Insights

I had to laugh: The climate scientist Brian Brettschneider last week discovered that the Twitter account of John Kerry, Joe Biden’s pick to be his administration’s “climate czar,” was following zero climate scientists. The response: dozens of scientists jumping up and down to suggest themselves and others to an account whose handler (be they John Kerry or a staffer) is clearly struggling to do basic Twitter and does not respond to tweets from anyone he doesn’t already know.…

The journal Nature Communications is in hot water for publishing a paper claiming to show that having a female mentor (or being one) puts scientists at a career disadvantage.

As Science magazine summarized the findings, “the more female mentors an early-career scientist had, the lower the impact of the papers they published when they became senior scientists” — impact being measured by citation rates.…

This week I’ve been attending a virtual conference on B2B thought leadership.

The most interesting panel: executives from F500 companies talking about which kinds of thought leadership content they pay attention to.

Answer: virtually none.

These executives are inundated with irrelevant or superficial reports and content — much more so since the pandemic began.…

It’s the latest episode of Science+Story: The Podcast and possibly the best so far if you’re a scientist interested in how to manufacture space and time and funding for public engagement.

Daniel is a climate scientist at UCLA and one of the few scientists in academia with science communications built into his job description, so we had to talk first about how he made that happen, what the requirements are and how other researchers might create similar positions.…

The 2020 election shows that some modelers (and scientists) seem to have forgotten this, or never learned it.

If you want the big picture in the wake of yesterday’s Pfizer vaccine announcement, read Alex Tabarrok’s blog post “Where We Stand.”

Tabbarok’s post summarizes a) what the early Pfizer results mean for this and other vaccines that target the virus’s spike protein, and b) the issues still facing us despite Pfizer’s apparent vaccine breakthrough and how we might solve them.…

No. To assert otherwise is just myopic and/or solipsistic. Get over yourselves, scientists and lovers of science.

Two reactions from leading scientists crystallize this self-involvement:

1. Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of Science magazine, told STAT News: “Science was on the ballot and this means that a significant portion of America doesn’t want science.

…

In a pandemic, is inaccurate science communications that motivates beneficial action or behavior change now good enough?