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Illustration by Xiang Zeng www.freerangedoodle.com

By Sebastian Meznaric

The recent scientific crisis around climate research data leaks has greatly damaged the credibility and respect usually accorded the scientific community. The collected global temperature data was the subject of statistical analysis where the scientists in question used a “trick” to conceal certain decreases in the temperatures measured. The “trick” apparently went unnoticed through the peer review process which ended up leading to the processed data being published in a high profile scientific journal. After failing to obtain the data by other means, the sceptics wishing to analyse the data for themselves were (as they saw it)  forced to resort to using the Freedom of Information Act. Their efforts went unrewarded as the requests were routinely rejected and evaded by the researchers. This situation eventually exploded in dramatic style in November with startling news of the public data leaks conducted with the help of hackers based overseas. The damage that was caused to the image and reputation of the scientific community was grave and should lead us to ask: could there be an overarching solution to deal with such problems in the future?

Open source, whether in computing or in broader terms, is a principle advocating free access to the end product’s “source materials”. This may be the source code (in the case of computer software), it may also be the design specifications for a product or it could be the data used for a statistical analysis in a scientific project. The main guiding principle behind it is peer production by collaboration. The end product is made available to the general public at no cost at all.

The creative practice of sharing the source of one’s work is nowhere more appropriate than in science. The work is by its nature collaborative and very often publicly funded. As such, it should be freely available for public examination.

Other than raw data, there are numerous scientific projects where a computer programme is the key part of the project. The need for verification of the results by the scientific community would dictate that the code be made available for inspection and modification. Indeed, if in the climate scandal noted above, the raw collected data had been made available from the beginning, the errors in the analysis could have been noticed and corrected early, benefiting both the integrity of the scientific process and the search for truth. In today’s competitive research environment, however, the data and source code for computer programmes are not always freely available.

The competition among various research groups makes the idea of hiding one’s software code and/or data (we will henceforth simply use “source” for both terms) extremely attractive to most scientists. The implication is that sharing the source would make it easier for other groups to reap the benefits of one’s hard work. However, it would be very easy (and indeed necessary) to give credit to the principal author of the source by making them a co-author of the resulting publication. Indeed, the practice of making people who collected the data and/or wrote the code co-authors of journal articles is actually already well established. For large projects where co-authorship is impractical, like perhaps CERN-related findings, the name of the open source project can simply be referenced in the acknowledgements. Such practices would avoid having a very large number of authors while at the same time give credit where credit is due.

Another commonly used argument is that competition drives the scientific research better than openness. Different competing research groups in the same field might therefore use their own self-written versions of software designed to accomplish very similar tasks. Often, these groups would compete with one another in adding new functionalities and improving the performance of their code in order to publish new results before other competitors. However, as we see with Wikipedia, Linux and other greatly successful open source projects, more “eyes” see better and, more importantly, think better. Scientific collaboration among peers very often leads to ideas that one would not think of in a smaller group or on their own. Indeed, dramatically increasing the group of people working together on a scientific software project often quickly leads to a sky rocketing improvement in performance and applicability. Perhaps even more crucially, researchers would have more time to focus on science rather than coding or collecting data.

The open source concept has been successfully used in the commercial world, notably in the automobile industry, where the patent sharing started by Ford led to automobile design innovations moving faster than ever to the great benefit of the general public. The sharing of technology did not at all reduce the competition among the companies nor their innovative drive.

The adoption of open source models in science would not only foster greater creativity, but would also attract interest in science from programmers and other interested parties, further increasing our global productivity and efficiency.

For instance, the field of biotechnology is fast adapting to the drive for greater openness in the scientific process. Other disciplines will hopefully follow suit to harness the greater efficiency and openness offered by the open source development model. Whether the scientific community at large adopts the open source paradigm remains a matter of speculation but, considering the climate data leak fiasco, the potential benefits are surely beyond dispute.

Sebastian Meznaric is a theoretical physicist and doctoral reseracher at the University of Oxford. His areas of interests include the study of information theory in quantum mechanics. He is also a keen observer of politics and current affairs.

The background to Haiti’s recent suffering was suppressed, pretty effectively, in the press coverage on the recent devastating earthquake. Aristide’s demand for reparations from France, for example – surely a sizeable issue, whatever you think of it – was only mentioned as far as I know by Seumas Milne and Naomi Klein in the Guardian op-ed section, as well as on Democracy Now! (from the US) and the excellent MediaLens. There didn’t seem to be a trace of it anywhere else – not even in Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe on BBC4, which is usually fairly critical. If you watched 24 hours of BBC and Sky news coverage on Haiti you’d have come away with a slew of vague tropes: “dark history”, “violence”, “dictators”, etc. Anything that might have implicated ‘us’ was distinctly excised.

Back to the interview. Chomsky doesn’t think the US response, criticised for being too reliant on militarisation, was part of a long-term strategic US plan: the US just “tends to react to anything at first with military force. That’s what it’s good at.” Elsewhere there’s some very interesting stuff on Cuba’s internationalism (particularly to do with Angola), and a troubling warning about the aid effort:

The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there’s a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded.And that applies right now. Take the aid that’s coming in. There is aid coming in-we have to show we’re nice people and so on. But the aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs-to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7. They don’t want popular organizations; they don’t like popular movements; they don’t like democracy for that matter. What they want is for the rich and powerful to run things. Well, if there was a strong solidarity movement in the United States and the world, it could change that.

In less than two years of reporting on Venezuela, Carroll has written an astonishing 79 articles with Chavez’s name in the headline alone. It is predictable then that the allegations against the US are presented by Carroll as yet another example of Chavez’s quirky and paranoid persona; the latest in a long running feud between the ‘self styled revolutionary’ (as Carroll repeatedly refers to him) and ‘the superpower’ he calls ‘the empire’.

Sunday’s Observer saw – you guessed it – another piece on Venezuela. Did it have ‘Chávez’ in the title? You bet! Was it a collection of regurgitated half-truths, the type that even the New York Times is (by now) a little embarassed to publish? Why, of course! And who was the journalist? (This is getting a little boring.)

(Carroll’s previous reporting assignment was Iraq. I can find no evidence anywhere that he speaks a word of Arabic.)

- The channel was “accused of giving a platform to an alleged extremist cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki”.

-  In late January, its chief executive Mohammed Ali Harrath ”found himself arrested in South Africa” and was released without charge within 48 hours. The arrest, we learn, was because of “alleged activities two decades ago in Tunisia, where he co-founded the Tunisian Islamic Front”. The piece confirms that “no evidence has ever been produced linking him to terrorist activities”.

- Thirdly… well, that’s pretty much it actually. though the piece does go on in rather sinister tones to confide “Prospect understands that there is continuing controversy about the leanings of the Islam Channel”. No word on how it “understands” this and where, exactly, are any signs of this “continuing” controversy to be found.

So let’s get this right, the Channel had somebody on who is an “alleged” extremist (whatever that means) and its CEO was arrested for 48 hours because of allegations for which no evidence has ever been presented. And yet, the piece reads like some sort of smoking gun exposé that has unearthed some seismic dark secrets. What’s going on?

Of course, no such piece would be complete without a healthy doze of antisemitism insinuations… the Islam Channel has, horror of horrors!, “refereed to Israel as the ‘Zionist State””. It seems the (anonymous) diarist is under the impression this is some sort of uber-controversial stance. He is alarmingly unaware that Israel’s creation was specifically as a Zionist state. (Indeed, it could be argued you’re more likely to get in trouble for denying that “Israel was a Zionist state”).

There’s more, the Channel even had “presenters though [sic] to be sympathetic to the Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir”, imagine the same lazy speculations being bandied about concerning presenters at the BBC or CNN.

Now, the Islam Channel (like any media outlet) is certainly not above reproach and should (like any media outlet) be subjected to constant, rigorous and sceptical examination but this is, with all due respect, just silly.

The piece concludes by confidently predicting the Channel will, presumably under the weight of all the overwhelming evidence, “be keen to lay such concerns to rest”. We hope the “concerned” in question will make themselves known soon enough…

According to the WSJ, at least two of the alleged Mossad operatives entered the US after concluding their (now disastrously amateurish) job and, to quote the august Journal, “investigators can’t be sure the two are still in the country”.

So there you have it, you spend Zillions, at home and abroad, on fighting “terror”, and on “making the country secure” etc.. But still manage to find a way of letting your average professional assassin wander in and out undetected using BS documents. Well done, Homeland security, very well done!

A key quote:

Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials–people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests–have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens–and in some cases hundreds–of appearances.

Of course, one wouldn’t be surprised if the problem existed here in UK too, though the whole Westminster lobbying racket is nowhere near the systematic rottenness of  Washington DC (or so we’d like to believe).

As to the reporting itself, take the following:

Unrelated to the Marjah offensive, an airstrike in neighbouring Kandahar province killed five civilians who were mistakenly believed to have been planting roadside bombs.

The deaths come after two US missiles struck a house on the outskirts of Marjah on Sunday, killing 12 people, half of them children [our emphasis]

The question of course is, how can you mistake someone not planting a roadside bomb for someone who is? and even if you DID find people on the ground planting bombs, surely there is a way of stopping them without bombing them to smithereens? To misquote the late great Bill Hicks: “You’re in a plane, they’re on foot, I think I can see a way out of this”

When a Super Power starts turning up the lip service to democratic ideals, it’s time to pay attention and to expect the very worst.

The essay is an assortment of platitudes, vague speculative pronouncements and a rather hurt refutation of what, he believes, are serious misreadings of his famous tome. He ends on a sort-of-optimistic note, saying (quoting Amartya Sen) that democracy is the “default” state, even where/when it’s not practised or celebrated.

The essay is not exactly a fountain of witticisms or sparkling prose, whatever clear assertions can be detected are couched in such a thick padding of disclaimers and bet-hedging that they belie what seems to be a clear reluctace to say anything “falsifiable” enough (to use Popper’s coinage) and potentially  turned against him. In other words, he’s playing it extra safe this time ( and who can blame him?).

The essay is a disappointment, the ideas hardly revolutionary or even challenging, the sentences stilted and business-like, a sample:

“The next phase of global history will be a challenging one…”

“the single most important determinant of which countries would go on to become successful, stable liberal democracies was the degree of consensus in favour of strong new state institutions”

“Such is the prestige of modern liberal democracy that today’s would-be authoritarians all have to stage elections and manipulate the media from behind the scenes to legitimate themselves.”

And so on.. in other words, the sort of “wisdom” that gets dispensed by Time and Newsweek all-year-round.

Which leads us to ask: twenty years of observing and learning and thinking and evaluating to come up with this!