BAMOS Vol 29 No.4 2016

AMOS

AustralianMeteorological & OceanographicSociety

Communicating Science: Lessons for Scientists, Forecasters, Educators, and Students Keynote address by Professor David Schultz at the AMOS 2015 National Conference

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society Vol 29, No. 4, 2016 ISSN 2206-6063

Contents Introduction....................................................................................................................................................................76 Three rules.......................................................................................................................................................................76 Scientists are popular, but our credibility suffers...........................................................................................................76 Scientists communicating with new media..................................................................................................................77 Scientists communicating with other scientists............................................................................................................77 Rejection rates in journals publishing atmospheric science..........................................................................................78 Is peer review worth it?..................................................................................................................................................78 Navigating peer review..................................................................................................................................................79 Five tips for improving your writing...............................................................................................................................80 Scientists communicating with other disciplines..........................................................................................................80 Changing communication styles....................................................................................................................................81 Communicating the forecast..........................................................................................................................................81 Changes in education.....................................................................................................................................................82 Summary........................................................................................................................................................................83 References.......................................................................................................................................................................84

ISSN 1035-6576 Main cover picture: Professor David Schultz gives the keynote address at the AMOS 2015 National Conference in Brisbane.

Image: Todd Lane.

Unless specifically stated to the contrary, views expressed in the Bulletin are the personal views of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Society or any other organisation or institution to which the author(s) may be affiliated.

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 28 page 75

Special feature

Communicating Science: Lessons for Scientists, Forecasters, Educators, and Students Text of keynote at the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) National Conference, Brisbane, 15 July 2015 Professor David M. Schultz Centre for Atmospheric Science, School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

INTRODUCTION

THREE RULES

I am honored to be invited to your annual meeting to give this talk. Thanks to the organisers who asked me to come down to Australia for my first-ever visit to the Southern Hemisphere. Given the diversity of the audience, the purpose of my talk is to say how communication has changed—and is changing—and how it will affect you.

Also, I hope that students and early-career researchers will come away with some useful tips about improving their communication skills, but also some perspective of the kind of world that we are moving into.

Let me begin with my three rules that I give in my writing classes. You might change the word “write” to the more generic “communicate” in these rules because they are equally applicable to other forms of communication such as giving oral presentations.

In some ways, I am embarrassed to be giving this presentation. Ever since the publication of Eloquent Science (Schultz 2009), I feel like I have become the unelected poster boy for communication in science. I thought the book would be useful, but I did not know it would be as successful as it has been. In five years, we have sold out of the original print run of 3,500 copies and entered a second printing. There is talk of a second edition, and it is even being translated into Chinese. Even if all I am ever remembered for was having written that book, I would have been satisfied with my career.

Yet, I was not confident that I would have the career that I did. As I describe in the preface, I had to overcome difficulties in my ability to write as early as 12 years old.

Despite doing well as an undergraduate, I struggled initially in graduate school, and it was not clear whether I would even get to pursue a Ph.D. Writing up the paper that would come from my Ph.D. (Schultz et al. 1998), one of my advisors threatened to write it for me because he was not sure I could deliver on his expectations. Now, 20 years later and on the other side of the red pen, my own students must suffer immensely trying to live up to my high expectations. So, let me reach out to the students in the audience who are struggling to write the paper that their advisors want. Experience counts for a lot in science, and you have much to learn. So please, listen to your advisors. Your efforts are not in vain, and worthwhile research often must struggle to be birthed. Do not give up.

I am glad that I didn’t.

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First, you can be taught to be a better writer. I have already mentioned my own struggles. In addition, I once worked with a student who had been diagnosed with dyslexia. She ended up receiving a first-class degree on her dissertation and publishing her research. There is nothing about writing that cannot be taught, and—with practice—mastered.

Second, writing improves your thinking. I often counsel people that the science is not done until it is written up.

How many of us have sat down to write a paper based on the ideas in our head, only to change the work, if not the principal conclusions, by the time the paper is done?

That explains why it is essential to write up your science.

Although the experiments may be completed, the analysis and explaining the results to someone else—or as I like to say, teaching—is not done. That’s why I encourage students to start writing their dissertations sooner than later. The brain needs time to subconsciously chew on these new ideas and synthesize them. Starting writing earlier is an intellectual exercise that pays off.

Now, onto the third rule. If you can master this one, you will have made a crucial transition in your ability to communicate to others. You write for your audience, not for yourself. Yes, that paper may be a requirement of the grant that you were given. That dissertation may be your ticket to a fulfilling job in industry. But, why should the audience care about your writing? If you do not internalise this message that you are writing to communicate your ideas to someone else, then you will fail. Now this last point is the unofficial theme of this talk: Respect your audience.

SCIENTISTS ARE POPULAR, BUT OUR CREDIBILITY SUFFERS When we think of audience, the biggest audience for science is the general public. It seems the popularity of

Special feature science in society has never been higher. The Big Bang Theory, a show about scientists and with the history of the universe as a theme song, is one of the most popular shows on TV. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the creator of Family Guy and Ted 2 rebooted Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on the most antiscience TV network in the United States. And, it’s never been cooler to wear clothes proclaiming yourself a nerd or geek—geek chic.

Despite this popularity, our credibility is in decline. On the subject of climate change, evolution, and vaccinations, for just three examples, the gap between the views of the public and of scientists can be quite far apart (Funk and Rainie 2015). It seems the Merchants of Doubt have been successful in eroding the public’s confidence in us, and our rebuttals have not been convincing.

We do not need to rely on the rich and powerful to communicate to the public. The internet has meant that we have opportunities to take our message directly to them.

If we are now going to show more of the scientific process online and publically, we need to educate the public about science, what it means to be a scientist, and how the scientific process works. We need to educate the public that science works properly when we test hypotheses, propose explanations, subject these proposed explanations to peer review, and then thoroughly test the results by independent researchers. We need to demonstrate to the public that science is not all known at any given time, that it evolves over time, and that the literature is not necessarily the truth. We need to demonstrate that disagreements are healthy, that the rules of how science works are fixed, and that peer review and time often sort out disagreements.

We should also discuss the types of questions that science can answer and those that it cannot.

Further to this point about communicating to the public, one exercise that I do with our first-year Ph.D. students is to pretend they are at a garden party and their mother introduces them to one of her old friends (not a scientist) and asks them to describe what they are doing at the University of Manchester. I am always surprised at how many students start going off about measuring aerosol particle composition using a mass spectrometer without even simply saying that they are studying how clouds form. Some students get the point right away, but others struggle. Again, it is about knowing your audience.

SCIENTISTS COMMUNICATING WITH NEW MEDIA The internet has given us great opportunities to communicate science, but can we quantify how our research has had an impact? Altmetrics is a new set of measures that relate to the impact an article has had on social media. Many journals are now making altmetrics available on the article’s web page. So, news stories, tweets, Facebook pages, and readers on Mendeley can be incorporated into these metrics.

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To assist access to these articles and thus raise the altmetrics on articles, there are two requests that I would like to make. First is a request to publishers, journalists, bloggers and tweeters: include hot links to the articles in question in your story. Doing so allows readers to access the original articles being discussed, and gives everyone the opportunity to see the original work.

My second request is to authors. How many times have you been at home looking for a journal article and have seen a page that asks for money to download the article?

These articles are behind a paywall and are available to subscribers only. Why $35 to $40? Where did this number come from? In the days when a song can be bought online for $1 and an ebook can be bought for less than $10, why should a scientific article cost $35?

Making scientific publications freely available to the public is part of a growing trend called open access, the movement by which the costs of publishing a scientific journal article are borne by the person doing the research.

Although it makes sense in the physical sciences where many publications are supported by research grants, the issue is more complex for the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Indeed, when the American Meteorological Society created the niche journal Weather, Climate and Society, it came along with an implicit recognition that social scientists wanting to publish in there would have to be subsidised.

Nevertheless, a growing number of journals are entirely open access, and depending on your funding you can choose to make your articles open access even if the journal itself is not entirely open access. Even if you do not have grant money, you can usually post the original accepted Word or PDF document online on your web page without violating copyright. Doing so means that taxpayers who likely have already paid for your research through grants and salaries do not need to cough up additional fees to access the results of that work. So, if you are not already on the open-access bandwagon, I urge you to look into it and make all your articles open access, if possible.

SCIENTISTS COMMUNICATING WITH OTHER SCIENTISTS Lessons that we learn from improving our communication with the public can also improve the way we communicate with other scientists. What I hoped with Eloquent Science is that we could get away from the things that hampered our ability to communicate, and I could provide some commonsense guidance, even if it broke some of the old rules.

Eloquent Science has two origin stories. The first origin story is the Research Experience for Undergraduates program that is run in Oklahoma for ten undergraduates for ten weeks each summer (Gonzales-Espada and LaDue 2006). These were students who barely knew what scientific research was at the start. After an unsuccessful attempt at getting an English professor to teach our

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REJECTION RATES IN JOURNALS PUBLISHING ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE The second origin story for this book was when I assumed the role of Editor for Monthly Weather Review in 2004.

After a few months of doing the job and making decisions, I was appalled by how poorly written the manuscripts we received were. These were written by senior scientists at NCAR and established professors who were graduating Ph.Ds. I was pretty shocked. I later found out that we rejected 34% of the manuscripts we received, a number that has remained nearly constant over many years.

Wondering if Monthly Weather Review was unusual, I did what all good scientists do when faced with a question, I went out and collected data. I asked all the Chief Editors of journals that published atmospheric science what their rejection rates were. Some journals made their data available online, so I was able to amass quite a collection of data. All in all, 75% of the journals provided me their data, and allowed me to publish it (Schultz 2010a).

Here is the distribution of rejection rates for those 47 journals (Figure 1). You can see that Monthly Weather Review’s 34% rejection rate lies comfortably near the mean of the distribution of 38%. The range goes from 2% for one journal to 91% for Nature (which of course publishes more than just atmospheric science). Most of the journals lie between 25 and 60%.

Looking at a few of the notable members on this list (Table 2 in Schultz 2010a), there is little link between impact factor or prestige of the journal and the rejection rate.

Much of the variability in the rejection rates comes down to editorial philosophy. Take for instance, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, one of the highest impact factor journals in atmospheric science. Their Chief Editor told me at the time that their low rejection rate of 12% was due to their open editorial philosophy where they post the reviews and responses to the reviews online, and this was responsible for authors not willing to put their low-quality work online. I have since found out that payment for publication in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics occurs before the manuscript goes out for formal peer review.

Thus, because of the outlay of money—money that would Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 28 page 78

Rejection Rates for 47 Journals Publishing in the Atmospheric Sciences

8 7 6 Number of Journals

students about communicating science, I decided to teach this workshop myself. At the end of each summer, students would present their research in front of the Oklahoma weather community. As advisors, our hearts burst with pride on this day. Their presentations were better than most conference presentations by experienced scientists.

After six years of running this workshop and seeing the successful presentations at the end of the summer, I endured a particularly boring session at a national meeting, presented by the top researchers in the field. It was then I became convinced that the workshop I was delivering to these students needed to be heard amongst a wider community.

5 4 3 2 1 0

0

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

Rejection Rate (%) Figure 1. Histogram of rejection rates for 47 journals publishing in the atmospheric sciences (Figure 1 in Schultz 2010). be lost if the manuscript were rejected—some reviewers and editors are reluctant to reject marginal manuscripts, and encourage revision instead.

On the other end of the spectrum is Geophysical Research Letters, which has a 59% rejection rate. This rate is notable because Geophysical Research Letters has no category of major revisions; those manuscripts are rejected instead (Famiglietti 2007; Calais et al. 2010). This decision allows the journal to reset the clock on the editorial decision, enabling them to say that manuscripts are accepted rapidly after peer review, with no second round necessary. For both Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and Geophysical Research Letters, their different rejection rates are a byproduct of their different editorial philosophies.

Taking all these rejected manuscripts from all the journals (excluding Nature), more than 6,000 manuscripts were rejected in 2006. We know from a survey we did at Monthly Weather Review that the average reviewer takes 9.6 hours to perform a review, with all the combined efforts of the approximately 1,000 reviewers needed in one year amounting to an estimated value of 2.34 million US dollars (Golden and Schultz 2012). So, we are looking at a considerable cost to the science. One could ask the question,

“IS PEER REVIEW WORTH IT?” Peer review works well, but it is not perfect. Being a human endeavor, peer review has all the hallmarks of being human: imperfection, naivete, jealousy, anger, and sloth. Journals make both Type I and Type II errors in our decision making. What if we were to abolish peer review completely? No wasted time going through peer review.

Special feature Articles would be published upon receipt at the authors’ journal of choice. Or, we could break the shackles of corporate publishing—and the 30 to 40% profit margins of Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley (Morrison 2012)—and simply publish our articles on our web sites and list them on our CVs on equal par with our peer-reviewed articles.

Why not?

Every time I start thinking like this, I remember one of the most influential pieces of writing I have ever read about editorship. It was written by the Australian G. K. Batchelor —author of the classic textbook An Introduction to Fluid Mechanics, the founder of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and its editor for over 40 years. In 1981, on the journal’s 25th anniversary, he wrote a 25-page essay about his experiences entitled “Preoccupations of a journal editor” (Batchelor 1981). In there, Batchelor says this about rejection: “Papers of poor quality do more than waste printing and publishing resources; they mislead and confuse inexperienced readers, they waste and distract the attention of experienced scientists, and by their existence they lead future authors to be content with second rate work.”

After I read Batchelor, all returns to normal and I’m ready to reject low-quality papers again. Because, it is all about the next generation. I have will have done my job as an Editor, if I can protect my students from wading through 34% more literature with an uncertain level of quality.

That being said, when I am not rejecting manuscripts, serving the scientific publishing enterprise has been one of the most rewarding in my career. Writing reviews and making decisions on other papers is a form of selfimprovement. If anything helped me improve my own writing, it was being a reviewer writing 25 reviews a year or being an Editor making decisions on 80 manuscripts a year, while reading 180 reviews on these manuscripts.

It was trying to decide the fate of a manuscript where three reviewers have each recommended minor revisions, major revisions and rejection. Reviewing and editorship have accelerated my own ability to do and communicate science, argue fiercely and scientifically with reviewers and other authors, all the while still maintaining civility and professionalism. For early-career scientists who want to get involved, our journal and others are looking for new reviewers all the time. Please email the Chief Editor of

your favorite journal and volunteer. Do a good job, write thorough reviews, turn them in on time, and you will be on the Editor’s Nice-List. Enough Nice-List appearances and you may be asked to serve the journal in a more official capacity.

Lest you think that rejection is a major part of my job, it is not. Most authors and reviewers know how to play the game. They submit reasonable papers. Reviewers dutifully write their reviews and turn them in the majority of the time, and the authors do a great job at their revisions, and are truly appreciative of the input from the reviewers for making their manuscripts better. It is relatively rare that things break down and get ugly.

NAVIGATING PEER REVIEW So, how do you as an author navigate this world of peer review successfully? Here are four pieces of advice.

First, remember that peer review is not a democracy.

The Editor makes the decision, and the reviewers merely provide guidance to that decision. The Editor is charged with maintaining the quality of the journal, so decisions ultimately must lie with this person. The Editor knows who the reviewers are, who has the particular expertise, who wrote a disappointing slap-dash review, and who is being outrageous and hyperbolic. Trust that the Editor has a holistic perspective and a balanced demeanor to arrive at a sensible decision. They have information that you do not.

Second, treat the reviews as representative of opinions from the community. Although one bad review is easy to dismiss, what if this person represents a third or half of the community? If your manuscript were to be published as is, are the unresolved questions something that you want other readers asking the same questions of? Recognise that your manuscript can always be improved and that you may have not done as thorough a job in convincing the readers of your point. Is this low-quality published article something that you would be proud to put your name on for the rest of time?

Third, there are seven stages you will go through when receiving your reviews (Figure 2). Please do not contact the Editor until you are at least in stage 5. Be professional throughout the process. Even if a reviewer starts getting

Figure 2: The seven stages of emotions during manuscript revision (Schultz 2009, p. 244).

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Special feature hostile, remember that the best way to succeed is to rise above it.

Fourth, when you fail, get back out there and try again.

Have confidence in yourself and your science. We often welcome resubmissions of rejected manuscripts, and they do get published. If your science is good, do not give up on it. Work on it to improve it and communicate it better.

And, always remember, there is more than one fish in the sea. If your work is rejected but good, you will find a journal for it.

FIVE TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR WRITING Before I leave this section on writing and while we are talking about improving writing, let me give a quick list of five things that can improve your writing tomorrow (more tips are listed in Eloquent Science, chapters 8–10).

1. Avoid phrases that start with the unspecified it (e.g., “it is well known that”, “it is important that”, “it can be demonstrated that”). Usually you can omit these phrases or replace them with a single adverb without loss of information.

2. Do not be afraid to use first-person pronouns in some situations. Although you should probably avoid firstperson pronouns when describing rote scientific approach, use them when the specificity of who is doing the action improves understanding or sounds more natural.

DRAFT: “I performed the model simulations” BETTER: “Model simulations were performed” DRAFT: “The authors speculate that….”

BETTER: “We speculate that….”

3. Reuse words to maintain the coherence of the text. In elementary school, we were probably told that reusing words was wrong. In a scientific context, that precision in terminology is essential for clarity in communication. In this example, these two sentences are easier for the reader to follow when the word “disturbance” is reused.

“The life cycle of a Norwegian cyclone begins with a smallamplitude disturbance on the polar front. This…”

DRAFT: “perturbation consists of a cyclonic circulation...”

BETTER: “disturbance consists of a cyclonic circulation...”

4. Write precisely. Avoid what Nobel laureate Peter Medawar would describe as a “resounding banality.”

Rather than make vague or general statements, write Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 28 page 80

quantitatively. Tell the readers something that they may not know already.

DRAFT: “Tornadoes are violent storms occurring in the central United States.”

BETTER: “Over 1,200 tornadoes a year occur across the United States, with nearly 25% occurring over the Plains.

5. Write concisely. Google “words and phrases to avoid” and just peruse the links for an eye-opening experience that will dramatically change your writing. Look for words that can be eliminated.

WORDS AND PHRASES TO AVOID ALTERNATIVE

vs

CONCISE

a temperature of 30°C

30°C

despite the fact that

although

was found to be

was

the southeastern part of Victoria

southeastern Victoria

in the vicinity of thunderstorm activity

near thunderstorms

smaller in size

smaller

The bottom line is that we should not be afraid to use more natural language in our scientific writing. The days of stilted scientific prose must end. These steps are just the start to allow your papers to be more easily read by your colleagues, as well as by nonspecialists and nonscientists.

SCIENTISTS COMMUNICATING WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES What about speaking to other scientists in other disciplines to advance our field? I do not think I am exaggerating to say that the problems we need to address are getting more complicated and increasingly involve other disciplines: climate change, world population, energy. All require not only scientific solutions, but political, economic, and social solutions, as well. I am going to discuss two examples.

The first is the emphasis on research to operations and the gap between the two. This is not a new problem. CarlGustaf Rossby (1934), who strolled effortlessly between the operational and research meteorology worlds, said: “One of the greatest obstacles to the progress in meteorology is undoubtedly to be found in the wide gulf between the mathematical theory on one hand and the applied-science weather-map analysis and forecasting, on the other.”

This gap originates from what Steenburgh et al. (2013) call, the “profoundly different worldviews, which allow

Special feature forecasters and researchers to succeed within their individual communities by meeting the expectations of their colleagues and organizations”. For example, forecasters must work under the pressure of deadlines and the potentially deadly nature of rapidly developing severe weather, but with incomplete data and the imperfect understanding of a chaotic atmosphere. In contrast, researchers are less comfortable dealing with uncertainty, and generally have the luxury of time to test hypotheses and perform additional research to confirm or refute hypotheses. Thus, crossing the bridge for these two groups is difficult. Researchers may struggle to issue forecasts because of the lack of time available to fully address their questions, whereas forecasters have difficulty performing research because the intuition that works well for them on the forecast floor cannot be easily justified in formal publications. Given the need for forecasters and researchers to interact more closely, what are the ingredients of successful efforts to bridge the gap?

Steenburgh et al. (2013) identify one crucial ingredient, and six important ingredients to facilitate successful gapbridging.

The crucial ingredient is a champion or champions who can command respect from both forecasters and researchers. Without champions, especially those in the administration with supervisory or managerial powers, no way exists to enforce collaboration and distribute resources. The other six ingredients include: 1. Buy-in and commitment from both sides. A critical mass of participants willing to bridge the gap is needed to ensure success, especially for larger projects. Both forecasters and researchers must recognise that a certain amount of time must be spent educating the other group. Buy-in is also essential to overcome setbacks that may occur.

2. Grass-roots stimulation. Successful gap-bridging activities are rarely top-down efforts. Support for the day-to-day workings of the collaboration must occur among the people actually doing the collaboration.

Friendships and common social activities can strengthen these bonds.

3. Collocation. Although not essential in today’s highly connected world, sharing a common building and job responsibilities can be important to maintain focus on the project.

4. Time, resources, and incentives for collaboration.

Collaborations often require resources. Furthermore, these resources may not even be monetary; they may be relief from other job responsibilities to allow the interaction to occur. In my experience, getting the financially strapped forecasting agencies to release forecasters to participate in collaborative projects is often the limiting factor in enjoying greater collaborations between forecasters and researchers.

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5. Clearly defined priorities and goals. Each group must agree on a common set of goals for the project to ensure that each has reasonable expectations from the project. Defining achievable goals usually entails mapping the goals of the operational forecasters onto the capabilities of the researchers.

6. Incentives. Forecasters achieve recognition and job promotions through a different set of incentives than researchers do. Management must alter the reward structure for the participants. In case that is not possible, the champions may usually be more senior and receive satisfaction from seeing the collaboration thrive, not on achieving traditional rewards within their institutions.

Although all six of these ingredients are not needed in order for a gap-bridging effort to succeed, success is more likely with many of these ingredients in place.

CHANGING COMMUNICATION STYLES Successfully bridging the gap goes beyond just getting groups in the same room. Bridging the gap—whether between different disciplines, practitioners, or scientists and decision makers­­­ —usually requires understanding what the person sitting on the other side of the table means. Thus, improved communication is also essential.

Scientists need to remember to ditch the jargon and acronym-filled world that we are accustomed to. If a group of scientists were to talk to a decision-maker using the technical language they use among themselves, the decision-maker would surely not understand. Doing so does not necessarily mean dumbing down the content for the audience, but remembering three things.

First, find out what the concerns of your audience are, and make sure you address them.

Second, present the material at a level that your audience can understand. Technical words are not off-limits, but if you need to introduce one, then define it in plain language before using it.

Third, consider clever analogies, demonstrations, stories, or examples that you can use to help explain difficult concepts.

As a final note, remember that not all presentations require PowerPoint. Sometimes a well-prepared talk delivered from a set of notes, along with a handout of the main points and a figure or two is enough, especially if the presentation is quite short.

COMMUNICATING THE FORECAST My second example is a different kind of bridging the gap.

What would you do if the Bureau of Meteorology issued the following forecast?

Special feature “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks…perhaps longer. At least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. Persons…pets…and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death. Power outages will last for weeks. Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.”

In fact, this was an actual forecast issued by the U.S. National Weather Service one day before landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Despite the sternest warning ever issued by the NWS, at least 1,833 people died. Why did this have to happen?

Disaster plans had been written for these kinds of scenarios.

Drills had been conducted by agencies. The reason was because people (including those in government) did not know how to respond, delayed their decision, or chose not to respond. To address this issue, forecasters need to involve the end-users of the forecast, and lubricating this relationship are social scientists: those who can improve the language of forecasts in such dire situations, those who can say who are the most vulnerable to certain disasters, and those who can get decision makers to act in difficult situations. These are the people that we need to engage, if we wish our forecasts to not only be accurate, but be heard, understood, and acted upon.

Prof. Eve Gruntfest at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, attempted to bridge this gap between scientists and social scientists through the Weather and Society Integrated Studies (WAS*IS) movement. WAS*IS has produced over three hundred graduates over a tenyear period, including myself in the inaugural class. This effort has done much to raise the awareness of the need for social scientists and Earth scientists to engage. The successes of the WAS*IS movement are numerous, but perhaps best epitomised by the U.S. National Weather Service hiring a social scientist within the Strategic Planning and Policy Office to help involve these other disciplines in the business of forecasting. So, do not be afraid to reach out to those who can help improve the effectiveness of the forecast. The answer to some of our problems in communication may lie in other disciplines.

CHANGES IN EDUCATION Although I love talking about being an Editor and working with forecasters, in my day job, I teach. So, allow me to say something for the educators out there. I did a lot of teaching as a graduate student in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When I went into a research lab, I did not do much teaching until I took up my job as a professor at the University of Helsinki in 2006. I taught courses in communication skills (Schultz 2010b), numerical weather forecasting, and convective storms, mostly with interactive courses that involved the students working together on projects and in-class exercises. But, in those ten years of being in a research lab, the PowerPoint era of teaching started and left me behind. When I started Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 28 page 82

teaching at Manchester in 2010, the students loved that I spoke slowly and wrote all my notes on the chalkboard.

That was an advantage that I maintained over those who had already adopted PowerPoint years before. Within two years, however, the new cohorts of students had turned on me. Handwritten notes on the chalkboard were no longer what they wanted from me. They wanted the PowerPoint notes to take home with them after the lecture, even if they were less complete and allowed me to cover a lot more material in a superficial way.

It was this transition over such a short period of time that forced me to re-evaluate my teaching and reflect on what we teachers were doing to the students. Standing in front of a class plowing through PowerPoint lectures seemed less satisfying­—less like teaching and more like giving a research seminar. Indeed, I wondered if the ease in which others adopted PowerPoint in their lectures was because of their comfort in preparing their lectures in the same way as a seminar.

Moreover, what did it say about the students? Were they actually taking notes during a PowerPoint lecture, or were they sitting there passively waiting for the file to be available after lecture? Was a PowerPoint lecture a better learning experience for them?

In addition to this concern, let me raise several other dichotomies from my experience: 1. At the same time as students are more comfortable with computers and technology, they are losing skills in programming.

2. At the same time as students are more internet savvy, they are losing the ability to interpret and critique what they read.

3. At the same time as students have access to more information, they are searching through fewer sources and reading fewer primary sources, relying on Wikipedia and the like.

The period of time that I taught interactive courses in Helsinki convinced me that we could do better in helping students. For these last two issues, I worked with Richard Waller at Keele University to develop training material for students and instructors on what is called information literacy skills (Waller and Schultz 2013, 2015). Much of the material that I teach first-year students derives from these documents. Secondary-school teachers who I have talked to about this content have lamented that they would like to incorporate more writing exercises and critical thinking skills into the classroom, but are inundated with standardised tests that require them to “teach to the test”.

Is this why students have lost critical thinking skills?

These are perhaps larger problems than any one individual teacher can address. So, despite all the concerns about how the internet has negatively impacted learning and the larger context in which the government is changing

Special feature education, let me argue how internet-based education is making a positive difference.

First, the internet has made all kinds of educational and research resources available online. The importance of undergraduate research to motivating student learning was one of the lessons that I took away from our Research Experience for Undergraduates program in Oklahoma.

I believe that we have the potential to enrich our educational experiences for students through developing resources and accompanying exercises to involve students in enquiry-based learning. We all are probably already using online tools to access and analyze datasets. Think of the University of Wyoming soundings, NOAA’s reanalysis compositing site, or HYSPLIT trajectories. Get your students involved in using these datasets and interpreting the data for themselves, outside of book learning (e.g., Schultz et al. 2013).

In this vein, I developed and now teach a MOOC (massive open online course) called Our Earth: Its Climate, History and Processes on Coursera.org that has reached nearly 10,000 students from 159 countries. This course draws upon video lectures, recorded interviews, and some interactive exercises to teach online learners a sampling of the same Earth science content that I teach to our firstyear Manchester students. I used some of the funding for this course to develop a web-based tool to allow students to explore climate model output, through a collaboration with modeler Jonathan Fairman and eLearning Team members Stuart Anderson and Sharon Gardner.

Imagine the ability to build your own worlds by selecting various planetary characteristics: distance from the Sun, tilt of the axis, location of continents, oceans and mountains, atmospheric composition, etc. You would enter these characteristics on a web page, and then, after pushing the “Go” button, a climate model would run in the background and produce the climate on that world for you. Although producing such an instantaneous simulation of climate is not possible due to the speed of today’s computers, we nonetheless persisted with our vision and pre-selected 50 different simulations. The result is Build Your Own Earth (http://www.buildyourownearth. com).

Three types of simulations are performed: simulations using the modern-day Earth vegetation and topography but varying greenhouse gas forcing, solar constant, and orbital parameters, idealized simulations (e.g., aquaplanet, terraplanet, and ice planet), and palaeoclimate simulations ranging from the Last Glacial Maximum 21,000 years ago to the Ediacaran 600 million years ago. Along with this tool, we have built exercises for the students to explore the output, but without defining the assignment too prescriptively. We have made this tool freely available online for anyone to use for teaching or research.

Second, as a result of the availability of online teaching resources, classroom teaching has been invigorated.

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Regardless of what you think about the University of Adelaide’s decision to eliminate lectures1, it forces us to engage in a dialog about the most effective learning experience for students. Indeed, my online course got me thinking about incorporating more interactive teaching in the physical course that I teach at Manchester in the fall semester, despite the course being nearly 100 students.

Thus, I believe these changes happening in the digital world encourage instructors to reflect on the personal side of teaching: what works, how to engage students better, and having a dialog with the academic community about placing a greater emphasis on high-quality and innovative teaching.

SUMMARY I have taken you on a tour of some of the things that I have been thinking about with regard to communicating and teaching science. To conclude, I want to circle back to where we started from: guidance about writing (again, which could be taken to mean communication more broadly). This guidance comes from the American writer and satirist Kurt Vonnegut (1980), the brother of atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut who discovered that silver iodide could seed clouds: 1. Find a subject you care about. I hope that you find or will find science a satisfying career, because it really is a whole lot of fun.

2. Do not ramble, though. Keep it short.

3. Keep it simple. Explain your science so that your audience understands it.

4. Have the guts to cut. Never be afraid to improve your own writing through strict and careful editing.

5. Sound like yourself. Develop a style that is your very own.

6. Say what you mean to say. Write precisely and with great care. You must justify what you have written with supporting evidence.

7. Pity the readers. We are all too busy now to read the growing amount of literature. Remember that when you write a paper, you are forcing at least three or four people (the editor and the reviewers) to read it. Given that it takes almost ten hours on average for each one of them to do so, you are taking up a lot of someone else’s time. Pity them, and work hard to ensure that you deliver only your best.

Again, thank you very much for inviting me, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.

1 Since delivering this talk, Prof. Murray Hamilton of the University of Adelaide informs me that the Vice-Chancellor has since walked back this statement within the internal Staff News.

Special feature REFERENCES Batchelor, G. K., 1981: Preoccupations of a journal editor.

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Calais, E., N. Diffenbaugh, P. D’Odorico, R. Harris, W. Knorr, B. Lavraud, A. Mueller, W. Peterson, E. Rignot, M. Srokosz, P. Strutton, G. Tyndall, M. Wysession, and P. Williams, 2010: Geophysical Research Letters: New policies improve top-cited geophysics journal. Eos, 91, 337.

Famiglietti, J. S., 2007: Geophysical Research Letters: New policies and features for AGU’s top-cited journal. Eos, 88, 537.

Funk, C., and L. Rainie, 2015: Public and scientists’ views on science and society. http://www.pewinternet. org/2015/01/29/public-and-scientists-views-on-scienceand-society/, accessed 3 August 2015.

Golden, M., and D. M. Schultz, 2012: Quantifying the volunteer effort of scientific peer reviewing. Bull. Amer.

Meteor. Soc., 93, 337–345.

Gonzales-Espada, W. J., and D. S. LaDue, 2006: Evaluation of the impact of the NWC REU program compared with other undergraduate research experiences. J. Geoscience Education, 54, 541–549.

Morrison, H., 2012: The enormous profits of STM scholarly publishers. http://poeticeconomics.blogspot. co.uk/2012/01/enormous-profits-of-stm-scholarly.html, accessed 3 August 2015.

Rossby, C.-G., 1934: Comments on meteorological research. J. Aeronaut. Sci., 1, 32–34.

Schultz, D. M., 2009: Eloquent Science: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Better Writer, Speaker, and Atmospheric Scientist. American Meteorological Society, 412 pp.

Schultz, D. M., 2010a: Rejection rates for journals publishing in the atmospheric sciences. Bull. Amer.

Meteor. Soc., 91, 231–243.

Schultz, D. M., 2010b: A university laboratory course to improve scientific communication skills. Bull. Amer.

Meteor. Soc., 91, 1259–1266, ES25–ES34.

Schultz, D. M., D. Keyser, and L. F. Bosart, 1998: The effect of large-scale flow on low-level frontal structure and evolution in midlatitude cyclones. Mon. Wea. Rev., 126, 1767–1791.

Schultz, D. M., S. Anderson, and R. Seo-Zindy, 2013: Engaging Earth and environmental-science undergraduates through weather discussions and an eLearning weather forecasting contest. J. Sci. Educ.

Technol., 22, 278–286.

Steenburgh, W. J., D. M. Schultz, B. J. Snyder, and M. P. Meyers, 2013: Bridging the gap between operations and research to improve weather prediction in mountainous regions. Mountain Weather Research and Forecasting: Recent Progress and Current Challenges, F. Katopodes Chow, S. F. J. De Wekker, and B. J. Snyder, Eds., Springer, 693–716.

Vonnegut, K., 1980: How to write with style. IEEE Trans.

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Waller, R., and D. M. Schultz, 2013: How to succeed at university in GEES disciplines: Using online data for independent research. GEES, Higher Education Academy, ISBN/ISSN: 9781907207938, https://www.heacademy. ac.uk/how-succeed-university-gees-disciplines.

Waller, R., and D. M. Schultz, 2015: How to succeed at university in GEES disciplines: Enhancing your information literacy skills. GEES, Higher Education Academy, https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resource/howsucceed-university-gees-disciplines.

2016/17 Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society ISSN 1035-6576

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