Thursday, September 13, 2007

Lazy linking

A few posts and articles that I found interesting enough to link to.

Via Sara Speaking, I found “Do you understand where you are? over at Group News Blog.

Zuzu, over at Feminsite points to the news that the estranged husband of national evangelist Bynum, Thomas Weeks, has been charged with assault on Bynum. Weeks is a bishop, and shares an international ministry with Bynum. Must be that famous Christian love in action.

Over at Orcinus, there is a number of great posts up, but the one that really stands out, is David Neiwert's post Of Whales and Heritage - perhaps because the subject is so unusual, even for Orcinus?

Via Orac, I see that Prometheus' blog, A Photon in the Darkness, has moved. Orac also links to three great posts by Prometheus on "Myths and Legends of Autism".

Tangled Bank #88 is up at Behavioral Ecology Blog.

I am unsure on how I stand on GM food - on the one hand, I can see the utility of it, on the other hand, I must admit that I simply don't trust the testing in the US. However, it's not really a big issue for me, since I live inside the EU, which has some barriers towards GM food.
There have been at least one study in the past that shows that customers prefer GM food when facing the choice between GM food and unmodified food. This seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, but intuition has a tendency to be wrong.... or maybe not - Tim Lambert explains why that particular result might have been reached: Would you eat wormy sweet corn?
A 2003 paper in the British Food Journal by Powell et al described an experiment that found that, given a choice between genetically modified sweet corn and the regular kind, consumers preferred to buy the GM corn by a factor of 3 to 2. However, Stuart Laidlaw reported that the experiment was flawed -- there was a sign above the regular sweet corn saying "Would you eat wormy sweet corn?", while the corresponding sign over the GM corn said "Here's What Went into Producing Quality Sweet Corn". The experiment shows that consumers prefer GM corn to wormy corn, but they may well prefer regular corn to GM corn if they were both presented as worm free.

Seems like an perfect example of how now to conduct science.

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