The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is campaigning to defend bloggers’ rights. Most of the action is in the US, but many of the same issues arise here.
Just Google it?
The availability of search engines like Google provides an easy way of checking on factual claims you may find questionable – just enter the relevant keywords into a search engine and see what comes up. If such a search produces nothing to support the claim, or evidence to refute or qualify it, then it’s time to start demanding evidence.
This started me thinking about a more general problem with search engines. Using search engine results in the way I suggest rests on the assumption that a given query will produce given results. The same is true if I want to say “Site X is the top result on engine Y for query Z”. But what happens if, as is already possible, search results are personalised, based on, say, previous search history and choice among search results. The same search, undertaken by someone else, might produce completely different results.
Personalisation has some obvious benefits. if I’m searching for bus routes in Brisbane, I probably don’t want results about Brisbane, California. But it undermines the usefulness of search engines results as evidence in analysis or argument.
Full-scale personalisation might get us to the point feared by writers like Cass Sunstein. Dogmatic leftwingers or rightwingers, supporters and opponents of the Iraq war, and so on, might be presented exclusively with search results that confirmed their prejudices, and might never realise that they were looking at a completely different Web to that seen by someone with different views. This process would work only for people who usually don’t follow search results that lead to views contrary to their own – personalisation would reinforce this tendency until it became automatic.
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
Weekend reflections
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Why do they hate America?
In the leadup to the Iraq war, we were repeatedly told that anyone who disagreed with the rush to war, or criticised the Bush Administration, was “anti-American”. It now appears that the majority of Americans are anti-American. A string of polls has shown that most Americans now realise that Bush and his Administration lied to get them into the war and that it was a mistake to go to war. The latest, reported in the NYT is this one from the Pew Research Centre.
It has a lot of interesting statistics on the views of Americans in general, and various elite groups. The truly striking figure is Bush’s approval ranking among leading scientists and engineers, drawn from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. In Aug 2001, it was 30 per cent – not strong but not negligible either. In Oct 2005, it’s fallen to 6 per cent, with 87 per cent disapproving. I’d guess that the scientists in the sample are more hostile than the engineers (though, obviously, the engineers must be pretty hostile). Looking around science-oriented blogs and websites, I’d say that the attitude of Academy members is pretty representative of scientists in general. Anytime you find a favourable remark about Bush you can count on it that the site is an astroturf operation like Flack Central Station or the aptly-named Junk Science.
Scientists and engineers are not generally seen as a highly political group, but they can recognise enemies when they see them, and no government in US history has been more anti-science than this one.
Update: In the comments thread at CT and elsewhere, it’s been denied that anyone ever asserted that opposition to the war was anti-American. This post from Media Matters gives a number of instances, and there are more in the CT comments thread. Others, like Instapundit, preferred objectively pro-Saddam
1421
I saw a fascinating doco running over the last two Sundays on the ABC, called 1421: The Year China Discovered America?. This is the title of a book by Gavin Menzies, described as a “historian and former submarine commander”, who claims that the fleet commanded by Zheng He, and known to have sailed to India and East Africa, actually continued on to America and circumnavigated the world.
The first episode gave the historical background on Zheng He and a reasonably sympathetic outline of Menzies’ theory. In the second episode, the pieces of evidence advanced by Menzies were presented in more detail, along with responses from experts on a wide range of topics, nearly all of whom tore Menzies’ claims to shreds (though in a very polite way). He didn’t seem to be fazed and was busy mounting an expedition to look for more evidence.
What struck me, watching this, was how different everything would have been if it had, for some reason, been politically useful for the US Republican Party and their Australian offshoots, to support Menzies’ claim. Then we would have had opinion pieces from Andrew Bolt and the like denouncing the experts as elitists only concerned to suppress dissenting views, claims of ABC bias, blogospheric recycling of bogus quotes, claims that many scientists support the 1421 theory and so on. The whole panoply of postmodernist tricks would be pressed into the service of a patent absurdity, just as we’ve seen with Intelligent Design, global warming denialism, defence of CFCs and so on.
After all these years
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
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
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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TV appearance
I did an interview for Inside Business a while back, about the Internet and similar. A brief snippet went to air last Sunday, though I didn’t see it. There’s a transcript for those interested.
John Quiggin 