Censoring Science and Nobody Cares

I don’t know why a bigger fuss isn’t being made over this.

ScienceBlogs Jumps The Shark

Pepsi has a blog. What’s next? HuffPo Woo meistering?

Update 1: Okay, I have to admit that Badger3k makes a good point:

If SciBlogs can host Nesbitt without losing credibility, what is a corporate “blog” going to do to it?

An Open Letter To The New York Times

Dear Publishers of the New York Times,
This is why newspapers are going the way of the dodo bird.

Sincerely,
Afarensis

(Hat Tip to John Hawks)

Australopithecus sediba: Was the Embargo Broken

I will have more to say about the find itself this evening (hopefully), in the meantime time there have been more than a few accusations of someone breaking the embargo on the story. Ivan Oransky at Embargo Watch looks at the issue. Turns out it was a case of a reporter doing some interesting detective work and scooping the competition. The reporter in question emailed Ivan Oransky and I would like to quote one small part of it – a part that raises some profound questions about science journals and the embargo process:

We did not receive any embargoed press releases on this paper or the find until Monday morning and gathered information about the story in a perfectly reasonable journalistic manner. On Saturday evening I also checked to see if there were any embargoed press releases on Eurekalert and could find none.

Can this be an embargo break if no official embargo has been issued?

Should Science be able to put an embargo on information that has not come from them and has been obtained from other sources? [bolding mine – afarensis]

Does this mean that if I speak to any scientist who is hoping to have a paper in Science in the future, then I am prevented from publishing anything about this until it appears in Science?

The bolded question is , IMHO, incredibly important. I would say that, no Science does not have that right nor should they. But that is just me and I could be wrong.

NPR Science Friday: Update

As I have previously mentioned NPR’s Science Friday is coming to St. Louis on March 12th. Last I heard tickets were all spoken for but earlier this week a pair of tickets arrived in the mail. So, Mrs. afarensis and I will be attending.

NPR’s Science Friday Is Coming To St. Louis

NPR’s Science Friday is coming to the St. Louis Science Center according to a “new” story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Unfortunately, tickets to the event are already sold out. Sigh.

Damn! Fox News Is Stupid!

Via Highly Allochthonous comes this horrible story from Fox News. The story is supposed to be about lung cancer in China caused by people burning coal that formed 250 million years ago. The story veers strait into stupidity in the first paragraph:

Dangerous Ltd and the Discovery Channel Quote-mine a Paleontologist

Normally quote-mining is a behavior one associates with the creationist movement. So it is shocking when the Discovery channel and Dangerous Ltd (makers of Clash of Dinosaurs) engages in the same behavior. The main culprit here is Dangerous Ltd which made the show…

Gaah! This is Horrible Reporting

ABC News is pandering to creationists in this really bad article on
Ardipithecus ramidus. Basically it boils down to, and I kid you not this is a direct quote:

Carl Sagan And Stephen Hawking Music Video

Lately I have tended to ignore posts on the latest “hot thing” generating buzz. However, this one is too good to pass up.

I’m not really given to hero worship, but I make an exception for Sagan and as I have mentioned before, I really miss him and his elegant, insightful defense of science. A lot of scientists talk about the mystery and wonder of the universe, and of the joy in discovering how it works. Few are capable of actually making you feel that joy and inspiring you to want to learn more. Sagan is one of the later.

(Hat Tip to A Hot Cup of Joe)