Housekeeping and change of blogging strategy for 2016

For several years I've compiled an occasional series of "Burnee links" on this blog, intended as an archive of various posts, articles and general bits and pieces that have caught my attention and might otherwise get submerged in the social-media noise. Most of these have comprised a link and a brief comment to remind me what the article or post was about, and recently these have come almost exclusively from Facebook.

This is going to change, but not much. Rather than copying links to posts that originate on Facebook, I shall be posting my comments and links here at Evil Burnee first. Blog-fu will ensure those links get automatically copied to Facebook and Twitter (though I may revise this to avoid undue duplication).

By such means I hope to make Evil Burnee the central platform for my skeptical commentary, with everything automatically in one place without my having to force it so.

We'll see how it goes.

OK, not cancer. How about rewiring kids' brains?

Hard on the heels of the unfounded "Facebook and Twitter will give you cancer" scare, we have the Daily Mail now warning that in addition they will reprogramme children's brains:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1153583/Social-websites-harm-childrens-brains-Chilling-warning-parents-neuroscientist.html

Here's a summary:

A neuroscientist says social networking websites shorten attention-spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred. That's it. No evidence is cited, or even suggested to exist. Here are a few quotes from the neuroscientist, as reported in the article:

"My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain..."

"I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues..."

"It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations..."

"Of course, we do not know whether the current increase in autism is due more to increased awareness and diagnosis of autism, or whether it can - if there is a true increase - be in any way linked to an increased prevalence among people of spending time in screen relationships."

Fear, wonderment, difficulty of seeing, and lack of knowledge - not exactly the soundest basis for such conclusions, is it?

Susan Greenfield is a respected scientist, but the Mail's article gives the impression that her warning is nothing more than unsubstantiated opinion.

(via Derren Brown Blog)

UPDATE 2009-02-25:

Ben Goldacre appeared with Aric Sigman on BBC Newsnight the same day, in a segment also featuring recorded sound-bites from Susan Greenfield. Her statements are indeed unfounded - she admits as much. Watch the Newsnight segment on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg8LlUME-IM


...and there was a follow-up on this morning's Today Programme, with Colin Blakemore injecting a modicum of common sense into the whole affair (thereby backing up Ben Goldacre's position):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7909000/7909623.stm

Facebook and Twitter will give you cancer!

A short item on the Today Programme this morning had Dr Aric Sigman explaining the conclusions of a paper he has authored for the peer-reviewed Institute of Biology Journal, Biologist, entitled Well Connected?: The Biological Implications of ‘Social Networking’. The BBC website covers it here: BBC NEWS | UK | Online networking 'harms health' and you can hear Dr Sigman on the BBC here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7899000/7899649.stm

I'm not a biologist, and not a member of the Institute of Biology, so I can't access Dr Sigman's article*. But his press release is available on his website, so I've looked at that. Early on in the press release is this graph, presumably excerpted from the article:

I'm not a biologist, neither am I a statistician, but this graph seems to show only that over a period of 20 years, face-to-face social interaction went down from six hours to two hours per day, while over the same two decades use of electronic media went up from four to eight hours per day. So the conclusion seems to be that the four hours that were spent face-to-face in 1987, were in 2007 spent in using electronic media. He seems to be suggesting that face-to-face interaction has gone down because of the increase in use of electronic media. Maybe. Or it could be coincidence. The graph doesn't show what people were doing with the other hours in the day, so on the whole it doesn't tell you very much.

The rest of the press release seems to claim that face-to-face interaction has positive health effects, and this may well be true, but the preponderance of "links" and "associations" suggests that most of these are correlations and not causation. Take this, for example:

"Women who have suspected coronary artery disease (CAD) with a small social
circle exhibit more than twice the death rate of those with a larger social circle."

It's possible that some women have a small social circle for reasons that are to do with being medically disposed to more serious and life-threatening coronary artery disease - not the other way around. I've not seen Dr Sigman's actual paper (which appears to be a meta-study, and presumably doesn't include any actual clinical research), so I don't know if the causation he ascribes is valid.

Valid or not, it makes a good headline, and you can rely on the Daily Mail to pick it up: How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.

If the audio expires, download it from RapidShare here:


http://rapidshare.com/files/341833475/MoralMaze_The_BBCR4dtt-20090218.mp3

*UPDATE 2009-02-19:
The paper published in Biologist is now freely available:
http://www.iob.org/userfiles/Sigman_press.pdf

UPDATE 2009-02-20:
Until I get around to reading the paper myself, here's someone who already has:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/02/facebook_causes_marb.html
(via Ben Goldacre's Twitter feed)