One of my favourite science bloggers, biochemistry professor Larry Moran (Sandwalk), comments in passing on the TED talks — the global institution which the sci-tech-design-online segment of the creative class loves to attend and watch:

There’s a certain mysticism about TED talks that I deplore. In order to be a successful TED talker you need to be articulate and clever. You need to be engaging and just a little bit radical—though not too radical. That’s just about all it takes to get an enthusiastic standing ovation from the people who comes to listen to these 18 talks. What you’re actually saying doesn’t really count for anything as this example plainly shows.

The mantra of TED talks is “Ideas Worth Spreading” but if you think about it there aren’t very many important new ideas that can be explained in 18 minutes. On the other hand, if you want to spread ideas that your audience already agrees with then TED talks are just the thing for you.

Right! I always wondered why I like to watch TED talks. I’ve never really felt I learned anything from them that I didn’t somehow knew before. So what it’s about is the nice and fuzzy feeling of being in agreement with a good-looking, charismatic, reasonably famous, and relaxed speaker (TED talk speakers are always extremely relaxed).

Maybe it’s the same feeling evangelical Christians have when they go listening to their favourite charismatic preacher on Sundays?

We are proud to invite to the first seminar in our new MUSE seminar series:

Roland Wittje, University of Regensburg

From Material Culture to Material Heritage:
History of Contemporary Science Beyond the Linguistic Turn

Auditorium, Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen K
Thursday 26 January, 3-4.40 pm

Abstract:

Getting our hands dirty in the messy worlds of the laboratory and the storage room, and to entangle with the commemorative practices of scientists and technicians when it comes to contemporary material heritage does not belong to the common experiences of historians of science. Studying contemporary laboratories and their materiality has so far been the domain of sociologists and ethnographers. Despite the recent ‘material turn’ in cultural studies, engagement with the material world often remains a linguistic exercise, extending at the utmost to an excursion to the sanitised and academically encultured world of the museum exhibit.

For historians of science, I argue, engaging with the ‘unfinished’ material world of contemporary science poses many opportunities. By taking the material seriously beyond the linguistic turn and exploring local university departments and their recent histories through their material heritage, we can observe everyday science and confront scientists and technicians’ cultures with those of historians’. By engaging with recent material heritage, we can make an important contribution to enhancing the awareness about this heritage, its implications for history writing, as well as its documentation and preservation.

Alle som er interesserede af forskningskommunikation (på eller uden for museer) er meget velkommen til Medicinsk Museions nye MUSE-seminarrække.

Seminarrækken er en del af Medicinsk Museions projekt om “science communication”, som stiler mod at udvikle nye forskningsbaserede og eksperimentelle metoder for forskningskommunikation såvel som at udvikle teoretiske tilgange inden for feltet, specielt i lyset af den moderne biomedicins historie.

Vi inviterer forskere som arbejder med materialitet, forskningskommunikation, science and technology studies, videnskabsteori, museologi og relaterede områder.

Hvis du er interesseret i at deltage i seminarerne — eller måske endda selv præsentere noget — kontakt Karin Tybjerg (karin.tybjerg@sund.ku.dk) eller Adam Bencard (adab@sund.ku.dk).

Nemlig! (fremhævelserne af keywords er fra Easynews webovervågningsservice)

(Politiken, 18. januar, side 2, papirudgaven — fra Easynews webovervågning via ODM)

Two of our staff members — Nina Bjerglund, who’s working on social media for public health communication (read her posts here) and Daniel Noesgaard, who has created our web universe — are now on their way to Raleigh, North Carolina, to take part in the ScienceOnline 2012 conference.

I’m going to have the #scio12 hashtag window on Twitter open 24/7 — there’s already (the day before the conference) a lot of interesting activity on it. In addition, Danny will be tweeting from @dnnyboy and Nina from @bjerglund.

They’ll be back on Monday, so we expect to focus next Tuesday’s internal staff meeting on the latest news about how to communicate science through blogs, Google+, Twitter, Diaspora, Academia, LinkedIn, Facebook, you name it.

There has been quite of a trend of thinking museums in terms of globalisation. For example, critical museum people are discussing the place of their institutions on the global scene (for a very good take on this, see here), and curators have begun to discuss their work in terms of the transnational nature of collections and acquisitioning (see, for example, here).

One of the interesting things that could come out of this merger of museum/collection studies and globalisation is a rethinking of the role of materiality and materialism for understanding the contemporary world. Thinking the world in materialist terms, which was very prominent in marxist thinking between the 1930s and 1970s which largely buried with the demise of historical materialism in favour of discourse founded in social constructivism — which is still dominant, also in museology.

And that’s why I find the conference on ‘Materialism and World Politics’, to be held at the LSE on 21-22 October, 2012, so interesting. The point of departure is current debates about “rational actors, agency in a physical world, the role of affect in decision-making, the biopolitical shaping of bodies, the perils and promises of material technology, the resurgence of historical materialism, and the looming environmental catastrophe” which has emerged during the last decade in contrast to “the dominant discourses of neorealism, neoliberalism and constructivism”.

As the organisers point out, the common materialist basis to these discussions has largely gone unacknowledged, and therefore they want to push the critical edge further by focusing on material factors for world politics.  — with panels about affect, biopolitics, discourse and materiality, philosophical materialism, historical materialism, scientific realism, etc.

300 word abstracts for paper proposals should be sent to millennium@lse.ac.uk by 16 April, 2012. A selection of the conference papers will be published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, volume 41, no. 3.

More here.

In the late spring of 2011 we received the bad news that Museum Boerhaave (our history of science sister museum in Leiden) was in the risk zone of loosing its state support if it couldn’t raise enough “extra eigen inkomsten” by the end of the year.

But yesterday’s good news is that the museum has now succeeded to raise the extra income and can receive state support until 2016. As Marta Lourenco writes today on the public rete mailing list:

However, perhaps the most important thing to note is that the Boerhaave has successfully raised one million euros from donors in such a short period – and that is truly remarkable for any museum of science in the world, let alone in present-day Europe.

Congratulations, all dear friends and colleagues in Leiden, to your good work in the past year!

Read more here (unfortunately only in Dutsch).

As you may know by now, the Medical History Museum at the University of Copenhagen, founded in 1906-07, was renamed Medical Museion in 2003 to mark a change in focus: from doing traditional medical history to understanding what’s going on medicine’s past, present and future through a combination of research and curatorial work.

The results of the last five-six years efforts can be excavated from some of the earlier 2270 (wow, that’s actually quite a few) posts on this site/blog — and here are some of the latest highlights from the year 2011:

We opened the new Balance and Metabolism gallery on the 1st floor in the

We hanged the Genomic Enlightenment installation

The July 2nd cloudburst

Pic a Museum in March

New Web Presence

Astrid’s movies

Jan Erik Olsens research grant on the blind-historical collection

New staff: Niels, Nanna, Daniel, Karin and Louise

Nina came to help us develop the social web with special respect to public health science.

I just love this series of images from the Russian Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. The photographer, Mae Ryan, was primarily fascinated with the female custodians. But more fascinating, in my mind, are the galleries themselves — the huge rooms, the postwar bleak pastel colours, the curtains (yes, the curtains!), the refusal to translate into English, the heavy didactical atmosphere — and the rich stuff which reminds us that Soviet engineers were among the best in the world.

I hope the museum will never afford to ‘modernise’ these galleries. They are absolute gems — can’t wait to put this place in my museum travel diary:

 
(from here; hat tip to Sébastien Soubiran)

"Schenken heisst Anderen etwas von dir zu geben" (to give means to give something of yourself to others)

We repeat last year’s greetings, because the image is the best possible I can imagine from a medical museum involved in public engagement; after all, communication is a mutual gift-giving affair. (And again, thanks to Roger Cooter for sending me the original card.)