Posts Tagged ‘Uncategorized’
Just What the World Needed: The Bible Code II
Michael Shermer has an interesting article in the June 2003 issue of Scientific American on probably one of the most pointless book sequels ever — The Bible Code II which is currently riding the New York Times bestseller list. For those unfamiliar with Michael Drosnin and his first book, The Bible Code, Shermer provides a short summary of Drosnin’s method,
According to proponents of the Bible Code–itself a subset of the genre of biblical numerology and Kabbalistic mysticism popular since the Middle Ages–the Hebrew Pentateuch can be decoded through an equidistant-letter-sequencing software program. The idea is to take every nth letter, where n equals whatever number you wish: 7, 19, 3,027. Print out that string of letters in a block of type, then search left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, and diagonally in any direction for any interesting patterns. Seek and ye shall find.
In other words, turn the Bible into one giant word search and then look for words that supposedly prophesied recent events.
Dave Thomas (the physicists not the dead Wendy’s founder), has a blistering looking at just how foolish Bible Code-style efforts are. As Thomas notes, this can be done to any text to produce pretty much whatever the person doing the looking wants to see.
Thomas applied that method to The Bible Code itself to produce this message hidden in the text of Droslin’s first book,
“THE BIBLE CODE IS A SILLY, DUMB, FAKE, FALSE, EVIL, NASTY, DISMAL FRAUD AND SNAKE-OIL HOAX.”
As Droslin notes, this in and of itself is enough to falsify Droslin’s claims for the gullible who still believe it (emphasis added),
What does the puzzle above prove? It shows, once again, that detailed interlocking puzzles for ANY desired message can be harvested from ANY text, and not just from the Bible. This directly contradicts Drosnin’s false assertion from his first Bible Code book: “Consistently, the Bible Code brings together interlocking words that reveal related information. With Bill Clinton, President. With the Moon landing, spaceship and Apollo 11. With Hitler, Nazi. With Kennedy, Dallas. In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the Bible. Not in War and Peace, not in any other book, and not in 10 million computer-generated test cases.”
Still, I predict that this will hardly stop Droslin from scoring more success with the inevitable Bible Code III in a few years.
Sources:
Codified Claptrap: The Bible Code is numerological nonsense masquerading as science. Michael Shermer, Scientific American, June 2003.
The Bible Code. Dave Thomas, New Mexicans for Science and Reason, undated. Accessed: June 4, 2003.
Tags: Uncategorized
Faked Environmental Lab Results a Concern
The Environmental Protection Agency is concerned about what it perceives as a rise in the number of individuals and laboratories that it is finding are producing fraudulent results for legally required environmental tests.
David Uhlmann, chief of the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section, told the Associated Press in January,
In recent years, what has come to our attention is that outside labs are oftentimes in bed with the people who hired them, and conspired to commit environmental crime.
The sorts of fraudulent tests range from test at Superfund sites to determine the severity of pollution at the site, fraudulent water quality tests, and fake tests designed to show that underground gasoline tank storage tanks are not leaking petroleum when, in fact, they are.
But whether there is an increase in such fraud or whether the Justice Department is simply getting better at discovering and prosecuting it is still an open question. Regardless, such fraud undermines the government’s ability to monitor existing health problems as well as to formulate reasonable regulations to deal with pollution and other problems.
Source:
Private labs fake environmental tests. Associated Press, January 22, 2003.
Tags: Uncategorized
Deaths from vCJD Continue Decline in Great Britain
The United Kingdom’s National CJD Surveillance Unit reported in The Lancet that the number of people who died from vCJD continued to fall in 2002.
Last year 17 people in Great Britain died from the disease, compared to 20 in 2001 and 28 in 2000. Since 1995, 122 people have been killed by vCJD and another eight people who are still alive are believe to be infected with the prion disease that is linked to the consumption of meat contaminated with a bovine version of the disease. So far in 2003, one death has been linked to vCJD.
The big question is whether or not vCJD deaths will continue to decline. Dr. Robert Will, who heads up the UK CJD Surveillance Unit told the BBC,
That mortality is no longer increasing exponentially is encouraging. However, to conclude that the epidemic is in permanent decline would be premature.
In animal studies, for example, the incubation rate of vCJD-like diseases varies widely between individuals, so it is possible that the number of cases could begin to increase sometime in the future.
Source:
CJD cases ‘in decline’. The BBC, February 28, 2003.
Tags: Uncategorized
AntiPolygraph.Org
AntiPolygraph.Org is an excellent site devoted to just one topic — documenting just how unscientific and unreliable polygraph machines and techniques are.
Along with reports and documents about the polygraph, the site tracks news stories and incidents where polygraphs fail. For example, the site points out that one of the reasons U.S. officials spent so much time searching for 19 alleged terrorists who had supposedly slipped into the country was that the person who perpetrated this hoax was apparently able to pass “extensive” polygraph testing by U.S. and Canadian authorities.
Tags: Uncategorized
Are Parents Endangering Their Children with SUVs?
Keith Bradsher has written a book (which this writer has not read), High and Mighty: SUVs–The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, which (as you might suspect) does not look favorably on SUVs. Stephanie Mencimer reviews the book for The Washington Monthly, and includes a claim about the role that SUVs play in fatalities involving young children that doesn’t stand up very well to scrutiny.
Mencimer writes,
Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that’s illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his two-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he’d hit the curb.
Of course to evaluate the claim that “SUVs are particularly dangerous for children” we would need actual statistics rather than an isolated anecdote. Just how big of a problem is parents running over their own children? And to what extent do SUVs and other large vehicles play in this problem?
Whether or not the answers to this question appear in Bradsher’s book, I cannot say, but Mencimer certainly appears uninterested in sharing the information necessary to obtain a better understanding of the problem.
A search for data that would substantiate this claims comes up surprisingly short, largely because the number of fatalities involved appears to be so small that nobody keeps the sort of records that would tell us how many children die when their parents run over them, much less sorted by type or size of vehicle.
Kids n’ Cars, a group centered around preventing accidents involving children left unattended around cars, appears to be the only group tracking national statistics of such incidents, but even their efforts aren’t enough to allow us to address Mencimer’s claims adequately.
According to Kids n’ Cars, in the 5 year period from 1997-2001, there were at least 358 fatalities that involved unattended children around a vehicle. Of those, 115 fatalities involved children being run over by a car. So, during that period, an average of 23 children were killed when they were backed over by a car.
But how many of those involve SUVs and how many involve a parent-child relationship?
According to an interview with Kids n’ Cars’ Janette Fennell, 70 percent of such fatalities involved large vehicles, such as trucks, vans and SUVs. Fennell also claimed that about 50 percent of such fatalities involve parents running over their children.
For the sake of argument lets just assume that every time a parent fatally backs over his or her child, they are always driving an SUV. That would mean that from 1997-2001, there were on average 12 parents annually who ran over and killed their own young children with SUVs. Given that as of 1997 there were approximately 13.8 million SUVs registered in the United States (and there were likely close to 20 million by the end of 2001), 12 fatalities is certainly a tragedy but hardly much of a “troubling trend.”
If we look at all of these fatalities, the bottom line is there were still only 115 such fatalities in five years involving a class of vehicles which had approximately 60 million registrations as of 1997. Installing a swimming pool is far more dangerous — about 350 children under 5 die annually from drowning in residential swimming pools.
Sources:
CPSC Warns: Pools Are Not the Only Drowning Danger at Home for Kids. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, May 23, 2002.
SUV Registrations Nearly Double in Five Years, Census Bureau Reports. Census Bureau, October 19, 1999.
More tots being run over, killed. Henry K. Lee, San Francisco Chronicle, August 28, 2002.
Statistics. KidsNCars.Org, Accessed: 12/7/2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Do Children Who Harm Animals Later Harm People?
It has become almost a mantra within both animal rights circles and the larger mainstream media that children who harm animals are on the path to harming human beings. But is this claim true?
Manchester Metropolitan University researchers Heather Piper and Steve Myers looked at such claims and found a surprising lack of any actual valid evidence for it. They write,
A few years ago, the notion that abused children were likely to become abusers was common. This is no longer accepted as true. In this case the dominant view is that harming animals is directly linked to, or can be treated as part of a cycle leading to, violence towards people. It is suggested that the relationship is clear cut, consistent and predictable. This argument suggests that harming animals can be a predictive variable in indicating future harm to people. There are serious flaws in this argument. Although there may be some disturbed individuals who are cruel towards both animals and people, extreme cases do not provide the basis for generalized conclusions.
Piper and Myers identify two major problems with the alleged link between harming animals and harming people. First, the studies that claim to find such a link rarely define animal abuse in a methodologically sound way,
Few studies define what is animal abuse or violence or harm. Does cruelty include pulling the legs off spiders, or only those of vertebrates? Does it matter that one society eats dogs and another keeps them as pets? Richer children may legally kill animals through fox hunting, whereas poorer ones are prosecuted for similar behavior towards a cat or a dog.
Second, such studies have a deeper methodological flaw in who they choose to study,
Research supporting the supposed links is based mainly on extreme and non-representative samples. Accounts suggesting links between those who have harmed animals and later violence toward humans often rely on the same small sample of extreme criminals in the US. Researching a limited population to produce a broadly applicable generalization is problematic. Any number of life experiences could also be shown to correlate with the behavior.
A further problem is that much of the research tends to suffer from fallacies of logic. Just because some serial killers have harmed animals, this does not mean that all or even the majority of those who harm animals will become serial killers. Yet this stance is taken in much of the literature.
Piper and Myers conclude that “Social workers should not uncritically accept the arguments that have been put forward about linking animal and human violence.”
Source:
Missing Link. Heather Piper and Steve Myers, Community Care, October 3, 2002, p.38.
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
Tags: Uncategorized
Helen Caldicott’s Back
Helen Caldicott — the woman who claimed that Space Shuttle launches were destroying the ozone layer — is back with a retread of a radiation story ahead of possible U.S. military action in Iraq. This time around, Caldicott has joined in the chorus of those who believe that depleted uranium in some U.S. ammunition and armor used during the Persian Gulf War is causing birth defects and other problems in Iraq.
Depleted uranium is uranium 238 which is generally used to reinforce tank armor and, alternately, in ammunition designed to destroy enemy tanks. The primary advantage of uranium 238 is that uranium is an extremely dense material. In a much-publicized example of the power of depleted uranium armor in the Persian Gulf War, for example, one U.S. tank managed to take close ranged direct hits from three separate Iraqi tanks and not only survive but also managed destroy all three of the enemy tanks.
But according to Caldicott, depleted uranium is still dangerously radioactive,
. . . it is a potent radioactive carcinogen, emitting a relatively heavy alpha particle composed of 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Once inside the body — either in the lung if it has been inhaled, or in a wound if it penetrates flesh, or ingested since it concentrates in the food chain and contaminates water — it can produce cancer in the lungs, bones, blood, or kidneys. Third, it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, meaning the areas in which this ammunition was used in Iraq and Kuwait during Gulf War will remain effectively radioactive for the rest of time.
Depleted uranium is, in fact, barely radioactive (otherwise it would not be a very suitable battlefield weapon). In fact, in most parts of the world the top layer of soil is hundreds of times more radioactive than depleted uranium. Aside from weapons, depleted uranium is used as counter weights in aircraft and in radiation shielding for medical equipment.
Caldicott nonetheless claims numerous radiation-related health effects on children from the use of depleted uranium during the Persian Gulf War,
My fellow pediatricians in the Iraqi town of Basra, for example, are reporting an increase of 6 to 12 times in the incidence of childhood leukemia and cancer. Yet because of the sanctions imposed upon Iraq by the United States and United Nations, they have no access to drugs or effective radiation machines to treat their patients.
The incidence of congenital malformations has doubled in the exposed populations in Iraq where these weapons were used. Among them are babies born with only one eye or missing all or part of their brain.
The main problem with this is that the major effect of exposure to uranium is renal problems, which is the major illness that afflicts people who work in uranium mines and are exposed to the substance regularly. There is also some possibility that such workers may have an elevated risk of lung cancer after years of exposure, but separating out miners’ exposure to uranium and radon makes it difficult to establish this with any certainty (elevated risk of lung cancer in uranium miners has usually been ascribed to radon gas exposure given that it is airborne).
Claims of increased levels of birth defects, leukemia and cancers are simply not credible since the Iraqi government has shot down every attempt to independently study the alleged problems.
Source:
Medical consequences of attacking Iraq. Helen Caldicott, San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Misleading WHO Study on Violence
Last week many news outlets reported on a study by the World Health Organization that blondes were becoming extinct — that turned out to be a hoax. No such study existed. But now WHO seems to be using a genuine report to distort the rate of homicides by intimate partners.
The New York Times summarizes the WHO report on intimate murder this way,
The study found that violence against women by their male partners occurs in all countries, regardless of economic class and religion. Data from Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel and South Africa show that 40 to 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.
But the situation is not the same for male murder victims. In the United States, for instance, only 4 percent of men murdered from 1976 to 1996 were killed by their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends.
The problem with this statistic is that it makes it appear that the odds of a man being murdered by a girlfriend, wife or ex-wife is far lower than the risk that a woman will be killed by a boyfriend, husband or ex-husband.
But in the United States, the actual annual figures break out to something like 1,300 women killed by male intimates compared to about 600 men killed by female intimates. In most years, about 1/3rd of all murders by intimate partners are committed by women.
But at the same time, it is correct that only 4 percent of men who are murdered are killed by women they have an intimate relationship with. But this is because men are so much more likely to be murdered than are women. As WHO notes, men constitute approximately 3/4 of all homicide victims (in the United States, about 80 percent of murder victims are men).
Another major problem with WHO’s study on violence is that it lumps in suicide as an act of violence. Yes suicide is a problem and needs to be addressed, but somebody who wants to kill himself is not the same sort of social problem as somebody who wants to kill other people. Out of the 1.6 million victims of violence annually that WHO cites, well over 1 million of those deaths are the result of suicides.
Finally, WHO has lowballed the number of people who died as a result of violence at only 191 million in the 20th century. The complete report isn’t available online, but that figure is way too small unless WHO is playing with politics with who counts as a victim of violence.
Sources:
First ever Global Report on Violence and Health released. World Health Organization, Press Release, October 3, 2002.
War, Murder and Suicide: A Year’s Toll Is 1.6 Million. Sheryl Gay Stroberg, New York Times, October 3, 2003.
Tags: Uncategorized
Media Credibility on the Verge of Extinction
Numerous media outlets last week carried an incredible story — blonds would become extinct within 200 years. A World Health Organization study, it was reported, had looked at the issue and found that since blondness is caused by a recessive gene, blonds would gradually become rarer and then finally completely absent from the human gene pool.
The only problem with this is that it’s a complete hoax from start to finish. Several British newspapers initially reported these claims, and then newspapers and broadcast television (including CNN) in the United States picked up on the story. Few reporters and news agencies who reported the story, it turns out, ever bothered to actually check with the World Health Organization to find out if it had actually conducted such a study.
And, of course, it never has. The WHO put out a press release this week saying the story was completely bogus.
Source:
Extinction of blondes vastly overreported. Washington Post, October 2, 2002.
Stop those presses! Blonds, it seems, will survive after all. Lawrence K. Altman, New York Times, October 2, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Washington, DC’s Keystone Kops
The Associated Press reports that police in Washington, DC are once again looking at Ingmar Guandique as a possible suspect in the murder of Chandra Levy. Guandique was arrested and convicted for attacking two female joggers in the same general area that Levy’s remains were found.
The scary thing is that DC police had ruled him out as a suspect apparently based largely on the fact that he passed a lie detector test. Now the police want him to take another lie detector test because they think the first one was faulty.
What is really faulty here is that a pseudoscientific process like a lie detector test is used to rule suspects in or out. Why don’t they just bring Uri Geller and a bunch of kids with dowsing rods in to tell them whether or not Guandique killed Levy. They’re likely to be as accurate as their lie detector test.
Source:
D.C. Police Probing Man in Levy Murder. Associated Press, September 29, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized