"A recent study has shown...?

I was listening to the radio in bed last night and the topic was about 'Studies' and 'Surveys' and how when a list of figures are presented along with a load of giggley goop some of the us ordinary people take it as gospel. One week someone with impressive initials after his name will come out complete with his 'Paper', on say, chocolate. He will say eating chocolate is good for you as a recent 'Study' has shown..blaa blaa blaa. The next week you read in your paper that some other egghead has just put out his findings and he says eating chocolate it definitely bad for for you. This kind of thing is happening all the time on a variety of products with the result that people are totally confused about what they should eat and what they should avoid, they are being misled all the time just because someone in the scientific community wants to make a name for himself, that really annoys me. Personally I pay no attention to what these gobshites come up with but unfortunately there are those who do.

Wouldn't it be better if we got back to doing 'Studies' and 'Surveys' the more basic way, for example If you wanted to find out if monkeys liked music, take twelve of them into a room with a record player, turn it on and the ones who got up and danced were the musical minded monkeys, eight danced, four just sat there, study result = 2 thirds of monkeys like music, simple, doesn't cost much and there is no long drawn out hogwash to bamboozle the man in the street.

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Recent studies have confirmed that "A little bit of what you fancy does you good" Of course Miss Marie Lloyd knew that over a hundred years ago & even wrote a song about it. Today,it is thought that surveys quoting statistics are over 75% fabricated or merely guesstamits.. Who was it wrote the apocryphal soundbite "Lies, Damn lies & Statistics.


I was going to post more on this topic but I fear over 75%of you won't beleve me.

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With surveys, studies and research it is said that it is important to appreciate that what is left out is as important as what is put in.

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Couldn't agree more - everything in moderation, you can't go wrong then.

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I'm like you Jem, I don't believe a thing those "studies" come out with.

Hell, back in the 50s there was an American advertisement program running stating how more doctors smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes than any other brand which inadvertently stated that they couldn't be bad for you in that case.

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Ah, so this is how it's usually done. I found this and thought it was interesting, it's not that long.


Study Shows Studies Show Nothing
by NICK HUBBLE on 24 OCTOBER 2012
If you’ve ever wondered how a study can show something that just can’t be true, or how studies can completely contradict each other, we’ve figured it out. With a little help of course. After today’s Daily Reckoning, I hope you never believe another ‘study’.
Our heartfelt congratulations go out to Mathgen. A mathematics journal provisionally accepted its paper for publication.
Wait, ‘its’ study?

Yes, that’s right. These days a computer program can write an academic paper about mathematics. Then get published in academic journals like ‘Advances in Pure Mathematics’. And you thought those computer programs dominating the stock market were smart!
No longer are your sons and daughters safe from having to compete with machines in the academic world. That’s another ‘safe’ career choice gone. So what was the paper Mathgen wrote about? Here’s the abstract, which describes it:

‘Let ρ = A. Is it possible to extend isomorphisms? We show that D’ is stochastically orthogonal and trivially affine. In [10], the main result was the construction of p-Cardano, compactly Erdös, Weyl functions. This could shed important light on a conjecture of Conway-d’Alembert.’

If you’re confused, that’s sort of the idea.
Only a mathematics academic could decipher that abstract, because it’s completely meaningless. You see, Mathgen creates papers by combining random nouns, verbs, numbers, symbols and the rest of it.
It spits out something that makes grammatical sense, not that you’d know it, but is completely devoid of any meaning. The formatting is said to be nice, though.
Once the paper is randomly generated and submitted for the academic journal’s review, the academics safeguarding the gates of science and knowledge read the paper and figure it must mean something.
That’s how the paper gets past the peer review process. The same process that keeps climate change science squeaky clean, by the way. Here’s what the anonymous peer reviewer wrote about Mathgen’s bizarre creation:

For the abstract, I consider that the author can’t introduce the main idea and work of this topic specifically.

Maybe that’s because there is no main idea. No ideas at all, in fact.
Anyway, once the academics of the peer review process give the paper a once over and decide it’s fine to publish in their illustrious journal, the valuable and useful knowledge in the paper is disseminated around the academic world. That will probably never happen to Mathgen’s paper because the joke was exposed before the journal was finalised.
If all this makes you chuckle and shrug, consider that it’s the norm in academic publishing. A similar computer program managed to get an article about postmodernism published in a Duke University journal. And even when people run coherent scientific experiments (with real people) the results have a habit of being suspect too.
Many studies can’t seem to be replicated these days. Meaning, if you ran exactly the same experiment, you wouldn’t get results that confirm the study’s findings. According to one science journalist, 47 of the top 53 most important cancer studies can’t be replicated. They might be completely wrong, and yet we base modern research on the assumption they are right.
To be clear for any sceptics, the Mathgen paper is a true ‘gotcha’ moment. It wasn’t about the fact that a paper can be written by a clever computer program. It wasn’t about anything. It was complete gibberish. But it did show the fact that academic journals are…academic. Let’s hope nobody reads them.
Unfortunately, finance and economics journals actually do get mentioned in the real world. In fact, their conclusions often determine public policy. Politicians hurl studies at each other proving their opinion.
Luckily for economists, it’s very difficult to disprove an economics study. You never know the ‘counterfactual’ — what would have happened. But if maths and science are corrupted, you’d think economics is corrupted twice over.
So the next time you read ‘a study has shown,’ you can disregard the end of the sentence.

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I stopped reading after getting to "Nick Hubble"...

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I wonder is he any relation to the space telescope?
Any way he's just telling us that it's all a load of "Testicology".

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And the study says there is a 93.5% chance he is.

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There was another 'Study' on the 6oc news saying overweight folks now live longer than normal weight folks, woeful ain't it, when I think of all the beer I could have drank when it was cheap.