The wisdom of African cats

Two must read articles at Counting Cats in Zanzibar: one on the problems with mass schooling and an eloquent argument to reduce the age of adulthood to the early teens.

Liberty awakens?

Rubbing the sleep from its eyes, Britain's premier human rights organisation has snuffled sluggishly from its summer slumber, ready to shuffle valiantly to the aid of the oppressed.

Is there a problem, they wonder?

News reaches me that Liberty has finally got round to replying to some of the inquiries about where it stands on the Badman review of HE. This was published something like six weeks ago, but no doubt the freedom fighters have had other things on their minds, like Shami's latest TV appearance.

If Liberty are going to stir themselves into action, that's good news. There's plenty for them to get angry about in relation to the Badman review:

1. Presumption of innocence. It should not be for parents to prove anything to the state.
2. Warrantless searches. Even freed criminals are not subject to search of their homes without a warrant.
3. Discrimination. Preschooling families are not subject to warrantless searches etc. Why should HE families have to endure this? Or is the intention to extend the new laws to everyone?
4. Breach of right to family life (protected under the Human Rights Act)?
5. Breach of right to education according to ones principles (ditto)?

I think this will create a problem for Liberty. Their instincts will be to follow the woolly lefty line of  "balancing the human rights of parents and child". If Shami does come out with this line, it will have the unfortunate result of making her sound clearly and unequivocally like a cross betweeen David Blunkett and Charles Clark. 

This would, I'm sure you'll agree, be rather unfortunate.

Another alternative is of course to recognise that there are some pretty fundamental civil liberties in play here: the presumption of innocence and warrantless searches (although the latter is now a liberty that is honoured more in the breach than in the observance). Can Liberty really come out and say that these are going to have to be secondary considerations?

My prediction - Liberty will equivocate. They will say that entry should be demanded sensitively, or some words to that effect.

Or then again, maybe they'll find it more tactful to curl up and go back to sleep.

What is the point of Shami Chakrabarti?

I wrote something moderately rude about Shami Chakrabarti a few months ago. I wondered at the time if I was being a bit over the top, but increasingly it seems to me as if the head of Liberty is just as bad as I painted her.

Today, of course, we have had some people jailed for thought crimes, with not a whimper from Liberty. Diddly squat. Nada. Rien. It also occurred to me that the Chakrabarmaid has failed to make any comment on the government's grossly illiberal proposals on home education - ideas that if enacted will represent a disgusting infringement of family life. Further digging reveals that home educators have actually approached Liberty on the issue but have not even received an acknowledgement. What a bunch of Chakrab***ards.

Pedant's law

If this isn't a previously well-described law then it should be.

Whenever thou laughest at another's spelling or grammar, the spelling thou usest in doing so shall be found to be equally dodgy.

Take this, from the Independent, for example:

Thirteen out of 20 world class university websites analysed by Australian spelling software Spellr.us were found to have miss-spellings of the word ‘university’.

...

Despite representing one of the UK’s oldest and best educational institutions Cambridge’s website was found to have miss-spelled the word ‘service’ in one of its navigational bars.

Miss Spelling must be very upset.

Tagged

Carl Gardner has tagged me for one of those round robin meme thingies. Apparently I have to tell everyone about my mobile phone and also to name one of my heroes.

There's a bit of a problem with the first bit in that I don't actually have a mobile phone, although I occasionally borrow the missus' one - an antique Nokia with a negative street cred score. I did own one once, when my job at the time required it, but I hated it with a vengeance. I don't want to be contactable at any time. (Also, what is it about a mobile which makes the battery warning bleeper go off only in the middle of the night?)

A hero - that's a bit tricky too, not being given to hero-worship. People who have done good things in difficult circumstances flit in and out of my attention all the time. At the moment it's John Adams. He'll do.

How do the BBC moderate their blog comments?

A week or two back, I wondered if my comments to a BBC comments thread had been censored, as my reply sat in a moderation queue for four days, while the argument raged on without my contribution. Eventually my comment was released, with its link to a file of correspondence relating to the CRU's withholding of climate data deleted. According to the email from the moderators, this was because I had linked to a PDF file, something that is apparently against site rules.

I thought at the time that this was odd, since another commenter had posted a PDF link shortly after mine. This other PDF was posted by someone on the warming side of the argument.

Now one of the other commenters on the thread has got in touch to say that he had pointed out to the moderators the doctoring of a quote by another commenter, saying that this ought not to be tolerated. For anyone who followed the thread, this doctoring was done by the same commenter whose principal line of argument seemed to be to accuse everyone else of lying. And also the same one who managed to post a PDF unmolested by the moderators.

The moderators felt that doctoring quotes was OK.

So, according to BBC moderators, it appears that accusing other commenters of lying is acceptable. Doctoring quotes is acceptable. And posting PDFs is acceptable so long as you adhere to socially acceptable norms on the subject of global warming.

It's probably something to do with the unique way they are funded.

How does this work then?

Lisa Greenwood, an office administrator at the Department of Children, Schools and Families, posted an anonymous message on the internet at the height of the furore over abuse of the second home allowances.

It was traced to her work email account and the 38-year-old was initially suspended before being fired from her £16,000 post.

The comments were apparently posted at TheyWorkForYou, which is a site run by a charity. So how were the comments traced to Ms Greenwood? Just how closely are we being watched?

Climate cuttings 27

Last time round, we surmised that Stefan Rahmstorf had tweaked the smoothing period for his temperature graph for inclusion in the Copenhagen Synthesis report. The effect of this undisclosed change in method was that the warming trend appeared to be continuing up to the present day. He has now admitted that this supposition is correct and he can throw no light on why the graph's legend was wrong.

Lucia Liljegren amused herself at Rahmstorf's expense, describing his method as seeming "to involve a) guessing future data and b) smoothing using a filter with m=”number of years Rahmstorf currently likes". The issue she is getting at is that Rahmstorf is trying to test his predictions against observations, and smooths his observations to make it easier to do this. The problem is that the smoothing is itself has to create artificial future observations in order to create smoothed values for the present. As one of the commenters notes, creating more predictions is not a good way to test your predictions.

Steve McIntyre then piled in to the melee, discovering in fairly short order that Rahmstorf's method was not as exotic as he claimed, and that the smoothing period was not eleven years as originally claimed, not fifteen years as surmised last week, but actually 21 years.

A new paper finds no trend in tropical cyclone damage. Which is odd, because I'm sure someone mentioned that global warming was going to make storms more damaging.

Sceptics have been trying to get hold of the raw station data for Phil Jones' HADCRUT temperature index for years. Jones may now have slipped up, by providing the data to a researcher he viewed as sympathetic. This will make it hard to resist future FoI requests. Expect a reply to the latest one in the second half of July.

Much excitement among fans of Svensmark's theory that galactic cosmic rays cause cloud formation thus cooling the earth down. CERN are throwing money at a new set of Svensmark experiments, suggesting that arguments among AGW enthusiasts that the theory is discredited may be overdone.

It's not very hot - latest satellite readings show that global temperatures were pretty much on their long-term average in June.

And finally, the latest horror caused by global warming is an decrease in size among wild sheep in Scotland.

More market fixing

Timmy notes that attempts by the government to fix prices in the medicines market have had the inevitable consequences: shortages of medicines. Pharmaceutical companies no longer want to sell to banana republics like the UK where the price they receive is artificially held down. So they are selling to first world countries instead.

Still at least they're not messing up something really important, like some governments have.