Blogs / The Intersection

Having landed in New York, I’m finally going to get back to posting regularly next week. In the meantime, CM and I want to wish our readers a thrilling Halloween…

Happy 32nd Birthday Chris! In your honor, I’m posting footage from New Moon since lots of folks keep telling me you look like this ‘Jacob‘ character:

Uncanny. But seriously, I hope readers will join me in wishing my good friend another wonderful journey round the sun.

Remember the voyage to the island of garbage in the North Pacific Gyre? It’s a unqiue collaboration between Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and the nonprofit Project Kaisei. Known as SEAPLEX (Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition), the marine scientists on board are attempting to quantify hundreds of miles of floating plastic debris and determine the effects it may have on marine life.

I’ve just heard from Miriam Goldstein–intrepid chief scientist of SEAPLEX–about the huge SIO grad student-driven communication effort surrounding this cruise. They are working to involve the public in cutting-edge research through a website, mission blog, live Tweets from the ship, and the very cool set of Flickr project photos!

The SEAPLEX team has been featured on Science Friday, CNN, Reuters, Yahoo News, NBC San Diego, the Irish Times, and ScienceBlogs! It’s a wonderful initiative–not only because it’s intended to protect the environment and increase public understanding of oceans issues, but also in that it serves to highlight the kind of ‘New Scientists‘ we celebrate!

CM and I are following along with great interest…

by Joel Barkan

Last week, The New York Times, among other media outlets, reported on the discovery of seven new species of deep-sea worms. While the discovery is important for our understanding of the evolutionary history of annelids, the real draw is the worms’ unique defense mechanism. Some of these worms possess an appendage that, when released into the water, emits a bright green flash of bioluminescence—a “green bomb.” Like an octopus retreating behind a cloud of ink, the worm can flee while its predator ponders this green distraction.

The media coverage of this study made me think about how slowly scientific research is disseminated to the public. One of the scientists who participated in this study is Dr. Greg Rouse, a marine invertebrate biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Dr. Rouse lectured to my class back in June and casually mentioned these “green bombers” he had helped discover. Two months later, the study was picked up and publicized by the national media.

Contrast this to yesterday, when Senator Ted Kennedy’s death was immediately Twittered by thousands. Or the past few weeks, when congressional debates and presidential town hall meetings on health care played out every day on the internet and on television. We’re living in an age with virtually no delay between when news happens and when news is reported. Yet science lags behind.

Is this a bad thing? I’m not quite sure. We call it “the scientific method” for a reason: it’s methodological. Science is supposed to be slow, to make sure you don’t mess up. But is there a speedier way to broadcast scientific information than wading through the muck of the publishing process?

Would you follow Dr. Greg Rouse on Twitter?

While CM is traveling and I enter the homestretch of book edits, we’ve decided to feature some talented guest bloggers we enjoyed working with at last week’s communications workshop at Scripps. These graduate students are exactly the kind of emerging voices we highlighted in our Powell’s essay entitled The New Scientists and we’re pleased to have them contribute here. Kicking off the first post, we’d like to introduce readers to Joel Barkan.

Joel was born and raised in the small town of Holden, Maine, where he developed an interest in the ocean at the nearby coast.  He attended Vassar College as an undergraduate, majoring in Environmental Studies.  After graduating, Joel spent two winter field seasons in Hawaii with The Dolphin Institute where he assisted Dr. Adam Pack with humpback whale field research.  Their work focused on population abundance and behavior in their breeding grounds.  A highlight of each season was their collaboration with National Geographic, which sent a team to Maui to deploy a Crittercam (an underwater camera on humpbacks).  He left Hawaii to work at the Catalina Island Marine Institute on Santa Catalina Island, twenty-five miles off the coast of Southern California.  There Joel taught outdoor marine science to visiting middle and high school students in the form of snorkeling, kayaking, and hands-on labs.  He came to Scripps Institution of Oceanography to pursue his interests in marine education and marine science policy.

Please join us in welcoming Joel to The Intersection! His first post about the role of scientists in policy decisions will appear in a few hours. Once again, since he is our guest, we will be strict when it comes to comments.

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…

(more…)

Audio from this morning’s interview on The Brian Lehrer Show is now available:

It’s been wonderful to read commentary and reactions to Unscientific America around the web and in print and discuss the book with readers and friends. Still, the attention from my own town has meant the most. IndyWeek already ran their review, and today I was thrilled to see The Herald-Sun. I just love the research triangle. Here’s an excerpt:

“It’s easy to look now at the Obama administration and feel encouraged that there are beards back in the White House,” Kirshenbaum said recently, before heading off to Washington, D.C., to speak at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress. “But there’s still a rift between the world of science and the rest of society, and there’s a danger for those of us who care about science becoming complacent. Science, unfortunately, has become such a partisan, controversial issue, the situation is not going to change just because there’s a new administration in power.”

Whoever is in power, Kirshenbaum pointed out, scientists need to communicate better and science needs to take a more prominent role in education and public discourse.

Her claims are buttressed by the latest report from the Pew Research Center, which finds that 85 percent of scientists themselves see the public’s lack of scientific knowledge as a major problem for science.

I’m honored to be featured, and admittedly, the fact that they included the ‘charismatic sea cucumber‘ has me smiling ear to ear. The full article requires free registration and is available here.

Thanks to everyone for a warm welcome back to the District! Chis and I really enjoyed our lunch conversation with the bright and enthusiastic “New Voices” at Research!America.  This group of motivated young scientists certainly keeps us optimistic about the future!

Our book talk at Politics and Prose was terrific! There were some excellent and thought-provoking questions that followed from a great audience and we had fun meeting everyone afterward.  We were very honored to have Jonathan Moreno of the Center for American Progress and Mary Woolley of Research!America introduce us at the event–two individuals who already do so much to bridge the science-society divide and continue to inspire us. And special thanks to Zuska, Jason, Benjamin, Manil, Al, and so many other friends who joined us for the evening.  I only wish we had more time to spend together and it meant a great deal to see you there!

Throughout the day, we also did several interviews that we’ll link as they become available. And with that, posting will be light as we continue traveling…

As I’ve written before, it’s terrific to see others weighing the pros and cons of the arguments laid out in Unscientific America. Today Razib and Jason have posted two reviews that bring up many important themes from our book. They add thought-provoking points to the growing discussion and both seem to agree it’s worth reading.

(more…)