Heritage trust guy on Radio 4 just described Glasgow "in comparison to its competitor cities". What competition?? Heritage Wars?
Excellent STS analysis on the competing energy imaginaries between China and the US - Trump sees electrical infrastructure as private companies' responsibility while China has a long established and much more advanced national programme. Power really is power here.
www.ft.com/content/47da...
💔💔💔
Totally. University leadership acting as if the literal institutions of public intellectualism have no say in what knowledge is worth developing and protecting.
The dialectics of automation
The best electoral strategy against Reform would simply be to paint them as impotent progressives. Slogan would obv be "we want revolution not Reform!!!!!!!!!"
Viz is a totally underrated cultural resource
A wild failure in science communication has been its inability to generate public support against the madness of academic publishing where unis can't afford access to resources needed for learning, teaching, research that its own researchers have produced
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/silent-...
No idea if this is true or not but 🤣🤣🤣 "An Al chat-assist created and offered a customer an 80% off offer. Customer has now placed an order of £8,000+"
Actually - yes. Case closed.
The most interesting thing about this is the relentless surprise, anger and frustration we feel about it. How have we not evolved some spirtual practice to come to terms with the weather???
Totally! Not sure if you saw the recent UKRI public attitudes survey but it reflects DEEP ambivalence about sci & tech benefits, governance, trust etc. But the report is literally framed as "8 out of 10 public person like science yay!"
15) Insisting on pulling out some good news bytes will not fix the problem. That is simply manic denial. If we don’t confront what people are clearly feeling and thinking then we can't have mature conversations or work towards solutions.
14) Restricting studies like these to quantitative surveys only adds to this problem. Making sense of ambiguity and conflict requires qualitative data collection. The huge number of “neither” and “it depends” responses across the survey is an artefact of this.
13) The relationship between science and society in the UK is deteriorating. This should be the headline finding. Society’s ambivalence and uncertainty and the conflicts between our needs, desires, and values need to be given expression in public discussions about science and technology.
12) There are also broader questions about the meaning and relevance of science for people’s understanding of themselves which I find especially interesting. This confirms a lot of the work I’ve been doing recently about the ambivalence with which people engage with science and tech.
11) Further: 39% of people feel that rules will not stop scientists doing what they want behind closed doors. 42% of people agree that the speed of development in science and technology means that they cannot properly be controlled.
10) This uncertainty comes to the fore in questions of governance. 31% of people are not confident that UK scientists have thoroughly considered the risks of new technologies. That is startling. 43% of people view scientists as ethical and 56% of people view them as responsible.
9) Only 53% of people agree that the benefits of science outweigh the harms. While vaccines are viewed positively, other technologies are viewed with great uncertainty (GMOs, synthetic biology) and some, like driverless vehicles and AI, are viewed as having risks that outweigh the benefits.
8) The report is highly revealing on trust: 43% of people agree that we have NO OPTION BUT TO TRUST THOSE GOVERNING SCIENCE. This is an alarming insight for a democracy. A fundamental condition for trust is the capacity to choose, otherwise it is not trust - it is dependence.
7) Uncertainty, ambivalence and a loss of trust ARE MENTIONED but they are seriously downplayed. Ambivalence should be centre stage. Throughout the findings, public views on trust, benefits and harms, and ethics and governance reflect deep anxieties and uncertainties.
6) A better framing for the report might be that university scientists are trusted by the public and should therefore receive better government support.
5) 65% of respondents agree that scientific independence is often put at risk by the interest of funders and 53% agree that scientists are too dependent on business and industry for funding.
4) Scientists are trusted differently based on their institutional affiliation. Only 48% of people trust COMMERCIAL scientists to follow any rules and regulations that apply to their profession, whereas that figure is 87% for UNIVERSITY scientists.
3) The truth, once you dig into the survey findings, is that “the public” is highly ambivalent and conflicted about the contribution that scientists and innovators make to society. For example, people do not straightforwardly believe that all scientists make valuable contributions.
2) Unfortunately, the report's framing fails to acknowledge the serious issues that the survey reveals. The foreword leads with the simplistic and misleading finding that eight in ten people think scientists make a valuable contribution to society. This is FAR from what is contained in the data.
1) This public attitudes to science report contains troubling (but familiar) insights about public relationships with science. It reinforces what I and others have been saying about a deteriorating relationship between science and society marked by conflict, ambivalence & uncertainty.
pas.ipsos.com
Yeah maybe also absolutely no academic is relaxed about a paper being read by three people. Assuming all academics have a small readership and are relaxed about it is a bit reaction formation-y.
If only we had experts in the fucked up ways that capital, power, and human bodies are tied up together
