Archive for the 'News Media' Category

ChemBark has obtained the covers to the next two issues of Chemical and Engineering News.  Sources tell us that they may change at the last minute, but given the juicy nature of the featured stories, you will appreciate seeing them now:

May 28th:

June 4th:

Anyone interested in “discovering” future covers of C&EN should use this handy PowerPoint file.  It will prove especially useful for finding headlines like “My Hoodmate Smells like Cheese” or “Advisor of the Year”.  For decent conversion to j-peg, “print” your cover using the highest quality setting into a PDF file, then cut and paste it into an image editor like Photoshop.  You’ll have to adjust some things (colors, fonts, spacing) if you want a color print (directly from PPT) to look right.  I’ll be sure to tell Bill Gates about this problem when he comes here next month.

P.S.  When I said “big, Big, BIG…”, I was lying.

P.P.S.  Be sure to share your efforts with the rest of us.

As you know by now, I’m a C&E News superfan. In this week’s edition, editor-in-chief Rudy Baum discusses how he spices up the cover of our favorite chemistry magazine by insisting on variety.  That’s why I like it when he cuts the leash and lets the art editors (directors?) play with the covers. On May 7th, we saw the third (by my count) fancy cover since the 2006 redesign.  The blue and white title bar made a triumphant return, and the cover sported the most centrally-located address label that I can remember (yet required no ugly white box):

Now is probably as good a time as any to unload all of the comments and suggestions I’ve been saving for C&EN: 

— As much as I hate to say it, I’ve really liked the new ”C&EN Photo Gallery” section.  I’m torn, because while I like nice pictures, I am also troubled by some PI’s insistance on finding a pretty picture FOR EVERYTHING. That said, there are times when the crux of an experiment can be explained by a nice picture. Also, some pictures bankrupt of scientific value still have artistic merit.

— I think a regular reader/commenter on ChemBark took one of the pictures featured in this week’s gallery. I don’t want to out him/her, but would the mystery photographer enter and sign in, please?

— I’d like to see more opinion in C&EN, especially the point-counterpoint pieces. There is a simple method for selecting good pairs of chemists to fight in print. First, the people have to be recognized experts on the subject in question.  You can’t pick a random idiot, but you also can’t pick a big name in a tangential field just because he’s a big name. Second, it’s best if the people you pick are jerks who don’t care about upsetting anyone. Don’t pick writers who mince words—diplomatic writing is less informative and less entertaining.  Give us a duel.  We want to know why someone is wrong, and we don’t want to sift through BS to find out.

— My most radical suggestion: C&EN should sponsor a chemical song parody contest.  They could run a full-page call for submissions over several weeks, then post the best songs (top 50?) online and give prizes to the top 5.  I’m sure the contest would drive plenty of traffic to the online edition, and the feature would stand a good chance of getting picked up by Fark, Slashdot, and Boing-Boing.  If money is what motivates the powers that be, think about how this would increase site traffic, and consequently, ad revenue.

That’s it for now, but prepare for a big Big BIG BIG C&E News post on Friday.  Big.

BIG. 

For any curious parties, the first batch of Chemical Ed magnets went in the mail today. There are still plenty of these puppies available—send in your SASE today.

In other blog housekeeping news, there are a number of items in the March 26th edition of C&E News that deserve discussion, including the Priestley Medal address and Beth Halford’s piece on racial diversity in chemistry. I’ve added these to the official ChemBark To-Do list. The 3/26 issue also had a letter to the editor (sub. req’d) in which Max Taitel had the following to say:

Programs like “NOVA” do great service in presenting the tremendous contributions of scientific endeavors to everyday lives. They follow in the great tradition of the late Carl Sagan who appeared some 20 times on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson to describe the wonders of the universe to that audience. We need to reaffirm the good side of science in the eyes of the general public, without denying some of the downside, and perhaps be able to someday revive the DuPont slogan “Better Living through Chemistry.”

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A recent chemistry blog described a student chemist’s frustration in overhearing a couple trying to decipher the ingredient label in a supermarket. Maybe the ACS Education Division staff and the ACS Division of Chemical Education could work with school and industry people to create internships where a student chemist could work on the supermarket floor to give hands-on interpretation about the chemicals listed in food products.

Unless some other chemist was blogging about running errands, the writer was referring to my post on a husband and wife who were having trouble purchasing folate at CVS. As you would have guessed from the previous post on Percy Julian, I am in complete agreement with him that we need to do a better job of convincing the public that life would stink without the chemical industry. Just today, the NY Times ran an article with the headline “Some Suspect Chemical Mix in Pet Food” about the recent mass pet death. (You see, chemicals = death = bad.) That said, I hope the suggestion about putting chemistry students in the aisles of supermarkets was made with tongue in cheek.

Also, many thanks to the person who alerted me to the letter; I completely missed it. Whether it be from a randomly placed magnet or a mention in our profession’s top news magazine, it’s always gratifying to learn that a few people actually read this blog.

While chemists were home for the holidays, Dalibor Sames rang in the New Year by retracting more data from the Journal of the American Chemical Society. For those of you keeping score, that makes a total of eight retractions and partial retractions for Dr. Sames & Co.

This latest move was especially surprising because Bengu Sezen was not an author on the publication. While she was listed in the acknowledgments for “helpful discussions,” that would appear to exclude any experimentation. Dr. Benjamin Lane was the first author on the paper, and his name may sound familiar to you. Lane was interviewed by Science magazine for its initial story on the Sames retractions back in March of 2006. From that article:

Benjamin Lane, a former Sames group member now working as a chemist with the pharmaceutical company Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says some of Sezen’s work has been replicated and has been used by chemists in the pharmaceutical industry. Says Lane, “She has done some good things and made an impact on the field.”

So, the plot thickens. From the newest partial retraction:

For comparison purposes, this article refers to a palladium-catalyzed arylation of free azoles in the presence of magnesium oxide, published previously in a separate communication. Although the magnesium oxide procedure has recently been found irreproducible (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2006, 128, 8364), this fact does not affect the conclusions of this paper. Consequently, the magnesium oxide protocol has been removed from the Supporting Information. Also, Figures S5 and S8 have been replaced with corrected versions.

The previous retraction notice also stated that MgO could not be used as a base to give product, but cited Lane’s 2005 paper as showing that both Grignard reagents (RMgBr) and Mg(HMDS)₂ are appropriate bases. What exactly was retracted remains a mystery. The authors don’t offer specific details in the “addition/correction” notice, and the editors of JACS have overwritten the old supporting information so you can’t track the changes. It appears that the MgO reaction was compared against the new reactions in the paper, apparently in the context of kinetic studies. What is important—and completely ignored—is whether Lane’s paper used data from the old Sezen paper or if he repeated the previously-published experiments to generate new data.  If it turns out to be the latter, that would be odd.  And if I’m missing something obvious here, let me know.

Like its predecessors, the latest retraction also bypassed the JACS RSS feed and the daily ASAP alert e-mails. Why do the editors of JACS choose to post Sames’ retractions in this manner? By putting different information in their feeds, e-mails, and print editions, the editors are making it hard for their readers to process information. It seems to run counter to the whole idea of why the scientific literature exists.

As far as the significance of this latest retraction, here’s how I see it:

1. The development is especially bad for Dalibor Sames. He keeps his name in the news by retracting more data, and it will be hard to pin these results on Sezen because she isn’t listed as an author.

2. The fact that Sezen isn’t listed as an author in this work suggests a number of possible explanations:

i) Sezen performed these latest retracted experiments but was not credited in the paper as having done so.

ii) The “irreproducibility” goes beyond Sezen.

iii) Something happened in 2006 where this C-H activation chemistry ceased to work. For instance, the reagents they used in their lab were contaminated with a catalyst that worked and they finished that bottle. This would be the best possible explanation for everyone, but would still leave Sames on the hook for the aftermath.

iv) Experiments were sabotaged. (The use of the passive voice here is intentional.)

3. The editors of JACS, once again, have made some questionable moves. They have completely overwritten the retracted data instead of just posting the updated supporting information under the addition/correction notice. As far as I know, the generally-accepted, “standard procedure” in scientific publishing is to place a conspicuous note in the PDF file of the old publication and link to the correction notice. Furthermore, JACS has again allowed a Sames retraction to bypass their daily ASAP updates, which does a good job of making the news less visible. This practice of having addition/correction notices (which include retractions) bypass the ASAP system is not standard procedure. For instance, you can find addition/correction notices like this one on ASAP right now. In fact, there were four addition/correction notices on the JACS when when I made the last Sames-Sezen post a couple of weeks ago, and one of those had been sitting there since December 24, 2006. I have no problem with the editors sending retractions straight to the printers, but the notices should simultaneously go through the ASAP RSS feed and e-mail alerts. I mean, is there any reason they shouldn’t?

4. I have obviously lost some credibility as a blogger for missing this latest retraction. It had been out for over a week before I got the initial post up. I’ll blame JACS, but the fact of the matter is that I will have to change the way I read journals. What other important articles have I missed because they didn’t show up on ASAP?

4a. Thank you to the kind person who sent an e-mail alerting me to the retraction. It goes to show you how important blog readers are as sources of interesting info. If you see something of note, please speak up. Leave comments, use the wall, or send an e-mail. And “interesting” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad.” Pass stuff along that is remarkably good, bad, funny, strange, or inspiring. Anything goes.

Finally, in case you missed them, the Sames-Sezen retractions drew two mentions in the news this week. First, the outgoing Deputy Editor-in-Chief of C&EN, Pamela Zurer, raised an indirect reference to the case in her farewell editorial (C&EN, Jan. 22, p.5):

Misconduct in research is another complex issue the scientific community has yet to fully come to grips with. Although chemists like to think such unethical behavior is rare in our discipline, News Editor William Schulz reported on a couple of troubling cases in the past year and is digging into yet another. As I wrote in 1996, “The real question is not how often scientific misconduct occurs, or whether the scientific record is ultimately self-correcting. It is how the community behaves when faced with unpleasant allegations against one of it established members.”

Second, Nature singled out Sezen and Sames, by name, with regard to a story on the current status of some high profile cases of (alleged) scientific misconduct. Sames was clearly given a reprieve by the editors, as the section discussing the Columbia case was simply titled “Bengu Sezen”:

In March 2006, Dalibor Sames, a chemist at Columbia University in New York, withdrew two papers and part of a third from the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

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Work done by graduate student Bengü Sezen, he said, couldn’t be reproduced. The work was in the field of carbon–hydrogen bond functionalization, which aims to selectively break bonds within a molecule. The case got a lot of coverage on the ever-lively chemistry blogs, and a few press outlets mentioned the issue, including Nature (440, 390–391; 2006).

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Sames is not commenting further until an inquiry is completed, and Columbia University says that it is against its policy to “comment on the existence or non-existence of any internal investigation into allegations of research misconduct”. But Sezen has vigorously defended herself in e-mails to the editor of JACS and the press.

So, that’s that.  Next time on this “ever-lively chemistry blog”: something less unhappy.

Some recent discussions in the chemical blogosphere have wandered into particularly contentious areas. Whether trading news about scientific misconduct or sounding off on minorities in science, bloggers and commenters want to know how much they can say without getting into trouble. Fortunately, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School has the answers. They developed chillingeffects.org to help Average Joes and Janes on the Internet understand laws regarding what you can and can’t say online.

So, how many of the protections enjoyed by the press also apply to bloggers? All of them. Just remember that when you post stuff online, you are publishing information. Online publications are governed by the same laws that govern information published in more traditional media. Blogs have the right to report newsworthy things, but at the same time, bloggers are also open to defamation and violation-of-privacy lawsuits. You generally want to keep two things in mind: make sure what you say is both true and newsworthy. Don’t make stuff up, and don’t go digging into areas where someone would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

On the plus side, you only have to worry about what you say. Legal precedent has established that owners and operators of sites are not responsible for statements posted by third parties. That means that bloggers are not responsible for defamatory comments left on their blogs. (So keep on posting, Wolfie.) At the same time, commenters don’t have “freedom of speech” on someone else’s Web site; their comments can be deleted by the site’s owner at any time.

While those are the main points, I highly recommend surfing through the Chilling Effects Web site when you’ve got some free time. And should you ever find yourself having to figure out a cease-and-desist letter, they’ve got a great section on those, too.

While the law may treat bloggers as members of the press, the rest of the world has been reluctant to do the same.  Fortunately, that’s changing. A recent article in The Washington Post notes that 2 out of the 100 seats for the media at the Scooter Libby trial are being distributed to bloggers. With this new vote of confidence, it will be interesting to see whether bloggers improve their journalistic standards by doing things like taking the time to verify information, obtaining permission before using copyrighted images, and publishing corrections when circumstances warrant them.

As far as chemistry goes, the American Chemical Society has pretty much poo-pooed the idea of blogs being a legitimate news medium. As proof, look no further than national meetings, where the ACS offers complimentary registration and access to a media room (complete with wireless Internet access) to the people lucky enough to be deemed journalists. Seeing as how the ACS is coming to Boston this Fall, I thought it might be interesting to use their facilities to post dispatches from the lectures and maybe even get short interviews with anyone being offered to the media. Upon closer inspection, it appears that the ACS won’t let me:

Press/Media Registration: Press registration is complimentary for credentialed members of the news media (restricted to reporters and editors working full-time for print or broadcast news) who are approved by the ACS Office of Communications. Press representatives may pick up their badges with valid media credentials from the Press Room (Moscone Center, Room 232) during the meeting.

That stinks, and it makes little sense as a blanket policy. For instance, by their definition, no freelance reporter will be granted press registration. Furthermore, a reporter from the Harvard News Office could get credentialed but not a student-reporter from the Harvard Crimson, despite the fact that the latter probably has a much greater readership. If the ACS truly exists as an organization to promote chemistry, I think that encouraging intrepid bloggers to cover interesting chemistry would be a good idea. I mean, who’s going to do a better job of covering chemical lectures: some random reporter working full-time for the Sunnyville Post or some nerd on the Internet who actually understands chemistry?

Maybe I’ll send a letter to the ACS Press Office to see if they’ll step into the 21st century and reconsider their restrictions. I’m not looking for a free ride…I’ll happily pay for registration, just give me access to the Internet at the meeting site. Pretty, please?

UPDATE: Mitch found a more extensive write-up of the ACS’s Media Accreditation Policy.  Web entities can get media registration so long as they have a news component, and freelancers just need a note from mommy.

Expect more news posts on ChemBark in 2007.  If I can save some money on registration, the drinks will be on me.