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 test science – for a start, there are no Bunsen burners.

“On one side: excited militant men with weird haircuts, perhaps like Peter Dunne’s bizarre coiffure or like a monk’s tonsure. On the other, concerned liberals with furrowed brows in sensible clothes using long words.

“The poor judge will try to confine the evidence to process and won’t have Denny Crane or Alan Shaw to make the lawyers’ summations interesting.”

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. New Zealand has always prioritised its science spending. A glance at our New Zealand science tag cloud for 2009 shows that we are strongly focused on agricultural, environmental and medical sciences. If we have scale, then it lies in these disciplines.

…

“So does our science funding system facilitate or foil scientists’ attempts to beat these diminishing returns?

“There are some hopeful signs on the horizon. New Zealand scientists do collaborate through mechanisms such as the Centres of Research Excellence (the CoREs), and increases in non-contestable funding for the CRIs may be able to break down traditional institutional barriers. Furthermore, the government has also shown a willingness to invest in key scientific infrastructure, including advanced genomics capability and high performance computing.

“However, continued micromanagement of the contestable funding pool for science is likely to limit the size of science teams in Universities and skew the balance of this portfolio towards well-established, low pay-off areas.”

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 integrity and professionalism, as I have recently discovered.

Linda Bryder is a professor of history at the University of Auckland. As well as the author of ‘A History of the “Unfortunate Experiment” at National Women’s Hospital’she has written ‘Below the Magic Mountain: The Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain’ and ‘A Healthy Country: Essays on the Social History of Medicine in New Zealand’. She is on the editorial board of a number of international health and history journals including Hygeia Internationalis and is a council member of the New Zealand Historical Association.

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 February 2010 Philip Whitley went on trial in Nelson for fraud. This whole saga should not have happened. In 2001, Assoc Prof Tim Bell from the University of Canterbury, someone with international standing in the data compression field, tested the software and concluded “I had clear evidence that the system did not function, and could find no evidence at all that it was able to do what was claimed”. This talk will give a quick introduction to data compression, discuss tests done on Whitley’s software (and their flaws), and give a brief history of various efforts to develop the software.

Paul Ashton was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Canterbury from 1987 to 2000. Since 2000 he has been a Software Developer in Christchurch. He is also Secretary of the NZ Skeptics Inc.

Click below for Dr Ashton’s presentation to the New Zealand Skeptic Society conference held August 13 – 15, Auckland, New Zealand

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 Idioms from Strangeness to Illness”; “Panic Attacks – the history of mass delusion”, and “Outbreak!: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior”. He is currently editing a book on media scares entitled “The Sky is Falling! A Colorful History of Media Panics”.

Click below to listen to Dr Robert Bartholomew’s presentation at the New Zealand Skeptic Society conference, August 13 – 15, Auckland, New Zealand

PART I

PART II

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 Sitchin led to claims that there is a planet, Nibiru, on a several-thousand-year orbit around our sun and that the Annunaki inhabitants genetically engineered humanity from Homo neanderthal sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens in order to exploit our labour.

Click below to listen to Dr Warrensson’s presentation to the New Zealand Skeptics Society’s conference August 13 – 15, 2010 in Auckland, New Zealand

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 molecular medicine who works as Research Director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre. She is currently writing her PhD on factors associated with vaccine reactogenicity and recently co-wrote a chapter on immunisation scares for a book called “The Sky is Falling! A Colorful History of Media Panics”.

Click below to listen to a recording of Dr Petousis-Harris’s presentation at the New Zealand Skeptics Society conference August 13 – 15, Auckland, New Zealand

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 Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT). With a background in medicinal chemistry, Michael has a particular dislike for homeopathy and AIDS denialism. He has written several opinion pieces for the Christchurch Press and occasionally crosses swords with “wingnuts” via letters to the editor and in the blogosphere.

Click below to listen to the recording of Dr Edmond’s presentation at the 2010 New Zealand Skeptics Society conference, August 13 – 15, Auckland, New Zealand.

Figure 1 from Nutt et al: Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse. To be published in the Lancet on Friday, March 23, 2007 (Credit: David Nutt et al) NOTE: Classes are UK, not NZ

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 more dangerous than ecstasy and marijuana.  His sacking led to the resignation of a number of other members of the same committee.

He and his team used nine different parameters of harm caused by drug use, classified into three groups: physical harms, dependence and social harms.  Using these parameters, they found that alcohol was ranked fifth behind heroin, and tobacco ninth, making them more harmful than many illegal drugs (see image, right).

Professor Nutt is Director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit at Imperial College London, President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and Chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.  He is also the current Edmund J Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London.

In addition to his lectures (podcast below), he was also interviewed by 3 News about New Zealand’s drink driving laws.

David Nutt Lecture – Pt I

David Nutt Lecture – Pt II

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 order to develop appropriate and adoptable technologies.

An excerpt: (read in full here)

“The role of social scientists is to take these new technologies to the farmers and make them want to use them to function as agricultural extensionists.

“Here is my problem: agricultural extension is not a social science.

“While in the outside world, social scientists are economists, anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, geographers and so on and are valued for their contribution to understanding human behaviour (for use in policy development, land-use change modelling, systems development, etc.); in New Zealand we are extensionists, purveyors of widgets (mechanical tools, computer software, hybridised plant varieties, bio-engineered products, etc) dreamed up by the technologists.

“Why is it, when the rest of the world understands the need for social science, New Zealand fails to appreciate its value?”