Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Dept. for Business, Innovation and Skills' poor use of research in THES article

There is a good article in Times Higher Education Supplement this week: criticising some poor use of research by the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). I'm quoted saying that a report on 'future jobs'

promoted by many including Lord Drayson, the Science Minister, and Gordon Brown...is substandard...used "unjustified methodologies" to reach its conclusions and was "overly reliant" on weak online sources and media reports, with some sections referencing only Wikipedia.

Although sources are referenced...the report lifted "significant passages of text" word for word.

You can read the report on the future of the job market - written by Rohit Talwar and Tim Hancock at Fast Future Research - online (PDF). The report was used for the Science: So What? So Everything? science communication campaign, and it really is strikingly bad. Problems range from the systemic (methodologies are unjustified: for example, the survey used doesn't really answer the research question or prove much beyond 'some people said some things') to tediously basic flaws (for example, relying on Wikipedia as a citation for some points or referring to 'future jobs' which have been in existence for many years). The report comes nowhere near the standards that one would expect from work commissioned for a department like BIS - and I would have serious objections to the use of such bad social science in the name of science communication.

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Posted by jon_mendel at 10:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Peter Taylor's Generation Jihad: are we in a golden period of British security?

I've just watched the first episode of Taylor's documentary Generation Jihad. Some interesting discussion of radicalisation, but I almost spilled my coffee when the programme started by stating that

a small group of radicalised [Islamist] young men now constitute the single biggest threat to our national security

If this is correct, British security is remarkably little-threatened at the moment. Certainly, Islamist terrorism is a genuine and non-trivial threat: Islamist groups have killed too many British citizens, residents and visitors, and will very likely kill more. However, compared to previous threats (for example, the risk of nuclear war if the Cold War went 'hot') the risk posed by the tiny minority who are prepared to kill in the name of Islam seems strikingly mild.

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Posted by jon_mendel at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)