Badscience.net

[garote]

Badscience.net is especially good recently.

Ten Pieces Of Advice For Old Media is a list of suggestions - well, more like a series of brusque demands - for conventional paper, book, and journal publishers who are trying to establish an internet presence. All the suggestions are spot-on, but my personal favorite is number 7: DON'T FORCE ME TO REGISTER. The instant I see that login box, I am closing the window. There goes your ad revenue.

Here's a post trash-talking the conclusions drawn from a color preference study. Basically, it all comes down to journalists who just can't resist the temptation to sensationalize scientific data in order to excite their readership. I see it as a special case of what I have just now decided to call my Theory Of Post Popularity, which states that the most effective way to garner feedback and responses to your forum, blog post, news article, or television show, is to post something that scores as high as possible on three benchmarks:

1. Inflammatory
2. Hilarious
3. Clearly WRONG

(There is probably a place for a fourth benchmark: 4. Erotic . This is evinced by the thousands of YouTube clips with endless comments beneath them like "shes dumb but id totally do her"... But posting erotic content is a much more overt tactic than these other three.)

The articles discussed in the Badscience post about color preference score pretty well on all three benchmacks, but their scores are nothing compared to the study discussed here, where a couple of racist twits from Italy claim that there is a behavioral relationship between individuals with Down's Syndrome and Oriental people.

... Inflammatory, hilarious, and clearly wrong. Bingo: Attention. Well, hilarious in a kind of Three Stooges poke-in-the-eyes way, at least. And I thought racism was ugly in America -- these are Italian scientists? The text of the published study itself is absolutely astounding. (Note that if you choose the second provider in the list, you'll also discover the email addresses of the two lunkheads who wrote it. Feel free to email them LOLcats macros.)

Oh, if you're interested in taking that quaint "Bem Sex Role Inventory" test mentioned in the color preference discussion, I threw together a self-scoring Javascript version. So far, everyone I know has scored right around 60 - 60 - 60 ... Except The La got about 15% higher in the 'feminine' points than I did. I guess that shows who wears the pink around here, huh. Or the blue. Or whatever.

Comments

[sherrila.livejournal.com]

that's right!