1. Climate change is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Is the expense justified? Government policy should be based on credible science*. Thus it is important to know whether or not to support such policies.
2. All news sources in North Korea are state-controlled. Similarly, most of what you hear or read about Christopher Monckton is filtered through hostile media. You owe it to yourself to hear directly from the "original source".
3. Christopher Monckton is careful to include sources for all data that he quotes. Much of it comes directly from IPCC reports.
4. He attracts strange detractors to his meetings. None are willing to debate him publicly - or on broadcast media - but they attend purely to garner attention to themselves, or disrupt polite discourse. This makes for an amusing sideshow.
5. It's cheaper -- and better researched -- than listening to Al Gore.

Check him out for yourself. I did. Tour itinerary.



* "Credible science" is my term. It is science where all data (including confidence intervals), methodologies, and analysis algorithms are published so that independent researchers can confirm the results. The data presentation accurately represents the underlying measurements without resorting to dubious methods (such as carefully selecting time series ranges). The conclusions are scientific -- not political.

Summary

Describes the benefits of a local NuGet and Symbol Server, and reviews NuPeek (Open Source).

1. What/Why?

A NuGet server is a repository for NuGet packages. The advantages of a local NuGet server are:

* Secure dispensing of proprietary content
* Local control of third party content (eg you choose when to upgrade open source packages)

A Symbol Server is a repository for debugging information (such as source files and pdb files), commonly distributed via symbol packages. As source, it is even more important to keep it in-house.

2. How?

NuPeek is an open source project, comprising a simple web site and a collection of tools. It assumes that you can generate .nupkg and .symbols.nupkg files for your assembly. (I do that during my TeamCity continuous integration builds.)

Using NuGet commandline, you PUSH your packages to your NuPeek website where it processes them and adds them to its repository folders.

NuPeek also exposes feeds to the stored packages and source. In Visual Studio you configure the Package Manager to point to your local NuGet feed, and use it to add assemblies and references in the usual way.

3. No binaries in source control

Merely commit the packages.config file. All your fellow developers, provided that they have also configured Visual Studio correctly, will receive the packages too. As will your build server. Even if the internet is down.

4. Debug into your packages

Similarly, you can configure Visual Studio to look for debugging symbols from your NuPeek symbol server. It is tricky to get it right, but once set up, you can set breakpoints and step right into the source code of your packaged assemblies -- even though those projects are no longer included in your solution!

This means faster solution loading, less memory consumption, and less "noise".

5. Where?

Download NuPeek from https://bitbucket.org/thinkbeforecoding/nupeek. Kudos to Jérémie Chassaing for writing NuPeek and making it OSS.

There are various internet survey companies who pay their panels of members at below minimum wage to fill in online surveys.

The attraction to the public is a little pocket money. The survey company is attracted by the low cost -- far cheaper than paying staff to phone random telephone numbers. So a WIN-WIN situation.

Or is it?

For any survey, the company needs to know if it has reached its quota for each demographic sector, normally split by gender, age bracket, and location, and sometimes by other criteria, such as ethnic group, income, and survey-specific factors.

So, how are the companies cheating?

By asking actual survey questions, disguised as questions to filter out participants, before eliminating potential respondents. For example, I'd regard it as a reasonable filter question to ask about broadband v dialup internet. But to then ask which broadband company and which mobile phone company a person uses before the door is slammed shut...
There is normally no indication when the Actual survey questions begin. Nor any opportunity to comment on the filtering questions.

How is this cheating?

Because the survey company is gathering all the answers to these questions for free. There is no compensation for the time taken by participants to reach that point.

It is time for smarter survey companies.

Some companies maintain a detailed profile of participants to pre-filter surveys to better match their panelists. This is to be commended as it wastes less time. Companies should establish a reputation system to determine which participants on their panels are the most valuable -- across such metrics as Honesty (via consistency of answers), Availability (via speed of response), Intelligence (via comprehension of trickier concepts), and Suitability (as a measure of broadness of surveys for which they meet the filter conditions). I'm sure there are others.

With such an infrastructure, the survey companies would reject less participants, and gather higher quality data faster. They could afford to pay their quality panelists higher, attracting more people with quicker surveys (less mind-numbing filter questions) and more interesting surveys (aimed at a higher intelligence level).

Who will do it?

 

What's the next must-have high tech device?

After the iTouch, and the iPad. Is it the iLick?

No.

Early indicators point to the TechStik.

It is early days, but this NZ-developed clean green sustainable device has the potential to spread around the world in no time. The uniquely-transparent entrepreneurial accounts of the genesis of this product, inviting would-be users' feedback offers opportunity to crowd source features and "user experience".

I think TechStik will particularly appeal to technology people with a sense of humour.

What do you think?



Disclosure: I have no past or present pecuniary interest in TechStik.

Greenpeace started out well, with rational and effective campaigns to reduce whale killing and eliminate atmospheric nuclear testing. It didn't last long though, before they resorted to attacking things more for the sake of having a fund-raising "cause", rather a logical basis for argument.


This is the central theme of a very eye-opening book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout - The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, by Patrick Moore, one of the early leaders of Greenpeace.

Here are selected quotes that stood out to me...

Solar Power and Forestry

Environmental activists place huge importance on solar panels made from aluminum, silicon and gallium arsenide when in fact the most important solar collectors are the leaves and needles of trees and other plants. (p197)

Dangers of Nuclear Power

U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics confirm that it is safer to work in a nuclear plant than it is to work in either real estate or financial services. A study of 54,000 nuclear workers conducted by Columbia University and published in 2004 found these workers had significantly fewer cancers, less disease, and lived longer than their counterparts in the general population. (p234)

Danger of Pesticides on Food

In the 1990s, the Cancer Research Institutes of the U.S. and Canada collaborated on a multi-year study of all scientific publications about the connection between cancer in humans and pesticide residues on food. They could not find a single piece of evidence connecting the two. (p273)

Climate Change

In one of the most surprising surveys taken, 121 U.S. television weather presenters, all members of the American Meterological Society, were asked their opinions on climate change in April 2010. Ninety-four percent of those surveyed were accredited meteorologists. When asked about the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's statement, "Most of the warming since 1950 is very likely human-induced," a full 50 percent either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Twenty-five percent were neutral and only 24 percent said they agreed or strongly agreed. (p334)

Ocean Acidification

"Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.179 to 8.104 (a change of -0.075)." One has to wonder how the pH of the ocean was measured to an accuracy of three decimal places in 1751 when the concept of pH was not introduced until 1909. (p361)


Personally, I enjoyed the book very much -- except for the parts that made me angry (mostly when parties in a dispute resort to "terminological inexactitudes", as Winston Churchill calls them.)

If you're interested in it, check out this excerpt.