Smart meters, dumb science

Introduction

On February 21, 2013, the city council of Sebastopol, California (a small suburb north of San Francisco) adopted a resolution attempting to ban the installation of smart meters by Pacific Gas and Electric, claiming that the devices pose “potential risks to the health, safety and welfare of Sebastopol residents.” In taking this measure, Sebastpol officials followed the lead of Marin County (hardly a traditional bastion of conservative pseudoscience), which in 2011 passed a similar resolution. To date, PG&E has ignored both, claiming that only California’s Public Utilities Commission has jurisdiction in the matter, but debate continues at several levels.

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In Memoriam: Robert R. Phelps (1926-2013)

Robert Ralph Phelps born March 22, 1926 died on January 4, 2013 aged 86

After an earlier career as a radio operator in the merchant marines, Bob Phelps studied at the University of California in Los Angeles and then went on to completed a PhD from the University of Washington in 1958 under the supervision of Victor Klee. His thesis was entitled “Subreflexive normed linear spaces”. (A class of Banach spaces that disappeared when Bishop and Phelps showed all Banach spaces enjoyed this very important property!) After spending two years at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and a

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Scientific nonsense and relative risk

Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet very few receive any formal training in the requisite mathematics and statistics, and, partly as a result, many poor decisions are being made, both by individuals and governmental bodies. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that we may be neurologically ill-equipped to make the sort of decisions called for by modern society. Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes it clear in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that making careful (slow) judgements is a very complicated mental process.

For example, many have presumed that in the wake of

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