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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 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.
Because everyone here drives on the left there must be a genetic predisposition.
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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.
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
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.
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It does not matter what is said just so long as it was said well.
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.
There are a couple interested parties:
1. Those who for various religious and political reasons look for essential gender differences, to justify very stable, often traditional gender roles.
2. Businesses who produce goods that are marketed to gender-based expectation, and who dislike it when their markets diverge too far from the behavior that is expected of them.
Using "An Inconvenient Truth" as a basis for chastising the media coverage of Global Warming (or cooling, or climate change, or whatever it's being called today) when the very study they used was already 4 years out of date and was based on a survey of reports that are now up to 15 years old (the search was done on papers covering from 1993 to 2003) and done at a time when climate studies were really just starting to get real funding does not give you a very stable ground from which to throw stones.
The fact is that after the exact same search parameters were used on more recent data (examining papers published between 2004 to present) only 7% outright endorsed the Global Warming hypothesis, 38% accepted it without explicit endorsement, 6% rejected it and the rest were neutral. (link)
Even more interesting is that of all the papers published only one predicted catastrophic outcomes due to climate change. That's 1 out of over 500 published papers.
So perhaps in this case the media you've been watching/reading (which from what I've seen are almost too happy to report that all weather related catastrophes as being caused by man-made global warming) are actually closer to the truth than you'd care to admit.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
In this essay, Crichton writes: Though this is a rather cynical interpretation of mainstream media, I've found the same thing. On any subject I consider myself knowledgeable, I have found mainstream media's reporting to be very lacking. As a result, I've given up trying to get useful information from those sources. Unfortunately, if you want to gain even a superficial understanding of a subject, you have to do some basic independent research, reading from different sources, engaging an expert in conversation, and so on.
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.
"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?
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