Carsten Rahbek: Communicating Science Through the Media
Tag Archives: media
Why Pseudoscience Gives Me Nightmares
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.
Ecology in Media: Thoughts, Questions and the Insect Apocalypse
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
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.
Jarod Lyon: Science Communication at the Coalface
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.
