From: Robert W. Schramm (schrammrus@hotmail.com)
Date: 08/25/02-06:24:08 PM Z
Katharine,
Have you ever got it right. I call it bad science and I have been
fighting it for 50 years. Unfortunatly our politicians and newspersons know
very little about science. So we get unnecessary laws which either don't
solve the problems or make it worse and a population cowed or frightened
into believing all sorts of things that are not true and for which there is
no evidence. Its fairly simple. what is the evidence and how was it
collected and by whom? What are the controls? How, exeactly, does this
evidence proove the hypothis? Are the "scientists" envolved qualified? I
could go on but the real problem is that our schools including the colleges
do a very poor job of educating students about science and how it works.
Bob Schramm
>From: Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>
>Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>Subject: Re: how 15 minutes of looking at your Weston book per day can make
>you live longer, healthier, happier!
>Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 15:08:12 +0000
>
>Shannon wrote:
> >
> In fact, I heard
> > > about
> > > a study that showed that if men look at women’s breasts for fifteen
>minutes a
> > > day, it prolongs their life as much as if they jogged for thirty
>minutes a
> > > day!
>
>and Judy wrote:
> >
> > And I heard about a study that showed that doctors who liked exercise
> > found that exercise helped heart attack victims, and those who didn't
> > found it didn't.
>
>
>I'd guess Shannon was trying to introduce some levity into the
>discussion by mentioning this study; at any rate we don't know enough
>about the study to dismiss it by suggesting that the researchers found
>what they wanted to find. If the research were properly designed and
>carried out, there would be no particular reason to question the
>results, but we don't know how the study was designed, so we can't say
>either that the results were probably biased, or that they were probably
>not biased.
>
>The study Judy mentions just shows what happens when you don't design a
>study properly. People, not just researchers but all people, tend to see
>evidence that corroborates their previously held beliefs and ignore
>evidence that disconfirms their previously held beliefs. That's why we
>have scientific methods, to keep us honest and circumvent our natural
>tendency to see what we want to see. Unfortunately there's a lot of bad
>research which is done without any regard for proper scientific methods
>and research design, but that's not the fault of science but of
>individual researchers who should know better.
>
>Katharine Thayer
Check out my web page at:
also look at:
http://www.wlsc.wvnet.edu/www/pubrel/photo.html
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