Decoding the Language of Financial Aid

Interesting that you just spoke of Manning Marable the other day. I’ve always seen him as someone who is skilled at bridging the divide. While he was producing heavy-duty history in his books, he also for many years had a weekly newspaper column. He had the capacity to both speak to the theory crowd, as well as the (for lack of a better word) common crowd, the folks who read the paper in the barbershop.

A number of years ago there was an article in the CHRONICLE contending that history and historical scholarship were the last bastions of narrative, taking over from literary scholarship which had largely sold out to theory. It’d be a shame if history at last succumbed, for a decent piece of scholarship should be accessible to any informed reader. Yes, the specialist will gain more, but the knowledgeable lay reader should take away something of interest/value as well.

One other way of looking at the issue of making written history inaccessible because of the sometimes overwhelming presence and language of theory is that mainstream readers now more than ever can easily opt to ignore (even avoid) such writing altogether because today they have such increased access to artifacts, records, and other sources (through digitization) that they are literally writing history themselves. One area in which this is hugely the case is genealogy. Literally, each day access to historical information increases exponentially through various ambitious digitization projects (see for instance The Virginia Freedmen Project, which has made the entire set of Freedmen’s Bureau records for Virginia available online.) Genealogists, among many others, are accessing these records and writing (blogging about them) rather than waiting on university historians to get around to the topics that are important to them.

All of this is to say that here’s yet another reason why university-trained historians, if they wish to be relevant at all to the public, must adjust to the revolution that is Web 2.0 and digitization.

The thing about bosses from hell is that they could care less about you or any other individual they treat badly. Thus, long before you can ever begin plotting your freedom or revenge, one of the many other victims will almost certainly see their opportunity before you (due to the law of large numbers).

In addition, these bosses don’t stay anyplace too long (if only because the number of victims eventually reaches critical mass). A boss’ goal is to take credit for the accomplishments of their subordinates and then move on and up just when their “accomplishments” look rosiest (and before the sealing wax holding the ship together melts). So the biggest damage from a bad boss is the mess they leave behind — irretrievable losses and layoffs.

csmith52175 is in higher ed and has had b***hy female bosses but has never seen an incompetent male one?  Hard to fathom.

I was in a similar situation last year. Luckily, I had enough money in the bank to tie me over for a full year. I found a new position in five months where I report to a boss who is absolutely wonderful and with whom I am in absolute sync. I had to move to another state to find it, but I am happier now than I have been in a long time. It is scary to voluntarily leave employment with no prospects of future employment, but it is worth it. Good luck to you, 11236504; I have been where you are, and please know that there is life — and it can be a good life — after a bad boss.

More than once I have worked for bosses who were not only horrible but incompetent, immoral, and dishonest to boot..   Everyone in the institution seemed to be aware of the situation.   I concluded that these bosses must have known something so damning about someone on the Board,  or possibly the president,  that the situation was allowed to continue.  (My fantasy is that the horrible boss possessed the negatives to photos taken at the annual administrative orgy)  Either that or academic administrators are remarkably gutless.  In either case,  I’m glad to have retired.

So, maybe campfire stories grew into a sort of elaborate crowd-sourced combination of literature and experiential games on the internet?  Legend-Tripping would seem to cultivate the creativity and adventurism of many, and perhaps for some serve as a sort of rite of passage.  Certainly, a worthwhile research topic, exploring what is perhaps a “not so brightly lit” side of contemporary society.  If the Legend-Tripping crosses cultures, perhaps it is something that serves to bring people and cultures together. 

Bart Schuster
Arrive2.net
Twitter.com/arrive2_net

Speaking as a 1-person communications office, I can understand why the video didn’t specify cost: You don’t want to have to remake or re-edit the video every year when the process the video explains stays more or less the same year to year.

I found Duke’s 2011-12 undergrad figure of $57,180 from a standing start in about 1.5 seconds by Googling “cost of attendance” site:duke.edu. As my 13-year-old daughter wishes to go to Duke, this is disturbing … but not hard to find.

How about a word on FA for international applicants>

There may be more to the story:

Penn State coach accused of pimping out boys to rich donors

Mark Madden, a Pittsburgh sports reporter and radio personality, claims
that Jerry Sandusky used his Second Mile charity to pimp out young boys
for rich donors.

Mark Madden, a radio personality on 105.9 The X went on WEEI in Boston
and added more flames the fire at Penn State. He claimed that Jerry
Sandusky used his charity, Second Mile Foundation, to pimp out young
boys for rich Penn State donors.

Read more: http://www.kfiam640.com/cc-common/ne…#ixzz1dLnBoFzy

What does this say about the characters of these men? All of those involved. 

Really? Is the whole controversy between these two about how fancy a college you attended? I might expect anything from a politician, but a professor using as his excuse to trash his opponent’s opinions is because he attended a community college 50 years ago is downright shameful.

I’d take Brinkley more seriously if (1) he didn’t come off like a pompous ass here [Don Young can handle that on his own, thanks] and (2) if he was a good historian.

You’re not really furthering the conversation, though, and the subject is serious. If you just want to go around berating politicians, there are plenty of forums for that. To say his education isn’t good enough because of once attending a community college is a slap in the face to quite a lot more people. Sound personal? My daughter, a Harvard law student, began her college career at a community college. I’m with tee_bee: he’s probably not much of a professor either.

I suppose the good news for us is that in several places around the world, but not in the US, Douglas Brinkley would have been shot for a performance like this.

From the Amarillo Independent:

The Cowards of an Arrogant CongressTuesday, 22 November 2011 11:11 |  |  | If the citizens of the United States needed any more evidence that our national government is broken, we need look no further than this week’s news that the George mug-colorso-called congressional supercommittee has failed to agree on deficit reduction and taxes. And, they fiddled while Washington burned.This august (That’s sarcasm, folks.) group of legislators, supported by millions of tax dollars for their salaries, their staffs’ salaries and all of the perquisites that go along with being members of Congress, could not reach an agreement to rein in spending and increase revenue. The Christian Science Monitor has a great summary of the situation here and the Washington Post has a graphic telling us more about this entire dirty dozen who are an insult to our democracy and besmirch the name of representative government by kicking the can down the road once more. They are a gutless group more interested in protecting themselves than serving the people. Texans have a representative on this 12-member congressional body that is a failure. He is Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Republican representing District 5 in East Texas.And we the people pay their salary.Which brings us to another piece of congressional arrogance that brings far more credit to Texas than the discredit that Hensarling brings to our fair state.In a video that has by now surely gone viral, Dr. Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University history professor, stands up to Alaska Republican Rep. Donald Young and, ultimately, to Natural Resources Committee Chairman Richard “Doc” Hastings. By the way, a review of a variety of sites attempting to track down credentials that justified the nickname of “Doc” Hastings resulted in no evidence for such an honorific title. Once again, we see the duplicity of a politician.During the hearing, as several sources (here and here) report, Brinkley stood up to Young and Hastings despite both of their attempts to discount him. Hastings’ assertion that Brinkley destroyed the comity of Congress is the height of hypocrisy.A website based in Houston chided Brinkley for interrupting, labeling Brinkley’s behavior a major breach of protocol. However, somehow and some way, the citizenry needs to send a lesson to the plutocracy in Congress: “You are not better than we are. We pay your salaries. You work for us. You owe us the respect that one would give an employer.”As I conducted research for this commentary, I couldn’t help but notice the resources poured into the construction of congressional websites for both individual members of Congress and, for example, theNatural Resources Committee. No wonder incumbency is so powerful.The election next year is critical. Congress is rotting, filled with deadwood corrupted to the core. Honesty and integrity have become empty words. We the people are on the precipice of being no more than an empty slogan.I pray that by next year every congressional district and Senate seat will offer voters a choice between an incumbent and challenger. I hope the challengers win and if we throw a few babies out with the bathwater in order to clean house, so be it.

Are you kidding me?  The fool in the room was Brinkley. He didn’t even give Young the chance to correct himself before he was denigrating the Congressman for having attended Yuba Community College.   The citizens of this country may attribute arrogance and elitism to how  Congress works, but Brinkley proved himself to me cut of the same elitist fabric.  

Dr. Brinkley is a distinguished scholar whose motivation and whose contributions related to US natural resources and the health of the planet are to be warmly applauded.  That he stands up for something of inherent value that runs contrary to the foolish, short-term, self-interest of those who lick the booths of corporate America such as the blight on Congressman Young, yet another ignorant and arrogant elected Alaskan official, is to me an act of courage and insight.  Yes, the argument got heated and off track, but the fundamental issue of the mindless Palin-like “drill baby drill” ideology that the Congressman evidenced should not be driven into the background. Drilling in ANWR would be both stupid and virtually valueless to the US given the amount of oil & gas the US uses daily and the total that ANWR would yield. What would ANWR give us? Enough for perhaps 6 months to serve our national ill-advised consumptive excess? The undefended claim by the esteemed Congressman that only 3000 acres would be involved fails to see the interconnected nature of natural systems and precisely how much needless damage could be done to serve such narrow corporate interest of such limited value.

I commend the courage and wisdom of Dr. Brinkley.  I am ashamed of Cngressman Young.  Indeed, Congress as a whole is imploding, being devoured by corporate America and narrow mined people who should and indeed do know better if they have eyes oi see.  Education has failed Congress and it has failed our nation.  We need many, many more Douglas Brinkley’s.  We do not need a single additional Congressman Young.

ABS
Professor Emeritus
Golden, Colorado

Looked to me like Rep. Young fired the first shot.   I think that Young purposely called Dr. Brinkley “Mr. Rice” just to goad him.
And personally, I would prefer to be represented by Congress members who are well-educated.

And do I detect a little disdain for Ph Ds and anybody who would imply that there might be better educations than community colleges generally provide? 

I am inclined to favor drilling in restricted areas in the Refuge. However, while  ABS (laischron) above does not tell us what he is professor emeritus of, I note his residence in Golden.  If he’s a “wramblin wreck from Golden Tech”, i.e. the Colorado School of Mines, it is very possible he knows more about it than either a cc graduate of years ago or a current history professor at Rice Institute, and I’d be inclined to give his views considerable attention and consideration.

BTW, I thought from the tape / tube clip that both the Congressman from Alaska and the History Professor from Rice were way out of line.

I happen to agree with this in terms of civility. I also believe that the congressman’s experience and opinions are based on his experiences on the ground, not pontificating. There is a need for both informed research and pragmatic knowledge in discussing energy policy – I do wish Young and Brinkley had remembered that before, during, and after their exchange.

Young is one of the very worst in Congress, whether measured by incompetence, corruption, partisanship, or ideology. He is practically the only congressman that Alaska has ever had. That may be alright for a state that has a negative tax rate and that receives far more federal funds per capita than any other state, but he’s certainly no asset to America or the planet. Great to see these folks defend him.

Ah, you resort to personal insults.  So be it.  But I will not respond in kind.  However, I will stand by my comment.  That is not arrogance nor is it ignorance.  I must say that I enjoyed your foray into reductio ad absurdum, though.  You know, since I made no mention of any of those gentleman.  

And that was my point earlier in the thread – Rep. Young started this, and then continued with his derisive remarks about “ivory tower” academics.  Brinkley did get a bit carried away, but heck, I think many of us would have as well if someone who was likely unfamiliar with our body of work called it all “garbage”.    To quote Yosemite Sam, “Them thar’s fightin’ words!!”.

From Field of Dreams: “Well, there’s an intelligent response.” I suggest that lifelong bullies like Mike should back up his radical views. Simply sign over all future social assistance for himself and his decendants when the planet’s climate moves beyond the point of no return. And I do wish him a very, very long life, and mankind a long memory about folks like him.

To darccity):

Points taken. Then, the good citizens of Alaska, Sarah Palin’s people, owe the nation for this mark of Cain on their collective forehead. Otherwise, my opinions stand: the politician who represents a particular constituency, speaks for that constituency, or, in our little system here, he/she is increasingly liable to lose his/her job. Increasingly, politically disaffected Americans seem to be advancing extremist, intolerant-of-compromise political mandates on their respective Senators or Congresspeople, since they feel that the System has failed them and if they do not speak up at once, their will shall be completely forgotten, and Biblical darkness will descend on the faithful… Inevitably this recourse to extremist, unreasoning voices, uncompromising, one-way only messages by the Vox populi directed at their political representatives ends in general system paralysis and breakdown on the national level. Is this really what we want, people screaming at one another, with the amount of bandwidth given to each other’s media spokesmen being the deciding point as to what in the end prevails as national policy?

Saudi and the other resource-rich (or even resource poor) Middle Eastern rentier state despotisms do not need to curry the intelligence or the responsible views of their respective populations, although in the wake of regimes going down in Tunisia, Egypt (at least the despot figureehead there), Libya and Yemen, the little kings and lieutenants and feudal baron gangsters who rule throughout this region are increasingly whistling as they walk past the graveyard. Their time is coming too, the Asads and the Abdallahs and even the Akhmadinedjads and Kameneis realize all too well. But in America, we have chosen to at least rhetorically operate by a different political and social standard, that of the Lockean social contract between rulers and ruled. Those who aspire to rule in our country cannot (theoretically) dare to presume to rule in behalf, only, of some small vested interest which fills their pockets with favors owed them exclusively, and monies in payment of. At least, this is the presumption of democracy, no matter how little these theories have traveled from the documents of our Founding Fathers to the muck of practical politics. Those who rule must rule in behalf of, and to benefit, le peuple entier, not on the foolish and self-deceiving wish and a prayer of Tea Party moroni, who want to give over the farm to those already glutted with privilege, power and money, on the slim chance that In Gratitude, this same elite will throw some jobs down the hill for the rest of us poor slobs. The other side of the political contract, and this implemented by that great hoary genius of compromise in the nineteenth century, Henry Clay (who nearly singlehandedly prevented the Civil War from being fought in the1820s rather than in the 1860s) comes to the nearly forgotten-especially by Know Nothing Republicans and the Tea Party tin hat brigade-art of compromise, of treating your opponent in the highest levels of government with respect and decency, looking for possibilities of agreement rather than aavenues for controversy and aggression.

This Lockean Social Contract has, I feel, been forgotten by the GOP un-worthies, who are coming to shelter themselves in the outposts of racism, sexism, caving to empty, bloviated rhetoric, and like emotions. In so doing, these people are betraying their patriotism, and endangering the welfare of our people, OUR AMERICAN PEOPLE, ONE AND UNITED. The GOP, and their tin-hat allies, and the lobbyists and hatred-stoking media that keeps all afloat on a continuous effluvia of nonsense and recrimination, are revealing themselves as the real traitors in our midst.

The only disdain is reflected towards a person who implies that they are better than others  because of their education. One may have more education or more degrees, but that doesn’t make them “better”.  And I think that is what Dr. Brinkley was doing – attacking Young because of his inferior education and lack of educational pedigree.  

And yes, they were both out of line. Neither should have treated or been treated with such disdain.  Both should be equally embarrassed by their words.   

I remain thankful that in the US, unlike too many places, a man like Young does not have the authority to permantly silence those who he doesn”t like.

“What a narrow-minded view that people have to have a Ph.D. to be
considered well-educated.  My guess is that most soccer moms, or small
business persons, and other ordinary Americans (without a Ph.D.) could
do better than most of the “well-educated” elitists already there.”

I think you people are arguing about definitions. Yes, a BA soccer mom may be more intelligent, more capable, more charming than a PhD. But is she better educated? No, she is not, that is just the definition of the word “well-educated.” The PhD has studied longer and more intensely and has had to actually produce knowledge in an academic field. He or she is better-educated, whether the PhD is smarter or not in other life domains is completely irrelevant. And on another point, you say education doesn’t make people better than anyone else with less education. I agree with that but why the gratuitous dig at people who are in academics? And spare me the cliche attack of well educated as elitists. It generally takes ignorance, not education, to produce people who think they are better than others. Sounds like your “argument” is just the opposite, let me understand this, you are implying that  people with less education are actually smarter??  That is not a very smart arguument, but let me guess, your reasoning would be that the “soccer mom” ain’t confused by all that durn infermation and just uses her ole common cents to make her way in dis wurld. First of all, you make an odd rhetorical decision by insulting the demographic you are defending (“soccer moms” really?), and you then contrast “ordinary Americans” with academic PhDs so I can only assume that you mean PhDs are “extraordinary”? Did you not get into grad school or something?

If Brinkley was a fool, it was because he didn’t hit harder and more often that the Congressman.

Everyone is missing the real issue here, a Congressman should not serve for 38 years. He tried to tell him he was a public servant and didn’t own anyone. Give them 3 terms at most and no pension. Elect someone who is a real American and hasn’t grown up with the best of everything, someone who has rebounded from hardship. These guys make laws for them and the wealthy. It’s obvious and something must change. It sounded more like a disparaging monologue for the Congress than a discussion. Congress has lost it’s integrity.

Well some people are better than others because of their education. That’s what education does, it makes you a better person. However, that does not forgive a superior or holier-than-thou attitude, because there is nothing, and no one, that will forgive that. 

I had to listen to it twice to actually catch Brinkley’s comment about community college, because Young was shouting him down. Try put the shoe on the other foot. If you were a witness to the committee, and were asked about your special field of expertise, and then had your work called garbage by someone much less qualified in that field of expertise than you, wouldn’t you also seek to defend your work that represents your knowledge and expertise?

I agree with the commenter below that salaries for univ profs in India are on par with other public sector jobs; I am a Prof in the humanities in the US and our salaries are very middle income for the life style here; if I were to go to India I will still live a equivalent middle class life in India. So there is not that much of difference. I agree that there is sometimes unnecessary bureaucracy and hierarchy within institutions, but anybody who believes that doesn’t exist in the US has not worked in the Univ system here (I cannot say with authority about UK and Canada but hearsay suggests it is not much different). The processes here are smoother but politicking both  competitive and combative are very present.
However, with regards to money, the situation would be probably different for an Engineering or other applied science professors since individual univ here have the autonomy to pay higher salaries to their faculty; in India the salary structure is fixed by the University Grants Commission and universities have little wiggle room. So, Engg Profs would find it hard to reconcile to the lower salary in Public Universities in India.

Except for the sensational headline (‘In search of India’s “missing” professors), the article is a fairly accurate picture of the abysmal situation in India. Jairam Ramesh’s observation about the so-called excellence of the IITs and the IIMs was not a tongue-in-cheek remark; it was a perceptive observation which the minister had the courage to articulate, even though political compulsions made him retract it later. Several decades ago, one of the Indian Vice-Chancellors, V V John, who never minced words, put it even more bluntly: ‘There is nothing high about our higher education.’ ‘It cannot be brought lower,’ he might say if he had lived to see the abysmal depths to which higher education has sunk in India over the past quarter century.

I think it is not just better salaries and better living conditions that have forced talented people to emigrate to countries like the USA, Singapore and the Gulf. Indian higher education doesn’t just have the environment in which self-respecting people can breathe easily. I don’t think pulsation5 exaggerates things when he says, ‘I would not go back to teach in India even if they doubled my pay.’ And he gives two reasons for not going back to India: political interference and a hierarchical atmosphere in which the head of the department or the Principal acts like a feudal lord. The upshot of all this is that our academia consists predominantly of lowbrows. At the lower rungs of the higher education ladder, where you find State-funded universities and colleges, the situation is much worse. As a teacher in one of those colleges who rejected an opportunity to work in a foreign university early on in my three-decade-long career and stayed behind, I have often been a victim of thuggish brutality for standing up for intellectual freedom.

Research, which the article talks about in passing, is one of the sordid aspects of Indian higher education. Some years ago, I spent a few days with a professor from Canada who was an authority on second language acquisition and who was a research examiner for some of the prestigious Indian universities. When I asked her about her perception of the state of research in India, she told me with no hesitation that, without a single exception, the PhD dissertations she had received for assessment from India were third rate. And she took pains to justify her remark. She was blunt. And what she said hurt my national pride. But the fact remains that we, Indians, are a nation of third-rate researchers. Much of what goes on in the name of research in our universities cannot stand up to close scrutiny. The recently-reported case of plagiarism in Indian academia is just a tip of the iceberg. I have refused to evaluate several MPhil and PhD dissertations and asked the universities which had sent them to spare me the agony in future.

I shall conclude with an amusing anecdote which can demonstrate how appallingly lowbrow Indian academia is. Once I attended a scholarly lecture on research methodology which, I thought, was brilliant. The audience consisted of university or college professors most of whom were engaged in either MPhil or PhD research. Behind was a row of professors who launched into an hour-long natter minutes after the lecture began. In front of me were several rows of young lecturers, some chatting, some snoozing, and some with a bored expression of their faces. My own row was kept awake by the loud snores that came from a senior lecturer seated beside me!

Science writers, like Lehrer and Gladwell, do what many scientists cannot, and that is (a) to communicate the science to the masses in a clear and compelling fashion, and (b) to excite the general population about the value of science and what it contributes to society.  They may make mistakes, and Chabris, Pinker, and other scientists should continue to point out those mistakes when they are made.  But these high quality science writers contribute a great deal, flaws and all.  The fact that they make some mistakes does not negate their contributions, any more than a flawed scientific study negates the entire work of a scientist.

“Replication” has subtle meaning variations, and few there be who distinguish what they mean. The word may be used to refer to the generalizability of a research claim or finding from a previous study to a new study in a different population. The word may also be used to refer to whether a claim from a study is able to be reproduced in the same population; this latter meaning is a matter not of generalizability but of duplication of the claim. What may be replicated in the sense of duplicated may in fact not extend beyond its own population to other populations. What is replicated in the sense of being generalizable may be nothing but a broad theory which itself is serviceable precisely owing to its being generalizable as provisional as it happens to be (cf. the atomic “theory” in its ability to make broad and accurate predictions regarding the combination/decombination of matter based on mass ratios). 

I leave aside, however, Hume’s “problem of induction”–that the sun has always risen may be taken as a claim it shall do so tomorrow but not as a reliable prediction it must do so.

Replication is replication in practice.  “Theoretically replicate” and “cannot negate importance of new findings”–since when?

This is indeed a long-standing issue for communicating science to the public: how much detail is necessary to be “correct”? And does it matter if details are incorrect?  To the first I answer “not much”.  The level of detail a scientist demands for assurances is way more than necessary to get most points. You don’t need to know calculus to understand that things can’t go faster than light. 

To the second I answer, it does matter, but not for understanding’s sake. Most people don’t understand variation, uncertainty, or even replication, but they do understand “being wrong”. Authors like Lehrer risk general disbelief – of everything – by being called out. If he’s wrong about blue walls, what else in the book, or even the science, is false?  (As a scientist as well as normal person, I think the ‘blue wall’ conclusion is excessive generalization.) Scientists and science are likely to be painted with the same blue brush in many people’s minds. 

Of course, if no one notices until someone like Chabris point out such errors, maybe it won’t matter much.  Perhaps we should just prohibit scientists from reading and reviewing each other’s popular works.

accuracy and completeness keep science out of reach of the layperson, we need writers who can distill the information into broadly digestible fare.  I can see a critic making sure facts are straight, but asking a writer to include every possible permutation should be saved for a dissertation.

But wrong is wrong!  I frequently have to correct students in my classes who think they know everything about a topic because it is in the lay media.   I have to point out that it is not as simple as generally portrayed, only to have a student harrumph and quote a book in popular culture.

 Precisely–and that’s why, rhetorically speaking, one ought to believe a credible researcher.  The kind of scientific qualification that we’re talking about looks like insecurity to some, but in reality is really a demonstration of a researcher’s security, inasmuch as he or she is willing to admit limitations, identify potential problems, etc.  As an English teacher, I would call this definitely a rough draft, one that has all of the potential holes or weak spots in full view, acknowledged and dealt with as much as possible.  This invites the kind of scrutiny that those weak spots or holes need, and allows the ongoing jenga puzzle of knowledge to continue to climb.  Glossing over these allows non-researchers to think the problem has been solved and that it deserves no more scrutiny than the fanciful considerations of some writers who pass them by with hardly a nod.  Bully for Chabris, and if Lehrer can’t take the heat, he needs to get off the bunsen burner.

 I don’t know about this.  I think is might be a good thing to expect more out of readers.  Certainly I enjoy a stylized piece of scientific writing, but everyone needs to eat their scientific vegetables, and detailed, accurate, precise science might be just that.

 Exactly the point, I think.  Our students do not benefit from this kind of thing.  I had this debate about Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, which is vastly inferior to many other translations.  However, it popularized Beowulf immensely.  My colleague was convinced that this was the highest good for Beowulf.  My argument was that the quality of the translation mattered more than its popularity.  Similarly, scientific writing that reaches a popular audience might get the word out about something, but if that word is incomplete or inaccurate, we create more problems than we solve.

 Might it be more valuable, rather than dumbing down science for lay people, for lay people to smarten themselves up to understand science and scientific writing?  Understanding is as much a measure of the audience as it is the writer, and I don’t see a down side to a lay audience understanding complex and qualified arguments, even if badly written.  The up side is that they recognize bad writing and good facts and then move forward improved, informed, and ready to engage the next idea, rather than have the next idea fed to them in a twinkie.

my neighbor’s step-aunt makes $82/hr on the laptop. She has been unemployed for ten months but last month her pay was $19756 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Here’s the site to read more ⇛⇛⇛⇛► http://hirebestfreelancer.blogspot.com

There is great value and potential harm to imparting general ideas. So, there is risk to being an explainer because of attitudes such as Hardy’s:

“The English mathematician Hardy put it perhaps a bit too strongly: “There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.  Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds”. 

Still, if we could not reach the general audience, how will we decide on whether to fund research on controversial areas such as AIDS (no longer controversial) or Climate Change (still controversial)?

I am grateful to Lehrer’s article in the New Yorker, 12-13-2010, for introducing me to the work of John P.A. Ioannidis (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”). Such introductions to important scientific thought are an immense service to those of us outside science but interested in it. If we choose, we can go directly to the scientist’s work, as I did, for the details, but without the New Yorker article I would not have known about it.

 No, it’s not arrogance. He just knows better than everyone else. Clearly.

Good writing, I’ve always believed, presumes that the readership is intelligent but uninformed. Part of many specialists’ problems, it seems to me, is not knowing the difference between the two. I like to think that I’m intelligent enough to read something about a scientific topic, but if it’s written only for other specialists, I won’t be able to follow it because I’m uninformed. I don’t know the background, the terminology, the math behind it. So don’t dumb anything down for me, just put it in nonspecialist terms. I can “smarten up” myself along the way.

And how stupid or uneducated do we think the people are who read science books? I would think the very fact of reading such a book would classify someone at some point on the nerd spectrum. So let’s be honest and true to Science by not dumbing down the books. Instead, let’s present honest science in a form suitable to non-specialists.

 Some of this discussion reminds me of Sheila Tobias’ “They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different” about retaining students in the natural sciences who leave for the social sciences or humanities more for “academic cultural” reasons than intellectual. Scientific writing, more than specialized writing in other disciplines, is often inaccessible to lay audiences because of unfamiliar technicalities that only fellow specialists can appreciate. It is possible to be accurate rather than sloppy–but there will always be a cultural gap between journalists (even those who write well about science) and scientists about the need to keep the reader’s interest vs. the need to avoid going beyond the facts…

Of course you can – but it doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should.