Blogs a science communication student might like

A colleague asked me for a list of blogs that next year's science communication MSc students might like to read. I figured the only way to share this information was in a blogpost.

Warning: there is no such thing as a reading list of science blogs, you need to explore for yourself. These are just starting points.

• If there's a hot new biology story, you can bet Ed Yong will have a thorough and humour-filled post over a Not Exactly Rocket Science. He also regularly writes about issues in science and (new) media too, and his recent thread on the origin of science writers should be of particular interest to science communication students.
  
• Another blog everyone recommends (and I'm just going to agree) is Mindhacks. A very joyful neuro/psychology themed read, great for sending you to some of the more interesting ends of the internet.
  
• Two notable science writer bloggers currently developing personal sites after the recent mass-exodus from scienceblogs.com are Brian Switek and David Dobbs. Carl Zimmer's post on the scienceblogs diaspora contains a feast of links to more great writers once of this network (Zimmer's blog is worth a mention in itself too).
• I expect my prospective students to already know Bad Science, and I can also recommend his posterous account. The phenomenon of "bad science" blogging is bigger than Ben Goldacre though, two blogs in particular I'd recommend because they often write about science in the media are Lay Science and Gimpyblog (most of the media discussion goes on his posterous account).
• Fiona Fox of the Science Media Center doesn't blog very often, but when she does, everyone talks about it. On a similar note, Natasha Loder's blog is worth a look, as is Framing Science, from American science communication academic, Matthew Nisbet. Real science media nerds might also like Ivan Oransky's embargowatch.
• The Times & Guardian both have good (though very different) science blogs, note the former now has an "entrance fee". I really like Nature's the Great Beyond, and it is worth keeping track of New Scientist's range of blogs.
• The Science Museum's collections department has a nice blog, as does the Wellcome Trust. (and the Wellcome Library, and the Wellcome Collection...).
• Research Fortnight's Exquisite Life is a must for following UK science policy. It is also worth having a look at the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience Blog and the Campaign for Science and Engineering. The Royal Society policy team have just started a blog too, which (I hope) will be worth watching.
  

Twitter is a good way of engaging with the science blogosphere. My "awesome science" list of people who write and/ or link to great science writing on the web should be a useful starting point. Twitter is also brilliant for discussing/ eavesdropping on debates about science in the media and policy, so I can recommend people on my science policy and science communication lists too. Please note, many of these accounts will tweet about other things too.

These links are really just the tip of the iceberg. Or, a small section of a big chunk of ice, as I'm not sure something iceberg-shaped is the appropriate metaphor. I should also add that I don't agree with everything these people blog/ tweet about. Not even close. They do, however, tend to write about topics a science communication student might be interested in. At the very least, they'll point you towards some new ideas and make you think.

Click on a few links here and see who they link to. See what entertains, educates or enrages you. Go, have a play.

Student Sci-Art

Some examples of the interpretive practical group project we set our MSc students every year. They work in groups or three or four to produce something (and it can be about anything...) which reflects on some of the history, philosophy and social studies of science they study in the first term.

From the top-left clockwise, four scientists of the televisual age argue over how they see "the public", Mendel's pea (part of a knitted history of genetics), a philosophy of science influenced comic book, and "Enlightenment Edward" (part of a collection of history of science action men).

Each of the photos are links to flickr, where you can find more notes. You'll also see further examples of this year's group projects, including: bottles of cider which they actually brewed (or rather sci-der), some clever photography, an experiment in Romantic Scientific painting, and a mashup of the Large Hadron Collider with Cologne Cathedral.

Science Hoaxes

Cross-posted from The Science Project.

A week or so ago I asked my students and the wonderful world of twitter for examples of websites showing some sort of science-themed hoax, or at least a bit of artistic play with credulity and/ or realism in talk about science. I promised I'd compile a short blogpost with some of the best ones, so here it is.

Several people mentioned Dihydrogen Monoxide, a hoax which played with public fear over "chemicals" by using the unfamiliar name for water (see more background on the wikipedia entry). There were sites developed by artists interested in issues of belief and attitudes to new technologies: malepregnancy.com, now slightly dated perhaps, and the rather spooky GenPets. It was especially interesting to see a spoof sites set up as publicity for health information campaigns. For example, the site advertising a downloadable tan (see also Nursing Times article about it). Also, the Sense About Science/ Office for Fair Trading "miracle cure" sites for Fat Melting Pads and an "all-natural" diabetes breakthrough (see also SAS press release).

There is arguably a big difference between these sites and satire done for a more straightforward laugh, although there are also overlaps. A lot of the humour on satirical sites such as the Onion stem from the fact they are a mix of the believable and the unbelievable: they depend on an ability to reproduce and twist the real. Projects like malepregnancy.org or the Sense About Science spoofs are also different from sites which we might happen to simply disagree with, have accidentally got things wrong, haven't bothered to check their sources, or even deliberately aim to deceive in order to, for example, dupe people into buying things. Although, again, if such sites didn't exist, many of the spoof ones wouldn't either. In some respects, the diversity of wikipedia-alikes is illustrative of this. Uncyclopedia, Scholarpedia, CreationWiki, Conservapedia, Wikipedia itself, and Britannica for that matter: all very different entities, and yet also (self-consiously) similar.

To give a little background as to why I was looking for such sites: it was for a class on realism, science and the web. An awful lot of traffic on the web, especially science-themed traffic, is a matter of shifting information around, often shifting it quite far from its material points of origin. What's more, we use visualisations and mashups and embedded media and metaphors to communicate. This can make the information easier to understand, but sometimes decontextualises it too. It can be easy to loose a sense of where, who and how it came about, which in turn can make its validity hard to assess. Arguably, lot of modern life is about (a) symbols (b) trust and (c) shifting quite immaterial information along giant production lines. Social theoriests have been banging on about these issues for years. People seem to get especially worried about it online though, perhaps because there is so much information there, or simply because of fears of the immaterial 'virtuality' of the web. People can get especially worried when it comes to science-themed information too, again perhaps because there is a lot of it, perhaps because it's seen as especially important, or perhaps because of the history of associations between science and truth, openness and honesty (or perhaps all these reasons).

To boil bookloads of social theory into something simple: We do not have time to learn how to build a computer, programme it and do brain surgery. Instead, we do one of these skills (or another entirely), trading our own specialisation for the products of other people’s. In some respects this is very efficient; we get to utilise a lot of very specialist knowledge and skills this way. Many of the key advantages of modern life are built on such a model. However, it does mean we end up spending the bulk of our lives in ignorance. We are all very stupid most of the time. Personally, I think we should accept, even embrace, this. Ask questions: wear our ignorance and curiosity on our sleeves. This means we shouldn't be put off by other people's questioning either and, in accepting ignorance, hold off from too much pointing and laughing when people get something wrong and/ or are quicker to trust than they necessarily should.

If you are interested, but would rather avoid too much pomo theory, I can recommend Howard Rheingold's short essay on online 'crap' detection, and this week's Guardian Science podcast includes some thoughtful chat about trust and incredulity around scientific expertise. If you are really keen on science-themed fake sites, you might like this compendium, and, just to underline that crisis over public trust of the promises of science and technology isn't exactly a new issue, one of my students sensibly added this story of an 18th century chess-playing machine to the mix.