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Weiye Loh

How Crowdsourcing Is Improving Global Communities - 0 views

mashable.com/...crowdsourcing-communities

Crowd-Sourcing

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 May 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 25 May 11
     
    You can crowdsource almost anything these days - news, music videos, fashion advice, your love life or even your entire life. While these examples are all very useful (or just plain amusing), there are a plethora of examples of how innovative entrepreneurs and eager philanthropists are using crowdsourcing techniques to improve local and global communities in real, substantive ways.
Weiye Loh

Egypt: Timeline of Communication Shutdown during the Revolution - Global Voices Advocacy - 0 views

advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/...shutdown-during-the-revolution

Egypt Censorship Protest

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Jun 11
     
    This diagram represents sequence of communication shutdown implemented by security agencies in Egypt and telecommunications companies starting 25 January to 6 February, to control the flow of information between people.
Weiye Loh

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

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...arify-the-climate-conversation

Climate Science Climate Change Politics New Media Internet Journalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • In contrast to RealClimate and Skeptical Science, which are focused tightly on science questions, this initiative appears to be trying to both clarify the state of the science on global warming and, in the same breath, promote policies that could curb emissions of greenhouse gases.
  • I’ve expressed concern before about the pitfalls of efforts that threaten to conflate climate science and climate policy debates and that speak of “climate skeptics” as some unified force, rather than a variegated array of camps and individuals with all kinds of motivations and arguments. But I credit these researchers, even if I differ with their style, for experimenting with a new kind of outreach.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Jun 11
     
    A group of Australian scientists has begun a new online effort to communicate the body of science pointing to a rising human influence on the climate system. Their initial piece, "Climate change is real: an open letter from the scientific community," is on The Conversation, an academic Web site aiming to provide a credible source of information and analysis on important issues as traditional journalism shrinks. The letter is very much in the style of recent American-led efforts to counter groups and individuals who have mastered the use of the Web as a means of aggregating and disseminating just about anything - factual or not - as long as it casts doubt on climate science or stalls action on curbing greenhouse emissions.
Weiye Loh

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

Australian media take note: the BBC understands balance in climate change coverage - 0 views

theconversation.edu.au/n-climate-change-coverage-2462

Climate Change Journalism Objectivity Politics Science Climate Science Communication

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • It is far from accurate to refer to “science” as a single entity (as I just have). Many arguments that dispute the consensus about climate change being the result of man made activity talk about “scientists” as though they are “all in it together” and “supporting each other”. This implies some grand conspiracy. But science is a competition, not a collusion. If anything they are all against each other. No given person or research team has the whole picture of climate science. The range of scientific disciplines that work in this area is vast. Indeed there are few areas of science which do not potentially have something to contribute to the area. But put a geologist and a geneticist in a room together and they can barely speak the same language. Far from some great conspiracy, the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come to a consensus about climate change is truly extraordinary.
  • So the report is recommending that journalists do what they should always have done – investigate and verify. By all means ask another expert’s point of view, determine whether the latest finding is in fact good science or what its implications are. But we need to move away from the idea of “balance” between those who believe it is all a big conspiracy and those who have done some work and looked at the actual evidence. The report concludes that in particular the BBC must take special care to continue efforts to ensure viewers are able to distinguish well-established fact from opinion on scientific issues, and to communicate this distinction clearly to the audience. In other words, to remember that the plural of anecdote is not data.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Aug 11
     
    On Wednesday the BBC Trust released their report "Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC's coverage of science". The report has resulted in the BBC deciding to reflect scientific consensus about climate change in their coverage of the issue. As a science communicator I applaud this decision. I understand and support the necessity to provide equal voice to political parties during an election campaign (indeed, I have done this, as an election occurred during my two years writing science for the ABC). But science is not politics. And scientists are not politicians. Much of the confusion about the climate change debate stems from a deep ignorance among the general population about how science works. And believe me this really is something "science" as an entity needs to address.
Weiye Loh

Measuring the Unmeasurable (Internet) and Why It Matters « Gurstein's Community Informatics - 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.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 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.
Weiye Loh

Should technical science journals have plain language translation? - Capital Weather Gang - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AGhiY8fH_blog.html

Science Communication Latour Cultural Industries

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Given that the future of the Earth depends on the public have a clearer understanding of Earth science, it seems to me there is something unethical in our insular behavior as scientists. Here is my proposal. I suggest authors must submit for review, and scientific societies be obliged to publish two versions of every journal. One would be the standard journal in scientific English for their scientific club. The second would be a parallel open-access summary translation into plain English of the relevance and significance of each paper for everyone else. A translation that educated citizens,businesses and law-makers can understand. Remember that they are funding this research, and some really want to understand what is happening to the Earth
  • A short essay in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , entitled “A Proposal for Communicating Science” caught my attention today. Written by atmospheric scientist Alan Betts, it advocates technical journal articles related to Earth science be complemented by a mandatory non-technical version for the lay public. What a refreshing idea!
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 11
     
    A short essay in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , entitled "A Proposal for Communicating Science" caught my attention today. Written by atmospheric scientist Alan Betts, it advocates technical journal articles related to Earth science be complemented by a mandatory non-technical version for the lay public.
Weiye Loh

From Abstract to News Release to Story, a Tilt to the 'Front-Page Thought' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...tilt-to-the-front-page-thought

Misrepresentation Science Climate Science Communication Uncertainty Spin

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Oct 12
     
    "In the post on research on extreme rainfall and warming, Gavin Schmidt, the NASA climate scientist and Real Climate blogger, described the misinterpretation of some paper abstracts as mainly reflecting a cultural divide: "Here we show" statements are required by Nature and Science to clearly lay out the point of the paper. If you don't include it, they will write it in. The caveats/uncertainties/issues all come later. I think the confusion is more cultural than anything. No one at Nature or Science or any of the authors in any subject think that uncertainties are zero, but they require a clear statement of the point of the paper within their house style. I think that conclusion misses the reality that, particularly in the world of online communication of science, abstracts are not merely for colleagues who know the shorthand, but have different audiences who'll have different ways of interpreting phrases such as "here we show.""
Weiye Loh

The future of customer support: Outsourcing is so last year | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...future-customer-support

Mechanical Turk Crowd-Sourcing Crowd Curation Unsourcing Cloud Labor

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gartner, the research company, estimates that using communities to solve support issues can reduce costs by up to 50%. When TomTom, a maker of satellite-navigation systems, switched on social support, members handled 20,000 cases in its first two weeks and saved it around $150,000. Best Buy, an American gadget retailer, values its 600,000 users at $5m annually. 
  • Weiye Loh on 12 May 12
     
    "Unsourcing", as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles away, customers' problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company's own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » The Reasonableness of Weird Things - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...reasonableness-of-weird-things

Communication Diplomacy Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • people have been talking about Phil Plait’s powerful talk, now known to the blogosphere as the “Don’t be a dick” speech (after Wheaton’s Law, an internet maxim that provided the theme of Phil’s presentation). In his talk, Phil argued that skeptics who have outreach goals should get serious about communication: In times of war, we need warriors. But this isn’t a war. You might try to say it is, but it’s not a war. We aren’t trying to kill an enemy. We’re trying to persuade other humans. And at times like that, we don’t need warriors. What we need are diplomats.
  • there many excellent reasons to tend toward treating people with respect and courtesy. It’s morally bad to be cruel (and usually unnecessary); it’s contrary to scientific and journalistic ethics (and the search for truth) to shout down legitimate alternate views; it blinds us to flaws in our own reasoning if we fail to seriously consider viewpoints we don’t like. Most importantly (this was the theme of Phil’s talk) science communication is more effective when it starts with warmth and respect.
  • a few skeptics are tempted to think there must be something special about those who don’t believe. That conceit hardly seems worthy of dwelling upon, and yet people have actually tried to convince me on this basis that it’s not worth teaching critical thinking. “The smart people already get it,” I’ve been told, “and the stupid people never will. Don’t waste your time.” I suppose it’s human to want to draw these lines through the world: on this side, the good smart people; on the other side, the bad dumb people. But the world is not nearly so simple.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • One of the interesting things Phil Plait did during his challenging TAM8 speech was to ask the 1300 skeptics in the room this question: How many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to.
  • most pseudoscientific beliefs are not stupid. They’re just wrong.
  • the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted.
  • reasoning from visceral experience is a recipe for false belief.
  • I’m not suggesting that personal experience is an adequate basis for accepting paranormal claims (it isn’t) or that these claims are true (so far as science can tell, they’re not). I’m saying that, given their information and tools, many paranormalists have understandable reasons for belief.
  • However we label ourselves or others, we come up against the fact that people are complicated. Generalizations are doomed to inadequacy. But, I will suggest that the differences between skeptics and paranormal believers have less to do with innate credulity, and more to do with training and resources.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Jul 10
     
    THE REASONABLENESS OF WEIRD THINGS by DANIEL LOXTON, Jul 26 2010
Weiye Loh

Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...hykKnw1.html

Knowledge Economics Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Sep 10 - Cached
  • the "data" from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.
  • The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.
  • The economic problem of society
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
  • who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about "economic planning" centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the
  • Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge.
  • It may be admitted that, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts.
  • Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation.
  • the relative importance of the different kinds of knowledge; those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts. If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant.
  • It is a curious fact that this sort of knowledge should today be generally regarded with a kind of contempt and that anyone who by such knowledge gains an advantage over somebody better equipped with theoretical or technical knowledge is thought to have acted almost disreputably. To gain an advantage from better knowledge of facilities of communication or transport is sometimes regarded as almost dishonest, although it is quite as important that society make use of the best opportunities in this respect as in using the latest scientific discoveries.
  • The common idea now seems to be that all such knowledge should as a matter of course be readily at the command of everybody, and the reproach of irrationality leveled against the existing economic order is frequently based on the fact that it is not so available. This view disregards the fact that the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer.
  • One reason why economists are increasingly apt to forget about the constant small changes which make up the whole economic picture is probably their growing preoccupation with statistical aggregates, which show a very much greater stability than the movements of the detail. The comparative stability of the aggregates cannot, however, be accounted for—as the statisticians occasionally seem to be inclined to do—by the "law of large numbers" or the mutual compensation of random changes.
  • the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the "man on the spot."
  • We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system.
  • The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.
  • To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.
  • That an economist of Professor Schumpeter's standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term "datum" sets to the unwary can hardly be explained as a simple error. It suggests rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man's knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people's knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Sep 10
     
    The Use of Knowledge in Society Hayek, Friedrich A.(1899-1992)
Weiye Loh

The Fake Scandal of Climategate - 0 views

www.skepticalscience.com/fake-scandal-Climategate.html

Science Internet Climate Science ClimateGate

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The most comprehensive inquiry was the Independent Climate Change Email Review led by Sir Muir Russell, commissioned by UEA to examine the behaviour of the CRU scientists (but not the scientific validity of their work). It published its final report in July 2010
  • It focused on what the CRU scientists did, not what they said, investigating the evidence for and against each allegation. It interviewed CRU and UEA staff, and took 111 submissions including one from CRU itself. And it also did something the media completely failed to do: it attempted to put the actions of CRU scientists into context.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10
       
      Data, in the form of email correspondence, requires context to be interpreted "objectively" and "accurately" =)
  • The Review went back to primary sources to see if CRU really was hiding or falsifying their data. It considered how much CRU’s actions influenced the IPCC’s conclusions about temperatures during the past millennium. It commissioned a paper by Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, on the context of scientific peer review. And it asked IPCC Review Editors how much influence individuals could wield on writing groups.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Many of these are things any journalist could have done relatively easily, but few ever bothered to do.
  • the emergence of the blogosphere requires significantly more openness from scientists. However, providing the details necessary to validate large datasets can be difficult and time-consuming, and how FoI laws apply to research is still an evolving area. Meanwhile, the public needs to understand that science cannot and does not produce absolutely precise answers. Though the uncertainties may become smaller and better constrained over time, uncertainty in science is a fact of life which policymakers have to deal with. The chapter concludes: “the Review would urge all scientists to learn to communicate their work in ways that the public can access and understand”.
  • email is less formal than other forms of communication: “Extreme forms of language are frequently applied to quite normal situations by people who would never use it in other communication channels.” The CRU scientists assumed their emails to be private, so they used “slang, jargon and acronyms” which would have been more fully explained had they been talking to the public. And although some emails suggest CRU went out of their way to make life difficult for their critics, there are others which suggest they were bending over backwards to be honest. Therefore the Review found “the e-mails cannot always be relied upon as evidence of what actually occurred, nor indicative of actual behaviour that is extreme, exceptional or unprofessional.” [section 4.3]
  • when put into the proper context, what do these emails actually reveal about the behaviour of the CRU scientists? The report concluded (its emphasis):
  • we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.
  • we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.
  • “But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognize not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.” [1.3]
  • The argument that Climategate reveals an international climate science conspiracy is not really a very skeptical one. Sure, it is skeptical in the weak sense of questioning authority, but it stops there. Unlike true skepticism, it doesn’t go on to objectively examine all the evidence and draw a conclusion based on that evidence. Instead, it cherry-picks suggestive emails, seeing everything as incontrovertible evidence of a conspiracy, and concludes all of mainstream climate science is guilty by association. This is not skepticism; this is conspiracy theory.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10
       
      How then do we know that we have examined ALL the evidence? What about the context of evidence then? 
  • The media dropped the ball There is a famous quotation attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is more true in the internet age than it was when Mark Twain was alive. Unfortunately, it took months for the Climategate inquiries to put on their shoes, and by the time they reported, the damage had already been done. The media acted as an uncritical loudspeaker for the initial allegations, which will now continue to circulate around the world forever, then failed to give anywhere near the same amount of coverage to the inquiries clearing the scientists involved. For instance, Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian published no less than 85 stories about Climategate, but not one about the Muir Russell inquiry.
  • Even the Guardian, who have a relatively good track record on environmental reporting and were quick to criticize the worst excesses of climate conspiracy theorists, could not resist the lure of stolen emails. As George Monbiot writes, journalists see FoI requests and email hacking as a way of keeping people accountable, rather than the distraction from actual science which they are to scientists. In contrast, CRU director Phil Jones says: “I wish people would spend as much time reading my scientific papers as they do reading my e-mails.”
  • This is part of a broader problem with climate change reporting: the media holds scientists to far higher standards than it does contrarians. Climate scientists have to be right 100% of the time, but contrarians apparently can get away with being wrong nearly 100% of the time. The tiniest errors of climate scientists are nitpicked and blown out of all proportion, but contrarians get away with monstrous distortions and cherry-picking of evidence. Around the same time The Australian was bashing climate scientists, the same newspaper had no problem publishing Viscount Monckton’s blatant misrepresentations of IPCC projections (not to mention his demonstrably false conspiracy theory that the Copenhagen summit was a plot to establish a world government).
  • In the current model of environmental reporting, the contrarians do not lose anything by making baseless accusations. In fact, it is in their interests to throw as much mud at scientists as possible to increase the chance that some of it will stick in the public consciousness. But there is untold damage to the reputation of the scientists against whom the accusations are being made. We can only hope that in future the media will be less quick to jump to conclusions. If only editors and producers would stop and think for a moment about what they’re doing: they are playing with the future of the planet.
  • As worthy as this defense is, surely this is the kind of political bun-fight SkS has resolutely stayed away from since its inception. The debate can only become a quagmire of competing claims, because this is part of an adversarial process that does not depend on, or even require, scientific evidence. Only by sticking resolutely to the science and the advocacy of the scientific method can SkS continue to avoid being drowned in the kind of mud through which we are obliged to wade elsewhere.
  • I disagree with gp. It is past time we all got angry, very angry, at what these people have done and continue to do. Dispassionate science doesn't cut it with the denial industry or with the media (and that "or" really isn't there). It's time to fight back with everything we can throw back at them.
  • The fact that three quick fire threads have been run on Climatgate on this excellent blog in the last few days is an indication that Climategate (fairly or not) has does serious damage to the cause of AGW activism. Mass media always overshoots and exaggerates. The AGW alarmists had a very good run - here in Australia protagonists like Tim Flannery and our living science legend Robin Williams were talking catastrophe - the 10 year drought was definitely permanent climate change - rivers might never run again - Robin (100 metre sea level rise) Williams refused to even read the Climategate emails. Climategate swung the pendumum to the other extreme - the scientists (nearly all funded by you and me) were under the pump. Their socks rubbed harder on their sandals as they scrambled for clear air. Cries about criminal hackers funded by big oil, tobacco, rightist conspirators etc were heard. Panchuri cried 'voodoo science' as he denied ever knowing about objections to the preposterous 2035 claim. How things change in a year. The drought is broken over most of Australia - Tim Flannery has gone quiet and Robin Williams is airing a science journo who says that AGW scares have been exaggerated. Some balance might have been restored as the pendulum swung, and our hard working misunderstood scientist bretheren will take more care with their emails in future.
  • "Perhaps a more precise description would be that a common pattern in global warming skeptic arguments is to focus on narrow pieces of evidence while ignoring other evidence that contradicts their argument." And this is the issue the article discuss, but in my opinion this article is in guilt of this as well. It focus on a narrow set of non representative claims, claims which is indeed pure propaganda by some skeptics, however the article also suggest guilt buy association and as such these propaganda claims then gets attributed to the be opinions of the entire skeptic camp. In doing so, the OP becomes guilty of the very same issue the OP tries to address. In other words, the issue I try to raise is not about the exact numbers or figures or any particular facts but the fact that the claim I quoted is obvious nonsense. It is nonsense because it a sweeping statement with no specifics and as such it is an empty statement and means nothing. A second point I been thinking about when reading this article is why should scientist be granted immunity to dirty tricks/propaganda in a political debate? Is it because they speak under the name of science? If that is the case, why shall we not grant the same right to other spokesmen for other organization?
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10
       
      The aspiration to examine ALL evidence is again called into question here. Is it really possible to examine ALL evidence? Even if we have examined them, can we fully represent our examination? From our lab, to the manuscript, to the journal paper, to the news article, to 140characters tweets?
Weiye Loh

MacIntyre on money « Prospect Magazine - 0 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...alasdair-macintyre-on-money

Religion Philosophy Capitalism Communism

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • MacIntyre has often given the impression of a robe-ripping Savonarola. He has lambasted the heirs to the principal western ethical schools: John Locke’s social contract, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Yet his is not a lone voice in the wilderness. He can claim connections with a trio of 20th-century intellectual heavyweights: the late Elizabeth Anscombe, her surviving husband, Peter Geach, and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, winner in 2007 of the Templeton prize. What all four have in common is their Catholic faith, enthusiasm for Aristotle’s telos (life goals), and promotion of Thomism, the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas who married Christianity and Aristotle. Leo XIII (pope from 1878 to 1903), who revived Thomism while condemning communism and unfettered capitalism, is also an influence.
  • MacIntyre’s key moral and political idea is that to be human is to be an Aristotelian goal-driven, social animal. Being good, according to Aristotle, consists in a creature (whether plant, animal, or human) acting according to its nature—its telos, or purpose. The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others; and the good society is composed of many independent, self-reliant groups.
  • MacIntyre differs from all these influences and alliances, from Leo XIII onwards, in his residual respect for Marx’s critique of capitalism.
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  • MacIntyre begins his Cambridge talk by asserting that the 2008 economic crisis was not due to a failure of business ethics.
  • he has argued that moral behaviour begins with the good practice of a profession, trade, or art: playing the violin, cutting hair, brick-laying, teaching philosophy.
  • In other words, the virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life.
  • After Virtue, which is in essence an attack on the failings of the Enlightenment, has in its sights a catalogue of modern assumptions of beneficence: liberalism, humanism, individualism, capitalism. MacIntyre yearns for a single, shared view of the good life as opposed to modern pluralism’s assumption that there can be many competing views of how to live well.
  • In philosophy he attacks consequentialism, the view that what matters about an action is its consequences, which is usually coupled with utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness” principle. He also rejects Kantianism—the identification of universal ethical maxims based on reason and applied to circumstances top down. MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end.
  • MacIntyre seeks to oppose utilitarianism on the grounds that people are called on by their very nature to be good, not merely to perform acts that can be interpreted as good. The most damaging consequence of the Enlightenment, for MacIntyre, is the decline of the idea of a tradition within which an individual’s desires are disciplined by virtue. And that means being guided by internal rather than external “goods.” So the point of being a good footballer is the internal good of playing beautifully and scoring lots of goals, not the external good of earning a lot of money. The trend away from an Aristotelian perspective has been inexorable: from the empiricism of David Hume, to Darwin’s account of nature driven forward without a purpose, to the sterile analytical philosophy of AJ Ayer and the “demolition of metaphysics” in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic.
  • Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 10
     
    The influential moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has long stood outside the mainstream. Has the financial crisis finally vindicated his critique of global capitalism?
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Political Affiliations of Scientists - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...filliations-of-scientists.html

Science Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Dan Sarewitz tossed some red meat out on the table in the form of an essay in Slate on the apparent paucity of Republicans among the US scientific establishment.  Sarewitz suggests that it is in the interests f the scientific community both to understand this situation and to seek greater diversity in its ranks, explaining that "the issue here is legitimacy, not literacy."
  • The issue that Sarewitz raises is one of legitimacy.  All of us evaluate knowledge claims outside our own expertise (and actually very few people are in fact experts) based not on a careful consideration of facts and evidence, but by other factors, such as who we trust and how their values jibe with our own.  Thus if expert institutions are going to sustain and function in a democratic society they must attend to their legitimacy.  Scientific institutions that come to be associated with one political party risk their legitimacy among those who are not sympathetic to that party's views.
  • Of course, we don't just evaluate knowledge claims simply based on individuals, but usually through institutions, like scientific journals, national academies, professional associations, universities and so on. Sarewitz's Slate article did not get into a discussion of these institutions, but I think that it is essential to fully understand his argument.
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  • Consider that the opinion poll that Sarewitz cited which found that only 6% of scientists self-identify as Republicans has some very important fine print -- specifically that the scientists that it surveyed were all members of the AAAS.  I do not have detailed demographics information, but based on my experience I would guess that AAAS membership is dominated by university and government scientists.  The opinion poll thus does not tell us much about US scientists as a whole, but rather something about one scientific institution -- AAAS.  And the poll indicates that AAAS is largely an association that does not include Republicans.
  • One factor might be seen in a recent action of the American Geophysical Union -- another big US science association: AGU recently appointed Chris Mooney to its Board.  I am sure that Chris is a fine fellow, but appointing an English major who has written divisively about the "Republican War on Science" to help AGU oversee "science communication" is more than a little ironic, and unlikely to attract many Republican scientists to the institution, perhaps even having the opposite effect.  To the extent that AAAS and AGU endorse the Democratic policy agenda, or just appear to do so, it reflects their role not as arbiters of knowledge claims, but rather as political actors.
  • I would wager that the partisan affiliation of scientists in the US military, in the energy , pharmaceutical and finance industries would look starkly different than that of AAAS.  If there is a crisis of legitimacy in the scientific community, it is among those institutions which have become to be so dominated by those espousing a shared political view, whatever that happens to be. This crisis is shared by AAAS and AGU, viewed with suspicion by those on the Right, and, for instance, by ExxonMobil, which is viewed by a similar suspicion by those on the Left.  Sarewitz is warning that for many on the Right, institutions like AAAS are viewed with every bit as skeptical an eye as those on the Left view ExxonMobil.
  • Many observers are so wrapped up in their own partisan battles that they either don't care that science is being associated with one political party or they somehow think that through such politicization they will once and for all win the partisan battles.  They won't. Political parties are far more robust than institutions of science. Institutions of science need help to survive intact partisan political battles.  The blogosphere and activist scientists and journalists offer little help.
Weiye Loh

Climate Emails Stoke Debate - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB125883405294859215.html

Censorship Hacking

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 09 - Cached
  • The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.
  • Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.
  • "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."
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  • "The selective publication of some stolen emails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way," the university said.
  • A partial review of the hacked material suggests there was an effort at East Anglia, which houses an important center of global climate research, to shut out dissenters and their points of view. In the emails, which date to 1996, researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. repeatedly take issue with climate research at odds with their own findings. In some cases, they discuss ways to rebut what they call "disinformation" using new articles in scientific journals or popular Web sites. The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with.
  • Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
  • John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville attacked in the emails for asking that an IPCC report include dissenting viewpoints, said, "It's disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested."
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 09
     
    The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.
Weiye Loh

Unwise to criticise alternative medicine, says SMA - 0 views

www.straitstimes.com/...STIStory_634921.html

Alternative Medicine TCM Science News media bias

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • While Western-trained doctors do warn their patients about the risk and safety profile of what they prescribe and voice their opinions on various kinds of alternative medicine to their patients, it is another thing to advocate that the local medical profession collectively criticise alternative medicine groups.
  • This is especially so when doctors and alternative medicine practitioners are seen to be competitors and criticising alternative medicine can be construed as self-serving.
  • Dr Ho's column on Saturday failed to take SMA's proposal to amend the SMC ethical code in context. When the current code was introduced, TCM practitioners and acupuncturists were not state-registered. They are now. We do not think doctors will refer widely to TCM practitioners even if the code is amended. However, patients do request from their doctors medical reports and summaries when they seek care from TCM practitioners. The present code disallows such formal communication. Amending the code will facilitate better communication between a patient's various caregivers so that the patient's interest is best served.
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  • The SMA does not encourage its members to refer to alternative medicine practitioners. But we have to be realistic. They exist and are here to stay. Most public hospitals already offer acupuncture services. Several have TCM clinics on their premises. Continuing this "iron curtain" of no formal communication between doctors and alternative medicine practitioners is impractical and anachronistic.
  • Finally, many alternative medicine forms are steeped in cultural and religious beliefs, such as TCM and ayurvedic medicine. From the perspective of safeguarding social cohesion in Singapore, getting the local medical profession to collectively criticise various alternative medicine modalities is unwise.
  • In Singapore's social context, journalists should not try to pit one group of caregivers against another. It is best for an impartial and respected body such as the Government to step forward to decide what is safe and unsafe for patients. Dr Abdul Razakjr Omar Honorary Secretary Singapore Medical Association (SMA)
Weiye Loh

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

alicerosebell.wordpress.com/...the-politics-of-online-science

Online Science Blog Gender

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Mendick, H. and Moreau, M. (2010). Monitoring the presence and representation of  women in SET occupations in UK based online media. Bradford: The UKRC.
  • Mendick and Moreau considered the representation of women on eight ‘SET’ (science, engineering and technology) websites: New Scientist, Bad Science, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic, Science: So What, Watt’s Up With That and RichardDawkins.net. They also monitored SET content across eight more general sites: the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.
  • Their results suggest online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present. On some websites, they found no SET women. All of the 14 people in SET identified on the sampled pages of the RichardDawkins.net website were men, and so were all 29 of those mentioned on the sampled pages of the Channel 4 website (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 11).
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  • They found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 7). Personally, I’d have really liked some detail as to how they came up with this, and what constituted ‘hyperlinking of women’s names’ precisely. It’s potentially an interesting finding, but I can’t quite get a grip on what they are saying.
  • They also note that the women that did appear, they were often peripheral to the main story, or ‘subject to muting’ (i.e. seen but not heard). They also noted many instances where women were pictured but remain anonymous, as if there are used to illustrate a piece – for ‘ornamental’ purposes – and give the example of the wikipedia entry on scientists, which includes a picture a women as an example, but stress she is anonymous (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12).
  • Echoing findings of earlier research on science in the media (e.g. the Bimbo or Boffin paper), they noted that women, when represented, tended to be associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, demonstrating empathy with children and animals, etc. They also noted a clustering in specific fields. For example, in the pages they’d sampled of the Guardian, they found seven mentions of women scientists compared with twenty-eight of men, and three of the these women were in a single article, about Jane Goodall (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12-13).
  • The women presented were often discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances, again echoing previous research. They also noted that women scientists, when present, tended to be younger than the men, and there was a striking lack of ethnic diversity (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 14).
  • I’m going to be quite critical of this research. It’s not actively bad, it just seems to lack depth and precision. I suspect Mendick and Moreau were doing their best with low resources and an overly-broad brief. I also think that we are still feeling our way in terms of working out how to study online science media, and so can learn something from such a critique.
  • Problem number one: it’s a small study, and yet a ginormous topic. I’d much rather they had looked at less, but made more of it. At times I felt like I was reading a cursory glance at online science.
  • Problem number two: the methodological script seemed a bit stuck in the print era. I felt the study lacked a feel for the variety of routes people take through online science. It lacked a sense of online science’s communities and cliques, its cultures and sub-cultures, its history and its people. It lacked context. Most of all, it lacked a sense of what I think sits at the center of online communication: the link.
  • It tries to look at too much, too quickly. We’re told that of the blog entries sampled from Bad Science, three out of four of the women mentioned were associated with ‘bad science’, compared to 12 out of 27 of the men . They follow up this a note that Goldacre has appeared on television critiquing Greenfield,­ a clip of which is on his site (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 17-18). OK, but ‘bad’ needs unpacking here, as does the gendered nature of the area Goldacre takes aim at. As for Susan Greenfield, she is a very complex character when it comes to the politics of science and gender (one I’d say it is dangerous to treat representations of simplistically). Moreover, this is a very small sample, without much feel for the broader media context the Bad Science blog works within, including not only other platforms for Ben Goldacre’s voice but comment threads, forums and a whole community of other ‘bad science bloggers’ (and their relationships with each other)
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11
     
    okmark
Weiye Loh

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

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

Science Politics Diversity Divergent Thinking

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

Religion: Faith in science : Nature News - 0 views

www.nature.com/...470323a.html

Science Religion Faith Funding Academic Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?
  • With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.
  • however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.
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  • But other researchers, both with and without Templeton grants, say that they find the foundation remarkably open and non-dogmatic. "The Templeton Foundation has never in my experience pressured, suggested or hinted at any kind of ideological slant," says Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, a magazine that debunks pseudoscience, who was hired by the foundation to edit an essay series entitled 'Does science make belief in God obsolete?'
  • The debate highlights some of the challenges facing the Templeton Foundation after the death of its founder in July 2008, at the age of 95.
  • With the help of a $528-million bequest from Templeton, the foundation has been radically reframing its research programme. As part of that effort, it is reducing its emphasis on religion to make its programmes more palatable to the broader scientific community. Like many of his generation, Templeton was a great believer in progress, learning, initiative and the power of human imagination — not to mention the free-enterprise system that allowed him, a middle-class boy from Winchester, Tennessee, to earn billions of dollars on Wall Street. The foundation accordingly allocates 40% of its annual grants to programmes with names such as 'character development', 'freedom and free enterprise' and 'exceptional cognitive talent and genius'.
  • Unlike most of his peers, however, Templeton thought that the principles of progress should also apply to religion. He described himself as "an enthusiastic Christian" — but was also open to learning from Hinduism, Islam and other religious traditions. Why, he wondered, couldn't religious ideas be open to the type of constructive competition that had produced so many advances in science and the free market?
  • That question sparked Templeton's mission to make religion "just as progressive as medicine or astronomy".
  • Early Templeton prizes had nothing to do with science: the first went to the Catholic missionary Mother Theresa of Calcutta in 1973.
  • By the 1980s, however, Templeton had begun to realize that fields such as neuroscience, psychology and physics could advance understanding of topics that are usually considered spiritual matters — among them forgiveness, morality and even the nature of reality. So he started to appoint scientists to the prize panel, and in 1985 the award went to a research scientist for the first time: Alister Hardy, a marine biologist who also investigated religious experience. Since then, scientists have won with increasing frequency.
  • "There's a distinct feeling in the research community that Templeton just gives the award to the most senior scientist they can find who's willing to say something nice about religion," says Harold Kroto, a chemist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who was co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and describes himself as a devout atheist.
  • Yet Templeton saw scientists as allies. They had what he called "the humble approach" to knowledge, as opposed to the dogmatic approach. "Almost every scientist will agree that they know so little and they need to learn," he once said.
  • Templeton wasn't interested in funding mainstream research, says Barnaby Marsh, the foundation's executive vice-president. Templeton wanted to explore areas — such as kindness and hatred — that were not well known and did not attract major funding agencies. Marsh says Templeton wondered, "Why is it that some conflicts go on for centuries, yet some groups are able to move on?"
  • Templeton's interests gave the resulting list of grants a certain New Age quality (See Table 1). For example, in 1999 the foundation gave $4.6 million for forgiveness research at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and in 2001 it donated $8.2 million to create an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (that is, altruism and compassion) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "A lot of money wasted on nonsensical ideas," says Kroto. Worse, says Coyne, these projects are profoundly corrupting to science, because the money tempts researchers into wasting time and effort on topics that aren't worth it. If someone is willing to sell out for a million dollars, he says, "Templeton is there to oblige him".
  • At the same time, says Marsh, the 'dean of value investing', as Templeton was known on Wall Street, had no intention of wasting his money on junk science or unanswerables such as whether God exists. So before pursuing a scientific topic he would ask his staff to get an assessment from appropriate scholars — a practice that soon evolved into a peer-review process drawing on experts from across the scientific community.
  • Because Templeton didn't like bureaucracy, adds Marsh, the foundation outsourced much of its peer review and grant giving. In 1996, for example, it gave $5.3 million to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, to fund efforts that work with evangelical groups to find common ground on issues such as the environment, and to get more science into seminary curricula. In 2006, Templeton gave $8.8 million towards the creation of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which funds research on the origins of the Universe and other fundamental issues in physics, under the leadership of Anthony Aguirre, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
  • But external peer review hasn't always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics. Those awards became a major embarrassment in late 2005, during a highly publicized court fight over the teaching of intelligent design in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. A number of media accounts of the intelligent design movement described the Templeton Foundation as a major supporter — a charge that Charles Harper, then senior vice-president, was at pains to deny.
  • Some foundation officials were initially intrigued by intelligent design, Harper told The New York Times. But disillusionment set in — and Templeton funding stopped — when it became clear that the theory was part of a political movement from the Christian right wing, not science. Today, the foundation website explicitly warns intelligent-design researchers not to bother submitting proposals: they will not be considered.
  • Avowedly antireligious scientists such as Coyne and Kroto see the intelligent-design imbroglio as a symptom of their fundamental complaint that religion and science should not mix at all. "Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
  • Foundation officials insist that this is backwards: questioning is their reason for being. Religious dogma is what they are fighting. That does seem to be the experience of many scientists who have taken Templeton money. During the launch of FQXi, says Aguirre, "Max and I were very suspicious at first. So we said, 'We'll try this out, and the minute something smells, we'll cut and run.' It never happened. The grants we've given have not been connected with religion in any way, and they seem perfectly happy about that."
  • John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, also had concerns when he started a Templeton-funded project in 2007. He had just published a paper with survey data showing that religious affiliation had a negative correlation with health among African-Americans — the opposite of what he assumed the foundation wanted to hear. He was bracing for a protest when someone told him to look at the foundation's website. They had displayed his finding on the front page. "That made me relax a bit," says Cacioppo.
  • Yet, even scientists who give the foundation high marks for openness often find it hard to shake their unease. Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is willing to participate in Templeton-funded events — but worries about the foundation's emphasis on research into 'spiritual' matters. "The act of doing science means that you accept a purely material explanation of the Universe, that no spiritual dimension is required," he says.
  • It hasn't helped that Jack Templeton is much more politically and religiously conservative than his father was. The foundation shows no obvious rightwards trend in its grant-giving and other activities since John Templeton's death — and it is barred from supporting political activities by its legal status as a not-for-profit corporation. Still, many scientists find it hard to trust an organization whose president has used his personal fortune to support right-leaning candidates and causes such as the 2008 ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage in California.
  • Scientists' discomfort with the foundation is probably inevitable in the current political climate, says Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The past 30 years have seen the growing power of the Christian religious right in the United States, the rise of radical Islam around the world, and religiously motivated terrorist attacks such as those in the United States on 11 September 2001. Given all that, says Atran, many scientists find it almost impossible to think of religion as anything but fundamentalism at war with reason.
  • the foundation has embraced the theme of 'science and the big questions' — an open-ended list that includes topics such as 'Does the Universe have a purpose?'
  • Towards the end of Templeton's life, says Marsh, he became increasingly concerned that this reaction was getting in the way of the foundation's mission: that the word 'religion' was alienating too many good scientists.
  • The peer-review and grant-making system has also been revamped: whereas in the past the foundation ran an informal mix of projects generated by Templeton and outside grant seekers, the system is now organized around an annual list of explicit funding priorities.
  • The foundation is still a work in progress, says Jack Templeton — and it always will be. "My father believed," he says, "we were all called to be part of an ongoing creative process. He was always trying to make people think differently." "And he always said, 'If you're still doing today what you tried to do two years ago, then you're not making progress.'" 
Weiye Loh

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

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

Science Academic Research Newspaper News Bias Representation Public Relations

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