Imperial College & Science Museum, London.
3rd and 4th of July 2010.

Now in its fifth year, the Science and the Public conference aims to bring together the various strands of academia which consider science’s relationships with groups generally called ‘the public’. Delegates come from a wide range of disciplines: science and technology studies, history of science, geography, psychology, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, development studies, English literature, science policy studies and more.

Keynote Speakers: Professor Mike Michael, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Professor David Edgerton, Imperial College, London.

This video is achingly beautiful. A product of the high-low tech group at the MIT Media Lab, it shows a "pop-up book that sparkles, sings, and moves". You can find out a bit more here. Aside from the simple prettiness of this MIT project, I thought it was significant that the topics they choose to illustrate might be considered those of science and technology books: plants, fishes, clouds, planets, a city-scape, and plants again. On the whole, the effect here is to add sparkles to illustration, but the techniques they've developed could readily be applied to some of the challenges of communicating science inside the pages of a book.

I think this is FASCINATING. Firstly, I was amused by Greenslade's slightly sardonic take on it as a matter of new media business models. Arguably, Popular Mechanics and its ilk have particular competition fromWired and other similar electronics-orientated publications, but ALL magazines are suffering in the age of the web. We consume media differently these days, as well as technology. Faced with a 21st century 'crisis' in the magazine business, publishers have decided to cash in on the nostalgia market. Still, I think the history of technology issue (in terms of the content of the magazine, not just media tech) is a really key aspect of this story.

I was also interested to see that it was kid's clothing that are going to carry the images. It seems weird, perhaps, that the market is a generation who were born nearly 100 years after some of these covers were first published (more to the point, it's a fair few decades before the parents who buy the tshirts were born). Arguably, there is something particularly youthful about this sort of tech-nostalgia A sense of youthful enthusiasm for technology, even when the youths pictured would, today, be OAPs.

Follow Greenslade's link to larger coverage of the story, over at the New York Times' media blog, and we can see that the publishers want to 'revive the days when children dreamed that flying cars were just around the corner'. Note, it was children who were dreaming: surely the magazines were produced for adults, or at least a multi-generational audience? (I don't actually know much about the history of this magazine... I am just guessing). It's noticeable that there is a lot of this sort of tech-nostalgia in kid's culture already. Phillip Reeve, anyone?

The NYT post also quotes the publisher as saying that the T-shirts represent a revival of efforts to interest children in mechanics. This is, I'm sure, nothing but PR fluff. However, I do think it is interesting to see the selling of tshirts articulated in connection to science education. For one thing it reflects the history of technology issue I flagged up at the start - kids' media is largely designed around the use of technology today, rather than building, understanding, making and controlling it (at least that's what colleagues researching kids science fiction tell me).

Glancing at some examples in the huge (and addictive...) gallery of Popular Mechanics covers, I found this one from December 1925 which really reminded me of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It's also worth noting the reference in this cover, from February 1939, to 'Davy Jones Locker' (not exactly kids books, but a story we associate with kids nonetheless), and the use of images of families too.

Found at the museum-shop at the Exploratorium. I also managed to pick up a few Max Axiom comics - big in the USA, haven't really figured over in Blighty yet. These feature a super-hero scientist (the Max Axiom of the title), thus applying a *completely* different culture of comics-style illustration to science communication from the Horrible books (Axiom really is a super-hero scientist in a superman mould. The much more British Horrible Science would just take the piss out of such an image). You can't con me with your pic of a semi-naked hunk, you're talking about the importance of variables.

To finish on a slightly more conventional type of science in cartoons (i.e. fictional science stories), I saw a great talk from Bryan Talbot at the London Comica Festival this weekend. Talbot was talking about his new book Grandville, a historical scientific detective romance, with badgers: a sort of mix of steampunk and comic art's tradition for anthropomorphic-animal characters. In the talk Talbot discussed several of his key influences, which included Beatrix Potter, Rupert the Bear and Wind in the Willows. (I should add that it is a 'grown-ups' book, even if he does draw upon kid's media.) One of the points I found especially interesting was that, with Grandville, Talbot seems to be juxtaposing a steampunk aesthetic for technology with (via the anthropomorphic animals) more Romantic aesthetics of nature in children's literature. However, I asked Talbot if this was intentional, and he said it wasn't. He also emphasised the rather un-romantic way Beatrix Potter saw nature (e.g. Tying up kittens for accurate drawings. Talbot knows about Potter, see his Tale of One Bad Rat). All interesting stuff. The Comica festival goes on till the 26th of November.

I emailed the Department for Energy and Climate Change suggesting I might put in a freedom of information request for the data. The reply was again speedy and helpful, and yet missing the point. They directed me to a much larger piece of research into public attitudes towards the environment. As the guy emailing me suggests, this is more detailed and in many ways more useful to me. I'm thankful for the link. But, I still don't see why the small scale Yougov survey remains hidden from public view? I emailed a reply saying so. I'll post more if I get more.

I'd also like to underline that I am, personally, broadly in agreement with a lot of the DECC campaign. I am in no way a climate change sceptic, in fact I find such people a bit worrying. I don't have a problem with politicising climate science (indeed, I think we should acknowledge the politics of it). Further, have no real problems with the notion of government PR, environmental or otherwise. I just want it to be good campaigning which respects its audience, not 9 out of 10 cats stuff. I also think this sort of government data should be open.

Update to the update (13:40, 4th Nov) - two more emails from the DECC. Credit where credit is due: they've submitted my email as an official FOI request and an offer to discuss the work over the phone. Good stuff.

Update to the update (11:10, 6th Nov) - Just had very interesting, useful, intelligent and (most important) open phone conversation with a DECC press officer. She clarified that they had no problem emailing me the survey (it is already in my inbox) - any appearence of it being hidden was just the marketing team being careful. She was happy to admit that the small yougov survey in question was entirely commissioned for PR purposes (still over 1000 respondents, so in area of credible national research, but basically designed to produce newsworthy information).

So, yes I'm right that it's '9 out of 10 cats' style stats for PR, but (a) they are open about this, (b) they had built the advert itself on more detailed research conducted over the previous eight months, and (c) this smaller yougov piece simply aimed to draw out talking points. Personally, I'm quite happy with the use of slightly rough social stats to inspire debate. As long as it doesn't replace more detailed work or present itself as something it's not. After this morning's conversation with the DECC press officer, I don't think it was either.

We are seeking contributions to a one-day symposium on 20th century popular science: the morning devoted to the apparent post-Einstein boom in popular science publishing, the afternoon considering post-Hawking works.

We are keen that this event should help foster connections between the wide range of people who study and think about popular science: historians, science communication researchers, professional scientists, science writers and literary critics.

Have you seen the new advert from the government's ACT ON CO2 campaign? A lot of people have. It premiered during Coronation Street on the 9th October, and quickly prompted a slew of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.

The ad is called ‘bedtime stories’ and features a chap reading a picture-book to his wide-eyed young daughter: 'There was once a land where the weather was very, very strange. There were awful heatwaves in some parts, and in others, terrible storms and floods'. This is illustrated with animated picture-book animal characters drowning and crying with starvation. The man goes on 'The grownups realised they had to do something [...] maybe they could save the land for the children.' The girl looks a little scared. 'Is there a happy ending?' she asks, biting her lip and looking expectantly up at her father. The voice-over answers them both: 'It's up to us how the story ends. See what you can do. Search online for ACT ON CO2'.

Cue complaints about scaring children, over hyping climate change and/ or being the wrong approach to cutting CO2 emissions. Glance quickly at the Daily Mail and one might even imagine the Labour party had been drowning puppies in the name of environmentalism. One American climate change sceptic news site actually likened the project to Hitler Youth (I’m not linking to either of these sources, I stumbled across them through googlenews easily enough. If you’re really interested, so can you).

I followed this fuss over to the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) press release for the campaign. Interestingly, this starts not with a reference to the advert, but the line: 'Research published today from the Department of Energy and Climate Change reveals that over 50% of people questioned don’t believe climate change will affect them and only 1 in 5 (18%) respondents think that climate change will take effect during their children’s lifetime'. It goes on to state that over 55 year olds are least concerned than the under 24's and 74% of people would take immediate action to change their lifestyle now if they knew that climate change would affect their children’s lives.

Fascinating stuff. I'd love to see this research in more detail. I looked around the press release: all I found was a link to the advert, not even contact details for a press officer and certainly no reference to where this research had been published. I clicked ‘contact us’ to try to track down more. After a good ten minutes of ping-pong between the DECC and the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, during which I spoke to two very kind and helpful, but ultimately confused and frustrated telephonists and repeatedly listened a computer voice asking me if I wanted to report a dead bird or learn more about bluetongue, I was spoke to someone who gave me a direct line of someone who had an email address of someone who could pass my message onto to someone who could deal with it. The process was rather maze-like, but reasonably quick.

The reply itself was, I think, pretty rubbish though:

Timely research was carried out just prior to the launch of the new ACT ON CO2 campaign – with over 1000 people responding to a Yougov survey – the results of which included the 52% figure.

This survey carried out was developed with earlier creative development research in mind that had been carried out by DECC which tested the chosen creative route for the campaign. Unfortunately, we are not able to publish this set of research findings.

The results of the survey which you saw in our press notice for the launch of the campaign included all of the topline results so there isn’t really anything you haven’t seen already.

So, it appears that the publication of research which the press release is ostensibly about was, in fact, the bullet point summary provided by the press release itself. How very postmodern.

The cynical sociologist in me suspects this 'timely research' (conducted days before the ad's launch) is just window dressing. Costuming a press release to look like a notification of research, rather than the ad-for-an-ad it really is, lends the project some credibility and provides content which, at least at face value, is slightly more newsworthy than what's going to be on telly during Corrie's commercial break. It is nothing more than a '9 out of 10 cats prefer' marketing exercise; a shampoo-advert ‘science bit’.

Moreover, such stats on social research rhetorically appeal to another idea UK government marketing teams seem to be recently enamored by: the public are influenced much more by each other than any message you might put up on the telly. Read in the newspaper that 74% of the population feel similarly to you, and the experience of watching the advert becomes attached to a bit of social context; the desire to save those puppies is given a small sense of social movement. Again, this is all '9 out of 10 cat prefer' stuff.

This may well be a very unfair analysis. I can’t tell: the details of the research aren't available.

This is research which is about public opinion, it is publicly funded and used to justify the use of further public funding of making and distributing of a (controversial) advert. Arguably, by any of those criteria alone, it should be publicly available. In Open Access Week and everything.

I want to emphasise that I’m largely on the side of ACT ON CO2. I even quite like large parts of the advert. However, if we’re not transparent in our own campaigning style, how on Earth can we successfully critique the rhetoric of our opponents?

A huge pile of books telling kids to recycle. Insert easy laugh of choice here. Because no matter the intentions of these books’ content, the sourcing, materials and shipping of these objects has a reasonably large environmental impact of its own.

As ever, it’s a great conference. Today was especially exciting for me as it was full of history of science communication. This morning we had a whole session on the history of the Science Museum (after all, it was their birthday last week).

We heard all about the motivations for building Children’s Gallery in the 1930s (largely to stop kids distracting grownups), the continual issues surrounding class politics between the museum and its visitors (e.g. suggesting they bring in a fee, so as to keep the ‘hooligan element’ of schoolboys from distracting serious children). I also learnt about a 1975 Science and Islam exhibition (one of the first to charge admission, though it’s not clear why), the role played by Science Museum’s library in 1940s war effort and why the Science Museum did so badly for post-war building works compared to other national museums. Not to mention the long and complex history of relationships with Energy Industry. It's not just about BP's sponsorship of the Energy Gallery. All fascinating stuff (though I do admit I’m a bit of a Science Museum history geek).

In the afternoon, I went to a session on film. This started off with a great paper from Tim Boon (author of this book), on Julian Huxley. He showed us a clip from Huxley’s (Oscar-winning) film ‘The Private Life of the Gannets’ and told us the fascinating story of Huxley’s 1929 trip to British East Africa. This was supposedly to show African schoolchildren his film, but Boon suggested Huxley took they whole project largely as a way of promoting the role of biology education in the UK.

We then had a couple of presentations based around the film achieves at the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), aiming to convince historians of science to make more of the non-fiction film archives scattered across the country. We saw some fascinating vox-pops (of people outside a cigarette factory just after the RCP report linking smoking to cancer), and a few interview with scientists. Watching these clips and Boon's paper I couldn't help but start playing fantasy PhD thesis: a history of cancer reporting; tensions of nationalism and local cultural identity in national/ local science reporting; the role of women in science filmmaking; the increasing television-literacy of scientists; a history of scientific visualisation on screen (fantastic shot of a 3d map starting the Huxley movie, and some lovely 30s microscopy films).

These are only a snippet of the possible stories bursting to be told from these rich archives. To keep everything on a kids and science focus, I also think there’s a fantastic PhD to be written on the history of children’s science television, and Boon pointed out what a peach of a PhD topic the early history of schools-films would be. More PhDs on the history of science communication, that’s what I say.

Three other conferences that might be of interest:
1) Eye of the Storm: An interdisciplinary conference on scientific controversy. Run by Arts Catalyst at Tate Britain, 19 / 20 June 2009
2) Feeling Good: Health information for children and young people, Chester, UK, 23rd & 24th June 2009
3) CFP for IBBY UK/ NCRCL MA conference: Comics and Graphic Novels, to be held at Roehampton University, London 14th November (details below cut)

Music video aiming to subvert evolution education via the medium of late 20th century North American Rock Music (found at The Huffington Post).

For those who don't want to set the video playing - we start with a bald and bespectacled biology teacher ranting in front of a board emblazoned with the word evolution. You can tell he's a wrong'un because he has a strained, whiny voice, dresses badly and there is an odd green light shining up at him. Not to mention the use of scary jagged closeups of his face. A pretty blonde student stares at her textbook: bored, sceptical and biting her lip. But lo and behold, there's a rockstar winking out at her from behind a diagram of the evolution of man, conspiratorially shaking his head. Then it all goes a bit Labyrinth as she sort of floats into their song. The lyrics poke fun at some of the images of evolutionary thought (monkeys), as well as the scientific faith involved. They also suggest a different take on the word evolution in terms of (Christian) personal development and the work of God:

He [the teacher] spoke with such conviction, it really made me think, maybe my teacher, he's the missing link [...] It takes a lot of faith to say we're accidents of nature, but I believe we are the work of a loving creator [...] My evolution to perfection started when God rescued me.

Eventually the aforementioned blonde and her classmates are all dancing along, the dour science teacher transformed into the smiling rockstar who points to the word 'Redefined' which is now written over 'Evolution' on the board.

The video is easy to mock, especially for those of us who tend not to question to validity of teaching evolution in schools (including me, unless I make myself question it for research purposes). However, I'm pretty sure the producers of this have their tongue quite firmly in their cheeks - at least in respects to media images (I imagine their critique of science is entirely serious). I thought it was interesting as a bit of alternative/ anti-science communication, but also because despite its very different ideological position in respects to mainstream scientific thought, aspects of its style really reminded me of Horrible Science.