Tag Archives: Queen Anne

NNI’s clumsy attempt to manipulate media; copyright roots

Is it ever a good idea to hand a bunch of experts at your public workshop on nanotechnology risks and ethical issues a list of the facts and comments that you’d like them to give in response to ‘difficult’ questions from the media after you’ve taken a recent shellacking from one reporter who is likely present? While the answer should be obvious, I’m sad to say that the folks at the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) publicly and demonstrably failed to answer correctly.

The reporter in question is Andrew Schneider who wrote a series on nanotechnology for AOL News. I’ve mentioned his series in passing a few times here and I’m truly disheartened to find myself discussing Schneider and it, one more time. For the record, I think it’s well written and there’s some good information about important problems unfortunately, there’s also a fair chunk of misleading and wrong information. So, in addition to the solid, well founded material, the series also provides examples of ill-informed and irresponsible science journalism. (Here’s an example of one of his misleading statements. If you want to find it, you have to read down a few paragraphs as that post was about misleading statements being bruited about by individuals with differing perspectives on nanotechnology.) The Schneider’s series, if you’re madly curious is here.

Yesterday, Clayton Teague, director for the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, provided a riposte on AOL News where Schneider, a few hours, later, offered a devastating nonresponse. Instead, Schneider focused on the NNI’s recent report to the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors (PCAST) getting in a few solid hits before revealing the clumsy attempt to manipulate the media message at the public workshop that the NNI recently held and which Schneider likely attended.

If you want the inside story from the perspective of one of the experts who was at the panel, check out Dr. Andrew Maynard’s latest posting on his 2020 Science blog.

Two more points before I move on (for today anyway), Schneider’s ‘nonresponse’ refers to both Andrew and another expert as ‘civilians’.

  • Maynard [director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health] and Jennifer Sass [chief scientist and nano expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council], both leading civilian public health scientists who participated in the review … [emphasis mine]
  • “Surely it is inappropriate for the federal government to advise independent experts what to say on its behalf when it comes to critical news reports,” added Maynard, who was one of the civilian advisers on the panel. [emphasis mine]

As far as I’m aware, only the police and the military refer to the rest of us (who are not them) as civilians. Is Schneider trying to suggest (purposely or not) a police or military state?

As for my second point. Somebody passed the list of NNI preferred/approved facts and comments on to Schneider. The first thought would be someone from the expert panel but it could have come from anyone within the NNI who had access and is sympathetic to Schneider’s concerns about nanotechnology.

Copyright roots

If you’ve ever been curious as to how copyright came about in the first place, head over to Greg Fenton’s item on Techdirt. From the posting where Fenton is commenting on a recent Economist article about copyright,

The Economist goes on to highlight:

Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right.

Surely there will be copyright supporters who will cringe at such a statement. They believe that copyright is “intellectual property”, and therefore their arguments often confuse the requirements for laws that support copyright with those that support physical properties.

The article Fenton refers to  is currently open access (but I’m not sure for how long or what the policy is at The Economist). The last lines (with which I heartily concur) from the Economist’s article,

The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised. None of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning. But tools are not ends in themselves. [emphasis mine]

Today’s posting is a short one. About time I did that, eh?