Media
angrytoxicologist | October 31, 2007If you haven't seen it yet, USA Today is doing a series called "toxic legacy". First was lead, then mercury, and today, plastics. Well, really it's about BPA. We've dicussed BPA here before and I'm not going to rehash it. The article is good but doesn't give a lot of new information if you have been following this issue. One of the things that most people what to know is who to believe. And when you have two committees (NIEHS & CERHR) coming up with different takes on it, you don't know who to trust. You know how I feel about it. A great look into how the different panels reached their…
pharyngula | October 29, 2007I'd almost forgotten, myself. But look, Gannon shows up in the virtual flesh at Denialism to try and defend his record.
Trust me on this, Jeff. You want us to forget your sleazy softball approach to fake journalism. You aren't helping yourself by reminding us.
pharyngula | October 16, 2007I admit it, I'm often very harsh and critical of science reporting — it's important stuff, so it's infuriating to see it done badly. Rather than my usual angry growl, though, I'll recommend this first-rate collection of constructive suggestions for what we can do to improve the media.
angrytoxicologist | October 16, 2007So cancer death rates are going down. This is good. What's left out of all the news coverage is the question: So what's going up. Face it, we all die. The all cause, all age mortality rate isn't changing as fast as cancer, stroke, and heart disease. What's going up then? Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Hypertensive Disease among others. Now, the increases in these diseases aren't as large as the decreases for the others (our life expectancy is going up), but it's the other side of the coin that you rarely see in news coverage.
Cancer is down, so is quality of life.
By getting better at…
clock | October 14, 2007
Jeffrey Feldman nails it:
Every journalist working in America should print out that passage in extra-large font and tape it next to the bathroom mirror. Better yet, they should put the passage on a chain and wear it around their necks.
Obligatory Reading of the Day!
clock | October 12, 2007Alma Swan and Lawrence Lessig remind us that Creative Commons is celebrating its 5th birthday this December.
Alma writes:
Creative Commons (CC) is celebrating its 5th birthday. Lawrence Lessig has written to all supporters describing its 'dramatic' growth during the last quinquennium and yet acknowledging that as CC works to strengthen the underpinnings of participatory culture 'others are working equally hard to make sure culture remains proprietary'. Although this way of putting it is rather starkly black and white, and there remains a need for proper protection of creative rights in a…
clock | October 8, 2007Some good, thought-provoking reads about the Web, social networking, publishing and blogging:
Aggregating scientific activity
Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results
Would limiting career publication number revamp scientific publishing?
The Public Library of Science group
The Seven Principles of Community Building
clock | October 6, 2007Jeffrey Pomerantz invited me to give a brownbag lunch presentation on Science 2.0 yesterday at noon at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was fun for me and I hope it was fun for the others in the room, about 20 or so of faculty and students in the School.
This was my first attempt at putting together such a presentation, something I will be called on to do several times over the next couple of months and more. I was happy I made it within one hour, excellent questions included, though I probably talked too long about blogs and…
angrytoxicologist | October 5, 2007Perhaps I should call this entry Mr Kawamura, CA secretary of the state department of Food and Agriculture, is a moron.
Background
The Monterey area has a problem with the light brown apple moth. Apparently it's been there for a while but now the state is concerned. They want to spray a pheramone to disrupt the life cycle. The EPA gave them emergency clearance to spray Checkmate from an airplane over the area both agricultural and residental. The people of the Monterey peninsula don't want to be sprayed with something that the EPA didn't give a full review to. The state did it anyway.…
clock | September 25, 2007This is why you should attend ConvergeSouth. OK, Anton will lead a session, and so will I, but check out the entire program - it is just getting more and more amazing every year! And it is probably the most pleasant and enjoyable conference in any given year.
clock | September 25, 2007And it is hard to find anyone better than Brian:
I am now available for hire to consult on the creation, care, and feeding of online communities. Plus I can create audio and video for the web. To get an idea of my professional experience you can check out my resume here and my portfolio here.
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I'm interested in working for non-profits, businesses, and progressive political campaigns. I can help you make your own media and demonstrate how it will strengthen your mission and benefit your organization financially. But most important is communicating with customers,…
signout | September 22, 2007Much as activism kind of annoys me--I blame my polite mother--I am fairly solidly behind the woman who's fighting facebook for banning pictures of her breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is really good for babies,* and I'm all for making it as easy for moms to do as possible. That might mean overcoming our discomfort at viewing the breasts of women we don't know.
In the U.S., it's normative to find female breasts sexay. I'm not sure why; they have a pretty clear function, and it's not reproductive. Lots of people in this culture get a little shifty-eyed around breastfeeding mothers, and although…
scientificactivist | September 21, 2007Is this what we've come to after six and a half years of a Bush White House?
From a Wired Science blog post about Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns' resignation:
But what the heck -- by all appearances, Johanns wasn't grossly corrupt, didn't hand out more corporate freebies than you'd expect from someone of his background and position, didn't break the law and pretend that it never happened. Given the science-skewing and dishonesty that's permeated policy in other parts of the Bush administration, this sort of old-fashioned malfeasance ("Yes, I don't like what you've done -- but at least…
pharyngula | September 19, 2007The Great Wasteland is done. It's hit bottom. I suspect everyone has heard aboutSherri Shepherd, a new co-host on a talk show for stupid women, who doesn't accept the theory of evolution and, by the way, isn't so sure about the shape of the earth, either.
Way to go. Way to reinforce the idea that women are incurious airheads. Way to inform and educate and encourage thinking — hire an idiot to help anchor your program in idiocy.
pharyngula | September 18, 2007A bunch of us were asked to recommend science blogs for The Scientist … now you can see the picks, too.
clock | September 17, 2007My SciBling Craig McClain is one of the people considered by a major cable channel to host a show about the deep sea. You can help him get this cool job by showing your support in the comments on this post. Please do.
revere | September 11, 2007When smoking bans in public places were first broached, some of the fiercest opposition came from bar and restaurant lobbyists who predicted it would be their ruination. In March of this year 2006 Scotland instituted a ban and the rest of the UK on July 1. What's the verdict so far? If you read the business news, you might be a bit confused. Here are five headlines about pub chain, JD Weatherspoon:
Wetherspoon sales slump on smoking ban (TimesOnline)
Wetherspoon Says Pub Sales Growth Slowed After Smoking Ban (Bloomberg)
Wetherspoon warns on smoking ban (Daily Telegraph)
Wetherspoon cautious…
revere | September 10, 2007I try not to make mistakes on this blog but sometimes I do. When I find out about them, I correct them. But what do I know. I'm only a blogger, not a journalist. I thought you were supposed to correct your mistakes:
Almost half of the articles published by daily newspapers in the US contain one or more factual errors, and less than two per cent end up being corrected.
The findings are from a forthcoming research paper by Scott R Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication. The findings challenge how well journalism's "corrections box"…
signout | September 6, 2007See, this kind of shit makes me crazy.
There's a press release floating around about another study that demonstrates that women and men are, well, you know. The way they are.
It should be noted that this report will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (appropriately, PNAS), and is made of SCIENCE, so it's definitely true.
The study reports differentials in the importance of a potential date's physical attractiveness among male and female speed daters--I mean, among the general population. In their sampling--according to the press release--men went for the most…
clock | September 6, 2007When Klaus-Martin Schulte attacked Naomi Orestes and she responded, there was quite a lot of blosopheric response to it. If you look no further than scienceblogs.com, there were no less than eight direct responses (and some lively comments as well): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight.
What I was unaware of until today is an earlier article in Guardian by Jonathan Wolff about an outsider's look at the "controversy" around her 2004 Science paper. I saw it first on this post by Kaitlin Thaney (who also writes on the Science Commons blog), which links back to a post by Maxine…