TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Calls to protect devils, kangaroos Animal rights activists are using National Threatened Species Day today to call for an end to permits to cull Tasmanian forester kangaroos. abc.net.au |
Steve Jobs was a bit mean to you? Tough! | Martin Robbins Trainee journalists should learn that getting information out of people is not easyAs a freelance journalist, much of your spare time is spent trying to get information from people who at best couldn't give a crap about your article, and at worst are actively hostile to the idea of some grubby writer getting his or her hands on their precious secrets. That a journalism student has had a similar response from Apple is not exactly unusual.Take for example this recent response from the Department of Health to a Freedom of Information request I filed, scripted presumably by the writers of 'Yes Minister':"The Department neither confirms nor denies that it holds information falling within the description specified in your request. [...] This should not be taken as an indication that the information you requested is or is not held by the Department. [...] To be clear, the Department is not neither confirming nor denying whether the Secretary of State met with The Prince of Wales, as it is in the public domain that His Royal Highness met with the Secretary of State on 29 October 2009. The Department is neither confirming nor denying whether it holds any information within the specific terms of your request - i.e. information relating to discussions that may or may not have taken place..."*snip*"I hope that this reply is helpful."Wibble?!Or take this exchange between myself and the British Homeopathic Association. My relationship with them deteriorated to the point where they wrote a press release about me (you can find my response to that here). Even before that, my relationship with their spokesperson Cristal Sumner could best be described as frosty. While the Department of Health were unhelpful in a stylish and entertaining sort of way, the BHA were just plain uncooperative, as you can see in the following exchange. Referring to a comment Cristal had made about homeopathic remedies struggling in clinical trials because they needed to be "individualised" to specific patients, I asked her: "does this not apply to the mass-produced remedies made by companies like Nelson's, and sold off-the-shelf to millions of customers at Boots? These clearly aren't holistic or individualised treatments, since patients won't receive a personal consultation or assessment." In other words, if homeopathic remedies need to be individualised, surely the mass produced ones are inferior? The reply was a curt:"The BHA supports a person's legal right to buy and use homeopathic medicines."And those are mild examples. I get abuse from people on a weekly basis, like the following:"You are so dimwitted that you cannot see the wood for the trees, you will still be kissing the shoes of your muslim overlord's when they decapitate you, that is how stupid and dangerous you really are. Don't e-mail me again, i have no interest in having a drink with putrescence like you, if you do i will just delete it."The point being that if you're going to start out in journalism, you'd better develop a thick skin, because there's no rule that says people have to be nice, or helpful, or not threaten you with eternal damnation. For that reason you have to be polite, persistent, diplomatic, and willing to probe a story from many different angles. What doesn't help is: Sending out a seven-paragraph e-mail to a busy person – all e-mails longer than three paragraphs deserve to be ignored on principle.Filling your e-mail essay with snark directed at someone you need help from, and who probably didn't even know you existed until the contents of your spleen spontaneously appeared in their inbox.Sending the spleen contents to the head of Apple with some gushing comments about Apple products, but then adding the footnote "Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile" Implying to a squillion-dollar multinational company that they ought to help you because their quote is "crucial to my grade in the class, and it may potentially get published in our university's newspaper." Your grades are about as important to me as the colour of the fluff I just pulled out of my armpit (navy blue - it's always navy blue for reasons I can't explain, if anyone knows why please leave a comment). Putting yourself in a position where your article relies on a quote from Apple to be publishable in the first place. If you're relying on a quote from a PR guy for the substance of your piece, it's probably not a very good piece. I mean what are you going to do, just rewrite the press release and pass it off as an article? You won't get anywhere in the newspaper industry doing ... oh.Anyway, hopefully the budding young journalist has learned a lesson or two from her encounter with the patron saint of small devices you didn't realise you needed until you saw your friend's and ... OOOOOOOHHHHHH *kerching* At the very least they've learned the lesson that not getting a quote can be a story too. Which I suppose is as good a lesson as any for a journalist to learn.Martin Robbinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
50 years of cyborgs | Discover The concept of a man fused with a machine has been with us for half a century, but is now becoming a realityFifty years ago this month, the journal Astronautics published a paper titled "Drugs, Space and Cybernetics", recently presented by neuroscientist, inventor and professional musician Manfred Clynes and psychiatrist Nathan Kline at a space flight symposium in Texas. In contemplating the challenges that might lie ahead for astronauts embarking on voyages possibly lasting thousands of years – and this was still more than six months before Yuri Gagarin rocketed into orbit – the two authors proposed tampering with the crews' biological capabilities. There was no point in trying to cocoon them in artificial atmospheres – too risky, "the bubble all too easily bursts"; instead, how about "the incorporation of integral exogenous devices to bring about the biological changes which might be necessary in man's homeostatic mechanisms to allow him to live in space qua natura"?In other words, a man-machine. And what might this be called? "We propose," Clynes and Kline wrote, "the term Cyborg."Thus was the term coined, and since then, cyborgs have become staples of science fiction: from the silver cybermen in Doctor Who to the zombie-like Borg in Star Trek, and from the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman to Darth Vader and Robocop. (The Terminator, as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, doesn't really count: his skin is merely a disguise and so he might better be described as an android.) Inevitably, video games – Metal Gear Solid or Tekken, for example – frequently feature such creations, too."Those fictional characters speak to the horror as well as the excitement that we feel at our relationship with technology," says Tim Maly, the curator of website 50 Posts About Cyborgs and the complementary Quiet Babylon. "They ask what it is to be human and, as we augment ourselves and become dependent on these technologies, at what point do we stop being human?"That process of augmentation has indeed begun. In 2002, Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, underwent surgery to have a device implanted into the nerves of his left arm so he could experiment with extending his nervous system across the internet. This effectively made him part-human, part-robot: the world's first real cyborg."It was tremendously exciting," he says, explaining that his wife also had electrodes pushed into her, becoming "a mini-cyborg", so that they could communicate nervous system to nervous system. The experiment lasted three months and since then, while two of his students have implanted magnets into their fingertips to play around with ultrasonics, Warwick has remained resolutely human."I'm a bit disappointed there hasn't been more research in these areas," he says. "It is risky, but the technology is certainly there. In fact, it's about time I gave it a go myself again..."Of course, anyone fitted with a pacemaker might also be considered a cyborg. Disabled athletes have been considered as such, too: South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius is known as the "Blade Runner" because he competes with the aid of carbon-fibre artificial limbsSuch definitions sit quite happily with Manfred Clynes, who, at the age of 85, continues to explore the man-machine relationship through his creation of a music software program called SuperConductor."You could even say that if you're riding a bicycle or wearing spectacles, that fits the cyborg concept," Clynes says. "There's feedback there. You don't have to go into space!"The paper coining the term "cyborg" appeared in the middle of the space race at the height of the cold war. Clynes and Kline, who died in 1982, emphasised in the paper that "although some of [our] proposed solutions may appear fanciful, it should be noted that there are references in the Soviet technical literature to research in many of these same areas..."Times have changed, albeit not necessarily for the better. The professor says that "films such as The Terminator sadden me because they misinterpret our original message". That message was that technology offered mankind the chance to actuate its potential.Or, as he and Kline concluded half a century ago: "The purpose of the cyborg... is to provide an organisational system in which... robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel."Caspar Llewellyn Smithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Toxic coal sludge pollutes Ky. town 10 years later By DYLAN LOVAN 2010-10-10T19:27:25ZLOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- In parts of eastern Kentucky, the pictures coming out of Hungary of the red sludge that roared from a factory's reservoir, downstream into the Danube River, are all too reminiscent of what happened a decade ago this week.... hosted.ap.org |
Scientist at Work: Cowboys of Madagascar In Madagascar cattle country, every cow has a story. feeds.nytimes.com |