I get frustrated when I see an interesting article on the web that starts with “Scientists have discovered…” and followed by a surprising new ‘fact’, backed up with a write-up, some quotes but no more information on what the research is, by whom, and crucially what they had to say in their own words about what they found.
WOMEN use more brain power and take longer than men to understand jokes but derive more pleasure from a good punchline, according to scientists.
Experiments at Stanford University in California found that women use more parts of the brain than men to process jokes and have less expectation that they will find them funny.
(snip)
In one Stanford study, 10 women and 10 men were placed in an fMRI scanner and shown 70 black-and-white cartoons on a screen.
So – was the research just based on 20 people or is this just one experiment of many? Because surely generalising to all men and women based on a small set of people who happen to be able to get into an fMRI scanner in California can only go so far..?
The problem is – no links. I can’t find out the answer to that question.
So, here’s an idea. If you see an article like this and would like to know more, pop a link to linkscientists.com in the article’s comments box, or ping the author an email/tweet with the link.
The idea is simple – all it takes to give the reader more information is to link the word “scientists” somewhere in the story to a page/article/blog-post about the research the article is based on.
If you like the idea, please show your support by adding a comment on linkscientists.com!
I can’t promise the page linked to will make as much sense as this however:
Link “Scientists”
I get frustrated when I see an interesting article on the web that starts with “Scientists have discovered…” and followed by a surprising new ‘fact’, backed up with a write-up, some quotes but no more information on what the research is, by whom, and crucially what they had to say in their own words about what they found.
So I’ve come up with LinkScientists.com.
A case in point was an innocuous-enough Sunday Times article:
So – was the research just based on 20 people or is this just one experiment of many? Because surely generalising to all men and women based on a small set of people who happen to be able to get into an fMRI scanner in California can only go so far..?
The problem is – no links. I can’t find out the answer to that question.
So, here’s an idea. If you see an article like this and would like to know more, pop a link to linkscientists.com in the article’s comments box, or ping the author an email/tweet with the link.
The idea is simple – all it takes to give the reader more information is to link the word “scientists” somewhere in the story to a page/article/blog-post about the research the article is based on.
If you like the idea, please show your support by adding a comment on linkscientists.com!
I can’t promise the page linked to will make as much sense as this however: