Interesting news

[akashiver]

I think this is "Questionable Data Day" in science news.

First, via gollum: we learn that the doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research.

Thanks a lot, bud.

And here's a new study: Time Watching TV in Adolescence Linked to Depression in Future. This sounds like an interesting result, until you read that their big finding is that "while about 6 percent of those who watched under three hours a day were depressed, more than 17 percent of those who watched more than nine hours a day had depressive symptoms.

9 hours a day????!!! In the school year????

Who has that kind of time, and what the hell is wrong with their lives? Answer that question, and you may well find out why they're depressed years later.

And here we learn that Education is all in Your Mind. I was interested in the first few reports, but by the time I got to the end of the article I was all skeptical again. Sure, positive thinking and expectations are important, but I didn't see a control group referred to in these results. There's a lot of "post hoc" thinking going on here.

Comments

[drydem.livejournal.com]

my thought on the TV study is symptom not cause. If you're feeling depressed, would you rather go out and find something to do or just sit there and have the TV feed you stuff? It's more about early warning signs, not a case of TV making you magically depressed.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

That's what I'd think. The study, though, insists that at the time the data was recorded none of the participant displayed "depressive symptoms" or reported feeling depressed. Like you, I'd count 9 hrs of tv / day one hell of a depressive symptom, so I don't know what measures they were using.

I guess one thing that's interesting about the study is that they also included video games, and only found the 9 hrs = later depression result for TV. I wonder if that's because video games are a less passive form of entertainment, or whether its an issue of economic class (the kids are watching TV because they don't have video games). I dunno.