Auntie Em is a Pushy Middle-Class Constituent

My local MP, Mr Simon Hughes, will be recieving the following from me (thanks to the awesome Write To Them site.) Because this is going to lead to stupidity like this. (EDIT: I want to make it clear that Simon Hughes is not part of the problem! I'm writing because I'm hoping he will be part of the solution.)

I know I should have rung too. Blame my computer-scientist/academic introversion...

FOR THE ATTENTION OF:

Simon Hughes MP
North Southwark and Bermondsey

Friday 20 November 2009
Emma Byrne
XX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
London
SE1 XXX

Dear Simon Hughes,

I am writing to express my concern about several measures proposed in the Digital Economy Bill, particularly those that allow for secondary legislation to change the Copyright, Designs and Patents act.

These amendments would allow the secretary of state wide ranging powers to define new penalties without parliamentary scrutiny. They would also allow the secretary of state to hand over investigative powers to bodies such as record companies and film distributors, again with no parliamentary oversight. Such powers are exceedingly troubling, as parliamentary scrutiny is essential if legislation is to have any chance of being effective and proportionate.

I have no confidence in the business secretary's understanding of the domain he is seeking to legislate. This proposal comes hard on the heels of the unworkable "Three Strikes" proposal, that would compel ISPs to suspend accounts suspected of file-sharing. This proposal is unworkable on three counts:

It is unjust: the proposal assumes a one-to-one relationship between users and computers whereas in reality most internet connections are shared. This would lead to collective punishment, where a household, business or even a whole town[1] is disconnected from the internet.

It is unworkable: many wireless internet access points are only weakly secured. Illegal downloads may be carried out without the knowledge of the bill payer [2].

It is unenforceable: again, the relationship between users and computers is not one-to-one. A user whose internet access is suspended by one ISP is still free to access the internet via public hotspots, connections in their place of work or education, or pay-as-you-go mobile "dongles."

As an academic computer scientist I consider these proposals to be breathtakingly technologically naive. I hope I can count on you to subject these proposals to the scrutiny they so desperately require.

Yours sincerely,

Emma Byrne


[1] http://www.coshoctontribune.com/article/20091109/UPDATES01/91109015
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8305379.stm

"Welcome to Southwark. Fuck you."

We just bought an ex local authority flat in the London borough of Southwark. This means that the local council are the freeholders and we are the leaseholders.

I know that dealing with councils can be a world of hurt, and that Southwark has a pretty awful reputation in this area, but I never expected the hell our first two weeks is turning into.

Things began well enough. A form from the council tax department on our first day addressed to the new owners. "Good," we thougt, "that saves a phonecall, even if there is a BOLD, CAPITALISED threat of legal action if tge form isn't returned in 21 days. A little heavy handed but heigh ho."

I've also spent the last few weeks chasing the repairs team to sort out the communal lighting, which needs a bulb changing. I finally got an answer today. It was about a completely different flat with a completely different problem, but hey, 10/10 for being able to send an email (eventually.)

what I didn't realise is how much *better* they are at sending lettters. Second class. In a postal strike. We arrived home tonight to find this cheery missive:

9th October 2009

Service Charges

I refer to the above matter and advise that there are substantial service charge arrears on the above-mentioned property.

Should we fail to hear from [you] within 7 days of the date of this letter [tomorrow. No, today now, fuck] the Council will commence forfeiture proceedings without further notice to you.

Yours faithfully

[peon]

Home Ownership Unit

Which is why I'm awake at 4am, trying to put visions of bailiffs and barristers and locksmiths (oh my) out of my head.

"PS Welcome to Southwark. Fuck you."


[UPDATE] David has been to the council offices this morning to deal with this in his extremely reasonable middle-class way*.

The ex-owner has now cleared his arrears. However, because Southwark Home Ownership Department haven't received information from another department (the department of pointlessly holding shit up?), we don't officially live there yet as far as they are concerned. So they can't write to tell us that the account is clear, or tell us what our service charges will be.

*headdesk*


* "I am trying to solve this with you on a person-to-person basis in an entirely reasonable way. If that fails I will, entirely reasonably, consult your management. If that fails, I will, still in an entirely reasonable manner , consult whatever ombudsmans** are relevant to the matter in hand. After that option is exhausted, I will then, in an entirely reasonable and fair way, put the matter in the hands of my lawyers."

**Ombudsmen? Only the truly middle class know - upstarts like me give ourselves away by mispronouncing these shibboleths.

Time to get me another doctorate:

From the Southern Evangelical Seminary this time!

This is the D.Min. course. You have four things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 30% of your grade); (2) write a 1,500- to 2,000-word critical review of Francis Collins’s The Language of God -- for instructions, see below (20% of your grade); (3) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 30% of your grade); (4) develop a Sunday-school lesson plan based on the book Understanding Intelligent Design (worth 20% of your grade)

.

Wow - no research, no critical thinking and no pesky originality needed. With a coursework submission date of August 14th I could be a double doctor by September I'm sure. If I could just fight down my gag reflex long enough!

UPDATE: tee hee - it gets better. From the takehome exam:

This exam is open-book, but you must limit yourself to the six books read in class.

Excuse me - I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

*facepalm*

Or "light up the Doctorow-signal"



So the great firewall of Australia was an epic fail. Now the Oz government wants to go after the links instead.

Yup - Aussies linking to "banned" sites are being threatened with massive fines ($11,000 AUS per day).

Now I'm as rabid as the next reader of the British tabloid press when it comes to wanting to flay the people making and hosting images of child abuse. Slowly. From the feet up. But this isn't what the watch list is about. Or at least, that's never what it stays about for long:

"[Wikileaks] has also published Thailand's Internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions."

Asher Moses, Sydney Morning Herald, March 17th 2009.

The first Aussie site to be threatened with a fine was a discussion board. Why? Because one of the posts had a link to an anti-abortion website. The next big target was Wikileaks - added to the "do not link" list because it hosts "a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites."

Does the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) have no idea how the Internet works? I bet that within six clicks from your favourite auntie's blog you could be at most of the sites on the Internet that would make you wish you could claw your own eyeballs out (including, but not limited to, Conservapedia.) Whether I want to be or not, I'm part of the big network of pointers that makes the web work.

If ACMA doesn't realise that this plan is unworkable then that's some breathtaking incompetence on the part of a body whose whole reason for being is to understand communications networks. If the ACMA dosn't care that the plan is unworkable then they are using bullying tactics to achieve something that they know could never be achieved through legislation and the courts.

M=F in (high school) maths.

At secondary school I had a maths teacher confidently (and regularly) claimed that no girls should be in his (the top) set. The fact that I and a handful of other girls were in his set was an anomaly that he couldn't explain. He *could* explain the other, larger handful of girls that asked to be moved down a set - they were no good at maths, of course. It couldn't bet that they were fed up of being singled out as freaks and failures by this abrasive character.

At the end of my second year of GCSEs, in a class of over 30, only five girls remained. I'm sure the other teachers were good, but dropping a set in maths was a disaster. You see at that time (possibly still?) there were two papers for maths: a lower and a higher. The higher paper could lead to any mark from A-C or fail (iirc) whilst the 'lower' exam capped your possible mark at a C. I think this was a hangover from the old 'O'-Level/CSE divide, which had only been abolished a year or two ago. [Edit: I've just found out that this ridiculous system still exists so there are essentially 3 maths exams with a narrow band between cap and ceiling - how discouraging, knowing the school has put you in for an exam you can get a maximum of an E-Grade in (that's got to help with revision). And how terrifying (I remember this feeling) that if you don't get an A*, A or B (A,B, or C in my day) then you fail outright. Is this peculiar to the Maths GCSE? What is the rationale?]

At my school, only those in this top set were entred for the paper that allowed you to get a grade above C. No matter what your potential, if you were in any other set you were only entred for the 'lower' exam, which capped your possible mark at a C. So of my year, there were only five girls (of a cohort of about 100) that could possibly get a grade greater than a C.

I'd like to think that this is good news. That sexist bastard maths teachers will have to bow to the evidence and treat all their pupils according to their skills, not their sex. Sadly, the same results were shown in a study 20 years ago - and whilst I'm old, I'm still young enough that my maths teacher should have been aware of them if he's been a half way committed professional.

As it was I got an A grade (A* hadn't been invented back then). Not only that, I won an honourable mention from the exam board. I shared the school maths prize with my friend James. My maths teacher took me to one side and told me that he'd vehemently opposed 'his' maths prize being given to a girl, hence the share. He also told James, one of my best friends, that I'd only been given the prize as a token gesture - despite my commendation from the exam board.

At that point my heart was broken. I always liked maths because you're on the safe ground of being able to unambiguously prove something. You know when you're right. However it seemed that my results should have unambiguously proved that I was enough of a freak to be a girl who could do maths (oh yes, I bought the girls can't do maths stereotype too - I just longed to be an exception). At that point I gave up on maths - I couldn't bear the humiliation and the though of two more years fighting my way upstream was more than I felt capable of.

Despite excellent maths and science grades I took French and German (two very honourable and serous subjects) and Business and General Studies (what was I thinking). It wasn't only my maths teacher - old fashioned views about "girls subjects" (easy) and "girls jobs" (few) put me off too. To this day I regret, no I'm *ashamed*, I don't (officially) have A-level maths. And that I still think I caouldn't do it, because I'm a girl.

The real torchwood:

Fearlessly investigating extraterrestrial influences in Wales.

The Gramineae is not necessarily more verdant over there...

My entire professional life, and all of my postgraduate scholarship has been in a male dominated field (MDF). It's not without its perils - the possibly older, definitely wiser Female Science Professor has a depressing litany of the kind of bigoted fuckwittery that goes on above my paygrade in her particular MDF. In the main though, I've had to deal with far less overt sexism in the academic version of this MDF than I ever did in industry. Sure, there's still wayyyyyyy too much of this, and the odd well meaning suggestion that this constitutes a viable alternative to childcare. But in the main the sexist ass-hattage seems to be limited to those with an evolutionary psychology bent.

Now over to my friend P, in a particular Female Dominated Field (FDF). The friend, the field and even the institution will have to remain unnamed for now, as legalities may be about to ensue. I was in P's office the other day, in the FDF department of Nameless Big University (NBU). P's colleague popped her head 'round the door, visibly choked with emotion. P disappeared for 30 minutes or so and came back far from gruntled.

Turns out that P's colleague has just come back from maternity leave, and has asked to discharge her role part time. It's a research role so some mix of part time and home working is usually possible. Not only has the (female) head of the FDF rejected her application for flexible working, she's actually increased the number of hours that she wants P's colleague to be in the office. She has to be visibly at her desk from 10-6 every day.

To put in context - academics are not in front of their desks 9-5. I for example am writing this from the members' bar in the Southbank Centre with a nice cup of Earl Grey and my Macbook Air - ain't life grand? No other academic in the department has set hours of presence, as far as P knows.

Now the refusal to consider flexible working/a job share/part time hours is bizarre enough. Yes, everyone wants papers and grants written yesterday, but an experienced head of group should understand that the best insights aren't written between 9 and 5, aren't written at your desk and certainly aren't written when you hate your job. Keeping good researchers productive is 90% of this person's job description, and it appears that she's failing dismally at it.

Making a new parent's terms and conditions more restrictive beggars belief. It seems like P's colleague's is being pushed into quitting. But there's a name for that: constructive dismissal.

So MDF may not be perfect - but FDF is not without it's problems. The sisterhood is a myth.

Fun with fruit gums

Ben Goldacre does a good post on the heinous waste of money that is the ID card project. Of course the Mythbusters have already shown that it is possible to bust the fingerprint biometric with nothing more than a photocopy of a fingerprint.

So if you think a couple of CDs with names, addresses and bank details going missing is bad, just wait until your fingerprints (which you leave behind you everywhere) are the key to all your data. Time to start wearing gloves.

What a Crockus

Dan Hodgins coordinates the the child development program at Mott Community College. He seems to have some sound advice to parents about developmental stages of children. What he doesn't seem to do so well is neurophysiology. Which is a worry - as he's using it to prescribe educational interventions based on differences between the brains of the sexes that are, for the most part, of dubious significance, some of which are of dubious reality and in once case, are totally made up.

Dan Hodgins has a theory about the "Crockus" which, Hodgins claims, is four times larger in girls than in boys. Apparently, among other ramifications of the difference in size is that "Girls see the details of experiences" whereas boys see the broad picture. He even provides an unlabeled slide showing the size of the Crockus in girls and the size of the Crockus in boys. Strangely however, his slides don't actually show the Crockus - instead using the pars opercularis and the motor cortex as examples of the scale of this structure.

So where is the Crockus? Apparently - nowhere. No literature search/Google search/"shout out" to the neuroanatomy community has managed to find it. Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Lab had a theory. Maybe Hodgins misheard/misremembered "Broca's" or even "Pars Opercularis" as Crockus? Not wishing to just, y'know, hypothesise baselessly, Liberman emailed Hodgins, who replied:

Thanks for asking....The Crockus was actually just recently named by Dr. Alfred Crockus. It is the detailed section of the brain, a part of the frontal lope. It is the detailed section of the brain. You are right, it is four times larger in females then males from birth. This part of the brain supports the Corpus Callosum (the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemisphere. The larger the crockus the more details are percieved by the two sides of the brain.

For boys, usually they only view and analyze the whole picture, not the sum of its details. Girls brains are wired to look at the details first, which then leads them to the whole picture.

Look at the work by Moir.

You think that Liberman would be happy with that explanation, no? It's in the "frontal lope" [sic] - case closed. Over to persnickity Professor Libermann:

This deepens the mystery, I think, because I can't find any likely-looking Alfred Crockus via Google Scholar or Wikipedia or even general web search. I think that the "Moir" he's referring to is the co-author of Anne Moir and David Jessel, Brainsex, 1992. But Amazon offers its "Search Inside" feature for that work, and a search for "Crockus" in it comes up empty.

I have to say - I did find one kind of Crockus - and I would be quite happy if mine was four times bigger than yours! [SFW]

She's rational/he's a flake...

There seems to be a common point of view that women are more susceptible than men when it comes to new age woo-woo (and indeed old age woo-woo: horoscopes, homeopathy and the like). Men are the rational ones, we're more... "intuitive" (read: flakey, gullible, and prone to uncritically accept answers that "just feel right").

I've often wondered if this has any basis in fact. After all - for every Randi there's a Uri, and 66% of the very rich UK fortune tellers I can name, are men: Jonathan Cainer and Russel Grant for the guys, Mystic Meg for the gals. Maybe the "XY = rational, XX = addlebrained" divide is just the way the media plays it. Are all the loopy guys, and rational women, hiding?

Well, my suspicions were further piqued on receiving this email:

I am contacting you from [TV Channel]. We are producing a new programme called [Hopelessly Derivative Programme Name] and I was wondering if you might know someone who would like to take part. The premise of the show is opposites attract. We are looking to match people together who have different viewpoints so there will be interesting discussion and have them spend a long weekend together to see if romance [1] can take place over opposing views.

We are looking for a sceptic man in his 30’s and 40’s to be on the show.

Do you know any sceptical single men who might be interested? ...

Let me know if you need any more information

I look forward to hearing from you

Best wishes

[Researcher doomed to work for terminally unimaginative program execs][2]

Now I may be wrong - they may also be matching a new-agey man with a rational-chick (I'd volunteer but I'm off the market). Maybe they tried it the other way round, but smart women are much prized by smart partners, and we're all off the market by now. Perhaps the dumb bunnies are all that's left. But I have a sneaky feeling that they believe idea of matching, say, one of the Skepchicks with this guy[3] would be too much of a stretch for their viewers.


[1]For some reason I hear "romance" in scare quotes...
[2]My words, not the researchers - though I wonder if in her heart of hearts she wonders if this is what the masters in Elizabethan literature was for...
[3]Or heck, Randi and Uri - I'd Tivo that!

"The name of the page has been changed"

Or why the word "quack" seems to have been adjudged to be inflammatory.

The ever bombastic pharmacology Professor David Colquhoun has been running a "quackery" blog for some time. In it he takes on the purveyors of such woo-woo as "blood cleansers" and "magic water". His posts are less readable than the taut prose of Ben Goldacre, and he can get even more frothing than James Randi. What he says about pseudoscientific quackery, a multi-billion pound industry which preys on ignorance and fear, is ill-tempered but well founded.

Recently, the husband of one of these placebo-mongers launched a "kitchen sink" legal action which, according to Colquhoun and UCL provost Malcolm Grant, included: allegations of defamation, malicious falsehood and breach of copyright; enquiries under the FOI and a demand that "a paper [be] circulated to all UCL Council members concerning an alleged misuse of IT resources and possibly office space and secretarial facilities by Professor Colquhoun". UCL, in what must be conceded was a responsible, if ass-covering, move requested Colquhoun's blog be shelved whilst a QC was summoned to give advice.

Long story short - the blog is back. Ben Goldacre covers the public statement released after the advice was given. The joint statement by Colquhoun and Grant concludes:

"UCL... continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies"

The victory was not complete however. In thesis speak, some minor emendations were required. Colquhoun writes:

"The name of the page has been changed from quack.html to improbable.html on [the] advice of lawyers"

Who says lawyers don't have a sense of humour.

Is this what a lead baloon looks like?

So the London 2012 Olympics logo has garnered more brickbats than bouquets since its unveiling, with the petition against it standing at 43,442 signatures as at 16.35. And now it emerges that the video to launch the logo is in breach of Ofcom guidelines on the use of flashing images and that the version on the website has been pulled after causing seizures in viewers with photosensitive epilepsy. Is this the logo of doom? Or is this an attempt to preempt all the Olympic 'bad karma' that seems to affect host cities?

The BBC website is carrying a poll where readers' designs are pitted against the logo of doom. So far the favourite logo, a neat mash up of the figure 2012 and the word London is 10 times more popular than the official logo. Heigh ho - this could be a long five years.

"And all I got was a giant piano player..."

...or the perils of trusting an incompetent genie.

A few weeks ago my attention was brought to the Gender Genie: an online tool for determining whether a text of 500 or more words was written by a man or a woman. Plausible, I thought, if there really is some significant difference in the Zipf distributions of the words that men and women use, or in the order of parts of speech that they prefer. Then I read that the authors claimed 80% accuracy and that has been touted as a serious tool rather than a parlour trick. Hmm - I thought - are they claiming to be able to check whether I get David to write my journal articles?

The authors of the Gender Genie (Koppel and Argamon) used texts from the British National Corpus (listed here). From the [PDF] paper it seems like this is an honest attempt to determine what the differences between male and female writing might be.

However, it's certainly not working for me. When the Gender Genie first came to my attention I was in the middle of writing a conference paper, so I tried it on that. Bad news - on a randomly selected few paragraphs the results were as follows:

Words: 671
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 368
Male Score: 1058

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Ok, fair enough, perhaps a scientific article will throw the Genie off (though the makers don't suggest any such caveat - it is supposed to be a generally applicable tool). Here's what it thinks about my blog post on Jackie Cochrane. It couldn't be more "womany":

Words: 326
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 80
Male Score: 544

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Hmmm. Not according to the Gender Genie then.

What about that über-male, St Paul, and his letter to the Colossians? [1]

Words: 277
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 732
Male Score: 401

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Really? Wow. That's going to require a serious dose of hermeneutics.

I should be clear: I'm not being methodical here, and I'm not attempting a genuine critique of the Gender Genie. I could look more deeply into the methods and work out why both I and St Paul are apparently so hard to place. But just as it takes only one red fleem to disprove the axiom "all fleems are green", my experience calls into question the general applicability of the Gender Genie algorithm.


UPDATE: apparently I (and St Paul) are not the only ones finding that the Gender Genie performs poorly:
Alexander Chancellor in the Guardian reports that all but one of the Guardian's female writers were classified as male. Of 9 journalists, 8 were classified incorrectly. Now if Gender Genie was guessing randomly you'd expect a better hit rate than that.

UPDATE++: The Gender Genie site gives the stats since 2003. It's not impressive, and certainly not up around the 80% mark that the authors claimed in their article.


------------Notes-------------
[1]Colossians 3.12-3.25, NIV. The verses include "Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord".

B'bye Jerry

Jerry Falwell, the chap who claimed that 9/11 was the fault of:

" the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America,"

Is dead aged 73.

This is the same Jerry who gave us:

"Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men - that's their problem."

I don't hate men, Jerry. You personally turn my stomach, but I'm not ill disposed towards real men[1]. Away from your shrill, playground accusations, I find my attitude towards men (and one man in particular) is this:

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

Anaïs Nin

---

[1]Men who are so free from cowering xenophobia that any difference: sex, sexuality, race, elicits neither a howl of revulsion or tyrannous cant disguised as concern.

Eppur si muove...[1]

Whaaaa?

[1] "Nevertheless, it moves..." statement ascribed to Galileo (by legend) after his forced retraction of heliocentrism.

The "great global warming swindle" swindle

The brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant Ben Goldacre reports on a fantastic article from the Indie on the (increasingly laughable) Channel 4 doc "the Great Global Warming Swindle" (GGWS).

To whet your appetite, here are Connor's graphs:



Martin Durkin, the writer and director of the GGWS, has form in this area. The ITC ruled that his 1997 documentary "Against Nature" (also for Channel 4)

"The programmes breached the Programme Code in respect of the failure to make the four interviewees adequately aware of the nature of the programmes, and the way their contributions were edited. The Commission directed Channel 4 to issue an on-screen apology to the individuals concerned."

Durkin's editorial fastidiousness is apparent for all to see in the Connor article:

[C]rucially, the axis along the bottom of the [Global Temperature] graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the Nasa website he could have got the most up-to-date data. This would have demonstrated that the amount of global warming since 1975, as monitored by terrestrial weather stations around the world, has been greater than that between 1900 and 1940 - although that would have undermined his argument.

"The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.

Very "wiggly-lined"? And Channel 4 pay this man to make science documentaries? They'll be paying Jade Goody to make documentaries on race relations next.