Cosmic Variance‘s Sean Carroll doing a very good job indeed on The Colbert Report. That shit is hard. Along the way he makes deft use of a Dara O’Briain line (“Of course science doesn’t know everything — if science knew everything, it would stop”) that I believe I introduced him to, so therefore I take full credit for all the laughs he got and expect to receive a check for any royalties accruing from Colbert-related sales.
“Charlemagne’s prediction”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/02/not_federal_union_yet 1 that the Greek crisis would have no substantial effects for EU integration is looking “decidedly wobbly”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2b0933f4-2b1a-11df-93d8-00144feabdc0.html.
bq. Radical plans for a European version of the International Monetary Fund to bail out crisis-hit countries would need a new treaty and the agreement of all European Union member states, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has warned. Throwing her weight behind the proposals from Wolfgang Schäuble, her finance minister, Ms Merkel admitted that the European Union had lacked the tools to deal with the Greek debt crisis: “The sanctions we have were not good enough.” But she added that a full-scale negotiation of the EU’s 27 member states would be needed to set up a European Monetary Fund, which would be able to bail out eurozone members subject to strict budgetary conditions. “Without treaty change we cannot found such a fund,” Ms Merkel told foreign correspondents in Berlin yesterday.
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I now have in front of me the final issue (vol. 10 no. 3) of Imprints, currently subtitled “egalitarian theory and practice” but originally “a journal of analytical socialism”. Conceived in Dunkin Donuts Piccadilly Circus branch in 1995, and launched in London during Euro 96 (we crowded round a small radio after the launch conference to hear the England-Spain penalty shoot-out), Imprints has been an important part of my life for nearly 15 years. We’ve interviewed many of the important intellectual figures of the left: Cohens Joshua and G.A., Philippe Van Parijs, John Roemer, Ruth Lister, Carole Pateman, Martha Nussbaum, Nancy Fraser … there’s a long list, and published some good and interesting work. But circulation was always small, and the effort involved in a small group self-publishing was large. A couple of years ago we believed we had a deal with a publisher to take the grind off our hands, but it all fell through at the last minute and it has been hard to rally the troops ever since. Many thanks to all our readers and contributors: it has been fun to work with you. Subscribers should get their final copies within the next month.
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This story (via Leiter) concerns the requirement in Pennsylvania that any university department within the PASSHE system that graduates fewer than 30 majors over five years justify its existence. A theater and dance department chair is quoted as follows:
“This is an insult to many of our faculty who feel what they do is central to the life of the university,” said Dr. Slavin, who also is vice president of the campus chapter of the faculty union, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties. “Challenging them to justify their existence is really a slap in the face.”
It is odd that in “normal” times it is just assumed that the departmental units can carry on without ever having to justify or even reflect very much on their existence or what they are supposed to be doing? It is entirely un-obvious why many departments should continue to exist (and some of the most un-obvious graduate huge numbers of majors); and one might have thought that it was a good idea even in normal times to review the justifications of their existence. The fact that there is so little reflection on the missions of departments is down, in part, to a failure of management; a failure that is just made starker by the demand that departments picked out by some arbitrary feature which, until this moment, they have been given no reason to think was a problem.
The issue made it to Leiter because several of the Philosophy departments in those institutions fall into the low-major category. But is producing Philosophy majors the point of having a Philosophy department? In Our Underachieving Colleges
I don’t think of the curriculum, or the mission of my department in my institution, that way at all.
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Ponnuru and Lowry have responded to critics of their American Exceptionalism piece, I see. I’ll just quote a bit from the end:
Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England “a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs.” Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.
Thank goodness it never became a serious problem. It might have left scars.
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I wrote “a year ago”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/09/belated-happy-birthday-international-womens-day/ that it was the 100th International Women’s day, but looking at the status updates of my Facebook Friends that special birthday seems to be today. Never mind! The “BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8555459.stm has a short documentary reporting on a UN conference reviewing what has been accomplished since the 1995 Beijing conference. The UN reports on all the progress that has been made; the activists rather note all that hasn’t been achieved yet.
Interestingly enough, that is precisely the pattern we see in debates in rich countries too: yes, there has been progress, but no, we haven’t reached a gender just world yet. In “a debate”:http://www.womeninc.nl/page/17963/nl on recent Dutch policy initiatives to facilitate employment for parents (an issue many more women than men struggle with), which I attended in Amsterdam on Saturday, Mariette Hamer, a leading labour party politician said the same: feminists should count their blessings, and not just focus on what hasn’t been achieved, but also note all the positive changes.
I guess it’s good to focus on change and keep a positive attitude, but in some areas of feminist concern, the change has been painstakingly slow. I’m not going to elaborate on examples here, but rather invite you to ponder on what you think has been an area in which progress has been too slow, or perhaps even negative. In any case, I don’t think there is any reason yet to stop ‘celebrating’ International Women’s Day. There is still way to go.
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As foreshadowed a while back, I’ve taken myself off to Nairobi for the week to take part in the ICANN meeting here. The security is pretty heavy but I’m glad to report the opening morning was one of the best attended I’ve ever seen and had by far the best dancing. I’ll be blogging about it pretty much every day this week. So far, I’ve written about the CEO’s provocative speech on the first day, where he called out unnamed African government representatives for telling porkies about IPv6 availability. I also mused about how we should act with President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan probably attending an unrelated meeting in the building tomorrow.
Topics I’m planning to write about during the week will be what’s next for the proposed .XXX top level domain, local civil society organisations and social entrepreneurship, something about the new top level domain process in general, and a few other bits and pieces. If there are pressing topics of this meeting you’d like me to write about, let me know in comments here.
But as the blog posts are a bit specifically Internet policy wonk for CT and I’m also doing a bit of self-marketing at the mo, please come on over to www.mariafarrell.com if you’d like to read more. I’ll probably do a more general wrap up post on CT at the end of the week.
Update – just realised I forgot to add a link to the ICANN meeting itself, for anyone who’s interested. What with all the security concerns, remote participation has been beefed up. No better time to get informed & involved.
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I’ve finally completed a near-final draft of my book, although some bits, such as the following ‘Reanimation’ section of the chapter on privatisation are still a bit rough.
I’m getting some good comments from readers here, and through more conventional academic channels, which should help me sand down the rough spots a bit. Anyway, thanks to all for the comments I’ve received. It’s made a huge difference to me, and made the production of this book a much less daunting undertaking than laboring alone.
Remember, before pointing out stuff that is missing, that an earlier draft is online here and may be worth reading to see where I’m coming from.
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My namesake, Tom Quiggin has been in the news lately, debunking the idea that Al Qaeda cultivates sleeper agents and also tracing to its source the urban myth that Osama Bin Laden used a private fortune of $300 million to promote the group.
He’s sent me some reflections on the sloppy research that’s been used to promote some of these ideas, noting
. A disconnect between the statement in the body of the article and the sources in the footnotes which do not back up the statement being made,
2. Strong statements which are made, but which are built on weak foundations or on assumptions which cannot be shown to be valid,
3. Information from two different situations is overlapped or mixed together, leaving the reader with a false impression about the nature of a particular problem or situation,
4. In a limited number of cases, information provided in articles is simply false.
The faults he points out are, I think, found to some extent in every field (I’ve certainly found plenty of instances in economics, though the prevailing flaws are a bit different), but fields like the study of security issues have the added problem that replication and verification are particularly difficult. Processes such as peer review, replication and empirical testing aren’t panaceas, and errors will always slip through, but they work pretty well in the long run.
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A riveting piece by Elizabeth Green in Sunday’s Times magazine on the coming revolution in teacher preparation. Rarely for a Sunday magazine piece it is well worth reading the whole thing. She takes as her starting point the movements for deselection (firing teachers — my rule of thumb is that the more someone talks about firing teachers the less likely it is that they will actually do it) and merit pay, and points out:
So far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning. Even if competition could coax better performance, would it be enough? Consider a bar graph presented at a recent talk on teaching, displaying the number of Americans in different professions. The shortest bar, all the way on the right, represented architects: 180,000. Farther over, slightly higher, came psychologists (185,000) and then lawyers (952,000), followed by engineers (1.3 million) and waiters (1.8 million). On the left side of the graph, the top three: janitors, maids and household cleaners (3.3 million); secretaries (3.6 million); and, finally, teachers (3.7 million). Moreover, a coming swell of baby-boomer retirements is expected to force school systems to hire up to a million new teachers between now and 2014. Expanding the pool of potential teachers is clearly important, but in a profession as large as teaching, can financial incentives alone make an impact?
There is no alternative but to prepare teachers better for the task.
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This is a travel bleg. In a couple of weeks’ time, I hope to meet up with my beloved who’ll briefly be in Fort Benning, Georgia, and spend a weekend travelling together in Georgia or Alabama. His initial thoughts lead to south Georgia and the coastline or perhaps into Alabama. Mine are more a night in Athens, soaking in some music, and a drive around the classic heartland. The cherry blossoms in Macon also appeal, though we’ve got plenty of those in D.C. We’ve already been to Savannah and are more interested in visiting smaller towns this time, and getting a feel for another side of America. 48 hours is a very short time so spend in a place I’ve wanted to visit for so long. We’ll be flying back from Atlanta but don’t plan to spend time there. Any wisdom to offer?
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The deadline for the manuscript of Zombie Economics (last complete draft here) is only a few weeks away, and the zombies are popping up faster than I can knock them down. I’m adding a section on reanimated zombies to each chapter. Over the fold is the social mobility defense of trickle down economics, as animated by Thomas Sowell. There’s still time for me to benefit from your comments.
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And today (still today as I write in the Midwest; I realize it is over in the UK) is the 25th anniversary of the end of the Miner’s Strike. The Radio Ballad is quite moving (although, no doubt, designed to provoke cries of BBC bias). Chris marked the 20th anniversary of it’s start here.
A week or so before the end there was a large demonstration in London.
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BBC obit here (with weird comment from Gordon Brown — “unifying leader” — what party was he in during the 1980s I wonder?). FWIW my own thoughts about Foot are here.
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I discussed the ‘no statistically significant warming since 1995’ talking point on my blog recently This talking point has been around the delusionist blogosphere for some time, though with a lower profile than ‘global warming stopped in 1998’, and was put as question to Phil Jones of UEA in a BBC interview. Jones answered honestly, if a bit clumsily, that the data period since 1995 is marginally too short to derive a statistically significant trend, a response which was headlined by the Daily Mail as “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995?” and became the talking point of the day. As has been widely noted, confusing not statistically significant’ with ‘not significant; in the ordinary sense indicates either deliberate dishonesty or ignorance of a point covered in excruciating detail in every introductory stats course.
But where did this silliness come from? I’d seen Janet Albrechtsen quote Lord Monckton on the point, and it seemed about right for him, an innumerate debating point that would take a fair while to refute, during which time he could move on to the next one.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the point being made (and apparently originated) by Richard Lindzen of MIT who is (or ought to be) by far the most credible figure on the delusionist side. In a piece published on “Watts Up With That” Lindzen says ‘There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995’. Lindzen illustrates this claim with a graph he appears to have made up for the occasion, complete with unexplained error bars (I’ve appended a NASA graph with error bars for annual estimates).
In this piece for Quadrant he gives a variation, saying “has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years” and “the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged” . Note the slide from “has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years ” to “warming has ceased”, committing the basic newbie error against which all budding stats students are warned.
Lindzen has published a couple of hundred papers in climatology, so I think we can assume he knows that the statement “there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995” means nothing more than “given the variability in the data, we need at least 15 observations to reject the null hypothesis at 95 per cent confidence”, a fact so trite as not to be worth mentioning.
It is sad to see a respected scientist reduced to this kind of thing. And as far as I can tell, all this is simply to avoid admitting that he backed the wrong horse back in 1990, when he bet that he was smarter than the majority of climate scientists who thought humans were (probably) causing global warming. The data since then has supported the majority view, but instead of revising his position, Lindzen has resorted to dishonest statistical trickery.
To quote The Economist, with respect to the Daily Mail
Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie.
But at least the Daily Mail headline writer could plead ignorance. Lindzen has no such excuse.
Update: More on this from Deep Climate
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