Studies of cave paintings have shown....

The mammoth has a good point. Ogg's father is making a classic error of logic. Not having found proof that something really happens, is not the same as having definitive proof that this thing cannot possibly happen.

Ogg's family doesn't have the benefit of Aristotle's explanation of deductive reasoning. But even two thousand years after Aristotle got started, we still often fall into this trap.

In evidence-based medicine, a part of this problem is touched on by the saying, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." A study says "there's no evidence" of a positive effect, and people jump to the conclusion - "it doesn't work." Baby Ogg gets thrown out with the bathwater.

The same thing is happening when there are no statistically significant serious adverse effects reported, and people infer from that, "it's safe."

This situation is the opposite of the problem of reading too much into a finding of statistical significance (covered here in Statistically Funny). Only in this case, people are over-interpreting non-significance. Maybe the researchers simply didn't study enough of the right people, or they weren't looking at the outcomes that later turn out to be critical.

Researchers themselves can over-interpret negative results. Or they might phrase their conclusions carelessly. Even if they avoid the language pitfalls here, journalists could miss the nuance (or think the researchers are just being wishy-washy) and spread the wrong message. And even if everyone else phrased it carefully, the reader might jump to that conclusion anyway.

When researchers say "there is no evidence that...", they generally mean they didn't find any, or enough of, a particular type of evidence that they would find convincing. Obviously, no one can ever be sure they have even seen all the evidence. And it doesn't mean everyone would agree with their conclusion, either. To be reasonably sure of a negative, you might need quite a lot of evidence.

On the other hand, the probability of something being extremely unlikely to be real based on quite a lot of knowledge - that there's a community of giant blue swans with orange and pink polka dots on the Nile, say - increases the confidence you might have in even a small study exploring that hypothesis.

Which brings us to the other side of this coin. Proving that something doesn't exist to the satisfaction of people who perhaps need to believe it most earnestly, can be quite impossible. People trying to disprove the claim that vaccination causes autism, for example, are finding that despite the Enlightenment, our rational side can be vulnerable to highjacking. Voltaire hit that nail on the head in the 18th century: "The interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists."

Benefits Of Healthy eating Turmeric every day for the body

One teaspoon of turmeric a day to prevent inflammation, accumulation of toxins, pain, and the outbreak of cancer. Yes, turmeric has been known since 2.5 centuries ago in India, as a plant anti-inflammatory / inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and also have a good detox properties, now proven to prevent Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Turmeric prevents inflammation: For people who

Women and children overboard

It's the Catch-22 of clinical trials: to protect pregnant women and children from the risks of untested drugs....we don't test drugs adequately for them. In the last few decades , we've been more concerned about the harms of research than of inadequately tested treatments for everyone, in fact. But for "vulnerable populations," like pregnant women and children, the default was to exclude them. And just in case any women might be, or might become, pregnant, it was often easier just to exclude us all from trials. It got so bad, that by the late 1990s, the FDA realized regulations and more for pregnant women - and women generally - had to change. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) took action too. And so few drugs had enough safety and efficacy information for children that, even in official circles, children were being called "therapeutic orphans." Action began on that, too. There is still a long way to go. But this month there was a sign that

Not a word was spoken (but many were learned)

Video is often used in the EFL classroom for listening comprehension activities, facilitating discussions and, of course, language work. But how can you exploit silent films without any language in them? Since developing learners' linguistic resources should be our primary goal (well, at least the blogger behind the blog thinks so), here are four suggestions on how language (grammar and vocabulary) can be generated from silent clips. Split-viewing Split-viewing is an information gap activity where the class is split into groups with one group facing the screen and the other with their back to the screen. The ones facing the screen than report on what they have seen - this can be done WHILE as well as AFTER they watch. Alternatively, students who are not watching (the ones sitting with their backs to the screen) can be send out of the classroom and come up with a list of the questions to ask the 'watching group'. This works particularly well with action or crime scenes with

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