I suspect applying for science outreach jobs may be affecting which things I’m linking today, but it does seem like a theme running through my newsfeeds at the moment.
- Marie-Claire Shanahan reviews Ankylosaur Attack by Daniel Loxton (a great-looking new children’s book about dinosaurs), and writes passionately about the importance of having science conversations with kids.
- The Guardian ran a piece that advocated journalists using science sources to copy-check their articles. Seth Mnookin righteously smacks that idea down. The post is long, but completely worth reading through: he covers the whole story in detail, including a lot of thoughts from across the spectrum of science writing. Go ye and read it.
- Speaking of science journalism, Bora Zivkovic reposted an article from a few months ago, detailing a conversation about the role of science writing in public science education. (Full disclosure: I participated in said conversation, and wrote a post about it which is linked in Bora’s article. I think we have created OuroBoras, the blogger that eats his own tail.)
- On a lighter note, Kevin Zelnio takes Brian Switek to task for dumping a cold bucket of reality over the “Triassic kraken” story.
- Update: I intended to include this link, but my brain is evidently elsewhere. Lauren (AKA @PygmyLoris on Twitter) writes about the stupidity of separating science toys into “everyone”, “boy”, and (inevitably pink-packaged) “girl” categories. Why can’t girls play with robot and dino toys?
Galileo's Pendulum 
6 responses to “Science Outreach Links of the Day”
That Lauren piece on the pink science toys is really disturbing. I mean, this is even worth discussing? Explaining what’s wrong? Sheeesh, I thought that was all settled 20 or 30 years ago when the pink Lego sets came out.
Ok, kidding. But not about the sick feeling on seeing such stuff. I can tell you, 20 years ago the sight of those toys would have had my daughter holding forth eloquently. (Some people are eloquent, especially in denunciation of bozos, at an age in single digits.)
Plus ça change and all.
I have to dig up the article, but I remember reading a piece within the last year that said the pinkification of girls’ toys has actually gotten worse over time.
Just *have* to post here about the Triassic Kraken, because it’s very late, and I can’t post there without going through some login process that requires me to start disabling, one by one till I find the right combination, the things that protect me from spam, popups, and other malicious garbage, and I’m getting grumpy — indeed, well past that — so I need to take it out on you that somebody is wrong on the Internet.
Anyway, in response to a couple of erudite comments on how Sagan’s Rule (extraordinary claims and all that) is Bad Science:
Interesting. That’s the second blanket denunciation of Sagan’s dictum that I’ve seen in this thread. Also, the second ever, afaik.
Sagan’s dictum is not an important principle, in fact, in the land of peer-reviewed science, where there’s a lot of agreed-on common ground. (Uh-oh, here come the creationists to tell us how bad that is.) It applies more to how we think about the stuff that hasn’t achieved that status. Like, f’rinstance, Triassic krakens.
And all that the dictum does is apply Bayesian ideas: If a report has extraordinarily low prior probabilities, other terms of the report have to meet higher standards than we routinely apply. 95% confidence level isn’t much use if the rest of the story is unsupported. It’s sometimes necessary to remember that a report might have some explanations that aren’t quite respectable (and are statistically less common in peer-reviewed matters than in random reportings). The report, after all, could be based on someone’s doing somethng really stupid that didn’t apear in the report, or on outright lying. Asimov expounded this nicely in one of the Black Widowers stories.
Where the probabilities of those off-the-wall explanations are low, they don’t usually affect our figuring of how much credibility to give the report; but the calculation changes when the report is “extraordinary” in the sense given.
(Not that such problems are absent from the professional literature: XMRV, anyone? But the peer review process does some good in reducing the frequency of such stuff. If the reviewers had known about the AZA, Lombardi et al. could never have been published; failing to mention it was somewhere in the range from very bad science (something really stupid not reported) to serious malpractice (lying).)
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Of course, the only thing that matters is the penultimate paragraph there. Sometime when I’m awake, I need to write this up coherently.
I hesitate to speak fully for Brian, but I think his main point is more about a credulous press. The scientists who know about the paleontology knew the press release was nonsense, but by the time they were able to write about it, the story had run through all the major media outlets.
I’m not disagreeing with your larger perspective, however!
Oh, I agree about Brian’s real point. But when he invoked Sagan’s rule, he got a couple of replies about what bad science it is, which I found odd.
Ah, I understand — you’re responding to a critic on Brian’s blog. I didn’t spend much time in the comments, because too many people seemed to be missing his point entirely. (One of the dangers of blogging, methinks.)