Making Science Public
Event: FREE screening of Kansas vs Darwin + Q+A with director Jeff Tamblyn
April 11, 2013
In May we are very honoured to welcome US film director Jeff Tamblyn for screenings of his award-winning documentary, Kansas vs Darwin, followed by Q&A sessions with Jeff. The film tells an extraordinary story: This darkly comic documentary explores the epic 2005 Kansas state school board hearings, in which a group of creationist politicians attempted to …
Is there something dehumanising about science?
March 12, 2013
At the recent launch of Making Science Public, the Rt. Rev Dr Lee Rayfield – a member of our programme’s advisory board and, as Bishop of Swindon and a trained medical scientist, the lead contact on science matters for the Church of England – participated in a late-afternoon panel. He posed an interesting question, which …
Wonder, Wunder, Wissenschaft
March 10, 2013
Television series like Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of Life have triggered online debates about the relationship between science and wonder, wonder and religion, science and science communication. I began to wonder: should I not write a blog about ‘wonder’? So I started to search, as I always do, trying to find some scraps …
The privatisation of science is not in the public interest
February 25, 2013
This Blog post is a summary and more extended reflection on some thoughts presented as part of the ‘Making Science Public’ launch event. In the afternoon we kick-started a debate about issues related to the privatisation of science with two short talks by Alex Smith (tasked with speaking in favour of the motion as set …
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Some family memories
December 24, 2012
It will soon be time for our family to sit down and watch the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. This is a ritual that is almost as important as Christmas itself. When I came to Oxford in 1985 from Germany, having studied French and philosophy. I had never heard of the Christmas lectures and ‘science’ was …
Inside climate science: the opening and closing of IPCC expertise
December 12, 2012
This is a guest post by the University of Nottingham’s Paul Matthews – outlining what he can (and can’t!) divulge about the IPCC’s peer review process. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the scientific body established by the United Nations to provide assessments of current knowledge in this complex and controversial field of …
The scientist as political tourist: the perils of pairing
November 7, 2012
On Wednesday last week (31 October 2012), BBC Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme featured a scheme run by the Royal Society to promote interaction and engagement between civil servants, Parliamentarians and scientists. According to their website, the ‘Pairing Scheme’ seeks to match participating scientists ‘with either an MP or civil servant and the Royal Society supports …
Science, politics and the new scepticism
October 14, 2012
While I blogged on MSP a couple of times while finishing up my thesis on local and regional climate policy, I have now started on the programme full time as a Research Fellow. My project has a working title of Science, politics and scepticism in the age of new media, and aims to “map the …
Images and visualisations: Technology, Truth and Trust
October 6, 2012
This is a GUEST blog by Andrew Balmer (University of Manchester): I recently co-chaired (with Brigitte Nerlich and Annamaria Carusi) an ESF conference on visualisation, hosted by the University of Linköping but actually held in Norrköping, Sweden. It went swimmingly, with a variety of interesting and instructive presentations and posters, from philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, nanoscientists, …
Making people happy: Science, technology and engineering in the summer of 2012
September 9, 2012
Over the summer I have been watching, sometimes reluctantly, bits of the Jubilee celebrations, bits of the Olympics and, yesterday evening, bits of the Last Night of the Proms (8 August, 2012), where the Proms choir did a mass Mobot, a new gesture popularised during the Olympics. This evening many people will be watching the …
MSP bookmarks
- Annual Lecture 2013: The Public Value of the Social Sciences - Eventbrite June 17, 2013
- Open government and climate change: Help us identify case studies | Involve June 17, 2013
- Clive Barnett on doing public things June 15, 2013
- Reading the RIAT Act: publishing unpublished results from confidential documents June 14, 2013
- Statistically speaking, politicians place too much faith in figures June 13, 2013
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