Peter Griffin

Auckland through the years (infographic)

The New Zealand Herald has created a simple but effective infographic to accompany the series John Roughan is writing on the changes Auckland has gone through over the years. While Roughan goes all the way back to the layered rock formations that created Auckland’s distinctive cliffs, the interactive graphic on the site at the moment […]

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Clash of the anecdotes on vitamin C

If you read today’s letters to the Sunday Star Times you’ll see the flip side of anecdotal evidence on the use of intravenous vitamin C to treat serious illness. The letter below illustrates well why it is potentially very dangerous when people make decisions that may impact their health based on anecdotal evidence. Miraculous recoveries […]

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How the media lost interest in Climategate

I’ve blogged before about how climategate’s final act, in which three separate investigations largely exonerated the scientists concerned and reaffirmed the climate science, was under-reported by the New Zealand media compared to the explosion of coverage at the start. Well, TVNZ’s Media7 show hosted by Russell Brown set out to find out just how much […]

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Unvaccinated and bizarrely proud of it

A colleague who read my previous post about the 60 Minutes miracle cure programme pointed out some of the reaction to the story on the Facebook page of the official-sounding Vaccination Information Network. A visit to the page finds it is anything but informative. Despite that, the VINE has attracted a following of 8000-plus people […]

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How many ways can you spell QUACK?

The weekend’s Skeptics conference was a refreshing reminder that there are sharp-witted people in New Zealand interested in rational thought and with a healthy disdain for pseudo-scientific claims, quackery and silly beliefs. Some of the conference sessions are available as podcasts over at the Science Media Centre website – more are to come as soon […]

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Rumble in the Kermadec trench

As NIWA faced a scurrilous legal challenge over its climate data yesterday, its scientists were getting on with business, releasing details of the partial collapse of an undersea volcano in New Zealand waters. As the Herald reports: A volcanic cone on Rumble III, 200km northeast of Auckland, had crumbled. The volcano’s highest point had dropped […]

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