Media
pharyngula | July 8, 2007I'm home from our vacation, and our painfully tiring redeye flight from Seattle, and I get a treat right as I step through the door: a copy of Natalie Angier's The Canon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) arrived in the mail while I was away. What did I do? Right after we got all the luggage into the house, I flopped down on the bed with it and read it until the lack of sleep caught up with me — and it's good enough that I actually made it through the first two chapters before passing out. It's a passionate and enthusiastic survey of basic principles in science, and it's fun to read.
Then I discovered…
clock | July 2, 2007Books: "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge.
It's 2025 - What happened to science, politics and journalism? Well, you know I'd be intrigued. After all, a person whose taste in science fiction I trust (my brother) told me to read this and particularly to read it just before my interview with PLoS. So, of course I did (I know, it's been two months, I am slow, but I get there in the end).
'Rainbows End' is a novel-length expansion of the short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" which he finished in August 2001 and first published in "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge". The novel was written…
clock | July 1, 2007I am having difficulty understanding what this is about, who is who, what are the institutional affiliations and potential biases, etc. Can someone explain it to me:
Net Neutrality: Undifferentiated Networks Would Require Significant Extra Capacity:
Using computer models, the researchers compared the current "best-effort" approach with a tiered model that separates information into two simple classes -- one for most types of information and another for applications requiring service level assurance for high-bandwidth content like video games, telemedicine, and Voice over Internet Protocol (…
revere | June 28, 2007You can't look at the bird flu news without seeing a new outbreak somewhere, whether it's in Bangladesh, Ghana, Togo, the Czech Republic, or Germany, or of course the old standbys, Vietnam, Indonesia and Eqypt. Lots of it around and I didn't give anywhere near the whole list. So it's curious to find this headline, "UN finds progress in tackling bird flu" in an AP story in the Houston Chronicle by Marta Falconi (same story and headline in Washington Post):
Scientists and officials gathering in Rome for a three-day technical meeting on bird flu said that in most cases the virus is rapidly…
clock | June 26, 2007Apophenia, danah boyd's blog is one of the first blogs I ever read and have been reading more-or-less continuously over the past 3-4 years (since she took a class on framing with George Lakoff and blogged about it).
She is probably the most thoughtful analyst of online behavior. There are thousands who can write about technology and "killer apps", but she understand better than anyone the users' point of view: what works and what not and why.
Her ethnographic/sociological/anthropological/psychological approach to the study of the Web is, to me, much more insightful than any technology…
revere | June 25, 2007It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years, biomedicine has had nothing or virtually nothing (that last to cover myself in case I am forgetting something or just didn't know about it). What's a preprint server?
A preprint is a version of your scientific paper prior to its publication. Maybe it hasn't been submitted yet and you are circulating…
revere | June 23, 2007I like Keith Olbermann's TV show, Countdown, and I couldn't care less about Paris Hilton. But watching him last night I was dismayed -- again -- by the meanness and stupidity and exploitative nature of his coverage of Paris Hilton. She isn't news anymore. If he insists on covering her, doing it in such a vicious and meanspirited way can only be to entertain and pander to the basest instincts of TV viewers. It says something about Olbermann and his TV colleagues on all the channels, regardless of politics, who are doing the same thing. What it says about them isn't very pretty.
I'll grant you…
clock | June 22, 2007I am looking in the closet to see if I can find my tie, because I am going to this in an hour - a very bloggable event:
A Lunch and Panel Discussion
TALKING TO THE PUBLIC: How Can Media Coverage of Science Be Improved?
Friday, June 22, 12-1:30 p.m. at Duke University, Bryan Research
Building, Rm 103, 421 Research Drive, Durham
Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, The Council for the
Advancement of Science Writing (CASW) and The Duke Institute for Genome
Sciences & Policy invite you to a lunch and panel discussion on science
and the media. Scientists and journalists face challenges…
clock | June 21, 2007First, a video of Jonathan Haidt - Morality: 2012 (Hat-tip to Kevin):
The social and cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks with Henry Finder about the five foundations of morality, and why liberals often fail to get their message across. From "2012: Stories from the Near Future," the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
Second, a post by Drew Westen - Winning Hearts and Minds: Why Rational Appeals Are Irrational If Your Goal is Winning Elections:
The difference between the Clinton ad and the Kerry ad -- like the difference between the Clinton campaign and virtually every other Democratic…
clock | June 21, 2007Thanks to Jeff over on Shakesville (or should it be IN Shakesville?):
Election Central reports that Drudge (who the hell and why still reads that sleazeball of all people!?) tried to slander Edwards by insinuating that his daughter Emma-Claire supports Hillary:
Her comment came in response to a Drudge item quoting a local newspaper account that suggested that the Edwards' nine-year-old child supported Hillary, not her father.
Election Central has learned that Elizabeth put a comment in the comments section of another Web site's post debunking the Drudge item.
Elizabeth claimed the…
clock | June 20, 2007You may be aware of the ongoing discussion about the tense relationship between scientists and science journalists. Here is the quick rundown of posts so far:
Question for the academic types--interview requestsThe Mad Biologist and Science JournalistsScience Journalists are NOT the ProblemJust don't quote meScience and the PressScientists and Journalists, Part DeuxScientists in the MediaScience/journalists update redux: Mooney chimes inScience and journalismJournalists and scientists - an antimatter explosion?Madam Speaker, I Yield My Remaining Time to the Paleontologist from the Great State…
revere | June 16, 2007When Don Herbert died last weekend, many offered tributes to this television pioneer of science education (our contribution here). Herbert was TV's Mr. Wizard and many of us scientists-to-be loved to watch him. Maybe we should have been out playing stickball or strikeout or whatever (I became pretty proficient at strikeout later when I started dating). But instead we were inside watching grainy black and white science on TVs with tiny screens and rabbit ears (rabbit ears were part of an early form of wireless).
There were many heartfelt blog pieces from the many who remembered Mr. Wizard with…
pharyngula | June 14, 2007Now, see, this is why you shouldn't read a gadgets & fashion magazine for information on science. Wired has run an awful little article that breathlessly claims that junk DNA ain't junk—it's all got a purpose, because opossum junk DNA is different from human junk DNA (I know, that makes no sense at all, but there it is in the article).
Then, just to make it even worse, that non sequitur is followed up by bunch of "we knew it all along" quotes from creationists. And then they've got Francis Collins chiming in and saying that he doesn't use the term "junk" because he thinks it's all lying…
revere | June 13, 2007Don Herbert died yesterday, just short of his 90th year. Don Herbert was host of television's Watch Mr. Wizard, a Saturday morning live TV show that had a run of 547 episodes from 1951 to 1965. He was an important figure in the youth of many of today's scientists.
The weekly 30-minute show featured Herbert as Mr. Wizard with a young assistant who watched while Herbert performed interesting science experiments. The experiments, many of which seemed impossible at first glance, were usually simple enough to be re-created by viewers. The show was very successful. (Wikipedia entry on Don Herbert…
clock | June 12, 2007Scott Gant is on NPR's Diane Rehm show right now, valiantly defending bloggers from grouchy journalists. They will have a podcast up later.
revere | June 7, 2007We need to celebrate our victories, small as some are. I learned from my SciBling, Grrl, over at Living the Scientific Life that Elsevier is abandoning their ill gotten gains as enablers of international arms merchants, a role we and many others posted on. Her summary is excellent. Here's some more detail:
As first reported by The Scientist, the Anglo-Dutch publishing behemoth, which puts out more than 2,000 journals and 2,200 books annually, has bowed to pressure from leading scientists and will no longer organize trade shows for weapons merchants.
Despite the profitability of the company's…
revere | June 6, 2007I don't usually do movie reviews here, much less reviews of movie reviews. But since I was pretty hard on Marc Siegel a year or two ago (I won't link to the posts since that would be just criticizing him all over again; they are on the old site), I'll take the time to say his movie review of Pandemic on the Hallmark channel didn't offend me. I wouldn't have written it that way, but there were some good things in it. What I liked about it was the balanced way he evaluated the veracity and plausibility of the facts portrayed in the movie. Dramatic presentations like this are a mode of public…
scientificactivist | June 4, 2007The New York Times is currently offering free Times Select access for university students and faculty. If you have a university email address, click here to sign up.
scientificactivist | June 3, 2007Last Thursday, President George Bush unveiled a new climate change initiative, and this was further elaborated upon in a press conference by Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality (all of this, interestingly enough, as NASA Administrator Michael Griffin bizarrely proclaims that global warming isn't really a big deal after all). Although the Bush plan was given quite a bit of attention in the media, it's not a major departure from administration policy, as it continues to flout the tried and true international process led by the UN and does not insist on mandatory…
clock | May 31, 2007It is high time a blogger wins this prize, don't you think? If you are in Europe or Israel, and you have a life-science blog, apply for this award:
EMBO Award for Communication in the Life Sciences
Call for entries 2007
DEADLINE 30 JUNE 2007
Description of the award
The award is intended for scientists who have, while remaining active in laboratory research, risen to the challenge of communicating science to a non-scientific audience. The winners of the EMBO Award are nominated for the EU Descartes Prize for science communication.
Prize
The sum awarded is Euro 5.000, accompanied by a silver…