Open letter and video re threat to GM Research - Rothamsted Research - YouTube/Sense About Science

Open letter and video re threat to GM Research - Rothamsted Research - YouTube/Sense About Science:
27th April 2012
Dear Take the Flour Back,
We have learned that you are planning to attack our research test site on 27th May. Please read the following in the spirit of openness and dialogue – we know we cannot stop you from taking the action you plan, nor would we wish to see force used against you. Therefore we can only appeal to your consciences, and ask you to reconsider before it is too late, and before years of work to which we have devoted our lives are destroyed forever.
We appeal to you as environmentalists. We agree that agriculture should seek to work “with nature rather than against it” (to quote from our website), and that motivation underlies our work. We have developed a variety of wheat which does not need to be sprayed with insecticides. Instead, we have identified a way of getting the plant to repel aphids, using a natural process that has evolved in mint and many other plants – and simply adding this into the wheat genome to enable it to do the same thing.
So our GM wheat could, for future generations, substantially reduce the use of agricultural chemicals. Are you really against this? Or are you simply against it because it is “GMO” and you therefore think it is unnatural in some way?
Remember – all plants in all types of agriculture are genetically modified to serve humanity’s needs, and the (E)-β-farnesene compound our wheat produces is already found in over 400 species of plant, many of which are consumed as food and drink on a daily basis (including the hops used in beer, to give just one example). To suggest that we have used a ‘cow gene’ and that our wheat is somehow part-cow betrays a misunderstanding which may serve to confuse people or scare them but has no basis in scientific reality.
You seem to think, even before we have had a chance to test it, that our new wheat variety is bad. How do you know this? Clearly it is not through scientific enquiry, as the tests have not yet been performed. You state on your website: “There is serious doubt that the aphid alarm pheromone as found in this GM crop would even work.” You could be right – but if you destroy our test, you and we will never know. Is that what you want? Our research is trying to shed light on questions about the safety and the usefulness of new varieties of the staple food crops on which all of us depend. As activists you might prefer never to know whether our new wheat variety would work, but we believe you are in a minority – in a democratic society most people do value factual knowledge and understand that it is necessary for sensible decision making.
You have described genetically modified crops as “not properly tested”. Yet when tests are carried out you are planning to destroy them before any useful information can be obtained. We do not see how preventing the acquisition of knowledge is a defensible position in an age of reason – what you are planning to do is reminiscent of clearing books from a library because you wish to stop other people finding out what they contain. We remind you that such actions do not have a proud tradition.
Our work is publically funded, we have pledged that our results will not be patented and will not be owned by any private company - if our wheat proves to be beneficial we want it to be available to farmers around the world at minimum cost. If you destroy publicly funded research, you leave us in a situation where only the big corporations can afford the drastic security precautions needed to continue biotechnology research - and you therefore further promote a situation you say you are trying to avoid.
We end with a further concern. You may not know much about Rothamsted. You may not know that our institute is the site of perhaps the longest-running environmental experiment in the world, with plots testing different agricultural methods and their ecological consequences dating all the way back to 1843. Some of these plots are very close to the GM wheat test site, and we are extremely worried that anyone walking onto them would endanger a research programme that has been in operation for almost two centuries.
But we also see our newest tests as part of this unbroken line – research never ends, and technology never can nor should be frozen in time (as implied by the term ‘GM freeze’). Society didn’t stop with the horse-drawn plough because of fears that the tractor was ‘unnatural’. We didn’t refuse to develop better wheat varieties in the past – which keep us well-fed today – simply because they were different from what went before and therefore scary. The wheat that we consume today has had many genetic changes made to it – to make plants produce more grain, resist disease, avoid growing too tall and blow over in the wind, be suitable for different uses like pasta and bread, provide more nutrition and grow at the right time for farming seasons. These agricultural developments make it possible for the same amount of food to be produced from a smaller area of land, meaning less necessity for farmers to convert wildlands to agriculture, surely we should work together in this?
When you visit us on 27 May we will be available to meet and talk to you. We would welcome the chance to show you our work and explain why we think it could benefit the environment in the future. But we must ask you to respect the need to gather knowledge unimpeded. Please do not come to damage and destroy.
As scientists we know only too well that we do not have all the answers. That is why we need to conduct experiments. And that is why you in turn must not destroy them.
Yours sincerely
J. A. PICKETT DSc, CBE, FRS (Professor) Michael Elliott Distinguished Research Fellow and Scientific Leader of Chemical Ecology Toby Bruce (Scientist specialising in plant-insect interactions, Team Leader) Gia Aradottir (Insect Biology, Postdoc ) Huw Jones (Wheat Transformation, Coinvestigator) Lesley Smart (Field Entomology) Janet Martin (Field Entomology) Johnathan Napier (Plant Science, Coinvestigator) John Pickett (Chemical Ecology, Principal Investigator)
Original letter
YouTube video:
If you wish to show your support for the research being carried out and add your voice against those who are planning to disrupt it, there is a Sense About Science petition here.

Civic life and law must bind us, not ritual and religion - Polly Toynbee - The Guardian Comment Is Free

Civic life and law must bind us, not ritual and religion - Polly Toynbee - The Guardian Comment Is Free:

No surprise that the Queen defends the established church, as she is the anointed defender of the faith. In a week of attacks on secularism she has invented a new role: "not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country." Who is threatening the free practice of any faith? Not any secularists I know.

Read on

RDFRS UK/Ipsos MORI Poll #1: How religious are UK Christians? - Paula Kirby/RDFRS UK - RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net

RDFRS UK/Ipsos MORI Poll #1: How religious are UK Christians? - Paula Kirby/RDFRS UK - RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net:

'via Blog this'

Lastpass or Keepass?

At the office today we were discussing which is better - Lastpass or Keepass?

The answer is: it really doesn't matter. Using either is vastly better than what the majority of the population uses for staying secure online.

This point was hammered home in my mind when I got back from work to see a Facebook update which said the following:

some **** in London has hacked into my account and ordered himself a nice new expensive mobile on my account, time to change all passwords I think

Now I don't know all the details, but it's more than likely the culprit was poor password security. The victim was very likely to be using the same password for several or all of their logins, and that password was probably  "easy to remember", exactly the property which makes it easy to hack.

Both of the above solutions allow you to achieve the same goal, which is to stop you having to remember a boatload of passwords, and just concentrate on remembering one strong password or phrase.  From that starting place, every site you visit can have a unique, random, long (>12 character) and therefore secure password.  You don't have to remember all these passwords because the password vault does it for you, even filling it into web pages at the right time.  If one site is hacked, all your other passwords are still secure.

The problem is nicely summed up by what's known as the Dancing pigs problem, which states

Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time

People would rather not care about this sort of stuff, but it's important, because when it goes wrong it will be, at best, a whole lot of hassle.

WDTV model numbers

This post will be a bit of a rant because I bought the wrong Western Digital TV streaming media player late last year.  Instead of buying the new, latest and greatest, streams Spotify, Netflix and iPlayer (as of today) version, I bought a 3 year old model for the same price. Feel free to laugh in the comments.

This mistake was made all too easily, as they've changed the name from "WDTV HD" to "WDTV Live HD" to "WDTV Live Plus" to "WDTV Live Streaming".

The fact that they're all sold as HD streaming media players means that you have to try to tell the difference between a "WDTV Live HD streaming media player", and a "WDTV Live Streaming HD media player".  Not so easy now is it?

They look very similar, apart from the new model having a larger remote (and the extra chipset for streaming Spotify + Netflix, etc).

So you don't make the same mistake I did, here's an official list of models, and here's an unofficial list of model numbers (you might need to register to access the latter).

Luckily I own a Wii which can handle Netflix and BBC iPlayer, but it would've been nice to have everything on the same box, and not feel slightly ripped off.

The Debunking Handbook: now freely available for download - John Cook & Stephan Lewandowsky - skepticalscience.com

The Debunking Handbook: now freely available for download - John Cook & Stephan Lewandowsky - skepticalscience.com:

The Debunking Handbook, a guide to debunking misinformation, is now freely available to download. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there's no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation.

DOWNLOAD THE HANDBOOK

The Handbook explores the surprising fact that debunking myths can sometimes reinforce the myth in peoples' minds. Communicators need to be aware of the various backfire effects and how to avoid them, such as:

The Familiarity Backfire Effect

The Overkill Backfire Effect

The Worldview Backfire Effect

It also looks at a key element to successful debunking: providing an alternative explanation. The Handbook is designed to be useful to all communicators who have to deal with misinformation (eg - not just climate myths).

The Authors:

John Cook is the Climate Change Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He created and runs Skeptical Science and co-authored the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand with environmental scientist Haydn Washington. In 2011, Skeptical Science won the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge.

Professor Lewandowsky is an Australian Professorial Fellow and a cognitive scientist at the University of Western Australia. He received a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council in 2011. His research examines people's memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. He has published over 120 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, including numerous papers on how people respond to misinformation. (See www.cogsciwa.com for a complete list of scientific publications.) Professor Lewandowsky is an award-winning teacher and was Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition from 2006-2008. His research has been funded continuously since 1990 by public agencies in 5 countries, but he has no commercial interests of any kind. He has also contributed numerous opinion pieces to the global media on issues related to climate change "skepticism" and the coverage of science in the media. A complete list of his public essays can be found at http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/inthemedia.htm, which is a blog run by academics from W.A.'s three major universities.

Click here for original of this page.
Click here for the handbook.

Synology NFS stops working suddenly

I've just experienced an instance of the Synology NAS (DS411j) NFS file sharing stopping working overnight. I didn't make any changes and a reboot didn't fix it.  Trying to mount the shares would give "permission denied" messages on two different Linux clients.  Windows file sharing worked fine.

In the end, I turned off the NFS service in the Web interface and turned it back on again, and this seems to have fixed it.  Posted here for anyone else who experiences the same problem.