QUOTE (Ondaweb @ Oct 12 2012, 01:52 PM)
My complaint is that too little data is presented at the press conference. They seem in a rush to say everything as quickly as possible.
Press conferences are not for data, they are for
news. There already is a well defined and proper path for the release of data and detailed information. PDS releases will give you everything. Peer reviewed papers will give you a more digested version of everything. Science should be done with peer review as an integral step--not by press conference. That doesn't mean results shouldn't be presented, but you should not demand the press conference be the tool to do things that other tools are so well suited to--patience...
QUOTE (Ondaweb @ Oct 12 2012, 01:52 PM)
Further, I have long believed that if a scientist gets public money to conduct research, s/he ought to be required to write a paper explaining his/her results in terms an educated layman can understand (e.g., similar to a Scientific American article.)
If you do not like science, require that every practicing scientist be a science journalist. Or vice versa. Everyone who is conducting research as part of this mission is essentially required to present (or help do so) the results in publication. Sure, those will be technical (but I would hope that more and more would be open access). But textbook authors, science journalists, and other popular science writers will read those, and further digest the best of the information. You will be able to find mission results in places like Sci Am. I assure you, you do not want to see 400+ Sci Am articles on each narrow facet--and neither does Sci Am or any equivalent. But those who are so inclined do blog, write articles, and write books--patience...
And--what do you know--the mission scientists also present the results in terms educated lay people can understand in press conferences, to supplement the data and technical publications. There are places you could legitimately complain about lack of availability of data or lack of publicly understandable publication of results. NASA's Mars missions are not among those places. Patience: we have more and better access to this mission than to virtually any other scientific endeavor. That seems like a good thing, not a topic of complaint.