Cosmopolitan

Even Cosmo has started to science communicate! Imagine my surprise when a quiz in the December 2006 issue with the headline “What sex is your brain?” turned out to have nothing to do with, well, what you expect of Cosmo!

The gregarious claim that men and women’s brains are “completely different” was supported by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge. He asserts that women are “geared up for empathy” whereas men have “excellent spatial awareness.” Interestingly within the introductory paragraph to the quiz lies a contradiction. Men and women supposedly have different brains, but the Professor’s research concludes that “only 50% of each sex have the brain type that corresponds to their gender,” hence the quiz. In this article you can take the quiz to find out whether your brain is more male or more female, even though your sex should determine that already.

While I acknowledge that Cosmo readers may not be the most intellectual bunch, I wonder if such a huge contradiction went unnoticed by them. If women can have male brains and if men can have female brains, is there really such a thing as a male or female brain?

Why did I buy Cosmo? The free bag matched my shoes. My brain is male, in case you were wondering.

Noora Husseini

science and pseudoscience

Do you know the difference? Dr Ben Goldacre (he of 'Bad Science' fame) talks about which category he thinks 'Dr' Gilian McKeith falls into in this Guardian article. See her side of the story on her website.

The March of the Penguins: a Trade Off

The film documentary ‘La Marche de l’empereur’ was first released in January 2005 in France. Other versions were later released including the American ‘March of the Penguins’ which we saw in Britain. It follows the reproductive journey of Emperor penguins in the Antarctic.

It has been received as a documentary, and in that category has won many awards including an Oscar. Although I think it is a brilliant film, I do not agree with this classification. Documentaries are visual records conveying factual information. Being interpreted as a documentary when it clearly isn’t bestows on it false factual authority.

Anthropomorphism is used to increase empathy in the audience. However, this leads to misunderstanding the nature of the penguins. There is a trade-off between how realistically you portray the subject, and how the devices that create empathy affect the realism. The French version was dubbed to give the penguins dialogue. It successfully instilled empathy in the audience, but was a far cry from a visual record.

Although the American version was narrated, it again developed the penguins’ character beyond fact. It assigned the penguins emotions such as love, and encouraged an interpretation that has led to both the Conservatives and US religious groups heralding the Emperor penguin as the epitome of family values.

Kate Royle

Jan 1st, not April 1st

Only days into 2007 and already I have a contestant for weirdest piece of science communication of the year.

PUS campaigning group Sense about Science have published a "science for celebrities" leaflet. This will be placed in "VIP hangouts" such as VIP lounges at airports, Premiership football clubs, exclusive restaurants and clubs, aiming to catch the attention of those foolish celebs who ignorantly expose the dangers of MMR or the wonders of eating sprouting beans. BBC story here, The Guardian here.

I assume they are taking the mickey as a PR stunt, but (a) it's hard to tell with Sense About Science and (b) I'm still not entirely sure of what they are trying to achieve.

The Core and dodgy Hollywood science

You may have talked about this in your class on science in fiction last week.

But I was inspired to post after being unfortunate enough to catch the last hour or so of the film The Core last night: the plot of this involves a team of people having to drill/float/fly to the centre of the earth to start the earth's core turning again (very 21st century Jules Verne). This being a disaster movie, they save the world but get killed off one by one, leaving only - what a surprise - the two good-looking ones.

My physics isn't so hot, but even I found people wandering around 700km below the earth's surface (with only lines like 'These suits are holding up pretty well against the pressure!' to protect them) kind of unlikely. And indeed, Wikipedia's page on the film has a whole list of inaccuracies (ranging from the laughable to the subtle).

My question is: does this kind of thing matter? Normally I'm not too fussed about bad science in films - it's fiction, right? - but in this case I found it distracting. Do you think it's important that science in fiction is good science?

class 10: Science in Fiction

We started the class talking about this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We then discussed some of the symbols of science and technology suggested by the piece, before going through some more general issues of science and fiction. I also touched on narrative, although we'll talk about that issue more next term.

I mentioned David Kirby's work on "scientists on set", and I've put a link to his paper up on WebCT which is well worth reading if you are thinking about writing an essay on the topic.

Some other links to things I referenced in class:

• Jon Turney's book Frankenstein's Footsteps. It's also worth looking up this book, although I forgot to mention it in class.
• A definition of slash fiction (warning, may offend) - I don't think I made the link between fan fiction and internet communities as clearly as I should have. Fan fiction (including slash) existed before the web, but much of it is now published there. Wikipedia cites 1993 as when the first slash mailing list started.
• Harold Rheingold's book (electronic version) on early internet based communication.
• The "Buffy Studies" online journal.

The hands in the photo above are Willow's, from when she goes evil (Buffy nerds can try to work out which episode).

Horizon - Human 2.0 (24/10/2006)

I tuned in late to this program and found it so ridiculous that I really had trouble watching it through.

When I joined, the program seemed to be just finishing ‘explaining’ Moore’s Law and impressing upon the viewer that this ‘law’ made it obvious that very soon in the future the average computer would be ‘more powerful than the human brain’.

What does this even mean? Will a computer in 2 years time be able to hold believable verbal conversations with me or is it suggesting that a computer of now is not quite powerful enough to find the first million primes faster than I can? Clearly the statement means nothing unless it is followed up by a discussion of how ‘power’ is defined in this context.

The program then proceeded to introduce us to a line up of supposed ‘scientists’ that where there to share their crackpot visions of the future. By crackpot, I mean absolutely on the very fringe of current scientific thought, my favourite example being Ray Kurzweil, a man who sells pills designed to extend ones life long enough so that future science can help you live forever (see this link for a good laugh).

Ray was there to tell us about a future where we were ‘upgraded’ to the point where we had superhuman powers, ranging from the obvious super-strength (from the implanted nano-wires) to the memory and vision enhancements provided by brain implants.

Keeping with the outlandish theme of technology gone crazy, Horizon decided to bring in another doubtful personality to tell us about how things might happen differently – we might all be wiped out by a marauding artificial intelligence at any moment, despite presenting zero evidence suggesting that current science can deliver anything like a genuinely independent A.I.

At no point did Horizon see fit to introduce a scientist that put forward the much more plausible claim that neither of the above scenarios might play out.

Fundamentally, there was little in the way of real science presented to the viewer and what science that did appear was distorted, unbalanced, massively over-dramatised and generally misinterpreted. If a viewer were to take the program seriously they would have no choice but to start saving for the implants or begin digging a nuclear bunker immediately. Somehow I don’t think many people did either, they simply left this miserable ‘science’ program with no better understanding of technological progress than they had before.

submitted by Dan Rogers