Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I know these are tangentially related, but hear me out on this.

JoAnn looks at the views of kids and scientist:

Much has been said here about the image that the public has about scientists - how we dress, how we work, what makes us laugh…In particular, one study concluded that children did not picture scientists as “normal young and attractive men and women.� Fermilab did their own study, asking 7th graders to draw pictures of scientists before and after visiting the laboratory - with markedly different images resulting from meeting real scientists at work.

And this topic came up at SLAC over the weekend. The annual DOE Bay Area Science Bowl was held at SLAC on Saturday. I unfortunately had a conflict this year and could not participate, but it’s a great event and a pure delight to watch the kids think about science and reason their way through problems The winning team was from Harker School in San Jose and they will compete in the national Science Bowl held in DC at the end of April. Good luck to Harker School!

In the midst of the action last Saturday, this group of science-oriented teenagers saw this picture:

Their comments were:

Gosh, scientists obviously work hard because in this picture they are working late at night, have used up the blackboard, and are wearing their pajamas.

You know that’s a real quote, because no one could make that up if they tried! Next time I put on a skirt and heels, I will try hard not to think of it as pajamas! However, note that the kids did not think it strange that a group of women would be discussing science….now that’s real progress! Pajamas and all…

The thing is, this isn't about "nerd patrol" (Mr. President, you asshat). This is much more fundamental. This is about respect we show scientists and engineers in this country. Kids aren't worried about cool, and working "hard" I don't think means kids don't want to work long hours in some distant future. This is about the level of respect meted out to the "nerd patrol". Let's face it. In the 60's scientists and engineers were nominally heroes, working against the red bear and keeping the world safe for democracy. Deep blue hero shit.

Now, engineers are Dilbert. Same tie. Same shirt. Same glasses. None of the respect (and no ashtrays at your desk). Engineering staff has become the new blue collar in this country. Of course kids want to go into law or business (Mr. MBA President, you asshat) or communications (assuming American Idol or NBA Star is off the table). Because they are the ones "in charge" and respected. Hell, look at the uproar around Google in the banking world because it is the one company where the business interests are there to serve the engineering goals.

Of course, how can we expect much when the average person has such a feeble knowledge of science? I mean, look at the shitty job done by our Journalists (Hey, there are those people again!) when they cover science as typified by this article in the NYT (no link because they are paywall asshats):

February 13, 2006
Reporters Find Science Journals Harder to Trust, but Not Easy to Verify
By JULIE BOSMAN

When the journal Science recently retracted two papers by the South Korean researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, it officially confirmed what he had denied for months: Dr. Hwang had fabricated evidence that he had cloned human cells.

But the editors of Science were not alone in telling the world of Dr. Hwang's research. Newspapers, wire services and television networks had initially trumpeted the news, as they often do with information served up by the leading scientific journals.

Now news organizations say they are starting to look at the science journals a bit more skeptically.

"My antennae are definitely up since this whole thing unfolded," said Rob Stein, a science reporter for The Washington Post. "I'm reading papers a lot more closely than I had in the past, just to sort of satisfy myself that any individual piece of research is valid. But we're still in sort of the same situation that the journal editors are, which is that if someone wants to completely fabricate data, it's hard to figure that out."

But other than heightened skepticism, not a lot has changed in how newspapers treat scientific journals. Indeed, newspaper editors openly acknowledge their dependence on them. At The Los Angeles Times, at least half of the science stories that run on the front page come directly from journals, said Ashley Dunn, the paper's science editor. Gideon Gil, the health and science editor for The Boston Globe, said that two of the three science stories that run on a typical day were from research that appeared in journals.

Beyond newspapers, papers from journals are routinely picked up by newsweeklies, network news, talk radio and Web sites.

"They are the way science is conducted, they're the way people share information, they're the best approximation of acceptance by knowledgeable people," said Laura Chang, science editor for The New York Times. "We do rely on them for the starting point of many of our stories, and that will not change."

There are limits to the vetting that science reporters, who are generally not scientists themselves, can do. Most journal articles have embargoes attached, giving reporters several days to call specialists in the field, check footnotes on an article and scrutinize the results.

"Scientific discoveries are more difficult because they often require in the generalist reporter a good deal of study, follow-up interviews and some guidance on how to make sense of technical matters," said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, which studies journalism. "But I think the scandals do require both a new level of skepticism on the part of the reporter and also maybe some new protocols between scientists and journalists."

The Hwang case was not the first time journals had been duped: recently, editors at The New England Journal of Medicine said they suspected two cancer papers they published contained fabricated data. In December, the same journal said that the authors of a 2000 study on the painkiller Vioxx had omitted the fact that several patients had had heart attacks while taking the drug in a trial. A study on the painkiller Celebrex that appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association was discredited when it was discovered that the authors had submitted only six months of data, instead of the 12 months of data they had collected.

Of course, it is off the first-business-page and way way behind the lead before one non-asshat statement gets made: publication is an early step in the scientific process. Results have to be repeated before anything is accepted. Just because there is one paper in the JAMA or Nature doesn't make it true. It is when there are dozens of concurring results (global warming? asshats.) that is becomes widely accepted as "True" or (get this) an "Established Theory" (Discover Institute, asshats).

At a time when scientists and engineers are treated with declining respect (hey, at least we aren't schoolteachers!) and the fundamentals of science are under constant attack, should we really be surprised that our children "is not" learning?

An in a round about way talking of Science Bowl, congrats to Hume-Fogg for making The Washington Post list of best high schools!