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Weiye Loh

Major reform for climate body : Nature News - 0 views

www.nature.com/...473261a.html

Climate Science IPCC Error Conflict Bias Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The first major test of these changes will be towards the end of this year, with the release of a report assessing whether climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events. Despite much speculation, there is scant scientific evidence for such a link — particularly between climate warming, storm frequency and economic losses — and the report is expected to spark renewed controversy. "It'll be interesting to see how the IPCC will handle this hot potato where stakes are high but solid peer-reviewed results are few," says Silke Beck, a policy expert at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Jun 11
     
    A new conflict-of-interest policy will require all IPCC officials and authors to disclose financial and other interests relevant to their work (Pachauri had been harshly criticized in 2009 for alleged conflicts of interest.) The meeting also adopted a detailed protocol for addressing errors in existing and future IPCC reports, along with guidelines to ensure that descriptions of scientific uncertainties remain consistent across reports. "This is a heartening and encouraging outcome of the review we started one year ago," Pachauri told Nature. "It will strengthen the IPCC and help restore public trust in the climate sciences."
Weiye Loh

Iceland Crowd-Sources its New Constitution on Facebook | The Utopianist - Think Bigger - 0 views

utopianist.com/...s-new-constitution-on-facebook

Crowd-Sourcing Politics Law

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The Guardian reports: In creating the new document, the council has been posting draft clauses on its website every week since the project launched in April. The public can comment underneath or join a discussion on the council’s Facebook page. The council also has a Twitter account, a YouTube page where interviews with its members are regularly posted, and a Flickr account containing pictures of the 25 members at work, all intended to maximise interaction with citizens. Meetings of the council are open to the public and streamed live on to the website and Facebook page. The latter has more than 1,300 likes in a country of 320,000 people. The crowdsourcing follows a national forum last year where 950 randomly selected people spent a day discussing the constitution. If the committee has its way the draft bill, due to be ready at the end of July, will be put to a referendum without any changes imposed by parliament – so it will genuinely be a document by the people, for the people.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Neville Nicholls on Australia's Extreme Rainfall - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...lls-on-australias-extreme.html

Disaster Weather Climate Science Global Warming

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Apr 11
     
    The record La Niña event was the fundamental cause of the heavy rains and floods, ie it was a natural fluctuation of the climate system. There may be a global warming signal enhancing this natural variability, but if so then this effect has been quite subtle, at least thus far
Weiye Loh

Technology and Inequality - Kenneth Rogoff - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

Technology Inequality Digital Divide

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • it is easy to forget that market forces, if allowed to play out, might eventually exert a stabilizing role. Simply put, the greater the premium for highly skilled workers, the greater the incentive to find ways to economize on employing their talents.
  • one of the main ways to uncover cheating is by using a computer program to detect whether a player’s moves consistently resemble the favored choices of various top computer programs.
  • many other examples of activities that were once thought exclusively the domain of intuitive humans, but that computers have come to dominate. Many teachers and schools now use computer programs to scan essays for plagiarism
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • computer-grading of essays is a surging science, with some studies showing that computer evaluations are fairer, more consistent, and more informative than those of an average teacher, if not necessarily of an outstanding one.
  • the relative prices of grains, metals, and many other basic goods tended to revert to a central mean tendency over sufficiently long periods. We conjectured that even though random discoveries, weather events, and technologies might dramatically shift relative values for certain periods, the resulting price differentials would create incentives for innovators to concentrate more attention on goods whose prices had risen dramatically.
  • people are not goods, but the same principles apply. As skilled labor becomes increasingly expensive relative to unskilled labor, firms and businesses have a greater incentive to find ways to “cheat” by using substitutes for high-price inputs. The shift might take many decades, but it also might come much faster as artificial intelligence fuels the next wave of innovation.
  • Many commentators seem to believe that the growing gap between rich and poor is an inevitable byproduct of increasing globalization and technology. In their view, governments will need to intervene radically in markets to restore social balance. I disagree. Yes, we need genuinely progressive tax systems, respect for workers’ rights, and generous aid policies on the part of rich countries. But the past is not necessarily prologue: given the remarkable flexibility of market forces, it would be foolish, if not dangerous, to infer rising inequality in relative incomes in the coming decades by extrapolating from recent trends.
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Jul 11
     
    Until now, the relentless march of technology and globalization has played out hugely in favor of high-skilled labor, helping to fuel record-high levels of income and wealth inequality around the world. Will the endgame be renewed class warfare, with populist governments coming to power, stretching the limits of income redistribution, and asserting greater state control over economic life?
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