Brian Clegg's Blog, page 117

All in a good cause

I am currently scanning in some old photos from my university days and I feel I have to share the Winter 1976 British Lecture Attendance "Record Breaking" Expedition that took place in Cambridge on 20 February 1976. The aim was to attend as many lectures as a possible in a single morning, raising funds for RAG '76.


Those present above are Dave Izod, Rod Hill, Me, Helmut Jakubowicz, Dick Lacey, Neil Thomas and Andy Brookes and (taking the photo but on the right below) Mark Saville. We stormed into the lectures, held up the lecturer and demanded money with menaces.

I do appear to be wearing a skirt. This is because a couple of those present designed a 'British Board of Lecture Censors' certificate to post up at each lecture. In the corner of the certificate was a picture of their sponsor, 'Mrs Ethel Trappit.' For some reason they used a picture of me with a Newcastle Brown bottle. (I was not amused initially.) So I had to, really.

Those attending the lectures seemed highly entertained. Not surprising really. They were students.

Perhaps rather more surprising was the good grace of the lecturers, who allowed us to disrupt their teaching with surprisingly few moans. Although the physicist below did seem a little wary of the (toy) gun. (We would probably be arrested as terrorists today.)

What I had totally forgotten was the 'Boo Now' sign in the bottom left of the photo below, prepared to get the audience on our side in case we had any trouble from lecturers. It is also notable that the gangster with the hat, shades and violin case to the right below is now himself a professor. I wonder how he would react if this happened to him?


There is an epilogue. A year later I went to visit someone I knew from home, who was at Lancaster University. He had on his wall one of the British Board of Lecture censor certificates, given to him by a friend of his who had been at one of the lectures we hit. So this person who I was visiting had my picture on his wall without realising it. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the certificate any more, but this is a fuzzy picture of what was there:

What's yours and what's mine?

We have a difficult dilemma. Our daughter has had an iPod (and now an iPhone) for a number of years. When she started using it she was a child, so of course we set her up on our account.

Over the years she has bought a fair amount of music. Now, this is fun for me, because my iTunes has access to all these trendy songs, some of which I rather like. But here's the thing. Now she is an adult she wants to do her own thing. She doesn't want to be on our iTunes account any more. But if she starts a new account, she starts from scratch. She loses her hundreds of tracks. And there is no way to transfer them across.

Take a look online and you will find lots of people asking how to split an iTunes account, sadly in many cases because a couple has split up. It's almost a cliché, a couple deciding who gets which CDs from their collection when they break up and go their separate ways, but on iTunes they are scuppered. It is all or nothing.

Now it is possible that the indivisible iTunes library could mean fewer divorces. But I think on the whole this inability to split a digital library is a bad thing. It is going to be needed more and more as we move to a more cloud-based world. And it is time companies like Apple and Amazon caught up with the reality that they are hosting some of our most treasured assets - and they had better find a way to split these when someone starts off on their own.

Is the Director of Public Prosecutions innumerate?

It varies a lot, so Mr Starmer couldn't average itListening to the Today programme on Radio 4 a few days ago (5 June), I couldn't help wonder if the Director of Public Prosecutions, the exotically named Keir Starmer, struggles with numbers and particularly with statistics.

There were two issues with Mr Starmer's answers. The interviewer was trying to get Starmer to put a percentage on the point at which the prosecution service would take a case forward. What was the probability of success required before prosecuting? Starmer couldn't reply. There just, he said, had to be a reasonable chance of success. The actual percentage could vary from case to case. That's really not good enough. What does 'a reasonable chance' mean? There is an implied number in there - but he's not admitting what it is. And if it does vary from case to case, fine. But what are the criteria? It's fair enough to say there isn't a consistent percentage of likelihood across different types of case (though there needs to be a clear reason for varying it), but there needs to be a good logical reason for doing this. Without it, the justice system is anything but transparent and potential subject to misuse.

The second problem Mr Starmer has is that he clearly doesn't understand what an average is. He was asked how long it took them to consider a case and replied 'It varies a lot, so we can't come up with a average.' Well, no Mr Starmer, this is exactly when you can come up with an average. If it was always 21 days you wouldn't need an average - it is only if there is variability that you need one. Of course if it is an interesting distribution you need to tell us a bit more - the median, perhaps, and what the distribution is like. But this provides no excuse for hiding behind vagueness.

There are two possibilities here. Either Mr Starmer is innumerate or he was trying to conceal things with deliberate vagueness. Taking the kind view that no deception was involved, perhaps we can make sure that when he is replaced we get someone who has familiarity with the basics of statistics and can make sure his department is acting fairly and logically - impossible without having a grasp of those numbers.

With light handling marks

One of my salesWe hear a lot about how evil Amazon is, the way they ruin things for friendly local bookshops. And there is a degree of truth in this. But it isn't an entirely balanced view. After all, with Amazon I can be shopping in the afternoon and have a book delivered next day, far easier than ordering a book from my local shop. But that isn't the advantage I want to discuss here.

I get sent a lot of books to review, and when I have finished with them I sell them most of them. I don't feel guilty about this - I'm mostly not paid for doing the reviews so a fiver or whatever I get for selling the book on is not exactly an unreasonable compensation. And I am always reminded of science fiction author Brian Aldiss's excellent memoir  Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's in which he remembers working in a bookshop in Oxford which had frequent visits from poet laureate John Betjeman, turning up with boxes full of books he had been sent to review and wanted to sell.
I am a very careful reader, and the books usually still look new after I've finished them, so I tend to sell them 'Used like new - has been read with light handling marks.' And here's the point I wanted to make about bookshops. That is the condition of a book you buy as 'new' from a bookshop. If you are lucky. Because they have been taken off the shelves, manhandled, sneezed on and generally abused by the browsers. Where if I by a book new from Amazon it really is new, as pristine as when it left the publisher.
This might seems trivial, but it is not. Why, after all do I still buy paper books? I can read them just as well and usually cheaper on an iPad. But I quite often do buy paper books, for the pleasure of owning and handling them. And if I am going to do that, I much prefer them not to have been pawed by the general public.

One up for buying online, I feel.

Too many charities

As I left the supermarket the other day I had to run the gauntlet of someone collecting for an obscure charity. I pointedly looked the other way and hurried past. This sounds heartless, but I genuinely believe that we have too many little charities, which result in dilution of the results that the money provided could bring.

Don't get me wrong - I am not talking about all small charities. I used to be a trustee of a local charity called the Zaslowya Project (ZP), and I am still a supporter. This was one of a good number of charities, usually with 'Chernobyl' in their name, that were set up in response to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, usually targeting children in neighbouring Belarus, which bore the brunt of the fallout.

Like most of these charities, ZP was set up to bring children to the UK on extend stays - usually about a  month - because it has been put about that by doing so, the level of radiation in the children's bodies dropped significantly and this extended their predicted lifespan by a considerable amount. It has turned out that the whole Chernobyl/radiation thing is something of a red herring. There was never any scientific basis for the original claim, the impact of the radiation seems significantly less than first thought, and even if it were true, taking the children out of the country for a few weeks could only ever have a minor, short term effect.

What ZP does now is concentrate on supporting the children back home - because there is a lot of poverty which, combined with rampant alcoholism amongst adults, results in some dire home lives. The charity does still bring children over on a small scale, but this is primarily to make bonds with donors - the real work goes on back in Belarus.

I have no problem with ZP, or a charity supporting, say, a local hospice. They do great work. No, the ones I have problems with, like the one in the supermarket foyer, are those that nibble away at a bigger charity's important work. They usually combine children with a disease - leukaemia is a common one, tugging at the heartstrings. And I absolutely understand why people feel the need to do this. However I would suggest that the most important thing with diseases is to get them cured, and it would be much better if the money given to these small charities was focussed instead with the big boys like Cancer Research. Yes, care is also important - and if you want to, go with something like Macmillan. But cure and prevention is by far the top priority. I'm afraid these little, well-meaning me-too outfits must divert funds from where they can do most good.

You may wonder if the same should also apply to something like ZP - as I mentioned this is one of many 'Chernobyl' charities. There are several others in Swindon alone. However, ZP concentrates on a single Belarusian town (as many of these charities do), confusingly called Zaslavl rather than Zaslowya (don't ask) - and as I've already indicated, it seems to be one of the few that really understands the need on the ground, rather than reprising the 'holiday from radiation' story.

The news suggests people are giving to charity less at the moment. The last thing I want to do is encourage that. But I do think we ought to be a bit more discriminating - find out a bit more about a charity before we donate. And that means, unless you know the charity already, ignoring those heart-rending pleas at the supermarket entrance.

Shiny isn't always best

The soundbar looking just right under an iMac I like to think I'm very rational when it comes to choosing my IT equipment. Those of you who aren't Mac users may be sniggering and rolling around on the ground at this point because you know perfectly well that us Mac users pay far over the odds for what is basically just a prettier PC. Well, you are wrong. I am now into my second year on a Mac and it's still the case that every day I use it I get far more enjoyment out of interacting with it than I did with my old PC. If you are on the computer most of the day like me, that is well worth paying a bit extra for. And that's without all the added slickness in interworking with my iPad and iPhone. However...

... I must admit that there is a mindset that goes with being an Apple lover that says 'if it looks sexy and shiny it's worth paying extra for.' And I have just had a classic example of why this isn't always true.

Although the iMac's screen is superb, its sound through the built-in speakers is so-so at best. It's not bad on the high registers but it has very little bass. I don't have music on while I'm writing, but during the rest of my activities I quite like to delve into my reasonably chunky iTunes portfolio - and to be honest the iMac's sound just isn't good enough. So I invested in something called an XtremeMac Tango soundbar. Let's see what it had going for it:

It has the word 'Mac' in the nameIt looks sleek and Apple-like in its designIt fits beautifully under the iMac screenIt has good reviews on Amazon Old speaker hiding coyly behind iMac and sounding great
(the subwoofer is on the floor)Now, I think my soundbar was faulty. There certainly was more bass than with the built-in speakers,  but the higher frequencies were very fuzzy, like listening to an AM radio. And it soon developed an irritating interference buzz. So I sent it back. But here's the thing.
Once I'd got the improve-the-sound bug, I thought 'let's see what things sound like with my old system.' Because I had a circa 15-year-old Altec Lansing 2 speaker+subwoofer rig sitting on my desk, still attached to my old PC which I keep around in case there's some ancient email I need to access. I plugged it into the iMac... and wow! Not only does it blow the soundbar out of the water, it is much better than it ever was on my PC. Even the little alert pings and whizzes the computer makes sound exquisite.
So there's my lesson. Rather than shelling out £70 on a soundbar I should have checked out the old tried and tested first. Ok, it's ancient. It looks rubbish (though it's out of sight, so that doesn't matter). It's dirty and has seen better days. But boy does it make my iMac sound better. 
Repeat after me three times: Just because something is shiny doesn't mean it's better (at least, if you don't have to look at it to use it).

Who was the monkey in this trial?

Anyone who knows anything about the battle to preserve rationality in supporting the theory of evolution against marauding creationism will know of the 1925 Scopes trial - or 'the infamous Scopes monkey trial' as it is often known. What I didn't realize until reading John Grant's excellent rallying cry for embattled reason, Denying Science , was that the whole Scopes trial was a publicity stunt.

It's not that there wasn't a serious issue to be fought. The trigger was the signing of an act prohibiting the teaching of evolution in universities and schools in Tennessee. But the Scopes trial was apparently one of those good ideas that civic leaders have when they've had a drink or three down the local saloon. Apparently the dignitaries of Dayton, where the trial took place, spotted that any such trial would bring a lot of cash into town. So they got together both the prosecution and the defence, and looked for a likely candidate as defendant.

Scopes, a general science teacher (who had probably never taught evolution) was approached and agreed to be prosecuted. The town's bigwigs then went on a hunt for celebrities to be involved in the case. They failed to get H. G. Wells as a witness, but they succeeded superbly in getting hold of the lawyer Clarence Darrow to represent Scopes. It's a mark of how much this was all a setup that one of the main prosecution witnesses, pulled to pieces by Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, offered to pay Scopes' fine if the prosecution was successful.

I ought to stress that the fact that the whole thing was a setup in no way contravenes the effectiveness of the demolition of the prosecution done by Darrow. This was the first of many clear legal decisions in favour of evolution - though in the end, the legal system with its ancient Greek idea that the best way to get to the truth is have an argument and the best argument wins (as opposed to science, which is dependent on data and experiment, rather than the quality of the legal team) is not a great way to make an appropriate decision. There are still legislators, particularly in the US, attempting to impose creationism and 'Intelligent Design' on schools and colleges, which have no place in the science classroom (except when studying the psychology of self-deception).

But I do find it fascinating that the Scopes trial, in many ways the pinup of the good guys in this battle, was a setup job to get a town some publicity. And the fact that we are still talking about it today shows what a good job it did.

Stop blaming the customer

I am fed up with the way that every time farmers get ripped off by the supermarkets, or a tragedy occurs while manufacturing cheap garments, the customer gets blamed. Frankly, it is a load of reproductive oblate spheroids, and not of the canine variety.

What we hear, both from the stores and on ill-thought out TV documentaries and news reports is that it is the consumers' fault because we demand cheap milk and cheap clothing (say). That is ludicrous. When did anyone ever stand outside a supermarket yelling 'What do we want? Cheap milk! When do we want it? Now!'? When did anyone email Primark saying 'It is disgusting that your tops cost £6! I want them for £4!'? It just doesn't happen.

Of course customers will buy things cheap if they are made available cheap. They would be stupid not to do so. I would rush out tomorrow to buy a Jaguar XK if they were £10,000 instead of £70,000, but strangely Jaguar has no intention of selling them at that price.

So yes, it's true - I buy my milk at 25p a pint from Asda, because that's the price they sell it at. If they decided to sell it at 35p a pint and give an extra 10p to the farmer, I would still buy it. But the choice of how much to pay the supplier is entirely down to the shop, not to me. Of course if they made it £10 a pint I would go elsewhere - but no one is suggesting that should be the case. In reality, if Asda wants to sell milk for 25p a pint, that is entirely up to them. But they should still pay their farmers a fair amount - if they want a loss leader, Asda should take the loss, not the farmer.

Similarly, it is entirely the responsibility of Primark et al that they squeeze every penny out of the suppliers, not the consumer. No one asks the shops to do this. And when there is a disaster like the terrible loss of life recently in Bangladesh, while most of the blame has to go to the local country's government that didn't maintain safe standards, the rest falls squarely on the shoulders of the aggressive retailer.

Some retailers will try to play the competition card at this point. 'We can't increase our prices,' they say because everyone will go to our competitors.' Unfortunately this just doesn't hold up. I suspect there is little evidence that price sensitivity is so strong that the few pence per item required to move from being an aggressive squeezer of suppliers to a more sustainable model will make much difference. But if it really does, then make the price change anyway - and instead of aggressively squeezing your suppliers, aggressively take it out on your competitors. Point out that the only way they can undercut you is by mistreating their suppliers. Make a big campaign of it. Name names. Blame and shame. Of course, this is only a safe course if you yourself are squeaky clean, but then you will be, won't you?

So please stop this ridiculous claim. Customers don't 'demand' low prices. They will take advantage of them, naturally. But pricing is not their decision, and to suggest that it is is to shift blame and weasel out of responsibility. Only the shops (or the government through legislation) can ultimately make the choice to set prices fairly and pay their suppliers fairly. And it's time they did so.

This has been a Green Heretic production

The mystery of memory

This is definitely in colour. Sort of.Human memory is a strange and wonderful thing. We can't help but think of what we remember as fact - but in reality we need to, erm, remember that memory is a totally artificial construct of the brain, not a video recording of the world. And it is often wrong.

I had a wonderful of example of this at the weekend. I was doing one of my regular appearances on the Saturday show of the excellent local radio presenter Mark O'Donnell. On my way in to BBC Wiltshire, I was listening to the show, as I like to be able to fit in with any discussion that has been taking place. Mark was asking listeners to recall when they first saw colour TV. Two separate listeners said the first thing they saw in colour was the 1966 World Cup final - always remembered in the UK as England won. Even I, not exactly a sports fan, watched it, though in black and white as we didn't get a colour set until around 1970.

However, a niggling doubt set in. 1966 seemed very early for the introduction of colour. So as I sat in the car park, before going into the studio, I did a quick Google search and discovered that according to a BBC website, the first colour broadcast was of Wimbledon. In 1967. Both listeners were describing false memories. This was fascinating and Mark got the listeners back on the line, where they had to admit that they couldn't be quite sure.

What is likely to have happened is that they have seen colour images since and combined the two in their memory. Memories are both faulty and not fixed and permanent. I pointed out the example of the remarkable experiment undertaken in the early years of the 20th century that I describe in Extra Sensory :

On December 4, 1901 there were as a horrendous incident during a seminar on criminology at the University of Berlin. As Professor Franz von Liszt gave his lecture, one of the students interrupted to give an alternative viewpoint to the professor’s “from Christian morality.” A second student jumped up and disagreed profoundly. He said that he was fed up of with these Christian morality arguments. The first student was incensed. He pushed the desk over and strode over to his opponent, pulling a gun from under his coat. There was fight, the two students wrestling for control until the gun went off. The second student fell to the floor, apparently dead.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the class was in shock. Von Liszt picked up the gun and asked for attention. He apologized, telling them that he had staged the event in order to perform an experiment. He now wanted everyone present to write down exactly what they had seen. Still shaken, they all obediently wrote out witness statements. And here’s where it gets interesting. The versions that the students gave differed wildly. This was no distant memory and featured no ordinary everyday event. They were giving their recollection of something amazing that had been seared on their memories just minutes before.

When the different reports were compared there were, for example, eight different names given for the person who started the fight. Across the observers there were wildly differing accounts for the duration of the event, the order in which things happening and how the whole scene finished with von Liszt’s explanation. Some were convinced that the gunman had run from the lecture room – which he hadn’t. He had remained standing over the body.

 My point in describing this was that there is an exact parallel with those who remember seeing remarkable events like spoons that they thought they saw bending on their own with no one touching them under the influence of performers like Uri Geller, again dramatic events that they believe they have witnessed. There is very good evidence that we can’t believe what people 'have seen with their own eyes' if the only information we have is their testimony. Without clear video evidence, for example, such recollections are practically worthless.

The same, frighteningly is true of witness evidence in court (which was von Liszt's main point). A jury puts a lot of weight behind what a witness says they saw - and yet the fact is that it is amongst the least reliable of the evidence that is likely to be presented. We really need to change our legal system to take account of this - and we have known this for over a century.

Luckily, memories of the World Cup are not going to put anyone in prison. But it still is a reminder of just how uncertain memories really are - and how remarkable the human brain is.

Image of the 1966 World Cup champions' statue from Wikipedia

Dealing with royalty

If you are an author, one of the mixed joys and horrors of your life is the royalty statement. The joy part is that this could be a piece of paper telling you that you have earned some money. The horror is two-fold. Sometimes instead, the royalty statement tells you the reverse. Because books are sent out to stores sale or return, it is entirely possible in a six month accounting period to have negative sales when returns outweigh outgoings. This is highly dispiriting the first time it happens. But the other horrific aspect is that royalty statements often suffer from byzantine complexity. And this means it is very easy for the publisher to make mistakes. This is not malicious - it is just that as an author you are one of many and there is only a limited amount of effort they can put into getting it right.

Because of this, I recommend that all authors check their royalty statements with a fine tooth comb. If you have an agent you may feel 'It's okay, I don't need to do this, my agent will do it for me.' And perhaps he or she will. But in my experience agents have neither the time nor the inclination to do this properly (and some, I suspect, struggle with the numbers). It really is on the author's shoulders.

Here is a royalty statement:

As you can see it is quite a loaded document. (Incidentally this particular format has one oddity which is that it is almost impossible to find the name of the book. It is positioned where I have put the little green arrow, quite difficult to spot.

I have accumulated a whole list of possible mistakes that have been made in royalty statements - not all to me, and not all from the same publisher, but all things that the sensible author should check. So here we go:

Is it the right kind of book? Contracts often have different rates for, say, a hardback, a trade paperback and a mass market paperback. If they use the wrong category, you could get the wrong rate.Are the basic values right? Are, for instance, the percentage royalties the same as the ones in your contract?Have escalators been applied properly? The percentage the author receives often increases after a certain number of sales, but this isn't always reflected in the statement. This is one of the most common errors.Do the return numbers make sense? If you have returns, add up the total for a particular type of sale across all periods. If the final value is negative there is a problem: it seems they have had more returned than they sent out.Have any special triggers been reflected? Contracts sometimes have special triggers, providing, say, an extra advance if a certain number of books are sold. Make sure these are applied.Are returns being counted at the same percentage as sales? If there is an escalator you could have  several different percentage royalties. If for instance your base percentage is 10% and the escalated value 15%, but it hasn't been triggered, make sure that returns are not being made at 15%.Are translations, rights deals, serial rights etc. in there? A lot of money can be made from, for instance, giving rights to another publisher to do a translation. As these are not part of the normal accounting it is easy for the publisher to forget to include these. Don't rush this one - they may not come in until the period after the deal is set up, but if there's nothing by then, flag it up.I'm sure there are other possible mistakes - these are just the ones I'm aware of, so please do let me know of any others! I am not suggesting you should be a thorn in the flesh of your publisher - you are both on the same side - but they can make errors, and it is in your interest to check. If you do think you've found an error, don't be aggressive - ask nicely. Apart from anything else, you could have got it wrong!