Podcast: Working Scientist (LS 30 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: How to craft and communicate a simple science story
Pub date: 2020-07-17

Ditch jargon, keep sentences short, stay topical. Pakinam Amer shares the secrets of good science writing for books and magazines.

In the final episode of this six-part series about science communication, three experts describe how they learned to craft stories about research for newspaper, magazine and book readers.

David Kaiser, a physicist and science historian at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the 2012 book How the Hippies Saved Physics, tells Amer how he first transitioned from academic writing to journalism. “This kind of writing is different from the kinds of communication I had been practising as a graduate student and young faculty member.

“It took other sets of eyes and skilled editors to very patiently and generously work with me, saying ‘These paragraphs are long, the sentences are long, you’ve buried the lede.’ It was quite a process, quite a transition. It took a lot of practice to work on new habits.”

David Berreby runs an annual science writing workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He adds: “One of the hardest things for scientists to do is to tell a story as they would to a friend on campus. If you run into someone in the hall you say ‘Hey, the most surprising thing happened….’

“Generally your instinct for how you would tell someome informally is a good guide. This is hard for scientists as it’s been trained out of them. They have been trained to formalise and jargonise.”

Beth Daley, editor of the The Conservation US, an online non-profit that publishes news and comment from academic researchers and syndicates them to different national and regional news outlets, describes how she and her colleagues commission articles.

After a daily 9am meeting, they issue an ‘expert call out’ seeking comment on that day’s news stories.

Her team also receives direct pitches from academics. “The question I always ask scientists is ‘What is it about your work that can be relevant for people today?” she says.

 

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Podcast: Teaching in Higher Ed (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: An Interdisciplinary Legacy
Pub date: 2021-04-15

Sandie Morgan and Warren Doody share about Elizabeth Leonard’s interdisciplinary legacy on episode 357 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

She was very intentional about introducing faculty, colleagues, and students to people from outside that would bring different perspectives.
-Sandie Morgan

She could fight if she had to. She could stand her ground if she had to. What was so wonderful about her was she always fought the right fight.
-Warren Doody

She was a one-size-fits-all person. She could do so many different things.
-Warren Doody

She knew so much from such a broad spectrum of disciplines and she wanted her students to have that kind of competency.
-Sandie Morgan

Podcast: Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves. (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Dyatlov Pass incident – Alexander Puzrin
Pub date: 2021-04-06

In episode 97 of Parsing Science, we’ll talk with Alexander Puzrin from ETH Zurich about his research into a 62-year-old mystery over the deaths of 9 hikers in the freezing Russian wilderness, a tragedy that’s been attributed to everything from a yeti to military weapons testing, and an avalanche.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves., which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: The Life Scientific (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Professor Martin Sweeting, inventor of microsatellites
Pub date: 2021-04-20

When Martin Sweeting was a student, he thought it would be fun to try to build a satellite using electronic components found in some of the earliest personal computers. An amateur radio ham and space enthusiast, he wanted to create a communications satellite that could be used to talk to people on the other side of the world. It was a team effort, he insists, with friends and family pitching in and a lot of the work being done on his kitchen table. Somehow he managed to persuade Nasa to let his microsatellite hitch a ride into space and, after the first message was received, spent more than a decade trying to get a good picture of planet earth. The technology that Martin pioneered underpins modern life with thousands of reprogrammable microsatellites now in orbit around the earth and thousands more due to launch in the next few years to bring internet connections to remote parts of the world. The university spin-off company, Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited (SSTL) that Martin set up in the 1980s with an initial investment of £100 sold for £50 million a quarter of a century later. If his company had been bought by venture capitalists, he says he would probably have ended up making TVs. Instead he developed the satellite technology on which so much of modern life depends.

Producer: Anna Buckley

Photo Credit: SSTL

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC Radio 4, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: Changing Academic Life (LS 30 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: RW6 Exploring your own superpowers
Pub date: 2021-04-12

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2021/4/11/rw6-superpowers for a time-stamped transcript and related work links.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Geraldine Fitzpatrick, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: Voices from DARPA (LS 42 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 42: The Infrared Visionary
Pub date: 2021-04-05

 

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Whitney Mason, a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Microsystems Technology Office, explains how she became smitten with the science and technology of imaging. Even as a child, Mason was curious about the world, wondering about everything, she says, from why the sky is blue to what makes concrete hard. But what ended up inspiring her most and cementing in her professional trajectory was the fantastic ways that animals see, including the ability to see in the night using infrared light. “A soldier needs to see at night,” Mason says. “Or see through dust. Or find homemade explosives. Or find things really far away. Or track things.” That list of warfighters’ sensory needs explains a lot about the bold portfolio of projects Mason oversees at DARPA. She is out to provide warfighters with some of the smartest, most discerning, most versatile imaging sensors ever devised. As she explains in the podcast, this will require designing into the sensors brain-like functions of identifying what really requires attention in a complex scene of mostly benign features, preprocessing huge amounts of data the ways eyes do before sending information brainward via the optic nerves, and purging raw sensor data of extraneous portions that can be confusing to both people and computers. One of her programs, which aims to shrink otherwise unwieldly infrared imaging systems into much smaller and lighter packages, challenges materials researchers with a task equivalent to reforming a brittle ceramic dinner plate into the shape of cup. That’s just a taste of the tough problems her projects’ research teams are working on. Challenging as her job might be, Mason seems to be just where she wants to be. “I have had very fun jobs,” Mason says, “but this is the funnest.”

 

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from DARPA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves. (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Early Galaxies’ Formation – Arianna Long
Pub date: 2020-11-23

How did the earliest and largest clusters of galaxies form? In episode 88, Arianna Long from the University California – Irvine discusses her research into the emergence of massive dusty star-forming galaxies which developed billions of years ago.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Parsing Science: The unpublished stories behind the world’s most compelling science, as told by the researchers themselves., which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Podcast: The Story Collider (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Stories of COVID-19: Teachers
Pub date: 2021-04-16

Few professions outside of medicine and research have played as pivotal of a role in the events of the past year as teachers have. In today’s episode, we’ll hear two stories — one from a Chicago Public Schools teacher and another from a New York Public Schools teacher — about how the challenges and triumphs they’ve experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part 1: Jenny DeLessio-Parson has always prided herself on being a super teacher — until the challenges of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic begin to add up.

Part 2: As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, Amanda Geduld begins to feel that she and her fellow teachers aren’t receiving the support and respect they need to do their jobs.

Jenny DeLessio-Parson was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After studying Public Policy in college, she worked in various roles serving Chicago students and families before returning to school to become a teacher. Jenny has been an educator with Chicago Public Schools for 8 years and currently serves as a middle school Social Studies teacher and staff delegate to the Chicago Teachers Union. She was introduced to storytelling through Lily Be, which later led her to become co-host of The Stoop, a Chicago-based storytelling show.

Amanda Geduld received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. She went on to study English education at Boston University where she received her M.Ed. Now serving as an 11th and 12th grade ELA teacher in the Bronx, she is deeply passionate about approaching education reform through a social justice lens. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post and CNN.

As always, find photos and transcripts at storycollider.org

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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Erin Barker, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.