Talking to the Media

A few weeks ago I woke to a media report that Optus customers had no landline, or mobile services. So I sent a message to the local ABC Canberra station to say I was available to talk. There was a text back within a minute to say could I speak on air in fifteen minutes. I have been on the Australian National University's list of experts to speak to the media for more than a decade, so this was a routine interview. But other ABC stations who monitor their own media, and rivals heard this, and I spent the next week talking to radio, and TV journalists (and ending up in print). 

The Australian Science Media Centre, which ANU subscribes to, sent out a comment from me:

"The Optus outage is most likely a regular software upgrade gone wrong. The problem is too widespread to be due to a cable break or equipment failure. " 

When it proved my diagnosis of the problem was correct featured me as their expert of the week. The result was mentions in 970 radio segments, 753 online articles, 169 on TV, and 22 in print. This is not as impressive as it looks, as many are local stations of the same network (each ABC local radio station is counted separately, when carrying the same item, for example).

The key to speaking to the media as an "expert" is not saying more than you know. In this case there was a national outage at Optus, effecting a large range of services. So I speculated it was due to a software upgrade in the routers (the specialized computers which send data around Optus' network). This turned out to be the case. I was asked if Optus could have had a backup, telecommunications but explained that because this was likely a problem with software, that would not have helped.

Another part is providing explanations which the public can understand. Technical jargon just confuses. It also helps to provide something the public can do. In this case I suggested if you have multiple phones at home have them on different networks (although this may cost more):

"This is a reminder to have backups for essential services. Even if you have another Internet connection, if you are using two-factor authentication to your bank, or employer, you will not be able to get the code on your phone to log in. If you buy a spare SIM card, check it is not using the same network as your usual telco, and your phone is not locked to them."

Also to keep the university happy it is important to ensure the interviewer mentions the name of the institution. The expert is not there to plug the university, I do like to tie the topic back to research, and education, where relevant:

"At the Australian National University, we are completing grading of the final assignment for computing students, before they graduate. The last thing they do is spend a year working in a team, building and testing, a real system for a real client. This is the ANU Techlauncher Program. An important part of this is to have more than one set of eyes on each line of code, and have students realize that failures of systems have real-world consequences for people."

If you are an academic, don't just pick up the phone and start talking to the media. First do the the media training offered by your media unit. Check on the rules for speaking publicly with your media unit. Get yourself added to the experts list. 

The Scientific Paper Is Dead: LONG LIVE THE SCIENTIFIC PAPER!

James Somers argues that the scientific paper, developed as early as 1600, enabled our modern age but is now obsolete. He envisions the "paper" being replaced by something  more interactive ("The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete", The Atlantic, April 2018 ). However, interaction doesn't render the paper obsolete and is not new technology. In 1989 an interactive technology was developed specifically to enhance scientific communication, it came to be known as The World Wide Web. In "Information Management: A Proposal", Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

    "This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system."

Since then it seems the Web has been used for just about everything except scientific communication. But there have been some advances. There are social media-like forums for academia and in some fields data and working is published electronically, along with final results.

I expect we will continue to have scientific papers, but with hypertext links to the workings which lead to the paper and to where new work is being done. The resulting "papers" can be backward compatible, so if you print one out it looks like a "paper".

However, the purpose of a scientific paper needs to be kept in mind. Scientific papers are written by scientists for other scientists, they are not for the general public. Writing about science for the general public is, in itself, a specialist discipline and requires skills most scientists don't have and don't need.

However, we do need to train scientists, and other academics, in how to use the technology for communicating with their peers. I took part in a workshop recently on how to do the research to create a major new Australian export industry. There were to be several dozen researchers involved in multiple overlapping multidisciplinary projects spread across the country. The first issue was, inevitably, about funding. But the next question was which on-line tools were we to use for collaboration.

Software and engineering students now get trained to use tools to help with projects and which will, as a byproduct, produce documentation and reports. One of the first steps for a new student team is which tools to use. There is a lively discussion in tutorials between teams on the features of the different tools. But I doubt that many other STEM students do and few non-STEM.

Communicating a Big Idea in Science

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where ABC science journalist Robyn Williams is telling scientists how to communicate with the media. He mentioned the value of the Australian Science Media Centre (AusSMC) in Adelaide, which helps scientists contact journalists.