Kill or cure? The results are in
Thanks to an amazing burst of effort, we managed to get all the Daily Mail cancer articles categorised in a matter of a few hours. I’m still impressed with how fast it was. It’s like Wikipedia for bad science journalism.
I spent a couple of hours normalising the vocabulary used by volunteers (so that, for example, the pill and contraceptive pill were the same) and wrote some code to index the articles by the thing to which they refer.
All this means that you can now see a long alphabetical list of items, colour-coded depending upon whether the Daily Mail says that they cause or prevent cancer—or both! Each claim is accompanied by a link to the relevant article.
Thus, we now know that artificial light causes cancer, coffee both causes and prevents it, and wasabi seems pretty healthy.
There are a few errors due to bogus submissions, so I’ve added a reporting mechanism. Just hit the link if you see anything untoward.
2009-07-20 00:28 UTC. Comments: 10.
Neil Trodden
Wrote at 2009-07-20 08:45 UTC using Mozilla 1.9.1.1 on Linux:
It might be useful to be able to search the list rather than just browse. I’m surprised (naively) that it is such a long list.“age causes cancer” – priceless
Paul Battley
Wrote at 2009-07-20 09:07 UTC using Firefox 3.5 on Mac OS X:
Yeah, I’d like to add search, but I wanted to get it public as soon as possible.Ed
Wrote at 2009-07-20 15:20 UTC using Firefox 3.5.1 on Windows XP 64 or Server 2003:
Interesting stuff. As Neil says, a search would be good, and maybe a ‘random’ button too :)Ed
Wrote at 2009-07-20 15:20 UTC using Firefox 3.5.1 on Windows XP 64 or Server 2003:
By the way, it says above that I’m using Firefox on Win 2K3 – I’m not I’m on XP 64 bit…kzap
Wrote at 2009-08-08 09:30 UTC using Firefox 3.0.13 on Linux:
Have you heard the latest episode of ‘The Now Show’ on iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lxh42/The_Now_Show_Series_28_Episode_7/They mention this at about 22:00
Michael Dare
Wrote at 2009-08-08 15:15 UTC using Firefox 3.5.2 on Windows XP:
Not one word about marijuana preventing and curing cancer? Just google it and don’t miss www.phoenixtears.ca/.Lee
Wrote at 2009-08-08 19:55 UTC using Unknown browser on Mac OS X:
Minor note. I’ve noticed a few of the contradictory subjects aren’t really contradictory. Rather than something being claimed to cause and prevent cancer there are stories about causing and NOT causing cancer.e.g Nuclear Power, Breast Implants.
Also Nuclear Weapons for example is not claimed to prevent cancer but claimed to not cause cancer.
Hélène Wilkinson
Wrote at 2009-08-11 19:07 UTC using Firefox 3.5.2 on Mac OS X:
This is absolutely brilliant. I agree with Lee, though. This fantastic tool would be even better if you weeded out the “does not cause ” and “there is no proven link to” stories from the “prevent” category. I think this is more important than a search functionality.Also, have you come across this?
http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/toys/dailymail/
It was created several years ago but I am pleased to see that it was updated recently.
Paul Battley
Wrote at 2009-08-11 21:35 UTC using Mozilla 1.9.1.1pre on Linux:
Hélène and Lee: if you see something that’s wrong, just click on the link next to it.Lee
Wrote at 2009-08-12 11:45 UTC using Unknown browser on Mac OS X:
Ok, I can report things as incorrect, but it appears there is no designation to mark a story as “no proven link to”.More often than not these stories appear in pairs, with one stating that X causes cancer followed by another which effectively cancels that story out. But that’s not the same as saying it prevents cancer. To paraphrase a popular lightbulb joke – it’s the system needs changing.