Despite the media’s claim that the London Blitz was the dawn of a new era of warfare against civilians, the terror-killing of civilians had been practised earlier by the Nazi’s during the Spanish Civil War – at Gernika (note that I use the Basque spelling which seems more natural to us odd-ball English people). This happened three years earlier than the London Blitz in 1937 and in retrospect was clearly a honing of tactics by the Nazis.

The scale of course was quite different – between 400 to 1600 people were killed at Gernika whereas the London Blitz killed around 20,000 civilians with even more killed in other cities in the UK. We should remember the victims of the Blitz both in London and elsewhere, but we should also remember the Basque victims of the Nazi terror bombing and their other victims too.

Perhaps we need to have a national day of mourning for the victims of all such terror bombings of civilians.

Challenger

Whilst unfortunate, and in fact inevitable – something like space would eventually result in deaths because it is an inherently risky activity – there is nothing about the Challenger disaster that can be blamed on science. The engineering of the O-ring seal wasn’t up to scratch and poor decisions allowed Challenger to be launched in weather conditions that encouraged the O-ring seal failure.

No science in sight. There is a school of thought that anything big and shiny is science, whereas in truth it is big engineering.

Darsee and Slutsky and Fraud, Oh My!, The Debendox Debacle, Nuclear Winter of Our Discontent, Piltdown Chicken

Here we have four separate “sins” of science which boil down to the fact that some scientists have fabricated results. Whilst that is definitely bad, and in the worst cases these “scientists” can cause the deaths of numerous people, science itself isn’t in the wrong here. What is at fault is a tiny handful of scientists. Which just goes to show that scientists are human and just as fallible as your neighbourhood plumber.

If your neighbourhood plumber turns out to be a bit of a crook and in the habit of overcharging for work done, do we blame plumbing ? No we do not.

Statistics for Dummies

Here we have an example of statistics being used incorrectly and incorrect conclusions being made from those statistics. This is hardly the first example of such a mistake in using statistics and statisticians have been growling about such foolish things for probably several centuries.

Notice I haven’t mentioned science in that paragraph. There’s a good reason for that – whilst scientists may well (and hopefully do) use statistics as an analytical tool, statistics itself is not science. It’s not a branch of science; it’s a branch of mathematics.

Blaming science for poor use of statistics is hardly fair!

Skipping over “Very Cold Fusion” section as it concerns yet another couple of so-called scientists rather than science itself, we get to …

Chernobyl

So we have a situation where people who do not follow the operating procedure for a nuclear reactor and unintentionally cause a run-away chain reaction. No science here either.

Just your standard poor decision making.

Currents That Don’t Kill

Ah! Here we actually have an example of science! A number of studies into the effects of living close to power lines shows that there is no significant effect from living close by.

So where is the poor science here ? Scientists did exactly what they are supposed to do – when presented with a theory (“power lines generate electrical fields that are dangerous”) they tested that theory and found it false. Whether it was true or not, here we have an example of science doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Sure it cost quite a bit – mostly because there was an apparent need for multiple studies in different parts of the world. But I cannot see any bad science here except possibly the initial hypothesis.

Mars Meltdown

So NASA had a problem with a probe that one group used metric units on and another group used traditional US units? That’s an unfortunate issue with the engineering management. Science isn’t responsible here – yet again.

Rock Of Life

At last! We’ve found something that is science. Scientists decided that their rock from Mars contained signs of life on Mars, and other scientists eventually decided that it was a false alarm.

So some scientists made a poor study of the rock in question and made a mistake. Just goes to show (yet again) that scientists are human and fallible. And note how the mistake was corrected by other scientists – which is much the way that science is supposed to work. If one scientist produces a result, other scientists try to duplicate that result, and if they fail there’s a problem somewhere.

All Abuzz

Yep, this one was definitely a poor decision. Cross-breeding bees to produce a particularly aggressive strain wasn’t the brightest idea. I guess this one does count as a scientific blunder.

Here They Come To Save The Day

So scientists came up with antibiotics and they have been misused by doctors and the public (and industry!) for 50 years or so. As a consequence, drug-resistant ‘bugs’ have evolved and antibiotics have a harder job of killing off these ‘superbugs’.

So what blunder has science made here ? Particularly where it is pointed out that average life expectancy has increased from 47 to 76 in the US thanks to antibiotics. Sure multi-drug resistant ‘superbugs’ are a problem, but how is science to blame for creating those ?

Wrong call. Again.

The Sky Is Falling Again

In this section we learn that an early approximation for the trajectory of an asteroid was not as accurate as it could have been so what was a near miss of 30,000 miles becomes a near miss of 600,000 miles.

It might be nice if the earlier approximation had been a little more accurate, but ‘forewarned is forearmed’ as they say, and it is better to make a mistake along these lines than to miss the asteroid all together.

I wouldn’t say this is a scientific blunder at all.

Evolution? What’s That?

In this section we hear that sections of the US education system are run by mindless drones of extremist christians, who have decided to stop teaching the theory of evolution or to stop testing the knowledge of the theory. Scientists are outraged by this.

How on earth can this qualify as a science blunder ?

Fen-Phen Fiasco

A researcher discovers that a combination of two drugs can be used to combat obesity, but later it is discovered that those tow drugs interact poorly and themselves can cause health problems. Ignoring the fact that science was used to confirm the cause of  the health problems, we can probably put this one down as a scientific blunder.

Assuming of course that the original researcher who introduced the new wonder treatment for obesity wasn’t distracted by the dollar signs from doing some proper hard science first.

To Be or Not to Be, Thanks to MTBE

Ok, I guess we can put this one down as a scientific blunder.

Earth To Iridium

So a telecommunications company who produced an early satellite phone went bust because nobody wanted the produce.

Did the product work ? Yes, so the engineering and the science behind the engineering was fine. Sounds to me more like an entrepreneurial blunder.

Chest Say No to Silicone Implants

Curiously even the writers of this list of “20 Scientific Blunders” admit that this was not a blunder of science, but a blunder caused by lawyers.

So why does it appear on the list then ?

Y2K

This is quite possibly the most ridiculous entry on the list. I was there on the eve of Y2K watching everyone else celibate the false millennium. This was (as pointed out) firstly a programming blunder where programmers wrote software using two-digits as a date format ignoring what would happen when 99 become 00 (or 100). And secondly a bonanza for legitimate contractors, and less legitimate doom-mongers and snake-oil salesmen.

No science anywhere near Y2K

Summing It Up

So out of the top 20 Science blunders in that article, we actually have just 2.5 (I’m counting the Fen-Phem as 0.5 as science was used to correct the blunder). That’s an accuracy of 12.5%; a pretty poor showing by journalism!

There are several things that occur when watching this video :-

1. Anyone can be arrested for no real reason whatsoever. So everyone has an interest in ensuring that the police or others who have power over us are prevented from abusing us, or punished for doing so after the event. It is too common to hear comments along the lines of “well, they probably deserved it”; maybe they do, but the police are not the ones who should be dishing it out. That’s what the whole criminal justice system is for.
2. Stand on your rights if arrested by all means, but don’t do so physically. Whilst the Sergeant in this video is totally in the wrong, Ms.P. doesn’t help matters by being awkward about being “thrown into a cell”. She shouldn’t be there as she hasn’t done anything wrong, but refusing a breathalyser test and physically resisting being put into a cell was foolish. Understandable perhaps, but foolish.
3. Whatever the police are doing to screen candidates to prevent mindless thugs from joining the police is obviously not working. Whilst many of the police are undoubtedly hard working, conscientious, and fully aware that abusing prisoners is wrong, it must always be remembered that a certain kind of thug will want to join the police as a way of getting power over people. These must be excluded.
4. It seems blatantly obvious that two police officers should be the minimum for putting a prisoner in a cell. No matter how frail a prisoner may be, they can make considerable difficulty for a single police officer tempting the officer into using unreasonable force.

Much to my surprise, it is happening to me!! The following embed one or more of my images in their pages :-

• http://jesthevampire.spaces.live.com/?_c11_BlogPart_BlogPart=blogview&_c=BlogPart&partqs=amonth%3d5%26ayear%3d2008
• http://www.popmundo.com/Common/Artist.asp?action=view&ArtistID=1255239 (this one distorts the image so much it took even me a few seconds to recognise the image).

Not exactly a huge list, but somewhat disconcerting.

What is an intern anyway ? Well as I understand it, an intern is a sort of trainee; somewhat analogous to an apprentice, but used in somewhat more high-faluting professions such as the medical profession, journalism, advertising, etc. An intern gains experience in a particular industry with the hope that sooner or later they will be employed as a “proper” whatever on a suitably high salary.

But what does an intern do ? Well if they’re unlucky they will be doing nothing but the dogsbody jobs :-

• Making the tea and coffee.
• Passing out documents at meetings.
• Running down to the local shop to pick up lunch for the “boss”.
• Picking up the bosses kids from school and keeping them entertained  until the end of the working day.

Most interns find a position with considerably more training value than this of course. But even in such a position, the intern could well pick up considerable experience just from being ‘around’. After all an intern is quite likely to be a recent graduate in the right area and probably knows quite a bit of theoretical knowledge.

Because of that training element, there are those who feel that the value of an intern’s position is sufficient that people should be grateful for the experience and should not expect to be paid. Bollocks.

First of all, whilst the intern gets some value from being in a training position, the company providing that position also gets value by adding some additional training to recent graduates because those who start in the profession will have sufficient experience to get up and running far quicker. Balancing these values quantitatively is difficult, so let us agree that the two values are equivalent.

Secondly, all those dogsbody jobs (getting the coffee, etc.) are not part of training. They are merely a way of keeping an intern busy and effectively freeing up those with high salaries from performing mundane tasks. Nothing wrong with it, but because it allows those doing ‘real’ work to make more effective use of their time, those interns are of value to the company.

Not a great deal of course, but still some value. Enough that it can be said that those interns are actually performing a real job which should be paid at least as much as the minimum wage.

Can’t afford to pay that minimum wage ? Let me tell the story of a job I once had which could effectively be called an interneship – I once had a summer job working with a software house running around doing a wide variety of different tasks. I was paid a pretty trivial amount – such an insignificant amount that when the software house was rapidly running out of money towards the end of the summer and beginning to let people go, they carried on paying me because my wages would not make any difference to whether the company survived or not.

If a company cannot afford to pay minimum wage to an intern, then it is probably in such a poor state that it is probably going out of business.

There is a more sinister aspect to unpaid interneships. It is a conscious or unconscious means to keep certain professions to those of a ‘suitable background’. To survive, an intern needs a place to sleep and enough money to buy some food occasionally. Without a salary, an intern has to turn to other resources to survive – a friendly Uncle with a flat in central London, handouts from relatives and friends. Not everyone has those resources, which effectively increases the barriers of entry to certain professions to those whose background is of more limited means.

Of course it is possible that some interns may be able to survive in these positions on handouts from the government – income support, or whatever the benefit is called – effectively meaning that those companies ‘employing’ interns are sponging off the government.

Companies that make use of unpaid interns are in the same category of employer as those backstreet sweatshops that pay under the minimum wage. And should be condemned as much as possible. Perhaps ‘employing’ unpaid interns is not illegal, but that is only because these companies are exploiting loopholes in the law; it doesn’t excuse them from the moral position.

But is it really a good thing?

We have heard on the news from clampers and victims of clamping, but we have not heard from anyone who employs clampers to protect their property. And it is not always evil people who see a money-making opportunity. Sometimes there are good reasons to protect against illegal parking.

Many people perhaps do not realise just how aggravating and potentially dangerous illegal parking can be. Taking an extreme at the low end where clamping currently is not employed (but should be!), my flat is in a block which has a small narrow courtyard behind the building which is open to the road.

There are admittedly no notices up to indicate that parking is illegal, but you would have to be really dumb not to realise that it is private property. Parking there not only means that the council frequently finds it difficult to collect the rubbish, but the area is supposed to be kept clear as it is a fire exit and access for fire engines in the event of a fire. People parking there put the resident’s lives at risk.

Do they care ? Don’t make me laugh. On almost every day, there will be two or three cars parked there.

This can be done by opening up the keyboard and removing the jumper from JP3 (just below a small chip and close to the scroll LED). In addition, it is strongly suggested that you set the kernel parameter “atkbd.softraw=0″ which can be done with Ubuntu 10.04 with the following :-

1. Edit /etc/default/grub and change the variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to include “atkbd.softraw=0″ at the end of what is already there.
2. Finish editing and run grub-update and finally reboot.

Without this, showkey -s only shows the scancodes of keys that the kernel knows about – not what scancodes are sent by the keyboard! It is possible to show the unknown scancodes by enabling the i8042 module debug mode, but atkbd.softraw does the same thing more effectively.

This is currently a work in progress, and will need further checking before it can be taken as gospel, but …

• Group. To break things up a little, I’ve grouped the keys into the 5 separate parts of the keyboard – the function keys, the keypad to the left, the qwerty pad, the editing pad, and the number pad (“keypad”). The details of the qwerty pad will be the last as the other groups are more interesting (‘qwerty’ keys just work).
• Key. This is the label on the key on my keyboard. This may be different on different variants so in all cases I have started with the top left, worked left and down (the “qwerty” row before the “asdf” row).
• Make. This is the scancode produced when the key is pressed.
• Break. This is the scancode produced when the key is released.
• Keycode. The configured keycode produced on the Linux console. The red cells are values that are wrong, but in addition many are missing because they are not produced on a keypress. I say wrong because the keycode gives a result that does not match the key legend – in some cases dangerously wrong such as PageDown generating Delete. One thing to be aware of is that you must use “showkey -k” at the console to get the same numbers I have – X seems to add 8 to each keycode.

Three interesting oddities here … F14 and F15 have somehow been graced with keycodes by default; their scan codes must coincide with keys defined on more popular keyboards. And of course Num Lock and Scroll Lock sharing the same key is a little … odd. And lastly the Record key is effectively sending two keystrokes in one.

Fixing The Wrong Keys

The first place to start is to map the keys that return a keycode that represents a key other than that written on the keycap – such as the key marked “End” which thinks it is an “Esc” key. I have left out two of the wrong keys from this group as they fit better into the next section.

The wrong keys can be fixed with the following commands :-

setkeycodes 7e         1    # Esc
setkeycodes e049      82    # Insert
setkeycodes e051     105    # PageUp
setkeycodes e052     111    # Delete
setkeycodes e053     109    # PageDown
setkeycodes 01       107    # End
setkeycodes 37        98    # KP-/
setkeycodes e035      55    # KP-*
setkeycodes 4e        74    # KP--
setkeycodes 4a        78    # KP-+

I have left out a couple of the wrong keys from this section as they do not return dangerously incorrect values, and they fit more logically into the next section (being Record and Blue Return).

Dealing With The Extra Keys

Now onto dealing with the extra keys. The tricky bit here was coming up with new keycodes for these keys that did not conflict with existing keycodes, and were reasonable. This is effectively impossible, as xmodmap -pk appears to show no significant range of unused keycodes although some of the used keycodes are for things like “Shop” buttons!

So I picked a range with a larger number of useless key symbols and some unused ones :-

setkeycodes 5b       222    # F13
setkeycodes 5c       223    # F14
setkeycodes 5d       224    # F15
setkeycodes 63       225    # F16
setkeycodes 64       237    # F17
setkeycodes 65       238    # F18
setkeycodes 66       228    # F19
setkeycodes 67       229    # F20
setkeycodes 68       230    # F21
setkeycodes 69       231    # F22
setkeycodes 6a       232    # F23
setkeycodes 6b       233    # F24
setkeycodes 72        99    # Record (after keyswap)
setkeycodes 74       209    # Print
setkeycodes 6d       138    # Help
setkeycodes 6f       239    # Play
setkeycodes 75       234    # Windows (GUI)
setkeycodes 6c       240    # Menu
setkeycodes 5a       235    # Backtab
setkeycodes e04f     236    # BlueReturn

Once this has run, we can look at fixing the X mappings … which is why F17 and F18 are out of sequence in the above! One key has to be (at least until someone comes up with a better solution!) sorted out with a keycap swap. Take the keycap from the Record key and swap it for the one marked “Print Screen”. This is because the scancode for Record is effectively two scancodes in one and attempting to remap it will result in strange things happening.

Sorting Out X11

Once you have a set of keycodes that don’t do funny things under X (for instance F17 and F18 when in sequence produce not a keystroke under X11 but some other event), you can move onto configuring the X keyboard. The following attempts to map as close to the keycaps as possible without going to extremes :-

xmodmap -e "keycode 230 = F13"
xmodmap -e "keycode 231 = F14"
xmodmap -e "keycode 232 = F15"
xmodmap -e "keycode 233 = F16"
xmodmap -e "keycode 245 = F17"
xmodmap -e "keycode 246 = F18"
xmodmap -e "keycode 236 = F19"
xmodmap -e "keycode 237 = F20"
xmodmap -e "keycode 238 = F21"
xmodmap -e "keycode 239 = F22"
xmodmap -e "keycode 240 = F23"
xmodmap -e "keycode 241 = F24"
xmodmap -e "keycode 217 = Print"
xmodmap -e "keycode 9 = Escape 3270_Attn"
xmodmap -e "keycode  93 = cent bar"
xmodmap -e "keycode 175 = 3270_Record"
xmodmap -e "keycode 175 ="
xmodmap -e "keycode 247 = 3270_Play"
xmodmap -e "keycode 242 = Super_L"
xmodmap -e "keycode 248 = Multi_key"
xmodmap -e "keycode 243 = 3270_BackTab"
xmodmap -e "keycode 118 = Insert 3270_Duplicate"
xmodmap -e "keycode 112 = Prior 3270_Jump"
xmodmap -e "keycode 117 = Next 3270_Rule"

This results in a keyboard that more or less matches the key caps. For some of the blue symbols, you press the key in combination with shift.

The number pad could do with a little more attention in the realm of X-mapping, and there are a few blue symbols on the main qwerty pad that might be usefully mapped, but this is sufficient for my purposes.

No problem. Just pay out.

Then seize the money under the proceeds of crime act – after all he wouldn’t be in prison if he hadn’t committed the Soham Murders, and the other inmate wouldn’t have slashed his throat if he hadn’t been a notorious murderer.

But the prison authorities should be hauled onto the carpet to query why this attack on him happened. He may be a notorious murderer, but he is entitled to protection from other inmates no matter how bad his crimes were.

Firstly, the shiny glass back cover means I cannot just put the new iPhone on the arm of my chair. The old iPhone (a 3G) sits quite happily there, but the new one is far too keen to slide off. Worth bearing in mind if you’re used to a “sticky” iPhone – wouldn’t want you to have an accident with a brand new phone!

Next is the special coating the glass gets to prevent fingerprints. Nice try, but they can still appear. Of course today my fingers are especially sweaty and greasy so although some prints are showing up, the screen is a good deal better than older iPhones would have been.

Finally (for now), and this one is hardly Apple’s faulty, but there are some applications out there that lose data when you go through a backup old phone and restore to new phone. This is definitely a bug in those applications, and I’m sure they know who they are, because better written applications didn’t lose a bit of data. Apple itself does in fact lose passwords, but I would guess this is a security measure to ensure that stored passwords can’t be “hacked” by restoring a stolen phone backup onto another phone.

The new iPhone does not give an initial impression of being significantly smaller than the old iPhone – even though for the first weekend I was shuffling between old and new phones. But it does seem a lot smaller as soon as you start carrying it around – it feels quite a bit smaller in the pocket.

The known problems with the aerial are obviously a serious issue for those effected, but I suspect the number of sufferers is smaller than the impression given online. After all complaints are louder than the sounds of satisfaction. Certainly I have not seen the issue myself.

Well the idea of offering vocational qualifications is such a great idea that Universities have been doing it for centuries – they call it the “degree”. One of the first degrees ever offered at any of the truly old Universities was a subject called Theology, which doesn’t sound especially vocational now (although it is – what qualifications do you think are useful for Bishops?), but was very vocational at the time. The Church (of Rome then) was desperate for more educated priests – there are records of Bishops insisting that uneducated priests be sent to various Universities to get a basic education, and of course the career prospects for an educated man at the time were pretty much limited to the Church or the Law. And of course Universities offered degrees in Law too.

It is easy to see how the “hard” subjects such as science, engineering, geology, etc. are very much vocational, but all of the so called “soft” subjects are very much vocational too. In some cases the vocational aspect of degrees such as history, or philosophy are not immediately of use to business but that does not make them any less vocational (historians need job training too!), or any less valuable.

And more than that, a degree is about teaching someone to think and study on their own, and  work on projects with other people. Are these not skills that businesses need ?

Our friend Digby insists that Universities should be talking to businesses about what subjects they should be teaching students to assist business. Well first of all, business is not the only type of organisation to take on graduates – Universities have a responsibility to train students going into government, the church, and Universities too! Secondly Universities are perfectly willing to talk to businesses about the degrees they offer.

Perhaps it should be businesses who should be a little more pro-active about talking to Universities!

If Digby Jones were to come up with a half decent degree proposal, he would probably find any number of academics knocking on his door ready to turn it into a course. And if the market finds it good, he will find students eager to sign up and qualify as “Digby clones”.

Yes the free market is at work within the University sector (complete with government interference) – students choose which degree courses they want; popular courses survive and prosper and unpopular ones wither and eventually disappear. One of the long running criticisms of Universities is that they do not turn out enough good scientists and engineers; well to fix that we need to make the students opt to go for those degrees.