Well, I’ve just got back from a series of conferences (3 in the space of 10 days) – & all of them about teaching! I was getting pretty tired by the end of it all, but at the same time it was really good to be able to spend time talking about teaching (& about […]
Continue readingTag: science & society
astrology can help achieve pregnancy? um, really?
Over at Grant’s, a commenter on one of his posts noted that, in its ‘World News’ pages, the Dominion-Post included an article entitled: "Pioneering’ astrology analysis may help women get pregnant after IVF treatment has failed". The commenter said he’d nearly choked on his weetbix when he saw that, & I can sympathise. I’d like […]
Continue readinga little exercise in critical thinking
Grant‘s just sent me a piece that a recent Sciblog commenter posted on a US website. (Oh, all right, it was the Huffington Post. Not a place to go for good science coverage, but anyway…) I knew a New Zealand dairy farmer who told me that her 9-year-old daughter had been growing breasts and pubic […]
Continue readingseven signs of bogus science
Over at Sciblogs there’s a lengthy comments thread on vaccination, following an excellent post by Darcy on some myths about vaccines. I hesitate to call the thread a ‘debate’ because, frankly, it’s impossible to actually debate someone who practices what evolutionary biologists would call the ‘Gish gallop’ – firing off so many factoids that you […]
Continue readinghomeopathic ‘vaccines’ and smallpox
in a reversal of normal practice, what follows was first written for the Sciblogs site (usually it’s the other way around) but I thought I’d share it here as well 🙂 Okay, a bit late for ‘vaccination awareness week’ but I have to share this one. Over on Science-Based Medicine, Mark Crislip is talking about […]
Continue readingvaccination & smallpox
One last post for raising-awareness-of-the-science-behind-vaccination week 🙂 On one of Grant’s threads, an antivaccination commenter has posted links to very old images of smallpox victims from a German publication. The commenter implies that these patients acquired the infection as a result of a smallpox vaccination (as I don’t speak or read German I can’t comment […]
Continue readinghomeopathic vaccinations – fail
Since over at SciBlogs many of us are blogging about vaccination, I thought I’d take the opportunity to re-post something I wrote earlier this year, concerning the promotion of homeopathic ‘vaccines’ for a range of serious illnesses. Over on Code for Life, Grant’s put up some posts concerning homeopathy (here & here, for example). He’s also […]
Continue readingchelation quackery around vaccination
You may be aware that November 1-6 is ‘Vaccine Awareness Week’ (a reminder from Darcy, over at SciBlogs, prompted my previous post.). Those who originally gave the week this label are actually strongly-antivaccines, so all the more reason for some science-based discussion around it as well 🙂
Continue readingon polio
As a child, in the 1920s, my mother contracted polio. It left her with little in the way of the muscle at the base of her right thumb, and her right calf muscle was much smaller than the left. At about the same time my friend Dorothy (who fairly obviously wasn’t my friend at the […]
Continue readinglady gaga in the lab?
The government’s Tertiary Education Strategy makes it clear that New Zealand needs to continue to develop a well-educated workforce, and that one of the priorities within this is to support high quality research that helps to drive innovation. So it’s fair to say that a fair proportion of that workforce needs to be employed in areas based on science, […]
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