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Pink, Blue, and Bad Science
DocDJ writes "Ben Goldacre writes an excellent column in The Guardian called Bad Science, which regularly demonstrates how poor the mainstream media are at reporting science. He recently pointed out the flaws in the reporting of research that purported to show the evolutionary basis of 'blue for boys, pink for girls'." Another Guardian writer, Zoe Williams, has an even more acerbic take on the research.
I always wondered why people call them pinkos!
"But within this study, was the preference stable across cultures? Well no, not even in this experiment, where they had some Chinese test subjects too. For these participants, not only were the differences in the overlapping curves not so extreme; but the favourite colours were a kind of red for boys and a bit pinker for girls (not blue); and they had more of a red preference overall. Red, you see, is a lucky colour in contemporary Chinese culture."
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
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A slashbot article on misrepresentation. The ironing is delicious.
Journalists aren't scientists capable of peer-reviewing scientific work?
I long ago learned never to use science journalists as primary sources of information. First of all, these guys are part of an infrastructure that needs to sell advertising (whether via TV, newspapers, web sites, whatever), so the more sensationalistic they can make things the better. Secondly, and most importantly, they often don't understand what it is they're reporting. It's rather like having a reporter covering Congressional sessions who doesn't understand any of the rules of the house, or what Constitutional powers and limits it has. You wouldn't accept financial reporters who didn't understand the essential concepts of stock exchange, and yet it seems people who don't understand the fundementals of science are given the "science journalist" hat and sent off to report on new data and new theories and hypotheses.
There's nothing that makes me angrier than "New fossil rewrites human evolutionary history" and then when you actually go and read the source, it does not such thing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
On the one hand, the media is definitely at fault for overhyping every burp and gurgle coming from medical research. An old amino acid causes an unexpected hypertrophy of T-cells? OMFG! It's teh cure for cancer!
On the other hand, grants seem to awarded to any post-doc with an itch to scratch. The problem is that most of those idiots (for want of a better term) can't tell the difference between the itchiness caused by an ingrown ass-hair and the ass-hair itself. That's what Zoe's ripping on in her article.
There's something to be said for "pure research" which theoretically expands our collective knowledge. Without pure research, we wouldn't have found penicillin, US America, or bread-yeast. However, I can't even begin to understand what kind of expectations the grant awarders had when they supported "Boys like blue, Girls like pink" research.
For a couple bucks, the researchers could have just as well satisfied their itch with a tube of Preparation H.
Because everyone here drives on the left there must be a genetic predisposition.
Deleted
That's a study I'd like to see done.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Getting up at 4:00 AM or so to watch the first shuttle launch.
Dan Rather, new at the job of anchoring liftoffs, said: (I am not making this up)
"The skies are clear this morning, so we should be seeing some spectacular entrails...."
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I think see misses the target. Knowledge is cumulative, knowing that there's a gender specific preference for color could be useful to researchers in other fields. The problem is the mainstream media which publishes such trivial research while managing to ignore scientific discoveries of far greater importance.
Tell me, did you intend to link to a parody site? Or do you just not know the URL of the whitehouse website?
I believe you wanted http://www.whitehouse.gov/ as should be fairly easy to tell if you'd loaded & read your own link.
Maybe it is because pink might have a higher wavelength than blue since it is closer to red. So males can see a woman, if dressed in pink, from far away and get ready to show off or think of instant one-liners, whereas if men are dressed in blue, then women cannot see men approaching from far away and might not have their guard up on time to hear the shitty one-liner from the guy...
there are so many people out there who believe in creationism (particularly the type with the earth being 6000 years old) and intelligent design...
It's fun to read and think about these things even if they are not true.
It's not as troublesome as plain lies from governments presented to you over and over again from all 'respected news networks' to gain support to nullify amendements, for example.
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Blue! No, pink [SPROING] Aarrgghh!!
It's all arbitrary anyway. That said, I like pastel black and the number eleven.
Someone hates these cans.
I have an extremely low opinion of journalism, and when I hear the term "journalistic ethic" I cringe. In addition to the reporter's biases we also have to account for their stupidity and laziness. Meanwhile, reporters run around and act like journalism is some sacred religion, exempt from the law, to be placed above God and country. Nonsense.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Most media stories (carried by commercial media conglomerates) are motivated by a desire to sell products, and contain little to no actual science! (shock)
"Caveat Emptor" applies to just about everything you see, read, or hear as well. Be (at least) skeptical of everything you hear, and you'll be just fine.
-Styopa
Just look at mainstream media portrayal of global warming. They make it sound as if global warming is a contested theory in the scientific community. As was mentioned in _An Inconvenient Truth_, of the hundreds of journal articles on the subject, there was not a single one that disputed that global warming existed.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Most science discoveries are boring. They don't bleed, so they don't lead. They don't get the scared parents to tune in at 11 to see what will kill their kids next.
Most discoveries are small scale, and many merely confirm expectations. But the news needs to turn them all into cancer cures, or frame them into current politics, or turn them into earth shattering in scope.
In fact, the expectation that the media would be good at science is the big lie. Since when has the media been about enlightenment? The media is all about drawing eyeballs with hype.
Wow. Just wow.
Apparently it's internet day at the retard home.
YHBT
Really? There's officially 163,000 homeless households in the UK and this research like virtually all research in the UK is government funded.
Of course, that's nothing compared to the 6 billion pounds we've just spent upgrading our Channel Tunnel rail system so that wealthy commuters between London and Paris can shave 20 minutes off their journey.
Deleted
She seems to be saying "I don't see why anyone should ask a question like this, therefore everyone should stop". That's not acerbic, that's obscurantist.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
As the article points out, the speculation that the color preference was to help women gather berries was on the part of the scientists who wrote the paper, not the journalists. And of course, if men had preferred the redder colors, they would have said it was an evolutionary adaptation to give them sensory reinforcement when spearing a woolly mammoth. I agree with the article, and I always get annoyed reading the circular, baseless speculation on the evolutionary causes of whatever is discovered. It has no place in a scientific paper. Give a little room to the unknown. Don't just throw it in the nearest a bucket like a retard.
BTW, the article, with the graphs from the study, which are interesting, is here: http://www.badscience.net/?p=518
Years later, girls needed a color of their own, so they just got pink.
Sink your Roosterteeth into that!
That's stupid. A hundred years ago it was pink for boys and blue for girls.
Google Answers
You mean a liberal arts degree doesn't have anything to do with the real world?
I'm shocked... SHOCKED I say!
Well ok. Not that shocked.
[snicker]
A Human Right
I have a vague notion that it was the other way around in Western culture about 200 years ago. I could be wrong.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Whenever I watch a news story about something which I know something about, I find that they are inaccurate or misrepresentative. Interestingly, I find that even though I KNOW they have facts wrong on every single occasion that they reported on something I had knowledge of, it doesn't seem to shake me from accepting as accurate the items they report on of which I have NO knowledge. I believe this to be the case with most people.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Everyone knows that men prefer blue because it stands out against the red Martian landscape.
Women prefer pink because the thick Venusian atmosphere blocks the higher wavelengths of light.
It does not matter what is said just so long as it was said well.
I was given a good talking to when I complained about the pink logoing for the Subaru STI cars. The dealer told me how in Japan that this "pink" in my mind is caled "cherry blossom red", which is a very masculine color in Japan, since the cherry blossoms come out in spring season, and spring is seen as a very masculine time of year in that country.
This particular blue vs pink thing may have come out very different in different parts of the world. If it was all down to evolution and looking for berries, why would there be such differences from one region to another in terms of the "genderness" of these colors?
>>Meanwhile, reporters run around and act like journalism is some sacred religion, exempt from the law, to be placed above God and country.
It's amazing how many reporters are like that. It is particularly sad because of how lousy reporters generally are. Everybody I know that has been interviewed or questioned by reporters were misquoted. Often the reporter was trying to dress up a statement and ended up twisting what the person was actually saying, but they were too stupid or arrogant to realize it.
Donut: It's not pink, it's lightish red.
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
Matt Drudge links to the Guardian all the time.
It isn't just science. The media screw up everything: Law, medicine, politics, sports of course since sportwriters all all nerds, you name it.
And since, in a democracy, the majority of people who vote at all base their vote on what the media presents to them, the entire system of government is also screwed up.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Yes.
K. Trout, C.I.O.
and when I hear the term "journalistic ethic" I cringe.
And coming from a lawyer it really drives the point home how bad journalists are.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Agree completely - the media is a bunch of fuck-ups. On every news story where I've known the real story first-hand, on everything from articles specifically about me in small town papers to major news outlet coverage of national events they have gotten significant details completely wrong, often in cases where they had asked specific questions on that subject - ie. it wasn't interpretation or simply filling in the blanks. And it typically wasn't mistakes made in the name of sensationalism and such - just basic factual errors that I can attribute to nothing more then laziness and stupidity.
"This concentration on innate biological difference between (let's be frank) oppressor and oppressed is so discredited in the racial arena, it's functionally an academic taboo. How did we never manage to discredit the same impulse in the business of gender?" Well said. *applause*
One interesting thing about these studies is they always point out the difference between men and women. Perhaps because that is something that people can giving a knowing chuckle about over their morning tea, because everyone knows that women are naturally more sophisticated and men are naturally the hunters.
Notice how none of these evolutionary geneticists are writing about how black people got a sense of rhythm because of some remnant of their stone age past, and that the Chinese aren't good at math because the proto-Chinese used math in their mammoth hunts, etc.
That aside,
A little over a year ago, I wrote my own critique, called Women, Men and the Bad Scientific Study of the Week
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Shouldn't this article be tagged omgponies?
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Sir, while my peers were watching the Simpsons, I was doing homework.
;o)
Now I depend on Slashdot and Wikipedia for all my facts.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Quite simply, basic research does need to be done to test hypotheses about whether behaviors are based on biologically inheritable traits or cultural environment and to what extent each has a role. Both extremes, "culture has nothing to do with evolutionary biology" vs. "human behavior has nothing to do with culture", are, of course absurd. So why is this research in any way contentious? Why would anyone be afraid of the idea that, horrors!, some behavioral tendencies are either genetic, sex differentiated, or both? It has been shown time and time again in research that there are both cultural constants that correlated to evolutionary biology and that there are behavioral variations within a culture that correspond to genetic makeup and to differentiated development due to variations in sexual hormones during fetal development. Blinding yourself to avenues of research or labeling those who honestly pursue those avenues of research as bigots and Nazis is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending that goal oriented social engineering is going to change human nature. I don't see where anyone can extract a value judgment or a sustain a bigoted attitude based on these studies. Nobody is saying, "Girls like pink, therefore they are sissies" or even that "All girls like pink", just that within a population, there is a statistically significant predilection that tracks gender.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
There is no book named "Revelations" in the Bible. You may be thinking of the book of "Revelation", which is short for the "Revelation of St. John the Divine".
Fata viam invenient.
a professor i work with on autonomous modular robotics was interviewed a couple years back on the future implications of his research. generally our goals are search and rescue missions and possible space missions (reconfigurable robots are just so much more space-friendly) and the majority of our work has been towards these two milestones. the journalist, however, arrived at the interview with the fantastic vision of shrinking down these robots to nanoscale sizes and continuously (about a dozen times) asked if these robots would one day be able to enter the human body for medical purposes...
as you can imagine, my professor wasn't too amused but eventually gave in after the twelfth time being asked the question with an emphatic 'sure, why not.' and what do you know, the headline that week was something along the lines of 'Scientists creating robots to enter the human body.' we still haven't heard from any doctors yet....
Isn't it funny how "journalism" is the only so-called academic discipline that ends in "-ism"? The only things I know of that end in "-ism" are either religions or diseases. So which is it?
Oh my God! It is in the Guardian! it must be TRUE!!!! (and if you doubt it, even just a little, you know in the back of your mind. WE KNOW WHERE YOU WILL END UP YOU FILTHY DEGENERATE RIGHTIST)
Journalistic ethic is a bit like computer scientists' ethic - both have the power to screw up things in a horrible fashion (they misinform people by doing their work badly, we kill jobs by doing our work well) and both more or less follow a certain thic to keep us from abusing said power (they try to monitor themselves, many universities tell first-grade CS students that developing the control systems for cruise missiles is somewhat unethical).
In the end we booth can do what we want - if you want to help develop a better cruise missile there are plenty of defense contractors who are happy to hear that; if they want to write bullshit there's plenty of maggazines, papers and TV stations who will employ them. Like the hippocratic oath, such work ethics are a nice thing to have, but in the end everyone can decide to ignore them. It's better to have them, though - by showing fledgling journalists/scientists/etc. an ideal of how they should be, some do keep aspiring to meet it. Of course they hide behind their ethic, but there often are other reporters who point out how much bullshit they're talking - a nice example for Europe's biggest tabloid would be http://bildblog.de/ [in German].
Just imagine how bad journalists would be if they were told "write anything you want as long as it sounds good" from the get-go. *shivers*
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One of the problems, is sometimes the media gets science wrong out of ignorance.
w rite_a_terrible_scienc.php
o king_cannabis_cause_sc.php
Other times, there's a 'reason'. Either it's a well oiled PR firm or political gain.
I love this site that blogs about bad science and reference the other CRANKS and WONKS out there that continuously spout off the wrong information and call it science.
They've deemed it the art of Denialism:
This one is classic:
How to write a Terrible Science Paper:
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/09/how_to_
Or Does Smoking Pot Cause Schizophrenia?
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/07/does_sm
http://www.scienceblogs.com/denialism/
Great stuff!
It describes exactly why the research isn't saying what the scientists claim that it's saying. Zoe Williams' article, on the other hand, is a piece of anti-scientific trash. She seems to think that research is pointless unless there's money to be gained out of it, and cowardly pulls out the race card on anything that looks into the differences between groups of people.
Rob
I prefer blue because I can see it. Like 10% of the male population, I'm red-green colorblind.
Notice the Guardian moans about pop science to suit its agenda. To them, evolutionary psychology is a tool of white/male/rich/zionist oppression since it often comes to conclusions that are not politically correct. I don't expect to hear them moaning about the greater volume of environmentalist pseudoscience that's pumped out by the tree. Take this recent BBC article which misleads the audience in to thinking ordinary PCs have 1200 watt PSUs and this is melting the icecaps. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online /6950960.stm
I've seen a real problem with researchers seeming to always want to report the results as though it supports their hypothesis, probably in the interest of continued funding. My experience with this is mainly limited to the behavioural sciences, mostly as related to cognitive psychology but man, you want to talk about some SHITTY papers that get published. They'll gloss over large portions of their methods, consolidate hundreds of points of data in to 3 numbers and not provide the originals, write conclusions that vastly overstate what was found and sometimes even run contrary to the evidence and so on.
To be clear: This isn't crap in a newspaper, this is crap from actual academic journals. We are talking things bad enough that a smart undergrad can find sever problems with it in 5 minutes.
As far as I can tell it is this attitude that to keep getting grants, you have to generate "results" and "results" mean being right. So doing a study and proving your hypothesis wrong isn't ok. Even doing a study that indicates something very weakly and suggests further research isn't ok. Nope, you've got to come to a strong conclusion, the evidence be damned!
So I am with you in saying it isn't 1005 the media's fault. They cannot be expected to be experts in everything, you can't expect them to read over every paper and carefully review the whole thing. They more or less have to assume that's been done and take the abstract to be correct. In my experience, it isn't in a shocking number of cases.
many universities tell first-grade CS students that developing the control systems for cruise missiles is somewhat unethical).
Much better to carpet bomb than hit your target.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
"Anthropological etymology"? What's that?
Universal constraints on color vocabular inventories were one of the major paradigm cases of cognitive anthropology back in the 1960's (as was analysis of folk etymologies, and prototype concepts). However, it would be good if you didn't make up terms like "anthropological etymology" to refer to this sort of stuff.
Careful how you state this. In what sense are those two words "first"?
...and the actual evidence for this is what?
(We have cross-linguistic surveys of color vocabularies that support the hypothesis that color term systems must follow certain patterns. While this is certainly suggestive about possible patterns of language change, I don't think there is much in the way of direct evidence for what you're claiming here.)
This is rank speculation on your part.
Are you adequate?
The gene for driving on the right would thrive in a population where it outnumbered the gene for driving on the left. For example, if a small group of people with a recessive mutation for driving on the right were to be thrown together into an isolated island, driving on the right would have a good chance of becoming epidemic among their inbred offspring.
Are you adequate?
Maybe those homeless people should get jobs so they could afford a place to live. That way, you know, people like you wouldn't have cause to get self righteously indignant over the cost of improving the transportation infrastructure. Seriously, until you're spending your nights and weekends volunteering in soup kitchens and homeless shelters, you're not doing anything but politically correct whining when you talk about the poor, poor homeless people. Put *your* time and money where your mouth is, or shut the fuck up.
Consider the perspective of drivers in front of you!
Therefore if more people drive on the right side, the left driver will be eliminated from the gene pool.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
Men picked the colors. Pink was chosen because it represents a favorite body part of women. For those slashdotters who are really confused, log out, leave the basement, and avoid coming back until this all makes sense.
Well said.
It's been a long time.
Well, you see, it's all based on litmus paper. Girls are more acidic and therefore when dipped in liquefied girl, the paper stays pink. Boys are acerbic, so when dipped in liquefied boy, the paper turns blue.
Brings a whole new dimension to "pH+ balanced for a woman," eh?
--
Toro
Indeed. "What matters" is relative to the forum. I think election politics suit your thesis better than science writing.
Anyone willing to do some basic research and reading (this takes effort!) could easily locate a preponderance of evidence that Gainsborough's famous painting The Blue Boy had significant cultural impact in changing gender color roles. Not too long ago, it was customary for boys to wear pink and girls to wear blue. This isn't bad science, but simply a matter of finding historic cultural references. But in this modern lazy Slashdot society, people want simple answers without having to search and read sources beyond Wikipedia and the World Wide Web. Peer-reviewed journals are by far the most credible source for new theories and research. Research can also go beyond journals by gathering cultural artifacts (a few counter examples does not necessarily disprove any theory) and interviewing individuals.
signature pending slashdot approval
You're absolutely right -- a degree in journalism doesn't teach you much about the real world. It's not designed to. A journalist's *sources* are supposed to teach readers about what's important in science, technology, medicine, politics, legal affairs, etc. Journalists' own thoughts on any given subject should never be apparent in the finished product, specifically because journalists often do not know the first thing about science, technology, medicine, politics, legal affairs, etc. A degree in journalism isn't supposed to educate on any of these subjects; the degree teaches you how to write well, how to interview sources and, most importantly, how to get out and find news that's interesting to the average reader.
Interestingly enough, many journalists I know also have an extremely low opinion of today's mainstream media too. Over the past couple of decades, most working journalists have witnessed a strong shift in their organizations, from a previous focus on high-quality news gathering and journalistic integrity towards a profit-centered business structure that leaves little room for in-depth and/or investigative reporting. While I won't argue the stupidity comment -- but do keep in mind that it takes time to educate yourself in a subject, and time is a commodity few working journalists have much of these days -- I think you're dead wrong that today's journalists are simply 'lazy' in their efforts to report the news. Most modern newsrooms I know of have sharply reduced the number of reporters on staff from what they enjoyed a few decades ago, yet these organizations continue to churn-out the same number of news stories in a given period of time. See this recent memo from a Bay Area news organization to get a first-hand look at newsroom consolidation in action. Consolidation certainly doesn't speak to lazy reporters; is speaks to journalists who are, in almost every case, overworked, poorly-paid and under constant stress to produce something on deadline, anything that will help fill the daily news-hole. If you want to point the finger and place blame for the increasingly piss-poor reporting in newspapers, magazines and on television these days, you might want to try aiming your mark a little higher in these news organizations. I guarantee you that the problem is a lot more complex than the shoddy work of a few 'stupid' or 'lazy' reporters.
Sadly, the 'sacredness' of their religion is just about the only thing left to motivate modern news reporters, so don't knock their faith; they sure as hell aren't in it for the money, and they definitely aren't in it for the respect. At least in my area, starting salary for teachers is higher than the starting salary for reporters, and I don't see too many teachers threatened with legal action or bodily harm just for doing their jobs.
You may not like how today's reporters do their jobs, but keep in mind that their job is still an important one. I'm glad that someone is still willing to do that job. I don't think it's an easy one. But before you pop-off on the poor journalist, do yourself a
Well, I wouldn't say _most_ of them. There is a lot of honest research, it just doesn't make headlines.
E.g., since you mention all the "OMFG! It's teh cure for cancer!" articles, in at least 90% of cases that's not what the researcher said. The researcher usually said something closer to "hmm, well, it might possibly help against some types of cancers, but we don't know that yet, more research is needed. And, oh, it only worked on mice not humans so far, so hold your horses." It was the media that blew it out of proportion.
This isn't to say that such flawed studies, or prejudice-motivated studies don't exist. They do. God knows the idea of trying to pack a prejudice or political agenda as only science is centuries-old, and PR dressed as pseudo-science is even more common. It's just that they get disproportionately more media attention than the honest research.
Remember, journalism _needs_ big headlines. It also needs "controversy". In fact, a lot of the fucked-up idea of journalistic impartiality is based on showing at least two conflicting points of view, as equals, and without telling the readers that one is a recognized scientist and one is a quack with a faked diploma... and not even in the right field. If they told you that, then it would be taking sides, thus no longer "impartial".
Another kind of research which the media loves is: PR disguised as research. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of "blue vs pink" research was that.
It goes sorta like this: let's say I had a company, Moraelin's Snake Oil Co. It does the normal advertising too, of course, but let's say I feel there's a need for an extra push to tell people to buy more snake oil. So I go to a PR agency. These guys are _good_ at faking journalism or faking research. So they write a bogus piece of pseudo-research that says "anti-cancer enzyme found in snake oil!" or "the formula for the perfect day to apply snake oil calculated!" (neatly timed to coincide with my product launch).
Now so far it would look almost comical, if it was my company that released it. So they'll find someone with a Prof or Dr title to sign it. Most will say "take a hike", but eventually they find someone, let's call him Prof Weasel, who essentially has nothing to lose. It's not like he had a respected name in the scientific community anyway. Sure, he'll take their thirty silvers and sign their paper.
And from there the PR agency carpet-bombs all newspapers and news agencies with it.
So Joe Average buys the newspaper and or sees it discussed on whatever site, and thinks it's genuine. Now my purposes there are served regardless of whether he actually believes every word there, or goes, "ha ha, these 'scientists' are all such arse clowns. Why's my tax money paying for this crap?" Even in the latter case, now he's also less likely to listen to the real scientists telling him that my snake oil is just that: snake oil. At the very least, the seed of doubt has been planted into his brain: maybe we don't understand snake oil after all, maybe if you asked 5 scientists you got 6 different answers, and maybe there's really no difference between the quack telling him to buy snake oil and the doctor telling him to buy clindamycin.
And either way, he's been reminded that snake oil exists, and at least one newspaper told him it even works, so essentially it was some disguised marketing.
And the newspapers sold some extra copies with that headline, so they're happy too. They're not going to wring the neck of the goose that lays golden eggs, by debunking it instead of running the headline.
*sigh* Perhaps the biggest damage that 20'th-21'st journalism has done is creating the false impression that all research is like that, and all researchers are a bunch of arse-clowns.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yup, that's one of the small gotchas.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The reported science and media coverage was bad. But not as bad as many more, present outlet included.
Having grunt writers cover science stories from press releases rather than having science editors or at least science trained journalists cover makes it worse to print the resulting bilge rather than just leave it out. Invariably the under-, mis- and non-trained end up writing to the formula that makes it look like ever result reported is a breakthrough that nobody's ever seen before, which is almost never the case. Almost all are just another step built on many previous that showed the same thing, just maybe not in this particular fashion.
I don't give a genus Rattus's posterior extremity reflecting lower frequency visible EM radiation how much science they actually know, they can well learn how to accurately report the science and where it fits into the history of relevant research.
If Alan Boyle ever leaves MSNBC, I hope he gets a post at a university training both science and journalism students how to report to the public accurately and without the bogus sensationalizing. I'll travel to where ever and sign up for his first class.
Maybe that kind of position would give you the time to finish your book, Alan.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Beige.
We didn't paint the kids rooms specific colors until they were ready to tell us what colors they wanted.
My daughter (as it turned out) decided she wanted pink. Picked a color that looked good on the swatch from the store.
Boy, did it look a lot pinker when the whole wall was covered with it.
That was the pinkest damn room.
Stick to beige, that's my advice.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it