Author: Giles

Saving lives

When the press and marketing people talk about “Saving Lives” it’s a bit misleading really. You can only prolongs someone’s life for a certain time – perhaps not very long – rather than permanently saving it – as this phrase (at least to me) implies.
The reason this bothers me is that
1. It reinforces people’s denial of death, which in the end is bad for everyone.
2. It makes an artificial division between people who are terminally ill, die young etc… and people who die later on in life. People are afraid of terminally ill people for example because they remind them of their own mortality but they don’t want to be reminded.

Perpetual growth

Doesn’t work as a strategy even though it’s a goal for most economists. Recession is seen as an evil hell. But economic growth is inseparable from increasing use of natural resources and the capacity to deal with waste products – which are finite – very finite. If we continue to grow at the present rate in this century, the use of resources will be totally absurd by by 2100…
See this New Scientist Report for more facts and argumentation.

The next big war

Will probably be between China and the US. By analogy with personal debt – if you owe too much and can’t pay it back, the creditor will come knocking on your door and if necessary use force to get it back. The US foreign debt particularly to China is becoming unsustainable. One day they’ll want it back… I mean most products in the US are made in China – what is the US really giving back except increasingly worthless greenbacks. The so-called “financial rescue plan” is just going to delay and increase the problem by devaluing the greenbacks yet more.

Technologies which have never worked even once for me

There are certain technologies which have been rolled out on a massive scale, but which (at least for me) have never worked at all, not even once, or are quite obviously completely unuseable. I’m thinking in particular of:
* Windows is searching for a solution to your problem…
*Windows is looking for drivers online…
*Multimedia Messaging (MMS) (Europe) – I have spent days trying to set it up and have only ever received one successfully in my life and that was from identical phone to identical phone on the same network provider.
*Video calls on a cellphone (would anyone want to use that on a cellphone anyway?)
*Chat on a cellphone
I’m interested to know if anyone else had the same experience with these or other technologies and if so, what they think can be the explanation for a company rolling out a technology which so patently does not work.

Zimbabwe deal

Negotiations on the future of Zimbabwe have just ended in the signing of a deal which gives the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai – the real winner of the recent elections – the post of prime minister. The presidency, head of state and control of the army are retained by Robert Mugabe, who:

  • Killed more than 20,000 Ndebele in the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland.
  • LOST the most recent election despite extreme physical intimidation of the electorate in this and previous elections.
  • Arrested opposition MPs since the last election.
  • Used the army to intimidate any previous opposition members
  • Made Zimbabwe, a country rich in natural resources and human resourcefulness into the country with the highest inflation rate in the world and 80% unemployment, due to his corrupt mis-management of the economy.

Am I missing something (maybe it really is the only way for Tsavangirai to get some form of power) or is this not a little unfair? Will the leopard really change his spots if he is allowed to retain such power? Who will control the funds allocated to the army? Will the next election be truly fair and free from violence?

New placebo findings question double blind tests

“An ineffective drug can be better than a placebo in a standard trial” according to a paper by Paul Enck, Fabrizio Benedetti, Manfred Schedlowski – and “Often, an active drug is not better than placebo in a standard trial, even when we can be confident that the active drug does work,”
Double blind tests are supposed to show whether a drug really works, or whether it is just down to the placebo effect because neither the researcher nor the test subject knows they are taking the drug.
This paper totally discounts this methodology because it shows that the very fact of BEING TOLD you are taking a drug has an effect on whether it works or not. The researchers tested a painkiller called a CCK-antagonist, first in a standard double-blind randomised controlled trial. The CCK-antagonist performed better than the placebo. So the CCK-antagonist must be an effective painkiller, right? But when the same drug was given to volunteers without telling them, it had no effect. If it was a real painkiller, there should be no difference compared to the test where subjects are told what they are taking. But if you don’t tell people, the CCK-antagonist is ineffective in relieving pain.
So it seems some drugs only have an effect IN CONJUNCTION with expectation. Interesting stuff…