Megan Garber hits her stride at AtlanticTech: The TED talk, at this point, is the cultural equivalent of a patent: a private claim to a public concept. With the speaker, himself, becoming the manifestation of the idea. And so: In the name of spreading a concept, the talk ends up narrowing it. Parisers filter bubble. Andersons […]
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 →I resist best-of-year roundups when I see the heads — but then find I usually like reading them, and lo and behold, find it instructive to do my own. While most of my attention last year went into pitching and then beginning work on The Orchid and the Dandelion, I spent a lot of time […]
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 […]
Continue reading →“The iPad is the most exciting opportunity for the media in many years. But if the press is ceding gatekeeper status, even if it’s only nominally, over its speech, then it is making a dangerous mistake.”
Continue reading →Hang in for the question at 5:55: He asks Obama what he does about “getting bullied a lot.” Obama: “I wasn’t bullied too much in school.”
“Can you dunk?”
“Not anymore.”
“Would you like to become my homeboy?”
“You bet.”
A couple weeks ago I was at the lab of NIH researcher Doug Fields, who has shown that myelin is laid down and modified, primarily during childhood and adolescence, very much in response to experience. If TV is a big part of that experience — and it is, for most American kids — then it is presumably driving a lot of the brain’s wiring
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