| CARVIEW |
Call for assistance!
I am working on a Web project as part of the University of Waikato Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. The project is called Huri Whatatu / Jury Room; an online discussion and consensus building platform with the explicit aim of including culturally approriate practices for Māori.
The keen eyed among you may notice that I myself do not fall into this group. In the last few days I have tried desperately to find anyone willing to collaborate with me on the look and feel of this site in a way the both represents and is respectful of Māori culture and practices. This search has been only minimally successful (read: a dismal failure). I have done my best (which isn’t bad if I do say so myself. Which I must because I can’t find anyone to offer an opinion). But see above for why I may not be the best person for this.
I’m not really comfortable being the person deciding what maori representation on the internet should look like. So, in my desperation I turn to you, linkedin users: Are you someone who is/knows/knows someone who knows/met someone in a bar once who said they might know someone who knows someone who might be interested in offering feedback, advice, or even proactive help on this project?
If so, please contact me ASAP. Thats As Soon As Possible, if not sooner.
There is a prototype is of the site live at https://huriwhakatau.ac.nz/ so any prospective collaborators can view and critique.
My sincerest thanks to anyone who responds or shares this request.
With many of us celebrating holidays and gathering with loved ones in the coming weeks I want to make the same plea but narrow the focus to friends and family. How often do we run into a colleague, friend or family member whom we thought believed as we do but it turns out there’s this one thing they hold on to we can’t abide? This might be a conspiracy theory, UFOs, homeopathy, astrology or even religion. At this point what do we do? Our friend is an intelligent rational person so obviously if we just ruthlessly point out why they are wrong they will agree, thank us for setting them straight and we will live happy in the knowledge that we have done our bit for rationality, right? Right?
Anyone who has been in the skeptic game for long will know, that is simply not how people work. At the very least taking this tack means an upset friend, possibly even the loss of a relationship. At the outset you have to decide what is your goal, what is of value to you? What are you trying to do? Is it more important to you to keep this friendship or that your friend thinks like you?
The people around us hold beliefs for any number of reasons; sometimes it is ignorance, sometimes it is comfort, sometimes it is habit. I have been in the position of heedlessly smashing these beliefs and believe me it is not something of which I’m proud and I try to be more careful how I go about things, not always successfully.
There are a wide variety of people who are drawn to skepticism but we all tend to share the same high regard for truth, reason and evidence. But we have to be wary that we don’t use this as an excuse to trample those we care about. Truth is noble, but it is not paramount. There is the tendency to use the truth as a cudgel as well as a shield “What you’re offended? I was just telling the truth.”
This does not mean we should always hold our tongue. If the belief is causing harm, we should speak up, if the belief could lead to poor decisions we should speak up. But not all battles are worth fighting, not all arguments are worth having and not all beliefs need vanquishing.
We may believe that we have right on our side, but so do our loved ones. It is our relationships that help define who we are as people, are we good people or bad people – ask our friends. Before you next gleefully knock over your friend’s beliefs think, is this friend more important to me than being right? If the answer is no, I feel sorry for your friends.
]]>The new moniker for the group is Australian Vaccination-Skeptics Network, I assume the hyphenation is present so that the group might reasonably continue to use the AVN contraction making the transition easier.
Backstory
As reported on Sciblogs in 2012 in a guest post from Dr Racheal Dunlop (via an article originally posted on The Conversation) the New South Wales Department of Fair Trading ordered the AVN to change their name citing:
“The Australian Vaccination Network does not present a balanced case for vaccination, does not present medical evidence to back-up its claims and therefore poses a serious risk of misleading the community,”
The AVN billed itself as an impartial information source on vaccine matters but even a cursory look at their website and associated materials reveals an organisation whose only purpose is to oppose vaccination. On the information page of their website the AVN states:
“the AVN says that you need to look at both sides of this issue, ask lots of questions, look at your own family’s health history and then – and ONLY then – make a decision that you think is right for your child and yourself.”
further on,
“Let’s look at it this way. If you were going out tomorrow to buy a new car and your budget was $35,000, you would not just go to the first car yard you came to and say, “Here’s $35,000. What can you give me?” That would be stupid!
Instead, you would do research, read car magazines, speak with family and friends about their experiences, do some test drives and then, after you had satisfied yourself that you had found the right care [sic] for your needs, would you plonk down your hard-earned cash to buy a vehicle.”
This sounds reasonable, in the same vein what I would not recommend and would not do is to take as reliable information from a source whose only objective is to tear down the type of car I was looking at. It does not lend credibility to a view for it to only recognise the failings of a particular approach. Regardless, this is merely window dressing which provides a veneer of reasonableness for the group’s anti-vaccination agenda.
This assessment may seem harsh and/or simplistic but it is difficult to come to any other conclusion considering the fact that every news story, article, personal anecdote, everything has some sort of negative light attributed to vaccines or the people who promote them. The assertion above can be refuted by a single instance of positive vaccine related coverage in any AVN publication. Have at it.
In 2010 the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission published a public warning advising the AVN to include a statement on their website stating that their purpose is anti-vaccine, that they do not provide medical advise and that vaccination decisions should be made with a doctor. The AVN appealed this warning and won but the judge in that case described Meryl Dorey as “coy” regarding they anti-vaccine nature of her group.
Name Change
As noted above, the AVN was ordered to change it’s name in 2012 or risk being disincorporated. After fighting this order the name change has finally been instituted. Not everyone is happy with the change.
In an effort to restrict the AVN from using names that incorporate the word “skeptic/sceptic” members of the Australian Skeptics registered variations of the AVN name with the word “skeptic/sceptic” included. One of these is very similar to the final name change opted for by the AVN. The action taken to prevent this outcome was undertaken due to the perception that scepticism is not the appropriate description for action taken by a group that advances a particular (scientifically unsupported) conclusion. Scepticism is a process, informed by science, by which we can move ever closer to the truth by clearing away misunderstandings and incorrect conclusions.
This is antithetical to the message of the AVN which is essentially “We have the truth and that truth is: vaccines are harmful”.
It will be interesting to see where this goes in future, legal challenges may well be in the works.
Regarding the AVN referring to themselves as skeptics, they follow in the footsteps of climate change skeptics so this is really nothing new. For the moment I’m preferring to be optimistic, perhaps those on AVN’s side of the fence will take the Skeptic label to heart and be open to all evidence, even if it contradicts their own views.
OK, perhaps that borders on the delusional side of optimism.
Vaccine Education
The AVN styles themselves an educational resource for parents investigating vaccines, news of their name change comes on the heels of recent research investigating the effect of different educational approaches attempting to increase vaccine compliance.
The study was a survey based investigation which tried multiple methods of educating parents about vaccines. The disappointing result was that none of the approaches succeeded in the goal of increasing intent to vaccinate. All of the approaches had negative side effects, ranging from actual decrease in intent to vaccinate to increased belief in vaccine/autism link or other serious vaccine side effects.
While these results need to be investigated further they fit into a larger known pattern known as the “backfire effect” where corrective information ends up reinforcing the false belief rather than replacing it with the facts.
In a climate such as this any public effort to educate could result in lower vaccine uptake, especially among those pre-disposed to be wary of vaccines in the first place. Such is the danger when dealing with the tangled web of bias that is human cognition.
Other resources on this story
]]>I admitted that possibility but argued that any fantastical creature could be substituted for Taniwha and no information would be lost – we would still be confronted with a superstitious claim with no way to verify if there was an underlying consideration that could impact civil works. I suggest alternative creatures such as fairies and gremlins – had I inserted Elves I would have had a much smoother segue to my latest topic.
Icelanders also have mythical creatures that interrupt engineering projects – via human intermediaries of course.
It appears local myth has it that Elves occupy the landscape, including in this case lava fields scheduled to have a road constructed. Many in Iceland believe in, or at least do not dismiss, the existence of these Elves. Might we conclude then that the Elves are stand-ins for other environmental concerns? Perhaps but it seems to me that a more productive case could be made by referencing only known biological and environmental entities – indeed the disruption by Elves routine seems to be almost a matter of amusement in some quarters such that the media employ a stock “The Elves have left the area” bit.
In this case then the inclusion of the Elves may grab interest but it quickly gives ground to ridicule.
Are there parallels to the situation here in NZ? In both cases there are vague claims of supernatural entities who must be appeased/avoided or otherwise respected based on claims by human representatives who may or may not be transmitting (in garbled fashion) legitimate concerns about the advisability of local engineering projects.
Should we automatically take all claims on equal footing? If so what other entities might we need to be wary of, borrowers? If not – on what basis do we make that determination? Supporting ecological/geological evidence? If so that seems to lead to cultural arrogance itself. What we are in essence saying is “Your cultural heritage need not be taken seriously in its own right – it is just a method of encoding local knowledge of other things”.
Is that better? I’m not sure.
Where cultures clash it it not always possible for both to leave the encounter unchanged, but I’m not sure it is helpful to add in spurious interpretations that at best add little to the conversation and at worse cheapen the whole enterprise.
]]>Lucky for them many of the diseases vaccinated against had the debut of their vaccine quite some time ago which makes it easier to cloud the issue as to causation: perhaps the disease was waning naturally, perhaps it was improved sanitation etc.
Lucky for us vaccine development continues and new vaccines get evaluated down the line to determine effectiveness. This gives us a more recent look how vaccines work and their impact on the population that is not as susceptible to these tactics.
For example, pneumonia is a risk for young children and hospitalisations in the US prior to 2000 hovered around the 1,200 per 100,000 mark. In 2000 a pneumonia vaccine was introduced into the vaccine schedule which targeted 7 of the 90 odd bacterial strains that cause the disease. Recently a study was published looking at the effect of the vaccine on incidence of hospitalisations. In particular the researchers were looking to see if the initial drop in hospitalisations seen in 2000 was holding steady considering the other strains that could fill the gap. They also looked at incidence of pneumonia hospitalisation in age groups other than infants (classed as <2 yrs old) to see if the vaccine was having any effects outside of the nominal target population.
I’m not sure if this expanded scope is normal for this sort of study but I gather that the older population tends to contract the disease from the young family members so this sort of cross population effect at least has a plausible mechanism in this case.
So what was found and why did I bring anti-vaccinationists into this?
Well, first off as was hinted above there was a significant drop in infant hospitalisations in 2000 (the year the vaccine was widely introduced) which continued to the end of the study period in 2009, as shown in this graph:
In other words, the vaccine is doing it’s job. It’s hard to argue that there was a significant change in sanitation or general practice between 1999 and 2000 to account for the dramatic and sustained drop as seen. I would like to have seen the incidence prior to 1997 extended further in order to see what the trend for the previous 10 years was. However given that the purpose of the paper was routine surveillance, not to refute anti-vaccine proponents, that’s probably a bit much for me to ask. This 2004 study suggests that childhood incidence of pneumonia is around 3,500 cases per 100,000 (~35 per 1,000 as noted in the paper, adjusted here to give the same units as the current study) but does not specify how many of these would have required hospitalisation.
Secondly the study also found a significant drop in hospitalisations for older people as shown in this graph:
So you don’t even need to receive the vaccine directly to get a benefit from it. That’s already well known but it’s nice to have an instance graphed out like this.
As I started this article, if you can throw doubt on the effectiveness of vaccines then arguing follow up points becomes much easier. A corollary to this is that if people are unaware of the facts around vaccine efficacy they will be unable to counter the miss-information and will either be persuaded by it or fail to effectively argue with those who have been already persuaded.
With this in mind I offer the above as further ammunition for those who come up against anti-vaccine arguments at home, at work or as you potter around the wilds of the internet.
Previous Articles on the topic of vaccines:
]]>This exchange followed a conversation I had had with my son earlier while getting him dressed which went something like this:
[a noise outside very much like a car door slamming]
Son: What was that noise?
Me: Sounds like mum putting something in the car.
Son: No.
Me: ok, what do you think it was?
Son: Robots.
Me: ah…… Where did the robots come from?
Son: Outside. [so much for the imagination of the young…]
Me: What where the robots doing?
Son: Something with mum’s car.
Me: ok…. Have you seen any robots?
Son: No.
Me: Have you seen mum?
Son: Yes.
Me: What do you think made the noise outside?
Son: Not robots.
At which point said mum returns from outside and receives the triumphant exclamation which titles this post.
Proud at having determined we were not being invaded by robots my son wanted to share his conclusion with his mum.
What exactly is my point with this? Well, other than an amusing story I thought is was illustrative of something I want to teach my son as well as convey to others. We should think about what we see and hear, as well as examine our own narrative about how the world works.
When faced with new information and new explanations we should consider them carefully and ask questions like: How do new facts/hypotheses fit into our existing knowledge? Is it reasonable to posit new entities/explanations for things when existing ones will do?
Future episodes like this will provide ever more opportunities to help my son examine the world around him and come to thoughtful conclusions – which are themselves open to revision with new information. Lessons which are appropriate no matter what age you learn them.
]]>Today I saw one that I just had to have some fun with and hopefully give people some idea of what the product is really about at the same time.
In this case the product was an “Energy Calcium Activation Cup”. I hadn’t heard of these before but the altmed buzzword combo of “energy” and “activation” got my attention.
The forum moderators tend to be quick to remove questions about products that are overtly critical so I had to play a bit dumb and make sure I didn’t get too much to the point. The outcome was quite amusing:
You can see the discussion at:
https://www.grabonestore.co.nz/energy-calcium-activation-cup/discuss (or archived at https://www.webcitation.org/6GTWgpSot just in case the entire thing gets deleted after this post goes live)
I would like to thank the company liaison Sabina Chadliwa who here was very forthcoming and quite speedy in comparison with other companies I have interacted with in this way. No offense is meant to her – but BS is BS.
Various shows where suggested such as CSI and NCIS. Bones made an appearance in the comments as one show that exhibits a fair amount of pseudoscience along with it’s “real” science. House was praised for it’s attention to hypothesis generation and testing. I generally agree with that but found the fact that House always came up with the correct answer alone and via an epiphany type insight a bit unsatisfying.
In any case most shows do poorly at portraying science, this comes inevitably out of the fact that the show is there to tell a story. The science may or may not help with that but in the end it is merely set dressing for the real aim. I’m fine with that – I watch a lot of tv and aside for the odd grumble along the lines of “It would take longer than that!” or “You wouldn’t do it that way!” I’m happy enough to suspend my criticism and enjoy the ride.
But the question remains – which show does it best? Over the weekend an answer came to me that might be cheating a bit, but I think the best I’ve seen lately is one called “Guess with Jess“*.
If it sounds like a kids show, you’re right – it is.
The basic set up is like this: A cat decides on a question for the day and then sets about trying to answer it. Pretty simple.
I think it does pretty well showing the methods of science:
A question is generated via an observation of the world, a “literature” search is conducted to find what is already known on the topic (via asking the other animals), a hypothesis is generated that fits the question and what is known, the hypothesis is tested and the results observed to see if it answers the question. Often the first attempt is incorrect, so the question is refined, another “literature” search is conducted, another hypothesis generated and another round of testing conducted.
At the end an answer is arrived at which satisfies our feline protagonist and everyone is happy at having learned something new. Possibly Jess goes off to write a grant proposal – I’m not sure.
So that’s my answer. Adult fiction is too focused on telling a compelling story with relate-able characters in a limited time frame to make more than a passing effort at getting the science right. But that’s ok, we can rely on a young cat named Jess to pick up the slack.
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* If a black and white cat named Jess sounds familiar, you might remember that this describes the cat of Postman Pat. According to wikipedia they are one in the same, I’m not sure if Jess has been put out to pasture or if this depicts Jess’s life before settling down with Pat.
Some updates: I’ve added some demographic questions so if you have already filled out the quiz you can do it again to fill out the new data set! YAY!
Questions look at age, education level – that sort of stuff.
Anyway what have we found so far?
Average score is 24 with 68% of respondents being within +/- 3 points of this value (1 standard deviation for those who remember such things). The lowest score 4. A mere 7 respondents scored lower than 15. Almost 380 people got 20 or higher
With each subcategory of the test being so small (5 questions or less) and with so many people getting greater than 20 these are pretty difficult to interpret – so I won’t.
If anyone wants the full data set I’m happy to provide it, it’ll only get better and more interesting with those demographic questions added, so take it again – really – that would be cool. And pass it around especially if you have colleagues, family and friends that are outside of the science arena!
Here’s the link again. Enjoy, it’s fun – honest.
Thought I’d put up a couple of initial thoughts/feed-back on the testing:
First off it’s becoming clear that some of the questions are ambiguously worded. This is especially obvious in the results for questions 12 and 14.
Question 12, looking at categorizing sources, is worded in such a way that it is not clear whether the question refers to the story extract itself or the sources used in the story extract. This means that respondents incorrectly label the source as “Primary” (correct for the sources used for the story extract) and “Tertiary” (correct for the story extract itself and therefore the correct answer for the question).
The other one that people are obviously getting wrong because of the wording (including myself) is question 14. This question asks what element of a study design is not a strength of the study.
This implies that you are to critique the design as it is actually presented, not how it could have been. Thus people are choosing the option that is “least wrong”. A bit of a change in this wording to make it clear what design could have been used but wasn’t or that could have made the study better or even restricting the answer options to just the study elements present in the background information would probably bring the score for this question up.
Interestingly there are a few questions nobody has gotten wrong, indicating they may be a little too easy (but perhaps the sample size is still too small yet, 45 responders so far).
The first question “Which of the following is a valid scientific argument?” has a 100% responder correctness score. As does Question 16 on the proportions of house building materials and question 20 on the rat population. Question 27 “Which of the following actions is a valid scientific course of action?” also has a 100% score.
So, great stuff so far, as I mentioned there’s been about 45 people taking part so far and things already are shaping up nicely. So spread the word and lets see how many people we can get. If possible it would be nice to get constructive criticism on the question wording like I have done above that can be feed back to the original test designers.
Thanks for the interest so far and keep it up!
I liked this idea so much I decided to put together an online version of the quiz that people could take and get instant feedback for. This could also be adapted for use in an educational environment as intended in the original paper.
To that end I need beta testers, people who would like to take the test and give me feed-back on how to improve it. A couple of things I need to mention at this point:
First, the test will ask for your email address in order to send a summary of how well you did on the test. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose and indeed I’ve set up the back-end so that the address will be deleted as soon as your email is sent – your private information will remain that way.
With this in mind – If you have feed-back about your performance, there is no way for me to tell which entry is yours unless you give me the time you submitted the form.
Secondly, I have used some custom html code in creating the form which doesn’t integrate seamlessly with the google drive document that runs most of the functionality. This means if you miss a required question (all of them are required FYI) than you will be re-directed to the original form of the test, this will look a bit different and will not contain the pictures (but will have urls you can use to get to them).
You can either continue with this version of the form or hit your browser’s Back button and fill out the questions you missed there.
Finally, If you have and comments or suggestions leave them here and I’ll see what I can do. Also I am actually fairly mediocre at html coding and such like so if there is anyone who wants to volunteer their services to upgrade the quiz I’m happy to share the load :).
Ok, here’s the link to get you started, have fun.
[Edit: Here’s a link to some initial analysis of the results]
This indeed was my main goal. There are innumerable groups out there that I don’t agree with but you get that in a wide and varied world. In the case of the IAS though the speech they engage is is effectively publicly subsidised via the tax exemption, this should mean that they are constrained in what they can say. At the very least it should mean that they must present the facts undistorted by ideology.
Yesterday I found out that the Charities Commission agrees with me. In a decision handed down late last month they determined that the IAS does not qualify for charitable status and removed them from the charities register.
So, I guess you could say – I won.
It the words of one of my colleagues it also shows that one person can make a difference. Clichéd but true.
Reading through the Charities Commission decision it seems they focused on two things:
1. The biased nature of the information provided by the IAS and;
2. The political nature of their campaigning for a change in public policy.
This makes sense given the requirements that the Commission need to fulfil to determine whether an organisation meets the requirements to be a charity. Even so I’m a bit disappointed that there was no focus on the factual inaccuracy of and misrepresentation in the materials published by the IAS.
The decision does seem to skirt this line though when stating that “Overwhelmingly, the information on the website argues that vaccination is ineffective and dangerous” the inference being that is view is incorrect as well as being biased. Even so, none of the language of the report actually states this outright (that I can see).
There was also an additional point touched on that merely providing information does not in and of itself “advance education”. In other words to be an educational charity you actually have to actively educate people, not simply act as a repository of information – otherwise every private citizen with a decent library or informational website could become a charity.
Finally, in my personal 15 minutes of fame, the Commissions decision has been reported in the Dominion Post – complete with a quote from me. Not my most eloquent moment but it’s close enough to the point I wanted to make that I’m fairly happy.
[Edit: Thanks goes to commenter Hemlock for sharing the IAS response to this news]
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1. And here they are in all their tedious glory:
https://scepticon.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/anti-vaccine-charities-is-there-any-quality-control-on-charities/
https://scepticon.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/ias-complaint-part-1-thimerosal-in-your-vaccine-no/
https://scepticon.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/ias-complaint-part-2-gardasil-horrors-horrific-reasoning/
https://scepticon.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/ias-complaint-part-4-anti-vaccine-impact-in-new-zealand/
https://scepticon.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/defending-the-term-anti-vaccine/
https://scepticon.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/the-legitimate-risks-of-vaccines/
In setting up how “everyman” their acquisition of the new phone was the author provided a teaching moment on the ins and outs of investment bias and how we prefer things when they are hard to get.
Here’s the extract of relevance:
“Just to be clear, this isn’t some corporate review unit we’re talking about—we waited outside at the hellacious crack of dawn in a hell-pit shopping mall alongside people who were willing to actually hit each other for a new phone. We battled line-cutters and a shifty AT&T retail manager. I wasn’t due for a new contract, so I ponied up extra money for a semi-subsidized handset I was truthfully only buying because I shattered my last one.
I say this both because we got this phone like most people did, and because it was a gigantic pain in the ass. I had every reason to resent the iPhone 5. And yet…”
This might be intuitive but actually gets the psychology precisely backwards. We actually value things more highly if we are force to go through hardship to get them.
A similar effect is seen with the (now illegal) “hazing” rituals of American college fraternities. These groups would put new recruits through torturous initiation rites. You would think that any normal person would despise with a passion the person or group that did this to them but that’s not the case; these rituals inculcate a fierce loyalty to the group.
One theory to explain this is that of Cognitive Dissonance, the reasoning goes that people are justifying the effort by convincing themselves that they really like the group/item/task that they had to go through so much pain to join/get/complete because otherwise they are some sort of moron. Ok maybe not quite in those terms, but you get the idea.
To illustrate this from a slightly different perspective here’s the defining early experiment demonstrating the effect. Participants in the study had to complete an extremely boring task (adding and removing spools from a tray and turning pegs for about an hour). They were then paid to lie to a new participant about how enjoyable the task was, for this they were pain either 1$ or $20.
After this the participants rated honestly how enjoyable they found the task.
Those who were paid $20 predictably rated the task as boring, but those paid only $1 rated it as relatively more enjoyable.
These participants had done something relatively distasteful (lying) for very small reward ($1), as such they had two choices consider themselves liars or alter their attitudes about the task to seem like they hadn’t really lied at all. Being the heroes of their own story, as we all are, they “chose” the second option.
How does this relate to the hardship of getting an iPhone on release day? Well, if you go through all that effort you are either a schmuck, or the product really is that good. I know which one I’d rather believe.
That’s not to say the phone isn’t that good, could be. But it is one more thing to cement loyalty to the brand. Maybe other brands should take note.
I think the author of this article is quite correct in his condemnation of this person and those who support him who tout this technology as a solution to the country’s energy woes. That said I think he does his audience a disservice in not breaking down the claims more fully to explain why this “invention” is not all that it seems and why it will not act as a panacea for the dependence on fossil fuels and the deficit of energy that Pakistan endures.*
It is explained that you cannot run a car on water due to the fact that that it would require a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics. A law that is deemed so fundamental to the operation of the universe that it prompted this quote from a distinguished scientist:
“The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. ”
—Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
But this is not the end of the story. For while the “inventor” and his supporters use the word “fuel” to refer to the water, it is a misnomer as we normally understand the word. A fuel is something that supplies energy, it stores energy that is created by one of any number of processes and enables it to be used to do work seconds, hours or millennia after the energy was first produced.
This is what fossil fuels are – the condensed energy of biological processes that occurred millions of years ago. We tap this energy and use it to run our cars, and depending on where you live, the entire rest of our lives.
So what’s this to do with water?
Well, simply put water is the end product of energy use. It is not a storage medium it is a waste product. It would be like saying you’ll run your furnace on ash. You would be laughed out of the human race. But say you’ll use the magical liquid of life – water – and for some reason people think there’s something to this idea.
Now, what is the proclaimed inventor claiming? When you get right down to it he knows the water isn’t a fuel. He is in effect using the water as a convenient hydrogen source. It is the hydrogen that runs the car, and presumably the “water-kit” enables the car to process this hydrogen as it would petrol. The kit also contains an electrolysis component that splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. I am unaware as to whether the oxygen released is retained to react with the hydrogen or whether atmospheric oxygen is used for this.
In any case the energy for running the car comes not from the water, but the batteries used to extract the hydrogen. The hydrogen then becomes the interim energy storage medium and the “fuel” for the car.
What we have then is the energy generation being pushed back a step, instead of being done at the car via petrol, it will be handled by the country’s power plants.
I can well imagine that there are benefits to converting cars to this set-up. It effectively turns your automobile into one of this new fangled electric cars without the downside of looking like a self-righteous dick*. There are benefits to using electric cars even if the ultimate power generation comes from fossil fuel consuming power plants (which by my calculation more than half of Pakistan’s electricity comes from) such as local air quality improvements. The ability to deal with emissions at centralised locations and the possibility of sequestering that pesky CO2 at the source.
I suspect however that in the rush to embrace the technology at issue here these peripheral concerns are not really being considered. And for a country that already has too little electricity for the population it has (40% of the country has no access to electricity, and demand is ever increasing for those that do) this does not sound like such a great idea and won’t result in everyone having unlimited fuel for their cars. It can only add to the pressure on the already over-taxed electrical grid.
In addition it is being implied (if not outright stated) that water could be used to run generators. This is where you could justifiably call fraud. While there are conceivable reasons why you might convert a car to “run” on water those reason evaporate when you try to argue that the same can be done for a generator. I’m sure you can see why. You end up just inserting an extra step in the energy generation process, well more like a loop. You have to provide energy to the water to extract the hydrogen and then burn the hydrogen back to water to get the energy. Thanks to that second law thingy you will never get more energy out of that reaction than you out in.
Not only do you insert a completely useless extra step, in doing so you guarantee that the whole process is less efficient. You literally get less combustion for your buck.
I hope that no government official is seriously considering funding a project to replace generators with water powered devices, though I gather millions may be spent investigating the possibility of employing this technology in Pakistan. I don’t know where that money (assuming people don’t wake up by then) is intended to go.
This is the concern whenever fringe theories and technologies are held up as the solution to our problems, that money will be wasted on these rather than put toward more worthy projects.
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* A more thorough treatment is here, by former chairman of the Pakistani – Higher Education Commission Dr Attaur Rehman.
** Just kidding. For what it’s worth I think electric cars are really cool and if I could spare the dosh would love to have one. But I gather there is something of a stigma and well it’s a joke – lets not analyse it too much eh?
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One in seven.
Think about that for a second.
One seventh of the world thinks they will see the end of civilisation as we know it.
One prediction has only a few weeks to go before hitting the cold light of reality, it won’t be the last. Why? I don’t know – You tell me.
I’ve given up, people are crazy.
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