Arctic: Area larger than US melted

That’s right, this summer’s record-setting melt of Arctic sea ice eventually killed off anarea larger than the United States. Yet the US continues to drag its feet at Doha, Qatar just as much as anybody else.

That’s even as the alarm bells continue to sound:

The dire climate news — following on the heels of a report Tuesday that found melting permafrost could significantly amplify global warming — comes as delegates from nearly 200 countries struggled for a third day to lay the groundwork for a deal that would cut emissions in an attempt to ensure that temperatures don't rise more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) over what they were in preindustrial times. Temperatures have already risen about 0.8 degrees C (1.4 degrees F), according to the latest report by the IPCC.

And as the Antarctic melt is increasing, too.

And, assuming they don’t get a deal? As I have blogged before, temperatures are likely to hit a rise of at least 4C overall. And, that’s overall, including the water of the world’s oceans, which warms more slowly. We could see temperatures at least 6C, or 11F, higher than preindustrial times by the end of this century.

Which means droughts like this year’s, now intensifying again, will be “the new normal.”

And, not just for the US. China, ahead of us on carbon emissions though still far lower on per-capita emissions, would probably lose one-third of its agricultural output. An 11F rise would certainly nuke much of the Himalayan glacier field on which its, and India’s, rivers depend, as well as causing massive changes to India’s monsoon.

So, yes, the US is at fault for diddling away under Team Obama. So, too, is China for insisting “rich countries” pay more. Chinese leaders, look into your Mahayana Buddhism past: We’re all on the one “big raft” together.

Texans: Blame Rick Perry for gas prices

Map from NRDC via High Country News

Per this post from my go-to magazine about the American West, High Country News, rather than blaming Barack Obama for high gas prices, inside Texas, wingnuts should be honest and blame Rick Perry instead.

Oh, and wingnuts should also be honest and join the reality-based community another way. The future EPA standards will save drivers a lot more in gas money than they will add to the price of a car. Of course, the new EPA standards are full of loopholes, like “credits” for air-conditioning, alt-fuel vehicles (Ford could roll out a shitload of E85 vehicles), etc., but it’s still an improvement indeed, both for saving oil and for reducing carbon emissions.

Does AI engage in behavioralism?

Noam Chomsky/From The Atlantic

Noam Chomsky, a long and persistent critic of artificial intelligence, says yes, or that it at least engages in the equivalent thereof, as related in this extended interview with the Atlantic.

If he is right, and I think he’s at least in the right ballpark, I think this arguably explains why AI, for all its self-touting, is the biggest research science and technology failure this side of peaceful fusion power. Indeed, progress on the two shares a remarkably similar arc.

The interview is indeed worth a read. It’s in-depth, and as the Atlantic editor-reporter notes, it’s rare these days, because everybody wants to interview Chomsky on political topics, not scientific ones.

Beyond his “behaviorist” comments, he suggests AI researchers, and at least some people in fields such as his own cognitive science, are still doing research on mind and intelligence at what might be called the wrong level of abstraction. It brings to mind Dan Dennett’s comment (ironic at times, given Dennett) of “greedy reductionism.”

It also brings to mind Paul Davies’ book “The Eerie Silence,” which criticizes SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, for various blinders it may be wearing in its search.

Chomsky, in the interview, also veers at least a bit into his home turf of linguistics. As part of that, he doesn’t have a lot of good to say about Bayesian statistics.

He says there are better ways for us to try to understand the “noise” with which we are bombarded on a daily basis.

To me, Bayesian statistics seems like “the hip thing” for pop and semi-pop observers of human cultural sociology. All it needs is a new book by Malcolm Gladwell.

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For a more in-depth analysis of what I see Chomsky’s meaning, go here at my philosophy and arts blog.

A better idea for drug screening in Tejas

Gov. Rick Perry continues to tout the tired old wingnut line of drug-testing welfare recipients.

I have a much better idea. Given that yahoo at the mall in San Antonio on Black Friday, let’s drug test applicants for concealed handgun licenses.

And, no, it’s not a total “pox on your house” idea, or joke. The greatest number of homicides in the U.S. involve a victim who knows his or her killer; many of those involve domestic issues. Why shouldn’t we drug-test you? And, include alcohol as a “drug” on the testing, too?

Clay Shirky - new day, same old dishonest New Media blather

Well, Clay Shirky, this time with two co-authors, has largely “done it again.”

He’s commented mordantly on the financial future of journalism without major overhauls, while again largely dissing paywalls as part of the financial side of that overhaul.

As part of that, he (like Jay Rosen and others) has again — deliberately, I have to think — misunderstood Stewart Brand’s “information wants to be free” idea.

He’s again overtouted crowdsourcing’s potential value.

And, he’s exacerbated that by now touting the bright, shiny future of machine-generated journalism, while writing nary a word about ethical and other problems that have already cropped up with machine-generated journalism.

This is all in a new report, portentiously, or perhaps pretentiously, titled, “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present.”

Here’s some insights from the PDF of the report.

Page 12 of text:

Web advertising has never generated anything like the same revenue per reader, mobile looks even worse, and the continuing rise in online advertising generally is now often bypassing traditional news properties altogether. Meanwhile, hoped-for sources of direct fees—pay walls, micropayments, mobile apps, digital subscriptions—have either failed or underperformed.

Of these, digital subscriptions, as practiced at the Los Angeles Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, New York Times and others have done best, but even here the net effect of subscriptions has not made up the print shortfall. Furthermore, because most digital subscriptions are designed to increase print circulation, the short-term effect of digital subscriptions has the immediate effect of making the papers more reliant on print revenue, despite the long-term deterioration of print.

We do not believe the continued erosion of traditional ad revenue will be made up on other platforms over the next three to five years. For the vast majority of news organizations, the next phase of their existence will resemble the last one—cost reduction as a forced move, albeit in a less urgent (and, we hope, more strategic) way, one that takes into account new news techniques and organizational models.

Generally agreed on the “outlook” side, including for mobile. But, if that is what it is, for short, and even medium, term, it makes sense that paywalls should in part be used to drive people (Back) to print. Also, Shirky fails to mention his past general opposition to paywalls.

Page 13 of text:

This restructuring will mean rethinking every organizational aspect of news production—increased openness to partnerships; increased reliance on publicly available data; increased use of individuals, crowds and machines to produce raw material; even increased reliance on machines to produce some of the output.

Shirky et al should know the limitations of machine-based journalism. In case you don’t, they include possible spamming susceptibility roughly along the lines of computer-based trading on Wall Street having computers ping each other back and forth; computer inability to “read” human emotions/motives; and more. For the trio not to report on the problems that have already happened with computer-generated reporting from the human side, such as fake bylines, is simply unacceptable.

Page 22ff of text — The trio talk about the crowd as journalists, while appearing to conflate crowd journalism and crowd eyewitnessing taken to the next phase. An eyewitness with a Twitter account isn’t necessarily a journalist; often, rather, he or she is simply an eyewitness broadcasting his/her observations before being queried by a journalist. There’s really not, IMO, a huge difference between this and old-fashioned tips. There is some difference, but it’s not huge. And for the trio to not even see Twitter eyewitnesses as a continuum to this, again … they’re wanting to see what they want to see, just as I am. As for “social” breaking the reliance on old sources … maybe, or maybe new social sources soon enough become the new old sources.

Crowds and photos? How many crowds, or individuals within a crowd, know journalistic ethics on things such as not photoshopping photos?
 

Or, the guy who did the fake Tweet of false “news” in NYC during Hurricane Sandy?

Related to that, on page 88ff, the group tends to overestimate the power of social media, in specific, in things such as the Arab Spring.

Page 25ff of text — machine journalism. If it’s being done by algorithms, there’s still humans who are needed to set and tweak the algorithm’s parameters. And, as Facebook users know, some algorithms suck. They hugely suck.

On news as institutional and other things … yes, changes are still coming, even to smaller newspapers, whether desired or not. But, the money issue will still be there, and in ways that Shirky et al don’t cover.

Foundational funding, for example? What if the foundation wants particular news covered, or wants a particular “angle”? What if it doesn’t want other news covered? That said, on 108ff, the trio does discuss the issue of further blurring PR and journalism.

Page 90ff — the financial cat is out of the bag. Shirky et al clearly believe that fair use means the old “information wants to be free,” and in its normal, misquoted form.

Per a previous blog post of mine:

Just maybe, more newspaper execs (and “Webbies” in general), are reading the full paragraph that contains Stewart Brand’s “information wants to be free” statement.

If you aren’t familiar with it, I’ll post it now:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The issue at hand is what “free” means, whether to Brand himself, or others.

Also, per this American Journalism Review article, new buyers of newspapers, for whatever reasons they’re buying them, see paywalls as part of the business-side equation.

Indeed, as I blogged last week, many such new owners, and more and more legacy owners, are simply ignoring the new media fluffers like Shirky on paywalls.

And, at bottom line, per one commenter in the AJR story, a newspaper (or a TV station, for that matter) is a business. Yes, the business part of the current model, especially on print journalism, is what’s most broken in the journalism field.

Related to that, as Evgeny Morozov and others have noted, most the new media fluffers have spent most to all their careers teaching at taxpayer-funded public universities. It’s a luxury that people actually owning media operations don’t have.

 That said, the AJR story also notes, by taking elbow-throwing rich new owners as an example, of what could go wrong with foundational funding.

Page 109ff — by giving “shoutouts” to the likes of Twitter, Wikipedia and others, aren’t the trio trying to establish new “legacy organizations”?

Page 113 — This simply doesn’t make sense:

The wastefulness of pack journalism and the empty calories of unimproved wire service news are both bad fits for most institutions in the current environment. The organizations that set out to provide a public with a large part of the news will more often be aggregators, in the manner of Huffington Post or BuzzFeed.

Uhh, aggregators still survive, in part, on the “empty calories of unimproved wire service news.” And, isn’t commentary a filter, and any alleged improvement in the eye of the beholder?

That last graf just showed me that Shirky will write what he wants to write. Touting aggregators, without even noting that much of their aggregation is still wire service, is untruthful. Also not noting that much of the rest of the aggregate is unpaid contributions, much of the rest of the rest is vanity blogging, and that Huff Post has gotten its hands slapped on fair use issues before, is more dishonesty.

Finally, let me add one other important observation.

A theological-philosophical mashup can’t save god

A Jewish scholar, Yoram Hazony, tries to make the claim that the Christian Old Testament/Jewish Tanakh doesn’t support the idea of a god who is both omnipotent and omnibevolent.

He tries to do this with an old angle … claiming the “omnis” all come from Greek philosophy, and they’re not supported by the Old Testament.

Simply not true that they all come from Plato et al, and simply not true that they’re not biblical.

The second issue first.

“Second Isaiah” is probably the clearest Old Testament example of the omnipotence of the biblical god. Isaiah 45:7 NIV:

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.

Second Isaiah has numerous other passages like this.

As for the provenance of omnipotency, etc., in early Judaism, after the return from exile? That came from the Persians that liberated the exiles, namely from their Zoroastrianism that gave us, as well, cosmic dualism, heaven and hell, etc.

That’s why Second Isaiah has passages like this. Ditto for Zechariah and some other late books.

Beyond that, Hazony is wrong in another way.

Daniel, of course WAS written long after Jews had had extensive contact with Greek philosophical thought. Depending on where you butter your bread on the date of this book, Ecclesiastes may reflect Greek philosophical influence, too.

And, the rabbis by the time of Rome certainly did.

A "more plausible" idea of god might exist, but it's not in the Tanakh.

Second, what is this "more plausible" idea? Is it a "god of the gaps"? Is it a magic-god of Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum, wielding advanced enough technology to seem divine to at least a few?

Finally, the idea that the Hebrew imperfect is best translated in this case as “I will be what I will be,” rather than “I am what I am,” in god’s burning bush appearance to Moses, is a weak reed. In English, both tenses can be seen, to some degree, as implying continuity, not a one-time event, or as implying an ongoing status. In either case, the Yahwist author of that portion of Exodus wrote about 450 years before Second Isaiah. If Hazony is going to give us an ounce of exegesis, please give us the whole pound.

And, he should also tell us that modern scholarship thinks the name of Yahweh is yet another botched pun, whose roots are actually in the verb HaWaH, to storm or blow. In short, Yahweh was a Midianite Zeus, with Sinai, like Olympus, an old volcano.