The Washington Post is fiddling with a potentially game-changing piece of software that promises to fact-check political speeches and other public statements in real time automatically, with no help from fallible human fact-checkers.
The key word here is "promise." Called...
The Washington Post is fiddling with a potentially game-changing piece of software that promises to fact-check political speeches and other public statements in real time automatically, with no help from fallible human fact-checkers.
The key word here is "promise." Called Truth Teller, the gadget has a long way to go before it fulfills that promise, if these demos are any indication.
Before I go any further, I should note that I have enough conflicts-of-interest in the writing of this item that I should probably kill this post and go home. According to the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California (Knight supports the Tracker), Truth Teller was developed with a Knight News Prototype Grant (ugh, Knight again...
(Disclaimer: I wrote about this issue for my WHYY blog. I don’t want to commit any Jonah Lehrer style double dipping, but I think the coverage of this issue is worth discussing here at the Tracker as well.)
It was open season on biblical creationism last week following the latest waffling weirdness to...
(Disclaimer: I wrote about this issue for my WHYY blog. I don’t want to commit any Jonah Lehrer style double dipping, but I think the coverage of this issue is worth discussing here at the Tracker as well.)
It was open season on biblical creationism last week following the latest waffling weirdness to come from a politician’s mouth. This time it was Marco Rubio, a U.S. Senator from Florida, who had this to say when a GQ interviewer asked him the age of the Earth:
I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I...
In the early 1990s, when I was the science editor at the Associated Press, I covered the EPA's development of a report outlining the dangers of second-hand cigarette smoke. That kind of story begged for a comment from the Tobacco Institute, a group formed by the tobacco industry to respond to...
In the early 1990s, when I was the science editor at the Associated Press, I covered the EPA's development of a report outlining the dangers of second-hand cigarette smoke. That kind of story begged for a comment from the Tobacco Institute, a group formed by the tobacco industry to respond to press inquiries. To cite just one example, a story I wrote about the EPA delaying release of the report sent me to the Tobacco Institute for comment. The comment was an assertion that said nothing substantial about the merits of the report. It did not provide balance. What it did provide was an opportunity for the industry to create doubt about the report. But the AP's editors would not allow me to write such a story without including industry comment.
This is just one example of what reporters and others refer to as false balance--the requirement that stories...
In an appearance in May on Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Chris Mooney discussed, among other things, a new kind of denialism: Conservatives denying that there is a personality...
In an appearance in May on Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Chris Mooney discussed, among other things, a new kind of denialism: Conservatives denying that there is a personality difference, a psychological difference, between liberals and conservatives. In other words, they are denying the science he covers in his most recent book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality. If conservatives admitted that we are all shaped at least in part by our personalities and our gut feelings, Mooney said on MSNBC, "we could agree that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and then we would just say, you know, some people are good at this, some people are good at that. You're not inherently better. You're not inherently worse. And then, actually, you may have a ground for cooperation."
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It's a classic response of some editors to assume that if the liberals are saying one thing,...
It's a classic response of some editors to assume that if the liberals are saying one thing, and the conservatives another, that the truth lies somewhere in between. Where this doctrine comes from is a mystery. Where is it written that liberals or conservatives cannot sometimes be right? Or mostly right? Or completely wrong?
This is one version of a problem that Chris Mooney, our most prominent and adept critic of the political abuse of science, addresses in a post on his newly transplanted blog. Mooney's science and policy commentaries are now appear on a blog called Science Progress, part of the blog family of the liberal Center for American Progress. And he has...
Last year, The Pew Research Center for People and the Press reported that 55% of...
Last year, The Pew Research Center for People and the Press reported that 55% of scientists say they are Democrats, 32% say they are independents, and a scant 6% say they are Republicans.
Who knew? It's an interesting finding, and you might find yourself wondering, as I do, why that's the case, and what might explain it.
In an article in Slate, Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, concludes that the Democrats' scientist-majority is advancing findings that support a Democratic agenda:
Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by...
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