Ben Goldacre's Blog, page 10

Great piece in .net magazine about nerdydaytrips.com

Hi, just to say, there's a great piece in this month's .net magazine about www.nerdydaytrips.com, the crowd-sourced dorky-days-out Why-Don't-You project I built with Applecado, Aaron Rudd, and Jo Brodie. Snippet: Tanya Combrinck: Tell us about your ideal kind of day trip. Ben Goldacre: I'm not really interested in guide book stuff, I'm interested in stuff [...]

New edition of "Testing Treatments", best pop science book on Evidence Based Medicine ever.

People often ask if there's one good book that is accessible to all, about how evidence based medicine works. The answer is undoubtedly "Testing Treatments". I name-check it to death in Bad Science, I learnt a huge amount from it, and it's just come out in a new edition. You can (generously!) download the full [...]

New edition of “Testing Treatments”, best pop science book on Evidence Based Medicine ever.

People often ask if there’s one good book that is accessible to all, about how evidence based medicine works. The answer is undoubtedly “Testing Treatments“. I name-check it to death in Bad Science, I learnt a huge amount from it, and it’s just come out in a new edition. You can (generously!) download the full [...]

What if academics were as dumb as quacks with statistics?

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 10th September 2011 We all like to laugh at quacks when they misuse basic statistics. But what if academics, en masse, deploy errors that are equally foolish? This week Sander Nieuwenhuis and colleagues publish a mighty torpedo in the journal Nature Neuroscience. They've identified one direct, stark statistical error that [...]

You might also enjoy my second blog…

As well as being here I'm also there: here's a quick round-up of recent posts from my other blog where I post scatty, brief scribbles in between bouts of real work, they're in the sidebar on the right too.: - - How accurate is turnitin? And a brief scribble on plagiarism - This man's reasoning [...]

You might also enjoy my second blog… and nerdydaytrips.com

As well as being here I'm also there: here's a quick round-up of recent posts from my other blog where I post scatty, brief scribbles in between bouts of real work, they're in the sidebar on the right too.: - - How accurate is turnitin? And a brief scribble on plagiarism - This man's reasoning [...]

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

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 September 2011 Last week the Daily Mail and the Today programme took some bait from Aric Sigman, an author of popular sciencey books about the merits of traditional values. "Sending babies and toddlers to daycare could do untold damage to the development of their brains and their future health," [...]

Benford's Law: using stats to bust an entire nation for naughtiness.

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 17 September 2011 This week we might bust an entire nation for handing over dodgy economic statistics. But first: why would they bother? Well, it turns out that whole countries have an interest in distorting their accounts, just like companies and individuals. If you're an Euro member like Greece, for [...]

Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 3 September 2011 This week George Monbiot won the internet with a long Guardian piece on academic publishers. For those who didn't know: academics, funded mostly by the public purse, pay for the production and dissemination of academic papers; but for historical reasons, these are published by private organisations who [...]

Brain imaging studies report more positive findings than their numbers can support. This is fishy.

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 August 2011 While the authorities are distracted by mass disorder, we can do some statistics. You'll have seen plenty of news stories telling you that one part of the brain is bigger, or smaller, in people with a particular mental health problem, or even a specific job. These are [...]