The Cranky Uncle smartphone game is currently being developed... teach you to throw the arguments of even your crankiest climate-misinformed uncle back at him... let’s learn the arguments of denial to defeat them...cartoons and gameplay to interactively explain the denial techniques used to cast doubt on climate science... ‘active inoculation’ — l…

does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers?... although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs... an author needs three times more followers to gain only one mention more... to be or not to be on Twitte…

Informing Knowledge4Policy with an Understanding of our Political Nature - exploring on Medium what “Understanding our Political Nature”, a recent EU study into knowledge, reason and policymaking, has to say about how the Knowledge4Policy platform could (should?) evolve.

In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors are not producing a steady stream of new digital content about settled science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill ... Data voids may be relatively easy to diagnose, but they are very difficult to fix... cannot be achieved by removing problematic content... W…

Take the Pro-Truth Pledge to encourage politicians – and everyone else – to commit to truth-oriented behaviors and protect facts and civility. ... Pledge-takers are held accountable through crowd-sourcing the truth.. volunteers who evaluate whether public figures violate the pledge by sharing misinformation.... this peer-reviewed article... Publ…

intellectual humility, the crucial characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness... crucial for learning... difficult to foster... a virtue worth striving for... entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning ...actively curious about your blind spots... It’s about asking: What am I missing here? our reali…

May, 2018: the EU Commission’s cross-EC Knowledge4Policy platform for evidence-based policymaking goes live in Beta mode.

How should policies be made? Ideally by policy makers making decisions after weighing the facts and reconciling the different values that exist in plural democratic societies.Reality often looks different! Operating at both sides of the science-policy interface is made challenging due to the over-supply of knowledge on one side and the complexity …

"“Policymakers seem to need answers yesterday,” reflected the young scientist from Italy. “That’s the direct opposite of how science works.”" - first report from the K4P audience research.The key finding from me was that scientists want to see their work taken up by policy, but seem at a loss on how. A platform which was explicitly built around ma…

Our bodies exploit fractal networks to maximize surface areas ... Blood vessels branch out like root systems; the brain houses folds within folds... means we don’t simply enjoy looking at fractals—we are designed to process them effortlessly, and even have a need to be looking at them....That’s also why you might see a face in a cloud... or a prof…

Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours... lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime... great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately... engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improv…

science has become as horrifically politicized as any other aspect of American life.... If we truly want to endorse the idea of science, let’s break up into groups and fan out across America:

The objectivity that matters so much in science is not primarily a characteristic of individual scientists but of scientific communities. Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses... Their fellow scientists will be happy to expose these hypotheses to severe testing... Not being afraid of being wrong... is a value we could promote... Intel…

vast universe of self-built social media empires devoted to spreading false, misleading, and polarizing science and health news ... Natural News ... are “[o]pening my eyes to the reality that everything about our culture is corrupted and I can’t trust nothing but what I see and experience.”.. people tend to hold beliefs that align with their cultu…

There are always “alternative facts.” What matters is how we decide which of those alternative facts are most likely to be true... Conway’s statement based ... on a much older tradition of deciding what is true: the argument from authority.... the culmination of a long retreat from the scientific perspective on truth... pitted against creationist…

scientists and their supporters need to paint a positive vision of the future, where science re-affirms its moral authority, articulates how it will help us, and advances a noble cause

While we would like to believe we can persuade people ... with evidence, studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information... “politically motivated reasoning,”... people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The mot…

Scientists often speak of the “general public” as a group that is far removed from the academic circles that they belong to.... Scientists have “othered” the general public... there is no such thing ... except for in very specific contexts (i.e. vaccine developers are not the general public vs those who do not develop vaccines when one is speaking…

Many scientists are asking themselves: What can I do?... the answer from ... 314 Action is: Get elected... most scientists view their work as pure and noble, and politics as a dirty game... since Trump’s victory, “many more scientists are realizing why their voices are needed... Scientists bring a unique perspective in how they ... think about …

Hidden Figures serves as a sort of blueprint as to exactly how STEM stories can also be financially viable crowd pleasers

Freedom of speech, and of the press... also brings responsibility. The Editors’ Code of Practice... requires the “highest professional standards”... IPSO’s overall message is that ocean acidification is just a matter of opinion – not a hard-won, testable understanding ... Why support any research if 250 peer-reviewed papers ... can all be summaril…

many leading physicists now consider space-time and gravity to be “emergent” phenomena: Bendy, curvy space-time and the matter within it are a hologram that arises out of a network of entangled qubits... space-time really is just a geometrical representation of the entanglement structure of these underlying quantum systems

the science on how to best communicate science across different issues, social settings and audiences has not led to easy-to-follow, concrete recommendations... becoming increasingly clear that the “deficit model” ... if we just “fill people up” with science knowledge and understanding, they’ll become increasingly rational decision-makers – simpl…

the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science. Perhaps nothing captures this dichotomy better than the story of the Higgs discovery... Almost 3,000 people qualify as authors on the key physics papers ATLAS produces... easier to guard against bias in interpreting the data The depth and breadth of this effort transform the act of discov…

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how

When it comes to a wide variety of issues ... many of us have opinions that are based on fear or ideology, rather than on what the science says... we even vote (or ask our representatives to vote) on not just policy but on the science ... voting on science is completely antithetical to the entire enterprise ... debate in science isn’t about achiev…

Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions. User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively,

In many fields of research right now, scientists collect data until they see a pattern that appears statistically significant, and then they use that tightly selected data to publish a paper ... this p-hacking ... uses a quiver of little methodological tricks that can inflate the statistical significance of a finding ... a significant problem …

"Newsrooms are under pressure. Revenues are down, budgets are being cut, and journalists are losing their jobs. Sadly, it’s often the specialists whose jobs get axed ... Yet, never more than today has the need for sound science journalism been so great." - Why the World Needs Better Science Journalism | MediaShift