The Crapologist

Shane Warne, TAIslim and the phantom clinical trial

2011-08-15T21:35:00.000+10:00

Shane Warne is a man of integrity. He is the last person anybody would accuse of selling out. Sure, he is always going on about one product or another, but really, there is nothing wrong with telling the world about the things you like, and Warnie likes a lot of things. Why, in the last fortnight alone he has, on twitter, enthusiastically endorsed Russell Crowe's new album, McDonalds Cheeseburgers, British Airways, Carlton Draught (twice), Spinners by Shane Warne, 888 sport bets, Mr Whippy (twice), Special K and Dunhill¹, and has not declared any financial or other interest in any of these products. He's just a fan.

And when he loses a lot of weight in just a few months, and puts it down to "Fitness and healthy lifestyle, with help from @StevenBaker10 and his protein shakes and Tai Slim drinks", and some people deign to suggest that it is simply a marketing exercise and not a genuine miracle weight loss product, then I am, to be perfectly honest, shocked and saddened. I mean, you only have to look at the post on his website² to see how genuine he is about this.

During a game of poker at my house, I was chatting to my good mate Steven Baker (professional football player) about how he had managed to maintain his fitness over such a long career. Our conversation drifted onto how I really wanted to drop a few kilos and get super fit for my last year of cricket in the IPL with the Rajasthan Royals.

Bakes told me how his Mum had recently lost a substantial amount of weight on a new system. He is now totally behind the product as he has seen amazing results among his family and close friends, and realises it could help so many people.

I used the system in conjunction with a better diet and exercise, and couldn't be happier with the results. I managed to lose 12 kgs over the first 2 months and continue to maintain my current weight by continuing with the products and improved lifestyle.

The system is called the TAIslim Total Body System. It's a safe, easy and healthy way to manage your weight..The shakes taste great and the low calorie chocolates stop me snacking so much between meals. I highly recommend it to anyone serious about improving your health and well being..

I started with the best pack available, which is the ‘TAislim Quickstart pack with Skinny’s’ and reached my goal weight in only two months. I'm now keeping the weight off with ease on a smaller maintenance pack.

If you decide to give the system a go, I hope you enjoy the same great results as I have.

shanewarne.com

If you are thinking that that resembles a paid testimonial - like you might see in a bad late night infomercial - concocted by Shane, his mate Steve³, and their unnamed corporate paymasters for the pupose of gaining free press for their product worldwide, then you sir, are a heartless cynic!

For my part, I am quite prepared to take Warnie's word as gospel, and accept that TAIslim helped him lose his weight. He is, however, only one person, and I was interested to see whether his fantastic results could be replicated in the population at large⁴.

What is TAIslim?

From what I can gather, TAIslim is a series of products - shakes, powders and juices - with a base ingredient called Himalayan Goji berries⁵. It is produced and marketed by multi-level marketing company FreeLife, and WOW! Does it work a treat?

FreeLife recently undertook a strict 3-month randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind human clinical study (the “gold standard” of clinical studies), which included caloric restriction and moderate exercise. The results from this study are nothing short of miraculous. Compared to participants who were on a placebo, TAIslim® product users lost: 4 times more body weight; 6 times more body fat; 6 times more inches from their waist; and 4 times more inches from their hips. TAIslimusers also recorded a 6 times greater reduction in Body Mass Index (BMI), while also experiencing significantly greater improvements in blood pressure and blood sugar levels than the control group.

These are seriously impressive results that will revolutionise the weight loss industry, so I thought that I would take a closer look at this research, which was undertaken by their chief scientific officer, Dr Haru Amagase. I looked on PubMed, the major repository of peer-reviewed medical literature. Oddly, this particular research did not appear there. Thinking that it may be so new that it has yet to be indexed, I dug a little deeper.

I found a just published review article in the journal Food Research International by Dr Amagase entitled "A review of botanical characteristics, phytochemistry, clinical relevance in efficacy and safety of Lycium barbarum fruit (Goji)". At last, here was the proof I'd been looking for. Reading the paper, I found a small section on weight loss.

LBP-standardized L. barbarum fruit juice has been reported in several randomized clinical studies that it significantly increased postprandial energy expenditure compared to the placebo (Amagase, 2010). L. barbarum intake was effective to control waist circumference in the humans, and may reduce the risks of metabolic syndrome (Amagase & Nance, 2009). Subjects in the L. barbarum group maintained waist circumference at the starting point measurements even during the holiday overeating time at year's end. The placebo group showed no significant changes (Amagase & Handel, 2008). L. barbarum may stimulate metabolic rate through adrenocortical hormone control, and these effects may be related to the changes in waist circumference produced by daily consumption of L. barbarum in the form of fruit juice (Amagase, 2010). As these studies are preliminary and there are limitations, these did not include any functional measurements of substrate utilization, heart rate, muscle activity, temperature or respiratory quotient (RQ). These are additional relevant dependent measures that will need to be addressed in more detailed future studies. However, the absence of these additional measures does not diminish the clear functional and statistical significance we observed in the present studies in terms of postprandial energy expenditure. Considering the overall effects of L. barbarum, it appears that the combination of nutritional ingredients with L. barbarum may be useful for increasing metabolic rate and body weight control. Thus, future studies with additional measures of energy balance and anthropometric parameters related to the body weight control will establish the possible effects of L. barbarum on glucose and fat metabolism, metabolic syndrome, and obesity-related hormone levels in humans in order to identify the mechanisms of actions of L. barbarum.

Pretty impressive stuff, and there, finally, were the primary references I was looking for. So I looked them up.

Amagase and Handel, 2008 H. Amagase and R. Handel, Randomized, blind, placebo-controlled human clinical studies showed waist circumference reduction by an intake of standardized Lycium barbarum fruit juice, The Obesity Society 2008 Annual Meeting at Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, AZ October 3–7, P0751 (2008).

This is a reference to a poster presentation at a conference. I didn't go, so this was not much use. I was specifially looking for a detailed, peer-reviewed article in a respected journal. So I looked up the next one.

Amagase and Nance, 2009 H. Amagase and D.M. Nance, Effect of standardized Lycium barbarum (Goji) juice, GoChi® intake on resting metabolic rate and waist circumference: Randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical studies, FASEB Journal 23 (2009), p. LB419.

Again, disappointingly, this is a reference to an abstract (summary) of a poster presented at a conference. All my hopes lay with the last reference.

Amagase, 2010 H. Amagase, Comparison of Lycium barbarum-containing liquid dietary supplements to caffeinated beverages on energy/caloric metabolism activity and salivary adrenocortical hormone levels in healthy human adults, FASEB Journal 24 (2010), p. 540.13.

Another conference abstract! This was becoming ridiculous. It would be unethical for FreeLife to market their product with this study if it was not actually published. It just didn't make sense. So I dug a little deeper.

I found this on the FreeLife website.

Just this past October, our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Haru Amagase, presented the results of our TAIslim Total Body System clinical studies at the annual Obesity Society Annual Meeting in San Diego. This important conference brought together the leading players in the field of obesity; from world-renowned speakers, researchers, and clinicians to educators, advocators, policymakers, and practitioners. This was a veritable “Who’s Who” of weight control experts, making it even more impressive that one of the biggest stars of the conference was our very own Dr. Haru!

Since returning from the Obesity Society meeting, Dr. Haru has been deluged with requests for information and manuscripts. The request excerpted below is typical:

Dear Dr. Amagase,

My name is Elizabeth Fetterman, and I serve as the lead editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Physician and Sportsmedicine.I’ve recently reviewed your extraordinary research from the Obesity Society’s annual meeting. . . and I wanted to get in touch to see if you would be interested in submitting your research for our upcoming May 2011 issue, which will have a clinical focus on diabetes and obesity. Your research would be of great value and interest to our readership.This issue will be distributed at the American Diabetes Association shortly after publication, so articles will benefit from instant recognition and distribution to its primary readership. In addition, we market every paper via press releases (MedicalNewsToday.com, etc.), RSS feeds, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and all published articles are uploaded to Kindle, iPad, and eReader.

To understand the full significance of this request, which will help to spread the word of FreeLife science all over the world, you must first know that acceptance and publication of a clinical study in a peer-reviewed journal is not easily achieved. In fact, only 1 out of every 5 studies submitted are judged to be worthy of acceptance, and the journals don’t typically solicit articles. Therefore, it is a testament to the quality of our research that peer-reviewed journals are asking us to permit them to publish our studies!

Jackpot! I now had both a journal title and issue (May 2011). I had finally found the Holy Grail.

Except it wasn't there.

I was getting a little bit downhearted at this point and was beginning to bemoan my obvious incompetence. So I decided to take a different tack. Maybe if I couldn't find the study so I could evaluate it myself, I could find other experts who had given their independent assessments of it. Happily, there were a few, such as...

PHOENIX, AZ – October 28, 2009 – FreeLife International recently presented the significant results of several human clinical studies on TAIslim™, its proprietary triple-patent pending liquid weight loss supplement, at the 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of The Obesity Society. This important conference, held in Washington, DC, brought together the world’s leading players in the field of obesity - from basic and clinical researchers and clinicians to educators, advocates, policy shapers and practitioners.

FreeLife’s findings on TAIslim will be published in the respected journal Obesity⁶. “These results are very interesting and promising,” remarked Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, noted obesity research expert and Assistant Professor at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Qatar Islamic Bank Hospital and New York Obesity Research Center at Columbia University. She added, “The rise in energy expenditure (i.e., fat burning) with these goji-based products is interesting and suggests a mechanism by which they can assist in weight management.”

This looked promising, but then I found this...

San Francisco, CA — February 27, 2010 —FreeLife International recently presented the results of several human clinical studies on its TAIslim Total Body System, a proprietary triple patent pending weight loss supplement system, at an American Society for Nutrition (ASN) meeting.

“These results are interesting and promising,” remarked Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, noted obesity research expert and Research Associate at the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center at St. Luke's/Roosevelt Hospital and Assistant Professor at Columbia University. She added, “The rise in calorie-burning capacity with these products suggests a potential mechanism by which they can assist in weight management and should be explored further.”

I guess she just forgot that she'd already said exactly the same thing at the earlier conference. But then I found this...

San Diego, CA — October 9, 2010 — FreeLife International® presented the results of several human clinical studies on TAIslim Total Body System, a proprietary triple-patent pending weight management supplement system, at the Obesity Society Annual Meeting...

"These results are very interesting and promising" remarked Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, noted obesity research expert and Research Associated at the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's/Roosevelt Hospital and Assistant Professor at Columbia University. She added, "The rise in energy expenditure and reduction in self-reported appetite level with these products is interesting and suggests a mechanism by which they can assist in weight management."

At this point, I was suffering from a potentially terminal case of déjà vu and I needed a quick lie down and a nice cup of tea.

Later I reviewed the evidence. 1. Shane Warne loses weight and claims that TAIslim products helped him achieve that aim. 2. The mainstream media uncritically report this claim. 3. The producers of TAIslim claim to have undertaken a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind human clinical study. 4. The results of this study have been presented as a poster presentation at a number of scientific conferences, but the details of the study have never been published. 5. Dr Marie-Pierre St-Onge, noted obesity research expert is caught in some kind of Groundhog Day situation wherein every time she goes to a conference she says exactly the same thing.

No matter how I look at it, I cannot put the pieces together. This is what you might call an un-solved mystery. Might this be an expensive but ultimately useless add-on to a perfectly sensible calorie controlled diet? Could Warnie have been hoodwinked? If so, is Baker in on it or is he a victim as well? Why are all of the best products sold by multi-level marketing companies (instead of in regular shops), where the purpose of sellers is not to sell the product, per se, but to recruit more sellers?

I will keep searching until I have satisfactory answers to all of these questions, but until then I'll take solace in the knowledge that AFL legend and all around good bloke Brendan Fevola is on-board. While I'm not totally satisfied, I have looked hard at what evidence there is, and I can confidently say that the authors of the taislimscam website are completely wrong.

¹ The men's clothing store, not the cigarette brand. I prefer Benson & Hedges polo tops myself, but each to their own.
² You have to be registered to get into shanewarne.com so I copied the text from another website that had copied the text from Shane's website. I assume Warnie would be cool with this.
³ Who only ever mentions one product on his twitter feed... TAIslim. Every. Single. Day.
⁴ Or whether you had to be shagging a supermodel to get the best results.
⁵ Their real name is Wolfberry, and they aren't actually from the Himalayas, but don't let that distract you from their miraculous benefits.
⁶ When?

Internet browser versus IQ: The truth!

2011-08-08T22:53:00.001+10:00

A new study has found that people who think that Internet Explorer users are dumber than users of other browsers are actually dumber than Internet Explorer users.

Researchers came to this conclusion after reviewing media reports, blog posts, comments, forums and tweets referring to the AptiQuant hoax; a made-up report claiming that IE users - and especially those using older versions - had average IQs up to 40 points lower than those using other browsers.

The researchers collected all online references to this study that were written in the two days before the hoax was exposed, and categorized the commenters into those who got "sucked in" and those who "called shenanigans".

Example comments for the sucked in group were

LOL turns out IE users are retards

Ha! I always knew it, but now here's proof #IEsucks

and for those who called it correctly

What a load of bullshit! No way is this real

What's a browser?

The researchers then determined from which browser each commentary originated and calculated the percentage of users who got sucked in (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. % of users of each browser who fell for the AptiQuant hoax.

They also used a newly discovered relationship between level of suckedinness, lameness of commentary and IQ (the gullibility-legibility scale^TM) to determine the true IQ of each commentator (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Average IQ (with standard deviation) of people commenting on or reporting the AptiQuant hoax, calculated using the gullibility-legibility scale^TM. Note, there were insufficient journalists in the IE user group to accurately calculate an IQ for this group.

Professional journalists and media organisations came out particularly badly. Not only were they almost universally not IE users (being predominanlty Mac users), they were almost universally sucked in, although their smugness tended to be tempered somewhat by their professionalism, and their IQs ended up slightly higher than those who blogged the story (use of the words "retard" and "fuckwit" negatively impact IQ scores on the G-I scale).

Dumbest of all were the non-IE using tweeters. Not only were they incredibly gullible, their IQ scores were negatively impacted by their lack of insight (e.g. RTs with a LOL added) and their inability to make their point in 140 characters using whole words.

IE users came out well ahead on both "calling shenanegans" and overall IQ.

Lead researcher Dr Foxy Fire adds "Non-IE users' smugness levels were off the scale, but we are still analysing this data and will publish a follow up shortly. Likewise, the IE users' ability to take a joke was possibly the lowest level ever recorded, but we are having this verified before commenting further".

Sockpuppetry of the dicks

2011-07-13T00:56:00.001+10:00

What would you do if, like me*, you had a prominent online presence and people started saying nasty things about you on blogs or in comments or on Youtube, or you weren't happy with your Wikipedia entry?

If you said, "I would create a fake online persona and set about deviously correcting all of these perceived wrongs" then you are a dick. If you are now thinking "you'd have to be a moron to believe that you could get away with something like that" then you are not a dick, although you are a bit up yourself.

Recently, a couple of high profile hands have unwillingly emerged from the sockpuppets they control. First up was Scott Adams, author of the comic strip Dilbert. He created the pseudonym PlannedChaos and for several months went around defending "himself" on websites such as Reddit and Metafilter, including, at least twice, referring to himself as "a certified genius". He ended up outing himself as certified douche bag.

And in breaking sockpuppetry news, acclaimed British journalist Johann Hari - fresh from accusations of pathological plagiarism - is increasingly looking like he may well be his own biggest fan, "David r from meth productions", also known as "David Rose". For years, David r has been editing Hari's wikipedia entry in an extremely favourable light, whilst savagely editing the entries of people who criticise or disagree with him. It is possible that David Rose exists but the evidence presented by David Allen Green and others is quite damning. Let's review:

David r claims to have been at Cambridge University with Hari
Claims to work as a sub-editor at the Independent, where Hari works
Hari claims to know a David R who has a degree in environmental science from Cambridge
No person matching any of those descriptions actually exists
Hari is suspiciously silent on the subject even in the face of a Twitter barrage

As an aspiring, half-arsed journalist myself, I would just like to take this opportunity to assure all of my fans, including my 16 Twitter followers, 93 Facebook friends and the 16 people who read my last blog post, that I would never, ever stoop to creating a sockpuppet, or any kind of fake or anonymous persona for the purpose of self-promotion. That would be wrong, and stupid.

Besides, I am much too busy reading gay, incest porn.

*Yeah, I know. God I wish someone would say something nasty about me online.

How to win the lottery. Part 3: The Scam

2011-06-23T23:33:00.001+10:00

Thus concludes the epic trilogy that is "How to win the lottery". If you were wondering, yes there will be a digitally remastered special extended edition, some disappointing prequels and I'm currently working on a 3D version that is bound to be an embarrassment for all concerned.

In Parts 1 and 2 we learnt that if Mr Sucker buys a quickpick every week for fifty years, he will lose about $14,000.

Is there any way that he could increase his odds of coming out ahead? Yes, there is, but before you proceed, I must warn you that each of these techniques brings with it a terrible curse. Enjoy.

Put everything into one ticket
Due to a quirk of probability theory, if Mr Sucker spent the total $20,400 in one go, rather than spreading it out over the 50 years, his odds would increase dramatically, one might say spectacularly, from a measly 1 in 251.6 to an astonishing 1 in 251.1. But then he would miss out on the anticipation of the draw every week, which is the whole point anyway. And his testicles would shrivel up like sultanas.

Spend more money
Mr Sucker could drop his coke habit and funnel some of that money into lottery tickets. The more you buy, the better the odds. The downside is that you also increase your likely losses. Your chance per $1 invested is always the same - there is no way of improving this no matter what anybody tells you. Spending $7.85 per week is a bit of fun, spending $785 a week is a really bad idea. Please don't do that.

Also, if you use this method, your first born child will become a Young Liberal.

Pick rare combinations
Mr Sucker buys sets of randomly generated numbers each week. He knows enough about probability to know that lucky numbers are pointless. What he doesn't know is that, while his chance of winning 1st division is the same no matter what the combination of numbers (because every number has an equal chance of being picked), he could increase his chances of a bigger payout if he picked numbers that no one else picked.

Except he can't know what everyone else chooses and a lot of people choose numbers randomly generated on a computer.

Still, according to my rudimentary research, the most common number chosen is 8 and the least common 13, while numbers above 31 are also less likely to be picked.

Another way to guess the rare numbers would be to trawl through the previous results and find the numbers that gave the biggest payouts. But then you have to ask yourself, how many other people are doing exactly the same thing?

Also, if you do this your favourite TV show will get cancelled - or Channel 9 will show it so many times each week that it gets ruined.

Join a syndicate
This is similar to the spend more money section, except it's not Mr Sucker's money being spent, it is other people's. Woohoo... free money! The benefit is a much better chance of winning 1st or 2nd division. Previously I explained that the Mr Sucker's likely losses will be 69% of his investment, because he will almost certainly not win 1st or 2nd division playing by himself*. By investing that money in a big syndicate, he will decrease his likely loss to closer to the government mandated 54%, thereby losing less money in the long run. The downside is that because he only wins a proportion of the winnings equal to the proportion of money he invested in the syndicate (or even less if the organiser of the syndicate takes a cut, which is common), he will have zero chance of winning the magic $1 million all for himself.

He will also spend eternity having to try and read this website without having a seizure.

++++

And then there are the ways that give you no extra chance of winning.

Play a systems entry
Instead of buying games of just six numbers, Mr Sucker could choose games of seven or more numbers from which the six winning numbers need to come. A system 7, for example, gives you exactly seven times the probability of winning, but it also costs exactly seven times as much as a regular game. Plus if he did this people would discover that he was the real author of a lesbian blog.

Pay someone for winning numbers, or use some bogus software program
There are a plethora of websites offering books, advice, software and personalised systems designed to increase your chance of winning. For example here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here here or here. (WAIT A SECOND! All of these websites are advertising the same products and the information in them is basically identical, apart from different garish colour schemes and horrible templates**. They also seem to be run by the same guy.).

If you are tempted by any of these, just remember one simple rule. You cannot win more than 46% of what you put in unless you are lucky. No system can improve this percentage. These websites claim that they can provide numbers that can "win every single week". This is true, but you will almost always "win" less than you put in. You could just as easily design a system where you win every second week, but win twice as much, or win once a year, and win 52 times the amount you would win from an "every week" system. In the end, you will lose, on average, the same amount no matter what system you use.

I expect that most of the people selling these systems genuinely believe in them. They are wrong.

Also, if you buy one of these systems, you will get seven years bad luck. Probably not the smartest move, then.

Save up for the jackpot
Mr Sucker could bide his time and only play when the jackpot is really huge. This would slightly increase his odds of winning more if he played something like Oz Lotto, where the odds are so ridiculously high that hardly anybody ever wins, and when somebody does, it is usually just the one winner. With Tattslotto, where multiple people win 1st division every week, the super draws often pay the same or less than regular draws, exactly because people bide their time and then put all of their money into them, meaning more people win and the prizes get spread thinner. The last $21 million Tattslotto draw paid out less per winner than the two following weeks with standard $4 million draws. If he were smart he would therefore bet big the week after a big draw, because everyone will be hung over from the previous week and not as many bets will go down. Or it could just be a coincidence. Probably a coincidence.

++++

Money back guarantee
I promised that I would provide a guaranteed way to win 1st division in Tattslotto, and because you've been kind enough to read this far I'm going to give you two. In fact, I guarantee that these are the only two methods that will guarantee you a 1st division prize.

Buy all 8 million plus possible combinations. This will, cost you about $5 million, and you will lose 54% of your money, but, well, actually I don't really have anything else to add to this. It is a stupid idea.
Be incredibly, ridiculously, outrageously lucky.

I told you you'd be pissed.

Good luck.

++++

One last point. Remember Cedric from Part 1?

"Hey Bob, I did some sums, and do know what?"

"What?"

"If you invested the money you spend on Tattslotto every week at just 5% interest, after fifty years you would have a very tidy $91,000. What do you think of that, Sucker?"

"And if you bought one less porno a week, you'd have $150,000. What's your point?"

"I, uh, I retract my previous statement."

Besides, Mr Sucker would otherwise just blow the money on, er, Blow. Or blowjobs.

++++

If you disagree with any of my maths, then there is a good chance that you are right. Leave a comment or send me an email at daryl at thecrapologist dot com and I'll make any necessary corrections. If you are really keen, you can see my working on this spreadsheet, although you may also get an uncomfortable insight into the working of my brain (I may tidy it up at some point, but it's mostly all there, somewhere).

* If he'd just learn to play with himself, he'd have much more money to spend on gambling.

** I have a confession to make. Some people are racist, some are sexist. I am neither. I am, however, internetist. If you build a website that looks like it was out of date in the '90s, with a totally incomprehensible layout and a different font in every paragraph etc., then you will have to work very hard for me to take anything you have to say seriously. If you have at least ten equally offensive websites, then it will be ten times as hard***. Terry Fisher, you have a lot of work to do.

*** If Pfizer wants to pay me $10,000, they can use that on their marketing material.

How to win the lottery. Part 2: The Payout

2011-06-20T22:30:00.001+10:00

Part 2 in a three part magnum opus - or possibly optimus prime - on how the lottery really works, and what you can do to make it work in your favour, if you can, which you can't. Or can you?

AMagill

Mr Sucker lived a simple life. He loved his family and worked hard to support them. His one vice was his weekly lottery ticket. And the occasional line of cocaine. And the prostitutes, the many, many prostitutes.

But let's concentrate on the lottery, at least for this post.

In Part 1 we learnt that his lifetime chance of winning 1st division was approximately 1 in 262, and that he was guaranteed to win 4th, 5th and 6th division many times. But what I want to know now is how much money will he spend in total, and how much can he expect to win?

The total spend is easy: A standard quickpick each week for 50 years is approximately $20,400 at today's price ($7.85). Calculating the winnings is a bit of a pain in the arse, but here goes. There are two ways: The first is to calculate the average number of times he will win each division, using the odds calculated in part one, then multiply these by the average dollar amount paid out for each division. This sounds hard. Fortunately, there is an easier way. A much easier way. One might call it a piss-easier way. Tattersalls and the Victorian State Government have already done the work for us.

You see Australian lotteries are run on a system called parimutual betting, whereby winnings are paid as a proportion of the money taken in, rather than as a set amount. For Tattslotto, this is a government mandated 60%, not including the ticket sellers' commission. Each game costs 65 cents, of which 15 cents is commission, 20 cents gets divied up between the government and Tattersals, and 30 cents gets paid back to the punters. So the actual payout once commission is taken into account is actually 46%. What this means in real terms is that if you bought infinite tickets, you would end up "winning" exactly 46 cents for every dollar you paid out. Or to put it another way, you would lose 54 cents for every dollar you spent. Mr Sucker won't buy infinite tickets but he will buy a lot (2,600), so one could suppose that the odds will even out, and Mr Sucker will end up winning 46% of his outlay, or $9,200, leaving him with a total lifetime loss of $11,200.

Unfortunately, no.

Mr Sucker, alas, is one of the vast majority of people who will never win 1st or 2nd division prizes, so his winnings will be a lot less, because the lucky bastards who do win big will take way more than their fair share. How much less? Thanks Tattersalls, you've come through with the goods again! The percentage of the prize fund that goes to each division is the same every week:

Division 1: 28.0%
Division 2: 3.8%
Division 3: 8.2%
Division 4: 12.4%
Division 5: 20.8%
Division 6: 26.8%

Assuming that Mr Sucker wins his fair share of divisions 3-6, his total payback will be 68.2% of the 46% payout, which is 31.4%. Mr Sucker, then, is more than likely, after payingout $20,400 over his lifetime, to win approximately $6,300, leaving him out of pocket more than $14,000; that's a lot of coke and hookers. To rub it in further, even if he wins 2nd division once, he will still be out of pocket several thousand dollars, as 2nd division only pays about $10,000.

In essence, if you don't win 1st division, you will lose in the long run. Mr Sucker could, I suppose, make a profit by winning 2nd division twice, but the chance of that is ten times lower than the chance of winning 1st division once, so forget it.

But surely Mr Sucker could use some kind of system that increases his odds of winning, and besides, I hear you thinking, "this series is called how to win the lottery, not why everyone loses at the lottery, so when the hell are you going to throw me a bone here, crapman?"

In my next post I will show how to both markedly increase your odds of winning, and a foolproof way to guarantee 1st division*.

*Although you are going to be seriously pissed off with me when I do.

How to win the lottery. Part 1: The Odds

2011-06-18T02:27:00.004+10:00

I like to keep my posts, like my love-making, short and/or sweet, so when this one started ballooning out to Oracian, or possibly John Holmesian proportions, I decided to break it up into a trilogy of geeky maths delights, guaranteed to show you how to win the lottery.

Tatts Group

I have bought precisely one lottery ticket in my life. I was fifteen and it was technically illegal. Luckily, I won jack shit.

I gave up, because you'd have to be stupid to buy a lottery ticket. Or so I keep telling myself.

Do you buy lottery tickets? If so, the following conversation may sound familiar to you, especially if your name is Bob.

"Hiya Bob, what brings you to the local newsagent where I buy my pornography."

"Hey Cedric, I'm just picking up my weekly quickpick."

"Tattslotto, eh? Did you know that the odds of winning Tattslotto are more than eight million to one against? Eight million!"

"I think I heard something like that. Still, you've got to be in it to win it."

"Uh uh. Sure, someone will probably win, but, statistically speaking, it is virtually impossible for you to win. You don't buy Powerball too, by any chance? "

"Er, sometimes, if there's a jackpot."

"Fifty five million to one*. Fifty five! Million! Man, you are such a Sucker. You won't catch me throwing my money away on this delusion. Those odds are seriously crazy. Did you know that the chance of getting hit by lightning is only one in 1.6 million? Know anyone who has been hit by lightning? Ha ha! Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe that the latest issue of Brazilians get brazilians is out."

"Right then. See you later, Prick**."

Cedric seems like a nice enough guy, and I like calculating big numbers and have as much interest in the goings-on behind the curtains at beauty salons as the next man, but the thing is, those odds are not true - or at least not honest. How could they be? It is a ruse invented by the anti-fun brigade. I mean, c'mon? Multiple people win these lotteries nearly every week.

Where then, do the odds above come from? Are they:

The odds of any particular person winning the lottery?
The chance of an average ticket winning the lottery?
The lifetime chance of winning for a regular lottery ticket purchaser?
The odds that a single game will win?

Of course it is the last one, not because it is in any way meaningful, but because it is the biggest number that can be concocted. The thing is, you can't even buy just one game when you play Tattslotto or Powerball. The minimum number of games you can purchase is four, and therefore the worst odds you can possibly get from a single Tattslotto ticket is actually two million to one, and Powerball likewise fourteen million to one. Most people who play the lottery buy multiple games and play regularly, often for many years.

"How about some realistic odds, Prick?"

OK.

I have invented a man - let's call him Mr Sucker. He buys a Tattslotto quickpick at the local newsagency every week for his adult life, which just happens to be exactly 50 years. What are his chances of winning? I can tell you upfront that they are a crapload better than 1 in 8 million, although, to be honest, they still kind of suck.

A regular quickpick is $7.85 and gives Mr Sucker twelve games. His chance of winning each week is therefore 12 in 8,145,060, or 1 in 678,755, for a payout of, on average, about $1 million. But that is just 1st division. If Mr Sucker gets five right and a supplementary, then he could win 2nd division and a cool $10,000, and so on down to 6th division (two numbers and a supplementary), where he basically gets his money back plus a scratchy for the wife. And he gets these same odds every week for 50 years.

Each of his tickets gives him the following approximate odds.

Division 1 - 1 in 679,000
Division 2 - 1 in 57,000
Division 3 - 1 in 3,000
Division 4 - 1 in 68
Division 5 - 1 in 25
Division 6 - 1 in 12

Each year, his odds of winning 1st division are around 1 in 13,000. I wouldn't bet my Millennium Falcon on it, but when you look at the odds this way, you start to get a different perspective on the chances of winning. Each year, he is more than 99% likely to win at least one prize, he has a two in three chance of winning division 5 ($20) and will probably win division 4 (about $30) every two years or so.

Over his lifetime, the odds of winning at least once are:

Division 1 - 1 in 262
Division 2 - 1 in 22
Division 3 - 1 in 0.7
Division 4 - 1 in 10^-17
Division 5 - 1 in 10^-47
Division 6 - 1 in 10^-100

These are the real odds that matter. The ones that keep the punters coming back for more, week in week out. As you can see, Mr Sucker is odds on to win division 3 at least once, and is guaranteed to win many prizes. In fact, if we want to talk big numbers, the chance of him not winning at least one division 4 prize is 1 in 100 trillion, and the chance of him not winning division 6 at least once is 1 in a googol, and that is a damn big number. And on top of all that, he actually has a chance of winning first division. It's a small chance, but a real chance.

So maybe Mr Sucker isn't such a sucker after all. He will undoubtedly win many prizes, but, overall, how much money is he likely to win or lose? Well, over 50 years, we can actually say this with some confidence.

Part two: The Payout, coming soon.

++++

Incidentally, the 1 in 1.6 million chance of being struck by lightning is, I think, actually the chance of being killed by lightning in any one year (about 10 people in Australia), although I couldn't find a good source for this. The lifetime chance is more like 1 in 20,000, while the chance in a weekly Tattslotto cycle is a whopping 1 in 83 million. What do you think of that, Prick?

*In the U.S., Powerball odds are 1 in 195 million.
** The conversation doesn't seem nearly as nasty when you realise that their names are Bob Sucker, and Cedric Prick.

Bolt Cola - now with 10% less carbon pollution!

2011-05-31T21:23:00.001+10:00

Melbourne columnist, broadcaster and prominent climate change denialist* Andrew Bolt likes Coke. He also has a television show called The Bolt Report. On this television show he has a segment called "Spin of the Week". On this week's show his spin of the week was "carbon pollution". Here is the transcript.

And to our spin of the week. You’ve heard a thousand times that to stop global warming we’ve got to cut our emissions or, as the urgers now put it.

[this is followed by footage of various politicians repeatedly saying "carbon pollution"]

Carbon pollution? Now that phrase is meant to make you think of dirty soot, but it’s a lie. They aren’t talking about carbon, but carbon dioxide, which isn’t black stuff but invisible gas [breathes out]. And carbon dioxide isn’t pollution but plant food for photosynthesis. Now look, this is the sound of carbon dioxide [cracks a can of Coke open] and if that really was pollution would I do this? [takes a mouthful] Ahhh.

Yes, he really did say "ahhh".

It was pretty funny.

I study pollution for a living. The two big ones in my field are nitrogen pollution and phosphorus pollution. These come in various forms, often from fertilisers, and when they end up in the water they cause eutrophication and toxic algal blooms. This is bad.

They are also plant food.
They are also in Coke.
Continuing the theme on his blog, Bolt poses the following question.

With Julia Gillard taxing the emissions caused by the packaging and gas in the drink itself, as well as on the petrol used to bring the Coke to you and the power to cool it, how much more will a can of Coke cost?

For some odd reason he throws this question out there but leaves us hanging on the answer. If this is the game changer he implies that it is, surely Mr Bolt's argument would be even more persuasive with a figure attached. Very strange. Maybe he just finds maths hard.

I like maths, so I decided to work it out for him.

Take the carbon footprint of 170g of CO₂ that Bolt quotes on his blog
add the approximately 2.2 g of CO₂ in the drink itself (from here)
Take a carbon price of $26 a tonne that Ross Garnaut recommends in his latest report
and spin.

The result.

172.2 g CO₂ x 10^-6 tonne g^-1 x $26 tonne^-1 = $0.004 per can of Coke

Does that answer your question, Mr Bolt?

++++

An interestng factoid I came across while researching this was the etymology of the word pollution. It is first known from about 1340, and was then exclusively used for "discharge of semen other than during sex". Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase

and if that really was pollution would I do this? [takes a mouthful]

Ahhh.

*More precisely, he is a global-warming-is-happening-but-we-don't-know-what-is-causing-it-and-even-if-it-is-us-it's-probably-not-worth-the-cost-of-mitigating-it-ist, but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

The end is still nigh, goddamit!

2011-05-26T21:22:00.001+10:00

There has been a lot of misinformation bouncing around about the end of the world and how it was supposed to be on the 21st of May and how stupid those people who believed it were and how funny it was when it didn't happen and how even more hilarious it was to go up to the believers afterwards and say "cheer up, it's not the end of the world".

Everybody, believer or not, just needs to chill. It hasn't happened yet, but it will.

The actual date for the end of the world is the 21st of October this year, and it always has been. Harold Camping and I have been saying this for months yet nobody seems to have listened. People have simply been misinterpreting the myriad billboards posted around the world. You'll have seen them, they are the ones with a guy crapping in the corner and the seal of approval from The Bible.

Judgment Day has different meanings depending on what religion you follow. For some (the Cameronites for example), Judgment Day is the day robots become self aware, realise that humans are a threat and set about wiping them out. For others (Christians, for example), Judgment Day is the day Jesus comes back to earth and starts kicking some serious arse, the dead rise, and God lays down his final judgment (at least according to Wikipedia, and, I think, the bible, although I'm not 100% sure about that).

Revelations 42:9. And he proclaimed in an unconvincing accent, "I'll be back".

It's not the end of the world! It's the beginning of the end, but not the end. Harold Camping is still right, mostly, and if you don't pull your finger out and start praying like hell, eternal damnation awaits.

So what happened? Where were the predicted massive earthquakes around the world? Where were all the zombies I was so looking forward to chainsawing?* Where was the judgment?

Well, the good Reverend Camping has realised that God is a modern kind of guy, and all this fire and brimstone business is, like, so Old Testament. No, God has taken a different, more sophisticated approach to the End of Days.

If you live in Melbourne you will remember that the department store Myer quietly opened it's refurbished flagship in January, yet the official opening didn't happen until March. This is a common practice in retail, and is called a soft opening. It allows all of the new features to be thoroughly tested so that the official, Grand Opening then goes off without a hitch.

God has taken a similar path.

Instead of all of the bad stuff happening on the first day, and then everyone having to sit around twiddling their thumbs until October, he'll be rolling out the nasties progressively over the next few months. Perhaps a tornado or two in the United States, a zombie uprising in Prague, or me going on a murderous rampage after inadvertently catching a few minutes of the Oprah finale. Pretty much every bad thing that happens from now until the 21st of October is God warming up for the apocalypse, and you're all invited.

That is my take on it, but Harold Camping is now saying that because God is so merciful, he isn't going to do anything until the last minute and then BAM, we're all fucked.

Seriously, pull it out now.

*Please don't tell me I've been waisting my time playing video games for all these years.

Ham-fisted cancer scare

2011-05-26T00:54:00.000+10:00

Full disclosure upfront: I like meat. It tastes good. I like steak, ham, salami and sausages. A lot. They are delicious.

They also cause cancer, dammit! Bowel cancer... cancer with shit in it.

Red meat 'increases risk of bowel cancer' - cries the Herald Sun

Warning to stay out of ham's way - puns the Sydney Morning Herald

No ham, say cancer experts - moans The Age

I had a strange sense of déjà vu (is there any other kind?) when reading these headlines. And not without reason.

The World Cancer Research Fund UK has just published a 855 page report on the best available evidence for preventing bowel cancer. This is an update to a 2007 report.

The new report, or should I say the press release*, makes a number of statements about whether particular nutritional and lifestyle factors either increase or decrease the likelihood of developing bowel cancer, or whether there is insufficient evidence. One such statement is:

For red and processed meat, findings of 10 new studies were added to the 14 studies analysed as part of the 2007 Report. The Panel confirmed that there is convincing evidence that both red and processed meat increase bowel cancer risk.

So, nothing new really, just confirming what we already knew. And, if you look more closely at the report (I didn't but these guys did), the stated risks from red and processed meats are actually slightly lower than they were in the previous report.

Is it the advice they give that's new, then? Nup. The advice to restrict weekly intake of red meat to 500g and to avoid processed meats has not changed.

In fact, the barely mentioned (in the press) major new finding of this report is actually a good news story.

The Expert Panel behind the CUP’s judgements also concluded that the evidence that foods containing dietary fibre reduce bowel cancer risk has become stronger since the publication of the 2007 report. They considered the evidence sufficient to strengthen the conclusion that foods containing fibre protect against bowel cancer from “probable” to “convincing”.

Now that is news! Pass me another Weat-Bix! Another notch in fibre's arrow of goodness! But they bury this information in a story that is mostly not, in fact news at all. Why? Because meat is a polarising topic (vegans hate it and Matt Preston loves it**). Fibre, not so much. A story about meat causing cancer will be widely read. A story about fibre preventing cancer, not so much.

Unless there was a catchy headline. May I suggest:

Abbott and Turnbull throw support behind fibre

It might require a couple of phone calls to make sure it is true, but I reckon it would be well worth the effort (and, surely, I'd be one-third of the way to a Walkley).

Funnily enough, one article that isn't going to win a Walkley award is the Herald Sun article mentioned earlier. Not only is the headline super dull, but the first line of the article reads...

EATING less red meat could prevent 6000 cases of Australia's second deadliest cancer every year, experts claim.

Which is wrong. Way wrong. What the experts in fact claim - in the very same article and elsewhere - is that 43% of cases (around 6,000 cases per year in Australia, although the percentage is based on UK data) could be prevented if people "ate less meat and more fibre, drank less, maintained healthy weight and kept active".

So very wrong.

* I won't blog about anything unless I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.
** I wonder how his bowels are holding up?

It's the (fuel) economy, stupid!

2011-05-19T23:06:00.001+10:00

Have you ever bought a new car, admired the impressive fuel economy figures plastered over the front window, got the car home, driven it around for a few months and realised that it is almost impossible to reach those fuel economy figures doing anything like normal driving? Yeah, me too.

I have always assumed that the fuel economy figures were based on some kind of track - one that simulates both city and driving conditions - and that the good people from the government testing laboratories put on their grandpa hats and driving gloves and diligently drive the cars around the track for a few hundred kilometres whilst monitoring how much fuel they are using.

WRONG.

Turns out that rather than a track, it is an indoor rolling-road dynamometer (a glorified treadmill for cars) that the cars are "driven" on. And how far are these cars driven? A grand total of 11 km over 20 minutes. That's right, to calculate urban, extra-urban and combined fuel economy figures, most cars will use less than 1 litre of fuel.

(from http://www.greenvehicleguide.gov.au)

OK that's not, technically, exactly right*. They test at least three cars. So for most cars, the testers will burn through at least 2 L of fuel getting the fuel economy figures. Impressed?

I assume that the test is precise enough to give accurate, relative fuel consumption values over a range of vehicles but it's just, you know, a little disappointing. I was also worried that because the test is run without the car actually moving, there is no wind resistance and the aerodynamics of the car are therefore not taken into account. So I read the Vehicle Standard (Australian Design Rule 81/02 - Fuel Consumption Labelling for Light Vehicles) 2008** and, actually, not only do they account for wind resistance, but also rolling resistance. These are combined into a term called the running resistance, and the dynamometer is set up to provide this resistance, which varies depending on the speed. Actually, I take back my criticism; that is pretty cool.

I guess it's not so much that the testing conditions are fabricated to make it impossible to reach those economy figures, it's just that the roads are full of lead-footed, over-loading, non-tyre-pressure-checking, air-conditioner-overusing, unnecessary-roof-rack-installing wankers, with you, me and anyone bigger than me being the only exceptions.

Thanks to the latest issue of Choice Magazine for the heads up.

*Which therefore means it is, technically, dead wrong.

**Appendix B: Annex 7: Section 6 if you are interested. You probably aren't.

I am so smart, S-M-R-T, I mean SMEs

2011-04-19T22:46:00.000+10:00

I wonder who first realised this was kind of a silly idea?

FUNDING AVAILABLE FOR DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION SUSTAINING DRINK

SMEs are invited to submit proposals for the development of a pleasant-tasting, low-priced drink that will enable secondary school students to work safely and with sustained alertness all day.

Was it the high school students who came up with the idea in the first place?
Was it the teacher who sent the proposal to the Victorian Department of Education?
Was it the bureaucrat in the Department of Education (Western Metropolitan Region) who asked the Department of Business and Innovation to help develop the proposal?
Was it the departmental manager who agreed to fund the project?
Was it the underling who put together the TRS (Technology Requirement Specification)?
Was it the poor sod who wrote the advertisement that appeared in Melbourne newspapers last Saturday?
Or was it the education minister Martin Dixon, after a journalist gleefully rang him to let him know?

It's either an hilarious prank, or it's all just a little bit embarrassing. A phone call or two by any one of these people might, perhaps, have prevented a few red faces (and, no doubt, some harshly worded memos).

Health experts said the proposal was so weird it sounded like a hoax.

Australian Medical Association state president Harry Hemley said: ''The most important thing is children get to bed early, have a good diet and don't watch too much TV or play too many computer games."

It's really not that this was the stupidest idea in the world, on the face of it. Kids do need to concentrate at school or they'll end up in a dead-end public service job writing proposals for the development of pleasant-tasting, low-cost drinks. It is, however, a clear example of how government initiatives can and do get funded without following The Crapologist's rule #27*

Ask an expert. None of this would've happened if they'd been there to keep you from acting stupid.

*Apologies to Homer Simpson for bastardising one of his Best. Quotes. Ever. Twice.

Think of the children

2011-04-12T13:44:00.000+10:00

I held this post off while I waited to see if I could get it published on the Screen Play blog on theage.com.au. Mission successful. Incidentally, I've been getting some excellent comments, including a couple from Barbara Biggins herself. It's been a lot of fun and makes me realise how great it would be to write a blog that people actually engage with. Oh well.

First published in theage.com.au, April 12, 2011.

Think of the children

The debate over an R18+ rating for computer games in Australia reminds me of the republican debate (and not just that the letter R is prominent in both). It is inevitable that we will become a republic, and it is just as inevitable that we will get an R18+ rating for games, yet there will always be a vocal and powerful group of "concerned citizens" hell bent on going to their graves opposing it. Given the age of most anti-R advocates (both kinds), this is a distinct possibility.

Barbara Biggins, CEO of the Australian Council of Children and the Media this week published an opinion piece on the ABC website complaining that proponents of an adult rating are cynically manipulating public opinion by claiming that the introduction of an R18+ rating would, in fact, protect children because many games that, under the present system, would get rated MA15+ would instead get rated R18+. These would then be off-limits to children (hurrah!). Her main gripe is that the supporters of an R18+ rating have co-opted the opposer's (her) main argument ("Won't somebody please think of the children?"). She is not happy.

She also makes some misleading claims about the psychological effects of video game violence, such as"desensitisation, loss of empathy, a lack of appreciation of the real life consequences of violence, increases in risk taking activities" etc. These particular claims are dealt with nicely in a follow up piece by psychologist Christopher Ferguson, and I won't repeat that here. I'm more interested in her argument that the MA15+ rating system is bad, but an R18+ classification would not fix this.

Biggins claims

Many of the 80 per cent of Australians who agreed that there should be an R18+ classification for computer games (Galaxy 2010) did so because they believed that this would provide better protection for children from inappropriate violent content.

She provides no evidence for this. The survey results are, however, publicly available, and quite illuminating. There were seven questions asked. For brevity, I will only state the percentage who agree with each statement.

Adults would know that a game classified R18+ is clearly unsuitable for children - 91%
Adults in Australia should be able to access the same computer games as adults in other countries - 66%
Playing violent games results in real life violence - 63%
Adults should not be prevented from playing games with adult content, including those that may have sexually explicit content, simply because they are unsuitable for children - 62%
If there was an R18+ classification for games it would be difficult for parents to stop children from accessing those games - 70%
Computer games should be classified differently, because you play them, not just watch them - 59%
Should there be an R18+ classification category for computer games in Australia? 80%

My interpretation of these results is that most Australians think that we should have an R18+ rating for games, even though they should not be played by children (Q1), and even though children will probably play them anyway (Q5), and even though playing violent games results in real life violence (Q3). This is the opposite of what Biggins is claiming. If the pro-gaming lobby is trying to manipulate the argument to a "protect the kids" rather than an "adult choice" line, then based on this survey they have failed.

The minister for Home Affairs and Justice, Brendon O'Connor, last year released a list of 47 games that were rated MA15+ in Australia. All except one (Uncharted 2) were rated R18+ in Europe and M17+ in the U.S., and around half were rated for adults only in the U.K. and New Zealand. Biggins argues:

There was no proposal or question on the table about changing the classification criteria for games at the MA15+ or any lower levels. If the R18+ proposal were accepted, it would simply mean that higher level games would be legalised.

Except that Brendan O'Connor says:

If the new category is introduced, it could result in computer games that are currently classified MA15+ being reclassified R18+, providing a new level of protection for children.

And he would know.

The irony of this debate is that the current rating system makes us the most liberal country in the world for access to high impact content for children, but the least liberal when it comes to access to high impact content for adults.

The scary thing is that not only is Biggins against an R18+ rating, but she also believes that we should return to the games classification system of 1999, where an MA15+ rating only allowed “depictions of realistic violence of medium intensity”, unlike the current system which allows violence of strong impact, if in context. If we returned to this old system, it is likely that 46 of the most popular games of the last few years would be refused classification. Youch!

On the upside, I'd still have Uncharted 2.

"Interest Free" not as interesting as it sounds

2011-03-30T23:21:00.002+11:00

I am interested in interest, and my interest in interest was recently piqued when I saw a promotion for Sydney's Furniture & Bedding.

NO DEPOSIT. INTEREST FREE! 28 MONTHS^*

Free for 28 months! Sounds wonderful. Nice one Sydney! I've never shopped there myself, but I am told that their furniture is great. Perhaps I should check them out. But hold on a sec, what does that incredibly small asterisk next to the 28 signify? I'd better check the small print. After all, I suppose there is a slight possibility that there could be fees and charges that aren't prominently displayed in the massive banner advertisement.

fees and charges apply and are available on application

drat!

My interest started to wain, so I instead visited the website of Australia's biggest provider of interest free terms, Harvey Norman, where they are a little more forthcoming.

So what is the deal with these deals?

Take this hypothetical but imminently realistic situation. I wander into my local Harvey Norman and purchase a $1,000 computer.

"Sir, would you like to take advantage of our 500 days interest free offer?"

No Deposit. No Interest. No Repayments until August 2012

"Why yes I would. How kind. Thank you very much. This must be costing your employer a fortune, eh?"

"Er, yes. A fortune. Here, please fill out this form so I can get my commission."

"There is no pen."

"Oh, yes, that. Here is a knife. We prefer blood."

"Why?"

"I don't know, it just seems, well, more appropriate."

The first thing one needs to understand is that none of these deals are offered by the retailer themselves. Sydney's deal is through HSBC, while Harvey Norman offers a deal through either GO MasterCard, GO Business MasterCard, Buyer’s Edge or GE CreditLine. All of these are fronts for GE Credit and are broadly the same, so I'll focus on GE CreditLine.

When taking up this deal, I am, in fact, signing up for a new credit card. GE Credit has a $25 establishment fee, so that $1,000 computer has now cost me $1,025. It also has a $3.95 per month account servicing fee, so in the 15 months of "No Interest. No Repayments", I will in fact pay an extra $60, bringing my total to $1,085. This is equivalent to paying almost 7% p.a. interest over this period. To be fair, up to this point this is not that bad a deal, compared with a personal loan or standard credit card**.

And then my "No Interest. No Repayments" period ends. If I am smart, I will immediately pay the full amount, close the account, cut up the card and invest in an emu farm. But maybe things are a little tight this month, the iPad 3 just got released or I have to post bail, and I don't pay it off straight away. Now it starts to get expensive. The interest rate is 29.99% - outrageous even by credit card company standards. Plus, my $3.95 monthly fee continues until I get my debt below $10. If I take an extra year to fully pay off this crappy, now totally out-of-date computer, then I am looking at paying around $200 more, pushing my total cost to around $1,300.

And don't forget that these deals are always on the ticketed price, and I probably could have saved a couple of hundred bucks by doing a deal at a different retailer.

In short, these interest free deals are not a generous offer from you friendly local retailer. They are an inducement to get you to sign up to a new, grossly overpriced credit card.

Interesting.

**It is of course shithouse compared with paying cash, but who buys anything with money they already have anymore. Chumps, that's who.

Final statement by the Journal of Cosmology: Waaaaaaaah!!! Also, buy our book

2011-03-21T22:30:00.001+11:00

Alas, all things must come to end. It is with great sadness that I must report that the special series of comically paranoid press releases from the Journal of Cosmology (JOC) have finished, forever. On the upside, they go out with a bang.

Final Statement by the Journal of Cosmology on the Hoover Microfossil-Meteorite Discovery

All Roads Lead to the Obama White House

This latest statement is almost all in bold, so you can tell that, this time, they are serious. Read it (scroll down, down, down - the website still sucks). It goes on a bit, as usual, but in summary, the President of the United States of America is behind the plot to destroy the reputation of everyone involved in the Richard Hoover paper. Oh, yes!

On Friday, March 18, 2011, Dr. Rudolf Schild, Editor-in-Chief of JOC spoke at length with Richard Hoover and learned that the White House, i.e. the offices of President Obama, became a party to this issue almost immediately after the story broke. The exact nature of this involvement is unknown to us.

A lot of the rest of the statement is a classic straw man argument. They make great pains to point out that "Hoover's data is accurate", and nobody has proven that the data isn't accurate, and therefore they "...believe the data is real. The implications profound" (grammar still isn't their forte). The thing is, none of the commentaries I saw claimed that the data was faked. They complain about the interpretation, not the data.

The editors of Science and Nature were, sadly, "uncooperative", following the JOCs generous offer to form a scientific commission to examine these claims.

Finally, though, I think we get to the point; the point of this whole, embarrassing exercise.

The Hoover data, by itself, does not mean life on Earth came from other planets. It simply means we are not alone--and the implications are staggering. However, based on the evidence compiled in an inexpensive book, "The Discovery of Alien ExtraTerrestrial life" and which includes Hoover's discovery and landmark paper, and the discoveries of other independent scientists, the conclusions are threefold:

We are not alone. Life is everywhere. Life on Earth, came from other planets.

That's right folks, for just $48 you can get the full story, all condensed into just 480 pages. I can see the reviews now. One of the coauthors just lost his job, so I expect he'll be hoping to sell a few copies.

"Lucid and poetic"

"Contains mostly sentences"

"Earth-shatteringly paradigm shifting"

"Caveat emptor"

I think I'll pass on this book, and instead save up for some hot pokers to jam into my eyeballs.

But, like I said at the top, the JOC have had enough:

It is the intention of JOC to say no more about the Hoover paper and to ignore all further inquiries;

But wait! What's this?

unless backed into a corner and forced to respond.

We can only hope.

Is there life on Mars?

2011-03-17T00:27:00.000+11:00

Famed NASA astrobiologist, Richard Hoover, has been hunting meteorites and extremeophiles in the frigid Antarctic for over 10 years. To the amazement of all, what this treasure hunt has uncovered is alien life: Fossils of ancient bacteria which hailed from colonies which thrived on comets, moons, and other planets.

Finally, definitive proof of life on other planets. I've been waiting for this since, well, the last time scientists discovered definitive proof of life on other planets.

In case you didn't notice, I was being sarcastic. The Journal of Cosmology, on the other hand, is almost certainly not being sarcastic with their press release:

In a world-wide exclusive, this startling, paradigm busting research, and the pictures to back up these claims, has been published in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Carl Gibson of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at Scripps Institute and the University of California at San Diego had this to say: "Dr. Hover has provided the world with extraordinary evidence to back up extraordinary claims. This discovery completely changes our perspective of the nature of life and our place in the Universe, The world will never be the same."

Extraordinary evidence to back up extraordinary claims? Truthfully, I have no idea about the extraordinariness of this evidence. I am not an astrobiologist and I have no experience with "the most advanced micro-scanning technology in the world". I know a little more than most about cyanobacteria, but as far as I am aware, they evolved on Earth around three billion years ago, and that is where it ends, or should I say, begins.

Also, I haven't read the paper.

The Journal of Cosmology, for all of their grandstanding, is not a real scientific journal. It might have allusions of grandeur, but these are not backed up by any real facts. For one, look at the journal's response to the criticism that they have received over this paper. The first official post-publication statement from this "prestigious academic journal" included the sub-heading

Have the Terrorists Won?

You can read the whole thing on their spectacular website* (scroll down, have a giggle, and then scroll down some more). The first two sentences are not even sentences.

The Journal of Cosmology is free, online, open access. Free means = No money.

It then goes into great detail explaining how prestigious they are, but also how they are different to other journals because they "do not reject great papers because we disagree with them as is the habit of other periodicals". This is the classic conspiracy theory favoured by fringe - and by fringe I mean shit - scientists. It is not true. If this research truly showed the first conclusive evidence for extraterrestrial life, then it would be published in Nature or Science, but probably Nature. I have no doubt about this. They would be all over it.

The Journal of Cosmology must have realised that this first statement was a bit over the top, so they toned it down for the second statement.

Open Letter to the Editors of Science & Nature
The Journal of Cosmology Proposes a Scientific Commission,
Established Co-Jointly with Science and Nature,
To Investigate & Confirm the Validity of the Hoover Paper

It starts out with a variation of the Galileo Gambit. This is a particularly lame argument.

In 1584, Giordano Bruno published "Of Infinity, the Universe, and the World" and wrote: "There are innumerable suns and an infinite number of planets which circle around their suns as our seven planets circle around our Sun." According to Bruno, we are unable to see these planets and suns "because of their great distance or small mass." On February 19, 1600 Bruno was tortured and burned at the stake by the Inquisition for publishing these claims which contradicted established "scientific" dogma.

The next paragraph contains some mild hyperbole

The publication of Richard Hoover's paradigm shattering discovery of microfossils within carbonaceous meteorites, unleashed an ugly storm of violent, histrionic invective not seen since the Middle Ages when they burned scientists for making discoveries that threatened the established order.

It goes on like that for quite some time. It's quite entertaining, but the entire premise of the letter is wrong. A scientific commission to investigate and confirm the validity of a paper? Sorry Dr Schild, but that's not how science works. It might be how "science" works, but it is not how science works. The validity of the paper is being checked, right now, by hundreds of highly qualified experts. Some of them will repeat the experiments, or look at the same samples in different ways. As with all scientific findings, these findings will be validated or rejected by people doing science, and writing their own papers. Peer review doesn't stop at the time of publication.

Science and Nature are the two most prestigious journals in the world, by a fair margin. To think that they would be convinced to climb into bed with a previously little known journal with a possibly crazy editor seems to me a little ambitious, on par with thinking that some interesting patterns in a rock are proof of extraterrestrial life. Having said that, both journals are also total media-craving sluts, so who knows? Either way, I look forward to more of Dr Schild's musings.

Eric Idle provides the perfect summation

So pray that there's intelligent life, somewhere out in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth.

I'm pretty sure that this whole episode is an elaborate prank, two years in the making, and somewhere, someone is pissing themselves that we all fell for it.

The Crapologist is free, online, open-access. And remember "Free means = No money".

*Check out the hit counter, which is blank because it only has room for ten million hits, and they had had over 14 million just in the first couple of weeks of March. The counter now looks like a prison cell with good taste and functionality chained up behind those bars.

Bust a cap in your plan

2011-03-09T22:45:00.000+11:00

How does your friendly local telecommunications company jack up their prices without jacking up their prices? This week, Telstra showed us one way.

TELSTRA will start charging all long-distance and mobile calls in one-minute blocks later this month, after moving to 30 second blocks two years ago.

What kind of difference does this make? Let's use maths to work it out. Assume that calls cost one dollar per minute. Each full minute will cost the same regardless of whether you are charged for 30 second blocks, one minute blocks or even one second blocks. That final minute, though, is where the scam kicks in. If you are charged in one second blocks, maths says you will pay an average of 50c for that final minute (or part thereof). If you are charged in 30 second blocks, you will pay 50c if the call finishes in the first 30 sec, and the full dollar if it's more than 30 seconds, for a maths determined average of 75c. If you are charged in one minute blocks, you will obviously pay the full buckaroonie. In short, Telstra now charges an extra 25c per call. All without increasing their prices. Genius.

Telstra's spokesperson tells us that "The reason behind this is about simplification [and] making [bills] clear, simple and easier for customers to understand". To be fair, charging in one minute blocks is stupid*. It makes no sense at all that a 60 second call should cost the same as a one second call, and half as much as a 61 second call. This is an underhanded ploy to earn more money. But wait

Telstra says only 10 per cent of customers will be affected because most are on so-called bucket plans - paying a fixed amount each month and receiving a value of calling credit - and do not exceed their allocated minutes. Customers on bucket plans are usually less worried about the cost of each call because they have already paid.

Really? According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, 58% of people on capped plans exceed their cap at least once a year. At an extra 25c/call, how many extra people will now exceed their cap? More than none, I expect.

And don't get me started on the word "cap". Cap infers a maximum, but in reality, the mobile phone cap is exactly the opposite. It is the minimum spend. There is no maximum. Dagnammit!

CHOICE and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network have been campaigning to make mobile phone pricing fairer. I heartily endorse this event or product.

*To clarify, if I didn't want to be fair I'd say "charging in one minute blocks is fucking retarded"

The Nightingale Collaboration - neatly clobbering online quacks

2011-03-01T22:41:00.000+11:00

As of today, online quacks in the UK have a reason to be afraid... somewhat afraid. The Advertising Standards Authority has new powers to investigate and punish companies who's websites make bogus claims. Not-at-all-coincidentally, the Nightingale Collaboration (NC) has just launched.

The ASAs new powers include the power to ask search engines to remove ads that link to the dodgy website. These ads are then replaced with ads pointing out how stupid the website is. Superb! Google is a partner, so it looks like it will have real balls.

The NC is specifically aiming to stamp out dodgy health claims. They are running a 'focus of the month' campaign, aiming to eradicate one dodgy health claim at a time. First up is homeopathy. Easy, seeing as any health claim made for a homeopathic product ('nothing' in a pill) is provably wrong. Easier still, the NC website includes a handy set of instructions for submitting a complaint.

Expect a truckload of complaints over the coming months and, just maybe, fewer bogus health claims online. At least in the UK. Temporarily.

I will follow with interest.

You have to be read

2011-01-31T21:16:00.000+11:00

Does writing a science blog that nobody reads make me a real journalist? No, says Tim Radford, "Former Guardian science editor, letters editor, arts editor and literary editor"*. Why not?

Journalists write to support democracy, sustain truth, salute justice, justify expenses, see the world and make a living, but to satisfactorily do any of these things you have to have readers. Fairness and accuracy are of course profoundly important. Without them, you aren't in journalism proper: you are playing some other game. But above all, you have to be read, or you aren't in journalism at all.

Dammit! I'd like to be thought of as a journalist, of sorts, sort of. But the words "you have to be read" have haunted me since I read them.

I have to be read. I want to be read. I need to be read. The question is, how can I be read? I have a theory that will probably not pan out: Write it and they will come. If I produce good content, people will find the blog and link to it, and others will find it, and the cycle will continue. Is that realistic? What I don't want to do is spend my days pimping my blog wherever I can. That is not my way. I am, therefore, probably doomed from the start.

Still, stick to the plan; produce good content. Even though he has sucked my will to live with that one aweful phrase, Radford makes some good points in his 25 commandments for journalists. And, as he admits, "I realised that when stories that I had tried to write turned out wrong, it was because I'd broken one of my own rules." For me, the one that says it all is number 6

And here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says "Nobody has to read this crap."

Touché. A second article came to my attention too, this one by novelist Adam Haslett, called "The art of good writing", which is not really a review of the book "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One" by Stanley Fish. In an article about the perfect sentence, the one that stood out for me was the following:

The writing of complete sentences for aural pleasure as well as news is going the way of the playing of musical instruments – it’s becoming a speciality rather than a means most people have to a little amateur, unselfconscious enjoyment.

Trying. Hard. Not. To. Make. Joke. About. Aural. Pleasure.

This, then, is my quest. To try and write interesting articles that are a pleasure to read, which are then read. In short, I want to aurally pleasure you.

Thanks to Nick Miller** for the links

*Which I suspect qualifies him as a real journalist.
**Also a real journalist.

Brain-Body Performance Institute - Nintendo's creepy half-brother

2011-01-18T00:12:00.000+11:00

Executive brain training hit the news this week...

OFFICE workers will undergo brain training to become ''executive athletes'' in an Australian-first clinical trial aimed at making staff smarter, healthier and more productive.

You know? Just like the Nintendo DS Brain Training games (RRP $49.95). The program being spruiked in this article is the one run by Paul Taylor of the Brain-Body Performance Institute.

We take the latest research from the disciplines of Neuroscience, Physiology and Psychology and blend it with the lessons of the Armed Forces and Elite Athletes to create programs that are both easy to follow and powerfully effective.

So you're saying I'll also need a Wii Fit Plus (RRP $159). Assuredly, though, my "Biological Age" ("as seen on the Biggest Loser"), bares no resemblance whatsoever to my Wii Fit Age? Or my Brain Age?

I'm probably being unfair though. I am sure that the testing developed by Mr Taylor and neuropsychologist Dr Roy Sugarman is far more sophisticated than those silly Nintendo 'games'. Why not try this simple test? Pick which of these lines is from Mr Taylor, and which is from the website of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training.

Ten years ago we thought the brain wasn't very changeable, but we know now it is completely malleable, just like the body. And if you want to get the most out of it, you need a good training plan and you need to stick to it.

Everyone knows you can prevent muscle loss with exercise, and use such activities to improve your body over time. And the same could be said for your brain.

The Brain-Body Performance Institute's website is humorously dressed up in typical life coaching mumbo jumbo. Here is my personal favourite:

...they enter into ‘self-determinism’, a critical stage in the motivation continuum which is characterised as being driven to improve current health and fitness situations

Translated into English = "they decide that they want to get a Wii Fit Plus, and they swear that they'll totally use it everyday".

Oddly (reminder, RRP $49.95), brain training programs are big business:

The trial is part of a growing trend, in which online brain-training programs in the United States have grown into a $US295 million business

Here is what you do. Develop a computer based IQish test, and then develop a training program so that participants get better at your test. You know? Exactly like Nintendo does.

Elements of the program also sound eerily similar to the embarrassment that is Brain Gym, a program which was popular in schools across the UK a few years ago.

Brain Gym is a set of perfectly good fun exercise break ideas for kids, which costs a packet and comes attached to a bizarre and entirely bogus pseudoscientific explanatory framework.

Still, this new training program is probably good for a laugh, and if I worked for SAP I'd sign up. Actually, I might first ask a few questions about this "Biological Age" testing:

Mr Taylor's trial will start in March with 60 of SAP's Melbourne staff, who will have stress hormone levels measured, undergo genetic testing, brainpower assessments and bio-age tests to measure their real age against their health age.

Genetic testing? A multinational software company is going to allow a personal trainer access to the individual results of the most personal of all homonyms of jeans. The mind boggles. Admittedly this particular study is being run with some Swinburne University researchers, so it may be that someone on the ethics committee at the university keeps some kind of cap on the amount of personal genetic information that is passed around. However, Mr Taylor's websites contain the portentous line

GENETIC SCREENING

coming soon...

This, my friends, is a VBI (very bad idea).

Oh celebrities! Will you ever learn?

2011-01-06T21:59:00.000+11:00

The excellent UK science charity Sense About Science have released their Celebrities and Science 2010 pamphlet, part of an ongoing campaign to correct some of the pseudoscientific crap spouted by various celebrities.

Each year at Sense About Science we review the odd science claims people in the public eye have made – about diets, cancer, magnets, radiation and more – sent in to us by scientists and members of the public. Many of these claims promote theories, therapies and campaigns that make no scientific sense. We ask scientists to respond, to help the celebrities realise where they are going wrong and to help the public to make sense of celebrity claims.

It has short explanations from experts in the various fields as to why these people are kooky, and is well worth a look, with simple explanations doled out by experts in the various fields. This year's collection includes a variety of food related celebrity silliness, such as Sir Cliff Richards' blood group diet, and Olivia Newton John's insistence on taking "digestive enzymes with every meal". Power Balance bracelets ($60 rubber bands) also get a mention. Disappointingly, my high school crush Julia Sawahla gets called out for, when visiting the tropics, taking homeopathic 'nosodes' instead of anti-malaria tablets; this is exactly the same as doing absolutely nothing.

By far the oddest though, comes from cage fighter Alex Reid with this delightful anecdote:

it’s actually very good for a man to have unprotected sex as long as he doesn’t ejaculate. Because I believe that all that semen has a lot of nutrition. A tablespoon of semen has your equivalent of steak eggs, lemons and oranges. I am reabsorbing it into my body and it makes me go raaaaahh.

although this is spoiled by the party poopers at Sense About Science

Alex... the nutritional content of the ejaculate is really rather small. And it’s worth remembering that unprotected sex might result in pregnancy or the passing on of a sexually transmitted infection.

The main lessons from this exercise are nicely summarised in four dot points:

Nothing is chemical free: everything is made of chemicals, it’s just a case of which ones.
Detox is a marketing myth: our body does it without pricey potions and detox diets.
There’s no need to boost: bodily functions occur without ‘boosting’.
Energy and fitness come from… food and exercise: there are no shortcuts.

Oh celebrities! Will you ever learn?

Do not read!

2010-11-30T22:35:00.001+11:00

If you're a *cough* regular *cough* reader, you might notice a new totally clickable button to the right - "So you've had a threatening letter". This is a new initiative from the Libel Reform Campaign, a U.K. organisation campaigning, oddly enough, for libel reform. The problem lies in the rather draconian libel laws in England, where costs for a court case can easily be hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds, and the odds are stacked way in favour of the claimant (accuser). People and organisations around the world now use the threat of libel in England - regardless of whether the material was written in England or whether either party is English - to silence any criticism of them, as most people will cave and remove the offending material and/or make a public apology rather than risk the horror of the English courts.

Our libel laws allow people accused of funding terrorism or dumping toxic waste in Africa to silence their critics whilst ‘super-injunctions’ stop the public from even knowing that such allegations exist. We need to reform our libel laws now, and that’s why we’re launching a national campaign to persuade our politicians to do so. Jonathan Heawood, Director of English PEN

This sucks, and Sense about Science, Index on Censorship and English PEN have taken it upon themselves to get the law changed, so that the outcomes are fairer and the costs are reduced. It seems to be working too, and it will truly be a great day when I can call someone a cocksucker* with impunity; I'm making a list for just such an occasion. In the meantime, bloggers, journalists, scientists and others will continue to sweat over whether to publish valid criticisms at the risk of being financially ruined by a stupid system in an otherwise lovely country. Hence the "Bloggers and libel law" guide, which is a handy information source for anyone accused of libel, and also a great heads-up for anyone who writes on the web.

Seeing as though I regularly criticise people on this very website, and having followed the cases of Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh with interest, I admit that I was a little concerned for my own skin. I feel much better after reading the guide, however, because I now know that I am fully protected from all risk of libel by the fact that nobody actually reads this blog.

Limitation period is the time limit after you publish something that someone can bring an action for defamation against you. Currently this is one year. In the case of writing published on the Internet the limitation period of one year begins again every time someone clicks on the blog post or online article. This is known as the multiple publication rule.

If you have read this far, please leave a comment along the lines of "I promise not to sue Daryl under any circumstances, even if he accuses me of orally interfering with male chickens. Infact, I will forget everything I just read for a period of exactly one year." Just to be sure.

*the word "cocksucker" may not be considered "fair comment" when the libel reform bill is finally passed, but we can all pray that it will.

CHOICE Shonkys

2010-11-25T21:37:00.001+11:00

The latest edition of CHOICE magazine features the 2010 Shonkys, "the year's dodgiest products, services and companies". This is yet another example of why I wish I worked for CHOICE, dagnammit. Here are some of my favourites:

Nurofen - for producing a range of caplets (for migraine, period pain, back pain etc.) that are in fact, identical, and which cost almost twice as much as Nurofen Zavance, also identical.
Coles - for their Curtis Stone MasterCreations $10 meals, including the $7.76 Coq au Vin, the price of which includes the Coq but not the Vin. CHOICE calls this "The CHOICE Shonky Ten buck blow-out", but I think they should have called it "The CHOICE Shonky for being a coq".
Power Balance - for, well, doing nothing, for $60.
LG - for rigging their fridges so that they went into energy saving mode under official testing conditions, artificially improving their energy star-rating.

Good work CHOICE. Always looking out for the little guy... by kicking the big guy in the nuts just as he's about to stick the little guy's head in the toilet.

Sometimes, however, the little guy doesn't want to be saved, and sticks his own head in the toilet and presses flush. As CHOICE says of Power Balance

After the Australian Skeptics demonstrated on national TV that it didn't do anything, sales skyrocketed.

Can I recommend a Placebo Band instead. Identical, only $2 and 100% guaranteed to work just as well as a Power Balance Bracelet.

For sale: Doubt.

2010-11-22T23:00:00.000+11:00

"Doubt is our product" Internal memo, Brown & Williamson (subsidiary of British American Tobacco), 1969.

Science is hard! I know, dude, from experience. And climate science is really hard! It takes thousands of clever people and huge expense, but great work is being done. Uncertainties remain, however, and they always will.

Denying, or casting doubt on, science is a piece of piss in comparison. Whether it is the health effects of tobacco or DDT, or the severity of acid rain, the ozone hole or anthropogenic global warming, doubt is a commodity, and it is serious business.

U.S. science historian Naomi Oreskes, currently on an Australian tour promoting her new book Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to Global Warming (coauthored with Eric Conway), laid out the tricks in a few simple dot points at her recent presentation at the State Library of Victoria. She calls this "the tobacco strategy", as it was in the arena of big tobacco vs science that these skills were honed by men such as those who founded the George C. Marshall institute and later became key players in the climate change denialist industry. She lists five simple tricks:

Cherry picking
Using data out of context
Personal attacks
Pressuring journalists to "publish the other side"
Finding the tiny handful of dissenting scientists and promoting the hell out of them

And that pretty much covers every argument you will ever hear a global warming denialist make, although I would add a sixth: lying.

To be clear, the facts of global warming are pretty much beyond reasonable doubt, and many of them are not at all new: 1850s, John Tyndall establishes that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas; early 1900s, Svante Arrhenius postulates that burning fossil fuels could increase atmospheric CO₂ and lead to global warming; 1960s, confirmation that atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are increasing; 1979, a consensus position of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that

Climate change will result from man's combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.

And that statement holds true to this day (although it should be changed to "climate change is resulting..."), even though many of the details are still a little vague. As Oreskes puts it

There are big trees of uncertainty in a forest of robust scientific certainty.

What can you see?

Online polls. Seriously?

2010-11-16T23:18:00.000+11:00

"Online poll sends message to Brumby" was the headline on theage.com.au last Friday, followed by the rather startling results of a Victorian election poll, showing the Coalition on 40% support, the Greens on 36% and the Labor party trailing badly on 18%. This seemed odd, given that the Labor party have led every poll I can remember since they came to power over a decade ago, and the Greens never get more than about 15%. What had suddenly changed so much?

An online poll on theage.com.au has sent a message to the Brumby government, with Labor heavily trailing both the Coalition and the Greens.

An online poll? On theage.com.au? This is newsworthy?

I find them incredibly irritating, but The Age loves online polls; it feels like every second article has a poll attached. A quick glance just now shows the following polls linked from their front page

Which party will get your vote in the November 27 Victorian State Election? (still there, 40,000 votes later, with Labor still on 18%)
Do you support Labor's plan to send Year 9 students away from home for two weeks? (50:50)
Do how-to-vote cards influence where you send your preferences? (No)

and from the story of the day

Should Steve be disciplined for his actions? (No)

The Age rightly adds the following disclaimer to each of these polls

These polls are not scientific and reflect the opinion only of visitors who have chosen to participate.

Polls like this serve no purpose other than to give readers the opportunity to participate in some kind of debate, or at least give them the impression that they are participating. They do not even necessarily represent the opinion of the general readership of the site. Poll crashing; when a well-known blogger or such instructs their (potentially) tens of thousands of readers to vote in a particular way, en masse, can devestate polls. Essentially, online polls are a bit of fun for those that are into that kind of thing. There is, however, no excuse for publishing them in an article as if they have a bearing on the coming election.

While not a scientific survey of voters' intentions on November 27, the results of the online poll will concern many Labor supporters as the party attempts to gain a record fourth term in government.

Tomorrow's edition of The Age will feature the latest Nielsen poll, which will give a clear indication of the thoughts of the voting public.

These results are meaningless but we just wanted to scare you a bit, ha ha. Oh, and don't forget to buy our paper tomorrow. I guess they had to do something while they waited an entire day for the results of the real, scientific poll. And what did the latest Nielson poll show? Labor 38%, Coalition 40%, Greens 16%, with Labor leading the Coalition 52% to 48% on a two-party preferred basis.

Professional pollsters use sophisticated techniques to ensure that those they poll cover a representative cross-section of the electorate. Online polls require that participants have the ability to click on a small, round button. They don't even need to know how to read.

I think the best thing we can all do is just ignore these online polls, and they will, quite literally, go away. But this is just my opinion. What do you think? Have your say in the comments, or vote now on the poll on the right.

Publish or Perish

2010-11-11T00:07:00.001+11:00

The above phrase strikes both fear and loathing into the hearts of any scientist, especially one *sob* who is not yet established and does not have a reputation to precede them. Scientists are largely judged on their publication output: the number, quality and impact of these publications is probably the key determinant of career progression. Needless to say, the pressure to publish is immense, and the temptation to cut corners is omnipresent. One way to cut corners is to avoid peer-review, a problematic but “the best we’ve got” process whereby experts in the field review research papers and give their opinions on the quality of the work, and any changes that they think need to be made before it should be published. This is supposed to improve the finished publication and weed out poor quality work or outright wrong work.

How does one avoid this process? Publish in a journal or newsletter that doesn’t have peer review, or write a book, or publish original research on a blog. The problem is, employers aren’t stupid, and other scientists aren’t stupid. If you publish original research in low quality or non-peer-reviewed literature, your research will be either ignored or belittled, as will your reputation. This is what I like to call (ever since I just made it up) WOT publishing: Waste of Time publishing. I’ll give you a few examples that I've come across recently.

VDM verlag is a German publisher that describes itself thus

VDM publishes academic research worldwide - at no cost to our authors. We specialize in publishing theses, dissertations, and research projects. From the large number of research papers that are continuously being completed in higher education, we identify those which - due to their quality and practical relevance - are suitable for publication. In this way, the latest research is conveyed quickly and tailored to the needs of the respective specialist audience.

They also spam researchers offering to publish their books. Recently, my university circulated an email to all researchers with the following warnings about this organisations:

The quality of these books is very low.
They encourage academics to purchase copies of their own text, and appear to gain most of their income from this (“at no cost to our authors”, eh?).
They are not peer reviewed.
They pay abysmal royalties.
This company is becoming more well known and publishing with them makes you (and the university) look like a fool.

InTech - “Open Access publisher in the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine”, uses a slightly different method. It charges an upfront fee of €470 for each “book chapter”, using the open-access model, which is a perfectly legitimate publishing model – where the author pays to allow free access to their research papers – increasingly used in the traditional, peer-reviewed publishing system, that is being bastardised by companies such as this into a form of vanity publishing. I, myself, recently received a rather flattering invitation to publish with them:

You are invited to participate in this book project based on your paper "Digital recordings of gas-vesicle collapse used to measure turgor pressure and cell-water relations of cyanobacterial cells", your publishing history and the quality of your research.

I knew nothing about this company then, and was a little suspicious, having written exactly one paper that mentions hydraulic conductivity, and even then it was only mentioned in a small section, and the results were inconclusive. I ignored the email and moved on with my life. Exactly one week later, a reminder came:

I contacted you by email last week, and since we have not as yet received a response from you, I am taking the liberty of resending as we are aware that you may be engaged in other activities or my message may not have successfully reached you. If you are interested in participating, may I respectfully ask that you respond at your convenience in order to secure your participation in this project.

Which I duly ignored. Then, exactly one week later, I received yet another reminder with the subject “Feedback required”. This time I was a little peeved and did a little snooping into InTech and found a fascinating article by Richard Poynder featuring an interview with the CEO of InTech, or is it Sciyo, or are they the same company? Regardless of that odd situation, the article confirmed my fears that this is not a publisher that I should be submitting articles too, let along paying to take my articles. I then looked into them a bit further, found some interesting titbits, and, somewhat cheekily, perhaps naively, wrote an email reply.

Dear X,

Thank you for your continued invitations to write a chapter for the book "Hydraulic Conductivity". Before I accept this offer, I have a few concerns that I am hoping that you can clear up. I was previously unaware of your organisation, InTech, and I hope that you understand that I need to be fully convinced that I should take the time to write a scientific article to publish with you. No editor is listed for this book. I will need to know the name of the editor so that I can form an opinion of the likely quality of this book. Also, your website says my paper will be indexed and abstracted in major repositories and scientific search engines, yet I searched for a random article from one of your books (Zhiwei Zhao and Helong Jiang (2010). Enzyme-based Electrochemical Biosensors, Biosensors, Pier Andrea Serra (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-7619-99-2, InTech), and it did not appear on Google Scholar, Web of Science or Scirus. Can you explain this? Also, the lack of peer review concerns me. I am a firm advocate of open access, but only when it also adheres to the highest scientific standards. I note that your company does not appear to be a member of OASPA, and therefore there appears to be no independent verification of the standard of your publications. Perhaps I am being presumptive, but it appears to me that this is simply a way for researchers to easily publish poor quality research, for a price, and simply a money making exercise on the part of your company.

If you are able to allay my fears, I would be happy to consider preparing an article for you book. If not, please stop pestering me, and please remove my email address from your database.

Regards,

Daryl Holland.

P.S. The article I mentioned above has a spelling mistake in the first sentence, and the first 17 words are copied word-for-word from the cited article.

And that was that. Well, at least I thought it was, until exactly one week later (yes, it is starting to get a bit creepy), I received a reply.

Dear Dr. Holland,

I will gladly answer Your questions.

And he does answer a couple of them, badly. Apparently the editor is not, and will not be named because

In the past, we have had some organizational difficulties when each of potential author would contact the editor directly.

Like there is something wrong with an author or potential author wanting to talk to the editor of their book. Regarding the quality of the book

...once the abstract will be reviewed and in case there will be a need to make changes, the Book Editor will give You clear instructions

i.e. no proper peer review. Regarding the indexing of articles

All the content from the Sciyo platform is currently being shifted to the main websites of the publishing group – intechweb.org and intechopen.com (our reading platform). That is the main reason why You could not "locate" the mentioned articles.

And I was sent the following two links to prove that they are indexed. The first was simply a Google search for “site:sciyo.com pdf” and was therefore irrelevant, and the second was a Google Scholar search for “Search within articles citing Iwahashi: Robots that learn language: A developmental approach to situated human-robot conversations” which, as far as I could tell, did not refer to a single InTech publication.

In conclusion (unless I receive another email reminder in exactly one week, in which case I may well be killed by a pale, dark-haired Japanese girl), avoid at all costs (especially if that cost is €470), and make that spam filter work for you. I really cannot summarise the situation any better than Phil Davis

Most of the journals in which I aspire to publish never ask me for a manuscript. They don’t need to. They receive thousands of voluntary contributions each year and turn most away.

Dog food

2010-11-01T22:13:00.008+11:00

Recently I sent my dog to a commercial kennel, and as I was chatting with the owner, he asked what kind of dog food I used. The conversation went pretty much like this:

"Mostly dry stuff, with a few leftovers thrown in occasionally"

"What kind of dry food?"

"Whatever's cheap. Usually Pedigree I guess"

"Do you eat McDonald's everyday?"

"No"

"Well that's what you're feeding your dog. Dogs fed on that stuff end up with all kinds of problems as they get older, like liver disease. If you are using dry dog food, buy the most expensive stuff you can find. It still works out pretty cheap in the end. Frankly, you make me sick!"

(I may have made up that last sentence). So I left my dog and went on holiday feeling like a prick and a cheapskate. But then I started to think about it and wondered, is there any evidence that the pricey dog foods are actually any better for dogs than the cheaper one's? I figured a couple of hours of research to justify my tight-arseiness would be time well spent, and if it turned out I was the worst dog parent in the world, well, I suppose I could fix that.

Compare the brand I currently buy from Kmart, Pedigree Real Mince and Vegies (approx. $20 for 12 kg, on special, of course - less than $2/kg), with the one they sell at my local Vet, Hill's Science Diet Adult Lamb Meal & Rice Recipe (about $120 for 15 kg - $8/kg).

First, let's see what they say about their own products.

Pedigree

"... our Adult Complete Nutrition recipe is specially formulated to provide adult dogs with the complete and balanced nourishment they need to live long and healthy lives."

Hill's

"Hill's® Science Diet® Adult Lamb Meal & Rice Recipe dog food provides precisely balanced nutrition to maintain lean muscle and promote digestive health."

Both make pretty much the same claims regarding balanced nutrition, so no help there. What about the ingredients list?

Pedigree

Meat & meat by-products (beef, poultry & lamb); wheat &/or sorghum &/or barley; wheat bran, glycerol, sunflower oil; beet pulp; salt; minerals (including calcium, zinc, iron, potassium); safflower seed; vitamins (including A, C, D3, E, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, B5, B6, folic acid, B12); preservatives; antioxidants and food colourings

Hill's

Lamb Meal, Brewers Rice, Brown Rice, Whole Grain Wheat, Whole Grain Sorghum, Corn Gluten Meal, Animal Fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols and citric acid), Cracked Pearled Barley, Chicken Liver Flavor, Flaxseed, Dried Beet Pulp, Soybean Oil, Potassium Chloride, Iodized Salt, L-Lysine, Choline Chloride, Vitamin E Supplement, vitamins (L-Ascorbyl-2-Polyphosphate (source of vitamin C), Vitamin E Supplement, Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate, Vitamin A Supplement, Calcium Pantothenate, Biotin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Folic Acid, Vitamin D3 Supplement), Taurine, minerals (Ferrous Sulfate, Zinc Oxide, Copper Sulfate, Manganous Oxide, Calcium Iodate, Sodium Selenite), L-Tryptophan, preserved with Mixed Tocopherols and Citric Acid, L-Threonine, Phosphoric Acid, Beta-Carotene, Rosemary Extract

Fairly similar, with meat products first, followed by grains, fats/oils, salt, minerals and vitamins. Hill's certainly has more ingredients listed, but is that better?

Any other claims I should know about?

Pedigree

Omega 3 + 6: Shiny Coat
Dental Kibble: Healthy Teeth and Gums
Beet Pulp: Healthy Digestion
Antioxidants: Immune Support

Hill's

Vitamin C + E: Healthy immune function
High quality ingredients, such as lamb meal: easy to digest
Omega-3 and Omega-6: Healthy skin and radiant coat
High quality lean proteins: lean muscle and ideal body weight
Controlled levels of minerals including sodium, magnesium and phosphorus. Supplemented with taurine and soluble and insoluble fiber: Healthy vital organs

Pretty much the same, yet again. How about the nutritional information

Pedigree

Protein 22.0 %
Fat 10.0 %

Hill's

Protein 24.6 %
Fat 16.8 %

and a bunch of other stuff (carbohydrates, sodium etc.). Interestingly, neither mentions anything about % of recommended daily allowance, because I guess there is no such thing for dogs.

Hill's sells itself as scientific, but what's to say that's not just a marketing gimmick. After all, Mars Inc. (maker of Pedigree) funds the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, "unarguably the world's leading authority on pet care and nutrition", so I can't even separate them on the sciencey stuff.

Interestingly, neither of these companies publicise any actual research publications that give details into their food development, and I couldn't find any using Google Scholar, so we basically have to accept their word for it, or do we. Thankfully, the good people at Choice have looked into the independent research, and they conclude:

Do we need to buy premium pet food? Unless your pet has specific dietary problems, probably not. Any pet food that says it's 'complete and balanced' contains all the required nutrients at appropriate levels for the maintenance of healthy pets.

That'll do me.

Some call me a cheapskate, I call them suckers. Both are probably right.

Watts up with these speakers?

2010-05-12T15:12:00.004+10:00

The Climate Sceptics Party has just announced the Watts Up with the Climate? Australian Tour featuring three prominent sceptics (climate sceptics, not, you know, the real kind, who actually look at the balance of evidence). So who are these speakers? All prominent and well respected climate scientists no doubt. Let's take a look, shall we?

Anthony Watts
A television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air, Anthony Watts operates a weather technology business and runs one of the most popular science blogs on the internet, wattsupwiththat.com. He will present advance results on his surface stations project to photographically survey every one of the 1221 USHCN weather stations in the USA used as a “high quality network” that has fallen into neglect.

"Television meteorologist" is a rather heady title, and seeing as though he has no formal scientific training, I think the better description is "weather presenter", like Livinia Nixon. And I'm sure he wouldn't want you to confuse his weather technology business which makes "weather graphics systems for use on television broadcasts" with the kind of technology that meteorologists use to predict the weather. He does have some nice photos of weather stations, and some analysis suggesting that weather stations near buildings, for example, are hotter than those out in a field. This is important work, because no-one in climatology has ever before taken these problems into account.

David Archibald
An Australian scientist operating in the fields of climate science and cancer research, and the author of “Solar Cycle 24: Why the world will continue cooling and why carbon dioxide won’t make a detectable difference”.

Mr. Archibald received a bachelor of science in 1979, so yes, that means he can call himself a scientist. But what has he been doing since then?

David Archibald is a Perth, Australia-based scientist operating in the fields of cancer research, oil exploration and climate science. After graduating in science at Queensland University in 1979, Mr Archibald worked in oil exploration in Sydney and then joined the financial industry as a stock analyst. Mr Archibald has been CEO of multiple oil and mineral exploration companies operating in Australia. He has published a number of papers on the solar influence on climate, and is a director of the Lavoisier Society, a group of Australians promoting rational science in public policy.

He is also the author of what one commentator labelled "The worst climate science paper ever of all time anywhere" (it is really bad). But what's with the cancer research? I turns out he and others have developed a "a new capsule which may help prostate cancer sufferers", made from "...well know vegetables mainly broccoli and chilli [sic]." Just to let you know, I have also developed a new capsule which may help prostate cancer sufferers, except mine contains two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. I'm pretty sure the two are equally effective.

And last...

David Stockwell, Ph.D.
Former U.S. scientist, living in Emerald, QLD, and author of the book Niche Modeling, David Stockwell presents the “known knowns” of climate change, especially for the Central Highlands environment, mining, pastoral and agricultural industries.

It always seems odd to me when people state their names followed by Ph.D., instead of just using Dr, but who am I to judge? Here is what else he has to say about himself.

After receiving a Ph.D. in Ecosystem Dynamics from the Australian National University in 1992, I worked as a consultant (WHO, Parks and Wildlife, Land and Natural Resources services) until moving to the San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California San Diego in 1997. There I helped to develop computational and data intensive infrastructure for ecological niche modeling mainly using museum collections data with grants from the NSF, USGS and DOT. I developed the GARP (Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production) system making contributions in many fields: modeling of invasive species, epidemiology of human diseases, the discovery of seven new species of chameleon in Madagascar, and effects on species of climate change. I have published in major journals and was judged by the US Immigration Service as an Outstanding Researcher, recognized internationally as outstanding in their academic field.

So he is a legitimate scientist. Not a climate scientist, but a real scientist. However, does anyone think that last sentence is very odd? Next time I want a glowing reference, remind me to ask for one from the US Immigration Service.

Finally, it is only fair to check the contribution of each of these speakers to the vast scientific literature on the causes of climate change. I'll only look at peer reviewed journal articles, because as we all know, real scientists simply do not publish original work in books, newsletters or blogs. As far as I can tell, Watts is unpublished, while Archibald has one paper (see above), and Stockwell has three papers about predicting the effects of climate change on biodiversity, but only one paper regarding actual climate change scenarios. Interestingly, the only two peer reviewed scientific papers that I could find by these presenters both appeared in the journal Energy and Environment. I had not heard of this journal, so I looked it up in the list 20,000+ journals catalogued and ranked by the Australian Government for the purpose of assessing the quality of academic output in Australian Universities. It wasn't there.

Be sure to check out the national tour of ex-TV weatherman, oil prospector and Outstanding Researcher^TM "to hear all sides and make up your own mind".

Posted by Daryl Holland, Ph.D.

Man pisses in bath

2010-05-11T11:23:00.003+10:00

Sometimes I like to rename headlines to more accurately convey the true nature of a story. The original headline from the Sydney Morning Herald is:

How does he live? Starving yogi 'blessed by goddess' astounds doctors

An 83 year old Indian holy man by the name of Prahlad Jani who claims to have lived without food and water for the past 74 years...

...spent a fortnight in a hospital in the western India state of Gujarat under constant surveillance from a team of 30 medics equipped with cameras and closed circuit television.

During the period, he neither ate nor drank and did not go to the toilet.

"We still do not know how he survives," neurologist Sudhir Shah told reporters after the end of the experiment.

It is still a mystery what kind of phenomenon this is.

The long-haired and bearded yogi was sealed in a hospital in the city of Ahmedabad in a study initiated by India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the state defence and military research institute.

To analyse this claim, we need to break it into two parts. Firstly, pretty much anybody can go 15 days without food, so even if that part was true, it is fairly unremarkable. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to go without water for more than a few days, even under the best of conditions, so that is the claim that needs to be analysed.

"(Jani's) only contact with any kind of fluid was during gargling and bathing periodically during the period," G. Ilavazahagan, director of India's Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), said in a statement.

Uh, A bath? They conducted a scientifically rigourous study into a man who claims to drink no water, and they allowed him to gargle and take baths?

Still, I guess if there was a reasonable physiological explanation for this man’s gift, I might give it a bit more credence.

If Jani does not derive energy from food and water, he must be doing that from energy sources around him, sunlight being one," said Shah.

Makes sense. Trees use sunlight as an energy source. Hmmm, but trees also require all kinds of nutrients, and copious amounts of, you guessed it, water.

Alternate headline:

Scientists confuse tree for man; tree enjoys bath

The researchers say that they will publish the full results in a few months. I’ll hold my breath until then, just because I can.

New Scientist fails maths.

2010-04-07T16:49:00.003+10:00

A recent article in New Scientist online (I hope it doesn't/didn't get past the editors into the print version - oh wait, it says Magazine issue 2754, oops!) has the title "Search engine's dirty secret". In it physicist James Clarage explains to us the laws of thermodynamics and does some simple calculations to conclude that every Google search uses 100 Watt hours of energy,

so one search has the same energy cost as turning on a 100-watt light bulb for an hour.

But does it? Really? Does that number sound way too high to anybody else?

Ignoring the clunky use of the laws of thermodynamics to explain in an extremely round-a-bout way that computers use electricity (duh?), I'd like to pick over his calculation, which contains three serious errors, even though it only has three terms. His simple (very simple; too simple) argument basically goes like this: take the amount of power Google's servers use at any one time and divide this by the number of searches every hour to give an energy cost per search. This is the calculation he makes...

(1,000,000 servers)×(1,000 Watts of power per server)/(10,000,000 searches/hour)=(100 Watt hours/search)

Pretty straight forward, but where do these numbers come from? The first term, the number of servers Google has, is an estimate from Gartner research, and I have no reason, or need, to dispute it.

The second states that each server constantly uses 1 kW of power. This is a conveniently round number, but is it true? A simple search (with the lights off, I promise) reveals the following about Google's servers...

The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

Er, so that would be 216 W per server, at maximum power. So already we've gotten our cost per search down to about 21 watt hours, or about 12 minutes of leaving the light on, assuming that every one of those 1 million severs is running at full capacity 24 hours a day - not a very convincing assumption.

The 10 million searches/hour figure is an estimate based on the number of searches in the USA in February 2009 measured by comScore, and once again I have no gripe with this number. Actually, yes I do. It's probably accurate, in and of itself, but it is the number of searches in the USA, and Google services the entire world. A better figure, also from comScore comes from December 2009, when Google served 88 billion searches worldwide, approximately ONE HUNDRED MILLION *inserts little finger into side of mouth with great comedic effect* per hour. So now our figure drops to 2.1 watt hours, or about 1 minute of power of your 100-watt light globe.

But that's not all. Unbeknowst to some, apparently, Google's servers do more than just process searches. In fact, that is probably only a small fraction of what they do, given that they first have to index every website on the planet, as well as running Gmail, Google Docs, Analytics, Adsense, Blogger, YouTube etc. etc.

To conclude, I really cannot understand why New Scientist (a generally high quality science magazine, that I have enjoyed for many years) would publish an opinion piece featuring a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on figures that are wrong by orders of magnitude and using assumptions that border on the ridiculous, when they could have just, you know, asked Google how much energy there web searches use.

How efficient is our infrastructure? Google-designed data centers use about half the energy of a typical data center. As a result, the energy used per Google search is very small; to be precise, we currently use about 1kJ (0.0003 kWh) of energy to answer the average query.

Which would power a 100-watt light globe for approximately 10 seconds, or, as Google puts it...

In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query

Touché.

The definition of "conspiracy theory"

2010-02-15T15:56:00.003+11:00

I have recently taken to commenting on an anti-vaccination website that goes by the name Child Health Safety (I won't link to the site because I think it, along with it's ilk are dangerous, but obviously Google can find it for you in a jiffy). While bringing a skeptical view to these kinds of sites is a kind of pointless exercise, in that I am fairly certain that I will not be changing the views of anyone who regularly visits them, still, sometimes I just can't help myself. And, to their credit, the authors of this particular website at least allow dissenting comments (and always reply to them), unlike other similar websites that militantly moderate comments to remove any contrary remarks (see here).

After a couple of comments where I tried to point out studies that contradicted the studies that they were promoting, and they pointed out studies that contradicted my studies that contradicted their studies, etc. (you know how it goes), I linked to a British study that shows that full spectrum autism rates are similar in all age groups, which contradicts the website's claim that autism rates in children are going through the roof, and by a rather tenuous correlation, vaccines are to blame. Here is my comment:

It appears that 1% of 30 year olds have ASD, in line with the percentage of children currently diagnosed with the disorder, and way higher than the diagnosis rate 25 years ago. It is sad that many of these adults were not correctly diagnosed as children and did not (and still don’t) receive the support that they really need.

With the editor replying

[ED: We suggest you read our article here regarding the adult "autistics". They don't exist:- UK “Faked” National Autism Data To Declare MMR Vaccine “Safe”]

Once I got over the crassness of their suggestion that adult autism sufferers don't exist, I read their article (hint: the title pretty much says it all). I then somewhat cheekily replied

Hi again. I’ve read your article and I’ve read the NHS report. I read one highly informative, well written, properly justified and statistically sound report, and one rambling conspiracy theory. I’ll leave you to decide which is which.

And here is where it got interesting, because, leaving aside all notions of whether what they were writing was correct or not, they were, undoubtedly alleging a massive conspiracy of universities, public health bodies and the government to - as they say - "Declare MMR Vaccine "Safe"". I cannot really see another explanation. Apparently I hit a nerve, though, as the editor replied

[ED: Hah. When people fall back on alleging "conspiracy theories" you know the argument is won. Thanks for your "balanced" summary.
Others can make their own minds up on the basis of the overwhelmingly clear evidence and facts. You will clearly never be able to throw off the blinkers.]

OK, so obviously I was being dismissive with my claim, as we all know that the term "conspiracy theory" has taken on a pejorative meaning in modern times, but still I felt aggrieved that they would deny this. So I decided to push the point home (and hopefully regain the high ground I had lost with my flippant remark above) and in my next comment I gave a straightforward question.

Just one more question, and then I’ll go away. Do you believe that there is a conspiracy by the government (and public service), multiple universities (and their researchers) and pharmaceutical companies in multiple countries to use vast sums of taxpayer money to provide increasingly large doses of ineffective vaccines that are known to harm children?

And the inevitable reply (broken up so can I comment on each point)

[ED: Daryl, thanks. Even when you are presented with the kind of evidence shown in this article you are unable to accept it and fall back on accusing people of conspiracy theories. No one needs them.

Firstly, I don't believe I was 'accusing' anybody of anything, I was simply stating a self-evident fact and then asking a (I admit somewhat rhetorical) question. But the clincher came with the next statement.

There is a long and well documented history of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and commercial medicine running through many levels, including government and medical publishing. You can start with the thalidomide scandal, psychiatric drugs and run through them all including recent ones like Vioxx.

Reading this, the only conclusion I can come to that doesn't involve deceit is that there was a typo in their response. Where they wrote "No one needs them." they meant to say "No one needs them. Oh, except this one". It goes on.

Do you believe they never happened? Some people believe the holocaust never happened. Is that the category you are in?

*swallows own vomit*

Who needs conspiracy theories when corruption, greed and self interest work pretty well all by themselves.]

While I can totally understand why people are uncomfortable with the label "conspiracy theorist" the definition of the term itself cannot really be debated. It is not just crazy people that believe in conspiracy theories, and not all of them are wrong, either. For example, I genuinely believe that there is a conspiracy by some highly polluting industries, some scientist and some government officials to deliberately and dishonestly promote doubt about the science of global warming, for their own personal gain. That is my conspiracy theory, and I'm sticking to it until proven wrong.

So in conclusion I would like to reclaim the term "conspiracy theory" from its current form as a slur and return it to its traditional definition, as a succinct, descriptive term. I would also like to invent a new term, "conspiracy theory denialists" to describe someone - such as the aforementioned Ed. - who refuses to admit that they believe a conspiracy is afoot when they obviously do. I would also like to submit the following definition to whichever dictionary will have it (first part taken from here):

Conspiracy theory (n.) A theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act.
E.g. “There is a long and well documented history of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and commercial medicine running through many levels, including government and medical publishing.”

What's you conspiracy theory, or are you a conspiracy theory denialist?

Six sex sux

2009-09-25T14:44:00.006+10:00

In the news this week.

Brits have had 'indirect sex' with 2.8 mln people.

This is the latest marketing gimmick from Lloydspharmacy UK; the Sex Degrees of Separation Calculator. It purports to calculate the total number of direct and indirect sexual partners that you have had in your lifetime. This is a good way to raise awareness about sexual health issues, but as a statistical exercise it bites.

Here is their description of the calculator:

In July 2009 Lloydspharmacy commissioned the polling firm YouGov to ask 6,000 people over 16 about their sexual behaviour, specifically how many sexual partners they have had. We then created 17 age ranges and calculated the average number of sexual partners within each of these ranges.

When you enter the age range of each person with whom you have had sexual intercourse, the calculator raids its database to work out how many previous sexual partners people within that age range have had on average. It then repeats this process for their partners, their partners, their partners, their partners and their partners.

This is added together to give a Sex Degrees of Separation total.

Give it a try. It all sounds very scientific, but all they have really done is take some legitimate survey results and concocted a meaningless calculator so they can then put out a fancy press release so that the media can put the words "sex" and "2.8 million people" in their headlines, so that people click on the inevitable link and increase traffic to lloydspharmacy’s website. Why don't they just take the easy route and put out a press release saying "Please visit our website. It has a lot of information about sex".

I think the calculator is a little bit more sophisticated than I present here (although not much), but from what I can work out, what it does is take the number of people you have had sex with and multiply that by the average number of sexual partners for each of those (adjusted for age) and then multiply this through again 6 times (to complete the 6, sorry sex, generations). Therefore, if you have had sex 5 times and the average sexual partners of those in the groups you identify is 7, then your total indirect sexual partners is 5x7x7x7x7x7x7 = 588,245. That is huge, scary and almost certainly wrong.

While the calculator makes the correct assumption that the person you had sex with as a 16 year old has not, on average, had as many sexual partners as the one you bonked as a 30 year old, it does not then extrapolate this through to the next generation – e.g. it assumes that the first person that your 30 year old wife had sex with as a 16 year old had, at the time, the same number of sexual partners as your wife has had in total, hence the constant use of 7 in my example above. This is completely, ridiculously wrong and hugely over-inflates the real value. Also, why 6 (sorry sex) generations? Why not 8, or 10, or 1000? This arbitrary value seems to have been chosen for three reasons: 1. Because 6 sounds a bit like sex (wink wink nudge nudge); 2. Because of the term six degrees of separation, which is meaningless in this context; and 3. Because for most people the calculator will produce a number in the hundreds of thousands or millions, which is mighty impressive, but not completely unrealistic. Take the generations up to 10 (and why not?), and suddenly you have a problem, because most people will have had more indirect sexual partners than there are people in the world. And on this same point, the calculator makes no correction for the fact that once you are a few generations in, most of the people will be having sex with other people already counted in previous generations.

Here is my simple and I believe far more realistic idea for a calculator. It doesn’t require big surveys or complex age calculations. Simply make one assumption, that each person you have had sex with had had sex with the same number of people as you, at the time that you last had sex with them. This seems reasonable to me, as people in similar social circles are likely to have similar sexual proclivities. The first person you had sex with therefore counts as one, because we assume that you were their first too, the second person counts as 1+1,because they would have had sex with 1 other person, who would have been doing it for the first time. The third person counts as 1+2+1 (they’ve had sex with two people, one of whom had sex with one other person and the other with none). And so on. Doing the maths on this gives the formula x = 2ⁿ-1 where n is the number of sexual partners you have had an x is the number of direct and indirect sexual partners you have had. Recalculating my example above then, your five sexual partners would end up being 2⁵-1 = 31 not 588,245. That is quite a big difference. To get to a million indirect sexual partners would require 20 sexual partners, but even that isn’t true, because, just like the Lloydspharmacy calculator, I have not taken into account people having sex with those already counted.

Feel free to tear my formula to bits or point out my error in analysing the Lloyds calculator, but in the end does it really matter whether you have had indirect sex with 30 or 600,000 or 2.8 million people? Always take appropriate precautions, in sex and marketing. They are both dirty little exercises, yet strangely alluring.

Poor Janet Jackson

2009-09-01T12:54:00.004+10:00

The latest celebrity fad has reached Australia - $600 charm bracelets that are supposed to enhance the power of positive thought.

Says theage.com.au today. The article is - unintentionally - a good summary of the classic pseudoscience propaganda; combine eastern philosophy with celebrity endorsement and cha-ching.

Importer Hans Wrang said the bracelets contained the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac and were inspired by the ancient Eastern philosophy of attracting luck, health and prosperity by thinking positively.

and

Princess Mary sparked the craze when she accepted one of the La Chance bracelets as a gift from the Danish jewellery designer Martina Baggar. Stars including the U2 lead singer Bono, the Hollywood actress Kate Hudson and the soccer star Ronaldhino followed suit.

If you think positively, you attract luck, health and prosperity. Sounds reasonable. Attracting the same by buying a $600 bracelet that will be out of fashion in six months; not quite as convincing.

The twist to this story comes at the end, and it's a corker.

Mr Wrang said celebrities were carefully selected before being offered a bracelet.
''One of the things we insist on is sitting down with them face-to-face to make sure that we know what they think of the bracelet.''
The singer Janet Jackson requested a bracelet while in Denmark last year but could not spare the 10 minutes Ms Baggar insisted on to explain the bracelet's philosophy before giving it to her.
''Her minders asked us to just send it round but we said no … We don't just give them to anybody.''

It's the celebrity snub. Can't find 10 minutes in your busy schedule to hear some bastardised version of Eastern philosophy from a Danish jewelery designer (Ms Baggar), then no free bracelet for you. What a brilliant piece of marketing. Imagine the discussion down at your local beauty parlour.

"Nice bracelet, Jan"

"Thanks luv. Did you hear that Janet Jackson was told she couldn't have one."

"Really? Why?"

"You see she just didn't get what this bracelet is all about. It's not a fashion item, you know. It's about positivity. You have to be totally committed to the whole philosophy or it's just not for you."

"Gee, and then her brother died. Just goes to show you."

Glancing at the website of the company - LaChance - that produces these overpriced charm bracelets (which are, appropriately enough, made in China), they seem to be happy to sell them without the requisite 10 minutes of intense training, but maybe I'm wrong and Ms Baggar does personally deliver every single one. If not, Janet Jackson might just buy one anonymously off the internet, and we certainly cannot have that.

We don't just give them to anybody.

I personally think that if Buddha found out he'd be turning in his... uh... nirvana.

Oh, and If you've got $600 to spare and your looking for a way to enhance positive thinking, how about donating it to your favourite charity? If you've got that kind of disposable income you already are lucky, prosperous and probably healthy. Enjoy it.

Some ads suck, some don't

2009-07-30T17:29:00.006+10:00

Recently, two somewhat similar TV advertisements have caught my attention. Both rely on foreign accents for their humour, yet I find one stupid and one charming.

The first ad is for Budget Direct insurance, where a young woman with an 'outrageous French accent' repeatedly asks an older, Aussie guy to "Googelay boojay direk" until the man puts her straight with "It's Google, love, Google Budget Direct". Patronising? Yes. Funny? No. The second is for Mainland Cheese, where the locals of a New Zealand town are preparing for the first annual Mainland cheese day, until they excitedly reveal the specially prepared banner which reads "Mainland Tuesday".

Both ads make fun of the characters accents, but in completely different ways. The first ad encourages us to laugh at the funny accent in a "aren't French people stupid that they can't even say Google properly" way, while the second uses a clever pun that just happens to only work with a New Zealand accent. No one is belittled by that, and most importantly, it's funny. The way the characters take the error is also incredibly endearing.

"Well, I guess we'll just have to celebrate every week."

Reminds me slightly of a Seinfeld episode where a non-Jew converts to Judaism for the jokes and Elaine asks Jerry if he is offended, as a Jew, and he replies "No, I'm offended as a comedian".

I don't know of Boojay is any good, but Mainland Cheddar is delicious.

Simon Singh's pulled Guardian article

2009-07-29T15:17:00.003+10:00

I've been trying to think of something cool to post about and have been put off by my lack of real insight into, well, anything really. It's a bit of a problem, but hopefully something will come to me. In the meantime, what better way to get things rolling then to hear some true insight from a dead-set legend, Simon Singh. For those who don't know, Singh (author of several bestselling science books) was recently sued by the British Chiropractic Association for an article that appeared in the Guardian newspaper (more information here). His article has been pulled from the Guardian website, and today, a worldwide campaign has been launched, whereby the article will be posted in blogs and magazines worldwide in protest at what many believe is his poor treatment by the BCA and the British legal system. Hopefully it will be hard to miss. And here it is.

Beware the spinal trap

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.”

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

Everyone's at it.

2009-07-01T15:55:00.000+10:00

Hello and welcome to my new blog, The Crapologist. If you've made it this far then I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Well, it's a start.

So what is crapology. According to the Urban Dictionary it has two meanings.

1. An apology that is crap.
2. The study of feces to predict the future.

I like both of those - and am particularly intrigued by 2. - but I was thinking more along the lines of...

3. Talking crap as if it were science.

I also found this eloquent definition from The Blogtionary.

Any body of conjecture, surmise or hearsay that is dressed up in the garb of scientific knowledge in the hope of passing it off as fact.

So what I said but written by a lawyer.

Whether it's intentional, poor research or just plain ignorance, crapology is a genuine social problem. It's also really annoying.

And because there aren't nearly enough blogs out there (15+ million, apparently), I thought I'd dilute things just a little bit more with yet another one.

Enjoy.