Candidate Traits in Elections: When Good News for Selection is Bad News for Accountability

Climate sensitivity uncertainty: when is good news bad?

Climate change is real and dangerous. Exactly how bad it will get, however, is uncertain. Uncertainty is particularly relevant for estimates of one of the key parameters: equilibrium climate sensitivity--how eventual temperatures will react as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations double. Despite significant advances in climate science and increased confidence in the accuracy of the range i...

hiv/aids good news and bad news

The Good News and the Bad News

There is much that is attractive about Michael Burawoy’s examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser’s “theoretical practice.” I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the USA and especially with how socia...

Consistent Good News and Inconsistent Bad News

Good news is more persuasive when it is more consistent, and bad news is less damaging when it is less consistent. We show when Bayesian updating supports this intuition so that a biased sender prefers more or less variance in the news depending on whether the mean of the news exceeds expectations, and we apply the result to selective news distortion by a manager of multiple projects. If news f...

NO news is good news for plants.

The organization of redox signaling and the use of nitric oxide (NO) to transmit information, modulate biological processes or create cellular damage are highly complex. Recent reports provide an exceptional picture of NO production, of the regulation of NO bioactivity through detoxification reactions and of biochemical events by which NO transduces signals into cellular responses, in particula...