davblog

Comments

2010-02-01T09:28:53Z

In the middle of last week I upgraded this site to Movable Type 5. And at (I assume) the same time comments stopped working.

It seems that it was some incompatibility between the MT5 Javascript that drives the comment system and the old MT4 templates that I was using. I've now rebuilt the site using MT5 templates and everything seems to be working.

Sorry for the inconvenience. If you've tried to leave a comment recently and just got a never-ending spinner then I hope you'll try again now.

And a tip to people upgrading to MT5 - rebuild your templates.

Update: Looks like I spoke too soon. Commenting is still completely broken. I'm looking into it. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Andrew Wakefield

2010-01-29T13:24:04Z

After a hearing lasting two and a half years, the General Medical Council has decided that Andrew Wakefield acted unethically in his study which proposed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

It's now twelve years since his paper was published. During all of that time there has never been more of a tiny number of scientists who agreed with his findings. Unfortunately the few who do have been widely reported in the press and this has lead to a climate where a large proportion of the general public still believe that his findings are valid. Before Wakefield's study was published, 91% of children in the UK were receiving the vaccine. By 2003 that had fallen to 80%. in 2006 the UK had its first death from measles for fourteen years.

Wakefield should, of course, be ashamed of the effect he has had on the immunisation figures, but a lot of the blame must also be shouldered by the press who reported his findings as fact and who still refuse to admit that no link exists despite the number of studies which comprehensively disprove Wakefield's theories.

Reporting on yesterday's events, the Daily Mail still talk about "the controversial study" and devote a lot of column inches to interviewing people who still (with, it has to be emphasised, no scientific basis whatsoever) believe that Wakefield was right.

Yes, children contract autism. That's a sad fact. And there is a tendency for it to first be noticed at about the same time as the MMR vaccine is administered. But in study after study it has been shown that there is no causal link between the two events. Children who don't have the MMR vaccine are just as likely to become autistic as those who do.

But this is a classic example of a mob reaction that can't be turned off. The idea of the link is now out there and no amount of proof seems to counter that. You only have to read the comments on the Mail story to see that. The verdict from the GMC investigation is seen as Big Pharma trying to shut up the one man who is telling the truth. Or it's our Marxist Government trying to stifle dissent. Here are some examples:

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

I particularly want to draw attention to this one:

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

I agree with this. If there is a shred of doubt then, of course, no-one should be expected to give it to their child. But there isn't any doubt about MMR. Any doubt was manufactured by a hysterical press misreporting a flawed study. I really wish there was some way that the journalists and editors responsible for publishing these stories could be held accountable for their actions. They have probably caused more (and more lasting) damage than the original study.

As you'd expect, Ben Goldacre has more detail on the affair. His book also covers this area in some depth and is highly recommended.

PCC: An Important Update

2010-01-25T13:31:20Z

Last week I pointed you at a petition that you could sign to support our suggestions for reforming the PCC. Things went fine for a day or so and the number of signatures easily sailed past 500. Then, for reasons we still haven't understood, the petition vanished from the site where it was hosted. Despite valiant efforts by Tim Ireland to resolve the problem, the petition remains missing in action.

This leaves us with a huge problem. The deadline for submitting these proposals is approaching fast. In fact one of the deadlines is today. We no longer have access to the petition and we can't even get the list of names of people who had already signed.

There is one solution. We can all submit the suggestions independently by email.

If you support our suggestions (and even if you have already signed the petition), can you please email a copy of the suggestions to the two email addresses below. The suggestions are listed on my previous blog entry. The two email addresses are Vivien Hepworth, Chairman, (PCC) Independent Governance Review - governancereview@pcc.org.uk and Ian Beales, Code Committee Secretary, Editor's Code of Practive Committee ianbeales@mac.com. The deadline for the first address is today (hence the urgency) and the deadline for the second address is 31st January. I suggest you do what I'm going to do and send the same mail to both addresses this afternoon.

Apologies for the short notice and for asking you to support the same campaign twice.

More details over on Tim's blog.

Press Complaints Commission

2010-01-18T12:42:20Z

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.

Customer Relationship Failure

2010-01-15T12:12:44Z

I generally don't like getting marketing email. Whenever I buy something online or sign up to a new web site, I always make sure that the "please send me email" is not checked. This doesn't, of course, stop me getting marketing email but it does give me the moral high ground if I choose to complain about it.

There are, however, a small number of companies and organisations who I'm happy to receive mail from. Generally that's campaigns that I support and things like that. There are only a couple of retailers in that list. One of them is Jessops, the photographic people. Photography is a hobby that I don't have time to follow that closely, so I'm happy for Jessops to send me information about new products every few weeks. Sometimes it might even get me into a shop to buy something.

But over the last couple of months my patience with Jessops has been sorely tried. I think they have started to use a new CRM or mass-mail tool. Whatever the issue is, the result has been that the email I get from them has become really impersonal and, actually borders on being rude.

The problem is that somehow they have got the parts of my name confused. Perhaps they got the forename and surname fields the wrong way in some data import exercise. Or perhaps they are using the wrong data field in their mail merge process. But where they think they are writing email with friendly subjects like "Dave, 3 for 2 offers on photo products", I'm actually seeing "Cross, 3 for 2 offers on photo products".

To be honest, I prefer it if retailers address me as "Mr Cross" (I realise I may be a bit out of date there) but I'm reasonably happy for them to call me "Dave". Calling me "Cross" just isn't acceptable. The first time it happened I assumed it was a glitch that would be fixed before the next run. But I've since received three or four other messages with the same error in the subject line.

Each time one of those messages arrives it lowers my respect for Jessops. Each time I get closer to just removing myself from their mailing list. But I do still find the contents of the mail interesting. Today I got another message and I replied to it asking them to fix the problem. But I strongly suspect that the reply address won't go to a real person - that seems to be standard (if broken) practice these days.

It'll only take a couple more of these messages to push into unsubscribing. And Jessops will probably lose the small amount of custom that they currently get from me. I don't suppose they really care.

By the way. Whilst we're talking about Jessops, does anyone else think that their new slogan is a little excessive? Does anyone really go to a camera shop for "advice for life"?

Binary Dates

2010-01-11T16:53:50Z

There's a strange meme going round that today is the last "binary date" for a hundred years. I'm not sure where it came from but a couple of people have repeated it on Twitter over the last couple of days.

A binary date is one which is made up completely of ones and zeroes. So in order to find any we'll need to ignore the "2" in "2010" and assume that we're writing dates in the shorthand dd/mm/yy format - or your local variation thereof.

In that form we can easily agree that, yes, 11/01/10 is a binary date. And so was yesterday (10/01/10) and the 1st of January (01/01/10). But to suggest that there are no more for a hundred years is clearly nonsense. Anyone suggesting that is guilty of not giving the matter the smallest amount of thought.

There are still six more binary dates to come this year (01/10/10, 10/10/10, 11/10/10, 01/11/10, 10/11/10 and 11/11/10) and another nine to come next year (01/01/11, 10/01/11, 11/01/11, 01/10/11, 10/10/11, 11/10/11, 01/11/11, 10/11/11 and 11/11/11).

After 11th November next year, there will be no more binary dates until the year 2100.

If you're going to pass on memes, at least check them for accuracy first.

Snow and Global Warming

2010-01-06T13:06:13Z

I'm reading reports that Tory MP Ann Winterton has made a complete fool of herself in today's Prime Minister's Questions. She has suggested that the government should cancel "wasteful expenditure" on wind farms as the current weather clearly demonstrates that global warming is nonsense.

Despite being complete nonsense, this is an argument that I hear on a regular basis. It's trotted out by someone every time the weather takes a turn for the worse. Here's another Tory MP, Douglas Carswell[1], making the same claim during December's snows. [Update: And here's the the front page of today's Express: Snow Chaos - And They Still Claim It's Global Warming]

I was about to write a post pointing out the obvious flaws in this argument, but there was a feeling of deja vu niggling away at the back of my head. Then I remembered what I wrote during the snow we had last February.

[1] You might want to take a look around Carswell's site. There's a lot of nonsense there. I'm planning to cover him in more detail in the coming weeks.

Mid-Life Crisis Nostalgia Project

2010-01-03T22:00:12Z

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.

Review of 2009: Favourite Posts

2010-01-02T18:00:00Z

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.

Review of 2009: Most Popular Posts

2010-01-02T12:05:39Z

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's Probably No Bus
A silly post containing a picture based on the Athiest Bus Campaign.
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.
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.
Watching the Watchmen
A pretty obvious title for my review of the Watchmen film.
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.

Humphrey the Happy Hippy Tortoise

2009-12-30T17:07:25Z

Round these parts the period between christmas and new year is a time for turning the house upside down and trying to get rid of most of the rubbish that we've accumulated over the previous twelve months. My part in that is often going through the piles of paperwork in the study, filing the stuff that needs to be filed and getting rid of the stuff that is no longer (if, indeed, it ever was) needed. If I have time I'll also engage in a spot of paperwork archaeology (do I really need all those credit card statements from 1998?)

This year I got deeper into cupboards and drawers that I have for several years. And I found some old stuff that brought back some memories. I particular, I found a green notebook that I was using in 1983.

In 1983 I was unemployed and living in Hackney. I had dropped out of my first attempt at a degree and I wouldn't start my second (ultimately successful) attempt until the following year. I had a lot of time on my hands.

So I started to draw a cartoon. About a tortoise. We actually had a pet tortoise at the time so I wrote cartoon strips based on his antics. Or, at least, the antics I thought he'd be getting up to given half a chance. These cartoons are all in the green notebook that I have just found.

I wanted an break from sorting and shredding paperwork, so I've started to scan in the cartoons in order to preserve them (notebooks don't last forever). And because the internet gives me a global audience, I've started to put them online.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Humphrey the Happy Hippy Tortoise. I'll be publishing the strips over the next few weeks. There's also a page with more background on the real Humphrey.

Randall Munroe has nothing to be worried about.

Rage Against The X Factor

2009-12-21T08:42:13Z

Well done everyone. We really showed 'em. We showed The Man that he can't mess with Da Kidz.

But, actually, we really just doubled the amount of money that Sony BMG made out of this year's christmas number one. And, despite clear instructions to the contrary in the song's lyrics, we did exactly what They told us to do.

The truth is, of course, somewhere between the two extremes.

I know it's only a christmas number one and doesn't mean anything at all, but I couldn't help feeling really happy when I heard the news last night. It really felt like people were telling Cowell "enough is enough". We've had enough of the anodyne tripe that is pushed out year after year by X Factor, Pop Idol or whatever it's called this week. There are still some people out there who want to hear real music. Of course, it's not many people. And it took a co-ordinated internet campaign to get us all pointing in the same direction. And I have little doubt that this is only a blip in the chart's inexorable decline into mediocrity. This time next year, I'd love to look back on a year of interesting and intelligent number one records. But I know that's not going to happen,

If nothing else, we can surely chalk this up as another in this year's impressive list of social media triumphs. 2009 must go down as the year when social media grew up and started to achieve something. We've proven time and time again this year that social media can be a force for change. But "with great power comes great responsibility" and all that. We must do all we can to ensure that our new power is used to make positive changes.

We're going to have a general election next year. And pretty much anyone you speak to seems to think that the result is a foregone conclusion. But those of us who remember the disappointment of 1992 know that the result of a general election is never a foregone conclusion.

If we can get people out buying Rage Against The Machine records, then surely we can also get people to think about their vote. Maybe we can even persuade some of the 40% who didn't vote last time to get out and make a difference.

Of course the problem with this plan is that the christmas number one is something that people actually care about. Most people don't care at all about politics or who is running the country.

And if that's not a sad indictment of the state of British society, then I don't know what it.

Update: Charlie Brooker, as always, has interesting things to say on the subject.

Climate Hoax

2009-12-18T21:53:38Z

(Via PZ Myers)

Twisted Christmas

2009-12-16T09:01:07Z

As I mentioned yesterday, last night I went to the Barbican Centre to see their Twisted Christmas show. The show was definitely a mixed bag. Most of the musical performers were good. I particularly enjoyed Alasdair Roberts' "The 12 Days of Yule" (On the first day of Yule my druid brought to me a crow in a Yggrasil tree), Ed Harcourt's "The Devil Came Down the Chimney" and Polly Scattergood's version of "Walking in the Air". The whole evening was compered by Jeremy Hardy who I haven't seen for far too long and who was on top form. Other, less impressive acts included Simon Fisher Turner who seemed to think that singing "In The Bleak Midwinter" with lungs full of helium would be entertaining. It wasn't.

But, for me, the evening was completely ruined by The House of Fairy Tales. They appear to be a loose collective of performance artists who had been invited to do something interesting in a side room. Their antics were then projected live onto a huge screen at the back of the stage. This really didn't work. The stuff they were doing bore no relation to what the musicians were doing and it just proved to be a pointless distraction.

Some examples of the nonsense:

The man who covered himself with a sheet whilst his partner projected pictures of cultural icons (Gandi, Lennon, Chaplin) onto him.
The person who moved animal bones around on a lightbox attempting to demonstrate that they made up a fairy.
The man who painted over postcards to turn them into winter scenes.
The man who took power tools to old books.

This is the kind of stuff that you see in obscure corners of the Green Field at Glastonbury. You don't expect to see it given credence at a top London venue. I don't think I've seen anything so embarrassing since I saw the Ice Man - a man whose act was to melt a huge slab of ice live on stage.

When bands like Pink Floyd have visuals projected behind them on stage, they spend a lot of time ensuring that the images match the music that they are playing. They don't just turn a video camera on a bunch of nutters backstage. And do you you know why? It's because they know it's a recipe for disaster.

At the start of the second half the nutters were let out onto the stage and we were forced to sit through ten minutes of the worst "comedy" that I've ever seen (and, trust me, I've seen some bad comedy in my time). If you ever have a chance to see acts calling themselves "Story Pirates" or "Princes in the Tower" then my advice would be to run very fast in the opposite direction.

At times I felt really sorry for the musicians. It can't have been easy trying to compete with that huge screen showing such an unremitting stream of shit. I know that the organisers were just trying to an a little something different to the show, but I hope they can see that this was a complete disaster.

I'd like to go to Twisted Christmas again next year. But I shall be studying the programme closely for signs of pointless performance art before I go.

Bloggers - help beat Trafigura gag on BBC!

2009-12-15T16:23:18Z

Richard Wilson writes:

You can help beat Trafigura’s gag on the BBC by embedding this Youtube video on your website… …and linking to this pdf!

Here’s why…

Late last week the BBC chose to delete from its website a damning Newsnight investigation into the Trafigura scandal, following legal threats from the company and its controversial lawyers, Carter-Ruck.
….
The mainstream UK media has so far assiduously avoided reporting on the BBC’s climbdown. Yet it’s an issue that raises serious questions about the state of press freedom in Britain, at a time of unprecedented attacks on the media.

via Left Outside