BBC1 attempts to do science - why do they bother.

[brixtonbrood]

I was watching the Richard Hammond (off of Top Gear) show "Should I Worry About Additives?" this evening while feeding the kids, and it perpetrated the worst excuse for a scientific experiment I have ever seen on television.
A class full of primary schoolers were seen listening quietly to their teacher reading a story. They then were given lunch consisting of Monster Munch, Fanta, and assorted sugary biscuits.
Without giving them a break for their normal lunchtime run about Richard Hammond then attempted to read them a story, with predictable consequences. QED right?
To be fair, he did point out that he was not a primary school teacher, and that this was not much of an experiment, but he _didn't_ point out that feeding a seven year old a packet of Iced Gems washed down with Fanta will put them on a glucose high regardless of any effect of the tartrazine etc.
It also didn't make any distinction between additives, which are listed on the label, and pesticide residues, which aren't.
It redeemed itself slightly by getting someone on at the end who distinguished between the actively bad effects of additives in processed food and the passive effects of food so over-processed that it is seriously deficient in major nutrients.
But still, grr, memo to self, do not watch BBC1 for anything except films and Doctor Who - it will only annoy you.

Comments

[sparkymark.livejournal.com]

The worst experiment I have seen was on regional news programme Northern Life where they were trying to shatter a few myths, in one case proving that the direction water flows down the plug hole is not fixed in the northern hemisphere. They did this by putting some mealy visibility-enhancing stuff in two full sinks and pulling the plug out of both, the implication being that if it is random, one would go down one way and the other the other.

They just ended up with two clogged up sinks, but regardless of that their grasp of what constituted independent probabilities appeared to be, from what I remember P. telling me many years ago, Skandialike.

Sink drainage direction

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

There is a northern-hemisphere/southern-hemisphere bias in the direction water flows down a sink, but to detect this you need to remove the chaotic elements that mask the effect. I vaguely remember reading that someone has done this -- making gigantic very very shallow sinks with some complicated way of draining them without creating ripples.

Re: Sink drainage direction

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Magnus Pyke, in Butter Side Up, goes on about this at length. I have no idea whether the size of basin he created could possibly be large enough to demonstrate this tiny effect.