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Acupuncture and polycystic ovary disease: A depressing case of science by press release

I've railed on more than one occasion about how much I detest science by press release. For one thing, it bypasses the peer review process and reports results directly to the public, which to me is a strike against any study. Indeed, releasing results by press release or using a press release to tout a study before it's even published is, as far as I'm concerned, quite dubious, and when I see it I'm automatically way more suspicious of whether the study represents good (or even OK) science. One form of science by press release that can be a bit more subtle than, say, the cold fusion guys…

Ptychozoon: the geckos that glide with flaps and fringes (gekkotans part VIII)

In the previous few gekkotan articles we looked at the seriously weird and highly distinctive leaf-tailed geckos of Madagascar. There's another group of especially unusual, highly notable gekkonid gekkotans I want to write about: the flying, gliding or parachute geckos (Ptychozoon) of south-east Asia and India. These geckos are weird: the adjacent pic (widely available online, but only at frustratingly small size; it's credited to Tim Macmillan/John Downer) makes them look like tiny screaming dragons... Parachute geckos are cryptic, forest-dwelling lizards. Patterned in greys or browns and…

Raven, the claw-handed bird, last of the phorusrhacids

As if the revelations about Brontornis and all that new work on the ameghinornithids weren't enough, 2007 also saw the publication of a long-awaited new study on the age of Titanis walleri, North America's only phorusrhacid, and - supposedly - a species that survived until as recently as 15,000 years ago. Yes, it's time to crack on with more terror birds, or phorusrhacids. It's a story of ancient island-hopping, of the proposed re-evolution of clawed forelimbs, and of Raven, the giant claw-handed bird of Native American folklore... Titanis walleri Brodkorb, 1963 is one of the largest and…

Interview with Mark Patterson, Executive Director of eLife

Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. This latest installment is with Mark Patterson, Executive Director of new OA publisher eLife. I attended an ARL Directors briefing conference call on eLife with Mark a little while back, highlighting for me just how interesting this project is and just how little I knew about it before the call. Hence, this interview. A huge thanks to Mark for agreeing to participate! =============   Q0. Mark, tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up…

Reflections on the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians

Whoa. Now that was a intellectual reset button hitting if there ever was one. From July 31 to August 5 I attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL) in Boston. It was a one-week, intensive, immersive course not so much on how to be a leader but how to think like a leader and how to understand a little more about the leadership process. Not solely aimed academic library leadership per se, but more broadly about leadership situated in an academic environment. In other words, it was about people who happen to be librarians leading…

What I learned at SRBR meeting last week

A couple of days have passed and I had a lot of work-related stuff to catch up with, but I thought I better write a recap now while the iron is still hot and I remember it all. Here we go.... Surprise #1 Last time I went to a SRBR meeting (or for that matter any scientific meeting) was in 2002. I started my first blog in 2004. I started writing about science, specifically about Chronobiology, in January of 2005. Before last week's meeting I knew of one chronobiologist who reads my blog regularly. I knew of one other chronobiologist who contacted me to ask to use some of the material for…

Twilight of the Elites and the Rise of the Culture

In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes's much-discussed book. ------------- I don't read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They're usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a…

Quoth an antivaccinationist: "Help, help, I'm being repressed!"

I must admit. No matter how long I've been dealing with the antivaccine movement, in particular the pseudoscience, misinformation, and sometimes outright lies they use to demonize vaccines, I can never quite understand the profound persecution complex that so many of them have. After all, they lash out with so much vehemence and outright nastiness at their perceived enemies, trying to harass them at their jobs and get them fired, for instance, and launching Internet smear campaigns against them. That is why I find it disingenuous in the extreme when they then turn around and clutch at the…

Why not just castrate them? (Part 6): The State of Maryland finally takes "emergency action" against Mark Geier and his Lupron protocol for autism

One of the most persistent myths is one that's been particularly and doggedly resistant to evidence, science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and reason. It's also a myth that I've been writing about since a couple of months after the beginning of this blog. Specifically, I'm referring to the now scientifically discredited myth that the mercury-containing thimerosal preservative that used to be in quite a few childhood vaccines causes autism. The myth began in the late 1990s and was later fed by the publication of David Kirby's book Evidence of Harm, which was basically a paean to various…

Predatory open access journals and a crank mutual admiration society

I know I really shouldn't peruse NaturalNews.com too often. It's bad for my blood pressure, and, like many old farts on the wrong side of 50, I do have a touch of the ol' hypertension. Reading Mike Adams' blather risks raising that blood pressure either through causing me to laugh uproariously at the sheer idiocy of what he writes or by making me angry at just how despicable he can be at times. Still, I looked, and I saw something I almost wish I hadn't seen. However, that something that I saw illustrates a point about the dark side of open access journals; so I thought it was worth…

What's wrong with Steve Jobs: Yes, Jobs did have a liver transplant, but was it for metastatic insulinoma?

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reason for Apple CEO Steve Job's five month medical leave of absence from Apple is that he needed a liver transplant, which, according to the story, he underwent a couple of months ago in Memphis. In my discussion, I assumed, for the most part, the most likely clinical scenario, namely that Steve Jobs' insulinoma had metastasized to his liver and that the liver transplant had been done for that indication, but, as some pointed out, it was possible that Jobs had somehow fried his liver without his tumor having metastasized. Unlikely,…

Statements by John R. Lott, Jr. referencing his gun use survey

compiled by Otis Dudley Duncan and Tim Lambert revised 26 Feb 2003 by Tim Lambert This pages documents direct and indirect references Lott has made to a survey he claims to have carried out in 1997. Further analysis is here, and the latest update is here. The information of over 2 million defensive uses and 98 percent is based upon survey evidence that I have put together involving a large nationwide telephone survey conducted over a three month period during 1997. Letter from John Lott to Otis Dudley Duncan, dated May 13, 1999. There are 15…

Who Moved My Garden? Spatial Learning in the Octopus

Say you're visiting Los Angeles and you have a sudden craving for Chinese food. Since you are only visiting, you might not be aware that nothing is open past, like, 10pm (not even coffee houses), but you get in your rental car and go driving around in search of your Chinese feast anyway. You try hitting up Panda Express, but no such luck. Of course they're closed. You try the neighborhood Chinese restaurant: closed as well. You get back in the car, and think to yourself "maybe the OTHER Panda Express will be open", but alas, it is not. You are ready to return to the hotel and just go to sleep…

A new nomenclature for auricular acupuncture: The ultimate in Tooth Fairy science

Acupuncture is nothing more than a theatrical placebo. I wish I could take credit for the term "theatrical placebo" to describe acupuncture, just as I wish I could take credit for coining the term "quackademic medicine" to describe the unfortunately increasing infiltration of quackery into academic medical centers and medical schools and as I wish I could take credit for the term "Tooth Fairy science" to describe doing scientific studies on a phenomenon that has not been proven to exist, but alas I cannot. I can, however, use the terms as I see fit, even if it might annoy some believers in…

Weekend Diversion: Fluoridated Water: Science, Scams and Society

"Fluoridation is the single most important commitment a community can make to the oral health of its children and to future generations." -C. Everett Koop Most weekends, I take on a lighter topic, as a way of taking a break from the deep physics, astronomy, and science we share during the week. But every once in a while, there's an important story that needs to be told. This weekend, I invite you to enjoy Tony Rice's rendition of a fabulous Gordon Lightfoot story song, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. One of the most contentious issues going on in my city -- Portland, OR -- right now, is our…

Scientists heart journalists? Plus a quick guide to dealing with the media

It seems that every scientist has an anecdote about being misquoted, misrepresented or otherwise misled by that most seemingly dangerous of foes - the journalist. And yet, a new survey published in Science suggests that beyond the horror stories, conflict between the two professions is much less volatile than you might imagine. To scientists, it seems that journalists are more likely to be back-slapping comrades than back-stabbing adversaries. The interaction between science and the media is an area close to my heart. I am steeped in it in both my full-time job and my freelance work and I'…

James Ray's Sedona sweat lodge stash: lessons in polypharmacy and endocrine pharmacology

On October 8, 2009, paramedics responded to a 911 call at a mystical retreat being held at Angel Valley Spiritual Retreat Center in West Sedona, Arizona, a stunningly beautiful area known widely as a mecca for New Age enthusiasts. Eyewitness accounts compiled in this October 21 New York Times article describes what medics encountered upon arriving at a 415-square-foot "sweat lodge" on the center's grounds: Midway through a two-hour sweat lodge ceremony intended to be a rebirthing experience, participants say, some people began to fall desperately ill from the heat, even as their leader,…

Crank magnetism at a young age: Anti-vaccine "resistance" and 9/11 Truth

If there's one thing that irritates me about the anti-vaccine movement, it's the utter disingenuousness of the movement. How often do we hear the claim from anti-vaccine loons that "we're not 'anti-vaccine'; we're 'pro-safe vaccine'"? I've tried to pin such people down time and time again to answer just what it would take in terms of scientific studies and evidence or in terms of what "toxins" would have to be removed to convince them that vaccines are sufficiently safe that they will have their children vaccinated? Inevitably, the answer involves levels of evidence that are beyond what can…

Do negative clinical trials change practice?

One of the central themes of this blog from the very beginning is that all medicine, regardless of where it comes from or how it was developed, should be held to a single science-based standard with regards to efficacy, effectiveness, and safety. I tend to focus primarily on “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more commonly known as “integrative medicine,” (1) because I believe it to be undermining the scientific basis of medicine and allowing outright quackery (or, as I like to refer to it, quackademic medicine) to infiltrate medical academia, which is fast becoming medical…

Regulators and Enforcers

As background for the final project violations posted last night at 9:30 and the violation clearance taking place this morning from 7 to 10 a.m., we've interviewed Paula Johnson from the Scientific Review Committee (SRC) and John Cole from Display & Safety about why all those pesky rules and regulations are so important, and what typically happens in the last-minute rush to ensure projects with violations will qualify. Read on to get the scoop on the most common violations, how to avoid any trouble with your project, and some hair-raising anecdotes from Fairs past. Paula Johnson,…

How stigmatized are undervaccinated children and their parents?

I've discussed several times over the last several years my impression that the media have become in general less tolerant of antivaccine views. At least, the media seem less willing to indulge in "tell both sides" false equivalence. Back when I started blogging, I routinely used to bemoan how news stories about vaccines or autism would almost inevitably include obligatory quotes from antivaxer like J.B. Handley, Jenny McCarthy, and sometimes even Andrew Wakefield. More recently, over the last five years or so, such tropes seem a lot less common. I don't have any solid evidence to back up my…

The complexity of cancer

About a week ago, there appeared a story in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research written by George Johnson and entitled Cancer's Secrets Come Into Sharper Focus. Overall, it was a better-than-average article for the lay press about recent discoveries in cancer research that go beyond just the cancer cell and just oncogenes. I must admit, however, that certain aspects of it irritated me, not the least of which is that it appeared to buy into one of the most cliched of tropes about medicine and science in spinning the story along the lines of "everything you know about…

More false "balance" on vaccines and autism

There's so much horrible reporting on vaccines and the whole manufactroversy that promulgates the myth that vaccines somehow cause autism through a combination of confusing correlation with causation, bad science, quackery, and misrepresenting autism that it's gotten harder for me to be sufficiently irritated to write about it. When I see yet another another example of credulous reporting, it has to be either truly egregious to the point of catching my attention above the baseline noise of stories presenting anti-vaccine pseudoscience as though there were any truth to it or somehow illustrate…

Abraham Cherrix and the promotion of pseudoscience in medical school

One of the aspects of blogging that I've come to like is the ability to follow a story's evolution over the long term and to comment on new developments as they come along. If you're good at blogging, you can take that story and make it your own, adding it to your list of "signature" issues for which you become known and about which people come to you for commentary as new developments arise. Indeed, now that the fourth anniversary of the start of this blog is fast approaching (December 11, in case you don't remember!), I can look back and see a number of issues that I've done this with,…

The "toxin gambit," resurrected

Well, I'm here. That's right. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm at CSICon. As is the case when I'm at conferences, be they skeptical conferences or professional conferences, it's hard to predict the blogging time available. It could be a lot; it could be a little. Or it could be none. (Well, obviously it's not none, or you wouldn't be reading this.) In any case, there was lots of stuff going on, plus there was the second game of the World Series, which made me miss the live recording of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Oh, well. Steve understood. So I wasn't up for any heavy lifting or taking…

CAM use, but not all CAM use, is correlated with skipping chemotherapy

So-called “alternative” medicine is made up of a hodge-podge of health care practices and treatments based on beliefs that are unscientific, pre-scientific, and pseudoscientific. These modalities include practices as diverse as homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, reflexology, reiki and other forms of “energy medicine” based on vitalism, chiropractic, and naturopathy, and that’s a short list of the quackery that falls under the rubric of the term “alternative medicine.” Unfortunately, this unscientific, pre-scientific, and pseudoscientific hodge-podge of treatments rooted in nonsense are…

Blinded by the Disco. light

Casey Luskin, intrepid Upchucky also-ran, is aflutter. Last week's New York Times story about creationists and global warming deniers partnering up has the whole Disco. 'Tute in something of a tizzy, but Casey's outrage is of a special sort. Casey, you see, thinks the the Times misdescribed Selman v. Cobb County. The article states: The legal incentive to pair global warming with evolution in curriculum battles stems in part from a 2005 ruling by a United States District Court judge in Atlanta that the Cobb County Board of Education, which had placed stickers on certain textbooks…

Pseudohistory and pseudoscience

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Fifty woo-ful facts

It's time. Well, it's sort of time, anyway. As you know, it's been over three months since I last indulged in my little Friday exercise known as Your Friday Dose of Woo. At the time it was because I couldn't get myself into the appropriately light-hearted but nonetheless just vicious enough frame of mind to do the exercise after we had to have our dog put to sleep. In retrospect, however, it was clear to me that the whole feature had been running on fumes for a while before that. It had become a bit stale and, I thought, could benefit from a hiatus. At the time, I hadn't planned for the…

When the next big outbreaks happen, they'll probably happen in Texas

Back in the day, I used to write posts with titles like When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California. I even wrote a followup, When the outbreaks occur, they’ll start in California, 2014 edition. The reason, of course, was that California was one of the epicenters of vaccine hesitancy as well as the home to some high profile antivaccine-sympathetic physicians, such as Dr. Bob Sears (who’s known for making Holocaust analogies about bills tightening school vaccine mandate requirements) and Dr. Jay Gordon (who’s known for continuing to claim, against all evidence, that vaccines cause…

Everything Old Is New Again: ZOMFG!!! Ads Influence Our Media!

By now, perhaps, you are aware of the uproar about the ScienceBlogs corner of the bloggysphere. PepsiCo has bought started a blog here, called Food Frontiers. Many are unhappy, bloggers and commenters alike. Read PalMD's take, and commenters there, for one perspective. One of the potential disadvantages [of a blog network] is advertising and sponsorship. Here at Sb, we've been very fortunate in that our content is completely independent. We control anything in the center column. The top and right however belong to Sb, and they use this space to keep the place running. There have been…

Running a Well Organized Political Campaign in Minnesota

I have participated in Minnesota Democratic Party (officially known as the DFL1) activities in the past, but never as intimately as this year. In doing so, I've observed a number of very interesting things about how a political campaign works, and I'd like to share those observations with you. In particular, I'll contrast the campaign I'm volunteering for whenever I have a chance (Sharon Sund for US Congress) with the opposing campaign (Brian Barnes for US Congress). The Sund-Barnes campaign is not over, and we don't yet know how it will turn out. At this point, the campaigns are about…

The Huffington Post delves deeper into the woo

Since its very inception, the Huffington Post has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Shortly after that, antivaccine woo-meisters like David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kimg Stagliano, and, apparently, one of the editors (Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar) were joined by all-purpose woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra. True, for a brief period of time there appeared to be an occasional voice for vaccines on HuffPo, but they never lasted. After all, RFK, Jr.'s been there nearly four years now and David Kirby almost as long, while pro-vaccine commentary pops up briefly, gets shouted down by…

No, the CDC did not just apologize and admit that this year's flu vaccine doesn't work

If there's one thing about having a demanding day job, it's that the cranks usually have the advantage. They can almost always hit first when a news story comes out that they can spin to attack their detested science. On the other hand, it usually ensures that by the time I get home, have dinner, and settle down in front of the TV with my laptop to discusse the latest bit of science, there's some tasty crankery to deconstruct. Oddly enough, tonight appears not to be one of those times. Heck, as of this writing, even that wretched hive of antivaccine scum and quackery, Age of Autism,, doesn…

The quack view of preventing breast cancer versus reality and Angelina Jolie, part 2

After yesterday, I really hadn't planned on writing about Angelina Jolie and her decision to undergo bilateral mastectomies again, except perhaps as a more serious piece next week on my not-so-super-secret other blog where The Name of the Doctor is revealed on a weekly basis. As I mentioned yesterday, there are a number of issues about the decision that could use my professional attention, from the process, to the evidence, to the issue of how the surgery was handled. Oh, and if I do decide to do that I'm sure I won't be able to resist a mention of some of the quackery that oozed out from…

Another cancer quack dies...of cancer.

As a cancer surgeon and physician, I can’t stand Ty Bollinger. I’m sure that comes as a surprise to absolutely none of my regular readers, given what a massive cancer quack he is. Most recently, he has become known for a series of deeply dishonest videos about cancer, chemotherapy, and alternative treatments for cancer called The Truth About Cancer. If there’s one rule I’ve learned in skepticism, be it about quackery or any other outlandish claims, it’s that any time I see a book, movie, or article called “The Truth About...” chances are at least 95% that the content is not the truth about…

What's going on here? Andrew Wakefield's antivaccine propaganda film to be screened at the Tribeca Film Festival

When last we left Andrew Wakefield, hero to the antivaccine movement, he was a headliner on the Conspira-Sea Cruise, a cruise filled with conspiracy theorists, crop circle chasers, cranks, quacks, and antivaccine activists. It was a huge come down from his formerly exalted position as chief spokesman and "scientist" for the antivaccine movement, a position he enjoyed for many years before he was struck off (i.e., had his medical license stripped from him) in the UK and later had his scientific fraud documented so thoroughly by investigative reporter Brian Deer. Since then, it's all been…

Proposed Medicaid changes would shift risks to the most vulnerable

A policy brief about Congressional Republicans’ bill to replace the Affordable Care Act has two Medicaid provisions that could prove seriously detrimental to public health and states’ finances: Gutting the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and changing the current Medicaid financing structure. A Center on Budget and Policy Priority analysis of these two changes calculates that they would shift hundreds of billions in costs from the federal government to the states over the next 10 years. I’ll explain what these two policies are, but first I want to highlight a few things about the Medicaid program. (…

Global Warming: Separating the noise from the signal

A small "Signal-to-Noise Ratio" means that there is not enough real information (signal) compared to the background noise to make a definitive statement about something. With a sufficiently high Signal-to-Noise Ratio, it is possible to make statistically valid statements about some measure or observation. This applies to a lot of day to day decisions you make in life. Climate change denialists understand this principle and they use it to try to fool people into thinking that "the jury is still out" on Global Warming, or that scientists are making up their data, and so on. Here, I want to…

Breast Cancer Awareness Month abused by Mike Adams

I should have guessed. Leave it to uber-crank (a. k. a. One Crank To Rule Them All) Mike Adams, the "intellect" behind what is perhaps the crankiest website known to humankind (at least when it comes to medicine), NewsTarget.com, to try to slime Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As fellow ScienceBlogger Mark points out, in his "report" Breast Cancer Deception, Adams accomplishes this by characterizing Breast Cancer Awareness month as nothing more than part of a conspiracy by the "male-dominated" cancer industry to keep women down. I have to admit, in the realm of sheer wingnuttery, I've seldom…

Arthur Allen-David Kirby Debate: All about a story with "legs"

Well, it's finally been posted, video of the debate between Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver (a book that I am about 2/3 of the way through and plan on reviewing before the end of the month if possible) and mercury militia vaccine fearmonger David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm and arguably one of the two people who have done more than anyone else to bring the bogus claim that mercury in vaccines is the cause of the increase in the number of diagnoses of autism over the last 15 years or so to a wider audience. (The other is Robert F…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Coffee, the ultimate cleanser

Earlier this week, I thought that I had identified this week's woo target. I told myself that this was it, that this was the one for this week. I even started writing it the other day, because, as much as I try to get this thing done early, somehow I always seem to be writing it at 11 PM Thursday nights. I thought this week would be different. I was mistaken. The reason that I was wrong was because I came across a link that was so amusing, so full of outrageously concentrated woo, that I just couldn't restrain myself from throwing my old topic to the wayside (well, not exactly; I can always…

Dr. Oz versus science—again

That Dr. Mehmet Oz uses his show to promote quackery of the vilest sort is no longer in any doubt. I was reminded yet again of this last week when I caught a rerun of one of his shows from earlier this season, when he gazed in wonder at the tired old cold reading schtick used by all "psychic mediums" from time immemorial, long before the current crop of celebrity psychic mediums, such as John Edward, Sylvia Browne, and the "Long Island Medium" Theresa Caputo, discovered how much fame and fortune they could accrue by scamming the current generation of the credulous. Speaking of Theresa Caputo…

SafeMinds swings at Price et al and misses

On the blogging front, I started out this week with a part facetious, part serious, part the highly detailed analysis of a new study of interest that you've come to know and love (or hate). The study was Price et al, and it was yet another nail in the coffin of the scientifically discredited notion that mercury in vaccines causes autism, a notion whose coffin already had so many nails in it that Price et al probably had a hard time finding even a tiny area of virgin wood into which to pound even a tiny nail of a study published in an impact factor one journal, much less the spike that their…

This PRISM does not turn white light into the beautiful colors of the rainbow

When technological or social changes start altering the business landscape in a particular industry, people involved in that business tend to respond in three general ways. The visionaries immediately see where their world is going, jump to the front edge of it and make sure that the change is as swift and painless as possible, resulting in as good new business environment as possible. They immediately sell their horses and invest in the development of the internal combustion engine, gear-boxes, brakes and start building car factories. The followers are much more timid, but they are astute…

Kevin in China #20 - turtles and crocs and Steve Irwin

Kevin has only 5 more days in China so, apart from rain, various farewell dinners are keeping him too busy to do much collecting. Except, this time, it is a different kind of herping altogether, watching the alligators at a farm and diving for turtles. Anhui 4 September My last complete day in Muyu; as this day had been approaching I have been thinking about all my experiences. The most beautiful hikes would have to be the hike on the 31st in Xiagu, when we followed the river back down to the trail. We saw many sights that we know no one else ever went to, due to the remote access and danger…

Explaining the War of the Metaphors1

In his comment to my post on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), reposted here, Dr. Gibbs writes: The topic of why conceptual metaphor theory arouses such vehemence is one that greatly interests me and is again the subject of my in progress book. My own opinion is that conceptual metaphor theory, and other related ideas from cognitive linguistics are threatening to traditional scholars because it is contrary to prevailing, enduring beliefs that the mind is literal and disembodied. Put simply, many cognitive scientists could not continue to work in the ways they do if they embraced some of these…

Library vendors, politics, Aaron Swartz, #pdftribute

On January 10, 2013 Rick Anderson published a post at The Scholarly Kitchen published on six mistakes library staff are making when dealing with our vendors. Most of them were fairly standard stuff like don't be rude, don't waste people's time. That sort of thing. (Yes, sometimes I think that every time I link to a Scholarly Kitchen article, an open access journal loses its wings.) The sixth, however, was a bit different. Putting political library concerns above patron needs. I’ve saved for last the “mistake” that I know is likely to be the most controversial, but I think it must be said.…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 29: Indecent Exposure

Much of the current news is about exposure and fallout. As a point of information, the Sievert is a unit of "dose equivliant" from exposure to ionizing radiation. It was designed to indicate relative levels of biological effects on living organisms. This measurement technique attempts to take into account the fact that radiation is absorbed differently by different tissues. Usually we speak in terms of humans unless otherwise specified. There are one thousand millisieverts in a sievert (mSv). Zero to 0.25 Sv in a day is considered to have no effect. At up to one Sv people feel sick…

Autism's False Prophets: Finally, science pushes back against antivaccine lunacy

NOTE: This review of Dr. Offit's book Autism's False Prophets originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here... Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste... Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not. Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I…