Can Manipulators Mislead Market Observers? – Ryan Oprea, David Porter, Chris Hibbert, Robin Hanson and Dorina Tila.

This study showed that uninformed third parties (observers) are able to make significantly better forecasts of asset values based on market prices (of those values) in an experimental market.  Even when half of the traders attempted to manipulate the market, the observers’ forecasts were no less accurate.

It appears that the observers are able to adjust the market price to remove most, or all, of the effects of manipulation.  To me, this means the observers were using some other form of decision model to arrive at their forecast.  Such a model used the market price along with other trade data, enabling the observer to alter the forecast from that determined by the market price alone.  The authors note that the observers were able to do this, despite the fact that the non-manipulative traders and the observers did not know which direction the incentives for manipulation ran.

This is quite a remarkable result.  It would have been nice to know how they were able to make these accurate forecasts with market price data that had been manipulated.  One of the findings was that upward price manipulation resulted in about a 7% increase in the market price (though there was no similar effect for downward manipulation).  The authors note that further study is required along with robustness tests.  I agree that it might yield very useful insight into the process of making a forecast based on prediction market prices.

In a sense, the observer should be considered a decision-maker.  If decision-makers are able to filter out the effects of manipulation in a real public policy prediction market and make an accurate forecast of the underlying metric, perhaps there is a role for such markets.  I would feel a lot more comfortable if we knew how the decision-maker (observer) is able to accomplish this feat.  Finally, we need to know if this was only possible, because it was a fairly simple experimental model.  Will the same decision-maker’s  ability exist in extremely complex public policy markets?

James’s Empty Blog:

It is hard to miss the irony in people eagerly poring through illegally-obtained private email, looking for ethical breaches by the writers! I’m sure we can all imagine the outrage if one of the emails revealed that a scientist had hacked into one of the sceptics’ computers and was reading all their correspondence. So a bit of perspective is called for here.

James Is A Scientist (IANAS), and he has much good stuff to say (read some of the other posts about the hacked e-mails while you’re there) — but you gotta wonder about a blog that follows such a post with this:

Prawns not in their native habitat. Probably Tastimus deliciousus

Tip of the old scrub brush to Stoat.

The hard core uneducables who make of the hard knot at the center of the anti-science and anti-environmental movement just refuses to jettison their adored myths about science, regardless how many times those myths are shown to be false.

It’s a religious exercise with them, and their faith in error and bad applications of science won’t be shaken.

Have you ever read Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers? Claiming Ruckelshaus an enemy of Africans and Rachel Carson a mass murderer is the new Radical Chic, and constant writing about it the new Mau-mauing.

Natalie Sirkin writes screeds for newspapers in Connecticut, I understand from an odd blog that collects these misdeeds, Don Pesci’s Connecticut Commentary:  Red Notes from a Blue State.

(Pesci has a particular fetish for DDT myths, and Sirkin’s been there, too.  He’s hard-core — no amount of information can sway him.)

Sirkin’s latest screed is “Myths for Fun and Profit,” and includes as one of the myths DDT’s ban in the U.S.  Her complaint is badly worded, but from the brief and grossly wrong explanation, we can see she thinks that DDT shouldn’t have been banned, and that map and calendar challenged, she thinks the ban on using DDT on cotton in the U.S. in 1972 somehow led to a rise in malaria in Africa in the 1980s. (Mosquitoes don’t travel that far, generally, either across the ocean from the U.S. to Africa, nor in time, from 1972 to 1980, nor the other way around.)

Sirkin wrote:

8….DDT, the most wonderful chemical ever. “It is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable,” concluded the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the year before EPA head William Ruckelshaus banned it. Thanks to Ruckelshaus, Rachel Carson, environmentalist extremists, and the WHO, millions of Africans including children are dying or disabled today.

Why, these irrational policy errors?

So I responded:

Banning DDT from agricultural use was an extremely rational act, as vouched for by the summary judgment against the DDT manufacturers in both of the cases brought against EPA for the ban, and as vouched for by the removal of the bald eagle and brown pelican from the Endangered Species List.

Sirkin wrote:  “DDT, the most wonderful chemical ever. ‘It is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable,’ concluded the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the year before EPA head William Ruckelshaus banned it.”

EPA relabeled DDT in 1972, not 1971, effectively banning the use of DDT on cotton.  Under that rule, DDT could be available to fight malaria in the U.S., and DDT was manufactured in the U.S. for export to anyone who wished to use it.  There has never been a ban on using DDT to fight malaria.

But DDT ceased to work well against malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the 1960s.  Africans are not stupid.  Had DDT been a panacea, I’m sure they would have used it.

But while I worry about your implicit denigration of Africans and Asians in suggesting they are somehow incapable of deciding for themselves to use an effective weapon against disease, I am more concerned at your erroneous characterization of DDT’s value.  The National Academy of Sciences made an editing error, so part of your error is understandable.  DDT was never credited with saving 500 million lives.  During the entire time DDT has been available to fight malaria, from 1946 to today, the death rate worldwide from malaria has never exceeded 4 million a year, and since the 1960s the death rate has been about a million year.  At 4 million deaths per year, to save 500 million lives, DDT would have had to have been used for 125 years prior to now.  Insecticidal properties of the stuff were discovered only in 1939, 70 years ago.

At about a million deaths per year, to save 500 million lives, DDT would have had to have been used for 500 years.

Clearly there was an error in math, or confusion in citations.  About 500 million people are afflicted with malaria annually, noted earlier in that NAS book, which is where I think the 500 million figure came from.

But let’s leave that aside for a moment.  That 1970 publication by the National Academy of Sciences was an evaluation of chemicals in the environment.  That sentence crediting DDT with saving so many lives, erroneous as it was, was in a call to ban DDT as quickly as possible, and to increase research to find alternatives to DDT in order to get DDT use completely stopped.

NAS recognized the value of DDT, but said it was too dangerous to keep using.

Don’t cite NAS’s credit to DDT without noting they said we must stop using it, because its dangers outweigh the benefits.

You can find a more thorough discussion of the NAS report at this blog. [You should go see, Dear Reader -- neither Sirkin nor Pesci will likely ever bother.]

Sirkin wrote:
“Thanks to Ruckelshaus, Rachel Carson, environmentalist extremists, and the WHO, millions of Africans including children are dying or disabled today.”

With the great assistance of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and continued efforts of the World Health Organization, several African nations have cut malaria rates by 50% to 85% with the use of bednets and “integrated vector management” (IVM), usually known as integrated pest management (IPM) in the U.S.

Anyone who reads Carson’s astoundingly accurate book knows that she did not call for a ban on DDT, but instead called for the use of an integrated program of pest management.  Had we listened to Rachel Carson in 1962, we could have saved several million children from death, in Africa, from malaria alone.  It is scurrilous, calumnous, and inaccurate to the point of sin to blame Rachel Carson for deaths caused by failure to listen to her and heed her words.

Ruckelshaus acted with full knowledge of the National Academy of Science’s calling for an end to DDT use due to its harms, known and then unknown.  It is foolish to blame people for acting with hard evidence and careful, rational thought.  It’s particularly ungraceful to then accuse them of acting irrationally.

I doubt that either Pesci or Sirkin will ever change their tune.  They’d have to concede that science works, that scientists are not all evil, and that sometimes environmentalists, and even liberals, get things right.  More importantly, they’d have to concede they erred — and that would be like Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West taking a shower.

White House Reporter Using Shorthand

We journalists like to think of ourselves as scrappy purists. Give us a reporter’s tablet and a Bic pen, and we craft prose that makes readers smell the waffly-goodness of a corn dog at the state fair, hear the grating nasal tone of the politician’s condescension, and see the glistening sheath of ice the winter storm slipped on the birch tree’s limb.

All this from scribbled notes and a photographic memory.

For as long as I can remember, my print journalism teachers in high school and college, as well as some wonderful editors,  looked down their noses at audio tape recorders. Relying on electronics was not considered real journalism. After all, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t need a tape recorder to break Watergate. It was, in fact, admitting some reporting deficiency to need an electronic device — like  we were Hell’s Angels bikers with training wheels.

Ironically, however,  journalism students in the United States —for the most part — are not required to take shorthand. (In the United Kingdom and Australia, most journalism students must perfect shorthand before graduating from college.) Most of us U.S. reporters rely on some self-taught skill of eliminating vowels or using stick-man symbols. It is, indeed, not perfect — especially when time has lapsed between note-taking and filing the story or when, say, your pen is low on on ink and you miss a few sentences reaching for your fresh one.

After 22 years of reporting, editing and mentoring interns, I have become very opinionated about this practice: Journalists should use all the technology afforded them to ensure accuracy. Young journalists should be taught shorthand in college and modern journalists should use both a notebook and a digital recorder when conducting interviews.

Holding firm to some silly tough-guy rule helps neither the writer nor the reader. To wit: When I was stringing for Bloomberg back in the mid-90s, I interviewed one of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and she gave me an important quote about the possible rise in the fed funds rate. In my notes, I had written the quote with an up arrow — so my first read of the scribble implied that she said the rates were likely to climb. Listening to the tape, I realized I had missed the key words “not likely” — completely changing the quote. On the flip side, when I was crafting the profile of Under Secretary of Education Sara Martinez Tucker, my mini cassette tape (pre-digital recorders) got mangled at the end — and I had to rely on my notes for some crucial information.

In an age when telling apart a trained journalist from a community blogger is difficult, journalists should do everything in their power to use best practices… to deliver to our readers the *most* accurate quotes, warts and all. And, more importantly, as journalists, we must always put ourselves in our subjects’ shoes. Would I want a reporter taping my interview to ensure statement accuracy? You bet your press pass.

Me? I use a digital recorder and a notebook. And I record my telephone interviews, always with permission from the source at the other end.

Go ahead and call me a wimpy journalist. But remember, I’ve got it all on tape.

Robin Hanson and others have suggested that prediction markets be used to help shape the direction of public policy.  The current hot issue is how to combat global warming and its effects on the environment. 

Matt Yglesias has argued that big money can manipulate markets.  So, we should not use prediction markets for this purpose.  On paper, prediction markets provide monetary or ego-related rewards for truthfully revealing private information by trading.  In this sense, prediction markets are said to “incentivize accuracy”.  When the incentives for manipulating the market price are greater than the incentives for not doing so, it is obvious how traders will act.  Matt argues that prediction markets that are prone to manipulation, such as climate change futures, will make inaccurate predictions, and any policy that is based on these will be inappropriate.  I agree.

Robin Hanson, on the other hand, believes that big money manipulators can only improve the accuracy of prediction markets.  He goes so far as to say that prediction markets are “especially incorruptible”.  I need to read all of his papers on this subject in their entirety, however, based on his own summary of the findings, I will make a few comments, now.  [I promise I will read them, fully, and update this post if necessary]

Robin (and others) argue that prediction market accuracy improves “as more big money powers are known to want to manipulate them.”  Manipulators are in essence noise traders.  Markets with more noise traders are more accurate, because informed traders are attracted to the possibility of profiting by trading with the noise traders. 

He qualifies his conclusion by stating that “this isn’t an absolute guarantee.”  Then, he suggests that we try it before we condemn it.  However, before we do so, I suggest we look at the theory more closely.  We may find that it works as well as the neoclassical economic framework in economics.  It works fine in a hypothetical, assumption-simplified world, but fails miserably in practice. 

Let’s look at some of the simplifying assumptions in Robin Hanson’s application of prediction market theory.  One, the informed traders are more powerful than the manipulators, or noise traders.  In Hanson’s experiments, the manipulators are able to affect the market price, but the informed traders quickly bring prices back to an accurate level. 

What if informed traders aren’t wealthier (than the manipulators)?

In a typical prediction market, greater trader wealth is accumulated by being better informed than other traders and making trades that payoff more frequently.  By virtue of their greater wealth, informed traders have more power to influence the market than uninformed traders.  This is a necessary condition to mitigate against manipulative behaviour.

In a public, real money market, trader wealth may have nothing at all to do with knowledge about that, or any other, outcome.  Manipulative traders can simply bring wealth to the market.  Furthermore, if such wealth is known to other traders, it may send a false signal to all traders about the manipulator’s “expert” status.  That is, rather than being viewed as a manipulator, the trader may be seen as an expert.  This is especially likely in markets where it is difficult (or impossible) for any individual to have enough knowledge to make an “informed” trade.  Even if you place restrictions on wealth that may be traded, so as to prevent a small group of traders from manipulating the market, if the stakes are high enough, the big money manipulator will simply finance a large number of other traders to carry out the manipulation.  I think many big money players would find the incentives large enough in the global warming debate.

What if most (or all) of the traders are uninformed? 

I would argue that as long as the collective information set is sufficiently complete, the market could obtain a reasonably accurate prediction.  If this is not the case, we will likely see a very flat distribution of predictions, reflecting the high degree of uncertainty.  Such a result would be practically useless for policy decision-making, other than to indicate that we need much more information about the subject.  Unfortunately, for an extremely complex issue, like climate change, it is highly unlikely that the market participants will have a “complete” set of information.  It is doubtful whether any of the participants would be able to properly weigh and assess all of the information, in order to make a truly accurate prediction of any climate change metric.  There are simply no, known frameworks for making such assessments, which leads us to…

Another possibility is that if traders have very little personal information about the subject, they will instinctively look to the others (the market) for guidance.  The prediction market principle of independence begins to break down.  If the market price has been manipulated, there is a good chance that the non-manipulative traders (notice I didn’t say “informed”) may “read” information in the price that isn’t true and place their trades accordingly. 

Public vs. Enterprise Prediction Market Manipulation

One of the reasons I haven’t looked into the issue of market manipulation is that it isn’t much of a problem in enterprise prediction markets.  Generally, we expect EPMs to have a sufficient number of informed traders, who tend to be “wealthier” than manipulators.  There are some noise traders, but not too many.  I agree with Robin Hanson’s assessment that manipulation will be overcome in enterprise markets.  Consequently, I’ve had little interest in looking at this issue.

However, prediction markets on public policy issues are different.  Apart from the market participants, there are many groups that have vested interests in the implications that might flow from a public policy prediction market outcome, and they will seek to influence the market prediction, by trading or by other means.  For example, big business may try to influence the information available to all traders to achieve the desired prediction.  This may take the form of advertising, public announcements, privately funded research, and all forms of lobbying activity.  Governments issue their own propaganda.  This information may be corroborated with price changes in the prediction market, lending credibility to inaccurate information.  Unless these prediction markets can be insulated from the manipulative influence of non-trading interest groups, they will not be able to prevent or eliminate manipulation of the market predictions.

How Manipulation is Nullified (or not)

Robin Hanson states that the informed traders must know that the noise traders want to manipulate the market.  In order to profit from this knowledge, they also need to know which way they wish to manipulate the market price. 

In a global warming market, big business, carbon emitters would likely exert downward pressure on any metric that shows adverse effects from their activities, so that legislators would be less likely to impose costly laws to prevent such activities or to compensate others for the effects.  On the other hand, “tree-hugging” organizations may wish to increase the market price, so that such legislation is more likely to be enacted.  In both cases, the truly informed trader must know who the trader is and the trader’s motive for trading.  Since there is no way to prevent a trader from diguising his identity, it is impossible to properly match the motive with the trader.  It also begs the following question.

How might the informed trader distinguish between a manipulative trader and a misinformed honest trader?  I don’t have that answer, but unless it can be answered,  it may be impossible to ensure that attempts at manipulation will lead to more accurate predictions, at least in complex, public policy prediction markets. 

Conclusion

In theory, it is a nice idea to try and accurately aggregate as much information as possible in order to determine the best course of action in public policy decisions.  Most public policy decisions are remarkably complex with numerous tradeoffs among competing interests.  All decision-making benefits from more information that is more accurate and more timely.  Unfortunately, simply inserting a prediction market framework into the decision-making process does not eliminate the political biases that have been, and will always be, there. 

While it may be possible to operate public policy prediction markets for some issues, their use in the climate change or global warming debate is questionable.  Not only can there be no guarantee of manipulation-free markets, we wouldn’t even know if market predictions had been manipulated.  If actual public policy were to depend on false readings from such markets, the potential for significant misallocation of resources is immense.  It is simply too great a risk to consider at this time, in my opinion.

New memo to Fox News employees: “It is more important to get it right, than it is to get it on.”

Yeah, I’m sure they’re gonna get right on that. I notice that Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity still have jobs, so apparently it’s only the unintentional errors that can land you in hot water. This is, after all, the network that basically claims it has a constitutional right to lie to its viewers.

Just the other day Google announced its intentions to automatically generate closed caption files on a select group of YouTube files.  The story quickly made it to the NY Times and all over the blogosphere, as it rightfully should.  The idea is to eventually rollout the capability across YouTube for all users to test.  With 20 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, that’s a lot of text being created!

At its core, this is a brilliant move by Google to improve YouTube search (and advertising) capabilities.  But Google’s announcement, largely because it’s Google, also puts the accessibility issue in front of the entire country for a change.  Captions are mandated for much of television, but they are only beginning to get some attention on the internet, well until now.  Representative Ed Markey, the same Congressman who made the original push for closed captioning on television, introduced H.R. 3101, the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009, during this session of Congress, and it currently has 19 co-sponsors.  This is actually the second attempt at getting a bill passed that would mandate an improved user experience for the hearing impaired.

Thanks to one of the most talked about technology companies of our time, closed captioning is getting attention all over the internet.  Anyone who works with online video is now paying attention to closed captioning.  Not only are we empowering the hearing impaired, but in a virtual world that seems to be driven by search and discovery, video can now be made more “accessible” than ever.

So for a business that is centered on providing high quality, time synchronized transcripts, what does this announcement mean?

Well, it could mean a lot of things.  First, let’s look into this new Google service.  Google will deploy the same technology that powers Google Voice across YouTube to enable the creation of text.  This means they will be using automatic speech recognition (ASR) to create the caption files.  Using ASR on audio and video is not a new concept, but it’s new at this scale.  We’ve commented on our experiences with ASR capbilities in the past.  In fact, we’ve even played with the very engine that will be front and center for the YouTube initiative.

We’ve spoken with many people who have tested ASR solutions.  Usually, if they are talking to us, they weren’t satisfied!  The truth of the matter is that ASR will be good enough for some people, and it won’t be good enough for others.  80% accuracy (at it’s best and in studio quality recording conditions) leaves a lot to be desired.  In fact, Google even admits that results can be somewhat amusing when they’re off.  On the search front, the most critical keywords tend to be the most unique and, therefore, least common to be recognized accurately.  Google’s announcement does not change that, it just makes an ASR solution easier to use and free to consume.  In many cases, Google has likely provided a medium for people who may never have put captions on their video with the ability to do so with very little effort.  Google has also made the search benefits of captions glaringly obvious.

Ultimately, the organizations that require (or believe in) high quality output for captions and search will be willing to pay for cleaned up text.  There are significant benefits to the high-quality approach, whether it be accurate search results or truly legible transcripts.  Branding is also a critical issue for many organizations who add a text component to their video offering.

We at 3Play Media will continue building high quality solutions that make multimedia more accessible for everyone.  More people than ever are aware of the benefits of captions and time-synchronized transcripts now.  We have some new product launches on the way that will build off these very benefits, and we can’t wait to show the world how their online video experience can be changed forever.

Accuracy of Results vs Voting Method

Graph by: dunno source via Graph Jam Builder

I am that girl—the one who leaves the gym, t-shirt drenched in sweat, hair piled on top of head–bird nest style–previously light blue shorts now almost dark blue, and mascara smudges beneath her eyes–warrior style–who hopes that no ones gets too close or else their nose will NOT be thanking them. Yup—I have left the gym and overheard people (yes, people—not person) say, “Oh my god … gross … that girl is so sweaty!”

I happen to take great pride in my sweating abilities. Once or twice I have been embarrassed, but nothing feels better than the completion of a kick-ass workout accompanied by those “I feel so good neurotransmitters,” otherwise known as endorphins.

With all my heart pumping and sweat drenching, I wonder how many calories I’m torching. I know the gym machines always exaggerate, but by how much? Then—I received my belated birthday present from my dad—a Mio Motiva Petite Pink Watch! Can we say … exciting?!?

My Mio Experiment

The Mio is a watch that provides electrocardiogram (ECG) readings of your heart. All this means is that it has built-in sensors, allowing it to measure the electrical activity of your heart’s contractions. Simply put, the watch allows a pretty accurate reading of  your heart rate.

What’s even more exciting is that my Mio can track how many calories I burn during my sweat sessions.

With this knowledge I set out on a calorie burning experiment. I strapped on my Mio Motiva Petite Pink watch—what a name, huh?—and chronicled my workouts over the last few days. Note—I only used it when doing cardio.

Below are my results:

Machine Causing Me to Sweat Buckets	Time On Machine (minutes)	Calories Burned According to Machine	Calories Burned According to Mio
	60	7oo	500
	30	292	242
	20	232	215
	60	612	696
	60	915	597

As you can see, my Mio results were all lower than the machines’ estimate of calories burned. The elliptical-type machines were most “off.” Now, I know what you’re all thinking … “Well, how do you know your Mio is right?” To answer your question—I don’t. BUT, I do know that it is more accurate than the gym machines and that the results more closely match the rule of thumb for calorie burn—approximately 100 calories per every 10 minutes of heart-pumping, sweat-dripping exercise.

Just as the machines do, the watch asks for your age, gender, and weight and times the length of your workout. But, it also continuously assesses your heart rate, measuring your level of exertion. It then takes into account of all these factors, does some calculations, and finally, displays your “torched” number. Oh, how I wish it matched the machine’s number, that would mean a lot more chocolate covered raisins for me, but nop … maybe next time…

Now, my goal is NOT to parade my Mio—though I do adore the watch. But, rather to simply show that the machines in the gyms, particularly the “ski-like” ones, overestimate the number of calories torched. To more closely examine this point, I turn to one of my all-time favorite New York Times pieces by Ms. Gina Kolata, Putting Very Little Weight in Calorie Counting Methods. Kolata writes,

Claude Bouchard, an obesity and exercise researcher who directs the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., found that if, for example, the average number of calories burned with an exercise is 100, individuals will burn anywhere from 70 to 130 calories.

What Determines Your Exercise Burn?

• Level of exertion (aka are you barely blushing OR are you creating the next Niagara Falls?)
• Time exercising
• Calories burned per day, regardless of exercise (aka resting metabolic rate)
• Age
• Sex
• Size
• Body weight
• Body composition

What you do while on the machine also matters. William Haskell, an exercise physiologist at Stanford, explains this in Kolata’s article,

…with treadmills, the calories are not accurate if you hang on the bars. Hanging onto the rails reduced the number of calories burned by 40 to 50 percent. The same thing happened with stair-climbing machines.“I’ve seen people hanging on stair climbers who think they are doing 1,200 calories an hour,” Dr. Haskell said. “They probably are doing 600 calories an hour.”

A Message From Me to You

Ladies and gents—keep up those sweat sessions, just don’t take the calorie counts on the machines number for number—they’re not accurate. However, I must note that out of any machine, the treadmill is most accurate in terms of calorie counts.  BUT, keep in mind that not one “calorie counting tool” is dead-on, since there are MANY factors that determine how many calories your muscles are burning, and they just can’t be measured precisely by the average Joe or Jane in the gym. But, hey—if you have a device that can do this, ya better get on that … you’ll make a lot of moola.

Also—exercise to keep you feeling good and healthy. This is SO Important! (you know it is because I put it in red). Time and time again, it’s shown that those who exercise are happier, healthier, and more energized.  Remember—we’re in this to be Healthy Inside and Out!

Lastly, the nutrition in me must tell you this–just because you worked out, doesn’t mean you are entitled to a double serving of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream . I hate to be the wind that ruffles your feathers, but it’s true. Think about it, if you run for 30 minutes, you torch about 300 calories—which equals about 25 wheat thins (yes, even the Multi-Grain kind) and a slice of cheese. Hence, it is important to still keep your nutrition basics in your mind’s forefront. To nab some workout fuel tips, read my post—Fooding the Fire.

Til next time, I will leave you with the words of Jillian Michaels (yea, I know she “sold out” with her line of “diet” pills, BUT you can’t deny that the woman knows how to work you out!),

Don’t forget you have to be smart about what you eat. Don’t erase all the work [you] did … by eating badly. Make sure that you’re eating healthy, staying focused on your workouts, and remember that this is about … being strong, being healthy and making time for you…

Want to get a better idea of how many calories you’re burning during your sweat sessions? Click HERE for a “Calories Burned Calculator.”

Happy Healthifying!

What are your thoughts on gym machine calorie counters?

Satire, hoax, fact — how can we tell the difference?

Maybe more importantly, how can we tell early on that the “Climategate” kerfuffle, involving purloined, but otherwise dull e-mails from climate scientists, is nothing to worry about?

Look at history!  Remember Newtongate?  Read it here, at Carbon Fixated.

If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.

When you read some of these letters, you realise just why Newton and his collaborators might have preferred to keep them confidential. This scandal could well be the biggest in Renaissance science. These alleged letters – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists behind really hard math lessons – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in covering up the truth, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

But perhaps the most damaging revelations are those concerning the way these math nerd scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence to support their cause.

What kind of conspiracy keeps calculus being taught to innocent children today?  Exactly the same conspiracy that causes scientists to sound the alarms about climate change.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Tim Lambert at Deltoid.

by paulabowles

Many lecturers and teachers will recognise the feeling of disheartenment when confronted by an undergraduate essay containing multiple references to Wikipedia. Despite regular exhortations for students to resist its charms, its appeal seems almost overwhelming. Although the site is loved by many, its major selling point of completely open access (i.e. ‘anyone can contribute to or edit’ its entries) is precisely why academics shake their heads in frustration.

However, in a recent interview with Emma Barnett of The Telegraph, Jimmy Wales (co-founder) appears to suggest that things are about to change at Wikipedia. Most noticeable is the creation of new measures, described as “flagged revisions”. In essence, this will mean that all new submissions and edited content, which relate to a living person, will have to be authenticated by one of Wikipedia’s editors, prior to online publication. Despite criticism that the whole ethos of the Wikipedia site will be degraded by the introduction of pre-publication censorship, Wales is convinced that this is the way forward. He points to a slowing of growth amongst new articles on the English version, suggesting that contributors are now concentrating on ensuring the articles already available are accurate, rather than simply adding more and more new material.

Whether the promise of ‘an increasing focus on quality and referencing’ will be able to sway the academic community, remains to be seen. However, the sheer volume of information and the speed with which it is checked and uploaded, makes it unlikely that Wikipedia is anywhere near reaching the stringent standards required for academia and education.

Read More

Allison Cavanagh on ‘From Culture to Connection: Internet Community Studies’

A friend was asking me how many pages of my book my seemingly endless research will take up.  It won’t take up too much.  Maybe ten to fifteen pages total.  But I need them to be accurate.  I have a bone with BS in books.  I get we’re working with fiction here, but there’s no reason to insult reality or the reader while we’re at it.

I just read a fun book set in medieval England.  The author clearly knew the period rather well.  My quibbles with details were less about the facts, than about the choices. 

A)  The author chose to paint the Church with a wide, unforgiving brush.  No room was given at all to honest clerics–to their very possibility.  None.

B)  The author chose to depict a Jew burnt at the stake in punishment for bringing about the plague–a terrible and terrifying reality for entire communities of Jews in medieval Europe, despite their innocence–but then made the oddest decision about how to depict the victim.  The Jew was depicted as–get this–a Christian.

WTF?  This Jew was basically a Jew for Jesus, without the title.  Why?  I can’t think why.  Or rather, I can’t think that it’s accurate to the Jews of this period.  So the author made another choice.  Who knows what the reason was. 

Does the author doubt the reader will sympathize with a Jew, an “other”?  Did the author simply struggle for a way to include a subplot featuring a Jew as well as a subplot allowing her to reveal that reading (Christian) scripture was forbidden to layfolk during this period, and so she meshed both stories into one?  If the former, it’s an insult to readership and diminishes the value of the historical accuracy the book otherwise edges toward.  If the latter, uh, that’s just wrong.  It’s two separate issues affecting different peoples.

Add to this bundle the fact that the heroine is also an accomplished markswoman, rider and swimmer, and the story veers just off the set, stumbling off stage as I reel, making up my mind whether the pages are turning fast enough for me to stick with the ride.  That’s not what one wants:  disrupting internal credibility such that the reader breaks to make a conscious choice–not to believe, but to enjoy despite not believing at all.  To enjoy while seeing tricks played before their eyes.

I did choose to ride on, as it happened.  But the set had crumbled.  Maybe that’s the issue.  The center did not hold.  Things fell apart as the centripetal force crumbled.  Credibility was lost in the malaise.

There’s fiction, and then there’s license.  The twain are not the same.  A book ought not to purport history to be its set when it’s only its gloss.

Used to be, I avoided all historical fiction.  I didn’t want to absorb a sense of a time, how things went down, etc, from a novel, and then in my ignorance, assume it accurate.  Now I try read quality fiction almost regardless of genre, and only read historical fiction when it’s fearlessly self-described as fantasy.  Sometimes I wonder at myself, choosing to write a book which touches on history, when I have that strong bias.

Fiction is one thing, but glaring misdirection or toying with facts–nope.  Toy with mysteries, with the unknown.  Ponder the significance of known and unknown occurences–sure.  Make up stories that could fit, or alternate realities that you call by their honest names–yes.  But to place a novel in a period or in a location and then to violate its truths– that’s just not cool.   It’s a lazy choice, even if the book is still an enjoyable read.

What are your thoughts about the same, in books you’ve read or even are writing?

Ishakpasha Palace, overlooking eastern Turkey

On the 18th November 2009 a group of Physics teachers from South Wales met in Caerleon School to build giant air cannons out of a 200 litres water butt. I organised the event with Cerian Angharad’s help (South Wales Network Coordinator) and the lovely cakes that Ann Dunster (Head of Physics at the school) provided! All the equipment could be found in Wickes (though the first time I went to buy some of these huge water butts in the Cardiff branch, they told me they either got lost, or stolen… Mmm I still have to figure that one out).

Cutting holes through the butt

This workshop is very useful if you are organising some spectacular activities for your Open Evening. I trialled it in my school (Croesyceiliog School, Cwmbran) and both parents and children loved it. In fact, we filled the giant air cannon with fog from a smoke machine and started shooting at people, who would see these massive smoke circles getting towards them and eventually blasting in their faces! But the fun was not over because we used McFlurry cups and tops to get the children to make their own mini-airzookas. And again the kids loved it, because they could take a little present home that costed nothing to my department, but was good fun for them.

Blasting the cameraman!

The below video shows how you can make you mini-aizooka. All you need to do is going to McDonald and order a McFlurry icecream. The rest you probably have in your house!

But what is the educational value, you might think! Well, there are a number of projects and experiments you pupils could carry out with their mini-airzookas:

1. They could make some observations about what affects the shape, speed and distance travelled by the smoke ring. E.g. by tapping the rubber in different ways, by pulling it and releasing it, etc…

2. They could try to measure the speed of the smoke rings and/or the distance travelled when they tap using more and more force. This activity could generate some very good discussions about reliability of results and method.

3. They could also measure the diameter of the rings at a certain distance from the cannon.

4. A follow on from experiment 2 could be a project were they need to design and build the most reliable tapping mechanism they can. You could even embed this as part of a long term project on electromagnetism, as the children could try to make an eletromagnetic tapper, and so on.

Please, add some more suggestions as comments!

Coming back to our

This blog looks at talking points, arguments, quotes and claims from Republicans and Democrats on the current health debate and verifies their accuracy.

I got a letter in the mail the other day from an energy company that wants to build a nuclear power plant a couple miles from my house.

The letter was pretty much some pre-emptive propaganda to prepare the community to accept a big corporation’s* nuclear facility that had supposedly (according to what they told us last year) pulled out because they couldn’t find a suitable area. It included un-pro phrases like “that’s just media hype” to describe opposing viewpoints. They made several claims and promises, so I want to add my comments to those claims:

Nuclear power is a preferable clean energy source that does not contribute to health issues and Global Warming.

And even less so are our existing Hydroelectric dams, which supply all the power our region needs, don’t cause health problems, don’t pollute the rivers with “accidental” releases of radioactive water, and don’t cause emit greenhouse gasses that may contribute to Global Warming (like AEHI I’ve chosen to capitalize Global Warming out of respect for Al Gore who is still trying to trademark the term).

Construction of a new reactor will create four to five years of jobs for as many as 5,000 workers

So where are these 5,000 temporary workers going to come from, and where will they be going once the reactors are completed? Are they going to be members of the existing community (which numbers around 5,000 as it is), or are they going to be contractors from elsewhere? If its anything like the construction work that pulled into town after Obama’s stimulus packages were dealt, they’re going to be big companies from out of town or out of state. Their impact on the local economy will be them buying groceries at the local store, eating fast food, buying fuel and maybe lodging or rentals. That’s great for people in those industries – they’ll get extra income for four to five years while the rest of us continue to wither and die in a stagnant economy – but then what? What happens five years later when half the population of a town that instantly doubled in size packs up and moves out?

1,000 to 1,500 workers will have permanent jobs once construction is completed and will make up to $80,000 a year each

They said these workers only need a high school diploma or GED and some minimal specialty training. Is that training going to be provided by the company to encourage existing residents to work there, or are they – like most big companies that have come into the area – simply going to bring their own staff or advertise and recruit in the “nearby” (70 miles away) big city?

Nuclear plants will contribute $2 billion in GDP to the local area during construction and $1 billion to the state GDP during operations

Read that closely. During construction, $2 billion will be pumped into the “local” economy. I seriously doubt that means our town of 5,000 – it likely includes cities off in the distance who will be shuttling their workers out here from their existing jobs in the big city. The remaining $1 Billion is for the state. It does not say “annually”. Not that these numbers really mean anything anyway – AEHI, the company that wants to build the nuclear facility, has never built a reactor before, and they don’t really have any way of accurately predicting how much money it will bring to the area or to the state.

Nuclear power is the lowest-cost energy and more reliable than solar or wind energy

Great! But is this a guarantee that the local power monopoly will lower its rates? Absolutely not! In fact, rates will likely continue to increase, as they have in other parts of the country when new energy plants spring up. What happens is there are now 1,000 – 5,000 high-paid people living in town, so the cost of living increases, which inspires groceries, taxes, real estate and utilities to increase their rates too. If you think Idaho Power or whoever is going to lower their rates after being involved in a multi-billion dollar construction project, think again!

67% of Americans favor building new nuclear plants

Because the majority of Americans don’t have to live downwind or down stream from one! I think it would make more sense to give the big cities (the primary consumers and reason for building these things) the nuclear plants. Big cities are usually built on water sources, and it would save money both in the construction and in piping the power to town to have the reactor perched right next to downtown. Build it in Boise, or Portland, or what ever place will benefit most from it, and stop stealing our wilderness, our farmlands, and our hunting areas!

Environmentalists, including one of the founders of Greenpeace, support nuclear power

Again, because it’s not in THEIR backyard! All the prominent environmentalists live in big cities and are severely detached from real nature and true wilderness. I’m a little suspicious about this claim too, because it, like the others, doesn’t bother to back up its claim. I guess AEHI thought the rednecks can’t read or haven’t heard of the internet!

The reactor will only use about one million gallons of water a day

This cracks me up. If they knew how arid it is here, or that the only source of water at the location they want to ruin (Big Willow Road & Stone Quarry Road) is unlikely to reliably provide “a million gallons of water a day”, maybe they’d re-think this thing. One has to wonder here they are REALLY planning to get the water – are they going to pump it out of the Payette or Snake Rivers? Will they be stealing our groundwater?

Since the nuclear industry started in 1957, no one has been killed, injured, or even improperly exposed to radiation at a commercial nuclear plant

This is a flat out lie. I thought maybe they used the word “commercial” to differentiate between the numerous military, nuclear testing labs and other non “commercial” nuclear facilities, but even using the word “commercial” doesn’t cover this one up. Unlike their propaganda, which provides no sources, I will provide a very good link here to a list of nuclear accidents and deaths, including several which were at commercial facilities: http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html#power

Robert Peabody, 37, died at the United Nuclear Corp. fuel facility in Charlestown, Rhode Island on July 24th, 1964 after being exposed to a lethal dose of radiation from some Uranium that went critical.  In the years that followed, 6 workers died from being scalded to death in commercial nuclear facilities. There have been several accidents where workers were accidentally exposed to radioactive water, or came into other contact with low-level radioactive waste.

As residents of the area – and unlikely to get a job in the facility – we really shouldn’t be as concerned about the workers who were injured or killed. Yes, it’s tragic, but what we should be worried about are the thousands of incidences in which radioactive material (storage containers, water that is released into local rivers and lakes, radioactive gasses, etc) has been inadvertently released into the public’s drinking supp.lies, food supplies and air.

“Despite media hype, the Three Mile Island incident did not harm any workers or members of the community”

to counter this, a direct quote from the site I referenced above:

A major accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. At 4:00 a.m. a series of human and mechanical failures nearly triggered a nuclear disaster. By 8:00 a.m., after cooling water was lost and temperatures soared above 5,000 degrees, the top portion of the reactor’s 150-ton core melted. Contaminated coolant water escaped into a nearby building, releasing radioactive gasses, leading as many as 200,000 people to flee the region. Despite claims by the nuclear industry that “no one died at Three Mile Island,” a study by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, showed that the accident led to a minimum of 430 infant deaths.

Wow! Should we trust an industry and business that claims 430 babies are not members of a community?

Spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed for re-use in power reactors

Great! I want to know this, though: When nuclear fuel is arriving at your reactor, or when spent fuel is leaving it, will you be trucking it on public highways through Emmett to Arco, through Payette & Ontario to Washington, flying it in over our neighborhoods and farm lands, or bringing it in on a train and unloading in downtown Payette? I can’t speak for the rest of my community, but I don’t like any of those plans. Maybe you’ll just send it up willow creek on a barge?

When they build their plant on Big Willow, our state (and certainly our area) will lose one of the last hunting areas where there are still actually deer. We will be losing one of the only places to ride dirt bikes and practice our marksmanship. Public land will become part of private industry, and the public – and wildlife – will not longer have that place to roam. They haven’t told us how many acres they will be robbing us of, but don’t be fooled into thinking “it will only be a few hundred”.

Those who support AEHI’s desire to build a nuclear power facility i our backyard do so out of points of ignorance. They’ve bought into the hype : that it will create thousands of jobs for existing residents of the area, that it will lower our power bills, that nuclear energy is “100% safe”, that this company is experienced in building reactors in desert areas.

The truths need to be made known. AEHI has never built any nuclear reactors, and their experience in “consulting alternative energy executives” is questionable (they never offer verifiable proof, and their consulting company was only in existence for one year, ending in 2006 because they didn’t pay a $50 fee).  They don’t have the money to build the reactor, they don’t have the money to pay people to ensure it is safe, and they don’t have the money to buy the 5,100 acres of land they want to steal from the public. They don’t even have the money to proofread their website or hire a decent graphic designer!

“Progressives” who live far away from the proposed nuclear sites want to distract you and point out AEHI’s primary opposition, the “Snake River Alliance” has failed at their attempts to stop AEHI. I have to ask, does that mean the SRA have something wrong with them? Heck no! It simply means that the same kind of market saturation-driven consumer-mentality exploited by Apple, Obama, AT&T and Lady Gaga is helping AEHI develop “loyalty” based on its own campaign of “hope” (you get a job) and “change” (the wilderness into something to recharge your iPhone).

So what do we do about it?

1. Educate yourself about Nuclear Energy from a variety of sources other than those happily provided by AEHI. They’re just going to tell you the things that will make them look harmless or beneficial.
2. Educate yourself on the dangers that a nuclear facility will bring to the community. What happens when the creek runs dry? Where will they store waste? How deep is the water table? What geologic composition might prevent leaks from contaminating our ground water?
3. How will area wildlife (like the endangered squirrels – S. brunneus endemicus -  that ONLY live in the Payette foothills!) respond to further building on their territory, or to strange sounds, smells, or even release of radiation?
4. Since AEHI has never built a reactor before, it is difficult to analyze their past reactors to see how many local people actually got hired on to work there, or what kind of business it has brought to the community. Try to find examples of similar communities and other energy companies to estimate the likelihood of local citizens getting jobs with the company. It is likely there will not be the kind of help to existing residents that AEHI is promising.
5. Keep your eyes open for any opportunities to learn more about their plans, and certainly any opportunities to voice your opinions!
6. Find out what kind of liability AEHI will have if/when something goes wrong.
7. If nuclear fuel or waste will be railed through our town, voice your concern!
8. Contact politicians and neighbors to raise awareness after you’ve studied these things.
9. Keep in mind, if you fail to prevent this from being built and it is revealed that there aren’t that many jobs for locals, it does present a danger to the community, and power rates actually go up, it will be too late to change your mind. The land it sits on will be lost forever. You won’t be able to evict 1,000 people who moved into our little community to work at the plant, and any poison that spills into the soil, goes to our ground water, leaks into our rivers or puffs up into the atmosphere will be there for thousands of years.

* It turns out AEHI isn’t really a big company. They put on a big front, but only have $409,000 in assets, no source of income, and their big financial backers haven’t given them any money yet because they’re waiting for AEHI’s due diligence. Despite documented claims that the CEO hasn’t really ever run any big businesses (and looking at their unprofessional website and mailings, I’m not surprised), a lot of people are still cheering them on for the promises of “5,000 new jobs”, “lower energy costs” and “cleaner energy”.

Additional Links:

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2009/02/aehi-finds-sec.html
AEHI never built a reactor before and doesn’t have enough money to buy a house.

http://nuclearstreet.com/blogs/nuclear_power_news/archive/2009/10/20/aehi-submits-application-for-new-idaho-nuclear-plant-site-10206.aspx
AEHI wants 5,100 acres outside Payette

http://smellydeadfish.blogspot.com/2009/06/slime-trail-continues.html
Source One Capital hasn’t given them any money

http://aehitruth.blogspot.com/2009/06/grace-glens-consulting.html
Inconsistencies in CEO’s story

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article2265768.ece
The missing link: Greenpeace’s Stephen Tindale Now Advocates Nuclear Energy

http://www.alternateenergyholdings.com/
AEHI’s Website (complete with second-rate graphics and typo’s!)

UPDATE:

AEHI’s website is trying to promote their project to the suckers in Payette on the following points:

• Thousands of high paying jobs
• Better schools, hospitals, police, fire
• Better roads
• 5 times more tax revenue
• Appreciating property
• Low cost energy to attract other industry
• Idaho is out of baseload power
• Northwest and west coast have critical power shortages with dams closing and prohibitions on coal plants
• The nation has a national security problems due to energy shortfalls
• The only power source that can significantly address “Global Warming” according the UN study on Climate Change

taking my cue from them, I suggest anyone who is NOT in favor of nuclear power in Payette to email your concerns to the following people:

lroyston@payettecounty.org
imachuca@payettecounty.org

and ALSO SEND A PAPER COPY to:

PAYETTE COUNTY PLANNING AND ZONING
PAYETTE COUNTY COURTHOUSE
1130 3rd Ave N. Room #107
PAYETTE, IDAHO 83661

AEHI does not care about this community, they care about making money themselves! That’s why they sent a single letter to area residents that is nothing more than a biased “look at how good a nuclear plant in your town would be!” piece of propaganda. The make a lot of claims, but haven’t bothered to substantiate any of them.

I am not against nuclear power … I just think it needs to go somewhere else rather than stealing our wilderness from us and increasing the liklihood of disaster in the area.  Their materials talk about a shortage of energy in the “northwest” – why not go to Washington or Oregon instead? And what happened to keep them out of Elmore county?

UPDATE #2:

On 11/18/09 The Argus published an interview with the AEHI guy (Don Gillispie), you can find it here. In that interview, he snidely refers to the good people of Elmore county who blocked him there:

“We moved to Elmore County, but we were sort of forced out by some locals who don’t know much about nuclear energy and don’t want to, either.”

Of course that’s what the problem was! The locals were ignorant rednecks, right? Maybe, Gillipsie, they were EDUCATED and you couldn’t pull your scam over on them. I heard that their local paper exposed some of your lies, like when you claimed to have graduated MIT (but, it turned out you actually just attended a seminar there once? wow!).  As I’ve mentioned here, the mailing you sent the Payette community was littered with little white lies about cheaper energy (not for consumers!), jobs (not for the local folks!), safety (yes, actually there have been several deaths and injuries in commercial plants from exposure to radioactive material, even in recent years!), and environmental friendliness (invading the endangered squirrel’s territory, ignoring the fact that Idaho already has hydroelectric dams that also don’t contrinute to global warming, and they don’t pollute the earth with radioactive material, either!).

I also came across another website today that I’d like to share:  myidahoenergy.com

I discussed the proposed nuclear plant with several people over the last day or two, and have been surprised at how few people outside Payette even knew about it! With it potentially affecting Emmett, Weiser and Ontario, you’d think there would have been some news coverage or additional mailers sent! I guess some of Ontario knows now because of the article from this afternoon, but I am amazed at how “hush-hush” this has all been!

Am looking forward to TOMORROW NIGHT (Thursday 11/19/2009, 7:00pm) at the PAYETTE HIGHSCHOOL – the community will have the chance to speak their researched and educated concerns, and AEHI can go away and tell the next community how ignorant and stubborn we were.  I hope they will finally reveal what kind of reactor it will be so we can have a chance to look up safety and water consumption information … bhecause it is frustrating (and to AEHI’s advantage!) to NOT give us enough information to go look into it ourselves. (And it ruins their “you’re too stupid to argue with me” approach).

UPDATE #3:

There was an excellent article in the Argus today about a man whoalso opposed the AEHI plant, based (also) on the lies (sorry to use the word, but it is true and accurate!) AEHI and Gilipsie have spread in their attempts to fool the public into letting them build here. I am thankful that Dr. Peter Rickards spoke up, because with “Dr.” in front of his name, people are more likely to listen and not brush him off like they would a nameless, faceless blogger.    The article is located here.

UPDATE #4 – The Hearing:

The hearing was last night. Because of the format, I was not able to ask my questions, but of the areas they covered that fit the format (it was on land use, not safety), I have to issue the following corrections:

- The proposed plant (which they still have not revealed enough information on to allow any of us to study and prepare in advance for discussion for the saftey hearing) will use at most 1 million gallons of water a day, and as little as 100,000. I had misread the line about the 1 million gallons in the letter. It had said “up to”. MY APOLOGIES. That eases my water concerns (related to safety, not water rights) a little, but they still haven’t said where the water will be coming from, only that it will be pumped into two on-site ponds and circulated back & forth, only drawing more water to replenish that which leaks or evaporates.  Leaks? Leaks where? Into our ground water? Down to our rivers? And (still) where will it be pumped from? Groundwater or the rivers?

- My wife seemed pretty convinced with their stated backgrounds. I need to do more research before I can state whether or not their claims are “stretched truths” or not. Supposedly the members of the board of AEHI are wanting to bring radiation to Payette out of the goodness of their own hearts, and not for money.  Deep within my soul there was a resounding, “yeah, right!”, but whatever. They claimed to be doing something upstanding and righteous, so it must be so, right?

- My wife was also satisfied with their claims that nuclear energy was safe and that there is nothing to worry about. When I brought out a list of documented accidents and deaths involving commercial nuclear facilities, she insisted I’d read the claim AEHI made in their promotional letter wrong, that I’d missed some kind of nuance. After reading it to herself again and again, the only thing she could say is, “I wonder why they would say that?”  I love my wife dearly, but she’s the kind of person who will buy anything the door-to-door salesperson brings by, or the phone solicitor asks for … because she has a belief in the universal and inherant truth and goodwill in all people. It is difficult for her to grasp the real truth that people lie, especially sales people and people who are laying their life on the line for something that stands to satisfy some desire of the flesh, like money, power, food, drugs, or sex. I don’t think she realizes that the guy pretending to need gas money to visit his family (but really wants more cash to buy meth) is the same thing as the guy who tells a girl how pretty and smart she is (so he can, you know) or the businessman who tells you that bringing radioactive materials through your town is safe (so he can become a billionaire).  The thing I’ve learned about such people … is that those who use BS to get something they crave are so subject to addiction as to bypass honesty, and will eventually ignore other moral points in their path to get that thing.  If AEHI are going to tell a little white lie about safety, and maybe a grey lie about financial benefits to the community or that they aren’t in it for the money, but want to “give something back” to the community … what sort of terrible, full-fledged black lies are off in the distant future? Lies about accidentally releasing radiation into the community? Lies about not being able to raise money or maintain funding to safely run the plant or safely dispose of spent fuel and other materials? It never stops at the “little white lie”.

- They went into a little more specifics about the types of jobs that will be available, and that very few of these jobs would be the $80,000/year jobs. I don’t think they did a good enough job of portraying the reality that few (if any) of the construction jobs will go to out-of-work handimen … instead going to large and established contracting companies with experience (and a low bid) on building roads or nuclear facilities. Even so, my personal concerns were relieved just a little.

In the article in The Argus today (found here), AEHI’s CEO said something downright strange:

“Gillispie said he encourages people to do their own research on nuclear plants. He said he doesn’t want people to draw conclusions from the meeting or the media. He motivates people to research him, the company and the impact this proposed plant can have on Payette County.”

I can understand the remark about “the media” … it’s sadly become a catch-phrase, particularly in politics. The sad thing about it is that it is only when we only view one media source, or only look at one point of view that the media is dangerous.  If we look at everything we can find, however, the media can be pretty enlightening in providing opposing views, information that gives us a few keywords to search, etc.

The problem I have with what he said falls into two points:

1. How are people supposed to be any more educated when AEHI won’t tell us what kind of plant it is? We can’t look up safety features specific to this plant if we don’t know what kind of plant it would be. We can easily look at the problems of other plants and nuclear power in general, and we can look at the economic impact that construction of such plants has on other communities elsewhere in the US.
2. If he doesn’t want people to make any conclusions based on the meeting, why did they have the meeting?

Gillispie was certainly right about one thing: people need to research him and his company.  It is unfortunate that those who have become personal targets of Gillispie and his AEHI buddies and supporters. There really is very little about the company online, except for scattered opposition and the company’s own website (which provides little more than the same hype AEHI has been spreading through mailers). The “facts” AEHI provides (like the “84% of people would have a nuclear plant built again” thing) never include sources, yet they expect (and have received!) citations from those who criticize them.

In pleading with the community not to base their decisions on anything they find in “the media” (i.e. internet) or at the meeting (where they could hear the man speaking in the flesh!), and then not supplying enough information to allow a reasonable person to research, Gillispie is setting up the public and his competition to look foolish when they debate him on these points. If a person were to list off facts about safety problems with nuclear plants, he can simply say “but not this kind of plant!”.  That seems unfair.

Some links worth viwing (though not by Gillipsie’s criteria, because the involve ‘media’):

“Hammett farmer Nancy Blanksma has a completely different impression. She went to the June 16 meeting to learn more about the nuclear plant Gillispie was planning to build only 200 yards from the 960-acre farm her husband, Jeff, and his father transformed from desert in the early 1970s.

Today, with water pumped out of the Snake River, they grow wheat, potatoes, alfalfa and beans and plan to turn the farm over to their children. When she raised questions about the plant, Gillispie told her if she didn’t like it, maybe he’d buy them out.

“His remarks were extremely flippant,” Blanksma said. “He didn’t give people answers to the questions we deserved. He didn’t even try. He came across arrogantly, as if he didn’t care if he had our opinions or not.”" (http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/2636398)

Don’s own blog: http://cleanidahoenergy.wordpress.com/ It’s interesting to go through and see how inconsistent some of his articles are with some of the ‘facts’ he presents elsewhere. Which are true?

and, in the interest of fairness, since i have now linked to two of AEHI/Gillispie’s websites, as well as favorable and unfavorable blogs, i have to also link to AEHI’s opponent: http://www.snakeriveralliance.org/

There’s an interesting article from the other side of the state that said:

AEHI, which shifted its proposed plant from Owyhee County to Elmore County in early 2008, has asked for a comprehensive plan amendment for a privately-owned, 5,100-acre site in remote northern Payette County. (www.magicvalley.com)

remote?

anyway …

There is certainly much to be said/learned/cautious about over the next year in regard to this plant.

This month, I decided to embark on The Simple Dollar’s 31 Days to Fix Your Finances, because it is an interesting exercise. I cannot use it to my full advantage because I do not work outside of the house, so I rarely get paychecks – or any checks higher than $10 or so. The first week is useful, however, and has some interesting exercises, including the one that inspired this post: five main values.

Our first step is to define exactly what our values are. We are not defining goals here! Goals are specific actions, like “retiring at age fifty five” or “paying for my son’s graduate school.” What we are looking for are values. Friends. Love. Freedom. Truth. What are the fundamental items that make you tick?

The truth is that at first I didn’t know. I started with a list that sounded kind of true, but just rang with trite and stereotypical jargon I didn’t full understand. I needed to take this seriously, so I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs, assuming the meditation pose.

I started thinking. What was my first value? Justice. Fairness. Accuracy.

I strive to be fair, to ensure that whatever is “right” happens always. I want every situation to be assessed perfectly and to have accurate decisions made. I don’t care about mercy too much, but justice is very important. I wrote it down.

My second value came to me immediately: compassion. I don’t care about mercy, but I also fail to believe somebody cold and unsympathetic can make a fair and just decision over a human life. Every murderer should get what is coming times three, but who is to decide what is coming? Another murderer?

My third was harder to find. I had read about astrology for the billionth time that day, though, so it was on my mind as a Leo: loyalty. Kinship. Solidarity. People should never use their friends and then leave. Rather, a bond must be maintained forever, or there was little point to forming it in the first place. People must be respected and treated as you would treat yourself. This ties into fairness and compassion.

Fourth was balance, which occurred to me as I realized I was meditating. I did not add it to the list immediately, because I had to first answer the following question: I strive for balance. I want balance. I know I need balance. I am taking steps toward balance. But I don’t have balance. Should I include it? I decided to include it solely for the fact that it is inspiring me to be a better person.

Finally was growth, which has always and will always be important to me. Knowledge and training, honing skills and becoming closer to self-actualization: these things are what drive 90% of what I do on a daily basis. I want to grow every day and make it a point to ensure personal development is accomplished by every action. It should have been first on the list, but it seems the most obvious things are also the most difficult to see.

I hope this was not too rambling or boring to read. It meant a lot to me, though, and I needed to get it “on paper.” Dear readers, what are your five main values?

Addendums can severely impact the scope of a project prior to the bid.  It is very important to check frequently if an addendum has been issued for a project you are estimating.  Even if you are on the plan holder list, an estimator can’t rely on others to notify them of the changes.  Whether you call the Architect to verify or subscribe to publications that show addendums the estimator is responsible for ensuring they have received all the addendums.

 The market is hard enough these days, there is no use making it more difficult on yourself by making it possible for your bid to be rejected because you didn’t incorporate an addendum into your bid.

 By the way, a subcontractor should always include a scope letter with every bid.  The scope letter needs to state which addendums they have seen even if it didn’t pertain to their scope of work.  If by some miracle, there was no addendums issued, the scope letter should state that no addendums were received.

With the proliferation of the Internet more voices are becoming part of the conversation.  The web 2.0 enables users to not only receive information, but also to produce content. With the increase of people participating on content production, concepts like crowd sourcing are emerging. Now it is possible to gather people from all over the world to join forces and perform tasks, such as improving products or building the world’s largest encyclopedia.

Having access to the knowledge of some many people is definitely something positive. Before, knowledge and information were provided by a limited number of sources, such as encyclopedias, newspapers, academic books published by experts. Now, we have easy access to a wider variety of experiences provided by people coming from all walks of life.

However, this immense source of information has its limits. Not all the information available on the internet is true. Therefore, people should also develop a sense of “wariness” and critical thinking..

A good example of what we should be wary is Wikipedia, which is an ambitious project of organizing the knowledge of the world in one place.  With more than 13 million articles in over 200 languages, Wikipedia’s success relies on being a platform which people can easily access, edit and contribute. However, this collective encyclopedia also has its drawbacks. The accuracy of the information and the amateur source are constantly a target of critics. Some academic institutions are no longer accepting Wikipedia references in students’ papers.

We can also find the Wikipedia supporters, such as Chris Anderson in The Long Tail who believe that the accuracy problems fall under the probabilistic theory and are the exception and not the rule. And that Wikipedia is even more accurate than Britannica Encyclopedia.

I see a great value in the collective wisdom and agree that Wikipedia does an amazing job putting it together. I also understand its accuracy limitations. However, here is my main concern: isn’t the “beauty” of Wikipedia about building knowledge coming from different sources and experiences?  If so, does the fact that the 83% of contributors are men, mostly white, put Wikipedia’s “representativeness” in check? Who is expressing the knowledge and experiences of the ones who have no access to internet: 93% of the population in African, 80% in Asia, 75% in the Middle East, and 70% in Latin and Caribbean American? Is Wikipedia articles biased by a limited perspective?

Reading Groups – Content Connector 

Name: __Jacki DuPont____________

Discussion Date: ___November 9____

Chapter read to prepare for discussion: ____VN 4 &5__________

As the content connector, it is your job to find the connections between the text, the journalism profession and society. This means connecting the reading to:

• Your own life
• Current events in the community, region, state, region, etc.
• Similar events at other times and places
• Other writings or media on the same topic

Think about a minimum of two connections today’s reading generated. List the connections and briefly explain their relationship.

Pg 69.

     While reading, I found something that Meyer wrote was interesting. More of a question than a fact or statement, Meyer said:

     “Throughout the discussion on credibility, some editors have wondered if the underlying variable is really lovability and whether a newspaper that tries too much to be loved risks losing its journalistic integrity and its ability to tell hard truths that the community needs to hear for its own good.”

     Is there a fine line between making readers happy and journalistic integrity? In the world that we are living in today, where people are much more inclined to hop online instead of pick up a newspaper, should we be leaning towards grabbing their attention and trying to keep it? But at the same time, aren’t we as journalists supposed to stick to the rules and morals that we have learned? Is this going to be necessary because newspapers are dying?   

     This is interesting because as we go out into the world after graduation, I think we are all going to find jobs within different areas of print journalism. I also think that different companies are going to react differently because of the need for lovability and others will act differently because they are hard-pressed on journalistic integrity.

Pg. 85

     Meyer cites Chris Urban in Chapter 5, saying that Urban wrote that, “Both journalists and the public believe that even seemingly small errors feed public skepticism about a newspaper’s credibility.” In the same paragraph, Meyer wrote that “more than a third of the public -35 percent- see spelling or grammar mistakes in their newspaper more than once a week, and 21 percent see them almost daily.”

     After reading these two chapters, I further understand the automatic fail rule. I also wonder about that statement in this chapter that says whether it is more important to get it right or get it fast. In the fast-paced technologically controlled world we live in, everything seems to be faster, so does that require us to work even faster, and will this create more problems and mistakes within our writing?