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Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Litigation gone wild! A geologist's take on the Italian seismol... - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...litigation-gone-wild

Climate Science Earthquake Law Politics Seismology

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Apparently, an Italian lab technician named Giampaolo Giuliani made a prediction about a month before the quake, based on elevated levels of radon gas. However, seismologists have known for a long time that radon levels, like any other “magic bullet” precursor, are unreliable because no two quakes are alike, and no two quakes give the same precursors. Nevertheless, his prediction caused a furor before the quake actually happened. The Director of the Civil Defence, Guido Bertolaso, forced him to remove his findings from the Internet (old versions are still on line). Giuliani was also reported to the police for “causing fear” with his predictions about a quake near Sulmona, which was far from where the quake actually struck. Enzo Boschi, the head of the Italian National Geophysics Institute declared: “Every time there is an earthquake there are people who claim to have predicted it. As far as I know nobody predicted this earthquake with precision. It is not possible to predict earthquakes.” Most of the geological and geophysical organizations around the world made similar statements in support of the proper scientific procedures adopted by the Italian geophysical community. They condemned Giuliani for scaring people using a method that has not shown to be reliable.
  • most the of press coverage I have read (including many cited above) took the sensationalist approach, and cast Guiliani as the little “David” fighting against the “Goliath” of “Big Science”
  • none of the reporters bothered to do any real background research, or consult with any other legitimate seismologist who would confirm that there is no reliable way to predict earthquakes in the short term and Giuliani is misleading people when he says so. Giulian’s “prediction” was sheer luck, and if he had failed, no one would have mentioned it again.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Even though he believes in his method, he ignores the huge body of evidence that shows radon gas is no more reliable than any other “predictor”.
  • If the victims insist on suing someone, they should leave the seismologists alone and look into the construction of some of those buildings. The stories out of L’Aquila suggest that the death toll was much higher because of official corruption and shoddy construction, as happens in many countries both before and after big quakes.
  • much of the construction is apparently Mafia-controlled in that area—good luck suing them! Sadly, the ancient medieval buildings that crumbled were the most vulnerable because they were made of unreinforced masonry, the worst possible construction material in earthquake country
  • what does this imply for scientists who are working in a field that might have predictive power? In a litigious society like Italy or the U.S., this is a serious question. If a reputable seismologist does make a prediction and fails, he’s liable, because people will panic and make foolish decisions and then blame the seismologist for their losses. Now the Italian courts are saying that (despite world scientific consensus) seismologists are liable if they don’t predict quakes. They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. In some societies where seismologists work hard at prediction and preparation (such as China and Japan), there is no precedent for suing scientists for doing their jobs properly, and the society and court system does not encourage people to file frivolous suits. But in litigious societies, the system is counterproductive, and stifles research that we would like to see developed. What seismologist would want to work on earthquake prediction if they can be sued? I know of many earth scientists with brilliant ideas not only about earthquake prediction but even ways to defuse earthquakes, slow down global warming, or many other incredible but risky brainstorms—but they dare not propose the idea seriously or begin to implement it for fear of being sued.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11
     
    In the case of most natural disasters, people usually regard such events as "acts of God" and  try to get on with their lives as best they can. No human cause is responsible for great earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, or floods. But in the bizarre world of the Italian legal system, six seismologists and a public official have been charged with manslaughter for NOT predicting the quake! My colleagues in the earth science community were incredulous and staggered at this news. Seismologists and geologists have been saying for decades (at least since the 1970s) that short-term earthquake prediction (within minutes to hours of the event) is impossible, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. As Charles Richter himself said, "Only fools, liars, and charlatans predict earthquakes." How could anyone then go to court and sue seismologists for following proper scientific procedures?
Weiye Loh

In Japan, a Culture That Promotes Nuclear Dependency - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...31japan.html

Nuclear Economy Japan Green Energy

shared by Weiye Loh on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • look no further than the Fukada Sports Park, which serves the 7,500 mostly older residents here with a baseball diamond, lighted tennis courts, a soccer field and a $35 million gymnasium with indoor pool and Olympic-size volleyball arena. The gym is just one of several big public works projects paid for with the hundreds of millions of dollars this community is receiving for acce
  • the aid has enriched rural communities that were rapidly losing jobs and people to the cities. With no substantial reserves of oil or coal, Japan relies on nuclear power for the energy needed to drive its economic machine. But critics contend that the largess has also made communities dependent on central government spending — and thus unwilling to rock the boat by pushing for robust safety measures.
  • Tsuneyoshi Adachi, a 63-year-old fisherman, joined the huge protests in the 1970s and 1980s against the plant’s No. 2 reactor. He said many fishermen were angry then because chlorine from the pumps of the plant’s No. 1 reactor, which began operating in 1974, was killing seaweed and fish in local fishing grounds. However, Mr. Adachi said, once compensation payments from the No. 2 reactor began to flow in, neighbors began to give him cold looks and then ignore him. By the time the No. 3 reactor was proposed in the early 1990s, no one, including Mr. Adachi, was willing to speak out against the plant. He said that there was the same peer pressure even after the accident at Fukushima, which scared many here because they live within a few miles of the Shimane plant. “Sure, we are all worried in our hearts about whether the same disaster could happen at the Shimane nuclear plant,” Mr. Adachi said. However, “the town knows it can no longer survive economically without the nuclear plant.”
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  • Much of this flow of cash was the product of the Three Power Source Development Laws, a sophisticated system of government subsidies created in 1974 by Kakuei Tanaka, the powerful prime minister who shaped Japan’s nuclear power landscape and used big public works projects to build postwar Japan’s most formidable political machine. The law required all Japanese power consumers to pay, as part of their utility bills, a tax that was funneled to communities with nuclear plants. Officials at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which regulates the nuclear industry, and oversees the subsidies, refused to specify how much communities have come to rely on those subsidies. “This is money to promote the locality’s acceptance of a nuclear plant,” said Tatsumi Nakano of the ministry’s Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.
Weiye Loh

Criticism and takedown: how review sites can defend free speech - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...tes-can-defend-free-speech.ars

Criticism Review Law Censorship Libel

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Review sites depend on user trust, and that trust is eroded when businesses are able to manipulate their own reviews. Some, including Yelp, view themselves as passive conduits for their users' reviews. Others take a more active role in fighting against censorship of patients. We think the latter approach makes more sense.
  • "it's scary to be involved in litigation," Levy said. "For many ordinary people, the easiest thing is to move on with your life."
  • Review sites can protect the integrity of their review processes by actively fighting such takedown requests.
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  • review sites could do more. For example, Yelp could have offered to represent Alice itself, or even filed for a declaratory judgment that Alice's post was not an infringement of copyright.
  • According to Yelp spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose, that isn't Yelp's role. "The way we approach this space is that we're a platform," she told Ars by phone. When faced with a lawsuit threat, "some reviewers might choose to take down their reviews, others may choose to leave them intact."
  • Wendy Seltzer, founder of the Chiling Effects clearinghouse, thinks that's not good enough. "It's in Yelp's interest not to let it or its submitters be manipulated by these agreements," she said. "The reading public is going to learn that these things exist and then come to distrust the sites."
  • Transparency is another key weapon against review censorship.
  • Ars talked to Angie Hicks, founder of Angie's List, about the steps her company takes to prevent manipulation by business owners. "Angie's List is positioned very differently in the review space," she said. "We don't accept anonymous reviews. Consumers pay to be a part of Angie's List. And any time a flag is raised about a review, it's reviewed by a human." Angie said that her company actively penalizes businesses who try to use user agreements to censor her users. "Whenever we find that a doctor is asking patients to sign this kind of agreement, we put a notification on that provider's record," she said. "We also take them out of search results."
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11
     
    the mere threat of a lawsuit-even a legally frivolous one-is enough to force patients to take down negative reviews.
Weiye Loh

YouTube - I'm A Climate Scientist (HUNGRY BEAST) - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Climate Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 May 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 19 May 11
     
    yo....we're climate scientists.. and there's no denying this Climate Change Is REEEEALL.. Who's a climate scientist.. I'm a climate scientist.. Not a cleo finalist No a climate scientist Droppin facts all over this wax While bitches be crying about a carbon tax Climate change is caused by people Earth Unlike Alien Has no sequel We gotta move fast or we'll be forsaken, Cause we were too busy suckin dick Copenhagen: (Politician) I said Burn! it's hot in here.. 32% more carbon in the atmosphere. Oh Eee Ohh Eee oh wee ice ice ice Raisin' sea levels twice by twice We're scientists, what we speak is True. Unlike Andrew Bolt our work is Peer Reviewed... ooohhh Who's a climate scientist.. I'm a climate scientist.. An Anglican revivalist No a climate scientist Feedback is like climate change on crack The permafrosts subtracts: feedback Methane release wack : feedback.. Write a letter then burn it: feedback Denialists deny this in your dreams Coz climate change means greater extremes, Shit won't be the norm Heatwaves bigger badder storms The Green house effect is just a theory sucker (Alan Jones) Yeah so is gravity float away muther f**cker Who's a climate scientist.. I'm a climate scientist.. I'm not a climate Scientist Who's Climate Scientists A Penny Farthing Cyclist No A Lebanese typist No A Paleontologist No A Sebaceous Cyst No! a climate scientist! Yo! PREACH~!
Weiye Loh

Don't dumb me down | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...badscience.research

Science Journalism Communication Latour Statistics Humanities

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • 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
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  • At the other end of the spectrum, scare stories are - of course - a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. The MMR disaster was a fantasy entirely of the media's making (www.badscience.net/?p=23), which failed to go away. In fact the Daily Mail is still publishing hysterical anti-immunisation stories, including one calling the pneumococcus vaccine a "triple jab", presumably because they misunderstood that the meningitis, pneumonia, and septicaemia it protects against are all caused by the same pneumococcus bacteria (www.badscience.net/?p=118).
  • people periodically come up to me and say, isn't it funny how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be Bad Science after all? And I say: no. The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.
  • Once journalists get their teeth into what they think is a scare story, trivial increases in risk are presented, often out of context, but always using one single way of expressing risk, the "relative risk increase", that makes the danger appear disproportionately large (www.badscience.net/?p=8).
  • he media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. It's quite understandable that newspapers should feel it's their job to write about new stuff. But in the aggregate, these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical world view, is only about tenuous, new, hotly-contested data
  • Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases. Often, a front page science story will emerge from a press release alone, and the formal academic paper may never appear, or appear much later, and then not even show what the press reports claimed it would (www.badscience.net/?p=159).
  • there was an interesting essay in the journal PLoS Medicine, about how most brand new research findings will turn out to be false (www.tinyurl.com/ceq33). It predictably generated a small flurry of ecstatic pieces from humanities graduates in the media, along the lines of science is made-up, self-aggrandising, hegemony-maintaining, transient fad nonsense; and this is the perfect example of the parody hypothesis that we'll see later. Scientists know how to read a paper. That's what they do for a living: read papers, pick them apart, pull out what's good and bad.
  • Scientists never said that tenuous small new findings were important headline news - journalists did.
  • there is no useful information in most science stories. A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the "correct form" of the drug. I don't use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information.
  • Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.
  • Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science.
  • Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages.
  • Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.
  • science journalists somehow don't understand the difference between the evidence and the hypothesis. The Times's health editor Nigel Hawkes recently covered an experiment which showed that having younger siblings was associated with a lower incidence of multiple sclerosis. MS is caused by the immune system turning on the body. "This is more likely to happen if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to infections from younger siblings, says the study." That's what Hawkes said. Wrong! That's the "Hygiene Hypothesis", that's not what the study showed: the study just found that having younger siblings seemed to be somewhat protective against MS: it didn't say, couldn't say, what the mechanism was, like whether it happened through greater exposure to infections. He confused evidence with hypothesis (www.badscience.net/?p=112), and he is a "science communicator".
  • how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned." And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it
  • The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in. Gillian McKeith, Andrew Wakefield, Kevin Warwick and the rest can all get a whole lot further, in an environment where their authority is taken as read, because their reasoning and evidence is rarely publicly examined.
  • it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".
  • This misrepresentation of science is a direct descendant of the reaction, in the Romantic movement, against the birth of science and empiricism more than 200 years ago; it's exactly the same paranoid fantasy as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, only not as well written. We say descendant, but of course, the humanities haven't really moved forward at all, except to invent cultural relativism, which exists largely as a pooh-pooh reaction against science. And humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for 200 years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over that.
  • had a good spirited row with an eminent science journalist, who kept telling me that scientists needed to face up to the fact that they had to get better at communicating to a lay audience. She is a humanities graduate. "Since you describe yourself as a science communicator," I would invariably say, to the sound of derisory laughter: "isn't that your job?" But no, for there is a popular and grand idea about, that scientific ignorance is a useful tool: if even they can understand it, they think to themselves, the reader will. What kind of a communicator does that make you?
  • Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they'll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it's edited by a whole team of people who don't understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they've got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.
Weiye Loh

How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles | Technology | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...sation-internet-data-filtering

Internet Search Search Engine Optimization Fragmentation Polarisation Cultural Industries

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.
  • Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results – the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google any more.
  • In the spring of 2010, while the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I asked two friends to search for the term "BP". They're pretty similar – educated white left-leaning women who live in the north-east. But the results they saw were quite different. One saw investment information about BP. The other saw news.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the query "stem cells" might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem-cell research and activists who oppose it.
  • "Proof of climate change" might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil-company executive.
  • majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. Google's announcement marked the turning point of an important but nearly invisible revolution in how we consume information. You could say that on 4 December 2009 the era of personalisation began.
  • We are predisposed to respond to a pretty narrow set of stimuli – if a piece of news is about sex, power, gossip, violence, celebrity or humour, we are likely to read it first. This is the content that most easily makes it into the filter bubble. It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years". In a personalised world, important but complex or unpleasant issues – the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness – are less likely to come to our attention at all.
  • As a consumer, it's hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. "It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest," technology journalist Clive Thompson told me. Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it a different way: "Customers are always right, but people aren't."
  • Personalisation is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life – much of which you might not trust friends with.
  • To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you're letting the companies that construct it choose which options you're aware of. You may think you're the captain of your own destiny, but personalisation can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you've clicked on in the past determines what you see next – a web history you're doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever- narrowing version of yourself – an endless you-loop.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11
     
    An invisible revolution has taken place is the way we use the net, but the increasing personalisation of information by search engines such as Google threatens to limit our access to information and enclose us in a self-reinforcing world view, writes Eli Pariser in an extract from The Filter Bubble
Weiye Loh

Index on Censorship » Blog Archive » Code breakers - 0 views

www.indexoncensorship.org/...code-breakers

Journalism Privacy Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the code of practice of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), which at least in principle binds journalists working for member organisations and which includes clauses on such matters as accuracy, privacy and the use of subterfuge. The code makes clear, for example, that it is not acceptable to employ a clandestine recording device on a ‘fishing expedition’ — in other words, when you don’t have good grounds to expect you will gain a particular kind of evidence of a particular kind of wrongdoing.
  • journalism has to be about truth
  • The public interest is central because it is a sort of get-out-of-jail card for journalists, though it is actually recognised only grudgingly in law. An ethical journalist can justify telling a lie, or covertly recording a conversation, or trespassing if this act is done in the pursuit of the public interest, and even if he or she is found guilty of an offence, others will usually understand this as valid and will give their support. The public interest can literally keep a journalist out of jail, and it is not merely in the eye of the beholder. The Press Complaints Commission, for example, defines it as follows: The public interest includes, but is not confined to: i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety ii) Protecting public health and safety iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11
     
    We tend to speak of journalists, of their role, their rights, their responsibilities and very often their lack of restraint and how it should be addressed. But this is misleading, and prevents us from seeing some of the complexities and possibilities, because the word 'journalist', in this context, covers two very different groups of people. One group is the actual journalists, as traditionally understood, and the other is those people whose principal professional activity is invading other people's privacy for the purpose of publication.
Weiye Loh

Does Anything Matter? by Peter Singer - Project Syndicate - 0 views

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

Morality Relativism Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Although this view of ethics has often been challenged, many of the objections have come from religious thinkers who appealed to God’s commands. Such arguments have limited appeal in the largely secular world of Western philosophy. Other defenses of objective truth in ethics made no appeal to religion, but could make little headway against the prevailing philosophical mood.
  • Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1 + 1 = 2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit’s defense of objectivity in ethics.
  • One major argument against objectivism in ethics is that people disagree deeply about right and wrong, and this disagreement extends to philosophers who cannot be accused of being ignorant or confused. If great thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham disagree about what we ought to do, can there really be an objectively true answer to that question? Parfit’s response to this line of argument leads him to make a claim that is perhaps even bolder than his defense of objectivism in ethics. He considers three leading theories about what we ought to do – one deriving from Kant, one from the social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the contemporary philosophers John Rawls and T.M. Scanlon, and one from Bentham’s utilitarianism – and argues that the Kantian and social-contract theories must be revised in order to be defensible.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit’s vivid phrase, “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”
  • Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.
  • When Parfit does come to the question of “what matters,” his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that “we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.” Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit’s work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths.
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11
     
    Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer. Among philosophers, the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930's, when logical positivists asserted that, because there seems to be no way of verifying the truth of moral judgments, they cannot be anything other than expressions of our feelings or attitudes. So, for example, when we say, "You ought not to hit that child," all we are really doing is expressing our disapproval of your hitting the child, or encouraging you to stop hitting the child. There is no truth to the matter of whether or not it is wrong for you to hit the child.
Weiye Loh

UNICEF - India - Children map their community using innovative technology in India - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...india_58382.html

Technology Map Children

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • After data were collected, the children drew the map’s first draft on a big sheet of paper. It clearly labelled and colour-coded each detail, from houses to street lamps. Now, the map and survey – which identified 71 sources of water but not one clean enough for drinking – can also be used as a powerful advocacy tool.
  • Ms. Das says improvements have already been made. Pointing to a lamp post in her crowded alley, she observes, “Things are already better. We have more light here.” The children also use survey data to target households during polio immunization campaigns. In teams armed with handmade paper megaphones and signs, they regularly march about shouting: “Shunun, shunun (listen),” imploring neighbours to bring children for polio drops. They also take toddlers to polio booths themselves. The children also mobilize for malaria information drives, to check on children who drop out of school, or to teach proper hand washing techniques. They tackle tough topics, like child marriage and human trafficking, with puppets and street plays at each community festival.
Weiye Loh

Google Adds Voice Search, Visual Search and Results Prerendering - 0 views

googlesystem.blogspot.com/...oice-search-visual-search.html

Search Engine Optimization Google

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Google Goggles is a full-fledged visual search engine that's trapped in a mobile application. But why do you have to buy a smartphone to use Google Goggles when you could simply upload an image to Google and find related pages and images on the Web? "Search by Image" does more than TinEye, the "reverse image search engine" that lets you find an image on the Web.
Weiye Loh

The Failure of Liberal Bioethics - NYTimes.com - 1 views

douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...e-failure-of-liberal-bioethics

Bioethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • There are three broad camps in contemporary debates over bioethics. In the name of human rights and human dignity, “bio-conservatives” tend to support restricting, regulating and stigmatizing the technologies that allow us to create, manipulate and destroy embryonic life. In the name of scientific progress and human freedom, “bio-libertarians” tend to oppose any restrictions on what individuals, doctors and researchers are allowed to do. Then somewhere in between are the anguished liberals, who are uncomfortable with what they see as the absolutism of both sides, and who tend to argue that society needs to decide where to draw its bioethical lines not based on some general ideal (like “life” or “choice”), but rather case by case by case — accepting this kind of abortion but not that kind; this use of embryos but not that use; existing developments in genetic engineering but not, perhaps, the developments that await us in the future.
  • at least in the United States, the liberal effort to (as the Goodman of 1980 put it) “monitor” and “debate” and “control” the development of reproductive technologies has been extraordinarily ineffectual. From embryo experimentation to selective reduction to the eugenic uses of abortion, liberals always promise to draw lines and then never actually manage to draw them. Like Dr. Evans, they find reasons to embrace each new technological leap while promising to resist the next one — and then time passes, science marches on, and they find reasons why the next moral compromise, too, must be accepted for the greater good, or at least tolerated in the name of privacy and choice. You can always count on them to worry, often perceptively, about hypothetical evils, potential slips down the bioethical slope. But they’re either ineffectual or accommodating once an evil actually arrives. Tomorrow, they always say — tomorrow, we’ll draw the line. But tomorrow never comes.
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Aug 11
     
    The Failure of Liberal Bioethics; http://t.co/6QrUPkl
Weiye Loh

Measuring the Unmeasurable (Internet) and Why It Matters « Gurstein's Communi... - 0 views

gurstein.wordpress.com/...le-internet-and-why-it-matters

Internet Economics Accounting Statistics Measurement

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • it appears that there is a quite significant hole in the National Accounting (and thus the GDP statistics) around Internet related activities since most of this accounting is concerned with measuring the production and distribution of tangible products and the associated services. For the most part the available numbers don’t include many Internet (or “social capital” e.g. in health and education) related activities as they are linked to intangible outputs. The significance of not including social capital components in the GDP has been widely discussed elsewhere. The significance (and potential remediation) of the absence of much of the Internet related activities was the subject of the workshop.
  • there had been a series of critiques of GDP statistics from Civil Society (CS) over the last few years—each associated with a CS “movements—the Woman’s Movement and the absence of measurement of “women’s (and particularly domestic) work”; the Environmental Movement and the absence of the longer term and environmental costs of the production of the goods that the GDP so blithely counts as a measure of national economic well-being; and most recently with the Sustainability Movement, and the absence of measures reflective of the longer term negative effects/costs of resource depletion and environmental degradation. What I didn’t see anywhere apart from the background discussions to the OECD workshop itself were critiques reflecting issues related to the Internet or ICTs.
  • the implications of the limitations in the Internet accounting went beyond a simple technical glitch and had potentially quite profound implications from a national policy and particularly a CS and community based development perspective. The possible distortions in economic measurement arising from the absence of Internet associated numbers in the SNA (there may be some $750 BILLION a year in “value’ being generated by Internet based search alone!) lead to the very real possibility that macro-economic analysis and related policy making may be operating on the basis of inadequate and even fallacious assumptions.
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  • perhaps of greatest significance from the perspective of Civil Society and of communities is the overall absence of measurement and thus inclusion in the economic accounting of the value of the contributions provided to, through and on the Internet of various voluntary and not-for-profit initiatives and activities. Thus for example, the millions of hours of labour contributed to Wikipedia, or to the development of Free or Open Source software, or to providing support for public Internet access and training is not included as a net contribution or benefit to the economy (as measured through the GDP). Rather, this is measured as a negative effect since, as some would argue, those who are making this contribution could be using their time and talents in more “productive” (and “economically measurable”) activities. Thus for example, a region or country that chooses to go with free or open source software as the basis for its in-school computing is not only “not contributing to ‘economic well being’” it is “statistically” a “cost” to the economy since it is not allowing for expenditures on, for example, suites of Microsoft products.
  • there appears to have been no systematic attention paid to the relationship of the activities and growth of voluntary contributions to the Internet and the volume, range and depth of Internet activity, digital literacy and economic value being derived from the use of the Internet.
Satveer

Why I hate stem-cell technologies & Regenerative Therapies - 5 views

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8314442.stm This article is another one of those regenerative therapies article that use of stem-cell technology to reverse aging because first world countries ar...

stem cell regenerative first world third

started by Satveer on 21 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
yongernn teo

Ethics and Values Case Study- Mercy Killing, Euthanasia - 8 views

www.brainmass.com/...86151

Euthanasia

shared by yongernn teo on 21 Oct 09 - Cached
  • yongernn teo on 21 Oct 09
     
    THE ETHICAL PROBLEM: Allowing someone to die, mercy death, and mercy killing, Euthanasia: A 24-year-old man named Robert who has a wife and child is paralyzed from the neck down in a motorcycle accident. He has always been very active and hates the idea of being paralyzed. He also is in a great deal of pain, an he has asked his doctors and other members of his family to "put him out of his misery." After several days of such pleading, his brother comes into Robert's hospital ward and asks him if he is sure he still wants to be put out of his misery. Robert says yes and pleads with his brother to kill him. The brother kisses and blesses Robert, then takes out a gun and shoots him, killing him instantly. The brother later is tried for murder and acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. Was what Robert's brother did moral? Do you think he should have been brought to trial at all? Do you think he should have been acquitted? Would you do the same for a loved one if you were asked? THE DISCUSSION: In my opinion, the most dubious part about the case would be the part on Robert pleading with his brother, asking his brother to kill him. This could be his brother's own account of the incident and could/could not have been a plea by Robert. 1) With assumption that Robert indeed pleaded with his brother to kill him, an ethical analysis as such could be derived: That Robert's brother was only respecting Robert's choice and killed him because he wanted to relieve him from his misery. This could be argued to be ethical using a teleoloigical framework where the focus is on the end-result and the consequences that entails the action. Here, although the act of killing per se may be wrong and illegal, Robert was able to relieved of his pain and suffering. 2) With an assumption that Robert did not plea with his brother to kill him and that it was his brother's own decision to relieve Robert of all-suffering: In this case, the b
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  • Elaine Ong on 22 Oct 09
     
    I find euthanasia to be a very interesting ethical dilemma. Even I myself am caught in the middle. Euthanasia has been termed as 'mercy killing' and even 'happy death'. Others may simply just term it as being 'evil'. Is it right to end someone's life even when he or she pleads you to do so? In the first place, is it even right to commit suicide? Once someone pulls off the main support that's keeping the person alive, such as the feeding tube, there is no turning back. Hmm..Come to think of it, technology is kind of unethical by being made available, for in the past, when someone is dying, they had the right to die naturally. Now, scientific technology is 'forcing' us to stay alive and cling on to a life that may be deemed being worthless if we were standing outside our bodies looking at our comatose selves. Then again, this may just be MY personal standpoint. But I have to argue, who gave technology the right to make me a worthless vegetable!(and here I am, attaching a value/judgement onto an immobile human being..) Hence, being incompetent in making decisions for my unconscious self (or perhaps even brain dead), who should take responsibility for my life, for my existence? And on what basis are they allowed to help me out? Taking the other side of the argument, against euthanasia, we can say that the act of ending someone else's life is the act of destroying societal respect for life. Based on the utilitarian perspective, we are not thinking of the overall beneficence for society and disregarding the moral considerations encompassed within the state's interest to preserve the sanctity of all life. It has been said that life in itself takes priority over all other values. We should let the person live so as to give him/her a chance to wake up or hope for recovery (think comatose patients). But then again we can also argue that life is not the top of the hierarchy! A life without rights is as if not living a life at all? By removing the patient
  • juliet huang on 28 Oct 09
     
    as a human being, you supposedly have a right to live, whether you are mobile or immobile. however, i think that, in the case of euthanasia, you 'give up' your rights when you "show" that you are no longer able to serve the pre-requisites of having the right. for example, if "living" rights are equate to you being able to talk, walk, etc etc, then, obviously the opposite means you no longer are able to perform up to the expectations of that right. then again, it is very subjective as to who gets to make that criteria!
  • Magdaleine on 02 Nov 09
     
    hmm interesting.. however, a question i have is who and when can this "right" be "given up"? when i am a victim in a car accident, and i lost the ability to breathe, walk and may need months to recover. i am unconscious and the doctor is unable to determine when am i gonna regain consciousness. when should my parents decide i can no longer be able to have any living rights? and taking elaine's point into consideration, is committing suicide even 'right'? if it is legally not right, when i ask someone to take my life and wrote a letter that it was cus i wanted to die, does that make it committing suicide only in the hands of others?
  • Low Yunying on 04 Nov 09
     
    Similarly, I question the 'rights' that you have to 'give up' when you no longer 'serve the pre-requisites of having the right'. If the living rights means being able to talk and walk, then where does it leave infants? Where does it leave people who may be handicapped? Have their lost their rights to living?
Weiye Loh

Breakthrough Europe: A (Heterodox) Lesson in Economics from Ha-Joon Chang - 0 views

breakthrougheurope.org/...on_in_economics_from_haj.shtml

Economist Economics Free Market Activism Sustainability Cultural Industries Capitalism Marxism

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • But, to the surprise of the West, that steel mill grew out to be POSCO, the world's third-largest and Asia's most profitable steel maker.
  • South Korea's developmental state, which relied on active government investment in R&D and crucial support for capital-intensive sectors in the form of start-up subsidies and infant industry protection, transformed the country into the richest on the Asian continent (with the exception of Singapore and Hong Kong). LG and Hyundai are similar legacies of Korea's spectacular industrial policy success.
  • Even though they were not trained as economists, the economic officials of East Asia knew some economics. However, especially until the 1970s, the economics they knew was mostly not of the free-market variety. The economics they happened to know was the economics of Karl Marx, Friedrich List, Joseph Schumpeter, Nicholas Kaldor and Albert Hirschman. Of course, these economists lived in different times, contended with different problems and had radically differing political views (ranging from the very right-wing List to the very left-wing Marx). However, there was a commonality between their economics. It was the recognition that capitalism develops through long-term investments and technological innovations that transform the productive structure, and not merely an expansion of existing structures, like inflating a balloon.
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  • Arguing that governments can pick winners, Professor Chang urges us to reclaim economic planning, not as a token of centrally-planned communism, but rather as the simple reality behind our market economies today:
  • Capitalist economies are in large part planned. Governments in capitalist economies practice planning too, albeit on a more limited basis than under communist central planning. All of them finance a significant share of investment in R&D and infrastructure. Most of them plan a significant chunk of the economy through the planning of the activities of state-owned enterprises. Many capitalist governments plan the future shape of individual industrial sectors through sectoral industrial policy or even that of the national economy through indicative planning. More importantly, modern capitalist economies are made up of large, hierarchical corporations that plan their activities in great detail, even across national borders. Therefore, the question is not whether you plan or not. It is about planning the right things at the right levels.
  • Drawing a clear distinction between communist central planning and capitalist 'indicative' planning, Chang notes that the latter: ... involves the government ... setting some broad targets concerning key economic variables (e.g., investments in strategic industries, infrastructure development, exports) and working with, not against, the private sector to achieve them. Unlike under central planning, these targets are not legally binding; hence the adjective 'indicative'. However, the government will do its best to achieve them by mobilizing various carrots (e.g., subsidies, granting of monopoly rights) and sticks (e.g., regulations, influence through state-owned banks) at its disposal.
  • Chang observes that: France had great success in promoting investment and technological innovation through indicative planning in the 1950s and 60s, thereby overtaking the British economy as Europe's second industrial power. Other European countries, such as Finland, Norway and Austria, also successfully used indicative planning to upgrade their economies between the 1950s and the 1970s. The East Asian miracle economies of Japan, Korea and Taiwan used indicative planning too between the 1950s and 1980s. This is not to say that all indicative planning exercises have been successful; in India, for example, it has not. Nevertheless, the European and East Asian examples show that planning in certain forms is not incompatible with capitalism and may even promote capitalist development very well.
  • As we have argued before, the current crisis raging through Europe (in large part caused by free-market economics), forces us to reconsider our economic options. More than ever before, now is the time to rehabilitate indicative planning and industrial policy as key levers in our arsenal of policy tools.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Apr 11
     
    heterodox Cambridge economist exposes 23 myths behind the neoliberal free-market dogma and urges us to recognize that "capitalism develops through long-term investments and technological innovations," spearheaded by an activist state committed to sustainable economic development.
Weiye Loh

BioCentre - 0 views

www.bioethics.ac.uk/...reject-radical-enhancement.php

Human Technology Transhumanism Bioethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Humanity’s End. The main premise of the book is that proposals that would supposedly promise to make us smarter like never before or add thousands of years to our live seem rather far fetched and the domain of mere fantasy. However, it is these very proposals which form the basis of many of the ideas and thoughts presented by advocates of radical enhancement and which are beginning to move from the sidelines to the centre of main stream discussion. A variety of technologies and therapies are being presented to us as options to expand our capabilities and capacities in order for us to become something other than human.
  • Agar takes issue with this and argues against radical human enhancement. He structures his analysis and discussion by focusing on four key figures and their proposals which help to form the core of the case for radical enhancement debate.  First to be examined by Agar is Ray Kurzweil who argues that Man and Machine will become one as technology allows us to transcend our biology. Second, is Aubrey de Grey who is a passionate advocate and pioneer of anti-ageing therapies which allow us to achieve “longevity escape velocity”. Next is Nick Bostrom, a leading transhumanist who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement and finally James Hughes who is a keen advocate of a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and un-enhanced.
  • He avoids falling into any of the pitfalls of basing his argument solely upon the “playing God” question but instead seeks to posit a well founded argument in favour of the precautionary principle.
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  • Agar directly tackles Hughes’ ideas of a “democratic transhumanism.” Here as post-humans and humans live shoulder to shoulder in wonderful harmony, all persons have access to the technologies they want in order to promote their own flourishing.  Under girding all of this is the belief that no human should feel pressurised to become enhance. Agar finds no comfort with this and instead can foresee a situation where it would be very difficult for humans to ‘choose’ to remain human.  The pressure to radically enhance would be considerable given the fact that the radically enhanced would no doubt be occupying the positions of power in society and would consider the moral obligation to utilise to the full enhancement techniques as being a moral imperative for the good of society.  For those who were able to withstand then a new underclass would no doubt emerge between the enhanced and the un-enhanced. This is precisely the kind of society which Hughes appears to be overly optimistic will not emerge but which is more akin to Lee Silver’s prediction of the future with the distinction made between the "GenRich" and the "naturals”.  This being the case, the author proposes that we have two options: radical enhancement is either enforced across the board or banned outright. It is the latter option which Agar favours but crucially does not elaborate further on so it is unclear as to how he would attempt such a ban given the complexity of the issue. This is disappointing as any general initial reflections which the author felt able to offer would have added to the discussion and added further strength to his line of argument.
  • A Transhuman Manifesto The final focus for Agar is James Hughes, who published his transhumanist manifesto Citizen Cyborg in 2004. Given the direct connection with politics and public policy this for me was a particularly interesting read. The basic premise to Hughes argument is that once humans and post humans recognise each other as citizens then this will mark the point at which they will be able to get along with each other.
  • Agar takes to task the argument Bostrom made with Toby Ord, concerning claims against enhancement. Bostrom and Ord argue that it boils down to a preference for the status quo; current human intellects and life spans are preferred and deemed best because they are what we have now and what we are familiar with (p. 134).  Agar discusses the fact that in his view, Bostrom falls into a focalism – focusing on and magnifying the positives whilst ignoring the negative implications.  Moreover, Agar goes onto develop and reiterate his earlier point that the sort of radical enhancements Bostrom et al enthusiastically support and promote take us beyond what is human so they are no longer human. It therefore cannot be said to be human enhancement given the fact that the traits or capacities that such enhancement afford us would be in many respects superior to ours, but they would not be ours.
  • With his law of accelerating returns and talk of the Singularity Ray Kurzweil proposes that we are speeding towards a time when our outdated systems of neurons and synapses will be traded for far more efficient electronic circuits, allowing us to become artificially super-intelligent and transferring our minds from brains into machines.
  • Having laid out the main ideas and thinking behind Kurzweil’s proposals, Agar makes the perceptive comment that despite the apparent appeal of greater processing power it would nevertheless be no longer human. Introducing chips to the human body and linking into the human nervous system to computers as per Ray Kurzweil’s proposals will prove interesting but it goes beyond merely creating a copy of us in order to that future replication and uploading can take place. Rather it will constitute something more akin to an upgrade. Electrochemical signals that the brain use to achieve thought travel at 100 metres per second. This is impressive but contrast this with the electrical signals in a computer which travel at 300 million metres per second then the distinction is clear. If the predictions are true how will such radically enhanced and empowered beings live not only the unenhanced but also what will there quality of life really be? In response, Agar favours something what he calls “rational biological conservatism” (pg. 57) where we set limits on how intelligent we can become in light of the fact that it will never be rational to us for human beings to completely upload their minds onto computers.
  • Agar then proceeds to argue that in the pursuit of Kurzweil enhanced capacities and capabilities we might accidentally undermine capacities of equal value. This line of argument would find much sympathy from those who consider human organisms in “ecological” terms, representing a profound interconnectedness which when interfered with presents a series of unknown and unexpected consequences. In other words, our specifies-specific form of intelligence may well be linked to species-specific form of desire. Thus, if we start building upon and enhancing our capacity to protect and promote deeply held convictions and beliefs then due to the interconnectedness, it may well affect and remove our desire to perform such activities (page 70). Agar’s subsequent discussion and reference to the work of Jerry Foder, philosopher and cognitive scientist is particularly helpful in terms of the functioning of the mind by modules and the implications of human-friendly AI verses human-unfriendly AI.
  • In terms of the author’s discussion of Aubrey de Grey, what is refreshing to read from the outset is the author’s clear grasp of Aubrey’s ideas and motivation. Some make the mistake of thinking he is the man who wants to live forever, when in actual fact this is not the case.  De Grey wants to reverse the ageing process - Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) so that people are living longer and healthier lives. Establishing this clear distinction affords the author the opportunity to offer more grounded critiques of de Grey’s than some of his other critics. The author makes plain that de Grey’s immediate goal is to achieve longevity escape velocity (LEV), where anti-ageing therapies add years to life expectancy faster than age consumes them.
  • In weighing up the benefits of living significantly longer lives, Agar posits a compelling argument that I had not fully seen before. In terms of risk, those radically enhanced to live longer may actually be the most risk adverse and fearful people to live. Taking the example of driving a car, a forty year-old senescing human being who gets into their car to drive to work and is involved in a fatal accident “stands to lose, at most, a few healthy, youthful years and a slightly larger number of years with reduced quality” (p.116). In stark contrast should a negligibly senescent being who drives a car and is involved in an accident resulting in their death, stands to lose on average one thousand, healthy, youthful years (p.116).  
  • De Grey’s response to this seems a little flippant; with the end of ageing comes an increased sense of risk-aversion so the desire for risky activity such as driving will no longer be prevalent. Moreover, plus because we are living for longer we will not be in such a hurry to get to places!  Virtual reality comes into its own at this point as a means by which the negligibly senescent being ‘adrenaline junkie’ can be engaged with activities but without the associated risks. But surely the risk is part of the reason why they would want to engage in snow boarding, bungee jumping et al in the first place. De Grey’s strategy seemingly fails to appreciate the extent to which human beings want “direct” contact with the “real” world.
  • Continuing this idea further though, Agar’s subsequent discussion of the role of fire-fighters is an interesting one.  A negligibly senescent fire fighter may stand to loose more when they are trapped in a burning inferno but being negligibly senescent means that they are better fire-fighters by virtue of increase vitality. Having recently heard de Grey speak and had the privilege of discussing his ideas further with him, Agar’s discussion of De Grey were a particular highlight of the book and made for an engaging discussion. Whilst expressing concern and doubt in relation to De Grey’s ideas, Agar is nevertheless quick and gracious enough to acknowledge that if such therapies could be achieved then De Grey is probably the best person to comment on and achieve such therapies given the depth of knowledge and understanding that he has built up in this area.
Weiye Loh

The messy business of cleaning up carbon policy (and how to sell it to the electorate) ... - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...45810.html

Carbon Tax Global Warming Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • 1. Putting a price on carbon is not only about the climate.Yes, humans are affecting the climate and reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a key commitment of this government, and indeed the stated views of the opposition. But there are other reasons to price carbon, primarily to put Australia at the forefront of a global energy technology revolution that is already underway.In future years and decades the world is going to need vastly more energy that is secure, reliable, clean and affordable. Achieving these outcomes will require an energy technology revolution. The purpose of pricing carbon is to raise the revenues needed to invest in this future, just as we invest in health, agriculture and defence.
  • 2. A price on carbon raises revenues to invest in stimulating that energy technology revolution.Australia emits almost 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. In round numbers, every dollar carbon tax per tonne on those emissions would raise about A$100 million. A significant portion of the proceeds from a carbon tax should be used to invest in energy technology innovation, using today’s energy economy to build a bridge to tomorrow’s economy. This is exactly the strategy that India has adopted with a small levy on coal and Germany has adopted with a tax on nuclear fuel rods, with proceeds in both instances invested into energy innovation.
  • 3. The purpose of a carbon tax is not to make energy, food, petrol or consumer goods appreciably more expensive.Just as scientists are in broad agreement that humans are affecting the global climate, economists and other experts are in broad agreement that we cannot revolutionise our energy economy through pricing mechanisms alone. Thus, we propose starting with a low carbon tax - one that has broad political support - and then committing to increasing it in a predictable manner over time.The Coalition has proposed a “direct action plan” on carbon policy that would cost A$30 billion over the next 8 years, which is the equivalent of about a $2.50 per tonne carbon tax. The question to be put to the Coalition is not whether we should be investing in a carbon policy, as we agree on that point, but how much and how it should be paid for. The Coalition’s plans leave unanswered how they would pay for their plan.A carbon tax offers a responsible and effective manner to raise funds without harming the economy or jobs. In fact, to the extent that investments in energy innovation bear fruit, new markets will be opened and new jobs will be created. The Coalition’s plan is not focused on energy technology innovation.The question for the Coalition should thus be, at what level would you set a carbon tax (or what other taxes would you raise?), and how would you invest the proceeds in a manner that accelerates energy technology innovation?
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  • 4. Even a low carbon tax will make some goods cost a bit more, so it is important to help those who are most affected.Our carbon tax proposal is revenue neutral in the sense that we will lower other taxes in direct proportion to the impact, however modest, of a low carbon tax. We will do this with particular attention to those who may be most directly affected by a price on carbon.In addition, some portion of the revenue raised by a carbon tax will be returned to the public. But not all. It is important to invest in tomorrow’s energy technologies today and a carbon tax provides the mechanism for doing so.
Weiye Loh

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 0 views

motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

Denial Climate Science Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader processes of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.
  • Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out such subjective lapses
  • Our individual responses to the conclusions that science reaches, however, are quite another matter. Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation.
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  • a large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs.
  • In a classic 1979 experiment (PDF), pro- and anti-death penalty advocates were exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies: one supporting and one undermining the notion that capital punishment deters violent crime and, in particular, murder. They were also shown detailed methodological critiques of the fake studies—and in a scientific sense, neither study was stronger than the other. Yet in each case, advocates more heavily criticized the study whose conclusions disagreed with their own, while describing the study that was more ideologically congenial as more "convincing."
  • According to research by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, people's deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider "scientific consensus" to lie on contested issues.
  • people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views—and thus the relative risks inherent in each scenario.
  • When political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler showed subjects fake newspaper articles (PDF) in which this was first suggested (in a 2004 quote from President Bush) and then refuted (with the findings of the Bush-commissioned Iraq Survey Group report, which found no evidence of active WMD programs in pre-invasion Iraq), they found that conservatives were more likely than before to believe the claim.
Weiye Loh

Meet Science: What is "peer review"? - Boing Boing - 0 views

www.boingboing.net/...meet-science-what-is.html

Fraud Academic Research Peer Review Academic Journal

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Scientists do complain about peer review. But let me set one thing straight: The biggest complaints scientists have about peer review are not that it stifles unpopular ideas. You've heard this truthy factoid from countless climate-change deniers, and purveyors of quack medicine. And peer review is a convenient scapegoat for their conspiracy theories. There's just enough truth to make the claims sound plausible.
  • Peer review is flawed. Peer review can be biased. In fact, really new, unpopular ideas might well have a hard time getting published in the biggest journals right at first. You saw an example of that in my interview with sociologist Harry Collins. But those sort of findings will often published by smaller, more obscure journals. And, if a scientist keeps finding more evidence to support her claims, and keeps submitting her work to peer review, more often than not she's going to eventually convince people that she's right. Plenty of scientists, including Harry Collins, have seen their once-shunned ideas published widely.
  • So what do scientists complain about? This shouldn't be too much of a surprise. It's the lack of training, the lack of feedback, the time constraints, and the fact that, the more specific your research gets, the fewer people there are with the expertise to accurately and thoroughly review your work.
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  • Scientists are frustrated that most journals don't like to publish research that is solid, but not ground-breaking. They're frustrated that most journals don't like to publish studies where the scientist's hypothesis turned out to be wrong.
  • Some scientists would prefer that peer review not be anonymous—though plenty of others like that feature. Journals like the British Medical Journal have started requiring reviewers to sign their comments, and have produced evidence that this practice doesn't diminish the quality of the reviews.
  • There are also scientists who want to see more crowd-sourced, post-publication review of research papers. Because peer review is flawed, they say, it would be helpful to have centralized places where scientists can go to find critiques of papers, written by scientists other than the official peer-reviewers. Maybe the crowd can catch things the reviewers miss. We certainly saw that happen earlier this year, when microbiologist Rosie Redfield took a high-profile peer-reviewed paper about arsenic-based life to task on her blog. The website Faculty of 1000 is attempting to do something like this. You can go to that site, look up a previously published peer-reviewed paper, and see what other scientists are saying about it. And the Astrophysics Archive has been doing this same basic thing for years.
  • you shouldn't canonize everything a peer-reviewed journal article says just because it is a peer-reviewed journal article.
  • at the same time, being peer reviewed is a sign that the paper's author has done some level of due diligence in their work. Peer review is flawed, but it has value. There are improvements that could be made. But, like the old joke about democracy, peer review is the worst possible system except for every other system we've ever come up with.
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11
     
    Being peer reviewed doesn't mean your results are accurate. Not being peer reviewed doesn't mean you're a crank. But the fact that peer review exists does weed out a lot of cranks, simply by saying, "There is a standard." Journals that don't have peer review do tend to be ones with an obvious agenda. White papers, which are not peer reviewed, do tend to contain more bias and self-promotion than peer-reviewed journal articles.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Decrease in Floods Around the World? - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...se-in-floods-around-world.html

Flood Disaster Climate Science Climate Change

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Bouziotas et al. presented a paper at the EGU a few weeks ago (PDF) and concluded: Analysis of trends and of aggregated time series on climatic (30-year) scale does not indicate consistent trends worldwide. Despite common perception, in general, the detected trends are more negative (less intense floods in most recent years) than positive. Similarly, Svensson et al. (2005) and Di Baldassarre et al. (2010) did not find systematical change neither in flood increasing or decreasing numbers nor change in flood magnitudes in their analysis.
  • This finding is largely consistent with Kundzewicz et al. (2005) who find: Out of more than a thousand long time series made available by the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) in Koblenz, Germany, a worldwide data set consisting of 195 long series of daily mean flow records was selected, based on such criteria as length of series, currency, lack of gaps and missing values, adequate geographical distribution, and priority to smaller catchments. The analysis of annual maximum flows does not support the hypothesis of ubiquitous growth of high flows. Although 27 cases of strong, statistically significant increase were identified by the Mann-Kendall test, there are 31 decreases as well, and most (137) time series do not show any significant changes (at the 10% level). Caution is advised in interpreting these results as flooding is a complex phenomenon, caused by a number of factors that can be associated with local, regional, and hemispheric climatic processes. Moreover, river flow has strong natural variability and exhibits long-term persistence which can confound the results of trend and significance tests.
  • estructive floods observed in the last decade all over the world have led to record high material damage. The conventional belief is that the increasing cost of floods is associated with increasing human development on flood plains (Pielke & Downton, 2000). However, the question remains as to whether or not the frequency and/or magnitude of flooding is also increasing and, if so, whether it is in response to climate variability and change. Several scenarios of future climate indicate a likelihood of increased intense precipitation and flood hazard. However, observations to date provide no conclusive and general proof as to how climate change affects flood behaviour.
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  • References: Bouziotas, D., G. Deskos, N. Mastrantonas, D. Tsaknias, G. Vangelidis, S.M. Papalexiou, and D. Koutsoyiannis, Long-term properties of annual maximum daily river discharge worldwide, European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2011, Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 13, Vienna, EGU2011-1439, European Geosciences Union, 2011. Kundzewicz, Z.W., D. Graczyk, T. Maurer, I. Przymusińska, M. Radziejewski, C. Svensson and M. Szwed, 2005(a):Trend detection in river flow time-series: 1. annual maximum flow. Hydrol. Sci. J., 50(5): 797-810.
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