Date sort
Good Night and Good Well-Defined Statistical Distribution of States
Posted: 19 Sep 2014
That's it. Today was my final day as a BSA Media Fellow at the Financial Times.
It passed quickly and relatively smoothly but took every joule of energy that I had to give.
I'm glad its done and I'd do it over again in a heart beat.
What should I write about? Should I write about how my last day happened to be the morning after the Scottish referendum? Or about trying to help the UK News desk but probably just getting in the way? Maybe about finding a hidden little gem of a paper buried deep in the embargoes that I doubt the other big news papers will cover?
A Job by Any Other Name
Posted: 17 Sep 2014
Yesterday, I had the wonderful chance to accompany Clive Cookson on an interview of Dame Ann Dowling, who had only been elected President of the Royal Academy of Engineers the night before.
Dowling is a mechanical engineer, whose career has been spent studying acoustics of combustion and flight. She still has a month as head of Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge.
Some Secrets Are Just Too Good to Keep
Posted: 16 Sep 2014
One day while at the British Science Festival, I didn't have a clear story from the press briefings, so I spent the day attending the public talks searching for something to cover. I did eventually find an exciting story but I didn't write about it.
I'm going to be annoyingly oblique in this blog post and I'm sorry about that but you'll see the reasons become clear in a moment.
I went to a presentation that I thought was pretty interesting but by the end of it I was unclear whether or not the material was novel and newsworthy.
A week at the BSF
Posted: 16 Sep 2014
The reason why I didn't post last week was because I was covering the British Science Festival for the Financial Times.
It was great. I did all the normal things that I'm used to at a festival, like attend talks and go out in the evening (we BSA Media Fellows won second place at the BSF pub trivial night --- that's right second place).
PUNder the Many Differences
Posted: 07 Sep 2014
A few days ago my first news article was published. Although certainly tied to science it is most certainly a news story and not a science story.
Ahead of a pair of papers being published in scientific journals, the UK authors called a press conference to vocalize their criticism of the WHO's recommendations for countries to enact stronger regulations on e-cigarettes.
Frazzle-dazzle
Posted: 07 Sep 2014
Off to Birmingham for the British Science Festival. This is a totally novel and even foreign experience for me. I don't know that there were science festivals in Canada while I was growing up. If there were, I certainly don't remember attending any. The British seem to be great at this sort of thing.
While I am excited, I am also a bit frazzled. I'm not sure what to expect, I don't feel organized and, as a cherry on top, I'm sick.
I'm sure that I'm sick because I've been going non-stop since I started my placement at the FT.
This Just In: Cake!
Posted: 04 Sep 2014
I spent a portion of the day working on a press release. It's an interesting one with a scientific contribution and immediate international consequences. That's great. Except...
The press release relies on a submitted manuscript that is referenced as a footnote. In preparing to interview the scientist, I requested the manuscript so that I could do a intelligent interview. But the researchers don't want to give it to me because it's not peer-reviewed yet. Does anyone else notice an inconsistency here?
You can't have your cake and eat it too, name-of-scientists-redacted-here!
Rotten Apples
Posted: 03 Sep 2014
Are you a scientist who thinks the media doesn't do your field of research justice?
Do you study differences in the brain related to gender?
If you answered “yes” to the first question but “no” to the second, you have no idea. I can't say anything specific because it involves another embargo but this morning I watched a neurologist present an argument against biologically intrinsic differences between genders.
Down the Rabbit's Hole
Posted: 02 Sep 2014
Today was a day of prescribed distractions.
I started the day working on an article about domestication. While doing research for it, I got entirely fascinated by the process of domestication. I learned that dogs were domesticated from a now extinct population of Eurasian wolves tens of thousands of years ago. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domesticated_animals]The majority of domestic animals were tamed in the mists of prehistory.
