Daily Archives: January 13, 2004

Mammalian Embryology

This entry was posted in Biology Education on by

Sit down when you have some time and review this tutorial on Normal and Abnormal Mammalian Development. It is both interesting and informative:

The 3-D like quality of the micrographs coupled with selected line drawings and minimal text allow relatively easy understanding of the complex morphological changes that occur in utero. Because early human embryos are not readily available and because embryogenesis is very similar across mammalian species, the majority of micrographs that are utilized in this tutorial are of mouse embryos. The remainder are human.

There is nothing hard here and I don’t understand why students coming out of elementary school do not have a understanding of this material at this leve l(other then it is not presented to them).
Via Metafilter.

Journalism or Editorializing

This entry was posted in Journalism on by

In Part IV of his series Toward a Field Theory of Journalism Andrew Cline discusses the epistemology of journalism:

… and any answer I offer here is necessarily general and incomplete.
That said, we may observe that journalism operates with an objectivist epistemology: What is real is located in the material world and human actions within that world. What can be known are empirically verifiable phenomena. We are connected to the material world by our senses and certain faculties of the mind, which are capable of perceiving the world through sense impressions and then thinking about, and acting upon, these impressions.
Journalism’s challenge in this epistemology is to perceive the world correctly and then represent perceptions correctly through language.

This also seems to provide a good set of criteria for separating journalism from editorial opinion. While both often appear in the same publication journalism at least attempts the following:

Because it is empirically verifiable that humans disagree about events (our opinions), reporters collect data from “both sides” and present these data without comment, allowing readers to apply their own reasoning to discover the incorrect opinion versus the correct representation of events.

Editorial/opinion content attempts to substitute the writer’s reasoning for that of the reader.
One of our challenges as we apply our own reasoning to journalism is to evaluate the quality of the data being presented and to ascertain whether the data has been inappropriately passed through editorial/opinion based filters.
Yesterday’s post Orchestrating Emergencies suggests that the OMB/White House tend to do the latter rather then provide the citizenry with information that would meet journalistic standards.