Media
clock | July 20, 2008Titles of blog posts have to be short, but I could expand it to something like this:
"Depending on the medium and the context, many scientists can be and often are excellent communicators"
That is what I understood to be the main take-home message of "Sizzle". If you check out all the other blog reviews, even those that are the harshest do not state the opposite, i.e., that the movie pushes the stereotype of scientists as dull, stuffy communicators. Though, some of the commenters on those blog posts - people who could not have seen the movie themselves yet - imply that this was the case.
So…
clock | July 19, 2008Robert Grumbine has a series of posts with thoughts about climate change and what a non-expert can do to get properly informed:
Climate is a messy business:
Climate certainly is a messy business. One of the things that makes it interesting to those of us who work on it is precisely that. Wherever you look, you find something that affects climate, regardless of whether you look at permafrost, sea ice, forests, farms, rivers, factories, sunspots, volcanoes, dust, glaciers, ...
So certainly we have a complicated science and certainly few people are going to understand enough of it to argue the…
scientificactivist | July 16, 2008When I published my review of Sizzle yesterday, I felt like adding a reluctant-parent-disciplinarian-esque "this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" qualifier. Although I felt that Randy Olson's heart was in the right place, I just didn't have many positive things to say about his new movie, and I wasn't too excited about the prospect of writing such a negative review. But, since I had been recruited--like so many others--to participate in this science blogosphere-wide experiment before seeing the movie, I went along grudgingly.
Fortunately for me, various events today have helped…
angrytoxicologist | July 3, 2008The Good
Analysts from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the FEMA trailers had too much formaldehyde (well, yeah) but also that it was due to cheap materials, sloppy design, and drumroll please, lax or non-existing government standards. It's rare for a gov't report to directly say the standards need to be tighter.
The Bad
This is a terrible news story. Why? Just last week, the EPA said they wouldn't lower the formaldehyde standard to the CA level, but they did say that they would do some new exposure and risk assessments; a good sign of progress. This fact isn't mentioned…
pharyngula | July 2, 2008
Yikes. As everyone seems to have noticed, their cover story this week is Lincoln vs. Darwin, an absurd premise driven by the coincidence of their common birthday, which stoops to quoting their horoscope at us.
As soon as you do start comparing this odd couple, you discover there is more to this birthday coincidence than the same astrological chart (as Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached--hmmm, so far so good).
And of course, this being our brain-dead media, it can't actually discuss them as independent…
pharyngula | June 23, 2008We've got a couple of appalling examples of awful journalism to scowl at today. The first is this credulous piece by Gordy Slack in The Scientist. I've been unhappy with Slack before — he sometimes seems to want to let creationist absurdity slide — and I got yelled at by some readers for my uncharitable interpretation of his review of the Creation "Museum". Well, I think I've been vindicated now.
This article tries to give credit to the Intelligent Design creationists for some discoveries or interpretations. It's wrong from top to bottom. Here's his list, with my brief rebuttal; Jeffrey…
clock | June 17, 2008I know this call was kinda last minute, but I hope some of you have called in. And if you did, you may have heard yourself on the radio - the audio clips of your reviews are now uploaded here. Even if you didn't, keep an eye on the site and perhaps one week the question will get you all fired up and you will do it and become instantly famous!
clock | June 17, 2008Follow up on this story (re-check the links within for background):
Jeff Jarvis: AP, hole, dig
Patrick Nielsen Hayden: The Associated Press wants to charge you $12.50 to quote five words from them
Cory Doctorow: Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license)
Afarensis: AP to Bloggers: You Must Pay or Our Narcs Will Get You!
Patrick Nielsen Hayden: The Associated Press: worse than merely foolish
Oh, oh. Associated Press is sooooooo dead on arrival. Nice to have known you have existed, cavemen!
clock | June 14, 2008You have to act quickly, though:
We've been airing audio comments on our new national public radio
show, The Takeaway (http://www.thetakeaway.org), for the past couple
of weeks. On Monday, we want to highlight your scientificky thoughts
on "THE INCREDIBLE HULK" and "THE HAPPENING".
There's a lot of genetics and plant biology and global warming stuff
there to sink your teeth into. Here's what we're looking for: By
Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern, tell us two things about whichever movie you
saw:
1. ONE-PHRASE CAPSULE REVIEW -- IT'S QUICK AND EASY!
Say, "It was __________". Put an adjective or…
clock | June 14, 2008Associated Press is going to go extinct, due to being incorrigibly idiotic. In the era of blogs, Creative Commons licences, Open Source, Open Access... they are working actively at stopping traffic to their site!!! How much more stupid can they be? And the way they try to bully everyone around about this, I say...let them have it: never, ever link to their stories again - they are stolen stories to begin with, so take a couple of minutes to find the originals that AP stole from, then link to the original. Let the AP die.
clock | June 9, 2008Remember Chez Sapienza? The guy who was fired from CNN for having the gall to write a blog?
Well, a lot of people with brains got upset about this. And Simon Owens decided to investigate further, to see what is the general attitude about blogging among the Corporate Media control freaks. So he did a survey, and has just posted the results. Check them out.
scientificactivist | June 9, 2008Just a bit of self-promotion here, but on Friday I got a nice mention by Curtis Brainard in the Columbia Journalism Review blog The Kicker:
Yesterday, The Scientific Activist blog (part of the ScienceBlogs.com community) carried a keen-eyed piece of media criticism, turning the rating scheme of The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" blog back on the paper itself.
The blog's editor, Nick Anthis, a doctoral student in biochemistry at Oxford University, took issue with a recent Post article by Juliet Eilperin, which claimed a little too much credit for exposing NASA's censorship of climate…
scientificactivist | June 5, 2008A report by the NASA inspector general released earlier this week acknowledged that political appointees in the NASA press office censored climate scientists from 2004 to 2006. That would have been interesting news... about two years ago. Yawn.
What caught my eye, though, were these claims in an article by The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin:
The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.
James E. Hansen…
clock | June 2, 2008The media monitor:
"Timothy Caulfield has spent years listening to scientists complain that the media does a poor job of explaining science. As research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, he has heard this so often, he says, that he started to believe it too. Finally, he decided to find out for himself.
Caulfield pored over the print media's coverage of genetic discoveries from around the English-speaking world and compiled a list of 627 newspaper articles reporting on 111 different scientific journal articles. Together with a team of coders, all of whom had…
revere | April 24, 2008The art professor is finally cleared but a distinguished biologist was still punished by a ridiculous, mindless, cruel and utterly reckless use of raw power by the Bush administration:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
Judge Richard J. Arcara of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo ruled that the indictment against the professor, Steven J. Kurtz, was "…
kateseip | April 21, 2008As many of you may/may not know, my two wonderful colleagues and I organize an interdisciplinary lecture series on science communication, called the Science Communication Consortium. It followed on the heels of the framing debate, after I invited Chris and Matt to speak at New York Academy of Sciences last year.
My colleagues and I believe that framing is one small component of the larger systemic problem of deteriorating science communication, and began organizing a series of lectures to delve deeply into other critical areas. We hope that this dialogue will flesh out the broader issues of…
angrytoxicologist | April 14, 2008The Post really screwed this one up, not so much because they took a side on an issue in news piece (this is close to an opinion piece), but because it gets so much wrong and doesn't even address the rest of the story.
Issue 1: Science will save them!
I've been over this before, here and here, but we'll do it again. The Post makes it seem as if we have all this technological advances that can make tests more applicable to humans. Okay, here's how you would make an in vitro system similar to a human: take cell that you want to look at, surround it with other cell types it interacts with from…
revere | April 13, 2008Since we posted here less than a week ago on a recent paper authored by Chinese and US scientists in The Lancet giving scientific details confirming what most people had already assumed was a person to person transmission of H5N1 between a father and son, it was with considerable surprise we read the headline of a story from wire service Agency France Presse (AFP) claiming that Chinese authorities had "rejected a study which found a probable case of human-to-human bird flu transmission in the country, state media reported." On the one hand we were hesitant to accept this report at face value…