Saturday, 2 July 2011

Watch THIS space...

...from the UK Guardian comes news that the University of East Anglia
has been forced to release up to 4million individual thermometer readings taken from 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years, data that is the life's work of the head of the UEA's Climatic Research Unit, Phil (Hide the Decline) Jones. The same Phil who wrote ... "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so.

...An Oxford academic has won the right to read previously secret data on climate change held by the University of East Anglia (UEA). The decision, by the government'sinformation commisioner, Christopher Graham, is being hailed as a landmark ruling that will mean that thousands of British researchers are required to share their data with the public. The ruling also marks a victory for critics of the UEA and itsClimatic Research Unit in the "climategate" affair. It comes at the end of a two-year rearguard action by UEA climate scientists to prevent publication of their "crown jewels", an archive of world temperature records collected jointly with the Met Office. Jonathan Jones, physics professor at Oxford University and self-confessed "climate change agnostic", used freedom of information law to demand the data that is the life's work of the head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones. UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so...Under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, public bodies such as universities have to share their data unless there are good reasons not to. But when Jonathan Jones and others asked for the data in the summer of 2009, the UEA said legal exemptions applied. It said variously that the temperature data were the property of foreign meteorological offices; were intellectual property that might be valuable if sold to other researchers; and were in any case often publicly available. But in a damning verdict, Graham said suggestions that international relations could be upset by disclosure were "highly speculative", and "it is not clear how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the information requested...more here...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Middle and high school students in Korea voted miss A’s Suzy and IU as two female celebrities who seem to be bad at math.

On August 17th, K-Stem, an institute that conducts a scholastic ability test in mathematics, announced the result of the survey asking 220 students to vote for the celebrities who seem to be good/bad at math.

For the category asking student to vote for celebrities who seem to be good at math, actress Kim Tae Hee ranked first with 43.4% of the votes, and Lee Seung Gi followed with 30.9% of the votes. According to the students, “Lee Seung Gi looks smart and intelligent” and “Kim Tae Hee went to Seoul National University, she is smart for real.”

On the other hand, for celebrities who seem to be bad at math, Boom ranked first with 45.15% of votes, followed by female idols Suzy and IU who received 29.1% and 22.9% of votes respectively.