Tag: Science Communication
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Climate change on Twitter 2013: who tweeted what about the IPCC?
Climate change is a fiercely debated public issue, with much of that debate taking place in various online fora. In a new paper for PLOS ONE with Kim Holmberg, Iina Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich – Climate change on Twitter: topics, communities and conversations about the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 report – I explore the…
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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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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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Global warming is dead, long live global heating?
This post emerged from a weekend conversation between Mike Hulme, Brigitte Nerlich and Warren Pearce. It is also available as a pdf. There has been a lot of talk recently about a so-called ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in global warming. Some argue that it poses a serious challenge to established climate science and may undermine its…
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Dan Kahan public lecture 13/2/14: Democracy and the Science Communication Environment
UPDATE: over 100 people attended the event at Lakeside Arts Centre. Dan has posted a detailed synopsis with link to slides. We are delighted to announce that Dan Kahan (Professor of Law and Psychology, Yale Law School) is visiting the university to deliver a public lecture on February 13th. This is a rare opportunity to…
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How to do things with GIFs: Some musings on online science communication
Some weeks ago my son said to me: “Mum, you should write a blog post about GIFs”. As I am a bit of a techno-culture-laggard, I asked him what these things were. He showed me a few and they made me laugh. They also made me think. Images, GIFs, infographics, short videos and so on…
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Blogs, publics and controversies: climate change lectures in February
Time to unveil three four FIVE! exciting climate change lectures hosted by Making Science Public in February. Superb speakers examining different perspectives on one of the defining issues of modern public life. All are welcome to these lectures, all held on University Park campus. Thursday, February 6th: 1-2pm, Law & Social Sciences (West Wing), A100 Amelia Sharman…
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Jules Verne: Making science visual
On Christmas Eve I had a chance encounter on twitter and the result is this blog post, or rather: essay. Richard Ashcroft had retweeted a tweet about a book by Adam Roberts. The tweet by Adam Roberts said: “Finished copies came by this morning’s post. Very lovely piece of book making!” The book retells Jules…
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Making science public blog posts in 2013 – an overview
This is now our second year of blogging at Making Science Public. Just like at the end of the previous year, I want to provide an overview of what we have done, what we have covered, and what the highlights of our blogging activities have been. Launch and SiP There were two major events that…
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