Last year, DSN compatriot and Captain of the rag-tag crew over at Southern Fried Science, dropped a science outreach bomb. Dr. A.D. Thaler struck some ecological/technological brilliance in the form of the Scanning the Sea project. In a word, I was inspired and wanted to do my part in pushing this magical ocean outreach toolbox forward and to the masses. Over the past year, and with Andrew’s much appreciated mentorship, my team and I have been working diligently to compile the next piece in the 3D puzzle.

I am stoked to unveil the Rocky Intertidal segment to the #ScanningtheSea library in the form of “3D Cabrillo.” Working at a National Park revealed the perfect opportunity to preserve the resources in this way and make them available for the public.

3D Cabrillo is a multifaceted educational resource and experience available to educators both near and far. In local collaboration with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the La Jolla Library, we utilized the #ScanningtheSea methodology to create biomodels of many of the prominent organisms found in our Rocky Intertidal Zone. Free downloadable versions of these models are available to the public on the park’s website at the 3D Cabrillo Biomodel Library. These models can be produced on any 3D printer. Our hope is that this will increase accessibility of ocean resources throughout our community and beyond.

In conjunction with the biomodel library, we developed an interactive Student Resource Manual. This takes students through a step-by-step guide on how to create and render 3D models. The 3D Cabrillo Student Resource Manual was specifically developed to connect students to the ocean ecosystems, while simultaneously teaching 3D printing techniques. We look forward to implementing this program with local schools during their upcoming Spring semester and putting their work on display for thousands of visitors to see and learn from.

Using the new tools available to us, we seek to reach the public in different and exciting ways. Our goal is that this initiative will highlight the public’s important role in awareness and stewardship of our ocean resources. By connecting nature and technology, we look to foster excitement in the next generation of environmental stewards.

A special thanks to Andrew D. Thaler for inspiring this project and his ongoing commitment to ocean science education. Onward Captain.

The post Rocky Intertidal v.2.0 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For people who know how clams actually live, the misconceptions of this video are obvious. That’s not the clam’s tongue, that’s its foot. The clam is trying to use its foot to burrow into the table and escape. (Here’s a video showing a clam using its foot to launch itself away from a predatory sea star (via Chris Mah), and here’s a video of a clam using its foot to burrow in the soft sea floor.) For people in the know, it can be easy to be scornful of a public so ignorant that they think clams lick salt. But that’s the wrong reaction.

First, it was perfectly reasonable for most people to think that this appendage was a tongue. Think about how bivalves are portrayed in cartoons. Here’s a bunch:

Yeah. They don’t have eyes, either.

Second, the “clam licking salt” video was a golden opportunity to teach a huge number of people a little bit about how invertebrates actually work. The video has been viewed over 1.7 million times – how often do that many people care about ANY aspect of ocean science? So when io9 contacted me to ask what was going on in the video, I was happy to talk to them. And when the io9 post lead to the Huffington Post and Daily Mail also contacting me for information, I talked to them too. Getting cool scientific information out to interested people is why we do this whole damn blog, after all. Here’s a selection of comments from the HuffPo piece:

Man, that looks freaking. I never saw anything like that before. WOW, Thumbs up. [link]

I have to say that was pretty gross but also pretty cool to watch [link]

Wow that’s interestingly creepy. :) [link]

awwwww.. it was looking for water and like the article said a anyplace but on a table with salt and no water. I tell you people …….More should read about the world around them and how it operates. People spent lifetimes to get that information to you [link]

I do feel a little ashamed about being the media point person for this story. After all, I haven’t “earned” it – while I do work with marine invertebrates, I am not a bivalve specialist. I had to resist to the urge to pass the journalists off to someone who really was a clam expert. I didn’t do so for two reasons: 1) I am sufficiently knowledgable to confidently address what was going on in this video, When I didn’t know the answer, like what species of clam was on the table, I simply said so. 2) Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” I was already talking to these journalists, and I wanted to get correct scientific information out to their readers. This is especially important for publications like the HuffPo and the Daily Mail, which are….not consistently focused on the best available science.

I encourage my fellow scientists to take advantage of opportunities like this. Viral videos about things like clam anatomy don’t come around every day – most people’s interest in clams begins with white wine and ends with butter. If this kind of opportunity comes your way, don’t be afraid to address it if you know the answer, even if it’s not your particular subspecialty. I’ll leave you with this inspirational and classic documentary on the importance of molluscs (make sure you make it to 2:45!):

The post Secrets of the clam tongue: a case study in opportunistic science outreach first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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Faced with such a question, I did what any studious scientist does: I went to the literature.  I did this simply because am not an expert on the current state of the social science of ocean literacy, which seems rather important if you’re planning a strategy aimed at improving it!  In other words, to work out how to get where we want to go, we need to know where we are.  In doing this search I was especially helped by a paper by Brent Steel and his colleagues from Oregon State University: “Public ocean literacy in the United States” (Ocean and Coastal Management 48: 97-114).  It paints a picture even more disappointing than I expected.  In their survey of 1,200 Americans, just 4% of folks assessed themselves as being well informed about ocean and coastal issues, whereas over a third considered themselves totally uninformed (this disparity was even greater in non-coastal states).  I was pleasantly surprised to read that 75% of respondents were familiar with the term “Marine Protected Area”, but disappointed that only just over half knew the term “Biodiversity”, which, after all, is what MPAs seek to protect!  About a third of people understood that El Nino affects ocean currents, while less than 30% understood the term “by-catch” in relation to fisheries.  I could go on.  Interestingly, Steel et al. went on to analyse the sources of knowledge that people use for ocean issues.  The use of newspapers and the internet (you go, ocean bloggers!) as information sources was positively correlated with ocean literacy, whereas TV and (to a lesser degree) radio were negatively correlated.  Armed with rigorous confirmation of the poor state of ocean literacy and some ideas about which media modes may/may not be helping, we can go on to think about ways we might help improve the situation.  I came up with 5 steps or ideas to start with, but I’d love to hear more ideas from readers in the comments section.

It might surprise some people that I would start with improving ocean literacy in scientists, not the public.  How does that work?  Aren’t scientists supposed to be the ones with all the knowledge?  Well, yes, but I’m pretty sure that if you ask most marine scientists (and scientists in general) they’ll tell you that science is an exercise in embracing individual and collective ignorance; scientists are just incrementally less ignorant of the world’s workings than everyone else!  Thankfully, improving ocean literacy for scientists is relatively easy; by virtue of their skillset, scientists are pretty good at assimilating and integrating new knowledge.  But there’s still one big hurdle to get over and that is access to that knowledge.  I enter into evidence the following anecdote.  Every day I get emails from scientists that go something like this “Dear esteemed colleague, I am <insert name here>, postdoctoral scholar from <insert developing nation here>.  Please send me a copy of your paper <insert latest earth-shattering Dove et al. effort here>.  Also, I have not the library access, so in addition please to be sending me all papers you have relevant to this topic also as well.”  There are good, earnest and hard-working scientists all over the world that are hamstrung because they just can’t get access to even the most mainstream literature.  If you think I’m picking on developing nations, think again.  In doing the search described above for “public AND ocean AND literacy”, I tagged 9 abstracts in a search of Web of Science, one of the major abstracting journals that gathers summaries of scientific literature into a conveniently searchable database.  When I sought the full papers, however, I could only get 4 out of 9, even using 2 different major university library logins.  In other words, the majority of relevant literature in this case may as well not exist, since it was inaccessible to me, blessed though I am by location and vocation.  Yes, it seems that improving ocean literacy for scientists is another case where the open access publishing revolution offers hope for real improvement.  It’s not the be all and end all of course (the financially-challenged, developing-world scholar can no more afford to publish in many OA journals than to subscribe to the traditional ones!), but it’s a huge step in the right direction.   To improve ocean literacy, therefore, I say Step 1 is – improve access for SCIENTISTS.  Of course, open access would make the very same information available to the public as well, which is even better!

Step 2 on the path to improved ocean literacy is a simple problem with an equally simple solution, one whose simplicity is matched only by many scientist’s resistance to embracing it.  It concerns ocean literacy very literally, but not literacy in the definition “familiarity with concepts”, rather, literacy as “ability to read and write”.  How can we expect the public to become familiar with the concepts if they can’t speak the language?  And therein lies the rub: marine scientists spend years of tertiary training and subsequent on-the-job experience learning, assimilating, indeed inventing, an entire language that describes the content of their research.  It’s not malicious – all expert fields, scientific and otherwise, do exactly the same thing to abbreviate complex concepts and give names to unique entities and processes encountered only in that field – but it does present something of an obstacle to effective communication.  The cold hard fact is that the public cannot and will not (and I argue should not have to) meet the scientific community half-way when it comes to communicating scientific concepts, and that puts the onus on scientists to use language more effectively when communicating about science.  I meet a lot of bright young scientists and students who rail against this idea.  “No!” they say, “Why should I do all the work?  The public needs to make an effort!”.  No, they don’t.  They won’t.  They just don’t care, and that won’t change until you tell them that the oceans are something to care about, and do it in a way that they understand.  So, my step 2 is – Scientists must use the language that we ALL possess, not the one only scientists possess.  Why do scientists not do this more often, anyway?  I think the answer to that may prove surprisingly complex, but here’s a couple of reasons I can think of right off the bat.  (1) It’s a pain in the arse; it’s hard to remember which words or usages others may or may not be familiar with.  To remedy that, I often suggest that people just try explaining it as if they were talking to their grandma: simply and respectfully. To succeed in communication, it is essential that scientists not lapse into jargon, nor give into condescending speech, which is easy to do if you’re oversimplifying.  I often find, though, that its not the complexity of the concepts that is the problem, anyway, so simplifying them is not the solution.  The real problem is that the audience is simply not familiar with the words you’re using, so they are denied the opportunity to understand the concept in the first place. In other words, its the style not the substance, stupid!  (2) The language is part of the scientist’s identity and so ingrained that it can be really hard to unlearn it for the purposes of sharing with others.  For some marine scientists, explaining the subtleties of Ekman transport, thermohaline circulation or bioturbation could be as disconcerting and challenging as a sighted person trying to explain “red” to someone blind from birth.  Of course, this problem of language awareness isn’t a new idea in science communication.  Most recently, Andrew Thaler at Southern Fried Science started a thought-provoking thread about words that mean something different in science than in regular use, and Carl Zimmer’s list of banned words has become essential reading for scientific communicators everywhere.  We at DSN and in the broader science community need to keep the ball rolling and remember at all times that the onus is on scientists to reach across the linguistic divide to engage the public.  One great way to do that: reverent irreverence (see? The core values tie together. Total package…)

My third step is all about who drives the approach we take to communication, scientists or non-scientists; in that sense, it’s probably also tied to the previous step.  There are lots of amazing things to see and learn about life in the oceans, and pretty early on the storytellers of society picked the low-hanging fruit.  These included animals like dolphins, whales, seals, otters and penguins; the animals that scientists label “charismatic megafauna” (a term that has come to have a somewhat derisive stigma in scientific circles!).   As a result of this process, a disturbing proportion of non-science folks think marine biology is all about Flipper and Salty, when of course those animals make up a vanishingly tiny portion of the diversity and abundance of marine life.  Rather than move on to tell the stories of other (IMO more interesting) animal groups, however, many uninformed/unmotivated producers of mass media have continued to hammer these species as being somehow iconic of “all things ocean”.  In doing so, the storytellers of society have often embraced stereotypes and trite oversimplification in order to give the people what they think the public wants; perhaps this is why Steel et al. found a negative correlation of TV with ocean literacy.  Regardless, I call this the Detroit approach.  When the US auto industry tried to give people what they thought we wanted during the SUV craze of the early Naughties – each trying to outdo the other with greater excess – we ended up with the Hummer H2 and so many other similarly ridiculous and irresponsible vehicles, and it drove the industry to the collapse.  No, Step 3 to improve ocean literacy is that scientists need to drive the storytelling more, using the Steve Jobs approach and not the Detroit approach.  The public didn’t know we wanted iPhones/iPods/iPads until Jobs told us we did through excellence in design and marketing.  If we want to achieve meaningful improvement in public ocean literacy, we need to stop pandering to what people think the ocean is about by, for example, not taking the easy route offered by the charismatic megafauna.  Instead, we as scientists need to take charge of the conversation and work with the storytellers to find intriguing, inspiring, exciting and entertaining ways to tell the public why the rest of the ocean is just so incredible, so cool and so critical to our collective survival.  Will it be easy? Not always, but I’m pretty sure the folks at Apple worked their tails off too.  We would all do well to follow the lead of the BBC documentary team in this respect, and to foster the development of new charismatic scientist celebrities (can you say Cousteau?) to help tell the stories.  This all seems to me especially important in light of the findings of Steel et al. that TV is negatively correlated with ocean literacy.  Whether that correlation represents cause or effect is not yet clear, but certainly there appears to be a lot of work to do to improve mass media as sources of ocean knowledge for the public.  At DSN we are in the gifted position of controlling our own media “channel”, however modest, so you can bet we won’t shy away from a good story, however challenging, about some less fuzzy but no less amazing aspect of marine biology.

Step 4 – Improve experiential learning options.  Learning is a funny old thing, and everybody does it differently.  Some folks can learn just from lectures (hearing), while some folks can remember everything from a book they read or a documentary they watched (seeing).  I, on the other hand, am an experiential learner: one who learns by doing.  I swear I learned more in one 2-week marine biology field course in 1993 than I did in the rest of that year’s university lecture courses put together.  The previous points I’ve addressed in this essay only really address the first two types of learning, though, the listeners and the watchers, so what do we do for the experiential learners?  How do we bring marine science to a largely land-based public in a genuinely hands-on way?  Well, there are actually lots of ways, just ask the National Marine Educators Association.  Here’s just two: Public Aquariums and Citizen Science Projects.

One of the best ways people can experience the ocean without setting sail themselves is by visiting their local public aquarium.  Most of the biggest and best of these are driven by multi-pronged missions that integrate entertainment with educational and conservation/research goals (if you’re not sure about your local aquarium, just ask if they are members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, it’s A Good Sign).  It’s a case of come for the fun, stay for the learnin’!   Their complex societal role puts a significant responsibility on aquariums to develop exhibit and program materials that will successfully engage the visiting public in marine issues.  As an industry insider, I can tell you that this is something the husbandry, conservation, research and education staff of all aquariums take very seriously.  So get out there and see what they’ve got going on: go to your local aquarium (or a zoo, a museum, a science center), touch an animal, enroll your kids in a camp, go to an aquarium sleepover.  In other words, get involved.  In most cases your attendance dollars will go to support a non-profit institution that can act as a key conduit for you and your family to experience hands-on the oceans that we all love.

The other way to improve ocean literacy for the experiential learning public is through Citizen Science projects.  That is, projects that aim to gather scientific data using the freely-offered help of the tax-paying public that so often supports our work.  Citizen Science is definitely a buzz word in science education and outreach and many column inches and blog screens have been devoted to this topic.  I’m no expert but I think I can safely summarise by saying that Citizen Science is admirable in principle, but hard to do well.  There are lots of them out there, but few marine ones have succeeded in engaging the public at any mass level (compared to, say, the SETI at Home program, for example).  Why aren’t there more?  Probably because they are not always appropriate to the topic at hand (e.g. how many average folks visit hydrothermal vents at bone-crushing depths, hundreds of miles from shore?), they can be more difficult to execute/administer than traditional data gathering projects, and also because scientists often have concerns about data quality when the information isn’t gathered by qualified scientists, or the grad or undergrad students under their direct supervision.  If you’re a scientist, consider a Citizen Science element for your next proposal, and if you’re not, look for one in which you, your kids or your school can participate.  Does DSN have a role in experiential learning or are we “just” a blog.  Well, we have some ideas bouncing around the collective noodle, so watch this space…

At the risk of losing readers who may be suffering from climate change fatigue, I will finish briefly with Step 5 – help the public understand that global warming is first and foremost an ocean problem, not an atmosphere problem.  Climate change is a topic that has received a lot of attention on this blog and countless others, and rightly so; it is the single greatest threat to the future  diversity of life on this planet.  Despite all the talk, there’s still a tragically huge amount of climate change denial going on (we’ve written about that too) and we can’t afford to allow that voice, unscientific as it is, to overwhelm the voice of reason, rigorous data and, let’s face it, reality.  We will continue to cover the importance of climate change phenomena as expressed in the sea, whenever important news develops in the field.  That will include warming but also ocean acidification, which is one topic of which the wider public remains sadly illiterate.

One of the best ways I think we can help promote ocean literacy is simply to be true to ourselves.  We, the DSN bloggers, but really all marine scientists, science online folks, science communicators, science journalists, all of us, need to get excited and to share that with the public.  As Holly Bik has said, we do need to cast aside the stereotype of the scientist as austere, bookish, lab-coated egg heads interested only in  publications and personal impact factors.  Instead, we need to embrace our own individuality, personality and passion for nature, then infect others with our enthusiasm for the cool things we’ve learned about the oceans and – even more importantly – for all the awesome unknown stuff left to learn.  We’re all faced right now with a fantastic opportunity to reinvent science itself (open access etc.) and its relationship with the people who so often pay for it (citizen science etc.).  In addition, we’re living at a time when newer and better technological tools are becoming available every day (social media etc.), tools that can help us make the most of these opportunities for the betterment of science and society.  It’s a great time to be a marine scientist and a scientist communicator and we at DSN are looking forward to playing a part.  I, for one, am psyched.

The post Promoting Ocean Literacy – a DSN Core Value first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Less than four months into 2011, lawmakers in seven states have proposed nine pieces of legislation designed to undermine public science education.It’s a record-breaking pace on schedule to eclipse 11 similar bills proposed in 2009.

“There’s been a rising tide of not just evolution denial, but science denial all the way around,” Robert Luhn of the National Center for Science Education wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Creationists and their kin are attacking global-warming science, plate tectonics, the Big Bang and on and on.”

So it seems very peculiar and short-sighted for the National Science Foundation to cancel a successful program that brought science and engineering graduate students into K-12 classrooms. From Save GK12:

The main purpose of the program is to provide graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) with training to better communicate their science, to bring their research into the K-12 classroom, and to engage K-12 students and teachers in the process of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics through hands-on activities.

The program, which started in 1999, has benefited over 10,000 STEM graduate students, 11,000 teachers, 5,000 schools, and as many as 600,000 K-12 students.

According to an independent assessment, GK-12 met and exceeded every one of its goals. GK-12 graduate students became better teachers and communicators, GK-12 teachers became more comfortable and confident teaching science content, and the classroom students became more excited about science.

This was certainly my experience as a GK-12 fellow last school year (2009-2010). Being in a 9th grade Earth Science classroom was extremely challenging and rewarding. The teacher and I were able to bring diverse students into a local canyon to learn key Earth Science concepts, scientific observation, and California natural history. Since most students had little experience with non-urban environments, this increased their curiosity about nature (and decreased their fear – they really thought they would be eaten by coyotes!), as well as improving their performance in the classroom.

According to this Science article, NSF’s reasons for cancelling the GK-12 program was that graduate students enrolled in the program do not become better researchers than their peers. (They are neither better nor worse.) GK-12 fellows do become better teachers, communicators, and advocates for science education – I find it peculiar that NSF deems this irrelevant, as that was the entire purpose of the program. All the rest of graduate school is dedicated to becoming a better researcher!

In their template letter for graduate students, the Save GK12 website points out:

President Barack Obama has called upon professional scientists and engineers to participate in enhancing the STEM education of K-12 students. In his address to The National Academy of Science on April 27, 2009, he said, “I want to persuade you [STEM professionals] to spend time in the classroom, talking and showing young people what it is that your work can mean, and what it means to you.” Among all federal STEM education programs, there is a single program that does exactly what the President has suggested — the GK-12 Fellows program.

If you value science education in the classroom, and think that it is valuable for emerging scientist to hone their teaching and communication skills, I encourage you to write a letter of support for GK-12. I have written my representatives – on paper! – and sincerely hope that even in these tough financial times, we can find the funding to continue this wonderful and successful program.

The post Why is a successful NSF science education program being cancelled? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’ve tweeted this a couple times but never sparked a debate, but admittedly, Twitter isn’t necessarily the best tool for thoughtful conversation, so I chatted up my most excellent internet friend (and annual IRL comrade-in-magenta-tights) Scicurious for a discussion. We have edited this chat for grammar, clarity and length, and Sci has cross-posted it over at her place.

——-

Miriam: So here’s what I’ve been thinking during this very very earnest discussion on women science bloggers. We have a fundamental conflict between selling science & including women. Everything in our society is sold with female bodies. Just check out the blog Sociological Images. Everything from household items to soap to apples. Everything.

Scicurious:  No kidding.

Miriam:  So tapping into this to sell science is very effective. It totally works.

Scicurious:  But it utilizes a framework that involves the objectification of women’s bodies to the detriment of women, who continue to be objectified and thus get judged not on what they do, but on how they look. What a man says on blogs is usually (not always) disconnected from his looks, while a female face on a blog tends to be associated with whatever she writes, and the quality of what she writes is influenced by the way that she looks.

Miriam:  Therefore leading to these issues with female science bloggers.

Scicurious:  Yes.

Miriam:  I’m actually surprised that we didn’t get more anecdotes of women being called fat ugly hairy lesbians & being dismissed. The current discussion seems to be focusing around inappropriate complimenting. But it’s two sides of the same coin.

Scicurious:  We want to be noticed, but often when we DO get noticed, it’s for the wrong things (and by “wrong”, I mean things unrelated to the stuff we blog about).

Miriam:  Actually, I’m sure Zuska has some pungent tales.

Scicurious:  Well, how many women WANT to come forward and say “You were called hot, I was called fat and ugly”? There’s another little issue in there, I think.  The fact that, when you get complimented, it is somehow more OK than if you get harassed for being ugly.  People seem to feel more sympathy for those who are harassed for being pretty.

Miriam:  GOOD POINT.  I think the ugly-harassment is much more common in the feminist blogosphere.

Scicurious:  Oh yes, ugly harassment is very rife among the feminists.

Miriam:  The reason that both ugly harassment and attractive harassment take that form is that women are powerfully, powerfully socialized to believe that the most important thing in their lives is how they look. Thus, how could calling a woman attractive be insulting? And the worst thing you can do is call her fat and/or ugly – because thereby you are attacking the entire root of her self worth.

Scicurious: And similarly, men are socialized to believe that the most important thing is how a woman looks so it makes it even easier to say things, because that’s a COMPLIMENT, right?  that must be what she WANTS.

Miriam:  And some women – who perhaps are a little younger – do think it’s a compliment. At first. But I think the true nature of those type of compliments becomes clear – and it comes back to using the female body to sell everything.

Scicurious:  I do think it’s especially hard for some women who are in science or other rigorous fields, and who have tried very hard to base their self-worth on their intelligence and work.

Miriam:  Those of us who are trying to sell our brains are NOT selling our looks, and it’s insulting to presume that we are.

Scicurious:  Then when you get a compliment on your looks in the workplace, it’s like a slap in the face, taking away the other things you strive so hard to be proud of, by telling you what really SHOULD matter: your looks. Many people may say that really when you get a compliment on your looks, what they are REALLY saying is that you can be pretty AND do science!  But why should the pretty even MATTER for your content?  Why should this be pointed out at all?  It has no effect on the content you are presenting, and mention of it is thus at least a non sequiter.  But what it really does is remind you that you can be brilliant or not brilliant, or do good writing or not…but you’re so PRETTY!

Miriam:  And as you’ve said in one of our previous conversations – science can be a refuge from the very labor-intensive task of having to perform femininity. All that plucking and shaving and expensive clothing!

Scicurious: Right. It’s only cool to be smart if you’re ALSO doing your female duty of being hot.

Miriam: But you better not forget your primary directive. So that brings us – again – to the controversy over using sexy women to sell science. There’s a couple examples of this that have come across my radar (and everyone else’s)  – Nerd Girls, Science Cheerleaders, the list of 15 sexy scientists (since removed) and to some extent, the Geek & Gamer Girls video (though that’s about geek culture, not science).

Scicurious: I feel like using hotness or women or sexy to sell science is not good for the women IN science. But i also think it’s not spectacular for science itself.

Miriam:  How so?

Scicurious:  Coolness doesn’t rub off. Putting science next to something that’s cool doesn’t make it more cool. It makes it science, standing next to something cool, and I feel that science has a great deal to sell itself on its own merits.

Miriam:  Hah, I am imagining a poor little test tube with glasses, leaning next to a pipette in a leather jacket.

Scicurious:  To sell science with sex implies that it’s not GOOD ENOUGH on its own, that science itself can’t be fascinating or interesting unless it’s got glitter on it. But it CAN be!  Look at the citizen science projects!  They makes science perfectly interesting and fun, without having to prop it up next to something that’s sexy.

Miriam:  I don’t have as much of a problem with that – I just see it as part of the way our society sells EVERYTHING. Why should science be different?

Scicurious:  i feel like science, and other academic fields, should strive to be different, because we all know and have evidence of how much that objectification harms women, we in fact have scientific evidence of it.

Miriam:  I’m thinking of all kinds of highbrow stuff that is sold with glitter. Like how art museums have special exhibits on the Art of Pixar for example. (Actually I loved that exhibit.)

Scicurious:  Yeah, I have to say that sounds really cool…but that’s not using women to sell it, it’s using something else, and something which has not yet been deemed to be harmful.

Miriam:  So, playing devil’s advocate, should science strive to be better than society at large, even at the cost of perhaps reaching fewer people?

Scicurious:  Hmmm. That’s a fair point. Should science strive to be “better than” the public at large in our recruiting strategies?  Or is it a matter of life or death and let’s use whatever we’ve got?

Miriam:  Actually, one of the issues in the Science Cheerleading debate was about the audience. I have a much less negative reaction when the audience is little cheerleaders.

Scicurious:  Oh yes! Absolutely!

Miriam:  Clearly they already connect to cheerleading. So yay! Reach them!

Scicurious:  But the audience is often not little cheerleaders, and most of the people paying attention to the video on the internet are probably not showing it to their kids.

Miriam:  Exactly. And then we come back around again to selling science with sexy women. People made arguments that Nerd Girls or cheerleading are not actually about sexy women, which frankly I think are ridiculous.

Scicurious:  When they perform live, the vast majority of their audience will be adults, and at the science and engineering festival, it will also be majority male.

Miriam:  If it wasn’t, they would wear comfy warm tracksuits like the men (and Sue Sylvester).

Scicurious:  I mostly get told in response to that that little girls won’t respond unless they see cheerleaders dressed like they are ‘supposed’ to dress.

Miriam: I actually buy that. Who imagines a female cheerleader in a tracksuit? It’s ridiculous. Why? Because cheerleaders = sexy woman. Sexy women don’t wear tracksuits.

Scicurious:  Also…why science cheerleaders?  Why not literature cheerleaders?  Financial cheerleaders? English teachers surely need more exposure and appreciation.

Miriam:  I’m rather fond of the Radical Cheerleaders. They cheer for left-wing causes, are kinda punk, and include a range of body types.

Scicurious:  I feel like science cheerleaders tends to fly very well because most scientists are men. I think in a female dominated field it wouldn’t be so positively viewed.

Miriam: So I wanted to bring it back around to the lack of prominent women science bloggers. Can we articulate why we find it so bizarre that everyone in the Science Online-oriented blogosphere is so concerned over the women science bloggers thing –  while being nearly universally positive about using sexy female bodies to sell science?

Scicurious:  I have been thinking about this too. I think for a lot of women it comes down to an inner conflict. We DO base most of our self-worth on our work in science. But it’s REALLY hard to give up the idea that looks really matter.

Miriam:  Hey, you and I will be the first to admit that we like to look nice! At least, I try to look nice at conferences – at work I mostly wear dirty blue jeans and smell like dead sea life.

Scicurious:  Too true! I usually try to start out my days pretty well dressed. it makes me feel more confident, but at the end of the day, I smell like rodents.  Oh well, at least Sci-cat thinks its pretty cool.  And of course no one wants to punish people for being good looking. You’re ALLOWED to be good looking and a scientist.

Miriam:  There are a TON of examples…in fact marine scientists are pretty damn hot on the whole.

Scicurious:  It’s totally fine!  I encourage it as much as I encourage being ugly and a scientist, or being bright green and a scientist! What you look like should not influence your work.

Miriam:  Some of the looks-based science outreach, like Nerd Girls, seemed to try to specifically reach self-identified hot girls by telling them that it was all right to be hot and a scientist.

Scicurious:  Darlene Cavalier has stated in comments on my blog that she wants it to be ok to be good looking, and a cheerleader, and a scientist. I think that’s great and just fine, but I worry that using cheerleaders to promote science makes the looks supersede the science. And while using cheerleaders, and things that little girls like, to promote science for kids SHOULD be fine, it’s only really fine when we live in a society where we do not have to worry about being taken less seriously because of our looks. Sadly, we do not live in that society, and cheerleaders have far more connotations than just being role models for little girls.

Miriam:  I have an “Intermediate Hotness Hypothesis” based on the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis in ecology that it is best to be unremarkable. I have no doubt that really beautiful women are taken less seriously – but unattractive women have it really bad too.

Scicurious:  Ooooh, that sounds quite plausible, at least as far as being taken seriously in academia.

Miriam:  So, yeah, I guess my summary is that by selling science with female bodies, we are actually contributing to the barriers that women run up against both in science and science blogging. When female looks are central to science outreach, the physical attributes of women become part of the conversation, whether they want them to or not.

Scicurious: I think there is a divide here. People want to promote science, and the easy way to do that is based on using female images to make science sexy.  But I’m not sure we can do that AND try to keep comments on our boobs away from our blogs at the same time.  While, in a perfect world, we SHOULD be able to do this, there’s no perfect world, and there are still too many connotations with using sexy to sell science that could negatively affect the women trying to perform and write about science on a daily basis. 

I think there’s got to be a way to promote science that is effective and exciting.  Citizen Science projects and fun science blogs for kids and adults are a GREAT start.  Other great ideas for outreach are things like math books for girls and books on math and science that spark general interest, and are BY women, but do not focus on appearance.  I think we can and should build on that kind of outreach.  It’s great to look however you want, and do whatever you want (cheerleading, gymnastics, D&D, anime), and still do science.  But mostly, it’s great to DO SCIENCE!

The post Let’s talk about sex (in science) first appeared on Deep Sea News.

• A celebration of Darwin and to put his work in context with the work of international collaborations like Census of Marine Life and Consortium for the Barcoding of Life
• Exploring the scientific possibilities of doing various kinds of science on tall ships
• Corresponding with the International Space Station to verify phenomena observed from space imagery as it passes overhead AT THE SAME TIME (how awesome is that??)
• Speaking with 60+ children from local schools in Paraty about evolutionary science, Darwin, marine science and maritime history aboard the brazilian tallship Tocorimé.
• Facilitating an audio connection between the Brazilian school students and astronauts aboard the ISS.
• Engaging local teachers and the public to discuss ways they can stimulate Darwin activities in the schools and local areas.

It is very exciting to be a part of this project. I feel like a missionary for science in rural Brazil. Brazil is a scientific powerhouse in Latin America with a long and great tradition of excellent research. Darwin recognized the significance of Brazil and South America in the very first lines of the Origin:

When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle’, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.

As a science missionary, I hope to be able to inspire children, and adults, from any country to appreciate and inquire about the natural world in the Darwinian tradition and from within an evolutionary context. I wish that everyone can enjoy “throwing some light” on their own “mystery of mysteries” great and small.

So please follow along here at Deep Sea News and The Beagle Project blogs. Also, follow along Karen and mine twitter feeds. We’ll be using the hashtag #beagleinbrazil and I have installed a widget in the sidebar that aggregates all tweets with that hashtag.

[mappress]

The post Join DSN and the Beagle Project in Brazil first appeared on Deep Sea News.