SitP For the next Winchester SitP on the 26th of August we are pleased to host, from Improbable Science, the most excellent Prof. David Colquhoun. .
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Thanks to all for coming to last night’s SitP where Andy Lewis gave a fantastic talk and also had a go at electrocuting some of our members ! And I even have pictures of the crime fun err, incident.
We also saw the ultimate in woo machines with a fascinating battery powered pocket device that is claimed to remove all the “bad” electromagnetic fields in your personal area. You switch it on and the fields go away ! Awesome.
Naturally we had a look inside as part of Andy’s talk and can you imagine the level of sophisticated technology we saw ? Something that small capable of filtering all “harmful” EM radiation from radio waves to gamma radiation. It was incredible. Never before have I seen a box, 9V battery, a green LED and a switch put to such revolutionary and potentially Nobel Prize winning use. And most astonishingly of all, it can be yours for only £60. I have already written to the Nobel commission insisting that the inventor be awarded the next prize for Physics. I just hope they ignore the length of copper plumbing pipe with a bit of wire wrapped around it that was also in the box but not connected to anything. It was there presumably to act as ballast.
At the end of the meeting I found a piece of paper with a photocopied article from a newspaper about Steve Brine’s support of the Bonkers Tredinnick’s EDMs on homeopathy and our criticism of his decision. I don’t know who left it there and unfortunately the source is missing as the top of the page didn’t photocopy. I’m presuming it’s from the Hampshire Chronicle or one of the other local papers. So would it be possible for someone to locate a copy of the article or even the actual newspaper and let me know please ?
And afterwards we had another great Skeptics in the Curry House. Special thanks to Dan (@lordmauve) for hosting that. It was great to see so many new faces.
Thanks again everyone. See you next time.
Learning learning learning. The voracious absorbing of information. The insatiable desire to find out new things, to learn new things, to seek out better ways of doing things. An astonishing capacity for expanding minds. To face a problem and gain enough knowledge to solve it quickly, efficiently and then distribute that solution to everyone else to the benefit of all.
Sound like a natural scientist to you ? Me too.
And they are. They’re children. I’ve just been blown away by this BBC article about the work of Professor Mitra of Newcastle University who decided to embed a computer in the slum-facing outside wall of his office in Delhi. The kids didn’t take long to pick up on it and start using it and others to teach themselves and their friends without the ‘help’ of adults.
I’ll be looking into the background of this report but on the face of it the Professor seems to have hit the nail right on the head.
Andy Napier, Journalist for the Hampshire Chronicle asked for an over-the-phone comment from a ‘Hampshire Skeptic’. He specifically wanted comment from a BMA member – and here is the result: Steve Brine supports EDM. This has been tweeted a few times, but it has left me wondering if I really do speak like the queen did in the 1950s!!
Woo at work – Holistic Therapies
Do you have any woo at your place of work ?
Well last week was an interesting one at work for a number of reasons but the most intriguing thing came from our HR department. They publish a quarterly newsletter with all sorts of company goings on therein and in previous newsletters there has been a small mention of ‘holistic therapies’ provided by an external contractor. This time however this practitioner gets a full page. Now I’ll say up front that I don’t know who has written this page. It could be someone in HR or it could have been penned by the practitioner themselves and then passed on to the newletter compiler. I haven’t asked which of these it is yet. Now obviously that would seem like one of the first questions one should ask but I’ve held off because the actual article raised some important questions that I’d like some help in answering and I have some observations I’d like to share with you.
Below you can see a copy of the page with the names removed to protect the guilty.
Continue reading Woo of the Week
I can’t remember what exactly but something on Twitter alerted me to a Merseyside Skeptics blogpost about Early Day Motions in support of Homeopathy. I clicked a few links and found to my horror that my new MP was a signatory to all four of them. Mark Oaten may have had his issues but he could at least be relied upon not to support pseudoscience.
I wrote an email to Mr Brine, initally just about David Tredinnick’s EDM 285 “EFFECT OF HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES ON BREAST CANCER CELLS” calling for further research into the use of homeopathy in this area. I asked him if he’d read the (deeply flawed) scientific paper that it quotes and pointed him to a critique of the paper. In short, I warned, the study is seriously flawed and the results in the paper are not to be trusted.
I reminded him that homeopathy is 200 years old and in all that time there have been about 200 well-designed trials to test its efficacy and none of them have shown that homeopathy is more effective than a placebo. I also pointed him to the House of Commons Science & Technology Select Committee recently published Evidence Check for Homeopathy, reminding him that it concluded that NHS funding of homeopathy should cease because it works only as a placebo. I also mentioned that after an unbiased weighing of the evidence for and against homeopathy, members of the British Medical Association recently passed a motion denouncing use of alternative medicine and branded homeopathy as witchcraft. Finally, I asked him why he was supporting the motion.
He took the time to read what I wrote, although admitting he hadn’t yet followed the links. He said that by signing the EDMs he wasn’t so much supporting them as being keen to open up debate on the issue. He says he was asked to sign them, although he doesn’t say by whom. He also pointed out that he has also been contacted by people who “believe in homeopathy and feel equally strongly [as you]“.
I felt a need to reply and warned him that his support of all four pro-homeopathy EDMs, 284, 285, 286 and 287 was making him appear firmly in the pro-homeopathy camp. I am not certain that this was his ever his intention and suggested that he might want to reconsider his decision in this new light. I also alerted him to the existence of amendments to all these EDMs tabled by Julian Huppert MP which correct their inaccuracies and put them back in line with real science and evidence and suggested he take a look at them.
Steve Brine does appear to listen to the opinions of others — “… Personally, I was asked to sign [the Homeopathy EDMs]…” — so if you’d like to write to him in support of reason you could add your voice to mine. Remember though, you can only write to him if you are in the Winchester and Chandler’s Ford Constituency, otherwise you’re expected to write to your own MP.
Thanks to Dave for letting me post on this blog and thanks to you for listening.
Suzanne.
[Oops! *egg on face* I've never used WordPress before. I've corrected all the links so they work now. Sx]
Now is a good time to remind those who want to see an international drugs policy based science not ideology that they can do something about it. The main thrust of this declaration is:
“The criminalisation of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed.”
There are few arguments for the continuation of prohibition. It criminalises otherwise law-abiding people, imprisons them and causes them to lose their livelihoods for no other reason that their poison of choice is not on the approved list.
There reasons why some drugs are licit and other illicit seem to boil down to xenophobia and fear of the young; they certainly aren’t based on dangerousness.
Prohibition has led to physical harm to users though, amongst other things, contaminants and increasing strength. Opium has given way to heroin, just as beer gave way to spirits during prohibition in America. Given the choice, with legalisation and control, this may revert, just as it did post-prohibition.
The Vienna Declaration is particularly concerned with how the illegality of drugs has fuelled the HIV epidemic and has become hugely harmful to public health.
Go to http://www.viennadeclaration.com/index.html to find out more and to sign the declaration.
For those who don’t know me I am the peroxide blonde who wears too much make up and sits to the front of Hampshire sceptics in the pub. With this in mind it may surprise you as much as it does me to find that I am writing a blog post on the subject of cosmetics and their woo factor.
Rightly or wrongly people wear make up, and most of those people are women. There is a lack of up to date information that I can find but one source reports that in 2003 the cosmetics industry in the UK was worth £4.5billion, a staggering figure – goodness knows what that figure is now in 2010. It is no surprise then that manufacturers and their advertising exec’s need to come up with more and more fantastical reasons for people like me to buy their cosmetics. One section of the market as an example, exhibits a plethora of ‘natural’ cosmetics; these come adorned with added minerals, vitamins, herbs, spices, et cetera, et cetera and it is still not clear that these added ingredients provide any benefits at all to the consumer so I remain sceptical. However, this is not to say I don’t succumb to the promises made by anti ageing creams and potions and I do have about fifty lipsticks in every shade one might imagine! Partly this is to do with liking a change of face every now and then, a lot of this is to do with media pressure and a great deal of this is to do with the fact that cosmetics are often the only luxury item I can afford in contrast to say, a Prada dress. It’s a treat, and like many women I treat myself to a small piece of self esteem over and over many times a year.
When we purchase cosmetics we women should be aware that the studies of ladies who would recommend the product as claimed by the manufacturer may only have contained a couple of hundred subjects or less; we should notice that often the advertising has to carry a (usually very very tiny) footnote to say that the luscious lids of the mascara’d madam portrayed, contain infills or have been CGI’d; we should question the relevance of the same old cream with dubious added ingredients and wonder if those ingredients really help to keep us looking younger. We should think about the amount of money we spend on said cosmetics and if it’s really worth it. Finally we should demand proof that these cosmetics work, and this is something I hope to address in so far as contacting cosmetic companies and requesting data and, oh OK I might ask for the odd freebie as well. Hopefully I will have some wild claims of fountain of youth face creams and details of imaginative ingredients to report back with later in the year.
Caroline
Recently I was asked “What is the use of science, what is science for ?” Now this is the sort of question I would normally expect to get from one of two stereotypes: The nice but ignorant person or the rabid 110% organic luddite.
But this time it came from neither of these two inaccurate and incomplete characterisations. It came straight from someone I know and work with and who I had never suspected of not knowing what science was for.
So I thought about it for rather longer than I would normally have done and realised that aside from the initial impression shining out from a face glowing with 24 carat ignorance there’s actually quite a deep question in there.
So what is science for ?
Continue reading What Is Science For ?
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