Michael Kenward

What does proof reading prove?

2011-07-30T19:23:00.000+01:00

The second annual review from the UK’s Government Office for Science lets itself down with sloppy proofreading.

What do we make of a document that tells us that “the GCSA met with senior officials from organsiations such as the World Bank, USAID and the National Academy of Sciences to disucss opportunities for UK-US collaboration and cooperation”? Yes. Those spelling mistakes really are in there, buried towards the end of The Government Office for Science Annual Review 2010-11.

At one time, the UK’s Office for Science and Technology, as it was before someone thought it trendy to turn it into the Government Office for Science – GO-Science, get it? – hired people to weed out such sloppiness. Sometimes, there were capable writers and editors in house who cared about these things.

A disclaimer here, I was one of several people who earned a bob or two working on documents for the OST and other departments, before the coalition government decided that all consultants were evil and expensive and should never darken its doors. But this isn’t just a whinge about lost opportunities to bid for work. It is about the message that an organisation sends out by releasing poorly edited material like this.

No one expects literary masterpieces from a chief scientist or anyone else in government but you do expect some attention to detail. Isn’t that what science is about?

Mistakes like these are an invitation to look more closely at the document itself. Sadly, it begins to fail as soon as you do so. What, for example, do we make of the notion that GO-Science is there to “strengthen confidence in climate science”?

What on earth is confidence in climate change? Do they mean confidence that it is happening? Confidence that the government knows what to do about it?

Scope for improvement

Then there is the inevitable lapse into policy speak. What does they do when they “scope potential future developments in technology”?

That one can take some unravelling. First there is the “scope” bit. My now slightly aged copy of Collins English Dictionary doesn’t like the idea that scope is a verb. Even the current on-line version agrees and has the fuddy duddy notion that scope is a noun.

Perhaps GO-Science means anticipate maybe even investigate. It could even be “think about”, or is that too colloquial for such a high minded bit of the government?

How about the next bit, “potential future developments”? What is the “future” doing in there? I can’t think of any way in which someone could study, let alone scope, potential past developments: potential developments in technology says it all.

Here’s a few more: “GO-Science participated in Exercise Watermark, a national exercise to asses the UK response to flooding.” Please, no jokes about beasts of burden please or rear ends of North Americans. Funnily enough, they get it right several times, so someone must know how to spell assess.

You can’t say that about “phenomonon” which appears just once. They shouldn’t have used the word anyway. At least, not in the sentence “Scientists, planners and emergency managers from around the globe discussed their concerns and the risks this phenomonon poses to societal and economic well-being and national security.” It would have been better to have said “space weather”, which is what that paragraph is about. And what is “societal and economic well-being”?

We could go on about other spelling gaffes and the inconsistent use of capitals – as in government and Government – not to mention a layout that manages to separate headings from the associated text, but what the heck? They have never been good at that sort of think in any government department.
GO-Science also worries about Influenza and influenza. The Government Chief Scientific Adviser “has continued to engage with UK pandemic influenza preparedness”. How do you engage with preparedness?

We also read that “December 2010 was the coldest recorded for some years”. Coldest what? December? Month? Temperature?

The sad bit is that one of the better, and mostly widely read, guides to clear writing started life as a government document. The Complete Plain Words, by Sir Ernest Gowers and Revised by Sir Bruce Fraser, showed that even knights of the realm could string a few words together. At one time, HSMO published this book. But that venerable institution, which also used to help the government to make sense, joined many other fine agencies on the bonfire in the slash and burn of privatisation and “outsourcing”.

One final nit to pick, whoever turned the document into a PDF file pressed the wrong buttons and managed to use a font, Velvenda Cooler, that chucks up an error when you open the file.

Questions of meaning

A decent editor doesn’t just pick up typographical errors. They also question the meaning where it is unclear, trying to decipher the use of phrases like “engage with preparedness”, for example.
A good editor also picks up howlers of the “security needs of the 2010 Olympic Games” variety. Did I miss something? I hope so.

It may be that in the days of text messages and Twitter, the English language has become a joke. There are some of us, though, who still think that it is important to have white papers, reports and other documents that make sense to the largest number of people. You don’t achieve that with poor editing.
Sloppy presentation of the type that pervades this document, which should be the highlight of the year for GO-Science, really isn’t much help. If nothing else, it could provoke readers with grammatical sensitivities to throw the document across the room. That would be a pity. It does have one or two interesting leads. I was particularly taken by the short bit on the Royal Academy of Engineering’s plans to get at people in the civil service with a background in engineering. But that will have to wait for another day.

PS This rant has a major shortcoming. Like most blogs, it has not come under the eye of a subeditor. So there is no guarantee that it is error free. But at least it has had the benefit of being written with software that has a spell checker. I even had to tell it to ignore the "deliberate" errors lifted from the report. The ubiquity of that technology makes it all the more puzzling that documents can escape from the government with so many errors.

Back into Pipex hell – and ‘support’ that doesn’t know how its system works

2011-07-07T18:13:00.000+01:00

Over the past couple of days I have been struggling with a broadband service that has suddenly decided to deliver an internet connection that is pegged at 2Mb/s. Before this episode, it delivered speeds up to 6Mb/s, albeit varying throughout the day as the number of punters on line changes.

My experience shows just why internet companies have such a poor reputation. In my case, the service comes from one of the oldest companies around, Pipex.

I have a pretty good idea of what the problems is, of which more later. Sadly, the “support” people do not even understand the technical terms that I throw at them, even though they come straight from the website where I check the speed of my connection and are more than familiar to technical people working in other parts of the same company.

Pipex has been bought and sold even more often The Independent has changed hands. I never did sign up for its services, but ended up there when the BBC decided that it wasn’t going to run an internet service and passed all the members of the BBC Network Club over to Unipalm. That became a part of Pipex which, at the last move, ended up in the jaws of Talk Talk, the company famous for being near the bottom of any survey of customer satisfaction.

When Pipex’s system works, it is fine. Over the years the technical quality, and speed of the service, has risen steadily. Sadly, you couldn’t accuse their support – technical and customer accounts – of improving.

It took me near on a year to get them to acknowledge that there was a problem on my telephone line. They kept on talking about modems, phones and other things on the line that they include in the scripts for trouble shooting. At one time they muttered about charging me a large fee if they got BT involved – it is a BT line in an exchange that contains no other internet company’s kit. This gives the impression that they really don’t like calling on BT even though there is a high probability that problems are on its lines.

When Pipex eventually realised that maybe there was a line issue – they sent their own engineer who found no problems but still didn’t call in BT until I shouted at them again – it took BT’s technician about 10 minutes to detect a resistance defect on the line, 50 metres from the socket. A cover had come off of a junction box up a pole and the rain was getting in.

Did Pipex apologise? Of course not.

The latest problem is down to the “IP Profile”, also known as know as the BRAS Profile, is BT’s way of setting the speed of the connection to handle things like the noise on the line and the speed at which a modem can synchronise with the exchange.

Google is positively chatty on the issue of IP Profile. There are some good definitions out there, along with many messages from people who have encountered the same problem that has clobbered my connection.

Such is the central role of the IP Profile that it has become a standard technique in diagnosing connection issues for any line that runs over BT’s equipment. (It seems that only BT subscribes to this approach to setting connection speeds, so anyone on an exchange that is LLU, local loop unbundled, doesn’t have to worry about this factor.) For example, if I run line tests on BT’s speedtest site, it tells me that my broadband modem is connecting to the exchange at a respectable 7680 kbps.

Unfortunately, the download speed I achieve even with this high connection speed is just 1829 kbps.
Running tests on various other sites shows that over the past couple of days my connection has achieved an average speed of 1849 kbps. Earlier tests showed that during June the average speed was 4229 kbps.

IP Profile

The big difference between June and July was that IP Profile. In June it stuck at 6000 whereas it now sits at 2000.

OK, so we know what the problem is, what do we do about it? Contact Pipex support of course.

Rather than being the end of the issue – tell them about it and they can pass on the complaint – contacting Pipex support turns out to be where the problem begins. Fill in an on-line form and you get a response that first of all does not understand the issue.

This is the message that I sent them:

"The IP Profile on my line has suddenly dropped from 6000 to 2000. But the DSL connection rate has gone up to 8032 from a previous maximum of 7616."

The response was:

“I understand from your email that your broadband sped [sic] has dropped from 6000 Kbps to 2000 Kbps.”

Well, up to a point. Yes, it has, but that is only because the IP Profile has changed.

One more message determined that, as I thought, the support person did not understand the concept of IP Profile. They also washed their hands of the issue and told me to phone a support line, at my cost of course, because “they are fully trained and equipped to deal with your queries quickly and efficiently and help you to bring your query to a satisfactory conclusion because nothing would please us more than satisfying our esteemed and valuable customer”.

So, I called the number. This time I got verbal confirmation that far from being “fully trained” the support people do not understand the term IP Profile. It wasn’t that easy to make out what the person, calling himself Amon, was saying, but he seemed to admit that no, he hadn’t come across the term before.

Amon muttered about reports of known problems at the exchange, although my tiny village exchange is too small to have appeared on their radar. He then suggested that it would get back to normal in 24 to 48 hours.

By coincidence, this is the time that a line usually takes to renegotiate a connection speed, and an IP Profile, so he may prove to be correct. But it really shouldn’t be down to time to solve Pipex’s problems.

Pipex should be able to get in there with its rubber hammer and hit the relevant bits in the exchange. The least it could do would be to pass on a request to BT make a remote connection to the exchange and reset the IP Profile.

Before Pipex could do that, though, it has to understand what the technology does and what the terms mean. It should be at least as knowledgeable as its customers and should not be ignorant of an important factor that determines the quality of the service that it provides to customers.

Now that Talk Talk owns the Pipex brand it has been talking about moving all customers over to the Talk Talk system. There might be one good outcome of such a move, although as much as anything it is more likely to prompt me to switch suppliers.

The good thing about Talk Talk is that it maintains a user forum where customers with problems talk to support people who do know what they are doing. Unfortunately, the service is not available to Talk Talk customers who subscribe through other subsidiaries, even though they now connect through the same network.

The TalkTalk staff even understand what the term IP Profile means. They discuss it openly among themselves and with customers, which makes it all the more puzzling that the people on the end of the phones have no idea what you are talking about when you raise the subject.

Technorati Tags: Pipex,Broadband,IP Profile,Internet,Talk Talk

Will higher education buy this snake oil?

2011-06-13T18:17:00.000+01:00

It may be a tired old cliché to describe consultancies as organisations that charge outrageous fee to borrow your watch to tell you the time. But there are times when the sideswipe seems aposite.

One recent piece of self puffery hints at why the Conservative government, stuffed as it is with people who have consulted in their previous lives, wasn’t completely bonkers when it told civil servants to stop hiring these purveyors of snake oil. Deloitte Development LLC is touting its services to higher education. In just 117 words, the business manages to cram in more gibberish than seems possible.

There is the usual gobbledygook about “ongoing challenges”. What does the ongoing bring to the party? If universities face challenges, they face challenges – ongoing, a word that should instantly arouse suspicion, is irrelevant, put in there to make it seem more important.

Maybe the consultants charge for their advice by the word. Perhaps that is why they always use three words where one will do.

How does “drawing upon a pool of multidisciplinary resources” differ from “drawing upon multidisciplinary resources”? What are these “resources”? Perhaps they mean, "We have lots of experts."

And what in heck does it mean by “Reengineered business processes that align personnel activities with institutional goals and strategies”?

It would be nice to think that the UK’s persistently contrary universities can see through this gibberish. With luck they too will ask themselves what consultants mean when they trot out twaddle like retaining “quality students, faculty and staff”. High quality? Low quality? Indifferent quality? Or do they just mean “good students, faculty and staff”?

It may seem picky to dismember an organisation’s language, but it is as good a way as any of sorting out the consultants who will bring clear thinking to the problems they tackle. If they can’t even make sense in their own sales pitch, what will their advice look like?

The sign-off sentence says: “The Deloitte difference is recognized in the higher education marketplace locally, nationally and globally.” With luck, globally excludes the UK from the clutches of this semi-literature North American operation.

Germany says ‘yes’ to nuclear power in its backyard

2011-05-23T14:11:00.001+01:00

An interesting item over on World Nuclear News reports that a Germany power utility, RWE Group, has acquired a chunk of a nuclear power station in the Netherlands. The story, Dutch nuclear plant to be 30% German-owned, describes “legal wranglings” that have been going on for a couple of years.

So, as Germany, ever hostile to anything nuclear, ponders unplugging its own reactors, can it, like the UK, where EDF Energy owns a large chunk of the electricity industry, look to a future when it imports nuclear electricity from foreign power stations?

Then again, if German consumers really do turn the idea of radioactive electricity, perhaps RWE’s customers in the UK will benefit from the company’s share in the Borssele nuclear power station.

The internationalisation of energy seems to pass over the heads of many. For example, someone asked to comment on something I had written on technology and climate change recently dismissed the idea that one day the UK might import electricity from solar power stations in the Sahara desert. I suggested that this could happen over the existing links to France, and through the planned European Electricity Grid Initiative, not to mention the recently opened BritNed cable.

I have no idea why the reviewer, probably an academic, dismissed the idea that the UK could receive renewable energy from Europe over a grid that is designed to carry renewable energy between countries in Europe. Then again, the same critic did not seem to realise that China is by far and away the world’s biggest supplier of rare earth metals.

Microsoft rips off students in the UK

2011-04-27T10:51:00.000+01:00

The pricing regime of the (mostly American) software industry has always shown contempt for “foreign” customers. For buyers in the UK that usually shows itself in the £1=$1 exchange rate in prices. So something that you pay $99 for in the USA costs £99 in the UK.

Some companies, and here Adobe comes to mind, don’t even apply common prices for internet sales. So while I can buy a product on line from Nuance, say, at the same price as anyone anywhere in the world, Adobe insists on higher prices.

The latest sign of discrimination comes from Microsoft. It has just sent out a newsletter inviting students to “Upgrade to Windows 7”. Hit the link in the message and you land on a page where the price on offer is $29.99, tell them that you are in the UK and you arrive on a page where the price has magically risen to £70.99. Australian students are invited to pay $119.

It seems that there is one place outside North America – Canadians also get a good deal – where Microsoft does not have a funny notion of exchange rates. That is France where the asking prices is just €35.

Perhaps the reputation of French students has reached Microsoft. wouldn’t want them taking to the streets to protest would we?

Technorati Tags: software,Microsoft,Adobe

Nuclear fission’s unsafe circular arguments

2011-04-26T11:44:00.001+01:00

It is hardly surprising that the usual suspects have come out bashing nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima. The Worldwatch Institute is no exception, dragging in Amory Lovins and Walt Patterson to endorse its latest report The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010-2011: Nuclear Power in a Post-Fukushima World. Of course they endorse it, they have been banging on about the death of nuclear power for your decades, although they no longer go under the Friends of the Earth banner that sheltered them in the 1970s, preferring more prestigious and seemingly non-partisan .

Without paying to read the report, it is impossible to see if objectivity gets a look in. But the press release isn’t promising. It tells us:

“Annual renewable capacity additions have been outpacing nuclear start-ups for 15 years. In the United States, the share of renewables in new capacity additions skyrocketed from 2 per cent in 2004 to 55 per cent in 2009, with no new nuclear capacity added.”

The release implies that this is a black mark against nuclear power. It is, of course, no such thing, merely a reflection of the fact that Lovins, Patterson and the Worldwatch Institute have been very successful in stirring up trouble for half a century. These are, after all, bright people who know how to sell a line, not to mention themselves. we even have the report’s author, Mycle Schneider, billed as someone who has received an award that Worldwatch bills as “Alternative Nobel Prize”, thereby adding fake gravitas to something that will be unfamiliar to most readers.

Had the opponents of nuclear power not been able to run rings around a pathetic nuclear industry for all that time, who knows how many reactors might be out there, reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

The same argument applies to the other statistics that Worldwatch seems to think are a telling case against nuclear power, rather than an indictment of their own role in creating an environment that is conducive to the Japanese nuclear industry’s incompetent management of events like Fukushima.

Fukushima may have killed off nuclear power, but its death will have nothing to do with the fact that “In 2010, for the first time, worldwide cumulative installed capacity from wind turbines, biomass, waste-to-energy, and solar power surpassed installed nuclear capacity.”

Who calls the shots at the Research Councils?

2011-03-20T15:04:00.001Z

The UK’s Research Councils regularly have to fight off accusations, especially from academics, that they hand out money to satisfy the whims of their political paymasters. “Never,” say the councils, “we decide where to invest on the basis of requests from the research community and peer review.” in this way, the RCs argue that they don’t decide where to spend the money, they leave it to the country’s academics to tell them where it should go.

Somehow, this reasoning falls apart when politicians leap at every opportunity to claim credit for any spending.

Take last week’s announcements about money for research into manufacturing.

It seems reasonable enough for the government, in the shape of Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, and the Deputy Prime Minister, probably Nick Clegg, although the press release that went with the announcement forgets to give him a name check, to take the credit for “the country’s first Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC)”, the High Value Manufacturing TIC. The TICs and the body that is set to run these operations, the Technology Strategy Board, are undeniably children of BIS. But claims of independence in research funding begin to evaporate when another member of the government, David Willetts, boasts of putting money into manufacturing via the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The suspicions begins when the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the playground of Cable and Willetts, puts out a press release proclaiming “A £51 million investment to ensure the UK stays at the leading edge of manufacturing research was unveiled today by Universities and Science Minister David Willetts”. The release compounds the suspicions of government influence when it goes on to say “The announcement forms part of the Advanced Manufacturing strand of the Government’s Growth Review and will help stimulate growth through research in the most promising areas of manufacturing including pharmaceuticals, aerospace and the automotive industry.”

It may well be that EPSRC came up with this plan all on its own. But, unlike the announcement about the TICs, there is no mention of an EPSRC press contact in the release. The EPSRC doesn’t seem to have anything to say about the announcement. Its own website merely regurgitates the piece from BIS. There isn’t even a quote from anyone at EPSRC that lazy “churnalists” can recycle.

Perhaps EPSRC’s silence is another symptom of the government’s current embargo on spending on publicity and other extraneous “fluff”, which prevents Research Councils from putting money into promotional activities. If so, this throws an interesting light on that embargo: maybe it has nothing to do with saving money after all, but is a way in which the government can hog the limelight.

Researchers to be assessed on engagement

2011-02-25T14:23:00.001Z

Starting a new project – for a university with the sense to realise that some editorial input would beef up some case studies – I had to check out on the plans for the Research Excellence Framework. (REF has taken over from the Research Assessment Exercise as a way of judging academic researchers before handing out money.) The next exercise continues the pursuit of evidence of ‘impact’, the idea that research doesn’t just sit on a shelf but has some tangible effect, economic or otherwise, on society.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the people behind REF, conducted a pilot run of impact case studies last year. It recently put on its website Research Excellence Framework impact pilot exercise: Findings of the expert panels a “report to the UK higher education funding bodies by the chairs of the impact pilot panels”.

While much of the report is about the usual things you would think of as impact, it also mentions “public engagement”. It says that in the prototype case studies that universities put forward “Panels received a number of case studies of benefits arising from engaging the public with research and we consider that this should be included as an appropriate kind of ‘impact’ in the REF.”

This prompted the report’s authors to recommend that the REF exercise “should include benefits arising from engaging the public with research.” It then went on to flesh this out with the observation that the case studies should:

“Show a distinctive contribution of the department’s research to that public engagement activity.”

and

“Make a case for the benefits arising from the public engagement activity. This must go beyond showing how the research was disseminated.”

Explicit statements like this are important. Researchers may pay lip service to the idea that they communicate their work to the public, the source of their research funds after all, but they will quickly forget about this in their pursuit of the next paper. But academics are also good at playing the game. Tell them that the minister for science is interested in spin-out companies – that really happened a few years ago – and they will suddenly list all of the businesses that they started, regardless of how successful they were. adding public engagement to the mix may be yet another box to tick, but at least it draws the academics’ attention to something that it is all too easy to overlook.

No, Nuance, I am not a software pirate

2011-02-24T17:56:00.002Z

Software companies have every right to protect their wares. It costs millions to develop a new program and to keep it at the ‘bleeding edge’. But I don't see why unsuspecting users should have to put up with their incompetent attempts to stop piracy.

One company in particular seems to be so sloppy in its defence mechanism that you have to wonder about its software writing skills. That company is Nuance, the crew behind some reasonably heavyweight software tools.

Over the years Nuance has brought together: OmniPage, which does optical character recognition; PaperPort, which does file management and document scanning; PDF Converter Professional, which some might describe as a budget conscious alternative to Adobe’s Acrobat; and Dragon Naturally Speaking, probably the most widely used speech recognition package you will find.

I have the misfortune to own all of these, a bundle that costs more than $600 at Amazon prices, more if bought direct from Nuance, or in other countries, where the usual software trend prevails with predatory pricing of the $1 = £1 variety. Each software package fulfils its intended task pretty well. What they don't do is to work together harmoniously when it comes to piracy control.

Activation aggravation

Nuance uses a familiar approach to software protection, something called activation: its software “phones home” when you install the software, checks your serial number against its database and then, it if it is satisfied that you are a legitimate customer, does something magical with your computer to tell it that you are not a criminal.

Microsoft and Adobe both use a similar strategy. They do, though, implement it in a way that is usually unobtrusive and that does not throw a hissy fit whenever you do something to your computer.
Microsoft, for example, uses activation for its Windows operating system and for its Office suite. After the initial installation, most people will see the process again only if they rebuild a computer and want to reuse the same serial number.

Soft on hardware

Microsoft’s official line on hardware changes is “When you make a significant hardware change to your computer, such as upgrading the hard disk and memory at the same time, you might be required to activate Windows again.”

Do anything less drastic and you won’t be bothered. Add a new hard drive? No problem. Plug in an external drive? Fine by us. Upgrade the ‘BIOS’, the core code that tells it what it can do, on your motherboard? We don't need to know about it.

Nuance, on the other hand, throws a wobbly if you try any of these things. Like Microsoft, Nuance takes a ‘fingerprint’ of your computer’s hardware. As the support person put it “The BIOS update changes the machine fingerprint and our Nuance application activation is based on the machine fingerprint.” Other small changes will also alter your machine’s fingerprint to such an extent that Nuance treats these modifications as suspicious. So the software scurries off to check out its database.

Why Nuance needs to take a more complete and sensitive fingerprint of your hardwarethan Microsoft or Adobe is anybody’s guess. But that is only the half of it. If you have a mixture of the packages listed above, adding them in the wrong order can lead you into a perpetual cycle of activation.

You are running PaperPort? Fine, now add PDF Converter Professional and PaperPort thinks you have rebuilt your computer. Now add OmniPage and the whole pack of cards comes tumbling down around your head. Do just about anything and PDF 7 Pro will protest.

The workaround advice that you will receive from support is “Please uninstall the application in the following sequence: 1.Paperport; 2.Pdf Pro; 3.Omnipage; 4.Reinstall Omnipage first then PDF 7 Pro and Paperport”? Isn't it an admission of failure to have to offer such nonsense?

Support collapses

The problem with this is that, after a while, the computer back at base decides that you are a criminal and locks you out. You can no longer use the software that you have paid good money to install on your computer.

Yes, there is an on-line support system, but activation issues aren’t a part of it: in any case you get only 90 days of “free” support. Even if you do manage to get support to take pity on you and answer, they don't seem to see the point. The response is along the lines of “that’s how it works, get used to it”.

Something similar happened a few years ago when Adobe unleashed Acrobat 7 on the world. It too got locked into an endless loop of activation. Raising this with their support team evoked a very different response. They saw the point, understood the issue and put in train a repair mechanism. Adobe event sent a new CD that was supposed to deal with the issue, which turned out to have something to do with motherboards that included RAID, a fancy feature for people who want to do clever security things with several hard disks. The disk didn't work, but by the time it arrived Adobe had tracked down the source of the problem and put out an update the squelched the activation messages.

By contrast, even though Nuance received reports about the problem near on a year ago, during the beta tests of the latest version of PDF Converter Professional, the company remains in denial.

What can a customer do about this? Nagging them obviously doesn't work. So I have reviewed the product on places like Amazon, praising the software but warning potential customers of these activation concerns. The responses suggest that the review has hit a nerve. It has also smoked out others hit by this diseased software.

Not just me

Just in case anyone thinks that this is a one off, brought about by my own constant tinkering with a computer that I built myself, look no further than the places where people, some of them fans of Nuance’s software, get together to compare notes. Activation and the problems it provokes come up regularly. Other users have also copied me in on email exchanges with Nuance’s support team showing that they have also tried to get to the bottom of this insane behaviour, with little luck.

Nuance’s response in these cases is dismal. Unlike Adobe, its first reaction is to say there’s nothing wrong, that’s how it is supposed to work. You get the same denial if you point out that these four software packages don't all behave in the same way, and did Nuance really set out to be inconsistent?

Nuance needs to address this issue properly, and not to fob off users with complicated and time consuming workarounds. My first question on this through the official support channels dates from 21^st June last year, but as I said this issue also came up during beta testing of PDF Converter Professional. Does it really take that long to chase up whoever wrote that particular feature and to get them to do something about it?

TIC’d off by the name

2010-12-17T18:52:00.000Z

One idea that survived this year’s change of government in the UK is that of the, er, what do we call them? Technology and Innovation Centres? Maxwell Centres?

Both names, it seems, have bitten the dust. No one likes the idea of TICs – it was, after all, coined for the previous administration and that bête noir Peter Mandleson.

As to Maxwell Centres, another idea that was rattling around, the physicists, in the shape of the Institute of Physics complained that if you must steal the great man’s name then you should use the whole mouthful. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the media, for one, would adopt the tag James Clerk Maxwell Centres. So the people in charge of the creation process, the Technology Strategy Board, have been going into huddles to come up with clever names.

The idea of these centres arises from Herman Hauser’s report on innovation in the UK, The Current and Future Role of Technology and Innovation Centres in the UK. Borrowing the idea of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes, Hauser wanted TICs, as he labelled them, to “act as the bridge between research and the commercialisation of new ideas by business”.

The need arises because over the years other places that filled this role have faded into oblivion. The research associations have been privatised, the companies that arose out of the nationalised industries no longer run large R&D centres, so not railway research centre, BT’s Martlesham lab is a shadow of its former self and essentially a software a machine for the company, while energy businesses have abandoned R&D in the UK.

Universities can't, and don’t want to, do the sort of work involved in taking bright ideas from discovery to technology. And when it comes to the physical sciences that underpin much of manufacturing, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) doesn't have the research centres of, say, the Medical Research Council and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

The government plans to put £200 million into TICs. Word has it that there should have been an announcement about the first of these before the Christmas recess. This seems to have been buried in the snow that has brought the UK to a halt. Or maybe they really are stumped for ideas as to what to call the things.

What’s in a name? Is it an academic question?

2010-08-11T14:24:00.003+01:00

Headline writers can be lazy, resorting to such words as 'boffin' to label scientists. It doesn't help when the people who write press releases collude in the inappropriate use of language, especially labels.

Take the press release "Southampton academics investigate effects of lightning strikes on aircraft". It may come from one of the best, and most media savvy, research groups in its subject area in the UK, but that headline and the first sentence seem to miss out on the subtle undertones of the 'academic' word.

It says: "An academic at the University of Southampton is studying the potential for damage posed by lightning for carbon fibre composites (CFCs) which are increasingly being used in aircraft manufacture, with a view to reducing damage and minimising repair costs."

Engineers constantly moan that their title is abused by people who mend washing machines. The person quoted in the release works in the Electrical Power Engineering Research Group. Doesn't this make him an engineer? If the issue is to avoid the 'mechanic' taint, why not call the researcher just that, a researcher?

This is, by the way, an interesting story, albeit one that surfaces fairly regularly. Nothing wrong with that, it is how research happens.

So, farewell then Susan Greenfield

2010-04-16T11:24:00.005+01:00

The recent turmoil at the Royal Institution has sparked off some thoughtful comments by people who know what they are talking about. One such came from Professor Colin Blakemore in The Times. When I tried to add these comments to the article, they vanished into the ether, perhaps because they are too long and rambling. So, here they are, for others to judge, should anyone be interested in the views from someone who was around at the time.

As Colin Blakemore says, the Bodmer report lit a bomb under what some of us call the Public Engagement in Science and Technology (PEST) movement. (It started of as "Public Understanding", but that was deemed to be too patronising.) The report led to COPUS, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, which brought together the Royal Society (RS), British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) and Royal Institution (RI) in what could have been a powerhouse for public communication.

The first two organisations went into overdrive. Even the Royal Society, ostensibly the stuffier of the three, became really enthusiastic about PEST. Other players, such as the Science Museum and the Wellcome Trust, picked up ideas and made them work. The RI sat on its hands.

Unlike the BA and RS, which were led by people who made their enthusiasm for public engagement clear to anyone who would listen, especially if they had money to hand out, those then in charge at the RI had little time for PESTs. They still saw the RI as a quiet haven in the middle of London for world leading researchers that would deliver yet more Nobel Prizes. That is why they rejected attempts to engineer a merger between the RI and the BA, then less healthy than it is now, and to develop the RI's buildings.

The RS remains stuck in overdrive on all fronts, proving that good science and public engagement can coexist and even feed off one an other. The BA, in its new home, and with its new name, the British Science Association (BSA), no longer needs the RI.

Does anyone?

Even after a decade with a leader who rejected the stuffier view of science, the RI as a whole, rather than its director, hasn't achieved the visibility that its excellent work deserves and that could have attracted financial backing.

The RI's biggest asset is its building. It may also be its biggest liability. But without the buildings it might as well hand its various PEST activities over to the RS or BA.

Visit the "members' rooms" at the learned societies and you will soon see that there is a real need for a venue in London where scientists who are not eminent enough to be allowed into the Royal Society can while away an hour or two and grab a bite and perhaps rub shoulders with an interested public.

Would a Groucho Club for scientists make money? Perhaps in the longer term. But is there time?

Why put links to "paid for" papers

2010-04-15T11:11:00.001+01:00

Once again, a press release has a link to a paper that you have to pay to read. No less than $30!

For a US Government lab, this is pretty rich.

It really doesn't make sense to put out this sort of thing.

Maybe there will be an accessible copy over on the password protected area of EurekAlert! But I am not holding my breath.

in reference to:

"A copy of the Nano Letters paper “Direct Chemical Vapor Deposition of Graphene on Dielectric Surfaces” can be viewed here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl9037714"
- Graphene Films Clear Major Fabrication Hurdle « Berkeley Lab News Center (view on Google Sidewiki)

The RI and its director – history rewritten

2010-01-11T09:38:00.005Z

It has taken the kerfuffle at the Royal Institution to wake me up here. Reading the growing flood of material on the current state of the RI, and the redundancy notice handed out to Baroness Susan Greenfield, suggests that some people seem to have forgotten their history.

Baroness Greenfield has been in the job so long – can it really be 11 years? – that some of the younger bloggers commenting on the saga were probably still at school when she became director. For this reason we can forgive them for not knowing about the history of the RI before the regime of Professor Greenfield, as she still was until 2001.

You cannot apply the same excuse to Professor Lisa Jardine, who was, as the Guardian reminds us, a former member of the RI's governing council. The newspaper quotes Jardine as saying of RI directors "It has been always a charismatic scientist supported by a membership."

This is not the case. There have been some charismatic scientists in charge, perhaps most notably Professor Sir George Porter, who was eminent enough not just to be elected to the Royal Society, but to be, at one time, both the President of the RS and the Director of the RI. But there have been some directors of recent memory who were fine scientists but who were at the back of the queue when they handed out the charisma gene.

While this hardly changes the goings on at the RI, it could be seen as rewriting history, something that you would not expect of Professor Jardine.

As an observer of the RI for more than a quarter of a century, and at one time a member of a committee advising on its future, it has always struck me as an odd place. Down in the depths of the venerable old building, a prime site in the middle of London, they carried out experiments that would horrify some health and safety zealots, what with all those gas cylinders.

More important than the safety was the puzzle about its status as a research organisation. It just didn't make much sense in today's scientific environment. The RI got away with it simply because it was the RI.

For years, the quality of that research was undeniable. That is partly because of the eminence of the director. This probably explained the RI's ability to attract research funds.

But scientific eminence does not guarantee charisma or an ability to fulfil the RI's other role, as a place for public engagement in science. Some directors failed hopelessly on that front. So it is misleading to suggest that all directors managed to balance scientific excellence with public engagement.

The evidence of this failure shows in the RI's contribution to the late but not much lamented Committee on the Public Understanding of Science. (I should declare an interest here, I was one of the first members of this body.) COPUS, which grew out of the Bodmer report of 1985 on the public understanding of science, existed in part to bring together the Royal Society, the Royal Institution and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), as the British Science Association was then known.

Before COPUS, the BA was really the brand leader on public engagement in science and technology (PEST), as this activity is now known. Before COPUS, the RS was itself pretty stuffy and far from a leading player in public engagement. But it soon learned how to improve its PESTery, thanks partly to the enthusiasm of Sir George and his willingness to take the RS in that direction.

The BA also became more dynamic and forged ahead in the PEST arena. The RI somehow seemed to miss out on the game. That all changed significantly during Baroness Greenfield's regime.

Quite how much of the improvement in the RI's work on PEST is due to Greenfield is for others to decide. I haven't been as closely involved in events as I once was. So it would be unwise to comment on the current kerfuffle. But anyone who does feel the urge to write about it might find it useful to look at the history of the RI.

As the accounts of recent events remind us, the RI's history is long. This year it marks 200 years "as a member organisation". That history precedes by centuries the era of the internet. It is, therefore, beyond the reach of Google. A proper understanding of even the RI's relatively recent past needs a somewhat old fashioned approach to research which almost certainly involves reading bits of paper.

About about

2009-08-04T14:07:00.000+01:00

Whatever you think about the new innovation investment fund that the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS), you can't admire their use of words. Take their latest announcement, Government’s Uk Innovation Investment Fund Takes Shape.

The press release does its job, but the "Notes to editors" perpetrate one of those crimes against English that can upset pedants. It says:

There are about 1,093 venture capital backed technology companies in the UK employing over 40,000 highly skilled people.

About 1,093? There really is no point in attaching 'about' to something that definitive. Either it is 1,093 or it is about 1,100.

There are several reason why 'about 1,093' doesn't make sense. The first is that the number is current for a very short period, until the next one comes along. Then there is the problem that the number was probably never really that accurate, at least not in terms of the official statistics, which are bound to miss one or two businesses.

Lost in transition

2009-04-24T17:52:00.002+01:00

That's it. I have had enough of this mangling of the language. It is time to point the finger at the guilty parties, starting with Frost & Sullivan.

This usually intelligent bunch of people cannot hide their roots in management land, where clear writing has never been the name of the game, as the ever excellent Lucy Kellaway points out every week in the Financial Times.

The latest crime against clear writing comes in the article North American Battery Manufacturing Trends. This item is one of a continuing series of excellent briefs on important subjects that Frost & Sullivan puts out regularly. Any journalist following technology would do well to sign up for access to these free reports.

The service would be a lot better if the articles were written in English. For example, why on earth do they have to write in this short report "Historically, battery manufacturing has transitioned away from the U.S. and Canada towards regions that offer lower production and capital costs, and higher governmental incentives"?

Transitioned? They mean moved. If you want to use a longer word to describe this simple process, try migrated.

Repeat after me, Frost & Sullivan, transition is not a verb. If the word transition is dear to you, and has some special meaning in the world of batteries, the phrase you are looking for is "made the transition".

The trouble with this sort of language is that it makes you look at the rest of the article. So you ask yourself, what can they mean when they say "North America has been cultivating battery innovation and advancement for years"? What sort of fertiliser do they use?

Then you start to look at how the company describes itself. Frost & Sullivan, we read, is "the Growth Partnership Company". What does that mean?

It gets worse. The next bit of the description of the business says that it "partners with clients to accelerate their growth". Partners with? Do they mean "works with"? Or is there something kinky going on here?

It would be all to easy to go on, and on and on and on, about this sort of drivel. (Frost & Sullivan's "services empower clients to create a growth-focused culture that generates, evaluates, and implements effective growth strategies".) Instead, perhaps it would be better to offer them some editorial support, paid for, of course, they are consultants, after all. It wouldn't take a decent writer very long to eliminate the most egregious crimes against the language.

Forgotten travellers are a mental challenge

2009-02-24T15:36:00.003Z

Ever arrived at a strange railway station or airport terminal and wondered what the heck you are supposed to do? Spare a thought, then, for people "with cognitive impairment and those with mental health problems”. The chaos and confusion can be even worse for them, as I found when working up the item Forgotten travellers for my IET transport slot.

Prompted by a report from the OECD's International Transport Forum, Cognitive Impairment, Mental Health and Transport, the story concerns the design and operation of transport systems in a way that makes them easier to navigate. Information has to be simple and easier to pick out from stuff that doesn't matter.

The real message for me is that make life easier for this segment of the population, one that is growing as there are more older folks around with declining mental powers, and travel also becomes easier for the rest of us.

Useless PDF files

2009-02-09T15:58:00.001Z

I was looking forward to writing about the CBI's recent survey of companies and their attitudes to R&D tax credits. In the end, the piece I wrote, Would you tax credit it?, over on Science|Business was less than it might have been.

That is because whoever produced the report over at the CBI decided that it was too sensitive to allow anyone to copy text out of the PDF file. This removed the possibility of copying quotes out of the document.
We all know about selective quotes, but this is counterproductive.

Surely the CBI would not prefer to have journalists type the quotes. That is a good way of adding mistakes to reports of your work.

This is not the first time I have come across PDF files with a "chastity belt". Indeed, I have encountered the ultimate here in the shape of press releases that you can't copy.

When you point this out to people, they are often as surprised as the recipient. They did not ask for this level of security, which should be a lesson to anyone responsibvle for culculating PDF files. Check that the audience can get at the content.

EU meddles in transport research

2009-02-05T11:18:00.001Z

The EU comes in for plenty of stick from the media. One area, though, that has attracted little vilification from the Daily Mail and other Europhobes is its support for R&D. This is surprising given the amount of money that Brussels hands out. For example, over at The IET I have a few details of the €1 billion that the EU has committed to the European Green Car Initiative alone.

It isn't just cars that Brussels wants improved. Trains are in there too, with some signs of significant success.

Take ERTMS, the European Railway Traffic Management System. As I wrote in an earlier piece, by creating a new standard for railway signalling, and supporting development of the technology, the EU hasn't just eased the flow of trains through Europe, it has put the indigenous signalling companies in a position to flog systems to the likes of China and India.

Business with the right chemistry

2009-02-05T10:56:00.001Z

Ludwigshafen, home of BASF, the German chemical company, may not be the most bucolic location but the company's R&D facilities there are impressive. At least, they were when I last had a trip to join one of BASF's PR jollies.

Now we have some insights into the philosophy that currently underpins their R&D effort. BASF is into clusters. But as I say on Science|Business, the company's clusters are not the geographical variety that many observers of the R&D scene would recognise.

The real message is that BASF is one of a number of large technically advanced businesses that continues to spend oodles on R&D, even in these times of economic gloom. It is also interesting to see the company talking about adapting its research strategy rather than banging on about changes in its business structure.

Maybe it BASF does that too, but having seen other chemical companies go down the pan as they constantly restructure their business, while steadfastly saying nothing about research, it is encouraging to see them openly recognising the value of R&D.

Can R&D save the world's economy?

2009-01-31T10:54:00.001Z

Buried in all the hand wringing about the collapse of the economy as we know it, a handful of folks are pushing for an economic revival built on technology, on R&D and brain power. The notion has even made it into corporate PR, as I found in the usual scour for ideas to feed LabNotes on Science|Business.

Ray O’Connor, president and CEO of a company that "designs and manufactures precise positioning products and solutions for the global surveying, construction, agriculture, civil engineering, mapping and GIS, asset management and mobile control markets," Topcon Positioning Systems, decided to have a rant in his "State of the Industry Message" about the need to continue spending on R&D even when the economy is at death's door. He is not alone, which is why it was worth writing R&D rides the recessionary bandwagon.

Mix messages in R&D Scoreboard

2009-01-26T14:52:00.001Z

The UK R&D Scoreboard always provides a lead for a piece on Science|Business. This time there wasn't even any need to read the report to get the ball rolling. (That can come later.) The R&D Society raised enough questions about the numbers to spark off the piece, Scoreboard delivers mixed message.

It seems that the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills concentrated on the top of the table when writing its press release. The R&D Society noticed that the "increase" in R&D spending by smaller companies was actually less than inflation.

Can technology save Detroit?

2009-01-23T14:09:00.001Z

Motor shows aren't my cup of tea. I went to the London show once, and even managed to write a story. It was about some fancy electronic diagnostic system that Volkswagen was pushing out into the dealers that serviced its vehicles.

That was a long time ago. But even then it was pretty obvious that Detroit, the city that gave as the mass produced motor car, was behind the curve when it came to adopting technology.

Japan threw technology at making cars. It also began the arms race of adding technologically inspired bits and pieces to make cars more attractive to buyers.

European car makers were no slouch when it came to technology. Wasn't it Audi that gave us the "vorsprung der technik" slogan?

Detroit simply didn't feature in the technology game, as you found when you went to the USA and hired one of the cars made there. But now we have the leaders of the American motor industry calling for the US government to help to fund the adoption of technology, as I found when writing my latest rant for the IET, Can technology save Detroit?

Much of the enthusiasm for technology hinges on the electric car, which both Chevrolet and Ford talked about long and loud at this years Detroit car show, inevitably labelled the "North American International Auto Show".

Americans generally have more enthusiasm for new technology than Europeans, but when it comes to cars, they don't seem to have the same love of the new, or of the environmentally responsible. So Detroit may have a hard time selling this particular package to customers even if the government buys the sales pitch.

Decongestion is not for Manchester

2009-01-20T18:06:00.001Z

While many people are happy to proclaim their green credentials, ask them to vote for measures that might actually achieve something and they seem less convinced. Voting for congestion charging, for example, brings out dirtier tendencies.

Working on a comment piece for the IET's "Transport sector," The wrong medicine to clear congestion, turned up evidence that even Swedes, often seen to be greener than many, will reject such proposals.

When asked for their views on congestion charging in Stockholm, there was a narrow vote for the idea in the middle of the city, but suburban Swedes were heavily against the idea.

As an aside, these commuters would not have had a chance to vote under the original plan. It was only when surrounding municipalities decided to hold polls that the rest of the region got a chance to vote on the plan.

In the event, Stockholm got its congestion charge because it was down to the parliament to make the final decision. That should be a lesson to others who want to implement green measures.

As in London, the charge brought positive benefits. But it seems unlikely that this will carry any weight with voters in other cities.

Research in magic circles

2009-01-20T10:08:00.001Z

It is interesting to see how companies change their models of working with academics. One recent development, most visibly promulgated by Rolls-Royce, is the "university technology centre". UTCs, as Rolls-Royce dubs them, are big university teams with the company as the "sole proprietor". These centres work on specific issues that appeal to the company.

Originally a British phenomenon. RR now has UTCs all over the world. For example, one of the most recent, number 25, is in Darmstadt, where the Technical University in Darmstadt has a UTC that specialises in "the aerothermal interaction between the combustor and turbine".

Now we have a new variation on the theme. Well, GE Healthcare says it is new, but I gather that the late lamented chemical giant ICI did this sort of thing years ago. The new model is the "research circle," which I can across when writing about it for Science|Business, Research in magic circles.

Instead of a fragmented web of bilateral arrangements with dozens of different academic groups the company sets up a club of academics who work on different aspects of a subject. In this case the subject is a promising new way of doing magnetic resonance imaging, bringing it into the realm of "live" analysis of how drags treat cancer, for example.

Today the world, tomorrow New York

2008-04-03T15:55:00.000+01:00

When is a World Science Festival not a world science festival? When it is, in reality, the New York Science Festival. So, treat with caution the announcement: World Science Festival: A Universe of Science in New York City, May 28 - June 1, 2008.

It turns out to be the science festival equivalent of the World Series, which is, of course, nothing of the sort, just an obscure ball game run in a country that has had its day.

The World Science Festival "will take place from May 28th through June 1st, 2008 at 15 venues throughout New York City, many in the Washington Square Area of Greenwich Village". Nothing wrong with that. But you will struggle hard to find anything in the proposed programme that yells out "world".

If I lived in San Francisco, or even Boston, north American cities with genuine scientific stature, I would be a bit miffed. Don't even talk about London, Oxford or Cambridge, to pick a few nearer to home.

Science journalism through a telescope

2008-01-20T15:01:00.000Z

For many years, the excellent Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has spasmodically picked over the entrails of journalism . Science journalism has featured in its pages many a time. this aspect now has a blog, The Observatory, in which Curtis Brainard sets out to "to critique the coverage of science and the environment".

The "manifesto" for this new slot tells us that "The science desks at our nation’s newspapers are shrinking or disappearing, just as the number of foreign bureaus and correspondents, investigative teams, and other costly (and thus “expendable”) facets of the journalistic enterprise have been shrinking to bolster profit margins." In their place we have "a vast array of Web sites and blogs [that have] emerged in recent years to crank out a daily torrent of scientific, environmental, and medical news and information".

Some would argue with the assertion that "To a certain extent, these new gateways are making up for the loss of traditional platforms for science news." As Dave Tebbutt, a writer on IT rather than science has said in his own blog, much of blogdom is "ego-driven dross". Science blogs are not immune to this all too accurate observation.

The propensity of bloggers to drivel, and Brainard's spot on view of the decline of mainstream science journalism, reinforce the need for something like The Observatory. In his note launching the slot, Brainard says that:

"The Observatory will monitor science journalism - covering the coverage - with an eye toward improving the journalism and thereby improving the discourse. It will be a guide to the best and worst of science and environmental journalism; it will tell you where the press excels and makes bold innovations. And it will point out where it falls victim to spin, engages in alarmism, perpetrates false balance, misrepresents the science in peer-reviewed literature, or displays questionable priorities in news judgment."

You have to admire anyone who sets out with such high ambitions as "improving the journalism". To achieve this, if blogs really are taking over from journalism, let us hope that Brainard finds time to criticise them with the same rigour.

It might be nice if CJR also looked beyond the USA. They may have turned science journalism into a recognised profession, and something that you can actually study at degree level, but their style of journalism is not the same as that practised elsewhere on the planet. That's not a value judgement, just a fact of life.

While science journalists in other countries cannot fail to observe, and perhaps learn from, what goes on in the USA,
the insularity of the locals there suggests that this is unlikely to be a two-way process. Perhaps the CJR can bring this home to the locals from time to time.

Writing across the disciplines

2007-11-13T19:27:00.000Z

Science, the journal, walks a narrow line between accessibility and scientific rigour. Up front the articles are for all and sundry, well anyone with a smattering of, and an interest in, science. At the back of the paper it is heavy science.

The result of this balancing act, which Nature also manages, is that many readers can't penetrate much of the back half. The editors are well aware of this, which is why Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science, has tackled the subject in an editorial Approaching Science (vol. 318, issue 5851, p 715). He also introduced a new experiment and invited readers to respond.

Kennedy sums up the issue as follows "The language used in Reports and Research Articles is sufficiently technical and arcane that they are hard to understand, even for those in related disciplines." No one would disagree with his assertion that "accessibility is a problem". And it is getting worse, as subjects become ever more arcane. "Each specialty has focused in to a point at which even the occupants of neighboring fields have trouble understanding each others' papers."

The experiment? "Each Research Article published this week and in the next five issues will be preceded by a one-page 'Authors' Summary': an account, with one figure, of what the paper reports and what its conclusions are."

The approach that Science is taking matches the way I used to describe the approach that New Scientist took to its editing. Unashamedly written for scientists, but not so much so that a seriously interested "outside" would stumble, the line was that the physics, to pick a discipline at random, was there for geneticists, for example, and vice versa.

Kennedy takes a similar tack in describing Science's experiment. "Our plan is for summaries of papers in physical science fields to be reviewed by our life-sciences editors and vice versa."

The objective is laudable,m if ambitious. "The one-page summary is intended to make clear what the investigators did, how it was done, what the result was, and its significance."

It would be wonderful if every scientific journal went down the same road. But there just aren't enough literate scientists out there. Nor enough science journalists and editors to help them with the task.

Anyone interested in this experiment can catch up on the papers that have received this treatment over on the relevant bit of the Science web site.

Let's hope it catches on. In these web enhanced days, it would be a great add on for the electronic versions of journals. No need to soil paper with the summaries. They could even make them freely available to people who do not subscribe to their journals. But that may be a step too far for the money machine that is scientific publishing.

Twisted DNA experts

2007-10-28T15:14:00.000Z

James Watson firmly planted his foot into his mouth recently, with his comments about race and intelligence. This should, though, surprise no one. It certainly would not surprise Clive Cookson, who recently reviewed Watson's latest book in the Financial Times.

In his review, Gene genies, Cookson writes "There is something almost otherworldly about Watson, as if he does not know what effect he is having on people." Having sat through a rambling and provocative talk by Watson, I can only agree. The man may have won a Nobel Prize, but he is also a loose cannon.

The publicity will have done nothing to harm sales of Watson's book, but perhaps the biggest beneficiary will be Craig Venter and his own book. All of a sudden, this "renegade scientist" looks like a good guy.

By a coincidence that almost smacks of collusion between the publishers, Venter and Watson were both in the UK with their new books to promote. (Cookson reviews both books.) It was Watson's own book tour that blew up in his face, leaving Venter to hog the airways.

The FT isn't the only newspaper to commission joint of the two books. The Guardian also commissioned an omnibus review, Learning the lessons of life, this time from Georgina Ferry. The Guardian tells us that Ferry is "the author of Max Perutz and the Secret of Life" – a good read, by the way – but it fails to mention the book she wrote in collaboration with Sir John Sulston, who also collected a Nobel prize for his work on gene sequencing, a subject that is central to the work of both Venter and Watson.

Ferry and Sulston collaborated on "The Common Thread" an excellent account of the race to sequence the human genome. This described how Sulston and Venter were at daggers drawn, with the former horrified by the latter's commercial approach to the scientific challenge. Given her closeness to the story, it is perhaps not surprising that Ferry is not quite as gushing as Cookson about Venter's role in the story.

He advised Mrs Thatcher so he must be right

2007-08-25T10:57:00.000+01:00

You have to be desperate to quote a clapped out advisor to Mrs Thatcher in support of your argument. When that person, Lord Monckton, is also a hereditary peer, and a retired journalist and "inventor" to boot, that desperation becomes terminal. But that is just what they do over at the grandly named Science and Public Policy Institute, SPPI, which has just published Papers by British Peer Disprove Catastrophic Human-Induced Global Warming and "Consensus".

Plenty of people have weighed in to dismember the peer's ideas. The puzzling bit for me is that an organisation should feel that advising Mrs Thatcher and being a "Lord" adds weight to their views. Both could equally be signs of eccentricity, or something even more deranged.

The idea that such a person can "disprove" all the stuff we read about climate change must also raise doubts about the credibility of SPPI. It seems that anyone can throw a bunch of grand words into its title and some people out there will take it seriously.

The problem with this set of initials, well, one of the problems, is that its title is awfully similar to a once credible outfit, the Scientists' Institute for Public Information. SIPI was in on the public engagement game, and in "educating" the media, long before the current bandwagon hit the road.

Would you report on Nature Precedings?

2007-08-06T18:11:00.000+01:00

The recent discussion about journals and their love of embargoes looks slightly strange in the light of the development of services such as Nature Precedings. This new web site describes itself as "a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents".

The description goes on to say that something called their "professional curation team" will screen submissions "for relevance and quality". But there will be no peer review.

The site seems to be a scientific version of "Digg" and the many other social networks that encourage members to vote on submissions. Nature Precedings has a place for "Most popular submissions". When we looked the hot paper, with 32 votes, was Henry Niman's "Swine Influenza A Evolution via Recombination – Genetic Drift Reservoir".

They offer RSS feeds so that you don't have to go and visit the web site to see what is happening. But how should science writers respond to this sort of thing? Are the papers "legit" enough to warrant coverage.

Friends over at AlphaGalileo used to tell me that in most of Europe science writers will not cover anything that has not been peer reviewed. How will they take to such a development when it emanates from a publishing outfit as prestigious as Nature?

The FAQ for the service says that the aim is "to share, archive and cite material that is preliminary or supplementary". You could, they say, use it as a "preprint server". Here they are following the lead of arXiv.org, which has done this sort of thing for years. This is also why Nature does not accept stuff on physics, perhaps fearful that people would see this as the heavy hand of a commercial outfit trying to respond to the open access movement.

The FAQ does not explicitly deal with media coverage, but it does say that "the content may be quoted, copied and disseminated for any purpose, but only if the original source is correctly cited". Maybe this would be an insurmountable barrier for the many newspapers that refuse to provide full details of authorship and publication when they write about papers.

Foot-in-mouth disease

2007-08-05T15:36:00.000+01:00

The whole world, if the news coverage is anything to go by, is probably beating its way to the door of the Institute for Animal Health, whose laboratory at Pirbright is implicated in the spread of the UK's latest outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). But click on that link and you will find that Pirbright has yet to wake up to the fact that we all want to read about FMD.

The page in question is headed "Disease factsheets". It is blank and, like the rest of the "new" web site, has a copyright date of 2006. In stead they urge visitors to "Click here to visit our old site." Follow the link and you can retrieve a file about Foot-and-mouth disease. The documents is sadly thin on useful details. Far better to read the pages on Wikipedia.

It would be unfair to expect the web weaver at the Institute for Animal Health to drop everything and rewrite the web site when news of the latest outbreak of the disease hit the headlines late on Friday evening, especially in the August holiday period. But there doesn't seem to be any sign that anyone at this institute or its paymaster, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is awake.

There is nothing on the BBSRC's home page or on its news page. The least they could have done would have been to post a link to the pages of the government department that is picking up the pieces.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), has the story at the top of its front page. This takes you to a constantly updated statement.

One thing you will find at the BBSRC site is a PDF file of the most recent, 2002, review of Purbright. This tells us that:

"The condition of much of the Pirbright Laboratory, site infrastructure and associated housing is unsatisfactory and there is a clear need for urgent investment over the next five years in new laboratories and facilities. This should be part of a phased medium-term (10-year) rolling plan for the Pirbright Estate to be developed by the new Director with BBSRC and in consultation with DEFRA. We further recommend that IAH, in concert with BBSRC, develop a realistic and achievable plan for renovating its housing stock. We view these as urgent issues."

If there is any link between Pirsight and the current outbreak, the opposition parties are bound to beat up the Government for not responding to this statement. Such is the short term thinking of these people, and their poor knowledge of science, that they will ignore the fact that Pirbright's decline did not happen overnight, or even in the five years after the change of government.

It takes many years of neglect and underfunding to bring a laboratory to its knees. It then takes time to undo the damage. I bet they won't say that in the Daily Mail.

Are embargoes bad for science journalism?

2007-07-23T16:42:00.000+01:00

The former BBC science correspondents, David Whitehouse, is stirring up things with his piece in The Independent, Science reporting's dark secret. David does not like the embargo system. He is not alone, this is an issue that has cropped up here from time to time.

Just in case anyone does not understand how the system works, David explains that "many, though not all, journals that publish scientific research operate an embargo system. It involves sending out details to journalists provided they agree not to publish anything about them until the embargoed time."

It is David's line that the result of the system is that "science coverage can be indistinguishable across outlets". That's because everyone waits for the embargo to lapse and then shovels their articles into print. As David rightly says, the embargo system "encourages lazy reporting and props up poor correspondents".

Even within the journal system there are ways to avoid the pitfalls of the embargo system. You could read some of the lesser journals. Few put out press releases. Indeed, it is only a small coterie of the self-professed leading journals that indulge in this practice. It isn't even a long standing practice. The embargo really did not come into ots own until the 1980s.

While David makes much sense, as usual, he is wrong to finger the embargo system as the main cause of the problem. It is really down to something else that he describes when he writes: "With the embargo system and the arrival of the internet it's easy to churn out story after story, usually without leaving your desk."

It is this last factor that really kills good science journalism. many a science writer I have talked to spends little time out of the office. They just sit there, hunched over a steaming terminal, browsing the torrent of electronic information and plucking out of it the stories that will get by the news editor.

That is why we get what David describes when he writes "We have many fine science reporters in the UK but there are some poor ones that do little else but reproduce press releases and embargoed copy."

Leaving the office and visiting scientists in their own habitat makes the embargo system irrelevant. You talk to the researchers as they do their work. Most will tell you what they are up to, and you are free to write about it.

This is how Dolly first surfaced. Some say that this was down to a broken embargo, but in reality the writer had the story before that paper entered the system. As David writes: "It was The Observer, outside the embargo system, that got the scoop about Dolly the cloned sheep in 1997 even though thousands of other journalists worldwide already had the press release but couldn't talk about it for another four days."

If you really want to know what is really hot, go to a scientific conference or two. Forget about the two events that seem to appeal to journalists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. They provide nothing new.

Go to the specialist events and sit through the presentations. That is where you will hear about science that will not surface in the journals for a couple of years or so.

There are journals that will refuse to publish papers that have already appeared in the media. Well that is their threat. Someone should call their bluff.

BBC Trust takes an alternative line on medicine programmes

2007-07-17T22:59:00.000+01:00

The people who made the programmes "Alternative Medicine: The Evidence," broadcast at the beginning of 2006, may have dismissed viewers' objections, but the BBC Trust found at least some of Simon Singh's complaints to be justified. You can find the result of the Trust's adjudication on the Editorial complaints appeals findings page. Go for April.

Then again, the Trust backed the programme's makers on most of the complaints, which leads you to wonder why DC's IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page describes the findings as "excellent news". (Please, DC, do something about that cumbersome web page.) A better phrase might be "good news" given the partial nature of the "victory".

Yes, the BBC Trust did uphold two of the 10 complaints, but from DC's comments you would have thought that it was rapped knuckles all round.

Isn't this the sort of misreporting, and spin, that DC (David Colquhoun), who usually avoids such elephant traps, likes to excoriate?

As to the two bits that the Trust did find dubious, the "summary finding" sums up the issues with content:

"The programme, while making reference to the clinical drugs administered to the patient in the open-heart surgery, did not accurately reflect the effect of acupuncture on each occasion that the operation was referred to and implied incorrectly that acupuncture was being used as the sole source of pain relief. It agreed that this could have misled the audience and upheld the complaint with regard to accuracy."

The other complaint that the Trust upheld was not about the programme's content, but about the tactics that the programme makers used to fend off criticism. As the adjudication describes it the complaint was that:

"The BBC orchestrated a letter to The Guardian without being open about its role and fabricating some of the signatories. The complainant noted that the letter “gave the impression that this was a volley of independent scientists rallying to its defence”."

The Trust also upheld this one.

"The committee ... while acknowledging that the programme had a legitimate right to write and organise the letter to defend the series, agreed that it was wrong for them not to have acknowledged that the letter was from the BBC. The Committee therefore upheld the complaint on the grounds that the letter did not satisfy the requirement to deal with audiences fairly and openly."

This last finding seems to be a symptom of the same malaise that has caused the BBC's recent problems. As the Trust put it:

"The Committee’s view was that this breached trust with the audience. The Committee agreeing that it was important for all programme makers to deal fairly and openly with the audience."

Treating the audience with contempt, with fake phone ins and dodgy editing, is a great way to lose friends.

Borat's cousin mugs media

2007-07-14T21:39:00.000+01:00

The media have been at it again. Misrepresenting research results. This time it is research on autism. And research that has yet to be through the peer review machine.

In this Statement by Autism Expert, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, complains that the reporters "did not wait until the study was complete and had been through peer review, since this is considered good practice in science and health journalism".

You would have more sympathy for the prof. if some members of the academic community didn't use the peer review system as a PR machine. Professor Baron-Cohen, Sasha's cousin, may not be guilty of this crime, but enough science reporters have been frustrated by journals' abusing the system to make the whole thing a charade.

Scientists who refuse to comment on papers that are going through peer review, have only themselves to blame if the media gets it wrong. Of course, some journals don't help by threatening not to publish papers if their authors blab.

Ben Goldacre has dissected the autism affair in his own inimitable manner, pointing the finger at The Observer and relating the story to the MMR saga that has kept him busy in recent years.

We may be witnessing a new phenomenon, Ben is not the only one to pick up on the professor's complaints. The Times has also jumped in to criticise those earlier media reports.

Perhaps we can look forward to both newspapers ignoring unpublished research when it comes along in future.

A press release on a press release

2007-07-14T19:54:00.000+01:00

It isn't often that a team of researchers feels the need to issue a press release to counter the coverage of their work sparked off by an earlier press release. Indeed, this statement from a group at Imperial College may be unique.

It all started with a paper in PLoS Medicine on HIV and AIDS. Imperial College put out its own press release on the paper. Unfortunately, the media had to get in the way with its own interpretation. It seems that they got it wrong in what they wrote:

"Unfortunately, the news coverage has given the impression that our study shows that current scientific thinking regarding how HIV causes AIDS is wrong, and that we 'refute a long-standing theory.' This is incorrect, and is a serious misrepresentation of both our work and that of HIV researchers worldwide."

It may come as no surprise to some that the point at issue is over whether HIV causes AIDS, something that certain newspapers have denied for many a year. Seems that they jumped at the wrong opportunity to "prove" that they were right all along.

It is a pity that the scientists at Imperial don't name names. Then again, journalists can be very touchy about such things and have been known to run to their lawyers at the slightest excuse.

Rocky Flats goes from bombs to wildlife

2007-07-13T22:01:00.000+01:00

This one raised a chuckle. The Department of Energy (DOE) in the US has announced that its Rocky Flats site, the place where it used to make nuclear weapons, is to Become National Wildlife Refuge. Nothing odd in that, Chermobyl is also something of a haven for widlife, but 30 years or so ago the place also got up to some more peaceful stuff. It was a test bed for wind turbines.

Like many countries, the US threw cash at research into renewable energy in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s. Lots of money then went into renewable (then called alternative) energy, including wind power.

The DOE was proud of its efforts in this area. At least it stopped people from talking about bombs. So when the American Association for the Advancement of Science was in Denver, Colorado, it invited the press along to hear about wind power. Just one problem, for any Brits present, the passport they had asked us all to bring didn't work. So we sat in the bus while all the Americans present sat through what was probably a fascinating account of what the DOE was up to.

It may not have been the equivalent of the "curse of Gnome" but a couple of weeks later a mighty storm came through and flattened all of those dinky little windmills.

Somehow, accounts of this episode do not seem to feature much in the modern revival of wind power.

Meaningless initials

2007-06-21T12:36:00.000+01:00

This one comes up because I receive regular email messages with "CSR" in the subject. Mostly these come from Cambridge Silicon Radio. Well, that was its name but like too many companies it has morphed into a set of cryptic initials.

A quick roam around CSR's web site provides little enlightenment. Even the company's press releases are silent on the subject.

This is dangerous. I once managed to use the name British Technology Group in an article I wrote for the Financial Times some time after the company became BTG plc.

Companies can reduce the likelihood of that sort of thing by using a phrase along the lines of "formerly known as Cambridge Silicon Radio". Just put it in the "About us" bit that seems to be an obligatory appendage to every press release these days.

In time the message sticks. It is most unlikely that anyone would mistakenly write "Imperial Chemical Industries" in an article. (Given the latest news they may even have to give up writing ICI.)

But back to those initials. Today's email brought a message from something called "article 13" with the subject "CBI CSR case studies - latest batch launched". I know what CBI stands for, but what about CSR?

The text of the message, including the web version, offers no clues. So over to the web site where we read that CSR stands for corporate social responsibility.

They actually spell it out in this non sentence "Typically in the areas of governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable development." What they really meant to do was to put a comma at the end of the previous sentence "We are strategic advisors on risk associated with business responsibility." But let's not get too picky.

There's nothing wrong with writing about corporate social responsibility and using CSR as a shortcut, but it is usually a good idea to explain what you are up to in email messages that people might want to pass on to someone else. I mean, if someone thinks that it stands for Cambridge Silicon Radio, you will have a very baffled reader.

Another unusable press release

2007-06-11T13:01:00.000+01:00

If an organisation has a funny name you would have thought that it would offer as many opportunities as possible for journalists to get it right in any articles that they write. For example, if you send out a press release, then give a writer the chance to "copy and paste" from the release into their own articles. Indeed, for many PR people the perfect press release is one that the press simply copies and pastes, without bothering to add their own unhelpful adornments.

Pöyry Energy Consulting, for example, has those funny dots in its name. So rather than leave it to a poor hack to hunt out the right bits on their keyboard, why not put the names in a prominent place in the press release?

They have, actually, well sometimes. But the latest "News from Poyry" - yes, that is the unhelpful subject of the email message - points at a press release that is a PDF file. Just one problem, whoever created the file decided to allow journalists to print copies but not to "copy from this document," as Acrobat describes the security setting.

This is not the first press release we have seen in this format. There was another one last year. When we raised it with the PR person responsible, he replied that he had no idea why the company opted for that level of security. Our guess is that the person who made the PDF file just didn't think about the journalists who might have used the press release.

A lethargic green writer

2007-06-06T17:47:00.000+01:00

There has always been a chasm between the stuff written by medical correspondents and "health writers" on many newspapers. The former are specialist science writers whose beat includes the latest goings on on medical research. This is territory that is also the natural habitat of many science writers with a broader remit. Now, it seems, we have to find some way to differentiate environment correspondents from "green writers".

Just as health writers will cover any old tosh that deals with the human body, be it quack remedies or copper bracelets that cure snoring, while medical writers want some science behind their articles, we had always thought that an environment writer also built on scientific foundations. Indeed, many science writers also cover the environment which is, after all, a highly scientific subject.

Evidence that the green writers do not need this underpinning of science comes in the shape on an article that appeared in The Independent, My war on electrosmog by Julia Stephenson. The article is yet another in the saga of slow death by electromagnetic radiation that surfaces from time to time around mobile phones and, more recently, wifi. Ms Stephenson, whose own embryonic web site verges on the cleavage side of photography, has been feeling tired of late. Even her plants are in a bad way.

The self styled "Green Goddess" consulted her naturopath who "insisted that my exhaustion was caused by electromagnetic "smog" in my flat". Apart from finding it dodgy that anyone writing on such matters should consult a naturopath, I am puzzled that she also feels the need to talk to a "London-based complementary health practitioner". Ms Stephenson quotes Dr Nicole de Canha as saying "Any imbalance in our electromagnetic field creates a disturbance in cell structure and function, which can lead to illness in sensitive individuals."

Where, we have to ask, did Dr de Canha acquire that PhD? Therapynet, which seems to be a place for such folks to advertise their magic, tells us little beyond saying that the good doctor has a Doctorate in Homoeopathy, as well as Sports and Therapeutic Massage Diploma, Indian Head Massage, Ear Acupuncture Diploma. There is a link to Relax-O-Therapy but the website wasn't there when we clicked it.

It is depressing that a newspaper as solid as The Independent carries this sort of tosh. Perhaps the one saving grace is that they file it under "Lifestyle".

Nuclear is an adjective – but don't tell the Royal Society

2007-05-24T12:38:00.000+01:00

In its consultation document on the future of nuclear power, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) wisely avoids using the term "nuclear option". Even the overarching White Paper avoids the phrase, except when quoting a third party exercise.

The problem with the phrase is that you will find it used in many contexts to describe the most drastic option you can take, as in nuclear weapons. For example, the "nuclear option" crops up as a description in the Washington Post of the tactics used in the US Congress to block the president's nominations for top jobs.

It isn't, then, a good idea to use the term "nuclear option" when what you really mean is the option to build new nuclear power stations.

The same need for careful use of language should also acknowledge that the word nuclear is actually an adjective. Its origins are in the nucleus. Nuclear weapons and nuclear energy depend on smashing up nuclei. Nuclear magnetic resonance, the old name for magnetic resonance imaging before the "N" word fell out of favour, also depends on doing things with nuclei.

Someone should tell this to the Royal Society. This august body, the highest in the land, by its own reckoning, when it comes to science, has put out the inevitable statement in the wake of the White Paper.

In the Royal Society response to Government energy plans we read that "in the short to medium term nuclear could be crucial in helping the UK tackle the challenges of climate change and security of supply". Nuclear what?

Picky? Yes. But when you are dealing with opponents who like to hold up nuclear weapons as a reason for not using nuclear power it seems silly to offer them a hostage to fortune.

It takes very little to use the right words. If the DTI can do it, why not the RS?

Jumped up ladder release

2007-05-04T15:19:00.000+01:00

The general advice to anyone writing a press release is to avoid being too clever, and not to upstage the hacks when it comes to headlines. It is good to see that some PR folks ignore this advice, or we would not have received this one from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Columbus Children’s Hospital in Ohio: Nonfatal Ladder Injuries Climbing Sharply.

They pile on the groans in the first paragraph "According to a new study, the number of nonfatal ladder injuries treated in emergency rooms jumped by 50 percent between 1990 and 2005."

It may be hard for the subeditors to top these.

Patently silly data on climate change

2007-05-02T22:59:00.000+01:00

You don't have to be a climate change denier to have doubts about some of the output from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is about to gush forth with another report. A couple of interesting bloggers have found some hilarious graphs in the IPCC's output.

Over on Prometheus there is a hatchet job on numbers showing a correlation between climate change and losses due to natural disasters. Roger Pielke Jr writes "I have generally been a supporter of the IPCC, but I do have to admit that if it is this sloppy and irresponsible in an area of climate change where I have expertise, why should I have confidence in the areas where I am not an expert?"

Even more hilarious is the message on Random Thoughts dismembering another graph from the IPCC which shows that U.S. patents cause global weather-related disasters!.

As the author comments " It's obvious that increasing the number of U.S. patents issued causes normalized global weather-related losses to increase. When will the U.S. Patent Office start behaving responsibly, and stop issuing patents???!"

Er, maybe not, when asked for the page reference, Mark Bahner, the man behind the thing, reveals that the graph in question "only appear on dates that have April 1 in them".

Damn, there goes another good story. Then again, maybe someone could sell it to the Daily Mail. They'd certainly buy a piece on the impact of climate change on house prices.

Even researchers can write about IT with style

2007-04-21T19:28:00.000+01:00

Those mad fools at EPSRC recently showed their lack of judgement by inviting me to be one of the judges for this year's Computer Science Writing Competition. They made up for this lack of wisdom by also lining up some of the country's leading lights in academic IT research as judges. EPSRC has now put out a Press Release on the results of our deliberations, all done electronically with the teeniest carbon footprint imaginable.

The interesting bit as a judge from the writing side rather than an IT expert was that most of the articles made a pretty good fist of explaining their subjects. They were no worse than some of the copy that has appeared in print, and certainly better than some that has come across my desk from "professional" writers in IT.

If there was a general trap that caught all of the writers it was that they took a bit too long to get to the message, and to tell us what they were writing about. These articles were, after all, around 750 words long. More a news item than a feature.

But I reckon that most of the pieces I read could have made it into something like the Guardian's interesting technology section.

Time to explode the hydrogen myth

2007-04-15T13:29:00.000+01:00

The hydrogen bandwagon continues to roll. Only rarely does someone point out that this really is a case of the emperor with no clothes. So we must be thankful to Russell Seitz for chiming in with his piece At Last- A Genuine Hoax!.

Seitz hits the nail on the head with his observation that "hydrogen produced from H2O is a rare and precious commodity, costing a quarter its weight in silver because of the high price of American electrical power-- most of which comes from coal".

Hydrogen is just a carrier of energy. In this respect it resembles electricity. It is only a good idea if you need something to replace oil and gas in applications where you need a fluid that you can carry around.

In his attack on hydrogen from water Seitz misses reasons why hydrogen might have a role to play in a future energy system. Rather than turning coal into electricity to make hydrogen, why not get the carbon out of the coal and just use the hydrogen it contains? In that way you could tap the coal's energy without puffing CO2 into the atmosphere.

I leave it to others to calculate the thermodynamics of this idea. I raise it only because Lord Brown, the boss of BP, told me (links to a PDF file) that it is why the company is interested in hydrogen.

Another way to turn an "immobile" fuel into one that you can carry around is, of course, to use nuclear power as the source of energy for hydrogen creation. But once again the thermodynamics have to be right. And the sort of people who call for a hydrogen economy are almost certainly the last to contemplate the idea of building more nuclear power stations. They would rather see the lights go out all over the planet.

Science communication in a political climate

2007-04-08T18:51:00.000+01:00

Scientists like to think that it is the evidence that they provide that sways thinking on such issues as climate change. Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney beg to differ. Were that the case, then we would not end up with the recent poll finding that "23% of college educated Republicans think global warming is attributable to human activity, compared with 75% of Democrats".

Nisbet and Mooney raise this issue in an article in the latest issue of the journal Science. They set out to dispel the notion of many scientists who "retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists’, and controversy would subside".

In reality, people approach science much as they do any other subject. "Faced with a daily torrent of news, citizens use their value predispositions (such as political or religious beliefs) as perceptual screens, selecting news outlets and Web sites whose outlooks match their own." From this we can conclude that it is against the Republican philosophy to believe in anthropomorphic climate change.

The press release put out to drum up interest in the article, Scientists must improve communication tactics, Science article proclaims, spells it out in a quote from Mooney. "In writing this article together, we argue that scientists shouldn't exclusively blame politicians and journalists for gridlock on issues like climate change. Part of the problem is that scientists carry with them the wrong assumptions about what makes for effective communication."

One problem with the scientists' approach to getting their message across is that they can be so convinced that they are right that they are dismissive not just of crackpots but of anything that smacks of religion. Not all scientists take this stance, of course, but a few well known media superstars certainly take this line.

Bad idea, is the message from Nisbet and Mooney. Instead, they suggest, "scientists must realize that facts will be repeatedly misapplied and twisted in direct proportion to their relevance to the political debate
and decision-making. In short, as unnatural as it might feel, in many cases, scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it."

They don't go into the implications of this for science writers. They are there though. While it isn't the writer's job to make the scientists' arguments for them, but to report what they say. But we all know that writers pick and choose the material they include in their articles. With luck they want to pick the bits that will convince their readers. Thus they are in the same boat as the scientists.

There isn't, then, any point in presenting an argument that the reader will dismiss. Then again, another issue is that if you write for a publication that reaches an audience of people who are naturally inclined in one direction, you may have an uphill struggle when writing about a piece of science that is at variance with their view of the world.

Does it matter if the UK excels at research?

2007-04-05T11:32:00.000+01:00

It may make politicians feel good, and give them something to put into their speeches, but it is hard to know what to make of the news that the UK research impact outstrips US. The press release with this headline gives Malcolm Wicks, the relatively new Science and Innovation Minister, an opportunity to gloat.

"I'm proud to say the UK produces nine per cent of the world's scientific papers and has a citation share of 12 per cent.

"Britain's 21st century knowledge economy depends on science and innovation. We are in a good position - we have excellent science and strong investment."

He doesn't quite take all the credit for the government, but the message is in there. It is also the argument that the government uses when it wants to beef up the effort the researchers in the UK put into turning that research into money. We are really really good at doing science, the argument goes, and with just a bit more effort we could make oodles of cash by innovating on the back of that research.

The question you have to ask is if there is any proof that this research excellence has much to do with the ability of companies in the UK to innovate. After all, as the report that prompted this outburst shows, the scientific disciplines where the country excels include biological, clinical, environmental, humanities, maths, pre-clinical and health, social sciences and business.

You can argue over how they manage to shoehorn some of those subjects into science, or whether they can provide the foundations for successful innovation. More important, though, is the simple minded bean counting nature of the exercise.

Plenty of countries do nicely thank you without featuring as high as the UK in these league tables. Just think Korea and Taiwan. Even Israel, whatever you think of the country's atrocious racism, does very nicely in several areas of technology.

The cue for Mr Wicks's comments is the report with the unfathomable title PSA target metrics for the UK research base. It has a detailed analysis that provides a field day for anyone who wants to theorise.

Take the first paragraph of the summary. This says:

"The UK’s strong international excellence has been achieved with lower investment compared to its competitors. On available OECD data, the UK has a relatively sparse density of people with research training. However, this has led to a high level of research productivity, in regard to both research publications and trained people."

The bit about lower investment could mean that we do it on the cheap, paying researchers badly. You could infer the same notion from the later statement that "The UK produces relatively more PhDs per unit HERD (Higher Education R&D spend) than most OSI comparator group nations." PhD students may not be as poverty stricken as they once were, but few live in the lap of luxury.

The bit about the density of people could be a sign of inequities in the way the UK distributes its spending, a theory that will strike a chord with any scientists who operates outside the golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Then again, those within the triangle might well point out that the fact that they are a money magnet is the reason why the UK punches above its weight.

In reality, you can probably pick over the data and come up with support for any crackpot theory you care to dream up, including those out out by the government.

How does innovation work?

2007-04-04T11:40:00.000+01:00

Like many countries, the UK has been screaming about the need for innovation. It is the only way to make the economy grow, says the official line. So Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have vied with one another to make the right noises about innovation and the science that, they believe, will make it happen. Spending more on science may not have quite the same Daily Mail appeal as throwing cash at health and education, but it has come out at least as well as these sinks of taxpayers' money. And yet we don't really know how innovation works.

If we did there would be no reason for the Economic and Social Research Council to launch a new initiative: £2 million for Targeted Initiative on Innovation. The money will go to "eight different research projects focusing on innovation". Among the things they will investigate are, says the announcement:

How can the rate of innovation be increased to enhance economic growth and competitiveness, while the direction of innovation simultaneously steered to achieve social and environmental sustainability?
What are the options for public policy at different levels to increase innovation and steer towards such policy objectives?
What economic, social and managerial factors enable an economy such as the UK to best capture high value from increasingly global innovation processes?
How is it best to model and measure emergent innovation activities and systems?

All this is happening under the banner of the Advanced Institute of Management Research. As a part of the same package, AIM, as it calls itself, has also awarded seven Innovation Fellowships. one area that these people will delve into is that of innovation in the service sector, something that recently cropped up on the agenda when the UK's R&D Scoreboard suddenly added the sector to its number crunching.

As the ESRC announcement puts it "with over 75% of employment in the UK now being located in services, we need to enhance our understanding of service innovation".

Another topic for discussion is "green innovation". It isn't enough, it seems for innovative stuff to be "sustainable". We also need to look at how it happens. Or, as the announcement puts it "can the rate of innovation be balanced with the need to achieve environmentally and socially sustainable levels of innovation?"

Nearly half of Americans believe that Darwin was wrong

2007-04-01T18:28:00.000+01:00

The fact that Charles Darwin was himself of a religious turn of mind, and saw no conflict between evolution and his belief, does not mean anything to most Americans. A recent NEWSWEEK Poll found that 90 per cent of Americans believe in God. Nothing wrong with that, but following this belief, it turns out that it colours their views on other issues where science should be their guide. As the article puts it:

"Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view."

We mention this here only because it shows that science writers clearly have an uphill struggle. There may be people in our community who don't believe in man-made climate change, partly because a handful of maverick scientists fuel their belief, but has anyone ever come out against evolution, even though that too has a smattering of sceptics?

The other question is, where are these people? They seem to be like Americans who voted for Bush. There are plenty of them, but you never meet one.

Slaves to science

2007-03-26T11:20:00.000+01:00

One of the delights of the Royal Society is its historical archive. It must be one of the oldest repositories of scientific history.

It is also good that the RS takes this part of its activity seriously. Hence its efforts to buy up important documents when they become available, even when they were previously "liberated" from the RS's own collections by dubious means.

The latest entry on the history front is the piece on Slavery and the Royal Society. There is also a short video by Professor Lisa Jardine, whose dad, Jacob Bronowski, was also a fine commentator on the history of science.

The piece points out that certain prominent members of the RS were themselves involved in companies that were active in the slave trade.

Now, of course, the only form of slavery that the RS supports is that of lab grunts who are chained to their test tubes and petri dishes in the pursuit of yet more publications.

Is the best science buried on the internet?

2007-03-22T09:58:00.000Z

With the word Google turned into a verb, the world of research has changed. And that includes how journalists do their research. Want to bone up on an obscure topic that has hit the news? Google it. Much easier than maintaining a tattered contacts book.

There are, though, pitfalls in using Google, or whatever search engine turns you on. It is by no means a guarantee that you will find the best information.

We have evidence for this in a research paper from a group at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. The group took home a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of £45,173.12 for the project The World Wide Web of Science: Emerging Global Sources of Expertise. "The aim of this research project is to assess whether and to what extent the Internet and the Web are transforming access to sources of scientific expertise."

The paper that wraps up the project The World Wide Web of Science: Reconfiguring Access to Information describes what they got up to in great detail. It tells us that they looked at a set of hot topics, including "climate change, HIV/AIDS, water and sanitation, governance, and trade reform". They also set out to "triangulate on patterns of access through the use of Webmetrics, interviews and case studies of issue areas".

While this use of language explains why they got the grant from the ESRC, it doesn't make the resulting paper all that user friendly. But read on and you can see how some of the researchers they talked to go about their "Googling"and such. In essence, without the Web, these folks would have a hard time.

The Oxford group then took the interesting step of checking what is out there on the Web, a "Webmetric Analysis," and compared it with the strategies of the people they talked to. They plugged in a set of keywords and stood back and watched what happened.

One such analysis looked into the keywords "Climate Change, Climate Changes, Ozone Depletion and Global Warming". Then they refined it and drew a "Web space graph" showing the connections between the hits. The graph looks like a web created by a spider on some very dodgy drug.

The outcome is that these days many researchers "rarely use libraries or seek out offline copies of journals; this is too costly in terms of time and effort (and perhaps money for photocopying)".

The Oxford researchers really wanted to look into the notion that the Web is "democratising" science. As they put it they wanted "to explore how the Internet and Web are reinforcing the role of existing sources of information, or tending to either ‘democratize’ or centralize patterns of access conforming to the expectations of a ‘winner-take-all’ process of selection".

Their conclusions are frustratingly inconclusive. They conclude that the results:

... could suggest a reinforcement of existing networks of communication and research. Alternatively, it might represent a winner-take-all process within more specifically defined research areas. Finally, proponents of the globalizing and democratizing impact of the Internet and the Web might find evidence in the sheer size and scale – and low density - of the global networks of information exchange identified by our Webmetric analyses.

Fortunately, the researchers have let their hair down a bit and allowed themselves to put out a press release over on the ESRC's web site. Even the title, Key science websites buried in information avalanche, goes beyond anything you can immediately detect in the paper.

The release also tells us that:

New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) clearly shows that anyone using the Web to make their information available must now pay attention not only to the quality of their sites but also how easy they are to find.

I like the "clearly shows" bit. It wasn't that clear to me, but I am not a researcher in the social sciences. Other bits on the press release that are also hard to find in the paper include some interesting points.

The "visibility" of information on the Web is of increasing importance. Do people looking for research results on climate change or terrorism find themselves directed to a few top sites rather than a wide array of diverse sources? Do they encounter the most highly regarded researchers rather than marginal ones?

There's more in there, and anyone interested in the topic should read the press release as well as the paper. Dr Ralph Schroeder, one of the researchers, sums up the key messages in one of those cooked up quotes:

"This will be an issue not just for policymakers, but for educators, organisations involved in science and research communication, regulators responsible for access to the Web, and citizens who are concerned with the diversity and richness of the information world around them."

Our take is that scientists need to be a bit more careful in how they manage their web sites. Not only do they have to make them user friendly, they should also ensure that they stay up to date.

Still time to dash downunder for the science hacks gabfest

2007-03-21T14:13:00.000Z

AlphaGalileo has this one on the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists.

Participants include science editors from the Economist, Financial Times, Asahi Shimbun, the editors-in-chief of Nature and of Scientific American, senior reporters from BBC TV, radio and World Service, and some 50 journalists from developing and emerging countries.

Anyone want to sponsor another delegate?

Channel 4 and its problems with science

2007-03-20T19:12:00.000Z

The last person I'd usually point to is George Monbiot, who lives in an alternative world with his constantly negative view that always stops short of offering solution to the problems he posits. But it is too good to miss Don't let truth stand in the way of a red-hot debunking of climate change on Guardian Unlimited.

Sadly, it isn't Monbiot who makes it worth visiting the page. It is the observation from one of his readers, RogerINtheUSA:

Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail.

Manages to skewer two fine media outlets in one go.

FT referees war between medical journals

2007-03-19T16:37:00.000Z

When The Lancet came out against its owner's trade in arms fairs, it seemed like a possible case of biting the hand that feeds you. But now, in Spat erupts between medical journals the Financial Times reports that the BMJ, "the former British Medical Journal," has called on researchers to boycott The Lancet.

As you would expect, the FT refrains from taking sides. It is up to others to decide if Reed Elsevier's small income from the unsavoury activity, "a little more than 0.5 per cent of its total annual sales of £5.2bn last year," says the FT, is any less palatable than the BMJ's income "largely from pharmaceutical industry advertising".

The odd thing is that The Lancet set the ball rolling back in September 2005, but only now has the BMJ weighed in. Perhaps they were responding to the recent piece on The Guardian's blogfest.

Now we have the item pasted all over the BMJ's home page. This has a link to the editorial in question.

You will have to buy access to the article, if you do not have it already. You can, though, for the time being at least, read the "rapid response" slot to the editorial. At last count, the comments were two to one against the BMJ's stand.

As Christopher E Nancollas, a GP from Gloucester, puts it

You write "The BMJ has no wish to see the Lancet diminished." Well, you could have fooled me. Calling for contributors to boycott the Lancet will lead to its closure, which would almost certainly benefit the BMJ. Is there a hint of self interest dressed up as moral outrage in this article?

This one could run and run. But there is still little sign of action on the part of other publications the Reed Elsevier roster.

Declaration of interest: I hold a few shares in Reed Elsevier, from the days when I worked for them. Now they just pay my pension.

Global warming gets Media hot under the collar

2007-03-13T20:03:00.000Z

Any journalist worth their salt wants to be provocative. It goes with the teritory. That's why they will happily pounce on flimsy stories that don't really stack up. The journalists will try to justify their behaviour on the grounds of public interest, the same excuse they use when publishing pictures of princes out on the razzle with their girlfriends.

This is the only possible justification for the recent Channnel 4 programme on climate change, The Great Global Warming Swindle. The TV programme, it seems, presented the sceptics' view that climate change has nothing to do with people. Or rather, they aren't the cause of it.

For once, the rest of the media have not allowed their colleagues to get away with murdering science. They have come out flaming. One such response comes from medialens in an article Pure Propaganda - The Great Global Warming Swindle.

As usual, the people who have always taken a contrarian view, often because that is how they earn a living, welcomed the programme. But medialens brings together a pretty devastating overview of the media coverage of the programme.

In particular, they quote The Independent, which talked to one of the experts who appeared in the programme, Professor Carl Wunsch. It is worth quoting Wunsch at length:

"I am angry because they completely misrepresented me. My views were distorted by the context in which they placed them. I was misled as to what it was going to be about. I was told about six months ago that this was to be a programme about how complicated it is to understand what is going on. If they had told me even the title of the programme, I would have absolutely refused to be on it. I am the one who has been swindled."

The moral of the story is that scientists should be careful, very careful, when they talk to reporters. In particular, don't talk to people if you are not familiar with their work.

When advising scientists on dealing with the media, I tell them never to talk to certain tabloids, those that have never shown the slightest interest in writing sensible science stories. It seems that Channel 4 now has to join that list of media that you don't touch with a bargepole.

Cool response to global warming

2007-03-07T22:24:00.000Z

You may have thought that the media went into overdrive on the recent IPCC report on climate change. Some observers beg to differ. Matthew Nisbet, Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at American University, reckons that "The inability of the IPCC report to break through to the public about the urgency of climate change is just more evidence that relying on traditional science communication strategies has increasingly limited returns."

He explains his stance in A “Two Step Flow of Popularization” for Climate Change. His line is that "other public engagement methods are sorely needed".

Why? Partly because of some fundamental errors. As he says, "the Friday scheduling of the report's release couldn't have been worse".

You can always argue about when best to launch something. I always suggested something that gave the weeklies – Nature, New Scientist, Science, The Economist etc – a chance to dive in with their usually deeper analysis. Governments certainly like Friday for bad news stories because readers' minds are on other things.

Then there is the report itself. By being "a technical backgrounder, a massive synthesis of the state of climate science" this means that, for journalists, "an authoritative distillation of past research [is] a tough story to make exciting. The there is the fact that "the main themes of the draft report had been predicted for a few months, eliminating any real surprises".

Lots of leads to similar assessment so the media coverage. Well worth reading. His view that those seeking to get the message across should look beyond the media makes sense. But then it is much harder to tell if the report has had any impact. Indeed, maybe the very methods that he advocates really happened. It just won't show up in the headlines. Which is where we came in.

Do biomedical researchers believe in evolution?

2007-03-04T15:50:00.000Z

Is this article, we saw it first on Slashdot, another good story missed by the pack? It refers to an essay, effectively an opinion piece, on PLoS Biology Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word.

With the usual overkill list of authors that makes it hard to give due credit, the introduction to the essay says:

The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word “evolution” is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to “emerge,” “arise,” or “spread” rather than “evolve.” Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word “evolution” by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives.

The authors looked at papers published in recent years on antimicrobial resistance. They then ruled out any that didn't really deal with the evolutionary aspects of the topic. Next they looked at where the authors reported their work, in journals given over to evolutionary biology or biomedical research.

Guess what, "in journals with primarily evolutionary or genetic content, the word 'evolution' was used 65.8% of the time to describe evolutionary processes" but "in the biomedical literature, the word 'evolution' was used only 2.7% of the time".

The bottom line, the essay says, is that "evolutionary terminology, biomedical researchers could greatly help convey to the layperson that evolution is not a topic to be innocuously relegated to the armchair confines of political or religious debate. Like gravity, evolution is an everyday process that directly impacts our health and well-being, and promoting rather than obscuring this fact should be an essential activity of all researchers."

Another tree or two saved from the paper mill

2007-03-04T15:02:00.000Z

So many publications are rushing into electronic only versions that it is hardly news. One, though, caught our attention when it appeared in the Romeike Daily Media Bulletin.

We read there that:

The Waste Paper Magazine is no longer available in print. From this month, the newsletter covering sustainable waste management is available online at http://www.crn.org.uk/wastepaper and is updated on a monthly basis.

With that title, you wonder why they bothered with dead trees in the first place.

DTI raids science budget, but hacks miss the details

2007-03-02T10:32:00.000Z

I am surprised that none of the reports that I have seen so far of the raid by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) on the science budget refer to the fine print. Can it be that they have done no more than read the press release?

As I reported in my "Labnote" on Science|Business, The vultures descend on the UK's science budget, there are some nice ironies buried in the detailed "explanation" from the Treasury. This reveals where some of the money has gone.

One interesting statistic is that £27 million went from the science research councils for the "Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directive". By coincidence, this number is just £2 million shy of the amount taken from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. And what does EPSRC do? Among other things it supports research into electronics and electrical equipment.

There's another one. Science is all about measuring things. So laugh as the DTI switches six million smackers "between Science Research Councils and National Measurement System".

We are supposed to be talking to the world about science, so smile ruefully as you watch them switch money between "Science and Society and nonvoted expenditure on the Natural Environment Research Council". Not much money, to be sure, but a lot for a programme that does not need lots of expensive kit.

You need to be a better bean counter, or a journalist with more time to kill, than I am to understand will the switching of "non-voted non-cash to capital".

I'm sure there are other tales like that buried in the data. But to get them you need to put in a bit of effort.

Why The Lancet is up in arms

2007-03-01T11:57:00.000Z

I know from personal experience that relationships between editors and publishers can be fraught. The Lancet has taken the feuding to new levels. As Richard Smith, ertswhile editor of the British Medical Journal writes in A matter of life and death on the Guardian's Comment is free blogfest.

Smith reports on the moves by the editorial team on The Lancet to get their owner, Reed Elsevier, out of the arms trade. Well, trade in arms fairs.

His line is that "The hypocrisy of selling arms and health is particularly galling for the Lancet and its readers - because the Lancet has established itself as the world's leading global health journal. It is concerned not simply with scientific research that advances western medicine but also with poverty, injustice, environmental destruction, and war - the factors that mean life expectancy in the poorest countries is little over 30."

Where, Smith asks, are the other editors in the empire? "The Lancet has taken the bold step of speaking out against its owner's excesses, but little has been heard from the editors, authors, and readers of the other 2000 journals published by Reed Elsevier."

It is all very well for the editor and staff of "the world's leading global health journal" to campaign, but what about the people who work on a small trade journal that is hanging on by the skin of its teeth?

Page turns to science

2007-02-26T13:30:00.000Z

Researchers of all ages continue to complain that anyone who gets involved in popularising science can end up on the receiving end of sniffy comments from colleagues who see such activities as at best a distraction from real work, and at worst dumbing down. The naysayers don't quite say the same thing about teaching, but that is probably only because to come out of that particular closet would be to court professional death. After all, education is in the job spec and is supposed to be as important as research.

So there isn't likely to be much support for an idea put forward by Larry Page, whose main claim to fame is that he set up Google. Page put forward his ideas at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS has put out a News Release on Page's ideas, along with a video of the presentation, some of them would cause fits among the opponents of public dissemination.

Take the suggestion, as reported in the release, of "tying tenure and grant money to the media impact of research". Can you imagine it? Along with details of what you have done over the years, you have to include newspaper clippings about your earlier projects.

They haven't gone that far, but in the UK at least, some of the public bodies that fund research require recipients to devote some of their efforts to Public Engagement with Science and Technology (PEST). This seems to be influencing at least some scientists.

I recently helped run a two hour session on dealing with the media for young and mid-career scientists at Sussex University. One of the people who attended said that she was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that she should join in the PEST game. As well as the growing pressure from research funders, she also thought that being more visible might get people to take her research more seriously, buried as it usually is in obscure journals.

It wasn't just potential the fame and glory, or even the need to keep the grant income flowing, that interested her. Working as she did on important issues for youngsters with a disability, she felt that the people who could pick up her ideas and use it needed to understand what she does.

This may be some way from Larry Page's arguments, but it is certainly a case worth considering, especially if you are of the view that most of the science writers who write for large audiences ignore this sort of thing in favour of the usual safe stories.

The ethics of journals

2007-02-05T15:19:00.000Z

The boom in nanotechnology means that there is now a rush to get out journals that feed on the surrounding industry of ethics and safety. Springer joins the race going with a new journal, NanoEthics: Ethics for Technologies that Converge at the Nanoscale. Crazy title. Guess they have to make money before the move to open access puts commercial journals put of business.

tag: journals, nanotechnology, ethics

The rules of journalism

2007-02-04T12:03:00.000Z

A blogger withe twee name of Sans Serif (or is it sans serif?) has come up with 12 and a half rules to be a good journalist. Interesting and amusing as they may be, they aren't really rules so much as slogans or aspirations.

Maybe it is the way they are billed that suggests this. After all, what is the difference between "Chase Your Dream" and "Do What You Love"?

In among this laudable but probably useless stuff – it is after all saying that it takes a particular personality type to be a journalist – there is also the odd practical tip of real value. I particularly like the suggestion "Don’t Be The Loyal Member Of Any Party, Group, Club, NGO". In effect, this is saying be a sceptic.

That advice is also a key to the difference between journalists an writers, and why it is hard to be both. Writers can use their ability to string words together to good effect, to persuade readers to buy a line.

Interestingly, sans serif's rules say nothing on technical things, like learning how to write or to sell articles, something that you do even if you are not a freelance journalist. No reason why rules should cover that sort of territory. It is just that this is the sort of question asked by people who want to get into the business.

tag: writing, journalism

Portuguese science tackles an attitude problem

2007-02-03T19:27:00.000Z

They may not have quite the same planet sized chip on their shoulders as engineers, who are for ever complaining that people confuse them with the mechanics and technicians who mend vacuum, cleaners, but scientists the world over like to complain of their lot. It seems that in Portugal they really do have something to moan about. An article in The Scientist, A Portuguese Science Association Reaches Out, kicks off with the statement that "Portugal is a country where being a scientist is still not considered a career by most of its population and it's a place where funding for research comes almost exclusively from government sources."

Back in November 2004 a group of young life scientists decided to do something about this and set up the Associação Viver a Ciência (VaC). Their idea is to do something about attitudes to science in Portugal. And they are doing this on a shoestring. The annual budget of an €140,000 or so wouldn't buy one of those studies of the subject that we go in for in the UK.

tag: PEST, Public Engagement, Portugal

Royal let down on climate change

2007-02-02T16:30:00.000Z

Anyone who was hoping for something substantial in the way of a response from the Royal Society on today's IPCC report on climate change is in for a disappointment. We mention this only because they trailed their response earlier today in the puzzlingly content free press release we've already mentioned. Now that we have it, we find that despite the title, A time for action on climate change, it is actually less outspoken than the statements made by the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir David King.

The bottom line is that "We need both to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases and to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Those who would claim otherwise can no longer use science as a basis for their argument." Well, I never.

tag: Royal Society, press releases, climate change, IPCC

Royal Society winds up the excitement

2007-02-02T12:30:00.000Z

The poor old Royal Society has sunk to new depths of pointlessness in its latest "press release". Like everyone they are keen to climb on the bandwagon shoved down the hill today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So we get to read the Royal Society pre IPCC report statement.

They have persuaded Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, to say: "The IPCC is the world's leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue."

Er, yes. Maybe the point of this exercise is to alert all those slavering hacks to the fact that "The Royal Society will be issuing a short statement in reaction to the report on Friday".

Most of the writers who will cover the report are clearly desperately short of people they can talk to.

tag: Royal Society, climate change, IPCC, press releases

Future of science debate begins

2007-01-28T15:10:00.000Z

The BBC's take on Sciencehorizons, Future of science debate begins, naturally avoids the gobbledigook churned out by the people behind the venture .

Sciencewise – or may be sciencedumb

2007-01-26T10:55:00.000Z

For a movement that strives to reach out to a wider public, the PEST (Public Engagement in Science and Technology) brigade knows how to shoot itself in the foot. For example, it is hard to know what to make of this:

"...creating excellence in public dialogue to inform better policy"

What does it mean? How do you "inform policy"? What is the guff about "creating excellence"?

Here's are simpler alternatives that say the same thing:

"... public dialogue for better policy"

"... better policy through public dialoque"

You could even make it truly revolutionary with something like:

"... listening to people for better policy"

Not great, but that's because the starting point doesn't help. It would be better to come up with something altogether more punter friendly. It might also help to add what policy they are on about here rather than deeper down in the page. Catchall slogans like that are meaningless.

Life is too short to dismember the page's title:
Building the commitment and capacity of government to engage in public dialogue on scientific developments
Go on, unpick that one yourself. Catchy isn't it.

The first sentence on the page, a mere 41 words, is not much better. It rambles on, saying, among other things, that the idea is that it "helps policy makers in Government departments and agencies commission and use public dialogue to inform decision-making in emerging areas of science and technology".

For a start, they mean "help to commission". In general that's how you should use "help" in this sort of context. Often you can get away without the "to" but in this case it is essential if you don't want the reader to lose the thread. Good grief they even get it right when they they say "to inform decision-making" although once again they are informing something decidedly odd. You can inform "decision makers," perhaps even "the decision making process," but not decision making.

And what are these "emerging areas of science and technology"? What makes them so important? Why put it in unexplained? Why can't we talk about the old areas of science and technology?

All this, and more is on a new venture, Sciencewise "funded by the Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI)".

I wouldn't go on about stilted writing in webland, such is its prevalence, were it not for the fact that this is supposed to be about communication and talking to, or is it at, the public. The underlying idea also seems to be pretty sound, which makes it all the more sad that the front door for the venture is so intimidating.

This page reads like one of those reports – written, I might say, without the help of a professional to keep out waffle – used to justify throwing more money on to the PEST bandwagon.

Sad, really, that after 20 years or more PEST has sunk to such depths. Those of us who kicked it off, when they used the term understanding rather than engagement, just wanted to persuade people to take science, engineering and technology more seriously. We've won that battle in some important circles. The Treasury, for example, now sees the value of investing in R&D. But you won't get much further if you obfuscate like that.

The danger of falling into the jargon trap, where only the initiated can understand the language, is that it intimidates newcomers. It doesn't have to be like that. Indeed, the DTI proves as much in its own press announcement of the new venture.

The press release that unleashed this stuff on to the world tells us that the initiative is "designed to get the nation talking about the science and technology of the future". As this shows, the press release is written in English, which just goes to show that you can get this sort of thing right if you put professionals on the case.

The press release says that "Community groups, schools, families and friends up and down the country are invited to get together in village halls, classrooms, living rooms and pubs to have their own sciencehorizons discussions using the free packs." Great. Let's hope they don't go near the web site. With luck they will, instead, land on sciencehorizons, "a national series of conversations about new technologies, the future and society".

Saying all this may screw up my chances of getting any more work out of the DTI, but someone has to warn them that it is important to use language that matches the messages you want to convey.

tag: PEST, Public Engagement, gobbledigook

Dirty tricks close in on open access

2007-01-25T23:19:00.000Z

There's an interesting taster over on IWR Blog about a nice scandal uncovered by Nature. It seems that the heavyweight publishers of expensive journals have been, horror of horrors, using PR people to advise on their campaigns to fend off the rush to open access.

There probably wouldn't be much surprise at this revelation were it not for the fact that "Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, American Chemical Society as well as the Association of American Publishers (AAP)" had signed up "a PR man whose career has been spent putting a positive spin on fraudsters like Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and denying scientific evidence of climate change".

The puzzling things is that the advice they got is so lame. As Jim Giles on Nature puts it:

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles".

Other advice, that the opponents of open access should paint the move as some sort of communist plot, seems to come from someone completely out of touch with the scientific world. Scientists are notoriously non-conformist.

It would be amazing if commercial publishers, including Nature, which has done its bit to question the open access movement and is flooding the market with new paying only journals, did not indulge in some lobbying, subtle and not so subtle. But it seems counterproductive to have to sign up someone who, from these reports, makes Tony Blair's spin doctors sound like models of correctness.

There's a nice "Editor's note" at the end of Jim's story:

In the original version of this story, Susan Spilka was reported as emailing a note that said "Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate." It should have read "Media messaging", and has been changed accordingly.

Both versions seem perfectly reasonable to me. And since when did people check their emails that carefully?

tag: open access, PR, journals, Nature

Do these people really want you to write about them?

2007-01-24T22:24:00.000Z

Welcome to Advance Nanotech it says on the home page. Unfortunately, it says the same thing on every page I visited. That's because the poor souls at Advanced Nanotech have been sold a pup by some whizzy web site designer.

Here's what's wrong with it. You have to visit the web site to see what's new.

I have several ways of tracking web sites for their press releases. The most obvious, but least productive, is that you sign up to receive press releases from the people behind the site.

A slightly better choice is to use a "robot" to visit the page at predetermined intervals and to report back when it finds something new. For this I use a nice bit of software called Copernic Tracker. I have it set to do an early morning trawl before I start work. It checks some pages daily, others once a week, and some every month. If it finds that a page has changed, it highlights the new bits. I can then click on the links to get the new material.

The best option for following a changing web page is the RSS feed. This automatically lets me know when there is something new. Such is the boom in RSS feeds that you almost feel tempted to forget about any company that doesn't offer this feature.

None of these approaches works on the Advanced Nanotech web site. Whoever designed the pages has come up with some neat visual effects. Sadly, they are user hostile. No "sign up here for press releases" slot, no RSS feed, and pages where Tracker can't find a unique address that will change when something new crops up.

Pity, it is an interesting company, worth reporting. I'll see if the company's PR consultants can explain this strange behaviour.

tag: PR, press releases

Perishing publishers

2007-01-23T13:03:00.000Z

"Scientific articles are tailored to present information in human-readable aliquots." There you have it then. The foundation stone of all those journals that researchers love.

This is the first sentence in the abstract of a paper on BioMed Central, Publishing perishing? Towards tomorrow's information architecture.

Funnily enough, the rest of the abstract is in English and makes sense. Who would argue with the sentiment that "To truly integrate scientific information we must modernize academic publishing to exploit the power of the Internet."?

The language of the first sentence reminds me of a comment someone made at a meeting last week. It was a reference to an engineer who had written an impenetrable report. His excuse, my contact said, was that if he had known how to write he would have gone to Harvard. The authors of the paper with that delightful first sentence are from Yale.

tag: journals, writing

Cooking up some PR

2007-01-21T11:29:00.000Z

Given that much of cooking is chemistry, it isn't unreasonable for the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) to turn to a chef when seeking publicity as it has in its latest press release, Chemical engineers look for the ‘Jamie Oliver’ factor.

The challenge will be to find "50 ‘ChemEnvoys’ who will take up the gauntlet for chemical engineers worldwide, promoting their essential contribution to the world we live in". Engineers in general have a hard time explaining what they are up to. Chemical engineers may find it even more difficult than the rest of the pack, given that they deal with those nasty "chemicals" that everyone loves to hate.

Some put the engineers' poor record in communications down to the fact that they spend a lot of their time writing arcane reports that only other engineers can understand. Another line is that the whole life of an engineer is spent worrying about, and solving, problems. Scientists, on the other hand, can dream to their heart's content and make all sorts of fanciful claims. They aren't the people who will have to turn their discoveries into inventions. That will be down to the engineers.

All power to the IChemE's elbow. But even if they can find, and train, 50 brave souls, they will have to put a lot of effort into getting the message across, not least because the media have never worked out how to cope with engineering as a subject.

tag: PEST, engineers, chemistry, engineers

The clock ran out the mouse

2007-01-18T11:16:00.000Z

The "doomsday clock" promulgated by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a PR stunt of breathtaking simplicity, and longevity. The clock is 60 this year, making it one of the oldest marketing tricks around.

Originally there to warn of impending nuclear Armageddon, the clock is now just one of those portfolio tools that doom mongers throw around. To confirm its status as a PR stunt, look no further than the Royal Society, which now latches on to any piece of paper with a slightly scientific tinge and uses it as an excuse to cook up quotes from its President. The latest such emanation, Martin Rees comment on doomsday clock, contains the usual stuff that is all to easy to agree with but that leaves you asking "so what?"

The answer to that so what, of course, is that an increasingly gullible science media will give mileage to this stuff. Optimists will say that it is a sign that science is now more important, hence the media interest. More cynical souls will say that the Royal Society puts it out because it knows that an uncritical media will publish just about anything thrown at it.

tag: Royal Society, press releases, PR, science journalism

A video nasty heads for court

2007-01-16T23:02:00.000Z

The US's patent system must be in a mess when the country's most successful patenter gets hot under the collar. IBM used its recent appearance at the top of the US's patents league last year to have a go at the state of the country's patent system.

The computer company doesn't actually go for patent trolls so much as the general issue of patent quality. But you can see why the system is in bad odour when you read Internet video patent suit hits Google and Apple.

The law firm Pinsent Mason, on Out-law.comm, reports that a company that isn't in the online video business any more is suing a bunch of people who are in that trade. The company flicking its writs turned off the lights on its video operation in 2002. Now it has rubbed the magic lantern and become a patents business.

Just how strange they do things over there becomes clearer when you read that the litigant didn't even file for its patents until 2001, "five years after the company was founded and after some companies were already offering video and audio material for download".

Bonkers.

tag: patents, law

That's the way to do it

2007-01-14T12:16:00.000Z

Headlines really can capture the subject of a press release without being too complicated. Hot on the heels of the University of Edinburgh's baffling press release about a centre that will do something unknown, comes an announcement from an outfit just down the road and that just happens to be about that very same seat of learning. This time the headline says it all:

MAJOR CENTRE FOR REGENERATIVE MEDICINE ANNOUNCED FOR EDINBURGH

Apart from the shouty capital letters, there's nothing to upset anyone here. Well, up to a point, the people behind this press release insist on using the label "Edinburgh Technopole" to describe what is in reality a property venture. "One hundred and twenty-six acres of rolling parkland located at the heart of a cluster of internationally recognised research institutions, provide the backdrop for up to 500,000 sq ft (46,450 sq m) of high quality buildings designed to meet the flexible needs of research and technology based companies."

There's nothing wrong with universities bringing in the professionals like Grosvenor to handle their property schemes, but why not use the well recognised "science park" label?

The technopole tries to deal with this one by explaining that the idea is "to become not just a Science and Technology Park but a genuine scientific community where shared resources encourage shared ideas, engendering cross-fertilisation between different disciplines and synergy between different projects". Quite a few traditional science parks would insist that they manage to achieve this fashionable mixture of buzz words without borrowing a label invented in France.

tag: PR, press releases, science parks, writing

Religious right denies gory truth about climate change

2007-01-14T11:16:00.000Z

Oh dear, the religious fundamentalists in the USA who don't believe in evolution are now using their "it is only a theory" argument to remove discussion of climate change from America's schoolrooms.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer (P-I) has a report Federal Way schools restrict Gore film with some depressing quotes from a parent objecting to classroom screenings of Al Gore's disaster flick An Inconvenient Truth. "The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD," complains Frosty Hardison, described by P-I as "a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old".

At least one person has been listening to Mr Hardison, his wife. As P-I puts it:

"From what I've seen (of the movie) and what my husband has expressed to me, if (the movie) is going to take the approach of 'bad America, bad America,' I don't think it should be shown at all," Gayle Hardison said. "If you're going to come in and just say America is creating the rotten ruin of the world, I don't think the video should be shown."

Maybe there is some good news here for any movie maker who wants to tap into the wealth of the religious right. The school's board wants any viewing of Gore's movie to run alongside something that can ensure that a "credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented". Anyone want to volunteer? Mel Gibson?

tag: climate change, broadcasting, lunatic fringe, religious right, evolution, creationism

Research into what?

2007-01-13T21:42:00.000Z

The first note we saw about this new research centre simply said:

First Director Appointed to New Research Centre

Professor David Hume has been appointed as the first director of a new world-class research centre being established in Edinburgh.

The only journalist likely to follow up that sort of vague lead – centre for what? – is one looking for something to ridicule. Which is how we came to find First Director Appointed to New Research Centre on the University of Edinburgh's web site:

"The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the
University of Edinburgh are pleased to announce the appointment of Prof David
Hume as the first director of a new world-class research centre being
established in Edinburgh."

Still none the wiser, we had to dig deeper to find that the subject in question is, well we still aren't sure.

Near the end there is a quote from the Prof.

"This is a key opportunity to help maintain Scotland's world-leading status in
animal science through the establishment of an interdisciplinary and unique
intellectual environment that will foster new ideas and new ways of working
between researchers from different scientific disciplines."

So it is animal science then. But that could be anything. The place doesn't have a name, it seems.

Still they have time to find one. The place won't open its doors until 2008 and its new building isn't due until 2010.

Maybe they are being careful to avoid the attention of the Animal Lunatic Fringe. Sadly the extremists who hate people more than they like animals are bound to get the wrong end of the stick and will try to cause misery anyway.

tag: PR, lunatic fringe, animal experiments

Fellowships for Science Reporters

2007-01-12T12:04:00.000Z

Chinese reporters are the focus for this year's Fellowships for Science Reporters in Developing Regions. These awards will pay for "six promising journalists from the region to attend and cover the AAAS Annual Meeting in February".

The announcement has some comments on science writing in China from William Chang of the US National Science Foundation's Beijing office who was the independent judge for the selection process. According to Chang, open and unbiased news reporting is on the rise in China, "but there is still great room for further improvement. I feel that all the applicants recognized this, and made their best efforts under the present constraints."

tag: China, AAAS, EurekAlert!, journalism

Nuclear waste spins in its grave

2007-01-11T18:32:00.000Z

Scientists love to beat the media round the head with accusations of spinning science stories. But who needs hacks to do it when the scientists' own PR folks have their own ultra-fast centrifuges?

Here are two headlines:

Cambridge scientists lay groundwork for safer nuclear waste storage

Radiation degrades nuclear waste-containing materials faster than expected

Which press release do you think will get the biggest coverage?

I agree. Number 2.

But hang on. Read below the headline and you will find that they are based on the same scientific paper.

Interestingly, the journal carrying the paper, Nature, takes a middle way in the headline on its own report of the paper. This reads "Materials Science: Displaced by radiation".

Of course, the scientists who wrote the "Letter," Nature's way of describing shorter papers, opt for the impenetrable but scientifically accurate "Quantification of actinide alpha-radiation damage in minerals and ceramics".

As Nature's own write up says "The mineral zircon suffers more structural damage from the -decay of plutonium present in its crystal than was thought. That could have a knock-on effect on strategies for managing nuclear waste."

So, as you would expect, the paper supports both headlines. It is just that the folks who wrote the more "sensational" of the two have a better appreciation of which buttons to press to make a journalist jump.

tag: journalism, science writing, energy, nuclear, PR, spin

Universities as R&D partners

2007-01-08T16:33:00.000Z

Over on The Manufacturer.com, they have an interesting article on Universities as R&D partners. This describes the efforts that some universities in the USA have put into developing links with industry. The particular interest here is that the article focuses on manufacturing, not one of the areas where you would traditionally think of universities as R&D powerhouses.

The article makes the point that a number of universities have set up centres just to help business. For example, they describe The Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies (CIMS) at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. Established in 1992, its mission is to "increase the competitiveness of US manufacturers through applied technology and training".

The UK is not devoid of similar operations. The Institute for Manufacturing in the Engineering Department at Cambridge and the Warwick Manufacturing Group spring instantly to mind. They are one small sign that the country has not quite given up on manufacturing, despite many reports of its death.

Where is Lord Sainsbury when they need him?

2007-01-05T10:05:00.000Z

It may be just a coincidence, but within weeks of losing its Minister for Science, Tony Blair's government suddenly manages to provoke panic among the nation's scientists. It would not have happened in Lord Sainsbury's day.

First there were hints that the Department of Trade and Industry would raid the science budget to fill a hole in its own accounts. Now there is a threat to put a brake on stem-cell research. Reuters has the story, Stem cell experts slam UK stance on hybrid embryos.

It may just be scientists crying wolf. If so, they have come along way. Perhaps they have been talking to the same spinmeisters who have done such good work for the image of Number 10.

Madonna was right

2007-01-03T22:32:00.000Z

A campaign is under way to debunk some of the sillier personality endorsements of wacky science. First we read the item on the BBC web site Stars must 'check science facts', and then there is the article in The Guardian Neutralise radiation and stay off milk: the truth about celebrity health claims.

Unfortunately, the BBC story is thin on juicy bits. The anonymous item offers not one example of a celebrity suffering from scientific foot-in-mouth syndrome. We just get some quotes from some of the usual rent-a-gob mob of scientists and an exhortation from Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science, urging celebs to call this shadowy outfit before they go public.

It would be much better if they urged the people who passed on this tosh to check it before putting it into their magazines and newspapers. But that would not garner quite as much publicity as going for the celebs.

If you want to read to examples of celebrity tosh, you will have to download the brochure promoting the venture. We like the one from Jo Wood "wife of famous musician" who is quoted as saying "what you put on your skin goes into your bloodstream". She is mouthing off about why she uses organic beauty products.

Sadly, the response is a bit unscientific for us. It quotes Dr Gary Moss, a pharmacologist from the University of Hertfordshire, as saying "Ingredients in cosmetics are normally quite large and cannot get across your skin and into your bloodstream." We think this is a reference to the size of the molecules in all that gunk. He is right, though, when he continues "Your skin feels different when you apply cosmetics because their effect is on the outer surface of the skin."

The Guardian picks up the same story. Unlike the BBC, James Randerson has some of the quotes from the brochure. For example, he includes Madonna's comments on nuclear waste. "I mean, one of the biggest problems that exists right now in the world is nuclear waste ... that's something I've been involved with for a while with a group of scientists - finding a way to neutralise radiation."

The response here is even more suspect. Nick Evans, an environmental radiochemist at Loughborough University tells us that "Radioactivity cannot be 'neutralised', it can only be moved from one place to another until it decays away at its own rate. It comes in many different types: some last for billions of years, others decay away in a few minutes. There are no magical solutions."

Up to a point Lord Copper. By coincidence, we recently read an item on the EU's excellent Cordis web site, German researchers find solution to radioactive waste disposal. This reports that "German physicists ... have come up with a way of speeding up the decay of nuclear waste. The technique involves embedding the waste in metal and cooling it to ultra-low temperatures."

He even puts numbers on the possible reduction in half life. Dr Rolfe says "We are currently investigating radium-226, a hazardous component of spent nuclear fuel with a half-life of 1,600 years. I calculate that using this technique could reduce the half-life to 100 years."

There have been other reports over the years of using accelerators and the like to transmute radioactive isotopes into something safer. Madonna may be talking tosh, but it is unwise to blind her with science that she can easily counter.

tag: PEST, science writing, journalism, media

Stories that clicked on NewScientist.com

2007-01-02T10:02:00.000Z

Any editor worth the title wants to know what the punters like to read before going on and ignoring their input. So it is worth catching up on NewScientist.com's most popular stories of 2006.

Top of the list of "the ones you clicked on the most" was "Imagine Earth without people," and rounding off the list was "Revealed: What mosquitoes hate about humans".

As an aside, it was nice to see that New Scientist chose to list the top 13, thus poking fun at two cherished notions, that numbers can be unlucky, and that you have to draw up silly lists to grab the reader's attention.

tag: science writing, New Scientist,

Would you hyphen it?

2006-12-15T10:21:00.001Z

From the headline you have to ask yourself if this press release from Battelle is about a new type of fuel cell, or a new way of making, or even designing, fuel cells.

The title "BATTELLE DEBUTS MULTI-PURPOSE FUEL CELL GENERATOR" could mean that they have a fuel cell that generates electricity for many purposes, or it could be a new generator of fuel cells.

It might help to add a hyphen in "fuel cell". Come to think of it, why not just drop the "generator"? Anyone who understands the term "fuel cell" will know what this is all about. Fuel cells are, by definition, generators of electricity.

Do not copy this press release

2006-12-15T10:09:00.000Z

I have been looking for an example of this puzzling phenomenon for a while. The press release that you cannot copy. I have found this lot of Press Releases. Retrieve any of the PDF files beneath the links and you will find that you can't copy and paste text from the file.

The press releases come from a company called Acacia Research Corporation, part of which "develops, acquires, and licenses patented technologies".

Now the whole idea of a press release is that people will reproduce it, preferably using as much of it as possible. What possesses someone to put out a press release with security such that you cannot even extract text? Is this also why they break another rule of good communications and do not offer an html version of their press releases?

I have written to the company for their take on this. No reply yet. Maybe they have broken another law of good communications by ignoring emails.

tag: journalism, PR, public relations

Is solar power pissing in the wind?

2006-12-12T22:06:00.000Z

What are we to make of this proud press release proclaiming that altPOWER Inc. Installs 1.1 MW of Solar Power? Are they serious. A megawatt and they boast?

Younger readers may not know that we went through an energy crisis in the 1970s. Then there was a rush into "renewable" energy when we faced the threat of a world without oil. Now it is climate change that makes us turn to the Sun, although talk of "peak oil" suggests that that one isn't dead either.

Megawatts are for minnows. After 30 years, you would hope that we had got beyond such piddling amounts. We need gigawatts, and lots of them.

tag: energy, solarpower, renewable energy

A quote for our times

2006-11-14T21:45:00.000Z

I don't usually warm to George Monbiot, more like Monbiassed, with his unrealistic view of the world, but you have to applaud, his take on the Monckton papers as they appeared in The Sunday Telegraph. (Some pea-brained aristo thinks climate change has nothing to do with humans.)

I wonder how the science writers on the 'graph' take the comment that "For newspapers such as the Sunday Telegraph the test seems to be much simpler. If they don't understand it, it must be science."

In reality, with Melanie Phillips on the Daily Mail also being in the ranks of climate deniers, you have to ask yourself if this is a political thing, with the right denying any cause that the Government espouses.

tag: science writing, journalism, environment, climate change

Capnography – word of the year

2006-10-26T17:19:00.000+01:00

A paper in the BioMedical Engineering OnLine, A novel application of capnography during controlled human exposure to air pollution, brought me a new word. What, or who, is capnography?

Google threw up no less than a site dedicated to the subject. Just one problem, you have to dig around even there to find a definition of the word. Nothing on the home page, but way down in the terminology we read that capnography is "A graphic display of instantaneous CO2 concentration (FCO2) versus time or expired volume during a respiratory cycle (CO2 waveform or capnogram)."

Wikipedia has it as "the monitoring of the respiratory carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration as a time-concentration curve".

So you you know. Maybe.

Yet more picking on science journalists

2006-10-13T10:08:00.000+01:00

Over on The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer has written a sensible piece Don't Blame Science Journalists. It has smoked out some of the usual claptrap from folks who simply don't have a clue. There is, though, much sense in his complaint about the harmful influence of embargoes.

The embargo system is simply the puppet master pulling the strings. But the science writers collude with this, partly because they have their backs to the wall and they like an easy life.

Most newspapers cover science because they feel that they have to, not because there is an audience out there desperate to read the stuff. So the science reporter constantly has to wheedle space out of reluctant news editors, many of whom think that science is something that the dog brought in.

News editor have this funny idea of what constitutes news. To them it is the material that has just appeared in the rival press and on the broadcast media that day. If the front page of The New York Times covers a paper in PNAS, then heaven help the science writer on the Washington Post for passing on it.

Embargoes just make it easier for everyone to know what will appear in tomorrow's newspapers. (Don't be surprised if there is a lot on large-scale solar power or autism next Monday.)

The scientists go along with this game because it benefits them too. After all, a paper in Nature, Science or PNAS is often a crowning achievement in a scientist's career. What better for the next grant application than to have that paper splattered all over the newspapers?

If everyone heeded Jonah's words and went to find their own leads, you would rarely read the same stories in different media. Get out and about. Visit researchers in their labs. Attend conferences. There's plenty of genuinely interesting science out there. Not all of it is in university labs, and yet we rarely read about the results of corporate research.

Sadly, another nail in the coffin of science journalism is, paradoxically, the Internet. It means that science writers can sit at their desks, waiting for the flood of press releases to come in. Then they can research away to their heart's content. Much easier, and cheaper, than getting on a plane and spending hours trying to fathom some hard science.

Is it any wonder that much of today's science coverage is bland?

Oh dear, more ranting about the state of science journalism

2006-10-10T11:39:00.000+01:00

Had any journalist I know written anything as tortured as this item in the otherwise usually sensible Adventures in Ethics and Science, or the even more confused original that provoked it, their job would evaporate overnight.

Underlying this guff is a complete lack of the scientific method that upsets these folks. They simply do not back up their theses with anything in the way of evidence. Anecdotal observations don't add up to a case.

Many years in the business have taught me that most complaints about inaccuracy of science reporting are down to two factors:

the reporters fail to present absolutely everything they are told, with all of the provisos and references to "co researchers" that are the stuff of science;

the scientists simply do not understand how the media operate.

There is a third one, misspelling the researcher's name, but we can overlook that.

Without any evidence of what it is that upsets these folks, it is hard to know which of these might apply in this case.

The first thing that a writer does is to check their spelling and to read what they write to see if it makes sense. For example, as well as an "obeservation" in this one, the original post contained:

"basic facts that had already been masticated in the form or press releases"

Apart from the smarty pants used of masticated, and the fact that any mastication would have been checked by the researchers involved, they probably mean "in the form of press releases".

Actually, the sentence itself smacks of an amateur writer. Why is there that phrase "the form of" in there, "masticated in press releases" says the same thing in fewer words. While I am at it, what are "basic facts"? Do they differ from other types of facts?

While it is not usually fruitful to dismember the writing that appears in blogs, grammatical correctness is an alien concept in blogdom, it is different when they rant on about writing. People who cannot write should think twice before commenting on the subject.

I could go on, but when the thing descends into a ramble about the state of education, you know that you are entering alien territory.

On the original post, they seem to be complaining about a TV reporter. These people are very different from newspaper reporters. Which brings us back to the point of knowing about how the media operate. To dismiss the whole of science journalism, as "Pinko Punko" does, on the basis of the behaviour of one TV crews is perverse and unscientific. It is like rejecting the whole of medical science because of the behaviour of Josef Mengele.

Does the public really care about scientific journals?

2006-10-09T19:02:00.000+01:00

The answer would seem to be "yes" if we are to believe this CORDIS story. They have given it the headline "Public supports overhaul of European scientific publication system".

I find it hard to believe that the person in the street knows what scientists get up to in the privacy of their own labs, let alone has a view on it. It turns out that this was a "public consultation" only in a very limited sense. It seems that the public was really 174 stakeholders who "responded to the Commission's 'study on the economic and technical evolution of scientific publication markets', which marked the start of an open policy debate on access to, quality and preservation of scientific publications in Europe". Hardly "the public," not really "a public".

Pity, the EU doesn't usually get that sort of thing wrong.

Another silly headline

2006-10-08T10:39:00.000+01:00

It says here, "Less expensive fuel cell may be possible". I have news for the fine folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory, so might more expensive fuel cells. It is also possible, but less likely, that I will be able to walk on water, or that PR people will stop writing silly headlines to press releases.

Rather than just sniping at this inane torrent, let's be helpful. Here's a headline that isn't obvious and that still tells the story "New catalysts could cut the cost of fuel cells".

Not only does this actually say something, it even flags up the sort of writer who might want to cover the development.

"Scientists Make World Breakthrough" shock horror

2006-10-05T16:12:00.000+01:00

This is Nobel Prize week, and it is a fair bet that the none of the scientists who collected the gongs described their results as a "breakthrough". Even PR people rarely do so. But, believe it or not, "Scientists Make World Breakthrough" really is the headline on a press release that has just gone out on Newswise.

This headline breaks two of the cardinal rules of science journalism. The first of these, which is actually true for just about every press release, is that it tells you nothing about the content. So a busy journalist will laugh and move on.

Breakthrough on what? Cosmology? Cloning? Pencil sharpening? It is actually supposed to be a breakthrough "in understanding how bacterial toxins cause severe gastrointestinal diseases".

The second crime against humanity is to even use the B word. Not just because you never know at the time of a new discovery if it is a breakthrough or not. (That's why the Nobel committees take so long to reward a particular bit of science.) But because the scientists who made the discovery almost certainly don't see it in those terms.

You do see "breakthrough" in too many newspaper headlines. But that it down to the subeditors and even there there's a fair chance that the person who wrote the piece cringed when they saw that headline.

A right royal megaphone

2006-09-24T15:31:00.000+01:00

Whoever, or whatever, The Scientific Alliance might be, you have to agree with its statement that this has been "an extraordinary week for the UK scientific establishment". That's how they kick off their latest newsletter, which, because it does not seem to be on the alliance's own web site, we read thanks to the Cambridge Network.

The alliance was moved to make this comment by the recent attempts by the Royal Society to bully Exxon, the world's most hated oil company, into pulling the plug on any funding it hands out to climate dissidents, folks who don't buy the party line on climate change.

According to a report in The Guardian, Bob Ward of the RS sent a letter to Exxon, or its UK arm Esso UK, complaining about the company's support for these crackpots, as some might dub them.

The first complaint in the alliance's newsletter is that "putting [the letter] into the public domain in this way is unprofessional and, at the very least, discourteous to Exxon, who seem to have been in discussion with the Royal Society in good faith". The alliance seems to have jumped to the conclusion that it was the RS that did the leaking. All that the newspaper report says is a copy "has been obtained by the Guardian".

The alliance is upset partly because The Guardian fingered it as one of the climate deniers. We'll leave it to others to fight about climate change. More interesting is the propensity of the Royal Society to issue statement left right and centre. In this case, they have latched on to an important issue, but sometimes they seem to utter forth for the sake of it.

This is a far cry from the old days, back in the 1970s, when I asked one President of the Royal Society (PRS) why they didn't come out and say things in public, he answered along the lines that they preferred to work through the corridors of power. As a noble lord himself, the PRS was probably talking about Westminster and the House of Parliament.

That attitude is long dead, fortunately, but has the RS gone too far? It seems to put out policy statements on a weekly basis. It churns them out on nuclear waste, evolution, and education. The RS even let the world know its views on "the UK Marine Bill consultation".

Then there are all those press releases and statements from the current PRS. At last count there were nearly 80 press releases this year. To single out one at random, do I really care what the Royal Society has to say about fishing quotas?

I guess they expect us to care because they are, after all, the country's brightest scientists. Then again, too many of the really bright scientists I meet may be experts in their subjects, but when it comes to the real world, it might as well be another planet.

I'm sure that all of these statements are world shattering, but you do get the impression that the RS feels that it needs to justify the existence of its policy machine. Doubtless they realise that media enthusiasm for these statements is a diminishing resource. Science writers have only so many pages for these Very Important Pronouncements. How long will if be before the "not them again" response kicks in?

How often do violins burst into flames?

2006-09-23T11:36:00.000+01:00

An item from Reuters, adds to the kerfuffle over incendiary batteries. The story, Sony investigates notebook fire, reports that a battery "caught fire at Los Angeles International Airport last weekend". This reinforced a question that I have been pondering for some time. After the recent, almost certainly over blown security scare, why did the Government allow portable computers on aircraft while banning the carriage of musical instruments?

As far as I can recall, there have been no recent sightings of spontaneous combustion of violins. Yet we get daily reports of exploding batteries. And you don't have to be a terrorist, just a tourist, for this to happen.

For some reason, airlines still allow you to board their 'planes with an unexploded battery. Must be something to do with the relative spending power of PC toting business folks against that of orchestral musicians.

Would you let the world edit your copy?

2006-09-07T12:54:00.000+01:00

Journalists hate it when people they are writing about ask to see their copy before it appears in print. They only put up with editors and subeditors because that is a part of the deal. So Ryan Singel must have had qualms when he posted a story he was working on for Wired so that the world could intervene and Wiki" it.

He recounts the result of the exercise in Wired News: The Wiki That Edited Me. It is an interesting account of how the story changed.

There may be little surprise in his conclusion that the exercise did little to improve the story. But his explanation of why this was so strikes home. "The edits over the week lack some of the narrative flow that a Wired News piece usually contains. The transitions seem a bit choppy, there are too many mentions of companies, and too much dry explication of how wikis work."

One bit that caught the eye was his observation that most of the edits merely made the story longer, until someone stepped in and did a proper edit of the piece. This is something that should happen to most of the material that appears in Wikipedia.

No matter how good the information there, it is often let down by lack of any editing to make it readable. But that's what you'd expect of something cooked up by experts. A bit like the result of Ryan Singel's experiment.

Hot science from Siberia

2006-09-07T11:47:00.000+01:00

It is always interesting to see science publications from other countries. Usually, though, I am reduced to admire the pictures, such are my language skills – I'm not what you'd call a cunning linguist. So it is nice to find
Science First Hand, which describes itself as "A good journal for inquisitive people".

This is an English language version of a Russian publication founded by the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and published since January 2004.

Unfortunately, the web site is no more than a place to check the contents and buy a subscription.

The headline that got lost in space

2006-09-04T22:49:00.000+01:00

The headline on the RSS feed was "One giant crash for mankind". It was the only light relief for one of those terminally tedious "so what" stories.

Decades after the US landed people on the Moon, Europe managed to crash a pile of expensive metal and electronics on to the Earth's biggest satellite. (How come the only stuff we can do in space is to crash into things?) The first response was to excoriate these scientific litter louts, but life's too short. Move on to something significant.

Then that headline came along, bringing back memories of the days when The Guardian gained a joint reputation for excrutiating typos but great headlines, mostly puns. You click the headline and lane on a far less entertaining version

Giant leap for mankind ... or just a big crash?. Ho hum.

Communication is a risky business

2006-08-29T12:47:00.000+01:00

A note over on the EurActiv web siteEurActiv web site adds to the growing debate about the way in which risk is presented to people. The main message is that "A report on the EU-25's national risk-communications practices recommends involvement of stakeholders in the risk-management process." There are links there to a rather large study of the way in which risk is communicated in electricity, chemical waste and GM food.

Another take on a similar theme comes up in Wordblog in a message entitled "Journalists need remedial maths". As the poster says:

Many of the young people who want to become journalists say they have always loved writing and want to use that skill to communicate with people. How I long to hear one substitute "maths" for "writing".

Pity they sometimes confuse maths with simple arithmetic. But at least they don't commit the American crime of calling it math.

Big money to think small

2006-08-17T18:02:00.000+01:00

Nanodot has a brief item, Converting nanotechnology cash into public engagement, showing that the US National Science Foundation is to spend "$20 million over five years to a network of science museums and related institutions" for "a program in Nanoscale Informal Science Education".

The money will include weekends of molecular model building, a three-hour lecture/discussion event and two artworks.

Nanodot's observer is "a bit dubious in terms of educational value". My take is that the US is putting almost as much money into this as some ostensibly scientific countries can afford for research in nanotechnology. And the US, where they love new technology, isn't exactly the place where you expect to find an anti-nano lobby.