Briefly: I thought this was a pricing error, but it turns out it’s deliberate, so… My book is £2.49 on Kindle for the next week or so. Read the rest of this entry »
Why won’t Professor Greenfield publish this theory in a scientific journal?
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 22 October 2011
This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, apparently announced that computer games are causing dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information: but it comes to us from the opening of a new wing at an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that’s not really what she meant. But they couldn’t say what she does mean.
Read the rest of this entry »
Great piece in .net magazine about nerdydaytrips.com
Hi, just to say, there’s a great piece in this month’s .net magazine about www.nerdydaytrips.com, the crowd-sourced dorky-days-out Why-Don’t-You project I built with Applecado, Aaron Rudd, and Jo Brodie. Read the rest of this entry »
New edition of “Testing Treatments”, best pop science book on Evidence Based Medicine ever.
People often ask if there’s one good book that is accessible to all, about how evidence based medicine works. The answer is undoubtedly “Testing Treatments“. I name-check it to death in Bad Science, I learnt a huge amount from it, and it’s just come out in a new edition. You can (generously!) download the full text as a PDF for free here, and there are translations in various languages for free on that page too. I recommend getting a paper copy (they’re lovely and it’s very readable) here, there’s a proper Kindle edition here, and the publisher page is here. Meanwhile a website version with extra resources is coming shortly.
I genuinely, truly, cannot recommend this awesome book highly enough for its clarity, depth, and humanity. My foreword for the new edition is pasted below. Read the rest of this entry »
What if academics were as dumb as quacks with statistics?
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 10th September 2011
We all like to laugh at quacks when they misuse basic statistics. But what if academics, en masse, deploy errors that are equally foolish? This week Sander Nieuwenhuis and colleagues publish a mighty torpedo in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
They’ve identified one direct, stark statistical error that is so widespread it appears in about half of all the published papers surveyed from the academic neuroscience research literature. Read the rest of this entry »
You might also enjoy my second blog…
As well as being here I’m also there: here’s a quick round-up of recent posts from my other blog where I post scatty, brief scribbles in between bouts of real work, they’re in the sidebar on the right too. Read the rest of this entry »
Cherry picking is bad. At least warn us when you do it.
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 September 2011
Last week the Daily Mail and the Today programme took some bait from Aric Sigman, an author of popular sciencey books about the merits of traditional values. “Sending babies and toddlers to daycare could do untold damage to the development of their brains and their future health,” explained the Mail.
These news stories were based on a scientific paper by Sigman in The Biologist. It misrepresents individual studies, as Professor Dorothy Bishop demonstrated almost immediately, and it cherry-picks the scientific literature, selectively referencing only the studies that support Sigman’s view. Normally this charge of cherry-picking would take a column of effort to prove, but this time Sigman himself admits it, frankly, in a PDF posted on his own website. Read the rest of this entry »
Benford’s Law: using stats to bust an entire nation for naughtiness.
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 17 September 2011
This week we might bust an entire nation for handing over dodgy economic statistics. But first: why would they bother? Well, it turns out that whole countries have an interest in distorting their accounts, just like companies and individuals. If you’re an Euro member like Greece, for example, you have to comply with various economic criteria, and there’s the risk of sanctions if you miss them. Read the rest of this entry »
Brain imaging studies report more positive findings than their numbers can support. This is fishy.
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 August 2011
While the authorities are distracted by mass disorder, we can do some statistics. You’ll have seen plenty of news stories telling you that one part of the brain is bigger, or smaller, in people with a particular mental health problem, or even a specific job. These are generally based on real, published scientific research. But how reliable are the studies?
One way of critiquing a piece of research is to read the academic paper itself, in detail, looking for flaws. But that might not be enough, if some sources of bias might exist outside the paper, in the wider system of science.
