Category: Media
YouTube warns us against questioning consensus science
| August 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Climate change, Culture, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
Further to kairosfocus’s thoughts yesterday on the digital empire suppressing the free flow of ideas: Buzzfeed reported August 7 that “YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation.” As of July 9, “YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change … as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant […]
Darwinian conniptions over domestic violence
| August 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Media |
New Scientist, where it is known that all things come of evolution and we make nothing ourselves, does not know whether we “evolved” domestic violence: Why is domestic violence so horrifyingly common around the world? According to a study out today, men who are violent towards their partners have more children in societies without birth […]
Climate change: Significantly limiting the right to be considered a “skeptic”
| August 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Climate change, Culture, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
As opposed to a denier: I propose a basic test to determine who has earned the benefit of the doubt on whether to be labelled a denier or not. Does the person have an academic or professional background in atmospheric science or climatology? If the answer is yes, then they earn the benefit of the […]
Why evolution is more certain than gravity
| August 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Media, science education |
From Sarah Chaffee and Granville Sewell at The Spectator: Whether the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism fully explains the origins of biological novelties is a question that scientists themselves increasingly contest. Yet for the media, evolution is the holy Kaaba of science. Resistance verging on hysteria greets attempts to allow teachers to introduce mainstream controversies found in […]
At the New York Times: Defending the failures of social science as “science”
| August 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Peer review, Psychology, Science |
Even while prominent people in that field are coming to terms with the problem. From a New York Times science writer: It is one thing to frisk the studies appearing almost daily in journals that form the current back-and-forth of behavior research. It is somewhat different to call out experiments that became classics — and […]
“Neil deGrasse Tyson” debuts at the Babylon Bee in an op-ed
| July 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Media, Naturalism, science education |
From Tyson at the Bee: There are a lot of things we can learn from science. Did you know that the earth is round? It is round, and it is not flat. A lot of religions think the world is flat, but they are wrong. It is round. I know this because I am a […]
Science writer: New York Times is cool with pseudoscience
| June 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From Alex Berezow at American Council for Science and Health: Scientists have a common saying about models: “Garbage in, garbage out.” That means if you put bad data into a model, you can fully expect for the model to spit out bad conclusions. The same is true for organizations. If a newspaper hires improperly educated, […]
Older vintages: From New Scientist (1996) on the dubious idea of something from nothing
| June 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From David Darling at New Scientist: But, as far as I am concerned, the fact that the Universe was an incredibly weird place 10-43 seconds after “time zero” is no big deal. What is a big deal—the biggest deal of all—is how you get something out of nothing. Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you […]
Feuding Wikipedia editors headed to their private top court
| May 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Information, Intelligent Design, Media |
From msmash at Slashdot: Wikipedia, the vast online crowdsourced encyclopedia, has a high court. It is a panel called the Arbitration Committee, largely unknown to anyone other than Wiki aficionados, which hears disputes that arise after all other means of conflict resolution have failed. The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee — […]
Why do science journalists promote “fake physics” to the public?
| May 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Multiverse |
Asks Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: University press offices and grant agencies put out irresponsible hype about the work of one their faculty or grantees. In this case, it’s Taming the multiverse: Stephen Hawking’s final theory about the big bang from Cambridge, and Stephen Hawking’s last paper, co-authored with ERC grantee Thomas […]
What a grand convergence of social media means to what we can know about design in nature
| April 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Media, Science |
From Mark Steyn: Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation – and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they’re increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela […]
At least the Soviets knew enough not to believe Pravda
| March 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Intelligent Design, Media, Off Topic |
Here’s my (O’Leary for News) review of James O’Keefe’s American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News (off-topic, unless you intend to rely on them in any way for communications): — Has North American journalism gone undercover? If traditional media were doing their job, few people would have heard of James […]
Breaking: Prominent science journal offers rational assessment of an unhinged climate claim
| February 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Climate change, Culture, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
Specifically, the claim that global warming promotes violence. From the editors of Nature: Such retrospective analyses raise two questions related to cause and effect: did climate change alter the weather? And did the change in the weather provoke the conflict? Only a solid yes to both can justify bold statements that global warming promotes violence […]
Google has the solution to Wikipedia! Only one tweak is now needed.
| February 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Naturalism |
From Katyanna Quach at UK Register: A team within Google Brain – the web giant’s crack machine-learning research lab – has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages… to varying degrees of success. Glitches remain: We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And […]
Salon “depublishes” article that attacks the Bible
| February 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Religion |
Eh? We’re as surprised as Heman Mehta at Friendly Atheist: She talked about how having multiple authors (because “God” didn’t write it) led to “two different creation myths, three sets of Ten Commandments, and four contradictory versions of the Easter story.” She explained the possible forgeries, the mixing of literary genres, the possible mistranslations, and […]
From American Council for Science and Health: Journalists’ war on science
| February 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From Alex Berezow at ACSH, who treats the journalism war as one of three fronts: Of the three, this one may be the most insidious, since the war is conducted in high-profile media outlets by practitioners who don’t understand science or hide behind a false pretense of “transparency” and “balance.” Indeed, the journalistic war on science […]
Further to Wikipedia as “censor”: Wikipedia is merely responding to the implicit wishes of the people it misrepresents
| February 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Naturalism |
Because those people agree to use it at all. Referencing Tyler O’Neil’s article above, At ENST, David Klinghoffer writes, All the same, Klinghoffer did not say Wikipedia was worthless. “You can rely on Wikipedia for things that nobody cares about. If you want to know the population of Peoria, you can absolutely trust Wikipedia, but […]
Is Wikipedia actually a “censor”? Maybe something more ominous… Updated!
| February 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Naturalism |
From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Each February 12, the scientific community celebrates the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday as both Darwin Day and Academic Freedom Day. The Discovery Institute also celebrates by naming a “Censor of the Year,” and on Monday they announced that “award” goes to none other than “the free encyclopedia,” Wikipedia. […]
Genetic novelty conference: “Errors cannot explain genetic novelty and complexity.”
| February 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From Guenther Witzany, Telos-Philosophische Praxis, Salzburg-Austria, Corrado Spadafora, CNR National Research Council of Italy, and Luis Villarreal, University of California here: Evolution – Genetic Novelty/Genomic Variations by RNA Networks and Viruses, 4 – 8 July 2018 Salzburg – Austria For more than half a century it has been accepted that new genetic information is mostly derived from […]
New Scientist also embraces the love drug
| February 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Medicine, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
Further to “New Scientist embraces politics,” we also learn, from Alice Klein at New Scientist, The love drug that could draw people away from any addiction: The “cuddle chemical” oxytocin boosts social bonds. Soon a version of it will be tested in pill form to see if it can reset the brain wiring that gets […]
