Recently in issues Category

Friday’s SciCast Awards event made the news bulletins on Irish broadcaster RTÉ last Friday - story here. Scroll down for a link to the clip, which requires Real Player.

The team from St. Joseph’s College in Lucan, County Dublin, flew over for the event and to celebrate their nomination in the Physics category with ‘Central Locking’. They were pipped to the trophy, but seemed to be having a blast when I caught up with them afterwards.

Thanks to the IoP in Ireland for pointing us to the story online; we look forward to a deluge of entries for 2009!

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.