Artificial intransigence

June 24th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, bbc, dangers, nanniebots, new scientist | 2 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
Thursday June 24, 2004
The Guardian

· You may remember Jim Wightman. He claimed to have written a piece of chat software that could pass itself off as a real child in a chatroom, and identify internet paedophiles by behaviour. To say this was thought highly dubious is an understatement – the software, if it existed, would have been 10 years ahead of everything written by huge teams of AI academics; he offered to let us see the software working, and then refused; and the NSPCC and Barnardo’s distanced themselves from his ideas about monitoring children’s activities himself with no child protection background. Embarrassingly, New Scientist accepted his claims uncritically, and the BBC and others followed suit, although New Scientist did, after two pieces here, remove their glowing article about him from their website.

· Now they’re back with Wightman. Here’s what happened. New Scientist visited Jim at home with two AI academics to chat with the program. In previous “test conversations”, over the web, without experimenters being able to see that the computer was not connected to any others, the program gave highly sophisticated answers after a suspiciously long delay (almost as if someone was typing them). This time it instantly gave rubbish computer-generated responses, nothing like those in the previous transcripts. In fact, it gave the very same answers that Alice, an old and not very sophisticated AI program, written by somebody else, not Wightman, gave in subsequent tests. Then Wightman offered to show them the code … but suddenly, and inexplicably, the power to Jim’s whole house went off. The test was over. Imagine.

· Did New Scientist finally give it up? No. “New Scientist can still provide no definitive proof of Wightman’s claims, but looks forward to a return visit when the complete ChatNannies software is available for testing.” Please. Did they ask Wightman about his unlikely claim to have a seven-figure offer from an American corporation which had “full independent testing performed on the AI and are confident of its validity and effecacy[sic]”? He was apparently quite capable of giving them a proper demonstration. Did they quiz Wightman on his previous false claims about writing software, or any of the other issues Bad Science raised? No. To those of us brought up loving the great institution that is New Scientist it is, as Tibor Fischer said, a bit like bouncing out of the classroom at breaktime, only to catch your favourite uncle masturbating in the school playground.

Get yourself a proper science education

June 17th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, dangers, very basic science | 1 Comment »

Ben Goldacre
Thursday June 17, 2004
The Guardian

· It’s hard to know who to trust in these dark days. Although an article in Physics Today by Dr John Hubisz suggests that US school science textbooks might not be your best bet (www.tinyurl.com/2l3dk). Ever heard the 50Hz low bass mains hum coming through your crappy stereo? Me too. So you’ll be surprised to hear that elephant vocal sounds occur at 400Hz, and so can’t be heard by humans. Middle A is at 440Hz after all, and there are about 40 notes on the piano below that. Pictures of prisms bending light the wrong way; Van de Graaff generators that store charge in their base; lamps that supply voltage; and absolute zero defined as the temperature at which molecules are so cold they don’t move. It’s enough to drive you to the humanities.

· Not strictly bad science but, as reader Catherine Moulton points out: if you really want to get kids experimenting with science for themselves, you could try www.geekdiy.com. Allow me to illustrate the depths of my childish irresponsibility. Capacitors are the big round things you see on circuit boards when you pull electronic stuff apart. They store the potential energy of accumulated electrons in the form of an electric field, across two metal plates. That’s how the little batteries in disposable cameras can build up enough energy to set off a big flash from the bulb on the front. The page on geekdiy is down now, but frankly, if that isn’t enough information for you to construct your own stun gun for £8.99 then you don’t deserve one. Suffice to say, when the oil runs out in 30 years and modern civilisation is annihilated in a hideous nuclear war, and we’re all fighting each other tooth and nail for tins of genetically modified baked beans … I don’t rate the chances of the humanities graduates much.

· Meanwhile, on geekdiy.com you can still find all kinds of useful tricks to help you reconstruct a post-enlightenment society after the holocaust, including a powerful high-quality Dobsonian telescope from an old record player and some household bits and pieces; a full-sized remote controlled car for those hit and run shopping trips; an android head to guard your booty; and a mountainside covered with fake snow, so you don’t have to miss out on those snowboarding holidays just because the aeroplanes are all being lived in by extras from Mad Max. Get yourself a proper scientific education: it’s later than you think.

Letters

June 10th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, letters | 2 Comments »

Pseudo corner

Thursday June 10, 2004
The Guardian

Nigel Calder should know better than to make the assertions he tossed out at the Hay festival (the Guardian, June 3). To state that any new discovery necessarily nullifies previous knowledge is absurd. Every discovery leads to dozens of new problems. And each of those gives rise to a new discovery to solve it.

There is always the possibility of a breakthrough which changes our view on a subject, but those are few. Far, far more common are the discoveries that act as stepping stones to new knowledge. The timbre of Mr Calder’s arguments treads uncomfortably close to the persecution theories and born-before-our-time laments of the quacks and pseudoscientists that Ben Goldacre so laudably works to eradicate in his Bad Science column.
Alex Ball
Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Ladies’ Pages

June 7th, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in adverts, bad science, cosmetics | 3 Comments »

Laura Barton quotes me, very kindly.

As if by magic

So, there’s an instant potion for lean, toned thighs? Hmm, says Laura Barton

Monday June 7, 2004
The Guardian

As the season of swimsuits beckons, our thoughts naturally turn to Slimfast, Atkins and half-arsed intentions of taking the stairs – last-ditch efforts, of course, to acquire the thighs of Halle Berry before we take ourselves off to the beach. But for those of us who cannot haul ourselves off the chaise longue and detach ourselves from the custard creams, come an exciting array of firming lotions and potions. These require only five minutes of our time spent inelegantly posed in the bathroom, dolloping herbal gloop on our thighs in the hope that it will “firm”, “tone” and “reduce” those lumpen bits of our anatomy.

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The notion that ladling cream on to one’s curvier bits might help us to lose several inches does, in saner moments, appear ludicrous. What is this cream going to do with the squadgy inches of podge? Eat it? Evaporate it? Feed it to the ducks? Nevertheless, in this isle alone, the “slimming creams” market is worth £30 million a year, and the shelves are heaving with impossibly-named products – Clarins Body Lift Contour Control, Shiseido Advanced Essential Energy Body Firming Cream, Christian Dior Bikini Anti-Cellulite.

“Skincare companies are really, really, really good at making pseudo-scientific claims,” explains Ben Goldacre, author of the Guardian’s Bad Science column. “They’ll say ‘Vitamin E and collagen are essential for the cross-molecular structure of whatever,’ in technical grand terms, without making any claim that the specific ingredient will have any effect on your skin. They blind you with cell-biology-level rhetoric and then they say ‘and our cream will moisturise your skin!’ Which even Vaseline will do. And they say things like, ‘you’ll absorb the nutrients through your skin,’ when you absorb nutrients through your gut. Your skin is very thick and dead and designed to be impervious, not letting things in or out. Otherwise you’d leak.”

But so lucrative is the market that, as summer arrives, one can barely move without seeing a lady’s naked bottom plastered across billboards and buses and squashed between segments of Coronation Street. And what a peachy derriere it is – unsagging, uncellulited and without stretch marks. Dove was the first this season, with its ad showing “real women” in sensible undergarments. They were curvy and fulsome, but my, they were firm. Now the skincare giants appear to have moved beyond touting their products’ firming properties and on to shouting about the actual slimming effects. The latest Roc ad, for example, shows a lady tugging at the gaping waistband of her jeans – beneath claims of dropping a dress size.

But at up to £20 a pop, do they work? Last month, a study by the French Consumer Association announced that two creams, L’Oréal PerfectSlim and Elancyl Chrono Actif, could actually reduce a lady’s (or, one presumes, a gentleman’s) thighs by two centimetres in two weeks. Two centimetres is not to be sniffed at, but the nagging question remains: is cream a long-term solution?

“It’s tempting to think you can buy thin thighs out of a bottle,” concedes Susie Whalley, co-author of Running Made Easy and features editor at Zest magazine. “But you shouldn’t rely on lotions and potions. You might lose a couple of centimetres off your thighs if you’re lucky, but you’re never going to shed half a stone. Exercise gives you lots of other health benefits that you won’t get in a squeezy tube. It improves heart health, boosts self-confidence, makes you feel more energised and gives you improved circulation, which helps with cellulite, and your skin facially will improve – that healthy flush tends to last.”

Yes, yes, Susie, but what about the thighs? “I would say you would really notice a difference after running for three weeks,” she says. “If you’ve altered your eating habits a little you might have lost 3-4lbs and you’ll feel slimmer all over. You might feel your thighs are toning and tightening up.”

The problem is that exercise involves some degree of public humiliation, sweat and physical exertion. And “altering your eating habits” requires, well, not having seconds and laying off the sauce. We want these slimming and firming creams because they’re easy and we’re lazy. But the hard truth is there is no magical fix. You want slimmer thighs? Eat fewer cream horns, honey. Do some exercise. It ain’t rocket science.

That floaty feeling

June 3rd, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, magnets | 2 Comments »

That floaty feeling

Ben Goldacre
Thursday June 3, 2004
The Guardian

Talk about bad science here

· You won’t be surprised that I get a lot of critical email. This is very embarrassing, but it’s best that I put my hands up and admit it: last week, I was wrong. In my defence, I am a very angry man, but that’s no excuse for getting in a huff and throwing out pejorative statements like “blood is not magnetic” because, as reader Mark van Ments – who may be the pickiest scientist in the world – points out, blood does, like all objects, exhibit diamagnetism (see Letters, page 10). Thanks Mark. What I meant to say is: blood is not ferro-magnetic. Diamagnetism was first thought through 150 years ago: the electrons orbiting an atom, being charged, are going to readjust their orbits when you stick them in a strong magnetic field, as you might expect. But in doing so, they then create their own magnetic field. To be fair [coughs] the effect is so weak that the rest of the world is roughly one billion times less magnetic than a lump of iron but yes, hands up, that doesn’t mean it’s not significant. And, let’s not be in any doubt, the most significant application of diamagnetism research is to allow mankind, and specifically me, to fly, unaided, like Superman.

· People have been levitating chunks of diamagnetic superconductor for years: that’s a bit easier, what with superconductors (unlike me) being specifically designed to let electrons roam around in them unhindered. But I don’t want to fly like Superman through liquid nitrogen; I want to do it where it’s safe to wear my Y-fronts over my corduroy trousers. Objects other than superconductors proved marginally trickier, but in 1991 Beaugnon and Tournier levitated water, and were soon followed by others who levitated liquid hydrogen and frogs’ eggs.

· But most promising is the work of Berry and Geim, who in 1997 levitated practically everything they could get their hands on, from hazelnuts and pieces of pizza to frogs and a mouse. Watching the video of a frog hovering in mid-air is a humbling and weirdly tranquil experience. For the anti-vivisectionists among you there is a film of a levitating strawberry. The basic small levitation set-up, of superconducting magnet with room temperature core, only costs about $100,000. To levitate yourself, you will need a special racetrack magnet of about 40 Tesla in the back garden, a socket in your home capable of providing around 1GW of continuous power consumption, and an extension cable with a 5 million amp fuse. Don’t forget it’s my birthday soon.

That floaty feeling

June 3rd, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, letters, magnets | 2 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
Thursday June 3, 2004
The Guardian

· You won’t be surprised that I get a lot of critical email. This is very embarrassing, but it’s best that I put my hands up and admit it: last week, I was wrong. In my defence, I am a very angry man, but that’s no excuse for getting in a huff and throwing out pejorative statements like “blood is not magnetic” because, as reader Mark van Ments – who may be the pickiest scientist in the world – points out, blood does, like all objects, exhibit diamagnetism (see Letters, page 10). Thanks Mark. What I meant to say is: blood is not ferro-magnetic. Diamagnetism was first thought through 150 years ago: the electrons orbiting an atom, being charged, are going to readjust their orbits when you stick them in a strong magnetic field, as you might expect. But in doing so, they then create their own magnetic field. To be fair [coughs] the effect is so weak that the rest of the world is roughly one billion times less magnetic than a lump of iron but yes, hands up, that doesn’t mean it’s not significant. And, let’s not be in any doubt, the most significant application of diamagnetism research is to allow mankind, and specifically me, to fly, unaided, like Superman.

· People have been levitating chunks of diamagnetic superconductor for years: that’s a bit easier, what with superconductors (unlike me) being specifically designed to let electrons roam around in them unhindered. But I don’t want to fly like Superman through liquid nitrogen; I want to do it where it’s safe to wear my Y-fronts over my corduroy trousers. Objects other than superconductors proved marginally trickier, but in 1991 Beaugnon and Tournier levitated water, and were soon followed by others who levitated liquid hydrogen and frogs’ eggs.

· But most promising is the work of Berry and Geim, who in 1997 levitated practically everything they could get their hands on, from hazelnuts and pieces of pizza to frogs and a mouse. Watching the video of a frog hovering in mid-air is a humbling and weirdly tranquil experience. For the anti-vivisectionists among you there is a film of a levitating strawberry. The basic small levitation set-up, of superconducting magnet with room temperature core, only costs about $100,000. To levitate yourself, you will need a special racetrack magnet of about 40 Tesla in the back garden, a socket in your home capable of providing around 1GW of continuous power consumption, and an extension cable with a 5 million amp fuse. Don’t forget it’s my birthday soon.

Letters

June 3rd, 2004 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, letters, magnets | 4 Comments »

Strong magnets can affect blood

Thursday June 3, 2004
The Guardian

Although blood does not appear to be magnetic at common levels of magnetism, I believe you are wrong to say it is not affected by magnetism at all (Bad Science, May 27). With a sufficient magnetic field it is possible to levitate any material, including blood, or even an entire frog using magnetism.

As to the medical benefits of using magnetism in this way, apparently the frog suffered no ill effects.
Mark van Ments
By email