Not your typical library (John Rylands Library, Manchester) Libraries are a touchy subjects amongst us authors, especially at a time when they are endangered. We love our libraries and anyone who suggests closing them risks an authorial tarring and feathering. Yet there comes a point with any technology and distribution method where there's a danger of clinging onto the past because it's what we grew up with, even if it's not right for the future. And I'm seriously wondering if the time has come to take the same attitude to libraries. Are we like the people who tried to cling on to gas lighting when it was obvious electricity was the way forward? Let's start with the good things about libraries, particularly for authors: Those who use libraries also buy more books than the average person - or so conventional wisdom has it. I haven't been able to find any good research to this effect (please let me know if you can point me to it). The closest I have co...

In my experience, people who understand numbers make better cheats than those who don't. Let me explain. I once did some creativity training for a company where certain managers had problems with the company's pay scheme. How much of a pay raise staff members got depended on a performance rating. And within each department, those ratings had to obey a particular normal distribution. However, some of the managers knew that this system would treat their staff unfairly. So they played the system. They tweaked the ratings here and there so that they could allocate the money they wanted, rather than the amounts the system churned out from its rigid distribution. All systems are open to a degree of honest playing (as opposed to out-and-out fraud). The most obvious example is tactical voting where individuals don't vote for their preferred candidate but for one who is more likely to keep a hated candidate out. In their book, When to Rob a Bank , the Freakonomics people pla...

If scientists had mantras two would stand out: The plural of anecdote is not data Correlation is not causality I'm sorry they're both negative - I'm sure it's not spiritually sound or something, but it does make them very valuable reminders of two key errors that crop up again and again in everyday life, and they are errors that even scientists can be prone to outside their field. I point this out because I've been semi-swamped on Facebook and Twitter by people, often scientists or with a science background, sending me stories about the way a particular doctor had worked at the weekend, so the government is entirely wrong. (For non-UK readers, there is a spat between the government, who want hospitals to operate the same at weekends as on weekdays, and the medical profession who say things don't need to change.) Spot the error from above? I'll come back to the weekends business in a moment, but let me illustrate why this is a terrible way of...

One of the themes I return to with regularity in Science for Life is the way that the media rarely distinguishes between quality of scientific sources. There is a huge difference between a Cochrane survey of all available research, or a large scale properly controlled trial and the type of 'study' where you choose 12 people who only ever buy Volkswagen Golfs and ask them what's the best family car. Yet the media just churn it all out with equal weight, telling us that 'a study has found...' or 'research shows...' They may give us a hint of a source, but that rarely gives enough information to be sure of the quality. As a demonstration of this I did a bit of a butterfly on a wheel analysis of a story in today's papers. It tells us what the top ten things are that parents do to embarrass their children - things like dancing and trying to use yoof-speak. And according to my favourite newspaper, this is the result of 'research'. So let's d...

I've recently had a very mild case of being trolled when someone moaned about a review I wrote of a book called Chilled . Before anyone thinks I got too horrible in my opinion, I ought to point out that I gave the book four stars, was very positive about it and the publisher gave every evidence of being highly pleased with the review. But someone wasn't, as I received this tweet: If this sounds rather confusing, I had said in my review: There are comments on both the front and back covers by Tony Hawks. Now, my first inclination was to wonder what a pro skateboarder had to do with the science of cooling. But it turns out that this is Tony Hawks the comedian and raconteur. Ah, well, it's obvious what his connection is. Well, no, it isn't. Apparently he did a TV show and/or book where he went round Ireland with a fridge, and this is the only reason for having him along to give the book a puff. It seems, to say the least, a little tenuous. A review, recently ...

If I am honest, my first reaction to seeing this headline was to send it to the only actor I know, the magnificent Roger-Ashton Griffiths as a bit of a laugh. But behind it there is a serious issue. The point the judge was making was that, legally speaking, actors are not employees, but self-employed professionals, and as such are not protected by minimum wage legislation. The same argument would apply to writers, I'm sure. Of course it's not always possible to apply a minimum wage approach to professional activities. If you look at writing a book and consider the advance as the 'wage', hardly anyone probably earns the minimum wage writing books. But then you can't really assign hours to the activity in the same way you would sitting at a desk at work. (Do I count the half hour I spent drinking my coffee before I got up this morning, thinking about how to re-arrange a chapter?) However, there are plenty of things that self-employed professionals like actors and...

The chances are that everyone who reads my blog is far too clever to be taken in by insurance renewal premium hikes, but just in case, an incentivising tale from my own experience. My building and contents insurance is coming up for renewal. Last year, my current insurer, Nationwide, had come up with quite an attractive quote of £268. (This is for fairly generous cover, business at home and no voluntary excess.) This year, the quote for renewal rolled in at a stonking £362 - pretty much £100 more. For a while my bank (Lloyds) had been pestering me to allow them to give me a quote - and when they did I was surprised, so I rang Nationwide to see how they'd feel about matching it and got another surprise. 'I've got a better quote,' I said. 'Tough,' said Nationwide, 'we don't change our renewal quotes.' Now, to be honest, this seemed to demonstrate that Nationwide shouldn't be in the insurance business, because they weren't prepared to ...

A rather delicious slimming aid? I was amused to see (admittedly year-old) headlines on Facebook saying that drinking tequila could help you lose weight. Can it? Short answer: No. Move on. Long answer: On the other hand, there's some interesting science lurking behind the bad media reporting. Take a look .

My 'garbage statistics' detector went onto high alert when I noticed the headline 'Don’t panic, but there’s a one in 30 chance you’ve had sex with your cousin' in that usually understated publication*, the Metro . We'll come back to that specific statistic, but it was probably prompted by a press release from a company called AncestryDNA, which apparently has done a 'demographic analysis' to produce this shock result. I can't find any link to the actual research, which is a touch suspicious, but various other publications have produced information from the press release including: 'For the average Brit' there's a one in 300 chance that a complete stranger is their cousin The average British person has 193,000 living cousins within Britain The 'typical Brit' has five first cousins, right up to 174,000 sixth cousins Researchers used birth rates and census data to estimate how many close living relatives each of us has. Okay...

Not my idea of symmetry (Image by Gregory H. Revera from Wikipedia ) Physicists love symmetry. A huge amount of the physical theory developed in the last 60 years has been derived as a result of starting from mathematical symmetry structures and using them to fit to observed aspects of the universe. The whole Higgs business is the result of a need to explain why a symmetry that was assumed isn't actually observed. (I'm not saying the Higgs field idea is wrong, by the way - it does its job well - but that's how it came about.) However, I do wonder how much this obsession with symmetry is based on the tools that are in vogue, and an over-dependence on mathematical 'beauty', rather than on a reflection of reality. The thing that made me ponder this was re-reading the introduction to the book Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe by Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill. It's a good book, but it is a bit worrying that the foundation laid in the introduction is ...

He could do it ( Wikipedia /HM Treasury) I'm a bit wary of blogging about anything vaguely political as Henry Gee tends to get upset when I do, but I hope he'll approve of this one. Unlike some of my red flag waving friends (whose opinions I respect, but often disagree with), I do believe that it is possible to be a caring Conservative. And that's what I'm asking George Osborne to do. Specifically I think he should take the opportunity of the budget to put in place a plan to raise the minimum wage to the living wage. The accountants KPMG has announced that to do so would only add 1.3 per cent to the national wage bill, but would lift 6 million people out of poverty. Of course, being accountants they want to do it voluntarily - but it won't happen that way. I see no reason why the minimum wage shouldn't be a living wage. In fact arguably it's obscene that it's not. To give a feel for the numbers involved at a personal level, the minimum wage fo...

A number of my friends have struggled with the new Netflix series Sens8 , from the Wachowskis. I have to confess the original Matrix movie was one of my ten best ever, but I was a bit worried that the siblings were one hit wonders (think M Night Shyamalan). But despite some problems with their first TV series, they have achieved something interesting with Sens8 . So here we go. Lie back and go with the flow. It will take some time. Not much happens in the first two episodes, but it does slowly build after that. Just let it wash over you. It's about the experience, man. Accept the fact that about 90% of the script is essentially an extended therapy session for the main characters. They won't necessarily end up happier, but they will be more self aware. Be happy for them. You are going to find flipping between eight main characters' storylines irritating, particularly when there is action in one of the locations and it gets engrossing. But over the season all the ...

A field. A few years ago. It's that time of year when a young person's fancy turns to wafting through fields of corn, wheat and other arable crops in slow motion, and the rest of us slow down a bit. As a result I will only be blogging intermittently for the next few weeks - but I'll be back to full force in September. Here we go. Fire up the Vangelis...

But it's a TV programme! It's not made from grapes. Being a science writer puts you at the intersection of two very different disciplines. Scientists know too well the importance of precision, but writers have to be aware of the nature of language - how it changes and evolves - and to be aware that following 'the rules' can be the enemy of good communication. One thing scientists sometimes struggle with is that 'the rules' in English aren't some universally agreed set of standards but rather an untidy mix of what has been used for a while and what's coming into use. There is no body setting the official version, though personally I do tend to consider the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) to be pretty much the definitive arbiter on words. It doesn't help, though, with grammar. And so, for instance, some continue to insist that we shouldn't split infinitives, even though people have found it acceptable to boldly split the 'to' and the ...