Tomfoolery Blog

Archive for May, 2010

The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) is coming to London this October! It’s two days chock full of the best skeptical speakers, including Richard Dawkins, Alan Moore, PZ Myers, Andy Nyman, Cory Doctorow, Marcus Chown (who badly needs a new website), Susan Blackmore, Richard Wiseman, everyones little mate Robin Ince, Stephen Fry (hopefully) and of course, James Randi himself!

It promises to be a skeptical extravaganza not to be missed! I shall be there, if you recognise me (unlikely, but you never know), please say hello, I won’t bite! I may try and promote the blog in some way, but I’m much more interested in learning what others have to say and having a good time.

I trust that tickets are selling fast, you can get that at tamlondon.org. A ticket for the two days is just over two hundred pounds, but I understand concessions are available for students and the unemployed.

Stop press: I’ve just been informed that Graham Linehan has been added to the bill. He is one of the writers of Father Ted, and is a comedy hero of mine. If they just added Chris Morris to the bill it would be perfect!

Check this antivax link out:

http://www.feedyourself.co.uk/wakefield.html

Today, justice was finally done. After two and a half years, the GMC has struck Andrew Wakefield off the medical register. You can read the decision (free from tabloid fudging) here.

Many are deliriously happy about this decision, but why? I believe this case shows a doctor drunk on power and greed, and the further you dig the uglier it gets.

Let’s be clear on this: Wakefield has not been punished just for suggesting a link between MMR and autism. His crimes are numerous:

1. He was paid money from the Legal Aid Board (taxpayers money) to investigate a link between MMR and autism. He did not declare this conflict of interest to the Lancet when he wrote the 1998 paper.
2. He patented a measles vaccine (referred to as Transfer Factor), which could only succeed if MMR was deemed to be dangerous. Again, he did not declare this to the Lancet. If that wasn’t bad enough, the father of one of the children in the Lancet study was the Managing Director of the company that made Transfer Factor.
3. He infamously paid children for blood samples at a birthday party, and joked about it in a presentation. This is the origin of the phrase ‘callous disregard’, a phrase used by the GMC to describe Wakefield’s attitude to the pain and sufering he caused to the children at the party.
4. He published an extremely shoddy piece of research (the 1998 Lancet paper) knowing full well it would cause panic about the MMR vaccine.
5. Worst of all, he conducted invasive procedures on vulnerable children without the consent of an ethics committee. This is by far the most serious charge, and (I hate to invoke Godwin’s law here) puts him on a par with the doctors who experimented on children in Nazi concentration camps. The procedures included colonoscopies (inserting a camera into the rectum, which caused bowel perforations in one of the children), barium meals (exposing the children to unnecessary levels of radiation) and lumbar punctures (inserting a long needle into a patients spine to collect cerebrospinal fluid).

His striking off will come as no surprise, as he hasn’t practiced in the UK for many years. So, what will Wakefield do next? His only supporters are the lunatics in the antivax community, and sadly they have quite a lot of money. I hate to promote it, but he has written a book about the whole affair. It’s called “Callous Disregard”, and features a forward by everyone’s favourite Playboy playmate and all-round loudmouth Jenny McCarthy.

Wakefield’s chances of getting a job in a respectable medical establishment are practically zero, and his shot reputation has had an unexpected benefit for anyone who wants to vent their spleen: you can say pretty much anything about him. He tried to sue Brian Deer, the journalist who exposed him, before later admitting defeat and paying Deer compensation. Future articles on him should be interesting.

In conclusion, I’m hoping his appeal is short-lived, and this sorry episode is finally put to bed. Sadly, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of him.

Twat

Bit of a plug here: my brother Ed has just arrived in Okinawa, Japan, where he will be working whilst learning Japanese. He’s got a blog at edinjapan.com and he’s already done a couple of video diaries. He used to work in Baker’s Oven, so he calls himself “an ex sausage roll salesman”. I’m sure he’ll appreciate any comments and encouragements, so why not pay his site a visit? www.edinjapan.com

With the UK political system completely up in the air, all eyes are on what the Liberal Democrats have been after for a long, long time: electoral reform. In a previous post, I discussed the merits of the single transferable vote (STV), although it did bear a close resemblance to the Alternative Vote system the Tories are proposing a referendum on. In this post, I will put forward my own crazy-sounding idea, something I call Qualified Voting (QV).

In essence, I want people who show a real interest in an election to have more of a say than people who don’t care. Now, whenever I mention this in a pub, the person I’m talking to always pipes up with “Yeah, yeah, you with the PhD, you want more of a say and all the thickos to shut up”, which is not the case. I don’t believe that academic qualifications, social standing, IQ or anything like that should come into it.

I’m very much against what I call “legacy voting”, where people vote for the same party at each election, without paying any attention to any policy changes.  I believe that people who are set in their ways should have less of a say than people who think “I’ve read all the manifestos, and I believe this party are worthy of my vote”.

So, how would this be achieved? I propose that several months before an election, each candidate is invited to write five or six “bullet points” outlining their policies. These policies could either be on local or national issues, but they must be policy statements rather than being about the candidates personal life. These bullets points are made available in all public locations, and they are published on the Internet. Then, a question based on each bullet point is devised, and agreed on by all candidates. Again, the questions AND the answers would be made available to the public (a little bit like the UK driving theory test).

The polling card would be the same as it is now (modified for AV or STV, obviously). Following the voting form, there would be a multiple-choice question for each candidate. For every question the voter gets right, they get an extra vote. So, if there were five candidates, each voter would get a maximum of six votes. One vote is awarded just for turning up, and each extra vote would result in the voter answering a very simple question about the candidates they are voting for. As it is multiple choice, the voter stands a good chance of getting extra votes just by being bothered to guess.

I believe this system would reward people who really care about the election, regardless of their political position. It would be relatively cheap to implement, and it would be completely transparent. Of course, I know people with find problems with it, so please post them below!

In this election, we have seen the worst of the “First Past the Post” voting system. The most striking statistic is that the Liberal Democrats got 23% of the popular vote, but only 9% of the seats in parliament. Here, I will give my views on the problems with the current system, and discuss what I believe to be the best alternative: the single transferable vote.

In a First Past The Post (FPTP) system, the candidate with the most votes wins, simple as that. This is fine if said candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, because that is a clear majority. However, a candidate can win with less than 50% of the vote, meaning that a majority of the electorate did not vote for that candidate.

This sad setup leads to the odious practice of “tactical voting”, where people say things like “I want Candidate X to win, but I really don’t want Candidate Y to win. Candidate Z has a better chance of beating Candidate Y, so I will vote for Candidate Z instead of Candidate X”. As a democratic exercise, I find this disgusting: people shold vote for who they want to win, not against who they don’t want to win.

This tactical voting could be wiped out with the introduction of the Single Transferable Vote (STV). In this system, you don’t just vote for which candidate you want to win, you list the candidates in order of preference. Imagine the tactical voter above. Their ballot paper could look like this:

Single Transferable Vote card

In this case, the voter wants Candidate X to win, so that candidate has been given the highest preference. They feel that Candidate Z has the most similar position to their preferred candidate, so they get second preference, and so on. In the event of no one candidate getting 50% of the first-preference votes, the second preference votes are considered, until one candidate gets over 50%. In essence, FPTP asks “Who do you want to win?” whereas STV asks “Who do you want to win? If they don’t get enough votes, then who do you want to win? etc”. More details can be found here.

Adoption of this system would require very few changes to the current system, would incur few extra costs, and would be much fairer on everyone. It avoids “split votes”, and should get rid of “tactical voting” all together. This system works in Ireland (both Northern Ireland and the Republic) and many US cities, including New York. Why couldn’t it work here?

This is my first chance to blog about the general election, and what can I say?!? We are now in uncharted political waters, but it is a chance for the Liberal Democrats to wield some real power as king makers.

First, a brief summary. For any one party to form a government in the UK parliament, they need to win more 50% of the seats, of which there are 650, so the magic winning number is 326. The Conservatives won 306 seats, Labour 258 and the Lib Dems 57. No party has an overall majority, so we have a hung parliament.

Overall, it was a good night for the tories, with them making almost 100 gains, Labour losing almost 100. It was a hugely disappointing night for the Lib Dems, with Dr Evan Harris losing his seat by a mere 176 votes.

So what on Earth happens next? Gordon Brown is still the Prime Minister, and bizarrely he has first say. However, Nick Clegg has rightly noted that as the tories got the most seats, he will talk to them first. A Tory-Lib Dem coalition would solve everything pretty quickly, but how likely is that? The two parties are at completely different ends of the political spectrum, and the Tories are very much against what the Lib Dems want: electoral reform. Today, David Cameron seemed to offer a cross-party committee on the issue, but Gordon Brown went much further and hinted at a referendum. However, a Lib-Lab coalition wouldn’t necessarily simplify things, as their combined seats still wouldn’t be enough for a majority. The smaller parties would need to be bought in, and the permutations there are almost endless.

Personally, I would like this chain of events to occur: the Lib Dems reject any miserly offer from David Cameron, and side with Labour. We get a referendum on electoral reform, and have another general election with a new voting system in six months time. The Lib Dems gain ground, tactical voting goes out the window, and hopefully Dr Evan Harris will be re-elected.

Tomorrow there is a General Election in the UK. It’s a chance to have a say in the running of the country, so please, please please, people get to the polls! If you don’t, you can’t moan about the state of the country for the next five years or so. I’m supporting the Lib Dems for their evidence-based policies and support for science, and I’m taking no notice of this ‘tactical voting’ crap, because I believe the tories and Labour will be equally bad in different ways. Vote Lib Dem!