Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2020
Volume 65, Number 2
Saturday–Tuesday, April 18–21, 2020; Washington D.C.
Session B03: Outreach and Engaging the PublicCancelled Invited Outreach Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FOEP Chair: Don Lincoln, Fermilab Room: Washington 2 |
Saturday, April 18, 2020 10:45AM - 11:21AM Not Participating |
B03.00001: Astronomers have it easy: EPO when you are asking for no sacrifices or changes in behavior Invited Speaker: Virginia Trimble EPO for astronomers is relatively easy, because we do not have to say "Here is an image of material very close to the horizon of a massive black hole, and therefore you should vaccinate your children!" and many other examples. We have, therefore, I think, an enhanced responsibility to focus on accuracy, error bars, alternatives, and how these change with new data. Steady State was a good bet in 1948, not in 1968. One need is to preserve our ability to reassure: that Trinity was not going to ignite atmospheric nitrogen (Bethe) and LHC particles would not trigger collapse of the universe into a black hole, because cosmic rays come at much higher energies. We need to distinguish at least three audiences, (1) those who come to us (read Scientific American, attend April APS public lectures) for whom "how we know" is vital and what constitutes understanding (equations? words for your grandmother?), (2) students in breadth courses, for whom "why is this useful?" is important (you will be safer if you know how electricity and statistics work), and (3) everybody else, for whom we must start "where they are" as in Naomi Oreskes' interview in 30/11 New Scientist. Items across the board: both special and general relativity matter for GPS; quantum mechanics matters for everything. Latest announcement isn't always truest and best (NSX2 and r process). Two sides aren't always, or even usually, equal. Changing your mind when you learn something new is good not bad. Even Albert E in Sept 1947 letter to Lemaitre accepted that his cosmological constant might be a solution to time scale problem, not a blunder! [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 18, 2020 11:21AM - 11:57AM Not Participating |
B03.00002: A Brief Tour of the Zooniverse: How Crowdsourcing Science is Solving Big Data Problems in Research Invited Speaker: Lucy Fortson Citizen science - the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in the research process - provides a radical solution to the challenge of dealing with the greatly increased size of modern data sets. Zooniverse.org is the most successful collection of online citizen science projects which have enabled over 2 million online volunteers to contribute to over 250 research projects spanning disciplines from astronomy to zoology. Starting from the original Galaxy Zoo project, I will briefly describe the Zooniverse platform and some of the results to date from the Zooniverse collection of online projects in the context of new approaches to combining machine learning with human classifications. I will then discuss future developments of the Zooniverse platform with the ultimate goal of producing a system that most efficiently balances human and machine classifications. Such efforts are critical in coping with data from the next generation of large-scale experiments, including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 18, 2020 11:57AM - 12:33PM Not Participating |
B03.00003: Outreach to Policymakers Invited Speaker: Francis Slakey How many constituent requests does a typical congressional office get every day? How much time do staff have to process a request, before they have to move on to the next one? What approach makes it easiest for staff to respond? We’ll explore the answers to each of those questions and consider the resulting boundary conditions for effective communication with policymakers: keep it tight, make it compelling, have a crystal clear ask. We’ll see what we can learn from a related format — the evening 1/2 hour news broadcast — where time is precious, and information is conveyed quickly and efficiently. We'll then have audience volunteers tackle some real-world cases to see how effective communication with policymakers works in practice. [Preview Abstract] |
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