| I am a grad student. If you consider how many hours I work, I probably make less than minimum wage. I am also the first author of the paper described in these videos, which my colleagues and I published in the top academic journal in our field. I also made all of the videos, did the voiceovers, and hand drew the animations (though I'm flattered you think they were professionally done). I wrote and presented the TED talk. I purchased the dedicated host name for a single algorithm (using money from my own grad student stipend no less) and created the webpage myself. I am an academic first, and I take academic integrity very seriously. I also take education very seriously. I consider educating the public about research to be part of my job, and this is done best when people are excited about the research. Also, this work IS exciting. If it weren't we wouldn't have spent so much time working on it and it wouldn't have been published in ACM TOG. But back to flashy videos and press... Consider that in the past three days, nearly 100,000 people (and counting) sat through a video where I explain what vibration modes are. VIBRATION MODES. They may have been lured in by pokemon, but kids who remember that video won't have to ask their physics teachers "but why should I care about this? what is it useful for?" Hell, if it gets people excited I hope teachers show it to their students before they teach the topic. I'm not making money off of these videos, I'm just stoked this many people are getting excited about research. Our paper has 17 numbered equations in it - it's not exactly a page turner. When scientists don't make an effort to communicate their work to the public, that responsibility falls on people outside of the academic community - people who often don't understand the work. When we make things harder for the press, we only encourage them to bastardize the work to make it more palatable to the general public. By taking an active role in how we present academic work to general audiences, we can better shape the message, manage expectations, and help prevent content from being sacrificed for click-bait. Ok, I'm going to get off my soap box now.
Cheers!
-Abe Davis |
To the advantage of being at MIT, they are very good about preparing a press release and contacting other news outlets to get exposure. But as a broader point, when it comes to reporting on science, I think the MIT/CSAIL set a good example.