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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing, DNA can accurately identify the source, if there is no "contamination" with other DNA, if there is contamination, then they have many orders of magnitude less accuracy in reconstructing the DNA and thus identifying the sources. But the issue is juries tend to think of accuracy in terms of uncontaminated DNA samples.

Now, npr, they always, always, ALWAYS take the side of the underdog, no matter the less favorable actual odds. They put more faith in soft science results (child psych says this is good for kids) than results from scientific studies (study showed none to negative impact).

Example, people in Seattle placing signs saying No Californians, it gets a chuckle, could you imagine a similar sign saying "No [insert poor country demonym]. NPR would be outraged, with reason, but you don't see the outrage when the same bias is projected against the relatively better off.

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> Now, npr, they always, always, ALWAYS take the side of the underdog, no matter the less favorable actual odds. They put more faith in soft science results than results from scientific studies

Oh give me a break. NPR is a standard mainstream news organization, with a higher journalistic standard than most. They don’t by any means “always always ALWAYS” do anything, except try their best to discover topical news stories and report them fairly. Like other mainstream news organizations, they aim for political neutrality, tend to analyze stories in line with the “consensus”, and shy away from saying anything which deeply challenges the dominant power structure.

You might argue that standards of evidence in science-related journalism are weak across the board, but let’s not pretend that there’s some problem with NPR in particular that wouldn’t equally apply to, e.g., the New York Times, the Associated Press, the BBC, Le Monde, or the Economist.

Ok, when was the last time they had something negative about an underdog class? It's not as if only people on the top, politically economically, socially do bad things.

The Giant Pool of Money episode of This American Life -- on of their most popular episodes in the history of NPR -- does not skimp on the role of low quality borrowers in the financial crisis - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/t...

A note: at the time of the Giant Pool of Money, TAL was distributed by PRI. It has never been a part of NPR.

> New York Times, [...] the BBC

If you set your bar this low, did you have to dig a trench first? What did you do when you hit the water table? Did ground heat ever become a problem as you edged closer to the Mantle?

"NPR is a standard mainstream news organization, with a higher journalistic standard than most."

Besides being a contradictory statement, I'd like to see an unbiased, reputable source regarding the second half of your comment.

I don't see how that statement would be inherently contradictory?

"X is a Y Z, with a greater W than most" I think would generally be interpreted as "X is a Y Z with a greater W than most Y Zs"

So, X would have a more than 50th percentile ranking in Y Zs, when ranking by W.

I don't see why it would be impossible for a standard mainstream news organization to have a greater than 50 percentile ranking when ordering standard mainstream news organizations be journalistic standards.

Sorry, been busy with baseball the last couple of days...

Clever bit going all-variable when there is no frame of reference, starting point, or baseline.

On its face, if it is a standard, mainstream organization, it has srandard, mainstream standards. However, there may be some source that indicates otherwise (the call in the second half of my statement).

The thing is, it is possible to distinguish samples of DNA in mixtures (and it can work fairly well). But the technique they used to do so was outdated and no one particularly bothered to find how well it worked. I mentioned in my comment above that their misstep was only applicable to "mixtures" and that DNA analysis as a whole still makes sense.

I would not extrapolate the error in the headline across the entirety of NPR, though. The reporting in this article was factual and (AFAICT) unbiased. Although I believe that "soft sciences" as opposed to "hard sciences" exist, and that NPR can be biased (they have been in the past), I do not believe this discredits NPR entirely. The mistake they are reporting allegedly affects thousands of cases. That statement is unlikely to be a result of bias.

It is very hard to prevent bias at the publishing outlet level (and very easy to introduce it). I recommend that people get their facts from a number of sources and that they listen to every opinion they can find.

Thank you for the concise clarification.

I think one other thing we can take from this is that DNA alone is insufficient to establish guilt, we need corroborating evidence. Just because someone's DNA was probably on a knob does not imply that person was the burglar. Maybe they were a repair person, but they could have been a burglar, if they returned afterwards and broke in, for example. Of course lawyers will point that out, but sometimes people think DNA = guilt.

The issue with npr is they like to have the image of being unbiased. If you can suffer through their pledge drives, you hear their listeners fawn and claim them to be the purveyors of truth and unbias and they, the journalists and interns, truly seem to believe they are.

Lets say an underdog commits a crime, something if done by a top dog, they would take it at face value) They did the crime, jail them. If it's an underdog, well, maybe there were deficiencies in society which contributed to their criminal behavior and thus perhaps that should be taken into account when they are tried.

> I would not extrapolate the error in the headline across the entirety of NPR, though. The reporting in this article was factual and (AFAICT) unbiased.

It's worth pointing out that journalists almost never get to write the headlines for their articles. Headlines often drive them crazy.

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