Tina Rosenberg, who wrote the hopelessly inaccurate article What the World Needs Now Is DDT, is back with more falsehoods about DDT: The truth is that many malaria victims would be better off if America still had the disease....
A misleading sidebar on this BBC story on Iraq only presents the IBC count of civilians killed in Iraq (which is guaranteed to be a significant undercount) and omits to mention the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths. Gabriele...
Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has organised an on-line seminar on Chris Mooney's War on Science. Lots of interesting reading, including two guest posters: someone called Tim Lambert and Steve Fuller. PZ Myers wasn't real impressed with Fuller's contribution....
In a Financial Times discussion in new and old media Trevor Butterworth says: Second, the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of "niche experts" blogging away (or ready and willing to blog) lacks empirical evidence. I'm very impressed with...
This Saturday, 1st April in the Royal Botanic Gardens from 1pm. We'll be at the lawn to the east of the Main Pond. Tigtog has some pictures of the location....
One of the less pleasant parts of my job is talking to students that I have caught plagiarizing assignments. All too often, rather than admit to copying they will tell me clumsy lies and blame somebody else. Which brings...
You have two 50g containers of cream. One is 10% fat, and the other 20% fat. You combine them. What is the percentage of fat in the mixture? A. 10% of 50 is 5, 20% of 50 is 10....
Last year Benny Peiser claimed that on a literature search he found 34 papers "reject or doubt" anthropgenic global warming. I posted the abstracts and it's very obvious that he misclassified most of the papers. Peiser left several comments on...
John Lott keeps trying to use sock puppets to scrub his wikipedia page of criticism. Unfortunately other wikipedia users undo his changes, he makes them again and he gets into an edit war. He's used his socks to try...
Today is Malaria Action Day. Dunk Malaria are holding a Dunk Malariathon. coturnix is running a linkfest for malaria related posts. My thanks to John Quiggin and Tara Smith for linking to my earlier post and extra thanks to everyone...
Note for visitors from Daily Kos: 120,000 is an estimate of the number of violent deaths. The total number of extra deaths as a result of the war is very roughly 200,000 once you include the increase in disease and...
Dunk Malaria is organizing a Malaria Action Day on March 19th, to raise awareness of malaria. The idea is that people net a basketball to symbolize the insecticide treated netting that is the best weapon against malaria. Good. Except that...
Carl Zimmer has reviewed two books on Global Warming: Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (I dissected some criticism of Flannery's book here) and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe....
The way the "Rachel Carson was worse than Hitler" folks tell the story, the all-powerful environmentalists were poised to ban DDT at the end of the 90s. For example, here's Tren and Bate's version of the negotiations leading to the...
Because if you don't you might end up like Tim Blair: Big call from Tim Lambert: "Crime and violent crime in Britain peaked in the early 90s and [have] since plummeted." His source? The British Crime Survey, an annual...
When I wrote about David Frum's voodoo criminology in support of the death penalty, I didn't mention any of the recent research that purports to find a deterrent effect for the death penalty because Frum didn't cite it. That research...
Voting has started for the Koufax awards. I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition....
In her latest rant, Miranda Devine warns about the imminent threat of a take over by scientists: It used to be men in purple robes who controlled us. Soon it will be men in white lab coats. The geeks...
Miranda Devine tells her readers what GIGO means: The outputs are totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the inputs. At university we had a name for what often happens: GIGO - garbage in garbage out. And then...
Dr Free-Ride may have Friday sprog blogging and PZ Myers may have his Friday cephalopod, but only here at Deltoid do combine them both! Here's an old picture of one of my kids with a cuttlefish he found on...
After Fumento had been worked over by yours truly, Chris Mooney and PZ Myers, you'd think there would be nothing left, but Steve Reuland has taken just one paragraph from Fumento's column and found as many mistakes as I found...
Chris Mooney and PZ Myers complete the demolition of Fumento's article that I started here. Sir Oolius also got stuck in and managed to get one of Fumento's characteristically lame comebacks. Inspired by my post mentioning co-authorship chains with...
Tim Blair links to some interesting articles in this week's Bulletin. First up is a page on John Howard with the intriguing title "The hosue of Howard". It's a fearless, hard hitting complete suck up to Howard. Apparently, after a...