There are more stories popping up today than I have time to comment on, so I'm going to point to a few and make only brief remarks, to try to catch up.
–Suffering from a cold? Liz Szabo in USA Today, more cruel than Cruella de Vil, snatches away any hope of relief. Her first "dirty little secret" about the common cold? "Nothing cures it." Ah, but a spoonful of one of those awful, viscous cough syrups will ease the coughing, you say. Nope. "Most popular remedies," she writes, "have little to no real effect on symptoms." Maybe we didn't want to know the truth.
—Mallary Jean Tenore at the Poynter Institute has written a fascinating and important piece comparing coverage of the recent rape and murder in New Delhi with coverage of another rape in Steubenville, Ohio. Differences in coverage "seem to revolve around journalists' handling of three main topics–the victims, the suspects, and the larger cultural and societal aspects of rape," she writes. The decision by the family of the Indian woman to release her name and to talk about her created a more sympathetic portrait than what has emerged in the Ohio case, in which the woman's name has not been released, Tenore writes. This is must reading.
—Heidi Ledford reports in Nature that so-called "expert firms" are bringing scientists and investors together to discuss technical issues related to new research. The purpose? There's the rub. Investors want an edge, scientists are asked to provide it, and sometimes they crack. Last year, a neurologist at the University of Michigan admitted tipping off a hedge-fund manager about clinical results that hadn't yet been released, leading to the largest insider-trading case the federal government has ever handled, Ledford reports. Science (paywall) also has a story on the practice by Jeffrey Mervis, which suggests that the risks to scientists far outweigh the benefits. All of this is simply another way that the rich get richer–and those of us without paid scientific consultants don't.
–Those who read my critique of David H. Freedman's cover story in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review might want to check back to see Freedman's response and what I thought was an interesting, brief debate between me and the science writer Charles C. Mann about Freedman's story.
-Paul Raeburn
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