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Mr Brown asked:
"Is the Sun Xu lynch mob going to go after Lai Shimun too?"
I observed that they aready had, and also that nationalism is not a sacred cow here like race and religion are.
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"All things being equal, it's your diet that effects your body's smell most, both positively and negatively. A fishy smell, for instance, may be caused by too much of the B vitamin choline in your diet. Curry, cumin, fish, garlic and onion in the diet are notorious for giving people who eat a lot of these foods and spices a particular smell as they stay in your body's secretions for hours after eating them. Butyric acid in butter and other dairy foods makes Westerners stink to Asians who eat no milk products."
"Eating foods like cumin, curry, garlic, fish, onion and dairy could also cause body secretions to smell" --- Better Nutrition Magazine, July 2000 -
Studies have shown that different races have different characteristic smells. Some of these differences are due to variations in diet: People in India, for example, eat a lot of curry and spices, a diet that is reflected in their body odor. Racial differences also depend on hereditary traits. Asians tend to have very little body hair and few sweat glands to produce odor chemicals. Koreans, for instance, have litle body odor even if they do not wash regularly; underarm odor is so rare among Japanese that they consider it an illness. Caucasians, on the other hand, have more body hair and plenty of sweat glands. Africans have even more sweat glands. People's unconscious reactions to others who 'smell different' can contribute to distrust and intolerance.
Understanding what causes these emtoional reactions can help us to behave more reasonably."
--- Senses and sensors: Smelling and Tasting / Authors Alvin Silverstein, Virginia B. Silverstein, Laura Silverstein Nunn
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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Supposedly students in Singapore are assessed with national tests every two years. Concurrently a teacher is assigned a class every two years. While some students will always come and go there will be a cohort of students who do not change over the two years. The normed average grades of those two years can then be measured and the percentage improvement (or decline) noted. Working on the famous Greek principle that victory has many generals but defeat is an orphan, the relative movement in the class average is deemed to be reflective of the quality of teaching the students have received. Not only that but the relative improvement can then be assessed against similar results for all the peers of the teacher for that year. Supposedly the top ten per cent of the Singaporean teachers are given substantial performance bonuses and earmarked for future promotion while the bottom ten percent are counselled and effectively told that if similar results occur again that they should look to another career besides teaching.
The silence of the Australians was by now deafening.
The Singaporeans then went on to point that before this system was introduced the best teachers would always try and get the best students because they could then brag about how many students they had in top 1000 performers etc. Now the best teachers would try and get the worst performing classes so they could get the greatest improvement. Thus the worst classes would get the best teachers and in that way the whole country's education system was lifted.
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a major key to his success was to ensure that everyone in his organisation was measured on some objective performance indicator and each year replace the bottom ten per cent.
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.
Previous attempts at drafting guidelines for science reporting failed because they came from the scientific community, looking like tablets of stone handed down from a priesthood of scientists. But these days many science reporters agree that basic guidelines would protect them from the vagaries of their news editors' preferences. The Science Media Centre also suggests making sure that newspapers include science in the training package for all reporters, editors, and copy editors.
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The media were not solely responsible for the MMR scare, but some of the news values that caused the problem are alive and well: the appetite for a great scare story; the desire to overstate a claim made by one expert in a single small study; the reluctance to put one alarming piece of research into its wider, more revealing context; journalistic "balance"—which creates the impression of a significant divide in scientific opinion where there is none; the love of the maverick; and so on.
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Every story on new research should include the sample size and highlight where it may be too small to draw general conclusions.
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On Wednesday the BBC Trust released their report “Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science”. The report has resulted in the BBC deciding to reflect scientific consensus about climate change in their coverage of the issue.
As a science communicator I applaud this decision. I understand and support the necessity to provide equal voice to political parties during an election campaign (indeed, I have done this, as an election occurred during my two years writing science for the ABC).
But science is not politics. And scientists are not politicians.
Much of the confusion about the climate change debate stems from a deep ignorance among the general population about how science works. And believe me this really is something “science” as an entity needs to address.
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It is far from accurate to refer to “science” as a single entity (as I just have). Many arguments that dispute the consensus about climate change being the result of man made activity talk about “scientists” as though they are “all in it together” and “supporting each other”.
This implies some grand conspiracy. But science is a competition, not a collusion. If anything they are all against each other.
No given person or research team has the whole picture of climate science. The range of scientific disciplines that work in this area is vast. Indeed there are few areas of science which do not potentially have something to contribute to the area.
But put a geologist and a geneticist in a room together and they can barely speak the same language. Far from some great conspiracy, the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come to a consensus about climate change is truly extraordinary.
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So the report is recommending that journalists do what they should always have done – investigate and verify.
By all means ask another expert’s point of view, determine whether the latest finding is in fact good science or what its implications are.
But we need to move away from the idea of “balance” between those who believe it is all a big conspiracy and those who have done some work and looked at the actual evidence.
The report concludes that in particular the BBC must take special care to continue efforts to ensure viewers are able to distinguish well-established fact from opinion on scientific issues, and to communicate this distinction clearly to the audience. In other words, to remember that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Before commenting on the BBC Trust’s report into the BBC’s science coverage, I thought I’d take the trouble of reading the actual document rather than the press previews. I’m very glad I waited because the finished product is an absolute corker. Let me take you through some of my favourite moments.
The report, as you may be aware, was written by my fellow Telegraph columnist Steve Jones. Besides being a fine and engaging writer, Dr Jones is a geneticist of distinction and I would certainly never dream of questioning his judgement in his fields of expertise (notably Drosophila and snails). Fortunately, as becomes quite clear reading the report, climate science isn’t one of them.
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What many of these sceptics – or deniers, if you must – do question is
a) whether – and if so by how much – this warming is anthropogenic (ie human-caused)
b) whether the warming constitutes a threat – or whether its benefits might in fact far outweigh its drawbacks
c) whether this warming likely to continue or whether – as happened without human influence at the end of the Roman warm period and the Medieval warm period – it will be followed by a period of natural cooling
d) whether the drastic policy measures (tax, regulation, “decarbonisation”, the drive for renewables) being enacted to ‘combat climate change’ will not end up doing far more harm than good.
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Though Dr Jones’s report argues that the BBC should from henceforward give less space to sceptics, it’s difficult to imagine quite how it could possibly do so. About the only occasion on which they have been given any air space has been on hatchet-jobs like the BBC’s feature-length assault on Lord Monckton, “Meet The Climate Sceptics”.
THE battle about climate science is, at its heart, a battle about science itself. Climate science represents the material world in abstract form. It turns the everyday experience of weather and other phenomena into a language that speaks beyond a particular place or thing. Think of global average temperature - built of myriad data readings drawn from direct and indirect sources going back centuries - or of sea level rise. They are abstract constructions that contribute to another, larger picture of reality.
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Sheila Jasanoff, historian of science and technology, has observed that science represents rather than mirrors reality. The work of science ''tends to erase specificity and remove traces of the human mind and hand: all the moorings that tie scientific claims to local, subjective and contingent circumstances are cut loose so that claims may float freely and persuade people as objective facts … scientific facts arise out of detached observation whereas meaning emerges from embedded experience''.
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climate science is uncertain: it is out of the clouds of data and the millions of hours of observations that we begin to see, imperfectly, the shape of things around us.
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Ask a scientist who is not a physicist and you might hear that we physicists are an arrogant bunch. And to a layperson, scientists in general often seem arrogant. No, we shrug, we're not really arrogant, we are just very objective and thus usually right!
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"It's clearly not plagiarism or churnalism – but was it an error in another way? Yes. I now see it was wrong, and I wouldn't do it again. I'm grateful to the people who pointed out this error of judgment."
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Hari's interview read: "With a shake of the head, he says: 'We had now two wars, the flotilla – it doesn't seem that Israel has learned any lesson, and it doesn't seem that Israel is paying any price. The Israelis don't pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative.'"
In July 2007, Levy wrote something very similar in a column for Haaretz: "The Israelis don't pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before the Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative, and why should they?"
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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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In the last few days, a couple of blogs have been scrutinising the work of Johann Hari, the multiple award-winning Independent columnist and interviewer.
A week ago on Friday the political DSG blog pointed out an eerie series of similarities between the quotes in Hari's interview with Toni Negri in 2004, and quotes in the book Negri on Negri, published in 2003.
Brian Whelan, an editor with Yahoo! Ireland and a regular FleetStreetBlues contributor, spotted this and got in touch to suggest perhaps this wasn't the only time quotes in Hari's interviews had appeared elsewhere before. We ummed and ahhed slightly about running the piece based on one analysis from a self-proclaimed leftist blog - so Brian went away and did some analysis of his own. And found that a number of quotes in Hari's interview with Gideon Levy in the Independent last year had also been copied from elsewhere.
So far, so scurrilous. But what's really astonishing is that Johann Hari has now responded to the blog accusations. And cheerfully admitted that he regularly includes in interviews quotes which the interviewee never actually said to him.
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this isn't just a case of referencing something the interviewee has written previously - 'As XXX has written before...', or such like. No, Hari adds dramatic context to quotes which were never said - the following paragraph, for instance, is one of the quotes from the Levy interview which seems to have appeared elsewhere before.
After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”
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So how does Hari justify it? Well, his post on 'Interview etiquette', as he calls it, is so stunningly brazen about playing fast-and-loose with quotes
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OBJECTIVITY:The judge said the blogger should not have criticized the restaurant’s food as ‘too salty’ in general, because she had eaten dried noodles and two side dishes
The Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday sentenced a blogger who wrote that a restaurant’s beef noodles were too salty to 30 days in detention and two years of probation and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to the restaurant.
Professional journalism is supposed to be “factual,” “accurate,” or just plain true. Is it? Has news accuracy been getting better or worse in the last decade? How does it vary between news organizations, and how do other information sources rate? Is professional journalism more or less accurate than everything else on the internet? These all seem like important questions, so I’ve been poking around, trying to figure out what we know and don’t know about the accuracy of our news sources. Meanwhile, the online news corrections process continues to evolve, which gives us hope that the news will become more accurate in the future.
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Accuracy is a hard thing to measure because it’s a hard thing to define. There are subjective and objective errors, and no standard way of determining whether a reported fact is true or false
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The last big study of mainstream reporting accuracy found errors (defined below) in 59% of 4,800 stories across 14 metro newspapers. This level of inaccuracy — where about one in every two articles contains an error — has persisted for as long as news accuracy has been studied, over seven decades now.
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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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The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a "churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.
The Guardian was given exclusive access to churnalism.com prior to launch. It revealed how all media organisations are at times simply republishing, verbatim, material sent to them by marketing companies and campaign groups.
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This Sunday before game-time you might want to set your Tivos to record Dateline. This week, supposedly, Matt Lauer interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield and several other affiliates of the Thoughtful House Center for Children, along with Dr. Paul Offit and journalist Brian Deer.
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Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.
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Atlanta Progressive News fires reporter for trying to be objective
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In an e-mail statement, editor Matthew Cardinale says Springston was asked to leave APN last week “because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”
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APN RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS FROM CREATIVE LOAFING ATLANTA REGARDING JONATHAN SPRINGSTON
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Chicago Economists on the Crisis
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Earlier this week, Dubner linked to a terrific New Yorker piece by John Cassidy, which explores the state of the “Chicago School.” Following up, Cassidy has posted some very revealing interview transcripts.
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All the interviews are with truly great economists. The very best come across as trying to build insight that is both rigorous and empirically relevant. But some come across as obtuse; others as arrogant; and some oblivious, or uninterested in evidence. Time and again I was surprised at how readily the interviews slipped from careful insight into personal ideology and dogmas.
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