J460 Science Writing » Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008 Students in a new undergraduate course in science writing report here on the 2008 meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, on new discoveries in science, on the scientists who make the discoveries, and on the science writers who translate these discoveries for the general public. They also review a recent book on science written by New York Times science writer Natalie Angier. Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:50:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 She Invites Us to Play, One Scientific Discipline at a Time http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/stories-and-reviews/saving-the-witches-one-scientific-discipline-at-a-time/ http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/stories-and-reviews/saving-the-witches-one-scientific-discipline-at-a-time/#comments Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:52:05 +0000 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/?p=128 The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, she’s making science accessible to all. Even to those “6 out of every 6.0225 Americans” who claim to have flunked chemistry in high school, as Angier puts it.

Well, I didn’t flunk chemistry in high school, I flunked it college, thank you kindly. Yet somewhere between James Bond and dentist-chair hootenannies, she tricked me into understanding handfuls of concepts in chemistry that I thought were forever out of my grasp. And she made me like it.

Angier is a welcome, witty voice to those who learn best by reading stories and anecdotes. There are so many people who are absolutely terrified of mathematical notation—so much that one tiny formula, regardless of how tastefully it is inserted into text, is enough to put them off their lunch and science. For those poor souls, Angier is a good dose of Dramamine. There’s not a formula to be found, save E=mc2, which has earned a green terrorist threat level amongst even the most science-phobic. Everything explainable is explainable with words. This seems to be her credo throughout the book.

Merely steering clear of jargon and mathematical notation is not enough to win over the uninitiated, however. Angier makes it fun—but fun is different for different people. She caters to interests vast and sundry. History, etymology, literature, art, music—her palette is huge.

If you are the type to be sidetracked by non-scientific queries around a subject, she reels you back in with just enough information to satisfy. Many students of letters both young and old have the compulsion of needing to know where words came from. To them, knowing a word’s root often helps with understanding how it’s used today. Angier, being a writer herself, seems to be familiar with such a craving. In her chapter on physics, she writes that the word “electron” comes from the Greek word meaning “amber”, which was considered in ancient Greece to be tears of the gods and would become easily charged when rubbed with cloth.

Additionally, she engenders science to the reader by describing ideas and phenomena from multiple perspectives. When talking to Brian Greene about what an atom might look like, she pulls out of him different ways to visualize it. One of them is easy to understand if you are already somewhat familiar with what an atom is, but another draws heavily on everyday objects and experiences to explain. It’s like a cloud or a dust bunny—those are easy to picture.

The Canon provides solid evidence that Angier is not only doing what she loves, but she knows that she’s doing something very important. Putting science into simple terms is an extremely daunting and frustrating task. It is so tempting to fall back on the jargon used by the experts because it’s easier and more efficient—that’s why experts created the jargon in the first place. But there are very real dangers present when scientific illiteracy runs rampant—from life-saving measures being put on hold to witches being burned at the stake. Angier takes on the burden of science education with unparalleled joy and playfulness—and she invites us to play along with her.

–Megan Meyer
]]> http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/stories-and-reviews/saving-the-witches-one-scientific-discipline-at-a-time/feed/ 0 Sci-Fi Technology Will Personalize Ads http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/stories-and-reviews/technology-to-make-ads-more-personalized/ http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/stories-and-reviews/technology-to-make-ads-more-personalized/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:32:55 +0000 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/?p=99
A video billboard shouts to Tom Cruise’s character in the film: “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!”

Current advances being made in computer science indicate that real-time advertising, specifically tailored to individuals, will soon exist outside of science-fiction movies.

Thomas Huang, professor of image formation and processing at the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute, is developing a new software program that will allow computers to recognize a person’s age, gender, ethnicity and even emotional state.

The principal aim of such a program is to create more sophisticated methods of advertising.

As a person stands in front of a camera, the program will be able to decide what commercials are appropriate to display according to his or her demographic, Huang said.

“What this does is tailor messages in real time,” said Raymond Burke, a professor of marketing at IU’s Kelley School of Business.

A large part of developing the software includes training its algorithm. It is routinely presented with images of faces whose ages are known, and it extracts information about the faces’ feature points and textures.

“It’s a holistic approach,” he said. “It takes the whole face into account.”

Using a database of 1,600 faces to train its algorithm, the program is able to estimate the age of anyone between one and 93 years of age.

The program is 50 percent accurate in gauging a person’s age within five years, but the accuracy jumps to 80 percent when the age bracket is expanded to a ten-year margin, he said.

Although the program will not be precise enough to use at clubs to prevent minors from entering, or in cigarette vending machines to enforce age limits, the rough estimation of a shopper’s age could be used for advertising and marketing research applications.
Burke said the estimation software will allow retailers to track the demographic profile of their customers and tailor digital messages to shoppers’ interests.
That will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of advertising communication, he said.
“People are more likely to pay attention and respond to those messages,” Burke said.
But the new technology could create some sticky ethical issues.

Shoppers might become concerned that the technology invades their privacy, Burke said. Or problems might arise when promotional offers are extended to some people and not others, he said.

“If people feel like they are losing control over their personal information, then there could be a consumer backlash,” he said.

Huang said the program is not a threat to privacy because it cannot determine an individual’s identity.

Despite the allure of new technology, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of having advertising tailored to their demographic.

Michele Boulais, a freshman political science major, said she is not particularly comfortable with the idea.

“It’s not Big Brother necessarily ­— that would be an overreaction,” she said. “But I would like to not be a part of a market research study.”

Boulais said she still thinks the idea is interesting, but that advertising is already pervasive enough.
–Megan Meyer
]]> http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/stories-and-reviews/technology-to-make-ads-more-personalized/feed/ 0 At the Heart of A Virus: The laboratory of Bogdan Dragnea http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/field-notes/at-the-heart-of-a-virus-the-laboratory-of-bogdan-dragnea/ http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/field-notes/at-the-heart-of-a-virus-the-laboratory-of-bogdan-dragnea/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:45:56 +0000 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/?p=87
Viruses, although seen as a scourge on other life, exhibit singular behavior worthy of emulation. A virus is able to detect and latch onto specific cells in an organism, into which the virus releases its RNA (or DNA) into its host. Discovering how a virus assembles itself within the host cell is, oddly enough, the work of chemists. Dragnea points out that chemistry studies how molecules attach to one another, which is exactly what happens during virus assembly. Dragnea envisions that with a precise knowledge of how viruses work, scientists will be able to create virus-like nano-devices which he calls "Trojon Horses." These proposed devices will detect individual tumor cells and release, not RNA, but anti-cancer drugs directly into the harmful cells. However, this potential usage will never become a reality until substantial gains are made in knowing how viruses work.

In order to better understand viruses, he is building a microscope powerful enough to track viruses’ movements in real time, a luxury virologists have never known. Tracking every moment of viral development will hopefully reveal more about the nature of viruses.

—-

My first contact with Dragnea’s research team comes not in the lab, but in a conference room. Dragnea had invited me to attend a meeting early one Friday evening. We meet at a coffee shop, and he asks if we might stop by a market to buy snacks on our way to Simon Hall. During our walk, as Dragnea wrestles with two grocery sacks, I ask if he’s making good use of his grant money. He grins and casts his gaze downward. “Oh, yes.” I knew it was a ridiculous question.

Dragnea and his colleagues at IU’s Nanoscience Center and the Center for Cell and Virus Theory received nearly $3 million from the National Science Foundation this year. The National Institute of Health is funding his own lab’s work to the tune $1.5 million over the next five years to construct the new microscope. The walk to the lab served as a great refresher for some of the terminology that I had months ago forgotten: icosahedral, capsid, spectrometry. By the time we reached Simon Hall, I recognized that meeting off campus was not an inconvenience, but a primer for all the vernacular headed my way.

Dragnea and his team, the Dragnea Group, are here to discuss things large and small. More specifically, they’re talking about viruses and the construction of their innovative microscope. A light-hearted quibble erupts over the distance of a gas station selling beer vs the distance of the market—it is a Friday evening, after all. Bets are placed before moving on to the task at hand. I think I know who won, but I never asked if the loser paid up.

Nancy is the first to speak. She pulls her PowerPoint presentation from her laptop and reports her recent findings. Slides cascade one after another, showing what is known about HIV as it is formed. Illustrations reveal the dissimilarities between the immature, non-infectious stage of the virus’ development and its mature, infectious stage. I am thankful for the visual crutch.

The main attraction is the capsid, a protein coat that sheilds the genetic information at the heart of a virus. The capsid’s shape and size change as the process of assembly unfolds. Additionally, the research has found that varying Ph conditions can also modify the capsid’s shape.

Mario, laptop in tow, moves to the head of the conference table. He’s having some problems calibrating the microscope. The images are apparently distorted at certain resolutions. The test particles to be observed are being obscured by what appears to be indications of heat much larger than the particles themselves. There’s still work to be done. The rest of the group offers hypotheses as what’s going wrong, which some find rather funny. “What’s wrong with you?” Dragnea asks the group. “You seem to be exceedingly happy.” This elicits a solid roll of laughter all around. The meeting nears its end, and everyone grabs a few more cookies amid chatter and wanders away.

—-

Dragnea says to come back anytime, so I drop by one afternoon. The lab is located deep in the belly of Simon Hall. My cell phone even turns off from lack of reception. I peak my head through the door and see people walking this way and that. Dragnea and Mario, flanking a miniature city of electrical devices, lurk in the darkness of a curtained nook. I see the laser leaving one device and entering another in several places; I assume I’m looking at the super-microscope to be. They’re having a difficult day because the laser is misaligned. But Dragnea immediately drops what he’s doing and introduces me to the machine.

A glinting green laser slightly smaller than a pencil in diameter cuts dark turning at varying angles. I poke my head around seeing where the beam comes from and where it’s going. Dragnea gestures toward a few pairs of protective sunglasses that look like the kind old people wear when they drive. I wrinkle my nose at them. It’s just a little laser, people use them all the time, what could it possibly do? Dragnea seems to hear the question though I’ve not said a word. A colleague of his lost an eye from this laser, he tells me, sliced him clean through the retina. I grab a pair of glasses, and after fumbling with them for a short time, I shrink from the microscope to explore other parts of the lab.

Behind the microscope a heavy, black curtain separates it from tobacco plants growing under horticulture lights. The young ones are nurtured until they reach a certain size, then are infected with virus and isolated from the others. Dragnea shows me the infected tobacco plants, which seem reasonably healthy. “You can’t smoke this tobacco,” he informs me. Thanks, man. I was thinking of stealing away with a few leaves.

At the other end of the lab a handful of people are combining chemicals in beakers and placing them on stirrers. They are creating gold particles that will help them to view the virus under the microscope. The solutions turn pink or violet, depending on the size of the particles; darker hues indicate that the gold particles are larger. When the microscope is on track and ready to roll, I imagine each person in this group will hover close by, eager to see what it reveals about the nature of viruses, bringing them closer still to building their Trojan Horse. But until then, the Dragnea Group will continue to tinker with lasers and tweak solutions.   
        –Megan Meyer

— For images and photographs from the lab, go to: http://www.indiana.edu/~bdlab/facilities.html
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]]> http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/field-notes/at-the-heart-of-a-virus-the-laboratory-of-bogdan-dragnea/feed/ 0 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/the-writers/megan-meyer/ http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/the-writers/megan-meyer/#comments Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:58:58 +0000 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/?p=88
Links to Megan’s articles

]]> http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/the-writers/megan-meyer/feed/ 0 Conversation with Joe Palca, NPR http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/say-it-in-a-minute-qa-with-nprs-joe-palca/ http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/say-it-in-a-minute-qa-with-nprs-joe-palca/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:57:10 +0000 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/?p=64 If you’re a fan of National Public Radio’s "Science Friday," then you are familiar with Joe Palca’s quirky, friendly approach to communicating science. He is an occasional host for Science Friday, as well as regular science correspondent for NPR.

He’s done pretty well for a guy who once hated writing. During his career he has won handfuls of prestigious awards for science writing and communication, and served as the president of the National Association of Science Writers (1999-2000). At this year’s NASW convention, he was awarded the 2008 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, presented by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

Palca received his Ph.D. in psychology from University of California at Santa Cruz, but felt that a career as a researcher lacked the dynamism he desired. Thanks to a media fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Palca heard the call of journalism.

He started in television, working for three years as a news broadcaster in Washington D.C. He then left television to spend seven years as a print journalist for Nature and Science, but found himself back in broadcasting in 1992, when he joined the team at NPR.


Did you go directly into journalism after you finished your schooling?

Pretty much. I intended to. It took me a while to find a job.


Why the change from science to science journalism?

I wasn’t sure that was what I was going to do until 1981, when I was on a fellowship that was sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The fellowship was called the Mass Media and Engineering Fellowship. The idea was to take scientists, or people who were training to become scientists, and to show them what it was like to present science to the public.

I didn’t think that it would get me into a career in journalism. I got the fellowship and I spent the summer here at a local television station in Washington D.C., and I just became completely hooked. I mean, I loved the idea of sweeping into some scientific lab with a camera crew and have everyone stop what they were doing and talk to me. Instead of being a graduate student who had to go to the library to get information, I just called the principle investigator and said, “Tell me what you’re doing!” He or she stopped everything and told me. So it was great fun.


Your first journalism job was in television, and now you’re an occasional host for NPR’s "Science Friday." Do you feel especially drawn to broadcasting? And if so, why?

Originally I was drawn to broadcasting because I detested writing and I figured it was the least amount of writing, being a broadcaster. Since then I’ve learned to enjoy writing.

The things I like best about broadcasting, that I really missed in print, is that you can write the words down in an interview and you can hear what somebody says and copy their words down precisely, but if you’re not hearing the way they say it, you’re missing a lot.


Do you feel that your experience in print journalism has affected your work in broadcasting, or is it the other way around?

I think probably the other way around. It’s a really good discipline to have to tell a story in one minute on television because it really makes you focus on what your story is. Then suddenly, when I got to print, I had already got into the habit of knowing the two or three sentences that actually make up the core of the story.

I think that there’s a lot of people in writing and in journalism who don’t write clearly because they don’t really know what their story is. I would say that broadcasting helped my writing because I was already in the habit of knowing what I was trying to say.


From your undergraduate studies to your PhD in psychology, I gather you were pretty interested in REM sleep. Why was that?

In high school I had gone to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist…I was having some difficulties in high school. I found the process really inefficient and frustrating. Then when I was a freshman in college, I went to this friend of mine who was going to Stanford University, and by coincidence the dorm resident in his dormitory was [founder of the Sleep Research Center], Bill Dement. He had set up a sleep lab in the basement of the dorm and he was letting the dorm kids use the lab.

At first I watched and then I was a subject. What I really found amazing was that you could look at an electroencephalogram (EEG) and say, “Oh, well that person is sleeping. This is going to be a lot more efficient. Instead of asking people what their feelings are, we can just look at a brainwave.” It was stupid and naïve of me, but that’s why I picked up on REM sleep because, damn, you could see the patterns changing, people would wake up and they’d be having a dream. That was awesome.


You took a year off from journalism to study clinical drug trials. What provoked such a dramatic shift in your career?

I just wanted the time to understand all the complexities that went into clinical trials. When you’re in journalism, you usually only get the end of the story, when the trial is over. I just became interested in the process of running a trial and what it took.


You’ve won several awards for making science accessible. You’re really good at infusing humor into your reporting, but that aside, how do you stay in tune with audiences’ interest and comprehension of highly technical subjects?

This is an endless process of fascination for me. It’s a process of empathy—putting yourself in the listeners’ shoes and asking yourself, if you heard this for the first time, would it make any sense to you?

I listen to a lot of scientific talks and they zoom over my head and I want to just stop people and say, “No, you can’t say that. It’s too much jargon.” And still, my editor says that I make things too dense. Sometimes I think I don’t quite get it right. It’s constantly remembering that the people you are talking to have no idea what you’re talking about until you tell them. I think about this a lot.

There are times when the story appears to be obvious, and when I tackle it, I say to myself, what’s really important here? Is there something even more basic going on that people need to know about?

For example, I’m doing a story on the oldest turtle fossil that’s been discovered. The fact that it’s the oldest is only sort of interesting, but I think there’s something interesting about evolution here. The earliest turtles had teeth and the turtles that evolved from the earliest turtles lost teeth. That’s kind of an interesting thing. Instead of just talking about the message of the old turtle, this is an opportunity to talk about how evolution works differently in different species. Not every evolutionary step is forward in the sense that we think of ourselves as being the pinnacle of evolution.


How do you keep from talking down to audiences? How do you find that medium where you don’t shoot over their heads, but you’re not explaining to them obvious things?

I think a way you keep people engaged is you keep your own interest and enthusiasm going. I think people feel lectured to or talked down to when you get this, you aught to know this anyway, but I have to repeat it because you don’t know it sound in your voice. So if every drop of the story is interesting to you, or if you can make it sound as if it’s interesting to you, then people might never feel as if you are lecturing them. You’re telling them something that’s just amazing and delightful.


What advice do you have for people who want to go into science writing or science broadcasting?

The most important thing is to find people who will publish your work or will broadcast your work, whether it’s your local station or your local newspaper.

If you’re interested in science journalism, I would say take any journalism job you can at all. Anywhere you can that will get you some journalistic credentials. Keep in mind that you’re always interested in doing science and push in that direction.

It took me three years to get into science journalism. Three years is pretty short. I think I was pretty lucky. To this day, I have very little interest in news, and yet I spent three years as a news person because that’s where the jobs were. I was trying to sell myself as a journalist so that I could sell myself as a science person.

On the other hand, if what you’re really interested in is science writing, and you don’t mind doing it for more public information kinds of outlets, then I would just try to get published or printed or excerpted in that world. I wouldn’t worry about it being a newspaper or broadcast journalism. I haven’t mentioned the web, but there’s a lot of stuff going on the web right now, which is sort of a hybrid between the two in some ways, but I’m not as familiar to how you get noticed there.


Do you want to share any interviewing anecdotes or blunders?

I actually get more nervous when I’m being interviewed than when I’m doing an interview.]]> http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/say-it-in-a-minute-qa-with-nprs-joe-palca/feed/ 0 Conversation Beats Comedy: NASW’s “happy hour” http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/conversation-beats-comedy-the-nasw-happy-hour/ http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/conversation-beats-comedy-the-nasw-happy-hour/#comments Sat, 25 Oct 2008 22:37:54 +0000 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/?p=100
Everyone gathered outside the lecture room on the patio, sipping wine and mingling. I found a seat close to the speaker and waited for crowd to file in. But it seemed as though everyone, save a handful of us, was reluctant to leave the buoyant, chattering mass churning on the patio. People stayed for about 15 minutes of the one-hour long talk. Then, to the speaker’s chagrin, most got up and left, more interested in socializing than in comedy.

Perhaps this was an indicator of why people fly across the country to participate in the NASW conference: It is not so much about the entertainment or the open bar as it is about networking, assembling each year to touch base with old colleagues and forge new paths by fattening their computer address books. Even those of us from IU made important contacts with science writers willing to give us advice, consider us for internships, and introduce us to some of the most prominent people in the field.
–Megan Meyer
]]> http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/conversation-beats-comedy-the-nasw-happy-hour/feed/ 0 Saturday, 3:30 am: Que fais-je ici? http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/the-newbie-syndrome/ http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/nasw-2008/the-newbie-syndrome/#comments Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:30:29 +0000 Megan Meyer http://journalism.indiana.edu/classwork/j460_science_writing_fall2008/?p=59 Que fais-je ici?

As I listened to the backgrounds of established science writers, it seemed that the most had received degrees in some discipline of science. I resigned myself to asking questions and answering those posed to me with as little fanfare as possible. Well-meaning friends introduced me to others, perhaps thinking that a mere wave of shyness had overcome my normal chattiness, but they didn’t know that each time they told someone I am a French undergrad, I felt as though they were telling everyone that my slip was showing.

Am I an imposter here?

The next day Holly informed us that these feelings awkwardness and misplacement are completely normal. We don’t know the protocol of "hobnobbing" in the professional world, and that can be a little intimidating. I overcame my fears for the rest of the convention, met some great people, and had a wonderful time!

–Megan Meyer

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