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Submission + - Has Science Become Corrupted?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Has Science Become Corrupted?

An award winning science author, Gary Taubes has written a book that pans the medical community's treatment of the obesity epidemic. By itself, that isn't particularly worth our time. Diet books are a dime a dozen and we don't cover them on Slashdot anyway.

What is interesting is that it looks like the medical community is behaving in a very unscientific manner. Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy has no basis in research. In fact, all the available research points in quite another (more traditional) direction. Here is BoingBoing's take on the story. You can follow the link from there to an excellent podcast of an interview with Taubes on CBC's 'Quirks and Quarks'.

The medical community seems to defer unthinkingly to authority. For instance, when Britain's most respected paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow came up with a crackpot theory (which I thought we have covered on Slashdot but can't find) that sent innocent people to jail, the courts and the medical community bought it hook line and sinker. Of course, he isn't the only one in that boat. Pathologists all over the world have sent innocent people to jail. There's a case in Ontario, Canada right now of a pathologist who screwed up more than twenty cases and sent several people to jail.

People who study expert behavior have found that people need feedback to maintain their expertise. If they don't get the feedback by the nature of the system or because others are too intimidated/lazy to disagree with them, their behavior becomes non-expert. Ericsson points out that surgeons get better as they get older but mammographers don't. Surgeons get feedback immediately. The patient lives or dies. Mammographers may never find out if they are right or wrong.

So, has medicine become a non-science? Is it mostly a non-science? Somewhat? Can physicists feel smug with their repeatable experiments or do they have some 'splainin to do about string theory?
E3

E For All Attendance Lackluster 50

Posted by Zonk from the e-for-not-that-many-people-really dept.
Despite the upbeat tone of IDG's official release about the first 'E for All', commentators are noting that the reported figure of 18,000 attendees is lower than expected. Wired is blunt about it: E For All has nothing on PAX. "Penny Arcade Expo was everything E For All dreams of being: a well-attended show packed wall-to-wall with crazy game fans. But it's also inexpensive: three days and two nights of musical performances for way, way less money than an E For All ticket, let alone the additional cost of Video Games Live. And it's got a whole mess of community events, like panels, gaming rooms, and other opportunities that make E For All's extracurriculars look slim. The show floor is just one part of PAX, but it's practically all of E For All."

Feed Engadget Mobile relaunches! (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Announcements

You might say we flashed Engadget Mobile with a new ROM. Or gave it a new SIM, or traded it in for a 3G model, or what have you. But whatever analogy you'd like to apply to it, Engadget mobile's been given its long overdue upgrade to the new Engadget layout, complete with breaking news / featured stories boxes and improved commenting system to make digesting the latest mobile news as easy as switching from 12-key to QWERTY.

Oh, and did we mention we're giving away a ton of phones over the next couple of weeks to celebrate? Because we are. Enjoy!

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Privacy

Site Claims to Reveal 'Tattle-tales' 565

Posted by Zonk from the true-capitalism-in-action dept.
Dekortage writes "Have you ever ratted somebody out? If it was a legal case, you might end up on Who's A Rat, an online database of police informants and undercover agents, identified through various publicly-available documents such as court briefings. The data-mined information is now available online at a price. As reported in the New York Times, 'The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents, many of them from documents obtained from court files available on the Internet.' Understandably, U.S. judges and law enforcement agents are upset, although defense lawyers seem to like the idea. Where do you draw the line between legal transparency and secrecy?"
Wireless Networking

How Bad Can Wi-fi Be? 434

Posted by Zonk from the good-thing-we-have-real-experts-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"

Soldiers Bond With Bots, Take Them Fishing 462

Posted by Zonk from the brave-new-world dept.
HarryCaul writes "Soldiers are finding themselves becoming more and more attached to their robotic helpers. During one test of a mine clearing robot, 'every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.' The man in charge halted the test, though - 'He just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. This test, he charged, was inhumane.' Sometimes the soldiers even take their metallic companions fishing. Is there more sympathy for Robot Rights than previously suspected?"

Feed LG's GGW-H10N HD DVD / Blu-ray combo drive previewed (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops, HDTV, Peripherals, Storage

We can't deny feeling a little rush of excitement when we first learned that LG would be releasing an optical drive that could handle both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs -- like many fence-sitters, we see these combo units as an end run around the format war -- so obviously we were quite stoked to read ExtremeTech's initial thoughts on one of these devices (provided by HP in what was likely an upcoming Media Center). Bearing in mind that neither the review unit nor the drivers were finalized versions, it sounds like the GGW-H10N does indeed live up to its promise of reading nearly every disc format available as well as burning and Lightscribing Blu-ray media, DVDs, and CDs; however, Blu-ray write speeds were well below the claimed 2x in testing, and the lack of HD DVD-R/RW read support could prove to be a rather frequent annoyance unless it's rectified through a firmware update (or HD DVD pulls a Betamax). Bottom line: if you just can't wait any longer to jump into the game, this LG drive will give you most of the capabilities you're looking for -- but with a likely pricetag of $1,000 and more full-featured models probably right down the road, it would seem to pay off if you can just keep on waitin'...

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Security

Submission + - 2012 Olympics security to be chosen by sponsorship

Submitted by denebian devil
denebian devil writes: In an Editorial/Blog at ITPRO, Davey Winder writes of a keynote speech at Infosecurity Europe by Member of Parliament Derek Wyatt. In this speech, which was about the IT security demands of running the 2012 London Olympics, Derek Wyatt MP dropped the bombshell that IT Security at the Olympics will hinge not on which companies show themselves to be the best in their field or to have the technology that best meets the needs of the Olympics, but rather on whether or not the companies were a 'major sponsor' of the Olympics. So who has bought their way into being the security experts of choice, and with whom our security and that of the visiting millions will rest? Visa.

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