news media
mikethemadbiologist | December 6, 2010I don't see the need to redescribe the recent paper about the discovery of bacteria that can might replace, in extremis, phosphorus with arsenic, which was overhyped by NASA, was poorly covered by most journalists, and which has compromising methodological problems (for good coverage, read here, here, and here; and snark). But what the paper does demonstrate is the importance of culturing microorganisms, knowledge about which is becoming rapidly lost by younger scientists.
With the advent of DNA-based, culture-independent techniques, where we can look at the DNA and RNA of microbes without…
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2010I've discussed before how our political discourse shouldn't be the sole purview of English majors, that some topics might gain from being covered by those who have some mathematical training (quite a few science journalists do have this, and are quite good at reporting 'quantitative' stories). A reader sends us a link to this column by Washington Post ombudsman* Andrew Alexander about the problem of mathematical illiteracy among journalists. I often get some pushback on the whole English major thing, so it was refreshing to read this:
"We are, more or less, an industry of English majors,"…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2010"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
-Stewart Brand
Many pundits have been discussing what Wikileaks means for either…
mikethemadbiologist | November 11, 2010Certainly, you shouldn't when the topic is education 'reform.' Some snarky bloggers refer to The Washington Post as the Kaplan Test Prep Company, since most of the Post's profits come from the KTPC, not the newspaper (both of which are owned by the Washington Post Company). Well, any claims The Washington Post might want to make about ethics or morality (not to mention for-profit education) should be utterly ignored:
Though Kaplan is not the largest in the industry, the Post Company chairman, Donald Graham, has emerged as the highest-profile defender of for-profit education.
Together,…
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2010They're almost there. The NY Times' Joe Nocera on Foreclosuregate:
The lawsuit uncovered a raft of similar examples -- case after case where the loan officers not only knew that fraud was being committed, but were actively engaged in committing it. "By about 2006," says the lawsuit, "Countrywide's internal risk assessors knew that in a substantial number of its stated-income loans -- fully a third -- borrowers overstated income by more than 50 percent." And that is just one small subset of what went on at Countrywide. The truth is, any rock you turn over in the Countrywide subprime portfolio…
mikethemadbiologist | October 15, 2010Despite The Boston Phoenix's running articles that occasionally contain the word fuck, as well as having an 'adult section' complete with ads for 'massage' (why one has to wear a bikini to give a massage escapes me; also, prostitution isn't exactly feminist), their politics are about as alternative or radical as a wet noodle. This is best shown by their unrelenting and irrational assault on teachers, although the continual brushback by their readers seems to have had a slight effect.
Well, now the Phoenix editors have decided how to fix the Boston schools--even as these same schools have…
mikethemadbiologist | October 9, 2010Sometimes, as decrepit as our traditional media corporations are, they suffer from an outbreak of human decency. Kudos to the St. Petersburg Times for this obituary about a hit-and-run victim. Here's why they ran it:
Shortly after the St. Petersburg Times announced Mr. Smith's death on its website, a reader posted a comment stating the following: A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead.
Web editors removed the comment, deeming it an offensive and insensitive insult to a dead man's friends and family. Though hardly unusual -- check…
mikethemadbiologist | October 8, 2010Just how desperate to find a story--and a controversy--do you have to be to believe this is real:
Anchors at the Fox News national morning news show "Fox and Friends" reported Tuesday that the city of Los Angeles had ordered 10,000 jetpacks for its police and fire departments. The price tag: a whopping $100,000 per unit.
Yes, jet packs. Thousands of them. Maybe that should have set off warning bells. Well, actually it did, but this being Fox News, well... (italics mine):
For those doing the math at home, the cash-strapped city of Los Angeles, which is regularly sending its police…
mikethemadbiologist | October 3, 2010Curse you Gail Collins and your evidence! Last week, Gail Collins wrote a good op-ed about education 'reform.' While it's probably not anything too new for regular readers, it's good to see that the Rockefeller Republican/neo-liberal educational propaganda isn't being swallowed hook, line, and sinker. First, on charter schools (italics mine):
But plot-wise, the movie seems to suggest that what's needed is more charter schools, which get taxpayer dollars but are run outside the regular system, unencumbered by central bureaucracy or, in most cases, unions. However, about halfway through, the…
mikethemadbiologist | September 27, 2010A while ago, I wrote, "Someday, a science reporter is going to hybridize with an economics reporter and then the topic of how science is funded will actually be covered accurately. Until then, you're stuck with the Mad Biologist." Well, I don't know if the hybridization experiment has been successful, but a Nature news article by Kendall Powell describes the grant selection process very accurately.
Before I get to the article, it's not anything shocking or especially revealing to most scientists, but my hope is that journalists (and members of the chattering class) will read it and realize…
mikethemadbiologist | September 21, 2010Robert Samuelson has a penchant for willingly misinterpreting data. Time was, the newspaper bidness considered that to be a bad thing. Given his track record on Social Security, which led me to create the Samuelson Unit, it should be no surprise whatsoever that Samuelson screws up educational data.
Bob Somerby, rightfully offended by Samuelson's false claim that students have made no educational gains over the last forty years, asks, "Does Robert Samuelson hate black kids? It's always possible he doesn't--but he certainly seems to enjoy misstating their academic gains."
Somerby:
Among 17-…
mikethemadbiologist | September 13, 2010One of the subtle, but important things that influences national discussions of education is that the Washington D.C. public schools are dreadful. Not only do students do worse than would be predicted based on the poverty rate, but, according to the NAEP, the schools also do a worse job of educating poor students. Due to this repeated 'discovery', opinion makers, pundits, and politicians are bombarded with bad news about education and how our educational system is failing (in a fair number of states, our educational system surpasses that of every OECD country, so this really isn't a '…
mikethemadbiologist | September 10, 2010Last week, the NY Times' Joe Nocera wrote about net neutrality, a topic I've discussed before. In Nocera's piece is a parenthetical aside that illustrates how those ensconced in large-scale corporate media simply do not comprehend what the net neutrality battle is all about. Nocera:
(Which brings up one of the true oddities about the fervor over net neutrality. Cable television distributors make decisions all the time about what people can see and how much they have to pay for it. If special sports-only tiers aren't an example of placing some content over other content, I don't know what is…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2010After l'affaire Heffernan, I was curious to see what, if any, letters to the editor would appear in the NY Times. The Sunday Magazine printed two letters, both critical of Heffernan, which suggests to me, that there were very few, if any, supporters of Heffernan's position (An aside: anyone know if the letters actually make their way to Heffernan? Just wondering).
I like this point:
If some bloggers sound desperate and strident, it's possibly because even into the 21st century, only 39 percent of Americans believe in evolution and one out of five believes the Sun revolves around the Earth…
mikethemadbiologist | July 31, 2010I had been considering, over the weekend to write a navel gazing post about The State of ScienceBlogs and Its Relationship to the Mad Biologist. And then Virginia Heffernan of the NY Times wrote a quote picking article about ScienceBlogs, thereby screwing up my weekend blogging (so much stupid, so little Mad Biologist). At the end of the post, I'll describe how I see ScienceBlogs, but, first, let's talk about Heffernan's arrogance.
From Heffernan:
I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that…
mikethemadbiologist | July 8, 2010Update: Shortly, after writing this, ScienceBlogs pulled the Pepsi Blog
Thinking about it overnight, I'm back for now. The short version is that I think the changes are sufficient, although I'm still very disappointed in Seed. Basically, the changes in presentation seem to make it clear that the blog is advertising, not Sb content--and I realize others might disagree. This isn't a final decision on my part by a long shot. Frankly, I would much rather not have Food Frontiers at ScienceBlogs at all.
There has been a lot of verbiage flying around the intertubez about Pepsigeddon so below…
mikethemadbiologist | July 3, 2010Most people who follow the interaction between science and politics are well aware of the problem of 'he-said, she-said' reporting, the attempt to grant equal time to opposing views, no matter how stupid those ideas are (An aside: I've always imagined a Monty Pythonesque TV anchor turning to a guest, and saying, "And now, for the stupid and incorrect viewpoint, we turn to..."). With that being said, I like how Ivan Oransky rephrases the problem:
The other day, a tweet by Maggie Koerth-Baker, a freelance science journalist in Minneapolis, caught my eye. In it, she bemoaned the fact that…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2010Once again, Chris Mooney has published an article castigating scientists for our supposedly poor communication skills. Since I've dealt with this before, I don't want to rehash old ground. But two good posts, one by ScienceBlogling Evil Monkey and Joe at Climate Progress, are worth noting because they echo some points I've made before (and save me the trouble of doing so again. Sweet Baby Intelligent Designer, this gets tiresome). First, Evil Monkey places this in the appropriate context:
The problem with Chris Mooney is that he doesn't understand the problem. And the reason he doesn't…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2010I came across this excellent article by Jerry Coyne, which is part book review, part defense of natural selection. I recommend it highly. But, in reading the article, I wondered why people are so threatened by natural selection. Because that's not the philosophically challenging part. Unless you're a biblical 'literalist', the idea of a creator dude who acts through the mechanism of natural selection isn't too theologically challenging. After all, traits that are beneficial (at least locally and in the short term) increase, while the deleterious ones decrease. Surely, this is the best…
mikethemadbiologist | April 19, 2010Since I've raised this issue before, and it doesn't seem to have taken, the gloves are coming off.
Once again, we see the sorry spectacle of blaming scientists for policy failures--all scientists, not a subset (consider this foreshadowing). As always the 'scientists' are described as bookish nerds who bore policy makers and reporters with p-values.
This is as stupid as blaming a working ob/gyn for the lobbying failures of NARAL.
Let's take global warming and the recent Swifthack affair. Where the hell were the professional organizations that kill many, many trees in order to ask me to…