diamond
sastyk | February 16, 2010With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time. Sometimes the people coming in are hostile, sometimes curious, sometimes troubled by what they are learning, annoyed by you or dismissive. Sometimes they stay, and sometimes they look in and look out. Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise. That's been an issue for me lately - I've now been at science blogs a…
bioephemera | May 31, 2009If you've been following the Jared Diamond/New Yorker controversy, or my ongoing posts on journalism vs. blogging (here, here, here, here, here), you might be intrigued by this conversation about the culture of fact-checking in journalism, between journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer, in their podcast series Rebooting the News. Consider this riddle: how is fact-checking in journalism like (or unlike) debugging a computer program?
Here's Rosen's take on it:
One of the features of a rebooted news system would actually be borrowed from the tech world. And it's the notion of…
bioephemera | May 1, 2009I was recently reading A Scientist's Guide to Talking With the Media, a useful and clearheaded book by Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Emphasizing the importance of science outreach, Hayes and Grossman praise the pop-sci luminaries who followed in the footsteps of Carl Sagan:
With his intriguing investigations into the activities of everyday life, Fisher joins a distinguished fraternity of public scientists that includes Barry Commoner, Jared Diamond, Sylvia Earle, Paul Erlich, and E.O. Wilson. These are some of the most famous of the hundreds of…