Friday Sprog Blogging: science fair wrap-up.

Since the school science fair is safely behind us, we can give you a peek at the projects the Free-Ride offspring presented. (We couldn’t do this prior to the science fair without running the risk that the sprogs would be accused of lifting their projects from a blog post.)
Here’s the elder Free-Ride offspring’s project board (or at least the central panel of it):

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Ethics and the ‘Oprah effect’.

There’s an interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune on the “Oprah effect”. The upshot is that products or people who Oprah deigns to grace with airtime tend to find enormous public acceptance.
While this is well and good if the product is a novel or the person is a television chef, it’s less clear that the Oprah effect is benign in the case of people without medical expertise offering medical advice.
From the article:

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