Ivan > Ivan's Quotes

“In eastern Washington, the territory around the Hanford reservation is promoted as the last stand of original shrub-sage habitat in the Columbia Basin, yet periodically deer and rabbits wander from the preserve and leave radioactive droppings on Richland’s lawns.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“That dawn he officiated at the daily mass of his ablutions with more frenetic severity than usual, trying to purge his body and spirit of twenty years of fruitless wars and the disillusionments of power.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth

“One guiding post to determine where the distressing issues, needs and aspirations is Maslow‘s Needs Hierarchy. If you can identify their fears and concerns, you can choose a story that provides hope.”
― Gideon For-mukwai, The Science of Story Selling: How Win the Hearts & Minds of Your Prospects for Profit and Purpose

“Last week I sat through a day of environmental talks. You know what I remember from that entire day? Only one thing-the story a guy told about how he was sitting on an airplane and the lady next to him asked for cream for her coffee, but when they brought her the small plastic containers of cream, she said, "No thanks; the plastic isn't biodegradable." And he thought to himself, "I can hardly hear her over the jet engines that are burning up fifty gazillion barrels of fuel a minute, and she's worried about a thimble-sized piece of plastic?"
That's all I remember from that day. Why is that? It's the power of a well-told story that is also very specific. Stories that are full of vague generalizations are weak. Specifics give them strength.”
― Randy Olson, Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style

“Truly Be the Voice of Science
If you want to make a major contribution to science communication, you need to know from the outset that it will be a long and personal journey. It won't be easy. It won't be safe. And it's doubtful you'll be able to control the timeline.
No one told Carl Sagan to write science fiction novels, get involved with Hollywood filmmaking, or go on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. He simply had an inner voice driving him to reach out and share his passion for science. He was the voice of science, by his own doing.”
― Randy Olson, Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style

“Stepping outside your comfort zone to reach out can have tremendous payoffs. Whether you are building your network of media contacts, writing an opinion piece for a newspaper or blog, arranging a meeting with your local Congressman, or engaged in a media blitz around your latest paper, you'll generate ripples that can lead to surprising and gratifying results.”
― Nancy Baron, Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter

“When scientists ask whether they should blog, they are sometimes paralyzed: "Will I be wasting my time? Narcissistically navel-gazing? What might people say?" It is probably healthy to consider these questions when your reputation is on the line. On the other hand, the safest route is rarely a useful path for anyone who wants to make a difference. When it comes to blogging, researchers should balance skepticism with a clear-eyed assessment of the power and possibilities.”
― Nancy Baron, Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter

“Though Americans have tremendous respect for the ability of engineers and scientists to solve important problems and answer important questions, polls indicate many of us worry that technology moves too fast, and that its benefits blind us to important spiritual concerns.”
― Cornelia Dean, Am I Making Myself Clear?: A Scientist's Guide to Talking to the Public

“In an editorial, the journal Nature warned that one of the dangers of winning the Nobel Prize is that people attempt to enlist you for all sorts of causes.' It particularly cited Scientists and Engineers for America and its opposition to Bush science policies, though "there is little doubt that US federal science has suffered under Bush," the editors wrote. By engaging in partisan behavior, the journal warned, scientists risk "seeming to be self-interested, grant-obsessed, and out of touch."
Actually, I think the reverse is true. It is remaining at the bench when times call for action that defines researchers as self-obsessed. As Burton Richter, a Stanford
physicist, Nobel laureate, and founder and board member of SEA wrote in response to the Nature editorial, the organization's aim "is to make available to society at large the evidence-based science relating to critical issues facing us all." He added, "We hope both to draw attention to underappreciated science issues and provide the advocacy necessary to get things done-not along party-political lines but scientifically."4”
― Cornelia Dean, Am I Making Myself Clear?: A Scientist's Guide to Talking to the Public

“Interestingly enough, it is now known that play behaviour is not limited to birds and mammals. Monitor lizards, turtles, crocodiles and even fish and cephalopods have been reported to engage in behaviours that do not seem to serve any other purpose than simply having fun.27,28 If all these animals could play, we are certain that Mesozoic dinosaurs could, too.”
― John Conway, All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals

“Even the most familiar of dinosaurs may hold great surprises in their life appearance. It seems that every time the soft tissue of a dinosaur is discovered, our views of that animal, and usually all of its relatives as well, are changed drastically. Such revelations show how artificial our images of even the most well-known dinosaurs can be. What we are drawing all the time may not be the "real" animals themselves, but artifacts of an artistic tradition.”
― John Conway, All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals

“did you know that way back in the 1980s some scientists proposed an ambitious effort called the Human Protein Project to map all human proteins? It never happened. Instead, the NIH backed the Human Genome Project for one big reason: Proteins were tough to study, while genes were far easier to sequence. The tools dictate the science.”
― Deborah Blum, A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers

“Conservatives have adopted messaging strategies that allowed them to succeed politically even with policies that don’t have strong popular support. Indeed, that is one reason they turned the tide against President Obama in 2010—simple, relentless messaging. Similarly, those who deny the reality of climate science have made use of the best rhetorical techniques. Those seeking to inform the public about the very real dangers of a warming climate will need to learn the lessons of the best communicators if they are to overcome the most well-funded disinformation campaign in history.”
― Joseph J. Romm, Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“You can tell me via straight narration that your main character, Mistuh Butts, never did well in school, never even went much to school, but you can convey the same thing, and much more vividly, by his speech  . . . . and one of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us,”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“good communicators learn from others, by identifying and studying examples of successful expression in their chosen field.”
― Scott L. Montgomery, The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science

“At that time, culturally relevant pedagogy consisted exclusively of urban young adult novels and hip-hop rap assignments doled out to the poor and Black students. Many teachers truly believed that they were offering culturally relevant pedagogy by offering “minorities” and “low-income students” stereotypical cultural activities.”
― Lisa Scherff, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Clashes and Confrontations

“Even the help wanted ads in the back of Science or Nature can give you a clue as to what technology is hot.”
― Deborah Blum, A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers

“one consequence of discussing racism only as a historical artifact is that it denies children the opportunity to engage those issues as highly relevant to their own lives and the society in which they currently live.”
― Lisa Scherff, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Clashes and Confrontations

“LUKE Thou dost not understand, thou useless scamp. I search not for a friend in this damp place, But for a Jedi master wise in skill! YODA O Jedi master! Yoda that you seek it is. ’Tis truly Yoda! LUKE [aside:] A strange turn of events! This tiny sprite May yet prove useful if he knows the man. [To Yoda:] Attend: thou know’st of Yoda, little one? YODA I’ll take thee to him. Aye, but first, let us eat food. Come, I good food have! LUKE I follow. R2, stay and watch the camp— Mayhap some hope still lives within this damp.”
― Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back

“Learning to communicate in and with a culture of science is a much broader undertaking than mastering a body of discrete conceptual or procedural knowledge. One observer, for example, describes the process of science education as one in which learners must engage in “border crossings” from their own everyday world culture into the subculture of science.1 The subculture of science is in part distinct from other cultural activities and in part a reflection of the cultural backgrounds of scientists themselves.”
― Heidi A. Schweingruber, Surrounded by Science: Learning Science in Informal Environments

“At the risk of oversimplification, one aspect of CRP strives to use learners’ cultural ways of being and knowing as a vehicle for instruction as well as a source of content, while place-based learning takes as its starting point the varying contexts from which learners come—though both certainly can and do draw from cultural and contextual sources of knowledge.”
― Lisa Scherff, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Clashes and Confrontations

“Cultivating an atmosphere of respect through caring relationships is particularly significant for Latino and Latina students (Garza 2008) as it is a critical source of motivation for Latino and Latina students who may feel marginalized by the schooling process (Perez 2000). Ladson-Billings (2009) found that the ability to form positive relationships between students and teacher was one of the most important criteria for identifying exemplary CRP educators. Gay (2000) emphasizes that the actual sites for determining successful learning resides in the interactions between learners—and between learners and their teacher. The fact that this positive student-teacher relationship was missing adds another dimension to the explanation of student nonperformance.”
― Lisa Scherff, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Clashes and Confrontations

“Spanish-language literacy development needs to be contextualized and embedded in real-world experiences that are completed for authentic purposes such as volunteering with Spanish monolingual children or elders, shadowing a Spanish-English court interpreter, or writing an immigration narrative of a family member. Reading and writing thus is not an end in itself, but a necessary means for effective communication, especially if that communication holds meaning for the student. Through authentic practice, students will understand how developing their Spanish-language literacy can be useful to them and may realize that classroom learning can develop skills that are not readily developed through casual conversation.”
― Lisa Scherff, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Clashes and Confrontations

“Could it be that a young, Black, working-class boy is always already perceived as vulgar within the nomos of schooling and therefore in need of harsh punishment to correct such deviant language practices and thoughts and force him in line with the unspoken rules of which he is only beginning to decipher? Whereas a White, middle-class girl who is typically a teacher-pleaser is always already perceived as fitting into the nomos of school, slipping into the context like a glove, and therefore in need only of a raised eyebrow or subtle reminder of the unspoken rules of refinement and civility in school that she already understands completely? Pacing, pacing, pacing.”
― Lisa Scherff, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Clashes and Confrontations

“Shake up the embodied discursive world of teacher education so we don’t produce the same repressed, rigid teachers who will move on to K– 12 settings and construct similarly repressive spaces.”
― Lisa Scherff, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Clashes and Confrontations

“In 2009, I attended Book Expo in New York City, where they had three editors of bestselling novels on a panel discussion. At the end of the discussion, the moderator asked the editors if they could make one prediction about the future of novel writing. They all thought for a moment, then one of them said that in the future, you won’t have forty to fifty pages of set up in a murder mystery before the body is discovered. To the contrary, the dead body will have to appear in the first few pages, as people’s attention spans are clearly waning.”
― Randy Olson, Connection: Hollywood Storytelling meets Critical Thinking

“Rule of Replacing.” He says, “I sort of always call it the rule of replacing ‘ands’ with either ‘buts’ or ‘therefores,’ and so it’s always like ‘this happens’ and then this happens and then this happens—whenever I can go back in the writing and change that to—this happens, therefore this happens, but this happens—whenever you can replace your ‘ands’ with ‘buts’ or ‘therefores,’ it makes for better writing.”
― Randy Olson, Connection: Hollywood Storytelling meets Critical Thinking

“when there was familiarity with the story, it was the superlatives that had more impact than the specifics. But once the familiarity was lost, the need returns for the power and specifics of the individual narratives. And the more detailed and specific, the more powerful.”
― Randy Olson, Connection: Hollywood Storytelling meets Critical Thinking