Denis Gingras, co-author of Foods to Fight Cancer, responds to questions on the food, life-style and the role of diet in preventing and treating cancer [Continued]

On the whole education is not a good news story in many nations in the West. Falling standards, social engineering, non-educational agendas (obesity, climate change etc), lack of student motivation and poor levels of attainment… The list of bad news headlines is far longer, and more familiar, than those few examples of good news that are high-lighted in the media. Despite of increases in spending and endless processions of new initiatives and ideas, the fact remains that education, in countries such as the UK at least, is seen largely as being in crisis.

One would think that the picture in developing countries would be worse. With lower levels of investment, patchy provision and poor infrastructure, the environment should be set for a decidedly bad news story. However, the story that emerges from James Tooley's A Beautiful Tree is anything is anything but bad - it is surprisingly positive and, dare one say it, optimistic. What is more it reveals, perhaps, the heart that is lacking in what is increasingly a sterile education debate in the more advanced economies.

Tooley outlines a number of journeys in different parts of the world - India, China, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria - where he discovers, in the teeth of official denial, the existence of 'underground' schools providing education outside of the state system. As the book progresses you get to know what to expect - first out-right denials that schools outside of the state system exist, then the discovery of these schools tucked away in small towns and villages, often in tumble down buildings or in the homes of the teachers and then an exploration of what these schools do and how they do it. [Continued]

Cancer patients, and their friends and families, are often faced with contradictory information on what to do about diet. On the one hand there are large numbers of mainstream oncologists and dieticians who tell patients to eat what they like so long as they keep the calories up and are able to get through chemotherapy or radiotherapy. On the other hand there are plenty of people who insist that only a strict vegan or macrobiotic or Gerson or other anti-cancer diet will help. And of course there are lots of books out there that advocate all kinds of diets, all of them claiming to be based on some sort of science. Those looking for a middle ground based on solid science are left trying to work out for themselves what makes sense and what is obvious nonsense.

Foods To Fight Cancer looks like lots of other books in the 'superfoods' genre. It's glossy, well illustrated and published by Dorling Kindersly. It looks more coffee table than operating table. However, unlike many of the anti-cancer food books that are on the market this one is written by scientists working in the field of diet and cancer and who are not only up-to-date with the science but who are engaged in making it happen. It just so happens that Richard Beliveau and Denis Gingras are excellent communicators able to write for the non-scientist as well as their colleagues.

The central premise of the book is that dietary interventions can help tip the odds against developing cancer, and also to aid in fighting cancer once it has started. The plant kingdom contains thousands of phytochemicals - polyphenols, terpenes, sulphides etc - which have potent anti-cancer properties. These micro-nutrients act in multi-faceted ways to block many of the different biological pathways necessary for cancers to form, grow and then metastasize. Unlike some of the over-inflated claims made by some, there is no promise of a single all-powerful cancer cure here. Instead the emphasis is firmly on looking at what pathways are necessary for cancer to develop and then what can be done to block these using multiple compounds from different foods. [Continued]

It will be a surprise for most people to discover that the world of statistics, like every other sphere of human life, has deep-seated ideological differences. We all know that economists, climatologists and physicists are prone to falling out with each other, but statisticians? But it is true, at the heart of statistics there are key philosophical disputes about the very meaning of probability. While everyone agrees that the chance of tossing a heads for a fair coin is 0.5, what that actually means will depend on whether you are a frequentist or a Bayesian, and if you're a Bayesian do you tend to the objectivist/logical or subjective schools? Understanding what these mean, and what the implications are as regards statistical thinking, is a key part of this entertaining and thought-provoking little book.

William Briggs is a research scientist, lecturer in statistics and the author of an engaging blog that is always worth seeking out. With this book Briggs sets out to provide the reader with a statistics course that aims to instil statistical thinking rather than providing a set of recipes to be followed. Where other statistics books take great delight in inflicting mind-numbingly tedious step-by-step algorithms on the reader, this book takes advantage of open-source stats software and instead focuses on what the stuff actually means.

This isn't to say that the book avoids math. Far from it, the reader is encouraged to think deeply about what he or she is doing. Statistical thinking is hard and the chances are that following pre-defined formulae is a recipe for getting things wrong. And, time and again, Briggs comes back to these differences between frequentist statistics (which is mostly what gets taught to students), and Bayesian analysis.[Continued]

What is 'statistical significance', 'standard error' and why should we care? For economists Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak, these are fundamentally important questions and we should all care. As they put it:

Crossing frantically a busy street to save your child from certain death is a good gamble. Crossing frantically to get another mustard packet for your hot dog is not. The size of the potential loss if you don't hurry to save your child is larger, most will agree, than the potential loss if you don't get the mustard.

In other words, it's not the probability of success or failure that's important in the real world, it's the pay-off that counts. Translate this probability of success or failure into 'statistical significance' and you have the heart of the problem.

It would be fortunate if we could simply blame innumerate journalists and commentators for mistaking 'statistical significance' with actual significance in the real world. Unfortunately there is more to the confusion over the meaning of 'significance' than journalistic ignorance or laziness. It is, argue the authors, increasingly common in the sciences too - and with potentially dire consequences.

Statistical significance is a test that looks at whether a given result (for a sample) could have arisen by chance (normally 1 in 20). It doesn't ask whether the result is important in any way. Results can have high levels of statistical significance and yet be utterly trivial or uninteresting. And, let's be honest, the press (popular and scientific) is increasingly filled with reports of findings that are statistically significant and yet totally pointless. [Continued]

Christopher Booker, co-author of Scared To Death, responds to questions on global warming, health scares, the mass media and responses to his book in this interview with LondonBookReview.com [Continued]

Nigel Calder, co-author of The Chilling Stars, responds to questions on the controversies surrounding his book, the film 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' and offers advice for the lay-person wanting to make sense of the competing theories of climate change. [Continued]

The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley; Introduction To Politics by Garner, Ferdinand and Lawson; Integrative Oncology by Donald Abrams and Andrew Weil…