society

New Media and Science Communication

Thursday, January 31st 7:00pm

Mount Sinai School of Medicine 1425 Madison Avenue at 98th St East Building Seminar Room

A discussion of how science is communicated effectively - and ineffectively - through emerging media outlets, such as blogging, podcasts, online multimedia, and more.

Please join:

Carl Zimmer, award-winning science writer and author

Christie Nicholson, science journalist and contributor to Scientific American's "60-Second Psych" online programming

Eliene Augenbraun, President/CEO of ScienCentral, Inc.

Eitan Glinert, Project Coordinator of "Immune Attack", a science-based video game and graduate student at MIT

Sometimes you have to look into yourself to truly appreciate was around you.

Imus was doing what he is paid to do. He was doing his job. He was doing what made him successful. He was fulfilling the role society offered him.

I don't defend what he does or even say he shouldn't get his comuppance. But I do feel that it is wrong that Imus is being dropped like a hot potato for insensitive, rude comments while Bill O'Reilly can tell American Jews to move to Israel if they don't like a Christian America and Ann Coulter can advocate terrorism and violence and largely get away with it.

Imus is a royal asshole. But that was what he was getting paid to be. Ann Coulter is getting paid to advocate violence. Bill O'Reilly is getting paid to advocate pogroms. They are each getting paid far more than I get paid to be a scientist.

This is what society values, if salaries are any indication. Assholes, terrorist advocates and anti-Semites. In the grand scheme of what is wrong in today's media, Don Imus ranks pretty minor in the long list of disgusting statements. He, at least, wasn't advocating violence.

A grad school friend of mine commented on the sexual assault charges against Mike Tyson: "We pay people to beat eachother up, then we are surprised when they are violent."

We pay people to be assholes, terrorist advocates and anti-Semites on the air...then we are surprised when they say things offensive.

Don Imus and his wife run a cattle ranch for children with cancer. They sell a line of foods where all the profits go to this ranch. They have designed cleaning products that are environmentally safer and safer for children than store brands, they sell them at cut rate prices to schools and hospitals and any profit they make goes to a center for pediatric oncology.

This little cranial wander around the digital neighborhood started when I shared the little tidbit about the FOX crew parent NewsCorp announcing they were starting a new channel. In what I think is no accident, the name will be My Network TV which I believe is a further capitalization on the "My" brand acquired by Fox two summers ago.

I made a rather broad sweep of a statement to the effect that Tom and Rupert had an opportunity to do what the folks at CNN/Time/Warner couldn't do when they joined AOL at the hip. We all know Ted Turner and the other Time Warner shareholders took it in another portion of the lower anatomy, not the hip.

As I've contemplated how to make my point, in order to explain why I think this is important, I decided to make my case by explaining the many ways the power of the packet has engrained itself into nearly every facet of our day-to-day life.

What happened as I gathered my thoughts and reviewed my material, and decided how to do justice to the TRANSFORMATIONAL opportunity MySpace and My Network might be, I decided to break this conversation into component parts and play with it one step at a time.

For starters it was fascinating for me to learn not long ago that the very same communication protocols that allow Client / Server networks to run in our closed Intranets of the workplace, are exactly the same communication protocols that make the Internet work. TCP/IP and Ethernet and packets are the defacto world wide standard for networked data. Nearly universal, I suppose we can still count the analog landlines but their days are limited.

It knows no party boundaries.
It is not caused by alcoholism.
That is all.
Go back to FOX News.