Fat Friends make you Fat?

We have heard of photo-shopping photos to make them look like we want them to look. And they can also photo shop movies. Remember the one with the telephone booth? They ADDED the New York street AND the traffic - it was actually, filmed in a studio. Amazing what computers can do. Amazing how computers can create a reality which looks ALMOST real.

For example, if you look at the image to the left, it looks like it was taken from a skyscraper but no, it's just two photos put together. Wonderful, fun but not reality!

Well, it seems that in this latest piece of fluff published in the New England Journal of Medicine which declared that fat friends make you fat, the scientists have PHOTO-SHOPPED old data to prove something so shocking, it was the subject of 300 news articles.

They apparently used computer analysis software to create a computer animation inputting selected existent data (called in the business, a "data dredge" study) to come up with what they reported as the results of the study.

Meaning it's about as accurate as a photo-shopped photo!

Somehow the news media calling this "study" a "breakthrough study" reminds me of the sports commentators calling biker, Floyd Landis' dope enhanced stage win in last year's Tour de France, "the ride of the century".

Here is an EXCELLENT analysis of this so called "study" - a must read - "What a tangled web"

And photo-shopping is fun - I do it myself. Just as long as we don't start BELIEVING the false results of our photo-shopping!