Skeptical reporter @ 2013-04-12

Skeptical Reporter for April 12th, 2013 In Great Britain, public health officials say a big increase in the demand for MMR vaccinations suggests parents' "legacy of mistrust" over the jab is being overcome. Take-up for the MMR vaccine in the area dropped significantly in the late 1990s when research - which has since been discredited - raised concerns over the jab. After an outbreak of measles, hundreds of people have started queuing at hospitals offering drop-in clinics for children and young adults. Families began queuing at the drop-in MMR clinic at Swansea's MorristonHospital an hour before it opened during the weekend. Before the introduction of the MMR vaccination in 1988, some half a million children in the UK caught measles each year and about 100 died from it. The latest figures for Wales, which cover October to December 2012, show that uptake of the first dose of MMR vaccine in two-year-old children was 94% and ranged by local authority from 87% to 97%. The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without a hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé. “I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society. Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon “the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available. Ali Razeghi, a Tehran scientist has registered "The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine" with the state-run Centre for Strategic Inventions. The device can predict the future in a print out after taking readings from the touch of a user. Razaeghi said the device worked by a set of complex algorithims to "predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual, with 98 percent accuracy". As the managing director of Iran's Centre for Strategic Inventions, Razeghi is a serial inventor with 179 other inventions listed under his own name. "I have been working on this project for the last 10 years," he said. Razeghi says Iran's government can predict the possibility of a military confrontation with a foreign country, and forecast the fluctuation in the value of foreign currencies and oil prices by using his new invention. "Naturally a government that can see five years into the future would be able to prepare itself for challenges that might destabilise it," he said. In the United States, a natural medicine lobbyist dropped off a bottle of nutritional capsules labeled "Calm" to the office of state Sen. Charles Schwertner. They had the opposite effect. Staffers in Schwertner's office called the Texas Department of Public Safety after the supplements were dropped off by a representative of the Texas Health Freedom Coalition, an advocacy group for natural health and alternative medicine. Coalition executive committee member Radhia Gleis said the senator’s office overreacted to the gift. The senator's chief of staff, Thomas Holloway, said the office was complying with direction from DPS and wasn't trying to worry anyone. Still,