traineeship for science communication student

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESF) are looking for a student interested in summer vacation work at their facility. The advert reads as follows:

We have a project for this summer, spanning about 6-8 weeks during June, July and August. We hope to find a native English speaker with a scientific background and an interest in communication. The project will be to write/edit the text for a new section of our website that will present a collaborative science project.  Organisational and editing skills are more important that web skills. An understanding of writing for the web would be beneficial.

Past trainees thought that working at the ESRF was a great experience, for them it was:
- an opportunity to spend a summer in Grenoble, France
- working at a major European Science Centre (640 employees and 3000 scientific visitors per year)
- working with scientists
- with English as the working language
- the trainee salary was thought sufficient to cover living expenses

Further details about the ESRF can be found at http://www.esrf.eu/

IMGAME: Budapest fieldwork

We arrived back in Cardiff last night after yet another successful IMGAME fieldwork trip. Local Organiser Zoltán Sallay did an excellent job recruiting participants, who almost all turned up, and we managed to complete the data collection phase is record time!

The topic for this set of Imitation Games was religion, with Pretenders given the task of passing as Christians. The results will be directly comparable with recent fieldwork at Cardiff, where secular students were also asked to pass as active Christians. We are still completing the final phase of data collection in Cardiff and will start this in Budapest after Easter. With any luck, we should have results to report at SEESHOP in June.

Lastly, we must single out our tour guide, Martin Weinel, for exceptional work in finding excellent hotels. He surpassed himself this time with the Gellert hotel, which includes entry to the Gellert baths as part of the room price…

IMGAME: Granada Fieldwork

Last week (19-24 Feb) we were in Granada for another week of IMGAME fieldwork. As ever, thanks must go to our Local Organiser, Adolfo Calatrava, and the two student helpers, Ignacio and Carolina, at the University of Granada for making the week very successful and very enjoyable.

The fieldwork topic was sexuality and, in particular, the extent to which straight participants can pass as gay. We used the new designthat was first trialled in Uppsala in which generating questions, pretender answers and then judgements are done as three separate stages rather than within single, real-time Imitation Games. The procedures are getting more efficient and our week’s work in Granada enabled us to collect data in two different conditions:

• In the first condition, pretenders (i.e. straight males) had to pretend to be gay but were allowed to use the internet to research answers. We recruited just over 80 participants to this stage of the research who each answered one of 13 different sets of questions generated on the first day of fieldwork. This data should be directly comparable to that collected in Uppsala, where pretenders were also allowed to use the internet.

• In the second condition, the pretenders (again straight males) had to pretend to be gay but were not allowed to use the internet but had to base their answers on whatever knowledge they had when they arrived. As with the first condition, each of the 80 or so participants answered one set of questions from the same set of 13. This answers, and the judgements they give rise to will be directly comparable to the other condition and will give us an important insight into the effect of using the internet on the outcome of the research.

We have now assembled the questions, non-pretender answers and pretender answers into the 175 unique dialogs and are now in the process of sending these out to judges. We hope to report the results – both the Granada/Uppsala comparison and the with/without internet comparison – at SEESHOP6 in June.

PhD Studentship : Science Communication and the Large Hadron Collider

[From the PCST mailing list]

Applications are invited for a fully-funded three-year studentship in the field of science communication, specifically to study the promotion of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Closing date: 24 February 2012

Select http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=6096 for more details about the studentship.

Potential candidates are invited to make initial, informal enquiries to Richard Holliman, <r.m.holliman@open.ac.uk>, to discuss the breadth and scope of your proposal for this studentship.

Final decisions about the focus of the research will be agreed between the successful candidate and the supervisors (Dr. Richard Holliman, Professor Eileen Scanlon and a contact at CERN).


Dr. Richard Holliman
Senior Lecturer in Science Communication
Department of Environment, Earth and Ecosystems
Faculty of Science
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
Tel +44 (0)1908 654646

Select http://www.open.ac.uk/personalpages/r.m.holliman for more information about my work.

Select http://isotope.open.ac.uk for the Isotope website.


--
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
_______________________________________________
PCST mailing list
PCST@mailmanlist.net
http://mailmanlist.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pcst

Job opportunity in science communication

The Orangutan Tropical Peatland Project (OuTrop), an NGO based in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, are currently advertising for a communications manager to join our group. The post would suit a student or researcher with a background in science communication.

More details at: http://www.outrop.com/work-with-us.html

Closing date is 1 Feb 2012

4S Annual Meeting, Cleveland

Now back in Cardiff after attending the 4S Annual Meeting in Cleveland. As the conference was co-located with the History of Science and Society (HSS) and the Society for History of Technology (SHOT), plenary sessions were especially abundant this year – one for almost every day of the conference in fact.

As might be expected given events in Japan, sessions about the nuclear industry in general, and Fukushma in particular, had a high profile this year. In contrast, biosciences and public participation felt less numerous to me although the official programme suggests there were lots of them too! My own paper – about Democracy and the ‘Third Wave’ – was part of the Science, Technology and Public Policy theme, which included over 120 separate sessions.

The conference was very enjoyable and presentations in the sessions I went to were all of a consistently high standard. Navigating through the conference program the size of 4S is inevitably somewhat arbitrary but I did enjoy several papers, hear the phrase ‘interactional expertise’ being used as if it were a standard explanatory term on at least one occasion, and find a couple of people to invite to the next SEESHOP.

Overall, therefore, I think it was a successful couple of days.

Linking STS and the Social Sciences, Korea

This conference was organised by Center for Social Sciences (CSS) at Seoul National University and the Korean Association of Science and Technology Studies (KASTS). I’m especially grateful to out hosts Prof. Myung-Seok Oh and Byeong-Cheol Mun for the invitation and the kindness they showed in looking after us so well and making my visit to Korea so enjoyable.

The conference was spread over two days (see programme) and included papers addressing theoretical issues in STS and their application to technoscientific risks. Theoretically, the conference was dominated by actor-network theory, which seems to be the dominant approach in Korea (as evidenced by the framing of the conference which reflected Latour’s view of the ‘the social’ as an outcome. I like to think that those of us who don’t subscribe to this view persuaded those present that there was at least some life left in the ‘social’ as an analytic category.

It was also interesting to see the extent to which there was a specifically Korean version of either science or STS. As the previous paragraph intimates, I don’t think there is a specifically Korean STS, unless by this we mean it is unusually persuaded by ANT but I am not sure it is unusual even in this sense. I also didn’t get much sense that there is a specifically Korean science in the sense that, for example, Arie Rip refers to Maori science. Korean science is basically Western Science as far as I could tell.

What is different, and is (I think) distinctively Korean, however, is science policy. The transformation of Korean society since WWII is quite mind-boggling to see and, as several of the talks from Korean scholars made clear, is no accident. Instead it is a deliberate result of adopting a science and technology policy that attempts to leapfrog the ‘appropriate technology’ logic of development by going straight for the high-end advanced technologies that Western countries want, use and develop. This is most apparent in the automobile and consumer electronics industries but, as the Hwang Woo-Suk scandal made clear, also includes considerable investment in biosciences too. Whether other countries can follow this model as well I don’t know but our brief visit to Seoul showed that it has certainly worked for the Koreans.