Media
clock | December 13, 2006If you missed the Hardball last night, you can watch it here.
Here is Raleigh News & Observer:'Hardball' not so hard for Edwards:
Likely Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards passed the world leader pop quiz Tuesday night.
He correctly identified the leaders of Canada, Mexico, Iraq, Germany, South Africa and Italy when quizzed by Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball" program.
In fact, Edwards seemed to have little trouble fielding questions, ranging from the war in Iraq to his relative lack of foreign policy experience to his political ties to organized labor, before a live…
pharyngula | December 13, 2006Is anyone else getting a "look how stupid Americans are" vibe from all the British coverage of Ken Ham's creation 'science' museum? It's another story from the European press that politely echoes Ham's overblown claims for his grandiose edifice to ignorance, and mostly recycles the same old stuff we've heard over and over again. It really does seem to simply parrot whatever the Answers in Genesis con men say with complete credulity…for instance, I've seen this strange comment repeated multiple times in these kinds of stories.
Two-thirds of the US population lives within six hours' drive of…
signout | December 10, 2006Today, in another of her cantankerous and directionless "interviews," Deborah Solomon of the New York Times at least got something right. This time, the subject of her bullying is Louann Brizendine, a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Brizendine, who in her picture insists on the heeled ankle bootie, just came out with a book about why all women are catty bitches. (Finally!)
Near the end of the interview, Solomon notes that while Brizendine draws on other scientists' research in writing her book, she hasn't done any research herself. In…
clock | November 30, 2006Is this the first such thing? A faculty position at UNC school of journalism. From the job ad:
This person should be highly skilled in writing and editing online news, in blogging and in developing news content for the web.
Apply if you think you can and want to do this.
clock | November 28, 2006NewsTrust is a news portal that rates the stories by the quality of the journalism, as assessed by readers.
Readers are asked to rate stories based on how fair, balanced, accurate, and important the stories are, along with other criteria. The system has been set up to try and limit gaming of the site and to promote a non-partisan balanced view of the underlying journalism.
Along with the major news-media, the new portal is also rating some of the biggest blogs.
You should register and make it a habit to rate the stories. Also, tell your friends (or blog-readers) to do the same. A good way…
clock | November 26, 2006 I am sure glad that others have started parsing the numbers of the new report on 'The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science'.
Duane Smith takes a close look at a couple of tables in the report and concludes that, while relatively few people say they get their information on evolution directly from the Bible and Church, many do so indirectly, by beeing steeped in their comunities' beliefs transmitted by family, friends and neighbors (as well as local and church-run media). Interesting take (and I agree with him on this). What have you found so far?
clock | November 24, 2006Pew Internet and American Life Project just issued a new report: The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science (pdf). It states that:
Fully 87% of online users have at one time used the internet to carry out research on a scientific topic or concept and 40 million adults use the internet as their primary source of news and information about science.
The report is chockful of statistics of great importance to us science bloggers. For instance:
Each respondent to this survey received questions on one of three specific scientific topics: stem cell research, climate change,…
clock | November 22, 2006My son wants Wii for Hannukkah and he will get it. According to Jonah, it's good for you in more ways than just training in spatial orientation. You get a physical workout and you get drawn deeper into the game which will, presumably, make violence, aggression, injuries and death more realistic and thus may have the opposite effect of cartoonish effects of older video games or even watching carnage on TV news. You may even start emphatizing and thinking about the meaning of life! Who knows - time will tell.
But, and I did not think of this, Wii may do something more. Brian Russell muses…
clock | November 17, 2006Glenn and Dave on eliminationist rhetoric and the complicity of the media in it. So, what to do with the media? Glenn describes, Sara prescribes.
clock | November 12, 2006On The Media is one of my favourite NPR shows and today I was lucky to be in the car for almost the entire show. Today's show was very "bloggy". First, they had a report of the election and mentioned the positive impact of the netroots as well as the way Internet was ahead of CNN et al. in posting results (e.g., in Virginia).
Then, Steve Rubel talked about the way large companies can use blogs to connect with their customers.
Then , they had Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark on , not as a blogger, or a curiosity, but as an expert - the best person to summarize the responses of Middle-Eastern…
pharyngula | November 2, 2006Coturnix finds a blog that is reviewing Seed magazine in a multi-part series. He seems pretty cool with it so far, but he hasn't reached that review of mine at the end of the last issue yet, though.
I know it sounds so crass, since Seed Media is hosting this site, but it really is a good magazine—I eyeball it every month with some trepidation, for fear it might go the Omni/Wired route of hyping widgets, but it's holding my interest every time. There's a real kicker of a testimonial to it, that I just learned about the other day:
My Mom subscribes to it.
Whoa. You know it's gotta be good. She'…
clock | October 31, 2006Check out the freshly unvailed Open Healthcare Manifesto, designed to foster "open media" in healthcare and medicine and to implement "some sort of a new "integrity standard" ... needed to help people sort through the junk that openness unfortunately tends to generate."
To see the details, download the HealthTrain - the Open Healthcare Manifesto (pdf) and the HealthTrain Press Release (pdf)
clock | October 31, 2006I have a couple of subscription for Google News e-mail notifications for terms like "circadian" and what-not. This makes me informed fast enough for what I need (i.e., making a decision to blog or not about the news). Usually, I'd get 2-3 new entries for the "circadian" search-term each day (and even less for some other terms). A couple of days ago, I noticed that I am getting dozens. What is interesting that the entries are not from MSM or places like EurekAlert, but from blogs and MySpace!
So, what is the purpose of Google News? If I want to see what all websites have, I'll use Google…
scientificactivist | October 3, 2006What they clearly lack in substance, they attempt to make up for in style, but global warming denialists certainly aren't winning any points for class. In a September 25th speech in the Senate, Crazy Ol' James Inhofe--who once called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and who ironically serves as the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee--attacked The New York Times' esteemed environmental reporter Andrew Revkin for what else but his new children's book The North Pole Was Here. "So here we have a very prominent environmental…
pharyngula | September 20, 2006How can Gregg Easterbrook be publishing a science column in Slate? Brad DeLong explains it all.
The fact that Easterbook's writing is "lively" and "provocative" and that he is a member of the appropriate social networks is sufficient reason to publish him as a "science writer."
I can see where "lively" and "provocative" are necessary pre-conditions for getting a column in a popular magazine, but are they sufficient? No. Would they hire someone for a gossip column who had never heard of Scarlet Johansson or Brad Pitt? There is this phenomenon called "expertise" that ought to be part of the…
revere | September 7, 2006Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh sweet poetic justice. Oh joy, oh joy.
Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined. (Wired)
The motherfuckers at Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of…
pharyngula | September 6, 2006But I like it anyway. It's a series of charts illustrating channels of communication of science.
I appreciate the distinction made between "Average Citizen" and "Informed Citizen." Maybe there ought to be another box interposed between "Mainstream Media" and "The Average Citizen" labeled "Fox News/Talk Radio/Other Organs of Propaganda," though. And shouldn't there be another arrow from "Mainstream Media" to "Informed Citizen"?
revere | August 28, 2006I have no doubt deciding who should get awards is a difficult business. Too many worthy candidates, only a few awards.
Still.
This week the 2006 Science-in-Society award winners were announced by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW):
NASW holds the independent competition annually to honor outstanding investigative and interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact on society for good or ill. The 72-year-old organization of science writers recognizes and encourages critical, probing works in five categories: newspaper, magazine, broadcast, Web and book. The award…