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There is new legislation in the offing regarding the regulation of complementary medicine. This is a bit like having legislation regarding the practice of sorcery: it just doesn't make any sense, and tends to encourage the view that 'alternative' medicine has some legitimacy.
Professor Ernst (whose book I still haven't gotten round to reading) is quoted in the Sun as saying:
If you regulate nonsense, it is still nonsense.
When even the Sun's columnists can make more sense on a topic than the government ministers in charge of it, I think it's time to be worried.
I'm slightly worried that anyone who reads this blog is going to start to think I get all my news from the Sun: actually I was pointed to this story by Ben Goldacre, but since he was just commenting on an article that appeared in the Sun, I think I'll quote it stight from the horse's as... mouth.
MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today.
Now, I am not an economist, but there is one very simple principle that I have managed to gather from reading only the very basic popular economics literature: a transfer of wealth is not an economic cost.
If I steal £100 from you, I have not cost the economy £100 - you have £100 less, but I have £100 more, so the economy as a whole is just as rich: all it has lost is the opportunity cost of the time I spent stealing the money instead of doing something more productive (and of the time that you spend trying to prevent me from stealing money, etc.). I would have thought this was even more obvious in the case of downloading music: when a track is downloaded one person gets richer (they own a track they didn't own before) and no-one gets poorer; some people who might deserve to get richer don't, but this is not an immediate cost to the economy.
People downloading music without paying the artists might cost the artists the net retail value of the music (although this is debatable): it certainly doesn't cost the economy that much. Goldacre's article points out that the numbers involved are utterly implausible, and that in fact they have been misreported by a factor of 10, but that's not the point: the numbers are not just implausible they are irrelevant.
A proper cost-benefit analysis of internet piracy would take into account the pleasure that people get from listening to downloaded music as well as the cost of failing to incentivise musicians to make more: people who download music are people, and their economic gains are just as real as those of record companies.
Sat in the café just up the road from our university having lunch today, I mentioned my quest for completely inane newspaper stories, which started at the end of last week with the classic story from the Sun (and the Metro) 'Dog Eat Dog', in which a dog swallowed a plastic toy. We came across a couple of contenders for the title of todays most pointless story, including 'some ducks went into a paddling pool' (that's pretty much all that story says). But there was a clear winner, especially given the context: Locker Spaniel A NURSE was left stranded after her cocker spaniel ATE her car key.
Yes, the Sun had once again decided that the nation needed to know that.. erm... dogs sometimes swallow stuff they're not supposed to. If you read the article, you'll notice that in actual fact, the nurse wasn't even left stranded - she was in the house when the incident happened, and took the dog to the vet a few days later.. presumably she had a spare key. And this week's headline is way less snappy than last week's too.
What really amazes me about this story is that last week's gem was from Chesire, and this one is set in Leeds - so it isn't just some maverick vet who's sent himself up sending in mildly amusing xrays to the Sun: there are two separate incidents of someone thinking that their dog swallowing something they weren't supposed to is interesting enough to make national news!
Anyway - hopefully the next instalment will be non-dog related, but if these xrays keep on coming, who knows?
When I came home after our university's Postgraduate Research Day (and the subsequent inevitable trip to the Senior Common Room Bar...) on Thursday night, I saw The Sun on the couch, open at the astounding headine: Dog Eats Dog.
What, you might ask, could the story be? Some new species of cannibal dog just been discovered in the Amazon? Maybe one of the 'dogs' is just a metaphor? Maybe both are? Maybe it's commentary on ruthlessness in the corporate world? No... to put it in the Sun's own words:
ALFIE the spaniel was sick as a dog after swallowing a toy pup.
Yes, that's right. Almost a full page in a national "newspaper" was devoted to the fact that a dog had swallowed a plastic toy. Now, I know that the Sun is not renowned for its in-depth coverage of topical issues, I know that it only requires a reading age of 3.5 weeks, or whatever it is, but seriously, how slow does a news day does it have to be for a dog's not-particularly-unusual eating habits to make the headlines? Yes, I know it makes for a nice headline, but so what? If they had a photograph of it, would they actually lead with 'Bear Shits in the Woods'? If I send them a video of myself pressing a shirt next week, will they run it with the caption 'Iron Man'?
I'm starting a new quest to find the most inane story I can in a national newspaper (I'm not yet sure whether to count The Metro, which, incidentally, also reported on Alfie's tragic mishap)
No, seriously... According to this article, Portugal decriminalised all drugs about 8 years ago (how I didn't know this, I have no idea) and the results have been exactly what you would expect... less drug-related crime, fewer drug related deaths, more drug addicts seeking treatment and even reduced HIV infection rates:
"Judging by every meric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
Ok, so the Cato Institute might not exactly be the most unbiased source in the world on this topic, but the fact is that this is exactly what you would expect. Most of the problems related to illegal drugs can be traced back to the fact that they are illegal. I mean, if Ben Elton can figure it out, how difficult can it be?
Unfortunately, I can't see the Tory government that we're pretty much destined to have in the next couple of years following in the Portugese footsteps.
This should probably be my facebook status or something, rather than an entire blog post, but I was astounded to discover this week that it is possible to get a discount on (at least.. I haven't bothered to look up the details) off-peak day travelcards on Oyster with a young person's railcard. I have so far saved about £3 since I found this out less than three days ago. Ok, so it's not a massive amount of money, but it's certainly non-trivial. In order to get this discount, all you do is go into the ticket office of any Tube station with both cards, and they'll do it for you (the Oyster card has to be registered, but that's probably a good thing to do anyway).
Anyway, the reason I'm writing this as a blog post is because it made me think: what the Hell is the student union doing? Does everyone else in the world already know this, in which case how come I'm the last to find out? If not, why on Earth is QMSU (and the NUS, for that matter) not shouting it from the rooftops? This could be saving a lot of students fairly significant sums of money, and most of them (ok... some unacceptably high percentage of them) have no idea about it. Seriously, this is probably the one useful thing the student union could have done for me in my time at QMUL (apart from my Topshop discount...), and they haven't. What are these people there for?
Apparently some pupils at a school in North Tyneside recently took part in an experiment. They crammed for a GCSE for a few hours, while taking exercise breaks in between, and then they took a multiple choice paper on the material. A year later, after four months of traditional teaching, they took a similar paper on different material. The results were... well, I don't know what the results were. The Times article had this to say:Their average scores were higher for the second paper than for the first one (68 vs 58 per cent). But more than a quarter of students did worse in the second paper, despite the months of preparation.
Yep, that's right. That says absolutely nothing. Who's to say that 1 quarter of students wouldn't have done worse if they'd taken exactly the same paper the very next day? 75% of the students had better grades after traditional teaching than after the new method - whose to say the rest wasn't noise? They don't seem to have a control group cramming in a different manner. According to the article "the repetition is key", but there's exactly nothing in the results that indicates this is the case - they didn't have some other group trying to cram the material in 1h 30 minutes without repeating it.
This might well be a preliminary study, and the techniques it suggests might well prove to be useful in a broader context, but at the moment what they have proven is that trying to cram lots of material in 1 and a half hours is less effective than teaching it over the course of 4 months. Amazing!!
