It is indisputable that a film or theatre production is an intellectual creation where the actions are the result of the vision of the writers, director etc. That's somewhat more difficult to argue for a sporting event. Beyond setting the rules, a league or ruling body will have a hard time claiming it had a creative input on a sporting event, unless its a scripted wrestling event.

The Premier League (and their legal strong-arming outfit Football DataCo) have plenty of previous for shakedowns with a flimsy legal basis. First it was fixtures, over which they claimed copyright and demanded extortionate licensing fees (see example: http://www.bsad.org/0506/repor...). This claim was ruled invalid when tested in court, where in a rare outbreak of common sense it was ruled that fixtures have insufficient creative input to be copyrightable.

The main reason they're going after goal clips so much is that they sell rights to such clips to the Murdoch media. Rupert is using it as one of the carrots to drive subscriptions to his paywalled titles The Sun and The Times. In ostrich-like behaviour the music industry would be proud of, the likes of Vine and 101greatgoals.com are viewed as the enemy, when many brands would kill to get their branding spread so widely in that fashion. Sometimes their aggressive approach to takedowns is at odds with the football clubs themselves. A friend of mine uploaded a clip of goal celebrations from a match he was at to Youtube. The club in question evidently liked it, since they linked to it from their official social media accounts. That, it seems, brought it to the attention of Football DataCo and prompted a copyright claim. His Youtube account was summarily suspended with no appeal, and has never been recovered. This, for a cameraphone clip consisting mostly of crowd scenes.

Then there is the ongoing legal battles over pubs showing games "illicitly". In a manner analogous to the TV blackouts in the US, no match starting at 3pm on Saturday (the traditional time from the pre-TV era) is allowed to be broadcast on UK TV. Since channels covering half the rest of the globe broadcast these matches, some enterprising publicans buy foreign satellite systems, and show the matches to their clientele. The legal situation for this is murky. Purchase of systems from the rest of EU is perfectly legal. The PL cannot claim copyright over the action itself, since it is not its intellectual creation. It instead pursues copyright claims on the grounds of the surrounding branding. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17150054) The legal battles will continue, but as with the music industry, the ordinary fan lacks the financial clout to fight a legal battle, no matter how strong the case for the defence may be.

I wonder what proportion of people who enthusiastically take up a new form of exercise quit within six months. I'd expect a correlation with fitness tracker use; people who aren't keeping fit any more won't have much use for a fitness tracker. A lot of them are probably sitting in the same cupboard as a hardly-used squash racquet or some near-pristine running shoes.

I used to work at HSL, left about 5 years ago. It has an unusual remit. Its origins are in providing scientific support to the Health and Safety Executive (e.g. accident investigations, providing scientifically sound guidance to HSE inspectors etc.) but it does a lot of research into wider occupational/public health areas too. It also has some of the UK's leading experts in the effects of fire and explosions, and a fair amount of work done there relates to that - most of the fireworks authorised for sale in the UK get safety tested there, for example. It was a nice place to work, as there were always a bunch of interesting projects being done. The pay there sucks, but I kinda regret leaving, even though I now earn more.

For many HSL research projects, the resulting reports are available on their website (generally those where 100% of the funding came from the public purse). There doesn't seem to be one about Vomiting Larry/norovirus available yet, a press release ( http://www.hsl.gov.uk/news/hsl%E2%80%99s-vomiting-larry-featured-on-the-bbc-website.aspx ) says "The outcomes of these studies have contributed to reviews of healthcare guidance in hospitals and are due to be published in relevant journals in the near future.", so seemingly not yet published.

A list of publicly available HSL papers/reports from 2012 is at http://www.hsl.gov.uk/publications/bibliography-reports-papers-and-articles/publications-2012.aspx
Where work was funded by or done in conjunction with HSE, reports are published on the HSE website at http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrhtm/index.htm

When I went backpacking around Europe 10 years ago, the cliche was that nearly every American backpacker had a copy of Let's Go. In some cities it was noticeable that hostels were far more likely to be fully booked if they appeared high in the list in Let's Go Europe. It'd be interesting to see how this has changed for today's backpackers, among whom smartphones and netbooks seem ubiquitous, and where bookings are primarily web-driven.

The version of TFA on Goldacre's blog is slightly longer (the Guardian version must have been subedited for dead tree format), and contains links to the sources of the material he's talking about.

Looks like someone else already pointed that out. That'll teach me not to browse at a high threshold.

Nelly Furtado is one of the few pop artists with a rep for *not* using auto-tune, at least if this article is to be believed. A pretty good primer on spotting auto-tune was posted on Hometracked a while back.

It is almost certainly gamma emissions which are detected in this case, not beta. You are not taking into account the full mechanism of beta decay. The beta minus decay of iodine-131 has an associated gamma emission, which occurs immediately after the beta emission when the daughter nuclide goes to the ground state. In terms of other isotopes, technetium-99m is a gamma emitter, albeit a low energy one at 140keV. Nuclides used in PET all emit 511 keV gammas.