Slashdot Mirror

The Sunday Telegraph here in the UK ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6083234/Health-warning-exercise-makes-you-fat.html ) used pre-publication data from this study that Blundell has stated totally mis-represented its findings (that, amongst other things, only 15% of the study group gained weight, and that they were all ones who ate more than usual during the study period.)

That article also quoted the one of 43 trials reviewed by the Cochrane Library that did not show a significant weight-loss in the participants (it says "some surprising studies in America " when it means "one surprising and possibly unrepresentative study in America". The lead author of that study, Dr Timothy Church of Louisiana University, seems to undermine the validity of his own study, in which the participants were asked not to alter their diet by saying (according to the Telegraph article) "after spending time in the gym, they eat a chocolate muffin, which undoes all of the work they did.”

The Telegraph unaccountably ignored the 42 studies which did not conform to what appears to be their preconception.

For more information see ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/29/telegraph-exercise-fat-bad-science ), or go to Ben Goldacre's own site ( http://www.badscience.net/ ) for a fuller version.

The title is broken. Exercise actually does lead to weight loss, as the linked article explains. Ben Goldacre has looked at claims that exercise does not lead to weight loss and has found that they are mostly bogus, using selective data to make a point that probably isn't there. He writes:

"The Cochrane Library is a non-profit collaboration of academics who produce unbiased, systematic reviews of the medical literature, and they have a systematic review of all the 43 trials that have been done on exercise for weight loss. This produces clear evidence that exercise is beneficial, albeit more modestly than you’d hope."

"It's difficult to describe how frustrating it is in the field seeing this man being our spokesman," says Richard Reeve, of the AI department at Edinburgh.

Well, quite.

Srsly? They're usually either (1) blatant marketing exercises by PR companies (2) one line out of unpublished research, taken completely out of context by the newspaper and an embarrassment to the researcher. Occasionally they're (3) one line out of unpublished research, taken completely out of context by the University press office desperately trying to justify their existence, and an embarrassment to the researcher.

Ben Goldacre covers this stuff a lot in the UK.

How about you cram your rant-supporting rant up your own ass?

You've got someone going off on a rant about how evil "pirates" they are. But it could just be a baseless rant - how do we tell?

We use facts to tell us if some guy's rant is justified or not. So his rant has some unsubstantiated "facts":

• "according to a recent UK study, 60% feel they are entitled to steal anything IP related they want"
• "even the largest of Android developers are making, at most, 1/8th what they should be making"

So, whether this guy has a point or whether he's talking utter bullshit depends on these claims being correct.

It's not up to us to go verify some rant on Slashdot. It's up to the ranter to show he's right.

Let's examine a related "fact" from The Sun newspaper:

More than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.

Trace that "fact" back to its origins and you'll find little substance.

Another example: 136 actual people became 7 million illegal downloaders.

There are people on both sides of the "piracy" argument with specious reasoning, dubious statistics and unstated biases. Don't let them argue their pet positions. Challenge them each and every time. That's the only way to take the bluster out of their rants.

Whatever is actually happening, we can be sure that electrosensitivty is not actually caused by EM fields. There have been too many studies showing no link.

As I mentioned in my other reply, there are large industry forces which need to be considered when evaluating these studies. You'll also often find that the U.S. studies are all favorable to an industry, and only foreign studies disagree.

For another view, which clearly shows what a researcher is up against whose research results threatens an existing large industry, see this:
http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/wakeupcall01.html

Note that he is an expert in DNA and DNA damage was clearly shown from exposure to an actual cell phone.

The aura of science is often used to make people believe exactly what the PTB want them to believe. Remember doctors on cigarette commercials, telling how great they were, while the tobacco companies were very well aware of the dangers? Careful who you believe, and check if they would lose their funding or even their career if they dared report anything which might cost a large corporation money (and or course some politician their campaign funding).

Real life is much messier than we want to believe...

As was discussed recently here, some people do physically feel the effect of cell phones on their body. I'm one of those people, so I'm certain there is an effect. Exactly what that effect is, I don't know, other than it makes me nauseous if I hold it next to my head for more than a minute or so. I just use a Bluetooth headset and don't have any problems, as long as I don't put the cell phone itself next to my head.

I realize your pain is real. However, the human brain is very susceptible to the placebo effect, or there may be other effects. Whatever is actually happening, we can be sure that electrosensitivty is not actually caused by EM fields. There have been too many studies showing no link.

Frankly, whatever is causing this pain, it isn't EM. It may well be something else casually linked to cellphones (just to throw something out there, perhaps pinched nerves due to a complicated set of body mechanics caused by holding the cellphone a certain way), but the mystery isn't going to be solved by continuing to perpetuate the idea of it being radio transmissions.

The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers

I presume by "downsides" you mean "reduces"? Well the summary says "That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.'" So they actually UPPED the number of filesharers. This is objection #1 to "good research":
1. You do a survey to objectively measure the support of your hypothesis
2. The survey of a tiny sample indicates that filesharers are a pretty low percentage
3. You "adjust" this number -- otherwise known as "fudging the data" -- to better reflect your own hypothesis.

The same tactics in any scientific endeavor would get your papers retracted, your funding canceled, some sort of disciplinary action initiated, etc.

The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers? What if they only polled home internet users, but then used the "total number of internet users" -- which includes corporate subscribers -- to come up with their 11mil number? There are other possible, non-numerical issues too. What if the respondents confused downloading from bittorent with downloading from iTunes?

If you want many other examples of "bad science", read Ben Goldacre's blog

Maybe you're thinking of Kevin Warwick, cyborg from England. He gave a lot of interviews to the press about how cybernetic implants would give us telepathy and that cybernetically enhanced humans would eventually for a new and superior species, the threat or cyberdrugs and so on. Of course experimentally all he did was put an RFID in his arm.

http://www.badscience.net/2004/04/the-return-of-captain-cyborg/

Oh sorry, that was a different piece of trivial "research" hyped as the road to transhumanism.

Because there are no known mechanisms for non-ionizing radiation to cause harm (except thermal damage; cell phones aren't nearly powerful enough for that), the burden of proof is on those claiming that cell phones cause harm. These things have, in fact, been extensively studied, and the majority of studies backup what we expect from a general understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum: cell phone signals don't cause harm. The few studies showing problems can be simply dismissed as outliers.

The best way to move forward is to toss the issue.

Er, the Daily Mail is a bad choice of news outlet if you want accurate science reporting - it's well known for sensationalist stories of every kind, and has a bad track record in hyping medical research. Recently, they were uncritically quoting an 'expert' saying that autism is caused by (undefined) toxins, and they're a regular presence in Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, like in this article.

Calling Ben Goldacre a nutjob is ridiculous. He's a medical doctor. One that actually believes in science.

You believing in your friend is mostly harmless (except you post publicly about it). Other failures to be sufficiently skeptical and realize the benefit of the enlightenment (you are literally willing yourself to live part of your life in the dark ages) lead to fucking evil bullshit like this:

http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthias-rath-steal-this-chapter/

Pure fucking evil. All because people refuse to set aside mysticism.

Aside: when you turn off your router, how often does your friend also turn off his mobile phone?

For anyone feeling anecdotal, here is a healthy dose of BS calling:

http://www.badscience.net/category/electrosensitivity/

As ever, the media companies are deploying insupportable statistics. Most of the numbers for 'lost revenue' are coming form multiplying 'estimates' for the number of files shared by the recommended retail price of the shared item, which makes the huge leap of believing that every single download that the RIAA thinks happened represents a lost sale that otherwise would have taken place. This assumption is not only naive but studies have shown that people who download music for free also buy more music. In the UK the government is basing policies on similarly erroneous information bought and paid for by the media companies. In that particular case the 'academic study' got it's numbers for lost revenue from an industry press release...

The version of TFA on Goldacre's blog is slightly longer (the Guardian version must have been subedited for dead tree format), and contains links to the sources of the material he's talking about.

So I guess the JREF blog will be illegal, because it could cause "substantial emotional distress" to hard-working snake-oil salespeople like Matthias Rath?

- RG>

Ben Goldacre had it right.

That's a pretty good list, especially 1, 4, and 5.

It does seem to me that large newspapers are having trouble on the web because they don't seem to understand the differences of what the "new media" has to offer. I don't got to the NYT website to read my news, I come to Slashdot or Digg, who might possibly link to the NYT. Why is that?

Well, first because they're offering a broader selection of news. Second and more importantly, Slashdot provides a good discussion system for me to talk about the story. It gives a place where people, sometimes with equal or greater expertise than those writing the story, can comment, either supporting the conclusions of the article or picking them apart. There's added depth.

And this is where the biggest value of this "new media" comes in: there aren't real space limitations. You can put up all your content, as much as you have, in any number of combinations, permutations, and sorted in any number of ways, all at the same time. You can have a good discussion system, and people who aren't interested in it can choose not to visit it. If you have a scientific issue and you have two different experts with differing opinions, you can have the dumbed-down synopsis of the debate written by a journalist, but you can also allow each expert to write their own argument and publish them alongside the journalist's story.

The only real expense for these things is in editing or moderating, which I think probably can be done in a cost-effective way.

Ben Goldacre had it right.

The thing that bothers me with newspaper and TV news is that many stories need information from a specialist and they insist on putting a non-specialist, a journalist, between you and the person who knows what they're talking about.

In scientific stories, you always get a 3 minute story with an idiot dressed in a lab-coat dumbing down the message of a professor or medic, followed by a measly 10 second snippet with the actual expert. Of course experts won't always speak in the most media friendly way possible - so coach them! Edit the interview until it makes sense! But don't feed them through a non-comprehending cipher.

It really is reaching the stage where the best way to get the information is to find a decent blog from somebody who actually works in that field.

You can mod off topic. Look on badscience.net (Mathias Rath / South Africa state on AIDS)). It needs to be repeated that a real tragedy happenned in south Africa. Thankfully Mbeki' resigned and hopefully the new one will be a bit better. So when the ultra corrupt south African govt make up new biometric passport... I would say this is the smallest of the problem of south Africa.

How do you know it's one out of one?

I have quack earthquake scientists like him in my own country. Luckily nothing bad happened and the media quickly got bored of the subject, or else we would have had to listen their preachings about how they were right, and that nobody listened to them.

It saddens me when I see the reaction of some Slashdot users with an attitude like: "Science bitches! It works (TM)!"

Science can only be reliable if we tune out all the fame and fortune seekers that plague it. I recommend reading this blog for more insight on this topic.

Example of drug value inflation

I know many physicians who prescribe placebo treatments and tests. I have trouble doing this

Would you have trouble prescribing a placebo if you told the patient what it was? If I recall correctly, at least one study showed benefit from taking a placebo even when it was carefully explained that there were no active ingredients in the pills.

For more information, check out a pair of radio programmes called 'Placebo' by Dr Ben Goldacre. (They were on BBC Radio 4 last year.) In fact, I'm surprised no-one's mentioned him before; his blog (Bad Science), occasional radio programmes and other media appearances are an inspiration to anyone interested in evidence-based medicine or the media's blatant misrepresentation of science in general.

Ben Goldacre writes for the Guardian in the UK with his excellent Bad Science column. http://www.badscience.net/2009/02/bad-science-bingo/
He recently highlighted an ill informed rant by Jeni Barnett from LBC Radio on this issue of the MMR vaccine. They seem to be unaware of the Streisand effect in trying to shut him up and remove the clip from his website.

'm guessing, based on your name, but I suspect that you're rather "youngish", and are in the middle of your drinking/partying years

A false assumption on your part, then.

I'm right now trying to think of a single religion that considers booze to be related to medicine ... granted, my grandmother was a great believer in the occasional medicinal shot of brandy, but that was hardly a religious belief.

Heh, what was written by me, wasn't what I meant to say.

Having researched it a bit more, I realise that Jehova's Witnesses and Amish do occasionally have some alcohol-- JWs aren't normally fans of modern medicine.

Salt has the same affect - but it's not intuitive that we should stay away from salt, any more than it is with alcohol.

No. Nice try though.

In my biology class at school (and those nice human physiology courses all those years ago at University), I was taught of Anti-diuretic hormone; its effects on kidney function. Salt and alcohol have opposite effects. Salt increases levels of ADH makes your kidneys piss out less water, mitigating the problem. Alcohol rapidly stops ADH production, making you piss out more water. On top of that, it dehydrates tissue rather effectively too. Which is why in the histology lab, I don't use increasing levels of salt to dehydrate tissue samples; I use increasing concentrations of ethanol.

rst - I suspect that the misunderstanding of stats & demographics are more likely to be your problem this time, not the media.

You know what. I'm not going to present my CV here, but I do understand 'em. Journalists, with a BA in English, rather than a BS in anything, presented with stats, more often than not, misinterpret or overinterpret them.

Repeatedly data showing mild amounts of alcohol intake are benefical are reported as "Ah, a glass of wine a day must be good for you. It's the tannins/ oils/ whatever", when no consideration is given to the fact is that a portion of the non-alcohol imbibing people are more likely to be ill (for whatever reason that proscribes them from drinking it) than those allowed to drink alcohol. It isn't controlled for. It is bias. It isn't what people-- especially the media with their nice reader friendly stories for people that like alcohol-- want to hear. Which (if my assumption that TFM = the fucking media is correct) is why you're not going to read those stats in the TFM, are you? There are few newspapers with good science journalism left, and the internet seems to be awash with blogs and sites promoting agendas left right and centre.

In essence, "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" needs to be employed on these topline blithe statements that are reported everywhere. I mean, the 3 cups of coffee doubles your risk of hallucinations bollocks recently: -- total sh*te

Actually, the guy that runs the badscience.net site wrote a book. There's a chapter in there that deals with this debate. They guy explains it all (with... evidence) far more eloquently than I. I suggest you read it. http://www.badscience.net/buy-the-book/ I'd have quoted from it, but I've loaned it to my Dad. Who is very old, just to reassure you I'm not a youngster. I just coined my username many years ago.

'm guessing, based on your name, but I suspect that you're rather "youngish", and are in the middle of your drinking/partying years

A false assumption on your part, then.

I'm right now trying to think of a single religion that considers booze to be related to medicine ... granted, my grandmother was a great believer in the occasional medicinal shot of brandy, but that was hardly a religious belief.

Heh, what was written by me, wasn't what I meant to say.

Having researched it a bit more, I realise that Jehova's Witnesses and Amish do occasionally have some alcohol-- JWs aren't normally fans of modern medicine.

Salt has the same affect - but it's not intuitive that we should stay away from salt, any more than it is with alcohol.

No. Nice try though.

In my biology class at school (and those nice human physiology courses all those years ago at University), I was taught of Anti-diuretic hormone; its effects on kidney function. Salt and alcohol have opposite effects. Salt increases levels of ADH makes your kidneys piss out less water, mitigating the problem. Alcohol rapidly stops ADH production, making you piss out more water. On top of that, it dehydrates tissue rather effectively too. Which is why in the histology lab, I don't use increasing levels of salt to dehydrate tissue samples; I use increasing concentrations of ethanol.

rst - I suspect that the misunderstanding of stats & demographics are more likely to be your problem this time, not the media.

You know what. I'm not going to present my CV here, but I do understand 'em. Journalists, with a BA in English, rather than a BS in anything, presented with stats, more often than not, misinterpret or overinterpret them.

Repeatedly data showing mild amounts of alcohol intake are benefical are reported as "Ah, a glass of wine a day must be good for you. It's the tannins/ oils/ whatever", when no consideration is given to the fact is that a portion of the non-alcohol imbibing people are more likely to be ill (for whatever reason that proscribes them from drinking it) than those allowed to drink alcohol. It isn't controlled for. It is bias. It isn't what people-- especially the media with their nice reader friendly stories for people that like alcohol-- want to hear. Which (if my assumption that TFM = the fucking media is correct) is why you're not going to read those stats in the TFM, are you? There are few newspapers with good science journalism left, and the internet seems to be awash with blogs and sites promoting agendas left right and centre.

In essence, "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" needs to be employed on these topline blithe statements that are reported everywhere. I mean, the 3 cups of coffee doubles your risk of hallucinations bollocks recently: -- total sh*te

Actually, the guy that runs the badscience.net site wrote a book. There's a chapter in there that deals with this debate. They guy explains it all (with... evidence) far more eloquently than I. I suggest you read it. http://www.badscience.net/buy-the-book/ I'd have quoted from it, but I've loaned it to my Dad. Who is very old, just to reassure you I'm not a youngster. I just coined my username many years ago.

Shouldn't all science fiction writers have some firsthand experience with science, ideally from an actual involvement with science? Well, maybe or maybe not. But more disturbing is the prevalence of people with no knowledge of science in the business of so-called science journalism. Of course, a few months in a science lab won't cure what ails most science writers. But it would be better than nothing, which is apparently the status quo.

Nah, people that claim to be sensitive to microwave/ mobile phone/ WiFi/ whatever radiation somehow mysteriously lose that sensitivity when subjected to double-blinded trials of their ailment/skill. BBC's Panorama made a huge fuck-up by broadcasting similar proaganda in Dec '07: http://www.badscience.net/2007/11/bbc-editorial-complaints-unit-debags-the-panorama-wifi-scare/ Turns out there was an agenda-- the proponent in the show was selling protective devices. Alas, they weren't Faraday cages, they were useless trinkets. Even people that pretend to be hippies are slaves to the cash.

http://www.badscience.net/ Ben Goldacre's website and his recent book "Bad Science". Covers similar topics but adds in wider issues such as nutrition showing how thses quack remedies are hyped and maintained by an ignorant/anything-for-a-headline media community.

Try this link: http://www.badscience.net/?p=540

Well you wouldn't want a Hardon in your Tract, would you?:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/72656781214715n4/

('Preview (Small, Large, Larger, Largest)').

For more of the same ('This may strike you as the geek equivalent of looking up "arse" in the dictionary'), see:

http://www.badscience.net/?p=238

Just in case you are talking about the author of the Guardian article -

see Ben's homepage. I think the bare minimum of research regarding his past and the articles he writes will encourage you to think that he does in fact delve deeply into the issues he presents.

OK, that's actually the best explanation I've seen for that distinction and I appreciate it.

However, the serotonin model of depression is flaky at best and most probably flat out wrong. Drug companies like to push it but there's very little data to back it up. SSRIs are really only more effective than placebo for serious chronic depression and even then only marginally so. Although as you mentioned cocaine I think you might have been talking about dopamine (definitely involved in rewarding behaviour).

Ben Goldacre raps on this (and other topics /. should love, funny I've never see links to him from here) on Bad Science, his one man crusade against bad statistics and science in mainstream journalism.

The Grauniad should know better since Ben Goldacre is one of their columnists and constantly berating the press for swallowing some bullshit PR without the slightest background research or consideration of its points.

What is wrong with the free market? When has it ever failed us?

A softball question. One simple example of the failure of the market is the apparent inability of science publishers, particularly in the pharma area, to publish so-called negative results or to spin negative results as if they are postive. In epidemiology and in pharmacology, negative results are at least as important as postive ones ("first, do no harm"). Yet, the greater economic forces of pharmaceutical sales (and nutricutical sales, and outright woo sales) incent the supression, or simple failure to publish, of such findings in pernicious ways. Check out Ben Goldacre's site (and buy his book while you are there). Tucked away among various rants against, among other things, media coverage of medicine, you will find several discussions about this very phenomonon, and why it is so incredibly bad.

Everything causes cancer, and cures it.

A lot of this "new study" stuff is horrendously lazy journalism caused by having too much space to fill.

Everything causes cancer, and cures it.

A lot of this "new study" stuff is horrendously lazy journalism caused by having too much space to fill.

Everything causes cancer, and cures it.

A lot of this "new study" stuff is horrendously lazy journalism caused by having too much space to fill.

By which I particularly mean, the bloody awful media coverage of science.

And did you see that list? Nitrous oxide is on there. WTF? Whipped cream causes cancer, then?

True, but since when has rational debate held sway in the realm of reporting science stories?

I'm allergic to stupidity. Can we ban these people?

Are they allergic? Let's not let data get in the way of a good argument: No they're not.

Wow, even Wikipedia agrees.

I think this might be Bad Science, personally, and that perhaps worthy of more study on your part.

The thing is, there are people that make a living out of propagating this nonsense, and these people are better at getting their message of mistruth than the sci/tech community. Even the good old BBC's (usually respected) Horizon programme was duped. http://www.badscience.net/?p=418 We -you, me, everybody!- need to [somehow] get the message across to people that didn't pay attention in high school physics, but are impressed at mangled scientific theories when given by slick snake oil salesmen. Otherwise we'll be getting more and more of this (agenda-driven) stupidness in the future.

Ben Goldacre, who writes a regular column on bad science for the Guardian on bad science wrote a great column about this once, in which he pointed out the obvious-in-retrospect: science journalists don't have science backgrounds. He regularly takes on both bad science and bad science reporting, and his blog/column is a lot of fun to read. Fun in a deeply disturbing way.

The one startling regularity I have noticed across all science reporting is that the more I know about the subject area, the more misleading the article seems. It seems clear this pattern can't be completely limited to science reporting. I cut popular media a lot of slack in terms of glossing over details and simplifying for a popular audience. But the distortions I see are more often fundamentally misleading about the nature of the work and the details that are relevant to the story. Disturbingly, I'm still tempted to believe some of what I read in areas about which I know little. Even more disturbing, I find this mode of reporting seeping into the scientific articles I read and review. I guess this saves the reporters the trouble, but points out one of the many problems with science reporting done by people who have no ability to read science critically.

The one time I was interviewed about my work, I had the sense the reporter already had a story outlined, based on a science-fiction-y reading of the press release, and was basically fishing for quotes to add meat to the story.

Ben Goldacre once gave a nice example of what such concentrations actually mean: in a sphere of water with the same radius as the distance from the Earth to the Sun, there's a molecule.

I'm not American, so I'll ask that you forgive my ignorance of this chicken pox vaccine story. However, it sounds interesting. Could I ask two questions:
1) is there now a known lifetime vaccine for chicken pox?
2) do you happen to have a good reference on this story to hand?

It's not that I don't believe you, but it's difficult to sort through the vaccine scares to find true examples of bad vaccines. For instance, there's been what Ben Goldacre calls "the MMR vaccine hoax" in the UK. As an aside, if you're not familiar with him, I recommend you try Goldacre's Bad Science blog. It's fascinating reading. He's a practising medical doctor who writes a weekly column for a UK newspaper about misleading and incorrect media coverage of science, and false claims made by practitioners of alternative medicine and nutritionists.

But for examples of what not to do, http://www.badscience.net/

It most certainly can. http://www.badscience.net/?p=540

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), measles is a leading cause of vaccine preventable childhood mortality. Worldwide, the fatality rate has been significantly reduced by partners in the Measles Initiative: the American Red Cross, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO). Globally, measles deaths are down 60 percent, from an estimated 873,000 deaths in 1999 to 345,000 in 2005. Africa has seen the most success, with annual measles deaths falling by 75 percent in just 5 years, from an estimated 506,000 to 126,000.