Green Hit list: Wasted money and brain power

TWAWKI found something he calls a green hit list.

The “Carbon Capture report” tucks away more meaningless data about you than you could hope to (not) have to read: Factoids you didn’t know existed, don’t want to understand and never cared to compare.

There is so much money sloshing around in The Big Scare Campaign, someone at the University of Illinois has created a massive database with an amazing array of superficial-to-the-point-of-meaningless data. Have you ever wondered what the NewsTone of joannenova.com.au was — and if I told you it to the second decimal place, does that change anything about the weather? Apparently, “0.36” and slightly “green”, whatever that means. The crew-with-too-much-money have created some autobot crawlers (presumably) that check language on tweets and posts and rate it all for polarization, activity, personalization, blah blah and to the nth blah.

Look closely and you can see part of the GNP of the West evaporating. Pfft.

The entry for someone called Joanne Nova is here.

Could this be your tax dollars at work?

I can’t be bothered trying to figure out what these indicators mean. None of it is obvious, the numbers don’t match up with the number of tweets or posts I’ve done, nor the number of tweet “followers” I have, nor any particular fact I can figure with a 2 minute glance. But hey, it’s flattering in an inane, passing kind of way. (ie not much).

As usual, it’s all about perception, and presentation.

You’ve got to wonder:

…

Find the logic

Let’s spend a moment in the Attention category. I might get 23, but is that good? Steven McIntyre scores 12, but Anthony Watts scores 89, Marc Morano 88, Benny Pieser 4.5, Michael Mann 83, and to make it all nonsensical Phillip Jones redlines it with just 3.36. But James Delingpole is in a class of his own with 0.97 though even he can’t ramp up the “polarization” score above 7.8 out of 100, though he does manage to get the tone into the red half. Congrats James. (Though so does Phillip Jones). The blogging force, Andrew Bolt does not seem to exist. Though nearly everyone else gets an entry: Bob Carter, Andrew Montford, Steven Mosher, Nigel Calder…

My husband “David Evans” has an entry, though his name confounds the bots. The first news entry of his “142 records” does belong to him, but he’s not the David Evans who revised Hudson River dredging methods, and hasn’t written for Reuters India, as far as we know. Don’t buy any “David Evans” puts, calls or futures based on decimals in his tally.

Steven McIntyre is apparently more polarized than Anthony Watts. But actually nearly everyone is polarised at around 6 or 7%. Whatever. I can feel IQ points being drained merely by spending time on the site.

It’s a bit like decoding hieroglyphics, except not as useful. I’m wondering if it’s all cute hoax, and a random number generator filled in the boxes.

Couldn’t someone get these people onto something like SETI, or Brazilian Beetle morphology?

The About section implies some people even pay for this service, and if somehow that covers the costs, and the subscriptions are not from government funded budgets, then good-o, I wish their business the best of luck.

ABOUT

The Carbon Capture Report (http://www.carboncapturereport.org/) is a free and open service of the University of Illinois devoted to being the preeminent global resource for tracking worldwide perception and developments in Climate Change, Carbon Capture, Carbon Credits, Alternative Energy, Renewable Energy, Green Energy, Biofuels, Geothermal, Hydroelectric, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Coal, and Oil. With subscribers in more than 100 countries the Report has become the go-to resource for daily insight into the global media discourse.

There is a complete analytical report generated every 24 hours just to imprison a few billion more electrons in futile mindless loops, and quite possibly (who knows) to suck a few more dollars out of pockets of real workers.

Thanks to Helen and TWAKI for the tip.

7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Peter Pond

January 12, 2011 at 5:35 pm

I love it! IMHO there is just too little of this important type of research being conducted these days. The dials are fantastic, but could be improved with the addition of several more – doesn’t matter what they are metering, the more the merrier.

Whilst we in Australia are being given lessons in the vagaries of Mother Nature, it is truly helpful to realise that there are others in this world who can focus on the really important issues.

/sarc off

2 0

pattoh

January 12, 2011 at 5:48 pm

BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU!!!!

Phillip Bratby

January 12, 2011 at 5:50 pm

The report says

All results are generated by computer and no guarantees of any kind are provided regarding accuracy or completeness.

A bit like climate models then. Worthless. A waste of money.

1 0

Mike Borgelt

January 12, 2011 at 6:36 pm

Yup. It’s official. The west has gone insane.

Bob Malloy

January 12, 2011 at 8:01 pm

I’m straying off topic but at the CanDo website I read the following comment Philip Impey from .

The worry is that the Federal and Qld Governments are going to crank up the AGW and Carbon tax rhetoric as soon as the initial shock of the flooding has sub-sided and while memories are still fresh. And, no doubt, they’ll label skeptics ,even more so, on a par with holocaust deniers accusing us of playing politics,while the flowers on the graves of the “victims of global warming” are still fresh. Be ready peoples for a very heated and vitriolic attack, because according to them, the effects of AGW are all too obvious.

Can we have some suggestions of how to counter this attack?

Having just emailed Gary Stewart at 2sm, talk overnight I re-posted the contents of my email.

Today I investigated a little and found a complete list of floods in the Brisbane & Bremer River Basin, put out by the Australian Government, BOM. http://www.bom.gov.au/hydro/flood/qld/fld_history/brisbane_history.shtml Two charts at the beginning of the report show flooding in both Brisbane and Ipswich, while Ipswich seems to have flooded on a regular basis since the early 1800’s, Brisbane shows far more flooding between 1840 and 1900 than the 110 years since. As rising co2, is blamed for climate change and prior to WW2, man had little influence on co2 levels how do so called experts reconcile the fact that incidents such as the current floods were common prior to mans influence on co2.

below is one exert taken from the report relating to 1839.

As reported by the Moreton Bay Courier, 30 May 1857, Ref.2 : “the river began to rise on Tuesday morning (at Ipswich) more rapidly than usual, and on Thursday afternoon it had attained the maximum height of between 35 and 40 feet above the level, being 14 feet less, we believe, than when it rose in the great flood of 1839 when, according to the statement of one who resided here at the time (probably one of the Thorn household), the river overflowed its banks to the extent of 54 feet completely filling all the gullies leading from the Bremer to what are today the main streets of the town, and inundating the country to the eastward of the Main Range for many miles.”

and on the floods of 1857

From a correspondent of the Brisbane Courier, 29th June 1907: “The flood of 1857 was the result of eight weeks’ continuous, but not heavy, rain. There had been a strong fresh in the river for several weeks, and during a portion of this time all vehicular traffic between North and South Brisbane was suspended as the horse-punt at Russell-street was unable to cross on account of the strong current. At Ipswich the river rose 45 feet, and waterside stores were submerged to the roof; in the Brisbane reaches, however, the flood waters did not rise more than 7 feet above ordinary springs. Rowing boats were plying in Margaret, Mary, and Charlotte streets, but except near Edward and George streets there were few house in the streets named. There were only a couple of houses in Albert-street between Charlotte and Alice streets, and the whole of the low-lying ground from Elizabeth-street to the river was a muddy lake. At South Brisbane one could stand on a hill at Cordelia-street near Boundary-street and see an unbroken sheet of water stretching from Melbourne-street to Tribune-street. Stanley-street was submerged from Walmsley-street to within 1000 yards of the present dry dock. A good deal of the land at Hill-end was submerged, as was also the land on the opposite side of the river, now known as St. Lucia, and which was then a dense vine scrub. Most of the scrub lands at Oxley were also under water, as was Montague-road from the Stanley-street to the present West-end Reserve”.

Percival Snodgrass

January 12, 2011 at 8:36 pm

I noticed that this COMMUNIST monitoring is conducted by the “University of Illinois.”.

If you click on the “About/Contact” link you discover that there is an email address

leetaru@illinois.edu

There are two people mentioned on their web site:

http://www.carboncapturereport.org/about-leadership.html

A “Kalev Leetaru” and a “Hannes Leetaru” who seem to share this email address.

Make sure that you add THEIR email address to your hit list and send them your thoughts and what you think of them!!!!!!!!

NOW THEY ARE ON MY HIT LIST!!!

D. King

January 12, 2011 at 8:55 pm

Maybe if your score is too low, you get Shawed.

http://tinyurl.com/46w5aof

Frank Brown

January 12, 2011 at 9:36 pm

Yes this is confusing and totally uninformative. So I conclude that they are expert in Public Communications.

Joe Lalonde

January 12, 2011 at 10:09 pm

Jo,

You know that it is content and correctness that matters and not readership of the masses. If this blog was a full time gig then you’d be pumping different stories constantly like WUWT.
Quality vs quantity. 🙂

Rick Bradford

January 12, 2011 at 10:45 pm

It’s just another lame Left/Green attempt to devise a better form of agit-prop, sending their useful idiots to troll blogs which fit a particular profile. More fiddling while Rome freezes…..

But where’s the ‘Big Oil Funded’ dial…. 🙂

WillR

January 12, 2011 at 11:10 pm

I get a mention in this report (under my “real life name”) and I was just as baffled as to its value.

Too much money, too much time , too little brains… at least that’s someones problem…

pointman

January 12, 2011 at 11:49 pm

Such attention to meaningless data has an air of Pathological Science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science

But then again, so much of the ‘science’ on climate …

Pointman

Craig Goodrich

January 13, 2011 at 12:03 am

Even by its own standards, the project is worse than useless. I regularly comment at a number of AGW-topical sites, but the ‘bot only picked up three posts over the last two years. Moreover, the ‘bot is incapable of distinguishing the master blog article from comments, much less individual comments from each other, so the common back-and-forth catfight in comments (for example, the notorious exchanges at the Guardian or Delingpole that often run to over 300 comments) all get dumped together and evaluated, which may explain why everyone gets the same rating.

Peter of Sydney

January 13, 2011 at 12:49 am

On the subject of wasted money, will the people involved in the decision making process for building the desal plant in Brisbane be charged with criminal negligence? Although unlikely I hope the plant actually gets washed away in the floods. It would be a fitting end to it. After all, this is not the first time such an extreme weather event occurred there. It has happened many times before due to the fact that Australia is a land “of droughts and flooding rains” because of the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation. It will happen again and again. So, the floods should have been expected, and some did expect them but they were ignored or laughed at thanks to the AGW nonsense who had nearly everyone conned into believing the droughts would be never ending. Note too there’s no point the AGW alarmists now saying the floods are due to AGW. If they do then they are admitting they got it totally wrong so their theories are totally useless. Back to the drawing board for them. Better still back to kindergarten.

John Smith

January 13, 2011 at 2:12 am

My gut instinct tells me that this seems like a waste of time, but maybe they might become serious about having a “green” hit list.
If there’s anyone who deserves to be on that list it should be companies such as Monsanto, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and globalists such as David Rockerfeller, Jacob Redshield (Rothschild), Henry Kissinger, Maurice Strong and Al Gore.

PJB

January 13, 2011 at 2:23 am

Looks like somebody was given the mandate to make an “enemies” list and couch it in as arcane a way as possible.

While this looks innocuous and trivial, it is not only an invasion of privacy (common information, once collated and “filtered” to show bias) and is pejorative in the extreme.

There can only be a negative outcome from such an activity and that site and the use of its information bodes no good will.

Shoal Creek

January 13, 2011 at 2:25 am

whois info for carboncapturereport.org

Domain ID:D155833522-LROR
Domain Name:CARBONCAPTUREREPORT.ORG
Created On:08-Apr-2009 23:40:27 UTC
Last Updated On:08-Jun-2009 03:53:06 UTC
Expiration Date:08-Apr-2011 23:40:27 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:43519271-NSI
Registrant Name:Kalev Leetaru
Registrant Street1:1501 Sandpiper
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Champaign
Registrant State/Province:IL
Registrant Postal Code:61821
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.2173284654
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:leetaru@illinois.edu
Admin ID:43519271-NSI
Admin Name:Kalev Leetaru
Admin Street1:1501 Sandpiper
Admin Street2:
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Champaign
Admin State/Province:IL
Admin Postal Code:61821
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.2173284654
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:leetaru@illinois.edu
Tech ID:43519271-NSI
Tech Name:Kalev Leetaru
Tech Street1:1501 Sandpiper
Tech Street2:
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Champaign
Tech State/Province:IL
Tech Postal Code:61821
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.2173284654
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:leetaru@illinois.edu
Name Server:NS69.WORLDNIC.COM
Name Server:NS70.WORLDNIC.COM

Andy

And with all of that (alleged) brainpower – they somehow managed to put a biographical list that is alphabetized by first name, rather than last name, and without a search function.

I have to agree with the earlier comment – the west has now officially gone insane!

January 13, 2011 at 2:32 am

http://www.kalevleetaru.com

It appears that he works for a political science department at a university and does software and data research. From what I can tell, he’s not as good at it as he claims.

Jaymez

January 13, 2011 at 2:48 am

Bob Molloy is right, it’s already started:

“”Australia has been known for more than a hundred years as a land of droughts and flooding rains, but what climate change means is Australia becomes a land of more droughts and worse flooding rains,” said David Karoly from Melbourne University’s school of earth sciences.
Professor Karoly stressed individual events could not be attributed to climate change. However, he said the wild extremes being experienced on the continent were in keeping with scientists’ forecasts of more flooding associated with increased heavy rain events and more droughts as a result of high temperatures and more evaporation.”

Heard Karoly on ABC TV today and he’s quoted here at: http://www.watoday.com.au/environment/fates-conspire-to-concoct-a-recipe-for-disaster-20110111-19mp7.html?from=watoday_sb

Of course he’s the same guy who said not so long ago that out of all the peer reviewed research papers published not one disagreed with the IPCC (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t be bothered finding his exact quote). He was of course wrong then and is even more wrong now as scientists learn more about what drives our climate.

Naturally he didn’t back up his statement today with any evidence that Australia has become a land of “more droughts and worse flooding rains”. It would be too much to expect an IPCC lead author to back up what he says with any real evidence.

I’ve had a quick look at the list of ‘notable’ floods on record in Australia and major droughts, and there appears no evidence to support Karoly. Perhaps someone had better capture the data before it gets ‘adjusted’ to suit the climate change story?

PhilJourdan

January 13, 2011 at 7:02 am

Just making an enemies list for their new world order.

Another Ian

January 13, 2011 at 7:37 am

Do commenters get on this or is it a sort of “pot luck”?

Mark D.

January 13, 2011 at 7:47 am

PhilJourdan @ 21:

I think you are correct! I was happy to see that my name was not listed (that I could find)

A good reason to NOT use a real name I think………

Bruce of Newcastle

January 13, 2011 at 8:29 am

Reminds me of the network diagram from early last year, where Jo gets a gurnsey but Joe Romm is nowhere to be seen. Its amazing how well the climate argument has gone over the last year, seeing that the ones on the sceptics’ side are almost all one person bands, and the AGW supporters side are mostly big organisations and their employees. Shows just how powerful truth is when it can get out to the people.

Bob in Castlemaine

January 13, 2011 at 9:21 am

Another new and innovative way to get your ticket for the greenhouse gravy train.

Roy Hogue

January 13, 2011 at 11:42 am

And we thought Michael Mann was wasting time and money. Wow!

Bernd Felsche

January 13, 2011 at 3:03 pm

The Stasi used to compile such reports as well.

But of greater quality.

January 13, 2011 at 7:58 pm

Alarming report on Brisbane River flood risks covered up!!!!!!!!!

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/alarming-report-on-risks-covered-up/story-e6frg6nf-1225986634328

Rereke Whakaaro

Mark D: #23

Ah, but if everybody uses an assumed name, as a matter of course, then they would know! So the safest thing would be to use your own name so that they think it is an assumed name used just to confuse them. Better still, use somebody else’s real name. The real Rereke is getting so much hate mail … and not all from me either.

It has been a long day …

January 13, 2011 at 8:00 pm

Bernd Felsche: #27

I take it you have seen the movie, “Other People’s Lives”?

If you want a vision of what life will be like under the new world order, it is worth the DVD rental fee.

Waffle

January 13, 2011 at 8:31 pm

I think he needs less dials and more knobs. Oh wait, there’s plenty of knobs in there.

This looks the offshoot of an evolved version of Leetaru’s SPEED project. A classic example of yet another academic jumping aboard the gravy train. He’s a description from his bio @ http://www.kalevleetaru.com

In 2006, while continuing his graduate work, Kalev joined the University’s new Cline Center for Democracy as full-time academic staff with a mandate to help position it at the forefront of computational social science. The Center’s two signature projects are its Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) and its Social Political Economic Event Database (SPEED). The CCP project aims to collect all written constitutions worldwide 1789-present and codify them under a 1,200-question protocol. Under Kalev’s technological leadership, the project transitioned from a largely manual workflow to a centralized data management infrastructure. Digitization was revamped using a high-speed dedicated document scanner and high-throughput enterprise digitization workflow. A specialized web portal system was developed to centralize all documents into a single interface supporting provenance tracking, advanced metadata capabilities, and fulltext searching across the entire collection. A new web-based protocol system capable of scaling to large numbers of users was developed with realtime progress reporting and built-in support for multiple coder reconciliation. Finally, a new message board system was created with a range of “awareness” indicators allowing faculty to analyze and visualize the communicative patterns across their entire team, proactively identifying problems before they impact coding progress. The resulting system’s progress indicators have proved sufficiently comprehensive that the team has been able to eliminate their weekly all-staff meetings.

The SPEED project is an effort to compile a global event database codifying every major social, political, and economic event in the world from 1946 to present. Textual news reports are transformed into codified database entries with date, latitude/longitude location, and more than 1,600 variables, including connections to related events. This required building a global news monitoring infrastructure from scratch capable of capturing news from every country of the world and constructing a workflow that leverages the efficiency and scalability of automated text mining in concert with the interpretive sophistication of trained human analysts. From an initial pilot project clipping articles out of the paper New York Times with scissors, Kalev transitioned the project into a turnkey digital infrastructure, developing tools such as a document categorization system capable of filtering out irrelevant articles from a collection of more than 70M documents at greater than 98% accuracy. Automated reliability checks, queuing systems, historical geocoders, and flexible lexicon and XML protocol management tools are all available from a single web-based portal capable of handling more than 30 students working simultaneously across an archive of more than 70M documents. Today, the SPEED project is one of the largest open source intelligence initiatives in academia, and is home to the only complete archives of the declassified CIA Foreign Broadcast Information Service and British Intelligence’s Summary of World Broadcast collections.

One can’t help but think Leetaru is wasting his intelligence by trying to automate the codification of ethics, not just facts. I hope he’s having a good time chasing those rainbows.

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January 15, 2011 at 2:04 am

In 2006, while continuing his graduate work, Kalev joined the University’s new Cline Center for Democracy as full-time academic staff with a mandate to help position it at the forefront of computational social science.

@31,

Does anyone know what “computational social science: is?

I’ve heard of social science and don’t think it has any legitimate claim to be a science. But where does this thing come from? How can you hope to evaluate a constitution according to a 1,200 question protocol? I’d sure like to see those questions.

How many ways can you spell “self-righteous”?

January 15, 2011 at 3:23 am

So I went looking for their list of questions for evaluating constitutions — and I found it. It basically wants to measure a constitution against criteria that expect it to preserve and protect every little aspect of human endeavor. Does it protect even the arts and what rights does it guarantee to artists? There are questions about terrorism provisions, economic plans (as in central planning).

They intend this list of questions to be a guide for new constitutions — one of the questions asks what the source document for the constitution was. Welcome to the new world order!

You can read this here.

And here you can find a constitution apparently based on this model — the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Loquacious to say the least.

When will they learn?

Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, Jan 13th 2011 « The Daily Bayonet

January 20, 2011 at 10:10 am

[…] The warmists are watching us, and rating us and nobody knows quite what the numbers mean. Who would have guessed that number put together by people invested in the global warming hoax would come up with metrics that can’t be replicated, understood or mean anything. […]