Full American gator (vamps and shaft) boots by Rodney Ammons of El Paso:
Saturday footwear
November 9, 2013 • 5:07 am
Saturday: Hili dialogue (in two parts)
November 9, 2013 • 3:49 am
Hili is bad today.
Hili: Jerry and I like this mug very much.A: Hili! I measured out this milk for pancakes!
Hili: Humanity never ceases to amaze me with their ideas.
***
Hili: I will drink it anyway.
In Polish:
Hili: Jerry i ja bardzo lubimy ten kubek.
Ja: Hili, ja sobie to mleko odmierzyłem do naleśników.
Hili: Ludzkość nie przestaje mnie zdumiewać swoimi pomysłami.***
Hili: I tak ci to wypiję.
Finnish kayaker saves drowning owl
November 8, 2013 • 3:43 pm
Like the evening news, I always like to end on an upbeat story, particularly one about rescued animals. PuffHo reports a Finnish kayaker whose story originated at the Finnish-language link below. The PuffHo puffery:
Whoooooo’s that in the distance?
That was the question on Pentti Taskinen’s lips when he was paddling out on Finland’s Lake Tuusula on Sunday. Once his kayaker got closer, he noticed that the moving figure jutting out of the water was not an otter or another marine mammal, but an owl.
Fearing the bird would die of hypothermia, Taskinen rowed closer and helped the owl onto the front of his kayak, Finnish daily newspaper Ilta-Sanomat reports.
. . . After the owl climbed aboard, it cuddled up to Taskinen and nestled itself partially under his life vest while he paddled back to shore. (Awww.) Once the bird — believed to be a northern hawk owl — dried off and regained its strength, it was able to fly away on its own.
Northern hawk owls are primarily found in Alaska and Canada, however a widespread population also exists in parts of Scandinavia. Named after hawks for their similar hunting techniques, northern hawk owls are not nocturnal like most owls are and instead prey on small mammals when the sun is high in the sky.
Oh dear. It’s “found primarily,” not “primarily found”! There are other bits of bad writing here, like the superfluous “are” in the last sentence and the equally superfluous “in the sky” at the end. I won’t say anything about the “Awww” and the “Whooooo’s”. . .
Photos below are from Ilta-Sanomat (if you speak Finnish, go over there and give us some details, as their story is much longer)
The world’s most politically correct salt
November 8, 2013 • 1:56 pm
From Amazon:
1. FDA approved
2. Non-GMO
3. Organic
4. Halall (sic)
5. Kosher, and, best of all
6. NO CHEMICALS!
And really—approved by the NIH? Since when do they approve salt?
Some of the reviews are hilarious:
Pure sodium chloride (a CHEMICAL) is white, and one reviewer suggests that the pink color comes from brine shrimp.
h/t: pyers
I’ve sold out again
November 8, 2013 • 12:22 pm
Well, not really, as, unlike the totally mercenary PuffHo, The New Republic actually pays some stipendiary emoluments to their writers. TNR wants to beef up its science-related online stuff, so I’ve agreed to allow them to cross-post some of my efforts from time to time. The first one, a slightly modified version of my piece on Rupert Sheldrake, the BBC, and the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia, is now up at their site.
Don’t worry, though—you always get to read it first.
Google doodle: Rorschach blots
November 8, 2013 • 12:14 pm
Today’s Google Doodle shows an animated series of Rorschach tests, the famous test using patients’ interpretations of inkblots as ways to diagnose their problems. The inventor, Hermann Rorschach, was born on this day in 1884, and died of peritonitis at only 37.
This Doodle has an interactive feature, so as the inkblots change you can share what you see on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter; just click on the “Share what you see” link at the bottom. It’s social-media psychoanalysis!
As Search Engine Watch reports:
The Rorschach test, created in 1921, is comprised of 10 symmetrical “inkblot” images. Subjects of the test are asked to interpret what they see in the designs. The test allows for psychoanalysis of the subject’s cognition and personality traits.
[Hermann] Rorschach was born in 1884 and prior to joining the scientific field, was reportedly torn between the arts and sciences. As a child, sources say he was very interested in klecksography – the art of creating images from inkblots. In the end, Rorschach combined his love for the art and his interest in science to create his life’s work in the inkblot test.
Rorschach died in 1922 – the year after publishing his book, “Psychodiagnostik,” which was the foundation of the inkblot test. He was 37.
Malcolm Gladwell finds his faith
November 8, 2013 • 9:48 am
Over at The New Republic, Isaac Chotiner reports (surprisingly neutrally) on an interview between unlikely twins, the unctuous Malcom Gladwell and the odious Glenn Beck, who met on Beck’s show for a conversation. As Chotiner reports, Gladwell is flogging his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (see the Guardian review here). I haven’t yet read the book, but it’s apparently how the supposedly “weak” can overturn the “strong” by concentrating on their weak points. In other words, a morality tale for Generation Y.
As the reader who sent me the NR link noted, “Please watch this video and try not to gag.” I was successful in watching it, not so successful in inhibiting the gag reflex. Listen, then, to Beck and Gladwell’s bro-fest about the wonderfulness of faith. As Gladwell notes, he was brought up in a strong tradition of faith, had drifted away, and, with this book, is returning to it.
When you watch the video, count the number of errors, lies, and misrepresentations—largely on the part of Beck. But the constant extolling of “faith” (i.e., belief without evidence) by both men is nauseating.
Of Gladwell’s books, I’ve read only The Tipping Point, but he’s been widely criticized for using anecdotes, as he did in that book, to make general points. Readers love stories more than they love scientific analysis. In a 2009 review of Gladwell’s book What the Dog Saw, Steve Pinker, who combines anecdote and science in the right way (viz., The Better Angels of Our Nature), judges him like this:
In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.
The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings.
. . .The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterback’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.
The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle.
The emphasis on anecdote (and self-help anecdote at that) over more rigorous—ergo more boring—science seems to be a theme at the New Yorker, which until recently also harbored the now-disgraced Jonah Lehrer, who used the same technique. I miss the old New Yorker multipart articles that really bored in on the science. But that kind of boring must have been boring. What’s true is that Gladwell and Lehrer sell—Gladwell got at least a million-dollar advance for his book.
Pseudoscience roundup: Guerrilla Skeptics mock Sheldrake’s paranoia; Tedx fails to keep its videos of Sheldrake off YouTube, and BBC criticized for giving “equal time” to climate-change denialists
November 8, 2013 • 6:49 am
Rupert Sheldrake has been whining everywhere, including on the BBC, that his Wikipedia page has been doctored by a group called the Guerrilla Skeptics (or rather, a branch called the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia (GSoW), once again suggesting there’s a conspiracy to cover up his marvelous findings on morphic resonance and telepathy in dogs.
In a post a few days ago, I gave evidence debunking Sheldrake’s claims: the GSoW has never had anything to do with his page. Rather, Sheldrake’s supporters, who loaded the original page with his loony theories, were simply displaced by more sensible editors following to Wikipedia‘s own policies, which forbid presenting pseudoscience as if it were an equally valid alternative to mainstream science.
This was supported by “Julie,” a member of GSoW, who left this humorous comment after my post on Sheldrake:
I love the “we didn’t touch his page, even with our minds” bit.
The Beeb has promised to give a “balanced” response to Sheldrake’s rant on its airwaves, but I’m not aware that this has yet happened.
***
Tedx, responding to criticisms of myself and others that they presented Sheldrake’s woo as “science” in one of their events, pulled the Sheldrake Tedx video off their site and put it in a separate place. They also promised me that they’d keep his Tedx video off of YouTube, as this was Tedx’s property and it was a copyright violation to repost it. They asked me specificially to report any YouTube violations to them. For a while I did report these violations, and finally the people at Tedx started getting angry at me for doing so. Apparently they’ve taken so much flak from Sheldrake supporters (a nasty and vociferous pack, to be sure) that they just decided to let the videos go viral. In other words, Tedx lied to me, failing to do what they promised. If you want to see the banned Sheldrake videos, just go to YouTube and search for “Rupert Sheldrake Science Delusion Tedx.” I’ve lost considerable respect for Tedx after this, as I consider them gutless.
***
Meanwhile the “Beeb” has been criticized on another front besides giving undue airtime and credibility to pseudoscientists like Sheldrake. This time it involves climate-change denialism. An Oct. 1 article in the Guardian reports that, despite overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic global warming, the BBC continues to present climate-change skeptics as credible experts. This is one of their misguided efforts (perhaps born of an ignorance of how science is done) to “let a hundred opinions blossom.”
First a bit of background. Two years ago, British geneticist Steve Jones, collaborating with a research group at Imperial College London, produced a comprehensive report on the Beeb’s coverage of science: “BBC Trust review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science” (free pdf at link). The main problems highlighted in the report were these:
1. An at times “over-rigid” (as Professor Jones describes it) application of the Editorial Guidelines on impartiality in relation to science coverage, which fails to take into account what he regards as the “non-contentious” nature of some stories and the need to avoid giving “undue attention to marginal opinion”. Professor Jones cites past coverage of claims about the safety of the MMR vaccine and more recent coverage of claims about the safety of GM crops and the existence of man made climate change as examples on this point. He suggests that achieving “equality of voice” may be resolved by the new 2010 Editorial Guidelines which incorporate consideration of “due weight” in relation to impartiality. A more common-sense approach to “due impartiality” would also help, he believes.
2. Underdeveloped links between science programme makers across the BBC’s divisions. This he recommends might in part be addressed by establishing a regular cross-division science forum and appointing a Science Editor for BBC News to work across a range of output.
3. Too narrow a range of sources for stories and a tendency to be reactive rather than proactive, particularly in news coverage. Professor Jones recommends that this might be remedied by better use of external electronic databases that draw from a wide variety of science publications. He further recommends working to improve – and share – BBC contacts with the science community.
Apparently the BBC took this report seriously and implemented several changes to deal with the report’s criticisms (n.b.: I haven’t read the full report, which is nearly 90 pages long). But, according to the Guardian, the Beeb recently failed when it came to covering the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of the world’s leading climate scientists. Last week the IPCC published its conclusions:
On Friday the IPCC, which represents the world’s leading climate scientists, produced a landmark report on the state of knowledge of global warming.
The IPCC said it was unequivocal that warming was occurring and that the dominant force behind it was human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.
The report, the first from the UN-convened body since 2007, and only the fifth since 1988, was the starkest warning yet of the dangers of climate change.
Apparently the BBC decided to give undue coverage to the skeptics:
But in the BBC’s coverage of the report’s release in Stockholm, which was attended by several BBC science journalists, the voice of climate-change sceptics, who do not accept the IPCC’s core findings, got considerable airtime.
Complaints focused on the World at One programme on Radio 4 on Friday, which featured the Australian sceptic Bob Carter. A retired geologist, he leads a group called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and is funded by US libertarians. His words also dominated several subsequent news bulletins.
Criticism immediately came from John Aston (the former top official on climate change in Britain’s Foreign Office), who said that the BBC’s coverage of the IPCC report was “a betrayal of the editorial professionalism on which the BBC’s reputation has been built over generations.” He added: “The BBC should now explain how its decision to give a platform to Carter serves the public interest. Otherwise, it will be undermining its friends when it needs them most and throwing the scavengers a piece of its own flesh.”
Jones also chimed in:
The biologist Steve Jones, who reviewed the BBC’s science output in 2011, told the Guardian he was concerned that the BBC was still wedded to an idea of “false balance” in presenting climate sceptics alongside reputable scientists.
He said: “This goes to the heart of science reporting – you wouldn’t have a homeopath speaking alongside a brain surgeon for balance, as that would be absurd. It’s just as absurd to have a climate sceptic for balance against the work of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists.”
And in this case, the BBC disregarded Jones’s recommendations. David Jordan, head of editorial standards of the BBC, told members of Parliament that Jones “made one recommendation that we did not take on board. He said we should regard climate change as settled. . . .we should not hear from dissenting voices on the science.” Jones denies this:
Jones told the Guardian that this was misquoting him; rather, he had recommended to the BBC not to show “false balance” by presenting climate sceptics as having equal scientific weight as mainstream climate researchers.
He said: “Science turns on evidence. Balance in science is not the same as balance in politics where politicians can have a voice however barmy their ideas are. They’re not taking this on board. Why, I don’t know.”
In response, the BBC defended its coverage:
The BBC responded: “[We] covered the IPCC report on climate change and its conclusions very fully on all outlets with analysis from our specialist journalists. The bulk of interviews on the subject were with climate scientists, many of whom had contributed to the IPCC report. We reject the suggestion that global warming sceptics were given too much time in our overall coverage of the IPCC report.
“As part of the BBC’s commitment to impartiality a small number of global warming sceptics were also interviewed. This is consistent with our response to the Jones report in which we said we would take care to reflect all viewpoints in the debate about the science and policy.”
But what does it mean to be “impartial”—to “reflect all viewpoints”—with respect to an overwhelming scientific consensus? When there’s a report on evolution, should the BBC present “a small number of creationists” to “reflect all viewpoints”? The consensus on anthropogenic global warming is now so strong that it is no longer “impartiality” to pretend that they have credible alternative views. When the BBC presents an article on medical advances, should they allow homeopaths to weigh in? What about astrologers when there are programs on psychology? After all, astrologers and their followers are numerous, and have an alternative theory of human behavior—it’s guided by the configuration of stars and planets when you were born.
I didn’t hear the BBC show, so I can’t weigh in personally. But there are so many critics of their coverage that one wonders if the Beeb (taking into account its sympathetic and erroneous portrayal of Rupert Sheldrake) has simply decided that the scientific issues are too hard for them to fathom.
But climate-change denialism is a far greater danger to our planet than is creationism. After all, creationism threatens science education in the U.S. and some countries in the Middle East. Global warming threatens the whole planet and all its species. Here the BBC has extra responsibility to get it right. The consequences of getting it wrong, and giving people false ideas about science, are extremely serious here.
The Beeb apparently didn’t get it right. As Ashton noted,
“In particular, the World At One on Friday provided a stunning display of false balance when it devoted less airtime to IPCC scientists than it did to Bob Carter, a sceptic who is funded by a free-market lobby group in the US, the Heartland Institute. Carter was allowed to make a number of inaccurate and misleading statements unchallenged.”
“In science, those viewpoints that are supported by robust reasoning and evidence are accorded greater weight, but the BBC does not always reflect this.
“Listeners to the World At One on Friday would not have gathered that there is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that it is driven by greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation. More than 99% of journal papers and all major scientific organisations around the world are part of this consensus.”
As a scientist, 99% is good enough for me. Our ancestors probably developed extra wariness about weird noises and sounds in their environment, because the cost of getting it wrong, and thinking a predator was merely rustling leaves, was too high. The situation is identical with global warming. While the critics stall progress with their quibbling and pseudoscience, the earth is warming beyond repair. The global fitness will, like that of too complacent hominins, drop to zero.