Categories
Medicine Politics Science

Wiley & Sons: When “fair use” equals “no use”

This is the sort of thing that really irritates me. Shelley, over at Retrospectacle posted a rather nice analysis of a paper that appeared in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture entitled Natural volatile treatments increase free-radical scavenging capacity of strawberries and blackberries. She was skeptical about news reports and press releases […]

Categories
Cancer Medicine Politics Science

NIH budget woes: Spin versus reality

As I mentioned before, I was at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Los Angeles last week. During the meeting, I happened to attend a plenary session talk by the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. John Niederhuber, whose topic was the rather dire NCI funding situation. I’ve written about this […]

Categories
Anti-Semitism History Holocaust Holocaust denial Science World War II

Embarrassed through insufficient skepticism?

A while back, I posted about news reports that teachers in the U.K. were reluctant to teach about the Holocaust because of fears of offending the sensibilities of certain parts of the population. The subtext, of course, was that Muslims were the ones who would be offended. I lamented that such sensitivity might be causing […]

Categories
Anti-Semitism History Holocaust Holocaust denial

The lowest of the low

Ever since the Virginia Tech shootings a week ago, there’s been a lot of playing of the blame game in the blogosphere over who or what was to blame for Cho Seung-Hui’s deadly rampage. A few days ago, I mentioned one bright spot of heroism among the carnage, where a faculty member, Professor Liviu Librescu, […]

Categories
Announcements

Skeptics’ Circle administrative stuff

This is just a brief announcement to inform everyone that, as part of a project to update and improve the Skeptics’ Circle main site, I’ve updated the link list in the sidebar to cull broken links, add several new skeptical blogs that I’ve come across (or older skeptical blogs that I’ve never heard of before), […]