Cooking the book?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Cooking the book?

While I can’t assure you that “high dose” vitamin E supplementation will definitely improve your health, I’m pretty confident that the Hopkins study shouldn’t scare you about the nutrient.

The researchers didn’t study any vitamin E-users first-hand; instead they simply reviewed data from 19 earlier vitamin E clinical trials, including 11 “high dose” trials. But 10 of the 11 “high-dose” trials didn’t make any statistically significant correlations between vitamin E use and premature death.

Apparently this glaring fact didn’t fit with the researchers’ seemingly pre-determined conclusion, so they “cooked the books,” statistically speaking. They combined the 11 high-dose studies into one larger, supposedly more statistically robust study.

But while this “study stew” produced the appearance of a slightly elevated risk of premature death among high-dose vitamin E users, the reported “increase” was exceedingly small — too small to be considered reliable, particularly given the crudeness of the statistical method used to obtain it.

In a sense, it’s like the researchers tried to count atoms with the naked eye — it simply can’t be done.

- Kyoto Controversy Continues, FoxNews.com, December 17, 2004.

2. Did Jack Welch say someone at GE must have “cooked the books” when reporting GE Tax obligation as none, zip, nada, zero, zilch? Jack Welch tweeted the unemployment rate of 7.8 released yesterday was cooked.