PHP 4 seemed relatively easy to get to grips with after an initial hair-tearing out period. I have now been told that PHP 5 is a step toward making it as unpleasant to use as any Visual Studio style langauage. That is, it has an object model that you have to stick to and variables have to declared properly and so on….

I thought the value of php was due to the way that any half-arsed neophyte could get a dynamic website running without having to worry about the demonic “object classes” and so on.

Is it true that standard programming logic has replaced the pleasantly ad hoc nature of php4 coding? If so, how back-compatible is it? Can I continue writing illogical but fast php code or do I have to draw a dozen class diagrams before I start and decide the names and types of any variable I might choose to create before I start?

On the plus side is it true that there is a short php5 alternative to the dreaded dbConnector stuff? Is it really easy to set up?

I want to know if it’s worth struggling with the new version in the hope it will have advantages, in the face of the fact that installing and configuring the thing is always the worst bit.

I must confess to having my online roots in an older wolrd (FTP/NNTP etc) so, for me,  using images in webpages is always a bit of an arcane art.

Often “usability” gurus will espouse how important it is for web pages to have text and very few people would argue against content being king. If you have ever visited a site where they use images to display blocks of text you will know exactly what I mean (I blame MS Publisher myself).

The end result of all this, is a tendency for me to create elegant websites, with really nice layouts etc – but which are totally devoid of images. I am sure it is great for people using screen readers or lynx but what about every one else on the web. Have I gone too far in the direction of accessibility?

I have tried looking at my own browsing habits, and I notice I have a tendency to prefer sites with fewer images and less flashy content. Is this indicative of other people’s habits or is it simply a quirk of mine? Does a lack of images on a site (all other things being equal) mean the site looks boring? Should I start getting more images on sites? Are they important?

Are we turning into “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”? (Don’t answer that) There are way too many rants as compared to raves.

So this is a rave about D and D online. It will be out in March sometime and it is in beta now. To be frank, I have only back-seat driven it but it seems really good so far. It’s shaping up to be what World of Warcraft promised – but failed – to become. That is, it seems to involve more than just endless killing of endless monsters in the same way. It also doesn’t make you spend half the game trying to find your way back to be reborn.

Some AD&D experinece will help but isn’t necessary. The player interaction can be as interesting as playing AD&D for real. (Except you don’t get to roll d20s but you don’t have to do endless calculations either.) It is a faithful adaptation of the game, with the human element but added good graphics. There are lots of wierd moves that various characters can do.

I think the Ohio state link mentioned below (http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5263.html) is a good example of legitimate science serving as “bad science”. The words “Research shows that a positive self-concept is more important to academic success than a high IQ score” are pure bad science. Clearly, a child who respects him or herself and is confident of his or her abiliity is likely to do better in life than one plagued by nervousness and self-loathing. However, encouraging children to become confident is an activity that fits into the moral category of making your children as happy as you can.

I refuse to belive there is any evidence that it will make them do better at school. Kids who are more confident in school are likely to have experieneced success at acdemic things and to come from a background that encourages academic success and therefore confidence. So academically successful kids are already acdemically confident . Just as people who are good at sports are likely to be more confident on the pitch. Confidence probably wouldn’t improve your goal-scoring average and I suspect that few people who can’t score goals would do better if they had more confidence.

Whose “research” is this? Isn’t a high IQ score already a piece of bad science which has been written into our educational polices? At least it’s measurable. There is no baseline indicator of confidence. Surely it varies enormously throughout the day, according to the situation one is in.

Anyone who has ever filled in one of those self-defining questionnaires will know that a respondent’s answers to any question are never true or consistent.

I also read the New Scientist report but don’t have it to hand. It claimed low self-esteem was not usually a factor in creating bullies, as was widely assumed. The report argued that bullies tended to be pretty full of self-esteem. It was their less fortunate victims whose self-esteem went down the tubes. Sorry, I can’t find the reference either but the title was something along the lines of “Raising self-esteem no panacea for bullies”

Bad Science is really good at pointing out the nonsense in the unsupported dietary and medical advice that seems to be everywhere in the media now. There seems to be a huge market for any theory that mixes a few bits of knowledge or insight with a lot of prescriptive nonsense to create a bizarre new set of quasi-medical instructions. The Guardian’s own alternative health column is one of the worst offenders, sadly.

 I’d also like to see some discussion of  actual “scientist-produced” bad science. A fair number of experiments reported in the popular science press seem pretty dubious ethically and logically. I will collect some examples and post here.

 

Reading the recent post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/02/16/presenting-both-sides/) reminded me of a guy on tv who was spouting nonsense this morning.

One of the guests on the “Wright Stuff” on Channel 5 this morning (I was off work so had nothing better to watch) was talking about confidence.

As part of his raison d’être he claimed that studies showed children with high self esteem / self confidence did better academically and as a result of this, raising a childs self confidence will impove his or her academic performance. Now, if you find no problem with this then I suspect you really should stop reading now. (note, this is something often repeated – http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5263.html for example)
Before I go on, I am not trying to say people shouldnt raise children’s self confidence or that having a high self confidence is a bad thing. I am also not (at the moment) trying to disparage studies which use blatantly self-assessed values (like “happiness,” “self-confidence,” etc.)

My issue revolves almost totally around the causal effects here.

The man (never bothered to find out who he was) has assumed that A causes B and therefore doing more of A will mean more of B. In reality there is (based on his evidence) no way of knowing that.

Self confidence and self esteem are products of a persons sucess. If you are good at something, and praised for it, there is the tendency to become confident about doing it. Logic screams out that children who are academically sucessfull will be more self confident when questioned (as the questions are in an academic context and relate to academic type work) which in effect implies A does not cause B but is caused by B. The claims that improving a childs self confidence will mean they “do better in life” does not really hold true based on the evidence. If anything, improving self confidence without basing this on actual sucess is more likely to create a situation where the person will fall down spectacularly.

Sadly I no longer have the back issue and cant find it on the online search, but New Scientist did an article on this last year (or 2004) detailing research that had in fact identified improved self confidence was not a causal agent for sucess, and more often lead to bulying and arrogance.

CSS is brilliant in concept. So why is it almost impossible to apply in any rational fashion?

Antiquated html table tags might be a pain to create, but once you had drawn a table, you know where things would turn up. CSS positioning can be an umitigated nightmare.

And given that CSS is supposed to be cross-browser- why does the toughest bit to code in one browser  – the positioning – turn out to be the one bit that’s not?

There seems an almost unwritten law in newspapers and magazines where journalists feel compelled to present what they see as “both sides” of the argument.

Now, at first glance it seems like this is a “reasonable” approach to take but is this always the case? Personally I think not, and it is the warped idea that this has to be done which has allowed real crackpot ideas like ID to get a foothold.

It is very easy to pass scorn on the “mainstream” press for this fallacy, but science journals (which really should know better) can be just as guilty. In todays New Scientist magazine, in the In Brief section there is an article entitled “Melatonin Myth?” [New Scientist, 18 feb 2006, p 21] – which is available online from http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg18925394.900 – and in this it explains that Nini Buscemi (et al) from the University of Alberty carried out a review on the use of Melatonin to fight jet lag. Their research implied that there was “no evidence the hormone helps people get to sleep sooner” and “at best it added 10 mins of extra sleep for every 8 hours in bed.”

In the sprit of presenting both sides, New Scientist helpfully adds in this reply from the “Surrey Sleep Research Centre” (Guildford, UK) “Dont knock it.” Fantastic. What an excellent refute of the Buscemi study. The reply is from “Jo Arent” (not listed on the SSRC staff list so I cant correctly attribute her scientific credentials) and she says “some studies are negative because subjects were not instructed to take melatonin at the correct time.”

Now call me old fashioned, and to be honest this is completely without seeing the studies she is talking about so I may well be wrong, but this sounds suspiciously like the argument Homeopaths use to justify thier witchcraft.

I get the impression, that as western society works hard to undo the enlightenment we suffer from journalists who feel the need to appear balanced (at times, the New Scientist staff are happy to present weak causal links elsewhere without retort) which in turn creates confusion and mistrust within the general public.

It is this hotbed of chaos which has allowed ID (and homeopathy, “alternative medicine” fools and cranks like Gillian McKeith) to gain a foothold in society. People are confused about science and as more nutjobs get on the news, the more confused people become. It is shocking.

Partly “science” itself is to blame. What once was fairly simple (basic science and “human scale” physics is straightforward enough for most people) but as we get into the realms of DNA, Quantum Mechanics etc., it seems people are feeling left behind. As this happens we create an environment where the lunatic can seem as reasonable as the next man.

This is not a Good Thingâ„¢.

See the BBC website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4714578.stm the gist of which is that, once gain, the government have overturned the Lords on an issue of civil liberties. To quote the BBC:

MPs reverse a Lords defeat for the government and insist there should be a new ban on “glorifying” terrorism.

Now a law against glorifying terrorism is so bizarre that I wonder how the courts can ever interpret it. The first problem is the old “terrorist” or “freedom fighter” arguement, with the terrorist defined by the winning side. Then there is glorifying – does this mean claiming that terrorist acts are glorious? You would think it would be easy to get round this one, even for the most enthusiastic terrorist, through clever use of language.

This sort of thing is definitely an own goal of the stupidest kind. Western society’s prime value is in its tradition of dissent and debate and the capacity to say unpopular things. This has allowed the development of science and technology, as people feel free to innovate and challenge. It is meant to have produced mature political systemswher we can tolerate other people’s opinions and challenge them. So how is it we can’t trust our own free speech traditions any more.

There are adequate laws in existence already against actual actions and against inciting people to commit violent crimes. So why do we need a meaningless new law that just shows weakness and further alienates those of us who believed that rationalitya nd freedom were worth defending.

As I am sure we are all aware, the internet is “getting old” now and it seems like its time to move on.

I remember when I first tried to design a website, all you needed to know was plain old HTML with a few netscape extras for the design. As time progressed (and MS become “internet-interested”) the IE extensions were added and pretty much every site on the web had a “best viewed with…” logo or a browser detection routine. Then, towards the end of the last century all manner of “new” things were developed. PHP became mainstream, java was everywhere and things that had previously only been done by arcane perl scripts were almost the required standard on web pages. Continue reading →

Very interesting PDF from two people at Cornel university, titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”

You can download the PDF from http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

Well, as always Dr Ben Goldacre continues his column in a witty and informative manner. You can find his column in print every Saturday in the Guardian newspaper but the website often has more information and is updated more often (somewhat irregular intervals though so you have to keep checking).

If you havent been there for a while there may be some new areas – for example the forum which at my last visit (1232hrs today) was full of “interesting” lines of debate and more than the requisite amount of cranks.

For those fighting the eternal crusade against the madness of “alternative medicine” there is a good article at http://www.badscience.net/?p=211

For those of you who are interested, the Linux convert has fought its way into the 21st century and now boasts an XML (RSS) feed for you to extract the information and any new articles into your own scripts or feedreaders.

The feed is available at http://linux.sci-tech.co.uk/rss/linuxconvert.xml and follows the RSS 2.0 specification. It is realeased under a relaxed creative commons licence and you may use the information as you wish – although you must attribute the original source.

If you do come up with any cool applications let us know and we can showcase them here.

Out of curiousity can you let me know what your prefered method for getting information from blogs and the like is?

Do you visit the blog pages themselves (or use technorati et al) or do you prefer something like Atom / Feedreader to extract the XML?

Well, if you cant guess this is something that has annoyed me.

http://www.no2id.net/

Everyone make your opinions known.

If you support ID cards then can you explain why to me please? Despite my strong opinions on the matter, I realise one freedom which we should be trying to defend is peoples freedom to speak so I am willing to listen to any rational discussion on the matter.

If you can explain to me why or how ID cards are good for people in the UK and dont destroy some of our basic “rights” then PLEASE do so!

(edited to add)

I promise there will be no flame wars as a result of any comments on this subject.