Category Archives: Journalism

The Hippocratic Oath Does Not Apply Here

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Did the OPERA affair harm or benefit science?

I think there was a benefit, because the actual process of science was displayed. But your mileage varied, as always, depending on your source. There were a lot of good stories, in which you would find explanations of what was going on. Unfortunately, there were a lot of stories that sensationalized the events, and gave us Einstein Overturned/Relativity is Dead – type headlines and stories, despite the fact that nobody associated with the experiment made such claims (of which I am aware, at least). But that’s par for the course. You have good reporting, you have bad reporting, and you have headline editors. They care about circulation, not whether they are doing harm to physics.

There were also instances of people stepping beyond their expertise in trying to explain the results. People were awfully quick to blame GPS (but not one of the critiques I read came from within the timing community; we know how well you can do time transfer) and with that came some “problem solved” stories. That, too is probably par for the course.

I think the only real damage to any credibility was the discovery that an internal calibration/check of the local timing system hadn’t been done in a couple of years. That seemed sloppy. People at the top resigned. They took responsibility for the oversight.

Overall I’m much happier showing off science, warts and all, than allow a stereotype to perpetuate — the mistaken notion that every announced result is the final word and that scientists see themselves as infallible. We got to have a discussion about uncertainty and statistical significance that wasn’t framed by someone equating uncertainty with failed science. The effect on public perception? I don’t know. I suspect that this just reinforced their biases — if they didn’t trust science before, this is just one more reason not to. But, as the adage goes, there is no bad publicity. If it raised anyone’s interest in science, that’s got to be good.

They Are No Longer Unwritten

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The Unwritten Rules of Journalism

I don’t blame science reporters for flubbing facts on occasion. Science is difficult to understand, and scientists famously lack communication skills.

But the problem extends beyond simply misunderstanding the science. In fact, science writers appear to obey a collection of unwritten rules when trying to convey science to a mainstream audience.

Cynical, even by my standards. But cynical ≠ wrong.

If Only Certain Journalists Could Be so Persuasive

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Warm spring weather and global warming: If only scientists could be so persuasive

Gah. What an unconvincing piece of tripe, which is too bad, because the message itself has a lot of merit.

It’s true that the recent warm winter weather has softened the American public’s stance on global warming, and that a colder winter has/will make them more reluctant to accept. This shows the lack of scientific literacy, in the form of a basic scientific disconnect between weather and climate, that the average person has. It’s also true that scientists should do more in the form of outreach. It’s too bad the article doesn’t connect how the latter would affect the former.

Generally, those who know the most about climate – and other important scientific fields – are locked up in their university ivory towers and conference rooms, speaking a language only they can understand.

And they speak mostly to each other, not to the general public, policymakers, or business people – not to those who can actually make things happen.

This is dangerous. We live in an age when scientific issues permeate our social, economic, and political culture. People must be educated about science and the scientific process if we are to make rational and informed decisions that affect our future. Indeed, a well functioning democracy requires it.

But instead, the relative absence of academics and academic scholarship in the public discourse creates a vacuum into which uninformed, wrong, and downright destructive viewpoints get voiced and take hold.

There are several scientists who are quite vocal in explaining climate change. And what do they get for their trouble? The get verbally attacked and threatened with violence, they get their emails hacked, and the people who have already decided that global warming is a fraud or hoax go right on believing so. The denialist camp can trot out a few “experts” to counter anything that is said in support of climate change, and the discussion is couched in language that subverts the process of science (such as the implication that having any level of uncertainty is a failure, or that because we don’t know everything that we know nothing) The press is complicit in this when they present a false balance to the story by presenting both sides of the issue, giving the impression that the scientists are split equally.

Scientific literacy through general education is another requirement that scientists can’t directly affect, either. You can lead a horse to water, and all that — if you don’t speak the language, any effort to explain details is wasted, but that’s not to say that the attempts aren’t being made. A big problem here is that the average (scientifically illiterate) person can’t tell if it’s shit or shinola — they see or hear some word salad and they think it’s the real deal. And they aren’t motivated to go and learn anything. That, however, is one avenue where outreach can help — getting people excited about science, and getting them to want to become literate.

Which means that people have to make an effort to meet scientists halfway, and improving that requires a very broad effort. It’s not something you can simply blame on scientists residing in their “ivory towers”. But that’s an uphill battle, because if parents don’t value education and scientific literacy, it probably means their kids won’t get the exposure that they need.

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It Doesn't Take a Physicist to Correct a Physics Mistake

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Comparing Temperatures

An article claimed — in its headline — that a ~5ºC (~10ºF) increase in temperature was an increase of 18.7 percent, by calculating using the relative temperature scale. Which is wrong, of course; e.g. 2ºC does not represent twice as much thermal energy as 1ºC. The site has since made a correction.

If you really want to do a percentage based comparison, you need to convert to an absolute temperature scale like Kelvin, which shows you that it’s actually a 1.8 percent increase in temperature (306.75 / 301.45). This is middle school science.

Sadly, I don’t think that this is generally taught in middle school. Or possibly even high school, except to a few students.

You Keep Using That Word…

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Ultra-efficient LED puts out more power than is pumped in

The LED produces 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, giving it an efficiency of 230 percent. That means it operates above “unity efficiency” — putting it into a category normally occupied by perpetual motion machines.

As the article goes on to explain, the LED doesn’t actually violate conservation of energy, because the LED is tapping into the thermal energy present, as manifested in lattice vibrations i.e. there is a conversion of phonons to photons occurring, which means that the LED is acting as a heat engine (a term that’s not mentioned until the last paragraph). However, efficiency isn’t typically used in this context because it’s misleading; what you discuss is the coefficient of performance: how much energy do you move around vs how much energy you put in, because for a given energy input, you can deliver/remove many times that energy to/from your target. This is what heat pumps do and why they are used.

The neat thing here is that the rejected heat from the LED is light, which is pretty neat. At such low powers (tens of picoWatts) this is not yet a usable light source, so there is a question of whether it can scale, and as mentioned, there is the possibility of using this as a cooling component for small-scale devices.

Writing About Science, When You’re Not A Scientist

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The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach Part 2: Writing About Science, When You’re Not A Scientist

I’m often surprised by how much scientists think the general public knows about their fields of study. For example, a researcher I was interviewing recently said “Surely most people know what tissue engineering is?” Actually, I think most people probably have no idea what tissue engineering is. We have to explain it to them.

Is There a Sand Shortage?

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Time is running out – literally, says scientist

[I]f time gradually slows “but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of ‘a standard flow of time’, then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an “effective accelerated rate of the expansion” takes place.”
While the change would be infinitesimally slow from an ordinary human perspective, from the grand perspective of cosmology – in which scientists study ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago – this temporal slowing could be easily measured.

Interesting hypothesis. Though the article mentions this as a “radical suggestion” the headline is much more certain, which has become a peeve of mine. Conjecture is one of the things that scientists do. We play a lot of “what if” games, and most of this gets shot down when we realize a conflict exists with existing observations, or someone points them out when you compare notes with a colleague. This happens a lot in the lab when faced with a novel set of data — what was going on here? Is this a problem with the equipment or some new effect? The former is much, much more likely than the latter, but until you run tests and replicate the results reliably, you are faced with a mystery, and chasing the solution is both frustrating and somewhat intoxicating. (The scariest scenario is when the anomalous signal just disappears and you can’t replicate it). But you can also do it with the models you build. What happens if a particular term in an equation is or isn’t small, when the opposite usually holds? What if there is some additional effect? You play with the equations and see where it goes.

If you don’t get tripped up by these “slain by an ugly fact” obstacles, you can formulate a model that could possibly be tested. Eventually, you present it for others so that they, too can comment on and think about it. Many of these ideas never pan out, at each stage of this evolution and distillation. These authors have an idea that has gotten to this point. It doesn’t appear it has yet been rigorously tested to see of it holds up — one needs to know what specific predictions it makes that distinguish it from the current models. It’s just not obviously wrong after having had some level of scrutiny.

I think that the headline editors and journalists do a disservice when they attach much more certainty to (in this case) as-yet untested ideas that show up in the journals, or any single peculiar experimental result that pops up.