I’m doing this awesome massive nerd tour with Simon Singh, Brian Cox and Robin Ince. We will talk about science and it will be funny. Also, we will make a Spinal Tap tour video. Come! There will be shouting and enthusiasm and nerd facts just like in our Godless shows and festival stuff.
The year in nonsense
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 18 December 2010
It’s been a marvellous year for bullshit. We saw quantitative evidence showing that drug adverts aimed at doctors are routinely factually inaccurate, while pharmaceutical company ghostwriters were the secret hands behind letters to the Times, and a whole series of academic papers. We saw more drug companies and even regulators withholding evidence from doctors and patients that a drug was dangerous – the most important and neglected ethical issue in modern medicine — and that whistleblowers have a rubbish life. Read the rest of this entry »
NMT are suing Dr Wilmshurst. So how trustworthy are this company? Let’s look at their website…
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 11 December 2010
You will hopefully remember – from the era before Wikileaks – that US medical device company NMT are suing NHS cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst over his comments about the conduct and results of the MIST trial, which sadly for NMT found no evidence that their device prevents migraine. The MIST trial was funded by NMT, and Wilmshurst was lead investigator until problems arose.
Wilmshurst has already paid £100,000 of his own money to defend himself, risking his house, and spent every weekend and all his annual leave, unpaid, dealing with this, at great cost to his family. So what kind of a company is NMT Medical, that the British libel courts have allowed to hound one man for almost two years? And how trustworthy are their utterances?
I made a documentary about science and libel for the BBC: here it is
Hi all, I made a documentary for the BBC World Service on libel and science. It’s really good, go and listen to it here:
Illusions of control
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 4 December 2010
Why do clever people believe stupid things? It’s difficult to make sense of the world from the small atoms of experience that we each gather as we wander around it, and a new paper in the British Journal of Psychology this month shows how we can create illusions of causality, much like visual illusions, if we manipulate the cues and clues we present. Read the rest of this entry »
A new and interesting form of wrong
Ben Goldacre. The Guardian, Saturday 27 November 2010
Wrong isn’t enough: we need interestingly wrong, and this week that came in some research from Stonewall, an organisation for whom I generally have great respect, which was reported in the Guardian. Stonewall have conducted a survey, and their press release says it shows “the average coming out age has fallen by over 20 years”.
People may well be coming out earlier than before – intuitively that seems plausible – but Stonewall’s survey is flawed by design, and contains some interesting statistical traps. Read the rest of this entry »
“Hello madam, would you like your children to be unemployed?”
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 20 November 2010
Obviously I like nerdy days out: like Kelvedon Hatch secret nuclear bunker, maybe, with its sign on the A128 saying “secret nuclear bunker this way”. Last month eight of us commissioned a boat to get onto a rotting man-made WW2 sea-fort in the middle of the ocean through Project Redsand (we genuinely thought we might die climbing the ladders), and a couple of weeks earlier, myself and Mrs Bad Science travelled to Dungeness, where a toytown narrow gauge railway takes you through amusement parks and back gardens, past Derek Jarman’s house, then into barren wasteland, before depositing you incongruously at the base of a magnificent, enormous, and terrifying nuclear power station.
Science is about embracing your knockers – updated as Rodial begin to play games
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 November 2010
If science has any credibility, it derives from transparency: when you make a claim about how something works, you provide references to experiments, which describe openly and in full what was done, in enough detail for the experiment to be replicated, detailing what was measured, and how. Then people discuss what they think this all means in the real world.
Maria Hatzistefanis is a star of lifestyle pages and the owner of Rodial, the cosmetics company who sell a product called “Boob Job” which they claim will give you a “fuller bust” “increase the bust size” and “plump up the décolleté area” with “an instant lifting and firming effect”, and an increase of half a cup size in 56 days. Or rather an increase of “8.4%”. It’s all very precise. Read the rest of this entry »
The glorious mess of real scientific results
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 6 November 2010
Popular science is often triumphalist, presenting research as a set of completed answers, when in reality much of what gets published makes a glorious, necessary mess.
Here is an example. Read the rest of this entry »
Neuro-realism
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 30 October 2010
When the BBC tells you, in a headline, that libido problems are in the brain and not in the mind, then you might find yourself wondering what the difference between the two is supposed to be, and whether a science article can really be assuming – in 2010 – that its readers buy into some strange form of cartesian dualism, in which the self is contained by a funny little spirit entity in constant pneumatic connection with the corporeal realm.
But first let’s consider the experiment they’re reporting on. Read the rest of this entry »
