The Outsider

Failure is my success

Australia Day and when universities chase publicity

Daniel Piotrowski does a good job in pointing out just what a methodological crock of sh*t this supposed study from the University of Western Australia is, (though what else would you expect from a professor of a pseudo-academic discipline like sociology?), though lets himself down with some typical cultural lefty self-consciousness about the flag at the end.

So a crack commando unit of researchers from the University of Western Australia has found that people who place Australian flags on their cars are more likely to express racist attitudes than people who don’t.

The team of researchers discovered this through a comprehensive census of a vast crowd of 102 car-flag-bearing Austrayans havin’ a rip-roarin’ Oz Day barbie in Perth last year. It’s an incredibly groundbreaking and revealing set of data.

As Piotrowski notes, it is just so painfully obvious that Professor Fozdar found want she went looking for.

And yet this flakey piece of rubbish now has the totally unmerited standing of a university study. Really, what was UWA thinking, (other than 'this will get us a lot of publicity'), in deciding that this completely worthless "research," not worthy of a first-year undergraduate, was suitable for a press release?

Unfortunately though, modern universities have given in to the modern cult of marketing and now consider publicity, any publicity, as more important than maintaining academic standards at times.

How else to explain Murdoch University's complicity for years in indulging the quack toxicologist Peter Dingle? I had alarm bells going off about the stuff he was saying and writing for years before the case of his late wife and her alternative cancer treatment became public, but nobody at Murdoch? Surely not? I can say that when news of his wife's death and his role in "treating" her illness broke, I was completely unsurprised. 

I think the answer, in part at least, is that Dingle was giving Murdoch what it wanted - media coverage and presence. (Indeed, I've heard that numbers of mentions in the media, irrespective of quality or content, is taken in some places as a measure that a high profile academic is achieving results.)

It seems the fact that a lot of what he was saying was pseudo-scientific nonsense, unsupported by any credible evidence, was considered secondary to this.

People smuggling from Afghanistan: Guardian article shows we are being played for suckers

For a passage to Australia, another popular destination, the smuggler offered an all-expenses-included trip for $11,500. Like others in his trade he recommended Australia, promising it was a soft touch on granting asylum
.

"Australia gives citizenship if you have a good story
," he said. "I am 100% sure that after spending six months in a [processing centre] in Australia you will get citizenship if you do not lose your temper and have warning documents from the Taliban saying you can't live in Kabul."

He also trains his clients to stick to their story: "They will know you are lying, but as long as you say the same thing whatever they ask you, you will be fine
.

Gobsmacking stuff from the Guardian - Boom time for Afghanistan's people smugglers - and an absolute indictment of all the smarmy left-wing wankers and poseurs here who have effectively aided and abetted this quite evil and wicked trade in human misery, all so they can think themselves superior to ordinary Australians they so casually dismiss as racists.

All the teary sob stories, designed to guilt us into ignoring the clear fact that the boat people trade was always an exercise in people jumping the immigration queue by buying their way into this country, are exposed here.

For f*ck sake, not even the haplessly incompetent Labor government even tries to pretend that it is so-called 'push factors' forcing people onto our shores anymore. They gave up on that fiction when they proposed off-shore processing in East Timor and Malaysia. 

The human rights and refugee lobbies have a lot to answer for.

From their tiny cubbyhole offices, an army of typists can run up everything from marriage certificates to CVs and job application letters. Also available, for several hundred dollars more: Taliban death threats
, the special chits also known as "night letters" that can be a passport to a new life in the west.

"We can write whatever you need
; it depends," said one young clerk. "For example, we will mention you work in a government department, your job title and salary. It will say, 'If you don't leave your job by this date, we will come and kill you or put a bomb in your house'.

"Or we can say you are working with US forces," he added.

***   ***   ***   ***

"I have people from all corners of Afghanistan, but most of them come from Kabul because they are rich," said the Jalalabad-based smuggler. 

So what we've ended up with is an orderly refugee intake completely suborned by criminal people smugglers and naive human rights activists who were more concerned about finding racism in others, (it's always 'others'), rather than looking with a clear and dispassionate eye at what was happening.

And people have died because of this foolishness. Maybe upwards of 400 or more men, women and children have drowned at sea because a stupid government gave in to these pressure groups and decided to put the people smugglers back into business.

A completely avoidable tragedy.

Plus, do you know who the real victims of our compassion junkies are? People like genuine refugees sitting rotting in camps in places like Africa as the limited number of places in each year's refugee intake are taken by those who have bought their way here so they can jump ahead of them.

Crap drug research: Two thirds of published claims cannot be reproduced

Two years ago, a group of Boston researchers published a study describing how they had destroyed cancer tumors by targeting a protein called STK33. Scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen Inc. quickly pounced on the idea and assigned two dozen researchers to try to repeat the experiment with a goal of turning the findings into a drug.

It proved to be a waste of time and money. After six months of intensive lab work, Amgen found it couldn't replicate the results and scrapped the project.

"I was disappointed but not surprised," says Glenn Begley, vice president of research at Amgen of Thousand Oaks, Calif. "More often than not, we are unable to reproduce findings" published by researchers in journals.

Extremely worrying. We need to have at least reasonable confidence in the methodology of science, otherwise the quacks and snake oil salesmen will be so much harder to argue against.

Huffington Post on the pathetic state of science journalism

Science journalism is not about taking sides, or about being a cheerleader. It's about shaking the tree, about asking akward questions, about standing in the place of those who can't ask such questions, and being persistent, unpopular and dogged. It's about moral authority, something science in BBC News has lost. Science and science journalism are needed. Journalists should portray where the weight of evidence lies, but that is the least they should do, and they should not look to scientists for guidance anymore than an artist asks a bowl of cherries for advice about how to draw them! They should criticise, highlight errors, make a counterbalancing case if it will stand up, but don't censor, even by elimination, don't be complacent and say the science is settled in areas that are still contentious. The history of science and of journalism is full of those reduced to footnotes because they followed that doctrine. --David Whitehouse, 
Huffington Post, 6 December 2011