[finsup]

1 In 5 Americans Think Blu-Ray Is A Sea Creature: Study

Not that this surprises me, really.  Not after years of watching the stupidity on display with Jaywalking with Jay Leno.

[Phil A]

Probably a fair amount think a tuner is a fish too

[ajzepp]

 

[Ericus Rex]

 

I'm actually surprised that number isn't higher!  I mean, what's the percentage of Americans who are elderly and still running VHS only?  Gotta be close to 20% right there.

[WGH]

After all these years I find out Blu-Ray's not a fish? 

[JohnR]

The Blu-ray one is not the worst by far.

"one in 10 think the coding language to build websites, HTML, is a type of sexually transmitted infection"

"Nearly a quarter believed that the audio format “MP3” was a “Star Wars” robot"

However, nothing is said about how the survey is conducted. But look at by who - vouchercloud.net. I feel like I'm getting defensive on behalf of my American friends but is this really a sufficiently representative sample to label a news article "1 in 5 of Americans think..."? Perhaps it should be labeled "4 in 5 news outlets make up misleading shit because that's how we get people to post links to our site on forums"?

  

[Rob Babcock]

Yeah, you can get any "answer" you want by manipulating the survey questions.  Sounds like more fluff "journalism" at work.

[jarcher]

Then there is the science survey that asked whether the earth orbits the sun (or vice versa), which more than 25% of Americans supposedly got wrong.  Surprisingly, not many more supposedly got it right in the other countries it was asked. E.g. 34% in the EU supposedly got it wrong. 

I'd like to think the survey was flawed, but if it was conducted by the National Science Foundation (at least in the US), you'd think they would know what they were doing.

I know this is getting away from Blu Ray players……but if your interested take a look at / try the questions yourself :

http://www.businessinsider.com/national-science-foundation-survey-2014-2

P.s. Not to get into religion / politics, but it's interesting that according to the NSF web page, when the words "according to the theory of evolution" were added to questions 7 & 10, the % of right answers increased a lot, showing that many more were aware of the answer, but personal religious beliefs changed the response, something the media didn't report on, but which shows that the way questions are asked / designed can have a major influence in the results.

[JohnR]

Interesting link, jarcher. I got 100% but then again, I really wasn't sure about question 7 (as a fact rather than as "the prevailing cosmological model" - see Wikipedia).