But what is a Science Journalist when it's at home?

Hello Readers

I have read an interesting excerpt on science journalism and I think it is about time we discussed it. See, a regular reporter is the chameleon, the jack of all trades. But sometimes you don’t need a hammer, a tool I believe can solve any problem, sometimes you need a flathead screwdriver or a drill. Sports writers and science journalists are these kind of specialists. You don’t go to the religion writers to talk about the Yankees players. We don’t need confirmation that they’re all going to hell anyway. Furthermore you would never give the Bruins correspondent something environmental to cover. But you know this; it’s obvious.

Now let’s talk about something less obvious- Science writers. Science writers are perhaps the most unique tool in the box. What they write about is dark, mysterious and goes bump in the night. They know why the universe does what it does and they know what a quark is. They’re the kind of people who ruin movies with facts- that one guy who points out why Jaws couldn’t happen in real life and the technology discrepancies in the film Alien, he is a science journalist.  

But they do an important and age old job others can’t do. They track weather patterns, read complex journals and know what NASA are doing. As Paul Rogers says, “While the science beat is old—dating back to even before Sputnik—the approach we take is new. “ And I agree. Science writing is old, very old and has been around for time immemorial. My namesake wrote about science and so did popular media of his day. It will always have its own special niche. And that’s why learning even the basics is going to be so useful. The readings have shown me that this is a storied art and there different ways to go about it.

The other thing I learned is that experts are not the only people who can write about such things. The Guardian had experts run blogs on different areas of science, but that is not always necessary. Sometimes you need somebody equally as ignorant as the readers to relay the facts. What better person to tell the public than one of them?

As Phoebe Buffay said in 1995, “Wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the world was flat? And, up until like what, 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess of crap came out.”

She’s correct- science is always changing and that means it is even harder to keep up. Especially if you aren’t in the know.

 I learned a lot from these articles, about how one article can change and affect the world. I also learned that one can learn on the job. Perfection is not required right away.

Science journalism, like peace journalism and Ringo Starr, is often left at the back of the room while their more talent-filled and attractive affiliates take centre stage. But this isn’t fair on peace and science journalism. In fact, it is a compliment because they are so much harder to master. There are more angles to journalism than one could ever anticipate.

And that’s my two cents

Galileo S.W

Forever ambitious, rarely successful

The articles I read are here

http://niemanreports.org/articles/category/the-beat-the-science-angle/

A kind of Magic

Hullo Again Everyone

Scientists, researchers and the like have been investigating what effect magic has on our muggle brains. It can show how people see things, how they remember and react. Study on the brain is very difficult and equally as important. Reading into this has been intriguing. Articles like this one give one an idea of why such things need to be researched.

Magic has been in our culture as humans from the start. From ancient Greece to today, from voodoo to the ‘Wizard of Oz’. We even have college courses involving magic and how it affects us. It’s in our songs, from The Police to Queen to Glen Miller and it’s in our books and movies too. Look at Matilda, at the Harry Potter series. Sabrina, Buffy the Vampire slayer and others have a cult following. We all know a 30-something man, probably living in his mother’s basement, who is still obsessed with Buffy.

That there is a link between science and magic should surprise nobody. Reading up on this, is an awakening. Of course it should come as no surprise the two are linked and magic affects us mentally. Magic is about altering our perception and perception is very ‘science-y’ indeed.

Of course they cannot reveal all their secrets, but being told that they can affect what should be our free choice seems to be more than a little spooky. Magic is about people and how they do things. The quote that best sums up the point magicians are trying to get across is this.

“A lot of the demonstrations that I do, when I get inside people’s minds, is understanding human behaviour and understanding how people think and getting their patterns down,” famed illusionist Criss Angel told Parade magazine in 2007. “Many people say I’m really a student of humanity.”

When neurologists began to make these connections, it soon became obvious they were more than just mere connections. The brain, magic and the choices we make were inexorably linked. Which card we choose from a deck can be influenced. A study of consciousness team did a research paper, collaborating with Las Vegas magicians and it was a very successful one.

It would go a long way to explaining human vulnerabilities. We are easily trackable as a species and finding out why could help with animal research too. I personally think this could be another angle with which to study autism. It certainly opens doors and options to many other fields of research and study. 

Well thank you all for reading, Galileo 

60 Minutes on heroin

Hi there, it’s me again and so soon after we last parted…

Yes, I blew the super bowl prediction. But so did a lot of people. Now our focus is on storytelling. This is one of man’s oldest past-times, one of the oldest forms of entertainment we have. As technologies have evolved, so telling stories have become easier. From parchment to paper to 240 characters, storytelling is woven into our culture.

Earnest Hemingway once said he could tell a story in six words, as part of a bet. He said simply this:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

He won he bet. You, with your best anecdote are no different from the Homo sapiens [first humans] of so long ago. And now with the advent of video technologies stories can became even bigger, though not necessarily better, than ever before.

Telling fiction stories has always been easier than non-fiction stories because one has freedom and can invent new characters. Telling medical stories well is a difficult art to master, but 60 Minutes seem to have a good grip on it. That’s as it should be- they’re coming up to 50 years doing it.

In this video, the storytelling is very good. They relate back to the viewer and the presenter is clear. Bill Whitaker makes complex language understandable and speaks in a tone that is easy on the ears. Phrases like ‘basic economics’ could be more verbose but here are in common English not in gobbledygook. 

Then it focuses on a specific place which has always been a key in story-telling. It focuses on Columbus, Ohio. Thy mention that Heroin is available in 20 minutes and is quicker to get hold of than marijuana. Hey go straight into an interview which shouldn't work as well it does. The interview is with a girl named Hannah, though it is likely a false one. They describe her as “the girl next door” and that’s when it begins to move you.

Hannah went from smoking it at parties, to shooting it at school. And that’s just one example.

For me, a part that affected me deeply was when they talked about how heroin sing-handedly wrecked the dreams of many sports stars. Hearing their parents say, in words laced with grief, that they had lost their child after they thought they had beaten heroin. The personal stories, like those of children aged as young as 15, really hit hard and pluck at ones heart-strings.

They had a good mix of sufferers and experts. They also incorporated some great quotes- “Heroin has lost its stigma.”

Best of all, however was that they kept the premise simple and added the complex bits later. That’s really the key to a good story.  Keep it simple and make sure the additions work.

Well I'm out. Thanks again and stay safe in the snow.

Happy Presidents Day, Galileo

All about statistics

Hola amigos! Hello friends!

We’re going to take a look at stats. Stats are nice and there are far scarier branches of math. Like all that algebra nonsense. We all know about statistics, but here is a little refresher course, just to clean off that rust.  

Which do you think has more speakers- English or Spanish? Well English speaking countries outnumber Spanish ones by 101 to 31 but there are some 60 million more Spanish speakers in the world. That was a taste of statistics that I found here.

When you watch the Superbowl you will undoubtedly see all of kinds of stats. Peyton Manning is likely to be pressured on about 30 per cent of his throws at last. How they do that is very simple. If he throws 100 throws and 30 of them he is pressured, that makes 30 per cent. It’s that simple!

But stats can also be found out from surveys. In 2014, surveys showed seventy-seven percent of this country believe in angels. Just 40 percent admit climate change exists. If you want to explore some similar frivolous, yet terrifying, stats click here.

Of course they do age and even that 2014 statistic could have changed by today. And sometimes statistics can go a bit wrong….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjvQFtlNQ-M 

And of course people sometimes make up whatever numbers they feel like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j2Duy_xzEA  

But generally they are accurate. 

Right, are we ready to explore something called post-positivism? I think we are. It sounds scary but it isn’t as scary as other bits of math we could be looking at like Algebra. Plus, of the two of us I am far more scared of wandering deeper into stats…

To get yourself acquainted with post-positivism click here and have a look. Essentially positivism is that there is one truth and it can be seen. The Panthers won the 2015 NFC Championship game. That is the one truth and everybody can see this. Now the opposite, post-positivism, is harder to define but it means there are is one truth but it cannot be observed. A good example of this is what lies at the bottom of certain parts of our ocean-post-positivist believes there is something but we will never know what it is.  

People have been debating these two beliefs for many centuries but the difference is, really, that the second is unobservable while the first is not. The difference is minimal, except that the first is more easily provable.

If a researcher is a positivist then they believe in presenting reality and predicting variables. They specialise in the tangibles. They know that information stands separate from humans. The blue whale is blue. Fact. Whereas if they believed in the other, they have to go on educated guesswork and seeing what cannot be disproved. They believe outcomes are never able to be proven fully. They might say there is a cure for cancer we just haven’t found it and may never do so.

Researchers believing one or the other changes drastically how they research. If something cannot be proven, one sees what can be disproved. And if something can be proved, one need only go and find out what it is. It really is that simple. It also means that positives are better predicting and controlling events whilst post-positivists are better at guessing not definitively predicting.

Now have a break from all that heavy, deeply philosophical stuff. This is a longer post and we've one more thing to explore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE54mDs6St4 

So qualitative and quantitative research. Scientists and researchers favourite hobby is to make impractically long names for things which are relatively simple. They complain when ‘ordinary people’ don’t understand their convoluted terms but, really, they made their bed. Quantitative is to do with numbers- ten per cent of Denver’s drives ended in a score. The other is the opposite. It measures things where numbers have no place. It might measure something like happiness or how content a company’s staff is for example.

Now as you can imagine, both of these have times when they are useful and times when they are not. If one is doing sports stats, you would want quantitative. Roger Federer hits an ace on 30 per cent of his service points. Asking a question about sports stats like that will always be requiring quantitative data. Asking about population increases, too, will also need a quantitative question such as “has the population of Connecticut increased or decreased since 1996, and will the trend continue?”

Now qualitative is vaguer. The Connecticut primary is coming up. Perfectly valid research to find out how New Britain will vote could be asking 200 local residents how they feel about each candidate and getting a feel’ of it from that. These questions are generally a little less specific and come up with a wider spectrum.

Right, I have bored you long enough. I'm going to go and watch the Super-bowl.

Thanks, All

P.S- Carolina 42-14 is going to be the score. It will be a blow-out.