Issues from May 2002

Owen McShane examines last year's Great Soya Sauce Scare

John Riddell learns to his cost that fishermen can be as easy to catch as the creatures they pursue

With winter almost upon us, the time has come to curl up in front of a nice screen and browse the internet. Speaking of which, congratulations are in order to our chair-entity Vicki Hyde and media spokesman Denis Dutton for having their websites nominated in the sixth annual Webby Awards.

I will detail these seven alternatives in forth-coming issues of the magazine. For now here is Eminence based medicine: The more senior the colleague, the less importance he or she places on the need for anything as mundane as evidence. Experience, it seems, is worth any amount of evidence. These colleagues have a touching faith in clinical experience, which has been defined as "making the same mistakes with increasing confidence over an impressive number of years." New Zealand Medical Journal Vol 113 No 1122 p479

University days are a great time to explore new directions. But sometimes you may end up a long way from where you thought you were going.

Netsurfer Science is a website every skeptic should bookmark. It provides a good lead-in to many science and skeptic-related sites and issues on the web. Here are a couple of recent items.

Damian Thompson argues that a tangle of folklore and urban legend, allied to a particular horror of paedophilia, has blinded many to the scientific facts

Snake Oil And Other Preoccupations, by John Diamond. Vintage, 2001, $29.95

Aristotle's Books in Auckland has started a skeptics section of titles. Books debunking the New Age and religion in general are found there.

The best paper in New Zealand (Waikato Times, May 6 - and it's got nothing to do with the fact that I work there) reports that depressed patients tricked into thinking they are being treated have undergone healing brain changes.

This article is drawn from interviews with Allan Coukell on the NZ National Radio science programme "Eureka!" in 2001.

It is hard to be sure what Mike Houlding is on about in his rather opaque letter but I gather that he is lumping the use of clairvoyants, homoeopathic remedies and ADHD under some collective rubric of quackery.

A man charged with threatening to poison food produced by Dick Smith has been refused bail in the Rockhampton Magistrates Court in central Queensland. Graham Andrew Cooper, 30, is charged with trying extort $100,000 from the Australian Skeptics Association.