Category: Science and Society

We need to talk about police dogs

We need to talk about police dogs

It’s time we had a national conversation about if the way police dogs are currently used does more harm than it’s worth.

Earlier today, I published a feature on the use of police dogs in New Zealand, based on Tactical Options Reporting (TOR) data detailing police use of force which was released under the Official Information Act.

A shorter version has also been published on The Spinoff.

I hope you’ll take the time to read my full article on this. I think it’s a very important topic that isn’t talked about enough in New Zealand, and we should very seriously consider whether or not current practices are worth the harm they cause. But I’d also like to talk a little about the process of writing it.

Getting this data has been difficult. Each year, NZ Police publishes a summary of the use of force data for this year – its Tactical Options Research Reports – but they don’t contain everything. When the first set of raw data was released in March 2017, covering July-December 2016, I took it apart and discovered things I hadn’t known by reading the reports.

Using that data, and later including data covering later periods, I experimented with my first attempt at interactive data visualisation with a focus on how NZ Police’s application of force has a disproportionate impact on Māori.

That interactive ended up accompanying an NZ Herald article about how NZ Police use tactical options, including an incident during which an attack dog was set on an unarmed 12 year old girl. This incident only came to light because NZ Police released the raw data.

Despite it being 2021 now, my recent feature relies on TOR data covering 2018. After releasing the third set of TOR data, NZ Police began to refuse my requests for more data unless I would pay hundreds of dollars first. It took several requests over two years, and a complaint to the Ombudsman that took 9 months to resolve, before NZ Police finally released TOR data covering 2018.

I think this is data NZ Police should release proactively each year, but I’ve yet to see how they will react when I inevitably request TOR data covering 2019.

When they released the 2018 data, NZ Police also asked that:

To ensure data accuracy and integrity, NZ Police recommends that members of the public access use of force data directly via the OIA process and/or through the NZ Police Annual Tactical Options Report series

Unfortunately, I haven’t found the OIA process to be very quick. Practically every OIA request I’ve sent to NZ Police has taken over a month to get a response, and often that delay has been unlawful.

There are some cases, when you know exactly what questions you want to ask, when asking their OIA team can be a good course of action. Though if you have a good understanding of the data, having access to it can often help you answer questions yourself in a fraction of the time, without taking up anyone else’s resources.

For example, in November 2019 when the Mental Health Foundation was speaking out about its opposition to Police’s “Armed Response Teams” trial, it cited figures from Police’s 2016 TOR report about the disproportionate use of tasers against mentally ill people:

(Despite my expectation at the time, I didn’t have the 2018 data released to me for over a year after this tweet)

Though Police did report this statistic in their 2016 report, they chose not to include it in their 2017 report.

Though, when TASER was deployed, it was more likely to be discharged at subjects with perceived mental distress, irrespective of whether the subjects were armed or not, with a show to discharge ratio of 4:1 (compared to 6:1 for subjects with no perceived distress).

NZ Police Annual Tactical Options Research Report #5 (PDF Link)

Because I had access to the TOR data covering 2017, I was able to quickly determine what the relevant statistic was for 2017:

In 2017, police discharged tasers in 14.4% of incidents where they used them against a person who did not have a mental illness. But they discharged tasers in 25.4% of cases where the person did have a mental illness.

But this is a comparatively minor positive from having access to the raw data. The real benefit comes from the ability to do exploratory analysis.

Simply put, you don’t know what you don’t know. The answer to one question can prompt five more, and only one of those answers might be of interest. Going through the OIA process for this, with delays of a month or more for each answer, would be a painfully slow process.

Having had access to the full 2018 data, however, allowed me to do an exploratory analysis. I had intended for some time to write about the use of police dogs, since seeing the alarmingly high injury rate of police dogs when compared with other tactical options. This injury rate has been consistently reported in Police’s summary reports, and some related statistics can be calculated from the figures presented in them. But more complex and specific figures are absent. The data set is simply too large to present all of it in a summary report.

Even the cut down data that was released to me under the OIA, after Police recoded and withheld many columns in consultation with the Ombudsman to sufficiently anonymise the data, it was still 4,324 rows and 422 columns.

Alongside my police dogs feature, I published a “codebook” containing all the code I used to process the data, and to produce each of the figures and charts used in the article. But I wasn’t able to also document the whole process of my exploratory analysis here, including all the questions and answers that didn’t make it into the final article. Perhaps the closest I came was in printing out the summary of each column to see what it contained.

Most of the interesting insights in this data comes from interactions between columns. One of the two core figures in my article was one that I hadn’t expected to find, and only discovered through exploratory analysis while looking at the “PCA” columns describing how police officers categorised subjects’ behaviour.

In 76% of incidents when police officers set attack dogs on people in 2018, those people were below the “assaultive” threshold. That is, they were not expressing any intent to cause harm, either verbally or through their body language or actions.

Almost every time that happened — 73% of all attack dogs uses in 2018 — NZ Police recorded those people as being “active resistant”. They were pushing away, pulling away, or running away.

When I had begun writing my article, I hadn’t yet realised that most of the moderate and serious injuries inflicted by police were caused by police dogs, but this is something I could have determined from the information in Police’s annual TOR reports.

Once I saw this, I expected it to be the central figure in my article, but finding that the vast majority of the time police dogs were directed to bite people they were just trying to get away it was clear that this added a very important context to their use, and to the harm they do. If I didn’t have access to the data, I doubt I’d ever have learned that this was the case.

Knowing the right question to ask is often the hardest part of investigating something like this. Without being able to do this sort of exploratory analysis, finding the right question can be a very difficult task.

I really hope NZ Police will continue to release their use of force data year on year. It’s too important a topic to not be subjected to independent scrutiny.

Official information kept secret too long

Official information kept secret too long

Official information is being kept secret for longer than it should be. For the past few months, I have been gathering and analysing data from 12 government agencies, looking at how they handle requests made under the Official Information Act.

My findings reflect what many have observed more anecdotally: responses to requests for information are often sent at the very last minute, and seem to often be delayed unnecessarily. Though it can be difficult to demonstrate that a response was not sent “as soon as reasonably practicable” — a requirement under the law — in any particular case, looking at a larger data set reveals some of the strategies used to delay the release of official information.

You can read my article here: Official information kept secret too long

NZ Police pursuits keep killing people

NZ Police pursuits keep killing people

Despite a repeated cycle of calls for change, people keep dying in police pursuits in New Zealand. Just today, a teenager and a child died as the result of a police pursuit in Palmerston North.

News stories like these keep appearing. In February this year I asked NZ Police to release a number of statistics regarding police pursuits so I could examine what, if anything, has changed. I began to write about it in March but didn’t end up publishing it, having intended to put it on a new “features” subdomain I’ve been working on where I’ll be able to do some more complicated stuff than WordPress will allow.

One of the statistics I included was the number of people who have died as a result of police pursuits since the most recent review began. I’ve gotten very sick of having to update that number. So out of that frustration, I’ve published my article. You can read it here: NZ Police pursuits keep killing people

OIA accessibility follow-up

OIA accessibility follow-up

What will be done about the Official Information Act’s accessibility problem?

Late last year, I published an open letter on the accessibility of the Official Information Act. I gave examples of inaccessible responses to requests under the OIA, and suggested a solution. I sent this letter to the Ombudsman, and later also forwarded it to Associate Minister of State Services (Open Government) Clare Curran and to Minister for Disability Issues Carmel Sepuloni.

I’ve now heard back from the latter two, and want to share their responses so others interested in this topic can read what’s being done to address it.

I’d also lodged an OIA request with the Ministry of Defence last year, as their Briefing to Incoming Minister document was released as a text-based PDF with watermarks and redaction. I’d asked them what software they used to produce this, and the associated costs, so I’d be able to give a specific recommendation to agencies who send me inaccessible responses in the future.

I’ve received a response to this request as well. As with the responses from Clare Curran and Carmel Sepuloni, you can find the text and PDF link to this response below.

Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically, all three responses were received in the form of image-based PDFs of documents that had been printed, signed, and then scanned. This is the primary accessibility issue I’d raised in my letter regarding OIA responses, as this format cannot be easily converted to text and is inaccessible to people who rely on screen readers. A couple of the responses also contained links that I’ve had to type out by hand instead, due to this inaccessible format. I’ve made the original PDFs available, and also converted them to text (by hand, so please assume any mistakes are mine), which you can find below:

Response from Clare Curran, Associate Minister of State Services (Open Government). Original PDF

Dear Mark Hanna

OIA Accessibility

Thank you for your email on 30 November 2017, regarding the accessibility of information released to requesters under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA). I note your concerns about the format some agencies choose to provide information in, which can render that information unsearchable by the recipient.

As you are aware, section 16(2) of the Official Information Act provides that information can be made available in a way preferred by the requester, unless there is good reason identified by the agency not to do this. In the first instance it is for the requester to ask the agency to make information, and in particular data sets available in a searchable format. If the agency refuses then this can be the subject of a complaint to the Ombudsman.

The State Services Commissioner has been delegated the functions under section 46 of the OIA by the Ministry of Justice. This function includes providing advice and guidance to agencies to act in accordance with the OIA. SSC has established an official information work programme which includes developing guidance for agencies. I think that the issues you have raised are worthy of further consideration.

I have asked the State Services Commission to consider whether accessibility of information should be part of the official information work programme that the Commission is undertaking.

Yours sincerely

Hon Clare Curran
Associate Minister of State Services (Open Government)

Response from Carmel Sepuloni, Minister for Disability Issues. Original PDF

Dear Mr Hanna

Thank you for your email dated 30 November 2017, regarding accessibility issues with Official Information Act (OIA) practices and across government more generally. The Government is committed to being open and transparent and we expect the same of the public service.

I have been advised that the Official and Parliamentary Information team within the Ministry of Social Development will soon utilise more sophisticated redaction software. This software will enable the Ministry of Social Development to send and publish OIA responses and documents that are text searchable and text recognisable for those requesters who use reading software.

Providing OIA responses in accessible formats should be standard practice as part of an open and transparent government. To this end, the Ministry of Social Development is leading a work programme to increase the accessibility of information and communications across government agencies. This will involve providing clear and practical advice to support government agencies to meet accessibility requirements for all their communications with the public. Participating Chief Executives have signed up to an Accessibility Statement to commit to this. You can find more information about this here: www.odi.govt.nz/nz-disability-strategy/outcome-5-accessibility/

Thank you for writing. I hope this information is helpful.

Ngā mihi

Hon Carmel Sepuloni
Minister for Disability Issues

Response from Ministry of Defence. Original PDF

Dear Mr Hanna

RESPONSE TO YOUR OFFICIAL INFORMATION REQUEST

Thank you for your email of 7 December 2017 regarding the software used to create the redacted and watermarked 2017 Briefing to the Incoming Minister of Defence, published on the Beehive website.

The Ministry of Defence recognises that publishing a document online as a text-searchable PDF file makes is easier to access. We prepare material for release in this form wherever possible, and endeavour to provide alternative formats on request for non-searchable documents, such as older files.

In order to produce searchable, redacted and watermarked files, the source documents are generally prepared using Microsoft Office software and then exported as searchable PDF files. Adobe Acrobat Professional software is then used to make redactions and add watermarks.

The Ministry has an agreement with the New Zealand Defence Force on software licensing. The Defence Force pays for an all-inclusive software bundle and is charged a flat rate. They distribute the licenses for Adobe Acrobat Professional as needed by staff. Please refer to the Adobe Acrobat website for costs: https://acrobat.adobe.com/nz/en/acrobat/pricing.html. The cost to agencies will be affected by volume. Assuming multiple licenses are purchased, the Adobe website indicated pricing of A$22.99 per seat per month (about NZ$25 at present exchange rates) or A$275.86 per year (about NZ$300).

Under section 28(3) of the Official Information Act 1982 you have the right to request the Ombudsman to investigate and review this response.

Yours sincerely

Helene Quilter
Secretary of Defence

It’s not clear yet whether or not accessibility of information will be part of the SSC’s official information work programme that Clare Curran mentioned. Though I’m hopeful that it will be, I’m not sure how likely this is to effect change.

I strongly agree with Carmel Sepuloni’s statement that “Providing OIA responses in accessible format should be standard practice as part of an open and transparent government”, and hope that she will do her best to ensure our government meets that standard. I’m cautiously optimistic, though the fact that this response itself was delivered in an inaccessible format isn’t encouraging.

For the foreseeable future, it sounds like the best course of action will be to ensure that all OIA requests specify that the response should be delivered in an accessible, searchable format. I have included this recommendation in the OIA Guide that I published last year.

If I receive inaccessible PDF responses in the future, I now intend to direct the agency to the Ministry of Defence’s response regarding the software they use.

OIA Accessibility

OIA Accessibility

The Official Information Act has an accessibility problem.

I wrote recently about asking the government for information, having just published a guide to using the OIA. The OIA is a powerful tool, but it can be limited by how government agencies choose to follow it. One particular limitation that comes up again and again is accessibility.

There is a hashtag on Twitter that’s often used by journalists and activists, myself included, to talk about issues with the Official Information Act: #fixtheOIA

Today Nikki Macdonald, senior feature writer at the Dominion Post, started a discussion about a widespread and rather infuriating practice for responding to requests for official information:

In response to a recent request she made under the OIA, she received a PDF of a scanned document that included a large amount of tabular data.

The issue she mentions is one I have seen many times. It is common practice to take a document that will be released under the OIA, print it, then scan it back into a PDF, then send that PDF instead of the original document.

Printing and scanning documents allows for them to be signed, which is typically done with OIA response letters (though not with documents released alongside them). PDFs cannot be altered by the recipients, so the information is kept intact as it was released.

Also, perhaps most importantly, because these PDFs come from scanned documents they don’t contain any text. Instead, they just contain images of text. This means there is absolutely no way the recipient will be able to view information that has been withheld from released documents.

But releasing documents as images of text has a huge drawback too: accessibility

Most obviously, this will affect requestors who are blind or have impaired vision. If you rely on a screen reader to read these documents, it won’t be able to read a PDF that’s full of images. It’s a pain in the ass for those of us who are fully sighted as well.

There is software that can be used to convert images of text back into text, but it doesn’t always work perfectly, and often these image-based PDFs will include tables of data that are only really useful once converted into a spreadsheet. And, frankly, knowledge of how to use specialised software shouldn’t be a requirement for using the OIA to get usable information.

This isn’t the only accessibility issue with the OIA. Government agencies have also been known to do things like refuse to release documents online for unclear “security reasons“, instead telling the requestor that they must pay to have it posted to them.

Recently, Sam Warburton has been documenting a particularly trying OIA response on Twitter. First, he was sent documents that were locked by a password, which prevented him from copying text out of them:

He then made a second OIA request asking for all correspondence regarding the first request, so he could get to the bottom of how this bizarre twist had come about. The response was, well, not very accessible. He was sent 249 pages of printed documents, with the excuse being that it was “too big” to send digitally:

I think we should be able to expect better. Far better, in fact. And I’ve written the following open letter to the Ombudsman in the hope that this aspect of using the OIA can be improved:

Tēnā koe,

There has been a discussion on the “#fixtheOIA” hashtag on Twitter started by Nikki Macdonald today about the common practice of agencies sending responses to requests for official information in PDF format, where the contents of the PDF must be either transcribed by hand or converted using specialised software before they are useful.

I’ve observed this practice across several agencies, including those I have most commonly made requests to: New Zealand Police, the Department of Corrections, and ACC. It seems as though the response is written up, then it is printed out and the physical copy is signed before being scanned, and finally the scanned copy is sent to the requestor as a PDF. This means that, effectively, the response is delivered in the format of an image of text.

This has obvious accessibility issues for requestors who are blind or have impaired vision, but is also detrimental to sighted requestors.

For example, I recently received such a response from the Department of Corrections which included some long URLs. It is not possible to copy text from these responses without specialised software that many requestors will be unlikely to know much about (OCR – Optical Character Recognition – software can be used convert images of text into actual text). In this case, I had to type the URLs out by hand. Though there were only three of them in this instance, a lengthier response could easily have made this a significant barrier to accessing the released information.

A very long and difficult to type URL.

In the case raised by Nikki Macdonald, I understand she received a PDF response that, unexpectedly, also included large amounts of data. However, because the release was effectively an image of this data rather than a more usable format such as a spreadsheet, it will require a conversion process (either by hand or via OCR software) before it can be used.

I received a similar response in 2015, when I requested documents from the Ministry of Health but did not specify a preferred format. One of the documents I had requested was a large spreadsheet, but it was released to me as a PDF. Though this particular PDF was at least text-based, I still had to use specialised software to convert it to a usable format. I have made the PDF I was sent available online: compliance-of-comp-meds-manufacturers-2-oct-2007.pdf

While this issue can be pre-empted by requesting that the information should be released in a specific accessible format, such as an XSLX or CSV spreadsheet for data, this is not always realistic when it’s unclear whether or not the response is likely to include this type of information.

Despite section 16 of the OIA laying out certain responsibilities here, this approach is also not always respected by the agency. I have received multiple datasets as image-based PDFs despite requested explicitly as XSLX or CSV spreadsheets.

Here is an example of one response where I had to transcribe data by hand. The full response contains more data, as it continues onto the next page:

A table of data.

I have also assisted other requestors in transcribing information received this way, during which I was reminded that it can be quite a painful and time-consuming process for a requestor who is neither a fast typist nor able to use specialised OCR software.

In cases where OCR software is used to convert an image-based PDF response into a text-based one, which allows responses to be searched for certain keywords, this is often hampered by “Released under the Official Information Act” watermarks that are commonly overlaid on each page of released documents. These watermarks interfere with the software’s character recognition, so that portions of the text must instead be transcribed by hand. Poor quality scans, such as misaligned pages, can also cause issues with using OCR software to convert released information into an accessible format.

OCR software can also incorrectly transcribe parts of text, so it is always necessary to compare its output with the original PDF. This can be a time-consuming process, and is inaccessible to requestors who are blind or have impaired vision.

My impression, from talking with other users of the Official Information Act, is that this is a common and frustrating experience, widely regarded by requestors as being unnecessary and obstructive.

I accept that there may be cases where it would be difficult for an agency to release a text-based document with appropriate redactions, and where the reason for each piece of information withheld is clear and the withheld information cannot be accessed. However, there are clearly many cases where information could be released in a more accessible format, and where this would happen if the requestor had known to specify such a format in their request. I would hope that it might be expected that, when information can be released in any of several different formats with similar effort, the most accessible format should be used by default.

For example, after having seen me express frustration on social media about having to transcribe length URLs by hand from an OIA response, the Department of Corrections has agreed that they will now include links in the body of the email sent as a response. Although this only affects a small part of the response, this change would make the URLs significantly more accessible by allowing them to be used directly, without having to transcribe them from the PDF attachment.

I have looked through the Official Information Act and the official information legislation guides on your website for guidance on this accessibility issue.

The closest thing I have found is the relatively recent case note regarding a request from a prisoner who was unable to access information publicly available via the internet, after their request was refused under section 18(d).

Unfortunately, I have not found anything specific to this issue of accessibility. I’d greatly appreciate any advice you might be able to give on making requests in a way that should make a more accessible response more likely.

I would also like to suggest that a guideline on this issue might significantly improve both the experience of making requests for official information and the accessibility of released information.

I think it would be reasonable to expect agencies to release information with an accessibility-first mindset. This would be consistent with standards such as the New Zealand Government Web Toolkit, which recommends the following:

“Choose formats that are both easy to use and most likely to be accessible in the future. Choose openly documented formats over closed formats, or ensure that material released in closed formats is also accompanied by an equivalent in open formats.”

Particularly as many requests are made publicly available, either by the agency, through a service such as FYI.org.nz, or by direct sharing from person to person, it is important to consider issues such as accessibility for the blind and visually impaired for every request.

It is my opinion that accessibility should be considered an important part of information being made “available”, as per the Official Information Act’s Principle of Availability.

Ngā mihi,
Mark Hanna

Asking the government for information

Asking the government for information

You have the right to ask the government for information. Because of a law called the Official Information Act (OIA), they’re obliged to give it to you unless there is a good reason not to.

You’ve likely seen the OIA mentioned in the news. Phrases like “Documents released to [news outlet] under the Official Information Act” can often be found in important news stories. It’s in indispensable tool for holding the government to account.

Some of my articles here have also been based on information that I only had access to because of the OIA. For example, my articles about ACC’s funding of acupuncture have all been based heavily on information released under the OIA.

My articles on strip searches in prisons, organ donation, and the history of the complementary medicines industry have also all used information released under OIA.

An interactive visualisation I did of police use of force data released under the OIA found a place on the Herald Insights website earlier this year, and the story accompanying it was published on the front page. Organ donation statistics I’d requested also made the front page of the Herald in April of 2016.

It’s such a great and flexible tool, so I want to make sure everyone is able to use it.

It can feel a bit daunting if you think you might need to read the legislation itself to understand what you need to do. So to help make the OIA more accessible, I’ve written a guide to its use based on my experience with it.

You can find the guide at oia.nz

OIA Guide

I hope you find it useful!

Steffan Browning Leaving Parliament

Steffan Browning Leaving Parliament

Steffan Browning will leave his role as an MP next year, which is a great opportunity for the Green Party to ditch their anti-science baggage.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Green Party. I love their social policies, but as someone who dedicates a lot of my time to fighting pseudoscience I have a hard time justifying support for a political party with anti-science tendencies.

In the lead up to the 2014 general election, when I was considering where I would place my party vote, I emailed the Greens’ then health spokesperson Kevin Hague with some questions about Green Party health policy.

Hague’s response satisfied me that, despite the party’s reputation, references in their health policy to being evidence-based were more than just lip service. I voted for them.

Then, just a month later, Green MP Steffan Browning went and endorsed homeopathy as a treatment for ebola.

Luckily, the response from Green Party leadership was pretty good. Browning’s “Natural Health” portfolio was taken away from him and folded into Hague’s health portfolio, after which then co-leader Russell Norman was pretty clear:

It’s not something we support and it’s not Green Party Policy.

Green MP regrets call to treat Ebola with homeopathy – One News

The Green Party was awarded two awards by the NZ Skeptics at their 2014 conference. One, the Bent Spoon award, goes each year to “the New Zealand organisation which has shown the most egregious gullibility or lack of critical thinking in public coverage of, or commentary on, a science-related issue”. In 2014, it went to Steffan Browning.

But they also chose Russell Norman for a Bravo award

for quickly responding to Steffan Browning’s comments and stating that this was not something the Green Party would support as they take “an evidence based approach”.

Bravo Awards – NZ Skeptics

After this wobble, it looked like the Greens had recovered and maybe taken another little step away from their anti-science past.

But since then both Russell Norman and Kevin Hague have left the Green Party. Though they are by no means the only great people in the Greens, I feel they had shown themselves to support evidence-based policy. I’ve been worried for some time now that it might signal a return to the Greens’ anti-science past, especially as Steffan Browning still held their GE portfolio despite his anti-science views on that topic.

The Greens’ reputation took another blow in my mind this year, as I discovered when researching DHB candidates for links to quackery that the Greens were backing Sue Kedgley in her stand for the Wellington City Council and the Capital & Coast DHB.

I felt strongly enough about this that I wrote to the Greens to express my disappointment.

When Steffan Browning put his foot in it soon after the election by supporting homeopathy for ebola, I worried I might have made the wrong choice. But the swift reaction from the party’s leadership again convinced me I’d done the right thing.

Now I see that the Greens are supporting Sue Kedgley as one of their candidates for Wellington City Council. I’m really, really disappointed about this. And it makes me worry for the party’s future.

I’m sure you’re aware of Ms Kedgley’s history of being on the wrong side of scientific evidence, especially when it comes to healthcare. I know I am. I have seen her be an anti-vaccine scaremongerer, try to get quackery like homeopathy integrated into the medical system, oppose safe and effective food biosecurity technology like irradiation, and misleadingly call smart meters a “threat to health“. I could go on and on; there seems to be no shortage of opinions Ms Kedgley has espoused that are at odds with the scientific consensus.

With Kevin Hague now leaving the Greens to his new role at Forest & Bird, seeing this makes me very concerned about the current direction of the Green party. Steffan Browning still holds his GE portfolio despite his unscientific views in that area, and the party is throwing its weight behind a city council candidate like Sue Kedgley. It makes me think perhaps the Greens aren’t the evidence-based party I hoped they could be.

Mark Hanna

Unfortunately, Kedgley has now been re-elected to both the Greater Wellington Regional Council and Capital & Coast DHB

With all this context, I hope you can all understand why I’m happy to hear the news today that Steffan Browning is not seeking re-election in 2017.

This could be a great opportunity for the Green Party to shed their anti-science baggage and commit themselves to becoming the evidence-based party that many people, including myself, want them to become.

A good start would be re-addressing their stance on GE technology to align it more closely with scientific evidence.

But also, I feel like the time has come for the Greens to cut ties with Sue Kedgley. She hasn’t been on their list since 2011. Although Browning is stepping down as a Green MP voluntarily, this is a chance for the Greens to move past their anti-science past by cutting ties with Sue Kedgley.

Here’s hoping that, in 2017, they will be an evidence-based option.

Fun with Light

Fun with Light

There are lots of cool science activities you can do at home with light.

Like I’ve done almost every year of my life, I spent my summer break at my family bach at Oakura. Last summer I wrote a post about a trip to the rocks and what could be found living there. This summer, on the relatively few sunny days we had, I had fun playing with light.

Here are three easy, fun, and cheap activities you can try yourself.

  1. Make a Telescope
  2. See Shadows Jump
  3. Wave at the International Space Station

Make a Telescope

The previous year, I made a simple telescope out of a $2 set of two magnifying glasses. Playing with trial and error and a piece of soft wood, I ended up with something that had a zoom of about 2x. However, because it only used two lenses the resulting image was inverted.

IMG_2683

IMG_2686

This summer, I came prepared with an extra set of magnifying glasses, making four in total. I raided the recycling bin and used some ginger beer bottles to hold them in place, facing an island in the bay. Then I moved them back and forth until the zoom and focus seemed as good as I could get it.

Once I had the placement right, I marked off the distances on a long piece of wood, then taped the magnifying glasses to it. What I ended up with wasn’t the strongest or most portable telescope in the world, but all it took to make was $4 and a fun afternoon.

20151228_160600

20151228_160808

20151228_16101820151228_190418

See Shadows Jump

My brother Jeremy is a concept artist for Weta Workshop, which has left him with a good understanding of light and colour. One evening up at the beach he started talking about some interesting things that shadows do.

Watching shadows of leaves dance on the ground, he wondered if they often form natural pinholes. When we had a partial solar eclipse in Auckland in 2012, my mum (who also has a great artistic understanding of light and colour) mentioned to me how the shadows in her garden looked strange when she went outside during the eclipse. This would have been due to the pinhole effect, and it’s why some of the recommended ways of viewing an eclipse are to make a pinhole in a piece of paper or use a colander.

You’ve probably seen diagrams showing the basics of how a pinhole camera works. Even without a lens, when light passes through a small hole it can project a sharp image on a surface opposite that hole. However, that image will be inverted (like in my first attempt at making a telescope).

Pinhole-camera

I often collect pāua shells from my trips to the rocks when I’m at the beach. A pāua shell has a row of holes along one side. When I held it a certain distance away from a wall, with the Sun low on the horizon, we found it made a row of pinholes. But because a projection of the Sun looks the same inverted as it does normally, in order to tell if the image really was inverted I moved a cardboard roll behind the pāua and watched at the holes “filled up” with shadow backwards – just as we’d expected.

But something else happened which I definitely didn’t expect. Watch this video we took to see the shadow of the pāua shell reach out to touch the cardboard roll’s shadow as they get close together:

If instead the pāua shell was held closer to the Sun and the cardboard roll was closer to the wall, then we found it would be the shadow of the cardboard roll that bulged out as they got close.

We immediately took to pen and paper to try to draw out diagrams that would explain how this worked. My initial idea was that we were seeing the area of intersection between the penumbras – the hazy edge of the shadows where the Sun was only partially obscured. But this wouldn’t explain why the bulge would change depending on which object was in front of the other.

Before too long, one of Jeremy’s ray diagrams seemed to explain what was happening. I’ve tried to reproduce them here (I hope you’re all suitably awed by my skills with MS Paint):

Shadow Single

This diagram shows a light source on the left casting a shadow from the object in the middle onto the surface on the right. It shows how a non-point light source such as the Sun produces a shadow with an umbra (where none of its light reaches) and a penumbra (where part of its light reaches). The darkest part of the shadow, the umbra, is the middle section between the lines on the right.

Now, what would happen if I insert another object partly between the light source and the first object?

Shadow Overlap

The new object blocks some of the light from reaching the original object. As this ray diagram shows with the red line – where the light is partially blocked – the result of inserting this second object is that the umbra of the first object’s shadow is extended toward the new object. This is the cause of the bulge you can see in the video above.

It turns out this shadow jumping effect is called the shadow blister effect. You can observe it easily for yourself on any sunny day.

Wave at the International Space Station

The sky at Oakura is lovely and dark, with the nearest city being nearly 50 km away. Before the Moon rose one night after Christmas a few of us went up a nearby hill to stare up at the night sky.

With a clear dark sky, you can see the band of the Milky Way galaxy arc across the sky like a pale cloud, as well as the fuzzy blobs that are the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud. These are dwarf galaxies which orbit the Milky Way.

We also saw many meteors, and a surprisingly high number of satellites. From Earth satellites look just like stars, except they move steadily across the sky in a straight line. Usually they appear quite dim, but there is one satellite in particular which can shine brighter than any star in the sky, and even brighter than any of the planets. That is the largest artificial satellite of them all: the International Space Station (ISS).

International_Space_Station_after_undocking_of_STS-132

The ISS orbits the Earth about once every 90 minutes, and although it doesn’t pass over New Zealand each time it does fly over us more often than you might think. But we can’t always see it in the sky; the conditions have to be right first.

Before we can see the ISS the sky needs to be dark enough for it to stand out. Also, it needs to be in the right position for sunlight to reflect down at us off its massive arrays of solar panels. This means that you’ll only be able to see it in the hours after sunset and before sunrise.

It generally takes 1-6 minutes for the ISS to pass visibly overhead. This will usually end with it appearing to fade into darkness as it stops reflecting sunlight back at us – you won’t see it set over the horizon like you would with the Sun or Moon.

NASA has a great online service, which you can subscribe to and get email alerts, that can tell you when and where to look to spot the ISS. It’s called Spot The Station. It lets you enter a city, and will tell you when the next few ISS sightings will be as well as how long they will last, and how it will travel across the sky.

ISS sightings often come in clusters – there will be sightings around a similar time in the morning or evening for several days in a row, followed by a period of no sightings. If you’re extra lucky, you might get to see it twice in one evening as it comes back round an hour and a half later.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that you can rent our bach if you ever want to see Oakura with your own eyes.

Press Council Complaint: Homeopathy in the Wairarapa Times-Age

In February this year, an article was published in the Wairarapa Times-Age (both in print and online) headlined Use of natural remedies is on the rise. The article discussed some specific cases of so-called “natural remedies” being used to treat serious diseases, such as intravenous vitamin C for leukaemia and homeopathy to treat various forms of cancer.

Except for a brief mention at the bottom of the article encouraging people with cancer to talk to their doctor before using any “alternative therapies”, there was no mention of the fact that none of the treatments discussed are supported by any reliable evidence. Instead, the article uncritically included various quotes such as this, from homeopath Claire Bleakley:

Featherston-based homeopath Claire Bleakley said she has treated cancer patients using similar natural remedies [to intravenous vitamin C] – significantly extending life expectancy.

She mentioned two of her patients in particular: A man with tumours who lived for seven years after being given two to live, and a woman with ovarian cancer who lived 15 years past her initial prognosis.

“There have been some exceptional results,” Mrs Bleakley said.

“We are indoctrinated to think chemotherapy is the only cure for cancer, but alternative [remedies] have been proven to be more life giving.”

Medical anecdotes such as these unfortunately tend to be very convincing despite the fact that they can also be completely misleading. The reasons why people might get better are varied and complex. Without running a controlled test, there’s no way to know whether or not a particular treatment contributed to an improvement in health. That’s exactly why we need to undertake rigorous clinical trials before we can say with confidence what the effects of any particular treatment are. It’s also why the Medicines Act prohibits the use of health testimonials like this in advertisements, although that restriction of course doesn’t extend to news articles in publications like the Times-Age.

I thought, and still do think, that the lack of balance in this article has the capacity to do serious harm. I wrote to the editor of the Wairarapa Times-Age to make my case, and to give some suggestions for how they might attempt to mitigate the damage this article could do, in a formal complaint:

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to you to make a formal complaint regarding the article “Use of natural remedies is on the rise” published in the Wairarapa Times-Age this morning:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/wairarapa-times-age/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503414&objectid=11399310

This article uncritically promotes the use of so-called “natural remedies” such as vitamin C or homeopathy for the treatment of cancer. They are promoted by the inclusion of quotes such as “There have been some exceptional results”, regarding the treatment of cancer with homeopathic products.

None of the relevant controversy regarding these treatments is discussed in the article. Although there is a brief note at the end that “those living with cancer [are encouraged] to consult their doctor or specialist before embarking on any alternative therapies”, this does not sufficiently address the important and relevant fact that these treatments are entirely unsupported by scientific evidence, as well as the utter implausibility of treatments like homeopathy.

The failure to discuss the lack of scientific evidence supporting these treatments, as well as the complete lack of plausibility underlying homeopathy, violates the Press Council’s principle of “Fairness, Accuracy and Balance”. The description of this principle on the Press Council’s website states that:

“Publications should be bound at all times by accuracy, fairness and balance, and should not deliberately mislead or misinform readers by commission or omission. In articles of controversy or disagreement, a fair voice must be given to the opposition view.

Exceptions may apply for long-running issues where every side of an issue or argument cannot reasonably be repeated on every occasion and in reportage of proceedings where balance is to be judged on a number of stories, rather than a single report.”

This is not a long-running issue in which readers can readily be expected to be familiar with the lack of evidence supporting the treatments discussed in the article, so the exception should not apply. There is significant controversy surrounding the issues discussed in this article, but a fair voice has not been given to the opposition view.

Particularly as this article could lead to people living with serious diseases such as cancer to rely on ineffective treatments such as homeopathy, its lack of balance has the potential to cause real and serious harm. Therefore it is important that the Wairarapa Times-Age take appropriate action to prevent this harm by amending the article, publishing a prominent correction, or publishing a followup article linked to from today’s article, that discusses the lack of evidence and plausibility underlying the treatments discussed in today’s article.

If the Wairarapa Times-Age has trouble finding any experts to talk to about this topic, either the Society for Science Based Healthcare (http://sbh.org.nz/contact) or the Science Media Centre (http://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/contact-us/) will be able to help.

Sincerely,

Mark Hanna
Society for Science Based Healthcare

Despite sending a follow-up email a few days later, I still hadn’t heard back from the editor over the next 10 working days, which is the deadline set in the Press Council’s complaints process as the time to wait before escalating a complaint to them if you don’t hear back from the editor. After I forwarded my complaint to the Press Council, the editor contacted me to apologise that he’d overlooked my complaint messages, which was apparently due to his having to deal with another complaint about the same article from Peter Griffin, manager of the Science Media Centre (Peter is also the editor and manager of Sciblogs, where my blog is syndicated, and we’d discussed our complaints via email prior to submitting them).

When I forwarded my complaint to the Press Council, I fleshed it out a bit more. I won’t quote the whole thing here as a lot of it would just be repeating myself, although I’d be happy to share my full complaint if anyone would like to see it, but here is one part I added that I think is important and worth sharing:

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the Wairarapa Times-Age has not published a large number of articles regarding this, so it cannot be argued that the counterpoints have already been published in earlier articles.

When it comes to whether or not readers can be expected to be familiar with the important facts not mentioned in this article, I would like to bring the Press Council’s attention to a 2009 study (I am not aware of any more recent data collected on this) published in the New Zealand Medical Journal entitled “Beliefs about homeopathy among patients presenting at GP surgeries”. This study can be accessed for free on Page 94 of this PDF:
http://www.nzma.org.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/17794/Vol-122-No-1295-22-May-2009.pdf

This study found that only 8 out of 124 respondents disagreed to some extent that “There is good scientific evidence that homeopathy works”, and only 24 respondents reported that they believed homeopathic products were either “very dilute” or that there was “nothing there”. In contrast, 82 respondents agreed to some extent that “There is good scientific evidence that homeopathy works”, and 80 believed that homeopathic products are either “Very concentrated”, “Moderately concentrated”, or “Moderately dilute”.

Contrary to these common beliefs, most homeopathic products are diluted to the point that it is astronomically unlikely that there is even a single molecule of the original ingredient present in the product, and there effectiveness is thoroughly unsupported by scientific evidence. For example, a rigorous review undertaken by the Australian Government’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) in 2013 investigated the evidence regarding homeopathy for 68 clinical conditions and concluded that “The available evidence is not compelling and fails to demonstrate that homeopathy is an effective treatment for any of the reported clinical conditions in humans”
(https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/your_health/complementary_medicines/nhmrc_homeopathy_overview_report_october_2013_140407.pdf)

For this reason, and especially because the article discussed the use of ineffective therapies in the treatment of terminal illness, it is very important that stories such as this be balanced. As I stated in my original complaint to the editor, I believe the article in its current form has the capacity to do serious harm and that the Wairarapa Times-Age has a responsibility to mitigate this harm. An appropriate response would be amending the article, publishing a prominent correction, or publishing a followup article linked to from the article from the 10th of February that discusses the lack of evidence and plausibility underlying the treatments discussed in today’s article.

(The NHMRC link I provide there is from their 2013 conclusion. Within 2 weeks of submitting this complaint, however, they released their final statement on homeopathy, which states “there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective”. This statement was not reported in the Wairarapa Times-Age)

Once the complaint was escalated to the Press Council, the editor of the Times-Age was given an opportunity to respond, then I had a final opportunity to write a short response to that. His primary argument was that the topic of “alternative medicine” was a long-running issue in a wider context, and that the exemption to the principle of balance should apply because other media have reported on the opposing side of the issue.

I strongly disagree with this argument. Although it’s true that media like the Wairarapa Times-Age do not exist in a vacuum, I don’t think this should mean that they don’t have a responsibility to provide balanced articles for their readers. The way I interpret the Press Council code, the exception can be useful when an article is part of a series of articles on the same issue, and when taken in the context of other articles in the series the overall view still maintains an appropriate balance. In the interest of balanced reporting, I believe exceptions to the principle of balance should be applied very sparingly.

Unfortunately, the Press Council disagreed with me. They have ruled not to uphold the complaint, and you can view their entire decision on their website here:
Case Number: 2426 MARK HANNA AGAINST WAIRARAPA TIMES-AGE

Here’s a link to their similar ruling regarding the complaint from the Science Media Centre:
Case Number: 2425 SCIENCE MEDIA CENTRE AGAINST WAIRARAPA TIMES-AGE

Here is a summary of their decision:

The Press Council agrees with the editor that the debate over alternative remedies is sufficiently well known not to require balancing comment in every story about them. The subject falls within the exception to the principle of balance for issues of enduring public discussion.

The complainant in this case raised the important question of whether the exception can be invoked for an article in a newspaper that may not itself have covered both sides of the debate. The Council considered this point closely and came to the view that the exception has not been applied as narowly as the complainant contends and should not be. A newspaper, even if it is the sole newspaper of its locality, does not exist in a vacuum. Its readers, meeting an uncritical story on the supposed popularity of homeopathy and natural remedies, are likely to be aware the efficacy of these treatments is strongly contested by medical science.

I think this is a very worrying precedent to set. Newspapers such as the Wairarapa Times-Age can now feel justified in publishing unbalanced articles on topics such as homeopathy without feeling bound to uphold the Press Council’s principle of balance. The public have a reasonable expectation, given that the Press Council exists to uphold standards in reporting and its first principle is that articles should be accurate, fair, and balanced. While it’s a good idea to take everything you read with a grain of salt, you should be able to feel justified in expecting media reports on controversial topics to provide a balanced view. I worry that people might read articles such as this with that assumption in mind, and falsely conclude that the views omitted from the article are not merited.

I’m also rather frustrated that the Press Council concluded that anyone reading articles such as this is “likely to be aware the efficacy of these treatments is strongly contested by medical science” even though I provided data from a survey that found only 6% of respondents disagreed that “there is good scientific evidence that homeopathy works”. I understand that the survey I cited was conducted 6 years ago, but as I said in my complaint I’m unaware of anything more recent.

Although I don’t think it is, I really hope that the Press Council’s conclusion that most people are aware that homeopathy is not supported by evidence is correct. Following last year’s story about Green MP Steffan Browning backing homeopathy for ebola and March’s story about the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council concluding that homeopathy does not improve people’s health, I think there is some basis to believe that more people are familiar with the lack of evidence surrounding homeopathy than 6 years ago, but I don’t expect there would be that large a difference.

One positive thing to take away from this, at least, is that the journalist who wrote the article said in a Facebook comment that she understood the article was unbalanced and that she should have done better. I hope she’ll take this as a learning experience and, when she or other Wairarapa Times-Age reporters write on matters of “natural health” in the future, that they get in touch with the Science Media Centre to provide that much-needed balance. If we can’t rely on the Press Council to hold journalists to a high standard of balanced reporting, then we’ll have to rely on journalists’ and editors’ own standards.

EDIT 2015/04/14 10:05 am: Peter Griffin, who also complained to the Press Council about this article, has published his thoughts on the ruling as well: When balance goes out the window

EDIT 2015/04/04 1:13 pm: The Wairarapa Times-Age has published a short article on this ruling: Times-Age supported by Press Council

EDIT 2015/04/14 2:21 pm: Grant Jacobs has also published a post with his thoughts on this ruling: Press Council rules on knowing readers minds?

EDIT 2015/04/15 2:51 pm: Andrew Bonallack, the editor of the Wairarapa Times-Age, has published his thoughts on the Press Council decision in an opinion piece for the Times-Age: Your right to choose sacrosanct

100% Natural and Chemical Free

This afternoon, the Advertising Standards Authority released their decision to uphold an interesting complaint regarding advertisements for a couple of cleaning products on a website. Here is the ASA’s description of how the products were described on the website:

The Wendyl’s website (http://wendyls.co.nz/) for “100% natural cleaning and beauty products” advertised their products as having “all their ingredients listed and contain no fillers, chemicals or synthetics.”

The webpage for Wendyl’s Oxygen Bleach 1KG (sodium Percarbonate) stated, in part:

This is powdered hydrogen peroxide which is a greener alternative to chlorine bleach because it breaks down to oxygen and water in the environment.

The webpage for Wendyl-San oxygen soaker 1KG stated, in part:

I’ve spent years testing this oxygen soaker and stain remover and I’m so glad to have something which is so free of chemicals and additives. Secret ingredient is sodium percarbonate, a powdered hydrogen peroxide bleach which breaks down in the environment to oxygen and water…

The complainant, food scientist Claire Suen, said that they breached the Advertising Code of Ethics and the Code for Environmental Claims. This excerpt is, I think, a good summary of their complaint:

The advertiser uses words such as “100% natural”, and “contains no fillers, chemicals, or synthetics”.

However, the product in question is sodium percarbonate, which is not a naturally occurring product. The main active ingredient, hydrogen peroxide, is also not a naturally occurring product and it is not stable in nature.

Both are synthetic chemicals.

After hearing from the advertiser as well, the Advertising Standards Complaints Board sided with the complainant. Here is a summary from the headnote of their decision:

The Complaints Board said it accepted the Advertiser’s view that “sodium percarbonate is a much safer and more environmnetally friendly alternative to chlorine bleach” but not that it was “chemical free” and “100% natural.” The Complaints Board said the advertisement was likely to mislead consumers into thinking the products were “100% natural” and “chemical free” when they actually contained naturally occurring chemicals, in breach of Principle 2 of the Code for Environmental Claims and had not been prepared with a due sense of social responsibility to consumers in breach of Principle 1 of the Code for Environmental Claims.

Accordingly, the Complaints Board ruled to Uphold the complaint.

The most interesting part of this complaint is, I think, who the advertiser is. As well as selling cleaning and beauty products online, Wendyl Nissen writes a weekly column for the New Zealand Herald called “Wendyl Wants To Know“. The Herald describes the column as:

Each week, Wendyl Nissen takes a packaged food item and decodes what the label tells you about its contents.

Have a look for yourself, but from the columns of hers that I’ve read it seems the main argument is typically along the lines of “natural is good, chemicals are bad”. So I find it very ironic that she’s now had a complaint upheld against her for misleadingly claiming that a product she sells is “100% natural” and “chemical free”.

For a counterexample to the attitude of “natural is good, chemicals are bad”, you need look no further than the “recipes” section of her website. There, she has some pet recipes which she makes available for free including one for De-Flea Powder for Cat Biscuits and another for Doggy De-Flea Treats. In both recipes, she claims the active ingredients are yeast and garlic:

The theory behind this powder is that fleas hate the taste of yeast and garlic so will hop off and look elsewhere.

Elsewhere on her website, she recommends that if you:

Put a garlic clove in your pet’s water you can help deter pests such as mites and fleas.

Although it certainly is natural, garlic is also toxic to cats and dogs, especially for cats. I couldn’t find any warnings about this on Wendyl Nissen’s website.

The lessons to be learned? Natural isn’t always good, and don’t take advertisers’ word for it when they claim something is “100% natural” or “chemical free”. As always, ask for evidence.