December 31, 2012
Briefly
- Merriam-Webster gives their most-searched words of 2012. At the top, “capitalism” and “socialism”, especially during the US election and the health insurance debates. As Fred Clark points out, this means a depressingly large number of Americans were constructing political arguments of the form “According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, X is defined as …”
- FakeAPStyleBook on Twitter advises journalists: “When quoting from a news release, pick the most nonsensical sentences to let people know what it’s like to have to read those things.”
- Almost 75% of Kiwis oppose testing ‘legal highs’ on animals. It would be interesting to know the figure among those who think these drugs should be legal and regulated. If you think they should be comprehensively banned or, at the other extreme, just left alone, then presumably you would be against requiring animal tests.
- In the same Herald survey, 29% were against animal testing for any purpose whatsoever. That’s a slightly higher level of opposition to modern medicine than I would have expected.
- Stuff had a good story about celebrity bad science, from the UK charity Sense About Science
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »