Good news at last (and thank you for keeping me sane)

Ms T has, as you may know, suffers from an immune disorder requiring lots of heavy cytotoxins (as well as surgery back in February that left a seppuku-scar, a couple of tumours, now gone, that frightened the daylights out of us, and other stuff).

And a great many people have said so many wonderful things to me about my previous posts, that it would be unfair to keep good news to myself. You may not know this, but it is a jack under the flat tyre of depression to know that other people understand.

So. We’ve had a little string of bits of nice news, and in my appreciation of your previous kind words, here they are.

“That’s not a cancer” – a worrying lesion gets a specialist’s cold-shoulder.

“The celiac bypass is perfect” – the surgeon following an ultrasound examining the 30cm of leg-vein that’s shunting from the aorta to the celiac artery, supplying Ms T’s liver and stomach (it may have been better if he hadn’t said to himself “damn I’m good” while looking at the pictures).

“Liver scores are good, and your kidneys are picking up” – today, at the renal specialist.

In fact, the renal said, the current round of mustard gas – sorry, cyclophosphamide – seems to be doing what it’s supposed to be doing: making the patient as sick as a dog, slaughtering the immune system, leaving the patent subject to random infections, leaving the patient defenceless against tumours that normal people wouldn’t ever know had been there because they’re dealt with and so on.

And keeping her alive.

The blood vessels remain open; the arteries that remain to her remain open (the carotid isn’t coming back, but there’s collaterals built around the blockage, thank heavens!).

The renal specialist was the most surprised, which surprised us. After agreeing with my general opinion of surgeons (“So smug I could punch him.” “Oh, everybody wants to punch surgeons, that’s how they are.”) she said to my wife, “Actually, I’m surprised at how well you’re doing. I thought you’d be on dialysis by now. If you survived.”

She did. And there’s my Christmas, along with taking care of Bunjaree Cottages for our guests (if you want to head to the Blue Mountains, we’re http://www.bunjareecottages.com.au here and there are still vacancies for the long school holiday!) and writing when there are people to write for, and doing GIS when it’s there, and wondering at life when there’s a moment to spare.

And here, as I said, is my thank you for the dear, kind, gentle and loving souls who have helped keep me sane this year. We – me and Ms T – both know what such things mean in the hard days and sleepless nights, and our appreciation is hard to adequately express. Thanks!

The plea of a deadbeat dad: how does my son enter work?

I haven’t often felt this inadequate as a parent.

No, strike that.

I have always felt inadequate as a parent. I was inadequate when Ms T was not-coping with post-natal depression and our eldest son was perfectly capable of crying for seven hours at a stretch, unless she was cradling him and dancing to early 1990s thrash-punk (he still likes The Pixies’ “Dolittle”, thank heavens). I was manifestly inadequate when he was being bullied in Year 4, to a point that was close to call-the-police. I tried to be adequate through his teens.

Now he’s nearly an adult, we get on brilliantly, and I’m insanely proud of things like his university results – where the hell does a son of mine get the seriousness to land regular “distinction” results, including in one did-it-on-spec unit that’s in the doctoral stream and he doesn’t yet have his BSc?

(This is especially poignant for me, the university drop-out because I ran out of cash in 1990.)

For someone who thought “why didn’t I know you?” when I carried my father’s coffin, that feels good. Snd I’m also gob-smacked at how he’s learned to care far and beyond his years: knowing how sick his mother is, he doesn’t maunder or rage, he simply says “yes” to whatever burden her illness brings to him. Cheerfully.

But: I have NO idea, none whatever, about how to tell him to get a start in the job market.

You see: when I started out, it wasn’t so hard. For office types, there were regular start-by-examination in any number of industries. My start was in the insurance business, as an 18-year-old clerk; I then moved to telecommunications – as a trainee with paid training – on the basis of another enter-by-exam job offering.

And I moved around a few jobs and suffered a few interviews, and then found my first niche, as a journalist specialising in technology. That was in 1987.

Since then, I have hardly ever needed to go through the indignity of job-seeking and interviews. I have been head-hunted, I have travelled with the furniture in acquisitions, and I have coat-tailed (“You do the bid, I’ll do the work and take my cut” – a wonderful way to outsource the interview thing!). But I have hardly ever actually applied for a job.

Which, as you might guess, makes me utterly useless to advise my son about how to get work in the long university break.

So: my son is intelligent, can present a decent facsimile of someone who likes the customer even if he doesn’t, can work hard, talks intelligently, likes old ladies and toddlers, and detests the very idea of making his start with McDonald’s. What should I suggest to him?

Google’s tutorial: how to lose a defamation case

How shall I put this? Bluntly, I think, is best.

It shits me to tears when the commentariat sees fit to drip venom on the result of a court case without reading the damn judgement. Even more tears, when it’s clearly a comment from someone who doesn’t understand the court case or even the legal system under which it was fought, but still sees fit to drip venom, etc.

And it shits me to tears when it’s clearly a knocked-off-in-a-hurry bit of cheap American clickbait with no reference to what happens in another country.

Enter ReadWriteWeb, with this http://readwrite.com/2012/11/26/court-rules-wrongly-that-google-is-a-publisher brick-thick intervention into Google’s Australian defamation loss.

"Court rules - wrongly - that Google is a publisher". Even even the bloody headline is wrong. 

Google is a publisher, and proud of it when it wishes to be. When it decides to let journalists into the inner sanctums of Google Maps, it is insanely pleased with itself at its job of correcting maps that governments think are authoritative. In other words, if a Google Map is more accurate than the “real” map, it’s because Google collected “ground truth” data, reconciled the discrepancies between that and its own maps, and publishes its own maps.

It also relentlessly (if, anyhow, you happen to be a recipient of notices) publishes its own Official Google blog posts, and creates its own direct mail campaigns (had one in the letterbox this week). Any claim that Google isn’t a publisher is disingenuous. And because some people between the Pacific and Atlantic have trouble with words like that: really, Google is a publisher, whatever statements it makes to mislead idiots.

But it’s the complete and utter failure to actually read the judgement that makes me want to pick up a broadsword and kill a thousand men in a mead hall.

Here’s a few salient points about the case. From the judgement, which Jon Mitchell didn't bother with because of the long words.

1. Google treated the original request – “remove defamatory material” – as too trivial to bother with. Its response was the equivalent of “here’s a phone, call someone who gives a shit”.
2. Google treated the court as too trivial to bother with. It had the opportunity to call witnesses with knowledge of what happened, and didn’t.
3. Google treated Australian defamation law as too trivial to bother with. It decided that its defence would rest on decisions made in England – which, in case it hasn’t noticed, is actually a different country. Its legal mind was about 25 years out of date, since we stopped sending appeals to the Privy Council in 1986. Australian courts can consider judgements in other jurisdictions – as they do, including those from America – but English decisions are no longer binding here. Idiots.

Now, instead of a frankly dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers off-toss by a remote twerp, here are the three facts which, it seems from reading the judgement, actually matter:

1. Google was asked to amend the search results so as not to present a defamatory imputation.
2. Google admitted in court that it could have done so.
3. Yahoo had already lost a case on the same facts.

In other words, Google just couldn’t be arsed. Its decision was “don’t bother and don’t spend more on the fight than a settlement would cost”.

The judge frequently makes it clear that Google could have done better, and had it done so, the jury may have been free to find in favour of the search engine giant.

In other words, through the combination of arrogance and can’t-be-bothered, Google has supported a precedent that ReadWriteWeb detests. Take your complaint to Mountain View, fools, and stop giving us patronising piss-in-the-pocket advice from the other side of the Pacific.

Patronising MSM journalists hasten their own demise

Well, Sydney is baking and I’m grumpy and I have a pet detestation that fastens on journalists either waving the arse of their ignorance in the reader’s face, or treating the readers themselves like idiots in their desire to patronise.

There’s this special tone of voice, “I-know-something-you-don’t” (imagine it singsong “nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!”), that journalists use when they think they’re educating their audience but are really just patronising the living daylight out of us.

Here’s a piece about battery technology research from the SMH. http://www.theage.com.au/business/carbon-economy/scientists-edging-closer-to-creating-holy-grail-of-renewable-energy-world-20121128-2aecc.html It’s lame in that kind of lameness that you get when the journalist fears any real science will turn off readers.

And especially lame is this:

“Batteries keep the lights on at night, and are perhaps the most surprising component of the otherwise high-tech array. Nestled among the coconut palms and shiny solar panels are bungalows containing 1344 giant lead-acid batteries weighing a combined 257 tonnes.”

And…

“Tokelau's energy set-up may seem anachronistic…”

As some of you know, my wife and I operate a solar-powered set of holiday cottages, Bunjaree Cottages in Wentworth Falls. We don’t have 1,344 batteries – a more modest 36 is our kit, and there are humans out there who will contrive ways to suck them down from 54 V at 5pm to blackout at 6am (no mean feat: my family in December 2011, during a rain spell, managed three days without losing power).

So okay, I am familiar with lead-acid batteries and not in the least surprised, but neither should the Herald’s “carbon economy editor” (the invention of useless titles is one way once-were-warrior newspapers rage against the dying of the light), nor the Herald’s readers.

If you open the bonnet of your car – an anachronistic activity I know, but bear with me – you’ll find it packed with “anachronistic” hundred-year-old technology. The internal combustion engine, for a start; not to mention the lead-acid battery in a corner to give you a start in the morning. Kick the tyres and you’re kicking something from the 19^th century, with enhancements, wrapped around improvements on wheels that even Pharoes had.

Now, I’ll grant that some of the story passes muster – although telling us that someone invented the vanadium redox battery, but not caring to describe it screams “out of depth reporter” to me (the science is easy to find on Google; essentially, it uses vanadium in two different solutions to store the charge).

I have found over decades behind the alphabet piano that mostly, you don’t need to patronise the reader – and in the world of the Internet, it’s an advantage not to. If the story is good, readers will find it, share it, pass it around – and you’ll get the hits. Is it better to seek out idiots, or to assume that it’s just as good to have the same number of informed, knowledgeable readers in front of the story?

I suspect a mindset is at fault: even as its readers flee, the old world of the newsroom believes itself party to privilege. It can’t shake the habits of “knowing something you don’t”, the keeper of the curtain who, for a suitable fee, will draw it back and give the audience a peek.

AusSMC: goodbye. You're not there to censor science

I have just asked the Australian Science Media Centre to no longer consider me a member.

Here’s why.

First let me set down my scientific credentials: I have none. I am a journalist with a strong interest in science, and – I hope – a functioning sniff-test on what I will and won’t write about. Their job was to educate me, but it seems I have to turn tables.

My only credential is that The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk), for whom I write (http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Richard%20Chirgwin), gets millions of hits in any given week (sometimes on a good day), and my science stories do well enough that nobody tells me to lay off science stories.

The Australian Science Media Centre has seen fit to upend a very public bucket (http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/11/27/3639625.htm) on two Southern Cross University scientists for “media coverage by press release without a peer reviewed scientific paper to back it up?” asking “whether releasing preliminary data to the media is ever warranted”.

Let’s start with the hypocrisy. For the AusSMC to set “peer review” as the benchmark for “talk to the press” blithely ignores its own patron, the Baroness Greenfield, who just as blithely ignores peer review (for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2012/feb/27/1) when it comes to her theories about social media and brain development.

Also, there’s this exceptionally silly statement.

“The scientific process goes something like this: a researcher constructs a hypothesis, runs experiments to test their hypothesis, gathers data, interprets the results and then puts the lot through peer review”.

Bollocks. Nonsense. That’s how the scientific publication process goes. Science is messy. I’d suppose the most exciting words that an elder professor can hear from a PhD candidate are:

“That’s odd…”

And I have an example, here (http://sydney.edu.au/news/science/397.html?newsstoryid=3204). Speaking at the Australian Institute of Physics recently, CUDOS’ Dr Ben Egglestone was more frank about the researcher’s puzzlement. Actually, the first thought was that a bit of apparatus (presumably expensive) was broken.

The observation came first; after which came the hypothesis; after which the experimental test. After which, the paper.

Back to the CSG issue.

The first public discussion of the work by Dr Damien Maher and Dr Isaac Santos was not, as far as I can see, this press release (http://www.scu.edu.au/news/media.php?item_id=6041&action=show_item&type=M) as asserted by AusSMC, but rather this (http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/submissions/closed-consultations/~/media/government/submissions/csg/CSG-20121109-CentreForCoastalBiogeochemistrySCU.pdf - PDF) submission to a Department of Climate Change’s inquiry.

I see nothing remotely improper about a scientist contributing to a government inquiry, even pre-peer-review.

It seems the press release was issued after the Sydney Morning Herald noticed the submission and put together this story: in other words, the press release was probably intended as a media summary after every man and his dog started calling up the University.

Which brings us to the question “whether releasing preliminary data to the media is ever warranted”?

To be polite, don’t be silly: is the world now to start censoring its scientists solely on the basis of whether a journal has accepted a particular item of research for publication? Sure, it’s good business for the big journals, but as a journalist, I acknowledge no obligation whatever to protect their business model.

In the specific instance of the SCU submission to the government inquiry: the document repeatedly makes clear that it is presenting preliminary results. The researchers say that their measurements are incomplete – they “provide evidence for significant but unquantified” emissions, and call for “baseline studies” before new projects are commenced.

Ahh, someone or other complains, but they didn’t release the raw data, so nobody else can test it! No: because the raw data is off with a publication undergoing peer review. It’s stuck in the “process” that the AusSMC is promoting.

More broadly, suggesting an extension of peer review from its proper(ish) role – ensuring that the science is sufficiently rigorous to justify publication in a specific journal – into a pre-publication self-censorship is an awful idea.

First, keep in mind that “peer review” isn’t magic. It means “this result is robust enough to warrant publication” – after which the real business of “replicate it or rip it to shreds” begins. The journals do not replicate an experiment before they publish: that is the job of other scientists, after they’ve got their hands on the data.

Apply a “pre peer review” gag? So that no scientist can ever answer the question “what are your current research interests?” So that all science journalism is forever beholden to the embargoes and fanatical media management of the large publishers? So that journalists can see nothing, read nothing and know nothing except by the grace of the journals – while laying out $20k in annual subscriptions?

Should Cornell University pull Arxiv because a journalist might download a document that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed?

To think that the Australian Science Media Centre wants to filter “science” through the lens of the “science publisher’s” world view is a depressing thought indeed.

Goodbye. I don’t wish the AusSMC bad luck, because – to paraphrase Archie Goodwin – even with good luck, it won’t get much of an epitaph.

Childcare and feminism

Usually, you’ll hear this kind of thing from shits saying “why should you get help that I didn’t get?” Bear with me. It won’t be that way.

Because of the people I follow, I saw a lot of observations recently on Twitter that child-care is the feminist issue that’s on the don’t touch list; that the people who have “feminism” in mind are happier dealing the clue-by-four to radio shock-jocks whose opinions won’t change si why waste the time? (courtesy Helen Razer); that motherhood isn’t sexy enough for the feminist agenda (Asher Wolf).

Yes to all of you. You’re fighting the hardest fight that remains to feminism.

I have no direct stake and therefore, I guess, no right to comment. I’m not a woman. I’m a father whose sons are now old enough to do without me. If I died tomorrow, they’d get by somehow, not least because Ms T has taught them to cook – properly. That is: they can get by without pre-preps for the sauce. They can eat cheap. They’ll live.

Ms T, however, would not get by without me. Does that at least qualify me for “observer” status? I bloody hope, so or I am in the cross-hairs for the best flaming I’ve had in years…

Because I’m trying to be sensitive to others in this post, it’s hard to have the words flow. So if I wander, forgive me.

I identify the child care issue as the hardest fight, not only as a father, but as someone whose contacts reach back to 1896, when my late grandmother was born. I’ll just stick with my father’s lifetime: his mother, Doris, suffered septicaemia when her youngest son was born. This was during the Depression, at a time when government support for the merely unemployed was as hostile and hateful as today’s bipartisan contest to rain horrors on the heads of boat-borne refugees.

She never truly recovered: my dim memories of her are as someone who wore heavy coats and felt hats in a Sydney summer, and once seated as a visitor, barely moved. People came to her.

When my father joined the navy in WW2, he was directed to the ship’s laundry as a volunteer, because he’d wrangled the copper since age ten.

When I was seven, my mother suffered an affliction which much later I identified as Menier’s Syndrome, and was so ill that she needed to convalesce. I was too young – strike that, I know what I was, too much of a trouble-making pain in the arse! – to remain in Sydney with dad and my siblings. He had an over-the-odds too-many-hours job that precluded him from travelling to school every other week.

So I went to Springwood with my mother, to be cared for by my grandmother while my mother lay in a bed that spun if she closed her eyes. There were penalties and compensations in that six-months. The school I temporarily attended liked me just about as much as I liked it; my grandmother was a very severe product of the 19^th century; but she had a short-wave radio! She also let me use any amount of cubed sugar in tea, and talked in a way that I liked hearing, in spite of the 70-odd years between us.

It would be easy, from my point of view, to say “So, there’s no support for child-care? Get over it, there never was any.”

I won’t.

My uncle – the only survivor today of Dad’s family – told me at a recent funeral how his elder siblings gave up fun and opportunity to help bring him up (dad didn’t resent his part in that; he resented bad medicine and the Depression).

And I recall a 1960s in which the only way to keep a family together – one that nearly failed anyhow for other reasons – was to divide it for a time. Because sickness didn't warrant support.

And me? I’m here. My sons are beyond compare, but they’re no the topic of this post. Nor are my experiences – and Ms T’s – of parent-hood. We got by somehow, in spite of short funds, a psycho school principal, and so on.

I merely wish to say two things: the first is that I wholeheartedly support the idea that child-care is a vital feminist issue. I have no particular right to say so, but I’ve never claimed the right to express my opinions, only the ability to do so and try to stop me.

The second: keep in mind that “care” is, also and maybe foremost, the right of the child. The insane ideological inputs from the right – that the child’s right to care is linked with getting women to be “real women” – can be disregarded, unless you want to subscribe to the equally-insane notion that “real women don’t get sick”.

Get the argument right – in a modern PR-driven construction that I utterly detest, “get the framing right” (may all savvy pundits die horribly, preferably at my hand) – and both the mothers and the children benefit.

Back to my introduction: “I never got help, why should you?”

Because we never buy our own salvation. If you wan to save the world, do so, but understand that it will be saved for others, not for you.

Life is tragic, that way: you are noble when you buy a better life for those that can’t do it for themselves, either because they’re powerless today, or because they don’t know they need what you’ll win for them.

Do it for yourself, and it’s just greed.

Since I’m not in the mood to dwell on religion, I’ll call instead on Lord of The Rings: Frodo didn’t rescue Frodo. Just everybody else. 

That’s why I support those who battle on the behalf of others: the new mother who finds the mere energy to become an activist on behalf of better child care will not benefit herself. It will take too long: the best she can hope for is that some other mother has a better time of it.

All mothers deserve enough support that their sons might feel that way. All children deserve their mothers – without the stresses that lack of support introduce. If feminists  – not mere publicity-seekers – choose this as a battle-ground, I can’t ride their horses, but I can carry spears.

To those trying to change things for the better: My bet is that you have my mother and both my grandmothers, my aunt and probably my father - all dead, alas - applauding you.

NBN Co’s alleged lack of telecomms on the board

Malcolm Turnbull’s latest talking point is, to quote his Tweet, that: “there is a woeful lack of telecom expertise on the NBN Co”. Ahhh, you may think, at last, a nut with meat in it, the Achilles’ heel of the government’s oversight of the project, the weak link. And so on.

So what does the NBN Co board look like? I looked here http://nbnco.com.au/about-us/our-people/board.html  to check off relevant experience. Everybody on the board spans multiple industries, so this is a very inadequate summary. In essence I have picked out the “most relevant” experience for each board member.

Board Members – eight

Finance / law / corporate – three

Civil engineering infrastructure / management – three

Telecommunications – two

Well, telecommunications isn’t exactly absent, is it? Mike Quigley’s been there all his life, and Siobhan McKenna was in telecommunications advisory at McKinsey, which must count for something.

It’s hardly surprising that the finance-law-corporate experience (people like Malcolm, if you will) dominates: it probably does in most companies. Considering the considerable dollars NBN Co has to handle, that’s sensible.

And the other three board members? They’ve spent time around civil engineering and infrastructure, one way or another.

That’s very sensible.

The NBN is primarily a civil engineering project. It’s about pits and pipes, ducts and digging, lugging and logistics. The cables are comparatively trivial: they’re just what gets installed into those pits and pipes. The cables themselves are worth much less than the cost of the civil works. Even the equipment attaching to the ends of those cables is far less, in terms of the overall cost of the NBN, than the price of the civil works.

It won’t always be that way, of course: today, NBN Co is a construction company; at some point in the future, network operations will dominate. None of the board members are appointed forever, though: there’s time enough to cycle one kind of expertise out of the NBN Co board, and cycle in another kind.

But for now, this large and very expensive construction project is headed by a board which mostly comes from the worlds of “big business” and “big civil”.

Sounds about right to me.

The glory of children: Go and wash the dishes, jerks!

I was going to try and talk about a corporate scammer of very good name that plays the Internet invoice scam.

WTF. If idiots actually believe they’ve signed on with a high-profile accommodation booking site, I can’t help them.

Instead, I’ll talk about the strange intersect between shit activities and family life.

I once gave up on a discussion about the washing up, when someone told me they regarded it as slavery – as something his children would never have to suffer. QED the dishwashing machine.

I own a dishwasher now, my fifth. Only one has ever been any damn good at the job – an ancient Vulcan that had to be ditched when spare parts became unavailable. Apart from that, each one has been, from the cheap to the “it costs HOW much?” have disappointed.

When our sons were young – younger than ten – Ms T and I stopped trying to find a dishwasher that pleased us, that didn’t demand a half-hour of pre-rinse and frequent “be nice to an appliance” routines, and reverted to hand-washing. There remains an unused machine of decent brand, taking up space because we can’t figure out how to remodel the kitchen.

Then she fell ill.

Sometime in the last two years, between me trying to earn an income between a chair in the corner of a hospital room, a home office that’s usually on the dining table, and wielding a mop-and-bucket in a Blue Mountains eco-tourism resort – and Ms T splitting her time between hospital, the kitchen because she loves to put meals on our table, the best chair in front of the TV when there’s cricket, and so on – where was I?

Oh yeah.

The boys took over the washing up.

I was at the Royal Prince Alfred, anytime I wasn’t fixing breakfast, preparing dinner (under Ms T’s instructions), working in the seat in the corner, or picking them up from schools.

Evenings, my two sons had to themselves, and they – not I – decided to assume the burden of washing up for themselves.

And that’s the way they kept it.

It’s a matter of pride for them: Ms T cooks meals (which when life is good I will set against any meal); I earn money; they help us keep things going.

And they’re proud of it. If we remind them that something wasn’t cleaned properly, it’s personal.

There are other things they do, without hope or expectation or reward, beyond their devotion to their mother.

And before anybody decides to create some kind of “ideal” out of them: I can assure you that in a great many situations, they would rate as “pain in the arse of the whole world”. They need a cattle-prod to actually undertake school or university work. They don’t understand the difference between “conversational emphasis” and “too fucking loud”. They spend too much time on games, much as I once spent too much time trying to perfect my skills as a drummer in the late 1970s.

And they are gifts, wonders, treasures that would blush if the ever notice how highly I regard them. If they don’t see this, they won’t blush. If they do? Fine by me. They deserve my admiration, and they have it.

Now, you loudmouth, game-obsessed, unscholarly lazy jerks: go and wash the dishes! :-)

We consider you two boys the unvarnished gold of our lives. You can live the shit-life of chemotherapy without cringing, will volunteer for things worse than mere dish-washing without flinching, will live the life of chronic illness without it even denting your savoir-faire. You are stronger than I could have been.

Please, in the outside world, can I account this as success as a father? Can Ms T and I believe we were good parents?

Please?

Generic drugs: good for the PBS

 

Since someone on Twitter has no idea about “chemo day”, and sees fit to tell me I don’t know, let me tell you what it’s like.

Today, Ms T didn’t get her usual chair in “siberia” – that part of the chemo suite reserved for people both on cytotoxins and with superbug-risk. Someone else was there first, so she had the chair next door.

He was an old gentleman who’d arrived, been given morphine, been sent off to get an MRI before his chemo (this sounds bad to me), returned, and waited. Then, before his chemo, he was visited by another doctor, given a butterfly for morphia, recommended for admission and assigned a bed, and sent off again for another MRI because they “wanted more information”. This sounds really bad to me.

On the other side was a teenager who nearly broke my heart: the beautiful-but-hairless that mostly I’d only seen in fundraiser ads (and in our adventures at RPA, we’ve met many cancered-and/or-transplant teenagers).

And there were the carers. On one side, a sixtyish woman fussing over her husband; on the other, a fortyish woman fussing over her daughter. In the middle, us: me arriving late, because I’d had other things to do today, Ms T waiting after some hours because the chemo suite is busy.

We were, remember, in a corner: sibera. The rest of the suite has maybe thirty chairs.

We got through with the small pleasantries that make tolerable being around so much grief. Everybody here is dying, and the carers are all cheerful. “Oh, I can’t stand to see the needle going in.” “I fainted once, so I must be worse than you.” From the teenager’s seat: “Pussies! I have to get the needle IN me, and my bags are bigger than yours!” (She was right. She had a line-up that looked like three liters).

Every single drug these three were receiving was an unbranded generic. There were two cyclophosphamide patients, one on something I didn’t recognise but didn’t come with a “big name” above the chemical name.

We all smiled and chatted. All of us thanked the nurses, whose job I wouldn’t take at two hundred thousand a year, who were invariably happy and gentle and solicitous. We chatted en-passant, wheeled our respective patients’ assemblies towards the toilets as required, tried not to invade each others’ privacy (funny thing: cram people in desperate circumstances into a tight space, and we’re all sensitive to each others’ privacy), and tried to smile.

In another corner of the world, the government has decided not to pay full-price for one cancer drug that’s now available as a generic. In essence the policy is this: “since the drug is available for $X, we will pay $X. If big pharma wants to supply at that price, fine. If not, we will buy it as a generic and pay $X.”

Whaddaya know? Within nanoseconds, the entire Big Pharma machine is in swing.

I know how the machine works. I once worked for the publisher of Australian Doctor, and not only did I get a close-up day-to-day of the machine, I had an internal training session on its practises.

The “desperate patient” is the poster-child of any pharmaceutical campaign, whether it’s for Viagra, the creation of a brand-new (medicable) psych complaint, or “protect this cancer treatment”.

The last one is the best. Who’s going to argue with a cancer patient’s needs?

Me. Someone inside the system. Someone who’s seen it at work. Someone who knows how it works, both as a journalist and carer.

The entire pharmaceutical campaign over the funding of one – just one – drug is based on a simple premise: most people don’t know.

The big thing they don’t know is this: most of the drugs you get in a hospital are generic. From the paracetamol up. Want an anti-emetic? It’ll be generic. Need morphia? Ditto. Artificial morphioid? Yep, generic. Cancer drug?

That’s the sensitive issue, but: most of the drugs used to fight cancers are out of patent, dispensed as generics. Not one person receiving those drugs wants them. They just need them – and don’t care about the brand name.

Some of those drugs are used for other things, like locking down the immune system. Cyclophosphamide, my wife’s drug of choice, came out of the 1950s: anyone arguing that the government must fund its branded versions, Cytoxan, Endoxan, Neosar, etcetera, merely to demonstrate its “commitment” to the health system?

Stupid.

When the premium for the brand could be spent somewhere else?

Stupid.

Should “paracetamol 500 mg” be replaced with a branded product at six times the price, in hospitals, merely as an icon of our “commitment to excellence” or some such shit?

Stupid.

Should the pharmacist insist that Ms T be dispensed with “Immuran” instead of Azathioprine, just so the government can pay more on the PBS to get the brand instead of the chemical compound?

Stupid.

There is no good argument for demanding that the government pay a brand-premium, when “brand” exists only as an emotional consumer artefact to get people to pay premiums that they don’t have to pay.

The idea that “extra spending” should happen as a symbol of “commitment” is childish and simplistic.

Open government spatial data: do it but don’t do it badly

I’m in favour of open government spatial data, I really am, but for the love of all things holy, why is it done so badly?

I don’t mean “badly” as in “you just have to know X and it will be fine”. I mean “badly” as in “Australia’s governments are embracing open data with unusable agglomerations that look like they were Web sites designed in 1993”.

The idea, it seems, is to start by creating portals that provide single-point-of-access to data that used to be held in different agencies – or still are held in those agencies. So what do you end up with? Generally, an unnavigable shambles that takes ages to navigate, and when you get somewhere, it was barely worth it.

Let’s get specific for a moment. Here’s one of the ACT Government’s datasets:

This is “Geographic data for the ACT, including ACT Legislative Assembly electorate boundaries, and boundaries for the Territory, districts and suburbs. There is also data for water feaures and Gazetted Feature Names.”

Well, as you can see, the display is less-than-useful. Too much of the screen real estate is devoted to everything but the map. And what does this page actually do? It takes a few already-available data sets, serves them out of (I think) an Arcgis server, and overlays it on a Google Map.

All of this is pretty, but to someone who does GIS, it’s useless. I’d still have to download the shapes to do anything with them. Now, take a look at the bit I circled in the screen-shot.

To add a dataset layer, you need to know the dataset name – which means you need to be already familiar with the metadata. If you wanted – who knows why – to add bus-stops to this not-useful display, you need to know exactly what the bus-stop dataset is called.

Once you zoom in, the profound uselessness of the display becomes apparent:

Ahem.

Yes, the download becomes convenient. And thankfully, it’s at least organised well: the individual layers aren’t blended into one set of vectors, as I’ve known some of the idiots of online mapping to do.

And there’s this, from the bus-stop data table:

 

-->

OK, it’s a simple parse error in the data import – but since it hasn’t been noticed, and recurs in other data sets, it suggests two things: (1) nobody ran a simple database query to see if their data import worked right, and (2) there aren’t that many users.

It’s not just the ACT, and it’s probably unfair of me to single the ACT out, but I’m not going to unpick the whole country. The ACT is at worst typical and better than some. Queensland has some dataset directory entries which, after you’ve clicked through a few navigation screens, turn out to be empty.

The thing is this: if you’re not going to make a very good directory, then merely doing an Open Government something because it’s the flavour of the month is a waste of money.

If I want electoral boundaries, Google will find them for me; ditto whatever street-level data exists. Topographic data in Australia is easy to find, thanks to Geosciences Australia, as is a lot of other spatial data.

And there’s the challenge, really: governments publishing the data sets aren’t spending their money wisely if their spiffy portals deliver results slower than Google searches. And map tools that do nothing but offer a passive display of one layer over another layer over another layer – are doing nothing but delivering up license fees to vendors.

Stop obsessing about Stratfor

Y’know what?

I don’t care whether someone had a meeting with Stratfor.

Let’s see. Stratfor’s own internal security was lame. Which suggests that, along with people like a CIA boss or Sony, Stratfor’s security was a pile of steaming dung. No surprises there: the number of “savvy” people with a slippery grasp of computer security seems astonishingly high.

But here’s the other thing: Stratfor’s intelligence was lame. It was second-rate stuff, cribbings from the local media with the kind of commentary that you get when most of the grunt-work comes from that optimistic slave-labour that Americans excuse under the word “intern”.

In another era, the work that Stratfor did would have been carried out by junior embassy staff as their first-year familiarisation: crib the local newspapers for relevant stories, write summaries, get them approved, and send them back home under the boss’s signature.

It's Reader's Digest stuff, literally: a news digest of local stories of interest to the diplomats.

Apart from a gossamer overlay of “analysis” from Stratfor, that’s what the outfit provided, because budget-counting idiots cut back on staff and outsourced the job at a higher price.

So if I get the stunning revelation that the current foreign minister met with Stratfor, I don’t think “international conspiracy”. I think “why is Bob Carr wasting his time with a bunch of losers who would provide more value behind the checkout counter at McDonalds?”

The difference between community and business

Let me introduce you to a migrant, who I suppose is dead now, or if not dead, is extremely old. Julius Kulhan, butcher.

When my wife and I knew him as our butcher, he would not reveal to us exactly where he came from: it was somewhere in the Balkans, and when I asked, he responded sadly, “My country is no longer my country, so it has no name.”

He’d been a butcher a long time, when we met him. In our late twenties, he already looked like God’s older brother: small, thin, wrinkled, white-haired, and with the hands of a pre-OHS butcher (the left hand was in a permanent claw from injuries).

He’d left his home either during or directly after World War Two, and after some wandering – which included on-board butcher for Cunard, something I suppose you didn’t get to do if you were hopeless – he and his wife, Maria, settled in Australia.

And his shop, when we lived nearby, was at an insignificant corner in St Peters. It wasn’t even close to the bits of St Peters that today’s hipsters like – it was near where St Peters becomes Sydenham, and has since been turned into something horrible and modernist. So it goes.

In the early nineties, Ms T and I were seriously short of money. Our affordable mortgage had passed eighteen percent, and buying food was so troublesome that while having some friends around for dinner, we padded the salad with dandelion (which, I have to say, worked so well we will still do so from time to time!).

And Ms T was pregnant with our first.

Julius was a very cheap butcher: his life was constrained not by money, but by other circumstances (the health of his family). He didn’t get out much – for example, to check other butchers’ prices. His prices were based on "what I spend, plus enough for myself" - and he'd long since paid his mortgage, and lived above the shop.

Some of his specialties were first-rate: I was in the shop one Saturday morning to witness him rebuffing a Major Chain Buyer on the subject of bacon: “But if I sell all my bacon to you, what happens to my customers? No.” I will attest that his bacon was excellent: he had an arrangement with a Marrickville smallgoods producer which let him smoke things to his own specifications in their chimney.

Before I ramble too far, two points: one about community, the other about choosing a butcher.

About community: he was a true believer. He loved the country he found himself in – there was a little Australian flag in the shop – and the community he found himself in, even though much of the St Peters of his lifetime could fairly be describes as a slum.

We found out about his love of community when Ms T was pregnant and we were broke. He discovered that she had a passion for lamb’s fry (which is, when cooked with skill, something close to heaven). So once each month during her first pregnancy, he would save a lamb’s liver for her, price thirty cents. “She needs it for the baby”, Maria would explain. Others in the community who were regular customers also got treats: I once saw a desperate mother leaving the shop with a stock of lamb shanks that today would fetch on the plus side of twenty dollars. “No, no, two dollars, when you can.”

And I know that he wasn’t poor, if only because of the queues that would form when his regulars knew he always prepared something special: there was a calendar for the various smallgoods and sausages he hand-made, and at some times of the year, a little street-corner butcher in a slum would have Rolls-Royces parked outside.

And that brings me to the other point of this post: sausage.

Chains and supermarkets haven’t destroyed the family butcher in this country, thank heavens. But people without experience beyond ColesWorths don’t know how to tell a good butcher from a mug. 

Sausage is our family benchmark.

If the butcher cares – really cares – about sausage, then you can safely bet the butcher cares about everything.

We’ve had sausage that tasted like heaven, but in the cooking, stunk like cat piss. The butcher had a good recipe, but didn’t bother soaking the offal before dropping it in the sausage bucket.

Whereas someone who is the real thing wants everything about his sausage to be loved: the tying is perfect, there are no disappointments (or cat-piss stench) in the cooking, and the eating is right.

If you find a butcher whose sausage is good, the rest of his work will also be good.

Oh, and a local businessperson who loves his community? A pearl beyond price. Nobody resents someone who does well, if that person loves the customer as much as the customer loves the business. That is something that big business can never steal from the small, for all the worship bestowed on “customer relationship management.”

Is wind-farm bat kill an urban myth?

Who knows why I got interested? I don’t read James Delingpole, because frankly the guy’s a dill. On the spectrum of “dills who are climate deniers”, his name appears near the “you’re a dill for even wondering what this dill says” end of the scale.

But for some reason I did, and therefore for some reason I came across his obsession about bats being killed by their “lungs imploding” because of air pressure around wind farms.

OK, at first glance, the Mythbusters would start at “plausible”. Barotrauma – the scientific term, which you use if you’re not apparently writing for an audience of idiots who’ll switch off even if you provide the definition in the third par – can happen even to mammals as big as humans, if (for example) we break the rules when diving.

Delingpole avoids the scientific term, either because (a) his science would fit in a matchbox without removing the matches, or (b) he’s a cynical dead shit who’s trying to snow-job readers who don’t do science. Take your pick

Bats are smaller than people, wind farms generate pressure differences, QED bats flying through wind turbine turbulence could die from barotrauma. Or, in the condescending “I know more than you but let’s use small words For the Dummies” tone of Delingpole, their “lungs implode”.

I wish I didn’t obsess about such things, I really do, but after a bit of a trawl through the scholarship, on a Saturday night why-do-I-do-this: it’s probably not true.

The whole “wind turbines kill bats through barotrauma” thing seems to arise from just one paper – this one: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982208007513

Now, there are some problems with the paper that seems to form the entire scholarly basis for Deligpole’s obsession about barotrauma killing bats around wind farms.

The first is entirely my own work: the number of bats the author says was killed in a single night (188 victims): because by the time the research reached Scientific American, the timeline had stretched to “between July and September”. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=wind-turbines-kill-bats

Hmm.

That’s significantly more dead bats than any other research identified. For example, this http://asmjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1644/10-MAMM-A-404.1 article in Europe said bats are being killed at “unprecedented rates” when the number – without a timeframe in the abstract, and I don’t get paid for this blog, so I didn’t buy the article – yielded a sample of 39 dead bats.

Yes, species, geography and season will impact the numbers, but going from 188 bats in one night, to 188 bats over some months, to 39 dead bats over any unspecified time-frame being “unprecedented” – that should give rise to questions, at least.

Here’s another contradictory number: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3161/150811010X537846 - which says wind farms in the area of the study kill 20 bats each year.

Now to the substance of the issue.

From – as far as I can find – one paper originating the idea of barotrauma, from which all else have followed, Delingpole has formed an urban mythology that wind farms make bats implode.

Bullshit.

This study - http://vet.sagepub.com/content/49/2/362.short - gives barotrauma as a very minor cause of death, comparing dead bats around turbines to dead bats in cities. It also notes that freezing specimens will give misleading results, because frozen cells (for example in the lungs) look a lot like pre-mortem barotrauma.

Bats die because, like birds, they fly into large structures (their sonar, after all, is attuned not to a skyscraper, but to hunting insects).

The foundation of “bat barotrauma” comes from one, single, and as far as I can tell, un-replicated study.

But we all know about cherry-picking the science, don’t we?

Don’t let me spoil your Christmas

I know I’m not alone in thinking this, but because I’m an arsehole, I’ll be the one to say it instead of grabbing a rivet-gun and a fixed grin and setting one to my face with the other (“Why so serious?”).

From last month until sometime in January, this country will start demanding that I make Christmas lists, plan Christmas menus, book Christmas holiday destinations, and buy more stuff.

Of course, the last three words, “buy more stuff” are the point. Anyone saying I'm a spoiler will do so on the basis of my spend, my product recommendations (none), or my attitude to parties.

So on behalf of all the people too polite to say it, I implore anyone who reads:

Think of those for whom the Christmas present will be a loved one who lives long enough after Christmas (and maybe, if fate decrees, past New Year) so that the twinned holiday is not spoiled for those that bury them.

Think of those who fear that their cancer might not give them Christmas lunch with the family, because they were in ICU after some emergency or other. On that score, think of those whose Christmas will be devoted to keeping someone alive on behalf of their family…

Think of those whose resources are exhausted by care: lucky to live in Australia, where chronic disease doesn’t turn into six-figure debt, care is still expensive. So think of those that won’t have “present money” left in the family budget, because they know the awful blow of January 1 (when they have to pay full-rate for prescriptions) is just around the corner.

Think of those that fall outside: who lack the disease or circumstances to come to the attention of a “famous” charity. For whom there are no pink ribbons or Movembers, neither Christmas soup kitchens nor wish-trees, the ones the bikies don’t ride for to cleanse their image of a year of gunplay and meth labs, who won’t get attention from attention-seeking shits called “celebrities” who arrive with cameras but no help.

Think of those whose Christmas will be one of apologies and comb-overs, patch-ups and promises, whose children knew stoicism before they knew Santa Clause.

Think of those for whom December 25 means work, because unlike you they’re not in the “knowledge sector”, don’t get six-figure salaries, and can’t eat on New Year if they don’t work on Christmas.

It won’t spoil your Christmas to think of them now. If you keep it until December, you may suffer a pang amid the wrapping paper. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

Pro tip: don’t live Tweet product launches

Hello, you may consider this my resignation from a bunch of casual acquaintanceships that probably should matter more but don’t, and from a bunch of publishers I don’t work for (excepting News and Fairfax, both of which would rather eat soap than pay me for anything) (suits me fine).

Some people might decide not to speak to me after this. My personal record among journalists is someone who is now an editor, who declined even polite greetings for about 10 years after I made fun of him in a 1997 press conference.

As I write this a bunch of technology journalists are live-tweeting a product promotion. I won’t mention the product, because that would be to buy into the idea that one of the world’s largest companies needs my help to sell products.

It’s a phone; phones already outnumber humans in Australia. That means very few people actually “need” a new one, if that word is given any reasonable definition.

Carriers need people to want new phones, it’s true. But I recognise no obligation as a journalist to join in the great game of making people think they need something they don’t need. Ditto the journalist’s relationship with a vendor, which should be one of caution bordering on trepidation (from the vendor’s point of view at least).

And as for Tweeting about b-list celebrities’ presence at the launch of a phone … Jesus T Christ and his Travelling Flea Circus.

The tech press aspires to Seriousness. It’s something that makes them sweetly vulnerable: roll out the chance to be pleasant to a CEO, and nine out of ten IT journalists get that kind of shimmery-in-the-belly thing that’s like being in love.

It’s a fucking phone, people. The reason the celebrity is there is that the product is as boring as bat shit, and the reason they’re not A-list celebrities is that the product isn’t from Apple (imagine: princess whats-her-name of Denmark in a nightclubby Apple product launch. The hypegasm would last for years).

Two worsts arise out of this.

One: someone’s going to go over the live Tweets from the product launch while reading the stories tomorrow. Is that going to be a good look? What if the “someone” happens to be the ABC’s Media Watch? (The tech press lives in constant terror of the day MW pays it serious attention).

Two: the same will apply to the product reviews. Someone who’s visited the launch party dressed as a premature orgasm will have zero credibility as a product reviewer (I have sworn off product reviews forever: the experience at twelve months never, never, never matches what you can accomplish in a few days reviewing the product).

I can’t tell you how it ended. Except for the few who think their immortal prose on Twitter is so irresistible that they won’t hashtag their posts (and therefore evade the mute), I gave up on the whole servile display of “ohh, shiny!”

But we had journalists here who consider themselves “serious”, and who will occasionally act it – happy to turn up, for example, at a lawsuit’s directions hearing even though nothing’s going to happen – re-drafting their public image as utterly enthralled by the combination of a bit of plastic in a rectangle and another bit of plastic on legs.

Pfui.

The new wowser is the enemy of pain relief for the sick

My next blog post was going to be about love, but it’s been pre-empted by the unreasonable, hateful, despicable hostility the healthy show towards the sick.

Because some people abuse pain relief medications, doctors want them banned. Or further restricted. Or something. And the ABC’s 730 program is more comfortable with talking to some well-heeled doctors than actually getting out where the pain is.

You utter deadshits: you’ve picked up a story driven by someone’s media unit, wrapped it up so it looks like “journalism”, and haven’t even been ARSED to ask any public medium – even the slack option of asking on Twitter, for fuck’s sake – whether there’s another angle.

If anyone wants to give 730 a Tabasco enema, I’ll provide the Tabasco, the hose, and a bike pump. Slack, insensitive journalism conducted from the New Wowser that Australian press have adopted as “normal”. Arsehats.

Let me provide a little background. Ms T is known to some of you personally; for the rest, “Ms T” will suffice for her name. She suffers a serious, chronic immune system condition that’s required surgery – three times this year, including a 14-inch monster wound in the belly – and has tumours as a side-effect.

Pain relief is a fact of life where we live – and due to factors that make me rage helplessly, access to “pain management specialists” is severely rationed, which you may interpret as meaning “they promised many times to visit, and never made it because someone with a badge and an affiliation appropriated their time on behalf of a More Important Patient” (“You might say that, I couldn’t possibly comment").

And she doesn’t have an interest in this: Ms T can’t take any of the medications mentioned in the 730 episode. Anything with anti-inflammatory properties is, always and forever, off her list. Nurofen: no-go. Asprin: no-go. Paracetamol: ditto.

Catch that, if you’re used to popping some Panadol: there are people in the world for whom it’s banned. Even for a simple headache.

Back to 730: Yes: some people abuse legal pain relief. So: some busybody thinks this Must Be Stopped. Do you understand, even to the least degree, where that ends?

First: access to pain specialists. In some hospitals in Australia the waiting list runs to years. You might die waiting for a specialist to decide what pain relief regime is appropriate for you.

In the meantime, you’re stuck with whatever people are permitted to prescribe for you. Codeine might get prescribed if you’re allowed it; if you’re not, you’re left with the various forms of natural or synthetic opium.

Yes: painkillers are addictive. Ask Ms T, as I just did (to get permission to tell the truth in this post). Should her life outlast her pain, there will be a very bad period getting off the painkillers: so it goes.

But the mindless, knee-jerk, “ban it! It might be addictive!” attitude from New Wowsers?

If they don’t know what chronic pain is like – I don’t actually know first-hand – I’d be happy to provide lessons.

But what’s it like actually getting treatment for severe chronic pain? It’s another layer of pain. As I said, “pain management” teams in hospitals are hard to access. GPs have to jump through hoops to prescribe something effective – and the rules don’t take into account people who are banned from asprin or paracetamol. We’re about to encounter a new rule that will make it harder to get the pain relief that Ms T needs – especially because everyone from the top specialist to the lowly GP agrees (as we do) that she’s addicted to the painkillers.

So no: we don’t see how the “junkie angle” in a tabloid-style report from the ABC’s 730 adds one fucking iota of new, useful information to the debate. And a new outbreak of the new-wowser will only make lives miserable.

Australian journalists could learn from India

Oh, it’s probably too late anyhow. As Mark Colvin has pointed out, we’re all on the road to hell anyway.

A while back, I was at an event in Sydney addressed by the boss of Tata.

He impressed me as being kind of cynically democratic: the very best way to make a shed-load of money is to make something everyone wants, and do it cheap so they can afford it. Which doesn’t make him an angel, but it’s at least more in line with how I see the world than “how can we rip people off with nothing more than a meaningless brand and a shoe just like every other shoe?”

Anyhow. Tata fielded some fairly strong questions from the local press after his speech. For some reason, one of the more revoltingly obsequious local journalists, whose name can remain anonymous because I don’t remember names, saw fit to apologise.

Amid cringes from other journalists present, Tata was amused. What he said was, approximately, “Impolite? Ha! You should come to Bangalore. I’ve had journalists lay hands on me to stop me leaving a press conference. Your people are the picture of propriety.”

That’s about right, really. Australian journalists can’t bear to be impolite to a CEO, unless he’s already a bleeding corpse. We don’t want to get blood on our own “At Lowes!” pinstripes.

In Vietnam, America honed the skills of media control: that access could be granted or withheld to reward or punish journalists who did or did not depart from the official line. Corporate America, quick up the uptake, systemised and perfected the technique.

“If you’re good, we’ll give you access to the CEO” – which, by the way, created a deeply unhealthy symbiosis. CEO-flattery inflated CEO income; journalists inflate the CEO’s importance to protect their access; the CEO’s profile puffs his income. The brain donors that infest the “business pages” play along with this, even if the CEO is in charge of outfits like FirePower. It’s almost always left to someone else to point out the Emperor’s nakedness (there’s a parallel here with the way sports journalists defended Lance what-me-worry Armstrong).

Australia imitated the American “journalists are nice to CEOs” so well that it took an Indian chairman to tell us that questions some of the lapdogs considered rude were nothing, compared to physical assault.

You see: journalists are easily flattered. The notion of being important still matters, even in a world where the media is happy to outsource its own leg-work to freebie amateurs under the sacred “Internet-savvy” banner of “crowdsourcing”.

But someone apologized.

This is Australia, people. Home to egalatarianism, the Eureka Stockade, and “G’day ya old bastard!” Since when were some cheap tricks of media relations sufficient to turn journalists into forelock-tugging, supine, boot-licking cheerleaders?

I should remark that I have been criticised for being rude to someone’s “honoured guest.” A minor politician giving a speech, and lacking the intellectual capacity to bridge the gap between ideology and fact, copped a roasting from me and one or two others.

The boot-licking brown-tongues, I can personally attest, are so devoted to their hostage status and servility that they consider “you can’t be serious!” to be not only a deadly insult, but a disgrace to journalism.

Whereas I merely consider them to be spineless shills whose only concern is how they can corner their next overseas junket.

If life ever gives me the chance to ply my trade in another country, I might try India. And since we’ve got the Asian Century coming, how about Australia learn from India, in this, instead of trying to teach India’s journalists to become supine shills?

CEOs should not invite journalists. They should fear them.

What’s the scientific method got to do with it?

Here’s a myth that needs busting: a lack of understanding of the “scientific method” is what gives rise to journalists doing a bad job of reporting on science.

What tosh.

There are many things that lead to bad science journalism, but journalists having the presumption to write about science they don’t understand is not one of them. If you insisted that only a physicist could write a story about physics, to pick a discipline, then the physics wouldn’t get reported.

“Physics”, you see, isn’t a thing. It’s lots of things. Thinking of physics as if it were a uniform monolith is what someone says if they don't understand science. It's about as smart as thinking "Asia" describes everywhere from Afghanistan to Java, India to North Korea. 

So which part of physics would I need to study to earn the right to write about it? Should I follow Brian May into astrophysics, only to exclude myself from the really cool stuff that happens in high-energy particle physics? Should I abandon the quantum zoo entirely but read up on atomic fusion?

I think you get the picture. A great many scientific endeavours need nearly-mutant intelligence just to get in the lift and decide which button to press.

Yes, you have to report facts – and woe betide the journalist who doesn’t try to find out whether they’re being offered facts or moonshine.

But: it’s actually not that hard. Here are a few random thoughts.

1. Accord the journals the one thing they’ve got going for them: scientific review. Be VERY wary of someone offering to “let you in” on something “even before it’s gone to the journals”.

2. Most “maverick scientists” are kooks. Journalists love the “successful maverick” narrative, so much that they overlook fifty cranks for one scientist, something I’ll discuss in more detail later.

3. You can’t “balance” facts. I’ve heard people ask “so why aren’t there any ‘Relativity sceptics’ or ‘quantum physics’ sceptics?” There are, but they’re ignored. With no well-heeled lobbyists to back them, they get no airtime, that’s all (look up "iron sun theory" for an example).

4. Talk to scientists. Not just the ones on the press release, and not just about the current story. Find scientists who like talking about their field, buy them coffee, and listen. You’ll get so much more than any university media office has to offer.

About mavericks

The reason someone like Barry Chapman – Google helicobacter pilori - is “news” is because he’s the exception, not the rule. Yes, he was a maverick who tested an unconventional theory and won, more power to him. 

For every Barry Chapman, there are dozens of unpublished, unrecorded, anonymous kooks with a pet theory that will Change the World of Science As We Know it. And they are, and remain, kooks.

What made Barry Chapman a headline-grabber was novelty. Most of the time, the maverick is a kook with a barrow to push (“cold fusion” anyone?). And, by the way: Chapman’s experiment demonstrating helicobacter pilori­ may have been unconventional (he self-infected), but once demonstrated, his work was accepted.

Journalists like the maverick because it fits a narrative and a mindset. The narrative is the great story, the scoop, “I was the one who told the world about magic water and saved thousands of lives”. But it’s also a mindset: the individualist set against a monolithic culture – which is how a great many journalists (I don’t exclude myself) like to imagine themselves. Regardless of our political opinions, at a personal level journalists tend to be individualistic. The maverick-is-always-right is appealing.

(Oh, and by the way: Galileo is a dumb example. He wasn’t fighting against a scientific consensus. His opponents were political power and superstition. A climate scientist looks a lot more like Galileo than a coal industry sock-puppet, from that angle.)

The awful truth

The main reason there’s so much bad science writing is because, sorry to say, there’s so much bad science on offer. The reason I stick to the hard sciences – apart from their appeal to my inner geek – is that I feel comfortable on my feet, and able to trust the consensus. So I favour physics, astronomy, climate science, biology, as being demonstrable and trustworthy.

Also, there are far fewer financial interests trying to piss in the pool. I rarely write a medical breakthrough story, because I know I’m inadequate to untangle whether or not there are interests behind it that I can’t see. The same goes for pharmaceuticals. I do trust myself to play “spot the backer” in genetic research, partly because I know some geneticists.

Pharmaceutical science is probably the most polluted: every study has a drug to sell. It’s probably responsible, on a purely numerical basis, for more bad science journalism than any other single discipline, climate change included.

However, this wouldn’t be improved by a journalist having first-year science and an understanding of the scientific method – because a new drug for a freshly-minted psychological disorder is going to be backed by papers that already got past the peer-review committees. If they – presumably real scientists – didn’t ditch the publication, merely giving someone a BA Comms with a sub-major in Science Communication won’t help. Really.

I’ve probably tried your concentration enough this evening. There are other things to be said about “good science writing”, but they’re about “journalistic method” rather than scientific method. Perhaps another day.