Didn’t the “best and the brightest” used to be, I dunno, better and brighter?...

In a similar vein to the media mudge in Rare News which took science journalism to task while applauding independent review, it seems that Wikileaks has been corrupted. I want to first start by saying that Wikileaks has really misled the public on the details of this video. They made it sound like it was an unprovoked massacre of unarmed civilians, and so it angers me when I wasted my time watching this video to see nothing like that. The stinker headlines are perhaps something like trailers that show a little skin, inferring that there is lots more to see, but then fail to deliver. And since politicians and activists don't seem to actually read anything but headlines, it can work for a while....

I'm just gonna steal this Marcelino Fuentes post. A news article in Science by Robert F. Service is titled "Nations Move to Head Off Shortages of Rare Earths" and subtitled "Looming scarcities of a handful of essential elements could shake the electronics industry, unless manufacturers and mining companies develop more sources soon." Service actually reports that rare earths are so abundant and cheap that mining companies do not bother to exploit most ores and some refining businesses have even closed in recent years for lack of demand. So better headings for the article would be: Rare earths not so rare Manufacturers and mining companies keep finding new sources of essential elements for the electronics industry But, alas, such information does not deserve the name of news. Or even worse, it may look like good news. He's so pithy that there's nothing to elide. I grow increasingly disgusted with the various science journals, and increasingly glad that so many are...

More about critical review of science writing: Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free. Veal calves and gestating sows are so confined as to suffer painful bone and joint problems. The unnatural high-grain diets provided in feedlots cause severe gastric distress in many animals. And faulty or improperly used stun guns cause the painful deaths of thousands of cows and pigs a year. We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it is still possible to reduce the animals’ discomfort — through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less. Did you ever wonder why sows were confined in farrowing crates that limit their movement? It's because they would otherwise kill or injure a portion of their get, crushing them when they roll over and move about while nursing. That's nature for you. This doesn't eliminate...

For those who are thrilled by retro kitsch. How might the current government stem the tide of economic and psychological depression? Can artists and designers help in similar ways today? It’s curious that the WPA style has been reprised in the recent past as a quaint retro conceit, but today may be an opportune time for a brand-new graphic language—equal in impact to the original initiative, but decidedly different—to help rally the cause of hope and optimism. Oh the thrill of imagining a Great Depression. It's an opportunity for Great Design and Really Cool Government. Some designers are already profiting. The Telegraph reports that Depression-themed Christmas cards are a hit. So far, fortunately, these are all fantasies. Peggy Noonan is right when she observes that "everything looks the same." Stocks have crashed to 2004 levels, but today's 6.5 percent unemployment rate, while high, is a lot lower than rates in the first half of the 1980s. And don't get...

As noted earlier there seems to be an ongoing collapse of climate related journalism perhaps due in part to the collapse of energy prices as some predict gasoline prices as low as $1.00 a gallon. Food prices are falling as well but there doesn't yet seem to be a reduction in food crisis talk. Food crisis almost over, people starving as usual Agriculture related press releases continue to start with a sentences like “The current crisis in world food prices…” . . . Haven’t they noticed that the crisis is (almost) over? Supply is up and speculators are retracting. The first stories about complaining farmers are coming in. Perhaps I am missing the point of the long term trend of dearer oil (fertilizer) and climate change? Either way, in a couple of months we’ll be back to business as usual. Cheap food, and, every day, almost 16,000 children that die from hunger-related causes — one child every five seconds...

The hot air seems to be going out of yet another bubble. This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07. . . In March, a team of climate scientists at Kiel University predicted that natural variation would mask the 0.3C warming predicted by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change over the next decade. They said that global temperatures would remain constant until 2015 but would then begin to accelerate. It seems much like the last climate trance period. Then came the trance, acknowledged by former President Bill Clinton in a video interview. Low energy prices, the distraction of the first Persian Gulf war, and a temporary cool spell following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in...

Press releases irk me. They often include brain dead speculation about what is otherwise sound if pedestrian science. I suspect that this is due to the efforts of writers trying to punch up the dry facts to give them some sizzle. One of the most important developments in human civilisation was the practice of sustainable agriculture. But we were not the first - ants have been doing it for over 50 million years. . . The ants have also adopted the practice of weeding. When a microbial pest is detected by worker ants, there is an immediate flurry of activity as ants begin to comb through the garden. When they find the pathogenic 'weeds', the ants pull them out and discard them into their refuse dumps. "Since the ant gardens are maintained in soil chambers, they are routinely exposed to a number of potential pathogens that could infect and overtake a garden. In fact, many of the ant colonies...

It's sort of like being famous for being famous. The NYT (and, I think, the AP, but not Reuters, which got it right) misread a GAO report in a way that drastically altered its meaning, converting it from a plausible but boring result (a substantial majority of corporations reported no taxable income in at least one year out of an eight year period) to a wildly implausible result that nicely fitted what a lot of people wanted to believe (two-thirds of corporations reported no taxable income over that eight year period). They simultaneously made another mistake almost as bad, calculating what the corporations "should" have owed on the basis of their revenue, not their profit. The Times discovered the latter mistake and corrected it; so far as I can tell, they have not yet noticed the former mistake. Googling around, I found an enormous numbers of online references to the story. So far, I have not found a single...

Again. Ocean acidification, although high up the agenda for climate scientists and marine conservation groups, is by no means as important in the minds of the public and policymakers as the climate change that increased atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels will also bring. . . If some advanced form of carbon capture and storage were available, removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could be as straightforward as having a bit of a tidy-up and hiding away all the unwanted rubbish out of harm’s way. But ocean acidification means that would be like trying to vacuum up pet hair (or carbon dioxide) from the living room when it had actually integrated itself into the fabric of the carpet (or dissolved into the ocean) and begun to harm the carpet’s ecosystems. Nonsense. The oceans are filled with plants that eat carbon dioxide. It doesn't merely accumulate, in fact plant life flourishes as ocean PH drops. It is misleading to even call it...

Cosma points to a Paulina Borsook post that criticizes the Wired article mentioned here in Green Goblins. His gnomic comment was that the post made him nostalgic for the 90s. There's no telling what he meant by that, so I'll talk about what I would have meant by that, had I said it. Borsook, who was involved with Wired at the time, sums up their pose as saucy, ignorant and contrarian. The June 2008 issue of Wired magazine, which counsels “rethinking everything you ever learned about being green” (with an implicit message of “don’t listen to the pieties of the left”), and has a forward by Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto, harkens back to the bad old days of its libertarian anti-progressive politics. When Wired magazine first hit the scene fifteen years ago in June 1993, part of its gestalt was a kind of world-turned-upside-down saucy contrarianism. Information technology is sexy! And more indirectly, pious humorless liberals are repressive and...

And another thing . . . If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam? (Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.) And he's got a 10mbps cable modem connection, while I'm out here in the boonies with glitchy dial up over a barbed wire and boogers telco system. It's a good thing that sites like Salon are mostly crap since I'm not missing anything by avoiding them....

An earlier post, Liberal Myths, investigated the idea of a liberal arts education, a generalist ability to think with some clarity and learn continually as life requires. It applied some of Timothy Burke's thoughts on the subject to a particularly bad NYT article. The article was so bad, such a good example of bankrupt journalism, that another post, Myth Makers referenced it too. But there's still more defects in the article which Branden Berg reveals. Back in January, I questioned Mark Bittman's claim in the NYT that Americans consume on average 200 pounds of meat per year. I've found data from the USDA on loss-adjusted food availability--that is, edible parts actually available for consumption and not known to have spoiled or otherwise been wasted. . . Total loss-adjusted weight (after adjusting for consumer-level losses) is 83g/52g/14g, or about 120 pounds per year. . . Of the 2680 loss-adjusted calories available per capita for consumption each day, only 375, or...

Tyler points to Saletan on science. Researchers are breeding mutant cows that make low-fat milk. After a farm accidentally produced the first such cow, milk-company researchers "bought her from her owner for $300 … and moved her to a secret location for further testing." Then they bred offspring that carry the trait. The milk is 1 percent fat instead of 3.5 percent, and it has omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for your heart. The next step is to identify how the gene causes the milk so this pathway can be directly engineered. Milk-company spin: It's natural! Cynical view: It's the "accidental" product of constant breeding, and now we're going to engineer it worldwide. All milk has omega-3 fatty acids, but the percentage and balance with omega-6 fats varies depending on the cow's diet as well as genetics. A grass diet yields milk that is much higher in omega-3 than does a grain diet. The amount of total fat...

One of my pet peeves is ignorant journalists. When utter nonsense is expressed with some competence and polish it is more offensive than if it had been brayed in gutter patois. IN A conversation today, someone averred that several characters in the book we were discussing had failed in a fundamental way because they had failed to be true to themselves; their other flaws were simply manifestations of that basic rift. By looking to the outside for validation, they had set themselves up for tragedy. It's a common sentiment. But is it right? On the one hand you know yourself best. But as James Surowiecki ably demonstrated in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, the collective judgement of the group is more likely to be correct than a single opinion. This provides an evolutionary explanation for why human beings are herd animals. Humans are not herd animals, we are pack animals. Failing to know and make the distinction is...

Tyler me-too's Nick's praise of Jonathan Rauch. In a world in which political discourse tends to veer from insane overstatement (think Ann Coulter) to plodding conventionalism (David Broder) to barely disguised partisanship (Paul Krugman), Rauch's independence of thought is incredibly rare. Whatever the topic, he consistently engages (and typically dismantles) the conventional wisdom. For example: The Convenient Truth [C]limate change is real and deserves action, but that the problem is nowhere near as overwhelming as the rhetoric commonly suggests, and the solutions nowhere near as difficult. As problems go, in fact, climate change appears to be one of the most convenient that humankind has ever faced. . . The convenient truth about global warming, then, is that radicalism is as pointless as it is impractical. Slow-but-steady is not only the easiest approach; it is also the most effective. Just as conveniently, the most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon...

The Hollywood version of the American southwest after the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier - and much earlier in Texas - is of rough, vigilante justice meted out by flawed heroes. The truly bad were tracked down and summarily dispatched with a minimum of fuss or passion. All in a day's work. There's some truth in that but it was as likely to be solid citizens as flawed heroes who did the deeds. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. That's one of the reasons that Bush was applauded for his initial handling of the event. I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11....

Like many blogs the Institute for the Future's Future Now does "links posts", short lists of pointers to other pages worth noting but not commenting about. A recent one was to a short essay by Hari Kunzru, Futurecasting, from a few years ago. I remembered having posted about it a couple of years ago, so I read my own old post. That post was critical of the failures of "the old hippies" at GBN and the whole concept of scenarios as useful planning tools - the Art of Long View and the whole Peter Schwartz "remarkable people" concept. Instead it spoke of a “Science of the Long View” which elevated futurism above pure speculation by adding a requirement that scenarios and models be testable. It's worth noting now that Kunzru also faulted Schwartz for sliding over to the dark side. . . . in writing The Long Boom, Peter Schwartz has crossed the line from disinterested futurism to political...

A pair of posts by Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek highlight one of the difficulties of public debates about important issues: figures lie and liars figure. In The impact of immigration Roberts takes apart an NYT article. There's nothing in the graphic that questions whether these numbers are accurate. They're presented as facts ("Reduced Wages") with no disclaimers about the statistical techniques or assumptions that went into them. Borjas is quoted in the article but no skeptic is quoted about whether these estimates are reliable. The numbers are about the impact of legal and illegal immigrants even though the article is about illegals, a smaller group. And there's nothing about the impact on the immigrants themselves from coming to America relative to the country they've left behind. But what's really misleading and bizarre about the chart is that there's no visual benchmark for these decreases. Your eye can see that 5.0 is almost twice 3.1. But is 5% a...

Small Dead Animals perhaps the time has come to send sports reporters to war zones. It seems to be one of the last refuges of journalism in which a) reporters have basic knowledge of the subject matter they're assigned to, and b) they're expected to report the details and outcome of the race, even if a contestant is injured or dies during competition. It's astonishing that the same country that still celebrates the envelope pushing performances (and near-death experiences) of the "Crazy Canucks" downhill ski team, hasn't figured out that covering a war in the context of body counts is the sports journalism equivalent of limiting Olympic coverage to the daily injury reports of the various countries in competition. You must read the rest of the post to fully grasp this insight....

Lots of Google bashing lately. Most of it is bog standard enmity toward BIG, the dingbats even liken Google to Microsoft and Wal-Mart in a sort of guilt by association ruse since they are all, well, BIG. The wing nuts have been nibbling Google for some time now to little effect but the opening of a Google portal in China, which was then subject to PRC regulation, has provided a new wedge for the wing nuts to hammer. There's also a not-entirely-bogus counterargument, that Chinese citizens with access to a censored Google are still more powerful, relative to their government, than Chinese citizens with no Google at all. Though this claim seems a bit, er, convenient, it may still have a grain of truth to it. The experience of empowerment that the Internet provides seems to affect people in ways that go beyond specific issues, and make them less tolerant of bossiness elsewhere; the more Chinese surf the Web,...

I have jaded tastes, a contrarian's eye for the obscure and unusual, and little patience with hustlers, grifters or fan-boys. "Popular" is an insult, usually a badge of mediocrity, and in those few instances when this isn't so, it isn't the most interesting attribute of whatever is popular. So naturally I have little use for popular blogs, the ones that are famous for being famous. I've read them, they're sort of unavoidable, but I always go away with the sense of having gone nowhere, seen nothing and done nothing. When a group of them decided to do a joint effort of some sort it barely registered. So what? Will a group of bland bloggers be more or less bland than the individual blogs of the members? Who cares? I was wrong. There is something interesting about the project. It has been a resounding bust and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, blood on the tracks, but not...

One of my disappointments with the net is the proliferation of politicized pseudo-science sites. They have the same relationship to science that economic think-tanks have to economic policy. In each case they are advocacy organizations that use the concepts and language of a discipline to promote a purely political agenda. They are rife with sins of commission and omission, especially the tried and true techniques of selective use of data, selective citation and quotation, and biased exaggeration. One of the sites I've criticized for this before is SciDevNet and the editor David Dickson. The site claims: The overall aim of the Science and Development Network (SciDev.Net) is to enhance the provision of reliable and authoritative information on science- and technology-related issues that impact on the economic and social development of developing countries. But it never delivers as promised. Instead it provides unreliable information selected to advance a political agenda. A previous post, Hedonic Materiality, criticized Dickson for this intellectual...

The foolishness of opposing GM food and fiber crops from an environmental perspective as well as a human health perspective has been pointed out in many previous posts. The list of benefits is long, everything from reduction of wilderness converted to cropland, to reduced use of toxic chemicals. In each case both the environment and humans, especially agricultural workers and rural residents, benefit. So, why do environmental posers work themselves into fits about GM? Some apologists claim that their motives aren't environmental so much as anti-capitalist. They oppose companies such as Monsanto or industrial agriculture. Their misdirected and ineffective opposition fails to consider that GM crops can and are being developed by many suppliers, not just large agribusiness companies, and the benefits accrue to even the smallest farmers, perhaps even disproportionately benefitting them compared to large factory farms. Other apologists claim that the role of environmental groups is to be negative, not positive. They exist to find fault. Environmental...

One of the factors contributing to the demise of the environmental movement is junk journalism, close kin of junk science. It is part of the sad state of journalism in general and related to the intellectual and ethical poverty of journalism in political matters. The environmental movement isn't about the environment, it's about politics, so this isn't surprising. For example, consider this interview of junk journalist Michael Pollan, unfortunately Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley so his disease is being transmitted to a new generation. [via The Poser] It appears I have a kind of corn obsession. I'm like that character in Middlemarch, Professor Causabon, who thought he had the key to the universe, the key to all mythologies. In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain... If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it – and what we eat is mostly carbon – comes from...

A point made in the previous post Bad Idea deserves emphasis. The New Deal socialism lite trend reversed in the 70s and 80s. During that era those who lacked scope and scale in their vision and analysis of society, who drive looking in the rear view mirror more than through the wind screen, saw only the extremes, the noisy surface of society, and concluded that the US was following Europe down the path to a centralized, stratified, authoritarian society fragmented into economic, social, racial, ethnic and gender interest groups who all looked to government to manage tensions between them and provide treats for the faithful, and in which there was not just a separation of church and state but a separation of church and society, where religious people were shamed and encouraged to practice their perversions in the closet. That isn't what happened because Americans didn't want that kind of society. What they saw was a world sinking into...

In the comments of the earlier post Compared to What? there was some discussion of the futility of attempting to draw conclusions about world events, such as the war in Iraq, from press reports. In a new post Timothy Burke, a key participant in that earlier discussion, has more to say. He develops an analogy using the firing of a sports team manager to demonstrate the Knowledge Problem, and then attempts to apply it to more serious issues. I’m going on at length about this because it seems to me this is how a lot of what we know comes into being. There is really very little we know from direct or eyewitness experience. Nor is it clear that being a direct participant yields information or knowledge that absolutely trumps all other kinds of knowledge. We know very well from recent research, for example, that witnesses to crimes frequently get some very basic details of their experience wrong. Eyewitnessing...