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SfN: (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How will it Affect You?

I attended a panel discussion chaired by David van Essen entitled (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How will it Affect You? It was focused on what the implications of the Open Access movement in science are, and what scientists should expect from that. For those of you who don't know, the Open Access movement is a push to make all journal articles published freely available to the public. This while a very laudable goal raises some issues, not the least of which is who is going to pay for publishing if all the articles are free. Nick Anthis from The Scientific Activist and I debated…

How can so much stupidity about medicine be packed into one article?

Mike Adams is an idiot. There, I said it. Adams runs the NewsTarget website, a repository for all things "alternative" medicine. In it, he rails against "conventional" medicine as utterly useless and touts all manner of woo as the "cure" for a variety of diseases. I generally ignore his website these days because I fear that reading it regularly will cause me to lose too many neurons, and, as I get older, I want to hold on to my what neurons I have remaining for as long as possible, or, if I must lose them, to do so in a pleasurable way, perhaps as a result of a fine bottle of wine. But,…

Winter Husbandry

You'd be surprised at how warm our barn is on winter nights. A few nights ago, the thermometer read -10 as I headed out the door, and the wind was howling, but inside the barn it was below freezing, but surprisingly tolerable. Close down a comparatively small space, insulate the floors with dry bedding and fill it with warm life, and the combined body heats make it surprisingly pleasant. Up in the rafters, some of the chickens and the turkeys are nested for the night, and they snuggle together. In the rest of the barn, they also nest in a heap. The goats snuggle together for warmth,…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 130 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work? A Blog Around The Clock: Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish A Blog Around The Clock: Co-…

So you want to be an astrophysicist? Part I - undergrad

Part 2 of Ye Olde Blog So You Want To Be an Astrophysicist? series. Lightly re-edited. Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from prof Charlton's freshman seminar for our majors): Do you like stars and stuff? If not, you probably should look for an alternative, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like. If you do, good for you. Now, do you have the aptitude? Professional astrophysics/astronomy is not about looking at stars (except at occasional star parties, for outreach or as a…

Powers of Ten (Dollars)

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. -Richard Feynman Not so long ago I wrote a snarky post about economics wherein I joined the chorus of voices deriding the ludicrously horrible track record of predicting the impact of the stimulus. Well, another month another data point, overlaid on the otherwise unmodified Obama stimulus prediction: Not only is it much worse than what the stimulus was supposed to…

Atheists can be stupid, too

This is the worst case of atheist buttery I've ever seen. I'm left with this terribly greasy, bloated feeling after going through it, and I think my arteries were clogging up just reading it. This fellow Malcolm Knox is an atheist who happily sends his kids off to the Catholic church, which is just fine (his wife is Catholic)…but he's got to rattle off ten terrible, awful, stupid excuses for why he has to do it. It's embarrassing how pathetic his reasoning is. And my SIWOTI syndrome compels me to take each one apart. In his 1995 open letter to his 10-year-old daughter Juliet, Dawkins…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Amy Freitag

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Amy Freitag from Southern Fried Science to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is…

Birds in the News 184 -- Nobel Prize Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Magpie Menace" Pete Marshall, 2009, Oil [larger view]. Birds in Science By genetically modifying the brains of songbirds for the first time, scientists may have a devised useful new tool for studying neurological growth and healing in humans. "Songbirds have become a classic tool for studying vocal learning and neuron replacement. This will bring those two topics into the molecular age," said neuroscientist Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University, author of a study published recently in the Proceedings of the…

Good intentions, bad effects: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

Remember the scares around December 2007 about lead in children's toys manufactured in China? Back then, people cried out for better testing to ensure that products intended for children were actually safe for children. Partly in response to this outcry, a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was passed. The intent of the law is to protect kids from harm from lead (and other substances) in children's products. However, the effect of the law may be something else altogether. I've been meaning to post on this for awhile, but I've finally been spurred into action by my…

The Perils of Ideological Continua and Coordinate Systems

This post (from January 14, 2005) is how I see the political/ideological landscape in the USA. ---------------------------------------------------- We use the words Left and Right to describe Liberal and Conservative ideological and political leanings. The phrases stem, if I remember correctly, from the seating arrangement in the first French Parliament in the late 18th century. That was a long time ago. By now, most people realize that a straight Left/Right continuous line does not represent the ideological spectrum very well, yet the terms are still in constant use and, more importantly,…

The Perils of Ideological Continua and Coordinate Systems

This post (from January 14, 2005) is how I see the political/ideological landscape in the USA. ---------------------------------------------------- We use the words Left and Right to describe Liberal and Conservative ideological and political leanings. The phrases stem, if I remember correctly, from the seating arrangement in the first French Parliament in the late 18th century. That was a long time ago. By now, most people realize that a straight Left/Right continuous line does not represent the ideological spectrum very well, yet the terms are still in constant use and, more importantly,…

Moving Overseas, Part 9

This week has not gone very well, probably because I've been ill since Sunday with some sort of illness that makes me vomit a lot. Last week, I thought I had everything figured out, but this week, I've been confronted by an increasingly complex tangle of paperwork and problems and with having to make decisions about how to spend huge sums of money (well, huge sums in the view of this unemployed scientist). All the while, I am reminded how intelligent I was to resist the pressure put on me to relocate anywhere unless I knew I had a job first. Here's a list of everything that has gone wrong so…

Growing Again...Maybe?

Last Friday afternoon my mother and step-mother came to visit.  My mother had surgery on her foot back in the summer and has had a long, slow recovery, and is only now able to travel and drive, so this was the first visit in nearly six months.  As we sat around the table, we joked that it would be a great day for our family to get a phone call about a foster placement. Five minutes afterwards, my mother was walking by the phone when it rang and she called out "It is the county!"  I laughed, thinking she was joking.  She wasn't.  It was a call about a sibling group of five kids.  We said yes…

Snookered by OSHA's Weekly Fatality Report Site

In a blog post seven months ago, I gave federal OSHA credit for placing worker fatality information front-and-center on its homepage. The sobering feature deserving kudos was the scrolling list of fatal-injury incidents in which men and women died recently at US workplaces. I remarked that the change by OSHA was a good start, and that I considered it a work in progress. It seemed that OSHA did as well. The first few weekly entries (here, here, here, here) did not include work-related fatalities reported to OSHA State Plan states. Federal OSHA indicated that some State Plans "elected not…

Watchdogs of Democracy?

An informed public and open debate is vital to a healthy democracy, but they depend upon free access to the facts. A free and fair media is indispensable to democracy because they are the only institution that can regularly question the president and other public officials. However, not everyone thinks that the American media has been doing their job recently. One of those people is Helen Thomas. Thomas is a journalist who has covered Washington news for more than 60 years. In her new book, Watchdogs of Democracy? The waning Washington press corps and how it has failed the public (NYC:…

OSHA should undertake an educational campaign on finding and fixing chemical exposures

by Eileen Senn, MS OSHA's intention to finalize a list of chemicals on which to focus the agency's efforts to address outdated rules on workplace chemical exposures was officially announced in the December 1 issue of OSHA Quick Takes and described in my November 17 post, "OSHA Poised to Action on Chemical Hazards." No matter what approach or combination of approaches OSHA ultimately takes on chemical exposures, employer education and training must lay the foundation for voluntary compliance and enforcement. OSHA will need to undertake a campaign to teach employers, employees, and union…

Ask Ethan #9: Why everything rotates

"Galileo got it wrong. The Earth does not revolve around the Sun. It revolves around you and has been doing so for decades. At least, this is the model you are using." -Srikumar Rao It's the end of the week, so that means its time to take on another one of your questions from the question/suggestion box, and continue our ongoing Ask Ethan series! Even though there's a backlog of hundreds of questions, you should keep sending the new ones in, as all questions are fair game for any segment. This week's question comes from reader Brian Mucha, who asks us: Where did the sun and planets get their…

If the Candidates Talk About Big Science Issues ...

... maybe they'll actually do something about them. Remember the Democratic and Republican party debates that were held just before that major international meeting about climate change, participated in by every country in the world? Of course you do. Do you remember the candidates' responses to the questions about climate change posed during those debates? No, you don't. Not a single question about climate change, or any other big science issue, was asked. When we think about the big science issues, climate change is often one of the main topics that comes first to mind. But there are many…

Do you kind of wish Pokemon cards had REAL creatures not FAKE creatures?

If so, you should join this facebook group. Or to discuss further, please go to http://friendfeed.com/phylomon. Here's part of what started this group and project: a friend of mine passed on this "letter to Santa:" It quite nicely demonstrates an issue with advocates of biodiversity - that is, what can we do to get kids engaged with the wonderful creatures that are all around them? They obviously have the ability and the passion to care about such things, but it appears misplaced - they'll spend a ton of resources and time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same…

Fishkiller

I write in my sleep. You see, the way it works is that if I have something on my mind when I go to bed, my brain will churn over it all night long, and because of the way my head works, it will spontaneously generate a narrative. I do that in all of my dreams — I float aloof from the events, mentally transcribing what's going on. My consciousness is a kind of disembodied reporter, I guess. This quirk can work out well. Lots of my longer posts are composed while I'm sleeping — I wake up in the morning and the structure of the story is all laid out in my head, with a jumble of words stacked…

Optogenetic fMRI

OF all the techniques used by neuroscientists, none has captured the imagination of the general public more than functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The technique, which is also referred to as functional neuroimaging and, more commonly, "brain scanning", enables us to peer into the human brain non-invasively, to observe its workings and correlate specific thought processes or stimuli to activity in particular regions. fMRI data affect the way in which people perceive scientific results: colourful images of the brain have persuasive power, making the accompanying data seem more…

Vegetative and minimally conscious patients can learn

THE vegetative and minimally conscious states are examples of what are referred to as disorders of consciousness. Patients in these conditions are more or less oblivious to goings-on in their surroundings - they exhibit few, if any, signs of conscious awareness, and are usually unable to communicate in any way. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to establish what these patients are experiencing, and the consciousness disorders are among the least understood, and most commonly misdiagnosed, conditions in medicine. Although technologies such as functional neuorimaging have enabled…

Fumento's sidekick

We last saw Fumento blundering around in a field of rakes. Now read on. John Fleck commented on the situation: The thing is, Fumento is, at times, a quite talented journalist. But then, over and over again, he shows himself to be a complete tool. My first encounter with his work was a solid take-down in Reason of Gary Taubes' New York Times Magazine piece on the wonders of the Atkins diet. I probably liked the piece because it fit my biases, but whatever. It was a solid piece of work. And true to form Fumento managed to make a complete fool of himself with an evidence-free claim that…

Egnor responds, falls flat on his face

The other day, the Time magazine blog strongly criticized the DI's list of irrelevant, unqualified scientists who "dissent from Darwin", and singled out a surgeon, Michael Egnor, as an example of the foolishness of the people who support the DI. I took apart some of Egnor's claims, that evolutionary processes can't generate new information. In particular, I showed that there are lots of publications that show new information emerging in organisms. Egnor replied in a comment. He's still completely wrong. The Discovery Institute has posted his vapid comment, too, as if it says something, so let…

Basics: Making graphs with kinematics stuff

**pre reqs:** [kinematics](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-kinematics.php) Suppose there is some experiment in which you throw a ball up and collect position and time data (with video analysis). What do you do with this data? Your instructor told you to make a graph, but how do you do that? Here is the fictional data you (or I) collected:  Here is the text file with the data if you want to reproduce the graphs I make here [kinematics data](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/kinematics_data.…

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do

If there is one "politics" book you should read this year, it is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Now, this sort of acclamation does need to be tempered by the fact that I myself don't really read "political" books very often. But despite the modest N, I'm rather confident that anyone who picks up Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State will not be disappointed. To a great extent the collective of Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi and Jeronimo Cortina have produced a work which is a response in substance, if not…

SiBlings

Since my move here to SEED scienceblogs, I made a mistake of assuming, quite wrongly, that most of my visitors are aslo science bloggers (or people interested in science) who, almost by definition, regularly read all of the other SEED sciencebloggers as well. I forgot that some of the readers are not new readers, but people who came over here with me, people who have read one of my three old blogs for a long time before my move. They may be liberal/progressive bloggers, or fans of John Edwards, or North Carolina bloggers, or Balkans bloggers, or edubloggers or academic bloggers. Not to…

The Global Amphibian Crisis, 2009

Last year was Year of the Frog (nothing to do with the Chinese calendar, but instead a global effort to raise awareness about the plight of the world's declining amphibian species). I hope that you've not forgotten that the global effort to slow amphibian extinction continues unabated. For various reasons, I haven't blogged about amphibians for a while, so, in an effort to bring balance (something I strive for, yet will always fail to achieve) I feel the need to bring you up to speed. What has happened lately in the world of amphibian conservation? [Pirri harlequin frog shown here: a species…

A New Labor Day Tradition: The Year in Occupational Health & Safety

In honor of (US) Labor Day, Celeste Monforton and I have started what we intend to be a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year.   The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2011 - Summer 2012 is now available online. We want it to be a resource for activists, regulators, researchers, and anyone else who values safe and healthy workplaces. Much as the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report focuses attention on workplace injury and illness statistics each…

Moving toward a saner health insurance system: rocky but necessary

Friday will be the two-year anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, and there's plenty of discussion about the law's impacts and the upcoming Supreme Court oral arguments. While many of the law's provisions won't take effect until 2014, it's already having an impact on some aspects of health insurance. I described several of these in a post on the law's one-year anniversary, so now I want to focus on two recent stories that underscore the difficulty and importance of changing how the US handles health insurance. First, it's important to remember that the law isn't an overhaul…

ANSI’s Nail Gun Safety Standard ignores safety research, ANSI process criticized

You’ve probably seen on-line the grim photos showing a construction nail embedded in a person’s skull or hand. The culprit: nail guns. In particular, those with “contact actuation triggers.” An estimated 37,000 pneumatic nail-gun related injuries are treated in US emergency rooms every year, with slightly more than half being work-related. Nail guns are the leading cause of tool-related injuries in the US construction industry that result in hospitalization. As researchers who study nail gun safety wrote in the March 2015 issue of Professional Safety: “Before pneumatic nail guns were…

The Boston Marathon

Subtitle: Snow white and the seven dwarves, though it is some time since I've been snowy white (even if I am wearing my SEH MCR 1988 top and my "these are older than you are young lady" rowing shorts) and some of the ladies are bigger than me. Left to right: Anne, Ev, Mels father (support car driver), Amy, Louise, Alan (trailer driver), Jo, Joss, Mel, Elissa (volunteer cox from Magdalene), Me. As you'll notice, they are female and I'm not. This is because they had a spare space and the men, as ever, hadn't quite got round to organising themselves. I was keen to do it, and also thought I…

Climate Science Denial at Carleton University: A Detailed Take-Down

A report detailing an audit of a course called "Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective" (ERTH 2402), taught at Carleton University, has been compiled by a team of concerned individuals and was released a few minutes ago. From the report: The course... provides an unbalanced and, in many cases, factually inaccurate view of anthropogenic global warming which detracts from the high quality of teaching at Carleton University. We highlight 142 incorrect or equivocal claims and cite the relevant scientific literature to correct those statements. While the principle of academic freedom…

The Franken Coleman Race: What will happen, why, and what you need to do

The last part ... what you need to do ... mainly applies to Minnesota residents. We'll get to that. Right now the polls are all over the place. There are five new and recent polls to consider (data all sourced through RCP). Public Policy Polling, covering October 28th to October 30th, with a margin of error of 3.0 percent, shows Franken with 45% of the vote and Coleman with 40. That is rather astounding. Research 2000 has a poll covering October 27 to October 29, with a margin of Error of 4%, and in this case Franken has 40 percent and Coleman 43. A statistical dead heat. A Mason Dixon…

U2 Academic Conference Registration Opens; Q&A With Organizer, Scott Calhoun

During the summer between high school and college, about this very time in 1981, I was sitting at a beach house in North Carolina listening to my uncle rail against The Beatles. He held that the band never truly took its fame and international press attention to doing anything good for the world except to glorify LSD. I now get to tell him about U2. That summer also saw the launch of MTV and in fall I watched four young Dubliners on a barge playing a song called, "Gloria," the opening track of their album October. And in the intervening years the band, and especially its lead singer Bono…

What is the Ecological Footprint of Disneyland?

Having just returned from a visit to the magic kingdom, the above was a question that continually haunted my consciousness. Disneyland was remarkably pristine in that cookie cutter, artificial, yet aesthetically pleasing way, but it must be a major sink in terms of waste, energy consumption, carbon emissions, etc. Or is it? Maybe in terms of footprint, by applying its incredible density (>15 million visitors each year!), it comes out not looking so bad? It should be noted that Disney appears to be viewing environmental issues in a relatively serious manner, with a number of programs…

Part Human, Part Virus

A lot of people think of viruses and bacteria in our bodies as nothing more than pests. It's certainly true that a lot of them do an excellent job of making us ill. But some viruses and bacteria merged with our ancestors over the course of billions of years, and if you were to have them removed from your body today, you'd die faster than if you'd gotten a massive dose of Ebola. In order to breathe, we depend on sausage-shaped blobs in our cells called mitochondria. When I say we, I mean not just humans or animals, but a vast group of species known as eukaryotes, which also includes plants,…

How Do You Figure Out How Chimps Learn? Peanuts.

What is culture? One simple definition might be: a distinctive behavior shared by two or more individuals, which persists over time, and that ignorant individuals acquire through socially-aided learning. There are at least four different ways to learn a particular behavior or problem-solving strategy. That is to say, there are four different ways to learn. The first is social facilitation, in which one individual does the same thing as the demonstrator at the same time. Essentially this is a situation of on-line matching of motor actions. For example, I might learn the steps to a complicated…

Monday Pets: Why Do Dogs Push Their Food Bowls Around?

Dog owners have a way - sometimes within DAYS of first becoming dog owners - of becoming EXPERTS on animal behavior. It blows my mind. These are people who observe their animals displaying interesting or curious behaviors and make up things like "dogs like being put in tiny cages, actually, because of when their ancestors were pack animals and lived in caves." Figure 1: Do they look happy to you? I didn't think so. That said, a reader sent me an email inquiring about a particular behavior that she has observed in her female poodle. This reader is not one of the above-described self-…

The 2004 Golden Rake Award

Welcome to the 2004 Deltoid awards. Today we are giving out the Golden Rake Award, named in honour of Sideshow Bob and the rakes in the Simpsons Cape Feare episode: How many other series would waste valuable prime-time real estate by showing a man whacking himself in the face with a garden rake not once, not twice, but NINE TIMES?!? If ever there was a gag genius in its repetitive stupidity (progressing from funny to not so funny to the funniest thing ever), this is it---merely the sharpest cut in an entire episode that just plain kills. The award…

Patent-Violating* Chocolate Chip Cookies with Festival Speaker Jeff Potter

By USA Science & Engineering Festival Nifty Fifty Speaker Jeff Potter Jeff Potter's Patent-Violating* Chocolate Chip Cookies. Photo by Jeff Potter One of the biggest advantages that home-cooked foods have over store-bought goods is time. Commercial products have to be shelf-stable, so manufacturers have to come up with clever tricks to mimic home cooking. What if we dug into the literature and tried using those tricks for ourselves? A freshly baked cookie—“just like Mom used to make!”—ends up being crispy on the outside and chewy in the middle. Some enterprising researchers at UC…

Messier Monday: A Four-Star Controversy Resolved, M73

"Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error." -Benjamin Rush Welcome back to another Messier Monday! Each week, we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky wonders of the Messier Catalogue, from distant galaxies to nearby star clusters, from nebulous star factories to ancient globular bunches, and from stellar remnants to the rare-but-interesting anomalies. There are only three such anomalous entries out of all 110 Messier objects, and today provides us with a fantastic opportunity to take an in-depth look at one of them. Image credit: The Messier Objects by Alistair Symon…

Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization

When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton's anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn't really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in the form of approving re-shares on my social media feeds, and in direct responses such as a rebuttal from Chris Anderson himself and most recently a long piece by Christiana Peppard at Medium, which are getting their own collection of approving re-shares. So I guess I ought to…

Perceived Atheist Prevalence Reduces Anti-Atheist Prejudice

Update: Saturday, 2:48 am. The original version of this post contained an unkind remark directed towards Josh Rosenau. My intention was facetious hyperbole, but upon further reflection I've decided that my remark is too easily misunderstood as personally acrimonious. For that reason I have revised that sentence, while leaving unchanged the substantive points I was making.   That's the title of a new study (PDF format) by psychologist Wll Gervais, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Here's the abstract: Although prejudice is typically positively related to…

Volcano Monitoring and the Stimulus: Cost Effective and a Clear Public Good

I've already talked about the basic dishonesty Bobby Jindal exhibited when he took a swipe at the mention of "volcano monitoring" in the stimulus - Jindal claimed that there was $140 million in there for "volcano monitoring", when it's actually only one of a number of projects listed under that line - but there's something more important that I didn't discuss. I took a swipe at the messenger, but what about the message? Jindal may be a liar, but that doesn't make him wrong. He is wrong, of course. He delivered the argument dishonestly, but the argument still fails on the merits. Volcano…

The Hunterian Museum (bioephemera archive)

This article originally appeared on the old bioephemera September 9, 2007. Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions Hunterian museum One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible. The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln's Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended…

Brain-Friendly Giftables, part 1: Books.

As promised, I bring you some gift recommendations for kids who are into math or science (or could be if presented with the right point of entry). The first installation: books. Books are the best. They don't need batteries or assembly. They don't have lots of little parts that will end up strewn on the floor (or lost under the couch). You can read them alone or read them with others. You can buy 'em new, but you can also find some amazing books at used bookstores, or garage sales, or library sales. And of course, if you have a library card you can partake of an astounding number of…

Are more physicians really prescribing CAM?

I and others have often written about how "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) represent a "bait and switch." The basic concept is that CAM/IM has co-opted several ostensibly science-based modalities, such as diet, exercise, relaxation, and the like. These are used as the bait by representing them as being somehow "alternative" and outside of the mainstream of medicine. The switch occurs when CAM/IM advocates use the known efficacy of modalities like this to argue that other woo works. They do this through a "big tent" policy, where diet, exercise,…

Psychotics prefer Bush?

I have to take this opportunity to express a bit of disappointment in one of my fellow SB'ers. When I encounter a study that seems to confirm my biases, as a skeptic, I try very hard to be even more skeptical than usual, because I would hate to be caught trumpeting a weak or bogus study as evidence supporting a belief of mine. That would be very embarrassing to me. At the very least, although I might not always succeed, I usually try to be very candid about limitations of studies that I cite. Unfortunately, yesterday, Bora (via Archy) failed to heed that rule. Indeed, he clearly let his…