February 11th, 2011 → 6:49 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I haven’t hid my feelings about The Huffington Post‘s track record when it comes to responsible science reporting, and earlier in the week, I speculated as to what effect AOL’s purchase of the site would have on the combined entity’s future coverage. (As part of the deal, Arianna Huffington will assume editorial control of AOL news operations.)
If today’s HuffPo story by David Kirby is any indication, the site will continue to run misleading and inaccurate stories about vaccines and their supposed connection to autism. Kirby is a more felicitous and intelligent writer than many of the site’s other contributors, but his conclusions are no less irresponsible or off-base. Earlier today, I unpacked a handful of the problems with Kirby’s effort in a Scientific American guest blog. (more…)
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February 7th, 2011 → 11:05 am @ Seth Mnookin
Last night, AOL finalized a deal to buy The Huffington Post for $315 million. From my perspective, the biggest news is that Arianna Huffington will, according to The New York Times, “take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.”
Much of the hand-wringing about Arianna’s ascension has focused on her liberal political views. (The headline on the Fox Nation website read, “AOL veers hard left, buys Huffington Post.”) I’m more worried about whether The Huffington Post‘s history of publishing baldly inaccurate stories about science and medicine will now infect the rest of AOL’s content. (more…)
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February 4th, 2011 → 6:05 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Earlier today, California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, posted a short piece on rising rates of autism and declining rates of students with “learning disabilities”: (more…)
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February 4th, 2011 → 10:27 am @ Seth Mnookin
I’ve been a bluegrass fan for years — which means I’ve come across a fair number of high lonesome oddities.
This video of Jimmy Martin lip-syncing along to his song “20/20 Vision” takes the cake. I’ll leave it here without any further comment.
(Hat tip to guitarist/singer extraordinaire Michael Daves, who also happens to be a kick-ass mandolin teacher. Look out for Michael’s album with Chris Thile of the Punch Brothers sometime in the next year.)
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February 2nd, 2011 → 8:49 am @ Seth Mnookin
Yesterday, The New York Times energy and environment blog ran a post titled “Are We Hard Wired to Doubt Science?” The central question posed by the piece — “How, in a rational society, does one understand those who reject science, a common touchstone of what is real and verifiable?” — is also the central question of my book, so it’s obviously a topic I’m very much interested in.
What struck me right off the bat was the use of the following illustration, which described “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus amygdala (in red) in a normal brain.”* The image was credited to Dr. Martha Herbert of Mass General Hospital. (more…)
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January 29th, 2011 → 4:28 pm @ Seth Mnookin
It didn’t take long for comments to start showing up on my post criticizing Sharyl Attkisson’s misleading flu vaccine story on the CBS News site. (A very quick recap: Attkisson implied, incorrectly, that a study by Amy Brooks-Kayal indicated that febrile seizures linked to the flu vaccine put children at an increased risk of developmental disorders.)
Before I get into the substance of those comments, I want to share the contents of an email Brooks-Kayal sent me this morning after I asked her about the CBS News report: (more…)
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January 28th, 2011 → 10:17 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Two days ago, CBS News’s Sharyl Attkisson posted a story on the CBS web site titled, “Child Flu Vaccine Seizures?” It ended thusly:
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