This week's news on Google Italy conviction.
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Irish Euro 2012 team to mark Loughinisland anniversary
17 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Players will wear black armbands for match on 18th anniversary of fatal shooting of six men who were watching World Cup
The Republic of Ireland team will wear black armbands for their group match against Italy at Euro 2012 to commemorate a massacre committed during the Troubles.
The fixture in Poland on 18 June falls 18 years to the day after six Catholic men were shot dead while watching a World Cup match between Ireland and Italy, at the Heights bar in the Co Down village of Loughinisland.
Uefa has given the Football Association of Ireland permission for its players to wear black armbands to mark the anniverary. The FAI chief, John Delaney, said: "What happened in Loughinisland in 1994 was an awful tragedy and deeply moving for all football fans. I would like to thank Uefa for assisting us in commemorating this atrocity and take the opportunity to remember all those who lost their lives in the Troubles."
No one has been convicted of the Loughinisland killings. Ulster Volunteer Force gunmen opened fire while the crowd were cheering on Ireland in their opening World Cup match, which Jack Charlton's team won 1-0 at Giants Stadium in New York.
Among the dead was the oldest victim of the Troubles, 87-year-old Barney Green. Five other men were seriously injured in the attack.
Niall Murphy, a solicitor for the families of those killed, said they were deeply moved by the gesture. "We would like to thank the FAI and Uefa for their assistance in providing a forum to recall the awful event that took place on that fateful day when Ireland played Italy," Murphy said.
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Kantar: Windows Phone clawing back share thanks to Nokia, but Android still rules the roost
16 MayEngadget
It's seldom the case that we get to look at world smartphone market share on a national level, but Kantar WorldPanel has given a rare peek that might give Windows Phone fans some good news to crow about. Even though things haven't always gone well for the Microsoft camp, Nokia phones like the Lumia 800 sparked a minor Renaissance in some countries in the three months leading up to mid-April: Windows Phone was up to between three and four percent in France, Italy, the UK and the US. The Metro interface must also be sehr gut for Germans, which nearly doubled Windows Phone's local share to six percent in that short space of time.
Kantar is eager to point out that it's still mostly a tale of Android and iOS successes, though. Google took extra ground in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US, while Apple was on a tear both on its native soil and in the UK. HTC's upbeat predictions may have played a significant part in Android's continued rise -- the One X cracked the British top 10 list despite having only been in shops for a few days. About the only underdog story not going well in early spring was RIM's, where the BlackBerry's share of the US was cut to a third of its year-ago glory at three percent.
Kantar: Windows Phone clawing back share thanks to Nokia, but Android still rules the roost originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 May 2012 02:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Android Making Gains Overseas
15 MayWebProNews
Data from Kantar WorldPanel has shown that Google’s Android OS has been making gains in the first quarter in seven major markets, including Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States.
In Italy and Spain, Android popularity more than doubled year-over-year in both markets, at 49% and 72% respectively. Germany saw a 62% rise, roughly double. Apple’s iPhone made gains on Android in the U.S. and the UK over the same period, but lost users in Europe. Android still is king in the UK, with over a third of that country’s smartphone users adopting the platform.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone has doubled its share in Germany at 6 percent, and has risen to roughly a 3-4% market share in France, Italy, the UK and the U.S. Microsoft has also seen a boost in Windows Phone use in emerging markets, having released the platform in 23 new countries in February.
Android gains have prompted losses in Nokia’s Symbian and the Blackberry platforms. RIM’s market share in the U.S. has dropped from 16% to 12% in the last year. Though, RIM still garners more app downloads than both Android and iOS.
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Are social tools used by optimists, or do they make optimists?
15 MayNew Statesman
A new report from Google reveals how social media is used in the workplace.There's a strong correlation between business and personal optimism, and use of social tools in the workplace, according to a new report from Google and Millward Brown.
After interviewing 2,700 professionals from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, the researchers found that frequent users of social tools at work are:
- Happier in their jobs. 38 per cent are very satisfied with their jobs, compared to 18 per cent of non-users
- More successful. 86 per cent have recently been promoted, compared to 61 per cent of non-users
- In faster growing companies. Frequent users of social tools are more than twice as likely to be working in high growth companies compared to non-users.
- More optimistic about their future growth. 59 per cent expect the performance of their company to improve over the next year, compared to 38 per cent of non-users.
Sadly, Google and Millward Brown don't unpick the most interesting part of these findings, which is the direction of causality involved. Clearly the internet services giant has a vested interest in pushing the idea that using social tools will make you happier, more successful, and more productive; but it would be an equally interesting finding if it were the case that people who are optimistic, both about their own prospects and their businesses.
Similarly, Google will want to emphasise the idea that social tools may help your company grow faster, but an alternative causal story may be that fast growing companies have more freedom to experiment with new technologies and work styles than those which are struggling to stay afloat.
Thomas Davies, the head of Google Enterprise in the UK, argued that adoption of social tools in the workplace wasn't an if, so much as a when, and that as such, what is important for Google and other purveyors of such tools is to understand the where and the why of social adoption. He added:
It won't be long before sharing online is as natural in our business lives as it is in our personal ones. . . Having the ability to find the people and information you want faster speeds up the decision-making process allowing businesses to be more agile and competitive.
Also present at the report's launch was Matt Knight, Ocado's marketing chief. Discussing the online supermarket's social strategy, he described how the company, which now has 5000 employees spread over 10 sites, deliberately attempts to retain the manoeuvrability it had as a smaller company. They had great success with an internal wiki, and 18 months ago, switched their company to Google's enterprise tools. Knight also spoke about the company's consumer facing social media strategy, which, frankly, seemed a lot more barebones.
Ocado, like so many companies, seems to know it ought to be using social media to interact with customers, but doesn't really know why. Ten per cent of Ocado's customers follow them on Facebook, and Knight envisaged a situation where a customer could "like" an individual product, but there was little vocalisation of what this would bring the supermarket. Whether social media is publicity, marketing, sales or something else entirely, it seems clear that internal tools are used in a far more result-driven manner than external ones.
One correlation which Google weren't so keen to highlight: The two countries in the study which are the most enthusiastic users of social tools? Spain and Italy, with 74 per cent of respondents eager to use them. Meanwhile, the least enthusiastic was Germany, where just 53 per cent. Linking those figures up with the macroeconomic state of those countries doesn't paint quite such a rosy view.
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Kantar Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In
15 MayTechCrunch
New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech — a market research division of WPP — show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a majority of sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 18.
Drilling down, Android is doing particularly well in some places. In Spain, Android is the platform to beat. It accounted for a 72.3 percent of smartphone sales in the period — the highest proportion among the markets analyzed by Kantar. But Android’s domination is not across the board: in the U.S., sales of devices based on Google’s platform actually declined by about 6.6 percent over last year and accounted for 47.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the country. Apple, meanwhile, saw its percentage of sales in the U.S. go up by 12.8 percent to account for 43 percent of all sales. Kantar also says that while now the majority of consumers in the UK and Australia now own smartphones, in other markets that it analyses, the tipping point has yet to be reached.
Kantar notes that in Australia, 57 percent of mobile consumers now own smartphones; and in the UK, 53.1 percent own smartphones. But in Germany the percentage is at 32 percent; France at 40 percent; Italy at 39 percent; Spain at 37 percent; and the U.S. at 38 percent.
Those figures are a moving target, though. In the UK, for example, Kantar’s analyst Dominic Sunnebo notes that in the next year, 22 million consumers aged over 13 will be buying mobile devices in the next year and some 80 percent of them are expected to buy a smartphone.
In Spain, Android also saw the biggest gains in terms of sales in the last 12 weeks: its 72.3 percent share of sales represented a huge rise of nearly 40 percent on a year ago. The platform saw similarly large growth in Germany (up 27.2 percent to represent 61.8 percent of sales); France (17 percent up to 54.6 percent); Italy (up by 29.3 percent to account for 48.5 percent of all sales) and Australia (up nearly 20 percent for 52 percent of all sales).
Kantar notes that among the top Android makers in the last quarter, Samsung and HTC were selling the strongest, together accounting for 86 percent of all sales in the the UK, for example. He notes that the HTC One X has been selling particularly well since its launch. In contrast, Sony only had 10.4 percent of Android sales in the past 12 weeks and LG had less than 1 percent in the UK.
Among other platforms, Symbian’s share declined across the board: Nokia’s legacy smartphone platform lost between 9 percent and 36 percent sales market share in the countries covered by Kantar Worldpanel. Sales of Windows Phone — the platform that Nokia is now using as its primary smartphone platform — are yet to make up for that. In markets where Microsoft’s OS saw gains (Spain being an exception), growth was in the low single digits in all cases — as was the total share of sales attributed to the platform. Windows Phone’s highest share of sales was in Germany, where it accounted for 6.2 percent of smartphone sales: that’s including all manufacturers building on Windows Phone, not just Nokia.
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Kaiser Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In
15 MayTechCrunch Europe
New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech — a market research division of WPP — show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a majority of sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 18.
Drilling down, Android is doing particularly well in some places. In Spain, Android is the platform to beat. It accounted for a 72.3 percent of smartphone sales in the period — the highest proportion among the markets analyzed by Kantar. But Android’s domination is not across the board: in the U.S., sales of devices based on Google’s platform actually declined by about 6.6 percent over last year and accounted for 47.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the country. Apple, meanwhile, saw its percentage of sales in the U.S. go up by 12.8 percent to account for 43 percent of all sales. Kantar also says that while now the majority of consumers in the UK and Australia now own smartphones, in other markets that it analyses, the tipping point has yet to be reached.
Kantar notes that in Australia, 57 percent of mobile consumers now own smartphones; and in the UK, 53.1 percent own smartphones. But in Germany the percentage is at 32 percent; France at 40 percent; Italy at 39 percent; Spain at 37 percent; and the U.S. at 38 percent.
Those figures are a moving target, though. In the UK, for example, Kantar’s analyst Dominic Sunnebo notes that in the next year, 22 million consumers aged over 13 will be buying mobile devices in the next year and some 80 percent of them are expected to buy a smartphone.
In Spain, Android also saw the biggest gains in terms of sales in the last 12 weeks: its 72.3 percent share of sales represented a huge rise of nearly 40 percent on a year ago. The platform saw similarly large growth in Germany (up 27.2 percent to represent 61.8 percent of sales); France (17 percent up to 54.6 percent); Italy (up by 29.3 percent to account for 48.5 percent of all sales) and Australia (up nearly 20 percent for 52 percent of all sales).
Kantar notes that among the top Android makers in the last quarter, Samsung and HTC were selling the strongest, together accounting for 86 percent of all sales in the the UK, for example. He notes that the HTC One X has been selling particularly well since its launch. In contrast, Sony only had 10.4 percent of Android sales in the past 12 weeks and LG had less than 1 percent in the UK.
Among other platforms, Symbian’s share declined across the board: Nokia’s legacy smartphone platform lost between 9 percent and 36 percent sales market share in the countries covered by Kantar Worldpanel. Sales of Windows Phone — the platform that Nokia is now using as its primary smartphone platform — are yet to make up for that. In markets where Microsoft’s OS saw gains (Spain being an exception), growth was in the low single digits in all cases — as was the total share of sales attributed to the platform. Windows Phone’s highest share of sales was in Germany, where it accounted for 6.2 percent of smartphone sales: that’s including all manufacturers building on Windows Phone, not just Nokia.
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Massachusetts Asks Judges to Curb Juror Facebook Use
14 MayWebProNews
In a state first, the Massachusetts Appeals Court has asked judges to more closely monitor the social media use of the jury, so as not to risk a mistrial. Essentially, judges will now make sure jurors stay off Facebook and Twitter during trials, regarding any conversations about the case.
The change was prompted by a Plymouth Superior Court larceny case to where a few jurors were adding trial comments to their Facebook Timelines, which were garnering responses and “likes” from their friends. While the social networking didn’t affect the outcome of the case, this sort of thing could turn into a distaster in a larger trial, say something like the
$1 billionOracle/Google infringement case.According to the court, “Jurors must separate and insulate their jury service from their digital lives – Instructions not to talk or chat about the case should expressly extend to electronic communications and social media.’’ The problem with social media in court is nothing new – last year the capital murder conviction of a man in Arkansas was overturned due to Twitter, after a juror tweeted details of the case before a verdict was reached. Judges have been aware that restrictions need to be placed on juror “public discussion” via online forums. The National Center for State Courts and a federal judicial conference committee have also put together some rules to instruct jurors, to dampen the risk of Twitter misconduct.
With so many mundane tweets concerning what one’s dog ate at brunch, all the juicy court details afforded by jury duty seem to be obvious points of Facebook mention, and some jurors might have a difficult time staying off of social media. Eric P. Robinson, deputy director of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Courts and Media at the University of Nevada, states, “It’s a growing issue. There are ways to address it, but I don’t think anyone has found a solution – The judge has to explain, ‘This is why we’re doing this, we’ll have to have a retrial, we’ll have to spend money.’’’
Robinson adds, “Jurors do have a sense of responsibility, and want to follow the judge’s instructions.’’ Though, some jurors also have a sense of responsibility to Twitter, and Robinson was perhaps right in pointing out that there’s no set solution to the problem as of yet.
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Apps Rush: Nokia Reading, PopSci Interactive, Monopoly zAPPed, LinkedIn, My NHS, Bulmers and more
14 MayGuardian.co.uk - Media News
What's new on the app stores on Monday 14 May 2012
A selection of 21 new and notable apps for you today:
Nokia Reading
Nokia has launched its own e-books store and reader app for Windows Phone. It's launching now in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Spain, through the Nokia Collection sub-store in Windows Phone Marketplace. The store includes paid and free e-books, with audiobook and an RSS-feed feature to come.
Windows PhonePopSci Interactive
Magazine publisher Bonnier has a new iOS app for its Popular Science magazine, tying in with its June "Invention Awards" issue. This year's crop of innovative inventors have been interviewed, and the videos can be watched in this app. Well, they can if you point it at the print issue. Yes, more media augmented reality in action.
iPhone / iPadMonopoly zAPPed Edition
Hasbro appears to be giving some of its classic board games a new app-related twist. This is a companion app for the latest version of Monopoly, acting as the banker, while also getting players to play mini-games when they pick a Chance or Community Chest card. It appears to be US-only for now.
iPhoneMachinarium
Beautiful adventure game Machinarium made a splash when released on iOS, but now Android devices are getting in on the steampunk fun. It sees a robot called Josef solving his way through hand-drawn puzzles.
AndroidLinkedIn
Business-focused social network LinkedIn has launched a native Windows Phone app, optimised for Microsoft's Metro user interface. Browse contacts, check out what groups are up to, and suspect people of looking for a new job whenever they add you. That last one may be just me, mind.
Windows PhoneUniqlo Wake Up
It seems everything can be social nowadays, even alarm clocks. Billed as a "social alarm app", this wakes you up with music that's "automatically created based on the weather, time, and day of the week". And then the idea is that rather than swear and hit a snooze button, instead you hit a button to share the details of your awakening on Facebook and Twitter.
Android / iPhoneHollywood Reporter: Cannes Film Festival
Gearing up for the 2012 Festival de Cannes? Industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter wants to be your guide, with an iPad app offering news, reviews and videos, as well as a guide to what's on during the event, and those all-important party photos.
iPadMy NHS
Microsoft's free NHS app provides access to information about NHS services and information, tapping into the company's HealthVault service to provide access to your NHS-approved records. No weblink, but it should be available in Windows Phone Marketplace on smartphones.
Windows PhoneCollins Big Cat: Playing Story Creator
This is the latest creative book-app for kids from HarperCollins – the sixth in its Big Cat series. Here, the story focuses on different places to play, and as before, children get to make their own stories using the pictures, characters and vocabulary too.
iPadTurntable.fm
Another US-only app – blame music licensing reasons this time – is the Android version of Turntable.fm. The social music service gets people to spin songs for one another as DJ avatars in virtual chat-rooms. The Android release follows last year's well-received iPhone version.
AndroidMini Motor Racing
The familiar genre of remote-control car-racing gets a reboot on Android with this game from The Binary Mill, with upgradeable cars, a four-player Wi-Fi mode and a tie-in with Fruit Ninja for branded tracks and motors.
AndroidLunar Racer
More Android racing here, although the twist this time is that the action takes place in Space. It's the work of Noodlecake Studios, which previously made the popular Super Stickman Golf.
AndroidNurofen for Children
To be honest, with my children, it's more likely to be me needing the Nurofen, etc etc. This is a branded app blending pain-relief promotion with tracking for feeds, nappies, sleeps and vaccinations. Oh, and a picture-book feature to store photos of your nippers – dosed up or not.
iPhoneBulmers
What often comes before a need for Nurofen? Cider. Well, it does in my case. And here's an official app from cider brand Bulmers which lets you "see for yourself how to pour the perfect pint of Bulmers through the magic of augmented reality".
iPhone / iPadTime Mobile
Time Magazine has also launched an app for Windows Phone, offering news, opinion and analysis from its bloggers, as well as photo galleries and list features.
Windows PhoneNATO News
Looking for your North Atlantic Treaty Organisation news fix? On an iPad? You're the target audience for this official NATO app. The news comes in a mixture of text and videos.
iPadPride and Prejudice: Hidden Anthologies
Sorry for the predictability of what follows. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a novel in possession of a good amount of bonnets and seething class tensions must be in want of a hidden-object adventure game for iOS. Possibly. This is from Europress, following the plot of the book.
iPhone / iPadMad Wig Out
You could think of this as SillyWigBooth, except branded. It's the work of DreamWorks Animation to promote its Madagascar 3 film. Slap a virtual wig from the Zooster characters onto your face, then share on social networks.
iPhone / iPadM Music & Musicians
M is the official magazine for songwriters and musicians from collecting society PRS for Music. Now it's available on iPhone and iPad, using Apple's Newsstand for an annual subscription.
iPhone / iPadLeonardo: Dream Inventor
It's a big year for the Leonardo da Vinci legacy, with the London exhibition of his anatomical notebooks and drawings. But now there's a separate book-app for children on Android that focuses on Leonardo's dreams of flying, too.
AndroidAmazon:Hidden Expedition
It's a very good week for Android gamers already, and it's only Monday. Big Fish Games has brought its Amazonian hidden-objects game to Google devices, promising plenty of secrets to uncover.
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Using the tools of science to improve social policy
13 Maywww.guardian.co.uk - science
When drugs are launched, we expect rigorous testing, yet with government strategy we rely on anecdote or public mood when empirical study could offer better results
Does prison work? (pdf)"All life is an experiment," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The more experiments you make the better." It's a maxim that is the stuff of science, the foundation stone of an approach to discovery that delivers reliable, if provisional, knowledge with incredible consistency.
Scientists observe the world, they develop ideas that may explain what they see and then, critically, they put them to the test in as dispassionate a fashion as possible. As the results of these experiments come in, we can start to separate good ideas from bad, and discard even beautiful hypotheses that fail to survive contact with the evidence. We can discover whether a medicine works, whether GM crops help or harm the environment, and whether the Higgs boson really exists.
The power of this experimental approach to knowledge has furnished us with understanding and technology that have shaped the modern world. It is also increasingly recognised by business, where successful companies like Google deliberately allow their staff the latitude to innovate and fail, so that they can learn from their mistakes.
Yet in another area of public life, experimental thinking is largely missing in action. If governments want to learn how best to teach our children, to cut crime or to rehabilitate offenders, they could use the rigorous methods of science to find out. Far too few of their policies, however, are examined by experiment before they are introduced.
We rightly expect new drugs to be properly assessed by randomised controlled trials (RCTs) before they are taken to market, so we can be reasonably sure that they are effective and that they don't do more harm than good. For policy interventions that have just as much impact on people's lives, we are happy to accept much lower standards of evidence. Pilot projects are designed badly, if they are bothered with at all. Ideology, anecdote and the imagined public mood trump data time and again.
Neither, when a drug is licensed, is the experiment considered over. As tens or hundreds of thousands of patients start to take it, their experience is monitored consistently, and those that raise concerns, such as the painkiller Vioxx, are ultimately withdrawn. Government policies, however, go unrecognised as the mass experiments that they are.
Teaching techniques or sentencing guidelines are rolled out, unencumbered by genuine attempts to evaluate their success. If they're ever stopped, it's usually because of a popular backlash or an election. When was the last time you heard a minister say: "We've decided to scrap this because it just didn't work"?
Policy experiments, of course, involve people, and we can't set up a school or a prison in a lab and vary the conditions at will. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to design appropriate trials that can shed real light on what works and what fails, as the examples that follow show.
The alternative to rigorous, well-designed experiments in social policy isn't no experiments at all, it's experiments we run without bothering to collect any useful data. It isn't unethical or irresponsible to experiment with education or criminal justice. It's unethical not to.
THE SCHOOL DAY
The hypothesis The traditional school day starts between 8am and 9am, and many teachers believe that pupils do their best work early in the morning. But research led by Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, has suggested that this may not actually be the case for teenagers.
He has found that the body clocks of teenagers run several hours behind those of adults and younger children, perhaps explaining their propensity for late nights and lie-ins. This raised a tantalising possibility: could it be that starting the secondary school a little later might actually improve learning, by allowing pupils to study at a time of day when they are naturally more alert?
The experiment Foster's idea was ridiculed by the teaching unions, but Paul Kelley, then headteacher of Monkseaton high school in Tyneside, thought it worth investigating. In 2010, he persuaded his governors to allow him to push back the start of the school day from 9am to 10am. An experiment was under way.
In August 2011, after the first full school year using the new timetable, Monkseaton's year 11 pupils recorded the best GCSE results in the school's history. The proportion of pupils achieving at least five GCSEs at grades A* to C rose by 19% on the previous year. Results were especially impressive in science and information and communications technology. Persistent absenteeism has also fallen by 27%. As things stand, this experiment proves little – as Kelley and Foster are the first to admit. It shows what's happened at a single school, over a single year – perhaps Monkseaton's year 11 was particularly bright, or perhaps the novelty of the new timetable, rather than the timetable itself, accounted for any benefits, which might thus fade over time. What it does reveal, however, is prima facie evidence that is worth following up properly. It would be relatively simple to run an RCT that would provide us with sound evidence. All the secondary schools in a particular region would be randomly assigned to start the school day at 9am or 10am. The exam results would then be tracked to see whether one group achieved statistically significant improvements in excess of the other.
ACADEMIES
The hypothesis Schools that are given academy status are made independent of the local authority, and have the opportunity to raise further funds from an individual or corporate sponsor. Academies can vary admissions policies and the curriculum. Many academies have recorded better exam results than their predecessor schools, but there is controversy over whether they sustainably raise standards. Michael Gove, the education secretary, is convinced of their value, and last year announced a plan to turn the 200 weakest primary schools into academies.
The experiment As with previous academy initiatives, Gove's policy hasn't been designed as an experiment that could be rigorously evaluated. The 200 weakest schools might well improve after the change, but as there is no way of benchmarking them against similar schools, it will be difficult to determine whether any differences result from the policy or some other factor.
It could be that standards would have risen anyway – the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean makes it likely that underperforming schools will improve by chance alone. It could be that extra money, or the impetus of new governors, has an impact unrelated to structure. Without a good experimental design, it's impossible to know.
This is a particular shame because Gove's policy could easily have been introduced in a different way that would have given us some real answers. Indeed, the large number of schools he wants to change, and the clear selection criteria, would have been ideal for a proper experiment.
Carole Torgerson, a professor of education at Durham University, suggests that it could work like this: the 200 worst performing primary schools would have been identified in the same way as is happening now, but they wouldn't all have been transformed into academies at once. Rather, the schools would be assigned at random to receive academy status either immediately, or a year or two later.
This staggered RCT would have created a well-matched control group, against which the schools that became academies immediately could have been compared. It would therefore become possible to chalk up any improvements to the policy. And if the results looked good, all the schools would go on to receive a proven intervention in a timely fashion.
DRUGS SENTENCING
The hypothesis It is well established that many people convicted of crimes such as burglary are funding drug addiction. Treating such offenders, rather than incarcerating them, may therefore reduce recidivism.
Attracted by this, the Labour government introduced a new sentence in 1998, the drug treatment and testing order (DTTO). When a qualifying offender was convicted, he would take part in a mandatory treatment programme, with regular drug testing. A pilot project was deemed a success, and the policy was rolled out nationwide.
The experiment It was commendable that the Home Office decided to launch a pilot study of DTTOs before introducing them more widely. But Sheila Bird, a professor at the MRC biostatistics unit in Cambridge, showed that the pilots were so badly designed as to be virtually worthless. First, they included too few young offenders to achieve statistical significance. Second, the research wasn't randomised.
Random allocation of research subject to intervention and control groups is one of the most powerful tools for conducting trials of human subjects. It leaves minimal room for bias, and without it there always remains a possibility that any differences observed between subjects and controls may be the result of underlying differences between the two groups, rather than a true effect.
It would have been a simple matter to randomise the DTTO pilot. When a qualifying offender was convicted, the judge would pass the sentence that he or she felt appropriate. But before that sentence was actually carried out, the judge would use a random code to assign the offender either to the normal sentence or to a DTTO.
Both DTTO and control groups would then be followed up for differences in recidivism rates after their sentences were over. All that would have differed between the two groups was the sentence, which would therefore explain any different patterns of reoffending.
In the real pilots, the judges were left to decide who was to receive DTTOs, creating great potential for bias: they could easily have been tempted to cherry-pick more serious offenders for one arm of the trial or the other, according to their prejudices. No pharmaceutical company would have got away with running a trial this shoddy. Yet it was sufficient to change a criminal justice policy.
FOREIGN AID
The hypothesis In the 1990s, a Dutch development charity called International Christelijk Steunfonds decided to fund a programme to support education in Kenya. Previous research had suggested that providing African children with textbooks that they could not normally afford might improve their exam results, so the charity paid for 25 schools to receive sets of English, science and maths books. The charity, however, didn't just provide the books. It decided to run an experiment.
The experiment As Tim Harford describes in his book Adapt, ICS asked the Kenyan government not to select 25 schools that would receive the books, but to identify 100 schools that would be equally suitable. From these, 25 were selected at random. The books were delivered and exam results at the 25 intervention schools compared with those from the 75 similar schools without the extra teaching resources.
The textbooks, it turned out, made very little difference. ICS then tried another intervention – illustrated teaching flip-charts – in a similar randomised trial. Again, there was no significant effect.
So the charity tried a third approach, funding treatment for intestinal worms. This time, the trial followed a staggered design: 25 random schools received the treatment immediately, 25 after two years, and another 25 two years after that. This time, there was clear evidence: de-worming children unequivocally improved their learning, probably thanks to improved nutrition.
ICS had used the power of randomisation to identify how its limited resources could be spent most effectively. Few governments, alas, are as far-sighted.
Mark Henderson's book The Geek Manifesto: Why Science Matters, is published by Bantam Press (£18.99). To buy it for £15.19 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6847
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Edward Lear celebrated in Google doodle
12 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Google homepage graphic pays tribute to artist and master of 'nonsense' rhyme who was born 200 years ago this weekend
Google's latest doodle celebrates Edward Lear, the artist, illustrator and master of "nonsense" rhyme who was born 200 years ago this weekend.
Although he published many popular collections of poetry and limericks during his lifetime, The Owl and the Pussycat is arguably his most famous work.
Born into a middle-class family in the village of Holloway, Lear was mainly educated at home and suffered from an early age from asthma and bronchitis, as well as depression and epilepsy
After the family split up in 1827, he began to earn a living from his mid-teens onwards by colouring screens, fans and prints, and sometimes making disease drawings for doctors and hospitals
Lear applied to the Zoological Society in 1830 to make drawings of the parrots in their collection and went on to produce fine hand-coloured lithographs, which were by subscription.
Although the series was never finished, it was highly acclaimed and Lear found himself employed by the the Earl of Derby, before going off to travel for three years in Italy
He published two volumes of illustrations, Illustrated Excursions in Italy, the first of many such books and is also recorded as having given drawing lessons to Queen Victoria, who was impressed with the "Excursions".
Lear later returned to the Mediterranean and also visited Greece and Egypt as well as India and Ceylon, producing large quantities of coloured wash drawings.
In 1846, he published A Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks that helped popularise the form. His most famous piece of nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the family of the Earl of Derby in 1867.
He died in January 1888, and later that year a new edition of his work, Nonsense Songs and Stories, was published.
Although his nonsense books were quite popular during his lifetime, in 1912 the Observer enthusiastically reviewed a small exhibition of his drawings, but it wasn't until 1985, when the Royal Academy held a dedicated exhibition of Lear's artwork, that he was finally afforded the status of accomplished artist that had eluded him during his lifetime.
One hundred years after his death, Lear took his rightful place in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. Lear achieved much, but it is as one of the finest writers of nonsense that he will be remembered affectionately by generations of children, past and to come.
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