SciWriteLabs 8.3: Adjudicating the Lehrer plagiarism accusations. Plus: Are...
Two weeks ago, Jim Romenesko revealed that Jonah Lehrer had recycled work from a 2011 Wall Street Journal column for a recent blog post on NewYorker.com. As anyone who has been following this knows,...
View ArticleDid the BBC rip off the Guardian’s Higgs boson explainer?
On Tuesday, Carl Zimmer, Deborah Blum, David Quammen and I discussed the Jonah Lehrer plagiarism accusations. (These are distinct from the recycling controversy, which we, along with Jack Shafer,...
View ArticleAre Warnings About the Side Effects of Drugs Making Us Sick?
Your doctor doesn’t like what’s going on with your blood pressure. You’ve been taking medication for it, but he wants to put you on a new drug, and you’re fine with that. Then he leans in close and...
View ArticleJonah Lehrer’s missing compass
My first contact with Jonah Lehrer came almost exactly two years ago, on August 4, 2010. He had just published a 660-word Wired blog post titled “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” which recounted...
View ArticleEdward Jay Epstein “submits that Fareed Zakaria is not guilty of plagiarism.”...
I won’t dwell on this for too long, but: Last week, Fareed Zakaria was suspended from both Time and CNN for plagiarizing a portion of a column (for Time) and a blog post (for CNN) on gun control from …
View ArticleThe Battle Over Generic Drugs in India (and elsewhere)
A few days ago, in a courtroom in India, a landmark ruling was made that could impact future legal battles over the sale of generic versions of expensive medications in India. When the Delhi High Court...
View ArticleNew York Times with most detailed account yet of MIT’s role in Swartz case
Late yesterday, Noam Cohen of The New York Times published a nuanced account of the events that led to the arrest of Aaron Swartz in January, 2011 for using MIT’s computer networks to illegally...
View ArticleA Jenny McCarthy reader, Pt. 4: The real dangers in following Jenny’s advice
Note: Earlier today, Jenny McCarthy was officially named as a new co-host of the popular daytime talk show The View. As many people have already noted, this is an extremely unfortunate move on ABC’s...
View ArticleMisogyny and sexism in SciComm, pt 2: Act inappropriately and suffer the...
Yesterday, I tried to publicly process my feelings about an incident in which Scientific American blog editor and ScienceOnline co-founder Bora Zivkovic acknowledged acting inappropriately^ toward a...
View ArticlePay $1000 to criticize a bad ‘blood test for depression’ article?
No way, call for retraction. Would you pay $1,000 for the right to criticize bad science in the journal in which it originally appeared? That is what it costs to participate in postpublication peer...
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