Tag Archives: media

Plastic Fanatics

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Image Credit: Emilian Robert Vicol, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped

It is hard to deny that plastics are having a moment – you open Facebook to find videos of turtles floating among plastic bags, Instagram to find every company is proudly getting rid of plastic straws, the news to find out the latest on the Great Pacific garbage patch. Plastics are what colony collapse disorder (aka. where are the bees going?) was a few years ago: the new environmental issue that everyone is talking about.

Now, plastics are certainly an irrefutable problem. We obviously have an unhealthy dependency on plastics that are found in our clothing, food, soaps, and homes. However, there is a question among conservationists and scientists over whether or not it is a good thing that the public conscious seems to become obsessed with a single issue, while others outside the limelight seem to fall away (similar to how in the USA people seem to have forgotten that Flint is STILL without clean water). I want to discuss how the new media landscape propels environmental fads, the good they can do, and the possible problems.

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Carsten Rahbek: Communicating Science Through the Media

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The last six months have seen several influential scientific papers been taken out of context and sprayed across myriad forms of media. From the Insect Apocalypse to claims of 60% of earth’s wildlife dying in the last 45 years, it seems like journalists have little regard for scientific nuance. But is it right to blame the media for these distortions, or do scientists themselves need a better understanding of how the media works?

Professor Carsten Rahbek has appeared in over 1000 scientific articles, including outlets like The Washington Post and the Times, and has appeared often on local and international radio and television programs. I sat down with Carsten during his recent visit to the CBD to ask him about science’s history with the media, and whether the scientific community needs to work to understand the media a little better.

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Why Pseudoscience Gives Me Nightmares

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Whilst pseudoscience is nothing new, it seems a lot more prevalent these days. So what can the scientific community, and the public in general, do about it? (Image Credit: Becker 1999, CC BY 2.0)

Fake science – or pseudoscience – has been around forever and somehow like that really annoying guy at the party just won’t go away. How is it in an age ruled by smart phones and CRISPR sci-fi level biotech are people still buying crystals and talking about super foods (don’t get me started on Goop). While I try to adopt a Californian “you do you” attitude to almost everything, people purporting even the most innocuous pseudoscience need to be stopped by both you and me.

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Ecology in Media: Thoughts, Questions and the Insect Apocalypse

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Recent reports of collapses in insect populations were eagerly devoured online. But were the reports exaggerations, and if so, how did they make it into the headlines? (Image Credit: Barta IV, CC BY 2.0)

Two weeks ago, an article on the Insect Apocalypse hit my Facebook feed. It popped up everywhere. People seemed genuinely concerned about the plight of the world’s insects, which was a first for me.

An hour later I was sitting at a conference seminar in which the speaker bemoaned the poor data that had contributed to the key statistic in the article: that biomass of flying insects had decreased by 75% over the last 27 years. The methods used in the report apparently show huge bias towards large bodied species, which may have exaggerated the findings significantly. So here lies our quandary. Read more

Policy-Relevant Ecology: Thoughts from the 4th Conference of the Norwegian Ecological Society

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The city of Tromsø, in which the NØF 2019 Conference took place last week (Image Credit: Mark Ledingham, Tromsø kommune. Image slightly cropped, CC BY 2.0)

I spent last week up in Tromsø, Norway, for the 4th Conference of the Norwegian Ecological Society. A two-hour flight further north might not seem like a big deal, however if I were a species alone to myself, my northern distribution limit based on temperature would be Trondheim, where I currently reside. It’s just too damn cold for an Australian in the Arctic Circle! Yet Tromso was surprisingly mild last week, coming off the back of a particularly warm winter. And whilst that might sound great, warming temperatures in the Arctic may cause a plethora of negative effects on local wildlife, including starving local reindeer populations and reducing the vital mosquito population.

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Jarod Lyon: Science Communication at the Coalface

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Jarod Lyon believes that people still want to hear science from experts, but that our perception of what makes an expert has changed

The advent of social media changed many things about the world, but if there’s one big change that’s become really quite evident in the last two years, it’s how we get our information. This has influenced ecology dramatically over the last decade, with a great deal of scientists now present on social media. But are we adapting fast enough, and in the right way?

At the Australian Society of Fish Biology’s Annual Conference last week, Jarod Lyon, who manages the Applied Aquatic Ecology Section at Australia’s Arthur Rylah Institute, gave a talk about applied science in the ‘fake news’ era. I took the opportunity to sit down and quiz Jarod as to how we need to approach public communication in the era of social media.

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