Formed just a few weeks ago, the Ad Hoc Committee on Constitutional Review has outlined its mission and operating guidelines.
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The World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ) has announced that the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), in partnership with the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW), will host the 10th World Conference of Science Journalists, in San Francisco, in fall 2017, marking the first time WCSJ will take place in the United States.
The Akha hill tribe of Northern Thailand once raised poppies for opium. With financial support and technical advice from two entrepreneurs, one Thai, one Canadian, the tribe now grows high quality organic Arabica coffee. As Mark Pendergrast describes in Beyond Fair Trade: How One Small Coffee Company Helped Transform a Hillside Village in Thailand, the coffee’s success has improved the community’s health, education, and, often, quality of life. At the same time, television, computers, and other aspects of modern life also have altered the community’s cultural landscape.
“What makes a journalist in 2015?” asked moderator Robin Marantz Henig, freelance journalist and president of NASW, to open the ScienceWriters 2015 panel discussion, Ethics in today’s science writing landscape: A community conversation.
Recognizing a red flag and following your gut when ethics is in question leaves a lot of science writers questioning what is or is not actually acceptable. Debates and anecdotes were encouraged during the session “Ethics in Today’s science writing landscape: A community conversation.” This plenary session kicked off the first of 17 sessions for the day, and more than 600 attendees showed up to watch two long-time freelance journalists square off.
NASW member Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn teamed up with her father, Vincent T. DeVita, M.D., a former director of the National Cancer Institute, to provide an insider’s perspective on decades of cancer research. In The Death of Cancer, they call for changes in delivery of cancer treatment in the U.S. Optimal care of people with cancer, they say, requires better-informed and less timid physicians, refocused national agendas, and fewer bureaucratic hurdles.
Science and journalism can change the world — or at least make an impact on it. On April 1, award-winning National Public Radio science reporter Richard Harris delivered that message at Virginia Tech's College of Engineering with the presentation “Using the tools of science and journalism to make a difference.”
The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson put finishing touches on the so-called “Standard Model” of particle physics. In From the Great Wall to the Great Collider: China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe, Harvard mathematician Shing-Tung Yau and NASW member Steve Nadis describe plans to build a giant accelerator in China.