Tag: Science Communication
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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interesting twitter conversation with Alex Brown, Peter Broks, Bev Gibbs, Angela Cassidy and Sophia Collins about some outdated metaphors for the spread of knowledge and for science communication, for example as transmission or transporting of ideas from one head to another and so on.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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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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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…
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Science communication: Some anecdotes, some stats and some questions
This is a guest blog by Ash Choudry which was previously published on the Nottingham Science Blog The blog reports on a public lecture by Rick Borchelt held on Friday, 15 June at the University of Nottingham. Rick is Special Assistant for Public Affairs to the Director of the National Cancer Institute at the US…
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Scepticism: Process, not position
Scepticism activism Scepticism is as old as human thinking, as old as philosophy and as old as science. Most recently scepticism has, on the one hand, become embroiled in a major controversy about climate change, and on the other hand scepticism has also become a form of activism, with Skeptics in the Pub being a…
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Making science songs
I wrote what follows in 2012. Now it’s 2021, I can’t believe it, and we are living in a time when science has become a matter of survival. We are living through the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines have been developed at speed to help us get out of this mess. Music and songs have helped…
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Making science (in) public: What we can learn from museums
I recently received an email from Philipp Schorch who was moving to Australia to take up a fellowship at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute and the Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific. The Institute carries out research across the humanities and social sciences in order to inform public debate and public policy; the…
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Climate communication conundrums
After climategate in 2009 I was reflecting on what this episode (which sort of opened the ‘door’ for the current climate ‘wars’) may mean for climate change communication. One thing struck me at the time: that climategate can be used to rhetorically flip previous (contrarian) discourses around climate change and climate science on their heads.…
Making Science Public 