Brian Clegg's Blog, page 70

Reviews and reactions

A couple of days ago I blogged about the suspicious nature of very short five star reviews. However, a recent revelation, pointed out by the excellent author Sara Crowe, has made me want to return to the whole business of reviewing - specifically what reviews are for and how, as authors, we ought to respond to them.

On the matter of what reviews for, I was struck by a response to my earlier post. Someone said 'Most Amazon "reviews" are not actually reviews anyway, they're about whether or not the reader liked the book, which is something different.' I'm not sure I agree with that sentiment. I'd certainly agree that there's little point a review just saying whether or not a reader liked the book - but I do think it's an important part of the mix.

Some while ago I moaned to a major science journal that did book reviews that their reviews were terrible because they never told you if the book was any good at what it purported to do. All each review consisted of (sometimes at length) was a summary of the science covered by the book. But, for me, a review isn't a synopsis. It certainly should give you a feel for what the book covers, but it should equally be about how well it puts across its content - fiction or non-fiction - and what the reading experience is like. Which inevitably overlaps with whether or not the reader likes the book. All reviews are subjective - get over it.

As far as I am concerned, the point of a review is to help a potential reader decide whether or not to read the book. And to do that, yes, it should give an idea of what the book's about - but it's not the review's job to reproduce the content in précis form. Instead it should tell us how well the book puts that content across, any issues with the book and how it delivers on the promise of its puff, the marketing blurb that attempts to sell it. In reading a review we are looking for informed guidance on whether or not the book might work for us.

Which leads me onto reactions to reviews by authors. I think anyone who has written a book and got a bad review feels an urge to respond (if they are silly enough to read the bad review in the first place). But the vast majority of us take the intelligent step of restraining ourselves, because it is only going to end in tears. To show how horribly wrong responding can be, we have a wonderful case study in the situation Ms Crowe brought to my attention - a Goodreads review of a book called The Boy and the Peddler of Death. Someone posted a one star review, calling the book wordy and pretentious and saying that it didn't live up to the summary, which suggested it would appeal to fans of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones etc. Now at the time, this book had plenty of good reviews too, and an average star rating of over four.

Unfortunately, the author felt it necessary to wade in and attack the review and the reviewer, digging himself a deeper and deeper hole. At the time of writing, just four days after the review was posted there are 2,062 comments, many of them in direct response to the original review, which alone has 15 pages of replies as more and more Goodreads members waded in to defend the reviewer. And still the author kept on digging. The book now averages two stars, and nearly every recent review gives it one star. The author has committed Goodreads suicide.

Now I have heard elsewhere what a nasty, backbiting place Goodreads is, but this incident isn't really a case of trolling. This is a genuine reaction to a shocked potential audience to the author's inability to take criticism and his remarkable inability to see how much damage he is doing himself. (It didn't help that his defence combined ad hominem attacks with pretentious twaddle.)

Personally speaking I rarely read reviews of my books on Goodreads/Amazon, though I can't resist doing so when a book is reviewed in a newspaper (in part to get pull quotes for my website). But if I do dip in to readers' reviews a) I tend to ignore the low scores and b) I would never think of responding. The only time I ever did so indirectly was to flag a review to Amazon because it contained blatantly incorrect information. All that happened is the same person put a variant of the review back on, adding a complaint that it had been pulled in the first place. So even that was a mistake.

As I've said elsewhere, no one likes to get a bad review. It's hurtful. They're slagging of your baby. But as an author, you make the choice to put yourself out there. No one asked you to. And if you do so, you have to accept that not everyone will like your books, sometimes for really stupid reasons, and get over it. Think nice thoughts. Stroke a dog. Read a compensatory good review. But PLEASE don't reply to the review.

Looking in the wrong direction for the next big TV thing

Stuff Magazine gets the wrong messageI read with a total lack of delight in a techie mag that HDR may be the next big thing for TV. Here's my prediction: no it won't.

The fact is that TV makers are really bad at getting into the minds of the ordinary buying public.

We've already seen that disastrously with 3D TV. It is now being phased out, because very few people actually bought it. Very few people could see the benefit.

Now we've got 4K TV (with a lot more pixels) and HDR (standing for High Dynamic Range) vying to be the next next big thing. And I'm not sure they are going to succeed either.

The benefit of 4K is getting far higher resolution images than the current HD, while HDR, an effect you'll find on most modern camera phones, zaps up the contrast, making it less likely that parts of an image will wash out, though in exchange it can produce some very artificial looking colour palettes with an unnaturally rich mix of colours - it has a tendency to make reality look artificial.

Why am I doubtful? Because for the typical, say, 40 inch screen, most viewers are perfectly happy with the picture quality on an ordinary HD TV. In fact many of us don't even care about using the best of that. I can watch the main channels in ordinary broadcast quality or HD - usually I just watch ordinary because I can't be bothered to scroll down to the HD channels. You can see the difference in picture quality if you look for it, but if you are actually watching a programme or film, you don't notice it.

There is no doubt we needed to get to current basic levels to cope with modern screen sizes. But unless the typical screen size goes up to about 60 inch, we really don't get a lot of benefit from going beyond standard HD, and at current sizes, even that isn't really necessary. The fact that you only notice the HD if it's a bad programme/film, so it doesn't grab your intention and you instead spend your time studying the quality of the image, says a lot for how much benefit it delivers.

I'm not sure what the next big thing is for TV - but I don't think it will be about an even flashier image quality. It's far more like to be about getting the back end right - cracking the integration, for instance, of streaming services like Netflix into the user interface, so you don't have to switch from broadcast to iPlayer to Netflix to Amazon Prime, but instead simply look through what's available across the patch that you've subscribed to.

Sorry, TV makers. But 'Mine is bigger [resolution] than yours' isn't a winning game.

The dark side of Amazon reviews

Spot the suspicious reviewsLike any other author I am delighted by good reviews and deeply saddened and wounded by bad ones. And amongst those we have to take very seriously these days are Amazon reviews. It might seem that a good review in, say, a national Sunday paper is far more important than a collection of good reviews on Amazon. And that's true over the weekend the paper was published. In fact when one of my books had huge, enthusiastic reviews in the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday it positively shot up the sales rankings. However, such reviews are transient.

Over time a book will build up a collection of Amazon reviews, and that will be the first point of assessment for many a potential reader. Such reviews probably weigh less for books than, say, reviews of a slow cooker, because as a reader you may well know an author's work and be quite happy to get another book from the same source. However, for many, the Amazon reviews will still be extremely important. We shouldn't read too much into a single review, but when there are plenty, it's usually possible to get a feel for what a book is like.

I've just posted one of my rare very bad reviews, of Stephen Fry's latest autobiography More Fool Me (you can see my review here, but for our purposes, the important thing is it's also posted on Amazon).

Now if you take a look at the Amazon page (I'll give you a link in a moment, but hang on til you've heard the argument), you'll see that all the major reviews - the ones that most people found useful - are one or two star and slagging the book off, just as I did. Frankly, it's very disappointing. But you will also see something rather odd. Although the lead reviews are all negative, the book actually has more five star reviews than any other - 118 five star to 66 at 2 star and 71 at one star. This is the reason it averages three stars, despite so many bad reviews. How could so many people rate such a bad book so highly?

Now take a look at the 'recent customer reviews' down the side of the page (extract shown above). All the five star reviews are just a word or two (apart from one, who doesn't understand the Amazon review system and is actually rating the price and delivery). If you click through to see all the five star reviews, there are certainly some genuine ones - people who just don't agree with readers who have taste, and that's fine. But there also a fair number that are just one or two words.

It could be just a coincidence that a lot of the people who like a book aren't particularly forthcoming as to why they like it. But there is another possible reason. Just like you can buy Facebook likes or Twitter follows, there are companies that will provide you with a set of good Amazon reviews. So if a publisher, for instance, is unhappy by how many negative reviews they are getting, they can balance them out with some cheap and cheerful good ones.

Now I need to stress that I am not saying that this was the case with More Fool Me; I am sure that the short five star reviews are purely coincidental here. But when there are so many short positive reviews (and some are by people who haven't reviewed any other books, or who title their review 'Five Stars' or who only ever leave four/five star reviews) it does look odd.

The way that the Amazon algorithm has shuffled them off to one side in favour of the decent quality reviews is a good lesson for anyone tempted to buy five star reviews - don't waste your money, because they aren't convincing. It's the same with the spam comments you get on a blog. They try to make them sound like real people making real comments, but they sound fake.

I must emphasize, of course, that a short review is not necessarily fake. I was intending to review this book with the single word 'Yawn', but my natural inclination to write overcame the urge. However, get a collection of them on a book that is otherwise being slated and, not surprisingly, people will be suspicious. Click through here and scroll down to the bottom for the reviews to see the effect.

More Fool Me review

Yawn. Don't bother. Self indulgent stuff. Which is a shame, because I liked Stephen Fry's second autobiography.

I really wonder if the Observer reviewer was reading the same book when (s)he said 'A beautifully erudite and richly entertaining page-turner,' unless they trimmed off 'this isn't.'

One of only four books I've ever given up part way through.

I'm not even giving you links to Amazon. It wouldn't be fair.

Quantum Age Comes of Age

I spent a nervous few minutes this morning in the BBC's Swindon NCA studio, connected down the ISDN line (remember ISDN) to London to appear on the UK's flagship current affairs radio programme, Today, being grilled by the inestimable John Humphrys. Thankfully he didn't want to ask me about David Cameron's performance so far, or the antics of Sepp Blatter and friends, but instead we talked about my book The Quantum Age , which is out in paperback today.

It has quickly become a favourite of my output, both because I love the weirdness of quantum physics - and I have fun exploring that - but also because few of us really think about the impact that quantum physics makes on our everyday life.
At a trivial level, pretty well everything is down to quantum physics, as matter, light and electricity (to name but three essentials) are all quantum based. But there is a more significant reason for calling this the Quantum Age, just as the nineteenth century was the Steam Age. Because are remarkable 35% (or thereabouts - no one seems to be able to trace the source of this figure) of GDP in developed countries would not exist without making explicit use of quantum physics.
So, for instance all electronics - computers, mobile phones, TV, radio, plus all the places electronics has reached into from washing machines to cars - required an understanding of quantum physics in the original design of the electronics. And some - flash memory, for instance, that enables your phone to remember stuff when the battery is dead - makes use of really weird quantum behaviour: in this case, quantum tunnelling, where a quantum particle jumps straight from being on one side of a barrier to the other without passing through the space in between.
What's more, electronics is just the beginning. Lasers and superconductors, for instance, both make use of particular quantum effects. Lasers are already well embedded in our lives. (I reckon I've at least 10 in my house.) At the moment superconductors, which lack any electrical resistance and so can support massive currents and magnetic fields, are mostly used in specialist applications like the LHC, MRI scanners and magnetic levitation trains - but the closer we get to room temperature superconductors, the more applications there are likely to be. And other quantum weirdos, like SQUIDs and quantum computers are waiting on the horizon.
The fact is that quantum physics has had a huge impact on our lives, and that impact is only like to grow. Something I hope that The Quantum Age really celebrates and explains.
Since this is, in part, a celebration of the BBC's quantum revolution, I'll just finish off with another chance to see my little adventure with the BBC's Robert Peston, attempting to explain why quantum physics is so remarkable:

Why I don't use OpenOffice

What?Broadly speaking, most professional writers either use Word or a specialist program like the much-praised Scrivener, which is apparently excellent for fiction work. However, every now and then, someone asks me 'Why do you spend all that money on Office, when you can get OpenOffice for free - and you can just export a Word file when you need it?'

People have been saying this kind of thing to me ever since I ran the PC department at British Airways, and my answer has always been the same. If all you are doing is handling lightly formatted text, cheap and cheerful is fine, but as soon as you use the more sophisticated aspects of a word processing program, this kind of transfer becomes risky, and simply isn't worth it.
I've just had a good example of how things can go wrong using OpenOffice. I was sent a document to check as an ODT file - the file format from OpenOffice. It had a series of appended comments. The file doesn't open in Word or Pages, but I tried it in both Google Documents and Textedit and neither showed the comments. No problem - the person who produced it exported a Word document from OpenOffice for me. And, yes, it did have comments - but they had been bizarrely scrambled. The image above are some of the actual comments, rendered utterly unreadable - and none of them pointed to the right bit of body text. It was garbage, pure and simple.
In the end, I had to download a copy of OpenOffice and work on the original with that. As it happens this was fine, because it was this way round - OpenOffice happened to be the standard used by the company I was doing some work for. But almost all publishers, magazines etc. expect material in Word format. And if you are working in OpenOffice, you will have to export your document to Word. Potentially with the kind of result I just experienced.
By all means use OpenOffice for printed documents, or those for internal use. But if you intend to share anything more sophisticated that straightforward text with a publisher, say, in a professional capacity, then think twice about turning up your nose at Word.

The dark side of Footlights

We're used to the Cambridge dramatic society Footlights being a breeding ground for media humorists - the source of many of the UK's comedy greats over the years from Monty Python and the Goodies to the likes of David Mitchell and Richard Ayoade. But what's not quite so well known is the distinct lack of humour exhibited by some of its members back in the heady 1970s.

When I was at Cambridge, probably the most feted Footlights show was a frothy little number called Chox from 1974. The cast featured Clive Anderson (at the same college as me, though I don't think we ever spoke), Geoffrey McGivern, who played Ford Prefect in the radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Griff Rhys Jones. And amongst the writers was Douglas Adams himself.

Now I confess that I never saw Chox - to be honest, to most of us, the Footlights crew were considered a bit up themselves, though clearly some of them turned out okay. In fact it was much more trendy to go the Medical Society review, which was widely thought to be more edgy and genuinely funny. And this was never more so than it was that year. Because, in a stroke of genius, the Med Soc gang used a very similar poster to Footlights, but added a load of red spots, and named the show Pox.

Brilliant humour, yes? Only the funny guys at Footlights didn't see it that way and either sued, or at the very least threatened to sue. (It's a long time ago - details on that are a bit fuzzy.) Either way, it was hardly the right way to respond to an affectionate spot of snook cocking. The Med Soc show itself was mixed, but certainly had some decidedly funny bits. I've no idea if it produced any famous funny people - a lot do start off as medics - but I just think it's useful to put the glamorous associations of Footlights into context.

TANSTAAFL

The other day I got a piece of junk mail that made a bit of a change from the dubious deals and diet supplements: 'THE FIRST FREE ENERGY GENERATOR' it proclaimed, and just to rub it in, 'Humiliates top scientists.'

Well, there's nothing I like better than humiliating top scientists* and what's more, apparently this energy generator 'violates all the laws of physics', which is even more fun. So what would this involve? If you look up 'free energy generator' on Google you'll find lots of examples claiming to be just this - but overall it is a worrying concept.

The obvious problem is conservation of energy, one of the most fundamental aspects of physics. You have to be a little careful with conservation of energy - it does require a closed system, and we patently don't live in a closed system, so it's easy enough to get 'free' energy in the sense that the Sun is pumping vast quantities of it in our direction and doesn't expect to be paid for it. Similarly, a 'free energy generator' could just be a way to steal energy from someone else. It's perfectly possible to light a fluorescent strip light by earthing it near a high voltage power cable - but you aren't producing energy from nowhere, you are just acquiring (to put it euphemistically) a small amount from the power company. Which they probably aren't too enthusiastic about.

However, this kind of 'free energy' device is usually supposed to get energy from nowhere, so we are indeed talking breaking conservation of energy - and you might as well throw in perpetual motion, because the one implies the other. And that's a bit worrying because things have to come from somewhere... so where is the energy coming from? (You could also get a bit excited about the great German mathematician Emmy Noether's proof that conservation of energy was equivalent to symmetry in time, but that's probably too subtle to be useful here.) Energy conservation isn't always obvious, because energy can change forms and so become apparent where it wasn't obvious before - but in the end, this has to be one of the best established and easiest to support natural laws.

More dramatic still is the claim that this device violates ALL the laws of physics. I can't even begin to imagine what something that did that would be like. Of course, the concept of 'physical laws' is a little fuzzy. It really dates back to a time when it was assumed that God was in charge and these were the laws he laid down. A law requires the same thing to always happen in the same circumstances - in practice this can never be proven, but is a good assumption. However if all physical laws are broken, it would seem likely that the universe as we know it would fall apart, which doesn't sound too healthy. I'm not sure free energy is worth that consequence.

In the end, I refer the con men to that classic science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein who regularly pointed out TANSTAAFL. Not a shouty Scandinavian delicacy but: 'There ain't no such thing as a free lunch'.

* Actually there are plenty of things I like better than humiliating top scientists, this was just rhetoric.

Don't diss the boasting shelf

Pretty well all authors have a boasting shelf (though, of course, we don't call it that) - the shelf at home with a copy of our book(s) on. Preferably on display to the world.

I'm rather chuffed as mine has just filled shelf four.

Of course the purist might moan that surely lots of these are the same book. But I think it's legitimate to include translations, different formats (e.g. hardback and paperback), new editions with totally different covers and ARCs.

It might seem like self-indulgence, and it probably is. But I think it's something more, which is why I'm respectfully asking you not to disrespect it.

Often, writing a book is a bit of a damp squib of an experience. A new author might think that once the book is published they will see it in all the bookshops, and reviewed in all the important newspapers and such, while in reality it's pretty common that a book comes out and... nothing much happens.

So the physical reality of the boasting shelf, the ability to look occasionally and think 'I did that' to yourself - whether it's one book or groaning shelves - is something of a compensation for not being the next J. K. Rowling or Bill Bryson. And that can't be too bad.

Yes, but what IS light?

Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder for drawing to my attention the little video below, asking people (in Germany) what light is. As a physicist, she was disappointed that most people don't realise that their idea of light was wrong. But as a science communicator, I find it neither disappointing nor surprising. Let's unpick that.

Is it surprising? Well no, not really. Although there might be passing mentions of photons at school, on the whole light is still solidly presented as a wave, certainly in the UK national curriculum. So I wouldn't at all be surprise by people saying it was waves. Equally I wouldn't be at all surprised by people saying particles thanks to popular science, or, for that matter, saying that they hadn't got a clue.

As for disappointed, I really don't think we can be, because of the way scientists use words, something I'll come back to in a moment.

I ought to clarify that arguably the best answer is that light is light. It isn't any of these things. We can usefully model light as a wave, a particle or an excitation in a field, but all of these are just models that help us understand and predict light's behaviour. Even scientists often struggle to remember that this is the case. And it's arguably impossible to explicitly say that this is the case all the time, because it does become very clumsy, qualifying what you say in every instance.

However if we are to use such a shorthand - and the same goes for lots of other such 'not really true' science statements like 'a quantum particle can be in more than one place at a time' or 'X% of the universe is dark matter' - it is important that somewhere in the article or book there is a disclaimer that explains the shorthand being used, and this is something both working scientists and science writers don't do enough. Which is why, if we are truly to be disappointed, we should probably be disappointed with scientists and science communicators, not the poor old public.

Here's the video in question. You don't have to speak German to get the gist, but it's useful to know that ein Teilchen is a particle and eine Welle is a wave.