medgeek

Most medical studies have a small sample size because it is difficult and often prohibitively expensive to do studies with large numbers of subjects. Small sample size increases the likelihood of spurious results.

The other problem is that mainstream journalism does an abyssmal job of reporting science. How many times have your read a newspaper article or seen a segment on the evening news that tells you that X is good for your health or X is bad for your health as if it was an absolute truth, a law of nature on par with V=IR or F=ma? Then, out of curiosity, you look up the actual journal article published by the scientists and find their claims to be considerably more modest.

The point is not that anyone would mistakenly believe that Digital Subscriber Line was the correct interpretation of DSL in that context. The point is that the nature of human cognition is such that Digital Subscriber Line is the term most likely to pop into consciousness first and it will be the wrong answer. The abbreviation DSL is not widely recognized as meaning Domain-Specific Language, or at least not so widely known that one may reasonably assume that any practitioner in the field will immediately know what you are talking about. They'll know that Digital Subscriber Line doesn't fit into context, but they won't necessarily know what meaning the author was trying to convey.

Microsoft is certainly not the only guilty party in this respect. Overuse of jargon and, more egregiously, failure to appropriately define all but the most universally well-known abbreviations at the point where the abbreviated form is first used in the text is a pervasive problem in the field. For example, the first few responses to this article use a total of four domain-specific abbreviations (IP, MSFT, VBA, and DSL), none of which were defined by the authors. Worse, within the field, the meaning of one of the abbreviations (DSL) is context-sensitive and the author's intended meaning is the lesser known one. The appropriate convention, used in virtually every other technical domain, is to explicitly state what the abbreviation or acronym stands for when it is first used in the text and then use it as much as you like in the rest of the text. Only a very small subset of abbreviations that are certain to be recognized by everyone in the field, regardless of their subspecialty, may be used without defining the term.