Chemists and "the public": IUPAC's role in achieving mutual understanding (IUPAC Technical Report)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This report informs IUPAC's efforts to enhance the public understanding of and appreciation for chemistry by evaluating IUPAC's mandate, strengths, and weaknesses, and providing insights from a substantial review of the relevant science communication literature. It summarizes the recommendations of an IUPAC project whose overall goal is to provide a framework that will bring the same level of intellectual rigor to IUPAC's science communication activities as to its scientific activities. This implies that careful attention must be paid to the terminology used to describe these activities, to clear articulation of goals and motives for public understanding of chemistry initiatives, and to inclusion of rigorous evaluations of outcomes from the outset in the design of projects on the public understanding of chemistry. Informed by our analysis of best practices for science communication, this report provides the following conclusions and recommendations: 1. IUPAC has an important role to play in enhancing public understanding of chemistry. 2. Public understanding of chemistry activities aimed at supporting teachers and students within the formal school system are more effective than those aimed at the general public. 3. IUPAC's primary targeted public should be IUPAC chemists and educators, and IUPAC's most important role is to help them understand and work with a variety of other publics. 4. It is proposed that IUPAC's niche be to focus on activities that indirectly enhance public understanding, such as: (a) Helping scientists identify and understand their publics. (b) Influencing international organizations. (c) Supporting science education systems, particularly in countries in transition. (d) Supporting scientists and educators by communicating relevant findings from IUPAC projects, conferences, and activities at an appropriate level. (e) Supporting national chemical societies and other organizations. 5. Recommendations are presented for steps to be undertaken by IUPAC to implement these recommendations and to develop a clearer strategy for public understanding of chemistry initiatives and activities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.306 | 0.227 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.055 | 0.048 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.059 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".