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Despite the revolutionary technological advance of the printing press in the 15th century, there is precious little economic evidence of its benefits. Using data on 200 European cities between 1450 and 1600, this column finds that economic growth was higher by as much as 60 percentage points in cities that adopted the technology.

Historians argue that the printing press was among the most revolutionary inventions in human history, responsible for a diffusion of knowledge and ideas, “dwarfing in scale anything which had occurred since the invention of writing” (Roberts 1996, p. 220). Yet economists have struggled to find any evidence of this information technology revolution in measures of aggregate productivity or per capita income (Clark 2001, Mokyr 2005). The historical data thus present us with a puzzle analogous to the famous Solow productivity paradox – that, until the mid-1990s, the data on macroeconomic productivity showed no effect of innovations in computer-based information technology.

In recent work (Dittmar 2010a), I examine the revolution in Renaissance information technology from a new perspective by assembling city-level data on the diffusion of the printing press in 15th-century Europe. The data record each city in which a printing press was established 1450-1500 – some 200 out of over 1,000 historic cities (see also an interview on this site, Dittmar 2010b). The research emphasises cities for three principal reasons. First, the printing press was an urban technology, producing for urban consumers. Second, cities were seedbeds for economic ideas and social groups that drove the emergence of modern growth. Third, city sizes were historically important indicators of economic prosperity, and broad-based city growth was associated with macroeconomic growth (Bairoch 1988, Acemoglu et al. 2005).

Plucking out of line most of the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking men at the airport for heightened screening is no more effective at catching terrorists than randomly sampling everyone. It may even be less effective. Press stumbled across this counterintuitive concept — sometimes the best way to find something is not to weight it by probability — in the unrelated context of computational biology. The parallels to airport security struck him when a friend mentioned he was constantly being pulled out of line at the airport.

Racial profiling, in other words, doesn’t work because it devotes heightened resources to innocent people — and then devotes those resources to them repeatedly even after they’ve been cleared as innocent the first time. The actual terrorists, meanwhile, may sneak through while Transportation Security Administration agents are focusing their limited attention on the wrong passengers.

Press tested the theory in a series of probability equations (the ambitious can check his math here and here).

N.Y.U. professor Clay Shirky—the author of “Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident

Shirky believes that we are on the crest of an ever-surging wave of democratized information: the Gutenberg printing press produced the Reformation, which produced the Scientific Revolution, which produced the Enlightenment, which produced the Internet, each move more liberating than the one before.

The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

rather than being forced to wait for parliament to meet to air their dissent, now opposition parties are able to post pre-emptively their criticisms online, shifting the time and space of Singapore's political debate

Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP)-dominated politics are increasingly being contested online and over social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Pushed by the perceived pro-PAP bias of the mainstream media, Singapore's opposition parties are using various new media to communicate with voters and express dissenting views. Alternative news websites, including The Online Citizen and Temasek Review, have won strong followings by presenting more opposition views in their news mix.

Despite its democratic veneer, Singapore rates poorly in global press freedom rankings due to a deeply entrenched culture of self-censorship and a pro-state bias in the mainstream media. Reporters Without Borders, a France-based press freedom advocacy group, recently ranked Singapore 136th in its global press freedom rankings, scoring below repressive countries like Iraq and Zimbabwe. The country's main media publishing house, Singapore Press Holdings, is owned by the state and its board of directors is made up largely of PAP members or other government-linked executives. Senior newspaper editors, including at the Straits Times, must be vetted and approved by the PAP-led government.

Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.

True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.

It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."

Last summer NCAR issued a dramatic press release announcing that oil from the Gulf spill would soon be appearing on the beaches of the Atlantic ocean.  I discussed it here. Here are the first four paragraphs of that press release: BOULDER—A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer. The modeling results are captured in a series of dramatic animations produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and collaborators. he research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor. The results were reviewed by scientists at NCAR and elsewhere, although not yet submitted for peer-review publication. “I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?’” says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock, who worked on the study. “Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood.” The computer simulations indicate that, once the oil in the uppermost ocean has become entrained in the Gulf of Mexico’s fast-moving Loop Current, it is likely to reach Florida's Atlantic coast within weeks. It can then move north as far as about Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, with the Gulf Stream, before turning east. Whether the oil will be a thin film on the surface or mostly subsurface due to mixing in the uppermost region of the ocean is not known.

A few weeks ago NCAR's David Hosansky who presumably wrote that press release, asks whether NCAR got it wrong.  His answer?  No, not really: During last year’s crisis involving the massive release of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, NCAR issued a much-watched animation projecting that the oil could reach the Atlantic Ocean. But detectable amounts of oil never made it to the Atlantic, at least not in an easily visible form on the ocean surface. Not surprisingly, we’ve heard from a few people asking whether NCAR got it wrong. These events serve as a healthy reminder of a couple of things: *the difference between a projection and an actual forecast *the challenges of making short-term projections of natural processes that can act chaotically, such as ocean currents

What then went wrong? First, the projection. Scientists from NCAR, the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, and IFM-GEOMAR in Germany did not make a forecast of where the oil would go. Instead, they issued a projection. While there’s not always a clear distinction between the two, forecasts generally look only days or hours into the future and are built mostly on known elements (such as the current amount of humidity in the atmosphere). Projections tend to look further into the future and deal with a higher number of uncertainties (such as the rate at which oil degrades in open waters and the often chaotic movements of ocean currents). Aware of the uncertainties, the scientific team projected the likely path of the spill with a computer model of a liquid dye. They used dye rather than actual oil, which undergoes bacterial breakdown, because a reliable method to simulate that breakdown was not available. As it turned out, the oil in the Gulf broke down quickly due to exceptionally strong bacterial action and, to some extent, the use of chemical dispersants.

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.

these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.

A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. Every Christmas and Easter, regular as clockwork, you can read that chocolate is good for you (www.badscience.net/?p=67), just like red wine is, and with the same monotonous regularity

The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it. “What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda,” McChesney said. “We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in this country.”

Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at Columbia University, cjr contributor, and author of Discovering the News, said modern public relations started when Ivy Lee, a minister’s son and a former reporter at the New York World, tipped reporters to an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before then, railroads had done everything they could to cover up accidents. But Lee figured that crashes, which tend to leave visible wreckage, were hard to hide. So it was better to get out in front of the inevitable story. The press release was born. Schudson said the rise of the “publicity agent” created deep concern among the nation’s leaders, who distrusted a middleman inserting itself and shaping messages between government and the public. Congress was so concerned that it attached amendments to bills in 1908 and 1913 that said no money could be appropriated for preparing newspaper articles or hiring publicity agents.

But World War I pushed those concerns to the side. The government needed to rally the public behind a deeply unpopular war. Suddenly, publicity agents did not seem so bad.

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.

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.)

Journalism is demonstrably valuable to society. It tells us what is new, important and interesting in public life, it holds authority to account, it promotes informed debate, it entertains and enlightens. For sure, it comes with complications. It is rushed and imperfect, it sometimes upsets people and in pursuit of its objectives it occasionally does unpleasant or even illegal things. But by and large we accept these less welcome aspects of journalism as part of the package, and we do so because journalism as a whole is in the public interest. It does good, or to put it another way, we would be much poorer without it.

journalists themselves are slow to draw the distinction because theirs is traditionally an open industry, without barriers and categories, and also because they don’t tend to think of what they do in terms of doing good and being valuable.

privacy invaders do everything they can to blur the line. It is in their interest to be considered journalists, after all. They can shelter under the same umbrella and enjoy the same privileges as journalists. They can talk about freedom of expression, freedom of the press and serving the public interest; they can appeal to tradition and history and they can sound warnings about current and future censorship. This helps them to protect what they do.

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

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

Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists)  and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why - whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) - the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.

in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.

the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today's "post-ideological" world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever - alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself.

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.

Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman’s remarks in the Wall Street Journal Asia piece, “Leaked cable spooks some U.S. sources” dated 3 Dec 2010. The paragraph in question went like this: “Others laid blame not on working U.S. diplomats, but on Wikileaks. Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had “deep concerns about the damaging action of Wikileaks.” It added, ‘it is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence.’” (emphasis my own)

on 25 Jan 2003, the then Singapore Minister of Foreign Affairs and current Senior Minister without portfolio, Professor S Jayakumar, in an unprecedented move, unilaterally released all diplomatic and official correspondence relating to confidential discussions on water negotiations between Singapore and Malaysia from the year 2000. In a parliamentary speech that would have had Julian Assange smiling from ear to ear, Jayakumar said, “We therefore have no choice but to set the record straight by releasing these documents for people to judge for themselves the truth of the matter.” The parliamentary reason for the unprecedented release of information was the misrepresentations made by Malaysia over the price of water, amongst others.

The then Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir’s response to Singapore’s pre-Wikileak wikileak was equally quote-worthy, “I don’t feel nice. You write a letter to your girlfriend. And your girlfriend circulates it to all her boyfriends. I don’t think I’ll get involved with that girl.”

Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures

The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that’s right, Russia’s Pravda): “What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic … After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when … government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. …”

I have a paper in this week’s issue of Science on the cloud feedback

clouds are important regulators of the amount of energy in and out of the climate system. Clouds both reflect sunlight back to space and trap infrared radiation and keep it from escaping to space. Changes in clouds can therefore have profound impacts on our climate.

A positive cloud feedback loop posits a scenario whereby an initial warming of the planet, caused, for example, by increases in greenhouse gases, causes clouds to trap more energy and lead to further warming. Such a process amplifies the direct heating by greenhouse gases. Models have been long predicted this, but testing the models has proved difficult.