Since 2000, the UK government has funded surveys aimed at understanding the UK public's attitudes toward science, scientists, and science policy. Known as the Public Attitudes to Science series, these surveys and their predecessors have long been used in UK science communication policy, practice, and scholarship as a source of authoritative knowledge about science-related attitudes and behaviors. Given their importance and the significant public funding investment they represent, detailed academic scrutiny of the studies is needed. In this essay, we critically review the most recently
After being cosseted by the media for what they incorrectly considered to be a scientific feat, the author found himself widely boycotted by the more “responsible” media. The reason for this was his critical view of the evolution of science, which he felt had become a tool at the service of innovation, and, therefore, of industrial interests. The traditional image of science, which serves to help us to understand the world, still persists despite being perverted by commercial interests, because it is defended by naive people as well as by lobbies, themselves responsible for this debasement
This is a 90-minute feature documentary film about falconry from award winning filmmakers Elisabeth Haviland James, Revere La Noue and Robert Nixon. The project will create a documentary experience that connects the past to the present and weaves together distant lands and cultures though a character-driven exploration of the art of falconry.
In Defense of Food (IDOF) is a media and outreach project based on Michael Pollan's best-selling book of the same title. Through the lens of food science, IDOF is designed to engage diverse audiences in learning about: (1) how science research is conducted, (2) how research findings are used in media, marketing, and public policy, and (3) how to apply food science research in everyday life. IDOF will be created by Kikim Media, an independent production company, broadcast and distributed by PBS and supported by an extensive outreach campaign and interactive website. The project's educational materials will be developed, in part, by the Teacher's College at Columbia University's Center for Food and Nutrition, with dissemination supported by the Coalition for Science After School and by Tufts University's Healthy Kids Out of School initiative, which involves nine of the leading out of school time (OST) organizations, such as Girl Scouts USA, and the National Urban League. The project advisory committee includes highly respected researchers in food, nutrition, and health. IDOF will use an integrated strategy of learning resources, combining a television documentary with online/social media, community outreach, and youth activities. Knight Williams Research Communications will conduct formative and summative evaluation of all major components of the project. The results will advance the informal science community's understanding of how the combination of a documentary with outreach, website/social media, and afterschool activities impacts motivation and learning. The evaluation study will pay special attention to the degree to which participation in the community events, social media/website, and afterschool activities motivates deeper or extended engagement with the subject. Project evaluation results and educational resources will be widely disseminated to the informal science community. IDOF includes a two-hour documentary film that will be produced in both English and Spanish; a community-level outreach campaign focused on reaching underserved audiences who may not watch public television; a set of activities for use in afterschool programs, youth programs and schools; and an interactive and content-rich website with tightly integrated social media tools. IDOF will be nationally broadcast by PBS; the Spanish-language version of IDOF will be broadcast by Vme Television. The ambitious IDOF educational materials and outreach campaign, combined with interactive web and social media, will reach large and diverse audiences. The intended impacts on audiences include increased knowledge and understanding of the scientific process by learning what food scientists do, what techniques they use, and how scientists arrive at their conclusions; the development of critical thinking skills audiences can use when evaluating messages about food and nutrition in media and advertising and when making decisions about what food to buy and eat; and becoming active learners and consumers regarding food. Evaluation results will be widely disseminated to science media producers and the informal science community via professional publications and presentations at conferences. The ultimate value of the In Defense of Food documentary and learning initiative will be to enhance public understanding of the crucial importance of science in people's everyday lives and in shaping dozens of daily decisions.
THE POWER TO HEAL (working title) is a 90-minute documentary on the dramatic yet largely untold story of how American hospitals were desegregated in the mid-1960s. With the active help of the civil rights movement and using Medicare as the lever, the U.S. government successfully desegregated thousands of hospitals in just a few months. Through eyewitness narratives, historians, scholars, photos, films and other period materials, we follow inspectors into the field, black and white doctors and nurses providing care and filing discrimination complaints, and senior federal officials charged with carrying out LBJ’s explicit policies. The film honors the 50th anniversaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 legislation creating Medicare, and draws on significant humanities perspectives in American, civil rights, and health care history with particular focus on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and the work still being done to achieve equality in health care.
This project will produce Into the Amazon: The Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, a special presentation of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, for broadcast on PBS. This two-hour film tells the story of a remarkable expedition, led by former US President Theodore Roosevelt and legendary Brazilian explorer Candido Mariano Da Silva Rondon, to explore an uncharted spur of the Amazon in one of the most remote and forbidding landscapes on earth. Over eight eventful weeks in the Brazilian rainforest Roosevelt and Rondon encountered and ultimately overcame a seemingly endless array of obstacles, including poisonous snakes, ravenous insects, flesh-eating fish, and impassable rapids. Meanwhile, indigenous people watched the expedition from the shadows, and debated whether the interlopers should live or die.
QUEST Beyond Local is a consortium of six public media providers across the country coming together in a unique collaborative structure to foster widespread STEM literacy for general audiences; support formal and informal education outcomes in the sciences; and revive ailing science and environment journalism in the face of its rapid decline. QUEST Beyond Local is built on the success of the local, cross-editorial QUEST model, in which media making professionals from multiple disciplines--radio, television, web, and especially education--collaborate to distribute high-quality content to general and underserved audiences. Two years ago, KQED (serving Northern California) introduced a capacity-building effort with five other public media stations serving markets across the nation: Seattle (KCTS), Wisconsin (WPT/WPR), Nebraska (NET), Cleveland (ideastream), and North Carolina (UNC-TV). On the heels of this pilot process, QUEST Beyond Local will expand production in all markets and focus its multimedia efforts around the theme "Science of Sustainability" so as to achieve maximum effect on critical STEM outcomes in formal and informal education settings, and to foster science/environment literacy among a wide general audience. QUEST Beyond Local is defined by an organizationally and technologically innovative model of content creation: a newsroom structured according to a hub and spoke model; with common branding, technical, and style guidelines; and with a central coordinating and editorial office liaising between local production teams. Under the guidance of this central office, the collaborative seeks to create content with both local authority and national relevance. Building on existing media impact research, and previous research and evaluation of QUEST, research firm Rockman et al will apply evaluation theory to determine: (1) the structures and strategies to a successful STEM collaborative that contribute to a greater understanding of and engagement in science and environment topics; and (2) determine the interests, priorities, and media consumption habits of local and national STEM audiences. Primary project deliverables include three diverse multimedia packages for general and professional audiences, focusing on three main themes and anchored in STEM disciplines. In total, the three packages will include: 18 television segments; 6 half-hour television programs; 20 radio reports; 18 "web extras" (slide shows, maps, etc.); 12 web-based videos; 144 blog posts; 18 education "explainers"; 5 educator trainings; and a comprehensive distribution and social media campaign. All efforts will be supported by at least 18 science community partners, including zoos, museums, aquariums, research centers, and others. Through these efforts, the collaborative seeks to repair the systemic damage done by years of neglect to science/environment journalism--particularly the marked decline in this type of coverage over the last decade. This decline is perhaps related to the observed disconnect between the public and scientific knowledge, despite a demonstrated public appetite for science content and educators' reported desire for more resources and professional development opportunities focused on STEM topics. At a time when an evolving workforce and economy increasingly demand STEM skills and environmental literacy, QUEST Beyond Local will contribute resources to address these challenges.
This award will support the production of a two-hour documentary about one of the great milestones in the history of flight: the 1935 crossing of the Pacific Ocean by a Pan American Airways flying boat called the China Clipper. The Pacific crossing was a technological achievement that captured the world’s imagination in much the way the space program did a generation later. It also began the era of transoceanic flight – an era that would lead to profound changes in American foreign policy, commerce and the very way Americans saw the world. Produced by one of the makers of "Forgotten Genius," NOVA's NEH-funded, Emmy Award-winning biography of black chemist Percy Julian, "Across the Pacific" will combine dramatic re-enactments, interviews with scholars, and films and photographs drawn from the rich archival record about the early days of commercial aviation.
This feature documentary will join film to humanities scholarship in investigating the historical production of nuclear waste, the present character of communities living with that waste, and the combined efforts of sociologists, anthropologists, writers, and scientists to imagine how to guard this material into the 10,000-year future. Drawing on important work in environmental (land) history, ethics, and politics, as well as work on the cultural anthropology of the nuclear world, the film “Containment” examines how the Cold War transformed the American landscape, how nuclear waste compels us today—in lands across the United States and beyond—to examine our most basic views about the control and ethics of land use, and how 24,000-year half-life of plutonium pushed scientists and humanists into the Congressionally-demanded business of imagining a ten-thousand year human future in order to mark and isolate nuclear waste.