Would you hyphen it?

From the headline you have to ask yourself if this press release from Battelle is about a new type of fuel cell, or a new way of making, or even designing, fuel cells.

The title "BATTELLE DEBUTS MULTI-PURPOSE FUEL CELL GENERATOR" could mean that they have a fuel cell that generates electricity for many purposes, or it could be a new generator of fuel cells.

It might help to add a hyphen in "fuel cell". Come to think of it, why not just drop the "generator"? Anyone who understands the term "fuel cell" will know what this is all about. Fuel cells are, by definition, generators of electricity.

Do not copy this press release

I have been looking for an example of this puzzling phenomenon for a while. The press release that you cannot copy. I have found this lot of Press Releases. Retrieve any of the PDF files beneath the links and you will find that you can't copy and paste text from the file.

The press releases come from a company called Acacia Research Corporation, part of which "develops, acquires, and licenses patented technologies".

Now the whole idea of a press release is that people will reproduce it, preferably using as much of it as possible. What possesses someone to put out a press release with security such that you cannot even extract text? Is this also why they break another rule of good communications and do not offer an html version of their press releases?

I have written to the company for their take on this. No reply yet. Maybe they have broken another law of good communications by ignoring emails.


tag: journalism, PR, public relations

Is solar power pissing in the wind?

What are we to make of this proud press release proclaiming that altPOWER Inc. Installs 1.1 MW of Solar Power? Are they serious. A megawatt and they boast?

Younger readers may not know that we went through an energy crisis in the 1970s. Then there was a rush into "renewable" energy when we faced the threat of a world without oil. Now it is climate change that makes us turn to the Sun, although talk of "peak oil" suggests that that one isn't dead either.

Megawatts are for minnows. After 30 years, you would hope that we had got beyond such piddling amounts. We need gigawatts, and lots of them.

tag: energy, solarpower, renewable energy

A quote for our times

I don't usually warm to George Monbiot, more like Monbiassed, with his unrealistic view of the world, but you have to applaud, his take on the Monckton papers as they appeared in The Sunday Telegraph. (Some pea-brained aristo thinks climate change has nothing to do with humans.)

I wonder how the science writers on the 'graph' take the comment that "For newspapers such as the Sunday Telegraph the test seems to be much simpler. If they don't understand it, it must be science."

In reality, with Melanie Phillips on the Daily Mail also being in the ranks of climate deniers, you have to ask yourself if this is a political thing, with the right denying any cause that the Government espouses.

tag: science writing, journalism, environment, climate change

Capnography – word of the year

A paper in the BioMedical Engineering OnLine, A novel application of capnography during controlled human exposure to air pollution, brought me a new word. What, or who, is capnography?

Google threw up no less than a site dedicated to the subject. Just one problem, you have to dig around even there to find a definition of the word. Nothing on the home page, but way down in the terminology we read that capnography is "A graphic display of instantaneous CO2 concentration (FCO2) versus time or expired volume during a respiratory cycle (CO2 waveform or capnogram)."

Wikipedia has it as "the monitoring of the respiratory carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration as a time-concentration curve".

So you you know. Maybe.

Tags: science writing