Slashdot Mirror

I'm interested in scientific studies that refute or at least clarify specific claims, in regards to neurobiology.
However that article is full of links to books (see below) and makes the claim that because only testosterone is mentioned, it's the only biological factor that has deterministic merit. The structural and functional differences found between male and female brains, seems to be something Dr. Fuentes is unaware of? This is a questionable source, when cherry picking for a (nearly) unsubstantiated narrative.

Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA by Richard Lewontin, PHD
"How is it that this book, indeed any science book, could earn such a title? The chief reason is that Lewontin recognises what few scientists do"
This is code for "he doesn't have the science to back him up, but his theories suggest..." That being said, I subscribe to his view that neo-Darwinism is not sufficient to explain differentiation results, so I'm a little disheartened to see his views used to support a supposed sex-differentiation ideology discussion...in which neither side is an ideology (insofar as any or no answer, is idyllic).

Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World by Anne Fausto-Sterling, PHD
Dr. Fausto seems to be an actual biologist, but has produced no science and lots of opinions on the issue of underlying biological sex differences. She tends to expand the 1-2% of intersex overlap into a general theory to apply to the rest of the population. She published a number of good papers on genetic components in-vitro, but as early as 1986 was publishing such opinionated gems as Good Science = Feminist Science, which characterize the entirety of her contributions toward the issues.

Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences by Cordelia Fine, PHD
Dr. Fine has been revising and reworking her assertions for years, dutifully. This review of her work (as of 2010 - https://www.researchgate.net/p...) is quite detailed and she's made some excellent points.
She also has no actual science, but has seen it sufficient to say what "might be true" as a critique to all the published science so far. None of her critiques constitute evidence, but are ideas worth exploring that might narrow the existing findings...assuming that researchers and reviewers have made some pretty serious oversights it should be a cursory exercise. I expect to see some of these ideas tested.

From the article, by Agustin Fuentes, PHD - "An evolutionary history clearly divided into women staying home caring for babies while the men made tools and hunted, both experiencing different evolutionary pressures, is not borne out by the available archeological and fossil evidence."

That was from a an Anthropologist PHD and may be subject to over-specification to reach that conclusion (what does "different evolutionary pressures" mean in context?). The recorded history is definitive, regardless. While it's not 100% true across space and time (http://metro.co.uk/2013/03/05/where-women-rule-the-world-matriarchal-communities-from-albania-to-china-3525234/), statistically, it's a near-certainty that any civilization in recorded time was divided into roughly these sexually differentiated groups, which was a result of AND reinforced the evolutionary roles (shape of the penis head being a particularly obvious one, mirrored to a grotesque degree in ducks).

I don't find this compelling, overall. Admittedly, Dr. Fine's work definitely has some issues worth testing out. YMMV

You slammed Debra Soh https://www.researchgate.net/p... because her Thesis was using fMRIs, among other observing tools. Then you claimed that you can prove a salmon has emotion the same way.

Copy-pasting my reply to the other poster, since he made your point much more succinctly:

No, fMRI has not been "discredited". The fish thing was cute and all, and it did make a valid point—that statistics have noise. That's a far cry from discrediting the technology. You might as well say that digital cameras have been discredited for use in astrophotography because they occasionally have hot pixels.

Absolutely, but her thesis was not on the imaging technology. There is no dispute that fMRI allows tracking of blood flow through the brain. Her thesis, however, used fMRI to "investigate brain differences associated with sexual orientation, paraphilias (or unusual sexual interests), and hypersexuality" and that's the part that has been discredited. It has no predictive abilities and, at present, is in the same realm as phrenology. That's not to say that calipers and other measuring technologies are discredited, but trying to use those measuring technologies for personality investigation is not science.

Or, to use your analogy, astrophotography is not discredited, but predicting someone's personality via astrology is, even if you use digital cameras to get really accurate positions of the planets when they were born.

The same applies to your post. fMRI is not discredited. Tensor imaging is not discredited. Other forms of neuroimaging are not discredited. Making personality predictions based on neuroimaging - which is what her thesis was about - however, has been discredited.

You slammed Debra Soh https://www.researchgate.net/p... because her Thesis was using fMRIs, among other observing tools. Then you claimed that you can prove a salmon has emotion the same way.

However, her thesis actually used a number of different observing tools, of which, fMRIs was only one. One of the others methods she used in her research was diffusion tensor imaging. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... I'm linking it since you seem to be completely unfamiliar with her thesis.

Obviously, using a dead salmon in order to prove that the salmon was emotional, via fMRIs doesn't prove anything.

However, she didn't just use fMRIs, only https://clairelehmann.net/2017...

But, when you are talking about fMRIs, you should at least accurately represent the state of the science.

"Whereas the kind of reverse inference described above is informal, in the sense that it is based on the researcherâ(TM)s knowledge of associations between activation and mental functions, a more recent approach provides the ability to formally test the ability to infer mental states from neuroimaging data. Known variously as multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), multivariate decoding, or pattern-information analysis, this approach uses tools from the field of machine learning to create statistical machines that can accurately decode the mental state that is represented by a particular imaging dataset. In the last ten years, this approach has become very popular in the fMRI literature; for example, in the first 8 months of 2011 there have been more than 50 publications using these methods, versus 41 for the entire period before 2009.

A pioneering example of this approach was the study by Haxby et al. (2001), who showed that it was possible to accurately classify which of several classes of objects a subject was viewing, using a nearest-neighbor approach in which a test dataset was compared to training datasets obtained for each of the classes of interest. Whereas early work using MVPA focused largely on decoding of visual stimulus features, such as object identity (Haxby et al., 2001) or simple visual features (Haynes & Rees, 2005; Kamitani & Tong, 2005), it is now clear that more complex mental states can also be decoded from fMRI data. For example, several studies have shown that future intentions to perform particular tasks can be decoded with reasonable accuracy (Gilbert, 2011; Haynes et al., 2007). These studies show that it is possible to quantitatively estimate the degree to which a pattern of brain activation is predictive of the engagement of a specific mental process, and thus provides a formal means to implement reverse inference. They have also provided evidence that activation in some regions may be less diagnostic than is required (and often assumed) for effective reverse inference. For example, neither the âoefusiform face areaâ nor the âoeparahippocampal place areaâ is particularly diagnostic for the stimulus classes that activate them most strongly (faces or scenes respectively) (Hanson & Halchenko, 2008)."

Despite there, there are some limitations

"Despite the incredible power of these methods to decode mental states from neuroimaging data, some important limits remain. Foremost, decoding methods cannot overcome the fact that neuroimaging data are inherently correlational (cf. Poldrack, 2000), and thus that demonstration of significant decoding does not prove that a region is necessary for the mental function being decoded. Lesion studies and manipulations of brain function using methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) will remain essential for identifying which regions are necessary and which are epiphenomenal. Conversely, a region could be important for a function even if it is not diagnostic of that function

No evidence? Do you even subscribe to scientific journals or just even use Google Scholar?

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.o...

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Both of those coming straight out of Universities. The first link is almost TWENTY FUCKING YEARS OLD.

I mean, it literally takes two seconds to type this shit into Google and find dozens of cited reports, and there are probably HUNDREDS more, many of them done by REAL RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS.

beta testing his shitty half-assed autopilot junk on the buying public

Questions Answer: Yes
(1) Have you ever used Autopilot before? 99 %
(2) Are you familiar with the car warnings that Tesla provides about how Autopilot is to be properly used? 98 %
(3) Are you aware that when you first enable the Autopilot, you have to do so through the Drivers Assistance section of Settings on
the center screen? 93 %
(4) Are you aware / Do you know that after enabling Autopilot, you had to agree to an acknowledgment box which stated that
Autopilot “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times” and that “similar to the
autopilot function in airplanes, you need to maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while using Autopilot? 99 %
(5) Do you know that each time you activate Autopilot, a message appeares on the screen behind the steering wheel stating:
“Please Keep Your Hands On The Wheel; Be Prepared To Take Over At Any Time“? 96 %
(6) Based on these communications, have you understood that when using Autopilot, the driver is expected to maintain control of the
vehicle at all times? 98 %
(7) Has the name “Autopilot” caused you to believe that the car is fully autonomous, meaning that it does not require the driver to be
supervising the car? 7 % (No : 93 %)

There was an interesting study done (unrelated to the German owners survey above) which showed that the minor autopilot failures (occasional lane drift, unexpected speed changes) are ironically improving consumer safety. Users were well aware of its ability to make mistakes specifically because they're common enough, and this keeps the vast majority of users from treating the vehicle like a tool you don't have to pay attention to it; instead they tend to treat it more like cruise control. As automation improves, the danger may counterintuitively increase as users get used to never having to do anything when the vehicle is driving and thus stop paying attention.

At the same time, despite the frequency of errors, the overwhelming majority of users felt that its failures presented either no risk, or little risk, as they tend to be things that any reasonable driver could react to (in the same way that we don't fear cruise control because if it's looking like it's going to drive us into the rear of the car ahead of us, we slow down). E.g. autopilot never just suddenly jerks the wheel to hard right in the middle of a road or whatnot. They also get quite used to what situations you use it in and what you don't use it in (just like people do with cruise control); the fact that the system won't let you use it when it perceives its ability to follow the road to be too poor doesn't even need to factor into the equation.

It's more like California, if you removed every large town and every city except for LA. 90% of Sweden's population is in the southern third of the state, and the rest has small community and farms in the northern area, mostly along the coast.

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Even the stock photo.

"Hey, we got an article about math and biology... Hmm... what about this image? Or This? No, what the fuck am I talking about? That's math! Biology isn't math! Biology is slimy and fuzzy, not math! Definitely go with a decades old picture of Ebola using EM which is nearly 100 years old. Yup, definitely, math is useful to biology in that engineers and physicists build toys like electron microscopes for biologists to get slime all over."

For the record, I'm firmly in the category of biologists who do slimy squishy stuff and have computers and engineers do all the mathy stuff for me... but... still man, stereotypes aren't good even if I am that stereotype...

Well expressed. I recently looked into the price of rattlesnake antivenin in the US and was astounded to see it costing up to $10000 per vial. A little searching revealed the cost of production was estimated to be about $14.
Link to an article discussing the costs:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Link to a research paper by the person responsible for creating the antivenin:
https://www.researchgate.net/p...

The first sentence really strikes a chord with me: Our science community still struggles with diversity, equity, and inclusion issues, including systemic bias, harassment, and discrimination among other things.

The thing I notice when I head into my office everyday is the huge imbalance of gender in my colleagues. Almost all of them are white or Asian males, like myself. I think this is a problem which is worth addressing. In a lot of ways, Science (and related TEM) has been the envy of other fields of study for the rapid amount of progress that we've made in the last century. The way that we conduct science, for the most part, produces novel and exciting results that shape the human experience. I don't think that we should change the way we objectively try to reach our goal of better modelling the world around us.

But we're behind fields in other ways. Other fields have made leaps and bounds in workforce diversity that we've really struggled at. Perhaps science isn't best equipped to understand why we've failed to make this jump, but it's troubling that to me, as a scientist,that we're so behind the curve here. I encourage you to take a moment to read through the below comment thread, and you'll get the feeling that there are a bunch of sciencey-folks whose beef with this article whose best argument is that Metcalf's article uses "science" and "people who do science" interchangeably. Yeah, science may be "unbiased" by definition, but Metcalf's point is that we, as people, let our biases in and are changing the way that science is done. The comment thread reads more like an attack on those trying to bring diversity to science than an actual critique of the article-- but maybe I shouldn't have expected any better of slashdot.

There are points of Dr. Metcalf's argument that I disagree with, but I also would never claim to be qualified to assess this article. Equality and the politics of science are something that I think about in my free time-- the author holds a doctorate in these subjects, and I'm sure if I spent an office hour talking to Dr. Metcalf, I would probably be convinced of their argument. This person has seriously thought about these, and granted this is an article for general audiences. Perhaps slashdot would be rather enjoy some of her research? https://www.researchgate.net/p...

  To end with another line that resonates with me from this article:

"Regardless of whether our work is scientific, being objective, then, does not and cannot mean ignoring our biases, assumptions, or background beliefs"

Spoilers don't ruin stories : https://www.researchgate.net/p...

In this study, they made people read classical short stories. Some had an added introduction revealing the plot. They then asked participants to rate how much they enjoyed it. In all cases except one, the "spoiler" group consistently enjoyed it more than the control group, and the remaining case is a close call.
Out of the 12 tested short stories, 4 are of the mystery genre and 4 other are ironic-twist stories, i.e. the kind where you most likely don't want to get spoiled.

The Springer article was paywalled but didn't seem to mention anything about health (or taste).

Here is the link to the free article. As you said, the study doesn't seem to indicate negative effects of soy.

Overall, although the SPI and acid- and alcohol-washed SPC produced from EE meals had lower protein contents than their counterparts from white flakes, certain functional proper-ties, such as emulsification capacity and dispersibility of acid-washed SPC, and emulsification capacity of SPI made from EE meals, were similar to, or higher than, those from white flakes. This indicates that certain soy protein products with good functional properties can be made from protein meals processed by extruding-expelling.

This research was financially supported by Iowa Soybean Promotion Board.

Read this http://link.springer.com/artic... and then say you are jumping for joy at the thought of consuming soy protein isolate and soy protein concentrate, hmm, i can imagine the taste and goodness of the high temperature acid bath. Soy protein isolate not a food any more, just the cheapest possible molecular chain you can get away with calling it food. If there was cheaper worse shit they could get away with calling food, they would. Personally I read that article and it sent a shudder down my spine and made me nauseas to think of some of the crap I have eaten. Here read about your 'food?' for a change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... If you think that shit is healthier than chicken, you are an idiot.

A better (and free download) link for the article which is not behind the pay wall is here.

It doesn't make the research useless. You can find plenty of recent research that any conversation with someone not in the vehicle -- i.e., someone who doesn't know when to shut up when road conditions get interesting -- raises accident risk considerably, whether the phone is hands-free or not. I've seen stats indicating that having kids in a car where the only adult is the driver shows the same tendency, although not the same degree.

You can Google around for the research. Someone earlier on this slashdot thread found this paper, for example. The exact level of risk varies between studies, but all of them are considerable. That's why studies of cell phone use have begun including hands-free use.

Nope. All evidence shows that it is the conversation on the phone that is dangerous.

Citation?

Really? Found this in 3 seconds: https://www.researchgate.net/p...

I found the research paper but alas the list of domains isn't included in the appendix. I'd love to block all of these at the edge of my corporate net.

First of all, trying to untie Koran from the Bible doesn't really work cause it contains the same damn stories and same damn people.
Only real difference being that Jesus is not the son of god but just another prophet.
So that "Islam by one hand" is a crock of shit regardless if that one hand is Allah's or Uthman's as you put it.

Second, saying shit like that "Islam is the work of one man. (Not counting nameless scribes, no one ever credits them.)" is basically proof that you don't know jack shit about Islam.
Or you would have known of hadith.
Which is basically an attempt to expand the Koran after the death of its writer - by compiling quotes attributed to him by various sources.
All of which are specifically and strictly credited because... well... some might choose not to believe some sources.

There are many flavors of Islam. Just like with Judaism or Christianity
Painting it with a generalization-brush of "one Islam by one hand", particularly in today's climate of CLEAR AND OBVIOUS EXAMPLES of Shia-Sunni divisions is beyond ignorant or retarded.

Third turd... Just like the Bible which was not written in modern languages it suffers from transcription and translation errors.
Which compound when most of the text is metaphoric in nature - as is the case with all religious texts.
Saying it is consistent requires more than just belief - it requires blind faith.

Fourth... The Bible is plentiful with DIRECT commands to murder anyone from witches and gays to infidels.
And both Koran and Bible, old testament and new give even more reasons for hate and murder of everyone.

Fifth... Islam is as "compatible with the civilized world" as any ancient religion, cooked up by schizophrenic hermits in a cave, desert or jungle somewhere, edited by lunatics, crooks and child molesters and left "unchanged" for thousands of years.
You know... like all those flavors of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism...

Not that newer religions cooked up by loons and crooks are any better!
Mormonism, Scientology and Moonism are the same kind of shit.
Just with fewer genocides to their name.
So far.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/238594798_fig1_Fig-1-The-number-of-transistors-per-microprocessor-chip-versus and many similar graphs show that Moore's observation of transistor count has been maintained at least through 2011.

Can we please mod submission "troll"? This has to be one of the worst Slashdot stories ever. It's got "social justice warrior" in the damn summary. The original submission is tagged "literallywho", a classic GG troll.

Slashdot got trolled. I was too busy to mod it down in the firehose, but I shouldn't have to. BeauHD should have binned this one, not posted it to the front page. It's click-bait shit for the alt-right.

AmiMoJo, you have the right to submit stories that express your political opinions, such as

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/12/2311244/the-guardian-publishes-comment-abuse-stats-invites-debate-on-moderation

Other Slashdotters also have the right to submit stories that express their opinions, but you appear to be trying to deny them that right. When you say that "BeauHD should have binned this one", you are attempting to influence the Slashdot editors to suppress your political opponents. It is clear that you do not support open discussion or debate on Slashdot. Instead, you are at political war and seek to silence your opponents. You are literally a "social justice warrior".

By the way, your tactic of asking authority figures (in this case, the Slashdot editors) to enforce your politics is a common tactic among social justice warriors. It has been documented in this article:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272408166_Microaggression_and_Moral_Cultures

But the tactic only works if the authority figures are willing to listen.

Whatever the reason, it's a natural behavior. Contemporary documentation of strandings dates back to at least the 16th century. Archaeological evidence suggest a stranding about 12,000 years ago. And the earliest evidence is for a possible mass stranding is about 6-9 million years ago.

So these strandings have been happening for a very, very long time. There is no reason to be disconcerted. Interest in the reasons why should be purely academic until prove to be unnatural. While there has been evidence correlating strandings with man-made activities, per scientific standards the burden of proof is upon those advocating such theories to prove a causal relationship.

SpaceX is based on materials science that doesn't exist and risks payloads as long as they don't have to pay for them, all based on ignoring all contrary evidence. Read to the end of the abstract.

That's your evidence? Posting a link to a paper regarding cracks in solid propellant rocket motors when the Falcon 9 is a solely liquid engine launch vehicle? Seems like you have yet to uncover anything approaching evidence to back your assertion.

SpaceX is based on materials science that doesn't exist and risks payloads as long as they don't have to pay for them, all based on ignoring all contrary evidence. Read to the end of the abstract. Tesla will never be safer than regular cars, and it will never even be as safe as regular cars. It is statistically impossible.

Oh, a cartoon. Strange how this looks nothing like the Vostok or Greenland core data. One could almost imagine it's cherry picked data that's first been massaged by the hairy hands of a fraudster. I'd be careful with that if I were you.

In 1974 a psychiatrist wrote a book on brain shape and personality dysfunctions. Dr Durfee was my psychiatrist. My ears were only a little crooked.

Crooked ears and the bad boy syndrome: Asymmetry as an indicator of minimal brain dysfunction

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Tunnels in an earthquake zone! Brilliant!

Tunnels are actually extremely safe around earthquakes, because they are in/move with the earth,

Imagine the worst-case tunnel scenario, (essentially the only one where any sort of major collapse is possible): A tunnel somehow constructed parallel to & exactly on a faultline, which then shifts by several meters. That sort of shift also levels all but the most high-tech/expensive above-ground civilization (which also probably should not be constructed *exactly* on top of the faultline).

Modern construction is focused on consideration & compensation for the (relatively minor) damage/danger that could (realistically) occur. Even a tunnel built directly on a faultline but perpendicular to it would likely survive with only localized damage to the meters-long area where the catastrophic shift actually occurred. https://www.researchgate.net/p...

It is not in doubt that SQL is a programming language, it has been proved Turing-complete. Not a general purpose programming language, I will grant you. You are dead wrong about Ruby or Eiffel for "anything serious". You are dead wrong about Fortran.

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Looks like a female to me...

The first IPCC report did not downplay anything...

It looks like the projections from the first IPCC report were pretty darn good. Of course, this was published in 2013. A lot has happened since then that may make the projections look a little on the low side.

Link to a scientific paper published last June with a decent set of arguments as to why it is more likely an impact crater than other types of geological formation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273313440_The_Wilkes_Land_Anomaly_revisited

"I" am not using, I'm citing the scientific work.

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

(C, thus K, not F)

Yes, lots of Americans say that they're OK with it. Abused wives often say they're OK with their husbands for years. And what of those opinion poll predictions of a landslide victory for Clinton in the 2016 election?

At the same time, when we actually test people's abilities, the picture looks very different. Only a small minority can effectively look stuff up on the web and find out whether the information is valid and reliable (OECD, 2016), and 25% of university students can't distinguish between meaningless strings of nice sounding expressions generated by an algorithm and actually meaningful sentences (Pennycook, et. al., 2015).

References

OECD. (2016). Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills. Paris: OECD Publishing. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789...

Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. ResearchGate, 10(6), 549–563. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/p...

If AI makes people obsolete, who will those companies peddle their wares to, and obtain income from?

Here's an even better question, given the headline: If CEO's believe AI makes people irrelevant, does that imply AI will make CEOs obsolete too? (Setting aside the obvious quip that "CEO aren't really people.")

Given that there are various studies over the years showing that CEOs don't necessarily provide significant benefits to corporations (e.g., studies have shown that CEO pay does not correlate well with company performance, past CEO performance does not correlate well with future results, etc., to the point that some have wondered if it's mostly random chance whether a given CEO succeeds -- studies that attempt to quantify the chance component vs. the skill component in CEO performance seem to indicate the CEO's performance is only a few percent out of the total factors) -- then isn't that an argument for putting an AI in the CEO chair??

After all, even a lowly janitor can clearly point to clean floors at the end of the day to prove his worth to a company. CEOs seem to lead to mediocre performance or even declines about as often as they lead to successes, and those ups and downs are pretty unstable over the course of a career. (And if you get one "down" that's just too much, they give you the golden parachute, and it's off to the speaking circuit.)

By the way, I'm not at all questioning the fact that many CEOs are smart people or whatever. I'm saying that markets are volatile, and CEOs who are determining a future course are navigating uncertain "waters," just like stock pickers and fund managers -- another group who has been shown, overall, to rarely exceed chance in terms of success as a collective group (or over long enough periods of time). If anything, the critical function of a CEO is to provide "leadership" by making it look like there's a steady, clear course... but whether that course needs to be determined by somebody with a seven-figure salary vs. an AI vs. a magic 8 ball... I'm not so sure.

Safety analysis of natural gas vehicles transiting highway tunnel - June 1989

A safety analysis was performed to assess the relative hazard of compressed natural gas (CNG) fueled vehicles traveling on various tunnels and bridges in New York City. The study considered those hazards arising from the release of fuel from CNG vehicles ranging in size from a passenger sedan to a full size 53 passenger bus. The approach used was to compare the fuel hazard of CNG vehicles to the fuel hazard of gasoline vehicles. The risk was assessed by estimating the frequency of occurrence and the severity of the hazard. The methodology was a combination of analyzing accident data, performing a diffusion analysis of the gas released in the tunnel and determining the consequences of ignition. Diffusion analysis was performed using the TEMPEST code for various accident scenarios resulting in CNG release inside the Holland Tunnel. The study concluded that the overall hazard of CNG vehicles transiting a ventilated tunnel is less than the hazard from a comparable gasoline fueled vehicle. 134 refs., 23 figs., 24 tabs.

The thing with natural gas is it's *very* picky about stoichiometric ratio. Too much or too little air and nothing happens.

The danger with LNG is the cryotemps before the 'natural gas' and the danger with CNG is the compressed cylinder more than the natural gas. Both can easily be mitigated.

Actually, combining both was done already twenty years ago, but obviously the results would be much better now: https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Very odd that this story comes out now, as I just read study about CO2 and fossil fuel emissions that concluded there is no correlation between emission and CO2 concentration. Here's a link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... I'm not a statistician, so I can't attest to it's accuracy or validity, but it was an interesting read.

It's not a study, but just an analysis. And it is neither peer-reviewed nor properly published, but just uploaded to the Social Science Research Network - think arXiv, but without any pedigree for natural sciences. The author is an Emeritus - and was a professor of Business Administration (!). Google Scholar shows an h-index of 6, with a153 citations in total. But nearly all the publications are on SSRN or equivalent, and nearly all the citations are self-citations - indeed. ResearchGate computes the h-index without self citations as 1. These are not numbers your average research assistant would be happy about.

I'm not a statistician, either, but I can see at least one obvious problem (apart from data quality): He uses CO2 measurements from a single source, Mauna Loa, and works on an annual time scale. But CO2 does not magically spread around the world - it takes about a year until a pulse has reasonably mixed world-wide. Also, of course, human emissions are only a small part of the total flow of CO2 (although significant because they only go one way). So the signal he is looking for is quite small.

We have several ways to know that atmospheric CO2 increase is largely anthropogenic. The easiest is simple accounting. We know that the increase in atmospheric CO2 corresponds to about half of our emissions (much of the rest is currently absorbed by the oceans). If the cause of the increase is not our emissions, then a) they need to magically vanish somewhere and b) an equivalent amount has to magically appear from somewhere. Oh, and the new magic source has to magically match the isotope ratio of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion.

Making linguistic arguments only side steps the reality that work is identity to a large and likely the largest segment of humanity. https://www.researchgate.net/p...

And considering how much information is out there about how money affects people's behavior and rationality, I think my case is strong.

http://www.livescience.com/112...

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

http://nymag.com/news/features...

No, I'm refusing to take the bait you're trying to use to change the subject, as a way to distract from the fact she only avoided indictment because of political support from the administration.

Nope, you're refusing to address a serious problem, and making a tedious excuse for your refusal to do the right thing. Yet it was a subject you brought up.

Why do you lack the courage to denounce an actually abusive system, so badly that you immediately start to retract your support for your own statement?

Did you not realize someone would notice what you said, and support you? Are you afraid that you'll be subject to criticism for taking on a sacred cow?

Regardless, not a SINGLE person in the US military is there but for having volunteered to be there.

Indeed, the rich and privileged have managed to end conscription, leaving themselves free to benefit, without risk of paying the price. And there are still concerns about lying recruiters, and even targeting of the impoversished for recruitment.. Recent editorial on conscription. Which is why there are severe questions about the prosecution of individuals in the military, since it is not representative of the public, which leads to abuse, since nobody cares about them.

And then there's Trump's proposals.

So needless to say, these are some serious issues, and you should treat them with a modicum of consideration, not attempt to ignore them.

The UCMJ is publicly available to read before you decide to start taking a paycheck and benefits from the DoJ, and nobody - NOBODY - is even a little bit foggy on whether or not being in uniform and carrying around weed are compatible. Anyone in uniform who's too dumb to know that should be in the brig just for being that dumb.

Which would be one thing except For all the shit it has lead to happening. I'd rather they smoke weed than commit suicide to be honest.

It's ok, you can continue to stick your head in the sand and ignore the problem. You can do that. Totally.

You shouldn't. But you can.

Both military and civilian government employees who work with the clearances to handle classified material are subject to the same rules.

Nope, different rules and protocols. Was true even when it was Francis Gary Powers, who absolutely was not working for the DOD, absolutely not. And of course, there are severe problems with that system, as came up in a story the other day.

And then there was the story about misuse of databases by individuals engaging in personal affairs. Which is another problem that gets ignored.

Any involvement of the military in Hillary Clinton's prosecution would violate the Posse Comitatus Act.

Whew! It's a good thing you made that counterpoint to an argument nobody is having with you.

You're the one bringing it up, when it's meaningless what would be done under the UCMJ to someone who isn't subject to it anyway. Now something meaningful is the treatment of individuals to injustice under the UCMJ. You brought that up, but the swerved away from it.

It's a hot-potato, I'll grant you, but if you're brave, you can handle it. Right?

The trigger to save food to body fat is high insulin. Conversely, the trigger to release body fat for energy is low levels of insulin. https://www.researchgate.net/f... If you graze throughout the day, insulin will be constantly elevated, inhibiting fat release from storage. This is especially true if you graze on carbs.

'A trained observer' - well - perhaps.
There is a truly massive difference between casual observations of physicians who have had no specific experience of a disease, and ones who deal with it daily.
For many conditions, general practitioners do not have much greater 'feel' for if you have something than the general public.

Quoting from https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
" Two parkinsons patients were under the care of each GP.
Only 33 percent of GPs were aware of atypical features in early parkinsons disease.
    If the early atypical feature was one that may occur in late-stage PD, the GPs' awareness was even lower at 19 percent.
32 percent of GPs were unable to provide any alternative diagnosis to parkinsonism.
This survey suggests a poor level of awareness among Singapore GPs on the identification and presence of alternative parkinsonian conditions."

(25% of patients with 'parkinsons' may in fact have other, treatable conditions.)
If your average GP has 2 patients with a condition, they may know very, very little about it other than the briefest outline.

You're claiming that GPs don't have a greater "feel" for symptoms and can't make a better casual observation than a random person.

You're using some researchgate.net article as support for your claim, yet you're quoting shit relating to ATYPICAL indicators. The topic we're discussing is the TYPICAL indicators that HRC seemingly presents.

The AC post you responded to doesn't deal with ATYPICAL indicators, it merely points out that yes, doctors and other practitioners have a better eye for this sort of thing and can and do make valuable assessments on mere casual observation.

'A trained observer' - well - perhaps.
There is a truly massive difference between casual observations of physicians who have had no specific experience of a disease, and ones who deal with it daily.
For many conditions, general practitioners do not have much greater 'feel' for if you have something than the general public.

Quoting from https://www.researchgate.net/p...
" Two parkinsons patients were under the care of each GP.
Only 33 percent of GPs were aware of atypical features in early parkinsons disease.
  If the early atypical feature was one that may occur in late-stage PD, the GPs' awareness was even lower at 19 percent.
32 percent of GPs were unable to provide any alternative diagnosis to parkinsonism.
This survey suggests a poor level of awareness among Singapore GPs on the identification and presence of alternative parkinsonian conditions."

(25% of patients with 'parkinsons' may in fact have other, treatable conditions.)
If your average GP has 2 patients with a condition, they may know very, very little about it other than the briefest outline.

Here's a free link to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Well, one way to reply to a post calling out confirmation bias ... is to double down on the confirmation bias. Apparently I get to represent all liberals now (or at least the ones you don't like, with that bit of no-true-scotsman mixed in under cover of "I didn't mean everybody").

Let's get back to your original claim, which can be distilled to 'liberals conform more than conservatives'. A few minutes of googling turned up no shortage of studies which appear to have reached the exact opposite conclusion. Here are a few studies and some related articles:
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://link.springer.com/artic...
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu...
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.psychologicalscienc...

Exactly. It's like creating antibiotic resistant probiotics and finding out that this resistance can transfer to everything else given enough time.

But what concerns me is the massive amounts of Roundup that is sprayed on the food, even if they say it completely degrades, etc. A recent paper suggest that it's not the glyphosate that's bad, it's some of the co-formulants in there they're not voluntarily revealing (trade secret, even though it's in our foodchain).

There is the law of energy conversion, perhaps you missed that in school. It was even added in a slight variation to the hand full of laws of thermodynamics later: "the sum of all energies in a closed system is constant." (loosely worded)

That is perfectly correct in physics but also utterly useless in engineering. Low-grade waste heat is generally disregarded as useful energy even though it's a part of that constant sum.

Perhaps you should google for the laws of thermodynamics and you realize: they handle a triple of volume, pressure and temperature.

I don't need to google anything to see that you've been confused by the ideal gas laws here. That's not what I was talking about.

If you don't believe it: read the laws up and find a formula that affects a wind mill ...

Easy. Also, the well-known four laws of thermodynamics do affect wind mills...simply because they affect everything! (Two of them, admittedly, are of little importance here, though.)

This study was not peer reviewed, and it appears to me that it has problems that would make it unpublishable. The methods section of the report describes data collection in a way that makes it clear that instructions for taking accurate heart rate readings in the Fitbit manual were purposefully ignored. These instructions describe stopping, staying still for a few seconds, and then taking a reading. This paragraph is just above the paragraph containing dominant and non-dominant wrist instructions which the report methods do pay particular attention to, so it could not have been missed. The description of data collection makes it clear that stopping and staying still was never part of the protocol since data was collected continuously during active exercise. The methodology used by Fitbit and all other wrist devices using light will never be accurate under these circumstances. The device is measuring the very small motions of blood vessels under the skin. If the device itself is moving, these measurements are disrupted. The scientists performing the study must have known this, so it is difficult to understand why there was at least no discussion of the Fitbit manual instructions and why they were dismissed in the text of the report. A reviewer, like me, would reject a paper with an omission like this. I performed my own series of scientific tests of the Blaze accuracy in March. Wearing both my chest band and my Fitbit for a week of 4 mile runs, and following the instructions, l found a difference of 2 beats per minute (bpm) with a standard deviation of 3.2 bpm at 95% of my maximum heart rate. I can understand consumers not reading the manual, initially, but eventually they should. A scientist performing a study, on the other hand... https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Use Dirac notation as extended for big data by Robson in "The New Physician as Unwitting Quantum Mechanic: Is Adapting Dirac’s Inference System Best Practice for Personalized Medicine, Genomics, and Proteomics".

This "notation" actually emphasizes certain primitive operations that can define the "machine language". Syntactic sugars should be used for parsimony, as well as and pragmas for efficient semantic heuristics are appropriate layers atop the primitives.

This is a huge shortcut. It is actually very difficult to simulate quantum phenomena on a computer. You can read this highly cited paper. Also interesting is this commentary.

Apart from that being the only report that makes the claim "porn access reduces rape,"

I'm trying to stick with things that are reasonably open access.

Ferguson, Christopher J., and Richard D. Hartley. "The pleasure is momentary the expense damnable?: The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault." Aggression and violent behavior 14.5 (2009): 323-329.

PDF at http://christopherjferguson.co...

Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse
relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested
similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic
effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the
scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to
increased sexual assault behavior.

Fisher, William A., et al. "Pornography, sex crime, and paraphilia." Current psychiatry reports 15.6 (2013): 1-8.

PDF at https://www.researchgate.net/p...

On page 362, they have a chart showing that from 1995 to 2011, rates of forcible rape went from 37.1 per 100,000 to 26.6.

While we would not go as far as Ferguson and Hartley, it
does seem to us that in the context of very widespread and
unfettered access to essentially all types of sexually explicit
materials, rates of sex crime, indexed in a variety of ways,
have not increased and may have decreased

There are other studies that show a similar trend.

A joke? Afraid not. This is representative of the quality of "research" feminists do.
Kind of telling that it's impossible to determine if it's a joke or not don't you think?

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

I hope you're right, but SCOTUS says money is speech and people are still compelled to pay money.

The issue of compelled speech is not completely settled either. The courts have ruled both that it can be and that it can't be depending on circumstances.

http://www.firstamendmentcente...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://www.researchgate.net/p...