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I've been using Google Reader recently, following the lamented death of Planet Fleck, and I suppose I have to admit its better.
Here are some "shared items" if, for some reason, you want to read what I read.
Tweaking the wackos refers. "James Pagett" wrote The Wonderful World of Wikipedia at WUWT complaining about the [[Soon-Baliunas controversy]] page. But despite the author knowing enough about wikipedia to have gotten himself topic-banned by arbcomm (which the post, oddly, doesn't have room to mention) the article does a very poor job of explaining how wikipedia works. Which isn't too surprising, as no-one outside does.
But because the post is at WUWT, and is about climate, and wikipedia, it doesn't take look for the wackos to start ranting about me, even though I don't feature in this story at all. Since I'd been invoked, I felt obliged to turn up (there, and in following comments). However, there is a disappointing lack of desire to learn about wikipedia, or indeed to make any attempt to back up assertions.
As far as can be told, the post didn't lead to an invasion of septics; about the biggest consequence (apart from the correction at S+B) was someone insisting that "climate" must go in as an example of chaos [1]. But the impression, from the comment thread, is that the Watties don't understand wiki, and they fear it, and they aren't even going to try touching it. Which is by and large all for the good.
There is a post of Top Science Scandals of 2011 at The Scientist (h/t: FE). It all seemed a bit life-sciency, but then that's what the mag is about, so fair enough.
Not much climate there, but number 5 is Wegman's shameless plagiarism (not forgetting, of course, that Wegman's real problem is that his work and analysis is wrong, not that it was copied).
But the amusing bit is the long long comments thread, which immeadiately derails into the usual nonsense that happens when you let the deniers in. Ah well, so it goes. Who needs paid advocates when you have useful idiots?
The "Conclusions" section is a bit odd. Having spent the paper trying to demonstrate that interested parties will try to buy off the messenger, i.e. the media, they then try to explain the media's non-accuracy by Morris's (2001) model of political correctness instead of their own results. I don't understand that.
The abstract is better, and explains their model and conclusions:
A neutral expert sends an informative message to an uninformed voter. An interested party can pay a cost to replace the expert's message with its own. The more informed is the expert, the greater is the interested party's incentive to replace the expert's message. In equilibrium, making the expert more informed has no effect on the voter's beliefs and strictly reduces social welfare. The model thus implies an endogenous limit on how credible a purported expert can be. I apply the model to public skepticism about climate change.
This is of course a model; but it helps explore something I've thought about a bit, which is "how to get the general public to understand GW". The problem, of course, is that whilst *I* know who are experts and whom to trust and distrust, Joe Public doesn't really know, and cannot evaluate the science for himself. So they try to model this: the expert can send a message, but interested parties can pay to replace that message (which simplifies the real world, where the voter gets both messages, but hey this is but a model).
One of the assumptions of the model is only stated in the conclusions, and then only implicitly:
I show that because voters cannot separate true experts from credentialed advocates, public opinion cannot, in general, converge to expert opinion in the presence of motivated, interested parties.
The assumption that voters can't separate is necessary, but may not be true. In fact I think it is quite likely false: people make a semi-conscious decision to believe dubious sources because it suits them (again, shades of Krugman). Further, the model has become so idealised that I can't tell how large the costs to the interested parties are, and what they might be compared to in the real world. Also, as they show (section 3.2, case ii) if the costs are "too high" then the interested parties don't bother pay and the voter gets the expert opinion.
making the expert more informed has no effect on the voter's beliefs and strictly reduces social welfare is I think dubious. What they mean is, that under certain of their assumptions, voter opinion isn't affected by increasing expert credibility. But the "interested parties" need to spend more buying off the message. They interpret this as a loss of social welfare. But actually it represents a transfer of wealth from a "Bad" party (one trying to buy off the true message must be Bad, I think we can agree) to a neutral one (those apparently-credentialled experts. We might call them Bad too, because they are lying-for-hire, but assuming they don't believe it and are only doing what they are paid for (otherwise, they wouldn't need to be paid, no?) they are less-Bad than those who are paying for the lying. So contrary to the papers stated result, I think that increasing expert credibility increases social welfare (again, shades of Krugman; do read him, please).
There is a fascinating article from Bronte Captial about the Euro Fix.
The story so far, if you've forgotten: the ECB can't be a lender-of-last-resort to governments, because it isn't allowed to (from memory, the Krauts say No). But in a transparent fix, it is allowed to lend to banks, if those banks put up suitable collateral. And it has said, lo, government debt, that is good collateral. And so 500 bn has been loaned.
Why, as a bank, would you want to buy shonky govt debt? Because dodgy Italian debt yields 6% or so at the moment, and lord knows what the Greek stuff provides. But the ECB loans are at 1%. With the difference yielding 5% pure profit risk-free (ahem), hooray. The downside, of course, is the long-term capital risk.
The Bronte article is speculating on the likely conflicts between the banks' traders - who can presumably see the short-time huge bonuses coming out of the short-term profits, all sanctioned by the Euro-governments desperation to get the banks to buy the debt - against the Risk Dept., who probably don't want to touch it with a bargepole.
We've finally got round to having solar PV panels installed. As you can see form the picture above.
The price of solar has been coming down, but still it isn't economically viable without subsidy for us. However, the subsidy makes it clearly economically beneficial (to us) so combined with a guess that the ecological payback, which is far less clear, might be acceptable too, we went ahead. What finally tipped us into doing something was (a) the government announcing the end of the fat subsidy regime (of which more anon) and (b) a local group organising an installation firm for the village.
Economics
Let's talk about the economics first. In the UK, this is all about the subsidy regime which is currently £0.433 / kWh for solar PV retrofitted, for an installation less than 4 kW. That compares with a cost of electricity from the mains per kWh (inc VAT) of ~£0.25-0.12 (depending on supplier, tier, phase of the moon, whatever). But since our energy needs are vastly less than our installed 3.5 kW, and we're usually out during the day, most of the time we won't be saving that money, instead we'll be feeding stuff back into the grid. And I don't really know what we get paid for that - casual conversation said £0.02/kWh, this says... its complicated. I can't even remember if we did the 50:50 "deeming" deal spoken about there.
With all that, the payback time was put to us as being about 9 years. Since it cost ~£10k, that implies generating about £1k/year of power, which certainly exceeds our current bill. Given that price depends so heavily on the subsidy, these calculations only apply to the UK. We scrambled to get our installation in place before December 12th, when the subsidy was due to ~halve, but Solar tariff cut plan ruled legally flawed says that maybe that won't be the cut-off date. It will be soon, though. Which is probably correct: the price is currently set too high, and its a cash cow for people with the installation.
Our system
We have 15 Trina panels which are supposed to produce around 220-240 W each (so ~3.3 kW), a 3.5 kW inverter (Schuco) in the loft, wires leading down the the electricity cupboard, several isolator switches, and a meter thingy which we need to read sometimes and send in, in order to get our subsidy. Note that to get the good subsidy, you need a system < 4 kW, but we'd have struggled to get more panels on our (fairly small) roof. We were originally going to have 16, and a 4 kW inverter, but apparently the 4 kW ones are in short supply.
Most excitingly, we have a "sunny beam" Bluetooth power meter, which talks to the inverter in the loft, and draws pretty graphs of your power generated and £'s saved. Miranda in particular loves it, and consults it every day. She did want to take it away with her on a recent visit elsewhere, but we explained that Bluetooth doesn't have a range of 100 km.
Bronte Captial (that isn't his best post on Trina, search around, you'll find the rest) isn't too impressed with Trina as an investment - indeed, he thinks that all panel makers are due to get squeezed. But that doesn't affect me as a buyer.
The ecologics
Well, I dunno really. I'm assuming that, since it has to be subsidised, the total unsubsidised economic value must be negative. And therefore, using economics as a proxy for ecologics, the ecological value must be negative too? That is less clear; after all, we don't cost externalities into our electricity costs.
I don't think I've troubled you with a picture of me for a while, so here is one I particularly like, taken with Miriam's Galaxy S2 (rush out and buy one now, its got our GPS in it, which is apparently far better than the competition).
If you look closely at my right thigh (and who would not wish to do so?) you'll see the graze I got on today's run at the point where I fell over an electric fence that I hadn't noticed was there. Fortunately the 'lectric itself was off. That was in the middle of the mad wiggly bit where I got totally lost trying to find my way back to the Thames, having got myself onto the wrong bank.
although I'm wearing a beer festival tee-shirt, I'm drinking port. Port by the fire of a winter's afternoon is very pleasant.
The camera isn't quite perfect - lens distortion has done something a bit weird to my head.
Pony - something that the customer wants, and which might even make sense, but isn't going to get done within your timescales. Might get done later.
Unicorn - Like a pony, but doesn't actually make sense, so will never be done.
Zombiecorn - Like a unicorn, but it won't die, no matter how often you prove that it won't work.
But that is a very short post, so in no clear order:
Nitpicking others' arguments is not the same thing as "critical thinking." That involves nitpicking your own arguments.
My family and me.
