Artist of the Week!

Wow, this is cool. My brother-in-law Jez is the artist of the week in the Guardian! Check out the story - and there's more on his own website if you're interested. I'm ashamed to say that modern art makes very little sense to me (it's like an in-joke I'm not in on) so I find a lot of what he writes incomprehensible, but he certainly makes some beautiful images and objects.

My favourite Jez story is about the Ballard interview mentioned briefly in the Grauniad piece. JG Ballard is famously reclusive so for Jez to get a long interview with him was quite a feat, and apparently it went incredibly well. Ballard talked at length about his life and work. It was solid gold! To safeguard this precious treasure he made a copy of the tape before sending it to be transcribed. But horrors, the transcriber told him the tape was blank! His copy turned out to be blank too. He had accidentally copied the blank one over the the interview rather than the other way around, wiping the interview forever. The two blanks eventually became an artwork themselves, his Erased Ballard Interview. Neat.

It's Cold!

Oh dear, no posts for six weeks? I really am not much of a blogger! I had planned a few updates over Xmas but ended up with no internet for more than a fortnight as a result of the big freeze. We were in Northern Ireland, in the glens of Antrim, which was stunning in the snow that fell on our first night and didn't go for the whole fortnight. I tried to get the car out after a couple of days, but ended up stuck and had to be pulled out of a snowdrift by a tractor. We were staying up a steep lane in Glenshesk that remained impassable (for our car at least) for more than a week. Made it to Cushendall on Xmas eve to collect a goose, but had to leave the car at the bottom of the hill and carry all the shopping home by hand. It was all quite an adventure.

We did manage to see a few sights in the second week - the giant's causeway, Dunluce Castle, a sheep with a pink mohawk. The usual tourist stuff! The causeway was ace. The road down to it was polished ice. We climbed down the grassy bank instead, watching people on the road sliding down on their arses. One woman slid for at least 50 yards on her back, spinning around and laughing hysterically. It was worth the effort though - a truly amazing spectacle. What a place! The sky was so clear you could see the paps of Jura.

Now we're back in Preston, and it's even colder. Preston rarely gets snow - it's too near the sea - but there's plenty out there today. So now I have to walk into work...

Facilitated Communication for 23-Year Coma Man?

In the newspaper yesterday, it was a heart-rending story. A man lies in a coma for 23 years, until a brain scan reveals he is actually conscious after all, and has been all that time. He is given a keyboard, and wow! He can tell us all about his thoughts and feelings, and how he coped throughout his long imprisonment, trapped inside his own body.

On TV last night, it looked like something else. Rom Houben was not exactly typing out his own messages. They were being typed by a "helper" who was holding his hand and carefully aiming his index finger at a flat touchscreen. He did not appear to be even looking at the screen (as you can clearly see in these pictures from the BBC & Guardian), yet he typed with amazing speed and accuracy. Now read this extract from the Facilitated Communication (FC) page at the Skeptic's Dictionary:

FC clients routinely use a flat board or keyboard, over which the facilitator holds their pointing finger. Even the most expert typist could not routinely hit correct letters without some reference as a starting point. (Try looking away from your keyboard and typing a sentence using just one finger held in the air above the keyboard.) Facilitators routinely look at the keyboard; clients do not. The messages' basic coherence indicates that they most probably are produced by someone who is looking at the keyboard.

The resemblance is uncanny, is it not? Needless to say, FC is complete bollocks. It is easy to test: show the patient some stimulus or other with the facilitator absent, then bring them back in and ask what it was. If they can only "see" what the facilitator has seen, it is not communication. Has this been done for Coma Man? None of the stories I have read seem to have mentioned this possibility. Are we being taken for a ride?

I will expand this post later if I have time to find the full article...

UPDATE: I have found the journal article mentioned in the news stories above. It's open access and can be read here. It's an interesting study of 103 patients, comparing different diagnosis methods. It doesn't include any details of individual cases but it does say that the main indicator of consciousness was "purposeful eye movements" rather than the foot tapping mentioned in the Grauniad article. This paper clearly isn't the source of the story. More digging needed...

UPDATE 2: Now the mighty Randi is on the case. He seems pretty sure it's a cruel farce. PZ Myers is sceptical too, but it also looks like the story is proving popular with right-wing yanks keen to restart the Terri Schiavo debate. I smell a rat. I smell a giant rat...

UPDATE 3 (Wednesday): Now it's getting ridiculous. The Grauniad today has a full page on the case, again without a single sceptical word. There is more detail of the foot movements mentioned in the earlier article, but it stinks!

Nicolaes (Rom's mother) recalled: "We needed to make him press the mouse. But how? He was lying down. He's very spastic. He can't control his movements. The doctor saw that he was moving his right foot. We put the mouse under the foot and were shouting, 'Push, Rom, push, Rom, push.' And he pushed. The computer said 'I am Rom'."

This is just plain daft. He goes in one second from barely being able to move, to being able to type a coherent sentence with one "spastic" foot? Clearly the computer must have been pre-programmed to say "I am Rom" on a single click. I could shove a mouse under my dog's paw and get the same effect!

The Science of Homeopathy

"I'm going to explain to you exactly actually how it works..."

You may have already seen this video when it first did the rounds a few months ago, giving everyone a good laugh. Now it seems that someone is trying to get it taken off the internet, with the entirely predictable result that hundreds of bloggers are now posting it all over again. Poor Dr Charlene Werner is rather embarrassed by all this attention. Good! This is as dense a pile of teh stoopid as you are ever likely to encounter! Enjoy...

Racism, Celebrities and the Poo Bin Mystery

I have been a dog owner for a few years now, and like all good owners I always pick up my mutt's crap and bin it. At first, this usually meant just lifting the lid of the poo bin and dropping the bag inside, but soon I began to notice that the bins round my way were gradually being replaced by bigger, chunkier receptacles with a lock on the front and a big metal flap on the lid. You lift the lid and place the bag on the flap, then when you close the lid the poo drops inside. To retrieve it, should you be minded to do such a thing, you would need the key to unlock the front. Why? What is the point of that? I began to wonder, is dog poo valuable? Is there a thriving market in dogshit derivatives? Is the borough council trying to corner the market in a precious commodity here? What are my hound's mounds worth?

I have been thinking about racism a lot this week. I went to Bolton v Tottenham last Saturday, with some old mates from London who follow the Spurs all over the country. They told me about their Sol Campbell song: a ditty so vile and so offensive that it has finally been officially outlawed by the club after years of complaints and hypocritical tabloid outrage. Anyone caught singing it nowadays is immediately ejected from the ground and may be banned for life. Undaunted, the crowds now simply hum the tune instead. "Dum dum dum-de dum-de dum..." they go, and everyone knows exactly what it means: "Sol, Sol, wherever you may be, you're on the verge of lunacy, and we won't give a fuck when you're hanging from a tree, Judas cunt with HIV". Nice. My view is that this is an incontrovertibly racist song. That may not be the intent (my friends were quick to deny it and you don't have to look far on the net to find convoluted self-justifications) but you simply cannot sing "hanging from a tree" to a black man without evoking the spectre of lynching. To argue otherwise takes a special kind of stubborn stupidity, a wilful refusal to step outside your own narrow worldview, and I expect better from Spurs fans who endure hissing and similarly obnoxious songs about "gassing the Jews".

Then Bruce Forsyth did something similar, defending dimwit nonebrity Anton du Beke for his you-look-like-a-Paki "joke". Can Brucie really be so dim or so divorced from reality that he really thinks "Paki" is no worse than "Limey" as an insult? Maybe in Brucieworld it isn't, but has he ever tried to imagine what it feels like to suffer that kind of abuse? Was he ever spat at or insulted in the street, or his kids beaten up for being "Limeys"? I don't think so. And if that scandal wasn't bad enough for the BBC, it then turned out that they featured the BNP on Radio 1's Newsbeat show last week, giving a platform for two racist morons (introduced as simply "young guys who are BNP members.. ..Joey and Mark", but who were actually Joey Smith, managing director of the BNP's record label, and Mark Collett, BNP Director of Publicity) to tell millions of listeners that London-born footballer Ashley Cole "came to this country" and will never be "ethnically British". And all this is in advance of Question Time next week, at which head nazi Nick Griffin will be presented as a democratic party leader. I have no doubt that Griffin will keep his nastier racist thoughts well-hidden on this show, and that the BNP will gain enormously from the coverage, however well his opponents perform.

The BBC used to make far better programmes about the BNP. In 2003 they gave a camera to Andy Sykes, a former BNP member in Bradford who had seen the light and decided to expose the truth about his erstwhile colleagues. Was it true, as Griffin claimed, that the BNP had modernised, become more professional, moved away from its racist past? No. Sykes's undercover filming for Panorama revealed them (surprise surprise) to be knuckledragging thugs just like their NF skinhead predecessors of the 70s (sadly, the film has disappeared from Google video, although there is more Panorama material about the BNP here). At one point in the film, a group are meeting in somebody's house when they are joined by a late arrival, who boasts proudly that on the way to the meeting he has emptied the dog poo bin at the top of the road and posted the bags through the letterboxes of Asian families along the street. What larks! And what a eureka moment for me! Could this be the answer to my poo bin mystery? Is this why the boxes now have to be locked up as tightly as the night safe at the bank, to stop racist scumbags using the contents to terrorise their neighbours? I don't know for sure, but to this day I have never again picked up a dogturd without thinking of the BNP. This, Brucie and Anton and Spurs fans, is why you should never joke about "Pakis" or black men "hanging from trees". Whatever your intentions, it makes you part of a culture of racist violence and oppression.

Who knows, maybe there is another explanation for the Fort Knox poo bins, but it is something to think about if you watch Griffin on the box next week. Every time you see his smug, pudgy, lopsided face, imagine a hand inside a pale brown plastic bag coming down on a huge pile of steaming, squidgy, stinking shite.

A Very Hard Easy Probability Question

Here is a question I set my students today. It is, mathematically speaking, very easy. It can be solved using mental arithmetic, and requires no complicated formulae or advanced concepts at all. It is not a trick question. However, people always find it incredibly difficult to get right, and many people fail to understand the solution once it has been explained to them. I have had vitriolic arguments with distinguished colleagues who refuse to accept my reasoning. What do you think? I will post my answer in a day or two, but in the meantime let's hear some suggestions...

The question is this. Imagine you have been tested in a large-scale screening programme for a disease known to affect one person in a hundred. The test is 90% accurate, and you test positive. What is the probability that you have the disease?

Understanding this kind of question is very important, because it leads to exactly the dilemma you might face if you were screened for a major killer like breast cancer or testicular cancer, and tested positive. Should you immediately opt for a risky procedure to investigate further, or would that be to submit yourself to unnecessary surgery? Gerd Gigerenzer wrote the book Reckoning With Risk about this kind of problem (it's a brilliant book too, so read it if you can), concluding that thousands of people are facing unnecessary dangers because of poor understanding of probability. Over to you...

Happy New Year!

New academic year, that is. By 'eck, it's been a busy, wet summer. I really feel like I need a holiday, but instead here come hundreds of new students. Welcome to Preston, guys! Here's a few bits and pieces to start with...

I'm doing 10:10. Are you? Follow the link, and pledge to reduce your carbon footprint by 10% in 2010. Also, while I am in campaigning mode, watch THIS FILM too. Good, isn't it?

Now, if that was a bit serious for you, check out this beautiful model pig. I love the customer reviews underneath! If it was just a bit cheaper I would definitely buy one.

What else is new in the world of quack (or should that be "oink") medicine? Following a campaign by Sense About Science, the WHO declared that homeopathy should NOT be used to treat HIV, TB, malaria, influenza or infant diarrhoea. Wahey! This is perfectly sensible advice, of course, since homeopathy is completely useless for all these conditions (as it is for all conditions, in fact), but it is still nice to see the WHO taking a stand. The reaction of the homeopaths has been predictable: the usual bluster, whining and cherry-picking of evidence. When will we be rid of these murderous imbeciles? Homeopathy is dead, dead, dead, but the corpse just keeps on twitching.

Meanwhile, Simon Singh's libel case against the back-crack quacks rumbles on, but legal blogger Jack of Kent has decided to take a sabbatical from blogging! How will I keep up now? I hope this does not mean I have to swallow my pride and join the infernal tweety thing.

I have been ill myself for the past couple of weeks, but there is one complementary medicine I do approve of and sure enough, a few doses of uisge beatha have made me feel a lot better (I like to use it in conjunction with a few crystals of dihydrogen monoxide, to enhance the effect). My trip to the Rebellion festival was probably the cause of my malady: I am really too old now for a four-day bender of alcohol, junk food, late nights and serious mayhem. Not that it will stop me going again next year! Here are a couple of highlights - the Exploited and the UK Subs. See what you missed?