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Weiye Loh

Do avatars have digital rights? - 20 views

hi weiye, i agree with you that this brings in the topic of representation. maybe you should try taking media and representation by Dr. Ingrid to discuss more on this. Going back to your questio...

avatars

started by Elaine Ong on 16 Sep 09 7 follow-ups, last by Weiye Loh on 18 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

Op-Ed Columnist - The Moral Naturalists - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...23brooks.html

Philosophy Morality

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.
  • By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.
  • Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it. At as early as six months, the babies showed a preference for the helper over the hinderer. In some plays, there is a second act. The hindering figure is either punished or rewarded. In this case, 8-month-olds preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it.
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  • This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.
  • If you ask for donations with the photo and name of one sick child, you are likely to get twice as much money than if you had asked for donations with a photo and the names of eight children. Our minds respond more powerfully to the plight of an individual than the plight of a group.
  • If you are in a bad mood you will make harsher moral judgments than if you’re in a good mood or have just seen a comedy. As Elizabeth Phelps of New York University points out, feelings of disgust will evoke a desire to expel things, even those things unrelated to your original mood. General fear makes people risk-averse. Anger makes them risk-seeking.
  • People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view.
  • The moral naturalists differ over what role reason plays in moral judgments. Some, like Haidt, believe that we make moral judgments intuitively and then construct justifications after the fact. Others, like Joshua Greene of Harvard, liken moral thinking to a camera. Most of the time we rely on the automatic point-and-shoot process, but occasionally we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method.
  • For people wary of abstract theorizing, it’s nice to see people investigating morality in ways that are concrete and empirical. But their approach does have certain implicit tendencies. They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society. Their implied description of the moral life is gentle, fair and grounded. But it is all lower case. So far, at least, it might not satisfy those who want their morality to be awesome, formidable, transcendent or great.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Jul 10
     
    The Moral Naturalists By DAVID BROOKS Published: July 22, 2010
Weiye Loh

The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine - 0 views

www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm

Income Inequality Social Divide Economy

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize.
  • In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.
  • when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.
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  • This is why, for example, large numbers of Americans oppose the idea of an estate tax even though the current form of the tax, slated to return in 2011, is very unlikely to affect them or their estates. In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor. There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally. The bailout for General Motors’ labor unions wasn’t so popular either—again, obviously not because of any bias against the wealthy but because a basic sense of fairness was violated. As of November 2010, congressional Democrats are of a mixed mind as to whether the Bush tax cuts should expire for those whose annual income exceeds $250,000; that is in large part because their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.
  • envy is usually local. At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It’s directed at the husband of your wife’s sister, because the brand of beer he stocks costs $3 a case more than yours, and so on. That’s another reason why a lot of people aren’t so bothered by income or wealth inequality at the macro level. Most of us don’t compare ourselves to billionaires. Gore Vidal put it honestly: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”
  • Occasionally the cynic in me wonders why so many relatively well-off intellectuals lead the egalitarian charge against the privileges of the wealthy. One group has the status currency of money and the other has the status currency of intellect, so might they be competing for overall social regard? The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most. That class composes a very small group, however, so the upshot is that growing income inequality won’t necessarily have major political implications at the macro level.
  • All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.
  • The numbers are clear: Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top. The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues, namely income growth at the very top of the distribution and greater inequality throughout the distribution. The first trend is much more pronounced than the second, although the two are often confused.
  • When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1
  • At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973. But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.
  • The broader change in income distribution, the one occurring beneath the very top earners, can be deconstructed in a manner that makes nearly all of it look harmless. For instance, there is usually greater inequality of income among both older people and the more highly educated, if only because there is more time and more room for fortunes to vary. Since America is becoming both older and more highly educated, our measured income inequality will increase pretty much by demographic fiat. Economist Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia estimates that these demographic effects explain three-quarters of the observed rise in income inequality for men, and even more for women.2
  • Attacking the problem from a different angle, other economists are challenging whether there is much growth in inequality at all below the super-rich. For instance, real incomes are measured using a common price index, yet poorer people are more likely to shop at discount outlets like Wal-Mart, which have seen big price drops over the past twenty years.3 Once we take this behavior into account, it is unclear whether the real income gaps between the poor and middle class have been widening much at all. Robert J. Gordon, an economist from Northwestern University who is hardly known as a right-wing apologist, wrote in a recent paper that “there was no increase of inequality after 1993 in the bottom 99 percent of the population”, and that whatever overall change there was “can be entirely explained by the behavior of income in the top 1 percent.”4
  • And so we come again to the gains of the top earners, clearly the big story told by the data. It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there. It also seems that most of the income gains of the top earners were related to performance pay—bonuses, in other words—and not wildly out-of-whack yearly salaries.5
  • It is also the case that any society with a lot of “threshold earners” is likely to experience growing income inequality. A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.
  • The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice. Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness. What isn’t so widely advertised is that those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality. Not only is high inequality an inevitable concomitant of human diversity, but growing income inequality may be, too, if lots of us take the kind of advice that will make us happier.
  • Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?
  • Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh have recently provided a detailed estimation of particular American incomes.6 Their data do not comprise the entire U.S. population, but from partial financial records they find a very strong role for the financial sector in driving the trend toward income concentration at the top. For instance, for 2004, nonfinancial executives of publicly traded companies accounted for less than 6 percent of the top 0.01 percent income bracket. In that same year, the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all of the CEOs from the entire S&P 500. The number of Wall Street investors earning more than $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public company executives earning that amount. The authors also relate that they shared their estimates with a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, one who also has a Wall Street background. He thought their estimates of earnings in the financial sector were, if anything, understated.
  • Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance. After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top. Yet many high-earning lawyers are doing financial deals, so a lot of the income generated through legal activity is rooted in finance. Other lawyers are defending corporations against lawsuits, filing lawsuits or helping corporations deal with complex regulations. The returns to these activities are an artifact of the growing complexity of the law and government growth rather than a tale of markets per se. Finance aside, there isn’t much of a story of market failure here, even if we don’t find the results aesthetically appealing.
  • When it comes to professional athletes and celebrities, there isn’t much of a mystery as to what has happened. Tiger Woods earns much more, even adjusting for inflation, than Arnold Palmer ever did. J.K. Rowling, the first billionaire author, earns much more than did Charles Dickens. These high incomes come, on balance, from the greater reach of modern communications and marketing. Kids all over the world read about Harry Potter. There is more purchasing power to spend on children’s books and, indeed, on culture and celebrities more generally. For high-earning celebrities, hardly anyone finds these earnings so morally objectionable as to suggest that they be politically actionable. Cultural critics can complain that good schoolteachers earn too little, and they may be right, but that does not make celebrities into political targets. They’re too popular. It’s also pretty clear that most of them work hard to earn their money, by persuading fans to buy or otherwise support their product. Most of these individuals do not come from elite or extremely privileged backgrounds, either. They worked their way to the top, and even if Rowling is not an author for the ages, her books tapped into the spirit of their time in a special way. We may or may not wish to tax the wealthy, including wealthy celebrities, at higher rates, but there is no need to “cure” the structural causes of higher celebrity incomes.
  • to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.
  • The first factor driving high returns is sometimes called by practitioners “going short on volatility.” Sometimes it is called “negative skewness.” In plain English, this means that some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices. Most of the time investors will do well by this strategy, since big, unexpected moves are outliers by definition. Traders will earn above-average returns in good times. In bad times they won’t suffer fully when catastrophic returns come in, as sooner or later is bound to happen, because the downside of these bets is partly socialized onto the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the taxpayers and the unemployed.
  • if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad. Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs.
  • To this mix we can add the fact that many money managers are investing other people’s money. If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses. And let’s say the whole thing does blow up in your face? What’s the worst that can happen? Your bosses fire you, but you will still have millions in the bank and that MBA from Harvard or Wharton. For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early. Furthermore, if everyone else made more or less the same mistake (very surprising major events, such as a busted housing market, affect virtually everybody), you’re hardly disgraced. You might even get rehired at another investment bank, or maybe a hedge fund, within months or even weeks.
  • Moreover, smart shareholders will acquiesce to or even encourage these gambles. They gain on the upside, while the downside, past the point of bankruptcy, is borne by the firm’s creditors. And will the bondholders object? Well, they might have a difficult time monitoring the internal trading operations of financial institutions. Of course, the firm’s trading book cannot be open to competitors, and that means it cannot be open to bondholders (or even most shareholders) either. So what, exactly, will they have in hand to object to?
  • Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside. Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly. Guaranteeing the debt also encourages equity holders to take more risk. While current bailouts have not in general maintained equity values, and while share prices have often fallen to near zero following the bust of a major bank, the bailouts still give the bank a lifeline. Instead of the bank being destroyed, sometimes those equity prices do climb back out of the hole. This is true of the major surviving banks in the United States, and even AIG is paying back its bailout. For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.
  • there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good. “Going short on volatility” is a dangerous strategy from a social point of view. For one thing, in so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large. But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.
  • And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve System has recapitalized major U.S. banks by paying interest on bank reserves and by keeping an unusually high interest rate spread, which allows banks to borrow short from Treasury at near-zero rates and invest in other higher-yielding assets and earn back lots of money rather quickly. In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks.
  • the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality. In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance. Simon Johnson tabulates the numbers nicely: From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.7
  • There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue. Let’s say that some news hits the market and that traders interpret this news at different speeds. One trader figures out what the news means in a second, while the other traders require five seconds. Still other traders require an entire day or maybe even a month to figure things out. The early traders earn the extra money. They buy the proper assets early, at the lower prices, and reap most of the gains when the other, later traders pile on. Similarly, if you buy into a successful tech company in the early stages, you are “moving first” in a very effective manner, and you will capture most of the gains if that company hits it big.
  • The moving-first phenomenon sums to a “winner-take-all” market. Only some relatively small number of traders, sometimes just one trader, can be first. Those who are first will make far more than those who are fourth or fifth. This difference will persist, even if those who are fourth come pretty close to competing with those who are first. In this context, first is first and it doesn’t matter much whether those who come in fourth pile on a month, a minute or a fraction of a second later. Those who bought (or sold, as the case may be) first have captured and locked in most of the available gains. Since gains are concentrated among the early winners, and the closeness of the runner-ups doesn’t so much matter for income distribution, asset-market trading thus encourages the ongoing concentration of wealth. Many investors make lots of mistakes and lose their money, but each year brings a new bunch of projects that can turn the early investors and traders into very wealthy individuals.
  • These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related. Let’s say that Goldman Sachs regularly secures a lot of the best and quickest trades, whether because of its quality analysis, inside connections or high-frequency trading apparatus (it has all three). It builds up a treasure chest of profits and continues to hire very sharp traders and to receive valuable information. Those profits allow it to make “short on volatility” bets faster than anyone else, because if it messes up, it still has a large enough buffer to pad losses. This increases the odds that Goldman will repeatedly pull in spectacular profits.
  • Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have. It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw. In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades? Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it. And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.
  • What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control; it just isn’t that easy to oversee a balance sheet with hundreds of billions of dollars on it, especially when short-term positions are wound down before quarterly inspections. It’s also not clear how well regulators can identify risky assets. Some of the worst excesses of the financial crisis were grounded in mortgage-backed assets—a very traditional function of banks—not exotic derivatives trading strategies. Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.
  • For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism. It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem. The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.
  • Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.
  • Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice. Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions. Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty. Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).
  • We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are. Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe. They are sitting on money rather than lending it out. The biggest risk today is how few parties will take risks, and, in part, the caution of banks is driving our current protracted economic slowdown. According to this view, the long run will bring another financial crisis once moods pick up and external scrutiny weakens, but that day of reckoning is still some ways off.
  • Is the overall picture a shame? Yes. Is it distorting resource distribution and productivity in the meantime? Yes. Will it again bring our economy to its knees? Probably. Maybe that’s simply the price of modern society. Income inequality will likely continue to rise and we will search in vain for the appropriate political remedies for our underlying problems.
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » What the Google Books Battle Really Means - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...ogle-books-battle-really-means

Google Books Copyright

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Google Books allows users to search a massive database of books — Google has digitized more than 15 million, and its ambition is to eventually reach all the books ever printed.  Google does not allow access to copyrighted books unless it has an agreement with a book’s publisher. Instead, users receive a list of books that include their search term.  Click on a book, and Google shows as much as its publisher has authorized, or, if there is no agreement with the publisher, Google shows only a few lines of text containing the relevant terms.
  • Google Books also provides — for the first time — access to millions of what are called  “orphan works.”  These are books that are out of print, but remain under copyright.  Google Books makes orphan works searchable too.  And that turns out to be extremely important.
  • The orphan problem arises because most books go out of print very quickly. A few copies may be available in used book stores or filed away in library stacks.  But for most purposes, these books might as well not exist.  Copyright, on the other hand, lasts a very long time — currently, the life of the author plus 70 years.  So for millions of books that are out of print and remain under copyright, would-be users — i.e., anyone who wishes to re-print the book, or to use it in a derivative work — must seek permission.
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  • The problem is that owners are often hard to find.  This is especially true as the decades pass.  Owners die, and copyright passes to heirs.  But there is no reliable record of copyright ownership.  As a result, it is often impossible to find anyone to ask for permission. By opening up this treasure trove of orphan works, Google Books may make a truly major contribution to nearly every field of writing imaginable.
  • The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google, arguing that by scanning copyrighted books into their database, and by distributing snippets from them, Google violated their copyrights.  Google disagreed, arguing that its copying was fair use.  But before the issues could be determined by a court, the parties settled. The settlement was, characteristically for Google, a masterstroke of creativity.  In return for modest payments to Guild and AAP members, Google obtained copyright immunity for its Google Books project.  But the settlement sought to do more — Google would be free to include orphan works in its database — even though the authors of these works, by definition, were not represented in the settlement negotiations.  Royalties would be directed to the owners of orphan works if they later surfaced.
  • The federal judge overseeing the dispute, however, rejected this settlement, in part because he didn’t like that it required authors to “opt-out” of it rather than “opt-in.”
  • A better option is for Congress to step in.  Legislation has been pending in Congress for several years that would ease the orphan works problem.  If passed, it would allow those who have made a reasonable search to use that work. And if the owner later surfaces, the user need only pay a reasonable license fee.  So under these revised rules, Google Books could include orphan works, and be assured that it would be liable only for the fair value of a license — exactly the type of compensation that they envisioned in the settlement.   And, importantly, firms other than Google –perhaps public libraries — could do so as well.
  • however, the orphan works legislation has been bottled up in Congress, due mostly to the objections of commercial photographers, who fear that the special difficulties of finding owners of visual works will deprive them of fair compensation.
Jiamin Lin

Firms allowed to share private data - 0 views

business.asiaone.com/...A1Story20090728-157536.html

firms

shared by Jiamin Lin on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Jiamin Lin on 19 Aug 09
     
    Companies who request for their customer's private information may in turn distribute these confidential particulars to others. As such, cases of fraud and identity theft have surfaced, with fraudsters using these distributed identities to apply for loans or credit cards. Unlike other countries, no privacy law to safeguard an individual's data against unauthorized commercial use has been put in place. As a result, fraudsters are able to ride on this loophole. Ethical Question: Is it right for companies to request for their customer's private information for certain reasons? Is it even fair that they distribute these information to third parties, perhaps as a way to make money? Problem: I think the main problem is that there isn't a law in Singapore that safeguards an individual's data against unauthorized commercial use. Even though the Model Data Protection Code scheme tries to do the above, it is after all, still a voluntary scheme. Companies can opt to adopt the scheme, but whether they choose to apply it regularly, is another issue. As long as a privacy law is not in place, this issue will continue to recur in Singapore.
Meenatchi

Online Defamation - 0 views

www.koreatimes.co.kr/...202_43363.html

online defamation ethical law responsibility

shared by Meenatchi on 18 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Meenatchi on 18 Aug 09
     
    Interesting Case In summary, the article discusses the court ruling of an online defamation case that took place in Korea. It involves Kim, the victim, who experienced the spread of false articles and defamatory comments that blamed him for his ex-girlfriend's suicide. The final verdict held Internet portals liable for the damages caused by the articles they displayed on their website. This is despite the articles having been provided by external media outlets. The Supreme Court ordered four of the major portals involved in the case to pay a combined 30 million ($22,500) as compensation to Kim. Ethical Question I feel there are a few ethical issues that are at play in this case. One would be if it is ethical to publish sensitive information about an individual without his/her permission on the Internet. This is of more importance when the credibility of the information is dubious. Another ethical question would be if Internet Service Providers can be held responsible for information they did not create. Is it fair to charge them on the basis that they have failed to regulate the content displayed on their sites? Problem The problem with the first ethical question is that it creates a question of individual privacy rights against the freedom of speech for another. Publishing sensitive information that might not even be true about an individual infringes his/her privacy rights. However, it is the right of the publisher to have the freedom of speech to state what he/she thinks. The issue with the second ethical question is that the Internet Service Providers merely provide a platform for people to express their views. They should not be held liable for comments posted by individuals using the website. However, the opposing view would expect the ISPs to be responsible for the content they allow to be displayed on their site. They have to regulate the content to ensure that sensitive or controversial information that would cause irrevocable damage to others
Weiye Loh

New voting methods and fair elections : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...100726crbo_books_gottlieb

Democracy Methodology

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Jul 10 - Cached
  • history of voting math comes mainly in two chunks: the period of the French Revolution, when some members of France’s Academy of Sciences tried to deduce a rational way of conducting elections, and the nineteen-fifties onward, when economists and game theorists set out to show that this was impossible
  • The first mathematical account of vote-splitting was given by Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician and a naval hero of the American Revolutionary War. Borda concocted examples in which one knows the order in which each voter would rank the candidates in an election, and then showed how easily the will of the majority could be frustrated in an ordinary vote. Borda’s main suggestion was to require voters to rank candidates, rather than just choose one favorite, so that a winner could be calculated by counting points awarded according to the rankings. The key idea was to find a way of taking lower preferences, as well as first preferences, into account.Unfortunately, this method may fail to elect the majority’s favorite—it could, in theory, elect someone who was nobody’s favorite. It is also easy to manipulate by strategic voting.
  • If the candidate who is your second preference is a strong challenger to your first preference, you may be able to help your favorite by putting the challenger last. Borda’s response was to say that his system was intended only for honest men.
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  • After the Academy dropped Borda’s method, it plumped for a simple suggestion by the astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was an important contributor to the theory of probability. Laplace’s rule insisted on an over-all majority: at least half the votes plus one. If no candidate achieved this, nobody was elected to the Academy.
  • Another early advocate of proportional representation was John Stuart Mill, who, in 1861, wrote about the critical distinction between “government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented,” which was the ideal, and “government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people exclusively represented,” which is what winner-takes-all elections produce. (The minority that Mill was most concerned to protect was the “superior intellects and characters,” who he feared would be swamped as more citizens got the vote.)
  • The key to proportional representation is to enlarge constituencies so that more than one winner is elected in each, and then try to align the share of seats won by a party with the share of votes it receives. These days, a few small countries, including Israel and the Netherlands, treat their entire populations as single constituencies, and thereby get almost perfectly proportional representation. Some places require a party to cross a certain threshold of votes before it gets any seats, in order to filter out extremists.
  • The main criticisms of proportional representation are that it can lead to unstable coalition governments, because more parties are successful in elections, and that it can weaken the local ties between electors and their representatives. Conveniently for its critics, and for its defenders, there are so many flavors of proportional representation around the globe that you can usually find an example of whatever point you want to make. Still, more than three-quarters of the world’s rich countries seem to manage with such schemes.
  • The alternative voting method that will be put to a referendum in Britain is not proportional representation: it would elect a single winner in each constituency, and thus steer clear of what foreigners put up with. Known in the United States as instant-runoff voting, the method was developed around 1870 by William Ware
  • In instant-runoff elections, voters rank all or some of the candidates in order of preference, and votes may be transferred between candidates. The idea is that your vote may count even if your favorite loses. If any candidate gets more than half of all the first-preference votes, he or she wins, and the game is over. But, if there is no majority winner, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. Then the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are distributed to the other candidates. If there is still nobody with more than half the votes, another candidate is eliminated, and the process is repeated until either someone has a majority or there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. Third, fourth, and lower preferences will be redistributed if a voter’s higher preferences have already been transferred to candidates who were eliminated earlier.
  • At first glance, this is an appealing approach: it is guaranteed to produce a clear winner, and more voters will have a say in the election’s outcome. Look more closely, though, and you start to see how peculiar the logic behind it is. Although more people’s votes contribute to the result, they do so in strange ways. Some people’s second, third, or even lower preferences count for as much as other people’s first preferences. If you back the loser of the first tally, then in the subsequent tallies your second (and maybe lower) preferences will be added to that candidate’s first preferences. The winner’s pile of votes may well be a jumble of first, second, and third preferences.
  • Such transferrable-vote elections can behave in topsy-turvy ways: they are what mathematicians call “non-monotonic,” which means that something can go up when it should go down, or vice versa. Whether a candidate who gets through the first round of counting will ultimately be elected may depend on which of his rivals he has to face in subsequent rounds, and some votes for a weaker challenger may do a candidate more good than a vote for that candidate himself. In short, a candidate may lose if certain voters back him, and would have won if they hadn’t. Supporters of instant-runoff voting say that the problem is much too rare to worry about in real elections, but recent work by Robert Norman, a mathematician at Dartmouth, suggests otherwise. By Norman’s calculations, it would happen in one in five close contests among three candidates who each have between twenty-five and forty per cent of first-preference votes. With larger numbers of candidates, it would happen even more often. It’s rarely possible to tell whether past instant-runoff elections have gone topsy-turvy in this way, because full ballot data aren’t usually published. But, in Burlington’s 2006 and 2009 mayoral elections, the data were published, and the 2009 election did go topsy-turvy.
  • Kenneth Arrow, an economist at Stanford, examined a set of requirements that you’d think any reasonable voting system could satisfy, and proved that nothing can meet them all when there are more than two candidates. So designing elections is always a matter of choosing a lesser evil. When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Arrow a Nobel Prize, in 1972, it called his result “a rather discouraging one, as regards the dream of a perfect democracy.” Szpiro goes so far as to write that “the democratic world would never be the same again,
  • There is something of a loophole in Arrow’s demonstration. His proof applies only when voters rank candidates; it would not apply if, instead, they rated candidates by giving them grades. First-past-the-post voting is, in effect, a crude ranking method in which voters put one candidate in first place and everyone else last. Similarly, in the standard forms of proportional representation voters rank one party or group of candidates first, and all other parties and candidates last. With rating methods, on the other hand, voters would give all or some candidates a score, to say how much they like them. They would not have to say which is their favorite—though they could in effect do so, by giving only him or her their highest score—and they would not have to decide on an order of preference for the other candidates.
  • One such method is widely used on the Internet—to rate restaurants, movies, books, or other people’s comments or reviews, for example. You give numbers of stars or points to mark how much you like something. To convert this into an election method, count each candidate’s stars or points, and the winner is the one with the highest average score (or the highest total score, if voters are allowed to leave some candidates unrated). This is known as range voting, and it goes back to an idea considered by Laplace at the start of the nineteenth century. It also resembles ancient forms of acclamation in Sparta. The more you like something, the louder you bash your shield with your spear, and the biggest noise wins. A recent variant, developed by two mathematicians in Paris, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, uses familiar language rather than numbers for its rating scale. Voters are asked to grade each candidate as, for example, “Excellent,” “Very Good,” “Good,” “Insufficient,” or “Bad.” Judging politicians thus becomes like judging wines, except that you can drive afterward.
  • Range and approval voting deal neatly with the problem of vote-splitting: if a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush. Above all, their advocates say, both schemes give voters more options, and would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority. Both can be modified to deliver forms of proportional representation.
  • Whether such ideas can work depends on how people use them. If enough people are carelessly generous with their approval votes, for example, there could be some nasty surprises. In an unlikely set of circumstances, the candidate who is the favorite of more than half the voters could lose. Parties in an approval election might spend less time attacking their opponents, in order to pick up positive ratings from rivals’ supporters, and critics worry that it would favor bland politicians who don’t stand for anything much. Defenders insist that such a strategy would backfire in subsequent elections, if not before, and the case of Ronald Reagan suggests that broad appeal and strong views aren’t mutually exclusive.
  • Why are the effects of an unfamiliar electoral system so hard to puzzle out in advance? One reason is that political parties will change their campaign strategies, and voters the way they vote, to adapt to the new rules, and such variables put us in the realm of behavior and culture. Meanwhile, the technical debate about electoral systems generally takes place in a vacuum from which voters’ capriciousness and local circumstances have been pumped out. Although almost any alternative voting scheme now on offer is likely to be better than first past the post, it’s unrealistic to think that one voting method would work equally well for, say, the legislature of a young African republic, the Presidency of an island in Oceania, the school board of a New England town, and the assembly of a country still scarred by civil war. If winner takes all is a poor electoral system, one size fits all is a poor way to pick its replacements.
  • Mathematics can suggest what approaches are worth trying, but it can’t reveal what will suit a particular place, and best deliver what we want from a democratic voting system: to create a government that feels legitimate to people—to reconcile people to being governed, and give them reason to feel that, win or lose (especially lose), the game is fair.
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Jul 10
     
    WIN OR LOSE No voting system is flawless. But some are less democratic than others. by Anthony Gottlieb
Weiye Loh

5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism | Cracked.com - 1 views

www.cracked.com/eir-careers-on-plagiarism.html

Plagiarism

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Ambrose invented pop history. He was the historical advisor on Saving Private Ryan and wrote the book Band of Brothers, that miniseries about WWII that starred the guy from Office Space.
  • In 1995, an almost unknown historian named Thomas Childers published the book Wings of Morning. It was a well-received but relatively obscure novel about the crew of a specific B-24 bomber during WWII. Ambrose was a fan of the book and, as a firm believer that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he proceeded to plagiarize the fuck out of it for his hit 2001 novel, The Wild Blue, which was the account of a different group of B-24 crewmen. Ambrose ripped off whole passages of text and stole several sentences and descriptions word for word. Then he got his book published and just sort of hoped no one would notice.
  • but fortunately for truth, he got caught. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard noticed what was going on and revealed it to the world. Ambrose was fast to respond. He had cited Childers' book in his bibliography (although he hadn't come close to listing everything he 'borrowed' from his fellow historian's work) and basically claimed that he'd just "forgotten" to attribute the stolen passages in the text, like he was supposed to.
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  • For a little while, Stephen's apology was enough.
  • Mark Lewis, of Forbes.com, was not one of those people. He read the first story about Ambrose and, like a good investigative journalist, proceeded to tear apart everything the pop historian had written in his search for the truth.
  • he found several blatant thefts in the book Crazy Horse and Custer, which Ambrose pretended to write in 1995. For that novel, Ambrose molested the work of esteemed historical writer Jay Monagham. Here's an excerpt from the Forbes article: MONAGHAM: "On August 28, 1859, Custer returned to West Point. Cadet James Barroll Washington, a great-great-grandnephew of George Washington, entered that year. He remembered hearing the crowd shout, 'Here comes Custer!' The name meant nothing to him, but he turned, and saw a slim, immature lad with unmilitary figure, slightly rounded shoulders, and gangling walk." AMBROSE: "When he returned to West Point, Cadet James B. Washington, a relative of George Washington, remembered hearing the crowd shout, 'Here comes Custer!' The name meant nothing to Washington, who was just entering the Academy, but he turned and saw a slim, immature lad with unmilitary figure, slightly rounded shoulders, and gangling walk, surrounded by back-slapping, laughing friends."
  • n total, seven of his books were found to contain some degree of plagiarism. His fucking college thesis was even loaded down with other people's unattributed writing. The most famous historian in the world built his career on a foundation of deception. Did He Pay? He really didn't. Evidence of his wrongdoing came up very shortly before his death from lung cancer in 2002.
  • T.S. Eliot wrote several great, enduring poems, such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" which had a ridiculous title, and "The Hollow Men," which, we were depressed to discover, wasn't about a naked, invisible, murdering lunatic. Perhaps his greatest work was a poem entitled, "The Waste Land," which was a haunting statement of his disillusionment with the post-war era. It was a literary milestone, and is still celebrated today as one of the greatest works of poetry in history.
  • The problem with this is that Eliot didn't write "The Waste Land." Not all of it anyway. As it turns out, the idea behind "The Waste Land," and a fair amount of its content, was plagiarized from an almost unknown American poet named Madison Cawein.
  • Cawein worked hard all of his youth, scrimping and saving and putting aside enough money so that he could begin finally working on his true love: poetry. He put out several volumes of work that is very well regarded, but he never gained any recognition and died almost unknown. Which just goes to show you that, if you work hard in this country and believe in yourself, you'll die alone and under appreciated.
  • Madison Cawein wasn't the only person Eliot stole from. This passage from "The Waste Land:" "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne / Glowed on the marble," was slightly altered but still stolen from Shakespeare, who wrote, "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne / Burn'd on the water". Eliot's line, "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song," was stolen entirely from Edmund Spenser's "Prothalamion."
  • Most of "The Waste Land" was just cobbled together out of quotes from other writers. Until very recently, most scholars have been happy to simply chalk these up as "allusions" to the work of other authors. For a long time, it was regarded as something poets just did, as a way of honoring their influences.
  • Did He Pay? "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" This is a quote from Eliot himself. You see, T.S. was rich, famous and beloved the world over. While he was alive, everyone just sort of ignored all of the evidence that he was a tremendous bastard. He died renowned as one of the greatest poets in all of history, which he was, but he was also a plagiarizing cockbag who denied a much worthier artist a place in history.
  • We're not saying that King wasn't an incredible person who did more to advance the human race
  • For starters, his own university admits that his doctoral thesis, the very foundation of his career, was significantly plagiarized.
  • Despite clear findings of plagiarism, the committee did not recommend he be posthumously stripped of his title, due to Dr. King's incredible services to the world. And due to their extreme fear of being beaten and castrated by hordes of angry MLK groupies.
  • Not only was his dissertation plagiarized, but many of his student papers and sermons were stolen in whole or in part from other writers. The staff of the King Paper's Project at Stanford even admits that, "King's plagiarism was a general pattern evident in nearly all of his academic writings." Is That All? Perhaps the most notable example of King's plagiarism was the general tone, and several select lines from his famous "I Have a Dream," speech. Theodore Pappas presents a detailed accusation in his book, Plagiarism and the Culture War. Most of the issue centers around the closing lines.
  • Did He Pay? Not during his lifetime. To be fair, it takes balls to accuse the greatest civil rights activist in history with plagiarism.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10
     
    5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism, Stephen Ambrose, Martin Luther King Jr., T. S. Elliot, Richard Owen, and H. G. Wells. 
Weiye Loh

Book Review: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Tr... - 0 views

www.skepticnorth.com/...aomi-oreskes-and-erik-m-conway

Science Uncertainty Political Economy

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Merchant of Doubt is exactly what its subtitle says: a historical view of how a handful of scientists have obscured the truth on matters of scientific fact.
  • it was a very small group who were responsible for creating a great deal of doubt on a variety of issues. The book opens in 1953, where the tobacco industry began to take action to obscure the truth about smoking’s harmful effects, when its relationship to cancer first received widespread media attention.
  • The tobacco industry exploited scientific tendency to be conservative in drawing conclusions, to throw up a handful of cherry-picked data and misleading statistics and to “spin unreasonable doubt.” This tactic, combined with the media’s adherence to the “fairness doctrine” which was interpreted as giving equal time “to both sides [of an issue], rather than giving accurate weight to both sides” allowed the tobacco industry to delay regulation for decades.
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  • The natural scientific doubt was this: scientists could not say with absolute certainty that smoking caused cancer, because there wasn’t an invariable effect. “Smoking does not kill everyone who smokes, it only kills about half of them.” All scientists could say was that there was an extremely strong association between smoking and serious health risks
  • the “Tobacco Strategy” was created, and had two tactics: To “use normal scientific doubt to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge” and To exploit the media’s adherence to the fairness doctrine, which would give equal weight to each side of a debate, regardless of any disparity in the supporting scientific evidence
  • Fred Seitz was a scientist who learned the Tobacco Strategy first-hand. He had an impressive resume. An actual rocket scientist, he helped build the atomic bomb in the 1940s, worked for NATO in the 1950s, was president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in the 1960s, and of Rockefeller University in the 1970s.
  • After his retirement in 1979, Seitz took on a job for the tobacco industry. Over the next 6 years, he doled out $45 million of R.J. Reynolds’ money to fund biomedical research to create “an extensive body of scientifically well-grounded data useful in defending the industry against attacks” by such means as focussing on alternative “causes or development mechanisms of chronic degenerative diseases imputed to cigarettes.” He was joined by, most notably, two other physicists: William Nierenberg, who also worked on the atom bomb in the 1940s, submarine warfare, NATO, and was appointed director or the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1965; and Robert Jastrow, who founded NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which he directed until he retired in 1981 to teach at Dartmouth College.
  • In 1984, these three founded the think tank, the George C. Marshall Institute
  • None of these men were experts in environmental and health issues, but they all “used their scientific credentials to present themselves as authorities, and they used their authority to discredit any science they didn’t like.” They turned out to be wrong, in terms of the science, on every issue they weighed in on. But they turned out to be highly successful in preventing or limiting regulation that the scientific evidence would warrant.
  • The bulk of the book details at how these men and others applied the Tobacco Strategy to create doubt on the following issues: the unfeasibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars”), and the resultant threat of nuclear winter that Carl Sagan, among others, pointed out acid rain depletion of the ozone layer second-hand smoke, and most recently, and significantly, global warming.
  • Having pointed out the dangers the doubt-mongers pose, Oreskes and Conway propose a remedy: an emphasis on scientific literacy, not in the sense of memorizing scientific facts, but in being able to assess which scientists to trust.
Weiye Loh

Science Warriors' Ego Trips - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...65186

Science Philosophy

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 May 10 - Cached
  • By Carlin Romano Standing up for science excites some intellectuals the way beautiful actresses arouse Warren Beatty, or career liberals boil the blood of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It's visceral.
  • A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness?
  • You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York.
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  • it mixes eminent common sense and frequent good reporting with a cocksure hubris utterly inappropriate to the practice it apotheosizes.
  • According to Pigliucci, both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory of history "are too broad, too flexible with regard to observations, to actually tell us anything interesting." (That's right—not one "interesting" thing.) The idea of intelligent design in biology "has made no progress since its last serious articulation by natural theologian William Paley in 1802," and the empirical evidence for evolution is like that for "an open-and-shut murder case."
  • Pigliucci offers more hero sandwiches spiced with derision and certainty. Media coverage of science is "characterized by allegedly serious journalists who behave like comedians." Commenting on the highly publicized Dover, Pa., court case in which U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent-design theory is not science, Pigliucci labels the need for that judgment a "bizarre" consequence of the local school board's "inane" resolution. Noting the complaint of intelligent-design advocate William Buckingham that an approved science textbook didn't give creationism a fair shake, Pigliucci writes, "This is like complaining that a textbook in astronomy is too focused on the Copernican theory of the structure of the solar system and unfairly neglects the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is really pulling each planet's strings, unseen by the deluded scientists."
  • Or is it possible that the alternate view unfairly neglected could be more like that of Harvard scientist Owen Gingerich, who contends in God's Universe (Harvard University Press, 2006) that it is partly statistical arguments—the extraordinary unlikelihood eons ago of the physical conditions necessary for self-conscious life—that support his belief in a universe "congenially designed for the existence of intelligent, self-reflective life"?
  • Even if we agree that capital "I" and "D" intelligent-design of the scriptural sort—what Gingerich himself calls "primitive scriptural literalism"—is not scientifically credible, does that make Gingerich's assertion, "I believe in intelligent design, lowercase i and lowercase d," equivalent to Flying-Spaghetti-Monsterism? Tone matters. And sarcasm is not science.
  • The problem with polemicists like Pigliucci is that a chasm has opened up between two groups that might loosely be distinguished as "philosophers of science" and "science warriors."
  • Philosophers of science, often operating under the aegis of Thomas Kuhn, recognize that science is a diverse, social enterprise that has changed over time, developed different methodologies in different subsciences, and often advanced by taking putative pseudoscience seriously, as in debunking cold fusion
  • The science warriors, by contrast, often write as if our science of the moment is isomorphic with knowledge of an objective world-in-itself—Kant be damned!—and any form of inquiry that doesn't fit the writer's criteria of proper science must be banished as "bunk." Pigliucci, typically, hasn't much sympathy for radical philosophies of science. He calls the work of Paul Feyerabend "lunacy," deems Bruno Latour "a fool," and observes that "the great pronouncements of feminist science have fallen as flat as the similarly empty utterances of supporters of intelligent design."
  • It doesn't have to be this way. The noble enterprise of submitting nonscientific knowledge claims to critical scrutiny—an activity continuous with both philosophy and science—took off in an admirable way in the late 20th century when Paul Kurtz, of the University at Buffalo, established the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Csicop) in May 1976. Csicop soon after launched the marvelous journal Skeptical Inquirer
  • Although Pigliucci himself publishes in Skeptical Inquirer, his contributions there exhibit his signature smugness. For an antidote to Pigliucci's overweening scientism 'tude, it's refreshing to consult Kurtz's curtain-raising essay, "Science and the Public," in Science Under Siege (Prometheus Books, 2009, edited by Frazier)
  • Kurtz's commandment might be stated, "Don't mock or ridicule—investigate and explain." He writes: "We attempted to make it clear that we were interested in fair and impartial inquiry, that we were not dogmatic or closed-minded, and that skepticism did not imply a priori rejection of any reasonable claim. Indeed, I insisted that our skepticism was not totalistic or nihilistic about paranormal claims."
  • Kurtz combines the ethos of both critical investigator and philosopher of science. Describing modern science as a practice in which "hypotheses and theories are based upon rigorous methods of empirical investigation, experimental confirmation, and replication," he notes: "One must be prepared to overthrow an entire theoretical framework—and this has happened often in the history of science ... skeptical doubt is an integral part of the method of science, and scientists should be prepared to question received scientific doctrines and reject them in the light of new evidence."
  • Pigliucci, alas, allows his animus against the nonscientific to pull him away from sensitive distinctions among various sciences to sloppy arguments one didn't see in such earlier works of science patriotism as Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, 1995). Indeed, he probably sets a world record for misuse of the word "fallacy."
  • To his credit, Pigliucci at times acknowledges the nondogmatic spine of science. He concedes that "science is characterized by a fuzzy borderline with other types of inquiry that may or may not one day become sciences." Science, he admits, "actually refers to a rather heterogeneous family of activities, not to a single and universal method." He rightly warns that some pseudoscience—for example, denial of HIV-AIDS causation—is dangerous and terrible.
  • But at other points, Pigliucci ferociously attacks opponents like the most unreflective science fanatic
  • He dismisses Feyerabend's view that "science is a religion" as simply "preposterous," even though he elsewhere admits that "methodological naturalism"—the commitment of all scientists to reject "supernatural" explanations—is itself not an empirically verifiable principle or fact, but rather an almost Kantian precondition of scientific knowledge. An article of faith, some cold-eyed Feyerabend fans might say.
  • He writes, "ID is not a scientific theory at all because there is no empirical observation that can possibly contradict it. Anything we observe in nature could, in principle, be attributed to an unspecified intelligent designer who works in mysterious ways." But earlier in the book, he correctly argues against Karl Popper that susceptibility to falsification cannot be the sole criterion of science, because science also confirms. It is, in principle, possible that an empirical observation could confirm intelligent design—i.e., that magic moment when the ultimate UFO lands with representatives of the intergalactic society that planted early life here, and we accept their evidence that they did it.
  • "As long as we do not venture to make hypotheses about who the designer is and why and how she operates," he writes, "there are no empirical constraints on the 'theory' at all. Anything goes, and therefore nothing holds, because a theory that 'explains' everything really explains nothing."
  • Here, Pigliucci again mixes up what's likely or provable with what's logically possible or rational. The creation stories of traditional religions and scriptures do, in effect, offer hypotheses, or claims, about who the designer is—e.g., see the Bible.
  • Far from explaining nothing because it explains everything, such an explanation explains a lot by explaining everything. It just doesn't explain it convincingly to a scientist with other evidentiary standards.
  • A sensible person can side with scientists on what's true, but not with Pigliucci on what's rational and possible. Pigliucci occasionally recognizes that. Late in his book, he concedes that "nonscientific claims may be true and still not qualify as science." But if that's so, and we care about truth, why exalt science to the degree he does? If there's really a heaven, and science can't (yet?) detect it, so much the worse for science.
  • Pigliucci quotes a line from Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Science warriors such as Pigliucci, or Michael Ruse in his recent clash with other philosophers in these pages, should reflect on a related modern sense of "entertain." One does not entertain a guest by mocking, deriding, and abusing the guest. Similarly, one does not entertain a thought or approach to knowledge by ridiculing it.
  • Long live Skeptical Inquirer! But can we deep-six the egomania and unearned arrogance of the science patriots? As Descartes, that immortal hero of scientists and skeptics everywhere, pointed out, true skepticism, like true charity, begins at home.
  • Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
  • Weiye Loh on 06 May 10
     
    April 25, 2010 Science Warriors' Ego Trips
Weiye Loh

The Way We Live Now - Metric Mania - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16FOB-WWLN-t.htm

Data Statistics

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers.
  • do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.
  • The problem isn’t with statistical tests themselves but with what we do before and after we run them.
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  • First, we count if we can, but counting depends a great deal on previous assumptions about categorization. Consider, for example, the number of homeless people in Philadelphia, or the number of battered women in Atlanta, or the number of suicides in Denver. Is someone homeless if he’s unemployed and living with his brother’s family temporarily? Do we require that a women self-identify as battered to count her as such? If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count.
  • Second, after we’ve gathered some numbers relating to a phenomenon, we must reasonably aggregate them into some sort of recommendation or ranking. This is not easy. By appropriate choices of criteria, measurement protocols and weights, almost any desired outcome can be reached.
  • Are there good reasons the authors picked the criteria they did? Why did they weigh the criteria in the way they did?
  • Since the answer to the last question is usually yes, the problem of reasonable aggregation is no idle matter.
  • These two basic procedures — counting and aggregating — have important implications for public policy. Consider the plan to evaluate the progress of New York City public schools inaugurated by the city a few years ago. While several criteria were used, much of a school’s grade was determined by whether students’ performance on standardized state tests showed annual improvement. This approach risked putting too much weight on essentially random fluctuations and induced schools to focus primarily on the topics on the tests. It also meant that the better schools could receive mediocre grades becausethey were already performing well and had little room for improvement. Conversely, poor schools could receive high grades by improving just a bit.
  • Medical researchers face similar problems when it comes to measuring effectiveness.
  • Suppose that whenever people contract the disease, they always get it in their mid-60s and live to the age of 75. In the first region, an early screening program detects such people in their 60s. Because these people live to age 75, the five-year survival rate is 100 percent. People in the second region are not screened and thus do not receive their diagnoses until symptoms develop in their early 70s, but they, too, die at 75, so their five-year survival rate is 0 percent. The laissez-faire approach thus yields the same results as the universal screening program, yet if five-year survival were the criterion for effectiveness, universal screening would be deemed the best practice.
  • Because so many criteria can be used to assess effectiveness — median or mean survival times, side effects, quality of life and the like — there is a case to be made against mandating that doctors follow what seems at any given time to be the best practice. Perhaps, as some have suggested, we should merely nudge them with gentle incentives. A comparable tentativeness may be appropriate when devising criteria for effective schools.
  • Arrow’s Theorem, a famous result in mathematical economics, essentially states that no voting system satisfying certain minimal conditions can be guaranteed to always yield a fair or reasonable aggregation of the voters’ rankings of several candidates. A squishier analogue for the field of social measurement would say something like this: No method of measuring a societal phenomenon satisfying certain minimal conditions exists that can’t be second-guessed, deconstructed, cheated, rejected or replaced. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be counting — but it does mean we should do so with as much care and wisdom as we can muster.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 May 10
     
    THE WAY WE LIVE NOW Metric Mania
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Kirsten Sanford - 0 views

skepticblog.org/sanford

Science News Newspaper objectivity Bias Representation Fairness

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • This Sunday before game-time you might want to set your Tivos to record Dateline. This week, supposedly, Matt Lauer interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield and several other affiliates of the Thoughtful House Center for Children, along with Dr. Paul Offit and journalist Brian Deer.
  • Please, Matt… don’t go Jenny McCarthy on us. Don’t do the usual journalistic job of being “fair-and-balanced”. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. This is science. Do tell the world what the science supports.
  • Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.
Weiye Loh

The App Store Moral Quandary - 0 views

gizmodo.com/#!5784923/the-app-store-moral-quandary

Apple App Mobile Morality Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • the App Store is Apple's world. They rule it, and can pull or approve whatever they want. They'll keep selling tons of apps regardless of what they remove or don't remove, or what some people find offensive. There's little consequence for Apple in the end. But as long as Apple makes itself the arbiter of App Store morality, or concerns itself with what one group finds offensive versus another, this stuff will never stop.
  • Who's to say where it ends? Everybody finds something offensive, and everything offends somebody.
  • a handful of senators are calling on Apple to pull apps that allow users to self-report DUI (and speeding and other law enforcement) checkpoints, like Trapster and FuzzAlert. Which, on the face of it, sounds almost like a no-brainer-the apps facilitate breaking the law. On the other hand, the data is entirely user reported. Somebody could tweet all of it, theoretically. Should Apple take down apps comprised entirely of user-generated data? Both of those apps are still in the app store.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Apple occasionally places itself in an awkward position. Like, for instance, when Exodus International, one of those ministries that promotes "gay cures," released an iPhone app. People complained that it was offensive (I don't like it myself), and Apple removed it, saying it violates their "developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people." Just last year, Apple repeatedly rejected the app Gay New York: 101 Can't-Miss Places-basically a gay sight-seeing app. The creator found Apple's rejection of the "PG-13" app to be "homophobic and discriminatory to the point of hostile," since, he claims, that "far racier photographic material is routinely available on other apps."
  • Apple doesn't want people to perceive the App Store as a seedy place (which the Android Market kind of seems like sometimes!), or a place where kids can get their hands on stuff they shouldn't. It's family friendly, mostly. (Apps that could lead to bad stuff, like browsers, carry 17+ warnings and can be blocked via parental controls.) And it keeps regulators and Congressmen off their back
Weiye Loh

SAY IT IN 17 WORDS: In Case You Missed It, Karin Calvo-Goller Explains it All for You - 0 views

plogspot101.blogspot.com/...you-missed-it-karin-calvo.html

Libel Academic Freedom Publication Selection

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • IMPORTANT NOTE: There is one point in this case that was totally misunderstood by many of the international observers and that point needs to be underlined here:  in France, no one goes to prison for libel. [All that a defendant in a lawsuit in France risks, such as the one that Calvo-Goller brought against Joseph Weiler, is a fine, and even then, even if the court decides in the plantiff's favor, against the defendant, even then, the defendant is not considered a criminal under French law since libel is a misdemeanor and not a crime under French law.]
  • I could not ignore Mr. Weigend's review and particularly [the suggestion] that, in my book, I had simply restated the contents of existing legal texts.
  • Q. How do you respond to the suggestion made by some observers that bringing the complaint in France amounted to libel tourism or forum shopping? A. I disagree with my critics completely. ... The court ruling states that "for reasons of preference ... she considered that only French law offered her a chance of being successful." But there was no option since, under two Israel Supreme Court judgments, at the relevant time (July 2007) the Internet was not considered'"contrary to the printed media, for instance'"to constitute a means of publishing what is deemed to be a libelous text or expression. I spoke to an American lawyer earlier, and I was told that in an American court, I would have had to prove "malice," among other [things]. ...
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The freedom to hold opinions and to express opinions is a right expressly provided in international human-rights covenants. This includes the freedom to criticize other people's ideas and works. These freedoms are the basic premise for the transmission and exchange of knowledge among others. However, one of the very few restrictions to the exercise of these rights is the respect of the rights or reputation of others. An author, [like] any human being, is entitled to the respect of his reputation. The publication of works of course exposes an author to criticism, but it does not deprive him of the right to the respect of his reputation. Fair criticism does not automatically mean that rights of the authors were disregarded. ...
  • In my view, fair criticism of someone else's idea can initially be put on the Internet without the agreement of the author. If an author finds the criticism unfair or erroneous and informs the manager or editor of the site accordingly, the author should be entitled to respond and be granted the same space as was accorded to the criticism, and'"I want to emphasize'"not only in the form of a comment. Where the author considers the criticism to be libelous and harmful to his reputation, another mutually agreed-upon reviewer should be found and, whatever the outcome, it [the review] can be posted. But in the meantime, the criticism should be removed. Words can cause tremendous harm, and there are higher principles telling us not to do so.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: IPCC and COI: Flashback 2004 - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...cc-and-coi-flashback-2004.html

Politics Science Activism NGO

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • In this case the NGOs and other groups represent environmental and humanitarian groups that have put together a report (in PDF) on what they see as needed and unnecessary policy actions related to climate change. They put together a nice glossy report with findings and recommendations such as: *Limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees (Celsius, p. 4) *Extracting the World Bank from fossil fuels (p. 15) *Opposing the inclusion of carbon sinks in the [Kyoto] Protocol (p. 22)
  • It is troubling that the Chair of the IPCC would lend his name and organizational affiliation to a set of groups with members engaged actively in political advocacy on climate change. Even if Dr. Pachauri feels strongly about the merit of the political agenda proposed by these groups, at a minimum his endorsement creates a potential perception that the IPCC has an unstated political agenda. This is compounded by the fact that the report Dr. Pachauri tacitly endorses contains statements that are scientifically at odds with those of the IPCC.
  • perhaps most troubling is that by endorsing this group’s agenda he has opened the door for those who would seek to discredit the IPCC by alleging exactly such a bias. (And don’t be surprised to see such statements forthcoming.) If the IPCC’s role is indeed to act as an honest broker, then it would seem to make sense that its leadership ought not blur that role by endorsing, tacitly or otherwise, the agendas of particular groups. There are plenty of appropriate places for political advocacy on climate change, but the IPCC does not seem to me to be among those places.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Organized by the New Economics Foundation and the Working Group on Climate and Development, the report (in PDF) is actually pretty good and contains much valuable information on climate change and development (that is, once you get past the hype of the press release and its lack of precision in disaggregating climate and vulnerability as sources of climate-related impacts). The participating organizations have done a nice job integrating considerations of climate change and development, a perspective that is certainly needed. More generally, the IPCC suffers because it no longer considers “policy options” under its mandate. Since its First Assessment Report when it did consider policy options, the IPCC has eschewed responsibility for developing and evaluating a wide range of possible policy options on climate change. By deciding to policy outside of its mandate since 1992, the IPCC, ironically, leaves itself more open to charges of political bias. It is time for the IPCC to bring policy back in, both because we need new and innovative options on climate, but also because the IPCC has great potential to serve as an honest broker. But until it does, its leadership would be well served to avoid either the perception or the reality of endorsing particular political perspectives.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Jun 11
     
    Consider the following imaginary scenario. NGOs and a few other representatives of the oil and gas industry decide to band together to produce a report on what they see as needed and unnecessary policy actions related to climate change. They put together a nice glossy report with findings and recommendations such as: *Coal is the fuel of the future, we must mine more. *CO2 regulations are too costly. *Climate change will be good for agriculture. In addition, the report contains some questionable scientific statements and associations. Imagine further that the report contains a preface authored by a prominent scientist who though unpaid for his work lends his name and credibility to the report. How might that scientist be viewed by the larger community? Answers that come to mind include: "A tool of industry," "Discredited," "Biased," "Political Advocate." It is likely that in such a scenario that connection of the scientist to the political advocacy efforts of the oil and gas industry would provide considerable grist for opponents of the oil and gas industry, and specifically a basis for highlighting the appearance or reality of a compromised position of the scientist. Fair enough?
Weiye Loh

New Service Adds Your Drunken Facebook Photos To Employer Background Checks, For Up To ... - 0 views

consumerist.com/...cks-for-up-to-seven-years.html

Employment Privacy Social Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Jun 11
     
    The FTC has given thumbs up to a company, Social Intelligence Corp., selling a new kind of employee background check to employers. This one scours the internet for your posts and pictures to social media sites and creates a file of all the dumb stuff you ever uploaded online. For instance, this sample they provided was flagged for "Demonstrating potentially violent behavior" because of "flagrant display of weapons or bombs." The FTC said that the file, which will last for up to seven years, does not violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The company also says that info in your file will be updated when you remove pictures from the social media sites. Forbes reports, "new employers who run searches through Social Intelligence won't have access to the materials if they are completely removed from the Internet."
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Mike Daisey and Higher Truths - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...-daisey-and-higher-truths.html

Politics Truth Journalism Objectivity News Climate Climate Change Climate Science Balance

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be.
  • some people do feel that certain issues are so important that there should be cause in political debates to overlook lies or misrepresentations in service of a "larger truth" (Yellow cake, anyone?). I have seen this attitude for years in the climate change debate (hey look, just today), and often condoned by scientists and journalists alike.
  • the "global warming: yes or no?" debate has become an obstacle to effective policy action related to climate. Several of these colleagues suggested that I should downplay the policy implications of my work showing that for a range of phenomena and places, future climate impacts depend much more on growing human vulnerability to climate than on projected changes in climate itself (under the assumptions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). One colleague wrote, "I think we have a professional (or moral?) obligation to be very careful what we say and how we say it when the stakes are so high." In effect, some of these colleagues were intimating that ends justify means or, in other words, doing the "right thing" for the wrong reasons is OK.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • When science is used (and misused) in political advocacy, there are frequent opportunities for such situations to arise.
  • I don't think you're being fair to Mike Lemonick. In the article by him that you cite, MIke's provocative question was framed in the context of an analogy he was making to the risks of smoking. For example, in that article, he also says: "So should the overall message be that nobody knows anything? I don’t think so. We would never want to pretend the uncertainty isn’t there, since that would be dishonest. But featuring it prominently is dishonest ,too, just as trumpeting uncertainty in the smoking-cancer connection would have been."Thus, I think you're reading way too much into Mike's piece. That said, I do agree with you that there are implications of the Daisey case for climate communicators and climate journalism. My own related post is here: http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2012/03/19/the-seduction-of-narrative/"
  • I don't want journalists shading the truth in a desire to be "effective" in some way. That is Daisey's tradeoff too.
  • Weiye Loh on 19 Mar 12
     
    Recall that in the aftermath of initial revelations about Peter Gleick's phishing of the Heartland Institute, we heard defenses of his action that included claims that he was only doing the same thing that journalists do to the importance of looking beyond Gleick's misdeeds at the "larger truth." Consider also what was described in the UEA emails as "pressure to present a nice tidy story" related to climate science as well as the IPCC's outright falsification related to disasters and climate change. Such shenanigans so endemic in the climate change debate that when a journalist openly asks whether the media should tell the whole truth about climate change, no one even bats an eye. 
Weiye Loh

Rod Beckstrom proposes ways to reclaim control over our online selves. - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...control-over-our-online-selves

Digital Data Man

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • As the virtual world expands, so, too, do breaches of trust and misuse of personal data. Surveillance has increased public unease – and even paranoia – about state agencies. Private companies that trade in personal data have incited the launch of a “reclaim privacy” movement. As one delegate at a recent World Economic Forum debate, noted: “The more connected we have become, the more privacy we have given up.”
  • Now that our personal data have become such a valuable asset, companies are coming under increasing pressure to develop online business models that protect rather than exploit users’ private information. In particular, Internet users want to stop companies befuddling their customers with convoluted and legalistic service agreements in order to extract and sell their data.
  • Hyper-connectivity not only creates new commercial opportunities; it also changes the way ordinary people think about their lives. The so-called FoMo (fear of missing out) syndrome reflects the anxieties of a younger generation whose members feel compelled to capture instantly everything they do and see.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphIronically, this hyper-connectivity has increased our insularity, as we increasingly live through our electronic devices. Neuroscientists believe that this may even have altered how we now relate to one another in the real world.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • At the heart of this debate is the need to ensure that in a world where many, if not all, of the important details of our lives – including our relationships – exist in cyber-perpetuity, people retain, or reclaim, some level of control over their online selves. While the world of forgetting may have vanished, we can reshape the new one in a way that benefits rather than overwhelms us. Our overriding task is to construct a digital way of life that reinforces our existing sense of ethics and values, with security, trust, and fairness at its heart.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Dec 13
     
    "We must answer profound questions about the way we live. Should everyone be permanently connected to everything? Who owns which data, and how should information be made public? Can and should data use be regulated, and, if so, how? And what role should government, business, and ordinary Internet users play in addressing these issues?"
Weiye Loh

The Real Hoax Was Climategate | Media Matters Action Network - 0 views

politicalcorrection.org/...201007020005

Climate Science ClimateGate

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Sen. Jim Inhofe's (R-OK) biggest claim to fame has been his oft-repeated line that global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
  • In 2003, he conceded that the earth was warming, but denied it was caused by human activity and suggested that "increases in global temperatures may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives."
  • In 2009, however, he appeared on Fox News to declare that the earth was actually cooling, claiming "everyone understands that's the case" (they don't, because it isn't).
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • nhofe's battle against climate science kicked into overdrive when a series of illegally obtained emails surfaced from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University. 
  • When the dubious reports surfaced about flawed science, manipulated data, and unsubstantiated studies, Inhofe was ecstatic.  In March, he viciously attacked former Vice President Al Gore for defending the science behind climate change
  • Unfortunately for Senator Inhofe, none of those things are true.  One by one, the pillars of evidence supporting the alleged "scandals" have shattered, causing the entire "Climategate" storyline to come crashing down. 
  • a panel established by the University of East Anglia to investigate the integrity of the research of the Climatic Research Unit wrote: "We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."
  • Responding to allegations that Dr. Michael Mann tampered with scientific evidence, Pennsylvania State University conducted a thorough investigation. It concluded: "The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University.  More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities."
  • London's Sunday Times retracted its story, echoed by dozens of outlets, that an IPCC issued an unsubstantiated report claiming 40% of the Amazon rainforest was endangered due to changing rainfall patterns.  The Times wrote: "In fact, the IPCC's Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure had, in error, not been referenced, but was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change."
  • The Times also admitted it misrepresented the views of Dr. Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds, implying he agreed with the article's false premise and believed the IPCC should not utilize reports issued by outside organizations.  In its retraction, the Times was forced to admit: "Dr Lewis does not dispute the scientific basis for both the IPCC and the WWF reports," and, "We accept that Dr Lewis holds no such view... A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate account of his views on these points. We apologise for this."
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Jul 10
     
    The Real Hoax Was Climategate July 02, 2010 1:44 pm ET by Chris Harris
Jiamin Lin

Technological Freedom - 4 views

http://media.www.csucauldron.com/media/storage/paper516/news/2009/09/06/TheMeltingPot/Technological.Freedom-3759993.shtml Digital Rights Management (DRM) or should it be called "Digital Rights Mis...

started by Jiamin Lin on 16 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
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