Writing
ddobbs | December 18, 2009
Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn't scarce because people didn't create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That's no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That's just one reason -- among many -- why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years.
When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way,…
ddobbs | December 17, 2009At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that session, as well as the entanglement of my own future with that of science journalism, has me focused on the subject. And two recent online discussions about it have piqued my interest.
One was the reaction, on a science writer's email-list I'm on, to a recent Poynter interview with Times science…
ddobbs | December 14, 2009
Dear Readers, here's your chance to weigh in:
Over at the Atlantic, David Shenk, a sharp writer who keeps a blog there called "The Genius in Us All," has posted a gentlemanly smackdown ("Metaphor fight! Shenk and Dobbs square off") that he and I had via email last week regarding the "orchid-dandelion" metaphor I used in my recent Atlantic piece, "Orchid Children" (online version title: "The Science of Success"). Every metaphor has its limits, and David Shenk, a highly capable writer, recognizes that well. Yet he thinks this orchid-dandelion metaphor is fatally flawed, at least as I use it…
sciencewoman | November 8, 2009I'm not going to apologize about lack of posting over the last month or so, and I'm not going to make any promises for the future. That said, here's what I'm up to for InaDWriMo this month.
Here's what I wrote at ring-leader Dr. Brazen-Hussy's kickoff post:
Finish revisions on the paper-that-won't-die (goal: November 6)
Internal release time application (due November 15)
NSF proposal (due ~December 1)
After one week, I haven't finished the revisions, but I'm 90% done. No question as to me getting it done this week. I've got 3 pages of first draft of the 5 page release time application. This…
ddobbs | November 5, 2009
By way of demonstration, the group plugged in stats from the Oct. 11 playoff game between the Angels and the Red Sox:
BOSTON -- Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.
Guerrero drove in two Angels runners. He went 2-4 at the plate.
via mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
ddobbs | November 4, 2009
Just heard of a neat article about why feeling stupid on a regular basis is actually a good sign if you're doing serious scientific research. The article is by a fellow named Martin Schwartz, a professor of microbiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, and it was published in April of 2008 in The Journal of Cell Science. Here's an excerpt:
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it…
ddobbs | October 21, 2009"Book Launch 2.0" This kills me -- but maybe just because I've written books. (Oh yeah -- the links to the books. First two here. Reef Madness here. Buy 'em. Read 'em. They're better than the stuff you're reading now.)
This video should follow or be followed by Ellis Weiner's "Our Marketing Plan" from the New Yorker:
Once we get back from Frankfurt, weâd like to see you on morning talk shows like the âTodayâ show and âThe View,â so please get yourself booked on them and keep us âin the loop.â If Iâm not hereâwhich I wonât be, since after the book fair I go on vacation for two weeksâjust…
ddobbs | September 22, 2009
Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates.
Tara Smith explains why she'll be getting her kids their (seasonal) flu vaccines. Revere does likewise
Daniel Menaker, former honcho at Random House, defends the midlist. (Where was he when my book was getting so much push?)
Just in case you missed it, lack of insurance is killing 45,000 people a year (Times) in the U.S. This doesn't include preventable deaths among the underinsured (like yours truly, who is sitting on some surgery that he'd rather put behind him). You can download the…
ddobbs | September 21, 2009 In the intro to his self-published (on Lulu.com) collection of blog posts, The Wreck of the Henry Clay, New Yorker contributor Caleb Crain sums up nicely the anxieties shared by at least one other writer-with-blogging-addon about blogging, and, by extension, about self-publishing books. Which I may just do myself soon -- a collection -- because I CAN. Ellipses are mine.
I came to blogging ... as a veteran of print.... [and so] came to blogging nervous about losing what footing I had there... The quandary: If I wanted to communicate an important discovery, shouldn't I write it up formally,…
ddobbs | September 7, 2009Bloggingheads.tv just posted a conversation Greg Laden and I had about the second-biggest scientific controversy of Darwin's time, and of Darwin's life: the argument over how coral reefs form. The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.
His story -- and the tumultuous 19th-century struggle to define science and empiricism -- is the…
ddobbs | September 4, 2009
photo: U.S. Forest Service
Notables of the day:
John Hawks ponders the (bad) art of citing papers you've never read.
Clive Thompson ponders the new literacy spawned of engagement with many keyboards.
A poll on public education shows how much opinion depends on framing, context -- and who else thinks an idea is good. In this case, people liked the idea of merit pay more if told Obama likes it.
Mind Hacks works the placebo circuit.
And Effect Measure weighs in on the weird contrasts and (limited) parallels between swine flu and avian flu.
And for fun, fire lookout towers, from BLDGBLOG. You…
ddobbs | August 2, 2009
I just finished reading Erica Goode's Times story on the suicides of four soldiers who served together in a small North Carolina-based Guard unit in Iraq from 2006 to spring 2007. This is a witheringly painful story. Goode, who has done quite a bit of science writing as well as substantial reporting from Baghdad, tells it with an unusual freshness of perspective and clarity of vision.
She starts where I suppose she must:
On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26…
ddobbs | July 29, 2009Pardon the long silence. A couple of posts fell to tech issues. And I'd love to blame the hiatus on a vacation.
But mostly I've been off-blog and, for social media purposes, offline, because I've been immersed in writing a long feature. It's a fun, meaty, juicy, really substantial story, one of two great assignments I've been working on this summer. And I'm greatly enjoying it, especially when it goes well. But as I've found before, the longer (and deeper) the feature, the more exclusively I seem to need to give it my attention. Thus the lack of blogging, and of tweets.
I don't seem to mix…
ddobbs | July 8, 2009
Ed Yong, echoed by Mike the Mad biologist PhysioProf asks what the heck investigative science journalism would look like. I hope to write more extensively on this soon. In the meantime, a few observations:
To ponder this question -- and to do investigative reporting -- I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Science -- the search…
ddobbs | June 3, 2009Forgive my recent blogopause. i was fishing, and then traveling, and then writing rather head-down intensely -- all activities I have trouble mixing with blogging and social media such as Twitter, which I've also left idle these last days.
So what gives with all that? I often find it awkward to switch between blogging or twittering and engaging deeply immersive physical activities. This hiatus, for instance, started when I went fishing last Tuesday on Lake Champlain for salmon -- a piscatorial retreat before a highly engaging work trip to NY, DC, and environs to talk to scientists and see my…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2009I have been pinching myself for the past three weeks for two reasons: first I have good news to share with you and second, I was afraid that my good news was a dream that I'd awaken from.
My good news is that I just sent off a book review to be published in Nature magazine. Nature? you say .. Do you mean .. ?
Why, yes, I do mean ... !
I don't yet know when it will appear in print, but believe me, as soon as I know, you'll know! (aaand the author will know, and the book publisher, editors and publicity agents will know) Additionally, I am working on a longer version of this book review…
bioephemera | April 3, 2009At 3quarksdaily, Sam Kean has an interesting essay on the future of theoretical mathematics, whether computers capable of generating proofs will supplant human mathematicians, and what that will mean for the "beauty" of math:
There's general consensus that really genius-level mathematics is beautiful--purely and uncorruptedly beautiful, the way colored light is, or angels. More particularly, it's regarded as beautiful in a way that science is not. With a few exceptions--Einstein's theories of relativity, string theory, maybe Newton and Darwin--no matter how much science impresses people, it…
ddobbs | March 23, 2009Now this makes my day: I've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. Beard, foodees know, was a great eminence in fooddom, and won my heart years ago by stressing in one of his cookbooks that (to paraphrase) the quantity of food in a meal can be as important to its enjoyment as the food's quality -- especially if the food is good. His food awards are greatly coveted among chefs, food writers, and others who care about food.
So I'm thrilled that, as Eating Well editor Lisa Gosselin kindly informed me today,, my Eating Well story "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at…
ddobbs | March 23, 2009I've had mixed reactions to Gladwell's writing over the years: I always enjoy reading it, but in Blink, especially, when he was writing about an area I knew more about than in his other books, I was troubled not just by what seemed an avoidance of neuroscientific explanations of attention and decision-making, but by an argument that seemed to come down to "The best way to make decisions is the quick gut method, except when it's not." I was also troubled by ... well, I couldn't put my finger on it. But Joseph Epstein has:
Too frequently one reads Gladwell's anecdotes, case studies, potted…
thusspakezuska | March 10, 2009I found Light-skinned-ed Girl via Acmegirl's blogroll. Lots of good stuff about the process of writing, quotes from writers, and the experience of being biracial. I like her idea about the Oscars for books. That is an awards ceremony I would definitely watch!
Black on Campus has a post about Lisa Jackson, chemical engineer, and head of the EPA, with links to several articles about her. Also check out the post on (Not So) Affirmative Action, wherein names are named of the selective admissions schools who admit Black students at a lower rate than other students. You don't hear the likes of…