media and science
sheril | February 23, 2009In lieu of blasting the Washington Post again over their recent faux pas, I'm interested in finding out whether you're as intrigued as I am lately over LOST...
During my recovery, I've been catching up on past episodes and this season includes a lot of 'science' in the script as the island jumps through time and space. And what is the DHARMA Initiative? Presently, we've got a physicist wandering through the jungle, years that span days, and the occasional troublesome nosebleed. All of which has inspired wide speculation about what's really going on.
Regular Intersection readers know this…
cmooney | February 23, 2009My post last week about the death knell of science journalism prompted some incredible responses. Here's Larry Moran, putting it more bluntly than I expected, and enunciating an opinion we'd better hope does not prevail:
Seriously, most of what passes for science journalism is so bad we will be better of without it.
Maybe the general public would have been more interested in science if science journalists hadn't been writing so much hype about "breakthroughs" for the past twenty years. Maybe the public would have been more interested in science if so-called "science" journalists hadn't been…
sheril | February 22, 2009Having recently emerged from the hospital, I'm catching up on the news I've missed--beginning with the Washington Post nonsense Chris has covered here.
Apparently reporter George Will is about as informed on climate change as octuplet mom Nadya Suleman is on the fiscal responsibilities of raising children. There's not much I'll add that hasn't already been written, except given Will's influential position, his dishonesty is far more reprehensible.
sheril | February 19, 2009
Listen to NPR's News & Notes today for our friend Al Teich--the Director of Science and Policy Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science--will discuss science under the Obama Administration, the stimulus package, and more.
Find your local station or listen to the podcast here.
sheril | February 18, 2009You've likely already seen this story all over the news:
Chimp's owner calls vicious mauling 'freak thing'
STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) -- The owner of a 200-pound chimpanzee that viciously mauled a Stamford woman calls the incident "a freak thing," but says her pet was not a "horrible" animal.
Sandra Herold told NBC's "Today Show" in an interview aired Wednesday that Travis, her 14-year-old chimpanzee, was like a son to her.
Herold tried to save her friend by stabbing the chimp with a butcher knife and bludgeoning it with a shovel.
I have extremely strong emotions concerning this particular issue…
cmooney | February 16, 2009CJR has the latest, from the Woodrow Wilson Center. Now Peter Dykstra, long at CNN, is writing for an environmental website; and now Seth Borenstein, long at AP, acknowledges that we're in a science journalism crisis (he was at time past a skeptic of this notion).
Meanwhile I sometimes worry that the science blogosphere--supposedly centrally involved in and concerned with science communication--doesn't grasp what is happening. Take this post from Jason Rosenhouse--and it's just one recent example. It's entitled "The Trouble with Science Journalism," and critiques something New Scientist put…
cmooney | February 13, 2009Folks, it has been a really rough time for Sheril--she may or may not tell the full story herself, but suffice it to say that she has been hospitalized for several days and has only recently been allowed to come home, and this unfortunate turn of events has prevented her from attending the AAAS meeting in Chicago, where she was set to headline at the high profile "Science of Kissing" panel on Valentine's Day.
That's a very sad missed opportunity; but luckily, Sheril has also done a freelance article for New Scientist about the same subject, which has just come out and which you can read here…
cmooney | February 12, 2009Over at Science Progress, I've been involved in putting together not one but two items timed for Darwin Day.
The first is an op-ed coauthored with my prof here at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett, who teaches Darwin. We argue for historical nuance, which leads one to reject the idea that Darwin should be considered an icon of conflict between science and religion. In fact, we call that idea "a hackneyed story, lacking in historical nuance and ultimately running counter to the project of drawing helpful lessons from the life of one of history's greatest scientists." A brief excerpt:
...Science-…
cmooney | February 9, 2009So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore.
The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…
cmooney | January 29, 2009My latest Science Progress column is up: It makes the case that Stephen Colbert is the heir to Johnny Carson in terms of talk show promotion of science.
It also includes various lame and stupid talking points that I made up and didn't use on the show, such as the following hypothetical Q&A responses:
Didn't scientists start the "war" in the first place? Didn't they commit acts of aggression?
Yes, if you mean by learning things.
Why should I care about science?
Because America is really good at it--much better than France.
Is there really a "war" on science? Where are the bodies?
Well,…
cmooney | January 28, 2009Here it is:
*/
The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Obama's New Science Policy - Chris Mooney
Colbert Report Full EpisodesColbert Report Tickets
Paul McCartney AppearanceMore Funny Videos
I'll have more to say about the whole experience in my next column....thanks to everyone who wrote in with positive words about the segment.
cmooney | January 27, 2009You can watch it here. Tons of funny stuff in Colbert's segment on science, which starts roughly at 6:15 and runs to roughly 10:45. I was on for about three minutes, and was instructed: "No monkey business. No evolution."
Of course, even though Colbert plays a rightwinger who thinks with his gut rather than his head and doesn't trust book learning, the truth is that his show features a ton of science content and, indeed, is doing vastly more than most other parts of the media to improve the role of science in our culture.
I was thrilled to be on.
cmooney | January 17, 2009You can watch here, and here's the embedded video:
Topics discussed:
Chris's optimism vs. Carl's skepticism on Obama's science policy
Weighing the costs of environmental regulation
Stop the presses! Did NASA just discover life on Mars?
The Sanjay Gupta controversy
Carl predicts artificial life in 2009
The future for science writing
Again, the whole thing is here.
sheril | January 1, 2009One Year In 40 Seconds by photographer Eirik Solheim
These images were captured in Oslo, Norway as the seasons changed and audio was recorded on site.
sheril | December 29, 2008Sure I'm concerned over Bush's last stand against the environment, but this piece from the Environmental News Network is, simply well... you decide:
In a few hundred thousand years, after all weather
effects of 21st century climate change have disappeared from the earth's surface, after our quietly smoldering nuclear waste has been extinguished, two destructive impacts traceable to George Bush's policies will yet remain.
The first is extinctions. Species that have died out, including the subset resulting from Bush's environmental policies, will forever deprive our evolving biosphere of their…
cmooney | December 23, 2008Well here we go....dutifully linking Bora, Brian, Isis, Laden...but excuse me, hasn't this debate happened before? And has it resulted in anything other than sound and fury?
Sheril and I have a long discussion of the science journalism/science communication problem in Unscientific America. I don't want to steal our thunder here, but suffice it to say that most of what I'm reading on ScienceBlogs about this subject seems to miss the most important part of the discussion. Which is this: Science journalists are vanishing from the traditional media, along with specialized journalists of many…
sheril | December 12, 2008Sometimes, the overlords at Seed have good ideas. Scienceblogs for example. The energy blog. Even the new life sciences site.
And other times, they go a bit off the deep end trying to hype up traffic by scaring the bejebus out of readers. Like today. Right now on the Sb homepage related to the latest topic at the life science blog:
What should humanity anticipate from WWIII?
Okay. Now I get bioterrorism is a serious threat. Nearly everyone in my Senate office was on Cipro after anthrax was found in the elevator on our side of the building. But that said, come on... 'WWIII'?
Alarmist…
cmooney | December 9, 2008
My latest Science Progress column is about the recent killing of science coverage at CNN, and the broader media business context in which this is happening.
The upshot: If we want science journalism, especially in these awful economic times, we have to fight for it and be willing to spend to support it.
You can read the full column here.
sheril | December 3, 2008'Try to be the smartest boy in class.'
..writes 9 yr old Alec Greven in How To Talk To Girls. Sure, he may not have much dating experience--and admittedly, I haven't read the book--but this charming little guy is onto something and may have better advice than John Gray. The author loves to read and write and has already won me over... He's also donating a portion of proceeds to Stand Up To Cancer.
Note to Alec, some of the coolest girls do like 'bugs and gross things'. You'll see ;)