Year: 2013

Periodically I receive links to stories in the British “tabloid” newspaper, The Daily Mail, from Sciencebase readers. I am yet to see anything in that paper that is worth the ink or electrons. Moreover, I wouldn’t even deem it fit to be torn up into squares and hung from a string in the lavatory for emergency use when you run out of loo roll.

This is an old clip from “Dan and Dan” singing The Daily Mail Song, if you have clipped a URL from the paper’s bizarrely popular web site, please watch, listen and learn before you share that link. We don’t call it the Daily Fail for nothing.

I met David Spiegelhalter at a conference a while back, a very engaging and charismatic chap with the real stats and the data to tell you all about true risk.

His proper title is Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. He is in two minds literally about playing it safe or chucking caution to the wind. Decisions, decisions! Are bacon sandwiches really that dangerous and is it wise to drive when you love cycling? David shows us how to use statistics to face up to lifes major risks. There’s a little bit of “Dan & Dan” going on this video. Neat…

NHS Choices critiques tabloid claims for recent research on fishy life extension.

“…study has found that higher levels of omega-3 in blood at the start of the study were associated with a 27% reduction in risk of death from any cause, and a 35% reduction in risk of death from heart disease in healthy older adults (aged 65 years or older) who were not taking fish oil supplements.”

There are, the NHS site says, “several limitations.” For instance, omega-3 fatty acid levels were only measured at the start of the study and may not have remained steady. Moreover, cause of death may have been misclassified and there is the strong possibility that other factors may be responsible for the measured life extension.

One extra thought, just because there might have been benefits to the older generation, doesn’t mean they will necessarily apply to the next. Given that it’s not so long ago that there were warnings to avoid some types of oily fish because of global mercury contamination, it’s probably best to proceed with caution. Everything in moderation, as ever.

Does eating fish really extend your life? – Health News – NHS Choices.

Science is often portrayed as a fixed set of rules, impersonal, and devoid of emotions. It is not, as can be seen from the discovery of fullerenes, or more specifically buckminsterfullerene, the molecule that became known as the buckyball and on which I must have written a hundred articles over the years.

I was working as Senior Assistant Editor on Chem Comm when the paper from Roger Taylor, Harry Kroto and their colleagues Jonathan Hare and Ala Abdul-Sada arrived in our offices…exciting times.

We did our best to get it published as quickly as possible. This was pre-web, everything still on actual paper, and referees searched on an internal RSC database called JES, although we did have email, thanks to JANET.

Unfortunately, if I remember rightly, Krätschmer’s Nature paper on C60 beat us into print by a week or so despite our best efforts, all without breaking any of the strict editorial rules on refereeing etc.

I assume journals prioritise papers these days and let them jump the queue for the sake of prestige, we didn’t, and I always felt we were pipped to the post by editorial policies rather than science at the time. Still it’s nice to have been a small, perhaps insignificant catalyst, in a much bigger reaction…

Like a Detective Story: The Discovery of C 60 :: ChemViews Magazine :: ChemistryViews.

Whose line is it? Nineteenth century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli supposedly remarked that there are “lies, damned lies and statistics.” Although often cited, we have no evidence that the phrase originated with Disraeli. A more likely possibility is that it originated with an American author, with Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Regardless of its origin, the phrase implies that the manipulation of statistics is so easy that their use is tantamount to telling the worst kind of lie.

Whose lies, Twain’s or Disraeli’s?

In science circles we hear regularly of the misuse of statistics, in the media, down at the pub, and in some cases by scientists themselves. But, argues Richard Hamilton of The Mershon Center, at Ohio State University, in Columbus, although stats might be manipulated, it is much easier to lie without them. Writing in IJBG, Hamilton suggests that, “With the constraint of evidence removed, an author can proceed unhindered to the declaration (or revelation) of a preferred ‘truth’.” He argues that there is a disconnection between the two branches of intellectual endeavours, the discovery/ research and the reporting/ dissemination. He believes that in the works of many popular writers, biographers, historians, social scientists, journalists, and freelance commentators the connection is often broken. He says that assertions are being made and “facts” stated with little research to support them and that these “declared truths” are a serious problem.

Part of the problem is that declared truths are made about human society, our beliefs and behaviour, especially in the context of history, without the recognition that while today we have access to enormous quantities of data on public opinion, prior to the 1930s, with rare exception we had essentially no credible information on the attitudes or the actions of “the masses”. We have, for example, no real knowledge of how close families were in New York City up to the 1830s at which point, according to commentator Alexis de Tocqueville, family values collapsed. Some accounts have it that the Great War was a response to popular opinion, to “strong anti-Serbian feeling [among the public] in Austria-Hungary.” This too lacks evidence, no one had polled “the people.”

We have one striking exception, this involving the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Many accounts have it that “Paris” rose in arms. But in this case we have some evidence, the participants having been given a certificate attesting to participation. The number, sometimes referred to as the “sacred nine hundred,” would have formed about one percent of the city’s possible contenders. Most Parisians, apparently, were doing something else on that famous day.

To repair the disconnection between research and reporting, we must discard those deceptions, the declared truths. On many occasions, the most honest intellectual stance for an author is an easy one, a simple statement–I don’t know.

Hamilton R. (2013). Things not known, Int. J. Business and Globalisation, 10 (3) 233-244. DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2013.052985

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is a growing problem, there are mountains of obsolete computers, mobile phones, refrigerators, televisions etc piling up on dumps around the world. Regulations implemented at the National and European levels seek to force those disposing of WEEE to recycle and reclaim the countless, often toxic, materials present in wiring, circuitry, electrical transformers, displays, casings, pipework.

However, Anastasia Katsamaki and Nikolaos Bilalis of the Department of Production Engineering and Management, at the Technical University of Crete, suggest that we should be taking a step back from the recycling and reclamation paradigm and designing instead for the whole cycle and in particular at the end-of-life (EOL) stage of device design. This would from the outset cut down on the variety of materials employed, avoid the use of those likely to generate toxic residues and focus on the greening of gadgets.

The European Union implementation of 2002/96/EU Directive from August 2005 already demands that EOL issues are studied from the perspective of product disassembly, recycling, reuse and remanufacturing and from the perspective of design and technical support. But, while this has led to a lot of theorizing, and certainly pressure on the recycling schemes and landfill policies of local authorities, much remains to be done.

The researchers suggest that there are five objectives surrounding cutting down on WEEE:

1. The efficient exploitation of natural resources used during the whole lifecycle.
2. To promote reuse, remanufacture and recycling after the end of useful life .
3. The use of materials with low environmental impact that are also readily recyclable.
4. The minimisation of different materials used that simplifies their separation.
5. The design of products that can be easily disassembled.

They have now shown how their objectives might be applied successfully to the example of electrical transformer design and so reduce the EOL impact of such a device. Their ongoing work will test the approach in other categories of device.

Katsamaki A. & Bilalis N. (2012). Determination of redesign proposals to optimise end-of-life treatment of electrical and electronic equipment, International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management, 6 (2) 161. DOI: 10.1504/IJPLM.2012.052675

Probably not.

A recent study from Japan was much hyped in the media earlier this week but as NHS Choices points out, the researchers themselves offered a number of limitations to their study:

The information on illness, green tea and coffee consumption was all self-reported, which introduces the possibility of error. For example, although food frequency questionnaires are an accepted way to assess food intake, there may still be errors in people’s estimations of their consumption.

People’s consumption of green tea and coffee was only measured once, so any changes in consumption over the years was not taken into account by the study. It was not clear when the potential confounders (e.g. smoking) were assessed, and these may also have changed over the course of the study.

The results may have been affected by other factors (confounders). The researchers did adjust for a number of these, including other dietary factors, but others could be having an effect. In particular, although researchers adjusted their results for whether people took medication for high blood pressure or high cholesterol, they did not take account of the existence of these conditions in participants who were not taking medication.

The study took place in Japan so its results may not be applicable to the UK or other countries.

 

These kinds of studies are endless, one week they demonstrate an effect or correlation the next another team demonstrates the opposite. But, there are no panaceas, no miracle cures or preventatives, too much of any substance will have detrimental effects one way or the other. So, if you enjoy a cup of tea at breakfast and a coffee mid-morning, fine, carry on, if you’re drinking twenty cups of either every day to boost your health, you’re probably on to a loser…

Can drinking green tea or coffee cut stroke risk?