Communicating
jjacquet | February 13, 2008I was interviewed at Bora's Blog around the Clock today as part of a series on science bloggers...
jjacquet | February 1, 2008Bryant Gumbel, in last week's edition of his HBO show Real Sports, ended with a great shifting baselines editorial which would probably irk a lot of people who hate American pop culture. After talking about all the silly trivia that will fill the airwaves over the next two weeks addressing non-football topics (like which quarterback is cuter, Eli or Tom, or which coach is nicer) he finished by saying:
It is life in the modern age in a pop culture world, and is why Super Bowl Sunday's have been only partly about football, and mostly about American excess. Some may bemoan that fact and argue…
jjacquet | January 21, 2008The blogging conference in North Carolina--not to be confused with a flogging conference or a logging conference or a jogging conference--is over and I just wanted to share some reviews (due to the nature of the beast, it's been blogged left, right, and center). Check out these links:
Aardvarchaeology's overview
Jennifer Ouellette's take on the Root of all Evil after the Framing Science talk
Our enthusiastic leader Bora's take on the event (plus photos)
Abel Pharmboy's take on framing science and herding cats
In my opinion, the best moment of the conference was Dave Munger's announcement of…
jjacquet | January 16, 2008That's one thing they ground into our little brains in film school. Film is a visual medium. A good test of how well you understand that is to show your film with the volume off and see if the viewer gets the same basic story.
And that would be a good test for the 60 Minutes segment on bluefin tuna. Take a look at it with the volume off. All you see is bountiful boatloads of happy fishermen with mountains of tuna. If you didn't hear the host say the tuna stocks were running out, you'd never know it.
Why would they do that? Because its a visual medium, and the producers select the shots…
jjacquet | January 9, 2008Lots o' Wednesday morning quarterbacking going on regarding the NH primary victory of Ms. Clinton (NOT "Hillary", even though an awful lot of people say "Rudy"). We got lesson #1 in Mass Communications 101 class with the note that Ms. Clinton's choked up moment of spontaneity was powerful good stuff for the last minute folks who were still making up their mind. Now comes Mass Communications 101 lesson #2, compliments of conservative guru Karl Rove (a.k.a. Dr. Really Evil) who notes the flip side of the dynamics--that Obama probably turned off a lot of people with his smarminess in the last…
jjacquet | January 9, 2008If you're an academic, it's officially not cool to speak from your heart. Academics do their best to keep things in the head--away from the sincerity of the heart, the humor of the gut, and especially (yeeks) away from the potentially atomic power of the lower organs. But Hillary saw for herself in New Hampshire this week the power of the heart.
You wanna save the oceans? Find yourself a genuine (un-phony and contrived) pathway to the heart. And you'll notice that her "heart moment" was not the carefully scripted work of a committee. It was her, letting go and being human.
Little known…
jjacquet | December 26, 2007Shifting baselines is about the failure to notice change. Here, sort of sadly, is a prime example of it, from my buddy Jason Ensler who is a director with NBC (he directed episodes of "My Name is Earl," and "Chuck" this season as well as co-creating the under-appreciated "Andy Barker, P.I."). It's a Christmas promo for CBS in 1966 which I even remember (yeeks).
Anyhow, look at the promo. It's so slow and sweet that today it would loose a half billion viewers before it's over -- everyone switching to the new reality show, "Who Can Dance with the Fattest Slob." And did you notice this year…
jjacquet | December 21, 2007Australia elected a new prime minister a month ago on the platform of having their country join the rest of the world (sans U.S.) in Kyoto. Now look at what one of his first actions is--to call the Japanese on the carpet for their stupid whaling antics.
Australia's new environment minister: Uncle Fester in da hizzouse
jjacquet | December 21, 2007Beware the Huckabee. He knows how to use the medium. Scientists, take note. He knows what he's doing.
Holy Huckabee, Batman, could that cross be an accident?
jjacquet | December 19, 2007The Best American Science Writing 2007, that is. Seriously, this book is good. First off, many of the articles center around medical conditions and who isn't interested if they or someone they love might one day face prosopagnosia (aka face blindness), depression, Alzheimer's, a Cesarean, or a dissecting aortic aneurysm? Stories like this explore the most fascinating interface: that between humans and life-altering afflictions. My friend who is a nurse borrowed the book and loved it, but it's not only about medicine.
This is the type of book perfect for someone like me who thinks: Golly…
jjacquet | December 18, 2007Cory Doctorow blogged about these posters earlier today at BoingBoing, calling the WWF campaign "effective and haunting". I agree.
jjacquet | December 16, 2007It doesn't get any better than this. My old buddy Ove Hoegh-Guldberg in Australia is the lead author on a paper in Science this past week that basically says we can see the end for coral reefs and its not far away. It says, in relatively simple language, here is the threshold (atmospheric CO2 level of 500 ppm) beyond which coral reefs will vanish, and here's when it looks like we're going to cross that threshold (by the end of the century) given current trends.
Very lucid. No hesitating, qualifying, hedging. Just a simple, bold statement. Much like when the late Ram Myers said in 2003…
jjacquet | December 10, 2007But first, support it. It's simple. There ought to be a Presidential debate devoted to science and technology in the 2008 election cycle. Already, many prominent scientists agree. Here at Shifting Baselines, we have added our name to a list of blogs that also rally behind a political discourse on science and technology. Read more on the call at the Intersection. Then voice your support and spread the word!
p.s. Sorry for the late post. I am in the South Pacific for the next couple weeks collecting data so expect posts at odd hours...
jjacquet | December 6, 2007 I was raised in the teeny town of Granville, Ohio. There were 112 kids in my graduating class and only one high school in the town. So you can imagine my surprise when, during my visit to the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival back in October, I ran into an old high school friend, Melissa Salpietra, who was there as a nominee for the "Best Newcomer" award for her film Longfin, which she co-produced with Lindsey Davidson (see more photos after the jump).
After saying our respective "Holy cows", Melissa gave me a copy of Longfin, which I held off on watching it until the arrival of my new…
jjacquet | December 5, 2007 An evening with Yann Martel
Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, spoke on campus last night and I was smart enough to attend. I cannot possibly impart all of his wisdom here so I'll give you what I found to be the most interesting snippets. My own wisdom: if you haven't read Life of Pi, please do. To be courteous to those who have not, I'll begin with Martel's politics and end with his writing.
On His Lonely Book Club with Stephen Harper:
About 8 months ago, Martel attended an event for the Canada Council for the Arts in Ottawa, where he said the politicians were largely absent and the…
jjacquet | December 3, 2007Friday night I went to the opening of Cameron MacDonald's "Catch of the day" exhibit at Little Mountain Studios here in Vancouver. The walls were covered in large-scale drawings of fantasy fish on 500 feet of thermal fax paper and there were several framed faux nutrition labels.
The new exhibit was a sequel to MacDonald's 2006 exhibit "Liquidation", a mixed media work that examined the issues of over fishing, globalization and food security. For the duration of "Liquidation":Little Mountain Studios (formerly The Butchershop) was transformed into Little Mountain Market. 1800 cans, comprising…
jjacquet | November 30, 2007Last week while I was home for U.S. Thanksgiving, I missed this event for Sounds Like Canada on CBC. David Suzuki, Canadian environmental hero, and his daughter, Sarika Cullis-Suzuki (also a student of Daniel Pauly's) spoke in front of a crowd of 250 people about climate change, fisheries, and hope. John Robinson, a UBC professor and contributor to the IPCC report, was also present and slips in a nice shifting baseline anecdote: "People don't remember, but Canada used to lead the world in energy programs in the early 1970s."
Referencing George Monbiot's Heat, David Suzuki discussed how…
jjacquet | November 28, 2007Last night at dinner, I asked whether a group of jellyfish was called a 'smuck' or a 'smack' to settle the debate on the blog last week. Though Wikipedia cites collective jellies as a 'smack', the three scientists I was eating with agreed it was 'smuck' and we even went to a big, tattered 1993 Webster's dictionary that confirmed a group of jellyfish was known either as a 'brood' or a 'smuck'. Knowing this term will become increasingly important, so we should settle it once and for all here. Does everyone agree on SMUCK?
If so, might some jelly expert volunteer to change the jellyfish page…
jjacquet | November 13, 2007Watch the 2-hour special tonight on PBS. Tomorrow we'll twalk amungst ourselves about it.