Tag Archives: News

Some Lazy Words on Valentines Day.

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Love is in the air, or at least it’s been commodified and sold to us as happens annually around this time of year. By writing this, all be it disparagingly, I myself am adding to the milieu of guff which gets tossed off by a slue of Journalists and PR agencies as well as  businesses from department stores and discount retailers in the post-christmas lull. And why not? It’s a useful device to hang whatever crap you’re trying to peddle or, in my case, is a lazy way of putting 600ish words on a page for a handful of people to read. For the majority of the year the people who utilize such days for professional reasons have to actually engage their brain and think, this can be hard. Valentines day, and other such days like it, are simply holidays for these brains more than anything else. But it’s all very well for producers of all kinds to push tripe out onto the public out of laziness, but do people really want to buy into the resulting outcome?

Well, this is a very hard one to answer… unless you ask a marketeers who’ll no doubt pull some figures out their arse to justify Love Day, followed up by the super cliche of “We’re only giving the customers what they want” On the other hand, if newspapers, and in particular their columnists, are representative of society’s opinions, there is a substantial amount of material which pours scorn on the event year on year, often because its easy copy to produce. Of course neither are particularly good metrics to use, both manipulate Valentines Day to their own ends. Undoubtedly shops do shift a lot of product on the run-up to Valentines Day, and restaurants and leisure activities will see a spike in activity, but how many people do this out of a feeling of obligation? After all we are never far away from a negative voice poo-pooing it as being a commercial scam or as phony.

My stance on the whole thing is that I dislike it, for all the typical reasons you hear regurgitated this time of year, but what annoys me more are the people that make it known in no uncertain terms that they dislike Valentines Day. They do so be restating the same stale arguments endlessly, and quite frankly it’s beyond tiresome. These people that dislike the day, and I mean really dislike it with a fiery passion (we all know them), they really should think about redirecting their annoyance towards something worthwhile, Valentines Day isn’t going to stop anytime soon, and while their arguments are undoubtedly sound, they’re pointless in this instance. Who are they trying to convince with them? It’s like atheists trying to argue with devout born-again Christians, doesn’t matter how good your arguments may be, you aren’t going to convince them to stop believing in the Holy Trinity.

Personally Valentines Day passes me by without much notice, of course there are hearts in the windows of shops, and all aspects of media are producing the same old love themed content, but in this growingly individualistic society in which we live we can easily choose wether to go along with it or shut it out. I think the people who argue against it secretly like the day as it gives them the opportunity to moan verbosely; furthermore, I don’t think the day would actually be the same without them. In my mind both the lovers and haters are one of the same, like heaven and hell or yin and yang, they both indulge on the signs of love produced around Valentines Day and derive their own meaning from them, those who truly don’t care for it don’t really notice it at all.

Double Standards in the Media

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Following my previous post I thought It would be apt to share this image with you taken from the Daily Star following the Brass Eye “Paedogeddon outrage” (If you haven’t watched it do, it’s brilliant) I had read about these brilliantly hypocritical pages existing, in fact I even wrote about it in a piece of work I did at university about satire, but Plashing Vole has recently posted an image of it so I basically stealing a post from him as it’s a sight to behold. On one hand the paper is blasting Chris Morris’ satire on how the media had been and still is covering paedophilia stories (perhaps it was too close to the truth for them to handle) while on the page next to it they comment on the breasts of a 15 year old Charlotte Church. (Click to enlarge)

EU to spend €2,000,000 on homeopathy research for animals

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On the 30th August 2011 MEPs voted on a budget amendment which will see €2 million worth of funds being directed towards research on seeing wether homeopathy works on animals; essentially they are spending a hell of a lot of money on finding out wether magic beans work on other species’. Clearly I’m skeptical of homeopathy and consider the case entirely closed due to the amount of research already held on the concept, however the EU justify such research by stating, in the Agriculture and Rural Affairs budget amendment document, that “Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem in the EU and worldwide… that is why research on alternative methods has to be moved forward…” This sort of reads to me that the EU have given up on legitimate science, if my painkillers start losing their effectiveness I do not suddenly decide I need to cast a “good health” spell, yet this is how the EU seems to want to conduct itself with this scientific issue of relatively high importance.

Let us assume then that researching the use of homeopathy on animals is a legitimate scientific pursuit, is €2,000,000 a reasonable budget for such research? Of course that depends entirely on the size, scope and type of study being conducted, for that amount of money you’d expect quite a comprehensive study to be undertaken. However it seems that isn’t going to be the case with this study, the budget document states that: “the pilot project should involve the collection of data as to what research projects in the field of homeopathy and phytotherapy have already been set up by the various Member States’ universities and higher education institutions, and what findings they have made.” So basically the EU are spending all that money on a very expensive literature review, not exactly a brilliant use of taxpayers’ money. Respected scientist Dr. Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, states that:

€2 million seems like an inexplicably large amount of money for someone to review what work has been done in this field. Large definitive randomised trials of pills are routinely done for a fraction of that cost. Something may be very amiss here.” (L)

Now to end this post with some sort of “balance”. The Soil Association, who support the use of homeopathic remedies on animals, argue that homeopathy has been shown to be effective in keeping animals healthy and that increasing its usage would cut the growing use of antibiotics on animals, they therefore actively encourage farmers to use homeopathic treatments as it is an effective alternative.

They are of course wrong.

Ben Goldacre: Why Don’t Journalists Link to Primary Sources?

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Cross-posted at: www.snackfoam.co.uk

Ben Goldacre,  author of the brilliant book Bad Science, has recently blogged about the issue of journalists and their refusal to link to primary sources, an issue that particularly bugged me when working on my undergraduate dissertation. Within research it is perfectly fine to use newspapers as a citable source, and for certain types of research they are useful as artifacts in their own right, but when they are being relied upon as an ends to means they can be problematic due to their innate biases and therefore deeper research into them is required. Newspapers are a great starting point in research but not being able to see their primary sources can be problematic, but there is a bigger issue at hand outside the academic world. Newspapers, and media in general, have a huge influence on the populations of the world and while a majority of people would not be interested in viewing primary sources I strongly believe news media needs to be held to account, I’m not necessarily against bias in news content, but bias with no basis bar ideology can be damaging. In his recent blogpost Ben Goldacre demonstrates The Telegraph, which is skeptical of global warming, making a link between beached whales and off-shore wind-farms.

This week the Telegraph ran the headline “Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales”. “Offshore wind farms are one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches, according to scientists studying the problem”, it continued. Baroness Warsi even cited it as a fact on BBC Question Time this week, arguing against wind farms.

But anyone who read the open access academic paper in PLoS One, titled “Beaked Whales respond to simulated and actual navy sonar”, would see that the study looked at sonar, and didn’t mention wind farms at all. At our most generous, the Telegraph story was a spectacular and bizarre exaggeration of a brief contextual aside about general levels of manmade sound in the ocean by one author at the end of the press release (titled “Whales scared by sonars”).

Click Here to see the rest of Ben Goldacre’s blog post

Coffee and Daily Fail

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Bought the Daily Mail this morning simply because the headline took my fancy, I did have to hide it behind another paper mind :P. Really I shouldn’t be giving my money to Mr Dacre and encouraging the publication to continue, but reading views which I don’t generally agree with I do find an interesting “hobby”, I’ll probably blog about the story later:

No doubt its attracted some interesting comments on the web version of the story,  as of yet I know nothing more than the title is proclaiming I should add; I’m going to hold back on looking at them for now.

I’ve come across this funny little comic square from XKCD which is somewhat related and I can’t help but think there really are many people like this. It is, I can imagine, very easy to get into a heated and ultimately pointless debate online, more so today online than previous years; I used to do it as a teenager but the scope was more limited then than today, thankfully.

Pointless Studies

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Pointless studies, generally speaking used to annoy me. It wasn’t the studies themselves, or even the fact that they were being reported that annoyed me, but the fact that some people seem to take them seriously. But who is to blame for this? The news media, for misinforming the public and abusing there position of power, or the people that just accept what is printed as fact without questioning it.  Well I’m not even gonna try to answer that here, nor do I wish to delve into it. But the use of “studies in the media” in all its various aspects is interesting in my opinion, and David Mitchell in his most recent article in the The Observer comically analyses new proposals by the Government to “weed out pointless studies”

A newspaper headline chilled me to the bone: “New panel to weed out ‘pointless’ studies,” it read. Pointless studies are meat and drink to columnists like me. Not the fillet steak and vintage claret of Gordon Brown audibly farting in the Commons or Jeremy Clarkson being attacked by a miniature poodle, but a Peperami and Fanta snack that keeps the wolf from the door in the leaner times. Without a constant supply of scientific research claiming that chocolate makes you romantic, white wine enhances sarcasm or automatic transmission makes your cock go floppy, I’d have to take a lot more weeks off.

I Just wanted to bring your attention to the article, and in fact his column which is consistently funny/informative, and while I’m recommending columnists that are entertaining to read, take a look a Charlie Brookers Column also.

Distractions = Creative Productivity?

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For me, this Monday didn’t turn out to be the productive day I wanted it to be, due to various electronic distractions, but despite this I don’t believe that social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, amongst other various Internet delights, are in fact leading us to be less productive.

On Sky News last Sunday, they reported that a study from the University of Northampton suggests that people are becoming addicted to there gadgets.

The scenarios they give are worryingly familiar.

Interrupted from our primary task by a pop-up alerting us to an email, we stop what we are doing to read the email.

That then directs us elsewhere, perhaps to another link on the internet.

We may then check other emails stacked up behind the new one. A quick look on Facebook, Twitter or something else, and it may be half an hour before we’re back to that primary task.

“You can not any more do effectively the task you were originally doing, even if it was routine,” Professor Kakabadse said.

“You will suddenly feel low energy, you become clumsy and you have a spatial disorder. You become exhausted,” she said. (Sky News)

This sort of reporting regarding technology hardly new, neigh it is expected, take for example the scares around televisions.  In relation to this story, which is nothing special; it seems to have only got coverage due to the PR department at the University of Northampton, I would suggest that you can find addiction in almost anything from cheese to stamp collecting from computer gaming to knitting.

It is of my opinion, and partly that of Russel M Davies from Wired magazine UK, that distraction may infact aid productivity. We were not designed to work solely on one task, as Davies points out, “we’re easily distracted creatures, evolved to be continually scanning for new stimuli…” I personally find that when doing creative work. i.e. not reading, it is much easier to do it with the occasional look at YouTube, the occasional bit of tweeting on twitter and the occasional stumble on stumble-upon. This personal affirmation seems to be proved plausible by a  study pointed out by Davies who states that:

A study from the universities of Harvard and Toronto suggests that people with reduced latent inhibition are more likely to have original thoughts than the rest of us. Latent inhibition is “the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant”. I think this means that imaginative people are worse at screening out the world than you and me. Or better at being distracted. So maybe we mortals can increase our originality by deliberately and purposefully using distracting and unfocused tools. (Wired Magazine UK)

I must now end this blog post and get some work done,  well, I’m going to have a quick look at facebook first, naturally.