Clarity and soundness
I feel a lot of non-science editors just switch off when they read science stuff. A friend told me this earlier today, during yet another conversation about how many of the editorial issues that assa…
COVID-19
34 posts
Go easy on the dexamethasone hype
1. The people involved with the RECOVERY clinical trial have announced via statements to the press that they have found very encouraging results about the use of dexamethasone in people with severe C…
Journalistic entropy
Say you need to store a square image 1,000 pixels wide to a side with the smallest filesize (setting aside compression techniques). The image begins with the colour #009900 on the left side and, as yo…
The number of deaths averted
What are epidemiological models for? You can use models to inform policy and other decision-making. But you can't use them to manufacture a number that you can advertise in order to draw praise. T…
The costs of correction
I was slightly disappointed to read a report in the New York Times this morning. Entitled 'Two Huge COVID-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms', it discussed the implications…
The virus and the government
In December 2014, public health researchers and activists gathered at a public forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss how our perception of diseases and their causative pathogens influences our…
A caveat for peer-review
Now that more researchers are finding more holes in the study in The Lancet, which claimed hydroxychloroquine – far from being a saviour of people with COVID-19 – actually harms them, I wonder where t…
The WHA coronavirus resolution is not great for science
On May 19, member states of the WHO moved a vote in the World Health Assembly (WHA), asking for an independent investigation into the sources of the novel coronavirus. Their exact demands were spelle…
The Wolfram singularity
I got to this article about Stephen Wolfram's most recent attempt to "revolutionise" fundamental physics quite late, and sorry for it because I had no idea Wolfram was the kind of guy wh…
Good journalism is still around
This morning, a trusted scientist called my attention to a tweet thread by Jordan Fischer listing the many good stories journalists in the US had done that had improved the lives of people. The scient…
Poor journalism is making it harder for preprints
There have been quite a few statements by various scientists on Twitter who, in pointing to some preprint paper's untenable claims, point to the manuscript's identity as a preprint paper as we…
In conversation with Sree Srinivasan
On May 1, I was hosted on a webinar by the American journalist Sree Srinivasan, along with Anna Isaac of The News Minute and Arunabh Saikia of Scroll.in. As part of his daily show on the COVID-19 cris…