This post should not be construed as supportive of Brian Haw

Will they be any better?

"Mr Cameron today told Sky News' Sunday Live a future Tory government would take steps to have it removed.

He said: "I am all in favour of free speech and the right to demonstrate and the right to protest.

"But I think there are moments when our Parliament Square does look like a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and the rest of it.

"I am all for demonstrations, but my argument is `Enough is enough'."" - [source]

That isn't an argument, it's a tautology. 

The myth of Richard Pike

An embarrassment for both the RSC and The Register

Richard Pike, the former BP executive turned head of the Royal Society of Chemistry, has written what Andrew Orlowski in The Register describes as "a hard hitting contribution to Research Fortnight". Orlowski goes on to claim that

"Pike says the £250m tax boondoggle designed to induce us to buy electric cars would save less than 0.01 per cent of UK carbon emissions - yet represents a third of the nation's annual budget of the science and engineering funding council."

Before going on, I feel obliged to note this is an unfortunate way of phrasing this that might easily be misread. The EPSRC budget is ~£750million this year, whereas the putative electric car program the Pike and Orlowski decry costs £250 million in total over 5 years (from 2011, when the DoT expects suitable cars will be available). However, there's rather bit problem with this, specifically that the program doesn't cost £250 million and isn't there to induce us to buy electric cars.

Pike is appalled by "woolly thinking" (as am I, although by a rather different target), warning of "a potential waste of £250 million of public money  to subsidise the purchase of over 50,000 vehicles."

 Oh dear. With 30 seconds on Google we can locate the press release on the program here: the description is "Central to the strategy is an initiative to help put electric cars into the reach of ordinary motorists by providing help worth £2000 - £5000 towards buying the first electric and plug in hybrid cars when they hit the showrooms - which we expect from 2011 onwards." We can see where Pike gets his figure from, he's divided what he claims is the total cost (£250 million) by the upper limit per car (£5000) to obtain 50,000 subsidies.

Unfortunately for Pike's argument: "This funding is included in a £250 million scheme to deliver a green motoring transformation, part of the wider Government support to help consumers and businesses make the transition to low carbon.....The strategy also includes plans to provide £20 million for charging points and related infrastructure to help develop a network of 'electric car cities' throughout the UK and an expansion of an electric and ultra-low carbon car demonstration project on the UK's roads. This project will mean over 200 motorists [!!!] throughout the country will have the opportunity to drive a cutting-edge car and feedback the information needed to make greener motoring an everyday reality." [emphasis mine, and under the circumstances pretty important]

Clearly, this is a measure with a tiny budget, to monitor what electric car drivers use, coupled with a much more expensive -and very sensible- proposal to build infrastructure and charging points. Even this last costs only £20 million over 5 years, a tiny fraction of the DoT spend.

Right, so those figures are just Pike's fantasy, as indeed is the whole "0.01%" thing, should we be any more convinced by the eye-catching claim that the efficiency of the electric car is a "myth", as is their environmentally friendly appearance?

No, I think we should not. Pike claims that, while electric cars are 3-4 times more efficient than petrol cars, the distribution of electricity from the power plant is only 36% efficient, and claim thats "the energy advantage has effectively disappeared". O rly? Accepting arguendo the figures he offers from the academic report - of 20kWh/100km and 80kWh/100km for electric and petrol respectively, this implies that accounting for his 36% efficiency, the electric car still wins, clocking in at 56kWh/100km vs. 80kWh/100km. 

What about carbon emissions? Grid electricity has a footprint of about 500 g per kWh (note we don't have to account for efficiency, as this is already built in to the carbon footprint), so 20kWh/100km implies a footprint of 100g CO2 per kilometer, comparing favourably with the UK average car 168g CO2 per kilometer (MacKay, Without Hot Air, p122, figure 20.9), unless we cherry-pick very small cars.

Note that electrification still wins, even with our present energy mix. As low carbon technologies are only going to make up a larger proportion the mix, the carbon emissions will continue to decrease. Surreally, Pike concedes that in nuclear France the carbon costs are close to zero (although a more intellectually rigorous author might have noted something about manufacture and the lithium supply).

Frankly, this is a massive FAIL for the RSC, and for the rest of us, a cautionary reminder both that an editorial in the house rag is not the same as a peer reviewed paper, and that The Register has real issues with energy policy.

Myspace Kills

Will no-one think of the children?

[Following the Susan Greenfield's "rather indulgent" claims regarding social media,  a guest post from my mate Ice-G]

A magnificent article from The Times :

"Social networking sites can provide a "constant reassurance – that you are listened to, recognised, and important". Greenfield continued. This was coupled with a distancing from the stress of face-to-face, real-life conversation, which were "far more perilous … occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses" and "require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones, those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously".

With only a few minor modifications it may be improved:

The Guardian can provide a "constant reassurance to academics – that they are listened to, recognised, and important". Greenfield continued. This is coupled with a distancing from the stress of the peer review process and real discourse with experts, which are "far more perilous as ones views may actually be challenged."  Furthermore peer refereed publications "require a real sensitivity to evidence, a body of theory and most worryingly can sense bullshit, those sneaky molecules that I release and which others smell subconsciously".

Ice-G

Now, a proper conservative film

...is called "Confessions of a shopaholic"

The excellent LemmusLemmus has pointed out that a film being stupid need not preclude it being conservative. I quite agree. [He also takes apart the rest of that list, in a post that I highly recommend. When I am in a more coherent mood, I will write a piece discussing what happened to the relationship between the right and the military]

But until then, you should go and see "Confessions of a shopaholic". It is far better than its title would suggest,  and IMHO has a far stronger claim to being on the conservative film list than "Red Dawn".

Marie Antoinette plays shepherdess

In Davos.

[via Ross Douthat]

No Scientific Method in his Madness
In which we discover that Feyerabend has much to answer for

I am a Very Silly Man. Here I am, trying to finish up my PhD, all set to spend my career toiling in the vineyards of condensed matter physics, and what do those clever so-and-so's at the Googleplex go and do? Only go and render "the Scientific Method obsolete", that's what. This is quite a striking claim, and one that merits examining in some detail: after all, if true, it will have serious consequences, not least of which is that I shall abandon my work and seek alternative employment, possibly with a travelling circus.

The structure of Chris Anderson's argument in "wired" is as follows:
He quotes the statistician George Box: "All Models are wrong, but some are useful", and proclaims the truth of this sentiment. "Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now." Because now, we "don't have to settle for models at all." There follows a panegyric on computers in general and the "Pentabyte age" in particular. "Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right." And not just about advertising: "Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them". What fields will Google be overthrowing next?: "linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology." He offers two examples - one from physics, one from biology - and argues that "Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all."

Oh dear.

We shall briefly note that the statement "All models are wrong, but some are useful" is itself a model (of an epistemological system, with many competing models) and thus is paradoxical, being true only if it isn't. Moreover, although it asserts directly that some models are useful and indirectly that others are not, the statement tells us nothing as to which is which, so it is not, itself, useful.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

Whilst if everyone knew one things about stats, it would be "correlation is not causation", it would be nice if everyone knew two things about stats: specifically WHY "correlation is not causation": are there confounding factors? Could the result have arisen by chance? If you have twenty variables even if there is no causal relationship, one will be significant at the 5% level, and if you have "penta"scale quantities of variables, chance correlations are far more likely. [It would, of course, be nicer still if everyone knew three things about stats:that chanting "correlation is not causation", or putting it in a comment box, is not a devastating critique of a report of a correlation.]

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Quite apart from the phenomenally irritating assumption that all or most physicists are engaged in "theoretical speculation" or in high energy physics - a popular assumption pandered to by the press, which seldom reports on the majority of physics research which is not "fundamental" - describing "quantum mechanics" as a "caricature of a more complex underlying reality" is a bit peculiar, and in any case does not tell us how "Google searches","throw[ing] the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen" and "statistical algorithms" will replace quantum mechanics.

The second example is likewise flawed:

The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.

If the words "discover a new species" call to mind Darwin and drawings of finches, you may be stuck in the old way of doing science. Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn't know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology. He doesn't even have their entire genome. All he has is a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.

This sequence may correlate with other sequences that resemble those of species we do know more about. In that case, Venter can make some guesses about the animals — that they convert sunlight into energy in a particular way, or that they descended from a common ancestor. But besides that, he has no better model of this species than Google has of your MySpace page. It's just data. By analyzing it with Google-quality computing resources, though, Venter has advanced biology more than anyone else of his generation.

No, this exactly like "Darwin and the drawing of finches". What Venter has done is gather together vast amounts of data - just as natural historians, biologists and so forth used to make collections and draw connections between them. The theory came later - but still it came. Also, from theories we derive testable hypotheses, and then test them. Here lies the difference between the science and advertising algorithms, however successful they may be. Mr. Anderson concludes:

"There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?"

No, it's time to ask what this scientist can learn from Google. And what he learns is:

Chris Anderson, Wired's waggle-eared rock-star editor, has been dropping hints left and right about the relaunch of HotWired, a faded Web property Conde Nast picked up along with Webmonkey last month. The rumor we've heard: That Wired is relaunching the site as a news-focused social network like Digg.

Hmmm. Mr. Anderson is "dropping hints ... about the relaunch of HotWired", and Mr. Anderson writes an article almost designed to get up the noses of scientists, science bloggers, and science fetishists alike. "Correlation is enough.", Mr. Anderson?

[via The Register ]

[Edited fur spolling]

Ben Goldacre, "The Lobby" and the Bilderberg Conspiracy
In which Patrick Holford introduces us to Martin Walker


Patrick Holford, whose exploits are chronicled by the marvelous HolfordWatch site, has a page of extracts from Martin Walker's new book. You can download that here for free: I have done so, and hope to review it next month.

In the meantime, I think it's worth looking at the noteworthy claims made by Mr. Walker, with the apparent approval of Mr. Holford. In the piece, Mr. Walker self-identifies as "a competent and experienced journalist."

According to his own biographical allusions [sic], almost ten years ago, while Goldacre was training to be a doctor, he was already a convinced skeptic, a person familiar with the Lobby’s institutions, their motives and designs, and someone who adhered to a set and unquestioning ideology of science. It could be, of course, that Goldacre has been ‘given’ a background retrospectively. Nevertheless, we are expected to believe that he was a convinced skeptic in his mid-twenties.

"Given" a background? Is Dr. Goldacre a spy? Who might have given him a "background"?

[Martin] Taylor and Dick Taverne are both Bilderberg attenders.
The Bilderberg group is a world government in waiting, which organises the future global economy at its restricted but increasingly less than secret meetings.

I see.

Goldacre has absolutely no sense of fair play or democratic rights.

Unless Dr. Goldacre has been going round shredding ballot papers or murdering voters Zimbabwe-style, the second half of this remark in completely nonsensical.

Very few of those who are attacked by him is [sic] allowed access to the pages of the Guardian to refute the attacks, or Goldacre’s transient grasp of science…On his website, he publishes only sycophantic crap from apparently illiterate followers.

I'm not sure that someone with Mr. Walker grasp of grammar is in a position to critique other people's literacy, or indeed to accuse anyone of a "transient grasp of science" given Mr. Walker's rather idiosyncratic views on Cold Fusion [as expressed on page 170 of his book]. Further, a quick perusal of the comments at BadScience [especially the MMR treads] reveal plenty of comments critical of Dr. Goldacre, the MMR vaccine, and the Big Farmer. Some of these comments are literate.

The entire piece is studded with gems like this.
Footnote 7, regarding "Roger Hole Essay Prize in Medical Scepticism’" notes that "R.C. Hole's full name, when pronounced with two of his first names in initials, sounds like ‘arsehole.’". This information was sourced from a "Grand Theft Auto" site - I am unsure as to what end.
A particular highlight is footnote 2, which devotes over 200 words to the definitions of the word "geek", before leaving it to the reader "to decide what Ben means by being a Geek". This attite of it's-not-for-me-to-decide-it's-up-to-the-reader is a varient of the I'm-not-saying-you're-a-Nazi-I'm-just- asking-questions gambit, and pervades the extract. A final example of this is this paragraph:

"Goldacre won a British Science Writers (BSW) award, in 2003, the very year that he began working for the Guardian. At this time, the BSW was funded by MMR manufacturers Glaxo Wellcome and called the Glaxo Wellcome BSW Award – perhaps there is something in this for these corporations, or am I just a conspiracy theorist?"

Well, I leave that to the reader to decide, but I recall Mr. Walker's statement earlier:

"Anyway, I have always had a relatively common-sense approach to these matters: if it cocks its leg against a tree to piss, barks and sniffs round bitches, it’s probably a dog."

Evidence based medicine?

From the BBC:

"Women should not drink any alcohol during pregnancy, NHS adviser the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has said.

It says if they must drink, they should not do so in the first three months and should limit consumption to one or two units once or twice a week afterwards.

It brings NICE in line with government advice and replaces previous guidance saying small daily amounts were fine.However, NICE concedes there is no evidence to support the change." [emphasis mine]

Have NICE employed "Doctor" Nick Fox of Capital Radio:

"Paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. It's a scientific fact - there no actual evidence for it - but it is a scientific fact"