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Of course you pay approximately 60% more for a big mac in Norway as compared to the U.S.

http://www.economist.com/conte...

There are other printers that can produce "erasable" braille. Some of the most interesting do it with tiny electrical impulses that produce a tactile sensation that is an illusion of dots. This was described in an article in last week's Economist. The article pointed out that far fewer people are learning braille today for two reasons: other technologies replace it for many purposes, and, because of better treatment and prevention, there are far fewer blind people today.

I sort of thought they get rid of most debt based arrests.

In theory, the US abolished debtors' prisons in the early 1830s(details vary by state, as usual).

In in practice, well, you can always spin a new set of legalisms to achieve the same effect, can you not?

Let’s see – you sister graduated at the top of her class and was a teacher? What is she doing now? And why are extrapolating from a single data point? That could be dangerous. But since you wanted evidence.

She's no longer on this plane of existence, but I get your point about small data sets.

The countries where pupils do best, such as Singapore, Finland and South Korea, draw all their teachers from the top third of the academic pool. In America three-quarters of teacher-training colleges accept students who graduate in the bottom half of their class.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

By the way, I have a pretty good idea what Special Ed teachers do, and I greatly appreciate what they do, but of the 40 or so that I have meet none of them graduated from the top of their class or from top schools. That’s my antidotal evidence.

Here's the problem: I looked up the group who did the "research" cited on that page, the National Council on Teacher Quality, and their credentials are shady at best. Some resources:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

An excerpt from the second link:

Several months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate rated, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

Rating schools as a zero because they refused to co-operate? Way to screw up your own results, NCTQ.

Let’s see – you sister graduated at the top of her class and was a teacher? What is she doing now? And why are extrapolating from a single data point? That could be dangerous. But since you wanted evidence.

The countries where pupils do best, such as Singapore, Finland and South Korea, draw all their teachers from the top third of the academic pool. In America three-quarters of teacher-training colleges accept students who graduate in the bottom half of their class.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

By the way, I have a pretty good idea what Special Ed teachers do, and I greatly appreciate what they do, but of the 40 or so that I have meet none of them graduated from the top of their class or from top schools. That’s my antidotal evidence.

Meanwhile the number of private jets has quadrupled since 1996 globally. So why did the regulators forget to quash that one, too, if that's the explanation?

universal health care

Debunked.

and usually enough to eat

Debunked.

I guess actual facts, gathered by people who have actually been to Cuba, are too hard to face for communist apologists...

Another factor perhaps? From The Economist magazine:

"That personality, along with intelligence, is at least partly heritable is becoming increasingly clear; so, presumably, the tendency to be happy or miserable is, to some extent, passed on through DNA. To try to establish just what that extent is, a group of scientists from University College, London; Harvard Medical School; the University of California, San Diego; and the University of Zurich examined over 1,000 pairs of twins from a huge study on the health of American adolescents.

The adolescents in Dr De Neve's study were asked to grade themselves from very satisfied to very dissatisfied. Dr De Neve found that those with one long allele were 8% more likely than those with none to describe themselves as very satisfied; those with two long alleles were 17% more likely.

Where the story could become controversial is when the ethnic origins of the volunteers are taken into account. All were Americans, but they were asked to classify themselves by race as well. On average, the Asian Americans in the sample had 0.69 long genes, the black Americans had 1.47 and the white Americans had 1.12."

-- "The Genetics of Happiness", The Economist, 15 Oct 2011

Why put trust into peer review when we're doing such a poor job of it now?
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong

When you google "peer review problems" the first hits are:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/
and this
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access
and this
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

So, should all the journals discussed there be closed down? Peer reviewing ending up favoring somebodies paper whom the anonymous reviewers happen to know or like, or whose conclusions they agree with is a well known problem. As is peer reviewers delaying papers that disagree with their own research, despite impeccable research.

The problem is not that the peer review process used here was acceptable and should in fact have continued. The problem is double standards.

This makes about as much sense as when the Clinton administration opened trade with China by personally promising reforms in Chinese government and an increase in Chinese demand for American cars and products, leading to an increase in manufacturing jobs. Yep, makes perfect sense.

Global warming propagandists would take any support — whether it comes from a heatwave-induced swing or real understanding of their theories.

Meanwhile, the inconvenient truth that those theories aren't really explaining the available facts , is explained only by lack of funding and failure to communicate...

I am not sure about the GP, but I can point to a study where the issue is not selection basis.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions

It is not that we know that the studies are wrong; it is that we know models are incomplete. Climate change is a young science so there are holes and gaps. One answer might be that the oceans have more ability to absorb CO2 then the models predict and we are reaching a new equilibrium point. Or maybe this is just a pause for something really nasty to pop up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation

Hope their space ship works better than their ice breaker ship.. Did we not already learn that chineese laborors don't particularly care about quality? *sigh* I sure hope the astronauts are not volentold as well..

That's not true at all. If you are considering *passenger* rail, then yes, it's terrible. But we don't really use much passenger rail. That chicken and egg problem aside, US freight rail is pretty good.

For instance: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21576136-quiet-success-americas-freight-railways-back-track

"Even the American Society of Civil Engineers, which howls incessantly (and predictably) about the awful state of the nation’s infrastructure, shows grudging respect for goods railways in a recent report."

And I forgot to inculded the link:
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21591190-united-states-amoeba

On June 16 the electric rate was -100 euros per megawatt hour. i.e. If you were producing electricity you were being charged. I might be wrong on who was paying it but I will stand on that point.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-electricity-providers-face-existential-threat-how-lose-half-trillion-euros

Not sure what you mean by "other plants". If you are implying that other plants can pick up the slack the answer is that they can – when wind / solar is a small part of the mixture. When they are a large part of the mixture then you have to think about if you want to turn on or off large chunks of the supply. If it is a windy day then maybe you don’t have to turn the power plant on. Guess wrong and you get brownouts.

And yes, compared to the rest of the world, Germany is heavily reliant on coal. Coal is cheap. Also, this is partly this is a sop to East Germany, partly to the Green’s stance on fracking and nuclear power.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that you have predictive power, that it is less than 100% (i.e. weather forecasting), but it is better than flipping a coin (i.e. psychics ). In short, you are not making any statement about its predictive powers. How about this – let’s say that the climate scientist with their models can get with 2 standard deviations – or be about right 5 to 10% of the time. Check out the top chart.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions

I will point out that most investors and political advisors can get below 2 standard deviations.

As you say, when the model diverges from reality you make adjustments. Or junk the model and try something else. This is something you do with science – in particular in a young and developing field. Not so much with older fields. I was taught Newtonian physics long after Einstein had debunked it.

Personally, I would reference seismologists, not geologist. That is another subject where the science is making huge bounds but has low predicting power of when, and how big, the next earthquake will be. And just because seismologist have poor predictive powers does not mean one should not prepare for earthquakes.

So do you agree that their policies are not Keynesian as the paper I provided shows?

I have to concede that I'm not an economist so I may be wrong, but the policies are sorta-Keynesian, involving government spending to stimulate the economy. And that spending is mostly social welfare projects, like the Bolsa Familia .

Can you provide a source for the improving wealth disparity you claim? Wiki shows this as steady, just like continued problems with corruption and taxes that target the poor.

My claim of the wealth disparity improving is not mine at all, you can look yourselft at the link you provided, Gini index has gone from ~0.6 to ~0.55 in one decade, a substantial improvement IMO. Corruption and taxes affects mostly everyone, not just the poor, and despite the cynism and bias of our media, I think we are slowly improving on that front too. :)

There is very little middle class in Brazil to my knowledge, maybe you have a data source that I can't find.

Not true at all . And Brazil's middle class has actually expanded during that last decade too.

I can't really cite all of Friedman's books. He gives very credible arguments on why Government run social programs may seem to help, but in reality don't. Friedman also gives numerous examples in his books on where these policies have failed. The book to start with would be "Capitalism and Freedom".

In that book, Friedman lays out arguments against even Social Security. The better method explained is to protect citizens so that they can save on their own. As stated above, this is a rare program that may have worked if not for politicians taking all the money from the coffers. Friedman would use that exact fact as one of many reasons why the Government can not handle social welfare programs of any sort and I would concede to his wisdom.

Nothing Friedman said has been shown to be wrong. Yet Keynesian policies have been shown to be wrong to some degree at least. We can verify the wrongness by looking at a few simple statistics in Countries that have maintained the Government as the energy for economic growth (Keynesian policy). Statistics such as wealth disparity, median income vs. inflation, poverty rates, etc...

As stated above, Economics is not simple. Other factors such as taxes, regulated monopolies, etc.. all play roles. If you want a link to harm of social policies in the News recently, look at the recent articles regarding how being unemployed for too long hurts your prospects for a new job. Here is one of many links.

I appreciate the time you've taken to elucidate your opinion and expound on Milton Friedman's opinions and arguments. They do merit consideration. Thank you.

Theory and logical argument are important to any discussion. All the same, I'm an empiricist. As such, I need data in order to be convinced. Can you cite even one study which hypothesizes about the effect of social safety net programs whose data shows that programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps actually harm the economy rather than help it?

I can't really cite all of Friedman's books. He gives very credible arguments on why Government run social programs may seem to help, but in reality don't. Friedman also gives numerous examples in his books on where these policies have failed. The book to start with would be "Capitalism and Freedom".

In that book, Friedman lays out arguments against even Social Security. The better method explained is to protect citizens so that they can save on their own. As stated above, this is a rare program that may have worked if not for politicians taking all the money from the coffers. Friedman would use that exact fact as one of many reasons why the Government can not handle social welfare programs of any sort and I would concede to his wisdom.

Nothing Friedman said has been shown to be wrong. Yet Keynesian policies have been shown to be wrong to some degree at least. We can verify the wrongness by looking at a few simple statistics in Countries that have maintained the Government as the energy for economic growth (Keynesian policy). Statistics such as wealth disparity, median income vs. inflation, poverty rates, etc...

As stated above, Economics is not simple. Other factors such as taxes, regulated monopolies, etc.. all play roles. If you want a link to harm of social policies in the News recently, look at the recent articles regarding how being unemployed for too long hurts your prospects for a new job. Here is one of many links.

I have no idea which finnish author you're referencing. Kindly cite the author's name. Notably, I'm a finn.

“Without Mercy” – U.S. Strategic Intelligence and Finland in the Cold War
Jukka Rislakki
http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/12/finland-and-american-intelligence

"It remains unknown in what kind of situations the superpowers would have resorted to their nuclear arsenal. By the mid 1960s the use of tactical nuclear weapons had become an increasingly remote possibility despite the fact that the United States had approximately 7,000 stored in Europe. It is unlikely that the U.S.A would have used them for purposes other than repelling or preventing an attack against herself.

It is hard to build a reliable picture of comprehensive plans and their exact nature since documents have come to light only randomly, and those that have are incomplete. (And practically nothing definite is known about the Soviet plans.) What is obvious, however, is that in the event of the outbreak of a war, all listed targets would not have been attacked automatically and all the bombs used would not have carried nuclear warheads."

Yeah, well, we have been in somewhat a flat stage, and will be for a while. Here is a good graphic.

http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-appears-be-coming-end-no-moore

Well, there's a couple of technical problems with that. While I'm certainly not a lawyer, I have informally discussed the issue with a friend of mine that is a lawyer. He raised a few of the following points, which I've supplemented.

First, it's not clear that this is actually theft. The crime of theft typically denies the owner of the property access to the property, which isn't the case with electronic documents. Rather, it's more likely to be a violation of the No Electronic Theft (NET) act. NET criminalizes copyright infringement. This may not be a bad approach given what kind of punishments one sees for copyright infringement Massachusetts. More often, the punishment for copyright infringement is fines and I think the prosecutor was looking for jail time.

As far as breaking and entering goes, that seems doubtful. The networking closet he accessed was unlocked. In fact, a homeless man used the area to store belongings. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that breaking and entering would be difficult to argue. Trespassing might be a more successful charge. Trespassing, though, is a relatively minor offense that's unlikely to produce a lengthy jail sentence.

That said the head of Toyota is still from the Toyoda family.

While that is true, IIRC that is only because the Japanese have a tradition of adult adoption. In short, the most promising executive gets adopted into the family of the current head of the company.

Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans October 1, 1989
http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/assuring-affordable-health-care-for-all-americans

You mean the event titled "Health Care for the Poor and Underserved." So why did the Democrats do a one-size fits all for the whole country instead of expanding Medicare/Medicaid? And I don't see how something from 1989 has anything to do with the previous Democrat-Controlled Congress in 2009-2010 session years.

Obamacare's hidden parentage
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-chart-1

In other news the word "the" is also found a large percentage of documents when cross-referenced. (That's really grasping at straws cherry-picking random words/ideas from "any" bill/topic, like "Nursing home transparency" being used in the chart on the page you linked to)

Timeline of the health care law
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/28/politics/supreme-court-health-timeline

Your own link proves the opposite since the Dates mentioned when the ACA was passed was under "Democrat" control of congress. (You just proved my point)

A healthcare history lesson for the GOP
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/15/opinion/la-oe-mansbridge-obamacare-democrats-single-payer-20131015

I'm not sure what this article was getting at but it was way after the ACA was passed and after Democrats lost control in the house.

The entire ACA/ObamaCare was/is/and will be a DEMOCRAT/LIBERAL caused problem! Republicans/Conservatives had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!

No need to repeat here.

You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts.
The legislative and ideological history of the law is out there for you to read.
You must have slept through a year of headlines and negotiations to have such a poor grasp of the what happened with the law.

And you have yours but your "facts" did not address the majority of my Opinion (most were from way before or way after it's passage and have nothing to do with it when it was done)

Name one Republican who voted for the "Current" bill when it was passed.

Name one Republican who wrote any of the law/amendments when it was being drafted 09-10. (Dems held them in backrooms in the middle of the night after they went home, sounds real honest of them doesn't it?)

It was DEMOCRATS who wrote and passed the current law when they had a super-majority. Passed under the most corrupt practices ever seen (bribes, backroom last-minute deals to even their "own" party, labor unions/lobbyists/obama/democrat BFFs getting exemptions,etc...) They even argued before the Supreme Court that it was not a tax at the same time telling the justices that they had the authority under the tax laws since it was a tax (they even called them out on it a few times)

This law would have "NEVER" passed in the first place from even Democrats if they went around saying what they are now about the details. (which is why it should be repealed and the whole thing started over from scratch with an honest debate by both parties)

You mean the "Plan B" that had absolutely no Republican input (they were locked out of the committee rooms)

Plan A was a single payer system.
The most generous way to describe the Republican position on Plan B (the individual mandate) is that they were for it before they were against it.

Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans October 1, 1989
http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/assuring-affordable-health-care-for-all-americans

Obamacare's hidden parentage
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-chart-1

Timeline of the health care law
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/28/politics/supreme-court-health-timeline

A healthcare history lesson for the GOP
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/15/opinion/la-oe-mansbridge-obamacare-democrats-single-payer-20131015

The entire ACA/ObamaCare was/is/and will be a DEMOCRAT/LIBERAL caused problem! Republicans/Conservatives had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!

You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts.
The legislative and ideological history of the law is out there for you to read.
You must have slept through a year of headlines and negotiations to have such a poor grasp of the what happened with the law.

Picked from 1995 here but it at least wasn't becoming much worse:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/gdp-growth

Then again never amazing either.

(Sweet page but not useful for this: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/11/european-economy-guide
Lots of downloadable data: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?page=2
Employment numbers: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Employment_rate,_age_group_15-64,_2001-2011_(%25).png&filetimestamp=20121030182934 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Employment_statistics)

It's difficult to pin down an exact date.

• It could have been when we started re-electing Congressmen the vast majority of the time, no matter how unpopular they were.
• It could have been when gerrymandering made its debut.
• It could have been when political parties started, leading people to vote for their team rather than who they thought was the best candidate.
• It could have been when money started to mean more than votes.
• It could have been one of the many instances where we have traded liberty for security.

Andrew Ng didn't use random forests but a neural network to actually "learn" discriminative features *UNSUPERVISED*.
This is done by creating a Neural Network that basically projects it's input on it's output (it's like an identity function).
Lets say you have 100 input parameters, and 100 output parameters. What you want the neural network to do is compress these 100 to (for example) 10 nodes, then go back to the initial 100. In the process, this neural network will actually learn an identity function, where it will learn the important discriminative features in those 10 nodes.
This is somewhat different from how you usually use a neural network, starting with input parameters, go through a couple of hidden layers and end up with just a couple of output results.

Andrew Ng's google experiment did exactly that! It was not fed cat images. It was fed random images and through deep learning actually learned the concept of cats *UNSUPERVISED*.

and here are some references for this:
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/google-built-machine-learns-find-cats-internet-846690
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/06/babbage-june-27th-2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html

Humans are not evil, greedy bastards by nature; we get to choose. Psychopaths have no choice. Creating a system designed to allow psychopaths an obstacle free route to dominance serves the wrong race.

Maybe not. The Economist had an article a few months back, about a study that showed that psychopathic leaders actually make better decisions, partly because their reasoning isn't clouded by misplaced empathy.

Of all countries US is one of the last in the failing list. Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and most of socialist Latin America, on the other hand are in utter misery. Social Democrat countries in Latin America and Europe, as France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina are not that bad but waaay worse than US.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/12/best-economies-in-the-world/2802701/

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic-countries-are-probably-best-governed-world-secret-their

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

I'd suggest that your intentional cherry picking of specific countries, ones that have shifted the burden of debt from investors to the public in Europe, and ones that are trying to move into the new century (still) in South America, while ignoring the the most socialist democracies in Europe and how exceedingly well their economies are doing... better even than the US... you might be being a bit disingenuous. The biggest problem with most of the European countries that are having serious problems is they bought into the American bullshit way of debt management that Uncle Ronnie started, and Auntie Margret followed (first).

They already do: http://www.economist.com/node/16910031 This article is old news

Yeah, you're right - capitalism always ends up with huge amounts of money. Strange how that works. Damn those capitalists! Meanwhile a socialist economy is failing again. Why does this always happen!

Not quite. Take a look:

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble

A p-value of 0.05 means that 1 in 20 results are false positives. This implies that 5% of all scientific papers with a p-value of 0.05 are false. However, applying some statistics, it might even be worse than that. Textual summary of that link:

Say 1000 hypotheses are tested, and that 10% are true - that is, 100 true hypotheses, and 900 false ones. If the false positive rate is 5%, then 45 of the 900 will end up true. Further, let's say there's a false negative rate of 10%. So of the 100 true hypotheses, 10 will be missed. That means after experimentation on all 1000 hypotheses, 135 true results will be found, out of which only 90 will actually be true. Also consider that usually only positive results are published. So the 1000 experiments yield 135 papers that are published, where 45/135, or 33%, are actually false!

This is a bit arbitrary in that it assumes 10% of all tested hypotheses are true. If this number is smaller, then this gets much worse. If the number is larger, then it gets better. But still it's quite an interesting indication.
What humanity needs is a severe revision of the whole peer review and publication method of doing science.

BTW, where did you get the 35b in reserves? I have not been able to find reliable numbers. Venezuela’s is not exactly independent and I have heard rumors that their books are not exactly square.

But let’s assume the 35b is right. The 35b means nothing in itself. It is a stock value – a snapshot. Think of your checkbook. It only has meaning if you compare it to a flow value – the amount of money coming in and out. A rule of thumb is that a central bank should have about 1 years’ worth of reserves. Venezuela imports/ exports about 90b a year.

So even by your standards the reserves are thin.

Here is a link to a more pessimistic article.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588093-latin-america-must-press-nicol-s-maduro-not-use-decree-powers-throttle-his-opposition

Unreliable research
Trouble at the lab
Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not
Oct 19th 2013 |From the print edition
The Economist

First, the statistics, which if perhaps off-putting are quite crucial. Scientists divide errors into two classes. A type I error is the mistake of thinking something is true when it is not (also known as a “false positive”). A type II error is thinking something is not true when in fact it is (a “false negative”). When testing a specific hypothesis, scientists run statistical checks to work out how likely it would be for data which seem to support the idea to have come about simply by chance. If the likelihood of such a false-positive conclusion is less than 5%, they deem the evidence that the hypothesis is true “statistically significant”. They are thus accepting that one result in 20 will be falsely positive—but one in 20 seems a satisfactorily low rate.

In 2005 John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist from Stanford University, caused a stir with a paper showing why, as a matter of statistical logic, the idea that only one such paper in 20 gives a false-positive result was hugely optimistic. Instead, he argued, “most published research findings are probably false.” As he told the quadrennial International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, held this September in Chicago, the problem has not gone away.

Dr Ioannidis draws his stark conclusion on the basis that the customary approach to statistical significance ignores three things: the “statistical power” of the study (a measure of its ability to avoid type II errors, false negatives in which a real signal is missed in the noise); the unlikeliness of the hypothesis being tested; and the pervasive bias favouring the publication of claims to have found something new.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble

The idea that Germany and Denmark can operate without carbon or nukes is far from realized. In fact what the shutdown on nukes in Europe has caused is a boom in coal consumption, construction of new coal burning power plants in Europe and an increase in carbon emissions in Europe.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21569039-europes-energy-policy-delivers-worst-all-possible-worlds-unwelcome-renaissance

Peerage of Science got quite a bit of publicity earlier this year. The idea is similar to what was suggested in the OP: You send you manuscript to PoS, who forward it to peer reviewers. When the reports come back in, journal editors can bid for the article. If the authors are interested in publishing the work in a journal that show the green light, they can. Suppose the authors' preferred journal(s) does not want to publish the paper, the authors can withdraw their paper from PoS and pursue more traditional routes. What you will get is more referee reports (I think I read ~5), and the referee's reports will be later peer review, too, so editors get a good sense of which referee to trust.

Before you say that 5 referee's is a waste: the average paper probably goes through a couple of different journals, being rejected once, twice, each time requiring 2-3 referee reports. Personally what I think is the biggest problem in science is inadequate peer review: Not enough people read the manuscript before it is published, and when it finally is published, no major changes can take place. There is very little discussion after, too, as comments in PLoS journals are rather informal, and one would onyl send a letter to the editor if there's something major wrong with the paper.

IAAESS also. There is clearly enough wind and solar energy available in the U.S. to meet our needs. It could be scaled up to completely replace coal-burning in much shorter time than it would take to build a new generation of nuclear plants, and with much less public subsidy. But that's not the real problem with nuclear. The bigger problem is that baseload resources are basically incompatible with renewable resources like wind and solar, because they cannot respond quickly enough to "fill in the gaps" when the wind stops blowing or the sun goes down. A large nuclear plant can take three days to start up, and a coal plant can take 8 hours or more. If you want really expensive electric power, build a new nuclear plant or a large coal plant in a place that already has high penetration of renewables, like Denmark or Germany or Spain, or even California. If you are lucky, you can run it about 10% of the time, so the cost has to be recovered with a fraction of the design output. For a nice description of what's happening to baseload plants in Europe, see a recent article in the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-electricity-providers-face-existential-threat-how-lose-half-trillion-euros. There's a much cheaper way and less risky way to go if cutting CO2 is the goal: renewables plus storage and demand response. It's happening in California already.

who is going to hire a ex-convict?

How would they know if the applicant was an ex-convict? Some employers do background checks, but most do not. Few even bother to cross check information on the resume. If someone is willing to rob a bank, they probably would have few compunctions about lying on a resume.

There was an article in the Economist Magazine a few months ago, that said people with criminal records performed better in some jobs: firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance. Indeed, for customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better.

But no, better to hand out fish then give access to fishing instructions.

Maybe so. There is a very interesting article in this week's Economist Magazine that compared different methods of helping the poor. One of the most effective is "Unconditional Cash Transfers" or UCTs, that basically just hand out cash to poor families in Africa. This was surprisingly effective, because these poor families knew what they needed a lot better than the aid agencies, and there was so little overhead that nearly all the money went to the people in need rather than being eaten up by overhead and administration. There were a few limitations: the UCTs worked better when they went to women rather than men, and CCTs (Conditional Cash Transfers) that required children to attend school were found to have better long term results than UCTs. But otherwise, UCTs and CCTs were more effective than nearly any other charity scheme.

Knowledge is power.

Indeed. But your mistake is assuming that you have it and the poor people don't.

Actually we haven't. There are even new theories dismissing dark matter

You're not alone in thinking that.

Scientists always set out to be less wrong than the last guy, though.

No they don't. TFA lists many examples of scientists choosing to advance their careers rather than trying to be "less wrong".

The Economist Magazine had a cover story on this issue just last week, that in my opinion covers the issue better than TFA.

Basically, the current system of peer review and replication is failing. Peer reviewers actually miss many errors, rarely check statistics, and almost never re-run any software. The current publishing system has little interest in printing replication, and spending time replicating experiments is a dead end career path. The existing system doesn't work well in the era of "big science" and "big data".

We need to move to a system where all publicly funded science is required to be disclosed when it is initially funded, so negative results cannot later be buried. We should also move to online publishing, with a permanently active area for comments, so if the research is later refuted, or even questioned, that is immediately visible. A portion of public science spending should be set aside for replication. There also should be negative consequences for researchers that publish papers that cannot be replicated, whether because their results are wrong, or because they failed to disclose enough information about how the experiment was conducted. Scientists accepting public funds should be required to make their data and software available.

But the biggest obstacle to reform is researchers and publishers that have prospered under the existing system. Many of them treat the current system of peer review as some sort of holy ritual, and refuse to even admit that the system is broken.

The Zeconomist has a debate about it

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/816

It has a larger impact then you might think.

Most industrial processes burn at a higher temperature and have filters – both which reduce the type soot which is big and black. And soot from a simple campfire can circle the earth. Not much mind you but it is the big black stuff.

Sorry that I can't cite anything but I don't have time to look up all of the articles. There was one brilliant one. These will have to do.

http://www.economist.com/node/17519770
http://www.economist.com/node/18175423

It has a larger impact then you might think.

Most industrial processes burn at a higher temperature and have filters – both which reduce the type soot which is big and black. And soot from a simple campfire can circle the earth. Not much mind you but it is the big black stuff.

Sorry that I can't cite anything but I don't have time to look up all of the articles. There was one brilliant one. These will have to do.

http://www.economist.com/node/17519770
http://www.economist.com/node/18175423

Well, maybe. The impacts of various items on climate change are not well understood. Each year something new is figured out and models have to be updated.

According to your chart aerosols are a major factor in cooling – not warming. It's 8 years on and scientific opinion is now it is believed to be a minor factor.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21587194-researchers-are-beginning-understand-aerosols-and-clouds-better-result

As for the increase in warm in oceans, don't worry about the crust. The crust can take it. It is the other possible effects that you should worry about. And we don't know enough about the ocean to know what will happen.