Archive for January, 2008

Scientists should learn to be communicators, says Chris Mooney

Published by Mr. Gunn on January 31, 2008 7 Comments

Interesting talk yesterday, the main points of which were:

  • is complicated
  • You can’t expect the media to get it right
  • So, scientists should stop obsessing over tedious facts and learn to market, or “frame”, our work.

    • Nice sentiment, but facts are what we’re trained to do, and facts are all that many of us care about. If gene expression profiling suggests that one race is smarter than another, then that’s what they’re going to believe. The very literal, logical point of view is why they became scientists in the first place, and it’s a necessary ingredient of their success. If they cultivated their creative, expressive side they might not have been able to tolerate the grueling tedious hours in the lab that were necessary to achieve their discoveries. I think Chris missed this because of his English background, really, so it’s understandable, but do we really want to put the responsibility of on the non-socialized, Asperger’s-afflicted, born nerds?

    blogging is great, but one’s audience is self-selected, so you can teach someone who accepts global warming about climate models, and you can teach someone who accepts evolution about phylogenetics, but you don’t get to reach the undecided without the help of broadcast media. Media that exposes people to things they didn’t seek out.

    Of course, I’m comfortable with blogs being a source of information for broadcast media reporting, digesting the raw into understandable issues, but I think that’ll be a pretty bitter pill for traditional media types to swallow.

    “Bloggers producing content that the media repeats?” “Inconceivable!”

    So it seems to me like the real question is whether the real story of gets told better by -ignorant reporters sensationalizing things or by unsocialized, slightly sociopathic scientists trying to learn to communicate their results better.

    Maybe there’s a niche for people with a background who somehow retained skills? What’s the going rate for a “ ambassador” these days?

    Chris Mooney in New Orleans

    Published by Mr. Gunn on January 29, 2008 2 Comments

    The talk is “ at High Speeds: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming”, at 5PM at the Lavin-Bernick Center on the Uptown campus and it’s part of the Focus the Nation event. Since Chris is a scienceblogger, I’d like to extend a warm blog-welcome to him from my adopted city.

    Check back here Wednesday for live coverage of the event. I haven’t heard of any plans for streaming this, and I’ve been wanting to play around with Qik(my review), so this seems like a good time. I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing, so I can’t vouch for the visual or auditory legibility of anything I stream, but check out my test recording and if you are watching and have questions, you can send me an IM on jabber/GTalk.

    The stream is here(FYI: this is service is alpha and may have network or other issues)
    My profile page is here, in case the embedded stream is showing something from someone else (like it is now).
    The parade is going to make getting from downtown a little difficult, so if you’re planning on being there in person, come early.

    It looks like I’ll be fairly limited in terms of battery life in what I can show, but I have a good feeling it will show up on his YouTube channel.

    Dissertations R hard

    Published by Mr. Gunn on January 20, 2008 3 Comments

    On the off chance anyone is wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been trying to finish up my dissertation in the extremely narrow gap between the Christmas holidays and Carnival in New Orleans. More content is going to be created in my Flickr photostream than here until approximately February 5.

    See in particular the tag “mardigras” and my friend Maitri’s photostream. How she manages to make it to absolutely every cool event that happens around New Orleans is amazing.

    Lots of changes under the hood.

    Published by Mr. Gunn on January 18, 2008 0 Comments

    Wordpress has updated a great deal of the back-end administrative code, and changed the default look of things a bit, so if something doesn’t work or look just right, please drop a comment here.

    Is this a new tactic of foreign scammers?

    Published by Mr. Gunn on January 10, 2008 0 Comments

    I just received a new email, in poorly written English of course, advertising jobs correcting “texts”.

    We will provide you with the texts for our employees with the important information and you will correct the texts as an english speaking person and send them back to us.

    Evidence the scammers are behind this:

    1. The email itself uses rather awkward sounding language.
    2. Scammers are known to use third-parties as unwilling intermediaries in their scams, so that when the angry fool goes to the address that he mailed his check, he finds only some idiot who thought he was “working at home” for a legitimate business, depositing mailed checks in the bank and receiving a salary.
    3. It’s always been easy to recognize a scam based on the ridiculously horrible use of language, even without considering the content. People are getting wise to this, so they need more natural sounding mailings.
        Plausible, right?