NJTT, in my own defense, I DID point these difficulties out by saying that in the case of recognizing the object being viewed, these “predictions” were based on prior observation - which is essentially what you said. Also, I did indicate that there was still substantial controversy and illustrated that point with 2 of the criticisms that are often leveled.
I agree that some outlets for scientific news that are accessible to the average lay person do tend to hype the news and draw unjustified conclusions and make unjustified predictions. But that doesn’t apply to all sources. As someone who has followed the lay scientific press for a couple of decades, I have a decent idea of who will give me the straight dope and who is just trying to sell copy or generate clicks.
You create the impression that anyone who isn’t in the field doesn’t know squat. Maybe I’m reading to much into to your comments and if so I apologize. I just want to make it very clear that even among lay publications, there are both good and bad sources. Had I been completely bamboozled by unreputable sources, I wouldn’t have known to include any caveats of any kind.
Personally if I was teaching this class I would turn it the assignment on its head.
show them an episode of one of these fiction fests and have them tell you all the shit that is just flat wrong about it and why.
To do this correctly they will have to know what the state of the art is, and where fiction comes in.
You could even divide the room into 2-4 teams and have them compete as to who can find the most mistakes. Would make for some awesome class discussions.
This would be a fun class to teach.
There is/was a Japanese CSI clone about a brilliant-but-assholish brain expert who worked with the police to solve cases.
One case, he busted a guy’s alias by scanning his brain when showing him a series of pictures. One was from the place he was supposed to be at the time of the murder, and yet he showed no signs of recognizing it.
I also would like to pick CSI ny. as lot of crime stuffs in CSI New york solved in Scientific way. But if you are asking about a good crime show, which use more science to resolve the crime cases then i would like to pick Bones or Criminal minds. Both are great crime show use scientific method to resolve interesting crime cases.
Just to confirm that you’re not hallucinating, I remember that episode. I’m not sure about the details, but I remember the “cognitive scan” monitor showing an image of an animated baseball player, which was what the patient was thinking about. Completely insane stuff.
*House *is usually on a pretty mundane level when it comes to scientific inaccuracy, but I think the writers had been popping acid before writing that one.