New Ben Goldacre book on clinical trials and academic misconduct

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I’ve been working on getting the blog up and running again, and I have a few posts in the pipeline.  However, this topic is one close to my heart and I wanted to post on it as soon as possible.  I have blogged about the limitations of clinical trials and the need for clinical trial registration before.  Ben Goldacre has published a new book (“Bad Pharma: How Drugs Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients“) on precisely this problem, and gave a recent TED talk that frames the issue brilliantly.  As he says “tell everyone that this is a problem, and that it hasn’t been fixed”:

Image credit: Tom Varco

From the Dojo to the Classroom: teaching in martial arts

Katatrepsis4 Comments

EDIT: While I was writing this I couldn’t remember the name of the instructor who led the roundtable: Dr Solveiga Armosakaite.  I should have included her name as a credit and I apologise for not doing so earlier!

I’ve been taking martial arts classes for a couple of years now (Shorinji Kan Jiu Jitsu, for those of you who are interested, more details here) and I’ve reached the stage where I have started taking on small teaching roles within the dojo. At the same time, I also started teaching undergraduate classes at a university. As a result, I was interested when the Educational Development Centre at Carleton University put on a “round table” event with an instructor who incorporated her knowledge of martial arts into her university teaching. I took fairly extensive notes which I have reproduced below.

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Why are there imperfect mimics?

Katatrepsis17 Comments

A few colleagues and I recently had a paper published in Nature on “A comparative analysis of the evolutionary of imperfect mimicry”. Those of you fortunate to have a Nature subscription can read the paper here.  Alternatively, you can email me and I’ll send you a copy.  Unfortunately, I can’t make the paper available due to issues with copyright from Nature (see elsewhere for details of scientists’ love-hate relationship with publishers…) but I can summarise the paper here.
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Best. Email. Ever.

Katatrepsis2 Comments

It’s just gone midnight and I’m still in the office, frantically trying to catch up on course preparation for an undergraduate course that I am teaching (single-handedly) at the moment (the reasons I’m playing catch-up are quite exciting, but we’re embargoed right now so I’ll write more in a few weeks…).  I’m busy writing Lecture 6 (to be given Monday morning) which is going to cover the role that evolution plays in conservation, but I also have to finish prepping the three hour, assessed conservation genetics computer lab for tomorrow, write up all the feedback for the last bunch of assignments and set up the second assignment through the online learning management system so that students can actually submit the assignment…  I’m tired and hungry and I would really rather be home, so I dreaded an email that I just received.
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The difference between men and women

Katatrepsis2 Comments

I had the pleasure this evening of introducing Prof Root Gorelick to give a lecture to the local Centre for Inquiry group here in Ottawa.  I have seen him give a number of relatively provocative talks at conferences and I knew his engaging style and fascinating subject matter would make for an interesting evening.  Some people have asked me to summarise the talk as they couldn’t make it, so here is my best attempt while it is still fresh in my mind…
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Clever little Keas…

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Intelligence can be defined as the ability to solve novel problems.  In other words, many examples of “animal intelligence” wouldn’t count because of the limited range of situations within which they are able to act.  Examples might include squirrels caching nuts and finding them again or the ability of drongos to mimic the alarm calls of meerkats to scare them off and steal their food.  A true demonstration of intelligence requires that an animal be able to solve a problem with which it has no familiarity.  The kea is an example of an animal that has a remarkable capacity to do just this (h/t Jerry Coyne):