New clean air stickers required for travel to French cities

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French anti-pollution car stickers

A colour-coded badge of honour or shame for every car under new French regulations. UK MoT certificates won’t do for city visitors.

UK drivers planning to go to France in the coming months are going to require new ‘clean air’ stickers or face on-the-spot fines for failing to display them, as CLM reports.

Paris, Lyon and Grenoble introduced the new Crit’Air scheme in January to tackle vehicle pollution in their city centres, with another 22 towns and cities said to be planning to follow suit over the next few years.

The scheme requires all vehicles to clearly display an air quality certificate windscreen sticker, or vignette, according to how much they pollute.

How does the Crit’Air scheme work?

The new Crit’Air system is used on high pollution days to prevent the worst polluting vehicles from driving in the affected cities. In future, however, vehicles may be banned from driving in Crit’Air areas on certain days based on which emissions sticker they have.

Air quality certificate stickers, which cost £3.60 (€4.18) each, including postage, come in six categories and cover the very cleanest electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles, which is designated by a Crit’Air green sticker, to the dirtiest, which is a Crit’Air 5 grey sticker.

These relate to the six European Union emission standards for cars, dating back to 1992 when the Euro 1 emission standard was introduced.

The scheme applies to every road vehicle, including two- or three-wheeled vehicles, quadricycles, private vehicles, commercial vehicles, heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches.

The penalty for failure to display a sticker is an on-the-spot fine of between €68-135 (£58 to £117).
. . .
Another important point to be aware of is the requirement to upload an image of the vehicle’s V5C [log book]. However, the maximum file size allowed is only 400kb which isn’t very big at all, and drivers should ensure that they don’t save the file in too large a format.

Full report: New clean air stickers required for travel to French cities – CLM

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April 15, 2017 at 08:39PM

Five Reasons Blog Posts Are Of Higher Scientific Quality Than Journal Articles

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In this blog, I will examine the hypothesis that blogs are, on average, of higher quality than journal articles. Below, I present 5 arguments in favor of this hypothesis.

1. Blogs have Open Data, Code, and Materials

When you want to evaluate scientific claims, you need access to the raw data, the code, and the materials. Most journals do not (yet) require authors to make their data publicly available (whenever possible). The worst case example when it comes to data sharing is the American Psychological Association. In the ‘Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct’ of this professional organization that supported torture, point 8.14 says that psychologists only have to share data when asked to by ‘competent professionals’ for the goal to ‘verify claims’, and that these researchers can charge money to compensate any costs that are made when they have to respond to a request for data. Despite empirical proof that most scientists do not share their data when asked, the APA considers this ‘ethical conduct’. It is not. It’s an insult to science. But it’s the standard that many relatively low quality scientific journals, such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, hide behind to practice closed science.

On blogs, the norm is to provide access to the underlying data, code, and materials. For example, here is Hanne Watkins, who uses data she collected to answer some questions about the attitudes of early career researchers and researchers with tenure towards replications. She links to the data and materials, which are all available on the OSF. Most blogs on statistics will link to the underlying code, such as this blog by Will Gervais on whether you should run well-powered studies or many small-powered studies. On average, it seems to me almost all blogs practice open science to a much higher extent than scientific journals.

2. Blogs have Open Peer Review

Scientific journal articles use peer review as quality control. The quality of the peer review process is as high as the quality of the peers that were involved in the review process. The peer review process was as biased as the biases of the peers that were involved in the review process. For most scientific journal articles, I can not see who reviewed a paper, or check the quality, or the presence of bias, because the reviews are not open. Some of the highest quality journals in science, such as PeerJ and Royal Society Open Science, have Open Peer Review, and journals like Frontiers at least specify the names of the reviewers of a publication. Most low quality journals (e.g., Science, Nature) have 100% closed peer review, and we don’t even know the name the handling editor of a publication. It is often impossible to know whether articles were peer reviewed to begin with, and what the quality of the peer review process was.

Some blogs have Open pre-publication Peer Review. If you read the latest DataColada blog post, you can see the two reviews of the post by experts in the field (Tom Stanley and Joe Hilgard) and several other people who shared thoughts before the post went online. On my blog, I sometimes ask people for feedback before I put a blog post online (and these people are thanked in the blog if they provided feedback), but I also have a comment section. This allows people to point out errors and add comments, and you can see how much support or criticism a blog has received. For example, in this blog on why omega squared is a better effect size to use than eta-squared, you can see why Casper Albers disagreed by following a link to a blog post he wrote in response. Overall, the peer review process in blog posts is much more transparent. If you see no comments on a blog post, you have the same information about the quality of the peer review process as you’d have for the average Science article. Sure, you may have subjective priors about the quality of the review process at Science (ranging from ‘you get in if your friend is an editor’ to ‘it’s very rigorous’) but you don’t have any data. But if a blog has comments, at least you can see what peers thought about a blog post, giving you some data, and often very important insights and alternative viewpoints.

3. Blogs have no Eminence Filter

[…]

4. Blogs have Better Error Correction

[…]

5. Blogs are Open Access (and might be read more).

[…]

Full post

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April 15, 2017 at 08:26PM

U.S. Energy Secretary Orders Review To Determine If Green Energy Is Killing Coal

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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Energy Secretary Rick Perry ordered a study Friday examining to what extent solar and wind power are hurting what the Trump administration considers reliable forms of coal power.

Perry, a Texas Republican who served as governor of an energy-rich state, wants the Energy Department to undergo a 60-day review of the energy grid to determine if green energy subsidies are hurting more reliable forms of energy like natural gas and coal.

“We are blessed as a nation to have an abundance of domestic energy resources, such as coal, natural gas,” Perry wrote in a memo to his chief of staff, Brian McCormack. The DOE chief was referring to sources of energy he and President Donald Trump believe should be included when discussing the country’s energy grid.

Perry’s review also seeks to evaluate to what extent regulatory burdens, subsidies, and tax policies “are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.”

The grid study comes after Perry said he and international counterparts discussed the need for a diverse supply of electricity during a G-7 Energy Ministerial meeting in Rome.

“It impressed upon me that the United States should take heed of the policy choices our allies have made and take stock of their consequences,” Perry said, not referring to any specific country.

But there is evidence that Germany and Australia’s reliance on green energy subsidies have caused damage to their grids. Germany’s subsidies for green energy, for instance, have sharply increased power prices in the country, with the average German paying 39 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The average U.S. citizen, meanwhile, spends 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour by comparison.

Wind and solar power plants in the European country under-performed in January because of cloudy weather with little or no wind, which nearly collapsed the country’s entire grid. Germany’s power grid was strained to the absolute limit and could have gone offline entirely.

South Australia underwent similar strains. The state has plenty of coal and natural gas reserves, but, thanks to South Australia’s environmental movement, many of the state’s most reliable coal-powered plants have been shuttered, forcing solar and wind power to make up the deficit.

Full post

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April 15, 2017 at 08:19PM

Subsidised Suicide: Wind Power Delivers Nothing But Rocketing Power Prices & Blackouts

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*** In this pair of pearlers, James Delingpole spans the globe: firstly detailing the growing and staggering cost of subsidised wind power in Britain; and then turning his attention Downunder to the disaster that is Australia’s wind power capital, South Australia. Post-Brexit Britain Wants To Escape Its EU Renewables Targets. About Time Too Breitbart James […]

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April 15, 2017 at 07:35PM