Why won’t Professor Susan Greenfield publish this theory in a scientific journal?

November 3rd, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, dodgy academic press releases, susan greenfield | 27 Comments »

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 »

Cherry picking is bad. At least warn us when you do it.

September 29th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, academic publishing, aric sigman, schools, systematic reviews | 9 Comments »

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 »

Existential angst about the bigger picture

May 23rd, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, academic publishing, publication bias, regulating research | 20 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 21 May 2011

Here’s no surprise: beliefs which we imagine to be rational are bound up in all kinds of other stuff. Political stances, for example, correlate with various personality features. One major review in 2003 looked at 38 different studies, containing data on 20,000 participants, and found that overall, political conservatism was associated with things like death anxiety, fear of threat and loss, intolerance of uncertainty, a lack of openness to experience, and a need for order, structure, and closure. Read the rest of this entry »

Dodgy academic PR

May 30th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, bad science, media, pr guff | 25 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday 30 May 2009

Obviously we distrust the media on science: they rewrite commercial press releases from dodgy organisations as if they were health news, they lionise mavericks with poor evidence, and worse. But journalists will often say: what about those scientists with their press releases? Surely we should do something about them, running about, confusing us with their wild ideas? Read the rest of this entry »