tlambert | October 14, 2011Dennis Ritchie, creator of C and co-creator of Unix, has died.
John Mashey writes:
Dennis was an old friend, and I'd heard this yesterday from Doug McIlroy. See this for how Dennis, Steve Bourne and I evolved my PWB stuff into UNIX V7's environment variables. Dennis in particular suggested the idea of just making them a 2nd argument list, which kept most of it out of the kernel and kept simple semantics.
Fortunately, Dennis got a Computer History Fellow Award a while back, among others.
While sad, I'd like to remember that Dennis had fun, as with Rob Pike in this prank on Arno.
Dennis has…
tlambert | October 6, 2011Said and Wegman 2009 does contain original and accurate material. Alas, the original material is not accurate and the accurate material is plagiarised, mostly from Wikipedia. Deep Climate has the details:
This paper is the fifth major work that I have analyzed from Wegman and Said. From the 2006 Wegman report to Congress, up to this year's "Colour Theory and Design", so much of Wegman and Said's recent work demonstrates extreme reliance on unattributed antecedents, as well as numerous errors and incompetent analysis.
Wegman did not reply to USA Today's Dan Vergano request for a comment.…
tlambert | September 30, 2011Andrew Bolt has been held liable of violating the Racial Discrimination Act for writing two columns intended to offend and humiliate several people because they were Aboriginal. Bolt lost because his writing was not done reasonably and in good faith, which we know is characteristic of his work in other areas as well.
The judgement makes interesting reading.
The judge found that Bolt's evidence was not to be trusted:
I am firmly of the view that a safer and more reliable source for discerning Mr Bolt's true motivation is to be found in the contents of the Newspaper Articles themselves rather…
tlambert | September 21, 2011Andrew Gelman details yet another case of apparent plagiarism by Edward Wegman. This one is a copy and paste from Wikipedia that manages to introduce an obvious error, claiming that a d-dimensional cube has only 2d vertices instead of 2^d. Gelman gets all sarcastic:
[Note to Drs. Wegman and Said: You can replace "2^n" by "2n" only if n=1 or 2. I checked by following the principles of statistical computation and making a graph in R: curve (2^x-2x, from=-2, to=5). I know it's a pain to do superscripts in Word, but next time you should really put in the effort to do it right.]
Hat tip: John…
tlambert | September 16, 2011Robert Manne's Quarterly Essay is 40,000 words on the malign influence of The Australian on public affairs in this country. You can read an extract here and watch an interview with Manne here. Also of interest is commentary on Manne's essay from Tim Dunlop who asks "why anybody continues to take The Australian seriously" and Margaret Simmons, who writes, "Manne's most powerful accusation against The Australian is lack of intellectual honesty".
Manne presents several case studies of The Australian's bias and bullying and their war on science (with an acknowledgment to my blog) is one of them…
tlambert | September 14, 2011The Climate Reality Project is doing a live broadcast at 7pm in every time zone. If I got the embed correct, you can watch it below.
target="_blank">Free desktop streaming application by Ustream
tlambert | September 14, 2011Astrophysicist Matthew Bailes writes in The Conversation:
Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar.
Based on the planet's density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded that it was certain to be crystalline. In other words, we had discovered a planet made of diamond. ...
Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been.
How so? Well, we could have been climate…
tlambert | September 12, 2011By popular request, here is the Jonas thread. All comments by Jonas and replies to his comments belong in this thread.
tlambert | September 6, 2011Andrew Dessler's new paper (preprint here) makes it clear just how bad Spencer and Braswell (2011) is. Spencer and Braswell assumed that changes in clouds were a stronger influence on temperature changes than changes in ocean heat content. Dessler used observations to show that the ocean heat content is vastly more important. He summarizes his paper in the video below.
See also: Gavin Schmidt and Skeptical Science.
tlambert | September 2, 2011Wolfgang Wagner, Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing writes:
Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and…
tlambert | September 1, 2011Haydn Washington author (along with John Cook) of
Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand is interviewed on Steaming Toad:
tlambert | August 31, 2011I have an article in The Conversation on the misrepresentation of the science on sea level in news stories in The Australian:
In August The Australian had a story by Ean Higgins on Tim Flannery's waterfront home.
Higgins' message was the fact that Flannery had a house near the water showed he was insincere in his warnings about sea level rise. The article also suggested Flannery had frightened the elderly into selling their seaside homes to him.
But the Hawkesbury River where Flannery's home stands has steeply rising banks. Waterfront homes there are several metres above sea level and are…
tlambert | August 30, 2011In The Conversation Michael Ashley writes about The Australian's War on Science, with emphasis on Michael Asten's misrepresentations of the science:
When I contacted The Australian's opinion editor late last year to express dismay at their bias, I was given the example of Michael Asten, a part-time professorial fellow in the school of geosciences at Monash University, Melbourne, as someone who was well-qualified to comment. ...
So, Asten, with no expertise in the field, is using a paper published in Nature to argue the opposite of what the paper actually says.
He then spins this as "top…
tlambert | August 29, 2011The Conversation is publishing a series of articles this week on how the media has misrepresented the science on climate change.
Selling climate uncertainty: misinformation and the media by Stephan Lewandowsky
Forget the fantasy politics - advertising is no substitute for debate by Robin Canniford
Drowning out the truth about the Great Barrier Reef by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Democracy is dead, long live political marketing by Andrew Hughes
Event horizon: the black hole in The Australian's climate change coverage by Michael Ashley
tlambert | August 24, 2011This is a guest post from John Mashey.
An amusing coincidence surfaced a few days ago, relating the US Presidential
campaign of Texas Governor Rick Perry to the Peter Wood kerfuffle at Chronicle
of Higher Education (CHE), including the stir in some parts of the
blogosphere.
I explain that, followed by the weird background.
0) Rick Perry and Peter Wood
1) Chronology at CHE and NAS
2) Deltoid and elsewhere
3) Climate thuggery discovered by blogosphere
4) Chronology of the thuggery wave
5) Conclusion
0) Rick Perry and Peter Wood
See Washington Post, 08/18/11 Fact-Checker:
href="http://www.…
tlambert | August 12, 2011Jane Fraser, columnist in The Australian , writes a column based on "facts" she got from a chain email:
Back to Plimer. He says he knows how disheartening it is to realise all your savings on carbon emissions have been eaten up by natural disasters. You've suffered the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up 'til midnight to finish your kids' "The Green Revolution" science project, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet, selling your speedboat, holidaying at home instead of abroad, replacing all those light…
tlambert | August 12, 2011In reply to my email, Murry Salby writes:
Thanks for your interest in the presentation at the Sydney Institute.
If not torrential (in some cases invidious), the expressions of interest
have at least been overpowering. Although I would like to respond individually,
the volume of inquiries makes that unfeasible.
Several requested illustrations that were displayed during the presentation.
Many of those illustrations were included in the broadcast which was
subsequently aired. Others are under publication embargo.
When that restriction is lifted, they will be made available.
Thanks again for your…