Science Media Centre

Sam Fisher, in an opinion piece in the NZ Herald, looks at the legal action being threatened against NIWA by the CSC, making the case that courts aren’t the proper place to test science.
He also writes that denying anthropogenic climate change is a fool’s bet.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“Courts aren’t the best place to [...]

Shaun Hendy writes in an opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald about the strategy of ‘picking winners’ in science funding, and how continued science funding shows diminishing returns in knowledge gain over time.
He proposes that this can be offset by investment in infrastructure and research networks.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“This is nothing new. [...]

From NZSkeptics: New Zealand’s Education Act 1989 states that academic freedom means freedom ‘within the law to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinions’. In theory one is protected but in practice there is no protection from ad hominem, scurrilous and unwarranted attacks on one’s [...]

From NZSeptic: Between August 2006 and May 2007, 490 investors (many from NZ) put $5.3m into NearZero Inc, a US-based company set up to develop and sell software written by Nelson man Philip Whitley, who claimed to have developed a revolutionary data compression algorithm. In May 2007 Near Zero was put into liquidation, and in [...]

From NZSKeptics: Robert is co-author of a number of books about mass hysteria and associated topics, including “Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illnesses and Social Delusion”; “UFOs and Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery”; “Hoaxes, Myths and Manias: Why We Need Critical Thinking”; “Exotic Deviance: Medicalizing Cultural [...]

From NZSkeptics: Nik discusses the phenomena of Catastrophism, the belief that humanity’s demise is impending. In particular, the notion that on 21 December 2012. a large celestial object will pass near Earth, causing widespread mayhem, a poleshift of 90 degrees and the accompanying return of the “Annunaki”. Mistranslations of Sumerian Cuneiform clay tablets by Zecharia [...]

From SkepticsNZ: Some of the links between diet and health outcomes in the 1970s were very tenuous. However these have been translated into ‘fact’ and public health policy in the belief that this was for the greater good. This talk explores some of the fallacies behind the ’science’.
Helen Petousis-Harris is a scientist in [...]

Richard Dawkins refers to some opponents as “wingnuts”, and often applies significant pressure to them. But are there other ways to deal with wingnuts? Could softer approaches be used to loosen their thinking?

From NZSkeptics: Michael Edmonds has spent the last decade as a chemistry lecturer, researcher, and more recently as manager of programmes at Christchurch [...]

Prominent psychiatrist Professor David Nutt has been touring New Zealand giving lectures about his view that illegal drugs should be classified according to the harm they cause.
Professor Nutt was sacked last year from his position as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), after publishing a paper claiming that alcohol was [...]

Rob Burton explains why New Zealand’s current attitude towards social science, particularly in agriculture, may be far from optimal.
While current practices are to use social scientists in an ‘expansionist’ way, to spread new technologies out to farmers, he argues that social scientists should instead be used to help facilitate dialogue between scientists and farmers, in [...]

Wrangling over water issues
Polluted rivers, dirty dairying, greening the MacKenzie Country, dams for hydro-power and water allocation — these are just some of the big water issues that have been in the headlines in recent months.
Although freshwater is relatively abundant in New Zealand, uneven distribution of water resources and increasingly intensive use have led to [...]