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Joy of Science Week 3 Reading Summaries

Welcome to Week 3 of our course on "Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science". This post will be a presentation of the summaries for each of this week's assigned readings. If you were not able to do the readings or couldn't get access to the books, I hope this post will give you a good flavor of what the week's readings were all about. You can reference the course syllabus for more details about the readings in the whole course and the course structure. Here's the initial post about the course. And here are some guidelines about how I'll post on readings and what we should strive for in…

The song of the scientist

A recent report on the songs of the eponymous "great tit", a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops of milk bottles in the 1950s, shows that they independently acquire a deeper song when in urban environments than when in forest environments. As the writer at ScienceNOW tells it, in forests they sound like Barry White, and in cities like Michael Jackson. Passerine songs are usually adapted to the acoustics of their usual environment. Birds in denser vegetation will, I am told, end their songs on a rising sharp note, because there is more absorption of sound than in…

Agnostic still

So, in an obvious case of Scibling Rivalry, Jason Rosenhouse has taken me to task about my comments on Dawkins and agnosticism. Indeed, I have been fisked. Obviously one can decide about whether God exists or not, and agnostics are just inadequate atheists... Let's set the scene with some philosophical definitions. A scientific question is one that evidence can tell for or against. All else is a philosophical question, or as it is popularly known, navel gazing. What is at issue here is whether or not evidence can tell for or against the notion that God exists. Atheists (and theists) say…

DHEA: The Saga Continues

Recently, a friend asked my opinion on an article that appeared in Life Extension magazine:  How Congress Is Being Misled to Think That DHEA Is an “Anabolic Steroid”.   title="Dehydroepiandrosterone">DHEA has been a topic here before; I wrote about it ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/10/tepid_water_thrown_on_a_hot_pr.php">Tepid Water Thrown on a Hot Product: DHEA); Tara wrote about it ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2006/10/failure_of_alternative_med.php">The failure of alternative medicine); and Orac wrote about it ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/…

A well informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will

Both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum are wrong, but I think Drum is infuriatingly wrong. They're arguing over a statistic, the observation that about 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old and that a god created human beings complete and perfect as they are ex nihilo. Andrew Sullivan sees this as a consequence of the divisiveness of American politics, that they're using it as a signifier for red vs. blue. I'm not sure how many of the 46 percent actually believe the story of 10,000 years ago. Surely some of them know it's less empirically supported than Bigfoot. My fear is that…

Augmented cognition: Science fact or science fiction?

We live in a time in which we are overwhelmed by information obtained from multiple sources, such as the internet, television, and radio. We are usually unable to give our undivided attention to any one source of information, but instead give 'continuous partial attention' to all of them by constantly flitting between them. The limitations of cognitive processes, particularly attention and working memory, place a ceiling on the capacity of the brain to process and store information. It is these processes that some researchers are aiming to enhance with augmented cognition, an emerging field…

Considering the science world's 'massive communication problem'.

In the aftermath of a pretty enthusiastic pile-on to a claim that Expelled! had a successful first week of release, Chris Mooney calls for "serious introspection about the massive communication crisis we're facing in the science world". You know I'm always up for introspection. Indeed, regular readers have been very patient with my labored attempts to get clear on the whole "framing" thing. While I'm not prepared to advertise myself as any kind of expert on framing, I finally think I know what questions I'd like to ask of the people with framing expertise to try to sort out the ongoing slug-…

More creationist misconceptions about the eye

Jonathan Sarfati, a particularly silly creationist, is quite thrilled — he's crowing about how he has caught Richard Dawkins in a fundamental error. The eye did not evolve, says Sarfati, because it is perfectly designed for its function, and Dawkins' suggestion that there might be something imperfect about it is wrong, wrong, wrong. He quotes Dawkins on the eye. But I haven't mentioned the most glaring example of imperfection in the optics. The retina is back to front. Imagine a latter-day Helmholtz presented by an engineer with a digital camera, with its screen of tiny photocells, set up…

Common ground and deeply held differences: a reply to Bruins for Animals.

In a post last month, I noted that not all (maybe even not many) supporters of animal rights are violent extremists, and that Bruins for Animals is a group committed to the animal rights position that was happy to take a public stand against the use of violence and intimidation to further the cause of animal liberation. On Wednesday, Kristy Anderson (the co-founder of Bruins for Animals), Ashley Smith (the president), and Jill Ryther (the group's advisor) posted a critical response to my post. In the spirit of continuing dialogue, I'd like to respond to that response. They write: AR…

Compare and contrast: Real cancer research versus Stanislaw Burzynski

I happen to be out of town right now, attending the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. It's been a more—shall we say?—eventful trip than anticipated, which is why at my not-so-super-secret other blog we have a guest post today and here I will (probably) be shorter than usual. I'm not really going to say much about what I mean by "more eventful than usual," because it's more personal than anything else. Suffice to say that it kept me from delivering the usual logorrhea. Well, the unexpected event plus spending the day visiting my sister and my nephews, one…

Dan Burton's last antivaccine hurrah?

A couple of months ago, I couldn't help but rejoice when I learned that Indiana Representative Dan Burton had finally, after twenty years in the U.S. House of Representatives, decided to retire after the end of this term. I thought that anyone in the U.S. who supports science-based medicine should rejoice, too, because I'm hard-pressed to think of someone in Congress who is more consistently antiscience, particularly anti-medical science, than Dan Burton. Worse, he put his politics where his beliefs were -- big time. Perhaps the most egregious example of Dan Burton's antiscience is his…

Russell Simmons: The latest celebrity antivaccinationist?

I hadn't planned on writing about this again today. (How many times have I started a post with that phrase? I forget, but a lot. Sadly, developments frequently make me change my plans about blogging.) Here's what made me change my plans It was a pair of Facebook posts on hip-hop and fashion mogul Russell Simmons' Facebook page. Here's post #1: And here's post #2: This, of course, is the news report regurgitating antivaccine talking points broadcast in Atlanta late last week by Ben Swann, an all-purpose conspiracy theorist and, apparently, now antivaccinationist, who is anchor for the…

A commercial for acupuncture masquerading as news

I didn't think I'd be writing about acupuncture again so soon after deconstructing another "bait and switch" acupuncture study less than a week ago. True, the quackery that is acupuncture and the seemingly unending varieties of low quality studies published to make it seem as though there is anything more than nonspecific placebo effects invoked by sticking needles into the skin against an even more unending variety of diseases, conditions, and complaints. Basically, according to its adherents, acupuncture can treat almost anything. Particularly galling to me as a cancer surgeon is the…

Autism One: As quacky as it ever was

Once again, the yearly autism quackfest known as Autism One is fast approaching. In fact, it will begin in Chicago tomorrow: five days of "autism biomed" quackery and antivaccine pseudoscience. Ever since the Great Schism in the autism antivaccine quackery community, which severed Generation Rescue from Autism One and ended Jenny McCarthy's run of being the keynote speaker every year, it just hasn't been the same. Well, not quite. It turns out that a lot of the speakers are still the same, Generation Rescue or not, Jenny McCarthy or not. Just take a look at the speaker list, and you'll see a…

"Where's Hillary-Gate" as a cautionary tale for religious accommodation

You've all seen the photograph. Here's a closeup: On the right is a bunch of people in the Sitch Room at the White House watching in-house coverage of the Navy Seals taking out O-b-L. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Counter Intel Adviser Audrey Tomason are, notably, the only women in the room. There are not a lot of women in the highest echelon of power in the US, it would seem. The photograph on the left is the same shot published in the 'newspaper' Der Zeitung, a Brooklyn Hasidic publication. Here, the two women who actually were in the room have been deleted for religious…

Melanie Phillips: Crank magnetism in action on evolution and vaccines

A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed this tendency long before I saw Mark's post, including one Dr. Lorraine Day, who, besides being a purveyor of quackery, is also a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who had treated arch-Holocaust Ernst Zündel with "alternative" therapies when he was in jail awaiting trial, and a conspiracy theorist…

Homeopathy and side effects due to cancer therapy: When bad journalism attacks

I've complained about it time and time again because it's annoyed me time and time again. Specifically, I'm talking about how various news outlets report scientific studies involving so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), sometimes called "integrative medicine" (IM), the latter of which I like to refer to adding a bit of woo to make the scientific medicine go down. In general, because the press likes stories that buck the establishment, it tends to favor studies that seem to show that CAM modalities work. Even worse, it tends to misinterpret negative studies in the most…

When the outbreaks occur, they'll start in California

I may have been deluding myself when I talked about 2009 shaping up to be a bad year for antivaccinationists. It turns out that the antivaccine movement is succeeding. That's right, a cadre of upper middle class, scientifically illiterate parents, either full of the arrogance of ignorance or frightened by leaders of the antivaccine movement, such as J.B. Handley, Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy, or the rest of the crew at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, are succeeding in endangering your children. Although the U.K. got a head start in bringing back the measles and mumps,…

Differences between CAM practice and primary care practice

If there is one aspect of "complementary and alternative" medicine (CAM) that can puzzle advocates of science-based medicine, it's why, given how nonsensical much of it is given that some of it actually goes against the laws of physics (think homeopathy or distance healing), CAM is so popular. Obviously one reason is that there are conditions for which SBM does not have any "magic bullet" treatments. Diabetes, heart disease, other chronic illnesses, SBM can manage them quite well, but it can't cure them. Then there are conditions that science doesn't understand very well, conditions like, for…

Shorty Awards "fraud": The evil Illuminati-Mason-Pharma-Vaccine axis of evil succeeds in its conspiracy!

Oh, yes, my brothers and sisters, we have done it! My pharma paymasters are very, very pleased indeed with me and all of their other blogging and Twittering minions. Very, very pleased indeed. In fact, they are cackling with glee over the discomfiture of one of their greatest enemies, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger! This brave rebel's plan to attack the conspiracy by winning a Shorty Award in Health has been thwarted, thanks to the efforts of you and me, oh my brothers and sisters, and The Health Ranger has gone completely mental about it: I was set to take the top prize, and Dr.…

Jack's Fourth Show: How anti-vaccine groups rebrand themselves as legitimate autism charities

There once was a time not so long ago--oh, say, four our five years--when the anti-vaccine fringe was looked upon as what it was: a fringe group, a bunch of quacks and quack advocates, all in essence one big conspiracy theory movement, in which vaccines are the One True Cause of Autism. At the time, there were two basic flavors of this movement, the American and the British variety. The British variety began back in the 1990s, fueled by Andrew Wakefield's pseudoscience, lack of ethics, bad science, and even potentially data falsification for his original 1998 Lancet study that claimed to have…

Breast cancer in TIME Magazine

Here we are, a third of the way into Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I haven't yet written a piece about breast cancer. Given that it's my primary surgical specialty, perhaps some readers were wondering why not. Truth be told, I've always been a bit ambivalent about Breast Cancer Awareness month. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my job makes every month Breast Cancer Awareness month. Or maybe it has something to do with the crassness of some of the promotions designed to attract donations, well-meaning though such campaigns undoubtedly are. From my perspective, any month…

A most uncomfortable question

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, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 26, 2006, which means that more of you are likely to remember it. However, given the discussion from last week, I…

Mercury Rises, Mercury Falls, and Toto, We're Not in Kansas Anymore

Orac in his first post about Autism's False Prophets by Dr. Paul Offit wondered at the book's chapter 5. Chapter 5 is entitled "Mercury Rising" and is (quoting Orac) a '"straightforward and relatively uncritical recitation of the 'science' used by antivaccinationists to show that mercury causes autism." Noting that he has "read and analyzed many of these studies and knowing that they are at best irrelevant and at worst rank pseudoscience" and that he found the chapter, with its uneditoralizing descriptions of studies by the likes of Mark and David Geier, Orac suggests that Offit's…

Lecture 2b: Genes, Traits and the Central Dogma.

[This past fall, I taught a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first time college instructor] In my first lecture, I used Powerpoint (well, technically Keynote), but I personally like chalk-talks a quite a bit more. Never mind the fact that classrooms never seem to have chalk boards any more, I like taking the time to write out important points, draw diagrams on the fly and connect with the material a bit more than just clicking through to the next slide. My students did not agree. My…

Fantastical Fridays: The End of the Hard Sciences?

It has been known officially since 2002 that the sciences are hard, and, as much as we scientists love it when our friends and family tell us how smart and wonderful we must be since they could never understand what we do... is this elevated position going to cost us in the end? Big time? Addressing this issue, an article by Emma Brockes in yesterday's Guardian explores the plight of the physical sciences in the UK, taking a humorous look at the question of whether a lack of interest from students will spell their eventual demise: It is presumably never easy being a physics teacher, what…

Avalon and the origin of multicellular life

New research published in Science on the origins of multicellular life reveals an interesting pattern. The Cambrian Explosion may have been samosamo. What is evolution about? Why are there different species, rather than just one (or a few) highly variable species? Is there a close correspondence between the ecological "spaces" that organisms can fit and the adaptations ... represented by morphology, for instance ... of the species that do exist? Can you imagine a different world where instead of having 10,000 species of birds there is only one bird that is highly adaptable in its…

Can you destroy a meter other than an irony meter?

I don't think I mentioned this, but I'm on a bit of a staycation this week. I figured, what the heck? After coming home from Skepticon I could do with a little R&R. Of course, fool that I am, I still can't resist blogging a bit. On the other hand, the day before Thanksgiving I realize I should dial it back a bit and keep it brief. Everyone in the US (which, sorry, international readers, still make up the vast majority of my readers) is generally busy getting ready and might not have time for checking in with their favorite blogs, particularly blogs of bloggers known for their logorrhea…

The argument that different races have genetically determined differences in intelligence

This post started out as a comment that would have gone here (but would have done just as well here). But it became sufficiently long and possibly interesting that I figured it would make a good, if somewhat rough, blog post. The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly, this post is about the sequence of arguments that are usually made when…

Quackademic medicine now reigns supreme at the Cleveland Clinic

Quackery has been steadily infiltrating academic medicine for at least two decades now in the form of what was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” but is now more commonly referred to as “integrative medicine.” Of course, as I’ve written many times before, what “integrative medicine” really means is the “integration” of quackery with science- and evidence-based medicine, to the detriment of SBM. As my good bud Mark Crislip once put it, “integrating” cow pie with apple pie does not make the apple pie better. Yet that is what’s going on in medical academia these days—witha…

Wiki woo?

While I was away over the weekend, a reader made me aware of a new development in the world of "alternative"--excuse me, "complementary and alternative"--medicine (a.k.a. CAM). I suppose I should have seen this coming. In retrospect, given the proliferation of wikis of seemingly every shape and for seemingly every purpose, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere would put together a wiki for CAM, known as the Wiki4CAM: Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Encyclopedia. My first thought was that maybe I should register. Certainly I could edit some articles, although, despite what…

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design: Chapter 3: Simply incorrect embryology

This article is part of a series of critiques of Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design that will be appearing at the Panda's Thumb over the course of the next week or so. Previously, I'd dissected the summary of chapter 3. This is a longer criticism of the whole of the chapter, which is purportedly a critique of evo-devo. Jonathan Wells is a titular developmental biologist, so you'd expect he'd at least get something right in his chapter on development and evolution in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, but no:…

Depression---an online discussion

Major depressive disorder (hereafter referred to as "depression") is a prevalent and disabling illness. According to the National Institute of Mental Health: Major Depressive Disorder is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for ages 15-44...[and]...affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year. There's been some terrific writing on depression around ScienceBlogs this year. I've written a few pieces touching on mental illness in the past, but never anything explicitly about depression. Given the…

Angst in my pants*: Academic surgeons lament their lot

*With apologies to Sparks. You'd think that a meeting of surgeons in such a beautiful and sunny city as San Diego would be one big party. Well, it was to some extent outside of the meeting, but the meeting itself was a bit of a drag. Academic surgeons are not a happy lot these days, and gathering a few hundred of them in one place at the combined meeting of the American Association of Surgery and the Society of University Surgeons provided an outlet for that unhappiness. To give you an idea of the mood among academic surgeons these days, you have only to look at the presidential addresses of…

Respecting parental concerns versus pandering to antivaccine fears

In common colloquial usage, there is a term known as "gaydar." Basically, it's the ability some people claim to have that allows them to identify people who are gay. Whether gaydar actually exists or not, I don't know, but I claim to have an ability that's similar. That ability is the ability to sniff out antivaccinationists. Over the last decade, I've become very good at it, so much so that it's almost instinctual and rarely wrong. My guess is that it's nothing more than my having internalized all the tactics and tropes that antivaccinationists like to use to the point where I don't need to…

Nanoparticles: The new One True Cause of All Disease?

They're here, they're there, they're everywhere! Sorry. I couldn't resist. I also couldn't resist revisiting the topic of nanoparticles one last time. You remember nanoparticles? They're the contaminant that poisons everything, at least if you believe two Italians, Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari, who published a paper that purported to show that vaccines were hopelessly contaminated with heavy metal nanoparticles. (Hey, that would make a great name for a band.) Unfortunately for them, the study was a hopeless botch that lacked anything resembling proper controls, experimental design,…

Musings from the mind of a mouse

Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn't the slightest smattering of background, and he keeps falling flat on his face. It's hilarious! The Discovery Institute is so hard up for competent talent, though, that they keep letting him make a spectacle of his ignorance. I really, really hope Luskin lives a long time and keeps his job as a frontman…

The Dark Ages

With all of the recent content ragarding the DI and other purveyors of hokum, I thought it would be an appropriate time to post an entry from a pre-scienceblogs version of the Refuge. ...and pretty soon there won't be no streets for dummies to jog on and doggies to dog on religious fanatics can make it be all gone I mean it won't blow up and disappear it'll just look ugly for a thousand years -Frank Zappa Did you ever wonder what the world would be like today if Western culture had never suffered through the Dark Ages? What if, given the controls to some omnipotent time machine, we could…

Fuller on Mooney on science.

By now you have seen the excellent Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science. In addition to the CT regulars, sociologist of science (and Kitzmiller vs. Dover expert witness) Steve Fuller contributed an essay to the seminar. While some in these parts have dismissed it rather quickly, I want to give it a slightly less hasty response. At the outset, let me say that I'm not going to respond to all of Fuller's claims in the essay. For one thing, it's long; the printout (yes, I'm a Luddite), not counting comments, is seven pages of very small type. For…

Prolegomena to any future sociology of New Atheism

The back and forth here in comments and at Jason Rosenhouse's blog has been interesting and stimulating in the last few days. The question of how the rise of New Atheism will or has changed public attitudes towards evolution, towards religion, and towards atheism/atheists are all important questions that have extracted gallons of ink from a lot of bloggers and book authors. But to date, I know of no attempts to measure those effects scientifically. This is odd, since all the advocates on all sides are heavily invested in science as a way of knowing about the world. Part of the problem is…

The evolution of human intelligence

Social Competition May Be Reason For Bigger Brain: "Our findings suggest brain size increases the most in areas with larger populations and this almost certainly increased the intensity of social competition," said David Geary, Curator's Professor and Thomas Jefferson Professor of Psychosocial Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "When humans had to compete for necessities and social status, which allowed better access to these necessities, bigger brains provided an advantage." The researchers also found some credibility to the climate-change hypothesis, which assumes that global…

Revenge of the roader: Chinese atheists are reactionary

One of the major problems in most societies, subject to "great sorts" of various kinds, is the fact that people observe correlations of attitudes & beliefs, and infer from those necessary relations. For example, if one of the first things that someone finds out about me is that I am an atheist, there is a general presupposition that I am a Left-Liberal. It is true that there is a robust relationship between atheism and liberalism in the United States, the problem I have, as an admittedly illiberal atheist, are those who believe that atheism entails liberalism. In a specific instance I…

ClockTutorial #3b - Whence Clocks?

This post about the origin, evolution and adaptive fucntion of biological clocks originated as a paper for a class, in 1999 I believe. I reprinted it here in December 2004, as a third part of a four-part post. Later, I reposted it here. III. Whence Clocks? Origin, Evolution, and Adaptive Function of Biological Clocks The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed. (Heinlein 1973) Now darkness falls. Quail chirps. What use Hawk eyes? (Basho) Local/temporary and global/universal environments. In the study of adaptive functions, usually the question…

ClockTutorial #3b - Whence Clocks?

This post about the origin, evolution and adaptive fucntion of biological clocks originated as a paper for a class, in 1999 I believe. I reprinted it here in December 2004, as a third part of a four-part post. Later, I reposted it here. III. Whence Clocks? Origin, Evolution, and Adaptive Function of Biological Clocks The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed. (Heinlein 1973) Now darkness falls. Quail chirps. What use Hawk eyes? (Basho) Local/temporary and global/universal environments. In the study of adaptive functions, usually the question…

ClockTutorial #3b - Whence Clocks?

This post about the origin, evolution and adaptive fucntion of biological clocks originated as a paper for a class, in 1999 I believe. I reprinted it here in December 2004, as a third part of a four-part post. Later, I reposted it here. III. Whence Clocks? Origin, Evolution, and Adaptive Function of Biological Clocks The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed. (Heinlein 1973) Now darkness falls. Quail chirps. What use Hawk eyes? (Basho) Local/temporary and global/universal environments. In the study of adaptive functions, usually the question…

ClockTutorial #3b - Whence Clocks?

This post about the origin, evolution and adaptive fucntion of biological clocks originated as a paper for a class, in 1999 I believe. I reprinted it here in December 2004, as a third part of a four-part post. Later, I reposted it here. III. Whence Clocks? Origin, Evolution, and Adaptive Function of Biological Clocks The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed. (Heinlein 1973) Now darkness falls. Quail chirps. What use Hawk eyes? (Basho) Local/temporary and global/universal environments. In the study of adaptive functions, usually the question…

Kevin Barry, you magnificent bastard, I read your antivaccine book!

I don't review books that often. The reason is simple. My posts for this blog sometimes take as much as a several hours to write (particularly my more "epic" ones that surpass 5,000 words), and I usually don't have the time to add several more hours to the task by reading an entire book. Also, by the time I've read a book I might want to review, weeks—or even months—have often passed, and a review is no longer of much interest to our readers anyway. Today, I'm making an exception for a book hot off the presses. The main reason is curiosity, because the book is about a topic that I've blogged…

Should you install Ubuntu Linux?

This is one of four related posts: Should You Install Ubuntu Linux? Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS How to use Ubuntu Unity Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Some Linux/Ubuntu related books: Ubuntu Unleashed 2016 Edition: Covering 15.10 and 16.04 (11th Edition) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and Administration The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction Why you should install Linux Linux is an operating system, as are Windows and Apple’s OSX. It is the operating system that is used on the majority of computing devices. Linux is the basis for the Android operating system,…

No need to pick a fight, but I will respond

MarkH, SciBling at denialism blog and fellow MD-PhD student, takes issue with my post about a move to ban "poaching" of doctors from African countries. I can't say I am entirely surprised, since I knew that post would be controversial. I want to respond to his -- in my opinion very substantive -- criticisms. (You might notice that people on ScienceBlogs don't always agree. No worries. I have no expectation that a group of smart and diverse people will agree on everything, particularly in science. I respect the opinion of everyone who blogs here including Mark, so I don't lose sleep in…

A study contributes to the deceptive rebranding of naturopathy as "lifestyle counseling"

That naturopathy is a veritable cornucopia of quackery mixed with the odd sensible, science-based suggestion here and there is not in doubt, at least not to supporters of science-based medicine (SBM). However, what naturopaths are very good at doing is representing their pseudoscience as somehow being scientific and thus on par with actual SBM. So how do they accomplish this? Certainly, it's not through the validation of any of the cornucopia of pseudoscience and quackery that naturopaths apply to their patients as though picking "one from column A and one from column B" from a proverbial…