So I have posted a couple of times via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ about the new website that Carley designed for me. What I tried to do with the site is make my work a little bit more accessible.
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Hume, the self, and morals
I was fortunate to attend a fascinating talk a few weeks ago, hosted by Centre for Inquiry Ottawa and given by Professor Gordon Davis, the chair of the Philosophy Department at Carleton University. The talk was intended to celebrate the contributions of David Hume to science, skepticism and secularism during the year that marked the 30oth anniversary of his birth. Prof Davis gave a really fascinating, off-the-top-of-his-head summary of what he felt were the most important and most influential (not necessarily the same thing) contributions that Hume made. The entire talk was informative, especially for someone as philosophically illiterate as myself.
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LEGO Friends: toy or tool of the mysognists?
It’s Saturday, my first day with nothing to do for about three weeks and how do I decide to spend it? Writing a literature review of sex-specific play behaviour in humans…
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How to make the world more awesome
Some of you may have noticed that some things about the world are a bit depressing. Economic crises, unemployment, famine, poverty, disease… There isn’t much that we can do about these things as individuals, but there are some initiatives up and running that might help to make the world a slightly less depressing and slightly more awesome place to live in.
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Licensing and legitimacy in alternative medicine
I saw this sign literally yards from my home in Ottawa. So close to the border between Ontario and Quebec, there is a lot of competition for services, competition which is enhanced by the fact that there are two different tax rates in the provinces. In this case, the Ontario naturopath is arguing that the customer (and let’s face it, users of naturopathy are really more customers than patients) would be better off using a provider from a province within which naturopathy is licensed and regulated (i.e. Ontario) rather than a province where the practice is unregulated (i.e. Quebec). Of course, this really boils down to a debate over whether or not the Emperor’s new clothes were made by a tailor who was part of the Tailors’ Guild…
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Pure Med Naturopathic Centre, Ottawa: Logical fallacies and unproven treatments
Since my involvement with the 10:23 Campaign here in Ottawa in February 2011 (see our media coverage), I have had a Google Alert set up to notify me when the words “homeopathy” and “Ottawa” occur together in a news article. This alert has been blissfully silent… until today!
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International variation in IQ – the role of parasites
I co-authored a paper with Tom Sherratt at Carleton University a few months ago and we have received a bit of attention in the press (Washington Post blog, Scientific American, the Ottawa Sun, the heady heights of the Carleton University newspaper…). As pretty much everyone has offered their views on the paper based on the press coverage (which has been pretty good but not perfect…), I had better set the record straight!
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The limitations of clinical trials
[I really should have discussed this before having launched into reviews of evidence from clinical trials as it is fundamental to the issue of what constitutes “evidence”. You will notice, if you read back, that I have peppered my previous posts with links to this article where appropriate.]
I have mentioned in a number of previous posts that there is some evidence for efficacy for some fairly outlandish alternative medicine treatments. This evidence comes in the form of significant statistical tests in clinical trials. Now, clinical trials (double-blind, placebo-controlled and properly randomised) are the gold standard for evidence-based medicine but (as with all statistics) you have to know how to interpret them for them to be of any use. There are three places where care needs to be exercised in the interpretation of clinical trials:Read More »
Odonate of the week: Ischnura elegans
For this odonate of the week, we are going to be a (fairly easy) game of spot the difference:
Mantids!
So our lab ordered some mantids from Home Depot (which don’t seem to be available so I presume it’s a seasonal product) for predation experiments. I was under the impression that they needed specific conditions to hatch that wouldn’t be met until next June. Then someone noticed one crawling over a desk. Sure enough, there were a few dozen wandering aimlessly about, migrating away from the egg case that was sitting in a corner of the lab. I think we got most of them, but those that we didn’t catch should take care of our fruitfly problem!
Katatrepsis 