Tips on communicating science to a class

Yes, I am still alive.

My wife and I just returned from a long hiking and climbing trip out in the western states. It's tough readjusting to normal life after having been on the road for a month, but I've managed to slowly get back into the world of science while I wait out the visa application process for Switzerland.

Today I came across an interesting article in Wired called "A Media Guide for Physics" by Rhett Allain. In the article, Rhett gives a few tips for producers of science TV shows that would help them communicate science better. His tips are

1. don't be wrong;
2. it's better to say nothing than to be wrong;
3. don't be misleading;
4. [don't focus] on comparisons and numbers;
5. don't get out of control crazy.

I agree with Allain on all these points, especially the last one. Though this example is not from TV, I've noticed that graduate students (myself included) will tend to describe the minutiae of their research to lay people because they don't want to be wrong and because they've been so immersed in it that they forget what other people know and don't know.

The article also got me thinking about what tips teachers and educators should use when communicating science to their students. The list must necessarily be different because the audience is different. What follows is my own list of tips that I think are valuable to college professors when communicating concepts to a class.

1. Don't assume that students are well-grounded in the "background" material and concepts.
2. Don't gesture too much while lecturing. When you gesture, you're referring to an image in your head that only you can see. At least put that image on the board.
3. Present ideas visually and verbally before going into derivations.
4. Include a little history behind the concept you're about to teach if there's time. The reasons for why a concept is important are often found in the history of the development of the idea. For example, Newton's laws seem obvious now, but philosophers had some very muddy ideas about motion before Newton formulated them. And all of thermodynamics arose out of a need to understand how newly invented engines and devices worked. If you start a class by talking about molecules in a box, the relevance is lost.

The list is obviously not exhaustive, but I've seen many professors violate one or more of these to the detriment of their students' understanding. What other tips might be included?

Improve your writing: write to a newspaper

I submitted an editorial piece to the Orlando Sentinel recently in my continuing efforts to improve my writing and expose myself to other forms of publishing. This article was published yesterday and may be found here: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/os-ed-ucf-bicycle-commuter-myword-030613-20130305,0,933320.story. It concerns the use of bicycles as a form of transportation near the UCF campus.

One thing I learned from this experience was that newspapers prefer much shorter paragraphs than scientific publishers. I originally had three or four paragraphs in the 400-word essay; the editor turned it into nine. I suppose having multiple paragraphs makes the article easier to read and allows the reader more opportunities to "abandon" the article once they've started reading.

I also learned that newspaper editors won't ask writers if it's OK to perform edits beyond simply breaking a piece of writing into paragraphs. I was a bit disappointed that a few phrases were cut from my original article since they argued for a few points that I felt were important. However, the overall message of the article is more clear in its published form since it is not obfuscated by too many arguments.

Overall, I'm pleased with the experience, and I'm contemplating how to move forward with increasing bike awareness in Orlando.

Math is not always the best form of communication

I attended a seminar at CREOL this past week concerning similarities between quantum entanglement and the theory of polarization of light. While the research that the speaker presented was interesting, I found the means by which he gave his presentation to be more enlightening. Specifically, I realized something very important about the role of mathematics in communication.

This talk, like every single scientific seminar I can recall attending but one [1], was given in a slideshow program like PowerPoint. The first half of the talk consisted of an overview of Bell's theorem, quantum non-locality, historical interpretations of polarization, etc. The corresponding slides complemented the speaker's words; they were full of illustrations, sentences, and diagrams that helped to convey his message. The second half discussed recent theoretical research by the presenter. The slides contained a lot of mathematics. To explain the math, he would often make statements like,

"From this equation we can see..."

or

 "It's clear that these two equations reveal..."

After the talk I was struck by how clear and easy to follow the first half was, while the second half was completely lost on me. His statements above were not true! The reason for this is, I believe, not my lack of familiarity with the material but because equations are not always good means to communicate ideas.

The strengths of mathematics are that they are unambiguous and succinct. Additionally, in terms an engineer might understand, they compress and encode ideas. The downside is that during a talk the listeners must uncompress these ideas to understand them, which takes time and distracts from the speaker's message. Additionally, if the audience doesn't have the background required to make sense of the equations, they can't even decode them to begin with.

Equations are most useful when they're easy to understand and when the speaker absolutely cannot allow for any ambiguity in their message. However, since the purpose of a talk is to transfer information to the audience, the speaker must consider more efficient tools, like illustrations and words. More than likely, if an idea can't be represented in words, then it's not a good idea.

[1] The exception was given by a physics Nobel laureate using transparencies and an overhead projector.

Open-Access Explained by PhD Comics - and more Data-centric science

My girlfriend sent me this video link from PhD comics last week about open-access publishing. The video is narrated by Nick Shockey and Jonathon Eisen, brother to one of the co-creators of the Public Library of Science (commonly known to academics as PLoS).

One of the arguments presented by the two is that research should be free to re-use. I think this means that scientists should be able to use all of the knowledge and material presented in a journal paper to advance their own work. The narrators mention that the full content of papers should be searchable to easily find connections between works and to facilitate locating relevant papers.

This is another hint towards the shifting focus to a data-centric approach to science, only here the arguments for it are coming from the open-access movement.

I also want to add that I support this movement. I can't access a paper that I've written because our campus doesn't have access to the journal. And when I graduate, I will not have access to any of them unless I or my employer has the appropriate subscriptions. Ridiculous.

Teachers vs. students: when interests don't coincide

I recently had a discussion with a close friend who is not a physicist by training but is very interested in many popular physics ideas. I was attempting to explain several paradoxes and non-intuitive scenarios such as Schroedinger's cat, the twins paradox, and the relativity of simultaneity. However, my friend was not impressed by some of these ideas, like Schroedinger's cat, and proclaimed them as "stupid."

I was of course exasperated by her failure to appreciate these concepts. Out of frustration I refused to explain any further ideas despite her questioning. As you could imagine, my refusal angered her; she interpreted my actions as pompous and arrogant. Fortunately, we are both open-minded to our own faults and quickly apologized to one another.

This bout made me realize that a teacher can't always convey why a topic is interesting. Interest is, after all, a personal attribute that varies between individuals. This mismatch of interests can cause a great deal of friction between a teacher and student and should be recognized by both sides for education to be successful.

Teachers must concede that sometimes students just aren't interested in a topic. A good teacher will be patient, even with difficult students, when they encounter a lack of interest. Eventually, the student will show interest in something that the teacher can help them learn about. Students should acknowledge when they are uninterested but still respect their teachers' enthusiasm. More importantly, they should not interpret their lack of interest as a failure to understand subtleties of a topic.

What's not so clear to me is with whom the greater responsibility for learning should lie. I'm inclined to place the greater burden on the student.

Harmful errors in science journalism

Popular science reporting is incredibly important for making current research known to the lay public in a concise and simplified manner. It often acts as the go-between for channeling information from scientists and engineers to the people who could benefit from the research. Unfortunately, translating new concepts from the jargon of specialists to untrained individuals poses challenges, and often the science in these articles is erroneous. This is a rather well-known problem and the reason why I read such articles with skepticism.

Two different friends sent me this article recently from MIT News reporting on the development of a camera for generating "Trillion-frame-per-second video." Armed with my usual dose of skepticism, I glanced quickly through it and the accompanying YouTube video. I think the significance of the work is a bit overstated [1], but the article sufficiently addresses its limitations and applications. Unfortunately, in describing the operation of a streak camera, the author Larry Hardesty notes that

"The aperture of the streak camera is a narrow slit. Particles of light — photons — enter the camera through the slit and pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects late-arriving photons more than it does early-arriving ones."

Electric fields do not deflect photons. Electric fields deflect moving electrons. What is likely happening inside the camera is that photons scattered from the bottle impinge upon a phosphor screen, which in turn ejects electrons. The electrons in turn are deflected by the time-varying field within the camera to different points on the detector. Electric fields can be modulated with RF equipment up to a few hundred GHz, which roughly corresponds to a few tenths of a trillion oscillations of the field per-second. I believe that this is how the noted number was obtained.

So what's the big deal? The point of the article, after all, is to inform a general audience about a newly developed camera—the details of its operation should not matter. Here are a few reasons why errors such as these are harmful:

1. Many people who read these types of articles are students or young people who aspire to be scientists. To provide incorrect information hurts their education by establishing false ideas within their minds.
2. It's dishonest. Whether the author knew he had made a mistake or not, the article should have been reviewed by one of the scientists before its publication [2]. Eventually, people could learn to associate dishonesty with science and this is clearly undesirable.
3. It's distracting and draws attention away from the article's main message. I'll admit that I had made up my mind that the research was flawed after I saw the error. Only a second, careful reading revealed that nothing about the research was in error.

This article is just a minor example of an all-too-common problem with science journalism. Unfortunately, I've seen much worse mistakes. I wonder how many times I've been fooled by a false proposition in a piece of reporting.

[1] It images processes that are stationary over at least one hour in time. For example, it can not image a turtle that walks through its field of view. Dr. Velten's quote in the beginning of the article might be placed in better context by noting that while few things are too fast for the camera, many things are too slow for it.

[2] I was once quoted several times in an article about my research that I had not realized had been published until I chanced upon it while Googling my name. I didn't find it until nine months after it appeared in print. I received no word from the author what-so-ever that it had appeared in the Orlando Sentinel, and was misinterpreted as having stated that our work existed only in theory. If the author had asked me to review the article prior to its publication, this error would not have been made.

Google Scholar Citations is up

This morning I received my notice that Google Scholar Citations, Google's new online tool for tracking your own publications, citations, etc., was up and running.

I haven't played around with it much, but I'm impressed that it automatically found everything I've produced that's on the web with only one mistake—it mistakenly concluded that I had authored a religious text.

I'm not quite so certain that it will be useful. After all, the number of citations that my papers generate don't improve the quality of my work. However, it's still fun to easily track these statistics, even if it only satisfies my own curiosity.

Guidelines for writing, pt. 1

I've spent some time thinking about it, so I suppose I had better get started. These are the first few points I've thought of for my personal list of writing guidelines for a scientific paper. I've tried to focus on the issues that I find most problematic when reading other papers. Some are technical while others are cosmetic. Of course, I can't claim that the following suggestions are without their own flaws, so judge them critically and apply them in any manner you see fit. In no particular order:

1. Figure captions should be able to stand alone. Do not include abbreviations or references to the text.
2. Make all your points in the introduction, figures and their captions, and conclusion. Use the body of the text to add detail and repeat your main points.
3. Eliminate redundant and unnecessary words. My favorite example from papers on light scattering is the term "material system" for describing matter that interacts with light. Either "material" or "system" can work, but using both just takes up space.
4. Do not list the paper's section titles and their descriptions as is commonly done in the last paragraph of the introduction. Almost every experimental paper (at least in optics and physics) follows the same format of introduction/theory/experiment/results/conclusion, so an outline of the paper is rarely needed by the reader.
5. Use descriptive titles for sections. Compare "Theory" to "Model for Partially Developed Speckle."
6. Use one tense throughout. I prefer past tense since you are reporting what procedure you followed and the results you obtained to the scientific community, not experiments that you are currently doing.
7. Do not refer to previous publications to describe experimental setups.

Feel free to add your own. I will be adding more in time.

But that makes it sound obvious

There is a brief article in Nature Physics addressing the issue of poor writing skills in scientific journal papers and other communications. The article mentions that writing in technical fields is a skill that is assumed to be had by students at the beginning of their research careers. I think that it's fairly obvious that this is very often a false assumption. The article also mentions the common misunderstanding among scientists that verbose and complicated sentences communicate a deeper understanding possessed by the authors. In reality, however, this practice only serves to befuddle readers and acts as a barrier for the proliferation of one's research.

I find it interesting that several experts suggest a linear style of writing journal papers in which ideas are presented in series. This reminds me of how a manual is written. I suppose journal papers should ultimately communicate the steps that were taken to obtain a given set of data and their corresponding analyses.

The article can be found here.

Please give my draft a meaning

I often find myself reviewing drafts of manuscripts and presentations for my colleagues. Usually I end up reviewing the direct results of a first draft. Consequently, the writing is almost always incoherent and does not feel like a "whole" document. I  fix many grammatical and mechanical flaws but find myself unable to critique the most important part of the document, that being the overall message itself. I believe that it is because of the fact that I am reviewing a first draft that I cannot perform this essential review function.

A major emphasis of my composition classes in college was that writing is a long process with many steps. A document will go through a large number of changes and will only superficially resemble any drafts that led to its completion. Proper placement of peer review in the writing process is essential to maximizing its effectiveness; if utilized too early, it reduces the quality of a finished work and costs valuable time.

Guidelines for writing

I've been thinking a lot about effective writing and communication within academia the past few weeks, which is why this post from Ross McKenzie's blog grabbed my attention. He's also posted other links to guidelines in the past, such as this one for writing good Physical Review Letters (PRL) papers.

I think that it would be a good exercise to create my own list of guidelines when writing papers. Or, for that matter, it might be a good exercise for anyone in academia to do so. Having these ideas down in print, as opposed to remaining vaguely defined in my mind, might make them more concrete and allow me to better define what I mean by the quality of a paper.

A few questions about presenting

I was fortunate enough to speak with Dr. Jean-luc Doumont over dinner Friday night following a talk he gave on effective presentations at CREOL. The man is a truly gifted speaker, and if you are at all interested in improving your technical (or otherwise) communication skills, I highly recommend that you read his blog or look at his book, though I have not read it. I have been following his blog for a short while now and have to admit that it is one of the reasons I decided to start writing my own. More precisely, I am trying to practice the methods he espouses through my own writing.

What I found most interesting from our conversation is his belief that his principled approach to presenting is universal, i.e. it applies to many people in many occupations and settings. Given that the culture and content underlying a business or academic field can be drastically different from another, I find it very intriguing that the same skill set can be effectively employed in different settings.

For example, a presentation on new data at a conference on astrophysics will surely contain very little information that is pertinent to topics discussed at a meeting of marketing executives, yet his methods for communicating the presenter's message can successfully be applied in both situations.

This may not seem too surprising since communication is a basic function of society. It does however bring a few questions to my mind:

1. Is there more than one structured approach to accurately conveying information to an audience? If so, does it relate to Dr. Doumont's methods, and to what degree does it overlap with them? 
2. Is there a better way to do it, or has Dr. Doumont described the best possible way to communicate a message to a large number of people. 
3. Is his approach only applicable to writing and speaking, or does it apply to multimedia and mass marketing as well?