tlambert | September 7, 2004 The Sydney Morning Herald reports (emphasis mine):
In late 2002 a casual lecturer employed by the University of Newcastle to teach at its affiliated school in Malaysia, Institut WIRA, gave zero marks to 15 students in a class of 50, citing "deliberate, serious plagiarism".
The lecturer, Ian Firns, found that several students had copied large sections of their essays from a paper available on the internet without acknowledging the source. In the comments he wrote on the papers before handing them to the business school, Mr Firns spelt out the web address.
However,…
tlambert | September 5, 2004 In my previous post I mentioned Daniel Davies' demolition of yet another dodgy Steve Milloy article. Milloy attacked a recent JAMA study that found: Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a greater magnitude of weight gain and an increased risk for development of type 2 diabetes in women, possibly by providing excessive calories and large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars.
Todd Zywicki, who endorsed Milloy's piece as a "devastating critique" has mounted a defence of Milloy. Unfortunately it is clear that Zywicki has not read the…
tlambert | September 3, 2004 Daniel Davies has some criticism of a Steve Milloy Fox News column that purported to debunk a study that found that sugary drinks were linked with weight gain and diabetes. Milloy has a column on Fox News where he regularly disinforms his readers. Today I'm going to look at a Steve Milloy effort titled Gun Control Science Misfires, where he attacks two studies that he clearly has not even read. Milloy writes: Dr. Kellerman claimed in a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine study that having a firearm in the home is counter-productive. He reported "a…
tlambert | August 29, 2004 On his blog Lott reports that he was recently asked by a reporter whether President Bush was evil or just stupid. If a reporter asks a question like that it raises serious questions about her objectivity. How can a reporter with such a negative opinion of the President write unbiased news articles? Seems like a clear case of media bias.
Oops, sorry, I made a mistake it the previous paragraph. The reporter actually asked Lott whether Jimmy Carter was evil or just stupid. Fortunately, the rest of my paragraph is still valid. Lott doesn't tell us who the…
tlambert | August 25, 2004 I've had a closer look at the "bombshell" paper that Patrick Michaels described like this: After four years of one of the most rigorous peer reviews ever, Canadian Ross McKitrick and another of us (Michaels) published a paper searching for "economic" signals in the temperature record. ... The research showed that somewhere around one-half of the warming in the U.N. surface record was explained by economic factors, which can be changes in land use, quality of instrumentation, or upkeep of records.
There seems to be some problems with their…
tlambert | August 23, 2004 Scott Campbell has a go at the Australian Historical Association, somehow managing to misread Cathie Clement's proposal that historians should not publicly attack their colleagues' integrity as a proposal that historians should not publicly disagree. Campbell has a fine old rant about how silly this idea is, even wondering "why anyone would think it's a good idea". Well, nobody actually thinks the straw man Campbell attacks is a good idea. Ken Parish has a nice exposition on why a rule like the one that Clement actually proposed would encourage civil debate.
Campbell then opines…
tlambert | August 16, 2004 In my previous post I commented on the various responses of sceptics now that both that satellite and surface record show global warming is happening. (The map below shows the global warming trend for the troposphere from the satellite record.) Scott Church left a comment giving a detailed explanation of the satellite data. He concluded: "Thus, the real lower to middle troposphere trend appears to be around +0.10 to +0.13 deg K/decade uncorrected for stratospheric cooling, and +0.18 to 0.21 deg K/decade with this accounted for---exactly as predicted by…
tlambert | August 11, 2004 (The title of this post is a quote from John Maynard Keynes.) Today I want to look at different responses to new information about global warming.
I'll go first: In my archives I found a Usenet post of mine from 11 Aug 1988. In response to a suggestion that global warming was caused by waste heat from power plants, I wrote: Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all (if it's really happening---we probably won't be sure until its too late) caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad---burning fossil fuels could well be more…
tlambert | August 10, 2004 Kevin Baker observes that Lott has removed Baker from his blogroll, presumably because Baker has described Lott as the pro-gun version of Michael Bellesiles.
This fits in with Lott's practice of not linking to criticism, which suggests that he thinks his position is a weak one. Rather than link to crticism and refute it he tries to pretend that it does not exist. Even when he does respond to criticism I make here, he does not link or correctly inform his readers what the source of the criticism is, instead claiming that someone emailed it to him. (For…
tlambert | August 8, 2004From pages 469 and 471 of Richard North Patterson's novel Balance of Power:
If the purpose of deposing an expert witness was to help him hang himself, Sarah meant to be as helpful as possible to Dr. Frederick Glass.
"Dr. Fred," as he cheerfully called himself, was as chipper as he was conservative, having risen from academic obscurity to prominence as a prolific contrarian who boldly challenged what he labeled "fatuous liberal orthodoxy." With the unflappable good nature of someone well pleased at the attention this had garnered, he proffered his research on topics…
tlambert | August 7, 2004 John Ray left a rather odd comment to my post about the continuing decrease in violent crime in England. He stated that police figures for gun crimes will be more accurate than survey figures. His statement is probably true (gun crime in England is too rare to be well measured by a survey), but not relevant to my post, which was about the decline in violent crime, and not about gun crime.
For those interested in gun crime, the statistics show that in 2003/4 police recorded about 10,000 firearms offence in England and Wales. Some of the subcategories showed decreases---for example,…
tlambert | August 5, 2004 Wikipedia states:Godwin's Law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
The point of the tradition is that such comparisons are so offensive that further…
tlambert | August 1, 2004 The latest crime statistics for England and Wales have been released. Sharon Howard has a good round-up of reactions to the statistics: What's happening here is that the British Crime Survey is suddenly being discounted by Tory politicians because it's showing falling crime levels (and, indeed, has been since the mid-1990s), whereas the police statistics record increases in violent crimes (but falls in most other categories). They've latched onto the one category and set of stats that are of use to them. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, will no…
tlambert | July 29, 2004 The Akron Beacon Journal reports that a trial on whether punch card ballots were constitutional has been delayed. Why? Read on:
ACLU lawyers complained Wednesday that the state's last-minute filing hadn't given them enough time to study the evidence---a report comparing punch cards with other voting methods. ...
The ACLU had wanted the judge to declare punch cards unconstitutional.It argues that the ballots---the bane of the 2000 presidential election---aren't uniform and don't alert voters to a mistake, as electronic machines do. The ACLU also…
tlambert | July 28, 2004 Some weeks ago Lott wrote this article, where he dismissed concerns about fraudulent electronic voting as "conspiracy theories". As far as I can tell Lott has no expert knowledge about computers, and rather than do any research into the electronic voting machines, he has just invented his own version of the way these machines work. For example, he wrote: After the election, most electronic voting machines transfer the election results to a compact disk or some other "read only" format. These CDs are then taken to a central location where they are read into a…
tlambert | July 25, 2004 Kellermann's studies on guns frequently get criticized by people who do not seem to have read them. The latest to do so is Michael Krauss, who writes Notwithstanding all this data, the press gave extraordinary publicity to a 1993 article by one Arthur Kellerman in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kellerman's "study" concluded that the presence of a gun in one's home dramatically increased one's chances of being killed by gunfire. As has since been widely noted, though, the study had stupendous methodological flaws that would surely have…
tlambert | July 24, 2004 Matthew Yglesias and Mark Kleiman have both written about the Assault Weapons Ban. I agree with Yglesias that the ban doesn't make sense since it bans weapons by name rather than by some characteristic that makes them dangerous. I've criticized the ban in Australia on semi-automatic long guns, but at least that was based on the type of the weapons rather than it's name. And while the ban in Australia may have caused a small reduction in the homicide rate, this reduction is too small to justify the cost of the ban.
Kleiman also states:The evidence that…
tlambert | July 24, 2004 After a comment spambot left spam on over a hundred of my posts, I've decided to close comments on posts older than 60 days. I had to write a small plugin to do this. Blosxom users can get it here. You'll also need Jason Clark's storystate plugin.
tlambert | July 18, 2004[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott's website on April 25, 2005. I have added critical commentary, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ]
1) Did I Attribute the 98 Percent Brandishing Number to Others? No
Apparently, some credence is being given to the claim that I have attributed the 98 percent brandishing estimate to others instead of myself. Some are taking this as evidence that I never conducted the survey. Yet, the fact is I never attributed this number to anyone else other than myself. It is claimed that I attributed this number to Gary Kleck on…
tlambert | July 16, 2004 I've been having a discussion with Kevin Baker about his claim that self-defence in the UK is practically illegal. The discussion started when Carl Lindsay was convicted of manslaughter after killing an intruder who was trying to rob him. I wrote:
Pro-gunners such as John Lott, Glenn Reynolds and John Derbyshire have written about the Martin case, apparently unaware of the facts that showed that the killing was not in self defence, and proceeded to make bogus claims that self defence was against the law in Britain. Claims which they have never…