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Bishop Hill Jan 14, 2009 Civil liberties The madmen at the Internet Watch Foundation have done it again. Not happy with banning Wikipedia, they are now banning the whole of the Wayback machine. The full story is here at the Reg.
Sorry, but this time heads have got to roll.
Bishop Hill Jan 14, 2009 Greens From a caption at the BBC
Elliot Kannel from the Pestercide Action Network says the ruling will take some time to have any effect, while farmer and Ulster Farmer's Union Vegetable Committee member Robin McKee says food production will be more difficult.
Pestercide eh? Sounds good to me.
Bishop Hill Jan 14, 2009 BBC Here's a name that's new to me at the BBC - Tanya Syed. In fact I can find almost nothing about Tanya on the web at all, apart from a couple of articles she'd already written for BBC News, so I guess it's fair to say she's the new girl. Trainee perhaps. Straight out of her media studies degree.
Welcome aboard Tanya.
Tanya has been diligent and has paid careful attention to her training course. In fact she catches on very quickly indeed. Today's contribution to the news effort is about a report issued by a political pressure group called the Worldwatch Institute (good girl Tanya, box ticked there), calling for drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions (tick). Our Tanya carefully omits to mention that they are a political pressure group of course (tick). And then she dutifully provides some balance by quoting a different opinion on the report (careful!).
Well...sort of different. It's by somebody different anyway. Yup, balance is provided by quoting another political pressure group called the Australian Conservation Foundation (tick! tick! tick!). They think the Worldwatch report is just great. (I think we knew that though.)
Tanya, you will go far.
Bishop Hill Jan 14, 2009 Climate David Stockwell is an Australian statistical expert who has written a book covering, among other things, statistical tests for detecting datasets which have been manipulated in some way. He also has a blog called Niche Modelling which is well worth a visit.
His latest post outlines the results of running one of these fraud-busting tests on NASA GISS's global temperature index, and the results were rather interesting....
RESULT: Significant management detected.
David is quick to point out that he's in exploratory mode and hasn't actually drawn any conclusions yet, but this is definitely going to be one to watch.
Bishop Hill
Lubos Motls has picked up on Stockwell's story and taken it a bit further by running the test over the satellite data from UAH. No sign of any manipulation there.
What fun!
Bishop Hill Jan 12, 2009 Climate A very interesting article for those of a global warming sceptic bent and for BBC watchers, over at The Register.
Bishop Hill The Times reports that Lord Barnett, a former Labour minister, is set to make a mint from an investment in a company that recycles the toxic lightbulbs we are soon to be forced to use.
A FORMER Labour cabinet minister is set make a fortune when the country switches to using low-energy light bulbs.
Lord Barnett, who was Treasury chief secretary two prime ministers during the 1970s, is a shareholder in Mercury Recycling Group, which is expected to see its value soar during the switch over from conventional lighting.
The Times seems to have asked the Ignoble Lord if he had used insider knowledge of the government's intentions to guide his investment decisions. "No" retorts his Lordliness, "I have never spoken in the House of Lords on an issue in which I have got an interest."
A case of denying something with which you were not charged, if ever I heard it.
Bishop Hill Jan 11, 2009 Climate The Council of Science Editors is not a body I've come across before, but I chanced upon their website while looking for something else, and given this site's recent interest in the subject, I wondered what their position is on data sharing. It's here:
Thorough peer review may require access to data and analyses that are not provided in a submitted manuscript, and sometimes such access is needed after publication as well. Editors should establish policies on access that address the following issues.
Organizations that sponsor research should encourage the publication of the results and should provide access to data if requested by journals for the purpose of peer review. Sponsoring organizations may limit access to data by others both during the research and after it is concluded, but should have no right to control the dissemination or interpretation of the results of the research and should provide access to any data needed for peer review.
Submission of an original article to a journal should carry with it the implied consent to provide access to data if needed for editorial evaluation and peer review. Journals should also have the right to review data on which manuscripts are based after publication, should questions arise regarding the validity of the work or of errors in it. This right of journals of access to data should be expressly stated by editors as part of their published editorial policies and in their guidelines for authors.
Editors should request access to data for the sole purpose of evaluating a manuscript for publication or in the case of a challenge to the validity of a work after publication. Editors, reviewers, and journal staff have a responsibility to keep the data confidential and not to use it for their own purposes in any way, or otherwise directly benefit from their access to the data that results from their role in the peer review process.
This is a bit of a disappointment as it seems to adopt the "weak" approach to data, assuming that authors will comply with requests for access after publication. Given that we know this doesn't happen in practice, it looks to me as if the society needs to revisit its policy and adopt the strong approach of the econometrics journals.
What was also interesting was that they seem to have examined the issue in more detail at their 2008 Annual Meeting. The schedule for the session reads as follows:
Most journals require that their authors share the data to support the conclusions presented in published papers. However, the devil is in the details when it comes to enforcing this requirement. Journal editors are being asked to arbitrate disagreements between authors and researchers with regard to just how much data must be shared. And the problem becomes even more complicated when a political agenda is behind the request for data. Come to this session to learn more about the issues surrounding data sharing.
Political agenda? Whoever could they mean? Surely they are not suggesting that someone's motives are relevant to whether they get the data or not? This aside, the statement here gets to the nub of the problem. If you are relying on authors complying with requests after the event, you have an enforcement issue. You just have to hope that your author is going to toe the line, and if they don't then you have a problem. Why do the journals do this to themselves? If they demand the data up front, the whole issue goes away. It's not rocket science.
Bishop Hill Jan 11, 2009 Quotes Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook."
PJ O'Rourke in the Weekly Standard
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2009 Civil liberties The problem of libel tourism, has been in the news again. This is the mad state of affairs where people from other parts of the world come to London to sue for libel damages because of the absurd reversal of the burden of proof here, the excessive damages frequently handed out, and the weak protections for free speech we "enjoy" in the UK.
In the internet age this has offered repressive regimes and individuals of dubious intent the possibility to silence critics whereever they are and the US has started to notice the deleterious effect it has had on their constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, plans are afoot to allow people to counterclaim in the US Courts.
Unfortunately it will only be possible to sue people who visit the US or have business interests there, but it's a step in the right direction. The interesting facet to the new bill for British bloggers is the question of whether it would in theory be possible for a blogger sued in the UK by a business with American interests to counterclaim through the US courts, thus partially extending the protections of the US constitution to the UK.
That would be a turn-up for the books.
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2009 Economics Argentina has a critical shortage of coins - change cannot be had for love nor, erm, money, it seems. The Wall Street Journal notes that this once happened in Britain. Back in the days when the a bit more backbone was displayed by the inhabitants of these islands, the banks simply started minting their own coins, solving the problem in fairly short order (at least until the government stepped in, forcing them to cease, and recreating the problem at a stroke).
A solution for the Argentine, perhaps.
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2009 Liberalism How do you organise your feeds? If like me you have loads of the things, you can't just sling them all on a single page. Well you could, I suppose, but it wouldn't be very easy to work with would it? In some ways this is like the old and rather important question that perplexed us as teenagers of how to organise the record collection. Alphabetically? By genre? Or perhaps like David Davis's books, there's always the "artistic" approach of organising by size and colour. In my teenage years my system was very much equivalent to slinging my RSS feeds on a single page - in other words my records were generally flung around the living room floor or piled up in a corner.
Nowadays I'm much more organised, and my RSS feeds are organised into tabs - one for liberals, one for statists, one for the rest of the political sites, plus tabs for specialists, two covering the different sides of the climate debate, plus one each for reference sites and things related to my work.
Who should go on the liberals tab is a tricky problem, and there are many sites I waver over. Particularly tricky are the Liberal Democrat blogs. LibDems all seem to know that they are supposed to be economic liberals as well as social liberals, but they are just to wedded to their statism to let go completely. There are a lot of sites with the word liberal in their titles on the Statists tab. There are exceptions though - Jock, Liberty Alone, Tom Papworth to name a few. Here's a new one, recently promoted from the ranks of the "others", and blogging up a storm at the moment too - Charlotte Gore. Well worth a read.
Bishop Hill Jan 9, 2009 Books There seems to be something of a new meme doing the rounds of the media at the minute. Fraser Nelson seems to have started it at the Spectator, with a short article wondering whether the similarities between Brown's Britain and the dystopian future imagined by Ayn Rand in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, weren't just a little to close for comfort. (If you don't know the story, you are probably a stranger around these here parts, but in a nutshell it tells what happens when government gets too big and all the productive people start walking away from society. It's a famously badly written book, but despite that manages to get under your skin and inspire you).
The Speccy piece was picked up by Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata and from the comments there, I found this article at the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Moore. The title tells it all: Atlas Shrugged: from fiction to fact in 52 years.
As I said, all the good guys in Atlas Shrugged walk away and head for a sort of anarchist utopia called Galt's Gulch, where the hand of government can't reach them. And if anyone can give me directions, I'd be grateful.
Bishop Hill Jan 8, 2009 BBC This morning I've been on childminding duty, with the smallest of the Baby Bishop keeping me occupied with a variety of more or less charming antics. The weather has cheered up (well, it's above freezing and the sun's out) and so we got out for some fresh air.
Duly refreshed and with fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, we switched on the television and caught a programme called Barnaby Bear on CBeebies. I don't know why I still let the children watch anything the BBC produces, I really don't, and true to form even Barnaby Bear managed to be infuriating. Yes folks, BBC output for preschoolers is just as disgustingly political as the rest of its output. Can anyone at the BBC stand up and tell me that it is considered suitable for preschoolers to watch a section about roads protesters at Twyford Down? Complete with Lord Porritt bawling into a loudhailer? I know he's a hero to those on the left, but this is meant to be a programme for the under fives, for heaven's sake! Barnaby Bear and the Twyford Down protesters? What planet are these people on?
Bishop Hill Jan 7, 2009 Civil liberties Henry Porter, one of the few journalists to "get it" has an excellent article today about how people are being lifted by the police for photographing things - cycle paths, derelict buildings, railway stations and the like. They are then whisked off to the police station and their fingerprints and DNA taken. As our Henry says, something really has to be done.
My idea would be to have a "Photograph a Potential Terrorist Target Day", in which everyone goes out with their cameras and snaps away at any state-owned building. It doesn't actually have to be a terrorist target, any state owned building would do, but the point needs to be got across that this kind of behaviour is normal and acceptable and should not be an excuse for the police to meet their arrest targets by simply lifting people of the streets.
In fact, while we're about it, maybe we should start photographing state officials at work - including particularly policemen.
Bishop Hill Jan 6, 2009 Books Donald Clark is one of the best business bloggers I know. Always thoughtful, always provocative. His thesis today is "Close down the libraries". This might sound daft but it's a well-thought out piece and I think he's probably right, but maybe the time is not quite right. It won't be long though.
