A fraud who didn't need to lie

Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean who went from national scientific hero to disgrace, is now well known as a fraud.

But it now appears he may have unknowingly made a scientific breakthrough - and one that is more important than those he claimed to have achieved.

A team largely based in Boston/Cambridge MA led by George Daley (Children's Hospital Boston /Harvard) have looked closely at his data and found that, indeed, he did not create stem cells by somatic cell nuclear transfer (i.e. cloning)

The distinct genetic fingerprint of the stem cells produced suggests they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by parthenogenesis ("virgin birth")

Reports all over the media, including at Nature, the BBC and the NY Times.

The paper itself is in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Friday feeling?

The BBC News reports that businesses are suffering from their slacker employees taking Friday afternoon off.

An alternative explanation is possible, though - that some of these businesses are so overworking their employees during the week that by Friday afternoon they are completely spent. Good management isn't about ensuring your staff are in the office for the maximum time possible - it's ensuring your staff do the most useful work possible. If they're burnt out by Wednesday, they could well be spending Monday and Tuesday fixing the errors that they and others made the previous Thursday and Friday.

Just in case anyone is speculating, the person responsible for giving me too much work to do at the moment is myself.

More misconduct in science

While following the Tour de France this year, I did notice one or two cycling supporters questioning whether the high level of scandal was because cycling was particularly drug-ridden, or because most sports had become particularly drug-ridden but cycling was finding more of theirs, so didn't deserve the reputation for being particularly dirty.

I sometimes fear that science could get the same reputation in some sections of the media, particularly since there are people out there who would like to discredit science in general so they can get their way.

So seeing another retraction of an article in Science last week was disappointing. This time the guilty party is is a former University of Missouri-Columbia researcher, Kaushik Deb, who has been found by his employers of intentionally falsifying and fabricating digital images in a paper. Deb has since disappeared from view, leaving his co-authors to apologise profusely for trusting him in the first place.

I have to ask myself if I could be similarly fooled given a sufficiently irresponsible co-author, and I have to admit the answer would probably be yes - if they presented data coming from a technique outside my experience, I may well not be able to tell if the data was genuine or had been fudged. Am I expected to demand the raw data? Would I be able to tell that this was the original raw data, and hadn't been reverse engineered?

Do not mess with the pagans

My pagan sister pointed this out to me:

Monday, 16 July 2007 - Wish for rain to wash away Homer
Friday, 20 July 2007 - Torrential rain hits Dorset towns

These guys don't know their own strength...

Facing floods and throwbacks

Some men clearly don't realise it's the 21st century.

Although I would say one comment in the article is incorrect - women are not all wonderfully restrained and well behaved individuals either, and certainly in my town can get very drunk and disorderly indeed, to the extent that they lose all judgement. In other words, I've encountered a woman drunk enough to pinch me on the bum. And if they'll do that to me, surely they wouldn't restrain themselves when faced with someone who doesn't have a good face for radio...

Bergman and Antonioni

Not a good week for great European Art house directors - less than 24 hours after the death of Ingmar Bergman comes the news that Michelangelo Antonioni has died.

As my view of life is more akin to an overcast Northern European style than a sunbaked Mediterranean, I've always found that I favoured Bergman of the two, but watching his films wasn't particularly good for my mood. Apparently, he didn't like watching his films either for much the same reason.

Fopp is back... sort of.

I see in the BBC News that my local Fopp is about to return under the same name, albeit owned by HMV, and one of a chain of only six shops.

HMV are quoted as saying

"These stores will operate independently of the main HMV chain in order to preserve their distinct customer offer.

Whether what I hereby dub Zombie Fopp will be a patch on the original remains to be seen.

More on Oscar, the Cat of Death

I see the blogs have been particularly interested/entertained/slightly unsettled by the news of Oscar, the death predicting cat (aka the Cat of Death, Goodbye Kitty, the Kitty of Doom, the Grim Rea-purr etc. etc.

Mildly interesting to see how the blogs react. You get:
Many various Lolcats
Declarations that the cat is psychic
Declarations that the cat is creepy
Suggestions that the cat can smell death and feels compelled to be present
Suggestions that the cat likes the smell of death (yes, I know, but who else is going to link to me?)
Suggestions that the cat can smell death and thinks it is the chance for a snack
Explanations that it is confirmation bias
And people pointing out that the dying people it predicts are normally so close to being dead at that point that anyone can tell just by looking at them that they're on their way out, so if the medical staff think the cat is being uncanny, then they're worried about the quality of the medical staff.

Haven't seen any suggestions that the cat can sense impending death and wants to comfort people. Maybe I only read cynical blogs...

Team Slipstream

One team that looks like it is on course for a wild card entry in next year's Tour de France is the US based Team Slipstream. Led by the stridently anti-doping Jonathan Vaughters, a man who's only tangle with the doping laws is when he had to pull out of a Tour because he couldn't take a cortisone shot for a wasp sting.

Team Slipstream have teamed up with the Agency for Sporting Ethics and will test their riders 20 times as often as the UCI, and they have offered WADA complete oversight of the results.

Although T-Mobile's testing set-up didn't stop one of their riders failing a test in training, it would rather be hoped that this team's setup pretty much ensures they will be clean.

So far announced for the team are American time-triallist David Zabriskie, Scottish time-triallist and poacher-turned-gamekeeper on drugs David Millar, and climber Christian Vandevelde. A few good names, a chance of a stage win, and a clear anti-doping policy probably put them near the front of the wild-card queue. If the TdF organisers get their way, I suspect they'd rather pick stringently clean teams than fast ones...

Back to work

I have cheered up now having found out that the piece of equipment I shall call the Small Machine had misaligned itself, so I hadn't gone mad on Friday, and my failure to obtain the data I'd hoped from the samples brought to my by the Chemists was because they brought me the hardest sample they possibly could.

So, I'm not breaking my machines, they break themselves, and I can't quite achieve the impossible. This fits my natural state of being slightly paranoid and somewhat egotistical, so I'm now happy.

The Large Machine was also whinging, but that was just because it got hot. Must be the only place in England without enough water flow...

Useless failure

A regular reader of this blog, if there were such a thing, might have got the impression that I was quite the sporty type. This is actually wrong; although I do regularly take part in a number of sports I am in fact useless as just about all of them, and merely passable at one or two. At rowing, I have even successfully achieved the ranks of the slightly above mediocre before slipping back (well, I did get in a University crew that qualified for Henley Royal Regatta, but I was only in because someone else got injured and all the undergraduates had gone home already. However, I was in the boat when we did the time that qualified us, so I feel I am justified in claiming some small iota of talent in this field)

I had for many years believed the sport I was worst at was cricket. The combination of hand-eye co-ordination and confident, controlled actions needed to be a successful cricketer come as naturally to me as taking to the wing does to certain birds - emus, kiwis and the dodo come to mind. The emu is large, ugly and annoyed, the kiwi occasionally forgets that it can't fly and makes a fool of itself hitting the ground, and the dodo is just dead. At the crease, I combine the lack of talent of all three.

But my abysmal cricketing, where I once achieved a rustic hoik that missed all the fielders, is nothing compared to my utter pathetic travesty of an attempt at water skiing. I never even got as far as the water skiing, you have to be good at the kneeboarding first before you can go onto the skiis, and I wasn't.

I didn't get around the course.

I didn't get around the first corner

I didn't get *to* the first corner.

I lasted two seconds.

I went about five metres, fell in, swallowed half the pond, and strained my left calf. My friends were considering diving in to rescue me as a swam to the board (did I say I'm bad at swimming? I thought I was merely poor, turns out that I swim about as well as an anchor) while choking from the foul weed-ridden water.

If I'd merely fallen in, I could have gone again - repeated, determined abject failure can win you plaudits from some circles for showing determination in the face of utter inadequacy. But I was crocked. So that was it - today I was not just crap, I was a quitter too.

It better be one of my good days at work tomorrow (one of the "this is brilliant, we've got a paper here" days, rather than another "oh. That didn't work. Oh well. Err. Sorry, I don't think this is possible"), or I'm going to be completely unbearable the rest of the week.

The Cat of Death

Just keep this thing away from me, that's all I say. The damn thing likes the smell of death, I tell you.

Drugs scandal at the tour de France (next up: dog bites man)

The Tour de France is getting tough on drugs cheats - and anyone else who doesn't comply fully. And it looks like some of the teams, at least, are joining in.

Rasmussen, who looked certain to win yellow after the riders most capable of catching up enough time to threaten him in the time trial were pulled, has suddenly lost the jersey, and probably ended his career, when his Rabobank team discovered that he didn't merely forget to inform people of his whereabouts and missed drugs tests, he appeared to have lied about it. Given the pressure on the tour these days, that simply isn't good enough.

Sadly, it looks like the man now likely to win the Tour will also be viewed with suspicion by many. Contador was previously in the Manolo Saiz run Liberty Seguros-Würth team, so will be linked to Operation Puerto in many people's minds. And while his recovery from a blood clot may make the sort of comeback from hardship that the US media love, others will mutter darkly about how steroid and EPO use are known to cause clots.

Once again, and despite all the efforts otherwise, I still don't feel convinced that the winner of the Tour this year will be clean.

Last.fm

Have I said how much I like Last.fm? I like last.fm a lot, they've found me a few artists I don't think I'd have heard of otherwise.

I suspect my most listened to artists chart places me firmly in the 30something "50 pound bloke" category.

Shocking news

< sarcasm > Someone who was at University in the 1980s smoked cannabis. Oh, the shock. < /sarcasm >

Yes, I did take a few puffs of cannabis at University. And yes I do feel it wasn't a clever thing to do, because all the people I knew who smoked cannabis regularly were so utterly dull and boring when they did. I think it was the cannabis that made them like that, rather than they smoked it in a futile attempt to compensate for their own natural tedium. Since they seemed happy to sit around on sofas watching terrible TV, I suspect the answer to dope smoking is make it legal for the over-65s. Once you're that age, a lack of ambition isn't really that much of a problem, and kids won't really be that keen on taking up something that is associated with their grandmothers...

NYTimes realises the truth

The NY Times admits American chocolate bars are inferior to ours.

I tried a Hershey Bar when I was in the US, as I always rather thought UK chocolate bars were the cheap kiddy friendly tosh rather than real chocolate, so didn't expect the American bars to be any worse. Instead it tasted like it had gone off. Apparently that's the way it's meant to taste. Probably for the best, they have enough trouble with obesity as it is without rather tasty chocolate.

Still prefer the really good quality stuff myself, though. Can be partial to a Mars Bar on occasions, though...

Its...

Something rather pythonesque (probably deliberately) about this picture in the Guardian.

Man eating badgers denied by MOD.

A rather odd BBC news story from Iraq, which contains the line

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said:

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area".

Perhaps Worcestershire is notorious for its man eating badgers...

Hmm, now where do I stow my knees?

Charlie Brooker in the Grauniad is often good for a laugh - I suppose his general persona of a slightly morose ageing Englishman appeals to me for some reason. His latest on airline travel is an easy target, but a deserved one.

airline seating distinctions, whatever they are called, actually break down into Misery, Misery Lite, and the highest achievable grade, Slightly Comfortable.

Although one of the commenters has come up with a story with that perfect blend of "possibly apocraphyl, but just might be true":

Basically, to fly a person across the Atlantic costed just a little more than an economy class ticket. All the profit is made in business class and, especially, in first class. In fact, business and first slightly subsidise the economy class. So why carry economy passengers at all? Well, this was told to me by a senior BA executive, without economy class passengers the aircraft would be too light and the turbulence would bounce the first class passengers about too much. Yes - economy passenger are ballast to keep first class passengers comfortable.

Tour de France in London - prologue

So Bradley Wiggins didn't manage to win in the end - after all, a top five performance in the prologue of the Tour de France is a pretty impressive achievement, and the performances by Kloden and most of all Fabian Cancellara were astonishing.

The thing is, I'm almost 100% sure there will be someone whinging on the BBC forums about how he can be satisfied with his performance if he didn't win. There are always these people around, but generally these are people who wouldn't know what it was like to be in the top 1000 in the world at something, let alone the top five. Wiggins knows what he was capable of, and he knows that three top time triallists had to put in flawless performances to beat him.