Science TV Research Articles

The Role and Development of Popular Science TV Programs During Times of MilitaryActions

The article explores the presence of popular science programs in the Ukrainian television media market, specifically on the television broadcasting of nationwide TV channels in Ukraine. Popular science content is an important aspect of social life, particularly as a means of distraction from news about military actions. Additionally, projects of this content indicate the country's prospects in technological development on the global stage. Television should serve as one of the propagators of scientific ideas. The goal of this research is to characterize the presence of popular science programs on nationwide TV channels. The method used is content analysis of the programming grids of 32 nationwide TV channels. Their television programs, as well as websites and YouTube pages, were examined. Results: Out of the 32 channels, only 5 transmit popular science programs. Among them, 4 channels produce their own content (Ми-Україна, Enter фільм, Піксель TV, 5 канал), while one, Мега, broadcasts mainly foreign-produced programs with a focus on natural sciences. Among the 4 channels with their own popular science content, 3 broadcasting programs of historical nature, and Піксель TV produces a project for children about chemical experiments. Conclusions: These results indicate an under-representation in this niche; the Ukrainian television media market lacks popular science programs. UA:Перший, as a public broadcaster, which should actively develop popular science television in Ukraine according to its status and mandate, has ceased the production of such content. Some channels are developing historical content; however, other scientific fields are almost absent from Ukrainian television. Considering the results of the content analysis, there is a need to create a market for popular science television in Ukraine in line with societal demands.

Scientific evidence/uncertainty (Science and Health Communication)

Scientific evidence/uncertainty (Science and Health Communication)

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ПРИМЕНЕНИЯ МЕТОДА САЙНСТЕЙНМЕНТА (SCIENCETAINMENT)В НАУЧНО-ПОПУЛЯРНОЙ ЖУРНАЛИСТИКЕ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ПРОГРАММ ТЕЛЕКАНАЛА «НАУКА»)

The article is devoted to identifying the using features of the sciencetainment method in Russian popular science TV programs. Currently, the method is actively used on television to attract the attention of viewers and implement several functions of journalism at once – the enlightenment and recreational ones. The study presents the characteristics of sciencetainment as a method of television journalism, describes causes for such a content to be in demand, identifies signs of the presence of sciencetainment in popular science TV projects, defines the advantages and disadvantages of using that method.

Russian media about medical innovations and technologies

The current state of demand for medical information in the media has a high practical significance for the mass audience. Medicine is a science-intensive, rapidly developing field. In this regard, it is necessary to systematically inform the public about the achievements of medicine - in science, technology and industry, explaining the essence and possible consequences of a scientific discovery, popularizing methods of treatment of a particular disease, introducing society to innovative technological processes in the medical field, achievements and developments of the medical and pharmaceutical industry. The paper reviews the experience of media coverage of medical issues in the aspect of familiarity with innovations and technologies in the context of historical development both in our country and abroad. It also describes the presentation of medical topics in modern media - in periodicals, on radio, on television - in popular science programs or TV movies, in electronic sources. In addition, the article analyzes the genre diversity of the presentation of medical topics. The paper provides information about the media coverage of the main directions of the national project "Health" and its innovative directions.

Does interest have an expiration date? An analysis of students’ questions as resources for context-based learning

ABSTRACTContext-based approaches can bridge the gap between abstract, difficult science concepts and the world students live in. However, the relevance of specific contexts to different groups of learners, and its stability over time, have not been extensively explored. This study used four datasets, collected in different formal and informal settings, to examine which types of contexts could capture the interest of many students and remain so for many years. In the formal setting, responses to closed-ended questionnaires in which 4–12th graders indicated their interest in studying the answers to science questions were compared. Over 700 questionnaires collected in 2007 were compared to over 1600 questionnaires collected in 2016. To document the stability of children’s interest in informal science learning settings we compared over 1600 science questions sent to a TV science show in 2004 with over 7000 science questions submitted to a commercial exhibition in 2014. Although there were some differences across ages, students’ interest in science remained relatively stable over the 10 years. In the formal setting, this similarity was reflected in the significant linear relationship between the two databases (r = 0.917) with regard to the questions students found interesting. In the informal setting, there was a striking similarity in the proportions of spontaneous questions in biology, astrophysics, Earth Science and chemistry. Based on the findings of this study and the literature we recommended, frequently asked questions are a valuable resource for context-based teaching which can serve to identify contexts that enhance the relevance of science in students’ lives.

Britain’s nuclear secrets: inside Sellafield

Lying on the remote north west coast of England, Sellafield is one of the most secret places in UK, and even one of the most controversial nuclear fuel reprocessing and nuclear decommissioning sites in Britain. The film director Tim Usborne let us enter into the world's first nuclear power station, revealing Britain's attempts to harness the almost limitless power of the atom. It is precisely the simplicity and the scientific rigor used in the film to speak of nuclear, which led this documentary to win the Physics Prize supported by the European Physical Society at the European Science TV and New Media Festival and Awards 2016.

Spreading Knowledge and Wonder

“To generate knowledge and not disseminate it, that to me just doesn’t make sense. It’s like writing music and never playing it.”Fans of TV science programs were likely captivated by the documentary about human evolution that premiered on PBS stations in 2014. “Your Inner Fish” provided a guided tour of the human body and where its many features came from—color vision and brain anatomy from primates, teeth and skin and hair from ancient reptiles, necks and fingers and eyes from primordial fish. The three-part series combined time-tested nature documentary footage with animated versions of long-extinct creatures worthy of any modern science fiction movie.

LEGO Dimensions meets Doctor Who: Transbranding and New Dimensions of Transmedia Storytelling?

This article explores how the ‘toys-to-life’ videogame LEGO Dimensions (WarnerBros. Interactive Entertainment/Traveller’s Tales/The LEGO Group, 2015) mashes upmany different franchise storyworlds and brands. Specifically, I focus on how DoctorWho (BBC, 1963—), the British TV science fiction series, is licensed and transmediallyengaged with in Dimensions. I consider how the transbranding of LEGO Dimensionsappears to co-opt children’s “transgressive play” (Nørgård and Toft-Nielsen, 2014)by combining intellectual properties, but actually continues to operate according tologics of shared corporate ownership where many of the combined storyworlds areultimately owned by Time Warner (placing Dimensions in competition with Disney’sown ‘toys-to-life’ game). Considering what value might accrue to the brand of DoctorWho by participating in LEGO Dimensions, I identify this as a particular example of“What If?” transmedia (Mittell, 2015), arguing that LEGO Dimensions’ Doctor Whonevertheless fluctuates in terms of its brand (in)authenticity. The Starter Pack remainscloser to LEGO Games’/Traveller’s Tales’ established format, subordinating Who, whilstthe separate Level Pack engages more precisely with Doctor Who’s history, albeit stilldisplaying some notable divergences from the TV series (Booth, 2015). Although LEGODimensions challenges influential theories of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2006;Aldred, 2014), its transbranding and child/adult targeting accord with established approachesto transmedia licensing (Santo 2015) and fan-consumer socialization (Kinder1991).

TRANSLATION OF TECHNICAL TERMS IN POPULAR SCIENCE TV PROGRAMS

Mass media play a vital role in the life of society, they record and report various events in human life. Television texts and hosts’ speech are full of stylistically marked lexical units and a variety of means of expression and figurativeness. One of these means is a term which is used in non-specific environment. Terms in non-technical context can not only perform their direct nominative function, but also they can perform a stylistic function enriching the speaker’s speech, hence making it more interesting for the audience. Terms in popular science TV shows can denote objects, processes and phenomena, as well as be used for description of person’s character and appearance. The article describes and analyzes types of terms used in popular science TV programs, translation techniques applied for metaphorical terms, abbreviations and anthroponyms. The influence of nontechnical context on translation of technical terms has also been highlighted as well as issues concerning it, namely the loss of terminological meaning in the target language (determinologization), acquisition of terminological meaning by target language lexical units (terminologization) and omission of terms in the target language. The research was carried out on original British and American popular science TV programs “Mythbusters”and“TopGear” and their translated versions in Ukrainian.

A Different Kind of Love Song: Vidding Fandom’s Undercommons

A Different Kind of Love Song:Vidding Fandom’s Undercommons Alexis Lothian (bio) Thieves and Lovers Now more than ever, fannish love is an essential part of industrial production. To keep the machinery of content creation profitable, someone has to care about what is being produced; the more money spent on a product, the more it needs fans. As Abigail De Kosnik points out, fans are “essential components of the capitalist system within which official producers operate.”1 According to a 2014 article in the Toronto Star, fan-made music videos make more money for recording artists than officially produced ones, all without costing the producers a penny.2 Fannish labors of love, manifested in creative works or in less tangible, affective forms, may not typically be compensated, but the ways in which these labors produce value has become paradigmatic of digital capital’s blur between work, play, community, and advertising.3 Yet this capitalist-realist model for understanding fan creativity fails to account for many practices and collectivities that exist under the broad heading “fandom.” In “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” my contribution to 2009’s “In Focus” on fandom and feminism, I insisted on the importance of countercapitalist currents within fan production. This piece updates and extends those arguments.4 Considering fandom as theft seems to be the opposite of thinking of fandom as love; lovers, after all, would surely work to keep order in the systems that benefit their beloveds. Thieves, however, will take anything they want for their own, laboring to disrupt the structures that maintain a property-based social order. You wouldn’t steal from the people you loved. Or would you? Seeking an answer to that question that can honor the complications and contradictions within [End Page 138] fannish communities, I borrow Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s term undercommons. Moten and Harney use the term to name the revolutionary, elusive, and very real zone in which delegitimized subjects steal from and steal away from the production of official knowledge to which their labor, in other contexts, also contributes.5 I argue that fan production forms part of an undercommons in which dominant media and cultural forms are both reproduced and unmade. “Living in a Den of Thieves” engaged Lim’s 2007 fan vid “Us,” which combined pop-culture images of rebellion with clips from shows familiar to slash fan communities to suggest that fandom’s revolutionary potential was real, if contingent and contradictory.6 Here, I turn to a more recent metadepiction of fans’ collective self-understanding. Gianduja Kiss’s 2012 vid “A Different Kind of Love Song” gathers TV and film imagery of fan practices, connecting this growing archive to extralegal content sharing.7 Looking to this vid enables me to think through labor and value in terms of not only intellectual property but also transient collectives that emerge among fans themselves—forms of being together that fan creations can capture and produce, where ideas of intellectual property as the dominant culture knows them simply do not apply. Dedicated to Everyone The opening sequence of “A Different Kind of Love Song” lays out its focus on fandom, copyright, and love. The first shot depicts a black man speaking to a white woman whose face blurs in the foreground. He complains, “Took more than an hour to torrent the last episode of Doctor Who” (BBC, 2005– ). Fans will recognize the character of Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge) from TNT’s Leverage (2008–2012), a show about a team of con artists who combine their skills to fight corporate injustice. Those who don’t know the show will recognize the speaker as an American fan keen to keep up with a popular BBC production. That the epigraph for this celebration of fannish pleasures is a man of color is worth noting, given the commonplace stereotype of TV science fiction fans as white—though popular media representations and scholarly work alike have given the lie to this in recent years.8 From here, we cross-fade to a game of Klingon Boggle (Figure 1), complete with a Star Trek–brand dictionary (Star Trek, CBS/Paramount, 1966–2005), played...

La elección de estudios superiores científico-técnicos: análisis de algunos factores determinantes en seis países

This paper addresses the international challenge of young people’s declining rates (lower for women) to pursue a higher education career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), though very nuanced depending on the country. The aim is to provide evidence-based data to understand the challenge for men and women, and consequently, to improve the patterns of recruitment, retention and gender equity in STEM degrees in the framework of the IRIS project (Interest & Recruitment in Science). STEM students from six Latin countries in their first-year of college were surveyed through the IRIS research questionnaire about a variety of influencing factors: previous school experiences, influencing persons, out-of-school activities and priorities for the future. The quantitative results allow finding the most influential factors on STEM choice, the national profiles of the countries and the differences between women and men; the most important factors for choosing a STEM degree are the interest in science, the lessons showing practical applications, good science teachers, popular science TV series, books and magazines and some priorities for the future (doing something interesting, using talents, developing myself). Further, many items display statistically significant differences across gender, and practically all items show differences across countries, which also devise some patterns for countries. Finally, the implications for teaching science and improving the recruitment in CTIM education are discussed.

Effects of Repeated Exposure to Science TV Shows on Beliefs About Scientific Evidence and Interest in Science

For scientific laypersons, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the concept of scientific evidence. Prior research shows that the media tend to underrepresent the tentativeness and uncertainty of research findings. Yet presently it remains unclear whether beliefs about the certainty or uncertainty of scientific evidence are affected by the mass media’s science coverage. In this study, we tested cultivation effects of features from German science TV shows on laypersons’ beliefs about science and their interest in science. A sample of adults (N = 700) representative of the German population in terms of age, sex, and education participated in a longitudinal field experiment with an extended Solomon four-group design (two experimental and three control groups). The treatment consisted of six successive media stimuli, which portrayed scientific evidence as either certain or uncertain, over the course of 6 weeks. Results indicate media effects on participants’ beliefs about the certainty of scientific evidence. Additionally, the treatment portraying science as certain enhanced participants’ interest in science, whereas the uncertainty treatment had no effect on interest. These experimental findings demonstrate cultivation effects using real-world stimuli and are interpreted in support of the claim for a greater acknowledgement of uncertainty in science communication.

Psychic Security

Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion takes some inspiration from TV science fiction to explore the concept of a psychic ID and see if modern technology can help bring his futuristic vision to reality.

과학전문채널 활성화 방안 연구

`YTN Science TV` that is the only one specializing in science channel in domestic have struggled low ratings and the restricted access in spite of the performance and significance that it has contributed to the population of science. This study will seek alternatives and development challenges through the comparison with the similar channel of international for the activation of the science channel. Accordingly, this study is to review the BBC knowledge channel that have contributed the successful overseas expansion and the education for the people of its country in pursuing commercial and public interest. This study will provide significant in the activation of the science channel in domestic through review of such cases.

Application and Analysis of Students' Responses to Utilize‘ Science TV’ in Science Communication Activities at Early Morning Classes on Elementary School Students

Application and Analysis of Students' Responses to Utilize‘ Science TV’ in Science Communication Activities at Early Morning Classes on Elementary School Students

“Future faces of physics” and other initiatives to broaden participation in science.

Together, Hispanic‐Americans and African‐Americans make up over 25% of the US population, but they earn only 7% of physics bachelor’s degrees. In order to help broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields, the American Institute of Physics has several programs to work with students as well as to reach the general public. To engage physics undergraduates on the challenging subject of diversity, the Society of Physics Students (SPS), a society of over 4000 undergraduate physics students that is part of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), has launched two new programs. SPS has developed a Physics Jeopardy‐like game as part of a “Future Faces of Physics” kit that includes various materials that help engage students in conversations about diversity. These kits have been used at more than 20 regional and national meetings since 2008 with positive results. AIP has also worked with Research Corporation to launch a program that brings Nobel laureates to HBCU’s and to SPS campus or regional events that include participation by Minority Serving Institutions. Another AIP program creates short TV science news segments and distributes them free of charge in Spanish. These programs and future directions will be summarized.

“Directing Attention to the Essentials”

AbstractBetween information and entertainment: Bernhard Fink presents his video diary “Love á la Darwin” on DFG Science TV – benefitting not only science communication but his research as well

Science TV News Exposure Predicts Science Beliefs

The authors attempt here to address a dilemma faced in recent investigation of science and health communication effects: the difficulty of assessing exposure impact in situations beyond the laboratory. Based on social representation theory, we posit that TV news exposure, especially for stories framed as relevant to the everyday lives of individual audience members, can affect people’s beliefs about science and that such exposure also should interact with interpersonal conversation to jointly predict beliefs. To assess these relationships in a real world setting, we integrated market-level and individual-level data from a science TV news project funded by the National Science Foundation and employed multilevel modeling to predict beliefs about science. This move allowed us to combine information about TV Designated Market Areas with responses from a national Internet-based survey and permitted a model that included both market-level and individual-level variables. Results indicate both main effects and interaction effects. Presence of relevant science stories in a TV market, for example, positively predicted subsequent beliefs about the general accessibility of science among audience members in that market even after controlling for individual-level variables.

Do quadro aos "quadros": o uso de filmes como recurso didático no ensino de administração

Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar e discutir duas experiências, na graduação e na pós-graduação (Mestrado), nas quais filmes são usados - respectivamente, como estudo de caso e sátira - no ensino de comportamento organizacional e metodologia de pesquisa. Argumenta-se que os filmes são uma poderosa ferramenta não apenas para ilustrar tópicos e conceitos relacionados à administração, mas também para demonstrar aplicações de teorias da área de Comportamento Organizacional, sem contar que podem ser usados para propiciar a discussão sobre abordagens, procedimentos e técnicas de pesquisa. Dessa forma, constituem uma fonte de material pedagógico mais estimulante e motivadora que métodos convencionais de ensino. Esse potencial dos filmes na prática de ensino é demonstrado por meio de dois exemplos baseados, respectivamente, no episódio "Origem Distante" do seriado de ficção científica para TV Jornada nas Estrelas Voyager (Star Trek Voyager) e do longa-metragem Tormenta (White Squall). Defende-se que, com o uso de filmes em sala de aula, os alunos aprendem por meio do processo de aprendizagem social e vivenciam experiências de forma vicária.

Book Reviews

Vanhoozer, Kevin J., Charles A. Anderson, and Michael J. Sleasman, eds. Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, reviewed by Paul Macdonald Arroyo, Raymond. Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles, reviewed by Christopher Lynch Beal, Timothy K. Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, reviewed by Kelly J. Baker Elkins, James. On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, reviewed by Caleb D. Spencer Bertonneau, Thomas, and Kim Paffenroth. The Truth is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction, reviewed by Anton Karl Kozlovic