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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.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
A slashbot article on misrepresentation. The ironing is delicious.
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.
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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.
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...
Blue! No, pink [SPROING] Aarrgghh!!
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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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
"Red" and "beautiful" translate to the same word in Russian. Hence "red square". I would imagine then that red is pretty popular there, too.
In anthropological etymology, it's common for the first two words for color in a language to represent warmer colors (reddish) and cooler colors (bluish or greenish, although which one of these comes first is split somewhat). They often appear just after the words for shades of light (light/dark). As a language evolves to have more vocabulary, it's typical that finer distinctions are made among colors and more words are added to represent them. Some languages today still share a name for blue and green, while others have two names for two different sections of blues.
There are also psycho-linguistic differences as well. Russians can visually discriminate lighter blues from darker ones more quickly if they happen to fall across the divide for those two categories that is provided by their language. English speakers, having a word for blue and words for many shades of blue, but no distinct separate single-word categories for lighter blue vs. darker blue, were used as a control group. Another such experiment is between Tarahumara and English.
It's possible the color words which are perceived differently by a particular race or which made the most difference to survival (think poisonous plants and animals vs. food sources) for people at the time and place of the language's early development lead to different color words coming about in different orders. It's being studied now whether the words and the groupings the words represent themselves limit and enhance color perception ability.
Heck, in the book of Revelations in the Bible, Death rides a green horse in the original Greek. It's a black horse in most English translations. Why? Well, the "black death" plague and black being a symbol of death mean that's fitting symbolism in modern English. At the time, though, there wasn't embalming, and as this list of Bible translation corrections says, green's the color a dead body turns, just like any rotting meat. The symbolism is completely different, though, when green from the leaves of plants is considered the color of life.
So there's a lot more to thoughts about color than gender. People's eyesight is involved, the colors in nature in different parts of the world, the language those people speak, the literature and symbols they know, and personal preference all figure in. Even if gender does play a role (other than through a societal reenforcement of perceived norms), it must be in conjunction with all of these other influences.
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
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.
That's funny... my Russian textbooks say it's true. Well, technically the words themselves are different but they are derived from the same root "kras-" What "evidence" do *you* have to the contrary? Oh nevermind... let me just embarrass you.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
You have the wrong horse. The "green" horse is described by the greek word "chloros." Theyer's Lexicon defines it as 1) green, 2) pale yellow. By my brief review on biblegateway, most English translations, especially the most common ones, NIV and NKJV, translate it as "pale," following the KJV, which followed the latin vulgate, which did likewise. "Pale green" is a close second, and "ashen" a close third. So if "chloros" was translated to "pale" in the 382 AD vulgate, which was a revision of multiple older latin translations, I think it's safe to assume that the earliest readers made the same inference from the context, rather than picturing a bright green horse.
The one who rode the black horse, who came before, wasn't Death, but the horseman who held the balances. The greek for his horse's color is "melas" which means black or black ink.
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
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!
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....
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'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.
The problem is not that they decided to do the research. The problem is the utter bullshit way they did it and the absolute bollocks they concluded.
What they said was was girls are genetically predisposed to like red, and boys are genetically predisposed to like blue. Now there is a problem with this because of one small fact. Their study does not show that at all! The British and Chinese group showed different results, and they were the only 2 cultures they tested, that doesn't eliminate cultural bias at all, and the results showed there was cultural differences, but they just ignored that.
Second they then went on to say it was an evolutionary trait because cave women pick berries and cavemen went hunting. WTF???!?! A) There is no evidence whatsoever supporting that idea of primitive gender roles, someone just made it up. B) They measured preference, not ability to recognise the colour, plus, most berries aren't red, and what's more many poisonous red berries are poisonous, plus berries are tiny, other fruits are much better. C) they just pulled that straight out of their arses.
No one said they are bigots or Nazis, they said they are chumps, complete and utter chumps, who wasted their time on a dumb subject, and fucked it up anyway, then talked utter shit about their own fucked up, incorrect results.
Fact is evolutionary psychology is not science, and all the people who eat it up like it is are chumps, utter chumps. The basic structure of every evolutionary psychology study I've ever seen is this:
1. Gather statistics on some human behaviour.
2. Draw conclusion that confirms what most people expect.
3. Pull from your ass some supposed beneficial behaviour based on stereotypical 'caveman' society, with an evidence whatsoever, and claim this is the purpose of said human behaviour.
4. Call your self a scientist, and watch the journalists lap it up like a bunch of chumps.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Ok, you're falling into the same problem that the author was complaining about in that you're attributing to biology that which is generally cultural. The reason for the ordering of colors is likely not from biological or evolutionary constraints.
Having words for light/dark (intensity) is the first and foremost necessary, as it distinguishes linguistically the difference detected by rods in the eye. Even with the rainbow of colors, we still distinguish between them internally with lighter tints, and darker shades.
Following that is red, then blue/green (as one word) then following less reliably a progression of colors. When the list typically hits blue/green again, that is when the old word is concreted to one, and the newer word is given to the other.
This does not mean that we can visually distinguish these colors better than other colors. In fact, we know by empirical biological evidence that humans can actually distinguish the variations of green the best of all shades.
What has happened here is that a language by assimilating, aquiring or generating a new word for a color or concept is now able to linguistically distinguish color or concept. While we read the rainbow as: Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Violet, Russians read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Cyan-Blue-Violet, and the Japanese natively read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green/Blue-Violet does not mean that one is able to distinguish the difference in the colors, but rather than mentally categorizing it allows that color to be compressed as information in a category, rather than remembered for the complexity of the color it really is.
There have been tests looking for tetrachromats, people with 4 types of cones (essentially, a normal set of cones, and a color-blind set of cones) which can typically only occur in women (as the genes controling this are sex-linked onto the X gene. Yes there are males with more than one X chromosome, but of the 1:500/1000 births that rarity is, along with having only one X chromosome with color-blindness, and the mosaic property occuring in their eye... it's a vanishing small number.) Testing this, they asked women to pair colors together that match, notably giving a number of options that could only be distinguished if visually recognized by a tetrachromat. They found a few, however, the tetrachromats can't tell you why the colors don't match, because there exist no words to express the difference, despite their ability to recognize the mismatch.
It's not that Russian speakers can visually recognize more types of blue than English speakers, it's that they have an easier time categorizing the difference.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Ahh, now that's a horse of a different color!
"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?
That would be par for the course.
This being Slashdot and all.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Well said.
It's been a long time.
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
You guys are all doing computer science, but I was thinking math too. So, let e>0: (3-e)+(3-e)=6-2*e now take the limit as e goes to 0. Course, the right left side terms become 3, but now let's turn to the magic of floats and doubles (C++, which I'm pleased to see you guys using too. If you're a geek, you know what I mean. And since you guys replied, clearly geeks.) for(double i=1;i>0;i/=10) printf("%f\n",i); Through out the loop, i>0, yet the result is 6. (Didn't check if it compiled. hope hope) Just a thought experiment, really. I'm typing this from my parents basement. :-(
That's funny... my Russian textbooks say it's true. Well, technically the words themselves are different but they are derived from the same root "kras-"
It's not true for some hundred years already. Are your textbooks that old?
Today "krasny" has only one meaning - "red", no beauty involved, period.
Though when reading an ancient text and encountering "krasna devica" (literally "red damsel"), a modern Russian can get the meaning, but more because this phrase is an idiom used widely in the Russian fairy tales than because he understands "krasny" == "beautiful".
Wikipedia: Red Square, Origin and Name, which says it means both "red" and "beautiful" although the latter is an archaic meaning of the word.
says specifically that "krasny" has lost the meaning "beautiful" over time and the meanign has been applied to red only
Diary of a Russian Wife: Colors in Russian
Moscow Life states the word means "beautiful" in Old Russian and only took on the exclusive meaning "red" in modern times.
The synopsis for the book "Red in Russian Art" tells us that in earlier Russian, the two words carry the same meaning, and that red is still understood to symbolize beauty.
NY Times travel section
This page states that recently as the fifteenth century "red" and "beautiful" were always both exactly the same word. It has its own list of references, too.
This Russian site states specifically:
Hotel-Rates.com page for Maxima Irbis hotel in Moscow
This sites for a bell foundry in Russia states "Krasny" means "red", and "red" means "beautiful".
Photo tour of Moscow, in which the phrase "Red Square (meaning beautiful square in Russian)" is written.
Another tourist of Moscow reports, "Our first stop is St Basil's Cathedral at the end of Red Square. In Russian, it is Krasne square meaning red or beautiful."
Russian traditional costume seller says, "The word "krasnoye" meaning "red" became identified in the people's minds with "prekrasno-ye" meaning "beautiful". Moscow's most beautiful central square is called "Krasnaya Ploshchad" (Red Square)."
talks about the modern link that still exists between "red" and "beauty"
Eduard Shevardnadze relays to the US State Department Chief of Protocol that krasny can mean "beautiful" as well as "red" -- in 1987.
Russia