Media
clock | June 29, 2010There are fascinating threads of comments developing on these two posts:
Science journalism pet peeve
and
Do arrogant, condescending, and dismissive attitudes contribute to the journalism crisis?
If you have bookmarked the quick guide to the maxims of new media you will easily find the origin of the phrase "Do what you do best and link to the rest." - Jeff Jarvis in this 2007 post.
For the origin of the reluctance of MSM to link outside their own websites, watch this video.
For my own thoughts on this topic, informed by my experiences as "media tracker" for PLoS ONE, see Why it is important…
pharyngula | June 25, 2010After the computer break-in that revealed so-called 'damaging' emails in the East Anglia Climate Research Group, after all the media hysterics and errors and misrepresentations, now at last some newspapers are coming out and admitting that they screwed up. Any idiot could just look at the released emails and see that they didn't call the substance of the data into question, but the media took the profitable way out and fanned the flames of denialism.
It's rather like the Andrew Wakefield story. Take a very weak story, puff it up a bit to appeal to fringe kooks, and before you know it, you may…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2010The more peer-reviewed papers a climatologist has published and the more often those papers are cited, the more likely it is that the researcher supports the science underpinning anthropogenic climate change (ACC). That's the conclusion of a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone working in or following the field. But scientists like to put numbers to things, and the paper, "Expert credibility in climate change" does a pretty good job of doing just that.
There's a marvelous, interactive, graphical…
clock | June 21, 2010Over the weekend I stumbled upon two phrases, new to me, which I instantly loved - "monitorial citizenship" and "temporary experts". And I thought they both say something important about the role of expertise in journalism as a whole and in science journalism in particular.
Temporary Experts
If you are a very regular and careful reader of my blog, you may remember that I totally adore the student journalists now in charge of UNC's Daily Tarheel - they 'get it'! I follow them on various online places, read some articles online, occasionally pick a hard copy of the paper from the news-stand. So…
hrynyshyn | June 21, 2010Few stories about climatology generated as much attention, positive and negative as one by Jonathan Leake in London's Sunday Times back in January. "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" claimed that references to threats to the Amazon rainforest from global warming were "based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise." As pretty much anyone without an ulterior motive who bothered to look into the matter quickly discovered, that wasn't true. Now, more than five months later, the Times has apologized for the story.
Joe at Climate…
clock | June 20, 2010Republican candidate for Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction and current State Senator John Huppenthal gets schooled by Tempe's Corona del Sol High School student journalist Keith Wagner during an interview about the state legislature's vote to cut career and technical education funding by 99.9%.
:
clock | June 19, 2010It is always funny to hear how "blogs are dying", being abandoned in droves as bloggers are all moving to Twitter. It's funny how that works - you see fewer posts on a blog, or a couple of bloggers going on a summer hiatus, and the sky is falling!
In response to the latest such lament (which includes a seed of an idea that many have already developed at length and detail), I wrote this in the comments, and thought I'd repost it here for more discussion:
It is June. Blogospheric summer slump has been observed every summer since blogging started. Nothing surprising: kids are out of school and…
clock | June 19, 2010Christine Ottery, on her awesome new blog Women's Mag Science (check older posts) did a very interesting interview with Dr. Petra Boynton about the way sex surveys in women's magazines are done, and how misleading they often are. Watch the video:
The quick and dirty world of women's magazines from Christine Ottery on Vimeo.
clock | June 18, 2010Back in 1999, during the NATO bombing of Belgrade, Salon.com bragged that they could send a reporter to Serbia - the first online-only magazine to do such a thing. That was a sign that online-only journalism was maturing. But Dave Winer, while agreeing this is a sign of maturity for a US-based outlet, voiced the opinion that the Web was already there, in Yugoslavia, and that the people were on it, using it. Last week, Dave remembered that episode in a different context and I have, in a few posts before (regarding Mumbai attacks and Iran revolution), wondered why would American audience put…
hrynyshyn | June 16, 2010The most intelligent thing I've read so far about Obama's speech Tuesday night, the one that included not a single mention of climate change, comes from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. He's talking about the assumption that fear doesn't motivation people, only inspiration does.
But that strikes me as depressing evidence of how unlikely we are to succeed. I simply don't believe you could've passed health care if you couldn't have talked about covering the uninsured, and I don't think stimulus would've worked without the spur of the unemployed. It's not that people wanted to hear about…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2010In a desperate bid to help staunch the propagation of a particularly insidious meme, I offer this attempt to help clear up any confusion:
Mike Hulme and Martin Mahony of the School of Environmental Sciences University at East Anglia have a paper forthcoming in Progress in Physical Geography that explores the IPCC, "its origins and mandate; its disciplinary and geographical expertise; its governance and organisational learning; consensus and its representation of uncertainty; and its wider impact and influence on knowledge production, public discourse and policy development."
The paper does…
hrynyshyn | June 14, 2010Smoke and Mirrors:Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century
By Burton Richter
Cambridge University Press, 218 pages.
Do we really another book summarizing the science of climate change and the available response options? Sure. Why not? What's the harm? In this era of hyperfractionated audiences and echo-chambers, there's no such thing as too many arrows in our collective quiver. This one, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, doesn't contribute anything new. But at this point in the conversation, there's not much new to contribute, just novel approaches to making the argument…
clock | June 10, 2010The Essence of Online Science Journalism
View more presentations from miriamboon.
From a lecture by Miriam Boon
drorzel | June 10, 2010One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was "When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?" (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot of him wiggling his hips, he made a deliberate effort to practice giving sound bites-- answering questions in 3-4 sentences with a good "hook" for the tv people to work with.
I thought of this when I stumbled across the following YouTube clips, which were shot by TV Ontario when I was at the…
clock | June 9, 2010OK, a busy day, mostly offline, so here's another provocation for you to trash in the comments ;-)
There are several different aspects of science communication. If we classify them, somewhat artificially, by who is the sender and who is the receiver of information, we can have something like this:
A) Scientists to scientists - mainly via scientific journals, also conferences, and recently via blogs and social networks.
B) Scientists to traditional media - mainly via institutional press releases, now also blogs and social networks.
C) Traditional media to interested ("pull" method) lay…
hrynyshyn | June 8, 2010There's a small community of bloggers and activists who spent the weekend scratching their collective heads in hopes of figuring out what was behind a story that came out of a little place called Beeville, Texas. Last week word came from a local paper than a fourth-grader had won a "National Science Fair" prize by "Disproving Global Warming."
The story immediately drew skeptical analysis, as there hasn't been a "National Science Fair" for some time. More curious was the notion that a fourth-grader could manage to do what thousands of climatologists who make their living trying to find holes…
clock | June 6, 2010You may have heard that, about six months ago, Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer started a new Monday Science/Technology section.
Among other articles, there is also an ongoing weekly feature - a brief interview with a science blogger (usually, but not always, located in North Carolina), conducted by amazing and unique Delene Beeland (blog, Twitter).
Today was my turn (actually not - the blogger who was scheduled for this week had a good reason not to be interviewed in this particular week, and I was glad to help in a hurry).
You can now read the interview with me at…
clock | June 6, 2010Reposted, as I needed to add several of the most recent posts to the list - see under the fold:
As this blog is getting close to having 10,000 posts, and my Archives/Categories are getting unweildy (and pretty useless), I need to get some of the collections of useful posts together, mainly to make it easier for myself to find them. I did that by collecting my best Biology posts a couple of weeks ago. Today, I am collecting my best posts from the categories of Media, Science Reporting, Framing Science and Blogging. There are thousands of posts in these categories combined, most with excellent…
hrynyshyn | June 3, 2010Much has been written of late about the nature of denialism. New Scientist a couple of issues back produced a special report on the subject, for example, and the New Humanist explores the idea of "unreasonable doubt."
There's plenty more out there. The most provocative I've come across (thanks to Joss Garman via DeSmog Blog's Brendan DeMelle) is a 2009 paper in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics by Jeroen van Dongen of the Institute for History and Foundations of Science at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His thesis is ideologically based denialism of…
clock | June 3, 2010Ever have one of those times when you have a cool new blog post all ready in your head, just needs to be typed in and published? Just to realize that you have already published it months ago? Brains are funny things, playing tricks on us like this. I just had one of such experiences today, then realized that I have already posted it, almost word-for-word, a few months ago. It's this post. But something strange happened in the meantime: that post, in my head, got twice as long and changed direction - I started focusing on an aspect that I barely glossed over last time around. So perhaps I need…