Citizen scientist

The above link is a blog post about why science is complicated, why non-experts like politicians shouldn't be trusted to relay scientific information accurately, and moreover what research really means. Translating scholarly work into a publicly accessible format as well as finding reliable sources of those translations continues to be an issue and a need. It is a real and crucial issue, since, as I mentioned, numerous versions of scholarly knowledge - some closer to the original facts than others - get used for a multitude of political, social, and economic initiatives every day. As voting citizens and as initiators, targets and recipients of these initiatives, we would do well to do what we can to bridge that gap from our end. I believe that the academic community also has a responsibility to shoulder its part of the bridge-building, and that educational systems and institutions, government ones included, fall somewhere in the middle. Learning more about what, and how, we all understand, citizens and scientists alike, can only help.