Curtis Brainard takes aim at a recent Washington Post health section story in a CJR Observatory post about deep vein thrombosis, in which blog clots form in the legs and can travel to the lungs, resulting in deadly embolisms. The story's author, John Donnelly, "badly mischaracterized the dangers of long-distance airplane travel," Brainard writes, citing statistics from the College of Chest Physicians that warn against using aspirin or anticoagulants to prevent DVT.
Science writing news
The sad state of SETI and of space exploration. NASA budget dooms planetary expeditions. Bad infographics of bad science. Deceptive docs. A new stolen email scandal besets some climate change folks, and this time deniers are the targets. Darwin's papers online. Dark matter is everywhere. Wall Street loves dopamine. Videos: Flying robot jugglers and the aurora borealis.
Jim Fingal was an intern assigned to fact-check an essay by John D’Agata. "Hi, Jim," D’Agata began. "I think maybe there’s some sort of miscommunication, because the 'article,' as you call it, is fine. It shouldn’t need a fact-checker." The exchange from their new book, "The Lifespan of a Fact," is excerpted in Harpers. More from Slate, the New Yorker, and Salon.
"Number hygiene for journalists" is the provocative title of a post on Getstats, a project of the UK Royal Statistical Society. The original Word document is posted in a more accessible form here. A sample: "The wording of a question can hugely influence the answer you get ... What the public understands may not match the survey researcher's idea." Comment here and an interview with the director.
For Richard Harris, a longtime NPR reporter and former NASW president, a paralyzed vocal cord became fodder for a post about his sudden illness, its diagnosis, and — one now hopes — its cure: "Being a science reporter, of course I dived into the medical literature to see what was up. It turns out that good statistics are hard to come by on how frequently Americans suffer from this condition, unilateral vocal fold paralysis." With recordings before, during, and after.
Breaking free of the corporate environment has its benefits, but one drawback is finding substitutes for familiar business applications. Jeremy Caplan offers some suggestions on the Poynter Institute web site: Evernote for organization; Google tools for creating content; InvoiceBubble and FreshBooks for handling finances; and other free or low-cost tools for sharing files or managing backups.
What made this story so good wasn't just that Andrea Curtis wrote a searing narrative about her son's premature birth, Bruce Gillespie says on Nieman Storyboard. It was how she wove it with a serious discussion of the costs and ethics of helping such babies survive. "Is it right to keep the tiniest, most at-risk babies alive outside the womb just because we can?" Curtis asks "And most critically, what are the short- and long-term consequences?"
It's the newest hot social networking tool, and Denise Graveline offers nine tips for taking advantage of the new wrinkles it offers. For starters, make different "boards" for each subject area you're posting about. Keep it social rather than focusing completely on business. More from 10,000 Words and TechCrunch, plus how Pinterest makes money from your content.
Archaic genomes and archaic behavior: The Neandertal within. The Denisovan DNA sequence is made public. Why the Komen-Planned Parenthood mess should cheer you up. Plus contraception, biological anthropology, the connected brain, Steve Jobs' FBI files, clinical trials, social media viewed from 2062, the politics of climate change, Mount Etna eruption video, and — don't miss this one — The Scale of the Universe.