As a scientist with empiricist philosophical tendencies, I like to see some element of evidence for published claims. So emotions have always been a bit of a question for me – being so unscientific and such. I mean it’s not like I’m a Vulcan or anything, though when I took the ‘which Star Trek character am I’ quiz, I did indeed see that I am most like that good science officer Mr Spock.
However there is an ad on Irish TV for those cell phone subscriptions where you can sign up for services which include texting your name and your partner’s name to some number which will then give you the percentage success rate of your relationship. How scientific can you get? Obviously the service provider has a nifty little program running in the background which analyses the content of the conversations on the subscribers phone; maybe even analyses the sweat on their fingers to arrive at this wonderous elucidation.
Joking apart, I’m hoping that the people who do subscribe to this are aware of the scientific or non-scientific basis behind this little experiment, but that would pre-suppose some science literacy on the part of the subscriber, and science literacy was one of the things that I discussed last week with Darlene Cavalier from http://sciencecheerleader.com/ on the Science Chat podcast.
We also talked about citizen scientists and citizen involvement in science. In the podcast I refer to an article that Darlene had published on scienceprogress.org. That article was called Harnessing Citizen Scientists and you can find it here http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/07/harnessing-citizen-scientists/
But the real thing that made me want to talk to Darlene about this subject was the short film which is on the sciencecheerleader blog, you’ll find it right at the top of the home page. This video challenges the notion of a Status Quo in science, which is a subject I felt I just had to find out more about. Oh, by the way this is where you can find the podcast… http://www.sciencechat.podomatic.com/
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