Brian Clegg's Blog, page 74

The new ban-the-bombists

Credit: Tony FrenchI am old enough to remember CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) marches, and generally speaking was always a bit wary of ban-the-bombists, particularly because there was a tendency to lump nuclear weapons in with nuclear power - I'm all in favour of a power source with very little impact on climate change - but the thought of nuclear weapons terrified my when I was younger and the threat seemed greater, and they still fill me with horror.

After watching the leaders' debate on Thursday with interest, it struck me that the Labour party was missing out on a serious trick - something emphasised in today's quick defence of the nuclear deterrent after the Conservative attacks on the subject. After all, senior Labour figures have been ban-the-bombists in the past, and I think Labour should seriously consider adding not renewing Trident and scrapping the current 'nuclear deterrent' ASAP. There are several potential benefits:
Huge savings - while I'm suspicious of the £100 billion figure, it's certainly a hell of a lotWin over lots of young undecided voters - young people, generally speaking, I suspect would support this moveClearly distinguish Labour in a way that didn’t happen in the debate - it was very much the big three versus the littlies in the debate. A 'get rid of Trident' Labour position would really differentiate themReduce SNP’s leverage - without the nuclear submarines on the Clyde, the SNP would have less of a stick to wave at WestminsterOf course you might argue that there's a cost to put against my benefits: reducing our security. This morning on the radio, the defence secretary called Trident our most important expenditure, more important it seems than the NHS or the conventional army. But is it really true that losing Trident would put a terrible dent in our security?

The whole concept of deterrence is questionable, but it is only of any value against a rational superpower opposition. If, for instance, ISIS got a nuclear weapon, our weapons have no deterrent effect, as the unhinged are quite happy to sacrifice everything to wipe out those that they believe their religion opposes. The fact is, the threats we face are not the kind where nuclear weapons are any use, and even if Putin started to rampage across Europe, there are others with nuclear triggers to hand. Let's be realists. Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, etc. etc. all get along fine without a nuclear weapon capability. It is perfectly possible to argue that we are clinging onto a past glory that we can no longer afford nor justify.
I sent this suggestion with my bullet points above on Saturday to both Ed Miliband (in the cringe-making 'Ask Ed' feature on the Labour website) and the Labour candidate for my ward, Mark Dempsey. (There didn't seem a lot of point sending them to the Conservatives, who seem more ideologically dependent on nuclear weapons.)  Dempsey's campaign has been largely on local issues, so I thought it would be interesting to see how he responded to a big picture question.

As yet neither has responded, but if they did, I suspect it wouldn't be an enthusiastic one. Apart from anything else, the Conservative intervention today pretty well ensures Labour can't back down. But for the future, maybe this is something they should consider.

You tweet my back, I'll tweet yours

One of the mysteries of using Twitter is how a particular tweet gets spread to the world. I might have got all excited when my tweet about seeing Loki on the underground was re-tweeted over 1,500 times, but a typical tweet of mine probably only merits a handful of retweets.

There is a way round this. A site called CoPromote offers a service where you indicate a tweet you want to boost and others retweet it. Why should they? Because this earns them points that enable them to put up their own tweets for retweeting. (It also works for Facebook pages, but I'm less convinced by the value there.)

Assuming that being retweeted is a good thing, this doesn't seem a bad idea (I'll come back to whether or not it is). It's not like paying for fake followers (apart from anything else, a basic account is free), and it should get your tweets wider visibility. At the moment, the system has two problems. One is that the tweets offered to be retweeted are usually heavily self-promoting, so not the sort of thing you want to retweet. And secondly, even if you can find something worth retweeting, there is no opportunity to modify it to put your own stamp on it, so it's difficult to give it your 'voice'.

I think it's also worth revisiting that assumption. Is being retweeted a good thing? I think it is, but not as much as people think. It means your tweet gets seen by a wider audience - which in the end is part of why we use Twitter - there's a chance for a wider conversation - because Twitter is two-way - and a very small number of people might follow you who otherwise wouldn't. But it's not exactly transformational.

I think I will continue to play with CoPromote - but I'm not yet 100 per cent convinced of its merits... oh, and if you don't follow me on Twitter - feel free to click the follow button on the Twitter thingy in the right hand column! I'd love to connect.

Doorways in the Sand - Review

Every now and then I take a break from reading science books and unwind with a spot of fiction. This is often something new, but I also like to dip back into old favourites... and was so glad that I did with Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand, which I haven't read for about 20 years, but was a delight to return to because it remains totally brilliant.

I was a huge fan of Zelazny's Amber series in my teens (I used to haunt the SF bookshop near Piccadilly Station in Manchester, as it sold US imports, and had the latest addition to the Amber books long before they were published in the UK), and still enjoy them, despite the output getting a bit strained towards the end. Doorways, though, is SF rather than fantasy, with that same type of wisecracking hero who would have been portrayed by a young Harrison Ford in the movies.

For the first few pages this could be a 1920s comedy, with a night climber at university who has a trust fund that pays him until he graduates - so every time he comes close to graduating, he changes to a different course, never quite accumulating enough points to graduate, despite the university's determined attempts to see him pass, leading to a comic encounter with the latest in a series of student advisors.

However, there are strange things afoot. Fred, our main character, seems to be receiving garbled messages from the universe, while chapter endings result in sudden, often quite baffling shifts of situation. You have to be prepared to go with the flow and enjoy the scintillating words that Zelazny throws at you and eventually all will become clear (if not straightforward). The book is a total delight, and I don't know anyone currently writing in SF who can achieve this kind of masterful mind play mixing science fiction, humour and adventure. (If there is, please let me know.)

If you've never read it, you really must. Come one - there's a talking wombat. Need I say more?

Still available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com though you'll have to resort to second-hand.

Giving away money for profit

The internet has thrown up some interesting and different business models - but I think few are as innovative as Chris Holbrook's idea of giving away money. It sounds a pretty impressive way to get people to your site... and that's what he does at the Free Postcode Lottery site.

Before you get too excited, we aren't talking vast sums of money - it's currently around £170 a day, so it's not going to change anyone's life.  But it is free to enter, there's a guarantee that your email won't be sold on, and with Holbrook giving away around £62,000 a year, it is still, at face value, a fast route to bankruptcy.

So how is Holbrook managing this feat? Nothing magic - just advertising. It seems that he has managed to get enough revenue that way (which is pretty impressive, going on the few pence I get from Google) to fund the site, which is apparently significantly in profit. In fact, profitable enough that he has quit his job to concentrate on the venture. The growth in the daily prize fund (it was £20 at the start of 2014) gives some indication of the increase in interest and advertising revenue over a surprisingly short period of time.

He does have one little trick up his sleeve. Players are entered with their postcode (the clue is in the name), and each day a winning postcode pops up, selected at random from those in the draw. But it's only available on the site. Don't check if you've won and 24 hours later your winnings roll over to the next winner. So there's an incentive to get eyes returning to the site day after day - an advertiser's dream.

At the moment, players have to live in the UK. Holbrook has looked into other countries but a combination of strange local laws in some countries that don't allow money to be given away and postcode formats that don't work so well with the approach have limited the possibilities - however, he hopes to launch in the Republic of Ireland once their postcodes go live in the summer.

Will it work long term? I really don't know - but I do think it's a real example of being creative about making use of the different kind of interpersonal contact the internet offers. Holbrook already has three different lottery games running (which means you have to look at three different pages to check if you've won - more eyeball space) and I can see scope for expanding the model even further.

Gambling isn't everyone's cup of tea, and it's arguable that even free gambling might encourage you then to have a go at the better rewarded payed version, but for me it's a very clever piece of work. Well worth popping over and taking a look.

The fluoride terror

There are few compounds with such a range of associations as fluorides. To some, these compounds of the halogen fluorine bring to mind healthy teeth, but for others, terms like fluoride and fluoridation suggest a terrible danger to health (and quite possibly a communist plot).

Find out the pros and cons of this controversial compounds in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on fluorides.  Take a listen by clicking to pop over to its page on the RSC site.

Bored with the things

There was a time when large scale institutional practical jokes for April 1 were brilliant because they were so unusual. I'm thinking particularly of the 1957 Panorama mini-documentary on the Swiss peasants going out to reap the spaghetti harvest, and the Guardian's magnificent, very large scale special feature on the floating island of San Serriffe.
However, on April 1 this year, as has been the case for a while now, I was bombarded with 'really funny' stories like:
The LHC has discovered The ForceJeremy Clarkson is leading a push to get people riding bikesNature piece on real dragonsMirror coffees in Shoreditch (don't ask)The new Orkney legal requirement for all scything to be done with the shirt off (I'm always amazed how many alleged feminists find this kind of sexist drivel appealing)The call for an extra day in April, so we could have British Pi Day (shame on you, Physics World)Ed's Easy Diner's claim to be delivering coffee refills to customers with a drone (see pic)Not to mention transparent Marmite... and basically practically everything that anyone put on Facebook and Twitter on the 1st. 
Apart from getting tedious, there is a real danger that people think a genuine story is a joke. My piece about snake oil teas yesterday was not a joke, for instance. So we get confused claims like this that suggest that Amazon's 'dash button' (something you stick on your washing machine, for instance that you press to order more washing powder when you are running low) wasn't a joke... or was it? (Frankly, I'm still not sure about their drone delivery system.)

So, please, could we have a spoof news embargo for the next couple of years? Then, perhaps, we could get back to the naif joy that greeted the spaghetti harvest:

Snake oil tea, vicar?

I have recently had brought to my attention the rather impressive way that in a single web page, a product by the name of Bloom teas manages to use three of the great woo-marketing terms.

Now, in the interests of fairness, I ought to point out that I don't drink ordinary tea, but I do enjoy the occasional cup of green tea, of which more in a moment.

So what's so woo-ified? There are three keywords here that raise the dubiousness alarm.

The first is rehydration. While the benefits of this are clear - it's good to keep hydrated - it really doesn't matter what you drink as long as it's mostly water and preferably doesn't contain alcohol. (And you certainly don't need 8 glasses a day - as with all this stuff, see my Science for Life .)So not an out-and-out negative, but something to be a little wary of. Then there the first biggy. Antioxidants. How many times does everyone have to say this? The antioxidants produced by your body are essential. But consuming extra antioxidants has no health benefit and serious supplementation seems to increase the risk of death.

And then, towards the end, there's that favourite of meaningless woo words: detox. There is no such thing as a detox product. Your body has lots of useful organs and processes that remove toxins, but nothing you eat or drink will have an active 'detox' action. It's marketing hogwash, pure and simple.

*ADDED* Thanks to Glenn Patrick for pointing out there's actually a fourth woo claim: that the tea kick-starts your metabolism, as if your metabolism was stopped and needed a starter motor. I could probably add some doubt to 'stomach-clensing ingredients too', while I'm at it. It's so full of... wonder.

You might think this is a matter of hunting butterflies with a bazooka - and to an extent it is. What's more, the reason I drink green tea is that I like the astringent effect that leaves you feeling refreshed and revitalised. But the key word there is 'feeling'. Where a manufacturer strays into snake oil territory is by making what  are effectively medical claims by using terms like antioxidant (or just fantasy by talking detox) - after all, they even make it sound medical by calling it a 'treatment plan'. So, I have nothing wrong with 'makes you feel good' type claims, but I can rightly bring out the bazooka when it someone says it 'makes you healthier.'

Who to vote for?

Snapshot of my ward, from www.ukpollingreport.co.ukIt's that time again. A UK general election in around five weeks. And I genuinely don't have a clue who to vote for. Or, rather, I have reasons for voting for three of the candidates and don't know how to assess those reasons.

According to this handy website I have a minimum of five candidates to choose from, who are (in alphabetical order of surname):
Janet Ellard (Liberal Democrats) - my default voting preference is Liberal Democrat (someone has to, and cousin Nick expects it). But there is no chance of the Lib Dems taking our seat. I am very disappointed by the total lack of online data about Ms Ellard. The site I used has not yet got anything like a webpage, Twitter, etc. And the only link they (or Google) do have is to a LibDems page that currently isn't working. No literature through the door or visits. Poor show, guys.James Faulkner (UKIP) - not a chance in hell of getting my vote, I'm afraid. We have email and Twitter. No literature through the door or visits.Justin Tomlinson (Conservative) - I am not a natural Tory voter. However, Mr Tomlinson, the sitting MP, has proved an effective constituency MP, which makes me teeter towards supporting him as an individual, despite significant concerns about his party's policies. He is also a real local, rather than someone dropped in from on high. He didn't reply awfully well to my email about better funding for science. But at least he did respond, very quickly. Every kind of way to contact him, and he has called personally, and put literature through.Mark Dempsey (Labour) - my other voting choice, though the problem here is that I am more New Labour than the current version. My opinion of Mr Milliband has gone up a bit since the TV appearance, and I probably agree with more labour policies than Tory. Mr Dempsey is a local, rather than a parachute in. Good online access. He hasn't called in person, but I had a letter (rather bizarrely addressed to me and one of my daughters).Poppy Hebden-Leeder (Green) - very unlikely to get my vote. I've studied their policies at some length and they are bizarre on defence, spin fantasy on finance and are  very poor on science, particularly nuclear power. While I have a natural aversion to anyone with a double barrelled name, Ms Hebden-Leeder is local. Good online connections, though the fact that her Twitter name is @veggiepoppy does her no favours. No literature through the door or visits.So there we have it. UKIP and Greens won't get my vote. My natural choice, the Lib Dems, can't win and so far the candidate is totally anonymous. While I was quite fond of New Labour, the current Labour is veering back to the left a little far for me, which is worrying, and more worrying still, faces the dreaded cold hand of the SNP. While I haven't voted Tory before, the sitting MP seems to have done quite a good job, but can I put constituency effectiveness above party policies and their impact on the country?
I will listen to the TV debate later this week with interest, but I suspect this is the first election in a long time when I will be going to the polls and not know which way I am going to vote until the pencil is poised over the voting slip. 
All advice welcome, as long as it is a reasoned argument, not knee-jerk nonsense.

The religious fervour of homeopathy fans

A couple of weeks ago I put up a blog item on Huffington Post, suggesting that it would be a good idea if alternative remedies, like cigarette packets, had to carry a health warning.

In some cases this was because there were reports of a high percentage of herbal remedies not containing the requisite herb, and sometimes containing fairly dubious contents that could be harmful. And in others, such as homeopathy, it was more because there was a danger of using a homeopathic remedy, and as a result not taking medication that actually does something. So I suggested a suitable warning for a homeopathic product might be something like:

WARNING -- contains no active ingredients. If taken in place of medical treatment could result in harm or death

Now it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that I didn't expect a certain amount of negative response. I was sure it would bring the homeopathy supporters out of the woodwork and it has. I'll go into some of the specific kinds of response in a moment, but the thing I was really quite surprised by (but probably shouldn't have been) was how close some of these responses were to someone defending their religious faith.

I expect, in a contentious area of science, that there will be arguments. So, for instance, if I were to say that I rather hope MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) can be made to work rather than dark matter as an explanation of the gravitational effects blamed on dark matter (which is true), I could sensibly expect cosmologists/astrophysicists to weigh in with the scientific arguments as to why dark matter is a better bet. But that's not what happened here at all. What I should have been seeing is a) a good explanation for the mechanism of homeopathy (as I claimed there wasn't one) and b) a good collection of large scale, double blinded trials undertaken by experienced professionals that came out in favour of homeopathy being more than a placebo effect. Neither of these things happened.

In practice, the science isn't contentious about homeopathy - it's fairly straight forward. And so, instead, arguments fell into these broad categories:

The report you mention only uses big studies - and this is a bad thing because? Good big studies give more statistically reliable results that good small studies - that's inevitable. If you don't understand this, take a statistics course, please.Making snide remarks - ad hominem attacks are the last resorts of those who have no good arguments. When I see things like 'Thanx [sic] for embarrassing yourself even more' and 'pointing out your egregious ignorance and prejudice in regard to the topic' I know I've hit a raw nerve, because clearly there is a total inability to answer my two key points above.Attack allopathic [sic] medicine - there's a technical term for 'allopathic medicine': it's 'medicine'. However the real point here is that you can't defend something by attacking something else. (E.g. 'Rx drugs are toxic, and RCTs have proven that 50% of the drug trials cannot explain the method of action.') I know the huge amount of good done by modern medicine, and know plenty of people whose lives have been saved or improved by it. But even if every real doctor doing real medicine made all their patients worse, it wouldn't make alternative remedies any better. It's a bit like responding to a restaurant critic who says the food in your restaurant is bad by saying 'Yes, but the food in McDonald's is really bad.' So?It was also fascinating that at least four of the comments were by the same person, someone called Dana Ullman who strangely enough, according to Google is a 'proponent in [sic] the field of homeopathy. Ullman received his MPH from the University of California at Berkeley, and has since taught homeopathy and integrative health care.' So he's not at all biassed, unlike me, as I don't make any money from either alternative remedies or real medicine.
The sad thing is that in all those comments, none of the supporters of homeopathy could address my two key points (or even tried - randomly mentioning the existence of trials without citing them, when meta-studies like the Australian government one have a very clear outcome is not trying). And none seemed to actually realise the point is not that we need a warning that homeopathic remedies (unlike some other alternative therapies) can harm you, but that using them instead of things that work to treat dangerous diseases (there are homeopathic remedies for malaria, for instance, one of the world's biggest killer diseases) really does put people's lives and health at risk.
In the end, as I mentioned above, these weren't logical or scientific arguments I was presented with but rather statements of faith. And that should be a bit embarrassing for those concerned.

What's in a (website) name?

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet (though would you really enthusiastically sniff a 'bumodour' or a 'dogpoo'?) - but websites can have problem if you happen to give a site a name that doesn't really fit with what it sells.

Why would anyone do something so stupid? Well, I did. Or, to be more precise, I didn't, but the world has changed around me.

I've always loved church music, particular from the Tudor / Elizabethan period. You'll never find me happier than relaxing to a spot of John Sheppard. So many moons ago, when the web was young and fresh I set up a fan site for this kind of music online. I was approached by some nice people who had recorded some CDs of hymn accompaniments to sing along to - hymn karaoke, if you like - and asked if I could give them a mention. This ended up with me being the online marketing arm of an operation that now has around 93 CDs under its belt, all recorded by a top-notch world-class organist, John Keys.
Not a church organistBefore long, this had far outgrown my little fan site, so I set up a more professional site for the CDs, imaginatively called www.hymncds.com - and so it continues to the present day, proving remarkably popular, as the world's supply of organists (with the exception of Henry Gee, pictured left, who doesn't do many hymns) is sadly getting on the elderly side.

But here's the thing. Some time ago, realising that this downloading and streaming was the thing (innit), I added the ability to download the tracks via fine facilities like iTunes and Amazon. You can even stream them for free on Spotify - just search for 'John Keys'. And over time this has become at least 75% of our business. So the site's home page is no longer quite as shown above, as it now proudly says 'ACCOMPANIMENT CDS AND DOWNLOADS' - but it was still www.hymncds.com - to me it seemed a bit strange going to a site called hymncds.com for downloads. The world has moved on from my URL.

Of course one of the joys of the interwebz is that the same site can have more than one address. So from now on, you can also get to it using hymnmp3s.com and hymndownloads.com - because you have to move with the times. Bro.



By the way, if you you wondering 'John Who?', here's a touch of Sheppard to chill out to. Enjoy.