One of the nice things about working at a university is that there is almost always an interesting talk to go to (supposing you have the time…). Yesterday I managed to go to a fascinating discussion of the use of meta-analyses by a Waikato graduate, Shinichi Nakagawa. (I suspect that Grant knows much more about […]
Continue readingYear: 2010
an update on facilitated communication
A while ago now I wrote about Rom Houben, who’d been in a vegetative state for 23 years but who, it was claimed, was really conscious inside an immobile body & now able to communicate via something known as ‘facilitated communication’. I and many others were sceptical of this claim – it looked too much […]
Continue readingarmed and dangerous…
… the intriguing title of a brief news item in the latest edition of Science. The story (anon, 2010) outlines some of the most serious plant & fungal threats to agricultural production. One of them is the potato blight fungus, Phytophthora infestans. The leaves & stems of an infected plant blacken & fall, & the tubers […]
Continue readinghappy darwin day!
And for a bit of vaguely scientific fun, you might like to try ‘devolving’ yourself here (found this one via a commenter on the Young Australian Skeptics – whence also came the image above).
Continue readingbreadth vs depth
One of the conflicts faced by probably every classroom teacher is the one between the amount of material one has to teach (& the students to learn about) and the time available. I face it myself: huge (though also very good) textbook, requests from my colleagues to make sure that the first-year course adequately prepares […]
Continue readingbut it does no harm…
Over on Code for Life, Grant’s recently put up some posts concerning homeopathy (here & here, for example). He’s also suggested that homeopathic (& other) remedies should carry disclaimers to do with their active ingredients (or lack thereof) and what they can & can’t do. Anyway, one of the common responses to articles critical of homeopathy […]
Continue readingthe power of the cuttlefish
I found this XKCD cartoon whlie clearing out my mailbox – I found it via PZ quite a while ago now (so it’s probably circumnavigated the world net 3.5 times by now!), but thought it was worth sharing. (Keep an eye out for cuttlefish, Marcus!) (Many of the XKCD cartoons are hilarious; some I just […]
Continue readingthe 8-glasses-a-day myth
I was at the gym yesterday when I read something in a women’s mag that quite put me off my stride on the cross-trainer. (In my defence, I’d forgotten to take a book & the only other reading material on offer was car magazines.) The offending article contained the following factoids: you need to drink at […]
Continue readingwhat’s your ‘risk intelligence quotient’?
‘Risk intelligence quotient’ (RQ) – something I’d heard about but never really thought about until I read one of PZ’s posts today. (Where on earth does he find the time to write so much???) Turns out that RQ is the subject of a private research project that hopes to assess levels of risk intelligence in the general population. Risk […]
Continue readingwhy dogs live shorter lives
Those of you who’ve followed my blog for a while (thanks, guys!) will know that in mid-2009 I farewelled my lovely old labrador Bella – & that after 9 weeks I’d had enough of being dogless & Ben joined our family. Having Ben hasn’t made me forget Bella, of course (I’m as soppy as the […]
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