Carnival of the Godless #37

Carnival of the Godless #37 is up at the Neural Gourmet.

Most generous countries

The March 4-10, 2006 issue of The Economist gives a table of private donations to poor countries by country, as a percentage of GDP (for 2003). The data comes from the OECD, which tracks 22 countries' aid (but only 21 of which are listed). The graph supplied shows the percentage of the giving attributed to tax breaks, which appears to be close to half for the top 14 countries. The top percentage of GDP is 0.20%, for Norway, where somewhere between a fourth and a third is attributed to tax breaks.

The 21 countries, from most to least generous:

1. Norway (0.20%)
2. Ireland
3. Switzerland (just under 0.10%)
4. Netherlands
5. Canada
6. Australia
7. United States (just over 0.05%)
8. Belgium (about 0.05%)
9. Germany
10. Austria
11. Britain (just under 0.025%)
12. Spain
13. France
14. New Zealand
15. Denmark
16. Sweden
17. Finland
18. Japan
19. Portugal (no visible bar on the graph)
20. Greece
21. Italy

Scalia's obscene gesture

After services at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Sunday, March 26, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was asked by a reporter for the Boston Herald, Laurel J. Sweet, how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality based on his worship. His response was to say, "To my critics, I say 'Vaffanculo,'" and made a gesture flicking his hand from under his chin. This gesture was caught by photographer Peter Smith, an assistant professor of photojournalism at Boston University.

The translation of "Vaffanculo" and the Sicilian gesture is loosely "fuck you," but more specifically the language suggests that the recipient of the gesture "take it up the ass."

The photographer released the photo for publication and was promptly fired from his ten-year position as a freelancer for The Pilot, a weekly Catholic newspaper.

The verbal response was apparently not heard by Sweet, only by Smith. Scalia's initial response was to say that he had not made an obscene gesture, and a spokesperson for the Judge released a letter saying that he explained the gesture to Sweet (which Sweet and Smith deny), describing a rather different gesture meaning "I couldn't care less."

(Via Donna Woodka's "Changing Places" blog.)

Youth minister smites dodgeball opponent

In Liberty, Missouri, from CNN:

A youth minister was charged with assault for allegedly knocking down a 16-year-old boy and kicking him in the groin after taking a head shot from the teen in a dodgeball game.

David M. Boudreaux, 27, was charged Wednesday with one count of third-degree assault. According to court documents, the incident happened in February at Crescent Lake Christian Academy.

Authorities said the teen missed Boudreaux with one throw but then knocked the youth minister's glasses off with the next.

The boy apologized, authorities said, but Boudreaux pushed him backward, and when the teen got up again Boudreaux kicked him in the groin and left.

The teen suffered whiplash and post-concussion syndrome and had blood in his urine after being kicked, according to court records.

Boudreaux later apologized, prosecutors said.

Jeanne D. Hewitt, administrator of Crescent Lake Christian Academy, said Boudreaux had been placed on administrative leave.

Big companies funding adware: Netflix, eHarmony, etc.

Ben Edelman has a report on some big or well-known companies that are funding adware on the Internet, this time through the company Direct Revenue. They include Citibank, HSBC, True.com, United Airlines, Sprint, United Online (NetZero), People PC, Sage Software (maker of Act! contact manager software), T-Mobile, and Vonage. They include Cheap Tickets, Howard Johnson, and Super 8 (all Cendant properties). They include Travelocity, eHarmony, Blockbuster, BMG, CarsDirect, Chase, and Netflix.

On Ben's previous report, he listed advertisers paying for adware through 180solutions, which has now also been reported by the Center for Democracy and Technology (PDF). Some of the companies reported there were Altrec, Club Med Americas, eHarmony, GreetingCards.com, LetsTalk.com, Netflix, NetZero, PeoplePC, PerfectMatch, ProFlowers, True.com, uBid, and Waterfront Media.

Ben also notes that the Interactive Travel Services Association has actually come out with a policy promoting the use of adware! ITSA members include Cendant, CheapTickets, Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Orbitz, Priceline.com, Sabre, Travelocity, and Vegas.com.

If you are a customer of any of these companies, let them know that you don't appreciate their paying for advertising through adware and demand that they stop.

Phoenix housing bubble deflation update

The number of homes for sale has gone over 40,000 (at last check it was 37,217 on March 6). Home builders are offering incentives like a free car or free upgrades (like granite counters, flooring, and cabinets) in order to avoid reducing prices, but price reductions are inevitable. And when price reductions occur, those who've already signed contracts at higher prices will be more likely to walk away... the rational response when an asset class you want to buy is deflating in price is to wait as long as possible, because the deals will only get better. (That's why I'm content to live with year-or-more-old computer technology; my last upgrade for a home system was to buy somebody else's used system.)

More at Ben Jones' Housing Bubble Blog.

The 31st Skeptics Circle

The 31st Skeptics Circle is hosted at Terra Sigillata.

Constitution, schmonstitution

The most recent budget which passed the House and the Senate and was signed into law by George W. Bush has a little constitutional problem. The problem is that S. 1932 differed from the House version of the bill. A small difference in text (the Senate version had a 13-month limitation on rental of medical equipment for Medicare patients; this was erroneously changed to 36 months by a Senate clerk before sending the bill to the House) led to a huge difference in effect ($2 billion more for the House version). Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert modified the House version of the bill to be identical to the Senate version without putting it to another vote, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist concurred that this was sufficient. Unfortunately, this means that the text of the bill Bush signed was never passed by the House of Representatives, as required by the Constitution.

Considering that Congress often doesn't read what they're voting on anyway, I'm not sure this is such a big deal compared to, say, the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act which were passed without being read--but it's a bad precedent nonetheless if allowed to stand.

Public Citizen has filed a lawsuit over the issue.

CBS series pilot based on Scientology?

A CBS series called "Orpheus" sounds like it involves a fictional cult based on Scientology. In the pilot script, a group called GD or "Grand Design" is based on a popular "quasi-philosophical" book that resembles Hubbard's Dianetics. Members of the group are ranked, with a level called "Galatean" that may be equivalent to an Operating Thetan (OT) level. A CBS Paramount spokesperson said that "The cult is an amalgamation of all cults throughout history." The show stars Nicholas D'Agosto and Mena Suvari, and is being produced by Nicholas Meyer.

Let's hope Tom Cruise doesn't cause this to be killed--it is another Paramount property, like Mission Impossible 3, so the possibility is certainly there.

Britannica asks Nature for retraction on Wikipedia comparison

Back in December, I wrote about criticisms of Wikipedia in Communications of the ACM and a study published by Nature which found that Wikipedia's coverage of scientific subjects was about as accurate as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Now Britannica has demanded a retraction of the Nature study on the grounds that its "research [is] invalid, its study poorly carried out, and its findings [are] 'so error-laden that it was completely without merit.'" (Inside quote is from Britannica's response, outside quote from Seattle Times coverage.)

Britannica's website has a 20-page PDF (7 pages of response, 13 pages of supporting information in two appendixes) that is a response to the Nature study, titled "Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature." This response states that "Nature's research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica."

The initial criticism of the response is that, while the Nature study headline claimed that "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries," the actual study showed that Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica.

The next criticism is that as they reviewed the alleged inaccuracies, they "discovered in Nature's work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results." Nature refused to supply the complete reviewer reports comparing Britannica to Wikipedia articles, so Britannica reviewed the truncated reviewer reports that had been posted to the web, along with the articles which were supplied by Nature.

Several of the Britannica articles reviewed were not from the Encyclopedia, but from editions of the Britannica Book of the Year. Britannica notes that "Yearbook authors are often given greater latitude to express personal views than writers of encyclopedia articles." In one instance, a sentence in an article on Steven Wolfram "in which point of view figured significantly" was counted as an inaccuracy. In one case, an article on ethanol, the source of the article was from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia, "a more basic work for younger readers."

A more significant flaw was that in some cases, reviewers criticized articles for omissions when they were only sent excerpts from the articles. The report notes that the reviewer of an article on lipids was sent only a 350-word introduction rather than the full 6,000-word article, which covered the items marked as omissions on the basis of the introduction alone. Similarly, what was delivered to reviewers as articles on kin selection and punctuated equilibrium were actually only sections from a longer article on the theory of evolution, and what was identified as an article on field-effect transistors was a section of the entry on integrated circuits. In another case, an article on aldol reaction was composed of selections taken from two separate Britannica articles, connected together with language apparently authored by Nature's editors.

Another flaw in the Nature study was that Nature did not require reviewers to document their assertions; where they disagreed with articles being reviewed, the reviewers were taken to be authoritative. The Britannica response supplies two examples where the reviewers were incorrect.

Finally, Nature failed to distinguish minor from major errors, treating all as equal even though Wikipedia had more significant issues, and counted as omissions cases where Britannica made editorial judgments to cover specific information in either a different way than the reviewer preferred or in other articles in the encyclopedia.

I think Britannica makes their case--the study shouldn't be relied upon as evidence that Wikipedia's coverage of science is as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica.