I will leave aside my view that the government should not protect people from themselves, and, just for this post,  and, for the moment, accept the consensus that the role of the government includes forcing people to do what the government judges best.

Lets start with the missing information. What is meant by “More than 200,000 people could die early from alcohol-related diseases, accidents and violence over the next 20 years”? Does it mean that the death rate will be 200,000 more than if no one drank any alcohol? Does it mean that 200,000 people will die from diseases, accidents and violence in which alcohol is one of (many) avoidable risk factors?

Of course, as always, The Guardian, fails to but the numbers in context. 10,000 deaths a year is not a huge number in a country the size of the UK: barely over 1%. Depending on he exact meaning of the numbers, the actual number of deaths caused by (as opposed to “related to”) alcohol could be much lower and comparable with, for example, the 3,000 suicides a year. Given the distressing nature of suicide, and its impact on the friends and families of its victims, I think that is sufficient to argue it should be a higher priority.

Compare the impact of alcohol with that of bad diet (too much sugar, too much, and harmful types of, fat, etc.): . There are at least 30,000 deaths a year related to diabetes, and that is almost certainly an underestimate, and it is worsening rapidly, and it is only one of many diseases caused by unhealthy diets.  Worsening rapidly is something of an understatement: the number of people who have diabetes has doubled over the last thirty years.

Diet bring us to another issue. The health effects of different alcoholic drinks is very different:  the amount of carbohydrates in one pint of beer is comparable to an entire bottle of red wine.

That is one possible reason for the lack of correlation between alcohol consumption and life expectancy. Given that, what reason is there to think that reducing overall alcohol consumption will improve public health. In fact a WHO study found that the countries with the lowest level of alcohol related health problems are the wine drinking countries of south western Europe, many of which have very high levels of consumption.

In fact, it may even worsen public health. Moderate drinking improves life expectancy, so price increases that deterred moderate drinkers would lead to lower life expectancies. Heavy drinkers, especially very heavy drinkers, may be addicted, and will therefore be likely to spend more rather than reduce consumption. Abstaining entirely from alcohol carries a similar risk to heavy drinking, why are there no calls for government action to encourage teetotallers to start drinking?

The criticism of a government strategy that relies on voluntary cooperation from the industry, has two serious fallacies. They claim that “the primary requirement for these industries is to deliver shareholder value by maximising consumption”. This is wrong. Individual firms want to maximise profit, which is not the same as maximising consumption: the profit on one bottle of expensive wine is likely to be far more than on many bottles of plonk. It is even possible that a minimum sales price may may the industry more profitable by killing the lowest margin products.

The other fallacy is that because a businesses aim is to make a profit, it is entirely uninfluenced by anything else. Companies are run by individuals who are just as likely to act from ethical motives as anyone else, they are subject to public pressure, and the ability of governments to coerce companies to act “voluntarily” is enormous. Consider the success the government has had in getting internet service providers to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation’s controversial, secretive, undemocratic, ineffective and unaccountable censorship scheme.

I have become very cynical about the reasoning behind calls for action on alcohol. It seems to reflect a fixed, and puritanical, idea that alcohol is bad, rather than an assessment of evidence and likely benefits.

The story is not a big one, and largely concerns local news outlets. Given that many people are bemoaning the closures of local papers, it is worth thinking about whether they actually worth having.

Brad Niesluchowski who works for a school district in Arizona was fired, and is being investigated by the police. The problem is that there are conflicting accounts of what he actually did.

According to local radio station KPHO and the Australian Daily Telegraph he was sacked for putting SET@Home on 5,000 school computers leading to a huge increase in electricity bills.

According to the East Valley Tribune, he was also incompetent, took 18 school computers home, and is alleged to have downloaded pornography on to schools machines.

Although his conduct was irresponsible if either set of allegations is true. He is supposed to have cost the schools district $1m in higher electricity bills and parts (it would have to be primarily the former). The problem is that these are two very different stories.

The schools district also does not look good, thanks to some idiotic comments made by its employees. The first is that you cannot simply uninstall SETI@Home, and it will be expensive to remove. It looks like it can simply be uninstalled on Windows. They might be using MacOS or Linux, but software removal on those operating systems is almost always easy.

The other is this gem:

“We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research,” said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. “However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T.”

I assume by cancer research she means Folding@Home or some other similar project. What exactly is wrong with the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence? Does she mean that it may be acceptable for third rate organisation like the National Science Foundation and the University of California at Berkeley to back SETI, but it does not meet the high academic standards of the Higley Unified School District? Perhaps the message is that you should not try to answer big questions? Either way, it is hardly a wonderful attitude to find in an educational establishment.

Getting back to the topic of local newspapers, this is not an isolated failure. Local newspapers (any thing less than city-wide) have been uniformly awful for as long as I can remember. One would have thought that journalists who had to cover a small town would be able to get to know it thoroughly and find interesting stories. It never happened. They were primarily a way of distributing classified ads with just enough content to make them look like newspapers.

I grew up in Wimbledon and we had no fewer than three local newspapers (I think four one time), all free apart from a hopeful knock on the door by the delivery boy just before Christmas. The only time they were ever worth reading was an occasional piece on then-controversial plans to redevelop the town centre. That is exactly the sort of thing that bloggers now do much better. Local papers are not needed for democracy to work, and they are not needed by communities, and we have better ways of distributing ads. Let them die unmourned.

I did rather wonder if I was being stupid, and missing something that all these journalists, and a scattering of academics out to get efficient markets, all knew. I was. I did not realise how stupid regulators were. It is less surprising that journalists have been conflating a number of related concepts: the efficient markets hypothesis, rationality, related bits of financial theory, and, most of all, market efficiency in the micro-economic sense (economic efficiency)

The main problem has been with the last of these: it is the justification for laissez-faire neo-liberal politics, which has become dominant. It is the basis on which

A related problem is that both the EHM and economic efficiency have been treated as absolutely true, not normative. They are a normal state of affairs to which correctly functioning markets tend, but the deviations from the normal state are what regulators and market participants should be focused on.

What the efficient markets hypothesis says is that securities prices reflect all available information. This also implies that you cannot predict futures movements in prices from past movements (i.e. technical analysis does not work). This is entirely different from economic efficiency that is the state in which markets in products and services function optimally.

Markets may function optimally without external intervention (as is the case for a market in perfect competition, with all consumers having full information and if no externalities or public goods (side effects on people other than a buyer and a seller) ) — then they do not need intervention. How well this reflects the market in financial services, especially given the existence of government guarantees against bank failure, you can decide for yourself.

The assumption that regulator made was the lassez-faire one, that the market in financial services (not the market in securities) would function correctly without much regulatory intervention. One reason this failed is that banks have both explicit and implicit state guarantees (they are “too big to fail” because of systemic risk)

The biggest single mistake made was to allow banks to use their own risk models for capital adequacy purposes. This was particularly stupid given that one reason for the reforms was that banks had been manipulating the previous system. Imagine you are running a bank and you are making a choice of different risk models. One says that you need to raise a lot more capital, and shut down some of your most profitable businesses (because they need so much capital raised that it would be uneconomic to do so). Another model says everything is fine. Which to you choose? If each model was devised by a different quant, who do you give a big bonus to?

Obviously, that is a gross oversimplification of how banks choose risk models: the process would involve many people, and there would be a lot of scrutiny: but everyone doing the scrutiny would have the same sort of bias.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the EMH. The only assumptions the risk models took from the EMH was that securities prices are unpredictable, and that is right. The financial theory, and the data, to do better risk models existed: fat tails, in particular, had been discussed extensively for decades before the financial crisis ()they were certainly a mainstream part of the syllabus when I did my MSc a decade ago).

Where regulators may have actually relied on EMH is in assuming that asset prices were always correct, so no unexpected nasty surprises would emerge. Even here they were really relying on rationality, not efficient markets: during a bubble prices reflect all available information, but the assessment of the information is systematically incorrect. Of course it means that the regulators did not believe bubbles happen: how did they come to that conclusion.

Now we have dealt with the stupidity of regulators, now back to the journalists. To be fair, the mis-reporting is not entirely their fault. A number of academics and other critics of the EMH have taken the chance of blame the EMH for everything that went wrong, and journalists have swallowed a line fed to them by experts.

Another reason for blaming the EMH, is to avoid admitting that the way markets have been allowed to function does not lead to economically efficient outcomes. It is a bizarre mixture of tight regulation and light touch, that largely favours big business. The problem here, is that this does not only apply to financial markets, but the whole economy, and there is little appetite among politicians, or journalists, or businesses, or anyone else that matters, for so fundamental a challenge.

The rest of the media has been busy pumping out the message that it was better to put a baby in a cot. This appears to be an excuse to reviving discredited ideas about letting babies cry, and imposing discipline on new borns.

The worst of it is this comment by the researchers:

Any advice to discourage bed sharing may carry with it the danger of tired parents feeding their baby on a sofa, which carries a much greater risk than co-sleeping in the parents’ bed

So we have a study that actually says the opposite being used to justify advice that may cause more cot deaths. Babies may die because of a refusal to retract bad advice.

Wonderful what a bit of spin can achieve!

The report actually talks about nutrients, not health. The very first paragraph is very revealing about what is covered:

This review does not address contaminant content (such as herbicide, pesticide and fungicide residues) of organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs or the environmental impacts of organic and conventional agricultural practice.

So, the most important reason for preferring organic food is ignored. Herbicides, pesticides and fungicides are toxic: they would not work if they were not, at least, toxic to plants, pests and fungi! Large doses are toxic (ingesting these is a common way of committing suicide in some places), and I would very much like to know of any conclusive studies of the long term effects of continually eating small amounts with each mean.

Why did journalists fail to mention this for the first day or two? Did they no even read the executive summary (the easy bit at the top for people who are unable to understand the rest)?

Even regarding the nutritional content, it is obvious that there are not going to be huge differences in the content of the main nutrient groups in organic food and chemically grown food. However looking at the details, there are lots of differences that could be significant, for example the level of both phenolic compounds and flavinoids is higher in organic food,and, to quote from the report itself:

Numerous health benefits have been ascribed to the actions of phytochemicals such as phenolic compounds and flavonoids, many of which related to their antioxidant activity. The recent World Cancer Research Fund report suggests that quercetin (a flavonol) may prevent lung cancer (although the strength of evidence for this relationship was graded as “Limited – suggestive”4) (17). There is also some evidence from cohort studies (although not from randomised controlled trials), that high flavonoid intake is associated with lower rates of coronary heart disease mortality.

There are plenty of other examples. These are a bit more difficult to find, as they require reading the report, but it took me about ten minutes. I assume the failure of various journalists to find this reflects either a the extreme time pressures they work under — the media like quality, as long as it is cheap!

The other thing that is striking about the conclusions is that in many cases there is not enough evidence to draw a conclusion. It is basic to statistics that the larger the sample size the more meaningful the conclusions. For example, four of the studies of the effect on people used fewer than 20 participants, and most were conducted over short periods of time, so long term effects are ignored altogether. The fact that it is a study of studies also has other effects:

Statistical analysis was not attempted due to marked heterogeneity of study designs, exposures and outcome measures among the included studies.

Another flaw is that the studies did not use a consistent definition of organic. This varies from country to country (the US, for example, has a long list of ingredients that can be used in food labeled organic, that do not need to be produced organically) and from certifying authority to certifying authority. A far better approach would be to use only food produced to a strict definition of organic.

The most important conclusion of the study, is that nothing has really been proved. Neither then Food Standards Agency, or journalists, have paid much attention to this

A surprising and important finding of this review is the extremely limited nature of the evidence base on this subject, both in terms of the number of studies and the quality of studies found. It is essential that future research (both human and in vitro studies) is better designed and, at the very least, meets the minimum quality criteria applied in this review, including an accurate description of the organic certification process. It is recommend that in future, high quality randomised controlled trials should be conducted which have samples of sufficient size to reliably detect the presence of effects, longer and more realistic dietary exposures, and more accurate and objective approaches to measuring dietary intake and health outcomes.

There is little evidence that organic food is more nutritious so far, because no one has really looked, and if we assume that constantly eating small doses of known toxins is entirely harmless.

There is an excellent debunking of the story at Arstechnica. I am more interested in analysing why journalists are so credulous.

Firstly, journalists do not understand the subjects they write about. The lack of good reporting of science and technology is often bemoaned: there are websites devoted to exposing it. I have often commented on the equally bad coverage of financial news. Given this is is not surprise that journalists did not ask all the obvious questions such as “how can someone be affected by wi-fi but have no problems with mobile phones and microwave ovens that operate at the same wavelengths?” or “are there any blind tests proving that people can even tell when they are exposed to wi-fi, let alone that it makes them feel sick?”

The 2% number for people who are “electrosensitive” was also not credible. Do they realise just how many people that means? It would mean over a million in the UK alone. It would mean everyone would know people who suffered from it. How many people do you know who complain of feeling ill if you turn on the wi-fi on a laptop?

There is also a lack of motivation. If you give most journalists a good story, they do not want to be sceptical. Why should they spoil a good story?

Minimal fact checking would have revealed that this was a hoax. Anyone with the slightest understanding of physics would have realised that this was not credible, and by “slightest understanding” I mean a the level of understanding I would expect school science classes to teach every 16 year old. Did these people think to check any fact with anyone?

Part of the problem is clearly the lack of fact checking. It is also probable that the journalist did not understand how Facebook works and did not distinguish between Facebook and third party app developers that use Facebook. Facebook does not control the third party developers: it does cut off those who break is rules, but that only happens after they have been caught breaking the rules.

This is why the only third part app I use is Posterous cross-posting (everything I post to Posterous is posted on Facebook as well). I trust Posterous more than Facebook, so there is no issue there. If you add every cute app you come across, you are taking a risk.

Anyway, could all those journalists who tell us who professional and trustworthy they are compared to bloggers and other non-professionals, explain why:

1. Journalists keep getting stories from bloggers and (often false )background information from Wikipedia?
2. Why journalists keep writing about things they get wrong because they do not understand the subject. I see this most in financial journalism, but that is because I know enough about the subject matter to spot their often serious mistakes.

Comparison with Microsoft

A lot of people claim that Google is the bad new monopolist, taking Microsoft’s place. Apart from the fact that I am not convinced that MS have vacated their place, the market position and behaviour of the two companies is entirely different.

1. Google has a market share of about 70% for its most successful product, much less for its other products. MS has 90%+ for its two most successful products
2. MS has frequently entered into exclusive agreements with distributors (the PC manufacturers) to lock out rivals. Google publicly supports laws that prevent it from doing that same.
3. >Microsoft has offered discounts to distributors who do not sell rival products
4. Microsoft consistently uses FUD, astroturfing and other misleading marketing. Google does not.
5. Microsoft benefits from large network effects, Google does not.
6. Customers face costs in switching from Microsoft products. This is not true for Google’s core products. I usually use Google, but it takes only an instant to search Yahoo, MS, or Ask instead. I keep using Google because it is the best.
7. MS locks in customers though deliberate non-interoperability (tactics such as embrace, extend, extinguish and its manipulation of the ISO voting process). Google consistently supports open standards and open source.

Copyright

First, he claims Google encourages breaches of copyright.giving Youtube, Google News and Google Books as examples. Google has a perfectly reasonable policy on Youtube, which, if any veers too much towards trusting claims on copyright — for example, by taking down material that falls with fair use/fair dealing exemptions.

It is clearly economically impossible to check every upload manually. The only solution would be to get out of user generated content altogether. So Youtube should be shut down: and, by implication, so should all other video sharing services, photo sharing services (like Flickr) and wikis (like Wikipedia). So should forums, discussion groups, etc.

As for Google News and Google Books, they operate just like any search engine does, except that Google displays some books, which it has paid license fees on, in their entirety. So, this time his demand boils down to ban all search engines.

As he apparently objects to search engines, I suggest he asks the FT (who host his blog) to stop Google from indexing his blog by the simple expedient of adding ”/maverecon/“ (just one line of text, 11 characters long) to their robots.txt file. The same applies to Murdoch and all the others who object to Google News: there is an industry standard way of indicating what you do not want indexed, why do you not use it?

In the course of all this, he sneakily slips in his opinion that breach of copyright is morally equivalent to theft as an incontestable fact. I am rather more pre-free markets on this particular issue than he his, and have grave doubts about whether state mandated monopolies are a good idea. It does not matter which of us is right: he is wrong to present his opinion as the only possible one, especially as so many of his fellow economists disagree with his opinion more strongly than I do.

Streetview

Next come the privacy issues. Starting with Google Street View. In a country where CCTV cameras follow everything that happens outdoors, how can he possibly regard rarely updated still photos with faces obscured as a threat to privacy? If you do something in public anyone may see you or photograph you. That is what ”in public“ means. Of course, the government could make it an offence to photograph anyone anywhere without their permission: I am sure that would be a boon to, for example, policeman beating up protesters.

The risk to privacy posed by Streetview is essentially that of being seen in public. It cannot track of search any individual: just those who have the bad luck to be somewhere they do not want to be seen when the Google photo van drives past. No greater a risk than of being seen there by the wrong person.

Cookies

Cookies are the biggest red herring, and his objects are hypocritical to boot: his own article is on a site that sets a lot of cookies. Merely by reading two blog posts, I have got no fewer than 18 cookies ft.com.

Personally, I do not object to cookies per se. As anyone who runs a website know, they are very useful They allow the site operator to gather statistics on visitors, they are by far the best way to offer services that require a login, they are the only way to offer any session based service without a login.

If you do find cookies in general objectionable, any web browser that supports cookies allows you to turn them off. Modern web browsers also allow you do turn cookies on or off on a site by site basis, to delete cookies when you shut down your browser, to ask you individually about each cookie a site tries to set, etc.

The opt out options offered by Google etc. are complementary to this, allowing you to opt out of an aspect of their sites that some people find intrusive, while still allowing the other uses of their services. The only way they can possible implement this is by setting a cookie.

Once again, all this ignores a much more significant threat to privacy. Google can, if you do not turn off cookies, track what you do on its own websites. Internet Services Providers and collaborators like Phorm (see the Open Rights Group website for more) track and record very website you visit. Governments do the same, and monitor every email and instant message you send as well. Google is supposed to be the big threat? It seem more like a distraction from the real issues to me, together with a bit of special pleading for the newspapers obsolete business models.

The other problem faced by any poll of this nature. Ideas of the relationship between God and creation are varied and subtle. This leads to problems with words like “quides” that Pew use. If God creates the universe so that certain things happen is that guiding? What about guiding (supposedly random) event? Is guiding restricted to a miraculous type of intervention that has visible effects that would be verifiable miracles if someone was there to observe and test them?

Bear in mind that the orthodox Christian view is (and has been for a long time) that God created time. That gives him a very different range of potential interventions from any actor within time who wishes to intervene. This is how natural selection is reconciled with guidance and purpose. Perhaps Pew’s researchers have not managed to get a grip on ideas like eternity yet?

The Guardian was fooled by an elaborate hoax into claiming that NASA conducted experiments on sex in space.

They believed the story because they got the claim from a “respected French scientific writer”, Pierre Kohler. Neither he nor Jon Henley (the Guardian journalist responsible) actually thought of doing some of the proper fact checking.