Quotulatiousness

October 22, 2011

IPCC authors: “They are people who are at the top of their profession”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

Whether you’re a global warming/climate change skeptic or not, Donna Laframboise has a book that might be of interest to you:

The people who write the IPCC’s report — which is informally known as the Climate Bible — are supposedly the crème de la crème of world science. Rajendra Pachauri, the person who has been the IPCC’s chairman since 2002, tells us this repeatedly. In 2007 he explained to a newspaper how his organization selects individuals to help write the Climate Bible: “These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done,” he said. “They are people who are at the top of their profession.”

Two years later, when testifying before a committee of the U.S. Senate, Pachauri argued that “all rational persons” should be persuaded by the IPCC’s conclusions since his organization mobilizes “the best talent available across the world.”

[. . .]

A close look at the IPCC’s roster of authors reveals that — on a wide range of topics including hurricanes, sea-level rise, and malaria — some of the world’s most seasoned specialists have been left out in the cold. In their stead, the IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students.

For example, Laurens Bouwer is currently employed by an environmental studies institute at the VU University Amsterdam. In 1999-2000, he served as an IPCC lead author before earning his Masters degree in 2001.

How can a young man without even a master’s degree become an IPCC lead author? Bouwer’s expertise is in climate change and water resources. Yet the chapter for which he first served as a lead author was titled Insurance and Other Financial Services.

It turns out that, during part of 2000, Bouwer was a trainee at Munich Reinsurance Company. This means the IPCC chose as a lead author someone who was a trainee, who lacked a master’s degree, and was still a full decade away from receiving his 2010 PhD.

Egyptian Facebook comments get man jailed for three years

Filed under: Africa, Law, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

The “Arab Spring” may have ousted the head of state in Egypt, but it has done little to liberalize the common experience of life. Things like speaking your mind on religious topics can get you jailed:

An Egyptian court sentenced a man to three years in jail with hard labour on Saturday for insulting Islam in postings on Facebook, the official MENA news agency reported.

The Cairo court found that Ayman Yusef Mansur “intentionally insulted the dignity of the Islamic religion and attacked it with insults and ridicule on Facebook,” the agency reported.

The court said his insults were “aimed at the Noble Koran, the true Islamic religion, the Prophet of Islam and his family and Muslims, in a scurrilous manner,” the agency reported.

It did not provide details on what he had written that was deemed to be offensive.

This probably explains why the “typical” comic book reader is no longer a young teen

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

It’s all in the economics of the comic book world:

Looking at the graph we can see that the relative price of a comic book stayed around a buck until 1970 or so, slowly ramping up to a buck fifty over the next 15 years. That’s a 50% increase. From 1985 to 2000 the price almost doubles (100%) getting neat three dollars. From 2000 to 2011, it’s around a 33% increase.

It’s a fact that costs increase over time, so I’m not saying prices could remain at a buck forever. But it is hard to see how young kids and teenagers can get into comic books, it’s simply too expensive. For $20 you get 5-7 books. Serious comic readers will pick up 10-20 books a week. A few years ago, when I was a more regular reader, I would the totals of other people routinely $30-50 a week. That’s $120-200 per MONTH. There can’t be many parents helping pay that much for a kid’s comic habit.

When my family came to Canada in 1967, one of the things I missed the most were British comics. Canadian American comics were very different from what I was used to, so I never really became much of a comic collector. I’d pick up the odd few, but it never was a “have to buy” item for me. I remember having to decide whether I wanted the immediate satisfaction of a chocolate bar or a can of pop, or the slightly longer-term satisfaction of a comic book. Immediate satisfaction won more of the time, and with my princely 25 cents per week allowance, there wasn’t a lot of satisfaction whichever way I decided to go.

Yet another bit of bad news for Vikings fans

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

The Vikings were already hurting in the secondary, with cornerback Antoine Winfield probably out with a neck injury that’s been bothering him for the last two weeks, and safety Jamarca Sanford out with a concussion. Now, Tom Pelissero reports that the Vikings will be even weaker at cornerback tomorrow, as Chris Cook (who had been starting in place of Winfield) has been arrested on domestic assault charges:

The Minnesota Vikings’ second-year cornerback was being held without bail at Hennepin County Jail early Saturday morning on two domestic assault charges, according to jail records. A source confirmed it is the Vikings’ cornerback.

Cook, 24, was booked into the jail at 4:06 a.m. Saturday on two misdemeanor domestic assault charges. His first court appearance is scheduled for 8:15 a.m. Monday.

Early indications were that means Cook would remain in jail while the Vikings play the Green Bay Packers on Sunday afternoon.

And here is the most recent bit of doom-and-gloom from the ESPN1500 team (recorded before Cook’s arrest):

This week in Guild Wars 2 news

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:34

I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. I think this has been the slowest week for GW2 news since I started doing the weekly round-up earlier this year. Hopefully this is just a temporary slowdown.

(more…)

October 21, 2011

Is the cost of living really rising?

Filed under: Economics, Food, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

Incentives matter, police edition

Filed under: Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Jonathan Blanks explains that the incentives provided to police officers clearly do influence their behaviour:

Last week, former undercover police officer Stephen Anderson told the New York State Supreme Court that planting drugs on innocent people was so common that it didn’t even register emotionally to him. The story is starting to get traction in the media as an egregious example of police corruption, but it’s notable only because of the admission to the practice in open court. Each year, there are hundreds of cases in which police officers are caught stealing, using, selling, or planting drugs or pocketing the proceeds from drug busts. Despite the obligatory PR protestations that any given instance of corruption is an isolated case, the systemic, legal, social, and economic incentives in every law enforcement agency in America combine to make police corruption virtually inevitable. And with no other category of crimes are these incentives stronger than with drug crimes.

Anderson testified that drugs would be seized from suspects at a given bust, divided, and then used again as evidence against other people on site (or at a time later) who had nothing to do with the initial arrest. This was, in part, due to established drug arrest quotas the officers needed to meet. As public servants, police departments face the same budgetary pressures as any other government entity and thus their officers are required to meet certain benchmarks set by the powers that be. Added to the normal budgetary justification, however, many police officers are in the position to confiscate cash and property that can be sold at auction thanks to civil asset forfeiture laws. Many departments across the country keep a percentage or the entirety of forfeiture proceeds, so pressure to maintain a certain level of drug arrests is something straight out of Public Choice: 101.

New study shows Tasers often misused by police

Filed under: Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Robert Farago lists some of the findings from a recent New York Civil Liberties Union study on the use and mis-use of TASERs:

  • Nearly 60 percent of reported Taser incidents did not meet expert-recommended criteria that limit the weapon’s use to situations where officers can document active aggression or a risk of physical injury.
  • Fifteen percent of incident reports indicated clearly inappropriate Taser use, such as officers shocking people who were already handcuffed or restrained.
  • Only 15 percent of documented Taser incidents involved people who were armed or who were thought to be armed, belying the myth that Tasers are most frequently used as an alternative to deadly force.
  • More than one-third of Taser incidents involved multiple or prolonged shocks, which experts link to an increased risk of injury and death.
  • More than a quarter of Taser incidents involved shocks directly to subjects’ chest area, despite explicit warnings by the weapon’s manufacturer that targeting the chest can cause cardiac arrest.
  • In 75 percent of incidents, no verbal warnings were reported, despite expert recommendations that verbal warnings precede Taser firings.
  • 40 percent of the Taser incidents analyzed involved at-risk subjects, such as children, the elderly, the visibly infirm and individuals who are seriously intoxicated or mentally ill.

    Neuroscientists and neurononsense

    Filed under: Books, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

    Stuart Derbyshire and Nina Powell review Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender:

    Given that objective measures show gender differences are in decline, it is surprising that there has been such an increase in books and reports describing hard-wired differences in male and female brains and that so many people are using them to explain why men and women live different lives. The most famous British example is Simon Baron-Cohen who has extrapolated from his research on autism (a predominantly male disorder) the more general conclusion that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy while the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.

    Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender brilliantly demolishes these overly simplistic and, essentially, wrong conclusions about male and female brains. She does this in two different ways. First, she points out that supposedly fixed differences between men and women are quite plastic. For example, merely asking men to consider the social value and benefits of empathising will lead them to be more empathic. And when men are paid to detect and correctly identify emotional states they perform as well as women. Similarly, when women are told that women perform better on a spatial rotation task their performance matches those of men. It appears that male and female differences in task performance can be fairly easily overcome by changing the motivation to do well or by changing the way the task is framed. That doesn’t sound like something hard-wired or fixed in the brain.

    [. . .]

    Fine also points to a problem that is, perhaps, more important. The brain is a complicated organ that we barely understand in anything but the most basic detail. Furthermore, brain imaging is a technology that is in its infancy and the data generated by imaging is also highly complicated. A typical brain imaging study will generate a matrix involving hundreds of thousands of numbers replicated across time and people. Analysis of these kinds of data sets is difficult, tedious and complicated, often requiring many years of experience and containing a surprising element of subjectivity and argument about what is the right and wrong thing to do. It is perhaps understandable that brain imaging throws up contradictory results and that brain researchers reach contradictory conclusions. Fine notes that this can lead to theories about brain function being untouched by the collection of brain activation data:

    ‘As the contradictory data come in, researchers can draw on both the hypothesis that men are better at mental rotation because they use just one hemisphere, as well as the completely contrary hypothesis that men are better at mental rotation because they use both hemispheres. So flexible is the theoretical arrangement that researchers can even present these opposing hypotheses, quite without embarrassment, within the very same article.’

    It is a strange science where exactly opposite data support the same interpretation. Fine’s conclusion is scathing. She suggests that neuroscientists are merely projecting cultural assumptions about the sexes on to the vast unknown that is the brain. This process she dismisses as ‘neurosexism’, which is part of a larger discipline called ‘neurononsense’. It is hard to argue.

    Pakistan’s conspiracy theories inhibit real world action

    Filed under: Asia, Government, India, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

    Strategy Page looks at one of the big problems in getting Pakistan’s co-operation on security issues:

    American leaders are dismayed as they keep encountering Pakistani politicians and military officials who believe all their troubles are caused by Indian, American and Israeli conspiracies. Pakistan is full of this stuff, and those who believe it are not eager to consider alternatives. While the Pakistani fears are largely based on fiction, the growing number of Indians killed by Pakistani sponsored (and based) terrorism is very real. There are Pakistanis who understand the reality of all this and some of them are diplomats. But as long as most Pakistani leaders, and most of the Pakistani media, embrace the conspiracy theories, real peace is not likely. But at least the diplomats from each nation can discuss possibilities.

    The U.S. constantly points to the continuing presence of Islamic terror groups in Pakistani sanctuaries. That is difficult for the Pakistanis to deny. The major danger here is that if a big attack is made in the United States, and tracked back to a Pakistani sanctuary, this could trigger a public call for war with Pakistan. Even many senior Pakistanis recognize this danger and try to control the terrorists they host. This precarious situation won’t go away as long as the terrorist sanctuaries (mainly North Waziristan and Quetta) are openly protected by Pakistani leaders. But without admitting anything to the Americans, Pakistan has apparently ordered some Haqqani personnel and bases out of North Waziristan. This might just be Haqqani fleeing an area that American intelligence knew too well, and that might have been under the advice of Pakistani intelligence. The movement of Haqqani personnel, to Afghanistan or elsewhere in the tribal territories, is making life difficult for the many foreign terrorists who find sanctuary (and work) with Haqqani. The desire to impose greater security on the new Haqqani bases means foreign recruits will take a lot longer to be led in.

    October 20, 2011

    Polls indicate 50% of Americans now support legalizing marijuana

    Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

    Cue all the “what are they smoking?” jokes:

    Once in office, Jimmy Carter didn’t abandon his temperate approach to cannabis. He proposed that the federal government stop treating possession of small amounts as a crime, making a sensible but novel argument: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

    Nothing came of it, of course. Carter’s logic was unassailable even 35 years ago, but it has yet to be translated into federal policy. The American experience with prohibition of alcohol proved that we are capable of learning from our mistakes. The experience with prohibition of marijuana proves that we are also capable of doing just the opposite.

    The stupidity and futility of the federal war on weed, however, has slowly permeated the mass consciousness. This week, the Gallup organization reported that fully 50 percent of Americans now think marijuana should be made legal. This is the first time since Gallup began asking in 1969 that more Americans support legalization than oppose it.

    [. . .]

    Over the past 30 years, federal spending to fight drugs has risen seven times over, after inflation. Since 1991, arrests for possession of pot have nearly tripled. But all for naught.

    As a report last year by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy noted, more high school students and young adults get high today than 20 years ago. More than 16 million Americans smoke dope at least once a month. Pot is just as available to kids as it ever was, and cheaper than before.

    If we had gotten results like this after reducing enforcement, the new policy would be blamed. But politicians who support the drug war never consider that their remedies may be aggravating the disease. They follow the customary formula for government programs: If it works, spend more on it, and if it fails, spend more on it.

    Timer now started for how quickly Quebec forces Harper to override shipbuilding contract awards

    Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

    The National Post editorial board has lots of nice things to say about the federal government’s attempt to take politics out of the huge shipbuilding contract process:

    On Wednesday, the Tory government released its Solomonic decision regarding which shipyards will build $33-billion in new military and non-military vessels over the next two decades. The evaluation of bids for the largest government procurement contract since the Second World War was handled by senior bureaucrats, rather than cabinet ministers. Even the announcement of the winning contractors was made by Francois Guimont, the top civil servant from Public Works and Government Services, rather than his minister or the minister of National Defence, as would have been the case with past contracts of this magnitude.

    Of course, that’s not to say there will be no political backlash from the decision. Irving Shipbuilding of Halifax will be given $25-billion to build new joint support ships, Canadian Surface Combatants — a sort of destroyer-frigate hybrid — and offshore patrol vessels capable of sailing off all three of Canada’s coasts — east, west and Arctic. Seaspan Marine of Vancouver will build science vessels for the Coast Guard and for the Fisheries department, plus icebreakers worth a total of $8-billion. That means Davie Shipyard in Levis, Que. was left without a major shipbuilding contract (though Davie is still eligible to bid on a further $2-billion contract to provide smaller government boats, such as Fisheries patrol vessels). It must have been tempting for the Tories to intervene in the contract-award process and toss Quebec a bigger bone. Their recent decision to expand the grasp of the official languages commissioner to several airlines, and their willingness to give new seats to Quebec in the House of Commons (despite the fact Quebec was not underrepresented there), just because Ontario, B.C. and Alberta were getting more, shows the Tories have become very concerned about their appeal to Quebec voters.

    You can guarantee that many Quebec politicians will benefit for having yet another stick to beat the federal government with — this would be true in all scenarios except the one where the Quebec shipyard got both contracts. It would be an even better deal for the taxpayers (and perhaps even the Royal Canadian Navy) if the contracts hadn’t been restricted to Canadian shipyards: it wouldn’t fly politically, but it would almost certainly have been better bang for the billions of bucks.

    This is why you don’t want to be a wine importer in Ontario

    Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

    In the lastest issue of the Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus explains the 16-point process that all independent wine and liquor importers have to follow in order to get their products into customers’ hands:

    Recently I received an email from an agent giving a blow by blow account of the process of getting booze onto the shelf of our beloved Monopoly, including the hair pulling and gnashing of teeth that goes along with it.

    [. . .]

    “I can take samples to the Licensees — Restaurants & Hotels — and if they want to buy it this is the procedure:

    1) They must purchase a minimum of one full case
    2) They must pay the LCBO a 25% deposit
    3) If I want to reduce the freight rate down from $100+ per case to a reasonable freight rate . . . more like $12/case then I need to gather a minimum of 20 cases in orders with specific Licensees names on them who have all paid the deposit.
    4) The LCBO Private Ordering department then processes the paperwork
    5) The producer would then ship the product to an LCBO pick-up location
    6) We wait until the LCBO consolidates our small order into a large container with other suppliers
    7) The product usually takes 4 months to arrive and then spends another month going through Lab Analysis at a cost to the supplier of $175 per product.
    8) When the product finally gets released we have to hope that the original licensees that ordered it all take delivery
    9) The producer gets paid 60 – 90 days after the order lands in Ontario (while the agent pays to get it out of the Private Ordering warehouse).
    10) The agent then has to chase the customer for at least 90 days to get them to pay since they will likely have an excuse not to have a cheque ready upon delivery
    11) We have to do this for a total a 300 cases sold within one year to EARN the privilege of getting into the Consignment warehouse.
    12) Once granted consignment space . . . we can start to ship from the producer to the LCBO consignment warehouse by the pallet (~56 cases)
    13) In consignment, the product can be shipped without an advanced licensee order . . . but still must sell by the case to customers.
    14) The producer gets paid once ALL of the order is sold through: 120 – 240 days later.
    15) If the product does not sell through within 120 days of arrival then the LCBO confiscates the remaining order, discounts it, and puts it into a sale warehouse.
    16) This frees up more space back in the consignment warehouse so that they can trap more agents into over-shipping and then the LCBO can punish them for trying to treat Ontario like a free enterprise liquor system.

    Oh, and if the LCBO decides to add your product to their regular merchandise, you’ll be out of luck as it’ll probably sell for less than you can (and your hotel and restaurant customers are paying for exclusivity in a lot of cases, so they’ll stop ordering through you if it’s available in the LCBO retail stores).

    Brendan O’Neill: Occupy movement is the death rattle of the old Left

    Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

    For a self-described man of the left, Brendan O’Neill is not afraid to critique leftist movements:

    In the increasingly whiffy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, amid placards declaring ‘The End is Nigh’, apparently a new kind of politics is being born. Young women talk about ‘politics starting again’. The media cheerleaders of the Occupy movement claim it represents ‘a substantive change not just to the nature of modern politics, but to the way in which it is done, demanded and delivered’. From New York to Madrid to Tokyo, the inhabitants of the so-called tent cities proudly declare themselves ‘citizens of a new world’.

    Is all this occupying really the start of something new? No. And not only because on the rare occasion when the protesters issue a coherent demand they end up echoing ideas we’ve heard a thousand times before. (Their call for tougher independent regulation of the financial industry was pilfered from the Financial Times.) More fundamentally, their globally contagious protest represents the death agony of something old rather than the birth pang of something new. What we’re witnessing is the demise of the progressive left, but — and here is the Occupy movement’s twist — that demise is dolled up as something good, something positive, where instead of addressing the vacuum at the heart of modern left-wing thinking, the occupiers make a virtue out of it.

    Around the world, the occupiers are adapting to the decayed state of radical left-wing thinking, moulding themselves around the organisational and political disarray of the left. All the negative things about the left today — the lack of big ideas, the dearth of daring leaders, the withering of organisational structures — are repackaged as positives. Leaderlessness is transformed into a virtue, the enabler of a fairer, more consensual form of politics. The absence of overarching ideology is sexed up as ‘liberation from dogma’. Even the thoughtlessness of the Occupy movement, both in terms of its lack of deep thinking and the way it has spread across the globe in a fairly thoughtless, meme-like fashion, is turned into a good thing: this is ‘unthought’, declares one observer, where creeds emerge ‘without much articulation of why they’re necessary, [almost] as reflexes’.

    October 19, 2011

    Selley: Milewski is right on Tories’ “tough on crime” policies

    Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

    Chris Selley can’t be accused of being a Terry Milewski fan, but he does agree with Milewski’s message:

    The CBC recently sent Terry Milewski to Texas, the blood and guts state, where he asked conservative politicians and various experts what they thought of building more prisons, and filling them up, as a means of driving down crime. “Don’t,” was the basic answer. “It doesn’t work. That’s why we’re doing the opposite.”

    It was a nice piece on a serious policy issue. It reminded us that the federal government seems to consider crime legislation inside a hermetically sealed chamber. But for that very reason, nothing any journalist says is likely to make any difference. If contrary evidence carried any weight in Cabinet, the omnibus tough-on-crime bill, C-10, wouldn’t be before Parliament. The fact that elites recoil at its provisions and spew champagne out of their noses is a feature, not a bug.

    And, if I may briefly adopt the voice of a partisan blogger, the mainstream media would denounce the law of gravity if it somehow helped the Liberals (or the NDP, depending what day it is). The CBC, in the memorable words of Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, “lies all the time.” And Mr. Milewski, as we all know, chairs the left-wing media conspiracy.

    This is not an ideal policy-making environment. But I’m going to try to change minds on a single, narrow, easily fixable issue: Mandatory minimum sentences for non-serious crimes. I can’t see any level on which they are supportable.

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