Time to end prohibition, this time on drugs (debunking “warcotics”)

Posted on March 10, 2015 by David Jimenez

The US has gone to war 14 times since the end of the II Word War, combating from Korea to Afghanistan. But there is one war that historians usually fail to add to the list, and it is the one Washington has been fighting – and losing – for the longest period of time.

The war on drugs, launched in its modern version by Richard Nixon in 1971, and still presented as a success by it supporters, has failed to reduce consumption in the US or diminish the business of the drug cartels. It has increased drug related crime, provoked an explosion of incarcerations in the developed world and aggravated conflicts in different parts of the world, as the example of Mexico clearly shows. Aren’t we repeating the mistakes of the years of alcohol prohibition, in a much bigger scale?

Five charts suggests that a new approach is needed and could have a bigger chance to work. It would have to include the legalization and regulation of drugs and the allocation of the billions spent today in “warcotics” in addiction treatment, crop alternatives in countries were drugs are produced and tobacco like health campaigns to educate people on the dangers of drug consumption.

Continue reading →

Truth Claim: The Measles Vaccine

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Gideon Gil

You have done everything you can to protect your child.

You breastfed her.

You put her in a car seat.

You insisted he wear a bike helmet.

You decided not to vaccinate your child against measles because of the risk of a serious side effect.

The US Centers for Disease Control says about 1 in 3,000 people suffer a seizure after getting the shot.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOXOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

That’s similar to the risk of developing breast cancer during pregnancy, according to the American Cancer Society – a chance millions of women accept annually.

Still, since measles is uncommon in the United States and the death rate is less than 1 in 1,000, many parents decide against vaccinating their children.

That seemed like a reasonable choice — until last December. That’s when someone with measles visited Disneyland, sparking an outbreak that has now stricken 142 people in seven states. Most were unvaccinated.

Measles is more infectious than even Ebola. And unlike Ebola, it can be spread by a child who looks perfectly healthy – no sneezing, no cough, no fever, no rash. The germ can survive in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours. A child could have been infected simply by getting on a Disneyland ride after the infected visitor.

One Disneyland ride, Peter Pan’s Flight, lasts 130 seconds. In two hours, at least 50 children could have ridden on the same car as the infected person and been exposed to measles.

The vaccine is the only way to protect your child against measles.

Myth debunked: MACs Do Get Viruses

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Charles Kaioun

For this assignment, I wanted to explore video making as I think it is a powerful way to captivate attention and transmit a message. The style is inspired from BuzzFeed’s videos which are typical of this kind of subject… Hope this will convince you…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvax_UrMVh8

Myth Debunking: Slumber Science

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Savannah Niles

Cars vs Public transport

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Luis Natera

For this assignment I chose to focus on a subject that has been controversial in my city (Guadalajara, Mexico), the public debate between invest in public transport and non motorised mobility vs invest in pro-automobile infrastructure.

One of the main argument that has been used from the pro-automobile side is that the government has to build new roads, tunnels and bridges to improve the mobility in the city, on the other hand the evidence shows that building more roads to solve the urban mobility is like trying to solve obesity with larger pants. It does not solve the real problem.

The approach to the debate was in a form of an infographic, trying to show the facts in a more friendly way.

Clic to see the infographic:

Debunking Space Exploration

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Melissa Clark

For this assignment, I chose to focus on space exploration and the U.S.’s transition into the private sector for funding and operations. Originally, I was pro-space exploration, pro-private-sector funding with government support. However, one has to ask oneself if attributing such funds for space exploration is moral, when we have poverty and natural disasters affecting billions of people on our planet? The facts I found were astonishing. Despite being “pro-space exploration” and having that undoubtedly shape my research, I wasn’t aware of NASA’s Spinoff program. Spinoff bolsters scientific research and innovations (funded by space exploration money) generated by space exploration research, to help improve living conditions in societies around the world. To see a more in-depth look into the research coming out of space exploration, visit: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2015/pdf/Spinoff2015.pdf

Its important to note that “people grossly overestimate the budget that NASA gets,” said Niebur. Obama’s fiscal year 2016 budget calls for $18.5 billion overall for NASA — 0.46 percent of the federal budget. “Most people think it’s 10 times that much.” Furthermore, according to the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space research and advocacy organization, for the planetary science division to run well, the United States should spend at least $1.5 billion every year to explore other worlds which is less than what “Americans spent on dog toys in 2012.” (Vox.com, 2/23/15)

Congress is also set to review NASA’s 2016 budget request, which is set at $1.2 billion (USA Today, 03/10/15)

To convey my point, and the various facts I collected, I implemented Sketch 3 (http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/). In hopes that this visual representation would have a more compelling and less aggressive impact on my viewers. I hoped this layout, combined with these images, would provide more compelling evidence for those opposed to any funds being attributed to space exploration (from private of public sources).

I’ve determined that despite the gross amount of funding that is required for space exploration, (especially when that money could be used directly to aid in developing nations and to end poverty and starvation) private sector funding of space exploration not only allows people to continue their grandiose dreams of space exploration, but it’s also responsible for scientific achievements and improvements that are implemented on a global scale (to improve the lives of billions). Despite global poverty and natural disasters, space exploration funding and action have helped save lives here on Earth. Continuous private sector funding will expand our presence in space while contributing positive scientific advances in other sectors of society…

Please see my composition below, rendered by Sketch 3

Does having parents of the same sex have a negative effect on children?

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Elaine Diaz

(Version in Medium is better and it has the video)

On March 8th, 2015, I went to Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachussets, with a poster that contained the following question: Does having parents of the same sex have a negative effect on children?

One month before, Cuban blogger and journalist, Francisco Rodriguez — better known as Paquito el de Cuba- had won a contest launched by Cibercuba with the most popular picture on Valentin’s day.

“Since I signed our picture up on February, 4th until today when they finally announced we were the winners with 439 votes, I thought about the opportunity that this initiative offered me to make visible other forms of love that never appear in the traditional media of the island during this celebration”, wrote Paquito.

The picture showed the first time his son Javier, Michelangelo, his partner, and Paquito shared some quality time together. Continue reading →

Assignment for March 11 (March 10, Tuesday, midnight)

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Ali

Tell a story that makes truth claims about a disputed subject.
Using techniques from the Debunking Handbook,
and using what you know about motivated reasoning,
leading with values, persuade a broad audience
– including those hostile to your claims – of the truth of your assertions.

Debunking Handbook
http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf

Meet Gideon Gil

Posted on March 5, 2015 by Kitty Eisele

Kitty Eisele / MAS 700 / Profile Classmate

3/1/2015

Meet Knight Science and Journalism Fellow Gideon Gil.

The Boston Globe is his professional home, where he’s been Health and Science Editor since 2003.

In Boston, where the health, science and tech industries have enormous footprints, that’s no small task. He has a lot to tell us about, among other things, whether Harvard can clone humans or what happens to unused embryos, stories about which helped his editorial team win the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

Do you remember the many medical stories that came out of the Boston Marathon bombings? Those were was under his watch, too.

As at many news organizations, the Globe has contended with cutbacks — its dedicated science section was eliminated in 2009, and Gideon’s reporters’ stories now appear throughout the paper and online.

He points out that you can always argue for strong science stories – but concedes the paper may not be doing as much to cover the non-life, and more basic, sciences.

This year at MIT Gideon is looking at how Big Data from health care can inform the stories his journalists tell.

He’s also challenging himself in the classroom: he teamed with some bio-engineering and MBA students to build a version of the Eye-Wire project that works with Minecraft.

You can see some of that fusion of science and art as far back as the mid-1970s, when he wrote lively columns about on-campus speakers for the Harvard Crimson (“I’m afraid to go back and look”) as an undergraduate bio-chem major.

(That’s an undergraduate Gideon, below, doing something important with pipettes for a professor at Harvard Med).

Screen Shot 2015-03-03 at 9.46.49 PM.png

In fact Gil thought he’d become a scientist. But he spent the summer before his senior year at the Quincy Patriot Ledger, and discovered it was “a blast.” And journalism had one other big benefit.

“Myself and another (Crimson) columnist had a following of groupies. Some Wellesley women tracked us down – and that was tough to do in those pre-Internet days. So the dating potential of these columns was my first recognition of the non-journalistic purpose of newspapers,” he said in a recent interview.

Gil went on to study for a master’s in journalism at Columbia before giving up the side benefits of the profession to marry Lisa Huber in 1985. The family lives in Wellesley with this guy

while their 21 year-old daughter Liana is off at Syracuse, getting a degree in television, radio and film and doing some other neat things.

Want to know Gideon better? If you want to fish out the microfilm, you can read through two decades of his stories for the Louisville Courier Journal, where he covered the development and use of the artificial heart. Online or in print you can check out some of his own Globe reporting from here in Boston; or from this class, enjoy his compelling portrait of a Massachusetts ER at night.

Or you could just scan his Twitter feed @GlobeGideon to see the range of his interests and the many science topics he follows.

“What I try to do,” he explains, “is to help staff do deep narrative and explanatory pieces about what’s happening in the world of medicine and science.”

Does he succeed? Let’s hear from Beth Daley, a former Globe science and environment writer, who calls herself one of his biggest fans.

The best anecdote about Gideon is being edited on a series many initially pooh-poohed at the Globe: Lyme disease. Gideon, in his calm, thorough and mellow way went to bat for me, doing his own research to convince the higher-ups this seemingly odd story to focus a year on was one of the most important of our time. Not because we were writing about a disease, but because Lyme Disease represented a far more important point: A reluctance by the medical establishment to try and deal with uncertainty. It was classic Gideon – taking a small point to illustrate something even bigger.

He is also incredibly thorough – maddeningly so, virtually every reporter who works for him will tell you. For years, I would be tapping my foot at 9:30 p.m., front page editor yelling for copy before the presses ran, and Gideon would, ever calm, be going through a story line by line. He invariably would catch major errors, and add in context from some recess of his brain.

He’s very gentle, incredibly loyal.

That’s high praise from a reporter for an editor. If you’re interested in good science writing, you should probably try to get to know him too.

Kathleen McLaughlin, “Staying Safe in China”

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Wahyu Dhyatmika

A long time correspondent of NPR in Beijing, China, Louisa Lim, describes her as the one “who kept of my secrets and offered unstinting moral support” in her book, “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited” which was published early last year.

The Chinese immigration official sees her as a fashion reporter, working for a publication with a very industrial title, “Women’s Wear Daily” which based in New York City, covering non-political events such as the Miss World beauty pageant at the city of Ordos, near Mongolia.