A tangled web

A very interesting article for those of a global warming sceptic bent and for BBC watchers, over at The Register.

Lord Lightbulb - guilty as charged

The Times reports that Lord Barnett, a former Labour minister, is set to make a mint from an investment in a company that recycles the toxic lightbulbs we are soon to be forced to use.

A FORMER Labour cabinet minister is set make a fortune when the country switches to using low-energy light bulbs.

Lord Barnett, who was Treasury chief secretary two prime ministers during the 1970s, is a shareholder in Mercury Recycling Group, which is expected to see its value soar during the switch over from conventional lighting.

The Times seems to have asked the Ignoble Lord if he had used insider knowledge of the government's intentions to guide his investment decisions. "No" retorts his Lordliness, "I have never spoken in the House of Lords on an issue in which I have got an interest."

A case of denying something with which you were not charged, if ever I heard it.

More on data sharing

The Council of Science Editors is not a body I've come across before, but I chanced upon their website while looking for something else, and given this site's recent interest in the subject, I wondered what their position is on data sharing. It's here:

Thorough peer review may require access to data and analyses that are not provided in a submitted manuscript, and sometimes such access is needed after publication as well. Editors should establish policies on access that address the following issues.

Organizations that sponsor research should encourage the publication of the results and should provide access to data if requested by journals for the purpose of peer review. Sponsoring organizations may limit access to data by others both during the research and after it is concluded, but should have no right to control the dissemination or interpretation of the results of the research and should provide access to any data needed for peer review.

Submission of an original article to a journal should carry with it the implied consent to provide access to data if needed for editorial evaluation and peer review. Journals should also have the right to review data on which manuscripts are based after publication, should questions arise regarding the validity of the work or of errors in it. This right of journals of access to data should be expressly stated by editors as part of their published editorial policies and in their guidelines for authors.

Editors should request access to data for the sole purpose of evaluating a manuscript for publication or in the case of a challenge to the validity of a work after publication. Editors, reviewers, and journal staff have a responsibility to keep the data confidential and not to use it for their own purposes in any way, or otherwise directly benefit from their access to the data that results from their role in the peer review process.

This is a bit of a disappointment as it seems to adopt the "weak" approach to data, assuming that authors will comply with requests for access after publication. Given that we know this doesn't happen in practice, it looks to me as if the society needs to revisit its policy and adopt the strong approach of the econometrics journals.

What was also interesting was that they seem to have examined the issue in more detail at their 2008 Annual Meeting. The schedule for the session reads as follows:

Most journals require that their authors share the data to support the conclusions presented in published papers. However, the devil is in the details when it comes to enforcing this requirement. Journal editors are being asked to arbitrate disagreements between authors and researchers with regard to just how much data must be shared. And the problem becomes even more complicated when a political agenda is behind the request for data. Come to this session to learn more about the issues surrounding data sharing.

Political agenda? Whoever could they mean? Surely they are not suggesting that someone's motives are relevant to whether they get the data or not? This aside, the statement here gets to the nub of the problem. If you are relying on authors complying with requests after the event, you have an enforcement issue. You just have to hope that your author is going to toe the line, and if they don't then you have a problem. Why do the journals do this to themselves? If they demand the data up front, the whole issue goes away. It's not rocket science.

Quote of the day

Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook."

PJ O'Rourke in the Weekly Standard

US to defend constitution from Brits

The problem of libel tourism, has been in the news again. This is the mad state of affairs where people from other parts of the world come to London to sue for libel damages because of the absurd reversal of the burden of proof here, the excessive damages frequently handed out, and the weak protections for free speech we "enjoy" in the UK.

In the internet age this has offered repressive regimes and individuals of dubious intent the possibility to silence critics whereever they are and the US has started to notice the deleterious effect it has had on their constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, plans are afoot to allow people to counterclaim in the US Courts.

Unfortunately it will only be possible to sue people who visit the US or have business interests there, but it's a step in the right direction. The interesting facet to the new bill for British bloggers is the question of whether it would in theory be possible for a blogger sued in the UK by a business with American interests to counterclaim through the US courts, thus partially extending the protections of the US constitution to the UK.

That would be a turn-up for the books.

Coining it

Argentina has a critical shortage of coins - change cannot be had for love nor, erm, money, it seems. The Wall Street Journal notes that this once happened in Britain. Back in the days when the a bit more backbone was displayed by the inhabitants of these islands, the banks simply started minting their own coins, solving the problem in fairly short order (at least until the government stepped in, forcing them to cease, and recreating the problem at a stroke).

A solution for the Argentine, perhaps.

Organising your feeds

How do you organise your feeds? If like me you have loads of the things, you can't just sling them all on a single page. Well you could, I suppose, but it wouldn't be very easy to work with would it? In some ways this is like the old and rather important question that perplexed us as teenagers of how to organise the record collection. Alphabetically? By genre? Or perhaps like David Davis's books, there's always the "artistic" approach of organising by size and colour. In my teenage years my system was very much equivalent to slinging my RSS feeds on a single page - in other words my records were generally flung around the living room floor or piled up in a corner.

Nowadays I'm much more organised, and my RSS feeds are organised into tabs - one for liberals, one for statists, one for the rest of the political sites, plus tabs for specialists, two covering the different sides of the climate debate, plus one each for reference sites and things related to my work.

Who should go on the liberals tab is a tricky problem, and there are many sites I waver over. Particularly tricky are the Liberal Democrat blogs. LibDems all seem to know that they are supposed to be economic liberals as well as social liberals, but they are just to wedded to their statism to let go completely.  There are a lot of sites with the word liberal in their titles on the Statists tab. There are exceptions though - Jock, Liberty Alone, Tom Papworth to name a few. Here's a new one, recently promoted from the ranks of the "others", and blogging up a storm at the moment too - Charlotte Gore. Well worth a read.

A new meme

There seems to be something of a new meme doing the rounds of the media at the minute. Fraser Nelson seems to have started it at the Spectator, with a short article wondering whether the similarities between Brown's Britain and the dystopian future imagined by Ayn Rand in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, weren't just a little to close for comfort. (If you don't know the story, you are probably a stranger around these here parts, but in a nutshell it tells what happens when government gets too big and all the productive people start walking away from society. It's a famously badly written book, but despite that manages to get under your skin and inspire you).

The Speccy piece was picked up by Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata and from the comments there, I found this article at the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Moore. The title tells it all: Atlas Shrugged: from fiction to fact in 52 years.

As I said, all the good guys in Atlas Shrugged walk away and head for a sort of anarchist utopia called Galt's Gulch, where the hand of government can't reach them. And if anyone can give me directions, I'd be grateful.

Brainwashing British Children

This morning I've been on childminding duty, with the smallest of the Baby Bishop keeping me occupied with a variety of more or less charming antics. The weather has cheered up (well, it's above freezing and the sun's out) and so we got out for some fresh air.

Duly refreshed and with fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, we switched on the television and caught a programme called Barnaby Bear on CBeebies. I don't know why I still let the children watch anything the BBC produces, I really don't, and true to form even Barnaby Bear managed to be infuriating. Yes folks, BBC output for preschoolers is just as disgustingly political as the rest of its output. Can anyone at the BBC stand up and tell me that it is considered suitable for preschoolers to watch a section about roads protesters at Twyford Down? Complete with Lord Porritt bawling into a loudhailer? I know he's a hero to those on the left, but this is meant to be a programme for the under fives, for heaven's sake! Barnaby Bear and the Twyford Down protesters? What planet are these people on?

Photograph a terrorist target

Henry Porter, one of the few journalists to "get it" has an excellent article today about how people are being lifted by the police for photographing things - cycle paths, derelict buildings, railway stations and the like. They are then whisked off to the police station and their fingerprints and DNA taken. As our Henry says, something really has to be done.

My idea would be to have a "Photograph a Potential Terrorist Target Day", in which everyone goes out with their cameras and snaps away at any state-owned building. It doesn't actually have to be a terrorist target, any state owned building would do, but the point needs to be got across that this kind of behaviour is normal and acceptable and should not be an excuse for the police to meet their arrest targets by simply lifting people of the streets.

In fact, while we're about it, maybe we should start photographing state officials at work - including particularly policemen.

Close down the libraries

Donald Clark is one of the best business bloggers I know. Always thoughtful, always provocative. His thesis today is "Close down the libraries". This might sound daft but it's a well-thought out piece and I think he's probably right, but maybe the time is not quite right. It won't be long though.

Privatising the state

...but not in the way any sane member of the public would want. Ian Parker-Joseph, writing at the Libertarian Party blog, has a very interesting post about the bureaucracy setting up private companies (limited by guarantee) to perform work that you or I would expect to be state-run. The examples he gives are the Association of Chief Police Officers and SOLACE (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers).

As Ian PJ points out, SOLACE advises on recruiting local authority chief executives and setting their salary levels. It includes several chief executives on its board, so there is a clear conflict of interest. As he says, it's a pretty clear case of racketeering.

One other interesting facet of this scandal which Ian doesn't pick up on is the fact that structuring these bodies outside the public sector makes them immune to Freedom of Information requests.

Handy, that.

Met Office forecasts

September 2008:The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.

January:2009:Severe weather warnings have been issued as temperatures in the UK dipped as low as -11C (12.2F) overnight.

A response from Prof Hardaker

With commendable speed, Professor Hardaker, the CEO of the Royal Meteorological Society has responded to my email asking for a statement on the Society's position on one of its journals standing in the way of an attempt to replicate a study published there.

Thanks for your note. I've had a couple of emails relating to this discussion and the position currently is as Prof McGregor mentioned. As I have mentioned to others who have emailed in, I'm very happy to consider the requirement for a clear policy statement and as suchI have put this on the agenda for the next meeting of the Society's Scientific Publishing Committee, at which all the Editors of the Society's journals are members. 

While I had hoped for at least some sort of recognition of the need for replication, it may be that Prof Hardaker feels he can't commit the Society to a new policy one way or the other without discussing the matter with his colleagues, and this is not an unreasonable position.

I would hope that the Society would start out from a position that every published study should be replicable and that both the data and code to do so should be in the public realm at the time of publication. The oft-cited policies of econometrics journals would be as good a place to start as any.

My concern would be that the committee ducks the issue by putting in place a bland policy stating that authors should make data available on request or some such, which then merely opens the question of what happens should authors refuse to do so - would the journal withdraw the paper? Would they sue the authors for breach of contract?.  Assuredly not. It is surely in the interests of the Society to avoid having to deal with any of this kind of unpleasantness by ensuring that the data and code are handed over up front.

It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Update on Jan 5, 2009 by Bishop Hill

In response to a follow-up email, Prof Hardaker has provided some more details:

Many thanks for the pointer to the blog and I would be very happy to feed your thoughts into the discussion. I'd also be very happy to share with you the decision of the Committee, and of course any new policy would be publicised through our respective Journal pages. I would wholly expect that if the Committee decided to establish a policy it would do so for all the journals in the Society's portfolio, but that's just my assumption. The Scientific Publishing Committee next meets in early May. I recognise this is a little way away but it will give us the time to take a considered look at the comments we have received and best practice from other respected journals in time for when we send the committee paperwork out in April. I will also make sure the Chair of our Committee sees all the correspondence we have had associated with this.

Data archiving

Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has been trying to get hold of the dataset underlying a study by prominent IPCC author, Ben Santer. Santer himself has (rather snottily) told him that he can't have the data, while the journal in question, the International Journal of Climatology, has refused to help too. The editor, one Dr MacGregor, has said that they do not require authors to archive data as a condition of publication and that data can be obtained from the authors. This was rather cheeky, given that the authors had already refused to release a thing.

The International Journal of Climatology is a published by Wiley on behalf of the Royal Meteorological Society. I have now written to the Chief Executive of the RMS asking for a statement on the society's position on the issue

Dear Professor Hardaker

I read with great interest a recent article on the Climate Audit blog http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4742, which reported on attempts to obtain copies of the datasets underlying a paper published in the International Journal of Climatology. According to the journal's editor, Dr MacGregor:

"It is not the policy of the International Journal of Climatology to require that data sets used in analyses be made available as a condition of publication. Rather if individuals are interested in the data on which papers are based then they are encouraged to communicate directly with the authors."

I found it frankly rather amazing that a journal would adopt a position of not requiring datasets to be availableas a condition of publication,given the importance of replication in the scientific process. It also seems somewhat unhelpfulof the editor to suggest a direct approach to the authors as a possible remedy, given that the authors in question had already turned down such a request. Mr McIntyre at Climate Audit has subsequently made unfavourable comparisons between the policies of IJC and the Royal Society's Phil Trans B which has adopted and enforced a policy on data archiving (see http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4754), and given that the paper in question is now essentially unreplicatable, I find it hard to disagree with this position.

Since this is a matter of pressing public concern, I was wondering if you would care to issue a statement on the Society's position on the importance of replication and the availability of data used in its publications, both in general terms and in relation to the paper in question. I think it is important for the Society to make a stand on the credibility of the papers that are published under its name. This would be an excellent subject for a posting on your blog.

I have published this letter on my own website at bishophill.squarespace.com and will of course link to or publish any response you give.

Kind regards

My feeling on this issue is that the Society has probably never concerned itself with nitty-gritty issues like data archiving, but that they could and should. It will be interesting to see what Professor Hardaker has to say.

(Professor Hardaker's blog is here).