Data Mining

Last week sometime, somewhere on the BBC I heard them tell us that 95% of scientific research data was still unanalysed, lying in drawers and filing cabinets, on computer hard drives, waiting to be checked out.

Who knows what they will find.  It makes you wonder about the stuff they claim they have found…..if their conclusions are only based on 5% of the data.

 

As an example of this WUWT brings us this:

1960’s satellite imagery of polar ice discovers “enormous holes” in the sea ice

In the Arctic, sea ice extent was larger in the 1960s than it is these days, on average. “It was colder, so we expected that,” Gallaher said. What the researchers didn’t expect were “enormous holes” in the sea ice, currently under investigation. “We can’t explain them yet,” Gallaher said.

“And the Antarctic blew us away,” he said. In 1964, sea ice extent in the Antarctic was the largest ever recorded, according to Nimbus image analysis. Two years later, there was a record low for sea ice in the Antarctic, and in 1969 Nimbus imagery, sea ice appears to have reached its maximum extent earliest on record.

 

They finish off  this video with the comment that if you don’t understand the past how can you understand the present, how can you understand the future?

 

 

Astonishing that scientists today clearly didn’t know the true state of the Arctic and Antarctic even as recently as the 1960’s….and yet they still managed to compare modern ice extent with the past…and predict the future.

 

 

 

 

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12 Responses to Data Mining

  1. Sir Arthur Strebe-Grebling says:

    And the BBC bias is …?

       5 likes

  2. The Old Bloke says:

    Aww, come on Sir Arthur! does every contributor on this site have to spell it out for you?

       17 likes

  3. chrisH says:

    Let`s give the BBC credit for these nuggets I`ve discovered.
    yes, they`re random and all over the schedule, but if you listen to
    `1. The Educators…where the hopeless Sarah Montague is shown continually to be out of her depth-but, so what; her experts are brilliantly chosen thus far.
    .John Hattie, Daisy Christadoulou and Ken Robinson( descending order of brilliance-but that`s a mere opinion-all three scorch the tenets of compulsory school processing, in a way I`ve never heard before…as if Gove`s got a mole there at the BBC)
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dwbkt

    2. A one stop demolition of the current efforts to be scientific…a dumbed-down conspiracy against truth, as far as I can see…again, brilliant expose.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04f9r4k
    Both of these efforts to blast the green/public sector groupthink will, of course not survive Montys editors agenda tomorrow morning….poor things not smart or absorbent enough to have taken in what the likes of Hattie says.
    But that the BBC paid for these shows-and that the likes of Joel Moore and Jolyon Jenkins are quietly doing such mighty programmes-gives me great hope.
    I`ve decided to see the BBC as a salad bowl, and will pick my shows..and not bitch about the pureed liberal slurry that they expect us all to suck from the feed lot.
    THESE programmes are the BBC at their best….but don`t tell their bosses or else we`ll lose them.
    Me?…I`m on a diet of Chris Evans, Steve Wright and the peerless Steve(Yabba) Yabsley for now…never felt better!

       6 likes

    • flexdream says:

      The BBC is a real curates egg. Even Evan Davies is good on the Bottom Line (despite the gay title). Melvyn Bragg is outstanding on In Our Time. And I admire Chris Packham and the Life Scientific with Jim Alkalede(?). Good stuff.

         0 likes

  4. deegee says:

    BBC Science seems less agenda driven than BBC News. They even occassionally note that the person behind some newsworthy scientific event comes from Israel.

       4 likes

    • ID says:

      When programmes such as Inside Science on R4, deal with heredity and intelligence, or any social impact of genetics, you
      can be sure Prof. Steve Jones will pop up at some point to
      assure the listeners that nothing much is determined by one’s genes and it’s all nurture not nature.

         2 likes

      • Richard Pinder says:

        I think the latest findings by brain scans in Japan prove that people in cold climates with white skins have more active brains which produce more heat than brains of people from warm climates, due to the fact that as people moved out of Africa, the evolutionary ceiling on brain activity and therefore intelligence, due to the need to cool the brain, is lifted by moving to a cold climate. So any genetic correlation with skin colour is probably just coincidental, because in Africa, the most intelligent Africans such as witch doctors, are more active in the cooler nights, so the genetic element to high IQ probably originated in Africa, but is at a higher ratio in northern latitudes due to the fact that people can be more active during the day in cold climates.

        But the science of race and IQ has been under politically correct censorship for far longer than Climate science.

           0 likes

    • Richard Pinder says:

      A one percent decrease in Galactic cosmic rays causes a 0.13 Kelvin increase in Global temperature (Shaviv, N. J. (2003).

      Nir Shaviv is an Israeli scientist who is censored by the BBC.

         0 likes

  5. phil says:

    At BBC news a lot of the famous analysis isn’t based on facts at all but on the BBC’s agenda on a topic.

    Using 5% of the available information would be an improvement.

       5 likes

  6. Richard Pinder says:

    Facts censored by the BBC.

    Although an increase in cloud cover eventually causes a decrease in global temperatures after a thermal lag, an increase in cloud cover in the Arctic could temporarily contradict or delay this trend, as clouds trap heat, and the Arctic has far more heat input than the Antarctic region, due to the jet stream. This makes the Arctic highly unreliable as a guide to Climate or Weather trends, compared to Antarctica.

       0 likes