Culture of science:
A few weeks ago the Question Du Jour, on Seed's Scienceblogs and elsewhere, was "Why Do You Blog?" Here's my answer -- or rather, here I explaine Why I DON'T Blog More Often, and Why I Won't Be Blogging Here Anymore. With this post -- and with mixed feelings -- I bid adieu to my blogging home on Seed's Scienceblogs and return to my own, quieter venue You can find my blog at http://smoothpebbles.com, where I expect to post a few times a month. But in light of how little I've posted here lately, Seed and I have amiably...
Posted on April 30, 2007 3:21 PM • 2 Comments •
From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one. As the PLOS Biology review notes, Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21 billion in 2002. Berry explores the fallout of this expanded...
Posted on April 17, 2007 11:21 AM • •
Maybe it sounded good at the editorial meeting: Have Christopher Hitchens, supposedly funny, clearly chauvinistic, write about
Why Women Aren't Funny. And so we gots, in a recent issue of
Vanity Fair, Hitchens -- who seems ever more a boorish drunk rather than a quick-witted friend of the vine; an intellectual bully who refuses to admit (regarding his support of the Iraq War) that he Got It Wrong; a one-time thoughtful leftist who finds himself stuck in the same dunce corner with the determinedly unthoughtful George W. Bush -- trying to legitimize a mix of half-baked 'conventional wisdom' and overtired chauvinism by wrapping them up with a few threads of sketchy evo/devo research findings. The
result is a piece about humor, sex, and science that is unfunny, off-putting, and -- in instructive ways -- far from scientific.
Posted on February 19, 2007 7:31 AM • 7 Comments •
Mind Matters, the "blog seminar" I edit at sciam.com, this week hosts
a debate (which readers can join) about a) how best to estimate the prevalence of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans and b) ultimately, how to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of war. ...
Check it out at Mind Matters. And feel free to chime in with comments or questions via the usual link at the bottom of the column there.
Posted on February 1, 2007 10:40 AM • •
I'm not a reagular reader of Foreign Policy magazine, but thank goodness I check in regularly at The Thinking Meat Project, which draws attention to a fascinating piece by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemnn on on how common "error biases" in our thinking make us vulnerable to the strident certainty of hawkish arguments. The article explains why leaders (and the rest of us presumably) often fall for arguments that advocate "forceful action" when something more thoughtful is called for. This is not a cutesy essay by some trendy thinker; it's is a careful piece of work by Princeton economist Daniel...
Posted on January 8, 2007 10:55 PM • 4 Comments •
Chris Anderson, editor of
Wired and author of
The Long Tail, recently
raising some juicy issues about what it would be like to bring a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (well, maybe, 1.6) "traditional" magazine like
Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print magazines and books, have been mulling over in a back-of-the-head sort of way.
Posted on December 22, 2006 11:23 AM • 3 Comments •
In my preceding post, about
Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part.
Posted on December 21, 2006 10:56 AM • 1 Comments •
Amid my guilt at not writing more on avian flu myself, I note well this
typically excellent post from Effect Measure, pondering: Why so little word lately of bird flu? Its issues intersect, in a very rough way, with those raised about science journalism...
Posted on October 23, 2006 10:08 AM • •
Even among the other scandals the drug industry has produced lately, the behavior
described in the latest New England Journal of Medicine stands out as particularly stunning.
Posted on October 20, 2006 9:15 PM • 2 Comments •
I've been interested in music and science since taking a physics of music class back in college (20 years later, amazingly, I discovered my violin teacher of 2000,
Kevin Bushee, was married to the daughter of the
professor who taught that class), so I was intrigued to find this Wired piece in which neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, formerly a rock producer, talks about
the neuroscience of music.
Posted on August 23, 2006 3:33 PM • 4 Comments •
It's good to see NASA hasn't completely abandoned its mandate to look after the home planet. As its Earth Observatory notes: Among the casualties of the conflict between Lebanon and Israel in the summer of 2006 was the Mediterranean. Israeli raids in mid-July on the Jiyyeh Power Station released thousands of tons of oil along the Lebanese coast, perhaps rivaling the Exxon Valdex accident in 1989. By August 8, the spill covered approximately 120 kilometers (75 miles). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture on August 15, 2006. The United Nations, the European...
Read on »
Posted on August 17, 2006 4:57 PM • 2 Comments •
From the Department of Fairness and Balance: Marrow stem, by Spike Walker For an elevatory antidote to the grimness of my previous post (about global warming cracking the Eiger), see the lovely collection of images from the Wellcome Trust's Biomedical Image Awards contest. As the site puts it, the gallery provides "a striking display of shapes and patterns [that] show a wide variety of subjects, most invisible to the naked eye, revealing new layers of complexity.... The winners of the Awards challenge the public perspective that scientists don't have an artistic side. " Another example: Some really lovely eye candy....
Posted on July 18, 2006 9:09 PM • 1 Comments •
In a promising experiment, Nature reports that it is beginning a trial in which it will evaluate submitted papers through two tracks, one using its current, traditional closed peer review system and another using open peer review. As the blog O'Reilly Radar notes, this is a highly encouraging and significant trial, and one with Nature's aggressive and creative exploration of how the Internet can enhance and improve scientific publishing. The O'Reilly article, well worth reading (and short), reports Nature's open peer review will allow anyone in a paper's field to comment on a submitted paper, which will be accessible via...
Posted on June 8, 2006 9:24 PM • •
The cover of the May 27 New Scientist bluntly asks, regarding climate change, “What Does It Take?” What will it take, that is, to convince our political leaders to start braking the accelerating runaway train we’ve created in global warming? I won’t review the (overwhelming) evidence here; for that, see some of the good writing on climate change lately, such as Mark Bowen’s Thin Ice or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. My concern here is not the evidence but our failure to act on it. Global warming is serving, in a way that, say, evolution doesn’t, as a...
Posted on June 6, 2006 9:21 PM • •
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