Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Society

  • Human Homecare

    Here in the Netherlands, there’s an annual award for the best TV commercial, which is voted for by the public. Usually, the winner is a commercial with humour, but this year, the winner was the commercial produced by the Dutch Socialist Party for its campaign for better homecare for the elderly. The commercial is startlingly simple, and probably quite shocking to many people. It also probably could not get screened in many countries.

    It is exceedingly effective. Go and watch it here.

    I am reminded about something that happened earlier this week. I had gone to Amsterdam by train to visit the bookshops. On the train from Arnhem to Utrecht, I overheard an elderly lady telling her friend the following story.

    My brother is 80, and together with his wife, he lives in an old people’s home in The Hague. His wife is somewhat senile, so they have separate rooms. Recently, I went to visit him, and when I got to his room, I found the door shut and locked. That’s unusual, because his door is usually open, but I thought that perhaps he was visiting his wife. However, when I went to her room, I found her alone. I went back to his room, and as there was a cleaner in the corridor, I asked her where Mr. Hooft might be. “Mr Hooft?”, she replied, “He doesn’t live here anymore”.

    Well, I was astonished, and went to the office. I asked the person there where Mr. Hooft was. “Mr. Hooft?”, she replied, “He doesn’t live here anymore”. “But, how is that possible?” I said, “What do you mean?” She reacted sharply to me: “And who might you be, madame?” “I’m his sister”, I replied, “What is going on here?”

    Well, she then told me that he had had a fall, and been sent to hospital. While he was there, the home’s administrators decided that it would be better that he didn’t return there, and arranged for him to be put into another home in Voorburg. They didn’t tell anyone else in the family, not me, not my other brother who is supposed to be our contact point, they just went ahead and did it. So there I found him, stuck in another home in Voorburg, separated from his wife, and no-one knew or cared…

    As Bette Davis once said: “Old Age is no place for sissies”. Your dignity is likely to be the first casualty.  

  • Feet of Clay

    Well, it didn’t take long for the euphoria over Barack Obama to evaporate. His choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration is a slap in the face for many people. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

  • What Makes Altruism Good?

    A very interesting and thought-provoking post by the Barefoot Bum. Go read.

  • Spoing!!!

    That’s the sound of my irony meter exploding. I did warn you here and here that irony was at dangerous levels. However, the latest pronouncements by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor have pushed it beyond breaking point. Where to start? Well, as usual, Ophelia flenses his bollocks with her usual efficiency, so I’d advise you to go and read her answer to his statements.

    Just to be clear, I’m perfectly happy for the Cardinal to carry on making his pronouncements. But he shouldn’t be surprised or “hurt” when we react in this way to his words. We’re not being unfriendly, we’re just calling them out for the self-serving, lying nonsense that they are. 

  • Irony Still At Dangerous Levels

    Following on from recent pronouncements from Catholic abbots, I find that my irony meter is still on the borderline of exploding into millions of tiny fragments with this. I think it’s the claim that Islam is the "religion of peace, tolerance and compassion, that sanctifies the human soul, and whose universal message is one of mutual peaceful coexistence among all the peoples of the world, regardless of their ethnicities, race, religions or languages, and which calls for kind reasoning and dialogue with all their fellow human beings" that tips me and my irony meter over into a parallel universe…

  • World AIDS Day

    Today is World AIDS day. Wear your red ribbon, or better still, give a donation to an AIDS charity. As I said three years ago, it’s also a day to think about some lost friends: Kerry, Lance, Eric, Humphrey, Peter, John, Kingsley, Graham, and Neil. I’m sorry that you’re not around with the rest of us today.

  • Out On A Spree

    I can’t do justice to expressing my thoughts on recent events in Mumbai, so I’ll let Ophelia do it for me.
     
    Today’s Observer carries several pieces about them. I found those by William Dalrymple and Jason Burke to be the most illuminating. That by Maninee Misra less so.

  • An Interview with Jacques Vergès

    Vergès: I believe that everyone, no matter what he may have done, has the right to a fair trial. The public is always quick to assign the label of "monster." But monsters do not exist, just as there is no such thing as absolute evil. My clients are human beings, people with two eyes, two hands, a gender and emotions. That’s what makes them so sinister.  
    I think that is an accurate summary of what we are dealing with. One end of the bell-curve of humanity. It’s an interview that is worth reading and pondering on.
     
    (hat tip to Mike Tidmus)

  • A Right Charlie

    I must confess that I have little time for the British monarchy, although strangely enough I do feel better disposed towards the Dutch monarchy. Thinking about it, it’s possibly because of the individuals involved and of what they say and do. Prince Charles, for example, has always struck me as a strikingly stupid man, who if it were not for the fact of his birth, would be put in the category of those tiresome people who write endless letters in green ink to newspaper editors.  

  • Dark Reflections

    Johann Hari has another powerful piece of writing – this time about a series of documentaries – that does nothing to dispel my pessimism. Kasim Abid’s Life After the Fall in particular makes it easy to despair.

  • The Miniature Earth

  • Spread Happiness

    Keith Olbermann with his reaction to the passing of Proposition 8. Bravo.
     
     

  • The Roots of Language

    An interesting article in today’s Guardian about Daniel Everett’s encounters with the Pirahã, an Amazonian tribe with a unique language. Sent as a missionary to convert the tribe to Christianity, he ended up not only rejecting his faith, losing his marriage, but also calling into question the Chomskyan orthodoxy of a universal grammar being the cornerstone of all language. Fascinating. 

  • Plus Ça Change

    And of course amidst all the euphoria over the Obama victory comes the depressing news that Californians have voted in favour of legalised discrimination against gay people. Proposition 8 looks as though it has passed. A sad day for many ordinary people in California.

  • Save Us

    I’m sorry, but I don’t really think that we have to be "saved" from gay marriage. Only from the delusions of misguided people such as these.

  • Unfathomably Foul

    I agree with Ophelia. I simply cannot understand people such as this.

  • Rudolph

    One of the current crop of web sites that gives me guilty pleasure is Not Always Right – a web site devoted to the dark side of customer service. Very often, I find myself shuddering at how people treat people. But every now and then comes an example of how humanity, even at its less than attractive side, can bring a smile of schadenfreude to the jaded soul…

  • The Atheist Bus

    So Ariane Sherine had an idea to put an advertising slogan onto London buses. A slogan that I could well stand behind:
    "There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life"  
    Simple enough, worthy enough, and almost certainly correct. Of course, it didn’t take long for the damning with faint praise to begin. And as a direct result of that barf-making guff from Mr. Barrow, I have contributed to the campaign. Thank you, Mr. Barrow. I see that the campaign is currently far beyond the original target of 5,500 pounds and now stands (at the time of writing) at over 31,000 pounds. Good show, people.  

  • Turning a Blind Eye

    A couple of stories this week made me think of how privileged some of us are, and how we ride on the backs of others. First up was Carole Cadwalladr’s piece in last Sunday’s Observer on the social strata and tensions in Dubai. And lest we think that the society in Western Europe is far removed from building the economy on the backs of slaves, Johann Hari’s piece about Chinese workers in the UK contains similar themes. Pacts with the devil take many forms, and we all turn a blind eye more often that we care to admit.

  • Statistics and Lies

    I see from today’s Volkskrant that Lucia de Berk has at last won the right to a retrial of her case. De Berk is a nurse who was convicted in 2003 for the supposed four murders and three attempted murders of patients in her care.

    The history of the case makes chilling reading, not because of anything that de Berk may have done, but because of the web of statistical “proof” that the prosecution used to put her behind bars. It is perfectly clear that the statistical evidence was deeply flawed from the start, but here we are in 2008, and she has spent almost six years in jail for “crimes” that never existed in the first case.

    The judgement against her was based largely on the claim (from the prosecution’s statistician) that the chances of so many people dying on the wards where she was on shift were “one in 342 million to one against”. But, as Ben Goldacre makes clear in his excellent book Bad Science, the fundamental flaw about this claim is twofold. First, the data was selected to make the hypothesis, and then the prosecution’s statistician made a simple, rudimentary error: he combined individual statistical tests by multiplying p-values (the mathematical description of chance, or statistical significance). As Goldacre points out in respect of the first part of the claim:

    A huge amount of corollary statistical information was almost completely ignored. In the three years before Lucia worked on the ward in question, there were seven deaths. In the three years that she did work on the ward, there were six deaths. Here’s a thought: it seems odd that the death rate should go down on a ward at the precise moment that a serial killer – on a killing spree – arrives. If Lucia killed them all, then there must have been no natural deaths on that ward at all in the whole of the three years that she worked there.

    And in respect of the second flaw, Goldacre points out:

    If you multiply p-values together, then harmless and probable incidents rapidly appear vanishingly unlikely. Let’s say you worked in twenty hospitals, each with a harmless incident pattern: say p=0.5. If you multiply those harmless p-values, of entirely chance findings, you end up with a final p-value of 0.5 to the power of twenty, which is p < 0.000001, which is extremely, very, highly, statistically significant. With this mathematical error, by his reasoning, if you change hospitals a lot, you automatically become a suspect. Have you worked in twenty hospitals? For God’s sake don’t tell the Dutch police if you have.

    It’s a very cautionary tale of statistics gone horribly wrong, and very reminiscent of the Sally Clark case in the UK (which Goldacre also dissects). Clark was put on trial in 1999, and convicted, for murdering her two babies. At the trial, child expert Professor Sir Roy Meadows stated that the chance of two children in the same family dying of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was “one in seventy-three million”. It was another case of statistics wielded in error, and Clark spent three years in jail (where she was targeted by other prisoners as a supposed baby-murderer) before her conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal. She emerged a broken woman and died in March 2007. I fervently hope that that will not be the fate of Lucia de Berk.