Quotulatiousness

May 24, 2011

Bribery: Canada ranked below international pariahs Australia, Hungary, and New Zealand

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Apparently, Canadian businessmen pass out bribes like business cards, and we’re accused of being the only G7 nation to fail to crack down on the practice, according to Transparency International:

Canada has again been scolded on the international stage for its “lack of progress” in fighting bribery and corruption by a watchdog agency that ranks it among the worst of nearly 40 countries.

Transparency International, a group that monitors global corruption, put Canada in the lowest category of countries with “little or no enforcement” when it comes to applying bribery standards set out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

[. . .]

The poor rating places Canada in the embarrassing company of countries like Greece, Hungary, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia — although New Zealand and Australia are also among the 21 countries in the bottom rung.

<sarc>Well, there goes our sterling reputation for international dealings. We might as well order in 30 million black hats now.</sarc>

“Why does dubious social science keep showing up in medical journals?”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

William Easterly and Laura Freschi have determined the decision tree for publishing crappy social science research:

Aid Watch has complained before about shaky social science analysis or shaky numbers published in medical journals, which were then featured in major news stories. We questioned creative data on stillbirths, a study on health aid, and another on maternal mortality.

Just this week, yet another medical journal article got headlines for giving us the number of women raped in the DR Congo (standard headline: a rape a minute). The study applied country-wide a 2007 estimate of the rate of sexual violence in a small sample (of unknown and undiscussed bias). It did this using female population by province and age-cohort — in a country whose last census was in 1984.

We are starting to wonder, why does dubious social science keep showing up in medical journals?

The medical journals may not have as much capacity to catch flaws in social science as in medicine. They may desire to advocate for more action on tragic social problems. The news media understably assume the medical journals ARE vetting the research.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

Forget May 21st: world now ending October 21st says Camping

Filed under: Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:42

If you were terribly let down not to ascend on Saturday, don’t worry: Harold Camping has recalculated the correct day of the Rapture!

California preacher Harold Camping is unrepentant following his second unsuccessful attempt to predict Judgment Day, and now says true believers should pack their bags for ascension to heaven on 21 October.

Camping’s first stab at nailing the Rapture advised Christians to get their earthly affairs in order before 6 September 1994. When the world failed to end, due to a “mathematical error”, he reset the clock for last Saturday at 6pm EST.

Christians expecting a rapturous elevation to glory were once again left twiddling their thumbs and their Bibles, but Camping now says he simply misinterpreted the word of God and 21 May “was not really the end of the world but the spiritual beginning of the physical end”, as the San Francisco Chronicle explains.

So the good news is that the world didn’t experience the Rapture on Saturday, and that we don’t get five months of Satan striding among us waving his evil appendages in the faces of the doomed, while those taken up in the Rapture watch us from Heaven, exulting in our pain and suffering while gobbling down popcorn-flavoured Manna bits. The bad news is it all comes to an end on October 21st anyway.

Britain’s entry in the new race to space

Filed under: Britain, Space, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Jonathan Amos reports on the UK Space Agency (UKSA) long-simmered design/proposal called Skylon:

Skylon has been in development in the UK in various guises for nearly 30 years.

It is an evolution of an idea first pursued by British Aerospace and Rolls Royce in the 1980s.

That concept, known as Hotol, did have technical weaknesses that eventually led the aerospace companies to end their involvement.

But the engineers behind the project continued to refine their thinking and they are now working independently on a much-updated vehicle in a company called Reaction Engines Limited (REL).

Realising the Sabre propulsion system is essential to the success of the project.

The engine would burn hydrogen and oxygen to provide thrust — but in the lower atmosphere this oxygen would be taken directly from the air.

This means the 84m-long spaceplane can fly lighter from the outset with a higher thrust-to-weight ratio, enabling it to make a single leap to orbit, rather than using and dumping propellant stages on the ascent — as is the case with current expendable rockets.

Update: Lewis Page has more on the Skylon project.

Why is the move to IPv6 so important?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:42

As you may remember, June 8th is World IPv6 Day, where hundreds of major players including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo will all turn on IPv6 access (but then turn it off again at the end of the day). It seems odd to make a big to-do about IPv6 Day then go back to business as usual after 24 hours. Most end users will not notice the change, as most of us connect through our various ISP networks using IPv4 addresses anyway.

So, what happens if IPv6 isn’t taken up by the movers and shakers of the networking world?

Proponents of IPv6 make dire predictions about the fate of the Internet if usage of IPv6 doesn’t rise dramatically in the next few years. They say the complexity of the Internet infrastructure will increase, network operations costs will rise, and innovation will be hampered. This is due to the multiple layers of network address translation (NAT) devices that will be required to share limited IPv4 addresses among a rapidly growing base of users and devices.

“If IPv6 fails to catch on, then the Internet will include nesting of NAT upon NAT,” says Russ Housley, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet standards body that created IPv6. “I hope this is not our future because it would be a very fragile Internet, making innovation more difficult. On the other hand, IPv6 will greatly reduce the need for NAT, restoring the opportunities for innovation that were envisioned by the original Internet architecture.”

Dorian Kim, vice president of IP engineering, Global IP Network at NTT America, a leading provider of IPv6 services in the United States, says that without IPv6 the Internet “will be even more heavily NATed than it currently is, but life will mostly go on. Unfortunately, such an Internet likely will have a negative effect on potential development of application or service innovation due to inherent issues with NATs. Additionally, should service providers become more and more reliant on NATs, this will probably change the cost and scaling trajectories of Internet services over time due to high cost and limited scalability of large-scale NAT solutions.”

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