I learned a new word this week – EmoTrance.
EmoTrance is the new name for bullshit.
In the last week, its received no less than two articles worth of coverage in The Times’ educational supplements; one, a vomit inducing piece of brainless advertorial by Adi Bloom, an arts correspondent with a taste for ‘kitsch’ – i.e. fucking [...]

Arthur C Clarke once famously noted that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. Were he still alive today he might also have observed that magic, when dressed up in sufficiently advanced technobabble, can be readily mistaken for science.
Tuesday’s New York Times carried this quite staggering report on the involvement of a number British [...]

Okay, its time for the third and final instalment of my investigation into the scientific evidence behind the DWP’s trial of Nemesysco’s ‘Layered Voice Analysis’ technology…
…and in this episode I intend to blow the lid on the system complete and explain exactly how this scientifically invalid piece of junk software has managed to gull several [...]

In defiance of Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes, Nemesysco have stuck out a lengthy press release in an effort to defend their technology, one which, rather hilariously puts forward this specific criticism of the work of Professors Eriksson and Lacerda:
The article’s claims that our technology does not work and cannot work are based on [...]

This is an expanded version of an article published at Liberal Conspiracy.
The next stage of my detailed coverage of the scientific evidence behind the DWP’s current ‘lie detector’ trial will be along, as promised, in the next 24 hours but, in the meantime, I’ve received a reply to an FOIA request I put in around [...]

One thing that those of us who’ve been working on the DWP Trial investigation discovered, only this week, is the we’re not alone in asking hard questions about the DWP’s trial. So, if you’ve read this week’s technology supplement then you’ll have already noticed that the Guardian has run an article on the technology behind [...]

Earlier this week, over at Liberal Conspiracy, I started to publish a comprehensive exposé of the DWP’s trial of a ‘voice risk analysis’ system on benefits claimants.
To follow the story so far, you’ll need to read:
Liberal Conspiracy briefing: Exposing the DWP’s lie detector testing, and
LC briefing: Lie detectors – how it all started
Due to legal [...]

Ordinarily, there’s nothing particularly unusual in stories of senior civil servants and local government officials scoring themselves a jolly junket on the public purse on the pretext of attending a course given by some sort of bullshit management guru nor in the press complaining that this amounts to a waste of public money.
What makes this [...]