Brian Clegg's Blog, page 96

Has the Daily Mail gone too far?

The Daily Mail's ongoing mission to boldly assign everything we eat or drink into the categories 'causes cancer' or 'cures cancer' is a cause of much amusement, but essentially harmless. However, its latest magnificent misunderstanding when it comes to science could actually cause serious harm.

A couple of days ago a Mail travel reporter (note they didn't let their science person, if they have one, anywhere near it) gave us the striking headline shown above (spot the typo). You will note there is no suggestion that there is no known scientific reason why this stuff should work - we are told straight 'just a teaspoon will offer three hours' protection' and apparently with a straight face that it causes your skin to vibrate and cancel out ultraviolet light.

The article goes on to explain that the liquid sunscreen, retailing at £17 a bottle, works, according to its manufacturer, as follows: 'If 2 mls are ingested an hour before sun exposure, the frequencies that have been imprinted on water will vibrate on your skin in such a way as to cancel approximately 97% of the UVA and UVB rays before they even hit your skin... This is similar to the amount of UV reflection created by SPF 30 titanium/zinc sunblocks but distinctly better than UVB chemical sunscreens which prevent certain damage that leads to the visible/painful/inflammation reaction we identify as sun damage.'

The article also reproduces testimonials from users including 'My year and a half year old drinks it as well and hasn't burned once this summer and is out everyday!'

The suggestion seems to be that somehow the frequencies ‘imprinted on the liquid’ can cancel out light the way noise-cancelling headphones cancel out noise. If this were possible, the military would be rushing out to buy this product for their planes as ‘cancelling out light’ would make them invisible. But in fact light is nothing like sound – you can’t cancel it out with a vibration, even if something you drink could make your skin vibrate with a particular frequency – which it can’t.

The real concern is that people will use this product and then undertake dangerous levels of sun exposure – and a particular concern is that such a simple apparent solution would be ideal for children. There’s no worse job when arriving on a beach than having to coat your children in sunscreen. Imagine how attractive the idea is of just being able to give them a drink and they are protected. But should parents do this, they will be exposing delicate skin to the sun’s rays without protection, which can result in very serious outcomes.

Of course scientists are coming up with new treatments and products all the time – but when the description of how a product works is one that bears no resemblance to known science, when the product has not been tested by any authorities for safety, and when the result of it not working could have very serious health implications, it was extremely irresponsible of a newspaper to cover it in this way.

The Mail does provide a few provisos:

The company's claims have not been approved by the US FDA - but there is no suggestion that they never will beA representative of the British Skin Foundation is quoted as saying they 'advise extreme caution of any product claiming UV protection using methods not supported by clinical research' and emphasising it is important to stick to tried and tested methods when protecting children's skin - which is all good stuff, but hardly the kind of warning that is necessaryWhen it comes down to it, all the editorial in the piece, apart from the remark about the FDA, is positive and reads more like a press release than an article. There is no suggestion that the advertised basis does not make scientific sense. There is no warning from the Mail about the consequences of relying on this product. Frankly, this article is very disturbing indeed.

Who makes the public ignorant?

I was interested to be pointed to these survey results in '12 things the British Public Are Completely Wrong About' on Buzzfeed (and finally to the actual survey results here at IPSOS Mori). This is partly fascinating because two of the results simply don't show what the headline suggests, yet no one seems to have noticed this, and partly because it's interesting to think about why public perception is wrong on these issues - and a large part of the blame has to go to politicians, TV and newspapers.

Let's deal with that little quirk where the figures don't reflect what's being said. We are told that 29% of people think that the government spends more on Job Seekers Allowance than pensions and, by coincidence, 29% of people think foreign aid is one of the government's top three expenditures. (In reality we spend 15 times more on pensions than JSA, and foreign aid is not even in the top 10.) The actual figures were 29% and 26%, which surely don't support the headline hypothesis 'Things the British Public are Completely Wrong About'. The title tells us that most of the public are wrong, and yet we are talking about a quarter of those polled. My suspicion is that one reason some people did get this wrong is that it involves doing comparisons with ridiculously large numbers, because the numbers spent on the health service, say, makes anything else seem negligible. In reality, for normal people, as opposed to the government, the £7.9 billion spent on foreign aid is still a massive number, which could easily make it sound like one of the higher expenditures.

But it is particularly interesting to take a look at some of the other assertions (which do seem to be more representative of public views) and see where they might have come from.
On average, those questioned thought that 15% of girls under 16 get pregnant each year. This is the most bizarre statistic of the lot. Assuming girls can get pregnant from around 12, this would require more than half of those who could get pregnant to get pregnant every year. In fact if you look at the breakdown of responses, around 70 people thought that 40% of girls under 16 got pregnant - which means every single girl who was capable of becoming pregnant doing so, plus rather a lot of others. Boggle. It certainly demonstrates a poor understanding of basic statistics. Where does the wrong impression come from? Probably right wing politicians, reinforced a bit by the media, who talk about teenage pregnancies far more than the actual data (which is a rate of about 0.6%) suggests is necessary.58% do not think that crime is falling and 51% think violent crime is rising (again the Buzzfeed article got a number wrong). There's an element of politicians talking too much about this, but the fault is primarily with the media. Admittedly I have heard several times on the news that crime rates are falling, but there is always a 'but' immediately afterwards where after some scraping around they manage to find some crime statistic (any crime statistic) that is rising. They can't just report good news, it goes against their miserable natures. And, of course, day after day crimes are reported in the way many other things that happen day after day aren't.We think that there are nearly as many muslims (24%) in the country as christians (34%) where the figures are actually 5% and 59% (sort of, though that second figure is an overestimate by most measures). This has to primarily be a news agenda thing. I can't remember when I last heard a news bulletin that didn't mention muslims in some way - in large part because a lot of world problems are happening in muslim countries. So the religion gets more media coverage than is representative of the muslim presence in the UK. It isn't helped when we get the silly halal meat type blowups, when people will assume that surely restaurants wouldn't make a change like that to accommodate such a small percentage of the population. This is a hard one to do anything about because the news agenda is so driven by strife.We thing 31% of the country are immigrants and 30% are black and asian, where actual numbers are around 13% and 11%. The immigrant side of the equation surely comes from the politicians making such a fuss about it. My suspicion is that the black and asian misjudgement is mainly because the media is so London-based, so whenever they, say, visit a school it has a different black and asian mix from that you would expect in the country as a whole. The media also tries so hard not to exclude minorities that there is a tendency to have a higher representation of black and asian presenters in some parts of the media than reflects the national average, though strangely the percentages tend to be too low in many dramas.It seems a mix of poor understanding of statistics (I still can't get over that '15% of girls under 16 getting pregnant'), disproportionate focus by political parties and imbalanced reporting in the media, which is always happier, for instance, to tell us about crimes than about the eradication of crime, means that the British public is sadly misinformed. 
If you'd like to see some more detail on the data behind the headlines, take a look at these slides:

Perils of Perception: Perception Gaps from Ipsos MORI

Tax schmax

I'm always surprised how many otherwise intelligent people respond emotionally rather than logically to news stories about tax. We hear them moaning about celebrities' tax avoidance schemes, and boycotting Amazon and Starbucks because of their immoral attitude to taxation. Fair enough, but let's take a step back.

How many people write to HMRC saying 'Actually, it's immoral for me to just pay the 20p in the pound I am legally obliged to pay, could I pay 30p instead? That way we'd have a better NHS etc.'? Not a lot, I suspect. But when companies and individuals employ tax avoidance, all too often people say 'Why aren't they paying more? It's immoral? That's money that should be going to the NHS etc.' However, just like the 20p in the pound PAYE, all they are doing is paying the minimum the tax system requires them to pay. (Gary Barlow's scheme failed to do this legally, hence the problems he is having.)

Rather than whinging about the corporations and rich individuals that do this, we should be pressing for a root and branch modification of the tax laws. Firstly, they're ridiculously complex (including all that silliness over whether a Jaffa Cake is a cake or a biscuit) and secondly they have far too many loopholes. The simpler the system, the fewer the loopholes.

This would be relatively easy to do for the Gary Barlows of this world - the problem with doing it for Starbucks, Amazon etc. is that what the moral argument seems to require is that corporation tax on money earned must be paid to the tax authority of the country in which the purchaser lives. And although in principle we could do this unilaterally we are almost certainly not allowed to by the EU. So it would require an overhaul of EU law, not just UK law... and we all know how easy that is.

It also would get quite complicated to administer. For example, I have a UK-based company. I pay UK corporation tax on all my earnings, even if I'm selling something to, say, someone in America. But if this kind of rule was applied, I suppose I would pay less UK corporation tax, and also pay some tax in America. And every other country where my books etc. are sold. Which would get pretty messy.

Nevertheless the principle is clear. We might like to have corporate scapegoats like Starbucks and Amazon to boo and hiss at, but they will comply with whatever laws are available - we just have to make sure our tax laws make sense. It's the politicians we should be complaining about (just for a change), not the tax avoiders. When it comes down to it, we're all tax avoiders, it's just that for the majority who pay their tax by PAYE the avoidance is done for them automatically by the system.

Time Bomber review

UPDATED 18 May 2014 - the book, formerly known as In Apple Blossom Time is now out in paperback and has been renamed Time Bomber.
At first glance I am the last person to be part of the target audience of Time Bomber by Robert Wack, set in 1944. I hate war films (or rather I have never seen one and never particularly want to). I even avoided War Horse because of the setting. As for written material, the last time I read anything set in the Second World War it was a comic back in the 1960s (usually, as I remember it, involving daring raids to blow up a submarine pen) when there was still a considerable appetite for gung-ho WW2 stories. But this is different.

I'll admit it appealed to my vanity that the author claimed to be inspired my book How to Build a Time Machine to create a novel around the extraordinary war career and death of Dutch-American mathematician Willem van Stockum, one of the first to take on the implications of Einstein's work on general relativity that implied the possibility of using warps in spacetime to create closed time-like loops that should enable travel backwards in time.

I can't deny I found the book gripping. I expected to read bits of it as and when I had a bit of time between research reading for my next book, but in practice once I started, Time Bomber took over and wouldn't let me put it down. If you are going to be picky, some of the dialogue is a little stilted and there are too many pages given to introspective thought, but the wartime scenes, both van Stockum's experience as a bomber pilot and the scenes on the ground in Normandy in 1944, are well-crafted and place the reader uncomfortably deeply into the action.

The book would have been quite interesting if that were all there were to it, but it is lifted to a new level by the inclusion of mysterious figures, some who appear to be trying to save van Stockum from his 1944 death, and others to prevent this interference. Van Stockum's impact on the physics of time travel would, it seems, have repercussions in the future, if he can continue his work after the war.

Technically there is a flaw in the approach taken to time travel here, as no device reliant on general relativity to travel backwards in time could reach further back than when the machine was first created, but I am always sympathetic to the argument that in science fiction the most important word is 'fiction' and it while every effort should be made to stick to known physics, if necessary the detail has to give way to making the story work. Apart from the violation of what I think of as the 'cardboard box of time effect' (more on that another time) the author does pretty well at keeping the science on track.

It won't appeal to everyone (and if you find the first couple of chapters confusing, bear with it), but I recommend giving Time Bomber a go. It is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Quick and elegant phone cases - review

Phone cases can be a handy present for those 'can't think of something to buy for people' - especially now that they can be personalised with photos. To date I've used the general purpose printing firms like VistaPrint for this, but I've just had a go with the dedicated case company Mr Nutcase (no, really), and was very impressed with the result.

Sizing and positioning an
image for a four-way case
on the websiteBecause it is dedicated to one purpose, the site is very easy to use. There are apparently hundreds of pre-conceived designs available on there, but I can't really see the point, as it's far more fun to use your own photos. After selecting the type of phone (a huge list available) and case (more on that in a moment) there are 14 different layouts - or at least there were for my iPhone 5 - from a single image taking up the whole of the back to complex designs which incorporate up to two dozen of  your images. 
Pictures are imported painlessly and positioned and sized on a clear layout of your phone using simple on-screen dragging process. The result was one of the simplest online design apps I've used. Then a couple of clicks to pay and the order was under way. I received the result in the post just two days later, which can't be bad.
There are three case types (again, at least for the iPhone) - a lightweight slimline plastic case, a wraparound case, and something I've never seen before, a leather flip case with your image printed on. The originality of this makes it particularly appealing.

To compare with existing products I went for a lightweight case - like other photo cases I've seen before, the contrast was not quite as good as a photo print, but the result was pleasing, well-finished and a perfect fit for the phone.

All in all, a good, easy to use online service that delivers one thing very well. You'll find it at www.mrnutcase.com

Do you have moth balls?

Napthalene, for many, will always be the substance of mothballs, with all the association of decay and faded Edwardian splendour that form a part of those outdated items’ baggage. But there's more to this smelly compound, as you will discover in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast.

To find out more about bicyclo[4.4.0]deca-1,3,5,7,9-pentene, as chemists like to call it on a bad day, take a listen by clicking play on the bar at the top of the page - or if that doesn't work for you, pop over to its page on the RSC site.

The trouble with tabloid science

The tabloid newspapers have a strange take on science which isn't always ideal. Take a look at the latest Daily FailExcess exclusive:

Our teenagers are facing a new and dangerous threat in the craze for helium hyperventilation. Mother of three Amanda Green (46) from Todmorden in Lancashire worries for her daughter. 'Lucy was an ordinary teenager. She did the sort of things you'd expect a girl of her age to do. Pony Club, that kind of thing. But then she started hanging out with the wrong kind of people. They introduced her to helium.'

Helium, the second most common gas in the universe, is usually employed innocently in party balloons, but in a new and sinister twist, teenagers, inhaling the gas to produce silly squeaky voices, have discovered that it can cause them to float. Lucy Green (14), pictured, was only saved from floating away into space when her parents threw a weighted net over her.

We would have asked a physicist, but no doubt they would have spouted some rubbish about this being impossible, as helium balloons only float because they are less dense that the surrounding air, while the overall density of a teenager is always going to be excessive. But we always try to avoid asking so-called experts as they often get confused by facts - a prime example being the 'consensus' over global warming. Some 'experts' might even suggest that the photograph is a fake. But a whole string of photographic professionals have proved that this photograph has not been altered in any way. IT IS GENUINE. (Really.)

To get a better, balanced picture we have approached media nutrionist Doctor Selena Fox, who clearly has appropriate expertise as her speciality ends in 'ist' and she has a doctorate from a real American internet university.

'This is very interesting,' said Dr Fox. 'The trouble with conventional science is that it is always attempting to explain phenomena by resorting to physical laws. Yet we know from human experience, that the world is far more mysterious than these so-called "laws" can explain. We need to take a holistic view. Yes, helium of itself could not provide enough lifting force. Take the movie 'Up' - it clearly demonstrates that far more helium than could fit in a body is required to achieve lift. But combine this with mental energy, harnessing chi at a quantum level, and there really is no limit to the possibilities of human achievement.'

The facts are clear. Our teenagers are at risk. We need to end illegal imports of helium cylinders, brought into the country by illegal immigrants, now. Or will the government wait until one of our sons and daughters is found floating, lifeless in space? The FailExcess demands action!

A gym to avoid

I have long been of the opinion that gyms are among the worst businesses there are when it comes to customer service, and I've just witnessed some incredibly bad behaviour from Feelgood Fitness gym (in Briton Street, Southampton), to the extent that I would strongly recommend avoiding them (aka Parkside Health Club) after the way they treated a teenage customer.

Said customer decided to leave the gym. She told them and stopped her direct debit. A couple of weeks later she got an email saying her account was in arrears. So the very same day she replied, apologising, saying she thought she'd already cancelled, please cancel immediately and let her know any final payment required. There was no reply.

Five days later, she emailed again, saying she hadn't got a reply, and if she didn't hear anything within 7 days she would assume they had closed the account and there was nothing further to pay. There was no reply.

Then on 24 April, 17 days after her second email, she got a threatening letter copied below. There were two problems with this letter. One is that it threatened action if there was no reply within 7 days - but the letter was not received until 7 days after the date on the letter. Secondly it totally ignored the communication in writing that had already been received.

This simply isn't acceptable behaviour. Avoid.

(Update: the cheque was sent immediately and signed for at the gym on 26 April. On 6 May an email was sent asking for confirmation of receipt. Guess what? As of 13 May there has been no reply.)

An interesting way to get children into programming

Yes, you can even use the environment to write
the kind of games we used to knock up in the old daysWe keep hearing how not enough children get the basics of programming. I did my first programming towards the end of secondary school. We didn't have a computer at the school, so we would punch cards (by hand, a character at a time - we didn't have the card punching 'typewriters' we had at university), pop them in the post so they could travel down from Manchester to London where they were put through either University College or Imperial College's magnificent machine, then we would get a printout back in the post one to two weeks later saying we'd made a punching error. It taught you to be precise.

Now, of course, computers are everywhere, but surprisingly few children get a feel for programming them. Here's one possible way around it - http://www.robotbasic.org - what these guys do is to provide an environment where you can use a variant of BASIC to program a simulated robot. You can use the same code to control real robots if you've the money for the hardware, but the great thing about this for cash strapped schools is that the students can have the thrill of bringing something to life with their programming without any financial outlay. I must admit I haven't had time to give it a go, so I don't know how good it is - the website does look more functional than flashy, but that might be a good thing under the circumstances - but in concept at least it's great.

You might say 'but no one uses BASIC any more, this is a waste of time and effort,' but that misses the point. It gets young people into the mindset of programming, to get a feel for the idea that you can control a computer or a device any way you like, rather than running existing programs, and that surely is good. As for the language itself, I have no problems there. When I was at BA, we often recruited programmers who hadn't done a computer science course, because there was always so much for the compsci students to unlearn because the academic approach to programming was so different to the real world. It's probably a good thing these young programmers aren't learning bad habits in a 'real' language, but rather getting a feel for what it's all about that will stand them in good stead if they ever take it further.

When will the green groups apologise for their contribution to global warming?

The infamous anti-nuclear power badge,
featuring the largest nuclear reactor within 4 light yearsWhen I talk to people in the media about their treatment of science, they often admit, rather sheepishly, how bad they are at apologising for misleading the public - even when it's something with the devastating impact of the way the media turned parents against the MMR vaccine with no basis in fact. However, I don't think they're the only ones to shirk their responsibility to apologise. How about Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth?

The fact is that without substantial green campaigning there is a good chance that the major percentage of our electricity - as is the case in France - could now be generated by nuclear power with a huge beneficial impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. So much so that we could have probably filled the gap with renewables and had pretty well zero carbon electricity. Instead we are now playing catch up far too late.
Long term, the best solution is likely to be nuclear fusion, but until that comes on stream, not until 2050 at the earliest, we need nuclear fission to tide us over in a low carbon fashion. Instead though, when they should have been building new power stations, governments gave way to the media impact of these green behemoths and failed to invest.
So how about it, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth? Time to say 'Sorry, we got it wrong'? Because your action seems at least in part to be responsible for one of the biggest segments of carbon emissions from the UK. Well done, guys. But my suspicion is that we won't see any such apology, because unlike science, campaigning groups (with the exception of a few individuals like George Monbiot) are not very good at accepting that they got things wrong and changing tack. They are happy to wave the 'scientific consensus' banner when it comes to manmade global warming - and that's a good thing - but they ignore the scientific consensus when it comes to the role nuclear power should take, suggesting that emotion is more of a driver than actually caring for what is best for the planet.
I think there's an interesting parallel in an email conversation I had with the Soil Association, the UK's main organic body, a while ago. I was pointing out that their policy on nanoparticles, which was that natural nanoparticles are ok, but artificial ones aren't, doesn't make any sense, as any problems with nanoparticles comes from their size and physical properties, not how they are made. In a burst of perhaps unintentional frankness, their spokesperson replied: ‘[T]he organic movement nearly always takes a principles-based regulatory approach, rather than a case-by-case approach based on scientific information.’ In other words, theirs is a knee-jerk reaction to concepts, rather than one based on genuine concerns about the dangers of various products. What's sometimes called greenwash. And sadly that is all too often the case with the big green organisations too.
This has been a Green Heretic production