I shall not be trying to switch off today. But I shall not either be trying to maximise my electricity consumption in some futile gesture to protest against the even more idiotic gesture that is Earthhour. I shall be as normal as possible.
The hype around Earthhour on 31st March each year is not just irritating – it demonstrates for me the intellectual bankruptcy that is now enveloping the environmentalists and conservationists and the eco-fascists. It is a tale told by idiots and full of sound and fury and signifying – nothing.
If it was a just a meaningless gesture it would not be as bad as it is. It actually denies all that humankind has achieved and promotes a view of what the future should be which not only do I not share but is one which celebrates the lack of electricity. It condemns humankind to return to a bleak world of hunger and death and misery. That may be a future which the lack of electricity could cause but it is not a future I would choose or glorify.
Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.
Here is my response.
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.
The Hungarian President has said he will not resign but will redo his dissertation to comply with current requirements. He blames his advisers and the examining committee for failing to bring the problems with his doctorate to his attention.
And being President he will probably get away with this.
Budapest’s Semmelweis University has proposed (note that is not yet a final decision) that the Hungarian President Pal Schmitt’s PhD be rescinded for massive plagiarism with 196 plagiarised pages in a 215 page thesis! While the Hungarian President has largely a ceremonial role he is seen as being a supporter of the new constitution and the very controversial “reforms” being pushed through by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“Plagiarism is an academic matter best judged by academic peers. Plagiarism can be of ideas and expression and not of facts except when they are facts that emerge out of particular research. Publicly available facts, and government policy statements when the source is revealed cannot be construed as plagiarism.”
But I would take issue with this statement on two counts:
it may be comfortable to be “judged” solely by academic peers but that does not work. The Wikiplag site in Germany emphasises the need to get out of the “cozy” establishment environment. So far Wikiplag has found some 20 cases of plagiarised theses which have been missed by the usual “academic peers”
Merely revealing a source is insufficient – it needs to be properly cited even if the source is as mundane as a government policy document.
Even if documents are in the public domain, improper attribution or citation is plagiarism. And if such documents are copyright protected then reproduction could be copyright violation as well.
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A case of when the dam breaks perhaps. There seems to be an epidemic of plagiarism at IIM-A.
A fortnight after Gujarat High Court asked IIMA to conduct a fresh inquiry into the case of a professor accused of plagiarism, a fresh controversy is brewing at the premier institute.
This time, an executive with a multinational company who also teaches management at a couple of B schools, has accused five senior IIMA professors of “mass copy-pasting” material from sources without crediting them in their cases.
Professor Anil Sharma has shot off a mail to institute’s director Samir Barua citing “serious instances of plagiarism” by professors Rekha Jain, G Raghuram, Rachna Gangwar, Sebastian Morris and Ajay Pandey. ….
…. The IIMs follow guidelines prepared by Harvard Business School and the American Psychological Association, which say that whenever there is sourcing, verbatim or otherwise, the source has to be cited adequately. Interestingly, the institute has a specialised internet-based software to cross-check research work submitted by students and alerts faculty to plagiarised portions, if any.
Even IIM Indore Director N Ravichandran, a former IIMA professor, has been asked by the Centre to respond to an accusation of plagiarism against him. Prof Ravichandran and a senior faculty member of the institute, Omkar D Palsule-Desai, had submitted a paper on euthanasia that was put up on the IIM website with a “Do not copy or reproduce” warning. Ahmedabad-based researcher K R Narendrababu has complained that the paper was sourced heavily from a Supreme Court judgment without adequate attribution.
A committee of inquiry seems to have been constituted for the earlier case of plagiarism but it is not clear if these cases will also be included.
The kind of study results I thoroughly approve of and would like to believe!!
If only I was also convinced that it was entirely unbiased. It sounds like one of those studies which, if it had shown that chocolate was poisonous, would somehow have not been published.
A new paper reports two studies of Bossou chimpanzees which show that “wild chimpanzees walk bipedally more often and carry more items when transporting valuable, unpredictable resources to less–competitive places”.
Susana Carvalho, Dora Biro, Eugénia Cunha, Kimberley Hockings, William C. McGrew, Brian G. Richmond, Tetsuro Matsuzawa. Chimpanzee carrying behaviour and the origins of human bipedality. Current Biology, 2012; 22 (6): R180 DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2012.01.052
Summary
Why did our earliest hominin ancestors begin to walk bipedally as their main form of terrestrial travel? The lack of sufficient fossils and differing interpretations of existing ones leave unresolved the debate about what constitutes the earliest evidence of habitual bipedality. Compelling evidence shows that this shift coincided with climatic changes that reduced forested areas, probably forcing the earliest hominins to range in more open settings. While environmental shifts may have prompted the origins of bipedality in the hominin clade, it remains unknown exactly which selective pressures led hominins to modify their postural repertoire to include a larger component of bipedality. Here, we report new experimental results showing that wild chimpanzees walk bipedally more often and carry more items when transporting valuable, unpredictable resources to less–competitive places.
The UK press led by Murdoch’s Sunday Times – is going to town with the story.
But why is anybody surprised?
The Tory Party co-treasurer, Peter Cruddas, was caught on film by some intrepid Murdoch reporters from the Sunday Times pointing out the benefits of paying for access. He has now resigned – for being caught on tape it would seem. He surely did not resign for doing what was expected of him in his job.
“One hundred grand is not Premier League… it’s not bad… But two hundred grand to 250 is premier league… what you would get is, when we talk about your donations the first thing we want to do is get you at the Cameron/Osborne dinners.”
“It’ll be awesome for your business. You’ll be… well pleased. Because your guests will be photographed with David Cameron. We do that, you know.”
“If you’re unhappy about something, we will listen to you and put it into the policy committee at number 10 – we feed all feedback to the policy committee.”
Rafale de l'Escadron de Chasse 1/7 Provence: Wikipedia
It is not unexpected or unusual in the award of large Indian contracts that the “losing” bidder cries “foul” and claims that the evaluation process was manipulated. From my own experience in the Power industry it is “standard practice” for a losing bidder to enlist the aid of the media, politicians and the courts in crying foul and in trying to get an award to a competitor overturned. Again, from my own experience, such tactics can often delay awards but rarely succeed. Such “spoiling” can cause much rancour with the client and – more often than not – is counter-productive. In marketing and sales for large projects in India, “spoiling” a competitor’s award is rather easy but only delays matters and is not really worthwhile. The real sales skill lies in getting to be the lowest bidder and then beating off the “spoilers”.
Dassault’s Rafale was announced as being the lowest bidder beating the Eurofighter for the $20billion Indian MMRCA contract at the end of January. Now comes the cry of “possible foul” from a Member of the Upper House of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) who is also a member of Parliament’s standing Defence Committee. (The MP, MV Mysura Reddy, is a former member of the Congress Party who left to join the regional Telegu Desam party. He has lost 3 elections for Parliament but has been appointed by his party to the Upper House).
A recent paper from a multinational team of researchers from the UK, USA, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden describes studies of mytochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in mice to track ancient Viking movements. The mice genetics confirm the movements of the Vikings some 1000 years ago to Britain and Greenland and Iceland. They do not however provide any confirmation of the fleeting Viking presence in Newfoundland.
Viking movements: map from bbc.co.uk
“Modern house mouse populations were sampled across Iceland (9 localities), at Narsaq in Greenland (near the Viking Age ‘Eastern Settlement’) and in the north-west of Newfoundland (near the Norwegian Viking archaeological site at L’Anse aux Meadows, 4 localities). Ancient DNA was obtained from archaeological house mouse bones. In Greenland, these were from the Norwegian Viking ‘Eastern Settlement’ (3 individuals) and ‘Western Settlement’ (2 individuals), dating from between 1015– 1165 AD. In Iceland, these were from four archaeological sites in the north of Iceland, three of which date to the 10th C (1 individual per site) and one of which dates to the Medieval period or later (1477–1717 AD; 2 individuals”.
There has been a debate going on in Sweden over the last few days as to whether surrogate motherhood should be permitted. In following the various views I cannot help feeling that a fundamental ethical consideration is being avoided – perhaps intentionally. The Swedish Parliament’s Social Affairs Committee voted by a large – and very politically correct – majority to carry out an investigation into whether Swedish surrogacy laws should be changed.
The Local:Sweden took a step toward a possible lifting of its ban on surrogate motherhood on Tuesday, despite impassioned opposition from political parties on both the left and right.
The Riksdag’s Committee on Social Affairs voted by a wide majority on Tuesday to authorize the government to carry out an inquiry into surrogate motherhood. Currently, surrogate motherhood is outlawed in Sweden. However, the Christian Democrats and the Left Party both opposed the measure. “The issue of childlessness shouldn’t be solved by having women’s bodies used to carry and give birth to children for other people. Women’s bodies aren’t a commodity,” the Left Party’s Eva Olofsson told the TT news agency. Even if surrogate motherhood is allowed on a non-commercial basis, there is nevertheless a risk for a black market trade in surrogate births, argued Olofsson. She said that legalizing surrogate motherhood would send a signal that would increase acceptance of the practice that would open the door to trade with surrogate mothers in other countries, citing India as an example. “It’s possible that we need more regulations that would make it so that it’s not allowed in Sweden to buy a child that has been born this way in India. But that’s not how the proposal looks,” said Olofsson.
With all new medical procedures I think the fundamental ethical requirement is the informed consent of all those involved. And for surrogacy that includes the child-to-be. But much of the debate about surrogacy laws in Sweden has been focused on the “rights” of women or the gay community to have children (or not). There is more concern for the “convenience” of these groups rather than for the welfare of the would-be child. Of course the “informed consent” of the would-be child is not available. But it should not be beyond the wit of man to consider the views the child would have – if it could. (more…)
Smeets is actually Dutch filmmaker and animator Floris Kaayk, who worked in collaboration with media production company Revolver on the “media art project” that took the world by storm.
It’s been a dream of scientists ever since the days of Leonardo DiVinci and even Icarus — human-powered flight. But where some of the greatest scientific minds in history have failed, did Jarno Smeets, a mechanical engineer from the Netherlands, finally succeed in building a pair of working human wings?
The above video showing human flight was created by Smeets, and uploaded to YouTube earlier this week. It’s generating an incredible amount of controversy — half from people stunned that such a feat was accomplished, and half from people convinced the feat was a fraud.
The k2p blog 