DC's Improbable Science

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 I had never intended to write about climate. It is too far from the things I know about. But recent events have unleashed a Palin-esque torrent of comments from people who clearly know even less about it than I do. In any case, it provides a good context to think about trust [...]

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Jump to follow-up We have listed many reasons hear why you should never trust Boots.  Here are the previous ones. Can you trust Boots? Don’t Trust Boots Boots reaches new level of dishonesty with CoQ10 promotion This post is about a "functional food".  That is about something a bit more serious than homeopathy, though I’ll [...]

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Jump to follow-up Being interested in science communication, I was pleased when the BMJ asked me to review Unscientific America , by Chris Monney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. The BMJ provides a link that allows you access to the whole review. They have made very few changes from the submitted version, which is reproduced below (with [...]

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BSc courses in homeopathy are closing. Is it a victory for campaigners, or just the end of the Blair/Bush era? The Guardian carries a nice article by Anthea Lipsett, The Opposite of Science (or download pdf of print version). Dr Peter Davies, dean of Westminster’s school of integrated health, says “he welcomes the debate but [...]

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Jump to follow-up Sense about Science have just produced a rather good pamphlet that exposes, yet again. the meaningless marketing slogan “detox”.  You can download the pamphlet from their web site. The pamphlet goes through the claims of eleven products.  Needless to say, the claims are either meaningless, or simply untrue. Garnier Clean Detox Anti-Dullness [...]

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Jump to follow-up Alfred Joseph Clark FRS held the established chair of Pharmacology at UCL from 1919 to 1926, when he left for Edinburgh.  In the 1920s and 30s, Clark was a great pioneer in the application of quantitative physical ideas to pharmacology.   As well as his classic scientific works, like The Mode of [...]

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There have been some really excellent books about quackery this year.  This isn’t one of them, because Nice dedication uh? it is about a lot more than quackery  It is about the scientific method in general. and in particular about how often it is misunderstood by journalists.  Abuse of evidence by the pharmaceutical industry is [...]

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After writing the recent post Boots reaches new level of dishonesty with CoQ10 promotion, I sent a complaint about the dishonesty of the advertisements to the Advertising Standards Authority. I got a surprsingly fast response. On April 22 I got “it appears you have a valid point and, with a view to acting quickly, have [...]

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This afternoon I went to the Coliseum to see a revival of Jonathan Miller’s 1986 production of the Mikado. It was beautifully staged. The well-known patter song of Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner of Japan, begged for a version that deals with anti-science (original here). The serious post will come later. Meanwhile here’s some late [...]

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This is the third post based on a recent trip to North America (here are the first and second) One aspect of the endarkenment, the Wal-Mart model of a university, is very much the same in the US as in the UK. At one US university, an excellent scientist offered the theory that an alien [...]

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We hear a lot about leadership these days. It has become one of the favourite buzzwords of those who do neither research not teaching. The word occurred six times in a recent HR-speak document that was sent to explain the criteria for promotion to a chair. Quite what it means is never clear. Could it [...]

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The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) last week had a headline “Staff loyalty key to Hefce report”. Staff loyalty is something I’m interested in, so I read on eagerly. The article was about report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). It came from their Leadership, Governance and Management Strategic Advisory Committee (dated [...]

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No longer are we just told what to do from the top. Important decisions are preceded by a long period of consultation. That is a wonderful contribution to democracy. Sometimes. But in truth, these consultations are only too often totally sham public relations exercises. Here are a couple of examples. The first is a government [...]

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This may seem very odd to people outside the biosciences area, but in recent years a business has grown up that will write a paper for you, on the basis of data supplied by a pharmaceutical company. The person who actually did the writing will usually not appear as an author at all This practice [...]

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