The things you learn at meetings

I learned yesterday that my graduate university, the University of Oregon, has a Science Literacy Program led by an old friend, Judith Eisen. It looks like an excellent idea.

The University of Oregon Science Literacy Program (UO SLP) offers General Education courses for non-science majors designed to improve scientific awareness and general science literacy of the educated public by enhancing competence in and appreciation of science. The SLP will empower undergraduates to consider scientific approaches to societal issues, enable graduate students in the sciences to effectively communicate ideas to audiences of non-scientists, and assist faculty in improving teaching techniques using modern pedagogy.

Awesome. More universities ought to do that. I know my own university has a dearth of non-major science courses that offer that kind of breadth and context — it’s one of those problems we could solve so easily if only the administration would let us hire a few dozen more faculty.

Visit for the trains, stay for the science

I’ve been to the UK a few times now, and I have to say that one of my favorite things about the place is visiting a huge wrought iron train station and hopping onto a train for a long ride through the countryside. I think my ideal for a pleasant British vacation (“vacation”? I don’t know what that is any more) would be to just ride around the country for a few weeks.

So Robin Ince hooked me by starting his story with a train ride (I now want to travel from London to Cornwall), but the real message is about a fundamentally human principle of science: curiosity, inquisitiveness, exploration.

Pamela Gay’s TAM talk

That talk by Pamela Gay that was so well received is now available as a transcript. It’s very good, and it’s also good to see that someone at least was praising skepchicks at TAM, instead of dismissing them.

Although it is offset by the fact that I now know of one woman who was so harassed she had to leave the meeting early. Let’s hope some of the organizers were actually listening to Gay, and that they’ll do better next year.

I’m soon to be stuffed and mounted on the mantelpiece

Bora has put together a history of science blogging, and there I am, one of the grizzled old pioneers, chewin’ tobaccy and slapping mules around. There’s also mention of my old Tangled Bank carnival, which isn’t totally gone — I’ve got the archive stashed on my lab computer, and someday I have to figure out how to extract and resurrect an old Expression Engine blog.

Larry Moran also talks about the crucible of talk.origins, and how a lot of the early science bloggers got their start on usenet (myself included). A lot of the feisty, confrontational style comes straight out of a history of prolonged combat with idiots.

My weekend at #cvg2012

It’s going to take a few days to recover from last weekend — I was participating in CONvergence, a regional Science Fiction and Fantasy convention. It was a fatiguing load of fun, you should have been there. You should go to an occasional non-atheist/skeptic conference yourself! Trust me, it’s relevant.

I’m a guy who’s into promoting godlessness and science, and there are two kinds of events I go to. Right now, there are a growing number of atheist/skeptic conferences that promote our causes, and draw in large numbers of people who already support them; these are internal events that strengthen and reinforce the movement, and in which we can also emphasize specific strains of thought (I tend to push more science at these meetings, for instance). There are also events which are more outreach: talking to people who are not in this movement, but maybe share some common interests. It’s internal vs. external, movement building vs. outreach.

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Science: It’s a Girl Thing!

The European Commission is trying to get more women involved in science, which is good, except…look at their Science: It’s a Girl Thing campaign. Jesus wept.

Serious man sits at microscope. Fashionable, slender girls slink in on ridiculous high heels and vogue to shots of bubbling flasks, splashes of makeup, twirling skirts, and giggling hot chicks. Seriously, this is not how you get women excited about science, by masquerading it as an exercise shallow catwalking. This is a campaign that perpetuates myths about women’s preferences. The lab is not a place where you strut in 3″ heels.

How do you get people excited about science and science careers? By talking about science. Ben Goldacre made some excellent comments on twitter about this.

The EU have funded a campaign to make women in science wear shorter skirts. http://bit.ly/KYRkBk #sciencegirlthing

Time and again with these high budget state funded science communication activities, they dumb down, shoot for the mainstream, and miss.

Meanwhile I can’t help noticing that the really nerdy stuff done by ppl like me and @robinince is commercially successful in the marketplace

I realise that sounds cocklike, but it’s true. Dumbed down state funded sci comms is patronising and fails to meet its stated objectives.

People – not just nerds – like nerd stuff. They like the details. They’re not thick.

@flypie @robinince we fill out rock venues, my book sold 400,000 copies, i dont know what more metrics you want. Nerd detail sells.

@edyong209 @robinince we make, a fucking, profit. we sell nerd details, and people buy it, while state £ sci comms patronises tiny audiences

The real tragedy is that somewhere, a marketing cock is celebrating that their “controversial” campaign is being discussed #sciencegirlthing

Also, to my vast surprise, for once the youtube comments are actually intelligent.

Oh wow, I can’t remember when I last felt this patronised. I’m pretty sure the message “scientists think that women are giggly, superficial and obsessed with fashion” isn’t going to get more of us doing science. Just eww. I have a physics degree. I managed to get it without strutting around a lab in a minidress and stupid shoes and doing ‘sexy’ pouts.

Rachael Borek

Please tell me that this is a sad joke. Being female and working in a laboratory I find it patronising in the extreme. I can’t believe that any intelligent woman watching this would not want to punch the advert-makers in the face. Is this REALLY what you think women interested in science want?? Go look at clips of Kari Byron hosting Mythbusters and then come back and apologise to everyone.

Catherine Du-Rose

Oh my god. I haven’t been this revolted by something since I heard about the human caterpillar. This is so insulting! I can’t find the words to properly articulate how irritated I am by this. Please tell me this isn’t a trailer – I mean, there’s not going to be more like this? I cannot imagine anything that would turn an intelligent girl off a subject faster than being patronised.

littlelixie

I’m a girl and I’m a scientist. I definitely do not go prancing around making make up. I work on a computer and do processing. Science is not a girl thing, it’s an everyone thing, everyone who is passionate enough about doing what they love. This is a terrible, terrible video, and I feel very offended, and I know my male colleagues do not see me like this. I feel rather disgusted.

chandratap

Hey, next time an organization tries to do the right thing and encourage more diverse people to participate in science, how about if you actually talk to scientists and try to understand what motivates them, rather than dragging some refugee from the fashion and music video world to tell women how to be scientists?

Gosh, the grapes sure are sour over here

Benjamin Radford, a regular at The Amazing Meeting, has decided he doesn’t like blogs, and never has, no sir. This is a fact which he has chosen to announce in a blog by citing his first blog entry.

As I write my first entry for the sparkly new “Free Thinking” blog, I’m skeptical of its utility. While I have spent much of my career promoting critical thinking and skepticism, I’m concerned about joining the noise, the glut of words inundating the Web and indeed the world.

By most estimates there are over 120 million blogs out there on the World Wide Intertubes. It seems everyone has a blog; teens are blogging, grandmothers are blogging, almost anyone with access to a computer, an opinion, and some spare time has a blog. The Web has democratized the dissemination of information, but not necessarily improved the content quality. There’s incredibly good, useful info on the Web, but the signal to noise ratio is higher than ever.

Of course, some blogs are better than others, but according to a statistic I just made up (so you can’t check), 98.3 percent of blogs are irrelevant, self-indulgent musings and journaling, read by the blogger and one or two friends.

Blogs are inherently personal; they rarely include references; they are short, thus allowing for little or no detailed, critical analysis. In this age of blogging and Twitter, communication comes in smaller and smaller bites, conveying less and less information. For people to accurately understand the world around them, they need more information and context, not less.

So he makes up a statistic and doesn’t bother to cite anything, so blogging is all noise and doesn’t include references (hint, Mr Radford: it’s called a “link”, some of us use them heavily.) And nobody reads them, except a few of the bloggers’ friends. He could make a case for that, I suppose; I sure don’t read Radford’s attempts at blogging, and only ran across this one because DJ Grothe praised it on twitter. (Oh, I so want to see Radford’s critique of twitter — I’m sure it will be as perspicacious as his complaints about blogs.)

Then he concludes by announcing that blogs still suck.

The same problems and issues I identified are still around, if anything magnified by the exponentially growing World Wide Web. Since that first blog I have been witness to (and occasional victim of) flame wars, troll attacks, misrepresentation of others’ positions (both obvious and subtle), and so on. We’ve all seen bloggers resort to feigned outrage, insults, and invective in their efforts to stir up controversy and increase page hits. This sensational, shock-jock sleaze is nothing new, and has been immensely successful for Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and their countless blogging ilk. It’s not helpful or productive, but it gets attention.

Still, media has always had the inherent problem of separating out the wheat from the chaff, the insightful from the banal, the incisive from the divisive. Such is the price for the democratization of speech that the Internet brings: anyone with a computer has equal access. It’s probably true that most of everything is crap-but it’s a shame that we must work so hard to find the non-crap.

There’s a grain of truth to what he says, and I’m trying to think of some productive suggestion that would help improve the web, and I’ve come up with one: Ben Radford could stop blogging, and stop adding to the noise.

But he’s also deeply wrong. You could make the same arguments about books, or magazines, or newspapers: they’re mostly junk. The only solution, obviously, is for everyone to stop writing. Everyone, but especially Mr Radford, who can then go back to talking about chupacabras. And then he can ignore every criticism made of his work by telling himself they’re just trying to stir up controversy and increase page hits.

This claim that blogging is all about stirring up controversy to get page hits is also nonsense, but nonsense that gets regurgitated regularly by every old school pundit who objects to getting criticized. It’s wrong. I can tell you what gets you traffic: reliable, sustained writing on subjects of interest to an audience. Just controversy is never enough; it’s the people who can write well about controversy who win the audience. If you can’t do that — and Radford certainly can’t — you lose, and you have to resort to whining that all your competitors for eyeballs are all hacks and cheaters who don’t have the skill at communicating that you do.

But actually, his second to the last paragraph does get to the source of his unhappiness: he has been the victim of blogging. The poor man last got on our radar when he wrote a most ludicrous and appalling piece of pseudo-skeptical, evo-psych bullshit to justify sexism. It was piece that ignored reason and evidence, what few scientific articles he used to support his claims he understood poorly and mangled misleadingly. Rebecca Watson spanked him hard; I took him to school on his abuse of the science; Stephanie Zvan showed that his rationale made no sense; the blogosphere, that wretched hive of irrelevant, self-indulgent musings, lit up with pointed criticisms of Radford’s ghastly abuse of skeptical thinking. His response? Throw up more banal, divisive crap. And get slammed again.

This was a case where blogs were actually extremely good at separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s just that we’ve determined that Ben Radford is the chaff.

And now the chaff is complaining, on a blog.

(Also, I have to add: DJ, your proxies aren’t helping.)

Creationism is a marketing game

And they know it. Ken Ham has started a new billboard campaign for the creation “museum”, with a variety of different designs, all featuring prehistoric* creatures as draws to get kids and family to attend. Here are some examples:

Notice what’s smart about them? They’re focused, featuring an element that they clearly know is a key draw, dinosaurs; they’re eye-catching; they’re professionally designed and have thematic unity; and the Creation “Museum” knows that good marketing is a way to get people to come in to their propaganda mill. You know they invested a good chunk of money in this effort.

So now Ken Ham is openly gloating about his wonderful billboards.

…just like everything else we do at the Creation Museum, they are done professionally—first class!

To make matters even worse, he goes on sneer at the feeble efforts of real museums, and to mock several atheist billboard campaigns, posting examples of some of the worst. And the sad thing is — and you won’t hear me saying this very often — Ken Ham is right. Real museums are strapped for cash, and most of their money is going into curating scientific collections and paying scientists to do work for them, while atheist organizations are actually small time compared to the multi-million dollar operating budget of a commercial enterprise like the Creation “Museum”.

Ham doesn’t have a clue about any of the things real museums do. When an NCSE spokesperson says he wishes more science museums could engage in this kind of promotion, Ham whimpers defensively.

You mean our government-funded (using our tax money) Smithsonian would not have a marketing budget as big as the marketing budget of the Creation Museum? And what about all the other secular museums (no doubt most are funded by our tax dollars) such as the Chicago Field Museum and New York Natural History Museum—and the many, many others!

The Smithsonian, the AMNH, and the Field Museum are not about marketing! They’re institutions doing science. Ham is confused in thinking that his freak show exhibit and monument to bunkum is anything like those places. He does not have a museum, he owns a sideshow attraction!

The article reveals Ken Ham’s ignorance in so many ways. He really doesn’t understand the difference, and he doesn’t comprehend why scientists might be worried about his campaign.

As of writing this blog post, an Associated Press article about our new dinosaur billboards has appeared on many news sites, including ABC News and the Washington Post. The AP article and many blogs indicate that secularists are concerned about them. Isn’t it amazing that they are so worried about one Creation Museum. Think of all the hundreds of secular museums and thousands of secular schools, colleges, and universities where evolution and millions of years are taught as fact—and the secularists are really worried AiG’s Creation Museum! That shows how insecure they really are. Secularists just can’t stand it when information they have censored from the public is being disseminated by us. And they don’t want people thinking for themselves; they want them to swallow their anti-God religion!

Those billboards and his “museum” are not disseminating censored information. Information about creationism is freely available all over, and gets routinely spread in a common American institution, church. We are worried because Ken Ham is spending buckets of money disseminating slickly-produced lies, while scientists are trying to do science. Lies are cheap and easy; the truth is harder to come by. That he follows the cheap and easy route means he has more money to sink into public relations.

We’re not worried that Ken Ham has some uncomfortable truth that he’s getting across to people. We’re worried that he’s an effective charlatan.

And really, it’s easy to see what a lying fraud he is. Did you notice one of the billboards in that montage above?

Yeah. Ken Ham claims that fire-breathing dragons were real.

*Well, actually, if Ken Ham were right, these are historic creatures that lived within the last 6,000 years.

What’s the matter with TED?

I enjoy many TED talks. I especially enjoy them because I only watch them when someone else recommends one to me — I’ve got filters in place. The one time I tried to sit down and go through a couple of random TED talks, I was terribly disappointed.

Carl Zimmer explains the problem with TED.

The problem, I think, lies in TED's basic format. In effect, you're meant to feel as if you're receiving a revelation. TED speakers tend to open up their talks like sales pitches, trying to arouse your interest in what they are about to say. They are promising to rock your world, even if they're only talking about mushrooms.

So the talks have to feel new, and they have to sound as if they have huge implications. A speaker can achieve these goals in the 18 minutes afforded by TED, but there isn't much time left over to actually make a case–to present a coherent argument, to offer persuasive evidence, to address the questions that any skeptical audience should ask. In the best TED talks, it just so happens that the speaker is the sort of person you can trust to deliver a talk that comports with the actual science. But the system can easily be gamed.

In some cases, people get invited to talk about science thanks to their sudden appearance in the news, accompanied by flashy headlines. Exhibit A, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, who claimed in late 2010 to have discovered bacteria that could live on arsenic and promised that the discovery would change textbooks forever. When challenged by scientific critics, she announced to reporters like myself that she would only discuss her work in peer reviewed journals. Three months later, she was talking at TED.

The problem can get even more serious in TED's new franchise, TEDx, which is popping up in cities around the world. Again, some TEDx talks are great. Caltech physicist (and DtU editor) Sean Carroll talking about cosmology? Whatever you've got, I'll take. But some guy ranting about his grand unified theory that he promises will be a source of  unlimited energy to fuel the planet? Well, just see how far you can get through this TEDx talk before you get loaded into an amublance with an aneurysm.

So there’s the problem: audiences pay a shocking amount of money to attend a TED session, and what they expect is an epiphany delivered every 20 minutes. That’s not how science works. You know that every excellent talk at TED is backed by 10 or 20 years of incremental work, distilled down to just the conclusion. Most of the bad talks at TED are people trying to distort the methodical approach of science into a flash of genius, and failing. Some of the bad talks are simply cranks babbling; the example Zimmer gives is a perfect illustration of that. Cranks are really good at making grandiose claims, and in a setting in which no data has to be shown and no questions can be asked, pseudoscience shines (and by the way, what is it with kooks and swirling donuts?)

Another odd connection: I wonder if this tendency to inflate the baby steps of science into grand world-changing leaps contributes to or is fueled by Kurzweilian transhumanism and an exaggerated sense of progress in science?