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That is nothing, though, compared with the attack by Temasek Review, the anonymously-run website with lofty ambitions “to foster an informed, educated, thinking and proactive citizenry.” The website delved into her personal life – even questioning her motives for marrying her husband – to present her as a materialistic, social climbing monster. Such attacks have also been flying around social media.

Never mind that Tin (unlike most high-flying PAP candidates) has several years’ grassroots experience; sections of the online community have dismissed the possibility that someone so young – she is in her 20s – could serve in the highest forum in the land. (I recall feeling similarly skeptical when Eunice Olsen was put up as an NMP. She proved me wrong and I have learnt not to prejudge.)

Siew Kum Hong, hardly a PAP apologist, has had the intellectual honesty and moral courage to come out swiftly in his blog against this distasteful turn of events.

a 2007 Journal of Political Economy study found that most downloaders would not buy that content, even if they couldn't share it. "Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero," the authors flatly concluded then. "Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during our study period."

But a later 2010 meta-study by the same authors concluded that piracy did, in fact, account for a bit of the decline in music sales—around 20 percent. The other 80 percent could be chalked up to the sale of digital singles rather than whole albums and the rise of other media options like video games.

"Downward pressure on leisure expenditure is likely to continue to increase due to rising costs of living and unemployment and drastic rises in the costs of (public) services," says the report. Having less money for entertainment has played a huge role in the decline of items like CDs. A 2004 US Consumer Expenditure Survey showed that even spending on CDs by people who had no computer (and were therefore unlikely to download and use BitTorrent) dropped by over 40 percent from 1999 through 2004. "Household budgets for entertainment are relatively inelastic as competition for spending on culture and entertainment increases and there are shifts in household expenditure as well," the LSE study notes.

We’re not here to defend peer review against its many critics. We have the same feelings about it that Churchill did about democracy, aka the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Of course, a good number of the retractions we write about are due to misconduct, and it’s not clear how peer review, no matter how good, would detect out-and-out fraud.

With that in mind, a paper published last week in the Annals of Emergency Medicine caught our eye. Over 14 years, 84 editors at the journal rated close to 15,000 reviews by about 1,500 reviewers. Highlights of their findings: …92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately correlated with their mean quality score, with better-than average reviewers decreasing at about half the rate of those below average). Only 8% improved, and those by very small amount.

The average reviewer in our study would have taken 12.5 years to reach this threshold; only 3% of reviewers whose quality decreased would have reached it in less than 5 years, and even the worst would take 3.2 years. Another 35% of all reviewers would reach the threshold in 5 to 10 years, 28% in 10 to 15 years, 12% in 15 to 20 years, and 22% in 20 years or more. So the decline was slow. Still, the results, note the authors, were surprising: Such a negative overall trend is contrary to most editors’ and reviewers’ intuitive expectations and beliefs about reviewer skills and the benefits of experience.

One part of Matthew Nisbet's recent report that has received very little attention is its comparative analysis of ideological and partisan perspectives of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nisbet shows that AAAS members are extremely partisan and ideological.  The word "extremely" is mine, and what do I mean by it?  Look at the figure above:  AAAS members are more partisan than MSNBC viewers and even Tea Party members.  AAAS members are more ideological than evangelical churchgoers but less so than Fox News viewers.  In both cases AAAS members are very different than the public as a whole.

Dan Sarewitz has discussed the problems with the ideological and partisan likemindedness of our scientific community, which has been exploited and reenforced in political debates: During the Bush administration, Democrats discovered that they could score political points by accusing Bush of being anti-science. In the process, they seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational. Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn't share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals. How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation? First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science. Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics.

It should come as no surprise that the increasing politicization of science has come to make science more political rather than politics more scientific.  At the same time, the more partisan and/or and ideological that you are, the more welcome and comfortable that you will find the politicization of science, as it reenforces your preconceptions.

Breaking the cultural code damages a person’s reputation, and perhaps one’s career. Britain’s Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke recently had to apologize for saying that some rapes were less serious than others, implying the need for legal discrimination. The parade of gaffes and subsequent groveling apologies has become a regular feature of public life. In his classic essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill defended free speech on the ground that free inquiry was necessary to advance knowledge. Restrictions on certain areas of historical inquiry are based on the opposite premise: the truth is known, and it is impious to question it. This is absurd; every historian knows that there is no such thing as final historical truth.

It is not the task of history to defend public order or morals, but to establish what happened. Legally protected history ensures that historians will play safe. To be sure, living by Mill’s principle often requires protecting the rights of unsavory characters. David Irving writes mendacious history, but his prosecution and imprisonment in Austria for “Holocaust denial” would have horrified Mill.

the pressure for “political correctness” rests on the argument that the truth is unknowable. Statements about the human condition are essentially matters of opinion.  Because a statement of opinion by some individuals is almost certain to offend others, and since such statements make no contribution to the discovery of truth, their degree of offensiveness becomes the sole criterion for judging their admissibility. Hence the taboo on certain words, phrases, and arguments that imply that certain individuals, groups, or practices are superior or inferior, normal or abnormal; hence the search for ever more neutral ways to label social phenomena, thereby draining language of its vigor and interest.

The press ad for Cadbury's Bliss range of Dairy Milk chocolate – which ran with the strapline "move over Naomi, there's a new diva in town" – provoked outrage from the supermodel as well as campaigning group Operation Black Vote.Campbell said she was shocked by the ad, while her mother Valerie said she was "deeply upset by this racist advert".Cadbury initially defended the campaign, saying it was intended as a tongue-in-cheek play on her reputation for diva-style tantrums and had nothing to do with her skin colour.However, after taking took legal advice Cadbury withdrew the campaign and made a public apology on its corporate website.

The complainants objected that the ad was racially offensive because it compared a black woman to a bar of chocolate.However, the ASA council said that the ad was "likely to be understood to refer to Naomi Campbell's reputation for 'diva-style' behaviour rather than her race"."On this basis the council decided that the ad was unlikely to be seen as racist or to cause serious or widespread offence," the ASA added.

Hari admits to substituting his interviewees’ written words for their spoken words, quoting from their books and pretending that they actually said those words to him over coffee. But that is okay, he says, because his only aim was to reveal “what the subject thinks in the most comprehensible possible words” and to make sure that the reader “understood the point”.

The nub of Hari’s argument is that reality and truth are two different things, that what happens in the real world – in this case a chat between a journalist and some famous author or activist – can be twisted in the name of handing to people a neat, presumably preordained “truth”. It is a cause for concern that more journalists have not been taken aback by such a casual disassociation of truth from fact.

the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.

Since the shale gas revolution and resulting confirmation of enormous domestic gas reserves, there has been a relatively small group of analysts and geologists who have doubted the future of shale gas.  Their doubts have become very convenient to the environmental activists I mentioned earlier. This particular NYT reporter has apparently sought out a few of the doubters to fashion together a negative view of the U.S. natural gas industry. We also believe certain media outlets, especially the once venerable NYT, are being manipulated by those whose environmental or economic interests are being threatened by abundant natural gas supplies. We have seen for example today an email from a leader of a group called the Environmental Working Group who claimed today’s articles as this NYT reporter’s "second great story" (the first one declaring that produced water disposal from shale gas wells was unsafe) and that “we've been working with him for over 8 months. Much more to come. . .”

this reporter’s claim of impending scarcity of natural gas supply contradicts the facts and the scientific extrapolation of those facts by the most sophisticated reservoir engineers and geoscientists in the world. Not just at Chesapeake, but by experts at many of the world’s leading energy companies that have made multi-billion-dollar, long-term investments in U.S. shale gas plays, with us and many other companies. Notable examples of these companies, besides the leading independents such as Chesapeake, Devon, Anadarko, EOG, EnCana, Talisman and others, include these leading global energy giants:  Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco, Statoil, BHP, Total, CNOOC, Marathon, BG, KNOC, Reliance, PetroChina, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and ENI, among others.  Is it really possible that all of these companies, with a combined market cap of almost $2 trillion, know less about shale gas than a NYT reporter, a few environmental activists and a handful of shale gas doubters?

this isn't just a case of referencing something the interviewee has written previously - 'As XXX has written before...', or such like. No, Hari adds dramatic context to quotes which were never said - the following paragraph, for instance, is one of the quotes from the Levy interview which seems to have appeared elsewhere before. After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”

So how does Hari justify it? Well, his post on 'Interview etiquette', as he calls it, is so stunningly brazen about playing fast-and-loose with quotes

When I’ve interviewed a writer, it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech. (I know I write much more clearly than I speak – whenever I read a transcript of what I’ve said, or it always seems less clear and more clotted. I think we’ve all had that sensation in one form or another). So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview. Since my interviews are intellectual portraits that I hope explain how a person thinks, it seemed the most thorough way of doing it...