I knew I was dealing with a sensitive issue, but didn’t know feelings still run so strong. An additional pleasure was meeting Laidlaw family members whose approval was important to me and most welcome. Thank you.

My piece was displayed, white text on a striking blue background, alongside the Piper of Loos installation in a quiet corner of the 3rd floor of the museum. A QR code was included for scanning by smartphone, so that you could have the dubious pleasure of hearing me reading the piece.

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As a note of explanation, the list of names are the men of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers regiment that died on the day that Laidlaw earned his VC.

UPDATE: The National Museum of Scotland has put all of the 26Treasures pieces and accompanying audio online, including “Victoria Cross”. Here’s me reading the piece:

Listen on Audioboo

And here’s Stuart Allan, Senior Curator at the Museum, and I having a chat about the process of developing the piece. Please excuse my bad hair and background rabble, there were some serious sandwiches to contend with!

Museum visitors could follow a 26Treasures trail that led them around the featured objects. If the idea was to draw people into areas they perhaps wouldn’t normally visit, to engage with the less seen artefacts, then it seemed to be working. While there for only a few minutes one weekday afternoon, I saw at least three groups following the trail, including two excited Japanese women who were photographing themselves at each 26Treasures station.

Here’s some of the 26Treasures literature for you to keep:

Stuart J. Ritchie, MSc, Sergio Della Sala, MD, PhD, & Robert D. McIntosh, PhD (2011) Irlen Colored Overlays Do not Alleviate Reading Difficulties. Pediatrics 128(4). doi:10.1542/peds.2011-0314

The condition causes the individual to experience unusual mobility in printed matter, i.e., the words fade, wobble, vibrate, move around, spin, jump off the page. This has been termed Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome (SSS), because the effect on the words is caused by the glare from the white spaces between them (you’ll have to imagine the text in the following pictures jiggling and dancing about, or get a better idea of what it’s really like using an animated interactive app.).

While coloured light (photopic) reception is handled by the cone cells in our eyes, scotopic reception for white light is associated with our rod cells. SSS has also come to be known as Meares–Irlen Syndrome, or sometimes just Irlen Syndrome, after the original researchers who discovered that placing a coloured acetate over the reading material markedly improved the subject’s reading comfort and ability. It’s staggering that, until diagnosed, children who have lived with this all their lives think this is how the rest of the world sees writing. I mean, who told them otherwise?

Helen Irlen clearly has a vested interest in the adoption of her treatment, and indeed, when aware the condition exists, schools are keen to introduce the coloured overlays for children with reading/learning difficulties. This suggests that while Irlen products are not the only ones available or even suitable for the purpose, there is an obvious additional financial incentive for their uptake.

Furthermore, the treatment is controversial, largely because the exact clinical causes of the condition are controversial. Much of this doubt prevails because there have been very few good experiments that control for complicating factors and placebo effects. In response, the correct skeptical and scientific approach is to design a good experiment that can investigate the most relevant issues to identify what it is that’s in the treatment that works. In doing so, much needed detail can be revealed about the condition. Plus, it can be established whether Helen Irlen and her Institute are profiting via deception, which is the obvious suggestion made by a paper refuting the efficacy of coloured overlays.

However, whether down to a placebo effect or actual clinical intervention, the fact that there is at least one person who has benefitted clearly indicates that there is a positive difference to be made. And be assured, there are countless testimonials from those marvelling at the immediate comfort while reading, brought about by using overlays.

This is where there are good grounds for disagreeing with the motivations for Ritchie et al.‘s research. Even if the Irlen treatment is unproven in a controlled experimental conditions, rather than attacking an intervention that is clearly doing good, perhaps they would have been better targeting their efforts and research funding (arguably some of which is donated by the tax-payer via ESRC backing of Ritchie’s studies) on something more constructive. Simply put, a single trustworthy testimonial from someone who claims they have benefitted from using coloured overlays makes a mockery of any statistics that claims there is no benefit in using them. That is irrefutable.

The question follows, why didn’t Ritchie et al. manage to discern any effect? As above, their claim that there isn’t one is easily disproved – ask anyone who has benefited. Therefore, the reason must be because,

1. their method is flawed,

2. their statistical analysis is wrong,

3. there is another factor.

The care and attention to their method seems admirable; it was designed to generally acceptable standards for this sort of trial. Noticeable though is that it involved assessment of the children by an Irlen specialist, who applied their diagnostic procedure to prescribe the overlay colour for each child. If then the trial was attempting to assess the effectiveness of this prescription, then all it really achieved is a measure of that practitioner’s ability, which rather undermines the objectivity of the experiment.

Their stats are straightforward and appropriately applied, although by their own admission, they lack the sample size to test one of the aspects of Irlen diagnostics that interest them, but not the main point regarding the benefits of colour overlays.

This then leaves “another factor”.

Young research students are generally ambitious and knocking the pedestal out from under an established leader in their discipline is a fun game. I’ve been there myself. Ritchie is clearly a rising star. It is he who was the field operative for this experiment. I do hope that ambition or procedural error have not led to an unintentional mix up over the allocation of overlays. Using prescribed colours matches the treatment to the specifics of an individual’s condition (as a function of light wavelength and optical neurobiology), so, receiving the wrong overlay would be tantamount to no overlay, a clear overlay, or any other inappropriately random (not prescribed) overlay, which is of course what the experiment found.

Anything other than an unintentional error is naturally unthinkable.

I am no psychologist, but regardless of the reasons for the experiment failing to identify any benefit, it does not take an expert to sit next to a child who has experienced reading discomfort, and therefore learning difficulties at school, who immediately lights up with excitement and disbelief because, as soon as an overlay is introduced, they report that the words stop jumping around and wiggling on the page. This is a real and tangible effect. Not necessarily a measurable effect, but a subjective result still, and only inasmuch that the degree of improvement is difficult to quantify.

Suddenly that child is able to sit still and concentrate on text for protracted periods. Suddenly that child is able to do their school work and home work. Suddenly that child doesn’t have reason to see themselves as a failure because the educational system is too unresponsive to detect this condition.  Suddenly that child realises what they are having to deal with on the page is not the same for the majority of others. Suddenly that child can feel normal and alike their friends. That child is my eldest daughter.

Far, far better had Ritchie et al. applied their expertise to discovering an improved system for treating this condition rather than spreading uncertainty about a system that is proven to have positive effects even if not statistically measurable, but one that is changing lives for the better. Their conclusion is downright irresponsible and unhelpful as it is certain to dissuade primary educators from at least attempting a course of action that just might alleviate reading difficulties for many young children, for example, a screening programme for every primary school child,

Our results suggest that Irlen colored overlays have no immediate effect on reading in children with reading difficulties, even among those in whom [Irlen Syndrome] has been diagnosed. On the basis of these results, and the lack of convincing evidence from previous studies, we recommend that parents, schools, health care professionals, and government bodies carefully consider the totality of the evidence before expending time, resources, and hope on this controversial treatment.

A simple informal discussion with parents of children benefitting from the use of coloured overlays would have suggested a more valid approach. If they had really want to make a contribution to the understanding of this condition, an obvious and easy method would have been to print their test text on to coloured paper of a range of hues, in order to investigate when, how and why the distracting glare of black-on-white occurs.

————–

Ritchie et al. have just had their follow-up paper accepted for publication:

Stuart J. Ritchie, Sergio Della Sala, & Robert D. McIntosh (in press) Irlen Colored Filters in the Classroom: A One-year Follow-up. Mind, Brain, & Education.

————–

UPDATE My 10-year-old daughter was tested for scotopic sensitivity yesterday by a professional optometrist with decades of experience. Her reading rate was immediately improved 36% using a purple coloured overlay, the colour found most appropriate for her specific requirements. The benefit my daughter has found, along with the many other children who have benefited likewise when accurately assessed, does suggest Ritchie’s study was lacking as they were unable to detect similar in 61 children of the same age (7-12 years) and with the same condition. This makes their concluding remarks even more inaccurate and irresponsible.

Christopher Hitchens
1949-2011

The previous post hopefully brought to your attention the alarming volume of neo-nazi content being hosted by YouTube, who must be aware it exists, and yet they allow it. Lots of it, despite YouTube guidelines being very clear: they will filter out and suspend their users for posting video content containing, nudity, pornography or sexually explicit content, animal abuse, drug abuse, or bomb making, graphic or gratuitous violence, or any video infringing copyright. And indeed, they are very good at spotting these violations, and rely only partially on other users flagging the offensive content for moderation.

So, why do they knowingly allow neo-nazi content on their servers? They must know it is there, and in doing so, they are being hypocritical: one of YouTube’s core standards states, “we don’t permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity)” and yet every channel listed in my previous post has either uploaded and published content that breaks this rule, or the user has commented openly on other users’ videos with hatred and racism, especially anti-Semitism.

As if this is not enough cause to hold YouTube to account, there is another dimension that is frankly shocking.

Large corporations are directly sponsoring neo-nazism via their advertising on YouTube. If you are a customer of Virgin Media, BT or O2, or any other of the many companies who advertise on YouTube, then your money is being used in this way, in support of neo-nazism and hate crime. Are you happy about that?

Companies pay to have their advertisements in Google’s Adsense scheme. These are the ads you see all over the internet, especially on Google pages when you search for something, and magically, related ads appear in the top bar and side columns of the search results page. The YouTube version of this is called ‘revenue sharing’, where Google Adsense banners appear semi-transparent across the bottom portion of the video screen. Unless you are a paying Youtube partner, you have to wait for YouTube to invite you to participate in the Adsense programme before you can monetise your video content. Evidently, this occurs when you reach a certain threshold of views per day of your video, and these invites to participate are then made based on a manual inspection of a user’s channel.

This strongly suggests YouTube are actively looking at neo-nazi content, and then offering the user the opportunity to profit from it.

When the Adsense banners appear, it looks like this

and if you are wondering who are Combat 18, this is their website making available literature cited by both Copeland and Breivik,

and, here is the news:

• Combat 18 claims responsibility for terrorist attack
• Combat 18 members charged with gun attack on mosque
• Belfast racists threaten to cut Romanian baby’s throat
• ‘Romanian gypsies beware beware. Loyalist C18 are coming to beat you like a baiting bear’
• Combat 18 ‘claims nail bomb attack’

Combat 18 is only one of many groups represented on YouTube, all decrying ethnic groups, all spreading hatred. So, what more evidence do you need to persuade you of their intentions?

There’s many injustices in the world and plenty of indirect ways our money is used unethically (banks are not the most moral when investing our savings, for example), but we often feel powerless to make a difference. But, there is something that you can do in this instance,

If you have further suggestions regarding this positive action, please include them in a comment, below.

Doubters, do you still think this is only about freedom of speech? Words don’t kill people. Murderers kill people. Murderers pack nails around incendiary devices, intent on inflicting the most human damage. Murderers don’t care when one of their nails kills a 4-month pregnant newly-wed, or drives itself through the skull and lodges itself in the brain of a 23-month-old toddler.

Neo-nazis are not born with their abhorrent world views, they learn them. It is likely that YouTube and it’s advertisers are actively inspiring the killer of the next victim of hate crime.

Recently, a horrifying video went viral on YouTube. It shows an individual abusing several others in a public place. But that’s enough about Benton / Clarkson. Even more recently, another video was published on YouTube that captured a 34-year old Emma West, possibly the mother of the young boy on her knee, on the Croydon-to-Wimbledon Tramlink route, verbally abusing the other passengers for their ethnic origins. She is clearly finding multicultural Britain a challenge.

(establishing shot, perhaps of outer door. door sharpley pulls open. soldier falls through it, object chucked after him. shouts from within, “Get out you nitwit!” switch to inside room. major at desk on raised platform. Corporal with clipboard to side.)

Major: Who’s next Corporal?

Corporal: I’m afraid it’s Henderson again Sah.

Major: Oh God! It’ll be another of his bird-brained schemes that he thinks will turn the war. What in blazes was it last time Corporal?

Corporal: All front-line troops to be issued with doves Sah.

Major: Don’t we give them enough food rations as it is?

Corporal: Erm, exploding doves Sah. Hoped to hit Jerry with an aerial bombardment Sah.

Major: Ah yes. What an idiot. Homing pigeons near bloody well wiped out the entire Royal Sussex Regiment. And the time before that wasn’t much better if I remember correctly.

Corporal: Yes Sah, pelmets Sah.

Major: Yerrs, dashed pelmets.

Corporal: No I think they were more of a Paisley pattern Sah.

Major: Ah yes, that’s right by Jove! And where did he want us to stick em eh eh?

Corporal: In the trenches Sah. Camouflage Sah. To make ‘em look like a tea shop Sah. If the Hun pop in ordering afternoon tea, run em through with a bayonet Sah.

Major: What a bloody stupid idea. Should never have been put into action. He just didn’t think it through did he Corporal?

Corporal: No Sah, didn’t think it through Sah.

Major: I mean, firstly Kraut prefers coffee doesn’t he Corporal?

Corporal: Yes Sah.

Major: And then, where in Hell we were supposed to find three million doilies for Ypres alone, I cannot fathom.

Corporal: Yes sah, I mean no Sah.

Major: Well, we’d better hear what idiotic rouse he has for us this time.

(enter henderson, quick marches in front of major, snaps to attention and salutes)

Major: Well, here we are again Henderson. What have you for us this time?

Henderson: My plan is to issue all Tommies with puppies Sir.

Major: (chuckling) And what type of dog might these be Henderson, a strudel I suppose!

(snorts and guffaws at own joke. aside to Corporal who is not laughing.)

Major: Sounds like poodle, but it’s German.

Corporal: No sah, I mean very funny Sah.

(Corporal forces weak laughter)

Major: Bah, anyway, what the hell for Henderson?

Henderson: As a defence against Fritz, every man would be issued, as standard kit, one puppy, breed golden retriever, colour golden, and harnesses, one, for the strapping of said puppy to the chest Sir. Even Jerry would never run a cute puppy through Sir.

Major: (head in hands) Are you mad man?

Henderson: No sir?

Major: It’s not golden retrievers we need to deflect 7.92mm bullets screaming at us from MG15 nA Bergman machine guns Henderson. Nooo. It’s Schnauzers man, a German dog. Hit them where they’re weakest dammit. And if any cute little German puppies are shot in combat, weeeell, that’ll be a few less of em for us to kill, eh? I’m just thankful we’re not as heartless as those barbaric bastards! Permission granted. (stamps document)

Henderson: Oh thank you Sir (salutes).

______________________________________________________

Secret Weapons Committee (WWII)

(same establishing shot, outer door. door sharpley pulls open. soldier falls through it, object chucked after him. shouts from within, “Get out you goon!” switch to inside room. major at desk on raised platform. Corporal with clipboard to side.)

Major: Who’s next Corporal?

(Corporal looks at clipboard, winces, looks at Major)

Corporal: I’m afraid it’s Hend…

Major: …derson. Oh God!

Corporal: Sorry Sah.

Major: Another hair-brained scheme no doubt. What was it last time Corporal?

Corporal: Commando parrots Sah.

Major: I fear the worst, but go on, remind me.

Corporal: Parrots were supposed to infiltrate German lines Sah.

Major: Why ever for Corporal?

Corporal: Hoped to confuse the enemy Sah. Hoped to capture German radio equipment and broadcast phony orders Sah.

Major: Ah yes. What an idiot. Almost did for us in the Africa Campaign. He should have known parrots are in actual fact supreme military strategists.

Corporal: Yes Sah, strategists Sah.

…

Major: Well, we’d better hear what stupidity he has for us this time.

(enter henderson, quick marches in front of major, snaps to attention and salutes)

Major: Well, here we are again Henderson. What have you for us this time?

Henderson: My plan is to parachute Basett hounds in behind enemy lines, armed to the teeth with standard issue rifles Sir.

Major: (chuckling) And I suppose, Henderson, that these dogs of yours, these dogs armed to the canines, I suppose they’re looking for a dogfight, eh, eh?

(snorts and guffaws at own joke. aside to Corporal who is not laughing.)

Major: Dogs, canine teeth, looking for a dogfight.

Corporal: No sah, I mean very funny Sah.

(Corporal forces weak laughter)

Major: Bah, anyway, what if they can’t get their chutes open? Have yer thought of that eh, Henderson?

Henderson: If the parachute fails, then the Bassett is perfectly equipped to glide to the battlefield safely by using their ears Sir.

Major: (head in hands) Are you mad man?

Henderson: No sir?

Major: Bassett hounds can’t carry rifles into battle. It’s not  .303 Lee Enfield rifles they want, Noooo, it’s a Sten Mk II machine gun they’ll want between their teeth. Straff the Bosch buggers as their gliding in! Permission granted. (stamps document)

Henderson: Oh thank you Sir (salutes).

______________________________________________________

Except, while you’re doing so, you could consider the interaction of scales in a multiscale system, such as an ecosystem. Oh, and this…

“How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile,
On every golden scale!”

Click the image to proceed

Relief Work

I. Etching

these words are older than runes
these words are not etched out of rock
these words are etched out of me
these new runes are neurones

II. Embossing

you put your words on paper

in the 1st dimension, they’re spoken in an instance
in the 2nd dimension, they’re printed, at best
in the 3rd dimension, they emboss your thoughts internally
in the 4th dimension, they etch your message eternally

for the benefit of the rest

Prize for the first person to tweet me with the (correct) Darwin connection.

© JFDerry-Kerosene101 2011

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