In April 2009, shortly after reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, I complained about this page. I no longer have the complaint – this was typed into a complaint form on the BBC webpage – but I pointed to inefficacy, and above all, the dangerous nature of a product which has in a few cases resulted in hot wax dripping into the ear canal. This was the response I got.

From: BBC Information Wales
Re: Hopi Ear Candling (ref. 16457386)

Dear Mr Pope,

Thank you for contacting us via the BBC Complaints website about the page relating to Hopi Ear Candling on the BBC South East Wales site. Your concerns have been discussed with the editorial team responsible for our online service.

As part of the ‘Mind, Body & Spirit’ section, all content is provided for general information only and each page carries a statement making this clear.

The section is not a health site but reflects a range of ’spiritual’ activities and approaches undertaken by our audience. The effectiveness of the complementary therapies included is a contentious topic but one which is clearly of interest to users of our website and worthy of discussion.

Views similar to those you expressed are included within the discussion at the bottom of the page in question, and you can of course add to the debate.

We’re grateful to you for writing to us with your concerns. I would like to assure you that I have registered your complaint on our internal report of audience feedback which we compile for BBC editorial staff and commissioning executives and their senior management. It ensures that your complaint has been logged along with all others we receive and considered across the BBC.

Regards,

Melfyn Clwyd Roberts
BBC Information Wales
03703 500 700
mailto:feedback.wales@bbc.co.uk

No tags Hide

There is one program on which the whole edifice of software has been built. Of course there are lots of great programs, but diff hold a special place in software engineering because it is the starting point for tools that support software projects to grow vastly more complex than they realistically could without it.

diff does one thing – it tells you the lines which differ between two text files. This sounds like an easy task, because it’s easy to see which lines are in one file and not in another. But it’s quite a bit harder to find the minimal set of edits that you need to make to one file to get another. This is done by determining which bits haven’t changed, which of course then makes it obvious which have changed.

So diff is a brilliantly useful tool for telling you what you’ve done to a file. I save version A, which solves some problem. Then I make some changes, and save an improved version B. B now represents my best understanding of the problem, but it is not all I want to record – how I got to version B is also important in my understanding of the code I have written. I need B, of course, and I want A to refer to, for all kinds of reasons, for example, because A worked, and I want to check how it worked in case I break B. But I also want to be able to rediscover my intent when I improved A into B. This is easier to spot from a small list of the changes I made than from comparing two large source files. This is all vastly more important when exchanging code with other developers.

But diff is even more useful than that. Because it contains the changes between A and B, with it I can derive A from B, or B from A! This utility is called patch, and it makes the change described by a diff, either forwards or backwards depending on which you start with. So the output of diff is saved to a file, called a diff or alternatively a patch. By chaining this process, storing diffs rather than whole versions, it is still possible to access a file at any version, while keeping storage requirements very low.

From this we can construct version control systems, where it is possible to jump to any version of a project very rapidly, to work out who wrote what (aptly titled `blame`), and browse the `diffs` between every version of every file. Patches can be exchanged and assessed as self-contained increments. Changes that were once made need never be lost, the intentions of the original programmers is recorded.

These are tools software engineers rely on to manage the complexity of large teams and large projects, and nearly every program we use, and even the designs for the chips we run them on, is developed with the help of these simple but brilliant tools.

No tags Hide

The Skeptical Voter wiki page for David Tredinnick deserves more link juice.

Here is a man promoting quackery and antiscience to government, in the form of several slanted Early Day Motions that attempt to make scientific discourse (in the loosest sense of the word) part of the role of parliament.

Julian Huppert deserves similar link juice for tabling amendments to entirely reverse the sentiment of each of these motions.

No tags Hide

Over the past couple of week the superb legal blogger Jack of Kent has been taking apart the evidential history of the Gary McKinnon case.

Of Kent toyed with the idea of being merciful to McKinnon on the basis of a long, drawn out extradition process and poor legal representation, but in the end agrees that such mercy should be applied when sentencing.

It has always appeared to me that the case against McKinnon exists and should be heard before a court of law. Jurisdiction is of little importance.

The only issue that gives me pause is the extent to which the US should be willing to accept some responsibility for the damage McKinnon caused. Quoting JoK’s blogpost, some of the allegations include

that Mr McKinnon deleted critical operating system files from nine computers and this led to a 24 hour shutdown of 2000 computers in the Washington network of the US Military

that Mr McKinnon deleted system files and logs from computers at the US Naval Weapons Station responsible for the identity, location, physical condition, staffing and battle readiness of US Navy ships, rendering the station’s entire network of over 300 computers inoperable at a critical time immediately following 11 September 2001

And from some of the legal proceedings:

Through the internet, he identified US Government network computers with an open Microsoft Windows connection. [...] [From these] he was able to scan over 73,000 US Government computers for other computers and networks susceptible to compromise [...]

… including critical army and navy computers.

There is at least some independence between the damage McKinnon directly caused and the knock-on consequences such as the consequential failure of whole networks that proper network architecture should have been in place to mitigate. There are several places McKinnon’s impact could have been mitigated:

• By securing the machines McKinnon was able to expoit.
• By isolating and firewalling networks to make it impossible to compromise more critical networks from less critical ones.
• By using Network Intrusion Detection Systems or honeypots to ensure an attack could be detected well before 13 months.
• By providing redundancy such that compromised machines could be immediately disconnected without impact.
• By providing disaster recovery to ensure that even if a whole station is forced to shut down, military operations are not interrupted. The phrase “inoperable at a critical time immediately following 11 September 2001″ implies they they were.

It becomes harder to hold a criminal responsible for consequences that flow from a criminal act the further removed you are and how many other parties had responsibility for ensuring that such consequences should not occur.

There is some parallel in the ongoing fallout from the Deepwater Horizon spill. At present BP is being pressured to pay damages to businesses across the Gulf of Mexico, but there some distance in the chain of consequences between what BP are responsible for (the existence and magnitude of the slick) and damages so sustained. Should the US government not have some responsibility, as they authorised the placement of the rigs, and failed to ensure safety requirements were being adhered to? It is they and not BP who have a direct responsibility to ensure the state of the coastlines even though it is BP’s fault they have failed. Should they not have been better able to mitigate the impact either physically, fiscally or legislatively – even a little bit?

In both cases it seems that the US would blithely declare itself free of responsibility. Parties who are prepared to admit some responsibility may be faced with an uphill struggle to have the courts recognise where the balance of responsibility justly lies.

No tags Hide

I will be watching the next three weeks of election season with interest.

One of the things that I dislike about the election is that I hear ad hominem attacks levelled at politicians, especially the Conservative party. This is annoying me more and more – not because I will vote Tory, but because it is uncritical, irrational thinking. I don’t want to hear screeching rhetoric. Please put what you are saying in the form of facts.

You’ve already lost me by the time you’ve mentioned Cameron’s Eton education, let alone begun you hilarious caricature of how Mr. Cameron would literally have anal sex with entire demographic groups. That’s an ad-hominem attack, and a pretty bloody poor one at that. Surely our leaders should be well-educated? But I don’t want to hear about Nick Clegg’s or Gordon Brown’s backgrounds or sexual proclivities either. I want to hear what these parties have to say.

The Conservatives, for example, recently tweeted:

Labour have failed to stop children starting a life of crime. Most of those released from custody reoffend within a year: http://j.mp/aWiGSB

This rang alarm bells. It sounds too absolute – black and white – to be true. And it isn’t. Needless to say the Tories have some statistics somewhere to back it up (though the link doesn’t include a reference), but looking up the relevant official numbers on the ONS website, the 2008 report (the latest available) says that 37% of juveniles re-offend within a year, and a 7.3% reduction since 2000. That’s not most, and while it’s strictly true that Labour haven’t “stopped” it, a decrease is certainly a positive step.

This is one element of the kind of debate I would like us to have – on what basis are the candidates making their claims?

The other aspect is how much candidates can be trusted to think critically and rationally, basing decisions on facts rather than media hype. The latter aspect is something that Skeptical Voter is making great strides towards. Volunteers are asking their candidates questions about religion, quackery, and evidence-based policymaking, and recording their responses. I urge you to read them, and if possible, to contribute.

No tags Hide

Last weekend I overheard a bullshit conspiracy theory claim that made me crack up. According to my source, the NSA have a database of large primes which they can use to brute-force public key cryptography. This is hilarious to any computer scientist. Here’s why.

A typical key length used in public key encryption today is 1024 bits. That number – key length – actually refers to the modulus, which is the product of two prime numbers each around 512 bits. 10 bits is approximately 3 decimal digits – this is easy to remember, because computer people conflate kilo meaning 1024 (= 2¹⁰) with kilo meaning 1000 (= 10³). So a 512-bit prime is a little over 153 decimal digits¹ – actually 154².

An approximation to the number of primes less than n is the logarithmic integral function, li(n). We can use, say, Wolfram Alpha to work out approximately how many 154-digit primes there are. That number, approximately the number of candidate primes for a 1024-bit RSA key, is a 152 decimal digit number.

I suspect you’re not whistling through your teeth, and saying “Wow, 152 decimal digits? Blimey.” This is a completely abstract concept to people. Go write out 152 decimal digits and you can do it a couple of minutes. But that’s the secret of cryptography. It’s easy to talk about 152-digit numbers, to write them down, multiply them together. But when we talk about the number of things this represents, this is a phenomenally big number. You thought a googol was big, but that’s just peanuts to this.

There’s not enough of anything in the entire universe to even begin to make a metaphor to describe how large a number we’re talking about. For example, the volume of the universe in cubic femtometers is about a trillion trillion times smaller than 10¹⁵². To even get on the same sort of scale you have to start multiplying up. For example: 10¹⁵² is about the number of atoms there would be if every atom in the universe was itself a universe as large as ours.

The NSA is going to need a bigger hard drive.

¹ based on a reckoning (512 ÷ 10) × 3 = 51.2 × 3 = 153.6
² 512 × log(2) / log(10) = 154.13

No tags Hide

I’ve had a response to my letter to the BBC regarding the titling of their Nerdstock: 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People broadcast.

Dear Mr Pope

Thanks for your e-mail regarding ‘Nerdstock: 9 Lessons and Carols for
Godless People’ as broadcast on 23 January.

I understand that you attended the live event during its run and you’ve
been disappointed by the name given to it for our broadcast. I note you
feel the term nerd is offensive.

We passed your comments on for the interest of the programmes Executive Producer.

We’re sorry that you found the title offensive. However, it was suggested by one of the performers in the show, and was put forward by the independent production company, and was agreed by the BBC with the organisers of the event.

‘Nerdstock’ is actually a take on ‘Woodstock’ – the music and art fair and so this was meant as a light humorous reflection on an entertaining mix of science and comedy. There was absolutely no intention to offend anybody.

I acknowledge you may continue to have concerns with the name given to the broadcast. Therefore, let me assure you I’ve registered your comments on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

All feedback we receive, whether positive or negative, is always appreciated.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us with your concerns.

Regards

Stefan Curran
BBC Complaints

I think it’s quite a reasonable response, but the defence they give – that Dara Ó Briain himself called it Nerdstock – doesn’t really carry weight. Dara can carry off that kind of comment because of his cheeky, warm disposition and the fact that he has a degree in maths and theoretical physics. The BBC has neither an Irish accent nor a science degree.

No tags Hide

This has been going around the tubes for ages, but worth reposting for the benefit of those introduced to homeopathy by the 1023 event this weekend.

Mmm… smells like sciencey word soup. Yum!

No tags Hide

Yesterday’s 10:23 event in Southampton was a great success. After meeting in Starbucks for a briefing and to discuss the claimed benefits of the active ingredients not actually present in the pills, we donned event T-shirts, paraded into the street and started clicking out our magical nutrasweet. About 24 skeptics lined up to swallow.

Crispian has photos and the video:

With a mouthful of pillules, they taste exactly like small sugary sweets – almost exactly the same as dragées, the hard sugar baubles used to decorate cakes. But at £5.00 for a tube of 84, they are vastly more expensive (using the aforementioned cake decorating site, you would pay 35p for 84 dragées). The price is part of the mystery that Boots seeks to encourage. Jack of Kent today discusses how the labelling of Boots’ homeopathy seeks to confirm any presupposition that this might be medicine. A pack of 36 Strepsils (which I don’t have more than anecdotal evidence in support of, but each contains 1.8mg of medicine) would set you back £4.00, and yet at that price, and with their fruity flavours, they seem altogether less medical.

I personally swallowed what were nominally a tube of Poison Ivy and a tube of Arsenic. Neither tube has ever come into contact with either of those ingredients, except perhaps through contaminants in the tap water used to prepare them.

I have experienced no effects whatsoever other than a strange reinforcement of my skepticism about homeopathy.

No tags Hide

Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Hampshire Skeptics Society. To launch Hampshire Skeptics and Winchester Skeptics in the Pub the guest speaker was Simon Singh, a man revered in skeptical circles for his spirited defence of truth in the face of the large pockets of spine wizards the British Chiropractic Association. Simon repeated the talk I heard him give at TAM, speaking candidly about his ongoing libel case and, more importantly in his view, the libel reform campaign. Simon selflessly points out that while his own case is hugely expensive and affecting to him personally, the state of libel law could affect hundreds of journalists, scientists and doctors if left untackled, as well as discouraging valid and important articles and research from ever being published.

The libel reform campaign has scored more than one minor victory already. As well as slashing “uplift” (effectively half of legal costs payable in the case of a legal victory) Jack Straw has set up a working group to examine the state of existing libel law. Simon urged people both to sign the petition, write to your MP, and continue to encourage others to sign too.

The night was very well attended. Perhaps 50 people Nearly 100 people crammed themselves into the conservatory bar of the Roebuck Inn, and in the all-too-few beer breaks it was great to chat to well-known skeptics including SitP frontman Sid Rodrigues and non-slimy lawyer Jack of Kent. There were also fresh faces just taking their first steps into the skeptical community who were warmly welcomed. A few of us – including the night’s organisers Crispian Jago and Dave the Drummer – headed out to a curry house afterwards to continue our deliberations. Thanks very much to Dave, Crispian, Rebecca, Sid, Simon and in fact everyone who turned out to make it such a good evening.

Introducing Simon was the inestimable Rebecca Watson of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. It’s always a pleasure to hear Rebecca speak, as she does so not from a position of scientific or legal authority, but from a position of warm humour, genuine curiosity and what I imagine yanks would describe as skeptical sass. By chance, Rebecca features on Robert Llewellyn’s Carpool this week, so I encourage you to see for yourself:

Update: Crispian Jago has posted some photographs from the night.

No tags Hide