Paul Raeburn's Tracker

I'm not sure how many technology writers and commentators would attempt to write a letter to John Stuart Mill concerning the subject of free speech, but Jason Pontin, the editor of MIT Technology Review, chose that as a way to explore the sometimes "vexing" issues concerning free speech in the Internet age. (The Tracker is published at MIT but has no connection with Technology Review.)

Addressing Mill as "pale ghost," he begins by noting that "much has changed since you died in 1873," but "your lucid little book On Liberty (1859) has survived." In that book, Mill lays out the "harm principle," which says that individuals are sovereign except when they must be constrained to prevent harm to others. Free speech, an expression of individual sovereignty, must be...

Eliza Strickland isn't the first journalist to undergo experimental genetic testing, nor the first to write about the advent of faster, cheaper sequencing machines that could one day become part of routine clinical testing and care. But in an article in  IEEE Spectrum, where she is associate editor, she weaves her personal story together with reporting that addresses the ethical, business, scientific issues surrounding personal genome sequencing. It's a nice piece.

"I want to learn my own biological secrets," she writes. "I want to get a look at the unique DNA sequence that defines my physical quirks, characteristics, and traits, including my nearsighted blue eyes, my freckles, my type O-positive blood, and possibly some lurking predisposition to disease that will kill me in the end."

Not everybody wants to know that sort...

While critics are still discussing the decision by The New York Times to cancel its Green environment blog, a Times columnist is demonstrating what can happen when environmental coverage is left to non-specialists who are not well informed.

In January, the Times announced it was dismantling its environmental reporting team, and last week it said it was canceling the Green blog. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote in January that the demise of the environmental reporting team would make it difficult for the Times to continue to cover the environment adequately. And yesterday, Sullivan wrote, "Something real has been lost on a topic...

Community news, sometimes called hyperlocal news, has become a hot topic among journalism foundations in recent years. You can get a sense of the enthusiasm by browsing the website of Block by Block, a network of online community news sites, or by checking into the work of the Knight Foundation's "$100 million plus Media Innovation Initiative, which seeks new ways to meet community information needs in the digital age." This is big money talking.

This belief in the importance of local news is not new. It reminds me of the old joke about the Los Angeles Times in the 1940s and 1950s, when a critic said that the paper was so locally oriented that ...

The Association of Health Care Journalists has announced the winners of its 2012 journalism awards, and the winning stories should be an inspiration to anyone who wonders whether it's possible to do good journalism during this time of upheaval and transformation in the news business.

Among the winners were Sheri Fink for beat reporting for coverage of hurricanes in New Orleans and New York City; Lisa Krieger of the San Jose Mercury News for consumer reporting at large news outlets; The Boston Globe for reporting on contaminated drugs; and about three dozen others, including some familiar names and some new ones.

AHCJ reports that it received 400 entries--a record number. "Entrants dove into complicated and sometimes heartbreaking issues to produce excellent pieces that...

The automatic federal spending cut known as the sequester that goes into effect today will have profound adverse effects on U.S. scientific research, cutting "past fat, through muscle and into bone," writes Tom Levenson in a guest blog post at Scientific American.

Levenson, an MIT professor of science writing currently on leave to write a book, gives us a thoughtful analysis that argues that it's not the youngest researchers or the most established researchers who will be hurt by the cut, but those who've just established themselves and are seeking funding. A newly tenured research faculty member "competes for grants against the entire population, Nobel laureates, National Academicians, and all," Levenson writes. First-time winners of a standard National...

[Updates with the name of the author of a Smithsonian item; and with comment from one of the authors of the study on the error in the study's estimates.]

Researchers using something called "Swadesh words" have estimated that the Iliad was written in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, about the time that scholars thought it was written.

You might then reasonably ask, "So what?" Here's what: The research team, which included a geneticist, tracked changes in language since the time of the Iliad using methods similar to those used to track gene mutations over centuries and millennia. "Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes," Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, England, told Joel Shurkin. "It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer's vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does."...