The Times has put up a second article on the flooding in Brazil, accompanied on the second page of the report by the map seen here.....
.....too bad it's spelled "Rio de JanEIro, and not Rio de JanIEro.
Oops.
Greenwald has an excellent piece on Sonia Sotomayor (and as usual, rips Establishment media a new one for using anonymous sources in the process).
I know far, far less than he does about Sonia Sotomayor or about the relative fitness of judicial nominees for the job. I was far more qualified to talk about Sarah Palin and the attacks leveled at her for being an affirmative action hire, a pretty dumb chick whose appeal was solely prurient.
Rebecca Traister pointed out the obvious gender bias to the TNR piece in question, a bias that is only multiplied by her being of Puerto Rican descent, as Adam Serwer notes. She's bossy! She doesn't shut up! She's not that smart--Obama is prioritizing diversity! (The Clarence Thomas arguments, of course, are too obvious.)
When Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the Court, we heard similar arguments about her intellectual ability--and we didn't argue. When Sarah Palin got the Republican VP nomination, we giggled and made our own jokes. Now Obama's nominees will face the same kind of criticisms, ones that would never be leveled at a white guy up for the same job, and what do we say?
It's a double bind. We don't want to be unable to criticize female nominees or people of color (*cough cough* Gonzalez--or closer to home, Roland Burris) but we need to be consistent in noting the difference between substantive attacks and gender or racially motivated ones. It's entirely possible that Sonia Sotomayor is not the best choice for the Supreme Court, but I very much doubt that she's any less "smart" than Thomas, Alito, or any number of federal judges that the Right (or the nominal left as represented by TNR) would have no problem with--because they're white and male.
The fact is, when it comes to the Supreme Court, there are probably many lawyers and judges and law professors who would do as good or better jobs than the people already on there. There's no one best person for the job, and it's also fairly difficult to predict how justices will rule once confirmed (note that the retiring Souter was nominated by George H.W. Bush and became one of the reliable liberal members of the Court). So there's absolutely nothing wrong with picking a qualified justice who comes from a different ethnic and class background than the rest of the Court for the sake of diversity.
Having been in scientific research for almost a decade, it always appalls me to hear science reporters make sweeping generalizations and oversimplifications on television. While this is by no means confined to broadcast news, the most erroneous bits of science information do come from soundbites of so-called experts called upon to enlighten lay audiences about complex scientific topics, usually on the pretext of an equally poorly-reported study in a newspaper. Unfortunately most scientists aren’t listening to that news report and most laymen aren’t schooled to realize that it ranges from anywhere between mildly misleading to dangerously inaccurate. This article in today’s Washington Post, which distinguishes between evidence and opinion in scientific reporting, is illuminating.
The biggest problem in science reporting, as I see it, is that scientific studies rarely have enough evidence to make categorical conclusions. Journalism, on the other hand, is all about conclusions; journalists are trained to jump to conclusions long before all the relevant facts are available – think of all the speculation and analysis and hearsay and exit polls that gets widely reported in mainstream media as if it were indistinguishable from fact. "You are making news here," Chris Matthews often cries after doggedly challenging a political strategist to make a prediction about an election result that is months away.
While a political pundit’s word is as good as news in politics, no research will be published in the journal Nature because a Nobel prize-winning scientist “thinks” something might be true (notwithstanding the in-high-places-prejudice that exists in academic research).
As David Brown is attributed as saying in the Post piece, science reporters have to take excessive care not to make foregone conclusions. They should be able to give the reader sufficient facts and background on all the evidence that is available on a given subject, and follow up, as research progresses. A reporter should spend less time telling a reader what to conclude from a study and more time detailing the evidence available so that the latter may be allowed to make his own conclusions.
A good example of the really shoddy reporting that happens in science is a recent reportage of a study that found links between areas with higher rainfall and the prevalence of autism. All the study really concludes is that potential environmental factors linked to precipitation levels might, when combined with genetic and behavioral influences, cause an increased incidence of autism. As Ewen Callaway notes in the New Scientist, headlines in newspapers ranged from Heavy rainfall could be linked to autism to -- appallingly -- Autism: Blame it on the rain.
This is not to say that this problem with opinions overriding evidence is not existent in other areas. For better or for worse, it is more clearly visible in science reporting, I think, because science so steadfastly relies on hard data and factual evidence. Every result you ever report has to be tested, refuted, challenged, reproduced and proved beyond doubt to be true. “That could just be an artifact,” my professor would say in graduate school, after my fifth consistent reproduction of an experiment. Inspite of this ruthless insistence on accuracy (one that among many other things prompted me to quit science), nothing you read in a peer-reviewed science journal can be taken as the gospel truth (boy, do gospels have it easier).
For every successful experiment in science, there are usually a dozen failed attempts, about two-dozen repititions, and a hundred contradictory results published elsewhere. Then there are a whole slew of exceptions, conditions, factors, and biases that might have influenced the results.
So, while it might be sensational and eye-catching to report that rain causes autism, it is far from the truth. “Environmental factors related to precipitation might contribute to autism,” is less exciting but closer to the truth, and might prevent a potential mass exodus from Seattle.
My original point on the religion post that seems to have caused all this drama was that "trend" stories like the one Erik linked are terrible, shoddy, attention-grabbing journalism and are a huge part of why I think the field has gone downhill.
If you didn't know, Karthika and I are both working on our master's in journalism, and one of the first things they told us about accurately reporting on 'scientific' surveys like the one quoted in the article was that you have to report the questions asked and how they were worded, the sample size, how the participants were selected, etc.
This survey used a random sampling of 1000, and I'm going to assume that the people doing it had reason to believe that that was a large enough number to be able to generalize it to the American population at large.
But what the reporter did not do was list the questions asked. Instead, he repeatedly used the word "could," which leads me to believe that the question was something like "Do you believe that God could save a gravely ill or dying person?"
Which, of course, is a quite different statement than "Do you believe that God will save a gravely ill or dying person?"
A woman interviewed for the article, who was not a survey participant, made the same point that I did in my rather hasty first response post: "When you're a parent and you're standing over the body of your child who you think is dying ... you have to have that" belief, Loder said.
The survey also asked questions primarily about trauma and accidents, which are more shocking to people and allow them less time to prepare for the death of a loved one.
And as one of the doctors pointed out, it is quite rare that cases such as Terri Schaivo's actually happen.
If you read the article, you can also see a trauma nurse noting a certain "miraculous" cure that she saw herself.
In any case, "trend" stories, as journalist Caryl Rivers points out in Slick Spins and Fractured Facts (which I happen to be reading right now for my thesis) often rise out of one media outlet reporting one set of 'scientific' results which may or may not be repeatable. The headline on this story is far more sensationalistic than the actual article, which was more balanced (though as I've said, to report accurately on this survey the questions asked have to actually be included). But especially in the era of click-on-the-headline news, the heads have to draw you in.
Nevermind that for many of us, all we have time to do is skim the headlines.
So what would your answer be if you were asked this question?
"Do you believe that God has the power to save people who are beyond medical hope?"
Would it be a different answer than the answer to...
"If your loved one was lying in a hospital bed after being hit by a car, would you pray for a miracle?"
I lost a friend this year. She was 24 years old. She had a drug interaction that put her into a coma, and doctors were fairly sure she wasn't going to wake up. She had zero brain activity.
Her parents are Jehovah's Witnesses. Her husband is an atheist. The three of them agreed, however, to wait a day just in case, and to give themselves time to come to terms with what had happened to her before they unplugged life support.
It gave my sister and I time to go down to Baltimore and hold her hand one last time.
We slept in the hospital that night with a bunch of her friends who had been there since the accident. We didn't hold hands and have a prayer vigil over her body, but we were all there waiting for some miracle. Waiting for her to wake up and laugh at us, even though we knew deep down it wasn't going to happen.
I prayed that night. I don't normally. And I'll bet that most of us did, no matter what our level of belief might be.
They took her off life support. They didn't keep her on in the continued hope that if they prayed hard enough, God would save her. That's the kind of belief most people have, and it's hardly dangerous the way say, George W. Bush's belief is.
On another note, a couple of people have apologized for the way they spoke in the other threads. Let me be clear about two things: One. I am not 'hurt.' I was quite annoyed for a bit by the way people seemed to be talking to me as opposed to the way I saw them talking to Erik or to each other.
Two. Declarations that entire groups of people are 'stupid' have no place on this blog. (Unless McCain gets elected president, in which case you'll see me ranting about the stupidity of America for a while ;) ). You never know who you're offending. And there are plenty of "smart people" who are quite religious. This guy and this guy are some good examples. (I particularly encourage you to check out the first one. I don't share his religious views but I find his story fascinating).
