To the editor

— Thank you for the coverage (Nature Materials 4, 105; 2005) of the teacher program held at the Materials Research Society's (MRS) 2004 Fall Meeting in Boston, as well as the other outreach initiatives advanced by the society in its efforts to improve public science literacy.

There appear to be a few attribution errors in your editorial with regards to funding sources of the initiatives mentioned. The National Science Foundation (NSF) division that supported the projects (Strange Matter, Materials World Modules) you described in the piece was the Division of Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education and not the Division of Materials Research (DMR). The teacher program that took place at the meeting was created through the efforts of the MRS and a few of its very proactive members who crafted and submitted the proposal to the NSF. This proposal, by the way, was indeed submitted to and supported by the DMR, although that was never mentioned in the article. Finally, it would have been much easier to have listed the Strange Matter Web site address — http://www.strangematterexhibit.com — than have your readers course their way through the Cornell website to find a link to Strange Matter.

If your political assessment at the end of the column is indeed correct, and the current administration's educational policies are stressing the flexibility of formal science education curricula, then the importance of the role of informal education programs and activities being created by the MRS and other groups is magnified.