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On October 19, 1977, the apartheid government of South Africa banned The World, the Sunday World, and Pro Veritas, and 19 other people and organizations who stood with the Black Consciousness Movement.

The National Press Club called on people who were opposed to wear black clothes, ribbon or armband, and they refer to October 19th as "Black Wednesday."

Black Tuesday

South African media groups are now calling last Tuesday, November 22, 2011, "Black Tuesday".

The lower house of the South African Parliament controlled by the African National Congress (ANC) approved the Protection of State Information Information Bill in a 229-107 vote. The bill would allow the state to classify documents as secret because of "national interest". Anyone caught possessing such a document would serve 25 years in jail. The bill will be debated and voted at the upper house of parliament, the ANC controlled National Council of Provinces, before it goes to President Zuma to sign. [The Wikipedia page for South Africa's ruling political party the African National Congress (ANC) was temporarily "censored" in protest of the secrecy law, shown here]

When Governments Aim to "Own" The Media

South Africa's National Editor's Forum chairman, Mondli Makhanya, said the press corps were devastated
"watching the bill become law." As he put it:

"We never thought we would come here dressed in black to witness the Constitution of our country being betrayed by those who built it."

The motivations behind the bill are suspect. The wife of the ANC's State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele has been convicted of running an international drug ring. Two years ago, we wrote on President Zuma's successful bid to get the National Prosecution Authority (NPA) to drop 16 charges against him related to several billion dollars of bribes for arms deals.

Recently, the Sunday Times reported that Zuma's government spokesperson Mac Maharaj sued newspapers reporting that 1.2 million French francs was paid to his wife to facilitate those arms deals. In the two years since ANC's Zuma was elected, allegations of this and that, like massive misuse of official funds have continued.

Hypocrisies of the Powerful

Perhaps there's no reason to ask then, if Zuma will sign the bill? Acronym Required has checked-in on the ANC's continued attempts to censor the vibrant South African media over public health issues over the years. Former President Thabo Mbeki expended hundred of thousands of spoken as well as written words typed into his weekly reports excoriating the media for covering the horrific conditions in hospitals, corruption, the lack of public infrastructure, the broken promises of his administration, and his twisted logic for not dealing with the AIDS crisis.

President Zuma seems to be taking it one step further by backing up rhetoric with more publicly forceful maneuvers. Last year we told parts of journalist Mzilikazi wa Africa's story of being kidnapped by the police as he was investigating ANC corruption in "South Africa'a Media Crackdown."

The officers who kidnapped wa Africa pestered him about why he was investigating ANC officers in the Mpumalanga province. They tried to extract his sources. They trumped up charges accusing him of fraud, forgery and passing forged documents that were later dismissed, and tried to force him to sign an admission of guilt. Under the new law, the documents that wa Africa received about the corruption and murders in Mpumalanga would be illegal for him to possess.

President Zuma has vigorously put down widespread outcry against the secrecy bill. He said that concerns were absurd and proclaimed the ANC to be a vigorous defender of the constitution. He has continually accused journalists of trampling the rights of others, who must "have recourse through legitimate institutions". As Zuma said in weekly address (August, 2010):

"The media has put itself on the pedestal of being the guardian. We therefore have the right to ask, who is guarding the guardian? All institutions, even parliament, has mechanisms in place to keep them in check."

Zuma accused the media, as did Mbeki before him, of not "reflecting the society it claims to protect and represent". Worst of all, he said, deploying the usual ANC strategy, the media defames the ANC party that worked so hard against apartheid. This isn't just Africa's problem, he pointed out, using Russia as an improbable example:

"Let us move beyond the hysteria, let the real debate begin. Our first point is that before looking at what they regard as external threats and perceived external threats, the media should conduct introspection first. During our State visit to Russia a week ago, Russian television was running a promotional jingle saying: 'How dependent is the independent media? Who pays for the news?'"

There's hardly a need to point out again, as we did last year, that using Russia, where investigative journalists and state critics regularly get murdered, to bolster professed ANC benevolence seems cynical and sinister.

Rebukes From Those Who Know

Many see the bill as a harbinger of more serious curtailments of freedom that the country has struggled to overcome in the 17 years since apartheid. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in an address about the Chinese suppression of Tibetans that the current ANC government was worse than the apartheid government, when "at least you could expect to eat." He said that by now you should expect a South African government to be "sensitive to the sentiments of the constitution", and continued:

"You, President Zuma and your government, you do not represent me. You and your government represent your own interests. I am warning you, as I warned the [pro-apartheid] nationalists, one day we will start praying for the defeat of the ANC government."

A strong independent media (if there is such a thing), and investigative journalism are keystones to democracy, in South Africa, America, and everywhere else. A strong democracy is critical to science, to commerce, to health, to welfare, and to all of civil society. South Africa's Bill of Rights provides:

"freedom of expression, which includes freedom of the press and other media; freedom to receive or impart information or ideas; freedom of artistic creativity; and academic freedom and freedom of scientific research".

It also gives anyone the right to:

"Any information held by the state; and any information that is held by another person and that is required for the exercise or protection of any rights."

Constitutional scholars lay out excellent arguments why this bill is unconstitutional², and the opposition party has said that if Zuma signs the bill, they would push for constitutional review in the Constitutional Court. Zuma's highly political evasion of charges against him, as well as other irregularities have shown that the judiciary and other institutions are increasing in the grip of the ANC. Snuffing out investigative journalism will accelerate that trend.

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¹ I should note that the move is not endorsed by smaller press who think that "Black Wednesday" should not be conflated with "press freedom" by major newspapers dependent on advertisers in their battle with the government over advertising spend. (Here's an article on that.)

² The website Constitutionally Speaking has an excellent discussion of this that I found unfortunately, after this was post was written. Go there for a thorough presentation of that scholar's reasoning and for the discussion that follows.

The 1987 movie Cry Freedom offers a look at a South African reporter muzzled covering the anti-apartheid movement and suspicious murder of activist-hero Steve Biko. I liked it when I watched it a couple of years ago, although I have to warn you that the mainstream media reviews called the movie a watered down version of the real story, with Robert Ebert saying it was: "sort of a liberal yuppie version of that Disney movie where the brave East German family builds a hot-air balloon and floats to freedom." I'm sure it would be fascinating to compare their harsh criticism of the movie to the MSM watered down coverage of years of South Africa's apartheid, but I'll leave that for another time.

If you look at the USGS earthquake map of the US, it all seems fairly predictable. The West Coast has earthquakes, - mostly in California. The rest of the country - not so much. Until recently. The 5.8 East Coast earthquake last August left people unharmed but "rattled". Last month, Oklahoma of all places, had a slew of earthquakes, including one that was 5.6.

Sparks, Oklahoma - Redefining Red State

That particular area of Oklahoma, around where the pipeline is slated to go through, has had over 1000 earthquakes in the past year, but historically had only 50 earthquakes a year. The biggest of the latest series of Oklahoma earthquakes measured 5.6 on the Richter scale. It was pretty scary, as the San Francisco Chronicle, reported: "'WHAM!', said Joe Reneau, 75, gesturing with swipes of his arms. 'I thought in my mind the house would stand, but then again, maybe not.'"

There's speculation that recent fracking activity is causing the spike in earthquakes. The way the media has it, fracking might precipitate earthquakes -- or it might not. IEEE Spectrum weighs in on the issue noting that yes, human activities like fracking and dam-building definitely cause seismic activity along established faultlines. Indeed, the USGS put out a report earlier this year linking fracking in Oklahoma to an increase in smaller temblors. Other experts say that fracking could only cause small earthquakes. A Stanford geologist characterized it: "as if you knocked a gallon of milk off the table".

The spate of activity had Oklahoma residents worried. If you've ever been through a series of earthquakes you understand the skittishness. Reeling from the earthquake and aftershocks, their unease became ripe breeding ground for rumors. One of the rumors said officials knew of another impending earthquake even larger than the 5.6 earthquake, but weren't telling residents. In response, officials held a meeting to quell both the rumors and the fears a couple of weeks ago.

Apparently 400 to 500 people attended the two hour meeting organized by the American Red Cross, and officials presented from the Oklahoma Geological Survey, state Emergency Management Department, Lincoln County emergency management office, state Insurance Department, Salvation Army and other groups. They moved the meeting to a bigger facility to accommodate the huge turnout. They wanted to dispel the rumors. As Newsok.com reported: "There should be no bigger quake coming, said G. Randy Keller, director of the OGS" Officials assured people they most likely wouldn't feel the aftershocks, and that governments were prepared for whatever happened. All things you would expect them to say.

Nothing's Too Different in Oklahoma

Officials thought the Oklahoma audience was perhaps frustrated by the experts inability to explain the spate of the earthquakes, though they were reassured. And that nervousness in Oklahoma is just the same as nervousness anywhere -- except Japan, I guess where they've had hundreds of aftershocks in the 5-7 range since Fukushima, including a 5.9 earthquake today, and they all just seem ho-hum about it.

In San Diego, California, the Juanita Faultline has recently caused a series of small earthquakes, leading SignsOnSanDiego to interview a local geologist about the likelihood of another earthquake. The article, "Should We Worry About Shaking on San Jacinto Fault?" illustrates the difficulty geologists have predicting the next earthquake. Foreshocks and tiny shocks called microseismicity sometimes precede earthquakes, but often they don't. The geologist spent most of the interview, citing the history of earthquakes along known faultlines to answer questions about the "next earthquake".

In Berkeley, California last month, a series of earthquakes along the Hayward fault led to similar nervousness in the Bay Area about the possibility of a larger temblor. Speculation abounded, and again geologists worked to get the facts out based on what they know about "hazard probabilities" along Califonia faults. Small earthquakes don't relieve stress they said. Mathematically, they noted, there's a very small chance that on any given day after a series of small earthquakes.

This all seems slightly analogous to a doctor predicting your likelihood of getting a particular disease by looking at your family's medical history. They can tell you that you too, are at risk of a heart attack. The insurance company might be more precise. And along some faultlines, geologists know the history and other details enough to say in the next 30 years, the probability of and earthquake larger then 6.5, say, is 65%.

And in L'Aquila?

Now a good part of the US knows what a temblor feels like, and many people have been told by experts to not worry. We can then imagine how the situation erupted after scientists reassured citizens of L'Aquila in March, 2009, that an earthquake was unlikely. In addition to the earthquakes, Italian citizens were subjected to the prognostications of a fellow citizen with no scientific knowledge who busied himself making dire predictions prior to the earthquake (similar to the earthquake soothsayer we recently blogged about, featured on FOX News.)

The next week, a 6.3 earthquake killed 309 people. A group calling themselves "309 martyrs" sued seven scientists. They accused the scientists of not providing enough evidence about both the hazardous buildings and risks of an earthquake. The town is also suing for about $68m in damages.

In Oklahoma and L'Aquila, multiple officials met with hundreds of people and the press. The press later noted cheerfully that scientists "calmed" peoples fears and "reassured" them. Through all that communication, it's clear that there might be a possibility for misinterpretation?

The trial has been delayed multiple times and according to people who know the Italian court system, will most likely drag on for years. The episode chills earthquake scientists, who constantly grapple with how to relay risks in ways that people understand without freaking them out. It's a science in progress.

Just Like 1908?

After Hurricane Irene, some people joked that the media sees hurricanes as a grand opportunity to dress up in the newest outdoor gear and brace against the howling wind, downed trees, and rain driving sideways (although sometimes pranksters steal the show.) Hurricanes have all the right elements for media profiteering too - drama, death, destruction and lots of "human interest". But to build drama, you need to build up the storm. On Friday night, August 25th, we linked to these four news stories in successive Tweets:

• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1903 (Published August 26, 2011) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired
• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1908 (Published August 24, 2011) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired
• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1938 (Published August 26, 2011 10:28 p.m. EDT) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired
• Hurricane Irene could be the most destructive hurricane to strike New York City since: 1985 (Published August 26, 2011 1:23AM) 25 Aug tweet acronymrequired

Not only can't forecasters predict with 100% accuracy the power or path of a storm, but certainly, as we showed, newspaper reporters can't. The media can't necessarily be faulted though, after all a hurricane is a moving target. In fact, as long as everyone tunes in, the media actually plays an helpful role public safety role, that is by creating more drama on television then any one person can witness outside, over-the-top media coverage can actually aid public safety officials.

The list of East Coast storms throughout history is extensive, but reporters plucked somewhat random mix of historical events out of the hundreds available: The so called Vagabond Hurricane of 1903, produced 65mph winds in Central Park; the deadly New England Hurricane of 1938, was a Category 3 at landfall; and Hurricane Gloria in 1985 struck as a Category 2 hurricane. It's unclear what storm in 1908 the Lehigh Valley Morning Call reporter was talking about, since none of the storms that year amounted to much, and on August 24th 2011, when the Morning Call published, most reporters were comparing Irene to Hurricane Katrina, not some random storm that blew out to sea in the Caribbean. Maybe the reporter hadn't had their morning coffee.

But there you have it, taken together, it's clear that storms can go many different ways and we don't have the technical or intuitive abilities to predict them exactly accurately, or at least to the degree that audiences seem to be demanding after the event.

That Healthy Cry, The Complainer - Alive and Well

When Irene actually hit, the hurricane created lots of flooding and destruction not to be trifled with. But as the New York Times reported after the storm, some New Yorkers were peeved at the pre-storm hype. New Yorkers expressed anger at the cops on bullhorns telling people to go inside, anger at the storm itself for not living up to its potential, and of course anger with Mayor Bloomberg. One person complained Bloomberg made people spend too much money: "The tuna fish and the other food, O.K., we're going to eat it. I don't need all this water and batteries, though."

But lets compare this outcome with the great bungling of Katrina in 2005, to see how things can easily go the other way. At least 1,836 people died in Katrina and property damage was estimated to be $81 billion 2005 USD.

FEMA took most of the fall for the Hurricane Katrina management disaster, along with FEMA administrator Michael Brown ,who appeared utterly useless despite fervent support from George W. Bush. As we wrote at the time in "FEMA- Turkey Farm Redux?", FEMA had failed US citizens in multiple hurricanes during the administration of George H.W. Bush in the 1980's, and had been expertly revived and made useful during the Bill Clinton administration under the leadership of James E. Witt. Then George W. Bush decimated the revived FEMA, using it as his father had. As the House Appropriations Committee reported in 1992, FEMA had been used as a "political dumping ground, 'a turkey farm', if you will, where large numbers of positions exist that can be conveniently and quietly filled by political appointment". (Washington Post July 31)

So given the recent history of Katrina, and the debacles of several state and city governments in last winter's multiple blizzards, it seems inane that so many people who lived through those disasters now fault Bloomberg as "the boy who cried wolf". But then people might complain no matter what, and given the somewhat unpredictable path of storms, I think everyone would agree that it's better to be alive complaining, than dead and swept out to sea because of lack of government warning.

Assuring Future Disasters are Worse

Of course we don't know how the government would have fared in a worse disaster. And while people complain about the lack of a bigger hurricane, FEMA is currently hindered from helping with Irene. Why? Apparently, a FEMA funding bill is being held up in the Senate while politicians with idiosyncratic proclivities indulge their hypocritical "family values" by meticulously delineating all the organizations that can't be paid with FEMA money.

To our detriment, we ignore larger issues while we complain. FEMA's role takes a role not only during and after a hurricane, but in adequately preparing people ahead of time, as we wrote in "FEMA and Disaster Preparedness". Neither FEMA nor state or local governments adequately helped prepare for Katrina, as we detailed in: "Disaster Preparedness - Can We?". Although states and cities didn't play as large a role in the the federal government failings as G.W. Bush would later say, rewriting of history, their role is important.

Of course, disaster preparedness means not only motivating citizens to buy supplies and stay inside, not only mobilizing a deft response, but shoring up infrastructure ahead of time. In the wake of Katrina, we all heard about the failure of governments to build adequate New Orlean's levees, an issue Acronym Required wrote about in "Levees - Our Blunder". However before Katrina, few people realized just how flagrantly officials ignored warnings about the weak levees. When the hurricane breached the walls, politicians acted surprised, that surprise masking the blunt unwillingness of politicians and US citizens to support and fund infrastructure.

We wrote about more widespread infrastructure failings in 2007, in "Guano Takes the Bridge, Pigeons Take the Fall". But infrastructure is easy to ignore. Just as vociferously as citizens complain about the hype preceding Hurricane Irene¹, they remain stunningly silent on the lack of infrastructure preparedness. In fact there's loud clamoring to dismantle the very agencies that assure our safety. Obama has tried in some ways to address the infrastructure problem, not without criticism.

In the case of the New Orleans levees, the New Orlean's Times-Picayune reports that although $10 billion has been spent upgrading the levees, the Army Corps of Engineers is giving them a failing grade. The report says that the refurbished levees might stand a 100 year event, but a larger event will result in thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. This was exactly the criticism of the levees after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

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¹ Here's an interesting analysis of the hype-factor of news relating to Hurricane Irene. The author uses a quantity of publications analysis to argue is that the storm was not hyped.

New Scientists Who Don't Do Science

Every so often, actually with disturbing frequency, claims about the underlying cause of autism spring up like fungii in manure after a rain. It's practically required that claims of this genre be built on false premises or make invalid conclusions, like this week's link between internet use and autism. Oxford personality Baroness Susan Greenfield breathed life into this rumor in an interview with New Scientist, then defended herself by saying provocatively: "I point to an increase in the internet and I point to autism, that's all." But where's the evidence, and why is this stuff being published?

Greenfield's been at this for a while, "popularizing science" for decades, and recently "popularizing science" at the cost of science itself. In 2008 she warned the children's brains were being destroyed by technology in a book reviewed in the Times:

"As it happens, her new book, ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century, digresses all over the place in little flash floods of maddening provisos and second thoughts. It's as if she dictated it while bouncing on a trampoline, fixing an errant eyelash and sorting her fraught schedule on a BlackBerry."

Back in 2009, before the UK's Royal Institution fired Lady Greenfield, she argued that the total immersion in "screen technologies" was linked to a "three-fold increase in prescriptions for methylphenidate" (prescribed for attention deficit disorder). She told the paper that people were losing empathy and becoming dependent on "sanitized" screen dialogues, just like packages of meat in supermarkets had replaced "killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat".

Had you ever thought of the internet like that? No? Science popularizing has that power. I'm not deriding science popularizers, I'm criticizing the practice of distorting science. Greenfield's analogies opened up new worlds of understanding for Guardian readers too. 254 people commented, some sarcastically:

• "That's exactly what my mum said about reading The Beano."

• "I hear it gives you cancer as well""

Guardian readers know how to take a piss. But Oxford's Greenfield knows how to get publicity. So her 2009 headline followed and preceded myriad other claims, all to scare people about technology. To her latest, scientists online responded briskly, with vitriol, meaning that in terms of popularity, Greenfield had a field day. We've been following false arguments about autism for a few years, so we wanted to look more closely at how Greenfield's latest claim about the internet causing autism differs from the claim that television caused autism that we covered back in 2006. For one, back in 2006 they actual did research -- well, economics research.

But Who Needs To Do Research When They'll Print the Stuff You Make Up?

Maturing her arguments of 2008-2009, Greenfield now adds autism to the mix, upping the ante by playing not just to fuddy-duddy technophobes but to all parents and their worst nightmares. One day the child seems fine, then something mysterious happens and the child is no longer themselves. What happened? Doctors and scientists have no clinically actionable idea. Greenfield knows.

Perhaps it makes life easier for some autism suffering families to attribute changes in their child to some outside agent. It's also common to say that a crime has been perpetrated by people from another state or town or country. We've seen autism blamed on vaccines, television, rain...Uncomplicated agents that can be controlled by parents are especially attractive - TV. But where's the evidence? When the New Scientist asked that, Greenfield replied:

"There's lots of evidence, for example, the recent paper "Microstructure abnormalities in adolescents with internet addiction disorder" in the journal PLoS One...There is an increase in people with autistic spectrum disorders. There are issues with happy-slapping, the rise in the appeal of Twitter - I think these show that people's attitude to each other and themselves is changing."

How nimbly she links computer use, with "internet addiction disorder" (IAD) -- not recognized by US psychiatrists; with brain change; with behaviors; and even with attitudes - facile. But the paper didn't say anything about attitudes; didn't prove "addiction", didn't prove detrimental brain changes, didn't prove behavior changes.

Can You Compare the Cognition of Chinese 19 Year Olds Playing Games 12 Hours A Day To 1 Year Old Cooing Babies?

The PLoS One paper deserves more comment than I'm going to devote here. To note, though PLoS One depends on the community for peer review, and although this paper has over 11,000 views (14/08/11), not one person has peer-reviewed - "rated" - the paper. Nevertheless, it's cited all over the internet as proof that "internet use" does bad stuff to the brain, take your pick - "shrinks it", "wrinkles it", "damages", "contracts", "re-wires" it... But the paper is not about "internet use". It's about on-line gaming.

The PLoS One authors write that the research is particularly important to China because unlike in the US, in China, IAD is recognized, and is cited as a big problem. The Chinese vigorously treat the "disorder" with strict treatment regimens including until 2009 shock therapy.

The authors used addiction criteria (i.e. "do you feel satisfied with Internet use if you increase your amount of online time?"), and asked the subjects to estimate how long they had had the addiction. They then used brain imaging to show that brain changes correlated with self-reported duration of online game playing. There were 18 subjects, 12 males average age 19.5 years, and presumably 6 others (females?) who the authors do not characterize.

The subjects played online games 8-13 hours a day. I can't evaluate the data, I don't know enough about voxel based morphology. But I'm not surprised someone "playing online games" 8-13 hours a day, 6.5 days a week for 3 years is different than the controls, who were "on the internet" less than 2 hours a day. Likewise, I would expect a soldier engaged in street patrol in Afghanistan 10 hours a day, 6 days a week for three years to be different than someone who walked their dog around the block in sunny suburbia 3 days a week for the last month. (If I were in a joking mood I'd say that kids playing online games 13 hours a day 6 days a week must have extraordinary abilities to actually still be in college.)

Even if you believe in IAD, the authors acknowledge the study's limitations. They say they don't prove IAD caused changes; don't prove that the subjects brains weren't different to begin with; acknowledge the "IAD duration" measurements (self-assessment) are crude; and the data aren't rigorous to conclude negative changes.

None of these caveats slowed Greenfield, who cited this paper and linked it to all sorts of unrelated things. But autism is NOT related. Wikipedia describes what she calls "Happy-slapping" as an outdated British fad", evidently more a media fad than a scary phenomenon - it's not related to autism. There's nothing inherently sinister about using Twitter - it's not related to autism.

Greenfield trained as a neuroscientist. Does she not know this stuff? In 2003, she mocked people who attributed anything to "scary technology." So why is she now popularizing the opposite message? Her PLoS One example is nothing more than pulling some study out of thin air and linking it to her own machinations about technology. Claims such as hers provide ripe fodder for quacks, crazies and zealotry.

How Does Technology Change Us? Research Shows Beneficial Effects in Online Gamers

Here's the second instance of "proof" Greenfield gives in the New Scientist interview, and note that again cites an academic paper and links it incongruously to her own made up stuff. She says:

"...A recent review by the cognitive scientist Daphne Bavelier in the high-impact journal Neuron¹, in which she says that this is a given, the brain will change. She also reviews evidence showing there's a change in violence, distraction and addiction in children."

But the Bavelier et al review says something different. The scientists specifically warn that no research predictably links brain changes to behavior like violence, distraction or "internet addiction" to technology - TV, video games. The authors cite studies showing the research remains too confounding, as they say in their conclusions:

• "the interpretation of these studies is not as straightforward as it appears at first glance"

• most reports tabulate total hours rather than the more important content type, therefore are "inherently noisy and thus provide unreliable data."

• technology use is "highly correlated with other factors that are strong predictors of poor behavioral outcomes, making it difficult to disentangle the true causes of the observations"

• Perhaps "children who have attentional problems may very well be attracted to technology because of the constant variety of activities."

Bavelier et al stress that the effects are unpredictable, for instance "good technology" like the once ballyhooed Baby Einstein videos can turn out to have zero or negative effects. Conversely assumed "bad technology" can be good. They write:

"action video games, where avatars run about elaborate landscapes while eliminating enemies with well-placed shots, are often thought of as rather mindless by parents. However, a burgeoning literature indicates that playing action video games is associated with a number of enhancements in vision, attention, cognition, and motor control."

This point from Bavelier et al is quite interesting because it appears to contradict the general conclusions of the PLoS One authors we cited above concerning online gamers -- assuming the study subjects played comparable games. Exploring these different results is potentially more interesting than a rhetorical sleight of hand tossing a science study citation in to falsely bolster gobbledygook.

To wit, the studies Greenfield uses don't support her points. That technology's effects are still unpredictable is widely acknowledged. Greenfield herself used to promote a computer program called MindFit which claimed to improve mental ability. The game didn't work. But it also didn't make kids pick up knives and murder each other. It's hard to understand Greenfield's motivation for denouncing technology as anything other than provocation.

Greenfield says: "It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations." But "hard to see" isn't science. A "brain", is not a "mind", nor is it "behavior", nor an "attitude". That's not to say brains don't change, or that technology couldn't affect us. Brains show changes during many activities, often temporarily. It's just to say that technology is not inherently, as she called it, "chilling".

I Point to Television and I Point to Picnics, To Family Dinners, To Teens Doing Charity, To Children Building Sand Castles on Sunny Days

As she is now vilifying the internet as a physiological change agent, Greenfield previously claimed that television changes the brain deleteriously. Now she dismisses the notion. When New Scientist asked her: "What makes social networks and computer games any different from previous technologies and the fears they aroused?" she responded:

"The fact that people are spending most of their waking hours using them. When I was a kid, television was the centre of the home, rather like the Victorian piano was. It's a very different use of a television, when you're sitting around and enjoying it with others..."

Nice image, the innocent television, like the innocent Victorian piano. Happy family times of the Victorian Era, singing around the piano, food aplenty, spirits flowing, enlightened, goal oriented well adjusted children unhindered by repressive social situations. Oh wait, it wasn't always like that? We learn more about the good 'ole days by venturing dangerously out on the internet where you can find the following first hand accounts:

Isabella Read, 12 years old, coal-bearer, as told to Ashley's Mines Commission, 1842: "Works on mother's account, as father has been dead two years. Mother bides at home, she is troubled with bad breath, and is sair weak in her body from early labour. "I am wrought with sister and brother, it is very sore work; cannot say how many rakes or journeys I make from pit's bottom to wall face and back, thinks about 30 or 25 on the average; the distance varies from 100 to 250 fathom. I carry about 1 cwt. and a quarter on my back; have to stoop much and creep through water, which is frequently up to the calves of my legs."

Sarah Gooder, 8 years old, trapper, as told to Ashley's Mines Commission, 1842: "I'm a trapper in the Gawber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to trap without a light and I'm scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning, and come out at five and half past. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then. I don't like being in the pit. I am very sleepy when I go sometimes in the morning."

Greenfield's current glorification of TV defies the fact that TV has been roundly implicated for causing all sorts of unsocial behavior and not only by Greenfield before she changed her mind.

The Autism TV Link: "Why Not Tie it To Carrying Umbrellas?"

In 2006 Acronym Required used a study by economists linking autism and television to write a satirical ten step tutorial on how to publish bad science and get lots of media attention for it. The authors proved that a theories popularity, if brought to the attention of a non-critical media was independent of clearly stating no link between autism and television in your study. You didn't even need to be a scientist.

After reviewing those economists' work, Joseph Piven, director of the Neurodevelopmental Disorders Research Center at the University of North Carolina, weighed in on the autism television-watching idea, asking the Wall Street Journal "[W]hy not tie it to carrying umbrellas?" And so the researchers did! And in 2009, in "It's Back! The Rain Theory of Autism", we described how the same researcher group that blamed autism on televisions decided that it wasn't television causing autism, but rain.

The nice thing about making up "science" or just leveraging your status for narcissistic purposes, is that you can change, chameleon-like, at will. If your aim is to generate a headline in mainstream media rather than research, it doesn't matter what the science says. Most people don't remember headlines from one day to the next and they aren't that curious to dig further.

I believe a natural response to Greenfield's wild claims is humor and sarcasm, the same response the Guardian readers had. To Greenfield's latest foray, Carl Zimmer started an amusing twitter exchange with this: "I point to the increase in esophageal cancer and I point to The Brady Bunch. That's all. #greenfieldism".

A string of #greenfieldisms followed, like "@carlzimmer I point to Alzheimer's and I point to cheese doodles. That's all. #greenfieldism". (Of course this territory is risk ridden, because of the prevalence of actual real random "studies" like the one about mice who eat fast food and get Alzheimer's.)

When challenged, Greenfield didn't back down, instead she spewed forth with more analogies, like a clogged toilet if test-flushed. Asked for a response to the fact that there's not evidence claiming detrimental effects of technologies, she scoffed that you wouldn't see effects for 20 years. With just as absurd a distracting non-sequiter she once asked someone who challenged her on the technology-is-bad assertions if they denied smoking causes cancer.

Flexible "Theories" Make For Good Publicity for Scientists, For Newspapers...

I think it's cathartic, funny and educational to diffuse Greenfield's claims with humor. Wicked-fast coordinated Twitter de-bunking of such people is of course useful and could be made even more useful. Unfortunately the issues aren't always as simple as a Greenfieldism. And debunking the rhetoric of individuals seeking publicity on the backs of science is only one angle.

I think it's important to note that it wouldn't be news if there weren't ready and willing news outlets. The New Scientist printed all her assertions about links between technology, brain structure, autism, and behavior. They didn't ask questions. They didn't challenge. They didn't say: wait, isn't autism diagnosed at ages 2-4? Who's propping their 6 month old up in from on the computer to play war games? Why?

The Guardian, like most papers, publishes articles that range in quality. A Guardian comment on the 2009 article about Greenfield's theories, that called the article "absolute nonsense", and wrote I am surprised that the Guardian has published this..."sloppy journalism"..."absolute drivel", pulled in 160 "approve" votes, far more than any other comments. So even if readers hate the article, they'll still read it. Media succeeds because of advertising and hundreds of comments translates to how many hundreds of thousand of hits?

The media is quite capable of selective coverage. They ignore important scientific, political, and economic stories that they consider politically sensitive. But is anti-science coverage ever "censored"? Not if it can drive traffic, and sell ads - provide economic benefit to media outlets.

But to what extent can we accept this concession to the market if it gives us in return uncritical readers, uncritical patients, and uncritical citizens? Does it create an atmosphere amenable to medical quacks? Might it prime a population to be more receptive to political efforts to curb real free speech via social media technologies? Too bad so many potential critics (even bloggers) are involved with or depend on mainstream news outlets, which makes them understandably hesitant to bite the hand that feeds (or might feed) them.

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¹ Bavelier, D., Green, C.S., & Dye, M. (2010). Children, wired - for better and for worse. Neuron. 67, 692-701, Volume 67, Issue 5, 692-701, 9 September 2010 Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.08.035

Acronym Required writes frequently on the diffusion and distortion of science in politics. We've written about individuals mixing religion with science, art with science, for instance here

Science Journalism Debauchery

Has anyone aside from science bloggers had so many rules imposed on them? OK, maybe science journalists. In the 1990's, when the debate over genetically modified (GM) seeds motivated the headline: "MUTANT CROPS COULD KILL YOU" (Express February 18, 1999), the British government attempted to correct the fear-mongering headlines. That didn't work, so to stem future journalistic liberties of that sort, the Parliament tried to subdue the culture that propagated such rumors.

They issued a a lengthy report warning of further journalistic depredation from "the approaching era of digital TV" and the "increasing ghettoisation". (No mention of the internet.) More journalists needed to be "scientists", they said, after surveying GM stories put out by all of eleven UK publications over two days. Only 17% of the stories were written by science journalists, they found, and not any of the commentary came from "science writers". The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons, the Royal Society, and SmithKline Beecham suggested punishing future misbehavior, especially for getting the facts wrong:

"media coverage of scientific matters should be governed by a Code of Practice which stipulates that scientific stories should be factually accurate. Breaches of the Code of Practice should be referred to the Press Complaints Commission."

Of course an editor at the Independent responded describing how writers could conquer the facts but still mislead the reader. Thankfully, there's often a compelling counterargument. So in the end, the report's authors settled for a rather bland collection of guidelines dealing with Balance; Uncertainty; and Legitimacy.

And of course while the Parliament fretted about the fate of genetically engineered crops, over at News of The World...

Digital Science Journalism - Publishing Freedom

When science blogging came along it seemed to offer an alternative to the maligned mainstream media science journalism. But despite its growing stature, it too has been besieged by criticism. Some of this came from mainstream media, especially in the beginning.

But interestingly, while traditional science journalism often gets attacked from the outside, online science journalists indulge in lots and lots of self-flagellation. Perhaps this is to be expected from people who labor at the frontier of the often masochistic bench science, replete with high rates of experimental failure. Or perhaps self-criticism makes it easier for science bloggers to generate conversation? Work out their identities? Get traffic?

Of course there's much more to online science journalism then blogging, but I'm going to limit my comments to that. Acronym Required started about seven years ago, and from the rather echoey halls of 2004 science blogging, the medium exploded. Now it impressively fills some of the gaping holes in other science journalism.

We last commented on the state of "science" television programming in 2007 -- and why comment further? The science blogging world offers an amazingly vibrant alternative, filled with witty, reflective, analytical, smart, and generous writers -- especially considering the frequent debauchery of mainstream journalism. Which makes the persistent whine of self-criticism all the more puzzling. Is it some evolutionary thrust gripping science bloggers to impose governing rules on their peers?

This is especially amusing in the context of how blogs started, to augment search. Search itself started in a era that included the (albeit, totally unrealistic) perception of internet as free of boundaries, regulations, and governments. Consider this piece from early 1996:

"We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."

Radical, but the philosophy is actually alive and well among quite a few technologists today.

Search back then was pretty rudimentary, thus the role of blogs. To understand just how rudimentary, look at this old Yahoo page with its awesome user interface. (Accompanied by the great ad with a winking person who looks photoshopped from two different faces, asking awkwardly: "So, My Yahoo! or yours?".)

My point is, the world in which blogging started was simple. For one, an early blog was often not much more than some geek saying -- "hey I found this cool site": link -- so I'm cool too, right? These "trusted links" made a prehistoric stab at "community" and "personalization" -- because who could trust something called the "World Wide Web", with its random collection of and unknown "links"?

Secondly, through innovation if not mindset, the Internet and blogging celebrated independence from tradition. As the internet expanded, many bloggers took to the medium in defiance of the exclusive world and onerous rules of offline publishing. The audience for blogs in the beginning was a very small group of internet users, frontiersmen strongly connected by their independence, who were by default "the community".

Page Views

As the originators of the real commercial internet intended, soon people realized they could make advertising money on the internet, and "pageviews" became an all important metric. The number of people publishing on the internet grew and bloggers were then advised to "keep it short". This advice about post-length was couched as insight about readers short attention spans. But it was as much about drawing pageviews and revenue. "Keep it short" and the unspoken "make us money" became compulsory over 'make it interesting'.

When Tumblr and Twitter arrived on the scene with truly short-form platforms, some of the same organizations then suggested that blogs could actually be a venue for "long-form posts". Finally, just as the fashion industry moved away from dictating skirt lengths sometime in the 1980s, people eventually stopped dictating ideal post length. Of course they still told people what to do, they just moved on from making demands on post length.

To Join Or Not To Join

It's my impression that science bloggers find more rules to bandy about than others, but granted, I don't have enough data to swear that economists, say, are really more laissez-faire. I couldn't possibly document all the various rules that science bloggers have proposed for other science bloggers over the years, but to illustrate my point, I'll mention a few.

First there's the question of where to host your blog. Some insist that science bloggers should join a science blogging network. This came about when the number of online science bloggers reached a point where they could actually form a group. Those advocating joining offer compelling reasons -- traffic, exposure, "community". Now, the number of such science blogging "communities" has surpassed our ability to keep track of them. There are still pros and cons to joining of course, depending on your goals, technical abilities, impressions of the different online venues, how your schedule might accommodate blogging, etc. But your agreeable answer to join is existentially far more critical to a potential host than to you. After all, the hosts wouldn't exist without the bloggers.

Of course the notion of "online community" includes many possibilities. Communities can be collaborative, nurturing, educational - great; or, if you've observed them in action, joining such an online science community can be like joining the military, where participants -- "travel to exotic foreign lands, meet interesting and exciting people, then kill them."

Proving Your Worth

Once the blogger decides where to put their blog, a barrage of other considerations and demands will follow. For example, in 2007 bloggers for peer-reviewed research reporting (BPR3) emerged, proposing

"to identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research by offering an icon and an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net."

While interesting as a business aggregation proposal, the blog "Peer-To-Peer" diplomatically commented on the idea, saying it would be impossible for such an icon to assure the "quality of the blog post itself". Or, we might add, to insure the quality of the writer's analysis, the quality of the science journal, the quality of the science research, and so on.

Questions of ethics in science blogging are constant, carrying on from earlier discussions of ethics in blogging and science journalism. Way back in 2003, bloggers started wondering whether they should adopt journalists' standards. Perhaps journalism in 2003 was wrapped in mystique that shrouded realities like "MUTANT CROPS COULD KILL YOU", but the drumbeat of ethics has since trailed science bloggers. I can't see how this could be useful people have written strong arguments noting that blogging wouldn't exist if bloggers weren't ethical. Nor has the whole ethics thing really led to changed behavior as far as I can see, but those who push "ethics" will forever peer over our shoulders, stick in hand.

Still other people demand, as the Parliament did 1999, that science bloggers/journalists only blog about things they know. Quite a qualitative statement considering variations in breadth and depth of knowledge among both scientists and journalists. A comment here provides a good rebuttal to that idea. You could also reason that writing solely about what you know at any moment, like the biomechanics of kangaroo tendons, for instance, despite how interesting, might also be good way to become a lazy, narrow minded, outdated, and one bored stiff writer.

Recently the subjects of anonymity and pseudonymity re-emerged and preoccupied many science bloggers. I'm not going to weigh down this post talking about that, except to note 1) that the discussion has largely revolved around the value and necessity of a particular type of individual authentication, and 2) that the discussion has largely ignored the politics and economics driving such individual authentication.

Other people try mark out precise roles for science bloggers/journalists. Science writers should be "educators", they say, or "explainers", or priests of "how things work". Each such suggestion is an invitation for extensive discussion and cogitation, and naturally other people will vehemently disagree with every proposal. So then why don't bloggers just do what suits them best? Or does the constant criticism and re-definition create "community" (and pageviews)?

Getting The Details Right

We've touched on some general instructions to bloggers about how to blog about science. There are more detailed demands too, aimed at all of science blogging and journalism, as the divisions between online and offline media blur. For instance:

• 2005: Don't use the word "Global Warming": Thus implored some scientists reasoning that people would confuse climate change with their local weather.

• 2006: Don't use big words: So lectured the film "Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus". The version I saw at Tribeca 2006 highlighted words used by scientists in dialogue that were "too big", while characterizing Intelligent Design folks as small word people, i.e. comparatively approachable and understandable. It employed character assassination on all fronts by advising scientists to drop their testy, pompous attitudes, while it basically infantilized people who were religious. Some scientists took this whole thing to heart, overlooking how the movie slyly played to both audiences. People who knew the fairly simple polysyllabic words could be secretly smug that they knew the words when the definitions flashed on the screen like some weird spelling bee; and the other side of the audience could be smug about the portrayal of scientists as surly and smug.

• 2007: Don't publish on Fridays: The IPCC panel and hundreds of scientists took flack from the communication "framers" for publishing their 2007 report on a Friday (link accessed 04/11) because 'any veteran journalist would know better'. The same post chastised the report for lacking "drama" like portraying "polar bears on melting ice". The authors gave another paper kudos for "reframing the IPCC report" with a "corruption angle" that gave it "more legs". In other words, said the framers, don't be scientists or reporters be PR ringmasters.
• 2008 "Don't use the word "denial", "denialist", or "denier": Some scientists said that labeling climate change denialists as such was pejorative.

At the time, each of these instructions drew passionate discussions. But times change -- or don't change. Today it's fine to use "global warming" and "denialist". Science Friday still airs to large audiences on Fridays, and Science Magazine successfully publishes, Friday, after Friday, after Friday.

As charming as "Flock of Dodos" was, do big words really make science/scientists extinct? If we believe that message, should we then be discouraged that in 4 years, the Flock of Dodos trailer has 13,376 views on Youtube, while Hoax of Dodos, the Discovery Institutes pathetically best response, has almost as many -- 11,405 views? OK true, the "Pulled Punches" video (cut scenes from Flock of Dodos) has 18,605 views. But for perspective on what 18,605 views means on YouTube, the video "Emma Watson Punches Interviewer" (Jan 19, 2006), has 4,159,895 (all view numbers as of 05/11). Despite the fact that "Punch" is a catchy keyword to put in your comparatively boring science video, what does all this mean for science and science journalism?

"Blogging" is Worthy

What if none of these rules and instructions make science blogging "better", whatever better is? What if people still deny climate change for example, no matter what the facts and no matter what manner we convey them? While pursuing better communication is incredibly important, as is presenting ideas compellingly, how much of science knowledge lost by miscommunication is really any responsibility or fault of scientists and journalists (online or offline)? How much should be attributed to the political inclinations, personal distractions, and various passions of our audiences?

In reality most science journalists have zero time to write stories, whether or not they have generous deadlines. Those stories must always be very compelling just to get read. The extreme example of this fact, illustrated by a UK journalist, applies to most writing:

"You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson's Green and Putney, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second.

We may not like this. We may wish readers didn't prefer reading science only when it's infused with sex or violence or something that 99% of the population have some opinion on. We may wish that journalists really comprised some "fourth estate", or could make a difference, or could educate readers. What if science writers could just all write about their own fascinating interest, rather than about something dictated by advertising? And what if the audience would just read, and not worry about about ethics, badges of legitimacy or whether education was happening as they read?

But until science journalists make a lot more money or have a lot more time, that won't happen on any large scale basis. But most science bloggers write for free or pittance. And if you write mostly for free on a blog, shouldn't you just write? Or does it have to be for some higher purpose (agreed upon by the consensus of one of many "communities")? Because wasn't that the whole purpose of blogging?

Science bloggers should keep in mind what their up against. The lifeblood of mainstream media consists of headlines the likes of this week's "GM Blunder Contaminates Britain With Mutant Crops", about "Frankenstein" crops.

So I'm sure whatever you write, dear blogger, will stand up just fine. And until "offline" journalism reaches different standards, can we stop insisting/demanding/pleading that bloggers "ARE journalists too"? Maybe science blogging could stand on its own apart from journalism if the community of science bloggers trusted themselves.

Gus Speth, NRDC founder, book author, law professor, and former academic dean, discusses the root causes of the collective lack of action on climate change and the environment in an interview with Bulletin of Atomic Scientists¹. He starts by pointing out that the United States, one of the world's wealthiest countries, has lost ground not only GDP but on on other quality of life indicators -- economic equality, life expectancy, and the environment. If the world continues its current path, climate change will inevitably get worse. The impact of continued environmental degradation is entwined with economic decline -- but not in the way that prominent messengers would have you believe.

True, climate change is difficult for individuals to come to terms with, especially if it's not directly impacting them. But understanding of the problem is amplified by what he calls "manufactured reaction". It's politics and lack of leadership that's paving the path to continued calamity, Speth says:

"Anxiety about acting on climate change was successfully injected into the Tea Party movement; and, as a result, a large percentage of the Republicans who came into office after the 2010 election were people who were on the record as climate deniers, and now the Congress is full of these people..."

Speth notes how the difference between politics now and the 1970's hampers action.

"American politics since, say, 1980, has gone seriously downhill. The level of public discourse on issues has deteriorated; the willingness of politicians to take up tough issues has deteriorated; and it's just a very different scene today in our country....

In the 1970s we passed a host of environmental measures, almost always with serious bipartisan support. There wasn't really a polarization on environmental issues between the two parties, certainly not like what we have today. Politics was far more civil, and it was far more bipartisan. For example, Senator Edmund Muskie, a Democrat, was a champion of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, but that legislation was also made possible by people like John Sherman Cooper, a Republican, and Howard Baker, also a Republican, and others. I think we've lost a lot of ground politically since that time."

He notes that the Tea Party is a force because of their ability to communicate ideas to the public. On the other hand, effective to communication about climate change and the environment has suffered because no one is communicating the most important ideas to the public, not the media; not the president, not environmental groups. On the media, he says:

"...the news media, when they report these events, aren't taking the time to talk to climate scientists about what's going on. The most they do is ask a meteorologist to comment, rather than digging in to get the real story...The coverage of these issues in Europe and Japan is much better, but the US mainstream media won't get into it. I think they're scared of losing viewers, frankly."

On what Obama needs to do:

"I think that he has got to find a way of using the scientific community, and the extraordinary strength of American and international science on climate change, to go to the public and talk about it. He's got to bring out what has happened in terms of this denial syndrome and expose it."

On policy, he says:

"We should establish a declining cap on the carbon entering the economy, sell the allowances for the carbon that does enter, and rebate the proceeds to the American public on a per capita basis."

Speth notes that major environmental groups have become close to Washington, so they now take an incremental approach constrained by what they think politicians can bear. So much of the action and most of the money today focuses on not losing too much ground from previous actions, rather than defining future goals based on what really needs to be done, for instance, on climate change action. Additionally, Speth notes that environmental law in its current form exists in a silo. Instead, it needs to become incorporated with tax law, corporate law, and laws that impact consumers.

Speth also discusses the "growth imperative" - the fact that politicians and corporations focus on growth, but what they're really talking about is profits. Talk about "the economy" is usually based on the crude GDP measure. However it's a myth that profit creates jobs. In fact our current cycle is one of skyrocketing profits while swaths of workers are laid off. By muddling growth and profits with individual well-being, politicians and corporations can continue to reject investments in clean energy and regulatory attempts to force cleaner manufacturing and production.

There's much more to the interview. Some points are quite obvious to you or me perhaps, but what I like is how the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and Speth cut through the morass of excuses, hand-wringing, and finger-pointing that clutter discussions of climate change and the environment. They clearly focus on the underlying problems with law, economics and politics that smother critical change -- change not as a promise but as action.

¹ Gus Speth: Communicating Environmental Risks in an Age of Disinformation" doi: 10.1177/0096340211413559 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/August 2011 vol. 67 no. 4 1-7 Article highlights here; full article (subscription) here

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On Communicating Climate Change: "Communicating Climate Change"

On Climate Change denial: Sea Change or Littoral Disaster

Business and Climate Change: "Carbon Emissions Disclosure Project"

Ice core research to study atmospheric conditions 650,000 years ago: "Holocene Days"

Politics and climate change: "Will Loose Lips - Or Global Warming - Sink Ships?".

Carbon emissions regulation after Katrina: "The Environment & Katrina-Slick Oil Fallout"

Drought in the "Amazon", and in "Australia".

Science research communication and climate change: "Research, Politics and Working Less", and "Science Communication".

Why did so many journalists, columnists, editors, bloggers and commenters miss the most obvious clues to science misinformation in a recent bisphenol-A (BPA) story? Why didn't a Knight Journalism blogger call an ethics foul on the guy originating the gross error, as opposed to taking his side and accusing journalists of "ethics breaches?"

Where's The Shining Armored Knight?

A recent "Science Stories" piece at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker site funded by the MIT Knight Journalism Fellowship Program piqued my interest. KSJ tracker Charlie Petit wrote that a Huffington Post columnist was correct to reprimand a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS) managing editor for "breaching journalistic ethics".

According to Petit, the ethics violations occurred after Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's (MJS) opinion columnist Pat McIlheran wrote a short column on bisphenol A (BPA). McIlheran said he based his column on a science study. However, George Stanley, the managing editor for MJS, wrote in a comment to McIlheran's story that the author relied on a study by researchers who had conflicts of interest. Knight writer Petit weighed in after being alerted to the "breach" by a HuffPo columnist/American Enterprise Institute (AEI)/Stats.org writer. Petit wrote: "traditional lines of free speech protection have been crossed in a news room". (links to all articles below)

So the Knight Writer Criticized The MJS Manager of Journalistic Ethics --> Based on the Accusations of a BPA Shill writing for HuffPo --> Who Defended the Columnist Who Copied the Words --> of The Same BPA Shill Writing at AEI --> Shills Bent on Promoting Research Funded By the Plastics Industry -- Get It?

Petit stressed that columnists like McIlheran should have freedom to write "reasonably justified opinions" without "worry of public ripostes", especially "from senior members of the news team". As he put it:

"McIlheran was hired to write opinions based on reasonable grounds. The German study seems to provide them, even if it turns out to be wrong. The ME [managing editor] should have pushed "delete" before adding his thoughts to the public comment string...a misdemeanor violation of journalism's non-codified book of ethics, I'd say."

Petit compared the MJS's editor's ethical breach to the Washington Post's handling of a George Will column a couple of years ago. I assume Petit means Will's column "Deep Dark Doomsayers", which scientists, online journalists, writers and newseditors tore apart in February, 2009.

One Man's Hogwash is Another's Gold

The difference, Knight's Petit wrote, is that Will's article was "hogwash", whereas McIheran based his MJS column on real "science", specifically: "the German study". As well, said Petit, critics of the Post column called on op/ed editors to fact check their columnists, whereas the MJS editor breached ethics by commenting online.

I disagree. First, let's quickly consider Petit's comparison of Will's unreasonable "hogwash" to McIlheran's column based on "reasonable grounds" that "the German study seems to provide". Go back and read Will's column. He did reference research, including from the prestigious journal Science. He also cited respected newspapers and magazines, and "quoted" respected experts like Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

By Petit's criteria, if the the MJS column is based on "reasonable grounds", it follows that Will's column is too. Only when people pointed out en masse how false Will's column was did it become "hogwash". ¹ Similarly, McIlheran's column falls apart even faster with one close look. Therefore, the difference, I contend, is that 1) Will was a known climate denialist 2) who denied accepted science, AND most importantly 3) scientists and journalists were paying attention.

News Flash For Journalists and Journalism Ethics Scholars: Repeating a Shill's Words in Your Column Does Not Make them Your Defensible Words

This is a story about journalists, columnists, editors, commenters, and bloggers not paying attention, and by doing so misleading readers.

In MclIheran's 300 word column, fewer than 75 of those words were his. Most words were Jon Entine's, who first wrote about "the German study" for the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) magazine "The American".² So while Petit declared that McIlheran's column was based on a scientific study "even if it turns out to be wrong" [clever, hedging like that], in fact McIlheran's MJS column was not based on a science study at all, it was based on someone else's interpretation of a study. The distinction is important. McIlheran linked to the study, but apparently didn't read it, because he repeated what he was told by Entine.

McIlheran/Entine's MJS column titled: "Bisphenol A? 'No Noteworthy Risk,' Says Big German Toxicology Panel", leverages the idea of a "big" panel and the large number of studies to substantiate claims of BPA's harmlessness. How large a number of studies? Wrote McIlheran:

"toxicologists reviewed about 5,000 studies and concluded that BPA, used in plastics lining the insides of metal cans and in some plastic bottles, is safe even in products used by young children and prenant women..."

Plus, he direct-quoted Entine's AEI article:

"some 200 studies--almost all small-scale 'explorative' studies on rats--have suggested that BPA might trigger biological activity, including possible neurological or endocrinological effects, and have called it an 'endocrine disruptor.' But after an extensive review of some 5,000 studies, the German toxicologists reaffirmed the scientific consensus that BPA is safe when used even by the most vulnerable populations--young children and pregnant women'"

The first time I read this I nearly spit my drink out of my mouth laughing at the rhetorical deceits, so clever, the: "small scale 'explorative' studies on rats"", "have suggested"", "have called it", and "reaffirmed the scientific consensus"; and not so funny: "even by the most vulnerable...". Together these words comprise two instances of "5,000 studies" and make up one-third of McIlheran's total word count. In short, he spares no space emphasizing the vast number of studies, in order to legitimize his claim that BPA is safe.

Fact-Checking

The gist, Entine/McIlheran wrote, is that scientists made an "extensive review of some 5,000 studies" and found "BPA is safe...even for the most vulnerable populations." The very people for which the FDA has the most concern.

So we glanced at the study abstract, as we're wont to do, and read the first two sentences, which say:

"Despite the fact that more than 5000 safety-related studies HAVE BEEN published on bisphenol A (BPA), there seems to be no resolution of the apparently deadlocked controversy as to whether exposure of the general population to BPA causes adverse effects due to its estrogenicity. Therefore, the Advisory Committee of the German Society of Toxicology reviewed the background and cutting-edge topics of this BPA controversy." (emphasis ours)

Does it say they reviewed 5,000 studies? No. No, they wrote: "more than 5,000 studies have been published". They repeated this line in the introduction of the paper for those who don't read abstracts. This of course makes more sense. I first clicked on the study because I wanted to see what the bibliography for a 5,000 study MEGA/METAreview would look like. 130-170 pages maybe? I wondered, did the journal publish a separate supplement to hold the bibliography?

No, the MJS columnist's source let's say, 'made a mistake'. But how did the mistake get propagated by so many journalists, editors, bloggers, and columnists, especially since this first clue that something was amiss was so easy to catch?

What the "big" panel of German scientists did, was claim "a controversy", then choose some "cutting-edge topics" to render opinions on, then when the press ignored the study (pretty difficult with BPA), AEI/Stats.org stepped in to publicize. (Reading the actual German study proved scintillating, but for now, we're focusing on the "ethics" of the whole thing.)

Define Free Speech

While Petit thinks the problem is the MJS editor, "ethics" and "free speech", I think the problem is that people at MJS, the Knight Science writer, and over one hundred commenters on all the various sites, plus many online sources, all repeated the false accounting. Repeated numbers put forward by industry without checking. Some of the writers even linked to the paper from their articles and/or directly quoted the study, but still said "5000 studies". To recap briefly:

• 1) In an AEI article Entine describes an "extensive review of some 5,000 studies" showing BPA is safe "even to young children and pregnant women".
• 2) Pat McIlheran, MJS columnist, repeats Entine's claim of an "extensive review of some 5,000 studies" finding BPA "harmless." He links to the study on PubMed. Why is the number of studies (albeit false) important? Ask McIlheran, who spent one-third of his post on it, or Entine, who emphasized the weight of "5,000" studies, versus the "200" studies.
• 3) George Stanley, managing editor of MJS criticizes McIlheran for quoting a study where "all" the authors have conflicts of interest, despite more obvious mistakes. ("5,000" is just one) MJS covered the BPA issue a few years ago, winning a George Polk Award, a John Oakes Award, a Grantham Prize Award, a Scripps Howard Award, a Pulitzer nomination, and spot on Bill Moyer's show. They were commended for reviewing over 200 scientific studies. The paper then basically stopped covering BPA.
• 4) Reporter Susanne Rust, award-winning former MJS writer (see above) and former Knight fellow, writes in a freelance MJS article that the "German study examined more than 5,000 scientific papers conducted on the health effects of BPA". Rust gathered comments from scientists for the article.
• 5) Jon Entine, writes a new article on HuffPo assailing both the MJS editor and reporter in a deceptively titled article: "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Faces Ethics Questions Over Award-Winning BPA Reporting". It's altogether ham-handed. He criticizes Stanley for commenting that "all" of the authors had conflicts of interest, when only a few did. Rust, he says, "glowingly touts the Journal Sentinel for examining nearly 260 studies (as compared to the German group, which reviewed 5,000 studies)".
• 6) Charlie Petit, the Knight Journalism author, links to the HuffPo piece, urges people to read it to understand the issues, and criticizes the MJS managing editor Stanley for "ethics violations" and curtailing a columnist's rights to free speech.

The thrust and parry continued at MJS and elsewhere, but still no corrections. The end result was that columnists, writers, and editors at MJS and HuffPo let Entine, AEI, and Stats.org produce their reporting for them. But if journalists had simply done a 10 second fact-check of the "5,000 studies" claim or other assertions made by their sources or study, would their reporting have informed instead of misled the public?

Fabricating Everything

Of course where there's one mistake, there's more, as in the Will column. For example, in his HuffPo article, Entine re-characterizes the FDA's statement that they have "some concern" for bisphenol A, making the FDA sound off-hand and parochial. In fact, the FDA elevated their concerns for BPA in 2010, especially for infants, children, and fetuses.

"When asked if children faced health dangers", Entine wrote, "Joshua Sharfstein, M.D., the agency's principal deputy commissioner, minced no words: "The FDA is not saying that it's unsafe to use a baby bottle with BPA", since "if we thought it was unsafe, we would be taking strong regulatory action."

He ignores the realities of regulation ³, but more importantly, if you read FDA briefing transcript, you'll see that no one in the briefing said what Entine alleges -- "minced words" or not -- despite the HuffPo "quotes". In the Entine world quotes simply mean what you wish the FDA officials said.

Former FDA Deputy Commissioner Dr. Sharfstein said the safety assessment was "ongoing", and "we [the FDA] share the perspective of the national toxicology program of some concern for the health effects of BPA at low doses in the food supply." Marc Smolonsky, HHS Associate Deputy Secretary, also at the briefing, said:

"we are recommending families and parents to minimize exposure to BPA", and "thanks to new technology and advances in science we now have new research findings about BPA that shows subtle effects of low doses of BPA in laboratory animals, and this has raised new concerns."

The FDA referred parents to HHS for ways to minimize BPA. The FDA also stressed their efforts to change the regulatory paradigm so that the BPA was not classified as a "food additive", a change which would enable the FDA to regulate chemical more effectively. An important goal for the agency is to bring the Toxic Substances and Chemical Act (TSCA) up to date.

Plastic Bottles Out of Sight, BPA Out of Mind?

Public attention to BPA dwindled when people replaced their Nalgene bottles but more than polycarbonate bottles is at stake. Cash register receipts contain BPA - who knew? Soda cans, canned food, and baby formula contain BPA? What else? We'd like to trust that BPA is a non-issue, but then corporations wouldn't be working so hard at misinformation would they?

And while companies know the size of the market for BPA and the thousands of chemicals (toxic and not) being used, you and I and the government don't know which chemicals are in use in what products, which are dangerous, which contain BPA or other toxic chemicals, and how extensive health risks might be. Companies like to keep this knowledge out of the public eye, so they fend off regulators by any means. But regulators also respond to citizens too, which is why it's important for citizens to keep attention to the issue even after newspapers have won their accolades and moved on to the next thing.

Back to the ethics and freedom of speech charges made by our Knight columnist/ethist/arbiter. I've mentioned some ideas, but you decide the ethics. Some questions I find interesting are:

• In contentious issues, "ethics" are often manipulated, bandied about, and brandished at people for made-up reasons or because those people offended the accuser somehow - for instance if it's a news reporter whose investigative reporting threatens a company's profits. So then, if we trust Petit's claim that he's concerned with ethics, are his "non-codified rules" a good way to set ethical standards for the publishing industry?
• The real purpose of comment sections of on-line reporting is for 2-way conversation -- in internet time. The Knight columnist dredges up some ethics charge based on Entine's column, than tries to confine the disagreement to some hidden newsroom meeting place. Why? McIlheran wrote a patently false column on behalf of the chemical industry - basically. The editor, knowledgeable on the subject, wrote a short comment, pointing this out. Banning knowledgeable people turns comments sections into cages for the riffraff to slur one another. Why wouldn't the reader benefit from seeing discussion among the newspaper staff?

  If McIlheran, the column's author, as opposed to Entine, his AEI/Stats.org source, thinks the managing editor made a mistake, why doesn't he add a comment - participate - rather than, as he did, write a whole new column propagating the myths?

• Petit writes that the managing editor compromised McIlheran's freedom of speech. But this is patently false because McIlheran already exercised his freedom of speech, as did Entine, in publishing the MJS column with its claims about big new BPA studies. How could the managing editor's comment violate that? That freedom was not impinged.
• In fact, isn't it violating George Stanley's freedom of speech to curtail him from commenting? Should he write pseudonymously? After all, who essentially wrote McIlheran's column? No McIlheran but
• Given that there are no "codified rules", isn't it curtailing the free speech of the MJS editor to suggest he can't comment? What if the editor commented positively -- "this is a great summary"? Or neutrally - "this is a great summary of AEI's position!" Would that be ok?
• Has Knight's Petit in effect granted corporations/lobbyists freedom of speech over the press -- or individuals -- depending on how you see Stanley's position?

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¹ Coincidentally Stats.org asserts that they're not denialists because they believe in global warming.

² Milwaukee's Best No Longer. By Jon Entine Friday, April 29, 2011

³ We wish the FDA were that efficient, but they're not, they're the epitome of bureaucratic, and when their labyrinths falter there's always OIRA.

Acronym Required's authors have followed Bisphenol A science, regulation and lobbying since 2005. To be continued.

A Republican state senator in Oregon cleverly killed a state bill to ban bisphenol A when he reneged on a deal he made with Democrat senator. The bill to ban bisphenol-A in baby bottles (SB 695) had received bipartisan support in a 20-9 vote in April. With such support, people predicted it would continue to committee, but the GOP had other plans.

Oregon Senator Jackie Dingfelder, D-Portland, recounted an agreement she had made with Oregon House environment committee co-chair, Representative Vic Gilliam, R-Silverton. Apparently the two worked out that he would initiate a work session on SB 695 in exchange for committee action on some other bills. According to Dingfelder, Gilliam ditched his end of the bargain and effectively squashed the bill. Gilliam then sent Dingfelder a bottle of Chardonnay and a scrawled note that read: "After all I put you thru yesterday - it is a tribute to your character that you would keep the 1st and 2 parts of our pow-wow inspite of it all."[sic]

Dingfelder told reporters that Gilliam's reasons for dropping the bill were unclear - he indicated the GOP pressured him. One Republican lawmaker offered: "it's not because I want to kill children".

Plastics industry lobbyists had also campaigned against the bill. For instance the American Chemistry Council wrote a letter in early May to Ben Cannon and Vic Gilliam, co-chairs of the state House Energy, Environment and Water Committee. In the letter, ACC used isolated quotes from government agencies about research on canned and packaged food to argue incongruously that polycarbonate baby bottles shouldn't be banned. The letter also misrepresented the US FDA position. The FDA is especially concerned about the endocrine disrupting effects of BPA on babies, and advises parents to avoid using bottles with BPA. It advocates alternatives to BPA lined food containers. Yet the ACC letter stated "optimistically" that the FDA said BPA is "not unsafe" (safe).

Representative Gilliam also voted against a plastic bag ban, noting he thought they should be recycled instead. He said he was disappointed Dingfelder had released their personal correspondence to reporters.

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In "Medicine on the Move", Gail Collins opens her column with this: "sometimes you really do want to tell the medical profession to just make up its mind".

She writes: "estrogen therapy, which was bad, is good again. Possibly. In some cases." Not only that, she continues, current research shows that calcium pills are not "good" anymore and because of conflicting research women don't know whether or not to check for lumps or even get mammograms. The column seems sympathetic to women, who are presented as collectively confused by the scattershot findings of medical research: "'It's very difficult to be a woman,'" Collins quotes Dr. Leslie Ford of the National Cancer Institute.

You understand what she's saying. And not only is it tough to be a woman, it's tough to be a man. On prostate tests, should men screen? Operate? Oh, now don't operate. And the latest, don't even screen. What should men do?

And what about children? Treat their teeth with fluoride or not? Eat organic or not? Give them plastic bottles or not?

The bottom line is, we all care to some extent about personal health choices, and depend on the latest research to make our decisions. Doctors can help by passing on recommendations based on the research and their own filtering of the risks of one action or another. But the research can be confusing. One research study rarely drives a decision, rather, bodies of research sway medical recommendations like the one to recommend that women take hormones after menopause to preserve youth. And now, 50 years later, the recommendation that women not take hormone pills.

When hormones were first recommended for women a half a century ago, even then there were concerns about possible side effects. But doctors, women, and media surged ahead with treatment. Now, after many women have stopped hormone therapy recent studies are showing that some women benefit from hormones while for others there's limited risks. The science is slowly capable of a finer grain analysis of the issues.

The tricky part is translating the results of many research studies into public health recommendations. As this challenges doctors and those in public health, patients are also confused by what sometimes seems like an arbitrary process. The barrage of pharmaceutical ads on television is not helpful. And the barrage of "studies" reported in the press is mind-numbing. Based just on the media, it's too easy for the consumer to view each study as a separate public health recommendation, since the press presents studies not necessarily to educate but grab eyeballs and sell ads.

Is Coffee Bad For You?

Take for instance the press report last week on research that people who eat fatty meals then drink coffee can raise their blood sugar -- dangerously. Science Daily published an article titled: "Got a Craving for Fast Food? Skip the Coffee, Study Suggests". The title is not very intuitive, but hundreds of news outlets explained by quoting the author of the study, who stressed the importance of the study's findings for people with diabetes and metabolic disease: "We have known for many years that people with or at risk of Type 2 diabetes should limit their caffeine intake". She continued:

"Drinking decaffeinated coffee instead of caffeinated is one way to improve one's glucose tolerance. Limiting the intake of saturated fatty acids found in red meat, processed foods and fast food meals is also beneficial. This study has shown that the affects of these foods can be severe and long lasting."

"Severe and long lasting" -- wow, that's alarming. Let's check it out. What do other studies find? Indeed, previous research suggests there's a connection between caffeine and diabetes. For instance in the column to the right of the story on the Science Daily site, under "Related Stories", is a link to one story titled: "Cutting Caffeine May Help Control Diabetes (Jan. 28, 2008)". So two studies that say the same thing, that caffeine is linked to diabetes, and cutting it may control diabetes.

"New Evidence That Drinking Coffee May Reduce the Risk of Diabetes (June 10, 2010)" (my emphasis). Aha! That story conflicts with the other two in saying that caffeine may reduce diabetes.

What Happens to Mice who Drink Coffee Instead of Water?

I'm going to call this the "The Caffeine Controversy". The latest 2011 and 2008 stories appear to agree, so lets look at the 2010 story, published in "ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry". I'm not an expert in caffeine physiology or diabetes, so I'm going to do some basic stuff to try to learn more about whether I should believe the study.

First, who's the publisher? Different journals have different levels of clout or respect. ACS, the American Chemical Society is a professional organization for chemists, not to be confused with the lobby group the American Chemical Council (ACC). The researchers come from Nagoya and Kinki Universities, in Japan, as well as Pokka Corporation, a drink company. 4 out of 12 researchers come fom Pokka Corporation and the coffee used in the study was "a gift". So hmmm...It's not that coffee is that expensive or that great research isn't done by corporations, but just in general, how often does corporate sponsored research show that their product is dangerous to health? But lets keep looking at this study anyway.

The actual title of the paper is "Coffee and Caffeine Ameliorate Hyperglycemia, Fatty Liver, and Inflammatory Adipocytokine Expression in Spontaneously Diabetic KK-Ay Mice", which is way more nuanced than the press title "New Evidence That Drinking Coffee May Reduce the Risk of Diabetes". The study looks at physiological markers of lab mice genetically altered to become insulin resistant. The mice were given coffee instead of water in their diet, before being tested for biochemical markers hyperglycemia and diabetes.

We could look further at the specific tests they did, their statistics, the length of the study, the amount of caffeine used, or the effects of substituting coffee for water. We could examine their specific results, for instance fasting blood sugar was statistically insignificant between both groups, so they did an insulin tolerance test that showed the desired difference. But like most people, we don't have the immediate knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of these tests, so this would take a fair amount time. So instead let's look for studies that seem from the outset to be without conflicts of interest. Not that you should ever make assumptions.

What Happens to Humans who Drink Coffee?

So far we've looked a three studies and still don't have an answer, therefore the benefits or dangers of coffee remain "a controversy". And we don't even drink coffee, so do we care? But we're really curious about this statement from the researcher in the latest 2011 study, "We have known for many years that people with or at risk of Type 2 diabetes should limit their caffeine intake."

Why are we curious? This is a significant statement. According to NIH statistics from 2011, diabetes affects 25.8 million people. This amounts to 8.3 % of the US population according to the NIH, 11% of people over 20 years old, and 26.9% of people over 65 years old. About 30% of people over 65 years old have undiagnosed diabetes.

According the National Coffee Association daily coffee drinkers make up around 50% of the US population of about 300 billion people. Obviously, there's an overlap between these two huge groups. So it would be really relevant if the advice "avoid coffee consumption" were to be added to "exercise and lose weight" to prevent diabetes? And if this is the case, why then, do at least some hospitals treating patients who are diabetic allow them to drink coffee?

We'll turn to PubMed, where lots of published science research is collected. Fortunately, other researchers have also turned to Pubmed or MEDLINE to answer this very question. Two epidemiology studies have recently found that coffee actually lowers incidence of type II diabetes. These are fairly large studies that if true would dispute the current study. Lets look briefly at them.

One group from Harvard's Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology, Brigham and Woman's, Harvard Medical School, and Vrije Universiteit's Department of Nutrition and Health, searched MEDLINE through January 2005 and found nine cohort studies culminating 193,473 study participants. They results of all these studies show that habitual coffee consumption decreases risk of Type II diabetes (van Dam et al: "Coffee Consumption and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes A Systematic Review" JAMA. 2005;294(1):97-104. doi: 10.1001/jama.294.1.97). That's a pretty solid epidemiological finding. The group doesn't appear to have conflicts of interest.

A second group with researchers from the US, France, Australia, Netherlands and Scotland. Huxley, R. et al: "Coffee, Decaffeinated Coffee, and Tea Consumption in Relation to Incident Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Systematic Review With Meta-analysis" looked at prospective studies between 1966 and 2009, 18 studies with 457,922 participants, also found an inverse relationship between diabetes and self-reported coffee, as well as tea and decaffeinated coffee drinking. This too is a solid finding. So these two studies differ from the one we're looking at, but it's fair to say that the results of epidemiological studies can differ from studies showing some metabolic influences of coffee.

Should Humans Forgo Coffee?

Of course there are more studies, in humans, in mice, epidemiological studies, and biochemical and physiological studies. For now, although it seems as though coffee may indeed alter glucose homeostasis, this may not add up to something that can be seen in epidemiological studies. It doesn't mean coffee doesn't have an effect, or isn't harmful. We could keep looking at studies if we drank coffee and wanted to make a decision about this. But circling back to the original study, we'd venture that the Ph.D student/researcher's statement, "we've known for years" that people at risk for diabetes (a third the population) shouldn't drink coffee (1/2 the population) is at best hyperbolic. More so considering that the paper's discussion section notes that one of their results may explain the "negative correlation between long- term coffee consumption and type 2 diabetes risks".

And since this was reported in hundreds of news reports, lets also look quickly at the methodology. The 2011 paper used 11 volunteers. Being that this was a controlled experiment, subjects fasted for 12 hours after going two days without coffee, exercise or alcohol. The researchers then had participants drink a "fat cocktail", which consisted of 1 gram of fat/1 kg of body weight. (I don't know what the exact fat composition of the drink was because I couldn't find the "Supplemental Table II".)

But if you were a 160 pound male (72 kg), your experimental "fat cocktail" would consist of 72 grams of fat, which amounts to 5.5 tablespoons of soybean oil (one of the ingredients used in the study); or more familiar to most people, 24 tablespoons of half & half cream; more than 3 McDonald's Double Cheeseburgers; (.pdf); or about 3 orders of large McDonald's French Fries. I don't know what you think, but this pile of food would be outside the range of and meal choice for me. The participants then waited five hours, before drinking the caffeine equivalent of 2-3 cups of coffee (5 mg/kg body weight). 1 hour later they were fed 75g of dextrose (like glucose) - about 75 grams of high-glycemic carbohydrates. By comparison, a large Coke from McDonalds has about 86g of carbohydrates and a package of sugar has about 4 grams of carbohydrates. This protocol, the fat then the sugar after a 12 hour fast, caused a physiological response in the participants. Suprise?

Crave Fast Food? Skip The Three McDonald's Cheeseburgers

"Craving Fast Food, Skip the Coffee", the title of the press report warns. But what if when "craving fast food" you just skipped the three cheeseburgers? What if you just had a small coffee in the morning, with your non-fat yogurt or your dry toast, ok maybe a pat of butter. What would that do? What if the press report for any study actually reported the real story about the research?

Or, what if the press report just included the actual title of the research? In this case the title of the research was: "An Oral Lipid Challenge and Acute Intake of Caffeinated Coffee Additively Decrease Glucose Tolerance in Healthy Men." This is a lot different than what the media reported. And while eating 6 tablespoons of soybean oil upon arising AM after a 12 hour fast might be something some people do, and indeed the results may be interesting, how does this translate to any sort of public health recommendation like the ones the authors and news is trying to make?

What if when interviewed, the lead author said, as she did in her paper ¹ that while a few studies have shown glucose responses to caffeine, there is actually a "negative correlation between long- term coffee consumption and type 2 diabetes risks?" What Science Daily published instead was basically a false statement "We have known for many years that people with or at risk of Type 2 diabetes should limit their caffeine intake", which the researcher qualified (above) by advising people not to eat a lot of red meat and to drink decaf. Isn't this last advice, just common sense? But then does it follow from their study? No. It's previous research.

As a consumer of health news, it's worth reading the actual studies, or even just looking at the title, because as we showed, they often contradict the headline in the press. Secondly studies differ. Epidemiological studies where people self report, differ from other literature reviews, differ from lab mice studies, and from studies where people are attached to an IV. Different methodologies between the same type of study can yield different results.

As consumers we could try to understand all the nuance differences, but like Gail Collins, I think it's impossible. It's enough just to know that different methodologies can produce different results but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. This may sound confusing, but it isn't any more confusing then talking to multiple people about anything, from fixing the squeak in your car to whether your tie looks good.

You may rightly point out that the caffeine controversy is different than the estrogen controversy that Collins refers to. But it's really not. You have scientific research presented by the media, which is a meld of companies with vested interests, scientists, reporters biases and limitations, and doctors and clinicians. Consumers (patients) need to make sense of it all.

Tragically, people got cancer from estrogen therapy. People will die from heart attacks, obesity, diabetes. Decisions they make about coffee may influence the rate of their demise, but we don't exactly know how. The indefiniteness of research today does not help us make today's decisions.

Or does it? Is it the science or medical professions who confuse us? Doctors? Or the press and pharmaceutical companies? Or do we confuse ourselves rather than trying to understand some basic stuff about scientific publishing, press releases, the news industry, doctors, and business? In the case of our 2011 science research study on caffeine, the actual peer-reviewed published study was fairly informative about the limitations of the research. Even the title was elucidating. I haven't yet seen widespread physician's recommendations regarding the dangers of coffee. The most hyperbolic accounts in this case occurred in the press (perhaps with the help of the Ph.D. student - and where was the adviser?)

Most professions are required to take continuing education credits. If we're in charge of our health except for periodic ten minute interactions with the doctor, maybe we should be trying to understand how science, medicine and news industries work in order to take care of ourselves? I'm not talking about diagnosing ourselves. In this case, most consumers know what a somewhat healthy diet looks like, and that it doesn't involve 3 orders of large fries at McDonalds for breakfast. People know they need to exercise. The consensus of scientists and doctors is not controversial, it's simple, we need not be confused. But fruits, vegetables and exercise don't sell newspapers and pharmaceutical drugs.

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¹ M.-S. Beaudoin, L. E. Robinson, T. E. Graham. An Oral Lipid Challenge and Acute Intake of Caffeinated Coffee Additively Decrease Glucose Tolerance in Healthy Men. Journal of Nutrition, 2011; 141 (4): 574 DOI: 10.3945/jn.110.132761

My first vision of an earthquake and tsunami was provided by Pearl Buck's 1948 book "The Big Wave", which I read as a child. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami provided vivid details absent in Buck's fiction. This month, Japan's Tohoku earthquake and tsunami surpassed anything we ever knew or could envision. Media provided what fiction and after-the-fact reporting had for centuries left largely to our imaginations and movies. The footage gave a surrealistic feel for the destruction of earthquakes, as we watched people run as huge huge boats got tossed by nature like toys an errant child flings might fling in a bathtub.

Compounding our worries, the modern nuclear world further complicates natural disasters. When Buck wrote in 1948, people were just waking up to both the potential of nuclear power and its immense ability to destruct.

If real events weren't unsettling enough, some people in the media expound on this fear by spreading rumors. Newsweek published an article predicting the next earthquake, titled "The Scariest Earthquake is Yet to Come".

The article described the Pacific Rim's "Ring of Fire" as "a giant bell", with earthquakes occurring sequentially around the reverberating bell. First Chile, then Japan, next the West Coast. Unfortunately Newsweek dabbles in unscientific fear-mongering as we've previously noted, and scientists roundly criticized the article and its bell analogy. But that didn't stop people from believing it, trusted news-source and all.

Watching the Animals

Some in the media took the fear-mongering to the next level. For Neil Cavuto of Fox News, the Newsweek story was just a jumping off point. He decide to push the fear by interview Jim Berkland, a former Santa Clara county employee who used to work evaluating buildings for earthquake risk.

Berkland achieved notoriety in 1989 after he told The Gilroy Dispatch ("serving the greater Gilroy, CA area"), that the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 was imminent. Berkland "predicted" the earthquake by noting full moons, high tides, and cataloging newspaper accounts of lost cats and dogs. As he told one reporter,

"'If you clip out the lost pet columns and splice them together then you will get an excellent bar graph' that shows a build-up to a peak just before an earthquake". (Nov. 30, 1990, The Orange County Register)

Fox's Cavuto described the bell phenomena from Newsweek, and

"what scientists are increasingly calling the so-called ring of fire that is encircling the entire Pacific Ocean"

.

Of course the term "Ring of Fire" isn't newly dubbed, my ancient Rand McNally atlas maps show the Pacific "Ring of Fire" subduction zones. As Berkland told Fox:

"Just before the World Series quake there was very unusual beaching of rare whales in the Ocean Beach, in San Francisco. Just after that, a equally rare pygmy sperm whale washed up at Santa Cruz, within about five miles of the epicenter of the World Series quake. That kind of beaching had never occurred before nor since. So we're looking for strange fish coming into from deep water to the shallow water, wild animals coming into cities."

Over the years, Berkland's criteria for predicting earthquakes has included full moons, high tides, lost homing pigeons, people with headaches, as well as "strange fish and wild animal" sightings. Let's look just at his claims of strange fish and wild animals losing their bearing. If you think about it for one second you'll realize this is not rare. As the world's human population expands, wildlife will inevitably cross our paths, more often as we increasingly disturb them. In a series covering a court case, Acronym Required documented increasing numbers of whale beachings and strandings suspected to be caused by military sonar. In "Whales in a Time of War", we wrote in 2007, "mid-frequency sonar testing caused whale strandings and deaths in North Carolina (2005); at Haro Strait off the coast of Washington State (2003); in the Canary Islands (2004, 2002, 1989, 1986, 1985); Madeira (2000); the U.S. Virgin Islands (1999, 1998); Greece (1996), and the Bahamas (2000)."

This is just whales suspected to be stranded because of sonar, not dolphins, giant squid, or devil crabs. This doesn't include bird and bee die-offs, wayward sea lions, or starving polar bears. If you could actually track the real number of lost, washed up and otherwise misplaced domesticated animals, marine mammals, wildcats, birds, bugs, fish, etc., Berkland's theory would drown instantly in the noisy cacophony of irrelevant data.

Although Berkland said that the rare pygmy sperm whale beaching prior to the Loma Prieta earthquake is unprecedented, scientists say the opposite. Pygmy sperm whales are about dolphin sized, and there have been hundreds of pygmy sperm whale strandings. The animals strand for various reasons, old age, illness, predators, toxins, from following porpoises, or pods sticking with a sick member. They're also deep diving mammals like the dolphins we described in Whales In The Supreme Court, which scientists suspect are more sensitive to sonar.

Recently, a calf and its mother pygmy sperm whale were stranded and died on a beach in Florida. George Beidenbach, director of conservation programs for the Georgia Aquarium's Dolphin Conservation Field Station at Marineland, noted that pygmy sperm whale strandings are the second-most frequent among whales and dolphins, second only to bottlenose dolphins. According to Beidenbach, volunteers come upon whale or dolphin strandings about once a month just on that particular beach. Two different pygmy sperm whales stranded on nearby beaches within a couple of weeks of that mother/pup stranding.

In my very cursory perusal, just for California, there were at least one or two documented strandings of pygmy sperm whales in 1981, 1989, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2008. This only includes incidences where the strandings were 1) observed 2) reported in a newspaper 3) happened to be seen by me in my brief search. The titles of these newspaper stories inevitably call such strandings "rare". But what are they going to title their news, the editors? "Extremely common and utterly boring pygmy sperm whale stranding?" Unsurprisingly, pygmy sperm whales also wash up in places that don't experience earthquakes -- Texas, France, UK...

Berkland notes natural phenomena to predict earthquakes within a broad window of time for a sometimes expansive geographical area. In December 1999, for instance, he predicted an earthquake between the 23rd and 29th of the month, as one reporter wrote: "with an 85 percent chance of a 3.5-to-6 shaker within 140 miles of San Jose, and an 85 percent chance of a 7-plus somewhere in the world, probably in the Pacific Rim". (Ostler, S. "Cheesy Thoughts on the Moon" Dec. 23 San Francisco Chronicle) As you can imagine, such a non-specific "prediction" heightens the odds of being right. But it still barely increases Berkland's success rate, which incidentally, he claims is much higher than what unbiased observers note.

Predicting Earthquakes, Genius or Beautiful Mind?

For his recent prediction for an earthquake last week on the West Coast -- it didn't happen -- Berkland told Cavuto about a "massive fish kill in Redondo Beach [sardines], a massive fish sweep in in a Mexico [I guess in addition to the drug sweeps], and a bunch of whales come in close to San Diego". If animals swimming within sight in any way predicted earthquakes and tsunamis, not only would whale-watching tourist excursions go out of business but we'd all be up to our ears in earthquake debris or washed out to sea. Nevertheless, plenty of people give in to the fear that Berkland might somehow be right.

But ironically, perhaps focusing on imaginary impending doom distracts people from doing the actual work of preparing for disaster. They twitter fears manufactured by Berkland's full-moon/lost dogs accounts, instead of acting usefully. They could for starters insist that California cities publish the locations of soft-story buildings. Cities are not releasing the data because property owners don't want property values to decrease. Property values are more important that lives lost to collapsed buildings? Twitter that.

Berkland himself used to evaluate building safety for Santa Clara county. Upon his retirement in 1994, one reporter noted that Berkland was respected in the county for assuring building safety and even going head to head with developers. But somewhere along the line, Berkland went from doing the day to day regulatory enforcement work -- helpful, tedious and probably contentious, to the more illustrious role talking to Fox-News TV. "He's a lively and agreeable man with a head full of facts, figures and memories he is eager to share", the same reporter wrote, continuing:

"Interviewing Berkland is like shooting the rapids in a canoe steered only with a Popsicle stick. The current sweeps you willy-nilly from one thought to the next: the baby bobcat he raised as a pet. The fossil shrew he discovered in 1963, later named Adeloblarina berklandi in his honor. The horned toads he caught as he grew up in Glendale..." (Chui, Glennda, San Jose Mercury News April 29, 1994)

The San Francisco Chronicle reported two decades ago that Berkland's wife called him "a walking encyclopedia, with the kind of memory that absorbs incredible amounts of numbers but allows him to forget what it was he went to the store for." (Minton, Torri Jan. 30, 1990 "An Unshakeable Quake Predictor Unfazed by Scorn"). These traits don't necessarily designate an Einstein in our midst, but perhaps help business. Berkland conducts interviews, and runs a for-charge earthquake prognostication call-in line, a website and newsletter.

Earthquake prediction is the type of gig that attracts a certain notoriety and appreciation, as does palm reading. Berkland's not the only one who claims to predict earthquakes, and in this tough economy it's quite nice to see that some such fervent prognosticators find paying audiences.

Unfortunately though, some media outlets are all too willing to make a main attraction out of a sideshow. Fear-mongering distracts attention from politicians spurred by vested interests to clamor that even less money be spent helping protect people from the real catastrophes. In natural disasters, buildings collapse and tsunamis wash out beachfront properties. Nuclear and chemical accidents occur along earthquake prone subduction zones. Inevitably, as has happened with Japan's TEPCO, responsible parties ignore safety measures. But until that catastrophe, people entertain themselves with the imaginary warning bells on a map instead of, for instance, ensuring functional warning bells in earthquake prone towns.