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Weiye Loh

Do Fights Over Climate Communication Reflect the End of 'Scientism'? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...n-reflect-the-end-of-scientism

Climate Science Journalism Communication Scientism Politics Policy

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • climate (mis)communication. Two sessions explored a focal point of this blog, the interface of climate science and policy, and the roles of scientists and the media in fostering productive discourse. Both discussions homed in on an uncomfortable reality — the erosion of a longstanding presumption that scientific information, if communicated more effectively, will end up framing policy choices.
  • First I sat in on a symposium on the  future of climate communication in a world where traditional science journalism is a shrinking wedge of a growing pie of communication options. The discussion didn’t really provide many answers, but did reveal the persistent frustrations of some scientists with the way the media cover their field.
  • Sparks flew between Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist long focused on hurricanes and warming, and Seth Borenstein, who covers climate and other science for the Associated Press. Borenstein spoke highly of a Boston Globe dual profile of Emanuel and his colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  Richard Lindzen. To Emanuel, the piece was a great example of what he described as “he said, he said” coverage of science. Borenstein replied that this particular piece was not centered on the science, but on the men — in the context of their relationship, research and worldviews. (It’s worth noting that Emanuel, whom I’ve been interviewing on hurricanes and climate since 1988, describes himself as  a conservative and, mainly, Republican voter.)
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Keith Kloor, blogging on the session  at Collide-a-Scape, included a sobering assessment of the scientist-journalist tensions over global warming from Tom Rosensteil, a panelist and long-time journalist who now heads up Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: If you’re waiting for the press to persuade the public, you’re going to lose. The press doesn’t see that as its job.
  • scientists have  a great opportunity, and responsibility, to tell their own story more directly, as some are doing occasionally through Dot Earth “ Post Cards” and The Times’ Scientist at Work blog.
  • Naomi Oreskes, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of “Merchants of Doubt“: Of Mavericks and Mules Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Realclimate.org: Between Sound Bites and the Scientific Paper: Communicating in the Hinterland Thomas Lessl, a scholar at the University of Georgia focused on the cultural history of science: Reforming Scientific Communication About Anthropogenic Climate Change
  • I focused on two words in the title of the session — diversity and denial. The diversity of lines of inquiry in climate science has a two-pronged impact. It helps build a robust overall picture of a growing human influence on a complex system. But for many of the most important  pixel points in that picture, there is robust, durable and un-manufactured debate. That debate can then be exploited by naysayers eager to cast doubt on the enterprise, when in fact — as I’ve written here before — it’s simply the (sometimes ugly) way that science progresses.
  • My denial, I said, lay in my longstanding presumption, like that of many scientists and journalists, that better communication of information will tend to change people’s perceptions, priorities and behavior. This attitude, in my view, crested for climate scientists in the wake of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
  • In his talk, Thomas Lessl said much of this attitude is rooted in what he and some other social science scholars call “scientism,” the idea — rooted in the 19th century — that scientific inquiry is a “distinctive mode of inquiry that promises to bring clarity to all human endeavors.” [5:45 p.m. | Updated Chris Mooney sent an e-mail noting how the discussion below resonates with "Do Scientists Understand the Public," a report he wrote last year for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and explored here.]
  • Scientism, though it is good at promoting the recognition that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, also promotes communication behavior that is bad for the scientific ethos. By this I mean that it turns such communication into combat. By presuming that scientific understanding is the only criterion that matters, scientism inclines public actors to treat resistant audiences as an enemy: If the public doesn’t get the science, shame on the public. If the public rejects a scientific claim, it is either because they don’t get it or because they operate upon some sinister motive.
  • Scientific knowledge cannot take the place of prudence in public affairs.
  • Prudence, according to Robert Harriman, “is the mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action. Contingent events cannot be known with certainty, and actions are intelligible only with regard to some idea of what is good.”
  • Scientism tends to suppose a one-size-fits-all notion of truth telling. But in the public sphere, people don’t think that way. They bring to the table a variety of truth standards: moral judgment, common-sense judgment, a variety of metaphysical perspectives, and ideological frameworks. The scientists who communicate about climate change may regard these standards as wrong-headed or at best irrelevant, but scientists don’t get to decide this in a democratic debate. When scientists become public actors, they have stepped outside of science, and they are obliged to honor the rules of communication and thought that govern the rest of the world. This might be different, if climate change was just about determining the causes of climate change, but it never is. Getting from the acceptance of ACC to acceptance of the kinds of emissions-reducing policies that are being advocated takes us from one domain of knowing into another.
  • One might object by saying that the formation of public policy depends upon first establishing the scientific bases of ACC, and that the first question can be considered independently of the second. Of course that is right, but that is an abstract academic distinction that does not hold in public debates. In public debates a different set of norms and assumptions apply: motive is not to be casually set aside as a nonfactor. Just because scientists customarily bracket off scientific topics from their policy implications does not mean that lay people do this—or even that they should be compelled to do so. When scientists talk about one thing, they seem to imply the other. But which is the motive force? Are they advocating for ACC because they subscribe to a political worldview that supports legal curtailments upon free enterprise? Or do they support such a political worldview because they are convinced of ACC? The fact that they speak as scientists may mean to other scientists that they reason from evidence alone. But the public does not necessarily share this assumption. If scientists don’t respect this fact about their audiences, they are bound to get in trouble. [Read the rest.]
Weiye Loh

Letter from Seed editor Adam Bly to ScienceBlogs.com contributors | Science | guardian.... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...logs-blogging-pepsi-bly-letter

Science Communication Blog

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Jul 10 - Cached
  • the conversation should include scientists from academia and government; we also think it should include scientists from industry. Because industry is increasingly the interface between science and society.
  • The bloggers who blog on 'corporate blogs' on SB are necessarily credentialed scientists (we make sure of that), in some cases highly credentialed scientists who have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. The fact that they work at a profit-making company does not automatically disqualify their science in our mind. And frankly, nor does it disqualify them in the eyes of the Nobel Prize Committee either.
  • All editorial content is written by PepsiCo's scientists or scientists invited by PepsiCo and/or ScienceBlogs. All posts carry a byline above the fold indicating the scientist's affiliation and conflicts of interest." This must be 100% transparent so our readers can evaluate the merit of the post for themselves.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Are we making a judgment about PepsiCo's science by hosting a blog for them on SB? No. (Nor are we making a judgment about your own research for that matter). Are we saying that they are entitled to have a seat at the table? Yes. Do they know that they are opening themselves us to debate? Absolutely. You may disagree with the substance of their posts (as you do on any other blog). You may even call into question their presence on a public forum dedicated to science. It will be up to them to respond. Better yet, it will be up to them to listen and take actions. The sustainability of this experiment lives or dies in the establishment of a transparent dialogue.
  • SB, like nearly all free content sites, is sustainable because of advertising. But advertising is itself highly unpredictable, as the last year has shown the industry. And securing advertising around topics like physics and evolution is even more challenging
  • We started experimenting with sponsored blogs a couple of years ago and decided to market long-term sponsorship contracts instead of sporadic advertising contracts. This is not a new idea: respected magazines have been doing the same thing for years (think Atlantic Ideas Festival going on now or The New Yorker Festival, where representatives of sponsoring companies sit on stage alongside writers and thinkers, or advertorials where companies pay to create content -- clearly marked as such -- instead of just running an ad). We think this may be a digital equivalent.
  • meaningful discussion about science and society in the 21st century requires that all players be at the table (with affiliations made clear), from all parts of the world, from every sector of society. And ScienceBlogs is where this is starting to happen.
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Jul 10
     
    Letter from Seed editor Adam Bly to ScienceBlogs.com contributors * Sent to bloggers in response to the controversial decision by ScienceBlogs.com to host a blog on nutrition, written by PepsiCo * Read and comment on the full story here
Paul Melissa

Hey, did you hear about S'pore 'Gossip Girl' sites? - JULY 24, 2009 - 0 views

www.tnp.sg/...0,4139,208548,00.html

blog defamation online rumors

shared by Paul Melissa on 18 Aug 09 - Cached
Meenatchi liked it
  • Paul Melissa on 18 Aug 09
     
    This case occurred recently this year. Following a popular TV series 'Gossip Girl', a group of senior students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic targeted Year One students from the School of Film and Media Studies (FMS). Blogs were created to defame the students by sparking off online rumors about them. The blog postings affected friendships as students became very suspicious of each other and started pointing fingers. The image of FMS was also affected especially when read by people outside the school. Though the blogs have been shut down, they have generated over 18000 hits. It is still uncertain who set up the blogs. Ethical Question: With regards to freedom of speech, is there an imaginary ethical line in cyberspace which when over-stepped, must lead to punishment? Who decides when or how this line is being over-stepped? What and how severed should the consequences be? This is because the culprits we practicing free speech but there was a price their victims had to pay. In this case, according to teleological theories, there is neither utilitarianism nor ethical altruism.
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

FleetStreetBlues: Independent columnist Johann Hari admits copying and pasting intervie... - 0 views

fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/...ent-columnist-johann-hari.html

Journalism Objectivity Plagiarism Churnalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • 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...
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • ...I’m a bit bemused to find one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought. I’m also a bit bemused to find that some people consider this “churnalism”. Churnalism is a journalist taking a press release and mindlessly recycling it – not a journalist carefully reading over all a writer’s books and selecting parts of it to accurately quote at certain key moments to best reflect how they think.
  • I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice and they had done it themselves from time to time. My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.
  • The Independent's top columnist and interviewer has just admitted that he routinely adds things his interviewees have written at some point in the past to their quotes, and then deliberately passes these statements off as though they were said to him in the course of an interview. The main art of being an interviewer is to be skilled at eliciting the right quotes from your subject. If Johann Hari wants to write 'intellectual portraits', he should go and write fiction. Do his editors really know that the copy they're printing ('we stare at each other for a while. Then he says in a quieter voice...') is essentially made up? What would Jayson Blair make of it all? Astonishing.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    In the last few days, a couple of blogs have been scrutinising the work of Johann Hari, the multiple award-winning Independent columnist and interviewer. A week ago on Friday the political DSG blog pointed out an eerie series of similarities between the quotes in Hari's interview with Toni Negri in 2004, and quotes in the book Negri on Negri, published in 2003. Brian Whelan, an editor with Yahoo! Ireland and a regular FleetStreetBlues contributor, spotted this and got in touch to suggest perhaps this wasn't the only time quotes in Hari's interviews had appeared elsewhere before. We ummed and ahhed slightly about running the piece based on one analysis from a self-proclaimed leftist blog - so Brian went away and did some analysis of his own. And found that a number of quotes in Hari's interview with Gideon Levy in the Independent last year had also been copied from elsewhere. So far, so scurrilous. But what's really astonishing is that Johann Hari has now responded to the blog accusations. And cheerfully admitted that he regularly includes in interviews quotes which the interviewee never actually said to him.
Weiye Loh

nanopolitan: Blogging by experts and non-experts - 0 views

nanopolitan.blogspot.com/...y-experts-and-non-experts.html

Blog Expertise Freedom of Speech

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Fed economist Karthik Athreya's rant -- Economics is hard, don't let bloggers tell you otherwise -- against bloggers (both experts and non-experts, and he names them) holding forth on the Big Economic Questions of our time has had at least one good effect: many bloggers, including those not named in Athreya's rant, have risen up to defend the role of blogs in policy debates; some have also used this occasion to talk about the role of blogging in their professional lives.
  • Weiye Loh on 19 Jul 10
     
    Blogging by experts and non-experts
Weiye Loh

Arsenic bacteria - a post-mortem, a review, and some navel-gazing | Not Exactly Rocket ... - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...a-review-and-some-navel-gazing

Journalism Ethics Science Biology

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • t was the big news that wasn’t. Hyperbolic claims about the possible discovery of alien life, or a second branch of life on Earth, turned out to be nothing more than bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, using it in place of phosphorus in their DNA and other molecules. But after the initial layers of hype were peeled away, even this extraordinar
  • This is a chronological roundup of the criticism against the science in the paper itself, ending with some personal reflections on my own handling of the story (skip to Friday, December 10th for that bit).
  • Thursday, December 2nd: Felisa Wolfe-Simon published a paper in Science, claiming to have found bacteria in California’s Mono Lake that can grow using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Given that phosphorus is meant to be one of six irreplaceable elements, this would have been a big deal, not least because the bacteria apparently used arsenic to build the backbones of their DNA molecules.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • In my post, I mentioned some caveats. Wolfe-Simon isolated the arsenic-loving strain, known as GFAJ-1, by growing Mono Lake bacteria in ever-increasing concentrations of arsenic while diluting out the phosphorus. It is possible that the bacteria’s arsenic molecules were an adaptation to the harsh environments within the experiment, rather than Mono Lake itself. More importantly, there were still detectable levels of phosphorus left in the cells at the end of the experiment, although Wolfe-Simon claimed that the bacteria shouldn’t have been able to grow on such small amounts.
  • signs emerged that NASA weren’t going to engage with the criticisms. Dwayne Brown, their senior public affairs officer, highlighted the fact that the paper was published in one of the “most prestigious scientific journals” and deemed it inappropriate to debate the science using the same media and bloggers who they relied on for press coverage of the science. Wolfe-Simon herself tweeted that “discussion about scientific details MUST be within a scientific venue so that we can come back to the public with a unified understanding.”
  • Jonathan Eisen says that “they carried out science by press release and press conference” and “are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature.” David Dobbs calls the attitude “a return to pre-Enlightenment thinking”, and rightly noted that “Rosie Redfield is a peer, and her blog is peer review”.
  • Chris Rowan agreed, saying that what happens after publication is what he considers to be “real peer review”. Rowan said, “The pre-publication stuff is just a quality filter, a check that the paper is not obviously wrong – and an imperfect filter at that. The real test is what happens in the months and years after publication.”Grant Jacobs and others post similar thoughts, while Nature and the Columbia Journalism Review both cover the fracas.
  • Jack Gilbert at the University of Chicago said that impatient though he is, peer-reviewed journals are the proper forum for criticism. Others were not so kind. At the Guardian, Martin Robbins says that “at almost every stage of this story the actors involved were collapsing under the weight of their own slavish obedience to a fundamentally broken… well… ’system’” And Ivan Oransky noted that NASA failed to follow its own code of conduct when announcing the study.
  • Dr Isis said, “If question remains about the voracity of these authors findings, then the only thing that is going to answer that doubt is data.  Data cannot be generated by blog discussion… Talking about digging a ditch never got it dug.”
  • it is astonishing how quickly these events unfolded and the sheer number of bloggers and media outlets that became involved in the criticism. This is indeed a brave new world, and one in which we are all the infamous Third Reviewer.
  • I tried to quell the hype around the study as best I could. I had the paper and I think that what I wrote was a fair representation of it. But, of course, that’s not necessarily enough. I’ve argued before that journalists should not be merely messengers – we should make the best possible efforts to cut through what’s being said in an attempt to uncover what’s actually true. Arguably, that didn’t happen although to clarify, I am not saying that the paper is rubbish or untrue. Despite the criticisms, I want to see the authors respond in a thorough way or to see another lab attempt replicate the experiments before jumping to conclusions.
  • the sheer amount of negative comment indicates that I could have been more critical of the paper in my piece. Others have been supportive in suggesting that this was more egg on the face of the peer reviewers and indeed, several practicing scientists took the findings on face value, speculating about everything from the implications for chemotherapy to whether the bacteria have special viruses. The counter-argument, which I have no good retort to, is that peer review is no guarantee of quality, and that writers should be able to see through the fog of whatever topic they write about.
  • my response was that we should expect people to make reasonable efforts to uncover truth and be skeptical, while appreciating that people can and will make mistakes.
  • it comes down to this: did I do enough? I was certainly cautious. I said that “there is room for doubt” and I brought up the fact that the arsenic-loving bacteria still contain measurable levels of phosphorus. But I didn’t run the paper past other sources for comment, which I typically do it for stories that contain extraordinary claims. There was certainly plenty of time to do so here and while there were various reasons that I didn’t, the bottom line is that I could have done more. That doesn’t always help, of course, but it was an important missed step. A lesson for next time.
  • I do believe that it you’re going to try to hold your profession to a higher standard, you have to be honest and open when you’ve made mistakes yourself. I also think that if you cover a story that turns out to be a bit dodgy, you have a certain responsibility in covering the follow-up
  • A basic problem with is the embargo. Specifically that journalists get early access, while peers – other specialists in the field – do not. It means that the journalist, like yourself, can rely only on the original authors, with no way of getting other views on the findings. And it means that peers can’t write about the paper when the journalists (who, inevitably, do a positive-only coverage due to the lack of other viewpoints) do, but will be able to voice only after they’ve been able to digest the paper and formulate a response.
  • No, that’s not true. The embargo doens’t preclude journalists from sending papers out to other authors for review and comment. I do this a lot and I have been critical about new papers as a result, but that’s the step that I missed for this story.
Weiye Loh

Haidt Requests Apology from Pigliucci « YourMorals.Org Moral Psychology Blog - 0 views

www.yourmorals.org/...equests-apology-from-pigliucci

Science Politics Diversity Divergent Thinking

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Here is my response to Pigliucci, which I posted as a comment on his blog. (Well, I submitted it as a comment on Feb 13 at 4pm EST, but he has not approved it yet, so it doesn’t show yet over there.)
  • Massimo Pigliucci, the chair of the philosophy department at CUNY-Lehman, wrote a critique of me on his blog, Rationally Speaking, in which he accused me of professional misconduct.
  • Dear Prof. Pigliucci: Let me be certain that I have understood you. You did not watch my talk, even though a link to it was embedded in the Tierney article. Instead, you picked out one piece of my argument (that the near-total absence of conservatives in social psychology is evidence of discrimination) and you made the standard response, the one that most bloggers have made: underrepresentation of any group is not, by itself, evidence of discrimination. That’s a good point; I made it myself quite explicitly in my talk: Of course there are many reasons why conservatives would be underrepresented in social psychology, and most of them have nothing to do with discrimination or hostile climate. Research on personality consistently shows that liberals are higher on openness to experience. They’re more interested in novel ideas, and in trying to use science to improve society. So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal. I don’t think we should ever strive for exact proportional representation.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I made it clear that I’m not concerned about simple underrepresentation. I did not even make the moral argument that we need ideological diversity to right an injustice. Rather, I focused on what happens when a scientific community shares sacred values. A tribal moral community arises, one that actively suppresses ideas that are sacrilegious, and that discourages non-believers from entering. I argued that my field has become a tribal moral community, and the absence of conservatives (not just their underrepresentation) has serious consequences for the quality of our science. We rely on our peers to find flaws in our arguments, but when there is essentially nobody out there to challenge liberal assumptions and interpretations of experimental findings, the peer review process breaks down, at least for work that is related to those sacred values. (
  • The fact that you criticized me without making an effort to understand me is not surprising.
  • Rather, what sets you apart from all other bloggers who are members of the academy is what you did next. You accused me of professional misconduct—lying, essentially–and you speculated as to my true motive: I suspect that Haidt is either an incompetent psychologist (not likely) or is disingenuously saying the sort of things controversial enough to get him in the New York Times (more likely).
  • As far as I can tell your evidence for these accusations is that my argument was so bad that I couldn’t have believed it myself. Here is how you justified your accusations: A serious social scientist doesn’t go around crying out discrimination just on the basis of unequal numbers. If that were the case, the NBA would be sued for discriminating against short people, dance companies against people without spatial coordination, and newspapers against dyslexics
  • Accusations of professional misconduct are sensibly made only if one has a reasonable and detailed understanding of the facts of the case, and can bring forth evidence of misconduct. Pigliucci has made no effort to acquire such an understanding, nor has he presented any evidence to support his accusation. He simply took one claim from the Tierney article and then ran wild with speculation about Haidt’s motives. It was pretty silly of him, and down right irresponsible of Pigliucci to publish that garbage without even knowing what Haidt said.
  • I challenge you to watch the video of my talk (click here) and then either 1) Retract your blog post and apologize publicly for calling me a liar or 2) State on your blog that you stand by your original post. If you do stand by your post, even after hearing my argument, then the world can decide for itself which of us is right, and which of us best models the ideals of science, philosophy, and the Enlightenment which you claim for yourself in the header of your blog, “Rationally Speaking.” Jonathan Haidt
Weiye Loh

The Breakthrough Institute: ANALYSIS: Nuclear Moratorium in Germany Could Cause Spike i... - 0 views

thebreakthrough.org/...is_nuclear_moratorium_in.shtml

Greenhoues Gases Green Energy Nuclear Risk

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The German government announced today that it will shut down seven of the country's seventeen nuclear power plants for an indefinite period, a decision taken in response to widespread protests and a German public increasingly fearful of nuclear power after a nuclear emergency in Japan. The decision places a moratorium on a law that would extend the lifespan of these plants, and is uncharacteristic of Angela Merkel, whose government previously overturned its predecessor's decision to phase nuclear out of Germany's energy supply.
  • The seven plants, each built before 1980, represent 30% of Germany's nuclear electricity generation and 24% of its gross installed nuclear capacity. Shutting down these plants, or even just placing an indefinite hold on their operation, would be a major loss of zero-emissions generation capacity for Germany. The country currently relies on nuclear power from its seventeen nuclear power plants for about a quarter of its electricity supply.
  • The long-term closure of these plants would therefore seriously challenge Germany's carbon emissions efforts, as they try to meet the goal of 40% reduction below 1990 carbon emissions rates by 2020.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The moratorium could cause a spike in CO2 emissions as Germany turns to its other, more carbon-intensive sources to supply its energy demand. Already, the country has been engaged in a "dash for coal", building dozens of new coal plants in response to the perverse incentives and intense lobbying from the coal industries made possible by the European Emissions Trading Scheme. (As previously reported by Breakthrough Europe).
  • if lost generation were made up for entirely by coal-fired plants, carbon emissions would increase annually by as much as 33 million tons. This would represent an overall 4% annual increase in carbon emissions for the country and an 8% increase in carbon emissions for the power sector alone.
  • Alternatively, should the country try to replace lost generation entirely with power from renewables, it would need to more than double generation of renewable energy, from where it currently stands at 97 billion kWh to about 237 billion kWh. As part of the country's low-carbon strategy, Germany has planned to deploy at least 20% renewable energy sources by 2020. If the nation now chooses to meet this goal by displacing nuclear plants, 2020 emissions levels would be higher than had the country otherwise phased out its carbon-intensive coal or natural gas plants.
  • *Carbon emissions factors used are those estimated by the World Bank in 2009 for new coal-fired power plants (0.795 t C02/MWh) and new gas-fired power plants (0.398 t C02/MWh) **Data from Carbon Monitoring For Action, European Nuclear Society Data, and US Energy Information Administration
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11
     
    Carbon dioxide emissions in Germany may increase by 4 percent annually in response to a moratorium on seven of the country's oldest nuclear power plants, as power generation is shifted from nuclear power, a zero carbon source, to the other carbon-intensive energy sources that currently make up the country's energy supply.
Weiye Loh

A DIY Data Manifesto | Webmonkey | Wired.com - 0 views

www.webmonkey.com/...take-back-the-tubes

Data Server Cloud Computing

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your desktop. That’s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets project.
  • Winer has put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon’s EC2 service. For a few dollars a month, Winer’s tutorial can have just about anyone up and running with their own server.
  • but education and empowerment aren’t Winer’s only goals. “I think it’s important to bust the mystique of servers,” says Winer, “it’s essential if we’re going to break free of the ‘corporate blogging silos.’”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The corporate blogging silos Winer is thinking of are services like Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. All three have been instrumental in the growth of the web, they make it easy for anyone publish. But they also suffer denial of service attacks, government shutdowns and growing pains, centralized services like Twitter and Facebook are vulnerable. Services wrapped up in a single company are also vulnerable to market whims, Geocities is gone, FriendFeed languishes at Facebook and Yahoo is planning to sell Delicious. A centralized web is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools disappear tomorrow.
  • But the web will likely never be completely free of centralized services and Winer recognizes that. Most people will still choose convenience over freedom. Twitter’s user interface is simple, easy to use and works on half a dozen devices.
  • Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation or technology platform. Microformats founder Tantek Çelik is also working on a distributed publishing system that seeks to retain all the cool features of the social web, but remove the centralized bottleneck.
  • to be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists, not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web and want to experiment.
  • Winer wants to start by creating a loosely coupled, distributed microblogging service like Twitter. “I’m pretty sure we know how to create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and no central point of failure,” he writes on his blog.
  • that means decoupling the act of writing from the act of publishing. The idea isn’t to create an open alternative to Twitter, it’s to remove the need to use Twitter for writing on Twitter. Instead you write with the tools of your choice and publish to your own server.
  • If everyone publishes first to their own server there’s no single point of failure. There’s no fail whale, and no company owns your data. Once the content is on your server you can then push it on to wherever you’d like — Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress of whatever the site du jour is ten years from now.
  • The glue that holds this vision together is RSS. Winer sees RSS as the ideal broadcast mechanism for the distributed web and in fact he’s already using it — Winer has an RSS feed of links that are then pushed on to Twitter.
Weiye Loh

The Breakthrough Institute: New Report: How Efficiency Can Increase Energy Consumption - 0 views

thebreakthrough.org/...eport_how_efficiency_can.shtml

Climate Science Review Meta-analysis Academic Research Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • There is a large expert consensus and strong evidence that below-cost energy efficiency measures drive a rebound in energy consumption that erodes much and in some cases all of the expected energy savings, concludes a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" covers over 96 published journal articles and is one of the largest reviews of the peer-reviewed journal literature to date. (Readers in a hurry can download Breakthrough's PowerPoint demonstration here or download the full paper here.)
  • In a statement accompanying the report, Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote, "Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a direct and easy way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions." The lead author of the new report is Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough's Director of Energy and Climate Policy; Nordhaus and Shellenberger are co-authors.
  • The findings of the new report are significant because governments have in recent years relied heavily on energy efficiency measures as a means to cut greenhouse gases. "I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency," said President Obama recently. "We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life." While there is robust evidence for rebound in academic peer-reviewed journals, it has largely been ignored by major analyses, including the widely cited 2009 McKinsey and Co. study on the cost of reducing greenhouse gases.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The idea that increased energy efficiency can increase energy consumption at the macro-economic level strikes many as a new idea, or paradoxical, but it was first observed in 1865 by British economist William Stanley Jevons, who pointed out that Watt's more efficient steam engine and other technical improvements that increased the efficiency of coal consumption actually increased rather than decreased demand for coal. More efficient engines, Jevons argued, would increase future coal consumption by lowering the effective price of energy, thus spurring greater demand and opening up useful and profitable new ways to utilize coal. Jevons was proven right, and the reality of what is today known as "Jevons Paradox" has long been uncontroversial among economists.
  • Economists have long observed that increasing the productivity of any single factor of production -- whether labor, capital, or energy -- increases demand for all of those factors. This is one of the basic dynamics of economic growth. Luddites who feared there would be fewer jobs with the emergence of weaving looms were proved wrong by lower price for woven clothing and demand that has skyrocketed (and continued to increase) ever since. And today, no economist would posit that an X% improvement in labor productivity would lead directly to an X% reduction in employment. In fact, the opposite is widely expected: labor productivity is a chief driver of economic growth and thus increases in employment overall. There is no evidence, the report points out, that energy is any different, as per capita energy consumption everywhere on earth continues to rise, even as economies become more efficient each year.
Weiye Loh

'A Gay Girl in Damascus' Is Actually a Married Guy in Edinburgh - Gawker - 0 views

gawker.com/5811169

Simulacrum Simulation Homosexuality Politics Post-Colonialism Blog New Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • At the time of the post describing Amina's arrest, "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was generally accepted at face value. But the young woman's story began to fall apart under the scrutiny of the bloggers and journalists attempting to fact-check it and follow up. She frequently canceled interviews at the last minute. A photo that Amina sent to The Guardian turned out to be stolen from the Facebook account of a British-Croatian woman named Jelena Lecic. NPR's Andy Carvin discovered that no one—not even her Canadian girlfriend—had met Amina in person.
  • MacMaster confessed on the blog: Apology to readers I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about. I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience. This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism. However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers. Best, Tom MacMaster, Istanbul, Turkey July 12, 2011 The sole author of all posts on this blog
  • MacMaster, fighting the good fight against liberal Orientalism, hasn't harmed anyone, huh? We wonder if "Amina"'s girlfriend feels the same way.
  • Weiye Loh on 13 Jun 11
     
    a post appeared on the prominent blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus" claiming that the blogger, an out Syrian lesbian who wrote under the name Amina Arraf, had been kidnapped by Syrian security forces. As it turned out, there was no Amina-just a guy in Scotland named Tom.
Weiye Loh

Daily Mail threatens 'abusive' blogger with libel action | Media | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...dailymail-blogging

Libel Law Freedom of Speech Blog Newspaper

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The legal letters point this out in claiming that the material "is seriously abusive and defamatory of Mr Dacre."
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 11
     
    A blogger has been threatened with a libel action by the Daily Mail, one of the papers that rails against the libel laws because of their chilling effect on press freedom. Kevin Arscott, author of the Angry Mob blog, reports that he and his webhosts have received letters from lawyers acting for the Mail's parent company, Associated Newspapers. It concerns an item posted on his former blog in November 2009 that attacked the Mail and its editor, Paul Dacre, over a story about the number of babies born in a London hospital to non-British mothers. (Needless to say, it was economical with the truth - see here).
Weiye Loh

No talk on politics and religion without license: NTU | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=7676

Censorship Politics Religion Blog

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Following the incident in which a student posted an ‘academic blacklist’ of international students, The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) sent out an email warning to its students about the school’s regulatory guidelines on internet postings.
  • The email, titled “Message on Exercising Freedom of Expression Responsibility“, warned students in particular not to ‘make comments that cause hatred or dissatisfaction with the Singapore justice system’ and not to create ‘web pages/blogs containing information on religion or politics’ unless the student has ‘acquired proper licences from the Media Development Authority AND the written approval of the University.’
  • While the list of regulations has a few sound guidelines on exercising exercising free speech on the internet, it makes no case to explain why dissatisfaction with the Singapore Justice system, if there was ever one, could not be freely expressed by its students. At the same time, the insistence on a complete blanket ban on blogs that discuss politics or religion without acquiring ‘proper licenses’ from MDA and the school contravenes the very tenets of freedom of speech.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, judging from the contents posted, the blog TheLiberatingTruth, which was responsible for the e-mail reminder, would not have contravened any of the guidelines stated by NTU. Firstly, the blog is neither a site that discusses politics or religion, and neither is it a complete fabrication of allegations against the international students. The testimonials posted on TheLiberatingTruth, which has since shut down, are based on real-life experiences and encounters by classmates of these international students.
  • The guidelines for exercising freedom of speech responsibly on the internet seemed to have confused responsible commentary on the internet with ‘positive’ commentary — insofar as you only limit your opinions about another organization, person or entity to positive or nice-sounding words, you are deemed to have commented ‘responsibly.’
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Sep 10
     
    No talk on politics and religion without license: NTU
Weiye Loh

Paul Crowley's Blog - A survey of anti-cryonics writing - 0 views

blog.ciphergoth.org/...survey-anti-cryonics-writing

Cryonics Evidence

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Sep 10 - Cached
  • cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic’s Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by “Invisible Flan”.
  • And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best’s Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It’s almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot. Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. T
  • Nano Nonsense and Cryonics goes for the nitty-gritty right away in the opening paragraph:To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.This sounds convincing, but doesn’t address what cryonicists actually claim. Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, replies in the comments:Strawberries (and mammalian tissues) are not turned to mush by freezing because water expands and crystallizes inside the cells. Water crystallizes in the extracellular space because more nucleators are found extracellularly. As water crystallizes in the extracellular space, the extracellular salt concentration increases causing cells to lose water osmotically and shrink. Ultimately the cell membranes are broken by crushing from extracellular ice and/or high extracellular salt concentration. […] Cryonics organizations use vitrification perfusion before cooling to cryogenic temperatures. With good brain perfusion, vitrification can reduce ice formation to negligible amounts.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry is no advance. Again, it refers erroneously to a “mushy brain”. It points out that the technology to reanimate those in storage does not already exist, but provides no help for us non-experts in assessing whether it is a plausible future technology, like super-fast computers or fusion power, or whether it is as crazy as the sand-powered tank; it simply asserts baldly and to me counterintuitively that it is the latter. Again, perhaps cryonic reanimation is a sand-powered tank, but I can explain to you why a sand-powered tank is implausible if you don’t already know, and if cryonics is in the same league I’d appreciate hearing the explanation.
  • Another part of the article points out the well-known difficulties with whole-body freezing — because the focus is on achieving the best possible preservation of the brain, other parts suffer more. But the reason why the brain is the focus is that you can afford to be a lot bolder in repairing other parts of the body — unlike the brain, if my liver doesn’t survive the freezing, it can be replaced altogether.
  • Further, the article ignores one of the most promising possibilities for reanimation, that of scanning and whole-brain emulation, a route that requires some big advances in computer and scanning technology as well as our understanding of the lowest levels of the brain’s function, but which completely sidesteps any problems with repairing either damage from the freezing process or whatever it was that led to legal death.
  • Sixteen years later, it seems that hasn’t changed; in fact, as far as the issue of technical feasability goes it is starting to look as if on all the Earth, or at least all the Internet, there is not one person who has ever taken the time to read and understand cryonics claims in any detail, still considers it pseudoscience, and has written a paper, article or even a blog post to rebut anything that cryonics advocates actually say. In fact, the best of the comments on my first blog post on the subject are already a higher standard than anything my searches have turned up.
  • I don’t have anything useful to add, I just wanted to say that I feel exactly as you do about cryonics and living forever. And I thought that this statement: I know that I don’t know enough to judge. shows extreme wisdom. If only people wishing to comment on global warming would apply the same test.
  • WRT global warming, the mistake people make is trying to go direct to the first-order evidence, which is much too complicated and too easy to misrepresent to hope to directly interpret unless you make it your life’s work, and even then only in a particular area. The correct thing to do is to collect second-order evidence, such as that every major scientific academy has backed the IPCC.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 22 Sep 10
       
      First-order evidence vs second-order evidence...
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Sep 10
     
    Cryonics
Weiye Loh

Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dang... - 0 views

climateprogress.org/...ative-feedbacks-clouds-tropics

Science Academic Research Academic Journal Climate Science Denial

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Consistently being wrong and consistently producing one-sided analyses that are quickly debunked in the literature should lead scientific journals and the entire scientific community (and possibly the media) to start ignoring your work. But when you are one of the last remaining “serious” professional scientists spreading global warming disinformation who retains a (nano)ounce of credibility because you are associated with a major university — M.I.T. — and your name is Richard Lindzen, apparently you can just keep publishing and repeating the same crap over and over and over again.
  • is this more, or less, support for the calls of some — most notably James Annan — for journals to shift at least some of the peer review cycle to an open format? http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 11/ 30/ more-on-the-climate-files-and-climate-trends/
  • Also, Gavin seemed to say that — with or without flaws– this paper’s approach was “a useful contribution to the literature”: “Even if it now turns out that the analysis was not robust, it was not that the analysis was not worth trying, and the work being done to re-examine these questions is a useful contributions to the literature –- even if the conclusion is that this approach to the analysis is flawed.” http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2010/ 01/ 08/ a-rebuttal-to-a-cool-climate-paper/ #more-13033
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • . Is the problem less with the paper and publishing process than the tendency of commentators (whether on blogs or elsewhere) to seize on particular findings as the new “truth” — and for public not attuned to the tussles of science to swallow such proclamations?
  • its only because of the blogosphere immediately seizing on every new paper as proof that we think there’s an issue with the peer-review process. For the scientists involved, this was a useful exercise in thinking about this problem, and moved the ball forwards rather than backwards overall. But we had to put up with way too much crap in the blogosphere in between the time when the paper was published and these rebuttals came out.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Science Impact - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...science-impact.html

Science Academic Research Newspaper News Bias Representation Public Relations

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Guardian has a blog post up by three neuroscientists decrying the state of hype in the media related to their field, which is fueled in part by their colleagues seeking "impact." 
  • Anyone who has followed recent media reports that electrical brain stimulation "sparks bright ideas" or "unshackles the genius within" could be forgiven for believing that we stand on the frontier of a brave new world. As James Gallagher of the BBC put it, "Are we entering the era of the thinking cap – a device to supercharge our brains?" The answer, we would suggest, is a categorical no. Such speculations begin and end in the colourful realm of science fiction. But we are also in danger of entering the era of the "neuro-myth", where neuroscientists sensationalise and distort their own findings in the name of publicity. The tendency for scientists to over-egg the cake when dealing with the media is nothing new, but recent examples are striking in their disregard for accurate reporting to the public. We believe the media and academic community share a collective responsibility to prevent pseudoscience from masquerading as neuroscience.
  • They identify an . . . . . . unacceptable gulf between, on the one hand, the evidence-bound conclusions reached in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and on the other, the heavy spin applied by scientists to achieve publicity in the media. Are we as neuroscientists so unskilled at communicating with the public, or so low in our estimation of the public's intelligence, that we see no alternative but to mislead and exaggerate?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Somewhere down the line, achieving an impact in the media seems to have become the goal in itself, rather than what it should be: a way to inform and engage the public with clarity and objectivity, without bias or prejudice. Our obsession with impact is not one-sided. The craving of scientists for publicity is fuelled by a hurried and unquestioning media, an academic community that disproportionately rewards publication in "high impact" journals such as Nature, and by research councils that emphasise the importance of achieving "impact" while at the same time delivering funding cuts. Academics are now pushed to attend media training courses, instructed about "pathways to impact", required to include detailed "impact summaries" when applying for grant funding, and constantly reminded about the importance of media engagement to further their careers. Yet where in all of this strategising and careerism is it made clear why public engagement is important? Where is it emphasised that the most crucial consideration in our interactions with the media is that we are accurate, honest and open about the limitations of our research?
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Mar 11
     
    The Guardian has a blog post up by three neuroscientists decrying the state of hype in the media related to their field, which is fueled in part by their colleagues seeking "impact." 
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Breakthrough Report on Rebound - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...through-report-on-rebound.html

Rebound Effect Climate Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Whatever one thinks about the so-called "rebound effect" or the role of efficiency in contributing to emissions reductions goals, the Breakthrough Institute (where I am a Senior Fellow) has done a great service to the discussion by publishing a new literature review on the subject.  You can find the review here in PDF and a PowerPoint overview here in PPT.  They discuss the new report on their blog here. This massive effort represents think tanks at their very best, and is likely to be the definitive literature review for years to come.  Whatever your views or level of expertise, if you want to dive into the subject, I can think of no better place to start.
Low Yunying

Pro-democracy activist placed on trial or political blogging - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

politics blogging

shared by Low Yunying on 30 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Low Yunying on 30 Sep 09
     
    This case study is dated back at 2001, when a pro-democracy activist in China was put on trial in western China for publishing political materials on the Web. Huang Qi was arrested after publishing articles commemorating the 1989 protests in Tiananmen square on his Web site, 6-4tianwang.com. He also uploaded information on his site about the democracy movement, Falun Gong and the independence movement in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang. In fact, Huang Qi remains in detention (as reported by a news article in Feb2009). This brings us to the question of whether it is ethical for the State to curtail an individual's rights to freedom of expression. After all, he was merely publishing articles about an event that has already happened, and he should have the right to upload whatever he feels on his blog. There is also an issue of the violation of human rights as he has been detained for almost ten years and some have reported that he was beaten while in custody. Does the state have the right to intervene and lock the man up for close to a decade over a political blog post? Does the state have the right to stifle any opposing viewpoints or dissent on the internet? Should political views be allowed to aired or should they be moderated for the well-being of the society? After all, dissenting views could lead to bloody events in conflicts between opposing groups and the state. How much should the government intervene in the regulation of the internet? Where is the line to be drawn in terms of freedom of expression?
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Kurzweil vs Myer on Brain Complexity - 1 views

skepticblog.org/...il-vs-myer-on-brain-complexity

Brain Gnome Mapping

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Kurzweil is still claiming that we can infer something about how much complexity is in the brain from the genome. He writes: The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.
  • Weiye Loh on 03 Sep 10
     
    There is an interesting blog debate going on between PZ Myers and Ray Kurzweil about the complexity of the brain - a topic that I too blog about and so I thought I would offer my thoughts. The "debate" started with a talk by Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit, a press summary of which prompted this response from PZ Myers. Kurzweil then responded here, and Myers responded to his response here.
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