In Science Chat Episode 16, I chat with Michelle Dunne about the recent reports into the failure rates in the Leaving Certificate in the Science subjects and Maths in particular. For those of my non-Irish listeners, the Leaving Certificate is the exam which is sat by students at the end of their secondary level education in Ireland, and forms the basis for selection for third level colleges and universities.
Michelle is a chemistry teacher in St Joseph’s College in Lucan, Dublin. Michelle has been successful over the years with her students in the BT Young Scientists Exhibition and was one of the ambassadors chosen to travel on the Dublin Science Bus http://www.dublinscience2012.ie/ to Turin in the summer.
The podcast can be found in the usual place… http://www.sciencechat.podomatic.com/ as well as on iTunes.

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In Science Chat Episode 15, I chat with Brian Trench about libel and science journalism. Brian is a well know science communication practitioner, academic and researcher who has until recently chaired the Masters degree in Science Communication in Dublin City University. Brian has also worked in journalism and has been a contributor on programmes on RTE radio and other broadcasters.
I first met Brian when I did the Masters degree myself, and he can always be counted on to be a willing participant in any kind of discussion about any aspect of science communication, and we chatted briefly about libel in science journalism following the talk given by Simon Singh in the Science Gallery, and this episode that you’re going to hear is the result of that initial chat.
The podcast can be found in the usual place… http://www.sciencechat.podomatic.com/ as well as on iTunes.
As usual I’d be glad to receive any comments you might have about this podcast or about libel in science journalism itself.

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Two things happened yesterday that reminded me of what it was like when as a child you hear about something that is wrong. As a child, certainly for me, I could never understand how something that’s wrong can be allowed to stand. For example, and not wishing to beat a dead drum on this one: the handball by Thierry Henry in the France versus Ireland World Cup play-off which led to France’s goal was clearly wrong; the evidence proves that it was wrong; yet it’s allowed to stand.
Okay, let’s get to the point. One of these two things I was talking about was the Libel Chill event in Dublin’s Science Gallery (http://sciencegallery.ie/); the other I can’t tell you about because it may be libellous itself (which I guess is a bit ironic).
It was when listening to the speakers at the Libel Chill event that something crystallised for me. I always thought that libel can’t be libel if what the person says or prints or blogs is true and this is what I mean by being reminded of being a child.
And of course this is correct. If I print something in this blog, like what I have said about that French football player, I can’t be sued for libel because it is true… well, of course I can be sued but the case clearly couldn’t win because what I said is true and provable. Thankfully, Thierry Henry is unlikely to sue for libel in any case.
So why then do organisations sue people like journalists or bloggers for amounts of money that they don’t have, and that the organisations don’t need, in libel cases where the evidence will show, when heard, that the libel cannot be proven – and in case any lawyers are sitting there with their fingers on some kind of litigation hair trigger, I am not referring to the cases discussed in the Libel Chill event, I am only speaking generally.
And I’m not going to conclude anything either. I am going to only pose a question, so please don’t sue me – trust me, I have nothing!
Is it that the only reason, and I may be wrong in this, for pursuing someone like a blogger or journalist through the courts in a libel case where what the blogger or journalist wrote or said is clearly true as proven by the available evidence, is to stop other bloggers and journalists from writing and saying similar things that will highlight to the public that the claims that organisations are making may not be as true as they would seem from the way in which the organisations say them? Isn’t that called bullying???
Was that vague enough? (I hope so)

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Science Chat Episode 14 looks at the use of science as a plot construct on TV and in film with Jennifer Ouellette, director at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, http://www.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org.
Jennifer has her own blog on http://www.jenniferouellette-writes.com
The podcast can be found in the usual place… http://www.sciencechat.podomatic.com/ as well as on iTunes.

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For any of you readers who listened to the recent Science Chat podcast about the hacked e-mails in the Climate Research Unit in University of East Anglia, you will know of the significance of the requests being placed on the climate scientists for their data under the Freedom of Information (FOI) act.
While the concept of freedom of information itself is laudable, and while it is perhaps even more important that information such as that which is so hotly debated and so important for future policy (like climate data) should be freely available, I imagine those who first put the term FOI were unaware of what it would actually mean.
Now, the concept of e-mails is far more interesting I think. An e-mail has probably the opportunity to be the most important communication method of the twenty-first century – as far as we’ve got into it anyway. But this form of communication has an inherent problem too, and one which I’ve fallen foul of many times before, I’ll come back to that later.
Imagine what our forbears would think of a form of immediate communication that also provides you with the ability to write with great consideration like in the written letters of long ago. Now I’m not suggesting that the e-mails I receive are reminiscent of the written communications of yesteryear, but it does give the writer the chance to properly order their thoughts, select phrasing and language, and to compose thoughtfully structured messages. So it’s much better than the immediate communication of a phone call for instance.
But this is where e-mail really comes into its own – it is also immediate. Even though you can spend time composing the message, once you send it, it’s available for the recipient to open and read, and its this benefit over traditional letters that also provide it’s risk that I mentioned earlier. Once you send it, it cannot be recovered. Even back in the days when mail was delivered by man on horse, there was always the chance of overtaking it and stopping it being read – this can’t be done with an e-mail.
The other big problem is what if it falls into the wrong hands? And it can, as we know.
So (and in light of what I started this blog off with) maybe people should think twice before sending e-mails. Maybe we should hark back to olden times – maybe use pigeons? Then if we realise as soon as we send something that it was a bad idea – out with the musket and no more problem…
Back to freedom of information, and notwithstanding the dangers of providing data under FOI, it occurred to me today when reading the open letter in defence of climate research from members of the US National Academy of Science that for the purposes of controversial science such as this, maybe it would be better to give them what they ask for.
Sure, some of them could probably still misuse it if they wished, but by providing all the data – and I mean all the data: everything… – openly and freely available to anyone, it would be quite easy to see if anyone with vested interests was intentionally selecting or omitting data.
Anyone with any respect for the amount of data and knowledge behind climate research knows that human actions are the major cause of the climate changes that we are seeing now and have been seeing since the industrial revolution. But if the climate contradictors believe that it’s not caused by man, give them the data and allow them to join in the scientific process themselves.
Here are our claims; here is the data behind them; if you wish to contend that we are wrong – prove it!

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Science Chat Episode 13 examines the ongoing controversy about the e-mails hacked from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia with Guardian columnist and the journalist responsible for the Guardian’s excellent 12 part special investigation into the story, Fred Pearce.
In it we talk about peer review and Freedom of Information, topics which I will be coming back to in future blogs. The podcast can be found in the usual place… http://www.sciencechat.podomatic.com/ as well as on iTunes, and the Guardian special investigation can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/hacked-climate-science-emails/.

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In episode 12 of Science Chat I chat with Sue Blackmore a freelance writer and occasional columnist for the Guardian about the move earlier this year by The Royal Institution to make Baroness Susan Greenfield redundant. I had hoped to speak to the Baroness herself but she was unavailable… I still haven’t given up hope of speaking to her at a later date.
You can find the podcast in the usual place… http://www.sciencechat.podomatic.com/ as well as on iTunes.
Coming in the next episode, I chat with Fred Pearce (also from the Guardian) about those hacked e-mails from East Anglia.

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Freedom of information documents released today, April 1, by the British Government under the 30 year law show that CP Snow whose ground breaking and controversial lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ given in the term he occupied the position of Civil Service Commissioner was in fact a government sponsored experiment designed to flush out scientists and humanists with communist sympathies.
The premise delivered in the 1959 Rede Lecture was that the breakdown of communication between the cultures of science and humanities, the two cultures of modern society at the time, was hindering the ability of mankind to solve the world’s problems. The British Government hoped that by measuring the response of noted scientists and humanists, they would be able to ensure that they could identify and further monitor the actions of those who revealed communist sympathies at a time when the Cold War was in full flow.
Whether they were right or wrong to do this, and whether it was even of any value, the lecture itself and subsequent publications have caused this supposed rift to be widely discussed by science communicators ever since, causing highly polemic positions to come out from both groups over the intervening 51 years of debate.
Imagine their surprise today when they learn that CP Snow himself didn’t believe the content of his lecture and as the documentation released today shows foretold that this would have a disastrous and divisive effect on the two cultures.
Well, at least we now know, so maybe we can all relax about this two culture nonsense…

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In this episode I talk to Lynn Scarff, Education and Outreach Manager in the Science Gallery in Dublin which you can find on http://sciencegallery.ie/. The Science Gallery has recently been nominationed for the prestigious European Museum of the Year Award. For those of you that haven’t been to the Science Gallery (and are near enough to Dublin to make a visit) I highly recommend it, as it’s not your usual science centre as you will hear from Lynn’s interview.
The podcast can be found in the usual place… http://www.sciencechat.podomatic.com/ as well as on iTunes.

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Recently I attended a talk given in the Science Gallery in Dublin by Professor Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti entitled The Role of Science and Technology in Meeting Societal Grand Challenges. It was very interesting and Prof Venky, which I will take the liberty of calling him, was an enthusiastic and articulate speaker who presented information about the course he runs in the Kennedy School in Harvard University, where he is Director of Science, Technology and Public Policy.
The course is designed to educate Harvard’s finest on science, technology, engineering etc in a broad sense so that they are educated enough to be able to put the knowledge to use when they become the inevitable leaders of society and policy that they are being prepared for.
What I found particularly interesting was that he recommended the use of Wikipedia as a source for teaching. Now, I would have always thought that Wikipedia is prone to having inaccurate information as well as prone to having downright false and sometimes libelous information as well.
This raised two questions for me:
First, and perhaps most important to those science communication types who read this blog: is it right to use a source such as Wikipedia to impart scientific knowledge, even if that knowledge is being imparted to a level of student that has had practically no formal scientific education to speak of and who quite often don’t even know the difference to quote Prof. Venky ‘between current and voltage’? Does it matter if the source of their learning is not exactly of the same quality as approved third level science textbooks? My opinion (and what would a blog be without an opinion) is that to a large extent it doesn’t matter. For a start, the Wiki article will probably be written in a much more readable form; it will be in a form that they are familiar with; and lastly the likelihood is that they are only going to use it for very broad knowledge – it’s not going to become the major reference for educating future surgeons on anatomy.
However I would express a note of caution… don’t use it to teach them about climate science – to be quite honest after everything that’s happened in the last 6 months about climate change data, we should all be very sure of the authenticity of the data we’re reading, and yes, that includes us science communication types, and scientists.
The second question, I hear you ask? Well, I just wondered if there might not be such a danger in Wiki science articles being ‘messed around’ with. What do you think? Answers on a postcard please…

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