The worst news article about phyiscs ever?

So I haven't blogged in a long while, mostly because I have been giving lectures on Supersymmetry (see the end of this, or read Herbi Dreiner's excellent blog describing it for a general audience) as well taking my normal set of tutorials.  I am really still too busy  right now, catching up with many things that I neglected etc, but I read a few things that annoyed me this week so I feel the need for a brief break to rant...Anyway sorry for the lack of recent posts. 

Earlier this week I read a very short article by Deborah Orr, where she misunderstood the significance of recent physics results,  representing it as a milestone in the road to discovering the Higgs, then made a very vague point about science and faith, which could be interpreted as saying anything from science = religion to the simple notion that belief that we will be able to keep finding answers or belief in specific unproven models requires faith. From reading her tweets it seems more like the latter, but not only was she vague, she also based her argument on the awful "god particle" phrase that  apparently Leon Lederman coined.  All this has already been pointed out though and afterwards Deborah Orr on twitter appeared to back down and accept the criticism was valid .  That she accepted the criticism actually leaves me with more respect for her, though to be fair I could only remember her as a writer I used to skip in the Independent and my level of respect for random journalists starts out a very low level.

Today I saw something more annoying,  about something which was of interest to me, but the article mangled the entire story.   Rather than ranting about the terrible new coverage I should probably write about the actual news, however others, have gotten there before me (and they are real particle physics bloggers rather than just a particle physicist writing rants about random stuff on a blog) so let me just summarise.


There was an interesting anomaly from CDF at the tevatron, from events with 2jets and a W boson, showing an excess in which was at a statistical significance (3.2 standard deviations) where people get a little interested but well below the standard for accepted discovery (5 standard deviations).  Then later the significance rose to  4.1 standard deviations, which is a very large discrepancy. However as well as statistics not being enough for discovery, many were sceptical because it was a small signal sitting on top of a very large background, so small misestimations in the background could, change the significance a lot, and  you have to be very confident you understand the background  (CDF of course know this and carried out a lot of checks before publishing, but it is still a tricky task).  In addition there was no very standard and popular theory prediction giving this, though many proposals were made afterwards, such as a leptophobioc Z' (neutral gauge boson with heavily suppressed couplings to leptons to avoid usual constraints) or a state predicted in models called technicolor (an analogy to the strong nuclear force where charges are discussed as colours), where a new strong forces leads to bound states.

Anyway when the other very similar experiment at the Tevatron, D0, looked at this they found no excess and their results are not consistent with CDF casting a lot of doubt on this as a signal for new physics.

Here is how Fox news decided to report this.  First the title and the first paragraph are totally wrong:

"Heartbreaker: Major Setback in Quest for 'God Particle'"

 This was not a Higgs signal and was not interpreted as such. It was a much more exciting prospect, not the conformation of the Standard Model, but new physics beyond the standard model, and not new physics from one one of the most commonly considered scenarios, but new physics that we didn't really expect!  

  Quite possibly the author has confused the rumour that a Higgs signal (at 4 standard deviations) had been seen by the Atlas experiment at the LHC, based on a leaked internal note created before proper checks had been done.  This turned out to be wrong (I have friends who had to work on this over Easter).  Atlas themselves killed that story and it is unrelated to the CDF anomaly. 

Indeed the first time the Tevatron is mentioned is in relation to the new revelation that the signal doesn't show up, but no mention of this being a result from D0, is made.  CDF and D0, the individual experiments, which use different detectors to study the physics from Tevatron collisions, don't get mentioned anywhere in the piece.  

One quote attributed to D0 Cospokesperson, Dmitri Denisov, must either be a misquote or taken entirely out of context: "At this point I'd say the chances are 50/50 for the Higgs to exist at all,"

  If this was a proper blog, that tries to amount to real journalism  I'd go check by emailing him, but thats not what this is, and to be honest I'd rather not waste his (and my) time checking something I know doesn't represent the situation here.   If anyone wanting to be a proper journalist/blogger does check I will try to add this as an update.  All I will say now is this result, given that it was not a predicted Higgs signal, doesn't decrease our degree of belief in the existence of the Higgs.

The article also has this stupid phrase, mocking people who are interested in the very topic of the article, that can only be described verbal diarrhea:

 "a heartbreaking setback for scientists and armchair experimenters worldwide, who have been following the particle-physics treasure hunt like a baseball fan monitoring stats."

Incidentally it should also be pointed out that just because the D0 and CDF analyses do not agree does not immediately prove that the CDF one is wrong.  We tend to assume CDF is wrong because it is their analysis which makes the surprising and dramatic claim, but we don't actually know this, jsut that the the two analyses are not consistent.   

If you look to the left of the article there is also a description of the LHC which is several years out of date, apparently written prior to the LHC run at 7 TeV, suggesting that the machine has only been run for 9 days and is still shutdown.  In fact the LHC was started up again on the 20/09/2009 and has been making 7 TeV collisions for over a year now, with plenty of interesting physics papers as a result.

I should probably acknowledge that towards the end of the story you see better quotes pointing out that they didn't ever expect a Higgs here and that the explanation of the discrepancy is likely to be the result of background misestimation, but these are direct quotes that tend to completely contradict the story, suggesting that either author didn't read them, couldn't understand what they meant or just didn't care.

My blog title here is probably a lie though. Sadly I doubt this is even close to the worst new article on particle physics,  the quality of reporting and general understanding is despairing low.  Of course part of the problem is communication from us, we care about research and are not experts in public communication, but there is no excuse for lazy articles like this one from  fox news.  It is not journalism it, it is just drivel!

 

 

Incompetent or lying politicians and a failing media

So after a quick read of Ben Goldacre's latest blog pointing out the emptiness of Andrew Lansley's evidence claims I felt inspired to write a rant about the wider implications, and this is mostly what you get here, but with some caveats towards the end regarding a point in Ben's blog that I don't understand or disagree with. 

In his blog Ben discusses the claims of "evidence" made by Andrew Lansley to support NHS reforms he is proposing as Secretary of State for Health in the UK.  In contrast to the impression given by Andrew Lansley it seems there is no such evidence.  In fact the few relevant studies that exist provide some (very weak) evidence that Lansley's reforms will have a negative impact on the health service.

Andrew Lansley is either deliberately lying or grossly incompetent at his job, which let me remind you is to review the evidence and make the best policy decisions in accordance with it and the general wishes of the public. Liar or incompetent, either way he should be sacked. These decisions can drastically affect many real lives, it may seem boring to think about NHS structures for delivering care, but get it wrong and valuable resources which could be used to save lives may be squandered.
 
Indeed for democracy to lead to good decisions it is essential that the public are informed properly about the evidence, rather than misled by false claims.  Given a lack of expert knowledge and indeed actual interest, with little time to think about the issues in their busy lives, from the majority of the public I am often amazed at how well democracy performs relative to other systems.   Yet the richest countries as measured by GDP per capita are mostly democracies.

While this may mix up causation with correlation I do believe democracies in the rich western countries  have brought both political stability and prosperity to their populace. I mostly attribute this success to an independent press holding the leaders to account and reducing corruption, and technical advisers providing experience, knowledge and an intelligent review of the evidence. This, however, is not to say democracies are well run in absolute terms.  

As Andrew Lansley illustrates politicians statements about evidence, and statistics are frequently poorly matched to reality and malformed policies often result.  This is not an isolated case, for example in the run up to the recent UK general election another Conservative Chris Grayling, currently Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions, repeatedly made false claims by misrepresenting statistics about crime.  And it is not only the tories, under Labour that the classification of cannabis was changed back to B, justified with misleading statements about the evidence of harm and against the repeated scientific advice the government received. Later an adviser to the government was sacked for discussing evidence the government didn't like.   The Labour controlled county council of Durham even funded fundamentally flawed "tests" to see if fish oil pills could improve childrens' performance in GCSE exams.    

These are not examples of politicians holding different opinions to me, they are examples of clear objective evidence being ignored, misunderstood or abused.   The politicians involved should not be allowed to remain as MPs let alone hold onto important jobs in the government, as they are either unable to perform their job competently or are simply deceiving the public.  Their contribution distorts the information the public (and the politicians) need to make informed decisions about how to achieve the outcomes we want.  The desired outcomes and values are subjective and may differ from person to person, but the evidence and statistics have a clear interpretation and should not be abused.  All of the politicians involved in the stories I've mentioned should be hounded by the media until they are sacked.

Sadly, disgracefully in fact, the media never holds them to account for this.  While if any muddled or slightly dodgy expenses claim for a few thousand pounds comes to light the media, right and left,  hound the politician relentlessly, on evidence about serious policies, politicians are free to continue to mislead the public, distorting the public debate, with potentially devastating results if flawed health policy is implemented nationwide.   Perhaps the problem is that the media also likes to play this game of distorting evidence and statistics to sell newspapers or push ideology.  Or possibly, simply through a lack of basic understanding of science and statistics, they actually believe statistics and scientific evidence really can mean anything and all opinions are equally valid.      

 Ben Goldacre is one of the few journalists who goes against this trend and instead exposes the dodgy claims of newspapers and politicians alike.  However even if they attain a very high profile it is dangerous when only a small number of people can be relied upon to give  a good overview of the evidence, because noone is perfect and the effect of any occasional error they make will be exaggerated.  When I read Ben's blog on Andrew Lansley I initially really liked it, and broadly I remain in agreement with it, his exposure of Andrew Lansley's lack of evidence is excellent. Unfortunately, when I read the paragraph,

Working from first principles, markets where people compete on price as well as quality will probably make quality worse, because prices are easy to measure, while quality is not.The evidence seems to support this theory. The introduction of variable price competition in New Jersey in the 1990s was associated with a worsening death rate from heart attacks, while in the UK, stopping variable price competition was associated with improvement. It’s hard to measure either way, but despite his using the word repeatedly, again, the “evidence” does not support Lansley here.

things got a little murkier.  There is a problem with the first sentence. "From first principles" implies to me that someone has really calculated what will happen based on some basic (presumably economic) postulates. I was surprised because it seems very tricky to judge what might happen. Ben's hand waved logic might apply, but I could imagine the lack of evidence on quality driving the hospitals to advertise procedures and safeguards, or hire "big name" consultants to assure people that they will provide high quality care. Perhaps the things they do improve quality perhaps they don't, but a clear answer from theory seems tricky. I am not an economist though, so I don't know.

However Ben links to an article on the words " Working from first principles" so I started to read it, only to discover it's a paper discussing the evidence, which is very relevant, just not at that place. Now normally actual evidence >> theory, but the problem here is Ben acknowledges the evidence is not that conclusive because "It’s hard to measure either way" in which case our prior prejudice based on theory becomes more important. It doesn't change the central theme of the article, that Lansley referred to non-existing evidence, but to me it does exaggerate the case against introducing a market on price and quality. This makes me uncomfortable praising it in my blog without adding this.  Indeed, while a much more minor error, this statement also has the power to distort the public debate if most people interpret it the way I do.

Maybe I'm missing something though, but it seems to me that even the best examples of journalism fall short of getting it right every time.  However that is a rare slip, while the real problem is that misleading statements about evidence from politicians and the media are the norm, not the exception, and there is no accountability.

Until this changes and the media take a positive role in informing the public about evidence, and thereby pressure politicians to do the same, we will be unable to transform to a society where policies are formed based on the best available evidence and people make informed decisions about how we are governed, and how it should affect our daily lives.

Auschwitz, mass murder and today

Last weekend I visited Krakow and Auschwitz, which is about an hours drive from the city. A friend has already made a vivid blog about what we saw there along with excellent photos. Being a theorist I won't dwell so much on our observations but instead I mostly want to talk about some of the thoughts it provoked here.

The obvious questions to ask are could it happen again  and how would you react in those circumstances?  The latter of course cannot be answered, so I won't try, but the former, though natural to ask, is really rather foolish.  "It" did not only happen once, "it" has happened before, "it" has happened since and sadly I would be astonished if "it" didn't happen again.  Indeed in some sense of "it", it is happening now.  Certainly anti-semiticism existed long before Hitler, from the Roman empire through middle ages and until today. However it is not really wide spread racism which makes things so abhorrent, it the was the horrifying treatment, torture and mass murder.

At Auschwitz  (or Oświęcim to use the Polish name) we saw the concentration camp where people (most of them Jewish) were held, fed starvation diets, leading to the horrifying images like on the left, forced to endure bitter cold with minimal clothing to protect them, humiliated, tortured and eventually murdered.  We also saw the cell's where prisoners there were held for "special" punishment. Given the treatment of the typical inhabitants it's hard to imagine what this could be, but there we saw small brick boxes called standing cells, where prisoners were forced to stand for days, and cell's where some were sentenced to death by starvation.   In the same building the first experiments with gassing were also started.

Then after visiting this we moved on to the second much larger camp, Birkenau, where the same horrors were then performed on an industrial scale.

But such treatment and mass murder is not unique. "Concentration camp" is term first coined to describe camps created by the British to hold people relocated during the systematic depopulation of certain regions in South Africa during the Boer war.   Hitler cited the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the dying Ottoman empire / nascent Turkish state, as reason to believe that history would look kindly upon him despite the horrors he was ordering, thankfully he was wrong. But further back one can also consider the widespread practice of conquest and slavery in ancient civilisations, the treatment and multiple massacres of the native populations of the American continents,  and many other instances of horror one can find.  Of course details and how exact the comparison is can easily be questioned and this might be important in many circumstances, but there is no doubt that human history is filled with horrible idea and horrible acts of violence and murder.

Nor did such horrors stop with the Nazi's.  At the same time there were the horrors conducted under Stalin's regime, many deaths on both sides in partitioning of India, the huge death toll in China under Mao and more recently there is Cambodia in the 80's,  the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90's and perhaps Darfur in the last decade. And this is far from a complete summary.

However perhaps by "it" one wonders if "civilised" western nations could ever turn to such brutal mass murder again. There are of course worrying trends, such as the leader of the French Front National making it to the final run off in the French presidential elections, Joerg Haider getting into a coallition government in Austria,  and to a lesser extent the British National Party (BNP) getting council seats.     In addition there is the apparent increase in Islamaphobia post 9/11, which appears to be being exploited by the BNP.

I believe and hope that it is very unlikely in the near future that such events and attitudes will spiral into state sanctioned murder in western democracies.  I have less confidence elsewhere, but whether the next atrocity to shock people will be perpetrated on some Muslims or be by some Muslims, as terrorists or as state part of some theocratic state sanctioned violence, or involve some other group, I obviously cannot say.  But sadly I'm sure something will come. 

I have previously  drawn comparison between some aspects of the horrifying attitudes, aims and acts of Hitler and policies of western countries which maintain or do not strive to diminish the appalling disparity of wealth, living conditions and health between people born in western countries and those born in the "developing" world.  In extreme times this poverty can lead to horrifying scenes of starvation every bit as stomach churning as those shown earlier from Auschwitz.


In "better" times people living in poorer countries simply have much lower standards of living, much higher levels of infant moratlity, and much shorter life expectancy (note the latter two are not independent).  For example the life expectancy in the UK is 79.4 years, while the average expectancy world wide is only 67.2 years, more than a whole decade of life lost, and in many African Countries it can be under 60 or 50 years.  Between the lowest and highest national life expectancies there is 40 year gap, it seems people in Japan, on average, live twice as long as people in Swaziland.

A significant contribution to this gap are high rates of HIV/AIDS infections and the lack of drugs which could significantly increase the life expectancy of those infected.  In the west there is wider condom availability and use and better education, which help prevent the rise infections and drugs which allow people who have been infected to have a much longer and higher quality life and people in other countries could and should have access to all of this.  Some of the problems result from bad governance and it is not quite as simple as needing the will of western nations to provide, but much more could be done. And when people seek to leave for other countries where the prospects are better they are refused entry and dismissively labelled "economic migrants".

In many cases economics is life and that is one reason (there are many others) I say, with all due respect to Godwin's law , and legitimate sensitivities about comparison's which could trivialise the horror and suffering, that in some sense of the meaning "it" is still going on today.