The Tories solve binge drinking

From the Evening Standard:

The system of measuring alcoholic drinks in units could be scrapped under plans unveiled by the Conservatives today.

They say units are widely misunderstood and fail to take account adequately of differing strengths of drinks, such as beers and wines.

Unveiling a raft of public health reforms, shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said units would be replaced by the actual number of centilitres of pure alcohol contained in each drink.

From Wikipedia:

In the United Kingdom, a unit of alcohol is defined as 10 millilitres (or approximately 8 grams) of ethanol (ethyl alcohol).

Problem solved!

Publicity is the top word

After the Global Language Monitor, following numerous publicity-maximising delays, finally announced they’d spotted the ‘millionth word’ in English (which was 2.0, lest we forget), I naively expected that they would go away for good.

Alas, they have not done so, and are now back with their latest piece of lexicographical tomfoolery, a list of ‘top words of 2009’. Apparently by means of a magical algorithm that takes into account “frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity”, they’ve come up with a list that includes Twitter (at no. 1), Obama, H1N1 (the “politically correct” name for swine flu), and vampire.

As far as I’m concerned, this is obvious nonsense. But I’m apparently alone. Not only did it get picked up in the media, it did the rounds on Twitter too. Because I’m sad like that, I looked through all 600+ Twitter posts that linked to the Global Language Monitor list, and not a single one of them was even mildly critical of it in any way.

I’m not sure that there’s a point to this in any way, other than this drives me mad.

Everything is dead

Inspired by this great post by Alex, here is a list of some things that are dead, and which therefore nobody ever uses:

• Print is dead.
• Email is dead.
• RSS is dead.
• Blogging is dead.
• Desktop PCs are dead.
• Search is dead.
• CDs are dead.
• Television is dead.

It seems the only things that aren’t dead, and which have apparently replaced most of the things listed above, are Twitter and Facebook. The main problem with that being:

• Twitter is dead.
• Facebook is dead.

Unfortunately, this leaves Internet Explorer 6 as the last technology standing.

Tesco now selling verbal nouns

The missing word is fat. This word is obviously so offensive to their customers that they decided to just remove it, despite the resulting label making no sense.

Copper nanotubes next Tuesday

If I were looking for an abbreviation for copper nanotube, I would probably choose something other than what these Chinese researchers went for:

(Thanks to Eleanor for letting me know this exists!)

More media statistics misuse

There was a fair bit of media coverage this week about the results of a survey, published by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, which suggest that nearly three out of every ten teachers had had a false accusation made against them by a pupil. For this to happen to a teacher is undoubtedly horrible; for it to happen to so many of them would suggest that problem is endemic, and can only be the result of a hysterical child protection culture¹.

As always with these sorts of figures, you have to ask, does it sound realistic? Can it really be true that nearly one-third of all teachers have had a serious allegation made about them by a pupil? And, as always when it comes to surveys and the media, the answer is “no”. The ATL survey tells us that:

The survey was completed in May 2009 by 1,155 ATL members working as support staff, teachers, heads of departments and school leaders in state and private schools around the UK.

Have you ever had a false allegation made against you by a pupil? (1,155 responses)
*  28% said yes
*  72% said no

That’s 28% of the 1,155 responses that the ATL got, of the 1,155 members who actually completed the survey. It’s not three-tenths of a random sample of one thousand teachers: it’s three-tenths of the 160,000 ATL members who actually went to the trouble of filling out the survey. The ATL’s Mary Bousted admitted as much on Radio 4’s Today programme (see the interview at 7:50am).

The problem is that it’s more likely that teachers who have had false accusations made against them will care enough to complete such a survey. They will have much more motivation to do so than a teacher who has never encountered such problems. This is a form of response bias, and basically means the 28% figure is very likely to be larger than the real figure. As very often is the case with the statistics used to drive media stories, it turns out to be meaningless upon even a cursory examination.

¹ The Daily Mail, showing their usual disdain towards consistency or accuracy, has trouble deciding how many teachers have gone through such an ordeal. While the headline of the story suggests 1 in 4 teachers, the title of the web page increases this to 1 in 2!

Under Construction

Geocities has now been taken down by Yahoo!, but at least Archive Team have managed to save some of the most historically significant images from it before it went:

Be sure to click through to see them all in their animated glory.

Also brilliant is xkcd’s Geocities-tribute homepage (a screenshot is here, for when it changes back to normal).

Denial of Service

A few days ago, The Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention had their websites brought down by a DDoS attack. In response, they decided to perform a denial-of-service attack of their own:

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS (‘Divine’ Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) & 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

Please join us in this important task, with any luck it will take God a while to get back online, ensuring us at least a few days of godless peace. It will also give the Westboro Baptist Church some much needed time to catch up on paperwork.

[via]

Wakefulness-impaired pilots have plane-landing issues

There’s two quality corporate euphemisms in this news article, about a flight that appeared to get lost and failed to land, possibly because the pilots were asleep. See if you can guess their real meanings!

Reports that the pilots may have fallen asleep were "speculative" but the investigation would look at fatigue issues.

The crew stated they were in a heated discussion over airline policy and lost situational awareness.

This ‘discussion’ must have been very heated to produce a flight path like this one:

.

Whatever

According to nearly every news source you can imagine, whatever is the word that Americans hate most of all.

Oh, except it isn’t. As Ben Zimmer at the Visual Thesaurus explains:

It’s important to note that the five words and phrases were preselected by the Marist pollsters. As you can see from the table of results that accompanied the announcement, 938 Americans were asked, “Which one of the following words or phrases do you find most annoying in conversation?” So there was no opportunity to pick a word or phrase that might annoy you more than the ones that Marist inquired about.

So basically, the whole thing is meaningless, and the media yet again shows itself to be entirely incapable of examining a press release for more than 10 seconds to see if it makes sense before reprinting it as news. Whatever.