In the final Reality Check episode (#208) with which I was involved, I presented a segment on whether or not the contraceptive pill influences women’s perceptions of potential partners. I’ve been interested in this question for a few years, ever since sharing an office with evolutionary psychologists at the University of Liverpool. Craig Roberts, whose work I cited a couple of times, was a lecturer there when I was doing my doctoral research. Anyway, on with the show!Read More »
Tag: research
I have an Erdos number of 5!
People may have heard of the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon“, related to the idea of six degrees of separation, where it was posited that any Hollywood actor could be linked to Kevin Bacon by six or fewer relationships (e.g. by virtue of having shared co-stars, etc). This theory of networks is fascinating in its own right, due to the uneven connectedness of nodes (people) within a given network. Not to be outdone, scientists have their own “centre of the universe” and that person is Paul Erdös (1913-1996). Read More »
A new paper
I recently had a scientific paper accepted on the topic of parasites in damselflies. The lead author, a graduate student at Carleton University, has put up a blog post about it. Go read! http://buddingbiologist.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/the-currency-of-science/
A skeptical take on allergy testing
This is the second of three segments that I presented on The Reality Check, Canada’s weekly skeptical podcast. On episode #205, I talked about allergy testing. Advances in medicine have completely eradicated diseases such as smallpox, and we are well on our way to doing the same for polio. Yet more diseases are firmly under control through most of the developed world through the use of vaccines. However, as we remove some causes of ill health, we notice that others have grown in prominence over the past few decades. Allergies are a good example of one of these increasingly diagnosed conditions, but the general public tends to have a fairly poor understanding of what allergies are, how they come about and how they can be diagnosed.Read More »
Journal dedicates entire issue to replicating previous studies
The journal Social Psychology has issued a call for proposals for a special issue of their journal to be published in 2014. The name of the issue will be “Replications of Important Results in Social Psychology” and the call is available here. Read More »
Is water fluoridation safe and/or effective?
I was lucky enough to be invited on as a guest presenter on The Reality Check, one of Canada’s largest skeptical podcasts. I recorded a couple of shows before I left Ottawa and it was immensely fun and interesting. I had made fairly extensive notes for the segments, and it seemed a shame not to post them here.Read More »
I’ve been nominated for an award (along with everyone else!)
Scientific American is running its Open Lab science blog competition, where readers submit blog posts that they have come across over the last 12 months. The best are turned into an E-book (you can find the previous editions here). Anyway, somebody has apparently nominated my post on “Why are there imperfect mimics?” (thanks, whoever you are!). I was excited until I saw the field of 269 other entries and realised I didn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance… There are some amazing people who have been nominated, so you should all go and check out my vanquishers! Oh, and the deadline is midnight EDT tonight (1st October) so…
New Ben Goldacre book on clinical trials and academic misconduct
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
Why are there imperfect mimics?
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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Scientific publishing – what a con…
I have a confession to make… I have an addiction. I just can’t live without it, no matter how much it hurts me… My drug is scientific publishing.
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Katatrepsis 