Removing DRM from eBooks

This one is mainly a place for me to record how one actually does accomplish the title task for future reference, but who know, it might be useful to someone else too.

Firstly, DRM? eBooks? Ethics? Well, it so happens that eBooks come in many different formats, and not all devices can read all books.

The ones I tend to have are either Kindle books ("azw" files, a form of "MOBI" files) or iBooks (epub files I think?). I guess there are probably the, or amongst, the top most popular formats. But the sad thing is that one cannot read a book purchased as an iBook on a Kindle, and you can't read a Kindle on anything that doesn't have a Kindle app installed. This feels naughty as one of the selling points of such things is that they take up no physical storage space, you always have them at hand no matter what device you have and so on. It's downright rude, especially the iBooks one.

Now the good news is it's easy enough (still a faff) to convert between book formats using a free program called Calibre. But it doesn't tend to work if they are books that you have paid Amazon or Apple for the privilege of owning, due to the protection code they put in, known in geekery as "DRM". And it's not like you can typically "upgrade" your book to work on a different device for money, you would simply have to buy the same book multiple times to do it the "official" way.


Of secondary importance, please note that a "popular feature" of paper books is that you can lend them to your family, friends and so on. This doesn't really work on iBooks or Kindle, even if they have exactly the same device. In the US to be fair Amazon do let you lend Kindle books to your beloved - or even borrow them from a library -  but not so far in the UK. Maybe one day it will come. The reason this doesn't work at all right now is again the DRM. You could send your friend a Kindle book easily enough but they can't actually open it. Nor could  you read it yourself in a program like the afore-mentioned Calibre, which also happens to have a nice organiser/reader facility too you might want to indulge in if you have a lot of books.

You might debate the ethics of the second, but the first problem I feel righteously correct in correcting! YMMV. You should certainly not use this to make public a book for download by the random internets. That is clearly extremely naughty. Please just do the things with it you would do with it if it was paper.

So this is how to do it, converting a paid iBook to a Kindle book and vice versa.

Do this first for both

Step 1: Download and install the lovely Calibre. This is the program that can actually convert the file format of a iBook to a Kindle book and vice versa. It has a bunch of other features you might or might not be interested in too (and is free, whoo!).

To convert iBook to Kindle:

 

Step 2: Obtain software called "Requiem". This is what will remove the annoying DRM from your iBook to allow it to be converted into a Kindle book. There's not really an official site for it so you have to find it in the ne'r-do-well depths of the Internet. Looking on torrents, or Tor, seems to be the way the most geeky do it, but enough Googling might do it too. You need at least version 3.3. Right now there is a copy here apparently, but it's not the precise one I used and may not last long.

The other thing to note is whenever Apple update iTunes it can break Requiem. So you may need specific versions of iTunes to go with specific versions of Requiem.

Step 3: Make sure your iBook is on your computer in iTunes. This probably means syncing your iPad/iPhone etc. to your computer. The actual files you will then probably find on your computer in your "my music\itunes\itunes media\books" folder or similar. Hopefully with self-explanatory filenames ending in .epub.

Step 4: Run Requiem. Now I'm sure this isn't what its supposed to do, but on my computer a blank window came up, the hard disk started whirring, what looked like random characters/corruption started slowly moving across the window. Disconcerting, no? Especially with where the program came from. But it seems to work. Eventually the whirring stopped and Requiem popped up a message or similar to close. I get the impression for most people they get something a bit less vague happening for whatever reason.

Step 5: At this point your iTunes books have hopefully been de-DRMed, not that you will notice the difference. Grab the relevant ePub file and import it into Calibre.

Move to step 6 (below)

To convert Kindle to iBook

 

Step 2: Download the vaguely-named "combined tools package" from here. The current filename is "tools_v5.1.zip" but I guess it changes as new versions are made. 

Step 3: It comes with instructions in the zip file, but basically the deal is that you unzip it, find a folder called "Calibre_plugins" and find the plugin called "K4MobiDeDRM_v04.1_plugin.zip". There are a bunch of other plugins, I guess for removing DRM from other file formats that I have not needed to learn about yet. A veritable workbench.

Step 4: Load up Calibre, go to Preferences, then "Change Calibre behavior". Under "Advanced" click on the on the Plugins button. Click on the "Load plugin from file" button and tell it to load the aforementioned "K4MobiDeDRM_v04.1_plugin.zip". Click OK, Yes, Whatever as many times as you need to.

Step 4a: I didn't bother with this one but if you got the book off a hardware Kindle device there is apparently some extra configurations to do, detailed in the zip file's text document "README-K4MobiDeDRM-plugin.txt" but it didn't seem necessary if you installed the official Kindle Windows software and downloaded the book through that, so why not make it easy and follow my example?  In that case you will probably find the book file itself somewhere like "My Documents\My Kindle Content", this time files with hopefully obviousish names (not always) but ending with .azw.

Step 5:  Grab the relevant .azw file and import it into Calibre. Magical DRM removal should have just taken place, again pretty invisibly.

Move to step 6 (below)

Last steps for both

Step 6: Now you have either a DRM-free Kindle book or a DRM-free iBook, joys. You can use the easy inbuilt function of Calibre to convert the file format to anything you like. Very simple in the Calibre program, but basically find the book in the Calibre catalogue you just imported and right click it. Select Convert Individually (if you only have 1 to do). Pick a format (ePub if you want to convert to iBook format, MOBI if you want to convert to Kindle), and hit OK.

Step 7: It whirs away and now all that remains is for you to save the file (right click the book in Calibre then Save File) and put it on your device. Actually Calibre has facilities for sending straight to Kindle etc. in it, but I haven't tried them.

For actually getting the books onto your device, by all means check your respective device's manual, but for me if it's an iBook I add it to iTunes and sync, if it's a Kindle I send it to my Kindle's email address.

The end. Happy reading, on your phone, table or Kindle as you please!

Live north, die young

An interesting article re-tweeted and discussed by my beloved over the weekend led to my formation of a fantatistically effective way to decrease the north-south divide. It's a shame they won't let me be Prime Minister really isn't it?

It doesn't hurt that I've also been reading about injustice (spoiler: there is too much of it in the UK) and am an avid fan of the Spirit Level et al.

The Government-passed facts are this. In our inarguably rich and "developed" country - where there is plenty enough food, accomodation and healthcare (well there was, RIP NHS) for everyone, there are big disparities in life expectancy. Big ones. When aggregated up to "local areas" - the Government never like to use postcodes, or anything easy - men who are born in the highest-longevity area can expect on average to live to 85. If born in the lowest-longevity area, it's a mere 72. For women, the corresponding figures are 90 and 78.

Yes, you might live nearly 20% longer if you happen to be born in the right part of the UK.

As far as I'm aware, it's not because certain parts of the UK's green and pleasant (aka rainy yet drought-filled) lands are made of poison, or that some areas breed dodgy half-human half-hummingbird organisms. It is of course down to equality; of wealth, health, life-chances and so on. There is no way I am going to be convinced that equality isn't an issue in this country as long as it remains that you can predict average longevity dependent on where you are born in this country with a range spanning 15 years from top to bottom.

Next point: the Government is also coming into some flack from the great unwashed (us) for fiddling with the pension age. Fiddling of course means putting up. It's part of the logic of the budget really: unemployment is far too high, getting ever higher, ruining even more peoples lives: so we'll solve it by ensuring people that have worked most of their lives definitely can't retire at a good old age and let the new blood in. Heaven forbid.

The age where you can claim your state pension - what remains of it - is going up to 66 by 2020,  67 by 2028 and no doubt more after that. This can be compared to present day, wherein for a long ime it has remained at 65 for men, and somewhere between 60 and 65 for women, depending on date of birth.

There are one or two valid arguments that in other circumstances might make it a good idea, but just to compare, moving it upwards makes it nigh on the highest state pension age in Europe. You can look forward to being saved by a 67 year old fireman, or helping a poor policeman/teacher pick themselves up at the age of 68 after being pushed over by a yob and so on. And heaven help the youngest generation:

Standard Life calculated that at its most simplistic if the Government follows through on its plan to raise the state pension age in line with life-expectancy then, with the current trends, students of today won't be able to retire with their state pension until they are 77. Yes, the mathematics behind that is no doubt full of implausible silliness , but on face value even that's optimistic when we hear that even today apparently half of 50 year olds will have to work beyond their state pension age in any case, if they want to maintain their standard of living.

Anyway, what has this got to do with in-country equality then? Well, seeing as the Government is such a fan of regional this-and-that (as long as it means nobody gets more benefit and poor people get less) why not have a regional state pension age?

Remember that in the "worst" places, men are living to an age of 71.6; thus if the pension age was 67 they will get on average perhaps 5 years of pension. However in the "best" place, the average age a man will live to is 85.1, thus getting more like 14 years worth of pension. Yes, the lucky long-lived areas will get an average of not far off 300% more pension-time than the short lived populations. Unfair times? And it might not be too surprising for you to learn that the long-lived areas tend to include people who are in any case more wealthy and hence don't need the money so much as the people who live in the quick-death areas (deliberately ignoring here living longer itself takes more money, my apologies).

Figures for women are 78 at the low end and 90 at the top end; so whilst the percentages aren't so extreme there's still a good 200% difference in there.

If only there was a way to how some inkling how long someone is expected to live! Actually there is, a whole branch of "science" as they like to call it; acturial science. That's why they ask you a whole bunch of questions as to your life status, job, location and so on when you apply for life insurance. But as I can't tonight be bothered to quickly do a masters degree in anything vaguely complex I came up with an easier method.

Visiting the Office of National Statistics site for the juicy "official data", it's easy to get a list of the top 10 places for life expectancy and the bottom 10. Here we go.

For men:

For women:

A glance at the second column told me that if the pattern holds - and it's a big if but would be easy to check I guess -  people who live in richer London/Southern areas tend to live longer than people who live in poorer Scottish/North areas. Even if the pattern doesn't stick, it looks like there's clustering.

So, simples: make the pension age dependent on which "local area" you live in. People probably would like to receive their pensions earlier rather than later, so these death-ridden Scottish and North West areas would be desirable for the sort of upwardly mobile wealthy semi-elderly that can move at will. This of course increases wealth, aspiration, local economy, investment, nice health-care facilties and so on (even morseo if you buy into the myth peddled by the neo-cons re trickle-down) so that area will become a lovely safe, long-lived haven.

Of course it all falls apart if the rich simply buy a second house there, helping to ensure there is literally nowhere for the poor to live, but hey, nothing I say is necessarily realistic, let's face it. I'm not suggesting this could happen, or even that it would be morally right for it to happen - but it kind of makes sense in a one-dimensional way, unless anyone fancies pointing out a huge logical flaw*. Elect me now.

(* only accepted if they are worse flaws then George Osborne repeatedly makes).

The great charity tax-relief debate

Somehow I seem to be half-obsessed with tax at the moment. What an interesting person that must make me.

Anyway, the weekend's taxation debate seems to be the prospective cap of tax relief available for charitable giving. It's taken me a while to get my head around this one. I think probably that was because, amazingly, Osborne actually has a valid point on this policy (this possibility was thereafter proven by Cameron half-saying he's going to stop them actually enacting it because a few newspapers & rich people don't like it).

So, here's a very quick reminder of the proposal

Under the plans, previously uncapped tax reliefs - including on charitable donations - would be capped at £50,000, or 25% of a person's income, if that was higher, from 2013.

I'm going to make it as simple and biased towards being a good idea as possible, which was what eventually made me decide that it wasn't.

Step 1 is to pretend that the only uncapped tax reliefs that exist are on charities, which is far from the case - but this is the one that is causing the most uproar and wasn't instinctively wrong to me.

Let's remember also that not all charities are "good" and do worthwhile truly charitable work. There are known fake charities that business' (e.g. banks, what a shock) misuse, there are charities that are basically fronts for the owner to hide money away, big-business lobby groups disguised as charities and so on. Even the legitimate charities are not all about saving the world in the commonly understood way - perfectly "normal" and within the law such enterprises as religious buildings and private rich-&-privileged-only schools are commonly of charitable status for some reason. But, to be fair, true illegality or wrong laws should be dealt with under other legislation so let's not tar all charities with the brush of some bad ones, and imagine that many may well be awesome well-meaning inspirational organisations with no agenda other than to help people. Charity, on the face of it, is a virtue.

The next question is who this change in law would affect. That's easy: it's anyone who pays at least the higher rate of tax, meaning that their declared income (excluding capital gains, company profits etc.) is above about £35,000 a year. So the large majority of the population - including those that give the highest proportion of their income to charity - will not be affected, because they don't earn enough.

In fact because it is a tax-relief cap rather than a ban, it's not until you earn £200,000 or donate over £50,000 a year where you would begin to feel the effects  - unless you are a higher-rate upwards tax payer fiddling with tax relief in some other way at the same time.

The other set of people that the law would not affect directly are the charitable organisations themselves, directly at least. Charitable organisations can still claim gift aid, so the value of a £1 million donation to the charity remains exactly the same is it is now (and claims the same bonus tax we all know as "gift aid", itself a form of tax relief but given to the charity rather than the giver).

So how does it affect the givers of over £50,000 a year? It's down to income tax relief. Officially right now:

If you pay higher rate tax, you can claim the difference between the higher rate of tax 40 and/or 50 per cent and the basic rate of tax 20 per cent on the total 'gross' value of your donation to the charity or CASC.
For example, if you donate £100, the total value of your donation to the charity is £125 - so you can claim back:

• £25 - if you pay tax at 40 per cent (£125 × 20%)
• £37.50 - if you pay tax at 50 per cent (£125 × 20%) plus (£125 × 10%)

Got it? So on a £100 pound donation, a tax payer with enough income to be in the top tax bracket gets a tax refund of £37.50 for his/her personal gain. This scales precisely, so on a million pound donation the same person would get £375,000 back. By personal gain I mean that the donator is then free to do what they want with that refund: clearly they can't ever legitimately claim back more than 37.5% of what they donated so they can't make a profit as such.

Note however that if a basic-rate taxpayer - someone with much less taxable income than the afore-mentioned imaginary person - somehow managed to donate £1 million they would get no refund at all personally (but the charity still benefits from gift-aid). This makes some kind of sense if you remember it's a tax refund, but what doesn't quite add up in my mind is why, following the example of gift-aid, doesn't the charity rather than the high-income person get the benefit of the higher tax rebate? All I can think is it's too hard to administer, not a great excuse.

The argument for keeping this system is that it encourages people to donate more. Obviously if a donation of size £X costs the donator less than £X then they can afford to donate a donation substantially bigger than £X in the first place. I have little doubt that this law would reduce the amount of money a few very rich people donate to charities, and hence the amount the charity has to use.

So, if rich people can't make profit and it encourages giving to lovely charities then what's the problem?

The issue is mainly this in my view. The tax relief isn't David Cameron giving a kind philanthropist some money back to say thanks for being a nice person. The tax relief money is from the general tax-payers money; yours and mine and everyone else who pays tax in the UK. However the general tax-payers get no say in what cause the donator is giving their money to. Money flows out of the state - which remember is actually there to look after us and our needs as a country and beyond after all - to private charities. A state school might have to close because the money that would have funded it has been given to a business director who prefers to facilitate an insanely expensive private school. A hospital closes because a super-rich Lord wishes to help out an organisation promoting methods to convert gay people to straight.

OK, I'm cherry-picking examples there but the point stands. Aside from via elections, taxpayers are obliged to pay tax to allow our representatives - for better or worse - run a country in the way that they see fit, supposedly in our best interests. By design and by necessity we're not supposed to be able to pick and choose the precise causes we support from the money we give to the state.

Rather our taxation goes to the government and is distributed back into society so people in general can go the the doctors, survive a bout of unemployment, drive on a road and have their bins collected every week whether or not you as an individual have an urgent and pressing need to do any of those things. I don't have children but I still pay towards state schools, because society benefits. Society will not probably benefit all that much if instead of schools it goes to some niche charitable endevour that happens to suit my particular interests.

[I maintain a perfect right of course to donate to whoever I want as long as I use only my own money, not that from the state.]

Remember also that we're apparently in such ridiculous state debt (actually that's surprisingly debatable, but let's assume that's true) that the UK needs every penny of tax, austerity and the rest of it to get by. You might argue that it's  irresponsible to continue to allow diversions from tax given the situation.

It's also interesting to consider that the reason charities are sometimes so desperately needed is because the state fails its duty to protect its citizens and environment:  with ever more state services, benefits, jobs and so on being cut because we apparently have no money, austerity policies actually create more of a demand for charity. As council-run homeless services are cut, of course more of the unfortunate users will have to plead for mercy at the door of a charity to survive.

So in summary, let anyone give what they want to charities. It's a very lovely thing to do (often). But, especially if we're worried about the state economy, I see no moral need to pay people with large incomes to do so. At its most favourable, the choice is down to whether you think we should let rich people take general tax-payers money from the state to give to other causes of their choice. At present I really don't think that's a great idea.

Does prayer work? A demonstration of idiocy by 3 MPs, either way

In a pleasing display of unity between the 3 main political parties, a MP from each one has been writing to the Advertising Standards Agency to complain about the injustice of a ruling.

No, sadly not the one where Carol Voderman trades on her perceived mathematical ability to induce people into eye-watering loans that they can’t afford. Rather it’s one that said that a Christian Healing group should not go around handing out adverts saying the praying to God can cure a surprisingly large amount of medical problems.

Here’s the text from the leaflet

"Need Healing? God can heal today! Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction ... Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?  

We'd love to pray for your healing right now!  

We're Christian from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus. We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness."

And here’s the letter itself

"We are writing on behalf of the all-party Christians in Parliament group in Westminster and your ruling that the Healing On The Streets ministry in Bath are no longer able to claim, in their advertising, that God can heal people from medical conditions. 

We write to express our concern at this decision and to enquire about the basis on which it has been made. It appears to cut across two thousand years of Christian tradition and the very clear teaching in the Bible. Many of us have seen and experienced physical healing ourselves in our own families and churches and wonder why you have decided that this is not possible.

On what scientific research or empirical evidence have you based this decision? 

You might be interested to know that I (Gary Streeter) received divine healing myself at a church meeting in 1983 on my right hand, which was in pain for many years. After prayer at that meeting, my hand was immediately free from pain and has been ever since. What does the ASA say about that? I would be the first to accept that prayed for people do not always get healed, but sometimes they do. That is all this sincere group of Christians in Bath are claiming.

It is interesting to note that since the traumatic collapse of the footballer Fabrice Muamba the whole nation appears to be praying for a physical healing for him. I enclose some media extracts. Are they wrong also and will you seek to intervene?

We invite your detailed response to this letter and unless you can persuade us that you have reached your ruling on the basis of indisputable scientific evidence, we intend to raise this matter in Parliament. 

Yours sincerely,
Gary Streeter MP (Con)
Chair, Christians in Parliament 

Gavin Shuker MP (Labour)
Vice Chair, Christians in Parliament 

Tim Farron (Lib-Dem)
Vice Chair, Christians in Parliament"

Now, let’s ignore the question of whether there is a God, a Christian God, a Christian God who only can be bothered to help when a sufficient number of people pray to him and all those other theological questions. In fact, assume that there is, if you really find the need to. The MPs writing that letter still terrify me. Their grasp on regulation, the law, fact-finding and - above all -  the scientific principle shows exactly why Government policy is often an evidence-free sanity-free zone.

"It appears to cut across two thousand years of Christian tradition and the very clear teaching in the Bible."

Well, considering we tend to at least pretend that the laws of the land aren’t based on religion, it’s not really that relevant. Don’t make me quote some other less savoury practices that the bible suggests is acceptable, even good, that even Cameron’s lot would flinch away from.

"On what scientific research or empirical evidence have you based this decision?"

OK, here’s the real point. None, there is no need whatsoever for the ASA to base their decisions on scientific research they come up with themselves. This is for such obvious reasons it’s hardly worth discussing. Let’s check in fact the regulation that was infringed.

It’s the Committee of Advertising Practice’s section 12.1 on health: "Objective claims must be backed up by evidence". Yes – the claims _of the advertiser_ are the ones which must be backed up by evidence that says they are true.

If this wasn’t the case it would be ridiculous. I could submit a vial of finest tapwater with particles of mud in and claim drinking that would cure you of 100 diseases…and I’d be safe to say that until the ASA commissioned, at public expense, 100 complex and expensive trials to prove that I was wrong (in fact, it would require far more than 100, but let’s keep it simple).

That "misunderstanding" is enough to make me laugh at the MPs, but just for the sake of completion it seems that they did include with the letter some evidence that God does heal. After all, I’m sure the ASA does get things wrong sometimes, and providing them some research as to why would be the exactly correct thing to do to repeal an invalid ruling.

Gary says:

"After prayer at that meeting, my hand was immediately free from pain and has been ever since. What does the ASA say about that?"

Great, well I would imagine the ASA would say that was quite nice, and a charmingly biased n=1 anecdote, but not exactly the level of evidence that is typically required from a medical advert. Did I mention that once someone drunk my muddy water and their flu got better a few days later?

He kind of even acknowledges the flaw in his evidence:

"I would be the first to accept that prayed for people do not always get healed, but sometimes they do."

People who have jobs as MPs also do not always get healed from their sicknesses, but sometimes they do. Is it really possible that our elected representatives are so idiotic they cannot understand why writing this letter is exposing a shameful level of ignorance?

(Oh, and just because I'm writing this around April 1st it doesn't mean that that’s when the story came out to be clear. These 3 didn't wait until April to show their fool-like nature)

Some might say who cares? It’s not like it’ll do much harm to have this leaflet out there. Prayer probably doesn’t hurt anyone very much. However that’s not the point I’m making here, it’s the level of response from these country-ruling people that bothers me.

 And in fact there is potential harm, even death, that comes from these ideas to a small minority: people do sometimes die unnecessarily when people use prayer as a substitute for medical treatment

See for example Asser and Swann’s paper from 1998 (1) examining the death rates of children who were (some would say unlucky enough to be) born into families who believe in faith healing over the more widely accepted general medical care business. Here’s a sad part of the abstract:

"One hundred forty fatalities were from conditions for which survival rates with medical care would have exceeded 90%. Eighteen more had expected survival rates of >50%. All but 3 of the remainder would likely have had some benefit from clinical help. 

Conclusions. When faith healing is used to the exclusion of medical treatment, the number of preventable child fatalities and the associated suffering are substantial and warrant public concern. "

Moving on:

"It is interesting to note that since the traumatic collapse of the footballer Fabrice Muamba the whole nation appears to be praying for a physical healing for him. I enclose some media extracts. Are they wrong also and will you seek to intervene?"

1. Not the whole nation. I’m not. And not because I don’t like him (honestly, I don’t know who he is, but I do hope he gets well soon).
   
2. There is a clue in the name "Advertising Standards Agency" as to whether its role is to ensure Advertising is of an allowable Standard, or whether it’s to prosecute some of the general population for having private thoughts, however metaphysical.

Fools.

Whilst we’re hear though, let’s have a swift review of  whether or not prayer does have any evidence of being able to heal or not for a bit of fun. If it’s a clear yes, perhaps I’ll write to the ASA in a far more appropriate way and get them to overturn this catastrophic ruling.

Back in 2003 the BBC reported on the MANTRA study which has some interesting mixed findings on praying for patients with cardiac problems, using a double-blind methodology and a sample size of a few hundred. Sadly the headline one is that:

"The study findings showed that prayer made no significant difference to the long term health of the patients involved."

But, that said, there was apparently some signs that although it did them no medical good in terms of heart condition, the prayed-for group did feel less distress. Also something of a dose/response effect apparently existed. That said, I haven’t been so virtuous as to read the original study so I must rely on the BBC to point these things out.

A followup involving the MANTRA people was published in the Lancet in 2005 (3). A little more disappointing, if the abstract is to be believed:

"Neither masked prayer nor MIT therapy significantly improved clinical outcome after elective catheterisation or percutaneous coronary intervention."

A handy consolidation of a few studies on the subject, again by the BBC, mentions a study in 1872 (old-skool!) suggested that prayers don’t work because monarchs were prayed for the most but didn’t live the longest. Sadly there was no danger of the scientific method being involved here and massive obvious confounders, so I would throw that one out only a little slower than Gary’s hand-related exploits.

Slightly more recently in 1988, Dr Randolph Byrd (2) got a group of Christians to pray for a randomized bunch of, again, heart patients. Here apparently some effects were to be found, the prayed-for group had a "significantly lower severity score". So his conclusion was in the affirmative:

"These data suggest that intercessory prayer to the Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect in patients admitted to a CCU."

To be clear, it didn’t affect the actual incidence of dying - but those in the prayed-for group who did eventually recover did so in a less unpleasant way. They required fewer instances of "ventilatory  assistance, antibiotics and diuretics".

An article by the Washington Post does also point out a potential flaw in most of these studies: for a true test, one would have to make sure a certain group of patients was never prayed for. But it’s perhaps hard to imagine, and certainly impossible to validate in this case, that no-one in the non-prayer group (bearing in mind of course these people did not know they were in this group) didn’t either pray for themselves or have family and friends that did.

Moving again towards the present day, a literature review of 17 relevant papers was done in 2007 by David Hodge, an Arizona State University researcher (5). Sadly the rather disappointing conclusion was that:

"Thus, at this junction in time, the results might be considered inconclusive."

Again in 2007 we see the publication of a review this time of 15 studies (4), most using good-standard double-blinding scientific techniques. Results even more disappointing this time.

"The effects of distant intercessory prayer are examined by meta-analysis and it is concluded that no discernable effects can be found."

So in summary: there’s some mildly interesting findings in a few of these studies that might be worth taking a peek into: but there is unfortunately no definitive and unarguable evidence that prayer works reliably in any study the Google-monster has thrown my way  – so sadly I will not be joining the ranks of the idiotic trio in calling for the ASA to repeal their decision. I am however quite happy to promise to never vote for Gary, Gavin or Tim should the occasion arise.


References


(1) Seth M. Asser, Rita Swan "Child Fatalities From Religion-motivated Medical Neglect" Pediatrics Vol. 101 No. 4 April 1, 1998 pp. 625 -629 


(2) Randolph C. Byrd, M.D., "Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in a coronary care unit population. ", Southern Medical Journal 1988 Jul; 81(7): 826-9


(3) Krucoff et al. "Music, imagery, touch, and prayer as adjuncts to interventional cardiac care: the Monitoring and Actualisation of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) II randomised study" , The Lancet, Volume 366, Issue 9481, Pages 211 - 217, 16 July 2005


(4) Masters, K. S., & Spielmans, G. I. (2007). Prayer and Health: Review, Meta-Analysis, and Research Agenda. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 329-338.

(5) David R. Hodge, "A Systematic Review of the Empirical Literature on Intercessory Prayer" in Research on Social Work Practice, March 2007, vol. 17 no. 2, 174-187

Regional pay and London weighting

One of the budgety-related announcements made by our less-than-esteemed Government was the idea of regional pay: that public sector workers working in poor parts of the country where private sector pay is typically less should also earn less than their counterparts who work in richer parts of the country.

These might be really small divisions, having seen an example where even people in different parts of Manchester would earn different amounts.

The main argument seems to be that paying public sector workers "too much" in these poorer areas means that private sector businesses struggle to recruit whilst remaining profitable.

I'm instinctively against this for a few reasons. 2 key ones might be that:

1. Really if the 2 people are doing doing exactly the same job with the same level of proficiency then they should receive exactly the same reward. Whilst discriminating based on location is not quite the same as discriminating based on gender or race we should bear in mind it is not trivial to up sticks and relocate to somewhere "richer". In fact it is probably nigh-on impossible for anyone relatively poor.
   
   This one I admit may be rather than idealistic view. But I'm nothing if not idealistic when it comes to these things...
2. However, more practically, this leads to the forming of even greater wealth divides, notably between the south-east (rich) and the north (poor). Once a poor northerner is locked into receiving low wages because of where they happen to live, it is hard to imagine social mobility could do anything other than decrease. The sad deprivation of some areas may be exacerbated ever more further. Public services could suffer: would the top-skilled workers really want to move to a job that pays them less, or - if lucky enough to be able to - not move from the deprived area to a lovely wealthy area that pays more

We should acknowledge that's its far more likely that the changes are going to push wages down, not up. I've not heard talk of paying people in rich areas more, just the opposite. Is it again a "race to the bottom"? Similar to the pensions argument, totally invalid in my view, that just because private sector people tend to have crappy pensions then it is "only fair" that public sector people are forced into them too (despite having signed up for different jobs with different rewards).

It also seems to be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, making things less equal for the sake of things. I really, really can't believe it's the "massive"* income that public sector workers receive that is causing the odd bit of trouble for some businesses recruiting. The levels of unemployment are so high that ones hears of ratio 20+ applicants for each job. Desperate people are not turning down jobs en masse because they don't pay like a Government job does. The jobs simply don't exist. And we are not going to stimulate demand, and hence the economy, by reducing the amount of income that people have to spend - especially poorer people in deprived regions who typically actually spend their earnings on something vaguely useful economy-wise.

However the concept of "London weighting" for public sector workers has existed for a long time. If you work in London you get paid more due to the extra cost of living. Is this so different? It's obviously regional pay, but just the country is divided into 2 regions. I've never really had a problem with this (and in fact effectively turned down a job because a weighting like that wasn't enough for me). Likewise the unions seem to be in favour of lots of London weighting, but very against regional pay. So I'm trying to understand why it's so different. If regional pay as described above seems wrong, then is London weighting wrong too, in theory?

Is it because London weighting is supposed to reflect the costs of living in London, which are indeed extremely high, rather than be benchmarked against private section businesses? I'm not sure there's a big difference in reality there though. Costs of living are high in London because people that live there have more money, the fortunate ones anyway. If nobody could afford million-pound houses then million-pound houses would not exist.


This new idea is a bit inconsistent with the Government's benefit strategy as well. I'm not hearing talkings of regional differences in welfare benefits, or in taxation. I'm sure things like council tax have some regionalities to them as they are based on property worth (in theory), but for instance income tax rules are the same wherever you live. The government is also a fan of capping benefits universally - the same cap wherever you live - which already seems to be causing some of the unfortunate recipients to have to move to poorer neighbourhoods (again risking local, self-perpetuating, enclaves of sad deprivation in between hot-spots of the fortunate and rich?) before even really kicking in.

Some - including Westminster council - might say that's fine. Their spokeperson said "To live in Westminster is a privilege, not a right, because so many people want to live here", a view that a lot of internet commenters seem to agree with. But that attitude, and a national total cap on benefits - typically the large part being housing benefit - seems inconsistent with a more regional approach on pay. If the argument is "the state will only give you a fixed amount of money and if it's not enough to live in a nice area then you will have to move" then it could equally well apply to money received from the state as wages as to that received from the state as benefits.

The obvious exception to this rule is if there is a deliberate intent to attract "good" - meaning working for the state - people to rich areas but farm "bad" - meaning don't work for the state or generate large amounts of private income - people out to some unnamed mass camp of relative poverty. But no politician has quite put it like that to date.

A final point too, probably would have been better above: is benchmarking public sector pay to private sector pay valid in the first place, when public sector jobs are not the same as private sector? The responsibilities are different, the activities are different, the conditions are different, the people are different and I suspect the income and employment distribution is very different between regions too. As an example, apparently 38% of people working in the public sector are graduates whereas only 23% of those in the private sector are. And let's not forget that in recent times a lot of public sector enterprises have privatised the parts of their workings that would normally have paid quite poorly (think cleaning, catering etc.) which naturally pushes the average public sector wage up.

* Any of the above which might lead you to think that public sector workers tend to earn a bucket load of cash is not intentional, quite the opposite, especially now. The TUC calculate "The combination of pay freezes, pay caps and pension contribution increases will already have resulted in public sector workers taking an average 16 per cent real terms wage cut by 2015". Many public sectors workers who right now earn "London weighting" can't begin to afford to actually live in the desirable parts of the city.

UK Budget 2012: the overall picture

Last one about the budget for now, I promise. But possibly the most important.

So with the myriad of either wilfully nasty or niceish-but-implemented-like-a-lunatic schemes come up with in Osborne's 2012 budget, what are the overall effects? Do we gain nicely increased tax revenues, ensuring those who can comfortably do so pay the most? Of course, just like pigs have wings.

Let's be (more than) charitable and use the Government's own figures - even though some of them are almost certainly misleading and not by accident - impact of 50% tax rate being one of particular note. Check this out, from the official big red book of budgetary impact.

(swiped from Mark Easton's BBC blog thanks!)

It's the black line you should be interested in. It attempts to show the cumulative impact of [nearly] all the changes in taxes and benefits on the various deciles of households, by net income. You can read "bottom decile" as meaning poorest 10% of all households.

And would you look at that: everyone's losing money, but the poorest half, and especially the poorest 20%, is losing more than most. The top decile - the very richest people - does look like it's losing a lot too, but let's read the small print first:

It is worth noting that this graph does not include the impact of the cut to the 50% rate of tax because, the Treasury says, "the behavioural response is so large that presenting a static analysis would not be representative of likely actual impacts".

All of the people who will receive the 50% rate tax-cut feature in the top decile so really one can assume that the top decile figure is lower than it should be. And if it's so hard to work out the effects of a certain policy, how could they be so confident in abolishings it? Curious.

Even without changes though, it's clearly not a fair or progressive tax change, far from it. The Government has entirely knowingly ensured that the very poorest in society will see some of the largest % reductions to their already meager income.

Boo.

UK budget 2012: other bits and pieces

Carrying on what appears to now be a series of budgetary happenings. But hopefully more briefly, as I have learnt a little less about many of these ones from the lurid headlines that inform my worldview.

Child benefit

I'm totally ignorant really on the actual value of this one. I have no idea what it costs to raise a child, the rationale for the value, or how it mixes in with all the various credits/incentives to work. But I can tell that it's being implemented slightly stupidly. I would say very stupidly, except their original plan was even more stupid, so at least this is an improvement.

Right now, everyone can get child benefit. It's the one benefit that I have actually heard more than once people, who are on a reasonably comfortable but not super rich income,  that receive it actually questioning why they are allowed to. If your income is relatively huge, does the state really need to pay over £1,000 a year towards your kid? Possibly not. It's definitely not a progressive benefit whatsoever. I wonder if the queen ever claimed it?

So I'm not really against the idea of curtailing it. But the method they chose is not great. The new rules are that you get it all except:

• if anyone in your household earns over £60,000 then you get none of it
• if anyone in your household earns between £50,000 and £60,000 then you get some of it
  
  (Richard Murphy calculates the rate to be equivalent to an overall 72% rate of taxation within this period - which is interesting considering a few minutes ago 50% was far too high for people earning £150k+. I suppose Osborne doesn't have many friends who "only" earn £50k)

Note: "anyone in your household". So although it was better than their last attempt, we still have the silly situation where a household with 2 parents who both earn £49k (total income = £98k) gets the full benefit paid to them, whereas a household with 1 parent earning £60k and the other earning nothing (total income = £60k) gets nothing.

The other genius idea is how this will be collected. Rather than simply not give child benefit to those people who are no longer eligible for it, they will give it out and expect the receiving parent/guardian to fill out a tax return at the end of the year and post it back to them. This is surely either an administrative nightmare as a bunch of sleep-free harassed parents attempt to fill in a complex form in-between cleaning up their kids' vomit, or a slightly progressive change in tax that - again - just won't be enforced.

Stamp duty

So, in a sort of nod towards the Lib Dem's desired mansion tax (but not really), any house that sells for over £2 million pounds will attract a7% stamp duty. This is adding a new layer of an extra 2% to existing stamp duty rates where the maximum one ever had to pay was 5% if the property was sold for £1 million.

Some might allege it's because I'm not a Londoner, but it does feel a little hard to feel sorry for those who were put off their purchase of a £2,000,000 house for the sake of £40k. A hard-hearted sort might tell them to just try and find a house that cost £1,960,000 and try and slum it in there. So no real complaints on the idea, but the execution is, like child benefit, a bit silly. To me, taxes with a precise point at which extra percentages become liable on the full amount are just asking for some sort of exploitation or other.

• A house that sells at £1,999,999.99 attracts a 5% tax ( = £99,999.95) 
• A house that sells at £2,000,000 attracts a 7% tax (= £140,000.00)

I wonder if we'll see a few penny discounts in house prices then?

We should also bear in mind that this is not a tax on wealth as such. It's a tax on the mega-wealthy who also happen to want to buy an expensive house; a rather smaller population.

What I have (amazingly?) no complaints about yet though is the new stamp duty on residential properties brought through private companies. It has been a scam of the very wealthy for a while to avoid buying a hugely expensive house themselves, which would attract a 5% stamp duty. Instead, they set up a fake company that does essentially nothing. The company then buys the house and allows the person to live in it. However, being a company, they have to pay only a tenth of the tax - 0.5% - that the wealthy tax evader should have. This is a reasonable chunk of change difference for anyone buying a property worth a few illion.

If you want some evidence that this fake-companyness is indeed an issue then simply look at Britain's most expensive residential development - Hyde Park One. 95% of the apartments sold so far there have been sold to "companies" conveniently headquartered in various foreign tax-evading jurisdictions. I suspect an examination of their interior would suggest that an actual person is actually living there, rather than an ethereal notion of a corporate entity being the sole inhabitant floating around.

The best bit is that stamp duty on these dodgy company-bought properties over £2 million will now be 15%, compared to the 7% it would be if one was to just behave and buy it like a (absurdly rich) normal person. Ha. I just trust it will be enforced in the way that, to his credit, Osborne has been talking about it. 

Corporation tax

The main rate of corporation tax is to fall steadily down to 22% over the next 3 years, starting at 26% presently. So simply, big business will pay less tax (the few parts of big business that actually pay their taxes due anyway). This too seems to be biased towards a reward for the already-rich as many larger businesses, believe it or not, are actually having the time of their lives at present in terms of stockpiled cash and the like. 

Weren't the businesses we're more supposed to be concerned with supposed to be the small entrepreneurial start-ups, for which the unfortunate economic climate makes it hard to cope in the first few years? Well, this tax cut will help them by exactly 0% as it only applies to companies with profits over £300k per year; sadly rather more than the average newly self-employed person is probably making.

Pensions

This is the one the newspapers have enjoyed hating the most. Check this load of front pages out.

But for me, bizarrely, it seems to be one of the lesser evil masterstrokes of this budget  (unless just by reading about it I am getting sucked in to nasty Osborne mindsets - terrifying).

The deal as I understand it is roughly this. Right now, as we already discussed, people are entitled to earn a certain amount of income of income allowed before they start being taxed on the rest of it. The standard amount today is £7,475. However if you are a pensioner, between the ages of 65 and 74 you get a bonus such that your amount is £9,940. Older than that and you get to keep £10,090 before tax starts. The Osborne scheme is to freeze those amounts until the end up being the same as the under-65 allowance, which is £7,475 right now and will be £9,205 come 2013.

So nobody is losing money in nominal terms today, but it is very true to say that in future years some pensioners will be worse off in real terms than they are today. Their tax-free income limit will remain the same as the prices of life's essentials goes up, until it becomes the same rate as everyone else has.

There's a philosophical question here of course: is it right that older people should pay less income tax than younger people purely based on their age? Given more of the awful affects of austerity (unemployment, low/no wages, no EMA, cuts in services, university fees etc. etc.) seem to have come to roost in the youth of today some might say it is OK to ask older people with half-decent incomes to pay the same rates of tax as they would. There are arguments both ways, especially when one considers the possible definition of income. Few people would want to penalise a pensioner for having had the foresight to maintain some supply of money into their dotage.

Which pensioners are likely to suffer? Here's some from the IPPR's view on the effects of this change on pensioner-inhabited households, arranged in order of income.

You can see here then that the worst affected pensioners will be the 2nd and 3rd richest quintiles who would lose over £300. The poorest fifth lose almost nothing, largely for the same reasons that the increases in personal tax allowances don't really help the poor. Many pensioners don't have an income stream of over £8,105 now so aren't affected (remembering that return from investments a pensioner may have are not taxed as "income" in many cases).

The reason it doesn't affect the richest fifth all that much is that already the bonus benefit is tapered, so if you have an income of over £24,000 already you start gradually losing entitlement to this benefit. Income-rich pensioners are therefore unaffected by this change.

But really, the argument is perhaps less about how much pensioners might suffer (there are both very poor pensioners, and very rich pensioners: and a 2009 study indicated that, for whatever reason, over half of existing pensioners don't claim this benefit). It's more about fairness. It is undoubtedly true, and not a good thing, that a majority of pensioners may be - in real terms - worse off because of this within a few years. But where is this public money being saved going to go instead? To quote Dot Gibson, from the National Pensioners Convention:

"Many older people will feel they are being asked to forego their reduction in tax to help out the super rich. There is no fairness in that."

I would certainly agree with that, no questions asked.