Politics

Fencing gold-medalist Mariel Zagunis, at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Writing in the Pacific Standard recently, Tom Jacobs pointed to two new studies that reveal a decidedly mixed picture of NBC’s prime-time Olympic coverage when it comes to gender equitability. The first study, out of the University of Delaware, found that in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics men received almost 23 hours of prime-time coverage, versus a little less than 13 hours for women. The second study, from the University of North Carolina, look at the Summer Olympics in 2008 as well as previous years, and discovered a more equitable balance: 46.3 percent of air time went to women in 2008, and 47.9 percent in 2004. However, coverage of women’s events tilted heavily towards what the researchers termed “socially acceptable” sports for women, and sports with minimal clothing where women can be displayed as physically attractive: [N]early three-quarters of the women’s coverage was devoted to gymnastics, swimm...

“The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval. ” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) is poised to release its findings next week on the cause of recent global warming. UPDATE (9 pm): A NY Times op-ed by Richard Muller, BEST’s Founder and Scientific Director, has been published, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.” Here is the money graf: CALL me a converted skeptic . Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global war...