July 2006

The latest round in the Republican War on Science is a report prepared for US Representative Joe Barton aimed at discrediting the ‘hockey stick’ analysis of global temperatures first undertaken by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, and subsequently supported by many other studies. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, this peripheral issue in the analysis of climate change has attracted disproportionate attention from denialists, most notably Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre. One result was that the US National Academy of Sciences recently reviewed the work, reaching conclusions broadly supportive of MBH.

The report for Barton was prepared by three statisticians, Edward Wegman, David Scott and Yasmin Said , and its only novel contribution is a social network analysis, which is meant to show that the various independent studies aren’t really independent and that peer review has broken down, since the same group of interlinked academics is reviewing each others’ papers.

Kieran and Eszter are the CT experts on this stuff, and I’ll be interested to see what they have to say. But in the meantime, I have a couple of observations (feel free to correct errors in my interpretation).

Note: A reader (who indentifies as TCO in the thread below) asked for this in another thread, but I couldn’t find it again when I posted.
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In my dialect of English, shared living arrangements (normally non-familial) can be described by three terms.
A housemate (or flatmate) is someone who shares your house (normally not your room, but this is open)
A roommate is someone who shares your room (normally not your bed, but see above)
A bedmate is self-explanatory.

In US English, “roommate” seems to cover all three, but US English speakers seem able to infer which is intended from the context. Can anyone help me with a usage guide?

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I’m back from a trip to the West Indies, including several days on Canouan – the home island of my brother. It’s one of the Grenadines – part of the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which became independent in 1979. It’s still tiny – around 3 square miles and somewhere around 1500 people – but things have changed a lot since Adonal was growing up. There’s now central electricity, for example, and a few more paved roads. There’s also a fence around the runway, so airplanes don’t have to circle around to wait for the cows to be driven out of the way.

But the really big change was the development of the northern half (actually a little more than half, I think) of the island. What was previously an uninhabited forest is now an ultra-luxury resort, complete with championship golf course, casino, and villas developed by Donald Trump. (Here’s a link with a nice picture – and notice the url.) Essentially the only previous building on the area was a church to which Adonal remembers making the journey a couple times each year when he was a kid. On our last night, we went to dinner at the resort. The food was outstanding and the setting unbelievably beautiful – the buildings and design were lovely and surprisingly tasteful. I was also surprised that by American standards, it was not outrageously expensive. Still, it is far beyond the means of essentially all residents of the island. Quite the interesting dilemma. On the one hand, turn over half of the island to obscenely wealthy foreigners who will only admit you past the gate if you are employed there. On the other hand, essentially everyone on the island who is able to work now has a job. Most of the people I talked to about it were not outwardly hostile, but neither did they view it as their salvation, either – just part of life. In any event, we’ll never know what they would have chosen since the decision was made by politicians in St. Vincent.

One of our loonier commenters referred yesterday to the “locally predominant anti-Israel consensus” at Crooked Timber. Odd that. One of our contributors strongly identifies with Israel and I spoke up last year against the proposed academic boycott by UK academics. (One unexpected consequence of which was that I was absolutely deluged for a while by emails from pro-Israel lobby associations, keen to share with me their view of the latest Palestinian outrages. No wonder bloggers of a certain disposition don’t struggle to find material to relay.) We don’t have any kind of a party line on Israel at CT, but my guess is that most of us share the view that many sensible Israelis have. Namely that an eventual solution will involve two states with something like the 1967 borders, and that it would be better if that came about sooner and with less bloodshed rather than later and with more.

All of which is a preamble to saying that “the current actions of the Israeli government”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5177346.stm , in bombing facilities like Beirut Airport and a power station in Gaza, in deliberately making civilians suffer (and in many cases causing their deaths) are illegal and disproportionate, words that don’t do justice to the bloody reality. Collective punishment and reprisal are not permissible actions, but that is plainly what is going on here. Lebanese people are being killed as a matter of policy in order to put pressure on the Lebanese government. There is also the matter of the Israeli government continually referring to actions against its soldiers as “terrorist”. At other times they have made a big deal out of the unwillingness of news organizations to use the term, but when they openly seek to gain the rhetorical benefits of the word in relation to actions that are plainly military, though irregular, they illustrate why the BBC and others operate the policy that they do.

Saying this is not to offer apologetics for Hamas or Hezbollah. Seizing soldiers as prisoners of war may not be illegal, but seizing anyone to use them as a hostage plainly is. And there seems to be evidence that Hezbollah’s actions are part of a power play by a Syrian government that once again sees Lebanon and Lebanese civilians as expendable pawns. But what Israel is doing in Lebanon and Gaza at the moment is wrong, and that needs to be said.

UPDATE: See Jonathan Edelstein at “The Head Heeb for some further comment”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/032451.html .

A recent British expat writes today about life in Belgium; a familiar topic here at CT. But what strikes me is this sentence; “It’s my first proper visit to the “UK” (as expatriates and no-one else calls it) since I moved to Brussels”. Admitedly, ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ is inconcise. The writer evidently calls it ‘Britain’ – something I hardly ever heard, despite living there for three years. I had a non-expat British friend visiting this week, and she only ever called it ‘the UK’. ‘Britain’ sounds like something the Queen would say. It sounds mustily heroic. As in ‘The Battle of’. ‘The UK’ is much more now, much more New Labour, totally Third Way. And not as cringingly embarrassing as Cool Britannia.

Several years ago, I gave a talk to a mixed group of Northern Irish business people (It was on compliance with the E-Commerce Directive; they were rapt.). Half way through, I realised I didn’t know how to refer to, er, ‘the mainland’. But they were a lovely, warm audience and only slightly embarrassed for me, and during the Q&A they gently illustrated the accepted usage. They say ‘GB’ to mean the island of Britain, and ‘NI’ for their own patch. I know they also had an elegantly benign name for the South, I just can’t remember it. Maybe it was ‘the South’.

But the worst, the absolute block your ears, nails on a black board worst is when people say ‘England’ instead of ‘the UK’ or even ‘Britain’. And, sorry, but Americans are the worst offenders. They say things like ‘London, England’ which is of course superfluous because there is only one London. (I say this having spent a weekend in London, Ontario.) We all know London is located in England, but it is the capital of the UK. It’s a really bad habit to keep saying ‘England’ as if it’s interchangeable with ‘Britain’. It’s not. Saying ‘England’ when you mean ‘Britain’ is gauche and annoying and very, very blonde.

There are moments to say ‘England’, but they’re actually quite rare. One of those moments is when England plays in the world cup – it’s the England team, as of course the Scots and Welsh are too rubbish to qualify. But England does not enter the Olympics; Britain does. And England will not decide whether to join the EMU, Britain will. (Arguably.) England has never held the presidency of the EU, or hosted the G8, or invaded a country on its own (at least not in a few hundred years), because it’s not a state. Of course England has a certain status. And there’s that constitutional oddity that has the Welsh and Scots deciding their own issues at their own assemblies, but being able to chip in when Westminster decides purely English questions. But that is no excuse to toss your hair and talk about your summer holidays in ‘England’ where you also took in the Lake District.

An (English) rose by any other name does not smell so sweet.

It is worth taking a look at this manifesto, which argues forcefully for weighted student funding (in which funding would be proportional to need, rather than, as in the current American system, roughly proportional to social advantage). Achieving weighted student funding is a hard road, and it is worth noting that nobody thinks it is a cure-all for educational equality, but it is at least a vital component of a progressive reform strategy. Here’s a simple explanation:

Under WSF, the per-student amount varies with the characteristics of the child. Students with added educational needs receive extra funding based on the costs of meeting those needs. The amount attached to each student is calculated by taking a base amount and adding money determined by a series of “weights” assigned to various categories of students. These weights could take the form of dollar amounts: an extra $500 for a student in one category, $1,000 for a student in another. Or they could be expressed in proportional terms, with students in a high-need category generating, say, 1.4 or 1.5 times the base level of funding. Either way, the concept is the same: students with higher levels of need receive more “weight” in the funding system. As a result, the schools they attend end up with more dollars.

I’d quarrel with the numbers here (I’ve argued for high need students to receive 3 times the base level of funding in a different context (PDF, p 95)), but even 1.5 would be a lot better than 0.5. It’s also worth looking at the list of signatories — but if you can stand the suspense you might want to read the manifesto first and the signatories last. (Full disclosure — I found out about this because a friend asked my advice about whether to become an initial signatory, triggering a small amount of relief on my part that I was not invited and thus didn’t have to think about whether to sign on).

“Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/12/mclemee makes a modest proposal.

bq. With such difficulties in mind, then, I want to propose a kind of public-works project. The time has come to create a map. In fact, it is hard to imagine things can continue much longer without one. At very least, we need a Web site giving users some idea what landmarks already exist in the digital space of academe. … AggAcad 1.0 would resemble the phonebook for a very small town — with one column of business numbers and another of personal. It would provide a rather bare-bones set of links, in two broad categories. There would be an online directory of academic publishers, similar to the one now provided by the Association of American University Presses. But it would also have links to the Web sites of other scholarly imprints, whether from commercial publishers or professional organizations. The other component of the start-up site would be an academic blogroll – perhaps an updated version of the one now available at Crooked Timber, divided broadly by disciplines. …

bq. AggAcad 2.0 would provide not just directories but content from and about scholarly publishing. As academic presses make more material available online — sample chapters, interviews with authors, etc. — the site would point readers to it. (This aspect of the site might be run by RSS or similar feeds.) Likewise, visitors to the site would learn of the more substantial reviews in online publications, including symposia on new books held by academic bloggers.

bq. AggAcad 3.0 would incorporate elements of Digg — the Web site that allows readers in the site’s community to recommend links and vote on how interesting or useful they prove. … By this stage, AggAcad would provide something like a hub to the far-flung academic blogosphere (or whatever we are calling it within a few years). Individuals would still be able to generate and publish content as they see fit. The advantages of decentralization would continue. But the site might foster more connections than now seem possible. Information about new scholarly books could circulate in new ways. It would begin to have some influence on how the media covered academic issues. And — who knows? — the quality of public discussion might even rise a little bit.

This all seems to me to be great. First, it would create some sort of credentialling process, which might make it easier, say, to get tenure committees to take blogging seriously as a form of disciplinary or public service (and some of the more thoughtful blog symposia etc as a form of publishing). Secondly, on a more personal level, it would allow me to get out from under the academic blogroll. As a new-ish father, I’m finding it more nearly impossible than ever to keep up with the expansion of the academic blogosphere, and have gotten woefully bad at updating it (I will be updating it with various requests next week, _promise_). It’s just too big for one person to keep track of any more. As a first step towards Scott’s proposal, I may change the blogroll to a wiki format, and ask a few people to act as discipline specific editors (or alternatively just throw it out to the public as an open resource). Or, if anyone has any technically elegant alternative suggestions, feel free to throw them out in comments.

The British “pro-war left” blog Harry’s Place, to which we still link in our sidebar, has recently expanded its roster of bloggers. One of the new crew, Brett Lock, has now posted “a lengthy diatribe”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/07/12/a_little_pizza_jordan_a_little_pizza_israel.php about the sinister campaign that has led Palestinian schoolgirls to bake a Pizza in the shape of a Palestine that appears include Israel too. This on the basis of an article in a small circulation London local paper. I thought this kind of thing — objectively terrorist cake-blogging — was the preserve of Fafblog or The Onion, or of wingnuts like Malkin (remember the “crescent-shaped” UA93 memorial?). Whatever next?

BBC obit here.

This “FT”:http://us.rd.yahoo.com/finance/news/ft/SIG=119k1ua5r/*http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto070920061427320025&referrer_id=yahoofinance op-ed by Timothy Garton Ash, Dominique Moisi and Alexsander Smolar makes some good trenchant points about the EU’s increasingly tricky relationship with Russia.

bq. Europeans are faced with a delicate balancing act in their policy towards Russia. Should the message be one of trust in a re-emerging power whose energy resources are vital to us, or wariness of a regime whose authoritarian instincts are clearer than ever? … Today we may be witnessing the emergence of competition between European states for privileged relations with Moscow and favoured access to Russian gas. … he time has come for the EU to develop a genuinely European policy towards Russia. While seeking a long-term strategic partnership with its giant Eurasian neighbour, the EU should not hesitate to ask three elementary things of Russia. …The first of these requirements is that Russia should allow its neighbours to determine their own futures. … The second requirement … Energy contracts should be clear, binding and respected … The third strategic requirement has to do with certain minimal standards of legal and political conduct inside Russia’s borders. …Non-governmental organisations should be allowed to function properly in civil society and media independence should be a reality. … The concepts of “sovereign democracy” or “managed democracy” advanced by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, remind us of yesterday’s concept of “people’s democracy.”

I was too busy grading to write a post a few weeks ago on Cheney’s comments on Russia’s slide into autocracy. These were undoubtedly hypocritical (Cheney was perfectly happy to kiss up to nasty Central Asian autocrats a couple of days later) but nonetheless dead on target. Russia is a real problem for both the US and Europe, but EU member states don’t want to face up to it. They’re increasingly dependent on Russian energy resources, and Russia has made it clear that it’s willing to exploit this dependency towards political ends. It has very successfully been playing the game of divide and rule, making individual deals with EU member states (many of which have been notably willing to reach agreement, sometimes under rather dubious circumstances). There were some mutterings a month or two ago about a special energy summit to be convened by the Finns, but as far as I know, nothing has come of this. Unless the EU comes up with a common approach to energy policy, its member states are likely to find their political choices greatly curtailed in coming decades. As far as I can see, there’s no sign that the EU is willing to do this.

When I heard Jonathan Edelstein, aka the Head Heeb, had been to Ireland recently and was planning to write something about it, I knew we’d be in for a treat. Today he’s posted a very informative piece on immigration in Ireland. It’s a good overview from someone who has a lot of comparative knowledge about immigration and can place our experience in a wider context. From being a net exporter of people up to 1995, we’ve been an immigration nation since, with 10% of people living in Ireland today born elsewhere. And it’s only getting started.
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Steven Poole, our guest-blogger from last week, has this to say about “asymmetric warfare”:

bq. Asymmetric warfare’ is the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot at: on the one side you have battalions of American infantry, marines, tanks and aircraft; and on the other you have terrorists, or guerrillas, or militants, or insurgents. [“Read the whole thing”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060611135824/index.html , as they say. cb]

Of course the reason people don’t line up to be shot at, wearing proper uniforms, distinguishing themselves from the civilian population, and so on, is that it would be suicidal so to do. And here lies a real difficulty for conventional just war theory. If recourse to war is sometimes just — and just war theory says it is — but it may only be justly fought within the jus in bello restrictions, then it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak. Faced with a professional army equipped with powerful weaponry, people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics. If those tactics are morally impermissible because of the risks they impose on non-combatants, then it looks as if armed resistance to severe injustice perpetrated by the well-equipped and powerful is also prohibited. And that looks crazy.

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So, Brendan remembers The Tomorrow People (on which UK amazon has a fantastic sale (the whole thing for 30 quid, here); US versions here, here and here). Not only him — a graduate student was in my office a couple of months discussing a paper when suddenly she completely lost concentration, on seeing Set 2 (series 3,4,5) on the bookshelf next to me. She was lost in that moment of complete joy one experiences when remembering the long-forgotten wonders of one’s childhood and realises that one can, if one wishes, relive them.

My parents were too liberal to prohibit us from watching the other side as kids, but my mother adopted the entirely successful and rather admirable strategy of mocking us mercilessly if we did, for being willing to waste our time watching people selling us things. This raised the quality bar; if it was on the other side it had to be that much better than a BBC offering for us to be willing to bear the cost of the ridicule. My strategy is less liberal; my kids watch only what we permit, and only when we permit it.

But there is some overlap, as I’ve mentioned before. Brendan will be glad to know that among straight dramas, my daughter (now 9) says The Tomorrow People is the best.

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A lot of people seem to be extremely upset with Zidane for doing what he did with Materazzi. But wouldn’t we at least want to know a little bit about the verbal exchange? I guess the idea is that no matter what Materazzi said, the physical response was not warranted. Maybe. The whole thing reminds me of the incident at the end of the movie Bend it Like Beckham.

On a related note, I always wonder what language players speak when addressing each other in such situations.