Month: January 2013

Chris Mooney delivers the results of a new study (paywalled) that reinforces the Dish’s stance against the comments section:

Participants were asked to read a blog post containing a balanced discussion of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology … The text of the post was the same for all participants, but the tone of the comments varied. Sometimes, they were “civil”—e.g., no name calling or flaming. But sometimes they were more like this: “If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these products, you’re an idiot.” The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn’t a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience . . . Pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their pre-existing beliefs.

The original kilogram—a slab of platinum-iridium in Sevres, Paris—now registers a different mass, throwing the benchmark off. The Economist explains why this matters:

Science would thus love to be free of this awkward lump of metal, but attempts to define mass objectively—with reference to, say, the mass of a proton—have always foundered on the question: “So how do you measure that?” For all the fancy equipment that scientists now have for monitoring the behaviour of caesium atoms and the value of the speed of light, no one has come up with a more accurate way of measuring mass than taking the Parisian ingot out of its sarcophagus from time to time, and putting it on a set of scales.

Earlier Dish on the original kilogram here.

Mark Hoofnagle and Matt Springer (both bloggers at ScienceBlogs) attempt a reasoned, fact-based discussion of gun control in America. Hoofnagle argues for stricter regulation:

Making access [to firearms] more challenging, and giving those who seek access more scrutiny, will dissuade those who seek to do harm from even trying to obtain these weapons. It will not stop the most motivated of individuals, it will not stop all crime, but it will reduce the frequency and severity of the problem, as well as inject some much-needed responsibility into the existing gun markets. No other product that has potential for so much harm is sold with so little oversight, or even liability for misuse, theft or loss.

Springer marshals evidence that gun control laws have little causal effect on gun violence:

Here’s a cautionary tale – one very similar nation has a homicide rate of 9.8, more than twice that of the US. That nation was the US, in 1991. What changed? Sociologists differ, but it was certainly not due to stricter gun laws. (One frequently-mentioned and surprisingly robust possibility is reduced childhood lead exposure after lead was phased out of gasoline.) Simultaneous declines took place in many other developed nations to various extents. If non-gun factors can change the murder rate within the same country by more than a factor of two, it is extremely challenging to say anything about the effects of gun laws in nations with very different cultures, histories, economies, and demographics.

Slate has rolled out a rather morbid tool for calculating the odds of freshly vacant seats on the bench:

Using publicly available data from the Centers for Disease Control, we can get rough odds for many different scenarios. It's rough because it assumes, to put it briefly, that Clarence Thomas has the life expectancy of the average 62-year-old black man. Which is likely not true. But it is true that with four justices in their 70s—and Ginsburg turning 80 this year—this Supreme Court is one of the oldest in a long time.

Bora Zivkovic argues that the NYTimes' reassignment of their environmental writers could help climate change coverage rather than hurting it:

[C]oncern is certainly warranted. But there is potential for this to be a good thing. It all depends on the implementation. My first reaction, quoted here, was that this may be a way to modernize environmental reporting at the Times. After all, reporters were not fired, the senior editors may be. All the environmental expertise is still at the Times, but now outside of its own ghetto, able to cross-fertilize with other beats, and to collaborate with reporters with other domains of expertise.

NYTimes Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has a similar, if slightly more pessimistic, take:

Symbolically, this is bad news. And symbolism matters – it shows a commitment and an intensity of interest in a crucially important topic… If coverage of the environment is not to suffer, a lot of people – including The Times’s highest ranking editors — are going to have to make sure that it doesn’t. They say they will. But maintaining that focus will be a particular challenge in a newsroom that’s undergoing intensive change as it becomes ever more digital while simultaneously cutting costs.

A reader writes:

The worst part of this? They were moderating the comments. You can make a comment on any post from Jeffrey Goldberg or Ta Nehisi Coates and it would go through. If you put something vile in there, it would go through until moderated after the fact. The Scientology advertorial, however, blocked all posts until they were approved. This means that they gave Scientology veto power over how people respond to them, which they do not give to anyone else. As a result, the comments were almost entirely glowing about Scientology.

Well, it seems pretty clear where the editorial staff stands. Goldblog touts Lawrence Wright’s new book on the subject (which, if it is anything like as good as his past work, will indeed be a must-read); Fallows tweets diplomatically but obviously with some concern. To its credit, the magazine pulled the pro-scientology propaganda advertorial pronto (if you call 11 hours pronto). Eric Wemple has a good summary here. My immediate thought was that this was overblown, and then I saw the sheer extent of the piece:

Look, these are extremely tough days for magazines and what David Bradley and Justin Smith have done to resurrect this pillar of American letters is quite something: a tour de force financially. James Bennet’s editorship has been a model for others. But advertorials in the Atlantic? For cults? What I’d like to know is how extensive the use of advertorials now is at my former beloved home. Maybe this was a one-off, quickly ended. Or maybe it wasn’t. But the integrity of a great magazine needs defending. Wemple ominously notes from his reporting:

Natalie Raabe, a spokeswoman for the Atlantic, says that such “native ads” are making their way onto TheAtlantic.com on a “regular basis,” though figures weren’t immediately available. Native ads are critical to The Atlantic’s livelihood. They are one element of digital advertising revenue, which in 2012 accounted for a striking 59 percent of the brand’s overall advertising revenue haul. Unclear just how much of the digital advertising revenue stems from sponsor content. We’re working on that.

The heart sinks.