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The biggest question, though, remains the extent to which climate change is the driver of hurricanes, cyclones and flooding that have hit the world with apparently increased ferocity and regularity in recent years.
It is still proving extremely difficult for scientists to extract a clear sign of the effects of climate change from the normal long-term historic cycles of weather and climate activity. That is despite simple logic saying that a warmer climate should result in more powerful storms because of a greater water content in the atmosphere.
Axel Lehmann, chief risk officer at Zurich Financial Services, says it is necessary to take a long-term perspective – of 200 or even 1,000 years.
“In terms of severity and frequency, is this type of event happening in a more systematic way? We do not yet have an answer on that,” he says.
“But on a systematic basis we do know that a growing population puts pressure on the earth and its resources.”
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May
30
2012
the reporter Mr.Chua Eng Wee of LianHe ZaoBao told me on phone in the evening of 19 May 2012 that someone from your group had called to SPH and requested to add in one sentence for their news report. On 19 May 2012 4pm, PM Lee and his team are all with your group together for the visitation. Thus, if you don’t investigate and clarify clearly, people may think it maybe PM Lee’s team who did it.
Speaking to TODAY, PAP Member of Parliament Baey Yam Keng, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Information, Communications and the Arts, reiterated that "no one can control the media and any responsible media would want full editorial independence".
Mar
19
2012
Recall that in the aftermath of initial revelations about Peter Gleick's phishing of the Heartland Institute, we heard defenses of his action that included claims that he was only doing the same thing that journalists do to the importance of looking beyond Gleick's misdeeds at the "larger truth." Consider also what was described in the UEA emails as "pressure to present a nice tidy story" related to climate science as well as the IPCC's outright falsification related to disasters and climate change. Such shenanigans so endemic in the climate change debate that when a journalist openly asks whether the media should tell the whole truth about climate change, no one even bats an eye.
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Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be.
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some people do feel that certain issues are so important that there should be cause in political debates to overlook lies or misrepresentations in service of a "larger truth" (Yellow cake, anyone?). I have seen this attitude for years in the climate change debate (hey look, just today), and often condoned by scientists and journalists alike.
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Jan
29
2012
a cursory look at the “standard operating procedure” (SOP) laid down by the powers on high for our traditional media could well explain MHA’s “plan” to make the announcements on 25 January. The SOP would have required every reporter to check facts with the government with the understanding that the story cannot run until the government has replied. This is evidenced by the curious style of newspaper reports in Singapore: the government’s reply comes first before the substance of the story is reported in subsequent paragraphs. For decades, reporting any story without the government’s stand incorporated within it would constitute “unbalanced” reporting, a cardinal sin according to the high priests of Singapore. My guess is that Wanbao would probably have tried to check facts with MHA, and MHA must have stalled for time. In other words, MHA would have known for days, (weeks?) that the news was likely to break.
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I argued that at the technocratic level, the government is trying to be more effective and responsive in meeting housing, transport and similar bread-and-butter concerns. However at the paradigmatic level, they are still complacent. They still believe that the old ideology of craving foreign investment, throwing pieces of gold at top talent, keeping less-than-top talent as cheap as possible, going for broke over GDP growth, going as fast as they can on immigration, remain the best ideas there are. If there is voter resistance, it is the voter who is wrong, not the PAP, though small concessions and dollops of public relations may be used to bridge the gap.
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The third tier (which I called Group C in the earlier article) comprises the issues the party considers of existential importance. On these, they will resist as hard as they can. They are acutely aware that they risk losing power altogether if they let go of these old habits. Control of media, and the associated control of the national agenda are among them.
Jan
17
2012
“By using HDR,” he told me by email, “The Washington Post has combined different moments, and thereby created an image that does not exist. The aircraft visible in the final product was not there for all the other moments combined into the final, and that alone simply raises too many questions about the factual validity of the actual published image.”
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“We were trying to be upfront, to tell the reader we used technology to achieve this result,” du Cille said. “ ‘Composite’ is probably what confused people, because in this case, it is a composite of exposures, not of an element” of the photograph.
Irby said the Post had the right idea by disclosing the technique, but could’ve done more to explain how and why that photo was chosen. “The caption definitely does offer you new insight about the photo. However, it presents more questions than usable information.”
Du Cille said he may write something for the Post explaining how the photo was made and why it was used. But he said that the issue is transparency about techniques, not the technique itself.
“I want our photographers to be experimenting with a range of things, not just technologies,” he said. Although HDR is uncommon now, “Ten years from now, HDR may be built into cameras, and who will know it?”
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But Sean Elliot, president of the National Press Photographers Association, said, “HDR is not appropriate for documentary photojournalism.”
Friday’s front page carried a photograph marking the 30th anniversary of the crash of Air Florida’s flight 90 into the 14th Street Bridge. The photo was taken using a high dynamic range. Several readers and journalists have questioned its use. On Saturday, Poynter.org ran a story about the photo and some of the reactions to it.
I selected the photograph, taken by Bill O’Leary, because it was a visually arresting image of the bridge.
Nov
29
2011
I identified 6 separate studies showing Fox News viewers to be the most misinformed, and in a right wing direction—studies on global warming, health care, health care a second time, the Ground Zero mosque, the Iraq war, and the 2010 election.
I also asked if anyone was aware of any counterevidence, and none was forthcoming. There might very well be a survey out there showing that Fox viewers aren't the most misinformed cable news consumers on some topic (presumably it would be a topic where Democrats have some sort of ideological blind spot), but I haven’t seen it. And I have looked.
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There is also a fascinating finding that those Republicans who do watch CNN/MSNBC are more persuaded than Democratic viewers are to accept global warming. In other words, Republicans in the study seem much more easily swayed by media framing than Democrats.
Jul
24
2011
The pressure to meet a daily strike rate on scandals and denouements made his UK tabloid editors slide beyond legality into allegedly criminal practices now being more thoroughly investigated by the Met and Parliament. NoW or The Sun were not alone in this. Phone-hacking and payoffs to police are alleged to be widely practiced by all the tabloids.
All of this raises existential questions about the un-wisdom of allowing such media ownership concentration and the urgent need to: quarantine media from politicians, government and Big Business; protect citizens from intrusive paparazzi and privacy invasion; establish a press ombudsman with real statutory powers, and hold editors accountable for sins of commission and omission.
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One is reminded of the pathetic performance of BP CEO Tony Hayward at the US Senate hearings on the Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster. BP employed 90,000 staff globally. Tony Hayward denied awareness of the cost-cutting obsessions which compromised safety standards across the company. He did not know who approved such dangerous compromises and how such risky operations at sea were supervised. Perhaps he too was betrayed by the people he trusted?
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Two high profile CEOs of high profile global corporations, both clueless when internal malpractice explodes into world news? Such lame excuses are unacceptable from corporate chiefs and political leaders. They are given too much power over people, resources and policy to be allowed to slither away.
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Jun
28
2011
I’ve recently been asked to clarify something about a few of the interviews I’ve done in the past. When I’ve interviewed a writer, it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech. (I know I write much more clearly than I speak – whenever I read a transcript of what I’ve said, or it always seems less clear and more clotted. I think we’ve all had that sensation in one form or another).
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occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview.
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if somebody interviewed me and asked my views of Martin Amis, instead of quoting me as saying “Um, I think, you know, he got the figures for, uh, how many Muslims there are in Europe upside down”, they could quote instead what I’d written more cogently about him a month before, as a more accurate representation of my thoughts. I stress: I have only ever done this where the interviewee was making the same or very similar point to me in the interview that they had already made more clearly in print.
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Jun
25
2011
Despite a professed designation as “America’s Finest News Source,” The Onion has never actually won the highest honor in American journalism: the Pulitzer Prize.
The front page of The Onion’s 1,000th issue, a count as calculated by the editors.
Not that it hasn’t tried. Editors at the satirical newspaper have submitted their work for consideration by the Pulitzer Board, sometimes in categories they could conceivably qualify for, like commentary, and other times in categories that would be a stretch, like public service.
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The Onion’s ostensibly crotchety old publisher, a character by the name of T. Herman Zweibel, explains the paper’s crusade for a Pulitzer as the ultimate revenge after a long-running feud with Joseph Pulitzer.
“As any student of American journalism, history and criminology knows fully well,” Mr. Zweibel says in an article, “I have been at war with Joseph Pulitzer since the beginning of his career. At first he showed a measure of promise, and was one of the leading lights among Onion copy boys, cheerfully going about his work, always busy, never requesting fresh crusts or more sleeping hay.”
The relationship soured when Mr. Pulitzer committed the ultimate sin for a newspaperman in Mr. Zweibel’s eyes: He began asking questions. “Why are Mr. Zweibel’s editorials about the Whigs when most of them are long dead? Does manipulating the masses with appeals to their baser instinct sell a lot of papers?”
Jun
19
2011
I find that the official news agencies in or of Singapore always portray religion, particularly Christianity, in the negative especially when it concerns government-related or public matters.
Jun
5
2011
Today's New York Times has an article by Justin Gillis on global food production that strains itself to the breaking point to make a story fit a narrative. The narrative, of course, is that climate change "is helping to destabilize the food system." The problem with the article is that the data that it presents don't support this narrative.
Before proceeding, let me reiterate that human-caused climate change is a threat and one that we should be taking seriously. But taking climate change seriously does not mean shoehorning every global concern into that narrative, and especially conflating concerns about the future with what has been observed in the past. The risk of course of putting a carbon-centric spin on every issue is that other important dimensions are neglected.
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The central thesis of the NYT article is the following statement:
The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.
But this claim of slowing output is shown to be completely false by the graphic that accompanies the article, shown below. Far from slowing, farm output has increased dramatically over the past half-century (left panel) and on a per capita basis in 2009 was higher than at any point since the early 1980s (right panel).
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The article relies heavily on empty appeals to authority. For example, it makes an unsupported assertion about what "scientists believe":
Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.
Completely unmentioned are the many (most?) scientists who believe that evidence is lacking to connect recent floods and heat waves to "human-induced global warming." - 1 more annotation(s)...
May
10
2011
An Orthodox Jewish newspaper has apologised for digitally deleting an image of US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, from a photograph of Barack Obama and his staff monitoring the raid by navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden.
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Brooklyn weekly Di Tzeitung, which says it does not publish images of women, printed the doctored image last Friday. It issued a statement saying its photo editor had not read the "fine print" accompanying the White House photograph that forbade any changes. The newspaper said it has sent its "regrets and apologies" to the White House and the US department of state.
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Di Tzeitung said it has a "long standing editorial policy" of not publishing women's images. It explained that its readers "believe that women should be appreciated for who they are and what they do, not for what they look like, and the Jewish laws of modesty are an expression of respect for women, not the opposite".
May
7
2011
Further, grumblings on Facebook accounts are hardly ‘anonymous’.
Lastly, how anonymous can bloggers be, when every now and then a racist blogger gets arrested by the state? Think about it. These sorts of cases prove that the state does screen, survey and monitor the online community, and as all of us know there are many vehement anti-PAP comments and articles, much of which are outright slander and defamation.
Yet at the end of the day, it is the racist blogger, not the anti-government or anti-PAP blogger that gets arrested. The Singaporean model is a much more complex and sophisticated phenomenon than this Guardian writer gives it credit.
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Further, grumblings on Facebook accounts are hardly ‘anonymous’.
Lastly, how anonymous can bloggers be, when every now and then a racist blogger gets arrested by the state? Think about it. These sorts of cases prove that the state does screen, survey and monitor the online community, and as all of us know there are many vehement anti-PAP comments and articles, much of which are outright slander and defamation.
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Yet at the end of the day, it is the racist blogger, not the anti-government or anti-PAP blogger that gets arrested. The Singaporean model is a much more complex and sophisticated phenomenon than this Guardian writer gives it credit.
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The Western media’s view of anything east of Greece is reductive and essentializing. Indeed, you may accuse me of returning the favour by generalizing about Western media in this same way. The recent Guardian article, “Singapore elections marked by online buzz of discontent“, however I think thoroughly deserves this dubious honour.
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The first reductive move made by the writer occurs here: “Singapore is known worldwide for censorship and corporal punishment.”
This is the Western media’s favourite trope of our island-nation. A whole political context and dynamic society gets reduced to these two ‘dirty’ words, at least for a ‘Western’ world that prides itself on ‘freedom’ and believes itself to be on a moral high ground because of this veritable self-image. (One could argue that censorship in the ‘West’ exists but in a different form – there, capitalist hegemons control media companies which quite effectively draw the boundaries of public debate.)
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The writer first makes the observation that lots of people have started to speak up and speak out against the “clan” that has ruled Singapore for almost 50 years. The People’s Action Party, is for Ms Hodal, not a political party, but a “clan” – which harks back to tribal societies, to tribalism.
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Liu starts out by writing: “It's a well-trod truism of folk science that you can’t prove a negative. But can you build a popular movement — or at least a well-received dinner party — around one?”Well, it may be a truism of folk science, but it is wrong. There are plenty of situations where proving a negative is very easy. Not only both logic and mathematics abound with proof of the impossibility of X (where X can be a conjecture, theorem or whatever), but there is a number of empirical negatives that are also easily provable. For instance, if I claim that I do not have a million dollars in my bank account, it is child's play to verify my (negative) statement in a matter of minutes.
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Contra Liu, the skeptical movement isn’t built around proving negatives. It is built around the positive value of critical thinking (which you would think journalists would make their own), and the simple Humean idea that “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
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I often highlight situations where the science of disasters and climate change is misrepresented. Here is a case of the opposite situation. Today's Financial Times gets the science of disasters and climate change exactly right:
Mar
28
2011
You highlighted two main changes to your letter which you felt collectively misrepresented your meaning. We do not think we did. In fact, we edited your letter to correct factual and contextual errors of which there were more than two
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1. You stated we wrongly replaced the statistic you cited with another from Ms Rachel Chang’s article on March 8 (“School system still the ‘best way to move up’).
Your original letter
“It is indeed heartwarming to learn that 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university.”
Reasons we edited it: Factual error, sense.
There were two problems with your sentence. First, it was contradictory and didn’t make sense.Your original sentence cannot mean what it says unless you were elated over the fact that nine in 10 children from less well-off homes failed to qualify for university. So we edited it for sense, i.e., underscoring a positive feeling (heartwarming) with a positive fact; rather than the self-penned irony of a positive feeling (heartwarming) backed by a negative fact (90% failure rate to university admission by less well off children). That was why we replaced the original statistic with the only one in Ms Chang’s March 8 report that matched your elation, that is, that 50 percent of less well off children found tertiary success.
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(Visa: Firstly, I find it hard to believe that nobody in the Straits Times office understands the meaning of sarcasm. Secondly, there was NO FACTUAL ERROR. Allow me to present to you the statistics, direct from The Straits Times themselves: http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf )
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Mar
23
2011
The Straits Times. They have a wonderful habit of manipulating statistics and distorting people’s opinions.
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Letter sent by by my good friend Samuel C. Wee to ST on the 8th of March, quoting statistics from their Page One infographic: (Read this closely!)
I read with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (“School system still ‘best way to move up’”; Monday).
It is indeed heartwarming to learn that only 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university.
I firmly agree with our Education Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen, who declared that “education remains the great social leveller in Singaporean society”. His statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination.
In recent years, there has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was greatly reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s great faith in our “unique, meritocratic Singapore system”, which ensures that good, able students from the middle-and-high income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.
I would like to commend Ms Rachel Chang on her outstanding article. On behalf of the financially disadvantaged students of Singapore, I thank the fine journalists of the Straits Times for their tireless work in bringing to Singaporeans accurate and objective reporting.
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What was actually published last Friday, March 18th 2011
A reassuring experience of meritocratic system
I READ with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (‘School system still ‘best way to move up”; March 8).
It is indeed heartwarming to learn that almost 50 per cent of children from one- to three-room flats make it to university and polytechnics.
I firmly agree with Education Minister Ng Eng Hen, who said that education remains the great social leveller in Singapore society.
His statement is backed by the statistic that about 50 per cent of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic bracket score within the top two-thirds of their Primary School Leaving Examination cohort.
There has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s own experience of the ‘unique, meritocratic Singapore system’: he grew up in a three-room flat with five other siblings, and his medical studies at the National University of Singapore were heavily subsidised; later, he trained as a cancer surgeon in the United States using a government scholarship.
The system also ensures that good, able students from the middle- and high-income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.
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Mar
20
2011
Former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once said: “Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.” I was somewhat amused at just how blatantly this rule was used in two recent letters to the Straits Times Forum, to completely ignore what the questions that had actually been asked.
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