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June 30, 2007
Freedom of speech for academic bloggers - a good result
I've previously blogged about Prof. David Colquhoun at UCL being forced to remove his blog from UCL's servers. However, UCL has relented: the blog will be restored, when Prof. Colquhoun has time to move it back. Clearly, this is something to be grateful for - and hopefully all the attention that this issue was getting in the 'old' and 'new' media has played a part.
Another positive outcome of this is that bloggers bit back against the attempt to censor Colquhoun. As the blogger and journalist Ben Goldacre puts it in a piece for The Guardian:
Amusingly, in these democratic times, there are inevitable consequences of trying to silence a blogger - especially when you make a hash of it - and a mass of activity has now grown into what is cheerfully being described as “a festival of Ann Walker”. As the Sciencepunk blog gleefully points out, Ann Walker’s claims are now more famous than ever.
Most have started by trundling through her pieces on a pill-vendor website called Healthspan. In one piece, Walker promotes the idea that neanderthals were not a distinct kind of human, but degenerate and malnourished versions of ordinary humans: buy pills or regress to a sub-human state, seems to be Walker’s message. Yikes. And there’s a handy list of links to the pills you can buy from Healthspan at the bottom of her article. Dr Andy Lewis on the Quackometer blog points out the flaws, but also shows how the “neanderthal as malnourished homo sapiens” argument is more commonly found on quack creationist websites, where biblical literalists don’t like the idea of “evidence that archaic forms of humans existed, quite distinct from ourselves, and that evolution can explain their development from earlier, more ape-like ancestors.”
Meanwhile, Holfordwatch wades in to look at the evidence behind her claims that Ginkgo biloba pills are effective in dementia and cognitive impairment, and Coracle from the Science and Progress blog examines her claims on glucosamine and chondroitin pills. Coracle makes an interesting general point about the patterns that often emerge in trial research on any pill: “Early, and poorer quality trials showed benefit for chondroitin vs placebo, but in later and more robust trials this benefit gets closer to equivalence with placebo.”
This is very good news: not only does Colquhoun get to move his blog back to UCL, but - while some may have hoped to silence critical discussion of Ann Walker's work - there was, instead, a festival of such discussion. I'm very please to have played my own small part in this festival of Ann Walker.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:37 PM | TrackBack
June 11, 2007
RIP Richard Rorty
Sad to hear, but the philosopher Richard Rorty died on June 8th. I remember struggling to get to grips with his writing for years - his work on human rights (especially a lecture delivered as a fundraiser for Amnesty) was always particularly interesting. Adding the finishing touches to my PhD at the moment, I'm still trying to respond to Rorty’s thought - in particular, to his argument that it is strange for Lyotard to abandon the project of universal history and yet discover world-historical significance in changes such as the new information-processing technologies (Rorty 1992, 69). Thinking back over Rorty's work, he raises a number of very good, very important questions - which I'm sure people much more significant than me will be able to benefit from for years to come.
Rorty, R. (1992) "Cosmopolitanism Without Emancipation: A Response to Lyotard," in S. Lash and J. Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:58 PM | TrackBack
June 10, 2007
Freedom of speech for academic bloggers - UCL forces Prof Colquhoun to remove his blog
David Colquhoun's a chemistry professor at UCL, and also runs an Improbable Science blog - criticising dodgy 'scientific' claims. Sadly, Colquhoun has been forced to remove his blog from UCL's servers: Colquhoun reports that an
item about claims made for alleged benefits of the red clover and other herbs has resulted in complaints being made to the provost of UCL (Malcolm Grant), and to Chair of Council (Lord Woolf). The complaints have come from Alan Lakin, husband of Ann Walker. I have received no complaints from them myself.
Describing these complaints and complainants, Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre notes that
it is striking that none of them engaged the Prof himself on the issue of the ideas. In fact, they all ran behind his back to the Provost, or rather, to teacher; and the Provost, after serving up a sterling defense of academic freedom in responses to them, quietly asked Colquhoun to take his blog elsewhere, on the grounds that it was bringing the university too much flak.
You can read more details about the affair at Colquhoun's and Goldacre's blogs (including more detail on the UCL provost's responses to the situation). Colquhoun has decided to stand his ground, and moved his blog to a new domain (instead of taking it offline). Colquhoun states that "I don't enjoy rows. They keep me awake at night. But some things are just too important to duck out of them."
I should declare something of a personal interest in this: I'm currently applying for funding for a research project on Mapping Virtual War, and I've proposed building a substantial project website for research dissemination. I've also found the online materials provided by a number of institutions - not least the Watson Institute's Infopeace site - extremely useful in my research.
Some aspects of my website will no doubt be controversial (it's hard to discuss mass killing without being controversial). Colleagues have been very supportive of my application - and I'd trust that if there were some controversy my university would support me. However, I would still be concerned that events such as those with Colquhoun and UCL could have a chilling effect on the many valuable attempts by academics to use the Internet to disseminate their work to - and discuss it with - the wider public.
