3 ms·

I really wish journalists could cut the crap. If science reporting is this, that's grim There is plenty of interest in covering ideas, papers and efforts that

I really wish journalists could cut the crap. If science reporting is this, that's grim There is plenty of interest in covering ideas, papers and efforts that are speculative, hopeful or early as what they are. Early, occasionally pioneering efforts to achieve something which may lead to success in the future, or enable new efforts to sprout at a tangent. Interview researchers. Ask them questions. Interview reviewers and peers. They're accessible. Communicate science. As it is. What science is, is worth covering. Do your job.

Angostura 3y ago
I'm not clear as to what your actual issue with the article is? It's a very short article, that clearly sets out the potential and alerts the reader to an interesting development. It includes a quote from an author, so they have spoken to him.
- defrost 3y ago
  Have they really spoken to him, or just summarised the paper (perhaps poorly), or clipped quotes from a university press pack? The Economist: Then it was the computer’s turn. The researchers fed their recordings to artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird species from their calls. “We found that the AI tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts,” says Dr Müller. The source paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w In the next step, we applied an independent artificial intelligence model for bird species identification, developed and trained in the region of our study prior to our sampling. Despite the model identifying only ~25% of species detected by the experts in our data, the model-derived first community axis was the single best predictor for expert-derived community composition. The thrust of his work is about bird population estimates via vocalisation being used as a predictor for insect biodiversity - number and breadth of insects. There are several recent papers about this work, one that focuses on the bird <-> insect connection, another that looks at the AI utilisation to identify birds. It appears that as of now the AI isn't as good as identifying birds as experts, only being trained to recogise a quarter of the vocalisations, however that's enough of a bird sample to get a reasonable estimate on the insects. I strongly suspect (I lack the smoking gun) that The Economist has just sourced "quotes" provided in the full university presser (the Press Release pack they send out). See, the lesser presser about the AI work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ai-biodiversity-rainforests/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... and a presser about some of the insect work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/weather-insect-decline/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... There are multiple studies and multiple papers stemming from this project: https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-station/prof-dr-joerg-mueller/ https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-statio... and there'll likely be bigger press packs not directly public web hosted for newspaper journalists to pick from.
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    Thank you! I guess I deserve the downvotes for coming in hot and opinionated. In my (admittedly lame) defense, mine literally is an off the cuff comment in a place intended for such. Your comment demonstrates well what I was (failing) to get at.the project is what it as and where it is. Whether or not that's really interesting is for a science journalist to decision. It can't be interesting enough to write an article about and not interesting enough to investigate curiously. It's not that hard to investigate. The people are not hard to reach. The good questions are not that hard to establish. Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.
    - defrost 3y ago
      > Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed. If you step back and think of "politics" as "the science of human behaviour" then Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) is still a worthwhile read. * It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent In short, TLDR, mass media (eg: The Economist) tends to take the path of most return (sales, eyeballs) for least effort. AKA it's much cheaper to be lazy. They don't have the resources to have experts in every technical domain that sit about and read as many newly released papers as they can in order to pick out the gold for you. They (and many other such public media newsrooms) skim the press packs sent out by university media teams, by political party media teams, the feeds curated by Reuters, third party summary feeds of stock market news releases, etc. On the big stories the larger papers can spare the time of gumshoe investigative reporters to dig into the heart of an event as best they can. Specialist public journals (such as, say, New Scientist) will background and go into more of the lesser stories specific to their domain (it's The New York Times of anglosphere science). But a great deal of the news that you see is first order lazy reporting, it's ideally assembled by reshaping press releases of self serving sources with a few phones calls, but more often than not it is nothing more than entire blocks of PR material 'plagiarized' as written with nary a phone call to fact check the basics. --------- * Worthwhile regardless of political party preferences, opinions on Chomsky, whether you thoroughly read the entire book or just skim to get a feel of the thesis and arguments made.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  It's puff, talking about what would be a breakthrough discovery without taking an interest in any more than it takes to generate buzz/content. How are be supposed to know anything about the space, where it is, how much promise it has, what that promise actually is. There's no meat in this burger.
rchaud 3y ago
The Economist are op-ed writers, not journalists. They don't do interviews and haven't broken a story in their 150 year history.

Angostura 3y ago

I'm not clear as to what your actual issue with the article is? It's a very short article, that clearly sets out the potential and alerts the reader to an interesting development. It includes a quote from an author, so they have spoken to him.

defrost 3y ago
Have they really spoken to him, or just summarised the paper (perhaps poorly), or clipped quotes from a university press pack? The Economist: Then it was the computer’s turn. The researchers fed their recordings to artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird species from their calls. “We found that the AI tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts,” says Dr Müller. The source paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w In the next step, we applied an independent artificial intelligence model for bird species identification, developed and trained in the region of our study prior to our sampling. Despite the model identifying only ~25% of species detected by the experts in our data, the model-derived first community axis was the single best predictor for expert-derived community composition. The thrust of his work is about bird population estimates via vocalisation being used as a predictor for insect biodiversity - number and breadth of insects. There are several recent papers about this work, one that focuses on the bird <-> insect connection, another that looks at the AI utilisation to identify birds. It appears that as of now the AI isn't as good as identifying birds as experts, only being trained to recogise a quarter of the vocalisations, however that's enough of a bird sample to get a reasonable estimate on the insects. I strongly suspect (I lack the smoking gun) that The Economist has just sourced "quotes" provided in the full university presser (the Press Release pack they send out). See, the lesser presser about the AI work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ai-biodiversity-rainforests/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... and a presser about some of the insect work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/weather-insect-decline/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... There are multiple studies and multiple papers stemming from this project: https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-station/prof-dr-joerg-mueller/ https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-statio... and there'll likely be bigger press packs not directly public web hosted for newspaper journalists to pick from.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  Thank you! I guess I deserve the downvotes for coming in hot and opinionated. In my (admittedly lame) defense, mine literally is an off the cuff comment in a place intended for such. Your comment demonstrates well what I was (failing) to get at.the project is what it as and where it is. Whether or not that's really interesting is for a science journalist to decision. It can't be interesting enough to write an article about and not interesting enough to investigate curiously. It's not that hard to investigate. The people are not hard to reach. The good questions are not that hard to establish. Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.
  - defrost 3y ago
    > Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed. If you step back and think of "politics" as "the science of human behaviour" then Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) is still a worthwhile read. * It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent In short, TLDR, mass media (eg: The Economist) tends to take the path of most return (sales, eyeballs) for least effort. AKA it's much cheaper to be lazy. They don't have the resources to have experts in every technical domain that sit about and read as many newly released papers as they can in order to pick out the gold for you. They (and many other such public media newsrooms) skim the press packs sent out by university media teams, by political party media teams, the feeds curated by Reuters, third party summary feeds of stock market news releases, etc. On the big stories the larger papers can spare the time of gumshoe investigative reporters to dig into the heart of an event as best they can. Specialist public journals (such as, say, New Scientist) will background and go into more of the lesser stories specific to their domain (it's The New York Times of anglosphere science). But a great deal of the news that you see is first order lazy reporting, it's ideally assembled by reshaping press releases of self serving sources with a few phones calls, but more often than not it is nothing more than entire blocks of PR material 'plagiarized' as written with nary a phone call to fact check the basics. --------- * Worthwhile regardless of political party preferences, opinions on Chomsky, whether you thoroughly read the entire book or just skim to get a feel of the thesis and arguments made.
dalbasal 3y ago
It's puff, talking about what would be a breakthrough discovery without taking an interest in any more than it takes to generate buzz/content. How are be supposed to know anything about the space, where it is, how much promise it has, what that promise actually is. There's no meat in this burger.

rchaud 3y ago

The Economist are op-ed writers, not journalists. They don't do interviews and haven't broken a story in their 150 year history.