Assault on Science

As I write this, it is the end of an interesting week where the western worlds decline to pre-enlightenment understanding of science has continued. Obviously, when I said “interesting” I meant sad…

The really annoying leader of this decline has to be Mary Midgley, as Heather previously addressed, who seems to think that “Science” is some dark art that has no relevance on any other aspect of society. Oddly she seems to be calling for the implementation of social policies, laws and the like without any scientific input. Obviously the idea that laws should be formulated without any experiemental reason to think they would ever work – I mean we are innundated with such laws now… Who cares if it can be demonstrated that Law X doesn’t work, as long as we “feel” it is a good law… Well done Mary.

Next in the firing line is the case of Dawn Page and here “nutritional therapist,” Barbara Nash. In a nutshell Page followed Nash’s frankly crazy advice and suffered major brain damage. Bad Science has an excellent take on this – the media as a whole has ignored the general trend of crazy advice by self appointed “Nutritionists” and focused on Nash as a one-off crank… The sad reality is the western world is inundated with fruitloops like this who go on about Chakras, Detox and the like. The even sadder part is that we fall for this nonsense without having the basic scientific reasoning ability to question their basically insane claims. I am all for sticking it to “professionals” who abuse their position (and I think £801,000 was a trivial sum in this case) but, for Toutatis’ sake, why on Odin’s Earth didn’t Ms Page go to the bloody doctors when she felt sick. When uncontrollable vomiting set in, most normal people (you would hope) would go to the hospital, probably via a 999 call to an ambulance. Not Ms Page, who returned to her nutritional therapist for more advice. As I see it, this is where Nash commited the greatest crime. Rather than telling Ms Page to seek real help, she stuck to her woo. Stupid or greedy? Who knows? Who cares – it still screams criminal negligence as far as I can see.

Closing on the heels of the above, and a strong candidate for the worst abuse of scientific illiteracy is the media’s “feeding frenzy” on the decision by Ronald Herberman (Director of the University of Pittsborough Cancer Institute) to issue a warning to his staff to limit their use of mobile phones due to the risk of cancer. Now, I am going to assume that Herberman is a scientist and aware of the nature of scientific reasearch – and indeed, he did say the “evidence is controversial” that phones cause cancer. The same can not be said for the media vultures that descended on this…

First off, often decisions have to be made on “inconclusive” evidence, so that in itself is not a bad thing. By its very nature a scientific proof is still liable to be disproven at any moment. In this manner, it is perfectly reasonable (there is that word again) for Director Herberman to send a memo to his staff saying that, in his opinion, they should limit their use of phones. Does this count as “evidence” there is an increased risk of cancers forming in users of mobile phones. No. Does this mean the “scientific community” (in as much as one can exist) thinks there is a greater risk today than they did two weeks ago – again, no.

If you were to absorb any news from the UK this week, however, you would think this was fundamental proof that mobile phones are dangerous. New calls are all over about how phone masts cause “electrosensitivity” and similar woo. It seems that people have assumed, that because Dr Herberman has sent out this message it must be true and obviously because Dr Herberman works at a Cancer Institute he must be correct, notwithstanding the fact that Cancer Research UK reported (in February) that phone users were no more likely to get cancer than someone who had never touched a phone. Obviously, as journalists are functionally incapable of reading research they go with what ever seems to have the power to sell as many issues as possible…

The Guardian newspaper on Saturday identifies what it sees as the logic at work here (and sadly this is where Dr Herberman seems to fall down). First off, it explains the problem in trying to find out what is a “cause of cancer” with:

Here’s the thing. Almost everything that causes cancer does so by causing mutations in our cellular DNA that accumulate over years and often decades before culminating in a tumour. So to prove something increases a person’s cancer risk, scientists must often not only wait for years to see a significant peak in the disease, but also be able to rule out any other possible cause. That could be changes in diet, environmental factors, lifestyle, the list goes on.

Yes. It it hard trying to work out what causes cancer, this is one of the reasons we have so many “institutes” around the world looking into it. I don’t seem to recall any of them having solved the problem yet though. The Guardian finishes with: (emphasis mine)

The independent Stewart review into mobile phones in 2000 advised children to limit their use as a precaution. Dr Herberman is following the same logic. “We shouldn’t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later,” he said.

Wow. A fail for science there. I think that funding research institutes causes cancer. Rather than wait to see if any study can agree with this, why don’t we withdraw the funding now so we can err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later.

Shame on you Dr Herberman, you have opened the floodgates to woo….

Deutsche malware

A Nelson-esque “Ha Ha” if you thought that other EC countries might be havens where the seemingly outdated Euro-values (justice, tolerance, protection under the law, presumption of innocence, free speech) are still observed.

The government of Germany (that’s the combined former East & West Germanies. Remember East Germany? That’s the one with the Stasi and a population that was so avid for freedom 20 years ago) has approved what the Register calls a Plod-spyware law.

This handy law will give the German government the “anti-terror” powers to monitor private homes, phones and computers. Don’t you just love the TWAT? Any government in the world can now take any powers they fancy just by invoking its name.

Instead of tapping phones, they would be able to use video surveillance and even spy software to collect evidence. Physically tampering with suspects’ computers would still not be allowed, but police could send anonymous e-mails containing trojans and hope the suspects infect their own computers (from the Register story)

Wow, government spam that carries malware! Did I put enough exclamation marks there? Here are more!!!!!!!

These powers will only be used in exceptional cases, yada, yada, usw. Oh yeah?

There have been already been several recent scandals about over-the-top surveillance in Germany (Lidl, Deutsche Telecom, usw) Although, unlike the UK, at least the Germans don’t yet seem to lose personal data on a biblical scale. But, if the Lidl surveillance is any guide, they see information on the dates of surveillees’ menstruation as worth gathering

XanderG made a beautifully phrased comment on a WgyDontYou post a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve never understood how we’re supposed to find a needle in a haystack, by chucking in more hay. So many of these measures simply add dead-ends and wild goose chases to an already massive monitoring system. How are we going to catch anybody with real malicious plans? (XanderG)

If a government REALLY cares about preventing terrorism, it is blatantly illogical to collect massive amounts of information on the general public. It’s well nigh inconceivable how much information is flying around in a noughts-and-ones format.

For instance, almost every person I passed in a half-hour walk was having a mobile phone conversation – including three dog-walkers and two cyclists. (Cycling, in traffic, ffs. Unselfish people, trying to cull themselves for the good of the gene pool) Pretty well every house in my low-income street has a relatively-fast broadband connection. There are enough traffic cameras and public CCTV installations in a 500 yard radius to provide a year’s 24-hour broadcast reality tv on every known channel.

Scale this level of data traffic up to the population of the UK and Germany. Unless half the population is engaged in monitoring this hurricane of electronic noise – using the most advanced pattern recognition and cryptographic algorithms known to science – anyone who is gathering this data might as well not bother.

Well not if they care about detecting real social threats anyway. It might come in very handy for finding people who are spoofing their address to get their kid into a school slightly out of their area. Or it might catch someone who hasn’t paid their car tax or is claiming invalidity benefit while working (as the threatening TV and billboard ads keep telling us).

It might not seem to make sense but I have finally figured it out, with the help of the Matrix and the Church of Scientology.

Clearly, the earth is threatened by a monstrous alien intelligence that eats human data. It can only be kept at bay by feeding it gargantuan stores of bytes. Earth rulers are doing us a favour by collecting all our data and recycling it as xenofood to stuff in the gaping maw of the evil extraterrestrial overlord Zarg. They can’t tell us the truth because there would be a global panic.

A question for the lawyers out there – Sending malware in spam may not be a crime if the German police are doing it. But would installing this malware become a crime if the recipient of a German-police email were to forward the spam to, say, a member of the German government? The government of another country? A major corporation? At what point?

Danger WiFi!

Computer magazines, being monthly, are often behind the curve of the news. This is a shame as the internet must be hammering them but still, for some reason, they seem unwilling to adapt and offer much in the way of unique selling points (other than you can read them sitting on the toilet, which is hard to do with a website…). But I digress.

For reasons which will become apparent soon (in a different post), I am was still subscribed to PCW today and, with the wonders of the Royal SnailMail, I got the August 2007 issue in the post. Now for the last few months I have been more and more dissatisfied with PCW, but out of some weird mindset I always hope the next issue will be better. So far it hasn’t failed to disappoint me… Anyway, on to this issue.

Turning to the news pages and wow – there on page 11 is the news “WiFi in ‘fried brains’ scare.” Well, cutting edge news, isn’t it, I mean it isn’t as if even this blog has mentioned it once or twice in the past … The news item briefly mentions the Panorama woo-ish nonsense and, as you can imagine with a PC magazine, PCW falls in the “Use WiFi” camp.

What is odd though, is how they defend WiFi. The main claim of Panononsense seems to be that radiation 1m from a WiFi point was greated than 100m from a mobile (cell) phone mast. PCW does not go to any lengths to dismiss this as such, nor does it comment on the massive “so what” that this carries. All PCW does to defend WiFi is say:

It did not spell out that the maximum WiFi power radiated is of the order of a thousand times less than that from the mast and a tenth that of a phone handset held right next to the head.

All well and good you may think, it is even probably factually correct (I don’t know off hand and can not be bothered to google it). This response has been echoed elsewhere on TV tech programs and in the computer press. Basically they are saying the WiFi danger is less than holding a phone to your head over and over to justify all manner of WiFi networks being put in everything from your PC to your underwear.

Amazingly, this is a sign the electro-woo cults have managed at least the divide bit of a divide and conquer. If the phone companies respond with saying their phones are less dangerous than WiFi, it will all be over…

Seriously, saying WiFi is “Ok because it is less dangerous than XYZ” is nonsense, especially as the danger from XYZ is almost comical. The downside, though, is it reinforces the idea in the listeners mind that XYZ is bad, and is almost certain to lead to “research” (or at least calls for a stupid “public enquiry”) which hypes up the dangers even more. It happens in almost every industry (GM is a good example) and often gets to the point at which people are confused over what is Woo and what is research. At this point, the “alternative practitioners” with their beads, EM-proof curtains and the like have truly won.

More than anything else, for me, this highlights that “Computer Science” is not a science…

[tags]computer science, computer magazines, computers, culture, electrosensitivity, em, idiocy, mobile phones, nonsense, pcw, personal computer world, philosophy, scaremongering, science, society, wifi, woo[/tags]

Wifi Dangers

I dont have much time online, so I have pick and choose my ranting carefully now… The Will of Toutatis seems to have decreed that while I am mostly offline, the news is full of things which almost make my blood boil over. Bah. Humbug.

There is a long list of things which are stupid beyond belief in the media this week. I picked the post headline based on the furore from the BBC’s Panorama program which claims Wifi is three times more “dangerous” than mobile phone masts.  I didn’t watch the program myself, so my comments about it are based on the (mostly radio) news which picked it up.

For years there have been minor scare stories about mobile phone masts (cellphones for you colonials) causing all maner of problems to the people who live in their footprints. There has even been a considerable amount of rigourous scientific investigation into this. Sadly, for both the frightened and the media causing the scares, there is little to support the claims. Now, call me old fashioned but if you have 99 studies which show no ill effects and 1 which does, it probably means there are no ill effects.

Why in Odin’s Name do people focus on the outlier and demand that be considered as the “real evidence?” It is insane. It really is madness, and the BBC radio news about it was a cringeworthy example of it. There were “concerned citizens” calling on the Government to carry out an “inquiry” (as is the case today, if a dog craps on the pavement there needs to be a government inquiry into how and why it happened) and, predictably, there were “scientists” who wanted 15 mins of fame, demanding the same. All based on the same lack of evidence.

When I see things like this, I like to remember a pop-science programme I saw on television a few years ago (it was something like Brainiac but it wasnt brainiac), in which a group of “electrosensitives” were put in a house for two weeks. Outside was a broadcast tower. The subjects were told the tower would be on for the first week and off for the second week.

All subjects reported the “electrosensitivity” problems during the first week, which miraculously cleared up in the second. As they predicted. The kicker of it all was, the experiment was reversed. The tower was off when they thought it was on, and on when they thought it was off.

Now, I am not for one second saying that is the sort of thing which should be published in the Journal of EM Woo or whatever, but it goes a long way to showing how people convince themselves about something – and once they do it manifests itself in other effects.

This recent nonsense about WiFi is prime example, but pure comedy value can be gained from the “three times as dangerous” phrase. Radio towers are not dangerous, so what is three times zero.

I think I can agree with that.