Root Privileges

Scicomm

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 you move towards the right, gradually blends into #1e1e1e on the rightmost edge. Two simple storage methods come to mind: you could either encode the colour-information of every pixel in a file and store that file, or you could determine a mathematical function that, given the inputs #009900 and #1e1e1e, generates the image in question.

The latter method seems more appealing, especially for larger canvases of patterns that are composed by a single underlying function. In such cases, it should obviously be more advantageous to store the image as an output of a function to achieve the smallest filesize.

Now, in information theory (as in thermodynamics), there is an entity called entropy: it describes the amount of information you don’t have about a system. In our example, imagine that the colour #009900 blends to #1e1e1e from left to right save for a strip along the right edge, say, 50 pixels wide. Each pixel in this strip can assume a random colour. To store this image, you’d have to save it as an addition of two functions: ƒ(x, y), where x = #009900 and y = #1e1e1e, plus one function to colour the pixels lying in the 50-px strip on the right side. Obviously this will increase the filesize of the stored function.

Even more, imagine if you were told that 200,000 pixels out of the 1,000,000 pixels in the image would assume random colours. The underlying function becomes even more clumsy: an addition of ƒ(x, y) and a function R that randomly selects 200,000 pixels and then randomly colours them. The outputs of this function R stands for the information about the image that you can’t have beforehand; the more such information you lack, the more entropy the image is said to have.

The example of the image was simple but sufficiently illustrative. In thermodynamics, entropy is similar to randomness vis-à-vis information: it’s the amount of thermal energy a system contains that can’t be used to perform work. From the point of view of work, it’s useless thermal energy (including heat) – something that can’t contribute to moving a turbine blade, powering a motor or motivating a system of pulleys to lift weights. Instead, it is thermal energy motivated by and directed at other impetuses.

As it happens, this picture could help clarify, or at least make more sense of, a contemporary situation in science journalism. Earlier this week, health journalist Priyanka Pulla discovered that the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) had published a press release last month, about the serological testing kit the government had developed, with the wrong specificity and sensitivity data. Two individuals she spoke to, one from ICMR and another from the National Institute of Virology, Pune, which actually developed the kit, admitted the mistake when she contacted them. Until then, neither organisation had issued a clarification even though it was clear both individuals are likely to have known of the mistake at the time the release was published.

Assuming for a moment that this mistake was an accident (my current epistemic state is ‘don’t know’), it would indicate ICMR has been inefficient in the performance of its duties, forcing journalists to respond to it in some way instead of focusing on other, more important matters.

The reason I’m tending to think of such work as entropy and not work per se is such instances, whereby journalists are forced to respond to an event or action characterised by the existence of trivial resolutions, seem to be becoming more common.

It’s of course easier to argue that what I consider trivial may be nontrivial to someone else, and that these events and actions matter to a greater extent than I’m willing to acknowledge. However, I’m personally unable to see beyond the fact that an organisation with the resources and, currently, the importance of ICMR shouldn’t have had a hard time proof-reading a press release that was going to land in the inboxes of hundreds of journalists. The consequences of the mistake are nontrivial but the solution is quite trivial.

(There is another feature in some cases: of the absence of official backing or endorsement of any kind.)

So as such, it required work on the part of journalists that could easily have been spared, allowing journalists to direct their efforts at more meaningful, more productive endeavours. Here are four more examples of such events/actions, wherein the non-triviality is significantly and characteristically lower than that attached to formal announcements, policies, reports, etc.:
1. Withholding data in papers – In the most recent example, ICMR researchers published the results of a seroprevalence survey of 26,000 people in 65 districts around India, and concluded that the prevalence of the novel coronavirus was 0.73% in this population. However, in their paper, the researchers include neither a district-wise breakdown of the data nor the confidence intervals for each available data-point even though they had this information (it’s impossible to compute the results the researchers did without these details). As a result, it’s hard for journalists to determine how reliable the results are, and whether they really support the official policies regarding epidemic-control interventions that will soon follow.
2. Publishing faff – On June 2, two senior members of the Directorate General of Health services, within India’s Union health ministry, published a paper (in a journal they edited) that, by all counts, made nonsensical claims about India’s COVID-19 epidemic becoming “extinguished” sometime in September 2020. Either the pair of authors wasn’t aware of their collective irresponsibility or they intended to refocus (putting it benevolently) the attention of various people towards their work, turning them away from the duo deemed embarrassing or whatever. And either way, the claims in the paper wound their way into two news syndication services, PTI and IANS, and eventually onto the pages of a dozen widely-read news publications in the country. In effect, there were two levels of irresponsibility at play: one as embodied by the paper and the other, by the syndication services’ and final publishers’ lack of due diligence.
3. Making BS announcements – This one is fairly common: a minister or senior party official will say something silly, such as that ancient Indians invented the internet, and ride the waves of polarising debate, rapidly devolving into acrimonious flamewars on Twitter, that follow. I recently read (in The Washington Post I think, but I can’t find the link now) that it might be worthwhile for journalists to try and spend less time on fact-checking a claim than it took someone to come up with that claim. Obviously there’s no easy way to measure the time some claims took to mature into their present forms, but even so, I’m sure most journalists would agree that fact-checking often takes much longer than bullshitting (and then broadcasting). But what makes this enterprise even more grating is that it is orders of magnitude easier to not spew bullshit in the first place.
4. Conspiracy theories – This is the most frustrating example of the lot because, today, many of the originators of conspiracy theories are television journalists, especially those backed by government support or vice versa. While fully acknowledging the deep-seated issues underlying both media independence and the politics-business-media nexus, numerous pronouncements by so many news anchors have only been akin to shooting ourselves in the foot. Exhibit A: shortly after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the start of demonetisation, a beaming news anchor told her viewers that the new 2,000-rupee notes would be embedded with chips to transmit the notes’ location real-time, via satellite, to operators in Delhi.
Perhaps this entropy – i.e. the amount of journalistic work not available to deal with more important stories – is not only the result of a mischievous actor attempting to keep journalists, and the people who read those journalists, distracted but is also assisted by the manifestation of a whole industry’s inability to cope with the mechanisms of a new political order.

Science journalism itself has already experienced a symptom of this change when pseudoscientific ideas became more mainstream, even entering the discourse of conservative political groups, including that of the BJP. In a previous era, if a minister said something, a reporter was to drum up a short piece whose entire purpose was to record “this happened”. And such reports were the norm and in fact one of the purported roots of many journalistic establishments’ claims to objectivity, an attribute they found not just desirable but entirely virtuous: those who couldn’t be objective were derided as sub-par.

However, if a reporter were to simply report today that a minister said something, she places herself at risk of amplifying bullshit to a large audience if what the minister said was “bullshit bullshit bullshit”. So just as politicians’ willingness to indulge in populism and majoritarianism to the detriment of society and its people has changed, so also must science journalism change – as it already has with many publications, especially in the west – to ensure each news report fact-checks a claim it contains, especially if it is pseudoscientific.

In the same vein, it’s not hard to imagine that journalists are often forced to scatter by the compulsions of an older way of doing journalism, and that they should regroup on the foundations of a new agreement that lets them ignore some events so that they can better dedicate themselves to the coverage of others.

Featured image credit: Татьяна Чернышова/Pexels.
Jun 14, 2020
Ocean-safe consumption

Just spotted this ad on the website of The Better India, a journalism website that focuses on “positive stories”:

India’s nationwide lockdown has many important lessons – including the fact that it wasn’t useful in slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus through the Indian population; and though there’s no way yet to tell if it was useless instead, state opacity, data manipulation, false advertisement, medical research devoid of science, struggling hospitals and apathy of the poor all make it so. This said, two lessons in particular have been decidedly positive: the air becoming cleaner, at least to see through, and the Ganga river becoming cleaner, reportedly even to drink from.

K.A.S. Mani, a hydrologist, observed shortly after the latter was reported that rivers could clean themselves in a matter of weeks only if we took a break from stuffing them with pollutants – and axiomatically that when governments spend crores of rupees on fancy technological solutions and set themselves deadlines that are years away to achieve the same goals, they’re probably not doing it right. The final message for the people is simple, and what it’s always been: if you want to protect the rivers – or for that matter the oceans – consume less.

This is also what makes any attempt to combine consumerism with eco-friendliness absurd, including The Better India‘s advertisement for a combination of different surface cleaners.

I admit their business model is worth considering: if you subscribe to their ‘service’, they’ll ship refill pouches to your place every month and whose contents you can store in the bottle you purchased the first time round.

(However, I’m skeptical of the claims about the cleaning substances, per the FAQ: “Our cleaners for laundry and dishwashing contain enzymes in addition to plant-based surfactants. These enzymes are lab-processed. Floor and toilet cleaners contain active microbes that create enzymes while performing the cleaning action.” Quite vague. I’m also very skeptical of the “non-toxic” bit: toxicity is highly context-specific, and the claim can’t possibly mean the cleaners are safe to drink!)

Most of all, none of this is “ocean-safe” – or even ocean-friendly – by any stretch of imagination. Bottles, refill pouches and cleaning agents still need to be made and shipped to households – all processes that will generate trash. It doesn’t make sense to claim simply that the contents of the bottles are unlikely to harm the ocean when spilled into the water (and even then I’d like to see some test results). What it is is very marginally less offensive to the world’s water bodies, where our waste eventually ends up.

And if anyone asks if I have a better idea: I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I get to pretend that what I’m doing is “safe” or “friendly” when it’s not.

Note: This post was updated on June 2, 2020, at 3.30 pm to clarify the lockdown’s usefulness in more detail.

Jun 2, 2020
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 ideas of what we can and can’t do to fight them. According to a report published in The Harvard Gazette:

The forum prompted serious reflection about structural inequalities and how public perceptions get shaped, which often leads to how resources are directed. “The cost of believing that something is so lethal and fatal is significant,” [Paul] Farmer said.
[Evelynn] Hammonds drew attention to how perceptions of risk about Ebola had been shaped mostly through the media, while noting that epidemics “pull the covers off” the ways that the poor, vulnerable, and sick are perceived.

These statements highlight the importance of a free press with a spine during a pandemic – instead of one that bends to the state’s will as well as doesn’t respect the demands of good health journalism while purporting to practice it.

We’ve been seeing how pliant journalists, especially on news channels like India Today and Republic and in the newsrooms of digital outlets like Swarajya and OpIndia, try so hard so often to defend the government’s claims about doing a good job of controlling the COVID-19 epidemic in India. As a result, they’ve frequently participated – willingly or otherwise – in creating the impression that a) the virus is deadly, and b) all Muslims are deadly.

Neither of course is true. But while political journalists, who in India have generally been quite influential, have helped disabuse people of the latter notion, the former has attracted fewer rebuttals principally because the few good health journalists and the vocal scientists operating in the country are already overworked thanks to the government’s decoy acts on other fronts.

As things stand, beware anyone who says the novel coronavirus is deadly if only because a) all signs indicate that it’s far less damaging to human society than tuberculosis is every year, and b) it’s an awfully powerful excuse that allows the government to give up and simply blame the virus for a devastation that – oddly enough – seems to affect the poor, the disabled and the marginalised too far more than the law of large numbers can account for.

Jun 1, 2020
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 spelled out in a draft resolution that asked the WHO to, among other things, “identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population, including the possible role of intermediate hosts, including through efforts such as scientific and collaborative field missions”.

The resolution was backed by 62 countries, including India, and the decision to adopt it was passed with 116 votes in favour, out of 194. This fraction essentially indicates that the overwhelming majority of WHO’s member states want to ‘reform’ the organisation towards a better response to the pandemic, especially in terms of obtaining information that they believe China has been reluctant to share.

The resolution follows from Australia’s demand in April 2020 for a public inquiry against China, suggesting that the Asian superpower was responsible for the virus and the global outbreak (not surprisingly, US President Donald Trump expressed his support). Together with the fact that the document doesn’t once mention China, the resolution is likely an expression of concern that seeks to improve international access to biological samples, specific locations and research data necessary to find out how the novel coronavirus came to infect humans, and which animal or avian species were intermediate hosts.

As it happens, this arguably legitimate demand doesn’t preclude the possibility that the resolution is motivated, at least in part, by the need to explore what is in many political leaders’ view the ‘alternative’ that the virus originated in a Chinese lab.

The WHA vote passed and the independent investigation will happen – but by who or how is unclear. Let’s assume for now that some team or other comes together and conducts the requisite studies.

What if the team does find that the virus is not lab-made? Will those WHO member states, and/or their politicians back home, that were in favour of the resolution to explore the ‘lab hypothesis’ let the matter rest? Or will they point fingers at the WHO and claim it is too favourable to China, as President Trump has already done and to which the resolution’s reformatory language alludes?

In fact, the investigation is unlikely to zero in on the virus’s origins if they were natural because too much time has passed since the first zoonotic spillover event. The bread crumbs could have long faded by the time the investigation team sets out on its task. It won’t be impossible, mind, but it will be very difficult and likely require many months to conclude.

But what if the investigation somehow finds that the virus was engineered in a lab and then leaked, either deliberately or accidentally? Will the scientists and those who believed them (including myself) stand corrected?

They will not. There’s a simple reason why: they – we – have thus far not been given enough evidence to reach this conclusion.

Indeed, there is already sufficient explanation these days to claim that the novel coronavirus is of natural origin and insufficient explanation that it was engineered. A study published on March 17, 2020, collected evidence for the former (and many others continue to do so). An excerpt from the conclusion:

The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimised RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.

If there is any animosity at all directed at China for supposedly engineering the virus, the countries that backed the resolution could only have done so by actively ignoring the evidence that already exists to the contrary.

In this particular case, it becomes extremely important for the representatives of these countries to explain why they think the evidence that scientists have not been able to find actually exists, and that they are simply yet to discover it. That is, why do they think some pieces are missing from the puzzle?

There is of course room for a deeper counter-argument here, but it isn’t entirely tenable either. One could still argue that there might be a larger ‘super-theory’ that encompasses the present one even as it elucidates a non-natural origin for the virus. This is akin to the principle of correspondence in the philosophy of science. The advent of the theories of relativity did not invalidate the Newtonian theory of gravity. Instead, the former resemble the latter in the specific domain in which the latter is applicable. Similarly, a ‘super-theory’ of the virus’s origins could point to evidence of bioengineering even as its conclusions resemble the evidence I’m pointing to to ascertain that the virus is natural.

But even then, the question remains: Why do you think such a theory exists?

Without this information, we are at risk of wasting our time in each pandemic looking for alternate causes that may or may not exist, many of which are quite politically convenient as well.

Perhaps we can assimilate a sign of things to come based on Harsh Vardhan’s performance as the chairman of the WHA’s executive board. Vardhan was elected into this position at the same WHA that adopted the draft resolution, and his highest priority is likely to be the independent investigation that the resolution calls for. As it happens, according to OP8 of the resolution, the resolution:

… calls on international organisations and other relevant stakeholders to … address, and where relevant in coordination with Member States, the proliferation of disinformation and misinformation particularly in the digital sphere, as well as the proliferation of malicious cyber-activities that undermine the public health response, and support the timely provision of clear, objective and science-based data and information to the public.

India as a member state is certainly a stakeholder, and Nitin Gadkari, one of the country’s senior ministers, recently said in an interview that the novel coronavirus was made in a lab. This is misinformation plain and simple, and goes against the call for the “timely provision of clear, objective and science-based information to the public”. Will the chair address this, please – or even future instances of such imprudence?

Ultimately, unless the investigation ends with the conspiracists changing their minds, the only outcome that seems to be guaranteed is that scientists will know their leaders no longer trust their work.

Featured image: The assembly hall of the Palace of Nations, Geneva, where the World Health Assembly usually meets. Photo: Tom Page/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

May 22, 2020
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 who could be a windbag. I haven’t ever had cause to interact with his work or his software company (which produced Wolfram Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha), so I didn’t know really know much about him to begin with. But I expected him, for reasons I can’t explain, to be more modest than he comes across as in the article.

The article was prompted in the first place by a preprint paper Wolfram and a colleague published earlier this year in which they claimed they had plotted a route to a fundamental theory of everything. Physics currently explains the universe with a combination of multiple theories that don’t really fit together. A ‘theory of everything’ is the colloquial name of a universal theory that many physicists argue exist and which could explain everything about the universe in a self-consistent manner.

Wolfram’s preprint paper was startling as things go not because of its substance but because a) he made no attempts to engage with the wider community of physicists that has been working on the same problem for decades, and b) for Wolfram’s insistence that those dismissing its conclusions are simply out to dismiss him. Consider the following portions:

“I do fault myself for not having done this 20 years ago,” the physicist turned software entrepreneur says. “To be fair, I also fault some people in the physics community for trying to prevent it happening 20 years ago. They were successful” [emphasis added].
“The experimental predictions of [quantum physics and general relativity] have been confirmed to many decimal places—in some cases, to a precision of one part in [10 billion],” says Daniel Harlow, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So far I see no indication that this could be done using the simple kinds of [computational rules] advocated by Wolfram. The successes he claims are, at best, qualitative.” …
“Certainly there’s no reason that Wolfram and his colleagues should be able to bypass formal peer review,” Katie Mack says. “And they definitely have a much better chance of getting useful feedback from the physics community if they publish their results in a format we actually have the tools to deal with.”

Reading of this attitude brought to mind an episode from six or seven weeks ago, after a pair of physicists had published a preprint paper modelling the evolution of the COVID-19 epidemic in India and predicting that multiple lockdowns instead of just one would work better. The paper was one of many that began to show up around that time, each set of authors fiddling with different parameters according to their sense of the world to reach markedly different conclusions (a bit of ambulance-chasing if you ask me).

The one by the two physicists was singled out for bristling criticism by other physicists because – quite like the complaints against Wolfram – their paper allegedly described a model that seemed to be able to reach any conclusion if you tweaked its parameters enough, and because the duo hadn’t clarified this and other important caveats in their interviews to journalists.

Aside 1 – In physics at least, it’s important for theories to be provable in some domains and falsifiable in others; if a theory of the world is non-falsifiable, it’s not considered legitimate. In Wolfgang Pauli’s famous words, it becomes ‘not even wrong’.

Aside 2 – Incidentally, Harlow – quoted above from the article – was one of the physicists defending physicists’ freedom to model what they will but agreed with the objection that they also need to be honest with journalists about their assumptions and caveats.

In a lengthy Facebook discussion that followed this brouhaha, someone referred to a Reddit post created three days earlier in which a physicist appealed to his peers to stop trying to model the pandemic – in his words, to “cut that shit out” – because a) no physicist could hope to do a better job than any other trained epidemiologist, and b) every model a physicist attempted could actually harm lives if it wasn’t done right (and there was a good chance it was at least incomplete).

Wolfram is guilty of the same thing: his preprint paper won’t harm lives, but the mortal threat is the only thing missing from his story; it’s otherwise rife with the same problems. His hubristic remark in the article’s denouement – that he deserves “better” questions than the ones other physicists were asking him in response to his “revolutionary” paper – indicates Wolfram thinks he’s done a great job but it’s impossible to see people like him as anything more than windbags convinced of their intellectual superiority and ability to singlehandedly wrestle hideously intractable problems to the ground. I, and likely other editors as well, have glimpsed this attitude on the part of some authors who dismiss criticism of their pieces as criticism of anything but their unclear writing, and some others who refuse to be disabused of a conviction that their conclusion is particularly fascinating.

I’d like to ask Wolfram what I’d like to ask these people as well: What have you hit on that you think others haven’t in all this time, and why do you think all of them missed it? Granted, everyone is allowed their ‘eureka’ moment, but anyone who claims it on the condition that he not be criticised is not likely to be taken seriously. More importantly, he may not even deserve to be taken seriously if only because, to adapt Mack’s line of reasoning, he undermines the very thing on which modern science is founded, the science he claims to be improving: processes, not outcomes; involving communities, not individuals.

Featured image credit: Anna Shvets/Pexels.

May 20, 2020
Nitin Gadkari, tomato chutney and blood

There is a famous comedy scene in Tamil cinema, starring the actors Vadivelu and ‘Bonda’ Mani. Those who understand Tamil should skip this awkward retelling – intended for non-Tamil speakers, to the video below and the post after. Vadivelu has blood all over his face due to an injury when ‘Bonda’ Mani walks up to him and asks why he’s got tomato chutney all over his face. Vadivelu looks stunned, and punches ‘Bonda’ Mani on the nose. Mani reaches a finger to his nose to find blood and cries out that he’s bleeding. Then Vadivelu asks, “If I have red stuff on my face it’s tomato chutney, but on your face it’s blood, eh?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbADAD7RIsE

It would seem Vadivelu spoke what he did for many millions of us today wondering how exactly the Indian government designed its unique response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. One of the centrepieces of its response has been to punish journalists, by shutting them down or in many cases slapping them with nothing less than sedition charges, when journalists are critical of the government or seem to be asking uncomfortable questions. On the other hand, pseudoscientific claims that can directly cause harm, what with us being in the middle of a health emergency, are let off without so much as a slap on the wrist when they’re pronounced by journalists in pro-right-wing newsrooms or – as it often happens – by ministers in the government itself.

Nitin Gadkari, the Union minister of road transport and highways, has told NDTV that he believes the novel coronavirus was not natural and that it was made in a lab. Another BJP member, this one a state-level office-bearer, had some time back said something similarly idiotic, prompting a rare rebuke from Union minister Prakash Javadekar. But I doubt Javadekar is going to mete the same treatment out to Gadkari – his equal, so to speak – in public, and it’s what’s in the public domain that matters. So if there’s red stuff all over a journalist’s face, it’s tomato chutney, even if it’s actually blood. But on a minister’s face, it’s always blood even when it’s actually tomato chutney. And the government and its foot-soldiers have conditioned themselves as well as >30% of the country to follow this rule.

Second, NDTV is also complicit in the ignorance, irresponsibility and recklessness on display here because its report simply says Gadkari said what he did, without so much as a note mentioning that he’s wrong. The reason is that what Gadkari, Javadekar – who recently vowed to “expose” those who ranked India poorly in press-freedom indices – and their colleagues, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, have done is hack journalism, at least journalism as it used to be practiced, with editors and reporters stubborn about not taking sides.

This culture of journalism was valid when, simply put, all political factions advanced equally legitimate arguments. And according to Modi et al, his government and colleagues are also advancing arguments that are as legitimate as – often if not more legitimate than – those in the opposition. But there’s often plain and simple evidence that these claims are wrong, often rooted in scientific knowledge (which is why Modi et al have been undermining “Western science” from the moment they assumed power in 2014). Journalists can’t treat both sides as equals anymore – whether they be the Left and the Right, the conservatives and the liberals or the progressives and the dogmatists – because one side, whether by choice or fate, has incorporated pseudoscience into its political ideals.

Now, sans a note that Gadkari is really spouting rubbish and that we have enough evidence to reject the idea that it was human-made and accept that it evolved naturally[1], NDTV is not – as it may believe – staying neutral as much as being exploited by Gadkari as a way to have his words amplified. NDTV is effectively complicit, bringing Gadkari’s unqualified nonsense to millions of its readers, many of them swayed as much by the authority and political beliefs of the claimant as others are by the weight or paucity of evidence.

Indeed, the news channel may itself be consciously playing to both sides: (i) those who know exactly why the minister and others who make such claims are wrong, joined increasingly by unthinkers who need to and do say fashionable things without understanding why what they’re saying is right (often the same people that place science in wrongful opposition to religion, social science and/or tradition); and (ii) the allegedly disenfranchised folks paranoid about everything that isn’t Indian and/or homegrown, and have since become unable to tell cow urine from a medicinal solution.

[1] I read some time ago that Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say to god if he died and came face to face with an almighty creator. Russell, a famous skeptic of various religious beliefs, apparently said he would accuse god of not providing enough evidence of the latter’s existence. I don’t know if this story is true but Russell’s argument, as claimed, makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? In the context of Gadkari’s comment, and Luc Montagnier’s before him, complete evidence differs significantly from sufficient evidence., and it’s important to account for sufficiency in arguments concerning the novel coronavirus as well. For example, the people who believe the novel coronavirus originated in a lab are called conspiracy theorists not because they have an alternative view – as they often claim in defence – but because most of their arguments use the fallacy of the converse: that if there isn’t sufficient evidence to prove the virus evolved in nature, it must have originated in a lab. Similarly, I and many others are comfortable claiming the virus evolved naturally because there is sufficient evidence to indicate that it did. For the same reason, I also think I and many others can be proven wrong only if new information emerges.

Featured image: Union minister Nitin Gadkari, 2014. Credit: Press Information Bureau.

May 14, 2020
When cooling down really means slowing down

Consider this post the latest in a loosely defined series about atomic cooling techniques that I’ve been writing since June 2018.

Atoms can’t run a temperature, but things made up of atoms, like a chair or table, can become hotter or colder. This is because what we observe as the temperature of macroscopic objects is at the smallest level the kinetic energy of the atoms it is made up of. If you were to cool such an object, you’d have to reduce the average kinetic energy of its atoms. Indeed, if you had to cool a small group of atoms trapped in a container as well, you’d simply have to make sure they – all told – slow down.

Over the years, physicists have figured out more and more ingenious ways to cool atoms and molecules this way to ultra-cold temperatures. Such states are of immense practical importance because at very low energy, these particles (an umbrella term) start displaying quantum mechanical effects, which are too subtle to show up at higher temperatures. And different quantum mechanical effects are useful to create exotic things like superconductors, topological insulators and superfluids.

One of the oldest modern cooling techniques is laser-cooling. Here, a laser beam of a certain frequency is fired at an atom moving towards the beam. Electrons in the atom absorb photons in the beam, acquire energy and jump to a higher energy level. A short amount of time later, the electrons lose the energy by emitting a photon and jump back to the lower energy level. But since the photons are absorbed in only one direction but are emitted in arbitrarily different directions, the atom constantly loses momentum in one direction but gains momentum in a variety of directions (by Newton’s third law). The latter largely cancel themselves out, leaving the atom with considerably lower kinetic energy, and therefore cooler than before.

In collisional cooling, an atom is made to lose momentum by colliding not with a laser beam but with other atoms, which are maintained at a very low temperature. This technique works better if the ratio of elastic to inelastic collisions is much greater than 50. In elastic collisions, the total kinetic energy of the system is conserved; in inelastic collisions, the total energy is conserved but not the kinetic energy alone. In effect, collisional cooling works better if almost all collisions – if not all of them – conserve kinetic energy. Since the other atoms are maintained at a low temperature, they have little kinetic energy to begin with. So collisional cooling works by bouncing warmer atoms off of colder ones such that the colder ones take away some of the warmer atoms’ kinetic energy, thus cooling them.

In a new study, a team of scientists from MIT, Harvard University and the University of Waterloo reported that they were able to cool a pool of NaLi diatoms (molecules with only two atoms) this way to a temperature of 220 nK. That’s 220-billionths of a kelvin, about 12-million-times colder than deep space. They achieved this feat by colliding the warmer NaLi diatoms with five-times as many colder Na (sodium) atoms through two cycles of cooling.

Their paper, published online on April 8 (preprint here), indicates that their feat is notable for three reasons.

First, it’s easier to cool particles (atoms, ions, etc.) in which as many electrons as possible are paired to each other. A particle in which all electrons are paired is called a singlet; ones that have one unpaired electron each are called doublets; those with two unpaired electrons – like NaLi diatoms – are called triplets. Doublets and triplets can also absorb and release more of their energy by modifying the spins of individual electrons, which messes with collisional cooling’s need to modify a particle’s kinetic energy alone. The researchers from MIT, Harvard and Waterloo overcame this barrier by applying a ‘bias’ magnetic field across their experiment’s apparatus, forcing all the particles’ spins to align along a common direction.

Second: Usually, when Na and NaLi come in contact, they react and the NaLi molecule breaks down. However, the researchers found that in the so-called spin-polarised state, the Na and NaLi didn’t react with each other, preserving the latter’s integrity.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, this is not the coldest temperature to which we have been able to cool quantum particles, but it still matters because collisional cooling offers unique advantages that makes it attractive for certain applications. Perhaps the most well-known of them is quantum computing. Simply speaking, physicists prefer ultra-cold molecules to atoms to use in quantum computers because physicists can control molecules more precisely than they can the behaviour of atoms. But molecules that have doublet or triplet states or are otherwise reactive can’t be cooled to a few billionths of a kelvin with laser-cooling or other techniques. The new study shows they can, however, be cooled to 220 nK using collisional cooling. The researchers predict that in future, they may be able to cool NaLi molecules even further with better equipment.

Note that the researchers didn’t cool the NaLi atoms from room temperature to 220 nK but from 2 µK. Nonetheless, their achievement remains impressive because there are other well-established techniques to cool atoms and molecules from room temperature to a few micro-kelvin. The lower temperatures are harder to reach.

One of the researchers involved in the current study, Wolfgang Ketterle, is celebrated for his contributions to understanding and engineering ultra-cold systems. He led an effort in 2003 to cool sodium atoms to 0.5 nK – a record. He, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman won the Nobel Prize for physics two years before that: Cornell, Wieman and their team created the first Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995, and Ketterle created ‘better’ condensates that allowed for closer inspection of their unique properties. A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter in which multiple particles called bosons are ultra-cooled in a container, at which point they occupy the same quantum state – something they don’t do in nature (even as they comply with the laws of nature) – and give rise to strange quantum effects that can be observed without a microscope.

Ketterle’s attempts make for a fascinating tale; I collected some of them plus some anecdotes together for an article in The Wire in 2015, to mark the 90th year since Albert Einstein had predicted their existence, in 1924-1925. A chest-thumper might be cross that I left Satyendra Nath Bose out of this citation. It is deliberate. Bose-Einstein condensates are named for their underlying theory, called Bose-Einstein statistics. But while Bose had the idea for the theory to explain the properties of photons, Einstein generalised it to more particles, and independently predicted the existence of the condensates based on it.

This said, if it is credit we’re hungering for: the history of atomic cooling techniques includes the brilliant but little-known S. Pancharatnam. His work in wave physics laid the foundations of many of the first cooling techniques, and was credited as such by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji in the journal Current Science in 1994. Cohen-Tannoudji would win a piece of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for inventing a technique called Sisyphus cooling – a way to cool atoms by converting more and more of their kinetic energy to potential energy, and then draining the potential energy.

Indeed, the history of atomic cooling techniques is, broadly speaking, a history of physicists uncovering newer, better ways to remove just a little bit more energy from an atom or molecule that’s already lost a lot of its energy. The ultimate prize is absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible, at which the atom retains only the energy it can in its ground state. However, absolute zero is neither practically attainable nor – more importantly – the goal in and of itself in most cases. Instead, the experiments in which physicists have achieved really low temperatures are often pegged to an application, and getting below a particular temperature is the goal.

For example, niobium nitride becomes a superconductor below 16 K (-257º C), so applications using this material prepare to achieve this temperature during operation. For another, as the MIT-Harvard-Waterloo group of researchers write in their paper, “Ultra-cold molecules in the micro- and nano-kelvin regimes are expected to bring powerful capabilities to quantum emulation and quantum computing, owing to their rich internal degrees of freedom compared to atoms, and to facilitate precision measurement and the study of quantum chemistry.”

May 5, 2020
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 crisis, hosted by Scroll.in, Srinivasan hosts a few people working in different areas, and they all chat about what they’re doing and how they’re dealing with everything that’s going on for about an hour. However, our episode, the 50th of the series, was a double feature: the first 60 minutes was a conversation among us journalists, and for the next 50 minutes or so, Srinivasan had on Aseem Chhabra to discuss the lives and work of Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor, who had passed away a few days earlier. The full video is available to view here as well as is embedded below.

I also transcribed the portion of the video where I spoke for two reasons. First, because I’d like to remember what I said, and writing helps me do that. Second, I’m a lousy speaker because I constantly lose my train of thought, and often swallow words that I really should have spoken out loud, often rendering what I’m saying difficult to piece together. So by preparing a transcript, pasted below, I can both clarify what I meant in the video as well as remember what I thought, not just what I said.

How would you grade Indian journalism at the moment, in these last two months, in terms of coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic?

The mainstream English press has been doing okay, I guess, but even then to paint it all with the same brush is very difficult because there are also very different stories to cover at a time like this. For example, many social and political issues are being covered well by specific publications. Some others are addressing different aspects of this.

In fact, if I had to pick out one aspect that I could say we’re not doing enough about is in terms of the science itself. The coronavirus outbreak is a crisis, and a large part of it is rooted in health issues, in scientific issues – much like climate change, antimicrobial resistance, etc. A lot of journalists are doing a good job of covering how this outbreak has impacted our society, our economy, etc. but there’s actually very little going into understanding how the virus really works or how epidemiologists or virologists do what they do.

One easy example is this business of testing kits. There’s a lot of controversy now about the serological tests that ICMR procured, probably at inflated prices, are not very accurate. The thing is, whenever you’re in a crisis like this and somebody’s rapidly developing kits – testing kits or ventilators or anything like that – there is always going to be a higher error rate.

Also, no test is 100% perfect. Every test is error-prone, including false positives and false negatives. But in this rush to make sure everything is covered, most of what is being elided – at least among organisations that are taking the trouble – is the science itself [of how tests are developed, why the errors are unavoidable, etc.]. That’s a significant blindspot.

But on the positive side of it, there is also a heightened awareness now of the need to understand how science works. We’ve been seeing this at The Wire, I don’t know if it applies to other organisations: there is a sort of demand… the engagement with science stories has increased. We’re using this opportunity to push out these stories, but the thing is we’re also hoping that once this pandemic ends and the crisis passes, this appreciation for science will continue, especially among journalists.

Apart from this, I don’t want to attempt any grading.

What is your reaction to the value of data journalism at this time?

The value of charts has been great, and there are lots of charts out there right now, projecting or contrasting different data-points. Just a few days ago we published a piece with something like 60 charts discussing the different rates of testing and positivity in all of India’s states.

But the problem with these charts – and there is a problem, that needs to be acknowledged – is that they tend to focus the conversation on the data itself. The issue with that is that they miss ground realities. [I’m not accusing the charts of stealing the attention so much as giving the impression, or supporting the takeaway, that the numbers being shown are all that matter.]

While data journalism is very important, especially in terms of bringing sense to the lots of numbers floating about, [it also feeds problematic narratives about how numbers are all that matter.] I recently watched this short clip on Twitter in which a bunch of people were crowded at a quarantine centre in Allahabad fighting for food. There was very little food available and I think they were daily-wage labourers. I think there is a lot being said about the value and virtues of data journalism and visualisations but I don’t think there is much being said at all – but definitely needs to be – about how data can’t ever describe the full picture.

Especially in India, and we’ve seen this recently with the implementation of the Aadhaar programme as well: even if your success rate with something is as high as 99%, 1% of India’s population is still millions of people [and it’s no coincidence that they already belong to the margins of society.] And this is something I’ve thus far not seen data stories capture. Numbers are good to address the big picture but they’ve been effectively counterproductive during this crisis in terms of distracting from the ground stories. [So even the best charts can only become the best stories if they’re complemented with some reporting.]

The Wire compiled a list of books to read during the lockdown, with recommendations by its staff. You recommended Dune by Frank Herbert. Why?

Dune to me was an obvious choice for [three] reasons. One is that Dune is set on a planet where you already see life in extremes, especially with the tribe of the Fremen, who play an important role in the plot. What really stayed with me about that book was its sort of mystic environmentalism, about how humans and nature are connected. The book explores this in a long-winded way, but that’s something we’ve seen a lot of these days in terms of zoonoses – [pathogens] that jump from animals to humans.

There’s also a lot of chatter these days about killing bats because they host coronaviruses. But all of that is rubbish. Humans are very deeply responsible for this crisis we’ve brought on ourselves in many ways.

This also alludes to what Anna Isaac mentioned earlier: what do you mean by normal? Yes, life probably will return to normal in India’s green zones next week, but the thing is, once this crisis ends, there’s still climate change, antimicrobial resistance and environmental degradation awaiting us that will bring on more epidemics and pandemics. Ecologists who have written for us have discussed this concept called ‘One Health’, where you don’t just discuss your health in terms of your body or your immediate environment but also in terms of your wider environment – at the ecosystem level.

Dune I think is a really good example of sci-fi that captures such an idea. And Dune is also special because it’s sci-fi, which helps us escape from our reality better, because sci-fi is both like and unlike.

The third reason it’s special is because the movie adaptation is coming out later this year, so it’s good to be ready. 😀

[When asked for closing remarks…]

When I started out being a journalist, I was quite pissed off that there wasn’t much going on in terms of the science coverage in India. So my favourite stories to write in the last eight years I’ve been a journalist have been about making a strong point about a lot of knowledge being out there in the world that seems like it’s not of immediate benefit or use [but is knowledge – and therefore worth knowing – nonetheless]. That’s how I started off being a science journalist.

My forte is writing about high-energy physics and astrophysics. Those are the stories I’ve really enjoyed covering and that’s the sort of thing that’s also lacking at the moment in the Indian journalism landscape – and that’s also the sort of coverage of science news we wanted to bring into the pandemic.

Here, I should mention that The Wire is trying to build what we hope will be the country’s first fully reader-funded, independent science news website. We launched it in February. We really want to put something together like the Scientific American of India. You can support that by donating at thewire.in/support. This is really a plea to support us to go after stories that we haven’t seen many others cover in India at the moment.

Right now, most stories are about the coronavirus outbreak but as we go ahead, we’d like to focus more and more on two areas: science/society and pure research, stuff that we’re finding out but not talking about probably because we think it’s of no use to us [but really that’s true only because we haven’t zoomed out enough].

May 4, 2020
The journalist as expert

I recently turned down some requests for interviews because the topics of discussion in each case indicated that I would be treated as a scientist, not a science journalist (something that happened shortly after the Balakot airstrikes and the ASAT test as well). I suspect science and more so health journalists are being seen as important sources of information at this crucial time for four reasons (in increasing order of importance, at least as I see it):

1. We often have the latest information – This is largely self-explanatory except for the fact that since we discover a lot of information first-hand, often from researchers to whom the context in which the information is valid may be obvious but who may not communicate that, we also have a great responsibility to properly contextualise what we know before dissemination. Many of us do, many of us don’t, but either way both groups come across as being informed to their respective audiences.

2. We’re “temporary experts”.

3. We’re open to conversations when others aren’t – I can think of a dozen experts who could replace me in the interviews I described and do a better job of communicating the science and more importantly the uncertainty. However, a dozen isn’t a lot, and journalists and any other organisations committed to spreading awareness are going to be hard-pressed to find new voices. At this time, science/health journalists could be seen as stand-in experts: we’re up-to-date, we’re (largely) well-versed with the most common issues, and unlike so many experts we’re often willing to talk.

4. It would seem journalists are the only members of society who are synthesising different schools of thought, types of knowledge and stories of ground realities into an emergent whole. This is a crucial role and, to be honest, I was quite surprised no one else is doing this – until I realised the problem. Our scholastic and academic systems may have disincentivised such holism, choosing instead to pursue more and more specialised and siloised paths. But even then the government should be bringing together different pieces of the big picture, and putting them together to design multifaceted policies and inventions, but isn’t doing so. So journalists could be seen as the only people who are.

Now, given these reasons, is treating journalists as experts so bad?

It’s really not, actually. Journalism deserves more than to be perceived as an adjacent enterprise – something that attaches itself on to a mature substrate of knowledge instead of being part of the substrate itself. There are some journalists who have insightfully combined, say, what they know about scientific publishing with what they know about research funding to glimpse a bigger picture still out of reach of many scientists. There is certainly a body of knowledge that cannot be derived from the first principles of each of its components alone, and which journalists are uniquely privileged to discover. I also know of a few journalists who are better committed to evidence and civic duty than many scientists, in turn producing knowledge of greater value. Finally, insofar as knowledge is also produced through the deliberate opposition of diverse perspectives, journalists contribute every time they report on a preprint paper, bringing together multiple independent experts – sometimes from different fields – to comment on the paper’s merits and demerits.

But there are some issues on the flip side. For example, not all knowledge is emergent in this way, and more importantly journalists make for poor experts on average when what we don’t know is as important as what we know. And when lives are at stake, anyone who is being invited to participate in an interview, panel discussion or whatever should consider – even if the interviewer hasn’t – whether what they say could cause harm, and if they can withstand any social pressure to not be seen to be ignorant and say “I don’t know” when warranted. And even then, there can be very different implications depending on whether it’s a journalist or an expert saying “I don’t know”.

Even more importantly, journalists need to be recognised in their own right, instead of being hauled into the limelight as quasi-experts instead of as people who practice a craft of their own. This may seem like a minor issue of perception but it’s important to maintain the distinction between the fourth estate and other enterprises lest journalism’s own responsibilities become subsumed by those of the people and organisations journalists write about or – worse yet – lest they are offset by demands that society has been unable to meet in other ways. If a virologist can’t be found for an interview, a journalist is a barely suitable replacement, except if the conversation is going to be sharply focused on specific issues the journalist is very familiar with, but even then it’s not the perfect solution.

If a virologist or a holist (as in the specific way mentioned above) can’t be found, the ideal way forward would be to look harder for another virologist or holist, and in doing so come up against the unique challenges to accessing expertise in India. In this regard, if journalists volunteer themselves as substitutes, they risk making excuses for a problem they actually needed to be highlighting.

Apr 30, 2020
Avoiding ‘muddled science’ in the newsroom

On April 23, I was part of a webinar called ProtoCall, organised by Pro.to with the support of International Centre for Journalists and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. It happens once a week and is hosted by Ameya Nagarajan and Nayantara Narayanan. Every week there’s a theme which, together with the discussion around it, is picked to help non-science and non-health journalists cover the coronavirus pandemic. The session before the one I was part of discussed the role of data, the gaps in data and how journalists could help fill them. My session was entitled ‘How muddled science drives misinformation’, and my fellow panelists were Shruti Muralidhar and Shahid Jameel, neither of whom should need introduction on the pages of this blog.

Given a brief ahead of the session (available to read here), I prepared some notes for the conversation and which I’m pasting below in full. Note that the conversation itself panned out differently (as military historians have noted, “no plan survives contact with the enemy”), so you could watch the full video if you’re interested or read the transcript when it comes out. Both Shruti and Dr Jameel made some great points throughout the conversation, plus the occasional provocative opinion (by myself as well).

§

1. Science journalists should continue to do what we’ve always had to do — empower our readers to decide for themselves based on what data they have available. Yes, this is a slow process, and yes, it’s tedious, but we shouldn’t have to adopt radical tactics now just because we haven’t been doing our job properly before. Introduce the relevant concept, theories, hypotheses, etc. as well as introduce how scientists evaluate data and keeping what in mind.

I can think of at least three doctors I’ve spoken to recently – all three of very good standing in the medical research community, and one is pro-lockdown, one is anti-lockdown, and one argues that there’s a time and place to impose a lockdown. This is a new virus for everybody and there is disagreement between doctors as well. But this doesn’t imply that some doctors are motivated by ideologies or whatever. It means the story here is that doctors disagree, period.

2. Because this is a new disease for everybody, be skeptical of every result, especially those that claim 100% certainty. No matter what anyone says, the only thing you can know with 100% certainty is that you cannot know anything with 100% certainty. This is a pandemic and suddenly everyone is interested in what scientific studies have to say, because people are desperately looking for hope and there will be a high uptake for positive news – no matter how misinformed or misguided.

But before everyone was interested in scientific studies, it was always the case that results from tests and experiments and such were never 100% accurate. They all had error rates, they were all contingent on replication studies, they were and are all works in progress. So no matter what a study says, you can very safely assume it has a caveat or a shortcoming, or a specific, well-defined context in which it is true, and you need to go looking for it.

3. It’s okay to take time to check results. At a time of such confusion and more importantly heightened risk, misinformation can kill. So take your time, speak to doctors and scientists. Resisting the pressure to publish quickly is important. If you’re on a hard deadline, be as conservative in your language as possible, just go with the facts – but then even facts are not entirely harmless. There are different facts pointing to different possibilities.

Amitabh Joshi said a couple years back at a talk that science is not about facts but about interpreting collections of facts. And scientists often differ because they’re interpreting different groups of facts to explain trends in the data. Which also means expertise is not a straightforward affair, especially in the face of new threats.

4. Please become comfortable saying “I don’t know”. I think those are some of the most important words these days. Too many people – especially many celebrities – think that the opposite of ‘true’ is ‘false’ and that the opposite of ‘false’ is ‘true’. But actually there’s a no man’s land in between called ‘I don’t know’, which stands for claims, data, etc. that we haven’t yet been able to verify yet.

Amitabh Bachchan recently recorded a video suggesting that the coronavirus is transmitted via human faeces and by flies that move between that faecal matter and nearby food items. The thing is, we don’t know if this is true. There have been some studies but obviously they didn’t specifically study what Amitabh Bachchan claimed. But saying ‘I don’t know’ here wouldn’t mean that the opposite of what Bachchan said is true. It would mean Bachchan was wrong to ascribe certainty to a claim that doesn’t presently deserve that certainty. And when you say you don’t know, please don’t attach caveats to a claim saying ‘it may be true’ or ‘it may be false’.

We need to get comfortable saying ‘we don’t know’ because then that’s how we know we need more research, and even that we need to support scientists, etc.

5. Generally beware of averages. Averages have a tendency to flatten the data, which is not good when regional differences matter.

6. Has there been a lot of science journalism of the pandemic in India? I’m not sure. A lot of explanations have come forth as background to larger stories about the technology, sampling/testing methods, governance, rights, etc. But I’ve seen very little of the mathematics, of the biology and research into the virus as such.

I don’t think this is a problem of access to scientists or availability of accessible material, which to my mind are secondary issues, especially from journalists’ point of view. Yes, you need to be able to speak to doctors and medical researchers, and many of them are quite busy these days and their priorities are very different. But also many, many scientists are sitting at home because of the lockdown and many of them are keen to help.

To me, it’s more a problem of journalists not knowing which questions to ask. For example, unless you know that something called a cytokine storm exists, to you it remains an unknown-unknown. So the bigger issue for me is that journalists shouldn’t expect to do a good job covering this crisis without knowing the underlying science. A cytokine storm is one example, but I’d say not many journalists are asking more important questions, from my point of view, about statistical methods, clinical trials, scientific publishing, etc. and I suspect it’s because they’re not aware these issues exist.

If you want to cover the health aspects like a seasoned health journalist would, there are obviously other things you’re going to have to familiarise yourself with, like pharmaceutical policy, clinical trials, how diseases are tracked, hospital administration, etc.

So I’d say learn the science/health or you’re going to have a tough time asking the right questions. You can’t expect to go into this thinking you can do a good job just by speaking to different doctors and scientists because sooner than later, you’re going to miss asking the right questions.

7. Three things have worked for The Wire Science, vis-à-vis working with freelancers and other editors.

First, there needs to be clear communication. For example, if you disagree with a submission, please take time out to explain what you think is wrong about it, because it often happens that the author knows the science very well but may just not have laid it out in a way that’s completely clear. This is also exhausting but in the long run it helps.

Second, set clear expectations. For example at The Wire Science, I insist on primary sources to all claims to the extent possible, so we don’t accidentally help magnify a dubious claim made by a secondary source. I don’t accept articles or comments on papers that have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal or in a legitimate preprint repository. And I insist that any articles based on scientific papers must carry an independent voice commenting on the merits and weaknesses of the study, even if the reporter hasn’t spoken to the paper’s authors themselves.

Interestingly enough, in our internal fact-check filters, these ‘clear expectations’ criteria act as pre-filters in the sense that if an article meets these three criteria, it’s also factually accurate more than 90% of the time. And because these criteria are fairly simple to define and identify in the article, anyone can check for them instead of just me.

Third, usually the flow of information and decisions in our newsroom is top-down-ish (not entirely top-down), but once the pandemic took centerstage, this organisation sort of became radial. Editors, reporters and news producers all have different ideas for stories and I’ve been available as a sort of advisor, so before they pursue any story, they sometimes come to me to discuss if they’re thinking about it the right way.

This way automatically prevents a lot of unfeasible ideas from being followed up. Obviously it’s not the ultimate solution but it covers a lot of ground.

8. The urgency and tension of a pandemic can’t be an excuse to compromise on quality and nuance. And especially at a time like now, misinformation can kill, so I’m being very clear with my colleagues and freelancers that we’re going to take the time to verify, that I’m going to resist the temptation to publish quickly. Even if there’s an implicit need to publish stuff quickly since the pandemic is evolving so fast, I’d say if you can write pieces with complexity and nuance, please do.

The need for speed arises, at least from what I can see, in terms of getting more traffic to your site and which in turn your product, business and editorial teams have together decided is going to be driven by primacy – in terms of being seen by your readers as the publication that puts information out first. So you’re going to need to have a conversation with your bosses and team members as well about the importance at a time like this of being correct over being fast. The Wire Science does incur a traffic penalty as a result of going a bit slower than others but it’s a clear choice for us because it’s been the lesser price to pay.

In fact, I think now is a great time to say to your readers, “It’s a pandemic and we want to do this right. Give us money and we’ll stop rushing for ads.”

Full video:

[facebook url=”https://www.facebook.com/heyproto/videos/589114175031406/” /]

Apr 26, 2020