Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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Responsive Research: Which Research? Whose Responsibility?
Over the past couple of months, I have been mulling over why the apparently simple idea of responsive research is so challenging. I began a policy thought-leadership project for Sciencewise-ERC aiming to investigate a key principle, namely, that research should be responsive to public needs and priorities. Admittedly, this definition of ‘responsive research’ is more…
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Harry Collins on gravitational waves
About 10 days ago a team of scientists at the South Pole made, it seems, a new discovery related to the Big Bang, inflation and gravitational waves. I quickly penned a blog post about this in which I looked at how this discovery was framed through the use of various metaphors. While writing the post,…
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Big bang, inflation, gravitational waves: A journey through metaphorical space
Today, on Monday 17 March, scientists announced that they had found evidence for ‘inflation’ in the shape of gravitational waves (paper). In cosmology inflation refers to an exponential expansion of the universe that occurred for a fraction of a second just after the Big Bang. The link between the theory of the Big Bang, cosmic…
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3D printing: When science and technology take us by surprise
3D printing (or ‘additive’ or ‘digital manufacturing’) has been around for a while (and we’ll see for how long further on in this post); even 4D printing has been around for a while. However, 3D printing only really came into focus for me quite recently, when I came across the metaphors ‘3D printer of life’…
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What does climate sensitivity mean? Peace for our time…or the wrong battle?
A very quick post on this week’s big news in the climate blogosphere: a new report on climate sensitivity, Oversensitive, written by Nicholas Lewis and Marcel Crok published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The GWPF’s role is discussed in a new Klimazwiebel post by my colleague, Reiner Grundmann, while Ed Hawkins’s Climate Lab Book…
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CALL FOR PAPERS, EASST 2014 – Solidarity and plurality: dimensions of ‘the public’ in scientific engagement
We warmly invite papers to our Making Science Public panel Solidarity and plurality: dimensions of ‘the public’ in scientific engagement, being held at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) conference in Toruń, the birthplace of Copernicus, on September 17-19. The panel is co-chaired by Stevienna De Saille and Warren Pearce (Making Science Public Research Fellows). The full call for papers is…
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Making weather personal
I was idly reading The Observer on Sunday (2 March, 2014), when I happened to glance at an article about the Scottish island of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. I read: “The past few months, too, have shown how vulnerable an island community is when the weather becomes truculent”. Truculent I thought; that’s…
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Making Responsible Innovation Matter: From Research Projects to Public Policies
Writing in this blog, my colleague, Brigitte Nerlich, suggests that the agenda of responsible innovation is becoming an unstoppable juggernaut in the world of research policy and funding. She asks that we take pause to scrutinize and reflect more on this agenda. So, just what is responsible innovation? Is it the latest tick-boxing exercise that…
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Responsible innovation: Great expectations, great responsibilities
I recently happened to click on a website providing advice to researchers working on ‘medical technologies’. It starts by pointing out that: “Researchers in cutting edge fields are increasingly being asked by funders and regulators to conduct responsible innovation in order to increase the social and economic benefits and effectively manage the risks of their…
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Working across science cultures: A student’s experience
This guest post is the outcome of a twitter conversation between Brigitte and Stephanie Ashenden. It’s great to have a student guest-post on this blog! Attending my first ever lecture back in my first year of university was without a doubt, one of the biggest eye openers to the competitive nature of the job market.…
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