Category Archives: science communication

The Exquisite Corpse of Science

How do different people and groups of people view science?  What do they know about it?  What do they think is important?

To help answer those questions – here’s a  fun ‘Sci-Art’ idea with a serious side.

Exquisite Corpse of Science
Exquisite Corpse of Science

You see, proof that  Big Science is alive and well at Imperial College, my colleagues Arko Olesk, Graham Paterson and I went crazy last month and invested in an A3 sketch pad and a felt-tip pen.

So armed, we’ve been accosting members of the public, scientists, and science communicators, and, looking over their shoulders in the nicest possible way, asking them to DRAW what they think is important about science.

We’ve made audio recordings of what was said whilst drawing and, in a bid to capture all this diversity in an intriguing and memorable way, stitched the pictures together in the manner of the surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse. A little photoshopping nicely finished this testimony to all our efforts.

A 14 yr old's view of science
A 14 yr old’s view of science

Pretty, but what’s been achieved here?

Our thinking was that long questionnaires and government surveys have their place, but they don’t catch those instinctive, spur of the moment thoughts and reactions that show where someone’s really coming from. We wanted to capture the ideas that get  lost in a more calculated response.  OK – we gave our subjects some warning, but we saw real spontaniety too.

The Communicator
The Communicator

On to our subjects and something of the learning……   We are indebted to Imperial’s Head of Physics – Professor Joanna  Haigh, Programmes Developer at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre – Dr Maya Losa Mendiratta, and our ‘public’ – Emma Sears and Gareth (14 yrs), for being temporary artists and great sports in equal measure.

The Scientist
The Scientist

To give you a flavour of what we learned from our statistically unrepresentative ‘spot sample’, take the youngest of our ‘public’ – Gareth.   Given his relatively young age, I was struck by his breadth of knowledge: we have AIDs in Africa, perils of passive smoking, space clutter, hearing damage, nuclear weapons, carbon footprint, materials shortages, and nothing less than the “de-evolution” of the human race.  A follow-up study might probe for depth, but he came over as a walking endorsement of the contextual focus of UK science teaching (although for me the jury’s still out).

Scientist Joanna Haigh chose to illustrate the scientific method, to which end she referenced her specialisation in atmospheric physics, especially topical given the field’s impact on the global warming debate (which all our subjects referenced).

Some of our subjects were quite complimentary about science journalism – others less so.  And we saw a ‘blurring of the lines’ between what a group or public really is.  Some of our scientists also dealt with the media, making them part communicator.  When it comes to keeping up with the sciences distant from her field, Haigh reads the popular press, like New Scientist, rather than specialist journals.

Haigh was also strong on interdisciplinary working, a theme that resonated with science communicator Maya’s comments about scientists needing to avoid stereotyping in one field. Yet that idea can conflict with another view we got that it is the focused scientist who traditionally ‘gets on’.   Behind all this I sensed a yearning for some enabling change in the scientific establishment.

Climate was perhaps THE common scientific theme, with Emma talking about water conservation and desalination.  She also discussed affordable medicine, which resonated with Gareth’s comments on AIDS.   The possibility of extra-terrestrial life (not so much UFOs – despite Gareth’s alien sketch) was another recurring theme.

Anyhow, my intent here is to share the idea, not this particular analysis.  And I’ve also avoided academic discussion of communication models: deficit, PUS/PEST, hierarchical etc.  – which this sort of exercise can inform.

Update 12th July 2009

You can watch the movie of this project here.

Life, Talk To Me About Life

Search for Life at the Royal Institution
Search for Life at the Royal Institution (Photo Tim Jones)

I kind of expect to see demonstrations at the Royal Institution, an association with the Christmas Lectures I guess.

So it was nice to see a few props at Lewis Dartnell’s talk on astro-biology yesterday evening:  a Geiger counter, a jar of fluorescent quinine, a piece of Mars.   A piece of Mars !!! That got a reaction from the audience – along with an intelligent question – “how do you know it’s from Mars?”  As it happens, matching isotopes between the 1911 meteorite sample and material tested in-situ by the Viking lander on Mars leave little doubt about its origins.  Whether it contains signs of former Martian life, as some claim, is another matter.

Lewis Dartnell & Naomi Temple (Royal Institution) with the famous RI bench.  Photo: Tim Jones
Lewis Dartnell & Naomi Temple (Royal Institution) with the famous RI bench. (Photo Tim Jones)

The evening’s bottom line was that no extra-terrestrial life has yet been found; but there is particular hope for Mars and/or Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Dartnell structured his lecture from the Earth outwards: Earth, solar system, galaxy, etc.   With ‘Earth’ came a definition of life, and what an excuse that was to show some clips from this amazing Harvard Biovisions simulation of how a cell works; fast forward to 4:00mins for the best bit with vesicles being dragged along by ‘motor proteins’.

Moving out from the Earth, we find that the combination of salinity, pH, and temperature on which earth’s more ‘extremophile’ lifeforms thrive: thermophiles, acidophiles, psycrophiles in the lingo, are the exact same as those prevailing on Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s moons.  Further out in the galaxy, there are candidate stars with Jupiter-sized planets at the right sort of solar distance for Earth-like temperature conditions to exist at their supposed moons (HD28185 and Gliese581 were the examples given).  So there’s hope.  Information, metabolism, blueprint  = Life.

Dartnell could see Martian material being brought back to earth for analysis at some point, but not for another ten years or so.  In the meantime, the European ExoMars probe, due for launch in 2011, will drive around the surface, drilling holes and taking samples.  It will also illuminate the landscape with ultraviolet light, organic molecules betraying themselves with their fluorescence.

No discussion on extra-terrestrial life is complete without some sort of Saganish ‘Billions’ illustration of how many stars – and presumably planets – there are in the universe: the implication being that we have a large sample size even if the odds are thin (which they aren’t necessarily).   Lewis Dartnell showed it last night.  Astronomer Stephen Warren showed it at his inaugural lecture at Imperial College tonight.  This is the now iconic Hubble deep field image showing a section of sky equivalent to only 1/30th the moon’s diameter (Warren reckoned a 1mm square at the end of your arm – sounds about right).  And most of the objects  here are galaxies.

Hubble Deep Field
Hubble Deep Field

The insufficiently humbled can check out higher resolution versions at Hubblesite.org.

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

“Life, don’t talk to me about life….”

🙂

Postscript

As a quick aside.  Before Lewis Dartnell kicked off, the organisers called for a show of hands of any first time visitors to the Royal Institution, and that turned out to be a fair chunk of audience; less than 50% I reckon, but a good number.  With my SciCom hat on, that’s really encouraging – folk taking an interest in science and technology (and they didn’t look like the UFO squad either).

Buon Compleanno Galileo – “Eppur si muove”

“And yet it moves” – supposedly the rider Galileo Galilei added to his confession to the Inquisition when questioned about the earth’s movement around the sun.

And clock hands move too – across timezones.  That makes it comfortably still 15th February in my equal most favouritistical country, the USA –  so,  HAPPY BIRTHDAY GALILEO!

To tell you all about him:  heeeeeeeere’s Carl…..

“Very Little Can Stop The Train” Sir David King On Media Reporting and MMR

I’ve just returned from the annual British Humanist Association Darwin Day Lecture, this year delivered by Sir David King at a session chaired by Richard Dawkins.

Sir David King and Professor Richard Dawkins at the BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2009 (photo Tim Jones)
Sir David King and Professor Richard Dawkins at the BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2009 (photo Tim Jones)

King is a former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, and now heads up a multi-disciplinary organisation tackling climate change – The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment- at Oxford University.

His talk entitled  ‘Can British Science Rise to the New Challenges of the Twenty First Century?’ was very similar in content to one I watched him give at a PAWS event in November, and dealt less with British Science, and more with the complexities of tackling global climate change.   There were some new angles, but I’d refer you to my previous blog HERE – inspired by Sir David’s earlier talk – rather than repeat myself.   I believe a podcast of tonight’s event will appear on the BHA site in due course.

So perhaps, given the greater relevance to current debate over poor media reporting of science, and particularly that related to MMR (and the Goldacre/LBC radio encounter), you’d like to hear what Sir David volunteered tonight on that subject.  It came up in response to a question from the floor about the Daily Mail.  Sir David’s transposed response:

We’ve now got a measles epidemic growing in this country, and the measles epidemic is the result directly of a very poor piece of science from John Wakefield, somehow being published in the Lancet – should never have been published – the database was far too small.  And then gaining momentum in the media, and it’s not only the Daily Mail, John Humphreys was one of those pushing that… that the connection between MMR and autism raised real questions, and the take-up of the MMR vaccine began to fall very dramatically.  And my prediction a few years ago was that we would approach something like a hundred deaths a year from, amongst children, from measles as a measles outbreak occured, inevitably.

If you do models and you drop below 80% uptake of the vaccine, the measles must come back.  Of course the Daily Mail’s campaign was one of the instruments that got people very worried about that particular issue.  So I think that was an example where the science was so clear.  Let me tell you.  There was a Danish study of all the children born in Denmark over ten years of whom 15% had not had the MMR vaccine, and 85% had.  The statistical incidence of autism in the two groups was the same.   Now just to be on the…on the…..when I say the same within statistical error.  The nice thing was, from the point of view of those who were sceptics, that amongst the group who didn’t have the vaccine, there was a slight larger number- larger percentage – with autism.  Now any parent worrying about the situation, just needs surely to be given that set of statistics, and yet the Daily Mail wouldn’t publish it when I went to them.   What am I saying, [finding his words]well, it rarely gets their story right.  There is…there is a sort of disbelief, but I’m afraid when a newspaper is running a campaign, there’s very little can stop the train

To which Richard Dawkins, with a look of amazement and with apparent reference to the Daily Mail not printing the Denmark evidence, said – “I’m shocked


Dogs Are Spies From Venus

Contrary to popular belief, dogs are in fact spies from Venus.  So maintained University of London philosopher Steven Law at today’s Centre for Inquiry London ‘Weird Science’ event at Conway Hall.

Ben Goldacre (left) and John Law
Ben Goldacre (left) and Stephen Law at ‘Weird Science’ today. Photo:Tim Jones

In doing so, he applied the same faultless logic and interpretation of evidence used by young earth creationists, defending their belief that the universe is only 6000 years old.  Say no more.   And that was pretty much the tone for a day of  talks on the science of the weird, wacky, and flaky variety, from Ben Goldacre (”Bad Science” in the Guardian), Professors of anomolous psychology Richard Wiseman and Chris French, and philosopher Stephen Law.

Conway Hall (Photo:Tim Jones)
Conway Hall (Photo:Tim Jones)

Before sharing what a great show this was, let me digress for a bit on CFI London itself.   CFI London are at pains to explain in their FAQ that they don’t see science and reason as the be all and end all, but their positioning, and the topics they choose to discuss, for me at least force the issue of the incompatibility of science and religion.  Once you engage in a discussion on human psychology and the concept of what it means to be rational, the polite separation of science and religion becomes difficult to maintain.  It will be interesting to see how CFI’s event programme and various potential allegiances with secular interests develop.

Anyhow – it was a great show.  Richard Wiseman, hotfoot from an evening debunking mediums with his mate Derren Brown, illustrated how easily our perceptions can be fooled and our attention directed.   Familiar gestalt switch examples, like the rabbit-duck picture, made an appearance, along with excerpts from Richard’s various TV appearances, including a hilarious debunking of firewalkers, and these clips: the amazing floating cork, and the colour changing card trick.

You might remember Chris French, a psychology professor from Goldsmiths, as the guy who organised the dowsing trials on Richard Dawkins’ ‘Enemies of Reason’ TV show.  French re-lived with us that demonstration of the refractoriness of dowsers’ belief in the face of out and out debunking, and shared the results of a study that aligned personality traits with the likelihood of belief in conspiracy theories.  Those more prone to belief tend to (a) have low trust in people, (b) feel alienated from society, (c) are quick to make assumptions from partial evidence.

Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman at ‘Weird Science’ today. Photo:Tim Jones

Writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor Ben Goldacre, while outspoken and opinionated, sticks to subject areas he knows something about.  That’s why he doesn’t address environmental issues and such like in his column and blog; their complexity not lending itself to case-based, winnable on evidence, 650 word analyses.

Ben shared his trademark disgust at alternative medicine and quackery, but majored on the rise and demise of medicine – through the Golden Age from the 30’s to the 70’s – after which the low hanging fruit dried up and major breakthroughs fizzled out.   His point – we should all get real that our level of understanding of much desease and suffering is still pretty minimal and (my words) – shit happens.   Although Ben’s book ‘Bad Science’ is still hot off the presses, his words reminded me of another honest text with a medical flavour – ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine’ by doctor and Telegraph columnist James Le Fanu; check it out.

Ben Goldacre
Ben Goldacre at ‘Weird Science’ today. Photo:Tim Jones

Mainstream newspapers, and particularly their ‘humanities graduate’ editors (I’m sure he’s not talking about scientifically trained SciComs Grads here) got it in the neck big time, as did the various PR and press agencies that feed them.  Why, when literary criticism of the highest intellectual level gets column space, do we not see science coverage of the same professional calibre?  Goldacre also, admirably, subscribes to the BBC Horizon dumb down theory. (There are still Horizon dumb down deniers out there – believe it or not.)

Ben’s closing comments were encouraging  – but not for mainstream conventional print journalism.  He saw no solution to the dire journalistic picture he’d painted – it’s simply what the market wants.  But the rise of the blog is changing everything, cutting out a middle man who is adding less and less value.  And if we doubt a blog’s content? – check the source references; all good blogs provide the links.

Zoonomian Podcast – Interview with Alan Mootnick, Director Gibbon Conservation Center, Santa Clarita, California

Alan Mootnick

(Update 4th November 2011.  We were very sorry to hear of Alan’s death earlier today.  A fantastic guy and unmatched friend of gibbons.  Rest in peace Alan.)

What better way to spend Christmas than in the company of your favourite gibbons?   That’s exactly what my wife Erin and I did on the 26th December 2008, on our second visit to the Gibbon Conservation Center at Santa Clarita, California – home to some of the world’s rarest gibbons.

As well as catching up with gibbon families first met in September and described in this earlier post, I recorded the gibbons singing, and an extended interview with the Founder and Director of the Center, Alan Mootnick.

Much of what Alan has to say about working in gibbon conservation with various institutes, authorities, and peoples around the world, and particularly in Asia, is also relevant to other species.

Pileated gibbon, young female Dec. 2008

Each recording lasts between 3 and 10 minutes, with the entire interview as one edit included at the end.

gibbon center foot wash

 

Part 1 – Arrival

An early morning tour ends in a noisy chorus.

Alan Mootnick speaking at a fundraising event

 

Part 2 – Introduction

Alan introduces the aims of the Center, the various gibbon genera and species, and gives a disturbing account of the threats facing wild gibbons.

gibbon at santa clarita gibbon center

 

Part 3 – Breeding Program

Alan describes the breeding program for the Javan gibbon – of which only 4000 remain in the wild, the Center’s collaboration with zoos – including in the UK, and the challenges of finding gibbons for study in the wild.

 

Part 4 – Taxonomy

Gibbon genomics, taxonomy, and a showcase of mistaken identity.  The challenges of moving gibbons and their DNA around the world, and the role  of faeces in working out bloodlines.

Part 5 – Behaviour

Including apparent similarities with man, and discussion around gibbon song and brachiation (swinging arm to arm).  The highlight is Alan’s empirically supported theory of hostile genital or anal presenting – ‘gibbon mooning’ in other words.

Part 6 – Volunteer Program

Including the possibility of joining the Center from the UK.

Part 7 – Threats

Discusses issues around land management and deforestation in Indonesia, the illegal trade in gibbons, and the impact that’s having on the gibbon population.  Also some tips on how to work to best effect when dealing with zoos in Asia.

And this is the entire interview as a single edit:

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60Mb. Approx. 1 hour. Copyright, all rights reserved, 2009, Tim Jones  communicatescience.com

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If you enjoyed hearing about – and hearing ! – the gibbons of Santa Clarita, and would like to make a donation, you can do so here.

Interview With Alan Mootnick – Director, Gibbon Conservation Center, Santa Clarita

(Update 4th November 2011.  We were very sorry to hear of Alan’s death earlier today.  A fantastic guy and unmatched friend of gibbons.  Rest in peace Alan.)

What better way to spend Christmas than in the company of your favourite gibbons?   That’s exactly what my wife Erin and I did on the 26th December 2008, when we made our second visit to the Gibbon Conservation Center at Santa Clarita, California – home to some of the world’s rarest gibbons.

As well as catching up with gibbon families we first encountered in September, and described in this earlier post,  I made some sound recordings during this visit, including an extended interview with the Founder and Director of the Center, Alan Mootnick.

I hope you’ll  find the resulting podcast, which you can stream or download below, gives an in-depth, candid, yet often humorous insight  into the mission of the Gibbon Center, the plight of the gibbon, and the work of a dedicated scientist and hands-on conservationist.

(Please note, a later edit with the interview split down into six shorter sections can be found here)

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60Mb. Approx. 1 hour. Copyright, all rights reserved, 2009, Tim Jones  communicatescience.com

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Alan Mootnick, Director Gibbon Conservation Center
Alan Mootnick, Director Gibbon Conservation Center

If you enjoyed hearing about – and hearing ! – the gibbons of Santa Clarita, and would like to make a donation, you can do so here.

Zoonomian Launches in Second Life

It was inevitable.   The indefinable, yet almost tangible buzz of excitement that has for weeks held cyberspace in a grip of nervous anticipation: it all  makes sense now.  For yesterday evening, to tumultuous public acclaim, the Zoonomian Science Centre opened its doors to residents of Second Life.

Zoonomian Science Centre in SL
Zoonomian Science Centre in SL

O.K. – if my brother hadn’t monopolised model railway construction when we were kids, maybe I’d have gotten this sort of thing out of my system earlier.  But all the same, putting this creation together has been a lot of fun and there is a serious side to it all.

A visitor on the Conference Floor on opening night
A visitor explores the Conference Floor on opening night

Virtual worlds have been with us for a while, as has their use for promoting interaction in science and technology; and indeed, for science communication.

There are many real world businesses, universities, museums, and even embassies represented in Second Life; most of which you can just turn up to and walk right in.  I particularly like NASA’a site, despite their copy restrictions preventing my placing the Saturn V launch vehicle as sentinel to the ZSC.   The NASA site is part of what is probably the major nexus for science and technology in Second Life: the  SciLands Virtual Continent.   The Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Publishing also have a substantial SL presence at the Elucian IslandsSecond Nature – which hosts events such as the recent Virtual Conference on Climate Change and CO2 Storage, held in association with my own Imperial College.

Second Life is the best known virtual world, but there are dozens of others – some, like OpenSim, snapping at its heels.

Entrance lobby
Entrance lobby (I'm most comfortable constructing as a meerkat)

I’ve previously discussed Second Life here, in the context of societies with boundless resource; and most recently here, when I first bought land and installed a giant gibbon on it.  (If anybody is missing the gibbon, don’t worry, she and others are likely to return with a vengeance.)   In the former post, I referred to owner Linden’s claim that 70,000 thousand residents were  ‘in-world’ at any one time; I’ve seen  between 45,000 and 75,000, so that seems realistic.

Entrance lobby and conference level
Entrance lobby and conference level

So, much more importantly – what am I going to do with this space?

As a conventional museum with exhibits, there are no limits –  save those dictated by the bounds of copyright and creative ingenuity; but mainly cost – of time and money.   Media: such as web pages, music, and movies, can be streamed into the Centre via two media panels.  The default is set to this blog, with which you can interact from within SL.

There is also the potential for groups to meet up at the centre to  share media materials, films, podcasts etc, and to hold mini-conferences to which a broader public might be invited.

Conference Level
Conference Level

And I guess this brings us to the big difference bewteen a straight web page interaction and an interaction in Second Life.  SL and its ilk are spaces where people who are geographically far apart in the real world can meet to share content and have discussions.   You might say you could do that sitting at your PC?  But then of course that’s exactly where you would be.  The claim is that a virtual world gives you more degrees of freedom for expression.  For sure, if during an SL discussion at the conference table, a guest gets up and orders a drink from the bar (did I not mention the bar?), then spends the rest of the meeting pacing around, that would send a certain kind of message.

If you want to visit the Zoonomian Science Centre, you will need to register for free at Second Life and get yourself a name.  Then come to this location in the Haddath Region.   Haddath has ‘mature’ status – so adults only please.   The Centre is normally open to all, but just come back later if not; it just means I’m working on the place and don’t want to jump out of my skin when someone walks up behind me and starts chatting.

Of course, the main pupose of the Zoonomian Science Centre has been as a learning exercise for me; Second Nature can relax after all.  That said:  “from small acorns……”

Oh yes – if you are reading this at the Centre…..Welcome !   Enjoy!