Back many moons ago, when I taught some basic science courses for a small university (tempted to put that in quotes), I encouraged a certain amount of skepticism and critical thinking in my students via a fictional sensational news/marketing push/story. I can’t remember all of it (stupid lightning), but enough to lead into today’s post.
The push story was that anyone contracting a particular gum infection, “gumjooboo,” stood a 99 percent chance of dying from it. Thing was, there was a special toothbrush now for sale that while very expensive, was 99.9999 percent effective in preventing gumjooboo. I then walked the students through parsing and researching to show that gumjooboo only effected a small percentage of a particular tribe in one small area of the Amazon basin. This led into some discussions on probability, odds, etc. Also, a bit of discussion on interpreting scientific papers.
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