Slashdot Mirror

Took two seconds to google these. I'm not alone on this.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ha...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21s...

Here's a link to a climate model you can run on a desktop computer: EdGCM

Tegmark certainly believes so, but YMMV.

Peter Woit

In the case of Peter Woit, a member of the arXiv advisory board eventually posted an explanation.

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000760.html

Apparently, despite the fact that Woit is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University, the arXiv moderators felt that he did not qualify as an "active researcher" because he only posted two papers within the last 5 years (at the time of the complaint).

I have never heard of this, and I am interested. Can you name an example of a respectable scientist (not a "fringe" controversial person, I mean) who has been banned?

Marni Sheppeard.
Peter Woit.

Note that they are not (as far as I can tell) banned, just blocked. Nothing is made public, it's just that certain things seem to happen consistently. And, in my experience, moderated papers are not available to the public.

Note that the real problem here is not that papers are moderated. I understand the desire for moderation. It's the way it's being done that is problematic.

Whenever I dial up to my ISP on my 1200 baud modem using an acoustic coupler, I prefer using Kermit!

http://www.columbia.edu/kermit...

I haven't heard of any cases where a piece of software has been banned from use in a country because of that country's political policies

Huh? A tonn of software — mostly having to do with encryption — can not (or at some point could not) be exported to places like Iran, for example. You "haven't heard" of it?!

The publication is under an undue burden if it has to comply with a license restricting it from doing certain business in countries it otherwise does business with

Not at all. The publication does not need to comply with the software's license, because it does not need to conduct the research. It is already completed research, which was published 11 years ago! People wishing to verify the study's results — reproducibility being a key of scientific method — can do so in another country.

For example, there is a whole list of medical studies currently considered unethical or even illegal. They can not be recreated for this reason, but their but we can still read the results — as well as cite and discuss them.

almost certainly taken on legal grounds

Nope, by all appearances — including the "fuck this Nazi" reaction of many Slashdotters right here — it was political at least in part.

Hence my question of whether this "software availability" policy has ever been applied before by the same publication.

This is great- Elsevier and Springer (and other for-profit publishers) have been charging exorbitant prices for journals and there have been some other mass resignations where people started a free or at least affordable alternative with pretty much the same board. One of the first big ones was the journal Topology, which reconstituted itself with the exact same editorial board in a non-profit setting, described here. That was in 2006 and though I'd hoped this would spread like wildfire, it has only happened about a dozen times since then.

There are good quality affordable journals, run by professional societies or universities, which are an excellent alternative to Elsevier and other expensive for-profit journals. For the health of science, it is important that people choose to submit there. For untenured people who are under a great deal of pressure to submit to "top journals" it poses a difficult quandary, but for those of us for whom that isn't a concern, I don't see a reason to continue to support journals and publishers which have repeatedly done poorly.

The Cost of Knowledge has lots of information about efforts to improve the scientific publishing culture.

There have been other cases of prominent people are resigning from Elsevier boards; here's a senior researcher in malaria who resigned from an editorial board on the life-sciences side. His motivation was particularly strong- he is working in malaria research, and the idea that people who could benefit from the research may well be not able to pay for the paywall is abhorrent. But I think the same rationale applies to all of science- why keep research from people who cannot pay for it?

In other Elsevier news, more journal shenanigans are described here which include both rigging the reviews to be sock-puppet reviews and getting into their editorial board systems, resulting in yet more retractions. It's not clear what the high prices of journals are paying for when there are intermittent episodes like this.

Evidence from weather satellites has shown no new warming for almost 18 years.

Here are some fun graphs: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs11...

Looks like a fairly linear increase when I hold a straight-edge up to the screen starting around 1970. No new surprises I guess?

Aside from all that though, a climate change religion doesn't sound so bad. Give a little money to the "church" and in return you get an insurance policy. The population is getting close to the estimated carrying capacity of the Earth. Once we get there, any major crop die-off would lead to starvation problems. Why should coffee drinkers spend money on bombing tea drinkers when we could instead invest that money to ensure that both coffee and tea keep growing?

Set your plot of linear warming alongside global CO2 concentrations. CO2 concentrations have also been rising linearly that entire time. If even the more moderate projections of warming are true, warming should be accelerating as CO2 increases. The fact it is not is suggestion/evidence that our climate sensitivity to CO2 may not be as high as feared.

Evidence from weather satellites has shown no new warming for almost 18 years.

Here are some fun graphs: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs11...

Looks like a fairly linear increase when I hold a straight-edge up to the screen starting around 1970. No new surprises I guess?

Aside from all that though, a climate change religion doesn't sound so bad. Give a little money to the "church" and in return you get an insurance policy. The population is getting close to the estimated carrying capacity of the Earth. Once we get there, any major crop die-off would lead to starvation problems. Why should coffee drinkers spend money on bombing tea drinkers when we could instead invest that money to ensure that both coffee and tea keep growing?

Feynman talked about this fairly often, most notably in Cargo Cult Science. The problem seems to be most common in soft sciences, such as the rat running example he gives from psychology. See also his commentary on science education in Brazil.

The Brazil report appears to be unrelated, but hear me out.

Brazil's problem was cultural. Their textbooks included all of the right information, but it wasn't presented as things that the student could learn about the real world, just as facts to be memorized. Scientists without the culture of science will make lousy experiments because they don't understand what they want to do or why, or how or why they need to keep themselves honest.

The culture of physics in the US was very good, but they were unable to export that culture to Brazil when they tried.

In the same way, other branches of science were unable to duplicate the physics culture. The rat runners in the example given didn't understand what they were trying to do, so they didn't pay attention to Young's work, which would have helped keep them honest.

Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming lecture was given nearly 30 years after Feynman's Cargo Cult Science, and it shows a creeping degeneration of the culture of science.

I go a step further, and say that the decline of the science culture has been part of a general cultural decline. There has been no great art or literature or music in decades.

The good news is that people are waking up. The internet is connecting people to each other, to science, and to culture. We are pissed about the decline of the past century, the decline that we've allowed, or at least failed to prevent, and are steeling our resolve to do the hard work to restore our greatness.

Articles like this show the stirring of the cultural revival. Keep them coming, please.

Unfortunately, they have the backing of this guy who is on some sort of crusade to protect humans and wildlife from those oh so dangerous invisible EMF rays.

Even more unfortunately, he appears to be a bright guy with fairly well established credentials.

The problem is (and this is sometimes overlooked by judges) smart people can be:
a) wrong
b) crazy
c) lying

In this case I think it's (a) with a healthy dose of (b) mixed in.

Hopefully the judge takes stock of the numerous double blind studies where it has been shown that EMF "sufferers" symptoms disappeared when they were unaware of the presence of EMF radiation

I was sort of enthusiastic, back in the day, for the 'Visual' interface in Visual Basic, in the 3.0 era. Which kind of went away. Visual C? Where do I click? heh.

What visual design elements does Visual COBOL bring? You get drag and drop Punch Keypunch Machines, Verifiers*, and a High Speed Card Reader? It would modernize and simplify COBOL coding. No risk of dropped decks! Output formatting would be in the code hidden under the Chain Printer icon.

I suspect all the code in the Visual COBOL program resides beneath the Card Sorter icon. You double click on it and there's your code!

(*the 'Verifier' was an odd beast. A big piece of equipment hulking on the floor in the same room that looked almost identical to the Keypunch machine, that didn't actually punch cards. You would feed the previously-punched cards into it and pay a keypunch operator to type in the same lines of data again and all the verifier did was verify the cards had the same data as what was being typed in a second time)

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/com...

Good call on Kermit!

http://www.columbia.edu/kermit...

Used to use that to get into my *nix shell accounts. Man do I miss those days..

For mathematics and physics, I read Not Even Wrong, by Peter Woit.

For theoretical computer science, I read Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP, by Richard J. Lipton and Kenneth W. Regan.

For analyzing the harm that modern feminism is causing, I read Dalrock.

Yes they can. http://www.psl.cs.columbia.edu... is specifically designed for the extraction of content based on class names.

You noted but didn't bother to post any evidence supporting your claims. We can wait.

Fair enough.

First, a thought experiment: Imagine Acme company sells widgets at 10 dollars each. One hundred people buy the widgets. Another hundred would like them, but cannot afford them. Uncle Phil sees this. Uncle Phil is a multi-billionaire. Uncle Phil says to those who cannot afford them, "I'll buy you your widgets for you." So now you have two hundred people buying widgets. The business sees its demand going up, and thus begins increasing prices. Most of the original hundred keep paying. Phil is a multi-billionaire so price isn't an option. The business owner wants maximum revenue, which is the maximum (price x quantity). So, business keeps jacking up costs until he reaches that point. If the widgets are essential to life (i.e. have inelastic demand), the original hundred do everything they can to keep paying the higher price.

So - that's the thought experiment.

Here's a paper by a Nobel (equivalent) laureate in economics, the conclusion of which states that subsidies will drive up prices in monopolistic environments (see page 28, the first paragraph of the section titled 'Conclusion': "This paper demonstrates two ways that a subsidy may increase equilibrium prices in a monopolistically competitive market"). My addition is that they drive up prices when demand is inelastic as well: Paper by Joseph Stiglitz (PDF).

You know who else wrote a cogent article on this? The Duke adult film actress, "Belle Knox." She talks about the impact of government subsidies in education, which isn't a monopoly, but for which demand is inelastic.

Because it can be mangled to fit any observation. It's not disprovable. All of the alternatives are better because they are actually disprovable via experimentation.

I dont understand why they arent powering it with the light entering the aperture. Surely a camera could be powered by some of the light its capturing?

It's still in the early stages of research, but yes you can power a camera from light entering the lens.

My dad ran the epidemiology department for the American Cancer Society when I was a pre-teen and teenager in the '80s. I grew up dialing into their VAX 11/780 with a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. At first I used a DECwriter terminal, which didn't have a screen—all the output was noisily printed to 132-column tractor feed. Eventually my folks brought home a VT180, around the same time that we upgraded to a 1200 baud modem. I'll never forget playing Crystal Caverns, and creating ASCII "animations" as a kid that scrolled up the screen.

Also, it means that as a 9-year-old kid, FORTRAN 77 was my first programming language. I think in some cultures that qualifies as child abuse.

See also Peter Woit's book "not even wrong" and his blog here. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~...

My question is: What observation from the LHC would disprove string theory? If ST is compatible with every possible experimental outcome, it predicts nothing.

Feynman's take:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Two more examples from Ignition! by John Clark.

James Dewar (later Sir James, and the inventor of the Dewar flask and hence of the thermos botde), of the Royal Institute in London, in 1897 liquefied fluorine, which had been isolated by Moisson only eleven years before, and reported that the density of the liquid was 1.108. This wildly (and inexplicably) erroneous value (the actual density is 1.50) was duly embalmed in the literature, and remained there, unquestioned, for almost sixty years, to the confusion of practically everybody.

Bill Doyle, at North American, had also fired a small fluorine motor in 1947, but in spite of these successes, the work wasn't immediately followed up. The performance was good, but the density of liquid fluorine (believed to be 1.108 at the boiling point) was well below that of oxygen, and the military (JPL was working for the Army at that time) didn't want any part of it.

This situation was soon to change. Some of the people at Aerojet simply didn't believe Dewar's 54-year-old figure on the density of liquid fluorine, and Scott Kilner of that organization set out to measure it himself. (The Office of Naval Research put up the money.) The experimental difficulties were formidable, but he kept at it, and in July, 1951, established that the density of liquid fluorine at the boiling point was not 1.108, but rather a little more than 1.54. There was something of a sensation in the propellant community, and several agencies set out to confirm his results. Kilner was right, and the position of fluorine had to be re-examined. (ONR, a paragon among sponsors, and the most sophisticated —by a margin of several parsecs — funding agency in the business, let Kilner publish his results in the open literature in 1952, but a lot of texts and references still list the old figure. And many engineers, unfortunately, tend to believe anything that is in print.)

For years people had noted that a standing drum of acid slowly built up pressure, and had to be vented periodically. But they assumed that this pressure was a by-product of drum corrosion, and didn't think much about it. But then, around the beginning of 1950, they began to get suspicious. They put WFNA in glass containers and in the dark (to prevent any photochemical reaction from complicating the results) and found, to their dismay, that the pressure buildup was even faster than in an aluminum drum. Nitric acid, or WFNA at least, was inherently unstable, and would decompose spontaneously, all by itself. This was a revolting situation.

All of this goes to show that even well-respected scientists and engineers are not immune to bad science.

There is disagreement over that.

"The new deterrence research has been discussed favorably and uncritically by national news outlets and has been declared persuasive in leading academic journals and by prominent scholars and jurists. Legal academics, such as Professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, both of the University of Chicago, find the new deterrence evidence "powerful" and "impressive." They couple it with "many decades of reliable data about [capital punishment's] deterrent effects" as the "foundation" of their argument, which holds that since "capital punishment powerfully deters killings," there is a moral imperative to aggressively prosecute capital crimes. Prof. Becker concurs, finding the evidence "persuasive," while Judge Richard Posner brushes aside worries about the possible execution of the innocent as we ramp up executions to achieve even greater deterrent effects. Twice, authors of some of the articles have appeared before the U.S. Congress, stating the case for deterrence."

https://www.law.columbia.edu/l...

Those profs will be funded well by congress so long as they give the answers congress is wanting.

There is disagreement over that.

"The new deterrence research has been discussed favorably and uncritically by national news outlets and has been declared persuasive in leading academic journals and by prominent scholars and jurists. Legal academics, such as Professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, both of the University of Chicago, find the new deterrence evidence "powerful" and "impressive." They couple it with "many decades of reliable data about [capital punishment's] deterrent effects" as the "foundation" of their argument, which holds that since "capital punishment powerfully deters killings," there is a moral imperative to aggressively prosecute capital crimes. Prof. Becker concurs, finding the evidence "persuasive," while Judge Richard Posner brushes aside worries about the possible execution of the innocent as we ramp up executions to achieve even greater deterrent effects. Twice, authors of some of the articles have appeared before the U.S. Congress, stating the case for deterrence."

https://www.law.columbia.edu/l...

While there may be some in the scientific world who dislike Mann several investigations of him have not turned up any damning evidence of wrongdoing.

The studies in question didn't attempt to interact with the damning evidence from the emails, in fact they carefully avoided addressing it.

Regarding similar studies confirming Mann's hockey stick graph here are some:

Huang 2000

Smith 2006

Oerlemans 2005

Here's a book from the National Academies of Science with more details:

Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years

If you throw out data from measurements are not known to be reliable proxies for global temperature, you are left with very little if anything; and certainly not with a thousand year hockey stick shape. The hockey stick is an artifact of cherry picking data. There are many reasons for an upswing in various physical measurements in the 20th century, including (yes) a warming temperature as we swing up from a low point on the multi-century scale, but also modern agriculture and its effects on things like tree growth.

Case in point, take Figure 6 -- the proxies seem to show a dip which we'd identify as the Little Ice Age of ca. 1300-1870. Not much else is obvious there, except the somewhat misleading superimposition of the instrumental record. It's not really fair to slap instrumental readings on the end of the proxies, since even assuming these proxies reflect global temperature in some way (big assumption), they will flatten out upswings like the instrumental record shows in the late 20th century.

It's true that water vapor is responsible for the largest chunk of greenhouse warming but it is not a greenhouse gas that can drive warming because the amount of WV in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature (and regionally the availability of water to evaporate). The level of WV is not something humans can have any significant direct effect on therefore it is not something to worry about.

Water vapor's status as the number one greenhouse gas makes it a hard problem because of the water cycle. What is the effect of cloud cover? How is the water cycle affected by more CO2? These are the billion dollar questions.

The "Pause" is not something that is statistically significant. Here is a statistical analysis that uses several different techniques to try and find some significance to the "Pause" but fails. There is no reason statistically to say the rate of warming since the 1970's has changed significantly.

The Pause has shown that the most highly vaunted predictions of carbon sensitivity were mistaken. What we do with that from here is a tricky question. Simply changing the fudge factors for aerosol albedo to keep our predictions "accurate" is a pretty lame response (Mann's, if you hadn't guessed).

While there may be some in the scientific world who dislike Mann several investigations of him have not turned up any damning evidence of wrongdoing.

Regarding similar studies confirming Mann's hockey stick graph here are some:

Huang 2000

Smith 2006

Oerlemans 2005

Here's a book from the National Academies of Science with more details:

Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years

It's true that water vapor is responsible for the largest chunk of greenhouse warming but it is not a greenhouse gas that can drive warming because the amount of WV in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature (and regionally the availability of water to evaporate). The level of WV is not something humans can have any significant direct effect on therefore it is not something to worry about.

The "Pause" is not something that is statistically significant. Here is a statistical analysis that uses several different techniques to try and find some significance to the "Pause" but fails. There is no reason statistically to say the rate of warming since the 1970's has changed significantly.

1. Why have vaccines and autism rates both grown exponentially in the last 25 years? (no, detection does not come close to answering)

Oh for goodness sake, are you claiming these are the only things that have grown rapidly over the past 25 years. Sugar consumption has grown rapidly. Maybe, just maybe, the mother's freakin' diet has something to do with autism. Why, yes it does. That one study does not explain the majority of cases of autism but it is a big red flashing neon sign pointing in a direction to look. In addition to eating too much sugar, which we now know can trigger autism, there are many many other things mothers are exposed to on a daily basis in modern societies that may also be detrimental to the health of their babies such as: an overabundance of drugs (in food and water), other highly processed foods, chemicals from plastics that get into food and water, and many forms of pollution. Perhaps it is related to increased stress or lack of sleep.

Many years ago, some shyster dickhead of a scientist made a bunch of money (from a firm that was already planning a law suit over the MMR vaccine) by concocting lies about a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. The science system worked, the lies were caught, the paper was retracted and the shyster lost his "scientist" badge.

What baffles me is that so many people cling to the results from the exposed shyster who truly was only in it to make a bunch of bucks while they ignore all the reputable scientific studies that don't agree with the conclusion they have already jumped to. I'm reminded of Feynman's description of cargo cult science. One problem with your completely irrational position (on the fence or not) is that it causes us to waste valuable and limited resources following up on things we already know are dead ends so we can't use those resources to look for the real cause of the increase in autism.

Yes, poor Karmashock, always having to defend himself/herself from the ruthless "ideologues".

The amusing thing about your persecution complex is that your perspective on this matter is driven entirely by ideology. As has already been pointed out, there is no robust evidence that capital punishment deters crime to any meaningful extent, and it is a much more expensive proposition than the alternative of imprisonment. In other words, in the United States, we know that capital punishment does not make us any safer than does imprisonment, and that it costs a lot more. So based on this objective reality, there is no rational reason to persist with executions, at least in the United States.

The only reasons left to support executions are ideological. E.g., "they deserve to die", or some notion of justice as revenge. Whatever your reason for supporting state-sanctioned executions, make no mistake that you are motivated by ideology. Those who oppose the death penalty for ideological reasons also happen to have convincing, objective evidence on their side -- you do not.

I had to scrabble around for a link and I wanted one you'd accept. I found one on ThinkProgress which is a leftwingy bloggy place.

http://thinkprogress.org/econo...

And they cite some re-visitation of the 1977 study here:
https://courseworks.columbia.e...

In it they're of course upset that women that have children are paid less than women that don't have children. That is their big complaint. As if it is the company's fault that someone took a few years off work or decided to take an easier career track because they wanted to spend more time with their children.

But the fun thing is that these people are so biased that they don't realize they're doing all the work for me here. By their citation the pay discrepancy falls to 7 percent if you exclude mothers and that has been true by their citation since 1977. I remembered the numbers differently... I remembered about 2 percent and 1972. But I could have gotten that wrong.

Now, lets revisit the wage gap discussion with the understanding that the actual wage gap is closer to 7 percent or women are paid 93% as much as women. Not 77 percent... 93 percent. That is a huge difference.

Now, that remaining 7 percent... who knows what the fuck that is... there could even be some honest to god discrimination in there. But are you going to start a holy gender crusade on 7 percent? No you're not. It isn't big enough to get anyone freaking out about it. It isn't politically useful. So you don't hear 7 percent. You hear 35 percent or something because that is big enough to get people angry. Only its bullshit. Which means the people angry about it are like those morons in the congress of Idiocracy that are too stupid to actually process a complicated or audit a falsified argument.

Now, if you want to talk about the remaining 7 percent, we can do that... I think that is an interesting topic but even then you can't just say the 7 percent is discrimination. Some of it might be... who knows. But you have a lot of variables to process in that. All told you know that under analysis you're going to lose a few percentage points at least. Which means if there is discrimination that is even statistically significant... you're going to be looking at something like a couple percent. A couple pennies on the dollar. And even one percent is unfair and wrong... but life isn't fair. I'm not getting excited or going to hold a grand inquisition over a couple percent. Which is at most the sort of discrimination that is actually real. And that assumes that the discrimination doesn't actually go in the opposite direction. As we saw in a couple other studies there are situations where women are favored for no apparent reason.

So it could be that the men that are getting paid more are actually getting UNDER paid because they're significantly overworking beyond what the women are doing. You don't know.

The point is that indifferent to any of that, if the number falls to 7 percent when you remove motherhood... it is generally speaking a bullshit issue. You have to admit that. Am I wrong? Is 7 percent enough for you to go on a rampage over it? Or like me, do you feel that they would need to show more discrimination than that to justify significant political and cultural effort? And keep in mind again, that 7 percent is still bullshit in and of itself because we haven't filtered out a half dozen other things that are going to push that number lower. I have no idea what would be left after that. It could be negative 10 for all either of us know.

Actually, we do have records going back to 1500 and even earlier. They're called "tree rings". The North American Drought Atlas collected tree ring data from across the US to understand tree growth patterns over the last 200 years. See, when there's a big drought, trees don't grow much and their rings are close together. When it's a good year the tree grows a lot and rings are farther apart.

So yes, there's a historical record, and yes, this drought is really really bad. Also, this drought isn't over yet so we don't know how bad it will continue to be. The drought to-date is a 500 year drought, but by the time it ends, it could be a 2000 year drought!

Obama's point is that the effects of climate change are being felt right now and are directly impacting human health. So while a warmer period (a couple degrees) doesn't necessarily hurt health wildfires caused by drought caused by climate change does.

This point is extraordinarily relevant because it ties into the current EPA coal court case going on. The case states that EPA exceeded its mandate. EPA is supposed to regulate pollutants that harm people's health. The coal people argue that even if climate change is real and may have an impact in hundreds of years, CO2 emissions are not harming people's health today and so fall out of the EPA mandate. Obama is saying otherwise.

-Andrew

Interested parties should also check out MB-System; it's GPL and NSF
funded. If you are familiar with GMT mapping tools this will be right
up your alley. Supposidly there's a Windows build using Cygwin, but with
datasets this large why would you want to?

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/r...

It is ainly focused on multibeam bathymetry but it despite the name it does
sidescan sonar processing too. It's not set up for LiDAR but its scripts
for dealing with massive point clouds could be adaptable.

Focusing on NIST and the NSA

Choose a safer curve

Once you get past the hype, the media stories, the click bait; and learn how to actually read scientific papers, they seem about as accurate as they've ever been. The second half of this paper discusses the difficulties, and that was decades ago.

Also worth recognizing that science papers are not an attempt to define absolute truth, and people who use it as such (saying, "this paper says X, therefore X is true") are likely to be disappointed. Science papers are essentially correspondence between scientists, saying "hey, look what I did and how it turned out." It's a form of dialectic, and a good one, but not every paper will be equally good, or even true......nor is it intended to be.

They also didn't have a good control group (that is, their control group consisted of the same environment, but without the emergency situation). There are so many potential problems that it's hard to draw a firm conclusion. For all we know, the problem was the environment was too dark, and it was hard to distinguish black pixels: that is, dressing the models in red shirts could have changed everything. Here is Richard Feynman talking about a similar problem with rats (second half of that link).

Null Modem serial cable and download a copy of Kermit. I recently had to do this to transfer software from Windows 7 to a PLC network card that for some reason was a 286 embedded PC running DOS. Worked fairly well.

Kermit For Windows

Kermit for DOS

If you've never read it before, Feynman's original essay is more worth your time (especially the part about the lab rats).
http://neurotheory.columbia.ed...

WtfUWT. ROTFLMAO.

Actually that graph may be reasonably accurate but it's mostly irrelevant because CO2 is not the only factor affecting climate. But most of the other big climate factors operate on long enough time scales that they aren't a significant factor on century time scales. For instance you may notice that there is a big temperature drop from 5.2 to 1.64 million years ago. A major factor in that appears to be the rising of the Isthmus of Panama cutting off water flow between the tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans causing the climate to cool.

For the last 800,000 years temperature and CO2 have tracked pretty well together.

It looks like GNU actually allocates its custom stack *on the stack*. However, in the comments they claim their algorithm guarantees that the stack need only be as large as log(sort elements), so they allocate a stack that is (in theory) guaranteed to be big enough. You can check out the code here. I'm not sure what version of glibc that's from, but it looks similar to what I extracted from 2.10 a while back.

It wasn't that I didn't want to help my group mates the previous semester. Our classes also had usenet newsgroups internal to the university network, and I was one of several students who pseudonymously spent a lot of time explaining lecture topics and helping other classmates interpret the problem statements late at night during project crunch times.

It seemed my groupmates much pride and/or insecurity to reveal that they were in over their heads. It was only when I was later assigned as their tutor that they opened up about their struggles. I suppose this was a learning experience for me as well, preparing me to be more cynical and pessimistic about any promises made by coworkers during my career...

Unfortunate but true. People will back away from previous promises even as they still admit that it's in their best interest not to. It's the "somebody, everybody, anybody, nobody" syndrome.

Or my shortened variant:

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
My name is Nobody*.

*Yes, that's a reference to the spaghetti western of the same name.

You can look at it in two ways, either against those with prior experience or a rapid learning rate or against those with little experience or a slower learning rate. Why are we speaking about putting people into ghettos[1]?

In any event there are two important questions that come to mind:
1) What happens when the AP twits have to work in a heterogeneous environment? Will they have the "soft skills" they need to function in such a work place?

2) There is the question of whether online courses are even effective. We could be holding people back. See http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/pu...

more like the god damned particle...

my non-physicist brain wants to stuff dark matter into the role of 'barely detectable multiverse'.

I find stuff like this online and find myself wondering if it is all hooey
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~...

How long until we can start to describe the pieces and parts of adjacent universes?

In most cases, no one is quite sure how it happened. The details of such a campaign have yet to be revealed.

Could it have been the Fed's control of the whole network? Or perhaps it was an analysis of router traffic flow records, which supposedly reveals 81% of tor users, according to researchers...

But it probably is a problem if your opponent is a state-level actor. For example, China (and the US probably too) probably monitors connections to known tor entry/exit nodes. Given the attack mentioned, someone using tor in china is safe as long as the server being contacted is known to not be acting in concert with the adversary. However, if the server (or its connection to the tor entry/exit nodes) is also under control of the same adversary, then the connection can be de-anonymized. So this is a problem for chinese bloggers blogging on chinese blogs, but not so much on foreign blogs hosted outside china. Though it appears blog traffic would probably be too small to facilitate a successful attack.

Absolutely. But the authors of the paper assert that:

As Tor nodes are scattered around the globe, and the nodes of circuits are selected at random, mounting a traffic analysis attack in practice would require a powerful adversary with the ability to monitor traffic at a multitude of autonomous systems (AS). Murdoch and Zielinski, however, showed that monitoring traffic at a few major Internet exchange (IX) points could enable traffic analysis attacks to a significant part of the Tor network [13]. Furthermore, Feamster et al. [14] and later Edman et al. [15] showed that even a single AS may observe a large fraction of entry and exit node traffic—a single AS could monitor over 39% of randomly generated Tor circuits

The implication is that less powerful (i.e., non-state) actors, given the ability to compromise a relatively small number of networks can perform these attacks as well. At the same time, the specific attack addressed has some serious shortcomings, as I noted in a previous post.

It's strange, you'd expect social scientists to be especially good at doing surveys and studies like this. Instead, they are still skewed by the problems mentioned by Feynman a half a century ago.

Mathematicians and Physicists have been pointing this out for years ...

* A Mathematician's Lament

* Cargo Cult Science

> A jail or prison consists of a school, dorm, library, ...

Some would say school is a jail of individual, creative thought. (A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart)

It was was probably inspired by Cargo Cult Science by Feynman.

The rest of us believe that telecom is, was, and (for the foreseeable future) always will be a *natural* monopoly

Natural monopoly is a myth. A myth very convenient for and thus perpetuated by the government officials of various levels as it gives them undue power, but a myth nonetheless.

You can't have meaningful competition for building roads and sewers and power grids

Yes, you can. Tokyo has competing subway lines — why can't New York City? Your GPS is likely to show you several options for any route of appreciable lengths — why can't those different roads be privately-owned and compete?

For example, to leave New York you have many options (most of them requiring payment on top of the taxes) — why can't those bridges and tunnels be privately owned and compete with each other? Maybe, their new owners will consider high traffic a profit opportunity, rather than a burdensome nuisance — and seek to attract more drivers by innovation of both toll-collection and road-maintenance... I dunno, it works for supermarkets... Heck, some private (and disgustingly profit-driven) concern may even undertake building a new tunnel (or a bridge)...

it will always be vastly more efficient for a single entity to install and manage that physical data network, at least at the local level

Really? Why not? In the 20ie we had competing telephone companies — each running its own wires to buildings. Today Google is laying down its own fiber — to much rejoicing on this very site — and AT&T is planning its own alternative, despite your claims of it being "inefficient". Various markets have competing coax-cable providers already. The actual cable-laying is just a (small) part of providing Internet service... Though in theory a monopoly ought to be easier — and thus cheaper — to operate (in any market), in practice any benefit is quickly consumed by the inevitable arrogance of such providers and the concomitant drop of quality and rising end-user prices (any wins in the monopoly provider's costs are compensated for by their fattening up the profit-margins).

We should have made this transition decades ago, but for a variety of reasons didn't

Oh, it is not a "variety" of reasons — but a single one: our government followed that myth of "natural monopolies" and granted cable-TV providers monopoly rights in their respective markets. That law was rescinded in the mid-1990ies, but the damage was done...

That's interesting. Maybe combined with this: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~le... - it could provide what's needed. What I need in my case is good handling of TCP and UDP, anything else isn't relevant. Maybe I should try creating some sort of virtual network card that handles TCP and UDP, and hands the rest over to a real network card?

The LHC has trouble being reproduced because of the expense, and that's problematic. It's better than nothing, but we shouldn't fool ourselves that it's all good.

Even Richard Feynman worried about this problem, you can see his thoughts on the topic here, around paragraph 19.