More climate in St Andrews

It's very rare that global warming propagandists debate sceptics - bitter experience has shown them that they always lose. Recently however, a couple of greens agreed to a debate hosted by the University of St Andrews debating society, with Richard Courtney and Nils-Axel Morner putting the sceptic case.

The greens seem to have lost again - or at least not to have won enough votes to pass their motion.

Report here (It was originally posted at Icecap, but I can't find a permalink there).

Sean Gabb on the constitution

Sean Gabb is always a provocative speaker. Here he is discussing the need for a revolution in the UK. I've heard people who are much less radical than Gabb saying the same thing.

Pigeons and paleoclimate

The Libertarian Alliance blog has posted another one of its "they can't really be asking intelligent children this drivel in an exam" articles - this time on maths.

While the paper is undeniably straightforward, Question 1 struck me for a completely different reason. It shows a table of the lengths of various species of garden bird and also their wingspans. The first question asks the reader to plot these as a scatterplot and to draw a best fit line through the points. Then they have to estimate the wingspan of a different species, whose length is given.

Easy peasy.

The last part of the question is this:

It is not sensible to use your line of best fit to estimate the wingspan of a pigeon
whose length is 41 cm.

Explain why.

The answer is that 41cm is longer than any of the other species in the list. To use rather more technical language, 41cm is outside the range for which the mathematic model has been calibrated. You don't know if your model still works for such big birds, in other words.

This is good sound stuff, and addresses an important scientific point. It's laughably easy of course, but that doesn't make it wrong or anything like that.

But the important point is this. Projecting answers outside the range for which a mathematical model has been calibrated is exactly what paleoclimate researchers do, including the stickmeister himself, Michael Mann. This is from the critique of the Hockey Stick by Burger and Cubasch:

For almost all of the 24 proxies, the range of the millennial variation is considerably larger than the sampled one, with numerous cases of proxies exceeding 7 and more calibration standard deviations (cf. SM). As a consequence, the regression model is extrapolated beyond the domain for which it was defined and where the error is limited.

So my question is this: if we can expect schoolchildren to get this simple bit of statistics correct in an examination that is widely seen as being risibly dumbed down, how come the world's leading paleoclimatologists can't?

Or am I missing something?

Clause 28 revisited

The whole Clause 28 debate is being revisited over at The Times, where a London primary school has been teaching children about homosexuality, including a trip to a "pink" version of Romeo and Juliet entitled "Romeo and Julian". (Conspiracy theorist hat on again: would they do this just to provoke a reaction from the Tories? - surely not.)

The readers are predictably unimpressed, nay outraged, and have been taking their offspring out of class in protest. For this outrage, we learn, parents are to be prosecuted. Free societies are wonderful things aren't they?

I can almost hear the sound of Clause 28 being dusted off in Conservative associations around the country. I wonder though if Cameron's Cuddly Conservatives have actually got the balls to bring Clause 28 in again, but fortunately there is a liberal alternative of dealing with this issue. That's the good news. The bad news is that Cameron's Cuddly Conservatives probably haven't the cojones to go through with this idea either.

Still, for what it's worth, here it is.

Privatise the schools. All of them. Bring vouchers if you must. Repeal the National Curriculum in its entirety. Fire the LEAs or whatever they are called nowadays. Then simply allow schools to differentiate themselves on their approach to education, including sex education. Some schools want to buy season tickets to Romeo and Julian, others will not mention homosexuality at all. Some will do heterosexuality in primary and homosexuality in secondary, others may choose to do things completely differently. Who knows what will happen? It depends completely on what parents want for their children.

It's impeccably liberal.

Oh, there is another problem with it of course. The education system is run by people who think that what parents want for their children is secondary to what the state wants - which is to say what the educational bureaucracy wants. Children, they believe should be taught to think like bureaucrats, which is to say rarely, uncreatively and only in a progessive, left wing manner.

Could my eight-year old pass a GCSE?

I reckon there is a real possibility she could, based on these GCSE papers posted at the Libertarian Alliance blog.

Biology

Chemistry

Physics

Go through to the LA blog to get links to the marking schemes. Alternatively ask a passing toddler: they'll probably know the answers.

NSPCC deletes criticism from its Facebook site

Everybody's favourite fake charity, the NSPCC, has been taking a bit of a kicking at its Facebook site, with home educators, outraged by the NSPCC's linking of HE with child abuse, giving full vent to their feelings about being slurred in this way.

Rather than engage, the NSPCC has first denied doing anything wrong and has now tried to kill the debate by deleting the criticism in its entirety.

Here's the Facebook page before

 And here it is now

Pretty much every trace of the criticism is gone, with only official responses from HE organisations like AHEd remaining. It looks as though they've got rid of the links section completely, presumably because they can't control what people are saying about them on other sites.

This is shameful behaviour.

Outrageous slur followed by innocent denial is a familiar tactic in political circles of course - I'm reminded of the Haltemprice & Howden by-election, when Labour backbenchers dropped heavy hints that David Davis was romanticly involved with Shami Chakrabarti. The smear was outrageous, and clarifications and apologies followed in due course, but by then the damage was done. This kind of subterfuge is the way of the world among politicians: acting without honour or decency is a mark of strength, showing remorse a sign of weakness.

But for a charity to behave in this way is a surprise, and with our conspiracy theorist hats on we can wonder if the NSPCC's sudden lurch into political hatcheting doesn't actually have the fingerprints of government spin doctors on it. Either way, a charity, especially a big one like the NSPCC, shouldn't be adopting the "apologise, shrug shoulders and move on" approach that suffices for the political classes. It has to deal with criticism in a public manner. Its charitable status depends on providing a public benefit, something that it is arguably no longer doing if it is facing such vehement disapproval by one sector of the community with which it is involved.

If it doesn't, people might just start to mistake it for an arm of government rather than the charity it purports to be.

Markets say Obama's policies will extend recession

The WSJ:

What's worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President's policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession.

Third sector hurting, public sector bearing up well

The wires are humming with the news that the National Trust for Scotland is to lay off a fifth of its full-time workforce.  Given the carnage in the private sector, it was probably inevitable that the damage would extend to the third sector.

Still, civil servants are all right. No pain there. Obviously, their pension schemes are not looking quite so healthy as a year or so back, so us in the private sector are going to have to keep working quite a bit longer to keep their retirements nice and comfortable. 

Funny expression, civil servant, isn't it? When the master gets laid off, normally the servants are the next to go. It's different for civil servants apparently. Civil would seem to carry the extra meaning of "cannot be got rid of". Or maybe "cannot be afforded".

More on the origins of the credit crunch

Apologies for the slow posting. I've been laid a bit low for a couple of days.

My search for the origins of the credit crunch goes on. Having watched this video of a big-time American financial whizz (with the most delightful James Stewart accent to boot) explaining what happened, I think I may finally be beginning to get the gist of it.

This is relevant too.

Some new blogs

My recent spleen venting over the Home Education review has won me some kind words and links from various HE bloggers, so here, returning the compliment, are some links back.

What shall we do today?

Renegade parent

Head-desk

Blogging can throw together some fairly unlikely bedfellows, but with the coming of the civil liberties crisis (if that isn't too strong a phrase) I think things are likely to get stranger still. I've been having an interesting conversation over at Head-desk in particular, and I think it's fair to say that the site's owner is quite surprised to find herself engaging with someone quite as wild-eyed as me. It's rather cool really.

I've not yet had a guest posting on civil liberties from a star of kinky sex films, as has Heresiarch, but I'm sure there will be plenty of surprises to come before we're done. By the way, if you haven't read about civil liberties and kinky sex, I urge you to do so.

MPs vote to keep their addresses secret

MPs are clearly rattled by the Jacqui Smith affair - can't have the proles knowing how the second homes scam works. They are covering their tracks just as fast as they possibly can. As Spy Blog notes, the cockroaches have voted to keep details of their constituency homes secret.

Getting children to sign up for the database state

The government is lying.

That's not news, of course. Babies puke, teenagers mope, and politicians tell you any old cack they think they can get away with.

So what are they up to this time? According to a report by ARCH (Action on Rights for Children), the government has been telling local authorities that children from "around the age of 12" can usually give their consent to the sharing of personal information across government departments. Some local authorities have responded by telling their staff that from the age of 12, it is lawful for children to disclose information about themselves, their parents and their families without their parents' knowledge.

It turns out however that this advice is not actually a reflection of the law. It's more like wishful thinking, both on the part of politicians and civil servants. There is one minor upside to all this deceit, and that is that individual civil servants could apparently be held personally responsible if they follow up on the government's advice and start sharing data with only the children's consent. It's rare to find anyone in the public sector being held responsible for anything (it's called "democratic accountability") and a few penpushers being flung in the clink would be sure to encourager les autres.

Is it just me, or is this just a bit uncomfortably reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, with children encouraged to inform on their parents by an overweening state?

Banning the Dutch prime minister

LabourHome is reporting that if an election were to be held in the Netherlands today, Geert Wilders' Freedom Party would probably emerge as the largest in the Dutch parliament.

Which would give Jacqui Smith the amusing problem of having to ban the Dutch prime minister from these shores.

de Soto on the credit crunch

Another interesting article explaining the credit crunch, this time by the eminent economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto spends a lot of time examining the importance of private property rights and how the lack on them prevents poor people improving their lives. This time though he's looking at how some rich people, namely the bankers, lost track of their property by securitising it and how this contributed to the global meltdown.