Science communication is something we do a great deal of here in Schmid College. Whenever we publish a blog post, help write a press release, or give a public lecture, I am reminded of an excellent PNAS paper entitled “Bringing values and deliberation to science communication” by Thomas Dietz from Michigan State. The basic premise
As scientists and humans, we are all going to make errors in our work – hopefully those errors arise from honest mistakes and not bias. In experimental science, we are accustomed to performing research using the principles of the scientific method. We form a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, collect data, analyze and interpret the data,
A particularly good read (whether you are a scientist or not) is Irving Langmuir’s classic Pathological Science lecture from 1953 (download the PDF). For most physical scientists, I imagine that the talk is well known. There are extensive websites on the subject, as well as the obligatory Wikipedia page, so there is no need to
Towards the end of this past spring semester, I walked into my office to find the dreaded red “you have voice mail” light blazing on my phone. As I listened to the message, I was happy to hear the voice of President Doti, who is known to use the medium to broadcast his musings to