in the news this week...

[acroyear]

Panasonic Unveils 103-Inch TV Screen - Yahoo! News:

Home TV screens just keep getting bigger. And there's no end in sight. Panasonic pitched a tent outside the
New York Stock Exchange yesterday to show off the biggest high-definition plasma screen yet.
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At 103 inches, it's an inch bigger than versions being produced by Samsung and LG.

Panasonic vice president Andrew Nelkin says the new screen weighs 400 pounds. If you buy one, and have a wall big enough to fit it, you'll want professional installation.

He also says he wouldn't be surprised to see someone come up with an even bigger screen before long.

Putting the Cat Back in the Bag - New York Times:

Documents wind up missing from public archives for many reasons. Sometimes they're shelved or labeled incorrectly, or lost, and sometimes they're even stolen. But at the National Archives, documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950's, have vanished. This not only violates the mission of the National Archives; it is also antithetical to the natural flow of information in an open society.

Enemy of the Planet - New York Times:

The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.

But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics — a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil — roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.

I'm O.K., You're Biased - New York Times:

VERIZON had a pretty bad year in 2005, but its chief executive did fine. Although Verizon's earnings dropped by more than 5 percent and its stock fell by more than a quarter, he received a 48 percent increase in salary and compensation. This handsome payout was based on the recommendation of an independent consulting firm that relied on Verizon (and the chief executive's good will) for much of its revenue. When asked about this conflict of interest, the consulting firm explained that it had "strict policies in place to ensure the independence and objectivity of all our consultants."

Please stop laughing.

That last one is interesting, but has a couple of significant flaws in its conclusions.  The biggest one is that it cites studies of single-instance, anonymous altruism by psychologists and tries to use it to support an opinion that politicians and doctors aren't necessarilly as influenced by the donations that come their way.  This is a flawed connection because there is a significant difference between not doing something *once* regardless of the "no strings attached" bribe, and stopping the flow of regular income by suddenly deciding against the wishes of the people supplying the money.  You can accept a donation and vote against the request *once*, but once you become dependent on the money, you don't "bite the hand that feeds you" and none of the studies the author referenced addressed that more realistic situation.

Its second one is implying that maybe because people are more truthful than they are perceived to be, we should give Cheney the benefit of the doubt when he says he had nothing to do with Halliburton getting the benefits (well, handouts, really) its gotten from the current administration.  I'm sorry, but evidence about anonymous people and truth is nearly irrelevant when compared to that man's extensive and well documented history of lies, deceptions, and greed.  You don't assume an instance is part of a general trend when the evidence for the instance himself goes against the trend statistics.  You can only apply a general statistical trend on an instance when you *don't* know the instance's own history.

oh, and they found a really big killer (in more ways than one...and in more numbers than one) dinosaur...

Comments

Re: Hey, Joe, how'd you miss this one? :-)

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

'cause saying a current [creationist] Kansas School Board member is an idiot ain't news.

Any opinions on that 2003 Boykoff study? I hadn't heard of it specifically, until now, but looking back its been cited quite a bit.

Re: Hey, Joe, how'd you miss this one? :-)

[rsteachout.livejournal.com]

Hadn't heard of it either. After reading the article (and that's all the info I have about it), I'd say they have an interesting hypothesis, but they have some problems with their conclusions. Minor, but enough that I'd like to see more verification by other researchers. From the text of the article, it seems the study would have been improved by allowing review by professors of journalism who could have pointed out some thing.

For example, they refer to the use of "scare quotes" used around the term "globl warming" in an article dated 1992. However, by their own admission, debate on the issue was just beginning to be covered more widely about that time. Standard journalistic practice is to put new phrases and concepts in quote marks to call attention to them and to then follow up the term with background information or definitions. As the phrase or term becomes more well-known the quotation marks are used less often and eventually dropped entirely. They are not used like "air quotes" to infer that a term is less credible or only "so-called."

Another misstep is that they cite articles written in the early 90's for exhibiting the alleged balance-as-bias. However, the IPCC findings weren't preliminarily announced until 1990 and generally published until 1992. You then need to figure a couple of years for the information to become more commonly know. So from preliminary to final to debated and discussed and known, it takes about 5 years. During that time, it *is* objective journalism (not merely "balanced") to include alternate views, because that is what the debate is about during that time. So the articles up through 1995 are not flawed, except in hindsight. Fortunately for their study, they do have several examples from *after* the time the IPCC conclusions should have been know.

Finally, they do not explore any alternate possibilities for the reporting error they hypothesize. In my opinion, a stronger liklihood for the lack of objective weighting of the viewpoints is the near non-existance of reporters with expertise in reporting on scientific issues. Specialists cost money and the news producers don't want to spend it for something that they don't think is a big draw; so they assign the stories to some poor schmoe who does the best he or she can by doing a straight compare-and-contrast "balanced" article. The next time the issue comes up, it goes to a different reporter who -- again, having no science background -- does pretty much a repeat of the same story.

But the study does raise important questions and presents a possible reason for the problem. By refining the story pool (eliminating stories from pre-1996), then having multiple teams replicate the study with other random samplings, and comparing the results would provide some objectivity and balance (pardon the pun) to the study and give the findings more weight.