In my last post, I wrote about the #overlyhonestmethods discussion on Twitter and its insights into creative (and funny) ways that researchers deal with unexpected problems in their work. While I was following #overlyhonestmethods, I came across a mention of a creative-sounding study reviewing the research on whether specific foods can cause cancer. Since the media regularly covers cancer research – and often makes wrong or misleading reports about it – I found the text of the whole article to see what it had to say. When I saw that the article had the awesome title of Is Everything We Eat Associated With Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review, I knew I had to write something about it. (more…)
fact checking
“All About Work” Is Taking a Holiday Break
All About Work will be taking time off over the holidays – which I hope all its readers will be able to do as well. I’ll be posting again starting in mid-January.
I began this blog in March 2012, and the response has been extremely gratifying – more than 6,000 hits so far. I’m very appreciative of all the visits and all the reader comments – and I’m looking forward to continuing the interaction.
It’s been a busy year. (credit: my own photo)
To summarize the year’s activity at All About Work, here’s a list of the most popular posts from 2012.
- Imagine: How Did This Happen? (Special thanks to the kind folks at WordPress who selected this post to be featured on the Freshly Pressed page.)
- Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up
- One Year and Counting: Rocky Mountaineer Lockout Keeps Chugging Along
- Best Author Acknowledgement Ever
- Things that Make You Go…Wow
Thanks, everyone, for your support. See you in 2013!
Vancouver Province Story Has Similarities to Another Online Article
In the past few months a couple of high-profile incidents in the Canadian media have demonstrated the problems that result when newspaper articles don’t include acknowledgements of material from other sources. (Problems with source attributions have also recently drawn negative attention to writing in other kinds of media, as I’ve discussed here.)
Sadly, these kinds of problems don’t seem to be going away. In the December 11 edition of the Province, a daily newspaper in Vancouver, a story in the travel section has wording bearing a close resemblance to wording in this article on about.com. (more…)
Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up
As regular readers of this blog know, it bugs me when writers get things wrong or can’t be bothered to justify their facts. Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of references to the “10,000 hour rule” – the idea that you need to spend 10,000 hours on an activity to be successful at it. I knew that this idea was popularized by writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, but I didn’t know where he got the idea from or what it was based on.
So imagine my surprise when I Googled “10,000 hour rule” and found a letter by K. Anders Ericsson, the lead author of the study that Gladwell cites as “Exhibit A” in support of the “rule”. (ETA: The full text of the letter is no longer available online, but its contents are described here.) Not only does Ericsson say that Gladwell “invented” the 10,000 hour rule, but he also describes Gladwell as making a “provocative generalization to a magical number”. (more…)
Jonah Lehrer’s ‘Imagine’: How Did This Happen?
This past week, I had the opportunity to read Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine – the book that’s part of the controversy about plagiarism and fabrication in Lehrer’s writing. Imagine has been pulled by its publisher as a result of that controversy, so pointing out additional problems with it may now be somewhat redundant. (The copy I read came from my public library.) Nevertheless, after reading it, I want to outline the problems I found with the referencing in the book – an area which other commentators have also raised concerns about. (more…)
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