Science Cheerleader

What if the media covered baseball like it covers science?

Larry Husten, founder of CardioBrief.org , poses this question and presents some interesting scenarios following this line of thought. For example, the World Series would receive one article in each major paper– after the series ended–set in no context at all (a la the Nobel Prize).

Check out Husten’s piece.

You’ll see this sweet intro where he has this to say about Science Cheerleader’s Brain Makeover effort to increase adult science literacy and bring science to the public:

“Beneath the highly attractive surface here there’s something important going on. I don’t know if the Science Cheerleader can single-handedly reverse the course of scientific illiteracy, but she deserves all the cheers we can give her for at least giving it the old college try. (Thanks to USA Today reporter Rita Rubin for tweeting about this.)”

Indulge me (Dr. John Ohab) for just a moment and check out this new story, Armed and Scientific, just released by UCLA Magazine. I was recently interviewed for the “Quick Takes” series, which highlights former students and their work since graduating from UCLA. While much of the article focuses on my experiences at the Defense Department, the author did include a brief ditty about Science Cheerleader, describing it as “a web-based media platform that… aims to make science more fun and understandable to wider audience.”  Right on!

Click here to read “Armed and Scientific” in UCLA Magazine.

Heeeeere’s John! About a year ago, Google announced it’s “10 to the 100th Power” contest to celebrate its 10th anniversary.  The intent of the contest was to get ideas from around that would help the most number of people.  Google would invest a big pot of cash to help kick-start some of those ideas.  The contest was a pretty neat; even I submitted several ideas in the hope of becoming the savior of all humankind.

Semi-finalists were supposed to be announced by January 27th, 2009, but got delayed until March 17th, and then  was put on hold again.  Apparently the company that handles a bazillion search requests each day got swamped by 150,000 ideas, but I digress.  On September 24th the semi-finalists were announced, and the public is invited to vote on their favorites.  I’m a little miffed because none of my obviously world-changing ideas were among the chosen, but I’ll just have to get over that small disappointment.

All of the ideas are meritorious, however there are a couple that readers of “Science Cheerleader” might find especially interesting…

1. Enhance science and engineering education
2. Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists

I’m really not trying to game the vote (well, OK, I am), but I encourage you to let your Google vote be heard.  Voting ends on October 8th, 2009.