… to which I knew the answer. It was ‘homeopathy’. Quite a few science bloggers comment on homeopathy from time to time. I haven’t done so myself, before this – partly because I haven’t been inclined to stir things up.,.. But recently I’ve read material that rather bugs me.
Continue readingTag: pseudoscience
lies, damned lies, and science
That’s the eye-catching title of my current reading matter – the book Lies, Damned Lies, & Science by Sherry Seethaler. And reading it led to the following musings: Science is complex. Yet too often it’s presented – in the media, but also in textbooks & science classes – as a series of stand-alone facts (in the […]
Continue readingoxygenate your brain!
I don’t often watch the TV news, but on Monday last week I didn’t feel like doing much else after work. Anyway, about 1/3 of the way through a story came on that had my critical radar twitching. It was effectively a puff piece about how employers were sending their workers on a course teaching […]
Continue readinghow well do we teach critical thinking?
Here’s a really interesting quote from Ryan, commenting over on Orac’s blog: Sometime in the 60s, education in America started putting a greater emphasis on skepticism. For the first time, kids were encouraged to question what they were told. This is a good thing, or course. But I wonder – have we been encouraging people […]
Continue readingonly in mice…
Just a quickie & a link: Ben Goldacre’s got an interesting post on the total misreporting of several bits of research, in the UK media. (Having read one of the ‘news’ items, on ‘man-flu’, I have to say that in that case the reporter was pointed in the right direction by the researchers themselves. But […]
Continue readinggreat balls of stone!
In this morning’s Herald there’s an item entitled ‘Call to save hilltop boulders’. According to the people doing the calling, the boulders were placed at the top of what is now an Auckland hillock prior to Maori settlement by a group of fair-skinned people, claimed to be Celtic voyagers. Hmmm. One of those campaigning for the boulders […]
Continue readingan alien star-child?
Last week one of my students wrote to me about something they’d seen on TV: My friend & I saw this on Breakfast this morning. Although we don’t think it is all true, we are still interested because they talked a lot about the skull’s morphology & how they believe it is the offspring from a […]
Continue readingfish oil follow-up (& some more stats)
I’ve written previously on suposed ‘trials’ of the benefits of fish oil on kids’ school performance. One was the ‘Durham trial’, where a large cohort of schoolchildren was given fish oil supplements without any real scientific basis for doing so; another was in New Zealand. As I said then, one of the many problems with this […]
Continue readingsocial networking & morality
Reading the UK newspaper, the Telegraph, I see that social networking sites can be bad for your moral values. Scientists say so, so it must be true… Only they didn’t, & it’s not. Ben Goldacre has picked up on this story (along with other examples of overblown reporting in the UK press). The paper on which […]
Continue readingben goldacre’s missing chapter
I’m a big fan of Ben Goldacre’s – I read his coliumn regularly & thoroughly enjoyed his recent book, Bad Science. Except for the missing chapter – when the book was published, Ben was engaged in a court battle over the content of that particular part of the book. Anyway, that’s over, Ben (& the newspaper […]
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