Category Archives: Journalism

Do We?

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At Backreaction, Bee asks, “Do we need Science Journalists?”

I don’t think science blogs are ready to replace science journalism, or even if that will ever come to pass. This harkens back to the argument of what is the purpose of blogs; if the niche that a blog fills isn’t competing with traditional science journalism, then that blog isn’t likely to present much competition. And if a blogger doesn’t present their work in a way that’s an alternative to journalism, then so be it — I don’t think I’m going to run anyone out of business, and if I find something interesting, I’m an asset, because I’ll link to it. To the extent that science blogs do compete with science journalism, I think that good blogging will force science journalism to get better, because good blogs will be read at the expense of poor journalism, and bloggers tend to not be shy about pointing out crap. And that’s a Good Thing™ because we can always do with better material all around. There will always be a place for good science journalism; the question will be on the size of the niche.

That's Dr. Time to You, Pal!

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Meet the world’s director of time

An interview with Dennis McCarthy, who is the Director of the Directorate of Time (or was at one point; I’m not sure how his retirement and subsequent resurrection affected the job title)

Though the BBC filmed in the lab, none of that footage made it into the embedded clip. Perhaps there’s footage in the show that’s airing on BBC 2, as I type this. I’ll have to check it out.

More than anyone, Dr McCarthy appreciates the need for the world’s population to be synchronised. But for those who don’t spend their working day checking atomic clocks, why is knowing the time so important? Think for a moment about how the GPS satellite navigation system works.

There is a network of over 30 satellites orbiting earth that broadcast a high-precision time-stamp down to the GPS system in your car.

These signals travel at the speed of light, which is very nearly one foot every thousand-millionth of a second – or one nanosecond (for the more metrically minded, that’s around 30cm, which is far less elegant. If there is a God, he built the universe using imperial measurements).

If that last part is true, God has a hell of a sense of humor.

The was one part of the embedded video that made me cringe, and that was the depiction of the Bohr-ish atom (with wavy orbit lines — is that supposed to make it all better?) and the electron making a transition between them. But in that representation, those are the levels described by the principle quantum number, and the transition of microwave clocks is in the spin state of the electrons, oscillating between spin-up and spin-down (whose energy degeneracy is broken because of interactions with the nucleus, which also has spin, and thus a magnetic moment) And the notion that you’re looking at radiation emitted by the atom is true in an active maser but not a passive standard like a cesium or rubidium clock — in those you make a separate measurement of the atom to tell you what state the electron is in.

(I don’t know if it’s a permanent link, but in the “In Today’s Magazine” column there’s Call him Mr Time . Hence the title, though I can’t actually envision Dennis saying that to anyone)

Help Me, Obi Wan

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General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle to explain what a hologram is, and isn’t.

I only watched a few minutes of CNN’s election coverage before becoming ill (figuratively) and switching off the TV, so I missed where he called their camera trick a hologram. But it wasn’t, and several people caught it.

So what happened?

CNN focused more than 35 high-definition cameras on Yellin to get multiple views from Grant Park in Chicago for the look of a 3-D holographic image Tuesday. That made it appear as if Yellin was in the studio talking with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

That’s a camera trick, but not a hologram.

Unfortunately, some of the criticism misses the mark. Uh, Wolf, That CNN Election Image Wasn’t a Hologram

A hologram is a photographic image that is three-dimensional and appears to have depth. They work by creating an image composed of two superimposed pictures of the same object, but seen from different points.

No, but I think I can see how the writer got from what a hologram actually is to this explanation. A hologram is a comparison of an image with some reference light, not the comparison of two images. Some of the light bounces off of the target and then interferes with the reference beam (and I think this interference pattern is the “superimposed” reference), and you record the interference pattern on the film. That pattern has all the information of the object, and when you pass a reference beam through the film (or off the surface, if it’s a reflection hologram) you’ll see a 3-D image.

The CNN image wasn’t 3-D. It looked something that was 3-D on the TV screen, but like everything else on the screen, the image was 2-D.

How Holograms Work

CNN’s Hologram. Real or Fake? calls the CNN technique a tomogram, which I don’t think is right. Tomography gives you 2-D slices of a 3-D object, and that’s not what’s happening here.

CNN’s “Holograms” Aren’t Holograms, So Cut It Out doesn’t attempt an explanation of holography, and is content to note that

It was movie magic, folks, similar to what we all remember from The Matrix. Given that it was done live without a hitch, it was extremely way cool. But it wasn’t a hologram, and no amount of wishing will make it so.

Zapperz, in Not A Hologram, has linked to an article that lists other instances of people misusing “hologram”

This isn't The Onion?

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Oh, wait. It’s just the time-honored (sorry, honoured) tradition of writing a headline that has the opposite implication than the actual story.

Call for creationism in science

Professor Michael Reiss says that if pupils have strongly-held beliefs about creationism these should be explored.

Rather than dismissing creationism as a “misconception”, he says it should be seen as a cultural “world view”.

Teachers should take the time to explain why creationism had no scientific basis, Prof Reiss said.
He stressed that the topic should not be taught as science.

Yeah, I can see how summing that up should be worded as a call for teaching creationism.

Focus, People

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This month’s Physical Review Focus: Nanoparticles Stick a Perfect Landing

They found that for speeds less than 1.2 kilometers per second, the nanoparticle bounces off the surface like a basketball. But at higher speeds, some of the nanoparticle undergoes a phase transition to a compressed state called β-tin, where each atom bonds to six neighbors. This transition is surprising, Dumitrică says, because the collision energy is not high enough to induce a phase transition in a macroscopic object. However, the impact force is applied over a few square nanometers, so the pressure inside the nanoparticle is extremely large–around 200,000 atmospheres, which is more than enough to cause the phase transition.

The β-tin state only lasts a few picoseconds, though. As the nanoparticle begins to bounce back, there is a second phase transition to an amorphous, or disordered, state. The combination of the two phase transitions, plus some heat generation, takes up all of the kinetic energy, and the particle remains on the surface. After all of this action, “the recoil is too weak to beat the adhesion forces between the nanoparticle and the substrate,” Dumitrică says.

However

A silicon nanoparticle flying at 8 times the speed of sound can slam into a surface and stick, but it bounces off if colliding at half that speed.

The speed of sound in what, pray tell? I wish journalists would remember (learn?) that the speed of sound is not a constant of nature.

Yes, John, You Had a Question?

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I notice that the answers are posted for the “Presidential Physics quiz” in the NY Times (original quiz wording) and, well, blech. Sorta. I’ve read decent things about the Physics for Future Presidents book, but I don’t want this to be the example for “how to quiz presidents and justify the answers.”

QUESTION 1. How does the amount of energy per gram of TNT compare with the energy per gram of a chocolate chip cookie?

My answer is (d), the cookie contains nearly 10 times as much energy.

But the answer is really around 5 or 6, depending on what numbers you’ve used, and one of the other choices is “about the same.” If you’re going to do multiple-choice, try not to bracket the right answer this way.

I do like the defense of discounting the E=mc2 answer, because it shows recognition that we’re dealing with chemical rather than nuclear reactions. But in the defense of the answer, there’s

TNT explodes all by itself, no air needed.

Well, no, not really. If you balance the reaction, you’ll find that significant oxygen is needed. Sugars have oxygen in them, too. You still need external oxygen for that reaction as well.

But all of this ignores that science isn’t just a bunch of facts. What I’d rather see from a president (or student) is some reasoning, like “these are both basically combustion reactions, so to first order, I’d expect them to release similar amounts of energy” and worry about the details later on, like what difference there is because you have some nitrogen in TNT, and how that might affect the bottom line, and maybe the reasoning that you give up some energy for the convenience of a reaction that forms more moles of gases (and those gases want to occupy 22.4L each at STP, so boom!) instead of keeping the molar amount of gas the same (swapping CO2 for O2).

QUESTION 2. Based on the answer to the previous question, suggest an energy-efficient way to destroy a car.

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Good Argument, Bad Argument

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Ran across the tube containing Standards in Science Blogging and My Inbox. I’m interested in standards of science blogging, so I gave it a read. The author almost gets it right when talking about the right way and wrong way to support your argument.

There is a right way and a wrong way to buttress one’s viewpoints on controversial issues involving science and society.

The right way is to do a comprehensive search of the literature on the topic and to find a group of peer-reviewed articles that support one’s argument. In a popular article, it’s OK to also quote popular sources, but if the subject is science, the focus should be on peer-reviewed mayerial.

I think you need to take it one step further. Finding articles that support your argument is the lawyer’s way of making a case. The scientist looks at all of the material, or at least a reasonable sampling of it. In any widely-researched area there will invariably be some literature that is unsupportive, contradictory or at least ambiguous, and it is not scientific to cherry-pick results. This is just the nature of, well, nature — you get statistical results, and sometimes those results are the outliers rather than the average.

So make sure it’s carefully-done research (peer-review helps with that). But survey the whole body of it, and make sure the science really is supporting you. There are people who will point to a poorly-done study and build a position from it, oblivious to the fact that it contradicts mounds of other works — these are not good arguments.

I think it that science bloggers and journalists should work toward a standard of ethics that their scientifically-related posts and articles will contain at least a minimal number of links or citations to peer-reviewed material.

Obviously, if blog posts aren’t about science, there’s no such need for literature citation.

I think this is true, remembering the context of discussions of science & society. One also needs to remember the difference between fact and opinion. There are quite a few people out there who post their opinions as if they were facts, or dismiss facts as if they were opinions.

Teleport, Shmeleport

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Today’s xkcd is about quantum teleportation, but the problem isn’t that journalists write the “same disappointed story” whenever quantum teleportation is being reported. It’s that they still report that teleportation is somehow connected to moving matter around, whether they’ve been waved off about it or not; the latter would be because they didn’t vet their story. They are almost Pavlovian (does that name ring a bell?) in their need to include the reference to Star Trek.

That’s only a small deduction in judging the overall message, though. (Especially the title tag, where Randall zings the sensationalization of story titles)

Playing Hard to Get

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Giving your new results away too soon

[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph? If you wait to long your paper will become a whodunit and readers will get bored and stop reading your paper. If the clue of your paper is already in the title you might fear that many of your readers will only read your title and will then go on to read the next paper.

It depends on the type of paper, but I think you generally give your main result in the abstract. The paper gives the details of how you did it, context and information about other related research (but not in that order)