In the journal-to-journalism cycle, the details of a study can get distorted on their way to the web. Here are three different takes on a recent article published by Canadian researchers. The study had apparently investigated links between spanking and child outcomes. Notice that the headlines in each study make different claims and focus on …
Continue reading Three different takes on a single journal article
Here is a link to a short video featuring Dr. Michael Gazzaniga discussing his experiences as a scientist. His work on split brain patients is described in Chapter 12.
This story reports that pregnant women are less likely to go into spontaneous labor on a negatively toned holiday (Halloween). Similarly, they are more likely to do so on a positively toned holiday (Valentine's Day). Here's a quote from the New York Times story: In a study published this month, however, researchers at the Yale …
Journalists have been covering a recent empirical article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study in question is a quasi-experiment; it tracked the testosterone levels of a probability sample of men in the Philippines. The main result was that compared to men of the same age who'd never had children, …
A recent study used Twitter text to track people's moods throughout the day. Here's how the study was covered by wired.com. The journalist explained that: Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a text analysis program that quantifies the emotional content of statements, Golder and co-author Michael Macy analyzed a total of 509 million tweets generated …
Here's Ben Goldacre in a 20-minute TED video talking about his favorite topic, Bad Science. He addresses the journal-to-journalism cycle, the flaws of authority, the placebo effect, industry-sponsored trials, publication bias, correlation/causation, ethics, and more. The overall message is the importance of publishing all data--both for and against a drug, therapy, or intervention. Ben Goldacre …
Sometimes journalists or politicians call out research projects that they consider to be a waste of money, such as a line of research in biology and ecology in which shrimp ran on a treadmill. This news story from National Public Radio covers some examples of research whose measures or instruments have been criticized as silly, …
Continue reading Shrimp on a treadmill? What’s research really about?
When asked about global warming, one of the U.S. presidential candidates in the Republican field was quoted last month as saying: "I don't think from my perspective that I want to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven and from my perspective is more and …
Continue reading On the political trail: Can we say a theory “hasn’t been proven”?