Once again, I am embarrassed to be an American

I have really been looking forward to seeing David Attenborough’s latest, Frozen Planet, here in the US. I’ve seen brief snippets of the show on youtube, and like all of these big BBC nature productions, I’m sure it’s stunning. And then I hear that the Discovery Channel has bought the rights! Hooray!

But wait, experience cautions us. Remember when American television replaced Attenborough’s narration with Sigourney Weaver? And <shudder> Oprah Winfrey? And when the Oprah version dropped the references to evolution? What kind of insane butchery would they perpetrate this time around?

Well, the word is out. The Discovery Channel only bought 6 of the 7 episodes. They dropped the seventh because…it talks about global climate change.

Goddamnit.

It’s not just our dimbulbs in government, it’s active collusion by the media to suppress scientific evidence because it might be unpopular with our undereducated booberati. Jerry Coyne suggests that you contact the Discovery Channel’s viewer relations page and express your displeasure. I will not be watching a neutered version of the program on Discovery; instead, I’ll wait until I can pick up the BBC DVDs.

You know what else is annoying about this? My wife and I are having a pleasantly quiet evening at home, and what she’s been doing is watching youtube videos…of David Attenborough. She’s been gushing over these spectacular videos all night long, and I swear, I’m beginning to feel pangs of manly jealousy. At least I get to tell her that the American media has decided that he’s seditious and dangerous.

And that will probably make him even more attractive. I can’t win.

Just to end on a more pleasant note, Mary almost orgasmed over this one. You’ll like it too. Too bad the Discovery Channel thinks you hate reality.

(Also on Sb)

Poll on the appropriate way to decorate a Christmas tree

The Gay Straight Alliance at Washington & Jefferson College has put up a tree* decorated with condoms as part of a campaign to increase HIV-AIDS awareness. The Young Republicans (can we please change their name? I think “Young Assholes” would be more accurate) are irate and are demanding that it be taken down, because it’s “a direct attack on Christianity and borderline obscene”. They’re also joining forces with the Christian Student Association and the Newman Club to try and get it removed.

And of course there’s an online poll.

Should the college force the club to remove the condom tree?

Absolutely. It’s offensive! 57.04%

Nope. Free speech! 36.61%

I’m in the middle on this one. 6.35%

Special bonus!The poll is on the Glenn Beck site, The Blaze, and we all know how much they love it when we crash their polls!

*Missing information: There is no word on whether the Gay Straight Alliance calls it a “Christmas tree”, a “holiday tree”, or a “phallic tribute to raging orgiastic hedonism tree”.

Bad science in the British Journal of Psychiatry

Would you believe that “”the largest, most definitive analysis of the mental health risks associated with abortion, synthesizing the results of 22 studies published between 1995 and 2009 involving 877,181 women, of whom 163,831 had abortions” has determined that “abortion harms women’s mental health”? It concludes that “10% of all mental health problems and 34.9% of all suicides in women of reproductive age” are caused by abortion. Here’s the author’s own summary of the results.

Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion. The strongest subgroup estimates of increased risk occurred when abortion was compared with term pregnancy and when the outcomes pertained to substance use and suicidal behaviour.

Those numbers are so extravagantly extreme that there ought to be alarm bells going off in your head right now, and the research had better be darned thorough and unimpeachably clean.

As it turns out, it isn’t. The author of the paper, Priscilla Coleman, is an anti-abortion advocate, and 11 of the 22 studies sampled for the meta-analysis are by…Priscilla Coleman. Methinks there might be a hint of publication bias there, something that has been confirmed statistically by Ben Goldacre.

Jim Coyne has carried out a thorough dissection of the paper, exposing the statistical games she played with the data.

If you examine Figures 1 and 2 in Coleman’s review, you can see that she counts each of her own studies multiple times in her calculation of the effects attributable to abortion. This practice was also roundly criticized in the E-letter responses to her article because each study should only be entered once, if the conditions are met for integrating results of studies in a meta-analysis and providing a test of the statistical significance of the resulting effect size. This may sound like a technical point, but it is something quite basic and taught in any Meta-Analysis 101.

Coleman’s calculation of overall effect sizes for the negative mental health effects of abortion involve integrating multiple effects obtained from the same flawed studies into a single effect size that cannot accurately characterize any of the individual effects – anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicide – that went into it. Again we are encountering a nonsensical statistic.

And just how good were the papers that Coleman chose to include in her meta-analysis? She claims they were the best, and that others were excluded because of their poor quality, but it seems other investigators hold her work in low esteeem.

…an APA task force report did find that Coleman studies–the ones she included in her meta analysis–had inadequate or inappropriate controls and did not adequately control for women’s mental health prior to the pregnancy and abortion. A similar verdict about Coleman’s work was contained in the draft Royal College of Psychiatrists report that also considered the bulk of her work too weak and biased to be entered into an evaluation of the effects of abortion on mental health.

I did find this comment by Jim Coyne bitterly amusing.

Readers should be to assume that the conclusions of a meta-analysis published in a prestigious journal are valid. After all, the article survived rigorous peer review and probably was strengthened by revisions made in the authors’ response to a likely “revise and resubmit” decision.

Obviously, you can’t assume that. This is a case where the editors and reviewers failed to do their jobs, and that happens way too often…and now this study has been thoroughly politicized and is being touted by the anti-abortion wackaloons to argue that abortion must be banned…for the good of the women. Which is probably one of the few times they’ve given a damn about the women involved.

But if you want a good, straightforward summary of why Coleman’s paper should have been rejected, that last link is it.

(Also on FtB)

Bad science in the British Journal of Psychiatry

Would you believe that “”the largest, most definitive analysis of the mental health risks associated with abortion, synthesizing the results of 22 studies published between 1995 and 2009 involving 877,181 women, of whom 163,831 had abortions” has determined that “abortion harms women’s mental health”? It concludes that “10% of all mental health problems and 34.9% of all suicides in women of reproductive age” are caused by abortion. Here’s the author’s own summary of the results.

Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion. The strongest subgroup estimates of increased risk occurred when abortion was compared with term pregnancy and when the outcomes pertained to substance use and suicidal behaviour.

Those numbers are so extravagantly extreme that there ought to be alarm bells going off in your head right now, and the research had better be darned thorough and unimpeachably clean.

As it turns out, it isn’t. The author of the paper, Priscilla Coleman, is an anti-abortion advocate, and 11 of the 22 studies sampled for the meta-analysis are by…Priscilla Coleman. Methinks there might be a hint of publication bias there, something that has been confirmed statistically by Ben Goldacre.

Jim Coyne has carried out a thorough dissection of the paper, exposing the statistical games she played with the data.

If you examine Figures 1 and 2 in Coleman’s review, you can see that she counts each of her own studies multiple times in her calculation of the effects attributable to abortion. This practice was also roundly criticized in the E-letter responses to her article because each study should only be entered once, if the conditions are met for integrating results of studies in a meta-analysis and providing a test of the statistical significance of the resulting effect size. This may sound like a technical point, but it is something quite basic and taught in any Meta-Analysis 101.

Coleman’s calculation of overall effect sizes for the negative mental health effects of abortion involve integrating multiple effects obtained from the same flawed studies into a single effect size that cannot accurately characterize any of the individual effects – anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicide – that went into it. Again we are encountering a nonsensical statistic.

And just how good were the papers that Coleman chose to include in her meta-analysis? She claims they were the best, and that others were excluded because of their poor quality, but it seems other investigators hold her work in low esteeem.

…an APA task force report did find that Coleman studies—the ones she included in her meta analysis—had inadequate or inappropriate controls and did not adequately control for women’s mental health prior to the pregnancy and abortion. A similar verdict about Coleman’s work was contained in the draft Royal College of Psychiatrists report that also considered the bulk of her work too weak and biased to be entered into an evaluation of the effects of abortion on mental health.

I did find this comment by Jim Coyne bitterly amusing.

Readers should be to assume that the conclusions of a meta-analysis published in a prestigious journal are valid. After all, the article survived rigorous peer review and probably was strengthened by revisions made in the authors’ response to a likely “revise and resubmit” decision.

Obviously, you can’t assume that. This is a case where the editors and reviewers failed to do their jobs, and that happens way too often…and now this study has been thoroughly politicized and is being touted by the anti-abortion wackaloons to argue that abortion must be banned…for the good of the women. Which is probably one of the few times they’ve given a damn about the women involved.

But if you want a good, straightforward summary of why Coleman’s paper should have been rejected, that last link is it.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Matthew Prorok

Interestingly, one of my friends just pointed me to a question from a pastor he knows, who was asking “why are you not a Christian?” I wrote this up, and felt it would be good to send along.

If you’d like to know why I’m an atheist, its because I am also a skeptic. Atheism is in a way an application of skepticism; I only believe that which has convincing evidence, and there is no convincing evidence for the existence of a divine being. The god proposed by every major religion is a supernatural god; even religions like Buddhism that do not promote a god do promote the supernatural in various ways. But through science, the study of the world around us, the observation of reality, we see absolutely no evidence of the supernatural. Everything fits, everything follows the rules. There is no E that does not equal mc^2, no F that does not have an equivalent MA. The universe appears exactly as it should if the only forces at work were those of the elementary particles of matter responding to the laws of nature. Its possible that there is a god of some kind, but its highly unlikely, and there is no evidence that any god affects reality in any way.

Why I am not a Christian is a little more specific. I was raised as a Christian, going to church every Sunday at the United Church of Christ. But as I grew older, and learned more about the religion I was following, it simply stopped making sense. Every time the Bible, and therefore god, made verifiable statements about the nature of reality, and even most of the time when it made statements of historical fact, it got it wrong. And very importantly, the god being described didn’t actually seem very loving. He demands worship and obedience, he demands that we bow before him, and tells us that we’re sinful creatures that must beg his forgiveness for not being perfect, despite the fact that supposedly he created us. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” He set the default state for the afterlife as eternal torture; how could a god who willingly sent most of his supposedly beloved children to hell be good? If there is a god, and an afterlife, and that god sits in judgement, then here is how I see it. If god is just and kind, then he will judge me on my works, not whether I believed in him. If god judges me on whether I believed in him without any evidence, then he is not just and kind, and thus isn’t worthy of worship anyway.

Matthew Prorok
United States

Anti-Caturday post

Game over, man. No cat video can ever be as awesome as this: two mimic octopuses mating.

It’s like watching a nest of snakes break out into a barroom brawl. It’s also the most erotic thing I’ve ever seen on the internet.

(Also on Sb)

Victor Ivanoff is a slimy stalker

I have been forwarded a message by Franc Hoggle aka Felch Grogan aka Victor Ivanoff. He is planning to attend the Global Atheist Convention in April, and has announced his intent to ‘stalk’ the people he doesn’t like…the “baboons” as he calls them. Looking at the speakers list, though, that seems to be just me.

Alas, if I am to accomplish any stalking, it would be foolish to make myself so readily identifiable. I will seek to surreptitiously besmirch as many baboons as possible by sitting next to them without them realising anything is amiss and then silently wandering off after a happy snap is taken.

It would be a grave disservice on my behalf to not feed their collective derangements and paranoias. They are martyrs remember? They have turned me into a hairshirt. I have obligations to live up to. PZ should keep checking his pockets too. I will deposit a strange, yet entirely innocuous and harmless, token of my affection for him in there. It’s up to him to catch me.

Doo-doo-doo-doo, they are entering the Twilight Zone… If they choose to make themselves insane, it’s entirely none of my concern.

I don’t consider myself a martyr, and I’m certainly not the insane deranged one here. Ivanoff is extraordinarily creepy: if I find him approaching me, I won’t be checking my pockets, I’ll be contacting event security.

By the way, I do know what he looks like. I’ve also been informed that he’s a heavy smoker and reeks, making identification even easier.

Mr Ivanoff: Stay away from me. I have no interest in communicating with you, and I’m definitely not interested in having you rifle through my pockets.