Via Facebook, of all things, a message reporting a conversation with Representative Bill Foster (D-Fermilab), talking about the best ways to encourage Congress to take science seriously. First, he addressed what’s been done in the past:<\/p>\n
\nOn the effectiveness of the APS letter-writing campaign:<\/p>\n
*Recently I sent my chief of staff to a meeting of about 70 House chiefs of staff. He asked, how many of them were aware of the APS letter-writing campaign. Only two others were aware of it.<\/p>\n
*These campaigns are a form of spam, and there are lots of groups involved in them. For many small-group issues, the responses aren’t even tallied.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Kind of a downer, as letter-writing campaigns have been a staple of these sorts of efforts for years. He does, however, have a constructive suggestion to offer for going forward:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n*The most effective thing you can do is to request a 15-minute appointment to speak to your Representatives about scientific research, in their home district offices. Be insistent, but patient – say that you are willing to speak to them at any time, and will take your place on the schedule. Most people who do this go to complain about gas prices – you’ll be talking about science, and that will probably be a relief to the Representative and may even be interesting to them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is a good deal more work than dashing off a quick letter, so I doubt we’ll get many people on the Internet to go for it, but the increased impact may make up for the decreased numbers.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it’s soemthing to think about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Via Facebook, of all things, a message reporting a conversation with Representative Bill Foster (D-Fermilab), talking about the best ways to encourage Congress to take science seriously. First, he addressed what’s been done in the past: On the effectiveness of the APS letter-writing campaign: *Recently I sent my chief of staff to a meeting of… Continue reading Selling Science to Congress<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,28,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","category-politics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}