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Written by nuncio
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Monday, 09 November 2009 12:25 |
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Somebody should explain endocannabinoids to UK Home Secretary Alan Johnson. Your brain is on cannabis Mr Johnson - everybody's is. Your brain is a drug-squirting machine. Perhaps you should have taken a good drag of THC from an external source before sacking Professor David Nutt in a fit of ill-educated pique. It might have calmed you down a little. This issue is, of course, much larger. There is a scientific process which politicians simply don't seem to understand. The scientific evidence about the relative dangers of commonplace drugs is not a matter of political opinion - there are well-established factual studies which cannot be buried just because politicians do not like people who take proscribed drugs. Professor Nutt could not, in all conscience as a scientist, do other than point out these facts. The easy availability of proper, detailed, scientific information should, I hope, make it increasingly difficult for politicians to hide the truth in a miasma of spin. But we need to make use of that information and hold them to account. Mr Johnson is starting to discover that the public is not quite as acquiescent, ill-informed and gullible as he thought. |
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Written by Iain
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Tuesday, 25 August 2009 14:27 |
I’m not entirely sure why I bought this book, since I was fairly certain it would tell me nothing I didn’t already know. I already take a dim view of homeopathy and alternative therapy in general, believe that the tactics of big pharmaceuticals are hardly above-board, and, the main focus of the book, that science reporting in the mainstream media is at best a bit thin.
So perhaps I bought it for reassurance, but as it turns out there were some real eye openers. Of particular enjoyment was the chapter on Dr Gillian McKeith PhD – her titles incidentally are not accredited. This chapter also contains an amusing brief history of nutritionism – if you eat any Kellogg’s cereal for breakfast be warned that the origins of this company were in creating granola bars and the like “as a route to abstinence”.
McKeith, along with other self-proclaimed nutrition and alternative therapists, promote a seemingly benign approach medicine. This approach though is certainly lacking should anyone dare to criticise their methods. For example, apparently a tactic of Professor Patrick Holford (another nutritionist with an un-accredited title) is to throw a hissy-fit at authors of any study finding flaw with his work, questioning their integrity, and accusing them of being pawns of the pharmaceutical industry.
Crucially though both the above and others have been taken very seriously in the mainstream media, demonstrating the lazy and downright wrong journalism that has propagated in the field of science that surely wouldn’t be tolerated in any other topic. If ever your cynicism alert goes off when you read phrases like “research has shown” or “an expert in [insert subject here]” you may find enlightenment in this book, and turn that alert into a full-blown bullshit detector.
Goldacre himself is a doctor, working full-time for the NHS, so understandably the vast bulk of this book concentrates on examples from the field of medicine. But his approach can be applied to any scientific field. As our technology continues to advance at an ever increasing rate, scare stories (some admittedly valid, simply because there are many unknowns, e.g. grey goo) are likely to abound. Books like this are crucial in helping us assimilate the facts, before the media scare the bejesus out of us unnecessarily. esm69ky57r |
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Written by nuncio
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Friday, 03 April 2009 11:03 |
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You'll see that we've just posted up a new poll on the technological Singularity. We know that there's been a lot of hype on the Singularity issue over the last few years, since Ray Kurzweil's book, but it looks like the subject is now starting to come of age. However, it's still easy to get caught up in the hype. Look at how many people fell for Google's CADIE AI singularity prank. It must be tricky to write a book about The Singularity. If the exponential explosion in technology and intelligence is really happening then your book is going to be vastly out of date as soon as it is published. I am sure Mr Kurzweil was aware of this but still couldn't resist putting out his seminal tome. He'll be keeping us up-to-date via his Kurzweil AI site anyway. The technological Singularity will happen (probably) because the only alternatives would be stagnation or extinction. We don't like these alternatives much. That wouldn't have made for a great poll on a future and technology site would it? Which do you favour - extinction, stagnation or technological nirvana? We are, however, interested to learn when you think it might happen. We'll ask for your reasons another day. |
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Written by Iain
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Thursday, 29 January 2009 15:41 |
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Greetings, and hopefully you've enjoyed what you've seen of our site so far. Futurehead was launched quietly a couple of weeks ago, so we're obviously still in the process of generating interest (and, of course, traffic!), and indeed the process of building the site itself is really an ongoing one. However it struck me that so far it's all been a little anonymous, so allow me to explain... Our main purpose will be to gather and publish interesting news stories from around the web dealing with new and future scientific and technological developments. Such articles will have to excite us and, hopefully, in turn they will excite you. This will be the main purpose of the home page, however you may have noticed we also have a Newsfeeds section. Here we've got a range of feeds from a variety of sources. Be sure to check this page often as anything cool that we've missed will likely appear somewhere in here. In case you're wondering (aren't we always), the Extravolution Blog is not my responsibility, but rather that of my co-collaborator on this project. He chooses to remain anonymous at this time, but he's nonetheless quite the sage (probably) when it comes to all things futurist, so it's a blog well worth subscribing to. As to this section, it's intended to have occasional pieces either by myself or a number of other collaborators. A blog of sorts, but more of a group effort. So what am I doing? Well, my main involvement in this project has been to build the website you're currently staring at. Whilst I do have a very strong interest in the subject matter, I was spurred on to do this by my re-awakened interest in web-design, something which I'd previously abandoned many moons ago. Hopefully you'll agree the results are pretty decent, although if you really do have any gripes (or merely suggestions) you can of course contact us. Cheers for now. |
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