A New Guide to Science Advocacy

Scientists used to think that sharing the facts and evidence of an issue was enough to sway policy makers and the general public. Unfortunately, with many issues facing us today there are vested interests looking to derail civil discourse around topics like climate change and vaccines. Today Evidence for Democracy launched a toolkit for scientists to better advocate for evidence based policy decisions. The idea now is to provide scientists with guides on how to share facts and evidence so that the general public can benefit from their research and not be manipulated by lobbying campaigns and the like.

Whether you want to dip your toes into advocacy for the first time, or are looking to fine-tune your skills, this guide will help you expand your toolbox of advocacy strategies, and build and nurture relationships with decision-makers.

Fostering a better relationship between scientists and policy-makers is not just about enabling ground-breaking discoveries or strengthening the economy. It’s also about how science can serve the collective good — for a healthier, more prosperous, and just society.

Within the guide, you will also find firsthand experiences from parliamentarians reflecting on their experiences interacting with the science community. Personally, I’m still thinking about this quote:

“Conversations around science are frequently centered around funding. They are less often about how [the] government can make better evidence informed decisions using the research that is being produced by the stakeholders I meet with.” — Member of Parliament

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iNaturalist Goes Its Own Way

Way back in 2011 we took at a new app that helps to identify the world around, back then it was to help the California redwoods. That app is iNaturalist and it’s had a great decade plus of identifying all sorts of plants and animals. The app, which has a very active and committed user based has been so successful that species that had never been seen before have now been found. The ap started as a research project and will now live on as a nonprofit thanks to a generous donation. Here’s to studying the world through citizen science!

Data from iNaturalist have been used in more than 4,000 research publications, and users have identified new species through browsing its observations. “We have a better understanding of current biodiversity than we have ever had because of iNaturalist—hands down,” says Young. In total, more than 2.8 million observers have uploaded more than 150 million verifiable observations to iNaturalist, and in July, an average of 124 observations were uploaded per minute.

Every month, around 350,000 people record observations. But Loarie recalls a time when he considered 50 regular iNaturalist users a triumph. Like any critter on its site, iNaturalist has gone through a number of life stages.

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Woman’s Nose Evolved Into Skin Swab Test for Parkinson’s

When Joy Milne‘s husband started to smell bad, she thought something was wrong. Her concern was met with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, which is a neurological condition impacting hundreds of thousands around the world. The causes of Parkinson’s are still being investigated and diagnosing it is also a challenge; this is where Milne’s nose coms in. A team of researchers worked with Milne to develop a new at to test for Parkinson’s.

Now a team in the University of Manchester, working with Joy, has developed a simple skin-swab test which they claim is 95% accurate under laboratory conditions when it comes to telling whether people have Parkinson’s.

The researchers analysed sebum – the oily substance on skin – which was collected by using a cotton swab on patients’ backs, an area where it is less often washed away.

Using mass spectrometry, they compared 79 people with Parkinson’s with a healthy control group of 71 people. 

The research found more than 4,000 unique compounds in the samples, of which 500 were different between people with Parkinson’s and the control group.

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The Climate Change Deniers are Done

tree with climate knowledge

Climate change deniers have clearly set back human progress and delayed us in reducing emissions, obviously that’s no good. What is good is that they barely exist anymore. The science has always been done properly around climate change and people are living the chaos that climate change has caused; it’s as impossible to deny as a round Earth. Conversations are no longer hijacked by people who deny climate reality, and that’s a good thing.

How do we know this? Some researchers set out to determine how present climate change denialism was online only to find it declining. A really need potential spinoff from this research is how to look into other aspects of people denying science and how to engage them to better understand reality.

In a study out this week in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, researchers found that outright denying the science is going out of fashion. Today, only about 10 percent of arguments from conservative think tanks in North America challenge the scientific consensus around global warming or question models and data. (For the record, 99.9 percent of scientists agree that human activity is heating up the planet.) Instead, the most common arguments are that scientists and climate advocates simply can’t be trusted, and that proposed solutions won’t work.

It took Cook and his team about five years to create a machine learning model that was able to reliably detect real-life climate misinformation claims. “Misinformation is messy and doing content analysis is messy, because the real world is always a bit blurry,” Cook said. First, they developed a taxonomy to sort arguments into broad categories — say, “climate change isn’t bad” — narrower claims (“carbon dioxide is not a pollutant”) and even more specific points (“CO2 is food for plants!”). Then they fed common climate myths into the machine until it was able to recognize each one consistently out in the wild.

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Philosophers Help Scientists do Better Work

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Some empiricists argue that science is a separate discipline from philosophy, and those thinkers may want to rethink their stance. The debate isn’t philosophy or science, the debate is actually how much philosophical rigour should be applied within a certain field of research. In order to effectively advance scientific fields scientists practice philosophical processes and patterns of thinking.

This hopefully comes to no surprise to many readers as we often see on this site that cross disciplinary practices usually provide the best approach. Plus, historically science and philosophy are one.

The researchers identified a substantial body of work by philosophers of science that used “philosophical tools to address scientific problems and provide scientifically useful proposals.” They call such work philosophy in science. So what kind of tools do philosophers use that can be applied to science?  The study authors don’t offer an exhaustive list, but point to activities such as making distinctions and proposing definitions, critiquing scientific methods, and combining multiple scientific fields as examples of typical philosophical tools.  And while scientists use these methods too, they don’t tend to do so as often or as rigorously as philosophers.

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