Year: 2012
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On Kansas, candidates and Creationism: the struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party in America’s Heartland
With a US general election due in November, media attention will be largely focused on whether Barack Obama will succeed in his bid to defeat the Republican Mitt Romney and win a second term in the White House. However, the Presidential vote is only one piece in a complicated electoral jigsaw puzzle, which will also…
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Making science public: The issue of language (jargon)
This is a guest blog by Gregory Hollin, a PhD student at the Institute for Science and Society (School of Sociology and Social Policy) Over recent days there has been a fascinating blog-based debate of great interest to the Making Science Public agenda. This debate focused on the nature of writing in the natural and…
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Metaphors in science and society
I recently had an interesting twitter conversation with Alex Brown, Peter Broks, Bev Gibbs, Angela Cassidy and Sophia Collins about some outdated metaphors for the spread of knowledge and for science communication, for example as transmission or transporting of ideas from one head to another and so on. I also read two interesting blog posts…
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When the limits of our knowledge collide with the limits of our language: Mixing metaphors around the Higgs Boson
I was sitting in the garden today (in the sunshine!) (Sunday, 22 July), reading the feedback page of New Scientist which featured some amusing metaphors and analogies for the Higgs Boson, which has recently been discovered at CERN. This made me think. Science and metaphors Metaphors and analogies are used extensively in science, both in…
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Religion, science and public education: a cautionary tale
I arrived last Monday (9 July) in Kansas City to begin a month of fieldwork in support of my Leverhulme research on religion and science debates in the USA. In particular, I am interested in whether these debates are having an impact on the Kansas Republican Party primary races for the state legislature and State…
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Unseasonable weather; unseasonable climate? Facts, fictions and fantasies
I have just come back from a place in Dorset that my husband’s family has visited every summer for the last forty years or so and that I have visited for the last twenty. I sometimes needed to take and wear an anorak. This has changed and I have been wearing it more often over…
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Not God but Goldilocks? The Higgs Boson and science communication
Being on a rain-washed holiday in the depth of Dorset, what else is there to do but watch some news, read some newspapers and getting a long lecture on the Higg’s from one’s offspring. I still don’t understand exactly what’s going on with the Higgs, but the whole thing ties in nicely with various topics…
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Battle looms over European funding for embryonic stem cell research
This blog was written for the ‘Making Science Public’ blog by Dr Alex Smith, University of Warwick, Senior Leverhulme Research Fellow. He is Project Leader responsible for ‘Science, religion and the making of publics in the UK and the USA’. According to an interesting story in this week’s Times Higher, a strong challenge is being…
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Rio plus 20 minus hope
The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development has recently been held in Rio de Janeiro (20-22 June, 2012). This summit has come to be known as Rio+20, as it was organised to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which, it should be pointed out, was organised 20 years after the…
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Open data, trust and data/visual literacy
Two reports When I opened my twitter timeline on 21 June, a stream of tweets announced the publication of two reports relating to open access and open data: The Royal Society’s report on Science as a Public Enterprise (plus an article about it in the THE and a Nature news blog) and the RCUK’s Open…
Making Science Public 