I’m so naive. I had no idea Romm was dictating his posts. I had pegged him as the fanatical obsessive type, singularly focused, the way he cranked out those multiple 2,000 word-plus posts every day.
So now I’m wondering: is this de riguer?
Or am I misunderstanding his comment about the perils of voice dictation software?
Sphere: Related ContentA few weeks back, I bet the Seed magazine editors pounded their desks when they saw this sunday New York Times article on climate change and social scientists.
Not to worry guys, your piece in the June issue, while covering much the same ground, examines one important obstacle to climate action the Times ignored: the division within the sciences:
Social science may be able to save the world from climate change, but only if there’s a change of heart — not just among the public, but among natural scientists and engineers.
In the Seed story, Baruch Fischhoff, of Carnegie Mellon, asserts that many natural scientists
do not believe in the social sciences. They grudgingly see that people matter, but they are not willing to share power with social sciences, or to entertain the thought that their own message is not the right one and that you need to include the social scientists in a strategic way.”
That message, it seems, is starting to gain some traction.
Sphere: Related ContentI’m ambivalent about the value of blog comments. Part of me loves Andrew Sullivan’s blog because he spares us from having to wade through the bushels of crap he undoubtedly receives– though Sullivan often highlights and edits the best of his reader emails in a way that provides excellent counter-perspective to a particular topic or thread.
The other part of me enjoys reading comments at Dot Earth, Real Climate, or academic sites, such as Savage Minds (even though I’ve lately been critical of them), because the comments are generally intelligent.
But at so many blogs the majority of comments are either 1) inane, 2) rah, rah, 3) churlish. They add little value to the original post. They don’t foster constructive conversation.
And I haven’t even started in about comments to newspaper stories. Troll around there for a few minutes and you’re bound to drown in a cesspool of nasty bile. It’s not the best face of humanity.
Still, as a journalist, I mine blog comments the way I mine policy papers, journals, goverment docs. There’s always buried jewels for the taking. And ocassionally, revealing debates break out in a comment thread that sometimes take on a life of their own. There’s value in that.
For anyone interested in how to become a quality commenter, this post is worth a read.
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