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Weiye Loh

Bodyshock - Age 8 and Wanting a Sex Change - 0 views

www.channel4.com/...episode-1

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Oct 09 - Cached
  • In America, children under 16 can be prescribed hormone 'blockers' to prevent the onset of puberty, with a view to then follow with hormone treatment to become their new gender. This film follows the American experience.
  • Using incorrect gender terms in such program as Bodyshock feels to me like almost mocking the whole idea of it. It seems disrespectful to those who decided to tell their stories, and to all others who have been born in bodies which do not reflect their actual gender
  • Bodyshock SHOULD be using the correct terms for thes children - Josie and Kyla should be refurred to as she and her, not he and his. Chris should be reffured to as he. Getting the gender terms wrong on a program about sex changes only reinforces the publics perceptions that it is okay to refure to transsexual people by the gender they were born as, and it's not.
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Oct 09
     
    I think this is in a way related to biopower and how biotechnology has influenced our ethical stance on previously impossible/ unconceivable situations. I wonder what we may think about children under going sex change at such a young age. How can the children be so sure is definitely one of the first questions that demands answer.
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

Straits Times Forum explains why it heavily edited letter | The Online Citizen - 0 views

theonlinecitizen.com/...s-why-it-heavily-edited-letter

News media bias Statistics Representation Singapore

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • 1. You stated we wrongly replaced the statistic you cited with another from Ms Rachel Chang’s article on March 8 (“School system still the ‘best way to move up’). Your original letter “It is indeed heartwarming to learn that 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university.” Reasons we edited it: Factual error, sense. There were two problems with your sentence. First, it was contradictory and didn’t make sense.Your original sentence cannot mean what it says unless you were elated over the fact that nine in 10 children from less well-off homes failed to qualify for university. So we edited it for sense, i.e., underscoring a positive feeling (heartwarming) with a positive fact; rather than the self-penned irony of a positive feeling (heartwarming) backed by a negative fact (90% failure rate to university admission by less well off children). That was why we replaced the original statistic with the only one in Ms Chang’s March 8 report that matched your elation, that is, that 50 percent of less well off children found tertiary success.
  • (Visa: Firstly, I find it hard to believe that nobody in the Straits Times office understands the meaning of sarcasm. Secondly, there was NO FACTUAL ERROR. Allow me to present to you the statistics, direct from The Straits Times themselves: http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf )
  • Second, we replaced your original statistic because it did not exist in Ms Chang’s March 8 front-page report. Ms Chang quoted that statistic in a later article (“Poor kids need aspiration: March 18; paragraph 5), which appeared after your letter was published. (Visa: It did not exist? Pay careful attention to the URL: http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf . Look at the number. 20110308. 2011 03 08. 8th March 2011.)
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  • 2. Your original letter “His (Education Minister Dr Ng) statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination. “ Reason we edited it: Factual error
  • “His statement is backed by the statistic that about 50 per cent of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic bracket score within the top two-thirds of their Primary School Leaving Examination cohort. (Para 3 of Ms Chang’s March 8 report). (Visa:  THIS IS NOT A FACTUAL ERROR. If 50% of a group score in the top two-thirds, then the remaining 50% of the group, by simple process of elimination, must score in the bottom third!)
  • You can assume that the stats are wrong, but you CANNOT CHANGE it and CONTINUE to use the contributor’s name! Where is your journalist moral, ethic, and basic human decency? Since it is YOUR meaning, and not the writer’s, don’t it mean that you ABUSE, FABRICATE, and LIE to the public that that was by Samuel?
  • Either you print a news column or delete the letter. At least have some basic courtesy to call and ASK the writer for changes. Even a kid knows that its basic human decency to ask. HOW come you, as a grown man, YAP KOON HONG, can’t?
  • “So we edited it for sense ……. That was why we replaced the original statistic with the only one in Ms Chang’s March 8 report that matched your elation ……” and “So, we needed to provide the context to the minister’s statement in order to retain the sense of your meaning.” These are extraordinary statements. My understanding is that editors edit for clarity and brevity. It is extraordinary and perhaps only in Singapore that editors also edit for “sense”.
  • 50% make it to university therefore the other 50% did not make it. This kind of reasoning only works in primary or secondary school maths. In the real world, academia and journalism, the above would be considered a logical fallacy. To explain why, one must consider the fact that not going to university is not the same as “not making it”. World class musicians, sports, volunteer work, oversease universities, travel, these are just a few of the reasons why we can’t just do a simple calculation when it comes to statistics. Bill Gates didn’t go to university, would we classify him as “not making it” Sarcasm has no place in journalism as it relies on visual and vocal indicators to interpret. I live in Washington, and if the above letter was sent to any newspaper it would be thrown out with all the other garbage faster than you could say freedom of speech. At least the editor in question here bothered to try his best to get the letter published.
  • “we felt your opinion deserved publication” Please, Yap Koon Hong, what you published was the very opposite of his opinion! As you yourself admitted, Samuel’s letter was ironic in nature, but you removed all traces of irony and changed the statistics to fabricate a sense of “elation” that Samuel did not mean to convey!
Weiye Loh

China calls out US human rights abuses: laptop searches, 'Net porn - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...s-laptop-searches-net-porn.ars

Human Rights China United States

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The report makes no real attempt to provide context to a huge selection of news articles about bad things happening in the US, piled up one against each other in almost random fashion.
  • As the UK's Guardian paper noted, "While some of the data cited in the report is derived from official or authoritative sources, other sections are composed from a mishmash of online material. One figure on crime rates is attributed to '10 Facts About Crime in the United States that Will Blow Your Mind, Beforitsnews.com'." The opening emphasis on US crime is especially odd; crime rates in the US are the lowest they have been in decades; the drop-off has been so dramatic that books have been written in attempts to explain it.
  • But the report does provide an interesting perspective on the US, especially when it comes to technology, and it's not all off base. China points to US laptop border searches as a problem (and they are): According to figures released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in September 2010, more than 6,600 travelers had been subject to electronic device searches between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, nearly half of them American citizens. A report on The Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2010, said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was sued over its policies that allegedly authorize the search and seizure of laptops, cellphones and other electronic devices without a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The policies were claimed to leave no limit on how long the DHS can keep a traveler's devices or on the scope of private information that can be searched, copied, or detained. There is no provision for judicial approval or supervision. When Colombian journalist Hollman Morris sought a US student visa so he could take a fellowship for journalists at Harvard University, his application was denied on July 17, 2010, as he was ineligible under the "terrorist activities" section of the USA Patriot Act. An Arab American named Yasir Afifi, living in California, found the FBI attached an electronic GPS tracking device near the right rear wheel of his car.
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  • China also sees hypocrisy in American discussions of Internet freedom. China comes in regularly for criticism over its "Great Firewall," but it suggests that the US government also restricts the Internet. While advocating Internet freedom, the US in fact imposes fairly strict restriction on cyberspace. On June 24, 2010, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which will give the federal government "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. Handing government the power to control the Internet will only be the first step towards a greatly restricted Internet system, whereby individual IDs and government permission would be required to operate a website. The United States applies double standards on Internet freedom by requesting unrestricted "Internet freedom" in other countries, which becomes an important diplomatic tool for the United States to impose pressure and seek hegemony, and imposing strict restriction within its territory. An article on BBC on February 16, 2011 noted the US government wants to boost Internet freedom to give voices to citizens living in societies regarded as "closed" and questions those governments' control over information flow, although within its borders the US government tries to create a legal frame to fight the challenge posed by WikiLeaks. The US government might be sensitive to the impact of the free flow of electronic information on its territory for which it advocates, but it wants to practice diplomacy by other means, including the Internet, particularly the social networks. (The cyberspace bill never became law, and a revised version is still pending in Congress.)
  • Finally, there's pornography, which China bans. Pornographic content is rampant on the Internet and severely harms American children. Statistics show that seven in 10 children have accidentally accessed pornography on the Internet and one in three has done so intentionally. And the average age of exposure is 11 years old - some start at eight years old (The Washington Times, June 16, 2010). According to a survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent of American teens have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves. (www.co.jefferson.co.us, March 23, 2010). At least 500 profit-oriented nude chat websites were set up by teens in the United States, involving tens of thousands of pornographic pictures.
  • Weiye Loh on 13 Apr 11
     
    Upset over the US State Department's annual human rights report, China publishes a report of its own on various US ills. This year, it calls attention to America's border laptop searches, its attitude toward WikiLeaks, and the prevalence of online pornography. In case the report's purpose wasn't clear, China Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said this weekend, "We advise the US side to reflect on its own human rights issue, stop acting as a preacher of human rights as well as interfering in other countries' internal affairs by various means including issuing human rights reports."
Weiye Loh

English: Who speaks English? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...english

English Language Cultural Industries

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord.  They were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large.
  • But Philip Hult, the boss of EF, says that his sample shows results similar to a more scientifically controlled but smaller study by the British Council.
  • Wealthy countries do better overall. But smaller wealthy countries do better still: the larger the number of speakers of a country’s main language, the worse that country tends to be at English. This is one reason Scandinavians do so well: what use is Swedish outside Sweden?  It may also explain why Spain was the worst performer in western Europe, and why Latin America was the worst-performing region: Spanish’s role as an international language in a big region dampens incentives to learn English.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Export dependency is another correlate with English. Countries that export more are better at English (though it’s not clear which factor causes which).  Malaysia, the best English-performer in Asia, is also the sixth-most export-dependent country in the world.  (Singapore was too small to make the list, or it probably would have ranked similarly.) This is perhaps surprising, given a recent trend towards anti-colonial and anti-Western sentiment in Malaysia’s politics. The study’s authors surmise that English has become seen as a mere tool, divorced in many minds from its associations with Britain and America.
  • Teaching plays a role, too. Starting young, while it seems a good idea, may not pay off: children between eight and 12 learn foreign languages faster than younger ones, so each class hour on English is better spent on a 10-year-old than on a six-year-old.
  • Between 1984 and 2000, the study's authors say, the Netherlands and Denmark began English-teaching between 10 and 12, while Spain and Italy began between eight and 11, with considerably worse results. Mr Hult reckons that poor methods, particularly the rote learning he sees in Japan, can be responsible for poor results despite strenuous efforts.
  • one surprising result is that China and India are next to each other (29th and 30th of 44) in the rankings, despite India’s reputation as more Anglophone. Mr Hult says that the Chinese have made a broad push for English (they're "practically obsessed with it”). But efforts like this take time to marinade through entire economies, and so may have avoided notice by outsiders. India, by contrast, has long had well-known Anglophone elites, but this is a narrow slice of the population in a country considerably poorer and less educated than China. English has helped India out-compete China in services, while China has excelled in manufacturing. But if China keeps up the push for English, the subcontinental neighbour's advantage may not last.
Weiye Loh

Right-wing publisher: We run "some misinformation" - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Photoshop Photojournalism Ethics Journalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • WorldNetDaily regularly publishes falsehoods (e.g. about Obama's birthplace) and wild conspiracy theories (e.g. about Democratic plans to create concentration camps) that have earned the site criticism even on the right. The organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, rejected Farah's request to host a Birther panel at the annual event in 2009. That said, WND is influential. Its stories regularly find their way onto the big cable channels (Trump's "$2 million" claim is a good example) and even get picked up by members of Congress.
  • I wrote back to Farah with just one example, the latest, of WND's credibility problem. That would be this column by WND's Jack Cashill on "Barack Obama's missing year." The lead of the column aimed to debunk a famous photo of a young Obama flanked by his grandparents on a bench in New York City. As proof, Cashill embedded a YouTube video that purported to show that Obama had been photoshopped into the picture, and that the real image included only Obama's grandparents.
  • Unfortunately for Cashill the supposed "genuine" image -- the one without Obama -- was itself a sloppy photoshop job that still included part of Obama's knee between his grandparents. This was pointed out by Media Matters about eight hours after Cashill's column was published on WND.
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  • At that point WND simply scrubbed the first two paragraphs of the story, without so much as an update, let alone a correction. These lines were now gone: In his definitive 2010 biography of Barack Obama, “The Bridge,” New Yorker editor David Remnick features a photograph of a dapper young Barack Obama sitting between his grandparents on a Central Park bench. The bench is real. The grandparents are real. The wall behind them is real. Barack Obama is not. He has been conspicuously photo-shopped in. Who did this and why remains as much a mystery as Obama’s extended stay in New York.
  • When I pointed this out, Farah fired back (emphasis added): Jack Cashill is an OPINION columnist. Admittedly, we publish some misinformation by columnists, as does your publication and every other journal that contains opinion. Bill Press seldom gets anything right in his column, but because we believe in providing the broadest spectrum of OPINION anywhere in the news business, we tolerate that kind of thing. Yes, Cashill’s column contained an egregious error, which we corrected almost immediately, which is far more than I expect you to do in what I assume is a NEWS piece you wrote.
  • I asked Farah if it is standard practice at WND to remove major sections of stories without any correction. To which he responded: How long have you been in this business, punk? My guess is you were in diapers when I was running major metropolitan newspapers. You call what you wrote a news story? You aren’t fit to carry Chelsea Schilling’s laptop. Worm.
Weiye Loh

Singapore does not have Third World Living Standards | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10991

Statistics World Income Inequality Singapore Data Representation

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • I apologise for this long overdue article to highlight the erroneous insinuations by my fellow KRC writer’s post, UBS: Singapore has Third World Living Standards.
  • The Satay Club post’s title was “UBS: Singapore has Russian Standard of Living”. The Original UBS report was even less suggestive, and in fact hardly made any value judgment at all. The original UBS report just presented a whole list of statistics, according to whichever esoteric mathematical calculation they used
  • As my JC economics teacher quipped, “If you abuse the statistics long enough, it will confess.” On one hand, UBS has not suggested that Singapore has third world living standards. On the other hand, I think it is justified to question how my KRC writer has managed to conclude from these statistics that Singapore has “Third World Living Standards”.
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  • The terminology of “Third World” and “First World” are also problematic. The more “politically correct” terms used now are “developing” and “developed”. Whatever the charge, whatever your choice of terminology, Moscow and Tallinn are hardly “Third World” or “developing”. I have never been there myself, and unfortunately have no personal account to give, but a brief look at the countries listed below Singapore in the Wage Levels index- Beijing, Shanghai, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Delhi, Mexico City even – would make me cautious about abstracting from these statistics any indication at all about “living standards”.
  • The living “habits” and rhythms of life in all these various cities are as heterogeneous as these statistics are homogenizing, by placing them all on the same scale of measurement. This is not to say that we cannot have fruitful comparatives across societies – but that these statistics are not sufficient for such a venture. At the very least UBS’ mathematical methodology requires a greater analysis which was not provided in the previous KRC article. The burden of proof here is really on my fellow KRC writer to show that Singapore has Third World living standards, and the analysis that has been offered needs more to work.
Weiye Loh

Taking On Climate Skepticism as a Field of Study - NYTimes.com - 0 views

green.blogs.nytimes.com/...skepticism-as-a-field-of-study

Data Climate Science Sociology Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Q. The debate over climate science has involved very complex physical models and rarefied areas of scientific knowledge. What role do you think social scientists have to play, given the complexity of the actual physical science?
  • A. We have to think about the process by which something, an idea, develops scientific consensus and a second process by which is developed a social and political consensus. The first part is the domain of data and models and physical science. The second is very much a social and political process. And that brings to the fore a whole host of value-based, worldview-based, cognitive and cultural dimensions that need to be addressed.
  • Social scientists, beyond economists, have a lot to say on cognition, perceptions, values, social movements and political processes that are very important for understanding whether the public accepts the conclusions of a scientific body.
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  • So when I hear scientists say, “The data speak for themselves,” I cringe. Data never speak. And data generally and most often are politically and socially inflected. They have import for people’s lives. To ignore that is to ignore the social and cultural dimensions within which this science is taking place.
  • I do think that there is a process by which, for example, the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer for decades had a scientific consensus that this was an issue, then a social process begins, and then it becomes accepted.
  • The interesting thing with climate change, I find, is that positioning on climate change is strikingly predictable based on someone’s political leanings. One-third of Republicans and three-quarters of Democrats think that climate change is real. That to me speaks to the political, ideological and cultural dimensions of this debate.
  • It’s interesting because it wasn’t always so. In 1997 with the Kyoto treaty, with the development of regulations that would impact economic and political interests, sides started to be drawn. We’ve reached the stage today that climate change has become part of the culture wars, the same as health care, abortion, gun control and evolution.
  • There are many who distrust the peer-review process and distrust scientists. So that can be step one. I think a lot of people will be uncomfortable accepting a scientific conclusion if it necessarily leads to outcomes they find objectionable. People will be hesitant to accept the notion of climate change if that leads directly towards ideas that are at variance with values that they hold dear.
  • do you trust the scientific process? Do you trust scientists? The faith-and-reason debate has been around for centuries. I just read a book that I thought was prescient, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” about this suspicion people have about intellectuals who are working on issues that are inaccessible, opaque to them, yielding conclusions that alter the way we structure our society, the way we live our lives.
  • There’s a certain helpless frustration people have: Who are these cultural elites, these intellectual elites who can make these conclusions in the ivory tower of academia or other scientific institutions and tell me how to live my life?
  • And we can’t leave out power. There are certain powerful interests out there that will not accept the conclusions this will yield to, therefore they will not accept the definition of the problem if they are not going to accept the solutions that follow it. I’m speaking of certain industry sectors that stand to lose in a carbon-constrained world.
  • Also, if you can’t define solutions on climate change and you’re asking me to accept it, you’re asking me to accept basically a pretty dismal reality that I refuse to accept. And many climate proponents fall into this when they give these horrific, apocalyptic predictions of cities under water and ice ages and things like that. That tends to get people to dig their heels in even harder.
  • Some people look at this as just a move for more government, more government bureaucracy. And I think importantly fear or resist the idea of world government. Carbon dioxide is part of the economy of every country on earth. This is a global cooperation challenge the likes of which we have never seen before.
  • Do you trust the message and do you trust the messenger? If I am inclined to resist the notion of global cooperation — which is a nice way to put what others may see as a one-world government — and if the scientific body that came to that conclusion represents that entity, I will be less inclined to believe it. People will accept a message from someone that they think shares their values and beliefs. And for a lot of people, environmentalists are not that kind of person. There’s a segment of the population that sees environmentalists as socialists, trying to control people’s lives.
  • In our society today, I think people have more faith in economic institutions than they do in scientific institutions. Scientists can talk until they are blue in the face about climate change. But if businesses are paying money to address this issue, then people will say: It must be true, because they wouldn’t be throwing their money away.
  • what I’m laying out is that this is very much a value- and culture-based debate. And to ignore that – you will never resolve it and you will end up in what I have described a logic schism, where the two sides talk about completely different things, completely different issues, demonizing the other, only looking for things that confirm their opinion. And we get nowhere.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Blind Spots in Australian Flood Policies - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...spots-in-australian-flood.html

Flood Disaster Climate Science Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • better management of flood risks in Australia will depend up better data on flood risk.  However, collecting such data has proven problematic
  • As many Queenslanders affected by January’s floods are realising, riverine flood damage is commonly excluded from household insurance policies. And this is unlikely to change until councils – especially in Queensland – stop dragging their feet and actively assist in developing comprehensive data insurance companies can use.
  • ? Because there is often little available information that would allow an insurer to adequately price this flood risk. Without this, there is little economic incentive for insurers to accept this risk. It would be irresponsible for insurers to cover riverine flood without quantifying and pricing the risk accordingly.
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  • The first step in establishing risk-adjusted premiums is to know the likelihood of the depth of flooding at each address. This information has to be address-specific because the severity of flooding can vary widely over small distances, for example, from one side of a road to the other.
  • A litany of reasons is given for withholding data. At times it seems that refusal stems from a view that insurance is innately evil. This is ironic in view of the gratuitous advice sometimes offered by politicians and commentators in the aftermath of extreme events, exhorting insurers to pay claims even when no legal liability exists and riverine flood is explicitly excluded from policies.
  • Risk Frontiers is involved in jointly developing the National Flood Information Database (NFID) for the Insurance Council of Australia with Willis Re, a reinsurance broking intermediary. NFID is a five year project aiming to integrate flood information from all city councils in a consistent insurance-relevant form. The aim of NFID is to help insurers understand and quantify their risk. Unfortunately, obtaining the base data for NFID from some local councils is difficult and sometimes impossible despite the support of all state governments for the development of NFID. Councils have an obligation to assess their flood risk and to establish rules for safe land development. However, many are antipathetic to the idea of insurance. Some states and councils have been very supportive – in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly. Some states have a central repository – a library of all flood studies and digital terrain models (digital elevation data). Council reluctance to release data is most prevalent in Queensland, where, unfortunately, no central repository exists.
  • Second, models of flood risk are sometimes misused:
  • many councils only undertake flood modelling in order to create a single design flood level, usually the so-called one-in-100 year flood. (For reasons given later, a better term is the flood with an 1% annual likelihood of being exceeded.)
  • Inundation maps showing the extent of the flood with a 1% annual likelihood of exceedance are increasingly common on council websites, even in Queensland. Unfortunately these maps say little about the depth of water at an address or, importantly, how depth varies for less probable floods. Insurance claims usually begin when the ground is flooded and increase rapidly as water rises above the floor level. At Windsor in NSW, for example, the difference in the water depth between the flood with a 1% annual chance of exceedance and the maximum possible flood is nine metres. In other catchments this difference may be as small as ten centimetres. The risk of damage is quite different in both cases and an insurer needs this information if they are to provide coverage in these areas.
  • The ‘one-in-100 year flood’ term is misleading. To many it is something that happens regularly once every 100 years — with the reliability of a bus timetable. It is still possible, though unlikely, that a flood of similar magnitude or even greater flood could happen twice in one year or three times in successive years.
  • The calculations underpinning this are not straightforward but the probability that an address exposed to a 1-in-100 year flood will experience such an event or greater over the lifetime of the house – 50 years say – is around 40%. Over the lifetime of a typical home mortgage – 25 years – the probability of occurrence is 22%. These are not good odds.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11
     
    John McAneney of Risk Frontiers at Macquarie University in Sydney identifies some opportunities for better flood policies in Australia.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » The Linus Pauling effect - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...the-linus-pauling-effect

HIV_AIDS Denial Science Falsifiability

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • So if syphilis causes AIDS, and not HIV, where is the evidence? As microbiologist and epidemiolist Tara Smith points out in her excellent blog, Margulis offers none. Instead, she says to the credulous and uncritical interviewer: The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient’s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing. Great. Just what we need: an untestable hypothesis promoted by assertion and reputation, not something concrete that scientists could test (although most specialists in microbiology would say the evidence is clear that the HIV retrovirus, and not the spirochaete bacterium Treponema pallidum, is the true cause of AIDS).
  • Has she never actually LOOKED at the hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers documenting the structure of the HIV virus, and the clear documentation of that virus in patients that suffer and die from AIDS? Or the fact that patients treated with anti-retrovirals manage to suppress their AIDS symptoms? Or the disaster in South Africa, when the government became active AIDS deniers, spread misinformation and myths about AIDS, and the infection rate shot up? Not even the hard-core AIDS deniers like Peter Duesberg deny that the HIV virus exists!
  • she slips outside the realm of science entirely, and becomes a full-fledged AIDS denier. My jaw just dropped when I read the following: There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11
     
    The phenomenon is a familiar one: let's call it "the Linus Pauling effect." A highly respected and honored senior scientist, largely out of the mainstream and not up to date with the recent developments (and perhaps a bit senile), makes weird pronouncements about their pet ideas-and the press, so used to giving celebrities free air time for any junk they wish to say, prints and publishes it all as if it is the final truth. The great Linus Pauling may have won two Nobel Prizes, but his crazy idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure nearly everything seems to have died with him. William Shockley may have won a Nobel for his work on transistors, but his racist ideas about genetics (a field in which he had no expertise) should never been taken seriously. Kary Mullis may have deserved his Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction, but that gives him no qualifications to speak with authority on his unscientific ideas about AIDS denial and global warming and astrology (he hits the trifecta for pseudoscientific woo).
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » The Economics of Happiness, Part 1: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...ssessing-the-easterlin-paradox

Economics Happiness

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Arguably the most important finding from the emerging economics of happiness has been the Easterlin Paradox. What is this paradox? It is the juxtaposition of three observations: 1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people. 2) But, rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much). 3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier.
  • Easterlin offered an appealing resolution to his paradox, arguing that only relative income matters to happiness. Other explanations suggest a “hedonic treadmill,” in which we must keep consuming more just to stay at the same level of happiness.
  • We have re-analyzed all of the relevant post-war data, and also analyzed the particularly interesting new data from the Gallup World Poll. Last Thursday we presented our research at the latest Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, and we have arrived at a rather surprising conclusion: There is no Easterlin Paradox. The facts about income and happiness turn out to be much simpler than first realized: 1) Rich people are happier than poor people. 2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries. 3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.
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  • What explains these new findings? The key turns out to be an accumulation of data over recent decades. Thirty years ago it was difficult to make convincing international comparisons because there were few datasets comparing rich and poor countries. Instead, researchers were forced to make comparisons based on a handful of moderately-rich and very-rich countries. These data just didn’t lend themselves to strong conclusions.
  • Moreover, repeated happiness surveys around the world have allowed us to observe the evolution of G.D.P. and happiness through time — both over a longer period, and for more countries. On balance, G.D.P. and happiness have tended to move together.
  • There is a second issue here that has led to mistaken inferences: a tendency to confuse absence of evidence for a proposition as evidence of its absence. Thus, when early researchers could not isolate a statistically reliable association between G.D.P. and happiness, they inferred that this meant the two were unrelated, and a paradox was born.
  • Our complete analysis is available here. An excellent summary is available in today’s New York Times, here, with a very cool graphic, and readers’ comments. Other commentary is available in the F.T. (here and here), and Time Magazine.
Weiye Loh

Epiphenom: People: not as nice as they think they are - 0 views

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...s-nice-as-they-think-they.html

Representation Social Sciences Instrument

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Just how far divorced from reality we are was shown recently in an elegant study by Oriel Feldmanhall, a PhD candidate at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, England. She's just presented the research at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, California.
  • she studied two groups of people. The first group she asked them to imagine a scenario where they would get paid a small sum to deliver painful but harmless electric shocks. 64% said they would never deliver a shock, and on average the participants would only deliver enough shocks to earn a paltry £4. The second group got the real deal. They actually administered the shocks, and saw the response on video (they were in an MRI scanner at the time). This time, a massive 96% of participants administered shocks. Those who saw video of the grimacing faces of their victims pocketed £11.55. Those who were spared that and only saw the hands walked away with a cool £15.77.
  • Brains scans vividly illuminated the emotional turmoil going on in the subjects who participated in the real experiment. They had a lot of activity in their insula, a deep, primitive part of the brain thought to be linked to moral intuition. People who did the pen-and-paper, hypothetical version had no such turmoil.
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  • So, does this mean that we should throw away all those pen-and-paper and survey-based studies of religion. Well no - they still tell us something. It's just not entirely clear what they are telling us!
Weiye Loh

journalism.sg » Tin Pei Ling's baptism of fire: Should bloggers have lit the match? - 0 views

journalism.sg/...tin-pei-ling

Democracy Gender Stereotype Singapore Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • That is nothing, though, compared with the attack by Temasek Review, the anonymously-run website with lofty ambitions “to foster an informed, educated, thinking and proactive citizenry.” The website delved into her personal life – even questioning her motives for marrying her husband – to present her as a materialistic, social climbing monster. Such attacks have also been flying around social media.
  • Never mind that Tin (unlike most high-flying PAP candidates) has several years’ grassroots experience; sections of the online community have dismissed the possibility that someone so young – she is in her 20s – could serve in the highest forum in the land. (I recall feeling similarly skeptical when Eunice Olsen was put up as an NMP. She proved me wrong and I have learnt not to prejudge.)
  • Siew Kum Hong, hardly a PAP apologist, has had the intellectual honesty and moral courage to come out swiftly in his blog against this distasteful turn of events.
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  • some others have argued that election candidates should expect such a baptism of fire. One blogger, while agreeing that the incident was “unfortunate”, said with Nietzsche-like logic, “If Ms. Tin is made of sterner stuff, she’ll live through this. If our future political leaders don’t have the tenacity to look past the Glee-like slushies and take the hit for the citizens of Singapore, then I don’t think they deserve my vote in the first place.”
  • how Tin and her party leaders respond to this episode will say a lot about their preparedness for the new terrain.
  • This, however, doesn’t really excuse those who have chosen to corrupt that terrain.
  • Some online posters have argued that the PAP is just reaping what it has sown: it has made life ugly for those who dare to enter Opposition politics, deterring many able individuals from joining other parties; now it’s payback time, time for the PAP can get a taste of its own medicine. Certainly, the online world should help to level what is undoubtedly a tilted offline playing field. This imperative is what motivates some of Singapore’s best online journalism.
  • Websites that say they want to help raise the level of Singapore’s political discourse shouldn’t go lower than the politicians themselves.
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Mar 11
     
    Never mind that Tin (unlike most high-flying PAP candidates) has several years' grassroots experience; sections of the online community have dismissed the possibility that someone so young - she is in her 20s - could serve in the highest forum in the land. (I recall feeling similarly skeptical when Eunice Olsen was put up as an NMP. She proved me wrong and I have learnt not to prejudge.)
Weiye Loh

A handbag and a pack of wolves « onesingaporean - 0 views

onesingaporean.wordpress.com/...a-handbag-and-a-pack-of-wolves

Democracy Gender Equality Gender Stereotype Singapore Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Were we expecting that there would not be such behaviour – at this first truly Internet election? Are we who are in Singapore so deep within our own well that we are surprised by this sort of behaviour? In the words of one old man, grow up.
  • If you teach a people how to behave, and coerce them, frighten them and show them examples of what would happen if they do not behave as told, then you must accept that this people would learn your ways.
  • And this is what is happening with Tin Pei Ling – the people have learned from the PAP. And yes, it is distasteful. It is unwarranted. But to lay the blame on the people alone is just plain missing the point, isn’t it?
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  • as for Tin Pei Ling, and those of you who feel sorry for her, perhaps you can take comfort in how all this will pan out – described so succintly by Martyn See: “I think it is okay to make fun of Tin Pei Ling. If we are a properly functioning democracy, she would’ve been torn asunder by comedians and caricaturists. But alas, we are not. In the end, she will stroll into her MP office, with make-up and handbags intact, and she’ll look back on this week as being the most trying period of her political career, and then she’ll have the last laugh, at your expense.”
Weiye Loh

The disappearing Yale-NUS article « The Mind Game - 0 views

findmuck.wordpress.com/...-disappearing-yale-nus-article

Censorship Education

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • I saw: “Comparing Yale in NUS and Cornell in Qatar“. Sounded quite interesting since I did read a bit about this Cornell in Qatar thing — uhh, in case I wanted to go somewhere where I could meet some oil tycoon’s daughter. So I clicked on the link and got:
  • Truth be told, I wasn’t thatttt interested — until it was taken down and hidden. I had to get my hands on those forbidden fruits! There was this other article that compared USP and YNC to show that there wasn’t much real difference in substance — only in surface packaging. And EVEN THEN, that five page of criticism wasn’t removed. So if this one got removed, it must be bleeding bleeding nasty. I had to see it. I just had to see it
  • I figured the most asshole thing I could do would be to reproduce the entire article here. But the crux of the article is essentially this: According to Cornell University’s own site, “Cornell is the first American university ever to offer its M.D. degree outside the United States.” The degree of involvement of Cornell in its Qatar campus differs markedly in two aspects. firstly, the same degree is awarded to students from both campuses. Secondly, the Qatar campus is featured both on cornell.edu/visiting/qatar and on qatar-weill.cornell.edu — both sites hosted by Cornell University. As of the time of writing, we know that YNC degrees will be awarded by NUS, and the only website featuring YNC is hosted by NUS (ync.nus.edu.sg).
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  • Three questions: 1. How Yale will the Yale-NUS thing be? 2. Why does Yale seem so much more reserved and passive, as compared to Cornell in Qatar? 3. Above all — Why did the article disappear suddenly? I can’t quite grasp the implications of this article — unless there was a really gross factual error. Normally, mistakes are just edited out later on anyway — unless there is something wrong with the core of the article. ….Of course, it could have just been a technical failure.
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » What the Google Books Battle Really Means - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...ogle-books-battle-really-means

Google Books Copyright

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Google Books allows users to search a massive database of books — Google has digitized more than 15 million, and its ambition is to eventually reach all the books ever printed.  Google does not allow access to copyrighted books unless it has an agreement with a book’s publisher. Instead, users receive a list of books that include their search term.  Click on a book, and Google shows as much as its publisher has authorized, or, if there is no agreement with the publisher, Google shows only a few lines of text containing the relevant terms.
  • Google Books also provides — for the first time — access to millions of what are called  “orphan works.”  These are books that are out of print, but remain under copyright.  Google Books makes orphan works searchable too.  And that turns out to be extremely important.
  • The orphan problem arises because most books go out of print very quickly. A few copies may be available in used book stores or filed away in library stacks.  But for most purposes, these books might as well not exist.  Copyright, on the other hand, lasts a very long time — currently, the life of the author plus 70 years.  So for millions of books that are out of print and remain under copyright, would-be users — i.e., anyone who wishes to re-print the book, or to use it in a derivative work — must seek permission.
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  • The problem is that owners are often hard to find.  This is especially true as the decades pass.  Owners die, and copyright passes to heirs.  But there is no reliable record of copyright ownership.  As a result, it is often impossible to find anyone to ask for permission. By opening up this treasure trove of orphan works, Google Books may make a truly major contribution to nearly every field of writing imaginable.
  • The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google, arguing that by scanning copyrighted books into their database, and by distributing snippets from them, Google violated their copyrights.  Google disagreed, arguing that its copying was fair use.  But before the issues could be determined by a court, the parties settled. The settlement was, characteristically for Google, a masterstroke of creativity.  In return for modest payments to Guild and AAP members, Google obtained copyright immunity for its Google Books project.  But the settlement sought to do more — Google would be free to include orphan works in its database — even though the authors of these works, by definition, were not represented in the settlement negotiations.  Royalties would be directed to the owners of orphan works if they later surfaced.
  • The federal judge overseeing the dispute, however, rejected this settlement, in part because he didn’t like that it required authors to “opt-out” of it rather than “opt-in.”
  • A better option is for Congress to step in.  Legislation has been pending in Congress for several years that would ease the orphan works problem.  If passed, it would allow those who have made a reasonable search to use that work. And if the owner later surfaces, the user need only pay a reasonable license fee.  So under these revised rules, Google Books could include orphan works, and be assured that it would be liable only for the fair value of a license — exactly the type of compensation that they envisioned in the settlement.   And, importantly, firms other than Google –perhaps public libraries — could do so as well.
  • however, the orphan works legislation has been bottled up in Congress, due mostly to the objections of commercial photographers, who fear that the special difficulties of finding owners of visual works will deprive them of fair compensation.
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
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF)
  • How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system react, now that it had been soundly refuted? At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A new message arrived, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute. Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials' new pronouncement: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the prophecy!
  • This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
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  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
  • We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
  • Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."
  • when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.
Weiye Loh

Politics and self-confidence trump education on climate change - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...ucation-for-climate-change.ars

Politics Climate Science Education Climate Change

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • One set of polls, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, focused on a set of rural areas, including Alaska, the Gulf Coast, and Appalachia. These probably don't reflect the US as a whole, but the pollsters had about 9,500 respondents. The second, published in the The Sociological Quarterly, took advantage of a decade's worth of Earth Day polls conducted by Gallup.
  • Both surveys asked similar questions, however, including whether climate change has occurred and whether humans were likely to be the primary cause. The scientific community, including all the major scientific organizations that have issued statements on the matter, has said yes to both of these questions, and the authors interpret their findings in light of that.
  • The UNH poll shows that a strong majority—in the 80-90 percent range—accepts that climate change is happening. The Gallup polls explicitly asked about global warming and got lower percentages, although it still found that a majority of the US thinks the climate is changing. Those who label themselves conservatives, however, are notably less likely to even accept that basic point; less than half of them do, while the majority of liberals and independents do.
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  • Although there was widespread acceptance that climate change was occurring, Democrats were much more likely to ascribe it to human causes (margins ranged from 20 to 50 percent). Independents were somewhere in the middle. Among those who claimed to understand the topic well, the gap actually increased.
  • Republicans with a high degree of confidence in their knowledge of the climate were more likely to dismiss the scientific community's opinion; the highly confident Democrats were more likely to embrace it. The authors caution, however, that "The survey answers thus reflect self-confidence, which has an untested relation to knowledge."
  • The people working with Gallup data performed the same analysis, and found precisely the same thing: the more registered Republicans and those who describe themselves as conservatives thought they knew about anthropogenic climate change, the less likely they were to accept the evidence for it. For Democrats and independents, the opposite was true (same for self-styled moderates and liberals). This group also did a slightly different check, and broke out opinions on global warming based on education and political leanings. For Democrats and independents, increased education boosted their readiness to accept the scientific community's conclusions. For self-styled conservatives, education had almost no effect (it gave a slight boost in registered Republicans).
  • Because this group had temporal data, they could track the progression of this liberal/conservative gap. It existed back in the first year they had data, 2001, but the gap was relatively stable until about 2008. At that point, acceptance among conservatives plunged, leading to the current gap of over 40 percentage points (up from less than 20) between these groups.
  • Both groups also come to similar conclusions about why this gap has developed. The piece in The Sociological Quarterly is appropriately sociological, suggesting that modernizing forces have compelled most societies to deal with the "negative consequences of industrial capitalism," such as pollution. Climate change, for these authors, is a case where the elites of conservative politics have convinced their followers to protect capitalism from any negative associations.
  • The UNH group takes a more nuanced, psychological view of matters. "'Biased assimilation' has been demonstrated in experiments that find people reject information about the existence of a problem if they object to its possible solutions," they note, before later stating that many appear to be "basing their beliefs about science and physical reality on what they thought would be the political implications if human-caused climate change were true."
  • neither group offers a satisfying solution. The sociologists simply warn that the culture wars have reached potentially dangerous proportions when it comes to climate science, while the group from New Hampshire suggests we might have to wait until an unambiguous consequence, like the loss of Arctic ice in the summer, for some segments of society to come around.
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11
     
    when it comes to climate change, politics dominates, eclipsing self-assessed knowledge and general education. In fact, it appears that your political persuasion might determine whether an education will make you more or less likely to believe the scientific community.
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.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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

Android phones record user-locations according to research | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...d-phones-record-user-locations

Location Android Apple Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The discovery that Android devices - which are quickly becoming the best-selling products in the smartphone space - also collect location data indicates how essential such information has become to their effective operation. "Location services", which can help place a user on a map, are increasingly seen as important for providing enhanced services including advertising - which forms the basis of Google's business.
  • Smartphones running Google's Android software collect data about the user's movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain. The discovery, made by a Swedish researcher, comes as the Democratic senator Al Franken has written to Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why iPhones keep a secret file recording the location of their users as they move around, as the Guardian revealed this week.
  • Magnus Eriksson, a Swedish programmer, has shown that Android phones – now the bestselling smartphones – do the same, though for a shorter period. According to files discovered by Android devices keep a record of the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts that it has communicated with, and the last 200 Wi-Fi networks that it has "seen". These are overwritten, oldest first, when the relevant list is full. It is not yet known whether the lists are sent to Google. That differs from Apple, where the data is stored for up to a year.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In addition, the file is not easily accessible to users: it requires some computer skills to extract the data. By contrast, the Apple file is easily extracted directly from the computer or phone.
  • Senator Franken has asked Jobs to explain the purpose and extent of the iPhone's tracking. "The existence of this information - stored in an unencrypted format - raises serious privacy concerns," Franken writes in his letter to Jobs. "Anyone who gains access to this single file could likely determine the location of a user's home, the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend, and the trips he has taken - over the past months or even a year."
  • Franken points out that a stolen or lost iPhone or iPad could be used to map out its owner's precise movements "for months at a time" and that it is not limited by age, meaning that it could track the movements of users who are under 13
  • security researcher, Alex Levinson, says that he discovered the file inside the iPhone last year, and that it has been used in the US by the police in a number of cases. He says that its purpose is simply to help the phone determine its location, and that he has seen no evidence that it is sent back to Apple. However documents lodged by Apple with the US Congress suggest that it does use the data if the user agrees to give the company "diagnostic information" from their iPhone or iPad.
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