Perhaps it's bad karma to do a column like this, but another mistake I made, this one not so humorous, was pointed out to me just after I wrote this blog today. It involves a newspaper story I wrote yesterday about Mariners minor leaguer Chris Minaker, whose honors thesis at Stanford was about the pressures athletes there feel to take peroformance enhancing supplements.
The survey taken by Minaker asked athletes about the substances they had taken. Only one question -- the one on steroids -- asked them solely about the pressure they had felt to take that substance. Not whether they took them or not. Nine of 89 athletes, including five baseball players, admitted they had felt pressure to take steroids. This is obviously different from those same athletes admitting they took steroids, as I wrote in my story.
Minaker has no idea whether or not those nine athletes actually succumbed to the pressure to take steroids. For that, I am sorry, both to him and to Stanford. More to him, because the last thing I wanted to do was diminish the importance of the work he did.
This is how you should handle mistakes and errors.
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