Domain: academia.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to academia.edu.
Comments · 67
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Re:But...
As the 1999 article Die Recken von Schöningen – 400 000 Jahre Jagd mit dem Speer discusses, throwing spears matters, animals will flee at a certain distance of a perceived threat. For most animals this is less than 30 m. The Schöningen spears make practical hunting weapons up to about 30 m distance.
The 1999 article also argues that in some situations throwing spears is more effective than using a bow: Animals learn to associate the characteristic noise from firing an arrow from a bow with danger; triggering a flight reflex that makes them start to move while the arrow is still in flight. This can be a problem when hunting with bows. On the other hand, there is no such noise when throwing spears
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No surprise here
I wonder why this study is considered big news now. It confirms the findings of German scientists from the late 90s (see e.g. Die Recken von Schöningen – 400 000 Jahre Jagd mit dem Speer, more publications referenced in the German Wikipedia and the new article in Nature). The design of the experiments seems similar. They even chose the very same spear (Schöningen 2) to base their replicas on.
Replicating earlier results is important and useful. Still I don't get why the results are reported by the media as if they were a surprise.
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Digital Product Placement instead of Ads
Netflix could experiment with digital product placement, just like they are producing Interactive movies and series. This 4 page paper is an introduction to this topic: https://www.academia.edu/12616... If they use state of art technology, Netflix could sell a lot of Ads and product placement without annoying their paying customers.
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Re:Do you know what thermal plants do to birds
That pdf is completely riddled with errors on every page, and most of its links are either dead, obsolete, or both. And when you can find the links, they're usually riddled with errors. For example, in their attempts to talk up a lithium "water crisis", they link to "DClithiumfullreportenglish.pdf", but the link is dead. However, you can find it scattered around elsewhere, such as here. Here's what it says on the subject:
One major problem that lithium development could cause is a major water crisis. The region already suffers from a serious water shortage, impacting quinoa farmers, llama herders, the region’s vital tourism industry, and drinking water sources. While Bolivian officials contend that the lithium project’s water requirements will be minimal, their estimates are based on very limited and incomplete information.
This is, of course, an absurdity (no references, of course!). The water lithium is produced from is not freshwater. It's brine. You don't dump brine on quinua or give it to llamas and people to drink. Furthermore, there are no farmers, herders, and tourism lodgings in the middle of salars. It's salt. You can't grow crops and graze animals on salt.
This pdf is from "Rebecca Hollender and Jim Shultz, May 2010". So first off, 8 years old. Secondly, who are these world-renowned mining experts? This appears to be her. Samples of her work:
"A Politics of the Commons or Commoning the Political Distinct Possibilities for Post Capitalist Transformation"
"Prescription for Failure: Examining the Drug Policy and Development Nexus for Shaping the UNGASS 2016 Discussion"
"Northern Fixes and Southern Realities: Three Climate Policy Debate Primers, Primer Three: Climate Finance and Bolivia"Etc. Clearly a mining expert! Well, what about Jim? This appears to be him:
I was raised in Whittier California, President Richard Nixon’s hometown, while he was President, which has a lot to do with how I became a political activist at an early age. After college at UC Berkeley I spent two decades deeply involved in California politics, as staff to the California Legislature, and as an advocate with Common Cause and Consumers Union (and in the middle took a detour to Harvard to earn a master’s degree). In 1991 my wife Lynn and I spent our first year of marriage as volunteers in an orphanage in Cochabamba and came home with a surprise daughter (today I am a father of three and soon to be a grandfather). In 1998 we returned to Bolivia for what was supposed to be a year and have stayed for almost twenty. As executive director of the Democracy Center for 25 years, it has been my privilege to work with citizen activists on five continents, from indigenous communities in Bolivia to senior leaders in the United Nations. I’ve also written three books, many articles and all along the way have done my level best to make sure David beats Goliath as often as possible. I publish on Medium, and I Tweet
You know, the author of such articles about intricate mining details such as "Feeling ‘the Bern,’ Before Bernie Sanders and After" and "When Anti-Immigrant Politics Came Back to Haunt the Republican Party"
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Re:An epic failure in science journalism
The deep question that you should be asking is the following: is the Big Bang Theory falsifiable?
If it is not, then it is not really science. If it is falsifiable, then the scientific method demands that scientists should be constantly looking for observational evidence that could invalidate it. This is not happening nowadays within academia. It did happened some decades ago, but when this world-renowned observational astronomer discovered the falsifying evidence, instead of being congratulated, he was basically sacked from the observatory (as explained in the video documentary previously mentioned).
If you had spend the time to actually look for such thing, then you may be surprised to find that the observational evidence falsifying the Big Bang creation story is very numerous. If you just want to focus on the controversy over redshift, then there are scores of papers related to it. This is just one for example:
https://www.academia.edu/81152...
If you really want to deeply understand why the Big Bang Theory has been observationally falsified, I recommend the following four books that you may use as a reference for all the papers that are cited within them.
https://www.amazon.com/Quasars...
https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-...
https://www.amazon.com/Catalog...
https://www.amazon.com/Galileo...
In any case, the lesson of Halton Arp's story goes far beyond the data which observationally falsifies the Big Bang Theory (assuming that the theory really is falsifiable, something that doesn't seem to be the case). Arp's story is a very sad one and a lesson about everything that is wrong within academic science, and about what we need to radically change if we want to promote scientific progress and innovation.
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Re:Another thing they don't tell you about the mod
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Re:Holy shit, stop the insanity
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Re:But is it food.
Actually, our intestinal tract is that of a frugivore and shares no traits with mammals adapted to eating meat. The articles you linked are not scientific, and the Harvard article reads like a student paper in human evolution.
Evolutionary theory is the heart of what paleoanthropologists study, and there is no consensus among them about meat eating "making us human". Although some do make that claim, perpetuating the outdated logic of the "Man the Hunter/Man the Killer" theories of the '40s and '50s. Contrasting this, some modern scientists believe that the consumption of tubers was actually the energy source that led to increasing encephalization (brain enlargement) and gut reduction. Others argue it to be starches more broadly, and many effectively claim that any energy-dense food source would do the trick. The goal was simply reaching reproductive age after all, not avoiding cancer or reaching ripe old age in a healthy state.
The starch and tuber hypotheses used to get shot down because the earliest controlled use of fire didn't seem to emerge until relatively recently (200,000-400,000 years ago), and root starches require cooking in order to fulfill the kind of calorie counts that would have been necessary. With older and older dates emerging for human's control of fire (possibly as early as 1.7 million years ago), there is a growing belief that the development of cooking with heat in general was the key contributor to encephalization.
Anyone claiming that there is a scientific consensus on these matters simply isn't reading enough paleoanthropological literature. Every single dietary claim has been argued ferociously for decades. There are a few simple facts that no one seriously working in the field would argue however:
The human digestive system is that of a frugivore and has no specific biological gut adaptations that would be expected of a species that "evolved to eat meat". The same is true of our hominin ancestors. And based on dental calculus analysis and corprolite data, our ancestors ate shit-loads of plants. -
Re:But is it food.
We have no specific biological adaptations to eating meat. Our teeth are those of herbivores, and our digestive system is that of a frugivore. Based on dental calculus analysis and corprolite data, our ancestors ate shit-loads of plants.
But we do have at least one specific biological adaptation that is a result of eating meat. Our intestinal system and muscle mass as evolved to much smaller than equivalent animals that are pure herbivores.
http://time.com/4252373/meat-e...
http://news.harvard.edu/gazett...Some folks think that these adaptations allowed us the luxury of evolving larger brains...
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Re:But is it food.
We have no specific biological adaptations to eating meat. Our teeth are those of herbivores, and our digestive system is that of a frugivore. Based on dental calculus analysis and corprolite data, our ancestors ate shit-loads of plants.
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Re:never cross the memes!
"The fact that somebody like Trump could even get elected is a death-sentence. The problem isn't the guy in the captain's chair. The problem is all the guys who wanted him in the captain's chair"
It's not the first time something like this has happened. I hesitate to bring up the canonical German case, but it has similar economic aspects. The US has been on an upward economic slope for such a long time that it ending or flattening puts the affected people under stress.
Humans evolved strategies during the stone age to cope with such stress. The stress was always one of not enough resources for the population. The solution was to attack neighbors and appropriate their resources. The lead up to war started with the spread of xenophobic memes. Eventually, irrational leaders become attractive and led the tribe into war. Win or lose, the balance between population and resources was restored. Because the young women were booty, the genes for this behavior become universal. https://www.academia.edu/77738...
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Re:There's an obvious reason
Going to have to call bullshit on your bullshit. Here's a wiki article for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I should also note that using them as servants and cheap labour was a step -up- from their previous status (especially as they started gaining legal protections throughout the 18th century).
Here's another article that goes into more depth: http://www.thefinertimes.com/M...
And during the early first century, which is the relevant point for my comment, children were considered infants until about 7 years of age, in large part due to high mortality up to that age. After that, they were betrothed, and at 12 likely to be either married off or apprenticed -- basically as soon as they hit puberty. (Modern children actually hit puberty earlier due to a combination of better diet and exposure to chemicals).
And here's a scholarly treatise for you: http://www.academia.edu/100468...
Finally, just because some figure thinks up a significant idea, that doesn't mean that idea will be adopted right away...or ever.
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Re:No kidding...
It's not surprising we have made "remarkably little progress." Humans are the result of millions of years of selection. From what we see in the archaeological record, there was xenophobia and violence aplenty.
What switches off the xenophobia is good times and rising prospects. What switches xenophobia on is stagnant or falling income and poor future prospects.
If you want the long version, try here: https://www.academia.edu/77738...
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Re:High quality Indian applicants are scarce.
I found your picture Not so anonymous now. But still a coward, I am sure.
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Re:not so micro
It's all relative, but depending who you ask, "micro" may mean < 2kg http://docs.house.gov/meetings..., or < 5kg http://www.academia.edu/205567... . It's not small by hobbyist standards, but in the military world it's tiny compared to the 14,628 kg Global Hawk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
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Re:There is a legitimate dispute
Those are mostly crap studies, with narrowly defined questions that even skeptical scientists will agree with (questions like, "Does human influence have some effect on the climate?"). Here's a much better study with a nuanced approach, for those who actually want to understand the issue.
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Re:Common for Cranks
I thought this citation made no sense, and did a quick check of the original source, not just reading the Wikipedia article. (You do do that, right?)
Wikipedia dramatically mis-represents the study. It suggests that "these people are so crazy, they believe two contradictory things." If you actually read the methodology, it's nothing like that. They were given a list of possible theories and asked to rank how plausible they were. In fact, this would be the result I would predict. It's simply people saying "there is something missing here, and I don't know what... any of the following could fill in the blank."
For example, imagine if I were to tell you that 90% of the voters in Alaska were in support of closing down all oil exports from the state, but Senator X voted to build additional pipelines from the state to the lower 48 states. Now I present the following theories and ask you to rank how plausible they are:
1) Big Gas Company paid Senator X $5,000,000 in campaign contributions.
2) Big Gas Company offered Senator X a job as a Vice President in the next 5 years if he voted for this bill.
3) Big Gas Company found compromising emails of Senator X and threatened him to vote or they would publish them.I'm sure you can see how somebody would rank all of these as plausible, even though 3 "contradicts" 1 and 2 by saying the Gas Company doesn't like the Senator.
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Re:Techies ARE improving the world
"We have gone 70 years without a major war."
Why did people fight in the stone age?
Over resources (mostly food).
When did they fight?
When things looked so bleak that fighting was better (on average) for their genes.
https://www.academia.edu/77738...
Low birth rate and any economic growth keeps the future from looking bleak and the mechanisms off that lead to wars and related social disruptions. This is the what happened in first world for most of the second half of the 20th century.
Most depressing science subject I know.
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Re:Waste of helium
You seem to forget that the nitrogen envelope weighs less than the equivalent volume filled with air. 3% less by volume, because nitrogen weighs 15% less than oxygen. There is no weight penalty for the envelope, since nitrogen is a weak lifting gas. Also, all things considered, hydrogen still has an 8% to 12% lift advantage to helium. 8% can be the difference between profit and loss for a business. link
The economic case for hydrogen is much better. Hydrogen doesn't need to be transported - it can and is generated anywhere you have water and electricity, as needed. Given that it's cheaper and a better lifting gas, if we are thinking of using it in compressed form in road vehicles operated by the average Joe, we can certainly use it in uncompressed form in airships operated by specialized crew.
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Re:Turtles
What do you have against metaphysical inifnitism? I say take the turtles and run hard with them,
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Re:At least sponsor this contest
http://www.academia.edu/783278... wow. he is old now. I knew him as a postdoc. Getting old sucks
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Re:Stupid Question... maybe?
I think you're suggesting if maybe they just hammered away to butcher a dead animal?
No one in this thread really addressed it clearly, so I'll explain. They can tell if a wound/break to the skeletal structure happened before or after death. Its similar in nature to breaking a branch off a living tree vs breaking a branch off a dead tree. The breaks are completely different.
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Sky burial is not limited to Tibet
http://www.academia.edu/375869...
The practice of Sky Burial was at one time, pretty common, from Anatolia to China
Even today, the Parsi people (whose ancestors came from Persia - currently known as Iran) in India still practice Sky Burial
http://www.treehugger.com/cult...
In Iran, "Towers of Silence" still exist, in remote places
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Re:Jargon
I have found that the amount of complexity and jargon is inversely correlated with the competence of the scientist. Great scientists, like Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein, were famous for their clear and simple explanations.
They may have been - WHEN THEY WERE SPEAKING TO THE PUBLIC - academic writing is different matter, maybe you should review their papers to appreciate the difference.
http://www.academia.edu/375613...
https://www.google.co.uk/url?s... -
Re:Yeah, that's sound about right
Yes, I do. And, even in the 4,000 pound helicopter I fly, a drone strike will absolutely take it out of the sky.
Did a little looking around and found one case of a 2.4 pound bird taking a helicopter out of the sky. The windshield had been intentionally replaced with a weaker one, and even then the helicopter only crashed because the bird hit the fire extinguisher, which then hit the engine controls. So don't swap out your windshield.
Yes, that was the accident I was referring to, but most helicopters don't have bird resistant windshields (neither of the two types that I fly do). Additionally, some more quick googling finds more accidents:
This one took out a pitch link on the rotor head with the same kind of bird as the PHI crash we referred to I found a paper with an interesting quote:
Most of the helicopters are damaged by small birds (more than 220 helicopters) and only a few helicopters have been impacted by large birds. As obvious in the plot, the small birds mostly cause minor damages and no helicopter has been destroyed by the small sized bird. The medium sized birds have destroyed most of the helicopters and have caused most of the substantial damages to the helicopter
Unfortunately it doesn't define the size of small, medium, or large birds, but my guess is that large would be a goose sized bird (which I found lots of fatal accidents, but those are clearly much bigger than the sized drones we're talking about. I'm guessing (but it's a guess) that when they talk about medium sized birds we're talking about birds in the relative size of drones, i.e. 2-5 pounds (but that's just a guess).
This is just totally made up and wrong. First of all there are battery powered ADS-B-IN systems (I use a Stratus 2 with about 8 hours of battery life while doing ADS-B plus AHRS plus providing a WiFi hotspot plus built in GPS) - an ADS-B system running for the length of a typical drone flight would use very little power.
The Stratus 2S, according to the web page, requires an iPad to work, is 10 oz, costs $900 on its own, and isn't a transponder anyway, so it's completely irrelevant. Their transponder with GPS is $3500, not battery powered, and looks like your average drone won't carry it.
The Stratus is designed to talk to a specific aviation iPad application: Foreflight (which we all love), so it does a lot of stuff a straight ADS-B doesn't need to do (like provide a WiFi connection to an iPad). I used it as an example to show that battery usage is low. Your comment about the transponder reminded me to mention that some people may not be aware that there are two frequencies in use for ADS-B. There is the 1090Mhz band which does use a transponder, but there is also the 978Mhz band which just uses a regular radio. I've been assuming all along that is what drones would use. Here is an example of a complete ADS-B IN/OUT system that I've seen Yes, it's $2,000, but keep in mind that this is a certified piece of gear for aircraft. Note that it weighs less than a pound (I picked it up at a trade show and it was very light despite being in a metal enclosure with heavy connectors etc.). Also note the total current draw: 0.2 amps @ 12 VDC. To put the cost into perspective, we once took apart an aviation clock from one of our helicopters (that costs $300.00) and my EE buddy said it was less than a dollar in components. You can imagine what's inside this FreeFlight ADS-B: a small microprocessor and a transmitter. If the Futaba type companies can't produce that for under $100 they aren't even trying...
Exactly. And there's no reason to expe
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Re: there is no
Wrong. The reputable models from the 80's and 90's (those that had a good level of peer-review and were based on sound assumptions) quite accurately predicted our current warming rate. The reason you don't know this is because you probably derive most of your 'information' from sources that actually don't deal in science.
Here's science man, read it and change your opinion, or you're anti-science.
We know that CO2 by itself increases the earth's temperature by about .9 degrees for a doubling of CO2. That much is fairly well established science.
The computer models additionally add feedbacks, that make the predicted increase much more severe (up to as much as 10 degrees for a doubling of CO2). These feedbacks have much poorer support scientifically. -
Re:work for free
I don't know one developer that isn't paid for their work.
How much software does one have to write to be a "developer"? Is it just writing software, or is there some other criteria that makes a person a developer, in your eyes?
I've written several programs that I haven't expected to get paid for.
http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde... has plenty of programs none of the writers expect payment for. I could show you more, but that should suffice. Galleon who makes QB64 itself, does not get paid for it.
I doubt you speak to very many people who write software about whether or not they write any programs for free.
Also, you ignore the fact that the people writing software to break DRM usually do it for free, though I'm not sure about what your definition of developer is, so in your mind they may not be developers.Indie devs are different as they put up the work up front hoping to get paid later (identical model to self employment).
No, that's never how I worked freelance. We agree on the payment up front. Sure, the agreed upon money is paid upon services rendered, but there are restaurants that work on the same principal, agree to the price first and then pay at the end of the meal.
I think's that's a valid way of functioning.
You seem to think that it is the only valid way of functioning, but on contemplation I don't think it is a valid way of functioning, because it says that copyright is not your problem when wearing a customer hat. I also don't think the value you place in ensuring obeying the law is not a valid way of thinking.
http://www.academia.edu/115138... is a relevant read, though it interferes with copy and paste. In it, he argues that people always have the right to disobey the law on two accounts. First obedience of the law does not follow as a necessity from the reasons we might choose to obey it and second the law infringes on our autonomy in making moral judgments.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr... says some philosophers now deny that law is entitled to all the authority it claims for itself, even when the legal system is legitimate and reasonably just.
I'm afraid the Wikipedia article on mercy does not explain how you connect mercy with paying someone a minimum wage for what they do. The article on an honor system is more illuminative on your way of thinking, but this line:
A person engaged in an honor system has a strong negative concept of breaking or going against it. The negatives may include community shame, loss of status, loss of a personal sense of integrity and pride or in extreme situations, banishment from one's community.
would seem to indicate that we are not on an honor system.
I did not say that mercy always has better outcomes than other things, just that it sometimes does and is always unfair. which is sufficient to prove your assertion, not playing fair = worst experience down the road false. I also said fairness is a broken concept, which you chose to ignore, but is more to the heart of the problem, which is that any decision making based on the concept of fairness is invalid.I totally agree that copyrights are a huge issue
Except when you are a customer apparently.
If you don't agree with the companies practices you can avoid their products.
I'm trying to understand what makes something a company's product in your mind. If a company chooses to sell something after it has entered the public domain, is it still their product? A lot of food products completely wrapped get thrown in the dumpster. Is it still their product and therefore stealing to go dumpster diving? What about
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nice article
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Re:Yeah, blame the parents
No one is researching the bias leading to medical schools with 90% women.
Actually there are people researching that. Lack of male nurses is a problem. The American Assembly for Men in Nursing offers support and scholarships in the US, for example.
No one is researching the bias leading to 99% male construction workers, or garbage men.
I spent five seconds searching for this on Google and it turns out that actually there is plenty of research and academic discourse on this subject, as well as newspaper articles and the like:
http://www.arcom.ac.uk/-docs/p...
http://www.academia.edu/634834...
http://www.equalityhumanrights...
http://www.theguardian.com/sus...
http://www.theguardian.com/sus...People do care, you are just too lazy to even type a few words into Google.
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Re:obvious answer: STOP FRACKING
Yep, it does. Other sources quote from (officially) 166,000 gallons per treatment (GAO) to one or two MILLION gallons per treatment (EPA estimates). This over nearly thirty thousand wells across the United States, that's a fuckload of water being taken and pumped five miles into the ground. In the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, 86% of fresh water extracted is used in hydraulic fracturing [citation: Fry et. al].
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Re:King Midas in reverse
... it's a worry that Blackberry -- having done the amazing job of pulling out of the total nosedive they were in
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Re:Sea Level Rising
With regards to the Wikipedia article claiming a historical 0.0-0.2mm range over the last 2000 years that probably needs to be updated with more recent research.
Thewell-preserved biological remains on the sh tank wall allow us to estimate anRSL rise of 40 ±10 cm at Frejus since Roman times
400 / 2000 = 0.2mm average per year over the last 2000 years. (And as documented in this paper there are other papers that claim higher numbers)
http://www.academia.edu/344003...éjus_France
(Slashdot seems to make a mess out of the hyphen in the link - the paper can be found as doi 10.1002/gea.21444 )
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Re:Awesome Models
You'd have a great point, but you don't seem to be able to recognize the difference between rhetoric and science...
This is science. This is rhetoric. Specifically, the latter is a sub-genre of rhetoric known as apologia.
The former might be reasonably construed as dialectic, but now we're getting way over your head. Go smoke another joint an be gone. -
Re:Horribly misleading summary
I think the reason he gave you the link in google was to help you get past the paywall. Getting a google.com referrer is usually enough for them to give you a free view.
If you want an analysis of the latest IPCC report, you can look here (of course, if you want something technical you can read the actual report).
If you want to see an actual survey of climatologists, and not the 97% report based on dubious questions, you can look here.
The problem with that survey that reported 97% is that the questions were very narrow......so that even skeptical scientists would naturally answer 'yes' to them. -
Re:Booze tunnel?
According to a study, seven million one-way crossings are made each year. That averages out at around 10 000 return crossings a day.
Compare that with Dover's 2013 figures which were 12.7 Million for "short sea crossings" and an additional 11 Million using the Tunnel. -
Re: A lesson about History- and the liar narrative
Difference being that relativity was mathematically deduced from a simple set of hypotheses.
Are you saying that archeologists don't follow scientific method? Because that is not how I have experienced archeology. Archeologist have to construct hypotheses based on certain evidence and then set out to prove them like everybody else. Of course you can't obtain your proof sitting on your ass in an air conditioned office deducing mathematical formulae, you have to go out and dig around in the dirt to find you proof. If an archeologist finds marble sheets in Roman ruins around Europe and the the Middle East bearing clear saw marks he can go with conventional wisdom which for a long time would have had us believe these slabs were produced by slaves using bronze hand-saws in painstaking and wasteful manual labour. However, an archeologist, with a bit of imagination might note that the slabs are a bit too uniformly sawed to have been produced by hand and he might also recall from conversations with his colleagues in the department of history that there are plenty of accounts in ancient sources pointing to sophisticated machinery being used in ancient times even though these accounts are often dismissed as fantasy or written off as references to grain mills etc. So taking the risk of applying a bit of imagination to the scientific process the archeologist could perhaps hypothesise that the Romans weren't stupid and that it is likely they developed the process of sawing stone to a high degree of technological sophistication. He could then go and try to confirm that hypothesis by looking for remains of stone processing facilities like, say the stone saw mill at Gerasa in Jordan where large blocks of half sawed marble blocks have been found with several parallels saw marks in them. This site and others like it demonstrates conclusively that the stone was being mechanically sawed into sheets of marble using water wheels at least some 1300 years before the industrial revolution. While I'm sure that mathematics is more logical, rigorous and absolute than many other disciplines of science I'm pretty sure that Einstein in particular with his numerous and fascinating thought experiments found plenty of room for imagination in his work.
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Re:Predatory?
it's very much a current issue: https://www.academia.edu/57099... (I'm listed as report drafting, I basically did the analysis) [PDF].
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Re:There is such a thing as fact
Please note that the consensus is that the damage will be massive, it's just about _how_ massive....
No, it's not consensus. Note that the fourth link indicates there's basically no consensus at all among scientists about how to respond to AGW. Should we adapt? Should we mitigate? No consensus at all there.
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Re:Facebook needs to be like Slashdot
to answer your last question: no, because they're implicated. To expand on that you'd have to read this, which also explains the other bit: https://www.academia.edu/57099...
[ABSTRACT]:
Freedom of Information Act 2000 requests made between October 2011 and May 2012 reveal that the majority of Local Authorities in England and Wales do not conform or abide by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963. Most have neither policy nor practice with due regard to the basic tenet of s.37 of the Convention: the receiving State’s duty to inform relevant sending state Consuls regarding their foreign children that have been removed from parents in UK care proceedings. The UK signed the Convention in 1964. Signatories have the following duty, without exception, under Article 37 (b) of the Vienna Convention of Consular Relations 1963: Article 37 (b):
“If the relevant information is available to the competent authorities of the receiving State, such authorities shall have the duty:
-to inform the competent consular post without delay of any case where the appointment of a guardian or trustee appears to be in the interests of a minor or other person lacking full capacity who is a national of the sending State.”
Nothing in the Convention states that adherence to Article 5 (h) is to be interpreted so as to exclude obligations under Article 37 (b).
Article 5 (h):
“safeguarding, within the limits imposed by the laws and regulations of the receiving State, the interests of minors and other persons lacking full capacity who are nationals of the sending State, particularly where any guardianship or trusteeship is required with respect to such persons;”There appears to be no domestic law or Convention signatory limitation obviating UK any of the UK authorities involved with removing and caring for foreign children from informing the sending states of their parents under legislative "limits imposed by the laws and regulations of the receiving State” Art.5(h) above.
The usual pattern appears to be that the UK local authority does not inform the relevant Consul once a foreign child is taken into care and judiciary refuse to uphold the same duty to the child and other States Parties to the Convention when the omission is raised in court. Other involved agencies, such as the Police, CAFCASS, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Ministeries and regulators, also have no regard to their respective duties as State bodies under the Convention.
The practice is widespread, with foreign children stealthily processed with the full knowledge and consent of current and previous Presidents of the Family Division - alongside Lord Justice Thorpe who currently heads UK International Family Law. The dilemma for parents of what appears to be the unlawful removal of children is compounded when subsequent statutory safeguards and processes are ignored by both local authority and judiciary. For example, interim care orders are routinely renewed by post without written consent of the parents. Recent changes to law obviate previous duty to hold monthly interim hearings before care order renewal, making lawful practices previously unlawful. Those hearings now need only be applied for only when affected parents can produce evidence of ‘change’ to the circumstances claimed as justification for the removal of their. Few of the local authorities fully particularise their claims. Police have been known to assist local authorities with unlawful removals, including immediately after birth by forceful restraint and assault of the mother and at least one case where the baby was actually cut out of the mother (Pacchieri), enabled by the presentation of false court documentation to hospitals (MANY example cases of this kind exist). Most removals effectively amount to kidnap.
[END ABSTRACT]:
The report details admission by local authorities of the abduction of well over three thousand children of foreign nationals between 2007 and 2012. THAT IS WHAT THEY ADMIT TO.
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Re:just wow
my report to evidence the first point: https://www.academia.edu/57099...
The rest is but a websearch away.
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Google Quantum Inference computing processor
Oh, Hell Yea! However, it will take time for the average computer user unable to handle current system with watercooling needs... My guess is that anything current does need super cooling as in liquid Nitro cold... So the likely scenario of a broadly deployable technology is probably a very long time away... for those wondering why? Read this: http://www.academia.edu/240382...
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Re:unfair policy
IF you look at what I linked to, this, you'll see it's the exact opposite of propaganda. But don't let that stop you.
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Re:unfair policy
The page you linked to is a propaganda page.
If you want to get an actual feel for what climate scientists think, here is a more scientific survey. The comment section at the bottom is especially fun. -
Re:In other news...
Thorium molten salt reactors are quite capable of load-following. In fact, load-following happens as an intrinsic feature of their design and can be optimized for as described in the linked paper which specifically investigates TMSR's as solar fill-in power sources.
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Re:Real Problem
Police departments across the USA are typically under staffed
There is little evidence that America is under-policed. Most studies have found a weak correlation between numbers of cops, and property crimes, and NO correlation with violent crimes. A meta-study found that a 10 per cent increase in officers will lead to a reduction in crime of around 3 per cent. There are far more cost effective ways to reduce crime, such as better prenatal and early childhood nutrition, better vocational training for teenagers, etc.
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Re:Magic is Magic
Storm water is a pollutant depending on what it is flowing over or leaching through.
It's flowing over storm-drains of EXISTING ROADS. Not over nuclear disposal sites or something similar.
Creators are padding their project to seem even more eco-friendly than it is, when fact is that said storm-drains are already in place (in which case this is a waste of money) OR they are not needed (in which case this is AGAIN a waste of money - AND PADDING).Not all concrete leaches C02. Make it out of geopolyer concrete a C02 sink closely related to the long carbon cycle
Except it kinda does.
Some case study geopolymer concrete mixes based on typical Australian feedstocks indicate potential for a 44â"64% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions while the financial costs are 7% lower to 39% higher compared with OPC.
So in theory it reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about a half, while the costs go from 7% lower to 39% higher.
That's a pretty big gap there. Almost 50% of a MAYBE cheaper MAYBE more expensive.
Sadly, that study is paywalled.But this one isn't. And it says it's only "approximately 9% less than comparable concrete containing 100% OPC binder"
So, to sum it up.
CO2 reduction is either negligible, or "about 50%", while the price is either negligibly lower OR significantly higher.And now the fun part...
IT IS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY!!!
Even if it is 0.0001% of CO2 at 0.0001% cost to regular, Portland cement, concrete - IT IS NEW AND ADDITIONAL AND UNNECESSARY.
And it would need to be done under every single square meter of "solar roadways".Any CO2 saving made by the solar power gathered (and most of it would go on drying the road for snow and rain) would be far overshadowed by CO2 released to create this new network AND the power it would suck up during the night.
AND on top of that the efficiency of those solar cells would degrade much faster than that of the regular ones - cause they would accumulate oil, soot from exhausts, mud, rubber from the tires...
All that stuff that we don't have to care about right now, would become a HUGE efficiency problem.Which gets us to the heaters...
If you have to invest some energy to raise the surface temp to just above freezing which then allows both traffic and restarting the solar panel it might be worth it.
No, it would not.
We are talking WINTER.
Shorter days. Less sunlight.
Meanwhile, it can snow FOR DAYS AND NIGHTS.This contraption would be trying to melt AT LEAST 16 hours of snow to gain 8 hours of useful light - IF... IF it stopped snowing during the day.
Solar cells are at around 20% efficiency AT BEST, and they admit that a pretty big part of their tiles IS NOT covered with solar cells.So how much are they producing?
Currently, the full size hexagons are 36-watt solar panels, with 69-percent surface coverage by solar cells. This will become 52-watts when we cover the whole surface when we go into production. When we add piezoelectric, they'll be capable of producing even more power. Also, as the efficiency of solar cells increase, more power will be converted.
We tested the heaters over the winter with a DC power supply that provided them with 72-watts. This was an overkill and made the surface warm to the touch on most winter days. We still need to experiment with different voltages at different temperatures, to determine the minimum amount of power required to keep the surface above freezing. Remember, they don't have to heat up to 85 degrees like the defroster wire in the windows of your car: they only have to keep the surface warm enough to prevent snow/ice accumulation (35 degrees?).
They ke
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Re:Humanity is Sick and Twisted
Keep in mind that historians' rating of Presidents is basically correlated with how many citizens got killed while they were in office (more is better). That's historians for you -- "if it bleeds it leads", that being good for their business, writ large.
http://www.academia.edu/1468267/War_and_Presidential_Greatness
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Economic eviction not gentrification is the issue.
Economic eviction not gentrification is the issue.
Mostly, it's a problem for renters, who get evicted or have their rents priced out of their reach when someone buys the house/unit they are renting,
It generally has nothing whatsoever to do with Google, other than highly paid people are capable of paying higher rents, and Google tends to pay its employees well. But if the now-priced-out-of-range rental unit were not rented by someone from Google or Twitter or Facebook, or Genentech, or Apple, or some other company, of which many are increasingly based in San Francisco, they would either be rented by someone else with more money than the previous occupants, or they would stand empty, and provide a tax write-off as a loss at the higher rental rate.
There are in fact huge amounts of both housing and office space in SF that are currently standing empty as a tax write-off for some absurd per square foot rental cost that no one in their right mind will be willing to pay.
Note that the vast majority of the investment driving the economic eviction in San Francisco is *not* coming from the tech industry, it is instead coming from foreign investors. Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Very few countries allow foreign ownership of property; the U.S. is one of the few which does; Japan, China, Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand, among others. Minnesota does not permit foreign ownership of agricultural land, period, and does not allow corporate ownership of such land, either, unless associated with an existing long-held family farm. Here's an interesting resource:
http://www.academia.edu/106796...
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
I imagine the Real Estate agents would not be terrifically happy, since most of their "big fish" clients are foreign buyers.
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Re:Survey results != Real worldGood point. There is a second part of the study that addresses this issue is to some extent.
A limitation of Study 1 is that we asked participants to select their favorite activity from a list of options. This necessitated a categorical index of trolling that likely underestimated the effects. Hence in Study 2, we assessed enjoyment of each commenting activity (including trolling) on separate continuous scales. To rule out the possibility that overall Internet use explains relations with trolling, we also included a question about total time spent on line for use as a control variable. Finally, to triangulate on trolling with multiple measures, we constructed a second brief index:the Global Assessment of Internet Trolling (GAIT) scale, which assessed trolling behavior, identiïcation, and enjoyment. As in Study 1, measures of the Big Five were included for comparison. Study 2 also featured data from a larger and more diverse sample, furnishing us with enough statistical power to test hypotheses about the unique contributions of the Dark Tetrad. For reasons articulated earlier,we expected sadism to dominate personality effects on trolling. Thus we predicted that the relations between sadism and trolling would remain signiïcant even when controlling for overlap with psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.
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setting the record straight
"In recent years, the increase in near-surface global annual mean temperatures has emerged as considerably smaller than many had expected. We investigate whether this can be explained by contemporary climate change scenarios. In contrast to earlier analyses for a ten-year period that indicated consistency between models and observations at the 5% confidence level, we find that the continued warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level. "
Can climate models explain the recent stagnation in global warming?
Hans von Storch, Armineh Barkhordarian, Klaus Hasselmannand Eduardo Zorita Institute for Coastal Research, Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Geesthacht, Germany(2) Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany