Swans on Tea

The Unpersuadables

Advice to Climate Scientists on how to Avoid being Swift-boated and how to become Public Intellectuals
Even though this is written in terms of climate science, it really applies in general to science and science reporting, but has added importance for any science that has political controversy attached to it — politics involves swaying public opinion, [...]

In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature
The departure from normal physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics remain unchanged if we view nature [...]

Cocktail Party Physics: a few choice words from the red pen brigade
Some more on the topic of targeting your communication, and the utility of editors.
The hardest thing about teaching anybody anything is finding the right level of communication, and the right way to express the concepts. It would seem logical that you don’t go [...]

PhD comics advice for news media

Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?
If a news organization had put words in the mouth of a political figure, there would almost certainly be a firestorm of controversy. The same would occur if one had turned to a Hollywood star or sports figure for comment on, say, a Congressional Budget Office [...]

Tree Lobsters! #118 Skeptics & Charlatans

Mystery Behind Galaxy Shapes Solved
Short version: new model does a much better job of predicting the distribution of galaxy types. Score! Nothing bad there.
But the title of the article bugs me just a tiny bit. It gives the impression that we’ve utterly nailed it: Game over; bye, [...]

We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.
Crunks 2009: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections
We reached a strange milestone this year when CNN fact checked a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Live
Which I already knew, via The Daily Show
There was one correction related to a story to [...]

Co-ed dorms linked to increased drinking, sex

Outside The Interzone: Reporting Done Right
Quit copying press releases. They’re not about research. Some of the relevant information might be in the press release, but part of what we used to expect from journalism was that it would do the hard work of making sense of something, then explain it in a way that [...]

Chad was recently at the Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos Festival, on a panel discussion called Communicating Science in the 21st Century. (Direct link to the video is here). It’s a pretty good discussion, I think, but a few things are left open — discussions have their way of drifting off in a [...]