davblog

Parents aren't daft and know full well the MMR damaged their children. He is a very brave man and a hero to many.
- Pippa, Notts, UK

A smear campaign was launched to discredit his findings.
In years to come I am sure that Dr Wakefield will be proved to have been correct in his beliefs about the MMR vaccine.
- Retired paediatric nurse, Surrey

Oh dear. Someone questioned the efficacy of expensive treatment courtesy of big pharma? Heaven forbid that someone would question the status quo of treating disease with expensive drugs for life, these alternatives might be more effective and actually cure, cheaply.
- tom bowden, perth australia

This is what happens under communist marxist Labour,,anyone who dares to disagree,rightly or wrongly is punished, now this doctor is struck off, this is to remind others not to dare confront these parasites, 3 months to go, then back to Democracy.
- jack, ashford.england

If there is every any shred of doubt about the safety of a medicine, no responsible parent should even consider giving it to their children.
- Susie Squeegee, Leicester, England

One of the major topics on this blog is the nonsense that is printed by a significant proportion of the British press. The press in this country is "controlled" by the Press Complaints Commission, but in the majority of cases the PCC either can't or won't adjudicate effectively.

Every year the PCC invites interested parties to submit suggestions of ways that its Editors' Code of Practice could be improved. Along with a group of other bloggers with an interest in this area, I've been thrashing out a list of suggestions to submit to the committee. We've come up with a list of five suggestions which we intend to send to the committee before the 31st January deadline. Our suggestions are as follows:

SUGGESTION ONE: Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).

Retractions, corrections, and apologies should normally be at least equally prominent to the original article, in both print and online editions. Any departure from this rule should only be in exceptional circumstances, and the onus on showing such circumstances should be on the publication.

SUGGESTION TWO: Original or redirected URLs for retractions, corrections & apologies online (as standard).

Retractions, corrections, and apologies in respect of online articles should always be displayed either at the original URL or at a URL to which the reader is redirected.

SUGGESTION THREE: The current Code contains no reference to headlines, and this loophole should be closed immediately.

Headlines should be covered by the same rules as the rest of a story. Further, headlines and titles for links should never be misleading in what they imply or offer and should always be substantiated by the article/contents.

SUGGESTION FOUR: Sources to be credited unless they do not wish to be credited or require anonymity/protection.

Sources should normally be credited. Any departure from this rule should only be when the source does not wish to be credited or if the source requires anonymity/protection.

SUGGESTION FIVE: A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.

We submit all of the above without implying support for the PCC, the remainder of Code as it stands, or even the concept of self-regulation, and request that the 20th year of the PCC be marked with an open debate about its progress to date, and its future direction.

We think that this is a sensible set of suggestions and that no reasonable newspaper editor could disagree with them. Time will, of course, tell.

Now, we could put these suggestions forward as coming from a small group of bloggers but we'd like it to be wider than that. We've put up a petition where you can register your support for our ideas. If we can get a large number of people signing the petition then hopefully that will make it less likely that the PCC can dismiss our submission out of hand. If we can get some press interest around our campaign, then that would be even better.

So please sign the petition and please pass on the information to anyone else who might be interested. With your help we might just be able to change something.

For more details, see Tim's blog post on the campaign.

These suggestions were decided upon by Tim Ireland, Kevin Arscott, Adam Bienkov, Dave Cross, Sunny Hundal, Jack of Kent, Justin McKeating, MacGuffin, Mark Pack, septicisle, Jamie Sport, Clive Summerfield, Unity, Anton Vowl.

Whilst sorting through some paperwork over the last few days I found this photograph. It was taken almost thirty years ago at my secondary school.

The picture shows just under fifty eighteen-year-olds who were just about to take their A levels. I'm in the back row, fifth from the right. The one with far more hair than is strictly necessary.

There are four or five people on the photo who I am still in touch with but I lost touch with most of them soon after the photo was taken.

But seeing the old photo again got me thinking. We were fifty-odd kids from an average Essex town. Half of our adult lives has been lived through the internet revolution. We've seen this rise and fall of Friends Reunited and MySpace and now, surely, most of us are on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Or, at the very least, have an email address and some kind of Google footprint.

I thought I'd try to find out. I'm going to try to track down as many as possible of these people in the next eighteen months (Why eighteen months? Because in about eighteen months time it will be thirty years since the photo was taken). I want to see how easy it is to find a random(ish) group of fortysomethings on the internet.

I've set up a web site (Class of 81) to track my progress. But I'll report any really interesting findings here too. I think it's going to be interesting.

If you know anyone with any connections to Clacton or (particularly) Clacton County High School, please let them know about the project.

Following on from my earlier list of the most popular posts on this site over the last year, here is a list of my favourite posts. As last year, I've chosen one from each month.

• Hope
  Not many posts to choose from in January so I've chosen one where I tried to sum up the hope I felt following Barack Obama's inauguration.
• Creationist Idiocy in the UK
  My reactions to the depressing findings of a poll which showed that creationism is on the rise in the UK.
• Internet Genealogy
  A post summarising the changes that the internet has brought to the world of genealogy.
• Overcomplicating Matters
  An attempt to understand why so many MPs' web sites and blogs get the simplest of things horribly wrong.
• Defending Homeopathy (Or Not)
  A post telling the story of how Neal's Yard's Remedies scored a spectacular publicity own goal by failing to engage with the Guardian's readership.
• Who Is To Blame?
  In June we had European elections. And the BNP won two seats. This made a large number of rational people very angry. In this post I tried to understand what had caused people to vote for such poisonous representatives.
• A Life Well Documented
  In July I wrote about a couple of projects that were helping me to document my life.
• Support from the Internet
  In August I alomost didn't get to a conference because I couldn't find my passport. I found it in the end and just made it to the airport in time. This post tells the story and talks about the incredible support I was getting from my friends on Twitter and Facebook whilst the saga was unfolding.
• Building Web Sites is Easy
  Returning to an earlier theme, I looked at why so many organisations spend too much money on web sites and end up with unmaintainable monstrosities, when the open source solution is often better.
• Nadnomics
  Nadine Dorries gave me a lot of material this year. In this post I attempted to teach her the basics of statistics.
• He Blinded Me with Science
  Following the sacking of David Nutt, in early November AN Wilson wrote the most ridiculous pile of anti-scientific nonsense that I've ever read. In this post I pointed out some of his most obvious errors. This post was also featured on Mailwatch where it received rather more comment.
• I Can't Hear You La La La La
  One thing that really wound me up in 2009 was the number of people who used blogs and Twitter to broadcast their opinions rather than as a tool for interaction. This post has some examples from that well-known internet expert Nadine Dorries.

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.

Last year I experimented with writing a couple of posts that summarised the year on davblog. It was interesting (if only because it gave me some useful perspective on what I'd been doing over the year) so I'm going to do the same for 2009. In this post I'll look at the ten most read articles that I posted this year and in another post I'll list some of my favourite posts.

So here are the ten most read articles from this site that were written during 2009.

1. Thunderbird and Exchange
   I'm surprised to see this at the top to be honest. It's a pretty standard piece summarising my experiments in sharing calendars between Thunderbird and Exchange. It was published in June but for some reason it had a huge spike in visits early in December.
   
2. The Power of Social Media
   This is what I expected to see at the top. In October, social media had a particularly interesting week when it was behind three successful campaigns. I summarised the week in this post. This post had a huge boost in popularity when Graham Linehan mentioned it on Twitter.
3. Headphones on the G1I think that many people were experiencing the same problems as I did with the headphones on my G1. I hope this post helped them.
4. Good Drugs vs Bad Drugs
   Very happy to see this in the top ten as it's a piece I'm particularly proud of. following on from the sacking of David Nutt, this piece covers some of the points about drugs that the mainstream press don't seem to be interested in covering.
5. Simpler Facebook URLs
   Something I knocked out quickly when I got annoyed with Facebook's ridiculous URL structure and saw a simple way to improve it. Later in the year, Facebook introduced a simpler URL structure which renders these ideas obsolete.
6. There's Probably No Bus
   A silly post containing a picture based on the Athiest Bus Campaign.
7. Freedom is in Peril
   No idea why this was so popular. Another post that contains pretty much nother other than a picture. Good poster though. And I expect it nicely captured the mood of the time.
8. Simon Singh vs The British Chiropractic Association
   Lots of people wrote far more eloquently than I did about the British Chiropractic Association suing Simon Singh for libel, so I'm glad that some people found my article interesting enough to read. It's still an important case and nicely illustrates the idiocy of the UK libel laws. One good result of this high profile case was the setting up of the Libel Reform Campaign.
9. Watching the Watchmen
   A pretty obvious title for my review of the Watchmen film.
10. Please Don't Label Me
    A post covering the launch of the "Please Don't Label Me" campaign from the same people who brought us the Atheist Bus Campaign. This campaign addressed the issue of children being labelled with the religion of their parents before they have a chance to make up their own mind.

So there it is. I think that's a pretty good cross-section of kinds of things that I've been writing about over the last year. Thank you for reading and I hope you continue to find this site interesting over the next twelve months.