Some of you might remember a TV broadcast from a couple years ago called The Great Global Warming Swindle. The central thesis, that cosmic rays are the central cause of global warming, has been long disproved. (To make the film-makers’ case more appealing they, uh, “omitted” the last 30 years of data.) Two of the interviewees filed official complaints with Ofcom because their views were misrepresented and their scientific findings distorted in order to show the opposite effect. The producer has previous record on this point and it’s a wonder anyone wants to work with him at all.
I bring all this up to mention that I saw the Ofcom summary by accident the other day:
However, whilst Ofcom is required by the 2003 Act to set standards to ensure that news programmes are reported with “due accuracy” there is no such requirement for other types of programming, including factual programmes of this type.
You heard it here first — factual programmes do not have to be factual.
It seems documentaries, or programmes which look like documentaries, do not have to hew to anything we might call reality. Graphs, figures and statistics can be pulled out of the producer’s… hat and this wouldn’t matter.
The remainder of the ruling makes for some quite depressing reading. You can get away with whatever you want if you introduce your detractors as “the orthodoxy”, mention that they represent a “distortion of a whole area of science” and that they are conspiring to “invok[e] the threat of climatic disaster, to hinder vital industrial progress in the developing world”. Because despite all that you are letting the opposing view have a say. The excuses can stretch even further if your programme is viewed as being “polemical”, as if unsubstantiated nonsense is its own rightness.
Totally unrelated to the above, the same document also contains other rulings, the last of which quite amused me. It was regarding a complaint against subscription-only SportXXXGirls, in which the female presenters “perform[ed] explicit sexual acts” and “invited viewers to contact them for ‘adult chat’ via a premium rate text service”. The complaint was that the “live chat” was a repeat from the week before, which wasn’t obvious (unless you’d seen the previous screening, I guess…). I can only imagine how often they get complaints like this — I don’t know how many people consider complaining about subscription porn channels — but the result was that “Ofcom viewed the recordings supplied and noted that the material shown on the 10 February 2008 was a repeat of that shown on 3 February 2008”. What a strange job…
Tomorrow (that is, 30 January 2010) there are going to be a number of demonstrations/protests outside branches of Boots, under the general name of the 10:23 campaign. At 10:23, a bunch of not-very-brave people will be “overdosing” on homeopathic pills. I think the plan is that each person takes a bottle full. This will, of course, have no downsides whatsoever because there is nothing in it.
The point in this case is not to point out the stupidity of homeopathy to the people in the street, though it will no doubt do that. It’s to make the point that Boots sell these things — have whole aisles devoted to these little white pills — even though they admit there is no evidence for their effectiveness. There are even Boots-branded homeopathic pills on the shelves! And at the same time they sell you something useless, they want you to know that their pharmacists are trustworthy enough to dispense medicines with active ingredients, and give advice about these medicines.
I leave you with James “the Amazing!” Randi, to explain the absurd details of homeopathy in his wonderful way:
This is the second grocery-shopping post I have made in a row, which is slightly alarming. In future will all my blog posts have some theme of standing in the cheese aisle, fretting over which kind of cheddar to buy? I hope not.
Anyway, at some point in the last six months — and I can honestly say I refuse to hunt down the references because it simply does not matter — the supply of 100W incandescent light bulbs has dried up. By law. I refuse to act like it is my human right to buy bulbs that are hot enough to burn fingertips. No doubt there are professional Boring Farts out there doing that very thing, in between complaining about the weather forecast being in degrees Celsius and milk being sold in litres.
Instead I will say something that really matters:
The aforesaid Co-op (the one that occasionally stock Our Kind of Tea™) has decided that No 100W Bulbs means No 100W-equivalent Bulbs. I’m only asking for something like a 20W bulb, but the most I can buy is a 65W-equivalent (=14W actual).
Sooner or later there will be a generation that doesn’t know what a 100W light bulb means. Woah.
God/no God? No God. We’re all freelancers. Some of us may choose to sit
in imaginary offices from time to time, pretending to receive memos from our
made-up boss, or enjoying watercooler conversations about the
loving/vengeful/forgiving nature of our fictional chief with our colleagues,
but no matter how many hours we clock up, it doesn’t alter the fact that no
one’s actually running things on the top floor. This is good news. We own the
company!
So, what’s up? Em, it was my birthday two weeks ago. Went to ESI (a Leith restaurant owned by an Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman) and had a good time there with Helen. The service was quite slow but the food was good and there was no faulting the company.
I also organised a sort of test-the-waters meeting of Edinburgh Haskell users. Four of us met in the pub on a Sunday afternoon, and I received two more emails from other people who would have come if I had given more notice. The time didn’t go particularly easily — one of our number was horrendously awkward to talk to — but it was a start. No plans to do anything more with it at the moment.
But out of that (and the advertisements I sent to the Haskell Cafe mailing list) I got a message from Eric Kow, asking if I wanted to help organise a Haskell Hackathon this August to coincide with the ICFP and Haskell Symposium in Edinburgh. So I’ve been thinking about that and coming to realise just how impossible it is to get anything organised while the Festival is on…
Meanwhile I feel that things are going quite well at work, which coincides with the contracting budget being cut to almost-nothing. A good handful of my colleagues are now on redundancy notice. I managed to get the one job for which there was funding, but that only lasts six months. In January or thereabouts I will be looking for something new. I’m not sure what. Helen’s horror stories from work make me think I could at least be a force for good if I tried programming with the NHS. But another part of me thinks the problem is likely to be systemic and no amount of enthusiasm or skill can make up for some problems.
It feels weird to now be looking for jobs — paying attention to the job market, at least — and realising that I have those “two years’ experience” that employers seem so keen on. I had to revise my CV when applying for this position with the extended funding (though strictly speaking it’s exactly what I was doing before) and it’s staggering to think how little experience was expanded to fill those two pages. But now I feel more confident — not only in my own abilities but also in knowing what’s important when applying/interviewing for a new position. I actually have points which are important to me as a developer. They always say you should have something to ask a potential employer in an interview, but knowing what to ask only really comes with that experience.
All this doesn’t get around the fact that applying for jobs is a horrible thing to have to do and I’m not at all looking forward to it.
Ever get really annoyed by the BBC not providing adequate citations for their science and medicine stories? At most we get a researcher’s name and maybe the name of an institution. Doesn’t that really bug you?
This website is the answer to all your problems. It scans whatever BBC or Reuters article you give it and then tries to extract whichever meagre details the journalist included. This information is used to search MedLine and give you a list of articles which may have been the source.
This is a really fantastic resource. I highly recommend using the “bookmarklet” as well. Whenever you’re reading an interesting or dubious article, just press the “bookmarklet” button and The Science Behind It will magically read your current URL and try to find the real data. Many congratulations to Andy, the author of this great service.
This is admittedly more juvenile and less immediately informative, but in my opinion still necessary. My little contribution.
The internet is full of people who can, and should, make more references. Bloggers don’t have any word limit. Inline URLs don’t even add to the word count, since they are seamlessly integrated with the text. But still people don’t cite their sources. And it makes me mad. It’s lazy and sloppy and reduces transparency. It also engenders distrust, especially for bloggers who are trying to push a social or political agenda. Anyone can lie about anything when they don’t give their readers the chance to check the facts themselves.
So next time you see someone make a claim about some new science story on a blog or forum, use this link — and challenge them to justify their claim.
If one dislikes Monday because of school or work then why does one continue
to go back to work or school? I believe that folks like this are probably in
the wrong job or studying the wrong course and probably should look for
something that enables them to enjoy Mondays — and every other day for that
matter. Those who genuinely enjoy work or school probably won’t give “Work or
School” as the reasons they dislike Monday.
Interesting, but I don’t agree with the conclusions. I think it’s specifically change that people object to. They don’t like to return to work because they’ve just had two days sitting around at home, relaxing over lunch with family — living in a holiday lifestyle. Then it all has to change.
The same happens to me every single day. In the morning I don’t want to get out of bed, and the evening I don’t want to go to bed. What I’m doing now is always far more interesting than something I might be doing later. And truth be told, last Friday I was late leaving work because I couldn’t bear to leave what I was doing.
So it’s not really about not enjoying the work. For me, at least, it’s about not enjoying the change and resenting that context switch.
Helen’s been doing some swotting for a “journal club” presentation and so we’ve been having some nice chats lately about genetics. I think I’ve heard the term single nucleotide polymorphism enough that I might remember what it means in future.
I’ve also been reading Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought which I was given at Christmas. The two came together in this article which Helen forwarded — Pinker writing about “personal genomics” in the New York Times. It’s an enjoyable read and, to my eyes, quite level-headed.
The best bit, the bit that really latched its claws into me, was this sentence, in the final paragraph:
So if you are bitten by scientific or personal curiosity and can think in
probabilities, by all means enjoy the fruits of personal genomics.
You see that? You’ve got no business learning about your genome if you’re not equipped to interpret the information — and the only information you’ll get is in terms of populations and probabilities.
You may think I’m being a bit harsh. But I don’t mean that in the sense of “you must be this tall to ride”. Height isn’t something you can change — but learning about the terms used in statistics, and then being faithful when talking about statistical data, is possible.
The media report statistical information very badly; and most people probably understand it just as well. All this despite the incredible relevance that “population” thinking has on modern people. Mark Liberman draws the comparison between our inability to think in terms of aggregate risk and medians and the same inability of hunter-gatherer tribes to understand basic counting. I honestly think that’s one of the most important things that Mark Liberman has written on Language Log, certainly on the subject of public understanding of science.
Unfortunately it’s not up to me or Mark Liberman how mathematics is taught or how newspapers cover stories relating to statistics. But it’s nice to see that Steven Pinker highlighted this issue in a popular newspaper.
I accidentally came across this video yesterday about bread, and the “Real Bread Campaign”. (The video is from the Do Lectures which seems to be something to do with Howies, the clothing company. I haven’t watched any others yet.)
If you can’t be bothered watching it yourself (and honestly, I don’t particularly recommend it) he:
talks about industrial milling and bread-making
makes threatening and evidence-free comments about “enzymes” in your food
suggests you start baking your own bread
I originally thought to mention the enzyme thing more, but it’s just tediously overdone on this blog I think. Just stop using vague science words in the hope you can make things sound dangerous. All it does is diminish any potential credibility you might have had.
I much preferred the last few minutes of his talk, when the subject settled on bread-making, community, and all that rousing stuff. I do like the idea of a Real Bread Campaign as a parallel to CAMRA, the real ale campaign. They are dealing with something fundamentally different though, so I don’t know what lessons can be learned from the real ale movement.
I recently came across this rather nice post about bread making from someone who obviously likes their bread and the process of making it, and explains it all in a cheerful fashion. And finally a short video on how they made bread back in the 1980s:
