{"id":4457,"date":"2010-01-22T10:24:15","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T10:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/01\/22\/public-knowledge-of-science-th\/"},"modified":"2010-01-22T10:24:15","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T10:24:15","slug":"public-knowledge-of-science-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/01\/22\/public-knowledge-of-science-th\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Knowledge of Science: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

The NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators report<\/a> came out not too long ago, and the bulk of it is, as usual, spent on quasi-quantitative measures of scientific productivity– numbers of degrees granted, numbers of patent applications for various countries, etc. I find all of those things pretty deeply flawed, so I tend to skip past them and go straight to the stuff about public knowledge and understanding (chapter 7, available as a PDF at the link above).<\/p>\n

This doesn’t get much press, probably because the results are depressing. They’ve asked a bunch of factual knowledge questions of people every so often for going on thirty years now, and the results are essentially the same year in and year out. There are two questions in particular that I like to look at, and because I am a shameless traffic whore, I’ll reproduce them here so we can see whether people who read science blogs are smarter than the general public:<\/p>\n