I was a little puzzled by something Kos said in discussing the latest polling from New Hampshire. The poll has Dean at 28% and Kerry at 21%, among a sample of 600 voters. The poll officially has a margin of error of 4%, so Kos was unwilling to call it a clear lead for Dean. This policy strikes me as rather conservative.
“Philosophy Talk”, a new public radio show hosted by two esteemed Stanford philosophers, John Perry and Ken Taylor, pilots tomorrow on KALW. The show is at 1pm Pacific Time (that’s 4pm in New York, 9pm in London and 6am in Melbourne, if I’ve done my sums correctly) and if the technology is working should be available in live streaming. The show tomorrow is on lying, with Tamar Shapiro (also from Stanford philosophy) and Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost authority on emotions and facial expressions, among the guests. It should be fun, and it should certainly be better than what passes for ‘talk’ radio in this country. If you want more info about the show, this puff piece from the Stanford Reporter gives John Perry a lot of space to set out what he wants to do with the show.
A trawl around the blogosphere finds Lance Knobel in agreement with a piece by Will Hutton in the Observer on the MMR vaccine and media reporting of science. Hutton’s main point is that although most (British) doctors believe the vaccine is safe and that there is no link to autism, the media report the debate to give a completely different impression.
bq. The dissident, so-called whistleblower, however dodgy the research on which his or her ‘evidence’ is based, is afforded massive attention; it is taken as axiomatic that the mainstream, evidence-based government-endorsed view will be self-serving and wrong. More than half of us believe the medical profession is divided over the health risks of MMR; in fact, it is more or less united that there is no risk.