Science & Society

J.L. Vernon echoes many of the points I made in Are Science Blogging Networks Dead? but also focuses on a distinct aspect, writing Just like the NBA, “Science” is a brand.  It's a message that may be lost on some, or they would self-police a little better and certainly ask their commenters for a little more maturity - but it may be that while science is a brand (Science 2.0, Discover, Nature, etc. certainly always want to make sure writers get benefit beyond traffic from being in respective publications) at Scienceblogs, bloggers are themselves the brand. This independence from the brand…

Colin Schultz, a video journalist in Ontario, has some tips for aspiring science journalists.   Science readership is going up each year but science journalism jobs are decreasing.  How so?   Some of it is that science literacy is increasing(1) so more and more people can read science directly from the sources, like here, but without editors or journalists pitching stories the breadth of coverage is not complete so independent writing did not harm journalism - the market is up regardless of reasons.   Journalists in general have lost the public trust and science…

A typical dream of an active citizen scientist might be to have one's own fully-equipment research laboratory and tinkering space conveniently established in one's own garage or basement. Proper lab setup, either being a diy bio lab or an electronics lab or even a nuclear fusion lab, takes a great deal of planning, time, and at least some form of significant financial resource. So, not everyone can implement personal lab spaces at home. And that is where the Hackerspace can be of assistance. A hackerspace is a specialized open community lab where people with similar interests can meet,…

Attractive women face discrimination when it comes to landing certain kinds of jobs, especially those with job titles like manager of research and development, director of finance, mechanical engineer and construction supervisor where appearance is considered unimportant, says a new study.   The discrimination was done by both men and women. But attractive men were not discriminated against, even by women.  It is called the "beauty is beastly" effect, where attractiveness is a hindrance.    "In these professions being attractive was highly detrimental to women," said…

“John is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, John is mortal.” This argument from two premises to the conclusion is a deductive argument. The conclusion logically follows from the premises; equivalently, it is logically impossible for the conclusion not to be true if the premises are true. Mathematics is the primary domain of deductive argument, but our everyday lives and scientific lives are filled mostly with another kind of argument. Not all arguments are deductive, and ‘inductive’ is the adjective labeling any non-deductive argument. Induction is the kind of argument in which we…

Back in the day, families in general seemed to do most of the work needed for themselves by themselves; since this was really required if a family was to simply survive the day. Over the past 100 years, the reliance on professionalism across the globe has steadily increased. The advantages to this “outsourcing of life’s primary needs” approach are endless… we have professional farmers that allow our refrigerators to be full with only a trip to the grocery store; we have professional protectors who work efficiently at keeping dangers as far away from our doorstep as possible without us even…

I've recently had two similar, yet very different, experiences in my day job as a science writer. A few months ago I was assigned to write a piece for symmetry Magazine (look for it in August!) about an artist in residence at Paul Alivisatos' nanotechnology research lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Without scooping myself, the basic idea behind this artist's residency was to use nanoparticles as an innovative means for creating structural color, which can be observed naturally in butterfly wings and beetles. She was very much employed as an artist. She created things with no…

The first of six parts of my presentation at Inconjunction 2010. I presented on Archaeology and PseudoArchaeology. It was my first live talk, so I was really serious, but the audience was great and I had some great audience participation at the end. Also, major Props to Anubis2814, he handed the filming despite the technical difficulties.

Early last month, Michael White’s Adaptive Complexity on Science 2.0 had a useful critique of the citizen scientist. It is very important to consider these things, and the future of citizen science opportunities will be dependent on how valuable their efforts will prove to be. The role of the citizen scientist is certainly still an evolving one, and will likely eternally be in flux. Before the era of professional scientists comfortably sitting at respected universities and industrial businesses, which is now commonplace, the majority of scientific exploration was accomplished by the non-…

In Symbol Stacks And Science Communication In The Scienceblogs Pepsigate Scandal I mentioned something that was unpopular with the bloggerati in science but obvious to those of us outside the relatively small confines of the science blogging clique; Pepsi was not the problem, it was simply the tipping point.   Institutional blogs were not really any better for science believability and that had been a minor focus starting in 2008 but became a real trend there in 2010.  I wrote: Now, Pepsi is a for-profit corporation but paid writers are paid writers. Scienceblogs people were…