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Recent Posts
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Politics & Religion / Ruling allows continuing effort to count 2020 Fulton County votes
« Last post by Crafty_Dog on Today at 03:01:10 AM »3
Politics & Religion / A post I made on FB
« Last post by Crafty_Dog on Today at 02:50:14 AM »There is a reason I bring this up today from the Memory Hole:
https://gazette.com/.../article_bd0ec09a-cdf0-11eb-989f...
By the way, until I saw this particular piece I did not know the reporter who broke the story was Hillaried , , ,
The article does miss two highly significant details though when it writes:
"The meeting took place days before then-FBI Director James Comey announced the bureau would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton's wife, for her emails. However, Comey called her handling of classified information "extremely careless."
FIRST DETAIL: Decisions about whom to prosecute are made by the Dept of Justice i.e. AG Lynch. However due to her getting caught in this violation of the canons of judicial ethics by having an ex parte meeting without representatives of both sides being present in political terms Lynch was a non-starter to make the decision.
It was at this moment Comey leaped into the vacuum and purported to make the decision to not prosecute-- a decision which in no way was his to make! After all the FBI is for INVESTIGATION, NOT PROSECUTION.
Given the highly perfidious behavior of the seventh floor of the FBI in burying Hillary's many felonies in the saga of her illegal private email server, her destruction of 33,000 Congressionally subpoenaed emails, and much more it seems safe to say that this was a highly purposeful overreach designed to get Hillary off the hook for her many serious felonies.
This brings us to the SECOND DETAIL, which is the standard of the statute against mishandling top secret materials. Remember this is what was used to prosecute and convict genuine war hero General Petraeus for letting his biographer (and lover), whose clearance was a step below his ("Secret" as vs. his "Top Secret") -- in other words this stuff is taken seriously-- as it should be.
Most felonies have a standard of "intent"-- but given the gravity of the consequences of the crime in question, the statute merely requires "recklessness"-- so note well Comey's misdirect with the slickly chosen phrase "extemely careless" so as to avoid its homonym "reckless".
All this comes to mind with today's revelation of President visiting a primary witness in Hunter's upcoming gun trial:
https://www.msn.com/.../joe-biden-visits.../ar-BB1n8Ioj
Witness tampering anyone?
Note too this:
"Joe Biden’s visit to Hallie Biden follows a state dinner held by the White House last week with Hunter Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland on the guest list.
"Garland is responsible for appointing special counsel David Weiss, who is leading the prosecution of Hunter Biden. The younger Biden’s attorneys have unsuccessfully sought to dismiss his gun charges based on arguments that Weiss is unlawfully appointed and selectively prosecuting Biden, even though Weiss’s boss is an appointee of Biden’s father."
Meanwhile in the Spermy Daniels trial wherein a State DA prosecutes an unnamed federal election crime which as a State DA he does not have the authority to do, the State gets to go last with the jury meaning the defense had to do its summation without knowing what the federal charge was-- the one purported to rectify the fact that the state misdemeanor charge was years past the statute of limitations.
THIS IS GENUINE BANANA REPUBLIC STUFF FOLKS!!!
Nothing to see here folks, keep moving, keep moving , , ,
https://gazette.com/.../article_bd0ec09a-cdf0-11eb-989f...
By the way, until I saw this particular piece I did not know the reporter who broke the story was Hillaried , , ,
The article does miss two highly significant details though when it writes:
"The meeting took place days before then-FBI Director James Comey announced the bureau would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton's wife, for her emails. However, Comey called her handling of classified information "extremely careless."
FIRST DETAIL: Decisions about whom to prosecute are made by the Dept of Justice i.e. AG Lynch. However due to her getting caught in this violation of the canons of judicial ethics by having an ex parte meeting without representatives of both sides being present in political terms Lynch was a non-starter to make the decision.
It was at this moment Comey leaped into the vacuum and purported to make the decision to not prosecute-- a decision which in no way was his to make! After all the FBI is for INVESTIGATION, NOT PROSECUTION.
Given the highly perfidious behavior of the seventh floor of the FBI in burying Hillary's many felonies in the saga of her illegal private email server, her destruction of 33,000 Congressionally subpoenaed emails, and much more it seems safe to say that this was a highly purposeful overreach designed to get Hillary off the hook for her many serious felonies.
This brings us to the SECOND DETAIL, which is the standard of the statute against mishandling top secret materials. Remember this is what was used to prosecute and convict genuine war hero General Petraeus for letting his biographer (and lover), whose clearance was a step below his ("Secret" as vs. his "Top Secret") -- in other words this stuff is taken seriously-- as it should be.
Most felonies have a standard of "intent"-- but given the gravity of the consequences of the crime in question, the statute merely requires "recklessness"-- so note well Comey's misdirect with the slickly chosen phrase "extemely careless" so as to avoid its homonym "reckless".
All this comes to mind with today's revelation of President visiting a primary witness in Hunter's upcoming gun trial:
https://www.msn.com/.../joe-biden-visits.../ar-BB1n8Ioj
Witness tampering anyone?
Note too this:
"Joe Biden’s visit to Hallie Biden follows a state dinner held by the White House last week with Hunter Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland on the guest list.
"Garland is responsible for appointing special counsel David Weiss, who is leading the prosecution of Hunter Biden. The younger Biden’s attorneys have unsuccessfully sought to dismiss his gun charges based on arguments that Weiss is unlawfully appointed and selectively prosecuting Biden, even though Weiss’s boss is an appointee of Biden’s father."
Meanwhile in the Spermy Daniels trial wherein a State DA prosecutes an unnamed federal election crime which as a State DA he does not have the authority to do, the State gets to go last with the jury meaning the defense had to do its summation without knowing what the federal charge was-- the one purported to rectify the fact that the state misdemeanor charge was years past the statute of limitations.
THIS IS GENUINE BANANA REPUBLIC STUFF FOLKS!!!
Nothing to see here folks, keep moving, keep moving , , ,
4
Politics & Religion / Smoking Gun for Covid Clots?
« Last post by Body-by-Guinness on May 28, 2024, 08:25:15 PM »2nd post. Remember the good old days when you’d be banned from social medial for suggesting Covid caused clots and such? Guess those days are past:
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-decode-deadly-blood-clot-disorder-triggered-by-covid-vaccines/
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-decode-deadly-blood-clot-disorder-triggered-by-covid-vaccines/
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Politics & Religion / Re: The Politics of Meaning
« Last post by Body-by-Guinness on May 28, 2024, 06:50:45 PM »Thanks BBG. This resonates with me. They say, politics of meaning. I've been saying, they're stealing our language. Good to see someone on it.
We are such sheep as a people to keep following these people with their nonsense terminology. Good examples in the article. Others: Affordable housing is anything but. Affordable Care also means subsidies. 'Smart planning', really? Pro-choice means kill someone, but make kids go to the same bad schools?
Gay means happy and rainbow is a real thing, not a symbol.
A flag flying upside down means his wife was in distress, nothing to do with being a traitor.
Election stolen is an opinion, and you can have a different one, but it isn't something "falsely claimed unless you personally tracked every vote and every tabulation.
And on it goes. Why are they always calling the shots?
Every time I hear the term “inflation reduction act” I want to box the ears of the fool emitting it….
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Science, Culture, & Humanities / The Implosion of the Paper Mills
« Last post by Body-by-Guinness on May 28, 2024, 06:41:33 PM »2nd post. There are a fair number of folks writing about paper mills, citation fraud, and related problems in science. Don’t see much about the 800 lbs. gorilla in the room: climate “science,” where IMO the perverse incentive are ever so amplified. As that may be, a well written piece re paper mills and related topics:
Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere
Portrait of Kevin T. Dugan
By Kevin T. Dugan, staff writer at Intelligencer, who covers money and business
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif. on May 2, 2022. (Carolyn Fong/The New York Times)
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned as president of Stanford University in 2023. Photo: Carolyn Fong/The New York Times/Redux
Junk science has been forcing a reckoning among scientific and medical researchers for the past year, leading to thousands of retracted papers. Last year, Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned amid reporting that some of his most high-profile work on Alzheimer’s disease was at best inaccurate. (A probe commissioned by the university’s board of trustees later exonerated him of manipulating the data).
But the problems around credible science appear to be getting worse. Last week, scientific publisher Wiley decided to shutter 19 scientific journals after retracting 11,300 sham papers. There is a large-scale industry of so-called “paper mills” that sell fictive research, sometimes written by artificial intelligence, to researchers who then publish it in peer-reviewed journals — which are sometimes edited by people who had been placed by those sham groups. Among the institutions exposing such practices is Retraction Watch, a 14-year-old organization co-founded by journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. I spoke with Oransky about why there has been a surge in fake research and whether fraud accusations against the presidents of Harvard and Stanford are actually good for academia.
Give me a sense of how big a problem these paper mills are.
I’ll start by saying that paper mills are not the problem; they are a symptom of the actual problem. Adam Marcus, my co-founder, had broken a really big and frightening story about a painkiller involving scientific fraud, which led to dozens of retractions. That’s what got us interested in that. There were all these retractions, far more than we thought but far fewer than there are now. Now, they’re hiding in plain sight.
That was 2010. Certainly, AI has accelerated things, but we’ve known about paper mills for a long time. Everybody wanted to pretend all these problems didn’t exist. The problems in scientific literature are long-standing, and they’re an incentive problem. And the metrics that people use to measure research feed a business model — a ravenous sort of insatiable business model. Hindsight is always going to be 20/20, but a lot of people actually were predicting what we’re seeing now.
Regarding your comment that paper mills are symptoms of a larger problem, I read this story in Science and was struck by the drive for credentialing — which gets you better jobs, higher pay, and more prestige. In academia, there aren’t enough jobs; are the hurdles to these jobs impossibly high, especially for people who may be smart but are from China or India and may not have entry into an American or European university?
I actually would go one step higher. When you say there aren’t enough jobs, it’s because we’re training so many Ph.D.’s and convincing them all that the only way to remain a scientist is to stay in academia. It’s not, and that hasn’t been true for a long time. So there’s definitely a supply-and-demand problem, and people are going to compete.
You may recall the story about high-school students who were paying to get medical papers published in order to get into college. That’s the sort of level we’re at now. It’s just pervasive. People are looking only at metrics, not at actual papers. We’re so fixated on metrics because they determine funding for a university based on where it is in the rankings. So it comes from there and then it filters down. What do universities then want? Well, they want to attract people who are likely to publish papers. So how do you decide that? “Oh, you’ve already published some papers, great. We’re gonna bring you in.” And then when you’re there, you’ve got to publish even more.
You’re replacing actual findings and science and methodology and the process with what I would argue are incredibly misleading — even false — metrics. Paper mills are industrializing it. This is like the horse versus the steam engine.
So they’re Moneyballing it.
Absolutely. They’ve Moneyballed it with a caveat: Moneyball sort of worked. The paper mills have metricized it, which is not as sexy to say. If you were to isolate one factor, citations matter the most, and if you look at the ranking systems, it’s all right there. The Times Higher Education world-university rankings, U.S. News — look at whichever you want, and somewhere between like 30 percent and 60 percent of those rankings are based on citations. Citations are so easy to game. So people are setting up citation cartels: “Yes, we will get all of our other clients to cite you, and nobody will notice because we’re doing it in this algorithmic, mixed-up way.” Eventually, people do notice, but it’s the insistence on citations as the coin of the realm that all of this comes from.
Your work gets to the heart of researchers’ integrity. Do you feel like you’re a pariah in the scientific community?
I’m a volunteer. Adam is paid a very small amount. We use our funding to pay two reporters and then two people work on our database side. We approach these things journalistically; we don’t actually identify the problems ourselves. It’s very, very rare for us to do that. Even when it may appear that way on a superficial read — we’ve broken some stories recently about clear problems in literature — it’s always because a source showed us the way. Sometimes those sources want to be named, sometimes they don’t.
We’ve been doing this for 14 years. There are various ways to look at what the scientific community thinks of us. We’re publishing 100 posts a year about people committing bad behavior and only getting, on average, one cease-and-desist letter a year. We have never been sued, but we do carried defamation insurance. Our work is cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature. I definitely don’t feel like a pariah. Me saying I’m a pariah would be a little bit like, you know, someone whose alleged cancellation has promoted them to the top of Twitter.
People are unhappy that we have do what we do. If you talk to scientists, the things we’re exposing or others are exposing are well known to them. Because of the structures, the hierarchies, and the power differentials in science, it’s very difficult for them as insiders to blow the whistle. There’s a book out by Carl Elliott about whistleblowers, mostly in the sort of more clinical fields. That’s the vulnerable position. That’s where you end up being a pariah even though you should be considered a hero or heroine.
Are some fields better at policing their own research than others?
Yes. Going back to the origin story of Retraction Watch, Adam broke a story about this guy named Scott Reuben, who came from anesthesiology. We have a leaderboard of the people with the most retractions in the world, and at least three out of the top ten right now are anesthesiologists. That is a much higher percentage than one might expect. Some people may say, “Oh, does anesthesiology have a problem?” No, in fact, anesthesiology has been doing something about this arguably longer than any other field has.
What is it about anesthesiology that makes it so anesthesiologists are more willing to scrutinize the work in their own field?
It had a crisis earlier than others, and it’s small. Journal editors are generally considered pretty august personages, leaders in the field. They got together and it was like a collective action by the journal editors when they realized they had problems. I’m not saying anesthesiologists are better, but they’re a more tight-knit community, which I do think is important. The same thing happened in social psychology and in psychology writ large. There’s a higher number than you would expect of people on leaderboards in that field. So it’s a question of, When did they get there, and how did they react to it? There are fields that haven’t actually gotten there, even though it’s been a while. So maybe there are some sociologists who could tell you better than me why that might be the case.
That wasn’t the reason I expected. I thought you would say something along the lines of, well, it’s life or death and anesthesiologists don’t want to see people dying on the table.
If anything, sometimes when the stakes are higher, fields are more resistant.
Geez.
There’s a guy named Ben Mol. Ben is an OB/GYN, and he is a force to be reckoned with. Fascinating character. He’s a pit bull, and he has found tons and tons of problems in the OB/GYN literature. I would characterize the leaders in that field now as still a bit more reluctant to engage with these issues than some of the other fields I mentioned.
Can you tell me how you go about authenticating real language from AI, especially in papers that can be hard to parse and are laden with jargon to begin with?
We rely on experts. We’re not really doing that ourselves. You don’t need to be an expert; you just need to know how to use Ctrl+F if you see certain phrases in a paper. And by the way, a lot of journals are perfectly fine with people using chat GPT and other kinds of AI. It’s just whether you disclose it or not. These are cases where they didn’t disclose it.
With the resignation of Stanford’s and Harvard’s presidents, do you worry about the way the general public has been using these tools?
The fact that they’re giving speeding tickets to certain groups of people doesn’t mean we’re not all speeding. It means they’re getting targeted in, I would argue, an unfair way. We’re in a great reckoning with Harvard’s Claudine Gay being the key example. Former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne is not an example of that. The targeting is a concern. And clearly, there are false positives. The flip side of this is that AI is being used to find these problems.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-scientific-fraud-is-suddenly-everywhere.html
Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere
Portrait of Kevin T. Dugan
By Kevin T. Dugan, staff writer at Intelligencer, who covers money and business
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif. on May 2, 2022. (Carolyn Fong/The New York Times)
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned as president of Stanford University in 2023. Photo: Carolyn Fong/The New York Times/Redux
Junk science has been forcing a reckoning among scientific and medical researchers for the past year, leading to thousands of retracted papers. Last year, Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned amid reporting that some of his most high-profile work on Alzheimer’s disease was at best inaccurate. (A probe commissioned by the university’s board of trustees later exonerated him of manipulating the data).
But the problems around credible science appear to be getting worse. Last week, scientific publisher Wiley decided to shutter 19 scientific journals after retracting 11,300 sham papers. There is a large-scale industry of so-called “paper mills” that sell fictive research, sometimes written by artificial intelligence, to researchers who then publish it in peer-reviewed journals — which are sometimes edited by people who had been placed by those sham groups. Among the institutions exposing such practices is Retraction Watch, a 14-year-old organization co-founded by journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. I spoke with Oransky about why there has been a surge in fake research and whether fraud accusations against the presidents of Harvard and Stanford are actually good for academia.
Give me a sense of how big a problem these paper mills are.
I’ll start by saying that paper mills are not the problem; they are a symptom of the actual problem. Adam Marcus, my co-founder, had broken a really big and frightening story about a painkiller involving scientific fraud, which led to dozens of retractions. That’s what got us interested in that. There were all these retractions, far more than we thought but far fewer than there are now. Now, they’re hiding in plain sight.
That was 2010. Certainly, AI has accelerated things, but we’ve known about paper mills for a long time. Everybody wanted to pretend all these problems didn’t exist. The problems in scientific literature are long-standing, and they’re an incentive problem. And the metrics that people use to measure research feed a business model — a ravenous sort of insatiable business model. Hindsight is always going to be 20/20, but a lot of people actually were predicting what we’re seeing now.
Regarding your comment that paper mills are symptoms of a larger problem, I read this story in Science and was struck by the drive for credentialing — which gets you better jobs, higher pay, and more prestige. In academia, there aren’t enough jobs; are the hurdles to these jobs impossibly high, especially for people who may be smart but are from China or India and may not have entry into an American or European university?
I actually would go one step higher. When you say there aren’t enough jobs, it’s because we’re training so many Ph.D.’s and convincing them all that the only way to remain a scientist is to stay in academia. It’s not, and that hasn’t been true for a long time. So there’s definitely a supply-and-demand problem, and people are going to compete.
You may recall the story about high-school students who were paying to get medical papers published in order to get into college. That’s the sort of level we’re at now. It’s just pervasive. People are looking only at metrics, not at actual papers. We’re so fixated on metrics because they determine funding for a university based on where it is in the rankings. So it comes from there and then it filters down. What do universities then want? Well, they want to attract people who are likely to publish papers. So how do you decide that? “Oh, you’ve already published some papers, great. We’re gonna bring you in.” And then when you’re there, you’ve got to publish even more.
You’re replacing actual findings and science and methodology and the process with what I would argue are incredibly misleading — even false — metrics. Paper mills are industrializing it. This is like the horse versus the steam engine.
So they’re Moneyballing it.
Absolutely. They’ve Moneyballed it with a caveat: Moneyball sort of worked. The paper mills have metricized it, which is not as sexy to say. If you were to isolate one factor, citations matter the most, and if you look at the ranking systems, it’s all right there. The Times Higher Education world-university rankings, U.S. News — look at whichever you want, and somewhere between like 30 percent and 60 percent of those rankings are based on citations. Citations are so easy to game. So people are setting up citation cartels: “Yes, we will get all of our other clients to cite you, and nobody will notice because we’re doing it in this algorithmic, mixed-up way.” Eventually, people do notice, but it’s the insistence on citations as the coin of the realm that all of this comes from.
Your work gets to the heart of researchers’ integrity. Do you feel like you’re a pariah in the scientific community?
I’m a volunteer. Adam is paid a very small amount. We use our funding to pay two reporters and then two people work on our database side. We approach these things journalistically; we don’t actually identify the problems ourselves. It’s very, very rare for us to do that. Even when it may appear that way on a superficial read — we’ve broken some stories recently about clear problems in literature — it’s always because a source showed us the way. Sometimes those sources want to be named, sometimes they don’t.
We’ve been doing this for 14 years. There are various ways to look at what the scientific community thinks of us. We’re publishing 100 posts a year about people committing bad behavior and only getting, on average, one cease-and-desist letter a year. We have never been sued, but we do carried defamation insurance. Our work is cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature. I definitely don’t feel like a pariah. Me saying I’m a pariah would be a little bit like, you know, someone whose alleged cancellation has promoted them to the top of Twitter.
People are unhappy that we have do what we do. If you talk to scientists, the things we’re exposing or others are exposing are well known to them. Because of the structures, the hierarchies, and the power differentials in science, it’s very difficult for them as insiders to blow the whistle. There’s a book out by Carl Elliott about whistleblowers, mostly in the sort of more clinical fields. That’s the vulnerable position. That’s where you end up being a pariah even though you should be considered a hero or heroine.
Are some fields better at policing their own research than others?
Yes. Going back to the origin story of Retraction Watch, Adam broke a story about this guy named Scott Reuben, who came from anesthesiology. We have a leaderboard of the people with the most retractions in the world, and at least three out of the top ten right now are anesthesiologists. That is a much higher percentage than one might expect. Some people may say, “Oh, does anesthesiology have a problem?” No, in fact, anesthesiology has been doing something about this arguably longer than any other field has.
What is it about anesthesiology that makes it so anesthesiologists are more willing to scrutinize the work in their own field?
It had a crisis earlier than others, and it’s small. Journal editors are generally considered pretty august personages, leaders in the field. They got together and it was like a collective action by the journal editors when they realized they had problems. I’m not saying anesthesiologists are better, but they’re a more tight-knit community, which I do think is important. The same thing happened in social psychology and in psychology writ large. There’s a higher number than you would expect of people on leaderboards in that field. So it’s a question of, When did they get there, and how did they react to it? There are fields that haven’t actually gotten there, even though it’s been a while. So maybe there are some sociologists who could tell you better than me why that might be the case.
That wasn’t the reason I expected. I thought you would say something along the lines of, well, it’s life or death and anesthesiologists don’t want to see people dying on the table.
If anything, sometimes when the stakes are higher, fields are more resistant.
Geez.
There’s a guy named Ben Mol. Ben is an OB/GYN, and he is a force to be reckoned with. Fascinating character. He’s a pit bull, and he has found tons and tons of problems in the OB/GYN literature. I would characterize the leaders in that field now as still a bit more reluctant to engage with these issues than some of the other fields I mentioned.
Can you tell me how you go about authenticating real language from AI, especially in papers that can be hard to parse and are laden with jargon to begin with?
We rely on experts. We’re not really doing that ourselves. You don’t need to be an expert; you just need to know how to use Ctrl+F if you see certain phrases in a paper. And by the way, a lot of journals are perfectly fine with people using chat GPT and other kinds of AI. It’s just whether you disclose it or not. These are cases where they didn’t disclose it.
With the resignation of Stanford’s and Harvard’s presidents, do you worry about the way the general public has been using these tools?
The fact that they’re giving speeding tickets to certain groups of people doesn’t mean we’re not all speeding. It means they’re getting targeted in, I would argue, an unfair way. We’re in a great reckoning with Harvard’s Claudine Gay being the key example. Former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne is not an example of that. The targeting is a concern. And clearly, there are false positives. The flip side of this is that AI is being used to find these problems.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-scientific-fraud-is-suddenly-everywhere.html
7
Politics & Religion / Re: The Politics of Meaning
« Last post by DougMacG on May 28, 2024, 06:03:23 PM »Thanks BBG. This resonates with me. They say, politics of meaning. I've been saying, they're stealing our language. Good to see someone on it.
We are such sheep as a people to keep following these people with their nonsense terminology. Good examples in the article. Others: Affordable housing is anything but. Affordable Care also means subsidies. 'Smart planning', really? Pro-choice means kill someone, but make kids go to the same bad schools?
Gay means happy and rainbow is a real thing, not a symbol.
A flag flying upside down means his wife was in distress, nothing to do with being a traitor.
Election stolen is an opinion, and you can have a different one, but it isn't something "falsely claimed unless you personally tracked every vote and every tabulation.
And on it goes. Why are they always calling the shots?
We are such sheep as a people to keep following these people with their nonsense terminology. Good examples in the article. Others: Affordable housing is anything but. Affordable Care also means subsidies. 'Smart planning', really? Pro-choice means kill someone, but make kids go to the same bad schools?
Gay means happy and rainbow is a real thing, not a symbol.
A flag flying upside down means his wife was in distress, nothing to do with being a traitor.
Election stolen is an opinion, and you can have a different one, but it isn't something "falsely claimed unless you personally tracked every vote and every tabulation.
And on it goes. Why are they always calling the shots?
8
Politics & Religion / Windows 11 Update Will Preserve Every Screen You’ve Seen on Your Computer
« Last post by Body-by-Guinness on May 28, 2024, 05:41:40 PM »And those screen will be AI searchable. Some days I’m really freaking glad I’m an Apple products user:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2024/05/27/oh-gawd-windoze-11-to-record-all-your-screens-are-belong-to-us/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2024/05/27/oh-gawd-windoze-11-to-record-all-your-screens-are-belong-to-us/
9
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Hottest Summah Evah
« Last post by Body-by-Guinness on May 28, 2024, 05:34:42 PM »Steve McIntyre is one of the gents that backward engineered the source code for the fallacious “Hockey Stick” foolishness purveyed by Michael Mann. Here he also takes apart the current “hottest summer” handwringing. Piece is graphics heavy so only the conclusion is posted below:
Conclusion
Whether or not the comparison of an observed temperature point to the confidence envelope of a reconstruction to draw conclusions about “warmest year in 1000 years” was precisely what either Mann or Jones defined as “Mike’s Nature trick”, it can be fairly described as a trick (sensu mathematics), whereas plotting an estimate and observed on same figure is so commonplace and trivial that it cannot reasonably be described as a trick (sensu mathematics.)
In that spirit, I think that it is fair to describe “Mike’s Nature trick” (and the similar trick employed by Esper et al 2024) as a confidence trick. In the mathematical sense, of course.
As a caveat, readers should note that the question of whether tree rings (ancient or otherwise) show that 2023 (1998) was the warmest summer (year) in 1000 or 2000 years is a different question than whether 2023 was the warmest summer in 1000 years. My elevator take is
that 20th and 21st century warming are both very real, but that the 19th century was probably the coldest century since the Last Glacial Maximum and that the warming since the 19th century has been highly beneficial for our societies – a view that was postulated in the 1930s by Guy Callendar, one of the canonical climate heroes;
per Esper et al 2012, given the failure of tree ring chronologies to reflect major millennial-scale changes in summer insolation and temperature, what possible reliance can be attached to pseudo-confidence intervals attached to 2000-year tree ring chronologies in Esper et al 2024 (or any other tree ring chronologies)
in addition, we know that there is global-scale “greening” of the planet over the past 30-40 years that has been convincingly attributed to enhanced growth due to fertilization by higher CO2 levels. So, in addition to all other issues related to tree ring chronologies, it is necessary to disaggregate the contribution of CO2 fertilization from the contribution of increased warming – an effort not made by Esper et al 2024 (or its references.)
In a follow-up article, I will examine details of the Esper et al 2024 reconstruction, which, among other interesting features, connect back to Graybill bristlecone sites and the Briffa sites under discussion in the period leading up to the Climategate emails.
https://climateaudit.org/2024/05/24/jan-and-ulfs-nature-trick-the-hottest-summer-in-2000-years/
Conclusion
Whether or not the comparison of an observed temperature point to the confidence envelope of a reconstruction to draw conclusions about “warmest year in 1000 years” was precisely what either Mann or Jones defined as “Mike’s Nature trick”, it can be fairly described as a trick (sensu mathematics), whereas plotting an estimate and observed on same figure is so commonplace and trivial that it cannot reasonably be described as a trick (sensu mathematics.)
In that spirit, I think that it is fair to describe “Mike’s Nature trick” (and the similar trick employed by Esper et al 2024) as a confidence trick. In the mathematical sense, of course.
As a caveat, readers should note that the question of whether tree rings (ancient or otherwise) show that 2023 (1998) was the warmest summer (year) in 1000 or 2000 years is a different question than whether 2023 was the warmest summer in 1000 years. My elevator take is
that 20th and 21st century warming are both very real, but that the 19th century was probably the coldest century since the Last Glacial Maximum and that the warming since the 19th century has been highly beneficial for our societies – a view that was postulated in the 1930s by Guy Callendar, one of the canonical climate heroes;
per Esper et al 2012, given the failure of tree ring chronologies to reflect major millennial-scale changes in summer insolation and temperature, what possible reliance can be attached to pseudo-confidence intervals attached to 2000-year tree ring chronologies in Esper et al 2024 (or any other tree ring chronologies)
in addition, we know that there is global-scale “greening” of the planet over the past 30-40 years that has been convincingly attributed to enhanced growth due to fertilization by higher CO2 levels. So, in addition to all other issues related to tree ring chronologies, it is necessary to disaggregate the contribution of CO2 fertilization from the contribution of increased warming – an effort not made by Esper et al 2024 (or its references.)
In a follow-up article, I will examine details of the Esper et al 2024 reconstruction, which, among other interesting features, connect back to Graybill bristlecone sites and the Briffa sites under discussion in the period leading up to the Climategate emails.
https://climateaudit.org/2024/05/24/jan-and-ulfs-nature-trick-the-hottest-summer-in-2000-years/
10
Politics & Religion / How Often Do They Have To Be Wrong Before We Ignore Them?
« Last post by Body-by-Guinness on May 28, 2024, 05:25:25 PM »2nd post. LawDog is a well regarded former LEO, publisher, and to my mind something of a renaissance man. To his list of abject doomstruck prophecy failures I’d add “peak oil,” “silent spring,” and of course everything associated with the Church of Anthropomorphic Climate Apocalypse:
BECAUSE WE’RE HERE, LAD
26 MAY 2024 LAWDOG 11 COMMENTS
In the classic 1964 film ‘Zulu’, there is a quietly moving scene where a junior soldier, realizing what is coming for them, plaintively asks, “Why is it us? Why us?”
Colour-Sergeant Bourne, ever-stoic, simply replies: “Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.”
Rita is fond of quoting one of my own aphorisms back at me:
“Things never turn out as good as the optimists hope, nor as bad as the pessimists say.”
These two quotes are oft on my mind these days.
I tire of the doomsayers; of the “black-pilled” “prophets” who have been wrong at every historical and political turn in my lifetime, yet whom do not allow their past total abject failures at soothsaying deter them from once more forecasting of Doom! And Gloom!
“Worst economy EVAH!” Well, it’s not good, but does no-one else remember stagflation in the 1970s?
“Worst political climate EVAH!” Not happy about it, but the America of the 1860s would like to have a word.
“World turmoil!” Yeah, that’s what the world does. Anyone else remember those decades where we were all going to die in atomic hellfire, with the few survivors being chased through a nuclear winter by mutant cockroaches the size of Volkswagen Beetles?
“Waaa-aaar!” I was raised in Africa. I have yet to see a decade, hell, a year, in which the Red Horseman isn’t plying his trade on at least one continent somewhere. I was a soldier during the era of Ronald Reagan, whose brash braggadocio and jingoistic rhetoric were “sure to start World War 3”; and I understood — and accepted — that my fate was to be a speed-bump, to die slowing down Soviet tank columns long enough to allow the Abrams crews to wake up.
Yet … here we are.
Remember the folks who wrote giant walls of text about how aeroplanes were going to fall out of the sky, cities would go dark, and the Internet crash, leaving all of us at the mercy of warlords ruling a post-Y2K apocalypse? Does anyone actually remember Y2K these days?
Remember That Guy who talked your ear off about how Carter, err — Clinton, err — Obama was going to declare martial law so he could stay in office after his mandated terms were up? (Insert Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump for the other side of politics.) And — so far — wrong every time.
And probably the same guy who has a quick-draw dissertation on how — via some United Nations shenanigans and a convenient spouse or family member — the same aim would be achieved. And how many decades has that one come up wrong?
Sigh.
Are things great?
Oh, I didn’t say that. Politicians are lying, self-serving bags of o-rings, morally bankrupt; and greedy beyond any fevered dream of Mammon could have hoped for.
But … is anyone actually surprised by this?
The media are hypocrites, who dissemble with pious expressions or noble brow, all the while shrouded in cloaks of sanctimony and mendacity; safe and happy in the knowledge that they will never be held to any sort of account for their lies, perfidies, and libels.
No, you don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don’t.
Again, though: Is anyone actually surprised that the Legacy Media has returned to their roots with William Randolph Hearst and Yellow Journalism? Were they ever actually that noble, or are we looking back through rose-coloured lenses at a carefully-curated image?
I realize that the afore-mentioned media has a vested financial and political interest in keeping the very worst of news up under your hat with you; that their profit margins require that they keep smacking us in the face in a 24-hour cycle of doom, gloom, and despair …
… But we don’t have to listen. We don’t have to watch.
I understand that social media has a vested financial and political interest in bringing the absolute worst that we as a species do on the regular as a barrage into our phones, and computers, and homes …
… But we don’t have to access social media.
Are things right now as good as the optimists claim? Hell, no. Are things as bad as the pessimists are dooming about? Also, hell, no.
Is it comfortable, nay, reassuring to be alive during this time? No. God, no.
But we’re here. Nobody else. Just us. And we can weather Teh Stupid that pretty much is the Sum Total of Human Existence (just writ large on Social Media and a 24-hour news cycle) with calm, confidence in our neighbors, and honest preparedness …
… Or we can run around with our hair on fire, listening to every kook who hasn’t been correct since Christ was a corporal, spewing panic, and just generally making things worse (as well as looking like a complete oik, historically)*.
I know which path I’m going to take. I invite you to take the same one.
LawDog
*Having seen how fast the average person panicked during the Recent Covid Unpleasantness™, I have my doubts, but I’m trying to not to be a doomer here. Give me a break.
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2024/05/because-were-here-lad.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=because-were-here-lad
BECAUSE WE’RE HERE, LAD
26 MAY 2024 LAWDOG 11 COMMENTS
In the classic 1964 film ‘Zulu’, there is a quietly moving scene where a junior soldier, realizing what is coming for them, plaintively asks, “Why is it us? Why us?”
Colour-Sergeant Bourne, ever-stoic, simply replies: “Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.”
Rita is fond of quoting one of my own aphorisms back at me:
“Things never turn out as good as the optimists hope, nor as bad as the pessimists say.”
These two quotes are oft on my mind these days.
I tire of the doomsayers; of the “black-pilled” “prophets” who have been wrong at every historical and political turn in my lifetime, yet whom do not allow their past total abject failures at soothsaying deter them from once more forecasting of Doom! And Gloom!
“Worst economy EVAH!” Well, it’s not good, but does no-one else remember stagflation in the 1970s?
“Worst political climate EVAH!” Not happy about it, but the America of the 1860s would like to have a word.
“World turmoil!” Yeah, that’s what the world does. Anyone else remember those decades where we were all going to die in atomic hellfire, with the few survivors being chased through a nuclear winter by mutant cockroaches the size of Volkswagen Beetles?
“Waaa-aaar!” I was raised in Africa. I have yet to see a decade, hell, a year, in which the Red Horseman isn’t plying his trade on at least one continent somewhere. I was a soldier during the era of Ronald Reagan, whose brash braggadocio and jingoistic rhetoric were “sure to start World War 3”; and I understood — and accepted — that my fate was to be a speed-bump, to die slowing down Soviet tank columns long enough to allow the Abrams crews to wake up.
Yet … here we are.
Remember the folks who wrote giant walls of text about how aeroplanes were going to fall out of the sky, cities would go dark, and the Internet crash, leaving all of us at the mercy of warlords ruling a post-Y2K apocalypse? Does anyone actually remember Y2K these days?
Remember That Guy who talked your ear off about how Carter, err — Clinton, err — Obama was going to declare martial law so he could stay in office after his mandated terms were up? (Insert Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump for the other side of politics.) And — so far — wrong every time.
And probably the same guy who has a quick-draw dissertation on how — via some United Nations shenanigans and a convenient spouse or family member — the same aim would be achieved. And how many decades has that one come up wrong?
Sigh.
Are things great?
Oh, I didn’t say that. Politicians are lying, self-serving bags of o-rings, morally bankrupt; and greedy beyond any fevered dream of Mammon could have hoped for.
But … is anyone actually surprised by this?
The media are hypocrites, who dissemble with pious expressions or noble brow, all the while shrouded in cloaks of sanctimony and mendacity; safe and happy in the knowledge that they will never be held to any sort of account for their lies, perfidies, and libels.
No, you don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don’t.
Again, though: Is anyone actually surprised that the Legacy Media has returned to their roots with William Randolph Hearst and Yellow Journalism? Were they ever actually that noble, or are we looking back through rose-coloured lenses at a carefully-curated image?
I realize that the afore-mentioned media has a vested financial and political interest in keeping the very worst of news up under your hat with you; that their profit margins require that they keep smacking us in the face in a 24-hour cycle of doom, gloom, and despair …
… But we don’t have to listen. We don’t have to watch.
I understand that social media has a vested financial and political interest in bringing the absolute worst that we as a species do on the regular as a barrage into our phones, and computers, and homes …
… But we don’t have to access social media.
Are things right now as good as the optimists claim? Hell, no. Are things as bad as the pessimists are dooming about? Also, hell, no.
Is it comfortable, nay, reassuring to be alive during this time? No. God, no.
But we’re here. Nobody else. Just us. And we can weather Teh Stupid that pretty much is the Sum Total of Human Existence (just writ large on Social Media and a 24-hour news cycle) with calm, confidence in our neighbors, and honest preparedness …
… Or we can run around with our hair on fire, listening to every kook who hasn’t been correct since Christ was a corporal, spewing panic, and just generally making things worse (as well as looking like a complete oik, historically)*.
I know which path I’m going to take. I invite you to take the same one.
LawDog
*Having seen how fast the average person panicked during the Recent Covid Unpleasantness™, I have my doubts, but I’m trying to not to be a doomer here. Give me a break.
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2024/05/because-were-here-lad.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=because-were-here-lad