    
Scott
storyteller
Username: Scott
Post Number: 2133
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Monday, November 05, 2007 - 12:00 am: |     |
Well here comes the dumbing down of science! Sigh. It is bad enough that they dumb everything down in the media, public schools and in retail (Warning: This coffee is HOT and may burn you!). If the public can't understand a basic article, perhaps they should go get themselves educated. And if they still can't, then perhaps they are too stupid to understand it in the first place. We have magazine for the the scientifically illiterate, they are called the morning paper. For those with more than a casual interest, Discover, Scientific American etc are out there. For specialists there are all sorts of peer reviewed stuff out there.
Scientists told to cut the gobbledygook
quote:OTTAWA -- Tired of printing scientific gobbledygook that almost no one can read, one of the world's top science journals has ordered its authors to write plain English.
If the researchers who write for the journal Science can't manage to do this, an editor will rewrite their work as savagely as necessary, at least for the next few weeks.
This ultimatum comes from editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy, who calls it an "experiment."
It's his solution to a problem recognized everywhere in science: The writing becomes more and more technical, until only a few scientists in a particular niche can read any given article.
For this to make any sense, a brief explanation of science journals is necessary.
Sure, if they want a one page summary, go ahead. But this is just the beginning of the slippery slope - soon the whole article will have to be written in English. I am sorry but there are some things that you can't explain in namby-pamby morning paper English. Oh sure you can summarise, that that is not what real science is about - it is about details.
And example is given as follows:
quote:The catch is that while scientists once wrote plain English (anyone can read Darwin), they don't today. Here's an excerpt from a recent Nature. A cancer researcher is explaining his work. This is his opening sentence:
"AKT activation is driven by membrane localization initiated by the binding of the plekstrin homology domain (PHD) to phosphatidylinositol-3,4,5-triphosphate (PtdIns (3,4,5) P3) or phosphatidylinositol-3,4-diphosphate (PtdIns (3,4) P2), followed by phosphorylation of the regulatory amino acids serine 473 (Ser 473) and threonine 308 (Thr 308)."
What is so hard to understand here? Yeah the names are big. The mechanisms are simple and understood if you know anything about biochemistry. All is very easy to look up if you need to know. How should we summarise this so that the un-educated can understand? How about:
Scott: An important cellular signaling molecule is facilitated at individual places on a membrane by putting together a special region of about 120 protein building blocks with various minor fatty molecules on the membrane and then the whole shebang gets off because we added some phosphate to the protein building blocks serine 473 and threonine 308.
Yup this gives us a great understanding, completely dumbed down. Lots of help and meaningful info transmitted there. I hope the "phosphate" wasn't over the top, and perhaps I should have left the numbers off those "protein building blocks".
Sigh! I don't want my science dumbed down! Everything else in the world already is for crying out loud!
Scott
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