Psychic meerkats and organic antioxidants
From the Independent, which used to be the sort of paper that knew better:
With a 100 per cent record up to this point – they predicted England would beat Fiji but lose to Wales – it seems that the meerkats might have some genuine psychic abilities.
Even if they do, that doesn’t explain why they care about rugby, or how they know which flags painted on pebbles correspond to which group of large men.
Yes, I get that it’s not supposed to be true. Simon Rice probably doesn’t believe the meerkats are psychic. He probably doesn’t expect his readers to believe the meerkats are psychic (and if they did, they would have been terribly disappointed). In the old days of paper newspapers though, you could distinguish stories that were supposed to be true from the ones that weren’t supposed to be true by a lot of positioning and formatting cues.
With the move from paper to digital, the presentation of news stories that are supposed to be true is getting more similar to the presentation of news stories that aren’t supposed to be true. That’s especially an issue for health science news: even when the reporter knows which stories are news and which are nutribollocks, it can be hard for the reader to tell.
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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 »