ScienceOnline2013

When children are asked to draw a scientist, they tend to draw a white man in a white lab coat. When Americans were asked to name a living scientist in a recent study, 47 percent named Albert Einstein. In another study, only 4 percent could name a living scientist. It's clear that researchers are largely absent from public life, and that science has a PR problem. If we are to change the overwhelming stereotype about scientists, or gain the trust of the public, then we need to aim for greater transparency. This session will explore two sides of this issue- changing the face of science for both kids and adults. For kids, it is important to shed the geeky stereotype so that science careers are more appealing. For adults, it is important to foster a more scientifically literate population that can make informed decisions when it comes to public policy. Let's discuss the best ways to address each of these issues. Session hashtag to use: #sciface

Questions:
- What do you think of when you think of a scientist?
- Does your institution have a science communication person?
- How can scientists help public understanding of science?
- How can scientists make STEM careers more attractive to kids?
- How can scientists improve adult understanding of science for politics?

This is the second session of a two-session track aiming to create a take-home resource to facilitate more and better outreach by scientists. In this session, we will focus on how to do outreach, or to help scientists do it. We will brainstorm a list of the wide variety of different kinds of outreach out there, including both well established outreach channels (blogging, press releases, interviews, lectures, teaching, school visits, etc.), and also emerging and overlooked outreach channels (two-way engagement, collaborations with sci comm professionals, integrating outreach with research, e.g. citizen science, ad hoc 1:1 interactions with family, friends and strangers, 'on the street' activities, etc.). We will also draw a 'so you want to do outreach' flowchart with, we hope, an accompanying storyboard.

Questions:
- We all know blogging and being interviewed by science journalists are great ways to 'do' outreach. Are there other ways? Spoiler: YES.
- How do they do it? …'they' being those few scientists that seem to not only to make time for outreach but also use it to 'get ahead' in their research careers?
- How can PIOs & scientists help newbie scientists make their outreach effective?

STEAM Education - putting the Arts in STEM education. Make their eyes pop and their curiosity peak - and the education will follow! Funding cuts aren't just hurting Science, Technology, Engineering & Math; the fine arts are taking a blow as well. Learn how to do more with less using techniques that explore STEM education through visual exploration, in a discussion moderated by two practicing science illustrators. Techniques from field sketching, data visualization, live-scribing, and metaphor building help organize the enthusiasm for STEAM and make students accomplished science communicators. How do visuals affect your own field? There is currently a lot of enthusiasm for STEAM and little organization to accomplish it. As scientists and science communicators, what can we do to facilitate this change?

Questions:
- How do visuals affect your own field?
- How do students discover effective visuals?
- What techniques can anyone apply to help understand science?
- As scientists and science communicators, what can we do to facilitate STEAM education?

New online only, open access journals are being created at a rapid pace. Many of them charge high publication fees for papers, which is a departure from much of traditional scientific publishing. The fees and lack of a tangible physical product makes these journals look like "pay to publish" vanity presses. And many open access journals are just scams, as shown by the recent “Predatory publishers are corrupting open access” editorial in Nature. Even some of these journals have genuine scientists who are trying to publish good science, apparently unaware of other suspicious practices by the publisher. How can researchers, particularly early career scientists, determine if a new journal is a “real” journal?

Questions:
• How do traditional scientific journals differ from newer open access journals?
• How can a researcher tell the difference between a take the money and run publisher and a genuine journal?
• How can new open access journals shake off the perception that they are just scamming scientists for the money?
• What standards should be used to judge new journals as real scientific platforms?

A session discussing the role of mathematics and statistics in public discourse. There's a huge amount of statistics constantly cited in the media and politics, which misleads through the use abuse of statistical concepts. One of the most important roles of math blogging for non-mathematicians is clarifying the ways in which things are abused, and how we can make the true meaning of statistics clear without losing the attention of the audience.

The famous American General, Douglas MacArthur said that "rules are mostly made to be broken and are too lazy for the lazy to hide behind." The same can be said for writing and blogging. There are a whole host of "rules" that writers tend to shift to, and they get drilled into you by the news you read, magazines you flip through and classes you take in school - have a central argument or thesis, pretend the reader knows nothing, use an active voice and avoid the first person. But why? Why are such restrictions taught in journalism school and pounded into us? Humans are a social species and enjoy telling and hearing a good story, which is how history was first shared. Science can be boring to some people, but if framed within a personal story and made relatable, it can have much more of an impact. This session, proposed and moderated by David Manly and Jeanne Garbarino, will delve into the often neglected writing style and demonstrate how to use personal experiences to make your posts and articles more engaging, engrossing and exciting for the reader. The official hashtag for the session will be #MySciStory.

Questions:
- How can you achieve balance in a personal science narrative and why isn't it used more? #MySciStory
- Why are personal narratives frowned upon in science storytelling? #MySciStory
- How can you frame your experiences in the context of a narrative that anyone can enjoy? #MySciStory

How many times have you asked yourself, "Can I say 'Cryptomonads are a group of photosynthetic/algal cells,' or must I make note of that one genus that isn't photosynthetic and makes it hard to say what exactly they are?" Well, you're not alone. In scientific publication and in science communication, one of the great challenges is streamlining the message at the expense of at least SOME of the data. But lending a hat-tip to ALL the data makes for unwieldy sentences—exemptions, exceptions and uncertain language add up to difficult reading. Not all the data can be represented, but how do you incorporate it into a coherent message? How do you decide what to emphasize and what to omit? How much qualifying is 'too much'? While some choices may be more subjective than others, this session will address best practices for assembling summaries that are the most accurate representation of the data.

Questions:
- How do you generalize without misrepresenting the data?
- How does one organize the transformation of raw image data (eg. micrographs) to a summary diagram?
- What sorts of details are permissible to omit?
- How does the target audience shape which details stay and go?