The communication of science to the general public is a subject dear to me, but unfortunately one that the majority of my colleagues neglect to consider as one to which to devote time and efforts.
In the last decade blogs have started to fill the huge gap that exists between scientific journals and general news media, a gap that no popularization magazine can bridge, given their restricted scope. More recently, I see efforts that employ video and graphics more heavily than before, and this is of course a step in the right direction - reading is harder, or at least less immediate, than watching an image or following a video clip.
I am spending my vacations in the beautiful island of Leukada, in the Ionian sea. Consequently, my posting rate here has dropped significantly in the last few days. I will return in August; in the meantime I will still post something, but expect a much smaller rate of articles for a while here.
The following text has been offered as a followup of the Higgs observation by the LHC experiments, which finds a signal at a mass compatible with the pre-discovery predictions made some time ago by Vladimir Khachatryan - ones which I published in this blog. - T.D.
Considerations following the Higgs boson discovery - Ashay Dharwadker
"Given that the search for the Higgs took some 45 years, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, billions of dollars, not to mention numerous divorces, huge amounts of sleep deprivation, tens of thousands of bad airline meals, etc., etc., we want to be sure as is humanly possible that this is real."
Harrison Prosper, Kirby W. Kemper Professor of Physics, Florida State University
Sense About Science, the British charitable trust that tries to educate the community on the correct handling of scientific claims, and to "
work in partnership with scientific bodies, research publishers, policy makers, the public and the media, to change public discussions about science and evidence", has produced today a very interesting booklet on peer review.