Do not read!

If you're a *cough* regular *cough* reader, you might notice a new totally clickable button to the right - "So you've had a threatening letter". This is a new initiative from the Libel Reform Campaign, a U.K. organisation campaigning, oddly enough, for libel reform. The problem lies in the rather draconian libel laws in England, where costs for a court case can easily be hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds, and the odds are stacked way in favour of the claimant (accuser). People and organisations around the world now use the threat of libel in England - regardless of whether the material was written in England or whether either party is English - to silence any criticism of them, as most people will cave and remove the offending material and/or make a public apology rather than risk the horror of the English courts.

Our libel laws allow people accused of funding terrorism or dumping toxic waste in Africa to silence their critics whilst ‘super-injunctions’ stop the public from even knowing that such allegations exist. We need to reform our libel laws now, and that’s why we’re launching a national campaign to persuade our politicians to do so. Jonathan Heawood, Director of English PEN

This sucks, and Sense about Science, Index on Censorship and English PEN have taken it upon themselves to get the law changed, so that the outcomes are fairer and the costs are reduced. It seems to be working too, and it will truly be a great day when I can call someone a cocksucker* with impunity; I'm making a list for just such an occasion. In the meantime, bloggers, journalists, scientists and others will continue to sweat over whether to publish valid criticisms at the risk of being financially ruined by a stupid system in an otherwise lovely country. Hence the "Bloggers and libel law" guide, which is a handy information source for anyone accused of libel, and also a great heads-up for anyone who writes on the web.

Seeing as though I regularly criticise people on this very website, and having followed the cases of Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh with interest, I admit that I was a little concerned for my own skin. I feel much better after reading the guide, however, because I now know that I am fully protected from all risk of libel by the fact that nobody actually reads this blog.

Limitation period is the time limit after you publish something that someone can bring an action for defamation against you. Currently this is one year. In the case of writing published on the Internet the limitation period of one year begins again every time someone clicks on the blog post or online article. This is known as the multiple publication rule.

If you have read this far, please leave a comment along the lines of "I promise not to sue Daryl under any circumstances, even if he accuses me of orally interfering with male chickens. Infact, I will forget everything I just read for a period of exactly one year." Just to be sure.

*the word "cocksucker" may not be considered "fair comment" when the libel reform bill is finally passed, but we can all pray that it will.

CHOICE Shonkys

The latest edition of CHOICE magazine features the 2010 Shonkys, "the year's dodgiest products, services and companies". This is yet another example of why I wish I worked for CHOICE, dagnammit. Here are some of my favourites:

• Nurofen - for producing a range of caplets (for migraine, period pain, back pain etc.) that are in fact, identical, and which cost almost twice as much as Nurofen Zavance, also identical.
• Coles - for their Curtis Stone MasterCreations $10 meals, including the $7.76 Coq au Vin, the price of which includes the Coq but not the Vin. CHOICE calls this "The CHOICE Shonky Ten buck blow-out", but I think they should have called it "The CHOICE Shonky for being a coq".
• Power Balance - for, well, doing nothing, for $60.
• LG - for rigging their fridges so that they went into energy saving mode under official testing conditions, artificially improving their energy star-rating.

Good work CHOICE. Always looking out for the little guy... by kicking the big guy in the nuts just as he's about to stick the little guy's head in the toilet.

Sometimes, however, the little guy doesn't want to be saved, and sticks his own head in the toilet and presses flush. As CHOICE says of Power Balance

After the Australian Skeptics demonstrated on national TV that it didn't do anything, sales skyrocketed.

Can I recommend a Placebo Band instead. Identical, only $2 and 100% guaranteed to work just as well as a Power Balance Bracelet.

For sale: Doubt.

"Doubt is our product"  Internal memo, Brown & Williamson (subsidiary of British American Tobacco), 1969.

Science is hard! I know, dude, from experience. And climate science is really hard! It takes thousands of clever people and huge expense, but great work is being done. Uncertainties remain, however, and they always will.

Denying, or casting doubt on, science is a piece of piss in comparison. Whether it is the health effects of tobacco or DDT, or the severity of acid rain, the ozone hole or anthropogenic global warming, doubt is a commodity, and it is serious business.

U.S. science historian Naomi Oreskes, currently on an Australian tour promoting her new book Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to Global Warming (coauthored with Eric Conway), laid out the tricks in a few simple dot points at her recent presentation at the State Library of Victoria. She calls this "the tobacco strategy", as it was in the arena of big tobacco vs science that these skills were honed by men such as those who founded the George C. Marshall institute and later became key players in the climate change denialist industry. She lists five simple tricks:

1. Cherry picking
2. Using data out of context
3. Personal attacks
4. Pressuring journalists to "publish the other side"
5. Finding the tiny handful of dissenting scientists and promoting the hell out of them

And that pretty much covers every argument you will ever hear a global warming denialist make, although I would add a sixth: lying.

To be clear, the facts of global warming are pretty much beyond reasonable doubt, and many of them are not at all new: 1850s, John Tyndall establishes that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas; early 1900s, Svante Arrhenius postulates that burning fossil fuels could increase atmospheric CO₂ and lead to global warming; 1960s, confirmation that atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are increasing; 1979, a consensus position of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that

Climate change will result from man's combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.

And that statement holds true to this day (although it should be changed to "climate change is resulting..."), even though many of the details are still a little vague. As Oreskes puts it

There are big trees of uncertainty in a forest of robust scientific certainty.

What can you see?

Online polls. Seriously?

"Online poll sends message to Brumby" was the headline on theage.com.au last Friday, followed by the rather startling results of a Victorian election poll, showing the Coalition on 40% support, the Greens on 36% and the Labor party trailing badly on 18%. This seemed odd, given that the Labor party have led every poll I can remember since they came to power over a decade ago, and the Greens never get more than about 15%. What had suddenly changed so much?

An online poll on theage.com.au has sent a message to the Brumby government, with Labor heavily trailing both the Coalition and the Greens.

An online poll? On theage.com.au? This is newsworthy?

I find them incredibly irritating, but The Age loves online polls; it feels like every second article has a poll attached. A quick glance just now shows the following polls linked from their front page

• Which party will get your vote in the November 27 Victorian State Election? (still there, 40,000 votes later, with Labor still on 18%)
• Do you support Labor's plan to send Year 9 students away from home for two weeks? (50:50)
• Do how-to-vote cards influence where you send your preferences? (No)

and from the story of the day

• Should Steve be disciplined for his actions? (No)

The Age rightly adds the following disclaimer to each of these polls

These polls are not scientific and reflect the opinion only of visitors who have chosen to participate.

Polls like this serve no purpose other than to give readers the opportunity to participate in some kind of debate, or at least give them the impression that they are participating. They do not even necessarily represent the opinion of the general readership of the site. Poll crashing; when a well-known blogger or such instructs their (potentially) tens of thousands of readers to vote in a particular way, en masse, can devestate polls. Essentially, online polls are a bit of fun for those that are into that kind of thing. There is, however, no excuse for publishing them in an article as if they have a bearing on the coming election.

While not a scientific survey of voters' intentions on November 27, the results of the online poll will concern many Labor supporters as the party attempts to gain a record fourth term in government. 

Tomorrow's edition of The Age will feature the latest Nielsen poll, which will give a clear indication of the thoughts of the voting public.

These results are meaningless but we just wanted to scare you a bit, ha ha. Oh, and don't forget to buy our paper tomorrow. I guess they had to do something while they waited an entire day for the results of the real, scientific poll. And what did the latest Nielson poll show? Labor 38%, Coalition 40%, Greens 16%, with Labor leading the Coalition 52% to 48% on a two-party preferred basis.

Professional pollsters use sophisticated techniques to ensure that those they poll cover a representative cross-section of the electorate. Online polls require that participants have the ability to click on a small, round button. They don't even need to know how to read.

I think the best thing we can all do is just ignore these online polls, and they will, quite literally, go away. But this is just my opinion. What do you think? Have your say in the comments, or vote now on the poll on the right.

Publish or Perish

The above phrase strikes both fear and loathing into the hearts of any scientist, especially one *sob* who is not yet established and does not have a reputation to precede them. Scientists are largely judged on their publication output: the number, quality and impact of these publications is probably the key determinant of career progression. Needless to say, the pressure to publish is immense, and the temptation to cut corners is omnipresent. One way to cut corners is to avoid peer-review, a problematic but “the best we’ve got” process whereby experts in the field review research papers and give their opinions on the quality of the work, and any changes that they think need to be made before it should be published. This is supposed to improve the finished publication and weed out poor quality work or outright wrong work.

How does one avoid this process? Publish in a journal or newsletter that doesn’t have peer review, or write a book, or publish original research on a blog. The problem is, employers aren’t stupid, and other scientists aren’t stupid. If you publish original research in low quality or non-peer-reviewed literature, your research will be either ignored or belittled, as will your reputation. This is what I like to call (ever since I just made it up) WOT publishing: Waste of Time publishing. I’ll give you a few examples that I've come across recently.

VDM verlag is a German publisher that describes itself thus

VDM publishes academic research worldwide - at no cost to our authors. We specialize in publishing theses, dissertations, and research projects. From the large number of research papers that are continuously being completed in higher education, we identify those which - due to their quality and practical relevance - are suitable for publication. In this way, the latest research is conveyed quickly and tailored to the needs of the respective specialist audience.

They also spam researchers offering to publish their books. Recently, my university circulated an email to all researchers with the following warnings about this organisations:

1. The quality of these books is very low.
2. They encourage academics to purchase copies of their own text, and appear to gain most of their income from this (“at no cost to our authors”, eh?).
3. They are not peer reviewed.
4. They pay abysmal royalties.
5. This company is becoming more well known and publishing with them makes you (and the university) look like a fool.

InTech - “Open Access publisher in the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine”, uses a slightly different method. It charges an upfront fee of €470 for each “book chapter”, using the open-access model, which is a perfectly legitimate publishing model – where the author pays to allow free access to their research papers – increasingly used in the traditional, peer-reviewed publishing system, that is being bastardised by companies such as this into a form of vanity publishing. I, myself, recently received a rather flattering invitation to publish with them:

You are invited to participate in this book project based on your paper "Digital recordings of gas-vesicle collapse used to measure turgor pressure and cell-water relations of cyanobacterial cells", your publishing history and the quality of your research.

I knew nothing about this company then, and was a little suspicious, having written exactly one paper that mentions hydraulic conductivity, and even then it was only mentioned in a small section, and the results were inconclusive. I ignored the email and moved on with my life. Exactly one week later, a reminder came:

I contacted you by email last week, and since we have not as yet received a response from you, I am taking the liberty of resending as we are aware that you may be engaged in other activities or my message may not have successfully reached you. If you are interested in participating, may I respectfully ask that you respond at your convenience in order to secure your participation in this project.

Which I duly ignored. Then, exactly one week later, I received yet another reminder with the subject “Feedback required”. This time I was a little peeved and did a little snooping into InTech and found a fascinating article by Richard Poynder featuring an interview with the CEO of InTech, or is it Sciyo, or are they the same company? Regardless of that odd situation, the article confirmed my fears that this is not a publisher that I should be submitting articles too, let along paying to take my articles. I then looked into them a bit further, found some interesting titbits, and, somewhat cheekily, perhaps naively, wrote an email reply.

Dear X,

Thank you for your continued invitations to write a chapter for the book "Hydraulic Conductivity". Before I accept this offer, I have a few concerns that I am hoping that you can clear up. I was previously unaware of your organisation, InTech, and I hope that you understand that I need to be fully convinced that I should take the time to write a scientific article to publish with you. No editor is listed for this book. I will need to know the name of the editor so that I can form an opinion of the likely quality of this book. Also, your website says my paper will be indexed and abstracted in major repositories and scientific search engines, yet I searched for a random article from one of your books (Zhiwei Zhao and Helong Jiang (2010). Enzyme-based Electrochemical Biosensors, Biosensors, Pier Andrea Serra (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-7619-99-2, InTech), and it did not appear on Google Scholar, Web of Science or Scirus. Can you explain this? Also, the lack of peer review concerns me. I am a firm advocate of open access, but only when it also adheres to the highest scientific standards. I note that your company does not appear to be a member of OASPA, and therefore there appears to be no independent verification of the standard of your publications. Perhaps I am being presumptive, but it appears to me that this is simply a way for researchers to easily publish poor quality research, for a price, and simply a money making exercise on the part of your company.

If you are able to allay my fears, I would be happy to consider preparing an article for you book. If not, please stop pestering me, and please remove my email address from your database.

Regards,

Daryl Holland.

P.S. The article I mentioned above has a spelling mistake in the first sentence, and the first 17 words are copied word-for-word from the cited article.

And that was that. Well, at least I thought it was, until exactly one week later (yes, it is starting to get a bit creepy), I received a reply.

Dear Dr. Holland,

I will gladly answer Your questions.

And he does answer a couple of them, badly. Apparently the editor is not, and will not be named because

In the past, we have had some organizational difficulties when each of potential author would contact the editor directly.

Like there is something wrong with an author or potential author wanting to talk to the editor of their book. Regarding the quality of the book

...once the abstract will be reviewed and in case there will be a need to make changes, the Book Editor will give You clear instructions

i.e. no proper peer review. Regarding the indexing of articles

All the content from the Sciyo platform is currently being shifted to the main websites of the publishing group – intechweb.org and intechopen.com (our reading platform). That is the main reason why You could not "locate" the mentioned articles.

And I was sent the following two links to prove that they are indexed. The first was simply a Google search for “site:sciyo.com pdf” and was therefore irrelevant, and the second was a Google Scholar search for “Search within articles citing Iwahashi: Robots that learn language: A developmental approach to situated human-robot conversations” which, as far as I could tell, did not refer to a single InTech publication.

In conclusion (unless I receive another email reminder in exactly one week, in which case I may well be killed by a pale, dark-haired Japanese girl), avoid at all costs (especially if that cost is €470), and make that spam filter work for you. I really cannot summarise the situation any better than Phil Davis

Most of the journals in which I aspire to publish never ask me for a manuscript. They don’t need to. They receive thousands of voluntary contributions each year and turn most away.

Dog food

Recently I sent my dog to a commercial kennel, and as I was chatting with the owner, he asked what kind of dog food I used. The conversation went pretty much like this:

"Mostly dry stuff, with a few leftovers thrown in occasionally"

"What kind of dry food?"

"Whatever's cheap. Usually Pedigree I guess"

"Do you eat McDonald's everyday?"

"No"

"Well that's what you're feeding your dog. Dogs fed on that stuff end up with all kinds of problems as they get older, like liver disease. If you are using dry dog food, buy the most expensive stuff you can find. It still works out pretty cheap in the end. Frankly, you make me sick!"

(I may have made up that last sentence). So I left my dog and went on holiday feeling like a prick and a cheapskate. But then I started to think about it and wondered, is there any evidence that the pricey dog foods are actually any better for dogs than the cheaper one's? I figured a couple of hours of research to justify my tight-arseiness would be time well spent, and if it turned out I was the worst dog parent in the world, well, I suppose I could fix that.

Compare the brand I currently buy from Kmart, Pedigree Real Mince and Vegies (approx. $20 for 12 kg, on special, of course - less than $2/kg), with the one they sell at my local Vet, Hill's Science Diet Adult Lamb Meal & Rice Recipe (about $120 for 15 kg - $8/kg).

First, let's see what they say about their own products.

Pedigree

"... our Adult Complete Nutrition recipe is specially formulated to provide adult dogs with the complete and balanced nourishment they need to live long and healthy lives."

Hill's

"Hill's® Science Diet® Adult Lamb Meal & Rice Recipe dog food provides precisely balanced nutrition to maintain lean muscle and promote digestive health."

Both make pretty much the same claims regarding balanced nutrition, so no help there. What about the ingredients list?

Pedigree

Meat & meat by-products (beef, poultry & lamb); wheat &/or sorghum &/or barley; wheat bran, glycerol, sunflower oil; beet pulp; salt; minerals (including calcium, zinc, iron, potassium); safflower seed; vitamins (including A, C, D3, E, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, B5, B6, folic acid, B12); preservatives; antioxidants and food colourings

Hill's

Lamb Meal, Brewers Rice, Brown Rice, Whole Grain Wheat, Whole Grain Sorghum, Corn Gluten Meal, Animal Fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols and citric acid), Cracked Pearled Barley, Chicken Liver Flavor, Flaxseed, Dried Beet Pulp, Soybean Oil, Potassium Chloride, Iodized Salt, L-Lysine, Choline Chloride, Vitamin E Supplement, vitamins (L-Ascorbyl-2-Polyphosphate (source of vitamin C), Vitamin E Supplement, Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate, Vitamin A Supplement, Calcium Pantothenate, Biotin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Folic Acid, Vitamin D3 Supplement), Taurine, minerals (Ferrous Sulfate, Zinc Oxide, Copper Sulfate, Manganous Oxide, Calcium Iodate, Sodium Selenite), L-Tryptophan, preserved with Mixed Tocopherols and Citric Acid, L-Threonine, Phosphoric Acid, Beta-Carotene, Rosemary Extract

Fairly similar, with meat products first, followed by grains, fats/oils, salt, minerals and vitamins. Hill's certainly has more ingredients listed, but is that better?

Any other claims I should know about?

Pedigree

Omega 3 + 6: Shiny Coat
Dental Kibble: Healthy Teeth and Gums
Beet Pulp: Healthy Digestion
Antioxidants: Immune Support

Hill's

Vitamin C + E: Healthy immune function
High quality ingredients, such as lamb meal: easy to digest
Omega-3 and Omega-6: Healthy skin and radiant coat
High quality lean proteins: lean muscle and ideal body weight
Controlled levels of minerals including sodium, magnesium and phosphorus. Supplemented with taurine and soluble and insoluble fiber: Healthy vital organs

Pretty much the same, yet again. How about the nutritional information

Pedigree

Protein 22.0 %
Fat 10.0 %

Hill's

Protein 24.6 %
Fat 16.8 %

and a bunch of other stuff (carbohydrates, sodium etc.). Interestingly, neither mentions anything about % of recommended daily allowance, because I guess there is no such thing for dogs.

Hill's sells itself as scientific, but what's to say that's not just a marketing gimmick. After all, Mars Inc. (maker of Pedigree) funds the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, "unarguably the world's leading authority on pet care and nutrition", so I can't even separate them on the sciencey stuff.

Interestingly, neither of these companies publicise any actual research publications that give details into their food development, and I couldn't find any using Google Scholar, so we basically have to accept their word for it, or do we. Thankfully, the good people at Choice have looked into the independent research, and they conclude:

Do we need to buy premium pet food? Unless your pet has specific dietary problems, probably not. Any pet food that says it's 'complete and balanced' contains all the required nutrients at appropriate levels for the maintenance of healthy pets.

That'll do me.

Some call me a cheapskate, I call them suckers. Both are probably right.

Watts up with these speakers?

The Climate Sceptics Party has just announced the Watts Up with the Climate? Australian Tour featuring three prominent sceptics (climate sceptics, not, you know, the real kind, who actually look at the balance of evidence). So who are these speakers? All prominent and well respected climate scientists no doubt. Let's take a look, shall we?

Anthony Watts
A television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air, Anthony Watts operates a weather technology business and runs one of the most popular science blogs on the internet, wattsupwiththat.com. He will present advance results on his surface stations project to photographically survey every one of the 1221 USHCN weather stations in the USA used as a “high quality network” that has fallen into neglect.

"Television meteorologist" is a rather heady title, and seeing as though he has no formal scientific training, I think the better description is "weather presenter", like Livinia Nixon. And I'm sure he wouldn't want you to confuse his weather technology business which makes "weather graphics systems for use on television broadcasts" with the kind of technology that meteorologists use to predict the weather. He does have some nice photos of weather stations, and some analysis suggesting that weather stations near buildings, for example, are hotter than those out in a field. This is important work, because no-one in climatology has ever before taken these problems into account.

David Archibald
An Australian scientist operating in the fields of climate science and cancer research, and the author of “Solar Cycle 24: Why the world will continue cooling and why carbon dioxide won’t make a detectable difference”.

Mr. Archibald received a bachelor of science in 1979, so yes, that means he can call himself a scientist. But what has he been doing since then?

David Archibald is a Perth, Australia-based scientist operating in the fields of cancer research, oil exploration and climate science. After graduating in science at Queensland University in 1979, Mr Archibald worked in oil exploration in Sydney and then joined the financial industry as a stock analyst. Mr Archibald has been CEO of multiple oil and mineral exploration companies operating in Australia. He has published a number of papers on the solar influence on climate, and is a director of the Lavoisier Society, a group of Australians promoting rational science in public policy.

He is also the author of what one commentator labelled "The worst climate science paper ever of all time anywhere" (it is really bad). But what's with the cancer research? I turns out he and others have developed a "a new capsule which may help prostate cancer sufferers", made from "...well know vegetables mainly broccoli and chilli [sic]." Just to let you know, I have also developed a new capsule which may help prostate cancer sufferers, except mine contains two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. I'm pretty sure the two are equally effective.

And last...

David Stockwell, Ph.D.
Former U.S. scientist, living in Emerald, QLD, and author of the book Niche Modeling, David Stockwell presents the “known knowns” of climate change, especially for the Central Highlands environment, mining, pastoral and agricultural industries.

It always seems odd to me when people state their names followed by Ph.D., instead of just using Dr, but who am I to judge? Here is what else he has to say about himself.

After receiving a Ph.D. in Ecosystem Dynamics from the Australian National University in 1992, I worked as a consultant (WHO, Parks and Wildlife, Land and Natural Resources services) until moving to the San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California San Diego in 1997. There I helped to develop computational and data intensive infrastructure for ecological niche modeling mainly using museum collections data with grants from the NSF, USGS and DOT. I developed the GARP (Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production) system making contributions in many fields: modeling of invasive species, epidemiology of human diseases, the discovery of seven new species of chameleon in Madagascar, and effects on species of climate change. I have published in major journals and was judged by the US Immigration Service as an Outstanding Researcher, recognized internationally as outstanding in their academic field.

So he is a legitimate scientist. Not a climate scientist, but a real scientist. However, does anyone think that last sentence is very odd? Next time I want a glowing reference, remind me to ask for one from the US Immigration Service.

Finally, it is only fair to check the contribution of each of these speakers to the vast scientific literature on the causes of climate change. I'll only look at peer reviewed journal articles, because as we all know, real scientists simply do not publish original work in books, newsletters or blogs. As far as I can tell, Watts is unpublished, while Archibald has one paper (see above), and Stockwell has three papers about predicting the effects of climate change on biodiversity, but only one paper regarding actual climate change scenarios. Interestingly, the only two peer reviewed scientific papers that I could find by these presenters both appeared in the journal Energy and Environment. I had not heard of this journal, so I looked it up in the list 20,000+ journals catalogued and ranked by the Australian Government for the purpose of assessing the quality of academic output in Australian Universities. It wasn't there.

Be sure to check out the national tour of ex-TV weatherman, oil prospector and Outstanding Researcher^TM "to hear all sides and make up your own mind".

Posted by Daryl Holland, Ph.D.

Man pisses in bath

Sometimes I like to rename headlines to more accurately convey the true nature of a story. The original headline from the Sydney Morning Herald is:

How does he live? Starving yogi 'blessed by goddess' astounds doctors

An 83 year old Indian holy man by the name of Prahlad Jani who claims to have lived without food and water for the past 74 years...

...spent a fortnight in a hospital in the western India state of Gujarat under constant surveillance from a team of 30 medics equipped with cameras and closed circuit television.

During the period, he neither ate nor drank and did not go to the toilet.

"We still do not know how he survives," neurologist Sudhir Shah told reporters after the end of the experiment.

It is still a mystery what kind of phenomenon this is.

The long-haired and bearded yogi was sealed in a hospital in the city of Ahmedabad in a study initiated by India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the state defence and military research institute.

To analyse this claim, we need to break it into two parts. Firstly, pretty much anybody can go 15 days without food, so even if that part was true, it is fairly unremarkable. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to go without water for more than a few days, even under the best of conditions, so that is the claim that needs to be analysed.

"(Jani's) only contact with any kind of fluid was during gargling and bathing periodically during the period," G. Ilavazahagan, director of India's Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), said in a statement.

Uh, A bath? They conducted a scientifically rigourous study into a man who claims to drink no water, and they allowed him to gargle and take baths?

Still, I guess if there was a reasonable physiological explanation for this man’s gift, I might give it a bit more credence.

If Jani does not derive energy from food and water, he must be doing that from energy sources around him, sunlight being one," said Shah.

Makes sense. Trees use sunlight as an energy source. Hmmm, but trees also require all kinds of nutrients, and copious amounts of, you guessed it, water.

Alternate headline:

Scientists confuse tree for man; tree enjoys bath

The researchers say that they will publish the full results in a few months. I’ll hold my breath until then, just because I can.

New Scientist fails maths.

A recent article in New Scientist online (I hope it doesn't/didn't get past the editors into the print version - oh wait, it says Magazine issue 2754, oops!) has the title "Search engine's dirty secret". In it physicist James Clarage explains to us the laws of thermodynamics and does some simple calculations to conclude that every Google search uses 100 Watt hours of energy,

so one search has the same energy cost as turning on a 100-watt light bulb for an hour.

But does it? Really? Does that number sound way too high to anybody else?

Ignoring the clunky use of the laws of thermodynamics to explain in an extremely round-a-bout way that computers use electricity (duh?), I'd like to pick over his calculation, which contains three serious errors, even though it only has three terms. His simple (very simple; too simple) argument basically goes like this: take the amount of power Google's servers use at any one time and divide this by the number of searches every hour to give an energy cost per search. This is the calculation he makes...

(1,000,000 servers)×(1,000 Watts of power per server)/(10,000,000 searches/hour)=(100 Watt hours/search)

Pretty straight forward, but where do these numbers come from? The first term, the number of servers Google has, is an estimate from Gartner research, and I have no reason, or need, to dispute it.

The second states that each server constantly uses 1 kW of power. This is a conveniently round number, but is it true? A simple search (with the lights off, I promise) reveals the following about Google's servers...

The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

Er, so that would be 216 W per server, at maximum power. So already we've gotten our cost per search down to about 21 watt hours, or about 12 minutes of leaving the light on, assuming that every one of those 1 million severs is running at full capacity 24 hours a day - not a very convincing assumption.

The 10 million searches/hour figure is an estimate based on the number of searches in the USA in February 2009 measured by comScore, and once again I have no gripe with this number. Actually, yes I do. It's probably accurate, in and of itself, but it is the number of searches in the USA, and Google services the entire world. A better figure, also from comScore comes from December 2009, when Google served 88 billion searches worldwide, approximately ONE HUNDRED MILLION *inserts little finger into side of mouth with great comedic effect* per hour. So now our figure drops to 2.1 watt hours, or about 1 minute of power of your 100-watt light globe.

But that's not all. Unbeknowst to some, apparently, Google's servers do more than just process searches. In fact, that is probably only a small fraction of what they do, given that they first have to index every website on the planet, as well as running Gmail, Google Docs, Analytics, Adsense, Blogger, YouTube etc. etc.

To conclude, I really cannot understand why New Scientist (a generally high quality science magazine, that I have enjoyed for many years) would publish an opinion piece featuring a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on figures that are wrong by orders of magnitude and using assumptions that border on the ridiculous, when they could have just, you know, asked Google how much energy there web searches use.

How efficient is our infrastructure? Google-designed data centers use about half the energy of a typical data center. As a result, the energy used per Google search is very small; to be precise, we currently use about 1kJ (0.0003 kWh) of energy to answer the average query.

Which would power a 100-watt light globe for approximately 10 seconds, or, as Google puts it...

In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query

Touché.

The definition of "conspiracy theory"

I have recently taken to commenting on an anti-vaccination website that goes by the name Child Health Safety (I won't link to the site because I think it, along with it's ilk are dangerous, but obviously Google can find it for you in a jiffy). While bringing a skeptical view to these kinds of sites is a kind of pointless exercise, in that I am fairly certain that I will not be changing the views of anyone who regularly visits them, still, sometimes I just can't help myself. And, to their credit, the authors of this particular website at least allow dissenting comments (and always reply to them), unlike other similar websites that militantly moderate comments to remove any contrary remarks (see here).

After a couple of comments where I tried to point out studies that contradicted the studies that they were promoting, and they pointed out studies that contradicted my studies that contradicted their studies, etc. (you know how it goes), I linked to a British study that shows that full spectrum autism rates are similar in all age groups, which contradicts the website's claim that autism rates in children are going through the roof, and by a rather tenuous correlation, vaccines are to blame. Here is my comment:

It appears that 1% of 30 year olds have ASD, in line with the percentage of children currently diagnosed with the disorder, and way higher than the diagnosis rate 25 years ago. It is sad that many of these adults were not correctly diagnosed as children and did not (and still don’t) receive the support that they really need.

With the editor replying

[ED: We suggest you read our article here regarding the adult "autistics". They don't exist:- UK “Faked” National Autism Data To Declare MMR Vaccine “Safe”]

Once I got over the crassness of their suggestion that adult autism sufferers don't exist, I read their article (hint: the title pretty much says it all). I then somewhat cheekily replied

Hi again. I’ve read your article and I’ve read the NHS report. I read one highly informative, well written, properly justified and statistically sound report, and one rambling conspiracy theory. I’ll leave you to decide which is which.

And here is where it got interesting, because, leaving aside all notions of whether what they were writing was correct or not, they were, undoubtedly alleging a massive conspiracy of universities, public health bodies and the government to - as they say - "Declare MMR Vaccine "Safe"". I cannot really see another explanation. Apparently I hit a nerve, though, as the editor replied

[ED: Hah. When people fall back on alleging "conspiracy theories" you know the argument is won. Thanks for your "balanced" summary.
Others can make their own minds up on the basis of the overwhelmingly clear evidence and facts. You will clearly never be able to throw off the blinkers.]

OK, so obviously I was being dismissive with my claim, as we all know that the term "conspiracy theory" has taken on a pejorative meaning in modern times, but still I felt aggrieved that they would deny this. So I decided to push the point home (and hopefully regain the high ground I had lost with my flippant remark above) and in my next comment I gave a straightforward question.

Just one more question, and then I’ll go away. Do you believe that there is a conspiracy by the government (and public service), multiple universities (and their researchers) and pharmaceutical companies in multiple countries to use vast sums of taxpayer money to provide increasingly large doses of ineffective vaccines that are known to harm children?

And the inevitable reply (broken up so can I comment on each point)

[ED: Daryl, thanks. Even when you are presented with the kind of evidence shown in this article you are unable to accept it and fall back on accusing people of conspiracy theories. No one needs them.

Firstly, I don't believe I was 'accusing' anybody of anything, I was simply stating a self-evident fact and then asking a (I admit somewhat rhetorical) question. But the clincher came with the next statement.

There is a long and well documented history of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and commercial medicine running through many levels, including government and medical publishing. You can start with the thalidomide scandal, psychiatric drugs and run through them all including recent ones like Vioxx.

Reading this, the only conclusion I can come to that doesn't involve deceit is that there was a typo in their response. Where they wrote "No one needs them." they meant to say "No one needs them. Oh, except this one". It goes on.

Do you believe they never happened? Some people believe the holocaust never happened. Is that the category you are in?

*swallows own vomit*

Who needs conspiracy theories when corruption, greed and self interest work pretty well all by themselves.]

While I can totally understand why people are uncomfortable with the label "conspiracy theorist" the definition of the term itself cannot really be debated. It is not just crazy people that believe in conspiracy theories, and not all of them are wrong, either. For example, I genuinely believe that there is a conspiracy by some highly polluting industries, some scientist and some government officials to deliberately and dishonestly promote doubt about the science of global warming, for their own personal gain. That is my conspiracy theory, and I'm sticking to it until proven wrong.

So in conclusion I would like to reclaim the term "conspiracy theory" from its current form as a slur and return it to its traditional definition, as a succinct, descriptive term. I would also like to invent a new term, "conspiracy theory denialists" to describe someone - such as the aforementioned Ed. - who refuses to admit that they believe a conspiracy is afoot when they obviously do. I would also like to submit the following definition to whichever dictionary will have it (first part taken from here):

Conspiracy theory (n.) A theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act.
E.g. “There is a long and well documented history of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and commercial medicine running through many levels, including government and medical publishing.”

What's you conspiracy theory, or are you a conspiracy theory denialist?