What you may find out about substance risk when you ask the right questions to the right people

I am currently reading some material on what the public knows about science and technological riks. Here is a nice story I found about what you can find out with surveys:
(From: Miller, H. J. 2009. The human cost of anti-science activism. Policy Review, No. 154)

"The pew approach to polling described above is reminiscent of that used by the Idaho junior high school student Nathan Zohner, who found that 86 percent of survey respondents thought the substance “dihydrogen monoxide” should be banned when they were told that prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage, exposure to its gaseous form causes severe burns, and it has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients. Only one in 50 of Nathan’s survey respondents correctly identified dihydrogen monoxide as water, or H2O. As any pollster (and common sense) will tell you, it’s not hard to design survey questions to elicit a desired response — a trick that Pew mastered.

Because public understanding of science is so minimal, hoodwinking consumers on surveys isn’t difficult. A study by the U.S. National Science Foundation found that fewer than one in four know what a molecule is, and only about half understand that the earth circles the sun once a year."

SMARTER THAN YOU THINK

SMARTER THAN YOU THINK
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software
By JOHN MARKOFF
New "e-discovery" software can analyze millions of documents in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost consumed by human lawyers, even deducing patterns of behavior.