DC's Improbable Science

Jump to follow-up The Scottish Universities Medical Journal asked me to write about the regulation of alternative medicine. It’s an interesting topic and not easy to follow because of the veritable maze of more than twenty overlapping regulators and quangos which fail utterly to protect the public against health fraud. In fact they mostly promote [...]

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Jump to follow-up This is a very important book. Buy it now (that link is to Waterstone’s Amazon don’t pay tax in the UK, so don’t use them). When you’ve read it, do something about it. The book has lots of suggestions about what to do. Stolen from badscience.net   Peter Medawar, the eminent biologist, [...]

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Jump to follow-up Academic staff are going to be fired at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). It’s possible that universities may have to contract a bit in hard times, so what’s wrong? What’s wrong is that the victims are being selected in a way that I can describe only as insane. The criteria they [...]

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Jump to follow-up One of my first posts about nonsense taught in universities was about the University of Westminster (April 2008): Westminster University BSc: “amethysts emit high yin energy”. since then, there have been several more revelations. Jump to follow-up Professor Petts The vice-cnancellor of Westminster, Professor Geoffrey Petts, with whom the buck stops, did [...]

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As promised in my last post about Edinburgh Napier University, I wrote to the vice-chancellor of the university, Professor Dame Joan K. Stringer DBE, BA (Hons) CertEd PhD CCMI FRSA FRSE, to invite her to respond. 7 February, 2011 Dear Professor Stringer, I should be grateful if you could let me know about your opinion [...]

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In 2009 I asked Napier University Edinburgh for details of what was taught on its herbal medicine "BSc" course. At first it was refused, but then (as often seems to happen when threatened with exposure) the course was closed, and Napier sent what I’d asked for without waiting for the judgement from the Scottish Information [...]

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Times Higher Education published today a version of an earlier post on this blog, Why should a postman pay for your university education?. Although the submtted version was within length, it got shortened and, worse, a bit garbled in places. I got no chance to check the final version. The penultimate paragraph was not written [...]

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One of my greatest scientific heros is A.V.Hill, and its one of my great regrets that I saw him only in the distance. He’s a hero partly because of his science, but also because of his other interests, in particular his efforts to help scientists escape from pre-war Germany. Read the Biographical Memoir of Hill, [...]

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Jump to follow-up We hear a lot about lifelong education, and a good thing too. But we have a government that seems to think life ends at 18. The contrast between official attitudes to schools and post-school education is striking. The contrast is most striking in two areas: religious discrimination and public support for costs. [...]

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Jump to follow-up Research quangos lead to mediocrity is the headline title of a letter to The Times appeared on 6 December 2010. It is reproduced below for those who can’t (or won’t) pay Rupert Murdoch to see it. The letter is about the current buzzword, "research impact", a term that trips off the lips [...]

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One problem with the Browne report is that it didn’t consider the whole picture. It looked only at how to fund universities as they are now, and concluded that arts and humanities weren’t worth funding at all. What it failed to do (and to be fair, it wasn’t asked to do) was think what universities [...]

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Jump to follow-up The mainstream media eventually catch up with bloggers. BBC1 TV (Wales) produced an excellent TV programme that exposed the enormous degree validation scam run by the University of Wales. It also exposed the uselessness of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). Both these things have been written about repeatedly here for some years. [...]

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This is part 2 of a critique of Steiner Waldorf schools. Part 1 was The true nature of Steiner (Waldorf) education. Mystical barmpottery at taxpayers’ expense. Part 1 The part 3 is Steiner Waldorf Schools Part 3. The problem of racism. This essay is largely devoted to the methods used by the Steiner movement in [...]

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Jump to follow-up The proposals made here are intended to improve postgraduate education with little harm to undergraduate education and no extra cost. It is not intended to get the government off the hook when it comes to funding of either teaching or research. The recent Royal Society report, The Scientific Century: securing our future [...]

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Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, said on the Radio 4 Today programme on September 8th 2010 “There was some estimate on the basis of surveys done recently that something in the order of 45 per cent of the research grants that were going through was to research that was [...]

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