Talks:
This was an excellent talk which I really enjoyed. The speaker is an ex-policeman and now a QI contributor. When in the police he always thought that there was not enough focus on crime prevention by the police and too much on cleaning up after crime, or chasing bad guys. The best approach is build an environment that will help to stop crimes happening in the first place! He espoused the idea that increasing sense of community in a city area (represented by people getting to know and appreciate each other and their issues) reduced the silo mentality and decreased crime. This is of course attacked by newspapers like the Daily Fail which say that police should be after the bad guys rather than community building. But wouldn't you rather not be robbed in the first place rather than the police catching the robber after he'd robbed you?
This approach can be very effective but difficult to prove statistically (due to many influencing factors). There is a sliding scale of priorities for crime according to the speaker: Prevention, then reduction, then better handling. Similar to the fuel, heat and oxygen "fire" triangle, there is a cause-effect-place & time dynamic for crime. Reducing the small crimes can create an atmosphere of intolerance for misdemeanours which in turn helps reduce larger-scale crimes.
He espoused some interesting ideas such as hosting dog shows to increase the sense of community on hard, dirty estates and getting people to stop dropping chewing gum by asking them to stick their gum to a board, showing pictures of political leaders with the slogan "who sucks most?" As an aside, this can also be used as an an impromptu polling device!
Alternative Medicine (AltMed) practitioners tend to use scientific-sounding terms to frame their arguments and make their ideas sound more genuine . But this is really just pseudo-science and there is little or even no real theory behind their ideas. A recently-coined phrase "cosmaceuticals" is now used by skeptics to refer to all these make-up and cosmetics products marketed these days (mainly to women) which claim to use a proprietary secret ingredient, which is clearly just made up, and reinforced by bogus claims of its age-defying or wrinkle-reducing effects.
There is a trend for AltMed practitioners to move away from the moniker "Alternative Medicine", and adopt even more dubious titles such as "Complimentary" (to what exactly?) or even "Integrated" medicine (don't even go there). They would like us all to believe that AltMed offers a Holistic solution. But this is about as accurate as explaining away the need for understanding how a supposedly magic disease-vulnerability revealing device works by just saying "It's Quantum, innit?!"
Skeptics would prefer to say that AltMed offers mere "No-cebos"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
which are even further down the scale of usefulness in medicine that placebos. Aromatherapy was discussed as well and its dubious to non-existent benefits exposed.
It was posited that the use of AltMed treatments on children, in place of real scientific medicine, was tantamount to child abuse. It was suggested that NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the UK body that approves treatments for adoption by the state health service, the NHS) should have to approve AltMed treatments before they could be offered to the general public at the taxpayer's expense. We should be intolerant of misinformation provided by AltMed quacks.
The excellent Dr. Rachel Dunlop (Twitter: @DrRachie) suggested that in her homeland of Australia, the AltMed pratices of Chiropratic and Accupuncture were viewed as more legitamate treatments unfortunately. But banning AltMed treatments entirely is not considered to be the best solution. Her main opponents are the so called "anti-vaxxers" who against all the evidence and scientific concensus, contnue to peddle the ridiculous notion that vaccinations against the most harmful diseases actually do more harm than good.
As an aside, the classsic case of the huge mis-step by Andrew Wakefield in falsely asserting that the MMR vaccine could cause Autism was brought up. His work has been almost universally condemned and exposed for its chief mistake. This is a famous victory for science and a big plus for the saying "correlation doesn't prove causation". So, in his study there were many cases of Autism detected in children after they had taken the MMR vaccine. But instead of thinking on this further, Wakefield jumped to the premature conclusion that the jab itself was the cause of the autism. However, the fact is that the most common age for autism to be detected is the same age that the vaccine is given. In other words, almost anyone who was ever going to get autism out of the population taking part in the trial (only 12, and autism is actually not that rare) would have been found anyway. Actually, it turned out that the rate of autism in his vaccinated sub-group was not (statistically significantly) higher than in the general population. On top of this, his supporting lobby are well known for wanting individual M,M,R jabs not a combined one, and so there was a clear conflict of interest in his study. It was even worse, as Wakefiled was later found to have manipulated data to fit his desired findings, and he was struck off.
See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy
It seems to me that Anti-Vaxxers and their allies are what could be called "fair-weather friends" to science, in other words they disbelieve us whenever they can and only grudgingly come on-side when they have no other choice. The old canard of "research funding" trotted out by ALtMed practicioners was brought up as well. It is an uncomfortable truth that pharmaceutical companies spend more money on marketing their drugs than they do making new ones (the so-called "reasearch to marketing ratio"), which is shameful. However, it is a bit rich for people from AltMed to use this argument, as their own industry has a far higher ratio for the same parameter - there is little to no R&D in AltMed, yet they make billions of dollars a year. This is a common and cruelly disingenuous meme strung out by AltMed - they are the "little guys" and "big bad pharma" are the real bad guys. Please, AltMed, get real.
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