[BPSDB] Interesting goings on around Dore and Wikipedia
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]It will probably surprise absolutely nobody to learn that NaturalNews are Wakefield defenders, although in this item by Aaron Turpen we can see a few goalposts being shifted. The news has been full of headlines trumpeting the discrediting of Dr. Andrew Wakefield`s 1998 study on vaccines (specifically MMR, measles-mumps-rubella) and childhood autism…the news outlets in the main stream wax poetic about their belief that this discredits all autism-vaccine links… Turpen isn’t wrong in his description of the press reaction, although they are wrong to claim that the ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

Just a quick note to say I can be heard jibber-jabbering in this week's Righteous Indignation Podcast, self-appointedly standing in for Marsh. First 'live' podcast I've done, and in fairness I could have benefited from a whisper less Dutch courage and ounce or two more coherence.Still, the edit is kind, and you can hear Trystan Swale, Hayley Stevens, Gavin Schofield and myself discuss skeptical news, ghosts and interview Rose Shapiro, author of "Suckers: How Alternative Medicine makes fools of us all" here (download).It was great fun to do - thanks to the RI team for the opportunity.BPSDB
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

Hot off the heels of the 10:23 campaign and the UK Parliamentary Science & Technology "Evidence Check" on homeopathy, a major UK supplier of homeopathic products has been investigated by the MHRA Enforcement Division, and forced to make website changes.Nelson's had previously stated that their homeopathic product 30c Sulphur is known amongst homeopaths for its many skin benefits.This is, of course, not in keeping with the UK legislation on homeopathic products which says that homeopathic products not licensed under the EU's National Rules Scheme must not provide therapeutic indications ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

[BPSDB] Mike Adams is turning into a parody of himself. If I had read this just about anywhere other than NaturalNews, I would have thought the author was taking the piss. Our Mike jumps from the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a government plot to reduce the civilian population in the space of three paragraphs:- Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has has recommended that the NHS should no longer fund homeopathy and that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency should ban medical claims on homeopathic remedies. I am not going to blog about that as it has been done already, such as here. What I am going to blog about is the all too predictable head-in-the-sand attitude of the Society of Homeopaths. You can read their press release here. First they moan that the Committe had dared to investigate whether or not homeopathy actually works:- Central to these ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

And about time to.The UK Parliament Science & Technology Committee today published their 'Evidence Check' into homeopathy.Lots of blogs and news outlets have been tiggerish with excitement and covering this excellently, so no need to repeat it all here - XtalDave has a good roundup of the blogs covering it, but suffice today the report (.pdf here) concluded that the NHS shouldn't fund Homeopathic hospitals, that the theory behind homeopathy was 'weak', that homeopathy trials have shown it is no better than placebo (very different from there being no evidence), that homeopathy decreases ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

[BPSDB]I recently made a Freedom of Information request to the University of Westminster via the What Do They Know website, for documents relating to the decision to offer the Diploma in Qigong Tuina. These are the documents I received as a result. The Proposal for Validation gives the total campus costs of providing the course as £32,378.17, Central Cost recharges as £9,873.59 and estimates a total income of £84,300 would be generated. Thus the profits surplus would be £42,048.24. This is not really much compared to the total budget of a University and therefore does not seem to be the ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] In the wake of the latest outrageously dishonest headlines misquoting Phil Jones, the excellent  Open Mind blog presented a good account of the error, and also initiated a civilised and productive discussion on how to present the facts to the general public. I urge you to read it. I hope to post some thoughts [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

[BPSDB] After threats from a couple of quacks, the blog For the Sake of Science was taken down by WordPress for ‘terms of service violations’. Pharyngula has several posts on the subject. Andreas Moritz is one of the quacks – he is clearly a vile person who exploits desperate people, and he would be up against [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

[BPSDB] The ten23 campaign looked at homoeopathic pills: there’s no active ingredient in them, once diluted beyond a certain level.  This post is going to look at the Dore treatment for dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD: and suggest that there’s no good evidence it works and (aside from the placebo effect) there may be nothing in it. Following [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] According to Mike Adams, disease is either your fault or your doctor’s. At least, that is the understanding I get from reading this. There are a few grains of truth in his latest pronouncement but it is padded out with the usual Adams factoids. Such as this:- Mainstream consumers, you see, have been trained by the medical industry to believe that disease strikes spontaneously, without any real cause. One day you have nothing wrong with you, and then suddenly the next day you’re diagnosed with a breast cancer tumor. Shazam! It happens just like being struck by ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] Mike ‘Health DRanger’ Adams is at it again – this time claiming that being vaccinated increases ones chances of catching the disease. All he demonstrates is that he does not understand simple statistics. Here he says:- Just this week, an outbreak of mumps among more than 1,000 people in New Jersey and New York has raised alarm among infectious disease authorities. The outbreak itself is not unusual, though. What’s unusual is that the health authorities slipped up and admitted that most of the people infected with mumps had already been vaccinated against ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB]I cannot be the only person infuriated by the decision of Mike Adams, the self-styled ‘Health Ranger’, to exploit the tragic killing of an eight year old boy to push his agenda. I hope you don’t mind me adding to the criticism but I need to, well, let off steam about it. He begins:- I’ve always said that Big Pharma executives were guilty of crimes against humanity. Now one of their wealthiest and most successful executives has been caught trying to pull off a murder-suicide in an upscale NY hotel. Gigi Jordan, who ran pharmaceutical companies selling pills to ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB]You can always rely on the self-appointed ‘Health Ranger’ for an understated opinion on conventional medicine. In his latest newsletter he says:- Looking for a way to fry your brain and cause memory problems and impaired cognitive function? Just submit to radiation therapy (and kiss your brain good-bye…) Kind of implies that all radiation therapy will destroy your brain does it not? Reality turns out to be a bit different. He links to this article by NaturalNews staff writer David Guttierrez. The first thing that struck me on reading it was that it does not quite ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] Sceptics stage homeopathy ‘overdose’: ‘The society [of Homeopaths]' chief executive, Paula Ross, said: “This is an ill advised publicity stunt in very poor taste, which does nothing to advance the scientific debate about how homeopathy actually works.”’ It. Doesn't. Work. There's no ‘scientific debate’ to be had about how something works if it doesn't work and it the quality of your science is represented by nonsense like this.
Read more [SHPalman's Blog] 

[BPSDB]Mike Adams, the self-appointed ‘Health Ranger’ seems to be getting a tad defensive about his anti-sceptic diatribe For example, he now says:- Getting back to the skeptics themselves, some of them took my article way too personally, attributing every single statement to themselves. Well of course every single belief in that article isn’t followed by every single “skeptic” person. It is hardly surprising that sceptics “attribute every single statement to themselves” since every statement began either “skeptics believe” or ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

Just a note to say that I've got a bit on The Pod Delusion this week (see above or download from here) blethering about homeopathic labelling and registration. (I know, pretty raunchy, huh?)Please don't leave any comments about my voice making me sound like a dick - that is already an established fact.The last two words on my bit were in response to Skeptic's With A K podcast - episode in question here. Please add SWAK podcast to your list of weekly podcast downloads here.BPSDB
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

[BPSDB]Mike Adams, the self-styled ‘Health Ranger’, has decided to debunk scepticism here. He claims that the views he describes have been pulled from sceptic websites but he gives no links. He claims that this is because he does not wish to boost sceptics’ google rankings but there is a way round this; he could replace the t’s in http with x’s. Readers could then copy and paste the url into their address bar and change the x’s back to t’s. This would allow them to look at his evidence without links boosting the rankings. The fact that he does not ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] BIS and Science: So What? So Everything promote bad research in the name of science communication: insisting that this bad research is "rigorous and credible".
Read more [Holford Watch] 

You may have already come across the 10:23 campaign, a project that aims to raise awareness about the reality of homeopathy coordinated by the Merseyside Skeptics Society.At 10:23am on January 30th 2010, more than three hundred homeopathy skeptics nationwide will be taking part in a mass homeopathic 'overdose' in protest at Boots' continued endorsement and sale of homeopathic remedies, and to raise public awareness about the fact that homeopathic remedies have nothing in them. The campaign has been picked up by a number of media outlets - The Independent here and here, The Telegraph, The ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

[BPSDB] BBC Radio Oxford broadcast an infomercial for Patrick Holford's books and his commercial diet programme. They did not invite any experts to discuss his diet or claims, question whether the 'free diet trial' involved purchasing supplements or blood tests, nor ask for detail of the 'science' that he claims supports his advice.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]I have received a reply to my Freedom of Information request to the University of Westminster for “research papers or other documents” that support claims made by their School of Life Sciences for the qigong tuina course they offer. You can read the reply here. As I have mentioned previously I was somewhat surprised that a university biology department was making claims about the usefulness of qi in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions so I made the following request: I would like to see copies of the research papers or other documents that support the ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] Having completed a second full year of blogging, I thought I’d do as I did in 2008 and post an overview of the year. It’s a bit late as I’ve just returned from South Africa and most of the time was a fair distance from an internet connection. Enough excuses. Talking of Africa leads neatly to the beginning of the year when I (along with many other bloggers, particularly Gimpy) covered the activities of Jeremy Sherr in Tanzania. Sherr not only claimed that homeopathy can cure AIDS but also talked of conducting human trials in Tanzania. This would be in breach of the ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] Uncritical and rather tedious Times article on Holford, superfoods, etc.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] Apparently the company ‘An Oasis of Healing‘ has written to the excellent My Malignant Melanoma blog – asking that a blog about Thomas Lodi is removed and saying they will be “forced to take legal action” if the post is not removed. It therefore seems like a good time to look at some of [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] It has been nice to see a lot ofgood coverage of the recent Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upholding of my complaint against Dore. One more forum to add to the list is Paul Flynn MP’s excellent blog: Flynn discusses how Dore “has been resurrected” and reminds readers of last year’s Early Day Motion about Dore. [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] In the holiday season, people often worry about weight gain. I’m not sure that things quite add up with Holford’s blog’s contribution to the discussion, though. A contributor has blogged that Research has shown that women in particular tend to put on 7 pounds a year. This steady weight gain is often linked to [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] After Wednesday’s ASA ruling, it’s great to see Dore starting to get some critical publicity. The Sun’s Jane Symons reports that Professor Maggie Snowling, a literacy expert based at York University, has analysed the trial most often used by promoters of the programme. She said: “There were no significant improvements on the key tasks of [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] I was delighted to see that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint of mine about Dore’s advertising. I complained about an advert referring to “help with Dyslexia, ADHD, Dyspraxia or Asperger’s”. The ASA has reviewed the evidence Dore submitted to support their claims, and found that: the evidence was inadequate to [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

You can help beat Trafigura’s gag on the BBC by embedding this Youtube video on your website……and linking to this pdf! See here (full blogpost) as to why.(H/T to Carmen Gets Around and Don't Get Fooled Again.)BPSDB
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

Whilst browsing Wikipedia, I came across a poignant early example of publication bias, the failure to make public scientific results that don't support a given hypothesis.The Judenzählung was a census of the German military carried out in 1916, at the height of the First World War. It was designed to measure the number of Jewish soldiers in the army.The background to this was the feeling, very powerful in Germany at that time, that the Jewish German minority were "unpatriotic" or "traitorous", and were dodging military service or avoiding front line combat.The survey was completed, but the ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

Breaking news from the BBC -Testosterone link to aggression 'all in the mind' Work in Nature magazine suggests the mind can win over hormones... Testosterone induces anti-social behaviour in humans, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect rather than its biological activity, suggest the authors. The researchers, led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, said the results suggested a case of "mind over matter" with the brain overriding body chemistry. "Whereas other animals may be predominantly under the influence of biological factors such as ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

Sinking and Swimming is a paper just out from the Young Foundation, a British think-tank. It "explores how psychological and material needs are being met and unmet in Britain." I'm not sure how useful their broad concept of "unmet needs" is, but there's some rather interesting data in this report.On page 238, and prominently in the executive summary, we find the following terrifying graph, which comes with warnings like "anxiety and depression looks set to double during the course of a single generation..." The % of the population self-reporting suffering from depression or anxiety seems ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

In yesterday's Guardian, Nick Davies, author of seemingly every British blogger's favourite book, Flat Earth News, delivered a pair of remarkable articles that confirmed him as one of the country's most important journalists.In the first, Davies reported that a recent nationwide police initiative, Operation Pentameter, did not convict anyone of the crime of forcing women into prostitution after illegally trafficking them into the country.This is rather surprising because, as he explains in a companion comment piece, forced sex trafficking has been widely reported as rife in Britain. The ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

[BPSDB] Relying on bad science to justify educational choices is a truly sorry situation. Providing state funding to support this is even worse.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] My requests for the scientific basis for the claims made for the University of Westminster’s qigong tuina course have so far remained unanswered. What a surprise. Not. On 23rd November I emailed the course leader as described here. A week later, I had received no reply, not even an acknowledgement so I emailed the Dean of the School of Life Sciences, Professor Jane Lewis, with the same request. I hoped that a proper scientist as opposed to a CAM therapist would understand the nature of evidence and the need for the scrutiny of scientific claims. In this I have so far been ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] In many comments on the CRU hack I’ve seen it alleged that Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit denied his data to another researcher with the words, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” Whenever [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

[BPSDB] Years ago, when I was a researcher, I used a technique called ‘infrared spectroscopy’ a lot.  It involves passing infrared radiation through a sample of a substance, then splitting the infrared radiation up into its various frequencies (a spectrum) and measuring which frequencies are absorbed by the substance. Most substances (though not all) absorb [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

[BPSDB] 32,500,000 hits for ‘climategate’ on Google today, and I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve seen most of them. Lots of repetition there, but what I have yet to see is any actual evidence of climate data being suppressed or distorted to falsify conclusions. Only tendentious interpretations of selected quotes from emails that were [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

10:23pm on a Friday night - this is my rock and roll life. Due to moving house, I've had a month off blogging. Luckily nothing in the areas that I tend to blog about has happened in the last month. Oh, apart from the UK Parliament having an evidence check session on homeopathy which is brilliantly on YouTube, so you can watch some governmental weaselling and squirming at your convenience. Lots of good blogs have been covering this such as Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, Lay Science and The Quackometer. All this, and I missed it.....The upshot of the session was a glut of anti-homeopathy ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

It's every man's dream - a pill to make women want more sex. According to Boehringer Pharmaceuticals, that dream could be a reality in a few years, in the form of the strangely-named flibanserin. But is it the latest wonder-drug or just a glorified sleeping pill? Read on.Flibanserin was originally developed as an antidepressant, but in clinical trials against depression it reportedly failed to perform better than placebo. The standard for getting approved as an antidepressant is low, so this is quite an achievement.The BBC today described flibanserin as the "Female Viagra", which is rather ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

[BPSDB] Concerns about Science So What website: poor accessibility, some poor quality content, and poor use of social media.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] BANT have not even acknowledged my complaint e-mail
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]It would appear that the University of Westminster have learned nothing from the intellectual mauling they received from Professor David Colquhoun over their homeopathy degree. I happenned to be looking at their website today when I noticed that they are offering an undergraduate diploma in qigong tuina. I had never heard of this so clicked the link to have a closer look. Oh dear. Lots of stuff about qi energy, including claims that the understanding of this nebulous concept will improve diagnosis and treatment. However, a contact email address for Rosey Grandage, the diploma ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

I have recently returned from an excellent holiday in sunny Spain.  Predictably, my first Monday back at work was a bit of a trial.  It was a training day to support the implementation of a new performance management system.  Not the most enjoyable part of my working life, but fair enough. However, after an excellent introduction from our CEO, the trial began in earnest when the following two words were projected onto a screen at the front of the auditorium: “BRAIN GYM” Before moving into the course proper, our brains apparently needed some fine-tuning from a well-known piece of quackery* ...
Read more [A canna’ change the laws of physics] 

[BPSDB] So it seems that Lionel R. Milgrom's legal knowledge rivals his physics for ignorance, delusion, and disregard of reality: Lionel R. Milgrom Lionel R. Milgrom All the while, speaking with a voice of (worthless) authority.
Read more [SHPalman's Blog] 

In the third part of my series examining an attempted refutation of the critics of homeopathy (Milgrom, 2009) I look at the claim that homeopathy has a serious scientific foundation. Dilute Science This part of the essay starts by outlining a common criticism levelled at the most common form of homeopathy practised in the US and UK.  This calls homeopathy unscientific because: “[…] in many homeopathic remedies, the original substance has been diluted out of molecular existence, detractors claim belief in homeopathy has no basis in science as ‘nothing cannot do ...
Read more [A canna’ change the laws of physics] 

[BPSDB]There’s only one word that describes July 17th feedback article from Ham’s idiot site– FAIL! The most dumbest explanation to why humans and dinosaurs are never found together in the fossil record is a total failure right from the start and Bodie Hodge knows it. He knows that what he believes about dinosaurs and humans living together thousands of years ago is completely false. But that’s not stopping him from making a fool of himself, explaining away why are there no humans and dinosaurs found together in the fossil record. To start the idiocy off, Hodge begins his explanation by ...
Read more [Stupid Dinosaur Lies] 

PTET finds a video riff on the theme of Expelled (2008), made with images from Tom Weller’s classic Science Made Stupid (1985). Let this be your BPSDB for today.
Read more [Science After Sunclipse] 

A fellow named Terry Witt has been advertising his self-published book, Our Undiscovered Universe, in places like Discover magazine and Scientific American. Unfortunately, the ad pages aren’t exactly peer-reviewed, or even cross-checked with a nearby grad student; being businesses, magazines naturally care about revenue. Upon examination, Our Undiscovered Universe turns out to be brimming over with crank physics and general nonsense. Ben Monreal, who was one of the intimidatingly smart people in the lab where I did my undergrad thesis, has weighed Witt’s “Null ...
Read more [Science After Sunclipse] 

Time for a little BPSDB! The redoubtable Ben Goldacre has the dirt on Bill Nelson’s “QXCI machine,” a device for “bioenergetic health auditing,” a medical procedure well-known among specialists as an essential step in the surgical removal of cash from wallets. Best of all, though, is what QXCI stands for: Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface. Now, quantum physics has jack to do with consciousness, but more importantly, “quantum xrroid” just sounds. . . painful. Like a blood boil growing inside your X, if you know what I mean. Maybe a ...
Read more [Science After Sunclipse] 

Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers had a lengthy, informal chat during the 2008 American Atheists conference in Minneapolis, and a recording of their conversation is now available on DVD and in the video tubes. They discuss the fight against pseudoscience as well as several interesting topics in good science. I did my best to summarize the kin-vs.-group business in this book review. Among the “glimmerings” which suggest there’s a better way to think about some evolutionary processes (name for that better way still to be defined) are, I think, the epidemiological simulations ...
Read more [Science After Sunclipse]