While the rest of the Program has been set for more than a month now, we have not yet announced who the Friday night Keynote Speaker will be at ScienceOnline2010. But now that all the negotiations have been done, we can do so. It is my pleasure to announce that we will have an exciting - and somewhat controversial - speaker that day - Michael Specter.
Michael Specter has started out in journalism at The Washington Post where he was, among else, the national science reporter and later their New York City bureau chief. He later moved to the Times and was the co-chief of the Times Moscow bureau and then the correspondent based in Rome. For the past decade or so, he has been the staff writer, focusing on science and technology, at The New Yorker.
Michael's latest book is Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives (order from Amazon, my copy is on its way). Of course, the topic is explosive, so the reviews span the entire spectrum. See, for example, two very different reviews in New York Times - here and here. Or compare the reviews in Grist and Boston Globe. There is an interesting four-part discussion on Slate between Michael Specter and Chris Mooney that is worth your time.
You can watch Michael give a talk here, discuss denialism with Chris Mooney on Bloggingheads.tv and you can see him on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on December 3rd. He will appear at TED in February (yes, we got him first).