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History and analysis of scientific publishing

A couple of days ago I had a nice conversation with Mitch Waldrop who suggested that I check out a book by Jean-Claude Guedon entitled In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing. This analysis of the history and future of scientific publishing has some very interesting factoids in it. I've only gone 1/5th through the book, but from the bit that I've read I can tell you that Guedon does not like the publishing industry and their aristocratic precedents. Also I find that the view of scientists is a little skewed, here is an…

Conditions for ethical therapeutic use of a placebo.

Jake has a great post up today about the frequency with which American internists and rheumatologists prescribe placebos and the ethical questions this raises. Jake writes: For my part, I don't think I would be comfortable deceiving my patient under any circumstances. I see my role as a future physician partly as a healer but also as an educator. Patients -- particularly patients with intractable chronic illnesses -- want to understand what is happening to them. I almost feel like in deceiving them, I would be denying them that small measure of control -- that small measure of dignity --…

Friday Sprog Blogging: did it have to be fish?

This post is dedicated to a donor to my Blogger Challenge who prefers to remain anonymous. The donor actually asked for artwork on the subject to which this discussion eventually turns; I hope the dialogue is an acceptable substitute. * * * * * Even though certain elements of the U.S. early grade school curriculum seem thoroughly ossified, some of them still end up sparking fresh thinking. For instance, in anticipation of Thanksgiving the younger Free-Ride offspring's first grade class learned about how Squanto helped the pilgrims learn how to grow corn in the challenging terrain of…

An open letter to the ACS.

Like Revere and the folks at The Scientist, I received the series of emails from "ACS insider" questioning the way the American Chemical Society is running its many publications -- and in particular, how compensation of ACS executives (and close ties to the chemical industry) might influence editorial policies at ACS publications. The ACS disputes the details of the anonymous emails, so I won't have much to say about those. But as an ACS member (who is, at present, participating in an ACS regional meeting), I'd like to ask the Society for some clarity. Does each member matter to the ACS?…

Friday Sprog Blogging: random bullets to start off the school year.

The Free-Ride offspring are 2.5 weeks into the new school year and still bubbling with enthusiasm. This week they share some of what they've been thinking about, and some hopes for the school year as it unfolds. * Material you saw when the first kid encountered it is still there for the next kid to learn. To be precise, younger offspring encountered lessons this week on phases of matter that seemed so two years ago. And indeed, younger offspring has vague recollections of learning about matter in kindergarten, not to mention discussing it at the dinner table. Still, not every first grader…

Friday Sprog Blogging: fixing a hole.

As an added bonus, this week's entry includes a behind the scenes peek at our FSB "process". Yeah, I'm scared, too. Walking across a large field at the junior high school where we sometimes play soccer: Younger offspring: My foot almost went in a hole. Elder offspring: Be careful! There are lots of holes, and they're all about the right size for your foot to get stuck. Dr. Free-Ride: Funny how it works that way. Younger offspring: Are all of these ground squirrel holes? Elder offspring: Either that or giant ants. Younger offspring: (With a dramatic eye-roll) They aren't anthills. Younger…

Bloggers who regularly make me think.

I've been dawdling on this. I was tagged by not one but two of my blog pals for the Thinking Blogger meme. Here are the official rules of the meme: If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think, Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme, Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog). Needless to say, I'm flummoxed by the fact that Zuska and Bill would have been in my list -- but they tagged me…

Final grades and missing student work: what to do?

Even though I got my grades filed last Friday (hours before the midnight deadline), this week I kept encountering colleagues for whom the grading drama Would. Not. End. As you might imagine, this led to some discussions about what one should do when the grade-filing deadline approaches and you are still waiting for students to cough up the work that needs grading. I'd like to tell you that this is a rare occurrence. Sadly, it is not. Before we get into speculation about why students may be failing to deliver the deliverables, a quick poll on your preferred professorial response: Final…

More hype than science: Ketogenic diets for cancer

If this looks a bit familiar to some of you, let's just say that it's grant crunch time again. This should be over after today. I hope. In the meantime, one of the difficult things about science-based medicine is determining what is and isn't quackery. While it is quite obvious that modalities such as homeopathy, acupuncture, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, Hulda Clark's "zapper," the Gerson therapy and Gonzalez protocol for cancer, and reiki (not to mention every other "energy healing" therapy) are the rankest quackery, there are lots of treatments that are harder to classify. Much of the…

And so it continues...

Why, oh, why is it that it is seemingly impossible for any sort of significant change to the ScienceBlogs collective to occur without major problems? It happened a a few years ago when we underwent the first major template upgrade. Given that experience, it was with great trepidation that I faced the upcoming migration of ScienceBlogs to WordPress. It began yesterday and thus far has not gone particularly smoothly. I was locked out of my account for a period of time, and, as of this writing, I've lost at least a couple of months' worth of comments dating back to before the original date that…

Here we go again: More radiation for Starchild Abraham Cherrix

I've written extensively before about Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the (now) 17-year-old who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease when he was 15 and who, after one course of chemotherapy, refused any further evidence-based medicine in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy. His refusal led to a big legal battle in Virginia, and the court ultimately (sort of) compromised, letting Abraham go to Mississippi to be treated by a radiation oncologist with taste for alternative medicine named Dr. R. Arnold Smith, who would give him low dose radiation and an unconventional variety of…

Update on Katie Wernecke

Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose "alternative" therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she still stood a reasonable chance of being saved with chemotherapy and radiation. More recently, we learned the sad news that her cancer had relapsed in a big way, with tumors in her chest. When last we saw her, she had written a heartbreaking story about a dying girl with…

I've heard of people who have tight anal sphincters, but this is ridiculous

I had thought of featuring this little gem on Your Friday Dose of Woo before, but my Friday feature usually requires a bit more to go on. Well, not exactly. Rather, it requires a bit more quotable material, the better for hilarity to ensue, and this is just a book with a description and some comments, but it's a nice bit of bizarre bonus silliness to start out the long holiday weekend. The title of the book? How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way? by Hiroyuki Nishigaki I kid you not. Thanks, Stupidity Tracker, for turning me on to this…

The lowest of the low

Ever since the Virginia Tech shootings a week ago, there's been a lot of playing of the blame game in the blogosphere over who or what was to blame for Cho Seung-Hui's deadly rampage. A few days ago, I mentioned one bright spot of heroism among the carnage, where a faculty member, Professor Liviu Librescu, barred the door to his classroom to the gunman, buying his students precious time to escape. He was apparently shot multiple times through the door. Librescu ended up giving his life so that a few more students could jump out of the windows of the classroom. As it turned out, he was also a…

Triassic Life on Land

The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination. ~ A repost for Back to School Special ~ Let's see ... The Triassic is about here: (You can also look it up in this PDF file supplied by the USGS. It is situated between two major extinction events, and is especially interesting because it is during this period that modern day ecological systems and major animal groups took a recognizable form. The preceding Permian, if contrasted with modern day, would form a very stark contrast while the Triassic would be at least somewhat more recognizable. But of course the…

Creationism and Evolution in the Classroom

A little over a year ago, there was a meeting of the Minnesota Atheists that included a one hour panel discussion of evolution, creationism, science education, and so on. The panel was moderated by Lynn Fellman, and included (in order from right to left as the audience gazed on) Randy Moore, Sehoya Cotner, Jane Phillips, Greg Laden, and PZ Myers. I thought it would be interesting to repost a description of that event for Back to School Month. There were several ways in which this discussion was interesting, and I'll tell you a few of them here. Presumably PZ will have something as well…

Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota

I've become very interested in Minnesota history, and by interested I mean annoyed in many cases. The first thing white Minnesotans did was to exploit the Indians. The second thing they did was to throw the Indians out, move them to reservations, kill them, and otherwise treat them very poorly. Meanwhile, they got going on the process of cutting down 90 percent of the trees in the state. Even New York State, where I grew up, did not have such wanton destruction of the forests, and Whitie had two hundred more years to do it there. They also killed off most of the wolves. Oh, and both…

Triassic Life on Land: I love this book

The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination. Let's see ... The Triassic is about here: (You can also look it up in this PDF file supplied by the USGS. It is situated between two major extinction events, and is especially interesting because it is during this period that modern day ecological systems and major animal groups took a recognizable form. The preceding Permian, if contrasted with modern day, would form a very stark contrast while the Triassic would be at least somewhat more recognizable. But of course the Triassic was in many ways distinct,…

HuffPo Religion and Science: the stupidest thing I've read on the internet all morning

Although I quickly add that I've not been reading much on the Internet this morning, but stilll ..... There is this item in HuffPo ... Jesus and the Evolution of the Species by Stanley Knick, PhD: This is not about whether you believe in God, or whether you believe in evolution. It is not about whether you believe that Jesus is the Son of God. If you believe in God, fine. If not, fine. If you believe evolution is real, fine. If not, fine. This is not about what you believe, or what I believe. It is about the idea of Jesus, and the idea of evolution, and what these two ideas might have to say…

The Plank's Constant

... continued ... In the US, political parties have what is called a "platform" which is a list of assertions ... "we want this" and "we want that" sort of assertions. The "platform" is made up, quaintly, of "planks" with each plank being about one issue. Like for my local Democratic Farm Labor party unit, one of our Planks is to get the damn road fixed over at Devil's Triangle, a particularly bad intersection down on Route 169. That's a local plank, but if we go to a party event, and a gubernatorial candidate is answering questions, she or he is expected to know what the heck is being…

Unpatriotic Missouri Academic "Freedom" Bill Advances Through Committee

A Missouri House Committee has just approved for consideration of the House an Academic Freedom Bill drafted with the aid of the Discovery Institute. The bill has a nice twist to it in that it prohibits the consideration of any boundary or difference between religion and non-religion in regards to what to teach or how to teach it. In other words, the bill requires that state agencies, school administrators, and teachers ignore the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America in deference to state law. Therefore, challenges to this…

Bats and Shade Grown Coffee

Birds have always gotten a fair amount of the credit for ridding shade grown coffee plants of various insect pests. But a new study now shows that bats have a huge positive impact in this area as well. The study also shows something else interesting: These insect eating bats often use a "perch and wait" technique for grabbing flying insects, rather than flying around all the time hunting on the wing. At a time when bat populations are declining worldwide, this new-found benefit to organic coffee farmers is another example of how these much-maligned mammals provide ecological services…

Science Blogging is Not Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research

I hate when people tell me what to blog (and not blog). I blog what I want, you read what you want. When the two coincide, wonderful. Bayblab, which is apparently some kind of science blog mostly written by anonymous bloggers, has a post critical of certain areas of science blogging. Mostly it is whining wannabee dribble, sour grapes, and all that, and I couldn't care less about it. But BB makes a deeply disturbing error in conflating science blogging with blogging about peer reviewed reserach. Nothing else is considered "true" science blogging. Here is my comment on BB's post:…

The annals of "I'm not anti-vaccine," part 3

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 begins right here, in the comments of (where else?) the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism, courtesy of commenter Kathy Blanco: Jeff, believe it or not riply, I think taking mercury out of vaccines, doesn't magically make them safer. It is proven that vaccines can cause the immune system to "trip" into autoimmnity against your own tissues if you have predispositions such as complement pathway problems, glutathione block, methylation quirks, autoimmunity in mothers or infections like XMRV/Lyme etc etc. Case in point, numerous vet manuals which warn of…

Vaccine Awareness Week begins: Raymond Obomsawin is still spreading the same misinformation

As brief as it will be, this is my first post for my self-declared Vaccine Awareness Week, proposed to counter Barbara Loe Fisher's National Vaccine Information Center's and Joe Mercola's proposal that November 1-6 be designated "Vaccine Awareness Week" for the purpose of promoting all sorts of pseudoscience, quackery, and misinformation about "vaccine injury" and how dangerous vaccines supposedly are. As you may recall, I decided to try to coopt the concept for the purpose of countering the pseudoscience promoted by the anti-vaccine movement and urging medical, science, and skeptical…

The case of chemotherapy refusenik Daniel Hauser: I was afraid of this

Maybe I was wrong. I praised the decision of Judge Rodenberg last Friday, in which he placed chemotherapy refusenik Daniel Hauser in the custody of his parents and ordered them to take him to an oncologist and have him undergo repeat staging studies in order to determine the extent of his Hodgkin's lymphoma. I did mention my one reservation was that leaving Daniel in the custody of his mother did run the risk of their fleeing to avoid the court order. Unfortunately, shades of Katie Wernecke, that's exactly what they appear to have done: Daniel Hauser and his parents, Colleen and Anthony…

"Politics is always intruding into the world of breast cancer"

Before I try to leave this topic for a while (which, like so may topics in the past, has temporarily taken over the blog for the last few days), one of the comments I've kept hearing since I started blogging about the new USPSTF mammography guidelines is something along the lines of, "Well, if the government runs health care, naturally politics will impact any attempts at science-based guidelines. That may be true, but in fact excessive politicization has always been a problem in that area, particularly for breast cancer. There's a good interview with to Dr. Barron Lerner, associate professor…

Owen McShane goes quote mining

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition registered climatescience.org.nz for their domain. A bit cheeky, given the dearth of actual climate scientists in their "coalition". Greenpeace New Zealand has countered by registering climatescience.co.nz and climatescience.net.nz and creating a web site describing mainstream climate science. The Climate Science Coalition's Owen McShane has complained (link to radio discussion), claiming that they are "passing off" their site as the CSC's one. It's easy to see that his claim is untrue. If you look at their site you'll see that it doesn't look…

Chronicle on Lott vs Levitt

David Glenn has a stellar article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Lott's lawsuit. (Free access only for five days.) Glenn writes: The passage concludes with these 60 words: Then there is the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that support his more-guns/less-crime theory. Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lott's admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem to be true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime. It is easy to see why Mr. Lott might find…

Oreskes replies to Schulte

John Lynch has posted Naomi Oreskes response to Schulte and the claims that there is no consensus: 3) The piece misrepresents the results we obtained. In the original AAAS talk on which the paper was based, and in various interviews and conversations after, I repeated pointed out that very few papers analyzed said anything explicit at all about the consensus position.This was actually a very important result, for the following reason. Biologists today never write papers in which they explicitly say "we endorse evolution". Earth scientists never say "we explicitly endorse plate tectonics."…

Lott tries to amend his complaint against Levitt

When we last visited Lott's lawsuit against Levitt, Lott was asking the judge to reconsider the dismissal of his case against Freakonomics. Well, the judge denied this, so now Lott wants to amend his complaint. The new complaint adds is now about another sentence in Freakonomics as well: Then there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that supports his more-guns/less-crime theory. Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lott's admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem to be true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they…

The War on Science

In my review of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, I contrasted Mooney's book with Gross and Levitt's book about the the postmodern left's war on science, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Now Mooney has got together with Alan Sokal (who punctured the postmodernist view of science) to write an article on the Republican war on science. Norman Levitt seems to agree with Sokal. Here's an email he sent commenting on my review. (Posted with his permission.) I think some of your remarks about HS are a bit unfair. The book was written in 1992-93, at…

Steve Fuller and Christian Exceptionalism

Poor Francis Collins: now his book has been panned in New Scientist…by Steve Fuller. That Steve Fuller, the pompous pseudo-post-modernist who testified for Intelligent Design creationism in Dover. His criticism has an interesting angle, though. Collins is just like Richard Dawkins. Who knew? In trying to accommodate too many camps, Collins ends up mired in confusion. Ironically, rather like Richard Dawkins, he treats religions equally, thereby homogenising them. Collins promotes "theistic evolution", a philosophy sufficiently devoid of controversy, if not content, to be "espoused by many…

Boudreaux: Do Nothing about Global Warming

Don Boudreaux says that we shouldn't try to prevent global warming because Capitalism produces so much food that we are never malnourished; it produces ample clothing and sturdy homes to protect us from the elements; it produces the soaps, shampoos, toothpastes and detergents that we use every day to cleanse our bodies and living spaces of bacteria and other dirt. And by continually substituting machines for human labor, capitalism progressively makes our work less backbreaking and less perilous. Those of us who recognize these important benefits of capitalism -- those of us who understand…

Ceri Dingle's campaign to kill African babies

A recent peer-reviewed scientific paper in Malaria Journal by Yukich, Lengeler, Tediosi, Brown, Mulligan, Chavasse, Stevens, Justino, Conteh, Maharaj, Erskine, Mueller, Wiseman, Ghebremeskel, Zerom, Goodman, McGuire, Urrutia, Sakho, Hanson and Sharp compared several large vector control programs to prevent malaria, including both insecticide-treated nets (ITN) and indoor residual spraying (IRS). The results: Method cost per child death averted Conventional ITNs $438-$2199 Long-lasting ITNs $502-$692 IRS $3933-$4357 Even using IRS, DDT was not the most cost effective…

The Australian's War on Science 33

Today's Australian has a piece by Bob Carter predicting global cooling Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why? Well, look at this graph from my previous post. When you want to talk about climate trends, you need to use at a bare minimum ten years and not cherry pick your starting point. Carter continues: There are two…

Religious nutjobs at their worst

While I'm being more political than usual, how about one more... I normally detest Sean Hannity. Basically, he's Rush Limbaugh without the flashes of cleverness or humor. However, this time, he's got it right on. I may be around three or four weeks behind the curve on this, but it's worth looking at the video below of Hannity & Colmes interviewing Shirley Phelps Roper, of the Westboro Baptist Church, a group of religious loonies of God Hates Fags infamy. This is the first time I encountered this video, and, given that none of my fellow SB'ers seems to have mentioned it, I don't feel so…

An update on Andrea Clarke

In the comments of my post regarding Andrea Clarke, the woman whom a Texas hospital is trying to pull the plug on because its bioethics committee has declared her care "futile" despite the fact that she is not comatose and is able to communicate her wishes comes an update posted yesterday to the Democratic Underground discussion boards: I don't really know how to begin this post. Everything is so different now, than it was before. It's like everyone moved the pieces on the chessboard, while I was out of the room. First the good news: Andrea's white blood cell count is down, for the fourth day…

It's Monday - Time to Get Back to Work!

Since I know I'm not the only poor soul swamped with post-Thanksgiving chores and Rodin-like cogitations I offer some brief headlines for perusal by those interested in the status of health on Mothership Earth. Smokers At Greater Risk of Alcohol-Use Disorders Adolescent smokers appear to have a greater vulnerability to developing alcohol-use disorders. Results indicate that smoking "primes" the brain for subsequent addiction to alcohol and possibly other drugs. Both academic studies and casual observation support the view that smokers tend to drink, and drinkers tend to smoke. New research…

"Beware of the Hateful Patient"

One of the more curious lectures we ever received in medical school was by a retired family doctor whose job was to interject some real-life medicine into our mind-numbing freshman syllabus. One day he started his talk with these words: "Beware of the hateful patient." As he said this he paused for dramatic effect while we raised our eyebrows or shifted nervously in our seats, all too ready to get back to our cadavers. "The hateful patient?" we thought. "Oh, great. Now we have to worry about getting chewed out by people that are both sick and angry. What a bunch of ungrateful jerks they…

Top Ten List: Color Science Fiction Movies

In our last episode of "The Scintillating World of The Cheerful Oncologist" I unveiled a list of my top ten favorite black and white sci-fi films. I certainly appreciate all those readers who took a moment out of their busy day to leave a cordial comment on my taste in cinema [Editor's note: He's just kidding!]. You know, watching a good science fiction movie is one of the most enjoyable pastimes available to anyone who has ever looked up into the sky at night and asked "Why?," or who gets a vague feeling of trepidation when interrogating a citizen of the animal kingdom. With your…

Best of The Cheerful Oncologist: "Good Doctors Leave Good Tracks"

[Editor's note: this essay is adapted from a post first written on December 16, 2004) The most influential mentor I ever had, who taught me how to chase and capture excellence in all aspects of patient care, and why giving one's best is the only goal worth pursuing in medicine, once told me that he had discovered a way to measure the merit of a doctor. He said, "Good doctors leave good tracks," by which he meant that one can always identify exceptional physicians by the "trail" of evidence they leave behind after their work is done - a ship's wake, if you will, that represents the effect…

Neuroscience education. . . byte by byte? (The Instant Egghead Guide to the Mind, by Emily Anthes)

Originally posted by Jessica Palmer On March 7, 2009, at 11:00 PM Brevity can be a creative coup. Consider Claire Evans' "Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds", which shoehorns our entire history into one minute: as the clock slowly ticks away, it makes me fear for a moment - implausible as it may seem - that it might run out before we evolve. Then there's the genius of Hamlet as Facebook updates (or Pride and Prejudice, though I don't find it nearly as good as Hamlet.) Maybe it's a symptom of our increasingly short attention spans, the acceleration of the news cycle, or simply the accumulation…

Environmental Science: The Marvelous Toy?

All these sets of knowledge were laid out before me, like packages tied in brightly colored papers and curling ribbons, each as enticing as the last. These weren’t just ideas, like the pictures on the pages of catalogs, but complete structures; laws and theories and all the understandings that led to their constructions. Bright packages of knowledge, each a puzzle unto itself--how was I to choose among them? To open them all would be certain madness--yet how could I resist? Oh, to be no longer limited to catalog poses, to grasp the real thing. If I opened them all at once, would I be…

Snakes and Symbols

I sent this petroglyph photograph to SmartGirlsRock for my recent interview, despite the fact that I've never posted it on my site. There is a bit of background story to it. My mom, who teaches high school anthropology, has always been a big fan of ancient rock art. A few summers ago, we drove cross country to California, and stopped in Utah to check out a few carvings along the way. While we were there, I found a lizard warming himself on a rock, not too far from a rock covered in petroglyphs. The clearest picture on the rock was a lizard. I was delighted to find prehistory repeating. This…

English homicide rates 1857-1993

Jim Zoes was kind enough to send me the data on English homicide rates that he obtained from the Home Office. I've typed it in and included it at the end of this message. The numbers are certainly higher than those recorded in the WHO Statistical Yearbook. I'll try to find out why, but for now I think we should consider the Home Office data to be more reliable. Anyway, there is plenty of data to let us look at the question of whether English homicide rates were lower before the introduction of gun control than after. Fortunately, the answer turns out to be yes and no, so debates here about…

Lott tries misdirection again

Lott has started a blog and responded to the questions I raised about his claims about the Merced pitchfork murders: Fox News interviewed the father of the dead children and reported the following: "Lott cited a Merced, Calif. family whose guns were put away because of the state's safe storage law. John Carpenter, who lost two children in an attack in 2000, said a gun would have stopped the man who broke into his home with a pitchfork. 'If a gun had been here, today I'd have at least a daughter alive,' Carpenter said." It doesn't appear that Fox News interviewed the father at…

Unpack the madness

From the Department of the Maximally Self-Righteous comes this delightful little piece of scholarship, a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that describes a survey of internal medicine interns on the subject of professionalism. In it, participants were asked to rate their participation in and perception of "unprofessional behaviors" related to residency. The survey* was created based on the input of third-year medical students, residents, and faculty, and was administered in the first three months of the subjects' intern years. Among behaviors rated as most…

Repost from old blog: the sound of mylonites

I'm neck-deep in a five-week summer class, and spending my evenings reading for class prep and thinking about how to run discussions. So I'm on a blogging semi-hiatus, at least until I've got an hour or two free of other commitments. In the meantime, I'll occasionally post some of my old favorites. This one was my first blog post ever, and was included in the 2007 Open Lab. NPR has had this series, off and on, in which listeners record interesting sounds and then explain them on the air. I didn't have a recording device with me last weekend, but I literally stumbled across some of the most…

Frogs in Boiling but Confusing Water: A Review of Climate Cover-Up

It's no wonder that the most recent Pew report finds that belief in rising temperatures is down. As Jim Hoggan explains in his new book Climate Cover-Up, the media and the public it serves are awash in a corporate conspiracy to undermine the science of climate change, the corporate buyout of politicians, and corporate greenwashing. Hoggan deals very well with the 'controversy' (i.e. there isn't one) and also shows some of the problematic issues between how corporations and scientists communicate (many of Hoggan's climate deniers are featured in Randy Olson's Sizzle, too). Yes, the book has…