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Maria Miller, the Culture secretary, said yesterday   that if arts funding councils wanted to avoid funding cuts they should make the case for the economic impact of investing in art. This, in my view, is a terrible way for framing the argument for investing in the arts. A few months ago I wrote a post about science funding . In this I argued that by limiting science funding to projects with a clear commercial benefit over those which seem a bit more ‘blue-sky’, there is a risk that development follows too linear a path and we remain blind to ‘unknown unknowns’. The same idea, I think, applies to the arts – possibly more so. Maria’s comments provide a good case study to talk about framing . In order to help an audience engage with an argument, the message is framed in a way that resonates with the beliefs and prejudices of the audience. Essentially, if a communicator can frame an argument correctly, they are able to effectively communicate with any audience. However, framin...

My opinion of science communication has changed over the 6 months that I’ve been studying it. Before starting, I was one of those who insisted that the public understanding of science could be improved via mass splurging of scientific facts. I was also critical of the media’s representation of science. At best, I viewed it as inaccurate and at worst I viewed it as deliberately misleading in order to drive a journalist’s own personal prejudices. There have been many studies into the proportion of science news stories within newspapers. One conducted in 1995 sampled 6000 articles from popular newspapers between 1945 and 1990 (a preliminary report can be found here ). The authors reported an increase in the proportion of science stories since 1945 (however, there was a peak in the sixties and there has been a decline since). “It’s all well and good to have a large number of science stories,” you might say. “But what about the accuracy of these stories?” A really good accuracy s...

My last couple of posts have been a little bit negative but this post   is positive. And also a bit weird. Ask people in the ex-colonial world what they know about Britain and most of them will say BBC World Service. Until recently, the headquarters could be found in Bush House – appropriately named for a service set up to communicate to colonial Brits living in "the Bush". For 70 years, radio has been recorded, edited and broadcast by men and women who walked the resonant staircases, who chatted in the lift and who could be heard striding down the corridors. Sadly, the BBC World Service said "Goodbye" to Bush House in 2012 and moved to their new home in the just as beautiful Broadcasting House.  No doubt this was an emotional time for the people who worked here and some tried to preserve aspects of the building for future generations. There's a brilliant radio show from BBC Radio 3 in which people who worked in Bush House walk through the now...

In Brave New World , Huxley presents a possible utopian/dystopian future in which humans are cloned into different classes of people. These various classes are not only genetically conditioned to fulfil their role within society – they are also psychologically conditioned to feel that their position in society makes them happy. In short, the people living in Brave New World are kept constantly happy while consuming products. I was filled with dread while reading this book. It trickled in off the page, through my eyes. It collected in pools in my brain before flowing down to my gut. This book represents my gut feeling about society as it is at the moment. Just after I started reading the book, I put the following post on my facebook page: My friends seem to like the society in Brave New World ! And actually, what’s not to like? Everyone, and I mean everyone in this society is happy. There is very little civil unrest, people do not celebrate the death of a politici...

It has been a busy week here in Science Communication. While the Sci Comm’ers have completed and presented our Group Projects, the Science Media Production team have completed their Documentaries and Radio Packages. All of the projects had to communicate an aspect of the courses covered last term (‘Philosophy of Science’ and ‘The Media Representation of Science’) and could do so either through a film or audio product, or through a more artistic product. And they were all brilliant. I was a bit worried when we started these projects, especially since some of the previous years’ projects were shown to us were so cleverly executed (see, The Scientist , Maps of Knowledge  and Ros the Rat and the Paratime Shifts ). Many of the groups this year produced art works and I think this made a refreshing change from the animations and videos from last year (perhaps this a cyclical pattern?). It was great to see the different takes on the ideas presented in class. My group decided to...

I read the God Delusion about five years ago. And I remember thinking that the ideas were really inspiring. It felt, to my late-teenage, hormonal self, that there was a great religious conspiracy which threatened to topple reason and science and society as we know it. Dawkins provided people like me, mostly agnostic/atheists with a voice and with the confidence to question religions. We were actively encouraged not to give two-hoots about respecting religious beliefs since they were ‘stupid’ and ‘irrational’. I went around like this for a while, genuinely believing that religion couldn’t answer anything and yet had a lot to answer to. For some reason, perhaps because it is the best description we have for describing how we arrived in this existence, evolution got pulled into the religion versus no religion debate. Horror, this was now a religion versus science debate. Both sides of the argument ran to opposite ends of the debating chamber, ready to charge at each other. There wer...

How confident are you of your privacy? When you log in to Facebook, gmail or Twitter, how confident are you that no one else can view your information? More importantly, how do you keep your bank details safe when paying for a novelty, festive hat on ebay? In our modern world, we have come to rely on encryption as a method of keeping our secrets secret. Since we first began transposing our thoughts onto papyrus, wax-tablets or paper, we have tried to invent more complex codes so that our thoughts can remain a secret to be shared with only those with whom we want to share. A simple code is the Caesar shift. Named after Julius Caesar, who popularised its use, the Caesar shift works by substituting every letter with a letter a certain number of positions along the alphabet. For example, an ‘A’ would become ‘B’, a ‘B’ would become ‘C’, a ‘C’ would become ‘D’ and so on. This shift is called the ‘ key ’ and the text it produces is called the ‘ cipher ’. Using the key above, the followi...