Related papers: Exploring the effectiveness of documentary film fo…
The ability to communicate with all audiences is a skill that is rapidly becoming a must-have for any future scientist. As more physicists engage in communicating science to non-expert audiences, research shows that this experience helps…
National studies conducted over many years show that, while most Americans are interested in science and support federal funding of scientific research, the scientific literacy of the public is very low. Why this situation exists and who is…
Over the past year and a half we have developed an innovative approach to the teaching of `Physical Science', a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. The new approach uses popular…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
Capitalizing on the enthusiasm about space science in the general public, our goal as an interdisciplinary group of scholars is to design and teach a new team-taught interdisciplinary course, "Philosophy and Science of Space Exploration…
A project known as "Physics in Films" currently underway at UCF is designed to generate renewed interest and excitement in the standard "Physical Science" course. In the initial, developmental phase of the project the instructors selected…
Engaging the public with science is critical for a well-informed population. A popular method of scientific communication is documentaries. Once released, it can be difficult to assess the impact of such works on a large scale, due to the…
Scientific communication inside and outside the classroom is the main means for providing an adequate understanding of how science and technological innovation relate to society. In order to achieve this goal, it is important to explore new…
It would seem that the present dry economic times impose a very precise focus for science in general and physics in particular: research, possibly of applied type. However in doing so two basic pillars of a healthy future for science are…
Space Science enjoys broad public support in the US. People say they follow developments with interest, and that the programs are worth their cost. This attitude seems to arise in part because of the intrinsic accessibility and appeal of…
The creation of popular science web videos on the Internet has increased in recent years. The diversity of formats, genres, and producers makes it difficult to formulate a universal definition of science web videos since not every producer…
Physics in Films is an alternative version of the physical science course offered to non-science majors at the University of Central Florida. The course uses the popularity of Hollywood films to generate interest in science and to engage…
I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and…
The concept of {\em complexity} (as a quantity) has been plagued by numerous contradictory and confusing definitions. By explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system,…
The impact of continually evolving digital technologies and the proliferation of communications and content has now been widely acknowledged to be central to understanding our world. What is less acknowledged is that this is based on the…
Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts, leading to creativity, and a love of learning. And while many school systems increasingly undercut curiosity by teaching to the test, teachers are increasingly interested in…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…
Curiosity is the strong desire to learn or know more about something or someone. Since learning is often a social endeavor, social dynamics in collaborative learning may inevitably influence curiosity. There is a scarcity of research,…
While the relation between visualization and scientific understanding has been a topic of long-standing discussion, recent developments in physics have pushed the boundaries of this debate to new and still unexplored realms. For it is…