A case for the unengaging

Obviously, I’m a believer in academia.

I don’t think our world could function without the brilliant people doing research on information technology, medicine, nutrition, sustainability, etc. etc.

I’ve written a profile (and created a video) about one such researcher here.

Now, before you go judging the video, let me reiterate how important I think researchers are to the health of society. Not only is my story’s protagonist the first person at the medical partnership to take on research, but the nature of his research addresses inequities experienced by real people, right here, where we live.

That said, the man is not necessarily the most engaging speaker. But who said you had to be?

Allow me to digress… yesterday, we watched the Presidential Debate between Carter and Reagan in my social work class. We noted some striking similarities (i.e. rhetoric about wealth and government involvement) to today’s political discourse, but also some pretty stark differences…

Namely, today’s debates could be confused with an episode of Dancing with the Stars.

Someone said that perfectly good candidates are now refusing to run for President because they don’t think they have the right look or image. It’s not supposed to matter, but it most certainly does!

The same goes for online content. People want to be entertained, they want to be engaged. Does that mean that we shouldn’t feature important work by legitimate scientists because they lack star quality?

I heard from a very credible source recently that journalists shouldn’t feature experts in their multimedia at all. I mulled it over and I’ve come to the conclusion that, even if the person is right about what audiences want to see, she’s wrong about what we should show them.

Like it or not, researchers know more than we do. They have a better, more nuanced understanding of what it is we want to know. After all, most of them studied for 7+ years on the subject.

Granted, they don’t always say things in ways we immediately understand or appreciate. That’s why it’s up to the crafty film editor to break it all up and piece it back together in a way that 1) makes sense and 2) tells us something we didn’t know already.

Part of that piecing-together process will likely include a layperson stakeholder. And that’s great. We want to see how advancements can help the average person.

But if it’s the average person dictating everything we end up hearing about… I’m afraid we won’t be learning very much.

Eutrophication, respiration, acidification…. Together they’re a big deal(-ation)

I’ve been waiting for about a month for the embargo* to lift on a news release I wrote. It was just published today, and you can find it here.

When the researcher’s abstract first hit my desk, I had no idea what any of it meant.  It just seemed an endless string of words ending in -ation.

But I looked the words up, and now I get it. I attempted to simplify it for the sake of the release, but when the researchers reviewed it, they snuck some of those thorny terms back in there. (They also got rid of my use of consonance in “carbonate coverings” so I didn’t have to use the word “shell” twice in the same sentence. Such is PR.)

So.. here’s what’s going on. Eutrophication, which results in respiration, when combined with the absorption of anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide, results in an unexpected increase in acidification. The water then loses its buffering capacity, precluding the formation of carbonate minerals.

Clear as mud, right?

So…

–Eutrophication= nutrients entering a river basin from fertilizer runoff. Sounds like a good thing, but it’s bad. The nutrients feed algae which grow in excess at the water’s surface. The Mississippi feeds into the Gulf of Mexico, where the algae ends up, resulting in…

–Respiration = the algae’s release of carbon dioxide as they sink to the floor of the gulf and die. That carbon dioxide, when mixed with sea water, becomes an acid.

–Anthropogenic = made by humans. So “anthropogenic carbon dioxide” is CO2 released by humans…not directly (ew), but by way of emissions from cars and factories, etc.

–Acidification = When the water becomes acidic, its pH gets lower. So there are two sources of acidification in the Gulf of Mexico: the CO2 absorbed from the air and the CO2 released by the dying algae. What the researchers found is that, in this case, 1+1=9. That is to say, the combined sources of acidification resulted in a much lower pH than expected in the Gulf of Mexico.

–Buffering capacity = the ability of a liquid to maintain its pH. The researchers think that the reason the pH is getting so low is that the combined sources of acidification lower the Gulf’s buffering capacity.

–Carbonate minerals = the big picture here. Marine creatures such as coral and oysters have shells made out of carbon. As the water in the Gulf is so acidic (and becoming more so), these animals are less able to produce and hold on to their shells.

The researchers predict that, in 100 years, oyster shells and such will start to dissolve. That’s clearly the bad news.

The good news is, when you pare jargon down to its core meaning, you start to understand it. Simply ignoring big words won’t help shellfish hold on to their homes.

Curtailing our reliance on petroleum and corn will. (As if we needed another reason.)

*For those of you playing the home game, when a researcher’s paper gets picked up by a journal, that journal imposes and embargo on the paper and its contents. What that means is that the press can’t publish the results before the journal is published, or else the researcher loses the publication.

Don’t be afraid!

You’re reading a news story and you come across a phrase like “proteomics and mass spectrometry facility.” At that point, you stop reading. Understandably.

Not to judge you or anything, but you probably should have kept reading. What you just did was dismiss a story completely because it contained a phrase you didn’t understand. Essentially, you proved that you have no interest in learning anything new and that you lack the humility to scratch your head and look for context clues. How could you!?

Seriously, though, I’m able to recognize this pattern because I used to do the exact same thing. I’d either skim over the complex parts or stop reading altogether. And then I started studying for the GRE (that’s alphabet soup for “Graduate Record Examination,” the standardized test most people have to take to get into grad school).

There were a lot of words on the verbal section that I didn’t know. And my screaming expletives at the computer screen didn’t make my practice test scores go up. (Trust me, that doesn’t work.)

So I took it upon myself to learn new words. My mom loved hearing about it so much that we started this email game where I’d send her a message with all the weirdest words embedded:

“Dear Mom, The GRE lexicon is so abstruse that I want to defenestrate myself. Love, Chelsea.”

Believe it or not, it was fun! So much fun that I now teach the GRE part-time (in case you hadn’t figured this out already, I’m a bit of a nerd).

The fun part was learning that big words don’t exist just to frustrate me. They have very specific and nuanced meanings. How else in one word can you say “the throwing of an object out of a window”? Defenestration is the only way.

It’s the same thing with science, or with business, or with any other field for which a Ph.D. is offered.

I came across an abstract recently that asserted: “It is well known that uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has increased ocean acidity and decreased seawater carbonate saturation state” (Cai et al, Nature Geoscience Nov. 2011).

And I caught myself thinking, “Oh, really? How well known can it be when I CAN’T UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT?”

And then I took a breath. And I turned to Wikipedia (yes, Wikipedia… it can be a great starting point when you haven’t the foggiest clue what’s going on). And then I figured out what the researcher was talking about. And it actually made for a pretty great story (more on that to come).

The point is, that researcher wasn’t born using jargon. Believe it or not, he started out as a little kid who just wanted to work with fish forever. And that’s what he ended up doing; he followed his passion to a Ph.D.

And now he has a nuanced understanding of the subject area about which he’s passionate. So it’s no longer second nature for him to say something like “caused by humans” instead of “anthropogenic” because a) the latter phrase actually makes more sense in context, and b) he doesn’t have time for more words. He has to save the shellfish.

It’s my job as a journalist to make sense of it all for you. You, as readers, don’t really have a job except to enjoy. But could you do me a favor and try to look out for the dismissive “I don’t know what this means” tendency?

Do yourself a favor and keep. on. reading.