Jonathan: December 2007 Archives

Merry Christmas!

Here's a great article at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories showing you how to make a skittering robot out of a toothbrush, a little electric motor, and a watch battery. Nice little film there, too

We’re aware of two other contests for short science films you might like to enter.

The first is being run by New Scientist to promote their new book How to Fossilise Your Hamster. Their video rules are fairly similar to SciCast’s — your film will be easily short enough, though:

“You need to include a concise explanation of what you are filming and it should be something that can be done, in or around the home.”

Great prizes, by the way. Deadline is 31st December, with entries via YouTube.

The second contest is Sci-Film 2008, being held as part of the Wrexham Science Festival in March. As a short film festival, the prize is being selected to be shown in the festival itself; entry deadline is 15th February.

Again, films you submit to SciCast should be eligible — and if you wanted to expand on your theme they’ll allow you up to 10 minutes.

Good luck!

We've only just heard of this project sponsored by Google and Specialized bicycles. Sadly it's now too late to enter for this year, but making pedal-powered contraptions was still a genius idea. There are videos of dozens of entries; our particular favourites include the bicycle tennis server, the elegantly-simple but perhaps mildly pointless pedal hacksaw, the amphibious bike-yak (though – hang on a minute – why doesn't it sink again?), and the bicycle water distiller, which must be darned hard work.

On 6th December, Richmond schools clubbed together in Twickenham for a distinctly glamorous evening to celebrate short science films they’d made, and to present awards to the best. And when we say ‘glamorous,’ we mean the whole thing — red carpet, posh frocks, dinner jackets, the Mayor, and Sir David Attenborough. Yes, you read that right. Sir David presented the awards, and chatted to the students who’d made the films.

The evening was part of Richmond’s ‘Scientific Edge’ project, a broader initiative to increase engagement in science education. The film-making part was set up by Andrew Hanson, outreach manager at the National Physical Laboratory, and — you’ve guessed it — was based on the model established by SciCast.

Nine schools took part, making I think twenty-five films, ranging from noble first efforts to spectacularly slick extravaganzas. We’ll hopefully bring you most if not all of them on SciCast, but in the meantime here are some stills from the evening. It was a wonderful night, with tremendous enthusiasm and excitement, and the council are already making plans for next year.

And for the record: we’re absolutely delighted to see SciCast used in this sort of way, and would love to see Richmond’s model repeated around the country. Expect more on this later.

There are several reasons we’re not using YouTube to publish SciCast. Chiefly that it’s blocked in many schools, which would rather limit the utility of our films, but there are issues surrounding quality too.

Quality of video playback, for one thing — we want these films to be projected on a classroom wall, and that’s hard with grainy YouTube quality. The downloads we’ll make available will be high-resolution, high-quality, and in our tests have looked terrific on big screens.

Quality of discussion is another worry. We all know the web is full of knee-jerk, intemperate comment, but even given that, does anyone else think YouTube comments are still below average?

The third issue is quality of content. We can’t rigorously vet SciCast films, and they’re not all textbook-accurate. But they’re rarely complete rubbish, and we haven’t any yet that I’d describe as ‘anti-science.’ We want SciCast to be a source you can trust to be frequently entertaining and at least mostly accurate — and with current web video, that’s unusual.

The first piece of work I’ve seen on this issue was published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it makes for alarming reading; there’s an excellent summary at Ars Technica.

There are good reasons why scientists need to be capable and effective communicators; part of SciCast’s ambition is to raise standards, and disseminate skills and best practice.

As we stagger towards offering you proper, high-quality downloads of SciCast movies (yes, downloads are coming. Promise promise promise), this query appeared in our email inbox:

Apologies to anyone who tried to leave comments here in the last week or so: I'd managed to break something, as you'll have seen from the cryptic error message. Now fixed, I think.

Here at Planet SciCast orbiting world headquarters, we continue to be huge fans of the Instructables site. Catching our eye this week is: making potato chips in the microwave. Take lots of care if you do this (sharp knives, hot things, and all that): and film yourself doing it! Then send us the film, so we can all be jealous of your crisps. Unless you make ginger and blue cheese flavour crisps, in which case we're fine, thanks.

In the iPM interview I referred to a film of toast landing butter-side down, which wasn't actually on the site when the interview went out. Oops. So here's a quick rough-cut of it, so you can see what I was talking about.

Just three new films this week; two connected to the new Inside DNA exhibition which opened in At-Bristol, and one charming little make & do for a rainy weekend. Click through to the main site to view them.

(And yes, we will get downloads and a podcast feed going just as soon as we can, so you can have the latest films delivered to you automatically)

This afternoon's edition of iPM on Radio 4 (5:30–6pm) features an interview with me, about SciCast; the show running order is here, and here's a blog post from the journalist I spoke to.