science

On Climategate

by

at The Register This piece originally had a much longer section summing up the state of climate “science” – which the CRU leak has verified. The peculiar nature of the problem is why anecdote and modelling play such an important part in the persuasion business. Scientific theories fall by the wayside when they fail to … Read more

To the Moon – with extreme engineering

by

Apollo space program as a triumph of power and industrial might. The superpowers’ space programs were, of course, political and chauvinistic, designed to showcase national wealth. But there’s a better way of looking at the program, Dennis Wingo reminded me recently. Masses of money helped put man on the Moon of course, but the Moon … Read more

Breaking Bad: the joy of chemistry

by

Here’s a show with the perfect profile to be a huge cult British hit – black humour, suspense, all the stuff we love. But what’s puzzling is how the British public broadcasters dropped the ball by failing to notice the show – particularly the BBC. …Read more at The Register

BBC’s science: ‘Evangelical, shallow and sparse’

by

The BBC’s environmental coverage has come under fire from a former science correspondent. Award-winning author and journalist David Whitehouse says the corporation risks public ridicule – or worse – with what he calls “an evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.”

Whitehouse relates how he was ticked off for taking a cautious approach to apocalyptic predictions when a link between BSE in cattle (“Mad Cow Disease”) and vCJD in humans was accepted by government officials in 1996. Those predictions “…rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data,” he writes.

“My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly.”

The Beeb wasn’t alone. With bloodthirsty glee, the Observer newspaper at the time predicted millions infected, crematoria full of smoking human remains – and the government handing out suicide pills to the public. Whitehouse feels his caution is now vindicated. The number of cases traced to vCJD in the UK is now 163 – and the only suicides were farmers who had feared their livelihoods destroyed.

Writes Whitehouse:

“Reporting the consensus about climate change…is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn’t believe them anymore.”

Read more

The Large Hadron Collider: Anton Wylie

by

The LHC comes at a crucial time for particle or quantum physics. In particular, it comes at a crucial time for the dominant theory, known as the Standard Model. The Standard Model has been to modern particle physics rather what the periodic table was to 19th century chemistry. It served both to organise the known … Read more

How the middle classes’ superstitions keep Africa poor and hungry

by

The man dubbed the “King of Climate Porn” achieved notoriety at the turn of the decade as the architect of the Foot and Mouth holocaust – which unnecessarily slaughtered seven million animals, and cost the country billions of pounds. But King astonished observers by saying something sensible last week – and he promises to do … Read more

Bringing it all back Hume: Anton Wylie

by

A philosophy of science that may be the best thing we’ve ever run WiReD magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has just seen the end for scientific theories. And it is called Google. The concept of the mind, and by extension that of a person, was also affected, with far reaching implications. In psychology, Behaviourism was one … Read more

‘Use me as a mouthpiece’, pleads Guardian hack

by

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian‘s Mr “Bad Science” writes witheringly about sloppy science journalists. Many of them are simply “juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk,” he writes. They trade on scare stories, and … Read more

Smart radios are still pretty dumb

by

More than three years ago, your reporter got a good taste of how miserable technology utopians can be. It was at Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco, and the debate was about liberating analog TV spectrum for exciting new digital uses. The analog switchover is slated for February 2009. On behalf of Microsoft, Google, and … Read more