In this month’s GeoEd post, Sam Illingworth explores the pitfalls of being a scientist in the public eye. Following the recent acquittal of 6 geoscientists on manslaughter charges after ‘failing’ to predict the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, is it time we thought about improving how risk is communicated to the wider public? At the beginning of November of this year, six Italian scientists were acquitte ...[Read More]
Connecting Earth scientists and school students – Apply to take part in I’m a Geoscientist!
What and when Imagine a talent show where contestants get voted off depending on their skills in their area of choice. Then imagine that this talent show is populated by scientists with school students voting them off based on the scientist’s ability to communicate their research well. This is the basis of a recent EGU educational initiative that launched earlier in 2014, and that will return in 2 ...[Read More]
GeoEd: Citizen Geoscience
Hiking to a survey site (Citizen Science). (Author: GlacierNPS; Uploaded by AlbertHerring, distributed by Wikimedia Commons)
In this month’s GeoEd column, Sam Illingworth tells us about the growing use of Citizen Science within research as a means of acquiring data. Whilst the practice is novel and offers exciting opportunities as to volumes of data collected Sam highlights the importance of appropriately crediting the work of the willing volunteers. Citizen Science is a phrase that is currently de rigour in scientific ...[Read More]
Open Access: Access to knowledge
“Access to knowledge is a basic human right.” Yet sadly as scientists we are often forced to operate in a framework in which this is not always the case. This week sees the celebration of the eighth Open Access Week, and whilst there have undoubtedly been many achievements by the Open Access (OA) movement since 2009, there is still a long way to go before mankind’s basic human right to knowledge i ...[Read More]