Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Don't call it a consensus | Feb 29, 2008 11:14

Just to spoil your enjoyment of the congenial weather hereabouts, Joseph Romm has an excellent column on Salon this week in which he wishes people would stop talking about a "consensus" on global warming, and also stop saying "the science is settled".

That doesn't mean, however, that he doubts the science:

The science isn't settled -- it's unsettling, and getting more so every year as the scientific community learns more about the catastrophic consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

The big difference I have with the doubters is they believe the IPCC reports seriously overstate the impact of human emissions on the climate, whereas the actual observed climate data clearly show the reports dramatically understate the impact.

But I do think the scientific community, the progressive community, environmentalists and media are making a serious mistake by using the word "consensus" to describe the shared understanding scientists have about the ever-worsening impacts that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are having on this planet. When scientists and others say there is a consensus, many if not most people probably hear "consensus of opinion," which can -- and often is -- dismissed out of hand.

Campbell O'Fee, Executive Assistant - House, Government Whips' Office has an important observation about yesterday's post:

It may be worth noting that the IP address you list is attached to the whole parliamentary complex. Therefore if anyone in the Parliamentary complex makes an edit it registers as being from that IP address. One individual did not make all those edits, it was an entire building's worth, which explains why this mystery editor seems to have an impossibly wide range of interests.

Whilst your question regarding political editing of information is valid, I think the way you described this situation paints it in an inaccurate light, there is no masked wikipedia editor at parliament rewriting history, just executive assistants making changes at the request of their members and researchers and press secs updating pages as part of their job. I think in the interest of providing a completely accurate story you may want to edit your own page.

Also FYI I have never edited a wikipedia page as part of my job, or personally. I am merely concerned with misconceptions being spread as to the nature of these edits.

Yes, and although I noted essentially that point in comments yesterday, I didn't consider it when I wrote the original post and I should have. It was remiss on my part.

Another person observed of the Parliamentary set-up:

There's a couple of different proxies, NATing firewalls etc for traffic in and out of the place, and who you are and where you physically are at the time will determine the path taken.

Indeed, there are a number of Parliamentary IP addresses logged as making edits, but the fact that so many are associated with that particular address is not evidence of a single Parliamentary dervish doing it all.

That said, there's a pattern of editing that suggests a smaller number of individuals are particularly prolific; too much so for it to be appropriate for such editing to be done anonymously. In this case, I'd like to see Wikipedia accounts registered and declarations of interest in the associated profiles.

As I said yesterday, there's no particular problem with MPs' staff adding or correcting information on their respective articles, and reasonable people might differ on the removal of the information from the Bill English article (the Allan Peachey incident is more clear-cut -- that was someone deleting something that was demonstrably notable, but embarrassing to their boss) but I think we're at the point where transparency is required.

And one more thing: Please, stop emailing me or posting comments associating these edits with the individual whose name can be found through a reverse IP lookup of that address. It's the IT guy, okay? Just stop it.

Yesterday's discussion covers a range of issues about Wikipedia and its status, and is well worth a read if you have time. And any news story that has me and Whaleoil on the same page has to be worth a chuckle.

Anyway, I spoke twice about Media7 yesterday as part of TVNZ's public briefings about the soon-to-launch (end of March) TVNZ 7 factual channel on Freeview. It was enjoyable and the reception was pleasing, but that was a loooong day and I'm fairly knackered today.

So let's go for a lighter note. I downloaded and watched The Brits, the British music awards, this week, and although most of the bits in between were crap, the stage performances were brilliantly produced. No more so than Rianna's collaboration with The Klaxons on that song. It looked and sounded huge, and it appears it may actually get a proper release.

In the meantime, there's a YouTube clip of that performance, and, just because I'm feeling generous, a high-quality version you can right-click to download, probably only for today. It's 52MB QuickTime movie, but I suspect it won't play in QuickTime Player unless you have the Perian components installed (which you probably should on a Mac, because they rock). VLC Player will do the trick otherwise.

Staying with the music: two releases I've been loving lately are Hot Chip's new album Made in the Dark and the locally-connected New Telepathics' You Have Been Warned, which pulls of the kind of fusions (a protest song for Fela Kuti, anyone?) that frequently make bands look silly. And it's certainly pretty cool having someone who played with Sun Ra in your band …

PS: Warmest congratulations to our design genius Matt Buchanan and his wife Catherine on the arrival yesterday afternoon of Elliot Rose Buchanan, 4.57kg. All well.

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202.22.18.241 | Feb 28, 2008 08:31

The Standard is in its usual high state of excitement after discovering, via Wikipedia Scanner, that Bill English's Wikipedia entry was edited last year, by someone on a Parliamentary IP address, to remove information about the deputy Opposition leader Bill English's moral beliefs and family.

You can see the difference here. With an edit made from the IP address 202.22.18.241, which is registered to the New Zealand Parliament, this:

He married a Catholic GP, Mary, and they now have six children - five boys: Luke, Thomas, Rory, Bartholemew and Xavier; and one daughter, Maria. He is a devout Catholic himself, and upholds his churches opposition to [[abortion]], [[voluntary euthanasia]] and [[physician assisted suicide]], [[civil unions in New Zealand]] and [[prostitution in New Zealand].

His wife Mary edited the newsletter of an anti-abortion medical practitioners group, "Doctors for Life," and served as President of a conservative Christian women's group known as the Family Education Network, before stepping down when her husband was elected Leader of the Opposition. Both organisations are now defunct

Became this:

He married a GP, Mary, and they now have six children - five boys and one daughter, Maria.

The same user also primly added the words "and spokesman for Finance and Revenue" to English's job description.

The obvious conclusion is that someone decided that the family information was inappropriate in a Wikipedia article on the MP. And, indeed, that's what 202.22.18.241 argued yesterday, when another editor raised the issue with him/her: "The material in question has absolutely nothing to do with Bill English. If you want to detail the life and practice of his wife, start a page on her."

On the other hand, the material excised is certainly political in nature. The family information had actually been in the article for some time, without objection. The information about English's moral beliefs and his wife's activity in conservative Catholic organisations was added last April by user Calibanu, who I presume is the GayNZ.com columnist Craig Young. I don't have a clear view on whether Young's edit was appropriate, although its removal is equally questionable. What do you think?

At any rate, whoever sits at 202.22.18.241 is Parliament's busiest Wikipedia editor. There are more than 500 edits logged against that IP address, many of them relating to Catholic organisations and schools in Auckland, going back to 2005, although it seems likely that the earliest edits were done by another person entirely at the same IP address.

At any rate 202.22.18.241 was back again yesterday, with a flat-out vanity edit on English's article.

More controversially, in March, 202.22.18.241 removed far too much embarrassing information from the article on another National MP, Allan Peachey. An earlier edit by user Cool Blue about the "knife in the back controversy" was poorly-written and non-neutral -- but removing all mention of the issue was wrong too. Another editor restored the reference, and delivered a ticking-off, this week. It appears that another Standard post prompted that action.

Let's keep this in context: we know that MPs' offices sometimes make sympathetic edits to their profiles. This might often be in the nature of factual corrections and is, to my mind, unobjectionable. But I think 202.22.18.241 is doing way too much, and behaving in too political a way, for someone hiding behind an IP address. I'd rather see Parliamentary editors register and declare interests in their profiles. That would be much better.

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The drugs don't (always) work | Feb 27, 2008 09:12

The reporting of medical research is a tricky business: the dynamics of news are often unkind to a measured assessment of what is actually being reported. So it might help to know that the study on the effectiveness of SSRI-type anti-depressants that leads the Herald this morning is not as new as its currency in the headlines would suggest.

The research is a meta-analysis of 47 clinical trials presented to the US FDA before approval of Prozac and other drugs. The data were obtained under America's Freedom of Information Act, and include both published and unpublished trials. This has the effect of removing "publication bias": where only the published research is examined.

Irving Kirsch, the leader of the project, published findings on this group of trials in 1998 and again in 2002, when he was at the University of Connecticut (he is now at the University of Hull in Britain). In large part, what is being reported is not new, and has been the subject of debate over the efficacy of SSRIs for years.

What is new, as explained in this editorial summary in PLoS Medicine, the online journal that has published the analysis, is that Kirsch et al have set out to determine the role of "initial severity" in the efficacy of SSRIs versus placebo.

Kirsch's previous analyses of the same trials had already raised doubts about the efficacy of SSRIs, so that was a given in the new study. So what did it find? It found there was virtually no difference between drug and placebo for patients with mild depression, but the efficacy of SSRIs rose relative to placebo as the initial severity of the depression being treated rose:

The difference in improvement between the antidepressant and placebo reached clinical significance, however, in patients with initial HRSD scores of more than 28—that is, in the most severely depressed patients. Additional analyses indicated that the apparent clinical effectiveness of the antidepressants among these most severely depressed patients reflected a decreased responsiveness to placebo rather than an increased responsiveness to antidepressants.

It did not say the drugs don't work.

It did find that other ways of treating depression -- including a therapy as simple as increased exercise -- may be just as good as treatment with SSRIs for many patients. It raises questions about the direct-to-consumer advertising of these drugs to people who may not need them.

Again: this is an ongoing study of the same body of data by the same researcher. It does not include trials presented to regulatory bodies elsewhere in the world, nor any conducted since the approval of Prozac and other drugs by the FDA. And as senior psychiatrist Dr Allen Fraser points out in the Herald's lead story this morning (yes, the one headed ' Anti-depression drugs don't work - study'), real-world SSRI treatments are not necessarily well represented in the results:

Less than 10 per cent of patients were deemed suitable for trials, and the trials lasted less than six weeks.

Treatment for depression usually lasted at least six months, and patients generally showed steady improvements throughout that time.

"I think that when [antidepressants] are used for people with a significant depression, these medications are essential," Dr Fraser said. "They are not just good, they are essential."

But there were valid grounds for suggesting that less severely depressed people have non-medicated treatment initially.

The danger here is that people taking these drugs will see only the headlines (and Radio New Zealand seems to have been about little else this morning) and just stop taking the tablets. I can't emphasise enough how dangerous this could be.

No Right Turn has already slapped up a post declaring SSRIs to be "snake oil". There are important implications about the conduct of drug companies, in their selectiveness as to what research they publish, and how they advertise their products. These are not lollies. But anyone minded to shout "snake oil" needs to calm down. To, metaphorically speaking, take a chill pill.

They could also read this interesting discussion of the way the news media handle this debate (it summarises the work of Kirsch and several other researchers who are strongly critical of him), and take its concluding paragraphs to heart:

Therefore, contra some of the media "hype" on this topic, antidepressant research confirms an empirically demonstrated drug-placebo difference, although careful examination of this literature reveals that this difference is not nearly as large as most individuals believe, or as many of the pharmaceutical companies would have the public believe.

Currently, the methodological problems with antidepressant trials preclude us from concluding definitively that the difference actually indicates specific biological effects of the drugs, as various nonspecific factors have not been adequately ruled out. Until these questions are answered, the media should understand that placebos can be double-edged swords, and that "expectancy" effects can result in harm as well as benefit.

In a piece on this topic for the Guardian, a UK newspaper, Jerome Burne (2002) reports that many subjects in Leuchter's trial (2002) relapsed and requested to be placed on the active medication after learning they were in the placebo arm. Vedantam's Washington Post piece is similar to other articles on this topic that have appeared in the popular press recently, in that it occasionally betrays an imbalanced presentation of the evidence. The media should continue to follow this complicated debate and report on it responsibly, making certain not to overhype the "power" of placebo and, as a consequence, the "powerlessness" of antidepressants.

Meanwhile, on another tip entirely, I'll be among those speaking (I expect my turn, on behalf of our forthcoming show, Media7, to be quite brief) at public briefings on TVNZ 7 in Auckland and Wellington tomorrow. There will be clips from new shows, speeches and some food and drink. The details are:

Auckland

The Academy Cinema,
Auckland Central Library Building,
44 Lorne St,
Auckland City
Starts: 10:30am

Wellington

Faculty of Law, Level One, Lecture Theatre 4,
Victoria University of Wellington,
Government Buildings,
15 Lambton Quay,
Wellington
Starts: 5:30pm

You're most welcome to come along. I gather it would help a lot if you could email TVNZ7@tvnz.co.nz and put in the subject title either: Yes Auckland or Yes Wellington, to indicate in which location you will be attending.

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They don't make 'em like they used to | Feb 26, 2008 10:11

Netscape the browser is finally dead. End of line. Not that it makes any real difference -- visits with all versions of Netscape amounted to 0.3% of accesses on Public Address this month -- but the news did cause me to reminisce.

I remember Netscape's arrival. Word got about (well, my buddy Richard Ram told me) in late 1994 that a new, much faster version of the NCSA Mosaic graphical web browser was on the way. It duly arrived. You could download it (good lord, the beta was nearly a whole megabyte!). For free!

Everything changed. Microsoft, which had planned to own everything via the Microsoft Network, built in to Windows 95, had to start making stuff up, quickly. It shoved a barely functional browser called Internet Explorer into the new OS, declaring that it would be henceforth looking to "embrace and extend" the internet. Ya, rly.

There followed a demonstration of the power of the free. Netscape Corporation's browser (only free to academic and non-profit users, but no one really believed that) shot to more than 90% market share of the emerging web. That thrilling IPO launched the tech boom. Telecom's new ISP, Xtra, trumpeted its deal with Netscape -- this was to be middle New Zealand's way to the brave new world.

It didn't work out that way. Bill Gates famously ordered that the ship be turned around, and Microsoft started to compete with its own, free browser; finding ways to make you use it. We were in the Browser Wars. Most weeks, you could download some mad-headed broke-ass point release with a barely functional new feature or three. Netscape's code turned into a mess.

I still have a personal soft spot for Netscape Navigator 3, the last major version before the bloat began (Netscape 4 was nearly twice the size and suffering). I even downloaded 3.04, from the evolt archive, just for old times' sake. Ironically, it looks like my best chance of getting it to run now is to install an old 68k Mac emulator on the kids' PC …

But there are screenshots of the major early browsers and -- remarkably -- some browser emulators (they work fitfully, but if you enter the whole URL the page text should load). I just read my blog in Netscape 1.0! Woot!

(It seems I'm not the only one. Our logs show 31 file hits from Netscape .06 for this month. Awesome.)

Now, Marc Andreessen isn't famous any more, and Netscape has been on death watch for years. But the whole thing had a second summer: the move to open-source the browser in 1998 was desperate and, it seemed, doomed. Yet, eventually, it bequeathed Firefox. (I explained the background here, in a Listener column about Ben Goodger and his role in Firefox's creation). I don't use Firefox much -- yes, it's flexible, but Safari 3.0 is faster and funkier and I'm still just an Apple fanboy.

Meanwhile, Paul Reynolds got in touch with a few more library links. He reminded me about Papers Past, a (mostly) searchable archive of vintage New Zealand newspapers and periodicals, complete up to the early 20th century. It's really fun.

There's also the Christchurch City Libraries blog (and the library's website).

Paul comments:

The Library TechNZ guys are indeed interesting.

I was talking to a couple of them last week in the National Library. They have a bit of in house sandpit running which is trialling a whole bunch of ways to open up the National Library Image databases, as well as some of the new digitisation projects , including the Maori Affairs/land agent Donald McLean.

They have been playing with PicLens, the Firefox plugin

The current results are just brilliant, especially as they put on screen some of the energy that is bubbling away in there around open access APIs etc ..

Indeed. PicLens is very cool. Looking forward to those APIs too …

And, finally, best of luck to reader Clare Tanner of Wellington, with the launch of the ambitious community e-book site BookHabit.

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