Odd goings on in the Guardian

Rather than write the whole thing out again, here's what I posted on the Bad Science forum:

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First post. Sorry if I appear pedantic but the Guardian's grasp of basic science facts irritates me in the face of their positioning in the market as being the clever clever paper.

Thing is, the Guardian's health correspondent has had a confusing weekend struggling with what E. coli is. Bug, virus or bacteria.

He plumped for virus in the first iteration of the article on which he was the sole author. I posted a link on my blog which now connects to a different article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/1 ... urrey-farm

This now has two authors, one of whom is, bizarrely, an economics writer. The avoids all mention of viruses or bugs, just "E coli". Confusingly, the article history indicates only a single revision 27 minutes after the first posting which I think is strange given that I had time to read the original article, work myself up into a whirlwind of pedantry, draft my blog bit with a photo (finding one always takes five minutes or so) so it looks like I lucked into a small window there.

Thing is, I think that this was the original piece which has also been edited:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/1 ... urrey-farm

From a different author (Ben Quinn rather than David Batty) but the timing fits with when my blog was updated: http://methuselahmedstudent.blogspot.com/ and it has the requisite "vomiting bug" reference missing from the new piece.

So: either the bylines have been switched, or there has been some unreferenced changes, or I'm a huge idiot missing something (which is always possible). Perhaps I should have archived the original page but I"m not that anal (I didn't even italicise E. coli above, I'm sure you've noticed).

Cheers

Meths
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Science literacy in the media

The Guardian, the paper of the British undergraduate (and me when I lived there), likes consider itself somewhat a cut above other newspapers. It provides a platform to the excellent Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre (although his recent article on drug patents left a bit to be desired) which is to be applauded.

However, despite all this it still seems to favour the art graduate stepping sideways school of training health correspondents and because of this makes regular, irritating (to me) mistakes in the most basic facts of science stories. There was an article which conflated influence vaccines with therapeutics quite recently etc etc.

Here's a classic. As I clicked on the link, I knew what I would find:

- Story about an E. coli outbreak.
- Covered by David Batty, "Health Correspondent"
- He thinks it's a virus. He's clearly not sure, so starts off with the classic "bug" gambit at the start of the article to avoid committing.
- He even quotes a bacteriologist.

How long does it take to search Wikipedia? I suppose if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know you need to search.

Maybe I could be the Guardian's Australian chess correspondent. After all, I know shag all about that.

Exam time again

It's that time again: exam next week so little time to post.

Share and choose

Working in a small team can be tricky at times. One of the first issues to arise is task allocation. The most intuitive approach understood by most people was codified by Hywell Dda in the laws of Wales and is known to most people as the principle of "one to share, the other to choose".

If you have never come across this approach, it's a treat and is particularly useful if you have children. Here's the deal: the first party allocates the tasks into two groups (or cuts the cake into two bits...); the second party then choses which group of tasks they want to do (or which slice of cake they want: bigger, more smarties on top etc).

This splitting puts a natural fairness control into the process. If the first party splits the work unfairly, they get lumbered with the worst / most work.

If there are more than two parties, then the work is allocated between groups in a iterative process until individuals are choosing.

Bags of fun.