A 75-year-old hypnotherapist was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years imprisonment last Tuesday after being convicted of a series of sex assaults on young women and girls. Peter Knight is the second British hypnotherapist jailed since September, when Stephen Dyer was sentenced to five years for similar …
E equals Mariah Carey “times two”, according to Ms Carey Sense About Science, a charitable trust set up to promote to promote good science and evidence-based thinking to the public, has just published its Celebrities and Science 2008 report, naming and shaming those in the public eye …
This is the first in a series of posts by R.P. McMurphy, a team manager in a busy community mental health team, about the spread of counterknowledge in Britain’s National Health Service. The Mental Health Trust that I work for recently gained Foundation status. For …
Image: AP The results are in and over 2,000 readers voted in the poll. Thank you! We can now announce that the winner of the 2008 Counterknowledge Award is HRH The Prince of Wales. Prince Charles received 25% of the vote, beating the Church of Scientology by …
Picture: Kirktoons Regular readers are likely to know of the news released this morning regarding a poll by Ipsos MORI, which shows that “29% of science teachers believe that creationism should be ‘taught’ in schools”. Of course, this still means that 65% do not think …
Two ex-employees of Diskeeper Corporation have filed a lawsuit against their former employer after they were wrongfully dismissed for refusing to undergo compulsory “religious” indoctrination. Alexander Godelman, the former CIO, and Marc Le Shay allege that the owner of Diskeeper, Craig Jensen, forced them to …
Simon Singh One of the most vivid examples of a lack of intellectual accountability in broadcasting is the now-notorious “Alternative Medicine: The Evidence.” Broadcast on BBC2 in 2006, it suggested that patients could undergo heart surgery with no anaesthetic other than acupuncture. Thanks to the …
Kudos to the Scientific Red Cards project, a new registry that allows academics and researchers to look up and report instances of fraud in published scientific papers. From their website: According to a note in Nature, one in three scientists confesses to having misbehaved in …
The conviction of Robert Napper for the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common is massively embarrassing for Dr Paul Britton, the psychologist whose “criminal profiling” helped convict the innocent Colin Stagg. It was Britton who concluded that Stagg had the same “sexually deviant personality …
A man considered to be the biggest fraudster in world history is now under house arrest. No, we’re not talking about Mr. Kiyosaki. Yet. Bernard Madoff has been charged with operating the world’s largest ever Ponzi scheme, in which investors are lured in by the …