Science and the media: 15 - 21 January

JAN 21, 2011

Charles Day

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

Evidence from the Washington Post‘s own pages of the paper’s decline in science coverage.
News from Science magazine of an important European survey of scientists’ attitudes to open-access journals.
A news story in the Washington Post about legislative efforts in Virginia to curb the state’s attorney general in his efforts to subpoena scientific records.
Online alarmism about the threat posed by household radon.
String theorist Brian Greene’s expansive commentary in the New York Times about cosmology and fundamental physics.

Science decline at the Washington Post

For science, one specific cost of the newspaper industry’s general decline has been the decline of science coverage at the Washington Post, where Rick Weiss and Curt Suplee once wrote. Apparently the Post‘s editors see the problem too; maybe that’s why they began a Tuesday “Health and Science” section some time back. No one should suppose, though, that this weekly section comes anywhere close to matching the New York Times‘s Tuesday science section. It’s mainly a personal health and medical section.

My claim’s admittedly only anecdotal justification comes from regular reading—and in this report is even more anecdotal. Please consider just the contents of the six-page 18 January edition of the Post’s “Health and Science” section.

The front page offers three stories:

“Can purified tap water be bad for children’s teeth?”
“Brace yourselves for endless orthodontia”
“The baby seemed fine—so why did his breathing alarm keep going off?”

No one claims that these dental and medical stories exclude science, of course. But consider what’s on page 2:

“They owe you a second opinion” (an advice piece about medical care)
“Pets: Not just good for your mood but also good for your health?”
“Quick Study: Antibiotic that treats diarrhea may ease gut symptoms for some people”
“Health Scan: Drug use over 50"
“Health News: Shooting in Tucson sparks interest in ‘mental health first aid’ courses”

An article about baby care takes up most of page 3, though in a column on the left appear a brief science blurb on pandas and old-growth forests and a nano-tidbit on sociology. Page 4 contains a medical health essay and two letters, both on medical issues. Pages 5 and 6 continue the dental stories from the front page.

Page 6 does have a nice little science item: a sort of science-textbook illustrated explanation of the Sun’s apparent track across the sky over the seasons. It’s not news, but it’s science.

Science magazine: European survey updates open-access issue

A brief news article in the 21 January issue of Science reports survey results from the European Study of Open Access Publishing—the SOAP project . Some 50,000 researchers were queried. “Scientists love open-access papers as readers,” the article says, “but they are less enthusiastic about submitting their papers to open-access journals.”

Some 89% of respondents reportedly find open access “beneficial to their field,” but only 53% had published an open-access article, and only about one out of every ten papers is published in that way. The two main impediments: publication fees and “a lack of high-quality open-access journals.”

Nevertheless the study “also found that open-access journals are proliferating, especially among small publishers,” with several hundred new open-access journals being launched annually. The article also reports that "[l]arge publishers are also catching on.”

The Cuccinelli files, cont.

“Democrats in the [Virginia] General Assembly,” writes political reporter Rosalind S. Helderman in a 19 January Washington Post article , “are trying to curb the power of the state’s attorney general to subpoena public universities in an effort intended to limit inquiries like the one Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II is conducting at the University of Virginia.”

You’ll recall that in earlier episodes of this drama, the attorney general took legal steps to gain access to e-mail and other documents from the time when the climatologist Michael Mann, now at Penn State, worked at UVa. Cuccinelli says he suspects fraud—scientific fraud—that he says would be actionable under a statute applicable to state employees fraudulently obtaining tax money.

“Cuccinelli’s demand has pleased conservatives, who say that global warming is a hoax,” Helderman explains, “but has outraged many academics, who say he is smearing an honest researcher because he does not approve of his findings.”

Helderman reminds readers that various investigations have exonerated Mann, that UVa has fought the subpoenas on grounds of academic freedom, and that a judge ruled in August against Cuccinelli, who has since restarted the process.

Helderman cites one bill in the Virginia Senate that “would shield academic work at universities from being subject to civil investigative demands by the attorney general” and another that “would require that in civil cases, the attorney general file a lawsuit that can be reviewed by a judge before he is able to issue subpoenas.”

She notes that such bills are unlikely to be approved in the House of Delegates, with its Republican majority. Nevertheless, the bills “afford Democrats a forum for hammering” Cuccinelli in a high-visibility way.

She quotes a Charlottesville Democrat who declares that “Jefferson would be turning in his grave.” She quotes Republicans who believe the opposite.

That judge in August ruled “that Cuccinelli had not properly explained his rationale for thinking fraud might have been committed,” as Helderman puts it. So Helderman closes by offering this information:

In his reissued CID [Civil Investigative Demand], the attorney general wrote that he seeks the documents because Mann wrote two papers on global warming that “have come under significant criticism” and that Mann “knew or should have known contained false information, unsubstantiated claims and/or were otherwise misleading.”

“Specifically, but without limitation, some of the conclusions of the papers demonstrate a complete lack of rigor regarding the statistical analysis of the alleged data, meaning that the result reported lacked statistical significance without a specific statement to that effect,” the new CID alleges.

No word on whether the attorney general has offered to become a peer reviewer at one of the climate journals.

Alarmism in science news, cont. (radon department)

Can alarmism be justified in news articles about radon in homes? It’s not a new question, but in at least one small daily last weekend, a brief online article under the headline “Radon alert!"—and please note that exclamation point—called it to mind.The article cites the Environmental Protection Agency’s belief that “radon gas causes over 20 000 deaths annually” across the country. “To put that into perspective,” it adds, “radon caused more deaths in 2010 than drunk driving, fires and carbon monoxide.” Moreover, because radon “problems have been detected in almost every county in the United States,” the Surgeon General and American Lung Association have “taken action to help prevent these needless deaths by recommending that all homes in the US be tested regardless of geographic location or foundation type.” (All homes? Even beach houses on stilts?) After smoking, the article declares in closing, radon is “the leading cause of lung cancer.”

I asked a health physicist, an occupational health and safety professional, a historian of physics, and an accelerator physicist whether the article constitutes unjustified alarmism. My friends are not published authorities on radon, and the discussion was social, not professional. But it was likely a much more informed exchange of thoughts than I could have had with journalists.

All four expressed serious misgivings. They brought up:

The question of varying geological and water-source characteristics.
Scientists’ alleged unreadiness to challenge EPA science determinations.
Social and bureaucratic pressures to overstate risks (“decisions made based on politics and self-protection”).
Cost tradeoffs for mitigation.
Misuse of the linear-no-threshold theory by ascribing quantitative mortality estimates to doses that have no known risk.
The inescapable necessity for decisions to be made not just scientifically but politically (“What’s the alternative—let some sort of scientists’ oligarchy rule?”).
The problem of public misperception of dose variations.
An alleged “squishiness” of the epidemiology of radon-related disease in the general population.

“These periodic calls-to-arms that mention that radon has been found in every state, I think, mislead,” said one of my friends. “It’s less about state and more about situ.”

Brian Greene’s latest long New York Times physics commentary (“starkly informative photons”)

Once every year or two, the Columbia University physicist Brian Greene publishes an expansive op-ed in the New York Times, invariably both entertaining and educating nonphysicists in ways that call to mind the science-outreach efforts of the late Carl Sagan. (Greene’s book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos will appear soon.) Last Sunday, another lengthy physics commentary appeared in the Times from Greene: “Darkness on the Edge of the Universe.”

Often in these media analyses I try to summarize a piece fairly thoroughly while also hoping to convey something about context or about science-in-the-media implications. But for me to try outright to summarize a Brian Greene Times commentary would be approximately as ridiculous as my teeing up my golf ball to play a round with Tiger Woods. I’d best just stay behind the ropes and watch from the gallery.

So I won’t try to summarize in any thorough way. But I’ll report that I believe physicists and friends of physics will want to see Greene’s thought piece for themselves, and as evidence for that suggestion, I’ll extract and offer illustrative excerpts.

Greene begins:

In a great many fields, researchers would give their eyeteeth to have a direct glimpse of the past. Instead, they generally have to piece together remote conditions using remnants like weathered fossils, decaying parchments or mummified remains. Cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, is different. It is the one arena in which we can actually witness history.

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing—literally—ancient times.

During the past decade, as observations of such ancient starlight have provided deep insight into the universe’s past, they have also, surprisingly, provided deep insight into the nature of the future. And the future that the data suggest is particularly disquieting—because of something called dark energy.

Concerning Einstein’s intellectual struggles, the cosmological constant, and Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery, Greene observes:

Had Einstein only trusted the original mathematics of general relativity, he would have made one of the most spectacular predictions of all time—that the universe is expanding—more than a decade before it was discovered. Instead, he was left to lick his wounds, summarily removing the cosmological constant from the equations of general relativity and, according to one of his trusted colleagues, calling it his greatest blunder.

But the story of the cosmological constant was far from over.

Greene explains his view that if Einstein were still with us, “his discovery that repulsive gravity lies within nature’s repertoire would have likely garnered him another Nobel prize.” He continues:

As remarkable as it is that even one of Einstein’s “bad” ideas has proven prophetic, many puzzles still surround the cosmological constant: If there is a diffuse, invisible energy permeating space, where did it come from? Is this dark energy (to use modern parlance) a permanent fixture of space, or might its strength change over time? Perhaps most perplexing of all is a question of quantitative detail. The most refined attempts to calculate the amount of dark energy suffusing space miss the measured value by a gargantuan factor of 10¹²³ (that is, a 1 followed by 123 zeroes)—the single greatest mismatch between theory and observation in the history of science.

These are vital questions that rank among today’s deepest mysteries. But standing beside them is an unassailable conclusion, one that’s particularly unnerving. If the dark energy doesn’t degrade over time, then the accelerated expansion of space will continue unabated, dragging away distant galaxies ever farther and ever faster. A hundred billion years from now, any galaxy that’s not resident in our neighborhood will have been swept away by swelling space for so long that it will be racing from us at faster than the speed of light. (Although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there’s no limit on how fast space itself can expand.)

Greene muses about astronomy in the unimaginably distant future, and concludes this way:

We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that with sufficient hard work and dedication, there’s no barrier to how fully we can both grasp reality and confirm our understanding. But by gazing far into space we’ve captured a handful of starkly informative photons, a cosmic telegram billions of years in transit. And the message, echoing across the ages, is clear. Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.

And I myself conclude this way: There’s obviously much to say about Greene’s friendly, accessible, entertaining and informative science-outreach clarity and style. But consider, please, for example just that one phrase “a handful of starkly informative photons, a cosmic telegram billions of years in transit.” I’ve made much of my living over the years as a wordsmith for physicists. From time to time a physicist’s writing reminds me that many physicists don’t really need hired wordsmiths at all. (Please don’t mention this to any physics community decision makers.)

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the Media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.