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Bad Reporting, Not Email, Worse Than Marijuana
MoNickels writes "Turns out, those endless news reports and blog entries in April about "texting makes you stupid" were inaccurate. As linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog now reports by way of apologizing to Wilson, it wasn't Wilson's fault, but that of "rotten science journalism." Psychologist Glenn Wilson was reported to have done a study said that chat and email, as the Guardian put it, "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis." But Wilson says, "This...is a temporary distraction effect—not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 [subjects] somehow became '80 clinical trials.'" The original Slashdot story was covered back in April."
/. admits they made a mistake...
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The reason that such things occur i because I think that we can not do much about media sensationalism or the scientific ignorance of many journalists. On the other hand , there's no reason why better information about science and technology should not also be available to the public.
+1 funny, -2 overrated. Life isn't fair.
Media don't sell news, they sell eyeballs. When you buy a paper, you're the product and not the client.
It seems that regardless of how many mistakes are made in scientific journalism that the root cause of the problem will never be addressed.
As long as money is the motivation for making and reporting discoveries, we will have skewed results (actual and/or reported) and our efforts may, more often than not, be focused in the wrong directions.
Are the days of curiosity forcing advances in science and eagerness to discover and learn promoting good journalism and sharing over with?
It is a non-issue to realize that most of the modern day losses in productivity come from distracted workers using the internet for personal pleasure rather than company projects. This distraction effort splits the focus of the individual and causes a decrease in the finite amount of cognitive processing ability given to any one task. Marijuana on the other hand results in modification of the reward pathway system in the brain. So there is an actually psychochemical difference in the brain which leads to addiction. Between the two, marijuana actually modifies the brain negatively while email only distracts. I really wish these people had taken the time to realize this before putting out a sensationalist piece of work.
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Wow... just Wow
That depends entirely on who funds the study. :)
marijuana reporting, er, not bad email, is better than..
er..
toast! I want toast!
Pot, and almost all other drugs, were illegalized for racist reasons. For cocaine it was blacks, for opium it was Chinese, and for pot it was Mexicans. Cigarettes and alcohol aren't banned because white people used them back in the old days, it wasn't just minorities. Yes, it's completely stupid. But then again, so is racism in the first place.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Freshmen year she was on the all Honors / A.P. course track, and by senior year she was in all the "Basic Remedial XYZ for dummies" courses. She talked a bunch of people out of smoking pot after she stopped.
I try not to judge people, but it wasn't worth risking to me.
Richard Feynman was an out user of recreational Marijuana, and he was one of America's leading physicists.
Of course, the burn out down the street who does nothing with his life except collect welfare is also an out user of marijuana. Bottom line? Everyone's different. Bottomer line? The burnout down the street might not want to do anything with his life, whereas Richard Feynman dug physics and math. Pot tends to lead you to do what you want, as opposed to what you should. Maybe if he didn't smoke, Feynman would have been some kind of accountant helping people get rich instead of contributing to the world of physics. Which would have been better? Who knows.
Anyone who's ever gone to a scientific conference can tell you that marijuana might not actually have any effect on IQ. Many, many scientists are pot heads, especially the especially bright ones.
Pot, and almost all other drugs, were illegalized for racist reasons. For cocaine it was blacks, for opium it was Chinese, and for pot it was Mexicans. Cigarettes and alcohol aren't banned because white people used them back in the old days, it wasn't just minorities. Yes, it's completely stupid. But then again, so is racism in the first place.
Tobacco was introduced to Europeans via Native Americans and then brought back to Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco#History), and alcohol originated in ancient Sumeria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer#History). There goes your theory about it being racist.
The difference is that alcohol and tobacco are very old, socially accepted institutions, whereas crack cocaine and the like are relatively new to society at large. It's reasonable to assume that after enough time, these drugs may be socially acceptable as well.
"Thanks to crack, I can get a blowjob for a buck!" -S.O.D.
a study involving repeated IQ tests of nearly 1400 participants over a time period of 12 years showed absolutely no statistical correlation between marijuana use and cognitive ability.
All the scientific studies show this same thing. All the studies showing that marijuana use does permanant damage always turn out to be bullshit. OK, saying "all the studies" might sound like a generalization--but actually try to find one that uses any kind of scientific method and shows that marijuana is bad for you. It's suprisingly hard considering what a great evil people claim it to be. It's truly evil that very sick people aren't allowed to use this cheap, easily produced drug to help them through their illnesses. It's illegal for no good reason.
BTW, if you sit around the house and smoke pot incessantly, it's true that you're probably not going to accomplish much with your life. Don't think that just because pot isn't inherently bad for you that you can't abuse it.
What you want it to say? 'Site of Republican and Facist lies about drug use'? That's like saying; "That article is from NYT, I refuse to believe a hurricane killed thousands of people, but when Fox News says it it's ok.". The information in that article is true. If you have a problem believing it, then try a little investigative reporting and look it up. Stop dismissing things just because you don't trust the source of the information. Think.
google.slashdot
the majority of pot users are non-famous random joes
s/pot users/people/
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
It'd be a lot easier to check their claims about the studies they cite if, well, they had cited any studies. Otherwise, it's just pothead optimism.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Correction: Correlation is not NECESSARILY causality. But it MIGHT be.
Severe depression can also cause sudden failure in school, and
drug use of any kind is often associated with depression. It is
likely that she is using marijuana as a scapegoat, people love
blaming their problems on drugs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!