Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong

It seems Sharon Begley can be rational when she wants to be. If she could apply a similar degree of healthy and appropriate scepticism to her climate change reporting, I'd be very pleased. It appears a lot of medical research suffers from the same problem that a lot of climate research suffers from, ie "stasticulation" - the use of inappropriate statistical methods to arrive at, at best, erroneous conclusions or, at worst, contrived ones. In climate science, the now infamous Hockey Stick is possibly the most egregious example. And where would we be without epidemiology? For one thing, we'd have far fewer bullshit "health" stories in the papers and on the nightly news: Statistical flukes also plague epidemiology, in which researchers look for links between health and the environment, including how people behave and what they eat. A study might ask whether coffee raises the risk of joint pain, or headaches, or gallbladder disease, or hundreds of other ills. "When you do thousands of tests, statistics says you’ll have some false winners," says Ioannidis. Drug companies make a mint on such dicey statistics. By testing an approved drug for other uses, they get hits by chance, "and doctors use that as the basis to prescribe the drug for this new use. I think that’s wrong." Which is of course what certain people have been banging on about for years. Even the case against second-hand cigarette smoke, (but not smoking itself), is based upon some pretty dodgy epidemiological studies with quite weak findings. But this isn't about anti-science. It isn't an endorsement of rubbish like so-called complimentary or alternative therapies which either basically don't work or end up making you sicker. And don't get me started on the anti-oxidant religion. It is however about the proper application of the scientific method, but with an understanding that our knowledge is always contingent and partial. Our minds should always be open to the possibility that, despite our best efforts, we can still be wrong and that we still have things to learn. Yet another reason to be sceptical about the "science is settled" crowd, wherever we find them. Keep in mind though, these reassessments aren't coming from fringe alternative medicine crackpots, but from men and women schooled in the scientific method and applying its most powerful insights.

The triviality of the Canberra press gallery

John Roskam  fumes at the kind of thing that had me so cross, too, on Insiders today: In the days immediately before Abbott’s perceived media gaffe, the big issue for the Canberra press gallery was whether it was appropriate for the liberal Party to send an email soliciting donations to fight the government’s flood tax. The email received more attention from journalists than such questions as why the Queensland government didn’t have disaster insurance (unlike other states) and why the federal government has agreed to pay for 75 per cent of the cost of repairing its infrastructure. We know the Prime Minister has appointed committees to check how the $5 billion is spent, but we don’t know yet what that money is going to be spent on… At a press conference on Monday when the Prime Minister was asked about Queensland’s lack of insurance, and she ignored the  question and changed the topic, no one bothered to follow her up. No one is brave enough to ask why the rest of Australia should foot the bill for the failure of the Queensland government to take out insurance. This week provided a clear demonstration of the misplaced priorities of the parliamentary press gallery. Trivialities (like Abbott’s media interview and the liberal email) were regarded as more important than a substantive policy point (government spending on flood recovery). Mr Bolt

Oil has joined the past… natural gas is the future!

The natural gas cartel, a dream of Russia’s just a few years ago, is dead. It died when a natural gas revolution broke out and Gazprom lost.  Energy importing nations around the world are evaluating their own geology, currently, to see if they have shale reserves that can be tapped.  Nations like Argentina, Germany, Poland, France, and Sweden are looking into their national shale reserves. The shale gas revolution is changing the world we live in, and the power structures of the past.

How to unlearn pessimism

For adults, one of the most important lessons to learn in life is the necessity of unlearning. We all think that we know certain things to be true beyond doubt, but these things often turn out to be false and, until we unlearn them, they get in the way of new understanding. Among the scientific certainties I have had to unlearn: that upbringing strongly shapes your personality; that nurture is the opposite of nature; that dietary fat causes obesity more than dietary carbohydrate; that carbon dioxide has been the main driver of climate change in the past. I came across a rather good word for this kind of unlearning—"disenthrall"—in Mark Stevenson's book "An Optimist's Tour of the Future," published just this week. Mr. Stevenson borrows it from Abraham Lincoln, whose 1862 message to Congress speaks of disenthralling ourselves of "the dogmas of the quiet past" in order to "think anew." The Rational Optimist

Archbishop Cranmer queries as to whether or not the BBC's Michael Buerk did compare climate sceptics to paedophiles

Initially, His Grace was persuaded by Bishop Hill's indignation at the inflammatory juxtaposition of multiculturalist sceptics and anthropogenic climate-change deniers with paedophiles. But, having reflected (and having read some of Mr Buerk's other pronouncements on the BBC), it is evident that he is actually criticising those who propagate absolutist dogma and hold to an unquestionable creed. The rest of His Grace's rumination is here.

The screen-cap that shows that Channel 7 are lying

Part of Mark Riley's defense of his nakedly biased attempt to 'get' the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in Australia, has been to claim that there was no imputation made about Abbott's "shit happens" comment in Afghanistan. The above picture shows this is a lie.

"one-in-a-hundred-year" floods hit Brisbane six times between 1840 and 1900

Two within a fortnight of each other. So those wanting to jump on the climate change bandwagon may want to be cautious. Maybe also cautious about media tropes like "one-in-a-hundred." Is the climate "changing" for Queensland, or is it more a case of it going back to what it used to be? The basic answer is that we really just don't know.

NASA's Hansen produces warming in January that the satellites didn't see, but still below Scenario C

Steven Goddard has it here.

Gregory S. Paul - Bringing dinosaurs to life

Climb the stairs to Gregory Paul's third-floor Charles Village apartment and you may quickly find yourself slipping back 100 million years or more into the Mesozoic era. The Baltimore artist's walls are filled with lush portraits of dinosaurian wildlife in action, many in color. Tyrannosaurs step off across mud flats on a sunset hunt. A pair of feathered Archaeopteryx cavort like gulls at the surf line of an ancient beach. The dynamic scenes are part of his work for the new Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs — but Paul, 56, a self-taught paleontologist, full-time illustrator, author and dino-consultant to TV, museums and the movies, is no newcomer. I don't think Paul is my favourite palaeoartist, but he is very, very good.

Henry Rollins: "What came first, the shitty rave music or the shitty drugs?"

Via http://twitter.com/DDsD

A developmental phase shift moved digits 1, 2 and 3 of the dinosaurian hand to positions 2, 3 and 4 in birds

Some say it's the last holdout for a handful of scientists still not convinced that birds evolved from dinosaurs. The fingers of the two groups of animals, they say, just don't match up. As embryos, birds seem to develop the equivalent of our middle three fingers, but theropods—two-legged, primarily carnivorous dinosaurs from which birds are thought to have evolved—sport the equivalent of our thumb, index, and middle fingers. Now, a study of chick embryos shows thatbirds do indeed have thumb, index, and middle "fingers" in their wings. The rest here.

World Bank Report: Stern's Disaster Claims 'Completely Inconsistent With Empirical Evidence'

What this inherent uncertainty -- perhaps better characterized as inherent ignorance -- means of course is that strategies of robust decision making make good sense. That is to say, with respect to preparing for future extreme events, we should emphasize those strategies that are insensitive to uncertainties. Perhaps the most robust finding of each of these studies (and the broader literature) is that future damages will increase regardless of the the effects of human-caused climate change. Thus, improving adaptive capacity is a no-regrets course of action.

A single PDF of 678 pages - is this Climategate 2.0?

In my opinion, 13 months after Climategate an equally important document was made public. It is a single PDF file three megabytes in size and 678 pages in length. Although it contains the remarks of 232 separate individuals, no attempt was made to, say, number these individuals for easy reference. Thus, it is far from user-friendly. Nevertheless, it is a gold mine. Info about the document may be found here. Details of a Canadian blogger’s efforts to shake it loose are here and here. The crucial point is that, within its pages, IPCC insiders have been remarkably candid. If one understands the larger context, many of their comments are jaw-dropping. The rest here.

No, THIS is a missile cruiser!

The Kirov Class cruiser Peter the Great

 

Another nom, nom, nom cat

Thanks to Damian Geminder http://www.facebook.com/Conservathink

Yes Virginia, English history is a crucial part of Australian history & politics. A Marxist says so.

Came across this blog post by Strange Times: The English Civil War Is A Crucial Part of Australian History via Twitter. As I read it I suspected that the blogger was something of a lefty, and indeed it appears he's some sort of Marxist. (Or is it she? I'm not sure.) Does my heart good though to see an article in Crikey being described as "arrogant, dismissive and, frankly a joke" by someone of the old (older?) left that still believes in a discourse based upon rational argument, and not the modern 'pseudo-left's' (it's term, not mine) parading of assumed moral virtue as a substitute for reason. It's this article in The Age, which reports comments on the proposed history curriculum by opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne, that started it all. Mr Pyne will today accuse curriculum writers of neglecting the contributions of Britain, Ancient Greece and Rome to Western civilisation because of an undue emphasis on indigenous culture, Asia and sustainability. This produced the previously mentioned response by Associate Professor Tony Taylor of Monash University in Crikey. After criticising some aspects of Pyne's comments, Strange Times moves on to Professor Taylor: However, the response in Crikey is arrogant, dismissive and, frankly a joke. Taylor’s lowest moment is when he says the English Civil War is “arguably just a series of confused and confusing localised squabbles that may have a special significance for UK history, but not for anybody else (unless they like dressing up in period costume).” As the blogger says, nothing could be further from the truth for Australia (or for that matter, Canada or New Zealand). Our political and constitutional systems are built on the bedrock laid down by the consequences of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of how bourgeois Parliamentary democracy [I think that was the giveaway line that this person is a Marxist] works knows that this is ridiculous. Most of the assumptions behind it come directly or indirectly from that Civil War. The most important tenet of parliamentarism – the idea that only the parliament, not the executive on its own, may tax – is a direct result of the war and the main issue it was fought over. You can’t understand the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, which lead to the sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, without understanding that crucial point. But as Strange Times notes, the worrying thing is not that Taylor can be so wrong, but that this is a person "in a position to affect the curriculum of Australian schools." And Taylor's basic point is not that Pyne is wrong, but rather he's an outsider. He's not part of the history club and therefore has no right to criticise what the club decides we should know. What’s worst of all about this article is it carries on the smarmy pseudo-left habit of congratulating themselves that they must be right, because the slightly more right-wing ruling class party is against them. This is part of the nature of the bureaucratic pseudo-left; they push the line that their work must be done behind closed doors because evil right-wingers and the stupid populace they fool are too dumb to know what’s best for them. There is no sense at all of actually trusting ordinary people, of welcoming outside debate or being ready to submit their decisions to the judgment of the great unwashed. We need to keep attacking the pseudo-left with this – with the idea that, while they parade their moral virtue, they are utterly unwilling to actually try to win public debates. Had to chuckle at the implied description of people like Taylor and Crikey as only slightly less right-wing than Mr Pyne.

About 160 million years ago a female pterosaur with an injured wing dropped from the sky into a watery grave...

She was carrying a single, nearly mature egg. "After this she drowned, her carcass became waterlogged, sank to the bottom and, as decay processes began, the egg was expelled from her body," wrote researchers who described the fossil in the January 21 issue of Science.

Linhenykus, a new one-fingered alvarezsauroid dinosaur from Inner Mongolia

An artist's rendering of the one-fingered, short-armed new dinosaur Linhenykus monodactylus (National Geographic) A new species of parrot-sized dinosaur, the first discovered with only one finger, has been unearthed in Inner Mongolia, China. Scientists named the new dinosaur Linhenykus monodactylus, after the nearby city of Linhe. The work was recently published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The new dinosaur belongs to the Alvarezsauroidea, a branch of the carnivorous dinosaur group Theropoda. Theropods gave rise to modern birds and include such famous dinosaurs as Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor.

Who's responsible for all the violence in America?

Thanks to itsonlywords @CO2HOG  @FoxieNews

Ex BBC frontman - how the BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots

The Daily Mail (shoosh back there!) continues its serialisation of Peter Sissons' memoir of his four decades as a television journalist. ‘What happened to the journalism? The BBC has ­completely lost it.’ It's quite astounding reading in so many ways. Back in the studio I suggested that we line up one or two sceptics to react to the report, but received a totally negative response, as if I was some kind of lunatic. I went home and wrote a note to myself: ‘What happened to the journalism? The BBC has ­completely lost it.’  But there's worse. Roger Harrabin, wrote a piece on the BBC website reporting some work by the World ­Meteorological Organization that questioned whether global ­warming was going to continue at the rate ­projected by the UN panel. A green activist, Jo Abbess, emailed him to complain. Harrabin at first resisted. Then she berated him: ‘It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics’ — something Harrabin had not actually done — ‘Please reserve the main BBC online channel for emerging truth. Otherwise I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated.’ Did Harrabin tell her to get lost? He tweaked the story — albeit not as radically as she demanded — and emailed back: ‘Have a look and tell me you are happier.’  This exchange went round the world in no time, spread by a ­jubilant Abbess. Later, Harrabin defended himself, saying they were only minor changes — but the sense of the changes, as specifically sought by Ms Abbess, was plainly to harden the piece against the sceptics. Or that Al Gore "entertained the BBC’s editorial elite in his suite at the Dorchester and was given a free run to make his case to an admiring internal audience at Television Centre." (Can you imagine the brouhaha that would have occurred if it had been evil oil industry executives doing the entertaining instead?)  All very funny and dispiriting at the same time.