Skepticblog

In February of this year, there was another round of media sensationalism when it was reported that a number of popular brands of lipstick contain potentially dangerous levels of lead. This is not a new claim; it has popped up a number of times, including during the 1990s and again in 2007.

It is, of course, true that many lipsticks do contain lead. It’s an effective component of some color additives, and is used at levels that are well below safety margins. Most mainstream media reported this accurately, such as this article from the Washington Post, but gave a voice to self-described watchdog groups such as the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics who put out this report claiming that there is “no safe level of lead exposure” and mischaracterizing the lead content in lipstick as “contamination”. Some alternative media and chain emails even got the science more wrong than that, stating that the lead is a cancer risk. (The practical danger from lead poisoning is as a neurotoxin, not a carcinogen.) Snopes effectively debunked those reports. Continue reading…

Even before the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA)  in Minneapolis started on October 9, there was a huge buzz among my colleagues about this remarkable abstract that claimed evidence of a giant squid, or “Kraken”, that had arranged the bones of the whale-sized ichthyosaurs (marine reptiles shaped like dolphins) from Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada. There was a post on the October 10 page of Pharyngula.org, and also one on Brian Switek’s Laelaps blog, “The Giant Prehistoric Squid that Ate Common Sense”. The only things geologists and paleontologists could evaluate was a short abstract, but it made such a sensational claim that the press was buzzing and the story was all over the internet.

Image of the ichthyosaur bones, showing the "alignment" of the disk-shaped vertebral centra that are alleged evidence of cephalopods arranging the bones.

Based on the abstract and the GSA press release, the argument seemed to be absurd. The only positive evidence presented before the talk occurred was the claim that the bones were arranged in a pattern that resembled the alternating pattern of suckers on the arm of a giant squid. No actual physical evidence of the squid itself—no soft parts, no tentacle hooks, not even the hard “pen” that holds up the back of the animal, or its horny beak. The only “evidence” given in the press release was the alternating pattern of the vertebral centra (the large disk-shaped bones in the photograph). According to the author, this was evidence of a conscious effort on the part of a large cephalopod to “arrange” them that way! There was no mention of the possibility that any string of disks connected in the vertebral column would settle in that pattern once the tissues rotted and fell away from the backbone. No suggestion that the entire premise of the talk was just speculation based on a “pattern” of bone distribution, or “seeing patterns” where there are none, known as pareidolia (such as seeing the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, or reading “patterns” in tea leaves and clouds). PZ Myers of Pharyngula.org immediately got very suspicious, as did Brian Switek, and so everyone was itching to find out if there was more to this story than just a press release. Continue reading…

On Monday, my family and I attended the annual Fourth of July Parade in Sunland-Tujunga, California. We go nearly every year, and most years they have virtually the same lineup: lots of classic antique cars and hot rods and ATVs and  motorcycles, plus flatbed trailers and marchers from church groups, anti-abortion groups, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, and Girl Scouts, the local Lions, Kiwanis, and other social clubs, horses from the upscale Shadow Hills neighborhood (where movie stars with horses, like Patrick Swayze, lived), fire trucks (including a lot of antique fire trucks and ambulances that come from a company in Sun Valley that supplies them for movie shoots), minor movie stars, TV actors, and local officials—and a small portion of the local high school band (because they’re out of school and mostly out of town by mid-summer).

This is not your typical small town Fourth of July parade, because Sunland-Tujunga is not your typical small town. Once a foothill retreat from the city with lots of “mountain cabins”, it is one of the last Anglo enclaves in the City of Los Angeles. Long ago it was settled mostly by former hippies and bikers, so it is “redneck-NASCAR” heaven (mostly lower-middle class whites). Nearly all of the rest of the City of Los Angeles (and its school district) is largely Latino and African-American now. The parade is very casually organized, and almost anyone can march if they want to. Often, it drags on for more than an hour with large gaps between units, because there isn’t much control over the marchers (except for LAPD putting traffic barricades along the parade route). It is very different from the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day in nearby Pasadena, which is a highly professional, tightly run, multi-million-dollar enterprise with floats that cost more than most houses, and worldwide TV coverage. By contrast, the Sunland-Tujunga parade’s “floats” were mostly flatbed trucks with simple decorations, or old hay wagons pulled by tractors. There were a few changes from previous years: the parade was not led off by the LAPD motorcycle drill team (must be the budget cuts), but instead by a guy wearing a kilt and a cow-skull bike helmet ornamented with flags playing bagpipes on a unicycle. Then there was first for any parade I’ve seen: a float (actually a pickup truck) displaying the “oldest rock in Sunland-Tujunga”—although even from the sidewalk I could tell it was Mt. Lowe Granodiorite (220 m.y. old), not the actual oldest rocks in our local mountains, the Mendenhall Gneiss (1.7 billion years old)(check out the video link above—they actually did a very clever parody of geology, and the rock has its own Facebook page). There were very few local politicians (Congress is still back in D.C. fighting over the budget and the debt ceiling, so they can’t come home). And it was not nearly as political as in previous years, with only a few cars and people touting the local GOP club.

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It was just one of those silly “fluff” stories they put on CNN to fill up the hours between commercials and bits of real news. The anchors were reporting on a study that surveyed the most common CEO names. With straight faces, they reported that the most common men’s CEO names were short single-syllable, mostly  four-letter names like Jack, Fred, Bill, Peter, Bob, and Bruce. The most common women’s CEO names were Deborah, Debra, Sally, Cynthia, and Carolyn. Their tiny bit of “analysis” of this undigested factoid by an “onomastics specialist” (a scholar who specializes in  names) was that “shortened versions of given names are often used to denote a sense of friendliness and openness. Female CEOs, on the other hand, use their full name to project a more professional image.” And, like most other stories on Headline News, CNN, USA Today, and other media which consist of no more than a few sentences of information and some superficial comment or analysis, that was it. No further discussion about why those names tend to be most common among CEOs.

It was such a jaw-droppingly stupid piece of tabloid journalism that I was intrigued to look it up and see what was really behind the story. But the story on the Linked-In site is not much longer or detailed than the reporting on CNN. Many other media on the web picked up the same story and gave it the same superficial level of discussion. All the site did was a simple analysis of correlations between occupations and first names, based on their data set of Linked-In members of professionals who join the site for networking purposes (which skews the result right there—it’s not based on a random sample of names from census data or any large, rigorously collected data set). But is it true, as they imply, that the name that parents give their child somehow determines what kind of profession they might enter? Does a decision  most parents make before we are born lock us into certain types of jobs? Are we fated, like the boy named Sue in the Johnny Cash song, to follow a certain path because a parental choices?

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This Sunday before game-time you might want to set your Tivos to record Dateline. This week, supposedly, Matt Lauer interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield and several other affiliates of the Thoughtful House Center for Children, along with Dr. Paul Offit and journalist Brian Deer.

The Thoughtful House agreed to the interviews because they figured they would get fair treatment from the likes of Matt. I’m interested to see what kind of a program NBC has put together on this very sensitive subject.

Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.

Please, Matt… don’t go Jenny McCarthy on us. Don’t do the usual journalistic job of being “fair-and-balanced”. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. This is science. Do tell the world what the science supports.

With a newly elected reality-based President in the White House, I was optimistic that our descend into an  age of “endarkenment” would be slowed down and halted. This optimistic outlook was further reinforced by last June 8 issue of Newsweek magazine.  The cover story took the very popular daytime TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey to task for promoting New Age stuff and “alternative” medicine for the masses uncritically.
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I didn’t go to TAM this year. In fact, I’ve never been. Not that I didn’t want to attend, but I’ve recently made it a rule to only attend conferences where I have been invited to speak. Makes it much easier on my pocketbook, and I don’t end up regretting my decisions to not attend any of the bazillion conferences I could attend each year. But, why do I bring this up… the conference?

Conferences are a brilliant way to bring people together in order to foster communication. Certainly, if you are attending a conference, you are most likely interested in the topics to be covered. But, there is always the session that you didn’t expect to be interesting that turns out to be thought-provoking. Not to mention the mixers where you most certainly bump into people of all types, and have conversations you could never expect. The environment (or, it might be the alcohol) pushes people out of their shells, making them more social than normal, more interested than normal, and allowing maximum information transfer to take place.

How can the conference vibe be transferred elsewhere? How can we get people out of their mental caves and interested in communication… or, even learning, dare I say it?

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It is amazing. With each new media snowstorm comes a new conspiracy theory.

From the Huffington Post:

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Eric Alterman from The Daily Beast has an interesting analysis of President Obama’s recent press conference. His take on the coverage of the event was that the press are troubled by Obama’s long-term thinking, which doesn’t mesh well with their short-term news cycles.

CNN wants emotions, theatrics, the stamping of feet, mano-a-mano anger, and outrage contests. This is a presidency defined by cable news food-fights and Maureen Dowd-style armchair psychoanalysis. Obama wants to “know what he’s talking about,” pick the best policy to achieve it, and explain it as calmly as he can to his country.

I’m curious to see how the contest turns out. Will Obama give in to the pressures of the press to deliver a sound-bite or some kind of emotional outburst that will keep the pundits busy for weeks? Or, will he continue on his tack of cool-headed, clear explanations that deal more with long-term planning than instant gratification? Continue reading…

Why is it that crackpots get so much air time? Is it because they yell louder than anyone else?

While that is probably true (non-crackpots see the world logically, and don’t understand how it could be any other way. Hence, no yelling.), the factor driving the publicity engine is controversy. The media loves controversy because it is usually fueled by emotion, and emotion gets peoples’ attention. Continue reading…