A needle in the eye for science

On my commute home the other day I was listening to the Radio 4 PM show, which had an article about acupuncture. It was inspired by a news item about a recent trial (also reported by BBC news online) and was framed as an interview with two experts. One expert (I couldn't find out his name) was pro-acupuncture, the other (Ben Goldacre) was quite sceptical.

Now I have no axe to grind about acupuncture - it looks kinda sharp, but people seem to like it and as far as I can tell no-one's bled to death yet, but I found the whole article deeply depressing. Why? Because the scientific results were being horrifically misrepresented, and even the sceptic seemed oblivious to the perversion.

So here's the experiment and results in a nutshell:

Over 1100 patients take part in the study. One group is given conventional therapy, one is given acupuncture and the third is given a sham acupuncture treatment (that looks like acupuncture, but is essentially just randomly pricking people with needles).

The results:

1. 27% of the conventional group show an improvement
2. 47% of the acupuncture group show an improvement
3. 44% of the sham group show an improvement

So the question, science fans, is what does this tell us about acupuncture?

The pro-acupuncture guy stated (with no sense of shame as far as I could tell) that this proves that acupuncture works. Remember I was driving? I almost crashed.

Never have I seen such an incredible twisting of a set of results (actually that's not quite true, a few years back I saw an article in the Bristol Evening Post that said a car was stolen every 30 minutes in Bristol, and then a councillor was quoted as saying that this was ok, as a car was stolen every 3 min in the UK, and so Bristol was plainly better than most :-/ Maths, people. Maths! )

To me these results show two things (within the scope of the study):

1. Acupuncture is not significantly better than a random sham activity
2. Both Acupuncture and the sham are better than conventional treatment

So the most probable conclusion is:

1. Acupuncture benefits significantly from a Placebo effect, that is so strong that it even beats conventional medicine

This is not the same as "Acupuncture works", in fact its a damn site closer to "Acupuncture is all a load of bollards".

I'm sure that the German scientists behind the work came to this conclusion (the more balanced wording that is :-) but I was dismayed at the complete lack of ability of the general public, even a Radio 4 audience, to understand the results in an unbiased way.

The sceptic was trying to be nice, and was arguing that although the improvements were impressive, we should be spending our cash on less expensive Placebo effects. But I wanted him to just pick up the massive logical club lying conveniently next to him, and wallop that damn needle guy right in the family arguments.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't written acupuncture off completely. This is just one study, and it does clearly indicate that the Placebo effect is worth investing (and acupuncture is one way). But please don't get overexcited about your meridians.

And don't even get me started on homeopathy (where's my axe!). Dawkins says it best:

Hypertext Conference 2007

I've been on my travels for a while, culminating this week in Manchester, where I attended the ACM Hypertext Conference. Hypertext is a smaller gathering than it used to be and in recent years has been in danger of becoming a fringe event, however this year numbers were up and the conference felt very positive. Besides I think that everyone should hang out at the fringe occasionally, it's good for the soul.

In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I was part of the Program Committee and am also on the Hypertext Conference steering group - but to be honest my fondness for the Hypertext Conference comes more from the fact that it was the first conference series I went to as a PhD student than it does from my professional connections with the event.

For me there were a number of highlights this year (besides the fine wining and dining that always accompanies a Hypertext conference):

• Hypertext and Tragedy - my only official job this year was as part of a panel on Hypertext Tragedy organised by Nathan Matias. Now my ignorance of literature is dwarfed only by my ignorance of literary theory, so I was feeling a little bit of a fish out of water as I sat alongside Emily Short (Interactive Fiction author), Nick Lowe (Reader in Classics) and Kieron O'Hara (Philosopher and Epistemologist). However, I have been involved in number of projects concerned with building narrative systems (information systems that in some way use story structures) and I hope that I was able to convey a sense that engineers do have some appreciation of narrative theory, and get across our slight disappointment that we can't get more mileage out of the ideas of the Russian Formalists (let alone Aristotle).


• Un-hyping the Semantic Web with Ted Nelson - If Sir Tim is the Father of the Web Gods then surely Ted Nelson must be one of the Titans, probably Atlas, bearing the weight of all the Web's failings on his back (this is responsibility in the didn't-finish-Xanadu-first sense). He is also great at coining new words and names (including the word Hypertext) and this year I have added swarf (swoop+morph), flinks (floating links) and hyperorthogonal (orthogonal in n-dimensions) to my vocabulary. I've known Ted and his wife Marlene for a few years now (Ted was a visiting Professor at Southampton) and it was great to catch up with them and talk over one of Ted's bugbears - the Semantic Web. I can't help thinking that some of the Semantic Web's most vocal supporters are also it's worst enemies; the arguments I've heard against the web such as "no-one will ever agree the one-true ontology" and "RDF is no match for the expressive power of human language" are just staw men, made possible by people who oversell the Semantic Web vision. Much of my conversation with Ted and Marlene was about me trying to un-hype the Semantic Web and present it for what it is - a simple set of technologies that allow machines to exchange meaningful tokens - perhaps a better name would be the Semiologic Web. Intriguingly it occurs to me that Ted's ZigZag idea might make rather a nice storage mechanism for Semantic Web triples (or if you like Semantic Web standards might make a nice exchange format for zzStructures). I shall have to mull that over :-)
  
• Wendy's keynote - This year we had the conference dinner at Christie's Bistro, which is part of Whitworth Hall at The University of Manchester. Wendy Hall gave the after-dinner speech, choosing to reflect on the history of Hypertext and the divergence and potential re-integration of Web and Hypertext research. Wendy recently gave up her position of Head of School within ECS and it was great to see her get some of her bounce back now that the pressure has lifted. There were a lot of messages in her talk, but the one that I take away is the message that came through between the words - that research can be joyful :-)
  
• Discussing Iraq with Mark Bernstein - The final event associated with the conference was a fascinating talk by Mark Bernstein on the rebuilding of Iraq and the role or lack of role played by information technology in that process. In some ways technology has dramatically changed our perspectives on war - the blogs of the citizens of Baghdad or the online accounts of the soldiers serving there have formed an independent channel of information that has prevented the type of media-control that we saw in the first Iraq War, but I am also struck my how much has not changed. It seems that even technology cannot prevent wilful ignorance. After all the European imperialists managed in the 18th and 19th centuries (for good and ill) without a Wiki or Blog in sight.

No other conference I can think of has the shear diversity of Hypertext. I hope that Wendy is right, and that the conference continues to grow and attract renaissance men and women - it is an important part of my continuing education, and I'm looking forward to next year's event in Pittsburgh.

Childish 30's: Zelda and the Transformers

This week I have been regressing to childhood. It started when I received a Wii for my 31st birthday, immediately turning it into my 13th birthday. As a paid up member of Generation X I grew up with gaming culture, but I haven't had a console since my original Playstation died of dust poisoning a few years ago. Wii Sports is a lot of fun but it's The Legend of Zelda that's been soaking up my time.

Zelda is a beautifully crafted game - just stunningly well thought out - with a perfect pace, that ebbs and flows as the game mode changes between Link the Hero, Link the Wolf and a number of well-placed minigames that slot carefully into both the storyline and the environment. For once puzzles seem natural, and the solutions are pitched at just the right level of difficulty.

I've played this type of arcade adventure before, but none have managed to create such a structured experience without making it feel linear (the only example I can think of is Knights of the Old Republic, but that didn't have the same pleasing variety of gameplay).

Now Zelda is worth regressing for on its own, but a few days after my birthday I had the chance to see the Transformers movie. When I was a kid Transformers were absolutely the toy of choice and god knows how much money I nagged out of my poor parents to build my collection of plasticy little alien robots. I watched the cartoon movie when it was on in the cinema, and even read the comic for a while, so the Autobots and Decepticons are imprinted on some impressionable part of my brain.

I'm a happy Britisher, but every now and again something comes along that makes me wish I was an American; the 2000 American election was one (in fact I wished I was 538 Floridians) and the new Transformers film is another. The reason being that if I was an American I could lobby for a new law that would force Micheal Bay to only ever make movies with giant robots in them.

Trust me - Micheal Bay was born to make this movie. Everything about his style: the ridiculous action shots, the hammy music, the slo-mo army dudes, and all the rest of the military pornography, everything is geared up to support giant robots in the best possible way. In fact, thinking back, Pearl Harbour would have been a lot better had the Japanese fleet been intercepted by a host of flying giant robots, and think how great Armageddon would have turned out had Bruce Willis been forced to put away his silly pimp-my-space-shuttle and fight some giant robot asteroids - for all mankind!


My one and only niggle with the ridiculous, testosterone fueled two hours that is Transformers, is that the new robot designs don't look that great when they're moving about, especially when Micheal Bay is having an attack of editor's Tourettes and fast cutting between fighting robots, giant guns and sweaty female midriffs. I mean look at Megatron, imagine that as a toy, you could have someone's eye out!

All in all its been a fun week being 13 again, sadly the mortgage needs paying and no amount of reminiscing will mow the lawn, so I better put the wii-mote aside and do some real work - at least until the next Giant Robot film, or they release No More Heroes:

Missile Command for Monks

Discovered this fabulous little flash game called Boomshine. It's a bit like Missile Command but with a calm sense of oneness instead of the needless aggression. Wonderfully Zen.

Ubuntu - a tale of discovery and woe

In the last few weeks I've been getting bored with Windows XP (my OS of lack of choice) and have had a bit of a roving eye, sneaking lusty glances over the shoulders of Mac users and hanging around in dodgy Windows Vista galleries ogling Aero through the glass.

Having decided that I cant really justify a MacBook when my Samsung PC has pretty much identical hardware already, I have resorted to a PC-based alternative and tried out Ubuntu.

For those that don't know, Ubuntu is a kind of Linux-for-dummies, a UNIX solution targeted at desktop users who cant be bothered to recompile their kernel every five minutes. Now don't get me wrong, I've been using flavours of Linux for over ten years, but I've never been religious about it, and I don't have the time or the energy to build, configure and tweak my laptop setup - I just want it to work.

The experience started off really well, I found a simple Ubuntu installer called Wubi that installs Ubuntu into a single file on your windows store and changes the bootloader to make Ubuntu an option on startup (this is handy as it means you don't have to repartition your drive - and essentially means you can try out Ubuntu risk free). Wubi worked really well, and (after waiting an hour or two for the 600MB download) I booted for the first time into Ubuntu.

Out of the box it seemed to work pretty well; the basic apps are all solid and critically it managed to autodetect and install the right driver for my wireless card and gave me a preinstalled Firefox, pretty much all you need to get started with anything.

But then I got greedy. I was after the whizzy 3d effects and fancy transparencies (check out the video above) and chose to ignore the bones of the dead that littered the way ahead. It all seemed simple enough, I had to install a specific ATI driver for my X1600, install an OpenGL driver, add a few installation repositories and then point the auto-installer at Beryl (a GUI extension that more properly would be called Candy). I even found some helpful tutorials using my complete and fully operational firefox to show me the way.

Mmmm... within five minutes I had resorted to the command line to try and install the ATI drivers. Within ten minutes I was busily editing my X config file - although in Ubuntu's defence I didn't have to use vi. Within fifteen minutes I'd broken X and had been chucked into fullscreen console mode, not very useful when your tutorial is on a web page in your broken X session :-( Luckily I had my trusty Glofiish with me (damnable thing) and so I found the tutorial on that, rediscovered the location of the config file and managed to fix it (with pico, I'm not using vi for anyone).

After an hour or so of hard work I just about had Ubuntu back into the same state it had been when I first installed it, not quite the experience I had been hoping for, but at least I hadn't killed anyone or resorted to sticking pins in a little Linus Torvalds doll like the last time I dated RedHat back in 99 or so.

Anyway, these things take time, and I still haven't forgiven XP for rebooting without asking every time I turn my back, or for popping up modal dialog boxes in the middle of typing a sentence, so I'm willing to give Ubuntu a second chance. But the second I see that bloody text editor coming it's out of here, and I'll be grabbing a Vista CD from the Uni's distribution site. Ubuntu - you have been warned!

Update 8th August 07: Ok - so I finally managed to get Beryl working. I have an ATI x1600 graphics card and I have to use the proprietary ATI driver (i.e. use fglrx) + XGL; a few places say to use the open source driver but I just couldn't get that to work. These guides were of great help:

• Paerez (on the Ubuntu forum)
• ArsGeek's guide
• ATI driver Wiki
• and especially happis' guide (also on the Ununtu forum)

One thing not mentioned very much is that XGL support is accidentally missing from Beryl 0.2.1, so I had to revert to version 0.2.0 using Synaptic and locking it to prevent it updating(which meant learning how Synaptic works). So now I have a very pretty looking Ubuntu setup - but it wasn't exactly effortless to set up, I think it took me around 5 hours to get it going in the end.

ICALT Japan Photos

I've had a chance to organise my photos since coming back from Japan, and also had a chance to play with Picasa (which as you'd expect is very polished and nicely integrates with all Google's other goodies). Turns out that we've all been busy little photo sharers:

• Dave's Photos
• Hugh's Photos
• Maurice's Photos
• Alex's album

Especially Alex's album of bad English translations and general weirdness :-)

My favorite pic is of this ema at the Meiji Jingu shrine (prayers written on wooden plaques at the shrine) . There's something oddly satisying about flying 5000 miles and finding a homage to the flying spagetti monster :-)

ICALT 2007 - Two steps behind

So the ICALT conference is over for another year. It's an interesting event that tries to bring together researchers from both east and west, and for the most part it succeeds - the mixture of presenters is about half and half and there is a lot of opportunity to meet people from countries that in the past have been under-represented in international academic research.

Of course there are some problems too. English is the conference language but not all participants have strong English skills which can make communication difficult (I probably experience this most jarringly as a native English speaker, but can guess that it is frustrating for everyone else as well).

But probably the most disappointing thing for me is that all the researchers, east or west, still seem to show undue reverence to the e-learning techniques, technologies and methods that have been built up in the last ten years or so. Many papers continue to look at standards such as SCORM, and systems like LMSs as if there existence was pre-ordained and their execution canon. What I'm really hoping to get out of a conference is an exciting dialogue or two, sounds of dissension and dissatisfaction, and if I'm really lucky some ideas for innovative new solutions.

In ICALT I really only got that feeling in the three keynotes, which were all rather good. Perhaps the best was from Marc Eisenstadt, entitled "Does e-learning have to be so awful?".

Its difficult (and never that accurate) to sum up someone else's argument, but the main message that I took away from Marc's talk was that if we want to understand how student's might make use of new technologies then we need to be using those technologies, and if we need to understand the issues then the best way is to have those issues ourselves. This extends to the wider case as well, and Marc argued that to gain a proper understanding of how those technologies effect learning we need to roll them out to real students on a real scale and experience the results.

I personally felt that given his provocative title Marc was pulling his punches a bit. There was an undercurrent of real dissatisfaction throughout his talk, a subtext of couldn't-we-do-better, and I think he's right to draw attention to the misalignment of our research on e-learning and our real world teaching. What I found frustrating about this conference was that everyone (and on reflection I am probably just to blame as everyone else) is about two steps behind where they should be. Two whole steps!

The people on the bottom step are the ones who haven't realised that the stone is already rolling and that the world is moving on. These folks are still working with the temporary solutions that are LMSs and ITS systems (temporary in that there existence is only justified in the narrow technology deficit decade of 1995-2005 - where IT skills were playing catch up).

The people on the first step, and I like to think that this is where I live, are focused more on the reality of students today, they are excited about social software and radical new ideas like Second Life (radical in the non-fictitious sense anyway!). They enthuse about the wisdom of crowds, loosely coupled systems and mashups. But even these people aren't really in the right place, because this stuff is happening anyway - there are teachers out there using second life, lecturers building learning communities on Wikis, students sharing their experiences on the blogosphere. The people on the first step don't have to enthuse, this is the reality.

So what's the second step, what should a conference like ICALT be serving up on its east-west plate? I think that we all need to move forward to a place where we can set the enthusiasm aside and begin to think more critically about social software and the consequences of all this can-do power in the hands of our students. At the minute we're so busy trying to persuade everyone that the rolling stone is right that we can't take the time to reflect on the times when it rolls down an inconvenient gully, or crushes a pedagogy when no-ones looking. How do we deal with the sidelining of experts, how can assessment cope with so much sharing, how can we manage cultural differences that might disadvantage some students in online settings?

As we left Japan I realised that despite Marc's excellent talk, this is what made me so dissatisfied with ICALT this year. No-one seems to be asking these difficult questions - and surely that's what the academic community is for?