[I wasn’t in a very good mood when I wrote this… Does it show…?]
The Vancouver Sun has published a story on the result of an FOI request into academic misconduct in Canada. Apparently a Canadian professor was awarded an NSERC (National Science and Engineering Research Council) grant on the basis of an application in which he knowingly included made-up publications. This makes me angry.
It came to my attention recently that some of my friends were not aware of the Sokal Hoax. I recommend that you check out the Wikipedia article on it as this provides not only an extensive discussion of the event itself, but also a look at the subsequent discussion that the hoax generated, but I’ll quickly summarise what happened here.
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I’ve been neglecting nature in the past few posts, focusing on in-depth (and probably quite dull-looking) reviews of pseudoscientific treatments. Here, I’m going to show some pretty (I think, anyway) photos of some bugs! In a post on the differences between dragonflies and damselflies, I included a couple of photographs that I took while identifying invertebrates from some field samples that I took earlier this year. The project is looking at the biodiversity of stormwater management facilities (SMFs) in Ottawa, Canada. I wasn’t expecting to find much, as these kinds of ponds and small lakes tend to be fairly small, unimpressive and dirty. However, I was pleasantly surprised!
This week’s odonate of the week is a big girl…
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Carl Zimmer wrote an interesting piece recently on “hardy relicts”. “Relict” species or populations are those that are left behind as all the other populations or individuals of a species die off.
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I was carrying out some fieldwork in northern Ontario last summer, which involved trips to Sudbury, Sault Ste Marie and North Bay. Each day while staying in Sault Ste Marie, we would drive past a small, squat building with a sign outside announcing the presence of a “Correactology Centre”. I had no idea what that was and made a mental note to look it up. I was surprised that when I googled “correactology” there wasn’t even a Wikipedia page! It didn’t bother me that much as I had assumed that it was some obscure form of alternative therapy. I was correct, but it is a little bit more interesting than that. Unlike many forms of complementary and alternative medicine, correactology (TM) is new. Not only that, but it is Canadian, with the headquarters based in Sudbury, Ontario, and there is also a branch in Ottawa, making this a local matter!
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For those of you who have been following the past couple of posts, I am currently working my way through part of a shelf in Shoppers Drug Mart and critically evaluating some of their products. I’ve already covered Boiron’s “Stodal” cough syrup and found it to be a combination of folk remedies and wishful-thinking. However, their big product is the flu-remedy Oscillcoccinum. This is among the top ten over-the-counter medicines sold in France (not surprising given their love of homeopathy), so it isn’t a “fringe” alternative medicine by any means. Oscillococcinum (“Oscillo” for short) and Homeocoksinum (its Canadian cousin) are the same medicine marketed by two different companies, so I’m going to deal with them together.
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I have neglected your odonate-related needs, faithful reader(s?)! Behold, your odonate of the week. I picked an interesting one to make up for my silence.
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For those of you who aren’t aware, I am on a mission to debunk at least a small part of Shoppers Drug Mart. This time, it’s Boiron’s Stodal cough mixture.
I hadn’t heard of Stodal before. Apparently it “relieves all types of coughs”, which seems like a pretty bold (and evidence-based claim). This surprised me as it is produced by Boiron, a homeopathic manufacturer. Now there are lots of perfectly good cough medicines out there, even if some of them taste like you’re drinking the products of a high school chemistry experiment. So what does Boiron bring to the table?
The skeptical movement is all about consumer protection, especially when people are being ripped off with woo-related paraphernalia. I’ve mentioned balance bands being sold on group-buy websites twice now. Well, it turns out that Groupon cancelled the deal because they realised that it was an absolute scam! Read More »
Katatrepsis 