Stormwater management terminology can be difficult for people in other fields to understand. I think that is because the scientific language used can be unintelligible to ordinary people. This also applies to epidemiologists speaking to ordinary people.

 The problem is as scientific knowledge grew it became more and more specialized. Separate scientific fields developed separate nomenclature.

I knew Nelly Blumenkrantz, a cancer research scientist working for the University of Pennsylvania. 

Cancer researchers (oncologists) might use insects to study the effects of drugs. But oncologists & entomologists (a person who studies insects) might not understand each other. 

Nelly went to a symposium. A Japanese scientist did decades of work using larva. My friend spoke with him. She was amazed that he didn’t know the larva were fruit flies. 

If even scientists in separate specialized fields use scientific language but their scientific fields are so unique they cannot understand each other, then how are lay people supposed to understand scientists. 

Scientists must learn to drop some of their language, that in some cases they might use to demonstrate their superior intelligence, in order to speak with politicians, journalists and voters in a way that can be understood. 

Columbia University offers a scientific explanation of COVID-19 in a way that ordinary people can understand. Or that even say rocket scientists that are not epidemiologists can understand:

***

"The novel coronavirus pandemic is the perfect model for understanding what exactly a pandemic is and how it impacts life on a global scale. Since the emergence of COVID-19 in 2020, the public has been bombarded with new language to understand the virus and the subsequent global public health response. This article will uncover the factors that make a pandemic and how it differs from epidemics and endemics."

MORE AT:

Epidemic, Endemic, Pandemic: What are the Differences?

This is from my Riverseekerblog. It contains a link to an article by Nicholas Kristof:

sunday, february 16, 2014

“Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane intelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.“ One of my pet peeves.

As in, why on earth is stormwater management encased in arcane language.

Water runs off waterproof stuff, eventually to the ocean.

Water soaks into water absorbing stuff eventually into well water.

Trees, bushes and long grasses direct water into the ground.

Concrete, asphalt and short grass over compacted soil direct water to storm drains, streams and eventually the ocean.

If you want drinking water you need as much trees, bushes and long grass as possible.

Parking lots can be surfaced with water absorbing asphalt & concrete or water-resistant asphalt & concrete.

If you build too many waterproof surfaces you get small stream flooding downstream. As in Downingtown, PA.

I was "The stormwater guy" on the City of Coatesville Planning Commission. The architectural engineers couldn't understand stormwater management. They knew the regs. but didn't understand them.

That's ENGINEERS that don't understand stormwater management.

How on earth are elected municipal officials supposed to understand and explain stormwater management while they listen to constituents complaining that there isn't short mowed grass to the stream bank edge?

Stormwater management is not astrophysics but it reads like astrophysics.

READ:

"Professors, We Need You!

 Nicholas Kristof

 The New York Times

SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don't matter in today’s great debates.

The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.

'All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,' notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation."

MORE AT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html?_r=0 

posted by james pitcherella at 5:34 pm