Journal of a Sabbatical

May 23, 1999

i flunked flounder

May 23, 1999
URI Bay Campus
6 common terns
1 yellow warbler

Wickford Harbor
2 snowy egrets
2 double-crested cormorants

Today's Starting Pitcher: Pedro Martinez

Pedro's strikeouts: 6

Reading: Murder at Monticello by Rita Mae Brown

Books Bought: Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions by Haraldur Sigurdsson, Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches by Cornelia Dean, Seals of Atlantic Canada and the Northeastern United States by Janice Hannah

Nancy and I headed down to South County for a debate about science journalism sponsored by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at URI. It was raining hard and it's commencement weekend so we allowed lots of extra time and ended up getting there over an hour early.

We stood on the beach watching a group of 6 common terns diving for fish in the exact spot where an adult male human and a juvenile male human were fishing.

The rain picked up again so we went indoors and played around with the Creatures of the Edge exhibit at the URI Coastal Institute Visitor Center. The idea is to see if you could survive as a tern, a flounder, or one of several kinds of plankton. Nancy succeeded fabulously as a tern, picking the right nesting site and the right foods. My baby flounder tried to eat a comb jelly and got eaten instead. How was I supposed to know it was a jellyfish from the picture they show? Must be hard to be a flounder. I loved the computer animation of the flounder's metamorphoses and eye migration. We both tried every species and I only totally flunked flounder.

The debate was entitled: Cross Purposes: Why Can't Scientists Speak English? Why Can't Journalists Get it Right?

Moderator:

David Baron, NPR science reporter.

Panelists:

Ellen Ruppel Shell, BU professor, Atlantic Monthly correspondent;

Art Gold, URI professor;

Phil Hilts, The New York Times reporter;

Trudy Coxe, CEO, Preservation Society of Newport County, formerly Massachusetts secretary of environmental affairs under the Weld administration.

They debated the relationship between scientists and journalists and talked about ways to make their interactions more constructive. They asked questions like:

How can scientists translate jargon into plain English without losing the important nuances they want to convey? How can journalists report research findings in a way that is compelling, understandable, and accurate? Why is it important to try?

This is a subject near and dear to me for many reasons. Communicating technical information to non-technically trained people is a craft that doesn't get the respect it deserves. And the problems the journalists and the scientists on the panel talked about were exactly the same problems technical writers and developers talk about. It was interesting to hear the conflict played out in a different arena for a change.