Quotulatiousness

February 17, 2013

Money talks, fading historical memories edition

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

The British army’s officer training college at Sandhurst (think “West Point” in the American context) has invited a lot of criticism for this decision:

Britain’s top military academy, Sandhurst, has come under fire for renaming a sports hall commemorating a First World War battle after the King of Bahrain.

The Mons Hall — named after the 1914 battle where thousands died — will have its name changed to honour the Bahraini monarch who has given millions in funding to the Army’s officer training college.

The building will now be called King Hamad Hall and will reopen next month after being refurbished thanks to a £3 million donation from the king, who is the patron of the Sandhurst Foundation but is known for brutally repressing demonstrators at home.

Sandhurst has also accepted a £15 million donation from the United Arab Emirates to build a new accommodation block, raising questions about the college’s links with authoritarian Gulf states accused of human rights abuses.

Critics say the Army is betraying the soldiers who gave their lives and that Bahrain and the UAE are trying to avert criticism of their regimes by buying silence with donations.

The 1914 Battle of Mons was the first major battle of the war. Against overwhelming odds, the British Army inflicted 5,000 casualties on the Germans. At least 1,600 British troops were killed.

February 4, 2013

CBS Sports fumbles during SuperBowl blackout

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

In the New York Daily News, Bob Raissman asks why CBS didn’t bother to do any actual “journalism” about the blackout:

The fans inside the Superdome were not the only ones left in the dark when half the building’s power went out in the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII Sunday night. Viewers were left with unanswered questions as CBS Sports’ sideline reporters, and the rest of the cast, failed to go into a reporting mode.

There was no outrage, no questioning how a thing like this could happen on the NFL’s biggest night of the year.

At a time when they should have been aggressively gathering news, CBS’ crew was satisfied with the crumbs the NFL dropped on them. And they swallowed the scraps gladly. Not once during the 34-minute delay did a representative of the National Football League appear on camera to attempt to explain what caused half the Superdome to lose power. Why should they? No one from CBS put any pressure on them.

[. . .]

Think about it. CBS pays billions for the right to air NFL games. Much of that dough is shelled out to secure rights to the Super Bowl. So, on the big night, there is a major screwup and the NFL won’t put someone on the air — and CBS won’t push the league — to try to explain what’s going on? That’s mind-boggling.

But not quite as wacked as CBS’ laid-back approach to reporting this story, which will go down as one of the more unusual moments in Super Bowl history. All the players were on the field, waiting, stretching. Why not take a camera and microphone on the sidelines for an interview? If they blow you off, fine — at least viewers would have something worth watching.

January 20, 2013

Oxfam and the top 1%

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:43

Oxfam is publicly blaming and shaming the top 1% of income-earners for their evil money-grubbing ways that deprive the worst-off and make poverty worse in developing countries. Simon Cooke explains why they’re wonderfully, gloriously wrong:

    “Concentration of resources in the hands of the top 1% depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else — particularly those at the bottom of the economic ladder.”

And that top 1% isn’t you and me we’re led to believe — it’s those evil billionaire capitalists who are stealing the very bread from the mouths of the starving children. Let’s leave aside the fact that poverty is largely unrelated to inequality — people do not become rich by making others poor, however often Oxfam want to pretend that this is so. Instead let’s remind ourselves who the 1% are in terms of world development and poverty:

    The truth is that the entry level income for the world’s top 1% of earners is:

    $34,000

    That’s it, in real money not a great deal more than £20,000 a year gets you into the 1% club — sits you among the world’s filthy rich, among those to blame for all the sins and evil of the world. Capitalist scum.

Most of you reading this blog are in the top 1% sucking up all those resources — depriving the poor in Africa and elsewhere of the chance to grow, to get out of poverty.

Except you’re not. Sit back, put a smile on you face — punch the air with joy. You and me — capitalists both — have sat getting a little richer for thirteen years while a billion folk have escaped absolute poverty. All the international trade, all those businesses and those business folk filling the posh seats in aeroplanes flitting across the world — they’ve done that, they’ve lifted those people out of poverty.

Oxfam are wrong. Neoliberalism is making all the world richer. Even the UN celebrates that neoliberal success:

    “For the first time since records on poverty began, the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen in every developing region, including sub-Saharan Africa. Preliminary estimates indicate that the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 per day fell in 2010 to less than half the 1990 rate…”

This is what capitalism does. Isn’t it wonderful.

September 26, 2012

Unthinking support of “the troops”

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

If you’ve read the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m far from anti-military. I was in the Canadian militia (the army reserve) during my teenage years, and still have friends who are serving in the armed forces of Canada, Britain, and the US. Since 2001, Canadians in particular have re-evaluated their views of the military and are now much more likely to demonstrate their support for the army, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Even so, Canadians are much more low-key in their demonstrations of respect and approval than Americans are.

Some of the more outspoken supporters actually give me the creeps … rather than showing their support for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen, they seem to be showing their support for militarism. That sort of thing enables and encourages military adventurism, armed intervention in other countries, and the militarization of civilian life (look at the military-style gear many police departments now operate, including drones for border surveillance and drug war operations). That’s a line I never want to see Canada cross.

At the Future of Freedom Foundation blog, Jacob Hornberger expresses some of the same concern:

One of the most fascinating phenomena of our time is the extreme reverence that the American people have been taught to have for the military. Wherever you go — airports, sports events, church — there is a god-like worship of the military.

“Let us all stand and express our sincerest thanks to our troops for the wonderful service they perform for our country,” declare the sports broadcasters.

“Let us pray for the troops, especially those in harm’s way,” church ministers exhort their parishioners.

“Let us give a big hand to our troops who are traveling with us today,” exclaim airline officials.

Every time I see this reverence for the military being expressed, I wonder if people ever give any thought to what exactly the troops are doing. No one seems to ask that question. It just doesn’t seem to matter. The assumption is that whatever the troops are doing, they are protecting our “rights and freedoms.” As one sports broadcaster I recently heard put it, “We wouldn’t be here playing this game if it weren’t for the troops.”

There is at least one big problem with this phenomenon, however: The troops are engaged in actions that are harmful to the American people, including most of the people who have a reverential attitude toward them.

September 24, 2012

US Navy works with Chinese Navy ship for anti-piracy exercise

Filed under: Africa, China, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

This is an unusual arrangement, but it makes sense in the larger picture:

The U.S. Navy and the Chinese Navy conducted their first joint anti-piracy drill. A Chinese frigate (the 4,000 ton Type 54A Yiyang) and an American destroyer (the 8,200 ton Burke class Churchill) carried out several training operations over five hours. This included joint use of communications as well as boarding and onboard search procedures. This was done in the Gulf of Aden, off Somalia.

While there was some PR angle to this, the crews of the two ships did get a useful look at how the other side operates. More to the point, it was a useful drill in the event that Chinese and American warships found themselves dealing with the same bunch of Somali pirates. Both sides will distribute what was learned throughout their respective fleets.

All this is part of a trend. China is becoming more inclined to work with ships from other nations patrolling the pirate infested waters off Somalia. Earlier this year, for example, China, India, and Japan agreed to have their warships off the Somali coast coordinate operations to more efficiently protect civilian ships in the area. Chinese and Indian warships have been operating independently off Somalia, while Japanese ships have been operating with Task Force 151. Most warships on anti-piracy duty belong to TF 151. Most of the remainder work with EUNFS (European Union Naval Force Somalia). But some nations continue to operate independently, more or less. In these cases there is always some communication, coordination, and sharing of information with TF 151 and EUNFS.

September 10, 2012

The non-romantic reality of a book tour

Filed under: Books, Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Poor Charles Stross has experienced one-too-many book tours. It’s so not conducive to anything like comfort or a normal life:

A book signing tour sounds romantic, but actually it’s not. It’s like one of those cheap package holidays in which you get to tour South America or Europe in seven days. Each day you have to get out of bed at dawn or earlier and head to the airport for another cavity search and economy-class ticket to a new city. When you arrive, a new guide meets you in, shovels you into their car, and then takes you on a whistle-stop tour of sights of the city. (On a tourist tour, it’s museums or monuments; on a signing tour, it’s bookstores, where you render the stock non-returnable by defacing it with your signature.) You might be allowed to dump your bag in a hotel room if timing permits. The hotel room will be luxurious and expensive and you will spend so little time awake in it that it seems like a cruel joke, because your time will be programmed so tightly you barely have a chance to eat. It is possible that you will be dragged in front of microphones or cameras to answer confused or confusing questions by journalists who haven’t read your book; then, each evening, you will show up at a bookstore where hopefully there will be an audience who will listen to you deliver a canned speech and/or reading and then buy books which you will then sign. And you will have to be nice to everybody, on pain of potentially not getting another tour (which might sound like a blessing in disguise until you work out what’s going to happen to your income thereafter). Finally, your head hits the pillow around 11pm — don’t forget to check in for tomorrow’s exciting anal probe and air-sickness theme-park ride! — for as much as five or six hours’ sleep.

But then, the nightmare thought: a book tour reality TV show…

September 7, 2012

“When I discover something surprising in data, the most common explanation is that I made a mistake.”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:20

John Kay suggests you always ask how a statistic was created before you consider what the presenter wants you to think:

Always ask yourself the question: “where does that data come from?”. “Long distance rail travel in Britain is expected to increase by 96 per cent by 2043.” Note how the passive voice “is expected” avoids personal responsibility for this statement. Who expects this? And what is the basis of their expectation? For all I know, we might be using flying platforms in 2043, or be stranded at home by oil shortages: where did the authors of the prediction acquire their insight?

“On average, men think about sex every seven seconds.” How did the researchers find this out? Did they ask men how often they thought about sex, or when they last thought about sex (3½ seconds ago, on average)? Did they give their subjects a buzzer to press every time they thought about sex? How did they confirm the validity of the responses? Is it possible that someone just made this statement up, and that it has been repeated frequently and without attribution ever since? Many of the numbers I hear at business conferences have that provenance.

[. . .]

Be careful of data defined by reference to other documents that you are expected not to have read. “These accounts have been compiled in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles”, or “these estimates are prepared in line with guidance given by HM Treasury and the Department of Transport”. Such statements are intended to give a false impression of authoritative endorsement. A data set compiled by a national statistics organisation or a respected international institution such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or Eurostat will have been compiled conscientiously. That does not, however, imply that the numbers mean what the person using them thinks or asserts they mean.

August 23, 2012

“I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

At Politico, the story of a former NPR congressional reporter who finally had enough of the political lies:

After 14 years at National Public Radio, Andrea Seabrook left in July and, to hear her talk about her experience covering Capitol Hill, it’s clear that she had one takeaway: It’s damn frustrating.

“I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say,” Seabrook told POLITICO. “And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”

If you’ve had any contact with politicians, you very quickly learn that they are always trying to spin: it’s just that some of them are naturally better at it than others, and some get help from the media to make them seem better at it.

August 13, 2012

The problems of conducting science-by-press-release

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

At sp!ked, Ben Pile explains why the first casualties in the climate change debate are usually the facts:

In plain sight of the fact that the melting was neither unexpected nor unprecedented, environmental journalists the world over picked up the story and ran with it. In the Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg, wrote: ‘The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.’

As I have noted elsewhere, Guardian journalists have a fetish for stories about melting ice. In September last year, following an unusually low measurement of Arctic sea-ice extent, Damian Carrington wrote: ‘Ice is the white flag being waved by our planet, under fire from the atmospheric attack being mounted by humanity.’ But the low measurement of sea ice that Carrington pointed to disagreed with at least five other continuous measurements of the Arctic, and was thus unreliable. This kind of over-reaction to scientific developments are facile attempts to turn science into stories of political intrigue. When images of the Arctic taken by US spy satellites were declassified in 2009, the headline of an article by Goldenberg and Carrington proclaimed that ‘the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide’ had been ‘revealed’.

The rash of excited articles about the dying cryosphere caused some surprising corrective responses from voices within climate research. Malte Humpert from the Arctic Institute Centre wrote a stinging response to the headline histrionics. ‘The Greenland ice sheet, which is up to 3000+ metres thick, is not “melting away”, did not “melt in four days”, it is not “melting fast”, and Greenland did not “lose 97 per cent of its surface ice layer”.’ Humpert continued: ‘Most articles also exaggerated the importance of the melt event on global sea levels by explaining how sea levels would rise by up to 7.2 metres if the ice sheet were to melt.’

Similarly, Mark Brandon, a sea-ice scientist at the Open University, reproduced an interesting series of tweets and links to articles that showed the development of the current panic about ice, beginning with (alleged) comedian Marcus Brigstocke’s misconception of the story. To Brigstocke, an ‘unprecedented’ melt was the proverbial canary in the coal mine — a harbinger of doom. But as Brandon and his colleagues pointed out, it was a bit soon to be calling time on the human race. This was just weather.

July 31, 2012

The BEST model: still science-by-press-release

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Andrew Orlowski on the latest PR offensive by Dr Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project:

Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, which began with goodwill from all corners of the climate debate, has made a series of bold announcements (without benefit of peer review) to the effect that global warming is definitely serious and definitely caused by humans. This has aroused derision among formerly supportive climate sceptics, caused an eminent climatologist to abandon the project, and even drawn criticism from generally alarmism-sympathetic media commentators.

Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, is often regarded as a climate sceptic because he has frequently criticised the techniques used by climate scientists in the past and because he accepted funding for BEST from libertarian oil billionaire Charles Koch. When BEST launched in the wake of Climategate, it vowed to be “an independent, non-political, non-partisan group”, with Muller promising that “there will be no spin, whatever we find”. Critics of the existing temperature establishment, including well known sceptics Anthony Watts and Doug Keenan, welcomed it.

However each announcement has been aggressively trialled in the press not only before the peer review process had judged them ready for publication — which may not be a major issue — but also before anyone outside the BEST project could examine the papers at all. This requires the ordinary reader to take BEST’s accompanying press releases on blind faith — which is not a barrier for some journalists, but is far short of acceptable practice.

June 27, 2012

Questions on the Elliot Lake rescue efforts

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Whether it was just a badly phrased moment in a press conference or not, Toronto’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue team has not done itself any public relations favours in the aftermath to the partial collapse of the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake:

The story of the collapsed mall in Elliot Lake, where the rescue mission is back on after being suspended on Monday because officials deemed the building too “unsafe,” has so far deviated from romantic tales of heroism and rescue, spiralling instead into talk of delays, strict mandates and “limited resources.”

A spokesman for Toronto’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue team, Bill Neadles, said on Tuesday the group was still in its “infancy” — that aside from winning some industry competitions and running mock rescues, HUSAR, as it is known, had only participated in one operation: a gas explosion in 2003. He said when he initially told residents on Monday the team had “reached the end of its mandate” he did not mean they were abandoning the operation, he “just didn’t want to lead anybody to believe I was going to come back with a silver claw and walk on water.”

[. . .]

In Elliot Lake, no one has been spirited away alive, at least not yet. One person is thought dead and a dozen are feared missing. At least one is believed to have made a noise amid the rubble on Monday morning.

“One of the things that gives rescue a sort of romance is the idea that you go in and you get the job done … and that’s one of the reasons this Northern Ontario mall story is so 21st century,” said Bob Thompson, a pop culture expert at New York’s Syracuse University. “Here we’ve got this potentially romantic rescue story, and what do we see? Good ol’ fashioned bureaucracy.”

When most Canadians think of rescue, they do not think of government inner-workings: a Ministry of Labour structural engineer suspending a search; provincial officials having to explicitly give the Toronto team the authority to go back in; a premier intervening to make that happen.

“If you had put 100 miners in there, they would have been out by Saturday,” said Greg Dillavough, a retired miner who once worked in mine rescue in the Northwest Territories and Ontario. “You don’t walk away from a site when someone’s alive.”

April 30, 2012

New frontiers in border control bureaucracy

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Travelling by air to the UK is a good way to discover the joys of forming queues. The British national pastime of days gone by has been making a stirring new appearance at British airports. The agency responsible is doing everything it can … to suppress information and forbid photography of the queues of people waiting for hours to get through customs:

Heathrow Airport has been ordered by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to stop handing out to passengers leaflets acknowledging the “very long delays” at immigration, which have become a serious government concern in the runup to the Olympics.

Passengers flying into the airport at the weekend reported having to wait for up to three hours before clearing passport control. But after leaflets apologising for the problem were handed out by BAA, which owns Heathrow, the UKBA warned that they were “inappropriate” and that ministers would take “a very dim view”.

The airport operator was also told to prevent passengers taking pictures in the arrivals hall, according to the Daily Telegraph, which obtained correspondence from Marc Owen, director of UKBA operations at Heathrow. Pictures of lengthy queues have been posted on Twitter by frustrated travellers.

March 28, 2012

Science and journalism, two flavours that have uneven results when mixed together

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

James Randerson on the intersection between science and popular journalism:

Just to be clear, we are talking here about standard news stories based on a single journal paper — the science hack’s bread and butter. For me, the answer is straightforward. Of course a good science/health/environment journalist should read the paper if possible. It is the record of what the scientists actually did and what the peer reviewers have allowed them to claim (peer review is very far from perfect but it is at least some check on researchers boosting their conclusions).

Without seeing the paper you are at the mercy of press-release hype from overenthusiastic press officers or, worse, from the researchers themselves. Of course science journalists won’t have the expertise to spot some flaws, but they can get a sense of whether the methodology is robust — particularly for health-related papers.

In any case, very often the press release does not include all the information you will need for a story, and the paper can contain some hidden gems. Frequently the press release misses the real story.

The tricky question is whether you go ahead and write the story if you can’t get hold of the paper. I think a blanket ban would be going too far. Sometimes, it is not possible to get hold of the research paper in the time available.

I’m not scientifically trained, so the odd time when I post something with a link to a recent scientific paper, you can be pretty sure that I’ve only read the summary — but I’m not being paid to present my readers with scientific information. I’d expect professional science journalists to at least do a bit more due diligence than I expect bloggers to do…

March 19, 2012

The PR problem of NASA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Politics, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

L. Neil Smith explains why and how NASA has managed to become so uninspiring (hint: it was deliberate).

The truth is, there are three kinds of people in the world, those to whom traveling to, landing on, settling, and terraforming the planet Mars requires no explanation, those for whom no explanation of any kind will ever suffice, and those who remain to be convinced.

Our job in that respect really amounts to putting the romance back into space exploration that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration carefully throttled out of it over the past half century. I think their secret motto was, “If you’re having any fun, you’re not doing it right.”

All that time, NASA and its supporters seemed to be asking desperately, why is the American public losing interest in what we’re doing? But the answer was in the mirror before them. In a desperate bid for false respectability, in a misplaced desire not to evoke visions of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers or Captain Video, they ended up not evoking any visions at all, and thereby destroyed any reason for the average individual, the average man, woman, or child, to support their program.

I have also come to think — very reluctantly, believe me — that there has been a secret agenda, probably in echelons much higher than NASA itself, to prevent that average individual from ever getting into space, which may be why they opposed the whole “space tourism” idea so hysterically.

February 14, 2012

The surreal world of international aid

Filed under: Britain, India, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

Brendan O’Neill on the ludicrous display of a donor literally begging the intended recipient to continue accepting the offering:

The debate about whether Britain should continue giving aid to India will surely rank as one of 2012’s most ‘Alice in Wonderland’ political moments. An outsider to the world of international aid probably imagines that it is cash-strapped countries in the South who do the pleading, sometimes having to humiliate themselves by asking Western nations for financial assistance. Yet in the surreal affray over aid to India, it was the well-off giver — Britain — which was on its knees, begging, beseeching the Indians to continue accepting our largesse because if they didn’t, it would cause the Lib-Con government ‘great embarrassment’.

This unseemly spat sums up the problem with modern aid: it’s all about Us, not Them. The reason British ministers were prostrating themselves before India, effectively begging the Indians to remain as beggars, is because aid is now more about generating a moral rush in the big heads of politicians and activists over here than it is about filling the tummies of under-privileged people over there. It is designed to flatter and satisfy the giver rather than address the needs of the receiver, which means ‘aid to India’ is way more important to Britain than it is to India. And for that reason, because aid has been so thoroughly corrupted by the narrow needs of its distributors, it would indeed be a good thing to stop foisting it upon India and other nations.

There was something almost Pythonesque (and I never use that word) in the sight of British politicians saying ‘We must continue giving aid to India’ while Indian politicians were saying ‘We do not require the aid. It is a peanut in our total development spending.’ Those were the words of India’s finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, who told his parliament that the nation should ‘voluntarily’ give up the £280million it receives from Britain each year. Cue outraged — and panicked — ministers and do-gooders in London kickstarting a PR campaign to show that the Indians are wrong — they do need British aid, because otherwise, according to Britain’s minister for international development Alan Duncan, in an article illustrated with a photograph of him accepting flowers from grateful little Indians, ‘millions could die’.

[. . .]

British historian William Hutton once said, ‘The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation’. That is pretty much all that remains in the world of aid: pride and ostentation. Indeed, it is striking that, in 2010, when DFID announced cuts to spending on the publicity side of ‘fighting global poverty’, various NGOs went ballistic, slamming the focus on ‘output-based aid’ over important things such as ‘increas[ing] public understanding of the causes of global poverty’ — that is, who cares about providing on-the-ground stuff, when there’s so much awareness-raising about the wonderfulness of NGOs to be done? Britain’s aid budget should be slashed, not because it costs the taxpayer too much money, as Daily Mail moaners argue, but because it costs too much in terms of the self-respect of nations in the South. Britain should have an emergency aid budget, of course, so that, like all civilised nations, it can assist quickly and generously when people are immediately threatened by starvation or disease, such as after the Haiti earthquake or the Pakistani floods. But the rest of the time, even sometimes struggling peoples don’t need the massive side orders of moralism and fatalism that come with Britain’s ‘peanuts’.

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