{"id":4116,"date":"2010-02-17T09:50:55","date_gmt":"2010-02-17T17:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=4116"},"modified":"2010-02-17T09:50:55","modified_gmt":"2010-02-17T17:50:55","slug":"many-roads-to-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/17\/many-roads-to-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Many Roads to Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve collected enough data in our <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2010\/02\/10\/what-got-you-interested-in-science\/\">What Got You Interested in Science?<\/a> poll to draw some conclusions.  Not very firm conclusions, of course, as the whole process was wildly non-scientific, and there&#8217;s no reason to expect that the respondents were a representative sample in any sense.  (The numbers were not bad; the smallest category, &#8220;the internet,&#8221; received 62 votes so far.)  But conclusions, nonetheless!<\/p>\n<p>And the main conclusion is:  there are many different things that get young proto-scientists interested in the field.  Books, both non-fiction and fiction, play an important role, but no one thing really stands out.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2010\/02\/10\/what-got-you-interested-in-science\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2010\/02\/sciencepie.jpg\" alt=\"sciencepie\" width=\"558\" height=\"412\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-4117\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s interesting, and not really what I would have expected.  Given that there certainly are many things that could get someone interested in science, I wouldn&#8217;t have been surprised if there was a dominant source for the pipeline, but instead it&#8217;s quite a diverse porfolio.<\/p>\n<p>If we think getting people interested in science is a good thing, the lesson is:  there aren&#8217;t any magic bullets.  A broad-based strategy seems appropriate.  Interesting books, educational classes, encouraging relatives, engrossing hobbies and school activities, inspiring movies and TV shows.  I approve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve collected enough data in our What Got You Interested in Science? poll to draw some conclusions. Not very firm conclusions, of course, as the whole process was wildly non-scientific, and there&#8217;s no reason to expect that the respondents were a representative sample in any sense. (The numbers were not bad; the smallest category, &#8220;the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-society"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}