Tabitha M. Powledge discusses the evidence on whether or not there are too many scientific studies whose results can't be reproduced in subsequent work. Her main point is that you can't put all of "science" in the same basket: "Those of us professionally interested in science are going to know that different fields of science have very different track records." Also, gauging how much of Tuesday's State of the Union speech was devoted to science, directly or otherwise.
Science writing news
Science does not stop at the U.S./Mexico border. Yet, regional and national news coverage that chronicles science, technology, the environment, agriculture, fisheries, and public health often overlooks the economic and human impacts south of the border. From the Fall 2013 ScienceWriters.
Ben Adler's advice for reporters might be summarized as "Be careful what you say, and be careful what you quote." Both can be risky, Adler says: "For digital natives, media consumption is platform agnostic — a Twitter feed and NYTimes.com are both just websites, visited in rapid succession. And so, say news literacy and journalism experts, no one should let their standards slip just because they are posting something on Twitter instead of their publication's website."
Have you heard that books-on-paper are dead and e-books now dominate? Don't believe it, Keith Cronin writes in a list of ten writing myths: "One of the latest industry studies showed that ebooks made up only 11% of the book market in 2012. Granted, that percentage has been rising yearly, and I'm eager to see the numbers for 2013. But the reality is that paper books are still the bread and butter of the book market." More from Business Insider.
So much for an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among Medicare patients. Michael Miner does the math: "To stick with absolute numbers, among Americans 20 to 24, there were a total of 545,934 cases of chlamydia and syphilis in 2011; among Americans 65 and older there were 1,202. To picture these STDs rampaging through both populations in the same way takes a certain bravado. It also takes credulous editors." More from Ronni Bennett.
Readers prefer to share stories that are positive and exciting, Maria Konnikova writes of a Penn marketing study: "When the researchers manipulated the framing of a story to be either negative (a person is injured) or positive (an injured person is 'trying to be better again'), they found that the positive framing made a piece far more popular." Also, fighting click-bait with software, and viral titles for famous books.
Maria Popova unearths a set of nine rules for healthy skepticism, set down by the man she calls "our era's greatest patron saint of reason and common sense." Popova writes that Sagan's politely named "baloney detection kit" comes from science but "contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation."
Tabitha M. Powledge weighs in about "humaniqueness" and other ideas that surfaced in a discussion of scientific ideas whose time has passed: "Here’s an idea we can all get behind: Dump that left-brain/right-brain hogwash. Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore points out there is no basis for that beloved misapprehension. Despite the fact that some activities originate in certain brain locales, the two brain hemispheres are normally in constant communication."
Last summer, 807 participants from 77 countries met in Helsinki, Finland, to attend the 8th World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ). Over the course of five days, more than 50 sessions, workshops, and plenary talks together with social events ranging from cocktails aboard an Ice Breaker to traditional Finnish dancing on an open-air stage took place. From the Fall 2013 ScienceWriters.