Archive for August, 2012

At last year’s Edinburgh Science Festival, Richard Wiseman demonstrated that people can’t tell the difference between expensive wine and cheap wine. It was covered in both The Guardian and The Telegraph. In fact, one of the funniest things about the whole business was some of the snobbery from the Guardian’s readers.

“Expensive is when you get to the £50 – £100 plus range. That’s when you really taste the difference.”

“Let’s do this with £2.99 against £299 instead. I think you might find the results aren’t quite the same.”

“£10 is expensive eh?
Pour them a glass of 2000 Domaine de Chevalier Blanc (the besr white I have ever tasted) at £60 a bottle and see if you get the same responses.”

“I ‘ve had £100 a bottle wine I CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE!”

The wine community didn’t seem to appreciate the results. Wine of the Week bolding told his readers that new evidence would be just around the corner.

WineOfTheWeek is aghast at such claims of label snobbery, and will bet his Tommy Hilfiger jeans that contradictory evidence will soon follow.

I presume he meant to say “against”. Unfortunately for him, more than a year on, and the new evidence has still yet to arrive. Wine Anorak did a slightly better job of arguing against, pointing out that members of the public weren’t given two wines to directly compare, but only one, and asked to say whether it was a cheap or expensive one.

Actually, this makes perfect sense though. You never (or at least I never) buy two bottles of wine, do a quick taste test and throw the bad one away. You just buy one bottle of wine (with others perhaps to follow later) and your enjoyment is based solely on that. As Richard himself said, “to keep it as realistic as possible, we presented them with a single glass of wine and they had to say whether inexpensive or expensive”.

Even if you want to poke your nose up at Richard’s experiment, a full paper has been previously published on the topic by the University of Minnesota. Here is what they concluded.

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.

So there you have it. You can’t tell the difference between an expensive wine and a cheap wine. So you might as well pick up the cheap bottle. Indeed, with the money you’ll save, why not buy two bottles of the cheap stuff, taste them, and throw the least pleasant one away.

Photos from this year’s Pride event. As ever it was an enjoyable day, though the parade was disappointing. I commented last year that there were a lack of floats, and this year there seemed to be even less effort. Still, that should only provide motivation to have a great parade next year – I’ve even got it in my calendar this time, would be great to have a humanism float.

Also, let it never be said that we weren’t doing our bit 😉 .

Recently, I made it down to the other “>Toastmasters group in Leeds, to see how it differed from Leeds City.

The answer is not a great deal – there were a few things that they did a little differently, but on the whole, it was the same enjoyable Toastmasters format. The biggest difference is that it is a much smaller club, with maybe around a dozen people there. This is understandable given they were only chartered in June, but is markedly different from Leeds City, the oldest club in The North, which will have around 30 people per meeting.

As they were somewhat short on roles, I was pounced upon on entering and ended up as timekeeper. It was a role I had been a bit nervous about doing, so giving it a go in a smaller club setting was perhaps a gentle introduction.

All in all, I’m not sure whether I will become a regular visitor. It would be a great chance to get round more roles and get more speeches it, but it does mean a time commitment of one evening every week.

Working out what to think about Julian Assange is a very, very difficult thing. Even for those of us in the Skeptics community, who are used to saying “it’s not quite a simple as that”, are left struggling to work out what is going on.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to this – Wikileaks has been an important development in creating a free, more open society. However, such services to the public do not qualify you from an exemption from rape, and if he did it, he should be brought to justice.

Of course we don’t know if he is guilty or not.

Last month, Australia’s ABC Network aired an episode entitled “Sex, Lies & Julian Assange“. It came out very favourably on the side of Assange. Biased? Possibly. But I’m not sure what the motive would be. It has a 50 year history and won many awards for their investigative journalism. In any case, the episode is available in full from their website, so you can make up your own mind.

EDIT: The video has now been removed from YouTube, but you can still watch it on ABC’s website.

Last month, I wrote to KFC to let them know that some of their customers do in fact want genetically modified products in their food. They wrote back.

Dear Mr Worfolk,

We would like to thank you for your interest in KFC.

Whilst we are certainly interested in new ideas, suggestions and information that will enhance our products we are unfortunately unable to accept unsolicited ideas and suggestions from the general public. This is partly due to the fact that a majority of ideas submitted by the public have already been considered by KFC and partly because they are not useful given the limitations of our particular field of business. Also, experience has shown the practice of considering ideas can give rise to misunderstandings as to the origin and ownership of particular ideas and lability in relation to them.

We nevertheless appreciate your interest, thank you for taking the time to correspond with us here at KFC and we look forward to your continued custom.

Yours sincerely,
Customer Careline

Basically, it says thanks for your opinion, but we’re not going to read it lol.

Back in 2010, we created the annual Worfolk Lecture for public understanding of science. If you have missed any, or all of them, you can find them on the Worfolk Lectures website. This year’s talk, delivered by Leeds Skeptics, saw Paul Hopwood present “You Know Less Than You Think“.

DKMS is in RPMForge, so we need to add that before we can install it via Yum.

cd /root/
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
yum install dkms

Recently, we said a fair well to Rich, who is moving down to London to further his career in medicine. Rich has been a dear friend to many of us since we first met five and a half years ago, and I wish him all the best.

I’m a big fan of the Gates Foundation, they do a lot of fantastic research and are working to wipe out a lot of diseases that are prevalent in the third world, such as malaria. Plus, it was co-founded by Bill Gates, who I am a big admirer of.

However, one thing that has always bugged me is their pushing of woo in one particular area – using circumcision to prevent the transmission of HIV. They even have a page about it on their website.

It doesn’t work though. Or, at least, we should say that there is insufficient evidence to suggest that it does work. This was the finding of a meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Pooled analyses of available observational studies of MSM revealed insufficient evidence that male circumcision protects against HIV infection or other STIs.

Ok, fine, you could argue, but there are some studies that suggest otherwise. IE, if you cherry pick your studies and ignore the meta-analysis, you can get the result you want. But interestingly, there was a study in 2009 by Maria J Wawer, and here is what they concluded.

Circumcision of HIV-infected men did not reduce HIV transmission to female partners over 24 months; longer-term effects could not be assessed. Condom use after male circumcision is essential for HIV prevention.

Why is this study so key to the debate? Because of its funder – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Their own study concluded that circumcision does not stop HIV. So why are they still pushing it?

Well said.