Second wind for renewables financing

The current edition of Envirotech & Clean Energy Investor magazine has a cover feature by myself on renewables project finance:
Renewable energy project finance gets a second wind
Long-term financing for renewable energy projects was all but halted by the credit crunch, but stimulus measures and state-backed investors are helping the market move again.

As part of the research for the feature, I carried out a very informative interview with Christopher Knowles, head of energy, environment and investment funds at the European Investment Bank, which has become a key lender to renewable energy projects following the general financial crash. There was only space for a fraction of the interview in the magazine feature so, as I thought it was of sufficient interest to anyone interested in clean energy development and investment (or, indeed, in European policy), I've put up a full transcript at my Clean Ventures news blog.

Also due to appear shortly is a feature looking at financing and support for innovative businesses spinning out of UK universities, in the ICAEW's Corporate Financier magazine.

Forteans out for a Burton

The following is a letter I've written to the Fortean Times regarding the editorial column in the current issue (258). The FT is a magazine which I've read for close to 20 years, and contributed many book reviews to, and which generally has high standards of factual accuracy and impartiality. This editorial, mostly a summary of 'controversies' around climate change, failed to meet those standards, being a largely fact-free witter deploying a lot of spurious arguments and biased language familiar from many common denialist sources - whether that was intentional, or just the result of sloppy writing, I don't know. I could have launched into a general argument about the column's bent (especially as I've recently been reading Hoggan and Livermore's Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, a well referenced exposé of the industry lobby groups behind much denialist blether), but decided to settle for a factual rebuttal of some of its central claims. For general reference, here's what I wrote:

Dear Editors,

I was disappointed to find that your reporting and commentary in the editorial column of FT258 on Justice Burton's legal ruling on philosophical belief is inaccurate and misleading in a number of respects. The inaccuracies are very similar to those seen in a lot of the newspaper commentary on the ruling at the time, but I would expect better of FT.

You say that: 'Mr Justice Michael Burton concluded that "a belief in man-made climate change... is capable... of being a philosophical belief for the purposes of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations."'

Those obvious elisions led me to seek out the actual ruling, to see what you'd missed out - a natural sceptical response, I'm sure you'd agree. I found the full text of the ruling with a few moment's googling (via Bindmans).

Here's what the ruling's summary actually said:
"A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations."

As the full ruling explains in some detail, it's those "alleged resulting moral imperatives" that make it a philosophical belief under the terms of this law, not the belief in climate change per se. Those 'moral imperatives', as stated by the claimant Tim Nicholson, are not necessarily accepted by everyone who gives credence to the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change.

Your 'inevitable conclusion' that the case for man-made climate change is 'not a matter of scientific fact but of faith' is anything but inevitable. According to the ruling, the scientific nature, or otherwise, of the basis for the belief is irrelevant in judging whether it is a 'philosophical belief' in the terms of the law. Burton says: "In my judgment, if a person can establish that he holds a philosophical belief which is based on science, as opposed, for example, to religion, then there is no reason to disqualify it from protection by the Regulations."

You say that 'our belief in atoms or electricity has required no such special status'. That would be because they've not been subject to any similar proceedings under this law. However, Burton rules that other scientific theories may also be the basis for philosophical beliefs. With reference to the case "exemplified in the play Inherit the Wind", he notes: "Darwinism must plainly be capable of being a philosophical belief, albeit that it may be based entirely on scientific conclusions (not all of which may be uncontroversial)."

Equally, he says that Creationism could also be a philosophical belief for the purposes of these regulations, as could belief in political philosophies such as "Communism or free-market Capitalism". The way is already open for Flat-Earthers, or even climate change Denialists, to seek protection under the same law, so long as they can show that their beliefs are "genuinely held". There could indeed be some interesting cases ahead.

The ruling is a great deal more subtle, and arguably fortean, that you give it credit for. No doubt it could be criticised from a legal or philosophical viewpoint, but misrepresenting the contents of the ruling does nobody any favours. At the least, it's a very disappointing lapse from FT's usual standards of accuracy and impartiality.

At the time of the ruling, some newspapers did predict that it would likely be distorted by the denialist lobby to use as a rhetorical weapon against the scientific consensus. A similar thing happened with a previous ruling from the same Justice Michael Burton, in which he ruled against an attempt to prevent the film 'An Inconvenient Truth' from being shown in British schools. Burton approved the film for educational use, on the proviso that it be accompanied by notes highlighting nine instances where it potentially overstated the scientific consensus - a judgment that was spun by the denialist lobby to seem like a condemnation of the film and its arguments, even though the plaintiff (backed by industrialist and political activist Robert Durward) decisively lost his case. For details, see desmogblog.com.

As ever, it's worth looking at the primary material (the text of the ruling, in these cases), rather than just depending on contemporary media coverage.

Regards,

Tim Chapman

Skunked by statistics

There's lots of stories today based on a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry on high-potency cannabis and the risk of psychosis. All the reports, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, lead with the same claim:
Skunk, the powerful form of cannabis dominating the street drug market, is seven times more likely to cause psychosis than ordinary cannabis, scientists say.
Which might be fair enough - after all, that's what the press release from the Royal College of Psychiatrists says.

But, having read the BJP paper concerned, I'm not entirely sure that stacks up. The research is on the proportion of psychosis patients who use skunk, not the proportion of skunk users who develop psychosis. The actual findings, based on samples of a couple of hundred, are that 78% of cannabis users in the group of psychosis patients use skunk, compared with 37% of cannabis users in the control group. In common parlance, that means around twice as many cannabis-using psychosis patients use skunk in preference to regular cannabis as cannabis-using non-patients. In all, 45% of the psychosis patients and 24% of the non-patients use skunk (56.9% of the patients say they have used some kind of cannabis, and 62.5% of non-patients).

The seven-times claim seems to be based on the adjusted odds ratio of 6.8. I admit I'm not entirely familiar with the use of odds ratios, as they're not a common statistical tool in econometrics or physics, but it seems (from a purely arithmetical consideration) that they aren't such a direct measure of how much more probable something is in one group compared to another.

And, unless I'm missing something, there certainly seems to be no basis for flipping the causality around. You can't assume that if group A is N times more likely to do X, then doing X makes you N times more likely to fall into group A.

Am I missing something here? Or are a whole bunch of health journalists (and whoever wrote and approved that press release)?

Note I'm not saying there's no connection between extreme cannabis use and mental problems, but I do like to see some sort of accurate reporting on research, especially when it relates to something that's such a political football.

[LATER: After a bit more consideration, and a couple of glasses of Cabernet Shiraz, I think I understand how odds ratios work a bit better. It's a measure of relative probability that doesn't intuitively translate into absolute probabilities. It's the ratio of odds expressed as fractions (eg 3-to-2=3/2=1.5) not absolute probability (0.6). An odds ratio of N doesn't mean that the proportion of As doing it is N times greater than the proportion of Bs (or that N times as many As as Bs do it). For example, if p(A)=0.8 and p(B)=0.4, then the odds ratio N=(.8/.2)/(.4/.6)=6, even though there's just a factor of two in the absolute probabilities. Tricky things, statistics.
Thinking further, it seems to work if group B is taken as a general population, and A as a sub-set - all other things being equal, the odds ratio is a measure of the increased probability that a member of B with behavior X will join group A, compared with the probability of a member of B without that behaviour. If that's right, it's certainly not obvious from the reporting that that is what it means.
The point about causality remains. If a random writer is twice as likely to drink red wine than a random non-writer, that doesn't necessarily mean that drinking red wine doubles your chances of becoming a writer.]

A new position

As of this month, I'm working part-time at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, with the grand title of European Communications Manager. I'll be working across the centre's European research projects, helping write funding proposals and manage the various international academic and industrial partners, through to disseminating and publicising the research once it's done.

I've been involved with the centre since its founding in 2001 - first writing about what they do for Yorkshire Business Insider and other publications, and more recently working on a few projects with them on a freelance basis. The centre's grown hugely over that time, and is now recognised as a world leader in its field of very clever metal-bashing (and, increasingly, composite-bashing). Of course, that's carrying on a long and noble tradition for Sheffield (even though the centre itself is located just over the border in Rotherham). I'm very happy to be helping, in some small way, to secure a high-tech future for my native city.

It's probably a good sign, then, that the AMRC appeared very briefly on BBC4's excellent Synth Britannia programme last week - to the unmistakable soundtrack of '4JG' (yes, a tribute to JG Ballard) by The Future (a short-lived early incarnation of The Human League).

Given that the main building here is called 'The Factory of the Future', it's a great visual/musical pun - I wonder if the production team actually realised that?

Anyway, it's a part-time position, and I'll still be writing and working freelance for the rest of the time - and, from a financial point of view, a monthly income will be a welcome stabiliser to the rock'n'roll revenues of a freelance life, particularly in the current media market. I'm currently deep in a lengthy feature for Corporate Financier on that perennial topic of finance for innovative start-up businesses and university spin-outs. My Clean Ventures site will also continue and, of course, I'll still be adding pics and ponderings here as and when. Stay tuned.

Blinded by the light

Now, this seems like bullshit. The Sunday Times reports:
Roman Abramovich zaps snappers with laser shield
[Abramovich's] boat’s most unusual feature is perhaps the anti-paparazzi “shield”.
Infrared lasers detect the electronic light sensors in nearby cameras, known as charge-coupled devices. When the system detects such a device, it fires a focused beam of light at the camera, disrupting its ability to record a digital image.

Tech mag Wired uncritically repeats the story (some blog comments there are rather more sceptical), as do many other organs that really should know better, and Amateur Photographer ponders the legalities of it.

The claimed tech makes very little sense, though. Most paparazzi use digital SLRs. In these, the sensor is hidden until the very millisecond that the photo is taken. Also, most professional DSLRs use CMOS sensors, not CCDs - even if this putative detection tech will work on both, that's very sloppy reporting.

It's not entirely made-up, though - there is technology that can detect camera CCDs and blind them with lasers. In 2006, Georgia Tech Research News reported on tech in development aimed at stopping illicit recording of movies. That notes:
Current camera-neutralizing technology may never work against single-lens-reflex cameras, which use a folding-mirror viewing system that effectively masks its CCD except when a photo is actually being taken.

It's entirely possible that Abramovich's people have installed a similar system in the belief that it will work against well-equipped paps. But whoever sold it to them is doubtless laughing - and not just at the Russians.

Tech off the geek beat

The Guardian Media section has a slightly annoying article from the paper's technology editor Charles Arthur on why technology journalists are terribly important trend-setters:
Why, though? Because technology is the second-fastest changing field in news (after fashion). You'd watch what the fashion writers are wearing to find out what's going to be in next season. It's the same with technology, but with a longer timelag. Cellan-Jones joined Twitter in March 2007 – long before it became popular. Jemima Kiss, one of the Guardian's best-known Twitterers (and with the largest total of "followers"), joined in December 2006; the service had only been open to the public since July 2006. Ditto for Facebook.
Thus technology journalists were often the first in an organisation to get (or demand) email, the web, to discover Google, YouTube and so on.

Smugness aside, it's annoying because it assumes such a narrow definition of what technology (and technology journalism) actually is. Arthur's talking exclusively about consumer IT, online media, and associated gadgetry - what the venerable blog calls the geek beat. That's a very small area of technology - and, in significant part, a rather trivial one (the comparison to fashion is accurate). If Twitter or Facebook are at all interesting, it's not because of their enabling technologies.

I'm largely a tech journalist, but I'm more often writing about next-gen solar power (in the current Cleantech Magazine), say, than about the latest ICT gizmo (admittedly I do do that regularly for Crain's Manchester Business, though I try to mix it up a bit with proper tech like aerospace composites). At the moment, I'm finishing up a piece on medical devices - a tech area of which I'm rather keen not to be an early adopter of its products.

So has Taleb gone nuts?

Last evening, I caught a rather bemused-seeming Nassim Nicholas Taleb appearing at the end of Newsnight, apparently following some kind of meeting with David Cameron. When he could get a few words in between Kirsty Wark and some chap from the Times talking about Cameron's intellectual credentials (such as they are), Taleb was making his usual points about risk in the economy and other areas. Here's something he said:
"We have to be more conservative with some classes of risk, like the climate - we have to be more worried about the climate than people traditionally have."

So it's slightly puzzling to read this morning's papers and see Taleb presented as a climate change denier (see the Scotsman, for instance - although it is strangely satisfying to see even the Sun portraying denialism as the hallmark of a crank).

The implication is that Taleb (and by extension, Cameron, who shared a platform with him at the RSA event) has joined that weird lobby of evidence-denying dishonest do-nothings. From what I've read of his work, that seems rather unlikely.

For example, there's this from an essay on the Edge:
Correspondents keep asking me if the climate worriers are basing their claims on shoddy science and whether, owing to nonlinearities, their forecasts are marred with such a possible error that we should ignore them. Now, even if I agreed that it was shoddy science; even if I agreed with the statement that the climate folks were most probably wrong, I would still opt for the most ecologically conservative stance. Leave Planet Earth the way we found it. Consider the consequences of the very remote possibility that they may be right—or, worse, the even more remote possibility that they may be extremely right.

Here's what he reportedly said at the RSA, as per the London Evening Standard:
"I'm a hyper-conservative ecologically. I don't want to mess with Mother Nature. I don't believe that carbon thing is necessarily anthropogenic"

[EDIT, 20/8: Having now listened to the recording of the meeting, available from the RSA page linked above, it's clear that what Taleb actually says is "Even if I don't believe that carbon thing is necessarily anthropogenic, I just don't want to mess with Mother Nature." Which is obviously quite different. Shame on the Standard.]

It's grossly unfair to paint Taleb as part of the denial lobby, when his message is that even if you don't accept the evidence, we should be doing all we can to reduce greenhouse emissions because the potential cost of not doing so will be devastating. That's a long way from the do-nowt bleating of the fossil fuel industry shills and the genuine fruitloop fringe.

I strongly suspect Labour party briefings are behind this morning's stories. That not only seems deeply unfair on Taleb (but then, if you lie down with dogs, etc), but also rather unnecessary, as you really don't need this kind of spin to suggest that Cameron's a bit of a twat.

Steven Wells RIP

Fuck me, Steven Wells is dead:

And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity -- the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans -- the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks. (Check out the AMA logos, those smiling beasts are not snakes.)
You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.
Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.

Probably the greatest and funniest pop journalist of the age, and more. His recent cancer diaries (find them via the link above) certainly transcended the genre.


Next day edit: That sign-off reference to the song made famous by the Jacksons suddenly looks weirdly prophetic...

ReWired

I picked up the launch issue of the new UK edition of venerable US tech culture mag Wired. It's a curious rebirth.

The original UK edition ran from 1995-97, expiring before the dotcom bubble began to inflate. Check out Phil Gyford's covers gallery on Flickr - I got quite a buzz of nostalgia. This was around when I was training and starting work as a journo. I recall phoning their London office in early '96 to ask for a work placement, and getting knocked back by one of the staffers, the now rather famous Hari Kunzru.

In the years since then, I'd occasionally pick up the US edition. So I was very interested to see how the new local incarnation turned out.

First impressions: at 186 pages with a thick multi-fold cover, it's a fair bit thicker than the last US issue I read, though not as doorstop-like as the mag at its bubbly peak. But I wonder how much of the advertising was paid for at full rates.

Visually, the cover is cluttered and dim and hardly leaps off the shelf - not a great choice of image (a twilight cityscape) or tagline ('Your life in the future.' - is that the best they could come up with?). Also, the cover's printed on horrible, scrapey textured paper - it's probably a personal dislike, but it really didn't make me want to actually have the mag in my hands. The inner page design also doesn't quite have the practiced style of the US edition - though, mercifully, they do avoid that US practice of hiving off the last few pages of each feature into a spartan back section (another pet hate).

Content-wise, it also seems a little off. Unforgivably for a title which is supposed to be at the cutting edge, the first item in the zeitgeisty 'Start' section, a double-page splash of a CGI flooded London, dates from last July (possibly this was a tit-for-tat between the mag and the agency responsible who also provided the cover art). Otherwise it's all similar stuff to the parent, though maybe less self-assured. A few items could fit as well in any other bloke mag, while others (the 'Fetish' section of elaborately photographed hi-fi kit, including Bad Science-worthy £170 cables that come with a CD that 'demagnetises the cables, removing interference'; and another six pages of supercomputer cabling porn) seem more like Barleyesque pastiche.

The lead feature, a scrappy assemblage of predictions from a panel of professional futurists and such, won't startle anyone. I'd guess it's meant as a statement piece for the relaunch, but it just seems a painfully obvious thing to do. John O'Reilly's piece on 'life-tracking' (keeping an online record of the minutiae of your daily existence) is more interesting, but possibly for the wrong reasons - it all seems more like a personality disorder than the exciting new trend it's painted as.

Worryingly for the mag's potential future as a UK title, the most interesting articles are the ones reprinted from the US edition, including the very good one by Felix Salmon on Li's copula, aka 'the formula that brought down the global economy' (which I'd already read the previous month); and the riproaring 'Cowboys of the deep' piece by Joshua Davis, first published in February and already optioned as a movie. Nice to see them again, but surely a large part of the target audience will already have read them in the US mag, which has been widely available over here? There's also Andrew Corsello's hagiography of Elon Musk, recycled from Conde Nast stablemate GQ.

There's some fairly big name columnists, but the sheer ubiquity of people like Susan Greenfield, the always faintly ludicrous Alain de Botton and the rather tired Warren Ellis (who might have been an interesting choice about 10 years ago when he was walking off Hellblazer) means that there's very little reason to buy the mag to read their thoughts, which is surely the whole point of columnists.

It's good to see this ambitious popular tech title back on the racks, but I do think it'll have to up its game to survive, particularly in the current market. And for all the excitement about Web2.0 (or whatever it's called this week), one has to wonder whether the target readers for WiredUK2.0 are too wrapped up in their TwitFaceSpotified social meedja networks to actually go out and buy anything as old-fashioned as a paper magazine.

And back

I'm back from the visit to San Diego, more or less refreshed after another temporally disorienting brace of flights (left the hotel 4am Sunday, home at 8am Monday). A very worthwhile and enjoyable trip, though, meeting everyone from the Mayor to a bunch of dudes making environmentally-friendly surfboards (possibly the most Californian business imaginable). I'll be doing a full write-up for Cleantech Magazine. There's more pics from the trip on my Flickr stream.

In the meanwhile, Cleantech's latest Infocus publication features another article by myself on venture capital investment in smart grid companies, an area that was high on the agenda in San Diego where the local utility is gearing up to install some 1.4 million smart meters in homes. Also due out is the latest annual review from Private Equity International with my review of the European mid-market; and, next week, another technology focus section for Crain's Manchester Business, looking at smart tech investment in a downturn and also featuring an unexpected bit of Hollywood glamour.

At last the 2007 show

Happy new year, folks. I've started with a long-overdue update on the main site, with a few new additions to the features archive.

The major one is the series of features on solar energy technology and venture capital I wrote for Cleantech Magazine from late 2007 to spring 2008. These were more recently republished in an updated, collected form in the magazine's Infocus supplement, from which I offer my features on the next generation of solar (PDF, 450kb).
The next issue of Cleantech will include another article by myself, reviewing the cleantech VC market over 2008 and looking forward to what the new year may bring. For more on this subject, of course, see my other blog Clean Ventures.

I've also put up a year-old feature I wrote for Private Equity International's Annual Review, casting my eye over trends in the European mid-market in 2007. I'm about to start on the equivalent feature for this year's review - I suspect I'll be hearing some interesting views on what's been happening...

Also, another piece for the ICAEW's Corporate Financier from late 2007, looking at company sales in the wake of the credit crunch (PDF, 620kb). All seems a while ago now, really, but some of the advice therein should still hold. The very attentive might also note that I've added a page with another Corporate Financier feature on technology sector M&A - this was previously linked to a PDF of the feature at the ICAEW's site which has now vanished into the ether, and of which I foolishly didn't keep a copy.

Anyway, that's the old news. More on new projects soon.

Nuclear future and past

This week's Crain's Manchester Business includes a technology focus section mostly written by myself. The lead story explores how the University of Manchester is positioning itself as a centre of nuclear R&D to serve the planned new generaton of nuclear power stations.

It's a fairly controversal move, as the Manchester Evening News picked up a few weeks ago. Personally, I've come to conclude that nuclear power has to be a key part of the UK's energy market for the near-future - but, at best, it's a medium-term solution with very long-term costs and consequences.

Local worries are likely to be fuelled by a report in the Guardian today on some of the long-term consequences of the university's previous nuclear work -
Radiation left over from 100-year-old experiments by Ernest Rutherford, the father of modern nuclear physics, may be responsible for the recent deaths of two Manchester University lecturers. Hundreds more former lecturers and students at Manchester University could be at risk from nuclear materials they were exposed to. At least as late as 2006, there was still contamination in the building in which Rutherford worked, known as the Rutherford Building[...] A confidential report given to the university in June, written by three academics who worked in the building, claims that the university suspected that there was a potential radiation hazard, but allowed staff to continue working in the building.

It's extremely unlikely that any of the uni's current or proposed research facilities will feature yer actual messing-about with radioactive materials in the centre of the city, but the university management's apparent response to the pollution problem will hardly inspire public confidence.

PE prognosis

Many private equity players are (quite rightly) criticised for doing all they can to avoid publicity. That's not a complaint you could make about Alchemy Partners' John Moulton - I fondly remember his Ali G impersonation, back in the Venturedome days ('Ali G' was a popular TV comedy character of the time), while interviewing himself about his much-reviled bid for MG Rover.

Anyway, he's back in the news, raising hackles with a gloomy speech at the more usually bullish 'Super Return' conference in Munich. As the FT reports:
"The industry needs to prepare for bad news," warned John Moulton, founder of Alchemy Partners, in his opening address as a handful of trade unionists waved "locust" placards and distributed anti-buy-out leaflets outside Munich's MOC centre.
"Parts of our industry were behaving just like the US subprime mortgage lenders," said Mr Moulton, a renowned industry doomsday forecaster.
"The quality of what we were doing went down, there was no checking and we used false numbers," he said [...]
"We really ought to expect returns of the industry to tumble," said Mr Moulton.

Gloomy, but hardly unrealistic. It'd be hard to argue that the top end of the private equity market hasn't been building itself a bubble in recent years, fuelled by cheap debt and the weight of new money pouring into the class. The cheap debt's gone now, slamming the brakes on new deals and leaving many over-leveraged existing investments in deep lumber.

The weight of money coming in is still there, though, and it's still looking for a home. I've recently been writing a couple of articles on the European mid-market for Private Equity International, and the folk in that market are a lot more optimistic. There's some problems from the credit crunch, but not nearly as bad as at the big LBO end. And everyone's claiming they were aware of the risks of the recent debt bubble, of course - the head of buyouts at 3i described the generous conditions as "beyond the levels of common sense... a dangerous place for a banking market to be". Many partners are seeing potentially rich pickings in the more troubled economic times ahead, and those out raising new funds over the crunch period say there was no loss of appetite from their own investors.

At the venture end, things are looking shakier. 3i's announcement that it's pulling out of earlyish deals (reported here at Real Business) is hardly unexpected, but might be symptomatic of a wider shift. The rate of new deals in the very-recently-hot areas of clean technology, which I've been tracking over on my Clean Ventures blog, certainly seem to be slowing.

Interesting times ahead...

Crain's on the skyline

The first edition of the new business paper Crain's Manchester Business hit the stands today. I've not been over the hills to get a copy (having finished my xmas shopping early for once, I'm trying to avoid urban centres for the while), but the online version is looking good.

Interesting choice of lead story, on problems in Manchester's city centre residential market - or Nightmare on Oldham Street as they head it. The editor's column, from my old boss Steve Brauner, pontificates further. These problems of over-supply and a very weak resale market are hardly unforeseen, and I've written about similar issues here before (see various posts under the regional label. They're not limited to Manc either - Leeds is probably as bad, or worse, and Sheffield is trying to deal with the problems before they develop.

Anyway, best wishes to Steve and the gang for making Crain's a success. As How-Do's reported, the Manchester Evening News and Newsco Insider have been stepping up to fend off the new entrant, though at least Newsco hasn't been playing as dirty as they did with the ill-fated North West Enquirer. One assumes that Crain's heavyweight US backing will help it last rather longer. New blood in the regional market has to be good.

'Climate hoax' advocates hoaxed

News, via Reuters, of an entertaining hoax on a certain group of conspiracy theorists -
A hoax scientific study pointing to ocean bacteria as the overwhelming cause of global warming fooled some sceptics on Thursday who doubt growing evidence that human activities are to blame.
Laden with scientific jargon and published online in the previously unknown "Journal of Geoclimatic Studies" based in Japan, the report suggested the findings could be "the death of manmade global warming theory".
Sceptics jumped on the report. A British scientist e-mailed the report to 2,000 colleagues before spotting it was a spoof. Another from the US called it a "blockbuster".

A wee bit of investigation finds that the supposed journal site is registered to one David Thorpe, who comics geeks of a certain age will remember as the creator of Doc Chaos, and is now apparently an environmental journalist.

Nice work, AuThorpe! Though next time it might be an idea to use an anonymous site registration service to help keep the joke going a little longer. Still, it seems to have put the wind up the wingnuts anyway.

UPDATE, Friday pm: Thorpe's acknowledged his involvement, but says he didn't write it himself:
I did not write the content of the site. Someone else did. I designed the site because I was asked to by someone who knew I would be sympathetic to the joke. I appreciate it looks as though I wrote it. I even wish I had written it, because it's very funny. But I didn't.
Fair play.

UPDATE, Monday 12/11: Thorpe's written an extensive and elegant blog post about the reasons for and response to the hoax:
What the hoax showed is that there are many people willing to jump on anything that supports their argument, whether it's true or not.
What we wanted to emphasise is that it's necessary to achieve scientific validity using the peer-review model. Proper climate science makes every attempt to do this, and is a constantly evolving and self-refining process, as all science is.
So, when commentator posted on my blog - sarcastically - "....And we do all have to go with the "scientific consensus" don't we?" - I can only say, if we haven't got the scientific consensus then what have we got?
Meanwhile, Nature snares an interview with the still-anonymous author of the fake paper:
Its purpose was to expose the credulity and scientific illiteracy of many of the people who call themselves climate sceptics. While dismissive of the work of the great majority of climate scientists, they will believe almost anything if it lends support to their position. Their approach to climate science is the opposite of scepticism.

Freelance rates guide

Fellow Calderdale NUJ chap Andrew Bibby has released the latest edition of his Freelance Ready Reckoner. This is an essential tool for any freelancer (journalist or otherwise) as it breaks down typical staff salaries into equivalent daily rates, and provides recommended freelance daily rates that take your overheads into account.

As Andrew explains:
Many freelances fail to adequately appreciate when pricing their work that they are responsible for a range of costs which, were they working as an employee, would be covered by their employer. These include office equipment costs, premises costs, sick pay, pensions, holiday pay, insurance and various other costs. When pricing their services, it is useful for freelances to take into account what the comparable cost would be for employers if they used their own employees instead.

To download the Ready Reckoner as a handy PDF (56kb), click here.

Bad Business

Sad news for tech journalism - the New York Times reports that the venerable Business 2.0 magazine is likely to be shut down by its owners at Time Inc ('venerable' here means that it survived the post-dotcom tech crash and more or less thrived since). The readership's been pretty stable in recent years, but ad revenue has plummeted, apparently following a particular piece of management stupidity -
Current and former Time Inc. employees point to what appears to have been an ill-advised move this year to combine the advertising sales teams of Time Inc.’s finance and business publications, which include Fortune, Money, CNNMoney.com, Fortune Small Business and Business 2.0.
Consolidated under a single banner, Time Inc.’s Business and Finance Network (or Tibfin, as it is known inside the company), Time sales representatives stopped pitching the distinct appeal and audience of Business 2.0 to focus on the larger titles like Fortune.
That often turned Business 2.0 into an afterthought; big advertisers like Microsoft and Intel were offered discounts on other Time Inc. business titles if they would also buy pages in Business 2.0.

Sharing ad teams over disparate titles is a pretty common tactic (though far from ubiquitous) at smaller publishers, but I'm quite surprised to see it at this level. Still, it'll hardly be the first time that bad management decisions have scuppered a good title. My sympathies are with all the journos affected.

Serial thrills

The new issue of Real Business is now out, including a feature by myself on the strategies and psychology of serial entrepreneurs. You'll have to get the mag to read it, as the online version has been somehow horribly mangled, starting and finishing rather abruptly mid-par.

Part of the feature was looking at the climate in the UK for serial entrepreneurship. It's heartening to hear that the successful guys are pretty happy with the financial, cultural and regulatory state of affairs, despite the incessant whinging from the CBI, IOD, etc, about 'red tape'.

I also liked, in the same issue, this piece by Charles Orton-Jones on family brewers, part of a special section on family firms.

Clean Ventures blog

I've just launched a new blog, Clean Ventures, focusing specifically on clean technologies and cleantech venture capital. There's a number of US blogs on a similar theme of course, but I'll be doing it from a UK and European perspective. I'll be documenting VC deals in cleantech companies, new research and analysis on the sector, and policy news of interest; pointing to emerging technologies, companies and services; and exploring issues such as the possible investment bubble in listed cleantech businesses, and what that might mean for companies and investors. It's starting out quite modestly, but I'm aiming to introduce new services and content as things develop.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed an increasing number of posts on cleantech and related concerns in recent months. If you've found these interesting, I hope you find the new blog to be a welcome addition to your personal blogosphere - and if you've not been that interested, it's also good news as there'll be less of that here.

Tech buyouts and bubbles

Here's a feature I wrote recently for Corporate Financier (the magazine of the Corporate Finance Faculty of the ICAEW), as a handy downloadable PDF. It's looking at M&A activity in the tech sector, examining what's driving the current high level of deals, and asking whether there's any risk of another tech bubble. There's also some nice pictures of balloons.

The feature also ties in with a couple of bits of original research I'm currently working on as part of my Master's in Economics & Finance. The first is an event study for the Industrial Organisation module, which is focusing on a deal mentioned in the feature - Sage Group's acquisition bid for Norway's Visma, which was trumped by a rival bid from HgCapital. The main question is whether the market saw the failure of Sage's bid as damaging its prospects, as potentially reflected in the group's share price.

The second is my dissertation, which I'll be working on over this summer. My proposal (yet to be formally accepted, and subject to modification) is an analysis of recent market behaviour in the clean energy sector, with an eye to identifying behaviour characteristic of a speculative bubble. As I briefly mention in the CF feature, the public markets are currently showing a strong appetite for clean energy and related businesses, and there has been some talk that there's a bubble developing (for instance, see this report from Forum for the Future). I'll be doing a little number-crunching on that question. More as it happens.