nullmouse

But you're a self-proclaimed anarchist, so of course you'd say that about anyone perceived to have authority And I'm hurt, after all - who do you think does all this work to show how accurate these tests are? For example, some weight-gain supplements contain compounds that can give false-positives on amphetamine EMIT tests, and that was work carried out by the University of Aberdeen. I can proudly say my urine was used in that very experiment. Mind you, I did have to carry my own piss around with me in a big plastic bottle for 72 hours. It's not all glamour, this science lark. Just to be clear, we've both got the same end-point view - That drug screening on the streets is a complete infringement of people's rights, and the only difference in our opinion is over the question of false positive rates. Your edit, whilst interesting, hasn't added anything that we've not already agreed upon - That these tests aren't infalliable and that some conditions will give you a positive when you're actually in the clear. Even a 1% false positive rate is unacceptable when it comes to civil liberties, as you've already pointed out with your example above. Screening only works from a population based perspective, for either drug screening or from a health perspective (e.g. breast cancer screening via mammographs). It's a balance between the number of people you need to inconvenience via the number of people that will benefit. I fail to see how the benefit to society can be justified for random drug screening on the streets, without due cause, considering how many people will be inconvenienced to find a few 'wrong-doers'. With that all in mind, I don't doubt your experience, but the only thing we're disagreeing over is this 40% false positive rate. We'd both agree that statistics are easily manipulated, or are often presented without the full context required to interpret them properly, so I'm just querying the validity of this number based on what I know from the literature and also my own experience. It seems to me that I'm thinking of false positive rates as being the overall, global percentage of individuals who will get an erroneous positive result, whilst you might be thinking of a very specific set of conditions affecting an individual. Let's say we've got an EMIT test for Tennants lager, to sort out who has been drinking pish. If you drink Tennants, this test should finger you out - But there's always a small percentage of people who will slip through the test. Maybe they had a Tennants shandy, so it's too weak for the test to detect accurately, for example. However, the big problem with this test is that people who drink Stella have a high chance of testing positive for Tennants. Let's say 40% of Stella drinkers, who have had a pint of wifebeater within the last 2 hours, will test positive for Tennants. That's 40 out of 100 recent Stella drinkers. As a Stella drinker, your odds are pretty high that you'll be branded a Tennants fan with obvious social repercussions. However, not everyone who takes the test drinks Stella. Some drink Leffe, because they're rich and dislike street fights. Some mooch cokes all night. Neither Leffe, coke or anything else interferes with this Tennants EMIT test. So the question that affects the false positive rate of the whole population of our theoretical bar is how many Stella drinkers are in the pub. Let's say it's a busy night and there's 1000 people shoved in a popular dock-side drinking-hole, of which 10 have been drinking Stella. Of course, this being a respectable place to be, no-one is drinking Tennants. So 10 Stella drinkers, with a 40% chance of their individual test being positive. Which gives 4 people with a positive result for drinking Tennants. Their friends point and laugh. The rest of the bar, however, test clean. So that's 4 out of a 1000 people who tested positive who weren't, which is a false positive rate of 0.4%. My point of view seems to come from that 0.4% population perspective, whereas I think yours is from the individual, Stella-drinkers point of view. Both are correct, per se, but the 0.4% is a more accurate representation of the false positive rate for a whole population.

If it's any help, it's a nightmare to try and explain anyway. I don't think there's any way to discuss statistics that doesn't make people hurt :/

EROWID's got a fairly specific agenda that makes it likely to over-report the inaccuracies of the tests, tho. I didn't get my information from labs running the tests for money or as a program of public control. I use tests like these on a daily basis through my work, plus there's a wealth of indepdendent, peer-reviewed research on their various accuracies and inaccuracies. There are definitely some factors that will affect your likelihood of getting a false positive on these tests, but that's as an individual and not as a population - If you get my meaning. They could test 100 people, 99 of which aren't on buflomedil for example, but that 1 person that is has an 80-90% chance of being tested positive for amphetamine use. Overall, that's still a 1% false positive rate. Anyhoo - The figures are up from the weekend's fun and frivolity with the ITEMISER machine. Whoot. The quoted false positive rates for this machine is <1% for swabbed samples and 0.1% for air samples. I assume they were only doing swabbed samples on the street, so let's assume a false positive rate of 1%... According to BBC NEWS | Scotland | North East/N Isles | Revellers tested by drugs machine 753 people were tested, 13 people were searched and 2 reported to the Procurator Fiscal. We could assume that between 7 - 8 of those were false positives. Would be interesting to know if any of the two that were actually arrested were found to be holding despite getting a false positive. Did anyone from here get tested this weekend, then?

EMIT assays are individually designed for individual drugs (or closely related drugs), so the false positive rates vary a little across the different types. However, none of them work at a 40% false positive rate, that's completely impractical and I think it must have come from some skewed statistics. For example, 80-90% of people on buflomedil give a false positive on one of the amphetamine EMIT tests. However, not everyone in the population is on buflomedil, so the false positive rate on the amphetamine EMIT across a normal section of the population isn't anywhere near 80-90%. In fact, it's closer to 1%. It's also worth pointing out that any test also has a false negative rate too, and it's usually higher than the false positive rate. False positives would obviously get ruled out at the GC/MS stage, but a false result on an EMIT would be a crap way to end your evening out - So this whole testing in venues/pubs is absolute bollocks in my opinion too.

I spot you! You really haven't aged a day... (... you've aged about 11,600 of them).

At the same time as Bon Iver? I think I arrived late during their set, and saw the latter half. Was around at the Bimble Inn for Thingumajig*saw and Seabear before that. Over the whole weekend? Faaaar too much. Best of the bunch were Dirty Three, Micah P Hinson, Thingumajig*saw, Devon Sproule, Low, Sun Kil Moon, Tindersticks, Calexico, Kimya Dawson, Bob Log III, Billy Childish and Zombie Zombie. I'd be hard placed to pick a favourite from all of those, tho.

Yay, End of the Road! I was there for most of Bon Iver's set, loved the Talk Talk cover.

I'd like to think so, but if you substitute 'paedophile' for 'devil' then you still get the same mob rage occurring these days, without even getting in to whether it's justified or not. And as for believing people in authority and ignoring actual evidence, that old "MMR causes autism" scare is a right chestnut. We've just changed the targets from irrational to seemingly more rational. Well, in most cases, Most Haunted, psychics and horoscopes aside once again... (and Gillian McKeith, Patrick Holford, perpetual energy machines, homeopathy, 'alternative' medicine etc etc etc)

That's great! Also, presumably in 1909 appearing crazy was 'all the rage'. I think we're (as in, the human race in general) still superstitious, and still prone to mass hysteria, but it would be interesting to see how the focus of these has progressed with time. It would take a lot of work to explain why Most Haunted is still on TV, tho...

The 15th's looking mighty fine between that and the new ohGr album. Whoot.

Will be there with a couple of friends - Looking forward to it as all the Myspace links sound very good indeed...

Aww yeah, really looking forward to that one

I need to pick this up... So, Low at End of the Road. Many things I expect to see at a Low gig, one of them definitely wasn't Alan Sparhawk's guitar doing a horizontal about two foot above my head. Luckily no one was hurt, but bloody hell... Fair wellied it into the crowd, after tearing guitar strings and cables. He had announced earlier in the gig that "today everyone that I've ever loved told me they hated me", so I'm guessing it wasn't a great day for him. Right, anyway, I stop digressing. I just bought: Volcano! - Paperwork Calexico - Carried to Dust The Bookhouse Boys - The Bookhouse Boys MIA - Kala

Missed Pictish + Rozi at End of the Road festival, but from what I heard it was great. Unfortunately I'm going to be in Edinburgh this Thursday evening otherwise I'd be there :/ Definitely recommended, tho!

Sapphire club do monthly burlesque nights, and I've heard mixed reviews about them - My understanding is the quality is very good, but it's very sparse between acts. There's a fledgling night in Aberdeen that's running very infrequently called Mis En Abyme (sp?) that does dark, off-kilter cabaret and burlesque: Keeva, the organiser, has also done burlesque at Obedience School. I'd wager she'd be a pretty good person to contact, but I don't think she's got an account on here. I know a man that would know, though.

I completely agree, I think the meaning of many words clash in discussions like this because they have subtly different meanings in common, scientific of philosophical use. "Theory" is probably a good example of this, and what people take to be a "truth" I think comes under the same problems.

"You can't prove it scientifically, therefore it can't be real" "Nothing is true unless it can be empirically proven" It occurs to me I've been trying to say things in a really roundabout way, and your rephrasing of your original statement made me realise this. "You can't prove it scientifically, therefore it can't be real" doesn't account for being able to disprove something by refuting a hypothesis. "Nothing is true unless it can be empircally proven" is misleading in the use of the word 'true', and would be much more accurately stated as "nothing is a scientific fact until it can be empirically proven", which isn't self-refuting. Many things can be true without proof, but that does not mean it is scientifically proven to be so, as we both agree. "Nothing is true unless it can be empircally proven", in my opinion, seems to equate truth with being scientifically proven.

If there were forces at work that couldn't be measured scientifically, we'd probably have noticed a lot more anomalies in the readings that can be measured by now. Unless, of course, that unmeasurable force or forces acts in a closed loop that doesn't affect our perception of the natural world. Which would be convenient. But that's the problem with these trains of thought, a supernatural entity or state can be argued to be undetectable, clever enough to evade detection or just above the mere understanding of us mortals. You could claim any number of mythical beasts rules the world but shift our perception of reality so we're not aware of them. It's true, prove it's not etc. Yes, something may be true but not proven. However, we can scientifically demonstrate the presence of gravity or cells, confirming it to be true - But until that scientific evidence was gathered it was just a hypothesis waiting to be confirmed, denied or modified based on the evidence. Scientifically it contained no weight. Your phrasing "But it also left a legacy of belief that unless something can be measured, weighed and quantified it is not worth documenting" implied to me that you thought it did. I took art to also be a documenting process.

TechFest starts again in September, and they've some great lectures and events lined up including topics such as reintroducing the lynx to Scotland, the science behind crime scene investigation, and the 'jovial' relationship between science and religion. You can also book tours to see the crime scene labs, go behind the scenes at Northsound or see the cows at Mackies (if you're so inclined). Details on how to book any of the events, plus full details of the entire festival, are available at TechFest in September This year's opening event is a talk from 'Big Cat Diary's Simon King on the 5th of September - Tickets for this are likely to fly, so get in quick.

Great link to a great website! For your information, the wonderful TechFest starts it's '08 season in September, and any of you interested in Science and Relgion might want to check out Professor Henry Ellington's talk on that very subject on the 15th of September: Should be a great talk from an entertaining speaker, tickets are 3.50 and you can get them (and see details on the rest of the talks) at TechFest in September

Set list for the Sunday night (courtesy of eyeballkid.blogspot.com): Lucinda/Ain't goin' down to the well Raindogs Falling down On the other side of the world I'll shoot the moon Cemetery polka Get behind the mule Cold cold ground Circus / Table top Joe Jesus gonna be here Piano set: Picture in a frame Invitation to the blues House where nobody lives Innocent when you dream Lie to me Hoist that rag Bottom of the world Hang down your head Green grass Way down in the hole Dirt in the ground Make it rain Encore: Goin' out west All the world is green

Jaw-droppingly good, despite the mood-killing pissed-up American who wanted to know where the mosh-pit was. After the thirty-second time being asked to sit down, stop shouting and taking sly recordings he announced loudly that we're on the verge of becoming a fascist state (in fact, he went off on a tirade about it to everyone nearby that would listen. Luckily, no one would). He toddled off to the bar during some slow numbers and didn't return. Shame.

In a similar vein, there's a great compilation of work from the Philips Research Laboratories (1956-1963) available via Basta Records: BastaMusic.com - Product details for Tom Dissevelt, Kid Baltan, Henk Badings and Dick Raaijmakers | Popular Electronics Will be great to hear more of Delia Derbyshire's work more videly available too.

Just in case any of you are at a loose end tonight: ELIZIUM FM - 7pm till 11pm, playing EBM, industrial, goth and alternative with a triad of DJs, jilted banter and, of course, the news at 9pm. Tune in / join the chat room via ELIZIUM | NM4NP