With two weeks to go before the NFL Super Bowl I have to decide who to support. My teams didn’t get there, New Orleans Saints and the Miami Dolphins. I cheered on the 49ers in the AFC championship as they beat the Saints and so were suitable of my support.
Now the choice is either the New York Giants or the New England Patriots. Too many support the Patriots, they are ridiculously popular in the UK. The Giants have Eli Manning as a quarterback and any Manning is irritating.
So I’ve decided to make my relationships more fun. My sister and her husband like the Patriots and Ades (one of the Fulham Five) likes the Patriots. That settles it. My cheers will go to the New York Giants.
Altogether now: D-Fense!
BBC Headline #5
BBC Headline from the website taken today:
Lagging pupils “don’t catch up”
This headline is lacking and, to be honest, the whole article is shocking. Headline problems are:
Quotation in Headline
No Shit Sherlock
Problematic Assumptions
Quotation in Headline
As long as someone wrote it or said it you can include it as a quotation in any headline or article. Say what you want. There’s always some nutter willing to give their opinion to give your leading headline some weight. “Crystal energies healed me” or “watch out for 23 December 2012! Those Mayans knew a thing or two”.
No Shit Sherlock
Pupils who are lagging behind in their work and understanding don’t then go on to catch up. Really! I need a whole BBC Headline to know this? How about “Some schools do really well!” or “Pupils getting better grades” or “Some schools not as good as others!”. There’s a distribution of schools or pupils, you can’t measure everyone and have everyone above average.
Problematic Assumptions
The biggest issue with the article and what the headline implies is that the bottom few pupils as measured by some arbitrary government test do not proceed to do well as measured by some other government arbitrary process. Have these people never heard of the Gaussian Distribution (the bell curve or normal distribution)? Some pupils will always be behind the others and will probably continue to be behind. Elsewhere in the article it is claimed that the top performers go on to get good grades later on. Holy Cow! This curve needs to be explained to them.
This is a graph of the Gaussian Distribution as everyone sees it:
The Gaussian Distribution as the government sees it (blue version):
No one is allowed to fail or fall behind or not be clever or be too far from the mean.
Descent into Skepticism
Most of my life I was little affected by “woo”. I think I had always been curious about some things like alternative medicine, but never really investigated it. Where would you go in the days before the internet? I didn’t care about it enough to go to the library. If I had I might have got a book by Deepak Chopra instead of Carl Sagan and perhaps that would have moved my life in entirely the wrong direction.
I can remember my dad saying to me in my early teens that if all other things had failed for a terminally ill patient then what harm was there in trying acupuncture? I think that was the only SCAM (I borrow Mark Crislip’s definition of SCAM here) I was aware of. When I was about 18 my mum trained in reflexology. She went to college and got a proper qualification and letters after her name. When she explained it to me, I paid attention and thought about it, but didn’t form a hard opinion. I was happy to let people believe what they wanted.
About 5 years ago (it’s currently 2012) my Dad bought me a fuel economy device(magnet) for my car that would also work on ANY vehicle. Now I was curious about this. I searched the internet and looked at the manufacturer’s website which tried to explain that the magnet aligned the fuel so it burnt more efficiently. I knew there is no ferrous material in hydro-carbons. I also now have progressed from an un-thinking 18 year old to having an engineering degree and about 15 years of reading about science and was hooked on this issue. Surely, my logic went, if a simple magnet could improve fuel efficiency then the car manufacturers would be buying all the magnets in the world. If it really worked it would be a standard component in all engines.
The magic-magnet manufacturer’s website had a money-back offer and lots of testimonials. How could so many people be wrong? I must have also stumbled upon a “skeptical” website with some information and a podcast. I was already listening to some BBC podcasts and so I subscribed to the skeptical podcast. I can’t remember which one it was, but probably “The Skeptic Zone” from Australia. From there it was a short journey into “Skeptoid”, “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” and “Skeptics with a K”.
I now don’t want to let people believe what they want. I want them to know what works and what doesn’t. Human civilisation has developed the most sophisticated tool for understanding the world and how it works – SCIENCE. Now although science occasionally has its flaws it is a self-correcting system. The evidence wins-out eventually. There is no evidence for SCAMs, they just keep inventing more ludicrous mechanisms to explain their failure.
I’ve read around the subject, including Bad Medicine by Ben Goldacre and a couple of Robert Park books and, of course, Cosmos by Carl Sagan. There’re still a few books to read and magazines to subscribe to, but I consider myself educated in this realm. I understand evidence, trials and logical fallacies. The world needs to be educated about SCAMs.
If you are not sure what the harm is, then have a look at this site.
Socks on Hands
A long time ago in a college not that far from London, pretty much in the middle actually, there were a bunch of students in their first year at University. “Let’s enter the Field Cup”, someone suggested. “OK”, was the response.
The Field Cup was essentially a pub crawl for teams with challenges and forfeits in each pub. We were rookies and unfortunately for the older entrants we were doing quite well. We had taken some loot and even a Hall Of Residence Warden to the final judgement but, because we were up against a group of girls from the CGCU, we were docked just enough points to ensure we came second. Good try for a bunch of Fresher’s though!
We were in one pub, possibly The Queen’s Arms, and our challenge was to sing on the karaoke machine. Chrissy was lead vocals on “Let It Be” by The Beatles and we were backing singers. However, for some reason we were wearing our socks on our hands! That must have been a forfeit somewhere but precise details elude me, 20 years later. The precise details probably eluded me the next day too. We shall all remember Karl’s backing vocal calls of “socks on hands” to the rest of the pub! Hilarious!
You had to be there, really.