The Wisdom of Whores

A couple of weeks ago I was talking condoms with the good folks at DKT, an inspiring company that sells condoms and contraceptives, and has fun doing it. There are many things I like about DKT. Not content to suck at the nipple of the tax payer, they actually make money selling products people want in many markets. They use that cash to subsidise programmes in other countries, where both generating and meeting the need for condoms and other contraceptives is a harder (and more expensive) sell.

One of DKT’s most successful markets is Brazil, not least because they give away a year’s supply of Prudence condoms to scads of voluntary testers, who twitter and twatter about flavours, shapes, sizes and the rest. They’re not above bonking us over the head with guerilla home videos, either. This one, I think is self explanatory.

“With a year’s supply of free condoms, any place is the right place.” Indeed. Though I could wish I spent more time in the right any place…

Other things I like about DKT: although they work in 16 countries, shift over half a billion condoms and some 75 million other contraceptives a year, they have a head-office staff of just four people, all, I’m guessing, with a sense of humour. Their penchant for fun and puns goes back a while; I’ve hung on for 15 years to a T-shirt promoting their Trust condom brand in Vietnam. It was a time when the Vietnamese currency, the Dong, was suffering a bit, and the government was running a campaign to restore our trust in it. DKT Vietnam turned the government’s “Put your trust in the dong” slogan on its head. Allow me to demonstrate:

Thirty years ago next month, the first reports of the illness that came to be known as AIDS were published. Five cases, all among young gay guys in Los Angeles. Since then, we’ve racked up over 60 million HIV prevention failures worldwide. But new draft guidelines on safe sex advice proposed for the UK suggest we’ve learned almost nothing from three decades of failure.

The guidelines, proposed by the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV are depressing, at very best. They seem to assume that it is the duty of health professionals to protect people from their own bad behaviour, in part by informing them of every possible risk, however marginal. They seem also to assume that the sort of people who take significant risks on a regular basis care about their long term health prospects. We don’t. And that comes from someone who today happens to be wearing a T-shirt embazoned with a slogan picked by algorithm on the basis of answers to 10 behavioural questions. Mine reads: “Runs with scissors”, but it might equally have read “Cycles without a helmet”, “Shags without a condom” or “Rolls her own cigarettes”.

The guidelines available here in pdf form, are open for public comment for another week or so. I would strongly urge people (especially people who’ve ever used a sexual health clinic) to look through them and put in their tuppence worth. The full text of my own comments is available in a doc file here.

In summary, I’m upset that we are still telling people to use condoms every time they have anal, vaginal or oral sex, even though we know perfectly well that that’s no more feasible than never having sex at all, for the same reason: for most of us, consistent condom use in every act of sex involving every orifice with every partner type at every age and level of sobriety is not feasible because it is not desirable.

I’m upset that we don’t give more practical and nuanced advice that people are more likely to act on. Example from my response:

“If you don’t have a condom handy, or don’t want to use one, then oral is your safest bet”. More useful still to a random gay man would be: “Do you have HIV? Yes? Then try always to use a condom if you’re top in anal sex. It would be great if you could use one if you’re bottoming too, but it’s less important, especially if you’re good about taking your meds. Don’t worry too much about oral, though it’s best if you don’t come in some other guy’s mouth. Definitely don’t come in his mouth if he’s just been to the dentist, or looks like he needs to go!”

I’m upset that we’re using evidence selectively. The guidelines imply there’s evidence that condoms work, and no evidence that abstinence works. In fact, condoms work and abstinence works even better, when they are used consistently and correctly. The more important evidence is around whether the promotion of condoms or abstinence lead to their consistent and correct use. Frankly, there’s very little recent evidence from the UK that condom promotion works very well; what worked in an age when HIV meant AIDS and an ugly death does not necessarily work in this post-AIDS age.

And I’m upset that, not content with giving clients information they won’t act on, we’re suggesting things that service providers won’t act on either. Sizing your clients up for condoms using a pasta measurer? Really?

I hate to wish HIV a happy 30th birthday, but I think at this rate it can expect to stay alive and well for several decades to come.

Regular readers know that I have little time for the uber-correctness that tries to wipe sex out of our daily loves and lives. But I am more outraged than usual at the price paid by journalist David Fox, one of the best conflict correspondents in the business, for an off-colour remark made in what he thought was a private chat. Reuters new bosses fired him, with no right of appeal.

I used to be proud to have worked for Reuters. It was an organisation of clever, brave people dedicated to reporting the truth in often difficult situations. I continue to be proud to have spent 10 years living with David Fox. His determination to give a voice to the men, women and children who are the pawns in conflicts not of their own making definitely took a toll on our marriage. I learned to recognise the lock-down mood that followed yet another assignment in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Iraq, Albania, Afghanistan. I laughed at the sick jokes that go with the daily reporting of incomprehensible grimness. As anyone who has worked as a surgeon, doctor, cop, undertaker or soldier knows (and as comments on Reuters’ imperious behaviour reflect) gallows humour helps you cope with shitty situations. I work on a sexually transmitted infection that has killed 30 million people; I can do a tasteless joke or two of my own. But along with the wisecracks came top quality journalism. I never failed to be moved by the stories David filed for an employer increasingly short of brave people who could be dropped in to a disaster area with equipment charged, functional, and ready to file. Read his coverage of the refugee crisis in Zaire and try not to weep.

So short is Reuters of people with David’s experience and competence, that they pulled him from his new post as bureau chief in Indonesia to help out with the coverage of the tsunami in Japan. He crunched his great height into an economy seat on an overnight flight and went to work on not enough sleep. An old mate, chatting with him on line in the middle of the night, made a crack about the effect radiation might have on the already bald David. David responded to a fairly classic disaster crack more or less in kind, although bringing women and Brazilians into the comment definitely upped the level of vulgarity. Most of the reporting of this incident has pussied around what David actually said and he will doubtless be appalled if I’ve let the cat out of the bag. But I feel the need to say that I can see why women might be upset; we’re all in a total quandry about our pubic hair these days. Though the subject is virtually taboo even in girl-talk, we spend inordinate amounts of time agonising in private: to wax or not to wax, landing strips yes or no? The constant dilemma of whether to disclose your status before you take your clothes off, the shocked looks if you strip before you tell. For the record I believe that men will soon lose interest in having sex with women who have tortured themselves into looking like pre-pubescents. In this context alone, I’m a proud defender of bush.

Still, it’s not a subject that most people want to engage with, least of all when facing an overwhelming human tragedy in the middle of the night. David can be a bit of a lad — it goes hand in hand with volunteering to report from the front line — but he is neither a sexist pig nor an insensitive idiot. He thought he was replying only to the mucker who had made the crack about his hair falling out. Fatally, though, he sent the comment by mistake to a Reuters-only chat room, populated at that hour by a couple of dozen people. Everyone’s worst nightmare. He realised his mistake right away and called the IT people within minutes to try and get the comment erased. It seems the techs at one of the world’s foremost electronic communications agencies were unable to help.

For an unintended slip of a keystroke conveying a silly, laddish comment to a small number of staffers in the middle of the night, a slip which he tried instantly to rectify and for which he apologised without reservation, David was fired. Let me repeat that. Thompson Reuters fired a brave, loyal journalist who has put himself on the front line for the company time after time after time for 20 years, because he mistakenly shared a gallows-humour joke with an internal audience.

Is that a company to be proud of?

Just as we were getting all excited about giving people antiretorvirals to protect them against HIV infection, a large trial of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PReP) in women is being shut down because the pills are unlikely to prevent HIV.

It’s a huge disappointment to those who were hoping that the pill-a-day-to-avoid-a-pill-a-day solution might drag us out of the despond that we’ve been in as we contemplate 2.7 million new HIV infections this year. That’s the same number as were newly infected when I started in this business 15 years ago. The only real change is in the cost of our failure: that’s increase over 70-fold.

The study, well conducted by my former employers Family Health International in four countries, is at odds with a study released last November, that showed that a daily dose of Truvada, a combination of two antiretorvirals in pill form, cut the risk of infection among gay men by over 40%. The earlier study did show that — surprise surprise — taking pills to prevent HIV doesn’t work unless you actually take your pills. Though virtually everyone said they took their pills, a later analysis of blood samples showed that wasn’t true. We don’t yet have that same analysis for the new trial in women (dubbed FemPrep), so although 95% reported taking their pills, it’s possible that real adherence was much lower. More than possible: likely. All women in the study were taking contraception, but there was a 9% pregnancy rate, apparently much higher in women on the pill than women on injectibles (we don’t yet have the actual numbers). That suggests that some women aren’t all that good at taking one pill a day (I’m one of them; thank God for implants), let alone two.

There’s a real possibility that antiretrovirals taken through the mouth and processed through the digestive tract aren’t as effective at preventing HIV from finding an entry point in the vagina as they are in the rectum, hence the difference between the trials in straight women and gay men. If that’s the case, it ups the ante for putting ARVs directly into your fanny (using fanny in the English sense!). We know from the Caprissa trials that antiretroviral microbicide works vaginally (though not necessarily rectally). But we only know that it works if you “shoot up” both before and after sex; in theory, at least, that is what was being tried. In practice, we know (well, strongly suspect) how unlikely it is that women will actually do that on a long-term basis. We now desperately need trials of a one-shot vaginal microbicide. Because for all the talk of “bio-medical solutions” the confusing results of recent HIV prevention trials remind us that most bio-medical solutions have a very strong behavioural component. Pills that “work” if you take them are no good if they make you feel so sick, so choked, or so fed up that you don’t take them.

One of the things that pleased me greatly about the FemPrep trials was that researchers made sure that the women who volunteered for the research knew about the disappointing results before the press or the scientific community did. There are more details from the study teams about how they interacted with participants on this interesting conference call, arranged by the ever-helpful AVAC network.

This post must end the way these posts seem always to end, with an underlining of the shockingly high rate of new infections in the study overall: five percent of women became infected, despite the fact that they were given female and male condoms, were regularly screened for other sexually transmitted infections and treated as necessary, and counseled up the wazoo. It’s a reminder of how badly suited the tools in our current toolbox are to the job of HIV prevention, and a caution about expecting much more from other behavioural interventions such as the use of pills or gels.

Health finance, food policy and the meltdown of the NHS. Why rant about these in the pages of the BMJ when you can do it so convncingly in rap?

Thanks to SH for engaging.

For reasons largely nerdy, I was wandering the London Book Fair today. It put me in mind of books I’ve read recently, and those I can’t help but revisit. Caught in the spider’s web of my memory is Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, a book in small part about memory and in large part about memorisation techniques. But under my skin, in much more persistent and uncomfortable ways, is Ariel Sands’ out-today Never the Face.

Foer’s book is delightful, if not ultimately all that memorable (for more, see my grown-up review in Prospect last month). But it does make the point that turning events, names, even playing cards into graphic sexual images tends to make them a lot more memorable, at least to the 20-something year-old blokes who tend to dominate the world memory championship circuit. I’m obviously not a 20-something year-old bloke, and I admit to not yet having read the final published version of Never the Face, a first novel by the publicity-shy Ariel Sands. But I can say that the sexual imagery (and its psychologically complex provenance) of an early draft is deeply etched in my memory in ways I sometimes wish it weren’t.

Daphne Merkin, who regaled New Yorker readers with the joys of spanking, describes it thus:

“Never the Face is a story in the tradition of 9 1/2 WEEKS – about the twisted corkscrews of desire, the hearkening after the call of brute submission and dominance that is the dark side of romantic attachment. Rarely has this skewed version of love been portrayed with the clarity and daring that Ariel Sands brings to it; her rendition makes for compulsive and disturbing reading.”

I can’t say more than that. Read it and (possibly) weep. Certainly, you’re unlikely to be unmoved.

It wasn’t until Eve ate the apple proffered by the snake in the Garden of Eden that she became ashamed of her nakedness. But a couple of recent decisions by Apple have made me wonder whether their censors are the real snakes.

The screen shot above shows a small corner of Filth Fair, a new, quite clever word game app commissioned by the somewhat staid scientists at The Wellcome Trust to go with their new Dirt season. On the left, the app before the Apple censors rejected it. On the right, the revised version. Even then, it has a 17 age rating; though the censors don’t have to give reasons for their decisions it appears that they remain upset about the use, hidden within the painting/puzzle of the words sex and pornography.

I remind you that these censors sit in a country which allows pregnant girls to marry at 14 in some states. To see a fig leaf on your phone, though, you have to be 17.

The Apple censors didn’t apparently, think there should be any age restrictions on homophobia. A recent app from Exodus International that seeks to cure people from the affliction of being gay was released with no age restrictions. Needless to say, there was quite a bit of protest. I’m glad to say that sense beat the censors, and the anti-gay app has been removed.

If you’re in London, I’d urge you to visit the Dirt exhibition. Perhaps because of my own dirty mind, I got roped in to writing a chapter for the book of Dirt, that goes with the exhibition. There’s quite a lot of fun stuff in it, quite apart from the sex and drugs bits.

Wiping out diseases: it’s a seductive goal. And like many of the best serial seducers, it’s ultimately hard to pin down. The eradication fashion item for this season is polio, the Lothario sporting it is Bill Gates.

Mr. Gates says we can eradicate polio in two years; that just a fifth of the time that it took his Internet Explorer to eradicate Netscape.

Gates has certainly put his (foundation’s) money where his mouth is, some 300 million dollars over the next couple of years. And he has some very good brains working on crushing the bug. But my own feeling is that the virus will be rather harder to wipe out than the browser that we all loved so well.

As I imply in an essay in this month’s Prospect, I suspect the only way we’ll achieve Mr. Gate’s goal is by defining “eradication” as wiping out wild-type polio. But that leaves us with the quandry of what to do about the weakened-but-still-live virus in the oral vaccine, the only vaccine we can afford to use in the countries where polio still circulates. Once re-established among kids who weren’t properly immunised despite dose after dose of vaccine (usually because they shit it straight out with their chronic diarrhea), it can revert to become as virulent as it ever was in the wild.

To get rid of that we need to switch to expensive, cumbersome injectible vaccines, or develop a killed vaccine that is cheap and easy to deliver. It’s not clear that it’s worth spending money on either. As richer countries re-evaluate their development spending (as the UK did today — nicely summarised by IDS’s Lawrence Haddad) we need to focus on what delivers greatest bang for buck. Hunting down the polio virus that hangs out in guts, drains and labs and crushing it makes jobs for epidemiologists, but it sucks time and money from other things that kill, maim and ruin the lives of far more than the 1,000 or so people who now get polio each year. Improving drains, making roads safer and diagnosing treatable infections earlier aren’t as sexy as wiping out polio, but we should allow ourselves to be seduced by them more often.

Young bucks locking body parts in a battle for supremacy: it’s that time of year again. Six Nations rugby time, of course. But also the time that many species pull themselves out of their winter torpor and start looking to spread their DNA.

London’s Natural History Museum celebrates with an exhibition of a Sexual Nature. For those who can’t make it to Kensington, Isabella Rossellini has made little sex-pods available on line. Here’s her take on young bucks:

Rossellini also offers charming, two-minute insights into the sex lives of spiders, sea-horses, dolphins and others, courtesy of the Sundance Channel. If your interest in the sex lives of other species is piqued by these vignettes, I would urge you to go to the (unacknowledged) source: Olivia Judson’s Dr Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation. Judson is an evolutionary biologist and sometime New York Times columnist who takes joy in the pleasures of creation, and who infects others with her enthusiasm for life. Give her more than two minutes: you’ll be richly rewarded.

I’ve been taken to task for not commenting on the ink-blot of corruption that is spreading inexorably across the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria. But really, the revelation that dosh sloshed out by the GFATM gets swilled into politicians’ pockets is about as exciting as the discovery that FIFA board members accepted a free dinner or two from Russian oligarchs before awarding the World Cup to Moscow. As the AIDS mafia has joked for years, it’s not called the “ATM” for nothing.

So instead, I’ll have a rant about something that is somehow still shocking to me: the lengths to which loopy anti-abortion groups in the United States will go to deprive women of safe contraception and sexual health care. The target, once again, is Planned Parenthood. Over a one-week period last month, men went in to the sexual health service providers clinics in 11 cities, claiming to be sex traffickers seeking services, including abortions, for the underage girls they’ve enslaved. That would be a really dumb strategy for a real sex trafficker — in the US, even more than in Britain, the authorities are under pressure to find the army of enslaved girls that the abolitionists conjure up at every turn. It’s a well-hidden army; though a massive UK crackdown led to over 500 arrests related to selling sex a while back, it didn’t yield a single trafficker. Not that that has stopped the abolitionists’ conjuring. Shame on The Guardian for not referring back to its own excellent investigative work in this area.

Planned Parenthood immediately suspected that no trafficker would be that dumb. Certainly not 11 traffickers in different cities in a week, when such a thing had never happened before. Though it smelled like a hoax, they dutifully reported the alleged trafficking to the FBI and asked for an investigation. Now Loopy anti-abortionist group Live Action has admitted, with some pride, to their juvenile prank. They’ve released two of their “undercover” videos, to which they’ve they added juvenile-prank-style title screens.

My personal favourite: “Planned Parenthood Gets the Pimp Discount for His Underage Sex Slaves”. I will say that the clinic manager in New Jersey sails pretty close to the wind. But then which of us who has tried to provide services for people in need who have nowhere else to go does not bend the rules? As Planned Parenthood says: “Falsely claiming sex trafficking to health professionals to advance a political agenda is an astoundingly cynical form of political activity.”

Compared to this, the standard operating procedures in the AIDS world — using Global Fund money to buy 4x4s for officials — seem somewhat tame.

Update: (or rather backdate). Steve sent me this interesting reminder of an earlier assault on Planned Parenthood. Sigh.

On the one hand, Canada bans Dire Straits. On the other, it fills the streets with posters aimed at extricating sex workers from social non-existence. Halifax group Stepping Stones is running an ad campaign reminding people that hookers are mothers, daughters, brothers, friends. They are also PhD students, civil servants, dental hygienists, actors and many other things when they’re not with a client, and shiatsu therapists, shrinks, grief counselors, actors and many other things when they are. Oh, and criminals (though it is my burning hope that this won’t be true in Canada by the end of the year).

It’s that criminalisation which creates stigma and the need for campaigns like this; the stigma in turn makes it hard to run these campaigns. The Chronicle Herald reports that ad agency Extreme Group‘s staff used their own grandmothers and Sepping Stones employees for the campaign because “regular” models didn’t want the job.

Also fighting invisibility are sex workers in Ottawa. There, Chris Bruckert and Frederique Chabot worked with members of prostitute group POWER to publish a synthesis of what sex professionals said about their work, and (perhaps more importantly) their work-life balance. Many of the comments reminded me just how hard it is to maintain that balance in any profession which society deems an identity rather than an occupation (film star, Royal, hooker). Here’s Janette, talking about how the police treat her when she’s not working:

“I was showing my new neighbour around, walking him up to the food bank. And as we were walking, one cop turned around and told the young man I was with ‘Do you know you are with a prostitute? You could get in trouble for that’. He yelled at the cop ‘She is my neighbour and I don’t care what she does for a living, she is helping me out. She is still a person’. I was so embarrassed. That did bring tears.”

You can read the whole (.pdf) report here. Stepping Stones have published a similar volume, which I haven’t yet read, called Sex Workers Talk Back.

It’s not that I think Canada is an over-protective nanny state full of cry-babies who had their sense of humour excised at birth and wouldn’t recognise irony if it bit then on the bum or anything. But really, scrubbing the airwaves of Dire Strait’s “Money for Nothing” because it uses the “F”(aggot) word is a bit much.

The song was banned by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council after a solitary Eljibiti radio listener whined that it bruised their fragile soul.

Every reader my age knows the “MTV” song virtually by heart — boneheaded delivery men being grumpy about the absurd amounts of money made by boneheaded musicians with more mullets than talent. The offending lyrics include the following:

“See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup
Yeah buddy that’s his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot he’s a millionaire”

Our Sensitive Soul found this “extremely offensive” and labeled it “discriminatory”. Since the complainant says they are a member of the Eljibiti Community, I’m assuming they consider it to be offensive to gays rather than to rock stars. But that confuses me. A pop classic which won the Grammy for record of the year in 1986 portrays homophobia as a sentiment expressed by bigoted and resentful boneheads. One person in Newfoundland, who apparently has not mastered the skill of switching off the radio, considers the association of homophobia with stupidity to be offensive. And six adults of sound mind meeting on behalf of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council spent I’m not sure how much time coming up with a 5000+ word decision that boils down to this: “The song contained a word that referred to sexual orientation in a derogatory way.”

Give me strength.

The decision makes for amusing reading, dredging as it does through the history of similar complaints. It seems that even more sensitive souls have in the past been upset by songs and skits about cigarettes (fags, to a good British sometime smoker such as myself). Of course the way Canada is going, it’s not impossible that cigarettes will soon be outlawed, with all evidence of their existence digitally excised from old Humphrey Bogart films.

In fairness, I should note that the overwhelming majority of Canadians of all sexual hues commenting on the Globe and Mail’s report of the ban think it is just plain silly. But I think I’ll try be more careful about my “hookers, fags and junkies” shorthand when I next visit Canada, just in case. I wonder if any radio listeners in Newfoundland are offended by any of these words: Big. Girl’s. Blouse.

Today, the world of public health research changed for ever. Or so I hope. The institutions that fund most health research in developing countries (and a good deal of research in rich countries too) have finally launched an assault on Data Hugging Disorder. They are pushing the scientists they fund to put any data they collect in the shared scientific domain.

The broadside against the culture of data-hoarding that dominates in public health is published today in a joint statement on data sharing signed by 17 institutions, including the three biggest funders of public health research globally: The U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. Other signatories include the World Bank, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, national research councils from the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. (Here’s the full list.)

I’d like to have had a more bombastic introduction. “From this day forth, all data collected by researchers who are paid by taxpayers or tax-exempt charities will share those data with the world”. I implied as much in a comment in the Guardian. Actually, the statement doesn’t go anything like that far. Indeed it’s pretty fluffy, couched in terms of principles and goals rather than requirements. But having helped draft the fluff, and been part of nearly three years worth of discussions leading up to it, I think it is a damned good start. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the key institutional players would have liked to go much further, but they were shouted down by their legal departments.

So the statement doesn’t actually commit institutions to do anything concrete. But implicit in its goals are important changes to the culture that makes us researchers so mean with our data. These mega-funders say they aim to reward us for publishing data, not just papers. They aim to support data management, so that data can be shared practically. Data management has always been the most neglected and undervalued part of the research enterprise in public health (something I’ve ranted about before in print (pdf) and on air; I’m looking forward to researchers rewriting their budgets so that the funders can put their money where their joint statement is. And they aim to make sure that the scientists in developing countries who do a lot of the grunt work of collecting data of interest to global health do not get “scooped” by data munchkins sitting in Seattle or Geneva with squigabytes of processing power and a constant electricity supply. The equity principle was firmly stressed in a commentary about data sharing published in The Lancet today to go with the Joint Statement.

Some researchers will feel queasy about sharing their data; it is hard not to feel ownership when, night after night after exhausting night, you’ve driven your motorbike at 4.30 am through the entrails of the red light district in the rainy season to get them to the lab in good order. But the truth is that “my” samples, and the data they produce, are first and foremost owned by the people who gave them to me — and data tied up on my hard drive waiting for me to get around to writing that third paper about the study (when I’ve finished my next grant application and the IRB paperwork for my current study) are not doing those people any good at all. The other thing that we’re all worried about is that other people will get to see how filthy our data really are. But that’s surely a reason to let more light in, not less.

So today’s statement, fluffy though it is, is a cause for major celebration. The funders say they are putting together working groups to start developing the infrastructures and data standards we need, as well as to change incentive structures so that universities as well as funders support data sharing. It’s up to us researchers to muscle in to those working groups, to make sure that an Open Data world works for us as well as for our paymasters and, most importantly, the people who we prod, poke and bleed in our studies.

Seasonal silliness from my family. I’d like to claim to be the stylish one on the ski-bob, that odd bike thing with skis where the wheels should be, but I’m afraid that accolade goes to my father. He’s on the bike in the final video clip (I precede him on the sled). But for the fact that he dropped his cigar in the snow, you’d never know he was 75…

Happy Christmas to everyone kind enough to read this blog, whatever your religion, thoughts about gift-giving, tolerance for sappy music etc. Extra thanks to people who’ve taken the time to post responses (including and perhaps especially critical responses) , or to write to me with comments and suggestions.

Year-end tends to be quiet on the work front: the time all those neglected peer reviews float to the top of the To Do list. Like so many others, I review out of a sense of duty. That same sense of duty often obliges me to say horrid things about papers or grant proposals that people have slaved over, but that just don’t make the grade. One is always worried that one is ruder than other reviewers, but more worried about allowing money or trees to be wasted on tosh. So I was delighted to find that other reviewers are just as rude.

The editors of Environmental Microbiology have published a year-end round-up of some of their more notable reviews. (pdf)

A couple that made me feel better about some of the things I’ve said:
“I suppose that I should be happy that I don’t have to spend a lot of time reviewing this dreadful paper; however I am depressed that people are performing such bad science.”

My personal favourite, because it mirrors how I feel today:
“The writing and data presentation are so bad that I had to leave work and go home early and then spend time to wonder what life is about.”

In the spirit of year-end cheer, let’s pull out some praise, too:
“Many spend much more time and space to say considerably less.”

It’s funny, isn’t it, that well-honed criticism seems so much sharper a weapon in attack than fullsome praise does in defence. It’s not just in peer review. I’ve recently been enjoying dipping in to a glorious collection of reviews of perfumes, published by Profile in the UK and Penguin in the States.

Here the rapier:
Desir deRochas Femme (Rochas) bleached rose
Thoroughly unpleasant fresh-rosy floral that whines like a dentist’s drill and hurts almost as much.

Here the back-handed compliment:
Deseo (Jennifer Lopez) coconut melon
Deseo is a clever mix of sauvignon blanc and Bailey’s, or in perfumery terms, Envy and Rush. Separately, its components would cause, respectively, a toothache and tooth rot. Together they work happily to produce a shortlived but superbly trashy fragrance for eighteen-year-old girls on the prowl.

And here the fullsome praise:
Le Feu d’Issey (Issey Miyake) milky rose
Whoever did this has that rarest of qualities in perfumery, a sense of humour…A reminder that perfume is, among other things, the most portable form of intelligence

Thanks to First Among Peers Mark Zip for the head’s up on peer review, and to Andrew Franklin for causing me to spend hours of my life buried in reviews of a product I don’t even use.

Clearly someone in the New York City health department believes that HIV sucks, even in a post-AIDS world. Here’s their brave new ad, targeted at the gay men among whom the majority of new infections in the city occur in this age of treatment. Pity about the Hollywood trailer soundtrack.

Predictably, most of the comments on the YouTube site are of the “This stigmatises gay men, especially those with HIV” ilk. More nuanced views over at Towleroad, one of the most consistently rational and informative gay blogs.

Okay, okay, I’m more than two years behind schedule. But we’ve finally managed to upload links to most of the papers, documents and visuals referenced in The Wisdom of Whores.

You can find anything referenced in the Footnotes here (that’s the notes labeled with asterisks which appear at the bottom of pages in the text). You can find anything referenced in the Endnotes here (that’s the notes labeled with numbers which appear at the end of the book). Links to full text versions of most of scientific papers and reports referenced in the book are also provided in the Bibliography.

Happy Christmas, and all other holidays. And thanks to MP and NL for their help with this, as well as for enriching my life.

The East London Borough of Hackney is trying to wipe lap dancing clubs and sex shops out of my back yard. I’m pleased to see men of the cloth joining me in pointing out that since the businesses are perfectly legal, it is not the goody-two-shoes local councilors’ job to abolish them.

The Vicar of St Leonards Shoreditch, says it is not for the local government to impose a moral code on its citizens. I agree with Paul Turp that it’s inappropriate for the council to decide which (absolutely legal) businesses may and may not operate in an area already desperately short of jobs. But I myself am especially infuriated at the way they are trying to do it.

I stumbled on the council’s clumsiness a couple of months ago, when I was responding to a call for opinions about a new one way system. There on the website was a “Consultation” asking for our opinions about a new sex shop licensing regime. Along with a paper telling us why they’ve already decided what they are going to do, there’s a draft of what they are planning to do, and a questionnaire.

Here’s the key paragraph from the planned policy:

1.5 The Council has considered the character of its wards and determined that the appropriate number of sex establishments for each ward is nil. It will not allow further licences to be granted where the appropriate number is exceeded. Please refer to paragraph 5 for more details.

There follows another nine pages of gumph before one gets to the critical paragraph 5. What that does is list the total number of lap dancing clubs, sex shops and erotic cinemas the council has deemed appropriate per ward:

…and so on, for all 19 wards. And then the coup de grace:
“5.1.4 There is no right of appeal against a decision based on this element of the Policy.”

So all that precedes and follows it, including the detailed description of the appeals process should your application get turned down, is null and void. It appears that the “consultation” itself may be null and void. Despite putting forms on its web site, the Good Governors of Hackney have decided that “Any unsolicited comments will not be taken into consideration”. And just to hedge their bets even more fully against undesirable opinions such as those of the highly respected vicar of one of the most socially engaged parishes in east London, we have this:

“2.4 The Licensing Authority will give due weight to the views of those consulted and amend the Policy where appropriate following responses received. In determining what weight to give particular representations, the factors to be taken into account will include:
• who is making the representation (what is their expertise or interest)
• what their motivation may be for their views
• how many other people have expressed the same or similar views
• how far representations relate to matters the Council should include in its Policy.”

Having spent many a long year living in countries where I am allowed to pay taxes but not allowed to vote, this is my first real experience of grass roots democracy at work. I’m looking forward to seeing whether our concern that men and women in Hackney ought to be allowed to do whatever work they please within the limits of the law is upheld in this process. Any readers who live in Hackney, or know anyone who does, are urged to respond to the consultation before December 13th.

At a conference in Mexico recently, I ran into Wired editor Chris Anderson. His essay on the petabyte age, published a couple of years ago, sounded the death knell for scientific method. I was seduced by the argument at the time, as well as by the beautiful graphics that accompanied the piece. Visualising Big Data can be a pleasure, as this graphic of edits of Wikipedia pages shows.

But when I started to dig around, I found that there’s nothing new about Big Data. People have been complaining about the data deluge since the 1600s.

“One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched andbrought forth into the world,” thundered Barnaby Rich in 1613. He himself contributed 26 books to the multiplicity and eventually gave his name to the Barnaby Rich effect: “a high output of scientific writings accompanied by complaints on the excessive productivity of other authors.”

What about the fact that new technologies are allowing us just to throw gobs of data at the wall, see what sticks, and turn that into a new theory, rather than starting with a hypothesis and laboriously collecting the data to confirm or refute it? In an essay just out in Prospect I’m forced to conclude that hypothesis driven science has always been a bit of a myth, shaped more by the way science is funded than by the need to create or maintain rigour.

I had fun writing the essay because it gave me an excuse to sit in the rare manuscripts room of the glorious Wellcome Library, rummaging through books written 300 years ago by the fathers of data mining and scraping, John Graunt and William Petty. As I note in the essay:

In one of his “Essays on Political Arithmetick,” Petty took death rates collected for another purpose, stirred them with a couple of wild assumptions on population, and seasoned them with a dash of prejudice to conclude that British hospitals were much less likely to kill their patients than French ones, where “Half the said numbers did not die by natural necessity but by the evil administration of the hospital.” In a precursor to the World Bank’s habit of pricing productivity lost by ill-health, Petty goes on to calculate the cost of the unnecessary deaths, valuing the French at £60 each, “being about the value of Ariger Slaves (which is less than the intrinsik value of People at Paris).”

English commentator trashes French health system. Indeed, there’s nothing new about the way we use data…