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paleonet survey 'paleontology today'



Dear Colleagues,

in short:

I work on a paper on “The discourses in paleontology in the conflicting 
perceptions between public and community”. One aspect of my investigation 
is to get a cross-section of opinion of the protagonists, on “What is 
Paleontology today?”
Please click at
http://www.palaeontologische-gesellschaft.de/palges/tagungen/pop.php
and answer my few questions.

Thank you.

---

In more detail:

Paleontology is a small science in terms of numbers of chairs, of journals 
and third-party funded projects. However, we are not a wallflower; the 
public interest for our science is remarkable.

It is a commonplace that the monetary social product that a science 
receives is in direct relation to its positive public attraction. This 
would imply full accounts for us. Obviously this is not the case.

Moreover, it seems that the usual methods of measuring the attention 
(citation rates, print run, number of visitors, audience rating etc) not 
work for us.

All these methods of attention measuring have in common that they delete 
the content of the things they count, they work like money at market.

My suspicion is that between the public and the paleontological community 
is a large discrepancy between of what we think is paleontology (what is 
cutting-edge, what is genuine in paleontology what are the most important 
paleontologists etc.) and that these discrepancies can cause for the 
paradox of increasing attraction and decreasing funding in paleontology 
(which is a fact at least in Germany these days). 

A better understanding of these questions would help to improve the public 
relations of paleontology.

The little online survey at http://www.palaeontologische-gesellschaft.de/
palges/tagungen/pop.php
is intended to get a cross-section of opinion of the paleontological 
community on “What is Paleontology today?”

The online survey is a qualitative survey. Thus I am rather interested at 
the content of the answers than on statistical distributions.

Thank you for answering the questions.

Björn Kröger

-- 
----------------------
Dr. Björn Kröger
Museum für Naturkunde
an der Humboldt Universität Berlin
Invalidenstr. 43
D-10115 Berlin
Germany
http://www.museum.hu-berlin.de/home.asp

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