Tag: Science Communication
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Making the planet public
I have always wanted to make a link between ISS – the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham – and ISS – the International Space Station – in OUTER SPACE. When looking yesterday at a picture of a cloud vortex taken by Commander Chris Hadfield from a window of the ISS,…
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Which Publics? When? – Part II
by Alison Mohr, Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies, University of Nottingham with Beverley Gibbs and Sujatha Raman This post was originally written for the Sciencewise-ERC blog: http://www.sciencewise-erc.org.uk/blog/?p=915 Part 2: When should dialogue take place? In this second blog post we look at when to carry out public dialogue. That public dialogue should take place ‘upstream’…
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Which Publics? When?
by Alison Mohr, Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies, University of Nottingham with Beverley Gibbs and Sujatha Raman This post was originally written for the Sciencewise-ERC blog: http://www.sciencewise-erc.org.uk/blog/?p=926 Part 1: Which publics should be invited to a public dialogue?In the discussions around public dialogue the term ‘public’ is often taken for granted. However the decision about…
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Wonder, Wunder, Wissenschaft
Television series like Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of Life have triggered online debates about the relationship between science and wonder, wonder and religion, science and science communication. I began to wonder: should I not write a blog post about ‘wonder’? So I started to search, as I always do, trying to find some…
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Are they really climate deniers? Closing down debate in science and politics.
Just had an interesting back and forth with Vanessa Heggie about ‘what to call climate deniers/sceptics’? At the bottom of her excellent post on ‘how to debate with sceptics’, Vanessa wonders whether ‘denier‘ or ‘sceptic‘ is the right word to use around climate change. This was a handy reminder that, although I read stuff on…
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The language of knowledge: A new tower of Babel?
For some time I have been intrigued by the word ‘knowledge’. The more I hear it being used, the less I understand its meaning. The confusion increases with every ‘compound’ use that I come across (in linguistics a ‘compound’ refers to a combination of two or more words). Most recently I came across the compound…
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Weather 1, Climategate 0
A short post sparked by this new paper linking public ‘belief’ in climate change with the weather conditions at the time they were polled (£). From the abstract: Belief that humans are changing the climate is predicted by temperature anomalies on the interview and previous day, controlling for season, survey and individual characteristics. Or, as David…
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Bringing science to life: Brady Haran’s approach to science communication
I have been following Brady Haran’s work as a science video journalist here at the University of Nottingham since its beginning in 2008. We have had many chats about his ethos and his practice of communicating science. Today I went to a talk by Brady that brought this ethos to life for me, an ethos…
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Public remaking science? Seeing Sandy, science and climate change
I wrote just after Hurricane Sandy about the tussle between literalism and lucidity in linking the disaster to climate change, contrasting the careful language used by some academics with the ‘tabloid’ simplification of publications such as Bloomberg Businessweek. Since writing that post, some data has emerged potentially shedding more light on these rather muddy waters.…
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What is science communication? Reflecting on one fall-out from the Cox/Ince debate
Just before Christmas 2012 Brian Cox and Robin Ince published an editorial in the New Statesman entitled ‘Politicians must not elevate mere opinion over science’, which provoked a lively debate on twitter, in blogs and in the Guardian about the relation between science and politics, the function of the history and philosophy of science, the…
Making Science Public 