Friday 21 March 2014

Weekly posts

For a while now I have been thinking about trying to post more regularly. There are two reasons for this; first, the blog gets pretty stagnant at times and I think it would be better if we had more regular material, and second most of my week is taken up staring at my computer and I thought this would be a good way to break up my week and get feedback on things I am thinking about or working on currently. These posts are likely to be more on the science side, but hopefully I will be able to do enough fishing and hunting to keep it somewhat interesting.

This week all I have are links to other sites that I thought were interesting:

Lately I have been trying to learn more about the science-policy interface with the idea of eventually trying to better focus my own work towards policy. Here is an interesting perspective recently published in Nature (link). The author links to a code of conduct for scientists developed by the Science Council of Japan (link). Interesting that Japan has a specific set of guidelines for science communication and the role of scientists in society. Not sure the US or Canada has anything closely resembling this.

I recently read this paper in Conservation Biology that retrospectively assesses the IUCN status of most carnivores and ungulates in the world (link). Most have had a decline in their status over time. Interesting thing to think about from this is that our perspective on a species status tends to be more near term. The authors suggests this can lead to shifting baselines in our expectation for the conservation of species- e.g. if a local population has stabilized over the last decade, but exists in only 10% of the range it occupied 30 years ago, is this really a success?

Lastly, a super nerdy link about data compression (link) and R. R's basic data compression outperforms the compression of other formats even after they have been zipped.




4 comments:

  1. I have been thinking a lot about science and policy over the past while and I find the Nature post enlightening...and scary.

    As an academic scientist/science advisor, you are expected to give rigorous and objective science advice. This advice may be trumped by public opinion. One of the most effective ways to inform public opinion is to "advocate" for your work - get out there, do public talks, write public pieces, etc. Once you're seen as an "advocate", then you risk losing the trust of those who make the big decisions.

    Clearly there is a balance between being an objective science advisor and one who regularly engages with the public, but how many scientists do we expect to be able to strike this balance, especially given that there is so little training provided? Should scientists have to choose between one or the other? Further, should we even force scientists to take on these roles (I think ‘yes’ – but provided there is a system in place to train scientists for public engagement)?

    Side note: I understand that discoursing your work to the public doesn't automatically make you an "advocate". However if you want to capture the interest of the public and influence public opinion, it seems to me that you have to ‘sell’ your research. People want to know why is it relevant to them, how your work affects major issues, and why they should care. This often means taking a strong stance (which I think is inherently difficult for scientists, as we have been trained to doubt everything). This, in turn, often looks like advocacy and makes one seem biased.



    But then again, sometimes scientists aren't even part of the policy picture, and all this is moot: http://www.fisheries.go.th/library/app/images/Fisheries/Fisheries%20%20VOL%2038%20NO%2011%20November.%202013.pdf#page=24

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    1. Tons of good points Kim. That risk of being perceived as an advocate is what probably keeps most people out of the policy, or even outreach arena. But, I think training is the biggest issue because I think all of the pitfalls can be successfully navigated at some level if you are trained properly- which we are not.

      So really the reason I started thinking about this stuff is because I got invited to a science-policy workshop, which is tomorrow in Ft Collins. It is being put on by Barry Noon who was a major player in the Pacific Northwest spotted owl work in the US. The first half of his career was spent doing research that was aimed directly at informing policy and now he is at CSU. I am planning to do a full post about that, but the thing I found fascinating about his invitation to this was that he said he only wanted people that felt it was their duty to communicate science, and to engage in the policy arena. He did not want to get into the advocacy debate. However, at the same time he said it was only open to profs, post docs and PhD students close to the end of their degree, because engaging in policy can be a career threatening activity, exactly because of the potential to be perceived as an advocate.

      Last thing on the training note. I think it is pretty amazing that we bemoan how science illiterate the public is when it comes to things like climate change etc. But the two ways that we reach the public are through outreach/science communication of some form and teaching. In fact for some people their undergrad intro bio course might be the only time they are exposed to science in a formal way. But these are the two areas in which we receive the least training. I would like to pretend that if I am ever a prof that I will push my grad students to get training in these areas, but that is a difficult thing to do when they don't really help with tenure.

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  2. I keep meaning to weigh in on this discussion - but haven't. So I'll say that I fully support the idea of more frequent blog posts, even just to share some links. And I'll try to do the same. It is just a matter of getting in the habit, right?

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  3. Hey Joe et al., interesting article re: public tolerance for predators
    http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/02_may_2014?sub_id=UQAon8sIdvUc&folio=476#pg36

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