Month: November 2005

After all these years

John Quiggin37 Comments

The Socceroos are finally through to the World Cup, after beating Uruguay 1-0 last night, then winning a penalty shootout. They certainly deserved the win, dominating most of the game, while the Uruguayans mostly seemed happy enough to hold the goal difference down to one (though they still came close to scoring in extra time, against the run of play).

Although the shootout was exciting to watch, and we got the result, I can’t help feeling this is an unsatisfactory way of resolving a tied game (or, in this case, a tied series). I’d prefer more extra time, maybe with a rule change like sending the goalkeepers off.

Self-plagiarism

John Quiggin15 Comments

In the Media and Culture journal M/C, Lelia Green has an interesting piece on self-plagiarism, linking referring to a site called Splat which asserts

Self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of their previous writings in subsequent research papers. Occasionally, the derived paper is simply a re-titled and reformatted version of the original one, but more frequently it is assembled from bits and pieces of previous work.
It is our belief that self-plagiarism is detrimental to scientific progress and bad for our academic community. Flooding conferences and journals with near-identical papers makes searching for information relevant to a particular topic harder than it has to be. It also rewards those authors who are able to break down their results into overlapping least-publishable-units over those who publish each result only once. Finally, whenever a self-plagiarized paper is allowed to be published, another, more deserving paper, is not.

Splat also refers to

textual self-plagiarism by cryptomnesia (reusing ones own previously published text while unaware of its existence)

(I know all about this) Green takes a more nuanced view and has some interesting discussion.
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Embedded

John Quiggin3 Comments

Via Kieran at CT, I learn that a new multi-blog enterprise with the working title Pajamas Media is about to be launched in New York. The name is redolent the early days of blogospheric triumphalism, with fact-checkers sitting at computers in their bedrooms, waiting to pounce on the errors of the tired and discredited MSM and their uncritical regurgitation of dripfeeds from inside-the-Beltway sources.

So who is giving the keynote address to this group of rebels against the established order (Answer over the fold).
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Bogus quote yet again

John Quiggin117 Comments

Via Jennifer Marohasy, I found this recycling of the infamous doctored Schneider quote, this time by Frank Furedi who writes in the Times Higher Education Supplement

Appeals to a “greater truth” are also prominent in debates about the environment. It is claimed that problems such as global warming are so important that a campaign of fear is justified. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, justified the distortion of evidence in the following terms: “Because we are not just scientists but human beings… as well… we need to capture the public imagination.” He added that “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified statements and make little mention of any doubts that we have”.

Schneider’s statement was originally quoted in an article in Discover magazine (not available online as far as I can tell). Reading it in full and in context, it’s an unexceptional statement about the difficulties of dealing with the media and their penchant for oversimplication and overdramatisation. However, the history of the quote, and its use by anti-environmentalists is fascinating and, in many ways, a demonstration of Schneider’s point.
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Hubris

John Quiggin23 Comments

Having gained unchallenged control of Parliament John Howard is displaying the same kind of arrogance that helped to doom Paul Keating after 1993. The huge expenditure on IR ads is one example, as is the general tendency to ram legislation through with no significant scrutiny or debate.

An even more striking instance was on display in Brisbane over the weekend. Howard has long been under pressure to upgrade the Ipswich Motorway, and has now decided that only a partial upgrade will be offered. Nothing surprising in that, and there may be a defensible rationale, though none was offered.

What is surprising is that Howard decided to make the announcement in Brisbane at the Liberal party state conference, with no advance warning for the local Libs, who are, not surprisingly furious. Then, when the Liberal Lord Mayor of Brisbane protested, he apparently got a threatening dressing down from one of Howard’s minders. These stories dominated the local TV news over the weekend.

I can only assume Howard believed that he could pull the local Libs into line in supporting his views, and ignore the inevitable attacks from the State government. If so, he appears to have miscalculated.

I’m surprised by this. Howard warned his colleagues against this kind of thing after the 2004 election victory, but he doesn’t seem to have learned his own lesson.