This report in GWPF where the UK Met Office is said to predicting a return of a little ice age is said to be based on a piece by Jonathan Leake in today’s Sunday Times (which I no longer read or access ever since they starting hiding behind a pay-wall). Somewhat surprising since it supports what I think is happening with our climate and especially since the Met Office, Nature, Jonathan Leake and the Sunday Times are all strong believers in the anthropogenic global warming orthodoxy.
Frost Fair on the Thames 1683-84 by Thomas Wyke. During the Great Frost of 1683–84, the worst frost recorded in England, the Thames was completely frozen for two months: wikipedia
Met Office U-Turn: Europe May be Facing Return Of ‘Little Ice Age’
Britain should brace itself for another freezing winter with the return of La Niña, a climate phenomenon known to disrupt global weather, ministers have warned.
La Niña, in which cold water piles up in the equatorial eastern Pacific, is linked to extreme winter weather in America. Some suggest that last year’s strong La Niña was linked to Britain’s icy winter, one of the coldest on record. The connection between La Niña and weather in Europe is scientifically uncertain but ministers have told transport organisations and emergency services to take no chances.
The warning coincides with research from the Met Office suggesting Europe could be facing a return of the “little ice age” that gripped Britain 300 years ago, causing decades of bitter winters. The prediction, to be published in Nature, is based on observations showing a slight fall in the sun’s emissions of ultraviolet radiation, which over a long period may trigger mini ice ages in Europe.
Some sort of confirmation is in this post here which quotes the same article but is equally incredulous about the U-turn by the Met Office:
After Steven King’s blatant – and rather incompetent – plagiarism in his articles for the Irish Examiner was disclosed by Brian Whelan all his previous articles for the Examiner are now being scrutinised. The editor of the Irish Examiner, Tim Vaughn, has acted rather quickly and decisively which is certainly commendable (especially compared to the immediate and knee-jerk denials and defensive statements which are usually the case).
King is employed by APCO Worldwide and is based in Delhi but has now gone into hiding and is not responding to the Irish Examiner’s attempts to contact him. APCO Worldwide is a communications and public affairs consulting firm serving the corporate world and government bodies. No doubt they are expert at tailoring their copy to suit the needs of their clients. It begs the question as to what extent plagiarism and recycling other people’s material for their reports to their clients is part of their normal behaviour. Of course expectations of ethical standards at a public relations firm are not very high since their brief is to make their clients look good under all circumstances. Perhaps it is a case of the methods used routinely in public relations spilling over into King’s article for the Irish Examiner.
The ‘Irish Examiner’ said it had been trying to contact Mr King, who is based in India, by email, phone and text message since Wednesday evening, but had not received a reply. “Obviously, I would much prefer if I had a response from him by now,” editor Tim Vaughan said. “This morning, therefore, I suspended publication of any future columns and in the meantime I still await a response.”
Mr King is based in New Delhi, where he works for public affairs and strategic communications firm APCO Worldwide. His company profile states that he is the former chief political adviser to Northern Ireland’s ex-First Minister David Trimble, and was also an Ulster Unionist Party negotiator on the Good Friday Agreement.
He has been writing a weekly column for the ‘Irish Examiner since 2006.
…. Mr Vaughan said Mr King’s previous columns were being put through plagiarism-detection software. “It is not practical for a newspaper to run every article through such software prior to publication, and there is a huge element of trust involved with freelance contributors.”
Interestingly APCO also makes much of the “trust” their clients have in them. I wonder what the clients being served by Steven King’s “cut and paste” methods may think?
Håkan Juholt, the relatively new leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, is in deep trouble.
He became leader of the party following an old fashioned “coup” in March this year – reminiscent of a Soviet style of leadership change which did not bode well for the “renewal” of the party.
Håkan Juholt: FOTO SCANPIX via SvD
It now seems that back in 2007 he moved into his girl-friend’s apartment in Stockholm and since then has been claiming the entire rental of the apartment as his “temporary” residence in the capital. Apparently he should not have been claiming more than half the rental. (By the rules, if he had evicted his girl-friend and was the sole occupant he would have been perfectly entitled to his claim!).
In any event his exaggerated claims have totalled some 160,000 kronor (about $23,000) that he was not entitled to. Yesterday he called a press conference and apologised excusing his behaviour on “not being aware of the rules”. He paid back the money yesterday. His acknowledgement of his “ignorance of the rules” is being received with some incredulity since an “internal audit” within the Social Democrats had apparently identified the problem back in 2009. The Parliamentary Finance Office pointed out the non-compliance a month ago when Juholt applied for an increase in his compensation because the rent had increased. That he kept silent for a month and only decided to apologise and pay the money back after the Aftonbladet newspaper had revealed the scandal has not added to his crediblity.
The extra payment he claimed has amounted to about 3,500 kronor per month and considering that his monthly salary is 144,000 kronor (about $21,000), the impression he has created is one of a greedy little man looking for every kronor he can squeeze out of the system.
Of course he is not the first – and is certainly not the last – Swedish politician caught with his hand in the till. Many have distinguished themselves by jumping housing queues and “purchasing” rental accommodation with very lucrative results. Swedish politicians are also known – both at the national and at the local level – for blatantly arranging the rules to ensure their financial well-being even after they have left office. Their defence thereafter has always been that they are “just following the rules” but they don’t usually mention that they made the rules themselves.
Swedish politicians like most of their European counterparts are extremely moralistic about the behaviour of others but are remarkably hypocritical when it comes to their own behaviour. Their own sense of ethics leaves a lot to be desired.
The season’s first winter storm walloped northern Sweden on Thursday night, dumping more than 10 centimetres of thick, wet snow, snarling traffic, and prompting warnings from police.
Between Sorsele och Arvidsjaur in Norrbotten Thursday night: image Aftonbladet
Kiruna on Friday morning: image Aftonbladet
“This is full-blown winter. I’ve been stuck for two-and-a-half hours,” truck driver Peter Härdfeldt told the Aftonbladet newspaper. A low pressure system moving across Sweden left parts of the far north covered in white on Friday morning following a night of gusty winds and wet snow.
Police in Norbotten urged drivers who had yet to change to winter tyres to “do so as quickly as possible” adding that “the snowploughs are on their way”. ….. On Saturday night, frost and below-freezing temperatures are expected to put a chill across much of the country. “It’s going to be one of the coldest nights this weekend,” meteorologist Lovisa Andersson from SMHI told Expressen.
Dr Steven King is the former chief political advisor to Nobel Peace Laureate and First Minister of Northern Ireland David Trimble and was a Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) negotiator on equality, human rights, security and cultural issues in the multi-party peace talks leading to the 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. He now writes about international affairs in a weekly column for the Irish Examiner.
But Brian Whelan who led the uncovering of the plagiarism of Johann Hari has found that Steven King has plagiarised widely and especially from the writings of Brendan O’Neill, the editor of the blog Spiked.
The Journal: THE IRISH EXAMINER says it is investigating substantial allegations of plagiarism against one of its columnists. Steven King, who writes about international affairs in a weekly column for the newspaper, is accused of copying lengthy passages for his columns from the output of Brendan O’Neill, the editor of British-based blog Spiked.
Evidence of the plagiarism was uncovered by journalist Brian Whelan,whose blog this morning published examplesof seven King articles which seem to rely heavily on passages taken from O’Neill’s columns. In one case – a column published by the Examiner in July – there are at least three paragraphs which bear striking similarities toan O’Neill column from 2008.
Whelan wrote on his blog that he had been in contact with O’Neill regarding the similarities, and had been assured that King was not given permission to use passages from his work.
DIT journalism lecturer Harry Browne subsequently uncovered further examples of potential plagiarism, in King’s column published yesterday. That column – dealing with the prospect of Barack Obama losing next year’s US election – carries similarities with pieces published on Salon.com and in Commentary Magazine.
Whelan hadpreviously helped to uncover accusations against London Independent columnist Johann Hari, which resulted in Hari being stripped of his 2008 Orwell Prize and suspended from duty at his paper. Hari is now on unpaid leave from the Independent.
… King was Educated at Oxford, Queen’s and the University of Ulster, holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, a Master of Social Science in Humanities and a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science.
I will show below that he has been extensively passing off the ideas of Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill as his own. I have contacted O’Neill who says he has never met King and never gave permission for any of his work to be reproduced by him. …
Presumably King gets paid by the Irish Examiner and – indirectly – by thousands of readers and then this becomes a case of theft and fraud and not just of his ethics.
Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. His passing got me thinking about leadership. The definition of a “leader” that I like best is
“one who visualises and then moves his “people” (or group or company or “tribe”) from a given “state of existence” (set of conditions or location or both) towards or to another desired state”
Steve Jobs was a leader who had a vision of the world and moved very many towards that destination – and not just at Apple.
With this definition it is incumbent on a leader to first have the vision to be able to visualise and communicate the “desired” state and then to carry his “people” with him towards that state. Kicking and screaming if necessary. A leader is not one who is merely an effective administrator who follows rules and hopes for a beneficial result. A leader is not one who – in the name of democracy or consensus – blends and averages out the opinions of many to produce a grey, amorphous blob of a destination. He is not one who becomes merely a “keeper of a process” where the process reigns supreme and the direction of movement and the change of state achieved is subordinated to maintaining the process.
Political democracies around the world today are suffering from a dearth of leadership. Maintaining the “democratic process” has become more important than defining the direction of where we are going and ensuring movement in that direction. Right now every single democratic leader has degenerated into a professional pessimist. The 2008 financial crisis probably prevents any “leader” today from daring to be optimistic and confident enough to look to the future. The current financial crisis being played out in Europe is no doubt due to the irresponsible and profligate behaviour of Greece and Italy and Spain and Portugal. But deeper than that is the lack of any leadership not only in these countries but also in the rest of Europe. Throughout the democratic world today it is fears which subordinate actions and the definition of courage is “when fear is subordinated to purposeful actions”. The people in positions of leadership lack courage.
In modern party political democracies, it is party politics which govern and every party is concerned primarily with getting to governmental power or staying there. Minor and fringe political parties (often fanatical and extreme) are allowed to hold the balance of power just so that some other larger party can form or remain in government. When these minor parties exercise greater influence than they should, the entire concept of democracy is compromised and corrupted (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria). Even in effectively two party states like the US and the UK and Australia and France and India, the lack of a clear mandate leads to political deadlock on the one hand, or having a clear mandate on the other leads to an oppression by the majority. (The Liberal Democrats in the UK merely bend with the wind to stay in government and do not count). Proportional representation in many European countries leads to hodge-podge, coalition governments with no clear direction and no clear mandate (Germany and Italy for example). In Belgium there is no government at all and actions have been abdicated to the bureaucrats and the administrators.
In political democracies there are no leaders visible today. Only followers.
Obama, Merkel, Cameron, Sarkozy, Gillard, Noda and Manmohan Singh all behave essentially like sheep or like “keepers of a process” and I see no signs of any real leadership. Staying in government is the name of the game and there is no hint of a vision of a desired state of conditions – let alone any movement towards such a desired state of conditions.
It is high time for some vision and some optimism and some daring in the political arena.
I am a strong believer in the Rule of the Iceberg where “whatever becomes visible is only 10% of all that exists”. And while I do not know if the number of retractions of scientific papers is increasing because detection methods are improved or because scientific misconduct is increasing, I am quite sure that the misconduct that is indicated by retractions is only a small part of all the misconduct that goes on.
What is clear however is that the world wide web provides a powerful new forum for the exercising of a check and a balance. It provides a hitherto unavailable method for mobilising resources from a wide and disparate group of individuals. The success of web sites such as Retraction Watch and Vroniplag are testimony to this. And the investigative power of the on-line community is particularly evident with Vroniplag as has been described by Prof. Debora Weber-Wulff’s blog. And this investigative power – even if made up of “amateurs” in the on-line community – can bring to bear a vast and varying experience of techniques and expertise which – if harnessed towards a particular target – can function extremely rapidly. The recent on-line investigation and disclosure that an award winning nature photographer had been photo-shopping a great number of photographs of lynxes, wolves and raccoons and had invented stories about his encounters was entirely due to “amateurs” on the Flashback Forum in Sweden who very quickly created a web site to disclose all his trangressions and exactly how he had manipulated his images.
Nature addresses the subject of retractions today:
This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters’ vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science’s ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction, the official declaration that a paper is so flawed that it must be withdrawn from the literature. … But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 (see‘Rise of the retractions’) — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade. ….
…… When the UK-based Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) surveyed editors’ attitudes to retraction two years ago, it found huge inconsistencies in policies and practices between journals, says Elizabeth Wager, a medical writer in Princes Risborough, UK, who is chair of COPE. That survey led to retraction guidelines that COPE published in 2009. But it’s still the case, says Wager, that “editors often have to be pushed to retract”. ……
In surveys, around 1–2% of scientists admit to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once (D. Fanelli PLoS ONE4, e5738; 2009). But over the past decade, retraction notices for published papers have increased from 0.001% of the total to only about 0.02%. And, Ioannidis says, that subset of papers is “the tip of the iceberg” — too small and fragmentary for any useful conclusions to be drawn about the overall rates of sloppiness or misconduct.
Instead, it is more probable that the growth in retractions has come from an increased awareness of research misconduct, says Steneck. That’s thanks in part to the setting up of regulatory bodies such as the US Office of Research Integrity in the Department of Health and Human Services. These ensure greater accountability for the research institutions, which, along with researchers, are responsible for detecting mistakes.
The growth also owes a lot to the emergence of software for easily detecting plagiarism and image manipulation, combined with the greater number of readers that the Internet brings to research papers. In the future, wider use of such software could cause the rate of retraction notices to dip as fast as it spiked, simply because more of the problematic papers will be screened out before they reach publication. On the other hand, editors’ newfound comfort with talking about retraction may lead to notices coming at an even greater rate. ……
The academic and scientific community will – perforce – mirror the surrounding society it is embedded in. Standards of ethics and instances of misconduct will follow those of the surrounding environment. But the scientific community is somewhat protected in terms of not often having to bear liability for what they have published. Having to bear some responsibility and face liability for the quality of what they produce can be a force which will improve ethical standards immensely. Bringing incompetent or cheating scientists to book is not an attack on science. And it is what science needs to regain some of the reputation that has been tarnished in recent times. With the spotlight that is now available in the form of the world wide web, I expect the level of scrutiny to increase and this too can only be a force for the good.
The Nobel prize for Chemistry 2011 has been awarded to Prof. Dan Shechtman, Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion for the discovery of quasi-crystals.
Dan Schechtman
Daniel Shechtman, Israeli citizen. Born 1941 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Ph.D. 1972 from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Distinguished Professor, The Philip Tobias Chair, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Daniel Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.
On the morning of 8 April 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Daniel Shechtman’s electron microscope. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically over and over again. For scientists, this repetition was required in order to obtain a crystal.
Shechtman’s image, however, showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. Such a pattern was considered just as impossible as creating a football using only six-cornered polygons, when a sphere needs both five- and six-cornered polygons. His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.
Aperiodic mosaics, such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam Shrine in Iran, have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level. In those mosaics, as in quasicrystals, the patterns are regular – they follow mathematical rules – but they never repeat themselves.
Atomic model of an Ag-Al quasicrystal: Wikipedia
When scientists describe Shechtman’s quasicrystals, they use a concept that comes from mathematics and art: the golden ratio. This number had already caught the interest of mathematicians in Ancient Greece, as it often appeared in geometry. In quasicrystals, for instance, the ratio of various distances between atoms is related to the golden mean.
Following Shechtman’s discovery, scientists have produced other kinds of quasicrystals in the lab and discovered naturally occurring quasicrystals in mineral samples from a Russian river. A Swedish company has also found quasicrystals in a certain form of steel, where the crystals reinforce the material like armor. Scientists are currently experimenting with using quasicrystals in different products such as frying pans and diesel engines.
Chemistry Nobel: 102 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been awarded since 1901. It was not awarded on eight occasions: in 1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940, 1941 and 1942.Of 160 Laureates Frederick Sanger was awarded twice and there are 159 individuals (but including only 4 women) who have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. All previous winners of the Chemistry Nobel are here.Chemistry was the most important science for Alfred Nobel’s own work. The development of his inventions as well as the industrial processes he employed were based upon chemical knowledge. Chemistry was the second prize area that Nobel mentioned in his will.
In 1901 the very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jacobus H. van ‘t Hoff for his work on rates of reaction, chemical equilibrium, and osmotic pressure. In more recent years, the Chemistry Laureates have increased our understanding of chemical processes and their molecular basis, and have also contributed to many of the technological advancements we enjoy today.
Dr. Aric Sigman is a biologist with fine credentials (a Fellow of the Society of Biology and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society) but one who has been seduced by the notoriety and adulation that comes from creating headlines with nonsense science (usually in the Daily Mail – popularly known as the Daily Fail).
Just the headlines brand Sigman clearly as a publicity seeking “kook”. He has even gone on record – with the Daily Mail of course – to suggest that smacking children can lead to their success!! He may have been a scientist once but has now fallen to become a “celebrity scientist” and appears to be a psychologist suffering from some form of narcissism.
Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in Saturday’s Guardian and of the Bad Science website and does not much care for Sigman (good for him).
But now Sigman has taken to publishing his crazy opinions in The Biologist. It is not science and the purpose is publicity and while The Biologist may well like basking in this publicity it degrades its own position as a scientific journal and degrades the work of those who publish real science in the journal.
Last week the Daily Mail and the Today programme took some bait from Aric Sigman, an author of popular sciencey books about the merits of traditional values. “Sending babies and toddlers to daycare could do untold damage to the development of their brains and their future health,” explained the Mail.
These news stories were based on a scientific paper by Sigman in The Biologist. Itmisrepresents individual studies, as Professor Dorothy Bishop demonstrated almost immediately, and it cherry-picks the scientific literature, selectively referencing only the studies that support Sigman’s view. Normally this charge of cherry-picking would take a column of effort to prove, but this timeSigman himself admits it, frankly, in a PDF postedon his own website. Nobody reading The Biologist, or its press release, could possibly have known that the evidence presented was deliberately incomplete. That is, in my opinion, an act of deceit by the journal. ……
Sigman replies to the criticism also in The Guardian by claiming that his article in the Biologist was not science and was clearly an opinion piece. But this does not wash. It was opinion – and nonsense opinion at that – but he clearly wanted it to be taken as science at least by the popular press to satisfy his narcissistic urges. He whines:
….. columnists and bloggers cannot assume a sense of entitlement over science and dictate to learned societies, their journals and journalists what they should publish, stifling healthy debate.
But bloggers and columnists can certainly demand of journals who claim to be scientific, peer-reviewed journals that they refrain from the politicisation and corruption of science and assure the quality of what they publish. The Biologist needs to clean up its act and cannot just pander to a “celebrity scientist” seeking publicity by passing off nonsense opinion as science. But it is Sigman’s ethics which are in doubt.
Barbaric and anachronistic punishments – straight out of medieval times – of stoning, lashing, amputation of limbs, mutilation and beheading are not only common but are enshrined in the law of several Islamic countries. Of course even nations which pride themselves on their civilised behaviour still resort to the most exquisite tortures they can devise – whether at Abu Ghraib or at Guantanomo. But at least in most countries barbaric behaviour and cruel and unusual punishments are not enshrined in law.
Now Russia in a burst of machismo is trying to compete with Saudi Arabia.
The Russian Duma today approved a proposal to castrate pedophiles by 332 votes to zero. President Dmitry Medvedev had introduced the proposal in May this year. This means that anybody convicted of offenses against children under 13 years and deemed to be mentally ill will be subjected to chemical castration.
The law must still be approved by the Senate before it becomes effective. Russia is now one of the few countries where castration may be carried out as a punishment and joins Poland which is the only country in Europe which does so.
A measure of how civilised we really are must be the extent to which we allow or tolerate or excuse or justify barbaric behaviour. And physical punishment to be imposed on the mentally ill sounds to me like a society which is taking an easy way out and abdicating its collective responsibility.
