<![CDATA[John Rennie · Storify]]>http://storify.com/tvjrennieNodeJS RSS ModuleWed, 22 May 2013 04:32:32 GMT<![CDATA[Exoplanets bore me (and what that means for science news)]]>

Actually, I think exoplanets are fascinating. But a science-writing discussion during a SpotOn NYC panel and a conversation on social media illuminate the challenge of keeping long-term stories interesting.

Storified by John Rennie · Thu, Feb 28 2013 06:22:27

View from the front row at #sonyc #smwscience · Lou Woodley
I am Death, destroyer of worlds. Well, I am at least dismisser of worlds, according to a recent conversation onTwitter. I hadn't set out to insult the Kepler space telescope and its epic, wildly fruitful quest to find planets around other stars, also known as exoplanets. Yet that's all part of the risk one runs when discussing the challenges of keeping science news interesting.

It all began with my participation in the SpotOn NYC (SONYC) event on the evening of February 20th at the American Museum of Natural History, with the theme, "Telling Stories with Scientists." The panel, moderated by Ben Lillie of The Story Collider, let me sit alongside the top-flight science communicators Amy Harmon of The New York Times, Meehan Crist of Columbia University, Jer Thorp of The Office For Creative Researh, and the AMNH's Carter Emmart, who shared terrific insights about using narratives to explain science and the hurdles that some scientists faced in learning to communicate in that way. Anyone interested in the content of that discussion can watch the posted video of the event, or can read SpotOn organizer Lou Woodley's Storify about it: 
I should also add that for me, no list of accounts of the evening is complete without this picture drawn by Amy Harmon's young daughter, who was watching from the audience:
!!! @amy_harmon's daughter made a drawing of last night's #smwscience panel, and it's *PERFECT* #sonyc http://pic.twitter.com/d3XtOxnUpf · Ben Lillie
I sincerely adore this picture. Amy is the beautiful lady drawn so lovingly at the center of the frame. I am the shrunken, monkeylike figure immediately to her left. Yes, the likeness is eerie.

Moving on....

During the discussion, amidst all our thoughts about the challenges of helping audiences to perceive what was exciting or interesting about new discoveries, I made the point that not all science news items were equally deserving of the public's attention, even if specialists did legitimately find them important. Context matters, and sometimes that can drastically influence how stories about research need to be told. As an example, I cited the ongoing discovery of exoplanets. At first it was enough merely to say that a new exoplanet had been found to earn a prominent headline, but now that the catalogue of suspected exoplanets numbered in the thousands, it simply wasn't interesting enough to say that hundreds more might be rolling in every couple of months. Science storytellers needed to dig deeper into the story to hold an audience.

Good-humored tweets about my remarks commented on them this way: 
Later, I had some fun with this myself, though Matthew Frances had the best topper.
Meanwhile, August Muench, who had been following the event only by way of these tweets, asked for some clarification.
I responded to August to clarify, and that initiated a worthwhile conversation.
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]]>http://storify.com/tvjrennie/discussing-boredom-with-exoplanetshttp://storify.com/tvjrennie/discussing-boredom-with-exoplanetsThu, 28 Feb 2013 14:22:27 GMT<![CDATA[Discussing Obama's Brain-mapping Project]]>

The proposed $3-billion Brain Activity Map is a formidably, if not unrealistically, ambitious undertaking but the merits and weaknesses of the idea can be explored even by nonspecialists.

Storified by John Rennie · Sat, Mar 02 2013 12:42:07

Blogspot
Serious science rarely manages to make its way into the annual presidential State of the Union addresses, so when President Obama spoke of the importance of "mapping the human brain" during his on February 12, it caught the attention of many. That vague reference took on even more importance, however, in light of the tweet that Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, made moments later:
With that, the world came to understand that Obama was throwing support behind the idea for a $3-billion, decade-or-more Brain Activity Map (BAM) project, a loosely defined effort that The Kavli Foundation had been trying to organize since 2011. These three articles for Time, Smithsonian, and The Scientist represent just a bit of the news coverage that the announcement garnered.
Brain Map: President Obama Proposes First Detailed Guide of Human Brain ...Brain Map: President Obama Proposes First Detailed Guide of Human Brain ...
So President Obama has proposed a Brain Activity Map (BAM) project to reveal some of these remaining secrets, using the Human Genome Proj...
Mapping How the Brain ThinksMapping How the Brain Thinks
At his recent State of the Union address, Barack Obama hinted at what could become his version of reaching for the moon–he&#39;d like sci...
Obama to Back Brain MappingObama to Back Brain Mapping
Indeed, Obama may have been teasing the new project during his recent State of the Union address, when he cited brain research as the kin...
As noted in those stories, details of what BAM would entail were hard to come by, and even many neuroscientists harbored doubts about whether the time was right for a high-profile, inevitably politicized project like this one, especially given the prospect of massive budget cuts that loomed with the March 1 sequester deadline. In this context, Twitter served one of its invaluable functions for the science writing community: as the water cooler around which we could gather to chat about the news and gripes of the day—a function that is in many ways as informative and important as any other research that we do. I offer the following conversation in which I participated as a sample.

I had just finished reading David Wagner's story, "Why Some Scientists Aren't Happy About Obama's $3 Billion Brain Research Plan" for The Atlantic Wire, and was moved to ask a question of the Twitterverse. Ben Lillie of The Story Collider was first to reply.
But of course, since Ben and I were having this conversation publicly, others quickly joined in with welcome contributions.
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]]>http://storify.com/tvjrennie/discussing-obama-s-brain-mapping-projecthttp://storify.com/tvjrennie/discussing-obama-s-brain-mapping-projectSat, 02 Mar 2013 20:42:07 GMT<![CDATA[Science Fiction Kitchenware]]>

What should you buy for the homebody nerd who has everything? Here's a list.

Storified by John Rennie · Wed, Feb 27 2013 21:08:46

Space
The officially licensed Star Trek Enterprise pizza slicer: Go where no mozzarella has gone before.
Somewhere out in space, past Tatooine, Arrakis, Gallifrey, Trantor, and the Delta Quadrant, there is a wedding registry at the end of the universe. Kind of a Bed Bath & Beyond with extra emphasis on the beyond. Please consider what follows to be its catalog.

It began to take shape as a result of my browsing through Space.com to check back on a news story I’d noticed last week. The loading of my page was delayed by a pop-up advertising a product available in the site’s gift shop: an official Star Trek licensed replica of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) starship incarnated as a pizza knife. See how the sharpened rim of the spinning saucer section stands ready to slice through any Tholian web of string cheese?

My tweeted comment about it led to an exchange with science blogger David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) of Southern Fried Science.
Naturally, I replied with my hallmark restraint and dry wit. Because less is more.
Then it only seemed right to open up the discussion more widely.
And we were off to the races with a list of actual science fiction-themed kitchen products, starting with what I think we can all agree was far too much more information about David Shiffman’s spatula. The licensing people for the world’s science fiction franchises have been very busy….
MT @WhySharksMatter: Here's a picture of the dark lord of pancakes himself. http://pic.twitter.com/qwV7Nkms #scifikitchenware · John Rennie
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]]>http://storify.com/tvjrennie/science-fiction-kitchenware-1http://storify.com/tvjrennie/science-fiction-kitchenware-1Thu, 28 Feb 2013 05:08:46 GMT<![CDATA[Science Writing in the Age of Denial (recap, part 2)]]>

More on UW-Madison's recent conference about the public's resistance to scientific messages about evolution, climate change, vaccines, and other matters.

Storified by John Rennie · Sat, Apr 28 2012 16:15:55

Previously, I recapped the first two sessions of the "Science Writing in the Age of Denial" conference organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison (April 22-24, 2012), which covered "Communicating Science in Politicized Environments" and "The Denial of Evolution, and the Evolution of Denial." (In the interest of disclosure, I'll note that I was a science writer in residence at UW-M last fall and was a paid, invited participant in this meeting.) Now I'll pick up with what happened in the two later sessions that first day.

Cheerleading, Shibboleths and Uncertainty

There was no better keynote speaker for this session than Gary Schwitzer (@garyschwitzer), the founder of HealthNewsReview.org. The site, funded by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, provides independent reviews of the accuracy, balance and completeness of news stories about medical treatments, tests, procedures, and products.

Unfortunately, Schwitzer explained, about 70 percent of all the stories evaluated by HealthNewsReview failed to meet those criteria. Rather, too much of the time, medical news was dominated by an attitude of uncritical cheerleading for any and all new offerings, without an adequate exploration of the relative costs, tradeoffs in risks, credibility of the evidence or conclusions, conflicts of interest, and other important considerations. (A list of the site's rating criteria can be found here.) 

New medical technologies he said, get treated like "shibboleths"—objects of cultish devotion. As a consequence, journalists who should be helping to their audience to set intelligent health agendas are instead just flooding the public with half-baked information and conflicting messages, according to Schwitzer. With a dig at FOX News (which he said was notably awful in this regard), Schwitzer called the present "an age of infoxification." 

For a good example of a dreadful phenomenon, Schwitzer pointed to coverage of cancer screening. Mass screening is expensive and potentially harmful, so it should be balanced against the potential benefits. But anyone recommending that younger people not get mammograms or prostate antigen tests was loudly accused of wanting to "ration health care" or not caring whether people died.

Schwitzer has posted some of the slides from his presentation online.
Gary schwitzer, http://Healthnewsreview.org #sciencedenial http://pic.twitter.com/jAXNxkDL · Paul Baker
Leading off the follow-up remarks was Ivan Oransky of Reuters Health and Retraction Watch. (Disclosure: Ivan and I are former colleagues from Scientific American, and I've often said that the creation of Retraction Watch is potentially one of the most important developments in science journalism in recent years.) Oransky discussed how credulous news coverage of the medical literature contributed to a "medicalized" view of life and the public's confusion about health. He suggested that the problem with the denial of evidence in health news is the mirror image of that the problem in evolution and climate denial: namely, that the public seems too eager to accept every utterance of science and that the media haven't spent enough time cross-examining the claims. He prescribed steps that health journalists could take to improve their work. (He has also shared online a longer version of his slides, which include warnings against false balance)

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]]>http://storify.com/tvjrennie/science-writing-in-the-age-of-denialism-recap-parthttp://storify.com/tvjrennie/science-writing-in-the-age-of-denialism-recap-partSat, 28 Apr 2012 23:15:55 GMT<![CDATA[Science Writing in the Age of Denial (recap, part 1)]]>

The University of Wisconsin-Madison assembled a roster of science-writing all-stars to consider the roots of the public's resistance to accepting the science about evolution, climate change, vaccines, and other matters.

Storified by John Rennie · Sat, Apr 28 2012 16:08:24

The University of Wisconsin-Madison made its goals for the event clear in the description listed on its website at sciencedenial.wisc.edu:

Science writers now work in an age where uncomfortable ideas and truths meet organized resistance. Opposing scientific consensus on such things as anthropogenic climate change, the theory of evolution, and even the astonishingly obvious benefits of vaccination has become politically de rigueur, a litmus test and a genuine threat to science. How does denial affect the craft of the science writer? How can science writers effectively explain disputed science? What’s the big picture? Are denialists ever right?

Welcome and Introduction

Science writer par excellence Deborah Blum of UW-M welcomed the audience at the event's start and introduced some of those making it possible. University chancellor David Ward considered the tensions between science and irrationality, modernity and anti-modernity, inclusive pluralism vs. ideological pluralization. 

David Krakauer, the head of the relatively new Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (the venue for the day's discussions), then pointed out that all of us engage in our own forms of denial. For example, journalists covering the denial of climate warming et al. fooled themselves into thinking that they could change public opinion. For decades, Krakauer noted, popular films had carried the message that we ignore scientists' warnings at our peril, yet the public still had this distrust of scientists. 
But journalists aren't the only ones.

Communicating Science in Politicized Environments

Arthur Lupia, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, kicked off the session with an energetic and engrossing review of what biology and psychology had discovered about the challenges of making complex arguments to diverse audiences. The fleeting, fragmented nature of human attention and the phenomenon of "motivated reasoning" almost guarantee that people will not absorb and accept upsetting information unless it speaks meaningfully to their priorities and values.
#sciencedenial Lupia: science comms don't understand their audiences http://pic.twitter.com/9CYMtp4r · Paul Baker
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]]>http://storify.com/tvjrennie/science-writing-in-the-age-of-denialism-day-1http://storify.com/tvjrennie/science-writing-in-the-age-of-denialism-day-1Sat, 28 Apr 2012 23:08:24 GMT