Ben Goldacre's Blog, page 14

I made a documentary about science and libel for the BBC: here it is

Hi all, I made a documentary for the BBC World Service on libel and science. It's really good, go and listen to it here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009xbbw It goes out live on the BBC World Service today (8 December) at 20:30 GMT; 9 December at 01:30; and 11 Dec at 13:30. There's a piece about it here [...]

Illusions of control

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 4 December 2010 Why do clever people believe stupid things? It's difficult to make sense of the world from the small atoms of experience that we each gather as we wander around it, and a new paper in the British Journal of Psychology this month shows how we can create [...]

A new and interesting form of wrong

Ben Goldacre. The Guardian, Saturday 27 November 2010 Wrong isn't enough: we need interestingly wrong, and this week that came in some research from Stonewall, an organisation for whom I generally have great respect, which was reported in the Guardian. Stonewall have conducted a survey, and their press release says it shows "the average coming [...]

"Hello madam, would you like your children to be unemployed?"

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 20 November 2010 Obviously I like nerdy days out: like Kelvedon Hatch secret nuclear bunker, maybe, with its sign on the A128 saying "secret nuclear bunker this way". Last month eight of us commissioned a boat to get onto a rotting man-made WW2 sea-fort in the middle of the ocean [...]

Science is about embracing your knockers – updated as Rodial begin to play games

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 November 2010 If science has any credibility, it derives from transparency: when you make a claim about how something works, you provide references to experiments, which describe openly and in full what was done, in enough detail for the experiment to be replicated, detailing what was measured, and how. [...]

Science is about embracing your knockers

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 November 2010 If science has any credibility, it derives from transparency: when you make a claim about how something works, you provide references to experiments, which describe openly and in full what was done, in enough detail for the experiment to be replicated, detailing what was measured, and how. [...]

The glorious mess of real scientific results

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 6 November 2010 Popular science is often triumphalist, presenting research as a set of completed answers, when in reality much of what gets published makes a glorious, necessary mess. Here is an example. Solomon Asch's legendary studies from the 1950s on conformity are among my favourite experiments of all time: [...]

Neuro-realism

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 30 October 2010 When the BBC tells you, in a headline, that libido problems are in the brain and not in the mind, then you might find yourself wondering what the difference between the two is supposed to be, and whether a science article can really be assuming – in [...]

Degrees of consent

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 23 October 2010 This month it was revealed that US academics funded by NIH deliberately infected mentally incapacitated patients, prison inmates, sex workers, and soldiers from Guatemala with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid during the 1940s.There has been outrage, and rightly so. Since the 1940s, regulations on consent have been tightened [...]

The caveat in paragraph number 19

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 16 October 2010 You will be familiar with the Daily Mail's ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer. Individual entries are now barely worth documenting, and the phenomenon is best appreciated in bulk through websites such as [...]