Media
clock | August 29, 2009I am feeling mean today. So, here is my first mean post of the day.
About a week ago I read this delicious post about the business of scientific publishing. It is a good read throughout - the title of the post is "Who is killing science on the Web? Publishers or Scientists?" and the answer is interesting. But what stood out for me was this paragraph:
This past February, I was on a panel discussion at the annual NFAIS conference, a popular forum for academic publishers. The conference theme was on digital natives in science. At one point I was asked (rather rudely) by a rep from a major…
edyong | August 24, 2009Our minds are battlegrounds where different media fight for attention. Through the Internet, desktops, mobile screens, TVs and more, we are constantly awash with headlines, links, images, icons, videos, animations and sound. This is the way of the 21st century - a saturated sensory environment where multi-tasking is the name of the game. Even as I type these words, my 24-inch monitor displays a Word document and a PDF side-by-side, while my headphones pump Lux Aeterna into my head (see image below).
You might think that this influx of media would make the heaviest of users better at…
clock | August 23, 2009I am proud to live in Chapel Hill, the home of UNC and it's campus newspaper The Daily Tar Heel. As soon as they got elected to their new editorial and managerial positions a couple of months ago, Sara Gregory, Emily Stephenson, Andrew Dunn and the rest of the crew opened up new channels of communication, including a Twitter account and a Facebook page. Did they use those to broadcast how brilliant they are and what great ideas they have in their heads? No, they used them to ask, ask, ask and to listen, listen, listen. Within days they organized an open-door meeting, inviting people from UNC…
ddobbs | August 19, 2009Well here you go. An 11-year-old interviews Obama -- and if I may say so, does quite a bit better than some of his journalistic elders.
Here's the vid, and some apt commentary from Tapped:
Hey, remember Damon Weaver, the 11-year-old who interviewed Joe Biden back in September? Well, he finally scored a sit-down session with Barack Obama yesterday.
Among the topics discussed: ways to improve school systems affected by budget cuts, Obama's attitude toward his critics, mangoes, basketball. Things not mentioned: the communist end of days, enchantment, swim trunks, death panels.
--Alexandra…
clock | August 15, 2009A run-down of good recent stuff, highly recommended for your weekend reading and bookmarking:
PLoS One: Interview with Peter Binfield:
...In my view PLoS ONE is the most dynamic, innovative and exciting journal in the world, and I am proud to work on it.
In many ways PLoS ONE operates like any other journal however it diverges in several important respects. The founding principle of PLoS ONE was that there are certain aspects of publishing which are best conducted pre-publication and certain aspects which are best conducted post-publication. The advent of online publishing has allowed us to…
awild | August 7, 2009A British film crew is in Arizona to film "Planet of the Ants," a National Geographic Television documentary about the picnic-spoiling arthropods.
The filmmakers, who shot in Phoenix and Tucson over the past couple of weeks, are now in the town of Portal, near the New Mexico border, until Wednesday, when they'll head back to England.
The leader of the crew, producer Martin Dohrn, director of the British production company Ammonite Ltd., said Arizona is a prime spot for ant filming."
More here, and my photo essay on the filming is here.
bioephemera | August 6, 2009The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…
clock | August 2, 2009SciBling Walt Crawford indulges himself in some prognosticating about the (non)demise of various physical means of delivering information: music, films, magazine, newspapers and books. He takes a cautious, conservative tack there, for the most part. I am supposed to be the wide-eyed digi-evangelists around here, but I was nodding along and, surprising to me, agreeing with much of what he wrote.
But I'd like to follow-up on this with some additional caveats and thoughts of my own. You may have to read Walt's post first for the context, as this will be a direct riff off of him.
Regarded as some…
revere | August 2, 2009Somewhere around mile 500 of the Revere tribe's 1000 mile trek to the beach for an alleged vacation -- long digression that interrupts the clear meaning of the sentence: if I'm on vacation, what am I doing writing about it? That's what Mrs. R. asked, as she headed to the beach, leaving me in air conditioned online splendor in a rented condo that could have been anywhere in the world, as long as it had high speed internet connection -- as I was saying, around mile 500 driving our new-ish car journey, CDC went live on a completely redesigned website for its novel H1N1 (aka swine flu) info. I'…
pharyngula | July 23, 2009Carl Zimmer discovers that George Will is still lying about global warming.
Also, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
pharyngula | July 17, 2009Some polls you know are just set up to try and get affirmations of what the pollster believes. Others are more inscrutable. Why would CNN even bother to ask this?
Do you believe the Apollo moon landings were faked?
Yes 14%
No 86%
It's meta-meaninglessness. I was tempted to vote yes, not because I think the moon landings were faked (shee-ya, you'd have to be a raving moron to think that), but because the poll question was so freakishly crazy.
But then, I guess that's what the modern media does. It doesn't evaluate; its job is just to treat every point of view as if they were equally sensible.
revere | July 15, 2009I hate to take off on the press. I do it every once in a while, but not often. The slow and agonizing demise of the main stream press has major consequences for keeping the public informed about issues both big and small. It's also a personal tragedy for many dedicated professional journalists. Still, while newspapers-as-we-knew-them aren't dead yet, they are at least moribund, and like the famous definition of a statesman as a successful politician who is dead, there is more than a bit of a tendency to endow the working press with some virtues it doesn't have now and in general never did.…
pharyngula | July 10, 2009I get called fairly often for quick fact checks by science journalists, which is a good thing. I've also written a fair number of science pieces for publication, which get improved by good editors, which is also a good thing. But there are also ugly tales of bad editing and the difficult realities of getting science stories published, and I got one this morning that I post with the author's permission.
I just read your post on journalist integrity, which reminded me to thank you again for your help with my article on zebrafish hair cells. I'm a recent graduate of an institutional science…
pharyngula | July 10, 2009I recently argued that to scientists, accuracy is the most important element of a story (surprising, no?) in response to a journalist trying to claim that character and plot were more important. I also tried to make the case that accuracy and an interesting narrative aren't mutually incompatible — and I should have added that accuracy ought to be the number one priority for science journalists, too.
In case you're wondering why so many scientists are distrustful of science journalists, you should take a look at this account from Ben Goldacre. A masters student in psychology gave a talk at a…
revere | July 7, 2009I'm not qualified to say if science and health reporting has gotten worse in recent years. Maybe I'm just paying more attention to how bad it often is now. My impression is that some reporters today are as good or better than we've ever had but there are fewer of them on the beat. This is compensated for by the fact that the ones still in there writing superb pieces can now be read and appreciated by many more of us, thanks to the very medium, the internet, that is killing their business model and their livelihoods. Exceptional science journalists aside, news outlets are continuing to do…
ddobbs | July 3, 2009It's been 26 years since health-care reform failed. Does the debate reflect anything that's happened since?
From The Columbia Journalism Review:"The idea that we've made a great breakthrough just isn't so," says Jonathan Oberlander, a health-policy expert at the University of North Carolina. "Most of the plans today are direct descendants of what was proposed for the '93-'94 debate. The debate reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day.
With few exceptions, like the fine series last summer by NPR that explained how a number of other countries handle health care, the press has…
clock | June 23, 2009Or better not. Is this the way Washington Post is trying to hasten its complete loss of respect and relevance? In the week they fired their only journalist worthy of that title?
Yuck!
[via @jayrosen_nyu]
pharyngula | June 22, 2009Oh, dog. Discussion of the conflict between science and religion. Francis Collins comes up first. Atheists are shrill. Human genome. Morality is a pointer to god. C.S. Lewis. Fine tuning. Atheists are arrogant. Atheists are fundamentalists. Atheism is irrational. Read my BioLogos website. The usual appalling Collins drivel.
Next up…you'd think anything would be a relief after that tepid, tired inanity, wouldn't you? But no. Who is the complement to the pious, gullible, nice Dr Collins? Someone who might offer a different point of view? Someone who might spark some real discussion? Someone…