The Daily Antics of a Hopeless Meanderer

Rampalian rampages

If there was one underlying concept that a rigorous, seven months shy of a Master's graduate degree in Epidemiology has shown me, is that I'm completely cynical of what popular news touts as "science". I just read an utterly ungrounded, unfounded, and absurd news article this morning about the social correlation of gender at birth and whether or not the mother lives with the father of the child. Goodness, there wasn't even statistical significance of p<.05 (49.9% to 51.1%).

Maybe through the compounded hours of poring over correlation coefficients, confidence intervals, and validity studies have made me slightly more judgmental than most. The overall point is that I think that media has a certain responsibility to report what is justified, and not just what "might be interesting" to the common Joe who spends 22 seconds scrolling through the MSN homepage. This aforementioned Joe will then spread this bit of news to his co-workers during their lunch break; one person will relay to another, and soon, this flimsy pseudo-science practically becomes gospel. Geez. I don't know how many times I've been told something that I know to be completely invalid, that even with heated discussion, the other person stands their ground on simple folklore or hearsay. Anyways, that's my rant for the day. Take it or leave it.

posted by Sheila @ 10/21/2004 09:28:00 AM