Last month, I reported that Jonah Lehrer, a noted young writer who covers neuroscience, had recycled material from other stories in his new blog for The New Yorker. Lehrer admitted wrongdoing and...
Tracker: July 2012
Last month, I reported that Jonah Lehrer, a noted young writer who covers neuroscience, had recycled material from other stories in his new blog for The New Yorker. Lehrer admitted wrongdoing and briefly appeared able to weather the storm. He was not immediately dropped by The New Yorker, which promised that this sort of thing would not happen again.
Now Lehrer is in ashes, after admitting making up quotes from Bob Dylan, and insisting to a reporter that the quotes were not made up. The fabricated quotes appear in his new book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works," which has sold 200,000 copies, an achievement most authors can only dream of. The sad tale is recounted in this story in The New York Times...
Richard A. Muller of UC Berkeley is an engaging, smart, and maverick physicist who has spent a good part of his career chewing on off-beat but not crazy hypotheses until they either fall apart or gain some credibility. He is good at being realistic about those that don't hold up or stall for lack of more...
Richard A. Muller of UC Berkeley is an engaging, smart, and maverick physicist who has spent a good part of his career chewing on off-beat but not crazy hypotheses until they either fall apart or gain some credibility. He is good at being realistic about those that don't hold up or stall for lack of more data (his hunch never caught on that a distant solar companion, a brown dwarf named Nemesis, occasionally sprays comets into the inner solar system). Perhaps by nature he looked fishy-eyed at global warming science until he took a hard look for himself. Two tempting ways to judge his latest analysis of climate change data are 1) Wow, if even a skeptic of the mainstream's consensus that climate change has us ankle deep in offal with knee- and hip-deep in sight can change his mind, that's a triumph for scientific method and maybe a politically effective tide-turner or, 2) He's a scientist. He had not paid much attention to global warming before. He and...
The pre-landing buzz for NASA's next Mars rover, nee Mars Science Laboratory with its newish, friendlier Curiosity moniker is reaching hornet's nest intensity.
The complex series of rocket firings, sashaying heat shield-gauntlet, parachute flutter, and final knuckle-whitening skycrane...
The pre-landing buzz for NASA's next Mars rover, nee Mars Science Laboratory with its newish, friendlier Curiosity moniker is reaching hornet's nest intensity.
The complex series of rocket firings, sashaying heat shield-gauntlet, parachute flutter, and final knuckle-whitening skycrane hover topped by a delicate final winch maneuver. That's just to get to work, from space to red soil. The drama unfolds through the late night and very early morning of August 5-6. Advance stories are piling up.
As a personal aside, as described here before I've resigned from tracking as a member of MIT's staff with my last day Friday. But I will keep on blogging often as an outside (freelance, sort of) contractor. I've also accepted invitation to give a talk Mon. Aug 6 to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in Tucson that's making me nervous as a cat. I'll do my best to get something in about coverage of the landing (or...
Questions have arisen in recent weeks about the propriety of showing a story to sources before publication. And now Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli has explicitly brought science writing into the conversation.
A quick recap: On July 15,...
Questions have arisen in recent weeks about the propriety of showing a story to sources before publication. And now Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli has explicitly brought science writing into the conversation.
A quick recap: On July 15, Jeremy M. Peters of The New York Times reported the increasingly restrictive practice by the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns to require that all quotes be approved by the press office before they can be published. "The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative," Peters wrote. Most reporters, eager for access to campaign officials, "grudgingly agree...
Your tracker happened, via the higgledy piggledy of search engine and news alert surprise, upon fodder for our first-ever post that I can recall from the press in Turkey. The first nugget is a short item without byline. I nearly scanned it (not digitally- but orbitally as in eyeball) before going on without sharing...
Your tracker happened, via the higgledy piggledy of search engine and news alert surprise, upon fodder for our first-ever post that I can recall from the press in Turkey. The first nugget is a short item without byline. I nearly scanned it (not digitally- but orbitally as in eyeball) before going on without sharing. It is on further thought unusual however in both topic and ambiguity. Hence intriguing. Thus the post.
- Huriyet Daily News - Nash shares memories of Albert Einstein in discussions ;
Intriguing indeed. In Turkey John Nash is so well-known the hed can refer to him only by last name and mean something to readers? The Huriyet paper says that it is the oldest (about 50 years) English language daily in Turkey. That it has an item from...
Melinda Wenner Moyer, on her Body Politic blog at PLOS, has taken issue with the coverage of resurgent pertussis epidemics...
Melinda Wenner Moyer, on her Body Politic blog at PLOS, has taken issue with the coverage of resurgent pertussis epidemics around the country. It's tempting to blame the epidemics on anti-vaccine activists, and the resulting failures to vaccinate some children. She suggests that something else is going on. The tempting explanation might not be the correct one.
- Paul Raeburn
A remarkably cool and removed essay at the Poynter Institute site late last week addressed an issue that appears to be a non-issue for a surprising number of the internet and digital era's "news"...
A remarkably cool and removed essay at the Poynter Institute site late last week addressed an issue that appears to be a non-issue for a surprising number of the internet and digital era's "news" outlets. At stake are practices that have gotten a steady diet of grumping from me among others here at ksjtracker. They stem from the use of information, including supposedly verbatim quotes, straight off press releases.
- Mallory Jean Tenore (Poynter assoc. editor): 6 ways journalists can use press releases effectively
There is much to chew on in Ms. Tenore's rightly link-strewn piece. Speaking of chewing, I'll take a bite out of the article...
30Jul 2012
The Knight Science Journalism program at MIT has launched its new website. The mission of our program is unchanged — to offer training and to stimulate discussion among science journalists — but the new site will have more audio and video, more information on our Fellows, and a gradually-growing set of...
The Knight Science Journalism program at MIT has launched its new website. The mission of our program is unchanged — to offer training and to stimulate discussion among science journalists — but the new site will have more audio and video, more information on our Fellows, and a gradually-growing set of Knight Science Journalism Trackers to follow science and health news daily. We hope to offer more guest posts, articles and multimedia presentations on the practice of journalism as we go forward.
Please note that the Knight Science Journalism Tracker blog's new URL is ksj.mit.edu/tracker. Visitors to the old URL will be redirected automatically. If you previously followed the Tracker via its RSS feed, please visit the subscribe page and update your RSS reader with the new feed URLs.
Please give us feedback; I'm sure we'll need it.
Here's a surprise and a warning that fully merits press attention - even though one wishes this story had gone through rewrite once more and lingered longer at the art director's desk. It's fascinating but blends in so many ways that geologically prominent or scenic places on Scotland landscape are...
Here's a surprise and a warning that fully merits press attention - even though one wishes this story had gone through rewrite once more and lingered longer at the art director's desk. It's fascinating but blends in so many ways that geologically prominent or scenic places on Scotland landscape are being looted or defaced that the central and surprising theme - sloppy geological sampling - gets blurred.
- BBC - Steven McKenzie: Rock drilling 'threatens' Scotland's geology ;
The piece would be better were readers to be able to see an example of what sources tell McKenzie about damage to scenery by the occasional thoughtless geologist out for a core sample. The photo you see here is not from the Beeb, but from a report at an organization, Scottish Natural Heritage, that prompted the news story. The...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Too many important newspapers in the Spanish speaking world said last week that 97% of Greenland’s ice had melted. They talked about the whole ice sheet instead of a thin layer in the surface. The confusion came from the terrible note of EFE; one of the most used news...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Too many important newspapers in the Spanish speaking world said last week that 97% of Greenland’s ice had melted. They talked about the whole ice sheet instead of a thin layer in the surface. The confusion came from the terrible note of EFE; one of the most used news agency in Spanish language. Its first sentence was: “The ice that normally covers Greenland disappeared almost completely during several days in July”, and the title “Greenland lost almost all its ice sheet in July” was literally replicated by some of the main newspapers in Latin America. In Spain, the initial stories were also much more alarmist than they should be (Check Charlie’s post in the tracker). Most reporters in Spain followed up with a less...
For years now Arctic sea ice, which is the ice pack and is not to be confused with an ice cap even though headline writers like to call it that, has been trending down steadily in extent and even more sharply in volume. Global warming is the accepted truth as the reason (not to be confused with 'proof' as...
For years now Arctic sea ice, which is the ice pack and is not to be confused with an ice cap even though headline writers like to call it that, has been trending down steadily in extent and even more sharply in volume. Global warming is the accepted truth as the reason (not to be confused with 'proof' as that's for mathematics and overconfident lawyers) if one gauges by every major national academy of science in the world. Thus the news that a paper in a big journal - Environmental Research Letters - says we done it is no surprise. Perhaps it is the number that catches the eye: 75% to more than 90% likelihood that greenhouse gas forcing has driven the summer ice extent smaller and some are saying we may see an open and navigable late-summer Arctic Ocean within about 20 years. Arctic Multi-decadal Oscillation and other known and natural processes don't easily explain the scale of this trend, the study says. Even flimsy yachts are now making the...
26Jul 2012
In the aftermath of Friday's movie theater shooting in Colorado (12 killed, 59 wounded), we find ourselves - as we've found ourselves far too often - wondering about the whys And for science writers - many of whom cover neuroscience, psychology, biology of behavior, one particular why....
In the aftermath of Friday's movie theater shooting in Colorado (12 killed, 59 wounded), we find ourselves - as we've found ourselves far too often - wondering about the whys And for science writers - many of whom cover neuroscience, psychology, biology of behavior, one particular why. Why would someone, anyone, buy four semi-automatic weapons and 6,000 rounds of ammunition for the single-minded purpose of harming people he did not know?
As Dave Cullen wrote in a The New York Times piece, Don't Jump to Conclusions About the Killer, this is tricky territory: "You have probably expressed your opinion on why he did it. You are probably wrong."
Cullen was a Denver journalist who covered the...
The last week or so has seen several news outlets reporting not only that space (actually, the insides of space ships and stations) has a distinct odor but that active research is underway on it. Speaking of distinct odors, this one smells a little like a fish. Which means old. And perhaps not entirely true...
The last week or so has seen several news outlets reporting not only that space (actually, the insides of space ships and stations) has a distinct odor but that active research is underway on it. Speaking of distinct odors, this one smells a little like a fish. Which means old. And perhaps not entirely true even when it was fresh.
The gist of the supposed news is that an ozone-tinged, slightly metallic, sort of sweet odor with a tincture of burnt steak is pretty consistently reported by space travelers. Also that NASA has hired a chemist in the UK to duplicate it for use in training.
And here's the problem, first reported to the tracker in an email by the UK's keen-eyed Jonathan Leake at the Sunday Times. The essence of the story, Leake quickly learned as he got curious about it, was first run nearly four years ago in several UK newspapers and spread rapidly from there. Here's...
A lot of stories erupted this morning due to NASA satellite analysts' revelation yesterday that they just saw something on Greenland they had never seen before: water everywhere. That is, it's still pretty much white. It is still mostly covered in a glacial mass reaching thousands of feet in thickness. But...
A lot of stories erupted this morning due to NASA satellite analysts' revelation yesterday that they just saw something on Greenland they had never seen before: water everywhere. That is, it's still pretty much white. It is still mostly covered in a glacial mass reaching thousands of feet in thickness. But the sunny part on top was abruptly melting, north to south, east to west. One imagines an unbroken wetness of sheets and rivulets and rivers and probably more noise from the maws of those ice-boring waterfalls called moulins that drain to the bedrock beneath. One supposes it could be an instrument error. But the folks running the multiple satellites at work say they checked. Ergo, the twinned images of ice v. melted-on-top, taken just four days apart earlier this month, are in wide circulation.
It's a peculiar thing and is unavoidable news. It could not last of course. Nobody should think a tipping point or something else drastic-sounding is upon us that...
Cornelia Dean has front and center a terrific story of daring engineering, wartime fears, remote wilderness, and to justify its place in ScienceTimes, climate change. The famed Alcan Highway from southern-ish Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska has gone in the last half century from treacherous gravel road...
Cornelia Dean has front and center a terrific story of daring engineering, wartime fears, remote wilderness, and to justify its place in ScienceTimes, climate change. The famed Alcan Highway from southern-ish Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska has gone in the last half century from treacherous gravel road to smooth pavement suitable for travel trailers, but now its engineers face a new challenge. The permafrost on which much of it was built is melting in many places. Sunlight on dark asphalt is one reason, a warming climate another. This is a story of adaptation: that of the original engineers who had to devise construction methods on the fly, and of adaptation today to the softening ground. Dean packs so much info in here that it reads like the pitch for a book on the Alaska Highway. I'd read it.
Other headlines to note:
- Denise Grady :...
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