British readers will be proud to know that their tax money pays for breakthroughs like this:
Only half of teenagers back raising the education age to 18, compared with 71% of parents, a poll suggests.
Tomorrow: 71% of teenagers favor legalizing pot, 80% of parents oppose.
srv
I swear, by the time I die, adulthood will be anyone over 25.
I tell every kid I know to get a GED and get the hell out of high school. Somebody in our society has to be mature, because the adults chaining their kids down sure as hell aren’t.
demimondian
Hmm. Srv, I’ll bet you don’t have kids. Am I right?
Eural
Reminds me of a study from around 10 years ago where scientists spent several million dollars to study the impact of various smells on people. They concluded that the most offensive order was human feces.
As a friend at the time pointed out, they spent $2 million to prove that shit stinks. Now that’s science (and your government) at work!
demimondian
All yes, everybody’s favorite “God those social scientists are idiots” kind of thing. You might want to go look at the extensive literature on human olfaction.
Did you know that 10% of all humans are anosmic? That’s right, one human in ten has no sense of smell. Who cares, you ask? Did you know a significant subset of male adults find the odor of beta mercaptan pleasant, or, at least, not distasteful? Do you know that you care about that result? Do you know why?
Now, does it make sense why there might be safety consequences to searching for a universally disgusting scent? (Hint: think about how you tell that your house is filling with gas. See the reference to beta mercaptan, above.) Don’t you think that would be worth studying? Now, do you think a newspaper report on an experiment might just have left a few…details…out?
Punchy
Please link to this percentage, b/c I’ve known a LOT of people in my life, and not a single one had (OK, told me) they had this condition. By your stat, 3 students in a classroom of 30 would have this, yet I’ve never met anyone, anywhere, ever, in all my years.
This number seems too high by a factor of at least a 100.
grumpy realist
Yah, usually what we’ve got quoted is a tiny chunk of research that if you knew the whole mess it would actually be rather logical. Plus newpaper reporters go running around looking for “look how dumb scientists are checking out stuff we all know!” Well, sometimes it turns out that what we take as “common sense” isn’t, so it isn’t all that outlandish a topic for research after all.
On the other hand, there *is* what I call “silly research” but it’s usually because somebody has a piece of equipment/technique/data massaging algorithm and then runs round applying it to whatever problem is sexy at that point. Usually the only people who understand how silly the application is are other experts in the field.
And sometimes we put something together that even the scientist involved thinks is good only for budget proposal dog-and-pony shows and actually discovers it’s pretty useful. (We did that with our 3D rendering of images–turns out that biologists loved the ability to take a peek at the data from different “angles” because it allowed them to quickly identify interesting areas that they wanted rescanned at higher resolution.)
Leader Desslok
Further evidence that parenthood makes you stupid.
Actually, Altmeyer’s research on authoritarianism found that people’s authoritarian index (which is characterized by paranoid overreaction to events and efforts to control others which tend to backfire, as opposed to using reason to solve problems and accepting reality) went up when they become parents.
So yeah, I totally want to give parents the final say on everything. Because it’s not like they might be biased to respond in a particular way or anything.
Sigh… The Nanny State marches on.
Rome Again
Pink Floyd made an impact?
Buck
Which came first? Parenthood or stupidity?
Tlaloc
I know it’s easy to regard this kind of thing as trivial, of course kids don;t want to be forced in school longer- it’s commonm sense.
But “common sense” is a valid scientific argument. Common sense held that the earth was stationary, after all we don’t feel like the earth is moving. Common sense said that heavier than air flying machines were impossible. Common sense says that a meter is a meter is a meter and a second is a second is a second. Common sense has told us a lot of things that just aren’t true.
Hence in science you can’t rely on what is obvious, you have to prove, or more correctly fail to disprove a contention. Given the unbelievable success of the scientific method it’s worth the occasional dumb sounding study.
Tlaloc
But common sense ISN’T a valid scientific argument.
God damn, when will I learn to type? Or, better yet, proof read?
Andrew
I think the number is right, but that all of these people live in Gary, Indiana.
That place makes death smell like fresh laundry.
BIRDZILLA
DOPE IS FOR DOPES