I have to read a lot of newspapers, and I enjoy doing it. Recently I found myself in a gentlemens’ club, chatting, in passing, with a couple of fairly senior chaps from the better known ones. This is the kind of situation I would generally avoid, but emboldened by the Diet Pepsi I began to offer unsolicited advice on what newspapers should do with the internet: as a punter, as a microfamous internet oligarch and, of course, as a gentleman. These were my words of wisdom, many of them developed in conversation, and therefore not entirely my own.

I’d be properly interested to know your thoughts.

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Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday August 25 2007

I want you to know that I love evolutionary psychologists, because the ideas, like “girls prefer pink because they need to be better at hunting berries” are so much fun. Sure there are problems, like, we don’t know a lot about life in the pleistocene period through which humans evolved; their claims sound a bit like “just so” stories, relying on their own internal, circular logic; the existing evidence for genetic influence on behaviour, emotion, and cognition, is coarse; they only pick the behaviours which they think they can explain while leaving the rest; and they get themselves in massive trouble as soon as they go beyond examining broad categories of human behaviors across societies and cultures, becoming crassly ethnocentric. But that doesn’t stop me enjoying their ideas. Read the rest of this entry »

Send me your old O level, CSE, GCSE and A level science and maths papers, any format, any condition, email ben@badscience.net, fax 020 7117 3593, snailmail 119 Farringdon Rd EC1R 3ER. Anything more than ten years old gratefully received. Ideally I’d like the accompanying marking schemes, where possible, but I’ll take anything you’ve got!

I’m cracking on at work stuff today, but the GCSE results are out, and the inevitable squabbles are ensuing over the dumbing down of education.

It occurs to me that this is a very simple and familiar problem: on the reliability and validity of a test. Read the rest of this entry »

The deepest and most universal geek impulse is to screw the back off a piece of equipment and poke about, to understand how it works, and to work out how it can work better for you. It’s an impulse celebrated in the work at places like Make, but also more than that, in every good classroom and university in the country. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday August 18 2007

Every now and then something comes along which is so bonkers and so unhinged that it unmoors itself from all cultural anchoring points, and floats off into a baffling universe all of its own. I am a connoisseur of freaky ideas, but nothing prepared me for this gem from the academic journal Medical Hypotheses: an article called “Down subjects and Oriental population share several specific attitudes and characteristics”.

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I missed it too, but here is Dawkipoos on t’ telly from last night.

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Peter Fisher and Elsevier have rather kindly given me permission to reproduce the experimental papers from the special issue of Homeopathy on the memory of water, so I’m posting them in full below. As you know I’m a strong believer in free access to academic journals, especially when they’ve been press-released and discussed in popular fora.

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Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday August 11 2007

Last week Alan Johnson unveiled his new plan of forcing Big Pharma to accept less money for the drugs we buy off them. The major pharmaceutical companies have now responded to this financial threat – very much in the style of right wing comedian Jim Davidson - by threatening to leave the country. It’s a compelling response: Big Pharma only get 2% of their revenue from UK sales, but they spend 10% of their research budget here. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay now look. I realise that political correctness has made it difficult to talk around some issues involving race, biology, and culture. I realise that some subjects have been effectively closed to discussion, under fear of accusations of racism. I don’t want to throw these accusations around wildly.

But can somebody please tell me what possible good there is to be found in this paper from the journal Medical Hypotheses, founded by controversialist David Horrobin:

“Down subjects and Oriental population share several specific attitudes and characteristics”

Federica Mafrica and Vincenzo Fodale.

Medical Hypotheses (2007) 69, 438–440

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2006.12.043

The central thrust of their argument is that people with Down’s Syndrome have a lot in common with people from oriental countries. Read the rest of this entry »

This week Alan Johnson announced that he wasn’t going to stick by the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme that lines the pockets of the drugs industry. You only have to say those words to trigger to my favourite 3 minute dinner party package: how evil is big pharma?

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