So I spotted this article in the Guardian, by one Damian Carrington, who gives us an example of how not to write about new research. The article is about the release of this paper in Science, by Gerland et al.
Let’s take a little walk through the article to see how Mr. Carrington mangles nearly everything important about this research.
- The title of the article is “World population to hit 11bn in 2100”. The Gerland et al article is about using Bayesian techniques to arrive at confidence intervals for the size of global population, meaning that their article is about how much uncertainty there is in a population projection. The entire point of their work is that statements like “World population to hit 11bn in 2100” are stupid because they do not tell you about the uncertainty in that estimate.
- “A ground-breaking analysis….” is how the Gerland et al…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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