Journalism
Category archives for Journalism
Plagiarism, Garbling, and Superluminal Motion
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 1, 2009 I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled “Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light “– somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish: Scientist John Singleton insists…
How Not to Break Into Publishing
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 28, 2009 One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn’t’ve guessed…
All Physics Is Not Particle Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 23, 2009 A wag of my finger at the Corporate Masters, for their new article about traffic jams, with the subhead “For particle physicists who study phase transitions, a traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars.” In the body of the article, we find: While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly…
Prizes for Science and Journalism
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 17, 2009 Two announcements landed in my Inbox yesterday and are worth passing along: 1) The Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism is now accepting nominations: # Articles must have been published for the first time between 1 July 2008 and 30 June 2009. # Entries must state clearly the website where each article appeared and the date…
Unhealthy Obsessions of Academia
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 10, 2009 Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature‘s embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature‘s embargo. So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I’d loooove…
What An Editor Does, and Why It Matters
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 29, 2009 I’ve had the Quiche Moraine post on editing open in a browser tab for far too long, now, but it deserves a more prominent comment than just a link in the daily links dump. It really is an excellent presentation of the important role of editing: Editing requires the strange ability to stand in the…
Strunk and White Is Not for You
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 21, 2009 I tagged Geoffrey Pullum’s rant against The Elements of Style for del.icio.us a few days back, because it struck me as interesting, but I didn’t have time to say more. In the subsequent days, I’ve seen a bunch of “Preach it, Brother Pullum!” responses, most recently from revere. I’ve also received the copyedited manuscript of…
I Do Not Think That Means What You Think It Means
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 20, 2009 A couple of physics stories in the last few days have caught my attention for reasons that can be lumped together under the Vizzini Effect– that is, they say things that involve unconventional uses of common words. Take, for example, the Physics World story Physicists distinguish between the indistinguishable, which starts off: Spurred on by…
CBS: Polling for the Innumerate
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 7, 2009 Via Matt Yglesias, a new CBS/ New York Times Poll has been released, accompanied by quite possibly the stupidest graphics ever. The pseudo-pie-chart at right is one of three, all of which have the same glaring flaw as this one. Somebody really ought to lose their job for this. There’s just no excuse for putting…
The Confusing Display of Quantitative Information
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 17, 2009 Nobody is ever going to mistake me for Edward Tufte, but whenever I run across a chart like this one: (from Matt Yglesias, who got it from Justin Fox where it was merely one of many equally horrible plots), I find myself distracted from the actual point of the graph by the awfulness of the…
