NZ Listener | 4 June 2015
Ever get the feeling you’re part of some great global experiment? For many of Silicon Valley’s bosses, the people of New Zealand are precisely that, confides the Economist. “In medicine, trials are conducted on guinea pigs, rats, mice and rabbits,” it says. “In digital businesses, tests are performed on New Zealanders.” Among the giants that have used New Zealand as a test market are Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo!, along with “games companies and small start-ups”.
For such companies, this pocket-sized South Pacific nation represents the perfect “development lab”: we’re culturally similar to the big Western markets, we speak English, we’re “technophiles, and always up for a challenge”. And, well, we don’t matter too much. The founder of Fade, a photo-sharing app, tells the magazine: “If you mess up and burn that market, it’s not that big of a deal.”
The companies, on the whole, are reluctant to discuss the Kiwi lab, however. “Few tech firms like having their test markets publicised,” says the Economist. “It is in no scientist’s interest for the guinea pigs to realise they are being experimented on.”
“I fooled millions into thinking chocolate helps weight loss,” boasts John Bohannon at the website io9. In collaboration with a German documentary film-maker, the US science journalist had conducted an “actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes”. The conclusion drawn: eating chocolate accelerates weight loss. There were, however, only 15 people in the trial, rendering it a spurious result – the likes of which you’re almost guaranteed to generate “if you measure a large number of things about a small number of people”.
Bohannon, who posed as a research director from the invented “Institute of Diet and Health”, proceeded to get his study published in the International Archives of Medicine, which calls itself a “premier journal” and charged a mere €600 to run the thing. A modicum of scientific nous, or even a Google search on the “institute”, would have revealed the “con”, says Bohannon, but almost as soon as the press releases were dispatched, the revelation was trumpeted on the front page of bestselling German tabloid Bild, on Huffington Post India and in the Irish Examiner and Modern Healthcare. In all, says Bohannon, it “made news in more than 20 countries”. And so it laid bare “journalists’ incredible laziness”, he writes. “Hopefully our little experiment will make reporters and readers alike more sceptical.”
Bohannon’s stunt attracted plenty of coverage – comfortably more than the bogus story itself – but not everyone was impressed. This was a “contrived attempt to bait the media”, chides Rachel Ehrenberg of Science News magazine. “He didn’t fool millions of reporters, the target of his con, but millions of innocent readers.” The whole exercise had been “ethically reprehensible … The point that journalists should take care when covering health and statistics has been made over and over again. This was not an instance of last resort that required undercover tactics.”
The press release had been sent via Newswise to thousands of journalists – only a few, and no major “quality” mastheads, had swallowed it, notes Ehrenberg. And yet Bohannon “concludes that reporters are lazy, treating science ‘like gossip, echoing whatever they find in press releases’. I don’t need statistics to call BS on that.”
Inspired by the helpful predisposition of smartphones and word processors to repair misspellings, self-described “comedy writer and social media idiot” Aaron Gillies, aka Technically Ron, has released an excerpt from his “new erotic novel Love in the Time of Autocorrect”.
“He moved his hams up her legs,” it begins. “He moved his lisp towards hers. They kissed, it was a hard kiss, their tongs roamed like two sneakers in a hedge. ‘Are you READYSETGO,” he asked seductively. ‘Yemen,’ she replied. He took off his shirley temple, she removed her tory logo. Her maleficent breads exposed, he looked stunned as she moved house. Their bodies moved as onesies, sweets poured from everywhere.”
