DAVID BERNSTEIN: Conservatives, Political Correctness, and the Academy. “I do think it’s clear that many product liberal-leaning institutions, starting with the universities, are sufficiently engaged in groupthink that they lack the most basic curiosity about or knowledge of what their ideological adversaries believe, and are instead inclined to dismiss them entirely as mere evil reactionaries.”
Archive for 2009
December 1, 2009
MEGAN MCARDLE: This Is Not Your FDR’s Federal Government.
ONE GIANT SPLASH FOR MANKIND: A “space station for the sea.”
ILYA SOMIN: Against Nationalism. Cogent arguments, but it’s also the case that nations whose populace — and leaders — don’t possess some degree of irrational affection for them tend not to do well. This doesn’t mean that nationalism is good, of course, only that trying to stamp it out in a national-state system is likely to be self-defeating.
BIG GOVERNMENT: Anatomy of a Beat-Down Part 2: Why Kenneth Gladney Was Beaten And by Whom. Plus, a promise for tomorrow: “Tomorrow we will show how this small network of insiders in the leftist political power structure of St. Louis are inter-connected with the very people charged with investigating and prosecuting the individuals responsible for beating Kenneth Gladney. And, how those same people were also instrumental in the Obama Campaign in Missouri in 2008. We will show how the three month delay in bringing charges against the assailants appear to be motivated by political and personal relationships in the close-knit family that is the St. Louis Democratic Party.”
REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.
AT THE INTERNATIONAL ROBOT EXHIBITION IN JAPAN, robots for your every need.
CLIMATEGATE UPDATE: U.K. Climate Scientist to Temporarily Step Down. Pending investigation. “The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.”
UPDATE: Ron Bailey: The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate.
ANOTHER UPDATE: POPULAR MECHANICS: What East Anglia’s E-mails Really Tell Us About Climate Change.
CLIMATEGATE AND SCIENTIFIC CONDUCT: Derek Lowe offers a working scientist’s view:
I’m not actually going to comment on the climate-change aspect of all this, though. I have my own opinions, and God knows everyone else has one, too, but what I feel needs to be looked at is the scientific conduct. I’m no climatologist, but I am an experienced working scientist – so, is there a problem here?
I’ll give you the short answer: yes. . . . A third issue I want to comment on are the problems with the data and its analysis. I have deep sympathy for the fellow who tried to reconcile the various poorly documented and conflicting data sets and buggy, unannotated code that the CRU has apparently depended on. And I can easily see how this happens. I’ve been on long-running projects, especially some years ago, where people start to lose track of which numbers came from where (and when), where the underlying raw data are stored, and the history of various assumptions and corrections that were made along the way. That much is normal human behavior. But this goes beyond that.
Those of us who work in the drug industry know that we have to keep track of such things, because we’re making decisions that could eventually run into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money. And eventually we’re going to be reviewed by regulatory agencies that are not staffed with our friends, and who are perfectly capable of telling us that they don’t like our numbers and want us to go spend another couple of years (and another fifty or hundred million dollars) generating better ones for them. The regulatory-level lab and manufacturing protocols (GLP and GMP) generate a blizzard of paperwork for just these reasons.
But the stakes for climate research are even higher. The economic decisions involved make drug research programs look like roundoff errors. The data involved have to be very damned good and convincing, given the potential impact on the world economy, through both the possible effects of global warming itself and the effects of trying to ameliorate it. Looking inside the CRU does not make me confident that their data come anywhere close to that standard.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Related thoughts here.
IF YOU EXERCISE MORE DURING THE DAY, will you sleep better at night?
A CLIMATEGATE UPDATE. “Phil Jones tried to hush my paper. SUNY Albany won’t discuss the investigation my paper initiated. And QUB ignored my three FOI requests for their data.”
Plus, A Josh Steiner Moment?
And remember kids: Proofread! Climategate: Imminent Demise of Glaciers Due to … a Typo! “The IPCC has been claiming Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035. The research paper they used concluded 2350.”
THE NEW AUDI A8: A car with . . . handwriting recognition?
APPARENTLY SOMEBODY BLEW THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT ON THIS ONE: Study Finds Ozone Hole Repair Contributes To Global Warming, Sea Level Rise: The 20th century’s biggest environmental success may exacerbate the 21st century’s biggest environmental crisis.
ANOTHER Chevy Volt test drive.
TWAP? I’m pretty sure they don’t mean “Time-Weighted Average Price.”
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER SPANKS ANDREW SULLIVAN: “Sullivan’s entire ad hominem conclusion — that my views are animated by nothing but the basest, most corrupt partisan motives — turned out to be a complete invention based on his inability to read dates.” Well, anyone can miss a date. I’ve done it myself, if not quite so . . . vehemently.
UPDATE: From Sullivan, a correction and an apology. “I was wrong in inferring any shift of Krauthammer’s position under Obama; and I apologize to Krauthammer and my readers for both the mistake and the unfair inference.”
MORE ON THAT courtroom document-theft case in Maricopa county.
GRAND ROUNDS is up!
IN THE MAIL: From Justin Binik-Thomas, Profit Is Not A Dirty Word: Free Markets And Grassroots Conservatism In America.
JOHN TIERNEY: Hacking The Climate Debate: “I’ve long thought that the biggest danger in climate research is the temptation for scientists to lose their skepticism and go along with the ‘consensus’ about global warming. That’s partly because it’s easy for everyone to get caught up in ‘informational cascades’, and partly because there are so many psychic and financial rewards rewards for working on a problem that seems to be a crisis. We all like to think that our work is vitally useful in solving a major social problem — and the more major the problem seems, the more money society is liable to spend on it.”