Arguing about climate change? There’s an app for that
The Skeptical Science blogger has created an iPhone app to aid your climate change/global warming debates with your friends and family sticking up for the anthropogenic CO2 emission status quo. Now you can scroll down and access a database of known popular arguments and find your response. I’m always keen to see knowledge outsourcing services in action. Why know what it is, when you know where it is?
I like science apps because it lets me pretend my iPhone is more like a tricorder. I’ve got a few psychology reference apps that have come in mildly handy for course work and the stethoscope thing is a nice party trick, but not really the potential spyware its touted to be. Brain tutor is fun with its 3D-esque fly-around mode, as who doesn’t want to jet through the the ossipital lobe on occasion?
The information on the Skeptical Science App is good. It looks to be a copy of the blog’s own database of Frequently Awful Quotes about the subject, but what’s even more intersting is the sort of emerging crowdsourcing intelligentsia part of the kit. When you encounter one of the arguments, there’s an option to upvote it, which lets the app keep track of the most commonly employed rhetoric.
Currently the information is simply stored on your phone in the “My Reports” panel,” though there’s plans to make that data shared amongst users, which to me seemed like an obvious thing. The blog indicates they’re working on a heat map display of where people are encountering arguments. I’d be more interested in seeing the raw numbers, though. I mean, am I really going to check the heat map before going out and think “well, it looks like Tooting is a hotbed for contention around Naomi Oreskes’ study on consensus! Let us make the requisite preparations.”
It would also be useful if the reports option had a place to include new arguments and memes, as The Lobby is effective at trickling them down to their unwitting advocates. I like the app; it’s an interesting read on the tube ride home, but I don’t know how it would go over in a debate with a person somewhere if you pulled out your gizmo and suddenly started reading at them. Good to have handy I guess for comment wars on the web, though.
Power, after all, is not just military strength. It is the social power that comes from democracy, the cultural power that comes from freedom of expression and research, the personal power that entitles every Arab citizen to feel that he or she is in fact a citizen, and not just a sheep in some great shepherd’s flock.
