Chris will have more on our morning conversation with Tom Bowman about communicating science, but in the mean time I’ll touch on the afternoon discussion with Mark Dowie and K.C. Cole on science journalism.
Both Mark and K.C. are award winning journalists and authors. Mark’s most recent book is Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples and teaches science and foreign correspondence at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journal. K.C. teaches journalism and communication at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism and her latest book is entitled Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up. Each expert shared their career experiences and offered advice on speaking with journalists. They weighed in on why science reporting matters and how it’s changing. Mark focused on the state of the media and K.C. shared her perspective on how a journalist collects information to tell the story. In the end we discussed what styles of communication are most sucessful in America. (The comic after the jump is a great interpretation by Jorge Cham).
It was a terrific afternoon and our speakers raised a lot of thought-provoking points, followed by a round table Q&A. Chris and I are very interested to read reactions from students who were in the room and find out what resonated most for them…
August 10th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
I wanna be on that boat!
August 10th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
I would rather be on the boat with T Pain. Heh
August 10th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Damn Straight!
August 11th, 2009 at 1:37 am
I loved Mark’s comment today:
“The greatest certainty in science and journalism is uncertainty.”
Much of the debate over climate change hinges on that exact idea- uncertainty. The science is not certain at all- we are effectively performing an experiment on our own planet with no control. The unfortunate thing is, we all learn that science is performed WITH a control, under the strictest of conditions, and we test theories. If they hold up, the theories are accepted as scientific laws, and then we know that they are true. This is what schoolchildren are taught, and this is what the people expect.
However, in the case of current events: climate change, overfishing, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, species extinctions, and even our own agriculture, there are no scientific laws. So why should any of the good people believe what the scientists say? It’s easy for your grocer, banker, or salesman to think “I’ll just wait until they decide amongst themselves, then I’ll learn about global warming.” After all, what is the point if the experts are going to change the facts on you after you’ve bothered to sit down and read something?
I would like to add another thing to the list of why it is tough to communicate science, why sometimes it seems like people just don’t care. There is the poor education, uncertainty, complexity, jargon and acronyms, the works. There is also an issue of expectations: the public EXPECTS that scientists know all of the answers and can solve all of the problems that they preach about. This is perhaps one of the largest drivers of the diaspora between scientists and the everyone else- they’ve both forgotten what the other group is really like.