Science 'Not for Normal People'

Ant writes "BBC News reports that teenagers 'value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them".' This was according to a recent study by The Science Learning Centre in London that asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists. From the article: 'They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people".'"

Truth is somewhere in between..

[Anonymous Coward]

In the research organization I worked, the importance was given to creativity management. The days are gone when somebody brainy can sit in closet and dream about the universe. Experiments (results and analysis) have a lot of importance.

Creativity management allows everybody to participate in the decision making process how the experiment will be performed. Brainstorming, ideas extension and lot of techniques are put in action to bring more and more ideas on the table. Normal people might not know, how many small small details go in before an experiment is commenced.

The point I am trying to make is, it is a team effort and lot of credit goes to the people who create that healthy environment.

Re:wtf

[rev_g33k_101]

Look, if you would get off your butt and look at your options you would see

In your Preferences page, under home page a section labeled "Customize Stories on the Homepage" depending on how you rank the importance of each of the sections on /. it will make stories smaller or larger.

Ones that you rank as low importance will appear smaller, sometimes as small gray bars

It took me like 10 seconds to figure this out

Re:wtf

[balster neb]

It looks like something CmdrTaco has introduced over the weekend. Basically it seems that "minor" stories that earlier used to appear only in subsections such as science.slashdot.org now appear as little stubs on the main page. For registered users, this can be customised -- see your Preferences page, under Homepage. You can use that to turn this feature off, or make full summaries for all stories appear on the main page.

CmdrTaco has been hinting that he will be making some major changes to Slashdot over the coming weeks/months. Check out some of his comments in this recent story [slashdot.org]. See this [slashdot.org], this [slashdot.org], this [slashdot.org], and this [slashdot.org]. These indicate that major changes to the moderation system are also to be expected.

This particular feature is probably the first of these changes he's experimenting with. When it first made an appearence on friday/saturday, the stubs would appear on a plain white background. They added the grey styling a bit later. The prefs for this still have to be fleshed out a bit it seems.

Expect CmdrTaco to make a post about this soon.

Re:It IS boring

[SillyPerson]

You got into the wrong field. I worked for eight years in mathematics, and it was an exciting, wild, mad ride throughout. Non mathematicians will never believe this. I am still sorry I had to leave university, because I suck at the publish-or-perish game.

Now, do applications of artificial intelligence for business software. Quite exciting and new, and actually with more direct positive results, but not the rollercoaster ride of the olden days.

Oh, well...

Re:NEWS FLASH

[micheas]

Read some of Richard Feynman's tales.

(probably the only member of the Manhattan Project to be commissioned to do a painting by a massage parlor.)