Slashdot Mirror

Also, to reply to myself, an interesting point about this journal is that it makes public the reviewers' notes preceding publication. Here they are: https://royalsocietypublishing... You'll see that an anonymous reviewer raised significant doubts about the scientific veracity of the paper as well as its general utility. After a revision, the reviewer made a grudging acceptance of the paper with the comment, "I remain sceptical about the usefulness of this approach... Perhaps it will start a further debate!" Which sounds a lot to me like they thought it was bullshit but didn't want to argue about it anymore.

He has been proposing this for quite a while.

The Scientific American article (published on October 21, 2009) has more details in a popularized format. Anyone who is actually interested in the techinical details, Salter et al. published their ideas here https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2008.0136 (DOI 10.1098/rsta.2008.0136).

Back then he thought 1500 ships would be needed. Now it is down to 300. Now, if this was based on extensive real-world testing, that would be impressive. As it is, it looks more like the pattern of increasingly wild claims made by "alternative med" purveyors.

I do not by any means think Salter is disingenuous! I think he is just very frustrated at the lack of support & trying to modify his plan until someone, anyone, is willing to finance a test ship.

You know that famous painting, "The Scream"? Can you guess why the sky is orange? It's because of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption. Here are more paintings from that time". We might end up with an orange-tinted atmosphere, and the constant "sulfur" smell everywhere. Their idea is that injecting SO2 will chemically convert into SO4. It will also convert into H2SO4, more commonly known as "acid rain". It can also cause ozone depletion, which is one of the reasons it "can't stop" if we start.

It's an apocalyptic idea, and has an insane amount of unmitigated risks. It's an "end-game strategy" that will irreversibly alter our entire planet, and will be the ultimate Anthropocene Epoch event; this will be our Chicxulub.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

The study is invalid. The participants are recruited from Mechanical Turk. Just how many rich and successful people are looking for work on there?

Moreover, the effect seems to be much stronger for those with some college than a bachelors. Which the authors didn't address at all.

Not to mention the ridiculous definition of "wise".

That was 30 years ago, and it is still true today. Optics are the only thing that matters.

Have you taken a good look at optics lately?

New optical fibres for high-capacity optical communications — 2016

That's enough bandwidth growth to support a personal productivity panopticon, where everything you do is summarized and assessed by Santa's little HR elves.

But I get it. You've wedged a wooden shoe into your PPP link, and the pan-optical future has not yet arrived at your particular below C-level employment backwater.

Dutch proverb: a swelling ocean which does not go through the dike will ultimately go over the dike—in one giant Nike offshoring swoosh.

Social complexity seems to be a driver for intelligence. Hyena society is quite complex with clans and a dominance hierarchy within each clan. Hyenas seem to have theory of mind and seem to practice tactical deception. Hyenas are also good cooperative problem solvers, outperforming primates.

There might be a clue in that in both species grandmothers play an important role in caring for and training their son's children.

Actually, human grandmothers help with their daughter's children. Not so much with their son's children.

Several studies, including this one, have found that when the maternal grandmother is part of the household, children grow faster and are more likely to survive. Paternal grandmothers confer far less benefit, and may actually be detrimental.

Orcas live in matrilineal pods, and grandmothers generally have no role in rearing their sons' offspring.

Disclaimer: My wife's mother lives with us, and my kids are doing fine. So there you go.

I remember a very similar study comparing trial and error strategies and analytical strategies in video games. The former was also associated with a decrease of grey matter in the hippocampus if I remember correctly. I found it: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royprsb/282/1808/20142952.full.pdf and big surprise it shares an author (Gregory L. West).

This original study is here.

The study presents an accurate description of how research is funded in the US (biomedical sciences in particular). I can't speak in detail about other countries, but the major issues seem to be the same in other developed nations.

The problem is how do you decide which study to fund. You have 100 scientist asking for money but you can fund only 10 of them. So you must come with some criteria that will allow you to decide which studies are worth pursuing and of these which ones have staff that is capable of completing the work they are proposing. National Institutes of Health (NIH) scores grants on five criteria:

1. 1. Significance - if the proposed research pans out how significant will its impact be
2. 2. Innovation - are unexplored areas and ground breaking theories being investigated, are new tools and methods being developed, etc
3. 3. Investigators - if a new investigator is applying, how well has he/she been trained in the past. If an established investigators is applying what matters most is his past contributions (the euphemism being used is "productivity")
4. 4. Approach - the reviewers evaluate how well designed the research approach is. Will it produce the desired results, does it account for all factors that may influence the results, are all necessary controls included, etc.
5. 5. Environment - is all the necessary equipment and facilities available; are there any other factors that may help the research, like intellectual environment, diversity of experts at the site that can be engaged, etc.

This is like relatively objective way to score. Yes, evaluating the significance, environment and particularly the investigators may get a bit subjective. Keep in mind that each application is discussed by a panel of experts, so individual biases tend to get evened out (group biases are reinforced). The downsides wouldn't matter much if the competition to get the funded wasn't not so fierce and the penalty for not getting funded wasn't as bad as it is. And this is where academic institutions with the help of NIH have created really perverse incentives. First, NIH has decided that they will fund any amount of salary for the investigators and on top of that will provide overhead to the institution. The overhead is money that are not directly required for research and are payed to the institution to support management and facilities. The overhead typically equals 50% to 100% of the direct research costs. A standard 5 year R01 grant with modular budget ($250,000 per year) brings income of $125,000 to $250,000 per year to the institution. If you are university you look at that and think of it as a great deal - you don't have to pay the investigators full (or any) salary, NIH will cover that, and then you get payed when they get funded. Now there is the small problem with tenure. You can't just fire a tenured professor because they can't get NIH funds. So you make getting NIH funds requirement for giving tenure. For tenured faculty you put pressure on them to leave: cut their salary (in many cases down to 25% of what it was), and take away lab space and access to research facilities.

In case you don't see where all this is going, here it is how it looks like from the perspective of a "young" scientist. You have just endured 5-7 years of miserably payed PhD training, another 3-7 years of post-doc with higher but still crappy salary. During this time you probably worked 10-12 hours a day often on weekends (those of you that had to time mouse pregnancies by coming to the lab at 1am to look at their asses, I salute you!). Now you have finally reached the holy grail and you have an academic position on which you can actually support a family. Except, there is a catch. You have 5 years to put together a research team on a limited budget, make "significant" discoveries that you publish, and as a result of that obtain external funding. If you don't do that you get kicke

Fun fact, the inventor of direct trans-cranial stimulation was in the same cybernetics club as Alan Turing at Cambridge.

Reportedly the first applications were only by devotees as it hurt like a ... and one hapless subject (also a researcher) fainted! The experimenters were dismayed as when the subject fell over he threatened to pull the lab apparatus with him, and that could have broken it as it was experimental, i.e. a hodgepodge of thrown together bits; not "patient proof". They went for the gear to stop it from hitting the floor, letting their friend take the fall instead! (Us fellow geeks could surely relate...)

It fell by the wayside as magnetic stimulation was invented, so it's interesting to see it come to the fore again.

New paper, that says fires decreasing last decades, much less 100s years rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/16... Love the title: "...perceptions versus realities in a changing world" [Les Johnson, 2016-06-11]

Again, as I pointed out, land clearing fires decreased (among other factors involving direct human intervention). From that new paper:

"... During the first half century, the global average area burned decreased somewhat by about 7% [41]. This was largely attributed to human factors, such as increased fire prevention, detection and fire-fighting efficiency, abandonment of slash-and-burn cultivation in some areas and permanent agricultural practice in others. ..."

That's why I objected when Tom Nelson and Lonny Eachus and "Steven Goddard" accused scientists of fraud and dishonesty based on a graph that compares apples and oranges by grafting old data which includes intentional burns onto newer data that excludes intentional burns. Short 2015 explains why their accusations are wrong:

"... Intentional ('controlled') burning was used extensively for vegetation management on nonfederal lands, especially in the south-eastern US during the early 20th century. Although now used to a lesser extent (but on both federal and non-federal lands) in the US, intentional burning is not classified in the current reporting systems as 'wildfire' unless the controlled burn escapes and requires a suppression response. However, the early USFS wildfire activity summaries do include millions of hectares of intentional burning on 'unprotected' lands, which, until approximately the mid-20th century was viewed by the USFS as akin to wildfire, as something that should be prevented and ultimately eradicated (Pyne 1982). Controlled burning was accepted as a viable landmanagement practice over time and persists to this day (Melvin 2012); however, statistics regarding its use have not been included in summaries of 'wildfire' activity for several decades. ..."

That's exactly what I told you earlier, and it answers your repeated question about intentional burns in the USA. So when you claimed a "massive decline" in fires, what you really meant is that the older USFS data included intentional burns, but more recent statistics don't include intentional burns.

There's really no need to imply that mainstream scientists don't understand that direct human intervention is currently a bigger factor than climate change. That is, in fact, exactly what Pechony and Shindell 2010 Fig. 2A shows. The gray line (fires without direct human intervention) projects an "impending shift to a temperature-driven global fire regime in the 21st century, creating an unprecedentedly fire-prone environment. These results suggest a possibility that in the future climate will play a considerably stronger role in driving global fire trends, outweighing direct human influence on fire (both ignition and suppression), a reversal from the situation during the last two centuries."

In fact, three years ago I quoted the same paper

This was proved in 1859. http://rspl.royalsocietypublis...

let's see something using the scientific method that shows us that this is real

Try this from 1859: "Note on the transmission of radiant heat through gaseous bodies" by John Tyndall - http://rspl.royalsocietypublis...

- Antarctic ice is growing: (shrug) we really don't have any idea why this is happening I guess we'll just have to figure it out (shrug, again)

Actually, we do have an idea. Warming temperatures is causing LAND ice to melt, decreasing salinity of the antarctic ocean. As I'm sure you know, we use salt on roads to melt ice because salt lowers the freezing point of water. Therefore if there is less salt in the water it will freeze at a higher temperature, hence more sea ice

http://rsta.royalsocietypublis...

I DID NOT POST THAT LINK. my words were stolen to promote a poorly written substitute to the story that i quoted and that i intended to share. if the plagiarist wanted to promote a different story, then that person should never have used MY NAME nor MY WORDS to do so. this bait-and-switch plagiarism should not be allowed to stand on this, or any, reputable site.

Your words and your submission were used to promote a discussion (reading the linked article has always been somewhat optional). Speaking of linked articles, it is extremely disingenuous of you to write "A recently published study reveals that climate change can cause birds' eggs to hatch early " while linking to a puff piece written by you and not to the actual study (as I just did).

That aside, I agree, it was wrong of the editor(s) to substitute the link you gave them with an alternative, especially without, at the very least, including an editor's comment to such an effect, and including your original link. While I can understand their logic / thought processes - new owners, wanting to make positive changes to slashdot, taking into account their audiences' preferences, and considering Forbes' less than stellar reputation here - it was a heavy handed 'fix', and unfair on you.

FYI: here's the link to the story that i shared ... i am sure you'll agree that the piece i shared is far superior ...

Containing such gems as ""It’s hard to think about 40 C [104F] when it is 2 C [35.6F] here in Milwaukee, but after doing the conversions I was starting to sweat thinking about those poor birds”, said ornithologist Peter Dunn," your surety is somewhat misplaced. About the best I can say is that your article was longer

Posting anon I'm afraid so as not to undo some moderation.

Or you could go actually read the original paper to see if you could detect any confirmation bias. I did and it's not that hard to read if you have a little biology literacy.

Fine. You tell me why the birds are hatching early and then starving to death from a lack of insects, in historically unprecedented ways. Your theory should provide evidence of comparable quality to that in this paper: http://rsos.royalsocietypublis.... It will not be sufficient for you to say "a kid stomped on all the bugs" or something like that.

It's not like they pulled this answer out of their asses. They presented actual evidence, whereas you are countering that by saying "well OF COURSE you'd say that, regardless of the evidence".

It's well-supported by anatomy, physiology, and genetic studies, but okay. Here are some examples of speciation in plants and other insects, with more references. I do still encourage you to look at this site.

The paper is here but it is probably paywalled. (I have institutional access, so I'm not sure what that link will do to people who don't.)

This is part of an ongoing debate about rates of evolution. To a large extent it was kicked off by a 2005 paper by Simon Ho et al. (Ho is second author on this paper.) They observed that estimates of mutation rates derived from studies over short time periods are much higher than mutation rates derived from studies over long time periods. Short time periods are up to a few thousand years, e.g. comparing populations that have been separated by for a few thousand years, or ancient DNA compared to modern DNA in the same species, or multigenerational studies over a few years or decades such as this one. Long time periods are from comparing species whose common ancestor is typically millions of years ago.

This apparent acceleration in mutation rates is controversial.

I'm going to read the paper now, so I may have more to say later.

I grant that the analogy is far from perfect and depends on many probably-flawed assumptions. While I wasn't suggesting that the only alternative was to halt everything, I think about this subject in the context of "which approach is most likely to yield a virtual human brain soonest". Looking at [what I call] the brute-force approach of understanding how neurons work, understanding how neurons are interconnected, and simulating them, it seems like this ought to be possible in a few decades, maybe even in a century, with only incremental progress and no expectation of revolutionary discovery. Looking at the "let's understand what 'intelligence' really is before we go trying to simulate it" approach, how do you even form an estimate? Inherently, this approach does rely on some revolutionary discovery being made. Perhaps it's just me being a pessimist, but I don't believe we'll ever have an answer for that (forever is a long time, but I say "we" meaning humans-as-they-exist-today), let alone within the next century. While I don't dismiss the value of seeking to gain a fundamental understanding of intelligence, I don't think the goal itself is attainable -- how can we hope to understand something that is many orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've managed to understand before?

But C. Elegans? with only 300 neurons, 7000 synapses? That's old news (though still not quite "complete" in some sense). Though we don't yet have a complete connectome for D melanogaster (it's in the works [sorry for the shitty citation]) nor a complete model for its neurons, but simulation work on its 100000 node CNS is underway regardless. Obviously we won't see virtual flies until this connectome is fully diagrammed and more experimental data about the neurons is available and computers get a bit faster, so indeed it is true that it is too soon to expect these projects to be fully completed. Probably much too soon. But that doesn't mean it's too soon to start, and $0.5B is peanuts when you consider how much a truly successful simulation project is likely to cost.

It's not just the compute power that's a serious limiting factor, but also the availability of imaging technology that would enable us to develop a complete connectome for the brains we seek to simulate. The most immediate hurdle for projects like these isn't our lack of fundamental understanding (although to say that such understanding "would help" would be a huge understatement), it's the combination of insufficient computing resources (though if past trends continue, this won't be an issue for long) combined with insufficient knowledge of the brain's structure (which can be remedied by continuing to advance the state of medical imaging technology, and dfMRI seems very promising recently). Getting more experimental data to develop accurate neuron models for various animals is simply labor-intensive and not really waiting on anything except more funding. However, these are well-defined engineering or funding problems, and steady incremental progress is being made on all of these fronts. I expected this infusion of $0.5B to simply help that along.

We have the technology to invasively/destructively map brains and develop accurate neuronal models today. We have the technology to simulate interconnected neurons today. Progress will continue, but only at the rate at which we fund improvements in these underlying technologies as well as projects that seek to pull together these technologies to shoot for ambitious brain simulations. While I don't doubt that there are other worthy causes to spend this money on (even within neuroscience), I think it's still unfortunate if this particular approach doesn't get the green light because of the actions of one seemingly power-hungry individual.

The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't.

Yeah, the thing is -- the actual study doesn't make any claims about anything being "universal." The only person who used the word "universal" was in the news story linked in TFS, and that person quoted in the news story was "not involved in the study."

In sum, the authors of this study don't make ANY claims that this is uncovering some sort of "universal code."

(Which, I might note, you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary.)

Instead, the authors' conclusion is much more subtle and intended to take a "middle ground" approach beyond the two extreme positions in language formation. One extremist position (a kind of Platonic Chomskian ideal) is that meaning is universal and ultimately derived from sort of inherent connection between word and object. The other extremist position (classically associated with Saussure) is that the connection between word and object is completely arbitrary, i.e., that we can choose any name for any concept and it would all work just as well. It's hard to believe, but there are actually plenty of linguists who subscribe to something close to this latter view.

Anyhow, if you truly believe connections between words and meanings are arbitrary (in technical language, the "sign is arbitrary," that is, the connection between signifier and signified is completely determined by linguistic convention), then you run into historical problems concerning the origin of language. You make up weird myths where people went around grunting and pointing and only able to use body language for a while. But then some hominid would vocalize an arbitrary sound and point, resulting in the "arbitrary" connection between sound and meaning.

While this undoubtedly happens, I think anyone with any common sense realizes that actual language conveys a lot of subtle meaning by the SOUND of words, some of which may actually echo the sound of an actual thing, and some of which may be much more subtle, with certain phonemes (e.g., "sn" in English often equals something stealthy or something having to do with the nose), word length, etc. conveying a very general sense of meaning.

Anyhow, that's where this study comes in. The authors (who actually did more than the "charades" study which was clearly uncontrolled; read the link above) try to make a claim that meaning can be conveyed by fairly non-specific verbal cues. That means that the "sign is NOT arbitrary" requiring bootstrapping by having the hominid point at things and grunt first, but rather than language and gestural meaning can develop concurrently, with the expressiveness of possible verbal utterances (shaping the tone of a word, length of a word, etc.) able to carry associations.

In basic terms, what they're saying is quite simple: basic sounds can convey meaning, and thus it's possible to create novel meanings in new words due to associations of those sounds. This may seem to be a really obvious thing, but to people in linguistics who are wed to the "arbitrary sign" theory, it's important research. The study itself summarizes what I've said at the end:

Given the traditional linguistic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, many scholars have maintained that, in these systems, the vocal channel primarily functions to carry the arbitrary linguistic components of a message, while the visible gestural channel conveys the iconic, non-linguistic components. Stemming from this idea, some have proposed that spoken languages must have originated as iconically grounded systems of manual and other visible bodily gestures, and at some point in human history, arbitrary vocalizations w

There's a study of oysters. down 88%. A model claiming cod biomass is down 96%

Maybe I'm too tired at the moment, but what does this article have to do with scientific conservatism?

With the advent and uptake of appropriate methodologies, ancient DNA is now positioned to become a powerful tool in biological research and is also evolving new and unexpected uses, such as in the search for extinct or extant life in the deep biosphere and on other planets.

Some real science has been done on DNA data storage as relates to evidence of panspermia. The theory goes that if intelligent life deliberately seeded the universe it may have used DNA or RNA sequences that could be decoded into a message. So far science's tendency toward conservatism has prevented anyone from coming out and saying it but I think available evidence is more than sufficient reason for optimism and intense study.

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

I see his citation and raise you these:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

By the way, implying 1% rabies infection rate is not a concern is ludicrous, as it's plenty to prevent eradication of a infection with human mortality rates, when undiscovered before symptoms, only rivaled by prion disease.

If you use p=0.05 to suggest that you have made a discovery, you will be wrong at least 30% of the time. If, as is often the case, experiments are underpowered, you will be wrong most of the time.

And given the low power of most psychology experiments I am not surprised by this result.

Hey, you know what didn't cause the Pliocene extinction event? High global temperatures. Know what hasn't caused any extinction event in the history of the world? High global temperatures.

You know what you are? Wrong. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1630/47.full / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum

I wouldn't be so sure... http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

http://www.pnas.org/content/99...

http://journals.plos.org/plosb...

http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

http://www.esajournals.org/doi...

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

Science is not a debate club

Yes, yes it is. Just because it deals in empirical facts, rather than philosophy, doesn't mean there's no debate. Why do you think so many journals are called (examples hyperlinked) "Transactions on/of...", "Discussions on/of" and such?

My point was all about what happens when the mosquitos are not as infertile as planned.

If some offspring survive that means that they didn't get the gene to kill them for some reason. Aka, they're just like wild populations. So.....?

If chemical companies are going to dump something into my backyard, I will scream and shout just as loud

Your back yard is full of the intentional products of chemical companies. Here we're talking about the intentional products of genetic engineering. You're trying to change the situation by comparing waste products with intentional products.

You seem to claim that people should just trust experts. I claim that experts should attempt to inform the public better, thereby earning their trust...

Sorry, but Joe Blow GED is never going to become an expert on genetic engineering. Ever. Period. And the same goes for the vast majority of the public.

So, rabbits that got released in Australia are the top predator? The Pampas grass in California is the top predator? I can make a long list of invasive species that are not the top predator and still influenced their ecosystem a lot

.

Got any examples that aren't introduced species? We're talking about reducing or eliminating species within an ecosystem, not adding new ones from totally different ecosystem. And part of the reason rabbits were so uncontrolled in Australia anyway was because settlers had killed off almost all of the top predators. One could easily imagine that, for example, tasmanian tigers would have quite enjoyed a rabbit feast. Dingo numbers were also shaply culled in the areas with the highest rabbit populations.

I didn't provide evidence because your statement was contrary to mine. I said decreasing populations lead to loss in technology. Which is supported by this article and the many referenced within it:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

You asked "What knowledge and technology has been lost as a result of regression effects from population growth?" of which I have no supporting evidence. That's why I assumed you misread my initial comment and also provided no citation.

You did, however, catch me in a logical fallacy. I should have stated above the minimum threshold of a sustainable population in where there is no loss of important technical knowledge from generation to generation, the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole for each person added. More to your liking?

... I'm hard pressed to believe that there is an advantage for colorblindness that would have been selected for in the earliest mammals.

There didn't have to be an advantage for partial colorblindness (they were never totally colorblind), there just doesn't have to be any penalty for the trait to be lost. Same with the inability of some mammals to synthesize vitamin C, no particular advantage to losing it, but with a vitamin C rich diet there was no penalty either and so it could get lost over time. Color vision only works in bright light. Mammals spent a lot of their early evolutionary history as nocturnal creatures, and so could lose this trait without penalty. In fact it appears there were multiple function S cone loss events in the mammalian line, not just one (genomics gives us powerful insights into this today). The article does point out though that "the fact that these gene mutations have spread throughout the populations allows the possibility that the loss of S cones may in some way enhance visual fitness". It is entirely possible that processing of images in dim light could be better optimized through evolution with the loss of the unneeded bright-light color vision baggage.

apples and oranges my friend, apples and oranges. your comparing mass scale systems, vs small scale systems.

Enviromental damage does happen from one coal burning stove, but millions.

Special Exceptions for Special Cases, and Edge uses that can't be properly addressed, but they are so small in scope they don't make a diffrence.

Even millions of stoves are nothing, compared to this: http://rsta.royalsocietypublis...

I knew someone would ask. All the sources I do have have links that are now broken to the studies(STOP REDESIGNING YOUR WEBSITES, YOU JERKS). Which is annoying.

I've tried searching google scholar on the various things I'm certain the study's properties: they measured galvanic skin response, eye movement, and used control groups with no threatening images, and evolutionary fears for the test group(spiders, snakes, large predators).

But the best I can do for an actual cite is a huffpo article buy a guy most would find to be pretty biased. Not exactly the level of quality I wanted

Here's one that establishes the same mechanisms in adults, but that's not what I promsied

I think it would make more sense to simply create a more bird-friendly environment (ie more sustainable development, no hunting, allow for return of wild forested spaces) and if there is a role for a passenger pigeon-like bird it will eventually be occupied by an existing bird species and those with passenger pigeon-like traits will be the most successful.

The passenger pigeon was killed by
1) overhunting - presumably, we can stop that, but we are doing the same thing to fish right now - what reason do we have to believe we would not immediate overhunt pigeons back to extinction?
2) habitat loss - we haven't done anything to address this. If anything in the past 100 years we've made the problem worse. Development is both good and bad, but for preserving natural habitats, we have not really solved all problems (or arguably even prioritized) allowing development in a way which is sustainable in terms of natural resources and does not threaten wildlife habitats.

Could passenger pigeons start over "from ground zero"? If they could be in a lab, I am very skeptical that such populations would survive.

I imagine if Kang and Kodoss ate all the humans and reduced all human works to rubble and poisone, then genetically engineered a bunch of humans and left them on the planet and said "go repopulate". It just would not work.

Birds are intelligent animals, require long developmental periods (with care of their already-able parents) and form complex social networks that allow them to thrive in adverse conditions. http://rstb.royalsocietypublis... Passenger pigeons would migrate 1000s of miles depending on weather patterns, and used decision-making processes we have yet to understand.

You might want to revise your facts.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Mice gengineered to be germ free were fed drinking water from public sources. Within the life span of the mice, they developed GI tract bacteria that were ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPECIES.

Hell, Galapagos Finches evolved different heritable beak differences in http://www.plosgenetics.org/ar...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

Why do you need thumbs for raping?

Plenty of species without hands get their rape on to a degree that makes A Clockwork Orange look like Saturday morning cartoons. Ducks, just by way of example, are so nasty that the evolution of their genital morphology is basically an arms race, with female reproductive tracts getting ever longer and more convoluted, and males developing ever more grotesque Cthulhoid horror-phalluses in an attempt to not let that stop them. ("Explosive eversion and functional
morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia" is always a good read if you suspected nature of harboring any traces of benevolence...)

Just. Damn.:

... Eversion of the 20 cm muscovy duck penis is explosive, taking an average of 0.36 s, and achieving a maximum velocity of 1.6 m s1. ...

A 15 lb/7 kg duck has a 20 cm or > 8 inch dick.

Makes me wonder where the name "wood duck" comes from...

This paper is probably the most influential.

Excuse for being anal, but - an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot who thinks he knows everything about fossilised poop? Something's wrong here.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

TFP isn't confused. The coverage by a journalist working for Science Magazine may be. (I RTFP a few days ago, and promoted it to several geological discussion lists.)

Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data.

The judge disagrees that there is a distinction. Since the dozens of temperature reconstructions using different methods and different proxies all come up with the same answer it will be difficult to understand how Mann's work could be considered wrong, let alone fraudulent.

you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not

Probably you cannot. Probably the most you can do is concoct conspiracy theories based on code comments. Leaving aside the fact that this code was authored by someone completely unrelated to the Mann temperature reconstructions (but why let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?), it may be worth noting that the code was used in a paper that calls tree rings proxies into question : Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today?

So if you want to dismiss the results of the paper that used this code, then you are dismissing work critical of one of the proxies used in Mann's reconstruction.

The specifics and criteria used to judge/choose "better/preferred" need to be known as well

Those are described in the paper (Possibly paywalled). They're talking about the optimal choice in terms of natural selection, and are assuming that the most energy per amount of time "handling" the food is best. They then throw in the possibility that some food options may only be transiently available.

If I've read it right they're saying that it's not always optimal to take the highest ranked food available at the time: if it takes you time to eat an item and other "better" items may appear and then disappear while you're doing that, it may be a better choice to ignore a "good-but-slow" item, spend less time eating a "lesser-but-faster" item and therefore make more decisions about what to eat per unit of time, giving you more opportunities to notice the best item suddenly appearing.

It's like only being able to take one plate off a sushi train at a time, and you can't take a new one until the last one is finished: you're hungry, so you have to take *something*, but it might be a better decision to take the crappy-but-fast items so that you're less likely to still be chewing if your favorite thing starts to roll past you, which is what would have happened if you'd taken the middle of the range but chewy clam sushi.

But did you read the full paper which describes how it actually works?

http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/469/2160/20130512.full

Radar clutter suppression and target discrimination using twin inverted pulses

The proposition that the use of twin inverted pulses could enhance radar is tested. This twin inverted pulse radar (TWIPR) is applied to five targets. A representative target of interest (a dipole with a diode across its feedpoint) is typical of covert circuitry one might wish to detect (e.g. in devices associated with covert communications, espionage or explosives), and then distinguish from other metal (‘garbage’ or ‘clutter’), here represented by an aluminium plate and a rusty bench clamp. In addition, two models of mobile phones are tested to see whether TWIPR can distinguish whether each is off, on or whether it contains a valid SIM card. Given that a small, inexpensive, lightweight device requiring no batteries can produce a signal that is 50dB above clutter in this test, the options are discussed for using such technology for animal tagging or to allow the location and identification of buried personnel who opt to carry them (rescue workers, skiers in avalanche areas, miners, etc.). The results offer the possibility that buried catastrophe victims not carrying such tags might still be located by TWIPR scattering from their mobile phones, even when the phones are turned off or the batteries have no charge remaining.

I read the article, I can't figure out if the writer was quoting him indirectly or if she is stupid. The model was based on moth flight muscle which is similar to human cardiac muscle, which was properly explained. He did say it can lead to new research in cardio and skeletal disease. I feel pedantic and want to know if the reasercher said that or if it is a case of bad editorializing. Don't shoot the messenger, but I guess in a sense that's what I am doing. So feel free to shoot this post if you think I'm stupid.

I've read what you wrote three times and I still have no idea what you're trying to say. You probably shouldn't be calling other people stupid until you can learn to write as well as they do. You might find your answer in the actual paper.

The oldest dinosaur? A Middle Triassic dinosauriform from Tanzania
The open access model would like to say "you're welcome".

Morten et al recently examined DNA in 158 bone fossils and determined the half-life of DNA to be 521 years in their sample. Even if Martian DNA functioned in the same manner, the idea that environmental conditions on Mars were suitable to sustain life as late as the year 1491 is ludicrous. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10/05/rspb.2012.1745.abstract?sid=abb89d94-00f1-431b-8863-c62996e35478

I agree that Land ownership rights by individual farmers would, all by itself, improve production, and also improve preservation of the soil.
If the land is theirs, people take care of it. Given just a modicum of education, even subsistence agricultural yields are expected
to increase by 50 percent in the next 30 years.

There would be no real need to sell it off to larger farms (this type of farming really only works well on flat land suitable for mechanization).
With more production comes greater wealth. With greater wealth comes fewer pointless babies.