The Cosmic Web

Every two to three years, the US’s National Science Foundation produces a report called Science and Engineering Indicators, on various aspects of science and technology in America. One section of the report is on the public’s level of scientific literacy, and includes a poll which asks people true-or-false questions about fairly basic scientific facts. The statements in this year’s report (available in a spreadsheet here) include things like “the centre of the Earth is very hot”; “lasers work by focusing sound waves”; and “it is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl”. On average, 64% of respondents were able to answer the questions correctly (the answers being ‘true’, ‘false’ and ‘true’ for the three above).

Worthy of comment are two statements which have been in previous reports since 1985 but were not in this year’s: “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals”, and “the universe began with a big explosion”. In the last report the proportion of people correctly answering that these are true* was 45% and 33% respectively, much lower than the average of 64% for the other questions.

These two questions were asked during this year’s survey and included in the original draft of the report, but removed before publication by the NSF’s oversight body the National Science Board. The rationale was that the questions are “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because the responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.”

(more…)

In case you suspected that the Daily Mail might be more interested in journalistic integrity, truth, the health of its readers or even simple consistency than writing what it thinks will sell the most papers, here’s something to make you reconsider. Martin of The Lay Scientist has accidentally discovered that the paper is either viciously against or stridently for the controversial* HPV vaccine - depending on which side of the Irish Sea you’re on.

(more…)

Shortly after I reviewed Bed Goldacre’s book Bad Science he released an extra chapter, which is in the new printing of the book and available for free on his website. This chapter concerns a man called Matthias Rath, whose hobbies include selling vitamin supplements to AIDS sufferers; claiming that people who give out actual medicine are part of a shadowy conspiracy to murder South Africans; and threatening legal action against anyone who disagrees with him (as though scientific truth and health policy were best established in courts rather than with, say, science). The fact that he was suing Ben Goldacre and the Guardian for writing nasty things about him is what prevented the chapter from being published earlier (he lost).

The chapter makes for interesting reading; particularly the part where Rath and his friend call for the International Criminal Court to have their detractors tortured. And lest you be tempted to dismiss him as a harmless crank, Goldacre also details the South African Government’s collusion in his successful campaign to manslaughter tens of thousands of its citizens.

Last week I was ill, which is partly responsible for my lack of posting. It did result in a lot of lying in bed reading though, so here are some fruits of my efforts in the form of a book review.

Bad Science is by Ben Goldacre, a junior NHS doctor who writes a column for the Guardian and a blog of the same name.

When I first heard of the book I was expecting it to be a collection of articles from his column, perhaps expanded to somewhat greater detail. I was quite wrong: it’s much more of a full book than a collection of essays.

(more…)

One of the brilliant things about internet news media is that journalists writing about science stories can link directly to the academic papers they’re writing about, so their readers can see whether they’ve provided a fair summary and read more details if they’re interested. Of course this requires that the research in question is freely available online, and a lot of journals aren’t - but a lot are. The arXiv, for example, contains almost everything being published in respectable journals in astrophysics and several other fields.

(more…)