john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

science communication

  • Best practices and tips for Twitter in the higher-ed classroom

    Fri, 2012-01-06 00:40 -- John Hawks

    Photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa, on Flickr, Creative Commons CC BY 2.0

    College students have become used to instant communication. Many professors complain that technology has given their students short attention spans and poor study skills. Others bewail the end of civilization, as they see their students reading Facebook during class instead of taking notes.

    In reality, students are adapting to a new information environment. The cues that guided young academics to new ideas a generation ago were subtle, steeped in unwritten formalities, and exclusionary. Today, the best students are using social networks, feeds, and blogs to forage for the information that matters to them. But others will inevitably take advantage of the social buffet to browse away from your course's content.

    What to do?

    Try taking the reins, to meet your students at the information smorgasbord. Getting your students to interact with each other outside of class is one of the best ways to deepen their educational experience.

    Twitter is a tool that can enable ad hoc conversations and interactions among your students, in ways that you can track and foster. Your students may not all be familiar with Twitter, but its simplicity and availability, much like text messages on a phone, has a broad appeal.

    Curious about how to apply Twitter in your classroom? Or maybe you've tried it in the past but had only partial success. My list of suggestions outlines some of the most common questions and hangups encountered with Twitter among groups of students.

    I use Twitter in large undergraduate lecture courses, where participation is voluntary and happens in conjunction with other modes of communication. I have spoken to many who use it in smaller courses and who require students to use Twitter in certain assignments. These applications all have their distinctive features, but there are many commonalities that emerge in today's diverse student communities. Here are some of them:

    Learn to work in 140 characters.

    The absolute greatest thing about Twitter: It forces concision. If you're a blathering, droning lecturer who won't shut up, Twitter will show you the smackdown.

    Brevity runs a risk. Your course syllabus has bloated to include 3 pages of small print in legalese for a reason. After years of teaching, you've seen students misinterpret every clear statement in every conceivable way. Every tweet is like a grenade waiting to explode with mistaken misinterpretations.

    Solution: Edit, edit, edit. The key to effective tweets is setting them aside for awhile before sending. Make sure every word counts.

    If 140 characters seems like being chained in a box, try to find the freedom in brevity. When you read a great story, you can forward it to your students in a flash with no regrets and little explanation. Salt your tweetstream with items from your feeds in the morning. Let your students take the pulse of how a real expert forages for information. Or set up a list with some of the best tweeps in your field of study, and encourage your students to follow it. Leverage the power of the Twitterverse.

    Make the course hashtag part of the syllabus.

    As cool as you are, your students may not want to follow you. Besides, as cool as you are, most of your tweets have nothing to do with your class! Besides, Twitter isn't about your students following you, it's about enabling them to find information from each other. You need a hashtag for your course. A student who keeps a search on the hashtag will see every tweet, including those by other students. This keeps the conversation open because any student can chime in anytime.

    Picking a hashtag is easy. It should include the course number and something memorable or distinctive. For example, my Principles of Biological Anthropology course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has the hashtag #uw105. Put it on the syllabus and show students how to use it on the first day. Give them a little handholding.

    Above all, when you've thought of the most awesome gangbusters hashtag, check first to make sure someone else isn't already using it. The last thing you want is to have your students confused because Unlimited Wrestling is using your hashtag for their 105-lb weight class.

    Students always have the option to reply to you or other students without the hashtag, taking the conversation to a more private sphere.

    Bring the feed into the classroom.

    The main problem with Twitter as part of a course: Most students may already have accounts, but don't use them. My first semester, I had only two dozen active tweeps out of a class of 240.

    Fortunately, there are many ways to leverage a small amount of initial engagement into a bigger interactive presence. Make an informal assignment to devise a 140-character answer to a question, and promote the best answers in class. When your students tweet a useful link, retweet it to your followers. Use the class hashtag to send informal study questions on the current readings, or preview the next day's discussion.

    One way to encourage greater uptake is to use Storify. Students can compile their tweets into a record of notes for the class session, or can use Twitter to put together a study guide for an exam. Because Storify stories are accessible from the web without Twitter, they also provide a way to show non-tweeps the value of Twitter in your classroom.

    Maybe the gutsiest use of Twitter is a live twitterfall next to your lecture slides. Giving your class a backchannel gives the students a voice even when they are listening to your lecture. My students have made great use of the backchannel during certain lectures, asking questions about the content that I can answer right during class. If you have a teaching assistant, you can task him to handle Twitter during lectures and alert you to questions; or you can watch the tweetstream yourself. But there's a risk: After all, when you give students a voice, some of them will use it to complain. Be ready to respond to questions, confusions, and complaints with good humor.

    Reward the students who are participating with attention. A daily pick of the top tweet, or a weekly top five, may be a real morale booster for certain students. Retweets are the currency of the Twitterverse, so use them liberally. Put your students into contact with other professional tweeps by mentioning them together in the same tweet.

    Be professional.

    If you spend a lot of time answering student e-mails, moving some of those questions Twitter can be a huge relief. An answer in 140 characters approaches the simplicity of handling questions in person at the end of class. But even though a tweet can be brief (or maybe especially because of brevity) you need to be conscious of your professional role in your class.

    All the usual advice about electronic communication applies to Twitter, too. Don't try too hard to be funny: Humor can easily go wrong in a diverse classroom, and in an electronic setting is often misinterpreted. Especially when the 140-character limit makes you omit words from the punchline.

    Twitter can help to level barriers in your classroom, but don't be too casual. You may be able to run your class effectively without formalities, but you are part of a college or department where not every instructor has your abilities. Don't unwittingly undermine your friends and colleagues.

    Don't assume your students are hanging on your every tweet, but be aware that some will cling to the barest scrap. A breezy tweet may mean little to you after you've written a dozen of them, but be conscious that a student may read those 140 characters just as they've spent most of the night studying for your next exam. Students may appreciate your quick and open communication style, but they are conscious of your power over their grades.

    Students in the U.S. are protected by FERPA, which limits the ways that coursework can be released to the public. That doesn't mean you can't assign graded exercises on Twitter, but you should be ready to justify your pedagogical goals: Is Twitter giving your students an additional way to communicate and synthesize content in the course, or do you expect that public communication is a skill they must master to be effective in your field? Anticipating possible outcomes for students is part of designing effective courses, and in this respect Twitter is adding a new twist to an old theme.

    Be prepared for abuse.

    Twitter is a public channel. Anyone who has tweeted much will have encountered spammers. Fortunately, bots and spammers usually don't tweet with hashtags, so they're unlikely to show up for students keeping a search on your course hashtag. But if you retweet your students' tweets, you should be prepared for the possibility that spammers find their usernames more than they would otherwise have done.

    Twitter makes it easy to report spam and block users. Making quick use of these facilities is often the most effective way to keep your students' timelines relatively uncluttered with spam. When you introduce Twitter to your course, you should always mention and highlight the ways that the service enables blocking other users.

    Because it's a public channel, one of your students may believe anonymity will protect him if he decides to be abusive. It's very easy to sign up for an anonymous Twitter account and a student can throw bombs into other students' timelines by including the course hashtag. An instructor needs to be concerned about the potential for cyberstalking or harassment, also.

    Fortunately, like other uses of technology in the classroom, your students' interactions on Twitter probably fall under your institution's electronic use guidelines. That means you have help from your IT department and college administration if you have a student creating a disruption. Don't think that an abusive student is solely a problem for your class: Electronic abuse and harassment are antithetical to a college's mission to teach students.

    A simple warning may be enough to let students know that anonymity will not protect bad behavior. Make it clear that electronic abuse is as serious or more serious than plagiarism. If you face a case of abuse that you suspect is caused by a student, inside or outside your classroom, make it clear to the entire class that the case will be dealt with by your institution's academic affairs personnel.

    A Twitter glossary:

    Tweet: The basic message, much like a text message on a phone. It's limited to 140 characters in length.

    Timeline: A series of tweets from people and lists that a user follows.

    Follow: By following another user or list, their tweets show up in your timeline.

    Tweeps: 6-character slang for followers and Twitter friends.

    List: A timeline can quickly become unmanageable if you're following hundreds of users. Including a set of related users in a list allows you to focus on content.

    Link shortener: Services like bit.ly or goo.gl take a long URL and give an equivalent that is 20 characters or less, making it possible to comment on links in a single tweet. Each of these services is essentially a huge database linking long URLs to short, customized ones.

    TweetDeck: Many users rely only on twitter.com or dedicated mobile apps for Twitter. Others use one of several software applications that manage Twitter content. Apps like TweetDeck automate certain tasks, like link shortening, and enable fast switching between concurrent searches.

    Hashtag: Any text string preceded by the hash (#) sign. Tagging a tweet with a hashtag helps to group tweets by subject. Searching by hashtag enables people to follow tweets from a course or meeting even if they don't know which users may be there.

    @: @ is a special character that let's Twitter know a username is coming (e.g., @johnhawks).

    Mention: A tweet that includes a user's @username. This shows up in the user's @mentions timeline.

    Reply: Clicking "reply" will compose a tweet that begins with a @username. This shows up in the user's @mentions timeline, but will not show up in your follower's timelines unless they also follow the @user you reference. Appending anything to the beginning of the tweet (like a '.') will make it appear in your followers' timelines, too.

    D: Twitter's private message option. If a user follows you, you can send them a direct message by D username. This will not show up in timelines of any of your followers.

    RT: The retweet. A basic way of relaying other people's tweets to your followers.

    MT: The "modified tweet". You can add a comment and edit other people's tweets to stay under 140 characters, and it's good form to include an "MT" to show that you've changed the original.

    Storify: A service (from Storify.com) that enables you to categorize a series of tweets and compile them with additional content into a narrative of an event.

    Other resources

    People are integrating Twitter into their classes all over the world, in many different academic settings, and they are sharing their ideas. Here are a few:

    "Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class — via Twitter": Jeffrey Young reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Cole Camplese, one of the first to use a live twitterwall alongside his lecture slides.

    "A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom": An even earlier article from Young, about David Perry's use of Twitter in an electronic communications class.

    "Twitter in the Classroom (this replaces those)": David Silver notes that Twitter replaces listserv, e-mail announcements, and serves as a way for students to share online assignments in other formats.

    "Twitter for Academia": Tips from AcademHack that go beyond the classroom and includes some ways that Twitter can actually promote good writing habits.

    "5 Unique Uses of Twitter in the Classroom": US News gave some interesting advice in their last higher education edition, focusing on ways that Twitter may benefit students beyond the classroom, and some very creative exercises.

    Tags: 
    teaching
    Twitter
    science communication
    education
    Synopsis: 
    Thinking about integrating Twitter in your class communication strategy? Here are some pointers.

  • How to blog for your lab

    Sun, 2011-10-02 17:07 -- John Hawks

    Christie Wilcox makes a case that every lab should be doing science outreach on social media: "Social media for scientists Part 1: It's our job, and Part 2: You do have time. Her rationale is worth spreading:

    Yes, part of the solution to this problem is to invest in better education. But even assuming we do that, we are ignoring the millions of Americans who are no longer in school. We can make the next generation more scientifically literate, but we have to consider the current generations, too. Adults over age of 35 never learned about stem cells, nanotechnology or climate change in school, so they depend on the media to learn what they need to know. These are the people who vote. They are the ones whose taxes pay for scientific funding. We need to reach out to them, and to do that we need their trust.

    I'm not sure social media are necessarily the best way for most labs to make an impact on the public. You may do better working with other institutions, or by going into a collective with other labs. I know that one great way to increase your lab's profile is to get your department or program to set up a group blog, where the lab's home page is one contributor along with other labs. Two new posts a month, as Wilcox suggests, is a good start for a single lab but won't drive much interest; weekly or biweekly posts by a group of five labs would build much more attention.

    Tags: 
    outreach
    metascience
    science communication
    blogging

  • No echoing the echo chamber here

    Sun, 2011-05-29 17:20 -- John Hawks

    Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.

    Yes, when I write it that way, it sounds kind of silly, doesn't it?

    But that's the thesis of an essay by Natasha Singer in the NY Times: "The Trouble With the Echo Chamber Online", and a separate essay by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal: "When We're Cowed by the Crowd".

    Singer posits that the problem is Google giving us search results that we want, not irrelevant ones.

    If you type “bank” into Google, the search engine recognizes your general location, sending results like “Bank of America” to users in the United States or “Bank of Canada” to those north of the border. If you choose to share more data, by logging into Gmail and enabling a function called Web history, Google records the sites you visit and the links you click. Now if you search for “apple,” it learns and remembers whether you are looking for an iPad or a Cox’s Orange Pippin.

    OK, seems like a pretty awesome thing to me. I'm here in Rome, and when I search for a location on my phone, it gives me the location in Rome! Not only does that give me the information faster, it saves me (expensive) bandwidth. Win!

    But Singer worries that this will harm our democracy. No, stop laughing. Really.

    But, in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”

    This argument is bunk. At no time in history have people been exposed to a wider range of opposing viewpoints. And you know what? Most of them are bunk.

    We have always had algorithms to select content. In the past, those algorithms were inside the heads of a small number of newspaper editors and media programming executives. Most of these people knew each other socially, and all of them were locked in competition for eyeballs with the same small group of people, thinking in minor variations on the same theme. That's why you see things like different newspapers, owned by different companies, publishing opinion pieces on the same out-of-the-blue internet theme on the same day! It's like a throwback to the past.

    I like Google better. Who is more likely to get the truth about bunk theories -- somebody who Googles, or somebody who flips his television to the History Channel?

    Lehrer picks up a related theme: the "wisdom of the crowd". The idea is like the "ask the audience" lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Ask enough people who don't know the answer, and the result of the poll is more likely to be correct than if you asked any one of them. Lehrer notes a recent study that showed that a crowd where people can exchange guesses with each other is actually worse at this kind of thing than if they all remain mutually mute.

    So if you find yourself in Slumdog Millionaire, you'd better gag the audience.

    We can all see that this "wisdom of the crowd" thing has pretty limited utility. Guessing number of ping pong balls in wading pool, yes. Unified field theory, no. That's why we don't make decisions by polling random ignorant people.

    Oh, I know, you're going to say that's exactly what we do in a democracy! But really it isn't at all. Shaping the information environment before an election is a multibillion dollar effort by political parties, candidates, independent organizations, and the media. The public in modern democracy is highly informed. It's just that each person is highly informed about a small window of things. The internet helps us to connect with other people who know about the same things, allowing coordination of action among dispersed people on a scale rarely seen before.

    Lehrer thinks all this communication is making us stupid. No, stop laughing. Really!

    And yet, while the Web has enabled new forms of collective action, it has also enabled new kinds of collective stupidity. Groupthink is now more widespread, as we cope with the excess of available information by outsourcing our beliefs to celebrities, pundits and Facebook friends. Instead of thinking for ourselves, we simply cite what's already been cited.

    Yep, it's that groupthink thing. The echo chamber.

    Someone who uses the word, groupthink, invariably means, "I can't stand that everyone doesn't think like me!" Oh, if you weren't deluded by your cult of celebrity, surely you would listen to reason!

    Bunk. If you have an argument that can't make traction against somebody's Facebook friends, it's not a very good argument. If you don't like it, make it better.

    Yes there is a social influence effect on decision-making. That's the way humans think. We're social creatures, and our friends and relatives are important. It's important that we get to choose our friends. It's important that we get to choose what we want to know. A society where we can't choose those things would be a tyranny.

    So if you want to influence people's ideas in our social world, you need to engage with their social networks. Seems like the sort of think that could use a better algorithm.

    Tags: 
    communication
    metascience
    science communication
    media
    psychology
    social
    Synopsis: 
    Some say the internet is an echo chamber. I say there's an echo chamber of elite coastal internet critics.

  • My turn as a science fair judge in Italy

    Sun, 2011-05-22 18:30 -- John Hawks

    Yesterday I had the distinctive experience as a judge of a scientific poster session, featuring the work of Italian high school students. The session was in the main lecture hall in the Physics building at the University of Rome "Sapienza".

    The students, around eighty of them, were from the Liceo Scientifico Statale Augusto Righi, a science-themed school with a long history in Rome. The session was the conclusion of an educational program with the anthropology section of the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnographico "L. Pigorini". The program gave the students an exciting chance to work with the museum's human skeletal collections from Classical and pre-Classical contexts, testing hypotheses from historical and archaeological contexts. The poster session was the climax of the program and gave the students a chance to show what they had learned with their hands-on projects.

    Students at the poster session

    Students getting ready for the program

    For example, one group of students examined teeth from the Bronze Age necropolis of Gricignano d'Aversa, in northern Campania. This site was a center of weaving and textiles, and women commonly used their teeth during one of the steps of threadmaking, leaving a distinctive pattern of grooved wear on them. The students studied the etiology of these grooves -- making casts of the teeth for microscopy, sexing the associated skeletons, and tabulating the results. They were able to show that only female skeletons had the distinctive pattern of wear on their teeth, and that the obvious signs of wear developed over many years, preceded by wear that was detectable only with a microscope.

    Great posters in Rome

    Some of the great posters on exhibit

    Another of the projects did a similar comparison for men from a Classical-era coastal village. A high proportion of the men developed small growths of bone in their ear canals, called auditory exostoses. These can result from repeated exposure to cold water, an occupational hazard of diving for fish. The students were able to show the increase in exostoses with age, and confirm they were present only in men. They also got to compare the exostoses with stable isotope data from an ongoing study that is trying to open a window on diet and work occupation in Classical times.

    Italian poster session!

    These kinds of projects are part of the ongoing scientific work at the Pigorini museum. My friends Luca Bondioli, Alessandra Sperduti, and Paola Francesca Rossi at the Museum facilitated the program, and they were able to pick projects that were just the right level for the students. Each presented a combination of sophisticated science being done on the materials by professionals, such as electron microscopy or stable isotopes, with the osteological and dental basics that students can engage with. With this combination, they got to see the anthropology develop a picture based on testing more and more detailed hypotheses about behavior.

    Alessandra Sperduti and Luca Bondioli

    Alessandra Sperduti and Luca Bondioli

    I was a little worried about the language barrer. As I told someone, my Italian is limited to morphology and menus. But the students did my work for me. For one thing, every poster had abstracts in Italian, English, and Latin. A couple added German or Russian!

    More important to me -- every group, as it turned out, had someone with very good English, and three or four other students who got along fairly well. I got them to help by asking questions of the other group members; I gave them a real grilling on their subjects. I'd say they did very well, and the posters -- obviously with a little help -- were very professional.

    Proud students at their poster

    Some proud students at their poster

    I got to talk to some of the parents, and had some good conversation with the director of the school. All were very proud of their students. As they should be! Some of them might have a future in this field!

    I do a lot of outreach, and this program was a really unique opportunity for the students. It coupled a unique research collection with some great historical topics. There are a few other programs like this going on internationally, and I wish we could bring this kind of work to many other schools. Maybe a virtualized version of certain exercises would help, but nothing beats the engagement with real active, and interesting, science!

    Tags: 
    teaching
    education
    science communication
    travel
    Hawks sightings

  • Frinking around Titan

    Mon, 2011-05-16 08:30 -- John Hawks

    From an article about exploring Saturn's moon, Titan, I have never in my life seen a scientist quote that sounds more like something Professor Frink would say:

    "Waves on Titan's seas will be far larger, but much slower, than on earthly oceans, according to our calculations," said Professor John Zarnecki, of the Open University. "That suggests Titan is the best spot in the solar system for surfing. The only trouble is that the temperature there is -180C (-290F). Either way you look at it, it is clear the place is pretty cool."

    HOYVIN-GLAVIN!

    Tags: 
    quotes
    humor
    science communication

  • Public impact

    Mon, 2011-05-16 07:19 -- John Hawks

    Alice Bell on public engagement for social scientists and humanists: "Being professional about 'impact'."

    Me, I’m a public sector professional, and as such, I take pride in the ways in which I may cultivate an independent voice, but do so within a network of constraints provided by public service. Listening to outside voices is not a threat to my professionalism; it’s an expression of it.

    ...

    We are paid to do our research. Teaching a small set of kids privileged enough to go to university, or publishing in esoteric journals only a couple of people will read does not cut it. Moreover, it doesn’t challenge our ideas enough to make the sort of high quality work we should be producing. Earn public trust by showing off your worth. You may well learn something in the process too.

    Tags: 
    science communication
    outreach
    open science

  • McPhee on writing about science

    Thu, 2011-05-05 16:43 -- John Hawks

    The Paris Review has a long interview with writer John McPhee ("The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee"). I like the writer interviews they have, and it is especially useful to see nonfiction writers in this forum. McPhee has been a staff writer at the New Yorker where he has written on many topics, he has additionally written more than 30 books.

    The interview goes into his work on environmental topics, including the book, Encounters with the Archdruid. He gives some very good advice about how to compose the structure of a nonfiction work. But I was most motivated to point to the interview because of this passage, where he discusses writing geology in the New Yorker:

    When I proposed writing about geology to [New Yorker editor William] Shawn, he was very sober about it. Well, he said, go ahead. Go ahead. Readers will rebel. But you go ahead; you’ll figure out a way—but readers will rebel.

    He was right. I’ve never had an experience like that. Readers strongly support it and strongly rebel, and seem to be split in camps.

    INTERVIEWER

    Why do you think that is?

    MCPHEE

    Two cultures. There are some people whose cast of mind admits that sort of stuff, and there are others who are just paralyzed by it at the outset, no matter how crafty the writing might be. A really nice thing that happens is when people say, I never thought I’d be interested in that subject until I read your piece. These letters come about geology too, but there are some people who just aren’t going to read it at all. Some lawyer in Boston sent me a letter—this man, this adult, had gone to the trouble to write in great big letters: stop writing about geology. And it’s on the letterhead of a law firm in Boston. I did not write back and say, One thing this country could very much use is one less lawyer. Why don’t you stop doing law?

    That is, of course, why writing for the internet is wonderful. People didn't pay to read it, they don't have to seek it out, so if they find it they're likely to want it. People who subscribe to the New Yorker are not the same as those who subscribe to Scientific American. Still, I have discussed the same problem with many editors of mainstream science magazines, who get similar responses from readers. There are a lot of cranks out there, who just don't want to engage with certain topics. It's not only the "two cultures" problem -- even within the "science" culture, people are epicures about what they want to know.

    McPhee's point struck me -- "no matter how crafty the writing might be." I think that's right. You can't trick people into science. No putting honey in the medicine. And if you give up the idea that you have to dumb it down, talk "friendly-like", well, then you can do some real writing.

    Tags: 
    science communication
    writing
    science writing

  • Conference blogging by Sci

    Wed, 2011-04-27 08:30 -- John Hawks

    Scicurious has written a very nice howto giving concrete advice about blogging a conference: "How To Blog a Conference". Lots and lots of good ideas and advice in her post. I admire anyone with the discipline to take notes and do interviews at a conference. It's all I can do to keep up with the schmoozing.

    But I would say that the process Sci followed is an excellent strategy for networking and training yourself as an effective communicator of your own science.

    Tags: 
    blogging
    meetings
    blogs
    science communication

  • Engaging with the public

    Wed, 2011-04-13 20:30 -- John Hawks

    Alice Bell raises an essential question: "What’s this public ‘engagement’ with science thing then?"

    I’m similarly sceptical about lumping this whole ‘science’ thing together (and in particular, lumping together ‘scientists). Science is big and complex, its ideas about itself vary and change over time. Maybe it should be pluralised to sciences, like publics. Or again, maybe we could just talk about specific people, ideas and approaches. Leave loose talk about ‘science’ to philosophers and advertising executives, and instead focus on sharing what you have particular expertise in, be honest about what you don’t know and think about all the new things you might learn from engaging in a bit of broader discussion about your work.

    Like Bell, I favor much more specificity about the "public" we're addressing. I like "people" much better than "publics" plural, because the effective point of contact is the individual, not the committee. People have many different goals in their interactions and experiences with science. When I bring Sophie to the local planetarium for a show, neither she nor I is the "public". We are people with a pre-existing relationship, looking to deepen that by engaging with the particulars of a science both of us have some knowledge about. Other people have their own goals and experiences -- many of them intent on avoiding science. No form of engagement can bring together all these people without addressing their distinct goals and interests.

    On that note, I very much like Bell's final suggestions -- particularly being receptive to serendipity:

    Don’t be silly about ‘the public’. Remember: knowing your audience and targeting specific groups can be very powerful, but so can the serendipitous connections made by packaging your work as accessibly as audience as possible.

    ...

    There is nothing wrong with a bit of ambition, but be realistic. This means keeping in mind the limitations of your project, including pragmatic concerns like money, time, your professional image and the weather. You are unlikely to change the world. You may not even change any minds, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, you may well have helped move towards a bit of world/ mind changing. These things take time. None of them are easy.

    I would add one thing. This final point may sound a little nihilistic. I mean, if you can't change minds, why even bother?

    But at an early career stage, very few people have the moxie to change minds. The point of engagement is to become a better scientist. Like all things, it takes practice to master. It may take many failed efforts to arrive at success.

    You are only a reed. But you are a thinking reed.

    Tags: 
    metascience
    public engagement
    teaching
    politics
    science communication

  • The "gay caveman"

    Thu, 2011-04-07 14:58 -- John Hawks

    I am just about to go crazy today. I just can't seem to escape the "gay caveman" story.

    No, I don't mean the Geico caveman who likes mango duck breast and who has Talia Shire as his therapist. His sexual orientation I don't know.

    I mean this story in the Telegraph (UK) ("First homosexual caveman found") which claims:

    The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.

    The story is based on a press conference with archaeologists in Prague, who are involved in excavating and analyzing a series of burials found at a site in the city. PressTV has put a televised report online (HT Eric Michael Johnson). The work is newsworthy, but there is no publication immediately forthcoming. The burial in question, one of many, is interesting because the archaeologists have perceived a mismatch between the sex of the skeleton (they assess as male) and the grave goods and positioning of the skeleton (they assess as female).

    I have few comments, and really none at all about the archaeology in question. All they did was outreach for their ongoing work, talking about its possible scientific importance. Good for them!

    My criticism is limited to the Telegraph and the (at this count) hundreds of press outlets all over the world who have breathlessly repeated the "gay caveman" story. Heck, they've even raided Wikipedia.

    Dudes! I could be wrong, but I think that to have a "gay caveman", you need a skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain't either!

    Corded Ware burials are pre-Bronze Age farmers, not anywhere near cavemen. These are scientifically very informative, I should know as I've measured many European skulls of equal age. But the Telegraph may just as well have said that Stonehenge was built by cavemen.

    Er, well, given the quality of their science coverage, I shouldn't speak so soon -- maybe they actually do think that cavemen built Stonehenge...

    Kristina Killgrove is ahead of me on the story ("So, what we've learned is that this skeleton was neither a caveman nor necessarily gay."). She pointed me to Rosemary Joyce's post on the story ("'Gay Caveman': Wrecking a perfectly good story"). Joyce is an expert in sex and gender in archaeology and points to the problems that inevitably arise in sexing skeletal remains in these contexts:

    We need to know the age and possible lifeway of this individual to avoid what Lori Hager called “the sexism of sexing”. She used as her example a burial at Çatalhöyük of an older woman whose pelvic anatomy had been remodeled and diverged from the expectations for female skeletons.

    It would also help to know what criteria are being used to assess sex. In 2000, Chris Meiklejohn and colleagues published a discussion of Mesolithic Europe that noted the difficulty using robusticity, for example, to identify males, as some females were more robust than some males in the samples they examined.

    Then there is the question of intersexed individuals– those persons whose chromosomal sex may vary from the dichotomous grid of two sexes that is assumed by the reporters writing about this story, and apparently, by the archaeologists involved as well. Contrast this with the work of Rebecca Storey, who identified a royal burial at Copan as likely a genetically intersexed person.

    On the topic of transgender, third gender or homosexuality in skeletal remains -- I agree entirely with Joyce. My only further comment is that we don't have any scientific report about the skeleton. From a photograph it does not look like an obvious male to me. If there are DNA results or a more systematic survey of features, we'll just have to wait for them. Based only on skeletal features there is a substantial chance of sex misassignment (a female skeleton that looks more male than typical). From a Bayesian perspective, the chance of a misassignment is higher than the chance that the burial is truly unique among known Corded Ware burials.

    So, maybe gay but not clearly so, definitely not a caveman. Absolutely bad science reporting. Bad, bad, bad. Miserably awful. No links, no indication of affiliation of sources, no background information. No photo (the Daily Mail, of all places, came up with a photo of the burial, while the Telegraph illustrates their web story with generic stock photo of African rock art). No indication of whether the work is pre-publication or whether there's a forthcoming paper. Yuck.

    Tags: 
    Neolithic
    science writing
    humor
    science communication
    Synopsis: 
    A Czech team announces an ambiguous burial, and the press goes off the deep end.

Pages

Subscribe to science communication

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.