the past couple of hundred years, the repercussions of Darwin’s seminal work are still being felt today.  2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (as if you didn’t know)—and what better excuse to go back to the source and read what the great man really wrote in what he refers to as “this abstract”—and some abstract at nearly 500 pages!

Unlike much of the debate and controversy it initiated, Origin is a carefully developed and reasoned thesis based on Darwin’s observations—evidence-based science at its best.  And rather impressively, the more we learn about life on this planet, the more Darwin’s Theory of Evolution makes sense.

This is essential reading for understanding how disruptive and empowering scientific knowledge can be within society.  As society comes to rely increasingly on science and technology, there are lessons here that are well worth learning. The Origin of Species sold out on the day it was published in 1859.  It’s hard to imagine a science text selling so fast nowadays.  Which makes you think—in all the talk about how essential technology and innovation are in today’s knowledge economy, have we lost sight of the underlying science?  I wonder…

Next up, another anniversary and another highly influential book.  On May 7 1959, Charles Percy Snow—better know as C. P. Snow—delivered the annual Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge.  His title:  The Two Cultures. The lecture—and its subsequent appearance in print—caught the spirit of the moment as two cultures; one dominated by literary intellectuals, the other by scientists; grew increasingly detached from each other and threatened to rob society of it’s ability to progress.

Snow’s thoughts have moulded thinking about science and society over the intervening 50 years.  But just as few who uphold or decry Darwinian evolution have read the original text, I suspect that not many who talk “knowledgeably” about the two cultures are that familiar with what the man actually said.

Having recently revisited the lecture, I would strongly recommend anyone interested in the interface between science and society to read it.  The lecture is clearly of its time—society has changed since 1959.  Yet scrape away at the surface, and many of the themes in the lecture are as relevant now as they were fifty years ago—negligible communication between the world of science and “traditional culture,” disrespect for science literacy (as distinct from technology familiarity), and the importance of ensuring the scientific revolution breaks down socially indefensible barriers—especially between the rich and the poor.

Today the cultures are different, and the boundaries between them blurred.  But the bottom line is that we are more dependent than ever on science in society, yet more ignorant than ever on how science works, and how to use it wisely.

If Darwin demonstrated how disruptive science can be, Snow illuminated how essential it is to harness and use its disruptive power for good within society—or suffer the consequences.

As an aside, even more significant (in my opinion) than the original Rede lecture is Snow’s 1963 assessment of the lecture’s impact.  In The Two Cultures: A Second Look, C.P. Snow finds the freedom to explain more clearly what he was really getting at in the lecture.  Here he explains the use of the “two cultures” as a vehicle to explore far more profound aspects of the science-society relationship—many just as important yet overlooked today as they were then.  Quoting from the beginning of the essay:

“In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretense of a common culture.  Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their intellectual concern.  This is serious for our creative, intellectual and, above all, our normal life.  It is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the present, and to deny our hopes of the future.  It is making it difficult or impossible for us to take good action.”

Read these essays—they are important!

Third in the list comes something a little lighter:  Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham. Published in 1960—right on the coat-tails of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures—it is a fictitious tale of a scientific discovery leading to longer lives for a select few, and the social and moral challenges this raises.

Admittedly, the book is dated—it was written nearly fifty years ago after all.  But it’s still a great read.  And more importantly, it raises questions about the development and use of disruptive scientific knowledge that are highly relevant to today.

The story revolves around the discovery of a lichen-based compound that can extend a person’s lifespan by a factor of three.  But the compound cannot be synthesized, and the source is limited.  The moral questions raised are complex—longer life expectancy could lead to a more reflective society, more time to find solutions to pressing problems, greater quality of life.  But it could also lead to social injustice—widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and initiate social unrest.

The context may be very 1960’s, but the general issues resonate strongly with challenges facing society today as science and technology become increasingly complex.  And just as society was ill-equipped to handle disruptive science back in the 1960’s, it must be asked whether we are any better off now.

The fourth book in this list of five is something of an outsider—Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee. 2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of this account of village life in rural England in the early twentieth century—anniversaries emerging as something of a theme here.  Most of the book has nothing to do with science and technology.  But it is worth reading for two reasons:

First, it is a beautifully crafted account of pre-industrial revolution English village life—I guarantee it will fill you for nostalgia, even if you have never seen an English village!

But more to the point, Lee begins to chart the enormous changes wrought on this thousand year old way of life by the industrial revolution—what Snow referred to as the beginnings of the scientific revolution we are still in.  If you get the chance, read the final chapter of the book.  While Lee is ambivalent on whether the changes he witnessed over the course of his youth were for good or ill, you cannot help but reflect on where the scientific revolution is leading us as you absorb his prose.

To whet your appetite, this is from the beginning of the final chapter:

“The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village.  I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ life.  The change came late on our Costwold valley, didn’t really show itself till the late 1920’s; I was twelve by then, but during that handful of years I witnessed the whole thing happen.

“Myself, my family, my generation, were born in a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cart-wheels, innocent of oil or petrol, down which people passed rarely, and almost never for pleasure, and the horse was the fastest thing moving.  Man and horse were all the power we had—abetted by levers and pulleys.  But the horse was king, and almost everything grew around him: fodder, smithies, stables, paddocks, distances, and the rhythms of our days.  His eight miles an hour was the limit of our movements, as it had been since the days of the Romans.  That eight miles an hour was life and death, the size of our world, our prison.”

Then came cars and machines and science and technology…

Lee’s eloquent prose demonstrates just how disruptive science and technology innovation is.  The innovation can lead to both good and bad—both Lee and Snow clearly acknowledge this.  The trick it would seem—the moral imperative even—is to act to ensure the good outweighs the bad.

Last but most definitely not least comes another novel, and a real gem of a book: Nation, by Sir Terry Pratchett.

(yes, Terry has just received a well-deserved “K”.)

A word of warning up front: This is a grown-up book masquerading as a child’s story. So you might at first dismiss it.  But you do so at your peril, for Pratchett weaves an enlightening and challenging tale about science, society and religion that succeeds where many academic tomes have failed.

The story revolves around a young boy living on a Pacific island who looses his whole community to a tsunami, but ends up building a new one from the flotsam and jetsam of society that wash up on the shores.  This seemingly simple setting allows Pratchett to explore the barriers between races, cultures, philosophies, religion and science, and what can be achieved when these are broken down.

The tale is set in a parallel world, which rather delightfully enables Pratchett to bend the history of science somewhat, and the activities of some of its leading lights.  There is a beautiful homage to the likes of Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and even Patrick Moore in the closing pages!

But the power of this book—and it is powerful—comes from Pratchett’s knack of shining a searing spotlight on the human condition in the most gentle and humorous of ways.

Nation covers may themes, one of which is the foolishness of blind belief.  Of course, this includes religious beliefs in the book.  But it also extends to scientific “beliefs.”  And there is a clear message here for societies facing a science and technology-dominated future: Learn from the past, respect evidence, and communicate across barriers.

To wrap up, while this is an odd set of recommended reading by anyone’s reckoning, hopefully the thread holding the list together is clear—addressing the challenges and opportunities of science and technology within society.  Writing on the brink of 2009, science and technology innovation seem more important than ever.  Yet we seem further than ever in understanding how to ensure everyone benefits from advances that are made.

Hopefully revisiting (or visiting for the first time) these books will provide a new perspective on making wise choices over the coming year.

Happy reading, and happy 2009!

_________________________

Footnotes, added 1/1/09

On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, is currently available in many imprints – check out Amazon.com for further details.

The Two Cultures, by C. P. Snow, is currently published by Cambridge University Press (in the Canto series).  This edition includes both the 1959 lecture, the 1963 essay, and an excellent introduction by Stefan Collini.

Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham was recently re-released by Penguin Books UK.  US readers will need to explore that archaic institution the Library… or pay for international shipping!

Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, is currently published in the US by David R. Godine. In the UK, the publisher is Random House.

Nation, by Sir Terry Pratchett, is published by Random House in the UK, and HarpurCollins in the US.

For more on the “slow blog,” check out Todd Sieling’s Slow Blog Manifesto!

Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse on his hopes for the future

Amidst intensifying discussions over what the incoming Obama administration will mean for science and technology, an opinion piece in today’s Telegraph caught my eye this morning.  Written by Sir Paul Nurse—Nobel Laureate and president of the Rockefeller University in New York—it provides a clear articulation of Obama’s campaign pledges, the challenges he faces in realizing them, and impact they could have on the US and beyond if he succeeds.

I usually eschew reproducing other people’s stuff here without adding my own perspective, but in this case, Nurse’s words speak for themselves…

“Putting good science advisers in place – as he [Obama] did with his campaign – could enable the new president to create sensible and sustainable policies, strengthening the world’s ability to respond to the complex challenges posed by some of the biggest issues of our time: climate change, feeding humanity, improving global health, driving the economy forward.

He could ensure advances in knowledge by supporting research in areas ranging from stem cells to particle physics, and restore the faith of the scientific community by allowing good impartial science to be seen for what it is, without political manipulation.

This is an opportunity for a fresh start. America is a nation that has stagnated scientifically during the first years of the 21st century, but this can be reversed if actions follow the strong rhetoric we have seen during the campaign.

If Obama delivers, the whole world will benefit.”

What else can I say?

[The full Telegraph op-ed can be read here.]

____________________________________________________

Postscript

OK, so I couldn’t resist adding just one comment.  As well as identifying the big targets for science and technology, the incoming administration will also need to get to grips with how it “does science” if limited resources are to be leveraged most effectively.  These will include establishing overarching science policy goals—something along the lines of my “Five slightly harder pieces.”

These more foundational goals will never replace the big issues outlined in Nurse’s op-ed.  But they just might make the process of addressing them a little bit easier.

Making sense of scientific information

While I was in the UK recently, I picked up a copy of Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science on a tip from a friend.  Ben is a medical doctor and writer for The Guardian newspaper—and a vociferous crusader of what he sees as the misuse and misrepresentation of science.  And when he comes to communicating why science matters in a highly accessible way, he has few peers.

If you read my recent “Five Good Books” blog, you will already have seen a micro-review of Bad Science, which can be summed up pretty succinctly in three words: “buy this book.”

Bad Science is a great read… which is probably why it topped the popular science charts in the UK when it first came out (although I should caution that despite it being endorsed as “quite possibly the funniest” book you’ll read this year, it is more likely to leave you incensed at the blatant and dangerous abuse of science in some quarters).

It is also an essential read for anyone in the business of making science-informed decisions.

And in this context, there is one chapter in particular that should be compulsory reading matter for anyone involved in generating, interpreting or using scientific information.

This is chapter 12: “Why clever people believe stupid things.”

The chapter is prefaced rather fittingly by a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig:

“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t mislead you into thinking you know something that you actually don’t know.”

As Goldacre explains “When we reason informally—call it intuition if you like—we use rules of thumb which simplify the problems for the sake of efficiency.”  But these short-cuts are vulnerable to misdirection—we can be fooled into thinking reality is other than it is.

The problem is, we have no internal reference for what is real.  When we get something wrong and the consequences are obvious, we self-correct pretty fast.  But where the consequences of misunderstandings are not direct or are not clear, things get more difficult—especially as we are hard-wired not to question our perceptions of reality.

So how do we know when we are deluding ourselves (and as a consequence, making potentially dangerous decisions)?  The answer, argues Goldacre, is in the scientific method—because it provides a systematic approach to testing our assumptions and correcting our perceptions.  Goldacre writes:

“When our cognitive system—our truth-testing apparatus—is fooled, then, much like seeing depth in a flat painting, we come to erroneous conclusions about abstract things.  We might misidentify normal fluctuations as meaningful patterns, for example, or ascribe causality where in fact there is none.

“These are cognitive illusions, a parallel to optical illusions.  They can be just as mind-boggling, and they cut to the core of why we do science.”

Goldacre goes on to identify five traps people fall into when evaluating information which lead to misunderstanding, misinterpretation and, at the end of the day, bad decisions:

1. We see patterns where there is only random noise
2. We see causal relationships where there are none
3. We overvalue confirmatory information for any given hypothesis
4. We seek out confirmatory information for any given hypothesis
5. Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our previous beliefs.

The chapter—which is brief (only 14 pages) needs to be read in full to appreciate how these traps arise and how they can be circumvented.  But even without the accompanying text, recognizing the traps is a critical step toward avoiding them.

As he writes, Goldacre has journalists firmly in his sights as some of the worst offenders for falling into these traps.  But on reading through the chapter, what struck me most what how easy it is for other users of science-based information to get things wrong.  Scientists aren’t immune—especially when they are communicating their work to audiences outside their field.  Neither are policy advisers and makers, who have been known occasionally to conveniently overlook inconvenient data!

The bottom line here is that clever people are quite capable of believing stupid things, and that without good science-based checks and balances in place, bad decisions can result that may cause a lot of damage.

The solution: Buy beg or borrow Ben’s book, read it, and use it.  And get those checks and balances working – however you are using scientific knowledge!

___________________________________________

Notes

Ben Goldacre blogs at www.badscience.net, The website is also great portal into the world of bad science!

Bad Science (Publisher: Fourth Estate – London) isn’t directly available in the US, but can be ordered from amazon.co.uk—be sure to use the click-through on Ben’s Bad Science website.

If you can’t get hold of the book, you could always lobby Ben and his publisher to make chapter 12 available for free—as a service to humanity ☺

Mea Culpa – why “clever” people write stupid things!

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that in the original version of this post, “Ben Goldacre” mysteriously transmuted to “Ben Goldring” after the first paragraph (thanks Devan at Holford Watch for the tip).

I can only lay blame at the feet of too many distractions, poor copy editing and just plain stupidity – and apologise unreservedly to Ben!

And confirm that this is now a Goldring-free posting ☺

(11/15/08)

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Obama and science – Essential bed-time reading for the next Administration

Finally, the campaigning is over, everyone knows more about fruit flies than they ever wanted to (thank you Sarah Palin), and on an historic day America has “voted for change.”  As the country looks forward to a radical change in leadership, the coming weeks are going to be wall-to-wall analysis of what an Obama administration will mean for everything from the economy to energy.  And 2020science.org will be there in the thick of things.  But after a heavy night of vote-watching, I thought something a little lighter was in order.

So here as an antidote to election fatigue are five good books every “convalescing campaigner” should have by their bedside as they work on regaining their strength.  And as you might expect, I’ve thrown in a subtle but nevertheless significant emphasis on good science policy.

But first some explaining is in order, because I suspect that the list below will raise more than a few eyebrows.

Much as I love science and technology, I’m savvy enough I hope to realize that not everyone has my passion for the subject.  In fact, when it comes to making big decisions that affect millions of people, I’m not sure that an obsession with scientific minutiae is necessary or even helpful—too many distractions to obscure the big picture.  (And there are always plenty of experts that can be tapped into when necessary with the right networks in place).

But I do think that an understanding of what science is, how it works, and how it can be used, is essential to good policy making.

Bottom line: It probably isn’t a good idea to try and turn the President of the United States into a scientist.  But it does make sense to ensure he has a good feel for how science (and technology) can be used to strengthen the country and change people’s lives.

And so my bed-time book list aims to enlighten the reader on how to use science wisely in a complex society, rather than educate them on the nuts and bolts of scientific knowledge.

Without further ado therefore, and in reverse order of preference, we have:

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. OK, so Bryson goes into the minutiae occasionally, but this is a book that succeeds where many fail in communicating what science is and why it is important—probably because it was written by someone who isn’t actually a scientist!  A close contender for this spot was Natalie Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.  Another great book, but while Bryson provides a rather homely thanksgiving dinner of a book, Angier’s Canon is more like the after-dinner truffles—exceedingly good, but best in small amounts!

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis Collins.  Wherever you are on the God-scale, this book has one overarching message—scientific evidence is not a matter of belief.  An important message for anyone making big decisions who doesn’t want to really mess-up.

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Because all work and no play makes anyone rather dull—no science here, but a reminder that there’s more to a functional social life than being a geek!  And if Jane Austen’s original is too much to stomach, there is always Helen Fielding’s re-write in the form of Bridget Jones’ Diary.

Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre. A searing exposé of the dangers of misrepresenting and misusing science, written by a physician and columnist for The Guardian newspaper.  A highly accessible, entertaining and essential read for anyone using scientific knowledge to make informed decisions.  Unfortunately the book is not available directly in the States, but beg, borrow or steal a copy—or order it directly from Amazon.co.uk.  Or failing that, check out Ben’s blog at www.badscience.net.  (look out for more on this book in later blogs).

The Bromeliad Trilogy, by Terry Pratchett. Ignore for a moment the fact that this is a fantasy tale, was written for children, and is in fact three books and not one.  Because this rather subtle and deceptively deep fable speaks volumes about the interplay between belief, technology and awkward citizens when tough decisions are needed under changing circumstances.  But more than anything else, it eloquently explores the importance of humility and conviction in leadership.  Read it, and you will be reminded that understanding the implications of science and technology is just the beginning of good decision-making.  And as a bonus, you will have a great set of books to share with the family.

So now I batten down the hatches and wait for the abuse to flow (“wot, no Einstein for Dummies?” I hear you say).

But before you post a suitably acerbic comment on the inanity of my choices, consider this:  What does it take to use science (and technology) most effectively in the service of society?  I would put high on my list three things: Humility, an open mind, and a willingness to change course in the light of new information—three things that all five books here tackle head-on.

Enjoy ☺

(Note: this entry was originally posted with the title “Five good books (Bed time reading for convalescing campaigners)

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With just over a week to go before the 2008 US presidential election, there’s no shortage of opinions floating around on the key science and technology-related challenges facing an incoming Obama or McCain administration.  But while advice swirls around issues like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, the environment, and establishing a top-level presidential science adviser as fast as possible, there is less talk about overarching goals that will underpin the science and technology policy agenda for the next four years…

Last Friday the journal Science published “10 meaty topics” for the 44th president to chew on, while a few weeks back we had “six easy pieces” from bioethicist Arthur Caplan (billed as a “Cheat Sheet for the Next Administration on Science & Tech Policy”).  And both the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Center for the Study of the Presidency have issued practical advice on ensuring a sci-tech savvy Whitehouse come the new year.

But most of the opinions laid out here and elsewhere address either the big science-based issues facing the next president, or the organizational challenges of getting a science-informed administration together that can hit the ground running.  What about the overall goals that are going to define the science, engineering and technology agenda for the next four years?

Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s essential that the next administration gets its act together on filling key science and technology positions as fast as possible, and identifies priority areas for research and development investment.  But a set of overarching goals is also needed, that will enable good intentions to be translated into effective policies.

So with this in mind, here are five goals the incoming administration could do worse than think about as it begins to reformulate America’s science and technology agenda:

Foster science-based decision-making. Build a network of respected and authoritative science advisers that reaches to the heart of government.  And in the process, enable decision-making processes that rely on science-fact rather than science-fantasy.

Develop a social challenges-driven research agenda. Use some of the biggest issues facing society—energy, health, water, food—to drive a multidisciplinary research agenda that serves people’s needs.  Make discovery-driven research an integral part of this process; creating a well of new knowledge and ideas that can be used to improve people’s lives.  Enable researchers to cross normally rigid disciplinary and institutional boundaries to address common concerns.  And re-examine the way that investment in science and technology can best serve societies’ long-term needs.

Build Constituencies. Engage citizens in research that is relevant to them.  Inspire and enable everyday people to take an interest in, support, and even participate in, research that could change their lives.  Make the scientific enterprise personal—where there are goals that will make a difference to individuals, help them to become part of the process. It works with medical research—it should work in other areas as well.

Nurture critical thinking. Institute formal and informal education programs that empower people to make evidence-based decisions.  Not everyone is interested in science.  But everyone should be able to distinguishing between good science and bad science—especially when important decisions are to be made. While many people struggle with the complexities of science at some point, most people are capable of understanding the implications of scientific and technological innovations—given half a chance.  As Arthur Caplan writes; “the American people are not dense.”

Cultivate civic scientists. Develop a generation of scientists, technologists and engineers that can, in the words of Neal Lane, “step beyond their campuses, laboratories, and institutes and into the center of their communities to engage in active dialogue with their fellow citizens.”  Because these are the people who will be most effective in informing science-based decisions, making a social challenges-driven research agenda work, building constituencies around key issues, and empowering citizens to think critically.

Developing such an overarching set of science policy goals will never replace addressing the big issues outlined in the Science article and others.  But it just might make the process a little easier.

Forget the economy, healthcare, the war in Iraq.  For some, the next President of the United States will need to rise to a far higher bar:  Is he an e-mail junkie, or still stuck on snail mail?

John McCain’s lack of e-mail-savvy was the butt of recent Obama/Biden campaign ads.  “Things have changed in the last 26 years.  But McCain hasn’t” goes the refrain.  The subtext: if voted in as leader of the free world, could he actually lead in a technology-dependent society?  In contrast, Barack Obama’s online social networking campaign-orchestrated by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes-promises a truly plugged-in president.

Yet strip away the superficiality and there is something missing in both campaigns-where is the science that will support the technology needed to keep America great in the 21st century?

Don’t get me wrong, we desperately need new technologies to address some of the biggest challenges facing America and the world beyond. By the end of the next administration, there will be an estimated seven billion people on the planet, all wanting food, shelter, and water, and most of them striving
for a first-world quality of life.  With dwindling natural resources and an environment struggling to absorb humanity’s assaults, old technologies simply won’t hack it in the 21st century.   Energy security, curing cancer,  quality of life in old age, plentiful clean water, climate change-none of these challenges will be met without developing and using brand new technologies.

But technology innovation is only as good as the fuel that powers it, and that fuel is science.  Without strong investment in science, the technology innovation “well” will quite literally dry up-or move elsewhere.  In 2005, Representative  Frank Wolfe (R-VA) recalled asking a group of scientists how the U.S. is doing in science and innovation.  Forty percent said the country was in a “stall,” while nearly two thirds thought the nation was in decline.  This is not good news if we are looking to home-grown technologies to make the future a brighter, better place.

I say home-grown because in today’s knowledge economy you can be sure that if there is a gap in the idea market, someone will fill it.  The less America invests in the science that will drive technology innovation, the
more other countries will take the initiative.

Thomas Friedman writes in The World is Flat,  “Let me put this in very simple language: There are many more Indians and Chinese than there are Americans and a much, much higher percentage of them are studying science,  computer science and engineering.”  This is good news for global science-based technology innovation as a whole-as long as you don’t mind America becoming Asia’s sidekick.

Fortunately, America still has the edge in some areas of science-driven technology.  Advances in U.S.-led fields like nanotechnology and synthetic biology for instance are radically altering how we can use conventional science in unconventional ways.

But the gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is closing rapidly.  Outmoded science policies, inadequate investment in science research and education, and a lack of respect for scientific evidence are all conspiring to weaken America’s scientific leadership.  In 2007 the National Academies’ Gathering Storm report concluded that unless the US government takes urgent action “We can expect to loose our privileged position” as world-leaders in science and technology.

This report addressed immediate steps “federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century.” The resulting 20 recommendations covered increasing the nation’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 science and math education;  sustaining and strengthening basic research; making the U.S. the most attractive place in the world to do science; and ensuring America is the premier place in the world to innovate.

Many of the recommendations are still languishing in political limbo.

McCain’s “cyberphobia” and Obama’s tech-savvy make great headlines.  But at the end of the day, it is their commitment to strengthening the U.S. science enterprise that matters.  And whoever is installed in the Oval Office next January will need to have one of the most sophisticated science policies in recent times in order to underpin the technology-based solutions society so desperately needs.

To be honest, I’m unlikely to loose any sleep over the next president’s e-mail prowess. But I do care that they understand the importance of investing in building a science-savvy society, which can both generate and use new knowledge in the pursuit of a better world.

Technology innovation is essential to America’s success in the 21st century-that’s a given.  But before the technology, it’s the science,  stupid!