Julia and Massimo question him on this point, and ask him for his thoughts on what can be done to improve scientific literacy. As the founder of the Center for News Literacy and the Center for Communicating Science, Schneider has plenty of thoughts to share -- including making scientists take improv classes. Should science communication involve more storytelling? And is there any way to take advantage of new, online media formats to remedy some of the weak points in the science communication process?
Massimo, you said that you instruct your students to write paper starting with the methods and results and I am a little surprised by that. Isn't it like drawing a target around the arrow? When you know know what the results are you can come up with a good story to justify it but that's not how you actually got your data right? Wouldn't it be more logical and ethical to first postulate the hypotheses and explain why you were doing what you did and then show if the result supported it or not? After all, the results didn't show up from nowhere and you have a reason to look for them.
ReplyDeletegil,
ReplyDeleteit isn't a matter of ethics, proceeding that way is simply the most efficient way to write the paper, but presumably one already has a pretty good idea of what the general meaning of the research was, and what the results tell us. I was simply referring to the pragmatics of writing papers, it has nothing to do with the logic of how the actual research was done.
Awesome show. Great topic and guest. I posted this comment along with a web link to the New York Times Topics page for Mortgage Backed Securities for an example for Julia's wish for updated primers on subjects. It didn't get through, just like last time. I posted a second note right afterward, without a link, and it was immediately posted. So something weird is going on.
ReplyDeleteWeirder still. I did include a url in the accepted comment. When I tried to post the NYT link with HTML, I got the same message as the first time: "Your post has been submitted. Your post will be visible on this site after it has been approved by an editor."
ReplyDeleteSo, maybe the NYT site is causing it to go into moderation?
Well, now the whole post is missing: "Page Not Found
ReplyDeleteThe page /show/rs56-howard-schneider-on-science-news-literacy.html could not be located on this website."
Is it me? I suspect you were talking about the two short ones. The original post was a full paragraph. Then I followed it with "Another ..."
Indeed it is! I'll check with our producer and fix it.
ReplyDeleteMark, problem fixed!
ReplyDelete