While not an official contributer to 'Of Two Minds,' Shelley's sidekick is an African Grey parrot named Pepper. His heros are Irene Pepperberg, Alex, and Rachel Carson. He spends his time learning Mandarin and writing the Great American novel.
Worst press release I've ever read
Category: Academia • Psychology
Posted on: June 25, 2008 2:50 PM, by Steve Higgins
This is seriously the worst press release I've ever read. It doesn't say how the research was done, it doesn't have the results from the research, it is poorly written (run on sentences?!), and it is pointless. Why was this even released? Does EurekAlerts even have any criteria for releasing press releases? I do know they have criteria for who counts as a journalist - and it certainly isn't bloggers (we can't get embargoed articles from them - but we can from PLOS)
Anyway... here's the release.
Brain & Behavior
Education & Careers
Comments
It looks like it's a translation, probably from a Spanish original. That explains the bad writing, but not the bad content.
Posted by: John McKay | June 25, 2008 3:25 PM
Yikes! I have to hope it's a language issue. As to why there is no apparent content - perhaps the translator wasn't up to the task on translating the actual data, and just deleted that part of the release? It's hard to imagine what else could be going on. . .
Posted by: bioephemera | June 25, 2008 4:22 PM
The Spanish version is somewhat less strangely written (it is obviously the original, written by a native speaker) but to my understanding the explanation is equally pointless or terribly confusing, no matter the language.
The main "finding" seems to be that endogenous attention can increase the effect caused by exogenous attention, even producing effects that endogenous attention would not produce by itself.
Whatever that means. Agh!
Posted by: Luis | June 25, 2008 5:46 PM
Hmmm, a release on different ways to manage attention. Maybe the writer's mind wandered a little while reading about data that "observed that endogenous attention can increase the effect caused by exogenous attention, even producing effects that endogenous attention would not produce by itself..." Yaaawwwnn...
Posted by: Dan | June 26, 2008 12:22 AM
I bet I've got a few in the archives that could beat that, but 50% of the problem is that it's been translated by a machine. As to Eurekalert's criteria, they vet press releases, but they're not paid to edit them for style or grammar. To be frank, Eurekalert is there to provide journalists with leads, they're not there for the general public, although obviously everyone does read them and syndicate and regurgitate them too...
Posted by: David Bradley | June 26, 2008 12:11 PM