[Coral-List] Coral Conservation versus Public Relations

Tom Shannon tshannon at uga.edu
Tue Mar 14 15:05:22 EST 2006


Erik,

By Jove, I think you may have stumbled upon the scientific funding direction of the future.  The
obvious answer to your questions of how "Discovery Land Company" can pull off such public dupings,
as I'm sure you are more than aware, is simple... MONEY.

They have it, we don't.

As a sidetrack from the exhaustive discussion of sexy scientists and coral porn that has recently
plagued this list... Perhaps we should deviate from the norm of asking governmental groups for
research grants, and suggest, instead, monies to take out full-page newspaper ads to publish our data.

To Heck with Science, Nature, MEPS, etc... Imagine the public impact of pretty, full-colored graphs
and charts representing REAL data in such publications as The New York Times, The Herald Tribune,
and The National Enquirer. 

Granted, I'm speaking with my tongue firmly ensconced in my cheek, but perhaps we should start
looking at ways to get our data out to the general public and not keeping it locked up behind the
Dewey Decimal System in academic journals.  It would appear that "Discovery Land Company" realized
the feasibility of such techniques (despite the cooked numbers); maybe we should take note.

Tom Shannon

Tom Shannon
Institute of Ecology
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
Lab(706)542-3328

www.arches.uga.edu/~tshannon

Evolution IS "just a theory".
Creationism, however, is an unsubstantiated hypothesis.



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