Public Understanding of Science Blog

 By Massimiano Bucchi. Photo Credit: Flickr A spacious meeting room in a prestigious university.  Vice-Chancellor - Good afternoon everybody and thanks for being here. I am the Vice-Chancellor for Public Engagement. We are here today to discuss how to improve our university public communication and public engagement strategy. Let me briefly introduce the participants: Professor Orange, Department of Physics; Professor Green, Department of Environmental Sciences; Professor Mustard, Department of Computer Science; Professor Turquoise, Department of Political Science; Professor Brown, Department of Statistics; Professor Blue, Department of Philosophy. And of course, Mrs. Black, who heads our communication office.  Mrs. Black - Thank you, Vice-Chancellor. I have asked also Mr. Mellow Yellow to be here with us today. Mr Mellow Yellow is a highly successful influencer and renowned specialist of social media and he is going to help us with his advice. He is a great expert...

By Jianxun Chu, Yuqi Zhu, and Jiaojiao Ji. We often come across news stating “authoritative sources said/revealed/stated...”. These named or unnamed sources are the laissez-passer for the credibility of the news. This is particularly true when it comes to complicated science-related issues, such as climate change, vaccination, and GMOs. People without prior knowledge or experience on these subjects are inclined to trust what appears credible. But is this always justified? We delved into Chinese social media to identify characteristics of climate change misinformation. Our study, yielding some counterintuitive results, suggest that the references to authority in a related field (authority reference) might, paradoxically, be the indicators of misinformation. The debate over climate change has been palpable, considerable, and unstoppable for decades. Even though an overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change poses a significant threat to humankind, some still view ...

By Emma Weitkamp How do you judge the quality of the science you consume online? In an increasingly diverse media landscape quality assessment becomes an important challenge for science communication, both from a practical and research perspective. Online, we encounter science via a patchwork of very different platforms and voices. It is this nexus between platform – Spotify, Reddit, blogs and newspaper feeds – and voices – climate activists, science sceptics, lobby groups and scientists – that creates the challenge of assessing quality. We cannot easily apply the same criteria to a YouTube video produced by an interested citizen, as we do to an in depth blog post written by a scientist. Nor should we. Yet debates around misinformation, science denial and infodemics raise questions about the challenges digital media pose to society, particularly given the lack of critical engagement on the part of users when it comes to assessing the quality of the material they consume . If readers ...

By Jordan Batchelor. Are you interested in science and technology? Do you seek out information online to learn more about specific issues? When you read about ‘new breakthroughs’ in academia, are you immediately skeptical or do you inherently trust it? For decades, government organizations world-wide have been interested in answering questions like these. For example, in the US, the National Science Foundation (NSF) publishes a biennial report called Indicators aimed at policy makers (the President and Congress are part of its target audience). It systematically collects information on the state of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in education, labor, and research, including a chapter dedicated to the public knowledge about and attitudes toward science. As you might guess, it’s not just government entities that are interested in such topics but researchers in the social sciences as well. This type of investigation has sometimes been referred to as the public understan...

  By Cristina Rigutto  &   Elena Milani Twitter lists are a simple way of grouping feeds of all the people you want to hear from on a given topic, place, organisation or even event. What makes them interesting is that, unlike your home feed, lists aren't affected by Twitter's algorithms and will display only the tweets from accounts you put on that list. Lists are also a great tool for helping your people to get to know each other better, improve networking, and connect with those who matter most to you, such as: Authors that publish in your field Research team members Colleagues from other organisations Journals in your field Alumni of a university degree or course Participants of a Twitter Chat you hosted People who share a common interest with you Speakers or attendees you met at a conference Journalists or blogger who writes about your field of research Research funding bodies relevant to your field You can create your own list (Twitter allows up to 1000 lists pe...

By Elena Milani & Cristina Rigutto Nowadays, if you want to reach the academic community online and share your research outputs with other scholars or journalists, the first place to be is Twitter. However, just being on Twitter is not enough; you need to know how to use it effectively.  For this reason, we, Elena and Cristina - the former and current blog and social media editors of Public Understanding of Science, decided to write a series of posts about the nuts and bolts of Twitter for academics .  The first post of this series is about how to write a good Twitter profile . How should I choose my handle? When we set up a Twitter profile, the first step is choosing a handle. A Twitter handle is the username that appears at the end of your unique Twitter URL and below your name. Twitter handles must contain fewer than 15 characters Twitter handles should be as simple and memorable as possible; for this reason, using  name and surname  is usually the best choic...