In former times it took dozens of clerks, secretaries, and administrators to create a bureaucratic milieu capable of diffusing responsibility for misinformation and disservices. Today thanks to desk-top information processors, small firms and agencies down to the neighborhood hardware store are finding it possible to emulate the bureaucratic style by blaming their disservices on their computer.
- Marvin Harris
More like this
Andy Deans of NCSU rightly rakes ASU over the coals for their Ugly Bugs contest:
Findings should be presented truthfully and fairly, their outcome being as independent from politics as possible. From those unbiased findings, we should make sound policy decisions. Misrepresenting science does a major disservice to everyone, and we shouldn't stand for it.
The Supreme Court recently decided that campus student groups do not have to be subsidized by the university if they discriminate — so, for instance, the campus Christian club can't refuse to admit gays and also collect university money. Perfectly reasonable, to my mind.
Roger Pielke Jr has another post promoting the whole Hockey Stick schtick.
As the old saying is, to err is human, but to really screw up, you need a computer.