Year: 2012

Guess what: Cancer vaccines don’t cause cancer

We’ve previously discussed the whole “oh-my-god-vaccines-are-terrible” carry-on that seems to have gripped the popular Luddite imagination since, well, since vaccines were basically invented. Well, they’ve been at it again. This time the controversy has related to the tragically young death of a teenager in New Zealand, who died some three […]

Todd Akin’s empirical question

So, as you may have heard, Mr Akin, the Republican Party Senate candidate in Missouri (hi, Missouri!) has some weird views on rape, conception, and abortion. Basically, this is what the Todd Akin t-shirts are going to be saying this November: It seems to me, from what I understand from […]

Quick media round-up is quick

I am totally on holidays right now. I even have a beard. However, I still function at an intellectual level (for all intents and purposes). Here are two minor updates regarding ongoing media coverage of this blog/blogger-with-beard. Yesterday, The Guardian’s Higher Education Network included my post on paywalls in its […]

Be careful where you put that paywall

So, lots of people (in the UK at any rate) are pleased at proposals to provide free access to the results of publicly funded research. Here’s George Monbiot’s tweet: This is great news: free access to British scientific research within two years http://t.co/RSZwkDAZ#academicpublishing #academicspring — George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) July 16, […]

Are conservatives less intelligent? Let’s ask a liberal…

Here is an interesting article from Discover Magazine, about some recent research into the association between intelligence and social attitudes. The study was conducted by some psychologists from Canada, and published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. It represents a newly burgeoning tradition of investigating whether social conservatives (such as […]