john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

science communication

  • Profile of Deborah Blum

    Sat, 2013-04-27 11:04 -- John Hawks

    The Guardian interviews my University of Wisconsin-Madison colleague and friend, Deborah Blum, on what inspires her to write about science: "Deborah Blum on science writing: I'm a neurotic over-researcher".

    Or to give you another, more recent example, consider the complex chemistry and biology of plants. It sounds like a dust-dry topic but I love being able to demonstrate that it's wholly fascinating. So stories about plants run like a theme through my Wired blog: the chemical reasons that chocolate is poisonous to dogs, the way that rice plants have an affinity for arsenic, for instance. Or the surprising way that grass – plain old grass in a Texas field – can in conditions of stress, actually generate hydrogen cyanide and kill cattle.

    The grass story reminds me of a point that the 19th century psychologist-philosopher William James liked to make. What science shows us, time and time again, is that the real world is a fantastical, wonderful, impossibly complicated piece of work and "nature is everywhere gothic". When I'm aiming high, I like the idea of being a kind of "gothic science writer" in the best Jamesian sense!

    It's a great interview with many useful thoughts about how to take your writing to a higher level of interest and depth.

    Tags: 
    profiles
    science writing
    science communication

  • Online communication biases upon the public perception of science

    Sat, 2013-01-12 18:01 -- John Hawks

    Last week's issue of Science included a perspective piece by my UW colleagues Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele, from Life Science Communication [1]. They focus on the impact of technology and internet communication on the public understanding of science.

    People find information online today very differently from the way people used to find information, whether from the traditional printed press or in libraries. Information in broad, authoritative works such as encyclopedias, textbooks or indexes involved highly selective editing by humans, moderated by expert opinion. A reader looking in any printed encyclopedia would be likely to see the same basic facts and be directed to the same essential references.

    Now, computer algorithms do much of this job by tracking what people choose to look at after they have searched for a topic or keyword. This changes the process of information discovery, and as Brossard and Scheufele discuss, may introduce feedbacks into the process with unpredictable effects:

    [T]here are often clear discrepancies between what people search for online, which specific areas are suggested to them by search engines, and what people ultimately find. As a result, someone's initial question about a scientific topic, the search results offered by a search engine, and the algorithms that a search provider uses to tailor retrieved content to a search may all be linked in a self-reinforcing informational spiral in which search queries and the resulting Web traffic drive algorithms and vice versa (7). This raises an interesting paradox when it comes to relatively new scientific topics, such as nanotechnology, that are still unfamiliar to many people: Is the World Wide Web opening up a new world of easily accessible scientific information to lay audiences with just a few clicks? Or are we moving toward an online science communication environment in which knowledge gain and opinion formation are increasingly shaped by how search engines present results, direct traffic, and ultimately narrow our informational choices?

    I encounter this problem here with my weblog. It is very difficult to design an effective presentation strategy for topic-specific searches on a website. It is also hard to maintain internal search capacity on a site the size of this one, with content that comprises both original text and bibliographic references. As you can tell by the fact that I frequently deactivate internal searching altogether, this has been a pain for me to develop and maintain.

    The more newsworthy part of this essay is a reference to the effects of online comments after articles about science and technology topics. Brossard and Scheufele refer to a recent conference that covered this topic, and the results of a study in which subjects were exposed to the same story but with different types of comment sections:

    Disturbingly, readers' interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story. Exposure to uncivil comments (which included name calling and other non–content-specific expressions of incivility) polarized the views among proponents and opponents of the technology with respect to its potential risks. In other words, just the tone of the comments following balanced science stories in Web 2.0 environments can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself.

    Anyone who reads comments sections following news articles surely will have noticed the rotten wealth of trolls and other idiots who inhabit such forums. I thought about Brossard and Scheufele's piece again today when I read a post by Dan Conover at Xark: "Why I shut down comments". The post reflects on how blog communities have changed since the early days of blogging in 2005. This timeframe has coincided with the growth of social media of other types, such as Facebook and Twitter, which have given many people a closed community for sharing comments and perspectives with like-minded folks. Conover observes that the trolls and spam are more persistent, causing a rapid degradation of the value of comment sections of many blogs.

    This isn't of course universal. Many blogs continue to have rich and varied comment sections with their posts, and some (like mine) never had any comments at all. What I find more interesting is this passage:

    I believed then, as I believe now, that the ability to comment and share across horizontal, informal networks is the killer app for the 21st century.

    Which sounds nice.

    Unfortunately, newspaper and other traditional-media websites, for all their hand-wringing concerns about libel and civility circa 2005, are typically the worst offenders when it comes to building quality comment cultures. We've taught users bad habits and turned comment sections into troll ghettos.

    Comments on professional news websites are almost always useless, misguided, or malevolent. Combine this with Brossard and Scheufele's claim that the tone of comment sections affects readers' comprehension of science and technology stories, and I propose a hypothesis: Professional news websites may be the worst way to communicate science, because their comment policies undercut science comprehension.

    References

    1. Brossard D, Scheufele DA. Social science. Science, new media, and the public. Science. 2013;339(6115):40-1.
    Tags: 
    science writing
    science literacy
    science communication
    Synopsis: 
    Do comment sections after science articles undercut public understanding of science?

  • Blog of the seven veils

    Sun, 2013-01-06 16:37 -- John Hawks

    Why should academics consider blogging, and when should they band together to work on a group blog? An interview from early 2012 helps to answer those questions: "Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson: 'Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now'".

    But in addition, social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world – and at the moment that’s often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.

    This is exceptionally good advice, which made me want to link the piece even though it's from nearly a year ago:

    Make sure your titles tell a story, and your findings are communicated early on. Academics normally like to build up their arguments slowly, and then only tell you their findings with a final flourish at the end. Don’t do this ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ in which layers of irrelevance are progressively stripped aside for the final kernel of value-added knowledge to be revealed. Instead, make sure that all the information readers need to understand what you’re saying is up front – you’ll make a much stronger impression that way.

    (via Christopher Lynn)

    Tags: 
    blogging
    science communication

  • Getting students into communicating anthropology

    Sat, 2013-01-05 21:01 -- John Hawks

    From Kristina Killgrove, a syllabus for a graduate course in Presenting Anthropology:

    A lot of the "reading" for the course, though, is going to be mandatory web-surfing, listening to podcasts, watching videos, and playing interactive games. Those links are currently within a private course wiki, but I'll think of a way to make that public by the end of the semester. And hopefully I'll convince most of the students to share their work, either here or on their own public space, throughout the spring.

    In this context, I also want to link to the excellent work by Christopher Lynn and his students at the University of Alabama. By instituting a departmental blog network where graduate students and others in anthropology courses are encouraged to post, Alabama has radically reduced the entry costs the prevent graduate students from sharing their work. Plus, they called me a superhero!

    I am so happy to see graduate education starting to shift toward interaction and broader communication.

    Tags: 
    science communication
    teaching
    education

  • Mailbag: Lynas flap, is he laudable?

    Sat, 2013-01-05 19:42 -- John Hawks

    Re: "Recantation of a former genetic know-nothing":

    I'm an admirer of your blog. I work in academia, but I've also had some experience writing for print media (though nothing so influential as The Guardian.)
    As such, the only thing I found jaw-dropping about Mark Lynas writing anti-GMO articles without the scientific background is the idea that you found it jaw-dropping. From my experience, nothing could be more common.

    From what I know of journalism it is tough enough without having to write peer-reviewed articles in science journals. Skills that papers value and pay for include the ability to write and the ability to appear competent about the subject. And meet deadlines. They're also in the business of selling news, so literally for the sake of argument editors are happy to include both sides of the story - even when there really is only one side. That's why anti-GMO people and climate change deniers are given space to air their views.

    As I understand it Mark Lynas is one of a handful of journos from the environmental left in Britain who are now letting their opinions be filtered through the science. He and George Monbiot, for example, are now cautiously pro-nuclear.

    The Mark Lynas thing got picked up by Slate today. As the piece notes, "To admit you were wrong for decades is terrifying. It is also the mark of intellectual rigor." He should be lauded for his change of opinion.

    Thanks so much for this. I appreciate the kind words!

    I agree, "jaw-dropping" is a bit of hyperbole. In my experience this particular problem is common and I find it shameful. Journalists have poor science training as a general rule. This seems forgivable if you consider that their media employers care about the news, not about getting science right. They consult experts for that.

    And yet…

    An op-ed piece about genetically modified crops is fairly obviously NOT news. Even as a perspective on something currently in the news, such as a court decision, it is not a news angle, it is advocacy. When it is purchased from a writer at anything less than the market rate, it is paid advocacy.

    I do think Lynas' change of opinion is a good thing, whatever his motivation. I want to focus on the editors, who are typically beyond shaming.

    Tags: 
    mailbag
    GMOs
    science writing
    science communication

  • Mailbag: What science writing can we trust?

    Sat, 2013-01-05 18:57 -- John Hawks

    Re: "Confessions of a former genetic know-nothing":

    Dear Prof. Hawks

    I have just read this article and it literally woke me up. A great deal is published concerning topical issues, but how is the public at large to decide what is to be trusted? By that I do mean based on scientific data. We can filter out the opinions peddled by so-called celebrities who have been recruited onto a bandwagon. But when an article appears in a newspaper or other media, and the author appears to have the confidence of the editors as a spokesperson for a cause such that against GM crops, via his or her books, appearances and consultancies, it is natural for us to accept that a degree truth is being spoken. Lynam has pulled the rug from under our feet with his admissions.

    But it with the editors working within the media to check their credentials. Is it my duty to cross-check the author's qualifications, before I repeat what I have read or heard to others? Where are the rebuttals from those who were actively working on GM crops? I don't know if they failed to materialise, or got relegated to a coumn inch because they were not sensational enough. In the case of the anti-GM crops movement my suspicions were aroused by their rent-a-mob tactics and scary-catchy phrases like Frankencrops. In the case of the latter once heard, not forgotten, and the link is made everytime the subject is discussed.

    Let us not forget that many issues become issues, not because of any true scientific validity, but because a tidy wad of cash can be made by writing a book. Those with an authorative style get believed, and are soon on the lecture circuit, or even advising governments.

    I do believe in climate change, though I am not convinced as to how fast it is happening. Neither am I convinced it is caused by man and industry alone. The whole issue is probably too complex, with natural cycles interacting, random events such as volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles all interacting to make any one factor (man) the villain. This does not mean I am against emissions control. I am just using this as an example of how those with an agenda can use those with the gift of the gab to promulgate a movement.

    Science as a whole does not get ignored by the media. We have had the likely discovery of the Higgs boson, the anomoly of faster than light neutrinos, and Earth-like planets discovered in the Goldilocks zone reported to the extend that they are the subject of jokes and cartoons. But when the news is a non-event, such as GM foods are good, the scientific community fails to get its message across. Perhaps the reason lies withn deeper scientific theory. "I was unable to disprove the X theory, therefore it is still valid. Success!"

    Thanks so much for this!

    Yes, I agree, and I was motivated to write something precisely because of that issue. Editors do NOT check the credentials of writers, not at all carefully. Most editors in the press are science-averse, they never took courses in science beyond the minimum, and they are not interested in science. People who write articles for them at cut-rate prices per word are desirable to them -- they do not exercise ordinary caution to question the motives of such people.

    How is a member of the ordinary public to judge? I'm afraid it is very difficult. Some science writers develop a reputation for professionalism, for basing their articles on solid science, and for consulting with skeptics and subject experts. But until you know which writers those are, you read at your own risk. Sadly, even science publications have blind spots, allowing advocates for particular political issues to write with little or no critical or editorial input.

    Tags: 
    mailbag
    science communication
    science writing
    biotech
    GMOs

  • Recantation of a former genetic know-nothing

    Fri, 2013-01-04 16:03 -- John Hawks

    The text of this lecture by Mark Lynas is remarkable ("Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference, 3 January 2013"). Lynas gained prominence as a critic of genetically modified crops, and describes in the lecture how his activism developed and how he has come in the last few years to renounce his prior views. This happened as he learned to read the scientific literature in order to write books about climate change.

    My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.

    I find that completely jaw-dropping. Here is someone who had never read a scientific study on the subject, purporting to be an advocate in the popular press, and having his ignorant statements printed widely by multimillion-dollar media organizations. I understand that he is an exception only in his newfound candor about his ignorance. But this is the totally unacceptable problem in science communication: Big media uncritically spreads the word of ignoramuses to fit a political agenda.

    Should we laud Lynas for his current change of heart? I'm glad to see that he started reading instead of mindlessly parroting ignorant anti-science propaganda. But his current stance even if honest seems transparently opportunistic, as he has found books more profitable than his former advocacy. I would rather see him name names about his former anti-science associates who likewise worked on the basis of complete ignorance.

    Tags: 
    anti-science
    science communication
    GMOs
    biotech
    climate change
    politics

  • A problem with communicating human genetic history

    Thu, 2013-01-03 19:02 -- John Hawks

    Vincent Plagnol in Genomes Unzipped last month wrote about a bad example of public communication of population genetics and DNA ancestry testing: "Exaggerations and errors in the promotion of genetic ancestry testing".

    One thing we have done in Genomes Unzipped is to report on what is on the market for consumers interested in getting information about their genetic data. While we have found generally positive things to say about this market, there are also many exaggerated claims especially when it comes to making inferences about an individual’s ancestors from direct-to-consumer genetics companies. An example came up last summer with a BBC radio 4 interview of Alistair Moffat of Britain’s DNA. This post will discuss the scientific basis of some of the claims made in the interview.

    Now, Genomes Unzipped has published a response from Jim Wilson, chief scientist of BritainsDNA: "Response to 'Exaggerations and errors in the promotion of genetic ancestry testing'".

    The two posts are a useful example of the problems communicating human population history and human variation. We know that 10-year-old descriptions of human mtDNA phylogeography are wrong. But those descriptions are still out there, with people assuming they are close to correct, and companies selling the "information" about where their customers' mtDNA came from 50,000 years ago.

    Tags: 
    science communication
    genetic ancestry
    testing

  • Quote: E. Ray Lankester on English for nomenclature

    Mon, 2012-12-31 21:40 -- John Hawks

    Here's a sentiment for popular science from the Victorian Age, from the translation note on Ernst Haeckel's The History of Creation, which was supervised by E. Ray Lankester:

    I have not attempted to escape a difficulty by ignoring the German names made use of by Professor Haeckel for classes, orders, and genera, but have adopted English equivalents. I do not submit these names as a maturely considered English nomenclature, they appear here simply as necessary parts of a close rendering of the German work. I do, however, hold that some such series of English terms is both possible and useful, and do not doubt—in spite of the pretended hostility of the genius of our language, and the curious sentimental objection that English names are unscientific—that we shall before long make use of plain English in speaking of the various groups of plants and animals—much to the gain of the larger public, and without detriment to the latinized nomenclature established for the purposes of the professional student.

    Emphasis in original.

    Tags: 
    history of biology
    science communication

  • Pseudoscience and TED

    Sat, 2012-12-08 11:08 -- John Hawks

    Phil Plait discusses ("TEDx Talks: Some Ideas Are Not Worth Spreading") a public letter from the TED organizers to their derivative TEDx community: "A letter to the TEDx community on TEDx and bad science". I have criticized TED in the past for promoting Elaine Morgan, who gave a TED talk on her ideas regarding the aquatic origins of human adaptations. Although TED provides a platform that has enabled some scientists to bring valuable work to a broader public, many TED talks have promoted ideas that have either quickly proven wrong (bacteria making DNA from arsenic) or are dismissed for good reasons.

    Plait shares his personal experience and gives a good accounting of how skeptics should approach untested ideas:

    GOOD: “It makes claims that can be tested and verified,” and “It is backed up by experiments that have generated enough data to convince other experts of its legitimacy.”

    BAD: “Has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth,” and “Comes from overconfident fringe experts.”

    These are then followed by a series of “red flag” topics and behaviors that, again, should serve as a warning that what the speaker is saying may not be legit: They are selling a product, they claim to have privileged knowledge, they demand TEDx presents “both sides of an issue.” (That last one is a biggie: In many cases there aren’t two sides unless one side is “reality” and the other is “nonsense.”)

    I don't know if TED will be able to resist the allure of pseudoscientific pitch artists in the future. After all, it is not a "science" conference, and many of the "ideas worth spreading" seem uniquely to appeal to a certain group of woo believers. But this letter is helpful and gives the hope that they will be careful in the talks outside their main conference that they choose to promote more broadly. Now, if only we could get the History Channel to adopt a similar attitude...

    Tags: 
    public engagement
    science communication
    pseudoscience

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