Policy
drorzel | January 11, 2010I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog.
I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…
drorzel | January 7, 2010A number of people have commented on this LA Times op-ed by Steve Giddings about what physicists expect to come out of the Large Hadron Collider. It includes a nice list of possible particle physics discoveries plus a few things that will annoy Peter Woit, and also includes the obligatory note about spin-offs:
All this may seem like impractical and esoteric knowledge. But modern society would be unrecognizable without discoveries in fundamental physics. Radio and TV, X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, PCs, iPhones, the GPS system, the Web and beyond -- much that we take for granted would not exist…
drorzel | December 18, 2009I've been dimly aware that physics in the UK was being hit hard by a financial crisis for a while now. It seemed to be a bit deeper than what people in other countries complain about, but I hadn't given it much thought until I read this Physics World story on the latest cuts, which includes the following explanation:
The origin of the cuts can be traced back to December 2007 when the STFC announced that it had an £80m budget deficit for the UK government's current spending round that lasts from 2008 to 2011. It is thought that the deficit emerged by an accounting mistake was made when the…
drorzel | November 30, 2009
Via Chris Mooney, a Seth Borenstein article about Obama's love for science:
Out in public, Obama turns the Bunsen burner up a notch, playing a combination of high school science teacher and math team cheerleader.
Last week, for example, the president announced that the White House would hold an annual science fair as part of a $260 million private push to improve math and science education.
"We're going to show young people how cool science can be," Obama said. "Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models."
It's nice to hear that the…
drorzel | October 25, 2009My panel on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century" was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven't watched the video yet-- Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I'm lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes-- but if the video feeds I've seen from other talks are an indication, it should be really good.
The panel wound up being primarily about journalism, which is understable given that the other four participants are all very distinguished journalists. I did my best to uphold the honor of the New Media…
drorzel | September 29, 2009I've grown thoroughly disgusted with most of the science-vs-religion stuff in blogdom, mostly because my views on the matter are kind of moderate, and don't fit well with the rather extreme positions taken by most of the bloggers and commenters who focus on this issue. This dooms me to either being ignored, or called names as some sort of collaborator, and I have better ways to spend my time, so I've pretty much given up on being an active part of those... discussions.
I do occasionally feel guilty, though, as if I'm letting down my side (well, my part of the squishy middle) by not speaking…
drorzel | September 28, 2009This book is, in some ways, a complement to Unscientific America. Subtitled "Talking Substance in an Age of Style," this is a book talking about what scientists need to do to improve the communication of science to the general public. This is not likely to make as big a splash in blogdom as Unscientific America, though, both because Randy has generally been less aggressive in arguing with people on blogs, and also because while he says disparaging things about science blogs, he doesn't name names, so nobody is likely to get their feelings hurt.
Olson is a scientist-turned filmmaker, who…
drorzel | August 20, 2009... to write a guest post at the Science and Entertainment Exchange blog. So I did, on science communication:
I was asked to write a guest-blog post about "increased incentives for scientists to develop their communications skills." I'm happy to oblige, but in typical ornery-blogger fashion, the first thing I want to do is take issue with the question's phrasing. While it's commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that's very far from the truth.
It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other…
drorzel | July 17, 2009I've been really surprised at the number of people writing about Unscientific America who are confused by the discussion of the Pluto incident (Mad Mike is the latest, but it's not hard to find more). For those who haven't read the book, the first chapter opens with a description of the public reaction to the decision by the IAU to demote Pluto from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet."
I didn't think the point of this was all that difficult to figure out, but it seems to have created a great deal of confusion. Some of this is probably disingenuous, but a number of people seem to be genuinely…
drorzel | July 16, 2009This isn't actually about a literal or metaphorical smackdown-- it's more about a distinction in language, related to a number of the comments that have been made regarding Unscientific America. (Yeah, I know. I'll find something else to talk about soon.)
The issue is most clearly laid out by Janet, who writes:
In addition to the research, the grant writing, the manuscript drafting, the student training, the classroom teaching, the paper and grant refereeing, and the always rewarding committee work, academic scientists should be working hard to communicate with the public, to generate their…
drorzel | July 16, 2009The most unfortunate thing about the furor over Unscientific America is that the vast majority of the shouting concerns a relatively small portion of the actual argument of the book. Far too much attention is being spent on the question of whether Chris and Sheril are fair to Myers and Dawkins, and not nearly enough is spent on the (to my mind more important) sections about political and media culture. Which is a shame, because unlike most bloggers, they make some fairly concrete suggestions about what ought to be done to address the problems they describe.
In particular, they make a fairly…
drorzel | July 7, 2009One of the most interesting suggestions made by Chris and Sheril in Unscientific America is the idea that science needs to play political hardball (page 158, in the endnotes):
Why not form a nonpartisan science political action committee, or PAC, devoted to funding candidates who are either scientists themselves or who make science a strong priority and have good records on science issues? With adequate fundind, the PAC might select, say, five or ten members or candidates to support each election cycle. If there's a desire to be really aggressive (and we have mixed feelings about this…
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…
drorzel | July 5, 2009This is a rare weekend in which I've completed two serious books-- the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They're very different books, but both excellent in their own way.
While they have very different subjects, though, they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under…
drorzel | June 21, 2009Via Steve Hsu, a lengthy rant by Bruce Charlton about the dullness of modern scientists:
Question: why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition? Answer: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational '…
drorzel | June 15, 2009The main speaker at yesterday's Commencement was Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman (the guy before Alan Greenspan) and current chair of President Obama's economic advisory council. As you would expect from somebody of his background, the bulk of the speech was about the current economic crisis. The full speech is online, but the relevant-to-ScienceBlogs bit is this:
The past couple of decades have been seen as a triumph of finance - new and more complex financial instruments, a huge growth of financial institutions, enormous compensation for traders, speculators, and finance…
drorzel | April 28, 2009So, the President gave some sort of speech to a bunch of smart people yesterday (video, transcript), and hearts are a-flutter all over the science blogosphere, as President Obama promises great things for science:
We double the budget of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation, a primary source of funding for academic research, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which supports a wide range of pursuits - from improving health information technology to measuring carbon pollution, from testing "smart grid" designs to developing advanced manufacturing…
drorzel | April 10, 2009Over at the Intersection's new digs, Sheril has posted a rather long list of fellowship programs for people interested in science policy. Sponsors include government agencies, private universities, professional societies, and private foundations, and cover pretty much every branch of science. If you'd like to take a look inside the sausage factory and spend some time trying to help make better science policies, check out the list.
Sadly, the list doesn't seem to include any of the programs Chris Mooney called for, where science-friendly billionaires donate money to support people to become…
drorzel | April 4, 2009Over at his new digs, Chris Mooney talks about efforts to re-launch the OTA:
I’m starting to detect some buzz on this very important front, which I wrote about in detail in 2005’s The Republican War on Science and elsewhere. Basically, the story is this: In 1995 the Gingrich Republicans, looking to slash budgets–and looking askance at science in general in many areas–got rid of their scientific advisory office, which had been in existence since 1972 and had become world renowned not only for accurate studies, but for far-ranging analyses that forecast future science and technology problems…