Sceptiphrenia

Sceptiphrenia has moved!

2008-08-05T01:03:00.000+01:00

To go to the new site, click here.

Why are planets called planets?

2008-07-31T16:19:00.006+01:00

Ancient astronomers knew that the stars move across the sky keeping together in the same fixed patterns. We call these patterns constellations. In the course of a twenty-four hour period, the constellations return to approximately their original place.

These astronomers were also aware that there were some stars that did not stay in fixed positions relative to the other stars. Instead, from night to night, they seemed to wander about the sky, following peculiar loop-the-loop paths of their own, while the rest of the stars formed a fixed background to their dancing.

The word for these wandering stars that we use now came to us from the Ancient Greeks, who used their own word for wanderer,

(planetes)

or planet.

And that's why planets are called planets.

Mark Borkowski's Fame Formula

2008-07-28T12:18:00.022+01:00

A public relations agent claims to have come up with a formula which "illustrates" the decline in fame of a brand or celebrity (he treats these two as synonymous) over time.

Mark Borkowski is a regular Guardian columnist and head of Borkowski PR. By happy chance the article in the Guardian where he introduces his formula coincides with the publication of his book today, where he discusses it, and celebrity in general in more detail. I hope the £16.99 price tag is worth it as it's difficult to make sense of his mathematics just from reading the article.

Mr. Borkowski wants us to know that (a) if you have a brand or are a celebrity your fame will decline dramatically over time, and (b) a good publicist can help prevent this and keep you in the public eye by judicious planting of stories and attention-grabbing vignettes. The trouble is that most celebrities and brand managers know this already and wouldn't see the need to purchase Mr Borkowski's services, so it's a good thing Mr Borkowski has developed a quantitative means of assessing fame which will give him the edge over his competitors. This is his fabulous formula:

Where F is the level of fame, T is time measured in three monthly intervals, B is a baseline of fame calculated from the average level of fame before the peak, and P is the "increment" of fame above the baseline, "that establishes the individual firmly at the front of public consciousness".

The formula is said to illustrate "that without intervention in the form of further publicity, fame follows an exponential slide to obscurity." Borkowski goes further than this and states that the slide to obscurity lasts about fifteen months. He shows us this by substituting T=5 into the formula (representing fifteen months) to obtain F = B + 0.04P, showing that the fame-boost received at the height of public attention has been reduced by 96%.

One is tempted to think that the formula is a bit of a gimmick, since publicity and the level of media interest in a brand or celebrity is a hard thing to quantify. Nevertheless, one would expect, given reasonable values for the parameters and the inputs, that the formula would give plausible outputs. However, those who do think this would be reckoning without a shocking ignorance of basic mathematics on the part of Mr Borkowski, and his assumption of the same ignorance on the part of the Great British Guardian reader, for his formula is a load of bollocks. For those who wish for a restoration of mathematical sanity there is the formula that Mr Borkowski should have used at the end of this article. It took about twenty seconds to draw up.

The problem with Mr Borkowski's formula is that it gives nonsensical values across an important part of the range over which it is supposed to apply. Here's an example: What fame value does it give at one month after the initial kick of publicity? At this point T = 1/3. If we plug this into the formula we get the answer F = B + 4.8P which is more than 4.8 times higher than the supposed high point is above the baseline.

There is also a problem in that at T = 0 (the starting point) the formula cannot produce a fame value. As the value of T gets smaller and smaller (approaching zero) the amount of fame gets larger and larger, and approaches infinity. Mr Borkowski thinks that at t = 0 the formula gives an infinite fame value, which he acknowledges is not accurate, but nonetheless thinks appropriate as it puts people in mind of the fame value being "off the radar". This is untrue: the formula does not give a fame value at T = 0 as the operation necessary to calculate it cannot be performed. Mr Borkowski is clearly sacrificing accuracy to appearances here. Further details at the end for those who can stomach it.

Here is a graph showing what Mr. Borkowski wants the formula to do, and the formula he should have used:

And here is graph of the formula he has actually used. Time is in Mr Borkowski's units of three month intervals, notional parameters of a baseline B of 1 and initial kick P of 1 have been used:

Call me a cynic, Mr Borkowski, but isn't your formula part of an avaricious (though mathematically inept) scheme to increase sales of your book by fooling people into thinking you've placed PR on a scientific footing? An A-level maths student could have told you you'd used the wrong function to model the data because it doesn't give sensible answers across the time period, but you went ahead anyway and fooled yourself into thinking that the discontinuities gave it extra cachet, rather than being an indication that you'd got something wrong. The irony is that you would have got away with it if you'd only used the formula given above. How much do you pay your mathematics consultant?

_____________________________________________________________

A More Technical Addendum

Let's look at the formula in more detail. Mr Borkowski does not give us any of the data he obviously used to derive it. He does not tell us any values for the baseline fame B, or the initial increment P given to the celebrity or brand: some sort of example would have been helpful here, because it could have been used to check his claims. But there's another nagging problem that only sad geeky people would be interested in; you see, despite stating that a celebrity's fame follows an exponential slide, this formula is a power function and not an exponential one. An exponential function would look like the formula given above and reproduced here:

where the time variable is in the index or exponent (hence the name). The difference is important because if he had used a function like this Mr Borkowski might have earned himself a little more credibility. The problem is that his original formula is what mathematicians call "undefined" at t = 0, and that's because of the 1/T and 1/T^2 (the ^2 means "to the power of 2" or "squared"). When you substitute zero into the formula wherever T is you end up trying to divide by zero, which is an operation in mathematics that is not allowed.

To see why, remember that dividing one number by another is equivalent to subtracting the second number repeatedly from the first until you reach zero. So 6 divided by 2 gives an answer of 3 because when you subtract 2 repeatedly from 6 you can do it 3 times until you reach zero. Now imagine dividing 6 by zero. It doesn't matter how many times you take 0 away from 6, you won't budge at all from your starting number. Hence you'll never reach zero. The division process is not working and that's why the operation is called undefined. Computers have to be specially programmed to recognise when they're getting into a situation where they'll be asked to divide by zero, or they'd plunge themselves into an endless loop trying to achieve it.

Darwinism

2008-07-24T13:54:00.004+01:00

The addition of an -ism suffix to any noun , especially a proper noun, usually puts the idea in people's heads that an ideology is being referred to. Examples are Thatcherism, Marxism, Freudianism, Lysenkoism and Hegelianism. The -ism suffix can also mean an action, process or characteristic behaviour, and examples of these are volcanism and despotism, but for most people, placing -ism on the end of a word is interpreted in its Maureen Lipman sense ("You got an -ology, you're a scientist!") and taken to mean an ideological position.

In fact, this connotation of ideology is so strong that the suffix has, as far back as the seventeenth century, been stripped of its possible antecedents and used as a word in its own right. Type "ism" into the OneLook internet dictionary portal site, and the quick definition returned is "a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school". The twenty-three ordinary dictionaries that the website turns up as containing "ism" as a word mostly agree on this, and the Webster's Revised Unabridged, 1913 Edition goes as far as to define an "ism" as "a doctrine or theory; especially, a wild or visionary theory".

In science, ideologies and other fixed beliefs are bad things, because they prevent us from testing an idea for its soundness by exposing it to potentially contradictory evidence. Instead, an ideology will usually try and wrap reality around its framework. The scientific method, on the other hand, is all about changing our ideas to fit reality. Failure to do this can lead to disaster, as the Soviet Union found out when it realised that being in the thrall of the bizarre ideas of the fraudulent agronomist Trofim Lysenko for several decades had set back their progress in biotechnology by the same amount of time. A scientifically minded person therefore, has a well-justified fear of ideology.

This fear is implicit in Olivia Judson's recent article in the New York Times, in which she argues that the terms Darwinism and Darwinist should be abolished because they give the false impression that the field was the "brainchild of a single person" many years ago, and that (crucially for an ideology) it has not changed in a significant way since then. Judson recognises, though she does not say explicitly, that the use of the term Darwinism, especially by fundamentalist religious groups, allows the hearer to infer that evolutionary biology is just another ideology, deserving of no more support than any other idea or belief. In this way, such organisations can caricature the theory of evolution, and thus make it easier to attack.

Of course, evolutionary biology is not an ideology: it has changed enormously since the nineteenth century, while still retaining the core ideas that Darwin espoused a hundred and fifty years ago. This is the essence of a field of science, revolutions in understanding occur, but they very rarely change our viewpoint completely. The development of Einstein's general theory of relativity did not wipe out Newton's laws of gravity. Like all good theories, it explained why gravity worked as it did, noted that Newton's equations worked perfectly accurately for most purposes, and predicted that there were occasions where Newton's laws would break down - mainly under high velocities and strong gravities - and provided an explanation of what would happen under these circumstances, time slowing down being one of them. In other words, Einstein's theories superseded those of Newton rather than completely replaced them. The only areas where a complete change of viewpoint took place were where the previous ideas were religious or ideological in nature. Examples of these are the heliocentric view of the solar system, or the development of modern medicine.

Voice Risk Analysis Software criticised in national media

2007-12-29T09:53:00.001Z

Regular readers will remember my writing an article about voice risk analysis software employed by Harrow Council in particular to detect benefits claimants who may be lying. At the time I pointed out that there was no evidence, other than anecdotal, that the product worked as claimed. And that:
"Harrow Council, and soon the Department of Work and Pensions, could well be detecting and prosecuting fraudsters using software whose only claim to be efficacious is that the company that makes it says it is."

Today I find that this is not just my opinion, but also that of Paul Lewis, presenter of Radio 4's Moneybox programme. He popped up on Breakfast on BBC1 this morning to put the arguments against the credibility of these devices much more succinctly than I have done.

In brief, Voice Risk Analysis (VRA) software claims to detect stress in a person's voice, not lying specifically. In day to day use, the software flags up calls from benefit claimants whose voices betray signs of stress and the call can then be followed up with further checks.

The presenters told Lewis that Harrow Council had saved £110,000 by the use of Voice Stress Analysis: Lewis pointed out that the problem was that they had nothing to compare the method to, how did Harrow Council know for instance, that picking people at random and following up their claims would not generate an equivalent saving? Also, simply knowing that Harrow Council was piloting such a scheme might be enough to put off fraudulent claimants (as well as discouraging genuine claimants wary of harassment).

Superbly put. Excellent piece. Also in Lewis's favour was his mention of Niels Bohr in the context of making predictions about the future. Anyone who can mention a famous physicist at 8:45 in the morning on national television gets my vote.

A piece on VRA also appeared later in the day on the 29th December issue of Moneybox. Lewis was presenting and went into a lot more detail.

It turns out that the supplier of the software is Digilog as predicted on this blog back in September. Digilog, it seems, will not tell anyone how it is able to detect stress in voices, nor why they assume that stress and lying are linked. This should start alarm bells ringing in any reasonable person's head. Contrary to what your intuition might tell you, systems whose workings are secret are far more vulnerable to exploitation than those which are not; this is because the more people who know how the system works, the more chance there is of them spotting errors, mistakes or other problems in the software. It's obviously very important that systems designed to catch people lying work properly: no one wants criminals getting away with it on the one hand, or innocent people being harassed on the other.

Unbelievably, James Plaskitt, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary with responsibility for Housing and Council tax benefit in the Department of Work and Pensions chose to beg the question when interviewed for Moneybox. What follows is a paraphrase of the exchange with the interviewer:

Interviewer: What scientific research is there to show that this technology works?
Minister: That's why we're running the pilot schemes, to see if it works.
Interviewer: But that isn't scientific research, is it?
Minister: No, but it's not up to us to review the science.
Interviewer: Surely it's important before you implement this system that you know it works. How will you know if you don't look at the science?
Minister: Well that's why we're running the pilot schemes - to test this thing out. What's more, the operators I've talked to who use this system are convinced it's solid!

With the minister responsible for national rollout talking in circles and presenting anecdote as evidence, it's no wonder that a device that has been shown to be no more accurate than flipping a coin can gain such a grip on the minds of politicians and civil servants, all of whom are seeing it as a magic wand to cut fraud.

How can intelligent people not spot that there's no evidence for something, or think that a pilot scheme will establish its efficacy without anything to compare it with? I hope the answer isn't "because they don't understand how science works".

Remember the recent biometrics scandal, where a person wearing a gelatin overlay over their fingers was able to fool a commercial fingerprint detector 80% of the time? The UK government is committed to launching a national ID card scheme based on just such biometric equipment starting in 2009, with about as much evidence that it will work as Digilog have for their VRA software.

The fact is we don't know that VRA technology works, and have no right to believe that it will work based on the evidence seen so far. The government should not be implementing it.

A Secret Santa Game

2007-12-27T12:20:00.000Z

(Note: originally, this article was written using Mathematica, a computer algebra package. Unfortunately, the conversion from Mathematica's native display format to HTML did not work properly, so the text had to be transferred by copy and paste, and the calculation inputs and outputs had to be done "by hand" where possible, and by conversion to bitmap where not. Apologies for the resulting confused appearance.)

A group of friends take part in a game of Secret Santa at Christmas. There are n people taking part.
What is the probability that m pairs of people will have each other as their Secret Santa?

The way to tackle this question is to find the probability that m particular pairs of people will have each other as their secret Santa, then multiply that probability by the number of possible groups of m pairs. A pair of people that have each other as their Secret Santa is called a reciprocating pair.

First we need to find the probability of finding one matching pair of people in a group of n friends. Let's start by imagining that there are 5 friends taking part: Dave, John, James, Jane and Erica. What's the probability of finding a reciprocating pair?

Well, we need one person to pick someone, who goes on to pick him or her in return:
This is 1/4 x 1/4 = 1/16.

This works because there is a 1 in 4 chance of say Dave picking John (he can't pick himself), and a corresponding 1 in 4 chance of John picking Dave.

In general, for n people, the probability is 1 in (one less than the number of people taking part), multiplied by itself.

This is 1/(n-1)^2

The probability that a further pair will have each other must now be calculated from the remaining people. In our example, we are down to James, Jane and Erica, which means that the number of reciprocating pairs is 3 x 2 = 6. In general though, we now have two fewer people than we did before to choose from. That's n - 2 people. Using the rule that a particular person can't pick him or herself, we can calculate the probability of a second match as

1/((n-2) - 1)^2 or 1/(n - 3)^2

The probability of a third match is calculated using the fact that we now have two fewer people to choose from again, or n - 4 people. This gives us 1/((n-4) - 1)^2 or 1/(n - 5)^2.

The probability of an mth match can be found by glancing at the numbers after n in the denominator of each fraction. You can see that they form a sequence 1,3,5,... The position-to-term rule for a sequence of this type is 2m - 1, where m is the number of the match. This is 1/(n - (2m - 1))^2.

To find the probability of a particular three pairs matching in Secret Santa, you just multiply the probabilities of a first, a second and a third match together.

For a game with 11 people (i.e. n = 11) this works out to 1/230400.

This low figure means that for an eleven person game, the probability of a particular three pairs matching, say Amy - Bill, Charles - Derren, and Emily - Fred is vanishingly small.

What about the probability of a particular m pairs matching? To calculate this, we need the probability of the mth pair matching, which we already know is 1/(n - (2m - 1)^2, and then multiply it by the (m -1)th probability, and the (m -2)th probability, and so on until we come to m = 1.

To do this, we use the product function, which multiplies its terms together in a way analogous to the sum function ∑. Here, the range variable is i.

∏ 1/(n - (2i -1))^2 (evaluated from i = 1 to m)

We are half-way to a general formula. We now need to know the number of possible groups of m particular reciprocating pairs chosen from n people. This is easier than it seems. The way to count the number of pairs in n people is n(n-1). Look at the possible pairs for our original 5 people: Dave, John, James, Jane, and Erica.

Dave - John
Dave-James
Dave-Jane
Dave-Erica
John-Dave
John-James
John-Jane
John-Erica
James-Dave
James-John
James-Jane
James-Erica
Jane- Dave
Jane- John
Jane-James
Jane-Erica
Erica-Dave
Erica-John
Erica-James
Erica-Jane

Looking in the left column, you can see that each of the five names appears, and is matched with everyone else except themselves. This means each person is matched with four others. That is why the formula for possible pairs is the number of names multiplied by one less than this number: n x (n - 1). In our particular case of 5 names, there are 5 x 4 = 20 possible pairs. Of course, to get a reciprocating pair Jane-John and John-Jane must be combined - Jane buys for John and John buys for Jane. This means the number of reciprocating pairs is half the number of possible pairs. The formula now becomes (1/2)n(n - 1).

Having matched up two people, they are removed from the group, which now has n - 2 members. We then count the possible pairs again. The formula for the next set of pairs is therefore (1/2)(n - 2)(n - 3).

We have n - 4 players left, so the formula is (1/2)(n - 4)(n - 5) and so on. To find the total number of groups consisting of three reciprocating pairs out of n people, we simply multiply our three formulae together:
(1/2)n x (n - 1) x (1/2)x (n - 2) x (n - 3) x (1/2) x (n - 4)(n - 5). For 11 people this is
(1/2) x 11 x 10 x (1/2) x 9 x 8 x (1/2) x 7 x 6 = 41580.

For n people, we use another product formula:

∏((1/2) x (n - 2i) x (n - (2i+1)) (evaluated from i = 0 to m - 1)

Using Mathematica, we can now combine the formula for m particular matches with the formula for m possible groups out of n people:

This gives us

The Pochhammer function takes inputs n and m and evaluates according to the rule

It is related to the factorial function.

Finally, we define a function whimsically called SecretSanta, which takes inputs n and m and gives us the probability of finding m reciprocating pairs in n people.

For n = 11 and m = 3 the output is given below.

SecretSanta[11, 3]

0.180469

Or an 18% chance that there will be three matching reciprocating pairs.

This 3D visualisation shows how the probability of any number of matches falls off quite dramatically with rising numbers of people taking part.

Cranial Osteopathy

2007-11-25T19:07:00.000Z

Cranial osteopathy, otherwise known as craniosacral therapy, is a type of osteopathy that involves "manipulation" of the bones of the skull to promote mental and emotional health. It was invented by William Sutherland, an osteopath working in the 1930's.

It is based on the idea that the human brain and hence the cerebro spinal fluid surrounding it pulses rythmically in a way unrelated to heart-rate, that these pulses can be felt with the fingertips, and that illness can be caused by restricting the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid.

Practitioners claim to be able to gently manipulate the bones in the skull in order to relieve flow blockages and cure or alleviate the symptoms of disease. Because the treatment is so gentle, it is promoted as being especially suited to babies and young children.

The Craniosacral Therapy Association of the UK claims that one of the causes of problems in babies and children is "displacement of things in their bodies" caused by compression of the skull during birth. This can lead to all sorts of problems, including behavioural difficulties. Fortunately, most of these problems respond very well to craniosacral therapy, which it describes as "a subtle and profound healing form which assists the body's natural capacity for self-repair."

Stephen Barrett, of the Quackwatch website, says that craniosacral therapy has no therapeutic value. This is for two reasons. One, the underlying theory is demonstrably false: the brain does pulsate, but this is solely for cardiovascular reasons, and no connection has ever been demonstrated between brain pulsation and general health. Two, tests done on practitioners of craniosacral therapy revealed that their examinations of the same twelve patients revealed very different rates of brain pulsation, which Barrett notes are exactly the outcomes one would expect from people trying to measure a non-existent phenomenon.

What does this mean for a mother who is worried about her child's behavioural problems? If craniosacral therapy is as gentle as its proponents claim, there is little harm to be done to the child, only to the mother's pocket. More serious is the possibility that there is something genuinely wrong with the child that your average craniosacral therapist wouldn't spot. Stephen Barrett comments that most such therapists have such poor judgement that they should be delicensed. This is in the USA of course. In the UK, a person working as a craniosacral therapist needs no qualifications at all.

Genetically Modified Food

2007-11-11T16:52:00.000Z

The Liberal Democrat party's DEFRA spokesperson has waded into the debate on GM food policy in the UK by commenting on a ministerial statement by the UK Government.

The statement, from Phil Woolas, the minister for the environment, referred to a recent consultation on the coexistence of GM and non-GM crops. The statement simply announced that the government wanted to wait until all the evidence is in before formulating a policy on growing GM crops near conventional crops. The government wants the policy so that the public can be sure that conventional crops are not contaminated by their GM neighbours.

The Liberal democrat spokesman, Chris Huhne , said
"People want to be safe and not sorry on GM foods, as the overwhelming bulk of responses to the Government's consultation show. Ministers should not give any go-ahead for commercial planting until they can state confidently that GM varieties would not contaminate non-GM foods and that they are safe."

Why is it important that GM crops not contaminate their non-GM counterparts, for example by cross-pollination? The answer appears to be that the British public thinks GM crops are probably dangerous, or at least have not been conclusively shown to be safe.

Is there any evidence that GM foods can cause harm to human beings? It appears not. An independent review of over 600 scientific papers in 2003 concluded that

"To date world-wide there have been no verifiable untoward toxic or nutritionally deleterious effects resulting from the cultivation and consumption of products from GM crops. However, absence of readily observable adverse effects does not mean that these can be completely ruled out and there has been no epidemiological monitoring of those consuming GM food."

Consumers in the United States have been eating GM food for more than ten years, and GM foods have been introduced in Canada, India and Australia. Presumably, we can look to these countries for some epidemiological monitoring.

The scientific evidence also seems to show that the negative impact on human health of various manipulations of plant DNA is low. This is unlikely to persuade a British public still aching from the scars of the BSE crisis of nearly twenty years ago, which is the most likely reason for public antipathy towards statements made by governments and scientists about food safety.

Campaigners in this country have exploited the fear that the BSE scare engendered in the public mind to mobilise public opinion to levels unheard of in the rest of the world. Couple this with images of "Frankenstein foods" evoked in the British media and it is no surprise to find that the result has been to hold back British progress in a very promising field of scientific research; to force scientists working in these areas to consider leaving the country to further their careers elsewhere; and to produce nothing of discernable benefit to the British consumer.

Of course,one can't blame politicians for wanting to react appropriately to the public mood, but would it be too much to ask that they introduce statements like Chris Huhne's with a caveat such as "There's no evidence that GM foods are harmful to humans"?

Is organic food better for you?

2007-11-03T14:55:00.000Z

No less an institution than the BBC recently reported that organic food is "better for you" than the conventionally farmed stuff. You can see the video report here. In it, the reporter says that "organically farmed milk, fruit and vegetables are more nutritious than conventionally farmed produce".

The BBC does not mention here exactly what is meant by "nutritious", but reports that up to 40% more antioxidants could be found in organic fruit and vegetables than in non-organic, and quotes the head of the research team, Professor Carlo Leifert, as saying "We have shown there are more of certain nutritionally desirable compounds and less of the baddies in organic foods, or improved amounts of the fatty acids you want and less of those you don't want."

The claims stem from research being carried out at Nafferton Farm near Newcastle Upon Tyne where a comparison study is being performed between organically and conventionally farmed vegetables. The research is being coordinated by Newcastle University's School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. It is funded to the tune of 12 million pounds by the European Union, under their Quality Low-Input Food (QLIF) initiative.

The QLIF initiative is a long-term "integrated project" to improve knowledge of the benefits and drawbacks of organic farming - since most of the consuming public seems increasingly fixated on the subject.

The QLIF initiative maintains its own website and publishes its own scientific papers which are available via an on-line archive set up by an umbrella organisation for research into organic methods and based in Denmark.

Before we jump ship and make the switch to organic however, we should reassure ourselves of two things: one is that we are not making the mistake of assuming that because nutritional quality might be higher in one type of food than another, it's therefore appropriate to switch to the higher quality food. The other is to make sure that the usual, rather basic pre-requisites of science apply: the research the BBC reported on should have been published in a peer-reviewed journal of reputable standing in the field in which the claims are being made, and it should have been repeated, preferably by someone else somewhere else, to ensure that the results found are not artefacts of the experimental design.

The trouble is that hardly any of the scientific papers that appear to relate to the comparisons between organic and conventional foods on the QLIF website have been peer-reviewed. Out of 14 papers on effects of production methods, only two had been peer-reviewed. Of these, one (published in 2007) stated that it was not possible to "draw overall conclusions about the effect of low input production on food quality and safety" unless more research was carried out; the other concerned food that was being fed to rats, and found that the content of lutein was higher in feeds prepared from organic produce. Whilst this second result is certainly positive, it is hardly earth-shattering evidence of benefit to humans.

Also, the BBC report made plain that the results of the current research will not be published until next year. The BBC did not even make clear, in their reports that talked about the higher nutritional content of organic foods, whether they were referring to previous work that had been published, or to the as-yet unpublished results of the current research.

So let's straighten this out. It looks like the BBC has been reporting on unpublished and incomplete research carried out by a team whose leader claims higher nutritional content in organic food, whilst in possession of no peer-reviewed evidence to make such an assertion. Of course, there may be evidence in hard-to-find places, behind an academic pay-wall for instance. On the face of it, however, this seems to leave the question as to whether organic food is better for us as just that: a question. It certainly does not seem to justify the rather positive spin placed on the news by the media. Indeed, one wonders, given that there seems to be nothing new to report, where the media picked up the idea in the first place.

Contemplative wonder and limitless scientific knowledge - at odds?

2007-10-27T14:09:00.000+01:00

The Face to Faith commentary section in today's Guardian contains this article, by Mark Vernon, a priest turned agnostic journalist and author of Atheism: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life.

Vernon argues that if we view scientific knowledge as being limitless in its scope, we are eroding our ability to engage in "contemplative wonder" at things which science cannot explain.

He draws a distinction between contemplative and "instrumental" wonder: the instrumental variety is the sort of wonder we might feel when solving a puzzle, a wonder that fires a desire to see the puzzle solved; the contemplative variety is the wonder "which does not undo, but lets be" - this type of wonder is the type our ancestors might have felt on seeing an approaching storm: an awestruck sense of connectedness between human beings, the natural world and the divine.

Having no problem with either type of wonder, one may be forgiven for asking what all the fuss is about. It turns out that Vernon is worried that our obsession with the instrumental type of wonder means that nothing is left sacred. There are some things, he asserts, that are beyond the comprehension of science: "consciousness, morality and existence itself" he gives as examples.

Apparently, the artistic, religious and moral imagination are well-equipped to ponder these matters. This leaves one thinking that the effect of Vernon's assertions about the nature of contemplative wonder is to set up a series of intellectual "no-go" areas where science cannot and should not probe.

The examples he gives of consciousness and morality in particular are areas where science is just starting to have the ability to explore. There's no problem with the idea of contemplating something "as it is" without wishing to probe any further, but seeking after a particular area of knowledge should not be prohibited simply because someone thinks it ought to be "sacred".

Auguste Comte said that mankind would never know the nature of the stars shortly before the invention of the spectroscope which yielded a treasure trove of information about their structure. Although he didn't make a moral case for not inquiring as to their nature, where would humanity's knowledge of astronomy be if everybody had believed him and turned their attentions elsewhere?

Vernon's remark about contemplative wonder being something which "does not undo but lets be" sounds a little like Tolkien saying "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom". Although in the case of a computer it might well be a bad idea to trash it in order to find out how it works, in particle physics it is more or less the only way that progress can be made.

If we set up arbitrary barriers to knowledge on the grounds that some things must be sacred, we risk depriving ourselves of a valuable insight into the human condition. A life without meaning is indeed an impoverished one, but there's absolutely no reason why we can't create our own meaning.

Postmodernism

2007-10-24T23:16:00.000+01:00

It's hard to take seriously a subject where one of its foremost exponents equates the penis with the square root of minus one, but this is what I have tried to do with post-modernism.

Struck by the question "What does post-modernism actually mean?" and concerned at my lack of knowledge of the meaning of the terms "jouissance", and the much-used but little explained "deconstruction", I bought a popular introduction to the subject by Appignanesi and Garratt: Postmodernism, A Graphic Guide to Cutting-Edge Thinking.

Nearly two hundred pages later, I was none the wiser. I still couldn't give a quick definition of the word "post-modernism", and I suspect that that is the way its proponents intend it to be. Fortunately, Wikipedia comes to the rescue saying that post-modernism "tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality".

This is putting it politely, throughout the book, one has to fight one's way through passages like:

"The male child resolves his Oedipal "murderous" conflict with the father by identifying with his Phallic Power. He can do this because he possesses a "signifier" - his penis - which in the Signified realm represents the Phallus or Sexual Power. The position of power in language is the phallus which imposes the Symbolic order."

Exactly what this is supposed to mean is anyone's guess. Signifiers were used earlier in the book in the context of language, and the Freudian idea of the penis as a symbol of power is a familiar, if discredited idea from psychoanalysis. But here the two seem to have been thrown together without any regard for meaning, or even coherence. The definition above comes to our rescue: post-modernism embodies lots of contradiction and ambiguity.

Another trait of post-modernist thinking is a reaction to the rationality of the sciences, and the notion that, at heart, science is merely a "narrative", a social construct, or a myth. On page 109 we find that "Critiques of science... have attacked [it] for its notion of truth and rationality as well as the alleged objectivity of the scientific method. All this criticism has established that science is a social process, that scientific method is little short of a myth, that scientific knowledge is in fact manufactured."

Strange to find then, that in common with other dubious disciplines, post-modernism seems to yearn for the imprimatur of science to lend it an air of respectability. The authors point to several theories and concepts in science which they seem to think support their ideas, but their explanations contain a number of errors which I find disconcerting: enough to make me think that the authors have not themselves understood what they are trying to explain. It is also unclear exactly why science supports post-modernist thought.

For example on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: "it states that there is always uncertainty in simultaneous measurements of the position of a particle". The uncertainty principle actually says that if you try and measure the position and momentum of a particle, you will find that the more certain you are of the position of the particle, the more uncertain you are of its momentum, and vice-versa. Note to lay readers: in this context momentum can usefully be thought of as the particle's speed in a particular direction.

On Theories of Everything: "we discover that the atom not only consists of protons, neutrons and electrons, but all varieties of gluons, charms, quarks". Although quarks are a constituent of protons and neutrons, "charms" are not constituents of anything; charm is the somewhat whimsical name for a property of one particular type of quark, the charm quark, which in any case does not form part of the everyday matter we are familiar with.

In science or mathematics, a person whose writing betrays a serious misunderstanding of the subject he is talking about may be safely ignored. The chances of him establishing new knowledge or manipulating existing knowledge in a meaningful way are vanishingly small.

However, in post-modernist writing, this stricture is clearly not important: a person who has not understood an important component of the idea he is trying to establish can continue his outpourings. Here is the French cultural theorist and post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard talking about the first Gulf War:

"It is a sign that the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean" - Baudrillard 1995 p. 50

One wonders what a Euclidean space of war would look like. A flat plane extending to infinity in every direction? The idea of a hyperspace with multiple refractivity is a meaningless concept in physics. The quotation above I took from Sokal and Bricmont's excellent book, Intellectual Impostures, which deals with the abuse of scientific concepts by post-modern thinkers.

Another idea in post-modernism is that of deconstruction. Introduced by another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, a definition of exactly what the term means is hard to come by. The closest one seems to be able to come is that it is a way of showing how a text subverts its own meaning:

"the term 'deconstruction' refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message" (Rorty 1995)

Though quite why this is important is not made clear. It's also just about impossible to get an example of deconstruction in action.

I'm reminded of a philosophy lesson attended by the scientist Richard Feynmann, recounted in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann. The discussion in the class was all about "essential objects", which were being spoken of in a technical way. These were extremely important to the argument, and Feynmann, who was only there to observe, was asked by the class instructor if, being a physicist, he thought an electron was an essential object.

To clarify the concept in his head, Feynmann responded with a question of his own: is a brick an essential object? To his enormous surprise, no one could agree on whether or not a brick fell into the category of essential object. Feynmann's point was that it was not surprising they got nowhere when they couldn't even agree on basic definitions.

Much the same thing seems to happen with post-modernist thought: not only is it difficult to follow the arguments, there are also no accepted definitions of what their terms of reference actually mean. The resulting scope for confusion is enormous. I feel sorry for people stuck on a cultural studies course, or another course with high post-modernist content. They can take comfort in the thought that when it comes to writing their dissertations, there exist post-modernist document writing generators on the internet that can produce a lengthy essay, with footnotes, in seconds. Here's one for example.

And I still couldn't give a definition of what post-modernism means, although jouissance is supposed to mean jollity or merriment. And the person who equated his penis with the square root of minus one was Jacques Lacan.

Gwyneth Paltrow and George Orwell

2007-10-23T18:16:00.000+01:00

A recent reading of George Orwell's 1946 essay "How the Poor Die" brought back memories of the 2004 photograph of Gwyneth Paltrow at a New York film premiere.

Gwyneth was pictured sporting half a dozen circular bruises on her back, which were widely believed to have been the result of a treatment called "cupping". Cupping is now described as an alternative therapy, part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

The treatment involves reducing the pressure inside a cup by heating it, and then quickly applying the inverted cup to the skin. The sucking effect this produces is the reason for the bruising. This therapy is often used to treat muscular aches, frozen shoulder, and conditions which affect the chest, such as colds, flu and pneumonia.

There is a variant on this technique, wet cupping, in which the practitioner punctures the skin before applying the cup. Blood is then sucked out of the wound by the cupping process. This technique recently featured on the BBC programme, Michael Palin's New Europe, and is believed to remove toxins by its advocates.

As with all traditional Chinese treatments, the aim is to unblock and restore the flow of Qi (Chi) around the body. Qi is variously described as a flow of "energy" around the body, or as a "life-force", which if blocked can cause the signs and symptoms of illness. Qi is a metaphysical concept rather than a scientific one, and as such, its existence can be neither proved nor disproved. With the salutary example of the invisible beer pixie with inaudible hiccups in my garden shed to guide us, it is important to remember that being unable to prove or disprove something is no reason to suppose that its existence is probable.

Cupping as a treatment for illness is not unique to traditional Chinese medicine. Indeed, it was used by the ancient Greeks in the fourth century BC, who believed that the body is filled with four basic substances (humours) which are in balance when the body is healthy, and in imbalance when the body was unwell. Cupping was one of many methods used to try to "rebalance" these humours. The technique has a long and venerable history in Europe, but had died out in Britain in the late nineteenth century: George Eliot, writing in the 1860's, pokes fun in her novel Middlemarch at provincial doctors who clung to the humoral notions of the ancient Greek, Galen.

George Orwell underwent this remedy involuntarily whilst being treated for pneumonia in a Paris hospital. He writes:

As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man's back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone.

What struck me about the article was Orwell's astonishment that such a treatment still existed. He clearly felt it ought to belong to a previous century, and linked its use explicitly to ignorance and poverty in his essay that refers to events that took place in 1929. It's alarming that 75 years later, there's such a resurgence of irrational belief that this "barbarous remedy" can be undergone by a rich, well-educated celebrity, and be worn as a token of open-mindedness to alternative medicine.

Is the structure of water different after homeopathic dilution and succussion?

2007-10-20T14:06:00.001+01:00

Homeopaths have long been searching for a possible mechanism of action for their remedies, even though they lack that most basic prerequisite for an effective medicine: evidence that it works better than a placebo. In the last twenty years, homeopaths have come to focus on something called "the memory of water", as being a likely candidate for this mechanism. Briefly, the story is as follows:

Homeopathy is supposed to work on the principle of "like cures like". Its founder, Samuel Hahnemann, convinced himself of this during his research into the properties of cinchona bark, a potent source of quinine. Quinine was, and is, widely used for the treatment of malaria, and Hahnemann discovered that ingesting large doses of it produced malaria-like symptoms in a healthy person. This led him to believe that what caused symptoms of a disease in a healthy person, could also be used to cure a person suffering from that same disease: "like cures like".

The trouble was that the doses of the substance that Hahnemann used to produce the said symptoms were so high as to be positively toxic. He therefore decided to work with dilutions of the substances he was testing. He soon discovered another curious thing: the substances, when prepared using a method that involved vigorous shaking (which he called "succussion") of the substance between dilutions, were just as good at producing symptoms, although just as curiously, no-one else was ever able to replicate the effect. Bizarrely, Hahnemann proposed that, when diluted, the original substance was effective as a treatment against the disease whose symptoms it produced in a healthy person; moreover, the more the substance was diluted, the more potent the effect!

Hahnemann was working in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and knew nothing about the molecular basis of chemistry. He can thus be forgiven for claiming increased potency with increased dilution. Nowadays, we know that the dilutions that he used were so high as to make it improbable that a single molecule of the original substance remained in the water. We therefore have no excuse for claiming anything other than that homeopathic remedies are indistinguishable from plain old water.

Such minor considerations as these have not shaken homeopaths from their convictions: starting in the 1980s with French immunologist Jacques Benveniste and continuing through to the 21st century with the work of Madeleine Ennis in Belfast and Louis Rey in Paris, homeopathy proponents have tried to show that water somehow retains a "memory" of the substances that were once dissolved in it. This memory, they say, accounts for the supposed therapeutic effect.

Benveniste started it all with a paper published in the journal Nature in 1988. His team exposed human basophils (a type of white blood cell that can be stimulated to secrete histamine, a chemical involved in allergic reactions) to solutions of water that had once contained human antibodies, but were now diluted to the extent that not a single molecule of anything once dissolved in it could remain. Amazingly, the basophils responded by secreting histamine, as they would have done if the antibodies had actually been present. More intriguingly, the effect only worked when the solution was shaken violently, a la homeopathic succussion. The basophils had also been exposed to water that had never contained human antibodies, and when this happened, they did not release histamine.

Benveniste published his paper in Nature, who sent a team to investigate his work. The team discovered that, in the original experiments, the experimenters had known which solutions had once contained antibodies and which had only contained pure water. When the experiment was repeated in such a way that the experimenters did not know which solution was which, the effect disappeared. Benveniste was forced to retract his paper. His reputation was destroyed, not so much by this experiment, but by his refusal to accept that there was no such memory of water, and by his later claims, which became increasingly odd, and which culminated in a 1997 paper stating that the effect could be transmitted over telephone lines.

The idea, once ignited, refused to go away. In 2003, the Swiss chemist, Louis Rey published a paper in Physica A, a reputable journal specialising in statistical mechanics. Rey was using the phenomenon of thermoluminescence to study the structure of solids. The technique involves bombarding a cold sample with radiation, warming it up, and analysing the light emitted, which reveals something of the structure of the sample.

Rey diluted solutions of sodium and lithium chloride to homeopathic levels (probably no molecules of the original substance remained), succussed them, flooded them with radiation, and warmed them up. He noticed that the thermoluminescence peaks were characteristic of the original substances that were dissolved in the water, even though the original substances were long diluted out of the solution. His interpretation was that the networks of hydrogen bonds in the samples were different, retaining thus a "memory" of the substance that was originally dissolved in them.

Unfortunately, it seems no-one has yet replicated Rey's experiment to show that such an effect exists. Other experts in the field of hydrogen bonds in water are unconvinced by his methodology, and given the known problems due to the experimenter effect with many other such attempts to show that water has a memory, one would not be optimistic about an early resolution to the issue. I have no reason to doubt Rey's integrity, but the example of Jan Hendrik Schon should suffice to warn us that unique results from one person or group should be treated with caution.

Society of Homeopathy

2007-10-20T13:23:00.000+01:00

The previous article, written by the author of the quackometer website mentions that at least one homeopath affiliated to the Northampton-based Society of Homeopaths has claimed that homeopathy is efficacious against a number of named diseases like asthma. This appears to violate section 48 of the Society's own Code of Ethics, (they're not supposed to advertise , explicitly or implicitly that homeopathy can cure "named diseases") although there may be some legal argument as to the whether a statement of efficacy is the same as claiming a cure.

Nevertheless, it's not hard to find practitioners on the membership roll who do make such claims. For example, the claim by homeopath Helen Bewers, at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nick.bewers/About%20Me.htm
on the “About Me” page of her website that she became interested in homeopathy after her daughter was “treated by a professional homeopath for asthma and successfully cured”?

Would this fall into the category of "advertising [that] expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.”? It's on the website advertising her practice, albeit not in the main section. Looked at from the perspective of a parent seeking an alternative treatment for an asthmatic child, it's hard not to conclude that the homeopath is claiming that a cure is possible, and has happened. Where does that place the Society's enforcement of its Code of Ethics?

The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing

2007-10-14T15:43:00.000+01:00

Below is a reproduction of the full text of an article on the Quackometer blog, part of a website where, among other things, you can enter the web address of a site you suspect of making unproven claims, and it comes back with the likelihood that the site contains quackery. I particularly like the use of the "canard" as a unit of measurement.

The author of this blog posted an article about the Society of Homeopaths' reluctance to deal with a proportion of its members who continue to promote the dangerous and untrue idea that homeopathy is effective against malaria.

The Society of Homeopaths responded with legal threats which have forced him to remove the article from his blog. On the grounds that this is a moral outrage, I include the text of his article below.

The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing

The Society of Homeopaths (SoH) are a shambles and a bad joke. It is now over a year since Sense about Science, Simon Singh and the BBC Newsnight programme exposed how it is common practice for high street homeopaths to tell customers that their magic pills can prevent malaria. The Society of Homeopaths have done diddly-squat to stamp out this dangerous practice apart from issue a few ambiguously weasel-worded press statements.

The SoH has a code of practice, but my feeling is that this is just a smokescreen and is widely flouted and that the Society do not care about this. If this is true, then the code of practice is nothing more than a thin veneer used to give authority and credibility to its deluded members. It does nothing more than fool the public into thinking they are dealing with a regulated professional.

As a quick test, I picked a random homeopath with a web site from the SoH register to see if they flouted a couple of important rules:

48 • Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority.
• No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.

72 To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease.

The homeopath I picked on is called Julia Wilson and runs a practice from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. What I found rather shocked and angered me.

Straight away, we find that Julia M Wilson LCHE, RSHom specialises in asthma and works at a clinic that says,

Many illnesses and disease can be successfully treated using homeopathy, including arthritis, asthma, digestive disorders, emotional and behavioural difficulties, headaches, infertility, skin and sleep problems.

Well, there are a number of named diseases there to start off. She also gives a leaflet that advertises her asthma clinic. The advertising leaflet says,

Conventional medicine is at a loss when it comes to understanding the origin of allergies. ... The best that medical research can do is try to keep the symptoms under control. Homeopathy is different, it seeks to address the triggers for asthma and eczema. It is a safe, drug free approach that helps alleviate the flaring of skin and tightening of lungs...

Now, despite the usual homeopathic contradiction of claiming to treat causes not symptoms and then in the next breath saying it can alleviate symptoms, the advert is clearly in breach of the above rule 47 on advertising as it implicitly claims superiority over real medicine and names a disease.

Asthma is estimated to be responsible for 1,500 deaths and 74,000 emergency hospital admissions in the UK each year. It is not a trivial illness that sugar pills ought to be anywhere near. The Cochrane Review says the following about the evidence for asthma and homeopathy,

The review of trials found that the type of homeopathy varied between the studies, that the study designs used in the trials were varied and that no strong evidence existed that usual forms of homeopathy for asthma are effective.

This is not a surprise given that homeopathy is just a ritualised placebo. Hopefully, most parents attending this clinic will have the good sense to go to a real accident and emergency unit in the event of a severe attack and consult their GP about real management of the illness. I would hope that Julia does little harm here.

However, a little more research on her site reveals much more serious concerns. She says on her site that 'she worked in Kenya teaching homeopathy at a college in Nairobi and supporting graduates to set up their own clinics'. Now, we have seen what homeopaths do in Kenya before. It is not treating a little stress and the odd headache. Free from strong UK legislation, these missionary homeopaths make the boldest claims about the deadliest diseases.

A bit of web research shows where Julia was working (picture above). The Abha Light Foundation is a registered NGO in Kenya. It takes mobile homeopathy clinics through the slums of Nairobi and surrounding villages. Its stated aim is to,

introduce Homeopathy and natural medicines as a method of managing HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in Kenya.

I must admit, I had to pause for breath after reading that. The clinic sells its own homeopathic remedies for 'treating' various lethal diseases. Its MalariaX potion,

is a homeopathic preparation for prevention of malaria and treatment of malaria. Suitable for children. For prevention. Only 1 pill each week before entering, during and after leaving malaria risk areas. For treatment. Take 1 pill every 1-3 hours during a malaria attack.

This is nothing short of being totally outrageous. It is a murderous delusion. David Colquhoun has been writing about this wicked scam recently and it is well worth following his blog on the issue.

Let's remind ourselves what one of the most senior and respected homeopaths in the UK, Dr Peter Fisher of the London Homeopathic Hospital, has to say on this matter.

there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won't find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice.

Malaria is a huge killer in Kenya. It is the biggest killer of children under five. The problem is so huge that the reintroduction of DDT is considered as a proven way of reducing deaths. Magic sugar pills and water drops will do nothing. Many of the poorest in Kenya cannot afford real anti-malaria medicine, but offering them insane nonsense as a substitute will not help anyone.

Ironically, the WHO has issued a press release today on cheap ways of reducing child and adult mortality due to malaria. Their trials, conducted in Kenya, of using cheap mosquito nets soaked in insecticide have reduced child deaths by 44% over two years. It says that issuing these nets be the 'immediate priority' to governments with a malaria problem. No mention of homeopathy. These results were arrived at by careful trials and observation. Science. We now know that nets work. A lifesaving net costs $5. A bottle of useless homeopathic crap costs $4.50. Both are large amounts for a poor Kenyan, but is their life really worth the 50c saving?

I am sure we are going to hear the usual homeopath bleat that this is just a campaign by Big Pharma to discredit unpatentable homeopathic remedies. Are we to add to the conspiracy Big Net manufacturers too?

It amazes me that to add to all the list of ills and injustices that our rich nations impose on the poor of the world, we have to add the widespread export of our bourgeois and lethal healing fantasies. To make a strong point: if we can introduce laws that allow the arrest of sex tourists on their return to the UK, can we not charge people who travel to Africa to indulge their dangerous healing delusions?

At the very least, we could expect the Society of Homeopaths to try to stamp out this wicked practice? Could we?

Labels: homeopathy

posted by Le Canard Noir at 6:37 PM

Religious Education - the thin end of the Creationist wedge. Part Two

2007-09-25T22:34:00.000+01:00

As you'll see from the previous post, we were looking at schemes of work from the UK's Education Department for the teaching of Religious Education (RE) for children of twelve to fourteen. In the last post we noted that the scheme of work for twelve year olds entitled "Where do we look for God?" used two philosophical arguments for the existence of a deity that twelve year olds would be unlikely to be able to critique; moreover, the scheme gave no guidance for teachers on the known flaws in these arguments, preferring to lead the discussion into realms of comparison between the two.

My argument was that, for the unwary teacher, this constituted the establishment in children's minds of the idea that the existence of God was highly likely on philosophical grounds.

The next scheme of work is further along the RE syllabus. It's called "Where did the universe come from?" and is aimed at thirteen to fourteen year olds, in their third year of secondary school.

Turning to the second lesson, entitled "Did God create everything, including us?", we find that the idea behind it seems to be to get the students to examine various accounts of how the world came to be here, both scientific and religious. On the face of it, there's no problem with that, but the suggested teaching activities propose that evolution and the Big Bang are introduced after a discussion of the chances of winning the National Lottery. It's hard to think of a reason why you would do that, unless you wanted to sow in the students' minds the idea that the scientific explanation is unlikely.

Of course, this is precisely what creationists believe about these two theories, which is what bothers me about the inclusion of this introduction. The tone of the whole document makes it seem in places as though the text has been imported from a United States curriculum, where opinions are much more polarised. The words "evolutionism", "creationism" and "creationist" keep cropping up, and the choice between ideas becomes much more sharply demarcated than Britain's tradition of liberal protestantism would allow.

The scheme advises that pupils read the creation account in Genesis and asks teachers to ensure that the language of the text is explored, giving the example of how the word "day" can be understood by a theist. I am suspicious of this line: it refers to the chapter in Genesis where God created the Earth in six days, and the only people I'm aware of who would concern themselves with this are biblical creationists, who wish to take Genesis literally, but who are bothered by the weight of evidence showing that a six day "creation" is nonsense. The number of people in Britain who believe this may be growing, but it is still small.

The final learning outcome for this lesson is that students should "understand that science leaves questions of ultimate meaning and purpose unanswered". I object to the phrasing of this sentence: it would be more accurate to say that science does not concern itself with questions of meaning and purpose because of the difficulty of framing a testable proposition from them.

Of course, any RE syllabus has to have an enormously wide scope, having to cover everything from animism through metempsychosis to Zoroastrianism. There's bound to be lots of things for an atheist like me to object to. If that is the case, why does this scheme of work restrict itself to an almost exclusively Christian, Bible-belt-versus-evolutionists world-view?

I would like to think that the folks at the Standards Site did what our education industry is so fond of doing, and borrowed ideas wholesale from the American education industry. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the US state school system does not teach RE because of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. This leads me to believe, because of the language used in certain places in the document, that the committee that assembled this scheme of work was under the influence of a creationist member among the many faith group representatives that were doubtless involved. This might not matter, but the existence of the wedge document makes me slightly paranoid about the whole thing.

Religious Education - the thin end of the Creationist wedge. Part One

2007-09-23T21:04:00.000+01:00

After reading an article in the Guardian about the R.E. curriculum in the UK having a distinctly religious bent in this age of secularism, I took a look at the Standards Site, an online arm of the UK's Education department which contains, among other things, schemes of work for teaching subjects in the National Curriculum, including R.E.

As the article in the Guardian explains, "Kids have a legally protected "entitlement" to religious studies, but there is no control over what is taught." The scheme of work for religious education, downloadable from here, is a case in point. I got a nasty shock looking at it. Some of the units read as if they were written with the intent of introducing Intelligent Design into schools, and betray distinct traits of U.S. style old-Earth creationism.

The unit designed for teaching to children in their first year of secondary school is entitled "Where do we look for God?". After a lesson or so on the nature of truth, the unit focuses on the question of whether the natural world can reveal God, and begins with a discussion of the argument from design.

This argument was famously articulated by philosopher William Paley in 1802, though in various forms, it existed much earlier. Paley pointed out that if one were walking along a heath and hit a stone with one's foot, one would hardly bother to wonder how the stone got there. However, if the object struck had been a watch, the question asked would be very different, because the watch is clearly an object that has been designed, and that implies a designer. It could not have arrived in that location unaided, or by chance. Paley went on to argue that the complexity of the world, and in particular the complexity of living things required an intelligent designer. (i.e. God).

It should not surprise us to find that a scheme of work for RE requires us to look at the argument from design, what should surprise us is the way in which students are being asked to put forward both reasons why it might be true, and reasons why it might not. A "learning outcome" of this section is that the student should "write about the main arguments to prove God's existence from the design of the world". Forgive me, but isn't this assuming that there is a design?

It may be that I am being too hasty, because the next section appears to bring relief: it's about "problems posed by the argument from design". Now students have to read material like a report of an earthquake, which shows that the world is not always wonderful and beautiful, and to examine the implications of this for the argument from design. It seems as though evidence for and against the argument are being presented.

Hold on, though. The idea that bad things can happen in it says absolutely nothing about whether the world was designed or not. This is not an argument against design, and although some of the students may realise that a God might allow bad things to happen as part of his mysterious purpose, they will probably not spot this. They are then asked to write down what they think of the argument, but without having been given the tools to critique it properly. Indeed, I think it's unlikely that the average twelve year old could see the flaws in the argument, given that it's fooled intelligent minds from Cicero onwards for at least 2000 years.

For a valid criticism of the argument from design we have to get a little philosophical. There are two objections. One is that, since the argument posits something that is designed, this necessarily requires a designer. To put it another way: the mere fact of using the word "design" implies that there was a designer. The argument has assumed what it seeks to prove, and is therefore circular.

The second objection is this: What is it more reasonable to assume: that a complex world just happens to exist, or that a complex creator just happened to exist beforehand to make it?
If we assume the first, then we must look for a mechanism by which the complexity came about. If we assume the second we must look for a mechanism by which the complex creator made the world and also how the (presumably more complex) creator came about. Occam's razor tells us that it is best not to multiply hypotheses, so we plump for the first assumption unless and until we're shown to be barking up the wrong tree - well, we do if we're thinking rationally.

Call me Mr. Churlish, but I don't think the twelve year olds are going to appreciate this ratiocination. It's not on the scheme to be covered and it's far more likely that they'll just accept some version of the argument from design unless the teacher really knows what he or she is doing. This I doubt, as whoever downloads and uses this scheme of work is not likely to have intact critical faculties, as a glance at the next lesson shows.

This lesson, entitled "Can the universe reveal God" starts off by asking the teacher to use dominoes, or the game "Mousetrap" to illustrate cause and effect, then to introduce the cosmological argument for the existence of God. The argument goes like this:

Everything in nature has a cause, and nothing can cause itself; nor can a chain of causes be of infinite length. Therefore, there must have been a first cause, or Prime Mover - with most religious people taking this to be God.

Again, the problems with this argument are not something I would expect a twelve year old to be able to get at, and once again the scheme is strangely silent as to what the teacher might say to stimulate meaningful criticism of it. The students are asked to say why they think some people would say this doesn't prove God's existence, and might get as far as realising that "First Cause" does not necessarily imply God. They are unlikely to be able to get at the main problem with the argument: that the prime mover is somehow uncaused, despite the first premise stating that everything has a cause. To put it another way, the problem is that a series of effects, complex in nature must have been set in motion by a prime mover which was itself simple, and uncaused.

Fortunately, the scheme sidesteps these issues by telling the teacher to get the students to vote on which of the two arguments for the existence of God are the most convincing, and to display the results in a bar chart. Arguments for the non-existence of God don't get a look in.

The result of learning via these schemes of work these could well be a group of schoolchildren who will have no intellectual defence against the idea of a God. A secularist would then be relying on that hoary mainstay against religious revival: apathy. This is something that will be sorely needed by the time the students reach the third year of secondary school, because the second unit to be taught in this year is "Where did the universe come from?" Of which, more next time, including the ineluctable seepage of creationism into British schools.

Madeleine Bunting

2007-09-09T16:12:00.000+01:00

Friday's Guardian carried an article in the "Comment is Free" section by Madeleine Bunting. She writes about Richard Dawkins' recent debate with John Cornwell on the Today programme for 6th September. Ms Bunting alleges that Dawkins has "repeatedly refused a head-to-head with protagonists such as his Oxford colleague, Professor Alister McGrath", and implies that this is the first such debate. She goes further, and says that the Today programme snippet shows him

1) "com[ing] over all conciliatory" under Cornwell's challenge.

2) Making non-existent distinctions, as when she quotes him thus: "I never said religion was a disease, only "a virus". She goes on to say that "It was a shame we didn't have time to establish the fine distinction Dawkins was trying to make." Implying, of course, that there was no such distinction.

The background to this debate is Cornwell's book, Darwin's Angel, in which he writes a riposte to Dawkins own God Delusion.

Ms Bunting's article arouses the Sceptiphreniac's ire for the usual reasons: blatant misrepresentation of the facts and outright untruths. As usual, the unfortunate recipient is the hapless British Public, who have to have read Dawkins' works and sought out his debates in order to know that Madeleine Bunting is being less than honest.

Take her early point about Dawkins not debating his critics. I may have been deluding myself that Dawkins interviewed Alistair McGrath as part of his "Root of all Evil" TV series. Clearly this link to a video of said interview is a figment of my imagination. I also seem to recall hearing audio of a lengthy debate with McGrath at the Oxford Festival, but surely a humble blogger like me can't know better than Ms. Bunting?

What about Dawkins coming "over all conciliatory"? Well, it seems that atheists have been "aggressive" and "shrill" in their attacks on religion, and that Dawkins' conciliatory tone during the debate was "welcome". I myself thought that this is how Dawkins always comes across when he speaks in public, but perhaps that's my subjective opinion. On the other hand, Ms Bunting might think that statements like "There almost certainly is no God" and "religious ideas are outrageous violations of rational thought" are aggressive and shrill. To me they seem no more so than the polemics one encounters on Newsnight, or in the House of Commons.

Finally, the part of her article where Bunting accuses Dawkins of making non-existent distinctions: when Dawkins refers to religion as a virus, he is referring to the way that the ideas of religion propagate from mind to mind, not because they have any truth value, but because they possess characteristics that make people want to believe them and spread them. This is an example of one of Dawkins' favourite topics, that of the meme, which he introduced in his 1970's work "The Selfish Gene".

Expert opinion appears divided as to whether the idea of a meme is a useful concept or not, but anyone who has read Dawkins' works would know instantly that he was referring to the meme theory of idea dissemination, and could not possibly make the mistake of thinking that Dawkins was talking about religion being a disease. Only someone who was completely unfamiliar with Dawkins' work could make such an error, with its obvious scope for, albeit unknowingly, setting up a straw man to attack.

Having only got as far in this critique as the third paragraph, I would be disinclined to read more on the very reasonable grounds that Ms Bunting was caricaturing Dawkins' position in order to attack it.

Stressed benefits claimants must jump another hurdle

2007-09-02T15:43:00.000+01:00

An article in the Observer today reports that Harrow Council has piloted the use of Voice Risk Analysis software in its benefit offices and found that, after its introduction "126 benefit cheats [have been caught] in just three months, saving [the] local authority £110,000".

The VRA software "enables trained operators to identify suspect cases at the start of a claim, helping to keep fraud out of the benefit system". It apparently does this by means of "thousands of mathematical calculations, resulting in the identification of different categories of emotional content."

A device that makes so many mathematical calculations naturally arouses our respect, and you are probably now thinking "Wow, let's roll out this technology across the country." Before we do, it's worth asking the question "What evidence is there that this technology can detect people in the act of lying?"

The answer so far seems to be "Not a lot".

The use of electronic devices to analyse the human voice has a venerable history dating back at least thirty years. A range of industries, from insurance and banking to the legal profession claim to use some sort of voice analysis to carry out their work. There is an obvious law enforcement value in using such a device to detect when people are lying, and this is the reason so many police departments, particularly in the US have got in on the act. Despite this widespread adoption, a 2002 report "Voice Stress Devices and the Detection of Lies", published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) National Law Enforcement Policy Center concluded that the accuracy of devices then on the market was "modest to poor".

Another test of two devices: the Vericator and the Diogenes Lantern concluded that "After reviewing the three technical tests performed, it could be stated that these two VSA units do recognize stress. Although these systems state they detect deception, this was not proven."

To be fair to companies licensing voice analysis software, the IACP report rightly said that the dismal showing they'd seen so far did not preclude the invention of an effective "lie-detector" in the future. So, which system is Harrow Council using to catch its benefits fraudsters?

Well, the actual software Harrow uses has not been disclosed, but a little tracing reveals that Harrow Council uses Capita as its IT partner. A quick search of Capita's website reveals a press release from 2004 announcing the acquisition of Brownsword, a claims investigation service that came with a ten year license of "Advanced Validation Solutions".

This is a package that includes "Voice Risk Analysis" software developed by a firm called Digilog, who in turn license the core technology from Nemesysco: an Israeli company who claim that their algorithms underlay products like the Vericator and The Truster, the first of which fared so badly in the tests described above.

Interestingly, Nemesysco also market a "Love Detector" for both Pocket PC and a version that works with Skype.

I would therefore make an educated guess that Harrow is using software that comes originally from Nemesysco. Nemesysco say that its pre-2002 technology (discredited for the purposes of detecting falsehood in speech) is obsolete, and that its latest offerings are much more the ticket. The trouble is, I can find nothing in the scientific literature that attests to its fitness for purpose. This means that Harrow Council, and soon the Department of Work and Pensions, could well be detecting and prosecuting fraudsters using software whose only claim to be efficacious is that the company that makes it says it is.

Durham's explanation of its rising GCSE results eagerly awaited

2007-09-01T17:24:00.000+01:00

Durham county council, roundly criticised in the on-line community for conducting a trial on its year 11 students without a control group, has seen its percentage pass rate of 5 A* to C grades at GCSE rise for the fifth year running.

To put you in the picture, Durham CC's education people took advantage of a deal offered by Omega 3 fish oil supplier Equazen to supply its entire cohort of year 11 pupils with a year's supply of tablets to see whether GCSE exam performance would be improved. There was just one catch: they didn't bother to supply a similar number of pupils with dummy capsules, to make sure that any increase seen wasn't down to something else, like easier exams for instance.

This omission was quite serious because it meant that the results of the exercise could not possibly have any scientific value. A pity, since a properly conducted trial might have provided schools with a badly needed weapon in the fight against falling standards of learning; or if the outcome had been different, might have discouraged Equazen and other pill pushers from indulging in a profligate waste of sardines and pilchards.

Having launched this process in September 2006 with a slew of scientific claims made directly to the media, the Council came under fire for lack of said control group, and hurriedly rebranded the whole sham as an "initiative". Later on in the year, in an interview with the boss of Equazen, a reporter for Radio 4's "You and Yours" programme asked the question "If GCSE pass rates go up this year, what will your publicity department say?" Well, naturally he couldn't say that the publicity department would be proclaiming the efficacy of Omega 3 in boosting brain power, so he chose to answer somewhat evasively.

According to a press release from Durham CC on 23rd August 2007, the percentage of students obtaining at least five A* to C grades rose by more than 3% to over 59%. Missing from the press release, and also absent on the website of Equazen was any mention of the fish oil initiative. I wonder whether they've just decided to quietly drop the whole thing. I hope we'll find out soon, as, according to Equazen's own figures, they'll be ten million capsules lighter by now.

The Times says girls prefer pink because of their role as "gatherers"

2007-08-26T14:52:00.000+01:00

Most of the British media covered the study by Anya C. Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling in the journal Current Biology on "Biological components of sex differences in color preference". As its title suggests, the paper deals with differences between men and women in colour preference, and can be found here, but there are a couple of things that bother me about the reporting of this study.

The first is an ongoing problem: without an academic login, you can't read more than the paper's abstract. This means that a layperson wishing to keep abreast of current developments in science cannot look at the actual science, whilst journalists from the national media - like those at the Sun newspaper to pluck an example from thin air - can.

My more perceptive readers might sense the sort of issues that could arise in circumstances like these; where the nation is beholden for its view on scientific matters to a few writers whose primary purpose is not to disseminate hard won evidence and the theories that try to explain it, but to sell copy to a public largely ignorant of how science works: issues to do with arbitrary filtration of data, misrepresentation and so on.

The second issue has to do with the reporting of the study. It seems its authors are evolutionary psychologists, or are dabblers in the waters thereof. This is a marvellous field because you can say whatever seems plausible without being hindered by data that might contradict you. The sort of claims one sees are such as this: "Girls like texting because in the Pleistocene they were the ones who had to communicate efficiently to other females about the gathering, preparation and cooking of food as well as matters such as what the children were doing. Texting is simply the modern outlet for this built-in urge."

The flaws in this approach only become apparent when one can show that absurd claims can also be made to match the evidence. Ben Goldacre has something to say on the subject here. For my part, it suffices to say that unlike xenobiology, which is a science without a subject, evolutionary psychology is a subject without a science.

In addition to the dangers of evolutionary psychology we also find that the article covering the story in the Times confuses the evidence with the hypothesis. Certainly the title “At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink” leads you to suppose that the researchers have discovered the reason for colour preference. In fact, all they actually found was the existence of a colour preference in the subjects they tested. The researchers hypothesised that "the explanation might date back to humans’ hunter-gatherer days, when women were the primary gatherers and would have benefited from an ability to home in on ripe, red fruits,” but other explanations might also explain the known facts.

In the article itself, the journalist was a little more careful and hedged about his assertions with “may”, “might” or “could”. Nevertheless, the average member of the public is likely to come away from the article thinking the title sums it all up.

I'm all for trying to find out why psychological traits might have evolved in the way they have, but it does seem as though the field is very young, and could benefit from more responsible reporting.

The Memory of a Wishful Thinker

2007-08-22T16:22:00.000+01:00

Ben Goldacre’s website recently put up the contents of a special edition of the "Homeopathy" journal, devoted to the Memory of Water. For those of you who don't know, this is the homeopath's favoured mechanism for explaining why homeopathy works, even though the evidence says it doesn't. Ben's idea is to have all the evidence in the public domain - where it should be - for all the sceptics to pick over.

The sceptics flocked joyfully to the Bad Science website and launched straight into critiques that can be found here and here. For my part I chose "The Possible Role of Active Oxygen in the Memory of Water" , a theoretical paper.

The author is Vladimir L. Voeikov, from the biology faculty at Lomonosov Moscow State University. He says that the memory of water relies on the water being in a stable, but out-of-equilibrium state for a long period of time.

Casting about for a mechanism that could explain this anomalous behaviour Voeikov points to several experiments that appear to show such a “water memory”, though whether this is the same type of “memory” that homeopathic remedies elicit is another matter. One of the more recent claims of homeopaths (and a theme in this edition of the journal) is that bubbles on the sub-micrometre scale (nanobubbles) could possibly be this mechanism they're looking for. More on this later.

Not having the requisite background in chemistry and quantum physics to properly evaluate all the author’s claims, I was forced to take many of his statements, particularly about active oxygen itself, at face value. Nevertheless, the results of two experiments performed by Katsir, Miller & Aharonov et al. and Elia et al. caught my attention.

Katsir et al. were looking at patterns of zinc deposition formed by passing an electric current through a solution of zinc sulphate. This is the process known as electroplating, familiar to us from school chemistry. They discovered that blasting the solution with radio waves (in the megahertz range) dramatically changed the deposition patterns that were formed in the experiment, and that this effect persisted for several hours after the radio waves were switched off. The deposition patterns even changed from dense branching growth to dendritic (tree-like) growth. The group also discovered that adding small particles of barium titanate (between 10 and 100 nanometres in diameter) made the unusual deposition patterns persist for months.

Katsir’s group hypothesized that the blast of radio waves caused small nanometre scale bubbles to form in the solution, which have a “self-ordering” property. They proposed that this acts as a means to perturb the solution into producing the unusual deposition patterns.

Another group, Elia et al. measured the heat released from extremely dilute, succussed (shaken) solutions that were mixed with acid or alkali, and found it to be very high and persistent over time.

I am not competent to say whether or not these experiments are scientifically valid or can be reproduced. I am assuming that both have described some real phenomenon. Of more interest to me is what Voeikov does with the information.

Voeikov groups the work of Katsir et al. with the work of Elia et al. and other authors and attempts to draw a parallel between them. He states that basically the same procedure is used in all cases – “physical treatment of water causing cavitation in it” (cavitation is the production of bubbles in a fluid).

Now Elia’s group may well have induced cavitation in their solutions with all that vigorous shaking, but they do not suggest that this had something to do with their results. Indeed they state in their abstract that “The nature of the phenomena here described remains still unexplained”.

As for Katsir’s group, they hypothesized that the effects may be due to cavitation based on the evidence, but cavitation was not itself part of their findings. This confusion of evidence and hypothesis is more usually the province of unwary journalists.

I believe that the reason cavitation is brought up here has more to do with homeopaths’ insistence on the possibility that nanobubbles can cause water to become biologically active than with the evidence presented in these two papers. Indeed, Elia's and Katsir’s experiments were conducted on very different aqueous solutions being treated in very different ways. Without the spurious interjection of “cavitation” here, there need be no connection between the experiments at all.

One does not have to be a scientist to be able to see the wishful thinking behind this chicane. Voeikov knows nanobubble formation is the mechanism behind the memory of water, so he cobbles together the supposed results of incompatible experiments until he gets them where he wants them. In other words, he twists the facts to fit his views. Others better versed in the relevant fields will have to read and comment on the sections in his paper that deal with active oxygen. I wonder if they'll make any more sense?

Coriolis Effect sends Blue Peter into a spin

2007-08-21T15:31:00.000+01:00

Today's Blue Peter on CBBC managed to resuscitate a long-standing myth for a new generation of viewers.

A segment of the programme showed presenter Konnie Huq on a trip to the equator in Uganda where she was shown a purported demonstration that water in the northern hemisphere flows out of a basin with a clockwise rotation, in the southern hemisphere the rotation is anticlockwise, while on the equator itself, the water flows straight out of the basin with no rotation at all. In fact, this is a trick performed by mountebanks at tourist spots across the equator in order to drum up trade.

The supposed phenomenon is said to occur because of the superimposition of motion on the rotation of the Earth. It’s called the Coriolis effect. The effect itself is real and can be seen in storm formation in both northern and southern hemispheres, but the rotational force exerted is far too small to have an effect in a short timescale on a small basin of water anywhere on Earth, let alone one placed so close to the equator. The Coriolis force is easily swamped by the tiniest currents in the water, which accomplished fakers can induce in the basin by small movements of the apparatus on the pretext of giving the audience a better view.

Fuller explanations of this fake phenomenon can be found here and here. The second of these links shows a transcript of a conversation between Michael Palin and a Kenyan “demonstrator” on a programme in the “Pole to Pole with Michael Palin” series. So this is not the first time this has happened to a reputable broadcaster – though since in both cases the broadcaster was the BBC it may be the first time a reputable broadcaster has been fooled twice by the same well-known trick.

Edit

Having just checked my sources, I now find that the Coriolis effect causes anticlockwise motion in the northern hemisphere and clockwise motion in the southern. Looks like the charlatans can't even be bothered to get their facts straight!

Closet Atheists Unloosed?

2007-08-20T18:31:00.000+01:00

In the 2001 census 71.6% of respondents described themselves as white and Christian. That's just over 42 million people. By contrast, a mere 15.5% (around nine million people) described themselves as having no religion (this figure includes those who described themselves as "Jedi Knight" in the mischievous hope of forcing the government to legally recognise a religion that didn't exist). This group of non-believers nevertheless formed the second-largest grouping after Christians.

This means that around 80% of the population of the UK claims to have a religion. But how many of those who responded in this way actually believe in a supernatural deity and accept the important tenets of their particular religion? I suspect (though I cannot prove) that many of them have no particular belief in a god or gods, little interest in their religion's articles of faith, and have not attended a place of worship since the most recent wedding or funeral. How many of those who ticked the box marked "Christian" really did so because for them the label functions as a sort of statement of their cultural identity, rather than a statement of faith?

Witness the grimly jocular response to people in Northern Ireland who claimed to be atheist during the troubles: "Yes, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic one?" Here, there was no doubt that a religious label masked an important question of cultural identity.

The recent surprising popularity in the best-seller lists of a small number of books written with an explicitly atheistic and anti-religious agenda can perhaps be explained by the existence of a significant segment of the population who have long acted and thought in a manner that is implicitly atheist, but who have never troubled to say so because the UK is a society where religion is not overtly a part of everyday life, or perhaps through fear of giving offence and upset to those around them, or maybe because there was no vehicle for them to express their lack of belief coherently.

All this has changed with the publication of books such as Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". Suddenly, large numbers of those whose viewpoint is implicitly atheist are handed a text which not only affirms what they had always thought, but gives cogent reasons for believing religion to be harmful, as well as questioning the special privileges hitherto automatically accorded to religion in our schools, political institutions, and on Radio 4's Thought for the Day.

Seeing the staying power of these books on the best-seller lists, I am tempted to wonder just how many people there are in the UK who see religion as at best an unnecessary hypothesis. If it turns out to be more than half the population we could probably come to an arrangement where we all agree what an occasionally glorious, sometimes vicious and ultimately stultifying waste of time it's all been.

"Scientists break the speed of light" says Daily Mail

2007-08-20T12:20:00.000+01:00

An article in the online version of the Daily Mail reports that two German scientists have succeeded in forcing "light to overcome its own speed limit using the strange phenomenon of quantum tunnelling". Although the authors do indeed seem to have made this claim: their paper's title is "Macroscopic violation of special relativity" the Daily Mail fails to point out that an expert in quantum optics was quoted in the New Scientist as saying that in fact the photons did not violate special relativity: it's apparently a question of interpretation.

The expert, Aephraim Steinberg , gave an alternative explanation of the reported results by way of an analogy. The details aren't important here, the point is that the Mail article made no mention of it. This is strange because the Mail specifically draws on the New Scientist article as a source for a quote from one of the researchers, so the journalist who wrote it ought to have been aware that there was an opposing view. Perhaps his statement of the fact was removed by a sub-editor wanting to save space.

So where does this leave the woman in the street who's reading the Daily Mail? It seems she would think that one of the great theories of physics was well on the way to being overturned, bolstering the widely held view that scientific theories are more fluid and uncertain in their nature than they really are.