The Smallest Minority

More please.

And thank you both.

Thank you for taking the time to notice his comment, and for the effort to contact him. A superbly written note, well worth posting.

Thanks to you both.

Kevin;

Holy snot...and Mr. Patrick is a tenured professor?

Something must be VERY wrong. I'm stowing my overtime sheet and a box lunch in the lifeboat,(just in case).

"This means no mass society run top-down by elites who claim to speak the truth on behalf of bovine masses, or a group of consumers rather than citizens,"

(Sounds like he's a union member...NEA or AFT, perhaps?)

So...now that we're armed with Professor Patrick's clarification of how his quotes were misrepresented, how can we "stick it in and break it off" in Paul Harris' journalistic keester?

There should be very drastic negative consequences for a professional journalist who is unmasked as a "stealth propagandist".

(Aside from awarding him a Pulitzer or the Limey equivalent.

Hmmm;

"1
Accuracy



i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.

ii) A significant inaccuracy, mis-leading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and - where appropriate - an apology published.

iii) The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact."

Seems pretty straightforward.

"It is the responsibility of editors and publishers to apply the Code to editorial material in both printed and online versions of publications. They should take care to ensure it is observed rigorously by all editorial staff and external contributors, including non-journalists, in printed and online versions of publications."

Yes...quite.

excerpted from:

http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html

(Lord, and this rag is owned by The Guardian? They used to be pretty reasonable, although in UK context, that meant slightly less loaded with glazed-eye Leftists than the rest of Fleet Street's organs.)

From the Guardian's website:

"Ian Mayes
Saturday February 2, 2002
The Guardian


From this week the Guardian publishes its editorial code on its website for all to see, and perhaps, as a colleague said, for some of you "to beat us with"."

Quite decent of you, old chap.

Now if you'd be so kind as to bow your head...


" Readers may contact the office of the readers' editor by telephoning 0845 451 9589 between 11am and 5pm Monday to Friday (all calls are charged at local rate). Mail to: Readers' editor, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. Fax: 020-7239 9897.
Email: reader@guardian.co.uk"

Ready on the left? Ready on the right?
All clear on the firing line!...

Delightfully refreshing. I especially think the good professor's parting comment might be amended to read, "...my colleagues are just beginning to realize I think." (Without the comma -- that activity apparently being so alien to them.)

Good on ya both.

M

One of those situations where tenure is a blessing. I love that he toed the line long enough for tenure, and then let loose.

My Dad's one of the other types. Quit grad school because he thought they were all idiots. He would have done more good if he'd worked quietly until tenured, and then done what he liked afterward. He was too much of a rebel, I guess.

Its not really fair to compare Lott to Kellermen...

It's not? Why not?

Ben,

Dad's problem was that he got penalized for writing brilliant papers using the truth, i.e. he deviated from the P.C. pseudo-intellectual jargon-filled catbox-liner material that too often passes for reasoned discourse in the social sciences. Also, some of his professors were insane. The social "sciences" are not like the natural sciences where you can do your degree work and more or less keep your politics under the radar.

As a tenured prof, you have a lot more latitude in expressing your views, but that doesn't mean your peers won't try to make your professional life a living hell. Then again, they may be principled enough to tolerate some diversity of thought.

"It's not? Why not?" [fair to compare Lott to Kellerman]

The knock on Kellerman is generally 3-fold - his research results have been mightily mis-represented by newspapers, his conclusions on his data are not as strong as other conclusions from the same data, and for quite a long time he did not care to provide his data so other researchers could analyze it.

Lott, on the other hand, damaged his reputation very seriously with his 'Mary Rosh' sock puppet and with a suspicious-looking disappearance of a study, almost to the Bellesiles level.

He's contrite about the former, I think he's adequately explained and recovered from the latter (others disagree vehemently), and he will provide his data to anyone who asks (I have it, for example, not that I have software that can handle a dataset that size).

I think Professor Patrick's evaluation may be accurate. The problem with Lott, I think, is not his data or his analysis (again, others disagree strongly) but with the extra baggage the other things have created - the message gets lost because of the messenger.

That and Kellerman only publishes in medical journals (for the most part anyway), and most of his work relies almost entirely on self-citation.

What's the problem with Kleck though? He seems to be the most professional about it. For example, his earlier work mentions that licensing and registration could be used to reduce gun crime, but after events in Australia, Britain, and New Zealand (where the police lobbied the legislature for years to overturn registration requirements due to their ineffectiveness and teh resource drain they imposed on police), Kleck changed his mind on the issue. Which is researchers are supposed to do when the evidence challenges their previously held ideas. Kellerman on the other hand just makes s*** up.