Month: February 2008
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A leap year Skeptics’ Circle
At Conspiracy Factory. In particular I like Skepchik’s take on a pretty horrifically sexist Oprah poll which seems to present the only options for women in a stressful situation are to cry now or cry later or act like a big strong man. Hmm. PalMD has really been fighting the good fight lately with this…
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Another attack on a researcher
This time it appears to be a physical assault and an attempt to enter a home of a researcher that works with mice. The researcher described the attack in which people wearing masks attempted to break into her house during her daughter’s birthday party. Although her identity is being protected, I admire her moxy, she’s…
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Measuring Identity Theft at Top Banks (Version 1.0)
I’ve been AWOL from Denialism Blog because one of my UC-Berkeley projects has become all-consuming. I’m interested in sparking a market for identity theft protection. A real one. One where consumers can actually make choices among banks based on their actual ability to address security attacks. Last year, I published Identity Theft: Making the Unknown…
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Trauma
I’ve almost come to the end of the core 8 weeks of my surgery rotation (4 more weeks follow in electives) and am currently working on the trauma service for another couple days before taking exams. I don’t have a great deal to say, the hours stay long, the medicine remains interesting etc. I’m enjoying…
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Science-based medicine – The good and the bad on a good new blog
I must say I’ve loved much of the writing at the new blog Science-Based Medicine. These guys are fighting the good fight and presenting very sophisticated aspects of evaluating the medical literature in a very accessible way. In particular I’d like to point out David Gorski’s critique of NCCAM and the directly-relevant articles from Kimball…
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Some Generalizations
One of the few advantages of having no time is that when I do get around to sorting through my RSS feeds of various denialists is that I end up seeing patterns I didn’t observe as much when I tracked these jokers day-to-day. So, inspired by BPSDB I decided I’m going to share some generalizations.…
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Skeptics’ Circle #80 up at Bug Girl’s Blog
I’m late to the party sorry, but this week’s circle is up at Bug Girl’s Blog. Check it out. She’s one of my favorite bloggers and she’s done a great job with her Valentine’s day edition. In particular I will point out Greta Christina’s review of “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”, and the…
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Why Privacy Is What It Is…
The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe have just released their annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy report. As part of this report, the groups asked consumers about the factors–positive and negative–that shaped their perceptions of companies’ privacy practices. (Full disclosure: I am a fellow of the Ponemon Institute.) Bar Charts 3 and 4 in the Ponemon/TRUSTe…
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Can One Live Anonymously?
I’ve spent the last few months working with an excellent journalist on the Anonymity Experiment, which will appear in this month’s Popular Science magazine. In it, Catherine Price attempts to live a normal life without revealing personal data: …when this magazine suggested I try my own privacy experiment, I eagerly agreed. We decided that I…
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Edyth London targeted again by animal rights terrorists
I’m very upset to see that following up on previous threats, animal rights terrorists have set fire to a scientist’s house. I’ve been saying for a while that the real threat towards biological science isn’t the evolution denialists and other silly cranks’ rather laughable attempts at trying to convince people the earth is 6000 years…