Intrusive ads are counter-productive – at least with me

February 6, 2014

I must be representative of some consumers since I do buy stuff.

I even buy quite a lot of stuff on-line. Tickets of any kind (theatre, airline, museum, train, football, hockey bus ……), books, music, electrical and electronic gadgets and a host of small articles capable of being delivered by post. We book hotels on-line and sometimes pay on-line as well. We generally don’t buy food or clothes on-line but we do sometimes (at least my wife does) respond to the flyers dropped into our letter box by local retailers. Nearly all automotive products or materials for house repairs are bought physically and not on-line though we may have searched on-line.

But what I observe is that when I buy-on line it is from sites that I know or for which I have searched on-line. Never by clicking on an ad at another site. Even when I search I always hop over the paid ads which show up at the top of the search results. For a store to show up in a search result is much more important in getting my custom than in their advertising having been seen on another site. I cannot recall a single instance in the last year of buying something in response to an on-line ad. But what I also observe is that there is some threshold level of intrusiveness which leads me to remove sites from my bookmarks. If a site directs me first to full-page ads which I have to click away – and especially if they make it difficult to find the “close” button – then those sites get removed from my bookmark lists. I don’t watch videos on-line if their ads don’t disappear within 5 seconds. If my mouse, when hovering over text, brings up too many intrusive ads then the entire site gets onto my “black-list”. I don’t mind registering for some services at some sites but if that process takes longer than about 30 seconds (perhaps a minute) then that site never gets visited again.  Of course it could be that some of the on-line ads are having a subliminal effect and reinforce my perceptions when I search for on-line stores – but it is not very likely.

Even on TV and especially since the break for commercials is so long (in Sweden a commercial break lasts 6 minutes and there are not many ads of high quality), the commercial break either leads me to surf other channels or to go do something else. In the last year or two I notice that there are more TV programmes that I watch only up to the first commercial break because I then go and do something else and never get back in time to watch the rest of the programme. If it is a sporting or political event, then I may well return to the programme – after the commercial break. In any event the people paying vast sums for making and airing the commercials do not capture my attention. If anything they create a resentment in me since I am either a “captive audience” or am being coerced to view their “nonsense”. And it is the resentment which leads to the content being classified in my mind as “nonsense”. I never watch TV shopping channels but they clearly don’t have me as their target audience. The very existence of the commercials is leading me to strategies to avoid them!

My behaviour is surely influenced by the presence of ads on-line and commercials on TV. However, the behaviour engendered in me is nearly always counter-productive from the viewpoint of the advertiser. Maybe I am an untypical consumer – but I doubt it.  Which makes me wonder how effective some of this advertising is?

Certainly advertising agencies and the industry in general will never admit that there can be too much advertising. They get paid for exposure (or apparent exposure) and not for sales achieved. They don’t suffer any penalty for resentment caused or customers driven away. But I would suggest that there is a threshold – very low in my case – at which on-line advertising and commercials on TV become counter-productive.

I get virtually no text ads on my phone. I stopped using Facebook and Twitter some months ago so at least I am not harassed by their ads. But from what I hear, the intrusiveness of the ads on the social media are now leading to some people reducing their use and, in some cases, ending their use of social media. Social media and their business models are still evolving but the assumption that advertising revenues can keep increasing forever is fundamentally flawed.

BBC: Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

Microblogging site Twitter has reported a net loss of $645m (£396m) for 2013, just three months after its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange. The loss was expected by analysts, who highlighted Twitter’s revenues, which rose 110% last year to reach $665m.

But a reported slow growth in user numbers was a bigger concern for investors. Twitter averaged 241 million monthly users in the last quarter of the year, up just 3.8% on the previous quarter. That represents a slowdown compared with a growth rate of 10% seen at the beginning of 2013. Timeline views were down nearly 7%, suggesting users were refreshing their feeds less often.

“What this report will do is it will question how mainstream is Twitter as a platform,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach.

Shares fell as much as 12% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

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Posted in Behaviour, Business, Media | 1 Comment »

Queensland switches back to coal

February 5, 2014

Once upon a time Australia had among the lowest electricity costs in the world but that was in the days where the market was not distorted by carbon taxes, mandatory renewable energy targets and subsidies for solar power. Coal prices are declining while gas prives are rising. This from The Australian as Queensland goes the way of Germany:

QUEENSLAND’S largest power generator will today declare that Australia is one of the world’s most expensive countries for energy and warn that the electricity market is being distorted by the carbon tax, mandatory renewables target and solar-rooftop subsidies.

After Stanwell took the extraordinary step yesterday of announcing it would mothball its biggest gas-fired power station and resurrect a coal facility built in the 1980s – sparking predictions that gas-fired power plants would be withdrawn in other states – it will today call for a scaling back of the renewable energy target.

Before the introduction of the carbon tax, the RET scheme and solar feed-in tariffs, the abundance of coal had made Australia a source of low-cost electricity, the company will say. “These policies appear to have been implemented for ideological reasons with little analysis of the impact on electricity prices and economic growth,” Stanwell chief executive officer Richard Van Breda will say.

Stanwell will issue its warnings as part of its submission to the federal government’s energy white paper, being developed by Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane.

The submission will caution that a raft of energy policies is eroding Australia’s competitiveness in manufacturing, which is a sensitive issue for the government amid internal tensions over taxpayer handouts to businesses, including SPC Ardmona.

Yesterday, Stanwell revealed it would withdraw its Swanbank E power station, near Ipswich west of Brisbane, from service for up to three years from October so it could sell the gas rather than use it in electricity generation. …….. A unit at the Tarong coal power station – in cold storage since late 2012 – will be returned to service later this year.

….. Germany is shifting back to more coal-fired electricity generation, reopening some of its dirtiest brown-coalmines that have been closed since reunification, despite having spearheaded Europe’s push into renewable energy. China has plans to add another 860 million tonnes of coal production by 2015. ………  

Stanwell’s energy white paper submission will raise concerns that the surge in rooftop solar panels has increased the capacity of the market, making cheaper coal-fired power stations run less efficiently. It says solar feed-in tariffs (state government schemes) have resulted in high ongoing costs for network infrastructure. …

 

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Posted in Australia, Coal, Energy, Gas | 2 Comments »

Putin’s Sochi is “ready” but journalists are missing their basic luxuries!

February 5, 2014

Putin’s winter games open in Sochi on Friday and journalists have started arriving. But Putin is probably a little indignant that they are nowhere near as hardy as he is and expect all manner of luxuries ranging from

View image on Twitter

Twitter image Harry Reekie @CNN

  • one room per person (Putinities can manage with 11/room)
  • curtains
  • toilet paper
  • heating
  • internet
  • elevators that work
  • running water
  • hotel lobbies
  • reception desk
  • water safe to wash in
  • water safe to drink
  • flooring
View image on Twitter

Twitter image @wyshynski

Reuters: Russian officials have declared Sochi ready for the Games, on which President Vladimir Putin has staked his and his country’s reputation. But days before they open on Friday, the organizers acknowledge that not all the new hotels are ready, despite the Games’ $50-billion price tag. ……. 

macho putin

Although no athletes are affected, officials from two countries said they were turned away when they arrived at night in Krasnaya Polyana because their hotels were not ready. They too have been temporarily moved elsewhere.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has urged the Russian organizers to sort out the problems quickly and says only about three percent of the newly built accommodation – around 700 rooms – are not ready for guests.

Macho Putin is not impressed by these namby-pamby types. 

Related posts:

Sochi Winter Olympics: Champions of Corruption

Economic model predicts Olympic medals at 2014 Sochi winter games

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Give all your students an A+ and lose your job

February 4, 2014
Denis Rancourt

Denis Rancourt

Denis Rancourt is a recognised researcher and he may even be an excellent physics teacher for all I know. But he either suffers from wanting to be a “martyr” for the cause of “no competition in education” or is just plain lazy and couldn’t be bothered to go to the trouble of grading his students.

I am inclined to believe it is the latter together with a desire for the limelight.

Ottawa citizen:

Denis Rancourt has lost his bid to reclaim his job as a professor at the University of Ottawa. ….  arbitrator Claude Foisy concluded he had no reason to intervene in the university’s 2009 decision to fire Rancourt, then a tenured physics professor, for defying its orders to grade his students objectively.

The university dismissed Rancourt after he awarded A+ marks to all 23 students who completed an advanced physics course he taught in the winter of 2008. The university had earlier issued him a letter of reprimand for awarding A+ marks to virtually everyone in a first-year physics course he gave in 2007. As well, Rancourt’s dean, the late André Lalonde, gave him “clear and unequivocal direction” in March 2008 that he must not grant every student in his courses a grade of A+ based only on their attendance at class.

Rancourt, ……  testified that he’d come to believe that traditional methods of teaching and evaluating physics students were ineffective. Learning physics, he said, must be anchored in self-motivation. Key to his “student-centred” pedagogical method, he testified, was allowing students to learn free of the stress produced by the traditional method of grading and ranking.

…… Foisy noted that the university had opposed Rancourt’s evaluation method “every step of the way.” Lalonde testified that it would undermine the university’s reputation, causing it to be seen as a “Mickey Mouse university,” and was prejudicial to students graded in the traditional manner.

Foisy agreed, even accepting Lalonde’s characterization of Rancourt’s failure to objectively evaluate his students as “a form of academic fraud. This, in my opinion, is a very serious breach of his obligations as a university professor.”

Even though Rancourt was “well aware” of the university’s opposition to his method of evaluation, “he continued to defy the administration,” Foisy said. “Is the dismissal the appropriate remedy in the circumstances? The short answer is yes.”

The arbitrator rejected arguments that Rancourt’s teaching methods were protected by academic freedom, freedom of expression and his tenure status.

“Academic freedom is not so wide as to shield a professor from actions or behaviour that cannot be construed as a reasonable exercise of his responsibilities,” he said.

Foisy did uphold one of Rancourt’s grievances, ordering the university to remove any mention of a disciplinary letter dated Nov. 20, 2007, from Rancourt’s record. The letter blamed Rancourt for not having taught the content of an approved course.

But he rejected Rancourt’s demands for a written apology, monetary reparations and help in partially recovering lost time and career advancement.

joanne st lewis

joanne st lewis

Rancourt is not a stranger to controversy.  He claims that he was fired for political reasons rather than for his teaching methods, but that does not seem to have cut much ice with the arbitrator. His own blog is here and there does seem to be a touch of paranoia. In fact reading his blog suggests he is more interested in publicity through controversy than actually in teaching. He is also being sued for libel by Joanne St. Lewis a Law Professor at the University of Ottawa, after Rancourt referred to her as university president Allan Rock’s “House Negro” on his blog.

From my own experience – though not in a classroom – it was always very difficult to get my managers to objectively grade the performance of their subordinates. Poor performance ratings in a department reflected also on the manager’s own competence. And in my experience it was the goodness of the manager which determined whether he got the balance right in the application of stress to improve the performance of his subordinates or if he went over the top and caused a burn-out. But I have no doubt that performance ratings – done right – improved performance in the work place.

And I am quite sure that much of the poor performance of students reflects on the teacher’s ability to teach. An element of competition and stress is – in my experience – necessary for learning.

Which leaves me without much sympathy for Denis Rancourt.

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Japanese right-wingers continue to try and rewrite history

February 4, 2014

Victors write history.

But almost 70 years after the end of the Second World War the militaristic faction of the Japanese right-wing are still in a state of denial about the result. Their attempts to rewrite history – especially the actions and behaviour of the Japanese military in China – have never ceased but have never before had much impact or much support even within Japan. The Nanjing massacre and the use of “comfort women“ by the military in occupied territories are often downplayed or even denied by the revisionists. But now there is a rightist party in government which is in tacit agreement with many of these extreme views.The most potent symbol for the militaristic and nationalistic heritage in Japan is the Yasakuni shrine. As Mark Selden writes

Japan’s Yasukuni problem is inseparable from the fact that nationalism is the dominant ideology of our era. …… In the postwar, with Japan at peace and occupied by US forces, the shrine has played a role in structuring how the war is remembered and presented to the Japanese people. It did so within a framework crafted by the occupation authorities who exonerated the emperor of all responsibility for initiating or waging war. ….. Not only would the emperor not be deposed or tried as a war criminal, he would be shielded even from testifying at the Tokyo Trial. The verdict at Tokyo, sentencing Tojo and a small number of prominent military and government officials to death, as well as the convictions of thousands of soldiers and police officials tried in B and C class tribunals, in leaving untouched Japan’s supreme wartime leader, essentially absolved the Japanese people of the responsibility to examine their own behavior in the era of colonialism and war. For these reasons, the US as well as Japan ultimately shares responsibility for resolving issues of war responsibility that it helped to create, including those associated with the emperor and with Yasukuni Shrine. 

Emperor Hirohito at the Yasakuni shrine 1935

Emperor Hirohito at the Yasakuni shrine 1935

Just a month ago the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the Yasakuni Shrine to honour the convicted war criminals enshrined there.

BBC: Whatever Shinzo Abe says, any visit to the Yasakuni shrine by a Japanese prime minister is deeply political and sure to cause offence. In the 1960s and 70s, the spirits of scores of convicted Japanese war criminals were “enshrined” there. The most controversial were the 14 “Class A” war criminals, including wartime leader Hideki Tojo, who were “enshrined” in the late 1970s. These men were the ones who ordered and oversaw Japan’s brutal war in China and South East Asia. …..

…… Close observers of the Japanese prime minister say he is at heart a nationalist and a historical revisionist. He believes the trials that convicted Japan’s wartime leaders were “victors’ justice”. His own grandfather Nobusuke Kishi served in the war cabinet and was arrested by the Americans on suspicion of being a Class A war criminal. He was later released without charge.

School text books are now beginning to downplay or remain silent about Japanese atrocities (not that they have ever been fully accepting of their occurrence or of Japanese responsibility). Now this revisionism is spreading to the national broadcaster NHK and again with some support from the government.

JapanDailyPress: The Japanese public broadcasting firm NHK is under fire again as another senior manager sparked controversy over his comments denying any massacre from happening in the Nanjing province of China in 1930s. Naoki Hyakuta, member of the 12-man management committee for programming policy and budget-setting, denied reports of rape and murder by Japanese troops in China during 1937-38, shrugging it off as “propaganda.” …… 

…. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga justified the right-wing novelist’s statements, saying that he is entitled to his opinions. Speaking to the press, he said that he is aware of the reports “but has learnt (expressing personal views) doesn’t violate the Broadcast Law.” Fears of the broadcasting firm molding into PM Abe’s nationalist policy are starting to circulate with Hyakuta’s comments following new chief Katsuto Momii’s statements last month about the use of “comfort women,” or sexual slaves, being a normal practice during wartime, with many other nations doing the same.

Jan 31, 2014:The already embattled new chief of NHK is set to face a Diet committee today on claims that his comments about the “comfort women” system of World War II can be considered “political interferance.”  ……. Katsuto Momii will be grilled by the Parliament over his statement during his first press conference as the new chairman. He said that the use of sexual slaves, or comfort women, during times of war was also being practiced by other countries like France, Germany, and the United States, among others. While he has already apologized for his comments, saying they were his personal beliefs and not that of NHK, the international furor over it has not abated. ….

Certainly there is a growing concern about growing Chinese might in South East Asia and this concern is partially shared in the US. So the US, while disapproving of the revisionist trends in Japanese government circles, has been fairly mild in its criticism as long as the Japanese target is China. In the territorial disputes between Japan and China for example the US generally supports the Japanese positions.

I perceive a risk that as the Japanese commercial predominance weakens there could be an upsurge in the militaristic ambitions of the nationalistic right. It is only my perception of course but having lived in Japan and in Germany, I sense a greater risk of sudden chaos with the Japanese militaristic nationalists than with the German neo-Nazis. The manner is which the rest of Europe acts as a check and balance against extremism is something missing in Japan.

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Camel stories in the Old Testament were made up and long after the purported events

February 4, 2014

I suppose there are some who still believe that the stories of the Old Testament are not just fables and are an historical account.  As fables they are almost as well known as the stories of the brother’s Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson. But they are not at all a bad bunch of stories – though I always thought that a father offering up his son as a sacrifice was a sign of an evil man and not of any kind of faith to be admired. And even as a child I felt that neither the cowardly Abraham nor his tyrannical God came out of that story very well. And the grown-up son (Isaac) who allowed himself to be bound up to satisfy a demented father only comes out as an idiot.

In any event I cannot remember that I ever thought the stories were factual accounts or were anything other than fiction (which itself makes me wonder at what age we come to separate fact from fiction). To “prove” that fiction about the long dead past is not factual is, of course, trying to prove a negative. Researchers have now shown that at the purported time of the Age of the Patriarchs (supposedly 2000 – 1500 BCE), camels did not exist in the purported habitat of the purported Patriarchs (Abraham, Joseph and Jacob). I find it interesting that camels  were actually moved up from Arabia to the Levant apparently to help with a change of copper mining technology. But it is of little relevance to proving or disproving the fictions embodied in the fables of the Old Testament.

Finding Israel’s First Camels

Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph, and Jacob. But archaeologists have shown that camels were not domesticated in the Land of Israel until centuries after the Age of the Patriarchs (2000-1500 BCE). In addition to challenging the Bible’s historicity, this anachronism is direct proof that the text was compiled well after the events it describes.

Now Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University‘sDepartment of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the moment when domesticated camels arrived in the southern Levant, pushing the estimate from the 12th to the 9th century BCE.  …. 

Archaeologists have established that camels were probably domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula for use as pack animals sometime towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. In the southern Levant, where Israel is located, the oldest known domesticated camel bones are from the Aravah Valley, which runs along the Israeli-Jordanian border from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea and was an ancient center of copper production. At a 2009 dig, Dr. Ben-Yosef dated an Aravah Valley copper smelting camp where the domesticated camel bones were found to the 11th to 9th century BCE. In 2013, he led another dig in the area.

To determine exactly when domesticated camels appeared in the southern Levant, Dr. Sapir-Hen and Dr. Ben-Yosef used radiocarbon dating and other techniques to analyze the findings of these digs as well as several others done in the valley. In all the digs, they found that camel bones were unearthed almost exclusively in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BCE or later — centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible. The few camel bones found in earlier archaeological layers probably belonged to wild camels, which archaeologists think were in the southern Levant from the Neolithic period or even earlier. Notably, all the sites active in the 9th century in the Arava Valley had camel bones, but none of the sites that were active earlier contained them.

The appearance of domesticated camels in the Aravah Valley appears to coincide with dramatic changes in the local copper mining operation. Many of the mines and smelting sites were shut down; those that remained active began using more centralized labor and sophisticated technology, according to the archaeological evidence. The researchers say the ancient Egyptians may have imposed these changes — and brought in domesticated camels — after conquering the area in a military campaign mentioned in both biblical and Egyptian sources.

……. The arrival of domesticated camels promoted trade between Israel and exotic locations unreachable before, according to the researchers; the camels can travel over much longer distances than the donkeys and mules that preceded them. By the seventh century BCE, trade routes like the Incense Road stretched all the way from Africa through Israel to India. Camels opened Israel up to the world beyond the vast deserts, researchers say, profoundly altering its economic and social history.

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Posted in Animals, History | 3 Comments »

EU Corruption Report: Brussels bureaucrats kill chapter on corruption in EU Institutions

February 3, 2014

The EU corruption report is out today and is getting a lot of media attention. It has no big surprises and estimates the cost of corruption directly in the member states to be about 120 billion € which is about the same size as the EU budget and is about 1% of the total EU GDP at about 12 trillion €.

But – in a major victory for the faceless bureaucrats of Brussels – the report does not consider corruption within EU Institutions as it was supposed to. My perception is that the corruption level within the EU Institutions is as bad as in the worst member state. In Brussels where the bureaucrats are drawn from member countries, the practices they employ are imported from what they are used to in their home countries. And Brussels – in my little experience and in my opinion – is perfectly suited to levelling-down and to the spreading of the worst practices available.

EU Observer: The European Commission has decided not to include a chapter on EU institutions in a report on corruption in member states …. The original plan, announced in 2011, was to assess corruption across the member states and within the EU institutions. EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom is set to release the first bi-annual report on Monday (3 February), around six months later than originally planned.

Malmstrom’s spokesperson Michael Cercone told this website in an email that the commission had considered assessing the anti-corruption efforts of the EU’s own institutions but “realised that this is something we will have to come back to in a future EU anti-corruption report – to be sure that the evaluation would be satisfactory and objective.”

And when this part of the report does come out – if it is ever completed – it will ensure that the analysis is set so far in the past that no current bureaucrats/politicians will be implicated.

But the size of the corruption suggests that while petty corruption is much lower than in some developing countries, the extent of large sophisticated contract scams is not insignificant. It takes a few thousands of petty corruption events to come up to the level of a single large contract scam. The Report points out that:

The individual country analyses revealed a wide variety of corruption-related problems, as well as of corruption control mechanisms, some of which have proved effective and others have failed to produce results. Nevertheless, some common features can be noted either across the EU or within clusters of Member States. The country analyses show that public procurement is particularly prone to corruption in the Member States, …..

Of course the EU countries exhibit a wide variety of behaviour and some member states view the payment of “fees” or the exchange of “favours” to get an advantage as a normal activity. As the report states “However, the long-standing absence of comprehensive anti-corruption strategies in some Member States which are facing systemic corruption problems turned out to be an issue of concern, ..”.  There is a political dimension as well “Provoked by the crisis, social protests have targeted not only economic and social policies, but also the integrity and accountability of political elites. High-profile scandals associated with corruption, misuse of public funds or unethical behaviour by politicians have contributed to public discontent and mistrust of the political system. Integrity in politics is a serious issue for many Member States….”.

Oh well! Business will continue as usual in Brussels.

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“Black holes don’t exist” – Hawking applied to climate

February 3, 2014

Stephen Hawking’s recent paper is causing much consternation as Geraint Lewis describes in  The Conversation.

But could it be that it is Hawking’s non-existent black holes – located at the bottom of the oceans – which have swallowed up all the heat predicted by climate models and which has gone missing?

Grey is the new black hole: is Stephen Hawking right?

Over the past few days, the media has cried out the recent proclamation from Stephen Hawking that black holes, a mystery of both science and science fiction, do not exist.

Such statements send social media into conniptions, and comments quickly degenerate into satirical discussions of how you should never believe anything scientists say, as they just make it up anyway.

S. W. Hawking, Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, arXiv:1401.5761v1

Abstract: It has been suggested [1] that the resolution of the information paradox for evaporating black holes is that the holes are surrounded by firewalls, bolts of outgoing radiation that would destroy any infalling observer. Such firewalls would break the CPT invariance of quantum gravity and seem to be ruled out on other grounds. A different resolution of the paradox is proposed, namely that gravitational collapse produces apparent horizons but no event horizons behind which information is lost. This proposal is supported by ADS-CFT and is the only resolution of the paradox compatible with CPT. The collapse to form a black hole will in general be chaotic and the dual CFT on the boundary of ADS will be turbulent. Thus, like weather forecasting on Earth, information will effectively be lost, although there would be no loss of unitarity.

But while Geraint Lewis considers whether “black” is actually “grey”, I think it is no more complicated than a zero-sum game of arcane physics. Whereas zero divided by zero may be indeterminate it seems to me that zero multiplied by zero must be a double zero.

Apart from the obvious that a “black hole” – by its very naming – must therefore mean a double-dose of nothingness it is worth noting that Hawking – being the ultimate authority for Sheldon Cooper – distinguishes between “apparent horizons” which are not real “event horizons” and that he compares the chaos of collapse to a black hole to “weather forecasting”!!

Or did he mean “climate forecasts” and “climate modelling”? After all the hidden heat could well have been swallowed up into the fathomless pit of climatic black holes.

Maybe the abstract should read:

Chaotic climate and the black holes of climate modelling

It has been suggested that the resolution of the climate paradox for hidden heat is that the oceans are surrounded by firewalls, bolts of outgoing radiation that would destroy any infalling climatologist. Such firewalls would break the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and seem to be ruled out on other grounds. A different resolution of the paradox is proposed, namely that climate models produces apparent warming but the warming is a negative warming where heat is lost. This proposal is supported by the reality of the hiatus in global temperatures and is the only resolution of the paradox compatible with CS (common sense). The collapse to enter the new glacial will in general be chaotic and the approach of such a condition will be turbulent. Thus, like weather forecasting on Earth, information will effectively be lost, although there would be no loss of unitarity.

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Climate warming due to humans is highly uncertain says new paper in Science

February 2, 2014

The level of uncertainty in this supposedly “settled” science never fails to amaze. But I observe that it is beginning to be politically acceptable to talk about the uncertainties and even – as in this paper – to begin to question the significance of human activities on climate.

“Climate Effects of Aerosols-Cloud Interactions.“ Daniel Rosenfeld, Steven Sherwood, Robert Wood, Leo Donner. Science VOL 343, 24 JANUARY 2014

Abstract: Aerosols counteract part of the warming effects of greenhouse gases, mostly by increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back to space. However, the ways in which aerosols affect climate through their interaction with clouds are complex and incompletely captured by climate models. As a result, the radiative forcing (that is, the perturbation to Earth’s energy budget) caused by human activities is highly uncertain, making it difficult to predict the extent of global warming (1, 2). Recent advances have led to a more detailed understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions and their effects on climate, but further progress is hampered by limited observational capabilities and coarse-resolution climate models.

The paper is behind a pay-wall but the accompanying press release begins “The warming effect of human-induced greenhouse gases is a given, but to what extent can we predict its future influence?”. I have no doubt that “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere have a small warming effect but evidence is still lacking even for this simple statement because the carbon balance of the earth is still far from certain and the extent to which fossil fuel combustion contributes to the carbon dioxide concentration is still not certain. So while the warming effect of  greenhouse gases is established, its magnitude is not and the impact of humans on the concentration is also not yet certainly established. In fact, the primary contributors to the “greenhouse effect” are still water vapour and clouds but clouds also cause significant cooling by blocking insolation. Carbon dioxide by itself is almost of minor consequence and the weakness of climate models has always been that they make unjustified assumptions for the forcing effects of carbon dioxide. The pause in warming over the last 17-18 years and the slight decline in global temperatures for the last decade – while carbon dioxide concentrations have been steadily increasing – is a further indicator that the warming effect of carbon dioxide has been grossly exaggerated.

The Press Release goes on:

…… Indeed, one could say that the picture is a “cloudy” one, since the determination of the greenhouse gas effect involves multifaceted interactions with cloud cover.

To some extent, aerosols –- particles that float in the air caused by dust or pollution, including greenhouse gases – counteract part of the harming effects of climate warming by increasing the amount of sunlight reflected from clouds back into space. However, the ways in which these aerosols affect climate through their interaction with clouds are complex and incompletely captured by climate models, say the researchers. As a result, the radiative forcing (that is, the disturbance to the earth’s “energy budget” from the sun) caused by human activities is highly uncertain, making it difficult to predict the extent of global warming.

And while advances have led to a more detailed understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions and their effects on climate, further progress is hampered by limited observational capabilities and coarse climate models, says Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld of  the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of the article in Science. ….. 

Their recent studies have revealed a much more complicated picture of aerosol-cloud interactions than considered previously. Depending on the meteorological circumstances, aerosols can have dramatic effects of either increasing or decreasing the cloud sun-deflecting effect, the researchers say. Furthermore, little is known about the unperturbed aerosol level that existed in the preindustrial era. This reference level is very important for estimating the radiative forcing from aerosols.

Also needing further clarification is the response of the cloud cover and organization to the loss of water by rainfall. Understanding of the formation of ice and its interactions with liquid droplets is even more limited, mainly due to poor ability to measure the ice-nucleating activity of aerosols and the subsequent ice-forming processes in clouds.

Needless to say they end up asking for more funds:

While it is unfortunate that further progress on understanding aerosol-cloud interactions and their effects on climate is limited by inadequate observational tools and models, achieving the required improvement in observations and simulations is within technological reach, the researchers emphasize, provided that the financial resources are invested. 

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Clouds | 3 Comments »

The cons (“assholes”) of Paris – as seen from Marseille

February 2, 2014

The rivalry between Paris and Marseille is legendary though Marseille can boast human settlements starting from 30,000 years ago  while settlements in Paris can only go back about 7,000 years. Today Paris has a population about 3 times as large as Marseille’s (at about 2.3 million in the city and 12 million in the metropolitan area). The current pre-eminence of Paris does give Marseille a bit of an inferiority complex and there is usually an air of defensiveness evident from the Marseillais. They don’t like being perceived as the crime capital of France and the defence is then to take pride in the toughness of their criminals! Of course the rivalry manifests itself these days through football and an Olympique de Marseille versus Paris Saint-Germain match is something very special.

But even the New York Times magazine asks the question if Marseille is the secret capital of France.

Marseille remains a patchwork sprawl of rich and poor neighborhoods, a melancholy, compelling mess of corruption and sun — the anti-Paris and secret capital of a France that doesn’t pretend the country is race-blind.

GeoCurrents addresses some of the satirical maps of France at Carte de France.

I like these two particularly.

1. France as seen from Marseille:

France - seen from Marseilles image carte-de-france

France – seen from Marseilles image carte-de-france

The reported perception of France from the perspective of Marseille is particularly simplistic: amusingly, the map features two latitudinal lines and one oval to create a total of four regions: “North Pole” for the far North of France, “North” for everything poleward of the region the French call “Sud” (which itself usually corresponds to the regions of Provence-Alpes Côte d’Azur, Languedoc-Roussillon, Midi Pyrennées and Aquitaine, but is here even more constrained) and, finally, the shining label “cons,” (“assholes”), assigned to the oval encompassing Paris. Of notice, too, is the ironic “Capitale” label on top of Marseille. The map perfectly showcases the deep-seated rivalry between Paris and Marseille…..

2.France as seen from Paris

France seen from Paris image carte-de-france

France seen from Paris image carte-de-france

The map of France as seen by the Parisians seems more complex at first glance, though this does not mean that the Parisians are more discriminating than the Marseillais. The labels for the different regions here could be taken as offhanded proofs from inside the minds of Parisians, justifying France’s centralized political model. Alsace is perceived as the home of the “dépressifs” (depressed), the Bretagne region (Brittany), summed up for most Parisians by crepes and hard cider, are “alcooliques,”(alcoholics), and the Northerners are “pauvres” (poor).  The wildly successful 2008 French movie “Bienvenue Chez Les Chtis” (‘Welcome to the Sticks’) captured these dichotomies and prejudices perfectly. It is centered around a postal manager from the region of Lyon who is sent to the Northern region (Nord-Pas-de-Calais) as a punishment for having faked a disability in the hope of being sent to an office … on the Mediterranean. The movie was seen by a third of the French population in 23 weeks, thus showing the extent to which the regional question remains a running joke in France. ….. The labels “branleurs” (‘wankers’) and “menteurs” (‘liars’) for the southern regions show the extent to which Paris sees itself as pulling the country on its own—whether that is a role it has given to itself or the product of actual laziness from the other regions. The “terrorist” label both for the Basque Country and Corsica humorously point out the existence of occasionally violent separatist groups in both regions, though both places are also extremely popular vacation destinations for the Parisians, who seldom let geopolitics in the way of their summer migration.  Finally, the map reveals the idea that Parisians tend to see many regions of France as their playground. The “plages” (beaches) label along the Western and the Mediterranean coasts and the “ski” label along the Pyrenees and the Alps may seem amusing and reductive, but they are in fact indicative of the huge ebb and flow that occurs in the winter and summer (with all those weeks off work!), when a massive exodus heads out of Paris and into these regions.

Source: http://www.geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/seek-thou-shall-fiend-french-satirical-maps#ixzz2sBdyIUno

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Posted in Behaviour, Football, France | Comments Off on The cons (“assholes”) of Paris – as seen from Marseille

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