Amateur Transplants

Via the badscience forums I was reminded of this video (warning - contains references to paedophilia and the music of James Blunt):



Check out some of their others, sad and offensive joke medic songs, nice.

Web 2.0

"...this web hype was presentation layer people trying solve system level problems, all the while hiding behind a lot of New Age marketing guff"

Reading Andrew Orlowski review Nick Carr's 'Big Switch' I stumbled upon this:

"Honestly, how fucking embarrassing that some of you are gullible enough to buy into these notions that YouTube, Facebook and MySpace provide the citizenry with
a louder, more vibrant voice. Those of you supporting such ideas should be disgusted with yourselves. You've done little more than embrace another facade. Only this time it's delivered via TCP/IP instead through a pamphlet or phone bank."

Warms the cockles of my misanthropic old heart.

"...the deaths of these five women is no great loss"

Want more reasons to hate vile Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn? Then look here.

Atheists worse than terrorists?

Following on from the revelation that atheists are as bad as gays and Jews, we learn that: "

Far worse than the threat from international terrorism is the aggressive process of secularisation that has gripped our country, and most of Europe"

That's Peter Mullen, chaplain to the Stock Exchange. His article is amusingly bad tempered and contains some real gems, I'll share a few of his insights:

"it is against the law for state schools to teach the Christian faith as true...This is atheism by decree...

"...the many people who believed that homosexuality should be decriminalised never intended that this should create the proselytising Gay Liberation Movement...now the love which once dare not speak its name, shrieks at us in high camp from decorated floats along the high street.

"...the public was told by its supporters that legalised abortion would abolish the damage to women's health at the hands of the back street abortions...now 200,000 embryos every year are ripped, untimely, from the womb just because people fear that a child would interfere with their lifestyle.

"...the devout Muslim reproaches the secularised for their valueless consumerism and reckless hedonism...What do we reply? “No, thank you. We've got our own values - and if you don't like them we'll fire a salvo of condoms at you.”

"How truly Nietzsche prophesied that, after the death of God, crass utilitarianism would result in “pig philosophy”. "

I don't even understand the Muslim-condom bit, and I'm always annoyed at being accused of being a consumerist hedonist just because I'm an atheist. As the chaplain to the stock exchange you'd think he'd realise that, at least for some, Christianity appears to be (disturbingly) compatible with a selfish and greedy capitalist outlook, indeed this particular branch of evangelical Christianity is supposd to be the one part of the Anglican church that is on the rise - and one need only look over the pond to see it firmly enmeshed in a highly consumerist culture and possessed of real political power.

Conversely, I was always assured by my Gran that university would turn me communist, atheist, vegetarian, and gay - and while not all of those came true there's certainly an affinity between leftist politics and atheism that suggests that atheism is not inextricably connected to consumerism.

Finally I'm not aware of any law preventing Christianity being taught as 'true' (there should be mind you), indeed there is a legal obligation for a daily act of worship of a Christian character (a law fortunately mostly ignored) as well as schools of an explicitly Christian character. Presumably in religious education classes you aren't allowed to teach Christianity as true, just as you can't declare socialism as true in politics classes. The only area I can think he's referring to is science, where you can't teach children that creationism is true, and evolution by natural selection is false, because, you know, there's no scientific evidence for it whatever the Bible says.

"You can prove anything with facts"

Just read this in the Telegraph:

"What Miss Smith means is that crime measured by the British Crime Survey has fallen; and while many statisticians claim this to be the best measure of offending, it appears to bear little resemblance to reality."

Reminded me of this:



"I'm not interested in facts, I find they tend to cloud my judgement"

Wifi rots your brain!

The latest mobile/wifi scare story:

"Radiation from mobile phones damages sleep and causes headaches, according to a study by telephone makers."

is covered by gimpy:

"This is interesting as it implies the authors assessed a wide range of variables and possibly rushed the strongest results out in this paper. I can’t help but wonder if they fell victim to selection bias and discarded a whole series of measurements showing no difference. So this paper has enough weaknesses and oversights to throw doubt on its conclusions."

Not much to add to gimpy's analysis, if you read the paper it is clear that they measured a cornucopia of things (self-reported symptoms, cognitive symptoms, stress hormones, cognitive and memory tests, and subsequent sleep and EEG), yet they only report data for latency to deep sleep and amount of stage 4 sleep, so there were clearly a wealth of other comparisons performed, for example, latency to stage 4 sleep and amount of deep sleep, but presumably many many others which are not mentioned (and are therefore likely to all be negative). I don't suppose I need to even mention the problems of multiple comparisons. They also report a random effects logistic regression for headache (finding an increased incidence with exposure) and that 'electrosensitive' types were no better at judging exposure than normal people.

I don't want to be too hard on them, there is always a trade-off between doing lots of experiments to find things that might be affected by your experiment in order to generate hypotheses, and limiting the number of comparisons in order to maximise statistical power and falsify those hypotheses. It also sounds like this paper was derived from a conference presentation and is thus likely incomplete, preliminary, and ever so slightly dodgy (I hate to think how many 'groundbreaking' conference abstracts I've seen that have subsequently failed to be published as full peer reviewed papers, or have been published showing the opposite result).

UPDATE
The NHS Knowledge Service's "Behind the headlines" covers this story:

"This experiment has several important limitations and does not provide sufficient evidence to suggest that mobile use at night is a risk to health. The study only had 71 participants and 38 of them reported suffering from problems that they attributed to mobile use before they entered the study. The small group size and high proportion of people who reported sensitivity to mobile use are unlikely to be representative of the population."

Their emphasis differs from mine, in particular I disagree that the sample size was very small, it isn't bad for lab based studies of this kind. They don't mention the issue of multiple comparisons or cherry picking data.

I don't think their objection that this was an artificial situation is particularly relevant - sure the exposure was quite high, and sure they were trying to get to sleep in a lab, but the whole point of the experiment was to see if there is any tangible biological effect from microwave exposure. I'm also not sure that I agree that the use of allegedly radiosensitive individuals, who are thus unrepresentative, is a problem - because the experiment demonstrates that they actually can't detect when the signal is on, and because current evidence suggests that they aren't actually radiosensitive (i.e. it is a physical response to the belief that there is a microwave signal) - if it turned out that they were in fact radiosensitive then this again would demonstrate what the study sought to discover, that mobile phone signals have a detectable physiological effect.

More wikipedia

Following on from my last wikipedia post, there's some interesting stuff from the wikipedia 'reliable sources noticeboard' (because in wiki land being stated in reliable sources makes stuff true, not, you know, actually being true - see Ronnie Hazelhurst as Andrew points out in the comments to the last wiki post).

So there's a discussion as to whether well known online tech paper The Register actually counts as a reliable source, it's started by longtime wikipedia admin Phil Sandifer:

"...a willfully tabloid source, not reliable surely, right? Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:39, 7 December 2007 (UTC)"

After some to-ing and fro-ing, someone says:

"I think we are not seeing the forest for the trees. Or lets cut to the chase.
1. Was there ever a concern about the Register as a source before the current batch of Wikipedia stories? If so, please cite evidence here.
2. Disregarding the current batch of Wikipedia stories that we dislike, what is their journalistic reputation? Please cite evidence and facts.
3. Let's leave out personal stakes.
We can't exclude a source because it gave us a succession of bloody noses. Lawrence Cohen 16:14, 15 December 2007 (UTC)"

But worry not wikipediaphiles, here's another longtime admin JzG to confirm that we just can't count on media sources that embarrass wikipedia round here:

"The Register is reliable enough for techie stuff, but individual journalists pursuing some kind of muckraking "investigative" journalism with a pretty obvious failure to even attempt to look at dissenting opinions is not going to be reliable in any publication unless it has independent corroboration...a story about the Durova incident sourced entirely from an editor giving one side of the story (and a side which had been repeatedly rebutted at that...None of these shines out to me as an example of critical review, just Wikipedia-bashing. We should stick sources which draw form a wider base than one or two editors pushing a heavy barrow uphill... Guy (Help!) 17:36, 19 December 2007 (UTC)"

So that's fine then, we can't trust these internet publications anyway, can we? Oh yes, it looks like we can, because on the same page we see that someone isn't too impressed by Pajamas Media (no relation!):

"Is a collaborative blog like Pajamas Media a reliable source? // Liftarn (talk)"

Well another longtime (and high up) admin Jayjg (mate of the SlimVirgin mentioned in the last post) explains that apparently, unlike the evil extremist Register, Pajamas Media is the very epitome of fact checking and impartial journalistic values:

"In its "About Us" section it states "Besides adding to its blog network, through its portal, PJM now provides exclusive news and opinion 24/7 in text, video and podcast from correspondents in over forty countries. Pajamas Media also has its own weekly show on XM satellite radio – PJM Political – and syndicates its original material like a news agency." That seems to be more than a "collaborative blog". Jayjg (talk) 3:18, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Right-wing yes, but "extremist" - that's just hyperbole. Pajamas Media appears to be the right-wing counterpart of Common Dreams. Currently Wikipedia links to Common Dreams 1435 times. Admittedly, the majority of these are not actual references in articles, but certainly a significant number are.
Until we have a new policy that covers these kinds of sources on both sides of the political spectrum, we're going to have to be a wee bit more even-handed. Jayjg (talk) 02:52, 9 January 2008 (UTC)"

And this level of hypocrisy is just on one page I read today. Previously the rantings of Mad Mel at the Daily Mail have been promoted as a reliable source while both the BBC and Guardian have been dismissed as propaganda! (here is just the first example I came across when looking - the above uber admin Jayjg comparing the reliability of a Mad Mel blog post to the Guardian - any Israeli-Palestinian article is a good place to look for this sort of thing, and I've just found this article, which is an absolute hoot).

The problem is less the hypocritical flouting of their own, usually inflexible, rules by wikipedia true believers just because some news source is critical of wikipedia. Rather it is just how easily these bureaucratic rules can simply be bypassed by the insiders of the wikipedia community. Then all the pretentions of WP:NOR, WP:RS, and WP:V become a smoke screen to allow the partisan slanting of supposedly objective and encyclopaedic articles.

Amusingly the Wikipedia Review people picked up on my last post and were worried at my dig at their SlimVirgin obsession - I should probably reassure them that, while they are indeed completely obsessed by the woman, my perusing of wikipedia talk pages, and indeed personal experience, confirms that she is indeed the preeminent master of all the 'wikilawyering' and assorted dodgy techniques I'm talking about.