The tech and culture site The Verge has launched its new Verge Science vertical (what we used to call a science section), with Katie Drummond of Wired as the editor. FishbowlNY ...
Paul Raeburn's Tracker
The tech and culture site The Verge has launched its new Verge Science vertical (what we used to call a science section), with Katie Drummond of Wired as the editor. FishbowlNY reports that Drummond most recently covered military research at Wired and has also worked at The Daily and AOL News.
Drummond introduces the section (sorry: the vertical) with a video here, which you might want to check out before heading over to The Verge Science. There you will find stories on...
The early reports on the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion are not first drafts of history, but "tentative notes for the first drafts of the first drafts of history," as Tabitha M. Powledge writes...
The early reports on the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion are not first drafts of history, but "tentative notes for the first drafts of the first drafts of history," as Tabitha M. Powledge writes in On Science Blogs. Meaning that we can expect plenty of revisions before that first draft is correct.
Powledge notes, interestingly, that the Boston Marathon bombing got far more coverage than did the apparent accident in Texas, although it caused far more casualties. Terrorism is a better story than industrial accidents, but which kills and injures more people?
She points out a couple of pieces she didn't like in the bombing commentary. I hadn't seen Paige Williams's post ...
Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology...
Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology journalism platform that publishes one long story a month.
I wrote a couple of critical posts on Matter last November (here and here), mostly about problems I had downloading stories to my Kindle. One of Matter's founders, Bobbie Johnson, asked that I try the site again, because there were still "a lot of wrinkles to iron out."
Start-up issues aside, I confess that I don't get Matter. I'm always happy to see a new...
19Apr 2013
[I will be updating throughout the day with thoughts about Boston Marathon coverage.]
Allow me to say that as an alum and an employee of MIT, it was shocking to learn that the campus had become the scene of a terrorist shootout. The most violent event I can think of on the MIT campus was when it was...
[I will be updating throughout the day with thoughts about Boston Marathon coverage.]
Allow me to say that as an alum and an employee of MIT, it was shocking to learn that the campus had become the scene of a terrorist shootout. The most violent event I can think of on the MIT campus was when it was tear-gassed during Vietham War-era protests. But that was nothing like this.
And condolences to the family of the MIT police officer who was killed. I'm afraid I still cherish university campuses as a place for study and reflection; I'm always heartened to walk through MIT and see students buried in textbooks or collaborating on a project. That officer gave his life to help protect the unique place of MIT in the world, as a distinguished institution that contributes so much more to the world than terrorists can ever hope to erase. I hope that can provide some comfort to his family.
* * *
If you'll pardon the...
Last week, researchers at the University of Bristol published a study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in which they report that much of what passes for research in neuroscience is--what's the word I'm looking for?--worthless....
Last week, researchers at the University of Bristol published a study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in which they report that much of what passes for research in neuroscience is--what's the word I'm looking for?--worthless.
The researchers, led by Marcus R. Munafo, entitled their study, "Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience." In their abstract, they note that "a study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect," and it also allows for "statistically significant" results that do not represent real effects.
"Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low," they write. That means the studies are likely to overestimate the size of any effect they find, and less likely to...
17Apr 2013
Links--too numerous to describe in detail, but too good to pass up:
--Nicola Jones had a short update April 2 in Nature on the muzzling of Canadian government...
Links--too numerous to describe in detail, but too good to pass up:
--Nicola Jones had a short update April 2 in Nature on the muzzling of Canadian government scientists in seven federal agencies, which has drawn protests from Canadian science writers, among others. Jones reports that Canada's information commissioner has launched an investigation into the practice. Roxanne Palmer of International Business Times asks, in a longer story, which country is more open with regard to scientific research: Canada, the U.S., or China? The Tracker's carefully considered point of view...
Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced vaccine critic who claimed to link vaccines to autism and helped create a worldwide anti-vaccine movement, was featured prominently on the front page of a British newspaper over the weekend.
Wakefield's paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism was...
Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced vaccine critic who claimed to link vaccines to autism and helped create a worldwide anti-vaccine movement, was featured prominently on the front page of a British newspaper over the weekend.
Wakefield's paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism was later retracted. An investigation has accused him of fraud. And numerous studies have failed to find any evidence that vaccines cause autism. Yet a press release that he issued was reprinted by Britain's The Independent as if it were an Op-Ed comment.
In the press release, Wakefield, who may have done more than any other individual to discourage parents from vaccinating their children, blamed the government for a measles outbreak in the UK that has afflicted nearly...
[Updates with link to Scientific American stories.]
As I write, it's less than 24 hours since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the oldest marathon in the country and one of the nation's greatest amateur sporting events. Many reporters and others are reminding...
[Updates with link to Scientific American stories.]
As I write, it's less than 24 hours since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the oldest marathon in the country and one of the nation's greatest amateur sporting events. Many reporters and others are reminding us that early reports in the aftermath of violence are often wrong. That was the case following the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings. Even such prestigious news outlets as The New York Times made mistakes in the first hours.
And the same thing seems to have happened here. Initial reports said investigators had found two unexploded bombs after the blasts. But that was later retracted, and...
15Apr 2013
Today is Patriot's Day in Massachusetts and a holiday at MIT. We will be back tomorrow with something to say about statistical power in neuroscience, among other things. Please tune in.
-Paul Raeburn
Today is Patriot's Day in Massachusetts and a holiday at MIT. We will be back tomorrow with something to say about statistical power in neuroscience, among other things. Please tune in.
-Paul Raeburn
I had never heard of Markus Persson when I ran across him in an online story at The New Yorker, but I had heard of his most famous creation--the video...
I had never heard of Markus Persson when I ran across him in an online story at The New Yorker, but I had heard of his most famous creation--the video game Minecraft. I haven't played Minecraft. I haven't actually seen it. All right; my six-year-old told me about it.
In a piece entitled "The Creator," Simon Parkin tells us the story of the creation of the game and of Persson, a 33-year-old Swedish programmer who thinks of himself as "only a workmanlike coder." The game has sold more than 20 million copies, Parkin tells us, and Persson has earned more than $100 million from the game and related merchandise. (LEGO is among the companies that have done merchandising deals with Persson and Minecraft.)
Minecraft has rudimentary graphics and sound effects. Its...
The Lancet has just now corrected the obituary of a pioneering epidemiologist after what it calls "an unduly prolonged period of reflection."
The obit was published in...
The Lancet has just now corrected the obituary of a pioneering epidemiologist after what it calls "an unduly prolonged period of reflection."
The obit was published in 1858.
It reported the death of John Snow, who bucked the wisdom of "most medical men at the time" by suggesting that cholera "was a disorder of the digestive system not the blood; and that it was contagious and spread through the oral-faecal route, largely through contaminated drinking water." The medical men widely believed the cause was "miasma, or the stench from decaying vegetable and animal matter."
Here is the original obit, in full:
Dr John Snow: This well-known physician died at noon, on the 16th instant, at his house in Sackville Street, from an attack of apoplexy. His researches on chloroform...
Michelle Boorstein, a religion writer at The Washington Post, writes that following the...
Michelle Boorstein, a religion writer at The Washington Post, writes that following the suicide of the son of the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, "evangelical Christian leaders have begun a national conversation about how their beliefs might sometimes stigmatize those who struggle with mental illness."
Matthew Warren, who was 27, shot himself Friday, shocking even many close friends of his father's, who didn't know that his son "had long been suicidal," Boorstein writes.
Boorstein's story reports that evangelical leaders are calling "for an end to the shame and secrecy that still surrounds mental illness." The story portrays this as a welcome willingness to deal with an issue long...
David Brown at The Washington Post has a nice story on a government...
David Brown at The Washington Post has a nice story on a government-funded study of premature infants that "failed to adequately inform parents" of the risks faced by their infants, which included blindness, brain damage, and death.
The failure to obtain adequate informed consent in this study was pointed out by a government watchdog, the Office for Human Research Protections, which said in a March 7 letter that the directors of the study "went out of their way to tell you that your kid might benefit...but they didn't give the flip side, which is that there is a chance your kid might end up worse."
The study dealt with the use of oxygen to treat premature infants. It can boost the infants'...
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's...
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's Mirror Awards for reporting on the media industry have announced their winners and finalists. (The Mirror Awards announced finalists only; the winners will be announced at a June 5 ceremony in New York.)
Several science, environment and technology stories are among the winners and finalists.
The Seattle Times was a finalist for an IRE award with a story on "the dark side of elephant captivity," and National Geographic made the finals with a piece called "Blood Ivory," about the ivory...
10Apr 2013
Journalism is built upon shortcuts. Not always, and not everywhere. Long stories can be deliberately--and effectively--discursive. But daily news items rely on shortcuts to get the job done in as little time as possible.
Take, for example,...
Journalism is built upon shortcuts. Not always, and not everywhere. Long stories can be deliberately--and effectively--discursive. But daily news items rely on shortcuts to get the job done in as little time as possible.
Take, for example, an obit today for Robert Edwards, one of the developers of in-vitro fertilization. The obit was written by AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng. It begins, "Robert Edwards, a Nobel prizewinner from Britain...died Wednesday at age 87."
"Nobel prizewinner" is a shortcut. It tells us in two words (I'd make it three) that Edwards likely did good and important research, and that he was probably well known. A couple of grafs later, the story says that Edwards and his late colleague, Patrick Steptoe, were "accused of playing...
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