Thank you for completing this survey and for your interest. The survey is now closed.

The rationale behind it was to investigate fan perceptions of the relationships between Zoe and the Doctor and Romana and the Doctor respectively. It is my perception that both relationships are characterised by conflict, often intellectual or scientific conflict, but that the power dynamics and indeed gender dynamics between each pair are qualitatively different. I wanted to find out if other fans thought the same way.

Unfortunately, there were not enough responses to the survey to make any meaningful generalisations about that, so I will not be publishing the survey results. However, if I do publish any work on this topic I will post an update here.

Thanks again for the generous donation of your time in completing the survey.

“Cholera is frightened of a collar and tie” is an old saying in Mozambique, explains Jim Black. It’s not the dress-code that’s important, but the wealth it represents. Cholera, like other deadly forms of diarrhoea, is a poor man’s disease. Wealthier people have better living standards which include access to clean water and sanitation – the keys to avoiding diarrhoea. “I guess the moral of the story is to make people rich so they won’t get cholera anymore,” jokes Michael Emch. But since poverty is a difficult problem to solve, scientists are working out other ways to prevent this deadly disease.

The impact of cholera
Cholera kills 50% of untreated patients, but it’s not the only type of deadly diarrhoea. The World Health Organisation estimates that diarrhoea kills 1∙4 million children under five every year. Most of these children live in the developing world and many do not have access to basic sanitation and clean drinking water.
Even if people have clean drinking water, diarrhoea spreads if there’s not enough water available for washing. In 1985 cholera broke out at a refugee camp in Sudan even though chlorinated water was provided. There simply wasn’t enough water, according to Associate Professor Jim Black an epidemiologist from the University of Melbourne. “In a hot dry environment like the Northeast of Sudan, five litres per person per day is only just enough for cooking and drinking, and so basically no-one had enough water to wash anything,” he said.
In hospital cholera patients are treated by rehydration, and only 1% of treated cholera patients die of the disease. But treatment only helps one infected patient at a time. Working in Mozambique, Black tried to provide prevention as well. This involved chlorinating drinking water and sending “a kind of flying squad” into cholera patients’ homes that used bleach as a disinfectant. They also encouraged people “to wash all the clothes and bedding and anything that might have been contaminated as the person got sick.”

Mapping disease
A good vaccine would be a very effective way to prevent cholera. Professor Michael Emch of the University of North Carolina used spatial epidemiology, or mapping of disease outbreaks, to study a vaccine trial in the town of Matlab in Bangladesh. The vaccine was initially thought to be only 50% effective. But Emch’s research, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found that the vaccine was 75% effective in some areas.
Emch’s maps showed that the vaccine was effective in some neighbourhoods and not others. Places where more people had agreed to join the vaccine trial had less cholera. This happened because of what is described as the ‘herd effect’. This means that in a community where most people are vaccinated, a small number of unvaccinated people will be protected.
Emch tested to see if the new vaccine offered protection through the herd effect. Children under two years couldn’t be vaccinated in the trial. But since cholera is a childhood disease, Emch wanted to see if the herd effect protected them. He found that babies were less likely to get sick if the adult women in their household had been vaccinated.
“We think that this cholera vaccine should be used in endemic settings,” concluded Emch, describing places where cholera is common. In Matlab, cholera is certainly endemic – there’s an outbreak about three times each year. Emch’s maps of Matlab neighbourhoods have revealed that
the new vaccine could save lives there.

Simple prevention
Vaccines can only target one disease at a time, so Peter Dwan, head of international programs at the charity WaterAid, focuses on stopping the spread of disease. “The way that you get diarrhoea is through ingesting an infectious dose of pathogens, which mostly exist in infected human faeces,” explains Dwan. This is called the faecal-oral route of infection.
In practice, breaking the faecal-oral route of infection can be very simple. People need clean drinking water and toilets with lids to keep flies out. They also need to know that washing their hands is important and have good access to water. According to Dwan, “The more time that a family would spend collecting water, the less water they’re likely to use”. If a family has to walk half an hour to collect water, then it becomes difficult to carry enough home. After cooking, drinking and clothes washing, hand washing can become a low priority.
Dwan finds that people have traditions that protect drinking water, and aims to enhance these practices with a combination of infrastructure (basic toilets, wells and taps) and education. “You’ve got your science and then,” Dwan explains, “you’ve got people’s traditional practices, and you want to move these things closer together. It’s about how you interact with people that might lead to them making some of those changes for themselves.”

Millennium Development Goals
Getting water and toilets to everyone in the world is expected to take years. As part of its Millenium Development Goals the UN aims to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation. While we are on track to reaching the safe drinking water goal, basic sanitation is unlikely to reach its target.
Why can the world solve the problem of water supply but not toilets? Because it’s not a glamourous problem to solve. “Any politician would be happy to get up and give a speech in the parliament about water because it’s kind of clean and positive and uplifting. But to get up and give a talk about sanitation and toilets; it’s actually a backwards career step for a politician,” Black says. “It’s the kind of thing that people tend to sweep under the carpet, they don’t really want to talk about it”.
Frightening cholera out of the world might take more than a collar and tie. Water, sanitation, hygiene and vaccines are all parts of the solution. But if the UN sanitation goal is going to be met, we’re going to have to talk about toilets.

Arwen Cross won second prize in the New Scientist Prize for Science Writing for this article in 2011.

His call is for an independent peak body for scientists in Australia. Though I believe there are many other things we must do as well, this is a good call.

Trolls the lot of them. Deliberately offensive flamebait.

Now, with a line up of Catherine Deveny, Gerard Henderson and Graham Richardson, I suspect we’re likely to be further ‘enlightened’ by QandA tonight as well.

I wrote recently about the benefits of social reading – that social media can provide a better reading experience than editorially made traditional media – but I’ve since realised that trolling is the clear and present downside downside to this. This post explores how this dynamic works.

My thinking goes like this:

• Traditional print newspapers have long offered a public reading experience. That is, the newspaper you’d read would be clearly evident as you carried it out of the newsagent, picked it up off your doorstop or got your butler to iron it. Reading The Guardian or The Times or The Sydney Morning Herald or the Daily Telegraph would say something clear about you to the viewing world. In some ways the carrying of a newspaper would be a small insertion of a particular ideological argument into the physical public sphere.
• TV, on the other hand, has largely provided a private watching experience. Your friends and neighbours can’t, usually, tell what you’re watching. You might talk about the programs you watched later, but this is a choice. Your TV watching, enclosed by the walls of your lounge room, is not inherently revelatory about you or your ideas.
• The early masthead news providers of the internet (The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The New York Times, the CNN or the BBC etc) – have also provided an inherently private reading experience. Like your lounge room enclosed TV, no one really knows what news you click on.
• Social media, however, returns us to a more public reading experience. We read from our social network, and we link back into our network that which represents us. Interest becomes a key aspect of identity.

In my previous post I wrote that this was a good thing – that social media would provide a more socially responsible reading experience, more responsible, in particular, than the masthead web. I still believe that’s true. I still believe that social media is more likely to provide information, news and opinion that speaks to our better angels than our base instincts.

Yet what I didn’t touch on then was the downside – that this same dynamic leaves us particularly susceptible to trolls. That is, while opinion writers have always sought to provoke us, there’s a different dynamic at play that changes the equation.

In a private media experience – TV or masthead web – we can easily turn off or ignore the opinions with which we disagree. In the traditional public media experience of the newspaper, our opinions only count if we’re likely to stop buying the newspaper. We might grumble into our muesli, or even bellow to our friends that we’ll never read that paper again (“Oh, you’ve stopped reading The Australian following the Iraq War? I haven’t read them since the Whitlam dismissal“). But this can only have a small network effect, and (as a business strategy) can only induce audiences to buy or not to buy based on their longterm assessment of what that paper provides. Traditional newspapers – like tribes – are not likely to be decided on over one article.

Yet the shift to social media means we no longer read mastheads for their own sake (or the sake of the tribal brand) – instead we’re attracted to the particular articles which most interests us individually. This might be stimulating ideas and discussion, or it might be that which enrages us most.

Think about it: what are you likely to provide links to on Twitter or Facebook? For many of us, it’s either things that we really like, or things that we really hate, with our clear rejection stating that. Linking to either of these allows us to represent ourselves in a certain light to the online public sphere.

The problem is that as social network linking is now becoming a serious part of news organisations’ business or audience connection models, big media organisations (The Australian and the ABC in particular in Australia) seem to be realising that offending our sense of outrage is easier and cheaper than producing content that stimulates our intellect. We might all be more socially responsible, but being constantly (and professionally) trolled doesn’t make for a pleasurable reading experience.

Just a final, academic thought: It’d be interesting to test this argument. Here’s a simple method. Ask a bunch of people to spend 20 minutes reading the news on the internet – you might set them a small task to do, like read enough to be able to answer a ‘What’s happening right now’ type quiz, or perhaps just give them free time on the internet while waiting for something else. Randomly divide them into two groups. People in both groups are free to read whatever they like, but set up a small program such that for one group everything they click on is posted to Twitter or Facebook under their name.

Improvements?

Thoughts?

Image by flickr user cycle60

Guest post by Kristin Alford

Kristin: In November I attended a communications stakeholders meeting comprising representatives from science and research institutions from around Australia. It struck me that again that different organsiations have different goals in undertaking science communications. And then it struck me, that while I am an avid and open user of Twitter, was it also that corporate Twitter accounts needed to have an identifiable personality, someone to connect with? What were good social media practices for science organisations?

This tweet triggered a conversation amongst the science communication crew on Twitter list which led to this:

Will Grant (@willozap) then set up a Google spreadsheet and @nwynn,@ScientistMags, @mjberryman, @matt_levinson, @cobismith and@ben_hr started to contribute by gathering evidence of science and research organisations and their participation in social media (focused on Twitter and Facebook). We’d kick-started a research project including data collection over Twitter and in less than 3 hours.

Since then, information has been gradually added to the site and Will and I have had further discussions over beer and Skype to think further about what this research project might investigate and how it might be helpful. We’ve also been thinking about appropriate channels for publication and participation.

Our study will explore why  science and research organisations (universities, research instituions, museums, government bodies and others) participate in social media. We will interview them and collect data illustrating how they participate to see whether there are good practices that can be shared. Outputs will include a journal paper, as well as informing blogs, presentations and workshops.

We will undertake the research over the next 3 months. In doing this, we’ll have the added benefit of testing the effectiveness of collaborative research networks formed via Twitter.

You are welcome and encouraged to participate. The terms of participation are as follows:

• The journal paper will be co-authored by Kristin Alford & Will Grant
• Anyone can participate by adding data to the collaborative spreadsheet and you will be credited with an acknowledgement in the paper.
• Participants are welcome to use the data and findings to inform their own research and commercial work.

If you’re happy with this and want to take part, email Will Grant and he can link you to the spreadsheet. If you’d like to participate and want to be more involved in the process and journal-writing, also email Will Grant and we can work out something together.

Anyway, what I wanted write about here is based on this criticism, but I want to raise a directly opposite argument: Twitter will always provide a more socially responsible reading experience than editorial media.

People on Twitter know this already, what I want to flesh out is why.

The simple answer is that Twitter is social. Duh. That only half answers the question. The proper answer lies in the dynamic of production and consumption of each media source.

On the one hand, editorial media is produced by an editorial eye / mind / culture which seeks a dialogue at once with us as as a mass public (a nation or a city), but more precisely with us as individuals, in the very privacy of our mind. We’re free, as reading individuals, to click / read / watch whatever appeals to us in private, and so despite going to the Sydney Morning Herald to read a high fallutin’ argument about the economy of the Large Hadron Collider or some such, we end up clicking on Why Venus is the Gaga of Tennis (side note – why is it so cursedly easy to find examples of why the SMH website is a cancer on society? That search took 4 seconds).

As a converse, Twitter is produced by individuals who seek to show themselves as funny / clever / in-the-know / socially responsible. The key acts of Twitter-as-news-feed’s production – linking to a news article, retweeting that link – are about the user publicly showing themselves off.

So, what does this produce? Twitter will always be a service that has the space for tweets about lunch – but even those tweets will be by users who seek, in their own way, to make the public world better. Editorial media, instead, sells out the public at the expense of the private. And that’s why Twitter will always provide a more socially responsible reading experience than editorial media.

Image by flickr user ento

Liz Tynan and Will J Grant

Legendary British Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin probably didn’t say “why bother to muzzle sheep?” during a House of Commons debate in the 1940s on media censorship – there is no official record of him doing so – but the phrase still resonates with those concerned about the tensions between government and media.

Suddenly, the idea of media submission to the information controls set by government has new currency. D-notices, short for Defence Notices, are an antiquated system in which the government stakes out territory it claims as belonging exclusively to the realm of national security, and asks the media not to go there. They are voluntary agreements and are not enforceable in law. Britain has had D-notices since 1912 and still has them today (though now they are called DA-notices – the “A” stands for advisory). Australia had D-notices too, from 1952. In fact, technically we still do. Though the D-notice committee has not met since 1982, that may be about to change.

Are we on the brink of a new D-notice era in this country, as the Wikileaks juggernaut rolls on, spooking governments around the world? The system of voluntary media regulation now being proposed by Attorney-General Robert McClelland does not carry the old Cold War moniker but the name is bound to stick.

The latest attempt to revive a form of D-notices predates the current storm over Wikileaks. Just over a year ago, Australian Attorney-General Robert McClelland first raised the issue of a formalised arrangement to deal with national security information in the media sphere. The catalyst was the joint counter-terrorism Operation Neath in Melbourne in August 2009. Subsequent revelations of secret agreements between media and police to influence the timing of the ensuing media stories pointed to the possibility of a more systematic approach.

Yet it is the Australian Government’s response to Wikileaks that has really brought the prospect of a renewed D-notice system to the fore. On 26 November this year McClelland wrote to leading members of the mainstream media in Australia seeking their comments on new “mutually agreed arrangements relating to the publication of sensitive national security and law enforcement information.” Also on 26 November, Wikileaks announced that the UK DA-notice committee had issued a message to British media designed to deter publication of Wikileaks material. The message subsequently reproduced extensively online from the head of the UK committee said, in part: “…may I ask you to seek my advice before publishing or broadcasting any information drawn from these latest Wikileaks’ disclosures which might be covered by the five standing DA Notices.”

On 8 December 2010 Bernard Keane contemplated the prospect of McClelland’s proposal as the Wikileaks revelations continued spilling out indiscriminately, and politicians and commentators called for Julian Assange’s head. Keane said that the voluntary arrangements the Attorney-General was seeking “might see mainstream media outlets – the only ones invited to participate in the development of the arrangements – self-censor national security related material.”

The conclusion is inescapable: this amounts to D-notices for the twenty-first century, with the parameters expanded to include law enforcement along with national security. The Australian media have until 18 February 2011 to respond to the proposal. It is hard to imagine they will be in favour, if only because of the negative connotations of the D-notice system. And, since the notices would only apply to the mainstream media, it is hard to see how they could possibly be effective in this era of online media.

However, academic Scott Burchill ran a comment piece on ABC Online on 14 December asserting that the sheep are ready for muzzling. “Some journalists,” he said

“don’t need to be socialised because they are pre-programmed for obeisance. For those whose natural instinct is collaboration with the state, ‘don’t tell me, I don’t want to know and shouldn’t be told’ is the media ethic of the moment. It’s a form of self-censorship based on the belief that the public cannot be trusted with diplomatic confidences. The challenge, as they see it, is not how to ensure that the public stays better informed but rather how governments around the world can improve their capacity to withhold information…Instead of raising the veil of ‘official’ secrecy they are helping governments impose a burka of silence.”

The history of the D-notice system in Australia shows a remarkable willingness by the media to don the burka of silence. D-notices are a fascinating exercise in managing the nexus between government and media priorities. The UK introduced them in peacetime – although a war was looming – essentially as an adjunct to the Official Secrets Act that had passed into law in 1911, placing sanctions on the leaking of sensitive information and providing heavy penalties for espionage. While the D-notice system bolstered the official secrets legislation, it did not itself have a legislative basis. The only other country to adopt a similar system of voluntary media censorship, Australia, did so after lobbying from the UK that began in 1921 and gathered pace after the Second World War as international tensions and the nuclear arms race escalated. Successive Australian Prime Ministers resisted the UK’s entreaties until finally Robert Menzies agreed in 1950. No surprises there – Menzies was a noted Anglophile leading the country at a time when much secret business was afoot. Most of it concerned British weapons, both the atomic bomb tests and also the rockets being tested at Woomera. The British wanted the D-notice system to be in place before the first atomic bomb test on Australian territory, and it was. The nuclear tests were among eight items that became subject to media information controls in 1952. No-one outside the secret committee that discussed and agreed on the Australian D-notices knew of their existence for 15 years, from 1952 when the committee first met to 1967 when journalist Richard Farmer broke the story in Nation about the very existence of D-notices [Pauline Sadler, National Security and the D-Notice System, Dartmouth Publishing Company, Aldershot, 2001, p. 69]. In 1982 the committee met for the last time, refining the wording of four remaining D-notices. Those notices have never been rescinded.

The possible architect of Australia’s new D-notice system, Robert McClelland, shares his surname (though apparently not his genetics) with a senior political figure from an earlier generation, ‘Diamond Jim’ McClelland. The irony is rich: Diamond Jim headed the Royal Commission into British nuclear tests in Australia that reported in 1985. Media coverage of the test series was greatly influenced by the strictures placed on reporting by the voluntary censorship system. Diamond Jim was scathing of the information restrictions enforced in the name of “national security” throughout the British nuclear tests. His Royal Commission report is a masterpiece of controlled anger, not least for the fact that the Australian public was not able to know about much about the tests. As the McClelland report stated “There was no opportunity for the Australian public to have an understanding of the nature of the [first British atomic] test and so make any critical analysis of the conduct of it. This was to be a recurrent theme throughout the entire weapons testing program.” [The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, Vol. 2, AGPS, Canberra, 1985, p. 462].

The D-notice that had been established just a few months before the first test had worked brilliantly.

The prime attraction of the D-notice system, initially to the UK authorities and later to the Australian government, was their capacity to ensure “prior restraint” [Douglas Fairley, “D Notices, Official Secrets and the Law”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, Autumn 1990, p. 431] – in other words, media self-censorship. Getting media practitioners to provide their own restraint was preferable to the more hazardous option of pursuing media outlets after the event of publication of national security information. D-notices tended to flatter media organisations by treating them as equals with as much a stake in patriotism and national honour as government and also provided an orderly mechanism whereby media could publish agreed information on national security matters without risk of litigation or generally being harried by the government. [Laurence W Maher, “National Security and Mass Media Self-Censorship: The Origins, Disclosure, Decline and Revival of the Australian D-notice System”, Australian Journal of Legal History 3, 1997, p. 173.]

Robert Menzies took a keen interest in the development of the D-notice system and personally wrote to the leading media organisations of his day, including the Australian Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, the Australian Newspapers Council, the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the Australian Commercial Broadcasting Stations. [Robert Menzies, “Security of defence information”, letter to E Kennedy, President of the Australian Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, 22 November 1950, National Archives of Australia Series No. A5954, Item 1956/6.] Without exception, they all agreed to the introduction of D-notices. These organisations’ most senior representatives, along with the permanent heads of the departments of Defence, Navy, Army, Air, Defence Production and Supply, formed the Defence, Press and Broadcasting committee to oversee D-notices. The committee’s first meeting in July 1952 at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne was chaired by Defence Minister Philip McBride and attended by Robert Menzies. The participants established principles that emphasised the need to prevent dissemination of information “detrimental to national security” and the voluntary nature of the notices, among other things. Menzies welcomed the members of the media organisations present, and “…expressed the Government’s appreciation of their willingness to co-operate with the Defence Authorities in the introduction and operation of a system of ‘D’ Notices.” [Minutes of the first meeting of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee, 14 July 1952, National Archives of Australia Series No. A1209, Item 1957/5486.]

The 1950s media embraced the D-notice system, and some media outlets sent material to the secretary of the committee for “pre-publication vetting”. [Maher, op. cit., p, 195] The compliance of the Australian media to D-notices for the British atomic tests in Australia explains in part why so little was reported.

It is hard to imagine media being so compliant today and opting to report less than they know. Attorney-General McClelland may have an uphill battle. On the other hand, if the muzzle fits…

…

Liz Tynan is completing a PhD thesis through the Australian National University on how the Australian media reported the British nuclear tests. She works at James Cook University’s Graduate Research School in Townsville (Julian Assange’s birthplace).

Will J Grant | ANU

Image by flickr user Adam_flix, used under a Creative Commons license

So, we’ve decided to build a new one. Here’s our first attempt via Google Maps – it should be finished soon.

View ANU Campus Map in a larger map

Note, we’re having some technical issues with getting all buildings on to the same page, and getting the map to load in mobile devices (iPhones etc) – if you’ve got a solution, let us know!

This is the text of a talk I gave in a debate with

——-

Extraterrestrial aliens.

Visitation.

Mysterious happenings.

Odd marks on the skin.

I can’t talk about aliens without thinking about The X-Files. I’m sorry, but I was a teenager in the 1990s. The X-Files offered something cool. The Truth – and this is something dear to my little scientist heart – Was Out There!

As a young teenager living in the murky mists of Far North Queensland, The X-Files offered something special. It offered a coherent view of the world, but one that was just… twisted slightly. The people were the same; the buildings were the same; but something different rested underneath. Watching The X-Files in the 1990s, we were like the muggles of the world of Harry Potter, muggles being introduced to this magical twist on our normal world. While everything was the same on the surface, underneath was a radically – magically – different world of aliens, wondrous flying machines and government cover-ups and conspiracies of the highest order.

How cool!

Now, around about the same time, my high school up there in Far North Queensland introduced me to the wonders of the internet. What. A. Time.

The first thing I did on the internet – I was a 15 year old, remember – was look up the precise button sequence for a particular combo attack in the video game Killer Instinct. True story. The greatest invention since electricity, and I went instantly to video game secrets. Sometimes I really do despair for the human condition.

Anyway, back to the video game secrets.

The fact that I looked for them actually says something.

Not the video game thing, the thing about secrets.

You see, back in the glory days of the mid 90s, the internet had been announced to us as this amazing truth finding machine, something able to find out the secrets of the world. Not only would we be video calling and tweeting and chat-rouletting each other by the end of the week, we’d all be hacking into mainframes left right and centre. Not for nothing was the phrase “he’s hacked into the NASA mainframe” or “she’s downloaded secret files from the CIA” a supposed badge of internet pride.

And so the second thing I looked up when I first saw the internet was the United States Air Force’s infamous Blue Book on Unidentified Flying Objects.

Introduced to me probably by The X-Files – though it had been a concept important to popular culture for much longer – the Blue Book was supposedly the record of the US Air Force’s investigations into unidentified flying objects in the 1950s and 60s. This was it! The record of UFO encounters! How excitement!

I can’t remember if I found it then, though I do remember seeing a long and typographically awful text file at some point that claimed to be the Blue Book. I didn’t read it all, but the conclusions were plain.

“No evidence … that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and

“No evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”

Now I’m sure our friends across from us would say that this is merely evidence of a cover-up. That this is simply the US government’s spin on what was actually going on.

It might surprise them, but I’m not going to argue against that. We simply cannot know if this is a clinical, bureaucratic document was a clinical, bureaucratic document describing things as they were, or a clinical, bureaucratic document that covered up the truth.

What’s more important is to look at why I wanted to see this book.

You see, I thought – given the impressionable youth I was – that I was operating under the pro-science tagline of The X-Files of ‘The Truth is Out There’. This, to my inquisitive eyes, was an injunction, a command! Go out, discover! You too could be part of the quest to find the truth.

Yet deep down, I think I was operating under The X-Files’ alternate tag-line, the tag-line that became more prominent in later years: I Want To Believe.

You see, whether I actually believed in alien visitation or not – and I don’t believe I actually ever did – the search for aliens like this was fascinating, intriguing, fun. This giant possible secret, just beneath the surface.

But to play the game, you had to commit to a massive suspension of disbelief.

Weird marks on the skin?

Strange utterances by children?

Strange lights in the night?

Waking from a dream to find your mind wide awake, but your body paralysed?

The belief in alien visitation requires a suspension of disbelief; it’s an alternate reality game without a gamemaster.

To play the game of alien visitation, on each of these things – and on the countless other points of evidence that have been cited by our friends opposite – you have to reject the simplest explanation in favour of something rather more improbable.

Not impossible, I accept.

Indeed, not illogical. We can, logically, sustain a coherent argument about visitation by extraterrestrial aliens.

But if your theory starts to explain everything – if your theory can account for strange marks on the skin, weird gaps in people’s memory, odd things said by children, missing pieces of furniture, strange lights in the night – then we’ve got one of two things going on.

Either we have a perfect theory – an excellent account of what is going on – or there is a flaw in our method of collecting evidence. There is, quite frankly, a story that comes before the evidence that has been presented.