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Is Good Scientific Journalism Possible?
scida sends in a link to his blog post exploring the question of whether, roughly speaking, science journalism is an impossible task. From the post: "I have spent the better half of the past six months trying to understand one thing: how can you effectively present primary scientific literature to the general public? Is this even possible? ... During the past few months, I have spent entire days locked up in my office, writing my first manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal. While doing so, I have come to realize the following: details can change everything. There are a number of assumptions I have been forced to make while analyzing my data, many of which are critical for both my methodology and the development of few of my arguments. Why? Often, the information I require simply isn't available (the studies haven't been done, or the studies that exist are based on assumptions of their own). Now, can someone unfamiliar with a particular field, nay, a sub-discipline of that field, recognize these assumptions for what they are?"
There are a number of assumptions I have been forced to make while analyzing my data, many of which are critical for both my methodology and the development of few of my arguments. Why? Often, the information I require simply isn't available (the studies haven't been done, or the studies that exist are based on assumptions of their own).
Or worse yet for your readers, even the studies that do exist are locked behind a pay-to-read model of electronic publishing- so they can't tell assumption from fact. My suggestion: Make everything explicit. If you're forced to make an assumption, admit that it is an assumption up front and explain why you're making that assumption. If you are referencing a study, don't just link to the study or reference it in a bibliography, also copy the relevant portion of the data and explain the assumptions of that study AND it's relevance to your study.
Until the peer review system stops being broken by pay-to-read studies, I see no other option. And remember- to anybody outside of your special field of study, any assumptions at all will look like sloppy science based more on emotion than data.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It's just rarely done. Most journalists would prefer to write fluffy hype-pieces, exaggerate claims (or allow exaggerated claims to be published), and otherwise print a lot of BS. Regular, honest science pieces just don't sell as well.
implications rather than the actual research. And those implications may only be available after an interview with the scientist and his peers rather than primary source documents.
I think this has been the case for a long time- the problem of course is that the primary research scientist has a bias towards magnifying the importance of the findings, making it very important not to try to report anything of depth until doing some real digging. Which of course goes against the whole trend of "instant news"...
Is good journalism in general possible?
From the ark-tickle: I recently attended an interesting seminar, titlted, "The Informed Science Journalist: How Much Science Do You Need to Know?" led by UBC journalism Professor and Director of the School of Journalism, Stephen Ward. During the discussion, one theme in particular caught my attention: you don't have to have any background in science to write about science. Anyone with a keen interest for a field and sharp mind can write about anything, from philosophy to advanced string theory to climate modeling.
Is this true? Is a keen interest sufficient?
Well, it's a good starting place, but I think that "sharp mind" bit is more important... and judging by the quality of most science journalism I read, there's not a lot of 'em in the trade. I imagine deadline pressures aren't helping the quality of science reporting, either.
dear elitist:
within the mind of your average joe blow, you will find two shocking things:
1. amazing depths of stupidity
2. amazing heights of intellect
therefore, you sell sophisticated information to joe blow in the only way possible: straightforward. no watering down, no soft pedaling. then watch as what you deem ungraspable (that's the elitism in you) getting grasped notheless
dear insular academic:
not everything has to be explained. communication is not about impressing upon someone else's mind every little delicate detail. nor is it necessary to do that for joe blow to grasp important pieces of information
in fact, there is no value in science that cannot be communicated and explained. in the mind of the most advanced intellect can be the understanding and insight of the most amazing things. but if said great intellect can't open his or her mouth and explain it to someone else, in his head this great insight stays, and it dies with him, and becomes dust. in other words, dear insulated academic, i am saying your ability to communicate your research is actually more important than your ability to grasp every nuance of your own research
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can anyone not in the field explain what these are to the general public.
So as the author notes details are everything. And, at the same time, details such as assumptions mean the difference between science and bunk. I think that a good, scientifically trained, journalist could point these out if they were looking for them but whether that is what their bosses will let them do is another thing.
I have interacted with a number of journalists and have noted that, for many of them, there are two things that they need to do a good story: time to do research and an absence of biased assumptions. Ironically these are the same basic requirements to do good science. Even more ironically both are often denied them under pressure of tight deadlines and preexisting editorial biases. Not "liberal" or "conservative" biases but more the, if the elected officials say it it must be true or "there must be two equaly sides to every story" which trips up those comparing science to pseudoscience. Such gaps negatively affect reporting on all issues from science to war.
In many ways I think the question is really, can journalists do good journalism, and that is something I used to believe was true. Now, I'm not so sure.
To write anything well, the writer must (a) understand the material, (b) write to the level of the user, and (c) tell a coherent, interesting story.
If you can do that, you can also weave in the portions about assumptions, undone studies, and so on, while still being entertaining enough for a "normal person" to read. If you can't, it's better that you write for a specialized audience (if at all) that might be more forgiving of the writing's shortcomings.
That is all.
A couple of good examples of science writing for non-experts:
* Stephen J. Gould's books (e.g., "The Panda's Thumb") about natural history. He made a point of never "lying" to his students or readers. He believed that teachers only needed to fudge the truth if they didn't understand the material well enough themselves. His books are clear, informative and enjoyable, and they don't cut any corners on the science.
* Science News ( http://www.sciencenews.org/ ), which is one of the best examples of science journalism anywhere. I've subscribed to it, off and on, since the 1960s. (It's been published since the 1920s.) They're excellent journalists.
Forgive me here, but I couldn't tell what the point of the article was.
Was it challenging the use of assumptions?
Was it stating that people can't understand the research without advanced knowledge of the assumptions?
Help, I didn't understand.
Ok, I give up, why you?
http://www.ecoenquirer.com/
However you discuss journalism. I'm assuming from that statement that you are reporting other people's studies, findings, etc. In reporing this I would think you need to not be making your own assumptions but, instead, representing the assumptions of the researcher or scientist you are reporting about. Or, if you are reporting on the overall impacts of one person's work and utilizing assumptions based on your knowledge of other works, you should cite those as well.
Good journalism should encourage people to think, but it should also encourage people to learn more. If you are making assumptions, not only should those be clearly presented so you have impartial journalism, you should also allow for the foundation of that knowledge to be known.
When I studied journalism in school I was told that you start with the most important facts, and then devolve into the smaller details. This is what you should be doing in this case, I would think. A completely off-the-wall example I will cite is CNN's coverage of Michael Jackson's molestation trial a couple of years back. Daily they had updates on that trial, but every day they ended with a couple of paragraphs providing background on the story, telling the allegations, when they were made, etc. This meant that if you were reading about the trial for the first time the single article gave you all the knowledge you needed to understand the scope of that article, that you could further research this topic to discover more details about the charges, and summarize the high points thus far. Had you been reading daily and up to sepeed on all the events of the MJ trial, you read the top paragraphs with the new information and then skipped the bottom.
It seems to me that the journalism is possible but the classical principles of journalism need to be followed. Do that, and you should be good to go.
Good luck!
The self-contained-ready-to-go view of scientific submissions seems too rigid and static in the web era. I would suggest a blog with comment options such that others can comment on wording problems, assumptions, and open issues.
If you want to document something for credit-of-discovery purposes, then perhaps get it notorized or some other legally-binding recording system. But otherwise keep the dynamic web-based "publishing" approach going.
The current system is archaic and inefficient and hurts the little guy.
Table-ized A.I.
They might, if you're able to clearly phrase your assumptions in terms of things like widths of a human hair, the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, or the speed of a rifle bullet.
He seems to do fairly well at it, from both sides of the equation.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Journalism is a well known practice, but communications is much tougher.
The maximal information (says Jeremy Campbell in "Grammatical Man", a guide to entropy in information systems) is conferred when the speaker knows the most of the context of the listener.
I agree with that whole heartedly. This means that you have to know your target audience to be most effective, not necessarily the subject matter-- although it certainly has to help.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Never mind any particular kind of journalism. Most people who have been close to a story are astounded at how different it sounds when it is reported in the news.
My own favorite was a plane crash shortly after takeoff at the local airport. Somehow the reporter got it in his mind that the problem must have been wing icing. It was the middle of summer. The local Transport Canada personnel told him that icing wasn't involved. The crash investigation's report made no mention of wing icing. As far as I can tell the reporter never corrected his story. Maybe he figured that we were all trying to snow him.
Does anyone actually DO it anymore?
Not as far as I can tell.
Most of the stuff I've seen in the last 15 years or so shuffles between two categories.
1: Highly technical and scientifically accurate as far as information is available, but written in such a way that stereo instructions (in Japanese no less) are more intelligible to the common man.
2: Written to the understanding level of the common man (or slightly above if they don't use crayon), but woefully inaccurate and filled with assumptions and self-fulfilled hypotheses. Stuff that a generation ago, would have been laughed out of most scientific journals. An "in depth" study that winds up within a 15 percent confidence? Sorry, but 5% used to be considered shaky, but publishable. Lax standards and sensationalism now rule the roost.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Publish more, think less. It's what everyone else does.
I'm not a Scientist, but here's my take.
The only things that can be responsibly reported are things that are well established. But they aren't news. And the irresponsible are then left to report on the news. So we need responsible journalists to report on Science. Which they can't do properly.
The outcome is what we have. Science news that is at best inaccurate. More often it's sensationalized and misleading.
If there's a solution to this I certainly don't see it.
-Peter
Probably not from the Slashdot team...
Indeed. If Einstein asked slashdot, it would probably go something like this:
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by Einstein on 01:20 PM, 04/01/1908
[...] and this is why I think relativity is a good model.
Score: -1 Troll
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by Anonymous Coward on 05:35 PM, 04/01/1908
Mr. Einstein, don't worry about your low mod
because scores are all *relative*!
Score: 5 (50% insightful, 50% funny)
--------
Table-ized A.I.
Look at the science fact articles by various authors in Analog magazine when it was under John Campbell. Also look at Isaac Asimov's science fact articles in various publications during the same period.
Journalism has been dumbed down greatly since the post-Vietnam politicization of news and the television "vast wasteland" era concept of news as entertainment for people too dumb to read. This is why you have to go back to about WWII and its pre- and post-war periods to find most of the examples of good pre-web science writing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I went to college the first time for physics, the second time for journalism and am now a technician and an editor. What I learned was having a science background helps, having generalists in a field you can talk to first before asking the specialists questions helps and if you can review the story with your science sources so much the better. You may not get to include as much context as you want, but you can write to minimize, although not eliminate, errors you might make and the incorrect assumptions other people might make. Ideally you have non science and non tech types read a draft and talk it over with them, but that often takes more time than you have.
Really I think that the greater problem is with mass media grabbing a few points and stating them as 'truths'. Alot of the bad press that scientific studies have nowadays is from some major new organization blowing something out of proportion, having everyone accept that as 'truth', and then discovering a few years later that it was wrong/inaccurate/whatever. On a side note I agree with the previous poster that as far as getting the information across most people are not concerned with the details so much as the general idea. If then, in your article, you provide a sense of how 'certain' the information is most people will pick up on that as well. You can then get the idea across, as well as an impression of how many assumptions have been made or how fragile the results are. To most people that is better than a lot of detail that is out of context.
Think about it - journalism is generally the result of a person in possession of what amounts to half of an English degree with a few communications and maybe an ethics class thrown in trying to explain complex issues from geographical and topical areas with which, odds are, the journalist has no training whatsoever.
Ask any professional - legal, medical, IT, academic, business, etc. - if journalists adequately explain the complexities of their work. I guarantee you that the answer will be a resounding "no" on almost all counts. Part of this is the nature of the media - the need to get stories that sound interesting (and life is often boring and must be juiced up) out very quickly - more quickly than the other guy. The other is simply the result of the fact that the person writing the article simply has no idea what he's talking about - they taught him about dangling participles and conflict of interest, not what a summary judgment, kidney, floating point or profit margin is.
Truly great journalism is written by experts in the field they are writing about. Many often complain that these experts are "biased", but I think it is plain that most journalists are as well - and most media outside of the U.S. recognizes this. While these experts may have biases, they also have one thing journalists lack entirely - intimate knowledge of the subject at hand. While one cannot necessarily accept what these experts says at face value, one can also be sure that the writer has done more in-depth research than browse the Wikipedia article for a few minutes or ask some other, often unnamed "expert" whose bias bleeds into the article but often without attribution, leaving the reader to assume that the idea of one expert is a consensus opinion.
It's interesting reading the blog post. I'm a software developer, and software is also built upon other software, much like science is built upon science. In software development we call this dependencies. I.e. program A needs library C to run, library C needs library d,e,f,and g to run. I tested program A to run under version 1.2 of library C, which was tested under version 1.6 of library e, 1.5 of library f, etc. Will the program work if you use version 1.3 of library C? Who knows? So I'm not unfamiliar with building one thing on top of assumptions that may not prove to be true.
It seems to me that scientific journalism ought to try to hard to list it's dependencies more explicitly. It can only improve your paper to list all the assumptions inherent in it. I.e. that Joe Schmoe measured quantity XYZ properly, that lepton numbers are conserved, etc. You don't have to explain what a lepton number is, or even what the assumptions of Joe Schmoe's experiment was. Just a section talking about the assumptions and dependencies would do a world of good IMO.
(Oh, and the insane rambling by the journalist who think they can write about anything and not have a background in it is of course insane. That's typical journalism though. It's just that we tend to catch the errors in science more often though, because there actually IS a correct answer).
AccountKiller
well, there are a few issues with your suggestion - well at least things I think would be issues
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? could you imagine the price of journals if this were required? There are now plenty of journals that allow you to read content for free.
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain everytime
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. If people have issues with something, they can pay or do whatever else it takes.
4) to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions were true to begin with. As long as disclaimers are made in your original paper stating further study needs to be done, this may not be an issue
When all else fails, try.
I think there are several questions you need to answer for yourself before you address the question you're asking. One of the questions you need answer first is, "Who is my target audience and who will understand my hypothesis/arguments?" There are just a handful of people in my field. Researchers in related parallel fields my have a reasonable chance at understanding what I'm talking about but will likely have little interest or time to read my papers. Anyone else in the scientific community won't read the paper.
I am relatively certain that fewer than 10-20 people in the word have read the papers I have written simply because there just aren't that many people that are interested. If you deeply involved in your field you likely have a similar audience; possibly a larger one depending on your field but still very limited.
I believe that papers should be written in such a way that a person who is interested in duplicating your results but knows next to nothing of your field should be able to find in your writing the bread crumbs that have led you from the basic early research and the research of your contemporaries to the point where you are today. Careful use of references will help to create an overview that can act as a study guide to the interested student. It is likely that your assumptions are nuanced and possibly confusing to people outside your field but carefully chosen words and references can again leave enough of a trail that the interested student will be able to learn and fully appreciate those nuances and see why you have felt that it was important to clarify them.
It sounds like you have spent a lot of time learning to explain your hypothesis to yourself. All that remains is to capture and document the steps you have taken, weeding out or documenting false steps and emphasizing the real steps forward that you have made.
Good luck!
Yes it is possible to have decent scientific journalism.
Quark in the early eighties was a good example of this.
Especially the older shows with great animations.
This advice could affect what's going in a scientific journal and you're asking /.?
I can't wait to tell my family and peers about this. This is great!
The Ars science journal, Nobel Intent provides me with my daily science geek fix. Perhaps it isn't dumbed down enough for most folks?
Follow the examples set by Michael Bellesiles and Woo Suk Hwang. Simply make up data to fit your conclusions!
The concepts used and referred to by scientists take years to learn. If it were any other way, it would be possible get Ph.D.'s overnight. Therefore, the percentage of the population that truly understands what you're writing about is likely to be just slightly larger than number of people in your particular field. Of course, that begs the question, "What does it mean to truly understand something?" IANAE (I am not an epistemologist) but I would bet that understanding something is akin to being able to talk about the subject matter in a way that leads to effective action.
This fact is even more pronounced in fields that use terminology found in the popular vocabulary. It's relatively easy for a customer to know that they don't know the difference between MySQL and an Oracle Database (database engineering) and subsequently seek more understanding or query the opinion of an expert, but try convincing a mother that it would be worthwhile for her to learn a little bit more about reinforcement and punishment (behavior analysis).
On the other hand, it would still be worthwhile to try and disseminate the "big picture" findings from your research. Stephen Hawking is someone who is great at this. The people that read books like "A Brief History of Time" probably still can't do quantum mechanics but I would say most of them have indeed learned _something_.
I can empathize. I subscribe to Science and read most of it outside of the research articles. I sometimes read the actual research articles when they are in my field. My secondary background is Biology and I have an avid interest in Astronomy. Without looking up a few words and searching any of several wikis occasionally, I don't have a chance of understanding the questions, assumptions, or even the conclusions of several lines of research. If you can, look over a copy of Science (try your local library) and see how they describe the same piece three times: first as a two-paragraph summary, secondly for those interested but not particularly from that field of research, and thirdly the actual research article as submitted by the scientists. The best I've done when describing the deeper parts of research to less inclined friends is using pairs of analogy & example or example and question. Example: the differentiation of Darwin's Finches in the Galapagos (evolution). I give a brief description of the big 1998 ENSO and it's affect on food and hence the finches. Then I ask, "Why did it take scientists so long to find it? I mean, ENSO has been around for a long time, and food cycles are well documented in many places, ...."
Until the peer review system stops being broken by pay-to-read studies, I see no other option. And remember- to anybody outside of your special field of study, any assumptions at all will look like sloppy science based more on emotion than data.
If your research is in a special field of study, in fact a sub field, what makes you think people not interested in that sub-field would consider your work news worthy? I mean people interested in your general field of work might not even find it news worthy.
News is about how something impacts people. It's like the difference between science and engineering. Science is how things work in the world. Engineering is how we use those rules to human ends.
Two points though,
First reporting is about the audience for which your writing. The more learned the audience (i.e. one that may be interested in your field of study) the more complicated the explanations can be.
Second, science isn't the only complicated endeavour in the world, yet somehow you read articles about politics, law, economics and finance everyday. They just don't try and explain the wonky bits.
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? could you imagine the price of journals if this were required? There are now plenty of journals that allow you to read content for free.
Copyright is an issue only if you believe that science should be governed by economics. I'm sure you can guess from my nick what I think of THAT idea- science should be funded by government and the results of any given study should be considered public domain works. We're 10 years past the need for paper publishing of anything, and electronic publishing costs are negligible at best.
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain every time.
Oh, poor scientific writer, needing to actually explain "fundamentals" because it's TEDIOUS. I suggest that a free-to-read model could replace such explanations with mere hyperlinks, but only if we first divorce science from the shackles of a capitalist "intellectual property" model.
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. If people have issues with something, they can pay or do whatever else it takes.
Thus utterly undermining the scientific method with needless economics, hampering the pursuit of knowledge.
4) to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions were true to begin with. As long as disclaimers are made in your original paper stating further study needs to be done, this may not be an issue
Agreed. The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that science leads to a definition of reality. For those willing to take the study for what it is, it should be sufficient to link to explanations of the fundamental assumptions and leave it at that.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Good as far as it goes- but in this day and age of electronic searching of possible relevance, do you really think you can count on ONLY the people in your field reading your paper? Cross-specialty research can lead in interesting directions as well- but only if your paper is understood by people *outside* of your specialty.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think the real question is... "is good journalism possible?"
The answer, of course, is "no". Sure, it's possible in theory, but in practice it isn't. The fundamental problem is that journalism is produced by people who have spent their time mastering a subject other than the one they're reporting on. Even in the rare case of the "renaissance reporter" who understands both his own trade and the subject matter he's reporting, his report is still subject to the whims of an editor, the constraints of the medium, and the demands of the market.
On the few occasions that I've been the subject of journalism, the article has gotten facts wrong. On the many occasions that I have read articles about subjects I know well, I have invariably discovered basic errors in the articles. I think it's highly unlikely that journalists are only ignorant of subjects which I know well; it's much more likely that journalists are ignorant of all subjects and that good journalism in any field is impossible.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The whole point of writing was to communicate to people! If the words you use are not understandable, then use other words to explain yourself.
In other words, there's just too much ground to cover. It isn't possible to be fully explicit, not without writing a book instead of an article. The reality is that science (and my field, mathematics) is extremely specialised these days, and this has resulted in a disconnect between those doing research work and the general public (personally I feel this disconnect it worst in mathematics). Now I do certainly feel that trying to heal that disconnect, at least a little, is important (it is another of the motivations for my project to explain advanced mathematics to a general audience), but that is a life's work in and of itself, not something you can do on the side while writing an article.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
So do it like an advertisement and just state suggestive facts and let them make their own natural conclusions in their head and call it a report or study instead of a theory paper or persuasive essay. That way nobody can said "you said ____" but they're all thinking it because of what they read. If they really want to know if it's true, they'll test it themselves if possible and then you don't have to worry about 100% backing it up.
Or you could just stop making assumptions altogether and prove whatever you're assuming or find someone else who proved it since, you know, you're not supposed to make ANY assumptions in a scientific paper unless it's a complete theory and you're not trying to prove anything.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Or worse yet for your readers, even the studies that do exist are locked behind a pay-to-read model of electronic publishing- so they can't tell assumption from fact. My suggestion: Make everything explicit.
Peer reviewed is one thing, journalism is another. In peer review literature you have to make everything explicit and checkable. Journalism comes from judgment and is based on opinion. If you discover something and it has far reaching implications, you need to present your findings to the general public as an opinion. People need that opinion, because they only have an average of 15 minutes a day for news. Ideally, all of the information will be accessible so that anyone, including your peers, can dig further. Electronic publication promises to reduce barriers to knowledge but it's not a time machine.
Recently, Slashdot reported that the German government was paying scientists to edit Wikipedia. That is nearly ideal because it can link to sources directly and the contents can be edited to eliminate confusion in a way that traditional news never could.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Perhaps a general understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum?
And the difference between a watt and a joule, or between 1 rem and 1 rem/hr?
Or that hydrogen is not an energy source for denizens of the surface of the planet earth?
A vague grasp of statistics is too much to ask, I know.
Perhaps most important: If 99.8% of scientists think one thing, and 0.2% think another, this is not a dispute with two equally valid points of view. This is a consensus and a handful of wackjobs which should be presented as such.
"There's always the chance that.." should not be translated as, "OMG IT'S CERTAIN! SCIENCE! THEY SAY SO!"
"A 0.000000001% chance that.." should not be translated as, "OMG! METEORS WILL KILL US ALL TOMORROW! FACT!"
"...theory..." should not be translated as, "LOL THEY HAV NO CLUEZ!"
"Well, the others think I'm a crackpot, but.." should not be translated as, "SCIENTISTS EVERYWHERE BELIEVE CRACKPOT THEORY!" In fact, nothing should ever use the word 'scientists' - use 'a scientist' or 'a group of scientists'. People tend to have a certain vision of scientists. Either they're heretics who need to be burnt, or they're, wull, scientists. The guys in the white lab coats who know shit you couldn't even begin to comprehend. While you might get laid far more often, when they're talking about global catastrophe, you know enough (or little enough, as it were) to listen and take their words at face value. It's important to stress that, no - all scientists everywhere usually don't agree on Random Theory #362.
Honestly, there's stuff you simply aren't going to explain without using big words that frighten the average person. That's great. The bad part of science-related journalism is when things are taken entirely out of context. You've all seen it - ridiculous slim probabilities being overhyped. Oh and someone needs to, before any article containing the word 'theory', explain the massive difference between a scientific theory (with evidence, such as evolution) versus a normal theory (which is someone just guessing on gut instinct and fairy tales, IE, intelligent design).
Aside from that, if you're translating measurements, use something understandable. 22.62 to the nine billionth power is unintelligible. "Ten Libraries of Congress" is better - but I'd wager your average reader has never *seen* the Library of Congress. Use football buildings, or Empire State Buildings, or something else.
Title says it; I would say yes depending on the definition of general. Some random guy that just isn't that interested in science, or general newspaper-level -- no. For that, science articles I see are usually so dumbed down and "explained by analogy" that someone interested in science will not be interested in the article, and people not interested in science aren't interested in science anyway. Also, with even a vague understanding of some topics covered, these articles tend to be RIDDLED with errors.
But, for people that are into science, even if they don't know lots about a topic? Sure, in general. Look at Discover before about 5 years ago, when it seems to me the articles got a big dumbing down. As someone else said, Science. I haven't seen to many, but it seems Omni might have covered this too, at least for some articles -- it was a mix of articles about advancements in science and articles about techno-utopias and technological singularities, etc. though, so maybe Omni not as much as the other two 8-).
There's not a lot of good science journalism maybe (or maybe there is -- I haven't looked a whole lot), but I wouldn't say it's simply impossible.
Don't you mean that honest (science) journalism just doesn't sell well?
It's more like corporate controlled news aims to indoctrinate, not educate. It's not because they don't have the money or the time. It's not that their broadcast grants does not require them to eat the cost of educational broadcast, so that IT SHOULD NOT BE MADE INTO ENTERTAINMENT AND BE FOR PROFIT IN THE FIRST PLACE. It's that they have an agenda and won't train and pay people to violate it. Truth and information rarely come from corporate controlled media. Instead of information, you will be repeatedly bombarded with nonsense.
The march to war in Afganistan, Iraq and now Iran present tremendous media news failures. Even the most harried reporter knows they were lied to in Iraq but they still pump out the party line.
The charade of "press conferences" is another example of people playing along. Everyone sits in a room and raises their hand, knowing the questions and questioners have been approved in advance. Anyone who would dare to ask an unapproved question would get themselves and their news organization banned and harassed.
Corporate controlled, government censored media is not free and little truth comes out of it.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
If your research is in a special field of study, in fact a sub field, what makes you think people not interested in that sub-field would consider your work news worthy? I mean people interested in your general field of work might not even find it news worthy.
It's amazing what can be found using google these days- cross specialty research can be useful in it's own right.
News is about how something impacts people. It's like the difference between science and engineering. Science is how things work in the world. Engineering is how we use those rules to human ends.
I think you just answered your first question- engineers outside of your science specialty will need to understand your paper to use your advancement to create better designs.
Second, science isn't the only complicated endeavour in the world, yet somehow you read articles about politics, law, economics and finance everyday. They just don't try and explain the wonky bits.
Actually, I'm very interested in the wonky bits- and often find the same problem with those articles as well (that they fail to include their assumptions). Economists are especially bad at admitting their assumptions- I think there's a subconscious fear that if they did, we'd all recognize that what they do isn't science but rather religion.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The narrowest of niche sciences still progresses too fast in too many directions for even specialists to keep up in a meaningful way. Half of scientific inquiry is putting decimals on the end of constants nobody can bring themselves to care about, and half of it is The Singularity In Action. Humankind doesn't operate at the speed of cutting-edge science at this point, and asking a journalist to do anything other than offer pointers to the fun milestones is like trying to find the edge of the universe - the "edge" Doesn't Really Exist, it's moving away from you faster than you could ever hope to travel, and if in some tricksy way you manage to catch up you'll find that everything has changed.
Well, I'd point out that mathematics isn't a science to begin with. It's a method of modeling that is sometimes used by science and is found to be useful, but is in and of itself it's own philosophy starting with it's own basic axioms. Science is theories that predict the outcome of experiments, and compare those predictions to those experiments- modeling can be useful in this but isn't strictly necessary. So these are related sets, but not necessarily intersecting, to put it in the language of your specialty.
My complaint is far more general than that- where mathematics and other philosophies start with myths and axioms, the basic axiom of the scientific method is that science never should. This isn't always avoidable, agreed, but a true scientist should take every pain possible to include *everything* if they want their work to be useful to the engineer.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What you're proposing about assumptions is unproductive and impossible. In my field (semiconductor lasers and photonics), if every assumption was expounded upon, each paper would be thousands of pages long. I suspect this is true for all but the newest of fields. Journal articles need to assume that the reader already has a general familiarity with the material, because the target audience has this knowledge. For example, if I am writing a paper, I am not going to explain undergraduate quantum mechanics, solid state physics, or electromagnetics. Not only would that reflect poorly on me (as it would seem patronizing to the typical reader), but it would also be a poor use of my time.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can get the background required to understand journal papers. The most obvious way is to attend a university and study the material. Yes, it costs money and time, but that's the price you pay. If that doesn't work for you, there is plenty of reading material available. You can start by looking at undergraduate textbooks at your local college library. If those don't help you, move on to graduate textbooks. If you need more, then you can look at course graduate course lecture notes (many of which you can find for free online). If you want the most direct background, review articles are the way to go. If even those don't help, look up the author's past papers. If a person outside a field wants to understand a paper, then it is that person's responsibility to read the background material.
Regarding "pay-to-read studies," the system is not as broken as you make it out to be. Practically everyone who wants to have access to a journal can get it. Universities and research-oriented companies subscribe, so all you have to do is walk into a library and peruse them yourself.
A "keen interest" is nice, so is a "sharp mind", but nothing short of a serious degree in the field is useful.
I am a research mathematician; I've also done research in physics (where I have a B.Sc. and have taken some graduate courses).
Almost every science article I read trying to discuss results in these fields is bad beyond words. The words "utter crap" hardly begin to describe how bad they are. The writers so completely fail to grasp what the scientists are talking about that their writing it at best devoid of content and usually simply doesn't make sense. To add insult to injury the description of researchers and research are stereotypical rather than factual, and mostly serve to perpetuate myths rather than to give an impression of what science really is like.
The truth is, of course, that it is nearly impossible to understand current research in many fields. We've been working on problems in number theory for over 2500 years. We have made a lot of progress, but you can't understand what a modern number theorist is talking about without learning the ideas that have been developed to tackle number theory since then (hint: this is a large fraction of mathematics). This is not to say that it's always impossible to give a vague impression of what the number theorist is doing to an average person (though mostly, it is). However, the translation cannot be based on an average mathematician trying to talk at a "sharp-minded" journalist with the hope of information being transmitted. The person doing the translation must be a mathematician with a flair for explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians (people like Barry Mazur and Tim Gowers come to mind), and the reporter must have some mathematics. Otherwise what was a coherent explanation from the mathematician becomes completely garbled after paraphrasing and editing by the reporter.
Of course, this situation is difficult for scientists who'd like the public to pay for what they do (luckily, mathematics is cheap to do and we get paid for teaching calculus to students who don't need it), especially theoretical physicists. I know far more physics than the average person and yet cannot understand most of what a theoretical physicist is talking about.
PS: Note that you can't understand where current philosophy is coming from, or why they say what they say, without knowing what the philosophers of the past wrote. Perhaps this is why no journalist is trying to write about current trends in the philosophy of identity or of language.
The idea that someone can not reproduce evidence to support a study, especially when in many cases both the gathering of the previous evidence and the later study are publicly funded is ludicrous.
But then so is so much else that in the cold light of day makes no sense, (copyright of certain seeds, with DRM type traits to enforce re-purchase for example, and its impact on the availability and the legality of heritage seed stocks for one, patenting gene sequences (even if they are novel genetic sequences where sequence's product can be identified) as another) and much of it is for the perceived economic benefit, with no way of testing whether it is a benefit at all.
Publishing scientific results and "Scientific Journalism" are two completely separate things, with different motivating factors at their heart. Publishing scientific results is the process of explaining clearly what you did, why you did it, what you observed and what you think those observations mean. It is intended to share the results of experimentation and to increase the overall body of knowledge in a given area of research. Scientific journalism sells soap. Its entire point is to make money for the reporting entity, whether that be a journalist or periodical. This does not mean there are no journalists doing good scientific reporting or that there are no scientist that are motivated by fame and fortune (Korean stem cell research comes to mind). If you stick to the purpose of scientific publications, (assumptions, methods, observations, conclusions etc.) you'll fill the purpose of scientific publications. Bad science has been referenced at /. before but here is a post that applies to the subject. http://www.badscience.net/?p=537
Regarding "pay-to-read studies," the system is not as broken as you make it out to be. Practically everyone who wants to have access to a journal can get it. Universities and research-oriented companies subscribe, so all you have to do is walk into a library and peruse them yourself.
This shows the lack of understanding of what I'm talking about. Specialization is good from the point of view of economics- it means nobody needs to know everything. But it is quickly becoming an outdated concept- it's beginning to hold us back.
For example, if I am writing a paper, I am not going to explain undergraduate quantum mechanics, solid state physics, or electromagnetics.
But unless you do, how do you know that maybe biology couldn't make your discovery better, or lead your research into new directions? You don't- because you've specialized too much- and so have everybody else, the guy writing the paper on the transformation chemistry of DNA isn't stooping to link to papers on undergraduate biology either. But that can be rectified with the web- EVERYTHING can be available to EVERYBODY without worrying about cost. We don't need to limit science to specialty anymore.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Not every paper needs to be explained to the general public. Some papers, probably most, are interesting or important because they refine some detail of the field of study. In this case the paper may be very important to people in the field but to the general public the only interesting bit is a description of the general topic.
Totally by coincidence, just the other day I wrote up my impressions of an article that appeared in a recent issue New Scientist, as compared to Stephen Jay Gould's philosophy on what constitutes good science writing. In short, the New Scientist article did not fare well. Check it out if you're so inclined.
Breakfast served all day!
The idea that someone can not reproduce evidence to support a study, especially when in many cases both the gathering of the previous evidence and the later study are publicly funded is ludicrous.
Agreed, but that's what you get when you apply capitalism to science.
But then so is so much else that in the cold light of day makes no sense, (copyright of certain seeds, with DRM type traits to enforce re-purchase for example, and its impact on the availability and the legality of heritage seed stocks for one, patenting gene sequences (even if they are novel genetic sequences where sequence's product can be identified) as another) and much of it is for the perceived economic benefit, with no way of testing whether it is a benefit at all.
Exactly right- finally somebody gets it enough for me to ignore the rest of this thread except for it's entertainment value.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'm a scientist too (well, a mathematician). Let me tell you: if you can explain what you did in three sentences then either you work in an extremely new field (analytical chemistry in the 18th century; discrete mathematics in the 1930s), or you are lying to your audience. In three sentences I can lie in various ways and give an impression of what I did. You can talk about what was done in the very beginning of the field ("number theory is about prime numbers"), about vague intuition ("quantum particles are sort-of smeared along their trajectory, they don't follow an exact path"), or something similar. To me this feels like lying to the listener. The correct answer to "what did you do?" is "I can't tell you, but here is where we came from way back when ...". After 2500 years of thinking about number theory (and 500 years of thinking about gravity), we made a lot of progress. But the price is that the kind of number theory (and gravity) we think about today cannot be easily explained.
As an exercise you can try explaining topological confinement of plasma, or even the workings of the Aharonov-Bohm effect.
The science is only relevant to the people interested in the science, which can not be usefully abbreviated ... it's only the implications which are relevant to the general public. If I want the science I'll read the paper.
So according to you the only thing worth reporting on is mathematics?
http://xkcd.com/263/
But unless you do, how do you know that maybe biology couldn't make your discovery better, or lead your research into new directions? You don't- because you've specialized too much- and so have everybody else, the guy writing the paper on the transformation chemistry of DNA isn't stooping to link to papers on undergraduate biology either. But that can be rectified with the web- EVERYTHING can be available to EVERYBODY without worrying about cost. We don't need to limit science to specialty anymore.
The problem isn't one of physical resources, it's one of temporal and mental resources. Just as you say, practically everything I would need to know about biology, I can find on the web. Textbooks are easily found on P2P networks, course notes are readily available, and I can access any journal I want through my university. (Of course, this is ignoring all laboratory experience, but that is a whole other issue.) Why, then, am I not a biology expert? Because every person has a finite capacity for information, and because information takes a finite amount of time to absorb, and I have a finite time on this planet. I choose not to be proficient in biology so that I can be more proficient in my area, and because I'm not all that interested in biology.
Even if I was interested in learning about transformation chemistry of DNA, I wouldn't expect to find the basics of biology in the paper. You seem to be arguing that journal articles should contain nicely-packaged summaries of the field, but I think you're missing my point. That's not the goal of journal articles. Nicely-packaged summaries of mature fields already exist: they're called textbooks! Likewise, nicely-packaged summaries of younger fields also exist in the form of review articles. The purpose of journal articles is to inform and enlighten people who are already experts (or, in the case of grad students such as myself, are on their way to becoming experts).
You wouldn't expect a high school algebra textbook to cover the basics of counting, would you? Why should you expect someone with a Ph.D., who has studied their field for at least eight years, to explain the basics of their field? It's the same difference in number of years in school!
Is there a *market* for good scientific journalism? I don't think so, based on a few decades of observing the journalism market and the public's interest in the topic.
I wish it weren't so.
I despise the term "elitist" since most people use it support their /.er then you're not doing it right.
"Citizen Media" type arguments, where every dumbass's point of view holds equal weight, but, yes, if your academic paper can't be understood by your average professional journalist, high school science teacher, or reasonably coherent
Or, in other words, how would you approach your subject for a Scientific American article? If only 10% of academic papers were as well written as those.
I'm not sure what that has to do with journalism. Your paper will most likely seem just as incorrect 10 years from now whether it's one of your professional peers or Geraldo Rivero interpreting it.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Peer review systems are not broken by pay per view models. Most peer reviewers are other professionals in that particular field. They already have access to the necessary journals, and most likely have already read the studies being sited by the one being reviewed. They know the assumptions, have their own political / scientific agenda, and want to put their 'mark' on the study. That is what complicates the process. But by and large it works.
Often the reviewers do point out flawed assumptions, a need for subsequent investigations, further analysis, etc. This is important. We can easily get into a zone where we see only our point of view.
The pay per view model interferes when the layman wants to read primary publications. This can be useful, but not normally. We need to realize that in biology, chemistry, etc. the disciplines have become so specialized that even other scientists working in a similar field cannot provide good critique of the data analysis and discussion. I don't mean to sound elitist here at all. It would be great if people were really interested in a topic that they would read a lot of what's published.
But in this day, with the sheer number of publications involved, even the primary researchers are having a hard time keeping up with the publications. Sometimes there are over 10 primary publications in a month on a particular topic. To read each and analyze it, while reviewing other studies, plus doing your own research. Wow...that is not easy.
My 2 Canadian cents.
"My suggestion: Make everything explicit."
What do you mean by "everything". Do you mean I should add an apendix where I copy the entry for "explicit" from Webster's?
"Until the peer review system stops being broken by pay-to-read studies"
What the heck is the "peer review system" you talk about? What in hell are "pay-to-read studies"? What's an study, after all? Is it the same one of those on Nature than the review the "Apocalypsers of the Seven Day of the Return of the Beast" give me for free in the middle of the street?
Just to express this cleanly: here you just tried to "plain talk" about a certain non-technical common-sense issue. But even then, your two paragrahps are full of non-trivial asumptions and non-referenced assertions (do you *really* think any layman will understand i.e. what the peer-review system is and why it's any better than an authority-based assertion?) and still you expect that on really very especialized fields any technical article can go on all-explicit? I published some scientific papers back on my day... do you really mean I should add to my ten pages article the more than 1000 pages from the Strassburger's book on Botanics that backed them up (among others)? Or else, how do you expect for a layman to understand what do I mean when I talk about i.e. "cormophyte vs spermaphyte biological selection understanding by means of echotopic adherence function"?
Color code, or otherwise mark up the text. Personally, I like the color coding even though a percentage of the population might have trouble. Obviously you could do it with electronic documents using tags. or perhaps font changes in print.
meh
It's also worth looking at Scientific American from the 1950's and 1960's when it was being edited by Gerald Peale. It's particularly interesting to compare to issues from the 1980's just before it was sold.
In the early issues, every concept is clearly explained in terms that should be accessible to a competent high school student - and many of them read it. In the 1980's it had degenerated: The first few paragraphs were carefully edited and then it lapsed into jargon.
So, yes, it is possible but it's hard work and it takes a dedicated, skilled editor.
Public funding can be used to obtain private patents in this nation. Until such fundamental rules change there will be heavy pressure from administrators to impede open publication as much as possible.
I agree with you that current publication methods are a bit ludicrous; however, it will be at least half a generation before those in charge have any grasp of how to publish.
Right now, there already are a whole slew of online publications some of which are open access. The issue is one of prestige and acceptance. If I were to do major research, do I go to a newer publication whose reputation for peer review is still not well established or do I go with a big name. Having something in the New England Journal of Medicine is a big deal. It can establish a career for someone. At that point the fact that its not open access becomes a secondary concern - the journal is widely available to whom it would matter. This brings me to another point - elitism. It would have to be overcome before people will be fully willing to hand over access to these sources.
My experience has been that the resistance to open access runs deep. People question whether an open access journal could maintain the quality of the traditional sources.
When all else fails, try.
I have to say science journalists deserve a break. Consider the audience that they are writing for. The vast majority of readers, even with college education, most likely lack a good grasp of the modern math where science runs. We're way beyond describing things with the simple algebra... and really, some concepts just require more than a basic understanding of calculus and, surprisingly, probability and statistics. So, science writers not only struggle describing a new phenomonon, they struggle with trying to lay out in a paragraph what takes semesters to learn, and guess what, it is really hard to do that.
And, I don't think we should be asking scientists to try and dumb their communications down, either, as that really undermines the most important aspect of science - peer review. Publicly funded scientific communication begs for some sort of an open, publicly funded database that scientists can publish in. But, then, scientists depend on those publication moneys, so what to do?
Really, I wonder if the best course of action is for science journalists to up their level of math and science that they write to. Is it really so bad if a popular science magazine reminds its readers, that most of them do not know what they are talking about?
This is my sig.
I think it's quite possible. However, one must be a scientist who learns journalism. The other way doesn't work.
"Either he succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension; or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further. If these two categories are omitted from today's popular scientific literature, surprisingly little remains."
This was written by Einstein in a forward for Linconln Barnett's popularization of the theory of relativity in 1948.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O'Reilly
http://www.oreilly.com/
I work in the software field, but I'm nowhere near an academic scientist, mathematician or any such thing.
Several years back, I had a moderate interest in audio componentry. As a result, I was just curious about acoustics and what the proper way to set speakers up, how to set ranges/cutoffs, et cetera.
In the library, I found an author, Manfred Schroeder, who was a world-recognized expert on acoustics. But when I was browsing his books, the one I ended up taking home with me was "Fractals, Chaos, and Power Laws."
This work is the single best scientific book that I've ever seen. I am not a religious person, but this book literally brought science and nature together for me. The book communicates concepts such as symmetry, iteration, and fractal dimensions in ways that are not just understandable... but are FELT.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a great scientific read. It will make you look at nature and the world in a way that you never did before.
"Truth and information rarely come from corporate controlled media."
As apposed to that that we get from government controlled media? I'm not sure what you're implying here or where truthful information comesfrom.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
"copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare?"
By means of the "right for citation" every civilized country protects. I explicitly said "any civilized country" because I don't really know what's the state of affairs about this in non-civilized countries like the USA.
"not everything can be made explicit"
That's absolutly true. I already wrote about it in a different post.
"putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read"
Redundant. That's just an specific case of your second point.
"to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions"
You are even *forced* to make such assumptions (that's the very basis of the scientific method: you make some assumptions, then you test them and the tests show them wrong or reinforce them). But by the time you publish you "assumpt" no more: either your tests can't find them wrong after you honestly tried as hard as you could to break them (then as long as you can say they are not assumptions but well backed-up theories) or they find them wrong, in which case you don't publish.
"sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered"
But then you leave them *unanswered*. Quite a different thing than take them for *granted* (or assumed them to be right).
"so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions"
That's neither the way to properly advance, nor the way you will get further founds. Founds come from your *effective* findings. Of course you can (and probably should) have your own opinions, but grants don't come from them, but from your current findings and the fact that your findings show that there are new "shadow zones" to inspect. It is not that "I think we can go to Mars in a three weeks space flight" but "current findings provided in this article cast shadows about what we thougth about space travels so we need more foundings to dissipate them and see what we can find beyond -it might even be that we can travel to Mars in three weeks if it happens to be true A, B and C".
My whole argument with mathematics as it is taught in the United States is that it is taught backwards. I didn't really understand the axioms of basic computation until I took Numerical Methods- a senior year undergraduate class that should have been taught to six year olds. If we did, the rest would all fall into place.
Having said that, I disagree on the purpose of journal articles- to me the purpose of journal articles is to transmit knowledge from scientists to engineers. And then, yes, I expect any relevant assumption or axiom to at least be linked to. It doesn't need a full explanation, just a "click here if you don't understand"- and that pointer can lead to a textbook that contains the material.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If the results make almost everybody uncomfortable, then journalists don't write about it.
Case in point, this study documenting the effects of circumcision got almost no journalistic attention whatsoever, even though it's exactly the kind of information needed by parents in about half of all births:
abstract
pdf
It's the same reason this comment will be ignored.
"Oh, poor scientific writer, needing to actually explain "fundamentals" because it's TEDIOUS. I suggest that a free-to-read model could replace such explanations with mere hyperlinks"
But then you are WRONG! Do you think this kind of hyperlinks were invented in the Internet days? Look at *any* scientific paper: they are FULL of hyperlinks. Each time you see "this happens to be A[1]" or "we already know that to be true[2]", that's an hyperlink. At the end of the paper you will find quite some references (usually a *lot* of references) that links the current paper to the immediate antecedents. Those in turn provide new citations to other references and only very few seminal papers happen to be more referenced that the references they link to.
So all the information is already there, but do you know what? Even then, unless you are already an expert on the matter it still seems to be archaic Chinese to you (unless you are an archaic Chinese expert yourself in which case it will seem to be Quantic Chromodynamics no less). It is not that the information is not already "gettable", but how many information we can grasp in just one bit. I usually offer this example: I'm absolutly negated about dancing, so I admire those dancers from TV programs: each day the team offers three/four dancing numbers on their program "how the heck they manage to learn all those movents without failure?". Till I remember they are professional dancers and that means that they do not learn their movents like I'd do: "the left foot goes 45 degrees to the right then the left hand follows, two steps to the right, then I find the girl coming to me, I move my arms towards them, but don't forget to gracily elevate my hips..." they just need to memorize higher level abstractions: we start in first position, then we go for an "eigth lace" then take her in third, then rondó... Because they are professionals they already have a basis that allow them to grasp complex concepts by just looking for the "big landscape": the details are already known and taken for granted. Well, scientific papers are just the same and without all the "taken for granted" any ten pages papers would become a 1000 pages book and no one that already knows the 1000 pages book would understand the 10 pages paper anyway.
You just try to understand Einstein's paper first published on "Annalen der physiks" titled "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies" without a firm understanding on both newtonian theory of movement and maxwellian ecuations: you will see it doesn't matter it was published by 1905, when your "copyright overlords" were not so strong, everything was published and proper citations were both accesible and properly in place. And please remember it's not even a very hard paper; currently any minimally cute 16 year old boy should understand its maths without many problems. But still, you either already have the maths and the underlying theories already grasped or no matter how many citations or how free, the article will still seem Chinese to you (unless you are Chinese, in which case it will seem archaic Saxon to you).
"The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that science leads to a definition of reality"
I must say "bullshit". Science *is* our definition of reality. It can be controversial how much our definition of reality pairs the "real reality" or if there's in fact a "real reality", but there's no doubt science *is* our definition of reality. Only this assumption allows even you to not think that the seven lane bridge you cross to go to job is not suspended over the river by any magic force.
What do you mean by "everything". Do you mean I should add an apendix where I copy the entry for "explicit" from Webster's?
Nah, just link to it.
What the heck is the "peer review system" you talk about? What in hell are "pay-to-read studies"? What's an study, after all? Is it the same one of those on Nature than the review the "Apocalypsers of the Seven Day of the Return of the Beast" give me for free in the middle of the street?
True enough- I should have linked to my definitions.
Just to express this cleanly: here you just tried to "plain talk" about a certain non-technical common-sense issue. But even then, your two paragrahps are full of non-trivial asumptions and non-referenced assertions (do you *really* think any layman will understand i.e. what the peer-review system is and why it's any better than an authority-based assertion?) and still you expect that on really very especialized fields any technical article can go on all-explicit? I published some scientific papers back on my day... do you really mean I should add to my ten pages article the more than 1000 pages from the Strassburger's book on Botanics that backed them up (among others)? Or else, how do you expect for a layman to understand what do I mean when I talk about i.e. "cormophyte vs spermaphyte biological selection understanding by means of echotopic adherence function"?
A hyperlink will do.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Think how much money they could have saved if everyone just voted on the mass of the neutrino instead performing all those expensive experiments. (And this probably would have resulted in the wrong answer, too.)
But I am not talking about truth, I am talking about presentation. The view of the minority should not be suppressed, but that does not mean that it should be presented as equivalent to the consensus view.
Sometimes the consensus view is a house of cards, but usually it isn't. It does a disservice to the reading public to maintain that every issue is seriously disputed.
However, it's not possible if the reporter doesn't himself have a basic understanding of the field and scientific methodology in general. And those who do seem to be incredibly rare.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Ultimately the public wants to: a) marvel at the discoveries of science; b) be shown how new science might be applied to their life or understanding of the world. They are a different audience and have different expectations than that your colleagues.
Here's the formula for converting scientific writing into popular science: 1) delete any hedges or qualifications, words like "may," "seems," "suggests," "appears to be"; 2) when explaining the science use textbook writing (factual definitions); 3) use language that glamorizes or sensationalizes your findings (e.g. 60% becomes "well over half"); 4) speculate how your research could impact the life or world of your reader.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is important to publish all studies - _especially_ ones that don't confirm the researchers' hypothesis. This is what science is all about - testing theories, rejecting ones that don't agree with experiment, and then telling other people your results.
Imagine that 100 groups run that same study, with 5% confidence. Now, a couple groups will see a 90% confidence, just by random chance alone - after all, 100 groups did the study. However, if they are the only ones that publish, then the scientific community will have a false impression of experiment - they didn't read about all the people who tried the experiment and got inconclusive results (those groups didn't publish).
This is why it is important that a scientist always publish their results, even if the results don't support the hypothesis. Feynman gives a good discussion of this unfortunate phenomenon in his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", which I heartily recommend.
In my opinion, Scientific American took a nose dive a few years ago when it decided to dumb itself down, maybe to compete with Popular Science and Discover magazines. It seems to be very easy to read now, but short on information. I used to read it all the time, and learned a lot, but it seems more of a waste of time now. Sure, some of the articles used to be hard to read, but that's the price you sometimes need to pay in order to convey novel (to the reader) information.
Scientific journalism isn't a special case. In any writing endevour, but especially in journalism, you have to make assumptions about what your readers know, make choices about how much detail to provide, and generally be able to summarize complex stories. The choices writers make when determining how to address those issues affect what readers understand.
But it's in no way restricted to science. Political journalist, auto writers, even the folks writing for the 10:00 news--they all gloss over details. Sometimesin ways that are (intentionally or not) misleading. Ask anyone about news reports that cover their area of expertise and they'll tell you how often the writers get it wrong.
Guess I'm saying you're not alone
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to critically analyze a research paper probably DOES already have access to it.
The layman cannot do this anymore. Not even a scientist in a tangentially-related field can.
"It is important to publish all studies"
Okay. I just completed a study. It proves, conclusively, that aliens are vacuuming off our ozone layer.
Lemme publish it...
The problem isn't that other people can't get their hands on the data. They can.
It's that they're publishing these papers as unarguable, unalterable "fact".
If it bleeds, it leads? A terrible way to conduct science.
"This is why it is important that a scientist always publish their results, even if the results don't support the hypothesis"
Even if they fudge facts.
Even if their underlying science is known crap.
Even if they fail to disclose their statistics.
If you're going to publish (PUBLISH) a scientific paper, make sure that's it's based on science, not science fiction.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Before I forget, let me refer you to Ben Goldacre's column and web site at badscience.net. In a column that I believe I found via a link on Slashdot, Goldacre points out that at a typical newspaper, virtually no one involved in science journalism has any science background. It shouldn't be hard to find the link.
That said, I think you're confusing things. Good science journalism is not the same thing as good science reporting. What you're doing, we hope, is good reporting of the science you've done. A journalist trying to write a popular article based on your scientific article is not responsible for understanding and reporting on every nuance of your work. The journalist is simply responsible for conveying, as accurately as possible, the nature and importance of your work. This should involve nothing more challenging than sitting down with you and having a detailed conversation, and later having you look at a draft of the article. I don't believe anything like this is the norm in science reporting.
One of my studies was reported in the local newspaper once. The reporter read a press release issued by my institution, written by someone with no science background, with whom I had had a very brief phone conversation. Based on this, the reporter came in with a story already in mind, collected quotes to give the story some apparent substance, and had it published without making even a superficial effort to have anyone with knowledge in the area sanity-check the story. The published story was written in such a way that anyone who read it would be less well informed afterwards than before. How could this process have been fixed? I'm capable of explaining my work accurately to a lay audience, and that includes any reporter with half a brain. But whatever the fix, we really don't need journalists to be able to understand scientific reports. We need them to be willing to talk to people who are capable of understanding those reports, and to find out from those people what the reports really mean.
> I must say "bullshit". Science *is* our definition of reality.
No, Science is our *current interpretation* of understanding reality (Thankfully not the only interpretation.) Science is so far divorced from REAL reality that it needs another 500 years before it will actually understand the true nature of reality. One of these days it will grow up and start looking into the meta-physical as the cause, not the physical symptom; until then it is like a child: if one can't physically sense something, it doesn't exist. It has so many holes in the fundamentals, and become so institutionalized with its dogma, that Heisenberg said "Science progresses one death at a time."
The rest of your point about the power of abstraction are good.
I'm all for scientists learning English, math, German, Latin and a bit of Greek so that they can communicate with each other and those who need to know. When technical topics are to be presented to the public, however, I strongly urge that a professional be allowed to handle it.
The Society for Technical Communication (stc.org) is a good place to start. Many of their thousands of members are dedicated to that art. They have done their own scientific studies of communications and published in peer-reviewed journals.
You probably know them as the people who wrote your software manual or the instructions for repairing your bicycle. They also do medical & bio docs. Some specialize in educational material, a few are expert in glyphs and their effectiveness in various environments, others in fun specialties like indexing, many are well versed on effective web presentation of particular topics... Wherever technical information has to be introduced to unfamiliar users, tech comms will be there.
There is a certain aesthetic appeal to the idea of repairing your own car, building your own room addition or mowing your own lawn. In most cases it's best to let a pro do it.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Quick answer to the question :
I don't know if it's possible, but I prefer good vulgarisation to any journalist. My favorite one is Hubert Reeves. Take a look at it's writings, it's worth the look.
Tomorrow is another day...
If you try to give the lay person a complete picture of everything that goes into your experiments and conclusions, of course you will fail.
But that does not mean that good scientific journalism is not possible. Good articles give a good flavor for the framework surrounding the experiment without becoming bogged down in the details. And a good article will point out the possible weaknesses in any experiment so that the reader has some idea of the likelihood for future falsification.Not many writers know how to do this. Tom Standage, who edits The Economist's science and technology section, is about as good as it gets.
Don't use inaccessible language if your target audience is the general public, for starters. The language used in scientific papers is needlessly complex. Fortunately, it's also very formulaic, so once you've read a few papers, you can immediately figure out what the author(s) are really doing.
.9, which supports our hypothesis at alpha=.05."
.9 is so great, or what alpha=.05 is supposed to mean.
The common response when I present a paper to a member of my family is "well, I almost understand the title", even if nothing particularly tricky is going on in the paper. Maybe they'd get it if they read a few papers, but the language ensures that they won't even make the attempt. And my family tends to be more educated and more open to new ideas than the general public.
So the first step is to eliminate the jargon unless it's actually necessary. I know that writing that way is more precise, but it is also harder to read.
Some of the discussion of background is interesting to other scientists but not to a lay audience, as well. The way to write an accessible article is to start from an accessible overview, going into details as necessary after clearly presenting the main idea. That is what abstracts are supposed to do. Also, laypeople do not need to understand all of the methodologies underlying the analysis; they're not performing work in the field and it's unlikely that they will be capable of critiquing the research, so they simply need to know the impact of the results.
Here's an example:
"We analyzed the texture of mammograms and found that certain patterns correlate with an x% increased risk of breast cancer".
is accessible. Your mammogram looks like this, you have a higher risk of cancer. Simple. People get it. If I had to summarize this research results in one sentence, I'd do it that way.
In a scientific paper, it would sound like this:
"We performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract statistically uncorrelated discriminative texture features from the biomedical images. PCA can be performed in the following manner: Let X be a collection of feature vectors... (etc.)
We then performed k-nearest neighbor classification on the extracted feature vectors. Classification accuracy is given by the following ROC curve: (ROC curve that no layperson would have a hope of understanding). The area under the curve was
Etc.
Scientists can understand that. Laypeople cannot. I essentially just gave the reader the conclusion in that last sentence (plus associated figure of ROC curve), but it would fly over the head of anyone who didn't understand what an ROC curve is, why the area being
If you're talking about publishing in, say, Scientific American, you're talking about a step or two above the general public ("scientifically aware" is how I'd describe this group), so this may not necessarily apply. But you probably can't discuss any highly specialized knowledge in such things and expect the majority of readers to get it.
All of human language can be seen as concentric abstractions.
It's all well and good that you had a visionary dream that house cats get cancer from smoking cigarettes from McCancer field. But don't start your study by checking for nicotine withdrawal -- first prove cancer, then prove smoking, then worry about if they're smoking tobacco or cannabis, then check the tobacco.
Einstein got General Relativity because he started with Special Relativity, which he only got because he started before THAT with years of boring patent applications and thought experiments. The Wright Brothers got flight possible because they built a gilder first, and did tests before that, and focused on the first problems first.
There is NO reason to cut corners in science. Especially if you're doing a study. State what is known, state your hypothesis, and gather your data. Then, as we all learned in middle school, you try and argue for why your hypothesis is right. (If you don't see a logical progression in first facts to latter ones, maybe you shouldn't be a scientist. Or, if you doing shot-in-the-dark science, then just come out and say it.)
It would appear that, during my time here at Slashdot, I've picked up a stalker or two. While I obviously have no proof that a stalker was involved with this post, the pattern here would seem to follow. Otherwise, why would a post whose primary topic be journalism be modded down in a topic about journalism?
I would invite meta moderators to take a close look and decide for themselves before passing judgment.
Thank you.
Just to let you know, the guy you are arguing with is off his rocker - I wouldn't go to too much trouble in future responses.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Reality is all about the physical state of being so science fits. Other things describe things that are not physical - metaphysical - you can think about things that can not be observed and thought itself is not physical. The above rant about science is unfortunely a now very common typical anti-intellectual argument that has spilled over from those that discarded an educated clergy and now see anybody that is educated as their enemy and even incorrectly see science as a rival church.
Well it was originally, until the story got hijacked by the OMG-Patenz-sux0r brigade.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Good scientific journalism is completely outmoded. [I saw it mentioned in some textbook, I think.]
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
"Jesus Christ's lesson for Science: everything in moderation."
;) ).
I don't know which Jesus you are talking about. The last I checked, the Jesus I believe in was, and is an extremist.
Most Christians (especially the "extremist" ones) don't do a good job of following what Jesus says.
Bombing abortion clinics, spreading hate and violence are on a different extreme from his teachings - which are on the other extreme.
After all he did say in Matthew 5:21-22
21"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' 22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother[b]will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,[c]' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.
[a] Matthew 5:21 Exodus 20:13
[b] Matthew 5:22 Some manuscripts brother without cause
[c] Matthew 5:22 An Aramaic term of contempt
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%205:21-22&version=31;
Similarly for adultery:
27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
And: "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
"Be perfect" is as extreme as it gets. I don't see how you can be perfect in moderation (moderator quips notwithstanding
> I'm a scientist too (well, a mathematician). Let me tell you: if you can explain what you
> did in three sentences then either you work in an extremely new field (analytical chemistry
> in the 18th century; discrete mathematics in the 1930s), or you are lying to your
> audience.
I work in agricultural science, not exactly a new field.
"I'm currently working on a physically based model of how pesticides can move with water through the soil and reach the drain pipes. The idea behind this research is that once we have this model, we can use measurements taken from the drain pipes to help estimate how many pesticides might reach the depths where we extract our drinking water."
That's not a lie, and can be used as a basis to fill on details in the unlikely case the listener is interested.
Not all scientists work on number theory or quantum physics, most of us work on stuff that is quite more down to earth.
While a skeptic myself, in the beginning, I have found at least 2 media outlets to provide good (on average) scientific information. One of them is the review "Science et Vie" (science and life), which covers quite recent and technically difficult subjects. The other is a TV emission for kids called "C'est pas sorcier" (a good translation would be "it's not sorcery").
Neither of the two is sensationalistic, the objective being to give a good intuition of complex scientific subjects.
It's by now pretty clear that you've never written a paper...
Lots of people do put their papers on one or another free electronic resource (arxiv, homepage, whatever) as well as submitting to a journal. So, you can avoid most of your precious 'economic problems' that way, and if you ever bother to be minimally polite you can probably find some friendly university professor to give you access to his library anyway.
It's a nice idea that a scientist could just add a few hyperlinks and magically his paper would become intelligible to everyone, but it's just not true. I, for example, work in combinatorics, which is a fairly basic area of mathematics, where you don't really need to know too much to get started.
Here's a paper of mine:
http://www.cdam.lse.ac.uk/Reports/Files/cdam-2006-10.pdf
which in turn is a very simple paper; it doesn't reference all that much because it doesn't need to, and those things it does reference are mainly just to mention people who've done similar things. I'd guess that if you spent enough time you probably could understand that: but you'd need to start by understanding what I mean by a graph and getting a bit of basic graph theory. Now, I could've provided a hyperlink to Diestel's book (which is available online for free) to explain that - but then I'd have to keep updating it whenever the link changed, et cetera. And when I write a more complicated paper, I do not want to write an undergraduate course to go with it - so I am not going to try to explain all the stuff that everyone in the field already knows. If I mention the blow-up lemma in passing, and you want to know about it, read the paper describing it. When you discover you need to read a bunch of other papers to understand, go read those. Since they won't be all that helpful, you'll probably need to find a book on probabilistic graph theory. Which you can probably get hold of for free if you want to: but it will take you a few months to understand enough to know what the blow-up lemma is. That's nothing to do with economics, it's to do with how fast you can absorb information.
Put it another way: if you really want a helpful link to let anyone understand a scientific paper, then probably the most helpful one is a link to a nearby university's lecture list. They don't generally check that the people in the audience are registered students. And yes, it will take you a few years.
There is a lot of blame to go around for the state of scientific journalism. Because I am a scientist, and because I've been involved in a (relatively minor) journalistic "frenzy" concerning one of my papers, I can best speak about the inadequacies that we scientists add to the mix. In fact, most things that get even a minor note in a major city newspaper seem to the average scientist to be a journalistic feeding frenzy. When at work, we usually stay cloistered in our labs and offices working or reading Slashdot. We're not usually used to attention.
The biggest problem is, who wants to read something boring? Nobody. We scientists (and we Slashdotters, etc) may have a different idea of what is interesting and what isn't but we have a pretty good feel for what the "general public" likes. So, whenever a scientist discovers something that merits a high profile publication and media coverage, that person tends to want to make it interesting and exciting. After all, if the scientist spent years of their life doing the work, maybe people just like Mom and Dad might like to read about it for 2 minutes in the paper. And here is a problem. If the scientist is perfectly scrupulous and cautious to the extreme, then when that scientist talks to journalists, the caveats and assumptions overwhelm the discovery, and the result appears to be a boring piece of work and won't get reported. After all, it no longer even seems like a breakthrough. It will be in a journal, so why waste newsprint?
On the other hand, if, when the journalist asks a scientist about the work, the scientists sings the praises of the conclusions, downplays the caveats, and overstates its significance, it certainly sounds fancy. And it has a greater chance of being published. While most scientists wouldn't want their work mischaracterized, in their zeal to make their work interesting and relevant, they easily fall prey to simplifications that are wrought to aid the layman's understanding, but may take on a dimension of their own.
So, from the very beginning, there is a bias in what actually gets reported; the exciting stuff. And I can speak from first hand knowledge, when talking to reporters, trying to make your years of effort on a complex problem that is only completely understandable to a handful of peers is quite difficult. It is no wonder that, even when the scientists who do the work are consulted, that the work is often poorly represented. Of course, when the scientists aren't consulted or when they are more self-serving than average, the results can be disastrous for the quality of the journalism.
Of course, if you come up with the cure for cancer or the structure of DNA, you don't really need "talk up" the results. They speak for themselves. But if this is all that scientific journalism consisted of, then we'd only read two pages a year in the papers.
This always helps me: What is the subject of the article? (Solved a problem, proved / disproved a theory / correlated observations / data.) What have you done? (In terms of experimentation or theory. The actual tasks you have performed.) What conclusions did your work reach? Sometimes this type of simplification is practical, but can also be somewhat disheartening if you don't see concrete answers to some of the above. :)
Write the proper paper detailing all, then condense to the word count of your channel of publishing. Reducing information will always distort, but if you write the full paper you can always reference it. I print to a PDF that I put on a free hosting service.
When I read "Good scientific journalism is completely outmoded.", my instinct was to dismiss it as trolling, but then I realised that this is basically my position.
When a science story in the mainstream media intrigues me I start wondering what the real story is. I use the the names and affiliation of the researchers to track down the University press release from which the journalist wrote his story. I go to the academics' own homepages to see if they have tried their hand at writing a popular account of their own work. Typically they haven't done so, but there are links to other researchers in the field, and one or two of those have links to a competent popularisation.
I go to the source, cutting out the journalist/middleman. You can call my approach disintermediation because it cuts out the intermediary. You might equally say that science journalism is outmoded, readers are actually after a link to a webpage written by a participant, not a journalist.
It is the economics of web publishing that is driving this. Once upon a time newspapers only covered half their costs from their cover price. Journalists tried to sell eye balls to advertisers by writing catch penny copy. If you were not happy with this: tough. What was your alternative? Write to the Unversity and ask for a copy of the press release? Too much fetching and carrying of dead trees. Now the transfer of textual information is too cheap to meter. Universities run websites out of general funds and anyone can read the press release, instantly and for free. We don't need science journalists to re-write the press release for us, because we are not limited to reading the newspaper.
During the past few months, I have spent entire days locked up in my office, writing my first manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal.
The first time hurts the worst, rookie. Just wait till the reviews come back. You'll have ample opportunity to build up some calluses on your ego.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have three manuscripts to finish by the end of the year. The FISCAL year, that is, which ends on Sept. 30.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
In general, in the UK at least, there is a presumption that it's ok to be ignorant about science. Bits of enamel come off my teeth when I have to listen to John Humphries (BBC radio pundit) patronising some scientist after telling us all how little he knows about science. This is something he'd be ashamed to do with politics, economics, or the arts - and more importantly his editor wouldn't let him.
There are a few special cases where the audience is expected to be unforgiving of inaccuracies. I find The Economist's science section to be disconcertingly accurate if disappointingly brief. Sadly New Scientist, the main popular science journal in the UK, seems to be lowering its standards. It may be time to end the subscription.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Publish in the newspaper the big stuff and don't get into much of the details except where you have to and then so even an freshman scientist could understand it. In your regular paper on the subject, go into the details well. What seems obvious to you may not be so obvious to the rest of us. More importantly, not obvious to some of my colleagues. Sometimes they get a bad idea and it sticks like glue. It can take years to get rid of that bad idea.
Mathematics is a science - indeeed, a collection of sciences. Fundamentally, it is the study of number, form and space. Mathematics did not (and generally does not) start from a set of axioms although many have tried to impose purely axiomatic systems upon it. And yes, it is used by many other sciences just as other sciences employ one another to achieve their end (though to a lesser extent than maths is used).
"a true scientist should take every pain possible to include *everything* if they want their work to be useful to the engineer"
Well, it depends what level of understanding you expect the engineer to already possess.
I would add that it costs money to be initiated into any field, whether it be law, medicine, or science. Each takes several years of book study followed by more applied ("practical") study. Journalists who are trying to explain law to the average citizen have a daunting task, too, because legal language tends to be very difficult.
...
Partly, a high school education should make even mediocre medical, legal, and scientific articles in a newspaper more accessible to the average citizen. That education should do a lot of other things though
I think The New York Times does a pretty good job with its science articles. If I see something in there that I'm interested about, I would head over to PubMed/Science/Nature/Cell anyway to see how I missed the "real" journal article.
I disagree. Science is about expaining the world. Math doesn't explain the world, it's one of the languages of choice we use to describe it, some others are logic, statistics, ad-hoc languages such as chemical formulas, algorithmic computer languages, and of course [native toungue].
If we disregard the axiomatic basis later imposed upon math, math is about counting, measuring, and manipulating (hypothetical) collections of countable objects or measurable substances. Thus math can be used to describe precisely why 2 liters of water is more than 1.37 liters of water. On the other hand, math doesn't attempt to explain why there are 2 liters of water there in the first place (or what water is), as that would be in the realm of science.
Not "just as". Science constitutes knowledge, and knowledge in one field is often useful in another. Does understanding how birds fly help zoology or aerodynamics most? On the other hand, math is math. While it's possible for a biologist to contribute both to math and to biology, rarely will you have any problems classifying where the contribution belongs.
An acquaintance of mine, who teaches half the year around the US, says of the food chain in his "science for non-science majors", that the next to the bottom are the business majors, who don't get it, but don't let that worry them. Then, the very bottom, are the communications majors, who not only don't get it, but don't *know* that they don't get it.
So why is a reporter qualified to report on science if they have no background in it? You or I are only hired for knowledge and experience in ->what the job we're applying for is about-.
Example: the lead paragraph that I saw yesterday via google news, from Cyber-News Netword, read to the effect of "radiation was discovered in the 1890s, when they noticed the resemblance between (uranium? thorium?) and X-rays. (And they had no contact page, for me to excoriate them).
mark
This was written by Einstein in a forward for Linconln Barnett's popularization of the theory of relativity in 1948. Are you talking about Albert here? The guy who claimed that light travels at constant speed? That light rays furthermore do not travel along the straight lines because they get bent in the gravitational field, or, in other words, that they travel along the shortest paths in the curved space-time? The one who said that God does not play dice?
Yes, if you have (a) a person with talent for it, (b) who makes it is business to know the best system administration practices and puts them into effect and (c) works for an organization who understand the value of what he does.
Is good teaching possible?
Yes, if you have (a) a person with talent for it, (b) who makes it is business to know the best teaching practices and puts them into effect and (c) works for an organization who understand the value of what he does.
You get the picture.
Scientific journalism is a specialty that requires a specialist's dedication and expertise. For an organization to do good science journalism, it has to understand it is a specialized profession and value what that profession can do.
On the surface, science should be a natural match for journalism, because controversy is fundamental to the scientific method, and controversy usually makes good copy. So you send your reporter out, he interviews "both sides" to ensure balance, and he writes up his piece; on the surface nothing could be simpler.
The problem is that science is conducted according to rigid standards of fairness. This means it's not just the process wherein party A telling the truth and party B distorting the truth, you put the facts in the grinder and out pops the truth. Scientific "controversy" doesn't play out that way. Viewpoints, even unpopular ones, are given every opportunity to hang on to life by their fingernails, and they do. They occasionally come back. Even dead positions can come back, although they aren't allowed to come back triumphally at the head of a popular revolt. Instead they have to endure years of patient spadework to undermine the status quo. But the door never closes without being open a tiny crack.
Even creation science is allowed a foothold; it just can't demand to be treated equally. In science, fairness isn't treating viewpoints equally (this is an important shortcoming in mainstream journalism's approach). Fairness is treating evidence equally. You can believe anything you want, but others are not required to listen to your beliefs; only your evidence.
The result is that when you send a generalist reporter to cover science, you get articles that distort the story by breaking it down to a horse race between two sides, one of which is right and another of which is wrong. There may be a face, but it's more like the Tour de France: there are many teams, it isn't over in a single stage, and the winner doesn't have to win every stage (or any).
The final misunderstanding that journalists have when it comes to science is that they miss the significance of scientific trasparency: the "winners" in a controversy don't get to rewrite the narrative. All their mistakes and missteps remain part of the record. It is inevitable that the "winners" will have been shown to be wrong in many particulars, and the losers right on many particulars. You can't just point to one thing and identify a side that has parted ways with The Truth. To win, you have to endure round after round after round, losing or reaching a draw in many of them. Consequently, journalists tend to blow individual findings way out of proportion.
So, in a nutshell: (1) Reporters don't understand balance as it applies to the scientific method. (2) They represent scientific disagreements in ways that oversimplify them and fundamentally mischaracterize their ongoing nature. (3) They lend too much weight to individual findings, leading the reader to jump to conclusions based on isolated bits of evidence.
Scientific journalism can be done well. Science News does it well, because it's the only thing it does. Otherwise, I can't think of any other organization that makes an effort to cover developments in journals and scientific meetings, and then sticks with them year after year. The NYT may have a beautifully illustrated and well researched piece on some hot topic like buckyballs; but that's it. The reader of SN will read about the original findings as a kind of curiosity, follow the rapid explosion of research into this new material until it dies down to an echo.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
you know how to complete that sentence.
Seriously, though. Science that rests on too many, too important, too questionable assumptions is pseudo-science. You're essentially reading tea leaves at that point. If you need data that aren't available, then perhaps a better contribution on your part to the community would be to publish your vacuum analysis for the topic you really want to investigate and your plan to address that vacuum. Then start filling the void by conducting the necessary experiments.
Scientific achievements are attained by standing on the shoulders of giants, not standing on a house of cards. If you have to, be your own giant (by conducting the experiments yourself) or gather the buy-in and support of your community to build up a metaphorical human pyramid to stand upon.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Or, more accurately, science is our "current closest approximation" to those parts of reality that we think we have an interpretation of. There are observed phenomenoa which we do not have any explanation of (quasars, for example), phenomena which we know we only have parts of the explanation for (evloution of stars has a stage where the surrounding formation cloud is blown away, for which there is no accepted explanation, but I have one, so star evolution is incompletely understood), areas we have currently no way of observing, much less measuring (like the number of dimensions our space is made up of, or their structure) (or like most "metaphysical" phenomena, GOD, etc)
wake up and hold your nose
And Lemarkism is what you get when you apply communism to science.
Yes, because Herrnstein and Murray's bog-standard scientific racism which belonged in the 1920s is so fact-based. Ugh. If ever there was a collection of unstated assumptions lining up behind one's biases and politically motivated conclusions tortured out of the facts, it was The Bell Curve.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Science journalists have been attempting to explain chaos theory to the general
public for decades. Have they succeeded?
All those pretty pictures of fractal curves and strange attractors may stimulate
interest (and sales) but they do nothing to convey the essence of the relatively
new science of non-linear dynamics. A proper understanding of chaos requires
mathematical formulation and mathematical expression, but mathematics is a taboo
subject within popular journalism. For every equation that appears within an
article intended for general consumption, at least twenty percent of the readership
will be lost.
Mathematics is the language of science but it is completely absent from the
vocabulary of the science journalist.
QED
Truth comes from independent news organizations and citizen journalists. These are typically funded by advertisements but they can be subscriber funded. There were one thousands of these organizations in the US because every town had one or two printed newspapers. The role is now being taken up by independent organizations on the internet.
Corporate controlled media is what broadcast monopolies have given us. The major broadcasters are owned by big companies like GE, Westinghouse, Disney and Microsoft. Control has been extended over most newspapers as well through purchase and consolidation. These interests have dominated US opinion for more than fifty years, but their power has peaked. Just the same, the way corporate controlled media is run makes any kind of truth difficult to get out and scientific reporting impossible. The owners are not interested in their contractual and moral obligations to educate the public.
This issue is just one of the many imperatives to a free internet. Restrictions on internet freedom will drive us right back into the corporate controlled world of 1970.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Keen interest and a sharp mind is good enough: if you're willing to get your hands dirty when you have to. Martin Gardner wrote great stuff on semi-advanced mathematics and did not have a degree in math. But to write accurately about science you need to be willing to also check some details, calculations, etc. instead of just skimming over a paper.
"A theory is accepted in science when it's got overwhelming evidence or an actual proof." This isn't always the case- Scientists often have difficulty overcoming their biases, just like everyone else. Whether you're talking about phlogiston theory (17th century), the Luminiferous aether (19th century), or a steady-state model of the universe (1950s), you could find plenty of people who continued to believe the old theory when a better theory is introduced despite overwhelming evidence. Einstein hated quantum theory, just as many of the scientists who came before him hated relativity. The next generation of scientists can be relied upon to go with the theory that has the best evidence, which they then cling to even after some newer generation of scientists creates a theory better still.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Um, no. That's not quite right.
Previously, a citation was a link, that much is true. But it was a passive link that the user would need to track down the actual reference. The defining nature of being a 'hyperlink' is that it was actually dynamic -- clicking on it actually brought you to the referenced thing.
Just because back in the day people used to refer to other papers in their papers and bibliography, didn't mean they had hyperlinks. They were simply static references. You can touch the pages of a bibliography in a book until you're finger bleeds, but it's not going to magically make the referred books magically appear in your hand.
Words do have meanings, and hyperlink can't really be abused to refer to a static dead-tree citation. Because it totally ignores the dynamic nature that 'hyper' implies. 'Hyper' means "more than" -- as in "better than just a reference".
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Never had anyone follow me around slashdot before... I feel honored. OK, maybe just amused. I had a bunch of Ayn Rand nutjobs follow me around the Internet once because I pointed out things in "The Fountainhead" that they didn't want to think about, but they didn't make libelous posts about me to third parties.
Just FYI, I haven't got any argument with the previous poster. He made several excellent points. I don't know why you think we are "arguing".
But please, continue to exercise your freedom of expression as you see fit...
-- I'm sure you can guess from my nick what I think of THAT idea
I'm (honestly) uncertain if you are a sincere Marxist or someone "dressing overtightly" as one to mock the figure of a reasonable (I'll admit the possibility) one.
-=-=-
consider your comments a scientific paper,... let's see all the assumptions
ps -- science seems a sensible approach to group/individual exploration/mapping of the "outer world,"... but that "sensibility" was first humanly suspected/appreciated in an "inner world"... which was.......
-- oops, words got in the way,... sorry 'bout that
Scientific Journalism can't be done? Now that's just silly. You just have to realize that it's a sub-discipline of marketing, which is a sub-discipline of sales, which is a sub-discipline of business. It kind of goes like this:
1. Business
2. Sales
3. Marketing
4. ???
5. Scientific Journalism
6. Profit
See, the world make sense again.
I think you bring up an interesting point.... Is a paper meant to be read and understood by everyone/anyone,... or can we assume some "necessary" background for reading the report? There seems to be an assumption that the reader "speaks the language" the
report is written in.
Your best bet is to be very clear about what you are doing.
The big problem is journalists are generally dumb about science (and many other topics). What do people study to be a journalist? English and/or journalism, maybe communications. None of which impart even a remote scientific understanding.
So the mass media makes all sorts of errors and gross simplifications to explain a techie/science story. They never ask the right questions since they're incapable of understanding it in sufficient detail to ask them. They just never had the appropriate training to do it.
The other part is just about everything on (cable/TV) news is it's immediate. No time to research anything...so it's often wrong.
I'm sorry- what does football have to do with either communism or science? Or did I get the wrong Lemark?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The fundamental problem is that you don't know who your readership is, and the readership doesn't know you.
I frankly hate reading any article, purportedly by a journalist, about anything more interesting than the mundane, as I just don't know who is writing it, whether he/she actually understands what they are reporting and generally I quickly click on a link to find out more from a more authoritative source.
I don't envy your job for that reason.
I suppose if you look at your work as bringing research to the attention of the cogniscenti, then you should feel a warm glow of acceptance.
If, however you feel that your report should be taken more as an academic argument, then at least argue, or put an alternative across.
For example: Recently it was reported that the floriensis humanoid discovered in Indonesia was another species of human rather than a diseased, affected human.
The researchers concluded that it was another species. Nowhere in that article did the science writer argue otherwise, that the researchers would need to find/not find other samples of dwarf human species elsewhere.
It was only when the story was taken up by another agency, where the writer interviewed others in the field, who discounted the claims and provided an alternative view.
Now this happens all the time: An initial report followed by a more extensive account.
I really can't see how you can get around that considering the time restraints you have as well as the access you have on the field of study.
Good luck to you
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
> Reality is all about the physical state of being
Time is not real? So time is physical? Show me this "thing" called "time".
Are your dreams real? If they are not real, then how did you experience them?
Is consciousness physical? (Having interacted with non-human consciousness, that is a clear no.)
Reality is so much MORE then just the physical, which is the point you completely missed.
> see science as a rival church.
Science sets _itself_ up as a Rival Church; by ignoring the wisdom of the past Religions it has very much become its _own_ Religion.
Science through Quantum Mechanics have discovered most of these:
Awareness - There is no reality until one observes it.
Balance - Everything has an opposite, which brings equilibrium.
Eternity - Now is eternity, since "not Now" doesn't exist.
Faith - The Subjective Experience leads to the Objective Truth, and that it will lead to a more correct understanding of Reality when it has no proof of this.
Holiness - Honesty in searching for Truth which it
Infinity - There are many infinite parallel universes / dimensions.
Oneness - Everything is connected. i.e. Energy is mass, E=mc2
Uncorrupted Religion teaches the same thing at its core, when people aren't busy trying to convert everyone else to their incomplete religion.
I'm not the only one who sees the close minded nature of Science.
* http://amasci.com/weird/wclose.html
Others have written about the problems of Rationalism
* http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/skeptic.htm
--
You are a Spiritual being in a Physical body having a Human Experience.
Having written a few papers involving several highly-specialized social sciences (health care economics for example), these papers tend to have a hyperlink. It is called a method of citation, APA in my case. However, try from this link to explain why 'self-payers' (means no insurance) have such a risk of financial ruin within health care inside the United States. All the relevant information can be found on or through reference chains involving Wikipedia, but you would have to have an decent understanding in public health law, DRGs and their relationship to CMS, and even a basic coverage in regulations. I will give you a hint: the current US reimbursement system causes hospitals to have large 'standard rates' just to have a small profit. A $3,000 knee replacement implant will have a 75% to 163% mark-up to get a 5% profit off of the individual implant. This does not consider other costs, such as losses in other places or non-payers. In addition, you should explain why a hospital cannot charge a self-pay $3,150 for the implant. While you are at it, you will probably understand the fundamental problem with socialism and marxism. (They all involve the same basic principles of economic and a couple advances ones, such as game theory, price controls, and motivational theory.)
I admit that assumptions should be explicitly listed as such. Most methods of writing agree. However, trying to explain to the laity every concept will be an exercise in futility. Citing references means that the writer(s) are basing their work off another's work, with proper credit. An expert in a field might have to go to another paper, but usually only if the reference doesn't seem to make 'sense' to the expert. If the part I don't understand covers an area of expertise I don't have, then I find someone who can help. This is why some papers have more then four writers.
In God we trust, all others require data.
As people start to realize that you're twitter, the moderation on this sockpuppet account will start to change dramatically. It's already begun.
"This is an assumption" and a link explaining it as such is plenty. For anybody.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Time is not real? So time is physical? Show me this "thing" called "time"."
Sure: t=v/s. There. The fact that you can't touch it doesn't make something automatically "unphysical". Time is a property of the real world, thus is a physical magnitude (it's not a thing, but a magnitude: for the same you could ask "bring me the fruit called brick" asuming only fruits can be physical).
"Are your dreams real? If they are not real, then how did you experience them?"
Of course they are. And you have neurophysics investigating them.
"Is consciousness physical?"
More on the same: of course yes. And you have quite a lot of researchers working on this.
"Reality is so much MORE then just the physical"
Reality is much more than *matter*. Of course you have magnitudes (like time or speed), or energy or quite a lot of other *physical* things.
"Science sets _itself_ up as a Rival Church; by ignoring the wisdom of the past Religions it has very much become its _own_ Religion."
Yeah, sure. That's why Science builds up upon the shoulders of the past (we have not to rediscover Newton's laws on each generation) while things like religion or (part of) philosophy are still dicussing or accepting ideas "frozen" 4000 years ago.
"Others have written about the problems of Rationalism"
And that's the very point: they not only write about Rationalism, but they are just circling around the same ideas once and again without the ability to reach *any* valid conclusion to build upon. From the philosophy/religion front Humanity has advanced almost zero from Socrates or Plato. But they didn't have eight-lane bridges nor did they sent a man to the Moon.
Now, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the truthiness of the claim, just the logical problem contained in the reasoning.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I would like to thank everyone for their comments. This was my first post to Slashdot, as I only discovered it earlier this week (call me sheltered). Some of the comments left were very insightful and helpful, while other were not (i.e. constructive criticism/suggested readings/personal insight vs. what amounted to name calling, or even questioning my ethical integrity). However, I do realize that this is how the internet works, and "sticks and stones" etc. Now, I wanted to address a two themes I thought were interesting throughout many of the comments you left me. 1) Assumptions in Science: good or bad? A: Ultimately, unless your area of research covers the finest of analytical fields, assumptions are unavoidable. Its how you approach them that makes you a good or bad scientist. Take ecologists as an example - they study intrinsically complicated systems, with many known and unknown variables changing, over a gradient of environmental pressures. What is analytical and precise about that? Not much. Thus, many fields require certain assumptions. Are these assumptions unfounded and made up by the scientist? Of course not: they are based on previous theories that have met the test of rigorous investigation (i.e. standing on the shoulders of giants). The point I aimed to make through my essay was: the relative scope these assumptions (which are in fact well laid out in academic publications) cover is difficult to understand as a lay person. 2) Scientists are/aren't able to write to a lay audience I half agree - there are brilliant bumbling scientists out there who couldn't explain a movie plot to someone who just watched it with them, never mind their own research. However, are all scientists this way? Not at all. I have met some brilliant people, whose metaphors and analogies I admired so much, I use them myself when explaining my work. Furthermore, I think with any formal training, anyone can write accurately (yes, this may cause an uproar, but bare with me please). Beautifully? Elegantly? Perhaps not, but writing as a tool for imparting information, in my opinion, doesn't necessarily require these (although, they do make for an infinitely better read). Those two points said, I never aimed to "attack" science journalists, journalists, scientists, etc. It was simply a piece of insight I had thinking alone in my office one day.
Easy. Just wait a couple of seconds and I'll show you.
Now we get into the reals of utter bullshit I was refering to. It isn't very hard to spot the difference even if weird cults try to blur the lines to make money. Science is NOT a religeon - religeous people have been using it as a tool for centuries to attempt to see their God's design.Do you do realise that doubleplusgood marketingspeak actually means "sounds enough like truth to sell but isn't true"?
Well, yes. That's actually a tautology: math doesn't explain the world (it doesn't even try), and science is about explaining the world (although, similarly to your affirmation, I could say that physics doesn't explain the world, either, is just a language that we use to describe it -- but that's just semantics, and I see what you mean).
But, given the organization of the mathematical knowledge, I really consider it as a science. Because for me science is not just about explaining the world, I think of it more like "institutionalized knowledge", not restricted to "where the scientific method is used". This definition encompasses what you consider as sciences and more. It's completely artificial, yes, but it has its advantages when you are trying to classify some body of knowledge. 'The science of dancing' would be all the theories, observations, techniques, etc. about dancing.
This last one is mostly a joke, but I hope explains what I mean.
to elaberate on "making assumptions" about underlying data prior to doing a study. In the field of medicine many experiments and studies can not be done for obvious ethical concerns. Sometimes something that may not be the best for a patient is continued despite the prospect for "better therapy" because existing therapy is better than no therapy. Do you deny someone existing therapy to test a new methodology? That would more likely than not be considered unethical; however, if the standard of care is not available in a population and you were to then introduce your newer therapy you can potentially save lives. At this point you may be able to do a study comparing one populations survival with the other; however, this study makes an astounding number of assumptions about the similarity and comparability of the two populations. Despite this, you may go ahead and use this comparison to substantiate a better randomized double blinded study later. Its often better to do observational and retrospective studies prior to doing controlled trials despite their reliance on unscientific assumptions because its not always appropriate to do a "proper" study without having substantiated some aspects of your claim. Observational studis often get proven wrong; however, this doesn't mean that they don't play an important role or should be completely marginalized as bad science.
When all else fails, try.
Very well. While your definition of science isn't what most scientists say they are doing, I agree that it gives a pretty accurate picture of what most scientists actually are doing, and also of what the public perceives the scientists as doing. Which is also why the math department is usually grouped in the faculty of natural science in most universities.
(Given "math=language", math should be placed in the philological faculty, and given "math=methodology" it should be placed in a separate methodology faculty reserved for philosophy, metaphysics, math, statistics, logic, taxonomy, computing, hermeneutics, interview techniques, deconstruction, and lots of other more-or-less wacky subjects...)
So yes, I guess it depends on your perspective...
- Albert Einstein
The reason why it seems impossible to explain science to the public is because every good piece of writing needs to be addressed to some audience, i.e. one cannot "communicate" objectively with a person who does not share the same context as you do. Writing must be matched to the audience being addressed, but we take this shared background knowledge for granted most of the time.
Most of the public has a very simple conception of the natural world, and this is where the problem lies. They do not have a sufficiently complex understanding of the context in which scientific work is being undertaken. This is why scientific journalism has to first help the reader understand the context in which the discovery is being made, after which it has to show them where the discovery fits within that context...it's history lesson + journalism wrapped into one.
Rather than figuring out why individual scientific stories do not make sense to the public, and leave no imprint on the readers mind like a flash flood in the desert...as opposed to a flood on a grassy plain which has ample soil and plants to soak up the water, we should simple ask whether the popular common understanding of science in our culture is good enough to handle the information coming its way, or not.
Hasan
or another way to include your trees of fine detail so that it's there for review but not going to distract those with have a more moderate interest in the subject.
Sure it's extra work and generally another person to bounce explanations off of. Why not use a more open on-line development process to get more ppl involved in this process?