I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the best selling books of the past decade have been converted into a video game for kids and young adults. That’s right, available […]
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Last week, analysts at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty released a 70 page analysis of the strategies, tactics, and messages of the Sunni insurgent propaganda campaign. It’s the most interesting thing […]
Pew has released an analysis of the most frequently used words at the most popular sections of the presidential candidate Web sites, their candidate biographies. The findings are somewhat surprising, […]
Big Tobacco.Big Oil.Big Pharma.Big Biotech.Big Nanotech?Each of these phrases are examples of frame devices, words that act like triggers in activating underlying cultural meanings. In fact, these frame devices instantly […]
As I’ve argued at this blog many times and in our article at Science, defining evolution in terms of medical progress is probably the best way to translate its’ importance […]
Oxford University Press has published a new edited volume featuring research on public opinion and media coverage of the plant biotech debate in the US, Europe, Africa, India,and Brazil. The […]
Gallup has released an analysis of how support for various presidential candidates breaks down by church attendance. Somewhat surprisingly, in a general election match up, Hillary and Rudy are neck […]
Gore’s Live Earth concert series was supposed to catalyze American public attention around the problem of global warming, but did it? Polling data is not yet available regarding the concert’s […]
Has the effort by liberals to re-brand themselves as progressives been successful? What about Republicans who no longer describe themselves as a conservative but rather as a “Reagan Republican”? Rasmussen […]
In journalism, professional norms favor telling gripping stories about individuals and places. Applied to the debate over global warming, many journalists believe that if they can recast the complex issue […]
Last week I posted on the “Misunderstood Meanings of Science Literacy,” noting that scientists, policymakers, and journalists tend to narrowly focus on the recall of facts about science as the […]
The philosopher Paul Kurtz has published a new position booklet that addresses much of what I have been arguing is missing–and so deeply troubling–about the New Atheist movement. Below is […]
As part of their conversation series with scientists, the NY Times this week runs an interview with Harvard’s Eric Mazur featuring the headline “Using the ‘Beauties of Physics’ to Conquer […]
As I’ve argued, one of the reasons I find the New Atheist PR campaign so troubling is that it is has radicalized a movement that feeds on anger and fear […]
To date, nanotechnology has followed a public trajectory similar to that of plant biotechnology in the United States. Relatively low levels of attention have been paid to the still nascent […]
I’m obviously a bit late in commenting on the scientist-journalist debate that went on through last week, so I’m not going to weigh in at this point. (Round up of […]
Chris Mooney’s Storm World is reviewed in Sunday’s edition of the NY Times, a major moment for any author since the attention will surely give a major boost to the […]
Across the Atlantic, it’s a parallel universe when it comes to a focus on framing and its political uses. While here in the States, liberals have decried the use of […]
In an essay at the Web site of Skeptic magazine, David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin’s Cathedral, concludes that when it comes to a scientific understanding of religion, Dawkins is […]
Pew has released a survey analysis comparing American Muslims to other American religious groups, comparing levels of religious intensity, political identification, and policy preferences. I summarize and quote from some […]
The Center for American Progress has released a valuable analysis of the factors that account for the huge ideological imbalance in political talk radio. Here’s what they pinpoint as the […]
The Sunday Washington Post leads with a story that greenhouse gas mitigation proposals in Congress are likely to stall, in part because several key lawmakers believe (or at least claim) […]
One of the common claims that has been amplified by the Dawkins/Hitchens PR campaign is that “atheism is a civil rights issue.” (For an example, see the comments section of […]
On June 4, more than 120 people turned out for the Nisbet & Mooney Speaking Science 2.0 talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. The talk is now part […]
Over at the Intersection, Chris generated a discussion of what issues might be the next big science policy debates. I’d like to turn the question in a slightly different direction […]
The news frenzy over Andrew Speaker, the honeymooning lawyer with a rare strain of anti-biotic resistant TB, did little to shape public views on the disease as a global health […]
In new survey released by Pew, Americans see few ideological differences among the three broadcast TV news networks, but among regular viewers of cable TV news, content differences are readily […]
In 2004, when California voters approved a $3 billion dollar funding program for embryonic stem cell research, all eyes turned to the Golden State as the new national center for […]
Facebook and similar social networking sites hold vast potential for reaching non-traditional audiences for science. As the NY Times reports today, Facebook has 25 million users and growing as the […]
The NY Times’ Andrew Revkin details a study at Nature that finds that in the Caribbean there have been centuries where strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were […]