September 2008 Archives

I've always had a massive soft spot for Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds. I think that the album must have originally been released pretty soon after I read the book for the first time. And it must have really struck a chord with me. I borrowed a copy from the library, recorded it and listened to it constantly for several months. That was all, it would appear, thirty years ago.

When I went to university in 1981 we were all cool and trendy and listened to bands like ABC and Dexy's Midnight Runners. But there was always a time late at night, sitting in someone's room in the halls of residence when War of the Worlds would go on the turntable. And I have a distinct memory of at least one conversation when we were planning a stage show based on the record.

The stage show eventually saw the light of day in 2006. At the time I didn't have my ear to the ground and it passed me. I was most disappointed when I found out. But it as the thirtieth anniversary of the original release is upon us they have decided to take the production out again. It will be touring the UK next year. I've just bought tickets to see it at the O2 Arena (the old Millennium Dome) on June 20th. Tickets are ludicrously expensive (around £50) but I strongly suspect it'll be worth it.

I'm really looking forward to it.

Following last weeks entry about the media and MMR I have another post brewing which goes into more detail about the central message of Ben Goldacre's excellent book. That central message is that you usually can't trust science and health stories in the press because they are usually written by people who don't understand the story that they are writing. Most journalists seem to have only the shakiest of understanding of anything other than the most basic of scientific principles.

Another good example is the case of Michael Reiss. He gave a largely sensible speech saying that science teachers should be more willing and better prepared to discuss (and counter) creationism in the classroom. In journalists' heads this became "Royal Society Bigwig Supports Teaching Creationism" and before you know it, he's been hounded out of his job.

I thought that the Reiss story had run its course, but journalists were determined to have one last attempt to prove exactly how little they understood. And I'm embarassed to admit that it comes from the Observer - a paper I'd like to credit with higher than average intelligence.

The picture about comes from the web site version of this article by Sir Harry Kroto, the Nobel prizewinner. The article itself is eminently sensible. It talks about how there really is a huge philosophical difference between religion and science and how people of a religious nature must, by definition, believe things on faith alone which would, on the surface, seem to make it difficult for them to flourish in a scientifc career.

But the most brilliant piece of journalism is in the standfirst - that little piece of text underneath the title which is intended to draw the reader into the article. As you'll see from the image above (which I've taken because I fully expect it to change when someone realises how stupid they look), it says:

Creationists such as the Rev Reiss don't have the intellectual integrity to teach science

"Creationists such as the Rev Reiss"! Michael Reiss may have many faults. He may not have been the best choice as the Royal Society's Director of Education. He may believe a few crazy things (he's an ordained minister - that's part of the job). But he is not a creationist.

He was campaigning for science teachers to be given better training in order to counter creationist claims in the classroom. And now, three weeks later, a national newspaper is calling him a creationist.

I hope the person who wrote that standfirst is suitably embarrassed.

Update: In the discussion on this article, the nonsensical standfirst has been mentioned. Some people have tried to defend it by pointing out that, as a theist, Reiss must believe that god created the universe even if he followed scientific processes rather than the fairy stories in Genesis. And that therefore, at some level, it's reasonable to describe him as a creationist.

I say that if you're allowed to redefine common words like that, then there's no point at all in holding a conversation.

This makes me very angry.

Yesterday the NHS Information Centre released data showing that take-up of the MMR vaccination was lower than it should be. The national level has stalled at 85%, whereas it really needs to be at 95% in order to achieve "herd immunity" - an unflattering term which simply means that immunity is at a level where it's impossible for the infection to take hold in the community. A decade ago, this figure stood at 92% and was rising.

This is terrible news and many media outlets have commented on it. Here, for example, are the BBC. the Mail and the Express. All of these stories contain a similar explanation for the drop. Here is the Express:

Confidence in the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine fell after researchers published a 1998 paper in The Lancet medical journal suggesting a link between MMR and autism.

Uptake of the jab dropped to around 80% after some parents refused to let their children have the vaccine.

This explanation is, of course, being more than a little economical with the truth. It's true that in 1998 the Lancet published a paper that claimed to link MMR with autism. But papers in the Lancet don't generally lead to such a hysterical reaction in the general population. This one wouldn't have done so either if the media hadn't picked up the story and built it up in such a disgraceful manner.

The point of publishing a paper in an academic journal like the Lancet is for other qualified academics to examine the methods and the results of a study and to draw their own conclusions as to the quality of the research and the reliability of the findings. And in this case, the methods were extremely questionable and the findings were completely untrustworthy.

But that didn't matter. Andrew Wakefield, who lead the study which the paper was reporting on, held a press conference calling for the suspension of the MMR vaccination and it was this which was reported in the press rather than other doctors' doubts about the reliability of his research.

Very quickly the MMR/autism link worked its way into the public consciousness and everyone "knew" that responsible parents didn't give their their children the MMR vaccination. Hence the massive fall in immunisation and a couple of quite scary epidemics of measles in the last few years.

All of which makes it a bit galling to read yesterday's stories in the press. The same media outlets which drummed up the hysteria in the first place are now reporting on the drop in immunisation. Here's the BBC:

The study has since been discredited, but confidence has been slow to return in the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

That's accurate, I suppose, but it hardly makes it clear that the study was discredited almost immediately but that media outlets took years to listen and to drop their anti-MMR campaigns.

The problem seems to be that many of the original news stories were written by journalists who didn't know anything about how science works. Just because some doctor stands up and says that something is true, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is true. The study needs to be examined closely before pronouncements like this can be made. Andrew Wakefield should not have held that press conference and he's currently being investigated by the General Medical Council for many mistakes he made in the course of this study.

If you're interested in finding out more about this story and just how badly people were mislead by the media, I strongly recommend Ben Goldacre's recent book Bad Science. The final chapter covers the whole sorry tale in some detail. The rest of the book is well worth reading too.

The moral of the story is: don't trust science stories that aren't written by people who understand science.

As a freelancer, I've got more than a few jobs through Jobserve. In the past, they used to just post email addresses of the agents who were advertising the roles, but recently they've got cleverer than that. They now publish an email address that goes to the Jobserve servers before being passed on to the agent. It's clever, because they now know what sort of jobs you are applying for and can use that knowledge to suggest other similar jobs that you might be interested in.

Except it doesn't really seem to be working. I've recently started getting these recommendations from Jobserve. They actually come from a system called "Jobserve Alchemy". I got one just now. It says "From the information you have registered with on JobServe and your recent application activity on JobServe you appear to closely match the requirements of the following job".

They have an interesting definition of "closely". Here's the specification.

Type: Contract
Position: GIS Geographic Developer Contract
Skills: GIS, geographical information system, GIS Developer, Contract, Programmer. Fantastic opportunity for an experienced GIS Developer to join a prestigious market leading organisation. Talented GIS Software Developer to join a specialised team working in a fantastic environment Responsible for developing ArcGIS desktop and ArcGIS Server using the MS .NET platform. GIS using the C# .NET platform or VB.NET. Responsibilities also include database integration, developing Web services using SOAP. Technologies: ArcGIS GIS .NET C# Please apply immediate for this GIS Software Development opportunity.
Location: Berkshire
Start Date: ASAP
Duration: 6 months

Those of you who know me will realise how well this matches my skill set.

I have no experience of Geographical Information Systems. I have never used C#.NET or VB.NET. I'm a Unix developer and haven't developed anything on a Microsoft platform using Microsoft tools for about fifteen years. I have no idea what ArcGIS is. Oh, and I have no interest at all in working in Berkshire. Nothing about this role matches anything that I've applied for through Jobserve in the last ten years.

I think that Jobserve Alchemy still has a few bugs in its search algorithms.

I've been a fan of Arthurian legend for as long as I remember. It's one of my favourite stories. I've read and seen countless versions over the last thirty or forty years.

But I don't think I've ever come across a version as terrible as the BBC's new series Merlin which started last night. It was so bad that I'm shuddering as I think about it now. I have two major problems with it.

The first is that it's made in the same way as Robin the Hoodie - by which I mean that the BBC have managed to make another historical drama with absolutely no sense of history. The characters talk and act like they've just stepped out of the twenty-first century. Oh, there's some small effort to create sets and costumes that look historical in some vaguely Medieval fashion, but something about it makes it all completely unconvincing.

Secondly, and to my mind far more disappointingly, they've changed the story so much that it is only recognisable because of the characters' names. Now, of course I realise that the story is only a legend and that there is no "true version" to measure it against, but there are certain key points that a retelling needs to include and Merlin seems determined to remove them all. Here are a few of the obvious ones that I noticed.

• Uther Pendragon is king of Camelot. In any versions of the story that mention Camelot, it is created by Arthur once he has become king.
• Arthur is living with Uther. Arthur is, of course, Uther's son. But Uther tricked Arthur's mother, Igraine, into sleeping with him (with Merlin's help) and on the day Arthur was born, Merlin took him to live with Sir Ector and his son Kay. Arthur didn't find out who his father was until he became king.
• As suggested by the previous point, Merlin is far older than Arthur. He's older than Uther. But this programme has Merlin and Arthur as boys together. In fact Merlin seems younger than Arthur.
• Merlin's teacher was called Blaise, not Gaius.
• They have Guinevere as a servant. She's the daughter of King Leodegrance, not a servant. Oh, and she seems to be flirting with Merlin. Which is just wrong.
• There is no talking dragon in Arthurian legend. Geoffrey of Monmouth has a story about two dragon's fighting in a lake which Merlin finds when he is a young boy. But they don't talk and he doesn't learn anything from them.

There are probably more differences (I fully expect Morgana to do something completely out of character at some point - we don't know yet if she's still Arthur's half-sister) but those are the worst offenders that I noticed whilst watching it.

It's so different from the usual version of the story that it seems completely pointless to link it with the Arthurian story at all. If they just changed the names then it could be the story of any young wizard coming to terms with his powers. It would still be badly-written, derivative rubbish, but at least it wouldn't offend the sensibilities of people who know the story.

Actually, I think that's what I object to the most. If this is at all successful, then there will be a generation of children for whom this will be the first version of the story that they encounter. And for them it will become the definitive version. Which is a real shame when they could be getting far better versions of the story from Malory, TH White or even John Boorman.

I recently read Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur. That was a great retelling of the story. It introduced many interesting new ideas whilst staying true to the spirit of the legend. If the BBC wanted to make an Arthurian drama, then they should have adapted that. It would have been far better than the rubbish we've been given.

I have spent over a week waiting for an agent to get back to me with an offer of a contract. I saw this company last Tuesday and the manager is apparently very keen to get me working there. The sticking point seems to be the money.

When the agent first spoke to me about the contract, they wanted to pay about £30 a day less than the minimum amount I currently feel comfortable working for. She agreed to try to get me my minimum amount. A couple of days later she called me to arrange an interview. She told me at that point that they had taken a couple of days to get back to us as they had been confirming that the extra money was available.

I went to the interview last Tuesday. I thought it went very well. So, I'm told, did the people who interviewed me.

But the money was still a problem. They asked if I'd work for their initial suggested rate. I said no. They said that at the rate I was asking for, the initial contract would only be for two months rather than the six months discussed in the interview. I said that would be fine (see - that's me compromising).

On Friday of last week they told my agent that the money had been found but that (for reasons which were somewhat unclear) they still couldn't make a firm offer that day. The offer would follow on Monday.

On Monday I had a call from my agent. There was still no firm offer, but the client had asked her to "keep Dave warm". She tried to speak to the manager again on Tuesday, but he was out of the office for a day. On Wednesday I had no contact with them. On Thursday she called me to tell me that she still couldn't reach the manager because he was off sick. And his team seemed to think that he wouldn't be back the next day either.

At this point I was expecting them to tell me that they had the offer, but the dog ate it. Or perhaps that a big boy stole it and ran away. It seemed clear to me that there was some kind of stalling tactic going on somewhere in the organisation. But as my agent pointed out during Thursday's conversation, this kind of prevarication doesn't really endear you to someone who you are trying to do business with.

Fortunately, whilst this had all been going on, another opportunity had come along. On Thursday lunchtime I had an interview with another company. A company who, if I'm being honest, I would feel far happier about working for. And this morning they made me a firm offer. For more money and for a longer period of time. I, of course, accepted.

I felt somewhat sorry for the original agent as I told her that I wouldn't be accepting an offer from her client (should one ever appear). But I hope she enjoys explaining to them exactly where they've gone wrong in this process.

The contract market isn't great at the moment. But it's still not bad enough that I need to sit around for a week waiting for an offer from a company that's quibbling over £30 a day.

Whilst waiting for my comment to be published on the Daily Mail web site, I took a quick glance at their terms and conditions - just to ensure that there wasn't some obvious rule that I was breaking by calling attention to their hypocrisy. I didn't find the "you can't disagree with us" rule, but I did find this interesting clause:

You may not provide a link to this web site from any other web site without first obtaining Associated's prior written consent.

Which basically says that you can't blog about the Mail's site. Well, I suppose you can, but you can't provide links to the source material.

And just above that nonsense, is this:

You may not distribute, display or copy any of the contents of the pages contained in this web site to third parties including, but not limited to "caching" any material on this web site for access by third parties and "mirroring" any material on this web site.

Which, if nothing else, shows a spectacular lack of knowledge of how the internet works. Any ISP that caches material for its customers' use had better beware of the Mail's lawyers.

p.s. Oops. I've realised that this entry contains a link to their site. Please don't tell them.

Tim has been talking about the Daily Mail's comment moderation policy recently. It seems that any comment which fails to endorse the Mail's editorial policy is very unlikely to be published on their site.

So here's an experiment.

On their web site today (I assume it's in the paper too, but I haven't looked), they are running a story with the headline "My, hasn't she grown! Dakota Fanning passes the awkward phase with flying colours". You'll probably remember Dakota Fanning from things like Taken and Charlotte's Web. Well, Dakota was a young girl when she starred in those productions and, as young girls have a habit of doing, she has grown into a teenager. And that's what the Daily Mail story is all about. Dakota Fanning now is 14. One quote will suffice to demonstrate the tone that the paper has taken:

At the premiere for her controversial new film Hounddog, the 14-year-old unveiled a mature new look showing she's well on her way to being all grown up.

The story is illustrated with pictures of her looking "all grown up".

The Daily Mail is, as I'm sure I don't have to remind you, one of the UK newspapers which is most likely to run stories about the growing dangers of paedophilia in our society. Of course I don't condone paedophilia in any form. But I do find it somewhat ironic that a paper like the Mail finds it acceptable to print a story like this which exists purely to draw attention to the physical changes that a teenage girl is going through.

So, eventually, here's the experiment.

I've just submitted the comment below to the Mail site. Let's see if it gets published.

It's hard to believe that a story this is being run in a newspaper that frequently runs stories on the horrors of paedophilia. Do you not see a potential issue here?

I'm betting that it won't ever see the light of day. But I'd love to be proved wrong on this.

I've mentioned before that I run a few planets. A planet is a simple web site which aggregates web feeds on a particular subject. They are named after the software which is used to build many such sites.

I'm always looking out for good ideas of other planets to add to my collection. Yesterday on irc, Dave Hodgkinson suggested a "planet sceptic" which is, of course, an excellent idea. It would be great to have a planet which aggregates a number of feeds from the growing sceptic/atheist community. And I thought it would be an interesting experiment to ask for ideas for the feeds to include.

Looking through my Bloglines subscriptions, I find a number of obvious candidates.

• Bad Science
• Certic
• MediaWatchWatch
• TeenAtheist
• New Humanist
• Pharyngula
• Richard Dawkins
• Sam Harris

But I'm probably missing dozens of interesting feeds. If you have a suggestion, then please leave a comment. I'll start with my list today but it'll be easy enough to add stuff later.

Oh, and one other question. What should I call it? Dave originally suggested "Planet Sceptic". Does "Planet Atheist" sound better? Or "Planet Rationalism"? Or perhaps "Planet Bright" (no, probably not that!) Again, let me know what you think in the comments.

Michael Reiss has stepped down from his post as director of education at the Royal Society. This follows the controversy over his remarks about creationism in science lessons last week. I think he's right to go as having an ordained minister in such an important role in the Royal Society is pretty silly. I agree completely with Richard Dawkins, who described it as "a Monty Python sketch".

I'm slightly worried, however, that some of Reiss's real message has been lost in the furore over what he said. Nowhere did he actually call for creationism to be taught in science classes - and that's what many of his critics seem to be claiming. What he actually said was that teachers should be ready to discuss creationism when students bring it up in the classroom. He goes a bit wobbly here, saying that creationism should be seen "not as a misconception but as a world view". This is obviously nonsense. A science teacher should be willing and able to show up creationism as the nonsense that it is whenever it is mentioned in the classroom.

And here's where the current situation is letting children down. As in so many other areas of life, religion is given too much respect. Teachers are wary of discussing it as it is seen as disrepectful to question the children's beliefs. Well, of course it's disrespectful. But creationism doesn't deserve any respect. Creationism is nonsense. Letting these ridiculous ideas go unquestioned is ultimately more harmful to society than confronting them and showing children exactly why they are nonsense.

To paraphrase a comment I saw on Comment is Free last week[1] - "intelligent, honest, creationist; pick any two".

[1] And can't now find, or I'd credit the author.

It's very unlikely that you haven't heard of Chrome, the browser that Google launched last week. If you're running Windows then you may have even tried it out.

Those of you (and I assume it's most of you) who follow tech news will also know that there was some confusion over Chrome's licence agreement during the week. On Wednesday it was noticed that the agreement (which everyone is bound by when using the software) claimed that Google had full rights to do whatever it wanted with any data that you submitted through the browser. Uproar ensued for a few hours until Google realised its mistake, apologised and removed the offending clause. By Thursday lunchtime everything was fine again.

But not in the world of the Daily Mail. For some reason they decided to run the story about Chrome's licence today. Why they didn't run it on Thursday or Friday when the story was still fresh, I don't know, but it's there on their web site today. Of course as the confusion over the licence has all been resolved, they mention that in the fourth and fifth paragraphs.

Google's 'End User License Agreement' (EULA) attracted so many complaints in a 24-hour period that it was forced to edit the offending clause.

It now states that users 'retain copyright and any other rights' that they hold on material posted or submitted online.

But it seems that isn't clear enough for Mail readers, some of whom have left comments on the story demonstrating that they obviously haven't managed to get that far into the story. Maybe they only read the headline before becoming so insensed that they had to post a comment. Here are some examples:

Sounds like an excellent reason to steer well clear of it - Fred James, Worcester, UK

Thank you Daily Mail.You have just stopped me from downloading this new Browser. - william

I'm uninstalling... - Phillie L Hall, Abu Dhabi

All in all it seems that these particular Mail readers fail at basic comprehension.

Update: I've just noticed that at the top of their story, the Mail describe this problematic clause as a "hidden" clause. In what way was it hidden? It was just part of the licence agreement. It was only hidden in the same way that all clauses of all licences are hidden - because no-one ever reads them.

Sometimes (actually, it's really quite often) Free Software enthusiasts are their own worst enemy. Their insistence on using completely free formats for audio and video instead of the proprietary formats that most people use means that their message is often only seen by a tiny minority of people - generally the people who don't need to see their message anyway as they are already converts.

Here's an excellent case in point. The GNU project is twenty-five years old this month. And to celebrate the anniversary, Stephen Fry has recorded a video for them introducing the concepts of free software[1] and talking about the project. This would be a fabulous marketing tool for them, But the only people who will be able to watch it are already Free Software users.

If you had a video to share with as many people as possible, the way that most people would do it would be to upload it to YouTube, Google Video or some other video sharing site. The GNU project won't do that as all of those sites use Flash video which is a proprietary format and the GNU project are sworn to spurn proprietary formats at all times. This religious adherance to their holy writ also prevents them from using the second best approach which would be to make Quicktime or MPG files available on their web site. Again, these are proprietary formats and therefore verboten.

The approach that the GNU project takes is to make the video available as an Ogg Theora file. Now Ogg Theora is a perfectly good format. Videos in that format are reasonably sized and of pretty good quality. Also, and this is what the GNU project love about it, the format is completely free and open. For that reason, it's the format that the GNU project use for all of their videos.

There's only one problem with the Ogg Theora format - almost no-one can view it. On most standard installations of Windows and Mac OSX, there is no software that can play an Ogg Theora file. Which, to my mind, rather defeats the object of having such a useful marketing tool. The GNU project are using this as a way to encourage people to install and use their new gNewSense software package, but I can't honestly see anyone installing all of that just to watch a Stephen Fry video.

"Ah", I hear you saying, "but that's not really a problem, is it? Some clever geek will convert the Ogg Theora file and upload it to YouTube by the end of the day. We'll all watch it there." And you're probably right. There's a very good chance of that happening. But if it does, the GNU project will probably issue a takedown notice. You see they've released this video under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works licence in order to specifically prevent people from converting the video to a more friendly format. It's like they want to prevent people from seeing the video.

[Update: As pointed out by Matt (the producer of the video) in the comments, I was completely wrong about the licence. The No Derivative Works clause does not exclude conversion to other formats. There are many versions available on YouTube.]

Of course, this isn't a problem, for me. I use Linux on my desktop and that's the only major desktop platform which supports Ogg Theora out of the box. Or so I thought. My first attempt to play the video on my standard installation of Fedora 9 failed. I just saw a grey box and a Java applet error. I fiddled with the options a bit and tried again using the Totem video player. Ironically, that popped up a dialog message warning me that it needed a proprietary plugin to play the video and then telling me that no appropriate plugin was available. Ignoring the error, the video played fine anyway. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the BBC will play the video and lots of people will see that way. But getting Stephen Fry to record a video about your project is an incredibly powerful publicity tool. It is stupid to hang on to your religious beliefs to such an extent that you prevent most people from seeing it.

[1] The Free Software Foundation never ever use the term "Open Source Software" as it dilutes their brand.

Update: On investigating gNewSense further, I see that it's a completely new Linux distribution, because popular distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora are happy to include proprietary software. I despair.

Update 2: In the comments, Paul points out that they are using a Java applet to play the video, which will mean that it works fine everywhere where Java is successfully installed (not, it appears, on my machine). But it's 2008. No-one uses Java applets any more. And anyway (as Paul also points out) Java was proprietary (and therefore verboten) until very recently. What did they do before that?

This just came up in a discussion in the office. You read it here first.

Sarah Palin claims to be a christian. If that's the case then why are at least two of her children (Willow and Piper - I'm researching the others) named after teenage witches? I reckon she has wiccan sympathies.

Does anyone else have any evidence to add?

Mind you, this makes me somewhat conflicted. I'd far rather have a wiccan as VP than an evangelical christian who supports the teaching of creationism in science classes and denies anthropogenic climate change.