Category Archives: Media Criticism

How Unfortunate For The Narrative

So it turns out that George Zimmerman is black.

This is what happens when you have race mongers and baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the black caucus and the “liberals” in the media driving the national conversation. And I hold them responsible for this:

“During the course of the investigation, we learned that the crime was related to the victim’s race,” Reynolds said.

Conklin said Hayes told investigators that he was angry about the Martin shooting and decided to attack the victim because of his race. Reynolds would not comment if the crime had anything to do with the Martin shooting.

This has been as big a case of journalistic malpractice as the Duke lacrosse affair.

[Update a while later]

A second producer at NBC has been fired (assuming, of course, that a first one was — we still don’t have a name).

Another Unfortunate Document Leak

If you’re an SLS supporter, that is. Spaceref has a NASA document from November that concludes utilizing orbital assembly and fueling for exploration missions adds no significant mission risk. Opponents of this concept have been sowing FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about this ever since it became viewed as a threat to first Ares, and now SLS. It was always a monumentally ignorant argument, that could be made only by someone unfamiliar with basic statistics and space ops (and sadly, it was once even made by the administrator himself), but now NASA has an internal document that shows what nonsense it is (and really, always was). Of course, in defense of Bolden, he knew what his audience wanted to hear.

Open Access

…and its importance to the integrity and public trust in scientific institutions:

If scientists are reluctant to share their data with other scientists it’s very difficult to believe they will be happy to put it all in the public domain. But I think they should. And I don’t mean just chucking terabytes of uncalibrated raw data onto a website in such a way that it’s impossible to use for any practical purpose. I mean fully documented, carefully maintained databases containing raw data, analysis tools and processed data products.

You might think this is all a bit Utopian, but the practice of sharing data is already widespread in my own field, astrophysics, and there are already many public databases of the type I’ve described. An exemplar is the excellent LAMBDA site which is a repository for data arising from research into the cosmic microwave background. Most astrophysical research publications from all around the world are also available, free of charge, at the arXiv.

So astrophysics is already much more open than most other fields, to the extent that it has already made the traditional model of publication and dissemination virtually redundant. I hope other disciplines follow this lead, because if researchers can’t find a way to break free from the shackles placed on them by the current system, the fragile relationship between science and society – already frayed by episodes like the University of East Anglia email scandal – may disintegrate entirely.

The problem is that astrophysics, unlike climate “science,” doesn’t have a political agenda, so he’s obviously making an unreasonable request.