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The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgamesEARTHDATE: August 7, 2011
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REAL LIFE NEWS: JOURNOS TAKEN IN BY BROWSER/IQ STORYby HazedA lot of journalists jumped on some research published online last week, that showed that users of Internet Explorer had lower IQs that people who use other browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox or Opera. The study showed that the stupider you were, the more likely you were to be using Microsoft's browser. Tech journalists all chortled with glee as they wrote up their stories reporting this - after all, it chimed so exactly with what everyone would like to believe. Respectable news sites such as the BBC and the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK, and CNN and Forbes in the US, published stories based on the online research paper. Only problem is: it wasn't true. The website of the company who supposedly carried out the research, AptiQuant, only appeared in the past few weeks, and the photos of its staff were lifted from the website belonging to a French research company with no connection, or knowledge of, AptiQuant. What's surprising is that if you look at the figures given in the so-called research, alarm bells should start to ring. The low-end IQ it reports is around 80 - and I can't imagine anyone that dumb being able to tie their own shoes, let alone use a computer at all! But even if the research had not been a complete fake, that doesn't mean it would have actually been true. Online surveys don't tell you anything important, not really. For a start, you don't get a representative sample, just those that happen to see the advert or link to the survey, and decide to click on it to take part. And the results depend on exactly how you frame the questions, or set up the tests, as well as how you interpret the results. I am sure you could survey 100,000 real internet users and end up with the conclusion that 75% of IE users believe the Earth is flat, that Elvis is alive and that the moon is made of cheese! Source (original story): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/29/aptiquant_iq_survey/ |
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