Class 2: What is science? Anatomy of a newspaper

In this session we got our fingers dirty with newsprint and did a mini "content analysis" of science reporting in the British press.

Our rather rough piece of social research was inspired by a "proper" investigation, the Science Museum Media Monitor (details of this can be found on pages 118-119 of the reading). We finished up with a brief overview of formal definitions of science, information on this is in the handout.

The reading for next week is a short piece by Tim Radford, which gives some basic advice on how to approach science writing. Radford himself will be appearing at Imperial college on thursday, in a special event on popular science books - details here. This should be an interesting event and recommended to com'n sci students. You can read more about it on Jon Turney's science book blog.

We also introduced assignment four, if anyone has any questions about that, please email me (again, the handout is on WebCT).