davblog

Does the pope read the Daily Mail? It seems possible given some of the contents of his speech at Westminster Hall today:

There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.

There's that favourite Daily Mail straw man, the war against Christmas. They'll be claiming tomorrow that it must be true because the pope says it is (he's infallible, you know). But it's not any more true today than it was yesterday. It's a pile of lies and exaggeration which is rolled out by the tabloids every year in order to scare the christians into toeing the party line.

It's getting earlier each year, too.

Update: And here, as expected, is the Mail's story on this:

The Pope issued a clarion call to defend Christianity last night, saying Christmas was at risk of being struck from the calendar.

Nonsense. It's all nonsense. No-one is offended by christmas. No-one is trying to ban or rebrand christmas.

Tabloid Watch has more about tabloid coverage of this idiocy and here's what Enemies of Reason has to say.

In his first speech after arriving in the UK, the pope said:

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a "reductive vision of the person and his destiny"

What about the sobering lessons of the religious extremism of pretty much any century. He seems to have conveniently forgotten those.

The BBC are reporting that Walter Kasper, one of the pope's senior advisers has pulled out of the papal visit to the UK after saying in a magazine interview that the UK is a "third world country" marked by a "new and aggressive atheism".

Of course, atheists are used to being called aggressive because we ask religious people to defend basically illogical concepts. But this idea that atheism makes a country "third world" is new. Of course, it's nonsense too. The few parts of the world where christianity is still growing are largely parts of what we used to called "the third world". The developed world (with some exceptions - and, yes, I'm looking at you, USA) is putting religious nonsense behind it.

The Vatican have stepped in to clarify Kasper's remarks. I'm quoting the entire third paragraph of the BBC's story here as I think it's likely to change when they realise what it says:

The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended "any kind of slight", and was referring to the UK's multicultural society.

Did you get that? I'm astounded. Is there any other way to read that than:

Sorry he called you third world, but you have to admit the country is full of darkies.

The Daily Express will love it.

And these are the people we've invited over on a state visit.

[Thanks to Denny for pointing this out.]

We're all, no doubt, used to getting 419 scams in email. I get several a day, but they're not often as brazen as this.

PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE
TREASURY AND MINISTER FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE,
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Our ref: ATM/13470/IDR
Your ref:...Date: 14/09/2010

IMMEDIATE PAYMENT NOTIFICATION

I am The Rt Hon David Cameron MP,Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service British Government. This letter is to officially inform you that (ATM Card Number 7302 7168 0041 0640) has been accredited with your favor. Your Personal Identification Number is 1090.The VISA Card Value is £2,000,000.00(Two Million, Great British Pounds Sterling).

This office will send to you an Visa/ATM CARD that you will use to withdraw your funds in any ATM MACHINE CENTER or Visa card outlet in the world with a maximum of £5000 GBP daily.Further more,You will be required to re-confirm the following information to enable;The Rt Hon William Hague MP First Secretary of State for British Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. begin in processing of your VISA CARD.

(1)Full names: (2)Address: (3)Country: (4)Nationality: (5)Phone #: (6)Age: (7)Occupation: (8) Post Codes

Rt Hon William Hague MP.
First Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Email; bfcaffairs@info.al
Tel: +447405235350

TAKE NOTICE: That you are warned to stop further communications with any other person(s) or office(s) different from the staff of the State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to avoid hitches in receiving your payment.

Regards,

Rt Hon David Cameron MP
Prime Minister

I've left the contact details in there as I feel sure that William Hague doesn't really use an Albanian email address:-)

The email pretends to come from an address at the directgov.uk domain (note, not direct.gov.uk) and the reply-to address goes to Thailand.

On Saturday I was at the Opentech conference. Some brief notes about the sessions I saw.

The day was sponsored by data.gov.uk, so it seemed polite to see one of their sessions first. I watched Richard Stirling and friends talk about some of the work they're doing on releasing lots and lots of linked data. There were some interesting-looking demonstrations (using a tool that, I believe, was called Datagrid [Update: Sam Smith reminds me that it was actually Gridworks]) but I was in the back half of the room and it was a little hard to follow the details. The session also had a demonstration of the new legislation.gov.uk site.

The next session I attended was in the main hall. Hadley Beeman talked about the LinkedGov project which aims to take a lot of the data that the government are releasing and to improve it by adding metadata, filling in holes and generally cleaning it up.

Hadley was followed by Ben Goldacre and Louise Crow who have a cracking idea for a web site. They want to expose all of the clinical trial data which never gets published (presumably because the trial didn't go the way that the people running it wanted it to go). They already have a prototype that demonstrates which pharmaceutical companies are particularly bad at this.

The final talk in this session was by Emma Mulqueeny and a few friends. They were introducing Rewired State, which runs hackdays to encourage people to build cool things out of government data. I was particularly impressed with Young Rewired State which runs similar events aimed people under the age of 18,

It was then lunchtime. That went disastrously wrong and I ended up not eating and getting back late so that I missed the start of the next session. Unfortunately I missed half of Louise Crow's talk about MySociety's forthcoming project FixMyTransport. I stayed to watch Tom Steinberg give an interesting explanation of why he though GroupsNearYou hadn't taken off. Finally in this session, Tim Green and Edmund von der Berg talked about how three separate groups had worked together on some interesting projects during the last general election.

I was speaking in the next session. Unusually for Opentech, the organisers decided to have a session about the technology that  underlies some of the projects that the conference is about. I talked about Modern Perl, Mark Blackman covered Modern FreeBSD and Tom Morris introduced Modern Java (or, more accurately, Scala).

The next session I attended was largely about newspapers. Phil Gyford talked about why he dislikes newspaper web sites and why he built Today's Guardian - a newpaper web site that looks more like a newspaper. Gavin Bell talked about the future of social networking sites and Chris Thorpe talked about automating the kind of serendipity that makes newspapers such a joy to read.

For the final session I went back to the main hall. Mia Ridge talked about why the techies who work for museums really want to open up their data in the same way as the government is now doing and asked us to go banging on the museums' doors asking for access to their data. And finally Robin Houston told some interesting stories about the 10:10 campaign.

As always the conference was really interesting. As always there were far too many things that I wanted to see and in every session I could have just as easily gone to see one of the other tracks. And as always, I have come away from the conference fired with enthusiasm and wanting to help all of the projects that I heard about.

Of course, that's not going to happen. I'm going to have to pick one or two of them.

If you weren't at Opentech, then you missed a great day out. You should make an effort to come along next year.

It's over a month since I've posted anything here. Sorry about that. For the first half of August I was in Italy. The first week, I was speaking at a conference in Pisa and after that we spent a few days in Rome and Venice. I took more than a few photos and they're slowly making their way onto my Flickr page. They should all be up there in a week or so (although, having said that, I still haven't sorted out the photos from last year's holiday in the Baltic).

Rather pleased with the way this photo of the Colosseum came out. But given a half-decent camera, an ancient monument and the Italian flair for lighting there probably wasn't much that could go wrong.

Not quite sure what happened to the rest of August though...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.