Tag Archives: Science

Advertising Space Not for Sale.

Posted on by
1,041

I suspect this blog doesn’t get all that many views, and to be perfectly honest that doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I do intend to write more regularly so it may improve but that would be entirely incidental as I’m not going out my way to “advertise” this place.

However, out of the blue I have received two adverts over as many weeks, asking me, in different ways, to place advertisements on my blog. This can only mean a handful of things, either my blog is more popular than I give it credit for, something I highly doubt, the people who have e-mailed me are bad at their jobs in finding moderately well viewed sites or they are desperate to spread there messages in a random scatter gun approach. (I strongly suspect that there are more scenarios but I’m not going to give it too much thought)

The first of these came from someone claiming to be “Tammy Foster” from More Digital, ‘a UK based Digital Marketing Consultancy” The e-mail continued as follows:

We represent clients interested in social media marketing on smaller sites with little or no existing advertising and we’re currently looking for advertising partners.

We pay a fixed upfront annual fee which we will agree on with you. Once the ad is in place, payment is made within approximately 48 hours.

Would you be interested in placing a small text-based ad on Theunluckydip.com?

As you’d expect I tried to research the company, the conclusion I came to as to their authenticity was inconclusive. Their website looks genuine enough, but there are also many blogs out there claiming it to be a scam. Regardless of the truth of the matter, I’m not that interested in placing advertisements on my blog, not only because any money made would be minuscule, but also because I wouldn’t want to litter my blog with them, there’s enough advertisements all over the fucking web as it is, I’m noticing them more than ever, and I’d like to try and keep this microcosm clean from the infection.

The second e-mail I get was a different proposition, free content! I received an e-mail asking me to post an info-graphic covering the topic of Bad-Science.

Before I continue I’d like to say that I’m not necessarily apposed to mentioning businesses, or other websites in general, on my blog, for example I previously reviewed Graze.com and added a voucher code (which has been used a surprising number of times), but this was of my own volition and not because I’d be prompted to by the company (although one could argue I was incentivised by getting people to use the code I provided, this wasn’t actually the case, I’ve in fact never used any of credit I’ve gained)

I can only assume the reason this person found my blog to e-mail me is by finding my site via a google search on bad science; I have in previous articles discussed and mentioned both Ben Goldacre (author of Bad Science) and also Science in the Media more generally. I had a few back and forth e-mails with this person before it was revealed to me that the purpose of her contacting me was to place an info-graphic she had recently created to advertise a website she was trying to promote. As you can see I’ve not posted the image, but I have been in a quandary as to wether to do so or not. As a general rule I’m against whoring out my written space to advertise things for a third party, but this person, from what I can gather, is a recent graduate who is trying to get their foot on the employment ladder, something which I can greatly sympathise with, thus my confliction.

As I said at the start I doubt I get that many views to this blog anyway (I never check the statistics), so based on that it could be said that I haven’t really got any integrity of which to uphold, but, I still do not want to place an advertisement from a third party in any form directly on my blog. As a compromise, because I would like to help the stranger out, being the kind guy I am, I’m going to link to the info-graphic she sent me here.

Forgetting it as an advertisement now and looking at the piece itself, another reason for being slightly apprehensive about posting it is that it comes across anti-science, yet some of the points raised are interested nigh important. I am not anti-science yet I think the religious like nature it sometimes can have is concerning. basically I agree with most of Alan Moore’s points in this video:

In summery I do not intend to place advertisements from a third party, of any kind, on this blog anytime in the near future.

EU to spend €2,000,000 on homeopathy research for animals

Posted on by
1,321

On the 30th August 2011 MEPs voted on a budget amendment which will see €2 million worth of funds being directed towards research on seeing wether homeopathy works on animals; essentially they are spending a hell of a lot of money on finding out wether magic beans work on other species’. Clearly I’m skeptical of homeopathy and consider the case entirely closed due to the amount of research already held on the concept, however the EU justify such research by stating, in the Agriculture and Rural Affairs budget amendment document, that “Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem in the EU and worldwide… that is why research on alternative methods has to be moved forward…” This sort of reads to me that the EU have given up on legitimate science, if my painkillers start losing their effectiveness I do not suddenly decide I need to cast a “good health” spell, yet this is how the EU seems to want to conduct itself with this scientific issue of relatively high importance.

Let us assume then that researching the use of homeopathy on animals is a legitimate scientific pursuit, is €2,000,000 a reasonable budget for such research? Of course that depends entirely on the size, scope and type of study being conducted, for that amount of money you’d expect quite a comprehensive study to be undertaken. However it seems that isn’t going to be the case with this study, the budget document states that: “the pilot project should involve the collection of data as to what research projects in the field of homeopathy and phytotherapy have already been set up by the various Member States’ universities and higher education institutions, and what findings they have made.” So basically the EU are spending all that money on a very expensive literature review, not exactly a brilliant use of taxpayers’ money. Respected scientist Dr. Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, states that:

€2 million seems like an inexplicably large amount of money for someone to review what work has been done in this field. Large definitive randomised trials of pills are routinely done for a fraction of that cost. Something may be very amiss here.” (L)

Now to end this post with some sort of “balance”. The Soil Association, who support the use of homeopathic remedies on animals, argue that homeopathy has been shown to be effective in keeping animals healthy and that increasing its usage would cut the growing use of antibiotics on animals, they therefore actively encourage farmers to use homeopathic treatments as it is an effective alternative.

They are of course wrong.

Ben Goldacre: Why Don’t Journalists Link to Primary Sources?

Posted on by
696

Cross-posted at: www.snackfoam.co.uk

Ben Goldacre,  author of the brilliant book Bad Science, has recently blogged about the issue of journalists and their refusal to link to primary sources, an issue that particularly bugged me when working on my undergraduate dissertation. Within research it is perfectly fine to use newspapers as a citable source, and for certain types of research they are useful as artifacts in their own right, but when they are being relied upon as an ends to means they can be problematic due to their innate biases and therefore deeper research into them is required. Newspapers are a great starting point in research but not being able to see their primary sources can be problematic, but there is a bigger issue at hand outside the academic world. Newspapers, and media in general, have a huge influence on the populations of the world and while a majority of people would not be interested in viewing primary sources I strongly believe news media needs to be held to account, I’m not necessarily against bias in news content, but bias with no basis bar ideology can be damaging. In his recent blogpost Ben Goldacre demonstrates The Telegraph, which is skeptical of global warming, making a link between beached whales and off-shore wind-farms.

This week the Telegraph ran the headline “Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales”. “Offshore wind farms are one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches, according to scientists studying the problem”, it continued. Baroness Warsi even cited it as a fact on BBC Question Time this week, arguing against wind farms.

But anyone who read the open access academic paper in PLoS One, titled “Beaked Whales respond to simulated and actual navy sonar”, would see that the study looked at sonar, and didn’t mention wind farms at all. At our most generous, the Telegraph story was a spectacular and bizarre exaggeration of a brief contextual aside about general levels of manmade sound in the ocean by one author at the end of the press release (titled “Whales scared by sonars”).

Click Here to see the rest of Ben Goldacre’s blog post

Lets Talk Books: Celebrity Literature

Posted on by
69

Being in my final year at university; and potentially going on to postgraduate education, I’m naturally starting to accumulate a large amount of books. In fact I even find myself being unnaturally drawn into the second hand book stand that occasionally appears in Wolverhampton’s Wulfrun shopping centre; I’m literally (by which of course I mean metaphorically) like a bee attracted to honey (ok, that was a simile)

So recently while I belatedly tried to locate a science section within a local WHsmiths store; while waiting for someone else within the store, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of celebrity tush that was being peddled. Usually when I purchase books I tend to do it online, more often than not from amazon, and this is the reason the amount of celebrity “so called” literature that is being pushed had escaped my knowledge. From what I could see, the shop was; on the whole, nothing more than a temple praising the vacuous cult of celebrity, presumably Jordan, Kerry Katona and Cheryl Cole make up the Holy Trinity. But while these books appear to be spawned by satan himself, they actually play a vital role in keeping books alive.

Without actually going into the marketing figures yet, I can only assume that celebrity books are most probably single handedly keeping the book industry; as we currently know it, alive. So while the books are soulless and evidently appear to have a more elevated importance that science in mainstream stores, I’m willing; unlike many likeminded people I’ve spoke to, to accept that they could in fact be price worth paying. In a world where the choices for consumption of information and knowledge are ever growing and diversifying books should continue to play an important role, be them in traditional or digital form (a topic for a future blogpost perhaps).

So maybe rather than slating people for reading this celebrity rubbish, we should in fact be praising them for at least entering a book store and giving reading a go. Possibly we should thank them for keeping the industry alive for the time being. For I’m sure that many if not all of you will agree that books still have a vital role to play in shaping our knowledge of the world.

Edit: Perhaps I need to read even more, cannot believe I mis-spelt the word literature in the title, doh. Mistake has been corrected.


Return of the blog!

Posted on by
454

This morning/afternoon I’ve finally got round to making a few changes to my blog, and this will probably continue for the next couple of days as I finally get back into keeping my blog updated.

On that note, I’ve found a nice piece of blogging software to use on my mac called Blogo, I’m just testing it at the moment, and as with most well made mac applications it appears to be slick, simple and yet still a highly powerful tool. There’s nothing wrong with using the web client, but it can feel a bit clunky at times and Blogo will hopefully solve that, I’ll report back in a few weeks and give it a bit of a review.

In the meantime I’d better continue with my university reading; and yet again I’ll leave you with a some web generated visual media, this time it’s video that is in-fact vaguely linked to the topic I’m reading about.