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	<title>Bad Science</title>
	<link>http://www.badscience.net</link>
	<description>Ben Goldacre&#039;s Bad Science column from the Guardian and more...</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:11:51 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Caroline Pidgeon (lib dem) falls for bogus Rentokil story, in the London Assembly</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Briefly. Lib Dem councillor Caroline Pidgeon raised the bogus Rentokil stories in the London Assembly yesterday: and fell for them, hook, line and sinker. People often forget that politicians &#8211; as much as anyone else &#8211; get their information about how the world works from reading newspapers. I guess this is fairly good evidence that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/03/lib-dem-councillor-caroline-pidgeon-falls-for-bogus-rentokil-story-in-the-london-assembly/</link>
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		<title>Rentokil</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 March 2010
&#8220;2,000 bugs taking a ride in every train compartment&#8221; said the Daily Mail. &#8220;Cockroaches cluster on trains&#8220;, scuttled the Telegraph. &#8220;Commuters share trains with 1,000 cockroaches, 200 bedbugs and 200 fleas&#8221; said the Evening Standard. The figures were all very specific and very frightening.
&#8220;Rentokil say they also discovered [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/03/rentokil/</link>
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		<title>Is it okay to ignore results from people you don&#8217;t trust?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 6 March 2010
﻿﻿If the media were actuarial about drawing our attention to the causes of avoidable death, your newspapers would be filled with diarrhoea, Aids, and cigarettes every day. In reality we know this is an absurd idea. For those interested in the scale of our fascination with rarity, one [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/03/when-is-it-okay-to-ignore-people-you-dont-trust/</link>
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		<title>Obvious quacks: the tip of a scary medical iceberg</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 27 February, 2010
After the Science and Technology committee report this week, and the jaw dropping stupidity of “we bring you both sides” in the media coverage afterwards, you are bored of homeopathy. So am I, but it gives a very simple window into the wider disasters in all of medicine.
Homeopathy, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/obvious-quacks-the-tip-of-a-scary-medical-iceberg/</link>
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		<title>The BBC have found someone whose cancer was cured by homeopathy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ladies and Gentlemen, we have hit the bottom of the barrel. Homeopathy cured my cancer, on BBC News. 

]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/the-bbc-have-found-someone-whose-cancer-was-cured-by-homeopathy/</link>
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		<title>Parliamentary Sci Tech Committee on Homeopathy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s the report, press release below. It looks like pretty sensible stuff to me, homeopaths can&#8217;t expect special treatment among all forms of medicine, if the evidence actively shows it doesn&#8217;t work, then that&#8217;s that. I have to say what really frightens me about all this is the MHRA: if regulation is so political that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/parliamentary-sci-tech-committee-on-homeopathy/</link>
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		<title>How do you regulate Wu?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 20 February 2010
You might have read the case of Ying Wu this week: a fully qualified traditional chinese medicine doctor operating out of a shop in Chelmsford who for several years prescribed high doses of a dangerous banned substance to treat the acne of senior civil servant Patricia Booth, 58, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/how-do-you-regulate-wu/</link>
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		<title>Guns don&#8217;t kill people, puppies do</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 February 2010 
Often one data point isn&#8217;t enough to spot a pattern, or even to say that an event is interesting and exceptional, because numbers are all about context and constraints. At one end there are the simple examples. “Mum beats odds of 50 million-to-one to have 3 babies [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/guns-dont-kill-people-puppies-do/</link>
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		<title>Moments of genius</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sorry no column this week, I&#8217;ve got some fun stuff in the pipe, as they say, and a lot on. In case you miss me, here&#8217;s my shouty contribution to Radio 4&#8217;s &#8220;Moments Of Genius&#8221;, a eulogy to the startlingly new idea of systematic reviews. 

Other bits and bobs&#8230; 
&#8230;I&#8217;m on Quote Unquote this week [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/moments-of-genius/</link>
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		<title>Oh, I found you a new job</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I thought you might be interested in this job advert from the Independent.

It&#8217;s from the nice people at Maperton Trust.
You can go and see them for a diagnosis with their magical machines, although the best product is their Head Lice Repelling Unit or HELRU (right) which various people have emailed me about over the years, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/oh-i-found-you-a-new-job/</link>
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		<title>The Wakefield MMR verdict</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s a very brief piece I bashed out for the Guardian newsdesk today on the Wakefield finding, the further reading below will be more helpful if you&#8217;re interested in the story. 
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Thursday 28 January 2009
In medicine, “untoward incident inquiries” tend to look for systems failures, rather than one individual to blame. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/the-wakefield-mmr-verdict/</link>
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		<title>12 Monkeys. No&#8230; 8. Wait, sorry, I meant 14.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 23 January 2010
Like many people, you&#8217;re possibly afraid to share your views on animal experiments, because you don&#8217;t want anyone digging up your grandmother&#8217;s grave, or setting fire to your house, or stuff like that. Animal experiments are necessary, they need to be properly regulated, and we have some of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/12-monkeys-no-8-wait-sorry-i-meant-14/</link>
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		<title>LlewTube</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Brief note to say I&#8217;m a guest on LlewTube this week with Robert Llewellyn (or Kryten off of Red Dwarf if you prefer). The show&#8217;s great generally, and a galaxy of nerds, recent guests include Patrick Stewart, Graham Linehan, Martha Lane Fox, Adrian Edmondson, Brian Cox, and the rest. It&#8217;s also a genius format for [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/llewtube/</link>
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		<title>Voices of the ancients</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 16 January 2010
Every now and then you have to salute a genius. Both the Daily Mail and the Metro report new research analysing the positions of Britain&#8217;s ancient sites, and the results are startling: primitive man had his own form of &#8220;sat nav&#8221;. Researcher Tom Brooks analysed 1,500 prehistoric monuments, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/voices-of-the-ancients/</link>
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		<title>If you want to be trusted more: claim less</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 8 January 2009
“Public sector pay races ahead in a recession” shouted the front page of this week’s Sunday Times. “Public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector — a pay gulf that has more than doubled since the recession began.” The Telegraph followed [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/if-you-want-to-be-trusted-more-claim-less/</link>
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		<title>Today&#8217;s bible reading</title>
		<description><![CDATA[On the birthday of Jesus Christ – who was clearly a very nice guy, giant sky wizard issues aside – I can think of no better bible reading than this, Daniel 1:8, a description of the first ever clinical trial. 
 
Daniel and his people have been dragged off to the court of king Nebuchadnezzar, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2009/12/todays-bible-reading/</link>
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		<title>The year in nonsense</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 19 December 2009
It’s been a vintage year for dodgy science in government. We saw reports on cocaine that were disappeared, dodgy evidence to justify DNA retention, and some government advisors who estimated the cost of piracy at 10% of GDP, to media applause, and then failed to tell everyone they’d [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2009/12/the-year-in-nonsense/</link>
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		<title>Diarrhoea and Aids for Christmas</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Last year I ran into Ariane Sherine. She had found that no charity would publicly take money from a book written by atheists at Christmas, since Christians give so much money for good work, and they didn’t want to annoy them. Luckily the Terence Higgins Trust stepped up to this bizarre challenge, which is [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2009/12/mawkish-christmas-cheer/</link>
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		<title>The greatest show on earth</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ooh, starting tomorrow is this year’s run of our amazing super-nerd-comedy-musical spectacular Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People. It’s a galaxy of stars, Richard Dawkins, Johnny Ball, Barry Cryer, Chris Addison off the Thick of It, Brian Cox, Richard Herring, Simon Singh, me, and many many more random people. This is variety at its [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2009/12/the-greatest-show-on-earth/</link>
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		<title>Copenhagen climate change blah blah</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sorry, this felt a bit rushed and PollyFillaesque, I hope it’s vaguely interesting…
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 12 December 2009
So as we career towards a mediocre outcome in Copenhagen, why do roughly half the people in this country not believe in man-made climate change, when the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists do?

It certainly predates the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.badscience.net/2009/12/copenhagen-climate-change-blah-blah/</link>
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