Feb 18, 2019 at 8:05 AM | tomo
Yes, and that is something I have been trying to emphasise. Everything about Syria is ghastly, and that starts with the untrustworthy reporting fed to the UK by the BBC.

The BBC is NOT responsible for teenage girls running away to Syria or to see a pop concert promoted on the BBC.

The BBC has its own agenda for news reporting, changing the agenda, and shaping public opinion. The Childrens Crusade to fight Muslims was a disaster for children, now the BBC is promoting school absenteeism to fight Climate Science and childrens rights to fight anyone if it is abroad, provided they say sorry. Children being stabbed on British streets, by other children does provoke BBC concern, but there is still a reluctance to examine the causes. The parents of victims and perpetrators are normally offered the opportunity to avoid excess publicity.

The BBC seems to have misjudged evidence and public opinion, on a wide range of issues, Climate and BREXIT being two "popular" ones here.

The EU has helped trigger BREXIT, with Merkel's open door policy. The BBC avoids that. The EU and BBC said Syrian refugees were escaping war caused by Global Warming. The BBC is failing to inform UK taxpayers honestly.

Mark I was writing entirely about the girl in Syria story, and have little wish to travel yet again across familiar and much more extensive stony ground. You know by now my responses to all your points, so let's take them as written/read and save me from the wrath of other BH regulars.

Feb 18, 2019 at 7:45 AM | Supertroll
Feb 18, 2019 at 7:56 AM | Mark Hodgson

This morning, the BBC is leading with news of clampdowns on Fake News.

The BBC is guilty. Syria is a ghastly example of the BBC trying to change and shape public opinion.

"It is a crisis that has been growing for two decades and has come about because experiments are not designed well enough to ensure that the scientists don’t fool themselves and see what they want to see in the results."
Feb 18, 2019 at 7:38 AM | Mark Hodgson

I think many scientists prefer results that can be tweaked for their own gain.

Supertroll, it's groundhog day with the BBC debate here, and that's as much my fault as it is yours. You always make a fair point when you observe that much of the rest of the media behaves much as the BBC does, and I can't argue with that, since so far as I can see, that's true.

The key differences with the BBC (and the reasons people get upset about its behaviour) IMO are as follows:

1. We have no choice other than to fund it, via the TV licence. I pay for a TV licence; I don't subscribe to Sky, nor do I buy newspapers.

2. The BBC Charter imposes lots of obligations on it, which it routinely breaches or ignores.

3. The BBC still (despite everything) has a cachet; many people regard it as the place to read/hear/see the news, and many people think it reports objectively and fairly, fully and openly. It abuses this trust IMO, and then compounds that abuse by having a "fact checking" team and regularly pushing the "Why you can trust the BBC" lie.

I suspect most people would recognise that their favourite newspaper has a bias - after all, they probably buy it because it reflects their own view of the world. The BBC should not have a view of the world. It shouldn't push some stories and censor others. It should report fully, openly and honestly, and not ignore stories that don't fit with its view of the world. Unfortunately, IMO, it is guilty of all of the above.

Why this eternal fixation with the BBC? Sky sent out a team to the God awful parts of Syria and contacted the girl. Interviews with her parents were conducted by the print media. Yesterdays papers had pages and pages on the story. The BBC are not running the story, they are playing catchup. And as far as I can judge not particularly well.

Some here have ventured the opinion that this is only a small story, not worth its prominent place. IMHO they are wrong. It's a first rank human interest story. It has everything, a young beautiful woman who has just given birth and is in imminent peril, being left to die by a wicked government that refuses her aid. Grieving parents pleading for help. All it needs is a young El Lawrence figure to come to her rescue. Gosh there could be big Hollywood money available, but her rescuer has to be an American.

tomo, the consistent theme seems to be that the mad/bad/stupid Syrian combatants are all fighting noble causes, and can be ignored. All blame must be focused on Trump/ US/Russians/Global Warming/Trump Again Anyone running away from warcrimes including ethnic cleansing, must be given a free ticket home to a taxpayer funded house.

There are many still in the UK who have been enabling terrorists. Mr and Mrs Begum snr, have not. They are also victims of their daughters selfish behaviour.

There are many innocent UK victims of terrorists, suffering the consequences of other peoples murderous and selfish acts. Mr and Mrs Begum should not expect special treatment or sympathy from the UK Government or public. The feckless idiot did steal a UK issued Passport to start with. Did she destroy that to prove her devotion, as she now claims there is no evidence of her committing crimes?

I wonder if this applies to climate science?

"AAAS: Machine learning 'causing science crisis'
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News, Washington"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47267081

Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong.

Dr Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a “crisis in science”.

She warned scientists that if they didn’t improve their techniques they would be wasting both time and money. Her research was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

A growing amount of scientific research involves using machine learning software to analyse data that has already been collected. This happens across many subject areas ranging from biomedical research to astronomy. The data sets are very large and expensive.

But, according to Dr Allen, the answers they come up with are likely to be inaccurate or wrong because the software is identifying patterns that exist only in that data set and not the real world.

“Often these studies are not found out to be inaccurate until there's another real big dataset that someone applies these techniques to and says ‘oh my goodness, the results of these two studies don't overlap‘," she said.

“There is general recognition of a reproducibility crisis in science right now. I would venture to argue that a huge part of that does come from the use of machine learning techniques in science.”

The “reproducibility crisis” in science refers to the alarming number of research results that are not repeated when another group of scientists tries the same experiment. It means that the initial results were wrong. One analysis suggested that up to 85% of all biomedical research carried out in the world is wasted effort.

It is a crisis that has been growing for two decades and has come about because experiments are not designed well enough to ensure that the scientists don’t fool themselves and see what they want to see in the results.

Machine learning systems and the use of big data sets has accelerated the crisis, according to Dr Allen. That is because machine learning algorithms have been developed specifically to find interesting things in datasets and so when they search through huge amounts of data they will inevitably find a pattern.

“The challenge is can we really trust those findings?” she told BBC News.

“Are those really true discoveries that really represent science? Are they reproducible? If we had an additional dataset would we see the same scientific discovery or principle on the same dataset? And unfortunately the answer is often probably not.”

Dr Allen is working with a group of biomedical researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston to improve the reliability of their results. She is developing the next generation of machine learning and statistical techniques that can not only sift through large amounts of data to make discoveries, but also report how uncertain their results are and their likely reproducibility.

“Collecting these huge data sets is incredibly expensive. And I tell the scientists that I work with that it might take you longer to get published, but in the end your results are going to stand the test of time.

“It will save scientists money and it's also important to advance science by not going down all of these wrong possible directions.”