The Year in Bad Science 2012
Jan. 16th, 2013 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feste_sylvain- U.S. State Science Standards Are ‘Mediocre to Awful’, according to a report by the Thomas Fordham Institute. (State-by-state reports and full report available on that page.)
- The U.K. proposes to cover Gaming Addiction under National Health, despite no consensus that it even exists. This is based off a misreading of conclusions of one study, despite the plethora of studies that show it isn't a thing.
- Ars Technica calls out the journal "Nature" for not requiring open-source software. The claim is that closed-source software impedes the reproducibility of scientific claims.
- Good Science Critiques Bad Science: the Journal of Psychiatric Research has published a critique of a 2009 article which claimed that abortion leads to subsequent mental health problems. The critique all but calls the original study "bullshit".
- Is it science? pre-review of "The Republican Brain" by Chris Mooney
- The state of Florida marks rights answers as 'wrong' because they don't believe that students would know they got it right.
- Starfire Water, the water with magnetically-infused information in it. o.O
- 8 Paranoid Sex Myths Debunked
- The NYT screams "food deserts!", large swaths where people have no access to fresh produce. Turns out they were wrong.
- Some bad pseudo-science and circular reasoning went into the DSM, the psychiatric bible.
- Zenify, the Stress-Free Drink, feeds your brain's alpha waves at 8-12 Hz, not the beta waves at 14 Hz like jittery caffeine and taurine do. Uh-huh.
- The Union of Concerned Scientists cooked the books, to a willing media reception.
- The Washington Times published an utterly bogus study ostensibly showing harm to children of lesbian parents.
- Gallup poll: 46 percent of the U.S. are creationists. And another 32% believe that humans evolved, but that God guided the process.
- The Eurocrats of the European Union launched a web-site: Science! It's a girl thing!, complete with lipstick graphics, pink-themed photos, and a teaser video of girls getting together to giggle and do no science. This all ignores all research which shows girls responding better to appeals with more gender-neutral imagery.
- In the "don't believe everything you read" department, a Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a whopping 172 papers over the past 19 years.
- The A.C.E. Christian fundamentalist curriculum is using the Loch Ness monster to disprove evolution. In their science class. Yes, really.
- State chemist Anne Dookhan not only faked her academic credentials, she faked chemical analyses of drug trail evidence for several years, including sprinkling cocaine over evidence samples to get the "right" test results. She would also take 25 samples, test 5, then declare all 25 positive for illegal drugs.
