Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Is the Blogosphere Really Responsible for Hysteria in Modern Debate?

    Do any of these dickheads look virtual to you?

    A couple of days ago Australia’s prime minister (PM) Julia Gillard found herself in the unprecedented position of having to host an extended news conference to hose down allegations of corruption from 17 years ago. A slightly abridged version of the news conference is available here, and it’s a barn-storming performance by Ms. Gillard that shows some of her finer qualities. My reader(s) from countries with a more timid political climate might like to feast their eyes on it as an example of how politicians should handle the idiots from the press.

    This post isn’t about the press conference or Gillard’s finer qualities, but rather about the issue she was asked to address late in the press conference about how to handle what she (scornfully) describes as the “Americanization” of debate with its “lunar right, tea party fringe” and the role of new media in promoting a vitriolic atmosphere of political debate. The press conference itself is supposedly an example of how the internet has changed politics, since many of the allegations about corruption that Gillard has been forced to address have only been kept alive on the internet, by a couple of (apparently) misogynist and lunatic websites. A common question that consumes a lot of the (admittedly limited) processing power of the average journalist’s brain is whether the rise of internet communications and “new” media is corrupting political debate, and what journalists can and should do about it: near the end of the press conference Gillard summarizes this question more eloquently than any journalist could, and calmly points out to them what they should be doing about it – she doesn’t point out that her need to hold the press conference at all is an implicit proof that journalism has failed to rise to the task.

    At the same time the Observer is running another of the seemingly endless run of journalistic pleadings about whether the blogosphere is responsible for the modern atmosphere of political hysteria. It cites some of the now famous research that claims the blogosphere fragments rather than facilitates political debate, and calls on some (imo) fairly trite stereotypes of the internet generation as self-serving and individualistic. But is blogging, and internet debate more widely, really the cause of this modern hysteria? Can journalists really stand above the fray and pretend to be offering a better, more reasoned or more “balanced” form of public debate? Or is this all smoke-and-mirrors aimed at hiding journalism’s corruption, and subsequent loss of control of the space of cultural and political discourse?

    Returning to Gillard’s press conference, I can’t say I’m convinced that the problems she faces would just go away if a couple of vile and sexist websites were to disappear, and judging by her tone when she deals with a journalist called “Sid” from the Australian newspaper, she doesn’t think so either. Although the allegations she was confronting have been floating around for years, they were largely unknown to the wider public until 2007 – when the Australian published a defamatory version of them. And then 2010 – when the Australian published a defamatory version of them. And then last weekend, when the Australian published a defamatory version of them. Are we seeing a pattern here? On every occasion that it has chosen to move these allegations from the fringe blogosphere into public debate, the Australian has had to apologize and publish a retraction, and in 2010 it sacked the journalist who wrote the story. This newspaper – Australia’s only national newspaper – is on record as having declared a plan to destroy Australia’s environmental party, The Greens; its editor in 2003, Paul Kelly, traveled the country openly drumming up support for the Iraq war and calling anyone who opposed it cowards. The Australian is owned by News International – on the same weekend as the Observer was blathering about standards on the blogosphere, News International’s the Sun was publishing pictures of Prince Harry’s naked arse, presumably in the interests of free speech. This is the same News International that probably used illegal means to obtain and then broadcast a recording of Prince Charles telling his girlfriend he wished he was her tampon; the same News International that hacked a dead girl’s cellphone and deleted some messages, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive. The same News International – an American company, incidentally, run by an Australian – that probably also hacked the phone of the UK prime minister, and the families of a couple of soldiers who died in Iraq.

    So is Gillard’s problem really with the blogosphere alone? As she observes in the press conference, in a world with more and more information people will tend to put more weight on the opinions of trustworthy mainstream sources; but when these mainstream sources simply regurgitate the opinions of “the nutjobs and misogynists on the internet” then the issue becomes bigger than just the opinions of some lonely wanker with a PC – the bigger issue is the judgment and respectability of the employees of a newspaper company that thinks hacking dead girls’ cellphones is a justifiable act. The reality is that journalists are cheap and easily bought, and they were running down the respectability of their own profession long before the internet made it possible for lonely misogynists to pile on.

    But looking a little wider, beyond the issue of what journalists choose to confer legitimacy on, is the increasing nastiness of public debate really the fault of arseholes on the internet at all? The picture at the top of this page is from a rally against Australia’s carbon price. The poster at the back refers to Ms. Gillard, and is suggesting in quite a vile and sexist way that she is the sexual toy of the leader of Australia’s environmentalist party, Bob Brown. The man standing under that banner at the front, with the microphone, telling the demonstrators he agrees with them, is Tony Abbott, the leader of Australia’s opposition liberal party and Australia’s potential future PM. The woman next to him is Bronwyn Bishop, a senior and respected politician from that same party. One might call it merely an error of judgment, but it’s hard to say that they’re doing much to keep debate above board and polite when they choose these kinds of banners as their backdrop. Where are the bloggers in this picture? It wasn’t a lonely wierdo on the internet who called a feminist activist in America a “slut” for wanting contraception to be covered by health insurance – that was Rush Limbaugh, a major media figure. It was a Republican who decided to invoke the 10th Century fiction of “legitimate rape” in defending his anti-choice views; it was a politician, not a blogger, who put rifle cross hairs over pictures of American democrats (or was it their offices?); and there are more than a few birthers in the Republican party (indeed, in congress).

    So is the problem really with the blogosphere and the increasing fragmentation of political debate on the internet, or is that a symptom of a wider unhinging, that is being driven by powerful forces in politics and the media? Indeed, even though he’s completely wrong and definitely not honest or well-meaning, there’s not really anything wrong with what Anthony Watts does, in principle, in his little denialist fantasy land. There’s also lots of debate and engagement between the two sides of the AGW “debate” on the internet – if anything, the question is whether there should be less, not more, given how wrong and mendacious the denialists can be. And the role of the media here, too, is questionable since the average journalist’s understanding of the concept of “balance” doesn’t extend past “giving a nutjob a voice on national tv.” The notion that balance is best obtained through calm and rational presentation of facts and getting it right doesn’t seem to have stuck with modern journalists, who constantly trot the likes of “Lord” Monkton out to defend the indefensible – and in fact as the science gets more settled and the denialist population shrinks to a smaller and crazier rump, the journalist notion of “balance” just leads to crazier and crazier people being put on national tv to represent the “opposing view.” Again, is this the blogosphere’s fault? Sure some of those bloggers love to feed the fires, but everyone is craving the legitimacy of the mainstream public eye, and it’s journalists who offer that legitimacy, not blogs with too many colours and 30% of the words in block letters. If AGW was a fiction conjured up by powerful voices in the mainstream, then Watts’s work would be honourable rather than misguided, and he would be justified in both using harsh language, and allowing insulting and rude language on the part of his commenters. And even though some of the stuff he does there – particularly the shenanigans with publishing private correspondence that just happens to be embarrassing – is scummy and low and something he should be ashamed of, that kind of stuff is par for the course with national media and has been for a very long time.

    I guess there’s a fine line between being an arsehole and being a hero – a lot of politicians seem not to like the Watergate journalists, or Assange, and I guess from their perspective the work of these people is more than just an inconvenience. But there’s more than enough arseholes in politics and the media, and they’ve been around long enough and doing dirty enough work, that one hardly needs to look to the internet for the cause of the increasingly strident and aggressive nature of modern political debate. The Palins and Limbaughs and Abbotts and Murdochs of the world have pretty much cornered the market on being nasty in public, and given how often journalists offer them the fig-leaf of legitimacy through unquestioning regurgitation of their crap, acceptance of the “legitimate questions” they raise, or straight-out editorializing in their favour, I think it’s fair to say that when journalists start pointing the finger at new media they’re either trying to shift the blame, or warn each other that their time is up. They certainly aren’t trying to improve the quality of public debate, because they and their political masters managed to debase that years ago.

  • Visions of the Apocalypse: U-Store Auctions

    The Washington Post (which I’ve started reading since I was interviewed for it) has a four page feature on storage unit auctions out today. It’s obviously written from a light-hearted perspective, overlaid with a touch of cynicism and fatalism about consumer culture and the current economic climate, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was reading a kind of apocalyptic vision, of small bands of survivors roaming the wilderness eking an existence from the contents of abandoned storage units. The article builds that atmosphere a little, by reminding us occasionally of America’s straitened situation, and also with cute exaggerations like this:

    What Americans pay to store their junk is about equal to the gross domestic product of the west African nation of Burkina Faso. The industry added a billion square feet of storage space between 1998 and 2005, with 8,694 facilities opening between ’04 and ’05 alone.

    Such data, extrapolated imaginatively, herald a future dystopia wherein self-storage space outnumbers all else, and America is little more than row after row of quiet closed units containing saggy mattresses, rusty ironing boards and boxy computer printers from the 20th century.

    The cast of characters in the roaming auction also sounds like something from apocalpyse fiction – the guy whose retirement nest egg is composed entirely of gold jewellery recovered from storage auctions, and this guy, Tony Harris, who tells the reporter that

    in the early ’70s, he was indicted with six other Catholic radicals (dubbed “The Harrisburg Seven” by the media) for allegedly plotting to kidnap then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger in order to force a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War.

    Off the set of Born on the Fourth of July and onto the set of Storage Wars … how’s that for an apocalypse-scale fall from grace?

    Even the illustration accompanying the article has a feeling of a group of adventurers uncovering a loot pile – if you replaced the torches with lanterns and the wheel in the foreground with a pile of gold, you’d have an illustration from a range of classic gaming manuals. It’s a weird post-modern adventure game of free-booting, exploration and tramp trading in a world of abandoned treasure houses, mostly filled with junk …

  • I Want my Speeder Bike

    Apparently an Australian company has developed a Star Wars style speeder bike to the point where it can hover and move, and has posted video footage to prove it.

    I think I deserve one of these for being me.

    There needs to be more of this kind of development. Where is my jetpack? My AT-AT (admittedly not very useful in Tokyo)? One group of researchers in Japan managed to build a semi-functioning Mehve (from Nausicaa) but it only seems to be able to travel about 100m. Clearly physics isn’t the problem, since these things fly fine in the movie and I know that Hayao Miyazaki and George Lucas wouldn’t be sloppy about these kinds of details – I just think the researchers need to get on with the important research. There must be some swine ‘flu funding or Mars Rover money that can be diverted to actually important projects. I mean, what’s the point in getting a human on Mars if he or she doesn’t have a speeder bike on arrival?

    NASA haven’t been able to get their funding priorities right since they started work on the space shuttle!

  • Banned from Watts Up With That

    … for questioning the science. Ironic, don’t you think? All this thinking about Flood got me contemplating global warming, so I wandered through some global warming-related sites and ended up at the infamous Watts Up With That, where I found two egregious examples of poor science, made particularly annoying by their patronizing tone and vicious ill humour. I’m not an expert on global warming science, but I know a little bit about research methodology, the validity of classification methods, and time series analysis, so I decided, perhaps foolishly, to comment on the two offending posts. Within two days I had been banned from the site, though not before I’d been roundly insulted by its resident flying monkeys and not with an official declaration – just quietly shuffled off to the spam queue.

    Me, spam!!! Oh, the humanity!

    Poorly documented and subjective classification methods

    The first, and most egregious example of bodgy science that I commented on was an example of the ludicrous “surface station audit” that Watts and his cronies are engaging in. Recently Watts reposted one of the surface stations that his crew have audited, with a glowing commentary that reproduces the basic facts of the original audit. This post also includes a healthy dose of green baiting, because some governor or other has established a pro-anthropogenic global warming (AGW) website and this is just the worst thing ever so should be sneered at. Unfortunately, if you follow the link to the original “audit” (here) you find in comments that a major piece of the audit is completely wrong. Basically, at issue in this audit is the construction of a tennis court close to the temperature station, and the presence of  a trash burning can (some weird American invention) very close to the weather station. Watts claims that the tennis courts were built in “the early 1980s” and that this corresponds with a sudden increase in temperature readings – obviously this could be linked to the tennis courts. But in the original audit someone who lives in the area has posted to say that the tennis courts were built in 1973 and gives a link. In reposting the “audit,” Watts ignores this information and directly links the tennis courts with the 1980s temperature jump – which is false. He also consistently refuses to answer questions about the facts related to the tennis court.

    The big problem here, that Watts won’t admit to, is that his classification system in the surface station audit is completely bogus. It suffers from three problems, which anyone who knows anything about research methodology would immediately recognize as “junk science” (to use a Watts-ism).

    1. It is not objective: he has given no criteria for distance of a tennis court, no standards for waste heat sources, no standard methods for obtaining data, no system for establishing potential changes in data collection. In trying to establish when the tennis court (a potential heat source) was installed, he just chatted to a neighbour who admitted she wasn’t there when the courts were built. No reference to land and environment courts, no attempt to contact the owners. Worse still, when he is given data about the actual time when the court was built, he ignores it and reblogs the original (erroneous) date. This is, to use a scientific term, bullshit. There’s no objective assessment standard here at all.
    2. It is inaccurate: It is clear that Watts doesn’t care about little details like time, frequency or distance. He didn’t care to establish the exact date of the tennis court’s installation – was wrong by 10 years! – and has consistently failed to answer the questions I asked him about the trash burning can. How long was it there for? When were temperatures recorded – before or after the commencement of use of the burning can? Why was it removed? There’s no way a trash burning can can induce observations consistent with global warming if it was only there for 6 months. Watts can’t answer these questions because he doesn’t care about a 10 year error in estimation of when a heat source was placed near the station, and he doesn’t care about how long a waste heat source was functioning right next to a surface station.
    3. It is not blinded to the observed data: this is the worst of all possible worlds. In his post Watts makes it clear that his assessment of the validity of the station siting is directly related to his assessment of the temperature trend at the station. This is precisely the wrong way to categorize stations. Furthermore, when challenged about his bullshit assessment criteria, he defends them by saying nearby stations don’t show the same trend. This is both arrant shite (nearby stations could be underwater for all I know), and a further example of the same bias. You never, ever classify experimental groupings by the outcome! This is rule number one of good science! Imagine if a pharmaceutical company excluded from its research any patients who did not respond positively to its drug because they were “biased.” Would you trust that drug? That’s what Watts’s station audit does.

    This is absolutely the stoney end of the scientific method but it is common practice at Watts Up With That. When he posted his latest “paper” (haha, see below) for “peer review” (actually, editing), he was accused of the same thing – using the result he was looking for to classify stations. It’s a consistent problem in his work, and in other work he references. Which leads me in to the second thread I commented on …

    Tautological reasoning with erroneous statistics

    Watts recently posted a scan of a 1987 conference presentation by one Jim Goodridge, entitled Population and Temperature Trends in California, which predates Mann’s famous “hockey-stick” presentation and claims to find major flaws in the California temperature record. Unfortunately, this paper is an extremely poor research article, poorly presented with extremely bad statistical methods, and it shows nothing. Attempting to point this out to Watts is probably what got me banned, because criticizing mainstream climate science is fine but criticizing a paper Watts likes – even a crappy one – is unacceptable.

    This paper basically divides all of California’s temperature stations into “urban” and “rural” categories and shows that the urban stations are warming and the rural ones are not. Unfortunately, this isn’t much of a gotcha moment because the method of defining “urban” and “rural” is to divide the stations into two groups according to their temperature trend. Those that have a temperature trend greater than 0.0125 per year are “urban” and those that don’t are “rural.” That is, Goodridge concludes that a set of stations he defined by their warming trend show warming, and a group of stations that he defined by their cooling trend don’t show warming. Alert the press!

    Goodridge then goes on to show that the rural stations’ temperature trend correlates with sea surface temperatures, while the urban stations correlate with temperature. This is treated as a revelation by Watts’s flying monkeys, but is completely irrelevant because it’s purely statistical artifact. Under standard global warming theory, sea surface temperatures warm more slowly than the land – they should be expected to correlate with data from a group of weather stations defined purely through their low warming trend. Similarly, population is increasing over time, so should be expected to correlate with any other time series that is warming over time – e.g. data from a group of weather stations identified by having a warming trend greater than 0.0125 per year.

    This is exactly the same kind of subjectivity being used in the surface stations audit. If this was done in a trial of a new drug it would never get published. It’s reprehensible! The flying monkeys try to justify it by pointing out that Goodridge (who was a “state climatologist”) observed that

    In general the classification of records as urban or rural is fairly close to reality as the writer knows it from viewing most of the sites

    as if this is an objective criterion. It’s not, and if it were Goodridge would have divided his sites up according to his classification from the very beginning. On this thread I repeatedly pointed out that there are established standards for defining “rural” and “urban” and he could have just used them, but funnily enough no one was interested. They’re much more satisfied with Goodridge’s post hoc justification than with objective classification. I pointed out that if a climate scientist did the same thing they would be up in arms. Imagine if a climate scientist said this:

    stations were defined as ‘accurate’ if the regression slope of temperature was greater than 0.01. Accurate stations showed a significant warming trend, while inaccurate ones showed cooling. This is clear evidence that the world is becoming warmer.

    I don’t think the Watts crew would let that fly. But if someone who agrees with them does it, his subsequent clarification that the station division seems about right is good enough for them.

    That’s not science. Furthermore, Goodridge’s analyses don’t include any time series adjustments, and you absolutely do not calculate correlations for time series using the standard Pearson correlation coefficient (as he did). This is weak. But if you say so you draw a huge amount of flak and ultimately get banned – with no warning or announcement.

    The rank hypocrisy of denialism

    Watts up with that is a classic example of the hypocrisy of denialism. In the very post that I commented on, Watts posts up two emails between climate scientists, in which one refers to Goodridge as a “nitpicky jerk.” In response, Watts says these scientists “are some piece of work, aren’t they?” After 50 or so comments on this thread, I was forced to post this:

    Since I’ve posted on this thread I’ve been called a Nazi, accused of personal attacks, called a hater (by you), stupid, accused of getting “uppity” and “worked up” (by you), accused of “nit-picking” (ironic in light of the emails you’ve published), accused of being incapable of understanding what others write, and you’ve had to censor one comment for saying bad things about me. Also, even though it’s clear that I don’t want my identity revealed, you’ve tried to do so and have even published my place of work, in a very hostile forum.

    Watts’s response was to deny the Nazi part, and after I pointed out to him that he himself had censored the comment containing the phrase, he subsequently implied I had accused him of calling me a Nazi (which I clearly didn’t). So when climate scientists use the word “jerk” they are “a piece of work,” but when Watts’s flying monkeys lay into me en masse it’s just robust debate. When it comes to robust debate they’re complete naifs, however – nothing I said there is anything like the challenge I’ve been subjected to by commenters like Noism, Paul and various drive-by commenters in my Tolkien and Fascism or Allies World War 2 Race Trap posts, and I didn’t call anyone in those threads a nazi, hater or idiot. I didn’t call Noisms a coward, either, for not using his real name – which Watts did in his very next reply to me. Charming people over there, Watt?

    But the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. Just a couple of posts prior to this post – which contains two stolen emails – Watts reposts an opinion piece from the Heartland Institute in which they decry the theft of emails from the Heartland Institute. Apparently when denialists do it it is a quest for justice, but when a climate scientist does it it is a crime. After just two days of challenge they banned me from their threads – but they complain if climate scientists get defensive and evasive after 20 years of the same treatment. But compare: currently Tamino has a thread in which he critiques a paper by Hansen, who the denialists hate, and that thread has 104 comments of reasonable discussion about whether the paper is flawed. Yet I’m supposed to believe it’s the climate scientists who are prickly about criticism?

    In case you thought it stops there though, Watts’s approach to the ethics of publication is founded entirely in hypocrisy. He and his flying monkeys are constantly making jokes about climate scientists rushing to press with their results, and they dedicated a whole thread to bitching and moaning about Muller releasing his results to the press before peer review was complete. But Watts rushed out a press release about his own latest “paper” before he had even submitted it to a journal. When Watts does it it is an urgent effort to present pressing and important information, but when Muller did it it was an arrogant scientist protecting their reputation and drumming up funding. Ultimately of course, Watts’s paper is unpublishable – it contains no measures of uncertainty and doesn’t adjust for Time of Observation Bias, so it’s fundamentally flawed – but that didn’t stop him getting it into the press. He and his flying monkeys would be singularly angry at a climate scientist doing that. Furthermore, Watts won’t release the site classification details for his latest paper – having been deeply involved in a campaign to force mainstream climate scientists to release every scrap of their data and code. Of course, the climate scientists, being government funded, are covered by FOI rules and obligations to funders and courts. Not so the idiots at WUWT, who can make any claims they want and keep their data entirely private. The whole site is like an object lesson in projection – every single criticism they lay on climate scientists, they themselves are doing in spades. Even the omnipresent “alarmism” accusation is rife across the site. In the same breath that they talk about “alarmist” scientists exaggerating AGW for a political agenda, they will talk about the risk of impending fascism due to the political machinations of environmentalists and elites. That’s alarmism! Watts depends on this alarmism for donations, but saying so is oh so incredibly crass (not that I did) – while accusing scientists of exaggerating AGW for funding is de rigeur on every thread.

    A bunch of clowns

    For the last couple of years some bunch of madcap polar scientists have been taking bets on the arctic sea ice extent at maximum melt. Each time, Tamino at Open Mind has stomped the field with his predictions, and the Watts Up With That crowd have massively over-estimated sea ice extent, because each year they think is the year sea ice will recover. This year they have been a bit quieter, but they are currently hosting a thread about “when will the cooling begin” which includes a link to this doozy from February, in which some idiot deletes 40 years of data from a 100 year series in order to prove that a lake’s depth is related to solar cycles – without mentioning that the lake’s source rivers are heavily influenced by human behavior (a point raised in the comments). Gee, I wonder if they’d accept that from a climate scientist?

    These people are basically completely ignorant of the scientific method, data collection techniques, the basic rules of classification and validation, and any statistics that isn’t built into MS Excel. They are ill-mannered, defensive, hypocritical and shrill, and they are consistently wrong about everything they touch. This year the arctic sea ice is going to reach an all-time record low, just five years after the last one, at the same time as Watts and his flying monkeys are postulating a rapid recovery, claiming all temperature records are fudged, and predicting a return to a cooling world next year. They are simultaneously sneering at any environmentalist ideas (witness this response to the suggestion of using urine for carbon capture technology), any science which suggests humans can affect the climate, and any solutions for same. In the long march of history, once global warming has begun to really eat into our environment, these people will be viewed not as harmless clowns but as criminal propagandists, the way we now view the people who protected Big Tobacco. They don’t don’t accept any kind of genuine scientific debate, and they will turn nasty and threatening if you even try. In my opinion they aren’t worth debating with, they aren’t set up to handle debate, and debate is not their interest. The entire site is an exercise in poisoning the well. Denialism has no credibility, and if Watts ever gets any of his work published it will be through deception and luck, and whatever journal publishes him will regret it.

    So much for my first and only incursion into the denialosphere. Now I’m off to take a shower…

  • After the Flood: Raft Cities

    During the later years of the flood, many people took to the water independently, taking to ships and rafts and trading with the remaining parts of the land for food. Rather than developing communities through the seizure of large facilities, these formed communities over time through accretion. Small boats might gather around an abandoned collection of flotsam, or a small failed arcology; to these would be attracted random communities living on rafts, loners who are sick of plying the seas on their stolen boat, or raiders who want a permanent base to return to. These communities will not survive unless someone can come up with an industry that will hold them together, but such industries are not impossible to create, even amongst the flotsam and jetsam that naturally accrete to such places. Perhaps it would be prostitution in a raft city near a well-plied trade route; or a group of rafts and raiders congregated around a collection of barges that are used for scrapping stolen ships and selling the parts. Maybe someone will establish a shellfish farm on a partially-submerged ship, and then turn the shells into glass that is in turn ground into lenses; or turn unwanted glass from passing traders into valuable lenses. Perhaps the raft floats near a rich fishing area, and can sell preserved fish to traders in exchange for raw materials.

    Life on raft cities is harsh, and even if they have some central industry or focus these communities will always have a sense of impermanence, of being a precarious gathering of wind-tossed rubbish that will soon be washed away. Indeed, when the ocean world’s great storms hit they often are, or only those who live near the centre survive, with the rafts on the edge serving as nothing more than human barricades against the fury of the sea. If these communities want to survive they will need to attract larger ships or rebuild themselves around abandoned arcologies and flotsam; and indeed, if a better opportunity appears the raft community will rapidly disperse to take it on. The landscape of a raft city is always changing as newcomers enter and leave, ships are cut free to sink or drift away, or storms wipe out neighbourhoods. Adventurers may find that a whole city they once knew well has gone, or that people they knew have disappeared and all who knew of them have gone as well. In the shifting world of the waves, it is often impossible to know whether they have gone to the deeps, or to a better chance.

    In his book, Baxter describes one of the few pieces of useful bioengineering that are of value after the flood: a type of genetically modified seaweed that hardens into a plastic-like material as it grows in seawater, and can be shaped over time to form raft-like structures. Through the use of such biotechnology, perhaps connected to an original large base such as a floating wind power farm or larger river barges, raft cities can establish a central space on which they begin to pin some hopes of permanence. A wind-farm might be jury rigged to provide power again, connected to a ship that will form the administrative centre of the new city, and the plastiweed slowly grown around it to form a kind of island, raised from the water far enough to offer opportunities for farming and shelter from the worst storms. These raft cities will then attract less secure suburbs and exurbs, boats and rafts docked together in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, neighbours who change by the week or the month. The city as a whole will be impossible to catalogue or sustain, but its core will be permanent, and as that core grows over time – or as other parts of the city form their own stable pastiweed bases – the city will slowly take on a permanent character. As the plastiweed subsumes new ships and rafts, a floating island of chaotic colours and shapes and sizes will grow into being. These cities will often be filthy, poor and dangerous, but they represent the only legacy that the original raft communities have any hope of leaving the world.

    For adventurers such cities always offer opportunities. The factions within the city will always have some nasty job they need done, and there will always be individuals who have been wronged and need to find their own justice. Though unable to offer much, many of the rafts and ships in these cities hail from before the flood, and may contain relics of technology that the rafters have no use for, but which the adventurers can use or take to a place where they can repair it. A householder looking for the return of their children from hostage takers might offer the adventurers the radar equipment from their long-immobile yacht, or a radio communication set, or a night-vision camera they have not needed since they ceased roaming the ocean. The adventurers may also be able to find more exotic work, chasing old treasure maps or taking on security work for passing traders. The bars and brothels of a raft city will be full of travelers with tales to tell and jobs to share, so a good sized raft city will always have a surfeit of work for intrepid adventurers. But it will also be full of thieves and bandits, looking to steal a good ship with its weapons, or to lead the adventurers to a pirate trap. These cities also offer repair work and resupply opportunities, though they may be overpriced and unreliable, but with the distances between communities often great, adventurers may find they have no choice.

    The raft cities of the flood are like the hard scrabble colonies of intergalactic frontier settings. This is where Serenity-style adventures unfold on a yacht, and where the lowest tier of adventurers and scoundrels hide out while they wait for their chance to make their fortune. Raft cities, then, are a place all players will be familiar with, and an excellent setting to start a campaign from.

  • Privacy Policy at the Faustus Academy

    It’s come to my attention recently that I’ve never actually written a comments policy, or stated what my privacy policy is on this blog. Even though very few people visit this tiny part of the internet, it may surprise both of you to discover that I have actually had to enact an element of my privacy policy before, and this makes me think that I probably ought to specify what it is for those of you who comment here. So here’s my privacy policy in (more than) three easy dot points:

    1. I don’t demand real names or identification of any kind, though you’re welcome to use your real name and of course I encourage interesting screen names. Furthermore, I don’t demand that you provide a valid email address (one of my friends posts here with a pathetically obvious fake email address, that he should be ashamed of)
    2. I will never reveal your identity publicly on the blog or privately, and no matter how much I disagree with your loathsome political views (let’s face it, you’re all worms) I won’t be cashing them in to your boss/wife/mistress/dog, because that kind of behavior is complete shit. If some neo-nazi gobshite turns up on my blog and gives the email address “[insert obviously real name]@metropolitanpolice.gov.uk”, that gobshite can rest assured that I won’t be telling the cops that they’re a nazi gobshite (though admittedly, giving that email address would be profoundly stupid – but if you weren’t profoundly stupid, you wouldn’t be a neo-nazi gobshite, would you?]
    3. I’m a curious and kind of voyeuristic guy, so I might do a whois inquiry or google you or something, but I won’t reveal that information to others on the blog or privately. Furthermore, I discourage commenters from referring to people using details that haven’t been revealed online. If you know that commenter neonazigobshite is a woman because you shagged her at the last End Apathy! gig (you poor bastard!), that doesn’t mean you should reveal her gender here if she is trying to keep it ambiguous (some chicks do that). I’m also not going to get pissed with anyone for obvious stuff-ups in this regard (let’s face it, you guys are pretty stupid)
    4. I see search terms that link to my blog, and if I find that someone is trying to identify you on google, or they have your identity and are trying to find out something about e.g. your political opinions or your online activity, I will do my best to tell you (I did this for someone once before)
    5. If you are looking for a job/partner/friend/drinking buddy and you are worried about them googling you and finding out that you wrote something stupid on my blog (because, let’s face it, you did), then contact me and I will do my best to delete it and/or everything you ever wrote (your choice). I’m pretty lazy, though, so if you wrote a lot your chances of scoring a clean record are pretty low, plus there’s the wayback machine (but anyone who is small-minded enough to google you is probably not clued up to that stuff). Also note in this regard that if I discover someone hunting you out on google and I’m worried that what you’ve said here might endanger your job chances, I may unilaterally delete you from the internet. You can thank me later!
    6. None of these considerations apply if you reveal that you have committed serious crimes, especially involving children. I’m not a priest!

    Of course, a lot of this stuff is irrelevant because if you say anything really horrible I’ll just apply my comments policy, which is essentially: you’re free to say whatever you like, but I’m going to delete anything really nasty. I think if you review the comment threads on my Tolkien and Nazism or Tolkien and Fascism stuff you’ll see I’m pretty relaxed in my definition of “nasty.” I’ve never deleted a comment here before, but I’m sure one day I’ll have to.

    I think it should be fairly obvious that this comments policy means I’m in favour of internet anonymity. I’m aware that this anonymity encourages rudeness but I have also seen a few situations where people online got into a lot of real life trouble – including losing jobs – because of the shitty behavior of other commenters and/or blog owners, and I don’t think that encourages decent debate (plus it’s really not very nice is it?). I don’t hide my identity, but I don’t flaunt it either, and that’s because I like to use this blog for exploratory or speculative thinking about topics related to my work, that I can’t do at work. I don’t want people thinking that what I say here represents either my fully-formed professional ideas (which are generally quite conservative) or my employer’s opinion of the same topics, and I also don’t want to make any claims to authority in what I present here. I think it’s better if people view me in terms of my nickname and treat my comments here with all the seriousness the nickname deserves (i.e. none). Also, a lot of what I talk about here blends sci-fi and politics and real life, and it’s easy for people googling someone to confuse that kind of speculative thinking with real opinions. I don’t want that to happen to me or you, so I’m happy to preserve your anonymity.

    I know a lot of people on the internet think that anonymity is not one of its better qualities, but I disagree. I think debate can be enhanced by genuine anonymity, because people can say what they think without fear of work/loved ones/dogs discovering that they’re secretly an idiot. In general it hasn’t degraded the quality of debate here, there’s very little rudeness here and everything seems to be working out, but I certainly think that some of my commenters would be less inclined to, shall we say, engage in robust disagreement with me (you wankers) if they had to put their real names on the comments. So I’m going to preserve your anonymity. Although if the CIA come calling I’ll sell you down the river in a second – no one’s waterboarding me!

    Oh, and on that note, I’m sure there are hundreds of people out there with great things to contribute who’ve been scared to on account of not knowing my privacy policy. So please, lurkers, delurk now! You are guaranteed anonymity! But not freedom from ridicule…

  • Medical Journal Damns Romney with Faint Praise!

    Today’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine has an interesting editorial on cost containment mechanisms in the Massachusetts health system. It gives some interesting facts about the context of rising costs and the mechanisms put in place recently to try and contain them, and paints rather an alarming picture of the situation in America generally, but particularly amusing is its introductory discussion of the Massachusetts health financing system:

    Governor Mitt Romney and the legislature enacted a landmark law that expanded Medicaid eligibility for low-income residents, provided subsidies to make insurance more affordable for those with moderate incomes, and created a health insurance exchange to help individuals with moderate or higher incomes and small businesses to purchase private insurance. The law included financial penalties for individuals who can afford coverage but do not obtain it and for medium and large employers that do not offer insurance. As the proportion of nonelderly Americans without health insurance rose nationally from 17.1% in 2006 to 18.4% in 2010, Massachusetts countered this trend, as its proportion of uninsured residents decreased from 10.9% to 6.3%.

    It doesn’t beat about the bush here, making clear that this package, Romneycare, has a lot of hallmarks of socialized medicine, and having directly slated the whole package home to Romney, it adds in the last sentence:

    In 2010, central elements of this Massachusetts law were incorporated in the federal Affordable Care Act.

    Certainly, the key changes described at the start of that paragraph sound like Obamacare, and so it’s no surprise when they point out the obvious. Having just enrolled the Medicare-exterminator Dalek as his running mate, I doubt that Romney is particularly interested in having the Obamacare=Romneycare meme get validation from major medical journals.

    I think a lot of criticism of Romneycare and Obamacare from the right says that it will lead to increased costs, but the editorial lays out some additional information which contradicts that common criticism. It points out that

    From 1998 through 2009, Massachusetts had the highest personal health care spending per capita of any state.Since 2001, personal health care spending as a percentage of the economy has also risen more rapidly in Massachusetts and other New England states than in the United States overall

    But Romneycare was introduced in 2006, just past the middle of the growth period, which the attached graph (not included here) shows is pretty linear over the period. I wonder if this higher baseline costs, and the more rapid increase over time in Massachusetts compared to the USA overall, might explain the lower proportion of uninsured nonelderly (11% vs. 17% when Romneycare was introduced)? It certainly appears from the chart of spending growth that without any noticable increase in spending growth compared to before Romneycare, Massachusetts has managed to make big inroads into its uninsured population. So maybe Romneycare has been a big success in reducing inequality in the state?

    Lots has been written about Massachusetts’ cost containment problems, but the NEJM article doesn’t slate them home to Romneycare; however, it doesn’t suggest Romneycare made cost containment easier either. Instead, the state legislature has introduced a raft of additional laws to be implemented now, which will attempt to contain costs and which the legislature claims will save $200 billion over 15 years. Most of these changes seem to be a shift towards more rather than less state intervention, but a lot of that intervention appears to be towards supporting ailing providers and reducing the market power of big insurers – so it could be that the intervention is intended to strengthen the free market levers currently operating in Massachusetts, rather than interfere with them directly. The article finishes by saying

    Massachusetts will be a testing ground to determine the political viability and economic impact of transitioning from the long-standing dominance of fee-for-service care to a statewide focus on new payment models, with expanded public reporting of costs and quality and more explicit limits on the growth of health care spending.

    This makes me think it’s a bitter shame that Romney has been captured by the lunatic wing of his own party, because it appears that Massachusetts is where a lot of the creative thinking on US healthcare reform is being done, but none of it will translate into federal policy if Romney is in the White House and being held hostage by the unmarked helicopter gang he is appealing to now. Having engineered the predecessor of Obamacare, his state – and presumably a lot of people he is familiar with and able to work with – will now be tinkering with mechanisms to contain costs in a free market system. That would surely make Romney the ideal person to implement them, but I guess the USA will just have to wait for a Democrat to implement Massachusetts’ republican health market reforms. What, if anything, does this tell us about the increasing marginalization of “moderate” republicans in the US  (federal) public policy environment, and where is the Republican party going to end up if that continues …?

  • After the Flood: OTEC Cities

    In the first chaotic years after nations ceased to exist, before the last of the land disappeared, many people would have set out on their own, by whatever means they could secure, to make a new life on the waves. These people would have formed small bands and taken whatever they could find on shore and off, and after they set out to sea they would have raided and fought and traded for whatever would make them better off. Over time the most successful of these survivors would have formed into communities, either static or mobile, who live as best they could as independent city states in the new world. These states survive by trading with strangers and defending themselves against anyone who would try to take what is theirs – or by amalgamating with other states to form new and stronger collectives. Not as stable or as strong as the pelagic kingdoms and dependent on trade with them for new resources, these independent kingdoms offer their citizens greater freedom than the pelagic kingdoms, but at the risk of a precarious existence that may be subsumed by raiders or sink beneath the waves at any time. If such a city-state does not have its own special property to trade upon, it will no doubt disappear, becoming living space for the pelagic kingdoms (who exterminate residents of any property they subsume to make way for their own suppressed masses) or losing its populace to other, more stable economies.Ocean Thermal Energy Collection (OTEC) platforms are one of the greatest possible prizes for such fledgling communities.

    An experimental technology before the flood, OTEC platforms use differentials in the ocean’s heat to produce electricity. Anyone who could seize one of these after the flood has guaranteed themselves a tradable commodity – especially if they can somehow secure a supply of batteries to trade, or develop an industry in converting water to hydrogen and oxygen for fuel cells and combustion engines. City-states built around OTEC platforms will typically consist of many small ships, many no longer capable of independent movement, roped together to form a permanent floating colony based around their central power source. On the edge of the colony will be a few archaic patrol boats and the other mobile trade ships of the city, all converted to run on hydrogen-oxygen power and/or sails, and intended for trade and defense against attackers. The city itself trades on a special property that very few societies after the collapse can offer – abundant electricity. This means karaoke bars, game centres, concerts, and all the night life of a real city of old earth, all taking place across a wild and floating city of rafts, barges and yachts bound together and heaving and sighing on the wild deeps.

    Such a community is a great prize for any pirates or conquistadors who want to add a stable source of energy to their possessions. As a result, these city-states change hands often, and defend themselves ferociously… or make very dubious deals with any neighbouring kingdoms in exchange for their security. They may also offer special deals to the Pelagic kingdoms in exchange for their independence and security, but more likely they will develop a strong close-defense navy, and possibly even a primitive air force, to ensure they remain independent. Adventurers may be employed to help defend a platform, or to infiltrate it and take it over, but the most likely role of a platform in a campaign is as a rest and recuperation city, a place where mercenaries from many communities meet to find work and to sell the ill-gotten gains of their dubious profession. Here, adventurers will likely find an environment free of repression, where they can cut dubious deals and find new and sinister work, and where a strong but morally flexible industrial sector is able to provide them with equipment suited to a range of morally dubious tasks.

    In the world of the flood, OTEC cities hold one of the keys to power – energy. Life after the flood is determined by who has access to energy and who can control its use, and anyone who can find an OTEC city and make themselves useful to its leaders is guaranteed safety and success. This makes OTEC cities a much sought after location – and a dangerous nest of scheming, backstabbing vipers, to boot. The perfect adventure setting!

  • Low Levels of Radiation Exposure in Fukushima Residents

    I have been collaborating on some research to assess levels of internal exposure to Cesium in residents of Minamisoma, Fukushima prefecture, and today the results have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (paywalled), along with news reports in the Washington Post amongst other media outlets.

    Minamisoma is a small town located mostly just inside the 20-30 km “stay-indoors” zone around the Fukushima power plant, and is one of the closest towns to the plant that isn’t under a long-term evacuation order. Minamisoma Municipal General Hospital began to assess internal exposure to Cesium in August last year, and we report on the first year’s assessment of just over 8000 residents, finding most had no measurable levels of exposure (38% of adults and 16% of children). Those who were exposed had generally low levels of exposure. Although calculating the equivalent dose of internal exposure is a bit tricky and controversial, the lead author estimated the maximum at about 1mSv, and suggests this is about the equivalent of half a chest X-ray. The linked Washington Post article describes some other comparisons and gives the opinions of other experts in the field who know more about these kinds of calculations than I do. We also observe that the levels of exposure less than one year after the Fukushima disaster are much lower than those observed even several years after Chernobyl, despite the fact that supposedly similar amounts of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Our suggestion is that the combination of early evacuation and comprehensive food monitoring and control were key to containing the effects of the disaster.

    These results suggests that in many ways, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant explosion is far from the worst aspect of the disaster that hit Fukushima prefecture on the 11th March, 2011. I have visited Minamisoma before and previously put up a post describing the destruction at the seaside and some of the difficulties the town faces, and I hope that this research will serve to give some perspective to the severity of the various problems the town faces. I have now been given a two year grant by the Toyota Foundation to continue research (in collaboration with the local hospital), monitoring the radiation exposure of the residents and conducting a broader needs assessment of their health needs and the ways in which their mortality risks have changed since the earthquake. As I said in my previous post, the experience of these communities in Japan is of value to other countries with a similar aging problem that might experience similar disasters, including possible nuclear accidents, and it’s important both for the people of Minamisoma and for other communities at risk of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that we more clearly understand the best potential policy both for preparing and responding to these kinds of disasters. Hopefully this research will benefit both the town’s residents, and policy-makers in other places who face the potential of similar catastrophes.

  • Campaign Setting: After the Flood

    In the novels Flood and Ark Stephen Baxter describes a natural disaster that leads to the complete inundation of the earth by a massive flood. This flood is not a global warming horror story, but a completely new disaster in which oceans of water leak out of fault lines in the earth’s crust, submerging the continents and ultimately all land on earth. The first novel ends with a gathering at the peak of Everest, as it finally sinks below the waves. Ultimately the new oceans stop about 7 or 8 km above the old sea level, and the earth has officially become a water world. I reviewed the first of these novels here.

    The survivors of this flood are mostly trapped on rafts and boats, bereft of any natural resources that might enable them to retain a civilized existence, and over the generations of the flood these survivors slowly change to a new and more primitive form of humanity, eking a subsistence existence from the sea and slowly forgetting all that they had been. The only remnants of civilization are a few arks, which Baxter envisages maintaining some semblance of the pre-flood societies. We only see three such arks in the novels: a replica of the Queen Mary cruise liner, an inter-stellar colony ship, and a deep-sea arcology.

    I think that these arks Baxter envisaged are interesting, and the deep-sea arcology essential to continuing survival of the human species, at least in the short term, but I think there would be other, better ways of surviving such a catastrophe, and the world that resulted from human efforts to survive would make an excellent setting for a post-apocalyptic water world campaign, perhaps played with d20 modern or some version of Stars Without Number. Particularly, I imagine that the post-flood world would be dotted with what I think of as pelagic kingdoms, remnants of pre-flood societies that had taken to arcologies floating on the ocean, but linked to deep-sea arcologies that serve as industrial and resource extraction centres. The effort of building these arcologies in the two generations over which the flood submerged the land would mean that they were tiny compared to their pre-flood societies, and many people in attempting to escape the flood would make their own societies – on rafts and ships and old oil rigs and all manner of makeshift homes – and in the eras after the flood these societies would slowly drift across the globe, creating whole new settings and strange encounters. Furthermore, the strange weather and new ecologies of a submerged earth, and unexpected remnants of the old world, would create mysterious and intriguing adventure scenarios and settings. In the next few posts I will describe what I think would be some of the more interesting elements of this world, but starting today I will describe the main remnants of modern civilization in the post-flood world: the Pelagic Kingdoms.

    Pelagic Kingdoms

    These central kingdoms of the flooded earth would be the lynchpins of human survival in the post-apocalyptic world, because they would have solved the three problems that inevitably beset any attempt to create a sustainable human society in a world without land. These three problems are access to natural resources, energy, and diversity of food supply.  In Baxter’s novels human society fails to solve these problems fully, instead fleeing to a new world where they can find the resources they need or settling into a remnant city on the sea floor, where they can survive but never prosper.

    I think that in the era leading up to the flood the biggest societies on earth would solve these problems, though the pressing time scale and the challenges of adaptation mean they would not do it well and only a tiny percentage of their population would escape the flood into these official post-flood kingdoms. To rescue one’s society in such an era of social, economic and ecological collapse, with rapidly diminishing physical territory and resources, would only be possible for the largest, wealthiest and technologically advanced societies. This is because to do so they would need to simultaneously create floating arcologies and a functioning deep-sea city, capable of existing permanently at 4-6 km beneath the surface, but able to extract resources from the sea bed and ship them to the surface to exchange for food with the arcologies. The result of this would be the new, pelagic kingdoms of the US, Europe and China/India – kingdoms composed not so much of physical territory as of a large number of scattered, floating islands orbiting just one or two seabed mining communities.

    The Arcologies of the Pelagic Kingdoms

    As society realized that the flood was going to consume the earth, they would move to desperate measures. Old ships would be turned into floating apartment blocks and set free to drift, dependent on the diminishing land for food and increasingly needing to grow their own in rooftop gardens or fish for their sustenance; some of these arcologies would be set up as research centres or industrial towns, to continue producing the needs of a rapidly shrinking population base. As the situation became more desperate, governments would realize the need to build specialized arcologies rather than converting ships – with increasing numbers of their own internally displaced populations needing to be accommodated in a shrinking territory, they would realize that they needed to start building land on top of the sea. Thus would begin the project of building real arcologies, purpose-designed to float like oil rigs but cover the area of small towns. Whatever size technology enabled, they would begin to build, far enough away from the encroaching flood to be completed in time to rise with the sea waters when they came. These arcologies would be designed to be at least partially self-contained, proof against storms and the ocean salt but containing in their centre at least some small farms, intensive agriculture of some kind, power plants, and even manufactories. These arcologies, once they floated, would be populated with the elite of the old world and left to drift amongst the converted hulks and jury-rigged floating hamlets of a previous generation. They would trade with each other, try their best to feed themselves and their fellows, as they circled the diminishing landscape of their old nation. Perhaps some, equipped with deep sea salvage equipment, would mine the abandoned cities of the old world for ever scarcer resources.

    The Deep-Sea Manufactories

    Once it became obvious that the land was going to be forever extinguished, the problem of sustaining these arcologies beyond the next two generations would obviously present itself. How can one repair a solar panel without sand? How can one supply a nuclear fission plant without uranium? Obviously the only realistic solution is to build a deep-sea mining base, somewhere with resources that can be harvested. Such a base would perhaps be built entirely underground, with just a few carefully-constructed entranceways to allow ships in and out. It might be built in the last high points of the nation – the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas or the Alps – with docks carved into mountain sides and deep mine shafts stretching far enough down to give access to the key requirements of industrial society. These undersea bases would be designed to include manufacturies, so that crucial engineering equipment could be built, ore smelted, and perhaps even ships repaired. Robotic machines would travel far into the old world under the sea, scavenging the remaining organic detritus of the old earth, or digging up mud from the new seabeds to transport to the surface as soil for the arcologies. Perhaps they would build huge wave-power generators in the valleys of their old mountain ranges, entirely robotically made and controlled, to ensure that the world would have energy even after the uranium ran out.

    Society and Survival in the Pelagic Kingdoms

    The social order in the pelagic kingdoms would be harsh, built around keeping strict authoritarian control over population growth and resource use. Those people who floated out to sea in the first hulks, crammed together like prisoners in apartment blocks that offer little better opportunity than survival, would soon come to be judged as an expendable burden on the dwindling resources of their nation; even once the purpose-built arcologies floated and the undersea manufactories began to function, these people would be seen as a burden, first to suffer calorie restrictions as arable land disappeared, last to be allowed to breed, always required to do the hardest and nastiest work. They would spend much of their lives without energy, would be moved from hulk to hulk as the need arose and treated as a slave population in a world of harsh demands. These would be the slums of the floating world, where everyone vied for a chance to get out to one of the arcologies or to a specialist dormitory ship – one that sat near a resource zone or had some industrial or defense or cultural function. Otherwise the only work on these ships would be security, fishing, and farming shellfish or seaweed in the area around the ship.

    On the arcologies, life would be better, but still tough. Some arcologies might have a specialized industrial or farming purpose, others might play a mixed role providing energy, education and housing. These arcologies, being purpose built, would also be able to host proper docks and shipping, perhaps enabling them to trade between countries and with occasional visitors and develop a little real wealth. But even the largest arcology using the most advanced genetically engineered crops would only be able to grow a small amount of food, of which the entire surplus would be needed to keep the dormitory ships alive and functioning; life here might be better but it would still be harsh, and some of the chemical or industrial arcologies could be hellish indeed. In the world after the flood, no one would be allowed to rebel against their lot – find a way out, or be ground under.

    Despite the harsh life in the arcologies, these would be the wealthiest and the best places on the planet, and through their combination of resource extraction, limited agriculture, and energy production, the Pelagic Kingdoms would form the central component of the human race’s recovery from its near-extinction. Everyone else living outside of these kingdoms would view them with only three goals in mind: to live in them, to trade with them, or to raid them. In such a world the Kingdoms would always be seeking adventurers – as would their enemies. It would be this world that player characters would interact with – performing dubious missions for the masters of the arcologies, fighting raiders, or raiding them for specialized goods that make the difference between death and survival for the less fortunate peoples of the flood. These Pelagic Kingdoms would also hire adventurers to scour the ocean world hunting out old resources and finding new trade opportunities. In my future posts I will describe some of the other communities that live on the world ocean, how they survive and the adventuring opportunities they might offer.