Alcohol deaths public health and fuzzy thinking
This article arguing (yet again) for the government to introduce minimum prices and other strict controls on alcohol consumption. As usual, it contains fallacies, fails to provide important information, and is generally rather vague.
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SETI@Home sacking and the death of local newspapers
Two newspapers and a local radio station cover the same story, and it looks like two different stories. At the very least, one account is so incomplete as to be misleading. (more…)
Efficient markets, bamboozled journalists and stupid regulators
The media seems to have reached a consensus that the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) has been discredited by the financial crises. I have been somewhat bemused by this, as I could not see the connection. (more…)
Media spin killling babies
I can be nice about a journalist for once, because Sarah Boseley at The Guardian has shot down the misinterpretation (once again, spin to back up government advice) of a study on the safety of allowing babies to sleep in their parents bed. (more…)
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Journalists eat spin on organic food
I assume that everyone who is interested knows by now that the headlines claiming that a Food Standards Agency study showed that “organic food was not healthier” were grossly inaccurate. I want to know why journalists did not even read the first paragraph of the report itself, let alone any real analysis of the report itself, before reproducing the Food Standard Agency’s spin. (more…)
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Wi-fi allergy hoax: do journalists ever check facts?
The recent stories about the man claiming to suffer from an “allergy” to wi-fi were not just, as I initially thought, someone with a psychosomatic problem; it was a publicity stunt that cleverly exploited journalists’ inability to check facts. (more…)
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LA Times false accusation of Facebook
Yet more examples of the wonderful fact checking that we can rely on journalists to do, the LA Times has a story that relies entirely on the authority of “someone’s blog said so”, accusing Facebook of using user’s photos in ads without permission. It was soon convincingly re-butted by Facebook. (more…)
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Google hatred
The usually intelligent Willem Buiter has written a great example of the irrational hatred that Google seems to sporadically evoke. He attacks them with a list of charges, all of which are easily refuted.
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Scary Pew Research
Many people have called the recent Pew Research Centre poll that “showed” that only 26% of Americans believed in evolution. What is really scary is that no-one seems to have looked closely enough at it to see that it showed nothing of the sort.
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Old news, but….
…just in case you missed it (I did till today).
The Guardian was fooled by an elaborate hoax into claiming that NASA conducted experiments on sex in space.
They believed the story because they got the claim from a “respected French scientific writer”, Pierre Kohler. Neither he nor Jon Henley (the Guardian journalist responsible) actually thought of doing some of the proper fact checking.
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