Oops! A cannonball fired during a Mythbusters stunt went off course, bouncing through two walls of a nearby home and then crashing through the window of a minivan.
Speaking of press release journalism, they just ended a press conference at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting led by James Hansen, head of the NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. Hansen is a devoted global warming scientist, most well known to the public from his testimony to Congress in 1988 outlining the serious threat the world faces from global warming and carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere.
I had very much wanted to ask Hansen (as well as the rest of the panel) this somewhat challenging question:
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The pathetic state of science journalism.
Many survive as a science journalist just by paying attention to press releases and reproducing them, as long as others do the same. A recent BBC analysis of its science coverage in its own news reports revealed that 75% came from press releases, and only a tiny fraction contained views not expressed in those press releases.
This lip service is not good enough, and editors should wise up that science journalism has lost its edge and demand reform. It has also become uncritical and therefore not journalism. Too many who profess to practice journalism are the product of fashionable science communication courses that have sprung up in the past fifteen years. It’s my view that this has resulted in many journalists being supporters of, and not reporters of, science. There is a big difference.
I couldn’t agree more. I sometimes think my rants against “press release journalism” sound like a broken record. I am glad I am not the only one ranting.
Scrooge wins: Paypal shuts down a charity operation that was trying to raise money to buy Christmas gifts for kids.
At a press conference just completed at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, geologist Don Swanson of the U.S. Geological Hawaiian Volcano Observatory revealed that the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii has been in an explosive mode about sixty percent of the time in the past 2500 years. “Kilauea is not the gentle volcano that most people assume,” noted Swanson.
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And the winner is: The Hubble Space Telescope has now been used as a reference in more than 10,000 peer-reviewed science papers.
The next test flight of Falcon 9/Dragon has slipped again.
This article notes how an ISS status report that had indicated approval for a merger of the next two Falcon 9 test flights was premature.
Tonight’s press conference at the American Geophysical Union conference focused on the latest results from Dawn, orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta. Or to put it as scientist Vishnu Reddy put it, “Vesta is the most colorful asteroid in the solar system.”
At least, in geological terms. To our human eye the asteroid wouldn’t be so spectacular. However, the false color images released by the scientists show the global geological diversity of Vesta. From the press release:
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Theft by government: The family that once owned Santa Rosa Island off California finally and reluctantly gives up its property.
Fearing condemnation, Vail & Vickers sold Santa Rosa Island to the government for $30 million in 1986. . . . [Then, a] 1997 lawsuit by the National Park and Conservation Assn. hastened the end of both ranching and hunting.
Coming to your US healthcare system soon! The National Health Service (NHS) of the UK is making its patient database available to researchers.
NHS plans to change its constitution to allow patient data to be open to researchers by default, with an opt-out option for individuals. The ability to take advantage of NHS data will be a boon for research in the United Kingdom, said Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust. The more patients who are involved in research, the greater the public benefit, he said in a statement, adding that a patient once told him, “giving my anonymous data is the most painless thing I can do to help others get better.”
Some have raised privacy concerns about the data access plan, which is why the U.K. government will hold a public consultation on the idea before moving ahead, but Leszek Borysiewicz, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, also applauds the proposal. [emphasis mine]
It is significant that the NHS’s constitution forbid the release of this data without a patient’s permission. I suspect that this privacy rule was almost certainly a condition used to convince Great Britain’s population to go along with nationalized healthcare. “Don’t worry about your health records! The nationalized healthcare system will be required to keep it private and available only to you!”
As is typical for a government program, this promise had an expiration date. Government programs like to control things, and they will inevitably do whatever they must — twist the facts, break promises, lie, cheat, — to gain that control.
Right now the patient health records are supposed to remain anonymous once they are released. Want to bet that in a few years these same scientists will demand that they need to know who the patients are in order to do their research effectively? And do you want to bet on whether that information remains secret?
The DB Cooper hijacking case might finally be solved.
Two newly discovered supermassive black holes weigh in as the heaviest known.
One of the newly discovered black holes is 9.7 billion solar masses and is located in the elliptical galaxy NGC 3842, which is the brightest galaxy in the Leo cluster of galaxies that sits 320 million light years away in the direction of the constellation Leo. The second is as large or larger and sits in the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, which is the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster about 336 million light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices.
It is believed that these heavy supermassive black holes are the kind that produced quasars in the early universe.
This week the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is having its annual fall meeting in San Francisco. Due to the wonders of technology, they are now making their press conferences available to reporters on line. Thus, I will be posting periodic updates after each conference. This will allow my readers to get a heads up on stories they will be seeing in the mainstream press in the next few hours.
Right now they are wrapping up a press conference from the team of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, in which they have described the spacecraft’s status.
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At a press conference today the science team at Kepler announced a swath of new discoveries from the space telescope, all of which point to the impending discovery of multiple Earth-like planets capable of harboring life.
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U.S. military has rescinded its ban of bibles at Walter Reed hospital.
[Congressman Peter] King spoke from the House floor Thursday blasting a policy memorandum from the commander of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center written by Chief of Staff C.W. Callahan. The September 14th memo covers guidelines for “wounded, ill, and injured partners in care.”
“No religious items (i.e. Bibles, reading material, and/or artifacts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit,” the policy states.
I suspect the original intent of the policy was to prevent the proselytizing of patients by outsiders. However, even this is a violation of the First Amendment, as the government has no right to say where and when people can discuss religion.
World War II: After the war, in photos.
Astronomers have found a star that is spinning at a rate of a million times per hour.
A collection of pertinent quotes from Climategate 2.
I come to two conclusions as I read these and earlier emails.
Both of these facts are important to recognize in order to decide what sources of information are reliable in studying this issue. And obviously, this means that almost any reports or press announcements coming out of Durbin this week are untrustworthy.
The uncertainty of science: New data has thrown doubt on last year’s discovery of a bacteria that used arsenic as one of the basic elements of life.
India’s satellite television channels are facing blackouts due to the unreliability of an aging satellite.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached a new high in 2010.
And yet, the rise in the world’s climate has stalled since around 2000. This suggests to me, as does a lot of other research, that the Earth’s climate is far more complex than claimed by many scientists, and that there are some factors we do not yet understand contributing to the ebb and flow of the planet’s global temperature.
Let me add one more point: this lack of understanding about climate change also suggests it is a mistake for our government to take drastic action against global warming at this time. As George Will has noted, “The law is a blunt instrument.” It often does a poor job of dealing with these kinds of issues, especially in cases where our knowledge is flawed or incomplete.
German bomb experts have successfully defused a World War II bomb after evacuating 45,000.
“I did my job, that was all,” lead defusing expert Horst Lenz told local daily Rhein Zeitung.
Repeal it! The shutting down of business because of Obamacare and other federal regulation. This quote sums things up nicely:
In an economic climate of increasing uncertainties, Puzder says, one certainty is that many businesses that now are marginally profitable will disappear when ObamaCare causes that margin to disappear. A second certainty is that “employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as ObamaCare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”
Boston bans e-cigarettes, just because.
