Now on ScienceBlogs: On Scientific Embargoes: What Exactly Would Journalists Investigate? [Mike the Mad Biologist]
Two neuroscience bloggers team up for one chimeric blog, and world domination of course.
Shelley Batts is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. She studies hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, and is trying to finish that quixotic quest called 'thesis.' She lies awake at night pondering how science intersects with politics, culture, policy, money, medicine, and religion in an attempt to be more than just a niche scientist sitting in the oh-so-lovely ivory tower. Follow me and my parrot, Pepper, on our quest to finish my PhD, land a post-doc, and stay sane.
The Omnibrain is a psychology graduate student at an online university. He hopes that the three weeks and $29.95 that he is spending on his Ph.D. will get him a job at a Tier 1 research university. Do online universities have postdocs? Ok...just kidding, he is really a Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology studying high level vision. You know... stuff like scene & object perception.
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.
"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life." ~Rachel Carson
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Category: Academia • Psychology
Posted on: June 25, 2008 2:50 PM, by The Omnibrain
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.
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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