sts

Tracking the popularity of the sciences

I was thinking recently about the popularity of various sciences. Off the top of my head I believed that the social sciences were usually less popular than the natural/hard sciences. I also guessed that sociology or anthropology would be less popular than psychology, among the social sciences. The natural sciences get a lot of publicity from television programs such as Nova or Nature. I don’t believe there is very much coverage of the social sciences at all on television.

Candles, Faraday, and Teaching

I’m giving a guest lecture to a STEM class in about two weeks. I plan to talk about my research into citizen science. One of the questions I want to get the students thinking about is what makes someone into a scientist. Is it education, knowledge, skill, social influence, professional certification, or something else? But starting with one question always leads to another. So my mind began to wander back to when I was a volunteer at the Science Museum of Minnestoa in the 1990s.

New Science, Technology, and Society Blogs, with some further connections

Gustav Holmberg, Imaginary magnitude, has collected a couple of blogs by people in Science and Technology Studies, a field I’ve often considered for graduate school.STS blogs. One of the blogs on this list is by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, an STS program graduate who works at the Institute of the Future.  Earlier, on May 26, Holmberg cited a paper Alex on working in forecasting after having studied the history of science.  That paper STS at Work: Applying Science and Technology Studies in Technology Forecasting and Scenario Planning looks very interesting.