James Annan argues that Roger and I are both wrong in our discussion of how to properly think about James Hansens 2006 draft paper discussing the possibility of “super El Nino”:
(See here for history, thought if you don’t already know it, you’re likely to be uninterested, so I recommend against clicking.)
In this morning’s Albuquerque Journal (sub/ad req.):
When I began my search for Leopold, I asked Witt and his colleagues at UNM’s Museum of Southwestern Biology whether they had any specimens in their vast research collection of plants and animals that might have been collected by Leopold himself.
Witt, who is the curator of birds, took me into the collections area and began rummaging through the drawers looking for a Sharp-shinned Hawk that, according to the museum’s computer database, had been collected by Leopold.
He pulled out drawer after drawer until he finally zeroed in on the bird he was interested in — dry, stuffed with cotton, it still had the sleek look of the lethal predator it had once been.
There was no name on the tag attached to the bird’s ankle, only this explanation of where and when it was collected: Tomé Hill, Nov. 23, 1919.
Outside, as we stood by the UNM duck pond looking up at the Bushtits, Witt spotted a Sharp-shinned Hawk out of the corner of his eye as it tucked in its wings and dove earthward, apparently having spied some unlucky prey.
It was easy to imagine Leopold enjoying the sight.
Alan Mutter argued yesterday that newspapers’ print products are central to driving traffic to their web sites – that a significant fraction of the web audience overlaps print, and that the loss of print “stripped of the advantages that formerly differentiated it from all other rivals, would become just one of thousands of URLs competing for attention on the busy, noisy web.”
In the comments, Howard Owens offered a counterfactual:
The Kansas City Kansan doubled online traffic as soon as the print edition went away.
The Kansan stopped printing in mid-January, going to an all-Web delivery of its product. How has that worked out?
If you’ll indulge me, a big Inkstain hug for hug for Bob Brewin:
I’m a reluctant blogger and know that good reporting will always beat any blog, as this Albuquerque Journal story illustrates. The Journal is a privately owned, independent newspaper (a rare item in these times) and is struggling to survive in an environment where all news is supposedly “free,” but someone has to pay the bills.
Earlier this month the Journal laid off seven newsroom staffers because it — like the rest of us in the news business — try to figure out how to make a buck in a world of seemingly “free” news.
Kudos to Fleck and Journal publisher Thompson Lang for continuing to do a great job in tough times.
I’ve largely been out of the climate wars fray for years, but yesterday’s Hansen v. Pielke thread leads to a couple of observations:
Oh, and did I mention Roger Pielke Jr. and James Hansen?
Here’s the ticket to big time business success on the Internet.
The beauty of the model of Google is the way they’ve they leveraged their investment in engineering talent to, at relatively small marginal cost, aggregate information created by others into a useful package. And slapped their own ads alongside. Peter Osnos talks about the issue this week:
[N]o one delivers more of that content online than Google does, through its search functions supported by advertising, the revenues from which go to its bottom line. The notion that “information wants to be free” is absurd when the delivery mechanism is making a fortune and the creators are getting what amounts to zilch.
This is a great business model, and I am not blaming Google for pursuing it. They have added tremendous value, for which they deserve to be financially rewarded. But it has created a problematic asymmetry.
The standard argument is that newspapers, the primary creators of most of the real-time information under discussion here, should be doing X in order to garner some of those ad dollars themselves. (Where X is “Be more Web 2.0!” or “Hyperlocal!” or “Integrate with Facebook!”) But the reality of reality of the web is that advertisers will pay substantially less for a reader on line, because ads are substantially less effective on line. The problem here is not attracing readers. Newspapers have been enormously successful at that. More people read newspapers than every before, thanks to the web. The problem is that the web advertising model will not pay for the work necessary to create the content to draw the readers.
Which means that the only way to make the web work is to figure out how to put your ads next to work done by someone else. A bit of additional marginal investment to create some modicum of value, and profit!
(I thank Jim Belshaw for bringing this to my attention.)
Roger Pielke Jr. has a bit of an odd post up today taking James Hansen to task for predicting a “super El Niño” in 2006, which did not come to pass. Here’s Roger:
I’ve always thought that predictions made should not be forgotten, but evaluated and learned from.
The “prediction” in question, which I wrote about (somewhat critically) at the time, came in a draft paper Hansen circulated for comment. The “prediction” deserved criticism at the time. But to his credit, Hansen, at the time, before the paper was published, backed off, after hearing from members of the ENSO community who convinced him that the prediction was problematic. In the final version of the paper, published a few months later in PNAS, the forecast of a “super El Nino” in 2006 is gone.
There’s a significant difference between ideas shared in a draft circulated for comment and those finally published. To cite the former and ignore the latter in this case seems a bit misleading.
[update: Coby Beck has more details about the chain of events back in 2006 that I’d forgotten.]
In today’s edition of Ask Inskstain, reader Scot wonders:
Have we got updated U.S. gasoline figures to see if the $4.00/gallon dropoff, uh…thingie, continues to have legs?
Great question, Scot!
Gasoline Consumption
Gasoline consumption in the United States continues to lag.
As for the other gas thingie, the post-July decline in gas prices is finally over:
Gas Prices
Kelsey Atherton pokes at the newspaper elephant from the vantage point of the comics page:
Then, in 2007, webcomic Diesel Sweeties actually made the jump. The creator opted to create a separate print version, so as to keep his main comic and main revenue stream separate from the confines of print. Read that sentence again. This guy, who’s job primarily (though certainly not exclusively) consists of making a comic and putting it online, was making more from that than he was going to make from the previous holy-grail of webcartoonists, syndication. And in late 2008, he canceled his print comic. Too much work, his primary income was suffering, he was actually losing money, and it just wasn’t worth it to him. That club which Scotty had been kept out of four years prior? Totally not cool anymore.
Via Michael Campana, a remarkable graph:
Rainfall and GDP in Zimbabwe