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resource research Media and Technology
This book is a beginners' guide to science journalism, explaining the 21st century journalistic process, from generating story ideas to creating multimedia content when the story's written, taking in research and writing structures along the way. While many of the chapters are introductory, the book also covers topics also likely to be of interest to more experienced writers, such as storytelling techniques and investigative journalism. Readers are introduced to important debates in the field, including the role that science journalism plays; whether it is a form of `infotainment', or whether
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TEAM MEMBERS: Andy Ridgway
resource research Media and Technology
Visual narratives, such as comics and animations, are becoming increasingly popular as a tool for science education and communication. Combining the benefits of visualization with powerful metaphors and character-driven narratives, comics have the potential to make scientific subjects more accessible and engaging for a wider audience. While many authors have experimented with this medium, empirical research on the effects of visual narratives in science communication remains scarce. This review summarizes the available evidence across disciplines, highlighting the cognitive mechanisms that may
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TEAM MEMBERS: Matteo Farinella
resource research Media and Technology
Climate change is a global risk as its causes and effects are not limited to national borders, but the risks and the responsibility are not evenly spread [Beck, 2009]. Pakistan is facing especially severe impacts in the form of disasters, floods, droughts, rising temperatures, cyclones and rising sea levels due to global emissions, despite its national emissions being nominal and accounting for only 0.46% of worldwide emissions [World Bank, 2018]. Ironically, the level of public awareness of climate change is low in Pakistan compared to not only advanced countries, but also to other countries
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TEAM MEMBERS: Asim Sharif Fabien Medvecky
resource project Media and Technology
This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Cyber-Human Systems Program in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems in the Directorate for Computer Science and Engineering, the Gravitational Physics Program in the Division of Physics in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the Office of Integrative Activities.

This innovative project will develop a citizen science system to support the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (aLIGO), the most complicated experiment ever undertaken in gravitational physics. Before the end of this decade it will open up the window of gravitational wave observations on the Universe. However, the high detector sensitivity needed for astrophysical discoveries makes aLIGO very susceptible to noncosmic artifacts and noise that must be identified and separated from cosmic signals. Teaching computers to identify and morphologically classify these artifacts in detector data is exceedingly difficult. Human eyesight is a proven tool for classification, but the aLIGO data streams from approximately 30,000 sensors and monitors easily overwhelm a single human. This research will address these problems by coupling human classification with a machine learning model that learns from the citizen scientists and also guides how information is provided to participants. A novel feature of this system will be its reliance on volunteers to discover new glitch classes, not just use existing ones. The project includes research on the human-centered computing aspects of this sociocomputational system, and thus can inspire future citizen science projects that do not merely exploit the labor of volunteers but engage them as partners in scientific discovery. Therefore, the project will have substantial educational benefits for the volunteers, who will gain a good understanding on how science works, and will be a part of the excitement of opening up a new window on the universe.

This is an innovative, interdisciplinary collaboration between the existing LIGO, at the time it is being technically enhanced, and Zooniverse, which has fielded a workable crowdsourcing model, currently involving over a million people on 30 projects. The work will help aLIGO to quickly identify noise and artifacts in the science data stream, separating out legitimate astrophysical events, and allowing those events to be distributed to other observatories for more detailed source identification and study. This project will also build and evaluate an interface between machine learning and human learning that will itself be an advance on current methods. It can be depicted as a loop: (1) By sifting through enormous amounts of aLIGO data, the citizen scientists will produce a robust "gold standard" glitch dataset that can be used to seed and train machine learning algorithms that will aid in the identification task. (2) The machine learning protocols that select and classify glitch events will be developed to maximize the potential of the citizen scientists by organizing and passing the data to them in more effective ways. The project will experiment with the task design and workflow organization (leveraging previous Zooniverse experience) to build a system that takes advantage of the distinctive strengths of the machines (ability to process large amounts of data systematically) and the humans (ability to identify patterns and spot discrepancies), and then using the model to enable high quality aLIGO detector characterization and gravitational wave searches
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TEAM MEMBERS: Vassiliki Kalogera Aggelos Katsaggelos Kevin Crowston Laura Trouille Joshua Smith Shane Larson Laura Whyte
resource research Public Programs
This study examines the relative efficacy of citizen science recruitment messages appealing to four motivations that were derived from previous research on motives for participation in citizen-science projects. We report on an experiment (N=36,513) that compared the response to email messages designed to appeal to these four motives for participation. We found that the messages appealing to the possibility of contributing to science and learning about science attracted more attention than did one about helping scientists but that one about helping scientists generated more initial
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TEAM MEMBERS: Tae Kyoung Lee Kevin Crowston Mahboobeh Harandi Carsten Østerlund Grant Miller
resource research Media and Technology
While academic interest in science comics has been growing in recent years, the creators of these materials remain understudied. This research aimed to explore the experiences and views of science comic creators through the lens of science communication. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 science comic creators. Interviewees felt that the visual, narrative, permanent, and approachable qualities of comics made them particularly adept at explaining science and bringing it to new audiences. Science comic creators often had complex identities, occupying an ambiguous
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TEAM MEMBERS: Jordan Collver Emma Weitkamp
resource research Media and Technology
The rise of artificial intelligence has recently led to bots writing real news stories about sports, finance and politics. As yet, bots have not turned their attention to science, and some people still mistakenly think science is too complex for bots to write about. In fact, a small number of insiders are now applying AI algorithms to summarise scientific research papers and automatically turn them into simple press releases and news stories. Could the science beat be next in line for automation, potentially making many science reporters --- and even editors --- superfluous to science
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TEAM MEMBERS: Mico Tatalovic
resource evaluation Public Programs
Growing Beyond Earth (GBE) is Fairchild’s NASA-funded classroom science project designed to advance research on growing plants aboard spacecraft. As NASA looks toward a long term human presence beyond Earth orbit, there are specific science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) challenges related to food production. GBE is addressing those challenges by expanding the diversity and quality of edible plants that can be grown in space. On Earth, GBE is also improving technologies for gardening in urban, indoor, and other resource-limited settings. GBE is unique in its focus on real
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TEAM MEMBERS: Marion Litzinger Catherine Raymond Carl Lewis Amy Padolf
resource research Public Programs
This zine summarizes the book "Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning." It provides an accessible graphic introduction to how inequalities in everyday science learning happen, so that we can get to a place where everyday science learning practices could disrupt and transform social inequities rather than reproducing them.
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TEAM MEMBERS: emily dawson Sophie Wang
resource research Professional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The challenge to the science communication field put forward by Bruce Lewenstein, of the sector becoming a ‘ghetto’ of women's over-representation (see the commentary by Lewenstein in this issue), is a very timely wake-up call. This Commentary however, elaborates and frames the pivotal and constructivist premises on which this phenomenon should be interrogated and understood on many levels. It is critical that we undertake a deeper introspection, beyond just simplistic head counts of the number of women and men in the field, if we are to make sense of the seeming paradoxes that pervade the
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TEAM MEMBERS: Elizabeth Rasekoala
resource research Informal/Formal Connections
This essay discusses how gender-focused culture change initiatives developed for science (like Athena SWAN) might offer models for science communication. Such initiatives can seek to mobilise change amongst university departments and practices, but there are also potential pitfalls in such approaches. Using experiences in a department at UWE Bristol as a basis, the article will consider whether such schemes in science offer potential for science communication to reflect on its own gender imbalances.
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TEAM MEMBERS: Clare Wilkinson
resource research Professional Development, Conferences, and Networks
There is a significant under-representation of women in STEM which is damaging societal progress for democratic, utilitarian, and equity reasons. However, changing stereotypes in STEM requires a solution denied by the problem — more visible female role models. Science communicators are critical to curate the conditions to bypass this Catch 22. We propose that enhancing self-efficacy for female scientists and engineers to mentor others will generate more supportive workplaces. Similarly, enhancing self-efficacy for public engagement improves the visibility of diverse female role models for
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