Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
It is a natural tendency for us to cling to hope and assume that things will not be as bad as projections tell us. Obviously I’m taking about Climate Change, but this applies in many contexts – health, economic, etc…We humans are at heart emotional and so as we strive to make sensible decisions, but … Read more
There have been a few media stories about editing bots battling it out on Wikipedia and so I wondered what the alpha source for this was. It turns out that it all stems from a paper published within the Open Access Journal Plus One. Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia First the Basics … Read more
Dialog on most topics tends to not result in heated verbal exchanges, but move on to either strongly embraced politics or religion ideas and you may find that verbal a whiplash is soon being deployed. What is going on here, why is it like this? What is even more fascinating is that even when faced with mountains of … Read more
The BBC reports on a recently published study as follows … A University of Cambridge study devised psychological tools to target fact distortion. Researchers suggest “pre-emptively exposing” readers to a small “dose” of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims. Stories on the US election and Syria are among those to have caused … Read more
We live in a world that is awash with rather a lot of pseudoscientific claims that are pure grade one gold plated Bullshit, and so it is worth thinking about why some are very susceptible to such influences and others demonstrate a robust immunity to it all. A fascinating paper that yields some insights has been published within the journal Judgment … Read more
Reuters reports here on a study that has just been published (Oct 24) in the Archives of Internal Medicine. They wanted to see which was best for back pain; yoga or stretching, and did this with a study involving over 200 adults with lower back pain. Chronic lower back pain is a common problem and yet … Read more