Bad Science
My latest column for Visual Thesaurus, "Bad Science," has just been published. It's a selective list of scientific and mathematical terms that are frequently misused by the press and especially by corporate marketing departments. Yes, you'll need to subscribe to read the whole article (what are you waiting for? a year's subscription is only about $20), but here's a taste:
A fraction is not "a tiny amount"; it's any part of a whole. Nevertheless, we frequently see passages like this one, from a San Francisco Chronicle article about Hawaiian Airlines: "Hawaiian will offer one departure from Oakland and one flight back from Honolulu each day. That's a fraction of the multiple flights formerly operated by Aloha and ATA." What fraction are we talking about — one-sixteenth? One-half? Ninety-nine one-hundredths?
Other words that made the list: autistic, average, DNA, exponential, parameter, perfect storm, quantum leap, and schizophrenic. And I have a few things to say about paradigm shift, too.
What other examples of misused scientific terms can you think of?
