Search for "science communication"
Citizen science
January 9, 2015
I recently wrote a post about ‘scientific citizenship’. Today I want to home in on a related concept: ‘citizen science’. First I’ll show you how the Oxford English Dictionary has defined the phrase; then I’ll examine how the concept was used in the news and who employed the concept first; and finally I’ll briefly reflect …
Making science public: A compilation of blog posts – 2014
December 19, 2014
It is time again for my end of year blog of blog posts. Unbelievably, this is already the third time I am doing this. How time flies! Strange — so far we haven’t had a post about time! This is quite surprising, as otherwise we have had posts about more or less everything under the …
Making science picturesque
October 24, 2014
I was idly browsing io9 the other day and read a fascinating article on comets in the history of art. This would be a nice topic for another blog post… but that’s not what this post is about. When looking at these delightful pictures, my eyes fell on “an engraving from Le Magasin Pittoresque, a …
The invisibles: Science, publics and surveys
September 26, 2014
This is a guest post by two science communication researchers, one working at the University of Otago, New Zealand, the other at the University of Queensland, Australia: Fabien Medvecky and Joan Leach. How much can large-scales surveys tell us about attitudes to science and what can we say about the categories of publics constructed around …
Risk assessment policy as regulatory science
September 15, 2014
This blog is a joint posting by Sarah Hartley and Warren Pearce Following the University of Nottingham’s Circling the Square conference an interesting debate emerged around some of the fundamentals of science: objectivity, the confounding of science with regulatory science and what counts as science. Much of this took place under a post by our colleague, …
Science, politics and epigenetics
September 12, 2014
This post by Shea Robison is reposted here with the permission of author. Shea originally posted it on his blog ‘The nexus of epigenetics‘ under the title “Epigenetics Minority Report Part I: Epigenetics, blame, precrime and politics“ *** If you picked up the movie reference in the title to this post, you are likely (hopefully) asking …
Science, sensationalism and the dangers of over-selling research
June 27, 2014
This is a GUEST POST by FREYA HARRISON. Freya works in Steve Diggle’s group in the Centre for Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Nottingham, where she researches the ecology and evolution of cooperation. She spends most of her time exploring how communication and cooperation help bacteria to cause chronic infections, but she is also …
Working across science cultures: A student’s experience
February 21, 2014
This guest post is the outcome of a twitter conversation between Brigitte and Stephanie Ashenden. It’s great to have a student guest-post on this blog! Attending my first ever lecture back in my first year of university was without a doubt, one of the biggest eye openers to the competitive nature of the job market. …
Jules Verne: Making science visual
December 30, 2013
On Christmas Eve I had a chance encounter on twitter and the result is this blog post, or rather: essay. Richard Ashcroft had retweeted a tweet about a book by Adam Roberts. The tweet by Adam Roberts said: “Finished copies came by this morning’s post. Very lovely piece of book making!” The book retells Jules …
Making science public: The science and silence conundrum
December 26, 2013
The issue of science and advocacy is a complex topic and has led to heated discussions amongst scientists, science communicators and commentators of different persuasions, especially this year it seems. There was first a flurry of debate provoked, in July this year, by an article written by Tamsin Edwards who argued that climate scientists should …