New in the blogroll

This is the first addition to my blogroll for a while - Head of Legal, the blog of a barrister turned writer.

Great blogging career moves

One of the great blogging career moves of all time must be Lucia Liljegren's switch from writing about knitting to a site devoted to statistical analysis of climate science.

Her most recent posts were a piece about the application of the Cochrane-Orcutt method to monthly global temperature data and a short article about a stuffed elephant.

This makes me feel rather inadequate.

(Since you ask, Cochrane-Orcutt "adjusts a linear model for serial correlation in the error term", at least according to Wikipedia. Lucia's article actually looks rather exciting since it appears to show that the IPCC's projections for global temperature are too high. Only the mathematically inclined need read though).

Civil Serf is down

The Sunday Times has a story speculating about the identity of Civil Serf, the anonymous Whitehall blogger.

The Civil Serf - as she calls herself - claims to be a 33-year-old fast-stream civil servant ready to expose the daily chaos of the Labour government machine while lampooning ministers and highlighting the idiocy of mandarin colleagues. There are also moans about drunken advances from the opposite sex.

It's a great blog - she writes beautifully, or at least she did, because as of this moment the whole site appears to have been deleted.  It's a shame, but it was certainly good to have a light shone on the inner workings of the mandarinate for a while.

Blogger accused of having blood on his hands

John Adams is probably better described as an expert on risk than as a blogger, but we'll let that pass. A commenter has accused him of being complicit in the death of a driver in New Zealand. The driver was not wearing a seatbelt when killed, an offence he'd been convicted for many times previously, and the commenter reckons Adams is to blame because of his stated views on seatbelts. (OK, so the guy was also high on drugs too, but....)

I'm reading Adams' book "Risk" at the moment, and I find his arguments quite convincing. In essence he says that if you wear a seatbelt, you are probably going to driver more recklessly than if you aren't. So while a seatbelt reduces the risk of injury if you're in a crash, it also makes you more likely to have a crash in the first place.

This is perhaps all a bit subtle for the commenter in question who reckons that Prof Adams has been campaigning for people not to wear seatbelts. If he (the commenter) was consistent he would also be cheering Adams' "campaign" every time a pedestrian was knocked over and killed: if people weren't wearing seatbelts, they'd never drive so fast.

Illiberal and statist outreach work

I often wonder whether we in the libertarian part of the blogosphere end up just preaching to each other. With this in mind, I've been making doing some outreach work at LabourHome and LibDem Voice which has been lots of fun and much more of an intellectual challenge. (I don't think I've actually converted anyone yet though).

The latest venture here was the comments thread on this post at LibDem voice on the subject of Post Office closures. The point I keep coming back to is this: if you're not going to use economic viability as your criterion to decide if a PO branch should remain open, what are you going to base your decision on? So far this appears to have the Liberal party stumped. 

Light blogging

Well, I haven't written anything for a while now. It's all too depressing - I think Bruno feels the same way. Then again, perhaps it's the weather.

Adam Smith abducted by aliens

Has something happened to the Adam Smith Institute? They seem to have a new, very corporate-style website (yuk). The blog appears to be there, but there's no RSS feed. No word of explanation - no nothing.

Have they all been abducted by aliens or something? 

Weblog awards

Climate Audit is up for Best Science Blog at the 2007 Weblog awards. You can vote here every 24 hours.

Bent Society?

This looks like it could be interesting - Bent Society? is a blog by a professional criminologist called Mike Sutton. There is a good piece here about government lead property marking schemes. Choice quote from one particular scrote interviewed by Dr Sutton:

Another interviewee said that he was never affected by property marking, saying that he stole it anyway:

“…the criminals is always one step ahead of them [police]. It doesn’t take long for someone to sit there with a bit of brain on ‘em and fuckin figure out how to fuckin decode it, get rid of markings or whatever. And you always know somebody like that. There is always going to be somebody like that [who could remove property marking or security features for the thief or fence]. When you’ve got a proper buyer [Commercial Fence] who spends money getting it sorted out he will.”

Redeeming features

Having been offline for a day or so, I seem to have missed all the excitement, with lots of UK bloggers being threatened with writs by a large and greasy Uzbek - a man who actually seems to have no redeeming features whatsoever. I think we can take it for granted that anyone who manages to completely unite the UK blogosphere is a pretty nasty piece of work.

If anyone by any chance has missed it, the full story is here.

Great cludges I have known

Amit Varma at India Uncut is calling for entries for his competition to find the worlds' finest public conveniences. My suggestion is the gothic fantasy of the public dunny at Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. A true treat for your todger.

 

Because you're worth it. 

Harrassment of bloggers

Lurch, the author of a blog called Gun Culture has been visited by the police as part of the renewal for his firearms licence. During the visit they raised the subject of his blog:

It seems that my crappy little corner of the blogosphere has come to the attention of the police, and they don’t like it.  Specifically mentioned was the piece regarding the British Association of Women in Policing, where the woman wanted smaller guns for women officers, this didn’t go down well apparently despite my admission in the piece that my comments were flippant.

[...] 

The officers (who were very polite) were quick to point out that they couldn’t force me to remove posts or dictate my freedom of speech but the fact is that I am being watched. 

It's worth taking a look at the original post which must rank as one of the most innocuous imaginable.

It's hard to comprehend just how daft this makes the police look. I've no idea which force Lurch has the misfortune to be harrassed by, but it is absolutely staggering that they have time to monitor postings on obscure blogs for people making fun of them. The Chief Constable wants to have his priorities pointed out to him in no uncertain terms by someone in power. This kind of threat must be illegal, surely.

It just looks like another example of the police taking the easy option of harrassing the innocent rather than dealing with criminals. 

Via The England Project 

Libertarians take their pep pills

The Libertarian Alliance Blog has suddenly burst into life again, narrowly avoiding deletion from my feed reader.  "Abolish the BBC" is one of their first entries. It's almost like they never went away.

Nature blogs

MacMillan Nature group now has a really quite impressive web presence - at least in terms of volume. Their head honcho, Richard Charkin, is a blogger and what's more he's a real one too. He actually seems to write the posts himself, and does (for a corporate bod) dangerous things like offering the occasional opinion. He looks like a good man to have in charge of a publishing business when things are changing so quickly.

Under his tutelage, the group has started up a plethora of blogs (or "clogs" as EU Referendum likes to call corporate blogs) covering every subject from peer review to avian flu. (There's a song in there somewhere). This is admirable, but the group still gives the impression of not really having found its feet in the online world. There are also some pretty large risks they are running, and I'm not sure that they are playing their cards very cleverly. More of that later.

First though, why do I think they're not quite on the ball as regards blogging? I've subscribed to a couple of their blogs - one on peer review and also Nature Climate Feedback. The first thing to say is that content is a little thin on the ground. If you want a popular blog it's pretty much a given that you have to update it regularly, if not daily. Only the very best bloggers manage to buck this trend. Comments on Nature blogs are also pretty much moderated to death. I left a comment on the Peer to Peer blog shortly after it opened. This was not actually published until after I'd had an email correspondence with the site administrator which lasted the best part of a week - it was a friendly correspondence, for sure, but why didn't they just post the comment straight away? Another comment which I posted on Monday night was finally published today, more than 24 hours later. This is not the way to stimulate an interesting debate. It rather smacks of the way science was conducted in the nineteenth century, when you put your correspondence in the mail and it was delivered by packet steamer. It just doesn't cut the mustard any more.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Nature's web tech site, Nascent, has pulled in fully 164 comments in the 18 months since its first posting. Climate Feedback, being in such a controversial area, really ought to be their showpiece site, but has managed to pull in just 150 comments in three months. This all suggests that the punters are being turned off.

It's a tricky situation for Nature. It's not clear how the group intends to monetise their web presence. Most people out there are relying on getting lots and lots of eyeballs on their web presence in order to do this. This is fine for people like DK or Instapundit who can be opinionated, but Nature has a much more difficult tightrope to walk. Its whole commercial reputation relies as being seen as a neutral umpire in matters scientific. If it were seen to take sides in a debate, it might get away for it for a while, but eventually it would end up backing the wrong horse in one race or another, and then its reputation would be shot. It has to be very careful about getting into the news and opinion game.

A couple of examples:

In Nature Reports: Climate Change, which is a climate focused site of which the Climate Feedback blog forms a part,  Amanda Leigh Haag writes about a possible successor to the Kyoto Treaty. In it,  she cites the following:

• Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist and climate-policy expert at Princeton University in New Jersey,
• John Drexhage, director of climate change and energy programs at the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Ontario, Canada,
• Rob Bradley, director of international climate policy at the World Resources Institute, in Washington DC,
• Elliot Diringer, director of international strategies for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, based in Arlington, Virginia,
• Roger Pielke Jr, a climate-policy expert at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
• Saleemul Huq of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development

Now if you are going to take virtually all of your quotes directly from current and former staffers of environmental pressure groups (the exception is Pielke), you run the risk of people thinking that your publication is not actually a science site, or even just a news site, but is in fact just another arm of the environmental campaigning movement. You might perhaps think that this is an admirable thing to be. But many of your readers will not, and they may well stop reading both your websites and your scientific journals.

Another example is this post by Olive Heffernan, who is the editor in charge of Climate Feedback. In it she lambasts Czech president Vaklav Klaus' recent article in which he says that there is a risk to liberty from the demands of environmentalists. She decries his lack of qualifications as a climate expert by way of denouncing his views, although she is herself a zoologist by training. These kind of opinions are fine in general. It's fairly easy to take pot-shots at them, and if the comments cleared moderation in less than 24 hours I might do so more often - but that's not the point. When they come from a Nature employee the situation is rather different. Can a Nature editor really be seen to publicly take one side like this? Heffernan not only has a go at Klaus, but also at Richard Lindzen who is, if nothing else, a professional climatologist. These are Nature's customers for heavens sake. You can't go slagging them off just because they disagree with you, Olive. Should prospective Nature authors be asking themselves if their views are acceptable to the group before they submit their manuscripts?

It would be a pity if Nature were found to have spoken out in favour of the global warming enthusiasts and to have published junk science on their behalf, as well as having ridiculed the skeptics. It just wouldn't look very clever, would it?

I don't think all is lost though. The climate debate is largely conducted at Climate Audit and Real Climate and there is a real lack of communication between the two sides. There could be a very exciting role for Climate Feedback in umpiring a proper debate between the two sides. It could be wonderful to read, useful for the advancement of science, and cut a huge amount of risk out of the Nature business model. I imagine the moderators calling in expert advice - say a statistician when the conversation turned to matters statistical - in order to force people to address the arguments of their opponents rather than the usual ad-hominems and evasions which characterise most online argument.

First though they would have to admit that there is a debate at all, so I'm not holding my breath.

Update 21 June 2007: Welcome to readers from nurture.nature.com! I hope you find the posting useful.

Appreciation

The accolades continue to flood in for this blog. After being declared "94th best non-aligned political blog penned by someone adopting an ecclesiastical persona"^* in Iain Dale's political blogging guide thingy last year, I now find that while my back has been turned I have come third (or perhaps even second equal!) in the Blogpower awards - Best layabout and style category. Had I known I'd been nominated I might have voted for myself and come a clear second!

Thank-you to the eight people who voted for me (although since multiple voting is allowed, it may be one person with a crush on me). Either way, I'm touched.

^* I made part of this up.