Techradar Tuesday: Woz’s wind-ups and blogging for bucks

Is it Tuesday already? To celebrate the news that Woz is doing the US equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing, here’s a cheery look at some of the other daft things he’s done. Sadly there wasn’t enough time to Photoshop a pic to make him look like The Joker.

When we discovered that Steve Wozniak would be competing in Dancing With The Stars, we had two thoughts: one, could we get Steve Ballmer to go on, too? And two, is there anything Woz won’t do for a laugh?

The answer to both questions, it seems, is no. For the tech industry’s very own Joker, tomfoolery is never far away.

And here’s one about blogging for money.

Is there an alternative to ads? Not really. Citizen journalism photo agency Scoopt shut its doors last week because it couldn’t persuade papers to pay a decent whack for images – it seems that major media outlets would rather get you to send in your snaps for free – and the wages offered by firms via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are pathetic. Write a review? Five cents. Do some digging into historical figures? Three cents. Build a space rocket, fly to Mars, discover intelligent life and bring it back in a cage? Seven cents.

Sitepoint books: raising money for Australian fire victims

Via Heather:

Sitepoint, the excellent web design publishing house based in Australia, have put their work and their hearts on the line for the victims of the Australian bush fires.  Please take advantage of this opportunity to help those affected while brushing up on your web skills too.

http://5for1.aws.sitepoint.com/

“To support the victims of the Australian bushfires we’ve created our
best book deal ever. For the next 3 days, you can pick any 5 books (in
PDF format) and pay for only 1. That’s about $150 worth of books for
just $29.95!

100% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to the Australian
Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal..

Yes, we’re serious: 100%. If you buy 5 PDFs for $29.95, then $29.95 is
donated. Our ambitious target is to raise more than $50,000 to help
the families and communities affected by this tragedy.

We’re offering our entire range of books – from PHP to Project
Management – for the sale; designers, developers, freelancers,
managers, and business owners alike will all be able to choose a
selection of professional books to enjoy.

You have just 3 days to treat yourself to this amazing deal, courtesy
of SitePoint, and know that you’re helping Australian families in
need. What are you waiting for?”

One day all tech journalism will be like this [language NSFW]

The Onion, via Paul @ Techradar.com:

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and MMR

I will shut up about MMR in a minute, but I wanted to link to this post by Scots Law Student:

Saying that children’s vaccines cause cancer is a sure fire way to terrify parents and this should have been as well received as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s Radio 2 phonecall.

It’s a fair point, although of course the Barnett discussion was about autism rather than cancer – after all, scaremongering about vaccines actually harms children, whereas unfunny pranks don’t do any real damage. In an ideal world our campaigning newspapers would ignore the latter and scream the place down about the former. Then again, in that world certain papers wouldn’t manufacture anti-BBC sentiment to suit their own commercial agenda, they wouldn’t spend their whole time telling readers that everything in the world causes cancer, and they wouldn’t be guilty of anti-MMR hysteria that makes Jeni Barnett’s broadcast seem like very small potatoes indeed.

On the subject of which, Holford Watch has put together an exhaustive summary of the story, the legal threats against Ben Goldacre, the blog reaction and the involvement of Stephen Fry. Fry’s not just there for the techy things in life, you know.

If you’re interested in this, you really ought to check out Goldacre’s Bad Science book. The section on MMR will make you jump up and down in fury. I read somewhere (can’t remember where, sorry) a suggestion that we’re heading for a similar health scare over the cervical cancer vaccine, with evangelical groups pushing stories of the “this girl had the vaccine and her brain exploded” variety in the hope that gullible newspapers will run them.

Okay, back to gadgets and internet things…

Mummy duck said “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” and all the MMR crap came back

The other day, LBC broadcast a breathtaking programme where presenter Jeni Barnett used her expertise as a parent to pooh-pooh the entire medical and scientific community. MMR is dangerous. There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact. You know the kind of thing.

That first link is to the audio; there’s a transcript here.

I particularly like the bit where Barnett demands that a doctor explains how somebody who’s been immunised against flu can still catch a cold. As he explains:

That vaccine protects you from influenza, it doesn’t protect you from colds.

It seems she’s unrepentant:

I thank those of you who have sent me information about sites that may be of use to me.

I thank the Bad Scientist for being just that. Sarcasm doesn’t shift peoples opinions. Making another person feel small because they don’t have a Bad Science degree and then nit-picking over semantics is not the answer either.

Since when has providing a great deal of evidence that somebody’s been talking out of their arse been “nit-picking over semantics”?

In other news, it seems that the discredited Wakefield study that kicked off the stupid and dangerous anti-MMR scare was even more flawed than previously suspected. The Sunday Times reports:

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

Make money from blogging? Spamming’s easier and more lucrative

Dan Lyons on – spit! – monetising blogs.

My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.

The full article’s worth reading and includes some interesting numbers.

Windows 7 versions: come on, it’s not that complicated

Me, on Techradar: OMG! 132 versions of Windows 7!

We’re the first to mock Microsoft when the firm deserves it, but the Windows 7 line-up simply isn’t as complicated as some reports would have you believe. For the majority of us there will be two choices, just as there were with Windows XP. Home user? Windows 7 Home Premium. Home worker or small business? Windows 7 Professional.

Also on the site: Become an App Store millionaire: how three iPhone developers made it big.

“Look at it this way: most people show up to work, or school, or whatever, and they are eager to show their friends what cool new things they’ve got on their iPhone. Of the 50 apps they may have on their iPhone, they may only get a chance to show five of them to their friends. If your app is one of those five, and it can prove its worth in ten to fifteen seconds, then you’ve got yourself a successful app.” [Steve Demeter, developer of Trism]

It’s amazing the crap that sticks in your head

One of the people I follow on Twitter had a problem the other day: he needed to shave, but his shaving foam had been confiscated by airport security and nothing nearby was open. Any ideas? I did: somewhere in the back of my brain I knew, probably from a novel or a worthy newspaper piece, that you could use hair conditioner. It’s all about lubricating the blade, you see. He tried it, it worked, and that’s the end of a not particularly interesting story.

But it got me wondering, what mad crap is hanging around in your head? I mean mad crap of the Top Tips variety, such as “if you’ve got three old toilet rolls and some duct tape, you can MAKE A TANK!” or “you can get red wine out of a tablecloth by rubbing a small labrador against it” rather than voices telling you to kill people.

BadScience.net in MMR quack attack

When Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre had the temerity to criticise an LBC radio broadcast by Jeni Barnett, lawyers sent him a nastygram. Bad Science is currently offline.

As Goldacre writes:

It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. “It’s a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry.” “Science always changes so you can believe what you like.” “It’s a debate and a controversy.” “Measles was never that bad anyway.” “Immune systems are damaged by being understimulated.” “Immune systems are damaged by being overstimulated.” And so on.

Naturally, the audio is on Wikileaks now.

Slightly delayed Techradar Tuesday: has Facebook jumped the shark?

This one was slightly delayed because I’ve spent most of the last few days in bed feeling sorry for myself. Better late than never, though.

It came from nowhere and spread like a virus. Suddenly everybody we knew was on it – telling us what they’d been up to, uploading photos, sending flirtatious messages and logging on as if the site were crack and they were addicts.

In no time at all it had millions of users of all ages, and it was regularly name-checked in scandalous newspaper articles. People were using it to arrange affairs, or to waste time at work, or to post things they’d later regret.

And then we all dumped Friends Reunited for Facebook.