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Weiye Loh

The Free Speech Blog: Official blog of Index on Censorship » A tale of two tw... - 0 views

  • Hopefully you will have heard of the ridiculous case of the unfortunate Paul Chambers the man who now has a criminal record because of a jokey tweet made whilst frustrated with snow related delays at Doncaster Robin Hood Airport. “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” This was the offending tweet , a clearly flippant comment whose intent, or lack thereof would have been pretty easy to establish
  • At some stage yesterday Gareth Compton , a Tory councillor for Erdington in Birmingham tweeted this : ”Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death ? I won’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”
  • At any level , this is a thoroughly unpleasant tweet. First of all nobody in any political position should be tweeting or indeed telling ”jokes” that are in such flagrant bad taste. Secondly I am always uncomfortable about a certain type of rightwing (and sometimes leftwing) commentator who gets disproportionately angry when the opponent whose views they disagree with happens to be from a “minority” group. The tweet leaves a nasty taste, and Gareth Compton should think long and hard about his responsibilities as a councillor. But… It was clearly NOT an incitement to murder, in the same way that Paul Chambers was clearly NOT going to blow up Robin Hood Airport. It was a hideous misjudgement yes , but there is an obvious jokiness to the context. A remarkably unpleasant jokiness yes, but nevertheless it is there.
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  • Mr Compton has been arrested and bailed for his words , supported by Yasmin Alibhai Brown who has described his tweet as an incitement to murder.
  • Yasmin Alibhai Brown is a journalist I have admired over the years for her ability to get under the skin of both Islamic extremists, and also those who will never accept any form of multiculturalism.
  • Because of what she represents , every time she appears in the media she is the target of vituperative verbal attacks on her character and has been the recipient of numerous death threats. I can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like — I get upset by one bad review. But I would have thought this would have given her more insight into the difference between an actual death threat , and a boorish rightwing councilllor.
  • The context with Gareth Compton is that he is a Tory Councillor trying his hand at Twitter. Having read his tweets thoroughly it is clear that I don’t agree with most of his views. But nevertheless I think it is nonsense to claim that he is inciting murder. The irony is that all over the worldwide web, anonymous internet warriors are only to happy to incite hatred and murder, and surely this is where the appropriate resources should be directed.
  • A joke, however misjudged and offensive, is still a joke. The use of the sledgehammer/walnut analogy can surely never have been more appropriate than it is when describing the use of police resources to act on a poor taste tweet. I sincerely hope that this madness does not continue as the precedent it sets is worrying indeed.
Weiye Loh

Adventures in Flay-land: Scepticism versus Denialism - Delingpole Part II - 0 views

  • wrote a piece about James Delingpole's unfortunate appearance on the BBC program Horizon on Monday. In that piece I refered to one of his own Telegraph articles in which he criticizes renowned sceptic Dr Ben Goldacre for betraying the principles of scepticism in his regard of the climate change debate. That article turns out to be rather instructional as it highlights perfectly the difference between real scepticism and the false scepticism commonly described as denialism.
  • It appears that James has tremendous respect for Ben Goldacre, who is a qualified medical doctor and has written a best-selling book about science scepticism called Bad Science and continues to write a popular Guardian science column. Here's what Delingpole has to say about Dr Goldacre: Many of Goldacre’s campaigns I support. I like and admire what he does. But where I don’t respect him one jot is in his views on ‘Climate Change,’ for they jar so very obviously with supposed stance of determined scepticism in the face of establishment lies.
  • Scepticism is not some sort of rebellion against the establishment as Delingpole claims. It is not in itself an ideology. It is merely an approach to evaluating new information. There are varying definitions of scepticism, but Goldacre's variety goes like this: A sceptic does not support or promote any new theory until it is proven to his or her satisfaction that the new theory is the best available. Evidence is examined and accepted or discarded depending on its persuasiveness and reliability. Sceptics like Ben Goldacre have a deep appreciation for the scientific method of testing a hypothesis through experimentation and are generally happy to change their minds when the evidence supports the opposing view. Sceptics are not true believers, but they search for the truth. Far from challenging the established scientific consensus, Goldacre in Bad Science typcially defends the scientific consensus against alternative medical views that fall back on untestable positions. In science the consensus is sometimes proven wrong, and while this process is imperfect it eventually results in the old consensus being replaced with a new one.
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  • So the question becomes "what is denialism?" Denialism is a mindset that chooses to deny reality in order to avoid an uncomfortable truth. Denialism creates a false sense of truth through the subjective selection of evidence (cherry picking). Unhelpful evidence is rejected and excuses are made, while supporting evidence is accepted uncritically - its meaning and importance exaggerated. It is a common feature of denialism to claim the existence of some sort of powerful conspiracy to suppress the truth. Rejection by the mainstream of some piece of evidence supporting the denialist view, no matter how flawed, is taken as further proof of the supposed conspiracy. In this way the denialist always has a fallback position.
  • Delingpole makes the following claim: Whether Goldacre chooses to ignore it or not, there are many, many hugely talented, intelligent men and women out there – from mining engineer turned Hockey-Stick-breaker Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick to bloggers Donna LaFramboise and Jo Nova to physicist Richard Lindzen….and I really could go on and on – who have amassed a body of hugely powerful evidence to show that the AGW meme which has spread like a virus around the world these last 20 years is seriously flawed.
  • So he mentions a bunch of people who are intelligent and talented and have amassed evidence to the effect that the consensus of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is a myth. Should I take his word for it? No. I am a sceptic. I will examine the evidence and the people behind it.
  • MM claims that global temperatures are not accelerating. The claims have however been roundly disproved as explained here. It is worth noting at this point that neither man is a climate scientist. McKitrick is an economist and McIntyre is a mining industry policy analyst. It is clear from the very detailed rebuttal article that McIntrye and McKitrick have no qualifications to critique the earlier paper and betray fundamental misunderstandings of methodologies employed in that study.
  • This Wikipedia article explains in better laymens terms how the MM claims are faulty.
  • It is difficult for me to find out much about blogger Donna LaFrambois. As far as I can see she runs her own blog at http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com and is the founder of another site here http://www.noconsensus.org/. It's not very clear to me what her credentials are
  • She seems to be a critic of the so-called climate bible, a comprehensive report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
  • I am familiar with some of the criticisms of this panel. Working Group 2 famously overstated the estimated rate of disappearance of the Himalayan glacier in 2007 and was forced to admit the error. Working Group 2 is a panel of biologists and sociologists whose job is to evaluate the impact of climate change. These people are not climate scientists. Their report takes for granted the scientific basis of climate change, which has been delivered by Working Group 1 (the climate scientists). The science revealed by Working Group 1 is regarded as sound (of course this is just a conspiracy, right?) At any rate, I don't know why I should pay attention to this blogger. Anyone can write a blog and anyone with money can own a domain. She may be intelligent, but I don't know anything about her and with all the millions of blogs out there I'm not convinced hers is of any special significance.
  • Richard Lindzen. Okay, there's information about this guy. He has a wiki page, which is more than I can say for the previous two. He is an atmospheric physicist and Professor of Meteorology at MIT.
  • According to Wikipedia, it would seem that Lindzen is well respected in his field and represents the 3% of the climate science community who disagree with the 97% consensus.
  • The second to last paragraph of Delingpole's article asks this: If  Goldacre really wants to stick his neck out, why doesn’t he try arguing against a rich, powerful, bullying Climate-Change establishment which includes all three British main political parties, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the Prince of Wales, the Prime Minister, the President of the USA, the EU, the UN, most schools and universities, the BBC, most of the print media, the Australian Government, the New Zealand Government, CNBC, ABC, the New York Times, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, most of the rest of the City, the wind farm industry, all the Big Oil companies, any number of rich charitable foundations, the Church of England and so on?I hope Ben won't mind if I take this one for him (first of all, Big Oil companies? Are you serious?) The answer is a question and the question is "Where is your evidence?"
Weiye Loh

James Delingpole blogs about Simon Singh - slsingh's posterous - 0 views

  • James Delingpole criticised me in this blog ("The curious double standards of Simon Singh")
  • Quotes from Delingpole's blog are in blue. 1.      “Yet in the opinion of Singh, the worldwide Climate Change industry is the one area where the robust scepticism and empiricism he professes to believe in just doesn’t apply.” No – where I have said this? Climate change is an area that requires extreme skepticism, i.e., questioning and challenging. However, despite all the challenges, the climate change consensus remains solid. (By the way, I thought Professor Nurse explained this to you quite clearly and slowly.)
  • 2.      “Apparently, the job of a journalist is just to accept the word of “the scientists” and take it as read that being as they are “scientists” their word is God and it brooks no questioning or dissent.” No – where have I said this? I have been a science journalist for almost two decades and where there are differing opinions it is important to consider the overall evidence. And, having been a scientist for a short time (PhD, particle physics), I realise that nobody should be treated as a god.
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  • 3.      “That’s it. Finished. There’s a “consensus” on global warming. It’s immutable and correct.” No – where have I said this? In fact, you must have seen my tweet this afternoon: “I might be wrong, the climate consensus might be wrong, but the probability that the consensus is correct is +90% on the key points.”
  • 5.      “What sickens me is the hypocrisy of people who claim to be in favour of speech, claim to believe in empiricism, claim to be sceptics yet refuse to accept room for an honest, open debate on one of the most important political issues of our time.” No - where have I said this? All I have done is disagree with you, point out your lack of qualifications and mock you. I did not threaten to silence you or sue you. In fact, my approach was quite the opposite – you must have seen my tweet this afternoon encouraging further debate: “V happy for me & climate expert to meet you to discuss consensus, record it & put it in online unedited.”
  • To answer your question and explain my tweet; you denied Nurse’s explanation of the role of consensus in science and you dismissed Nurse’s perfectly valid analogy about consensus … so you do indeed seem to think you are in a better position than Nurse to understand how science operates.
  • 7.      “What I am saying, and I say almost every day, is that the evidence is not as robust as the “consensus” scientists claim” Okay, that’s what you say. James Delingpole, English graduate. You might be right. Those who think that the consensus is very likely to be valid include, as far as I know, all of the following and more: Paul Nurse, Ben Goldacre and myself, who you have come up against this week (but we are very small fry). Editors of the world’s foremost science journals, Science and Nature. The most senior science editors in UK national broadsheet newspapers. The overwhelming majority of science Nobel Laureates. All the world’s national academy’s of science. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists. Also, I must stress that all of the people/groups above will have questions about elements of the consensus and realisethat the models have uncertainties, but they also agree that the broad consensus is very likely (90%) to be correct. In short, the uncertainties are small enough to derive some fairly solid conclusions.
  • 8.  “Yet despite apparently knowing nothing more about me and what I do than he has learned from a heavily politicised BBC documentary, and maybe heard from his mob of Twitter bully chums or read in the Guardian, Singh feels able to decide that Paul Nurse is right on this issue and I’m wrong.” No – I have followed your rants for quite a while from afar.  I am not saying that Paul Nurse is right and you are wrong. Instead, both Paul Nurse and I are saying that we are not convinced by your views, but we are convinced by the sheer weight of evidence behind the consensus that has gathered over the course of three decades
Weiye Loh

Asia Times Online :: Southeast Asia news and business from Indonesia, Philippines, Thai... - 0 views

  • Internet-based news websites and the growing popularity of social media have broken the mainstream media's monopoly on news - though not completely. Singapore's PAP-led government was one of the first in the world to devise content regulations for the Internet, issuing restrictions on topics it deemed as sensitive as early as 1996.
  • While political parties are broadly allowed to use the Internet to campaign, they were previously prohibited from employing some of the medium's most powerful features, including live audio and video streaming and so-called "viral marketing". Websites not belonging to political parties or candidates but registered as political sites have been banned from activities that could be considered online electioneering.
  • George argued that despite the growing influence of online media, it would be naive to conclude that the PAP's days of domination are numbered. "While the government appears increasingly liberal towards individual self-expression, it continues to intervene strategically at points at which such expression may become politically threatening," he said. "It is safe to assume that the government's digital surveillance capabilities far outstrip even its most technologically competent opponent's evasive abilities."
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  • consistent with George's analysis, authorities last week relaxed past regulations that limited the use of the Internet and social media for election campaigning. Political parties and candidates will be allowed to use a broader range of new media platforms, including blogs, micro-blogs, online photo-sharing platforms, social networking sites and electronic media applications used on mobile phones, for election advertising. The loosening, however, only applies for political party-run websites, chat rooms and online discussion forums. Candidates must declare the new media content they intend to use within 12 hours after the start of the election campaign period. George warned in a recent blog entry that the new declaration requirements could open the way for PAP-led defamation suits against new media using opposition politicians. PAP leaders have historically relied on expensive litigation to suppress opposition and media criticism. "The PAP won't subject everyone's postings to legal scrutiny. But if it decides that a particular opposition politician needs to be utterly demolished, you can bet that no tweet of his would be too tiny, no Facebook update too fleeting ... in order a build the case against the individual," George warned in a journalism blog.
  • While opposition politicians will rely more on new than mainstream media to communicate with voters, they already recognize that the use of social media will not necessarily translate into votes. "[Online support] can give a too rosy a picture and false degree of comfort," said the RP's Jeyaretnam. "People who [interact with] us online are those who are already convinced with our messages anyway."
Weiye Loh

Hunch Blog | Blog Archive | You've got mail: What your email domain says about you - 0 views

  • AOL users are most likely to be overweight women ages 35-64 who have a high school diploma and are spiritual, but not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, in a relationship of 10+ years, and have children. AOL users live in the suburbs and haven’t traveled outside their own country. Family is their first priority. AOL users mostly read magazines, have a desktop computer, listen to the radio, and watch TV on 1-3 DVRs in their home. At home, they lounge around in sweats. AOL users are optimistic extroverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team.
  • Gmail users are most likely to be thin young men ages 18-34 who are college-educated and not religious. Like other young Hunch users, they tend to be politically liberal, single (and ready to mingle), and childless. Gmail users live in cities and have traveled to five or more countries. They’re career-focused and plugged in — they mostly read blogs, have an iPhone and laptop, and listen to music via MP3s and computers (but they don’t have a DVR). At home, they lounge around in a t-shirt and jeans. Gmail users prefer salty snacks and are introverted and entrepreneurial. They are optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the situation.
  • Hotmail users are most likely to be young women of average build ages 18-34 (and younger) who have a high school diploma and are not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, single, and childless. Hotmail users live in the suburbs, perhaps still with their parents, and have traveled to up to five countries. They mostly read magazines and contemporary fiction, have a laptop, and listen to music via MP3s and computers (but they don’t have a DVR). At home, Hotmail users lounge around in a t-shirt and jeans. They’re introverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team. They consider themselves more pessimistic, but sometimes it depends on the situation.
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  • Yahoo! users are most likely to be overweight women ages 18-49 who have a high school diploma and are spiritual, but not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, in a relationship of 1-5 years, and have children. Yahoo! users live in the suburbs or in rural areas and haven’t traveled outside their own country. Family is their first priority. They mostly read magazines, are almost equally likely to have a laptop or desktop computer, listen to the radio and cds, and watch TV on 1-2 DVRs in their home. At home, Yahoo! users lounge around in pajamas. They’re extroverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team. Yahoo! users are optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the situation.
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    What your email domain says about you
Weiye Loh

'Gay Girl in Damascus': Fact or Fiction? Some Speculate if Syrian Blogger Exists - TIME... - 0 views

  • Similarly, though some sites interviewed a "close friend" of Abdullah's, NPR reports that the source, Sandra Bagaria, only communicated with Abdullah via Facebook.
  • Bagaria also told NPR that, "Amina posted some 200 pictures [to Facebook] of someone who wasn't her." The person in question, is in fact Jelena Lecic, of London. Lecic told the BBC that she is not friends with Abdullah and has never met her. Her photo, however, has been used on several media sites to picture Abdullah.
  • While nobody knows the real truth, the discussion itself illustrates the many complications that can arise from Internet anonymity.
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    NewsFeed has covered the story of the 'Gay Girl in Damascus,' a blogger who has drawn significant attention for writing about her experiences living as a gay woman in Syria. But recent reports question Amina Abdullah's identity and the veracity of her posts. NPR's Andy Carvin questioned Amina's existence in a tweet that asked if anyone had met Abdullah in person. He wrote that he decided to investigate after receiving, "a tip from an LGBT Syrian source who didn't believe Amina existed."
Weiye Loh

An Effort to Clarify the Climate Conversation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In contrast to RealClimate and Skeptical Science, which are focused tightly on science questions, this initiative appears to be trying to both clarify the state of the science on global warming and, in the same breath, promote policies that could curb emissions of greenhouse gases.
  • I’ve expressed concern before about the pitfalls of efforts that threaten to conflate climate science and climate policy debates and that speak of “climate skeptics” as some unified force, rather than a variegated array of camps and individuals with all kinds of motivations and arguments. But I credit these researchers, even if I differ with their style, for experimenting with a new kind of outreach.
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    A group of Australian scientists has begun a new online effort to communicate the body of science pointing to a rising human influence on the climate system. Their initial piece, "Climate change is real: an open letter from the scientific community," is on The Conversation, an academic Web site aiming to provide a credible source of information and analysis on important issues as traditional journalism shrinks. The letter is very much in the style of recent American-led efforts to counter groups and individuals who have mastered the use of the Web as a means of aggregating and disseminating just about anything - factual or not - as long as it casts doubt on climate science or stalls action on curbing greenhouse emissions.
Weiye Loh

Johann Hari and the tyranny of the 'good lie' – Telegraph Blogs - 0 views

  • 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”.
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  • The idea of a “good lie” is a dramatically Orwellian device, designed to deceive and to patronise. A lie is a lie, whether your intention is to convince people that Saddam is evil and must be bombed or that Gideon Levy is a brainy and decent bloke. Lying to communicate a “vital message”, a liberal and profound “truth”, is no better than lying in order to justify a war or a law’n'order crackdown or whatever.
Weiye Loh

journalism.sg » Tony Tan engages the blogs: new era in relations with alterna... - 0 views

  • TOC, Mr Brown, Leong Sze Hian and other bloggers received the information from Tan’s office yesterday and honoured the embargo on the news.
  • As the presumptive government-endorsed candidate, Tan's move can be seen as a landmark in relations between the state and Singapore’s intrepid and often unruly alternative online media. Until now, the government has refused to treat any of these sites as engaging in bona fide journalism. Bloggers have long complained that government departments do not respond to requests for information. When The Online Citizen organised a pre-election forum for all political parties to share their ideas last December, the People’s Action Party would have nothing to do with it. TOC highlighted the ruling party’s conspicuous absence by leaving an empty chair on stage. The election regulations’ ban on campaigning on the “cooling off” day and polling day also discriminate against citizen journalism: only licenced news organisations are exempted.
  • The sudden change of heart is undoubtedly one result of May’s groundbreaking general election. Online media were obviously influential, and the government may have decided that it has no choice but to do business with them.
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  • While officials probably still can’t stand TOC’s guts, such sites represent the more rational and reasonable end of the ideological spectrum in cyberspace. TOC, together with Alex Au’s Yawning Bread and some other individual blogs, have been noticeably pushing for more credible online journalism within their extremely limited means. Most importantly, they have shown some commitment to accountability. They operate openly rather than behind cloaks of pseudonymity, they are not above correcting factual errors when these are pointed out to them, and they practice either pre- or post-moderation of comments to keep discussions within certain bounds.
  • Bloggers will have to understand that the huge and complex machinery of government is not going to transform itself overnight. Indeed, a blogger-friendly media engagement policy is probably easier to implement for a small and discrete Presidential Election campaign office than it would be for any government ministry.
  • On the government’s part, officials need to be clear that the success of the experiment cannot be measured by how quickly bloggers and their readers are led to the “right” answers or to a “consensus”, but by the inclusiveness and civility of the conversation: as long as more and more people are trying to persuade one another – rather than ignoring or shouting down one another – such engagement between government and alternative media would be strengthening Singapore’s governance and civic life.
Weiye Loh

Hacktivists as Gadflies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as "Weev." When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not "hack" anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day - sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole. For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure. When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato's "Apology." "You consider yourself a hero of sorts," she said, and noted that Weev's "special skills" in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: "My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down: "I don't come here today to ask for forgiveness. I'm here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life." He then went on to heap scorn upon the law being used to put him away - the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that prosecutors used to go after the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swart
Weiye Loh

journalism.sg » A voluntary code of ethics for blogs: possible but… - 0 views

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    I was quoted in today's Today suggesting that prominent independent websites come together to develop a voluntary code of ethics. An equally important point I made to the reporter was not carried in Today's article: that there is no need for any tightening of government regulation of online political debate. It's important to see these as complementary ideas. Bloggers won't consider voluntarily modulating their voices as long as they feel the government's hands around their throats.
Weiye Loh

When big pharma pays a publisher to publish a fake journal... : Respectful Insolence - 0 views

  • pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme paid Elsevier to produce a fake medical journal that, to any superficial examination, looked like a real medical journal but was in reality nothing more than advertising for Merck
  • As reported by The Scientist: Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship. "I've seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies," Peter Lurie, deputy director of the public health research group at the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, said, after reviewing two issues of the publication obtained by The Scientist. "But even for someone as jaded as me, this is a new wrinkle." The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Exerpta Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database, and has no website (not even a defunct one). The Scientist obtained two issues of the journal: Volume 2, Issues 1 and 2, both dated 2003. The issues contained little in the way of advertisements apart from ads for Fosamax, a Merck drug for osteoporosis, and Vioxx.
  • there are numerous "throwaway" journals out there. "Throwaway" journals tend to be defined as journals that are provided free of charge, have a lot of advertising (a high "advertising-to-text" ratio, as it is often described), and contain no original investigations. Other relevant characteristics include: Supported virtually entirely by advertising revenue. Ads tend to be placed within article pages interrupting the articles, rather than between articles, as is the case with most medical journals that accept ads Virtually the entire content is reviews of existing content of variable (and often dubious) quality. Parasitic. Throwaways often summarize peer-reviewed research from real journals. Questionable (at best) peer review. Throwaways tend to cater to an uninvolved and uncritical readership. No original work.
Weiye Loh

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Crowdsourced curation, reputation systems, an... - 0 views

  • A good example of manual curation vs. crowdsourced curation is the competing app markets on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phone operating systems.
  • Apple is a monarchy, albeit with a wise and benevolent king. Android is burgeoning democracy, inefficient and messy, but free. Apple is the last, best example of the Industrial Age and its top-down, mass market/mass production paradigm.
  • They manufacture cool. They rely on “consumers”, and they protect those consumers from too many choices by selecting what is worthy, and what is not.
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  • systems that allow crowdsourced judgment to be tweaked, not to the taste of the general mass, which produces lowest common denominator effects, but to people and experts that you can trust for their judgment.
  • these systems are now implemented by Buzz and Digg 4
  • Important for me though, is that they don’t just take your social graph as is, because that mixes many different people for different reasons, but that you can tweak the groups.
  • “This is the problem with the internet! It’s full of crap!” Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, and the natural scarcity that we became accustomed to, there’s a flood of low-quality material that we can’t possible sift through on our own. From blogs to music to software to journalism, one of the biggest fears of the established order is how to handle the oncoming glut of mediocrity. Who shall tell us The Good from The Bad? “We need gatekeepers, and they need to be paid!”
  • The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper. The better that these systems for crowdsourcing the curation of content become, the more accurate the results will be.
  • This social-graph-as-curation is still relatively new, even by Internet standards. However, with tools like Buzz and Digg 4 (which allows you to see the aggregate ratings for content based on your social graph, and not the whole wide world) this technique is catching up to human publishers fast. For those areas where we don’t have strong social ties, we can count on reputation systems to help us “rate the raters”. These systems allow strangers to rate each other’s content, giving users some idea of who to trust, without having to know them personally. Yelp has a fairly mature reputation system, where locations are rated by users, but the users are rated, in turn, by each other.
  • Reputation systems and the social graph allow us to crowdsource curation.
  • Can you imagine if Apple had to approve your videos for posting on Youtube, where every minute, 24 hours of footage are uploaded? There’s no way humans could keep up! The traditional forms of curation and gatekeeping simply can not scale to meet the increase in production and transmission that the Internet allows. Crowdsourcing is the only curatorial/editorial mechanism that can scale to match the increased ability to produce that the Internet has given us.
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    Crowdsourced curation, reputation systems, and the social graph
Weiye Loh

The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations | The Big Picture - 0 views

  • For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.
  • The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power.  The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights.
  • It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing. Consider: • Many of the regulations that govern energy and banking sector were written by Corporations; • The biggest influence on legislative votes is often Corporate Lobbying; • Corporate ability to extend copyright far beyond what original protections amounts to a taking of public works for private corporate usage; • PAC and campaign finance by Corporations has supplanted individual donations to elections; • The individuals’ right to seek redress in court has been under attack for decades, limiting their options. • DRM and content protection undercuts the individual’s ability to use purchased content as they see fit; • Patent protections are continually weakened. Deep pocketed corporations can usurp inventions almost at will; • The Supreme Court has ruled that Corporations have Free Speech rights equivalent to people; (So much for original intent!) None of these are Democrat/Republican conflicts, but rather, are corporate vs. individual issues.
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  • What does it mean when we can no longer distinguish between the actions of the left and the right? If that dynamic no longer accurately distinguishes what occurs, why are so many of our policy debates framed in Left/Right terms? In many ways, American society is increasingly less married to this dynamic: Party Affiliation continues to fall, approval of Congress is at record lows, and voter participation hovers at very low rates.
  • There is some pushback already taking place against the concentration of corporate power: Mainstream corporate media has been increasingly replaced with user created content – YouTube and Blogs are increasingly important to news consumers (especially younger users). Independent voters are an increasingly larger share of the US electorate. And I suspect that much of the pushback against the Elizabeth Warren’s concept of a Financial Consumer Protection Agency plays directly into this Corporate vs. Individual fight. But the battle lines between the two groups have barely been drawn. I expect this fight will define American politics over the next decade.
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    The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations
Weiye Loh

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.
  • Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company’s guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine rankings, including what it refers to as “link schemes.” The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google’s results.
  • In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Web site, BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search results.”
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  • BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration.”
  • The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.
  • He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.
  • He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months. “Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said. “But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job.”
  • You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.
  • Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.
  • PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.
  • “Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.” And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.
  • At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
Weiye Loh

Studying the politics of online science « through the looking glass - 0 views

  • Mendick, H. and Moreau, M. (2010). Monitoring the presence and representation of  women in SET occupations in UK based online media. Bradford: The UKRC.
  • Mendick and Moreau considered the representation of women on eight ‘SET’ (science, engineering and technology) websites: New Scientist, Bad Science, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic, Science: So What, Watt’s Up With That and RichardDawkins.net. They also monitored SET content across eight more general sites: the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.
  • Their results suggest online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present. On some websites, they found no SET women. All of the 14 people in SET identified on the sampled pages of the RichardDawkins.net website were men, and so were all 29 of those mentioned on the sampled pages of the Channel 4 website (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 11).
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  • They found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 7). Personally, I’d have really liked some detail as to how they came up with this, and what constituted ‘hyperlinking of women’s names’ precisely. It’s potentially an interesting finding, but I can’t quite get a grip on what they are saying.
  • They also note that the women that did appear, they were often peripheral to the main story, or ‘subject to muting’ (i.e. seen but not heard). They also noted many instances where women were pictured but remain anonymous, as if there are used to illustrate a piece – for ‘ornamental’ purposes – and give the example of the wikipedia entry on scientists, which includes a picture a women as an example, but stress she is anonymous (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12).
  • Echoing findings of earlier research on science in the media (e.g. the Bimbo or Boffin paper), they noted that women, when represented, tended to be associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, demonstrating empathy with children and animals, etc. They also noted a clustering in specific fields. For example, in the pages they’d sampled of the Guardian, they found seven mentions of women scientists compared with twenty-eight of men, and three of the these women were in a single article, about Jane Goodall (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12-13).
  • The women presented were often discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances, again echoing previous research. They also noted that women scientists, when present, tended to be younger than the men, and there was a striking lack of ethnic diversity (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 14).
  • I’m going to be quite critical of this research. It’s not actively bad, it just seems to lack depth and precision. I suspect Mendick and Moreau were doing their best with low resources and an overly-broad brief. I also think that we are still feeling our way in terms of working out how to study online science media, and so can learn something from such a critique.
  • Problem number one: it’s a small study, and yet a ginormous topic. I’d much rather they had looked at less, but made more of it. At times I felt like I was reading a cursory glance at online science.
  • Problem number two: the methodological script seemed a bit stuck in the print era. I felt the study lacked a feel for the variety of routes people take through online science. It lacked a sense of online science’s communities and cliques, its cultures and sub-cultures, its history and its people. It lacked context. Most of all, it lacked a sense of what I think sits at the center of online communication: the link.
  • It tries to look at too much, too quickly. We’re told that of the blog entries sampled from Bad Science, three out of four of the women mentioned were associated with ‘bad science’, compared to 12 out of 27 of the men . They follow up this a note that Goldacre has appeared on television critiquing Greenfield,­ a clip of which is on his site (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 17-18). OK, but ‘bad’ needs unpacking here, as does the gendered nature of the area Goldacre takes aim at. As for Susan Greenfield, she is a very complex character when it comes to the politics of science and gender (one I’d say it is dangerous to treat representations of simplistically). Moreover, this is a very small sample, without much feel for the broader media context the Bad Science blog works within, including not only other platforms for Ben Goldacre’s voice but comment threads, forums and a whole community of other ‘bad science bloggers’ (and their relationships with each other)
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    okmark
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Ideological Diversity in Academia - 0 views

  • Jonathan Haidt's talk (above) at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology was written up last week in a column by John Tierney in the NY Times.  This was soon followed by a dismissal of the work by Paul Krugman.  The entire sequence is interesting, but for me the best part, and the one that gets to the nub of the issue, is Haight's response to Krugman: My research, like so much research in social psychology, demonstrates that we humans are experts at using reasoning to find evidence for whatever conclusions we want to reach. We are terrible at searching for contradictory evidence. Science works because our peers are so darn good at finding that contradictory evidence for us. Social science — at least my corner of it — is broken because there is nobody to look for contradictory evidence regarding sacralized issues, particularly those related to race, gender, and class. I urged my colleagues to increase our ideological diversity not for any moral reason, but because it will make us better scientists. You do not have that problem in economics where the majority is liberal but there is a substantial and vocal minority of libertarians and conservatives. Your field is healthy, mine is not. Do you think I was wrong to call for my professional organization to seek out a modicum of ideological diversity?
  • On a related note, the IMF review of why the institution failed to warn of the global financial crisis identified a lack of intellectual diversity as being among the factors responsible (PDF): Several cognitive biases seem to have played an important role. Groupthink refers to the tendency among homogeneous, cohesive groups to consider issues only within a certain paradigm and not challenge its basic premises (Janis, 1982). The prevailing view among IMF staff—a cohesive group of macroeconomists—was that market discipline and self-regulation would be sufficient to stave off serious problems in financial institutions. They also believed that crises were unlikely to happen in advanced economies, where “sophisticated” financial markets could thrive safely with minimal regulation of a large and growing portion of the financial system.Everyyone in academia has seen similar dynamics at work.
Weiye Loh

The Free Speech Blog: Official blog of Index on Censorship » Thank God for th... - 0 views

  • The US Supreme Court ruled yesterday by an 8-1 vote that the bizarre anti-gay funeral picketers belonging to the Westboro Baptist Church have a First Amendment right to free speech. Rev Fred Phelps and his crew have been waving placards with messages such as “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “AIDS Cures Fags” at military funerals to promote their belief that God is punishing the US for accepting homosexuality.
  • The Supreme Court decision (see below) overruled a previous award of over $10 million (reduced on appeal to $5 million) to the family of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder in relation to a protest at his funeral.
  • First, undoubtedly debate about war, its causes and casualties is important. This was “speech” in a public place on an issue of public concern, even though the particular hypothesis is ridiculous and offensive. Free speech protection can’t, however, just be for views already presumed to be true. Secondly, protestors were scrupulous about staying within the letter of the law. They knew that they had to remain 1,000 feet from the funeral, for instance, and did not shout or otherwise disrupt the service. Preventing such orderly protests on issues of importance would have been a serious attack on civil liberties, even though the protestors displayed gross insensitivity to those mourning.
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  • we should welcome this decision even though it protects bigots of limited reasoning ability about cause and effect who are indifferent to the feelings of the recently bereaved. The best response to hateful speech is surely counter-speech. At many recent military funerals, counter-protestors have arrived early in their thousands and occupied the prime spaces in the surrounding area. That is a far better reaction than a legal gagging order.
Weiye Loh

RealClimate: E&E threatens a libel suit - 0 views

  • From: Bill Hughes Cc: Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen Subject:: E&E libel Date: 02/18/11 10:48:01 Gavin, your comment about Energy & Environment which you made on RealClimate has been brought to my attention: “The evidence for this is in precisely what happens in venues like E&E that have effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor’s political line. ” To assert, without knowing, as you cannot possibly know, not being connected with the journal yourself, that an academic journal does not bother with peer review, is a terribly damaging charge, and one I’m really quite surprised that you’re prepared to make. And to further assert that peer review is abandoned precisely in order to let the editor publish papers which support her political position, is even more damaging, not to mention being completely ridiculous. At the moment, I’m prepared to settle merely for a retraction posted on RealClimate. I’m quite happy to work with you to find a mutually satisfactory form of words: I appreciate you might find it difficult. I look forward to hearing from you. With best wishes Bill Hughes Director Multi-Science Publsihing [sic] Co Ltd
  • The comment in question was made in the post “From blog to Science”
  • The point being that if the ‘peer-review’ bar gets lowered, the result is worse submissions, less impact and a declining reputation. Something that fits E&E in spades. This conclusion is based on multiple years of evidence of shoddy peer-review at E&E and, obviously, on the statements of the editor, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. She was quoted by Richard Monastersky in the Chronicle of Higher Education (3 Sep 2003) in the wake of the Soon and Baliunas fiasco: The journal’s editor, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, a reader in geography at the University of Hull, in England, says she sometimes publishes scientific papers challenging the view that global warming is a problem, because that position is often stifled in other outlets. “I’m following my political agenda — a bit, anyway,” she says. “But isn’t that the right of the editor?”
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  • the claim that the ‘an editor publishes papers based on her political position’ while certainly ‘terribly damaging’ to the journal’s reputation is, unfortunately, far from ridiculous.
  • Other people have investigated the peer-review practices of E&E and found them wanting. Greenfyre, dissecting a list of supposedly ‘peer-reviewed’ papers from E&E found that: A given paper in E&E may have been peer reviewed (but unlikely). If it was, the review process might have been up to the normal standards for science (but unlikely). Hence E&E’s exclusion from the ISI Journal Master list, and why many (including Scopus) do not consider E&E a peer reviewed journal at all. Further, even the editor states that it is not a science journal and that it is politically motivated/influenced. Finally, at least some of what it publishes is just plain loony.
  • Also, see comments from John Hunter and John Lynch. Nexus6 claimed to found the worst climate paper ever published in its pages, and that one doesn’t even appear to have been proof-read (a little like Bill’s email). A one-time author, Roger Pielke Jr, said “…had we known then how that outlet would evolve beyond 1999 we certainly wouldn’t have published there. “, and Ralph Keeling once asked, “Is it really the intent of E&E to provide a forum for laundering pseudo-science?”. We report, you decide.
  • We are not surprised to find that Bill Hughes (the publisher) is concerned about his journal’s evidently appalling reputation. However, perhaps the way to fix that is to start applying a higher level of quality control rather than by threatening libel suits against people who publicly point out the problems?
Weiye Loh

Can Scientists Learn from Science Journalists? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Maggie Koerth-Baker, science editor of BoingBoing.net, gave a really good talk at the University of Wisconsin aiming to encourage scientists to communicate effectively with other human beings. A starting point: listening. Another: Start a blog.
  • Here’s a summary of the main points that I got from David Isenberg, who alerted me to the lecture: Show, don’t tell. Don’t just talk, ask. Lay people know more (and less) than you think. Not everything is news. Be critical of your own work. Mistakes last, but pedantry kills.
  • There are deep divisions between the cultures and norms of science and journalism. One example: For scientists, peer review occurs before publication, for journalists, afterward.
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  • Another: All lines in a newspaper story or broadcast, in theory at least, have to stand on their own as accurate; in a research paper, the inaccuracies produced by the compression in an abstract are seen as normal and acceptable by many scientists, with the nuance conveyed in the body of a paper.
  • In a recent conversation I had with Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and communicator, it was clear we had utterly different norms for interpreting summaries of a research paper. Some of the differences were touched on in my recent coverage of new analysis attributing some changes in extreme precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere to human-driven global warming. I would add that scientists (and science journalists) would do well to review the talk given by Thomas Lessl of the University of Georgia at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on the limited role of science, even if communicated clearly, in shaping policy and human choices.
  • As scientists and science journalists spar over who’s failing in climate communication, an outsider says they’re missing the point.
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