Science Communication
- What to do when you’re completely overwhelmed by climate anxietywww.vox.com What to do when you’re completely overwhelmed by climate anxiety
How to act in service of the planet — and your values.
- Why Read the Effective Activist Guide | Effective Activisteffectiveactivist.com Why Read the Effective Activist Guide | Effective Activist
Which forms of activism have the most impact? Where should you focus your energies to create change? Our research uncovered how to be an effective activist.
- The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinkingwww.themarginalian.org The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
- [vlogbrothers] Are You Eating a Credit Card Every Week?
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
> Are You Eating a Credit Card Every Week?
No, but it is an interesting example of how misinformation can be created and spread, even without malicious intent. Video is a couple years old, but it still holds up.
- Seven Speculative Stories About Preserving History and Culture - Reactorreactormag.com Seven Speculative Stories About Preserving History and Culture - Reactor
Which stories, knowledge, and experiences are worth saving, no matter the cost, and what can we do to keep them alive?
- Political uses of the ancient past on social media are predominantly negative and extremejournals.plos.org Political uses of the ancient past on social media are predominantly negative and extreme
This study assesses whether references to the ancient past in debates about political issues on social media over-represent negative and extreme views. Using precision-recall, we test the performance of three sentiment analysis methods (VADER, TextBlob and Flair Sentiment) on a corpus of 1,478,483 p...
- So you got a null result. Will anyone publish it?www.nature.com So you got a null result. Will anyone publish it?
Researchers have tried a bunch of strategies to get more negative results into the literature. Nature asks whether they are working.
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15160546 | ghost archive | Excerpts:
> ... findings with null or negative results — those that fail to find a relationship between variables or groups, or that go against the preconceived hypothesis — gather dust in favour of studies with positive or significant findings. A 2022 survey of scientists in France, for instance, found that 75% were willing to publish null results they had produced, but only 12.5% were able to do so2. Over time, this bias in publications distorts the scientific record, and a focus on significant results can encourage researchers to selectively report their data or exaggerate the statistical importance of their findings. It also wastes time and money, because researchers might duplicate studies that had already been conducted but not published. Some evidence suggests that the problem is getting worse, with fewer negative results seeing the light of day3 over time. ---- >At the crux of both academic misconduct and publication bias is the same ‘publish or perish’ culture, perpetuated by academic institutions, research funders, scholarly journals and scientists themselves, that rewards researchers when they publish findings in prestigious venues, Scheel says. > >But these academic gatekeepers have biases, say some critics, who argue that funders and top-tier journals often crave novelty and attention-grabbing findings. Journal editors worry that pages full of null results will attract fewer readers, says Simine Vazire, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and editor of the journal Psychological Science. ---- > One of the most significant changes to come out of the replication crisis is the expansion of preregistration (see ‘Registrations on the rise’), in which researchers must state their hypothesis and the outcomes they intend to measure in a public database at the outset of their study (this is already the norm in clinical trials). ... >Preliminary data look promising: when Scheel and her colleagues compared the results of 71 registered reports with a random sample of 152 standard psychology manuscripts, they found that 44% of the registered reports had positive results, compared with 96% of the standard publications7 (see ‘Intent to publish’). And Nosek and his colleagues found that reviewers scored psychology and neuroscience registered reports higher on metrics of research rigour and quality compared with papers published under the standard model8.
- Three ways to recognize hidden labour in researchwww.nature.com Three ways to recognize hidden labour in research
From designing studies and translating science to technical services, the work of support staff is highly diverse — and it needs merit systems to match.
- Scientists CT scanned thousands of natural history specimens, which you can access for freephys.org Scientists CT scanned thousands of natural history specimens, which you can access for free
Natural history museums have entered a new stage of scientific discovery and accessibility with the completion of openVertebrate (oVert), a five-year collaborative project among 18 institutions to create 3D reconstructions of vertebrate specimens and make them freely available online.
- Understanding how the brain works can transform how school students learn mathstheconversation.com Understanding how the brain works can transform how school students learn maths
Principles from cognitive science can help help in the design of more effective teaching materials for maths.
- Anyone can play Tetris, but architects, engineers and animators alike use the math concepts underlying the gamephys.org Anyone can play Tetris, but architects, engineers and animators alike use the math concepts underlying the game
With its bright colors, easy-to-learn rules and familiar music, the video game Tetris has endured as a pop culture icon over the last 40 years. Many people, like me, have been playing the game for decades, and it has evolved to adapt to new technologies like game systems, phones and tablets. But unt...
- How to become a 'supercommunicator'www.bbc.com How to become a 'supercommunicator'
You can learn to get better at connecting with people – and doing so will improve your life.
- How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Futurewww.nytimes.com How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future
Roger Fidler tried his best, but the excellent business of journalism is gone for good. Can the idea of “news” survive in a digital world?
- JSTOR is Now Available in 1,000 Prisons - News - About JSTORabout.jstor.org JSTOR is Now Available in 1,000 Prisons - News - About JSTOR
JSTOR is now available in 1,000 prisons across 4 continents, supporting the education and growth of more than 550,000 incarcerated people.
- Navigating the 'Memosphere'faculty.dartmouth.edu Navigating the 'Memosphere'
A public conference on Feb. 23 and 24 co-led by professor Nirvana Tanoukhi will explore the impact of memes on society and culture.
- The complexity of pluralistic ignorance in Republican climate change policy support in the United States - Communications Earth & Environmentwww.nature.com The complexity of pluralistic ignorance in Republican climate change policy support in the United States - Communications Earth & Environment
Republican voters in the US who support climate change action tend to self-censor because they anticipate social conflict, although they are aware that they hold a majority view, according to a survey of 1000 representative Republican voters.
- Largest post-pandemic survey finds trust in scientists is highwww.nature.com Largest post-pandemic survey finds trust in scientists is high
Study of more than 70,000 people suggests that trust levels vary among countries and are linked to political orientation.
- Global survey shows broad majority of global population supports climate actionphys.org Global survey shows broad majority of global population supports climate action
A recent study by behavioral researchers at the University of Bonn, the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE in Frankfurt, and the University of Copenhagen demonstrates for the first time that a broad majority of the world's population supports climate action and is willing to incur a perso...
- Half-Earth Socialism: The Gameplay.half.earth Half-Earth Socialism: The Game
Play as a planetary planner and decide what we should do about the climate, biodiversity, and human welfare. Can you bring the world safely to a better place?
- Climate disaster movies resonate in ways that news never willblog.geographydirections.com Climate disaster movies resonate in ways that news never will
By Oli Mould, Royal Holloway University of London This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Like many eco-conscious film buffs, …
- A leading data scientist's journey from doomism to climate hopewww.bbc.com A leading data scientist's journey from doomism to climate hope
Data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that planetary damage could be about to peak – but that the US election result could be "pivotal".
- Take the time and effort to correct misinformation - Naturewww.nature.com Take the time and effort to correct misinformation - Nature
Scientists should challenge online falsehoods and inaccuracies — and harness the collective power of the Internet to fight back, argues Phil Williamson.
- Creativity helps the disempowered to highlight climate emergency concerns, study showsphys.org Creativity helps the disempowered to highlight climate emergency concerns, study shows
Creativity can help promote environmental justice and support the disempowered to highlight their concerns about sustainability issues, a study shows.
- Psychology study unearths ways to bolster global climate awareness and climate actionphys.org Psychology study unearths ways to bolster global climate awareness and climate action
An international team of scientists has created a tool that can aid in increasing climate awareness and climate action globally by highlighting messaging themes shown to be effective through experimental research.
- The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.ourworldindata.org The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible.
- Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected resultsphys.org Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results
Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of...