{"id":250,"date":"2016-02-06T03:19:19","date_gmt":"2016-02-06T03:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/?p=250"},"modified":"2016-02-06T03:19:19","modified_gmt":"2016-02-06T03:19:19","slug":"science-and-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/?p=250","title":{"rendered":"Science and language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the rolling banners at last year&#8217;s meeting of the American Geophysical Union had a scantly-clad woman and the words &#8220;This is what most people think of as a &#8216;model'&#8221;.  See, scientists have a communications problem.  It&#8217;s insidious, and you forget how people use words and then feel attacked when you have to change how you speak.<\/p>\n<p>I have a highly-educated editor working with me on the <a href=\"http:\/\/eicoffee.net\">coffee and climate change report<\/a>, and she got caught up on a word I use daily: &#8220;coefficient&#8221;.  For me, a coefficient is just a kind of model parameter.  I replaced all the uses of &#8220;coefficient&#8221; with &#8220;parameter&#8221;, but I simultaneously felt like it dumbed out an important distinction and wondered if &#8220;parameter&#8221; was still not dumbed down enough.<\/p>\n<p>AGU has a small team trying to help scientists communicate better. I think they are still trying to figure out how to help those of us who want their help.  I went to their session on bridging the science-policy divide, and they spent a half hour explaining that we have two houses of congress.  Nonetheless, it is a start, and they sent us home with communication toolkits on USB.  One gem stood out in particular:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/sciencecommunication\/files\/2011\/10\/wordtable.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/sciencecommunication\/files\/2011\/10\/wordtable.jpg\" width=\"450\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So I will try to reduce the ignorance and political distortions of my devious communication plots, until I can flip the zodiac on this good response loop.  Wish me luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the rolling banners at last year&#8217;s meeting of the American Geophysical Union had a scantly-clad woman and the words &#8220;This is what most people think of as a &#8216;model&#8217;&#8221;. See, scientists have a communications problem. It&#8217;s insidious, and you forget how people use words and then feel attacked when you have to change [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Zh9E-42","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/existencia.org\/pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}