framing
oracknows | September 10, 2015NOTE: Orac is on vacation recharging his Tarial cells and interacting with ion channel scientists, as a good computer should. In the meantime, he is rerunning oldies but goodies, classics, even. (OK, let's not get carried away. Here's one from all the way back in 2008 in response to Dr. Offit's excellent book Autism's False Prophets. Notice how, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
One of the major points made by Dr. Offit in Autism's False Prophets is how badly the media deals with scientific issues and stories in which science is a major component. Indeed, he devotes two…
gregladen | December 27, 2012What about a picture of Charles Darwin burning in hell to teach kids about flames?
I don't think so. Although I personally am not like some of my fellow secularists in reacting viscerally to any and all stylistic or symbolic references to Judeo-Christian religious themes, I am aware that there are recognizable religious visual or literary elements which, if used as part of a teaching tool, can be easily construed as promotion of a religion. "Promotion" is not standing on a soap box preaching, or telling students that a particular religion is bad while another is good, or giving extra credit…
gregladen | September 4, 2012This is a response to Critiquing the “Critique” and the “Critique of the Critique” of Bill Nye’s Video at UrbanAstro.org. In that post, FURYGuitar addresses both Critiquing the Critique of Bill Nye’s Video by me and Bill Nye’s “Don’t Teach Creationism…” Video Dissected by Business Communication Expert in which scientist and marketing expert Marc Kuchner writes in a guest blog for Scientific American Blogs an interview with communication expert Patrick Donadio.
The background is that Bill Nye made a video called Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children that some viewed as controversial…
lborkowski | April 16, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Broccoli. A nutritious green veggie of the cabbage family? Or a symbol of the federal government's over-reaching power grab? Like most things in life, it all depends on your perspective.
I've been thinking about that word -- broccoli -- since last month's Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of provisions within the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Specifically, I've been pondering this comment from Justice Antonin Scalia during arguments on the ACA's individual insurance mandate:
SCALIA: . . . could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so…
mikethemadbiologist | January 30, 2011Dave Noon makes a very cogent observation about resistance to vaccination:
Advocates will have to explain why, if the risks are so minimal, the packaging inserts for commercially available vaccines all warn of horrifying potential complications (with no reference to their statistical unlikelihood); or they'll have to explain why the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System exists in the first place if vaccines are so uncontroversially "safe." There are, of course, strong and convincing responses to both of these detours among many others, but I can attest from personal experience at least that…
mikethemadbiologist | December 28, 2010Mary Carmichael has a great video (and associated post) about the rise of genetic denialism--ridiculous arguments that 'genes don't cause disease.'* Carmichael offers two reasons why the argument is flawed; I'll offer a third in a bit, but I do want to note one minor point of disagreement with Carmichael.
If you go to roughly the ten minute mark, Carmichael has a summary slide that lists several phenomena that could account for the 'missing heritability'--the observation that currently identified genomic variation can't account for much the expected heritability as determined by various…
mikethemadbiologist | December 14, 2010For anyone trying to make a living at blogging, including our Seed Media Overlords, one of the major hurdles is the poor pay of internet advertising compared to magazine and newspaper advertising. This is an accurate assessment of the problem (italics mine):
I think the evidence for this dynamic is weaker than a lot of people suspect. As far as I can tell, it's all based on Google. GOOG showed up and provided contextualized ads to consumers and a model that allowed advertisers to only pay for purchases that were "working". This is pretty much the only way they make money, and they make a lot…
mikethemadbiologist | November 26, 2010Anyone who follows politics regularly is aware of the phenomenon of the voter who "wants the government to stay out of my Medicare" (Medicare is a government program). But a huge fraction of recipients of government aid do not believe they have received government aid. I'll get to why I think that's the case in a bit, but first consider this chart:
Like I mentioned, mind-boggling.
How can 43% of those who received a Pell Grant--college aid--not know that it came from the government? Not only is it all over the grant application forms, but, presumably, at least some of the recipients were…
mikethemadbiologist | November 14, 2010This should be the new Democratic talking point about tax cuts:
We need to change the thinking. Taxes are not too high. Incomes are too low. If you are having problems paying your taxes then you need a raise, not a tax cut. Democrats need to practice this response to anyone talking about tax cuts. The sooner Republicans realize that talking about tax cuts leads people to want and think they deserve a raise, the sooner they will stop talking about them and we can have some sanity in our economic discussions.
I like this, since it mirrors my experience.
Really long-time readers will remember…
mikethemadbiologist | September 27, 2010I'm a little late to this, but Susie Madrak asked Obama advisor David Axelrod a very important question:
Madrak asked, "I'm a blogger, and I don't know if you know this term, but are you familiar with the term hippie-punching?"
There was about a 15-second pause. "Go ahead," said Axelrod.
She continued. "Liberals and bloggers feel like we're the girl you take under the bleachers but won't be seen with in the light of day." She mentioned a series of incidents where the White House distances themselves from their base, and wondered how that helps Democrats regain enthusiasm from those same…
mikethemadbiologist | September 16, 2010One of the things never discussed by 'framers' is anger. Anger, especially righteous anger, is a powerful motivation, yet progressives and Democratic political operatives seem oblivious to his. Thankfully, we have Lance Mannion to set us straight (italics original; boldface mine):
The Democrats aren't going to lose Congress because the Right Wingers are going to come out to vote. They're going to lose because Democrats are going to stay home.
And this isn't going to happen because the President has been insufficiently attentive to the vanities of liberal bloggers who like to think of…
mikethemadbiologist | September 6, 2010I'm no great fan of DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, but I'm on his side over his calling his book about movement conservatives "American Taliban." According to progressives such as Matt Yglesias, this title is unwarranted hyperbole*. Tristero explains to boychick Yglesias why the title works:
Matt has described a dismaying number of ways in which the right wing sounds terribly Taliban-ish. Rhetorically speaking, simply by engaging the notion that radical Islamists can be compared to the right wing GOP, the creepy similarities between their worldviews and values simply can't be…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2010In an otherwise excellent article about the Breitbart scandal/Sherrod non-scandal*, Eric Alterman writes the following:
To be fair, Kurtz does come up with one legitimate example [of liberal excess]. He quotes MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, observing that Sherrod's reputation had been "assassinated by Fox News"--which is undeniable--but who also referred to and "that scum Breitbart." Olbermann is always the example that conservatives use, but even though he does go too far on occasion, his antics are in no way comparable to those of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
What's more, there are more accurate…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2010By way of a very good post about the Tea Parties by Amanda, I came across this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the NAACP's call to the Tea Partiers to renounce the racists in their midst:
I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like "it's worth saying" and "it strikes me that..." or "respectfully..."
When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it's worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them--respectfully…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2010One of the flaws--a bad frame if you must--in the communication debate flareups that happen every so often is that the debate (such as it is) is phrased as "why can't scientists communicate?" This is actually an imprecise and incorrect way of stating the problem. It should be stated as "How do scientists convincingly explain that misinformation is actually misinformation?" Once we phrase it like that, we realize that the problem isn't that we need to 'stop being such a scientist', because no one has a particularly good strategy for dealing with misinformation.
To use an example that won't…
mikethemadbiologist | July 3, 2010Most people who follow the interaction between science and politics are well aware of the problem of 'he-said, she-said' reporting, the attempt to grant equal time to opposing views, no matter how stupid those ideas are (An aside: I've always imagined a Monty Pythonesque TV anchor turning to a guest, and saying, "And now, for the stupid and incorrect viewpoint, we turn to..."). With that being said, I like how Ivan Oransky rephrases the problem:
The other day, a tweet by Maggie Koerth-Baker, a freelance science journalist in Minneapolis, caught my eye. In it, she bemoaned the fact that…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2010Once again, Chris Mooney has published an article castigating scientists for our supposedly poor communication skills. Since I've dealt with this before, I don't want to rehash old ground. But two good posts, one by ScienceBlogling Evil Monkey and Joe at Climate Progress, are worth noting because they echo some points I've made before (and save me the trouble of doing so again. Sweet Baby Intelligent Designer, this gets tiresome). First, Evil Monkey places this in the appropriate context:
The problem with Chris Mooney is that he doesn't understand the problem. And the reason he doesn't…
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2010Juan Cole, who has himself been a target of political campaigns regarding Middle East foreign policy, lays out why climatologists haven't been as successful as they could be in persuading the public (hint: It's not framing). First:
Very, very wealthy and powerful interests are lobbying the big media companies behind the scenes to push climate change skepticism, or in some cases (as with Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp/ Fox Cable News) the powerful and wealthy interests actually own the media.
Reason number two:
Powerful politicians linked to those wealthy interests are shilling for them, and…
mikethemadbiologist | February 21, 2010Or it's not the messaging, it's the actual policy. John Aravosis was recently invited to the White House along with some other 'progressive' bloggers who were called out on the carpet for not supporting the stimulus enough (funny, I didn't realize they were paid political operatives...). Aravosis writes:
The problem with the stimulus messaging is, well, the stimulus messaging itself. The problem is the White House messaging operation. It kind of sucks. And while Joe and I were living in Democratic exile over the past year for being the Cassandra's who saw all of this coming early on,…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2010ScienceBlogling Matt Nisbet throws down the gauntlet about anonymity:
Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions, if you can't participate in a dialogue about issues without using your full name and true identity, then what you have to say is probably not that valuable.
It's a silly argument for many reasons (some people should be treated with incivility; they've earned it), but there are a couple points I haven't seen mentioned (Drugmonkey has a very good response). But ultimately, the decision to be anonymous boils down to why one blogs. I…