Slashdot Mirror
Bad Science in the Press
An anonymous reader writes " An editorial in The Guardian presents a good run down of what is wrong with science reporting today and tries to point out why this is. From the article: 'Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I've been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I'm ready to present my theory.'"
Science is complex. More often than not very well-trained and experienced scientists get it completely wrong. That said, somebody with a minimal scientific background (ie. a Journalism major) will very often screw up more complicated scientific articles. But likewise, many scientists dislike writing such articles. So we end up with a situation where those in the know would rather not write, and those not in the know are the ones who do write. And the result is lousy scientific articles.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
There are many efforts directed at educating scientists about the journalistic process, but fewer that aim to educate journalists about science. One of the arguments for the imbalance is that it is more efficient for scientists to learn about media constraints than it would be for journalists to learn about science. Some argue that a lack of scientific knowledge on a journalist's behalf may actually benefit their interpretation of science publications, allowing the author to be less biased when translating the information for public consumption. Others believe that introducing science journalists to the scientific process will help to correct inaccuracies and omissions of important information in the media.
"Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong?"
Because those things get ratings. Nobody wants to hear the truth - to most people it's boring and threatening.
There is a difference between pop scientists and academics. Academics know better than to trust one story in the news. Understanding is reached by gleeming information from dozens and dozens of studies that exhaustively research the subject. Real scientists also understand that many studies are finances by biased sources - medical studies and drug companies, for instance, and that this sort of information has to be taken into account.
Actually there used to be a time when you didn't need to stick with scientific journals. I remember Scientific American up to the late eighties. It was written by scientists in a language accessible to average educated readers. The format was to present some of the more interesting papers published to a wider audience usually by the authors themselves. It was so good that a lot of my colleagues scientists read it just to keep their intellectual curiosity about other fields satisfied a bit. Yes, scientists do get bored with their own fiedd as well, but it can sometimes be a useful inspiration to read something from a totally unrelated field.
However, in the last 15 or so years the quality of Scientific American is in steady decline. Rather than letting scientists work with the journal it is nowdays driven by (I guess) a strong and opinionated editorial team. As a result articles are too often opinionated, the contents following the current media stories rather than peer citations (scientific significance) even to the point where the commentaries are set to defend science. I say good scientific work is the best defense of science not hyped editorials. It would be nice to have a journal of some serious stature back on the news stands again, I'd be the first to switch subscriptions.
Boris Debic (too lazy to register).
Michael Chricton had an excellent piece on the decline of science reporting in an address at Caltech. His observations should be required reading because they get to the heart of what's wrong with "science" these days. (I use science in quote marks because it's only tangentally related to real science.) A sample:
Hell, I remember as a kid reading "50 Things You Can Do To Save The Earth" or some other such claptrap that argued that some massive amount of the rainforest disappared every day - and a little multiplication found that if such a figure were true the rainforest (and all forests on Earth) would have disappared in a year.
Whether "intelligent design" or "global warming", science is being used as a tool of politics - which is something it is not and never should be.
Journalists exist to be published. That is their function -- that's what they love, to see their name in print. They don't really care what they say exactly; they only care that their article pleases their editors, which in turn sells more newspapers or magazines.
I got a real education when I lived next door to a fairly high-up Sports Illustrated reporter. In watching him do his work, he would basically try and find an angle, and then shape the facts to fit his angle. Technically, he wouldn't "lie", but he would definitely flake and form things to give the impression that he'd decided to write ahead of time. That was generally for background pieces that he would write, but even for sporting events he followed that formula. He would write his article before the event had even finished, sometimes with multiple endings in case things went for one outcome or another (this is Standard Operating Procedure in the industry).
In realizing his "algorithm" to producing articles, I began to look at other journalist articles. And lo and behold -- I saw the same sort of pattern. When you realize this, you can see the "angle" they've decided to write, and the pattern shows up like a flashing red light. All the successful ones do this. They decide ahead of time what would make an exciting article to write.
This is why people get misquoted all the time. It's because when a journalist talks to someone, they aren't interested in what that person has to say, they want specific quotes that they can use to back up whatever they are writing.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There is a paradox that's taught in American J-schools and enforced by the media (print, broadcast, etc.) that, while it affects complex stories of all kinds, especially hits science:
Once an article is written, outside sources CANNOT read it. A reporter CANNOT show the full article to a source so that the facts or explanations to be checked out. This is a huge no-no boo-boo, probably falling under ethics, although I've never really understood why - but the practical effect of it is, basically, that the damage done by reporting erroneous content is considered to be far, far less than the damage done by letting sources edit stories before publication, and that accuracy by correction is plenty good enough anyway.
Excerpts are fine, but usually only when it's things that the source said. For example, if a reporter interviews me, a computer scientist, about Complex Computer Science Topic, writes a bunch of notes, and types up a report, there's a small chance he or she will send the parts where I'm cited to make sure that he or she is citing me correctly. Even this is pushing it, though - if I'm worried that the reporter is leaving something important out, I can mention it, and he or she can mention it to the editor, and if the editor shoots the reporter down, the article runs without it - and that's only if the reporter isn't a lazy sod. Remember, I only get the draft of only my comments back maybe once every 10 or 20 times I'm interviewed.
However, if that same reporter interviewed a colleague of mine who told the reporter a bunch of obtuse, useless crap, and gave him or her a horrible explanation of said crap, there is some unwritten (or possibly written, at some papers) rule where that reporter REALLY OUGHT NOT send me - a source who could maybe explain said crap better than his or her original source did - the draft of my colleague's interview. More than likely, the thought of doing so won't even cross the reporter's mind, but if they do it - which a couple brave souls have - and the editor finds out - as was the case for one moronic soul within that set of brave souls - there's a good chance they end up transcribing obituaries for a month.
Not sure if this is true for reporters outside America, but it certainly has been my experience as a source for journalists.
It may take a second to political belief systems, however. How long did China insinuate the moon landings were a hoax? As for Europe, lots of good research comes out of there...but then, so does lots of bullshit like anti-gravity and zero-point energy.
I would have to disagree. Science will continue in the US due to the excellent graduate programs, university systems, and corporate relationships between them.
And it will continue where ever it is unabetted by political--as opposed to any moral--influence. China for instance, has much too much political influence over their education systems to be the next springboard of discovery. As a result, Chinese students practically flee to the US after completing university. It is such a problem that in China, if one accepts admission to any graduate school within China all their identification will be seized by the government in an effort to insure you do not emmigrate. This does not help incubate a research community.
As for Europe, of course they are already sustaining a great research community,; however, governmental control is too prevalent to keep the top tier talent there. They simply can not pay enough to keep top tier researchers from emmigrating to US universities. And so their growth is not as great as in the US.
But if we are placing bets on the next large research community to complement the US, I'd have bet on India. IIT is producing, and attracting back to India, top tier talent.
Unfortunately, science via the media is almost worthless, and there is a pretty broad consensus around here from what I can tell. It is even worse when politics are involved. Here is my reasoning as to why.
1: Scientists who work in a particular field are self-selected to work in that field. Of course a cancer researcher thinks fighting cancer is important, or a global warming researcher thinks protecting the environment is important. This is not meant to attack these people, but I hope that you realize that one should take account of this when listening to their opinions. The result of this is one layer of hype for their research.
2. The second layer of hype is funding. If you want money to cure cancer, save the planet, or build better Legos, well, the first step is to scream bloody murder about how big the problem is and how wonderful your solution is. Like it or not, but scientists have every reason to hype their research - and as a research scientist myself, I can assure you that this is the way things really happen. This is a second layer of hype.
3: Then we get to the media, which receives this already-double-hyped information from the scientists. Well, what is the media's job? Selling information...and we all know their basic strategy is....hype!. So the "science" the average Joe reads in the newspaper is now triple-hyped.
4: Finally, we get to the big issue - politics. Most politicians get their information not directly from scientists, but from various media sources, lobby groups, and think tanks. But as noted, this information is already triple-hyped. Do you want to guess what the politician does? He/she then selects the information that best backs his or her position, and then hypes it.
By the time your favorite politician spews anything related to "science", you can be rest assured that it has been hyped so many times that it now bears no resemblance to anything approximating fact, and should be duly ignored. Before you start finger pointing, please get over the fact that both parties do it and are equally as bad (research anything related to Republicans vs Global Warming, or Democrats vs genetics/race/sex for all the anti-science details).
Perhaps it has to do with our daily TV & pop Magazine (Times, Life) and Newspapers that assume we're stupid and write/talk/present things to us as if we're at the 6th grade level.
If that's all you see, read, or hear 90% of the time - it will eventually filter down into your communication unless you actively prevent it. It will eventually spread to all media.
The british newspapers, I'm told, write at a 12th grade level.
If you ever watched the Daily Show where they showed the difference between George Bush's Social Security town hall meetings and the one PM Tony Blair did before his election - you will see the stark contrast in how the media treats it's viewers - intelligent adults vs. idiotic grown children.
(In short, it was 1000000 x more confrontational with people asking intelligent questions versus here where everybody had to kiss GWB's balls to ask a stupid & simplistic question)
I tried to find the clip but I can't find it.
As a scientist myself I'm very unhappy about the way the reporting of science has created a vicious circle. Journalists misreport science, the article comes up with some arguments as to why but in the end I'm tempted to think it has a lot to do with trying to summarise very complex things when you don't entirely understand them. But scientists are also to blame here; there is a general lack of both ability and interest in communicating our work more widely (the phrase "media don" is considered pretty offensive in certain circles). Unfortunately the kind of climate the journalists have created for us makes this venture even less appealing than it was in the first place. The eventual result is that people like myself don't like talking to journalists because we don't want to be involved in perpetrating a load of hype and making ourselves look unscrupulous in the eyes of our peers. The answer is probably getting scientists to try to write their own "popular" articles directly and to facilitate this would require that the systems that measure academic performance in terms of publication in impact-rated journals begins to pay some sort of recognition to activities of wider dissemination. Right now, you could be on the news once a week and have your own TV show discussing your work and it would do less (technically at least) to help you keep your academic job than publishing a two-page note in the back of an obscure journal. You might say that an academics job is to produce new research, not go on the TV. I think this is where the real question lies; what role should a scientist be occupying in the 21st century?
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
What interests me is how good astronomy reporting seems to be compared to all other science reporting. It faces the same guantlet as other articles, avoids the math and loves to fear-monger possible disasters, but somehow it seems to communicate the more-or-less current theories in a way that seems understandable, interesting, even inspiring.
Is it a difference in how the media approaches the subject? Astronomy seems to have an aura of purity (biology seems to only be reported to create ecological or evolutionary flamewars; medicine research sounds more like infomercials than news; engineering ... well, doesn't exist in the media). Have astronomers learned how to package their data/analysis in nice neat packages?
You are making the mistake many do in looking at bias - there doesn't *have* to be a coordinated effort for what the original article wrote to be true. In fact it's very very rare and usually not productive/widespread for it to be coordinated. It's too transparent.
You need look no further than slashdot - it's moderation tends to be heavily biased in many topics. I can assure you (and a little looking around will confirm it if you do not already know) that there is no controlling entity that seeks to impliment this bias. Yet there is still a VERY strong bias for pretty much similar reasons through many of slashdots readers.
It's like an ant colony where there is no "hive mind" to control things. Each participant does it's thing and the whole ends up being something specific.
It can be that a very few want this and hire people who are like minded (that is usually self sustaining - you usually only hire people you think are correct). It may be that the nature of the job pushes people who think that way into the field. It may be just random chance that one day went over the saturation point - it could have went anyway and just chose that one. There are many other explaination than "Grand conspiracy" - group think happens all the time with no controlling authority or grand conspiracy.
Personally I think the original authors are correct. At least in my experiance (in real life and when I was in the university) 3/4 (and note the 3/4 - there were some very nice very broadly educated people there also) of the humanties distrusted science and journalist students were mostly humanaties people (rare person who is really interested in science but chooses to do non-science for a living - nature of the job chooses people who think that way). If they believe that to be reality, thier editors believe that to be reality, then it's just the nature of the beast.
Just as there is no grand conspiracy to make science minded people think and write that the "Earth is 4000 years old people" are crazy (and our writings are VERY biased against them because we think they are, at best, wrong), so too does the average journalist do that. That's why if you want news about science you need to look to specialised journalist - not the times, cnn, fox, abc, nbc, or whatever general news rag (and don't look at a science journal for general news - they are usually pretty poor at it).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
WombatControl posted a great link in one of the threads here. It's a lecture by Crichton, incidentally he has noticed the same problem with SciAm:
s _quote04.html
"...
Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts. The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was "rife with careless mistakes." It was a poor display featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocust denier. The issue was captioned: "Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist." Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to?
When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn't enough, he put the critics' essays on his web page and answered them in detail. Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down."
Full text at:
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeche
Boris Debic (still too lazy to register).
I remember an essay by Paul Graham: "The Submarine", where he discusses the effect of PR firms on journalism in general. Extrapolating from Graham's article, it seems like an honest blog by someone genuinely interested in scientific topics might be a better place to get good science news than mainstream media. Heck, in many of the science articles here on /. it seems that some of the comments make for better science reporting than the articles themselves.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
If it really mattered, MS could have offered a stable system. Not just "stable", but as in mathematically proven. NASA does this for mission critical (i believe this is where the origin of this phrase came from) applications. The US Military does this for critical devices (detonation systems, guidance, and such).
...and if you produced a desktop OS like this now it would never sell. It probably wouldn't even get downloaded if you offered it for free. All the crashes and bugs we suffer from daily haven't set computing back nearly as far as waiting for every single new feature to be exhaustively tested (or worse, mathematically proven) would. We would be lucky to have a 100% verified bug-free equivalent of the Apple II on the market today. Another hundred years might pass before we have the tools to verify a system as complex as Athlon-64 hardware running Windows XP or a modern Linux distro.
As TFA pointed out:
;P")
1. It's not about articles written by actual scientists, and not about articles published in real scientific journals. It's the mainstream media that makes a mockery of science.
2. There is a group that seems to be on a crusade to present science as just hocus-pocus babble, as some new religion where self-serving high-priests spout obfuscated nonsense, and where if you asked 10 different scientists about any topic you'd get 11 different conflicting theories.
The article blames it on humanities students, but personally I think that's pointing the finger at the wrong group. In my personal limited observation -- but bear in mind that it's no scientific sample or anything, and generally it's just "IMHO" -- it's just a case of the dumb and uneducated feeling a _need_ to drag everyone back to their level, and articles that catter to that dumb and uneducated majority.
The article itself skirts with that answer when it says that those articles treat you like you're dumb and couldn't possibly understand any real scientific terminology or statistics. Well, bingo. Because they're written for people who don't, and who _want_ some positive reinforcement that the muck of mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) is cool- That any kind of academic achievement, humanities included, is (A) just some nonsense techno-bable, (B) irrelevant in the real world, (C) a scam, and usually (D) all the above.
And a lot of publications are basically just prom-queens. They'll print what sells. That means what their intended audience wants to hear. If that audience wants to hear that the nerds they mocked in school still didn't really achieve anything, and nowadays are a bunch of quacks and witch-doctors bickering over whose techno-babble religion is better, they'll publish just that.
(Before I go any further, let me mention though that by "education", I don't only mean strictly school. I also mean, in fact even _especially_ mean studying on your own, above and beyond just sitting and daydreaming in class. So if you've made the effort to learn something and improve yourself, even without an university degree, you're _not_ the category I'm talking about.)
And outside magazines, it gets even worse. Every single example is taken out of context and polished into shining proof that education is irrelevant, and sitting on your ass in front of the TV is just as good. Examples you occasionally see even on slashdot include:
- Start with the fact IQ test results are irrelevant for a lot of jobs, and indeed many would even question if they measure "intelligence", or that something as complex as the many aspects of human intelligence can be squeezed into a single number. But then extrapolate it to mean that _intelligence_ as such as irrelevant to any real jobs, or indeed a _handicap_ in the real world.
(In the words of a Slashdot poster in a recent post, the less intelligent have more other (presumably better) advantages, like empathising better with each other, since they're the majority. And, I quote, "So the next time, someone praised you for being intelligent and well-off....just bear these in mind.....seriously, it may not be a good thing in my not-so-honorable opinion
- Take some speech of someone rich and successful, e.g., Steve Jobs, and cut out of context the part where he mentioned he quit college. But conveniently ommit that he also says that he went to study on his own the things that interested him. So we're talking someone who still worked hard at improving himself, _not_ an example of a couch-potato that made it bigger.
Or even going as far as making up a fake speech of such a successful person where he calls college students losers again and again. (See the fake Larry Ellison speech being occasionally waved around.)
- That some prominent scientific figure, e.g., Einstein seems to be the favourite poster child, didn't do that well in school either, so it's ok for us to sleep in maths and physics classes too. But conveniently mi
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think your problem is at least as much with the editors as with the journalists. I realise what you're saying, but journalists aren't all like that. I have a good friend who's an amateur astronomer, and she's also a freelance science writer. She has things published in daily newspapers and/or weekly magazines about every week or two. She gets paid a commission, but definitely doen't make enough to cover the time she spends on it. Her primary motivation for doing it is to simply try and get some science writing in the media at all.
The irony is that even though she knows exactly what she's talking about when writing something, and she puts a huge amount of effort into being careful and accurate about what she writes, she still has to fight with editors. Probably most of the articles she writes end up getting lazily re-written in some way, even if it's just re-typed for some reason with half the words messed up. (eg. In an article last week, they changed "mass spectrometer" to "massive spectrometer", which is completely different!) It's not uncommon for chunks of writing to be cut without proper consultation, and with no respect for the context, or how they might be changing the message of the article. On a couple of occasions, they've held back time-critical articles and published them weeks after they were actually relevant, as if they didn't even bother to check the content properly.
It's not just the editors in this case, either. It's the whole system that involves deadlines and priorities that the people in the business give themselves. Editors of regular media publications just don't get to be editors by knowing about or having much respect for science. In the cases I've mentioned above, they've made a broad descision to step up and help to publicise science, but in reality they don't really care too much about the specifics of what they're doing -- it's for show as much as anything.
Some journalists "exist to be published", but I think the main ones in that frame are the staff journalists who are being paid a salary. Those people are only a subset of all the writing that you're likely to see in many publications. The problems are likely to come especially at times when they're being asked to write about things they don't find particularly interesting... and there simply aren't many staff journalists out there who find scientific topics anywhere near as interesting as things like politics, crime or business, for instance.
"Evolution is something the church gave up on decades ago, and the rest of the world knows is fact- but the American press feels "Intelligent Design" deserves presentation on equal grounds and parrots the President when he says it deserves "consideration"."
Well, actually here's a link to a poll that contradicts the "the rest of the world knows is fact" assertion:
Natural selection fighting to survive in the US
It's scary, really. Basically only 26% of those polled actually believed Darwin. (Ranging from 27% among the whites to as low as 14% among the blacks.)
To make ignorance even scarier, even in this group, 15% of them said that life existed from day 0 and never changed, and 10% said evolution was guided by some supreme being. Makes me wonder if they even have a clue wtf they're talking about, if they think "evolution" means life staying unchanged.
So, anyway, now let's subtract those 25% (10% + 15%, since both are really are creationists or ID fans in disguise) from that 26% group, and you're left with 26 * 0.75 = 19.5% who actually do believe in the real evolution theory. That's it. Less than 1 person in 5.
So with all due respect, I'd challenge that assertion that "everyone else knows evolution is a fact". It may be so for you and me and our equally nerdy, educated friends, but if we're talking the bulk of the population, less than 1 in 5 are anywhere _near_ sharing that point of view.
Also 64% supported teaching Intelligent Design in schools.
So basically when the press is giving ID equal opportunity, rest assured that it's not just for Dubya's sake. It's really cattering to those 80.5% who actually do believe in creationism or ID, or those 64% who are obviously ignorant enough to not be able to tell the difference between science and pseudo-science babble.
Seriously, whenever I start thinking that maybe we nerds are just elitist with our snotty attitude about the ignorant, uneducated masses... such a study comes along and proves it in hard numbers and percentages that we _are_ right, after all. The majority really _is_ that dumb and uneducated.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...the same sort of article could be written about "bad politics" and "bad economy" and all those other dumbed-down "you, mere mortal, could never understand (But we have a knowing air)" stories we read every day. But yes, I do agree that most everything in its most analytic form could be considered as science.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Think about it. Scientists spend decades figuring out how the universe works, Engineers (and Doctors, and other folks at the application end of things) spend decades figuring out how to apply those rules to create things that do something we could not do before. Lifetimes of research to create... a cell phone a complete moron can use. A pill derived from examining thousands of fly generations with genes knocked out to figure out which ones are crucial in the evolution of a disease... so a moron can live to teach others about Intellegent Design and how Darwin was a godless heathen. Hell, farmers must be pretty irritated at how they are looked at as hayseeds when they produce more food per acre than at any point in history - and I don't know a whole lot about how they do it (and I don't think too many other /.ers do, either - but feel free to enlighten me)
So the problem may boil down to the fact that our science and technology is so advanced that you don't have to have the slightest clue how or why it operates in order to use it. Thus, you can pretty safely ignore why or how it works, and substitue your own suspicions about how the world really works - i.e. human drama stories for many journalists, despite the fact they routinely USE such technological marvels such as cell phones, laptop computers, digital cameras, helicopters, etc. Such tactics would not work well in a endeavor more closely tied to reality, like launching a space shuttle or flying an aircraft. But a journalist only has to keep an editor happy and circulation up.
Not bad if you are a layman, but often filled with too much sensation reporting.
And I am speaking as a scientist of course
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
"He was comparing Christianity of the past with todays Christianity. Which in case you haven't noticed is different to the past of burnings and inquisitions."
That only means that the scope has reduced, but the ideology is still there.
"Which is evident enough in your post where you link to two of the same news articles and the rest are fringe lunatics. "
Fringe lunatics? FRINGE LUNATICS???!?
Sure, and the Taleban are just a bunch of rowdy college kids!
Give me a break.
"Are those news articles representative of the entire Christian community in today's U.S?"
Yes, because Christian doctrine itself is inherently intolerant.
So is Islamic doctrine, in caseanybody accuses me of defaming christians in favor of those nutjobs.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
That's a very insightful point, but I don't think the USA has a monopoly on stupidity or anything. It's just that this time we have data from the USA.
You may notice for example that TFA is from "www.guardian.co.uk". There's a reason for that last part of the domain name. And if you browse through their past list of articles in the "Bad Science" category, you'll notice that most of the bad science examples they pick on are from UK tabloids, not USA ones.
And I can tell you first hand that here, that meaning in Germany, there are plenty of dumb and uneducated people too.
And you know how previously I've mentioned having some first-hand experience with the Eastern Block, before the fall of the Iron Curtain? Much as I've commended their education system as IMHO superior to the feel-good education of the western world, the flip side is that they too had their own dumb people. People who argued that the downfall of their communist system was wasting money on having engineers and economists, instead of having everyone get a hammer or a sickle and do some real work already.
So, yes, there will be a lot of variation in what the percentages are among countries, and whether the anti-science gang will be good ol' bible-thumping christians or rally around some other bogus stuff. Yes, maybe the dumb uneducated people in other countries don't rally around ID like in the USA, but they _will_ rally around some other comfortable pseudo-science and/or excuse to mock and ridicule the real science.
Of course, this is all just IMHO. I don't have hard numbers or percentages to base it on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's not a scientific proof, that's a random leap into the unknown. Furthermore, there are other proposed solutions that don't involve a diety (but they're not really scientific either as they can't be tested). So the fact of a start doesn't guarantee your fiction is correct.
On Sunday, the Observer, the Sunday version of the Gaurdian, had an article which claimed that Einstein won his Nobel prize, not for relativity (true) but for explaining how light is converted to electricity in plants (false)
obviously feel a lot better after having got that off your chest.
Just to pin my colours to the mast, I'm a nice, white, atheist, middle-class chap from the UK.
The media likes good stories - as that's what people pay them to provide. The media will enforce the stereotypes of their readers - people prefer to pay for views that agree with their own. You reap what you sow (well more precisely you get similar stories to the ones you paid for the last few days)
If a story of a black girl vanishing doesn't get as much coverage of the disappearance of a white girl - then you can be pretty sure that's because the readership don't care as much. Publishers do actually research the correlation between what's in their paper and how many copies they sell. It's not nice, but many things in life aren't - nobody said living was going to be a barrel of laughs.
Right, where was I - oh yes, I've labelled you racist. Well not you personally, just the median media-consumer of your country - I'm sure you're a much nicer bloke.
Maybe it's not strictly racism, it's more just people caring more about stuff they can identify with. If you're a normal white family somewhere in the mid-west, you're unlikely to have your black daughter abducted in Florida - maybe you went to Aruba for your holidays and can see the light of your life playing in the back garden as you read.
What next, erm OK, Christianity. Well on that one, I'm gunning for you along with the media (read on before you get pissy). I personally don't believe it, it doesn't make sense to me. When other people state they're Christians it puts me on edge a little, how did they get fooled when I can see through it? Are they stupid? 99% of Christians you meet are lovely people though, we all have strange ideas, and if there's cause them to help the needy and forgive their neighbour - then in my humanist view of the world they're good people.
What freaks me slightly are the Christians you hear about: Prayer breakfasts in the White House on the eve of war, floods a condemnation on gays, Aids programs denied to any non pro-abstinence organisations, Intelligent Design being taught etc etc.
Christianity has crap PR, the nutters shout and get heard and all the rest of you don't speak out. I'm sure if a few million (you're not short on numbers)of you marched on Washington pointing out that a few billion condoms in Africa might do more good than harm - then maybe you'd get some coverage.
I think the point I was trying to make is that the media is merely a mirror. It prints what people believe and what they buy - sadly it doesn't tell people what to think (well unless it's Murdoch, but he's the exception that proves...oh I'd better stop now).
Most Anmerican people live in cities. Most American people don't pay attention in History class, and most don't have any idea what most of those things on the farm are for. Granted, I do, but I grew up on a farm. Most of the people who live in the cities with 75K+ people and who I've spoken to about farm implements of some type, those people generally don't have any idea what a plow is for (or a plough, if you wanna use eaxtrae lettears and have me read it to myself as "plawf"). I went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago recently, and most of the people around the farm exhibit had no idea what the Combine was. I've actualy spoken to people who have no idea what a cow or a pig is, or where meat comes from.
:p
So yeah, referring to "the plow in the sky" (never mind that it's probably a moldboard v/s a chisel plow) probably is gonna confuse as many Americans as it helps.
New Scientist articles are continually overhyping 'the next great breakthrough' by some unknown physicist at some unknown university in some as yet unpublished paper. It is well known to anybody above phd level that these are the physics equivalent of vapourware, and yet it seems New Scientist are either unaware or don't care about this. On the plus side, these articles are usually fairly easy to weed out, even if you don't have any specialist knowledge in the subject. For example, if the strapline is something like "Could Einstein Be Wrong?" with some random computer generated picture of nothing in particular then you have a very good candidate.
I'm obviously not a great "communicator", I only meant I trust Nature & Science more because of their "journal" status. I agree New Scientist is more suited to a general audience and is also widely available on the newstands as is Scientific American. Both are good mags.
:)
Why bad science reporting pisses me off:
I am a recovered victim of bad science reporting. Until the age of 30 I did not have any science education to speak except good marks for science at high school. In my late teens I belived all sorts of crap (especially phycic stuff). In my early twenties I read many books and magazines (from the science section in the newsagent!), I had been convinced that Uri Geller was genuine since I was 16! I picked up a second-hand book by The Great Randi and found out I had been reading science fiction as science fact.
After that I became more selective and started reading Scientific American and found a copy in the Library that contained J. Conway's "Game of Life". Like a true nerd I spent hours hand drawing grids to see what would happen. I got frustrated with the tedious drawings and taught myself programming on a secondhand Apple IIE. About 8yrs later I ended up with a Computer Science degree and a healthy pay-pack.
The first thing that people need to learn about science is the scientific method, ie:what is science. Unfortunately my high-school science class was absorbed in the experiments and results that flowed from the method, I can't remember it ever being mentioned. We were told to write our "reports" as Hypothesis, Method, Results, Conclusion. We did, but we didn't know why, most of the time we knew what we were suposed to "prove" and simply worked backwards. In hindsight the teachers either just assumed everybody knew about it or had no idea themselves. A magician taught me more about science in one thin book than the public school system had in ten years. I still get sucked in by bad science but at least it doesn't happen every day now.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.