A study has shown that mammograms increase the risk of breast cancer, according to The Daily Mail, the Irish Independent and all the other papers who picked up from the wires a rehash of a scientific study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.The risk from mammograms was greatly increased for women with two mutated genes which put them at a higher risk of cancer, they reported.

It isn’t true. The study showed that chest X-rays, taken while breast tissue is still developing in women with the genes, can increase the risk by up to 54%.

The study of 1,600 women did not analyse the risk from mammograms. Despite the study’s authors pointing this out when they realised their work was being misrepresented, the papers went ahead with their scare story anyway.

The chest X-rays might be taken in childhood for spinal abnormalities, for instance. Women from families prone to breast cancer should think about having MRI or other scans that aren’t X-rays, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, concluded.

“Exposure to chest X-rays (not-including mammograms, which were assessed in a subsequent part of the questionnaire) was assessed first as ever or never.”

Note the “not-including mammograms”. The authors concluded that because there was too much bias in reporting of having mammograms, another study specifically about mammograms was needed.

In fact, an advisory went out on the wires later the same day that the wires put out the original, incorrect, version of the story. It said something to the effect that “mammograms do not increase the risk of breast cancer in women with the genes, according to this study”.
Despite having plenty of time to do so before their print deadlines, the newspapers did not correct their incorrect, less sexy version of the story.

Or else they didn’t see the advisory.

Here’s what the Mail wrote.

And here’s the abstract of the scientific paper.

And here’s a quote from the full paper, which I had to get through nefarious means (thanks Mr D):

“The results presented here also raise the issue of the potential risks from mammographic screening, which is often used to screen BRCA [the faulty genes] carriers starting from their early 30s. Unfortunately, the analysis of the effect of mammographic exposure on BC [breast cancer] risk is likely to be biased in retrospective studies because of its obvious relatoinship to diagnosis, and accordingly, a prospective study of mutation carriers with detailed mammographic exposure history with adjustment for confounding variables (eg, family history) is a priority.”

So the upshot is:

• Chest X-rays when young increase risk of breast cancer in women who are prone to it.
• The people who did the study don’t know if mammograms do as well so we need to do that research.
• If you are a newspaper and a later advisory comes out which spoils your scare story, ignore it, especially if your story is about women’s breasts.

A great headline from Yahoo! news, leading to a much more mundane story than the day of horror that springs to mind.

This great site from the Bradshaw Foundation chronicles the stop-start spread of humans around the world, showing the enormous impact of climatic (and volcanic) changes and linking to more pages on some amazing ancient art, among others the Chauvet cave paintings, Indian rock art and the Dabous Giraffes in Niger, which are between 8,000 and 10,000 years old:

How cool: Tom P has done a CD audit, and come up with this alphabetical distribution histogram (there’s nothing under X):

I’m not surprised to see S getting the highest stack - why is that there are not only so many bands starting in S but so many great ones? Stone Roses, Sly and the Family Stone, Spiritualized, Smiths, Specials, Suede, Super Furry Animals …. I’m a bit surprised that C comes out ahead of B for Tom, because for me B is if anything even better than S - Beach Boys, Beatles, Band, Beautiful South, Beck, Bjork, Big Audio Dynamite …

Here’s an enjoyable if fairly standard BBC report on the celebrations in Ghana over their football team’s World Cup progress. Except for this bit:

“I think I’m going to die. I want to die. I’m ready to dieeee!” a young taxi driver shouted as he leapt out of his car, abandoned it in the middle of the road and ran in circles.

Jesus - how do we know he wasn’t actually suicidal / a mentalist? The reporter doesn’t seem to have stuck around to find out. Sheesh, journalists these days, I tell ya.

Wow, a real gem of 20th Century American cultural archaeology here: How To Speak Hip, an authoritative and as far as I know accurate document of the speech of late 1950s jazz musicians, hipsters, beatniks, juvenile delinquents and the criminal fringe.

I love Get Your War On, but I love the various spin-offs even more. Obviously I’d like to think it was due to some sort of ironic metareality that I fundamentally connect with, but since my Dad admitted lampooning a colleague with My Filing Technique is Unstoppable, I’ve abandoned that idea.

The latest wheeze: advertising. Scroll down here for some totally push-button online partnering, freshly birthed by Joey the Midwife.

Why would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for another dose of Typical Advertising? Ho-hum… another ad campaign… call the ex-football star, the girls in bikinis, the rock band with the most tattoos… make your stupid commercial… then wonder why nobody’s buying your stupid goddamn deoderant. Money well spent? Doubt it. Feel good? Doubt it. What you need is an exciting new ad campaign. Got it? No. Gonna get it? Yes. Go for it. Good going. You’re on your way to a stroke of brilliance. Check our hip attitude. Check our bargain prices. Then make your call: Joey The Midwife at 212-OH-MY-GOD. Then you’ll see why the NASDAQ Stock Report rated us “US-48 state-to-state.”

I’m as open to freakonomical ways of thinking as the next man, but can we stop pretending that economists were the first to uncover the phenomenon of ‘decision-making’, some time in the early years of this decade? See, for example, this really quite daft article by Tim Harford in yesterday’s FT magazine about his lunch with renowned economist Gary Becker. Best bit:

Becker’s approach to problems does not seem to have changed, with costs and benefits never far from his mind. As we head towards La Petite Folie, a French restaurant concealed inside the mall, he devotes some time to explaining the rationale behind choosing this particular eating place. He had originally suggested the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club, where I would have been able to observe Becker’s academic colleagues in their natural environment. In the end, though, the quality of the food outweighed all other factors: “I thought we should at least have a decent meal,” the professor says.

Brilliant! Truly we have so much to learn from this daring new science. Becker, who is by the way a very smart man indeed, comes across as distant and rather bored during their lunch, but that doesn’t stop Harford scrutinising everything he does for some trenchant and contrarian insight into the human condition:

The waiter tries again after a decent interval. Becker chooses the scallops and recommends seafood, but I am tempted by the steak. I press him to have some wine. “I’ll have a glass. No more than a glass for me.” Then we discuss whether to have French or Italian mineral water. I vote Italian. He concurs: “I like Italy. I like the Italians. They’re easy.” It is perhaps the only time in our conversation that he chuckles.

I’m afraid the article left me wanting more. How about a movie adaptation? Why, with the right mix of stony silences and statements of the obvious, this could be the sequel that ‘My Dinner with Andre‘ has been waiting for.

Normally I can’t bear to gloat over Bushisms, because they fundamentally depress me. But I’m prepared to laugh at this one. It’s on the far side of “dangerous idiot” and uncomfortably close to “I’ve been there”.

President Bush addressing sunglass-wearing Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Wallsten — who is legally blind — during a press conference on Wednesday: “Are you going to ask that question with shades on? I’m interested in the shade look. Seriously. For the viewers, there’s no sun.”

Welcome back, fafblog:

6/10 Changed Everything

Run for your lives - America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America’s freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the “Blame Atrocities First” crowd will tell you these prisoners were “driven to despair,” that they “had no rights,” that they were “held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice.” But what they won’t tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide! This fiendish attempt to slander the great American institution of the gulag is nothing less than an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States - a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people! - and when faced with a terrorist attack, America must respond. Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast!

“Oh but Giblets there are dozens of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo” you say because you are a namby-pamby appeasenik who suckles at the teat of terror. Well if these Guantanamo prisoners are so innocent then what are they doing in Guantanamo? Sneaking into our secret military prisons as part of an elaborate plot to make it look like we’re holding them in our secret military prisons, that’s what! And once they get there they can chain themselves to the floor, break their bones on helpless guards’ fists, and waterboard themselves to their heart’s content to further their sinister Salafi scheme to sully the reputation of secret American torture facilities everywhere!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Even as we speak the forces of Islamanazism are infiltrating our network of classified CIA prison camps, rendering themselves to third world dictatorships, and launching unprovoked assaults on innocent American bullets! There’s only one thing to do with all these malicious prisoners, torture victims, and massacred civilians - and that’s to imprison, torture and massacre them before they can mount another attack! Yes it will be difficult, but these people want to destroy our very way of life - our obliviously violent, guilt-free way of life. Let’s roll!

¶ posted by Giblets at 6:23 PM Comments (36)

I love finding parallels in y’know, stuff. Like when I found out what film the inspiration for ‘Blue Steel’ in Zoolander came from. Good times.

In a similar vein, I was reading Kant’s What is Enlightenment? this morning because John Holbo told me to. It turns out that enlightenment for Kant is freedom to argue with officialdom. Except for some unlucky losers: officials, duh.

Now in some affairs which affect the interests of the commonwealth, we require a certain mechanism whereby some members of the commonwealth must behave purely passively, so that they may, by an artificial common agreement, be employed by the government for public ends (or at least deterred from vitiating them). It is, of course, impermissible to argue in such cases; obedience is imperative.

This should sound familiar to anyone who’s just sat a jurisprudence exam. A similar idea was an influential part of modern legal positivism.

H. L. A. Hart shows in The Concept of Law that laws cannot be understood entirely from an external standpoint. At least for the officials who administer it, the internal aspect must be dominant. They look to the law for guidance not because they are anxious to avoid incurring penalties, but because the law is constitutive of their activity. In much the same way as chess-players must be guided by the rules of chess, or their activity becomes pointless, so legal officials must refer to the laws in undertaking their activities, if they are to have any significance.

Kant says that “some members… must” subordinate themselves. That’s essentially what Hart says too, but he doesn’t view it as a necessary evil, just a necessary, and then only for officials. Maybe I’ll break open The Concept of Law and put it in Hart’s own words. Til then stay safe kids.

Metallica have been playing outside the window of the office I work in for the past two hours. They are quite loud, but far preferable to Axl Rose’s sound check last Thursday, which was an hour and a half of a Jeff Buckley song on a loop.

Du na na na na, na na na na na na

The God that faaaaaaiiiiiiiillllllllled! Yeah!

After writing that last post, I went looking for more stuff by John Carlin - and it turns out he’s just written a good article on Brazil and particularly Ronaldinho for the New York Times. Interesting quote from The Goofy One:

Ronaldinho may get close to the secret of Brazilian soccer — the alliance of discipline and skill with superior imagination — when he explains his role with the team. “When I train,” he says, “one of the things I concentrate on is creating a mental picture of how best to deliver that ball to a teammate, preferably leaving him alone in front of the rival goalkeeper. So what I do, always before a game — always, every night and every day — is try and think up things, imagine plays, which no one else will have thought of, and to do so always bearing in mind the particular strengths of each teammate to whom I am passing the ball. When I construct those plays in my mind, I take into account whether one teammate likes to receive the ball at his feet or ahead of him, if he’s good with his head and how he prefers to head the ball, if he’s stronger on his right or his left foot. That’s my job. That is what I do. I imagine the game.”

I’ve copied the whole thing at the end of this post for anyone who doesn’t have a NYT registration.

Also check out the NYT’s entertainingly bizarre cartoon guide to the World Cup.
(more…)

Just in case you’re not already blubbering with excitement over the prospect of the next month of World Cup-ness, or in case you’re dreading the whole thing, have a read of this brilliant article summing up the unexpected wonders of the last one by John Carlin in the July 7 2002 Observer. “What this World Cup did”, he says, “in ways that sometimes reached beyond football itself, was clobber one conventional certainty after another”. My favourite example is the effect on Japanese culture itself:

The Japanese are the strangest, most rigidly repressed people on earth.

That was certainly my first impression. Even before arriving in Japan. On the flight over I was reading a book called Fear and Trembling by a Japanese-speaking Belgian woman, AmÀlie Nothomb, about her experiences working in corporate Japan. Female employees, she tells us, were compelled in writing to abide by a number of rules, including this one: ‘When you are in the bathroom for the humble purpose of relieving your bladder, you are constrained to ensure that no one will hear the trill of your stream. You should therefore flush continuously.’

Not long into my stay in Japan I witnessed the following scene upon looking out of the window of my jumbo jet as it taxied out to the runway at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport en route to Mr Kitano’s robo-footballers in Fukuoka. Four airport workers were standing parallel to the departing aircraft in matching silvery overalls, side by side like soldiers, waving in perfect unison, with what looked like genuine feeling, at the departing passengers. It was innocent, touching and pitiable at the same time. Customers - this is obviously the company rule - are there to be worshipped. It seems to be the company rule everywhere you go - every shop, every hotel, every McDonald’s. Endearing, certainly. But also incredibly weird.

Then I went to the Japan-Russia game. It began with the most lugubrious - most catastrophic, most apocalyptic, most death-drenched - national anthem in the world and ended with the most euphoric rendition ever belted out east of La Scala of the Triumphal March in Puccini’s Tosca. Sixty thousand people at Yokohama stadium celebrated the most memorable victory in the history of Japanese football, 1-0 against their closest neighbour and ancient enemy, singing, dancing, roaring in the least controlled expression of tribal hysteria seen in the land of the rising sun since, well, probably since they defeated the Russians in the war of 1905. More surprising still were the scenes later that night in downtown Tokyo. A mass metamorphosis was under way, a collective outbreak of schizophrenia. Under the utterly bemused gaze of the police, programmed to arrange themselves in imposingly tidy phalanxes but clueless as to what to do next, thousands upon thousands of Japanese behaved exactly as the English, the Brazilians, the Spanish do on such occasions. It was mayhem, as if a cork had finally popped on a giant champagne bottle that had been left to age far too long. Without even the courtesy - the elementary good manners - of an introductory bow, strangers were hugging on the streets.

Five days later came the quote of the World Cup. After Japan beat Tunisia to win Group H and move on to the last 16, the Japanese prime minister - the stylish, bouffant Junichiro Koizumi - uttered the following: ‘This is wonderful. It’s so moving it brings tears to your eyes. How strange, but I guess this is what joy is.’

Can’t really see Angela Merkel coming out with a line like that, but if this World Cup is half as fun and strange as the last one we’re in for a treat.

Zarqawi killed in US military strikes, Iraqi insurgency capitulates immediately - “He was the only one who could use the video camera”

Time was when you said you were 100% confident about something, that meant a lot. Nowadays 100% is nothing, reserved for cowards and mealy-mouthed fainthearts. 150% might have got you somewhere a few years ago, but now you might as well save your breath, because Wayne Rooney today raised the bar, declaring himself to Sven Goran Eriksson “300 per cent confident” of being fit for the World Cup. Which makes Tony Blair’s “one-hundred-and-one-percent” confidence in the police and security services a pretty damning indictment, the political equivalent of the vote of confidence from a football club’s board of directors dreaded by every manager as signalling his inevitable sacking.

It remains to be seen how far confidence inflation will go, and how fast. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear some particularly pluckly player declare himself “1000 per cent confident” during this World Cup, which would suggest a Singularity in the near future, coincidentally maybe around the same time as this one.

When Alan, Darren and I went to that music festival in Barcelona in 2005, we saw this band Nouvelle Vague, basically a couple of girl singers backed by two baldy men doing entertaining caberet-ish covers of pop ‘n rock classics. They were great live, and it appears they’ve got a new album coming out. There’s more here, including a downloadable and rather good cover of Killing Moon, along with the information that there’s apparently eight singing stunnas in the band - does this mean they can keep four shows on the road at once?