This week we present our storyboard concept for using technology as a means of communicating science and science policy to the general public.
We focus the scope of our project around climate change. In the past few years, the debate surrounding climate change has evolved from determining the extent of anthropogenic contributions to what can be done on a policy level.
However, the science that underlies any debate on climate change is complex, often too distilled or distorted in media. As shown in the example article, the top three news coverages channels have varying degrees of accuracy on reporting. This is indeed worrisome as this is a major outlet a huge portion of the US population is exposed to anything related to climate change.
In keep with our theme of technology, we have chosen to construct a website that displays and filters information taken from the web, and is ranked based on reviews of scientists and the general public.
What's the story?
Suppose you come a series of articles on climate change, and you see the following...
What is fact and what is fiction? It's hard to tell with the volume of information and complexity that surrounds climate change.
Our website Science(or)Fiction hopes to address this. The layout and motivation of the website is presented as follows.
We have a generic search bar. If brought to fruition, we hope to include other hot-topics surrounding science technology, such as nanotechnology and GMOs.
This is the overall layout of the website as it might appear in your browser.
A key feature of our website is the presence of interactive (info)graphs. That is, graphs taken from scientific papers and contextualized. An example shown here is a plot of global temperature anomalies and carbon dioxide emission levels since 1900. The user would be able to point to a spot on the graph, and relevant historic information would pop up. The motivation is to make information dynamic and interactive.
An important part of forming a community around this website would be to connect the user to a greater forum. Here, the user can submit a question. Initially, based on an internal key word search, the website can output possible answers. If the user is not satisfied, s/he would then be connected to a scientific community member.
A featured question or one that is related to a user submitted question would appear here. We think an interesting way to present the information (in addition to text-based answers) is a Wordle, in which words of a certain frequency are proportionally sizes and arranged. Much like a cascading Wikipedia search, we hope it will give a brief overview of the common words used to answer the user's question and spur further curiosity into the topic.
Perhaps the most important feature is the community-based voting of the validity and reliability of a particular source. We include the categories of newspaper, scientist, politician as a filter for ranking.
There would be a spectrum of icons to represent the overall ranking of a particular source, with some examples shown to the left.
How these sources will receive a ranking is an important issue. Our current idea is as follows. There are separate repositories of users- scientists, legislators, and the general public. All repositories require login to vote and rank. The first two require authentication of affiliation (e.g., an email associated with an official organization and other credentials). In order to vote, the user must login, provide credentials, and provide a short justification of their ranking if very low or very high.
In total there are three different rankings for each repository and an overall ranking.
The major idea is to aggregate information and have a community-based method of ranking the perceived validity and reliability of a source. Although a large amount of distillation of information occurs, it is our hope that having a simple ranking system spurs people to think twice about the media they encounter.
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