I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (45 page)

And finally, thank God that in this cynical world, in Wales, Dewi ap Ifan is still managing to feel optimistic: ‘Aren’t we all lucky that Sars has arisen in China? Traditional Chinese medicine, herbalism and acupuncture will have it under holistic control in no time.’

Keep the Bad Science coming: you are not alone.

Because You’re
Worth It

Guardian
, 27 November 2003

Reader Helen Porter writes in to tell me about the Ion-Conditioning Hairdryer, which uses ‘Patented Trionic Action’ to ‘micronize’ water molecules and, impressively for a hairdryer, magically hydrate your hair. The
Journal of Trionic Physics
– in case you thought the hairdryer people made those words up themselves – was actually the name of a Jefferson Airplane fanzine. But I digress: the manufacturer, Bio-Ionic, is also the inventor of Ionic Hair Retexturising (IHR). And this is not just a new way to straighten your hair, it’s a whole new branch of physics.

Colour Nation, hairdressers to the stars in Soho, London, offers Bio-Ionic’s IHR. Its public-relations material explains how it works: ‘Positive ions have lost an electron, and are considered unhealthy,’ whereas negative ions ‘have gained an electron, and greatly assist in a body’s mood, energy level, and overall health’. When these benevolent negative ions encounter water, ‘the water molecules are broken down to a fraction of their previous size … diminutive enough to penetrate through the cuticle, and eventually into the core of each hair’.

I might be wrong, but surely shrinking water molecules must cost more than the £230 Colour Nation charges for IHR? The only other groups that have managed to create that kind of superdense quark-gluon plasma used a relativistic heavy ion collider, and if Colour Nation has got one of those at the back of the salon, then I’m glad I don’t live in the flat upstairs. Although a
Mirror
reporter who had the compressed molecule treatment did say her hair ‘itched and smelled of chemicals’ afterwards. Maybe there’s something more potent than negative ions in there after all.

Meanwhile, a tip from a friend – who, may I just point out, doused for the sex of her baby. She was delighted, at her antenatal yoga class, after being told how immunisations would kill her baby, to be handed
Homeopathy News
. The pamphlet mentions a study from the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital in which 80 per cent of twenty-five children reported an improvement in their asthma after homeopathy. Which sounds impressive. But there was no placebo control group, and it doesn’t seem to have actually been published anywhere (or not anywhere peer-reviewed). Which doesn’t mean it’s not true. Just remember that in a recent review of all the evidence on homeopathy – I’ll say it again – it was shown, overall, to be no more effective than a placebo …

More Than Water?

Guardian
, 22 January 2004

What is it with pseudo scientists and water? After last week’s ‘clustered water’, Caroline Stacey in the
Independent
’s Food and Drink section was getting excited about Oxygizer water. ‘Oxygizer doesn’t just slake a thirst, it provides the body with extra oxygen too. A litre contains 150mg of oxygen, around twenty-five times more than what’s in a litre of tap water.’ Handy. ‘This apparently helps remove toxins and ensures a stronger immune system, as well as assisting the respiratory system, so you recover better from exercise … cleverly they’ve added something to water that’s not an additive.’

In the spirit of Victorian gentleman scientist self-experimenters, I decided to put Oxygizer to the test. Back in the sixties, a scientist in New York managed to get mice breathing underwater, in a saline solution at six times normal atmospheric pressure, just like in that movie
The Abyss
– it takes a lifetime of popular-science books to collect this kind of trivia. Unfortunately, the mice died after eighteen hours.

So instead, I decided to drink some Oxygizer after a three-mile run. I can take in about 100ml of oxygen with every breath, or 150mg, and like most humans I only absorb about 30mg of that. That’s 300mg a minute, but after serious exercise it goes up to about 3,000mg a minute. To help myself recover significantly faster after my run, I figured I’d need an extra 20 per cent of oxygen, or 600mg a minute. That meant drinking forty litres of Oxygizer over ten minutes, getting the stuff into me at a rate of one litre every fifteen seconds. This cost £120, and almost doubled my body weight, but it’s all in the name of science. Fairly soon my circulatory system was so overloaded that pints of frothy sputum were spewing up at the back of my throat; then my abdomen burst open and covered my laptop in guts.

This was inconvenient. But with my dying keystrokes, just in case any Oxygizer customer ever looks up Oxygizer to buy some Oxygizer, I’m using the word Oxygizer as much as Oxygizer, because articles on the
Guardian
website come up right at the top of the first page on Google keyword search.

‘Nanniebots’
to Catch Paedophiles

Guardian
, 25 March 2004

As I sit here, quietly shedding the weight off my fat arse in my Dr Norbert Wurgler caffeine-impregnated SlimFit tights, I find myself bitterly regretting the title of the column. Here’s one I’m not sure of. Artificial intelligence, in the form of ‘Nanniebots’, is being used to catch paedophiles. Nanniebots are AI programs which hang out in internet chatrooms, allegedly spotting the signs of grooming. They have done ‘such a good job of passing themselves off as young people that they have proved indistinguishable from them’, according to
New Scientist
. So that’s the Turing test – where a computer program is indistinguishable from a real person – passed; and who’d have thought it, in a program written by a lone IT consultant from Wolverhampton with no AI background. So I call him.

Here’s the problem. Reading
New Scientist
’s chat with Nanniebot
, the excellent
www.ntk.net/
(
Private Eye
for geeks) points out that Nanniebot ‘seems to be able to make logical deductions, parse colloquial English, correctly choose the correct moment to scan a database of UK national holidays, comment on the relative qualities of the Robocop series, and divine the nature of pancakes and pancake day’. Jabberwock, the winner of last year’s Loebner Prize for the Turing test, is rubbish in comparison (you can
talk to it online
and see for yourself). But Jim Wightman, the Nanniebot inventor – whose site claims they’ve passed the Turing test – isn’t entering the Loebner Prize this year. Maybe next year … it’s too buggy. But it’s live on the internet already? Can I test it? Sure. But I want to see with my own eyes that there’s not a real human being somewhere tapping out the answers, I explain. Jim offers network-monitoring software on my computer, to prove it’s connected to the one server. But what about that server? I want to see it working on its own, without a human. Can I come round to Jim’s place? He chuckles … Jim doesn’t keep the conversation datasets on site in Wolverhampton. ‘I know it sounds a bit
Mission Impossible
, but …’ He’s worried they might get stolen. They’re in a secure facility ‘with an iron lid under a mountain’. He has no copies. It’s eighteen terabytes of data, he says. There are copies in the hosting facilities, and one in London. I offer to go there. ‘There might be security issues with them letting us in,’ he says. So here it is. I’m going if I can. I’d love to see it work. If there is an AI academic who wants to come, email me: it could be the biggest ever breakthrough in AI. Or it could be a lot of fun.

Nanniebots and Neverland

Guardian
, 1 April 2004

Where were we? Everyone was questioning the authenticity of Jim Wightman’s paedophile-entrapping artificial-intelligence chat program Nanniebot, since it was more than ten years ahead of all other artificial-intelligence technology, and no one is allowed to see it in the flesh. But Jim – from the unfortunately named Neverland Systems – had personally guaranteed me a demonstration. Now he has changed his mind, although he is still claiming to have thousands of Nanniebots in action on the web. I’m not going to waste your time with any analysis of his ‘chat transcripts’, since no one can be sure they were generated by his program.

Of course, the BBC, ITV and
New Scientist
couldn’t possibly have known that Jim was caught out
making false claims
about writing software a year ago, on the Holocaust denial newsgroups he likes to frequent. He now admits to making these false claims, but said they were made in jest. He also got noticed in the Tivo hacking discussion boards, claiming to have
modified the device to stream shows
over a network, which the other experts felt was impossible. Jim provided no evidence to make them think otherwise, and disappeared. He still claims to have it working.

People are perfectly entitled to spend time on Holocaust denial chatboards if they really want to. Jim admits posting as ‘Death’s Head’, the same name as the SS murder and torture units. Death’s Head has made postings containing violent and graphic threats to rape, assault and kill, often with a firearm, in the context of chatboard discussions about the Holocaust.

In an online discussion after similar violent threats were mentioned, a
posting did state
that ‘me = Jim Wightman = Death’s Head = Totenkopf … all you needed to do was ask’. Jim denied to me that he made the postings, and says they were faked. Maybe they were, but his previous postings give reason to question his work. So far, he’s made a grand claim with no good evidence: business as usual for Bad Science.

Now he’s collecting donations and volunteers for
chatnannies.com
, a service where adults will enter children’s chatrooms to monitor them for paedophile activity. He will now be greatly assisted in this venture by the fact that he can cite on his website the uncritical reports on his work by
New Scientist
and the BBC.

Artificial Intransigence

Guardian
, 24 June 2004

You may remember Jim Wightman. He claimed to have written a piece of chat software that could pass itself off as a real child in a chatroom, and identify internet paedophiles by their behaviour. To say this was thought highly dubious is an understatement: the software, if it existed, would have been ten years ahead of everything written by huge teams of AI academics; he offered to let us see the software working, and then refused; and the NSPCC and Barnardo’s distanced themselves from his ideas about monitoring children’s activities, partly because he has no child-protection background. Embarrassingly,
New Scientist
accepted his claims uncritically, and the BBC and others followed suit, although
New Scientist
did, after two pieces here, remove its glowing article about him from its website.

Now they’re back with Wightman. Here’s what happened.
New Scientist
visited Jim at home with two AI academics to chat with the program. In previous ‘test conversations’ over the web – where experimenters couldn’t tell if the computer was working alone – the program gave highly sophisticated answers, albeit after a rather long delay (almost as if someone was typing them). This time, running on a machine in the room, with Jim present, it instantly gave rubbish computer-generated responses, that were nothing like those in the previous transcripts. In fact, it gave the very same answers that ‘Alice’ – an old and not very sophisticated AI program written by somebody else, not Wightman – gave in subsequent tests. Then Wightman offered to show them the code. But suddenly, and inexplicably, the power to Jim’s whole house went off. The test was over.

Did
New Scientist
finally give it up? No. ‘
New Scientist
can still provide no definitive proof of Wightman’s claims, but looks forward to a return visit when the complete ChatNannies software is available for testing.’ Please. Did it ask Wightman about his claim to have a seven-figure offer from an American corporation which had ‘full independent testing performed on the AI and are confident of its validity and effecacy [sic]’? He was, apparently, quite capable of giving
them
a proper demonstration. Did it quiz Wightman on his previous false claims about writing software, or any of the other issues Bad Science raised? No. To those of us brought up loving the great institution of
New Scientist
this is – as Tibor Fischer said in that famous book review – a bit like bouncing out of the classroom at breaktime, only to catch your favourite uncle masturbating in the school playground.

BOOKENDS

Be Very Afraid
: The Bad Science Manifesto

Guardian
, 3 April 2003

It was the MMR story that finally made me crack. My friends had always seemed perfectly rational: now, suddenly, they were swallowing media hysteria hook, line and sinker. All sensible scientific evidence was twisted to promote fear and panic. I tried to reason with them, but they turned upon me: I was another scientist trying to kill their baby.

Many of these people were hardline extremists, humanities graduates, who treated my reasoned arguments about evidence as if I was some religious zealot, a purveyor of scientism, a fool to be pitied. The time had clearly come to mount a massive counter-attack.

Science, you see, is the optimum belief system: because we have the error bar, the greatest invention of mankind, a pictorial representation of the glorious, undogmatic uncertainty in our results, which science is happy to confront and work with. Show me a politician’s speech, or a religious text, or a news article, with an error bar next to it.