Here’s one of the most familiar narratives in science:
We knew that! We’ve been saying that for years! Why didn’t you know that?
It’s the story of a subculture — a scientific field — so insular that it thinks it’s sufficiently communicated a piece of knowledge to the rest of the world, only to discover (after years, maybe even decades) that the rest of the world didn’t get the message at all.…
The CDC has finally done it: After many valiant near-bullseyes, they’ve finally managed to confuse and/or alienate just about everyone in the United States.
The last dart was the agency’s clumsy and data-free communication of the renewed need for indoor masking in areas with high COVID case incidence, given the Delta variant’s increased transmissibility and lethality over the original COVID-19 virus.…
In the time of COVID, should we wait for the perfect clinical study demonstrating whether portable HEPA filtration could reduce transmission of the COVID-19 virus specifically in schools?
Or should we apply what we already know from other settings and act?…
You’re probably already familiar with how most researchers summarize their new research on Twitter — they basically Twitterize their papers, with screenshots of the abstract, key figures and a more or less accessible summary of the methods, findings, and discussion. Here’s a representative example.…
Researchers, research funders and research communicators — almost all of them start with the same assumption: The only social impact research can have is positive. (It’s research, after all!) We can scarcely imagine research having negative social impact, much less having to plan against our research having negative social impact.…
Email is still a critical vehicle of communication — often the critical vehicle of communication — for public experts, especially ones who run organizations.
That’s why you should subscribe to email guru Dan Oshinsky and his monthly newsletter on email titled “Not a Newsletter”: It’s simply the best intelligence going on email for frequent content publishers. (And…
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick threads that “The secret heart of academia is…Wikipedia.”
Whaaaa?
Mollick cites a new SSRN paper titled “Science is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial,” which added new scientific content to a Wikipedia article on chemistry and tracked how the information spread.…
What makes information valuable? As producers and consumers of the stuff, we should have a precise answer to this question. Too often we don’t.
Yusuke Kuwayama of Resources for the Future (RFF) just published a little gem of an essay called “Value of Science 105: Three Principles of the Value of Information.”…
Producing a podcast consists of 1,001 tiny steps and decisions — none of which have anything to do with your choice of microphone.
Here’s a list of some of the most important categories of podcast production tasks, which you might want to clip and save to look at every time you think about starting a podcast:
What’s your argument? For researchers, the answer to the question often comes down to: What do the data say?
That question, however, implies that researchers just spit out the answer. No: You decide the answer, in three critical ways: