[MUSIC] Welcome to the last week of the MOOC. You worked really hard in Week 1 to put together your pitch. Then with Bethany and Sinead, you fine tuned your presentation skills. Now we're going to put together everything you've learned in this MOOC, so that you can promote your scientific results to the media. And by this, I mean every the type of media. Print, web, television, and radio. But it's important for you to know before we move forward, that the media world can often seems strange, frightening and even fascinating for you, the researchers. Being on television or answering interview questions for a newspaper can be scary, but trust me, it's worth it. You will have the opportunity to talk about science and sometimes even your own research to tens of thousands or even millions of people. It can even be fun. But you might find it difficult to trust me the journalist I am. This is why I asked an experienced researcher, Frédéric Restagno, who's quite a celebrity here in France. To tell us why he agrees to be interviewed and to take part in media programs. He's an expert physicist and often appears on various media formats. Thank you very much, Frederic, for agreeing to participate in this MOOC. [MUSIC] >> I am Frederic Restagno. I am a CNRS senior researcher. I am a physicist, and I am mainly interested in soft matter in physics. Which is the physics of foams, granular materials, polymers, I mean things which are daily use, but not that easy to understand. The first TV show I've done was some news in the morning. It was a direct show. I've been interviewed for the Fête de la Science. And this was kind of a funny experience where I had makeup, I had to wake up early in the morning to make this show. After that, during several years, I didn't interact that much with journalists. And one day I was contacted by a French TV show which is "On n'est pas que des Cobayes". It is a French version of "MythBusters". That's a TV show where at the end they make explosions, big stuff. And before doing these big experiments, they ask a specialist to answer to the basic science related to these big explosions at the end. So on this show I was interviewed nine times, which is kind of a lot. This show stopped. I mean, that's TV. And after that I have the chance, which is kind of a very, very tiny chance, but I had the chance to present a one hour and thirty movie for TV. Where I was not the expert but, instead of that I was kind of the journalist. I was the guy going asking questions related to fluid mechanics, history of boats, and I had to travel all around the world and it was very nice. Well, you can not do that all the time and at the end, I had to come back to my lab and now I am participating regularly to another French show which is "E=M6". Where the idea is basically to explain the basic science related to daily objects or daily phenomena, such as why do we wear white stuff in summer or how does this thing or this thing work? [MUSIC] Participating to a TV show is for me something really important for several reasons. I think that the first reason is I think that we need more science on TV. And if I say that we need more science on TV, and the journalist is calling me or sending me an email, saying, can you explain this are this? Well, I think it's my job to go to the journalist and try to explain what I am interested in and what are the basics of physics or what I am doing in the research related to this show. That's the first reason. The second reason is, is I really love physics. I'm a physicist and I'm daily working on that with students, with colleagues. And I think that seeing the world with the eyes of a physicist is really nice. And since I love that, I want to share this pleasure with other people. You can live without physics. You can live without science, but for me, my life is more exciting if I know some science and I want to share that excitation with other people. The third reason for doing this kind of a pubic outreach, they ask me to explain a very funny experiment, which is an experiment where you take two phone books. You interleave the pages like that. And if you try to separate the pages, it's more or less impossible. And in this show, what they have done is they have interleaved two phone books and they take these two part of the phone books and they hold a car just simply buy these two interleaved phone books. And when I went out of this show, I was where I basically explained the fundamental of friction. But when I went out of this show, I was thinking that I don't really understand this experiment. I am not able to write the equation saying how stiff will be this assembly of pages. How will the stiffness depend on the number of pages and so on? And well, I thought that it could be a very nice research project for that. So we spent several months working on that doing both experiments in the lab and trying to write the equations of that. And at the end, we had the chance to publish a very nice paper where we explained for the first time why inteleaved phone books are so robust when we try to separate them. So that's the third reason. That's a very uncommon way, a very uncommon consequence of interacting with journalists, but well, it happened to me. [MUSIC] I think that for young researchers, a very interesting point of interacting with journalists is to share the research. And if you want to share your research, if you want to reach a journalists, you cannot stay in your office. If you stay in your office, the chance that what you have done is sufficiently of broad interest for a journalist who will come in your office, is really tiny. So you have to contact the journalists. So, the first thing to do is write a small text. You write a small text with easy words where you explain what you have done, why you have done that, and what is the interest for other people (other than you) about your work. When you have done that, you send this one page text to your university. You send this text to journalists and if you are lucky enough, a journalist will come and you will be able to explain what you have done. [MUSIC] Interacting with journalists takes time. You have to prepare the interview, you have to think about what you will say, what is important to you. You have to be sure about how the interaction with the journalist will happen. So you have to find some time, and you don't have any time for that. But if you think about it deeply, you have no time for a lot of things you are doing in your lab. No time for meetings, no time for administration, and you do it. So if you really want to share your research, if you really want to make this outreach, take the time, organize yourself, and it will be possible to share what you love with other people. [MUSIC]
