JCHS’s Zeke Kossover at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts (He’s our next speaker!)

One of my favorite magazines, SEED (a magazine about the intersection of science & culture), just put out a great piece about the public perception of science.

Yes. People within the academic culture, in general, do not know how to speak to the public. And that’s not only scientists—that’s English professors, too. Some of the political problems the scientific community encountered in the past decade had to do with scientists not getting out into the public square to tell their stories. I think scientists realize this has to change, but I’m not sure they know how. The short answer is: Keep it simple.

As part of that article, there is a small piece on the emergence of science cafes, which directly address the above point. Science cafes are all about bringing scientists onto the public’s turf. In a way, what we do every month is the training ground scientists to tell their story.