It was news to these eyes to read this morning that a favorite citation among climate contrarians on the web is a paper published several years ago finding signs of collusion – hence skewing of conclusions – in the global warming literature – the famed hockey stick to be specific. But that’s what USA Today‘s Dan Vergano tells us, while telling us that the small journal Computational Statistic and Data Analysis has now retracted it. Not that this will truncate its use among doubters – might in fact inflame suspicion that the whole global warming thing is a crock, and its backers are themselves in collusion. The retraction follows evidence that substantial portions were lifted from other publications without attribution, assertions that now appear to have been deemed persuasive by the journals’ reviewers. The authors defense, it says here, is that if passages got lifted, they didn’t do it themselves and they thought somebody on their team wrote them.

USA Today gave this a good ride today:

• Dan Vergano : Climate study gets pulled after charges of plagiarism ; Just the facts of it.
• Dan Vergano / ScienceFair blog: Retracted climate critics’ study panned by expert ; A compilation of analysis of the study by a person familiar with the authors and their technique of analysis. This also includes telling examples of emails exchanged during the time that the paper got unusually fast approval at the journal in the first place.

It’s hard to independently judge the merits of the accusation of an ethical lapse. But in any case the on line ScienceFair analysis is a suberb example of the added value print reporters can provide via blog-style remarks that enrich an initial news story.

This retraction is the second shoe to drop on the case. When bells began to ring among researchers over what looked like plagiarism, Vergano reported that, too, in November last year.

*UPDATES – Several other outlets promptly followed with their own accounts.

• Ars Technica – John Timmer: Climatology-Defying Paper Yanked for Plagiarism; A piece with irony, narrative, and insight – or at least, having none myself hence not being sure, what reads convincingly like insight. Also, further tribute here to Vergano’s lead in following the story in press.
• Live Science – Benjamin Radford: Allegedly Plagiarized Climate Study Won’t Stifle Debate: Dunno why the hed says ‘allegedly.’ Its point is that even if all the accusations of ethical and other lapses hold up, the now-retracted paper’s traction among contrarians and the their Inhofes and Bartons and other-such allies in congress won’t fade much. Radford is deputy ed. of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, a pub. with deep familiarity with collective, recursive belief. That is, in many crowds convinced of a conspiracy, arguments marshalled against its reality merely demonstrate how deep the conspiracy’s roots go (Sometimes, one must know, that is the case. But usually not. It’s like the Galileo argument – he was persecuted, he was right. I’m persecuted, ipso factoidum idioticus, I must be right too.)
• Mother Jones – Kate Sheppard: Another Chink in Climate Skeptics’ Armor ; Sheppard, as has Vergano, has been following this news and links to her previous, damning posting on it. She tips her hat to USA Today’s Vergano too.

- Charlie Petit

Robert Krulwich is brilliant. I am sure he gets told that all the time. If you don’t know who he is, he’s an ingenious and witty explainer of scientific principles, is a limpidly talented story teller, and is currently in the employ of NPR. There he is a lynchpin of the Radio Lab program. His blog, Krulwich Wonders, is one small platform for his knack of employing easy words for hard concepts. Ive never worked with him or even met him that I recall, but his love for and loyalty to journalism, including science journalism, is without bound.

Ed Yong, freelancer and freebie-par-excellence via that Not Exactly Rocket Science blog he writes for no pay (aside from ad money of course), and also perhaps the record-holder of science tweetie meisters, features Krulwich in a recent, very long post. It is long because Yong includes the entire 5000 word plus commencement address that Krulwich delivered to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism a short time ago.

It’s a fine talk. Inspiring and utterly engaging. Much of it has to do with Krulwich’s youthful worship of the icons of radio, starting with Murrow and moving on to Kuralt. The theme is that the old days of paternalistic media barons and reliable healthy paychecks are about gone, the new days in journalism are tough but they also are fecund with excitement and possibility. It gets around – well after its midpoint – to science writing and the vital and somewhat distinctive communal, collegial atmosphere it has and that is rather unusual in journalism. It turns out that this passage was inspired largely by Yong and his cohort-mates in science journalism at this year’s Science Online meeting in N. Carolina, many of them scratching their ways to make a living in a slippery trade. Ergo, Yong is a paradigm. A digm here and a digm there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

I encourage anybody who wants to know more about the essential spirit of journalism and its future, including the science beat, to read it.

*UPDATE:  By the way, for Krulwich fans, here’s a recent blog piece of his on lyrebirds, a dance-obsessed Australian species that, with its talent for mimicry in song, sometimes sings a tribute to the agents of its own destruction. It’s imitation of a chainsaw is a stunner.

- Charlie Petit

A number of outlets ran with the main news from an unsurprising, but remarkable anyway, report on how to teach college physics. In Science on Friday a physics Nobelist, Carl Wieman best known for his role in confining Bose-Einstein condensates in the laboratory, reported that people like him giving lecture is an okay way to teach college students. A better way, his study concludes, is to let teaching assistants ride herd and interact with  students as they wrestle and collaborate over focussed challenges that compel them to embrace new information. In a one-week competition between traditional teaching and collaborative, interactive supervised learning without a professor in sight, students in the latter group crushed those in the former when they all took a standard quiz.

(By the way, Wieman is not only merely a Nobel-Prize winning physicist working for the White House who is not named Chu, interesting as that is. Now on leave from U. of Colorado and U. of British Columbia , he has a distinctive, fascinating early background. Check his Nobel Foundation autobiography and its passages on the backwoods of Oregon.)

While this topic is, strictly, one that might fit the education beat, many of the bylines with the stories are those of science reporters.

Stories (mostly filed Thur May 12):

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Study: It’s not teacher, but method that matters ; His first outside source notes this study is not the first to have this general message – but coming from a Nobelist, and in the nation’s leading scientific journal – its splash may be biggest.
• PostMedia News via Montreal Gazette – Margaret Munro: New teaching techniques earn top marks for boosting scores ;
• NYTimes – Benedict Carey: Improving the Science of Teaching Science ; Good for Carey – he finds an educational psychologist and another authority who see holes in this study’s set-up that take the edge of its lessons.
• ScienceNow – Jeffrey Mervis: A Better Way to Teach? ;
• Canadian Press – Anne-Marie Tobin: Involve students in big university classes instead of lecturing Nobel laureate ; Tobin finds another professor in Canada who finds a reason to discount – but not dismiss entirely – the results. That is, the novelty of the new method of teaching may have been a small thrill, hence more engaging, an effect that would fade if it were the norm.
• Voice of America – Rosanne Skirble: College Lecture Classes Need Overhaul ;

Grist for the Mill:

Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, UBC ; UBC Press Release ; U. Colorado Press Release ;

The gist of his teaching results are not new. Old fashioned problem sets seldom seem like fun puzzles for teams to solve. But done right, that’s how learning can occur – make them more like real life job assignments. What will be new is when the education establishment, not to mention students, embraces the idea that formal, pedagogic teaching is not as effective as letting students, with guidance of course, and maybe broken into little interacting teams, try to solve multi-faceted problems. The process is messy – in fact the environment is a little bit like a bunch of kids messing around trying to adapt a lawnmower engine to propel a race car. But I bet there are lots of electrical and mechanical engineers who could say they didn’t quite get the interactions of motors and actuators and rheostats and transformers and such stuff until they joined a team in college building a solar powered car for a competition, or something like that.

I was on a NSF-sponsored review group a dozen years ago that assessed progress of a chemistry curriculum reform, called the ModularChem Consortium.  The preliminary results were that those who spent time in small teams trying to understand acid rain or design better computer chips knew more about chemistry at the end of the year than those listening in lecture halls, plodding through textbooks, and running prescribed experiments at the lab bench. But it was not an easy sell. Many and especially the best students under the old system still said they preferred a regular class – because that  seemed like school, not like just messing around. Plus, one imagines, they got into good colleges by excelling at formal and rote learning, so they intuitively stuck with what they knew got them the best grades. I waited to see team-learning reforms sweep college chemistry classrooms. If it is happening, let me know.

The main lesson of the paper published Friday got handled well by many outlets. Several reporters to their credit took the time to round up a few  reactions with a skeptical side.

One additional angle that went unexploited concerns how teaching of this kind would go over at public universities and colleges, and with the taxpayers and lawmakers who help fund such schools. Professors have reasonably handsome incomes compared to the average Joe. But at least they have to teach – a chore anybody can understand. Doing research sounds to many ears like getting paid for a hobby. If it turns out that smart if grubby grad students can shepherd students toward knowledge just as well as those fancy tenured ladies and gentlemen, what happens next? The teaching assistants get big raises and get to eat lunch first at the faculty club with its linen napkins? The professors have to form unions to get a living wage? They’d have to live entirely on grants and other soft money, while the junior members of their research groups get to be the ones that future Nobelists remember as the inspirations of their undergrad years? This could mean a pecking-order revolution in the academy of learning!

OK, that’s mostly silly – to be tediously more serious, professors presumably would ramrod the overall system and take part in the interactive rigamarole, and one would still need the old guard to run the lab groups where the TAs spend most of their time gaining the chops to do big time science. Nonetheless, the caste systems at universities might evolve dramatically.

- Charlie Petit

(Missed this earlier today, here’s a late day tracker getaway special for the weekend)

What!? An ice free north pole within two years?!! That outlier projection is just one of the amazements in a BBC report today by Meirion Jones and Susan Watts as ministers from Arctic nations gather to discuss climate, sovereignty, trade, and shipping routes as Arctic ocean sea ice volume, and extent, continues to plummet.

Jones and Watts base much of the story on US embassy cables, released as part of Wikileaks’s roll out of a trove it obtained last year. But they also phoned around and learned a great deal more about what the serious money, both governmental and resource industry-related, jockeying for play and leverage in the expected transformation of what so recently was a forbidding sea of thick ice and lost expeditions, and where the ravenous appetites belonged more to polar bears than to captains of industry.

Aside from the continuing melancholic signs of a world sliding inexorably into conditions unseen on Earth for hundreds of millennia, one wonders if we’re seeing a wedge penetrating conservative, Chamber of Commerce, American Enterprise Institute, Fox New etc. reflexive doubt about the reality of global warming. It is one thing to reject the fact of it because of gut disgust for international actions, against climate change or anything, that might crimp free market and private property freedoms not to mention American exceptionalism and sovereignty. It’s quite another for the same class of people to see business opportunities that foreign corporations might get, and military advantages that foreign navies might seize,  and sovereignties to be surrendered, if the US does not move fast up northward from Barrow, Alaska. But to act, one implicitly concedes the Arctic is warming and losing ice at an accelerating rate. Reality bites. Somebody call around. Professors of all things Arctic are surely standing by. There is reporting to be done.

Hmmm. I can’t think of any, but I wonder if ocean acidification will somehow open new markets for hedge fund managers to leverage? That’d be another compulsive change of tune for the moneyed, unscientific classes.

Other Wikileaks & Arctic Stories:

• Independent (UK) Shaun Walker: Revealed: the secret battle for the riches of the Arctic ;
• Globe and Mail (Canada) Colin Freeze : Harper’s hard line on Arctic softens among U.S.envoys: leaked cables ;
• PostMedia News via Vancouver Sun – Randy Boswell: U.S. agreed to hold off on Arctic sovereignty claim during 2008 election ;

Other Arctic Council meeting stories:

• Stars and Stripes – John Vandiver:Arctic pact may herald cooperation in region ;
• Speaking of that wedge thing I supposed above…The Washington Times – Gen. Joe Ralston: From sea to shining sea to Arctic Ocean / Sovereignty issues and energy opportunities can no longer be ignored.
• Washington Post – Joby Warrick: As Clinton works against global warming in Greenland, some there don’t mind it ;

Grist for the Mill: Arctic Council Press Info ;

- Charlie Petit

It was so long ago … no, it was only Tuesday … that we posted briefly on a NYTimes story by Nicholas Wade reporting evidence in PNAS that while modern humans and Neanderthals probably met and even interbred a little bit, these cousins of ours were exterminated or out-competed or otherwise eliminated in a short time. Wades’s story was not the only one, by the way, with others at LiveScience by Charles Q. Choi, at  Nature.com by Ewen Callaway , at Discovery News by Jennifer Viegas, in Time Magazine by Eben Harrell, and probably other places.

Maybe. Or maybe a report out in Science today, asserting that co-existence persisted for a long time and all the way up to 33,000 years ago, perhaps 10,000 or even more years after the two species first met one another somewhere in the Middle East or Eastern Europe.

Maybe both are right? Where they met, H. sapiens quickly cleared the deck, while up in Siberia that meeting was delayed. Sort of like wooly mammoths left the stage most places around 11,000 years ago, but on Wrangel Island off Siberia they lasted until about the time Egyptians were building pyramids.

The news is from researchers in Russia, France, and other European nations, who found in the Ural Mountains near the Arctic Circle stone implements dated 31,000 to 34,000 years ago that look to be of classic Neanderthal manufacture. That’s fairly persuasive, but with no hominid fossils among the remains of mammoths, wooly rhinos,  and such, or other info on the tools’ makers, the evidence for Neanderthals must remain cirumstantial for now. The report notes that a few other sites, such as in southern Spain, also hint of such late Neanderthal occupation – and reinforce speculation that the last of their kind were mostly in places at the far end of modern human migration and occupation.

Stories:

• AP – Malcolm Ritter :Russian site may show late Neanderthal Refuge ;
• AFP- Neanderthal survived longer than thought: study ;
• USA Today ScienceFair blog – Elizabeth Weise:Did the Neanderthals linger in Russia? ; Good for Weise – she explicitly references the PNAS paper earlier this week with its very different conclusions. But even here we find none of the authors of either paper quoted on the other.
• NatureNews blog – Ewen Calloway: An Arctic refuge for Neanderthals? ; Calloway naturally refers to the earlier paper – he wrote them both up.
• DiscoveryNews – Jennifer Viegas: Neanderthals’ Last Stand Possibly Found; She covered both bits of news, too, and wraps them together well. One of her sources, a stalwart in paleanthropology news, explains how both papers may be correct, even if the broad themes seem to contradict.

Grist for the Mill: CNRS (French national research agency) Press Release;

- Charlie Petit

What gorilla??

The news business is about what’s new. If a prestigious body says something new and very important, it’s big news the first time. The second or third or fourth it’s gets attention but fades from the front page. It gets what old-timers at a newspaper I once worked for called DBI status. Dull but important. So one dutifully may  cover it. Or not.

Mostly not, as seen by the coverage of the US National Academy of Sciences – via its National Research Council – issuance yesterday of a  report called America’s Climate Choices. Bad enough that much of its contents has been previewed as much as a year ago, with four volumes already published. All this new one says is that that if we don’t do something fast the world as we know it will probably end and the next one won’t be fun. Well, not in so many words, but blah blah blah. One might as well write a report about overpopulation, or the soul-destroying impacts of extreme poverty, or the scientific emptiness of astrology, homeopathy, or a search for Big Foot. True, but not new.

It did get some coverage. For once, false balance is smart. The New York Times‘s Leslie Kaufman reported on this “stark warning to the American public” and after summarizing its highlights, promptly called up that keen intellect, Republican Representative Joe Barton of Texas. He  yawned. Nothing new. No need to do anything to his do-nothing policy stance.

Other stories:

• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathiou Jr: Research Panel Says Climate change Doubts Slow Urgent Action; This one seeks to get an actionable angle from the report – its declaration (no news here either) that many Americans continue to think there is substantial debate among expert whether climate change is real, is serious, and is our fault.
• Charleston Gazette – Ken Ward Jr. : Report finds ‘pressing nedd’ for climate action ; W. Wa. leaders opposed ;
• E&E ClimateWire via Sci. American – Lauren Morello: US Action to Combat Climate Change Remains Urgent / Yet another science report warns that action must be taken to restrain greenhouse gas emissions ;
• …. there are no other stories from major or even regional mainstream media that  jump immediately to attention.

One is driven at this point to refer Tracker readers to the last item on the next post down, the one that starts off YO!!.

Grist for the Mill:

- Charlie Petit

Some may debate the continuing relevance of NASA climate scientist James Hansen in US policy circles. He is among the most strident advocates of a carbon tax, of a forced shutdown and fast of coal-fired electricity, and other muscular top-down measures nobody thinks can be sold to the public -  not exactly a metric for essential merit but that’s politics for you. Jim Hansen thinks cap & trade is a road to corruption and failure. To read some accounts (see this one from Energy & Environment Daily two years ago by Christa Marshall) he has in recent years by some opinion become a shrill crank of fading relevance. One (meaning I) thinks he’ll go down in history as a prophet. Time will tell on that, including whether he gets much heed.

But he is a man with a following and ability, some places, to get media attention.

He’s currently in New Zealand, hosted by some local institutions . There he is telling that civil, pragmatic,  and generally careful nation that its self-image as a green place is near delusional. Well, hmmppphh, of course it’s green, top to bottom except South Island’s glaciers and the sheep in the endless pasture. I mean just look at the place. But Hansen is talking about seriousness in reducing carbon, mainly by eschewing coal.

• The Dominion Post – Kiran Chug:Use of coal ‘bad for NZ’s image’ ; Hansen upbraids his hosts, mentions “greenwashing.”
• NZ Herald – Isaac Davison: Scientist: Leave coal in the ground ;
• TV New Zealand: Time is running out – climate change scientist ;

Grist for the Hansen-in-NZ Mill: Univ. Canterbury Press Release;

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good (best is to be both). Hansen broke into public prominence in 1988 by telling Congress that global warming’s signature is rising from the data noise … and he did it in the middle of a terrific US heat wave. Apples and oranges, but it did accentuate his testimony. Well, there he is in New Zealand preaching climate catastrophe. Whatayaknow – a heat wave! And just before winter hits the Southern Hemisphere, too. (the clip also notes that parts of Australia are getting a cold snap, courtesy of the see-saw meteorologists call ENSO, or El Nino Southern Oscillation):

• TV NZ: Warm May Weather Breaking Records ;

Speaking Further of Down Under,  Australia Division Part I: I am among many who just got an email from Bud Ward, editor of The Yale Climate Media Forum, asking for money to help bring to the American Geophysical Union meeting in SF in December an influential New Zealand climate science blogger, John Cook. The appeal is aimed at climate scientists – it’s not such a hot idea for journalists to send money to bring somebody to a US meeting, to shake things up a bit, and thus sculpt the news before it happens. But I am unsure of the ethics. Reporters do organize meetings once in awhile and invite speakers who then make news. So I do not condemn such a thing. If you’re eager to help the cause you can dig up Bud’s email etc. at Yale in a twinkling and pledge the suggested $100.

It’s a reason however to bring attention to Cook’s blog , a service to the public and to reporters alike. For more on him, read Andy Revkin‘s NYTimes-Opinion interview with him last year. Here’s the latest posting there, by a guest who I gather is a California-based former physicist. It is a takedown of one prominently skeptical MIT scientist’s set of arguments why global warming won’t amount to much:

• SkepticalScience – dana1981: Lindzen Illusion #7:  The Anti-Galileo ; This post, natch, includes a link to the site’s home page for more like that.

YO!! Speaking Further of Down Under, Australia Division Part II – Aussie climate scientists – many of them post-docs to judge by their id’s -  hold their hands funny as per the genre’s demands, they hip and they hop and they RAP THEIR BRAINS OUT to twit the skeptics, contrarians, denialists, and various emissaries of the coal industry.

• Guardian (UK) Damian Carrington’s Environment Blog: Rap attack on climate change sceptics hits home; It links to the bloggin’ Oz crew, or if you can’t wait YouTube straight to it.

- Charlie Petit

Scanning through today’s messages on the listserv of the Association of Health Care Journalists, I found an email that demanded that I drop everything and race to the Tracker dashboard to post it.

In response to a query from Tina Tsomaia, an AHCJ member in Tbilisi, Georgia, Maia Szalavitz, also an AHCJ member, erupted with a set of bullet points on covering addiction that include some of the best and most concise reporting tips I’ve seen anywhere.

Maia Szalavitz

Some of Szalavitz’s advice is limited to covering addiction, but much of it relates to medical reporting generally. If she’d posted this, I would have linked to it. But because it was an email, I asked her whether I could publish her advice here. As an indication of Szalavitz’s enthusiasm for the topic, when you ask her for 10 tips on how to cover drug addiction, she gives them to you in pentadecimal notation. (That amounts to 15 tips for those of us hopelessly stuck on the decimal system.) Her bio at Time, where she is a regular contributor, says she is “a neuroscience journalist obsessed with addiction, love, evidence-based living, empathy, fertility and pretty much everything related to brain and behavior.” Obsessed she is (she’s a friend of mine, so I can kindly vouch for that), and for that obsession we should all be grateful.

Here, then, are Szalavitz’s tips, slightly revised and expanded from what she posted on the AHCJ list (and very lightly edited by me):

1) Maintenance—whether with methadone, buprenorphine (Suboxone, Subutex) or even heroin itself according to several studies now—is actually the most effective treatment for opioid addiction (if we’re talking about keeping people alive and cutting disease), regardless of what you hear in the media. See Institute of Medicine and World Health Organization.

2) Don’t ever write about a treatment center’s “new” approach without Googling: chances are, it’s already been tried and failed or had the same results as other treatments. Googling can also discover if the program operator has had regulatory problems in previous states.

3) Widely used “tough love” approaches are not effective and are actually counterproductive. This includes confrontational “interventions,” like the ones on TV; boot camps; and any kind of humiliating or “attack” therapy. Not a single study has ever found a confrontational approach to be superior to an empathetic, supportive one.  Consider this when you consider the need for coercion to get people into care: avoiding treatment may not be due to “denial,” or having fun high. It may be because of fear of these widely used and traumatizing tactics.

4) Don’t ever write about a new treatment for addiction—especially one that is harsh or invasive—without consulting academic experts and ethicists. For example, brain surgery was touted as a treatment in Russia and China and picked up by U.S. media. There was no reason to believe what they proposed would help anyone (taking out your pleasure center!), and it carries great risks of disability and death. The one study done found it was inferior to accepted treatments.

5) Don’t ever take seriously claims of success rates that are not from peer reviewed published research–and never make the false equivalence of contrasting a program director’s self interested and unsupported claim with findings from peer reviewed literature.  A common ruse is to claim an “80%” success rate—that’s typically 80% of the 15% who actually completed the 18 month program. (And btw, that’s about the same abstinence rate as untreated addicts).

6) 12 step programs are not superior to other approaches and are absolutely not the only way to recover.  Project Match is the biggest study done on this and AA was equivalent to cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy in one arm and slightly superior on one outcome only for those with lower psychiatric problems in the other.  Just because 90% of American treatment providers use it does not mean it’s right for everyone and many addicts lose hope when told that it’s the only way.  It helps some:  that doesn’t mean everyone should be forced into it.  Research shows providing options for addicts to choose from increases success of all options.

7) Having recovered from addiction doesn’t make you an expert on addiction.  You’re an expert on your own experience, which counts, but unless you’ve studied the research, you’re not an expert on addiction.

8 ) Police are not good sources of information about drug effects or pharmacology or addiction.  Nor, typically, are drug counselors, who are often not even required to have a high school education. Universities and NIDA have experts who actually know the literature: use them!

9) Don’t ever say that a drug is instantly addictive or that it addicts everyone who tries it. The most addictive drug is actually nicotine, and that captures only around 30% of those who try it.  Crack, heroin, and methamphetamine addict around 10-15%; marijuana about 5-6%.

10) Addiction is compulsive use of a substance despite negative consequences: it is not physically needing a drug to function, despite the fact that the DSM calls the condition substance dependence. (This should change in DSM V.)

You can be physically dependent on nonaddictive drugs—blood pressure meds, antidepressants—which are not addictive. You can be addicted to drugs that don’t cause physical dependence:  crack and methamphetamine, for example.

This is critical for pain patients who may be physically dependent on opioids but are not addicts: the drugs improve their lives and they aren’t taken compulsively.  The same is true for addicts on maintenance:  a steady, regular dose does not produce mental, physical or emotional impairment and relieves craving.

11) That “new worst drug ever” probably isn’t new or worse.  Learn the (extremely racist) history of drug laws and the cyclic nature of drug scares.  Media hype over infinitely increasing addiction never pans out.

12) Always, always, always think critically:  if editors had done this, a Pulitzer would never have been given to a woman who claimed that an 8 year old addict was being supplied by his junkie parents.  Why would they waste their drugs? What 8-year-old likes shots? Another myth that should never have been promoted by media:  “addicts like to share needles.”  So why don’t they do peace, love and sharing with drugs?

13) If you are covering the “prescription drug epidemic,” never write a story that does not include the perspective of a pain patient or pain patient advocate.  Virtually all coverage of this issue focuses exclusively on the risks to people from exposure to drugs—not the risks to patients from losing access or from requirements like weekly doctor visits that can be prohibitively expensive to patients and the system and can interfere with the ability to hold a job.  Consider what it would be like to be in agony and dismissed as a drug addict and whether we want our doctors’ first impulse to be to disbelieve claims of pain.

14) Drug diversion is not always bad—if a safer drug like buprenorphine is being sold on the street rather than heroin, it’s not a full win but it will reduce risk of overdose death.

15) The relationship between drugs and crime is complicated: contrary to popular belief, most people who steal to get drugs stole before they got hooked, most prostitutes who support their habit that way were prostitutes before they became addicts and were sexually abused before that.  Most violent drug addicts were violent before they got hooked and were abuse victims before that.  Drugs exacerbate but do not create most of the problems with which they are associated—at least 50% of all addicts have an underlying psychiatric problem and unemployment doubles the risk of addiction.

********

I don’t know about you, but I’ll be keeping these in mind. I’m sure I will never write about addiction again without thinking of Szalavitz looking over my shoulder. It’s helpful to have an editor like that.

- Paul Raeburn

7-foot Li-ion battery pack. Add motor, wheels, etc...drive off

For a time there, lithium was a pill that people with serious difficulty with thinking, such as trouble with hallucinations and phantom voices, got prescribed to them to calm the storms. Now this lightweight metal, one of the most abundant elements in the universe but not all that easy to find, has a more cheering persona. It is the key to lightweight and reasonably energy-dense, cheapish batteries. Our laptops and cell phones depend on them. They are not THAT cheap – the bill for electric cars is to a large degree high because of the wad of lithium ion batteries. I ought to know. We plan to get the Petits an electric car next year. We’re arranging a 240v line in the garage for it. (A hat tip to Tom McIntyre for urging me to listen to the item described next).

At NPR‘s Morning Edition on Monday reporter Steve Inskeep and his listeners learned a lot about lithium and lithium batteries. He interviewed Seth Fletcher, senior editor at Popular Science, who has a new book out on just that topic. There is good detail here, and some reassurance that the market for lithium ought not go the way that for rare earths has. The audio is more entertaining and satisfying, but the text has the fundamental info.

One suspects that Fletcher has an overly bullish view of lithium battery prospects. They still can’t hold a candle to the energy density, as I recall, of a tank of gasoline. One hopes the book says something about supercapacitors, which some say have a big future. But I do know I’m going to be buying a huge slab of lithium batteries pretty soon with a motor, four wheels, and a passenger cab bolted on.

Grist for the Mill: Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy.

- Charlie Petit

Allen Array, With view of Mount Shasta

In late April while I was in Cambridge MA helping select this year’s Knight Sci Journalism Fellows (congrats to winners, commiseration with the many, worthy others), the SETI Institute in California and the University of California-Berkeley’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory reported they’d run out of money to keep the celebrated Allen Telescope Array operating and eavesdropping on the cosmos, looking for smart aliens. (photo source).

This project has gotten floods of ink in the science and general press for years. I’ve written at least two major yarns on it. Its innovative instruments, like oversized versions of old-fashioned satellite TV dishes electronically lashed into a team, have been searching for the kind of complex, tightly-tuned signals that an alien civilization might send into the void. Startup money for it came mainly in a one-time gift from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (also prominent as one-time owner of the Seattle Seahawks, and a backer of Virgin Galactic’s imminent sub-orbital spaceship tour rides above the atmosphere and back). Another of Microsoft’s founding fathers, Nathan Myhrvold – in the press a lot as a super high-tech chef – paid about a million dollars to equip the data processing facility at the array of 42 dishes.

Below is a collection of stories that ran immediately after the announcement and continue to trickle in.

Collectively, they are good on lament. Given reasons for the mothballing operation are sound enough – the U. California budget forces all kinds of shutdowns, NSF  and other government money is shriveling, it’s not easy raising the $2.5 million from private donors needed each year to keep it going. One is sympathetic. One is also frustrated – there is a more satisfying, penetrating story here, surely. What went wrong, aside from a recession? How hard did the SETI Institute work to raise the money? I have no particular inside information one way or the other, but want just to know. There’s a magazine-length investigive feature in this for sure.

Plus, the stories so far imply that if the existing array can be kept humming it is up to snuff. No. It’s just phase one. Operating money for it is, one suspects, minor compared to the dough needed to install another few hundred dishes and provide the surveying sensitivity needed to satisfy the SETI Institute’s stated ambitions. All one has now is the embryo, the demonstration of feasibility, for the full job. What was the business plan to get the whole thing built and why did it fail, and how might it get back on track?

Is there no way to harness a common inspiration for bigtime philanthropy – ego? That is, if another sugar daddy or mommy comes along, can it become the YourNameHere / Allen Telescope Array? That could get an operating budget endowed, too. Is there a naming policy that makes that difficult? Few want to put up operating money, most want something solid to put a plaque on – but in fact there’s lots more to build. Besides all that, this array is not all about ET. It could do nifty studies of the astrophysical kind.

Here’re stories that have already landed:

• LA Times – Louis Sahagun: Filed May 7, after the initial rush in the last week of April. Sahagun visited the suddenly quiet observatory not far from Lassen Peak, talked with a forlorn staffer, filled in with quotes from other downcast sources. Lots of atmosphere – and includes the ultimate aim is, or was, for 350 dishes. ,
• NPR Science Friday/Talk of the Nation – Ira Flatow: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Is Put On Hold ; Flatow interviews SETI Institute officer and astronomer Jill Tarter (inspiration for the heroine of the movie Contact). Excellent interview – Tarter’s frustration shows. But she should have corrected Ira, an old pro who does not flub much,  after he said “You know you’ve seen pictures of that. That’s the cluster of radio telescope dishes out in the desert…” California has the Mojave Desert and some other places like it, but Shasta County is not in them. It’s in Lassen Nat’l Forest, has bubbling Hat Creek and its hungry trout nearby, pine trees, and a view of Mount Shasta. Hot dry summers, sure. It’s inland California. But not desert.
• San Jose Mercury News – Lisa Krieger: SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes ;
• CBC News – Bob McDonald: Big questions and big weddings ; The host of CBC’s Quirks & Quarks radio show has the gall to imagine that such science as this is surely more important than some prince’s wedding in another country. Last I checked, Canada is a constitutional monarchy with Elizabeth its Queen, but maybe McDonald is not keen on that.
• Time Magazine – Michael Lemonick: ET, Call Us – Just Not Collect ;
• Wired – Lisa Grossman: Still Searching: SETI Pioneer Jill Tarter Talks Shutdown, Aliens ; Another good Q&A with SETI’s reigning, exasperated queen.
• Redding Record-Searchlight (editorial) Life in space? Answers will have to wait ; Fine writing, especially the part about real-life aliens in Shasta County.
• Discover Mag/Bad Astronomy Blog – Phil Plait: E. T. call waiting ; “That sucks,” says Plait. And he links straight to the SETI Inst. donation page.
• AP – Marcus Wohlsen – Search for aliens shuts down because of shrinking budgets ;

Grist for the Mill: SETI Institute ;

- Charlie Petit

Brian Deer is a respected science journalist in the UK – and got for himself a rare distinction among those on the beat: designation as “special journalist of the year” at last month’s British Press Awards. He was most prominent among those who took after autism and innoculation man Andrew Wakefield, the defrocked doctor.

To the point. He writes in The Guardian this week about what happened after Nature dangled an assignment before him to write for its distinguished audience. His reaction is well summed up in his Guardian piece’s headline: How Nature’s lawyers drown investigative science journalism.

It appears that, if his account is to be believed and my bet is that it is pretty reliable, Nature demands that its writers pay it back for any legal costs or penalties that accrue to the magazine from one’s coverage. To promise not to write anything libellous. Etc. There also are some pretty restrictive clauses on keeping secrets, rights of republication, and on kill fees – but one is unsure those are particularly unusual in the publishing world.

But he was to be hired to write about scientific fraud. That means to go out and embarass people by reporting things they don’t want reported. Maybe get them in legal trouble. Maybe cost them their jobs. Is not that a formula for attracting libel suits?

His column is a rollicking put down of Nature, which he skewers as a luxury liner cruising the scientific waves with impeccable majesty – until one looks at conditions down in steerage.

It all reads true. One would not expect to find anything like the described contract at a major wire service, newspaper, or other natural breeding ground for aggressive, investigative, maybe muck raking journalism of the sort that does the Fourth Estate proud.

However, one must suggest that Mr. Deer unruffle just a tad. Much as the journalists at Nature, and at Science for that matter, are respected members of the science journalism clan, and much as they often lead the way in explaining hard stuff in easy English and sometimes in writing stories with considerable edge, they are – just as the man at Nature told Deer (he says) – trade journals. Superb ones, but trade journals. So, if one writes for them, there will be strictures of some sorts that might not be found at some other major news outlets.

Even so. To ask a writer to sign a legal paper that seems to threaten one with bankruptcy should one of your stories backfire in court, no matter the common sense ethics or reality involved, is a bit much. One wonders how typical or atypical the Nature contract is. How about over at Science?

I found this all by myself but other bloggers have perked up at it too, and before I did.

- Charlie Petit

Maybe it’s just because links in news stories to source material areon my mind, but one day after posting on just such a thing at AP (scroll down two slots)  I ran across another case of useful linking to the technical literature behind some news:

• National Geographic News – Dave Mosher : Mount St. Helens Erupts Again – This Time in 3-D ; Too bad there isn’t a really good video rendition. Mosher recounts how an international collaboration put together a fully-rounded recreation of the eruption. It exposes its dynamics as never before. Mosher also takes reader right  to the core paper’s abstract, from Geology.

Good then, more value added for the reader. Right?

One issue that this Nat’l Geo story rouses in my imagination – are such direct links potential distorters of news coverage? This one at Nat’l Geo goes to a journal abstract. To read the whole paper would cost the reader some money – $25. It thus provides income to a (presumably) cash-short journal. Thereby is a news outlet’s coverage hard-coupled in principle to the source’s income. One wonders. Is there potential in the spread of such practice to distort and amplify the way journals and the professional societies or commercial entities behind them promote their papers? In what news that outlets choose to cover? Kickbacks, do you suppose? Even more incentive for hyping news? The chance this one example at Nat’l Geo entailed such shenanigans is, surely, vanishingly small. But the possibilities are worth principled discussion.

Here’s another reason to follow the link to the Nat’l Geo story. Promoted there alongside is a NG story, somewhat self-serving, on a National Geographic TV piece on sharks. This is, it says, the biggest bad boy great white shark ever caught and documented. Great photo.

- Charlie Petit