The Last Word

Everyweek in the New Scientist magazine I always end up skipping straight to the ‘Last Word’ column. The ‘Last Word’ is a small section of the magazine in which scientist from across the world try to answer questions from members of the public. These can vary from intelligent questions which are quite difficult to answer such as;

Why is it when two people walk together they often subconsciously start to walk in a synchronised manner?

To highly amusing, silly questions such as;

Why is snot green?

The highlights of the ‘Last Word’ column were, last year, made into a highly successful book aptly named ‘Does anything eat wasps?’ This was so well received by the general public that the follow-up ‘Why don’t penguins feet freeze?’ has just been released.

Even though these books are presented in a light-hearted and jovial manner I believe they actually represent a very good piece of science communication and further aid the publics understanding of science.

Why? One might ask. It is precisely this type of informal scientific writing which intrigues those who relish wit, insight and scientific curiosity, yet may not want to read the complex, and sometimes slightly boring articles in the New Scientist or Nature. These books are definitely a ‘wise, weird and wacky compendium that is guaranteed to amaze, inform and delight.’

Chris McLeod

howstuffworks.com

How Stuff Works is an informative and easy to understand website which answers day to day questions to more complicated, specialised questions. It covers a wide range of areas including Health, Money, Science and Travel just to name a few. These categories are then sub-divided into about six areas which make the information needed easy to find.

The endless amount of topics, each contain animations, pictures or video clips which not only increases the audiences’ understanding of the topic but also keeps the audience entertained! Having a glance at the topics increased my curiosity of how things do work and I believe I could spend hours on the website to increase my general knowledge and have all my curiosities answered!

The audience are able to sign up for weekly news updates from the website keeping them up-to-date with all the great stuff going on in the world and it also contains brain teasers, not only for fun but also to challenge the audience. A new feature of the website is the section on readers’ opinions where the audience are open to discussion boards in which they can state their opinions and views of various topics.

The downside of this website is that the immediate presentation is not as attractive to the eye as say the BBC Science and Nature Website. The BBC website caught my eye straightaway and I was curious to have a look around, whereas, it was only after I had a look around the ‘how stuff works’ website that I found the positives of the site.

Younsuk Oh

Class 18: Health promotion and health metaphor

Today we looked at health communications. Probably one of the biggest areas of science communication (bar the weather forecast), this area nevertheless often gets forgotten by PUS promoters. This is maybe because these communications don't come from the usual suspects, but from the government, charities, and businesses.

Health communication comes in all sorts of formats, but we focussed on just one: leaflets. We had a whole bunch of these, advising us on everything from meningitis to migraines, and evaluated their audience, purpose, and effectiveness (good practice for the essay due in next week). Generally we quite liked the ones we had; although we noted that their purpose was ultimately to inform, educate, and change behaviour, which raised the memory of traditional PUS.

We then had a look at the metaphors the leaflets used. The ones that we found were often in images; other than the 'military' metaphor of disease the text seemed to use relatively few 'live' - i.e. obvious - metaphors. However, a final point at the end was that, according to Lakoff and Johnson, all of our language is actually suffused with metaphor - we just don't notice it any more.

One thing I didn't get chance to mention: health promotion as a recognisible genre. We talked at the start about we recognised health communication, and mentioned things like purpose and who the communication comes from. But are there other things in the style that make us think 'health promotion'? Take a look at this ad and think about what it's trying to mimic and why...

“Parasite Rex” by Carl Zimmer

Ever lie in bed at night and swear that you can feel something crawling around inside your skull?

Well it is probably paranoia or it could just be a Botfly larva devouring your brain from the inside-out. This disturbing thought is just one of the disgusting and frightening images depicted in Carl Zimmer’s “Parasite Rex”.

The front cover of “Paraste Rex” is analogous with that of a 1950’s Sci Fi comic, but on further inspection we find that this is not a story of intergalactic space aliens, but that these hideous, disturbing and grotesque organisms are actually ‘common’ human parasites.

Parasite Rex is a refreshing popular science book that neither shys away from using scientific names nor tries to patronise the reader with endless repeats of the same information like most popular science books of recent years.

The story of the human tapeworm I found particularly nauseating as we travel from mouth to gut to the intestinal tract and find that these pulsating Cestodes can grow up to 30m in length and break up into hundreds of egg sacs, ready to infect new hosts.

I would strongly advise those with weak stomachs and heart conditions to read this book at their own risk, as Carl Zimmer pulls no punches and delivers what I would call, a riveting and enlightening picture of those organisms that feed, breed and survive at our expense.

Matthew Hayward

SciPod – New Scientist Podcast

With the use of iPods and other MP3 players on the increase, it is of no surprise that the science world has started using ‘Podcasts’ as a way of communicating science to the public. An example of a science magazine employing this method of communication is the NewScientist.com Podcast – or SciPod.

SciPod is a weekly podcast which is available for download on the New Scientist website. The programme consists of four or five pieces of science news which correspond to articles in the upcoming issue of New Scientist magazine - published the following day.

The informal style of the programme makes for easy listening and the language used make the more detailed aspects of the science easy to follow. The topics are often related to current issues, allowing listeners to learn more about subjects covered briefly in the news, such as climate change, obesity, etc. The variety of subject matter is broad, with different areas of science being included in each programme.

SciPod is an effective audio programme for communicating science to the public, in spite of the cheesy music and tag-lines such as “SciPod - it’s not just a podcast, it’s the very essence of happiness!” With specialist subject matter explained in layman terms and in digestible chunks of about 7 minutes per topic, SciPod is a good overview of the week’s science and technology news that engages the listener’s interest and may also encourage listener to pick up a copy of the magazine to found out even more, which, in my opinion, indicates that SciPod has successfully served its purpose as an effective form of science communication.

Cheryl Lai

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

session 17: the internet

Comic-strip from xkcd.com - a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language, mainly because I like the idea of a internet-shaped cake.

Today's lecture started with a link to last week's discussion on realism and persuasion in popular science books. I introduced the class to "bob the balloon" who demonstrated, in a very hands on way, Newton's Third of Motion.

We then, more seriously, we looked through some science website before discussing topics of authority, access and the history of hypertext. I asked the class to think about what elements of a website make it appear trustworthy. Examples included: how high it was on google-searches, whether it had commenting, linked to other rebutable sites, had advertising on it, had been updated recently, seemed big and well designed. Of course, we can be fooled by many of these, the pregnant man website I promised to link to is here.

The second half was a group activity where I asked people to design a site for a (hypothetical) telecommunications gallery at the Science Museum. We had some great ideas; interfaces based on history of mobile phones, various styles of virtual tour, many different ideas about involving texting visitors and ways of using 3G or VOIP technology to get people in the gallery and outside to interact.

The Science Channel

The science channel is a television channel from the same people behind the discovery channel, it focuses specifically on scientific issues. The channel focuses predominantly on space science, such as astronomy, human science and other topics in science related to humans aren’t usually broadcasted on this channel. This channel can be watched on television and also on pod casts.

I recently watched a documentary about the discovery of new planets, which was titled our destiny.

The documentary was very simple, explaining how new planets were discovered and by whom. The documentary has a narrative text which describes what’s on the screen and features several guest speakers from universities that carried out research in to the topic. In this documentary research that the scientists were doing was simplified to a point that their work seemed trivial. Although taking away from the scientists achievements, it was probably necessary so that the audience could have a better understanding of the topic.

The documentary takes advantages of visuals using a lot of actual pictures and footage of events in space; however during this no information on what these pictures depict is given. These are simply used as they are appealing to the eye, they have no informational value.

The Science channel explains scientific topics very simply making it easy to understand for lay audiences and even children. The channel however only looks at a small part of science and what it does look at is oversimplified. It is a very interesting channel and I would recommend it to anyone interested in space science.

By George Banjo

Science is a game

Game On is a temporary exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the technologies that have changed gaming over the decades. It looks at the earliest games, different game types (action, simulation and puzzle games), game soundtracks, games associated with films and many other aspects of gaming. Visitors to the exhibition get the chance to play a wide variety of games, from pong to the Nintendo Wii.

Obviously getting to play a lot of games is immense fun. It's not just the game's ability to distract but there is a nostalgic attraction to some of the older games, which heightens the experience. However, does such an exhibition really belong in a science museum?

A science museum's remit surely should be to educate, inform and interest the public in scientific issues and also more generally in science and technology. Game On is really a history of games. It looks at how new technologies impact on how games are played - the Internet's influence on multiplayer games for example - but does not examine how these technologies work. And who would pay attention to any explanation while trying to collect all the coins or win the race? Here the Science Museum fundamentally fails its remit.

The exhibition does raise some questions. How well do play and science education mix? For example, how well can a game convey a scientific principle? Is it justifiable to have an educational 'loss leader', an exhibition which has a rather a tenuous link to the remit of the museum but attracts a lot of people who may explore other parts of the museum which deal more directly with science? I have my doubts.

Ryan Dee

Animals in the Womb

‘Animals in the Womb’ aired on channel four on Thursday 21st December at 9pm. The lives of an Asian elephant, a dog and a dolphin were followed from conception to birth, with revolutionary ‘4D’ technology used to illustrate each stage with images of foetuses moving inside the womb.

Public appeal was obvious with plenty of cute pictures of baby animals waving, blinking and yawning at the audience. However, this wasn’t merely ‘soft science’ –there was a strong informative foundation behind the pink dolphins and waving puppies.

I was impressed by the depth, quality and scope of the information the programme provided, from embryology to evolution to behaviour, all delivered in ‘everyday’ terminology that the layman could understand. The programme kept the audience awake by switching between species, rather than just recounting the lifecycle of each in turn. Computer imaging was also used to good effect, bringing the science alive.

However, I felt that the length of the programme was slightly too long; lay audiences may loose interest after the first hour. It would also have been nice to see a human foetus for comparison of the different stages of development. This may have related the programme to the audience more closely.

Despite these criticisms, viewing ‘Animals in the womb’ was a refreshing and rewarding experience. The programme was informative, appealing and exciting – exactly the way science communication in the public sector should be!

Submitted by Lucy Fray

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.

Popular Science

We started the session asking what is popular science, looking at some titles and considering whether we thought they were popular science or not. We then moved on to the broader question of what does popular science mean? What does the content popular science, indeed it's very existence, say about the cultural role of science?

Baudouin Jurdant suggests popular science can be considered as the "autobiography of science". Written mainly by scientists it articulates a public face of both scientific content and practise. This issue was largely discussed in the context of boundary work, we the class close analysis of an extract from this book; looking at where the writers construct and/or apply boundaries between science and an other.

We had a good student point raised about half way through. It was suggested that it was ironic I was talking so much about boundaries, when popular science was about acting as a bridge/ point of translation between science and the public. I agree, but... popular science can both aim to bring such groups together and act to separate them at the same time (we shouldn't imagine social actions are consistent). Last term Sarah probably mentioned a paper by Stephen Hiltgarter (see reading list). This argues that all popularised science, be it in book form or something like the Dana center, emphasises the difference between the public and science. The very existence of popularised science suggests the need for some special translation between science and society and so acts to emphasis the gaps between them. It might also be worth reading this paper by Massimiano Bucchi.

I also mentioned the problematic status of popular science books in terms of their claims to reality; a topic we'll pick up on next week. Baudouin Jurdant argues that much of the status of science is constructed by not being literature; science is special because it has a stronger (empirical) link to reality than simply text. Jurdant suggests that popular science is a rather problematic genre; textually communicating something that is by definition extra-literary. I suggested popular science books have to find ways in text to be as persuasive as visual or physical demonstrations, and we investigated this in some popular science books I'd taken out of the library

Anyone looking at popular science books as an essay topic should read the papers in the journal Public Understanding of Science by Jon Turney and Baudouin Jurdant. You can access them electronically from college. This is in addition to this week's reading, also by Turney, which is on webCT.

Hamster power

Amidst a frantic band of jumping and shouting little kids, a science teacher attempts to explain the concept of conservation of energy to an 8-year old. Meanwhile, another bunch of children is jumping up down, waving their hands in the air, to make a lightning bolt strike a tree. Designed to be yet another ‘interactive’ science exposition, the energy gallery in the science museum subjects a hapless visitor to a torrent of acoustic abuse and even electric shock therapy.

Indeed, for adults, the energy gallery may not be quite what they had in mind for an enjoyable, quiet afternoon out. However, by keeping in mind that it is aimed at children of about seven to fourteen years old, I think the gallery succeeds quite well in conveying some of the key issues concerning energy and its associated problems.

With a minimum of text and an overload of audio-visual-sensual effects, it is made clear that it will be very hard to change our current pattern of energy consumption. Visitors can have a try at energy management by pretending to be minister in a computer simulation. The kids are asked if they would process there hamster into electrical energy to power the television, illustrating rather well that tough choices must be made.

Although all-in-all a good initiative, it is deplorable that virtually no mention is made of the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change, which might raise questions considering that BP and BASF were the main sponsors of the gallery. Definitely worthwhile visiting with your hyperactive little cousin!

Submitted by Cornelis Plet

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

A Quite Interesting Blog

Based on the BBC 2 Quiz show, QI (it stands for Quite Interesting if you didn’t know) The Book Of General Ignorance throws what you thought was true in the recycling bin and sheds light on common misconceptions in History (Medieval people did not believe that the Earth was flat), Invention (Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb) and Nature and Science in general (the Blue Whale is not the largest organism on Earth – it is a 2000 year old mushroom covering 890 hectares).

Obviously then, it is not a pure science book, but what science it does contain is very enlightening. The book is broken up into small bits of texts only a few paragraphs long explaining the who/what/where/which in question. The science is not spread evenly throughout the book, but is rather delivered in chunks of a few small articles, so you could go through a few pages encountering no science at all – but that’s alright because each article is written in a witty manner, and most of them are indeed quite interesting.

Since it is not marketed strictly as a science book, it has the potential to reach a larger audience than most science books. Of course it doesn’t go into as great a detail as those science books, but in reaching more non-scientific audience it may spark a hidden interest in science in more members of the public, which can only be a good thing.

Class 15: Science in museums

Continuing our series of classes on the media of science communication, today we discussed - and experienced - science as it is presented in museums. While your handout (on WebCT) and the reading for this week (chapter 8 of Gregory and Miller 1998) give you some idea of the history of museums, helping us to understand the background to the format and the development of science centres, in our visit to the Science Museum we tried to concentrate on questions of exhibitions as constructed spaces.

We looked round two galleries: Making of the Modern World (ground floor), and Energy - fuelling the future (2nd floor). (Note that both have extensive websites attached to them, which can be used independently of the galleries - an interesting development in itself.) The galleries use very different styles, at least at first glance: MMW is object-heavy; while Energy contains very few objects but lots of computer-based interactives. We tried not to simply experience the galleries as a given - as we often do when wandering around museums - but to think critically about the effects they had and how these were created. In particular we considered what audience the gallery was designed for, how it was structured and laid out (and why), and how science was presented. In other words, we thought about the galleries as made for a particular purpose.

Opinion differed on both galleries: to some, Energy was 'gimmicky' while MMW was overwhelming in the mass of objects it presented. In our discussion afterwards, we touched on funding (how often are galleries updated, and where does the money come from?), purpose (are science museums there to present history, highlight contemporary science, or help people learn for themselves?), and the differences between visiting a science museum and an art gallery.

One final thought that we didn't get chance to discuss: should controversial science be presented in museums, and how could this be done?

Punk Science

Last term Sarah organised a trip to a "dialogue" event at the Dana Centre. I thought we could do something similar this term. Except this time, to see people aiming more to entertain than engage.

The "Punk Science" boys will be performing on the 27th Feb. They've been doing shows at Dana since it opened, and have even taken them to the Edinburgh Festival. The Metro said “Laugh as you learn” and the British Council sent them on a tour of Malta. There's more information about them here and a review of one of their older shows (by a Imperial College student) here.

They tend to sell out fast, so if you are interested email me, and I'll see about getting tickets.