Media
revere | February 15, 2008"Open Access" is apparently an Idea whose Time has Come:
All papers by Harvard scholars accepted for publication as of today will be freely available to the public. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously passed a motion last night (February 12) that requires all arts and sciences faculty articles to be made publicly available.
Harvard is the first US university to mandate open access to its faculty publications, Peter Suber, open access advocate, wrote on his blog yesterday. The mandate "should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have…
revere | February 15, 2008We've posted a bit (here and here) on this year's flu vaccine and some mismatches. Because of the time it takes to ramp up production the flu vaccines for the following season are made in the early spring of the year before, often, as now at the peak of the ongoing flu season. Yesterday WHO announced that they were changing all three of the strains in next year's vaccine, something that is unusual but not unprecedented.
This is all reported by the best of the best flu reporters, Canadian Press's Helen Branswell. I could do some pull quotes and summarize what she wrote, but instead I'll just…
clock | February 14, 2008Via Ed Cone (also see SteveK and McDawg) I see that CNN did Teh Stupid - they
fired their producer Chez Sapienza. Why? Because he is blogging! On his own blog as well as on HuffPo. He writes about the industry as a whole and writes well, though nothing specifically about CNN or his job there, so this is not a classical case of being Dooced, but a case of total blindness. The corporate media is used to controlling the message. Blogs drive them crazy. They cannot fire you and me, but they can fire one of their own, just for the sin of being a blogger, i.e., being the Enemy #1. Idiots.…
angrytoxicologist | February 14, 2008From the non-news that's news' department, Reuters reproted on a study that showed that ~15% of patients who took Sutent, a kidney and cancer drug, developed heart failure. Dr Melinda Telli presented information on 48 patients who took Sutent at an American Society of Clinical Oncology. You'd think this was new information the way it's being reported (WaPost, CNNMoney, ETC). Of course, if anyone had been reading the label of the drug, they'd find this under 'Precautions':
In the two MRCC studies, twenty-five patients (15%) had decreases in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) to below…
revere | February 11, 2008I clipped something from AP Pakistan last week but didn't use it because of interruptions. It turns out that Crof at H5N1 noted it at the time but I have a few observations to add, even at this late date. First, here's the gist:
Federal Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock, Prince Esa Jan Baloch here on Wednesday asked the journalists to focus on factual, objective and positive reporting to check spread of misconceptions and misinformation regarding the outbreak of bird flu in the country.
Addressing a press conference, following the coordination meeting between Ministry of Food…
scientificactivist | February 5, 2008For one reason or another when I was a student at Texas A&M University, I seemed to find myself in the student paper, The Battalion, fairly frequently--whether I was writing a letter to the editor, being quoted in a story, or reporting science news (as I did during my last semester there). It's been a while, but in a throwback to the 2001-2005 era, I'm once again quoted in a story today about presidential candidates using social networking sites:
"A candidate who doesn't take advantage of this is clearly out of the loop and out of touch with young people," said Nick Antis, class of 2005…
clock | February 2, 2008I've heard this one last year (02.16.2007) but heard it again today (it will probably re-air tomorrow - check your local NPR station) - the This American Life episode about Quiz Shows. It was composed of three stories:
The first one is kinda weird - the guy was lucky with questions on the Irish version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, he was shy and this win gave him self-confidence, and he is using the money to live and to help other people.
The third story totally floored me - I hope someone like Zuska or Amanda or Echidne does the analysis of it - it is about a failed quiz show for…
angrytoxicologist | January 31, 2008Everyone knows by now that the show Eli Stone misrepresents the facts about thimerosal and autism in it's fictional story of a lawyer going after a pharmaceutical after they put "mercuritol" in vaccines. It's clear that the story is supposed to mimic the thimerosal issue but as some defenders of the show say, hey, it's fiction.
So, when is fiction allowed to be fiction and when is it not? For example, look at The Da Vinci Code. Most of it is made up crap but even though it's fiction, people believed the 'facts' used in the book. Should that be permisible? The Dan Brown book is different in…
angrytoxicologist | January 28, 2008In an Slate article critiquing Marian Burros' story about mercury levels in fish, Jack Shafer takes issue with the omission of any discussion of a review published in 2000 in Environmental Research entitled "Twenty-seven Years Studying the Human Neurotoxicity of Methylmercury Exposure". Mr Shafer goes on for a while about the findings of this paper, but I find that his argument, on the face of it, to be very odd. Unless the review is a seminal piece of work, or the most up to date analysis, why should it be discussed? Hundreds of papers come out on mercury every year, and several discussing…
clock | January 23, 2008The Duke Medical Center News Office is seeking a Sr. Science News Writer to be responsible for planning, developing, implementing and analyzing strategic comprehensive and diversified media relations programs and tactics. Through direct support of Duke Medicine strategic objectives and the associated strategic plan, the Sr. Science News Writer accrues value to the Duke brand through local, regional and national news exposure.
The ideal candidate will have a Bachelor's degree in Journalism, English or a related discipline and at least 5 years of extensive media relations or science news…
clock | January 23, 2008On the heels of David Warlick's session on using online tools in the science classroom and the student blogging panel comes the announcement that SPARC has declared the winners of the first SPARKY Awards for student-generated videos on the theme of openess of information. The winner is Habib Yazdi, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the video entitled "Share." The three winning videos are under the fold:
revere | January 17, 2008When we complained the other day about World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) Director General Bernard Vallat's ill-considered remarks about how stable H5N1 was and that earlier fears were "overblown" we were not alone. Mike Osterholm at CIDRAP issued a similar remonstrance and the latter was publicized by the folks at Avian Flu Trackers on a press release that was picked up by a number of papers. Now DG Vallat is busy trying to extricate his foot from his mouth (or wherever he lodged it):
At an informal meeting with the press on 10/1/08 , the Director General of the OIE, Dr Bernard…
clock | January 8, 2008Obligatory Reading of the Day, by Glenn Greenwald:
"Do they ever think about anything without reference to some high school cliche?"
angrytoxicologist | January 8, 2008A reader sent an article from The Pink Sheet (an industry rag focused on Pharma). If you've never read industry-specific news publications, you're really missing out. They're really facinating and instructive. Sometimes you get early knowledge about industry trends and others, if you're lucky, that are not so subtle messages to other readers. This is one of the latter($ required, sorry).
The article is entitled "FDA Staffing Problems Extend Beyond Funding Shortfalls; Culture Shift Sought." I was expecting an article about what changes employees saw as need to change the culture. I was wrong.…
revere | January 3, 2008The back and forth about WHO over the weekend generated plenty of comment. I am still of the mind that WHO is an important part of the pandemic flu picture and we should try to help it do better. After defending them on Friday of last week I turned around and slammed them for poor risk communication on Sunday. A commenter observed that this may have been bad reporting, and while I allowed the possibility, I thought it too similar to past examples to accept this as the first explanation. However yesterday I received the following email from Mr. John Rainford, the WHO spokesman I took to task…
revere | December 19, 2007We have occasion to comment often here about how the same bird flu story is spun different ways. A case in point is reporting on statements made by the head of Indonesia's National Avian Influenza Committee, Bayu Krisnamurthi and the two different directions Agence France Presse and Reuters took the story.
Here's AFP:
Indonesian bird flu officials said Tuesday they were investigating several recent avian influenza deaths where the victims were believed to have not come into contact with infected poultry.
"In the last three to four months, we have had four cases where the poultry in the…
clock | December 7, 2007Praise where praise is deserved - Dan Abrams handled this segment perfectly, foregoing the he-said-she-said false equivalence, and even remembering to ask for the origin of the supposedly scientific study trotted out by the utterly dishonest proponent of the abstinence-only education:
Let's hope that his colleagues were paying attention and will try to emulate him in the future, whenever they have a liar on the show (both scientific and non-scientific topics, of course).
Thanks, Amanda.
scientificactivist | November 22, 2007From today's (well, technically, tomorrow's) New Zealand Herald:
Creature from hell promises salvationby Errol Kiong
Scientists have discovered a methane-eating bacterium at Hell's Gate in Rotorua which may offer hope for global warming.
Researchers at GNS Science hope their discovery of the bacterium could one day be used to cut down methane gas emissions from landfills and geothermal power stations.
The bug is part of a group of methane-eating micro-organisms known as methanotrophs, but this one is able to live in hotter and much more acidic conditions.
This article--sporting a wildly…
scientificactivist | November 21, 2007That could easily have been the shared title of a pair of articles in today's New York Times discussing the science and political implications of two very significant stem cell papers published online yesterday. The biggest offender was Sheryl Stolberg:
It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research.
Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did…
angrytoxicologist | November 1, 2007Or so says USA Today on the front page, paragraph two (regarding sausage, bacon and lunchmeat). Of course they are contradicted on paragraph 8 by someone who says that "you can still occasionally have a hot dog". The no safe level of bacon sounded fishy to me so I dug through the report (all 517 pages are here).
Cutting right to the chase, here's what they found, the consumption of processed meat increased the risk mainly for colorectal cancer. We'll get to the data in a second. They also found that salt caused cancer, particularly of the stomach.
Processed Meat
First, they don't specify what…