Inspector General Investigated For Muzzling Inconvenient Science 276
Layzej writes "Federal biologist Charles Monnett was placed on administrative leave July 18 pending final results of an inspector general's investigation into integrity issues. The investigation originally focused on a 2006 note published in Polar Biology based on a unique observation of four dead polar bears. The investigators acknowledged that they had no formal training in science, but later demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of science, the peer review process, and at times basic math with questions like 'seven of what number is 11 percent?' They also expressed concern over the fact that the note was reviewed by Monnett's wife prior to submitting the paper for peer review. When nothing turned up, the investigation turned towards Monnett's role in administering research contracts. But documents released by PEER, a watchdog and whistle-blower protection group, suggest even that investigation is off base. Monnett has since been reinstated, albeit in a different position. Now the IG handling of this case is itself under investigation following a PEER complaint that the IG is violating new Interior Department scientific integrity rules."
First (Score:2)
The Oil Corps (Score:5, Informative)
If you click through the links in the Summit County Voice articles that have been covering this story, you get to
"Feds may be muzzling scientist over Arctic research [summitcountyvoice.com]":
It's obvious what's going on here. The Interior Department, which under Bush/Cheney took cocaine and hookers [nytimes.com] from drilling, other oil and other energy corps who are supposed to pay (minimal) royalties to the Department, is totally corrupt. That is the agency that pretended to regulate BP and other drillers, allowing the Mocambo blowout to poison the Gulf last year (and generally, in less reported ongoing operations). Obama hasn't worked hard enough to replace the crooks running that department. But it's much harder when the Senate's Republican minority abuses the filibuster to block any useful replacement of the crooks, installed by Bush/Cheney when Republicans had the monopoly over all 3 branches. Specifically here Republican senator James Inhofe, paramount climate change denier, is wrangling the scientist witchhunt to protect the oil corps. Not to mention the lockstep loyalty Republicans practice in opposition to anything Obama does. Especially when it might interfere with oil corps' vast, subsidized profits protected from the consequences of their epic destruction.
I don't know why we even have to ask "who's responsible?" Of course it's the oil corps and their wholly owned assets in the government. The government should run real investigations, try and convict the people making and executing these plans. Then anyone asking the question will have to be an obvious employee of the oil corps, making their living by trying to make it somehow questionable who's doing this to us.
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It's obvious what's going on here. The Interior Department, which under Bush/Cheney took cocaine and hookers [nytimes.com] from drilling, other oil and other energy corps who are supposed to pay (minimal) royalties to the Department, is totally corrupt. That is the agency that pretended to regulate BP and other drillers, allowing the Mocambo blowout to poison the Gulf last year (and generally, in less reported ongoing operations).
For what it's worth, two terms that apply to this phenomenon are iron triangle [wikipedia.org] and regulatory capture [wikipedia.org].
Re:The Oil Corps (Score:4, Informative)
The Interior Department ... is totally corrupt.
It is accepted that the Minerals Management Service [wikipedia.org] was corrupt (some thin front to give Big Oil permission to do whatever they wanted). But I seriously doubt the National Park Service, the Geological Society or the Fish and Wildlife Service are "totally corrupt."
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You are correct. Thanks for the correction.
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I think of postal service employees, who I don't usually think of in cubicles. I think of the FBI, the US Geological Survey, the Coast Guard, the Navy, NASA.
Many of those might be depressed cubicle workers, but that's the case of most American workers. And they're probably more depressed now as the Republicans follow their own massive expansion of government labor [dailykos.com] under Bush/Cheney (but perfectly typical of all "Conservative" Republican presidents) with destroying jobs (and the product market demand those j
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Re:The Oil Corps (Score:4, Insightful)
So? I work in NYC, and what they said is at least as true of private corporate workers, but without any "serving their country" glory.
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Yep, the bad rap the government gets is usually pretty easy to dispel when simply comparing it to its private business counterparts. It's too easy to demonize the government and ignore the hell of the private workplace.
Re:The Oil Corps (Score:5, Insightful)
Winston Churchill [stanford.edu]: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It's likewise also the worst place to work - except for the others.
I note that while government and corporations both suck, no government but yes corporations sucks worse than no corporations but yes government. The Soviet Union sucked, but Somalia sucks worse. What's worst is when the government is just a tool of the corporations: fascism. And that really sucks. Fascist cubicles are the worst cubicles.
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The Soviet Union sucked, but Somalia sucks worse.
Depending on how you measure it, this really isn't anywhere near true. Pretty clearly, one of the most important things to consider is how likely you were/are to end up being killed for no good reason in these countries. In Somalia there are currently about 230 violent deaths per million population per annum (approx. 200 due to their ongoing civil war, and 30 from other causes). In Stalin's Soviet Union, however, the figure was (at least some years) many, many times higher than this. At the absolute wo
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The "free market" is just one institution of capitalism. That is, it would be if it actually ever existed. "Capitalism" is used to refer to all kinds of things these days, since the Cold War sanctified the term. But it simply means the economics that values capital higher than the alternatives, and distinctly devalues labor in comparison. Except when the labor is itself capital, property: slavery.
Corporatism is simply the ideology that values corporations highest, compared to the alternatives, notably human
Re:The Oil Corps (Score:5, Insightful)
And you are wrong.
The most dedicated and knowledgeable people I have ever worked with are federal employees. The primary difference is that federal employees, and many government employees, get to a point where they are happy with their job and have no desire to move up. The benefit of this is that it helps negate the peter principle, and you end up with incredibly knowledgeable and reliable people.m The down side is in the private sector their is a strong up or out attitude,. So when they see people who have had the same job for 5 years, they perceive 'lazy'.
You need to stop getting your opinions of the real world from movies and sensational headlines.
15 years ago I had the same opinion as you. The I did audit work and was surprised by, overall, how efficient he government actually is compared to the private sector; which is a mess.
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I don't have a problem with staying at the same job for years, (I've been in my own for 5 years), and I don't live in the US actually, but council jobs here in the UK don't seem very appealing. Whenever you read about government IT projects for example it sounds like they are a complete mess that rarely make it to completion. Working for the DoD could be interesting, but other than that I think I'd rather avoid government work.
Re:The Oil Corps (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Do you really think that Big Oil influencing government is a bigger threat than Big Green doing the same?
"Big Green?" Seriously?
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The concept of "big oil" comes from the fact that the oil companies spend almost $100,000,000 per year lobbying the US Congress, and about the same amount for other governments in the world in order to ensure that laws enacted are for their best interest.
"Big Green" publishes thousands of scientific papers with the same goal.
I'm not sure which is more desirable to society, do you? Which should we celebrate and which should we condemn?
If you have to choose one path, which do you pick?
Man.... so difficult.
Re:The Oil Corps (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sorry, it was actually $146 million last year.
Back in 2006, Bush passed a law giving Exxon a $6 billion annual tax credit. Exxon promptly reported a $30 billion profit.
The total lobbying bills from environmental organizations amount to barely $8 million.
PEER is not a "watchdog group" (Score:3, Insightful)
They're a lobbying group for public servants who work in environmental fields, with a very obvious stake in the outcome of this case. It'd be like the American Petroleum Institute complaining about the BP investigation.
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Summary (Score:5, Funny)
"The investigation originally focused on a 2006 note published in Polar Biology based on a unique observation of four dead polar bears. The investigators acknowledged that they had no formal training in science"
So the headline would be "Dead Polar Bears had no formal science training"
We must ensure better education for the bears so they can understand the climate changes and so adapt to the conditions.
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We need not only better educated bears, but bears trained to swim.
It appears that these polar bears could only dog-paddle. If polar bears are to survive the coming anti-ice age, we must be prepared to send Red Cross-approved instructors to graduate these bears for Swimming and CPR.
http://www.bearplanet.org/polarbear.shtml [bearplanet.org]
Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the transcript (admittedly a bit of a read), the implications are that these polar bears probably drowned attempting a long swim right when a storm came along. The scientist discusses how, during the 26 years of the surveys in the area, there has been a stark change in the characteristics of the area. The lack of ice forces the polar bears to swim further between rests and also allows the waves to get much higher during storms. That wasn't actually in the journal article he was being investigated in, but he discusses it with his interrogators near the end of the transcript where he's clearly getting some of his frustrations out about the ridiculousness of the particular situation and about the situation with his employer overall. The stuff about the high turnover rate of scientists is interesting. Apparently to even publish in the first place he has to go through what amounts to an official censorship system.
Global warming is a lie! (Score:3, Funny)
This proves it! It's all a lie. Fox news is right! ;)
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Physics is not Climatology. And Nobel Laureaute status is nice, but you'd be surprised at how many Nobel Laureates fly off into cloud-cuckoo land. (For example, Roger Penrose has caused biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to boggle, with his consciousness-by-quantum-nanotube-therefore-free-will spiel he's been pushing. He's great at astrophysics, but this stuff he's been writing lately is weird and wrong on many levels.)
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But it's apparently ok for the American Physical Society to endorse claims made by "Climatologists"? That appears to be Dr. Giaever's first complaint. His second point is that that 0.8 degrees difference in the average temperature of the average temperature of a planet over 150 years is well within "experimental error". Given the huge number of measurements and cacluations which would be needed even if the measuring devices and methods had not changed at all in that time.
And No
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Re:Global warming is a lie! (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you actually read anything about why he resigned from the APS, or are you just making assumptions?
His big point was their statement that AGW is *incontrovertible*.
He's right. That's not science.
His other opinions on the matter may or may not be valid, and are irrelevant. He's right. Deciding that one sort of conclusion is correct and may not be questioned or investigated is decidedly unscientific. Is the speed of light constant at all places and times? Hey, let's do some math, let's devise some experiments! Awesome! SCIENCE! Are humans causing global warming? YES AND SHUT YOUR MOUTH, ACCEPT THAT IT IS TRUE!
Huh? The fuck?
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Are humans causing global warming? YES AND SHUT YOUR MOUTH, ACCEPT THAT IT IS TRUE!
I'm pretty sure when Gore said that, he didn't use the "F" word.
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Until scientific evidence come forth , it is incontrovertible. There is no scientific evidence, or known method for the rise in global temperature. UNtil tat chanes it is incontrovertible.
Just like I would say that gravity acts equally on all objects in incontrovertible.
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No. Just, no, Mr. AC. Nothing is so certain that it cannot bear further scrutiny. If AGW is true, if it is a fact, further investigation -- even if the initial premise is that AGW is not happening -- will eventually come to the conclusion that AGW is true and happening.
The only bad science is the science that is held above questioning. That's called faith.
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Aside from the bit about the grant money, a lot of them would agree. The standard model works mathematically, but it has too many arbitrary constants to satisfy a theoretician's aesthetic sense.
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Ah, the Nobel Fallacy.(Argument from authority)
If someone is an expert in X, it doesn't mean they're opinion is worth shit in Y.
I can list many Nobel Laureate who went outside there expertise and did stupid shit. In fact, many of them have cause harm.
This guy is an expert in electron tunneling and superconductors... in 1973.
Any opinion outside the field is just the, an opinion
He only attacks the idea of global warming with incorrect facts, and ad hom attacks.
All tat said, why would you take on non-
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Wow, a nobel laureate stepping outside their field of expertise and being an idiot. That has never happened!
Oh wait, from Pauling going from a chemistry nobel prize to advocating megadoses of Vitamin C to cure everything. To Mechnikov winning the nobel for medicine and then going cuckoo for probiotics. To Montagnier winning the nobel in medicine and then jumping into the complete quakery of homeopathy. That seems to be a common ailment - win a nobel and then parade your idiocy in other areas.
Which says not
Context is nice (Score:4, Informative)
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah. Well, thats a nothing. Um,
23 yeah, 10.8. And then we said, um, four dead – four swimming
24 polar bears were encountered on these transects, in addition
25 to three.
26 ERIC MAY: Three dead polar bears?
1 CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, three dead.
2 ERIC MAY: Right.
3 CHARLES MONNETT: But the four swimming were a week earlier.
4 ERIC MAY: Okay.
5 CHARLES MONNETT: And, um, then we said if they accurately
6 reflect 11 percent of the bears present so, in other words,
7 theyre just distributed randomly, so we looked at 11 percent
8 of the area.
9 ERIC MAY: In that transect?
10 CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
11 ERIC MAY: Right.
12 CHARLES MONNETT: In, in our, in our area there, um –
13 ERIC MAY: Right.
14 CHARLES MONNETT: – and, therefore, we should have seen
15 11 percent of the bears. Then you just invert that, and you
16 come up with, um, nine times as many. So thats where you get
17 the 27, nine times three.
18 ERIC MAY: Where does the nine come from?
19 CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, well 11 percent is one-ninth of
20 100 percent. Nine times 11 is 99 percent. Is that, is that
21 clear?
22 ERIC MAY: Well, now, seven of 11 – seven of what number is
23 11 percent? Shouldnt that be – thats 63, correct?
24 CHARLES MONNETT: What?
25 ERIC MAY: So you said this is –
26 CHARLES MONNETT: Seven/11ths this is –
1 ERIC MAY: No, no, no, no, no. This, this is, this is 11 –
2 seven is what number of 11 percent?
3 CHARLES MONNETT: Seven?
4 ERIC MAY: Yeah.
5 CHARLES MONNETT: Is what number of 11 percent?
6 ERIC MAY: Eleven percent, right.
7 CHARLES MONNETT: Well, I dont know. I dont even know
8 what youre talking about. It makes no sense.
9 LYNN GIBSON: I think what hes saying is since theres four
10 swimming and three dead, that makes –
11 ERIC MAY: And three dead.
12 CHARLES MONNETT: Well, you dont count them all together.
13 That doesnt have anything to do. You cant – that doesnt
14 even –
15 LYNN GIBSON: So youre not saying that the seven represent
16 11 percent of the population.
17 CHARLES MONNETT: Theyre different events.
The confusion here seems to be about what metrics are being used. It looks like the IG people didn't look at things in much detail before the interview which is clearly bad. But if I'm reading this correctly the actual context of the 11 percent line seems to be a unit confusion of an easy form to occur if one isn't that used to handling percentages and isn't actually writing things down. The section does make the IG look pretty bad and like they haven't done their research. But it doesn't look as incredibly bad as the summary suggests.
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So, Who's on first?
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It's obvious that parent's AC author has never made it that far with a girl.
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Actually, it's worse than the summary. I could take the summary to mean that someone had to take a second to get their bearings straight about figuring how many polar bears there are when 7 bears is 11% of the total.
The real problem is that the interviewer thought that if you surveyed 11% of the area one day and saw 4 swimming bears, and surveyed another 11% of the area a week later and saw 3 drowned bears, that you should add the two number
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> The real problem is that the interviewer thought that if you surveyed 11% of the area one day and saw 4 swimming bears, and surveyed another 11% of the area a week later and saw 3 drowned bears, that you should add the two numbers together to get 11% of the total population of bears.
Technically it does not matter, because whether you add those or not, it brings the number of defective bears above 3.4 per million, meaning that by using Six Sigma highly scientific calculations there is a global warming p
Wrong People for the Job (Score:2)
if one isn't that used to handling percentages
Sorry but percentages are primary school maths. We are exposed to them frequently in the news, with interest rates etc. I'm sure the investigators in this case are well equipped to handle the average idiot criminal but if you are going to investigate a science-based case you should send someone with at least a basic grasp maths and some clue as to how science works if for no other reason that you have no context in which to evaluate the statements made by the person being investigated. It is not a proper i
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It's not about percentage, it was about the percentage of what. THAT was the confusion not percentage calculations.
Re:Context is nice (Score:5, Insightful)
But it doesn't look as incredibly bad as the summary suggests.
Did you stop reading the transcript at some point ?
The investigators were using the Richelieu technique, just trying to get Monnett to say enough so they could find something with which to hang him. I'd really like to know why Monnett didn't tell them to fuck off.
The investagiators clearly had no fucking idea what they were talking about. They spend pages asking him how he knew the polar bears were dead. they spent pages asking him more questions about the dead polar bears. Monnett responded in detail, and in exactly the fashion I would expect an experienced researcher to answer in. Details about how they gather the data, details as to how he came to the conclusions that he did. Deails, not generalizations. All they did was badger and needle him - it's like a 5 year old asking "why ?" all the time.
There's nothing here to suggest any wrong doing on Monnett's part.
So instead of the FBI going after the fucking banksters they're spending time and money going after a guy who made a valid and reasonable claim about the significance of dead polar bears in the artic.
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" They spend pages"
pages is an irrelevant metric, especially when its a large font triples spaced document.
There questuions was perfectly normal.
This is blown way out of proportion. His polar bear paper has no bearing on global climate. Global warming is a tool PEER os using to distract from the actually methodology of the report... and they are right to do so because the paper wasn't very good, and there methodology was sloppy.
And no, I ma not a denier, I have read a lot of studies and papers on this, and
Re:Context is nice (Score:4, Insightful)
It's very clear from the interview though, that the paper wasn't meant to be some big significant thing. It was meant to be a report to a nature journal that they saw more polar bears swimming than typical, then, shortly after, they saw more dead, apparently drowned, polar bears than they'd ever seen. That's the sort of thing you write small papers about to journals. He mentions a paper a colleague wrote about seeing mallards eating salmon. This is just reporting on observations they've made tangential to their actual mission, which is observing whale populations (and as he points out during the interview, concluding that they're doing just fine and that human development isn't affecting them is pretty much part of the job even when it isn't really true).
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Does not compute (Score:3)
'seven of what number is 11 percent?'
Is that way of asking the question confusing to anyone else? Guaranteed if someone asked me that out loud I would wallow in confusion. It's taken me several times reading it to figure it out even here, I believe they are asking .11 * x = 7, which I would have phrased in words as '7 is 11% of what number?' Maybe in other parts of the country people talk like that, but it sounds very awkward to me.
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No, they were asking "7 / x = 11%" which yes, is mathematically identical to your phrasing, but when one literally translates the divide and equal sign to English one gets "seven of what number is 11%"
The problem isn't you, and it isn't them; English just sucks in general for expressing mathematics.
why is science so mistrusted? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's odd in this case is there there's so little respect for science and the scientists that do it. and the idea that the government should hire its own scientists is just absurd - scientists need to report to an academic institution. the interview demonstrates that the agency involved (and this Eric May character) has a giant axe to grind - a political agenda.
agenda is corrosive to science.
but why do so many people feel that they're being misled by scientists? is it just that they don't want to believe what science says?
it's also kind of appalling that they still do these transects with some guys in a bush plane: no continual video record, no constant gps track, etc.
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>but why do so many people feel that they're being misled by scientists? is it just that they don't want to believe what science says?
The people who make their living or get their authority from telling other people what to think are directly threatened by science, so they tell the people under their control not to trust science and scientists.
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What's odd in this case is there there's so little respect for science and the scientists that do it.
The first clue would be that less than 40% of Americans believe in 'the natural selection of the species' (a.k.a. evolution) [gallup.com]. If people reject something that is so widely accepted in the scientific community, it isn't surprising that they will willingly choose to ignore scientists in other areas when it suites them. Especially if the people they elect (e.g. George W. Bush) are proud of the fact that they are uninformed or selective in what they want to hear. [slate.com]
Re:why is science so mistrusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sometimes the truth is just so inconvenient, people choose subconsciously to reject it. Climate change is a very good example of this. If the claims of scientists are true, then something has to be done - and whatever the something is will be horribly expensive, economically disadvantagious, personally inconvenient for millions of people and politically difficult in a time when any form of regulation meets with popular resistance. Far easier simply to deny anything is wrong, and thus remove the need to do anything. It isn't even something people realise they are doing.
There are several reasons that people are skeptical of global warming:
1. The current global warming evangelists are the equivalent of a Christian televangelist who gets caught with hookers and blow. If you believe that carbon is killing the planet, then don't buy giant mansions and yachts and have Global Warming conferences in Cancun. Live in modest houses and teleconference.
2. Environmentalists should go out of their way in supporting every alternate energy source, including nuclear. However, instead of
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Climate science seems like a bit circular---All scientists believe in AGW, but to be accepted as a scientist you need to believe in AGW.
Sure, except that the latter isn't true at all.
And it isn't a "hard" science in that you can experiment and see the results because, well, if AGW is occurring you can't wait till everyone is dead.
Science is all about developing models in order to make useful predictions. You don't need to do full-scale experiments of exactly what you're looking for in order for it to be "science". That's just called "observation" at that point.
On the other hand, we are aware of significant climate change in relatively recent human history (Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, etc) that are not related to humans.
Not surprisingly, climateologists know about these too. It's a logical fallacy, by the way, to suggest that because A causes C, it cannot be the case that B causes C.
And AGW isn't a new idea--Edward Gibbon blamed deforestation for Germany's warming in HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
Not only is that a different effect, it's also not global.
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"The people want their cars. Cars are more than a means of transport - they are a symbol of freedom."
Indeed. I was on a mailing list back in the 90s that had a member who would go wonderfully and entertainingly ballistic when someone would mention the benefits and convenience of public transit, particularly in cities.
This person was, of course, your bog standard libertarian schmuckwad. Rather a racist, too, as his comments about buses and subways being "dirty and smelly, due to the dirty and smelly people t
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As to your point 3. theshowmecanuck is probably right. The US is them main source of climate change denial, simply because it is well trained in scientific denial. The country is set up to make people think how you want them to think. It seems that climate change denial is even bigger in the US than evolution denial. It's funny, how the country that's doing most of the fundamental research is so willfully ignorant. The American paradox.
The paradox is I think caused because at this day and age, there are
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horribly expensive - as compared to doing nothing? I think not.
You are correct, but people don't look long term. So they are spending less money, RIGHT NOW. If people, as a whole, where good long term thinker, everybody would have a retirement account when they are 18.
personally inconvenient for millions - ah there it is. You didn't add "of North Americans and Australians", though
first off, I would change millions to billions. If you think this is only inconvient for north americans and austrailians, you ar
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Re:why is science so mistrusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Chances are pretty good that the GP is one of those people who thinks that s/he is more intelligent than most. Most likely that's because s/he really is more intelligent than most. It doesn't take much to be above average intelligence.
Re:why is science so mistrusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonesense on every count. Scientists have largely supported trusting institutions that support science, and institutions that make conclusions that are based on scientific skepticism.
Nobody IS saying that "replace coal now or millions will die" is a scientific conclusion. It is a policy conclusion based on a scientific conclusion. What they do say is that carbon increases heat absorption, we're increasing carbon output, and the temperature and weather is measurably changing. But policy is never a conclusion of the scientific method. Policy is the logical conclusion that rational people make in the face of scientific evidence and in light of facts revealed by the scientific method. The very idea that there should be evidence to support a policy conclusion, as opposed to the fact conclusions upon which the policy conclusion is based, indicates that you basically have no understanding of either science or policy.
I don't know, likewise, any scientist who has ever used any evidence derived from the scientific method to conclude that in a scientific sense that "god doesn't exist." What scientists typically and rightly say is that we don't need god to explain the evidence, that god is not a testable hypothesis, and that god is basically irrelevant to our theories and ideas. Only in the fevered imaginings of fundamentalists are scientists drawing the conclusion from scientific evidence and methods that god doesn't exist. They just don't do that, because by and large they know that this would be absurd.
Follow the money? (Score:2)
The Auditor General of Victoria Australia just released a paper showing that the local traffic cameras are working as desired and there is absolutely no question of their accuracy at all. I found 17 technical errors on 7 pages that I can cite counter evidence from their own sources and I expect there are hundreds of errors in the document. They are supposed to be auditors yet their statement about the money seems to indicate they forgot who gets lots of the cash.
Which IG is under investigation by whom? (Score:3)
This is a terrible submission. There is a link to a 96 page transcript. I'm guessing it's a deposition, as there is allusion to consequential perjury charges if the interviewees are found to be lying. No summary of the bulk of its contents is given. It is being used as material evidence for some lame jokes at the expense of the Interior Department.
It's a classic fishing expedition. But it clearly demonstrates that Monnett's counsel willingly let them go on that fishing expedition, and I'm left wondering why. One of the lawyers present on this transcript says this on p. 83:
We've been at this for an 1 hour and 45 minutes, and I'm curious, are we going to get to the allegations of scientific misconduct or, uh, have – is that what we've been doing?
He's on Monnett's side, supposedly. The Agents clearly identified themselves as criminal investigators. That strikes me as a good deal worse than asking (rephrased) "11% of what number is 7" without a calculator on hand. 63.63 repeating doesn't exactly leap to the brain. It's like he wanted this to be a fiasco, and he let it happen.
And then guess who the source is that claims that "the IG is being investigated?" Same guy that complained at 1:45. Jeff Ruch, the Executive Director of PEER. The only source claiming an "investigation" is PEER. For all we know, the investigation ended 15 minutes after PEER made a complaint to the proper office. There is no mention if this is an ongoing investigation.
Point of fact: All that is present in TFA is an unconfirmed allegation of an investigation. The only person claiming any "muzzling" is PEER, who represents the person being "muzzled." Any journalist worth a damn would investigate that allegation further before proudly proclaiming "Inspector General Investigated For Muzzling Inconvenient Science."
Sure. By whom? Which Inspector General, the current (acting) one, Mary L. Kendall [doioig.gov]? Is the investigation current? Is it backed by any sort of suit, law, evidence, or legal authority? Near as this summary and the links show, none of those facts are present. Fox News does better hit jobs.
And to be completely fair to the IG, Monnett did actually lose his position over this. That's what "BOEM immediately issued a stop-work order for the study and put Dr. Monnett on administrative leave" means. He was reinstated, but not in his original position. So he lost his job. It's not just IG monkey business, if there is any at all, it's Monnett's own administration at BOEM "muzzling" him, and his own attorneys who let "criminal investigators" go on a fishing expedition for nearly 2 hours before demanding the charges. Effectively providing fodder for years of investigation of, and vulnerability to, perjury charges.
None of this is the IG's problem. An investigation, especially one as unfocused as the transcript implies, doesn't have to mean forcibly interrupting the study and switching the good doctor to a new position after a period mandatory leave. It just does at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The combination of sheepish counsel and cowardly administration is what brought this man down.
Point of fact 2: The links aren't as advertised. The first purports to be "documents released by PEER" but instead links to a PEER press release, a press release is not documentation of this purported investigation. The second purports to show that "the IG handling of this case is itself under investigation " but that's only a claim by Jeff Ruch, in paraphrase, in the summation paragraph of an article about the investigation of Monnett. It does not link to an article that has any facts to support the link text.
Yikes. If you take up the methods of your enemy, you become the enemy, guys. This is a sleazy, bad submission.
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you have obviously never worked in the military or government. Here are some ideas you might be unfamiliar with...
1) It is standard procedure to remove someone under investgaiton from their post. Pretty much ANY investigation, criminal, civil, related to their job or not.
2) Is it very posssible the reason why he did not get his old job back was because it was filled during his leave. If a position is considered critical it would be filled ASAP. (It is also possible there are other reasons, but to assume he
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Seven of ~1.571428... percent is 11 percent. What shittily-worded question.
Your text doesn't make sense.
7 of 63.6... is 11 percent. If it shall be an integer, 7 of 64 is the best approximation.
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Seven = 7, of = times, what number = x, is 11% is =11%, therefore 7 X x = 11%; 7 X x = 11/100; 700 X x = 11; x = 11/700; x = 0.0157
You're right, the question is worded in a very vague manner (intentional, no doubt).,
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A verbose person would say "If 2 out of 5 people are ill"
FTFY
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Linguistically I think it chunks like this: (Seven) (of what number) (is) (11%). The prepositional phrase "of what number" can be moved after the "11%" without changing the meaning.
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Seven of ~1.571428... percent is 11 percent. What shittily-worded question.
I can see a great career for you as a government investigator
oddly-worded indeed (Score:2)
I estimated 63 (7 multiplied by 9) because 11 percent is about one ninth
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A fine estimate, though solving the actual problem is just as easy.
For half of the participants of this thread: Just divide 7 by 11, and multiply the result by 100.
Didn't everyone learn this in elementary school? Why is this even being discussed?
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7 of 9 is 100%.
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7 of 9 is 100%.
No, 7 of 9 is a 10 - that makes her 1000%.
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I believe they are asking for X in the equation: 0.11 * X = 7
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I think the question was meant to be 7/11 = X%, but it was worded extremely poorly and confusingly. So, yeah, none of us here would have been able to answer that question without clarification. And you'll note that the person being questioned is thoroughly confused by it, and tries to express that the question makes no sense, but the questioner doesn't seem willing to clarify...
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Read it again. The part that makes no sense is the interviewer adding 4 swimming bears from one survey and 3 dead bears from another survey a week later to get 7 bears and trying to extrapolate the total population of bears from that sum. Tha
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What does that mean? (Not a native speaker, I honestly don't know. Maybe it's asking for the solution to 7x = 0.11? I read the transcript excerpt, but it's not clear there either.)
You got it correct. They encountered 7 polar bears. They assumed they have seen 11% of all bears. The question was the total number of bears under this assumption. Eric May correctly got 63 by approximating 0.11 by 1/9 -- 64 would be a better estimate, but since it's an estimate, one bear more or less doesn't make a big difference anyway -- after Charles Monnett, also correctly, estimated the number of dead bears to 27 (3*9).
Nope, you got it wrong in exactly the same way May did - they counted 3 (dead) bears on their transect. A week before (before a storm) they counted 4 swimming bears - these may or may not have been the same bears - on a different transect in the same area. May and you now simply add up these two numbers and want to put them on the same transect to get a total. That's just plain wrong.
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Is it just my contrariness, or does "Inspector General" sound remarkably similar to "Holy Inquisition"?
No, it doesn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_General#United_States [wikipedia.org]
In the United States, an Inspector General (IG) leads an organization charged with examining the actions of a government agency, military organization, or military contractor as a general auditor of their operations to ensure they are operating in compliance with generally established policies of the government, to audit the effectiveness of security procedures, or to discover the possibility of misconduct, waste, fraud, theft, or
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Except that Congress has exempted itself from IG oversight.
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I've worked with the IG, and in every case they have been very professional and truely balanced.
While that is obviously anecdotal, it does jive with there history.
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Might you have one of those wonderful machines for measuring the engrams that are plaguing me?
Perhaps a helpful audit of my personality and a large cash donation from me would help.
Help me to "see clearly"
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I haven't hears LART used in years. Everyone seems to say cluestick these days.
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And that's where the problem lies. if you read the transcript [carbonbrief.org], Monnett worked for the Minerals Management Service (MMS). Yes, that [wsj.com] MMS.
So, when a government agency is working in the interests of the citizens of the United States, then yes, the inspector general preforms a valuable function. When the agency is in bed with the industry
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OK, but not gay (Score:2)
However, the person you are thinking of is the "modern Major-General". Interestingly, Gilbert got it utterly wrong. It was a satire on the ridiculous (to Gilbert) idea that trainee Army officers needed an education. Yet he mentions mathematics as one of the (to him) useless things now to be learnt, and doesn't realise that gunnery depends heavily on mathematics - which brings me back to Galileo, who of cou
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Polar bears can, as a general rule, swim for 80 Km in frigid water. After which, they remain active and vigorous.
If they are drowning, it is because of Arctic tsunami!
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The polar bear note wasn't the research. It was a report of an observation made while doing other reasearch, and it was a valid observation and note. The research was on whales, and the report on it (at least one of the reports on migration) was shit, which is why Dr Monnett refused to sign it. Read the transcript.