Things which are obvious within your field but controversial to the public

In My Humble Opinion
101

Purchasing - wine company.
‘Alternative’ wine packaging closures (screwcap, bag-in-a-box, synthetic cork, etc.) are generally superior than natural cork at preserving wine and preventing TCA (‘corked’ wine) and oxidation.

They are also cheaper, and usually more convenient than removing a cork (synthetics can be a little difficult, but the other two are obviously easier.)
Many wineries are reluctant to use them simply because the general consumer has been reluctant to accept them. Things are slowly changing, much to the cork industry’s dismay, and this consumer’s sheer delight.

102

And as my dermatologist pointed out to my worried mother, you’re far more likely to be depressed because you have acne (or at least, that would be part of the reason for your depression) than because of Accutane.

Just like you’re more likely to be killed driving to Six Flags than on a roller coaster at the park.

103

It does happen though. I spiraled down so fast soon after I started taking Accutane that no one saw what was happening. The only reason that I am here today is because my friend walked into my room suddenly when I was about to pull the trigger on the rifle in my mouth. I did clear up my skin great though.

104

Indeed.
Originally, MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging was NMR: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. It caused such an uproar, the name was modified to ease the public mind.

105

That’s crazy talk!

Ok, seriously… on a similar note, something I forgot to include in my previous post:

Many if not most college freshmen have to have it explained to them that they will be graded on results. It doesn’t matter how hard they work, or if they came from a school that didn’t prep them well. Some students will have to bust their butts for a C, while others who have better aptitude in that particular subject and had a strong high school program will find it easy to make a B. It matters not.

It also doesn’t matter if a C in this course will cause a student to lose his/her financial aid. (Besides, if that’s the case, clearly the student isn’t making As in every other course anyway.)

Finally (and this really is heresy) not every student is ready for college straight out of high school. And not every student needs a post-secondary liberal arts education to achieve his/her goals.

106

The System can’t stay up all the time.

99% uptime is easy and cheap. But that means you are down for 3.65 days a year.

99.9% is not as easy, and not as cheap, but .365 days a year is not too bad.

99.99% is hard, and expensive.

99.999% means you are down for about 5 minutes a year. This is extremely expensive.

The general rule of thumb is every decimal point adds 10X the cost.

Most companies expect the system to be up all the time, but are unable to see the correllation between cost and uptime.

107

I’m a librarian.

Amen to Zsofia on the filtering issue.

Also:

Only a small percentage of human knowledge is in electronic format.

An even smaller percentage is on the Internet.

It is unlikely that, in my lifetime, all human knowledge will be digitized. (I’m 34.)

The Internet and the WWW are not the same thing.

Information is not free. “Free” information on the WWW can be costed out in time and energy. And a lot of information is subscription only.

Librarians do not know every single book in the library. If you tell me it was “so high, so wide and red” I probably won’t be able to find it for you.

Patrons rarely ask the right questions. If reference librarians answered the questions patrons ask, our patrons would be very dissatisfied with our accuracy and service most of the time. Reference librarians, first have to figure out what patrons are really looking for, and then figure out where it can be found.

And a few others, not related to librarianship:

Many people with bipolar disease function quite well in society.

Greyhounds love to run. They love racing. They don’t like all the other stuff that happens off the track.

Some art is disturbing, displeasing, ugly and/or controversial. That’s the point.

Some stories don’t have happy endings, contrary to most mainstream Amerian films.

The adjectives natural, organic and or botannical do not mean a product is good. Poison Ivy is natural, and I’m not particularly eager to pay $$$ for a Poison Ivy soap.

Eating an M&M will not kill a dog. As with most things, it’s quantity and quality that count. (The more chocolate a dog eats, the more likely it is to get sick. The darker the chocolate a dog eats, the more likely it is to get sick.)

Many dogs eat plants with no consequent digestive problems.

Some people with handicaps show no outwardly visible sign of their handicap.

And finally, many people with accents from the Southern US are very intelligent, cultured and literate.

108

From education: No Child Left Behind, in general, is a horrible program that is leading to more kids failing, not less.

From economics: A flat tax system is unworkable.

109

Please, please help me. I’ve a running argument with a friend over exactly this. He sends me web sites “proving” that global warming is scientifically contentious. He thinks it is all hype by guys who have to defend their field’s existence. Crichton hasn’t helped at all.

110

Things I’ve learned as an anthropology student that make some people shocked:

*Everyone is ethnocentric to some extent. The culture you grew up in and your self esteem takes care of this, and also helps to determine how ethnocentric you are.
*Even within the same group (religion, country, etc.), people’s culture and behaviours will differ. This is especially true in places like America, where even in a small area, the cultural viewpoints will often change from household to household.
*The goal of ethnographic fieldwork and working with indigenous groups is not to convert them. We’re not missionaries.
*Additionally, ethnographic fieldwork can be very expensive and very dangerous. There are places anthropologists won’t go, and some of those places are visited by missionaries. Also, when anthropologists and missionaries are in the same area, there’s sometimes a rift between the anthropologists and missionaries based on practices within each group and rumours about each group.
*There is a different method to every practice that’s considered a cultural universal. These cultural universals are humans’ reaction to the events in their lives, and they are how they cope with the issues of their world.

I’m taking a class on Buddhism right now, and here are issues that had come up during the first week or so:
*No, it’s not easy, nor is it anything like the stuff in those new age books you own. Some of the doctrines will make your head hurt because you’re not inundated in the cultural context. Yes, the practices vary from area to area, and from sect to sect. Zen Buddhism is not Tantric Buddhism is not Mahayana Buddhism is not Theravada Buddhism.
*Not every Buddhist is a monk. Nor is every Buddhist a vegetarian.
*As far as it goes, the laity generally don’t get into the more esoteric material. Unless you’re doing (have done) academic studies on your own religion, you’ve probably got just about as much knowledge on the inner workings and history of your religion as the average Buddhist.
*Tantric Buddhism isn’t all about sex. And the parts that are about sex aren’t about enjoying it in a visceral way; they’re a meditative exercise that’s used to try to find enlightenment.

111

:smiley:

112

Some of these are great, but a lot of them are matters of definition (e.g., what a robot is), and others I’m not so sure about. For example:

When I worked at a clinical research center/medical school, I got time off to go listen to a professor’s lecture on the ethics of animal testing. This guy worked in the burn center, and a lot of his tests involved setting animals on fire without anaesthesia, inflicting burns on them that would be fatal, and studying their morbidity.

And he agonized over it. He wouldn’t say he was doing the right thing; all he’d say is that he lived in a culture where this was ethically acceptable, and that all researchers needed to come to terms with it, and that he ceded his judgment in this case to that of society at large. Personally, he felt that his research would lead to knowledge that would save lives into the indefinite future, and so he was willing to continue with the research; but he fully understood why it horrified people.

He wasn’t a manufacturer, mind you, but I wouldn’t characterize animal research as a “given” with him.

Okay, from my field:
-The majority of animals brought to animal shelters across the US are euthanized. In some areas this isn’t true, but the overwhelming rates of euthanasia in other areas back it up. And shelters that claim they take in all animals and never euthanize an adoptable animal are twisting the meaning of the word “adoptable” in order to increase their fundraising potential.

Daniel

113

Why no anesthesia?

114

I can’t say for sure, but IIRC physiology properly most anaestetics affect how vascular blood flows - thus if one were to anaestesize the critters before burning them the burns would be atypical, and thus of minimal use for research purposes.

115

I burning your…

nevermind.

116

Pharmaceuticals don’t get off that easy. Yes, it is very expensive to develop a drug. But consider: in western Wisconsin, my father (a general practicioner/family doctor) is visited by two to three (often more) drug representatives a week. When he started working there 20 years ago, he estimated that there were four reps for every doctor in the area. Now, he estimates there’s six for every doctor.

I’m aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, and I’m also aware that one doctor’s estimations are by no means fact. But there’s definitely problems there. Especially telling is by someone else’s throwaway remark: most drug development is done in the US, rather than in Europe, because profits are much higher here.

While drugs are very expensive to develop, I’m betting there’s also a lot that can be done to rein in drug costs. It’s a matter of drug companies not wanting to lose those profits.

On the technical writing/software development side:
–Indexes require a lot of thought and planning to create. Not that this is controversial; rather, most of the public don’t give it any thought at all. One of my friends was amazed that I had to index anything at all, and that it required manual work to create. I, for one, am horrified at the thought of a totally computer -generated index.
–No, software developers really aren’t capable of making bug-free software, when they have to work within the constraints of existing versions. There are bugs in software because companies have taken it on themselves to make sure that your old files can still be opened in the new version, or that the new version still works with your old operating system (up to a point), or that some key features still work the same way they did in the old version while being updated for the new version. That’s a lot of overhead to accomodate. Along with the fact that you, as a user, are going to use that software in ways they never envisioned or intended.

117

Indeed; my father, a doctor, reports very similar things. A lot of these seem to be along the lines of, “People in my profession think it’s obvious that my profession is okay,” which comes close to a tautology. You mean people who work in the nuclear energy field DON’T believe the reports of danger about nuclear energy? Be still my heart!

More interesting are facts that the outside world doesn’t realize.

And yeah, I think the lack of anaesthesia had to do with skewing the test results. I forget exactly why, but the doctor agonized over it.

Daniel

118

Booking a hotel room is always more expensive over the Internet. One company manages all the internet reservations and all sites go through them. They charge a fee that gets passed directly to the consumer. Call hotels directly for the best rate.

The price of hotel rooms is pretty much up to the whims of the desk clerk. Usually there is a range of $20-$30 they can offer (for example, they are told to sell the rooms for $59-89) and is based on the snap judgment of how likely you are to trash the room versus how much they think you will pay. You can nearly always bargain down.

The AAA discount doesn’t actually mean anything. Hotels will give you the same “discount” for just about anything if you ask for it. There is a standard percentage (usually 10) that clerks are free to take off at will.

119

More hotel facts
Most small hotels have am apartment in them- usually behind the front desk. The hotel managers live there and are on duty 24 hours a day, except when they hire a desk clerk so that they can go out every once in a while.

Nearly hotel managers/owners are East Indian.

Major chain video rental facts
There is no possible way for the clerks just not to scan in a drop box full of movies in time. There are other ways for a movie to get false late fees, but this is not one of them. If this ever did happen, you’d know because it would prompt a huge crisis involving calling everyone who works for the store to come in and try to track down the videos and fix late fees. But luckly it never does happen because video stores have forseen this possibility and have multiple safegaurds against it.

Movie selection is based on what people rent and is calculated by computer. If the store selection sucks, it has nothing to do with the store or employees.

Your account is covered in notes and every move on it is documented. This means your brilliant plan to never have to pay late fees (“I’ll just deny everything!”, “I’ll sneak the movie in and leave it on the shelf!”) may work a couple times, but will lose you goodwill and you will eventually get caught. There are only a few scams out there and video clerks see them every day. You havn’t thought of anything new or anything they don’t know how to detect- even if they are usually too lazy/nice to fight with you.

Your card does serve a purpose, and you might not be able to rent without it.

Only about a quarter of profits are from late fees- not the half or more people speculate. A huge chunk of profit comes from candy sales.

120

Folks, teenagers have sex. Lots of teenagers have a little sex; a minority of teenagers have a whole lot of sex. Abstinence-only education is about as effective in teaching teenagers to NOT have sex as showing Reefer Madness would be to discourage marijuana use.

There are some critical differences in how sexuality is viewed among different socioeconomic and ethnic groups. The Happy White Baptist Virgin model is only going to work with the Happy White Baptists Virgins.

Homosexual kids exist, and they are at higher risk for suicide than the general population. Erasing that fact from studies dealing with adolescent sexuality and self-esteem won’t turn kids straight, just dead. And no, you can’t use that data to conclude that ALL homosexuals of all ages are suicide prone.

We get zero dollars to research sexuality in this country. Everything we do we have to sneak into other types of research (mainly medical), and for goodness sake do NOT use words like “gay” or “prostitute” in your grant app. That will just keep you from getting research funds for a long, long time.

And a bit less obvious:

The kids who have the most sex seem to have the lamest sex. From my POV it’s kind of sad that a lot of these young women think their genitalia is too dirty to touch or look at and think oral sex for guys is just great but for girls it’s disgusting. And while I’m pro-choice, the idea that some of you actually consider getting pregnant just to get your boyfriend back and hey, if it doesn’t work you can just abort is really, really, really disturbing.