Third Turn

Report: ESPN Laying Off HUNDREDS

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:06:24 -0400

Report: ESPN Laying Off HUNDREDS - http://pulse.me/s/lS7gd

scotthensley: Art or science? medicalschool: Lungs Volume...

Fri, 10 May 2013 03:25:19 -0400

Art or science?

medicalschool:

Lungs

Volume Rendering of an ECG gated I.V. contrast enhanced thoracic CT angiography. Pictured above is the lung. The lung shows several small emphysematous bullae.

KONNICHIWA!

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:25:14 -0400

KONNICHIWA! - http://pulse.me/s/lpZCT

You Are Boring

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 23:34:09 -0400

yourmonkeycalled:

Here’s the full text of a piece I wrote for The Magazine a few months ago. I really enjoyed writing it, and would like to thank Marco once again for publishing it there. If you haven’t checked out The Magazine yet, you should. Anyway, here’s why you’re a total snooze:

Everything was going great until you showed up. You see me across the crowded room, make your way over, and start talking at me. And you don’t stop.

You are a Democrat, an outspoken atheist, and a foodie. You like to say “Science!” in a weird, self-congratulatory way. You wear jeans during the day, and fancy jeans at night. You listen to music featuring wispy lady vocals and electronic bloop-bloops.

You really like coffee, except for Starbucks, which is the worst. No wait—Coke is the worst! Unless it’s Mexican Coke, in which case it’s the best.

Pixar. Kitty cats. Uniqlo. Bourbon. Steel-cut oats. Comic books. Obama. Fancy burgers.

You listen to the same five podcasts and read the same seven blogs as all your pals. You stay up late on Twitter making hashtagged jokes about the event that everyone has decided will be the event about which everyone jokes today. You love to send withering @ messages to people like Rush Limbaugh—of course, those notes are not meant for their ostensible recipients, but for your friends, who will chuckle and retweet your savage wit.

You are boring. So, so boring.

Don’t take it too hard. We’re all boring. At best, we’re recovering bores. Each day offers a hundred ways for us to bore the crap out of the folks with whom we live, work, and drink. And on the internet, you’re able to bore thousands of people at once.¹

A few years ago, I had a job that involved listening to a ton of podcasts. It’s possible that I’ve heard more podcasts than anyone else—I listened to at least a little bit of tens of thousands of shows. Of course, the vast majority were so bad I’d often wish microphones could be sold only to licensed users. But I did learn how to tell very quickly whether someone was interesting or not.

The people who were interesting told good stories. They were also inquisitive: willing to work to expand their social and intellectual range. Most important, interesting people were also the best listeners. They knew when to ask questions. This was the set of people whose shows I would subscribe to, whose writing I would seek out, and whose friendship I would crave. In other words, those people were the opposite of boring.

Here are the three things they taught me.

Read More

Yes.

lareviewofbooks: A time before the city — and the nagging...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 15:11:02 -0500

lareviewofbooks:

A time before the city — and the nagging potential for destruction — is almost harder to imagine than a time after it. There have been attempts to resurrect in words the meadows of Harlem or waterways of Canal Street, linking them to a future long after the city is gone (I’m thinking here of books like Eric Sanderson’s beautiful Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City). But Sandy was more convincing than any book. The surge revealed the potential for pre-history’s return — flooding those parts of the city made by man, the filled up places like Battery Park City or the pestilential swamp surrounding the Gowanus Canal.

LARB’s latest dispatch from the Anthropocene: Environmental reporter David Biello reflects on our Armageddon fantasies in the wake of Super Storm Sandy, from his home near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. Authors mentioned in this essay: Walt Whitman, Eric Sanderson, Don DeLillo, Colson Whitehead and God.

Favorite smartphone apps

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 10:27:21 -0500

1. Weather Channel — it gives sunrise sunset, current temp, hourly temp, 10-day forecast in an easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate lay-out

2. Google Maps — do not upgrade to a phone (iPhone 5) or operating system that prohibits you from using this (such as iPhone’s iOS6)

3. Pulse — app with excellent interface for reading latest news on dozens of web sites at once, and sharing easily with social media — I prefer this to Flipbook

4. Podcasts - Native Apple app makes listening to and updating podcasts to which you subscribe fairly easy. Beats iTunes. Yes it’s still buggy but best alternative

5. Pandora - good for creating or subscribing to radio stations to listen to music. I use the free version with ads, but I’ll probably upgrade soon to paid version without ads

6. Instapaper — good for saving long-reads from magazines or other web sites for later reading

7. Kindle for iPhone — good for reading your Kindle books on the go on your phone

8. Yelp — good for finding local restaurants and reviews, directions to get there, phone numbers.

9. Seafood Watch — helps you choose the most sustainable fish on menus wherever you are in the world. Of course the best choice is no meat or fish at all if possible.

10. PostalPix — makes it easy to order prints of photos taken on your smartphone. Good idea to get prints because someday all these digital photos will be obsolete or inaccessible. Think about how long computer technologies last. Then think about how long paper lasts. Longer.

11. iBird Plus — spring for one of the more expensive versions of this app. excellent database for bird-watching and identifying.

12. MoonPhase — I like this for one fun reason — it plays a wolf-howl sound on the day/night of the full moon.

13. AwardWallet — tracks all your frequent flier points, hotel points, Amtrak points and other shopping points in one location

14. PaperKarma — allows you to easily get rid of junk mail simply by taking a photo of the offenders’ address. Fantastic app. Save the Indonesian forests where our paper is made.

15. Flashlight — get one of the free flashlight apps. At the very least, it helps you read menus in dark restaurants.

I EXPLAIN MARCH MADNESS

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 17:47:53 -0400

robdelaney:

Hi Sport fans of Basketball!

March Madness is a wonderful American sports tradition where over 800 college basketball teams compete to see who is the maddest! It’s VERY mad and everyone from President Barack Obama down to the lowliest, most recent immigrant from Sierra Leone or Canada get into it BIG TIME. It’s pretty much the most American thing that happens every year, more American than eating an apple pie off of a space shuttle’s hood on Jesus Christ’s birthday.

HOW DOES IT WORK!

Read More

Embargoes Master List

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 18:21:00 -0500

The goal here is a list of all major journal embargoes (the ones that science-health journalists and bloggers typically cover), not a comprehensive list of all sci-health journal embargoes.

Please do not trust this list. At best, this list is a resource to generate dialogue as to an actual or correct embargo, or against which to challenge an embargo time claim.

All times in Eastern time zone.

Sunday:

1 pm — Nature Biotech, Nature Cell Bio, Nature Chem, Nature Climate Change, Nature Comms, Nature Genetics, Nature Geosci, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotech, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Physics, Heredity, Cancer Gene Therapy, Cell Research, EMBO reports, Oncogene (all the Nature research journals http://www.nature.com/authors/submit_manuscript.html#n)

Monday:

12:01 am — Pediatrics

12:01 pm — Some Current Biology papers (others embargoed for Thursday)

12:01 pm — Canadian Medical Association Journal

3 pm — PNAS

4 pm — Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine — basically all the JAMA Archives titles

5 pm — Annals of Internal Medicine

7 pm — Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B

Tuesday:

9 am - Molecular Psychiatry (NPG)

10 am - International Journal of Obesity (NPG)

11 am — Nature Communications

1:20 pm — Molecular Therapy (NPG)

2:40 pm - Translational Psychiatry (NPG)

4 pm — JAMA

5 pm — PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (as above, official embargo time is 5 pm for all PLoS journals, but unofficially embargo lifts once the paper is published online, which may be as much as an hour earlier. Those on press list are advised to check if paper is online before publishing)

7 pm — All Royal Society journals, including Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biology Letters, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Interface

Wednesday:

1 pm* — Nature (*due to daylight saving, twice a year the time difference between US and UK is more than/less than 5 hours.)

1:40 pm - Kidney International (NPG)

2 pm — Science Translational Medicine

2 pm — Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (NPG)

3 pm - Neuropsychopharmacology (NPG)

4 pm — JNCI?

5 pm — New England Journal of Medicine

7:01 pm — Conservation Biology (and all Wiley journals typically)

Thursday:

9 am - Scientific Reports (NPG)

9:20 am - Journal of Investigative Dermatology (NPG)

11 am - Nature Communications

12:01 pm — Cell journals, including Cell, Neuron, Current Biology

2 pm — Science

4 pm — American Journal of Public Health

4:20 pm — Genetics in Medicine (NPG)

5 pm — PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, CompBio, BMC Evolutionary Biology

6:30 pm — The Lancet

7:00 pm — BMJ

Friday:

12:01 am — Bioscience

12:15 am — Journal of Experimental Biology

4:00 pm — JNCI?

Daily:

5 pm — PLoS ONE (Mon-Fri) (Sort of. PLoS ONE embargoes automatically lift as soon as the paper publishes. For instance, if that happens to be 4:28 pm, you can publish your story at 4:28 pm.)

NO EMBARGOES OR NO STANDARD EMBARGOES:

ArXiv, Astrophysical Journal, Astronomical Journal, Journal of Consumer Research, Physical Review Letters, Geology, AGU journals, ACS journals, ESA journals

NOTES:

Major publishers: Cell, Elsevier, JAMA, Nature Publishing, Public Library, Sage, Wiley, ACS

An embargo time of 12:00 or 0:00 is vague and subject to misinterpretation, so always push press officers to clarify and convert to 12:01 pm or 12:01 am to make the time more clear.

Compiled by Robin Lloyd with help from Bora Zivkovic, Ed Yong, Ivan Oransky, Dan Vergano, Alex Witze and whoever else chimes in.

To suggest updates to this list: robinmlloyd AT gmail.

Dealbook: Surf much?

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 09:51:32 -0500

Dealbook: Surf much?:

This Dealbook post reads musty. “A niche blogging site called Tumblr”? Really, Dealbook?

Congrats to Steve Silberman for winning 2010 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:22:37 -0500

Congrats to Steve Silberman for winning 2010 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award:

This is my favorite passage (it’s lower down):

In a media environment saturated with such blatant disinformation, it’s not only our job to report on the progress of science, it is our job to report on those who are working furiously — and with vast resources — to demean and diminish the role of science in our society by framing scientists as merely another special-interest group with an agenda.

Michael Mann compares climate change detractors to McCarthyism

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:16:41 -0500

Michael Mann compares climate change detractors to McCarthyism:

Alex Witze did a great job covering this talk that Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann gave at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing meeting on Sunday.

Here are a few other of his more pointed statements from that talk:

“No doubt we are in for a period over next months or even years where climate science is likely to be subject to the sort of politically motivated inquisition that we frankly haven’t seen in this country since the 1950s and it is of course necessary not only for the science community to do the best that it can to defend itself from this attack but frankly we are entirely reliant on willingness of mainstream media to serve in its role as a critical and independent arbiter to not just report the two sides of this so-called debate but to establish what is fact and what is fiction. Scientists will not be successful in their own attacks coming unless the media is serving its role.”

He added that we must “draw those analogies [to 1950s McCarthyism and its blacklisting campaigns] where they are appropriate. I think they are relevant and legitimate.”

And re: the Virginia AG’s efforts to get his hands on the climate scientists’ data, Mann noted that the data are already available to the public. He added that the attorney general “wouldn’t know what to do with data if he was given it. He doesn’t want any materials that relate to science and the conduct of science. He is looking to get hold of more private correspondences between scientists, emails written documents, that they can again mine for individual phrases that can be used to distort what climate scientists believe and say in their ongoing campaign to fool the public about reality of human caused climate change.”

NPR takes a tumblr

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:25:55 -0400

NPR takes a tumblr:

NPR says they chose Tumblr over Posterous b’c it’s the ‘sweet spot.’

Atlantic loses Kinsley, gains Madrigal

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:00:58 -0400

Atlantic loses Kinsley, gains Madrigal:

As this story says, it is interesting to see Politico evolve. However, I don’t see any signs that consumers really believe that there is political “over-saturation” in the media. Consumers complain about this, but they keep on eating. Losing Kinsley is a big intellectual blow to the Atlantic, but they still have such a strong brand and the top blogger in the world, Andrew Sullivan. So I think they’ll hang tough. And Atlantic did just acquire sci-tech-energy-digital wizard Alexis Madrigal from Wired.

Vermont vacation: this is how apple cider is made at Cold Hollow...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:05:48 -0400

Vermont vacation: this is how apple cider is made at Cold Hollow Cider Mill. Here a staffer fills a filter clothed tray full of apple smush. 12 such layers are stacked and subjected to 1000 lbs of pressure and the juice that flows out basically becomes delicious cider.

Bill Gates on zero-carbon energy

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:19:26 -0400

Bill Gates on zero-carbon energy :

This is a smart, dynamic, surprising interview abt zero-carbon energy and 4x efficiency as a goal, and what is owed by US to the developing world. (via @dbiello) A great read. Includes take-down of @SciAm re: how easy it will be to meet the zero-carbon, higher efficiency goal.

FAA revision to safety cards for Jet Blue employees

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:10:49 -0400

FAA revision to safety cards for Jet Blue employees

Web is dead, long live the internet

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:39:09 -0400

Web is dead, long live the internet:

Yeah yeah this Wired story is “old news.” Read it, pal. If you knew all this already, then why is most media still oriented to print or Web? Huh?

Amazon customer service

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:50:07 -0400

A month ago or so, my Kindle dropped from a chair on our clay tiled front porch. Not good. A hairline fracture in the front cover (not screen) turned into a crack. Before rushing out to work this a.m., I went to Amazon’s customer service page and found that I could ask them to call me RIGHT NOW to talk about this. They called and are sending me a new Kindle immediately—I have to send back the old one w/in 30 days to avoid a fee. The crack falls under the warranty, which should have expired a month ago (we think the Kindle is one year old; time flies), but I think they made a friendly interpretation of it. I’m impressed with this customer service.

I mainly read books on Kindle now. I have lost 75 percent of my interest in reading printed books. Mainly due to its convenience. To me, it is the perfect reading hardware.

Small paper in Mass. to start metering online access to stories

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:14:45 -0400

Small paper in Mass. to start metering online access to stories:

So once the big fish start metering, why won’t consumers just move over to smartphone app access? Cheaper if you have smartphone already. Maybe even if not. Is new industry ready for migration to mobile? Not just tech-wise but biz-model-wise?

NYC's trash-sucking garbage tubes

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:24:34 -0400

NYC's trash-sucking garbage tubes:

Beneath Roosevelt Island