On 22 October 2012, six members of a technical-scientific consultancy agency of the Italian Civil Protection were found guilty of multiple manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison by the court in L’Aquila. According to the prosecution, days before the earthquake that devastated the town of L’Aquila on 6 April 2009 killing 309 people, the experts failed to correctly alert the population on the actual seismic risk. The sentence was widely interpreted as an attack to science, penalised for not accurately predicting the quake. Actually, the defendants were accused of having deprived the
Despite the boom in science journalism in developing countries, little is known about the views of reporters in Sub-Saharan Africa on the future of science journalism. This commentary, based on a recent survey of 151 Ghanaian journalists, focuses on the journalists' wishes for the future of science journalism in Ghana and on ways that the power of the Web can be harnessed to help achieve those wishes. Many of the surveyed journalists indicated that the inadequate access to contact information for scientific researchers was a barrier to science reporting. Most journalists (80.8%) indicated that
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Bernard AppiahBarbara GastelJames BurdineLeon Russell
The authors use existing data from videos and field notes to analyze the effects of TV viewing on children as they are watching a program. They present a case study of two siblings to demonstrate their interactions, finding that children display complex reasoning practices while watching TV, but only under certain conditions and with certain types of social support.