Like a lot of people, I read the morgsatlarge post with Josef Oehmen’s email on the Fukushima plant shortly after the earthquake and tsunami. It apparently contained some inaccuracies and is found now in an edited form. A critique was written at Genius Now, and is now hosted by Barry Ritholtz, which is how I found it. Barry is supposed to be a smart guy, so I was surprised how poor the argument was. I’ll skip the part about Oehmen not being as appropriately credentialed as Jason Morgan indicated, since I have no cause for complaint there. I’ll jump down to the bottom where the author gets most ridiculous. Before the comments were expunged at MITNSE he wrote one saying:
“So far, although I see a link to this site from NSE, I don’t see any discussion of it. And frankly, Mr/MS mitnse, as far as I can tell you’re actually Ismail Subbiah, graphic designer occasionally on contract to MIT. The links between Siemens AG, Dr Oethman, Barry Brook, and MIT/LAI (which has cleverly been avoided – lets do bring that up, shall we?) suggest that no matter why the article was written in the first place, it’s become a major piece of disinformation masquerading falsely as academic opinion.”
Below that he writes, “As you can see, Siemens AG comes up again”. Comes up, how? Because you mentioned it? The only previous mention of Siemens is that Barry Brook (from the U. of Adelaide) wrote a post at BraveNewClimate which reproduced Oehmen’s summary, and that was subsequently reposted at a site called The Energy Collective which proclaims itself “Powered by Siemens”. Oehmen’s email downplayed the risks at Fukushima and it shouldn’t be surprising that those in the pro-nuke lobby would promote it. But Mr. Genius at that point had not provided any evidence that they were any more connected than me or you. Later on he noted that the Lean Advancements Initiative, the MIT department where Oehmen works, “doesn’t say is who [their] industry partners are. Oddly, they are all major defense contractors. And the only one I’ve found so far with any direct connection to nuclear power plants is Siemens”. That makes me curious as to who they are also, and oddly Mr. Genius does not list them! Now, the fact that LAI had partners in the nuclear industry might make them more inclined to promote a pro-nuke point of view. But if it was not the case that their “only” nuclear partner was Siemens, it would seem to amplify the nuclear industry influence. Why Siemens in particular is suspicious isn’t explained at all.
I wasn’t sure how seriously to take his purported belief regarding the authorship of the blog, but since a commenter at Ritholtz mocked the theory as “a hoax so pernicious that it included hacking the MIT content management system” and a trackback proclaimed “mitnse.com is a total fraud”, I’ll pile on. Mr. Genius writes that MITNSE was only set up after the Oehmen email went viral, it isn’t a .edu site, and while it is linked from the real MIT (“only a couple of links”) those were “added well after normal working hours on Monday night”. And the wordpress site was set up on, egad, a Sunday! Nor do we know the identities of the so-called “students” behind it, leading to his (possibly facetious?) accusation that it’s really Ismail Subbiah, graphic designer extraordinaire. If the wordpress site he set up doesn’t give contact info, Mr. Genius could always try contacting MIT, alerting them that someone may be fraudulently borrowing their authority, and asking who is actually behind the site. But he gives no indication he bothered to do that.
On a completely unrelated note, I think Greenwald may be wrong about standing. An ordinary criminal can indeed get away with crimes if they do so secretly and there is no identifiable victim. I believe that is the case even if they proclaim, “Muhahaha, I have committed nefarious crimes!”. Now a constitutional challenge can be facial rather than as-applied, but I think in that case it’s not necessary to demonstrate standing or for any victims to exist.
March 21, 2011 at 9:52 pm
On an even more unrelated note, looking up Nick Rosenkranz’ “The Subjects of the Constitution” led me to Jamal Greene’s SSRN page. Some of the abstracts look interesting, like The Anticanon on “Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York, and Korematsu v. United States”, which (despite the author being a progressive critic of originalism) says they weren’t such bad examples of legal reasoning. For my own part, I might be one of the only people today who thinks the Slaughterhouse Cases were correctly decided, and found this on the political context behind enlightening enough that it’s a puzzle I’d never heard about that background elsewhere. Greene also has a comparative legal study in Selling Originalism on why that approach is not popular outside of America. This one I’ve actually started reading, and indicates that Canada actually used to governed under originalist interpretations but that New Deal forces won a near-total victory and so critics of judicial overreach (as elsewhere) argue on a different basis such as prudentialism. I haven’t gotten to the part on Australia’s quasi-originalism yet.
March 22, 2011 at 4:33 am
Whenever anyone writes “I am not worried about X,” as Josef Oehmen did, its a red flag to me.
Genius Now effectively debunked Oehmen’s foolishness. It pointed out the many many inaccuracies of the Oehmen astroturfing piece.
I published that in the Think Tank section of TBP, which is a forum for a variety of opinions by different authors. But I would not have put it there if I didn’t find it both interesting and important.
March 22, 2011 at 7:43 am
“Genius Now effectively debunked Oehmen’s foolishness. It pointed out the many many inaccuracies of the Oehmen astroturfing piece.”
Maybe somewhere else, but I didn’t see any quotes/paraphrases of Oehmen’s original email. There is no reference to the content at all. No specific inaccuracies referenced. If Genius Now did that elsewhere, could you link to it? If their bandwidth is still being taxed we might be able to find it in google’s cache.
The term “astroturfing” arises from the notion of imitation-grass, as in grass-roots. But one member of the MIT faculty can hardly be supposed to constitute grass-roots! Let’s try to pretend that words retain their conventional meanings.
“But I would not have put it there if I didn’t find it both interesting and important.”
Yes, that’s what I found surprising.
March 26, 2011 at 9:39 am
Off-Topic, but I thought this was a good shot at technocratophiles like me. How come major research universities haven’t figured out how to make even their immediate vicinity low poverty?
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/new-haven-is-poor-new-haven-county-is-rich/
March 26, 2011 at 12:38 pm
Well, have they ever tried?
My admittedly limited experience with major research institutions is that they spend lots of time fundraising, and moderate amounts of time doing research. Attempting to benefit the community around them? Not so much. And I really can’t think of any reason why they would, or should, try. It’s just not part of their function.
March 27, 2011 at 6:50 am
Melendwyr,
I think in a lot of overlapping ways MRU’s have the conceit that improving the welfare of communities in their immediate vicinity is part of their responsibility. I can see why they should try, even out of a relatively limited interpretation of self-interest (I think they’d prefer their neighborhoods to be safe for their students and employees).
I think this is a bit different from topics like where corporations should be on the spectrum of maximizing investor returns and concern about general social welfare.
Yale does research on how to reduce poverty and social disfunction. Yale probably does more research on New Haven than other similarly situated communities. It’s a bad sign that Yale hasn’t “solved” New Haven yet.
March 28, 2011 at 8:50 pm
Surprised you didn’t link to Gelman, since I know you read him.
I don’t see any reason to expect universities to benefit their surrounding neighborhood.
March 28, 2011 at 10:43 pm
I feel like he’s been playing recently (past couple months) with censoring my comments, so I’ve avoided the blog.
March 29, 2011 at 10:09 pm
I searched the blog for recent comments from you and didn’t find any past January. I didn’t see much evidence of him indicating that he’d censor, but I suppose I didn’t look that closely.