That Science Communication Thing

We scientists mostly suck at communicating with the public. Many of us don't even try to do any real outreach to the non-science public. We communicate our results by publishing papers or giving conference talks squarely aimed at other scientists.

This is not great. People — like Christie Wilcox here — have been calling for scientists to open up and share directly with the public. It's a nice idea. It is important that science gets reported, and it's important that people from all walks of life participate in public discourse.

Of course it's not quite that easy. Steven Hamblin brings up some important good reasons why scientists aren't communicating directly with the public, and why doing so would not have such large effect. He focuses on the skills needed for good communication. Doing it well is hard, and many, even most scientists don't have those skills.

I'd like to offer another reason: good communication takes a lot of time. This is time we in general do not have. There is no time set aside for science communication; few or no writing classes offered for faculty specifically for communicating science to the general public; no support or funds for dealing with any ethical and other issues that may arise. The scientists that do communicate directly do so on their own free time, as a hobby and elect to do it instead of watching TV, talking with their family, playing an instrument, catching up on sleep or whatever you do for fun. It is laudable that people like Scicurious does this, of course, but it is strictly voluntary.

 
And it takes real time to do it well. I only post about 2-3 times a week on my blog here, mostly not science-related, and the rate drops whenever I get busy with work. A simple off-the-top-of-my-head opinion post like this one takes me about an hour to put together (there goes my lunch). An actual sciency post like the recent one on the history of violence can take several hours, what with finding and reading sources, writing, making illustrations and so on.

Some people claim an effective blog needs to post one big piece and a couple of fillers every day. That's too much for a science blog, but even at my current rate of three posts a week I'd need an extra hour every working day. That hour comes from my work time or it will have to come from my Japanese language studies, from reading, from photography, from spending time with Ritsuko. In short, from enjoying my time away from work.

If you want scientists in general to spend time on communication then you have to pay for it — pay by adding it into the job description; pay by setting aside time for doing so; pay by offering support and guidelines; and pay by offering training for those who aren't naturally good at or interested in social media or non-specialist writing. Understand that it would be quite doable; you could make part of your yearly teaching load for instance. It is teaching of a sort, after all, not just in a lecture format and not to a small, captive audience. It would mean somewhat less other teaching, or less research. That is unavoidable.


But do we really want to force all scientists to communicate directly? We don't require every public servant to communicate with the public in other fields, do we? It's rare for actual policemen, physicians, soldiers or firemen to communicate directly with the public, for instance. National administrators and bureaucrats don't tweet about new regulations all by themselves. They go through their public relations department and a dedicated press spokesperson.

Communication is hard — hard enough that public communication, journalism and outreach is an acknowledged group of professions. Why do we have this idea that every single scientist needs to do this by themselves? And, may I add, without the training, interest or time you'd need to make a decent job of it. Having stressed PI's dutifully dump their unedited abstracts onto Google+ or Facebook, or tweet the paywalled link to their latest paper, then ignore any questions and feedback would hurt science communication, not help it.

Oneiric On The Way

A quick note, on this beautiful, finally cool Monday morning: Oneiric Ocelot is coming!





"Huh?" What it means is, Ubuntu Linux, the operating system I've been using for a number of years now, is due to release a new version. This is not a particularly rare occurrence as they release every six months, on the dot. It's a fairly rapid pace, but that's OK; they keep supporting older versions so I usually don't bother upgrading every time. It's a good system, with pretty much anything I need for work and play.

If I never mention this here, why do I mention it this time? Well, I am upgrading (reinstalling, actually — good to clean house now and again) this time, but mostly because I find the countdown banner above kind of cute.

Oh, "Oneiric": Each version has a simple version number like Year.Month, so this one is 11.10 for the release of October 2011. But they also always have a semi-nonsensical code name during development, going alphabetically over time, with a pattern of "Adjective Animal". This coming release is Oneiric Ocelot. The current release is Natty Narwhal, and the one before (that I currently use) is Maveric Meerkat. If you're curious you can find the whole list here.

The Em-Dash and You

John McIntyre, newspaper copyeditor and proprietor of You Don't Say¹ recently had some much needed advice for all of us writing online: Know when to use the em-dash.

"Em-dash" is not, as you may believe, a short-distance foot race of some kind or another. It's the long horizontal mark we use to indicate a parenthetical remark — like this one — in our text. It's also used at times to indicate dialogue:

— You mean like this?

— Yes, exactly.

Note that it is a long dash. It is not the minus-sign we use for compound words (like in "minus-sign"). Why not use the minus-sign? Because the text looks cleaner and more professional, and is easier to read with the wide dash. There really is no reason not to use it. But how do you write it when it doesn't seem to actually be on our keyboards? fear not: it's easy to write. The Wikipedia page has instructions for many systems and programs, so check it out.

Under Linux you press the Compose key, then '---'. "Compose" key? On full-size keyboards it is often the right-hand "Win" key or right-hand Alt, but you can change which key is "Compose" in your keyboard layout settings. I always set Compose to be my Caps Lock key; I never, ever actually need Caps Lock, and hitting it by mistake is annoying, so I much prefer it to work as Compose.

While you're at it, it's time you also started using ellipsis '…' rather than simply write three full stops '...'. Depending on what font you use they may look identical, but trust me, they're not. The true ellipsis is one character while the dots are three. This matters particularly when you use a fixed-width font, such as in text editors or when writing Japanese. You write it by pressing Compose, then '..'.

A couple of other useful Compose characters:

• Degree symbol '°' as in "His fever was 39.2°": press Compose then 'oo'.


• Cross product or cross mark '×', as in "1024×768": Compose then 'xx'.


• Long o 'ō' as when you write long-o Japanese words with alphabet, as in "Ōsaka": press Compose then '_' (that is shift+'-'), then 'o' or 'O'.


• Copyright symbol '©' and trademark symbol '™', as in "Navelicious© — The Go-to Website™ For Your Bellybutton Needs!": Compose then 'oc', and Compose then 'tm'.


• In case you have no Swedish vowels in your keyboard, you can still write 'å' 'ä' and 'ö': Compose then 'o' then 'a', and Compose then '"' then 'a' or 'o'.

Those are not the only characters of course, and you have many, many more if you use the "AltGr" key (may be something else on a laptop keyboard), such as '·', '÷', 'µ' and so on. It's worth looking up these key combinations for your keyboard and system; it's surprisingly useful.

And use Em-dash, OK? Give the poor minus-sign a rest.

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#1 Sadly, while this is the personal blog of McIntyre it is hosted with his employer The Baltimore Sun, who in turn has decided to lock all its content behind a paywall beginning October 10. Since local news is of no interest for people like me living on a separate continent most readers are faced with the prospect of paying over 8000 yen per year for a single blog. Which, as you can expect, few to no people are ready to do no matter how good the content.

So unfortunately one of my favourite blogs will effectively disappear from the net beginning early next month. Do take the chance to browse through his archives while you have the chance; there's a lot of good stuff there to read.

History of Violence

I have my annual health check tomorrow morning, followed by a two-day project meeting in Kyoto so I'll be rather busy until the end of the week¹. But just so you won't feel a lack of long-winded reading, here is an excellent (and long!) essay by Steven Pinker on A History of Violence.

If you don't have the entire morning to set aside for the essay you can get the gist simply by looking at the collection of graphs scattered throughout the piece. Just be careful that you check the scales and units of measurement. Many graphs are logarithmic; it lets you see variation at both the low and high ends of the range, but it tends to understate the magnitude of the overall change. Also, he frequently plots rates — incidents of violence per 100 000 people — not absolute number of incidents. They reflect your risk of violence, which is probably what you're mostly interested in, but says nothing about the absolute number of events.

Pinker argues, quite persuasively, that levels of violence around the world is at a historical low, no matter of criterion for violence you take, and almost no matter what timeframe. Long time scale or short, we're less violent to each other than ever before. To illustrate, let me show you the data from one of his sources, Manuel Eisner² about overall level of homicide in Europe from early middle ages to today. Instead of a log plot like Pinker does, let's plot it on a linear scale to clearly see what the overall trend looks like:

Homicide rates in Europe from the 1300's to the 20th century. Rate is in victims per 100 000 incidents, with one data point per century. Data from Eisner (2003).

The data is very sketchy for the distant past of course, but overall the rate of homicide has dropped some 40-fold over time. The risk, today, for us to be killed by somebody else is only a fracťion of the historical average. And Pinker argues that the same thing is happening at shorter timescales as well as longer, and not just for murder but for war deaths, rape, child abuse, racially motivated violence and so on and so on. 

Then why do people feel so unsafe today? And why do Japanese — living in what is arguably one of the least violent societies in history — seem to be at least as afraid of violence as people in far less settled areas? Perhaps people feel unsafe precisely because violence is becoming so rare. As it becomes rarer, each incident becomes more newsworthy, grabs more media attention and focuses peoples minds more on it than before.

It's the same as with car accidents and airplane accidents: You're in much more danger in a car than in an airplane, and there's many, many more deaths from car accidents than plane crashes. But car crashes are so common that they don't get much attention, while the rare airplane accident gets big headlines. We estimate the risk to ourselves by the number of incidents we hear about in the news, not by the number of incidents that actually happen. So, paradoxically, we end up feeling airplanes are less safe than cars, in part because the reality is the opposite.

It's not just the rarity, though. We hear about more violent incidents than before simply because we get much more news about anything than we did before. If a man got beaten and robbed in a bar in Yokohama a century ago it's unlikely anybody in the rest of the country would have heard of it. If it happens today there will be a news item about it in every news outlet in Japan. Robberies where much more commonplace and less newsworthy a century ago, but news coverage at the time was nothing like what we have today.

And the goal posts have moved. We accept much less violence than we used to. Some type of violence that we rightly condemn today — beating your spouse or children for instance — were legal some decades ago; they were approved and even recommended in some cases. We're safer from violence overall, so our tolerance for violence is decreasing in turn.

So, we take acts of violence more seriously than before; we hear about violent crimes from a far larger area than we used to; and the very fact that violence is becoming rarer means each violent act gets more media coverage. These factors all mean that people become more worried about being victims of violence, and believe violence has been increasing, even as the reality is the complete opposite.

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#1 If I'm so busy, why do I spend most of my lunch hour writing about this essay rather than hurry along with my project? I do need an occasional break of course; also, for some reason other people's research always seem more interesting to me than my own.

#2 Eisner (2003), "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime", Crime & Just. 83 (2003) - webpage here, and direct link to the PDF from the author here. It's a very readable paper, even for a complete non-specialist like myself.

By the way…

The "Google+" post list to the right doesn't work any more. I'll just leave it for now and replace with a better solution later on. Meanwhile, you can head over to my page on Google+ for posts, and perhaps join yourself if you're so inclined.

Disaster Alert

I'm behind at work right now (OK, so when am I not behind?) since I took a vacation just before some project meetings. I have still written not a word about our trip to Sweden; and I have yet to develop the film I shot, nor have I downloaded the pictures from my digital camera. At thid rate you'll probably hear about our late summer trip sometime around Christmas.

But I don't want to leave this blog fallow while I'm busy panicking¹. So here is a chilling piece on the environmental risks of pseudoscientific quackery — risks just as real as the quack itself: Homeopathic leak threatens catastrophe.

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#1 Will I have good results in time for the meeting? No, not a chance. So why am I even panicking then, when it's doing no good anyhow? Good question.

Standing Desk

I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. A lot of time — there are days when I go from bed directly to my laptop; spend my morning commute, my entire workday, and my evening ride home staring at the same screen; then spend the rest of my evening in front of the machine, with only brief breaks for eating, showers and bathroom.

This is not exactly good for my body, needless to say. Hunching over a laptop hurts my eyes, hurts my back and neck, and ultimately hurts my ability to focus. I often take quick breaks where I walk down the hall and back again to think, have a drink water water and just get out of my chair for a bit. That helps, but it is not quite enough.

This July my back was hurting more than usual so I decided I'd try standing up rather than sitting down. I'd tried to stand and work a few times before but never managed to get comfortable. This time I've figured out how to make it work. Here is my setup:

Improvised standing desk. Note my cool "Cup Noodle" coffee mug. I'm very proud of it.

I found a couple of cinder blocks in a storage room and added a thrown-away cardboard box on top (I don't have a Sony laptop myself). I now also have a cardboard wedge of sorts under the back of the laptop to tilt the keyboard forward. The mouse pad support is just a collection of suitably thick books from my bookshelf. A bit impractical when I want to look something up in one of them but otherwise nice and stable.

Both the laptop and the mouse are higher up than I first thought they should be. With my previous attempts I had the desktop at waist level, with my arms at a 90 degree angle when typing, but that quickly gave me worse back pain than sitting down. This desktop is much higher, about level with the bottom of my ribcage, and my arms angle upwards to reach the laptop. The mouse is midway between hip and chest.

It makes sense. When your lower arms stick straight out at 90 degrees it puts maximum load on the upper arm and shoulder muscles. Our muscles are much worse at keeping our joints in a midway position than close to either end. Imagine a heavy jar full of water in your hand. imagine holding it in your hand with the upper arm straight down and the lower arm sticking right out in front of you. Now imagine the same thing, but with the lower arm angling upwards, toward your chest. Which one would be easier to hold over time?

With a higher surface your wrists also find support on the front edge of the desk and mouse pad, while they're dangling unsupported in the air with a 90 degree angle. Also, the screen comes up to a comfortable viewing angle. It is important to get the height just right though; I really notice when I need a book in the mouse pad pile and replace it with another of a different thickness.


At first, I could perhaps stand one hour at a time. I'd stand up and work until my legs and knees started complaining, then sit down until my back started hurting again. But within a few days my body was adapting and after a week I was standing up most of the day. I do need to move about a bit as I stand, and I continue to take quick walks every now and again. And I do sit down when I read stuff, or write by hand.

Now, two months on, I probably stand about 80% of the time at work. My shoulders are still stiff but my back no longer hurts. My headaches have become much less frequent too; I think that may be because I keep varying the viewing distance to the screen as I move about, rather than due to standing itself.

On my wishlist is some kind of less improvised setup. Ideally some kind of small add-on desk I can put on a normal desk like this. It'd have fully adjustable height, a laptop surface with adjustable angle, a separate mouse pad shelf and a small surface to the left for a book or things like that. And it'd have to be decently inexpensive; my employer is not likely to pick up the bill for anything like this. I may have a go at building something myself at some point, for home use if nothing else.