Friday, October 16, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Science of Scams: Derren Brown and Kat the Scientist debunk the paranormal industry

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 02:53 AM PDT

The Science of Scams is a new project from Channel 4 and mentalist/magician Derren Brown that aims to debunk the paranormal industry's lucrative claims about ghosts, fortune-telling, telekinesis and other assorted woo woo. Brown and C4 produced seven videos purporting to show the kind of "paranormal" activity held up as evidence of the supernatural and released them on YouTube for several weeks, allowing people to make what they will of them. Now, they're revealing the hoax videos once per week, with accompanying videos that explain how the scam works. The show is presented by Kat the Scientist, who did postgrad research in Biological Anthropology and Pharmacology at Oxford.

I love this to pieces and I've been waiting to tell you about it for months -- you see, it was commissioned by my brilliant and talented wife Alice Taylor for Channel 4, as part of C4's educational/public service remit. And that, friends, is why my marriage kicks ass.

Science of Scams

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Brit ISP TalkTalk shows why cutting people off because a record exec says they're file-sharers is dumb

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 01:46 AM PDT

The British ISP TalkTalk has produced a compelling case against the government's plans to disconnect whole households from the Internet if the copyright industry accuses them -- without proving anything in court -- of three acts of infringement. TalkTalk picked a random street in North London and showed that 23 of the households in that road were using WEP security to stop strangers from accessing their networks. WEP has been thoroughly broken for years, but many older games consoles, phones and other devices are only capable of using WEP to connect to WiFi networks. TalkTalk argues that householders who have done everything they can to secure their networks from people who want to use them for cover during illegal file-sharing are still vulnerable to being disconnected by record- and film-company execs.

Households that are subjected to this form of collective punishment -- "someone around here broke the law, so you'll all suffer" -- lose access to the net, and with it, connectivity related to their employment, education, family connections, health, and government. All on the unsubstantiated say-so of the same entertainment companies that have previously accused a laser-printer of illegally downloading an Indiana Jones movie, not to mention the small legion of dead people; ancient, non-computer-owning grannies; and other innocents who've been legally threatened by the music industry for alleged copyright infringement.

A rep from the record industry insists that he has bought some magic beans "robust" evidence-gathering software that will never, ever cut someone off from the Internet on false pretences, so we don't need judges or evidence or trials or any of that messy business. But, of course, if someone is hacking your WiFi without your knowledge, he's prepared to cut you off from the Internet, because "the responsibility for ensuring that an internet account shared throughout a household is not being used for illegal filesharing clearly lies with the account holder."

ISP in file-sharing wi-fi hack

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Air conditioner disguised as cartoony TV

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 11:50 PM PDT


Love this air-conditioner cover ("Tape & painted cardboard on window AC unit cover, Bushwick, Brooklyn NY") snapped by Flickr user Dbilly.

Televox (via Neatorama)

Impressionist Cake

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:54 PM PDT

Makers 6x6 tile game

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:47 PM PDT


Tor has updated the tile game that accompanies the ongoing serial of my forthcoming novel Makers, which comes out at the end of the month (and boy am I excited! Publishers Weekly called it "Brilliant" and a "Tour de force" and Library Journal called it "Enthusiastically recommended").

Each installment in the serial has been accompanied by a CC-licensed image from Idiots' Books, and the images tile, lining up with one another on all four sides. Tor is tossing these images into a Flash-toy that allows you to arrange and rotate these to your heart's content.

The serial is up to 44 parts now, and the first 36 illos have been combined into a new, expanded, 6X6 version of the tile game (we'll do the 7x7 soon, then the 8x8 and finish up with a 9x9 incorporating all 81!).

Makers Tile Game 6x6

Index of Makers installments

Previously:


Repository of Read-Along Adventure book-and-records

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:39 PM PDT


The mission of the Read-Along Adventures site is to assemble the audio and scanned pages from every Read-Along book ever created -- these were the short picture books that came with a 45RPM record that narrated them, with cues to turn the page as necessary. Where possible, the curator has recreated the Read-Alongs as Flash apps. There's even audio for the Haunted Mansion record. How lovely!

Read-Along Adventures (Thanks, TimK!)

Best microscopic photos of the past 35 years

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:35 PM PDT


Wired Science rounds up the winners of the past 35 years' worth of Nikon prizes for excellence in microscopic photography. These are just stunning. Shown here: 2001: Fresh water rotifer feeding among debris (200x), Darkfield. / Harold TaylorKensworth, UK.

35 Years of the World's Best Microscope Photography (Thanks, @timoreilly!)

Previously:


Toyota marketing stalks and terrorizes woman, claims she consented by doing an online personality test

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:32 PM PDT

Toyota marketing created some kind of ill-conceived alternate reality game whose premise was that you were being stalked by an unhinged criminal who sent you threatening emails saying that he was coming to your house, backstopped by things like MySpace profiles and even angry bills from hotels he trashed on the way, having given your name as the payment contact. A woman didn't realize that these were a marketing prank and thought she was being stalked, got scared, lived her life in fear, and then sued.

Toyota's defense? The woman had taken some online survey in which the fine print gave them permission to send her "marketing and other communications."

Duick's attorney said the marketing company went so far as to send Duick a bill for damages the fictitious man supposedly made to a hotel room...

The alleged harassment lasted five days, according to the suit, and frightened Duick so much she contacted neighbors, friends and family, and the occupant of her former home about the man she feared was coming to visit. Her attorney declined to comment as to whether or not she called the police. She even made her longtime boyfriend sleep with a club and mace next to the bed for protection...

It turns out the prank was actually part of a marketing effort executed by the Los Angeles division of global marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which created the campaign to promote the Toyota Matrix, a new model launched in 2008...

Tepper, Duick's attorney, said he discussed the campaign with Toyota's attorneys earlier this year, and they said the "opting in" Harp referred to was done when Duick's friend e-mailed her a "personality test" that contained a link to an "indecipherable" written statement that Toyota used as a form of consent from Duick.

Tepper, said that during those legal negotiations, Toyota's lawyers claimed Duick signed the written legal agreement, which they said amounts to "informed written consent."

Woman Sues Toyota Over 'Terrifying' Prank (via /.)

Huge fanged mouth hoodies

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 11:33 PM PDT

The Discovery store has these amazing wild animal hoodies (cobra, raptor, whale, shark) whose sleeves turn into huge fanged mouths when you cross your arms. I wish they didn't just have a boy modelling these -- they are definitely unisex.

Raptor Hoodie Shirt (via Geisha Asobi)

Update: The shirts come from Mouthman, and they're modelled by boys and girls on the site! Thanks to the anonymous commenter who alerted us to this!


Illustration of Makezine Man

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:51 PM PDT

ta4j77.jpg In response to a post I wrote earlier about Maywa Denki president Nobumichi Tosa's depiction of Engadget Man, Boing Boing reader RogueModron has created a solder-gun-carrying, motor-oil-haired Makezine man. But the real question is, can anybody accurately draw a Boing Boing Person?

Parish leader denies marriage license to interracial couple

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 02:49 PM PDT

A parish leader in Hammond, Louisiana is in the hot seat with the ACLU for refusing to grant a marriage license to a mixed race couple. Keith Bardwell of Tangipahoa Parish insists that he is not a racist, he's merely looking out for the well-being of the children that the couple might bear.
"I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children." ...He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said. "I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."
Meanwhile, the yet-to-be-married couple, 30-year old Beth Humphrey and 32-year old Terence McKay, are looking to file a discrimination complaint with the Justice Department, and the ACLU is asking the Louisiana Supreme Court to investigate. Just for the record, it is illegal for a parish leader to refuse to marry a couple on the basis of their race. Interracial couple denied marriage license in La.

Boy missing after experimental balloon crash lands

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:22 PM PDT

Falcon Heene, a six-year-old boy from Colorado is missing after an experimental balloon crash landed. The boy's brother said he saw Falcon get in the balloon before it went into the air. It rose to about 11,000 feet before returning to the ground near Denver.

Police are looking for the boy. Some say he may have fallen from the balloon and others think he never got in the balloon but is hiding because he doesn't want to get into trouble.

It doesn't look to me like a helium-filled balloon this small could carry a kid aloft.

No sign of boy said to have floated off on balloon

Update: He was hiding in a cardboard box in the garage all along! [CNN]

Musical Stairs

Posted: 14 Oct 2009 06:30 PM PDT

Swedish designers get commuters off the escalator by making the stairs more fun. It's awesome. And, yet, part of me wonders how creepy this would be if you were descending into the subway alone late at night. Plink...plink....plink...

Laura Levine photography at Brooklyn Museum exhibition of Rock & Roll photography 1955-present

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:03 PM PDT

remBBQ.jpg

Painter and photographer Laura Levine is one of several photographers whose work is on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum's Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present. She says: "The exhibition and companion book include two of my favorite portraits, of Bjork and R.E.M. To mark this event, I am making signed fine art prints of both these images available through a special offer."

UPDATE: Here's a link to a many more rock and roll photographs by Laura. They include interesting background stories.

Laura Levine fine art and photography prints

Why Your Idea to Save Journalism Won't Work (a checklist)

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 01:05 PM PDT

Oh, how I love fightorflight from Metafilter's checklist on why your plan to save journalism won't work. Top marks! 
Your post advocates a  ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced  approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)  ( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist ( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it ( ) No one will be able to find the guy (X) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste (X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model (X) Users of the web will not put up with it ( ) Print readers will not put up with it ( ) Good journalists will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business ( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt  Specifically, your plan fails to account for  (X) Readers' unwillingness to pay for just news ( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC (X) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives ( ) Sources' proven unwillingness to "go direct" ( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism ( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism (X) The high cost of investigative journalism ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (X) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting ( ) Legal liability of "citizen journalism" ( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist (X) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football ( ) The necessity of the editing process (X) Americans' huge distrust of professional journalism ( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog ( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything ( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income ( ) Rupert Murdoch ( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering ( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting ( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) The tragedy of the commons ( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing (X) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites
Problem with your plan to save media: the checklist (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Digital Open Winner: teen creates a robot shop

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 01:15 PM PDT

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

vivusa.jpg Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

In today's episode, you'll meet Brennon Williams, a teen from Hillsborough, CA, who created an online robotics store for beginners:

The BW Science Labs Store is an idea I've had for a while now, but it has taken a lot of work to get it up and running. There is currently 1 kit available, the Vivus the Robot kit. I"ve seen a lot of those really low-quality $20 robots where you clap your hands and they twitch, and I've seen $400 robots with a great deal of functionality. I wanted to make something in between, and that's exactly what Vivus is. During prototyping I wanted to make a "real robot", one that was autonomous and could truly act on its own, while trying to keep the cost down as well. 
Brennon cited Maker Faire and Make Magazine as inspirations for his work, and you can see why! Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.

Previously:


Mouse plays Quake II, everyone wins

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:53 PM PDT

Princeton's David Tank just published a paper in Nature describing how he used the open-source Quake 2 engine to power a VR maze that he ran mice through in order to study their neurons while they moved. My wife, who played Quake on the British national team, wants to teach the mouse to rocket-jump.

Tank's team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball's movement as the mouse runs.

Those readings were the input for the researchers' virtual reality software -- a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it "a mini-IMAX theater." Mice in the study ran through a virtual maze designed in the open source Quake game editor, but rather than earning points or power-ups, they were rewarded with sips of water from a head-side nozzle.

Into the hippocampus of each mouse the researchers inserted a glass capillary just one micron wide at its tip and filled with salt water. Known as a whole-cell patch recorder, it detects electrical currents as they pulse through individual cells.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding how the dynamics of electrical activity within single neurons is related to firing patterns among collections of neurons that accompany the performance of complex tasks," wrote Douglas Nitz, a University of California at San Diego cognitive scientist, in a commentary accompanying the findings.

Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake

Previously:


God's hand on the BBC's Big Screens

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:53 PM PDT



Artist Chris O'Shea ran an installation on the BBC's Big Screens in which he composited in a "hand of God" on live footage of the street so that "unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity." Creative Review has details on the tech behind the prankish miracle. "The hand from above"

CreatureCast video: multicellularity explained

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:33 PM PDT



The second episode of CreatureCast is now online! Created by evolutionary biologist Casey Dunn and his students at Brown University, CreatureCast is a terrific Web video series about unusual animals and evolution. Sophia Tintori, a student whose research focuses on marine invertebrates called Siphonophorae, put together the first episode, about squid iridescence, and this one too. Professor Dunn says:
(Tintori) spoke with Cassandra Extavour about the evolution and development of multicellularity, and how the ability to contribute to the next generation of organisms is usually restricted to a small population of special cells. This topic is near and dear to the research we do in our lab. Among other things, we look at the division of labor, including the ability to reproduce, in siphonophores.
CreatureCast Episode 2

Previously:


Design for futuristic synthetic biology "herbicide sprayer"

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 11:59 AM PDT

Sites Default Files Images Growth1 3 Sites Default Files Images Growth 5
The idea of synthetic biology is to engineer modular genetic components that can be snapped together like Tinkertoys to create new organisms that don't exist in nature. Inspired by this incredible concept, designers Sascha Pohflepp and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg developed an imaginary design for a futuristic herbicide sprayer, constructed from engineered plant parts, that would "protect delicate engineered horticultural machines from older nature." From their designs, Sion Ap Tomos created antique-looking botanical illustrations of the various components. Top left, "Growth Assembly"; top right, "Herbicide Gourd." A video about the project is after the jump...



From the Growth Assembly project statement:
After the cost of energy had made global shipping of raw materials and packaged goods unimaginable, only the rich could afford traditional, mass-produced commodities. Synthetic biology enabled us to harness our natural environment for the production of things. Coded into the DNA of a plant, product parts grow within the supporting system of the plant's structure. When fully developed, they are stripped like a walnut from its shell or corn from its husk, ready for assembly.
"Growth Assembly" (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)

Free Kim Stanley Robinson and Eric Simons reading in San Francisco this Sat

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 11:39 AM PDT

Rina from the excellent, free SF in SF reading series sez,
Eric Simons is the author of the wonderfully quirky "Darwin Slept Here" based on his own journey to see the people, places, and legends that interested Darwin, and what they're like now.

Saturday, Oct. 17/Doors and Cash Bar open 6:00pm/Readings start 7:00pm

Readings will be followed by Q & A moderated by author Terry Bisson.

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor/582 Market St. @ 2nd & Montgomery San Francisco, CA

Don't drive! Take BART or Muni to Montgomery St. Station; we're right outside the exit.

Bar proceeds go to Variety Children's Charity of Northern California; learn more at www.varietync.org

Kim Stanley Robinson & Eric Simons (Thanks, Rina!)
Previously:


Vampire killing kits from the 19th Century

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:48 PM PDT

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Deanna of Collector's Quest wrote about 19th Century vampire killing kits.

These are expensive kits, made for the wealthy; not some cheap and cheesy plastic novelty items. Such luxury concedes a seriousness -- a deadly seriousness. These items were made to address deep, dark, primal fears. And then, like our fears often are, they were not thrown away but stored in equally dark and out of the way places... Antique wooden killing kits in the attics of old houses, just waiting for the day when the creatures creep from the attics of our minds.

Fascinated, I spoke with Dwight Stevens, of Stevens Auction Company, on the phone yesterday about the antique piece of vampire history.

"I don't believe in vampires -- I've never met one. But somebody believed in them, something drove people to believe... From New Orleans to Vicksburg, these old boxes remain." Stevens has sold four vampire killing kits in his 27 years as an auctioneer, most recently selling one a year ago, in Natchez, Mississippi, for $1485.

Antique Vampire Killing Kits

Previously:


Using poison gas for "suspended animation"

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 11:30 AM PDT

A biologist is studying how poison gas can be used to induce a state of "suspended animation" in small animals. Someday, it might even work on people. The idea is that if someone has suffered a critical injury, the technique could be used to delay death so that emergency care could be administered. Roth, a MacArthur "Genius," has had some success with mice. He used hydrogen sulfide to dramatically drop the rodents' breathing rate and reversed the process after six hours. It hasn't scaled up to larger animals so far, but he's working on it. Meanwhile, other techniques to slow metabolism for similar purposes are also showing promising. From CNN:
Cnn 2009 Health 10 09 Cheating.Death.Suspended.Animation Art.Suspended.Animation "You get a state of suspended animation and the creatures do not pass away, and that's the basis of what we see as an alternative way to think about critical care medicine," Roth says. "What you want to do is to have the patient's time slowed down, while everyone around them [like doctors] move at what we would call real time."

If the patient's time -- the process of your death -- were slowed down, doctors would have more time to fix you. In medicine, time is key. An analogy is the history of open heart surgery. For years, surgeons had the technical tools to make simple repairs on the heart, but they couldn't help patients until the development of the heart-lung machine made it possible to preserve the body for more than a few minutes without a heartbeat...

Other researchers are exploring different approaches to tweak metabolism in a critical care setting. A group in Minnesota is developing a drug based on chemicals found in hibernating squirrels. Dr. Philip Bickler, an anesthesiologist at the University of San Francisco Hospital, is also studying animals, including whales and dolphins -- mammals like us, except that they can hold their breath for two hours underwater even during vigorous activity. Bickler says, "There's a lot of potential there. It hasn't been studied in extreme detail, but there may be new ways to protect human tissue from injury.
"Scientists hope work with poison gas can be a lifesaver"

Home Movie Day Oct 17: Show your home movies to your neighbors

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 11:21 AM PDT

Molly sez, "Home Movie Day (Oct 17) is a celebration of amateur films and filmmaking held annually at many local venues worldwide. Home Movie Day events provide the opportunity for individuals and families to see and share their own home movies with an audience of their community, and to see their neighbors' in turn. It's a chance to discover why to care about these films and to learn how best to care for them. Check out www.homemovieday.com for a location near you! 'Home Movie Day is important because our lives, our recollections, and our truth is recorded in home movies. One day, what the heck, c'mon!' -Steve Martin"

Home Movie Day 2009 (Thanks, Molly!)

Previously:


Amusingly Timed NYT Tribute to Polaroid

Posted: 14 Oct 2009 06:23 PM PDT

The Title: As an Era Ends, Celebrating the Polaroid

The First Paragraph: On Oct. 9, the last lot of Polaroid film will pass its "use by" date, and the era of instant Polaroid photography will officially be over, or at least for now.

The Unexpected Breaking News That Sort of Ruins An Otherwise Heartfelt Goodbye: Update | 12:51 p.m. After this post was written, Polaroid announced that they will resume production of instant cameras by the middle of 2010.

Illustration of the Engadget Man by Maywa Denki

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:57 AM PDT

engadget_man.jpg In anticipation of his upcoming performance at the Engadget party that was held last night in Tokyo, artist/performer Nobumichi Tosa of Maywa Denki drew this charming illustration of what he predicted the typical "Engadget Man" would look like. He points out details like glasses, clean hair, backpack, a small goatie, a rather expensive shirt, Uniqlo pants, an iPod, and leather shoes. Tosa writes this in the most inoffensive, matter-of-fact way, more as an artistic impression than as a judgmental stereotype. He mentions below the illo that Make Japan also has parties like this, but that somehow the Engadget Man gives the impression of being cleaner and better-off than the Make Person.

Why HealthNewsReview.org Gave Up On TV

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:46 AM PDT

My grandfather had chickens. Not chickens in the city, but, like, 100+ semi-feral chickens running around in a sort of anarchic "free range" on five acres of overgrown Christmas tree farm.

In other words, my grandfather ran a very nice coyote buffet.

God knows, the man tried--waging a Warner Bros.-worthy battle against the coyotes through most of my childhood. But as he got older, he kind of became frustrated at the lack of real progress and just gave up.

This story does have a point. Promise. I found out recently that HealthNewsReview.org--a fairly self-explanatory organization dedicated to weeding good health reporting from bad--would no longer be reviewing stories taken from television news. But where does that leave us chickens? I called up Gary Schwitzer, the seasoned journalist and professor behind HealthNewsReview to find out. sadTV.jpg

Let's start with the basics, where did HealthNewsReview.org come from?
I became enamored with an Australian effort to which I give endless credit--Media Doctor. There are now Media Doctor sites in Canada and Hong Kong, as well. As soon as I saw the concept I thought, "Oh my god, why did the Hell did we let the Aussies beat us to this?" I tracked down the Australian researcher who originated the idea and he was extremely gracious and said I could copy the format. But I changed the name, though. I'm a journalist and I was sensitive about other journalists having knee-jerk defensive reactions to the name. I thought Media Doctor would imply something was broken and needed fixing.

It got to be hourly briefings on patient urine output...rather than reporting on evidence and tech assessment, and cost, and access and all the things that now become our criteria on Health News Review...

But isn't something broken?
There are problems, yes. I worked in daily health news in Milwaukee and Dallas, and for CNN. I walked away with a lot of frustration. It was mostly the CNN experience that frustrated me. In the early days of CNN, we had this tremendous, exciting opportunity. The channel could be place to go in-depth with background and be analytical and contextual. But then the management side swung the other way and preferred to be the wire service of the air--take anything happening anywhere and report it with a quick turnaround. That's the continued recipe for disaster in my eyes. Into that was thrown the maelstrom of artificial heart experiments in the early 1980s. I saw how all of the incentives were to just have the information everyone else had, but more often. It got to be hourly briefings on patient urine output and stuff like that, rather than reporting on evidence and tech assessment, and cost, and access and all the things that now become our criteria on HealthNewsReview. We flood news consumers with this stuff and it does more harm than good.

We become complicit cheerleaders, and not independent vetters of sensational claims. When you think about the environment we're in right now, journalists have to take some of the blame for the inability of us, as a people, to have a meaningful health care reform discussion. We've created this sense of a pill for every ill. And God help you if you talk about comparative effectiveness research that may raise questions about efficacy, because you better not take that pill away from me or you're rationing.

Some cancer screening tests, like for prostate cancer, are an example of this, right?
Yes. You get news stories that promote screening outside the boundaries of evidence. You'll be bombarded with subjective, passionate, crusading comments that really say, "Let the evidence be damned. I've had this and it saved my life." And we just have to drop back and have a discussion about evidence. There's so much uncertainty that people need to get involved and make the decision for themselves. It's a mistake if people are hearing that they shouldn't be screened. But right now, you only hear the benefits. And there are potential harms.

Is TV really worse on this than other types of media?
TV is terrible, especially on the morning shows--just awful awful imbalanced, cheerleading, crusading crap day, after day, after day. But the rest of the media isn't off the hook. I compare what I hear from some journalists to what I hear from some doctors, "Yeah I may go on free trips and speaker fees from big pharma but I'm not influenced. I'm worried about my colleagues, but I'm fine." Similarly some journalists look at what we've done and say, "We don't do any of these mistakes." But I'm telling you, 70% of almost 900 stories we've reviewed fail to discuss costs, harms, and benefits. Somebody has to take responsibility for that.

If everybody is flawed and good reporting is so important, why give up on TV news?
It's not that we're looking the other way on TV, but they don't care. They don't want to listen. We had a lead person at one network flat out say, "Don't even bother to notify me. I won't share your review with my staff, because it's unfair to apply the same criteria to us as to print." That guy was praising of the effort before we'd launched. He saw our evaluation criteria and thought we were looking at the right stuff. But when it comes down to it, they don't like feeling like someone is telling them how to write. And that has to end. If you can't do health reporting right, it's OK to just stop reporting on new tech and discoveries, because you may be doing more harm than good.

Where does this leave news consumers, though? Does this mean HealthNewsReview is more for journalists than for the people who read their work?
Absolutely not. In fact, we're undergoing a complete site redesign to make it abundantly clear that the site is for consumers, as well. We want consumers to see that the way we evaluate health news stories is the same way they can evaluate claims coming from any source. They can use the same 10 criteria we apply to the review of stories. We're adding new sections to the redesigned site to emphasize why each of the 10 criteria matter. All along, in fact, I thought that if journalists ignored our work (which, for the most part, they haven't), that consumers would still benefit from our scrutiny of claims.

The thing is, though, we have limited resources. We will continue to comment on TV, but I'm not going to go through the time resource drain of manually transcribing broadcasts and having three different people apply criteria, as we did before we threw in the towel, only to have the TV reporters explicitly tell us that they'll be ignoring it.

Sad TV image courtesy Flickr user aprillynn77, via CC.

Soft mobile morphing robots

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:39 PM PDT


iRobot is developing a soft mobile morphing robots, designed to crawl through tiny holes and cracks.

Researchers from iRobot and the University of Chicago discussed their palm-sized soft robot, known as a chemical robot, or chembot, at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems yesterday. It's "the first demonstration of a completely soft, mobile robot using jamming as an enabling technology," they write in a paper presented at the conference. 

The concept of "jamming skin enabled locomotion" is explained quite nicely in the video. The polymer used for the bot's stretchy skin is off-the-shelf silicone two-part rubber.

iRobot's Shape-Shifting Blob 'Bot Takes Its First Steps( Thanks, Gever!)

Helping Mick Jagger in a toy store

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:26 AM PDT

200910151002

David Wahl, a blogger for Archie McPhee's Monkey Goggles blog, wrote a funny story about the time he was working at a toy store in Seattle and assisted Mick Jagger when he came in to shop.

The female owner of the store approached him and I thought her head was going to split in half from the size of her smile. "Mr. Jagger," she said, "I just have to tell you how much your music means to me. I lost my virginity to one of your songs in the back of a 1965 Chevy convertible. 'Jumping Jack Flash!'"

"That's very sweet of you," he muttered, indicating with a slight flare of his right nostril that the conversation was over and that she should leave him alone. But, to her it was as if he had swooped her off her feet, carried her out side and made love to her. That simple sentence flushed her cheeks and made her eyes roll back in ecstasy.

Then he began to shop. At first, I didn't understand his method of shopping. As he entered each new room of the store, he would begin taking things off the shelf and stacking them in the middle of the room. As he left, I would start putting them back, cursing at him under my breath for making a mess. Then, it dawned on me I was supposed to be carrying these items to the register for him.

The photo above is from The Rolling Stone's underrated Their Satanic Majesties Request from 1967 (Read Richard Metzger's essay about the album at Dangerous Minds). Doesn't it look like the lads bought their costumes from a toy store?

Mick Jagger's Adventures in Toyland

Another impossibly skinny Ralph Lauren model

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 09:58 AM PDT
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