Posts Tagged ‘University of Wisconsin-Madison’

« Older Entries

Tweet your nano

Thursday, January 24th, 2013

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have published a study titled, “Tweeting nano: how public discourses about nanotechnology develop in social media environments,”  which analyses, for the first time, nanotechnology discourse on Twitter social media. From the Life Sciences Communication University of Wisconsin-Madison research webpage,

The study, “Tweeting nano: how public discourses about nanotechnology develop in social media environments,” mapped social media traffic about nanotechnology, finding that Twitter traffic expressing opinion about nanotechnology is more likely to originate from states with a federally-funded National Nanotechnology Initiative center or network than states without such centers.

Runge [Kristin K. Runge, doctoral student] and her co-authors used computational linguistic software to analyze a census of all English-language nanotechnology-related tweets expressing opinion posted on Twitter over one calendar year. In addition to mapping tweets by state, the team coded sentiment along two axes: certain vs. uncertain, and optimistic-neutral-pessimistic. They found 55% of nanotechnology-related opinions expressed certainty, 41% expressed pessimistic outlooks and 32% expressed neutral outlooks.

In addition to shedding light on how social media is used in communicating about an emerging technology, this study is believed to be the first published study to use a census of social media messages rather than a sample.

“We likely wouldn’t have captured these results if we had to rely on a sample rather than a complete census,” said Runge. “That would have been unfortunate, because the distinct geographic origins of the tweets and the tendency toward certainty in opinion expression will be useful in helping us understand how key online influencers are shaping the conversation around nanotechnology.”

It’s not obvious from this notice or the title of the study but it is stated clearly in the study that the focus is the world of US nano, not the English language world of nano. After reading the study (very quickly), I can say it’s interesting and, hopefully, will stimulate more work about public opinion that takes social media into account. (I’d love to know how they limited their study to US tweets only and how they determined the region that spawned the tweet. )

The one thing which puzzles me is they don’t mention retweets (RTs) specifically. Did they consider only original tweets? If not, did they take into account the possibility that someone might RT an item that does not reflect their own opinion? I occasionally RT something that doesn’t reflect my opinion when there isn’t sufficient space to include comment indicating otherwise because I want to promote discussion and that doesn’t necessarily take place on Twitter or in Twitter’s public space. This leads to another question, did the researchers include direct messages in their study? Unfortunately, there’s no mention in the two sections  (Discussion and Implications for future research) of the conclusion.

For those who would like to see the research for themselves (Note: The article is behind a paywall),

Tweeting nano: how public discourses about nanotechnology develop in social media environments by Kristin K. Runge, Sara K. Yeo, Michael Cacciatore, Dietram A. Scheufele, Dominique Brossard, Michael Xenos, Ashley Anderson, Doo-hun Choi, Jiyoun Kim, Nan Li, Xuan Liang, Maria Stubbings, and Leona Yi-Fan Su. Journal of Nanoparticle Research; An Interdisciplinary Forum for Nanoscale Science and Technology© Springer 10.1007/s11051-012-1381-8. Published online Jan. 4, 2013

It’s no surprise to see Dietram Scheufele and Dominique Brossard who are both located the University of Wisconsin-Madison and publish steadily on the topic of nanotechnology and public opinion listed as authors.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in nanotechnology, New Media, public perceptions | No Comments »

Unintended consequences of reading science news online

Friday, January 4th, 2013

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Dominique Brossard and  Dietram Scheufele have written a cautionary piece for the AAAS’s (American Association for the Advancement of Science) magazine, Science, according to a Jan. 3, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

A science-inclined audience and wide array of communications tools make the Internet an excellent opportunity for scientists hoping to share their research with the world. But that opportunity is fraught with unintended consequences, according to a pair of University of Wisconsin-Madison life sciences communication professors.

Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele, writing in a Perspectives piece for the journal Science, encourage scientists to join an effort to make sure the public receives full, accurate and unbiased information on science and technology.

“This is an opportunity to promote interest in science — especially basic research, fundamental science — but, on the other hand, we could be missing the boat,” Brossard says. “Even our most well-intended effort could backfire, because we don’t understand the ways these same tools can work against us.”

The Jan. 3, 2012 University of Wisconsin-Madison news release by Chris Barncard (which originated the news item) notes,

Recent research by Brossard and Scheufele has described the way the Internet may be narrowing public discourse, and new work shows that a staple of online news presentation — the comments section — and other ubiquitous means to provide endorsement or feedback can color the opinions of readers of even the most neutral science stories.

…

Online news sources pare down discussion or limit visibility of some information in several ways, according to Brossard and Scheufele.

Many news sites use the popularity of stories or subjects (measured by the numbers of clicks they receive, or the rate at which users share that content with others, or other metrics) to guide the presentation of material.

The search engine Google offers users suggested search terms as they make requests, offering up “nanotechnology in medicine,” for example, to those who begin typing “nanotechnology” in a search box. Users often avail themselves of the list of suggestions, making certain searches more popular, which in turn makes those search terms even more likely to appear as suggestions.

Brossard and Scheufele have published an earlier study about the ‘narrowing’ effects of search engines such as Google, using the example of the topic ‘nanotechnology’, as per my May 19, 2010 posting. The researchers appear to be building on this earlier work,

The consequences become more daunting for the researchers as Brossard and Scheufele uncover more surprising effects of Web 2.0.

In their newest study, they show that independent of the content of an article about a new technological development, the tone of comments posted by other readers can make a significant difference in the way new readers feel about the article’s subject. The less civil the accompanying comments, the more risk readers attributed to the research described in the news story.

“The day of reading a story and then turning the page to read another is over,” Scheufele says. “Now each story is surrounded by numbers of Facebook likes and tweets and comments that color the way readers interpret even truly unbiased information. This will produce more and more unintended effects on readers, and unless we understand what those are and even capitalize on them, they will just cause more and more problems.”

If even some of the for-profit media world and advocacy organizations are approaching the digital landscape from a marketing perspective, Brossard and Scheufele argue, scientists need to turn to more empirical communications research and engage in active discussions across disciplines of how to most effectively reach large audiences.

“It’s not because there is not decent science writing out there. We know all kinds of excellent writers and sources,” Brossard says. “But can people be certain that those are the sites they will find when they search for information? That is not clear.”

It’s not about preparing for the future. It’s about catching up to the present. And the present, Scheufele says, includes scientific subjects — think fracking, or synthetic biology — that need debate and input from the public.

Here’s a citation and link for the Science article,

Science, New Media, and the Public by Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele in Science 4 January 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6115 pp. 40-41 DOI: 10.1126/science.1232329

This article is behind a paywall.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in science communication | No Comments »

Better night vision goggles for the military

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

I remember a military type, a friend who served as a Canadian peacekeeper (Infantry) in the Balkans, describing night-vision goggles and mentioning they are loud. After all, it’s imaging equipment and that requires a power source or, in this case, a source of noise. The Dec. 29, 2012 news item on Nanowerk about improved imaging for night vision goggles doesn’t mention noise but hopefully, the problem has been addressed or mitigated (assuming this technology is meant to be worn),

Through some key breakthroughs in flexible semiconductors, electrical and computer engineering Professor Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma has created two imaging technologies that have potential applications beyond the 21st century battlefield.

With $750,000 in support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Ma has developed curved night-vision goggles using germanium nanomembranes.

The Dec. 28, 2012 University of Wisconsin-Madison news release, which originated the news item, describes the Air Force project and another night vision project for the US Department of Defense,

Creating night-vision goggles with a curved surface allows a wider field of view for pilots, but requires highly photosensitive materials with mechanical bendability-the silicon used in conventional image sensors doesn’t cut it.

…  Ma’s design employs flexible germanium nanomembranes: a transferrable flexible semiconductor that until now has been too challenging to use in imagers due to a high dark current, the background electrical current that flows through photosensitive materials even when they aren’t exposed to light.

“Because of their higher dark current, the image often comes up much noisier on germanium-based imagers,” says Ma. “We solved that problem.”

Ma’s dark current reduction technology has also been recently licensed to Intel.

In another imaging project, the U.S. Department of Defense has provided Ma with $750,000 in support of development of imagers for military surveillance that span multiple spectra, combining infrared and visible light into a single image.

“The reason they are interested in IR is because visible light can be blocked by clouds, dust, smoke,” says Ma. “IR can go through, so simultaneous visible and IR imaging allows them to see everything.”

Inexpensive silicon makes production of visible light imagers a simple task, but IR relies on materials incompatible with silicon.

The current approach involves a sensor for IR images and a sensor for visible light, combining the two images in post-processing, which requires greater computing power and hardware complexity. Instead, Ma will employ a heterogeneous semiconductor nanomembrane, stacking the two incompatible materials in each pixel of the new imager to layer IR and visible images on top of one another in a single image.

The result will be imagers that can seamlessly shift between IR and visible images, allowing the picture to be richer and more quickly utilized for strategic decisionmaking.

It’s impossible to tell from the description if this particular technology will be worn by foot soldiers or human military personnel but, in the event it will be worn,  it does well to remember that it will need a power source. Interestingly, the average soldier already carries a lot of weight in batteries (up to 35 pounds!) as per my May 9, 2012 posting about energy-harvesting textiles and the military.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in military, nanotechnology | No Comments »

Sunflower season when thoughts turn to solar power systems

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

Sunflowers in Fargo, North Dakota, USA.. This image was released by the Agricultural Research Service, the research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture, with the ID K5751-1 (Downloaded from Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower)

I love the big sunflowers, the ones where the stalks extend many feet past my 5’4″ and which are topped with those improbable, lush, huge flowers. The flowers’ height always puts me in mind of trees.  While scientists may appreciate the aesthetics and poetry as much as I do, their thoughts tend to turn to less fanciful matters. From the Aug. 16, 2012 news item on ScienceDaily,

A field of young sunflowers will slowly rotate from east to west during the course of a sunny day, each leaf seeking out as much sunlight as possible as the sun moves across the sky through an adaptation called heliotropism.

It’s a clever bit of natural engineering that inspired imitation from a UW-Madison electrical and computer engineer, who has found a way to mimic the passive heliotropism seen in sunflowers for use in the next crop of solar power systems.

Unlike other “active” solar systems that track the sun’s position with GPS and reposition panels with motors, electrical and computer engineering professor Hongrui Jiang’s concept leverages the properties of unique materials in concert to create a passive method of re-orienting solar panels in the direction of the most direct sunlight.

Here’s a demonstration of Jiang’s concept, not as a pretty as a sunflower, in a very bare bones video where you have to watch closely or you might miss the action,

Here’s a description of what you’re witnessing from Mark Reichers’ Aug. 15, 2012 news release for the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

His design, published Aug. 1 in Advanced Functional Materials and recently highlighted in Nature, employs a combination of liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE), which goes through a phase change and contracts in the presence of heat, with carbon nanotubes, which can absorb a wide range of light wavelengths.

“Carbon nanotubes have a very wide range of absorption, visible light all the way to infrared,” says Jiang. “That is something we can take advantage of, since it is possible to use sunlight to drive it directly.”

Direct sunlight hits a mirror beneath the solar panel, focused onto one of multiple actuators composed of LCE laced with carbon nanotubes. The carbon nanotubes heat up as they absorb light, and the heat differential between the environment and inside the actuator causes the LCE to shrink.

This causes the entire assembly to bow in the direction of the strongest sunlight. As the sun moves across the sky, the actuators will cool and re-expand, and new ones will shrink, re-positioning the panel over the 180 degrees of sky that the sun covers in the course of the day.

This new approach improves solar panel efficiency by 10%. This is significant in a field where an increase of even a few percentage points is cause for celebration (my July 30, 2012 posting makes reference to this phenomenon of celebrating relatively small increases in solar power systems efficiencies).

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in energy, nanotechnology | 2 Comments »

Science communication at the US National Academy of Sciences

Friday, May 25th, 2012

I guess it’s going to be a science communication kind of day on this blog. Dr. Andrew Maynard on his 2020 Science blog posted a May 22, 2012 piece about a recent two-day science communication event at the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.

Titled The Science of Science Communication and held May 21 – 22, 2012, I was a little concerned about the content since it suggests a dedication to metrics (which are useful but I find often misused) and the possibility of a predetermined result for science communication. After watching a webcast of the first session (Introduction and Overviews offered by Baruch Fischhof [Carnegie Mellon University] and Dietram Scheufele [University of Wisconsin at Madison], 55:35 mins.), I’m relieved to say that the first two presenters mostly avoided those pitfalls.

You can go here to watch any of the sessions held during that two days, although I will warn you that these are not TED talks. The shortest are roughly 27 mins. with most running over 1 hour, while a couple  of them run over two hours.

Getting back to Andrew and his take on the proceedings, excerpted from his May 22, 2012 posting,

It’s important that the National Academies of Science are taking the study of science communication (and its practice) seriously.  Inviting a bunch of social scientists into the National Academies – and into a high profile colloquium like this – was a big deal.  And irrespective of the meeting’s content, it flags a commitment to work closely with researchers studying science communication and decision analysis to better ensure informed and effective communication strategies and practice.  Given the substantial interest in the colloquium – on the web as well as at the meeting itself – I hope that the National Academies build on this and continue to engage fully in this area.

Moving forward, there needs to be more engagement between science communication researchers and practitioners.  Practitioners of science communication – and the practical insight they bring – were notable by their absence (in the main) from the colloquium program.  If the conversation around empirical research is to connect with effective practice, there must be better integration of these two communities.

It’s interesting to read about the colloquia (the science communication event was one of a series events known as the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia) from the perspective of a someone who was present in real time.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in science communication | No Comments »

Science attitude kicks in by 10 years old

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

There’s a lot of talk these days about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in the field of education. It seems that every country that has produced materials about innovation, economic well being, etc.  in English and I’m guessing all the other countries too (I just can’t read their materia]s) want more children/young people studying STEM subjects.

One of the research efforts in the UK is the ASPIRES research project at King’s College London (KCL), which is examining children’s attitudes to science and future careers. Their latest report, Ten Science Facts and Fictions: the case for early education about STEM careers (PDF), is profiled in a Jan. 11, 2012 news item on physorg.com (from the news item),

Professor Archer [Louise Archer, Professor of Sociology of Education at King’s] said: “Children and their parents hold quite complex views of science and scientists and at age 10 or 11 these views are largely positive. The vast majority of children at this age enjoy science at school, have parents who are supportive of them studying science and even undertake science-related activities in their spare time. They associate scientists with important work, such as finding medical cures, and with work that is well paid.

“Nevertheless, less than 17 per cent aspire to a career in science. These positive impressions seem to lead to the perception that science offers only a very limited range of careers, for example doctor, scientist or science teacher. It appears that this positive stereotype is also problematic in that it can lead people to view science as out of reach for many, only for exceptional or clever people, and ‘not for me’.

Professor Archer says the findings indicate that engaging young people in science is not therefore simply a case of making it more interesting or more fun. She said: “There is a disconnect between interest and aspirations. Our research shows that young people’s ambitions are strongly influenced by their social backgrounds – ethnicity, social class and gender – and by family contexts. [emphases mine]

I was particularly struck by the fact that attitudes are positive but, by age 10, researchers are already observing that children are concluding ‘it’s not for me’.

Here’s a little more about the ASPIRES project,

The ASPIRES research team, led by Louise Archer, Professor of Sociology of Education at King’s, is tracking children’s science and career aspirations over five years, from ages 10 to 14. To date they have surveyed over 9000 primary school children and carried out more than 170 interviews of parents and children. After the age of 10 or 11 children’s attitudes towards science often start to decline, suggesting that there is a critical period in which schools and parents can do much to educate the next generation of the options available to them. [emphasis mine]

As for the report ‘Ten Science Facts and Fictions’, you may be in for a surprise if you’re expecting a standard academic study. It’s very colourful and illustrated with cartoons; each fact/fiction has its own page and only one; it summarizes and aggregates other research; and the whole report is 16 pp.  It’s easy reading and the reference notes mean you can follow up and read the research studies yourself.

On a note related to the conclusions made the ASPIRES researchers, I came across a Jan. 27, 2012 news item on Medical Xpress about a US study where researchers attempted an intervention designed to encourage more teens to study science,

In a different intervention study aimed at changing teen behavior in math and science, researchers did not target the students themselves but rather their parents. The goal was to increase students’ interest in taking courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). “We focus on the potential role of parents in motivating their teens to take more STEM courses, because we feel that they have been an untapped resource,” says Judith Harackiewicz of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. [emphasis mine]

The participants consisted of 188 U.S. high school students and their parents from the longitudinal Wisconsin Study of Families and Work. Harackiewicz and her colleague Janet Hyde found that a relatively simple intervention aimed at parents – two brochures mailed to parents and a website that all highlight the usefulness of STEM courses – led their children to take on average nearly one semester more of science and mathematics in the last two years of high school, compared with the control group. “Our indirect intervention,” funded by the National Science Foundation, “changed the way that parents interacted with their teens, leading to a significant and important change in their teens’ course-taking behavior,” Harackiewicz says.

Given Dr. David Kent’s panel at the 2011 Canadian Science Policy Conference (David’s interview about the panel is in my Oct. 24, 2011 posting) where he noted we have too many science graduates and not enough jobs, I’m wondering if we’re going to see a Canadian effort to encourage more study in STEM subjects. It wouldn’t surprise me; I have seen policy disconnects before. For example, there’s a big effort to get more children and teens to study science while graduate students from the universities have difficulty finding employment because the policy didn’t take the end result (the sector [e.g. universities] that needed people [science professors] when the policy was instituted had already started to shrink and 10 years later no one needs these graduates) into account.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in science policy | 1 Comment »

A nanocrystalline solar cell; nano haiku; and more courtesy of the NISE Net

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

June’s Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network newsletter features a 2009 video, Nanotechnology brings us Delicious Nanocrystalline solar cells,  which was entered for the American Chemical Society’s 2009 Nanotation Nanotube contest.Who knew you could use donuts and tea to make a solar cell?

ETA June 20, 2011: Dexter Johnson in a June 17, 2011 posting on his Nanoclast blog points out that the science in this video is not of the best calibre.

On another note entirely, an April 22, 2010 posting from Clark Miller on the NISE Net blog focuses on bio-non-bio interfaces. Excerpted from Miller’s posting,

What would it mean if biological and non-biological systems were not just fully connectable but fully interchangeable? That’s one of the questions that nanotechnology poses for us. More than any other field of scientific inquiry, nanotechnology operates at the basic scales of biology. DNA, for example, has a rough width of 2.5 nm. Viruses are roughly 20 to 250 nm. A bacteria is roughly 1000 nm. So, nanotechnology spans from the scale of individual biological molecules through the scale of simple biological systems to the scale of living cells.

Miller certainly poses an interesting question especially in light of work which could conceivably lead (or perhaps already has led) to interchangeable biological and nonbiological systems,

For example, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a new sensor for viruses that works through a combination of nanotechnology elements. The base of the sensor is a flat basin filled with liquid crystals (these are crystal molecules that behave like a liquid and form the core materials used in computer and flat-screen TVs). Within the basin are a series of parallel ridges approximately 5 nm on each side. These ridges help orient the liquid crystals so that they line up in parallel to the ridges and therefore exhibit a constant color across the entire basin. Finally, set into the ridges are a series of antibody particles for a specific virus. Once built, the sensor is exposed to material that might contain the virus in question. If the virus is present, it will bind to the antibody and, when it does, disturb the arrangement of the liquid crystals. When the liquid crystals are disturbed, the sensor changes color, signaling a positive match.

I haven’t seen any public engagement exercises that raise the issue in quite that way. At this point, it seems to be the province of science fiction.

Before I finish this posting with the June 2011 Nano Haiku, I’ll give you a little information about the article by Anne Trafton that inspired it, Finding a needle in a haystack: New sensor developed by MIT chemical engineers can detect tiny traces of explosives,

MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] researchers have created a new detector so sensitive it can pick up a single molecule of an explosive such as TNT.

To create the sensors, chemical engineers led by Michael Strano coated carbon nanotubes — hollow, one-atom-thick cylinders made of pure carbon — with protein fragments normally found in bee venom. This is the first time those proteins have been shown to react to explosives, specifically a class known as nitro-aromatic compounds that includes TNT.

And now the Nano Haiku,

Bee venom and nanotubes
Raise nano red flags
For super small explosives

by Vrylena Olney of the Museum of Science, Boston.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in energy, medicine, military, nanotechnology, poetry | No Comments »

« Older Entries