(Un) Masking the Truth

Some users of social media are claiming that a “Stanford University” or “NIH” (part of the USA's Department of Health and Human Services) study has shown that face masks are ineffective against the Covid-19 coronavirus and even harmful. There’s one problem with that claim though. It’s not really a Stanford study or a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study.

OK, there are two problems with that claim: it’s not a Stanford study, it’s not an NIH study, and, in fact, it’s not even really a study. All right, there are three problems with that claim: it’s not a Stanford study, it’s not an NIH study, it’s not really a study, and oh, it didn’t really show that face masks are ineffective against the Covid-19 coronavirus. Check that, there are four problems with that claim: it’s not a Stanford study, it’s not an NIH study, it’s not really a study, it didn’t really show that face masks are ineffective against the Covid-19 coronavirus, and by the way it didn’t really show that face masks are even harmful.

Umm, let’s start again.

Recently, there have been posts on social media, claiming that a “Stanford study”, “Stanford mask”, or a “Stanford face mask study” showed that face masks are ineffective against the Covid-19 coronavirus and may have “devastating health consequences”, and that the same “study” is from the NIH or was supported by the NIH.

But, and it's a big BUT, the sole author of the publication is someone named Baruch Vainshelboim, PhD who is not actually “from Stanford,” when it comes to properly designating from where the study came. It looks like the publication has him listed  as being affiliated with the Cardiology Division at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and Stanford University. However, that appears to be like a worn out underwear band as Stanford Medicine describe him as a one -year visiting scholar, and that's very different from being a true faculty member.

Also, the publication’s only connection with the NIH is that it can be found on PubMed. PubMed is a database and search engine maintained by the NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM). The database includes all articles that are published in a variety of biomedical and life sciences journals.

So rather than being published by, for, in, at, through, on, over, under, or on top of the NIH, the publication entitled “Facemasks in the Covid-19 era: A health hypothesis,” was actually published in a journal called Medical Hypotheses, one of over 5,000 titles that are currently indexed in PubMed which range significantly in type, quality, and focus. Some of the journals in PubMed don’t even publish scientific studies, instead focusing more on other types of papers such as commentaries, review papers, or, in the case of Medical Hypotheses: “theoretical papers.”

Yes, this journal actually published papers “which describe theories, ideas which have a great deal of observational support and some hypotheses where experimental support is yet fragmentary.” Can you imagine being asked or told to eat something with a caveat like “support that the thing is edible and won’t hurt you is fragmentary” or telling you just before a skydive that “the quality checks for parachute have been fragmentary?”

The journal description also states that that Medical Hypotheses will “give novel, radical new ideas and speculations in medicine open-minded consideration, opening the field to radical hypotheses which would be rejected by most conventional journals.” Would you feel reassured just before an operation by the surgeon telling you that he/she is "going to try a radical hypothesis that would be rejected by most conventional medical journals?”

After all, Dictionary.com indicates that “a scientific hypothesis is made before testing is done and isn’t based on results. Instead, it is the basis for further investigation.” It also says that hypothesis refers to “a proposition assumed as a premise in an argument,” or “mere assumption or guess.”

Medical Hypotheses is the journal that has published things like “Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia”, “Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males”, and “Losing weight by defecating at night.” Before you start wearing flip-flops all the time, masturbating furiously when you’ve got a stuffy nose, and sleeping on the toilet bowl, keep in mind that such articles, commentaries, and letters in Medical Hypotheses merely advance hypotheses without necessarily providing enough scientific evidence or any for that matter. After all, how many legitimate doctors will tell you, “hmm, to help us decide what treatment to give you, let’s take a look at Medical Hypotheses?” So if you have a radical idea that would be rejected by other scientific journals and a spare $1850 to pay the journal, you may be able to publish that idea in Medical Hypotheses.

Anyway, back to Vainshelboim’s article (which is not a study) about face masks presents arguments that fly in the face of scientific evidence and does so in highly flawed manner. First, when trying to claim that face masks are not effective against the Covid-19 coronavirus, the article interestingly focuses on studies of other types of respiratory viruses instead. It fails to mention the studies from 2020 that supported the use of face masks in preventing the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV2). As has been repeated over and over again, Covid-19 is not the flu. The SARS-CoV2 is not like influenza and some of the other respiratory viruses that Vainshelboim mentions. It seems to be more transmissible through the air, hence the face mask requirements.

Secondly, the article makes a number of leaps that really are not justified. For example, it claims that “trapped air remaining between the mouth, nose and the facemask is rebreathed repeatedly in and out of the body, containing low O2 and high CO2 concentrations, causing hypoxemia and hypercapnia,” and then cites some book chapters without really explaining how exactly these book chapters might support this claim. Is this a bit like claiming that you are an amazing lover and then citing The Joy of Sex?

Keep in mind that wearing a standard face mask is not the same as wearing a fish bowl or solid concrete and a microwave oven around your head. Oxygen and carbon dioxide should be able to move through the face mask material, assuming that you didn’t just take a condom and stretch it over your nose and mouth.

Then the article says, “severe hypoxemia may also provoke cardiopulmonary and neurological complications and is considered an important clinical sign in cardiopulmonary medicine.” How exactly would a standard face mask, which again allows oxygen to pass through its material, even cause “severe” hypoxemia, which is very low levels of oxygen in the blood, in most healthy people? If your oxygen levels have ever gotten that low, there’s a good chance that you would have already felt lightheaded, short of breath, and like you are going to pass out before experiencing any more longer term problems. This makes the next statement in the article potentially misleading: “low oxygen content in the arterial blood can cause myocardial ischemia, serious arrhythmias, right or left ventricular dysfunction, dizziness, hypotension, syncope and pulmonary hypertension.” A person doesn’t just develop conditions like a heart attack (which is apparently myocardial ischemia) or pulmonary hypotension just from wearing a face mask. These are conditions that develop over time from other factors. For example, a person typically has underlying coronary artery disease before suffering a heart attack.  

I'm all for debate and the sharing of information, but it needs to be open, honest and accurate. In this instance, it's surely theoretically possible that someone convinced by the article to not wear face masks, catches and transmits the Covid-19 coronavirus to someone else as a result? The other person could end up suffering or even dying. And that’s not just a hypothesis, given how much the article is getting shared on social media and used an ammunition in a war against mask wearing, it’s a real concern.

Size is Relative

If you asked a real historian to name the biggest person in history you're unlikely to get past what do you mean by "biggest"?
As in height?
Do you really mean who was the most influential?
That would depend on your perspective as many considerations of size do.
And what perspective would that be? European, African, Middle Eastern or East Asian?

And all of this is before we even get to the issue of whether this is a valid question to ask. You probably don't think that it is, but if you really did want to ask "who's the biggest person in history?", you now don't need to bother as Steven Skiena and Charles B Ward have produced a pre-Christmas offering that will answer just that question for you. It's called "Who's Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank" and - probably not just because it's Santa season - puts Jesus Christ on top.

Putting aside any debate about whether there's a god, and/or whether he's the offspring of that god, as there's no independent evidence to support that he even existed, why do the authors consider Jesus to be a "historical figure"? Napoleon and Muhammad fill second and third place, with William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln making up the top five, and quick reading shows the next ninety plus to be actual people, so how did they come up with this list, if the "winner" isn't (wasn't?) verifiably a person at all?

Fortunately, they've answered that one for us, by explaining how utilising a statistical approach, inspired by Google's method of ranking web pages gives:

"We ranked historical figures just as Google ranks web pages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements about their reputation into a single consensus value.

Significance is related to fame but measures something different. Forgotten U.S. President Chester A. Arthur (who we rank as the 499th most significant person in history) is more historically significant than young pop singer Justin Bieber (currently ranked 8633), even though he may have a less devoted following and lower contemporary name recognition.

Historically significant figures leave statistical evidence of their presence behind, if one knows where to look for it, and we used several data sources to fuel our ranking algorithms, including Wikipedia, scanned books and Google n-grams.

To fairly compare contemporary figures like Britney Spears against the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, we adjusted for the fact that today’s stars will fade from living memory over the next several generations. Intuitively it is clear that Britney Spears’ mindshare will decline substantially over the next 100 years, as people who grew up hearing her are replaced by new generations. But Aristotle’s reputation will be much more stable because this transition occurred long ago. The reputation he has now is presumably destined to endure. By analyzing traces left in millions of scanned books, we can measure just how fast this decay occurs, and correct for it."

So it's not just the inclusion of people who may or may not have actually existed that's the book's only problem: there's also the issue of conducting a study of the biggest figures in history from a completely English-speaking perspective. No wonder the full list is mainly white, male and American.

If nothing else, the study has the potential to be the basis of a critical thinking workshop next year - possibly what's wrong with this list and why? - but doesn't do anything to answer the question the authors set themselves.
What's for next year?
Who's the biggest Belgian in history?
Poirot?

Huffing and Puffing and Not Blowing the House Down

Only a couple of weeks ago Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, was asserting that a society without religion is doomed to moral and social collapse. "You cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact."

Quite where he gets his evidence from isn't clear (for example there's an irrelevant Facebook statistic about the "Friend" status of the under-35s) but a recent YouGov poll has come out since stating that only 25% of 18-24 year olds believe in God, and a mere 14% think that religion is, "on balance", a good thing.
So has an obvious absence of religious faith produced a generation of difficult-to-teach shallow hedonists? Does this, as Dr Sacks would presumably expect, mean that a decline in religion is leading us towards some radically new societal structure?

Nope, not a bit of it. Those surveyed confirmed that they are in most respects at least as level headed and conventional as their predecessors, with over 60 % looking forward to marriage and children and owning their own home. In other words, a significant majority expressing approval for the foundations of western civilisation, or what is normally described as traditional family values and its attendant structures.

Evidence eh? What would religious leaders do without it?

Easter Exaggeration (well actually it's a lie)

"Four out of five British adults believe in the power of prayer," according to a post on the Church of England's website yesterday (many thanks to Jenny Barlow for pointing me towards this "statistic") which references a new "ICM survey in the run-up to Easter".

Well, it's not just that I've a tendency to critically examine all sorts of claims and try to find out what they're based on, but I don't know four OR five people with any sort of religious inclination.
It doesn't even take much digging to read that the survey in question doesn't actually ask whether people believe in the power of prayer, or anything remotely similar, but instead has the question:

"Irrespective of whether you currently pray or not, if you were to pray for something at the moment, What would it be for?"

So, as 19% of respondents responded with "don't know" or said they would "never pray for anything", the C of E spin doctors contemptuously ignore the old "Thou shalt not bear false witness" commandment, and miraculously interpret this to mean that the remainder must believe that there's some sort of celestial concierge who responds to pestering (the website quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury as saying "...committed in prayer to Christ, and we will see a world transformed.").

However, as the Church article helpfully informs us that 31% of respondents said they would pray for world peace, and as there obviously isn't anything like "world peace", either nobody has got around to praying yet, God has so far ignored all the prayers but might do something about it later, or praying is a pointless exercise.

Maybe the C of E will add a request for clarification into its Pray One For Me programme of getting requests relayed through church groups?

More Money Matters, But No More Money?

So, just a few days after Harriet Harman had said (sort of - see last post!) that her Labour colleagues on Newcastle City Council were definitely not cutting their arts budget by 100%, the councillors have come up with some money after all.

Or have they?
In a miraculous feat of prestidigitation, £600,000 has "appeared" out of some sort of magic hat to replace the £1.2 million arts subsidy.

Or has it?
Closer inspection of this "fund" shows that nothing will happen before 2016, and that some of the total figure is coming from hoped-for private donations (council leader has called for "very wealthy" Geordie celebrities like Sting to contribute), some from as-yet-unsolicited business largesse, and whatever they can get from selling the Lord Mayor's 18th century coach.

So for now,  the arts are still getting a 100% cut, none of the libraries scheduled with closure are actually reprieved, and up in Newcastle the only art with a future is performing sleight of hand....

Money Matters

News in this week's Guardian on-line includes a piece about Newcastle City Council deciding to cut its Arts budget by 100 per cent.
This has been publicly backed by the shadow culture minister, Dan Jarvis, but criticised by many including the writer Lee Hall who said 'if as the shadow culture minister you cannot robustly and publicly defend the right of working-class and disadvantaged people to have access to libraries and culture, I do not understand what you are doing holding that brief'.

This little mess has prompted his boss, shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman, to deliver some damage limitation, but not in a way that stands up any sort of scrutiny. ‘There is not going to be a 100 per cent cut to the arts in Newcastle,’ she told The Guardian. ‘Across the board, they will be supporting the arts. I can’t give you the nitty-gritty . . .’
 
The facts, she means.
Actual, hard figures.
Finite numbers or information on where the funding will come from?
Anything at all that we can judge or evaluate?
Nope. Just some glib well-spun messages and the odd soundbite.

Maybe the plan is to leave one of those funny little notes for the next council leader telling him the money has run out so he can put it in a frame and ask the Arts Council if he can have a grant for it?

Weigh to go

Many of us who prefer to quote scientific data instead of diet or exercise to feel fitter have yet another reason to rejoice today as we've now got a much healthier body mass index without doing anything at all.

This is due to the formula we've been using to calculate body fat getting declared faulty by a University of Oxford Professor of Numerical Analysis. Nick Trefethen says that the original formula devised by Adolphe Quetelet in the 1830s underestimates how much broader tall people are on average. Trefethen's adjustment means that tall people (e.g six footers like me) who were previously misled into thinking they were fatter than they were are now thinner, but conversely what were up to yesterday short, normal people now count as overweight.

As Newton said, for every action, there's an an equal and opposite reaction.
Science eh?
Much better than exercise...

A shroud and its sillier aligning

I've just finished another Scholarly Activity workshop (the third in a series of seven) in Manchester and would like to thank Adele Turner for bringing me a copy of Saturday's Telegraph which contains a wonderful example of how not to conduct evidence based research.

In it, a Cambridge-based art historian called Thomas de Wesselow describes his feelings upon finally seeing the Turin Shroud "face to face", and puts forward a "theory" as what it is. His "theory" is that the Shroud is indeed two thousand years old and the image on it is that of Jesus, but not necessarily created in a burst of divine energy during the resurrection. Although De Wesselow's "research" "was largely done at his desk or in libraries, save for one episode ... when the connection between the Shroud and Resurrection came to him in a kind of eureka moment", he's concluded that the first disciples didn't see the Risen Christ; they saw a soiled cloth with a miraculously-produced image on it and knew at that moment Jesus must have risen from the dead.

Neat idea, but unfortunately for his credibility as a historian, there's absolutely no evidence to support it. Nothing. No historical, material, scientific, archaeological or palaeographical evidence, and not even anything in the Bible as far as I can tell; where if memory serves correctly, Thomas is described as putting his hand into Jesus' pierced but resurrected flesh.

So logically, not only did the gospel writers, Paul, the early church fathers and everybody else writing things down during the development of Christianity keep the "facts" of the Easter (up)rising secret; everybody who saw it for the next millennium-and-a-half or so also neglected to mention the existence of the Shroud until it was exhibited in northern France around 1355. It was soon withdrawn from view on the orders of the local Bishop (Henri de Poitiers) who doubted its authenticity at the time "after diligent inquiry and examination, ... the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed."

The real mystery of the Turin Shroud, is unfortunately not just limited to why this undoubted fake continues to exert any fascination over believers, researchers, writers and documentary-makers, but that it also gets used to disparage 1988's carbon dating which gave the Shroud's date of manufacture as sometime in the 13th or 14th century. It would after all, be truly miraculous if the normal rules of carbon 14 decomposition were actually unreliable just this once. So not only is there good 14th century evidence that the Turin Shroud was known (or at least very strongly suspected) at the time to be a forgery, there is excellent scientific evidence to confirm it.

To paraphrase an old saying about ducks: if looks logically a fake, looks historically like a fake, and tests scientifically like a fake, then it's a ....

Much ado about nothing sensible

Now I know that Hollywood produces works of fiction, and takes very extensive liberties with any actual facts upon which a story might be based, but I've just seen on the hotel television a report about the new film Anonymous which said that Sony Pictures were intending to send out "information packs" to schools to promote its release.

Not only did the reporter not point out how far from reality the film's basis actually is, she actually suggested that it was based on a credible theory which hadn't been disproved.
Well, let me have a go, and this is without even trying very hard...

The film advances the claim that Shakespeare’s works were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604. This was before 12 of Shakespeare’s plays were written, a year prior to the Gunpowder Plot alluded to in Macbeth, and five years before the Sea Venture ran aground off Bermuda and inspired The Tempest.

And that's without even trying to pull apart the "possibility" that De Vere put his own name to comparatively poor poetry while submitting works of genius behind an alias to a rival’s theatre company...

Quick (and admittedly not triangulated) research on Google tells me that the originator of this unintellectual drivel is an aptly named J.Thomas Looney, but unfortunately the stuff our schools might be getting won't come with a Looney Tunes label on the cover, just something that says it's "supporting education".

To Beeb or not to Beeb, was there a question?

Visiting my father yesterday on the way back from another post-presentation trans-pennine drive, I was amused (and sceptical!) to learn that the BBC had decided to ban the use of BC and AD in favour of the more pensioner-confusing terms BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).

Evidently, the front page of his Mail on Sunday displayed the banner headline "BBC turns its back on year of Our Lord" and followed it with claims that executives at the public broadcaster had banned the use of the dating terms and insisted that they be replaced with more "politically correct" ones. As I'm sure you'd agree, this would be an impressive feat even for an organisation with the Beeb's influence, but could it really "jettison 2,000 years of history"?
Well, er, no, as actually reading to the last paragraph makes clear via a spokesperson from the broadcaster...
"The BBC has not issued editorial guidance on the date systems. Both AD and BC, and CE and BCE are widely accepted date systems and the decision on which term to use lies with individual production and editorial teams."

So where did this "story" come from and why does the Mail want to castigate the Corporation for simply saying that two dating systems are common and staff can use whichever they prefer? The BBC's "politically correct, Europhile agenda" is cited as the cause, although how either has any relevance is utterly beyond me. It's not exactly an adherence to "political correctness" to tell people that they can use whatever words they like, and no stretch of my imagination can get even close to any reason why or how Europe might fit in.

As it happens, only a minimal amount of research is necessary to ascertain where the story started, but quite why it's developed into incoherent rage is much more of a puzzle.

On the Frequently Asked Questions page part of the BBC Religion religion website there's a bit saying:
"In line with modern practice bbc.co.uk/religion uses BCE/CE (Before Common Era/Common Era) as a religiously neutral alternative to BC/AD. As the BBC is committed to impartiality it is appropriate that we use terms that do not offend or alienate non-Christians."
a paragraph which is basically talking only about the BBC Religion web site, not making statements about BBC-wide policy, and has probably been there for some considerable time as there's nothing at all to indicates that this is some new rule.

Indeed, as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority guidelines say "CE/BCE is becoming an industry standard among historians," and "pupils have to be able to recognise these terms when they come across them", why should the BBC be only now issuing edicts about the use of terminology that's been around for over 150 years?

Going back only a week, one of the Mail on Sunday columnists has written in a review of University Challenge that "Jeremy Paxman referred to a date as being Common Era, rather than AD. This nasty formulation is designed to write Christianity out of our culture."

This was followed on Saturday by a piece entitled "How the BBC fell for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within" which links the above irritation to the BBC's website FAQ page (that's how I found it!) and proclaims
"No longer will [The BBC's] website refer to those bigoted, Christian-centric concepts AD (as in Anno Domini – the Year of Our Lord) and BC (Before Christ). From now on, it will use initials which strip our traditional Gregorian calendar of its offensive religious context. All reference to Christ has been expunged, replaced by the terms CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era)."

So by the time we get to Sunday, a columnist's trivial annoyance with a quiz show, a BBC FAQ and some incoherent rantings built on non-existent foundations have evolved into a full-page story which has fuelled over 1,500 on-line comments from Mail readers (mainly) unable to read past a headline!

Beware: Ninja Tellys!

After a six hour train journey, I'm now sat in a central Oxford hotel watching television before retiring for the night, a pastime that I've always thought relaxing but according to an article in today's Times is actually hazardous to my health ("TV is as harmful as smoking"). Indeed, every hour spent slumped in front of the box is as "serious a public health problem as smoking or obesity" and can reduce the viewer's life expectancy by 22 minutes, or in other words, you'll live 5 years less if you watch TV for 6 hours a day.

So does that magic box in the corner of the room emit some previously secret carcinogenic rays?
Does a seemingly endless stream of reality drivel, soap operas and gameshows have an adverse affect on the will to live?

Nope, "research" published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has compared the mortality rates of couch potato Australians with those who had "more active lifestyles". Then, after doing a few sums, the University of Queensland "experts" worked out that every hour spent glued to the screen shortened life by 21.8 minutes, and the "top 1 per cent of the population who watch six hours of programmes a day can expect to live 4.8 years less than a person who does not watch TV”.

So that's not a slow-acting electric assassin in the corner of the room after all. Not only will it not kill me, it won't even reduce my life expectancy, because all these "researchers" have actually done is correlate some data which shows that more active people tend to live longer. Wow!

On the other hand, the report also quotes a Lancet article claiming that "as little as 15 minutes of physical activity every day can increase lifespan by three years", which by my calculations means that I only need to do around 3 minutes of exercise for every hour's telly watching and they'll cancel each other out.

Fortunately for the reputation of the academic community as a whole, and as the participants in tomorrow's scholarly activity workshop will be told at 10.00am, getting your work published isn't quite like Homer Simpson once said, "Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true....."

Skullduggery

Today's BBC Science website headlines the revelation that anthropologists from Oxford University have examined 55 human skulls from various parts of the world and concluded that we in the North have bigger brains than those who hail from the South.

According to lead author Eiluned Pearce: "We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude ... and cranial capacity" which suggests that a few tens of thousands of years peering through the gloom of long winters and brief springs has enlarged northern brains in the same sort of way that a series of gym sessions is likely to increase the size of one's biceps/pectorals/deltoids/etc.

The Royal Society's Biology Letters journal goes on to say that this hasn't necessarily made Northerners more intelligent, however, it is now over 200 years since Canon Sydney Smith, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral (born in Woodford, Essex but obviously in possession of something akin to a Big Northern Brain) pre-empted the team's doubts on the matter by saying:
"Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does, he will tell you. If he does not, why humiliate him?".

Of course, it's now only natural modesty which prevents me speculating as to whether or not next week's news might confirm the Pope's religion or enlighten us on what bears do in the woods....

The Truth is Out There. Somewhere. Probably. Maybe...

I'm currently at Loughborough University engaging in discussions as how to teach students to draw coherent conclusions from their research; something that you'd expect to be second nature to anyone with a professorship.

However, earlier today we learnt on one of the breakfast television programmes that for Professor Andrei Finkelstein, of Russia’s Applied Astronomy Institute, normal rules of academic rigour don't appear to apply. He's observed that since we didn’t know of any exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) at all twenty years ago, and have now found more than 500 of them, the chances are that stars without any planets are the exception not the rule. This "logic" has led him to conclude that "earthlike" planets (i.e. smallish, rocky and orbiting well-behaved stars at a reasonable distance) are probably extremely common in the universe and therefore life must be everywhere: leading to either an "inevitable" contact with an alien civilisation or the discovery of alien microbes, at the very least, within the next 20 years.

Quite why Pr Finkelstein has concluded that the possible existence of small rocky planets with water-friendly surface temperatures etc means that "the genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms", wasn't revealed, nor were any tips regarding the solving of science's greatest mysteries:

• how, or where did life begin on Earth (although we have some idea as to the when?


• has biogenesis happened once, twice, many times, and is it still going on today?


• does the existence of one biosphere preclude the emergence of another one?

In short, while our knowledge of the stars and planets grows daily, what we actually know about life, how it comes about, or even what it really is hasn't moved on very much from the dark age superstitions that a Sky Fairy did it.

The idea that Earth is unique in some way might well fit in with these primitive beliefs, and is a yet-to-be-discounted possibility, but statements of certainty about alien life are currently nothing more than wishful thinking and need to be filed in the pseudoscience box until ET turns up and says that his dad sent him!

Figuratively speaking...

The Home Office has just (yesterday) launched what it laughably claims to be a "consultation exercise" (the quote marks are there to emphasise how inaccurate the term actually is) on its plans to tighten up visa requirements for foreign students.

The questionnaire on which this "consultation" is based invites the public and interested parties to "Contribute your views to our consultation into how we can best reduce the number of students who can come to the UK". However, it's either been very badly put together (rather ironically for something do with education as it highlights that somebody somewhere needs educating about questionnaire design), or it's been deliberately formulated to preclude dissenting opinions. I'll leave you to decide....

Example:
Q2. Do you think that only Highly Trusted Sponsors (HTS) should be permitted to offer study below degree level (at NQF levels 3, 4 and 5 / SCQF levels 6, 7 and 8) in the Tier 4 (General) category?

• Yes – only HTS should be able to offer these sub-degree level courses
• No – all sub-degree level study should be prohibited under Tier 4 (General)
• No – study at NQF level 3 should be prohibited, even where the sponsor is a HTS
• Don't know

So if you happen to think that sub-degree level courses should be available from a wider range of providers you have no box to tick, nor can you tick a box to show that you think that the system as it is ought to be maintained. Only if you believe that the Home Office proposals are insufficiently draconian can you enter an alternative.

Now regardless of whether or not these proposals are desirable, proportionate or in the interests of our educational system, highly biased "consultations" like this not only have no statistical credibility, they're a disgraceful way of canvassing public opinion.

Close, but no cigar....

On my way across London this morning for a conference where David Willets will this afternoon talk about the value, heritage and future of technical skills at FE and HE level, I picked up a copy of one of the free papers distributed outside Underground stations which today contains a report about an article in yesterday's Daily Mail (lazy journalism part one) regarding the alleged censoring of Winston Churchill's cigar from a poster outside an exhibition near London Bridge by anti-smoking zealots.

"It seems the man who steered Britain through the most dangerous period of its recent history may have fallen victim to the modern curse of political correctness," says the report (of the report!).

Oddly enough, the story goes on to describe that the disappearance of the Churchillian havana is "something of a mystery" with the ubiquitous, un-named spokesman for the visitor attraction "astonished" that such a thing could have happened and denying that the museum has been contacted by any anti-smoking lobby group, and was quite unaware of the airbrushing until a visitor drew it to their attention.

Anway, despite the Daily Mail (or the Metro) being unable to identify who was responsible for the airbrushed image (lazy journalism part two), typing "Winston Churchill Images" into Google gives a listing of which one the higher ranked results is Fanpix, an on-line image gallery. So, on the assumption that Fanpix isn't responsible for removing the cigar (why would they?), presumably someone creating the War Experience display went on to the Internet in search of suitable Churchill pictures and, not knowing that it was digitally altered, selected this one.

A bit more research using Google's advanced search facility gives what is probably the ultimate source of the doctored picture, a 2006 blog about a Washington Post story about politically-correct anti-smoking fanatics censoring old pictures. In this case, the story concerned Hanna-Barbera apparently removing scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons after a complaint to Ofcom that the scenes were "glamorising" smoking. The blog suggested that "they’d have to go back and edit all the old pictures of Winston Churchill to remove his cigar" and mocked up an image poking fun at the excesses of Political Correctness to illustrate the point, which four years later has ended up getting used as "proof" that PC has, once again, "gone mad". So, as we now know that it's not (in this instance at least), maybe something else is going on: an attempt to attract publicity to the Britain at War Experience, perhaps? Or am I just too cynical?

C'est la vie (ou la mort) ma femme fatale...

Looks like those romantic ballards about racing heartbeats might be scientifically based after all, as according to research carried out by the University of Valencia, just five minutes alone with an attractive woman can raise a man’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol to “dangerous levels” that “may be bad for the heart”.

The experiment, approved by the Faculty of Psychology’s ethical committee, involved 84 male students who were told to avoid alcohol and other stimulants for 24 hours, before being led into a room by one of the (male) scientists to solve a Sudoku puzzle. The researcher then departed on the pretext of getting another puzzle, leaving the unsuspecting student to sit alone in a room with a stranger.

Saliva samples were taken from the students to measure their cortisol levels which apparently remained the same when left with another male, but rose when left alone with an attractive female. The study added that this rise was heightened in men who believed the woman was “out of their league", and could even reach levels reportedly similar to that experienced by parachutists, an amount that can “bring on the possibility of heart attacks and strokes”.

As we now know that since pretty women are sociological gravediggers, surely our newspapers should be ablaze with headlines such as “Man dies in front of sexy woman”, “Ban these killer heels” and "French National Suicide Bid: instead of making it mandatory, they're banning the burka!"?

Not a holiday - honest!

7/8/9 July Isle of Man

What was by necessity (one mid-morning flight out, and one early afternoon flight back) a three-day trip for one day's work, did include three rounds of golf at some lovely courses and an evening at the Southern Cross motor cycle race meeting, so technically it was mainly leisure.....

As the college has only just moved towards delivering degrees (from September 2008, validated by Chester & Liverpool John Moores) they requested that I go over & share some thoughts with the college's HE staff (7 departments) on a few pertinent issues such as:

• How to create and sustain a HE culture in a FE environment in terms of resources, teaching and research.
• How HE and FE differ in terms of students’ needs and how they might need to change or develop their offering to improve the student experience.

A very challenging day, but hopefully has helped what is a remote (in terms of staff development opportunities anyway) part of the British Isles to see how what they compare with the mainland.