Looking Out To Sea

I received an email from a friend today, with a couple lines of text and twenty-two lines of pseudo-legal boilerplate letting me know:

• The name, position and full contact details of my friend.
• Some blurb about the attorney–client privilege.
• A plea to consider the environment before printing off this monstrosity of an email signature.
• How the company feels about their involvement with the 2012 Olympic Games. And the Paralymic Games.
• The full corporate ownership structure, official address and registered LLP number. And the URL to learn even more!
• That the email itself was confidential and privileged, to be read only by the recipient (obviously). And that if I wasn’t the intended recipient I had to forward this highly confidential email to some other address.
• Then it let me know that the mere act of transmitting email was prohibited, which probably applies to the sender and all the intermediate mail servers.
• Oh yeah, and this email isn’t secure and may indeed have viruses.
• And you probably shouldn’t believe anything you read in this email unless we’ve already agreed — by contract — that we won’t lie to you.
• Opinions not representative, blah blah blah.

The mind boggles.

This is an announcement:

• The Science Behind It

  Ever get really annoyed by the BBC not providing adequate citations for their science and medicine stories? At most we get a researcher’s name and maybe the name of an institution. Doesn’t that really bug you?

  This website is the answer to all your problems. It scans whatever BBC or Reuters article you give it and then tries to extract whichever meagre details the journalist included. This information is used to search MedLine and give you a list of articles which may have been the source.

  This is a really fantastic resource. I highly recommend using the “bookmarklet” as well. Whenever you’re reading an interesting or dubious article, just press the “bookmarklet” button and The Science Behind It will magically read your current URL and try to find the real data. Many congratulations to Andy, the author of this great service.

• Just Fucking Cite It

  This is admittedly more juvenile and less immediately informative, but in my opinion still necessary. My little contribution.

  The internet is full of people who can, and should, make more references. Bloggers don’t have any word limit. Inline URLs don’t even add to the word count, since they are seamlessly integrated with the text. But still people don’t cite their sources. And it makes me mad. It’s lazy and sloppy and reduces transparency. It also engenders distrust, especially for bloggers who are trying to push a social or political agenda. Anyone can lie about anything when they don’t give their readers the chance to check the facts themselves.

  So next time you see someone make a claim about some new science story on a blog or forum, use this link — and challenge them to justify their claim.

The fledgling JFCI was created after reading this post on Language Log. The first reference to TSBI that I saw also appeared in the comments to that post.