Brian Clegg's Blog, page 66

Lessons on using Twitter customer service

A lot of companies now offer quick and easy customer service response via Twitter. If in doubt these days, if I'm moaning about a company (or praising one for that matter) I will include their Twitter address in my tweet, and many will respond within minutes or hours.

I think this is a good thing - as long as it's done well. I've had some really zippy and helpful responses. But sometimes a company is far too slow in responding. At other times, even if the company responds quickly, it doesn't exactly do itself any favours.

I used Twitter to bring the above moan to the attention of my bank. Lloyds makes it clear just how much it regards Twitter as a way to ask it questions from the name 'AskLloydsBank.' It seemed a reasonable question - I've a relatively new business debit card, yet when I buy stamps or travel by tube, for instance, I can't use my card to pay contactless.

Back came the reply within an hour or so:


Well, I suppose it was nice to know I was dealing with CL. (No, it wasn't. I didn't really care.) But have you spotted what (s)he did? Answered my question by telling me what I already knew. Not exactly top quality stuff. So, subtle as ever, I replied:


To be fair to the Lloyds staff, at this point the actually read the question. (It's not just Lloyds. As anyone who has ever tried to use Amazon, eBay or Paypal customer service will know, they never read the question properly first time, churning out a knee-jerk reply.) Unfortunately, the response was not one to cheer my heart:

So there you have it. They can't provide a reason. Now, do you think that leaves me a happy customer? No. Twitter is genuinely a great medium for customer service - but in cases like this it proves worse than useless, and the company ends up looking worse that it did before responding. What's more, bearing in mind Twitter is a broadcast (these weren't PMs) they did it for the whole world to see.

Lessons? Yes, use Twitter for customer service. Yes, get back to your customers promptly. But read their questions first time. And if you can't give an answer, give the customer an easy mechanism to escalate the query. 'We wouldn't be able to provide a specific reason,' just isn't good enough.

Review - The Alteration

I've come back to this book after a couple of decades and it still holds up well as one of the two great alternative history books where there is no Reformation in Europe, leaving the Catholic church with a  stranglehold that limits the development of science, technology and society (the other, of course, is Keith Roberts' lyrical Pavane).

The central theme to The Alteration is whether a ten-year-old boy with a superb singing voice should be turned into a castrato to preserve that voice for life at significant cost for the boy - but Kingsley Amis has immense fun with many references to familiar people, books and events, seen in the different light of the tightly Catholic Europe. The strange mix of Tudor and 1970s is done beautifully and atmospherically, as are the many differences between their world and ours (though it's never properly explained why Cowley, now known as Coverley, is the capital, rather than London). There are Protestants in this world - but they are mostly limited to New England, which despite being arguably better than Europe has its own problems.

Altogether a rich and delightful book with enough varied topics (the passage of child to adult, for instance, and the nature of being 'gifted' as well as the obvious social and religious themes) to engage anyone. I do have two issues. The minor one is that it is written in a language that is modern, but with a period feel to deepen that Tudor/1970s mix - which is fine, but distances the reader a little. The rather bigger one is the major plot twist in the final segment of the book - I won't give it away, but this is a twist that will not only have a fair number of readers wincing, but that is so improbable in the context that it makes the ending seem contrived. I understand what Amis is doing here, but he should have found a different way to do it.

Despite that, though, this is a great example of that wonderful mix of science fiction and historical fiction that is an alternative history, and well worth a try.

You can find out more about the book at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Literary lunacy

There has been considerable negative reaction to an article by someone I've never heard of called Jonathan Jones in The Guardian who tells us to 'Get real,' because 'Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius.' Jones goes on to say 'I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to.' Why? Because 'life is too short to waste on ordinary potboilers - and our obsession with mediocre writers is a very disturbing cultural phenomenon.'

Some have suggested that Jones is indulging in the popular Katie Hopkins method of trying to become famous by irritating people. (If so, it hasn't really worked as it's just his bile and not his person that has reached public awareness.) But I don't think they are right. Instead what we have here is classic literary fiction jealousy of popular fiction.

The attitude is wondrously condescending and amounts to 'Only the fiction I like is worth reading, because it changes lives and enriches the soul whereas your rubbish just entertains the masses.' I'm sorry, I very rarely resort to offensive language, but this is bollocks. There's plenty of literary fiction that is, frankly, boring, unreadable self-promoting trash. It's showing off that is being passed off as art.

All written work (and art for that matter) is communication. If the work fails to communicate to the reader, it is more the fault of the author than the reader, unless what's getting in the way is changing language. The only thing that stops Shakespeare being instantly accessible is they way that language has changed considerably, but if you can overcome that, you don't have to work at getting Shakespeare - it gets you. Viscerally. But I suspect most of the authors Jones would champion with the obvious exception of Jane Austen (and unlike him, I have read some of the authors in question) present quite the reverse picture. They are poor communicators who are more interested in an artistic turn of phrase and piling on the painstakingly implausible angst than linking to the reader.

In one sense Jones is right. Pratchett wasn't a genius. His writing style is closer to P. G. Wodehouse than Shakespeare. But as well as Shakespeare and Austen, give me Pratchett (or Wodehouse, or Bradbury, another author Jones attacks) any day over the pretentious twaddle that Jones no doubt considers literary genius. Because writers like Pratchett and Bradbury knew their craft. They knew how to draw in a reader and get into their minds. And they have influenced and enriched far more lives than Jones' literary elite ever could.

Fun with vanadium oxides

In my latest podcast for the RSC's Chemistry in its Element series I take a look at the assorted oxides of vanadium.

Vanadium, the transition metal at number 23 on the periodic table, is one of those elements that sounds more like something out of a superhero movie than a real substance. You might expect that vanadium oxide would be of vanishingly small interest, but the reality is different. I should really have said the vanadium oxides, because thanks to vanadium’s five valence electrons there are enough oxides to sound like a successful Hollywood franchise – vanadium (II) oxide, VO, vanadium (III) oxide, V2O3, vanadium (IV) oxide, VO2 and vanadium (V) oxide, V2O5, without going into extra intermediate phases that can produce entertaining combos like V6O13 and V8O15.

Also like those Hollywood franchises, some instalments are more interesting than others, as you'll discover by taking a listen...

Corbynistics

There's nothing like politics to bring out lies, damned lies and statistics, and we have to be particularly careful when throwing around percentage figures when commenting on political figures, their supporters and their views. Recently published YouGov data compares the views of the supporters of different contenders in the Labour leadership election, and it is ripe with possibilities for statistical misrepresentation, if those reporting it aren't careful and have trouble with numbers.

I was brought to this observation by the blaring headline above from that intellectual powerhouse, Shortlist magazine. (Sorry, the snide factor just slipped up accidentally there.) The reason the headline made me want to dig deeper into the numbers were that, of itself, this headline doesn't tell us anything, because there's nothing to compare with. Is that a lot? Perhaps 50 per cent of the British people believe the world is run by a secret elite and the Corbynites are unusually rational. As it happens, that's not true, but the comparative figures make more interesting reading.

To give Shortlist their due, they did link to their source at YouGov, which meant those figures were available. Note, by the way, that these were the percentages who selected 'Strongly agree', of which more later:

Strongly agree to 'The world is controlled by a secretive elite'
Corbyn Supporters: 28%
Burnham Supporters: 19%
Cooper Supporters: 16%
Kendall Supporters: 7%
All GB: 13%

So the Corbynites are somewhat more paranoid and liable to believe in controlling conspiracies, which isn't particularly surprising - in fact for me it was rather more surprising that Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper's supporters were also above average. Note, also, by the way that Shortlist's headline subtly changed what the elite were, from secretive to secret, which isn't quite the same thing.

However, for me, the more interesting statistic was another one that Shortlist picked out. They highlighted that Corbyn supporters were much more in favour of nationalisation of the railways than the country 'with 86 per cent wanting this reform, compared to 31 per cent of the public.' (Actually they conflate railways and the health service, where the percentages aren't identical, though similar, while the figures they quote aren't quite either of these.) This confused me as the Corbyn supporters who seem to dominate parts of my Facebook and Twitter feeds are always telling me the public is in favour of nationalisation of the railways.

So I took a look at the YouGov page and what it says makes it clear that Shortlist's analysis is not necessarily true. Here's the YouGov result:

STRONGLY support nationalisation of the railways:
Corbyn Supporters: 86%
Burnham Supporters: 68%
Cooper Supporters: 72%
Kendall Supporters: 46%
All GB: 34%

Leaving aside the 34/31 difference, doesn't this support Shortlist's claim? Not necessarily. Let's imagine the question and the 'all GB results' were something like this:

What is your attitude to nationalisation of the railways?

Strongly support: 34
Slightly support: 25
Neither/don't know: 21
Oppose: 10
Strongly oppose: 10

Which, as it happens, I can tell you they were, as YouGov very kindly responded within minutes to a request for more data. Given these numbers it would be madness to say that only 34 (or 31) per cent of the public wanted the reform. And it is pretty clear that there is a stronger weight in favour than against.

Without that information, Shortlist could have been correct. It could even have been the case that the question had been:

Do you STRONGLY support nationalisation of the railways:
Yes: 34
No: 60
Don't know/no particular feeling: 6

But that's the only type of situation where the conclusions being drawn are valid. It could also, of course, have been:

Do you STRONGLY support nationalisation of the railways:
Yes: 34
No: 25
Don't know/no particular feeling: 41

... which feels very different from the previous result.

This is why we need more breakdown of information when such surveys* are presented. The headlines can be totally misleading. And it would help if the responsible pollsters, which I believe YouGov to be, gave rather more information, like question and range of responses, to make sure that we know what the statistics really indicate.

* Thanks to Freddie Sayers of YouGov for also emphasising that it wasn't actually a survey, but rather data extracted from the profile information of YouGov members.

Don't hold your breath

I dedicate a fair chunk of my book on the way that quantum physics is transforming our world, The Quantum Age , to superconductors. These remarkable substances with no electrical resistance and impressive magnetic properties are already supporting a range applications from MRI scanners to maglev trains, but what is always described as the 'holy grail' of superconductivity is a room temperature superconductor.

The earliest examples had to be cooled within a couple of degrees of absolute zero (-273.15 °C), and even now they need either liquid helium or liquid nitrogen, depending on the type, to keep them cool enough. This is okay for specialist applications, but means they can't break out into everyday everywhere use. But if a superconductor could work easily at room temperature it would transform electronics and electrical products everywhere.

Hence the excitement whenever a new temperature high is announced. This happened recently when the simple compound hydrogen sulfide showed superconducting properties at just 203 K (-70 °C) - okay, not exactly room temperature, but nearly 20 degrees better than the best previous attempt. Immediately, as always with a new announcement, we got claims that room temperature superconductors are on the horizon.

It's possible, but there is a big caveat. Most 'high temperature' superconductors are fancy ceramics featuring the likes of thallium, strontium, copper, oxygen and bismuth. Hydrogen sulfide is suspiciously simple - and there's a reason. Because this was no ordinary H2S. It was compressed using pressures of around 150 gigapascals - that's around 1.5 million times atmospheric pressure. Not surprisingly, achieving this for appliances in the home is probably even less likely than superconductors requiring liquid nitrogen.

I don't want to be negative, though. All such discoveries are highly useful in the slow process of possibly reaching superconducting nirvana. But I wouldn't necessarily expect it any time soon. You can read more on the H2S superconductor here in Physics World.

Why I want Jeremy Corbyn to become Labour leader

I will never know now if the Labour party would have weeded me out as a potential agitator if I had completed my application to be a supporter, because my political posts here have rarely been in support of Labour. Having said that I could say, hand on heart, I have voted Labour at three general elections (not all for Tony Blair), so it would have been highly unfair to have done so.

I also am rather saddened by the way they appear pleased to have weeded out hundreds, if not thousands of 'Green Party supporters'. My suspicion is that a fair proportion of Green voters are actually Labour supporters who weren't happy with the way the party had gone and wanted to return to the fold. My suspicion is the majority of voters are not 100% committed to a single party, even if they don't float as much as I do.

Despite the fact that I may well have been excluded, as someone who is more often a right-leaning Lib Dem (cousin Nick insists, even now), I would be delighted if Jeremy Corbyn wins the election to become Labour leader. This is not, like a dyed-in-the-wool Tory because I want Labour to become unelectable. Instead it's for the same reason that I wanted Scotland to vote Yes in the independence referendum.
As far as I can see, British politics has become far too cosy. This is why detestable parties like UKIP have done so well. Because, despite the idiocy of a public school educated, ex-city trader claiming to be anti-establishment, the fact is that pretty well all of British politics has become too staid and establishment-like in nature. It needs a shakeup. I believe that an independent Scotland would have done that - and I believe that Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour is our next best hope of doing so. It might not be good for the Labour party, but it would be good for the country long term. (Short term it would probably mean another Conservative win in 2020, but short-termism is the bane of politics.)
Finally we would see real challenges to the government. Real alternatives. Many of them, I admit, would not be widely palatable. I gather the only Corbyn policy that has wide public support is re-nationalising the railways. And some of Corbyn's views are positively nutty (like women-only railway carriages), while others appear to verge on anti-semitism. But that's not the point. He will certainly shake things up. And we really, really need that in politics. Bring it on, Jeremy!

What's wrong with authority?

Recently I was berated on Facebook for appealing to authority. As it may not be obvious to everyone why this was a put down (as the picture makes clear it was), I thought it might be worth looking at the problem with authority in science - and why I wasn't actually falling for this failing.

Arguably the biggest issue with Ancient Greek science, an approach that spread its way through most of the medieval period, was the dependence on authority. Just as we still do in law cases, most classical natural philosophy was decided by argument rather than by experiment or analysis. If someone repeatedly won the argument on a topic they were regarded as an authority and in some cases - Aristotle is the most obvious example - considered a source of wisdom on pretty well everything as a result. Hence the infamous suggestion that women had fewer teeth than men because Aristotle said it was so, and no one bothered to check. (Actually I am sure plenty did check and found it to be wrong, but because they weren't Aristotle, they were ignored.)

This reverence for the word of Aristotle was shattered in science itself by the likes of Galileo and Newton, and thereafter it should not be good enough just to be an authority figure to be assumed correct on any topic. But it tends to still happen outside of science. A good example today of when we make a mistaken appeal to authority is when, for instance, we think that a Nobel Prize winning scientist has more weight outside their specialist field than do other people. There is no reason, for instance, to give weight to Linus Pauling's beliefs on the medical benefits of vitamin C, because it wasn't his area of expertise - but still people do.

However, this is quite different from preferring people with expertise as sources within their subject of expertise to a random person on the street. That is not an appeal to authority, it is just common sense. I'm not a scientist, I'm a writer with a very rusty physics degree, and a very slightly less rusty operational research masters. As such, I would never dream of putting forward my own theories in science. But if I want to describe a physical theory or idea, I will give more weight to the word of a well-established physicist than I would to the next person who sends me their new physics theory by email.

I get sent quite a lot of these off-the-wall physics theories. I would not use those in one of my books, except to raise an eyebrow at it. Instead I put across ideas coming from well-established physicists (if I'm writing about physics - not if I'm writing about health). This is not using an appeal to authority, it's the only sensible thing to do as I can't possibly test out or check their theories myself. However, if I used Richard Feynman's viewpoint to provide expertise on music or Niels Bohr on literature, then I would indeed be incorrectly appealing to authority. Which would be wrong (as anyone who knows what Feynman's taste in music was would probably agree).

In the case that started this piece off, I had referenced another famous physicist George Gamow on a physics matter, so this was not the case. It's easily done, but we shouldn't confuse a flag that we are accessing expertise with an appeal to authority.

Is this the best of SF?

SF greats, ancient and modernI was interested to note a debacle started by a US list of top 100 science fiction and fantasy books. We'll come back to this furore over the suggestion that many of these books were 'shockingly offensive' in a moment, but first a couple of comments about the list itself.

To me it seems a mistake to conflate fantasy and science fiction - where most of their SF choices seemed sensible, I wouldn't have included over 50 per cent of the fantasy, which makes me suspect that there should be two separate lists.

If we just concentrate on the SF books, there were inevitably some ridiculous omissions. No John Wyndham, for instance (probably reflecting this being a US list). No Alfred Bester, James, Blish, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth or (if you want to be more obscure) no E. F. Russell. However it wasn't a bad list overall - no one will ever agree with everything in such a collection.

So what about the moaning article in the New Statesman (pointed out to me by Niki Gamm), which berates this list? One complaint in the article is that most of the SF books are pre-1990s. I think this, to be honest, is entirely reasonable. I struggle to name more modern authors other than Banks and Stephenson who are truly great. I do wonder if it's because a lot of the best SF is about surprising the reader with really original ideas, most of which had been played out by the 1980s.

The other complaint, the one that makes the books in the opinion of the article's author 'shockingly offensive' is that a lot of them appear sexist. I'm sorry, but to complain about this is revisionist nonsense. You can't apply the standards of the day to the past. You might as well take offence at the sexism, racism and anti-semitism in Dickens and Shakespeare. I'm afraid it shows little imagination in the reader if they can't read a book in the context of the time in which it was written.

You might as well moan that the science and technology in old science fiction is pretty well always wrong. Of course it is. And it certainly can be amusing. For instance, Blish notes that it's impossible for electronics to work near Jupiter because the gravitational pull is so strong it would crush the valves (vacuum tubes). However it would be silly to downgrade the status of a story just because it contains such an issue. It's certainly true that there are some pre-Enlightnment II books that I find it difficult to read now because science, sexism or racism issues are so badly handled - but that doesn't apply to many in that top 100 list on the SF side (I can't comment on the fantasy).

I think it's great that we don't have the same problems with sexism, racism etc. in modern writing as used to be the case. But to arbitrarily dismiss something written before attitudes changed simply because it fits with the values of the present seems a patently naive view.

Can you apply science to make writing better?

Thanks to Dr Phil Langton of Bristol University for bringing to my attention this interesting piece in Times Higher Education by Yellowlees Douglas on the way that 'understanding the reading brain can help academics and students improve [their writing skills].'

Douglas, an associate professor of management communication (no, really, they exist) at the University of Florida argues that we have a lot of data on the reading brain - how we take in information from the written word - and that we can make use of that to provide a series of rules for 'science-based writing' which could be taught in secondary schools to improve the quality of writing.

I don't doubt that we could do more to teach writing skills, but to my mind this is a craft, and benefits as much from practice and feedback as it does from a framework of rules, which the best writers break with ease anyway. However, there's something more dangerous here, which is the assumption that academic studies give us a picture of the real world.

Douglas points out that 'Readers best recall the last quarter of lists, sentences, paragraphs and documents', and I am sure that is true when it comes to students doing tests in some psych lab. However, in the real world I would suggest few people read in the same way they would when undergoing a lab-based test. I, for one, rarely read every word in a document unless it's either a contract or one of my books I'm proof reading. (If I'm honest, I don't think I read every word in Douglas's article.)

It's not for nothing that journalists put such a huge emphasis on the first paragraph, rather than the last as Douglas seems to. Because it's often the case when reading an article in a newspaper we don't get past the first paragraph - so it's essential in good writing in that kind of context to get a strong hook in the first paragraph, and a clear indication of what is to come. But the approach would be totally different for a literary novel. We read different types of material in totally different ways - but the most common thing, whatever the material, is that we tend to skip read. Many of us don't read word for word.

When, for instance, I get sent a press release, as I often do, I will usually read the title, some or all of the first paragraph and scan the rest. The whole thing takes about 20 seconds. That's it, unless it has really grabbed me. Delete already pressed. To be honest, even when I read a novel I tend to skim-read if it gets too descriptive and arty-farty.

So to suggest that you can build good writing on a rule like 'make sure your most important points are in the last quarter' (not explicit in the article, but implied) seems to be a product of a sterile university idea of what reading is like, rather than the real thing.

I'm not an arty type. I don't claim writing is purely an artform that has to come from the soul and can't benefit from technique and good writing skills. Like any craft, technique and skill are immensely important. But I'm highly sceptical that 'science' in the sense intended here can do a huge amount to improve the quality of the written word.