Reconstructing context from email databases

03. June 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: climate science

I thought I wouldn’t blog any more about the CRU emails story, but this one is very close to my heart, so I can’t pass it up. Brian Angliss, over at Scholars and Rogues, has written an excellent piece on the lack of context in the stolen emails, and the reliability of any conclusions that might be based on them. To support his analysis, he quotes extensively from the paper “the Secret Life of Bugs” by Jorge Aranda and Gena Venolia from last year’s ICSE, in which they convincingly demonstrated that electronic records of discussions about software bugs are frequently unreliable, and that there is a big difference between the recorded discussions and what you find when you actually track down the participants and ask them directly.

BTW Jorge will be defending his PhD thesis in a couple of weeks, and it’s full of interesting ideas about how software teams develop a shared understanding of the software they develop, and the implications that this has on team organisation. I’ll be mining it for ideas to explore in my own studies of climate modellers later this year…

Canadians rank global warming as the number 1 priority for the G8/G20 meetings

03. June 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: advocacy

Take a look at this recent poll from Nanos on priorities for the upcoming G8/G20 meetings. Canadians ranked Global Warming and Economic Recovery as the top two priorities for the meetings, but note that global warming beats economic recovery for the top response across nearly all categories of Canadians (with the exception of the old fogeys, in the 50+ age group, and westerners, who I guess are busy getting rich from the oil sands). Overall, 33.7% of Canadians ranked Global Warming as the top priority, while 27.2% named Economic Recovery.

There’s some other interesting results in the poll. In the breakdown by party voting preferences, the Block Quebecois and the NDP seem much more worried about Global Warming than Green Party supporters: 59.3% of BQ voters and 41.5% of NDP voters ranked it first, while only 33.8% of Green Party voters did. So much for the myth that the green party is a single issue party, eh?

Oh, and if you look at the results to the later questions, Global warming is clearly the issue on which Canada is perceived to be doing most badly in terms of Canada’s place in the world.