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Junk Science: Twenty-first Century Snake Oil |
| Section: NATURAL SCIENCE / SCIENCE AND SOCIETY |
| Author: Nancy Salvato |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/2006 |
| Size: 2,168 Words, 14,770 Characters |
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In the movie My Cousin Vinnie, an expert witness almost convinces the court that the car which Vinnie's nephew Billy Gambini had been driving implicates him at the crime scene. Then Mona Lisa takes the stand (http://www.wavsite.com/sounds/32958/vinny14.wav for audio link) and testifies,The car that made these two, equal-length tire marks had positraction. You can't make these marks without positraction, which was not available on the '64 Buick Skylark! She provides a more plausible explanation for what happened.Only two other cars made in America that had positraction, and independent rear suspension, and enough power to make these marks. One was the Corvette, which could never be confused with the Buick Skylark. The other had the same body length, height, weight, wheel base, and wheel track as the '64 Skylark, and that was the 1963 Pontiac Tempest. Mona Lisa's testimony included the two ingredients which the Defense Research Institute maintains are necessary to discredit an expert witness whose testimonial relies on an unsubstantiated scientific explanation; in other words, junk science. Her argument discredited the explanation by exposing the holes in the theory and providing a verifiable explanation for what occurred. Until she took the stand, the jury had no reason to find the initial reasoning questionable.
While it makes for good cinema, the reality is that the combination of "expert opini...
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...he latest global warming predictions are hype, not hard data
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:Q4zraRoiREsJ:reason.com/rb/rb012401.html+greenhouse+effect+hype&hl=en
--No Winter by 2105? New Study Offers Grim Forecast for U.S.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1017_051017_warming_weather.html
--1,2 Thimerosal in Vaccines
http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimfaq.htm#q4
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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