Posts by richard
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I suspect this comes under the heading of feeding the trolls.
-
Watching this from a distance, I can see why Labour members might want a bigger say in electing the Labour leader.
On the other hand, the much larger number of people who vote for Labour might prefer that the Labour leader (the leader of the opposition, and potentially the prime minister) be chosen only by the members of caucus who are actually elected by voters like themselves…
The Labour party can of course run itself as its members see fit – but there is an interesting question of ownership here, in that many Labour voters may see themselves as having a moral stake in the Labour party, even if they are not paying dues – in much the same way that Cantabrians see themselves having a stake in the Cathedral, even if very few of them actually bother to join the church…
-
I had a guy call me from Damascus last year (when I was still working in the US), to say he had worked out that the moon actually orbited the earth in the opposite direction from the one you find in the textbooks.
He was very polite, but also insistent, so eventually I had to cut him off and get on with my day.
But if he really was from Syria, people were being shot dead in the street as the revolution there got underway that same week.
There is a surprising volume of this stuff out there. Some of it is merely eccentric – I am sure there are more “armchair cosmologists” with their own theories of how the universe works in New Zealand than paid professionals (although the latter list is fairly small, so it not that surprising I guess), whereas others are clearly mentally ill.
When I was a post-doc one of my senior colleagues was the writer of several high-profile popular books, and another edited a major journal. They got this stuff by the boxload, and had a friendly rivalry as to who got the most :-)
-
I get letters (well, email, these days) all the time. I just hit delete.
One person's occupational hazard is another person's museum exhibit.
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Romney-esque dog-fucker analogies either
Surely that is Santorumesque? He is the "man on dog" guy. Romney is the "dog on car" guy.
-
One amusing fact -- The Catalogue of the Universe is also THIS book http://www.abebooks.com/CATALOG-UNIVERSE-MURDIN-Crown-Publishers/1363595292/bd
Mahy must have liked it enough to inject it into her own book (and borrow the title). Any self-respecting geeky young astronomer in Christchurch would have owned both. And the luckiest geeky astronomer of all got to have his Angela, as well :-)
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Who knows where that knowledge will lead? Next they will work out how to control the particle, then they will remove it to enable things – people – to travel at the speed necessary to explore the galaxy.
Wow. Who knew? (Where did this come from -- I mean it comes from the Herald, but where did Roughan get this idea from?)
-
Wow. A sequitur or two short of an argument there, I think. (Although he is right, geology is fascinating.)
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Fair point. But, ultimately, it’s writing those grants – and publishing papers – which matters more to academic science careers than enacting that outreach. The attitudes I have encountered have, with some exceptions, been that the outreach elements of grants are hoops to jump through more than goals to be enthusiastic about. In NZ, the PBRF is, for individual researchers, pretty much entirely about number of papers published.
Actually, in fairness to the PBRF (which has any number of shortcomings), it is more nuanced than that. Firstly, you can only lay claim to 34 "research outputs" over a six year period, so it is not purely quantitative -- at least in fields where people are fairly prolific, you will score higher with a smaller number of better papers. Secondly, there are two other categories "Peer Esteem" and "Contributions to the Research Environment" -- and the weighting is such that you can't score an "A" without doing well in all three. Public outreach is not tested explicitly, but does show up in these two categories. (My biggest complaint about the PBRF is that they gather a huge amount of data and then allocate everyone to just four categories A/B/C or R -- and I am guessing that you could accurately make the same determination with far less information. There is thus a huge compliance burden, although it is not an intrinsically unreasonable exercise.)
I agree entirely. I think we’d be much better off encouraging people into (and properly funding) science communication jobs – both as a channel for broader science communication and help for people who want to improve their direct communication with a lay audience. Expecting every scientist to develop expertise in engaging the public with their work overestimates the amount of spare time most researchers have available and underestimates the effort required to do so effectively.
I think your have put your finger on it here. Realistically, any given scientist will be more focussed on doing science than talking about science, so putting these requirements in grant rules looks like an imposition. But I did one "site visit" to an NSF center where they had hired an outreach person, and were running a really exemplary program -- it was inspiring, and made me rethink my own engagement.
More generally though, whether they realize it or not, this effort by the NSF and others is driving a cultural shift, where the scientific community is expected to explicitly engage with the "community".
-
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Depending on your chain of supervision, it can be viewed as a direct detriment to the important work of improving your university’s PBRF ranking. This isn’t always the case – NASA, for example, places a lot of emphasis on education and public awareness – but it’s pretty common.
In the US, all NSF grants have a “broader impacts” component, and larger grants typically require a specific outreach plan. I have sat on NSF panels, and this was taken seriously.
My own feeling is that it is not necessary for all scientists to be actively engaged with “the public” but that it is vital for some scientists to put effort into this, and at an institutional level it is important that this work be properly recognized and supported.