Nevada ClimateWatch

Here’s a short description (2:45) of our Knight News Challenge grant application:

The full application is posted on the Knight News Challenge site.

This article, Online Outreach, from Chemical & Engineering News features UNR journalism professor Todd Felts, who’s working with a chemical engineering professor on an NSF grant to use innovative ways to reach high school students. Other lessons scientists are learning about outreach efforts:

“The biggest thing to consider is who your target audience is and whether online is a good place to reach them,” she says [Lisa Van Pay, a public affairs specialist in math and physical sciences at NSF]. Online broader-impact strategies aren’t for every chemist or every project, she points out. “Some researchers’ time might be better spent volunteering in person at events,” she adds. “We want to make sure people are communicating in a way that works with their project and that’s right for them.”

This highlights, again, the differences and similarities between outreach and journalism. Our idea is that promotion is one component of a larger effort to communicate accurate, relevant, timely information and conversation.

World view: Not by experts alone
More and earlier public involvement is required to steer powerful new technologies wisely, says Daniel Sarewitz.
Nature 466, 688 (2010)

Expert & Citizen Assessment of Science & Technology
ECAST will engage experts, stakeholders and everyday citizens in assessing the broad implications of emerging developments in science and technology.

Open To All
Nature Volume: 465, Page: 10 Date published: (06 May 2010)

Reinventing Technology Assessment, a 2010 report from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC that lays out a new vision for US technology assessment, points to recent international experience, particularly in Europe, and calls for a broader, ‘participatory technology assessment’ (pTA) model that would supplement expert opinion with early input from all corners of society.

Such a model might have helped the US government to avoid spending 30 years and US$9 billion to develop the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, only for Obama to abandon the project last year in deference to local opposition. As National Academy of Sciences studies of risk assessment have inferred, it would have been wiser and cheaper to interact with the public at the beginning of the project, rather than at its end.

The Network For Citizen Science Projects & Resources
If you’re a citizen: This is the place to find out about, take part in, and contribute to science through recreational activities and research projects.
If you’re a scientist or a representative of a citizen science organization or community group: This is the place to tell eager citizens about your work and get them interested in helping out.

Science Cheerleader
Hey fans, look alive! You are the new face of science. This is your first stop to learn about, do, and shape science. We’ve got plenty of Science Cheerleaders who are NBA and NFL cheerleaders-turned-scientists and engineers to cheer you along. Check out their video. GOOOO Science!

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has a much better idea for how to cover science stories than the usual one-shot, big splash, gone-the-next-day mode of reporting. Acknowledging that science is an ongoing process, with each study building on and testing previous findings, the Guardian is tracking big stories over an extended period of time.

For example, the controversy and reaction to the recent Science article about arsenic bacteria at Mono Lake can be easily followed on the Guardian’s Story Tracker blog. Not only is the work generating critical responses from other scientists, but a discussion of how scientists can and should respond to criticisms of their work online is also generating a fascinating discussion, as summarized in this article from the Columbia Journalism Review: The Right Place for Scientific Debate?

Hans Rosling’s “Joy of Stats” demonstrates how to take large quantities of data and make them useful, understandable and even entertaining. Imagine doing something like this with climate data in Nevada. How has temperature, rainfall, population growth and water consumption changed over the past 100 years? Visualizations could do so much to help us understand our environment more clearly.