Dave's Articles and Stuff

davblog: Greens and Science

2010-07-29T18:48:50Z

At the time of the European election last year, there was some debate in the blogosphere about the Green Party's attitude to science. Holfordwatch picked up on a report which said that the Greens supported the continued use of "alternative medicine" in the NHS. Rational people, of course, gave up all idea of voting for them.

To their credit, the Greens responded to this by clarifying (and, actually, seeming to completely drop) some of these policies. In this Q&A in the Guardian, their press officer, Scott Redding, was asked:

If the balance of evidence suggests that a treatment does not perform any better than placebo, should it be supported by the NHS?

He replied:

The short answer is No. Our policy is that any medicine or treatment available on the NHS should be backed up by scientific evidence. Some new treatments, and some currently available on the NHS, will pass this test, others will not.

Of course, you might well think that it doesn't matter what the Green Party thinks on this as they'll never have the power to enact their policies. And you'd be right to think that.

But they do have an MP now. Caroline Lucas is the MP for Brighton Pavilion. And whilst she's not exactly driving government policy, she does have the same ways to make her views known as all other MPs, including signing Early Day Motions.

So, given the clear direction indicated by Scott Redding, it's disappointing to see the she has signed one of David Tredinnick's nonsense EDMs on homeopathy (as discussed previously on this blog).

On one hand, the Greens clearly say that they won't support medical treatments without scientific evidence to support them. And then their first ever MP goes and gives her support to something that is on a the same level as witchcraft. If I was one of the enlightened people who voted for her back in May, I'd be feeling pretty pissed off about now.

I had hoped that, at least, the Green Party would prove themselves to be above the lies and spin that characterise so much of British politics. I'm really disappointed to see those hopes dashed.

Update: Lucas has received a lot of comment over this on Twitter in the last few hours. She has posted what I can only assume is supposed to be an explanation for her actions:

EDM is about lack of BMA's consultation & argues that local NHS better placed to know patient needs, based on objective clinical assessment

It's nonsense of course. Tredinnick is a well-known parliamentary advocate for homeopathy. His EDM is purely about supporting the provision of quackery on the NHS. Tredinnick is deliberately inventing scientific controversy where none exists. The science is settled. Homeopathy does not work.

If patients have been told that homeopathy is worth investigating, then their doctors should make it clear to them that they have been misled. Doctors should not be encouraging this delusion.

davblog: Government Ignores Science

2010-07-26T13:03:55Z

Section 47 of the Government Response to the Science and Technology Committee's Evidence Check on homeopathy:

We note the Committee’s view that allowing for the provision of homeopathy may risk seeming to endorse it, and we will keep the position under review. However, we do not believe that this risk amounts to a risk to patient trust, choice or safety, nor do we believe that the risk is significant enough for the Department to take the unusual step of removing PCTs’ flexibility to make their own decisions. We believe that providing appropriate information for commissioners, clinicians and the public, and ensuring a strong ethical code for clinicians, remain the most effective ways to ensure quality outcomes, patient satisfaction and the appropriate use of NHS funding.

So basically no change. Our new government is just as capable of ignoring scientific evidence as the old one. And the NHS will continue to squander millions on sugar pills.

I expect I'll come back and fill this in with some more detail when I've calmed down a little.

davblog: Petition Closed Prematurely

2010-07-16T08:01:05Z

Earlier this year, I created a petition on the (then) government's petition web site. The petition called for the government to fully implement the recommendations of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's Evidence Check on Homeopathy - basically calling on the government to stop wasting money on homeopathy.

The petition was due to be open for signatures for a year. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake as no matter who was in government, they would have made up their mind about the issue long before the petition closed.

But since the general election everything has changed. All of the petitions were closed to new signatures during the election campaign and they didn't re-open once the new government was in place. Instead the web site explained that the new government was considering the best way to proceed with the site. The front page of the site now says:

With a new Government in place a review is taking place of online services, including e-petitions. We are committed to improving the e-petitions process and are looking at ways of ensuring that it functions as part of a cohesive approach to public debate and transparent government. A full announcement on how we plan to use these and other services across Government will be made as soon as this important work is completed.

It goes on to say:

Existing e-petitions, submitted to the previous administration, will not be carried forward to the new administration as part of this process. E-petitions that were live at the time of the election announcement on 6 April, when the e-petitions system was suspended, will therefore not be reopened for signatures. We are issuing responses to petitions that had exceeded the 500 signatures threshold as of 6 April 2010 and these can be viewed on the HMG e-petitions responses page.

So my petition has been closed. In the three or four months that it was open, over 1,600 people signed it. That means that we can expect some kind of response from the government, although it's not there yet and there's no indication of when we will receive it.

Thanks to everyone who signed the petition. Perhaps in this new cuts-driven regime removing finding for magic water on the NHS is an obvious way to save a few million quid.

davblog: Polite Discourse

2010-07-08T19:13:28Z

So today was the day that I was called a "sack of shit" by one of the UK's most popular political bloggers.

It was all pretty silly really. I didn't even really disagree with what he had written. I just pointed out that his blog entry had two completely unattributed quotations.

It's Iain's blog, of course, so it's completely up to him whether or not he wants to publish unattributed quotations. My point was that not to do so might lead people to wonder where they came from. It's so easy to link to sources on the web that if you don't you run the risk of arousing suspicion.

I found a reference for one of the quotes (it was a parliamentary Early Day Motion - they aren't hard to find), but Google came up blank for the other. I had assumed that it came from a blog post, but that no longer looked likely. I asked Iain if he had made it up. I didn't believe for a second that he had invented it (although, of course, he has previous in this area), I was just demonstrating the conclusions that it was possible to reach from the information he had made available.

And that's when he might have overreacted just a touch in his reply. A suspicious person might wonder why that touched such a nerve, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt (I'm sure he'd do the same for me). I pointed to his reply on Twitter and he responded:

@davorg Next time don't make groundless allegations. if you can't stand the heat, and all that...

I made no allegation, let alone a groundless one.

Bizarrely, even though he took such obvious umbrage at my question, he followed my advice and edited his blog post so that it included a link to the EDM. He also stated in his reply that the other quotation came from a private email. So I got all the answers I wanted. Which was nice.

When you're blogging you can choose the amount of reference material that you show to your readers. I like to link to any articles that I'm quoting and generally throw in as many links as possible to my sources so that my readers can make up their own minds about my interpretations of what I'm writing about. Other people deal in scurrilous rumour or unsubstantiated gossip. You wouldn't expect them to link to their sources. That's their choice. It's their blog. They can follow their own rules. Whatever makes them comfortable.

In my opinion, showing your sources is treating your readers as adults. It's trusting them to draw their conclusions about what you're writing. It's showing your working for extra credit. Giving your readers no information about your sources is treating them like idiots. It's a tabloid style of blogging and whenever I come across that style of blogging it makes me wonder what they are hiding.

In my mind, showing your sources equates to quality blogging. Not doing so is suspect.

I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I do, however, expect to be able to make these suggestions on one of the UK's most read political blogs without the blog author calling me a sack of shit.

That's just rude.

perl hacks: Modern Perl at OpenTech

2010-07-06T08:13:51Z

I mentioned a few months ago that I'd be running an "Introduction to Modern Perl" training course at YAPC::Europe this year. But in the interests of speaking outside of the Perl community as much as possible, I'm also going to be giving a slightly different version of that course at the OpenTech conference in London in September.

I say "slightly different", but that's a bit of an understatement. The original training course runs for six hours. The OpenTech talk is twenty minutes. But hopefully that will be long enough to introduce some people to many of the interesting things that are going on in the Perl world.

It you're going to be in London in September, then the OpenTech conference is always a lot of fun. I highly recommend that you come along. It's cheap too - just a fiver on the door.

davblog: Blog Nation 2010

2010-06-27T12:46:23Z

Yesterday, I was at Liberal Conspiracy's Blog Nation 2010 conference. This was a chance for left liberal bloggers to get together and discuss strategies we can adopt now that we find ourselves in opposition (or a minority partner in the coalition government).

Sunny has already blogged his thoughts on how the conference went. He asked for other people's thoughts/ These are mine.

It was great to meet so many liked-minded bloggers and to put faces to blogs that I've been reading for years. I also felt that most of the presentations and discussions were really useful and interesting. There were, however, a couple of area that I thought could be improved.

Pretty much all of the discussion centred on the messages that we can publish to counter the right-wing rhetoric we get from most of the media. This was all good stuff, but I couldn't help wondering if we were addressing the problem at the wrong level.

I have no doubt that we're all already doing what we can to publish these kinds of stories. I'm sure that we can all raise our game in this area, but don't believe that is the main problem that we have. The main problem is making sure that as many as possible are reading what we write. An d I was slightly disappointed that this issue was barely covered.

I have no easy solution to this problem. I suppose that we need to give some more thought to SEO. But I'm sure that there are other things that we can do to get our message in front of more people. I'd welcome a discussion on this topic at next year's Blog Nation. But in the meantime, feel free to add ideas in the comments below.

davblog: On the Intelligence of MPs

2010-06-25T12:12:46Z

It's easy to make cheap cracks about how stupid MPs are. The problem is that many of them seem determined to do nothing at all to counter this impression. Indeed, they often seem keen to reinforce it.

David Tredinnick (Con, Bosworth) is a particularly good example. He is a proponent of "complementary and alternative" medicine. This, of course, marks him out immediately as someone whose pronouncements on pretty much anything should be viewed with deep suspicion, but he likes to emphasise his idiocy by proposing Early Day Motions in support of homeopathy.

And it hasn't taken him long to stamp his brand of stupidity over the new parliamentary session. On Monday of this week he proposed four EDMs about homeopathy.

Each of these proposals is, of course, complete nonsense. They could only be written by someone with no understanding of science. If your MP is one of the (currently quite small) number of MPs who have signed these motions then I feel really sorry for you as your MP is obviously not quite as bright as you would no doubt want them to be.

There is, however, a brighter side to this. The new Lib Dem MP for Cambridge is Julian Huppert and he is obviously determined to continue the excellent work done in parliament by Evan Harris and he has proposed amendments to these motions which basically rip out the guts from the original motions and replace them with common sense (completely reversing the meaning of the motions in the process).They are 284A1, 285A1, 286A1 and 287A1.

I've written to my MP asking her to sign the amendments. I recommend that you do the same. Tell them that signing Tredinnick's original motions will lead to people they don't have the intelligence to do the job they were elected to do.

perl hacks: YAPC::Europe Talks Accepted

2010-06-23T07:49:25Z

The YAPC::Europe organisers said that they would tell speakers which talks had been accepted on July 1st. Well, it seems that the excitement was too much for them and they decided to do it a week earlier. Yesterday I got email telling me that some of my talks had been accepted and the list of accepted talks is now on the web site. As always, it looks like a really interesting conference.

I've had two twenty-minute talks accepted:

The Perl Community
The Perl community is a complex and interesting city. I've been exploring it for almost fifteen years and I'm not sure that I've been to every corner of it.

In this talk I'll attempt to guide you round some of the more interesting and useful parts of the Perl community. I'll point out some ancient monuments, some nice new areas and warn you about some places where you really shouldn't walk alone after dark.

Things I Learned From Having Users‎
When I first started releasing modules to CPAN it was great. I released modules that no-one used. I could release new versions as and when I wanted to.

Then people started using a couple of my modules. I started to get email about them. Suddenly my modules were no longer just for me. I had to deal with users.

In this talk I'll discuss how having users effects the way that you develop and release software. I'll also look at a few ways to keep on top of things.

I'm also doing my first lightning talk for several years:

‎Perl Vogue‎

You might not believe it to look at us, but the Perl community is a deeply fashionable place. If you're not using the currently fashionable modules in your code then people will be sneering at you behind your back.

Join Dave Cross for a quick review of the history of Perl fashion.

See you in Pisa.

davblog: Iain Dale Talks Balls

2010-06-14T11:52:57Z

Iain Dale has some new and interesting information about Labour Party leadership contender, Ed Balls. Apparently whilst he was at Oxford in the 80s, Balls was a member of the Conservative Association there.

Except, of course, the news isn't as new or interesting as Dale would have you believe. Dale quotes from an article in the Independent from July 2006 where Tory MP Philip Hollobone remembers Balls being a member of the association.

But, crucially, Dale "forgets" to link to the article in question so that his readers can check his sources for themselves. And after the bit that Dale quotes, the article goes on to say this:

"Ed hasn't exactly advertised the fact, but he's never sought to hide it either. It even featured in the jokes at his wedding," I'm told.

"He joined the Tories at Oxford because they used to book top-flight political speakers, and only members were allowed to attend their lectures.

"Ed was, however, also a member of the Labour Club. He was more active in that, and was always, at heart, a man of the left."

Dale leaps to the conclusion that because Balls was a member of the Conservative Association, he must have been a conservative. The unquoted section of the article makes it clear that Balls was a member of the association because they had interesting political meetings. The comments on Dale's blog post go further than this and make it clear that this is really common at Oxford - if you're interested in politics then you'll join a number of political societies whether or not you agree with their politics.

Obviously Dale is a Tory blogger, so you'd expect him to try to attack the Labour leadership candidates. But to sink to this level shows a certain level of desperation.

If you're going to base a blog post on an article that can be found on the web, then it's only common courtesy to link to that article so that your readers can read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions about what you're writing. Not doing so immediately makes people think that you're hiding something. Which, in this case, seems to be the case.

It's a nasty, tabloid way of reporting. And I hope that Dale aspires to be higher quality than that.

perl hacks: YAPC::Europe Talks

2010-06-11T15:05:54Z

The Call for Papers for YAPC::Europe closes in four days. If you're thinking of giving a talk in Pisa then this weekend would be a very good time to give it some serious thought.

I proposed four talks last night. I'm hoping that the organisers won't choose more than two of them, but I like to give them a bit of choice. The titles are as follows:

The Perl Community
Web Services for Fun and Profit
Things I Learned From Having Users
Perlanet Update

I've also submitted a proposal for a lightning talk called "Perl Fashion". It's been several years since I've given a lightning talk, so that'll be an interesting experience.

Don't forget that there are also training courses (including my course on Modern Perl).

Looking forward to the conference very much. Hope to see some of you there.