Tag Archives: Bad-Science

Square-eyes

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Watching over two hours a day of television is damaging to kids, according to the BBC, unselfishly reporting a study that clearly contravenes its own interests. This takes up a theme from past articles about stopping kids watching TV, on the grounds of behavioural problems, obesity or whatever is the current concern about kids and television.

Off the top of my head, I have a few questions about the evidence for all this.

  • Does “watching tv” mean sitting in rapt attention or having it on in the background, as so many of us do?
  • What are the mechanisms supposed to be that connect the square box and all these aspects of young humanity? Radiation? Mental torpidity? Engagement in popular culture? Exposure to advertising?
  • What type of tv? Are toddlers equally affected by watching CBBC or Men and Motors?
    Does the content make a difference? I’m prepared to argue that hours of watching reality tv and soaps would blunt the brain capacity of Einstein, but that’s just my bigotry. What about watching non-stop thought-provoking and educational programmes?
  • What about class effects? Middle-class kids are generally less likely to watch lots of tv. They are also less likely to be judged as having behavioural problems or be obese. Why single out tv as the crucial lifestyle difference, rather than, for example, having a decent family income, better access to other activities, less depression in the parents or any one of a huge range of distinctions?
  • Why two hours? Think of a number…..

My main quibble with the evidence is that it comes from people’s reports. When it comes to characterizing one’s parenting, no one wants to see themselves as being a “bad parent.” So, if they have soaked up any of the current standards in parenting, (i.e if they have any contact with other humans), they will claim to be keeping to them.

Parents who see themselves as bringing up their kids responsibly (who are probably those parents whose kids are least likely to fall on the wrong side of all the behavioural bars) are likely to say their kids watch a moderate apparently-ordered amount of tv. When these people are responding to survey questions, 2 hours sounds about right. They aren’t not exposing their kids willy-nilly to trash culture nor eccentrically cutting them off from the mainstream. This doesn’t mean it’s true.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hours of tv that children of self-identified responsible parents see (according to surveys…) can tell you what are the current social values for responsible tv watching. This is not the same as meaning x hours are healthy and >x hours are bad.

Do you know how much tv you watch? I have no idea. I can’t even define “watching” let alone count the hours.

GI food nonsense

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Sorry. Move to another post if you expect this to be about absurdities that the US military feeds its troops.

The BBC reports that that “High GI foods are associated with liver disease”

Boston-based researchers, writing in the journal Obesity, found mice fed starchy foods developed the disease

With an appropriately slim – nay starved – knowledge of food science, I assume that “starchy” means that carbohydrate-based foods are responsible. But a table on the BBC page shows this list of BAD “starchy” and GOOD, presumably “non-starchy” foods:

High GI foods:
Mashed potato
White bread
Chips
Some breakfast cereals (eg Cornflakes, Rice Krispies, Coco Pops)
Steamed white rice
Moderate GI foods:
Muesli (non-toasted)
Boiled potatoes
Pitta bread
Basmati rice
Honey
Wholemeal bread
Low GI foods:
Roasted salted peanuts
Rye and granary bread
Whole and skimmed milk
Spaghetti
Boiled carrots
Baked beans

These foods are nearly all carbs, apart from milk, peanuts and (possibly) beans. So what distinguishes the groupings and how could you tell where other carbs would fit into the groups? After all, if this is all true, and you want to avoid liver disease, especially for your kids, (it posits fatty liver disease as a serious future danger for today’s kids) you need to know the difference.

But “mashed” and “boiled” potatoes are in separate groups? Has the BBC never cooked food? It has enough food programmes and celeb chefs on its staff. Well let me explain.

Mashed potatoes are boiled potatoes. Mashed up. A bit like the effect of chewing up boiled potatoes. I think you could reasonably assume that a chewed portion of mashed potatoes and a chewed portion of boiled potatoes hit your stomach in the exact same condition. Chips (“French fries” to non-Brits) are slightly different, given the addition of fat, but the carb part of a chip is still pretty much what you’d get if you boiled a potato.

Steamed white rice is different from Basmati white rice? Why? Because it’s less tasty? Because it’s cheaper? Does the steaming make a difference?

Wheat breads and spaghetti are made from the same natural product. Unsurprisingly, that’s wheat. Which is mainly starch, whether or not you take the bran out. It’s certainly just the same starch if you shape it into a standard loaf or pitta shape. It even remains wheat if you throw in a few bits of grit from other grains (granary) or add a bit of semolina (spaghetti).

I can accept that the body may respond to wholemeal flour differently than to refined flour. Wholemal flour has more nutrients and roughage. However, it’s not a completely different substance. It may indeed be the case that semolina and bran and wheatgerm or chunks of other grains change the way that the body absorbs starch, possibly by slowing the rate of absorption. Or maybe by making you eat fewer carbs because you feel full with less carbs in your stomach.

So far, this would suggest that avoiding liver disease means eating fewer carbs and/or eating carb foods closer to their natural condition. These suggestions may or may not be true, but they are at least reasonable and don’t depend on a spurious carb classification.

The GI index is an odd way to categorise foods, which seems to be gaining ever more authority. I looked at these groups and could think of several alternative ways to categorise them. E.g.

Social/cultural: Group one is the carbohydrate food of the urban western poor. Group two contains the diet fillers more likely to be eaten by the better-off. (Just ignore the boiled potatoes nonsense.) Hmm, let me think. Does social class have anything to do with health?

Colour: Group one is mainly white or false-coloured (coco pops). Group 2 is generally a bit darker. Group 3 has some brightly coloured foods, if you ignore milk.

Number of vowels in their names: Gave up there, sorry. I was too idle to count them all. Feel free to take up the slack.

In any case, there’s another question hanging around. Group 2 contains muesli (non-toasted) Would toasting muesli push it up or down the food group chain?

Pink-eye

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Delighted to see Bad Science has soundly rubbished the “girls like pink, boys like blue” nonsense that has been in the media this week.

Some neuroscience research involving a couple of hundred subjects showed that female colour preferences were slightly to the redder end of the spectrum. From which the media oddly extrapolated that this proved women preferred pink for evolutionary reasons relating to hunting and gathering skills.

Ben Goldacre, a Zoe Williams piece in the Guardian and some commenters on Bad Science have all done a great job of pointing out the flaws in this.

Most tellingly, Goldacre pointed out that colour-gender identification changes according to the cultural context. E.g. A century ago, pink was considered most suitable for boys and blue was the girly colour. In Chinese culture, where red is greatly valued, both sexes prefer reddish colours. And so on.

From birth, we are assailed by cues telling us that pink means “feminity” and blue means “masculinity”. Go to any toy store. A pink mist will rise up before your eyes when you get near the girls’ toys. Amazing that any girls can resist a general preference for pink over blue.

You could almost argue that the fact that the colour preference differences were so tiny – given the social pressure to identify pink as girly – that girls really may have an evolutionary aversion to pink…..

The media’s usual pop science distortions fall into a predictable pattern when research relates to gender. Any statistical difference between men and women that fits current prejudices is exaggerated, generalised to all men and women, then treated as indicative of innate biological difference.

Surpise, surprise, they all tend to support a view of women exemplified by a more docile version of Paris Hilton. Argh.

Hollow holistics

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People who feel they need more attention and who express this feeling through medical symptoms will usually feel better after getting some attention.

(This is a theory based on anecdotal evidence but it could easily be tested)

Does this mean that denying the reality and giving them what they want is a good thing? Maybe adding to the world’s sum of myths that people forget are metaphors doesn’t matter. Except for the danger of suckering in the ill?

The mind is involved in many diseases, so you can’t rule out the effectiveness of the placebo effect, whether it’s sparked by consuming a well-marketed drug or by a set of rituals. The more incomprehensible the ritual, the better it seems to work. White coats and a prescription pad reassure some of us. A claim to focus mystical energies work on others. However, just because a fair bit of modern medicine is woo doesn’t make complete tosh is a reasonable alternative.

Here’s one of the most comprehensible bits of a thread from a homeopathy forum:

Scientific Validity of Homeopathy:– Dynamic effects from higher potencies are well observed and experianced by homeopathic community but not by scientific community, consitently in DBPC studies. Furthur science of homeopathic effects and presence of raw remedies substances in higher potencies remained unmeasurable, a truth, miss or weakness as per their current measurable technology of science. As such, homeopathic effects are interpreted as placebo effect by them and its legal and moral validity/existance may be based on “posing no harm”. But still ,some basis of “time lapse” in giving the needed treatments can pop up anytime in view of inconsistency in outcome, non-presence of raw remedy substance, placebo effects, least side effects etc.

Can’t make head nor tail of that? Homeopathy is at the almost-credible end of the alternative therapy chain. Go down the ladder a bit and homeopathy seems almost to make sense, in comparison.

Kinesiology? Sounds impressively scientific. What is it then? Buggared if I know after looking at a few websites. For instance, the Health Kinesiology definitions page says that:

Common forms of treatment include the use of magnets, homeopathic remedies, flower essences, or even a particular thought. ….In a single session, the therapist may identify allergies, rectify nutritional imbalances, deal with phobias and psychological stress, rebalance chakras and start the process of detoxifying the body from heavy metals, vaccinations, drugs etc.

So, it can treat everything by doing whatever the “therapist” feels like, then?

Crystal healing? (Do crystals really get sick?)

.. not part of standard medical theory, but it is included in a broader view of crystal power that says crystals, which are minerals with a periodic atomic structure, possess metaphysical abilities.
Crystal healers say that it works because everything is energy and vibrates at various frequencies and that crystals work via these vibrations. Every living thing has a vibrational energy system, which includes chakras, subtle bodies and meridians. By using the appropriate crystals one can allegedly retune an energy system or rebalance a body’s energies, thus improving well-being.

Reiki? (In the absence of a pseudoscientific name, an implied reference to the inscrutable powers of the east will have to serve the purpose.)

There is no need to remove any clothing as Reiki will pass through anything, even plaster casts. The practitioner gently places their hands non-intrusively in a sequence of positions which cover the whole body. The whole person is treated rather than specific symptoms. …..
It is possible to heal at any level of being: physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Acute injuries can be helped to heal very quickly but more chronic illness takes longer. In some cases such as terminal illness, there is not enough time for the progress of the disease to be reversed….. The practitioner is a channel which the energy is drawn through by the need or imbalance in the recipient.

Sorry, I know this is getting boring. Treating the whole patient, rebalancing energies .. But, I am going somewhere with this. As it seems, incredibly, that your tax pounds are.

A website called NHS Directory of Complementary and Alternative Practitioners says that it is

compiled and managed only for use by NHS healthcare professionals by the NHS Trusts Association, the leading professional association for primary care in the UK

It purports to be a guide for NHS Trust staff so they can find alternative practitioners when they want to refer patients to them.

There are a few things in its list of therapies that don’t seem exceptionable (like counselling) but most of them are complete and utter nonsense.

Despite my fervent hope that this is just a phishing site, i am afraid that it’s real.

Good science

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Today’s excellent Bad Science discusses some reasons for why drug trials remain completely in the hands of Big Pharma. Ben Goldacre mentions the Cochrane Collaboration as an alternative.

If we ever had a scientist in charge of health, instead of tinkering with payments to big pharma, they would do one simple thing: move hell and high water to collect and collate the best and cheapest evidence on healthcare. First you would give huge amounts of money to the Cochrane Collaboration, which collects and collates data independently on all healthcare interventions (and is quietly one of the most subversive organisations ever to be created, because it blows the lid on false commercial claims

Wow. This is an amazing resource. They provide free “Plain Language” abstracts and summaries of the research. I tried a few. Go to the reviews page and choose a topic from the drop down list.

I was a bit constrained by having to pick things that I could understand the arguments about. Depression, anxiety and neurosis seemed a fair start, so I chose that. Nice comprehensible summary.

Active placebos versus antidepressants for depression
Tricyclic antidepressants are only slightly better than active placebos.
This review examined trials which compared antidepressants with ‘active’ placebos, that is placebos containing active substances which mimic side effects of antidepressants. Small differences were found in favour of antidepressants in terms of improvements in mood. This suggests that the effects of antidepressants may generally be overestimated and their placebo effects may be underestimated.

Drugs and alcohol?

Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programmes for alcohol dependence
…The available experimental studies did not demonstrate the effectiveness of AA or other 12-step approaches in reducing alcohol use and achieving abstinence compared with other treatments, but there were some limitations with these studies.

Alternative AIDs treatments?

Herbal medicines for treating HIV infection and AIDS?
There is no compelling evidence to support the use of the herbal medicines identified in this review for treatment of HIV infection and AIDS.

(Although another link says exercise can be beneficial)

What an amazing resource. A busy healthcare worker can access the results of research from around the world in a few mouse clicks. A nosy member of the public, e.g. me, can find a better source of medical information than the daily scare stories/new miracle cures stories. It’s one of those things that makes you realise what the Internet can achieve.

Teaching Bad Science

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The levels at which bad science has penetrated our society are breath taking. Even teachers, who you would hope were able to teach the principles of good science to our kids, are falling foul of the woo and nonsense. Almost makes you despair for the human race.

Today, the BBC have reported that the Professional Association of Teachers are…

seeking an inquiry into safety concerns surrounding new wireless technology.

Shockingly, there have already been studies, inquiries and the like. Is the PAT unable to read the studies? Were there no science teachers available to explain the nature of scientific research? The mind truly boggles.

The BBC mention that the former Education Secretary pointed out the Health Protection Agency guidance was that there is no threat. Like all good woo-ist scaremongers, the PAT General Secretary replied with:

Mr Parkin said: “There is a view out there that you have no right to express concerns on such issues and that if you do, you are scaremongering or promoting so-called bad science.”

But he said that because some scientists were concerned about the risks, an inquiry was necessary.

Blimey – he may not know any science, but he is certainly an expert in woo, nonsense and debating skills.

Lots of people will start a sentence saying “I dont want to cause offence” then say something very offensive, “I dont mean to be rude” then say something rude and so on. Here Mr Parkin has started off saying “I dont want to scare monger with bad science” then scaremongered with bad science.

The first sentence is simply not true. People always have the “right” to be concerned about issues. Just because they are concerned does not mean it is not scaremongering or it is not bad science. Mr Parkin can express all the concerns in the world for all I care. For example, there is greater reason to worry about teachers abusing their pupils than the dangers of WiFi. Which concern should get priority?

As for the second sentence. Well… Because “some” scientists are concerned is not justification. This just shows Mr Parkin does not understand science. I could probably search through journals and find scientists concern about any topic, subject or technology he chose to mention. I am sure Mr Parkin is happy for children to be driven to schools – yet some scientists are concerned this is bad for their health. Some scientists are concerned that mixed sex schools inhibit children’s developments, conversely some scientists think the opposite.

Research has been carried out on the dangers of WiFi. It is valid research and presents little evidence of any risks for children. If future research shows differently, then the situation can be revised. Forming an inquiry every single time “some” scientists had a concern over things would be ludicrous in the extreme. If they are so concerned, the PAT can fund the necessary research… Unless they just want the government to reduce the education budget to carry out pointless inquiries…

This wonderful line from Mr Parkin really messed with my mind:

I have heard and read enough to make me concerned and I had been made aware of an accumulation of evidence which suggests that the non-thermal, pulsing effects of electromagnetic radiation could have a damaging effect upon the developing nervous systems of children.

The frequently-quoted current safety limits in operation refer to the thermal effects of such radiation and not the non-thermal effects.

Blimey.

Oddly, I am not sure if this is a result of the BBC’s editing or the way things were talked about at the conference, but it seems like the dangers from WiFi have been conflated with the risk of asbestos… Now that would be bad science.

[tags]Science, Bad Science, Scare, Woo, Nonsense, Teachers, School,Education,Health, Wifi, Electromagnetism, EM, Radiation, Asbestos[/tags]

Mad scientists

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Blimey Britain leads Europe in something! Don’t start waving the flags yet though, it’s the number of animal experiments. Peter Tatchell’s Comment is Free points out that animal experiments are at an ll-time high.
The Home Office website provides some details here.

Mice, rats and other rodents were used in the majority of procedures; eighty-three percent of the total. Most of the remaining procedures used fish (9%), and birds (4%).

Dogs, cats, horses and non-human primates, afforded special protection by the Act, were collectively used in less than one percent of all procedures.

The number of procedures using non-human primates was 4,200 down by 450 (10%) from 2005, mainly due to a decrease in old-world primates. The number of animals used was 3,108.
…
Genetically modified animals were used in 1.04 million regulated procedures representing thirty-four percent of all procedures for 2006, compared with thirty-three percent in 2005 and eight percent in 1995. The vast majority (95%) of these procedures used rodents, most of the remainder were fish and amphibians.

Around thirty-eight percent of all procedures used some form of anaesthesia to alleviate the severity of the interventions. For many of the remaining procedures the use of anaesthesia would have potentially increased the adverse effects of the procedure.

Apparently these procedures are now increasing and will increase further with ever greater demand for GM beings.

One of the people who framed the animal experimentation legislation has very severe doubts about its operation.

Prof Balls said he was dismayed that progress in science had not produced more alternatives to using animals in research. “As a scientist I’m entitled to believe in modern technology to deal with these problems, but I’m disappointed that more effort hasn’t been put into bringing the numbers down,” he said

There are some issues that leap out as you read the bald statistics, such as,

  • if this is just ‘science’, how it is it that the cute pet factor seems to influence the choice of animals? Shouldn’t it be the similarity to human biology that determines their sacrificial value?
  • Is a mouse genetically modified to have disease x really very much like a human being who has developed that disease?
  • What can fish and amphibian experiments tell us about human biology? They might indicate levels of river toxicity.
  • 72% were conducted without anaesthetic, then….

I’m far from absolutist on this. If the sacrifice of some poor mammal can spare great human suffering, then I’d have to go for saving my own species.

All the same, it’s well nigh impossible to skim through a few issues of any pop science magazine without finding large numbers of experiments that are so morally dubious and seemingly pointless that you wonder what ethics committees are for.

The naive observer, i.e. me, would assume that you couldn’t torture animals unless human life hung in the balance and there was literally no alternative way to get the information. These should surely be the mininum requirements.

There has just been a ruling on a judicial review sought by the British Unnion for the Abolition of Vivisection . A High Court judge ruled that the government acted unlawfully in allowing some experiments on primates. Astonishingly, cutting the top of a primate’s head to induce a stroke was seen by the government as causing ‘moderate’, rather than ‘severe’, suffering. The mind boggles at a definition of “severe”.

In any case, I didn’t realise there was a problem with strokes in people who have had the tops of their heads cut off. Wow. that must affect approximately, erm, 0% of the population.

Phone Masts Not Harmful

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In today’s Guardian newspaper (and online and here) there is an article explaining how the fears and worries of the “electrosensitive” woo-mongers is unfounded.

Sadly, the Guardian’s “news” editors have chosen to go with the headline:

Research fails to detect short-term harm from mobile phone masts

Now, it may just be my pedantry, but surely that strongly implies there is a short term harm and the researchers simply failed to detect it? The second link above is better and carries the tag line:

Yet another study shows no link between mobile phone radiation and ill health

Which pretty much captures the repetitiveness of this as a research result. The overwhelming weight of science shows there is no evidence of any short term harmful effect from communications masts and the only proven long term risk is from the most popular source of electromagnetic energy itself – the Sun.

In a nutshell, this seems like a well designed study which, like all the others, has resulted in no evidence that people who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation actually are – this is even something I have mentioned in the past. Repeated tests have shown that if you get an “electrosenstive” and tell them there is a transmitter near by, they evince the effects they claim are caused by “EM.” If they dont know the transmitter is near by, they don’t have the effects. In my unsympathetic, un-medical opinion this is pretty good proof it is all in their mind – for various reasons they are completely making it up. Part of me concedes the symptoms may be real, but it is only a small part of me. Either way, targeting phone masts as the culprit is doing no one any favours. As the Guardian comment on the topic finishes:

What sufferers experience is real and in many cases very unpleasant. But in the light of this evidence we can be pretty certain that phone masts do not cause short term health problems for the vast majority of people. Electrosensitive support groups should recognise this and begin to look harder for other causes of the condition.

Well said. Stop fighting a bogeyman and find the real cause – if there are real symptoms.

As always, there are those who are so wedded to a concept that no matter how much evidence to the contrary is presented, they will refuse to accept it. Sounds a bit religious to me, but never mind. The wonderfully named “Mast Sanity” website is a cited opponent of the recent study, and shows many of the traits you would normally associate with creationists trying to debunk evolution.

Unsurprisingly, Mast Sanity is a screaming example of bad science and a place where spurious arguments are used to dispel the results of the most recent study — I assume similar tactics were used on older studies, I didn’t look into the site that much, what I did read seemed like a check list of logical fallacies and debate-scoring tactics rather than anything reasoned. Some examples include:

We question why psychologrists are doing this research at all since physical changes to the skin and heart rates have been found in other research. Presumably the psychologists ‘believe’ this is all in the mind and this is what they set out to ‘prove’.

Yeah, and when you read the research notes it shows the psychologists set out to measure the physical responses. This smacks of a combination of appeal to ridicule and the laypersons perception that educational disciplines exist in complete isolation of each other. If the researchers had set out to prove the Electrosensitivity was in the mind, this would be obvious from the experimental design, not from what discipline the people who run the experiment come from.

Their conclusion was made possible by eliminating 12 of the most sensitive electrosentive volunteers who had become too ill to continue the study. Even a child can see that by eliminating 12 of the original 56 electrosensitive volunteers – over 20% of the group – that the study integrity has been completely breached.

Wow. First off the 12 people withdrew themselves, they were not eliminated to make the experiment possible. If the other 44 “electrosensitives” were actually electro sensitive, then what would the loss of those 12 change? As for the great “even a child” comment — well really. I have not met many children who can do the statistical analysis required to account for the changed sample sizes, but most would probably make a random assumption as to the status of the experiment. Does that mean they would be correct? Critically, the “study integrity” has certainly not been completely breached, it just gives a larger error bar to the findings.

There is more bad statistics with this bit of meandering nonsense:

One participant in the study questions Professor Fox’s assertion that only four people got all six test correct. He said “I got five [out of six] as during the first three five minute tests on session one, I stated ‘not sure’ after the first five minutes, which was marked as NO, but on session two, three and four I got it 100% right and actually identified the type of signal, so are the Essex [study] numbers meaningful?“

I will confess to not really understanding what this is trying to say. One person thinks that more (or less) than four people got all six tests “correct” because he got five out of six in one of them. Blimey. The whole experiment must be flawed then… I would really appreciate it if someone could explain what the above means to me — I must be having a bad understanding day today. Talking about a previous study, quoted by the BBC, Mast Sanity continues:

… We don’t think Dr. Rubin [author of previous study] is qualified to comment on the Essex study as he didn’t even use a shielded room for his own experiments at King’s College and the so called ‘sham’ (zero) exposure was not a zero signal as people have been led to believe.

What makes me laugh about this, is the “pro-sensitives” leap on the shielding issue, and largely it is a cornerstone of their defence against the real science. In a nutshell, it explains why the “sensitives” report effects when no mast is transmitting, but they are led to believe it is. The problem with this is that when the “sensitives” believe the mast is off, they report no symptoms. Is the shielding belief-powered?

With no signs of irony whatsoever, Mast Sanity finishes its tirade with this wonderful bit of woo-spin:

Mast Sanity Spokesperson Yasmin Skelt says “All in all the Media release of this study has been an exercise in spin and propaganda and a poor one for science.”

“It is the long term health effects where people are forced to live near real Mobile Phone Masts that count and this study in no way covers those.“

Great isn’t it? They refer to themselves in the third person and claim the science is spin and their spin is science. New Labour must love the world they have created.

The study was solid science. It certainly was not a perfect experiment, but few ever are. The conclusions drawn are sound and the reasoning is valid. The Woo-Monger reactions have been an exercise in spin and bad-logic, rarely coming close enough to science to be thought of as bad science. The study was very upfront — as have been the media reports — that this didn’t look at long term effects. Sadly, spinning the goal posts to a new location does not invalidate the research — not that the woo crowd have ever worried about that.

Asking if there are long term health effects is a good question, and an area where the research is sketchier which results in less certainty over the answers. That said, the common cries of the “electrosensitives” is that they suffer short term effects (which is why people buy “shielded curtains” and the like) and on this, it is quite probable that they are wrong. Redefining the criteria each time one is falsified is typical of another group who hold to nonsensical beliefs in the face of all evidence. Will Electrosensitivity become the Woo of the Gaps?

[tags]Media, News, EM,Woo, Science, Bad Science, Statistics, Bad Statistics, Electromagnetism, Guardian, Electrosensitivity, Nonsense, Society, Belief, Research, Experiment, Evidence, Logical Fallacy, Spin[/tags]

Fundamentalist Newton?

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The Boston Globe has an article purporting to show that Newton believed in Intelligent design so he couldn’t possibly get a decent post in a modern university.

They reach this conclusion via a mode of rhetoric that makes you want to chew your own arm off. It’s like one of those long drawn out jokes in which the punchline is supposed to come as shock.

That is, they characterise the beliefs of an unknown professor in a succession of paragraphs that are supposed to make you think he’s a real extremist fundamentalist.

Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely “intelligent design” but out-and-out divine creation.

Of course, Dawkins’s name gets drawn in, Dawkins somehow having the ultimate say over all academic appointments in the fundy worldview. Continue reading →

Bad Social Science from Ben Goldacre

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This blog is a great fan of “Bad Science”. But this week, Ben Goldacre has pretty well gone out of his depth when he dipped his toes in the murky pool of social science research.

He applauds what he believes to be the first randomised controlled trial in social research. So far so good. An excellent idea to apply scientific methods to social sciences…. He makes some reasonable specific points but, overall, he is completely missing the point.

For instance, he suggests there should have been randomised trials for Drug Treatment Orders as alternatives to prison, with prisoners allocated at random to one or the other. In this specific case, he shows a lack of social understanding that seems almost wilfull for a doctor. Continue reading →

A poor diet?

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Research from the Food Standards Agency was reported as showing that the poor do not have worse diets than the rest of the population. I am all for truths that fly in the face of “common sense” but I am finding this quite hard to swallow.

As soon as you look at the specifics, this whole argument starts to fall apart for me.

The Food Standards Agency found that contrary to popular belief, nutrition, access to food and cooking skills are not much different in poorer families.

  • Nutrition. Given that so much of nutritional science is founded on guesswork and can often barely be distinguished from the Gillian McKeith schools of science, I’m not going to do this one to death, except to say that the points that they notice any difference in – such as consumption of fruit and vegetables – are the very things the nutritionists keep saying are important for our health
  • “Cooking skills?” Why would anyone asume that poor people are less able to cook. Well, it seems that the survey does suggest that the British poor are indeed too stupid to know how to eat food, apparently unlike poor people in the rest of the world.

    Men and women with a lower level of educational achievement tended to have a ‘less healthy’ diet than men and women with more education. Men and women with less education ate fewer vegetables and more chips, fried and roast potatoes. Less educated women also consumed less fruit and fruit juice.

    If educational level has any correlation with income (as we are told by other parts of government), doesn’t this suggest that the poor do have a worse diet? So it might be poverty rather than lack of education that leads to the duff feeding?

  • “Access to food? ” What on earth does that mean? It appears from the FSA website that it means where we shop and how we get it home.

    About 80% of this group did their main shopping at a large supermarket. About 50% had access to a private car for shopping

    Hmm – car? Not markedly poor then, you would think.

But then:

Mean weekly spending on food and drink (including eating out, but excluding alcoholic drinks) was just under £30 for one-adult households, just over £50 for households containing two or more adults, £55–£65 for households with one adult and one or more children, and £80–£90 for households with two or more adults and one or more children.

(You have feel particularly sorry for the adults in a 2 or more adult household, scraping by on £25 or less per person.) Continue reading →

How to avoid Alzheimer’s?

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The British Alzheimer’s Society are apparently promoting healthu living advice as a way to avoid or delay the illness. Wow, amazing. One of the great fears of an increasingly geriatric population? And there’s a way to avoid it?

Launching a booklet, Be Headstrong, he said that five steps were necessary to reduce the risks – do not smoke, eat less saturated fat, exercise regularly, lead an active social life and have blood pressure and cholesterol checked regularly. “If we could delay the incidence of dementia by five years we could reduce its incidence by 50 per cent,” he said.

(“He” refers to the society’s director.)

The Society has produced research which suggests that overweight people are twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s, according to the Independent. The information is being linked to this research.

(Sorry, I’m too idle to look at the research. I will of course take the newspaper’s shorthand analysis of it – after it’s been filtered through the Alzheimer’s Association Press launch – as being the truth and leave it at that….. Oh, blimey, I thought that was what we were supposed to do.)

I can’t quite see a clear connection beteen the research and the booklet- it doesn’t even mention overweight in that summary. It even mentions things like “not smoking” when I seem to recall that one of the few benefits of smoking was supposed to be lowering the chance of getting Alzheimer’s, according to research reported in New Scientist a few months ago (Don’t even think about making me look that up.)

Doesn’t this sort of thing sail dangerously close to woo? I mean, this is advice given out on the basis that it will allow you to avoid Alzheimer’s, which seems a bit spurious. Well, quite spurious, if you must.

Let’s just think for a minute- all those “healthy” things. Don’t they sort of characterise people who have a bit of education and spare money and time? Don’t such people generally tend to be healthier generally? On every health measure?

Does observation of things that occur together prove causation?

(It’s raining and Columbo is on TV right now. This happened last week as well. Does showing Colombo cause rain. Does the rain make the Hallmarck channel show old Columbo episodes?)

Isn’t it logical cheating to say that these are the specific things that give the wealthier people their advantages? I would lay out actual money that people living in Hampstead or the Cotswolds have lower Alzheimer rates than say, Glasgow Govan. And that people with double-barrelled surnames have a later onset of Alzheimer’s than the rest of us.

Does that mean, that calling your son Piers Oldmoney-Jenkins or your daughter Cressida Cholmely-Waugh will ensure they don’t get Alzheiners? Well no, but the existing evidence suggests that it’s probably going to work at least as well as following the advice of the Alzheimer’s society.

Oh dear, I’ve forgotten what was I going to say next 🙂

Science fair

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Wireless energy promise powers up, says a BBC article that claims that wireless energy transfer is close to practicable. Which would be impressive if it were true (although it might give the anti-wifi campaigners a few more warranted causes for concern than your standard Belkin device currently justifies.)

I probably am too cynical for my own good but I’d have to say this story has less of the ring of truth than the kidney transplant reality show that suckered me last week.

US researchers have successfully tested an experimental system to deliver power to devices without the need for wires.
The setup, reported in the journal Science, made a 60W light bulb glow from a distance of 2m (7ft).

For a start, I am not too impressed by making a lightbulb glow. Don’t some science museums have a display where you can light up a bulb at a distance by using some innate physical property of the gas in the light bulb? (Apologies for the vagueness. Yes, sometimes social science really isn’t a “science” and sometimes you really can’t ask me cos I’m just a girl.) This makes the whole public unveiling seem like a school science fair. (No, we don’t have them in the UK – or didn’t when I was at school – but we do get the Simpsons.)

But then again, maybe it is another example of a physical property that was considered only a toy that turns out to be really useful… I’m thinking of the gyroscope, but maybe the toy came after the engineering thing. OK, table blow-hockey and hovercraft then? Surely they had those tables before the hovercraft?

The BBC site says the news is from an experiment reported in Science. Ever diligent, I looked through a good few days’ news items in Science without finding it. Which is not to say it isn’t there, just that I couldn’t spot it. I looked at the MIT site and it had the “stem cells in mice” article that Science did, but no mention of any amazing new wireless energy transfer experiments.

Maybe this is actually old news and just appears on the BBC today because it’s a slow science day.

(Aside. It bloody must be. They have a totally spurious article saying that cannabis-caused mental health hospital admissions have gone up by 85% since Labour took power. Don’t make me go into the utter nonsense of this one. It merits an entire newspaper full of mocking deconstruction.)

So, with no easy science references to check out the light bulb, I was reduced to going back through the BBC’s own site. And, blow me down with a feather, etc, here’s a reference from November 2006 about the same chap, Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic, announcing that physics is about to solve the resonance issue, as soon as they build a model….

The article has basically the same content as today’s, even down to the same bizarre illustrations, minus the science fair-style lightbulb display..

  • Prof Soljacic, in front of an LCD monitor with a garish abstract screen saver – messaging how cutting edge he is;
  • a GCSE science-style diagram of two antennaed headsets, with an explanation – this is the bit I understood. However, I saw too many Tomorrow’s World’s to be totally convinced. Please note: I AM STILL WAITING FOR THE JETPACK;
  • a lot of wires in a multi-socketplug – so we can find out what plugs in a multisocket look like, in case we’ve never seen one.
  • Plus a garishly coloured plug with trailing wire that looks like an artist’s impression of a future wirefree energy provdiing device, until you realise it’s supposed to be a standard plug, lit by someone with only a 1960s lightshow as their illumination.

Brave New Age and wi-fi

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The wifi panic looks set for a long run, by the standards of modern technofear terrors. Ben Goldacre’s column more or less says everything worth saying, between the text and the comments. I am going to stick in a couple of links to the Register and even to Powerwatch – the opposite side.

So there. That’s a flourish of even-handedness, before I do exactly what Ben Goldacre says not to, somewhere on the Bad Science site, and slag off the people with the electro-sensitivity symptoms.

These symptoms aren’t things like bleeding from the ears or collapsing or losing control of their bladders. i.e., symptoms that would get you past an ER triage nurse. They are the sort of symptoms that might drive you to take a paracetemol.

Sleep disturbances. Or headaches? Well, I doubt there’s a person alive that doesn’t get these. At the risk of seeming completely compassionless, maybe these symptoms are just part of the human condition. Continue reading →

Dangers from fat increasing by the year?

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The BBC website “science” pages have text on obesity and a quiz about it. I am always interested in trying to find any real science basis behind our current obsession with obesity and diet. I still remain to be convinced by more than a scraping of it. (See old post about child obesity/anorexia scares. )

While I was scoring poorly on the quiz- I failed the first question on how many years of life obesity can cost – I saw this,:

Obesity can shorten your life by 9 years. 18 million days of work are lost through sickness due to obesity, and it costs the NHS £500 million a year.

I always have a problem with health rants that discuss how much problem x or y costs the Health Service. We get used to seeing things that put arbitrary cost figures on health. Unfortunately, no source is quoted, so it’s hard to argue with the data. But, an absence of facts never stops me making an argument.

Is every illness suffered by an obese person to be blamed on their weight? Don’t they get the same range of health problems as everybody else? So, any extra cost calculation would surely have to deduct a baseline standard level of health costs.

Continue reading →