Rise and Fall of wikipedia

Posted on 18 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

Number of new wikipedia articles

Number of new wikipedia articles


Wikipedia were one of the earlier websites on the internet launching in 2001. Like other big sites, they saw rapid growth in user participation from 2001 till 2006 and then very suddenly, as the graph to the right shows, the number of new articles hit a peak and it has been declining steadily since.
That decline coincided with a change in the culture stemming from the increasing costs of running the website and the appointment of Florence Devouard as board chairman who introduced a more commercial outlook for the site, which although low-key clearly had profound impacts.
Anyone familiar with graphs will recognise that we have two phases of exponential change. The first, exponential growth, the second exponential decline. And clearly something “flipped” at Wikipedia around 2007 as it changed very dramatically and sharply from one to the other.
I was one of the people who edited Wikipedia around 2007 so here are some possible reasons:

  1. They had an article on everything – the most obvious answer is that there are only so many articles that fit in an encyclopaedia and once they are all written, the fun of “being the first” to create an article disappears.
  2. The focus on “quality” – it is (was) very easy to start an article on Wikipedia and great fun, however it was just tedious doing all the small minor edits and updates once they were written.
  3. Wikipedia couldn’t afford more articles so started restricting them – perhaps the top of Wikipedia suddenly realised they were running out of money and that if the size of the website kept growing, they would have to close. Perhaps there was a conscious decision to “put off” new work.
  4. The constant political edit wars – for any of us that edited the global warming articles, we know how ridiculous these politically motivated edit wars were. And I’ve no doubt that certain views were being pushed by the top of Wikipedia, so in effect any decent editor was simply giving cover through their quality work to hide the overt political nature of Wikipedia.
  5. Asking for money put off editors – that as soon as editors were told “it’s not free to edit Wikipedia”, they stopped giving their time and efforts for free.

 

Posted in Climate | 1 Comment

Change of site address to scottishsceptic.co.uk

Posted on 13 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

I’ve finally decided to provide this Scottish Sceptic blog its own url:

scottishsceptic.co.uk

If there are any teething problems please add your comment here.

Posted in General | 6 Comments

Why climate engineers beat the climate academics

Posted on 13 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

The academic way: if one theory won't reach, just use two.

The academic way: if one theory won’t reach, just use two.


There is no doubt that skeptics have a proven track record on predicting the inability of climate academics to predict the climate. After nearly 18years without warming which none of the academics predicted (even after it started), they are looking increasingly sheepish and trying to talk about anything but their proven inability to predict the climate.
However, whilst us “climate engineers” have been vindicated, there is still the question: “why?” Why is it that people from a general engineering/science background like us skeptics could have known that the academics would get it wrong?
Of course, the obvious answer is: “because they are academics”. But … how do I put this … I’d rather like a more academic answer.
In my previous post I highlighted yet another shot in the foot comment from The EndOfPhysics:

People who are insisting on validation of models, or precise confirmation of certain quantities (like the ECS for example). It’s as if they think science should be more like engineering and don’t realise that science is about trying to understand the world around us, not control or use it. You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand, you can only do as well as is possible given the tools/knowledge available at that time.

Strangely he does add to the sum of human knowledge – but not quite in the way he hopes. Because he confirms some key points. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate | 8 Comments

The Toad goes rowing – TheEndofPhysics laments those "insisting on validation of models"

Posted on 13 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

I nearly thought about posting on this, where the Toad (aka Connolley) has finally decided that 8minutes of watching him rowing is more important than anything else.
However, then I noticed people were commenting and I couldn’t help wondering what the eco-fascist line was on rowing. Then I spotted this gem from the EndOfPhysics:

Apart from the “can can’t” this is something I seem to be encountering more and more. People who are insisting on validation of models, or precise confirmation of certain quantities (like the ECS for example). It’s as if they think science should be more like engineering and don’t realise that science is about trying to understand the world around us, not control or use it. You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand, you can only do as well as is possible given the tools/knowledge available at that time.

Yet another classic example of the ivory tower mentality: “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“. And yes, because engineers deal with this type of problem day in day out where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“, engineers are the professionals in judging a situation where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“, and this is why engineers work on these kinds of issues where we do need to make decisions where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand” and this is why we don’t allow academics in their ivory towers to go anywhere near problems where you do want “scientific results on demand“.
This is the delusion of academia. They sit in their ivory towers thinking they are better than engineers, telling us they are “95% confident” and that there is “97% consensus”. But when anyone asks them to justify their claims that any engineer can see are fraudulent they say: “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“.
The difference between science and engineering.
An engineer is a scientist. The difference is that engineers have ADDITIONAL TRAINING, SKILLS & TECHNIQUES which allow them to make the best possible decisions when “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“. So engineers are scientists who are also trained to deal with situations with limited information, with unclear results, with the human factors and with life and death decisions – and make the best decision.
In contrast academics don’t make any decision. They understand how to deal with less-that-perfect real world situation. The reality is that they only work in areas where “You CAN deliver a scientific result on demand“,  and look down at the far higher training, skills & techniques of engineers having to make time-critical, life-critical decisions in the real world outside their ivory towers.
And it is this arrogant stupidity of academics, who clearly do not have any legitimacy as any kind of expert in situations like the climate where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“. It’s this arrogance they have any expertise, which has led them into the non-science of pretending to be experts in an area where they have no competence:Climate Engineering
Definition: Climate engineering is the scientific & engineering skills, techniques & training to  make the best scientific, engineering, economic & policy decisions on  climate in a situation where “You can’t just deliver a scientific result on demand“.

Posted in Climate, Goat Toads, Humour | 6 Comments

Corruption Of Academic Journals For Profit and Climate Change Propaganda

Posted on 13 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

A long time ago, I recognised that the climate signal was far too short a time period to be able to say anything at all about it – and so it was fraudulent to say much at all.
But academics don’t get grants for saying “we don’t know”.So a whole academic industry has been born to fabricate “understanding” about the climate where there is none.
And now it appears that much of what the public call “science” is very much the same: fraud!

Posted in Academia, Climate | Comments Off on Corruption Of Academic Journals For Profit and Climate Change Propaganda

R code to plot CET daily

Posted on 12 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

As a programmer who has learnt & used perhaps 20-30 programming languages (I even created my own “language” at one one for a particular application), when I heard some other skeptics talking about using ‘R’ I made the mistake of thinking it would be a very simple task to get up to speed with ‘R’

I was wrong R … isn’t a language

It’s the expression I find myself saying when trying to do even the simplest thing Rrrrr … If that hasn’t deterred you, then you can download the code here:
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/
And there’s an introduction here:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html
And quickly here are a few “hello world” examples. Copy and paste these into the window that says “R console”: Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, computing | Tagged | 2 Comments

Neil Craig, the Lone wolf howls no more

Posted on 12 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

Neil Craig, the Lone wolf

Neil Craig, the Lone wolf


It is with sad regret that I have to announce the sudden death of Neil Craig, friend, SCEF committee member, prolific blogger, and strident “voice in the wilderness” who gained the nick name “the lone wolf”.

Excellent letter from Mr Craig. He is like a lone wolf howling in despair in the intellectual wilderness of our politics.

As founder of the 9% growth party he was ambitious in his politics or as he put it:

The policies advocated then were unquestionably the most progressive (ie promoting progress) of any party in Scotland, indeed by a very wide margin.  Even after these years they still are. Indeed moreso since our ruling political class have deliberately put us through an unnecessary recession when we could have had at least 9% growth, and put over 1 million Scottish households into fuel poverty with the world’s most damaging “Climate Change Act”, allegedly designed to prevent the catastrophic global warming we are suffering from – despite it being admitted there has been no warming, catastrophic or otherwise since 1995.

A strong advocate for nuclear power and free market thinking, he was a constant thorn in the side of a complacent public sector frequently being heard to ask the question:

Name me one scientist who supports the alarmists, anywhere in the world, who is not ultimately paid by the state

Always surprising, Neil recently married a lady I never had the chance to meet, however whilst he appeared to mellow following that union, I also saw a marked improvement in his political writings so that  I felt he had a real chance of being elected for UKIP.
If so, he would no doubt have livened up the otherwise drab and boring politics of Scotland.

Neil Craig

A Place to Stand

Posted in Politics, Sceptics | 5 Comments

Mirror Mirror on the wall who's the most electable politician of them all?

Posted on 11 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

The new role of the press

The new role of the press


The press, hammered by lost advertising revenue, are now little more than copy and paste merchants. The result is the “reality” politicians see is increasingly an uncritical mirror of themselves.
We’ve all seen the graph below. This shows that the “reality” as believed by the scientific establishment has increasingly diverged from the reality of the climate. Well, the same thing is also happening in politics.
IPCC AR5 figure 1.4 showing predicted versus actual. (spurious grey area removed)

IPCC AR5 figure 1.4 showing predicted versus actual. (spurious grey area removed)


The road on which I live isn’t very long, yet we have two  journalists living here. One used to write on health and education – but now she doesn’t. The other used to write on important things like government policy, but now he laments the good old days because he hardly has time to read the press releases he edits into the paper let alone critique them.
They are both victims of the internet revolution. Before the internet, papers had massive revenues from advertising. As a result they could employ lots of journalists to fill the space between the adverts. Then along came the internet and this is what happened:
US Newspaper Advertising Revenue corrected for inflation (Newspaper Association of America published data)

US Newspaper Advertising Revenue corrected for inflation (Newspaper Association of America published data)


Advertising revenue fell off a cliff and with it still continuing in its death spiral downward, the industry has been shedding journalists left right and centre.

The biggest story never printed by the press – its own demise!

Donna Laframboise who runs the  blog “No Frakking Consensus“, is another example of the biggest story that was never printed: the story of the death of mainstream print journalism. All over, the story is the same. Just over a decade ago, the print press was full of highly intellectual people sifting and commenting on news. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Humour, internet Revolution, Politics | 2 Comments

Warning: the end of TV could herald a scared world without experts

Posted on 10 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

As we all know….

Climate Depot: Monckton: ‘Just about everything the mainstream news media say about global warming and its supposed dangers is the opposite of the truth’

… the print media have been printing nonsense about climate for years.

In my last post (The Bloggers that killed the mainstream Press) I came around to the view, that the massive drop in revenue of the press may have been largely responsible for the drop in press standards and the “struggle for headlines” that allowed the scandal of the global warming scare to happen.

However that massive drop in revenue did not happen to the TV. Unlike the printed press, TV largely retained a viable income stream. That is not something I had expected. I had assumed that if the print media was affected by the rise of the internet, then so would TV. It turns out that the public are continuing to watch TV and the internet does not appear to be eating into that.

However, a new report (http://s3.amazonaws.com/kpcbweb/files/85/Internet_Trends_2014_vFINAL_-_05_28_14-_PDF.pdf?1401286773) is beginning to worry me.

In this report, they highlight the growing increase of portable devices and video streaming. Seeing how the change in technology that enabled easy access to blogs and information online so impacted the press, this is a change we should treat with caution. We are now at a stage, where it is very likely that “portable video” is cost effective and we may be on the verge of seeing this technology transform – or more accurately undermine – TV in the same way as the internet undermined the press.

Also the report supports my view, that academia will also be under pressure to reform. (The end of the UK university? )

A world without experts

So, I am now beginning to realise that what happened to the press (a drop in revenue of 80%) could be about to happen elsewhere. So I am forecasting these major trends in the next decades:

  1. The press will continue to decline and by around 2020 we will be left with a rump of around 20% of the news content we had at the peak of 2000.
  2. TV as a fixed format by large companies will likely suffer a similar catastrophic decline to that seen in the press. TV, will largely disappear to be replaced by “on demand viewing” with a rapid increase in content from small internet sites with a small rump of “big channels” dominated by public sector organisations like the BBC, the (once) big US companies and  YouTube.
  3. Academia, will also be facing a similar crisis of funding as new low-cost formats start to eat into the education budget replacing “tenured” academics.
  4. Similar threats may also be seen by doctors and other experts as “online expertise” becomes a viable alternative to “face to face” consultation.
  5. Politics will see a rise in smaller, almost anti-establishment parties (like UKIP).

This might sound a great thing. However, it may well be much worse than we thought. Because rather than this being an improvement, we may just be creating the environment whereby pressure to “up ratings” on TV leads to another “dash for scares, but this time most of the other forms of trusted authorities such as journalists, academics, etc., will also have been undermined.
So, I am now issuing this warning to all skeptics:

WE MAY WELL SEE AT LEAST ONE, IF NOT SEVERAL, OTHER MAJOR SCARE LIKE GLOBAL WARMING OVER THE NEXT FEW DECADES.

It may be climate, it may be medical, “latent” pyschological effects of …,  but if internet TV starts to take off, we must be more vigilant than ever that unscrupulous scammers like the wind lobbyists and carbon traders of global warming do not use it to feather their own nests.

Posted in Climate, Media | 2 Comments

The Bloggers that killed the mainstream Press

Posted on 10 July 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

In 2000 the US newspapers had their best ever year with $65billion worth of ad revenue. Less than a decade later it had dropped 2/3 that value and as the graph below shows it continues in free fall and online revenue has not replaced the loss in print revenue.

US Newspaper Advertising Revenue corrected for inflation (Newspaper Association of America published data)

US Newspaper Advertising Revenue corrected for inflation (Newspaper Association of America published data)


If present trends continue then it is likely that by 2020, print revenue and online revenue combined will be around 20% of their peak in 2000. Continue reading →

Posted in Media | 6 Comments