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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.

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.

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.

This is why, for example, large numbers of Americans oppose the idea of an estate tax even though the current form of the tax, slated to return in 2011, is very unlikely to affect them or their estates. In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor. There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally. The bailout for General Motors’ labor unions wasn’t so popular either—again, obviously not because of any bias against the wealthy but because a basic sense of fairness was violated. As of November 2010, congressional Democrats are of a mixed mind as to whether the Bush tax cuts should expire for those whose annual income exceeds $250,000; that is in large part because their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.

envy is usually local. At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It’s directed at the husband of your wife’s sister, because the brand of beer he stocks costs $3 a case more than yours, and so on. That’s another reason why a lot of people aren’t so bothered by income or wealth inequality at the macro level. Most of us don’t compare ourselves to billionaires. Gore Vidal put it honestly: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”

Occasionally the cynic in me wonders why so many relatively well-off intellectuals lead the egalitarian charge against the privileges of the wealthy. One group has the status currency of money and the other has the status currency of intellect, so might they be competing for overall social regard? The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most. That class composes a very small group, however, so the upshot is that growing income inequality won’t necessarily have major political implications at the macro level.

All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.

The numbers are clear: Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top. The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues, namely income growth at the very top of the distribution and greater inequality throughout the distribution. The first trend is much more pronounced than the second, although the two are often confused.

When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1

At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973. But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.

The broader change in income distribution, the one occurring beneath the very top earners, can be deconstructed in a manner that makes nearly all of it look harmless. For instance, there is usually greater inequality of income among both older people and the more highly educated, if only because there is more time and more room for fortunes to vary. Since America is becoming both older and more highly educated, our measured income inequality will increase pretty much by demographic fiat. Economist Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia estimates that these demographic effects explain three-quarters of the observed rise in income inequality for men, and even more for women.2

Attacking the problem from a different angle, other economists are challenging whether there is much growth in inequality at all below the super-rich. For instance, real incomes are measured using a common price index, yet poorer people are more likely to shop at discount outlets like Wal-Mart, which have seen big price drops over the past twenty years.3 Once we take this behavior into account, it is unclear whether the real income gaps between the poor and middle class have been widening much at all. Robert J. Gordon, an economist from Northwestern University who is hardly known as a right-wing apologist, wrote in a recent paper that “there was no increase of inequality after 1993 in the bottom 99 percent of the population”, and that whatever overall change there was “can be entirely explained by the behavior of income in the top 1 percent.”4

And so we come again to the gains of the top earners, clearly the big story told by the data. It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there. It also seems that most of the income gains of the top earners were related to performance pay—bonuses, in other words—and not wildly out-of-whack yearly salaries.5

It is also the case that any society with a lot of “threshold earners” is likely to experience growing income inequality. A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.

The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice. Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness. What isn’t so widely advertised is that those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality. Not only is high inequality an inevitable concomitant of human diversity, but growing income inequality may be, too, if lots of us take the kind of advice that will make us happier.

Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?

Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh have recently provided a detailed estimation of particular American incomes.6 Their data do not comprise the entire U.S. population, but from partial financial records they find a very strong role for the financial sector in driving the trend toward income concentration at the top. For instance, for 2004, nonfinancial executives of publicly traded companies accounted for less than 6 percent of the top 0.01 percent income bracket. In that same year, the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all of the CEOs from the entire S&P 500. The number of Wall Street investors earning more than $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public company executives earning that amount. The authors also relate that they shared their estimates with a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, one who also has a Wall Street background. He thought their estimates of earnings in the financial sector were, if anything, understated.

Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance. After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top. Yet many high-earning lawyers are doing financial deals, so a lot of the income generated through legal activity is rooted in finance. Other lawyers are defending corporations against lawsuits, filing lawsuits or helping corporations deal with complex regulations. The returns to these activities are an artifact of the growing complexity of the law and government growth rather than a tale of markets per se. Finance aside, there isn’t much of a story of market failure here, even if we don’t find the results aesthetically appealing.

When it comes to professional athletes and celebrities, there isn’t much of a mystery as to what has happened. Tiger Woods earns much more, even adjusting for inflation, than Arnold Palmer ever did. J.K. Rowling, the first billionaire author, earns much more than did Charles Dickens. These high incomes come, on balance, from the greater reach of modern communications and marketing. Kids all over the world read about Harry Potter. There is more purchasing power to spend on children’s books and, indeed, on culture and celebrities more generally. For high-earning celebrities, hardly anyone finds these earnings so morally objectionable as to suggest that they be politically actionable. Cultural critics can complain that good schoolteachers earn too little, and they may be right, but that does not make celebrities into political targets. They’re too popular. It’s also pretty clear that most of them work hard to earn their money, by persuading fans to buy or otherwise support their product. Most of these individuals do not come from elite or extremely privileged backgrounds, either. They worked their way to the top, and even if Rowling is not an author for the ages, her books tapped into the spirit of their time in a special way. We may or may not wish to tax the wealthy, including wealthy celebrities, at higher rates, but there is no need to “cure” the structural causes of higher celebrity incomes.

to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.

The first factor driving high returns is sometimes called by practitioners “going short on volatility.” Sometimes it is called “negative skewness.” In plain English, this means that some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices. Most of the time investors will do well by this strategy, since big, unexpected moves are outliers by definition. Traders will earn above-average returns in good times. In bad times they won’t suffer fully when catastrophic returns come in, as sooner or later is bound to happen, because the downside of these bets is partly socialized onto the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the taxpayers and the unemployed.

if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad. Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs.

To this mix we can add the fact that many money managers are investing other people’s money. If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses. And let’s say the whole thing does blow up in your face? What’s the worst that can happen? Your bosses fire you, but you will still have millions in the bank and that MBA from Harvard or Wharton. For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early. Furthermore, if everyone else made more or less the same mistake (very surprising major events, such as a busted housing market, affect virtually everybody), you’re hardly disgraced. You might even get rehired at another investment bank, or maybe a hedge fund, within months or even weeks.

Moreover, smart shareholders will acquiesce to or even encourage these gambles. They gain on the upside, while the downside, past the point of bankruptcy, is borne by the firm’s creditors. And will the bondholders object? Well, they might have a difficult time monitoring the internal trading operations of financial institutions. Of course, the firm’s trading book cannot be open to competitors, and that means it cannot be open to bondholders (or even most shareholders) either. So what, exactly, will they have in hand to object to?

Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside. Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly. Guaranteeing the debt also encourages equity holders to take more risk. While current bailouts have not in general maintained equity values, and while share prices have often fallen to near zero following the bust of a major bank, the bailouts still give the bank a lifeline. Instead of the bank being destroyed, sometimes those equity prices do climb back out of the hole. This is true of the major surviving banks in the United States, and even AIG is paying back its bailout. For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.

there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good. “Going short on volatility” is a dangerous strategy from a social point of view. For one thing, in so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large. But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.

And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve System has recapitalized major U.S. banks by paying interest on bank reserves and by keeping an unusually high interest rate spread, which allows banks to borrow short from Treasury at near-zero rates and invest in other higher-yielding assets and earn back lots of money rather quickly. In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks.

the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality. In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance. Simon Johnson tabulates the numbers nicely: From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.7

There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue. Let’s say that some news hits the market and that traders interpret this news at different speeds. One trader figures out what the news means in a second, while the other traders require five seconds. Still other traders require an entire day or maybe even a month to figure things out. The early traders earn the extra money. They buy the proper assets early, at the lower prices, and reap most of the gains when the other, later traders pile on. Similarly, if you buy into a successful tech company in the early stages, you are “moving first” in a very effective manner, and you will capture most of the gains if that company hits it big.

The moving-first phenomenon sums to a “winner-take-all” market. Only some relatively small number of traders, sometimes just one trader, can be first. Those who are first will make far more than those who are fourth or fifth. This difference will persist, even if those who are fourth come pretty close to competing with those who are first. In this context, first is first and it doesn’t matter much whether those who come in fourth pile on a month, a minute or a fraction of a second later. Those who bought (or sold, as the case may be) first have captured and locked in most of the available gains. Since gains are concentrated among the early winners, and the closeness of the runner-ups doesn’t so much matter for income distribution, asset-market trading thus encourages the ongoing concentration of wealth. Many investors make lots of mistakes and lose their money, but each year brings a new bunch of projects that can turn the early investors and traders into very wealthy individuals.

These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related. Let’s say that Goldman Sachs regularly secures a lot of the best and quickest trades, whether because of its quality analysis, inside connections or high-frequency trading apparatus (it has all three). It builds up a treasure chest of profits and continues to hire very sharp traders and to receive valuable information. Those profits allow it to make “short on volatility” bets faster than anyone else, because if it messes up, it still has a large enough buffer to pad losses. This increases the odds that Goldman will repeatedly pull in spectacular profits.

Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have. It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw. In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades? Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it. And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.

What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control; it just isn’t that easy to oversee a balance sheet with hundreds of billions of dollars on it, especially when short-term positions are wound down before quarterly inspections. It’s also not clear how well regulators can identify risky assets. Some of the worst excesses of the financial crisis were grounded in mortgage-backed assets—a very traditional function of banks—not exotic derivatives trading strategies. Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.

For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism. It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem. The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.

Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.

Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice. Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions. Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty. Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).

We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are. Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe. They are sitting on money rather than lending it out. The biggest risk today is how few parties will take risks, and, in part, the caution of banks is driving our current protracted economic slowdown. According to this view, the long run will bring another financial crisis once moods pick up and external scrutiny weakens, but that day of reckoning is still some ways off.

Is the overall picture a shame? Yes. Is it distorting resource distribution and productivity in the meantime? Yes. Will it again bring our economy to its knees? Probably. Maybe that’s simply the price of modern society. Income inequality will likely continue to rise and we will search in vain for the appropriate political remedies for our underlying problems.

thanks to Wikileaks, the world has been enlightened to the fact that the Obama administration not only refused to prosecute these individuals itself, it also exerted pressure on the governments of Germany and Spain not to prosecute, or even indict, any of the torturers or war criminals from the Bush dictatorship.

we see many right-wing commentators demanding that Assange be hunted down, with some even calling for his murder, on the grounds that he may have endangered lives by releasing confidential government documents. Yet, for the right-wing, this apparently was not a concern when the late columnist Robert Novak "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame after her husband Joseph Wilson authored an OP-ED piece in The New York Times criticizing the motivations for waging war against Iraq. Even though there was evidence of involvement within the highest echelons of the Bush dictatorship, only one person, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted and convicted of "outing" Plame to Novak. And, despite the fact that this "outing" potentially endangered the lives of Plame's overseas contacts, Bush commuted Libby's thirty-month prison sentence, calling it "excessive."

Why the disparity? The answer is simple: The Plame "outing" served the interests of the military-industrial complex and helped to conceal the Bush dictatorship's lies, tortures and war crimes, while Wikileaks not only exposed such evils, but also revealed how Obama's administration, and Obama himself, are little more than "snake oil" merchants pontificating about government accountability while undermining it at every turn.

When the United States Constitution was being created, a conflict emerged between delegates who wanted a strong federal government (the Federalists) and those who wanted a weak federal government (the anti-Federalists). Although the Federalists won the day, one of the most distinguished anti-Federalists, George Mason, refused to sign the new Constitution, sacrificing in the process, some historians say, a revered place amongst America's founding fathers. Two of Mason's concerns were that the Constitution did not contain a Bill of Rights, and that the presidential pardon powers would allow corrupt presidents to pardon people who had committed crimes on presidential orders.

Mason's concerns about the abuse of the pardon powers were eventually proven right when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, when Ronald Reagan pardoned FBI agents convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins, and when George H.W. Bush pardoned six individuals involved in the Iran-Contra Affair.

Mason was also proven right after the Federalists realized that the States would not ratify the Constitution unless a Bill of Rights was added. But this was done begrudgingly, as demonstrated by America's second president, Federalist John Adams, who essentially destroyed the right to freedom of speech via the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to say, write or publish anything critical of the United States government.

Most criminals break laws that others have created, and people who assist in exposing or apprehending them are usually lauded as heroes. But with the "espionage" acts, the criminals themselves have actually created laws to conceal their crimes, and exploit these laws to penalize people who expose them.

The problem with America's system of government is that it has become too easy, and too convenient, to simply stamp "classified" on documents that reveal acts of government corruption, cover-up, mendacity and malfeasance, or to withhold them "in the interest of national security." Given this web of secrecy, is it any wonder why so many Americans are still skeptical about the "official" versions of the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, or the events surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001?

I want to believe that the Wikileaks documents will change America for the better. But what undoubtedly will happen is a repetition of the past: those who expose government crimes and cover-ups will be prosecuted or branded as criminals; new laws will be passed to silence dissent; new Liebermans will arise to intimidate the corporate-controlled media; and new ways will be found to conceal the truth.

What Wikileaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic and content to lose themselves in one or more of the addictions American culture offers, be it drugs, alcohol, the Internet, video games, celebrity gossip, text-messaging-in essence anything that serves to divert attention from the harshness of reality.

the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts from being aware of these evils can be paralyzing, especially when accentuated by the knowledge that government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes

“It was just too sensitive, and we didn’t want to go there,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. “You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.”

The second article focuses on innovations in high frequency trading in financial markets, which bears some responsibility for the so-called "flash crash" of May 6th last year, in which the DJIA plunged more than 700 points in just minutes.

One debate has focused on whether some traders are firing off fake orders thousands of times a second to slow down exchanges and mislead others. Michael Durbin, who helped build high-frequency trading systems for companies like Citadel and is the author of the book “All About High-Frequency Trading,” says that most of the industry is legitimate and benefits investors. But, he says, the rules need to be strengthened to curb some disturbing practices.

This situation raises what I see to be core questions in the governance of innovation -- to what degree can innovation be shaped for achieving intended purposes? and, To what degree can the consequences of innovation be anticipated?

But even when the perfect liver became available a few days after she was put on the list, doctors could not operate. What made Nataline different from most transplant patients, and what eventually brought her case to the attention of much of the country, was that her survival did not depend on the availability of an organ or her clinicians or even the quality of care she received. It rested on her health insurance company.

Cigna had denied the initial request to cover the costs of the liver transplant. And the insurer persisted in its refusal, claiming that the treatment was “experimental” and unproven, and despite numerous pleas from Nataline’s physicians to the contrary.

But as relatives and friends organized campaigns to draw public attention to Nataline’s plight, the insurance conglomerate found itself embroiled in a public relations nightmare, one that could jeopardize its very existence. The company reversed its decision. But the change came too late. Nataline died just a few hours after Cigna authorized the transplant.

Mr. Potter was the head of corporate communications at two major insurers, first at Humana and then at Cigna. Now Mr. Potter has written a fascinating book that details the methods he and his colleagues used to manipulate public opinion

Mr. Potter goes on to describe the myth-making he did, interspersing descriptions of front groups, paid spies and jiggered studies with a deft retelling of the convoluted (and usually eye-glazing) history of health care insurance policies.

We learn that executives at Cigna worried that Nataline’s situation would only add fire to the growing public discontent with a health care system anchored by private insurance. As the case drew more national attention, the threat of a legislative overhaul that would ban for-profit insurers became real, and Mr. Potter found himself working on the biggest P.R. campaign of his career.

Cigna hired a large international law firm and a P.R. firm already well known to them from previous work aimed at discrediting Michael Moore and his film “Sicko.” Together with Cigna, these outside firms waged a campaign that would eventually include the aggressive placement of articles with friendly “third party” reporters, editors and producers who would “disabuse the media, politicians and the public of the notion that Nataline would have gotten the transplant if she had lived in Canada or France or England or any other developed country.” A “spy” was dispatched to Nataline’s funeral; and when the Sarkisyan family filed a lawsuit against the insurer, a team of lawyers was assigned to keep track of actions and comments by the family’s lawyer.

In the end, however, Nataline’s death proved to be the final straw for Mr. Potter. “It became clearer to me than ever that I was part of an industry that would do whatever it took to perpetuate its extraordinarily profitable existence,” he writes. “I had sold my soul.” He left corporate public relations for good less than six months after her death.

“I don’t mean to imply that all people who work for health insurance companies are greedier or more evil than other Americans,” he writes. “In fact, many of them feel — and justifiably so — that they are helping millions of people get they care they need.” The real problem, he says, lies in the fact that the United States “has entrusted one of the most important societal functions, providing health care, to private health insurance companies.” Therefore, the top executives of these companies become beholden not to the patients they have pledged to cover, but to the shareholders who hold them responsible for the bottom line.

BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration.”

The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.

He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.

He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months. “Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said. “But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job.”

Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.

PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.

“Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.” And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71.

Unlike the drum language, which was based on spoken language, the optical telegraph was based on written French. Chappe invented an elaborate coding system to translate written messages into optical signals. Chappe had the opposite problem from the drummers. The drummers had a fast transmission system with ambiguous messages. They needed to slow down the transmission to make the messages unambiguous. Chappe had a painfully slow transmission system with redundant messages. The French language, like most alphabetic languages, is highly redundant, using many more letters than are needed to convey the meaning of a message. Chappe’s coding system allowed messages to be transmitted faster. Many common phrases and proper names were encoded by only two optical symbols, with a substantial gain in speed of transmission. The composer and the reader of the message had code books listing the message codes for eight thousand phrases and names. For Napoleon it was an advantage to have a code that was effectively cryptographic, keeping the content of the messages secret from citizens along the route.

After these two historical examples of rapid communication in Africa and France, the rest of Gleick’s book is about the modern development of information technolog

The modern history is dominated by two Americans, Samuel Morse and Claude Shannon. Samuel Morse was the inventor of Morse Code. He was also one of the pioneers who built a telegraph system using electricity conducted through wires instead of optical pointers deployed on towers. Morse launched his electric telegraph in 1838 and perfected the code in 1844. His code used short and long pulses of electric current to represent letters of the alphabet.

Morse was ideologically at the opposite pole from Chappe. He was not interested in secrecy or in creating an instrument of government power. The Morse system was designed to be a profit-making enterprise, fast and cheap and available to everybody. At the beginning the price of a message was a quarter of a cent per letter. The most important users of the system were newspaper correspondents spreading news of local events to readers all over the world. Morse Code was simple enough that anyone could learn it. The system provided no secrecy to the users. If users wanted secrecy, they could invent their own secret codes and encipher their messages themselves. The price of a message in cipher was higher than the price of a message in plain text, because the telegraph operators could transcribe plain text faster. It was much easier to correct errors in plain text than in cipher.

Claude Shannon was the founding father of information theory. For a hundred years after the electric telegraph, other communication systems such as the telephone, radio, and television were invented and developed by engineers without any need for higher mathematics. Then Shannon supplied the theory to understand all of these systems together, defining information as an abstract quantity inherent in a telephone message or a television picture. Shannon brought higher mathematics into the game.

When Shannon was a boy growing up on a farm in Michigan, he built a homemade telegraph system using Morse Code. Messages were transmitted to friends on neighboring farms, using the barbed wire of their fences to conduct electric signals. When World War II began, Shannon became one of the pioneers of scientific cryptography, working on the high-level cryptographic telephone system that allowed Roosevelt and Churchill to talk to each other over a secure channel. Shannon’s friend Alan Turing was also working as a cryptographer at the same time, in the famous British Enigma project that successfully deciphered German military codes. The two pioneers met frequently when Turing visited New York in 1943, but they belonged to separate secret worlds and could not exchange ideas about cryptography.

In 1945 Shannon wrote a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” which was stamped SECRET and never saw the light of day. He published in 1948 an expurgated version of the 1945 paper with the title “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The 1948 version appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal, the house journal of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and became an instant classic. It is the founding document for the modern science of information. After Shannon, the technology of information raced ahead, with electronic computers, digital cameras, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live

The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.

Gordon Moore was in the hardware business, making hardware components for electronic machines, and he stated his law as a law of growth for hardware. But the law applies also to the information that the hardware is designed to embody. The purpose of the hardware is to store and process information. The storage of information is called memory, and the processing of information is called computing. The consequence of Moore’s Law for information is that the price of memory and computing decreases and the available amount of memory and computing increases by a factor of a hundred every decade. The flood of hardware becomes a flood of information.

In 1949, one year after Shannon published the rules of information theory, he drew up a table of the various stores of memory that then existed. The biggest memory in his table was the US Library of Congress, which he estimated to contain one hundred trillion bits of information. That was at the time a fair guess at the sum total of recorded human knowledge. Today a memory disc drive storing that amount of information weighs a few pounds and can be bought for about a thousand dollars. Information, otherwise known as data, pours into memories of that size or larger, in government and business offices and scientific laboratories all over the world. Gleick quotes the computer scientist Jaron Lanier describing the effect of the flood: “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.”

On December 8, 2010, Gleick published on the The New York Review’s blog an illuminating essay, “The Information Palace.” It was written too late to be included in his book. It describes the historical changes of meaning of the word “information,” as recorded in the latest quarterly online revision of the Oxford English Dictionary. The word first appears in 1386 a parliamentary report with the meaning “denunciation.” The history ends with the modern usage, “information fatigue,” defined as “apathy, indifference or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information.”

The consequences of the information flood are not all bad. One of the creative enterprises made possible by the flood is Wikipedia, started ten years ago by Jimmy Wales. Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it. Distrust and productive use are not incompatible. Wikipedia is the ultimate open source repository of information. Everyone is free to read it and everyone is free to write it. It contains articles in 262 languages written by several million authors. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate. It is often unreliable because many of the authors are ignorant or careless. It is often accurate because the articles are edited and corrected by readers who are better informed than the authors

Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon’s law of reliable communication. Shannon’s law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The rapid growth of the flood of information in the last ten years made Wikipedia possible, and the same flood made twenty-first-century science possible. Twenty-first-century science is dominated by huge stores of information that we call databases. The information flood has made it easy and cheap to build databases. One example of a twenty-first-century database is the collection of genome sequences of living creatures belonging to various species from microbes to humans. Each genome contains the complete genetic information that shaped the creature to which it belongs. The genome data-base is rapidly growing and is available for scientists all over the world to explore. Its origin can be traced to the year 1939, when Shannon wrote his Ph.D. thesis with the title “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.

Shannon was then a graduate student in the mathematics department at MIT. He was only dimly aware of the possible physical embodiment of genetic information. The true physical embodiment of the genome is the double helix structure of DNA molecules, discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson fourteen years later. In 1939 Shannon understood that the basis of genetics must be information, and that the information must be coded in some abstract algebra independent of its physical embodiment. Without any knowledge of the double helix, he could not hope to guess the detailed structure of the genetic code. He could only imagine that in some distant future the genetic information would be decoded and collected in a giant database that would define the total diversity of living creatures. It took only sixty years for his dream to come true.

In the twentieth century, genomes of humans and other species were laboriously decoded and translated into sequences of letters in computer memories. The decoding and translation became cheaper and faster as time went on, the price decreasing and the speed increasing according to Moore’s Law. The first human genome took fifteen years to decode and cost about a billion dollars. Now a human genome can be decoded in a few weeks and costs a few thousand dollars. Around the year 2000, a turning point was reached, when it became cheaper to produce genetic information than to understand it. Now we can pass a piece of human DNA through a machine and rapidly read out the genetic information, but we cannot read out the meaning of the information. We shall not fully understand the information until we understand in detail the processes of embryonic development that the DNA orchestrated to make us what we are.

The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information. The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems. In the living and in the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest. Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannon’s discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.

. Lord Kelvin, one of the leading physicists of that time, promoted the heat death dogma, predicting that the flow of heat from warmer to cooler objects will result in a decrease of temperature differences everywhere, until all temperatures ultimately become equal. Life needs temperature differences, to avoid being stifled by its waste heat. So life will disappear

Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox. The best popular account of the disappearance of the paradox is a chapter, “How Order Was Born of Chaos,” in the book Creation of the Universe, by Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian.2 Fang Lizhi is doubly famous as a leading Chinese astronomer and a leading political dissident. He is now pursuing his double career at the University of Arizona.

The belief in a heat death was based on an idea that I call the cooking rule. The cooking rule says that a piece of steak gets warmer when we put it on a hot grill. More generally, the rule says that any object gets warmer when it gains energy, and gets cooler when it loses energy. Humans have been cooking steaks for thousands of years, and nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire. The cooking rule is true for objects small enough for us to handle. If the cooking rule is always true, then Lord Kelvin’s argument for the heat death is correct.

the cooking rule is not true for objects of astronomical size, for which gravitation is the dominant form of energy. The sun is a familiar example. As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.

The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information.

A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in a famous story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.3 Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe.

Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition:We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

That’s when I wrote my last significant piece for Skeptic North.  Titled, “Rodney Palmer: When Pseudoscience and Narcissism Collide,” it was a fiery take-down of every claim I heard Palmer speak before the committee, as well as reiterating some of his undisclosed collusion, unethical media tactics, and some reasons why he should not be considered an expert.

This time, the article got a lot more reader eyeballs than anything I had ever written for this blog (or my own) and it also caught the attention of someone on a school board which was poised to vote on wifi.  In these regards: Mission very accomplished.  I finally thought that I might be able to see some people in the media start to look at Palmer’s claims with a more critical eye than they had been previously, and I was flattered at the mountain of kind words, re-tweets, reddit comments and Facebook “likes.”

The comments section was mostly supportive of my article, and they were one of the few things that kept me from hiding in a hole for six weeks.  There were a few comments in opposition to what I wrote, some sensible, most incoherent rambling (one commenter, when asked for evidence, actually linked to a YouTube video which they referred to as “peer reviewed”)

One commenter was none other than the titular subject of the post, Rodney Palmer himself.  Here is a screen shot of what he said: Screen shot of the Libel/Slander threat.

Knowing full well the story of the libel threat against Simon Singh, I’ve always thought that if ever a threat like that came my way, I’d happily beat it back with the righteous fury and good humour of a person with the facts on their side.  After all, if I’m wrong, you’d be able to prove me wrong, rather than try to shut me up with a threat of a lawsuit.  Indeed, I’ve been through a similar situation once before, so I should be an old hat at this! Let me tell you friends, it’s not that easy.  In fact, it’s awful.  Outside observers could easily identify that Palmer had no case against me, but that was still cold comfort to me.  It is a very stressful situation to find yourself in.

The state of libel and slander laws in this country are such that a person can threaten a lawsuit without actually threatening a lawsuit.  There is no need to hire a lawyer to investigate the claims, look into who I am, where I live, where I work, and issue a carefully worded threatening letter demanding compliance.  All a person has to say is some version of  “Libel.  Slander.  Hmmmm….,” and that’s enough to spook a lot of people into backing off. It’s a modern day bogeyman.  They don’t have to prove it.  They don’t have to act on it.  A person or organization just has to say “BOO!” with sufficient seriousness, and unless you’ve got a good deal of editorial and financial support, discussion goes out the window. Libel Chill refers to the ‘chilling effect’ that the possibility of a libel/slander lawsuit has.  If a person is scared they might get sued, then they won’t even comment on a piece at all.  In my case, I had already commented three times on the wifi scaremongering, but this bogus threat against me was surely a major contributing factor to my not commenting again.

I ceased to discuss anything in the comment thread of the original article, and even shied away from other comment threads, calling me out.  I learned a great deal about the wifi/EMF issue since I wrote the article, but I did not comment on any of it, because I knew that Palmer and his supporters were watching me like a hawk (sorry to stretch the simile), and would likely try to silence me again.  I couldn’t risk a lawsuit.  Even though I knew there was no case against me, I couldn’t afford a lawyer just to prove that I didn’t do anything illegal.

The Libel and Slanders Act of Ontario, 1990 hasn’t really caught up with the internet.  There isn’t a clear precedent that defines a blog post, Twitter feed or Facebook post as falling under the umbrella of “broadcast,” which is what the bill addresses.  If I had written the original article in print, Palmer would have had six weeks to file suit against me.  But the internet is only kind of considered ‘broadcast.’  So it could be just six weeks, but he could also have up to two years to act and get a lawyer after me.  Truth is, there’s not a clear demarcation point for our Canadian legal system.

Libel laws in Canada are somewhere in between the Plaintiff-favoured UK system, and the Defendant-favoured US system.  On the one hand, if Palmer chose to incur the expense and time to hire a lawyer and file suit against me, the burden of proof would be on me to prove that I did not act with malice.  Easy peasy.  On the other hand, I would have a strong case that I acted in the best interests of Canadians, which would fall under the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision on protecting what has been termed, “Responsible Communication.”  The Supreme Court of Canada decision does not grant bloggers immunity from libel and slander suits, but it is a healthy dose of welcome freedom to discuss issues of importance to Canadians.

Palmer himself did not specify anything against me in his threat.  There was nothing particular that he complained about, he just said a version of “Libel and Slander!” at me.  He may as well have said “Boo!”

This is not a DBAD discussion (although I wholeheartedly agree with Phil Plait there). 

If you’d like to boil my lessons down to an acronym, I suppose the best one would be DBRBC: Don’t be reckless. Be Careful.

I wrote a piece that, although it was not incorrect in any measurable way, was written with fire and brimstone, piss and vinegar.  I stand by my piece, but I caution others to be a little more careful with the language they use.  Not because I think it is any less or more tactically advantageous (because I’m not sure anyone can conclusively demonstrate that being an aggressive jerk is an inherently better or worse communication tool), but because the risks aren’t always worth it.

I’m not saying don’t go after a person.  There are egomaniacs out there who deserve to be called out and taken down (verbally, of course).  But be very careful with what you say.

ask yourself some questions first: 1) What goal(s) are you trying to accomplish with this piece? Are you trying to convince people that there is a scientific misunderstanding here?  Are you trying to attract the attention of the mainstream media to a particular facet of the issue?  Are you really just pissed off and want to vent a little bit?  Is this article a catharsis, or is it communicative?  Be brutally honest with your intentions, it’s not as easy as you think.  Venting is okay.  So is vicious venting, but be careful what you dress it up as.

2) In order to attain your goals, did you use data, or personalities?  If the former, are you citing the best, most current data you have available to you? Have you made a reasonable effort to check your data against any conflicting data that might be out there? If the latter, are you providing a mountain of evidence, and not just projecting onto personalities?  There is nothing inherently immoral or incorrect with going after the personalities.  But it is a very risky undertaking. You have to be damn sure you know what you’re talking about, and damn ready to defend yourself.  If you’re even a little loose with your claims, you will be called out for it, and a legal threat is very serious and stressful. So if you’re going after a personality, is it worth it?

3) Are you letting the science speak for itself?  Are you editorializing?  Are you pointing out what part of your piece is data and what part is your opinion?

4) If this piece was written in anger, frustration, or otherwise motivated by a powerful emotion, take a day.  Let your anger subside.  It will.  There are many cathartic enterprises out there, and you don’t need to react to the first one that comes your way.  Let someone else read your work before you share it with the internet.  Cooler heads definitely do think more clearly.

The Fiolas say they have health problems from the stress of the case. They say they've talked to dozens of lawyers but can't get one to sue the state, because of a cap on the amount they can recover. "It ruined my life, my wife's life and my family's life," he says. The Massachusetts attorney general's office, which charged Fiola, declined interview requests.

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.

Now the project is involved with a second set of human trials, pushing the technology to see how far it goes and trying to miniaturise it and make it wireless for a better fit in the brain. BrainGate's concept is simple. It posits that the problem for most patients does not lie in the parts of the brain that control movement, but with the fact that the pathways connecting the brain to the rest of the body, such as the spinal cord, have been broken. BrainGate plugs into the brain, picks up the right neural signals and beams them into a computer where they are translated into moving a cursor or controlling a computer keyboard. By this means, paralysed people can move a robot arm or drive their own wheelchair, just by thinking about it.

he and his team are decoding the language of the human brain. This language is made up of electronic signals fired by billions of neurons and it controls everything from our ability to move, to think, to remember and even our consciousness itself. Donoghue's genius was to develop a deceptively small device that can tap directly into the brain and pick up those signals for a computer to translate them. Gold wires are implanted into the brain's tissue at the motor cortex, which controls movement. Those wires feed back to a tiny array – an information storage device – attached to a "pedestal" in the skull. Another wire feeds from the array into a computer. A test subject with BrainGate looks like they have a large plug coming out the top of their heads. Or, as Donoghue's son once described it, they resemble the "human batteries" in The Matrix.

BrainGate's highly advanced computer programs are able to decode the neuron signals picked up by the wires and translate them into the subject's desired movement. In crude terms, it is a form of mind-reading based on the idea that thinking about moving a cursor to the right will generate detectably different brain signals than thinking about moving it to the left.

The technology has developed rapidly, and last month BrainGate passed a vital milestone when one paralysed patient went past 1,000 days with the implant still in her brain and allowing her to move a computer cursor with her thoughts. The achievement, reported in the prestigious Journal of Neural Engineering, showed that the technology can continue to work inside the human body for unprecedented amounts of time.

Donoghue talks enthusiastically of one day hooking up BrainGate to a system of electronic stimulators plugged into the muscles of the arm or legs. That would open up the prospect of patients moving not just a cursor or their wheelchair, but their own bodies.

If Nagle's motor cortex was no longer working healthily, the entire BrainGate project could have been rendered pointless. But when Nagle was plugged in and asked to imagine moving his limbs, the signals beamed out with a healthy crackle. "We asked him to imagine moving his arm to the left and to the right and we could hear the activity," Donoghue says. When Nagle first moved a cursor on a screen using only his thoughts, he exclaimed: "Holy shit!"

BrainGate and other BCI projects have also piqued the interest of the government and the military. BCI is melding man and machine like no other sector of medicine or science and there are concerns about some of the implications. First, beyond detecting and translating simple movement commands, BrainGate may one day pave the way for mind-reading. A device to probe the innermost thoughts of captured prisoners or dissidents would prove very attractive to some future military or intelligence service. Second, there is the idea that BrainGate or other BCI technologies could pave the way for robot warriors controlled by distant humans using only their minds. At a conference in 2002, a senior American defence official, Anthony Tether, enthused over BCI. "Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine." Anyone who has seen Terminator might worry about that.

Donoghue acknowledges the concerns but has little time for them. When it comes to mind-reading, current BrainGate technology has enough trouble with translating commands for making a fist, let alone probing anyone's mental secrets

As for robot warriors, Donoghue was slightly more circumspect. At the moment most BCI research, including BrainGate projects, that touch on the military is focused on working with prosthetic limbs for veterans who have lost arms and legs. But Donoghue thinks it is healthy for scientists to be aware of future issues. "As long as there is a rational dialogue and scientists think about where this is going and what is the reasonable use of the technology, then we are on a good path," he says.

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.

European politicians have their own blind spots at the interface of science and policy.  For instance, several years ago former German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel claimed rather implausibly that: "You can build 100 coal-fired power plants and don't have to have higher CO2 emissions."  His explanation was that Germany participates in emissions trading and this would necessarily limit carbon dioxide no matter how much was produced. Obviously, emissions trading cannot make the impossible possible.

We should expect policy makers to face difficulties when it comes to governance when it involves considerations of science, technology, and innovation for the simple reason that they are just like everyone else -- mostly ignorant about mostly everything.

in 2010, the US NSF reported that 28% of Americans and 34% of Europeans believed that the sun goes around the earth.  Similarly, 30% of Americans and 41% of Europeans believe that radioactivity results only from human activities.  It should not be so surprising when we learn that policy makers may share such perspectives.

A popular view is that more education about science and technology will lead to better decisions.  While education is, of course, important to a healthy democracy, it will never result in a populace (or their representatives) with expertise in everything.  

Achieving such heroic levels of expertise is not realistic for anyone.  Instead, we must rely on specialized experts to inform decision making. Just as you and I often need to consult with experts when dealing with our health, home repairs, finances, and other tasks, so too do policy makers need to tap into expertise in order to make good decisions.

it should be far less worrisome that the public or policy makers do not understand this or that information that experts may know well.  What should be of more concern is that policy makers appear to lack an understanding of how they can tap into expertise to inform decision making.  This situation is akin to flying blind. Specialized expertise typically does not compel particular decisions, but it does help to make decisions more informed.  This distinction lies behind Winston Churchill's oft-cited advice that science should be "on tap, but not on top." Effective governance does not depend upon philosopher kings in governments or in the populace, but rather on the use of effective mechanisms for bringing expertise into the political process.

It is the responsibility - even the special expertise - of policy makers to know how to use the instruments of government to bring experts into the process of governance. The troubling aspect of the statements and actions by the Gummers, Gabriels, and Bachmanns of the political world lies not in their lack of knowledge about science, but in their lack of knowledge about government.

Can any Singaporean honestly say the she/he can conceive of a fellow Singaporean setting himself or herself on fire along Orchard Road or Shenton Way, as a result of desperate economic pressures or financial constraints? Can we even fathom the social and economic pressures that mobilized a whole people to protest and overthrow a corrupt, US-backed regime? (that is, not during elections time) Singapore has real problems, the People’s Action Party has its real problems, and there is indeed much room for improvement. Yet such irresponsible reporting by one of the esteemed newspapers from the UK is utterly disappointing, not constructive in the least sense, and utterly misrepresents our political situation (and may potentially provoke more irrationality in our society, leading people to ‘believe’ their affinity with their Arab peers which leads to more radicalism).