Poor old Jacqui Smith! The Home Secretary is currently embroiled in controversy concerning her expenses claim for here "second home" (which turns out to be the home she lives in. Turns out of course that her "main home" is a room in her sister's house (BBC News "Smith asked to explain expenses".
I've got no opinion as to her guilt or innocence here, but the amusing thing in this report is that it suggests she was turned in by her neighbours:
This more than slightly barmy web page (The Faith of Britain) suggests a band of psychics and "healers", with a bit of help from the British public, will, for a two minute period, focus "positive energy towards achieving our hopes and aspirations".
The date and time chosen for this happening is 6th March, because:
Followers of the huge Operacion Puerto blood doping scandal will remember the affair - Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes offered a blood doping service to professional sportsmen (and presumably sportswomen). His services are most talked about in the context of professional cycling, but in fact his clients are reported to have included professional sportsmen from other sports.
The saga began with police raids in 2006, when Spain's Guardia Civil collected coded blood bags during its raid on the offices of Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. (There is excellent coverage over at cyclingnews.com going back several years.) Fuentes' scheme was to withdraw blood from the cyclists, and store it for retransfusion, a process known as blood doping. This is a formerly legal technique (I believe it was used in the past by the US Olympic track cycling team( but it has been prohibited for many years now. It's still clearly in use - witness the sorry tales of (for example) Vinokourov and Hamilton in recent years.
Over at his blog Heresy Corner, the Heresiarch has an excellent overview of the continual erosion of our civil liberties (Remember what he said about "British liberty"?).
The article is framed over a series of points made by Gordon Brown in a speech delivered shortly after he took office as Prime Minister.
The former chief of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, has warned that the UK risks becoming a police state (The Daily Telegraph, "Spy chief: We risk a police state"). In the interview, she accuses ministers of interfering with people's privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.
This is a theme that I've returned to on numerous occasions over the last few months: that the UK Government has used (and, I believe, mainipulated) the terrorist "threat" to force through draconian measures that threaten out civil liberties and right to privacy. From extended detention periods, to the increased databases held about (and following the Coroners bill, increasingly joined together), the general drift is to a situation where the state has uprecedented access to out communications and other aspects of out private life.Rimmington says
The Guardian reports today (UK mobile phone firms to sell data about customer activity) that mobile telecomms firms have been harvesting data about their customers web browsing habits, and that they plan to uses these data to increase advertising revenues.
The GSMA's chief marketing officer, Michael O'Hara, said: "We can see the top sites, see where people are browsing regularly. See the time that sites are being viewed, the number of visits, the duration of visits and we can also get demographic data so you can have age ranges, male/female ranges.
The journal Current Biology invited a number of prominent biologists from a number of disciplines to re-read Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and to write commentaries - they can be found at (Re)Reading The Origin.
Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species is much referenced, especially in this double anniversary year. But, does anyone still read it? And, if so, what is the book itself like as a text? We have asked biologists from a range of fields evolutionary biologists, but also geneticists, ecologists, paleontologists and molecular biologists to re-read (or read) The Origin for Current Biology. Below are the responses, contributed by: Andrew Berry, Matthew Cobb, Simon Conway Morris, Jerry Coyne, Hopi Hoekstra, Peter Lawrence, Robert May, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Mark Ptashne, Matt Ridley and Marlene Zuk.
After a bit of teasing in the blogosphere that the draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome would be released in time for Charles Darwin's birthday this week, I was eagerly looking for a paper. Instead what I find are three news articles in Science, one describing some of the outcomes of the work, and two setting it in context. Some quotes:
Initial comparisons with our own 3 billion bases indicate that a mere 1000 to 2000 amino acid differences, as well as a yet-unknown number of non-coding changes, do that job. For comparison, about 50,000 amino acid differences separate us and chimpanzees.
A bit of a rumpus about UK science funding policy erupted this week, following publication of a letter to the Times Higher about the move to increase the emphasis towards funding science with a more immediate benefit to the UK economy. This manifests itself as a two page document (the Impact Summary) that now forms part of every Research Council grant application (in addition, I think, to the short "Beneficiaries" section that already exists.
This policy seems to be favoured by the Science Minister, Paul Drayson. Lord Drayson is a politician with a commercial science/engineering background, but who has never been elected to public office. he was ennobled, and reaches Minister status via a seat in the House of Lords. Interestingly, as befits a proponent of grant applicants predicting and outlining future benefits of their yet to be performed research (not just economic but social as well), he appears to claim sixth sense "I saw it coming, says minister of sixth sense Lord Drayson".
It's been a little while since I last blogged about the vile Phorm system, in which all internet activity that is undertaken by customers of ISPs using the system is inspected and analysed for key words via which targeted adverts may be delivered. For more information about this system, check out the excellent Dephormation. We've seen a variety of "spinning" techniques used by both Phorm (former spyware distributors) and their principal client, BT, over the last few years, and news over the last couple of days has been typical.
Back in 2006 and 2007, BT conducted secret tests of the system, using their customers as guinea pigs, without their knowledge or consent. This was probably illegal, and certainly an unreasonable act. A third trial (in which users were invited to participated) was held at the end of 2008.
While wandering round the internet during the recent flare-up of bloggers writing about recent developments in the MMR-autism conspiracy theory, I came across this neat graphic which seems to me to encapsulate some of the issues relation to causation vs coincidence (for example, see "MMR and false syllogisms" for more information).
In the meantime, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog seems down - maybe the recent upsurge in traffic has overwhelmed it.
I am sat on the train, reading my emails using the Vodafone USB mobile broadband stick, when I get this:
I've been looking at reports of various eBook readers over the last few years, and even read a few books on my Pocket PC. This device, Amazon's Kindle 2, looks to being very useful for a traveller wishing to carry several books.
There's a review over at The Register (Amazon unveils Kindle 2.0), from where this image is sourced.
Ben Goldacre's posted an update on the fracas with LBC and Jeni Barnett over their ill-advised broadcast on the topic of the MMR vaccine and autism. In essence, while LBC's decision to threaten their legal muscle did cause Goldacre to pull the audio clip from his blog, it's now got spread over the internet, has attracted considerable celeb support, and now is the subject of an early-day motion. Barnett's own efforts at damage-limitation appear to be restricted to deleting critical comments from her blog. Thankfully, the power of the internet has ensured the information is still out there, and is proliferating.
Ben Goldacre's latest article very clearly explains why this is such an important issue, and why under-informed dimwits shouldn't make irresponsible broadcasts. Perhaps LBC should keepa closer eye (or should that be "ear") on their broadcasters.
The Open Rights Group have reported on the Lords Constitution Committee report on surveillance and privacy. This is a monster document, which can be read here: Constitution Committee - Second Report. Surveillance: Citizens and the State. It's a big document, and it perhaps easier to digest via the ORG synopsis, and as the ORG say, "Those with nothing to hide can still have a great deal to fear".
The RIPA sections are interesting (Committee report section; ORG interpretation), in light of pretty clear local council abuses of RIPA ro spot fly-tippers etc.
As the UK and international cycling season begins to swing into action, it's also the time that my blog articles on cycling will start to reappear (see also the Team Grumpy blog).
Some really quite sad news from the recently completed Tour of Qatar cycling stage race this week: one of the riders (Frederiek Nolf, of Team Topsport Vlaanderen-Mercator) died in his sleep, just five days short of his 22nd birthday. The newsflash at cyclingnews.com (Belgian rider passes away in Qatar) was published on 5th February: the following stage was neutralised out of respect.
For the last few seasons, my availability for training has declined steadily. This, coupled with the passing years, means that each year when I start reviewing past performances for completing CTT entry forms for the coming season, I find it a little depressing. This season is no exception.
But at least the Cycling Time Trials website back again after yet another SQL injection attack, this time using a different platform. Hopefully this'll be more secure. Actually, I think it would look a lot better without all the flashing, moving adverts, but perhaps that's just me being a grumpy old man (and anyway, as a Firefox user, I can always use the AdBlock plug-in).
A paper in the current issue of Nature [Love et al (2009) Nature 457; 718-722] suggests that multicellular life existed about 100 million years before the explosion of bilaterian animals in the Cambrian. The evidence comes from analysis of rocks from the Arabian peninsula, in which geologically preserved derivatives of characteristic chemicals have been detected. Now, this paper interested me because of its message concerning the dating of the origins of multicellular life; I am not a geologist or a chemist, so many of the details escape me.
Identification of the presence of soft bodied animal in the fossil record is always difficult: it's generally the hard parts of the animal that are preserved by fossilisation (there are exceptions). The Cambrian explosion (see timeline diagram- click on it to link to the interactive Wikipedia diagram) resulted in a wide variety of animal forms: what's less clear is from where this abundance of diverse forms arose. This paper takes chemical approach to establishing the presence of animal remains in rock samples.
The BBC reports that UK measles rates continue to rise (Rise in measles 'very worrying'), in response to falling levels of MMR vaccination. The downward trend in MMR vaccination followed Andrew Wakefield's claims that there is a link between MMR vaccination and autism. That the British public continue to believe there is a link between MMR vaccination and autism, despite the many investigations that have disproved it is really very sad.
Ben Goldacre has written extensively on the culpability of the media in propagating the scare stories that have resulted in this appalling situation. Recently he blogged about a highly irresponsible LCB radio broadcast in which Jeni Barnett continued to push distorted and inaccurate information on the supposed dangers of vaccination. Today he reports that LCB have launched lawyers at him, on the grounds that his posting mp3 recordings of that segment of the radio show breaches copyright (he promptly removed the link from his website). Too late, I fear, the recording has begun to proliferate on the internet (see Streisand Effect). Now, it's made it to Wikileaks, so I guess it's out there to stay. And I hear that transcripts are being prepared for release.
The BBC has announced that it's no longer using the US-based company Omniture to track the browsing habits of visitors to its website (see earlier blog post - BBC gifting private data to a USA-based company). Well, at least for UK based visitors - those in the rest of the world will still be tracked.
Source - nodpi.org forum posting