My panel on “Communicating Science in the 21st Century” was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven’t watched the video yet– Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I’m lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes– but if the video feeds I’ve […]
Category: Journalism
Taking Off for the Great White North
I’m heading to the airport right after my second class today (I’m doing two weeks of our first-year seminar class), to appear at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. This promises to be a good event– I had a great time at the Science in the 21st Century workshop last […]
Grocery Store Science
Dan Meyer, like most people, has long wondered whether there was a good way to predict which check-out line at the grocery store will be the fastest. Unlike most people, he used science to find an answer: “I spent ninety minutes last week just watching, counting, and timing groceries as they slid across a scanner.” […]
Dehumanizing the Two Cultures
It’s probably a good thing that I don’t have full-text access to Mark Slouka’s article in Harper’s, with the title “Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school.” Just the description in this Columbia Journalism Review piece makes me want to hunt down the author and belt him with a Norton anthology: According to the […]
CSI: Ambiguous Sentences
The New York Times yesterday had a story with the dramatic headline DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show, explaining that, well, there are nefarious tricks you can pull to falsify DNA evidence, provided you have access to a high-quality biochemical laboratory. The story is a great boon to conspiracy theorists everywhere, especially with this […]
Science Blogging: The New Science Journalism?
I’m a late addition to a Sunday panel at Worldcon: Science Blogging – The New Science Journalism? Touted as a new way of reaching the public, has science blogging matched its initial promise? Has it caused more problems than it solves? Well? What do you all think?
Journalists Unclear on the Concept
No, this isn’t another “How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic” post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong’s discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what “science journalism” actually means: Certainly, […]
Plagiarism, Garbling, and Superluminal Motion
I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled “Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light “— somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish: Scientist John Singleton insists […]
How Not to Break Into Publishing
One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn’t’ve guessed […]
All Physics Is Not Particle Physics
A wag of my finger at the Corporate Masters, for their new article about traffic jams, with the subhead “For particle physicists who study phase transitions, a traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars.” In the body of the article, we find: While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly […]