Bob's World

More Bobs

2011-06-30T18:25:00.001+01:00

In anticipation of trying out Google Plus, I've resurrected an old gmail profile that I was only using for various, tedious technical reasons that I won't bore you with.

What that means is that this blog is now run by two boB's, both of whom are me. So all new posts will come from the new Bob!

Johann Hari

2011-06-28T15:57:00.000+01:00

There's been a lot of fuss about this Johann Hari lark. If you missed it, you can find the details here: http://johannhari.com/2011/06/27/interview-etiquette .

It has prompted a lot of predictable crowing from people who don't like his politics and are relishing the thought of bashing an outspoken opponent while they're down. Something that I think does the offending people no credit.

Sadly, the waters of this debate are muddied by the rebuttal from Hari, which simply gets the definition of "plagiarism" wrong. Admittedly, it is the definition that a lot of non-academics ascribe to the word, but "Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own" is simply not true.

Plagiarism involves wrongly attributing information to another source. In this case "source" isn't just the person, but how you captured that information and when. That can mean pretending that something someone else has written is your own, but it can also mean pretending that you wrote a piece of work especially for one publication, but actually, it has been previously published by another. I.e. it also includes attributing something to the correct person, but suggesting, through lack of proper citation, that they said it at a different time, in a different context.

Now I'm not suggesting that Hari be strung up for this minor journalistic offence, as I think that in journalism this type of plagiarism isn't as important as it is to academia. But I would say this - it is bad form. As people, we're not the coherent embodiment of views that we're often portrayed to be. Our minds and opinions change as we gather new experiences and have more time to contemplate them. So attributing a piece of text to a recent interview, even if you as a journalist believe it to be representative of the same point, is dodgy ground.

Hari quite rightly points out that no-one has ever complained about being misrepresented, and it is testament to his journalistic skill that these quotes have indeed been judged as representative by the interviewees. But not all journalists have that skill and to encourage it as "normal practice" is dangerous. I appreciate that clarifying a source in this strict definition, carries with it the danger that the end product be clunky and not as entertaining. But it would be accurate.

Addendum: Dawn Foster raises an interesting point about this issue here: http://dawnhfoster.co.uk/?p=247 Where, (and apologies for my over-simplistic paraphrasing) the acquisition of the information is a skill, so claiming that you got the quote from your interview, but it came from someone else's, means you have effectively ripped off their hard work.

Papaly Mache

2010-09-15T14:04:00.000+01:00

Pope fever is gripping the UK, but it turns out that it is those opposed to the pope's visit to our green and pleasant land who are the most animated.

The Guardian has been the flagship for this cause, publishing several comment articles by rock 'n' roll skeptic Ben Goldacre and Polly Toynbee, the President of the British Humanists Association. Most recently a carefully worded open letter signed by many public intellectuals and scientists was published along side several religious comments, (all of which, interestingly, attacked Toynbee's article directly rather than the faultless logic of the letter itself).

My personal beliefs on this issue are quite strong. Regardless of your sentiment towards Catholicism in general, this specific pope has had some fairly significant allegations made against him, including aiding paedophiles and of course, the numerous human rights violations outlined within the open letter. True or false, these are yet to be adequately investigated and paying for this man to come to our country as an honoured guest seems morally reprehensible given the current climate.

My concern isn't so much the pope's visit, but what it represents. In the UK it seems like the majority of the public is throwing off the shackles of organised religion in favour of a secular environment, where debate and the core tenants of human rights provide a foundation for ethical and social debate, rather than the relatively weak "it says so in this book written centuries ago by bigots and misogynists". Yet still religions are given special protection from mockery and public questioning.

The longevity of religion is obviously helped by promises of rewards in the after-life and the promise of "a plan", but modern society has developed another weakness to religion, that there is no easy solution to. In the public eye, atheism appears to be strongly correlated with liberal politics, (something at least hinted at by The Guardian being at the front of the charge against the pope) so we have our hands tied behind our backs by the Voltairian sentiment "I disagree with everything you say, but would defend to the death your right to say it". When extremists threaten violence, then the moral prerogative forces action, when the danger is the steady trickle of propaganda, then the moral question becomes murky and difficult to rally behind. Religions are of course, not bound by those rules and can happily make bizarre claims about the atheist's weak, principle-based morality and call for legal protection from nasty people picking holes in their contradictory belief systems. It seems as though the best we can hope for is that good old-fashioned middle class peer pressure will eventually lead to people practising religion guiltily behind closed doors like an addiction to pain-killers or watching sci-fi.

Ironically, the solution seems to be faith. Faith that eventually, through pursuing the (now) less controversial ideals of education for all and furthering public understanding of science, that religion will lose its public authority, if not its hold over people. Sadly, with the government supporting the religious apartheid of faith schools and the rise of extremism in other parts of the world, faith in people can be hard to come by.

Arkham Horror

2010-06-10T00:19:00.000+01:00

If anyone else out there in interweb land is a bit of a board game geek, I recommend "Arkham Horror", it is a lot of fun and we've had a good few hours of entertainment from it. My one criticism is the rule book, which isn't very well written. It seems that the same type of people who write technical manuals also write game manuals for Fantasy Flight.

I'm currently in the middle of thesis correction hell. I'm at the stage where I'm making trivial changes to the plots, that obviously take hours, because all of the plots were done in R which is a hellishly complicated language to do anything in and has some pretty weak help, (though some attempts have been made to rectify this).

So I'm wading through impenetrable literature during the day so that I can come home and have a good wade through some impenetrable literature in the evening. Good times.

Dancing to the beat of my own drum

2010-05-27T15:33:00.000+01:00

This week I discovered beyond all doubt, that my sense of rhythm is so bad, that my own heart has failed to keep time.

On Sunday I felt a bit knackered, a complaint which I attributed to the blazing, apocalyptic sun which transiently forgot that we live on a miserable grey island and that sunshine is for continental types who think that mayonnaise is the height of sophistication. Sadly when Nic & I went for a lie down in the garden to enjoy what was left of the day, I noticed that my heart had decided to forego the traditional "bom-bom-bom" approach to life and opt for a samba rhythm instead. When traditional remedies, (a nice cup of tea and a sit down) failed to convince it to return to normal, we decided to have a jaunt to the local A&E department.

A&E departments, the evening after a hot sunny day filled with beer gardens and binge drinking, are of course, filled with the best kind of people. Mercifully I didn't have to wait very long in the waiting room as the triage nurse took one look at my heart beat and pulled a face which conveyed two important messages:
1) Oh shit, his heart's mental
2) I should NEVER play poker

So I was whisked away for blood tests, heart traces and the like, while nurses and doctors alike hovered round my trolley in the resuscitation ward fingering their defibrillators in a way reminiscent of the midday crowd at the O.K. Corral. The A&E doctor who saw me was brilliant. As anyone who knows me knows, I do love a geek, and I'm not sure if she was at all aware that the enthusiasm with which she explained that I had an atrial fibrillation and the possible treatments, did a great deal to make feel a lot better about the whole thing. Her recommended course of action was to zap me back to life, but after the cardiologist interceded, she forlornly tried the drugs instead.

And that, as they say, was that. After a few hours, my heart abandoned its individuality and decided to conform like an American teenager on ritalin.

If I have another episode, I will need treatment, but for now, we are putting it down to the fickle finger of fate and hoping that I stay vertical.

Election

2010-05-07T12:01:00.000+01:00

Well, crap monkeys, if it isn't a return to the party that made the eighties the blood-soaked, economically disastrous and morally bankrupt decade it was.

Of course, I am being a little extreme. However, there are two things that frighten me about our new overlords. Firstly, the Tories don't have a very good track record for scientific research. Thatcher liked funding "high-tech companies" but that's not the same. The sad fact of the matter is that most companies are crap at research. The research budget is always the first to go when times get hard; the focus is on application, rather than sound scientific progression and one only needs to look at the robotic abomination that is Asimo, to see that companies tend to be more focused on style than substance.

My second problem is that I am quite lazy. Politics should be an all year round thing, but I have been fairly passive unless we got close to an election. But Britain has voted in the only major party with an explicit connection to the Christian right. Science, reason and equality are threatened by a Tory government in a way that is going to require robust, organised defence. The sad truth being that this is going to require a 365 day a year engagement with politics. We can no longer afford to be passive and hope it turns out for the best. Which is annoying, because I was really rather hoping to get to know my Xbox better in 2010.

Paul Farrelly MP

2010-04-13T23:09:00.000+01:00

I underwent a middle-class right of passage recently and wrote a letter to my MP.

In it I asked him to clarify his opinions on three key areas
1) The teaching of intelligent design on the science curriculum
2) The funding of homeopathic treatments on the NHS
3) The ongoing libel reform issues

I won't post the letter's contents verbatim, (unless people really want me to), but I will say that he was extremely against the teaching of ID and has been an active voice in the libel reform process, he even sent me a copy of the early day motion he signed in support of libel reform (EDM 423).

Sadly, when it came to homeopathy, I discovered the level of slipperiness that one should have expected from a politician.

Here's the paragraph from his letter...

"In relation to homeopathic treatments, I fully agree that the safety and efficacy of medicines should be established by the most reliable methods available and that money should not be spent on making ineffective treatments available on the NHS. The importance of clinical trials must not be underestimated for both proving that medicines are effective and for minimising dangerous side-effects."

That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? It stops just short of actually saying homeopathy is ineffective, but certainly hints that's what he means. I was REALLY please with the letter and I was very impressed with the speed of the response, (even though he did call me "Mr" Oates... cue a little "I didn't go to evil university for 9 years to be called 'MR' Evil..." rant). This happiness was somewhat undermined, when I looked up his track record for signing early day motions and discovered EDM1240...

Here is the text description of EDM1240 that the very same Paul Farrelly signed...

"That this House welcomes the positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals; notes that some six million people use complementary treatments each year; believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients, including chronic difficult to treat conditions such as musculoskeletal and other chronic pain, eczema, depression, anxiety and insomnia, allergy, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome; expresses concern that NHS cuts are threatening the future of these hospitals; and calls on the Government actively to support these valuable national assets."

Valuable national asset! Clinically-effective! Now, my biology is pretty weak, but my PhD does look at the immune system in a bit of detail, so in particular, listing "allergy" as a potential area where homeopathy could be used as a treatment, is particularly vexing.

I feel a little deceived. Not sure what my next move is going to be...

Electoral Optimisation

2010-04-07T13:07:00.000+01:00

Running a country involves a policy. A series of managerial rules, that will react to future and current situations and result in a transformation of the decision space. No party exists which will perform optimally over all decisions, so I see my choice as an attempt to identify the party who's values suggest that they will perform well in an appropriate manifold of that space.

So we have three main problems:
1) What should our fitness function be? Are we trying to maximise human achievement, minimise suffering, maximise our specific region of the world's position?
2) How do we assess that function?
3) Do we actually have sufficient data to make any of these choices?

It seems to me that there is no right answer and no way of predicting success. In addition, I'm just one vote. A hung parliament could prevent choices from being made in a timely fashion, so voting for a group that you don't agree with, but is better than a diluted hybrid policy, is the better choice. Voting for no-one increases the effects of noise, which in a political setting is often sourced by extremism and policies only optimal to a small subset of the population.

Anyway, that's my comp sci oriented perspective. As you were.

'Fun' Run

2010-03-29T09:48:00.005+01:00

Before I launch, let's just get one thing clear, I will be insisting on putting single quotes around the word "fun" when used in conjunction with the word "run". This is largely to enforce some kind of separation between them, as I firmly believe that they are totally incompatible.

Sooooo, I'm doing a 'fun' run, the "Great Midlands 'Fun' Run" to be precise. http://www.greatmidlandsfunrun.com/home.aspx

At 8.5 miles, including a large sloped section that the locals have affectionately termed "Cardiac Hill" to commemorate the fallen, this is possibly the longest distance that I've ever run. That's not particularly hard, as the previous record was set when I was around 16 and forced by my school's resident sadist, (also known as a PE teacher) to perform something called a "cross-country run". Even then I seem to remember wondering what this could possibly be doing to further my education as the big kids lapped me for the 2nd time.

The cost of this exercise, (apart from my dignity as I wheeze, red-faced past a few hundred smirking Brummies) alone is going to do me some damage. The £15 pound registration fee felt a bit steep to be honest, though I suspect after running up "Cardiac Hill" my definition of the word "steep" might go through a bit of re-evaluation. In addition to this, there's the small matter that I don't actually own any trainers. There just didn't seem to be any point in buying any, what with me being so resolutely against running for the sake of it.

I am of course going to be sponsored to perform this feat of endurance. With all of the proceeds going to... some medical charity or other. You see, to add insult to injury, I agreed to this act of insanity whilst a bit tipsy and I can't actually remember what I'm raising money for. I think that it has something to do with sick children. Just thinking of those poor little buggers, coughing and spluttering as the disease of my girlfriend's mate's choice consumes them is of course the fuel for the fire that is my new found sense of altruism. It has nothing to do with the beers I chugged attempting to be rid of the taste of "low fat wine". On a related note, after trying my girlfriend's low fat wine, I would now happily perform a 'fun' run to raise enough money to have all of the low fat wine in the world loaded onto a rocket and launched into the sun. If you want to watch the calories, here's a little tip for you, stop drinking wine. You also might want to consider getting some exercise, say an eight and half mile 'fun' run.....

General bothering of people for money in a self-righteous "doing it for the kids" way will commence shortly, just as soon as I know which particular ailment I'm stamping out for humanity.

New Blog

2010-03-29T09:48:00.001+01:00

They've changed the settings on my blog and I appear to be unable to fix my website, (their account management software appears to have gone titsup).

So here is a brand new place for my drivel. Enjoy!