Boxing clever
IN THIS post-truth era, Feedback is delighted to discover one company using trickery for the powers of good. 51¶ŻÂţ has often mused on the mystery of how bicycles stay upright (5 September 2015, p 32). Dutch cycle makers VanMoof found themselves wondering the same, after customers received bikes that had been damaged by boisterous handling during the delivery process. Then they devised a novel solution.
Realising that its boxes were about the same size as a very large television, the company started printing a picture of one of those on the side of each box instead of a bicycle – a move it claims has since cut .
Advertisement
“Jeff Dickens is intrigued by an email from travel company Booking.com that included the sage advice: “Plan ahead for the best trip yet. Minimise stress by completing your trip before you set off.”“
Bad blood
LAST year, journalist John Bohannon announced he had “fooled millions” with a bogus study on 16 people that claimed to show eating chocolate could help you lose weight. into the world, and picked up by such august journals as Bild, theDaily Star and “both the German and Indian site of The Huffington Post“.
Bohannon’s actions received far greater coverage as the story started to focus on whether performing a fictitious study to draw attention to lax journalistic practices was any more ethical than doing so to sell chocolate.
German authorities have now decided it is not – and sanctioned Gunter Frank, the doctor who took blood samples from people in the study, none of whom were aware they were participating in a bogus trial. Frank was fined €500 for failure to obtain full consent or arrange an ethics committee. A final bitter aftertaste in the chocolate chicanery?
Opinion maker
MORE fakery: to dodgy studies and bogus journals, we can now add a tool for generating fake peer reviews. Noting that “commercial publishers may find… excellent opportunities for profit, even in the form of journals with little or no scrutiny”, Alberto Bartoli and his colleagues have thrown a lit match into the tinderbox of predatory publishing with a software program that can produce plausible-looking reviews on demand.
In 25 per cent of cases, the machine-generated reviews were good enough to fool experienced readers into agreeing with them while rejecting a genuine review.
Feedback is left wondering if we can believe anything we read – even papers on how to publish fake scientific papers.
It’s clearing up
MEANWHILE, presidential candidate Donald Trump’s weak grasp of reality appears to be catching. During the recent televised debate, the Republican nominee denied ever claiming that global warming was a hoax.
Feedback readers will recall Trump has done just that on Twitter, on several occasions (). Rumours circulated that his team had quickly deleted the offending messages, a claim that itself turned out to be untrue.
, (Rumsfeld this time) “There are true untruths, and there are untrue untruths…”
Stone the crows
WHO will rid us of these troublesome untruths? Environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth has been accused of misleading the public about the dangers posed by fracking.
A flyer received by Reverend Michael Roberts last year implied that Grasmere in the Lake District was threatened by shale gas extraction. The retired geologist noted on his blog that “this scare story is so laughable as the rocks on surface are Ordovician Borrowdale volcanics” – so the rock beneath has no organic material to tap.
(ASA) has now agreed, adding that claims about poisoned water supplies and plunging house prices could also not be substantiated.
Flammable gas
MEANWHILE, the same body reversed anti-fracking flyer, which claimed that “experts agree – it won’t cut our energy bills”. Having originally sided with the complainant, Lord David Lipsey, the ASA rescinded the verdict on the basis of new evidence and found in favour of the environmental group. Has anyone calculated the carbon footprint of this war of words over fracking?
Banding together
the Journal of Acute Medicine has published a case report of man who arrived at the emergency department of Kuang Tien General Hospital in Taiwan with his badly swollen scrotum “incarcerated” in nine galvanised iron rings.
Unsuccessful attempts were made to remove the rings with lubricants, ring cutters, pliers and orthopaedic bone cutters, until finally the doctors borrowed a hydraulic bolt cutter from the nearby fire department, and freed the man from his predicament.
The authors note drily that such emergency challenges require “resourcefulness and a multidisciplinary approach”.
The milk-y way
. Hannah Hazlehurst discovers that Marmax Products, a company that sells recycled plastic furniture to schools, claims it has “saved enough plastic milk containers to do 2 orbits around the space station”.
Feedback certainly doesn’t remember seeing that bit of craftwork on Blue Peter – do Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos know about the impressive propulsion of these bottle rockets?
