 Up next folks, we have Faye Flam. Her talk is crisis in the media. Can we fight fakers in an accelerating information universe? Faye Flam is a science journalist who's written for the Economist, science, new scientist, Washington Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She's from my side of the country. She's from Philadelphia, the cool side of the country, which, yeah. Boo, yes. Go ahead and boo. We don't care. We wear black. It's fine. She also writes the lightning blog on the W-H-Y-Y, which is the the Philly station that I listen to all the time. So again, crisis in the media. Can we fight fakers in an accelerating information universe? Her haiku is things move so fast now. For example, recently I fell off a train. Please welcome Faye Flam. We did this really interesting meeting. I thought I'd start with a little show-and-tell object. Over a certain age, we'll recognize this. It's a newspaper. This is actually the Philadelphia Inquirer. This is a newspaper that I wrote for 16, a little over 16 years. And I thought this was relevant because a big part of what we do papers is investigating claims. And so I thought I would talk a little bit about how newspaper journalists investigate claims and also what we're in danger of losing as this becomes an artifact of the past. I started out writing for more science-oriented publications. It's news. New scientist and science, where I was a staff writer. I had a really interesting beat there. I wrote about particle physics and cosmology and that was actually the beat I would have chosen if I had to choose any. Those fields are really interconnected in a fascinating way. The physicists are trying to figure out what the universe is made of and the cosmologists are trying to figure out where the universe came from, how it got here, where it's going, and they're both trying to figure out what the dark matter is made out of. But as much as I enjoyed that job, I left to come to a newspaper. I actually moved to Philadelphia to work for the Inquirer. And one of the reasons was that it had a great reputation for investigative journalism. They had just run a big series called America What Went Wrong that was really incredible. It involved digging up all kinds of corruption and examples of corporate welfare and then explained in a very clear way how all of this affected ordinary hard-working people. So it was really great stuff and I was honored to get to work for them. And I really liked the idea of being able to write about science for a newspaper. Move ahead, Kara. Because I like the diversity of the readership of the people who, you know, everybody read the newspaper. It served everybody from university presidents to the people selling hot dogs on the street. And I felt like it was also a great way to reach what I think is a sort of a big middle ground of people between science enthusiasts and sort of true believers. People that just want to be informed about science and have a lot of curiosity. And they want to keep up on new developments in science as we all want to keep up on everything. And one of the things that I enjoyed doing the most at The Inquirer was there it is, writing up a couple of weekly columns. The last one I did was about evolution. We called it Planet of the Apes. And I did it in collaboration with our political cartoonist, Tony Oth. And he's one of the many Pulitzer Prize winners at The Inquirer and also turned out to be a great science illustrator. And I was able to cover all kinds of things in that column. Everything from the origin of life to the evolution of sex differences. One week I might be interviewing historians of science on creationist claims that evolution was a big motivating factor for the Nazis. And the next week I might be questioning Catholic biologists about their belief in the soul and asking them where exactly in the human lineage did we acquire our souls? Was it during, before or after we branched off from the Neanderthals? So I got some very interesting answers on that. But unfortunately just about the time I joined The Inquirer it started a kind of long decline. And a lot of the readers who didn't like my column very much blamed me. But this was sort of a newspaper industry-wide. And eventually The Inquirer ended up that the owners bankrupt and it changed hands a couple of times. And the last owners brought in new management and they didn't like my column very much. They told me I couldn't write it anymore and that was a good explanation for it. So it's my cue to continue things. We also had a lot of opportunities, I missed a slide here, to discuss intelligent design and various forms of belief in God of the Gaps. And so there was a lot of good discussion of science and religion. And after I left The Inquirer I started a bunch of new ventures. This is one of them. This is the Lightning Broad. It's an online science column for WKYY, the Public Radio Station in Philadelphia. And Tony Auth, the illustrator also left and is now continuing to illustrate my columns here. I also work as a media critic for a site called The Night Science Journalism Tracker where I sometimes take my colleagues to task either for failing to properly fight fakery or for sometimes adding to the fakery. So I thought I'd just bring in a little anecdote about what kinds of people work for newspapers. Back in the 1990s when The Inquirer was a huge newspaper and there were a couple of hundred people in the newsroom, one of my colleagues, a medical writer, decided to do an informal survey and he asked all of us two questions. Do we believe in God and do we believe in an afterlife? And I was surprised to find the results were that almost everybody, about 98% of us answered no to both questions. And that actually makes us, would make us less religiously inclined than scientists according to some similar surveys, even less religiously inclined than biologists who are considered to be the least religious among scientists. And some people might think that there was some sort of a bias there but I think that it's really just a natural consequence of the types of people that gravitate toward a newspaper like The Inquirer. I think we were all basically skeptics and the types of people that just don't take people's word for things but want to check them out for ourselves. And that would include the words of religious figures or industry CEOs, politicians or even scientists. And as a science reporter a big part of my job was to look at claims. I think it's great that a lot of people want science over superstition but at the same time it's not always that easy because sometimes science and fakery get mixed up together. Sometimes fakers of different types hire scientists to put an authentic veneer on what they're doing. Sometimes fakers adopt scientific terminology in order to make their quackery look like science. Sometimes fakers lie about scientific credentials or scientific data. And sometimes scientists may not exactly be fakers but they can delude themselves. I have had a lot of really good interactions with the skeptics community in Philadelphia. There's a great group there called the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking and they've given me some ideas for claims that I thought were worth investigating. I've written about magnet healing which was a really popular thing back in the 1990s. I think it's still around and some of the magnet sellers had a mechanism. They said that the magnets would heal you by moving your blood around because supposedly your blood had iron and it would be drawn by a magnet. It's actually pretty easy to test because when the blood isn't in your body it's not drawn by a magnet. Another thing that I learned about from the local skeptics group was something called therapeutic touch. When I first heard about it I didn't really understand what the big deal was. They were saying well you know it's infiltrating the training of nurses and it's in the nursing books. And I thought yeah well I mean I can see where touching people might be comforting if you're sick. And then I saw a demonstration and I understood that there's actually, I don't know silly me, I thought that there was touching involved but there's actually nothing therapeutic and no touching. And fakers can be very creative and come up with all kinds of new things and so there were no shortage of claims to look into. Sometimes we would get ideas from the advertising section of our own paper and you might think that that would be a short route to getting fired working for a newspaper and then trying to look into claims in the advertising section but at that time the inquire was such a powerful strong paper that we didn't really worry about that because if some advertiser pulled an ad there were more where that one came from and one particularly memorable one I looked into was a company that offered a DNA test and it was supposed to tell you what vitamins you needed. And I thought well okay it's not completely crazy because there are some mutations that can affect the way you absorb certain things. There's one that affects how you absorb folic acid. So I convinced the inquire to pay $200 to have me take this test. I did a little cheek swab and I sent my DNA to them and they sent me back the results in a couple of weeks and they told me that it was imperative, really kind of urgent, that I get on their vitamins right away. I actually needed, according to them, about $400 a month worth of their special vitamins. Okay so I took my results and I went down to NIH, the National Institutes of Health and I talked to some geneticists and some people who were experts in nutrition and they looked at my results and they said well you know these are all just polymorphisms. They're places where our DNA varies from person to person. There's really nothing unusual or abnormal here. And not only that, none of these have a thing to do with vitamins. And the response from the company was just that I didn't understand the sophistication of their science well enough to be able to write about it. And you know a lot of these types of things, they may not kill off the fakers, the fakers will keep going, but I think they do have a value for society because they can help people understand how the scientific process works and that's especially true with things like therapeutic touch where there were some really clever experiments designed to put these things to scientific tests. So they can help show people how scientists think, how to design a proper experiment and think about mechanisms and sort of why a claim may or may not turn out to be scientific. I think it can be particularly dangerous when fakery gets mixed up with science because people really do put a lot of trust in science. They may not understand science very well, but they tend to believe things when they come from people they think are scientists. And that can be particularly problematic in court cases when scientists act as expert witnesses. And one case that I looked into for a story involved somebody who had been in prison for more than 50 years for murder and there were some forensic scientists and lawyers who thought he didn't belong there and thought that there was never a good case against him. And so I read huge stacks of court transcripts and did some research on this case and I found that indeed the main reason he was in there was the testimony of a sort of a celebrity scientist. Our name was Agnes Malatrad. Agnes Malatrad was written up in women's magazines and in newspaper feature sections as this sort of amazing female sleuth who always got the evidence against the guy that the police wanted. And then right there is a little bit suspicious. It turned out that in a subsequent trial the opposing lawyer looked into her background and found that she was not in fact a scientist at all. She had lied on her resume. She had no science background and hadn't even graduated from high school. And they actually did a second trial and the lawyers convinced the jury that the science that she did was still good even if she didn't have the right credentials. So that was the interesting question to me was what science did she do? What did they really have? And it turned out what they had was she would go to the crime scene to in this case there was a body that was found out in an alleyway and she would collect a whole bunch of stuff. This was before there was DNA fingerprinting so they'd look at hairs and fibers and things and she'd collect a lot of things and then she'd go to the suspect's house and she'd look all over and see if she could find things that looked similar. And so that relevant question here is well what are the odds that if you took a lot of samples of stuff from a crime scene that you could find something similar in somebody's house? And she never said, no one ever said. The jury was never told that there were no controls and they often use the term match which I think can be pretty misleading. And I don't know how much that story contributed to what happened later but three or four months after it ran the guy was released. Another claim that I looked into as a science writer, this was back in 2002 was the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and this was something that we should be worried about. And I considered this a scientific claim, a science related story because there were scientists, there were physicists who had gone to Iraq as UN weapons inspectors and a lot of them had learned quite a bit about what was going on with the Iraqi nuclear weapons program and what the rate limiting steps were toward their being able to make a bomb. And I remember distinctly one of those physicists telling me that the term weapons of mass destruction was a term of propaganda and I asked him why that was and he said, well if they were specific and said there were chemical weapons then people would question whether that was really a reason to go to war since other countries had those and we weren't at war with them. And if they were specific and said there were nuclear weapons then people might ask more specific questions about the centrifuges and about how long it would actually take for them to build up enough nuclear fuel to make a weapon and the scientists said it would take quite a long time from where they were at that point. I think that illustrates a kind of a common tactic that you see when people are trying to mislead that they tend to try to be as vague and fuzzy as possible and not be specific about their claims. And that kind of blurring out of claims came up again in a story, an issue that got labeled climate gate. This was a couple of years ago, some of you, this came up in an earlier talk. There were a group of climate scientists who had a huge number of their emails stolen by hackers and then a group of people who called themselves skeptics claimed that these mainstream climate scientists were fakers. So who were the real fakers here? Well, as part of the reporting on that story, I called one of the most vocal opponents of global warming, a guy named Patrick Michaels and I think he actually does have some science background and I asked him to tell me the very worst thing that they found in those emails. And his first reaction was, well, I can't do that because there were so many. There were thousands. So you're telling me that because somebody stole thousands of emails from them, that means they did something wrong. So that's your evidence. Or is it that they wrote thousands of emails? And he said, okay, okay, I'll get back to you on that. And he hung up on me. Then he actually called me back a few hours later and he said, okay, okay, here it is. Here's the worst thing. He said two of the scientists nominated each other for an American Geophysical Union Fellowship. And I said, that's it? That's the best you got out of all those emails? And he said, well, don't you think that's unethical? And I said, well, I don't know. I mean, obviously not compared to falsely accusing people of scientific fraud. No. I mean, it seemed like that was hardly enough to bring down the whole scientific field of climatology. And I think those last two stories really illustrate something that we did at newspapers, that it has not done so much anymore and that's direct confrontation. That, you know, it's not false balance, but sometimes you really do need to go to people and try to pin them down, try to confront them and get them to really explain themselves. And I think also there's a lot of value in talking directly to people. There are so many stories now just used quotes that people find in Google, but you never really know the context of those quotes, why those people said those things, or even whether they said them at all. I mean, I also think that takes care of the problem of civility that some people have discussed earlier in the meeting. I think if you go to people and give them a chance to explain themselves and confront them that that's a really more productive approach than just calling them names or saying that they're stupid or that they're wrong. And the issue of direct confrontation and personal interviews came up again in another story. You might remember when there was a claim that NASA had discovered arsenic-based life. And this one, a lot of skeptics kind of fell for. It wasn't exactly what it was made out to be. And the first suspicious thing about it was that it came out in a big journal science, but normally when reporters get a little sort of advanced notice on papers like that, the lead researchers actually have their contact information there, and even really, really prominent famous scientists will agree to do press interviews. But this team wouldn't do it. They wouldn't grant anybody an interview. And instead they gave a big press conference. And the press conference was not very informative. They spent the whole time talking about how important their finding was, but very little time talking about what exactly they found, what their evidence was, and no time at all talking about the limitations of their science. And weirder than that, they kept talking about a shadow biosphere. And the shadow biosphere is a term that scientists sometimes use to describe a hypothetical form of life that didn't spring from the same origin as the life we know. Evolution tells us that all life, all known life, sprung from a common origin, so it would be incredibly exciting and profound to find an example of a shadow biosphere. So I thought it was just kind of weird that these scientists were spending a lot of time at their press conference talking about something that was incredibly exciting that they didn't find. But we in the media don't always get things right. And I've noticed some patterns in the ways that things often come out wrong. And one of the things that I thought was particularly weird about the way a newspaper people think was that editors would tell us that the amount of time we should spend on a story should be proportional to the length of the story. And that might sort of make sense if we spent most of our time writing, but we really don't. We spend almost all our time investigating things. And then usually you don't start writing until you can feel the editor's breath on the back of your neck. And that's, you know, it's not really, it's sort of a positive form of procrastination because you really want to get as much information as you possibly can before the deadline of a story. You want to make sure you're right. You want to check things. Most journalists don't have outside fact checkers. We are our own fact checkers. So we want to make sure we really know what we're saying before it actually gets out there. But what that means then is that big long pieces did take a lot of research and a lot went into it. But if you read a little short piece then you can assume that very little time actually went into checking whether what you're reading is true. And I think that problem has gotten worse as the perception has grown that readers only want little short things, that they don't have any attention span, that they just want little short blurbs and briefs and things on that order. And I think that leads to another problem which is the blurring of the lines between PR and journalism because a lot of these little short things, people just end up copying something off a press release. And sometimes there are also aggregator sites that present press releases and journalistic stories mixed up. And there is a distinction. It's not that journalists are necessarily objective because we're human. We're allowed to care about people that we write about. But if I write a story about somebody trying to care cancer, I'm allowed to care whether that person succeeds as a human being. What I'm not allowed to do is care because I own stock in the company that's making the drug. And I think that actually is an important difference. We get fired if we could benefit financially from the people that we're writing about or we got paid by the people we're writing about and PR people are paid by the people they're writing about. So where are we going now? One of the jobs that I've taken on since I left The Inquirer was to become a journalism critic for a site called the Night Science Journalism Tracker. It's a very interesting site. It's funded by The Night Foundation. And four of us look over what's going on in the science journalism world and we write about what's good and what might be hyped or exaggerated or where some of our colleagues make mistakes. And there actually is a lot of good stuff still out there. There's a lot of positive things to say. But actually the story here, if you look closely, this is a jellyfish which was made famous in The New York Times magazine. There was a big story called something about the immortal jellyfish. And I actually got a lot of people emailing me this story. I'm putting it up on my Facebook page saying, you got to see this. You might have even done it. Immortal jellyfish, amazing. But if you read this or actually if you really read The New York Times story carefully to the end, you'll find it's not really immortal. Oh, it's this one, right? It's a little jellyfish. Oh, well, I'm sorry. It's not up? Oh, okay. All right. There's the immortal jellyfish. It's not really immortal. And I thought I'd end by talking about one of the posts that I wrote before, the tracker, that they kind of changed the way I approached things and sort of pulled me back from, I think, contributing to all this information pollution as opposed to trying to sift through it. And it started with this cat. This cat plays a role in it. This is my cat. His name is Higgs. He used to be an alley cat. He fell on hard times and he came to live with me. And somehow he inspired me to create a fictional character who wrote some of my Philadelphia Enquirer Evolution columns. And I started him out by answering some of the hate mail I got from Creationist. And he did a really good job, actually, the post that he wrote got a lot more hits online than I ever got. He actually was like up there with the sports and the gossip logs when he appeared. I mean, I would like to also think of him as one of those honest liars because he doesn't really need those glasses. And Higgs was also sort of good for discussing evolution from the point of view of another branch on the Tree of Life. Because one of the big misconceptions I found that a lot of people had, even people who had learned evolution and liked evolution, is that they thought that the purpose of evolution was to create people or that people are sort of the top of the evolutionary tree. And so Higgs was really good at reminding people that evolution really isn't all about us. And so I had a lot of fun writing about Higgs. But when the column was canceled, unfortunately, he lost his job too. But I ended up finding a new job for him with Parade, an editor at Parade actually wanted to hire Higgs as their science cat. And I actually sort of got this idea that maybe we could present him as the world's smartest cat and eventually he could replace the Ask Marilyn column. I'm not sure if that's going to happen or not. Sometimes I think this is the journalistic equivalent to me wearing a clown suit. But it actually started out pretty well. And I was able to kind of create the voice of the character in the same way I had done for the Philadelphia Inquirer. But it just wasn't getting the same traction. I think that part of that is that the Parade website was almost all either recipes or beauty tips or celebrity gossip. It just didn't attract the kinds of readers who would like this sort of thing. And so it just wasn't really picking up an online following. And I talked to my editor there about it. And I said, well, you know, is there something you can do? Can you advertise it or something? And he said, well, you know what would really help is if you wrote every day. You know, if you just put something in there like a link to something else. And I thought, you know, that's not really what I do, but I guess I could. And it lasted about a day because I picked something I thought would be reliable. I picked a link from a blog called Curl Witch Wonders, which is an NPR blog. And actually Robert Curl Witch has a really interesting show. And I thought, okay, well, this is pretty reliable. It was also a really interesting post about how you lose a little bit of weight overnight without doing anything just in the form of carbon that you breathe out with carbon dioxide. And I thought, well, it's really thought provoking and interesting. I mean, people think a little bit differently about the way the body works. People sort of don't sometimes think if you lose weight, where exactly does the mass go? But then I thought, you know, it was so interesting I would write a post for the Night Science Journalism Tracker as well. And that's such a serious thing that I looked into it a little more closely. And when I read it carefully, I realized that Curl Witch was claiming that we lose more than a pound of carbon. We breathe out more than a pound of carbon overnight. And that was part of the reason that his post was getting a lot of attention. And I thought, that seems a little high. A pound? Could that really be? So I actually called a friend of mine who's a chemist, and I thought of a couple ways we might be able to sort of do a back of the envelope calculation. And we did that, and it came out to something more like a little fraction of a pound, maybe less than a quarter of a pound. And when I went back to the original source that Robert Curl Witch used, it was a really interesting video blog called Veritasium, actually something out of Australia. Really good blog, and the guy that did that actually got it right. Somehow he said, yeah, it's a fraction of a pound. And he did a controlled kind of interesting experiment where he would weigh himself at night and then the morning. And then he did it a few times and he said he was very, very careful not to go to the bathroom in between the two wings. And then he found he actually didn't lose very much weight. He lost maybe, you know, between a half and a quarter of a pound. And then, you know, that made, I think Higgs and I thought maybe we had discovered something, a connection here that Higgs thought, you know, maybe, you know, 90% of everything really belongs in the litter box, whether it's the weight you lose overnight or stuff you find on the web. But I found that Higgs and I hadn't actually discovered this. Somebody else discovered it. Sturgeon's Law. And I don't want to end on this sort of a negative note here. So I thought I would say just that I'd originally thought I would say that I think that the skeptics community and reporters like me are really kindred spirits. But I thought it's not the right, maybe not the right expression to use. So instead I'll say I think we have a lot to offer each other. And I also wanted to say that I was really flattered that you put my name on your T-shirt. So I thought that was a really nice touch. But you spelled the first name wrong, so just for next year. Thank you.