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Current Events » in reply to In theory, anyway...

Good advice on sources
Tom Brosz — (archived)

You are right to be suspicious of filtered data. One famous example of abstracts vs. body of papers was a major paper on global warming a couple of years ago where the summary blamed it on human action, while the body of the paper stated that the scientists were not sure one way or the other.

I try to go back as far as possible to original sources whenever possible. Most news articles don't bother (wonder why). This isn't easy. Some items are damn hard to find. Sometimes I get stopped by "pay per view" situations. This is very common with polls--most poll organizations want hundreds of bucks to see the original data, so I am left with news articles that cherry-pick the information one way or the other depending on the agenda. Frustrating.

Many science and other organizations want memberships to view some of their papers, too, and a lot of newspapers make you cough up for older articles (hope some ears are burning at the NYT).

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