It was pure-and-simple phishing, the Guardian reports after the Heartland Institute makes public an email chain in which Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick asks for — and gets — internal documents from the climate-denying thinktank. Turns out Gleick pretended to be a Heartland board member and asked to have board emails sent to an address that wasn't the board member's. Gleick asked for a leave of absence Friday.
Science writing news
AAAS meeting blogging. Are the enemies of science growing or just getting louder? A microbe field guide? Primate moral outrage over inequality. Those purloined Heartland climate change documents: the surprising villain, the textual analysis, and the education scheme. The first watery exoplanet, misexplained. FTL neutrinos, not so fast. Download the Universe and the future of science ebooks.
In the past seven months, the National Association of Science Writers has awarded an additional five Idea Grants, totaling $67,000, bringing the total awarded since the grant program's inception one year ago this month to almost $140,000. Funding is provided by income from the Authors Coalition, and the grants are intended to help science writers in their professional lives or benefit the field of science writing.
Salon's Kerry Lauerman says his publication tried the formula — quick summaries on trending topics — and found it didn't work. So it moved the pendulum back: "We've tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We're actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago." More from Nieman Lab and CJR.
In the circles in which we run we have seen the results of polls that seek to tease out how the public perceives science and scientists. For this edition of Scholarly Pursuits, we are taking a look at one of these polls as well as exploring some recent papers that seek to elucidate how and why people perceive science in certain ways. From the Winter 2011-12 ScienceWriters.
"If you’re looking to portray loss of innocence, your character dropping flowers into a muddy river ain’t a bad metaphor," Tommy Tomlinson writes about the 1967 song, "Ode to Billie Joe" on Nieman Storyboard. "Every writer can learn from music – not just rhythm and pacing and mood, but the poet’s efficiency a songwriter needs to tell a story in the short span of a song. Bobbie Gentry wrote a textbook here in 358 words."
NASW awarded travel grants to 8 undergraduates interested in science writing to attend the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, B.C., Feb. 16-20. The fellows reported on some of the scientific sessions that they found most interesting and newsworthy.
Maybe you heard that Newt Gingrich's communications director made more than five dozen changes in his candidate's Wikipedia entry and related pages since 2008. Rob Pegoraro on Discovery News offers a guide to Wikipedia tools that can help flush out the rogue editing: "Even if the assertions in an entry or the references provided for it don't seem fishy, the encyclopedia also provides a good set of tools to spot mischief," including the "talk" and "history" pages.
NASW's Kayt Sukel certainly created a buzz when promoting her book "Dirty Minds." Sukel, Rebecca Skloot, and four other authors are interviewed about the increasingly aggressive world of book publicity by Maggie Galehouse on the Houston Chronicle's Bookish blog. "Publishers expect authors to create Facebook pages for their books and maintain author websites," Galehouse writes. "Tweeting has also become a powerful publicity tool."