World's Plant Life Far Less Diverse Than Thought

Meshach writes "A report out of FOX News (I know, I know) says that there are far fewer unique species of plants than previously thought. The report states that only about a third of named species are actually unique. The rest have been 'discovered' multiple times, often by separate scientists."

Re:ah faux news

[DesScorp]

I'll make you a deal. I'll support a ban on submissions from Fox News as long as we never have to see another submission from MSNBC, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, or anything similar.

Or, you can simply evaluate stories as they are, and quit whining about "faux news". A news org can have a viewpoint and still be a news org. This is the model, in fact, in much of the world, especially Europe. America's one of the few places where big sources pretend not to have a viewpoint.

Re:ah faux news

[0123456]

No, because the people that watch Fox news think that every other news network is part of some secret hidden political agenda and therefor it's real.

True. Most news networks don't even try to hide their political agenda.

Re:Typical of Fox

[clarkkent09]

If politically correct means way more to the left than even Fox is to the right then sure.

Re:ah faux news

[blackraven14250]

The real issue is that the organization itself has a view that skews towards a certain ideology. There's not an issue with individuals within said organization having a point of view of their own (it's almost always seen in its most obvious form with selections of stories done near the end of a given anchor's newscast for filler), but it's the overarching "we'll only recruit people with X ideology" that's an issue at some of the cable networks in the US.

The Actual Source

[eldavojohn]

Well, there's a lot of details from the actual source of the study [kew.org] that are left out of the Fox News report. Like the fact that they used a taxonomic knowledge in a rulebase to reduce the set of unique plants. While fascinating, one must wonder how well an automated system could perform such a feat. Note: The part about putting "discovered" in double quotes is not found in the original source article but arises in the Fox News article. You might want to be careful as you could be insinuating gross incompetence in the field of botany across its entire history. It's also possible that this algorithm for reducing the list needs to be worked on.