Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Numbers - more Backlash?


Lookee lookee!
The European Elasmobranch Association is meeting in Berlin - and who is the first keynote speaker? None other than Shelley Clarke who is obviously poised to once again rant against the abuse of her numbers!

I'm of two minds about this.
Yes it is terribly frustrating to see how some of the Sharktivists continue to spew the same old tired nonsense, as in this brand new press release by Sea Shepherds that prattles on about almost 100 million (the "number", if you really want to use one, is 38 million!) and about the oceans providing for up to 80% (really???) of our oxygen, as if the latter had anything to do with Sharks!

On the other hand, Ms Clarke's public wailing is frankly starting to become irritating.
More and more, this is looking like a self serving crusade, the more as everybody and his dog has read her original piece in SeaWeb - especially her audience at that meeting!
I would be much more impressed if Ms Clarke decided to become part of the solution and started working on a new peer reviewed paper about the actual numbers more ten years later - and I would be incredibly impressed and thankful if Bayesian inference or no Bayesian inference, she could provide us with something a little more specific than a number with an error margin of 92%!

Or, may this be no more than some rather thinly veiled angling for funding - and if so, any takers givers?

But that's just cantankerous me.
Others may differ, and I shall undoubtedly hear about the reaction of her fellow researchers, the more as Juerg will be in Berlin to present the results of Kirsty's foray into the arcane realm of the shy-bold continuum.

So, here's to a positive outcome of this controversy!

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