Emlyn Koster
It’s a two-part session on "Innovative Projects in Public Engagement of Science. " This is Part 2, which will start momentarily and go until 3:30 or 3:35. Part 1, if you missed it, was this morning between 9:00 and 11:30, and also had eight presentations in it. May I ask, just by a show of hands, how many of you were in the room this morning for Part 1, Very good. But there are some people who were not here, I take it. That wasn’t all the hands, right? So I do have to be a little repetitious at the beginning, to set a stage. So I excuse myself if I sound repetitious to the majority of you.
My name is Emlyn Koster. I’m the president and CEO of Liberty Science Center, which initially opened in 1993, and is now undergoing, and about to reopen, after a $109 million expansion and renewal. This institution is located just on the shore of the lower Hudson, opposite Lower Manhattan, next to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. And our reopening purpose is to be a resource for living, learning, working, and caring for the New Jersey/New York City region, in locally and globally significant ways.
It’s a pleasure for me to be the moderator of these two sessions today, and I’d like to at the outset commend JoAnna Baldwin Mallory, Hyman Field, and Graham Farmelo for their design and assembly of this clearly very attractive conference. As I said this morning, and I think it’s a point that bears repeating, we all belong to various discipline-specific professional associations. Each of them has its own annual conference (or maybe more than that) per year, that always is a draw upon our resources, our time, our money, and our contributions. The speakers and delegates of this conference are proof positive that we are ready, willing, and able to convene in a trans-disciplinary manner at other times of the year. And I would therefore like to advocate that we do so more often, both by encouraging our own associations to take multi-disciplinary program initiatives, and by supporting independent convening’s such as this one.
My other point that I would like to make is that although there are a lot of us here at this conference, each category of delegate in the room is probably wondering, as I am, ideally, Why are more of our own disciplinary colleagues not here to be at the front line of this discourse about bridging the gap between science and society.
The conference program, which we’re now in day two of, as you may have understood, has been mostly built of invited speakers. This 2-part session today on innovative projects at the interface of science and society has been assembled differently. You will see speakers this morning and this afternoon from both Europe and North America, and it was built from a competitive process last fall. Some 80 submissions were received by the conference organizers in response to an early fall call for papers, and they were reviewed by a distinguished international panel. Each submission was asked to conform to a template, to be explicit about the goal of the project, its strategy, and its demographics of intended audience, in other words, the "why " and the "how " and the "for whom. " The resulting variety of 16 presentations today were deemed to be the most valuable for us to hear about. And clearly having experienced Part 1, as most of you did this morning, I think we would agree that there was an intentional variety of delivery mechanisms that were each sharing innovations with broadly applicable principles to other domains of the interface between science and society.
The session format will follow that of this morning. The decision was made this morning not to intervene after each 10-minute presentation with a 5-minute audience comment period, but on balance to get the greater benefit of iterative comment that might cross-cut several presentations by going continuously through the eight 10-minute presentations with my one-minute bio introductions, and then having the benefit of some 40 minutes at the end to continue the dialogue with comments about "have you thought about " type questions, suggestions for greater effectiveness, parallel thoughts in other domains, etcetera. We’re interested as much in your comments as we are in your questions. I think these presentations have been so carefully prepared, I don’t think they will be unclear in what they are saying. If you do want to make a comment at the end of the session, please, there are two microphones in the aisles. Please identify yourself concisely and then offer your comment or suggestion or make your question, also concisely.
So with that as background, let me proceed to introduce the first speaker. And we are following the order in the program, beginning with Carol Lynn Alpert. Carol Lynn is the director of strategic projects for the Museum of Science here in Boston. She is also principal investigator for the 6-year-old NIH-NCRR-funded SEPA Health Science Education Partnership here in Boston. She also serves as co-PI for the new $20 million NSF Nanoscale Information Science Education Network, and as public engagement director for both Harvard and Northeastern, University of Massachusetts- Lowell NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers. Carol Lynn’s training was in the history of science, and she graduated from Harvard University. In the early eighties, she photographed and produced multimedia programs on the human-rights struggles in Central America, and then for the next decade wrote and produced science and history documentaries for PBS, mostly through WGBH Boston, working on such landmark series as War and Peace in the Nuclear Age and NOVA’s Race to Save the Planet, among others. Carol Lynn joined the Museum of Science in 1999 to build the award-winning Gordon Current Science and Technology Center, a live-stage live- cable-casting exhibit and multimedia production facility, designed to bring public audiences in-depth reporting on current research and science in the news. As co-PI of the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network, she is leading an R&D effort to co-develop and distribute updatable and interactive multimedia science research stories among a network of science museums, libraries, and other public venues. Please welcome Carol Lynn Alpert. The title of her presentation is "YouTube and Citizen-Science Communication: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. " Please welcome.
Carol Lynn Alpert
Thank you, Emlyn. In early 2006, Fritz Grobe and Steve Voltz dropped a Mentos candy into a bottle of Diet Coke and made history. They donned lab coats, which helped get this set within the framework of science. They filmed themselves and posted their findings on YouTube. Friends sent the link to friends, and Web 2.0 virtual marketing worked its wonders. Here’s what hundreds of thousands of us saw sometime last spring.
Fritz and Steve were invited on The Today Show, National Public Radio did a story, experts were called in. This one piece of campy science performance art stimulated thousands of discussions of physics, chemistry, material science, and fluid dynamics. It was a veritable science teacher’s holiday. Not only that, but hundreds of young people went out and reproduced the experiment with their own creative variations. Sales of Mentos soared. There are now over 4,000 Diet Coke and Mentos postings on YouTube, among them some brilliant satires. This experiment, by the way, has been found to be quite irreproducible, just like the cold fusion experiment or the Korean human cloning trials, which were published in scientific journals. How fragile can be the notion of evidence these days in any science journal even, or a photograph or a video. And how easy it is to be manipulated by a producer or a director, anyone with an axe to grind or a conspiracy theory to tout.
And yet when someone who called himself Meet Mr. Glock posted this video of what he called "the world’s smallest twin-engine airplane, " guys all over the world rated it four stars and were lusting after one of their own. But this barely coherent teen, who calls himself Piety, pointed out that there was an edit right here, between the takeoff and the plane in the air. And how could we know whether the whole thing wasn’t just a fake? Well, it turns out it wasn’t a fake. But the important thing is that these kind of questions can be raised on YouTube for everyone to see.
YouTube is a marketplace of ideas where we can see the good, the bad, and really gross and the ugly, and what sometimes authorities don’t want us to see. YouTube showed us things happening in Iraq that even CNN would not or could not show us. YouTube has also become a kind of alternative-energy journal for creative technical pioneers who share their ideas, innovations, and improvements with each other. Dozens of innovators have posted their individual solutions to the energy crisis. And they’ll give you all the details, such as the hardware and the wiring diagrams. But not only that. They also offer each other ideas for improvement. There are all these blogs. It functions as kind of an online-video science journal.
And on YouTube, if you search, you can see cool science phenomena, like cornstarch science, and learn quadratic equations, and you can chew gum and no one will mind. But the dominant culture of YouTube is a sense of fun, of pushing all the boundaries. Here’s a selection from Brainiac, produced by Granada Television for Sky One and posted on YouTube. I don’t know if you saw, but that white box was marked Boring Science Videos, and they were burning it up, throwing down the gauntlet to all of us.
The media group of the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network has been searching around for video resources to help teach young people and the public at large about nanoscale science and engineering. And everything we were finding was either a boring science video or kind of scary or something that was advertising a national lab or a company or way over-hyped and misleading. And even people trying to explain how to get down to the nanoscale were usually using "powers of 10 " approaches, which are just too quantitative.
So we got the idea of posting our own little goofy set of videos, trying to see if we could get people to interact with them. This is part of our first rough experiment, which we quickly threw together, shot, edited and posted in a few days this last fall. (That was Amy Swint, by the way, Museum of Science.) We got lots of feedback on these videos. And even though we really weren’t trying to market what we were doing, we were just testing the water with our toes, we got a sprinkle of calls from around the country from science teachers, wanting to use copies in their classrooms. And it turned out, they had been looking for something fun to spark discussion. And so I thought that was a really pretty interesting response, and it made us want to try more experiments like this, and actually to encourage all of you to try experiments as well, to use YouTube perhaps, besides your regular Web sites.
These two guys, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion last October. This is a valuable medium. Yes, it’s also full of frat pranks and vulgarities. But 25 million people visited YouTube in December alone. And they’re the exact demographic that we’re having trouble reaching with textbooks, with television, print, and other forms of media. So I just wanted you to invite you: let’s all step across the big digital, generational divide, and play with folks on the other side. Thanks to all these folks who helped support our work at the Museum of Science, and thank you very much for giving me the time here.
Emlyn Koster
Our second speaker is Paula Fraser. Paula received a B.A. from the University of Washington in philosophy with an emphasis on ethics, critical reasoning, and political theory. She received an M.L.S. degree from the University of Washington in 1991. For 23 years, she has taught in the Bellevue School District’s PRISM program for highly capable students. She is an educator representative on the Washington Public Legal Education Committee of the Washington State Bar, serves on the board of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, and has participated in a variety of committees for the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, related to essential academic learning requirements, frameworks and assessments in science, and also more extensively in social studies. For the past five years, Paula has worked with the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research to create the For The Greater Good curriculum, and most recently the Ethics Primer. She is currently president of the Washington State Council for the Social Studies. She strongly believes that understanding science in order to appreciate and evaluate the ethical, legal, and social implications of research and technology is a critical part of responsible citizenship within the context of a complex and interdependent world. Please welcome Paula Fraser with this talk entitled, "Why Science Ethics in Science: Education Outreach Efforts for Middle and High School. " Welcome, Paula.
Paula Fraser
I left two handouts in the back, along with some CDs that contain much of our materials. Thank you very much.
Although my first slide indicates science, ethics and policy in the science classroom, I would like to cite a study by the Wellcome Trust in Great Britain, that talked about how science teachers often just teach the biology, the science (I’m mostly talking about biology). Social studies do get into controversial issues: ethics, legality, policy, and so on. The trick is, how do you get both of these groups together for informed citizenship? And that’s what we try to do with NWABR (Northwest Association for Biomedical Research). We try to address what the human genome calls ELSI, those ethical, legal, social implications of biomedical research.
I am representing Jeanne Chowning in the pink sweater today. Some of you, I think, know Jeanne. She is a former biology teacher and has received NIH SEPA grants and so on, as part of this Northwest Association for Biomedical Research. (For the future, I’m going to say NWABR.) Originally, NWABR was involved in training for inter-institutional review board committees, IACUCs (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee), and doing some public speaking in the classroom and having scientists going into the classrooms, to educate young people about the role of biomedical research. But about four years ago, Jeanne applied for this SEPA grant and received it, and NWABR now does educational outreach mostly to science teachers. But there are the humanities, philosophy, social studies teachers who do attend our workshops. And what I’m going to do this afternoon is to highlight some of the things that NWABR does.
The first grant that we received is called CAUSE (Collaborations to Advance Understanding of Science and Ethics). And what we try to do is strong science content, bringing scientists in to work with teachers, but also those ethical, legal, social implications. In other words, putting that multi-disciplinary approach into practice is related, I think, to what Al Gore was talking about, this informed citizenry in a Jeffersonian sense, that our democracy relies on this, and if we don’t have it, there are some great concerns. And I share that concern with Al Gore.
The thing that we really stress right now: I think many people believe that you can’t be ethical without religion. But what we’re seeing in a pluralistic society, what is this common ground that we can find, working on civil, reasonable ethics that people can believe in, focusing on reasoned analysis of problems stemming from biomedical research—civil, reasoned discourse and justified, evidence-based decision making?
Several of the roles that we play with teachers as a result of the CAUSE grant are, we’ve created an ethics primer. Then I’ll tell you about later some summer workshops, curriculum units, in addition to the publications. We have a Web site, and you have that on the handouts that I gave you. In addition, we have the speakers bureau that I mentioned.
First of all, I want to talk about the ethics primer. It’s a toolkit. Science content is going to change in the future. That’s just the name of the game. But what are those skills that we can help young people have, as future citizens, to analyze critically, to have civil discourse, and to help decision making? Those are the things that are not going to change. And if we could provide students with those types of skills, I think it will really help them in and even a global level when it comes to their decision making.
Part of the primer, the first part, is the content and lessons. We do case studies, really engaging simulations with students, where they not only learn the strong science content, but they also are applying these ethics concepts that they have been learning. The second is the ethics concepts or perspectives. And I personally find kids are not so engaged with Kant or Jeremy Bentham, but there are some principles-based ethical approaches that are not inconsistent with our democratic core values here in the United States, at least the ideals of those things like justice, autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence. If we can help students look at their reasoning in terms of those principles to justify their reasoning, I think we’ve moved ahead.
For instance, here’s an example of our decision-making model. One thing to notice is that we do include those less objective areas of social values and so on. We factor those into the decision making, but also the strong science content. And at the end, the big emphasis is on justifying reasoning, whatever decision they come up with on these various problems.
Another facet of the NWABR program is the summer institute for teachers at Pack Forest, under the shadow of beautiful Mt. Rainier. And teachers go there for a week, and you get a stipend, and it’s kind of a camp situation. They have workshops and bring in scientists and ethicists to work with them on integrating ethics into their classroom curriculum. We also have a cadre of teachers who have gone through the program, who write curriculum units. For instance, we did one on HIV clinical trials (vaccines), stem-cell research (that’s one that I was involved with), and so on. "For The Greater Good " is about the role of animals in biomedical research. And you can go to the Web site and download these, but some are also on the CD that I gave you today.
To go up close and personal a little bit with the stem-cell unit, as you can see, we focus on strong science concepts. We use planaria to get across the idea of regeneration in stem cells and how that works; techniques for obtaining stem cells; doing a case study of a family who had to make a decision about leftover embryos; getting into the status of the embryo. And there are ways to do this that address the controversy right up, but you can also have students step back and look at it from different perspectives so that you can have a civil and reasonable discussion about it. Last of all, something that I worked with was on the policy issues, doing the Socratic seminar, where students looked at the policy speech that George Bush presented in August of 2001, outlining his policy on limiting the stem-cell lines, and that was followed up with the February 2001 speech, a letter to him by Nobel Prize laureates, where they tried to present the scientific perspective. Finally, the culminating activity would be an authentic assessment where students have to address stem -cell research and write a research proposal, going through a proposal that would be demanded of NIH proposals.
And finally, I think this speaks for itself, this quote from a teacher. But I would say that this makes science very engaging and motivating for students. It’s authentic, it’s real world, it’s complex, it’s problem solving and decision making, and it has great value beyond school, because students will have to make decisions about personal things (genetic testing, whether to or not), societal (the stem-cell research is a good example), as well as global issues (health care and so on).
In the future we plan to do an online ethics course. That’s where we’re going. We just received funding to continue what we have started. And we are going to be working to extend this to other states. Thank you very much.
Emlyn Koster
When I was in communication over the last month or so with all the speakers and inviting them to give me approximately one minute of introductory material, in our next speaker’s case there was such modesty that I only received about 10 seconds’ worth of material. So I said, "Heather, you can tell me more. " And Heather said, "Well, if I give you more, that will mean I have less time for my presentation. " The bad news is that the timer starts when you start speaking. So we obviously have career highlights here.
Heather is currently the recruitment officer in the Faculty of Agriculture, Forestry and Home Economics at the University of Alberta, which is in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Heather is a geographer pursuing graduate studies in the public understanding of science. And she has been an interpreter at both the Royal Alberta Museum and in William Switzer Provincial Park.
Heather Gross
I’m very excited to be here, and I’m excited to come to talk to a new audience about a project that has received a lot of interest where I’m from in Alberta, and interest by many people, not just scientists, not just educators, but anybody who’s ever asked the question: How do they get omega-3 into those eggs? Or: How many cowboy boots can you make from the leather from one cow? These are the kinds of questions that we’re going to be talking about here with this project. It’s a university project, it’s completely science-based, but it’s a way that the university has been able to connect with people who eat food, people who make food, elementary schools, agricultural groups, and what we call primary agricultural-product producers, known as farmers.
This is the brain child of the guy on the top there. His name is Dr. Robinson, and he’s only on the top because he made sure everyone else looked good first. He’s a great scientist from Alberta, and he was getting tired of teaching his introductory animal-science course. He wanted to find a way to make it more interesting for him. And the result of this is the project "There’s a Heifer in Your Tank. " The tag line is that this university class gives science answers to questions you didn’t know you had about animal agriculture.
Because it’s a university course, there is a long list of objectives. I’ll just point out to you that the objectives are those that I’ve heard in this conference so far: How do we make science applicable for people who don’t think of themselves as scientists? How do we help the science leaders of the future learn communication skills? And how do we make science relevant for every person in society, not just those persons who find themselves up against particularly scientific issues? From a university perspective, this program has created an environment where students meet their friends in the classroom. And it has provided an environment for the first time where students’ grandparents want to come to a presentation they offer, because this is what the presentations look like.
A key part of the program is, yes, to ask real questions, real science questions, and to do real science research, but then in the end to present them to a large audience, usually larger than this one, in a very entertaining manner. To give you a little bit more of a sense where the name comes from (and I’ve been asked this many times since coming to Boston), it comes from this question: If your car burned methane, how far could you travel on the methane from one cow? And a heifer is a particular sort of cow, a female cow. And the answer to this question, the students answered in many ways. Perhaps the most relevant is: all the heifers that are in Alberta, in fact, all the cattle in Alberta, produce enough methane, through the front and through the back, so that you could drive a car on methane from where I live in Edmonton, Alberta, to Texas, four times over. It’s a lot of methane. And interestingly, the students in their science research found out that more methane comes from the front than from the back of a cow.
Another thing we’ve developed with this program that is somewhat unique for a university class is, there is a visual identity. I have at the back of the room some programs that show you how this visual identity really carries on throughout. We have tattoos that the students put on when they’re about to do their presentations. (They’re temporary.) We have shirts. Everybody wears the shirts. The shirts have become very cool. We have DVDs for sale that people give to their grandparents for Christmas. And really it differentiates this entry-level class from, at the moment, every other entry-level science class at the University of Alberta.
Some of the other topics or ideas that we’ve used that really work are, we have a panel of judges, scientists who ask questions of the students after their presentation. If there wasn’t enough science content to begin with, they make sure they get more at the end. If there wasn’t enough humor, this panel of judges also infuses humor. Alumni that have been involved with the project before come back to be teaching assistants. And really it is a case of learning together. They enjoy it so much, they volunteer their time to come back and help out with the next "There’s a Heifer in Your Tank " project. And here you can see they’re all wearing pink. Last time we did "There’s a Heifer in Your Tank, " we added in the component that there was an auction to fund-raise for breast cancer research as well. So really it’s very much a community event. The project has reached the interest of our politicians. This was the minister of agriculture in Alberta. He came to "Heifer in Your Tank " every time we did it. Now he’s become the minister of higher learning in Alberta. He’s still coming to "Heifer in Your Tank. " So it’s not just an agricultural excitement; it’s an educational excitement.
Frank wanted to be sure that he could include the community, and this is how I’ve been most involved—finding ways for the community to be involved. Certainly science classes from our local elementary and junior high schools can be involved. But why not have a band? What good program doesn’t have a band to start it off with? Why not have a choir? I’m in there somewhere. And in the choir, Dr. Robinson spent all his free time writing humorous lyrics to go to familiar songs, talking about the acronyms we use in the science world, talking about agriculture and some of the stereotypes surrounding if, and he invited the choir to join in. And every once in a while you can hearken back to his former life as a poultry-science researcher, and we’re dressed as people in chicken-processing plants.
I was involved in bringing a group of grade 7 students to our campus, which includes a farm at the U. of A. They came onto the farm for an entire week. At the beginning of the week they had to figure out some questions to ask, so that by the end of the week they could research and present their own answers to science questions they never knew they had. And we invited three of these grade 7’s (so they’re like 12 and 13 years old) to come and present to 500 people at the "real " "Heifer in Your Tank. " My favorite question that the grade 7’s did was "The Moo Versus The Who. They did research in our dairy farms to find out the decibel level of dairy cows, depending on whether or not a calf was near, and compared it to the decibel level of the rock ‘n roll band The Who.
As you can tell, I think one of the key take-home messages, the "so what " of this project, is that it captures people’s interest. We’ve had ever so many media stories about this presentation and about this classroom. Never does a university 100-level class make it into the paper as much as "Heifer in Your Tank " has. It’s also the kind of format that not only does it make it into the paper. Dr. Robinson now has a monthly column in the paper, answering questions as they come up. You can write him your questions and he’ll set a group of students working to answer those questions. The challenge has been to move it beyond the classroom, beyond only the animal students that are in his class. We’ve taken it, as I mentioned, to grade 7 schools. Here’s a group of elementary school students as well.
I think you can tell that there are benefits to doing a program like this. Certainly the personal growth of students, having familiarity with presentations, speaking to groups that are much larger than the groups they usually get to practice with. The student satisfaction is key. And if there are any university professors in the group here today, I can tell you that Dr. Robinson has the number one highest teacher-commendation ratings at the campus. And the reason for that is that students enjoy the class. The flip side of that is, it does take a certain personality to tell the other chicken scientists that dressing up like chickens is really going to help the students remember the reproductive cycle, the ovum, and so forth and so on. And he’s been able to do that.
There’s a strong sense of community in the student-learning environment, which is evidenced when they want to come back and help out with the project the next year. There’s a good rapport with the public. We get a lot of questions about this. And in the end, you leave "Heifer in Your Tank " going, "Oh wow, cowboy boots are actually only made from the leather in one part of the cow. We need to think of other products to use the leather in the rest of the cow. " We find out the answers to some of these questions.
I want to make sure that you know that this does reach a large audience, but it also reaches a large audience of students. In our Animal Science 200 class, we now have about a third of the students in that class are agriculture, animal-science students, people who want to be vets. About a third of the students are education students, those who want to be teachers. And then a third of the students are people whose friends are in the class, and they want to be part of it. So I think that there are applicable areas in all of our lives that we can think about how drama, how humor, and how some really question-asking and question-answering techniques can be used. And I hope you’ll find some this weekend as well. Thank you.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you very much Heather. Laura Lynn Gonzales is an artist, animator, and science researcher who creates at the intersection of biological science and digital art. She is currently involved in an educational outreach project at Duquesne University, the Regenerative Medicine Partnership in Education, funded by a Science Education Partnership Award to John Pollock from the National Center for Research Resources that is a component of the National Institutes of Health. Beginning work as an animator on Dr. Pollock’s previous Science Education Partnership Award, entitled Tissue Engineering for Life, Laura’s creative contribution quickly grew to encompass creative director duties. On both projects she has contributed biologically accurate animations, video editing, content development, and script writing, as well as special effects for educational planetarium shows at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. In addition to these projects, Laura’s freelance work includes molecular visualization for several biochemists at the University of Washington as well as a series of animations for the Pittsburgh Development Center dealing with research in somatic cell nuclear transfer. She holds a B.S. and arts degrees in biological sciences and fine arts from Carnegie Mellon University. Laura is here today to present the latest project partnership between Duquesne University and Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, where she is in residence as a visiting faculty member for the duration of this semester, facilitating the production of an immunology video game. Please welcome Laura Lynn Gonzalez with a talk entitled "Simulation Video Game Based on Concepts in Emergent Immune Function. "
Laura Lynn Gonzalez
I’d like to say thank you to the organizers of this conference, and for giving me this opportunity to present the latest program in the Regenerative Medicine Partnership in Education. I’m here today as part of a team of people presenting, who are working on production of a planetarium movie and a simulation video game based on concepts in immunology. In addition to my presence at this session, our executive producer and director, John Pollock, is here, as well as Joana Ricou, our interactivity designer and Web developer. I’d just like to point out that our principal funding comes from a Science Education Partnership Award from the National Center for Research Resources, a component of the National Institutes of Health. This current phase of our project is made possible through an innovative partnership between Duquesne University, Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center, and several other Pittsburgh-based organizations.
So this is our problem. The general population’s literacy levels are declining. Not only is reading comprehension among 90 million Americans sub-par, but more and more Americans are choosing not to read. So we’re in a time period where scientific advances are increasing at an exponential rate, while most people are choosing to absorb the majority of their information through sound bites. The result of this is that although people aren’t choosing to read, they are very media savvy, meaning that they have very finely tuned filters for processing the ever increasing complexity of human culture. So our goal is to appeal to these biases and create learning materials that can compete with the constant onslaught of modern media, yet communicate concepts in health research with depth and accuracy.
Our team’s vision is that unencumbered visual representation can communicate by using the details of the image to show the processes of health and disease. To date, we have succeeded in creating learning tools that translate the somewhat abstracted visual language of researchers into a cohesive view of biomedical research. So we create these rich, biologically accurate environments that allow the public to have a visceral experience that both informs and engages. This neural-field visualization that we’ve developed as part of our latest planetarium show is an example of the kind of synthesis of imagery and information that is a central component of our projects.
Our main venue is the planetarium dome. This is a depiction of the audience in a digital planetarium dome. The immersive experience of our planetarium movies transports the audience inside tissues and cells, connecting them directly to the biological reality that unfolds with scientific discovery. This is basically a summation of the previous work that we’ve done on our grant. To me, our current partnership program with the Entertainment Technology Center represents, in a way, a new educational paradigm. Keeping with the tradition of our previous productions, the creation of the game and planetarium show will give a visually compelling point of access to modern science.
However, I see this latest phase for our project as having an increased ability to foster actual public engagement and participation. In order for this to happen, two things must be accomplished. First, we must continue to focus on building new and innovative tools that reveal concepts of science and biology through new techniques and visual translation. Second, we must build into these new tools the means for the public to engage in the discovery process. Basically we’re talking about the democratization of science. And I’ll come back to this point a little bit later.
Right now our new partnership set up by our director, John Pollock, between Duquesne University and the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon allows me, as creative director, to interface with key scientists and physicians in the field of immunology, as well as our ETC project team, to facilitate game production. Meanwhile, I’m interfacing with the other end of the project: our production team, Joana Ricou, interactivity design and Web development, and working with Carnegie Science Center and Duquesne to produce planetarium movies. And so this project structure allows for simultaneous Web-site, planetarium-show, and video=game production, all of which are distributed in various formats to the general population. Now, our initial audience for the planetarium show and video game about immunology is middle school age, but we will expand on that and create different versions in the future. And so right now, only our Web site acts as an interface between the general population and our project partners. But as I see it, the video game has increased opportunity to open up a conduit between the general population and scientists, or our project partners. And I’ll give an example a little bit later of how I think this can be accomplished.
So we’re deciding to approach the immune system by teaching the emergent properties. In our educational model, in-depth information will be accessible within the structure of the game. Users will interact with the system in an intuitive manner, and will learn by direct exploration. Our goal is not to indoctrinate and inform from on high, but allow kids to explore the ebb and flow of cellular and chemical interactions, forming an intuitive understanding of biological workings in the human body.
This is a typical textbook representation of the immune system. Using this approach to learning, students are first expected to memorize all of the various components, their terminologies that go along with that, and their individual interactions. Using this approach, the immune system appears to be a collection of individual actors attacking each other, essentially the "invaders versus host " view. Our project has several issues with this method. First, the required nomenclature memorization doesn’t communicate function or relationship between the various elements. Second, the "invader versus host " mentality, we feel, does not encompass the subtlety and biological beauty of a complex system of interaction. We want to present the immune system as no more or less complex than the rest of reality.
We are approaching it from an evolutionary and systems view. Systems biology is a relatively new field that is made possible through rapid advances in computing power. So as part of the program, we have been developing relationships with several researchers in this area, including a scientist, Dr. Christian Jacob, who is at the University of Calgary. He makes simulations of the immune system based on swarm data. So you take the information from bird, bee, and ant colonies, and apply it to the immune system, the simulations. Incorporating this kind of simulation data into our interactive game, we can present the immune system as a vast intelligence, a distributed organ whose principal purpose it is to collect information and make decisions. It allows us basically to avoid the war analogies that are so ubiquitous in modern video games and the teaching of immunology.
In addition to the holistic view of the system, these will have the ability to observe specific reactions within different parts of the body at the tissue, cellular, and possibly molecular level. Our focus is not on terminology. The user will have the ability and will hopefully choose to delve in and learn those terms because it will essentially improve game play through in-depth study. But the game will be playable without knowing those terms.
The future of the project. As I see it, one of our hopes for the project is that a version of the game will be implemented where we can incorporate user-designed elements. In order to do this, we will have to design the game with this in mind, keeping the conduit between the simulation data that scientists work on and the end product that the general population interacts with. So basically, the attributes of elements within the game will have meaning in biological reality. So, for instance, the user could tweak the attributes of a virus or antibody in the game, and that change in data could be used to actually develop that model in the real world. So you have this back-and-forth between the online version of the game, human culture, and the complex systems of immunology. I believe that the interactions of these systems can be used to study, as Rita Colwell was talking about yesterday, the complexity at multiple scales through the hierarchy of life.
In conclusion, these methods that I’ve described—visual representation, synthesis, and translation of information, the opening of a conduit between scientists and the public, using real data—is one of the most exciting and promising possibilities for the future of science and society. These are a couple of our other collaborators. This is our project team at the ETC. They’re also here at the conference. Trish and Marita Suhus, students from the Studio for Creative Inquiry at CMU, are also here. So we’ll all be available to chat after the session.
Emlyn Koster
Thank you Laura. I also want to thank Susan Levene of Partners HealthCare, and back in New Jersey my assistant Elise Nolan, who worked with all of these 16 presenters today to put this series of presentations together. Thank you to all of those people.
Our fifth presentation this afternoon is by Arun Bansil. Arun received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Delhi in India, a master’s from the State University of New York at Stonybrook, and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at Northeastern University in 1976, following a two-year research appointment at Brandeis University. In 2002, Arun was jointly appointed as a professor in the School of Education at Northeastern, in recognition of his educational and outreach contributions. He is the founding director of the ELMO (Embedded Learning Modules) laboratory for developing novel curricula for teaching science to diverse audiences, as well as the Northeastern University’s Advanced Scientific Computational Center. He is an honorary professor in solid state theory at Tampere University of Finland, a guest senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a scientific consultant at the Netherlands Research Foundation, a resident associate at the Argon National Laboratory in Illinois, amongst others. He was awarded the 2002 Robert D. Klein University Lectureship at Northeastern University for his many scholarly accomplishments, and he has authored or co-authored over 190 technical articles, twelve conference proceedings, and is the author of a major book, X-ray Compton Scattering, published by Oxford University Press. Please welcome Arun Bansil, speaking on "PASTEL, " the acronym for Partnership for Art, Science and Technology Learning.
Arun Bansil
Thank you very much, Emlyn. I also want to take this opportunity to thank the organizers for choosing the PASTEL project for this presentation. This is just a fabulous conference. I must say, I’m tremendously enjoying the conference.
What I want to do is give you a little overview of what PASTEL is, and I want to get across the key innovation here, because I think it has some legs. And I want to then say a few words on pilots that we have done at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which have been received very enthusiastically indeed, and go on from there to say a few words on the scale-up and the future plans. I do want to thank our partnership team (this is a large team and really I’m just one of many people who are contributing enormously to this whole project), and then conclude.
Our partners are listed here, all the major museums. You see those pictures changing there. That’s sort of Name the Picture, Name the Tune, that kind of thing. I think you should be able to pick out most of the museums. Some of them are labeled for your convenience. Museum of Science in Boston, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Citi Performing Arts Center (some of you will know that as the Wang Center). We are quite closely working with the Boston Public Libraries for outreach purposes, because of course many of the underserved audiences simply don’t go to the museums. So if they won’t come to the museums, we will go to them. Northeastern University, where I work, which kind of started this whole thing. And although many, many individuals are involved in this, I want to particularly mention Mayor Menino, who is the honorary chair of our advisory board and the support of his office. As you know, the mayor is very interested in science and so on for the families of Boston.
Our mission is very simply this. We want to change the attitudes of Boston’s families towards science and the arts. There is clearly synergy between these two things, which we want to capture. We want to reach diverse audiences, and we want to capitalize on our various venues, a point that I’ll comment on more in a second.
In terms of audience and programming, our audience is families with children age 5 to 12. Most of the people here who have familiarity with the museum world, you can’t get them all. You’ve got to focus. And this is where we thought we could have an impact. The goal here is to try and reach—something I’ll come back to again, which is central to this whole project—we want to reach the patrons of the arts in their own comfort zone. They go to these museums because they love art, presumably, and we want to get them there and infuse science into their thinking through the context of the arts. The programming is thematically linked in the sense that the goal, to the extent possible, is that while we do a program in the Museum of Fine Arts, then we carry it on into the Boston Symphony, and there are synergies between the programming, so that presumably at least some of the people will be going to all of this programming and seeing further links between various types of things. So that is done quite deliberately.
Now, I want to get this across very clearly. So the key innovation here– and as far as we know, and there are really a lot of people involved in this partnership, nothing of this sort has been done on this scale before, anywhere in the world. Of course there are always some efforts going on. That is that we basically want to turn the large amount of available capacity in the museums of arts, venues of arts (symphonies, performing arts centers, the Museum of Fine Arts) into places where you can teach informal science to people. That’s a huge capacity, and we want to unlock that. That’s, I think, largely untapped. So that’s the key innovation here.
Let me say a few words on the pilots. There were two pilots. You see those posters that look somewhat related, one at the MFA and the other at the BSO. These were both funded by the Informal Science Education Program of the National Science Foundation through a planning grant. There were appropriate focus groups carried out to do some front-end work before any of this planning and the execution went on, and they have played a significant role. You never really know what will work until you start talking to people. The academics have all kinds of ideas, but oftentimes they have nothing to do with reality.
Here’s the Museum of Fine Arts pilot. There were about 1,800 visitors involved. We attached it to the February vacation week at the Museum of Fine Arts, thereby our audience was guaranteed; they were going to come there anyway. But they really had a great time. And I tell you, if you’ll keep looking, you’ll see this kid running away from this torch. Ah, keep looking there. And see, this was a real space tile that we got from the Museum of Science. And this kid is holding it, and we melt a penny on top of it. It’s an experience they’ll never forget. You know how it is. You’ve seen some of that in the other presentations. So there are lots of these things. There’s that space tile thing coming up again. Similarly at the Boston Symphony. That’s Mike Alexander. That’s an actual BSO performer who had this big Swiss Alpine horn which he brought out. I had a lot of fun, to be honest with you.
The assessment was quite extensive, and this was done by Jeff Hayward of People, Places & Design Research, professionally done. And while I will not go into the results here, of course, it was very, very positive. Just many, many personal stories as well. And inspired by Gore’s wonderful remarks yesterday, which I tremendously enjoyed, I will quickly share one story with you.
So this is after the BSO pilot, and we were walking out. There was a lady with her daughter, maybe 5 or 6 years old. They didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. I was a few steps behind them. So this lady asked this young girl, "What did you think? " And this kid jumped up and down, I swear it, three times, saying, "I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. " And I tell you, that’s the sort of thing which keeps me going with this. I have a large research program and I don’t as such need more work. But when I see something like that, I said to myself, "Gosh, we can’t fail these children. If we did, at least God will punish me, if not everybody else. "
This is not a simple thing to put together. And the major challenge that has been overcome, I think, is that these great institutions with very diverse cultures and identities have genuinely come together. They have genuinely participated in putting all of this together, and there’s real synergy that has come up because of this project.
The scale-up is going to involve programs embedded into the culture of each of these institutions, building on the pilots, including the Boston Public Libraries that I mentioned. And we estimate we’ll reach about 10,000 people per year. There’s also a plan to think about a Science Weekend, the idea being, we have Science City here, we have the First Night, why not a Science Weekend? And there’s a fair bit of enthusiasm for it. It’s a logistically complex process, and we are thinking seriously about it.
Let me conclude. You can tell we are very excited about all this, and we very much are already thinking of the process of replicating this in other cities with large museums and so on. And in fact, the Science Museum of Minnesota has expressed interest under the leadership of David Chittenden, who the museum goers here in the science world will know well. Other partners are very welcome. Just please come and talk to me. We are also very much in the process of now thinking about partnering with the foundations, corporations, and individuals. As you know, a project like this can use all the help it can get. So if you have any interest, please come and see me.
Now, because of the changed format, I was given permission by the chair very graciously to take an extra minute or so to flash this, because my hope was that while discussion was going on, our graphics people did a fabulous job of putting it together. I do want to single out one person in all this, who is familiar to this audience. He is the organizer of this conference, Graham Farmelo. He has been just fabulously helpful in this whole thing for years. So I do want to single him out. But really it’s a team effort, and I would leave this on for just a few more seconds. As you can see, people from the Museum of Science, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, are very involved. All of these people are very involved. We have many, many meetings, of course. As you know, Boston Symphony people are here. You have the Citi Performing Arts Center. They have totally reorganized and they’re really energized about this whole project. I don’t know actually who all are here. I’m sure quite a few are here. But it wasn’t possible to identify everybody. The Boston Public Library is there, you see. And we’re almost coming to the end. Consultants. There is Graham, Katherine Esty, Jeff Hayward, David Durlach (I think I saw him earlier) did a fabulous job, Chris Rogers, and Veronica Boix-Mansilla. And so I do want to thank you all again, and thank the chair for letting me have an extra minute.
Emlyn Koster
The network of so-called Swiss houses, located in cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Singapore and Shanghai, aims to create a new paradigm in connecting people to promote science and technology around the world. The next presentation, which is going to be shared by two presenters, will delve into this novel delivery mechanism. Pascal Marmier is in charge of innovation and entrepreneurship at Swiss House, the Swiss Science and Technology Consulate in Cambridge. Swiss House brings together Swiss and U.S. entrepreneurs, investors, and scientists around collaborative programs and local events. Pascal helps Swiss entrepreneurs launch their businesses in the U.S., and works closely with Swiss decision makers on making Switzerland a better place for entrepreneurs. He has also developed international collaborative programs in the fields of sustainability, nanotechnology, and life sciences. Before joining the Swiss House team, Pascal founded SEND (an acronym for the Swiss Entrepreneurs Network Development), working as a consultant to assist innovative Swiss citizens connect, learn, and do business with the Boston entrepreneurial community. He is currently enrolled at the Sloan Fellows Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
His colleague this afternoon, Francis Waldvogel, is a medical doctor trained in Switzerland, and in Boston he is a specialist in infectious diseases. He directed the Department of Medicine at the University of Geneva for 15 years. He has also been vice-president of the Swiss Science Council. From 1995 until last year, he was president of the board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, which incorporates both the Swiss Polytechnic Universities in Lausanne and Zurich and other institutes. He is now retired from the board of that Swiss Federal Institute, and also from the Department of Medicine at the University of Geneva. However, he remains most dedicated to new projects and is currently in charge of the World Knowledge Dialogue, an initiative to bridge the gap between the natural and the human and social sciences. Please welcome Pascal and Francis, speaking on the matter of "Swiss Houses: Fostering Science and Technology Dialogue Around the World. "
Pascal Marmier
Thanks a lot to the organizer for this good invitation. I am very intimidated to be in the middle of all these very distinguished scientist people here. But I guess if I’m not a scientist and if I’m part of the government, it makes me a little bit the Al Gore of the panel, so I guess I’ll survive. As was said, we are going to share the presentation, 5 minutes and 5 minutes.
I’m very excited to talk a little bit about the last six years of my life that I’ve dedicated to this initiative of basically bringing a lot of the science that’s going on in Switzerland here to the Boston area and to other places in the world right now. As was said in the excellent introduction by Emlyn, I work with this place here in the Cambridge area. We have other offices, and I would have some of the same interests and same initiatives that some of the other panelists, namely working with partners. We do a lot of work with partners, be it inside the government, outside the government, in the private sector. And I’ll quickly flash down through some of our recent programs.
One of the things that’s important to notice on this slide is that we’re really stretching in different directions. We started in Boston six years ago. Since then, we opened another office in San Francisco. We have one in Singapore, another one in Shanghai, and we’re looking really at stretching around the globe. So I guess if there’s a heifer in your tank, there’s a Swiss house in your back yard, or at least very soon you’re going to have one.
So what we do is really look at a new paradigm of science diplomacy, as was said in the introduction, really looking at collaboration, working with the people, being embedded in the communities where we are, be it in Singapore or some other places. What I like to describe or what I like to say, borrowing from the YouTube analogy, is really being open source. To a certain extent, we’re just intermediary people. We’re really listening to you, the people that are doing science, that are experiencing it on a daily basis, and we’re trying to mix it with what’s going on in Switzerland. What we also try to do very hard is connect people. We believe very much that the power of our activities relies not so much on what we know, but on what you know, and some of the people we know. So we’re trying to redevelop a sense of community and collaboration.
Here are very briefly some of the topics on which we’ve worked. The audience basically ranges from the elementary schoolteacher to the Nobel Prize laureate, so it’s very difficult to be more precise than that. The tools: it can be anything from very small workshops and meeting (you’re only invited if you have the idea to contact us, by the way) to larger panel discussions, as we’ll see in a moment. I just also listed some of the collaborations, but it can be any artist or anyone who has a really good idea that we’re working with.
So how does it materialize? This is a typical example of what we’ve done, again looking in a multi-disciplinary way at risks in nanotechnology. This took place during a conference. We assembled a panel here in the Boston area, and then our colleagues in San Francisco did the same thing, opening it up to the public.
Another example was video conferencing, where again we’re trying to be a little bit neutral place where people can talk a little bit on what they want to say, and kind of give it an international flavor. I’m sure most of you would know Francis Fukuyama, who was one of our keynote speakers.
Again looking at engaging the public in what we do, this is a good example. We took the hot issue of stem cell, we looked at it in an international perspective. We had U.K., U.S., and Swiss researchers and policy makers, and we had a great discussion with the people in the Cambridge community.
Another example, this time addressing the need for communications. We’re working very closely also with the Swiss science ex-pat community here. We call them our most valuable assets outside of Switzerland, and we’re trying very hard to help them basically develop and present their science in a non-scientific way. So we have these science posters, science demos that we do a couple times a year, where again the community is there, and they’re forced to be a little bit outside of their zone of comfort, not just in front of their posters with other peers that are experts.
An example from San Francisco, interaction between a sculptor and someone that does atomic- force microscopy, that’s basically embedded into this exhibit. And then another example also from San Francisco, putting together science and fiction, and having key people (the gentleman on the right side, for example, is one of our astronauts from Switzerland) and bringing them together to talk a little bit about how science can borrow from fiction.
One of our (I would say) most relevant and most interesting partnerships in recent years has been with the World Knowledge Dialogue. So that’s why I’m delighted that Dr. Waldvogel is here today from Switzerland. I’m actually local to the Boston area. And I’ll let Francis Waldvogel talk a little bit about how we work together and what the World Knowledge Dialogue is all about.
Francis Waldvogel
Thank you very much, Pascal. Many people say that Switzerland is kind of a conservative country, but as you can see today, we are very open-minded because today, despite the generation gap, I’m Pascal’s assistant. I’m very happy to be that.
I would like to show a project which is very dear to me and has taken now two years of work, which is called the World Knowledge Dialogue. In fact, it has always occurred to me during all my life that the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities and the social sciences was deepening all the time, and that something had to be done about that.
So we have created a foundation which is called the World Knowledge Dialogue Foundation, and the idea and the objective is really to have some kind of a global and comprehensive understanding of the major questions of our planet and of our society, starting from the idea that there is probably not a single science at the present time which can really solve the major problems we’re dealing with, and that we really need a togetherness and a getting together from all the various aspects of today’s knowledge.
We also started with the idea that in fact the gap is deep and the gap is deepening at the present time, starting probably with the Enlightenment. We can talk about that, discuss whether it was earlier or later. But definitely the reductionistic approach of science for the last three centuries has really opened that gap.
And we also believe that because of all the major problems which a society is fighting with at the present time, and the world is fighting with at the present time, the time is just right to have a new attempt at closing this gap. And we believe, as was shown yesterday and discussed yesterday and also this morning, that science has here now a major role to play, and it has to play this role pretty fast.
So we created that foundation, and at the same time we organized a symposium which took place in September of this year in Crans-Montana, a nice skiing resort or golf resort, depending on whether you are there in the summertime or the wintertime. We invited about 250 participants from top academic positions from all around the world, and at the same time we also invited fifty young scientists who, after having presented in a short paper their interests for a transdisciplinary approach of science, got travel fellowships and invitations to come to the meeting. We had a meeting, as you will see in a minute, with absolutely remarkable personalities.
This gives you a few salient features of this meeting in Crans-Montana in September 2006. We had a scientist in residence as a moderator. This was Dame Julia Higgins, vice-president of the Royal Society for the UK. We had a variety of speakers, outstanding speakers, including Gerald Edelman from the United States, Jean-Pierre Changeux from Paris, Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute; Ian Hacking, who is presently teaching at the Collège de France, who is a major philosopher; John Schellnhuber, who is presently in Potsdam at the Climate Research Institute; and Richard Ernst, the Nobel Prize laureate in Zurich.
We decided on two topics, which we tried to approach from dual perspectives, both from the natural sciences and from the human sciences. And the two topics we chose were migration of humanity, an approach from paleontology, from the linguistic side, and from the genetics; and emergence of complexity, which we approached from the life sciences and sociology, from climatology, and from epistemology. A crucial question is: Can the human mind really approach complex problems, or do we need further development of new systems and new tools in order to understand complexity?
Those are the conclusions. As I said, 250 participants with fifty young scientists. The first conclusion was definitely that the dialogue between the natural sciences and the human sciences is essential; that there is no universal language bridging the two cultures, and that new faculty programs should be created for transdisciplinary approaches. And at the end, that dialogue bridges generations, because a young scientist had really a good time in connecting themselves with the established scientists.
That’s the end of it. Let me just give you what’s next. We are transcribing at the present time the presentations in order to make a publication out of it. And we are establishing a transdisciplinary network, including human sciences and natural sciences, with the Deutsche Akademie Leopoldina, with the Max Planck Society, with Science and Technology in Kyoto, and with the Santa Fe Institute, and planning a new symposium in 2008, at which we hope that you will be present. Thank you very much.
Emlyn Koster
Dee Rawsthorne is currently the outreach coordinator responsible for Science in Society at the John Innes Centre and Institute for Food Research. Both of these are government-funded research centers in Norwich, in the Eastern Anglia part of the United Kingdom. Previously, Dee worked in the director’s office at John Innes for over twenty years as the director’s personal scientific administrative assistant, working on various projects, many of which were either PR or science-in-society based. She has extensive experience in conference-meeting organization and project management. Originally trained as a plant pathologist in the UK, after her first postdoc at Cornell University she returned with her husband to the United Kingdom, and as she writes, "He won the race to get a job first. " That was at John Innes, where she was able to move into science administration, and "the rest, " she says, "is history. " Welcome, Dee, from Norwich, England.
Speed Dating with Scientists and the Public Decides
Dee Rawsthorne
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much indeed for the introduction, and thank you for allowing us to come and talk about some of the projects we’re involved in. In case some of you don’t know where we are, that’s Norwich there. It’s about a two-hour drive north from London, and Cambridge is somewhere in between. So this is Norwich. We’re located on the Norwich Research Park, and that basically represents about 3,000 scientists working in biology, chemistry, and environmental sciences. And we also have a new teaching and medical-research hospital on the site.
This is the John Innes Centre. There are about 800 scientists working there on mainly plant and microbial sciences. Opposite is the Food Research Institute. And they’re both funded by the UK government through one of their research councils. There are about 250 scientists here, and they’re working on the relationship between food and health. The local university is in the back here, and the new hospital actually wasn’t built when this photograph was taken, but that’s just about there. If you rank the scientists who are on site, we come fourth behind Oxford, Cambridge, and the Combined Universities of London. So it’s quite a growing center of excellence in England.
I’m responsible for Science in Society for both organizations (that’s the Institute of Food Research and John Innes) because we’ve merged administrations and merged communications departments. The two main thrusts of that are the Friends of John Innes and IFR in the City.
When our current director at John Innes came to us from the Salk in California (it’s Professor Chris Lamb), he made quite a daring statement in his first week. He said that we’re better known in California than we are in Cromer, which is a small seaside town about 10 miles away. And this was at the height of the GM debate in the UK. So basically what he was saying is, we had no local identity, no local trust, and basically no local pride in what they had in Norwich. So he said he wanted an organization, an association, where the local community could come in, open-door policy, ask questions always, have a series of events, have an external newsletter, and basically let them ask any question they could possibly want to know about what we do on site.
We were quite lucky compared to several of our colleagues in Europe, that we only had two attacks on our field sites at John Innes. One of those was an internal dispute; the other one was an outside organization. The director at IFR said he wanted a friends’ organization. So we said we couldn’t replicate the friends brand at John Innes. We’d have to create something different.
So we came up with IFR in the City, which could be taken off site in any part of UK or even any city in the world. It’s basically a database, a mailing list. It’s very cheap to run. It doesn’t cost anything for anybody to join, and all the events are free to attend. As I say, we drip-feed them. They get newsletters; they get a series of regular events. But the most important thing that every event has to have is some component of dialogue. Even if it’s a straight annual lecture, we invite as many of our own staff along as well, so that at the social event before or afterwards, they can discuss with scientists what they’ve heard.
On to speed dating and how this came about and how it works. Several of the friends leading events during the year said, "It’s great. We’ve really enjoyed this afternoon or this evening, Dee, but we still don’t have a sense of what John Innes does overall, and how science works, and how a science career works. " I thought, Oh, crumbs. We’ve done something wrong here. And at the same time we were trying to think of a way of telling people how science works on a daily basis, how 800 scientists interact and work.
The definition of speed dating seemed to provide us exactly what we wanted. I had seen it done with a farmer-science dialogue: one farmer, one scientist. But that only reached about ten farmers, and it was very specific to the projects they wanted to hear about. So what we’ve done is, we’ve got the scientists to talk to about ten or twelve people, and move round the tables in the evening. And we have a student, a postdoc, a project leader, a head of a department, someone from senior management, and also someone from the support services, so someone from the greenhouses, from contracts, from HR, from computing. And they all take a turn at talking to the group, and then move on after about fifteen minutes. They’re given pretty strict instructions. They’re not allowed to use any formal presentation material whatsoever, so no slides, no PowerPoint. But they are allowed to bring plants, equipment, show-and-tell type stuff to spark off the discussion.
The advantages of speed dating are: it’s very formal, very adaptable, very cheap, it’s easy to do; but the most important thing is that it is direct in dialogue and it’s primarily audience-led.
If I put the disadvantages up, getting the space right is crucial. The first time we did it, we had eighty people in quite a small room, I suppose, and we all split up into the groups. The scientists started moving around. After the first session, the noise level was so high, nobody could hear themselves speak, which was great. So we sort of split everybody up and put one group per room. The atmosphere completely dropped. It was intimidating again. It was, "I’m in a room with a scientist. " So getting two or three groups in a fairly large room seems to be a nice, comfortable way of doing it.
Going back to the disadvantages, at the start, the first impressions are permanent, and it’s vital you choose the right people, which is obvious. But it also provides a very good way of young scientists (students and postdocs) having their first experience of public engagement, because it is very informal and it is very relaxed. Some of the people come away and say, "It was great, but I only heard just a tiny bit. I want to know more. " Now, for me that’s an advantage because it really means you’ve engaged with them and you’ve hooked them in, as it were.
The groups can be dominated by individuals sometimes, which happens, I suppose, in any public engagement event. But when you have such a small group of people, one on one, you tend to find out one person can really take over during the whole evening.
So what next with speed scientists? We’d like to take it out to public venues. We’ve only ever done it on site at the moment. And more and more at home, we’ve got comedy nights and restaurants with single-seating dinners and that kind of thing. So we’d like to take it and try to find someone who’s brave enough to let some scientists into their venue for an evening, and also to take it into schools. We’d love to take it into schools. We really think this is a good way of breaking down that scientist stereotype with schoolchildren, and also with people thinking of going on to university perhaps, showing them how career structures work within science.
Very briefly, the next project we want to try (and it is very much in the planning stages at the moment) is getting a public audience to decide on what science gets funded. What we’re going to try and do is choose four research proposals, four scientists, to go head-to-head, off site. We’re going to choose an off-site venue, and it’s a new youth theater in Norwich. Maintain the informality, and this is the theater. We’re going to do it cabaret style, and we’re going to get a professional facilitator to run the evening, because we feel it’s very important that there’s a professional who keeps it going, to make it work. The audience will vote off two of the proposals, and then the final two will go head-to-head and be cross-examined by the audience. And then afterwards, if we feel the audience can take it, we’re going to try and do some evaluation on why they voted the way they did. Was it because, if it was a cancer research proposal, they had cancer or they knew someone who did? Was it very emotive reasons? Or did they really stand back and look at the science and see how it might go forward and what the public value of spending public money on it was? If you want to find out how it worked, contact me June 14th, because we’re doing it the night before. Thank you.
Emlyn Koster
To our eighth presentation, after which we move into an open discussion with you. Julia Schulhof joined ScienCentral, Inc., an independent science media production firm, in 2002, as the vice-president for business development. She builds and manages strategic partnerships for the company, having over fifteen years of experience in science-content development and communications. At the Nature Publishing Group, publisher of the journal Nature, she managed an international portfolio of professional journals, negotiated contracts, helped acquire new journals, oversaw the creation of profitable Web sites, and helped grow revenue. She co-authored, along with ScienCentral CEO Eliene Augenbraun and Jon Miller (who’s in the audience) of Michigan State University, a paper entitled "Adult Science Learning from Local Television Newscasts, " which was published in December 2006 in the journal Science Communication. She received her bachelor in science from Cornell University, and her talk is entitled "Research Video News: Catalyst for Increasing Engagement of General Audiences. " Please welcome Julia Schulhof.
Julia Schulhof
It’s that time of day where our blood sugar levels are probably dropping, so what better way to spend it than watching a little local commercial TV news? [clip played] So that’s right. It’s not their fault.
But what you saw just now was presented by Dr. Bruce on WNBC, which is the local affiliate in New York City. And in actuality, it was completely written, shot, and produced by ScienCentral, by one of our in-house producers. It started its life as this paper, which is probably a format with which many people in this audience are familiar and could make heads or tails of, but as we know, the majority of Americans probably could not.
So why study local commercial TV news of the sort that you just saw? I just wanted to say, you could see the format. It’s catchy, it was amusing, it kept (I hope) your attention. The first reason is really just the sheer numbers. Over 50 percent of the American public are regular watchers of local TV news. That number has dropped from the early nineties, but it’s sort of been holding steady for a number of years now. At the same time, of course, we know that the number of folks who are availing themselves of news online is increasing. But one thing that’s important to remember is that even though we know the leaders of tomorrow are using different platforms to access news and information, at the moment they’re still using local TV news as their main source.
So who are these local news viewers? Well, as it turns out, regular news viewers are an extremely diverse group of people in terms of their age, their race, and their education level. And Jon Miller has been invoked many times during this conference so far, and I think he’s here in the audience. But this was an article that was published about Jon’s work a couple of summers ago in The New York Times. Jon, of course, has been collecting data about Americans’ attitudes towards and knowledge of science for the past twenty years. And what he’s found is that although Americans have a very positive attitude on the whole toward science, and believe in science and technology, something like only 20 percent could understand an article published in the Science section of this very same newspaper.
When you ask the general public what do they want in terms of their news, they say, "I want something that’s helpful in my daily life. Tell me why I should care what this means to me. " And if you ask them what their interests are, in terms of categories, you see that they say, "things that pertain to my life. " They’re interested in crime; they want to know about people and events in their community; health news is somewhere in here; and here’s science and technology. Not so much.
Now, local news is a commercial enterprise, so it probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that up here are crimes, trials, accidents, bizarre events. That’s what local news spends a lot of its time on. Health is somewhere down here, and science and technology is dead last. What this graph (which mirrors the graph we just saw) basically shows you, too, is how much time and resources a local news station is likely to spend on these different topics. And so you see that complex stories like science and technology tend to get the short shrift.
So this is sort of a "how. " This is where we come in. We’re funded for the most part by the National Science Foundation, the Informal Science Education Division. And what we’ve found is, we sort of hack the system that’s in place with two of the major broadcasters here in the States, ABC and NBC, and they do the distribution. So we produce the packages (what’s what we call a little piece like the one you saw before, with the scripts that the announcers can use) and it’s then distributed by the networks. And the most important stop-gap in all of this is at the local producer level. These are the folks who are usually in their mid to late twenties, with no real science education, no interest in science, who are deciding what goes on the air. And I think of it as, you know when you want to give a dog a pill and you put it into a liver snap, and that’s how you get them to eat it? In a way, we’re sneaking the science in with the stuff that they think their audience is really going to keep watching for. And that’s how we get our news pieces on the air. It’s extremely important to remember about those local producers and what their needs are.
So how are we doing? Well, Jon Miller, along with a company called Knowledge Networks, has performed a few years’ worth of studies on our impact. And this is, as those of you who receive NSF funding know, an important part of your NSF grant. I have an article available which we all co-authored—Jon, Eliene Augenbraun (our CEO), and I. And it was just published in Science Communication last month, and I have PDFs of that available if you want to see me later. I also have some on disk. But essentially, you can get into the methodology, if you like, by reading that paper. But there were approximately 2,200 or 2,300 adults sampled for the study within a six-week period. And they represented about 220 million Americans. The long and short of this is that when you extrapolate all this out, over that six-week period of time and about sixteen news stories that we produced on air, that were shown in local news broadcasts, something like 60 percent of the folks who were polled (which represents 60 percent of the population) could remember seeing one or more of our news stories, and something like 40 percent of those could recall details accurately, which is a pretty stunning number.
This is the paper that I mentioned before. What we’re suggesting in the paper is that the reason it works is because local news is a comfortable and effective way to learn. It may be habitual. A lot of people who are watching local news tend to watch it while they’re making dinner for those lazy teenagers. It’s especially effective for those with high attentiveness, meaning that they have interest in science but also some background in science. The salience (that you’ve got a teenager at home; here’s what this means to you) may help encourage receipt and retention. It may enhance existing cognitive schemas. In other words, there’s a lens through which we all see the world, and if we can assimilate new information into that schema, we can grasp it more easily. But even still, if it’s novel information that we’ve never seen before (terms like "nanotechnology " that we don’t know), visual images may help the recall. It may help level the playing field between those who have a science background or science training and those who don’t. Repetition may be extremely important.
In the future we want to look at the cumulative impact of these stories. What happens over time? Can we push people from these catalysts (and that’s what these news pieces really are) toward more deep sources of science information? And that’s why we’re going to look at how these little short, thirty- to ninety-second pieces work in different platforms, whether it’s on handhelds, on the Internet, working with science textbook companies to see how we can bring them into the classroom, and so on and so forth—and also with science museums. We have plans to work with some science centers and see how well we can engage the audiences there. Also on mobile phones we’re distributing over in Europe, where they actually can run video on mobile phones, and so forth. Thank you very much.
Emlyn Koster
Using YouTube as a way to increase scientific understanding; the instilling of ethics into school students about science and decision making in science; using games and simulation games, video games, in applications of helping public to understand health-science advances (in particular, immune functions); the application of comedy in a situation of university studies in agriculture; the merger of arts and science institutions in a particular city, and what can be realized by institutions that are not used to working together, seeing their worlds apart coming together for the greater sum of the parts in terms of scientific understanding, bringing more resources to bear; the matter of international NGOs promoting a broader dialogue about science and society issues; the innovation of how to promote dialogue between scientists and the general public; and just now, the role of local television news in terms of science communication. That one of course is most recent in our memory banks; we just heard the presentation by Julia Schulhof.
But going back to this morning, for eight other categories of innovation (and then it opens up to you), this morning it started off with the role of public television in promoting an interest in engineering by competitions in high schools; the recent developments at the CDC (the Center for Disease Control) in Atlanta, thinking anew about how to engage the public in setting priorities for public-health initiatives such as who gets a limited quantity of a medication to prevent influenza, for example, as I understood it; the role of a local museum to work with local public schools and to use the museum’s resources to allow the students to become teachers of other students in science; the role of a scientific society (in this case, the American Society of Microbiology) to promote public awareness of the area of microbes and public health; the adaptive use of the exhibition medium within a science center environment, opening up possibilities for the audience to comment on improved ways of presenting the exhibition, through online mechanisms; the variety of inputs that can bring to bear an understanding by the public of the effect of climate change in a particular ecosystem (in this case, in the northern part of Wisconsin), by bringing art and science together, as well as other media; the use of virtual 3D media in terms of promoting science education; and the last talk this morning was another scientific society, that of the American Physiological Society, trying to raise awareness as a professional society of physiology in people’s lives, and to introduce physiology as a possible career path. That, in summary form, moderately accurately, I think, are the natures of sixteen presentations today.
I would now invite you. There are two microphones in each of the aisles. Again as a reminder, please identify yourself briefly and make your comment or suggestion or ask a question—if you would please, concisely—so we can move through as much dialogue as possible. Who would like to begin? You can address your question to any particular panelist, or just make a comment generally and I’ll direct it to one of the panelists or more.
Audience
Thank you. I do have a question for one of the specific panelists, but I’d like to thank everybody this afternoon and the morning sessions for great presentations. All of these creative ideas are just amazing in their diversity, and very inspiring. My name is Sue Stoessel. I’m an educator at the Museum of Science in Boston, and my question was actually addressed to Dee. I was curious about the science speed dating, which I think is a really great idea. And I wanted to ask when the scientists are involved with the groups at the tables and they’re doing their speed date, how she encourages the scientists to be curious about what the lay participants’ concerns are about science, if that’s a two-way dialogue. I know the scientists are informing the participants about their research, but how it works so that the scientists know what the public’s concerns are about their science.
Dee Rawsthorne
That was a real concern I had, that it wouldn’t just be informing them of what the scientist did. I deliberately didn’t say anything the first time we did it, just to see what happened. But we found that because it was so informal, so relaxed, that the questions they were asking, the people in the groups were taking the discussion where they wanted it to go. The scientist was in the back seat. "Oh, okay. Right. " And so it was a bit of role reversal, in a way. The audience felt very comfortable and they felt they could ask the difficult questions. And in a way, the students and the postdocs handled it better than the project leaders and the heads of department. They’re much more comfortable at addressing those difficult topics.
Emlyn Koster
You mentioned that your center was subject to only two of these attacks. Was that a cause for there to be a more receptive attitude by the scientists, that they knew they want to do something to bridge a gap in that case between science and society? Was it a spur to their being more co-operative?
Dee Rawsthorne
No, I think it made them more reluctant to do it, actually. And that was a problem with the GM debate in the UK. Science didn’t speak up for itself. It was hijacked by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and we couldn’t get the scientists to speak out.
Audience (Sue Stoessel)
There was just one other thing. I want to thank Dee for sharing some of the things that didn’t work, because I don’t think we get enough of that at many of the conferences that we attend. And that’s natural that people want to put the best spin on their projects, but I think it’s very helpful for us, and also a great venue for us to share our ideas when we know what didn’t work.
Audience
Hello. I’m Bridget Kelly-Stein, a senior curator at the Schenectady Museum in New York. We’re a technology-and science-based museum that’s kind of going into new territory from an art and history base. So we’re working more and more with scientists, bringing them in to construct the texts for our exhibits. And we do mostly cater to school-age children. So my question, following up maybe a little bit of a response from Dee and then hopefully from Pascal: How do you prepare your scientists to move beyond their peer group? I hear Dee say that at first there wasn’t much preparation. But when Pascal spoke about the scientists going to the public and presenting their materials, they have to move beyond the "science speak. " I’m coming up against some problems in working with the scientists, particularly preparing for their material to go to the public, so there isn’t an indirect interaction?
Pascal Marmier
I’m happy to start. I think what helped in our case is that most of them were already a little bit familiar with the place where this will happen. So these are not people that we hand picked just for one-time activities. As I said, the part of the community makes the scene a little bit, the locale and things like that, so there’s a certain sense of comfort. The difficulty then is to really find a format that works for all of them. And I think where we worked hard is basically helping them understand that they should do their presentations or their posters not as at a basically scientific conference. So we kind of rehearse with them to a certain extent. We give them clear directions on what we would like to see. It may seem a little bit too formal, but I think it forces them to branch out a little bit from the traditional science part. And we also make them rehearse in front of people that are not scientists and that don’t really understand it. Again, I think since we organized this as a little trial, if you want, like a little kind of school fair, they’re getting better at the end of the evening. It’s really interesting to see. And some of them ask to do it again a few other times.
Emlyn Koster
I’ll just interject before Dee adds her perspective on that. I don’t believe this type of question has a "one size fits all " answer. I think there are cultural differences between countries that pre-establish what might be a more comfortable mode for one country or another. I think that’s a variable meter on the dial.
Dee Rawsthorne
We did a couple of different things. Something we became very conscious of was that the administrative departments on site also didn’t know what we did. They worked in HR or they worked in finance, but they didn’t have any real pride about what John Innes was all about either. And so we get the scientists to practice on them first. And we also say, "Pretend you’re telling your mom what you do, what your day job is, or the guy in the pub. Don’t use jargon. No gene names, please. We don’t want this long list of names. " So those are the two main methods we use.
Audience
My name is Hilde Hein, and I’m a retired philosopher.
Emlyn Koster
Do you ever stop?
Audience (Hilde Hein)
No. That’s why I’m here. I’m delighted to see that there is someone in philosophy on the panel, and my question is to Paula Fraser. This is an issue that came up this morning in the pseudoscience session. And my concern there was that not only scientists but also philosophers tend to thrive on jargon, and that makes them incomprehensible to anyone else. And I thought it was interesting that what Paula emphasized was that you don’t work with what does Kant say, what does Bentham say, but rather pull out the concepts and apply them to the issues that are before us. And I wonder if you could go a little further with that, because I wanted to raise the question with the pseudoscience session and I didn’t get a chance to do it there. But I think that is a crucial issue, that starting with kindergarten, you really could introduce concepts, but we tend to embed them in historical and linguistic complications, and I’m wondering how to avoid that.
Paula Fraser
One thing I think that we need to think about: we’re in this complex world, but here in the United States we have our democratic ideals that we need to be thinking about. And in a public school, how do you avoid indoctrinating students with a certain way of doing things? And yet we do have some things, like fairness and justice and liberty and all of those, respect for autonomy, working for the common good, and so on. And so in the public schools, if we can draw on some of those ideals in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, I really like the principle-based approach, because kindergartners can understand fairness. Have you ever tried to divide a treat with a kindergartner? They know what it is. In fact, Vivian Paley, who won a MacArthur genius grant, actually worked with kindergartners on the idea of fairness and how to have those kinds of discussions. But I think you do need to avoid indoctrination. But students, even high school students, will pull out honesty, or identify an ethical question with a "should " (should I do this decision, related to sharing my homework or drinking or whatever it is), to first identify an ethical question and focus on some of the decision making and what their reasons are. And then you can go back and say, "Well, you know, Immanuel Kant felt that. " You’re using his reasoning. And then you can bring it in when they’re ready to have it. But it’s more constructivist. So it’s starting with their experience and then bringing in some of those other approaches.
Emlyn Koster
Let me ask Heather on this question. Do you think comedy compromises the ethical aspects of the subject matter of agriculture and energy and so on?
Heather Gross
I think there’s a place for a lot of different discussions. And I think if someone is not talking about a heifer at all in their lives, there’s a place for comedy to start the discussion. I think if we allow comedians and first-year science students who are learning presentation skills to have the last word, and never talk to our philosophers, and never really engage in a deeper conversation, then there is a problem. If we had fifteen minutes, we could ask about the debriefing from presentations like "Heifer in Your Tank. " There always has to be a debriefing. How did it come across? What wider questions, what deeper ethical issues arise from this kind of research?
Audience
This is mostly for Arun, I think, although many of you might be able to answer this. My name is Devra Wexler and I work at a traveling exhibition service which is fairly well known. And many of the museums are used to working with us, and tend to look for our exhibitions. But we’ve noticed that when we have exhibits that combine science and art, museums are very hesitant. They don’t know what to do with a photographic exhibit that looks at science, or a science exhibit that has an element of art in it. And I wonder if you can talk about how you were able to convince these various institutions that there’s a value to looking at the other side.
Arun Bansil
Well, I must say that some of it is historic, in the sense that somewhere we mentioned this ELMO lab that I had made, and that was a lab whose purpose was just a formal science education, so it was meant for designing new curricula. And the goal there was very simple. I was fed up with seeing kids coming out afraid of science and so on, and so I just wanted to take it head-on. And the way we did that was to embed science into the arts. So the visual-art students, for example, we would teach them the use of radiation in detecting art forgeries. They never even asked the question, "Why am I doing it? " They were just so excited. We never have less than 100 percent attendance, for example. And these are science courses for art students.
Now, in that context, what happened was that I started working with the Museum of Fine Arts and BSO (the Boston Symphony), and they are just a few minutes’ walk from my office. So the chief scientist of the Museum of Fine Arts, Richard Newman, actually used to come in and would teach. We would take our students in the back rooms of the Museum of Fine Arts for years. And so that led to a real synergy. And one thing led to another, and I think there’d always been, I think, a latent feeling that there is just so much science behind the scenes in the art museums. I don’t think most people here have visited—I hadn’t. If you go down to the back rooms of the Museum of Fine Arts, you will see rooms and rooms full of equipment which we use in labs, the high-quality infrared cameras and all the rest of it. They take x-rays of the Greek vases, just like of people. And so it was very natural. And then Richard and others pretty quickly were very comfortable with us to start with, and that’s how one thing led to the other. And we did hold those pilots, and they were just received so well. Now the Museum of Fine Arts is very excited about all this, and we may even be doing some joint fundraising and whatnot. So I think it’s really the level of comfort that comes by knowing and trusting. So there’s no simple solution except to work and be very respectful of the feelings.
Emlyn Koster
As a member of the science museum profession, I’d just like to insert a bit of relevant information to your question. I think there’s a welcome trend afoot in the last few years for science centers to indeed expect to be told about, and increasingly be willing to receive, exhibitions of a touring nature that are on more "serious " subjects. Recently, various associations who want to get their public message out have used the medium of exhibition and touring exhibition to do that.
A couple of examples. About to premiere at the Science Museum in Minnesota is an exhibition on race, which was proposed to the museum field by the American Anthropological Association. Several years ago, the American Materials Research Society worked with the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto to produce Strange Matter. Back in the early nineties, maybe a pioneer of this was the American Psychological Association, which worked with the Ontario Science Centre, again when I was there, to produce the exhibition called Understanding Ourselves, Understanding Each Other, the first exhibition interactive on psychology. We at Liberty Science Center have as a choice for our first traveling exhibition an interesting slant on that same point, where in this case science may well be a vehicle for a better understanding between the cultural friction between different parts of the world. We are bringing to North America an exhibition on a thousand years of Islamic science rediscovered from the years 700 to 1600, from Dubai and South Africa, to try and bring about a more enlightened view of contributions of cultures over time.
Next question, please. Gentleman from the Museum of Science in Boston.
Audience
We’ve been for about four years now experimenting with various kinds of program formats that stimulate dialogue and deliberation on issues of science and society. And this past year, thanks to the funding connected with the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network, we were able to bring four other institutions into doing experiments this year. And I think in the next year or so, with some support from the National Academy of Engineering, we will try to create another conference that will be specifically around how to stimulate dialogue and discussion between scientists, engineers, and the public in science- museum settings, or potentially other settings. So I’m interested in collecting ideas and information from folks about that. One of the things I’d like to do is find out if there are folks who are doing any of this kind of programming (a couple of our speakers today did), whether they’re willing to share short descriptions of their program format that we can share with other people in the field, and we’ll do the same thing with the ones that we’ve been experimenting with in the last couple years. And this will sort of form the basis for perhaps this future conference with National Academy of Engineering around developing this kind of thing. If folks want to send me an indication—
Emlyn Koster
Just identify yourself so they can find you in the booklet.
Audience
Larry Bell, Museum of Science.
Audience
Hi. My name is Nicole Duarte, and I am one of the not small pool of freelancers here that I’m sure were all capable and creative enough to create some of the wonderful content that we’ve seen today. And my question is for Julia and Carol and Laura. Are you seeing a market for these products? Are they successful enough that you see expansion and more opportunities for other people to create these things and still manage to eat?
Julia Schulhof
I think that getting to the mass levels that we do through local news is tricky, and we’ve worked it out through the method that I mentioned, and that’s working with the networks and having them do the distribution. It’s very complex. I would say that we’re seeing much more in terms of our partnerships. And I missed the last slide in my talk, but working with, for example, textbook publishers, who are realizing at this point in time that they’ve got to do something different to get educators to involve their content in the curricula. Producing online is a little bit trickier. I guess my point is that we see there’s a potential for a market. We’re not exactly sure how to monetize all of it, but certainly there seems to be a real need for the kind of video content that we’re doing, and especially we’re seeing a lot of established publications and publishers coming to us for this kind of content now, because they realize that it’s what everyone wants. (I don’t know if that answered your question.)
Laura Lynn Gonzales
What I do is mostly 3D animation, and it’s in high demand, just because you have these things like science centers that need content generated. But as far as general outreach, there is a specific market for these general outreach materials. Basically what I’ve found that’s been most successful for my freelance work is actually just seeking out projects, research that you find interesting, and then convincing them that they need outreach, and then they’ll pay you from their grants. But it’s a very specialized market and it requires very specialized skills, and so right now there is enough work for those of us who are in this specialized market. And I think that it will continue to build, first of all in respectability, second of all, more people will realize that that’s what they want and need, and will become less afraid of branding.
Emlyn Koster
Carol, is the Museum of Science satisfied with the subset of the total museum’s attendance that takes in the live science, the current science pilot experience?
Carol Lynn Alpert
Oh, yes. That’s centrally located in a big part of the museum, so you can’t fail to—
Emlyn Koster
Purposely so?
Carol Lynn Alpert
Oh, yes. So you don’t have to go into a door, like you’re going into a lecture and have the door close behind you, and be afraid that you can’t get out if it’s boring. We do the live presentations and the multimedia right there on the Current Science and Technology Stage in the middle of the museum.
But I wanted to respond to the freelance question. There are two different things here. One is making a living doing freelance. I think what we were talking about was what market forces there might be. And the point I wanted to make with the YouTube talk was that the cost, the barrier to making videos and multimedia has gone so far down in the last decade, with the rise of all of these wonderful desktop video production tools, that it’s much easier for new collaborations of people to get together and brainstorm innovative approaches. And it’s also much easier for people to test the waters and find things on the Internet that are suitable for their particular audiences. And the whole background of formal education science videos, some of them are really deadly. And many children are subjected to these things. So there is really an opportunity to be very creative and open up more possibilities and put them out there and see who’s interested in them.
Emlyn Koster
Paula, the kind of initiative you spoke about, how do you move it to larger scale or make it replicable, as opposed to the particular sites you were referring to?
Paula Fraser
I think about ethics, critical reasoning. Sometimes that can sound very deadly and boring. But I think there is a place we can do glitzy kinds of things that really capture kids, but also balance that with this reflective thinking, deeper thinking. And I have found when students do that, they’re very proud of themselves, just to sit back from all of the technology and to think. That was just kind of a preface that I wanted to say.
But I think what we’re doing, there seems to be a demand in school districts to address these science and ethical, legal, social implications of research in science. And to reach more teachers, we are having teachers go back and teach other people in their school districts. I think going online with courses is our next step. But I’m just thinking about a very wonderful collaboration that NWABR did in the state of Washington several years ago with the Human Genome Project. The Henry Art Gallery had artists come in and think about the future and what the human genome meant for society in the future. But in addition to that, there were science forums where scientists came in at different venues. We have a town meeting center in Seattle where people came and talked. And so we were able to support that with what we’re doing and looking at the ethics, and the long-term future of some of this research.
Emlyn Koster
I was reminded of Al Gore’s statement yesterday that he had an institute for 300 recently, to multiply the messengers. And one of my colleagues at Liberty Science Center, Dan Smith, is bringing what he can’t wait to share over a lunchbox talk at our place on Monday, for example. So the proliferation and the replication of the message can be rapid and enthusiastic.
Heather Gross
That goes back to the question about training scientists to be good communicators. And I think both speakers yesterday spoke to that as well. One thing that we’ve tried to do is actually address it with undergraduates and grad students who are not afraid to learn speaking skills and so forth. So we’ve held workshops for them at the museum in communicating science topics for our audience, and then we give them a chance to try it out in the museum.
Audience
My name is Marisa. I work for the American Chemical Society in the Community Outreach Office, so National Chemistry Week and Chemists Celebrate Earth Day are our two main outreach programs. NCW is in its 20th year this year, and we’re doing the fifth year for Earth Day, this spring. So first of all, anyone else who’s here who has a week or a day and would like to compare notes or brainstorm or share ideas, I’d certainly be interested.
Emlyn Koster
Just repeat your name so people can remember.
Audience
Marisa Burgener. We’re doing a lot of strategic planning and assessment at ACS, and one of our current things is metrics and outcome metrics. So I’m curious to hear what sorts of assessments you’ve been doing, particularly for impact. It’s hard for me to show that the first grader went on to major in chemistry. And that’s what they’re, in a way, asking for us to try to prove. Second of all, we’ve done some podcasting and blogging, but we’re thinking of doing our Earth Day contest on YouTube with video submissions. So I’d like to hear any thoughts, cautions that you have for us in considering that.
Emlyn Koster
Can I take the first of your questions? Because it came late this morning in the discussion that there had been little or no talk about evaluation. So because our time is limited, I’d ask you to pursue the YouTube one-on-one, and I’d like to have your question launch us into a bit of a roundtable on the matter of evaluation, because the point was made this morning that we’re not talking anymore in a satisfying way about just outputs, about numbers reached; it’s about the value created in human terms. So I’m going to ask any of the panelists to speak maybe not in terms of evaluative instruments, but to speak to the human-value positive-outcome aspect of their various initiatives. Quick comments, please.
Heather Gross
"Heifer in Your Tank " is a project that is a change to a mainline undergraduate course, and so it is part of what’s going to be more than a five-year project on researching the outcomes for those students’ lives. We’re doing research on things like subsequent course choices, subsequent career choices, and how comfortable people in the education field were in going on and teaching science. So I think that’s critical, and that’s one gift that a project at a university has, is there’s a great increase in researching not just the main topics that professors are interested in, but researching the teaching and the learning that’s happening. And I think that’s key.
Francis Waldvogel
We had this problem as well, and we elaborated this whole series of assessment systems, first directly during the meetings and then after the meetings over email and so on. I was surprised that almost three-quarters of the people at the end answered. And we gave them semi-open questions, and it was interesting because really at the end, when you got all the data in, it gave us the profile of what we did right and what we should improve for the next time. The answers were very homogeneous, which was of great help to us for the future. I think one of the crucial questions asked at the end is, "Would you come again? " And again there, I think most of the people would say yes, even those who didn’t answer.
Emlyn Koster
Any comments from the audience about the value aspect, the true outcome part of this agenda of bridging the gap? There’s a gap with a purpose here, or of bridging it with a purpose. One of this morning’s speakers from the CDC.
Roger Bernier
I was going to pass, but you gave me such an entrée here, I’m going to ask my question. It started last night when I heard Al Gore and Dr. Jackson, I believe. I think that to address the evaluation question, we should have a clear vision about what success looks like. I’m getting a little confused about, if we close the gap, what would that success look like? And I think we have a couple of competing purposes here, competing visions about success. One has to do with a participation deficit, that some people seem to be chasing greater participation; whereas other people seem to be more interested in literacy and promoting education and understanding, as if that was almost an end in itself, that the value of that is somehow supposed to be self-evident. I think if we can have some discussion, because a lot of us come from different disciplines, and to some extent we might be more effective and powerful if we did share a common vision. But I’m not sure that we have a common vision about what success would look like if we closed the gap.
Emlyn Koster
What gap are we trying to fill? What bridge are we trying to cross? Excellent. Maybe that’s where our summing up by Rita Colwell tomorrow is going to take us. Graham?
Graham Farmelo
Just a comment and observation. The comment is, first of all, thanks again to the speakers, a fantastic array of projects, brilliantly delivered. And thank you, Emlyn, for your superb chairmanship. I think, Emlyn, you very wisely steered us toward evaluation. I for one am happy to say that all of these projects look sensational. But as a field, I think science communication is rather weak and unscientific, in that to be really scientific, we should ensure that all of our endeavors have a measure of evaluation so that they can be compared against their initial aims and they can be shared with other colleagues. I would suggest that for our field to be mature, one could imagine a kind of YouTube-type Web site where all projects are registered in some sense, and everyone can access the evaluation, preferably against some common criteria. Maybe that’s too ambitious, but I think that’s what we should be aiming for.
Laura Lynn Alpert
There is the Informal Science Organization Web site. NSF requires all of the projects funded by it to be posted under there. And I also wanted to add, if any of you do want to try experiments on YouTube, it collects the metrics for you. You know how many viewings and "favorite things " you have, and you have comments. The problem is, I just want to warn you, that if you want to change something and re-post it, it wipes out the previous history. So you really have to take a snapshot if you do that. It’s one of the difficulties of testing that environment.
Julia Schulhof
Also I just wanted to mention, there’s something (I don’t know if you know about this, Carol Lynn) called Tube Mogul. And it’s a startup by a couple of grad students, and it actually does track metrics for YouTube videos over time. And I’ve found that really helpful for what we’re doing.
Emlyn Koster
I’ll do now what I did this morning with minutes to go, before I provide a quick perspective in an effort to try and sum up or close the session. There may be some aspect of this closing the gap through innovative approaches to public engagement that one of you or several of you may feel has just not had any air time this morning or this afternoon. Is there any such comment that we should hear in the room before we move to closure? Something that you’ve been burning to say?
Audience
John Anderson from the New England Aquarium here in Boston. Thank you, all. My mind is reeling from all the ideas and the good projects that I’ve been hearing about. And my comment is not entirely missing, but it’s something that I think needs emphasis, and that is: How do we get particularly young people, but all of us, outdoors practicing science?
Emlyn Koster
Can I just ask you to elaborate in a few sentences? Just make clear what you exactly mean by going outdoors, please. You’re in the aquarium business.
Audience (John Anderson)
I’m in the aquarium business. People come to the aquarium and they see live animals. They’re not going outdoors in our exhibit pathway to see them, but they are seeing live animals. Of course we have interpreters. But I want to get students, under the auspices of aquarium educators, out into salt marshes, into tide pools, into ecosystems beyond our walls as well as in our walls. I think a lot can happen there. And some would say there’s a crisis in the world of children not being able to do that today. And I think Al Gore’s point about the average amount of time we spend in front of television and video screens speak to that. And some of the projects, which are valuable and good, could tend to pull us in that same direction. So it’s a cautionary note to think about.
Emlyn Koster
You can decline to answer this question about something recently in the news, about an aquarium in North America. Not my commentary, that of the media, that the new aquarium in Atlanta is very spectacular, sometimes not so clear about its education and conservation messages. The recent item in the news that one of the four whale sharks died and one of the beluga whales has died, what does this say about the ethics of aquaria, and why is that analogous to more broadly discussed issues of primates going crazy in small enclosures in zoos?
Audience (John Anderson)
It’s a big and it’s an important question. I think the ethics, or our institutional thinking about ethics of animals in captivity and their use, has shifted over the years, particularly when you look at the whole history of the zoo and aquarium field. And I think that’s a continuing conversation that’s very important. To me personally, I think about (and this comes back to the evaluation question) can we somehow weigh the good of animals in captivity being ambassadors of their counterparts in the wild, and the positive benefits of that, because most people in the world will never see the animals in the wild. So there’s value there. But how do you weigh that good against the potential costs? It’s a very complicated question and an important one to raise. But let’s not forget to go outdoors also.
Emlyn Koster
There are more stuffed Bengal tigers in museums in the world than there are living now. We’ll have a very quick line of comments back diagonally, and then I’m going to sum up. This is in the brief comment, "what have we not covered " question.
Audience
Yes. There are two things. I want to address what you said, which is: it’s very easy for somebody in your position (I would hope it would be easy for somebody in your position) to find an educator or to work with an educator at a place like NOAA, to put together a very simple less plan, to give to a teacher to say, "Go out to the marsh. Do this project. Bring the materials back. " Whatever you need to do. Just give them a lesson plan. As we were all saying, in all these sessions, a lot of teachers don’t have the science background they need to teach, and they are not comfortable with making that lesson plan. And if the museums and the aquaria give it to them, they will bring their students out there and do it.
And on the complete opposite side of going outside, I feel as though many Americans, and probably around the world, think they know everything there is to know about law and a courtroom or emergency medicine from watching ER and Law and Order and CSI. And I wonder if what we really need is an hour-long drama that looks at science. I feel like people are watching those other shows and thinking they know everything, and maybe that’s what we need.
Emlyn Koster
These last comments about going outdoors, maybe you were not all aware that there are books recently written on nature-deficit disorders, where children these days just don’t go outside as maybe we did in our own generation, decades ago. Last comment, or almost last?
Audience
I’m Blue Magruder from the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and we are not only doing an exhibit on nests and eggs, but partnering with Mass. Audubon so that people will go out on bird walks early in the morning in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery. And also the Ecological Society of America has a new slogan, which is "Leave no child inside. "
Audience
John Durant, MIT Museum. I apologize for intruding one last comment, but I couldn’t resist it in this discussion about going outside. We’re working with a lot of other people in this room and in this community to create a new science festival, Cambridge Science Festival, which will happen for the first time in late April, that will be extensively outdoors, in the sense that much of what’s being offered will be around and about in the community, on the street. Among other things, we intend to re-create Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge as the largest model of the human genome ever created. We’ve put in a bid to the Guinness Book of Records for that. And the idea will be that people can walk down the street and literally discover human genomic research as they go.
Secondly, part of that festival will also be an attempt to plug into the increasingly interesting areas of citizen science, which allow members of the public to contribute to scientific research outdoors, for example by collecting field data that are relevant to questions of climate change. And we’re working with scientists at Boston University here, who want students from schools and also members of the public to work with them to build databases which help us to understand, for example, how climate is changing in eastern Massachusetts as part of a national and international initiative. And ASTC, the international science center network in the States, is actually coordinating a project around International Year of the Poles on that. So I offer those as two other examples of ways in which we can get people outdoors and engaged in science. If anybody wants to know more about the festival, please let me know. Thank you, Emlyn.
Emlyn Koster
I think citizen science maybe could have been its own subject matter here, and I’ll just mention three examples. I think this country maybe is not so progressive with respect to this matter as others. In Australia, the westward migration of the cane toad is being completely helped by people who live in the outback. There wouldn’t be another means to know about that species and its unwonted migration. The twenty-four-hour inventory of the biodiversity of Central Park that was conducted by the Explorers Club in New York was a phenomenal example of the power of people to understand and appreciate nature. And just think of the red hawk, the hawk that’s been well known now worldwide, that nests on one of the luxury apartments around New York, and the number of people that go out every morning to watch that—that’s a second example.
Before issuing a couple of final remarks, I’d like to invite you to give a warm round of applause to our speakers. We are ten minutes overtime, but please indulge me for two minutes of closing remarks.
When we look at the logo of the conference, where "science " and "society " are written in different fonts, presumably because they are not in the same territory often, and the "closing the gap, " I think that the point of these sixteen presentations today, selected from the eight (and I’m sure we could have learned a great deal from the other sixty-five or so), has been to point to the role of innovation as being the change agent for closing the gap or bridging the gap, whatever we would like to say. And as I said this morning, I didn’t check the dictionary definition of "innovation, " but it seems to me innovation is defined something like the thoughtful reconstitution of principles to new ends. We’re not often reinventing the forces at play; we’re rearranging them in an intent to get a different result. So the status quo is the opposite of innovation, and sometimes, as somebody said on this side of the audience, innovation does not succeed and we ought to be more candid about the attempts we make that don’t necessarily have the outcomes we desire.
Hopefully, the innovations are big increments forward. The faster we can close the gap—the point well taken that we need to be clear about what and why we’re trying to close the given gap in the given science-and-society bridging effort. I was wanting to go into the matter that we need to innovate in the most powerful way possible.
And I wanted to give you one quick closing anecdote from the world of Liberty Science Center, where oftentimes th