Insights
The Yoga Class Test
A church in my neighborhood holds a Saturday morning yoga class that I attend off and on. While the class was settling in, I overheard a discussion among some of the participants about kids and their smartphones — they’re on them all the time, they create bad posture, etc.…
Read MoreEsther Duflo’s TED Talk
Sometime soon — today, tomorrow, this weekend — you should watch Esther Duflo’s TED talk. It’s a model for how to frame your disruptive research and ideas.
This is Esther Duflo who just won the Nobel Prize in economics for her research to find the most effective interventions against poverty and associated, preventable diseases.…
Read MoreCan a Paper Change Everything?
How do you know when your research has changed things? And when do you say: “I’ve made enough change — I’ve hit my goal”?
When you’ve changed your field? Or is your ambition a bit larger?
It’s rare, says Tim Harford, to read an economics paper that makes one think: “this changes everything.” But he writes in the Financial Times that he read one over a decade ago: the late environmental economist Martin Weitzman’s review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.…
Read MoreWhat About a Flying Aspidistra?
Should you do an interactive/video/podcast/other piece of shiny content to promote that new important research-driven project?
First: who’s the content be for? Who are your audiences? Are those the same as your strategic audiences? Why not?
Second: does it answer a question those audiences have, in a way they want it answered?…
Read MoreThe Fake News of Discovery Narratives
I haven’t paid much attention to astronomy since the onset of puberty — but of course this piece caught my eye on Friday: BBC science reporter Pallab Ghosh writing for Undark on “Exoplanets, Life, and the Danger of a Single Study,” prompted by the uncritical media coverage (then walked back) of two papers published last month announcing the discovery of water vapor on a exoplanet called K2-18b.…
Read MoreNostalgia for ‘Just Science’
Despite Smil’s reach—some of the world’s most powerful banks and bureaucrats routinely ask for his advice—he has remained intensely private. Other experts tap dance for attention and pursue TED talks. But Smil is a throwback, largely letting his books speak for themselves.…
Read MoreOne Cheer for Sexy Soundbite Scicomm
Ecologist Manu Saunders (who helpfully poked holes in the “insect apocalypse” narrative) now asks: “How damaging is sexy soundbite scicomm?”
Wait: first, what is “sexy soundbite scicomm”? As best I can tell from Saunders’ post, it’s comms or reporting that
- Hypes Big Data as the master key to all problems;
- Lionizes individual researchers; and/or
- Promotes single-study findings (like the insect apocalypse or the “we’ve lost 3 billion birds in North America” ones) over what she terms “scientific context.”
Sexy soundbite scicomm, Saunders argues, is toxic — not just for public understanding of what science actually is (not glamorous, not hero-based, not about sudden discoveries); but also for early career researchers who think they have to strive for stardom rather than just do good research.…
Read MoreFrom Frustrated to Loyal
Yesterday I urged you to think about your email welcome series as an instrument of transformation — taking the first critical steps in transforming your drive-by audience into an actual audience, one that gives you permission to converse with it because it trusts you.…
Read MoreWelcome, Welcome
From Inbox Collective’s Dan Oshinsky (who directed the email programs for The New Yorker and Buzzfeed):
… Read MoreThe secret of the email world is that welcome emails open at incredibly high rates — often multiple times higher than a normal email. (77% of readers open my welcome email.) And when you get a chance like that to make a first impression, you better take it.
Anecdata & Bad Opinion
As the world pushes us more and more into reactivity, more and more opinion content — even by researchers — follows suit, trading in anecdata.
Anecdata: “anecdotal information gathered and then presented as fact,” says the Urban Dictionary.…
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