So am I a Syfy fan now?

The UK Sci-fI channel has followed its US companion and re-branded to SyFy. This is despite most people thinking the re-branding was stupid and pointless. Presumably it is in aid of something like "Brand Cohesion" or "Reflexive corporate image synergy" or some other meaningless marketing rubbish, probably dreamed up by the same person who said "Why are we just selling to geeks, if we call it the Syfy channel instead of Sci-Fi we'll remove that stigma that has stopped people watching it for ages. It even has a tagline "Imagine greater" and why when I am World dictator marketing people will have a hard time of things. I can't believe anyone looks at Syfy and thinks "hmm" then sees "Imagine greater" and says "I'm sold"

No, marketing dude, that was probably the period, which Sc-Fi is only just coming out of, where the channel seemed to be trying to show as little Sci-Fi as possible.

I remember the old days of the sci-fi channel, it was unashamedly geeky, Bionic Wednesdays, where a whole afternoon was filled with repeats of the Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, MST3K, Quantum Leap. Sure, it lacked anything you hadn't seen before, even its films were usually old, and not the blockbusters either. But damn it I watched it, because sometimes I want to see old SF series. The channel evolved a little in the early 2000's, taking a slightly "Weird" approach it almost looked like the guy who is an enormous geek but tries to claim he's more "Alternative" Still, it hadn't lost too much of its geeky content, and even netted some of the better leftovers from Sky and BBC clearing the US Schedules. Without Sci-Fi then I wouldn't have seen Now and Again. They also introduced themed slots, like saturday morning carrying a couple of hours about Anime, with reports on japanese culture and usually a couple of Anime series (To my memory it was the excellent Neon Genesis Evangelion and the odd but fun Martian Successor Nadesco) along with themed horror nights on friday nights. These two periods represent in my opinion some of the best programming on the sci-fi channel.

It went a bit downhill from there, the channel seemed ashamed to keep showing its old repeats and similarly didn't buy anything particularly expensive, what resulted was a mass of duff "Direct to DVD" movies, usually involving Dean Cain fighting some giant reptile. It got worse, as they expanded (And I firmly believe the SyFy name change was part of this) into showing documentaries on dangerous wildlife and extreme weather. Now you may show Killer Shark vs Giant octopus IV, and I'd even allow some sort of super storm/volcano/asteroid drama as a kind of "What if Disaster movie" but the documentaries were pushing it. Similarly sometimes they'd show duff action films, no objection in principle but let bravo sho the non SF ones. I refuse to believe there is a shortage of duff SF themed action films.

Recently things have been improving. Sci-Fi got some fairly high profile series like Knight Rider, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary and Dollhouse. In fact the name changing away from Sci-Fi has preceded an increase in actual Sci-Fi on the channel, as if the marketing bod was distracted by his re-branding excercise and the geeks got to pick the programming.

My advice, Capitalise on this success, try and get some more original series, but remember, you need schedule padding, people will watch repeats of Quantum Leap and I know will definitely jump at anime series and MST3K if you can get those. New programming isn't the be all and end all. I have no objection to the crappy B Movies, I watched Warbirds (WWII female pilots and US soldiers vs dragons) and it was poor, but enjoyably so. Things like this need a home and Sci-Fi or even Syfy could be a place for them. Avoid turning into Bravo 3 and there could be a future in the old nerd yet.

Compromise Politics

Well, the official election campaign is finally underway, as opposed to the unofficial one that we've had for the past year or so. Hopefully in 6 weeks time we'll have a little more policy and a little less posturing and soundbites.

Ha! Forgive my cynicism. At the moment we're looking at (According to polls) a potential hung parliament or a Tory Government with a small majority. This should be exciting, it should mean that politics will move away from the big majority, ram legislation through regardless mentality that has plagued our politics for more than 30 years. Sadly I fear this won't happen.

I suppose it all started with Thatcher, as most things inevitably do. Although brighter sparks than myself may be able to trace this back further. Thatcher took out the "Wets" those who didn't subscribe entirely to her ideals. It meant that her party would stand united behind any legislation, and with the majority get anything through parliament. This basic idea of working politics has prevailed since that time. Combined with the rise of the "Career Politician" this has made politic more like a debating society, where debates are won or lost rather than an agreement reached where legislation is honed and perfected through the means of open discussion.

Its a myth that is seemingly widespread that compromise is bad, a myth not helped by the media describing the smallest change of tack or compromise as a U-Turn, defeat or flip-flopping. Politicians should be free to say "I'd not seen it that way before, my mind has been changed by facts and good arguments" instead government and opposition alike are trapped in a bizarre Colonel Cathcart like existence where they weigh up "Feathers in Caps" and "Black Eyes" and hope the former outweighs the latter. Since the major players appear to care more about looking good than passing decent legislation it generates an MP that values the approval of party over the approval of constituents, particularly those in the 60% off Safe or Ultra safe seats. You'd have to be pretty confidant in your MP skills not to be de-selected for one of those, clearly most aren't. Barak Obama said recently that perhaps it should be a politicians job to make good policy rather than seek re-election. Judging by the behaviour of MPs Re-election is their goal.

This has a bad knock on effect on politics. Since avoiding "Black Eyes" is prioritized above good policy parties will go towards making the opposition (or government) look bad rather than contributing positive changes to policy.

This is very apparent in Scotland, where the SNP chose to form a Minority government, this initially had me interested, in a minority they would have to use argument, persuasion and compromise to get things done. This should have been very interesting indeed. Sadly Labour and The Lib-Dems aren't playing. Labour through badness and the Lib-Dems seemingly through a childish fit of pique after being snubbed to form a coalition as they expected. To this end they have adopted a stance of obstructing and blocking as much SNP policy as possible, seemingly with the singular view of saying at the next election "What have they done eh? Nothing"

Look at that closely, two major parties have actively decided to say "No" pretty much all the time, stalling and slowing any policy change in the hope of using it to gain power next time, that's 4 years of childish huff.

This is my fear with a hung parliament, rather than shake up the "big Majority" style of politics instead we'll see the big 3 vie for position until one thinks they have enough leverage to call another election and get the big majority they all crave.

Science and Politics

This post has been running around in my head for a while. Doubt that will improve on its clarity, consistency or how well argued it is.

I’ve been reading the book Bogus Science by John Grant. In its introduction it covers an interesting case of politics vs. science. Post-war America, and there is a shortage of lead. This leads to a search for additives that could expand the life of lead acid batteries. There were many of these on the market and so the National bureau of Standards conducted testing. All the additives failed to improve the performance of batteries and most faded away, all except one, called AD-X2, the difference was not that AD-X2 actually worked, it was every bit as useless as its competitors, but the man in charge was good at lobbying politicians. The case for whether AD-X2 worked spanned administrations, cost hundreds of thousands of tax dollars and demanded re-tests and resignations. All because politicians thought for some reason that persuasive debate could alter the results of an empirical scientific test.

Oddly enough, although with somewhat less open and shut tests, this continues in present day UK.

The first is the recent Parliamentary Sci Tech Committee Evidence Check on Homeopathy. This was purely a committee established to check for evidence on the effectiveness of Homeopathy. Unsurprisingly for anyone with a smidgen of knowledge on the subject the evidence check revealed Homeopathy to be no better than a placebo and advised on removing NHS funding. This has been blogged by better men than me including Ben Goldacre, The Quackometer and David Colquhoun.

The Society of Homeopaths reacted badly, badly in the way that every world religion might if a parliamentary evidence check deemed the existence of God unlikely, or indeed badly as if someone had just seriously threatened a major stream of revenue. (Of course not, that would be cynical) They threw around accusations and smears about those involved and, well I’d advise you to read the blogs above for more on this.

Anyway, one of the things they managed was to convince an MP to put forward an Early Day motion expressing concerns. The MP, David Tredinnik, who claimed for astrology software on expenses and wanted to use distance healing as health policy. Obviously a sharp scientific mind. Now this doesn’t really matter, EDMs aren’t debated and rarely amount to anything, however it has attracted the signatures of over 60MPs. What this demonstrates is that regardless of evidence, and this was a check on evidence, not opinion or anecdote, it takes very little to get an MP to sign an EDM, yes that’s how desperate for votes they are. Worse was probably the Lib Dems, who had quiet a few signatories, and who came out with the final fallback for the person who knows deep down they’re not going to win on evidence “More Evidence is needed” Oh yes, the Oil Company favourite “More research is needed” is one of the most obvious stalling tactics, and would suit the SoH and its ilk fine. Apparently 200 years of research where the only trials showing Homeopathy better than a placebo are badly run small trials. Any well organised large trial shows no better than placebo, so are we back to AD-X2 with Homeopathy, keep testing until you get the result we want? Regardless what we do know is an MP will always take votes over evidence.

The second to come to mind is of course the humorously named Nut sack affair. For those who came in late, the government’s chief scientific advisor did a big round up on the evidence for harm caused by drugs. His report was based purely on scientific research but demonstrated that many currently illegal drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy were in fact safer than Alcohol. As this went against two very important things, the governments current drugs policy upgrading the classification on cannabis, and more importantly, disputing the mainstream media’s view that “Drugs are Bad, except for Alcohol and tobacco which have wealthy backing” the government decided not to follow the recommendations. Nutt was clearly tired of being ignored for what was basically political reasons and so revealed his findings publicly, for his trouble he was sacked and we had to put up with a cross party harrumph from MPs about how they were elected to lead and these scientists should bloody well keep their facts to themselves.

This demonstrated one of the unshakable truths of when science and government collide. No amount of evidence can beat a policy that will upset the views of the right wing press consensus and therefore middle England, (or as described by some ministers “We have to consider many other factors”). Sadly this is the major problem evidence based policy faces, from the mounting evidence that sending petty criminals to jail merely acts as a gateway for greater offences (And the lambasting that a Scottish Justice secretary got for suggesting not sending many minor offenders to jail is evidence of this) to drugs policy the evidence clearly shows that science can find out what it likes but should be prepared to be ignored if it doesn’t fit existing government policy.