Halloween at Yahoo was pretty fun this year. A lot of great costumes and the little one in tow, as well!

I asked the question first. But now a University of Tennessee College of Law Associate Professor asks "Harry Potter and the (Re)Order of the Artists: Are We Muggles or Goblins?"

(Hint: The answer is YES)

There has been a lot of spirited discussion about the visit of Ahmadinejad to Columbia University yesterday. At first, I thought it would be the usual Conservative vs Liberal spitting contest (c.f. Saddam, Castro, Stalin, Chavez, etc), which generally starts something like this:

Conservative: How can you give a platform to this evil person?
Liberal: We stand for intellectual freedom, and open ideas
Conservative: But this dude is far beyond the pale
Liberal: PATRIOT ACT, GUANTANIMO, ARGH!
Conservative: ENEMIES, WAR, TERRORISM RAHH RAHH RAHH!

(etc.)

And in fact, that's pretty much how it was going, leading up to the speech. Until Lee Bollinger introduced A'Jad. At that point, the debate entered into the surreal. In what can only be described as a scolding, Bollinger called Ahmadinejad's views "absurd" and "uneducated". The reactions seemed very interesting.

At first, there was a lot of cheering on from the Conservative and the Liberal circles.

However, on the Conservative side, there now seems to be regret. I believe John Podhoretz at the National Review seems to have put it best at the summary of a good post, when he said "There's a little whiff of Ugly Americanism surrounding" the ambush. After all, Columbia did invite him to speak, and it is generally considered poor manners to then embarrass your guest as if it is some nationally televised intervention. If his views really were absurd, why was Ahmadinejad worth all the hype? Now, I think it is easy for Conservatives to be critical- most consider it best if A'Jad had never been invited in the first place, so its pretty easy to turn around and criticize this additional twist. Nevertheless, others I've talked to who seem more "Centrist" than I took similar views. If I were one of the organizers, I might feel like I couldn't win for losing with these guys...and that perhaps is a bit true.

Additionally, some Conservatives feel that the tongue lashing was nothing more than a feel-good moment for Americans. This opinion was best characterized in the comments of a Volokh Conspiracy post where one of the frequent right-of-center commenters said:


I think this is a good point- which seems to be turning out valid, if this Islamic Republic News Agency article is any indicator.

In the end, I think the Right acquitted itself well in this ordeal. (I do disagree with attempts to cut public funding from the school as a result.) I tend to agree that the invitation did not really do anything to forward public discourse, but it did do much to showcase the best side of Conservative opposition. When you contrast the Right's outraged-but-respectful protesting at Columbia to the treatment the Left gave to Ghilcrest of the Minute Men at Columbia (rushing the stage and preventing him from speaking), or to Larry Summers at Harvard (firing him for making "sexist" remarks), then I think the Right comes off rather well in the "Academic Freedom" department.

The Wall Street Journal covers some research that has been completed by an epidemiologist in Greece. According to his results, "a new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

This isn't because of fraud, but because scientists are making mistakes in their data analysis, or constructing their experiments in statistically troublesome ways. While the old adage of scientific research has always been that you provide enough data that the findings are reproducible, it is amazing how little research is actually reproduced when it goes up for peer review.

Once upon a time, our science was based mostly on empiricism- what could we reproduce in the laboratory. Today, the big questions require big data-sets. Selecting from that data, processing it, and correcting it if necessary leaves open the possibility that you only end up with the right data for the point you are trying to make.

I think this underscores further the reason why scientists researching global warming should release the code they used to process surface-temperature data to correct for aberrations such as equipment bias and urban heat island effects. However, so far, scientists have been unwilling to do so. That means, given the raw temperature data, it is impossible to duplicate the research of Hansen, et al, which is one of the keystones to the latest IPCC report.