If you happen to be in the San Francisco metropolitan area the week of August 16th, 2009 and can't get enough science, I'll be emcee'ing a symposium on communicating science to the public at the 90th Annual Meeting of the AAAS pacific region.

The topic is communicating science to the public as we get our legs under us in the 21st century and covers four areas;  Greg Critser, longtime science and medical journalist and author of books like "Generation Rx" and "Fat Land", will discuss how to help journalists create better science articles by helping to manage their expectations and training them on how they should interact with you.

Michael Eisen, Howard Hughes Investigator and Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development at Berkeley and co-founder of PLoS, will discuss the future of peer review and how we can get better science without having traditional journals at all.

Michael White, post-doc in the Department of Genetics and Center for Genome Sciences, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will discuss writing directly to the mass public and fellow scientists, how it can help your career, and the benefits it has brought in defusing hype and misconceptions.

Eugenie Scott, executive director at the National Center for Science Education, will discuss how to make positive science inroads when dealing with politically or culturally sensitive topics - and managing the discourse when science alone is not sufficient to overcome social roadblocks.

I don't know what AAAS policy is on providing copies after the fact so it's probably best you just show up and hear some great presentations and ask questions.