David Colquhoun, a pharmacology professor at University College London, has shamed some universities into ending alternative courses.

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The person in this role leads the process and is responsible for obtaining and evaluating the relevant facts and proposing alternative courses of action.

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He fatally undermined the idea that moral behaviour is a matter of dispassionately calculating the likely outcomes of alternative courses of action and plumping for whichever option stands to yield the greatest utility or happiness.

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In January a group of dismayed academics, doctors and scientists urged universities to renounce courses in alternative medicine.

ECONOMIST: Medicine and its rivals

Liberal Democrat Lord Taverne, chairman of the organisation Sense About Science, criticised universities offering bachelor of science degree courses in alternative medicines during questions on 21 December 2010.

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The campaign is funded by money from speed awareness courses drivers attend when they are offered an alternative punishment to points on their driving licence.

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Her alternative to quotas: a broad affirmative-action programme including scholarships and subsidised pre-vestibular courses for blacks and poor whites.

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