Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Science
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Today’s issue of PLOS Medicine contains an interesting debate between Australia’s own anti-smoking paladin, Simon Chapman, and a professor Jeff Collin from Scotland, over whether governments should introduce a license for smokers. Chapman puts the case for a license, while Collin opposes it, and the debate is refreshingly free of jargon or paywalls, so quite…
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Congratulations America! With the American electorate[1] having given a resounding endorsement[2] of the policies of the Revolutionary Islamic Socialist Party of Kenya, America will finally see a form of healthcare financing reform. Depending on who you read, this reform seems to be either an insane policy that will bankrupt America, or not much change. I…
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Christianity’s fundamental promise is of eternal life, and the risk of refusing to accept God’s grace is generally accepted to be eternal damnation. While the truth of these statements is still subject to debate, there is little empirical evidence of the benefit of eternal life, and little research exploring the possible drawbacks of a decision…
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One possible consequence of the collapse of the summer arctic ice cover is that storms like Sandy will become the new normal. There are reasons to think that the freak conditions that caused Sandy to become so destructive are related to the loss of arctic ice, and although the scientific understanding of the relationship between…
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A few weeks ago I put up a post about the research challenges in studying online communities, in which I suggested that online surveys are an essential but flawed tool for the study of communities that are largely defined by their internet rather than their physical presence. My post was in the context of the…
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… What would statistical analysis look like? Last night my partner, for whom computers always seem to fail, made a comment about having to “tap the secret window and turn three times widdershins” in order to get her facebook app to work. She is one of those people for whom computers hold slightly mystical properties,…
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Some academic has written a paper suggesting global warming (AGW) skeptics are moon-landing conspiracy theorists, and this has sparked a bit of a controversy. One of the many complaints about it is that it recruited subjects online through a survey posted on blogs, and therefore is completely unrepresentative of skeptics in the community. I’m going…
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Introduction In this post I will examine the data on beliefs about climate change, conspiracy theories and free market ideology collected by Stephan Lewandowsky. Lewandowsky conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) on the assumption that established theories of conspiracy theory ideation obtained from prior research could be applied to…
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… on a thread about censorship on warmist blogs. Ironic? After my brief excursion into the denialosphere, that ended with my rapid banning from Watt’s Up With That, you’d think I’d have known better, but there’s a juicy new scandal doing the rounds about a paper by a certain professor Stephan Lewandowsky that shows that…
Compromise and Conceit 