It is my pleasure to announce the winners of the 2nd Annual Florida Citizens for Science Stick Science Cartoon Contest. First, I would like to thank our four judges for taking the time to carefully consider and rate each of our top ten entries. Our judges this year are:
- Genie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education.
- Carl Zimmer, science writer whose articles regularly appear in the New York Times and Discover magazine, “The Loom” blogger at Discover magazine, and author whose latest book is The Tangled Bank, An Introduction to Evolution.
- Jorge Cham, writer and artist of Piled Higher and Deeper, a comic strip about life, or the lack thereof, in academia. He was a Research Associate at Caltech from 2003-2005 and obtained a Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, specializing in Robotics.
- Jay Hosler, author and illustrator of science-oriented comics such as The Sandwalk Adventures, and Optical Allusions. He is also an entomologist and associate professor of biology at Juniata College.
The judges were asked to rate each of the top ten cartoon from 10 to 1, awarding ten points to the best, nine to the next best and so on down to 1 for the least favorite. I then added up the points, producing our first, second and third place winners.
- The winner with 30 points is Jimmy Grayson from Stanford, California.
Scott said: The setup was good (stressing the good scientific point that decisions should be made after testing) and the punch line followed nicely — the naysayers’ favorite shapes matched their own (prejudices), which was another good point.
Hosler said: This cartoon is well rendered, funny and distills an illustrates the fundamental anthropocentric thinking of many denialists.
- Second place with 29 points goes to Aaron McGinniss from Little Meadows, Pennsylvania.
- Third place with 25 points goes to Anastasia Scott from Saint Augustine, Florida.
Congratulations to the winners. It’s now time to choose your prizes. My sincere thanks go out to everyone who helped out with prizes this year:
Jeremy Kalgreen at Amorphia Apparel
Carl Zimmer
The National Center for Science Education
See you next year!
