January 19, 2008 – 11:06 am
Scientific American has finally posted my Science 2.0 story on its Web site. As the introduction explains, this is actually an experiment in getting reader feedback well before the print version appears. So I hope you will all take advantage of that opportunity. And I hope you will also publicize the link as widely as [...]
January 2, 2008 – 5:40 pm
Big changes in the offing: Starting February 4 I will be joining Nature magazine as their editorial editor, working out of the Washington, DC, office. I.e., I’ll be the guy in charge of those two pages of official Nature opinion in the front of the magazine (along with Philip Campbell, the editor-in-chief), as well as [...]
December 10, 2007 – 11:52 am
Maybe it’s because I have the subject of innovation on the brain these days, but I couldn’t help thinking about it as I read Atul Gawande’s article The Checklist in the December 10 issue of the New Yorker. Because Gawande is a practicing surgeon, as well as an amazingly gifted writer, he has always been [...]
December 4, 2007 – 10:09 am
Over on BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis has written an eloquent rebuttal to the notion that bloggers are somehow in competition with professional journalists, or that they are hoping to replace professional journalism with some kind of bottom-up “citizen journalism.” Instead, Jarvis reiterates the concept of “networked journalism” that he first articulated in a post last year:
In [...]
November 19, 2007 – 3:57 pm
Back in 2003, the National Research Council commissioned me to write a chapter about “systems biology” for a report they were doing on the relation between biology and information technology. Since the report, which eventually appeared as Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology (2005), was radically reorganized after my assignment was done, [...]
November 17, 2007 – 12:06 pm
Like everyone else in (science) journalism, I am a). fascinated; b). perplexed; and/or c). terrified by how the Internet is changing our profession. Recently, though, I’ve come across several items that provide a little reassurance—and a challenge. Robert Niles‘ post in Online Journalism Review, Michael Hirschorn’s article in this December’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly, [...]
November 14, 2007 – 5:42 pm
Interesting post by Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, on the Google Public Policy Blog: “Global privacy standards should focus on preventing harm to consumers.” Fleischer points out that, on the one hand, three-quarters of the countries in the world still don’t have meaningful privacy regimes in place. And on the other, “virtually every organisation [...]
November 8, 2007 – 3:39 pm
The Urban Institute recently released the report by Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman that I mentioned in my post on challenges to conventional wisdom on innovation—the one claiming that all the “gathering storm” concern about a declining U.S. science and engineering workforce is way overblown. Their title, appropriately enough, is “Into the Eye of the [...]
November 7, 2007 – 9:36 pm
One of the most frustrating things about our relentlessly partisan debate over health care is that the proposals on every side are so-linear. Are drugs too expensive, and do too many people lack insurance? Subsidize them. Are malpractice awards spiraling out of control? Cap them. Is the total cost of health care growing faster than [...]
November 2, 2007 – 12:21 pm
A couple of newspaper items caught my eye this week, both making the point that culture matters-whether we’re talking about scientific creativity, economic competitiveness, the spread (or non-spread) of democracy, or almost anything else.
You’d think this point would be blazingly obvious to everybody, but apparently not. On the left, it regularly gets denounced as being [...]
A narrative history of personal computing and the Internet.
The story of the Santa Fe Institute and the emerging science of complex adaptive systems.
My first book—a study of artificial intelligence.
