Tagged: The Guardian
The year in bad science
Ben Goldacre, a physician who hosts the Bad Science website and writes the UK Guardian’s Bad Science has produced a witty compendium of the year in dodgy scientific research in the UK and elsewhere. Moneyquote:
A £6m Home Office drugs education study was published with no results, because it was so flawed it couldn’t produce any, we saw MPs being foolish about cervical screening and moon magic, and then when they didn’t like the scientific evidence they got from Professor David Nutt, they sacked him. If politicians want us to take them seriously on the evidence for global warming, they have to show they care about evidence everywhere. It’s only slightly worse in Iraq, where they’ve just spent $32m on 800 sciencey looking dowsing rods to detect bombs….
Elsewhere, alongside the usual barrage of PR reviewed data, we saw that exercise makes you fat, coffee makes you see dead people, and Facebook causes cancer, while housework prevents it, in women. There was industry-standard front page wrongness about vaccines (and the Irish Daily Mail campaigning for the cervical cancer vaccine, while the UK Daily Mail campaigned against it). We saw a man in a coma communicating with a method shown not to help people communicate, hideous distortion of research on rape, the earth’s magnetic field, and much more, although we also found that around half of all academic press releases fail to flag up studies’ flaws.
Hat tip: CC.
Datablog Advent calendar
The UK Guardian, a trailblazer in the quest for newspaper survival in a digital era, has an Advent calendar of its best datablog entries for 2009:
Hat tip: Cheryl Cook.
It never rains but it pours on Gordon Brown
The big story in the UK today?
- A British soldier dies in Afghanistan.
- The PM sends a handwritten a condolence letter, but misspells the soldier’s name.
- The mother makes a stink.
- The PM calls.
- The mother records the call.
The mother turned the tape over to the tabloid Sun, whose outrage barely masked its glee. The Guardian and the Times have more balanced accounts.
There are few things more sacred in journalism, politics, and life than the grieving mother of a soldier killed in action. In this case, however, having listened to the call with rapt horror, my symathies go to Brown.
[UPDATE] Geraint Jones writes check in from the seat of empire:
The nation feels sad for Mrs Janes, but nearly everyone thinks she and the media are very very sick.
Hat tip: AN.
Sedated and body-snatched
You have to wonder who in Michael Ignatieff’s camp thinks it’s smart for him to keep giving long form interviews to plummy foreign journals. First it was the New Yorker, now it’s The Guardian, a left-of-centre daily in Britain, where Iggy hosted a BBC-TV arts program for six years.
Interviewer Rachel Cooke is a tad shaky on Canadian politics—she calls Ignatieff “the man most likely to be Canada’s next prime minister,” and describes the Harper government as “on its knees”—but she does get off a few delicious zingers.
On his return to Canada:
[H]e likes to attribute his return at least as much to homesickness as to pragmatism. Honestly! It wasn’t like he disliked Canada, or anything, for all that he chose to live elsewhere, and for so long. He missed the place: the cold, the skating rinks, the desperate need for mittens in winter.
On his new book:
This is what has had [critics] holding their noses. Now that he is a politician, they say, it’s hard to see True Patriot Love as anything other than a grotesquely over-blown campaign leaflet. Ignatieff, who has the aloof manner and the half-closed, upwardly-tilting eyes of a pedigree cat, looks at me more in sorrow than in anger when I bring this up. It is so very… painful because, after all, he was a writer long before he was a politician.
On his manner:
His tone, as he tells me this, is slow, excessively careful, and completely without irony, none of which would be surprising were he a career politician. Since when did irony and politics go? But Ignatieff used to be a writer. Listening to him now, it’s as if he’s been sedated, or body-snatched, or something. He’s like a jazz man who’s lost his sense of rhythm…
[E]verything I know about Canada has been gleaned from the stories of Alice Munro, and the novels of Carol Shields. Ignatieff nods approvingly at this: “Good for you!” he says, in the manner of a kindly don to a kid from a council estate.
On his Iraq War cock-up:
[I]n Canada, his former support for Bush continues to hang over him, like a cloud of midges.
Cooke gets a few interesting quotes out of Iggy, too:
Going to meet the president of the United States is a big deal. You do get, erm, a little apprehensive. But he is a master political animal. Grips you by the elbow, tells you that he’s read your books, sits you down, makes you feel like you’re the only guy in the world. Thirty-five minutes later, you think: that was a great guy. But you don’t feel surreal. You feel you’re sitting down with an extremely intelligent, good listener who’s locked right in. A month into his presidency, and he conveyed the impression that he’s always been president. That was genuinely astounding. He was at ease in some amazing way.
“I married the right woman,” he says. “That has turned out to be the most important single fact. I’m not going to die out there if people don’t like me because there’s someone at home who thinks I’m OK.”
Hat tip: A.N.
Taking the ‘year off’ cure
After one too many disappointments, Biblically named British writer Hephzibah Anderson swore off boinking for a year, then wrote an intriguing article about the experience. Moneyquote:
“Beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes,” Thoreau cautioned, but today I am shopping for a chaste wardrobe. The clothes I pick out are generous and tough, nothing flimsy or flyaway. In my newly chaste state, my instinct is to wrap up and hide away. Read more »
