How to select and comment the news

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Week 1 > Week 1 Part 2 > How to select and comment the news

What are you supposed to do in order to take this course? In addition to

listening to the sequences and reading the additional literature we have
assembled, you mainly have to keep a blog in which youll note all the
instances you will be encountering where you can detect connections
between a piece of science or a technical project and another piece of
culture, society or politics. Yes, it is a huge task, but it is on the connections
you have to focus. What you have to do first is to follow the press or
to subscribe to several news feeds, blogs or newsletters.
You may also want to jot down notes about conversations that you have heard
or in which you have participated where the questions of expertise, public
discussions around evidence and proof, or the effect of this or that technology
are being brought in.
Ideally you should write every day. The crucial point is to follow the news in
real time; that is, from the first day of class to the last. It is the only way to
share in the difficulty that all readers have when they have to find their ways
through the maze of news before the issue is settled. If you take older cases,
chances are that they are settled and you will be led to believe that it would be
fairly easy to decide which expert was right and which expert was wrong. Well
it is not! And that's the problem. This does not mean that you should not learn
history of science; it is just that the method followed here offers a different
angle on the resolution of controversies, one that is less thorough than what
historians may offer but more adapted to a primer.
Take for instance the following example that appeared in the web edition of
The New York Times on January 18, 2012 (by the way don't forget to keep a
precise record of the author, date and medium of the item you have chosen).
The first thing to do is to underline the people or organizations (we often
call them actors, whether individual or collective) who, according to the piece
of news you have chosen, seem to have a role in shaping the piece of
science, expertise or technology under scrutiny.

So first read carefully the article and underline all the actors that take part
in the definition of the issue.
Then jot down an inventory of the participants you underlined in the
journalist's narrative. For example here is a partial inventory that may look a
bit like yours:
Places and events: Geneva June 2012 A few centuries ago no universal
time keeping Since the 1950s two systems of time keeping In 1967 new
definition of a second, based on atomic clocks
Organizations: United Nations telecommunications agency, the International
Telecommunication Union United States Naval Observatory primary time
keeper of the nation National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Stakeholders with different interests: The United States proponent of doing
away with the leap second Britain wants to keep the current system Computer
engineers worried about a bug Astronomers prefer to keep the leap second as
it is Defenders of the leap second 16 nations expressed an opinion. Thirteen
would abolish leap seconds
Individual: 700 delegates Geoff Chester, a spokesman for the United States
Naval Observatory Robert Seaman, a software engineer at the National
Optical Astronomy Observatory Franois Rancy, director of the unions radio
communication bureau.
Views of the world: Choose the atomic clock foundation and forget about the
sun and the earth who are unreliable Stick to the sun and the earth and
accept that there are two different clock systems
Note that because there is an issue -a minor dispute inside a highly technical
body about a very esoteric piece of science - science as it is really is easier to
grasp: those who are in favour of getting rid of the leap second, who are wary
of computer crashes, who are confident in the newer atomic clock definition of
time are in conflict with other scientists, equally competent, who wish to keep
a connection between the older definition of the day (sunrise and sunset) and
the rest of the knowledge infrastructure. It seems that their nationality matters
(American for the first group, English for the second) and also their
disciplinary affiliation (computer scientists don't react in the same way as
astronomers). And of course we are made aware, because of the dispute, of
the bureaucracy (in the positive sense of the word) that has to be present to

deal with the coordination of clocks. We are also made aware that in the past
the coordination of time was much less important since every town had its
own local time. Progressively we become aware of the immense importance
of a socio-technical connection made by clocks. It is also interesting to see
that there might be a vote in the end to settle the issue, just as is often done in
political assemblies.
Once you have done this first work of attentive reading, underlining the
various components, you might want to comment on the piece of news:

What have you learned about the making of

science through this example?

In what way does it exemplify or clarify or

allow you to dispute what has been said in
the class?

What other pieces of news, other examples,

and other blogs by your fellow students does
it relate to? Etc.

If you do this exercise very carefully every day for a whole term, step by step,
you will become literate in scientific humanities and, at the end of the class,
we hope that you will have become better equipped citizens for dealing with
scientific and technical issues.