Prometheus Class Assignment

September 22nd, 2006

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

A university class with about 90 students has been assigned Prometheus, and several other weblogs, as part of its reading assignments this semester. Welcome! The course instructor has emailed me to ask if I would write up a short note about what purpose our weblog serves and to offer some pointers to a few key posts on various topics. This seems like a worthwhile exercise, so here goes.


Prometheus began as a term project of a student, Shep Ryen, who like many of our student since graduated has gone on to power and influence ;-) He named it, came up with the design, and got it off to a running start. We have always seen Prometheus as taking advantage of the blog format to create a place where we can discuss a wide range of issues of science and technology policy. In practice, the site focuses on the subjects on which its contributors write about. I’ve been the most active blogger and since a lot of my work focuses on climate policy (and climate science policy), many of my posts wind up on climate policy issues. A recurring interest of mine, and subject of a forthcoming book, is the role of scientists in policy and politics.

We never anticipated a wide readership, being a niche subject area that sometimes delves into the minutia of science-policy issues. But we do have what I have often characterized as the best commenters in the blogoshpere on any site on any subject. In the comments you’ll find leading academics, reporters, policy makers, and informed general readers. The comments are a tremendous asset and by themselves worth the effort to run the blog. Not everyone agrees with everything written here, and that is I think a compelling strength of the dialogue.

The blog serves many purposes. It obviously serves an outreach function, helping us to promote our Center’s research. It serves as a resource where we’d like to store ideas and references. It serves as a test drive facility for ideas and arguments. It serves as a salon where we can engage in meaningful conversations and learn from each other. It serves as a place where people who disagree on topics, like hockey sticks or hurricanes, have engaged one another directly or indirectly. It also serves as a resource where we can focus attention on issues of science in society, a topical area that does not have too many venues for such open discussion that the blog format is ideally suited for. In short it serves a lot of purposes, and we continue to do it because it has been rewarding for us.

Some specific links requested for the class:

My publications: Here.

About me: Here.

On the hockey stick debate

Is the “Hockey Stick” Debate Relevant to Policy? 17 May 2005

On The Hockey Stick 6 July 2005

Invitation to McIntyre and Mann – So What? 31 October 2005

Challenge Update 1 November 2005

Does the hockey stick “matter”? 14 November 2005 Post by Steve McIntyre

Why Does the Hockey Stick Debate Matter? 14 November 2005 Post by Ross McKitrick

Reflections on the Challenge 21 November 2005

For the full list of “hockey stick” posts, including more recent stuff on the congressional hearings, Wegman and NRC reports, please search the site for “hockey stick.”

On the hurricane debate

The Other Hockey Stick 22 August 2005

Consensus Statement on Hurricanes and Global Warming 21 February 2006

Forbidden Fruit: Justifying Energy Policy via Hurricane Mitigation15 March 2006

Climate and Societal Factors in Future Tropical Cyclone Damages in the ABI Reports 24 April 2006

More Peer-Reviewed Discussion on Hurricanes and Climate Change 15 May 2006

Scientific Leadership on Hurricanes and Global Warming 25 July 2006

And there is a ton of stuff not linked here, just search the site for “hurricanes.”

2 Responses to “Prometheus Class Assignment”

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  1. JMG Says:

    IMO this evolving communications technology has tremendous potential to increase the speed of the generation cycle of scientific knowledge, particularly in rapidly advancing fields such as neuroeconomics, cognitive neuroscience and climate science. Blogs can make public, provide a historical record and speed the current but hidden informal (compared to the printed record in the form of meeting proceedings and primary refereed scientific papers) two-way communications that occur between scientists, whether in-person at local seminars, over a beer at meetings or across distance by telephone or e-mail. Commentors can perform some of the function that annonymous referees currently perform. Being public, science blogs can facilitate two-way cross-pollination between disciplines beyond the “push” one-way mode of general journals such as Science, Nature and New Scientist. Sort of like distributed computing compared to the central mainframe, this technology may enable considerably more “distributed science” away from high profile labs anchored at premier institutions. Perhaps the core literature for an area will become dynamic and real time in the form of “closed” wikis being updated by the cutting edge researchers in the area who have undergone an admission process and who gain credit from the number and durations of their contributions much like having papers cited does now. Major problems are maintaining a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio in the process to make participation worthwhile, improving the sensitivity and specificity of retrieval processes (retaining the wheat and discarding the chaff) and changing the academic reward paradigm for participating in such technology. The current process for advancing scientific knowledge has little if any reward for those providing important services such as performing anonnymous reviewers of manuscripts or grant proposals or who author synthesizing works such as systematic reviews. How this evolves in the next decade will be very interesting.

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  3. Steve Hemphill Says:

    A couple of questions for the class. Well, maybe three.

    1. How much does convection compensate and adjust for vertical long wave radiation distribution?

    2. How much does flora increase in marginally arable land as a function of increased atmospheric CO2?

    3. What does the Gift of Fire mean in terms of reaction to dogma?