News - Page 67 of 73 - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Knight Science Journalism / September 16th 2014 / KSJ News & Events

Cynthia Graber on Podcasting’s Comeback and the Importance of Passionate Fans

Did you think podcasting was dead? Not by a long shot. In an extensive Nieman Storyboard post last week, Knight alum Cynthia Graber (2012-13) chronicles “the remarkable resurgence of podcasting” underway over the last few years, and what it might mean for the “tribes” of engaged listeners who can gather around niche topics like astronomy or architecture.

Back in 2006, Graber notes, only 11 percent of survey respondents had ever listened to a podcast. Now it’s up to 30 percent. Remarkably, 39 million Americans have listened to a podcast in the past month, according to data Graber obtained from Edison Research.

“Digital audio can reach a niche audience with a sound that inspires community and a passionate fan base,” she observes. A fan base of 50,000 or 60,000 probably wouldn’t be enough to keep the lights on at a major NPR radio show, but it’s often enough to sustain a podcast—especially if those listeners they’re willing to contribute financially, through Kickstarter or other fundraising mechanisms.

Graber, who contributes regularly to Scientific American’s 60-Second Science podcast, looks at the growth of other …

by Knight Science Journalism / September 15th 2014 / Guest Posts

Knight Alum Mark Harris Uses FOIA to Get Under the Hood at Google’s Self-Driving Car Project

In the four years since The New York Times’ John Markoff broke the story of Google’s self-driving car project, there’s been no shortage of articles extolling the company’s forward-thinking ingenuity and the technology’s alleged safety benefits. “Letting robots take the wheel would save lives,” asserts Vox’s Brad Plumer. Netscape founder and venture investor Marc Andreessen told the Times that within 20 years, “driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.”

Yes, the cars seem safe—they’ve driven more than 700,000 miles in California without a serious accident. But what’s discussed far less often is Google’s campaign to constrain the conditions under which its self-driving cars are evaluated by regulators. In Nevada, the company carefully controlled the circumstances of an …

by Knight Science Journalism / September 12th 2014 / Guest Posts

Lawson Trek: Finding the Old Road

One awesome thing about undertaking a project like retracing the route taken by someone like Lawson is that amazing people almost instantly begin flinging themselves at you out of the ether. Consider Dale Loberger. A geographic information system (GIS) specialist, Loberger works with Bradshaw Consulting in South Carolina, using GIS to improve people’s lives and their understanding of their world – through systems that connect information with maps (it’s not just a fire hydrant; it’s a fire hydrant last painted in 2007 and last maintained in 2012; it’s not just an address, it’s an address with a 17 percent likelihood of generating a 911 call within the next year). That U.S. map showing which NFL team each county prefers? That’s a GIS map.

Anyhow, I’ve known Loberger on email for some time – a mutual friend introduced us when he learned of our mutual interest in old maps and trails. And when I got interested in Lawson, Dale began telling me about his interest in uncovering the old roads in the Charlotte area where he lives: the Great Wagon Road, the Trading Path, and other ancient trails that lead through the area – trails which …

by Knight Science Journalism / September 11th 2014 / KSJ News & Events

Prof. David Kaiser Anchors Hippo Reads’ Inaugural Ask Me Anything” Column

What better way to kick off the Ask Me Anything column at Hippo Reads, the new Santa Monica, CA-based publisher of academically inclined essays, than to put some cosmic questions about the shape of the universe and the feasibility of time travel to a theoretical physicist? And who better to serve as the inaugural Hippo Reads AMA respondent than a physicist who’s also an award-winning writer and historian?

I speak, of course, of David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT and Department Head at the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (the Knight program’s home department at MIT). In addition to his STS duties, Prof. Kaiser is a senior lecturer in MIT’s Physics department, where he co-leads a group with Prof. Alan Guth focused on inflationary cosmology, the events that occurred in the first few fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Hippo Reads assistant editor Benjamin Winterhalter tapped Prof. Kaiser for the AMA honor after seeing him on physicist Brian Green’s recent NOVA special Fabric of the Cosmos.

Under the Ask Me Anything format, developed to a fine art by the social news …

by Tom Zeller Jr. / July 18th 2014 / Announcements

Pulitzer Prize-winner to head Knight Science Journalism at MIT

Deborah K. Fitzgerald, the Kenan Sahin Dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), has announced that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum will join MIT in 2015 as the director of Knight Science Journalism at MIT, a fellowship program that enables world-class journalists to spend a year at MIT studying everything from science, technology, and engineering to history of science, literature, policy, and political science.

June 10th 2014 / Announcements

2014-15 Project Fellow Selected

Scott Huler, the Knight Project Fellow for 2014-2015, will take a modern walking expedition through the Carolinas, following in the footsteps of an explorer who made the trek in 1700, one of the earliest of the Lewis and Clark-type of scientific explorations in America.

Scott writes:

In 1700, explorer John Lawson left “Charles-Town,” the only settlement of any size in the Carolina colony, for a walk into the backcountry. First settled by Europeans in 1670, Carolina beyond its coast remained in 1700 mostly unknown, and its owners charged Lawson with figuring out what was out there. Over the next months Lawson, with native guides, made his way through the colony, mostly on foot. He kept a journal and produced a natural history of the colony; descriptions of the new territory’s plants, animals, birds, and crops; and a thorough account of the natives, including dictionaries. Lawson did, that is, what Lewis and Clark did for the Louisiana Territory a century later. Lawson’s resulting 1709 book – “A New Voyage to Carolina” — was a bestseller, and his observations formed the foundation of understanding of the Carolinas. With the cooperation of modern scientists and historians, I plan to retrace his journey to …