Group items tagged

the US government wants to boost internet freedom to give voices to citizens living in societies regarded as 'closed' and questions those governments' control over information flow, although within its borders the US government tries to create a legal frame to fight the challenge posed by WikiLeaks

The Russians seemed to take a special delight in tweaking Washington over its reaction to the leaks, suggesting the Americans are being hypocritical. “If it is a full-fledged democracy, then why have they put Assange away in jail? You call that democracy?’’ Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said during a news briefing with the French prime minister, Francois Fillon.

Even The Financial Times Deutschland (independent of the English-language Financial Times), said that “the already damaged reputation of the United States will only be further tattered with Assange’s new martyr status.’’ It added that “the openly embraced hope of the US government that along with Assange, WikiLeaks will disappear from the scene, is questionable.’’

Assange is being hounded, the paper said, “even though no one can explain what crimes Assange allegedly committed with the publication of the secret documents, or why publication by WikiLeaks was an offense, and in The New York Times, it was not.’’

3.      “That’s it. Finished. There’s a “consensus” on global warming. It’s immutable and correct.” No – where have I said this? In fact, you must have seen my tweet this afternoon: “I might be wrong, the climate consensus might be wrong, but the probability that the consensus is correct is +90% on the key points.”

5.      “What sickens me is the hypocrisy of people who claim to be in favour of speech, claim to believe in empiricism, claim to be sceptics yet refuse to accept room for an honest, open debate on one of the most important political issues of our time.” No - where have I said this? All I have done is disagree with you, point out your lack of qualifications and mock you. I did not threaten to silence you or sue you. In fact, my approach was quite the opposite – you must have seen my tweet this afternoon encouraging further debate: “V happy for me & climate expert to meet you to discuss consensus, record it & put it in online unedited.”

To answer your question and explain my tweet; you denied Nurse’s explanation of the role of consensus in science and you dismissed Nurse’s perfectly valid analogy about consensus … so you do indeed seem to think you are in a better position than Nurse to understand how science operates.

7.      “What I am saying, and I say almost every day, is that the evidence is not as robust as the “consensus” scientists claim” Okay, that’s what you say. James Delingpole, English graduate. You might be right. Those who think that the consensus is very likely to be valid include, as far as I know, all of the following and more: Paul Nurse, Ben Goldacre and myself, who you have come up against this week (but we are very small fry). Editors of the world’s foremost science journals, Science and Nature. The most senior science editors in UK national broadsheet newspapers. The overwhelming majority of science Nobel Laureates. All the world’s national academy’s of science. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists. Also, I must stress that all of the people/groups above will have questions about elements of the consensus and realisethat the models have uncertainties, but they also agree that the broad consensus is very likely (90%) to be correct. In short, the uncertainties are small enough to derive some fairly solid conclusions.

8.  “Yet despite apparently knowing nothing more about me and what I do than he has learned from a heavily politicised BBC documentary, and maybe heard from his mob of Twitter bully chums or read in the Guardian, Singh feels able to decide that Paul Nurse is right on this issue and I’m wrong.” No – I have followed your rants for quite a while from afar.  I am not saying that Paul Nurse is right and you are wrong. Instead, both Paul Nurse and I are saying that we are not convinced by your views, but we are convinced by the sheer weight of evidence behind the consensus that has gathered over the course of three decades

I have no doubt whatsoever that Sir Paul Nurse knows more about genetics than I do. It is, after all, where the field in which he won his Nobel prize. As for science, sure, Nurse has the advantage over me there, too. He has a PhD. He’s a science graduate and I’m an arts graduate. But then I’ve never pretended otherwise. My case is not that I “James Delingpole have taken a long hard look at the science of global warming and discovered through careful sifting of countless peer-reviewed papers that the experts have got it all wrong.”

What I am saying, and I say almost every day, is that the evidence is not as robust as the “consensus” scientists claim; that there are many distinguished scientists all round the world who dispute this alleged “consensus”; that true science doesn’t advance through “consensus” and never has; that the Climategate emails threw the peer-review process into serious doubt by demonstrating how eminently corruptable it is; that there are many vested interests out there determined and able to spend a great deal of money by making out that the case for catastrophic, man-made global warming is much stronger than it is. And on these specific issues I can reasonably claim to be better informed than Sir Paul Nurse, regardless of how many PhDs he has, because I’ve spent much more time than he has researching them and because they are not issues which require an exclusively scientific knowledge to understand. They just require the basic journalistic skill of being able to read and analyse.

Medical science, when it works well, tends to progress from basic science, to small pilot studies, to larger randomized studies, and then–only then–to those big, rigorous, insanely expensive randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. Dr. Spector mentions hierarchies of evidence, but he seems to fall into a false dichotomy, namely that if it’s not Level I evidence, it’s crap. The problem is, as Mark pointed out, in medicine we often don’t have Level I evidence for many questions. Indeed, for some questions, we will never have Level I evidence. Clinical medicine involves making decisions in the midst of uncertainty, sometimes extreme uncertainty.

Dr. Spector then proceeds to paint a picture of reckless physicians proceeding on crappy studies to pump women full of hormones. Actually, it was more than a bit more complicated on than that. That was the time when I was in my medical training, and I remember the discussions we had regarding the strength (or lack thereof) of the epidemiological data and the lack of good RCTs looking at HRT. I also remember that nothing works as well to relieve menopausal symptoms as HRT, an observation we have been reminded of again since 2003, which is the year when the first big study came out implicating HRT in increasing the risk of breast cancer (more later).

I found a rather fascinating editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine from more than 20 years ago that discussed the state of the evidence back then with regard to estrogen and breast cancer: Evidence that estrogen increases the risk of breast cancer has been surprisingly difficult to obtain. Clinical and epidemiologic studies and studies in animals strongly suggest that endogenous estrogen plays a part in causing breast cancer. If so, exogenous estrogen should be a potent promoter of breast cancer. Although more than 20 case–control and prospective studies of the relation of breast cancer and noncontraceptive estrogen use have failed to demonstrate the expected association, relatively few women in these studies used estrogen for extended periods. Studies of the use of diethylstilbestrol and oral contraceptives suggest that a long exposure or latency may be necessary to show any association between hormone use and breast cancer. In the Swedish study, only six years of follow-up was needed to demonstrate an increased risk of breast cancer with the postmenopausal use of estradiol. It should be noted, however, that half the women in the subgroup that provided detailed data on the duration of hormone use had taken estrogen for many years before their base-line prescription status was defined. The duration of estrogen exposure in these women before the diagnosis of breast cancer was probably seriously underestimated; a short latency cannot be attributed to estradiol on the basis of these data. Other recent studies of the use of noncontraceptive estrogen suggest a slightly increased risk of breast cancer after 15 to 20 years’ use.

even now, the evidence is conflicting regarding HRT and breast cancer, with the preponderance of evidence suggesting that mixed HRT (estrogen and progestin) significantly increases the risk of breast cancer, while estrogen-alone HRT very well might not increase the risk of breast cancer at all or (more likely) only very little. Indeed, I was just at a conference all day Saturday where data demonstrating this very point were discussed by one of the speakers. None of this stops Dr. Spector from categorically labeling estrogen as a “carcinogen that causes breast cancers that kill women.” Maybe. Maybe not. It’s actually not that clear. The problem, of course, is that, consistent with the first primary reports of WHI results, the preponderance of evidence finding health risks due to HRT have indicted the combined progestin/estrogen combinations as unsafe.

China also sees hypocrisy in American discussions of Internet freedom. China comes in regularly for criticism over its "Great Firewall," but it suggests that the US government also restricts the Internet. While advocating Internet freedom, the US in fact imposes fairly strict restriction on cyberspace. On June 24, 2010, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which will give the federal government "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. Handing government the power to control the Internet will only be the first step towards a greatly restricted Internet system, whereby individual IDs and government permission would be required to operate a website. The United States applies double standards on Internet freedom by requesting unrestricted "Internet freedom" in other countries, which becomes an important diplomatic tool for the United States to impose pressure and seek hegemony, and imposing strict restriction within its territory. An article on BBC on February 16, 2011 noted the US government wants to boost Internet freedom to give voices to citizens living in societies regarded as "closed" and questions those governments' control over information flow, although within its borders the US government tries to create a legal frame to fight the challenge posed by WikiLeaks. The US government might be sensitive to the impact of the free flow of electronic information on its territory for which it advocates, but it wants to practice diplomacy by other means, including the Internet, particularly the social networks. (The cyberspace bill never became law, and a revised version is still pending in Congress.)

Finally, there's pornography, which China bans. Pornographic content is rampant on the Internet and severely harms American children. Statistics show that seven in 10 children have accidentally accessed pornography on the Internet and one in three has done so intentionally. And the average age of exposure is 11 years old - some start at eight years old (The Washington Times, June 16, 2010). According to a survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent of American teens have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves. (www.co.jefferson.co.us, March 23, 2010). At least 500 profit-oriented nude chat websites were set up by teens in the United States, involving tens of thousands of pornographic pictures.

Mahathir did not leave it at that. He foreshadowed the Wikileak-chastised countries of today saying what William, the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US and Iran today, amongst others, must agree with, “It’s very difficult now for us to write letters at all because we might as well negotiate through the media.”

I proceeded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs homepage to search for the full press release. As I anticipated, there was a caveat. This is the press release in full: In response to media queries on the WikiLeaks release of confidential and secret-graded US diplomatic correspondence, the MFA Spokesman expressed deep concerns about the damaging action of WikiLeaks. It is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence, which is why Singapore has the Officials Secrets Act. In particular, the selective release of documents, especially when taken out of context, will only serve to sow confusion and fail to provide a complete picture of the important issues that were being discussed amongst leaders in the strictest of confidentiality.

The sentence in red seems to posit that the selective release of documents can be legitimised if released documents are not taken out of context. If this interpretation is true, then one can account for the political decision to release confidential correspondence covering the Singapore and Malaysia water talks referred to above. In parallel, one can imagine Assange or his supporters arguing that lies of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the advent of abject two-faced politics today to be sufficient grounds to justify the actions of Wikileaks. As for the arguments about confidentiality and official correspondence, the events in parliament in 2003 tell us no one should underestimate the ability of nation-states to do an Assange if it befits their purpose – be it directly, as Jayakumar did, or indirectly, through the media or some other medium of influence.

Timothy Garton Ash put out the dilemma perfectly when he said, “There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict.”

the advent of technology will only further blur the lines between these two public interests, if it has not already. Quite apart from technology, the absence of transparent and accountable institutions may also serve to guarantee the prospect of more of such embarrassing leaks in future.

In August 2009, there was considerable interest in Singapore about the circumstances behind the departure of Chip Goodyear, former CEO of the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton, from the national sovereign wealth fund, Temasek Holdings. Before that, all the public knew was – in the name of leadership renewal – Chip Goodyear had been carefully chosen and apparently hand-picked to replace Ho Ching as CEO of Temasek Holdings. In response to Chip’s untimely departure, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam was quoted, “People do want to know, there is curiosity, it is a matter of public interest. That is not sufficient reason to disclose information. It is not sufficient that there be curiosity and interest that you want to disclose information.”

Overly secretive and furtive politicians operating in a parliamentary democracy are unlikely to inspire confidence among an educated citizenry either, only serving to paradoxically fuel public cynicism and conspiracy theories.

I believe that government officials and politicians who perform their jobs honourably have nothing to fear from Wikileaks. I would admit that there is an inherent naivety and idealism in this position. But if the lesson from the Wikileaks episode portends a higher standard of ethical conduct, encourages transparency and accountability – all of which promote good governance, realpolitik notwithstanding – then it is perhaps a lesson all politicians and government officials should pay keen attention to.

Post-script: “These disclosures are largely of analysis and high-grade gossip. Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do….If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.” –Simon Jenkins, Guardian

the state’s reaction is typical: legitimise the violence by classifying the purported article as the culprit rather than those who took offence at it and engaged in violence. While our laws on speech undertaken with the malicious intent to give offence, or those governing attempts to produce enmity, are well intentioned, they have made the climate for free speech more, rather than less, precarious.

the simple fact that the state signals that it will easily punish those who engage in offensive speech creates incentives for offence mongering. Instead of sending a signal that a very high bar has to be crossed before speech is proscribed, the state essentially tells the people: if you can incite violence, or show that you are deeply offended, you will have your way.

A lot of representations of religion are needlessly gratuitous. But if we legitimise the taking of offence there will be more provocations, not less. The law should send a clear message that we live in a world where people cannot be protected from assorted things like Danish cartoons, Husain paintings, burqa lampoons or speculative novels on godly love. And religious believers commit the ultimate blasphemy by thinking that they need to protect their gods rather than their gods protecting them

And there is another, related aspect of discussions about eugenics that should be at the forefront of our consideration: what was particularly objectionable about American and Nazi early 20th century eugenics is that the state, not individuals, were to make decisions about who could reproduce and who couldn’t. Savulescu continues: “to grant procreative liberty is the only way to avoid the objectionable form of eugenics that the Nazis practiced.” In other words, it makes all the difference in the world if it is an individual couple who decides to have or not have a baby, or if it is the state that imposes a particular reproductive choice on its citizenry.

but then Savulescu expands his argument to a point where I begin to feel somewhat uncomfortable. He says: “[procreative liberty] involves the freedom to choose a child with red hair or blond hair or no hair.”

Savulescu has suddenly sneaked into his argument for procreative liberty the assumption that all choices in this area are on the same level. But while it is hard to object to action aimed at avoiding devastating diseases, it is not quite so obvious to me what arguments favor the idea of designer babies. The first intervention can be justified, for instance, on consequentialist grounds because it reduces the pain and suffering of both the child and the parents. The second intervention is analogous to shopping for a new bag, or a new car, which means that it commodifies the act of conceiving a baby, thus degrading its importance. I’m not saying that that in itself is sufficient to make it illegal, but the ethics of it is different, and that difference cannot simply be swept under the broad rug of “procreative liberty.”

designing babies is to treat them as objects, not as human beings, and there are a couple of strong philosophical traditions in ethics that go squarely against that (I’m thinking, obviously, of Kant’s categorical imperative, as well as of virtue ethics; not sure what a consequentialist would say about this, probably she would remain neutral on the issue).

Commodification of human beings has historically produced all sorts of bad stuff, from slavery to exploitative prostitution, and arguably to war (after all, we are using our soldiers as means to gain access to power, resources, territory, etc.)

And of course, there is the issue of access. Across-the-board “procreative liberty” of the type envisioned by Savulescu will cost money because it requires considerable resources.

imagine that these parents decide to purchase the ability to produce babies that have the type of characteristics that will make them more successful in society: taller, more handsome, blue eyed, blonde, more symmetrical, whatever. We have just created yet another way for the privileged to augment and pass their privileges to the next generation — in this case literally through their genes, not just as real estate or bank accounts. That would quickly lead to an even further divide between the haves and the have-nots, more inequality, more injustice, possibly, in the long run, even two different species (why not design your babies so that they can’t breed with certain types of undesirables, for instance?). Is that the sort of society that Savulescu is willing to envision in the name of his total procreative liberty? That begins to sounds like the libertarian version of the eugenic ideal, something potentially only slightly less nightmarish than the early 20th century original.

Not to mention that rich people can provide better health care, education and nutrition to their children and again no one is questioning their right to do so. Wouldn't a couple of inches be pretty negligible compared to getting into a good school? Aren't we applying double standards by objecting to this issue alone? Do we really live in a society that values equal opportunities? People (may) be equal before the law but they are not equal to each other and each one of us is tacitly accepting that fact when we acknowledge the social hierarchy (in other words, every time we interact with someone who is our superior). I am not crazy about this fact but that's just how people are and this has to be taken into account when discussing this.

That's not to say we're helpless. There is at least one climate lesson that we can draw from the recent weather: Whatever happens, prosperity and preparedness help. North Texas's ice storm wreaked havoc and left hundreds of football fans stranded, cold, and angry. But thanks to modern infrastructure, 21st century health care, and stockpiles of magnesium chloride and snow plows, the storm caused no reported deaths and Dallas managed to host the big game on Sunday.

How can we assess the competence of a scientist? Past performance is, realistically, the only way to judge future performance. Past performance can only be assessed by looking at their publications. Were they in a similar area? Are they considered significant? Are they numerous? Curiously, though, the second question is also answered by looking at publications—if a topic is considered significant, then there will be lots of publications in that area, and those publications will be of more general interest, and so end up in higher ranking journals.

So we end up in the situation that the editors of major journals are in the position to influence the direction of scientific funding, meaning that there is a huge incentive for everyone to make damn sure that their work ends up in Science or Nature. But why are Science, Nature, and PNAS considered the place to put significant work? Why isn't a new optical phenomena, published in Optics Express, as important as a new optical phenomena published in Science?

The big three try to be general; they will, in principle, publish reports from any discipline, and they anticipate readership from a range of disciplines. This explicit generality means that the scientific results must not only be of general interest, but also highly significant. The remaining journals become more specialized, covering perhaps only physics, or optics, or even just optical networking. However, they all claim to only publish work that is highly original in nature.

Are standards really so different? Naturally, the more specialized a journal is, the fewer people it appeals to. However, the major difference in determining originality is one of degree and referee. A more specialized journal has more detailed articles, so the differences between experiments stand out more obviously, while appealing to general interest changes the emphasis of the article away from details toward broad conclusions.

as the audience becomes broader, more technical details get left by the wayside. Note that none of the gene sequences published in Science have the actual experimental and analysis details. What ends up published is really a broad-brush description of the work, with the important details either languishing as supplemental information, or even published elsewhere, in a more suitable journal. Yet, the high profile paper will get all the citations, while the more detailed—the unkind would say accurate—description of the work gets no attention.

And that is how journals are ranked. Count the number of citations for each journal per volume, run it through a magic number generator, and the impact factor jumps out (make your checks out to ISI Thomson please). That leaves us with the following formula: grants require high impact publications, high impact publications need citations, and that means putting research in a journal that gets lots of citations. Grants follow the concepts that appear to be currently significant, and that's decided by work that is published in high impact journals.

This system would be fine if it did not ignore the fact that performing science and reporting scientific results are two very different skills, and not everyone has both in equal quantity. The difference between a Nature-worthy finding and a not-Nature-worthy finding is often in the quality of the writing. How skillfully can I relate this bit of research back to general or topical interests? It really is this simple. Over the years, I have seen quite a few physics papers with exaggerated claims of significance (or even results) make it into top flight journals, and the only differences I can see between those works and similar works published elsewhere is that the presentation and level of detail are different.

articles from the big three are much easier to cover on Nobel Intent than articles from, say Physical Review D. Nevertheless, when we do cover them, sometimes the researchers suddenly realize that they could have gotten a lot more mileage out of their work. It changes their approach to reporting their results, which I see as evidence that writing skill counts for as much as scientific quality.

If that observation is generally true, then it raises questions about the whole process of evaluating a researcher's competence and a field's significance, because good writers corrupt the process by publishing less significant work in journals that only publish significant findings. In fact, I think it goes further than that, because Science, Nature, and PNAS actively promote themselves as scientific compasses. Want to find the most interesting and significant research? Read PNAS.

The publishers do this by extensively publicizing science that appears in their own journals. Their news sections primarily summarize work published in the same issue of the same magazine. This lets them create a double-whammy of scientific significance—not only was the work published in Nature, they also summarized it in their News and Views section.

Very few of the other journals do this. I don't get early access to the Physical Review series, even though I love reporting from them. In fact, until this year, they didn't even highlight interesting papers for their own readers. This makes it incredibly hard for a science reporter to cover science outside of the major journals. The knock-on effect is that Applied Physics Letters never appears in the news, which means you can't evaluate recent news coverage to figure out what's of general interest, leaving you with... well, the big three journals again, which mostly report on themselves. On the other hand, if a particular scientific topic does start to receive some press attention, it is much more likely that similar work will suddenly be acceptable in the big three journals.

That said, I should point out that judging the significance of scientific work is a process fraught with difficulty. Why do you think it takes around 10 years from the publication of first results through to obtaining a Nobel Prize? Because it can take that long for the implications of the results to sink in—or, more commonly, sink without trace.

I don't think that we can reasonably expect journal editors and peer reviewers to accurately assess the significance (general or otherwise) of a new piece of research. There are, of course, exceptions: the first genome sequences, the first observation that the rate of the expansion of the universe is changing. But the point is that these are exceptions, and most work's significance is far more ambiguous, and even goes unrecognized (or over-celebrated) by scientists in the field.

The conclusion is that the top three journals are significantly gamed by scientists who are trying to get ahead in their careers—citations always lag a few years behind, so a PNAS paper with less than ten citations can look good for quite a few years, even compared to an Optics Letters with 50 citations. The top three journals overtly encourage this, because it is to their advantage if everyone agrees that they are the source of the most interesting science. Consequently, scientists who are more honest in self-assessing their work, or who simply aren't word-smiths, end up losing out.

scientific competence should not be judged by how many citations the author's work has received or where it was published. Instead, we should consider using a mathematical graph analysis to look at the networks of publications and citations, which should help us judge how central to a field a particular researcher is. This would have the positive influence of a publication mattering less than who thought it was important.

Science and Nature should either eliminate their News and Views section, or implement a policy of not reporting on their own articles. This would open up one of the major sources of "science news for scientists" to stories originating in other journals.