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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.
About 6 years ago, I was working in a virology lab, where one of the post-docs was doing some anthropological virology and investigating the possibility that one of the last extinctions was the result of a pandemic.
Discovery Channel did a 30-minute segment about this, which I decided not to participate in, and will be happy not to have done so till the end of my days. When I saw the final product a couple months later, I just sat with my mouth open for about 20 minutes... because I couldn't figure out whether I've been an idiot and couldn't figure out what my colleague was doing until I saw the segment, or the editors/journalists massacred the subject to the point that the research was rendered unrecognizable within the mounts of selectively quoted pseudo-science bullshit.