What is science?
Talk about getting back to the basics ... the first session of our gathering had nothing less than the theme of defining what science and writing about science is all about. There’ll be a comprehensive report provided later by the good folks from the Annenberg School, but this is just a quick rundown - aimed as much at testing the blog tool and providing a couple of links as anything else.
Don Kennedy, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, started out by noting the “terrible public confusion” over how science works. He ran through the main steps of the process - hypothesis, experimental testing of that hypothesis, efforts to falsify the hypothesis based on the facts, etc. He also provided a rundown of the types of research that Science finds most intriguing: work that confirms a hypothesis that’s important but hadn’t been confirmed before (say, global warming?), counterintuitive breakthroughs (say, the Chicxulub asteroid) and explorations of new territory that the editors “jump out of our shoes about.” Kennedy said the “secondary market [that is, journalists] is pretty good at picking out what matters and what doesn’t matter.”
Among the links to follow up, particularly if you want to address the ever-popular “theory vs. fact” debate, is the National Academies publication “Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science.”
Alex Witze, senior news and features editor at Nature, weighed in with her outsider-turned-insider view of the scientific publishing process. “Journalists in general do not recognize how sloppy science can be,” she noted. Peer review, for example, is “no inoculation against stupidity.” But there are ways to fight the madness.
She recommended getting up to speed on statistics, citing the classic work “News and Numbers.” ... and she recommended using a diversity of sources as your truth squads for scientific claims (not always turning to, say, John Pike, Keith Cowing and Art Caplan, for example).
She also put in a plug for Connotea, a social recommendation site for scientists a la Del.icio.us.
Michael Lemonick, a veteran of Time magazine, took on the “iconoclast” role: He cited the example of an astrophysicist who thought he discovered planets circling a pulsar - then, weeks before giving a big presentation, found a flaw that led him to reverse his views. He was persuaded to give the presentation anyway, and won a standing ovation for it.
Similarly, journalists should have a strong ethic of questioning what is thought to be known. “I don’t think we question ourselves enough,” he said. And in keeping with the iconoclastic point of view, Lemonick questioned whether having more science-friendly editors would solve the problem. “The proposition that ‘if only we could do it more, things would be better’ ... I think we’re kidding ourselves.”
In the discussion part of the session, we talked about the implications of a world in which embargo times were more fluid, or really hardly existed at all ... as well as some of the cautionary tales about going off half-cocked in science reporting. Some examples and links:
- The Arxiv site for physics papers, which is eroding the embargo paradigm.
- A controversial study about the origins of corn.
- Pyramids made out of concrete?
By the way, all these links are purely plucked out by me - in some cases, recommended by presenters, and in some cases not.
