Journalism
drorzel | August 2, 2013Thursday's tempest-in-a-teapot was kicked off by an interview with Dan Vergano in which he suggests science reporting is a "ghetto:"
The idea, and it comes from the redoubtable Tom Hayden, is that science reporting has largely become a secret garden walled off, and walling itself off, from the rest of the world. Instead of reporting on the scientific aspects of news stories — whether Iran really will have the bomb, whether Quantitative Easing will spark inflation, whether Peak Oil is a real concern — we write pretty entertainments about mummies, exploding stars and the sex life of ducks. All…
drorzel | May 28, 2013Last week's post about communications between scientists and journalists sparked a bit of discussion, and prompted the folks at the IoP's Physics Focus blog to ask me for a guest post advising journalists on how to talk to scientists. The post is now live, with the self-explanatory headline How Journalists Can Help the Scientists They Interview:
The temptation for each party in this situation is to try to push as much of the work to the other as possible, and that’s where most advice from journalists to scientists (or vice versa) fails. Each side treats the conventions of their particular…
drorzel | May 22, 2013Over at National Geographic's other blog network, Ed Yong offers a guide for scientists talking to journalists. Like everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, this was immediately re-tweeted by 5000 people calling it a must-read. Also like nearly everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, some of it kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
Given our respective areas of interest, there's approximately zero chance that Ed will ever contact me to ask my opinion of a paper, but I want to push back on a few of these, anyway. Because, in the end, scientists aren't responding in…
milhayser | April 25, 2013On ERV, Abbie Smith reports on the phenomenal success of the HPV vaccine in Australia. The vaccine, designed to protect against several types of sexually-transmitted papillomavirus, was first administered to Aussie girls in 2007. Since then, total prevalence of the virus among young women has dropped from 11.5% to less than 1%—and to 0% among girls who actually got the vaccine. These girls are also protecting their partners and reducing overall circulation of HPV; infections among young men, who were not even vaccinated, dropped from 12.1 to 2.2 percent. Abbie calls this a "blatant,…
oracknows | January 9, 2013About a year and a half ago, I applied a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to a a clueless article about the the "triumph" of New Age medicine. The article channeled the worst fallacies of apologists for alternative medicine. Basically, its whole idea appeared to be that, even if most of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" is quackery (which it most certainly is), it doesn't matter because allegedly it's making patients better because its practitioners take the time to talk to them in a way that most doctors do not. In brief, the article was…
denialism | October 19, 2012This has been a year of some wonderfully crazy new conspiracies. Birtherism is actually looking pretty banal next to the "Obama is gay-married to a Pakistani" conspiracy, the "Obama is a Jihadist sleeper agent conspiracy, the Aurora conspiracies, job numbers conspiracies, polling conspiracy theories from America’s least-accurate pollster Dick Morris, and, my former favorite, the Obama is buying bullets for the Social Security Administration to kill all Americans conspiracy theory.
Now the American Spectator is publishing a new crackpot conspiracy theory that I think rivals my former…
lborkowski | August 23, 2012North Carolina's News & Observer has published a terrific in-depth series on “ghost policies” – inadequate workers’ compensation policies that save employers money but leave injured workers without the safety net they’re supposed to have. North Carolina requires employers with three or more employees to have workers’ compensation coverage, and general contractors often require coverage even for smaller firms. But a News & Observer investigation found that more than 30,000 businesses in the state lack the required coverage. Mandy Locke writes about one injured worker whose employer’s…
lborkowski | July 12, 2012I wrote last week about the importance of the Freedom of Information Act, and Stacey Singer of The Palm Beach Post has just published a piece that shows how important sunshine laws can be for public health. Singer revealed that Florida is in the midst of tuberculosis outbreak that's claimed 13 lives and sickened at least 99 people, six of them children. Another 3,000 people may have been exposed to the bacterium through close contact with contagious sufferers. "Fortunately, only a few of the cases have developed drug resistance so far," Singer reports.
State health officials explained that…
sb admin | April 16, 2012As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm including a few resources along those lines as well.
The Panton Principles
Why does Dryad use CC0?
#sparc2012 a manifesto in absentia for Open Data
Information mining from Springer full-text: I ask for freedom
Textmining Update: Max Haussler's Questions to publishers: They have a duty to reply
The…
denialism | March 7, 2012Ed Yong demands higher accountability in science journalism and has made me think of how in the last two days I've run across two examples of shoddy reporting. These two articles I think encompass a large part of the problem, the first from the NYT, represents the common failure of science reporters to be critical of correlative results. While lacking egregious factual errors, in accepting the authors' conclusions without vetting the results of the actual paper, the journalist has created a misleading article. The second, from Forbes, represents the worst kind of corporate news hackery,…
drorzel | November 10, 2011I've been incredibly busy this term, but not so busy I couldn't create more work for myself. Specifically, by writing an opinion piece for Physics World about the FTL neutrino business, that just went live on their web site:
The result quickly turned into one of the most covered physics stories of the year, with numerous articles in magazines, newspapers and on television asking whether "Einstein was wrong". Just as quickly came numerous physicists denouncing the media frenzy, with Lawrence Krauss from Arizona State University and Cambridge University cosmologist Martin Rees both calling the…
bioephemera | September 14, 2011Recently, Scienceblogs/National Geographic decided it would no longer host pseudonymous science bloggers. As a result, many of my former colleagues have left. I think this decision was wrong. Read on for my reasons.
One: simple fairness. Several well-established pseudonymous bloggers had been active here for years. While it's perfectly reasonable to set up a media site from scratch and institute a "no pseudonymous blogging" policy at that time, it's quite another to change the rules and evict members of an established community. It violates my sense of fairness; it's why we usually expect…
sb admin | September 6, 2011Photo of Vermont highway courtesy of Kyle Cornell
Last week, I had my long-awaited vacation semi-ruined when, thanks to Hurricane Irene, my flight back from the West Coast was cancelled. I had to rent a car and drive across the country in a rush - not my favorite way to spend three and a half days. But based on what I saw passing through New York, and what I've heard about the damage in Vermont, I can't complain: flooding has overturned homes, isolated entire towns, and destroyed everything some families own.
Vermonters are a notoriously self-sufficient bunch, and I haven't seen that much…
drorzel | August 29, 2011My father's a huge fan of the Weather Channel, something I've never really gotten into. I did watch a bunch of its hurricane coverage on Sunday, though, trying to figure out how my travel was going to be affected. Thus, I got to see a really fabulous exchange as the studio anchor tossed to a field reporter on a boardwalk in New York City after learning that the storm had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. Paraphrasing from memory:
ANCHOR: [Reporter], we've just learned that Irene has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Has that changed anything where you are?
REPORTER: […
sb admin | August 26, 2011Gold Cortex
16 x 20, 2010Greg Dunn
I used to have a beautiful gold Japanese folding screen, which was purchased by my great-grandmother's feisty sister on a trip in the 1920s. I loved the gold patina and the surprisingly modern impact it had on my wall. At the moment, it's loaned to a friend, but looking at Greg Dunn's artwork, I couldn't help but be reminded of the best aspects of my screen: the gold leaf, crisp black patterns, and way that the scene seemed half natural, half abstract.
The biggest twist Greg, a 6th year graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania,…
drorzel | June 6, 2011One of the tabs I opened last week and didn't have time to get to was this Clastic Detritus post about what it takes to get science stories in the media, which is (quoting Michael Lemonick):
I get it that a stories involving science need a little something extra to make it in a magazine like Time or even near the front pages of a mainstream newspaper. Or, put another way:
It should be surprising, important -- or weird and fun, failing the important.
I get it that the average non-scientist out there isn't going to take the time to read an article about "ordinary" science. I get it. Our…
lborkowski | May 25, 2011I read a lot of stories about how our healthcare system fails people, but one of the ones that's stuck with me the most is the tragedy of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver, who died in 2007 after bacteria from an abscessed tooth spread to his brain. Deamonte and his brother were covered by Maryland's Medicaid program, but their mother, Alyce Driver, struggled to find a dentist that would accept Medicaid and had appointments available. Then, their coverage lapsed, mostly likely because their paperwork was sent to the homeless shelter where they'd been staying after they moved on to other housing…
bioephemera | May 12, 2011
I was playing The Fracking Song last night about midnight, and my boyfriend was grooving to it. At the end he asked, "what was that about?" "Uh. . . fracking."
"Which kind of fracking?"
Yes, we are a BSG household.
Anyway, it may be an explainer, but it's actually quite a nice little piece of music too. And I'm a sucker for good typography any day.
Is your fracking attention span longer than 2:33? Then go dig around in ProPublica's fracking investigation. "The Fracking Song" is by members of Jay Rosen's NYU graduate journalism class. Nice work, guys!
sa smith | May 11, 2011I want to bake our favorite ninja/journalist, Trine Tsouderos, some cupcakes.
Awesomesauce:In an email, retrovirologist Jonathan Stoye suggested that if the methods described in the original paper don't hold up, it should be retracted.
"Sooner or later they are going to have to face up to the fact that [their] paper is almost certainly flawed beyond repair," wrote Stoye, head of the Division of Virology at the UK Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research. "What is more, WPI cannot simply blame others for failing to reproduce their protocols."
"Rather they must ask…
bioephemera | May 1, 2011Now this is just cruel: yesterday the Cambridge Science Festival kicked off - a week of science, sciart, sci-journalism and sci-education activities at MIT, Harvard, the Museum of Science, and surrounds. Am I going to be hanging out all day with my fellow-geeks in the sun (which finally came out a few days ago, right on cue)? No! Because I have to write two final papers. (At least they're about sci-law. . . )
Anyway, don't be like me. If you're in the Cambridge/Boston area, have a life and check out the Cambridge Science Festival schedule. There are talks, performances, screenings, panels,…