When I was in school, I was asked to participate in a debate: “Science: A Cure Or A Disease?”. Yes, my school sucked.
Since then, I’ve been observing how the discipline of science remains largely misunderstood or not understood at all.
New Scientist has just published “13 more things that don’t make sense”, a sequel to their highly …
Category Archives: media
Do New Scientist’s Headlines Make Sense?
Encouraging Superstition on TV
A few days back, I was watching a children’s reality show on TV, Zee Saregamapa Little Champs. Young children sing and compete in this show, and there are two judges, one of whom is Ms. Alka Yagnik.
After one of the kids sung a song composed by Bappi Lahiri, Ms. Yagnik said she had brought a …
Rulebook for Indian TV News Producers
Any newbie TV News Producer who wants to compete with the top Indian news channels will be well advised to comply with the following guidelines:
All news is BREAKING NEWS. This also means that if there is no news, BREAK all journalism rules to get BREAKING NEWS.
TV news channels are in the business of TRPs, …
Weekend Flea Market 5-Oct-07
An assortment of stuff I came across in cyberspace, offered second hand, for anyone who may be interested.
If you haven’t read it already, Thomas Friedman’s penultimate op-ed 9/11 Is Over, is a must-read.
China has now started blocking all RSS feeds as well.
A woman has been sentenced to death by stoning in Iran for committing adultery. Kamangir …
Right to Free Speech: What does it mean?
The controversy started last week, when Verizon (one of the two largest telecom carriers in the US), refused to make their network available for a text message program advocating abortion. The program allows people to sign up for messages if they choose, and is a completely voluntary exercise of choice for consumers. Verizon would have …
A Case of Contempt
In a contemptuous ruling, the Delhi High Court today sentenced four journalists of Mid-Day newspaper to four months in jail.
It ruled that articles and a cartoon in the newspaper accusing former Chief Justice of India, Mr. Y. K. Sabharwal, were tantamount to contempt of court and would tarnish the image of the highest court in the …
Challenges in Journalism
The Kentucky Herald Leader reported an unusual story. An emotionally upset woman called up, and said that she had found the scalp of a dead friend’s remains, in the woods where he had accidentally died. His body had already been taken to the coroner’s office couple of days ago. She stored the 8x4 inch piece …
WikiScanning India
In the privacy-cherishing geek Internet populace, a monitoring tool for tracing changes to Wikipedia entries is gaining notorious popularity. WikiScanner, a tool created a few weeks back, maps millions of Wikipedia edits to the IP address of the computer used to make those edits. By referencing public databases that map sets of IP addresses to …
A Lesser Known Mutineer
It is people like these, from remote parts of India, that sometimes show us the way.
The BBC reports:
Gaurishankar Rajak is a poor, “untouchable” washerman, who barely went to school.
But the sixty-something Dalit from Dumka in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has published a newspaper every week without fail for the past 21 years, …
Yearning for Sense Beyond the Earth
At the start of the day, I was almost sure I was going to write about how the world doesn’t seem like a place that I’m proud to be in.
Depressing Scene
The Indian Left wanted India to be Left behind. The Indian Right didn’t know what was Right anymore.
China, a communist nation, seeks to achieve a nuclear deal …
