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...
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 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...
A hefty, long investigation into the environmental and human impacts of a messy, acrid pipeline rupture that forced evacuations of homes and polluted Michigan waterways won the upstart Inside Climate News service a Pulitzer yesterday....
A hefty, long investigation into the environmental and human impacts of a messy, acrid pipeline rupture that forced evacuations of homes and polluted Michigan waterways won the upstart Inside Climate News service a Pulitzer yesterday. Congratulations quickly poured in, including from many others who run non-profit news agencies to fill the gaps left by the fade of big media, including networks and metropolitan newspapers.
Kudos from this corner as well.
The winning reporters are Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song, and David Hasemyer. The story package that won it is "The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of. " The link goes to an Amazon page selling (for Kindle users) an e-book repackaging of the series....
[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...
Here's a switch on the usual cute critter story. While perhaps nothing is cuter than a newborn fawn gangly-hopping along beside its mother unless it is twin newborn fawns, one West Coast newspaper writer forthrightly celebrates them with a thought other than awww, lookit that.
- SF...
Here's a switch on the usual cute critter story. While perhaps nothing is cuter than a newborn fawn gangly-hopping along beside its mother unless it is twin newborn fawns, one West Coast newspaper writer forthrightly celebrates them with a thought other than awww, lookit that.
- SF Chronicle - Tom Stienstra: Fawns are food for predators in 2013.
Stienstra, who looks a lot like an old-time Rocky Mountain fur trading man, is the Chronicle's outdoors writer. He puts words down in a deliberately manly way. He also is as romantic as anybody about the soul-filling blessings of a solitary, meditative walk through the wild and is often rapturous upon spotting its native residents. One is unsure what the animal rights and PETA crowd generally will make of this piece. The story riffs off his recent encounter, at...
Lately geeks are heroes along manifold axes of popular culture. NASA's crop of them are near the head of their line. But in the newest New Yorker is a feature and profile that blows out the stops. And it raises a question: is the magazine's staff writer and frequent science specialist...
Lately geeks are heroes along manifold axes of popular culture. NASA's crop of them are near the head of their line. But in the newest New Yorker is a feature and profile that blows out the stops. And it raises a question: is the magazine's staff writer and frequent science specialist Burkhard Bilger always this good?* His latest is about one of the principle (yikes and correction, principal, as old pal D. Perlman tells me by terse email) characters who made possible the stunningly complex and, so far, highly productive Curiosity Rover. That's the plutonium-propelled machine poking around in Mars's Gale Crater on the prowl for leftovers of once-cozy habitats for life. And no, Bilger's particular focus for his story is not Mohawk Guy, the media hero of the landing's broadcasts who was done to death. Oh, he...
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...
For decades energy and environment writers have been reporting on the eco-dreamers who hope and plan for a time when renewable, distributed energy and its frugal use brings low-carbon gigawattage to the nation's homes, factories, and mega-malls. That means solar panels, heat pumps hooked to buried...
For decades energy and environment writers have been reporting on the eco-dreamers who hope and plan for a time when renewable, distributed energy and its frugal use brings low-carbon gigawattage to the nation's homes, factories, and mega-malls. That means solar panels, heat pumps hooked to buried thermal buffers, ultra-efficient buildings, bio-diesel and electric cars, wind farms all over the place and other greenie stuff making for a robust, resilient, and not-Earth-destroying way to get some real work done around here. And while a national grid would presumably still be useful, power blackouts would not take down as much. Lots of businesses and communities could keep their lights on with gizmos of their own.
The serious, gray people scoffed. Was it Dick Cheney who said such things may boost one's sense of personal virtue but are no way to run a profitable economy? That, the perceived wisdom had it, takes coal and oil, as always. Well, nuclear...
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'...
Har dee har all you Midwesterners and East Coasters, it's gonna be 80 degree in Northern California today. But the news says yet ANOTHER blizzard lineup is marching across the US mid-section heading toward New England. Dang those s0-called Circum-Arctic jetstreams that don't stick to the Arctic like...
Har dee har all you Midwesterners and East Coasters, it's gonna be 80 degree in Northern California today. But the news says yet ANOTHER blizzard lineup is marching across the US mid-section heading toward New England. Dang those s0-called Circum-Arctic jetstreams that don't stick to the Arctic like they used to! They're wandering far south with a load of frigid air and when they wander back up there they haul warmer with thwm, accelerating the summertime melt-off of the ice pack. Gadzooks, we really are getting a whole new planet.
So that led to a search for some snow news. First up is a story that got a good deal of coverage. It also offers a lesson in how somebody else's rewrite might really mess with your reporting.
1) The Adelies of Beaufort Island.
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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