The Resonsibility Forum

Is it grumpy to think this? : How to get things done

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:49:03 +0000

Author: harold
Subject: How to get things done
Posted: 08-Sep-2010 at 10:49

There is the anecdotal story of an American, with a recentPh.D. degree, who went to study statistics in England and met and studied withPearson (the correlation co-efficient Pearson). He asked Pearson how he hadtime to write, study and compute so much. Pearson’s reply was: “YouAmericans would not understand, but I never answer a telephone or attend acommittee meeting.”

From Coolidge,F. (2002:91). Statistics. A Gentle Introduction.SAGE, London.

Add to telephone ‘email and skype’ and thisseems as applicable today as it did then (Pearson died in 1936)

How would you define responsibility? : Are we more responsible now than we were?

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:50:04 +0000

Author: harold
Subject: Are we more responsible now than we were?
Posted: 08-Sep-2010 at 07:50

SCHOOL -- 1970 vs. 2010

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1970 - Crowd gathers. Johnny wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up best mates for life.
2010 - Police called, arrests Johnny and Mark.. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Mark started it. Both children go to anger management programs for 3 months. School board hold meeting to implement bullying prevention programs

Scenario: Robbie won't Keep still in class, disrupts other students.
1970 - Robbie sent to office and given 6 of the best by the Headmasterl. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2010 - Robbie given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. Robbie's parents get fortnightly disability payments and School gets extra funding from state because Robbie has a disability.

Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbour's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.
1970 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.
20010 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care and joins a gang. Goverment psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison.

Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.
1970 - Mark gets glass of water from Teacher to take aspirin with.
2010 - Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.

Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from Guy Fawkes, puts them in a model airfix paint bottle, blows up an ant’s nest.
1970 - Ants die.
2010- Police, Armed Forces, & Anti-terrorism Squad called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, MI5 investigate parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated. Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during break and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary . Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1970 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2010 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

This should be sent to every e-mail address to show how stupid we have become!

Think about it!

Edited by harold - Yesterday at 07:55

Reference : Nudging

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:54:55 +0000

Author: harold
Subject: Nudging
Posted: 04-Sep-2010 at 09:54

The Nudge blog is the online companion to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” Here you’ll find much more about nudging, choice architecture, libertarian paternalism, and many other terms you won’t read about in standard economics books.

Read more at nudges.org

Political Responsibility : Nonsultation

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:27:53 +0000

Author: planeta
Subject: Nonsultation
Posted: 03-Sep-2010 at 12:27

Absolutely brilliant! I'll be using this word in upcoming presentations and in the brand-new Buzzword Bingo game.

Political Responsibility : Nonsultation

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:58:11 +0000

Author: harold
Subject: Nonsultation
Posted: 03-Sep-2010 at 11:58

The word Nonsultation is gaining currency on both sides of the Atlantic. It is not in the dictionary yet - but if we use it enough it will be. It is a very, very useful word.

Andrew Gilligan used it in the Daily Telegraph in a piece attacking what he argues is a governmment "ruse that's nothing short of a fraud ....... 'Nonsultations' inviting us to have a say on big decisions are a fraud."

Two of the key elements of nonsultation are described here:
" it seems unlikely that ministers will take any notice. Nor is it possible to question the premise of the exercise – to disagree that there need be cuts on this scale at all, for instance."

"All major decisions, and many minor ones – including planning applications – must now, by law, be consulted on. A vast industry has grown up to do it. The purpose of "nonsultation", however, is almost never to act on the public's views. It is to manage, manipulate, or suppress them."

Andrew Gilligan describes a neat example

"Imagine that you are a developer wanting to knock down a much-loved heritage structure in your town – a covered market, say – to replace it with a modern shopping centre and 100-bed hotel. You convene a "key stakeholders' consultation group" consisting largely of people who support the plan, and keep everyone else off it.

You allow these "key stakeholders" to make some cosmetic changes, so they feel flattered and involved. But responses such as "leave the market alone" or "go away and stop messing up our town" are not allowed.

You hold a public exhibition of your proposals, more than a year before you apply for planning permission, and display a scheme substantially different from the one you eventually propose. Your exhibition is only open to the public for a total of 14 hours across two days. At this exhibition, you hand out questionnaires that claim, falsely, that the market is run-down.

You then claim "widespread public backing" on the basis of these questionnaires, though only 333 people filled them out and of those only 79 – about 0.01 per cent of the local population – gave their full support.

This has all happened, exactly as I have described, in the battle being waged by a developer to knock down my local market, in the heart of the Greenwich world heritage site... "

"Then there are the consultations, staged to comply with legal requirements, which even those holding them admit are charades."

Read the Andrew Gilligan piece more
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7955561/A-Government-ruse-thats-nothing-short-of-an-insultation.html

Schott has offered a definition in the New York Times
A specious public consultation on decisions that have already been made.

I particularly liked this comment from Elaine in Vancouver

"I love this term. I think it can also apply to in-house decision processes. My experience in academia left me at many meetings and presentations where the phrase "we consulted with the experts" was used. What was left out was the fact that the advice given by the experts was then blatently ignored, generally with the adverse response predicted by said experts. My partner tells me the same thing happens all the time in government corporations."
Read more at http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/nonsultation/

The word may have been coined in Greenwich
http://crossfields.blogspot.com/2010/06/greenwich-nonsultation-3.html

Political Responsibility : Greed and Cowardice

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 09:50:10 +0000

Author: harold
Subject: Greed and Cowardice
Posted: 21-Aug-2010 at 09:50

Paul Krugman in the New York Times on who is letting us down

"First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures."

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.

Read the original OpEd

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/opinion/26krugman.html

Local Food & Responsible Tourism : Famous Spanish “Jamon”

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:13:12 +0000

Author: msmiller36
Subject: Famous Spanish “Jamon”
Posted: 17-Apr-2010 at 19:13

Hi I am new to this Grate Responsibility forum in my first post in this board I have grate information to share you about “jamon” its a kind of food .

Jamon is the cured leg of a pig of which there are many varieties the most famous being Jamon Serrano and the Jamon Iberico. The different classifications depend on the type of pig, what it is fed on and its location.

Jamon Iberico

The Iberian pig produces the most famous of the range of spanish cured hams. Only the meat that comes from an Iberian pig can be called Jamon Iberico or pata negra which means black leg.

Jamon Iberico is divided into three categories

Jamon Iberico de Bellota
Jamon Iberico de Recebo
Jamon Iberico

Jamon Iberico is the best quality and comes from free range pigs that live in the mountains and graze on bellotas the fruit of the holm oak tree.

Hope you like my first post enjoy reading, please post feedback also.

Suggest a new topic : Limitations of fair trade

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:37:16 +0000

Author: Geof Cox
Subject: Limitations of fair trade
Posted: 06-Mar-2010 at 23:37

I'm currently working for Oxfam in Russia on a project that is trying to move fair trade up a gear. Most fair trade to date still deals with basiccommodities – foods, cotton, etc – rather than the intellectualproperty development now at the heart of Western economies. The nextstep surely is to move fair trade, and production in developing andtransitional economies, right into high added value processes,knowledge-based industries, and intellectual property development.
However, this is surrounded by ethical arguments. Fair trade is sometimes crticised because it often involves transporting things half-way round the world: goodfor income distribution, bad for the environment. The new model I'm working on with Oxfam might becriticised on these grounds, too, and also because in a world where theenvironmental imperative is to consume less it is perhapsharder to defend a fair trade model based on intellectual propertydevelopment rather than meeting basic neeeds like food and clothing.These arguments are part of a more fundamental conflict between theaims of reducing inequality and reducing emissions, if the former meansdeveloping and transitional economies becoming more like 'the West'.
I wonder if readers of this forum would like to feed back views on these issues? - for more details of my work for Oxfam please read my blog from Russia here.

Professional Responsibility : why people are ever more sceptical of scientists

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:49:39 +0000

Author: harold
Subject: why people are ever more sceptical of scientists
Posted: 30-Jan-2010 at 17:49

In a characteristically provocative piece in The Times on 14^th January Simon Jenkins wrote about the hyperbole about the potential swine flu pandemic with Sir Liam Donaldson asserting that 65.000 could die and the World Health Organization declaring a “six-level alert”. .. pure, systematic government-induced panic – in which I accept that the media played its joyful part.”

The death rate has been below the normal death rate expected of seasonal flu, 360 deaths to date. Jenkins points to officially induced scares over BSE and Sars - you can read more at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/14/swine-flu-elusive-as-wmd

He also points out that MRSA and C-difficile killed 10,000 in Britain in 2007 alone and goes on “But those deaths lay squarely at the doors of unclean NHS hospitals. Hence there were no scary stories or predictions about them from Donaldson.”

Governments may seek to divert attention; commercial interests may be at work too

Simon Jenkins writes “The Council of Europe's head of health, Wolfgang Wodarg, is one of the few who have dared blow the whistle on the links between "Big Pharma" and national and supranational agencies. He this week persuaded the council to stage a debate on the "enormous gains" made by GSK and others from the swine flu pandemic. He seeks details of relations between the companies and the WHO, given that stockpile contracts kick in the moment that organisation uses the word "pandemic". It did so for the first time last year, with reckless alacrity.”

His conclusion is sobering

This is why people are ever more sceptical of scientists. Why should they believe what "experts" say when they can be so wrong and with such impunity? Weapons of mass destruction, lethal viruses, nuclear radiation, global warming … why should we believe a word of it? And it is a short step from don't believe to don't care.

Professional Responsibility : Judgement day for public trust in science

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:31:21 +0000

Author: harold
Subject: Judgement day for public trust in science
Posted: 30-Jan-2010 at 17:31

The item was dropped because of pressure from other news stories but last night’s BBC Newsnight would have carried a piece by Susan Watts pointing out that peer reviewed science on MMR published in The Lancet in 1998 has led to Dr Wakefield being referred for professional misconduct to the General Medical Council. In recent days the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has been found to be in breach of Freedom of Information regulations and the IPCC has been shown to be relying on some less than solid evidence for some of its high profile assertions – glaciergate.

The old advice about not crying wolf applies to scientists and environmentalists too, they would do well to heed it.

Science progresses by respecting the skeptic and debate based on evidence. There is always uncertainty, the judgments need to be sober and well founded. Susan Watts raises the issue of peer review and quotes Evan Harris

“The liberal democrat MP Evan Harris is on the House of Commons' science and technology committee. He thinks the original Lancet paper should never have been published, and that the fact that it was means peer review failed.

"We need to look at peer review, because while it's far better than nothing, it is not perfect, and when it fails it gives claims made under peer review the imprimatur of being properly done, research being conducted properly, and there being sufficient oversight by other scientists of that work.

"So the stakes are very high and I think there's more that can be done to make sure that peer review is as fraud-proof or lazy-proof as possible. I just wish that either the science minister or one of the select committees would take this issue seriously, because it's in the interests of everyone, scientists and the journals and the public, that they can have faith in peer reviewed work."