We have long berated science writers for doing cursory rewrites of press releases when they should have done more careful reporting on their own. Now The Tennessean of Nashville has neatly sidestepped that problem by running the releases themselves, avoiding the irresponsible reporting.
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We have long berated science writers for doing cursory rewrites of press releases when they should have done more careful reporting on their own. Now The Tennessean of Nashville has neatly sidestepped that problem by running the releases themselves, avoiding the irresponsible reporting.
Clicking on the Health and Fitness link on the paper's website today, I found Children will be more active if their friends are, written by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Songs from the heart, again by Vanderbilt; and...
The earliest piece of news I covered that depended heavily on the internet and, if...
The earliest piece of news I covered that depended heavily on the internet and, if memory serves, the old Mosaic browser, for information other than by email, phone, and regular mail was the collision of fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in 1994. Astronomers watching the spectacle set up a web site that they updated continuously. In some stories editors let us write out the website location, http and everything. So let's just say it has been nearly 20 years since the web began to transform the way the ordinary public gets to look deeply into current events.
I bring this up this morning after noticing, very tardily I am sure, that stories at New Scientist display...
A few weeks ago a highly speculative spot of news circulated...
A few weeks ago a highly speculative spot of news circulated widely. It seems a researcher made public his notion that certain arrangements of fossilized vertebra from extinct marine reptiles in old ocean sediments imply that the seas once housed monster octopi or squid or something else resembling the mythical kraken. Evidence: the alignment of the vertebra looked sort of like sucker-lined tentacles, and hence could maybe have been the work of krakens making self portraits on their porches. That's right. Home-decorating cephalopods with an artist's grandiose eye.
We posted on the news here...
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In a post last week, I noted that Scienceblog.com, which looks like a news site, is actually a collection of press releases from universities and other research outfits. It's a perfectly fine source of news releases, but the site, in my view, didn't do nearly enough to alert readers that what they were reading was not a collection of independently reported news stories, but releases sponsored by institutions. The difference, of course, is that press releases are likely to give us the most glowing view of the research--not necessarily the most accurate.
ScienceDaily is...
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