Having written quite a bit about the ruckus raised when Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser was caught fabricating data and committing other acts of scientific misconduct, forcing his resignation, I was intrigued to hear he was self-publishing a book titled Evilicious. (Not making this up.) Today, Ivan Oransky at Retraction watch looks at an odd and […]
Continue reading →Last week a small group of scientists and journalists signed a secret pact to do a bad, bad, really bad thing to science, journalism, and everyone that depends on either of those things, which is to say everybody, including you. The authors of a small, weak study of genetically modified crops managed to warp media […]
Continue reading →I can think of several reasons NOT to do this post. I’m traveling. I’m trying to mix business and pleasure, family (loud) and work (quiet). I have no time, and, 7 time zones from home, no idea what time it is anyway. I have more important things to blog about. I can smell that the […]
Continue reading →I’ll be on three panels at ScienceOnline this weekend — one on ebooks, one on open science, and one on “Keeping the Bullshit Filter” (i.e., watchdogging science and science journalism). The ScienceOnline program describes all these (go there and search for the title). For those attending, considering following the streamed sessions, or curious about the […]
Continue reading →Are we squeezing everything we should out of the arsenic story? Some would say so. I’m not so sure. In a quick post-mortem yesterday on the Lake Mono bacterium, Brian Reid neatly ticks off how the “arsenic soap opera,” as he put it, “illustrates five trends in health and science communication that are likely to […]
Continue reading →Been a lot of hype over some strange life forms found in Lake Mono, encouraged, unfortunately, by some breathless, teasing press releases from NASA. But amid the muddle you can find some nuanced clarity in two stories in particular, from Nature News and Not Exactly Rocket Science. First, Alla Katsnelson brings some good balanced coverage […]
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