Ben Goldacre's Blog, page 15

Hurrah! Book out in US and Canada, talks in NY, Maine, Montreal, come…

My first book "Bad Science" is out today in the US and Canada, and there are some talks coming up in Canada and the US next week. Clicking on the covers below will take you to the Amazon page. . The talks should be fun, I'm passing through: Montreal Trottier Symposium in McGill  on October [...]

The stigma gene

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 9 October 2010 What does it mean to say that a psychological or behavioural condition has a biological cause? Over the past week more battles have been raging over ADHD, after a paper published by a group of Cardiff researchers found evidence that there is a genetic association with the [...]

Nerds, rise up! Science cuts protest tomorrow

I'm speaking tomorrow at the protest against science cuts, it's 2pm outside the Treasury, wear something that looks like your field, maybe a white coat, or a telescope, or a field if you're a botanist. Details of the protest:

Empathy's failures

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 2 October 2010 Like all students of wrongness, I'm fascinated by research into irrational beliefs and behaviours, but I'm also suspicious of how far you can stretch the findings from a laboratory into the real world. A cracking new paper from Social Psychology and Personality Science makes a neat attempt [...]

Pornography in hospitals

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 25 September 2010 The Sun, of all people, are angry about pornography: "THE hard-up NHS is blowing taxpayers' cash on PORN for sperm donors, a report reveals today." The Telegraph immediately followed suit. Some clinics provide pornography for men masturbating in clinic rooms to produce sperm for IVF with their [...]

Ghostwriters in the sky

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 18 September 2010 If I tell you that Katie Price did not, necessarily, write her own book, this is not a revelation. From academics I have slightly higher expectations, but now the legal system has spat out another skip full of documents: this time, we get a new insight into [...]

The pope and Aids

This week the pope is in London. You will have your own views on the discrimination against women, the homophobia, and the international criminal conspiracy to cover up for mass child rape. My special interest is his role in the 2 million people who die of Aids each year. In May 2005, shortly after taking [...]

Blind prejudice

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 4 September 2010 Everyone likes to imagine they are rational, fair, and free from prejudice. But how easily are we misled by appearances? Noola Griffiths is an academic who studies the psychology of music, and she's published a cracking paper on what women wear, and how that effects your judgement [...]

The power of anecdotes

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 28 August 2010 For simpletons and amateurs, there are good research methods, and bad research methods. In reality, different tools are valuable in different situations, and sometimes, even very tiny numbers of people can give you a meaningful piece of information: even an anecdote can be informative. For example, if [...]