Articles tagged with "review"

It is with great dismay that I report that the second season of the Telepathy Tapes podcast has been released, and it's weirder than ever. Topics covered across the 11 available episodes take pseudoscience to new heights, including mediumship, animal telepathy, near-death experiences, energy healing, and plant intelligence. My scan of the transcripts indicates that while the psychic abilities of Autistic children are still discussed, Autism has largely taken a back seat to a broader exploration of fringe science involving human consciousness. As Meghan Boilard for Asterisk Mag put it,

Several years ago I poked my head above the parapet by writing a letter to the NZ Medical Journal about crank medical treatments that they were happy to publish (see the bottom of this newsletter for a copy of the letter). Since then my details have obviously found my way onto some dubious contact lists, and as such I've been receiving the occasional request to review scientific papers. It's obvious these requests are for predatory journals, given that they usually flatter me by mis-labelling me as Dr Honeychurch, talking about my “expertise”, and asking me to review a paper that is obviously nothing to do with my day job and actual expertise.

There's been a recent hubbub around the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of infectious diseases, with Covid being the most obvious one.

I received an email last week with a stern warning:

There is now a second panel that has been convened to review Christchurch Council's "Tonkin Taylor" coastal erosion report. The panel has been instructed to:

Last year professor Paul Glasziou from Bond University in Australia headed up a team that wrote a systematic review of systematic reviews on homeopathy as part of a report for Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

One of my favourite podcasts is this seasonal offering from British skeptical activists and science communicators Brian Cox and Robin Ince. This is a BBC Radio 4 production – oooh get me! – but the podcast version is 10 minutes longer. As Robin says, “this show contains extra material which wasn't considered good enough for the radio.” In exactly that sort of way, Robin provides the banter and is the gleeful layman. Brian, on the other hand, brings it all back to reality, reining-in tangents and correcting any guest who dares oversimplify a bit of physics.

How much does the ACC spend on acupuncture? Mark Hanna investigates.

Dr. Steven Novella breaks down the latest environmental factor that apparently causes autism.

There may indeed be a place for creationism in the science classroom, but not the way the creationists want. This article is based on a presentation to the 2011 NZ Skeptics Conference.

Bob Metcalfe (Skeptic No 75) might have been reading New Zealand Tone magazine: Bringing Technology to Life, Sept-Oct 2004. The front cover promises "Hi-fi cables: science or hocus pocus", and on page 46 there is an interview with Bob Noble, "sales manager for respected cable manufacturer Chord". On page 47 there is a review of three Chord cables. The only science in the interview is the importance of screening to cables since cheap electronics in homes today are "leaking interference back into the same mains power ring that supplies the hi-fi. This degrades the final sound considerably. If you don't believe me, turn all those other appliances off and see what it does to your hi-fi sound." Nobody puts the case that there is any hocus pocus to cables.

We Dawkins fans have been waiting since "Unweaving the Rainbow" in 1998 for this. Unlike its predecessors, it is not written around a single theme, but is a collection of Dawkins's comments and reviews of the past 25 years, on a variety of topics, reflecting his wide-ranging interests and passions. His editor, Latha Menon, has arranged 32 of these into six groups and a final letter to his ten-year-old daughter on "Belief". In addition to a general Preface, Dawkins has written a short introduction to each group.