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General rule: Don't believe everything you read in the media.
Some media reports are out of date.
Some of them are woefully incomplete.
Some of them are just plain wrong.
Suggestion: Please, if you are going to email a link to 1000
people, it would be a Good Thing to vet it first.
For example, the recently-mentioned PennEnergy article is at
quite out of date. Anybody who reads
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/
or
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/
would have known about the "cold shutdown" announcement four
days ago.
The PennEnergy article is not a primary source. It is derived
from (and inferior to) something published in the New York times,
which itself is neither primary nor timely.
What's worse, the headline of the PennEnergy article says
"Japan's Fukushima reactors finally contained"
which is highly dubious. "Cold shutdown" is a highly technical term,
but even so, we don't know what it means. The US NRC definition
differs from the IAEA definition.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/cold-shutdown.html
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2011/coldshutdown.html
What's even worse still, given TEPCO's well-documented track
record of lying about their activities, I would not even trust
a primary source such as an official TEPCO announcement.
I don't vouch for the following article, but it suffices to show
that there is some difference of opinion about the state of the
plant:
mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111216p2a00m0na002000c.html
All in all, I am not convinced that the reactor is contained, or
stable, or even under control.
====================
The same principle applies to other news stories, such as the
recent Higgs search status announcement:
Don't believe everything you read in the media.
Indeed, the coverage I have seen has been truly terrible, almost
without exception.
Constructive suggestion: It takes only a few seconds to get
close to the source on this particular topic, including:
-- the CERN press release:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR25.11E.html
-- and references therein.From there it is one click to get tohttp://www.atlas.ch/news/2011/status-report-dec-2011.html
which contains a nice colorful plot that shows what "two sigma"
evidence looks like. It is interesting because it turns the
usual graphical practice on its head, by not putting error bars
on the data, but rather by plotting the data on a /background/
that expresses the uncertainties. This is a good trick, worth
remembering. It made me smile, and made me think these guys know
what they're doing.
As for an accessible explanation of what a Higgs is, or why the
general public should care, I still haven't found anything I
would recommend. Does anybody here have any suggestions?
===================
The same principle applies to non-physics stories as well.
On multiple occasions I have had first-hand knowledge of an
event that was covered in the press, and the coverage was
only tangentially related to the actual facts.
I don't want to discuss political issues in this forum, but
I will mention that history suggests that
http://www.intrade.com/
is a much better predictor than public-opinion polls or "pundits".
In particular, when things are changing, the changes are often
reflected on intrade.com first. It takes several days for the
polls to catch up with intrade, and then it takes several days
for the pundits to catch up with the polls.
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