Posts Tagged skeptical thinking

Local skeptics meetups Robert McCormick Oct 22

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One of the trends in modern skepticism groups that has been developing across the world is to get together and have a few drinks of choice. The Skeptics in the Pub concept has recently made it to New Zealand and groups have been meeting up in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and now Dunedin.

I for one think that these are a great idea, a great way to keep in touch with old friends and meet new ones, as well as learning something new (which we should all do every day)

My local Dunedin chapter is only a few days old and is light on people so if you are keen click the link and sign up. Of course if you are far away from New Zealand’s premier centre of learning go to the main national page (or the links above) where you can find the groups in the bigger cities or even start your own in your town.

The Advertorial Robert McCormick Oct 02

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This has to be what I would call one of the worst in terms of despicable advertising practices. Literally it is designing your advert such that it resembles an article in the newspaper/magazine, and usually the only way to tell is there is the word advertisement in very small text at the top. This is making it seem like the newspaper condones and supports the issues the author is raising, giving his/her position more authority than an opinion piece would.

And strangely enough those that practice this deceptive form of advertising seem to be those that are already attempting to deceive people (or themselves) in other ways about the quality of their product or service, such as alternative medicine (alt med) providers.

Now this might seem a tad harsh on alt med people, but then if the alt med had been shown to work, then it would not be alternative medicine but rather simply medicine.

One recurring example of this practice is seen in a local free weekly (one of many my locale seems to have) I get in my mailbox The Star (digital online version can be found here). Almost every week without fail either on page 3 or 5 (usually at the bottom right) there is an advertorial by a local chiropractor – laying down how we should manipulate our spines to prevent swine flu or some such (perhaps I will scan some in point you to the online version find them on the chiropractor’s website and deconstruct them at some point in the near future – it seems just to richer source of fodder to ignore).

Taking the example of this particular chiropractor, on his website under “health news“, which is where he says to look for the archive of his ad, he clearly states (emphasis mine):

Here are some of the latest developments in the world of healthcare, with chiropractic commentary from Dr Tat Loo. Tat also contributes occasional feature articles and commentary for the weekly Dunedin based paper The Star which we will be included on this page.

This is exactly the sort of deception which is being practiced in these advertorials trying to pass off ads and opinion as “feature articles”.

Any way enough for now… enjoy your weekend, I think I will spend some time looking at the relevant acts and laws regarding false advertising.

Relatively Science Humour week: Day 5 Robert McCormick Aug 07

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Well it is Friday already, the weeks are just zipping by which is not good for my deadlines and stress levels, but good laugh while waiting for the computer to run its programs is always useful and for today we have a couple of clips from the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb – first up a classic take on the religious seeing messages/images in food, followed by a homeopathic A&E.

Relatively Science Humour week: Day 4 Robert McCormick Aug 06

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For today we have comedian Dara O’Briain setting the record straight about the public understanding of science, with a good knock on some alternate medicine too

Relatively Science Humour week: Day 3 Robert McCormick Aug 05

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For some totally irreverant and skeptic humour, there is this aussie bloke who is quite funny and well worth a listen to. Tim Minchin is his name and his shows usually involve his scruffy haired, bare foot appearance and a grand piano. The juxtaposition of these and what he has to say only adds to humour. So it is well worth a poke around on youtube or his site, but for now I have two of my favourites.

Laughter is the best medicine Robert McCormick Aug 03

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While the title of this post is not necessarily true, a little laughter does go a long way towards reducing stress and making life a bit more enjoyable. And since I have been reading Richard Wiseman’s Quirkology and thoroughly enjoying it especially the section on his search for the world’s funniest joke, I thought that I would share some humor with you the readers.

If you would prefer something a little more intellectual go check out the latest skeptic’s circle at Beyond the Short Coat either before or after enjoying a little laugh

My plan is over the next week to include a post a day with humour in it – it will be a sort of Relatively Science humor week. And as that title sounds most of the humour will be relatively science related – but first up below the fold is comic genius Bill Cosby talking about kids and brain damage

Come back tomorrow and all week for more.

Cosmic Rays, Clouds and Climate Robert McCormick Jul 03

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For some reason I am still not sure of I ended up this afternoon on the wordpress homepage and one of the featured blogs was last year’s weblog award winner for best science blog What’s Up With That (WUWT).

If you have never come across this blog before, and I have only ever heard about it in passing, they are of some what of a climate change denialist point of view (which as Phil mentions in that last link just shows that all the webbies are is a popularity contest rather than an evidence based award). The post that was front and centre on the blog was this one about the relationship between cosmic rays and cloud formation. What really caught my attention was the juxtaposition between the “headline”: Message in the CLOUD for Warmists: The end is near?, and the graph that followed the first paragraph.

Now the paragraph (and actually the graph) talk about the correlation between cosmic rays (using various isotopes as a proxy) and temperature. Much of the rest of the post is a quite interesting description of the CERN experiments and hypothesis that links the galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and cloud formation, and while that is all interesting it is irrelevant to what I wanted to say, even if this turns out to be correct.

Now if you look closely at the graph you can see that it covers the last almost 800 years and the proxies for the GCR (10Be and 14C which are the blue and black lines) correlate very well with the red line (Siberian Temperature). They track each other quite well through the dark ages and into the medieval warm period and even through the maunder minimum (little ice age) right up until the middle of the 19th century. Now once we get to the late 19th century we see that the temperature continues to rise and the other lines level off a bit – you can still see that there is a slight influence with the dip in temperature around early to mid 20th century but the lines in general are no longer closely correlated.

Oops! Maybe if you are going to make an argument you should make sure that your strongest piece of evidence does not plainly and in clear sight contradict your argument.

What does that all mean, firstly well it looks remarkably like the temperature and sunspot cycle length plot I showed previously and as I stated in that post what we can see is an excellent correlation spoiled since the industrial revolution. I left a comment on the WUWT blog that outlined the above lack of modern correlation and stated that what has happened since the industrial revolution that we know may have caused this warming, well we have been putting out a lot of CO2.

Other commenters on the WUWT blog mention that CO2 is a very minor atmospheric constituent and that H2O is a better green house gas and much more prevalent. Well this is also true, however H2O has some rather interesting behaviors it saturates quite easily in the atmosphere and everyone that does not live in desert (or at least a drought) gets to experience this – RAIN! Also if you have ever been to the tropics, you may have noticed that the rain can be quite heavy when it is warm this is because increasing the temperature allows the atmosphere to hold more water.

If water vapor itself was enough to trigger the sort of greenhouse effect that we are seeing then we would have long ago passed the point of now return, but fortunately the saturation of water in the atmosphere (what we call 100% relative humidity) seems to prevent this from happening – although this is not to say that when the temperature does get warm that there will be more water in the atmosphere which will probably on lead to worse storms etc rather than any large feedback effect (which means I had to write a retraction since I claimed that there may have been an H2O feedback in my original comment on WUWT – ooops gotta think the consequences through more).

Bad experiment design Robert McCormick Jul 03

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Here in New Zealand we tend to import big important current affairs shows such as 20/20 and 60 Minutes, of course we put our own host upfront and show a couple of local stories as well as the interesting ones, mostly from the US, that seem to come with the program.

Well on Monday, during 60 Minutes they had a discussion (and this was one of the local stories) about food coloring and children’s behaviour (the video clip of the story at the link). They talked with the experts and afflicted parents about how food coloring is bad and is being phased out in places and why are we not doing it etc. This in and of itself is reasonable and studies have shown that coloring can lead to hyperactivity in (some) children

But the really bad part of this was when they set up an experiment to show just what effect that the colorings have. They got some parents to lend their children (the kids all looked to be around 6-10 maybe) to the demonstration and put them in two groups. One group would have a healthy color free afternoon tea and the other group would have an afternoon tea full of colorings. They tested the children by getting them to do a drawing and some writing both before and after the food, and the children with the color free food had very little change in their drawing/writing while those in the color group there was a marked decrease in competency. However the best illustration (as far as the producers and the anti-color people were concerned) was that the kids in the color group were just bouncing off the walls and in one case bouncing balls of the presenter and interviewee (a child psychologist I think).

On the face of it this sounds like a great demonstration that showed up exactly the concerns that exist about the colorings. The problem was in the controlling of the coloring/non-coloring foods. The coloring group got all the foods that you can give to kids with heaps of the bad colorings in them, things like candy, cordial drinks and coke and that sort of thing. The non-colorings group had lots of fresh fruit and water.

If you have not spotted why this does not show colorings in a bad light then maybe go back and compare those snacks again. The colorings group not only got colorings that the non-colorings group did not get but they also got lots of high sugar food (especially refined sugars) and caffeine that the control group did not get, for those of you at home these are known as confounding factors.

So what did the demonstration show, that a combination of lots of sugar, caffeine and coloring leads to kids bouncing off the walls. Last time I checked with my two little boys (and their friends) that amount of sugar alone will set kids off, as I witnessed at my elder boy’s 4th birthday party last weekend.

How could they have done this better, well clearly the control group should have had the same amount and type of sugars, that way you would have been able to see the effect of the colorings, rather than what I suspect was mainly the effect of the sugar that these kids got to stuff themselves with. An example of a way that this could have been done was to use cordial drinks alone as the difference between the groups as many brands put out a color-free variety as well as the usual colored ones.

Unfortunately, my wife tells me that some of the other mothers at the playcentre my children go to, did not manage to see this fault in the demonstration and my wife was not able to convince them of why it did not show what they said it showed.

That all said, there does appear to be something to this hypothesis that food colorings can be bad for children’s behavior – now if only we could get the TV people to realise how to design a demonstration to illustrate a point. Oh well I had better send them a copy of this.

Update: added link to clip from show.

The Power of Probability Robert McCormick Jun 26

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I wanted to take a quick detour into probability today, for various reason which I don’t really want to divulge.

But in particular I wanted to look at the cumulative probability of multiple independent events. Such as always rolling a 6, or always drawing a red card from a full deck.

It is fairly simple to see that if you want to roll a 6 there is a 1 in 6 or 0.16666… probability of this happening. The same goes for always drawing a red card where the probability is 1 in 2 or 0.5 (or 50%).

But once you start to choose multiple times then you see the the probabilities start to get smaller quite quickly. So the probability of rolling 2 6s, or drawing 2 red cards

  • P(2 6s) = 0.1666 x 0.1666 = 0.16662 = 0.0278 = 1/36 = 2.78%
  • P(2 red) = 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.52 = 0.25 = 25%

And then the probability of three

  • P(3 6s) = 0.16663 = 1/216 = 0.46%
  • P(3 red) = 0.53 = 0.125 = 12.5%

You can see that the dice roll is now quite unlikely less than half a percent and even the high probability drawing a red card from a full deck (which is the same as flipping a coin and getting a head – not sure why I didn’t use this as my example) is down to 1/8.

What about if we say drawing 10 cards that are all red, from a full deck

  • P(10 red) = 0.510 = 0.0977%

Which as you can see is really unlikely. So over 99.9% of the time you will not get 10 red cards drawn in a row (or 10 heads on a coin toss).

Of course our examples here uses the same event happening over and over again, but the same math applies when considering events with different probabilities as long as they are independent (which means that one event does not influence any others). As long as the probabilities of the events happening is less than 1 (which would mean that that particular event always happened) then the chances of a series of events happening is more and more unlikely as more and more events are in the series.

One place where this knowledge can be quite useful is in a court case. If for example there are several pieces of evidence that show that the accused could have done the crime. What the defense will try to do is cast doubt on those pieces of evidence, such as by saying that this bloody handprint could have gotten there in a total innocent way. Of course the whole idea of the defense is to cast reasonable doubt as to the accused’s guilt. But the more pieces of evidence that there are against the accused then the lesser the probability of them all being circumstantial and the greater the likely hood of the accused being guilty. Even if there is some doubt about each piece of evidence taken together they point to the accused as being guilty, even if the doubt is large such as 50% like we showed above.

Ayuveda in my paper Robert McCormick Jun 05

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The online version of my local paper carried a story today under the guise of its Lifestyle and Health section about a reporters experiences trying out some Ayurvedic “medicine”. It seems at least to my equal parts horror or pleasure (horror that they paid to have this and pleasure that it was not a local reporter) that this story has been imported from the LA Times and/or Washington Post. Skimming over it immediately prompted me to leave a lengthy comment on the site which I will post below for your reading pleasure.

The article mentions that few “western” doctors espouse these types of healing methods due to lack of (or inability to conduct) scientific studies.

However, those in learned circles, or at least with a working knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and physics as well as a rational brain can clearly see that methods that have no basis in any scientific understanding of the body, such as the “doshas” (which cannot be shown to exist) have no point in being studied in clinical trials until there is a viable method for their mechanisms of action.

This is all very similar to the ideas (the four bodily humours) that science correctly discarded at the end of the middle ages as utter nonsense. Many feature of the Ayurveda and indeed traditional Chinese medicine are based on disproven ideas of how the body works.

And while more and more this sort of non-reality medicine creeps into the western (especial post-modern) philosophies, you find that in their native countries (in this case India – but it also applies to China) the locals are abandoning these methods for ones that actually work by methods other than relaxation and the placebo effects.

The statements about nutrition and the need to balance what you eat are not restricted to Ayurveda, and can be found just as readily in science-based medicine.

And as for food having energies – Yep it does… you might have heard of them they usually go by the name Calories.

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