I'm reading Margaret MacMillan's fabulous Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World and in it, she notes that the U.S., in preparation for the peace negotiations that were to follow World War I had commissioned scholars and others to prepare more than 60 reports on the Far East and the Pacific. These reports, though, were largely ignored by the American delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. One of the reasons might have been was that these 'scholars' unearthed breaktaking conclusions like this one, on India, “A great majority of the unmarried consist of very young children.”
In a similar vein, the good folks at Ipsos-Reid (and I don't mean to pick on them but this is a little too good to resist) published a press release this week in which it announced that “online Canadians, especially young online Canadians, are embracing the Internet as a way to meet new friends and stay in touch with old friends.”