Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Vaccination not only works, but it works well. Smallpox is gone, and Polio, Tetanus, and Measles, have all been greatly restricted. Nobody would seriously advocate a return to the 18th century, a time when as many as 400,000 europeans died each and every year of smallpox alone, and yet the arise of an anti-vaccine movement … Read more
The news is that the UK’s publicly funded National Health Service has blacklisted Homeopathy and also Herbal remedies. Now, you might be tempted to think that they have finally decided to pay attention to the evidence that clearly demonstrates that it simply does not work at all … right? Nope, that is not the driving force … Read more
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more
You are hopefully familiar with the #MeToo twitter tag. Just over a month ago it went viral as a very public grassroot shout to denounce sexual assault and harassment. It was triggered by the very public accusations against Harvey Weinstein. Literally million of people used it to come forward and so the scale of abuse and harassment … Read more
There are moments when many eyes turn and focus on something dramatic. The recent example familiar to most will have been the utterly tragic shooting in Las Vegas that resulted in so much trauma (58 people dead and 546 were injured). Most will correctly attribute this to be the senseless act of one lone wolf … Read more
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof has a reputation as somebody who “rewrote opinion journalism”. While the core focus behind his writing has been his strong emphases on human rights abuses and social injustices, what makes his writing interesting has been his ability to throw an insightful spotlight upon things that are often hidden and not talked about. … Read more