Category Archives: Journalism
Science isn't Clue®
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, bye, see you later. But that’s not science, or at least “nailed it” means something different to a scientist, and from field to field. (In some fields, a factor of two improvement might qualify; in others it might mean more than an order of magnitude improvement in precision) I’m not intending to hold this up as an example of bad science journalism, per se. If it is, I don’t know how to fix it — editors need to exercise brevity in titles. But I fear that the un(der)initiated get a cumulative wrong picture of science, if they’re reading these headlines.
We usually don’t just pack our bags and move on to the next problem. Often the current problem still has issues to be resolved; I imagine in this case, the group will continue to improve it, or someone else working on one will do so, and work with better data that come along. This result, while having passed through peer-review, has to await an onslaught of feedback that might await. And it involves a model, like virtually all of science — these days, there are Global Warming discussions that imply that if it isn’t perfect, then we know nothing. The fear of uncertainty spreads, because impossible promises are implied by the absolute certainty of “the puzzle is solved.” Such arguments are crap, of course, but how do you recognize that if you aren’t aware of the subtleties of the situation?
A Møøse Once Bit my Sister
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 which I had linked (from another source, and which is now a dead link)
Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.
I really like this one:
This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2009. In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected.
Ah, Lake Woebegone, where every Ho is above average.
Doctor Obvious Goes Back to School
Doin' it Right
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 was mostly accurate, reasonably objective, and palatable to consume for the average high schooler.
I’m not demanding perfection, I’m just asking that you do your jobs.
Communication Breakdown
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 particular direction, and going back to cover a point isn’t always possible, especially with a moderator and a time constraint.
Very early on, there’s a general point about traditional journalism and the various requirements of it, including being balanced. Later on, Ivan Semeniuk goes into some detail about this, in the context of reporting vs. getting involved in a story — reporting science is not the same thing as promoting science. And there’s something to that, but I think a larger point was missed. A lot of the so-called controversy that is reported in various stories is not scientific in origin. I think “I’m only reporting the story” and “I have to be balanced” is a bit of a dodge, because if one is truly reporting the science, one often finds that there is no balance in what the science says — it’s very one-sided, and creating the illusion that this isn’t the case is not a responsible act. And yes, this falls under the rants-about-science-journalism umbrella that Chad mentions, early in the video.
The Large Hadron Collider was mentioned as one of the big stories of the past year, boding well for the public’s interest in science; even though the topic of “the LHC will kill us all” was discussed, it’s not clear how much that type of story is represented in the popularity numbers, but those stories were out there. Giving equal representation to Chicken-Littles grossly distorts the merit of their objections.
At least the LHC stories were about science, even if it’s bad science. Other stories where equal time is given are not. Stories involving creationism or intelligent design vs evolution, for example, are stories about ideology masquerading as science. Here the desire to provide both perspectives can be even more damaging, because it presents the illusion that this is a scientific conflict, rather than the truth that this is a political battle, with precious little actual science being presented by the cdesign proponentsists. One finds similarities with the “controversies” over global warming and vaccinations, where the detractors use rhetoric and distortion, but not a whole lot of legitimate science, and make their case in the popular press instead of in the science journals. Science is not a democracy, and equal time is not a right guaranteed to any particular proposition — scientific ideas are accepted because of merit, demonstrated by experiment. Not only is it OK to point this out, it’s something that should be demanded to consider a science story to be responsible journalism.
Super Spooky
Entanglement in the Macro World
By linking the electrical currents of two superconductors large enough to be seen with the naked eye, researchers have extended the domain of observable quantum effects. Billions of flowing electrons in the superconductors can collectively exhibit a weird quantum property called entanglement, usually confined to the realm of tiny particles, scientists report in the Sept. 24 Nature.
That sounds pretty cool, though they don’t go into any details about why exposing the currents to microwaves would entangle them. If the microwaves were linearly polarized, and the current loops are acting as antennae, I can see this; linear polarization can be expressed as a superposition of right- and left-circular polarization, so that might do the trick.
However, I have some objections to the reporting.
After interacting in a certain way, objects become mysteriously linked, or entangled, so that what happens to one seems to affect the fate of the other.
This is ambiguous, so I’m not sure if it fall into the trap of the “doing something to one changes the other” error, but even ambiguous is bad. Entanglement means knowing the state of one tells you the state of the other. And the real kicker here is “mysteriously,” which implies that nobody knows what the heck is going on. There are unanswered questions in entanglement, as there are in all areas of science, but it’s not the same as scientists fumbling and bumbling around, saying, “OMG! WTF?” Entanglement is a prediction of quantum mechanics, and the fact that people are exploiting it shows that it’s not really Sphinx-y (terribly mysterious) at all. Physics ain’t easy, but there’s no need to hamstring the understanding of it by selling it as mysterious.
In the new study, researchers used a microwave pulse to attempt to entangle the electrical currents of the two superconductors. If the currents were quantum-mechanically linked, one current would flow clockwise at the time of measurement (assigned a value of 0), while the other would flow counterclockwise when measured (assigned a value of 1), Martinis says. On the other hand, the currents’ directions would be completely independent of each other if everyday, classical physics were at work.
This can’t be right. If they are independent of each other you expect the currents to have no correlation, so half the time they should be in the opposite direction — so simply measuring currents in the opposite direction is not an indication that they are entangled. That could hold only if classically you always expected them to be in the same direction. The indication that they are entangled is the much higher incidence of finding the opposite currents, as was observed.
The Cheeseburger of Essay Forms
Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we’d have called its “outline.” Not explicitly, of course, but someone who really understands an article probably has something in his brain afterward that corresponds to such an outline. In a list of n things, this work is done for you. Its structure is an exoskeleton.
As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them.
Because the main points are unconnected, the list of n things is random access. There’s no thread of reasoning you have to follow. You could read the list in any order. And because the points are independent of one another, they work like watertight compartments in an unsinkable ship. If you get bored with, or can’t understand, or don’t agree with one point, you don’t have to give up on the article. You can just abandon that one and skip to the next. A list of n things is parallel and therefore fault tolerant.
Eerily Accurate
Here Now, Not the News
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
(1): The longstanding facts
…
In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites.
An interesting piece with which I basically agree; I’v noticed the problem of he absence of basic facts numerous times, especially on the 24-hour news shows. I’ve had the misfortune of tuning in a few hours after the breaking news was fist reported, and all I was fed was what had happened or come to light in the last hour or two, as if I was watching the whole time. Surely if you can repeat the same story every 15 minutes, you can give some background and context to it.