Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

Florida police shoot and kill the wrong man after knocking on the wrong door.

July 16, 2012 10:05 am Robert Zimmerman

Don’t you feel safer? Florida police shoot and kill the wrong man after knocking on the wrong door.

The police did not identify themselves, and began firing when the man opened his door holding a gun.

A review by the IPCC of its earlier reports has admitted to serious problems and fundamental biases.

July 16, 2012 9:51 am Robert Zimmerman

A review by the IPCC of its earlier reports has admitted that the manner in which the reports were produced had serious problems and fundamental biases.

The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.

The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18). Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18). In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.

The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking. “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25). [emphasis mine]

The sad part is that almost none of these problems have been addressed by the IPCC in producing its next report, due out sometime in 2013 or 2014.

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The field of clinical psychology is in an uproar over the resignation of two members of the group revising the field’s basic manual for diagnosing mental disorders.

July 16, 2012 9:37 am Robert Zimmerman

But is it science? The field of clinical psychology is in an uproar over the resignation of two members of the group revising the field’s basic manual for diagnosing mental disorders.

As the article notes, “An inaccurate [manual] could lead to misdiagnosed patients receiving useless or even harmful treatments.” The protest letter, written by the two resigning members, also includes this gem:

As it stands now, the [manual’s] personality section is not readable, much less usable. It will be ignored by clinicians and will do grave harm to research. This is the sad product of small group of cloistered … “experts” stubbornly ignoring the sharp criticism from within their own group and the near universal rejection of their proposals by everyone else in the field.

Kind of reminds me of climategate. I wonder who is funding this working group.

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The Obama administration has been caught tracking the emails of a group of scientists critical of certain FDA actions.

July 16, 2012 9:28 am Robert Zimmerman

George Orwell would be proud! The Obama administration has been caught reading the emails and personal files of a group of scientists who were critics of the FDA.

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

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Democrats in Congress proposed on Friday creating a federal program to develop and implement “forensic science standards.”

July 16, 2012 9:04 am Robert Zimmerman

Democrats in Congress proposed on Friday creating a federal program to develop and implement “forensic science standards.”

The bill calls for the creation of a forensic science committee chaired by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), which would assess how to best handle material from a crime scene, for example, and issue guidelines. Meanwhile, basic research into new forensic science tools and techniques might fall under the guise of a proposed National Forensic Science Coordinating Office, housed at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Over the next five years, the bill would provide $200 million in grants for forensic science research, and $100 million for the development of forensic science standards.

Two new federal agencies, costing millions. Gee, I wonder where these Democrats think the money will come from? And that ignores the more fundamental question of what business is it of the federal government to do this? Law enforcement is a state issue.

If this bill passes (which I suspect is quite unlikely), all it will probably accomplish is to create a new bureaucracy in Washington (jobs for the buddies of these politicians!).

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.