The trouble with letting survey respondents select themselves is that the results can be very odd. How likely is it, for example, that even though the Muslim world does not have a single university in the world’s top 500, it nevertheless produces all ten of the world’s top ten public intellectuals, according to the latest Prospect public intellectuals poll?

I must confess to not even having heard of seven of the ten. And what has Tariq Ramadan done in the last three years to push him up from 58 to 8?

If we ignore the campaign to get Muslims to vote and delete the top ten, we have the same situation as in 2005 with Noam Chomsky, who apart from his loyal band of leftist followers is not taken seriously outside linguistics, as number one. Al Gore is number two, perhaps reflecting the fashionability of his issue.

Another problem is that the starting point is Prospect’s list, with half of the top 10 and 17 of the top 50 in 2008 seemingly not even worth considering in 2005.

There is no easy way to conduct polls like this, but perhaps voters having to write in names without a predetermined list would both include intellectuals Prospect missed, and minimise blog-driven campaigns for particular individuals.

Though this is a marketing gimmick for Prospect, even gimmicks need a certain level of credibility. A list of top universities that put, say, Cairo University above Princeton is not going to be taken seriously. Whatever the merits of Fethullah Gülen, he is not the world’s top public intellectual, and Prospect lacks an even semi-plausible public intellectual ranking.

Sydney slips in city rankings

The Age, 11 June 2008

Sydney nicer than the other lot

SMH, 11 June 2008

Believe it or not, companies pay for this rankings rubbish.

Update: Another day, another city ranking, with different results. And this one you can have for the price of a lifestyle magazine.

As Joshua Gans notes, the final report of the 2020 Summit is out.

The authors of the productivity stream report certainly have an interesting definition of the word ‘agree’, as in ‘the stream agreed to the following’. What this means is that the ideas that follow were not, in the limited time available, subject to sufficiently vigorous dissent to knock them out of consideration. But given those time constraints, most people were more concerned with getting their own pet ideas in than keeping other people’s pet ideas out.

Given the lack of a proper decision making procedure, the productivity stream as a whole agreed to none of the ideas presented.

There are many bad ideas in this document, but two in particular amused me:

* [ensure] that policies and programs are informed by evidence and rigorous evaluation

This from a group that rarely gave policy suggestions more than a few minutes of explanation or discussion.

* develop measures to improve work-life balance

From a group sacrificing its weekend, led by a man who shows less regard for work-life balance than just about any other major employer.

Media reports this morning are claiming that a ‘confidential draft report’ to the federal government shows that plastic shopping bag use soared last year:

Bag use dropped steadily to 3.36 billion a year in 2006, but spiked back up to 4.84 billion in 2007, the report said.

Now I can think of at least one reason that this report is ‘draft’: that number fails a basic ‘does it look right?’ test. Despite the active efforts of retailers to reduce plastic bag use - supermarkets with their canvas bags, other retailers switching back to paper - and consumers declining additional bags when a new item can go in an existing bag, per capita use actually increased 40% in just one year?

The people writing that report would need a very good theory to explain that before I would believe it. The most obvious explanation I can think of is that either or both of the 2006 and 2007 figures are wrong.

Such a shonky set of numbers is worthy of re-opening my old Catallaxy-era ‘dubious research’ category.