Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future
- Kind
- Book
- Date
- 2009-07-13
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- Retrieved
- May 28, 2011
10 memes from this reference
80 Percent of Americans Can't Read the NYT Science Section
One prominent researcher on the public understanding of science has even found that due to their failure to understand basic scientific terms or the nature of the scientific process, 80 percent of Americans can't read the New York Times science section.
Carl Sagan Punished for Popularizing Science
Yet instead, Sagan was punished by the scientific community for his public endeavors. The persecution began as early as the 1960s, when Harvard University denied him tenure. Nobel laureate Harold Urey, a chemist who had previously served as one of Sagan's mentors, helped quash his chances with a nasty letter objecting…
Darwin Didn't Sound Like a Scientist
"At least at the outset," wrote the journalist Malcolm Jones, Darwin "was hardly even a scientist in the sense that we understand the term—a highly trained specialist whose professional vocabulary is so arcane that he or she can talk only to other scientists.
Decline of Science in Media
A 2008 analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that if you tune for five hours' worth of cable news you will probably catch only one minute's coverage of science and technology—compared with ten minutes of "celebrity and entertainment," twelve minutes of "accidents and disasters," and "26 minutes or…
European Union Citizens are More Scientifically-Ignorant
To begin with, citizens of other nations don't fare much better on scientific literacy surveys, and in many cases fan worse. Residents of the European Union, for instance, are less scientifically literate overall than Americans, at least according to one metric for measuring "civic science literacy" across countries.
Hollywood's Anti Science
"REALITY ENDS HERE." IT'S THE UNOFFICIAL MOTTO OF THE UNIVERSITY OF Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, cast in concrete at the entranceway to the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts and, in Latin, at the South entryway of a new complex building. As scientist-turned-filmmaker and use film school graduate…
Many Great Scientific Minds Were Religious
A great many leading lights of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment-Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle—were distinctly religious and viewed science as a better means of understanding God's creation and the laws governing it.
Science Bloggers Blast Science Reporting Without Expanding Knowledge
...the typical blog mode is to find an individual piece of science reporting with some particular failing and blast it—without addressing or even raising the broader issue of what's really going on in the media industry. One science logger. University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran, even put it this way in a…
Science is Self-Isolating
Still, it is undeniable that the troubling disconnect between the i scientific community and society stems partly from the nature of scientific training today, and from scientific culture generally. ). some ways science has become self-isolating. The habits of specialization that have ensured so many research…
Scientifically Accurate Movies and Profits
Contact didn't do badly. It earned $171 million worldwide, nearly doubling the ^90-million production budget. But it was also competing with two o considerably more brainless alien-related sci-fi movies, 1997's Men h in Black and 1996's Independence Day, both of which made a great at deal more money ($589 million and…