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Simon Singh

simonsingh

Singh is a well-known critic of alternative medicine. For the last 18 months his life has been made a misery by a libel suit from the British Chiropractic Association. On 19 April 2008 he wrote in the Guardian:

The British Chiropractic Association (BCA) claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organization is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

To succeed in a defamation claim it is necessary to show that you have suffered damage to your reputation as a result of the published statement. It is a defence to show that the statement is true or that it constituted fair comment.

Singh’s first problem came with the meaning of the first sentence. It can be read it two ways:

(1) The BCA claims its members can treat colic etc and that claim is false; or

(2) The BCA is making the claim knowing it to be false.

The first would be relatively easy for Singh to deal with. All he would need to do would be to show that it was not unreasonable for him to think that the claim was false. The second is hard to deal with because the truth of the claim is irrelevant. Singh has to show that the BCA believed it to be false, or at least that that was a reasonable interpretation. Of course, all the evidence is the other way. The BCA apparently believes the claim, however daft or incompetent Singh may believe that to be.

There is a similar issue with the second sentence, where the BCA claims that “happily” implies “knowingly”, with the same result.

In a preliminary ruling on 7 May, the judge supported the BCA’s interpretation, which bodes ill for Singh’s chances of success.

The UK libel laws clearly need reform. Too many journalists are being gagged by the rich and powerful because it is too risky and too time-consuming to defend libel actions. But I am not sure that Singh’s case helps the reformers.

Singh claims that he never intended to impugn the good faith of chiropracters. Indeed I think the first sentence is somewhat borderline. It could, I think, be reasonably interpreted as saying no more than that chiropracters are peddling remedies which do not work. The second sentence is not totally unambiguous, but on balance I tend to read it as “knowingly promotes”.

Clearly it would be quite wrong for Singh to be fettered in his ability to claim that chiropractic remedies do not work. He should be allowed to make those claims forcefully and without any need to present a balanced picture. But there is no obvious reason why he should be free to condemn chiropracters as dishonest.

One may still look at this with some alarm and think that these would be easy drafting mistakes to make under the pressure of a deadline. True. But, as usually happens, Singh has the opportunity to apologize, which would have carried no cost except mild embarrassment. He decided to fight the case as a matter of principle. That seems to me just dumb. If you want to fight as a matter of principle, then you need to pick your case carefully.

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2009 12 15 John Scholes Law Comments (0) Permalink

Fairly straightforward

creditcardscam

Click the ad and you get:

fakecheque

It turns out that you are not being offered a job in the usual sense, but an opportunity to work for yourself, getting paid by Google “£5 to £30 for every website link [you post] … on Google”. All you have to do is to pay a £1.39 fee to get sent the details which will explain all.

Such detail as is provided before you pay is somewhat mysterious. Most of the fairly extensive text seems to be aimed at people who know almost nothing about google, with plenty of reassurance about minor side issues.

There are even 20 comments, expressing enthusiasm or dealing with difficulties like “can I use a money order”. Finally, we get:

I’m sorry to have to do this, but I have disabled the comments as I was getting 6 spam messages for every 1 valid question or comment. It’s very sad and disappointing to see that there are so many people trying to advertise their distasteful content on here, but I have no choice but to disable this option.

Emily

So that seems fairly clear. It must be a scam, because “Emily” is getting essentially nothing out of it. But I was curious as to what the scam was, so I googled “emily rosher scam” and found a blog entry. According to Jonathan Paston, it is bizarrely simple. They just charge your credit/debit card for $60 and keep on charging it each month until you stop them. They have different “Emily” pages for each country and have been doing quite well in Indonesia recently. The main site is apparently here.

googleprofusion

The puzzling part is why they have not been closed down yet. If you look on the main site and click on Terms and Conditions at the bottom you get about 4,000 words. But the critical part is highlighted fairly clearly near the top:

gptermsconds

I am not sure what I think about this. For example, should I be happy that many people pay substantial amounts of money for National Lottery tickets? One can regard it as a form of voluntary taxation. If they want to pay, why should I complain? On the other hand, most people do not realize that only a small percentage of the ticket money is paid out in prizes. Is that fair, or is it a scam?

No doubt if one looked into Google Profusion in detail (which I do not have time to do) one would find that the majority of people paid out substantially more than they gained from following the recommended procedure. On the other hand, it is probably possible to make money from the scheme, with a good deal of work. It is also fairly clear from the complaints (including even a youtube video) that the majority of people signing up do not realize that they are paying a monthly subscription fee. So is that a scam?

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2009 12 02 John Scholes Business Comments (0) Permalink

Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins is one of my favourite columnists. But I could not understand an article he wrote for the Guardian last week about the banking crisis, ending up:

I find it simply incredible that a chancellor can take over a trillion pounds of public money, some of it in secret, without giving a remotely plausible account of why it was risked as it was, rather than in boosting consumer demand.

He apparently believed that it was not necessary to bail out the banks:

As yet, no one has explained why such stupefying sums of money were really needed to pay off the rotten debts of banks, whose speculative activities should have been nationalised and left to default.

He seems seriously confused here. We are not talking about the rotten debts of the banks, but the rotten assets of the banks, which prevent them paying off the loans which innocent people, including widows and orphans have made to the banks. Because many of the banks’ assets are rotten they would - without government help - be unable to pay off these loans.

You may say that some of these people deserve to lose their money. That may well be true. They may have been careless or greedy in the way they lent to the banks. But plenty of others were relatively innocent. In any case, particular loans to the bank are not tied to particular loans from the bank. So if the bank is caught short then everyone who lent to it suffers, whether or not they are deserving.

Moreover, there is a liquidity issue. Banks inherently lend long and borrow short, so if there is a crisis of confidence then those lending to the bank will demand repayment before the bank is entitled to demand repayment from those to whom it has lent. So even if it is sound and profitable, it can quickly be put in a position where it is unable to meet its obligations.

This means that in practice the government is forced to (A) invest tens of billions in the bank in new equity to restore its solvency, and (B) guarantee hundreds of billions of loans. You might think that (A) on its own would be sufficient, but those who have lent to the bank may still panic and want repayment, thus causing further problems. So in practice the only way of reassuring them is to guarantee.

Clearly none of that helps the economy. None of it encourages the banks to make large loans to businesses. Jenkins would like those things to happen. Fine, but that is a separate issue. The government is faced with wanting to rescue the banks and wanting to help the economy by encouraging bank lending. Unfortunately, it does not have the resources to do both (at least not on the scale that Jenkins would like). It reckoned that rescuing the banks was more important. That is hard to quarrel with. The collapse of Lehmans triggered the current mess. The collapse of RBS would have been much worse.

Of course, the government should have done more in earlier years to prevent us getting into a situation where it had to bail out the banks. Of course, the banks are not responding well to current concerns about salaries and bonuses, but none of that seems to me to suggest that the government was wrong to rescue the banks.

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2009 12 01 John Scholes Banking crisis Comments (0) Permalink

Johnston Press plc

johnstonpresssharepr

Johnston Press plc is the second largest publisher of local newspapers in the UK with about 80 titles. Unsurprisingly, it has not been doing well over the last few years. In mid 2007 its share price started to collapse from around £4 and has recently been around 25p (giving it a market cap of around £160 million).

It is still generating profits. Revenues for the half-year to 30 June were £218 million (down from £293 million) and profit after tax £20 million (down from £46 million). So its immediate problem is that it has relatively high borrowings and it has capitalized about £0.9 billion of “titles”. [In other words, they are placing a substantial value on the name of each newspaper, not its assets, just the name.] These are obviously worth little if anything, so it has effectively got negative net assets of over half a billion, which must make the lenders nervous. It is now making substantial write-offs of these intangible assets which push the reported results into losses. Its longer term problem is dwindling advertising revenues.

northumberlandgazette

Today it has started experimenting with two methods of getting more revenues from its online sites. The Whitby Gazette, the Northumberland Gazette, and the Southern Reporter now only have the first sentence of most articles online. If you want more then you are asked to pay £5 for three months’ access. Several other titles also give only a single sentence and suggest that you buy the paper if you want to see more. £5 may sound relatively cheap, but these are weekly papers, so you are being charged in advance nearly 40p per issue.

Still, this is a more radical approach than Rupert Murdoch’s current idea of getting Microsoft to pay him in return for giving Bing exclusive access to his newspapers for search. That sounds a hopeless long term strategy. Bing looks doomed. Getting large numbers of people to switch from google to Bing as their main search engine looks wildly implausible. So whilst Microsoft might be desperate enough to pay Murdoch for a while it is hardly a secure source of future revenue. It also does nothing to increase the size of the pie, it is just a way of getting search engines to take smaller slices of online advertising revenues in return for Murdoch getting a larger slice.

But the evidence is that there is simply not enough online advertising revenue to support free content. At some point someone will have to figure out how to charge for online content.

The basic idea seems fairly straightforward: those browsing the web have to pay for content. At the moment the typical user pays around $10-20/month for access, but none of this is going to content providers, it is all going to those providing the broadband which carries the content. So we need some system whereby users pay a similar additional amount for content. We would then need some system for dividing this up over the sites that provided the content.

The simplest approach is just pro rata for clicks. So if site A gets X clicks and the total number of clicks on all sites is T, then site A gets a fraction X/T of the total revenue. The snag about that is that it gives site designers a strong incentive to put only a small amount of useful material on each page, so that the user has to keep clicking to get more. It also rates equally a site which just gives some relatively trivial piece of information and another which has a lengthy article which required substantial skill and time to produce.

Perhaps more important, it is hard to see how you would ever get a system of this type up and running. It requires complete cooperation from all internet service providers. They become agents who collect revenue on behalf of others, which they are hardly likely to welcome. Equally, who would count the clicks? It has to be someone independent, because site owners obviously have a huge incentive to inflate the number of clicks.

But looked at the other way, most people visit hundreds or thousands of different sites over the course of a year. No one is interested in setting up separate deals with every site they visit. Faced with setting up some payment system (eg a year in advance) for a site they use relatively rarely, most people just look around for a free alternative.

So far I have talked in terms of a flat-rate content charge, because some kind of cap is likely to be essential for consumer support. No one would be happy with the idea that they might get a $1000 bill because their teenage children had browsed too many sites. But one might have to allow for low volume users, for example, each month a user’s first thousand page views would be charged at 1 cent/page, and thereafter they would be free.

One oddity of what I have described so far is that the page-charge is identical in all cases. If someone believes their content is worth more, they have no straightforward way of charging more. But variable charging has a host of problems. If it is combined with a cap, then every site has an incentive to inflate its charges. The user will not mind, because he is likely to pay the capped amount in any case, so you would end up with every site charging $10/view (or whatever the monthly cap was). A different kind of problem is that the user has no way of judging whether a particular charge is worth paying until he has viewed the page, but at that point he has got what he wanted, so the smart user would announce after viewing that he did not want it.

I suspect that most users would be relatively happy with some system of charging for content, provided it was seamless, not too expensive and capped. But at the moment I cannot see how you would deal with the incentive and admin problems.

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2009 11 30 John Scholes Internet Comments (2) Permalink

Raw data

Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia has been much in the news over the last week. Hackers broke into the CRU servers and downloaded a large number of emails and other documents. When I was writing this, a zipped 60MB file containing the stolen material was still available here . It is one of those sites where you have to wait for 45 seconds before pressing the regular download button. They hope that some people will pay to avoid the wait. There is a variety of interesting material in the 1000+ emails. The one that has attracted the most attention is this email sent on 16 November 1999 from Phil Jones to Ray Bradley (Univ of Massachussetts), Mike Mann (University of Virginia) and Malcolm Hughes (University of Arizona):

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil

[If you download the full set, unzip and look for 0942777075.txt]

This seems to be a non-issue. It looks like a discussion about exactly which figures to plot. Phil is clearly interested in the impression which will be given by the graph and want to make a choice which will support the impression he favours. But there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. He is talking to people he knows well who are familiar with the arguments, so he uses shorthand. “I want to hide the decline” may easily mean “I want to hide the misleading impression of decline which would be given if I used the X figures”. “A trick” just means a technique, it does not necessarily mean a technique which is illegitimate.

A rather different point is made by a retired academic Tim Ball, who complains about the way those of like mind are reviewing each others’ journal articles. I have not had time to look through to see if the emails support that this was a deliberate policy amongst those climate scientists who believe in man-made global warming. But it would be amazing if it was not true. That is one reason why I have always been hostile to peer review. From another point of view it is just one aspect of fashion in science. Clearly it would be better if scientists were not influenced by fashion, but it is inevitable that many of them will be, and it is hard to see what one can do about it.

George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, picks up on an email of 8 July 2004 from Phil Jones to Mike Mann:

The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

[1089318616.txt]

Monbiot is a campaigner who believes strongly in global warming and thinks international action is urgent, so he is distressed by this type of thing and thinks that Jones should resign forthwith. But again I cannot get excited. The basic problem is that the science has got irretrievably mixed up with the politics. Even though the more sober scientists might be persuaded that we do not understand the area at all well, the overwhelming majority have convinced themselves that urgent action is needed and so the purpose of IPCC reports is no longer the search for truth but the persuading of politicians and journalists. With that background, it is inevitable that they are going to focus on how to get the documents to make the best case possible for the viewpoint they favour.

Eventually these things sort themselves out. The evidence becomes sufficiently overwhelming that new people coming into the field lose interest in bogus theories. But it can take a surprisingly long time. It is not unusual for it to take several decades for a major misconception to get thrown out after clear evidence has become available. The difficulty about climate science is not that global warming is obviously wrong, but that it is not obviously right. It cannot be rebutted with present data, which means that those who have become passionate believers will not easily be persuaded to change their minds.

However, one odd thing does seem to have come out of this flurry of publicity. Apparently, the CRU is a leading player in reconstructing the climate history of the last 150 years. This reconstruction is far from straightforward. The raw data, most recently from satellites, but in earlier decades from weather stations, often has to be substantially adjusted. There has been a great deal of debate about some of these adjustments.

For example, a weather station may be set up on the outskirts of a town. Of the next 50 years the town gradually expands so that by the end of the period the weather station is well inside the town rather than in a field outside. That means that its later readings suffer from the “heat island” effect which makes towns warmer than the surrounding countryside. If one fails to adjust for that then the readings will apparently show global warming (at least in the area of that town) even if the town was getting colder.

Global warming is a small effect. Most people think that the argument is all about how much of the warming is due to human action. But there is also a debate about whether there really is a warming. Despite all the hoopla about vanishing arctic ice and so on (much of which reflects phenomena which are not so much new as newly studied), we are talking about tiny temperature rises over long periods (eg under 1 degree over the last 150 years).

So the kind of adjustments one makes to the raw data may be crucial. A bigger adjustment might completely wipe out the evidence for global warming. Obviously some scientists are interested in checking the CRU adjustments. So over the years many have asked for the raw data, and the CRU apparently refused their requests on a whole variety of different grounds. More recently, those wanting the data have got more aggressive and have started filing formal freedom of information requests. It now emerges that the CRU is unable to comply because it has destroyed the raw data. [I cannot check the CRU site directly because it has apparently gone down under the strain of recent events!]

The story sounds fairly strange, because the data was apparently dumped more than twenty years ago “in the 1980s”. Taking that at face value, it is clearly scandalous. These scientists have been collecting and analysing this data with the help of taxpayer funding. They clearly have a duty to preserve the data and to make it available to other interested researchers.

Conventions on when you have to make data available vary widely over different areas of science. In fields involving fossils, or other lengthy expeditions to dig things up, it seems to be commonplace for those collecting the original data to have an exclusive on it for as long as they wish. Those looking at the Burgess Shale or the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, both denied outsiders access for decades. In other areas, fairly tight timetables are imposed. In astrophysics data from spacecraft and elaborate ground based telescopes is normally made available 12 months after it is obtained. Clearly some period of exclusivity is reasonable so that those who devote large amounts of time collecting data get the opportunity to be the first to write about it.

But there seems to be little excuse for denying outsiders access to data for 20 years, particularly in a field like global warming where some scientists are advocating that extremely expensive international action be taken on the strength of their recommendations.

The destruction of the raw data seems even harder to justify. The CRU scientists must be mad to think that other scientists are all going to be happy to take their word for the fact that the correct adjustments have been made to the data.

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2009 11 29 John Scholes Global warming
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