What is the opposite? Women who drink are less likely to be raped? Men who drink are more likely to be raped? Anybody?

No apology. No retraction. No correction. Just erasing tracks, as far as I can tell.

No way to run a newspaper. (And I’m speaking as a newspaper writer myself.)

Moreover, they’ve put up a link to this page. I’m impressed that Ben’s article and the comments here and on the Telegraph page seem to have had such an effect.

Mind you, the edit they have replaced it with doesn’t seem to be that much better. Typo of ‘baring’ for ‘bearing’ as well, which might be funny with other subject matter.

It’s interesting to note some of his prior work at the Telegraph:

http://tinyurl.com/nryre5
http://tinyurl.com/ldb9l3
http://tinyurl.com/ku2wtt
http://tinyurl.com/42kra9

It’s not a good sign when a trained researcher (deliberately?) obscures the difference between persuasion and coercion.

I propose as a general rule that any “claim scientists” story on the internet which now does not link to the source is undoubtedly crap.

(Thanks for the cite, Ben)

I was a little more measured in my response I think. I wasn’t ruling it out of hand. The low intensity stuff was just to show that there could be brain/magnetic field interaction so it wasn’t complete fantasy. Of course there will no doubt be some new ageists who seize on this as evidence that their wholly unevidenced claims are right.

Of course it’s still not a thinking cap, but food (or maybe magnetic flux) for thought.

Good good – the pedigree dogs BBC program was full of facts. That the Kennel club has been promoting extremely unhealthy breeding practices through the promotion of “breed standards” is a scandal, all for the vanity of some obsessive owners. It wasn’t as if they were targetting gog lovers – who, for the most part, are much happier with a healthy dog rather than one compromised be breeding from incredibly narrow genetic pools. There was no speculation – many of the dogs that were bred are effectively physical freaks produced purely to satisfy human obsessions. In a proper world some of those breeders would have be culpable for inflicting suffering on animimals.

If so, what’s your complaint? How do you feel misrepresented?

If not, I think your comment, comparing Alleyne’s sexist, unprofessional idiocy to the BBC’s exposé of revolting breeding practices, is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read since reports they’ll be showing Michael Jackson’s body on international television. Sadly, I fear the body-rumours are more likely to be accurate.

In basic terms, TMS is a non-invasive way of affecting the activation of cortical neurons. It uses magnetic fields of a strength comparable to an MRI machine, and can be used to either increase neural activity or temporarily shut it down. TMS artificially forces neurons to fire; high-frequency repetitive TMS can also be used to exhaust a group of neurons, temporarily shutting them down. The stimulation can be aimed precisely enough that it can be used to selectively activate or inhibit specific cortical areas.

Although the technology is new enough that the applications of it are still being explored, the mechanism of TMS is solidly understood. It’s a legitimate tool of neuroscience and psychology.

There are quite a few people investigating the uses of it at my university. While some TMS researchers may be a bit prone to overly enthusiastic speculation (this is fairly common with any new research/therapy technique), TMS has significant potential as a tool for studying and treating the effects of strokes and other brain injuries.

Preliminary version here;

http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2202-10-72.pdf

No talk of “thinking caps” of course, and this was to do with establishing motor learning skills. Maybe of use if you want to learn to play the guitar or be good at video games. However, I thing I’d like to see others able to repeat this sort of stuff before I took it too seriously.

This is the article on the “thinking cap”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5760078/Thinking-cap-that-can-help-the-brain-learn-moves-a-step-closer.html

It does seem unlikely, but without access to the paper in the BMC Neuroscience journal, it’s impossible to say whether this is a misrepresentation or not. No doubt the “thinking cap” bit is a bit of journalistic whimsy, but if the report is true it’s interesting. However, I have a basic allergy to any stories about the magical properties of magnetic fields as there are so many charlatans and deluded folk hyping it as a solution for slmost ill; limescale, improving fuel economy and maladies of all sorts. That said, it’s certainly been shown that magnetic fields play a part in some migratory behaviour.