Month: February 2009

I swear that the Daily Mail only write these stories as fodder for Ben Goldacre, but surely they’ve reached a new self-parodying low with their Facebook causes cancer story.

Inspired by reading the excellent Bad Science book, and the fact that Ben posted the link, I read the original magazine article on which the story is based. Go on, have a look: it’s worth it if only to see the amusing use of tenuous stock photography.

This story comes to us from a chap by the name of Aric Sigman, who seems to have been banging on on a similar theme for some time: watching Batman will make your kids violent, he told us back in August, and TV is literally killing us he claimed back in 2005.

The main thrust of the article is the assertion that a lack of social interaction causes health problems. Even if this is true, though, I’m not sure how you get from that to the screaming headline claim that Facebook causes cancer: why is online social networking worse than the offline kind? And yes, the screaming headline is the Daily Mail’s, but Sigman subtitles his article with the heading “The biological implications of ‘social networking'” despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to say anything about ‘social networking’ in the Facebook sense. Further, the Institute of Biology’s press release tells us that:

In our latest issue of Biologist, Dr Aric Sigman warns us of the dangers of sacrificing old-fashioned social contact for the current trend towards more online interaction. It appears that there is no substitute for face-to-face contact with our family, friends and communities, when it comes to maintaining good health. A Facebook poke cannot replace a good old hug, it seems.

I’m not sure the article says that at all: perhaps this was written by someone who hadn’t read it.

But anyway, if we’re going to claim that social interaction has health benefits, wouldn’t it be the other way around–shouldn’t we be looking to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter as a valuable means of bringing together people who might otherwise have been lacking any kind of social interaction at all?

Talking about dementia, Sigman refers to research conducted by the Harvard School of Public health that

…examined the influence of social integration, including frequency of social interaction, on changes in memory in 16,638 subjects aged 50 and older. Ertel et al (2008) concluded that memory loss among the least integrated declined at twice the rate as among the most integrated.

So what has that got to do with “social networking”? Maybe the non-integrated group were huge Facebook fans, but I think that’s unlikely given that the study’s title was “Social Integration on Preserving Memory Function in a Nationally Representative US Elderly Population” (my italics).

Elsewhere, he talks about people with less social interaction having reduced immunity to diseases, and makes claims such as:

Lack of social connection or loneliness is also associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

I’m guessing, but is it not possible that people who are either lonely or don’t have a big social circle might also happen to lead sedentary lifestyles: isn’t it the “sitting around on your arse all day” bit of watching TV that causes the health problems, rather than anything intrinsically harmful about watching too much television.

I could go on, picking holes in the article and looking at more examples where the effect doesn’t seem to be due to the claimed cause, but I think I’ve already spent more time on this than it’s really worth.

It’s just rubbish. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, kids.

I’m about a month or so behind everyone else on this one, and so as usual I have nothing new or original to say, but anyway Sal and I finally got round to seeing Slumdog Millionaire earlier this week. We had been planning to see it at the moonlight cinema, outside in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, but after I stupidly left it too late to get tickets, we decided instead to go to the old Sun Theatre in surprisingly lively Yarraville, a little suburb just over the river from the city. As well as being in a lovely old theatre, it’s one of those places where you can take your beer inside with you, which always gets the thumbs up from me.

We enjoyed the film, of course, but I’m not quite sure how it’s become the runaway-hot-Oscar-nominated-success that it is: I couldn’t help thinking that it was all just a tad contrived. How convenient, for example, that all the significant life moments that give Jamal the answers to the questions just happen to have happened to him in chronological order…

I’m also not sure they ever plausibly explained why our Mr Slumdog lost his Indian accent: he did sound an awful lot like the very British Anwar from Skins by the time he’d grown up.

And I can’t surely be the only person to have spotted how they play fast and loose with the rules of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? at the end: the host repeatedly tells Jamal that if he gets the last question wrong he’ll lose everything. Surely everybody knows that’s not how the game works, no?

Or would “if you get the last question wrong you’ll only win a 640,000 rupees” (nine grand, apparently, which is presumably still a life-changing amount for a “slumdog”) not have worked quite so well as the climax to the film?

For Sal’s birthday, I decided to make her a present this year. Via the excellent Blurb books, I produced Adventures in South America, a 72 page hardback book of our best photos from our travels in South America. It came out really, really well.

In Rockpool, Melbourne
Who’s that tall chap over there?
Swimmer, Grant Hackett.

I almost forgot to mention: on Saturday afternoon, after we’d retreated back into the cool air-conditioning of the Fitzroy Bowls Club I went to the bar for a jug of Bullmers.

“You wouldn’t be used to this, would you?” said the barman.

When I replied that no, I wasn’t and that it was really quite hot out there, he asked me where in the UK I was from.

“Well, I lived in London for 8 years, but up North originally, near Liverpool” I said.

To which he asked: “Southport?”

I almost fell over. Apparently that’s where his mum’s from. It is indeed a small world.

*

In other news, I feel I should broadcast to the wider world the fact that I’m also twittering, sporadically on the new fangled Stephen Fry information service. Although I haven’t really twittered that much so far and am mostly interested in following the inane mutterings of assorted slebs.

The local papers cracked open the hyperbole last week, giving last Saturday the advance billing of “the worst day in Victoria’s history”. We’d had five consecutive 40+ degree days the week before last, and now the sun was back for revenge, for one day only.

In the event, it proved to be something of an understatement: the mercury topped out at a record 46.4 degrees in Melbourne on Saturday afternoon, half of the state ended the day engulfed in bushfires (some of which are apparently still burning, days later), whole towns were destroyed, and upwards of a hundred and eighty people are dead.

Here in Melbourne we’re both very close and yet very far away: life here continues largely unaffected, albeit with ever grimmer news being reported as each day passes…

I was going to attempt an amusing blog about our Saturday afternoon in the heat (it was Ange’s birthday, and we went “barefoot bowling” in North Fitzroy) but anything I could tell you about just how unpleasantly hot it was outside in the middle of the afternoon seems a bit irrelevant (we survived about half an hour before retreating to the air con…)

We might have been sweating in the heat, but at least we had a home to go back to at the end of the day.

And relatives who were still alive.

Links:
– Australian Red Cross Appeal
– UK Red Cross Appeal

I continue to enjoy seeing British bands in tiny venues in Melbourne. I suppose eventually after I’ve been here for long enough I will run out of bands I’ve heard of from over there that haven’t yet made it over here, but for now it’s great to be able to go to somewhere like the Hi-Fi, the tiny underground venue on Swanston Street, and watch a band who I’d be lucky to see in somewhere the size of Brixton Academy if we were in London. Here, instead, we were able to see them in a venue the size of someone’s (admittedly large) living room.

We stood to the side of the stage, within touching distance of the band, close enough to read the setlist taped to the floor, to see every bead of sweat on Johnny Borrell’s ugly face, to verify that, yes, the chords I worked out for Golden Touch are indeed correct, and close enough that when we had a text the following day from a friend of ours who we hadn’t realised was also at the gig he said that he’d spotted us across the room, adding that it was “hard not to, as you were practically on the stage”. Not that we’d particularly tried to be that close to the front, just that the Hi-Fi has a central sunken dancefloor area, so the best place to stand, we reckon, is on the step that runs around the edge of it–not only can you sit down while the support is on, but when you do stand up, no one can block your view–and the only free spot when we arrived was just to the side of the stage.

And despite no one over here knowing who Razorlight are, the tiny venue was packed out, and the mix of ex-pats and locals who’d presumably done time in London at some point loved every minute. We were even joined somewhere inside the venue, Sal reliably informs me having spotted him on her way back from the loo, by none other than Dr Karl Kennedy off of Neighbours.

At the end of the gig, as the last chords of Somewhere Else faded out, Mr Borrell signed off with “thank you Melbourne, you’ve been great, we’ll see you again in the summer.” Ahem. Johnny: it’s forty degrees out there. This is summer. Bloody Northern Hemisphere types…