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And rape rates in some other 1st-world countries are HUGELY higher--but nobody here cares apparently: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

The numbers may say so, but they comprise only official data. In more advanced countries, the case must be that less rapes go unreported, so the figures may be closer to reality, while not so in the US. Consider the Japan rates, which are among the lowest, while having a strong culture of sexual harassment, (it's the same culture that created things like RapeLay): http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/as.2007.47.5.811?uid=3737664&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21106029734881; http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1373&context=jil;http://ijo.sagepub.com/content/45/3/278.short.

Must I, or are you just dodging?
You see, I asked you for yours, because upon googling, I could find no such study information.

Now, if you google "gender differences in spatial intelligence", you're going to have quite a different result. The consensus is moving toward spatial ability gender differences being a matter of nurture, not nature. Determined by culture, not sex organs.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://pss.sagepub.com/content...
Wikipedia has probably the most comprehensive list of scientific citations on the topic, with the debunkings of decades-old studies that failed to account for even a modicum of non-physiological possibilities. You should read up. Learn something new.

Ultimately, though, given just how much information there is on the topic, I'm pretty sure you're playing off of some pre-conceived cultural leanings.

Well in that case I guess I must play role of appropriate personality type X to go and find the resource. As it turns out my vague recollection was exactly wrong, it is not choosing beliefs that imposes a cognitive load. Processing other people's beliefs imposes cognitive load (I would speculate this would be some kind of role-playing operation happening at a low (automatic) level).

So, in the context of online discussions it would work out the other way: that recognising that other people have differing beliefs would impose a greater cognitive load. Anyway, the experiment design that they used is quite cool so if it interests you the article is at this location.

However, it's obvious these parents care about their child's education

In reality this is the primary thing that really matters to be successful at homeschooling.

But having parents who care about their child's education also matters when it comes to the child's success in the public education system. Parent involvement, whether voluntary or as a result of school-based programs, produces results.

Uninvolved parents and homeschooling is likely to be a disaster. Uninvolved parents with public/private schooling probably won't be a disaster, but could easily be better.

The hard question is whether homeschooling makes all that much of a difference when the parents are involved, which is a prerequisite for successful homeschooling and which provides a known advantage with traditional schooling. Maybe, maybe not.

I particularly like the mounds of broken sticks that accumulate on the sideline during the game, mostly broken over the head of an opposing player.

Has been known to result in injuries to players.

From home I can click through to the full text as HTML but if I try to click through to the PDF it wants me to pay.

This might be an error (or perhaps their server has a guilty conscience from a crime it did not commit?) but for now if you want to see the full text, there it is.

For your review:

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis

Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Peer Reviewed Survey http://oss.sagepub.com/content...

That's from a " fee-charging open access journal" of Sage Publishing, which was one of the publishers that "peer reviewed" and published complete bullshit papers send in as a test by a Science sting last year. So, "yeah, right".

For your review:

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis

Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Peer Reviewed Survey http://oss.sagepub.com/content...

And just to reinforce that this douche is working on imagined extrapolations, if it's so damn heritable, how the fuck do racial IQ disparities shrink almost a whole standard deviation in one generation?

Why did anyone mod ShanghailBill up?

Is this some autistic need to categorize?

What is fucking wrong with slashdotters?

Higher IQs are correlated with a long history of urbanization and economic specialization, where higher IQs provide a selective advantage.

There's no arguing this. But, from what I've read about James Watson, he never said anything close to this. Instead, I can even find on his wikipedia page this quote from one of his books:

He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so"

So it's related to a long history of urbanization and economic specialization? And also Watson's unequal powers of reason? What is he implying if not to say that genetically some people are born without the equal "powers of reason"? He didn't quite say that due to "a long history of urbanization and economic specialization" instead he said due to geographic separation followed by their evolution. Watson's position as a genetic researcher commenting on something that is almost certainly attributed to socioeconomic status is strange, wouldn't you think? Was he commenting on this as an economist or perhaps historian?

I also like how you link to wikipedia pages but not their internal discrepancies on your open and close case that IQ is inherited. Including this quote from your first link:

Eric Turkheimer and colleagues (2003) found that for children of low socioeconomic status heritability of IQ falls almost to zero.

From this source.

You present a perfectly acceptable and fairly logical argument about the advancement of some cultures outpacing others. One need only read "Guns, Germs & Steel" where this sort of thing is discussed in a very sound and well researched way. Do we raise our pitchforks and chase after Jared Diamond with fervor? Not at all. Then again, his arguments didn't rest entirely upon some imaginary gene expression he just hadn't found yet.

Your "political correctness" claim is largely rubbish. While it may appear a knee-jerk reaction, this is the case of people objecting to a statement with no underlying scientific basis while Watson makes claims that we should be able to isolate the "Intelligence Gene." Have we had success in isolating such a gene from the Ashkanazi? Furthermore Watson implies (though never directly says) that lack of similar genes is what keeps Africa repressed -- while making zero reference to the reverberating effects of hundreds of years of European colonizations and their leeching of wealth & resources.

Ooch. I knew this was coming.

I have about 4-5 textbooks from college, and the one I enjoyed the most out of was this one http://www.amazon.com/CRIMINAL... though it's probably quite dated by now (published in 1981).

Otherwise, there's scads of both psychological and sociological journals with papers on it ... but they're all behind paywalls. For example, http://pss.sagepub.com/content... is a very recent study that says, basically, if they feel guilty, they'll be less likely to re-offend, but shaming makes it more likely: "Further mediational modeling showed that shame proneness positively predicted recidivism via its robust link to externalization of blame."

That shaming doesn't work is really well known.

In fact, we have a great deal of information about what does and does not work when it comes to crime and punishment, and largely, it's politically and emotionally charged individuals that ignore the scientific results. For example, 'nice' prisons don't affect recidivism rates vs. 'mean' prisons, within the same culture, but people point to say, a prison in america and a prison in norway and think that's a 1:1 comparison that only involves prison systems, when it's clearly ignoring important variables.

Really, the most cost effective way to deal with crime is to make sure it doesn't happen. That means promoting education, nuclear families, and work ethic, and there's statistics to back that. Educated, job-skill-having individuals with a stable home life tend to avoid criminal acts.

It's just not politically correct to say that, for a number of reasons, much less enforce that sort of policy change.

What constitutes excessive force in your mind? Ignore the Grand Jury's decision for this question, because we have ample evidence demonstrating that the system does not always work toward justice. You can see how many charges law enforcement agents have had to face, even after they brutally beat a homeless person to death on the street. This is one of at least several similar events where no charges were filed.

It is that question that has many people bothered about this event.

Buried under the racism and claims of execution and murder is a valid concern, which is that law enforcement has undergone a fundamental change in the last few decades which does not benefit society. The slogan of "Protect and Serve the Public" today is invalid, officers are placed above all members of the public and the statement "Officer Safety" has become a mantra justifying any and all actions the officer takes.

The take away we should be discussing is the question I proposed initially. The psychological profiling of potential law enforcement officers is a concern, the militarization of police forces is a concern.

I'm not a pacifist. If an armed suspect is threatening the public, the police have the right to shoot to kill. It's when suspects are not armed that we need to draw a firm line on the amount of force required versus the amount of force used. Unloading a full clip into an unarmed suspect from a vehicle goes beyond necessary force, especially in this case where bullets kept flying after the suspect was 15feet from the vehicle (from the evidence released to the public).

Further reading can be found pretty much anywhere, from cases of officers shooting dogs in yards to tossing flash bangs into the wrong house during an unannounced raid to serve a warrant.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381446/barney-fife-meets-delta-force-charles-c-w-cooke
http://www.sagepub.com/gabbido...
http://www.copwatch.org/databa...

Despite caring being perceived as a normal and natural expression of one’s humanity as a complete person, whether as male or female, “men are viewed as sexualised in predatory ways in our culture” (King, 1998, p. 76). For example, one expression of care, notably hugging, is regarded ambivalently in the wider society: “Society allows men to hug children at home. But outside of home, men don’t hug children or other men. They hug women” (King, 1998, p. 79). This ambivalent attitude toward men expressing care in physical ways (hugging, hand holding, permitting a person to sit on their lap) means that men who choose to work in elementary classroom contexts with children are monitored. Male teachers seen by others as performing atypical gender-identified behavior for men are marginalized and treated with suspicion (King, 1998).

Source: Hanson, P., & Mulholland, J. A. (2005). Caring and Elementary Teaching: The Concerns of Male Beginning Teachers.

In this study, the author used ethnographic and focus group interviews to examine the lived experiences of men who teach in the primary grades. Several themes arose from the men's narratives. First, the men are under closer scrutiny than their women peers regarding contact with the children. Second, there is considerable ambiguity regarding the kind of “male role model” the men feel they are expected to portray. Third, there is a sexual division of labor that reinforces the image of men as having different teaching styles than women teachers. In response to the cumulative effects of these phenomena, the men must adopt compensatory behaviors causing them to unintentionally reproduce traditional forms of masculinity.

Source: Sargent, P. (2000). Real Men or Real Teachers? Contradictions in the Lives of Men Elementary Teachers.

One of the common reasons given for this, including within the Male Teachers' Strategy, is that many men have a fear of false paedophilia accusations. The response of Education Queensland is to suggest setting up a support framework for teachers who are accused of sexual misconduct. While false claims of sexual abuse are devastating to those accused, there is little in this strategy that will help to develop challenging attitudes to the creation of this fear. The fear is most pervasive when men move in to non-masculinized areas of the curriculum and/or schooling sector. For example, when men move into early childhood their motives are often questioned (King, 2000, p. 9; see also Murray, 1996; Smedley, 1998; Sumsion, 1999). Such work is constructed within patriarchal societies as women's work and is devalued. The consequence of this is that men who want to teach young children risk being positioned as deviant, abnormal or lacking. That is, they are at risk of being seen as gay, 'effeminate' or a paedophile.

The risk that men pose to children in early childcare, and other educational settings, however, is an important topic that should not be trivialized (see Skelton, 1994; Cameron et al., 1999, chapter 7). There has been a significant amount of feminist political work carried out to get the issue of child sexual abuse on to the political agenda (see, for example, Kelly, 1988; Scutt, 1990; Segal, 1990). This work has seen the development of a number of institutions and legislation designed to protect children-in Queensland the Child Protection Act 1999 is one such law. It would be unfortunateif much of this work was undone in an attempt to attract more male teachers into the system. Rather, what is needed is not so much greater protection for men accused of sexual abuse of students, but rather a more thoughtful response. This would acknowledge that particular men, practising specific masculinities

Curiosity ~ Openness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

http://pss.sagepub.com/content...
We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
However, we did find that Openness/Intellect was associated—at p less than .01, uncorrected—with one region consistent with our hypotheses: an area of parietal cortex involved in working memory and the control of attention. A previous study found that a nearly identical region (Talairach coordinates: 46, 33, 45) showed the strongest correlation between neural activity (during a difficult working memory task) and intelligence (J.R. Gray et al., 2003). This finding is significant because Openness/Intellect is the only Big Five trait that has been consistently and positively associated with intelligence (DeYoung et al., 2005).

etc.

I had understood the US to have the most with some 6000, and other than western europe and Russia I didnt think anyone else had any.

From the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russia and US have rough parity, then it's France/China/Britain, then Israel/Pakistan/India, then North Korea, in descending orders of magnitude.

http://bos.sagepub.com/content...

You're right; feminists don't in general, push for only that, because legalistic bias isn't the only kind that's harming people. You can see object evidence of how systemic bias hurts women Or objective evidence that certain kinds of cultural media measurably cause those biases. Standing against that, in spite of having nothing to do with the law, is morally justified, and even necessary.

But I'm sure you meant that what they we want is some kinda imagined matriarchy, where special rights are reserved for one half the population. Which is dumb. And while people with all sorts of self-labels say all sorts of dumb things, it is not a suggestion made by anywhere near a large percentage of feminists.

Okay, let's just take a second and review this idea.

What on earth makes you think non-preliminary studies in psychology/sociology study correlation? People in the field take those correlations you reference, and develop causative experiments all the time. Expose groups to two different stimuli, and measure the behavioral differences. Have you never even browsed the abstracts of a psychology journal?

I know it's popular among engineers to dismiss the soft sciences for, being, well soft. But the fact that they're not untangling the fundamental rules of the universe, doesn't mean there's not science going on here. I get it. Humans aren't like computers, and don't follow precise and predictable behaviors at all times.

But that same unpredictability problem doesn't keep us from nailing down quantum mechanical behavior.

No, you need to grow up past being a fucking child, and recognize that humanity is made of individuals.

(Not to mention most stereotypes are completely misrepresentation)

And they are scientifically proven to cause people to treat each other worse

But if you look past all that, and use some extremely simplistic logic about cognition, and throw in a dash of naturalistic fallacy, then your conclusion makes perfect sense.

"When California’s .. carbon market took effect in 2013 .. A few months later .. [Edison] sold its interest in the coal plant to an Arizona utility .. The coal plant will keep emitting pollution just as before—only now it serves customers in Arizona, not California." ref

I don't know, but it sounds alien and terroristey to me! Are you sure it won't blow up in my hands?

Actually Oregon was getting high turnout decades before they switched to vote-by-mail. There was one study which showed that Oregon got increased turnout from vote-by-mail, but a more recent study was unable to replicate that. It showed that Oregon's increased turnout was due to a "novelty effect", but it has since disappeared (except for a very small effect in some small special elections).

Furthermore, Oregon's anti-fraud measures are inadequate (e.g., the handwriting analysis isn't done by fully trained people, and has never been subjected to third-party scrutiny). And the much-touted "ballot parties" -- where groups of friends get together and talk about the issues and then fill out and mail their ballots out together -- are a classic example of a violation of the secret ballot and peer pressure in voting. (And remember: this doesn't actually increase turnout.)

Vote-by-mail increases the risks, doesn't effect turnout, and removes the secret ballot. But at least it's cheaper, I guess?

I do agree that online voting increases the risks monumentally, though. Even the much-lauded Estonian system is fundamentally flawed.

Do you people get your information from a game of telephone or something? Seriously, double check things before you post.

Texas's rape law The basics?

22.011. SEXUAL ASSAULT. (a) A person commits an offense if the person:
(1) intentionally or knowingly:
(A) causes the penetration of the anus or sexual organ of another person by any means, without that person's consent;
(B) causes the penetration of the mouth of another person by the sexual organ of the actor, without that person's consent; or
(C) causes the sexual organ of another person, without that person's consent, to contact or penetrate the mouth, anus, or sexual organ of another person, including the actor;

No exceptions for gender.

Hereditary=genetics? What kind of a gross over-simplification is that? "Like in Humans, Genes Drive Half of Chimp Intelligence"? Genes don't drive human intelligence. They determine the upper and lower limits that can be achieved with proper nutrition, care and education and a multitude of other factors. More and more factors are being discovered everyday, each diminishing the role of genetics.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content...
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41...

http://jlr.sagepub.com/content...

http://works.bepress.com/leah_...

http://www.npr.org/2009/08/28/...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03...

http://www.literacytrust.org.u...:

Educational programming has also aimed to elevate knowledge of texts and literacy as in the programmes Barney and Friends (Guofang, 1999) and Reading Rainbow (Wood and Duke, 1997), which offer content on reading books and raising childrenâ(TM)s knowledge of books. This is important since researchers at the University of Sheffield have also suggested that pre-schoolers who develop an ability to talk about texts become familiar with literacy and have greater success with learning to read once they enter school (Hannon, 2000; Hannon, Weinberger and Nutbrown, 1991). "

Actually since the Flynn effect didn't alter ethnic differences, it verified that nurture failed to trump nature, which is flagrantly counter to your claim.

Let me get this straight: IQ scores of populations rise without changes to the ethnic composition of said populations, and this somehow proves that race is the main determiner of IQ? Sorry, buddy, but the Netherlands did not "whiten" between 1952 and 1982. Quite the opposite: immigrants began to flood in from Indonesia, Aruba and the Antilles, and Suriname. And yet IQ went up drastically. And if you look at 1960s Virginia, an unchanged population of a single race saw a dramatic changed by thirty points in just five years. 30 points is supposedly the difference between average (100) and mentally retarded (70). Do you want me to believe that as soon as the Virginia public schools shut down, radioactive spiders bit all the black students (and only the black students) to alter their DNA and turn them into retards over the span of five years? Or is it more likely that five years without schooling left their academic abilities rusty and atrophied?

Who "established that IQ tests are terrible measure of innate intelligence" and how exactly?

Binet (but you call that genetic fallacy, fine). But also Flynn and several professors of psychology. How? With scientific studies, but you'll probably just write them off as "PC."

IQ testing has certainly been updated since the long defunct original Standford-Binet test intended for predicting academic potential, and is far more robust than your reduction. Wechsler tests among others are different batteries for different indications, and the stats hold over large populations with a great many correlations over decades of study, regardless of your dislike.

Nice try, but the modern day IQ tests are exactly the ones that were debunked in those two articles I linked to. The Cell article I linked to specifically mentions Wechsler. They conclude that most general IQ tests are useless, but concede specific tests, such as the subtest component of Wechsler may still have some value (since they did not analyze the efficacy of subtests in this paper). But another paper that did analyze subtest scores concludes that they, too are entirely useless. Just Say No to Subtest Analysis: A Critique on Wechsler Theory and Practice.

You sound a lot like J. Philippe Rushton, who for years claimed that Africans were intellectually inferior to other races on a biological level. It almost sounded believable until he started claiming that there was an inverse relation between penis size and intelligence. My best guess is that you, like Rushton, are only engaged in this racial superiority pissing contest to because you want to lessen your insecurities about the size of certain appendages for which you are markedly below average.

EDIT* Arkins original Robot Schema paper was in *1989*, not his 1998 book http://ijr.sagepub.com/content...

Mostly it comes from Marx, "commodity fetishism" (see wikipedia). Using the same concept Marx used to describe how the labor added value of goods and commodities are unseen but known and measurable. Similarly, in regulating an object which is "waste" or "discard" differently from the same material mined and smelted attaches a fetish, ignoring hidden environmental and economic costs of production a waste or secondary commodity. I learned the concept from papers by Josh Lepawsky and Ramzy Kahhat on electronic scrap, but it goes back at least to 2003 http://oae.sagepub.com/content..., or more recently by Graham Pickren of Univ of Georgia 2013 "Political ecologies of electronic waste: uncertainty and legitimacy in the governance of e-waste geographies"

At a certain size schools become too big anyway. Plans for expansion probably don't need to go beyond 2000 students or so - at that point you are better off with an additional facility. I've seen papers where the optimal size of a school is somewhere between 600-900 students with a non-linear dropoff in student performance at either end.

(1) Intelligence is 80% heritable

Neat. I think you're talking about this stuff. It says researchers have put the heritability of IQ between 0.5 and 0.8. However, Turkheimer (2003) found that for children of low socioeconomic status heritability of IQ falls almost to zero. CITATION, BITCH.

See the link to heritability:

Heritability measures the fraction of phenotype variability that can be attributed to genetic variation. This is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics. In addition, heritability can change without any genetic change occurring (e.g. when the environment starts contributing to more variation). A case in point, consider that both genes and environment have the potential to influence intelligence. Heritability could increase if genetic variation increases, causing individuals to show more phenotypic variation (e.g. to show different levels of intelligence). On the other hand, heritability might also increase if the environmental variation decreases, causing individuals to show less phenotypic variation (e.g. to show more similar levels of intelligence). Heritability is increasing because genetics are contributing more variation or because non-genetic factors are contributing less variation; what matters is the relative contribution.

Key point: Heritability goes up and down depending on the environment. The environmental variation is completely dominant for the poor. Go figure, it sucks being poor and it's hard to go get your life on track.

But hey, I'm sure Ag school taught you all sorts of important things that are very useful for raising crops. It's not quite sociology however, so you might want to take your lessons with a grain of salt.

This does kind of lead to a unsettling conclusion: Eugenics for the rich! They're the only ones who we can identify as genetically gifted in the area. Thank goodness we're not getting out-bred by the bible-thumpers who don't believe in evolution, right? It's not like the intelligent upper class would avoid having kids.... right!?

That's the cunning appeal of Colbert. Both conservatives and liberals love him but for completely different reasons. This has actually been studied:

Summary: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report
Full Study: The Irony of Satire

Easy: with a strong probability, the viewer itself has been a victim (or witness) of sexual abuse in his past.

Social constructionists want to believe this; however, it is probably not true. The great unspoken alternative hypothesis which is too controversial to be even mentioned in most of academia almost certainly explains why there is a small correlation between abuse and history of abuse. What is true or not is a complex question that I do not see being addressed anywhere on this issue.

If you want to understand how liberals deny science, then social constructionism is the best place to start. (Radical environmentalism is not a mainstream liberal view -- but would also qualify.)

I agree 100% with you on the psychological projection bit. This history of abuse part -- not so much.

AIUI, and a quick Googling seems to confirm it, there are physiological responses to noise that don't go away with habituation (though you do get habituated at a conscious level). It seems to have been looked at most with aircraft noise (eg http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - higher stress in schoolchildren from aircraft noise - and http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - poorer long term memory and reading). So maybe you should blame the noise rather than lack of space.

AIUI, and a quick Googling seems to confirm it, there are physiological responses to noise that don't go away with habituation (though you do get habituated at a conscious level). It seems to have been looked at most with aircraft noise (eg http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - higher stress in schoolchildren from aircraft noise - and http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - poorer long term memory and reading). So maybe you should blame the noise rather than lack of space.

This was covered on Slashdot less than a week ago, link inlcuded: http://bos.sagepub.com/content/70/1/32.full

The article discusses at length the detailed concerns, but just to demonstrate that this is taken seriously far beyond the doomsday clock group, I quote here an excerpt related to that specific point:

Challenging the assumption of the inevitability of autonomous weapons and building on the work of earlier activists, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations, was launched in April 2013. This effort has made remarkable progress in its first year. In May, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Christof Heyns, recommended that nations immediately declare moratoriums on their own development of lethal autonomous robotics (Heyns, 2013). Heyns also called for a high-level study of the issue, a recommendation seconded in July by the UN Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. At the UN General Assemblyâ(TM)s First Committee meeting in October, a flood of countries began to express interest or concern, including China, Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. France called for a mandate to discuss the issue under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a global treaty that restricts excessively injurious or indiscriminate weapons. Meeting in Geneva in November, the state parties to the Convention agreed to formal discussions on autonomous weapons, with a first round in May 2014. The issue has been placed firmly on the global public and diplomatic agenda.

Do you have a cite for your assertion that most "really smart people" are atheists?

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Feel free to read any one of the scientific papers on how the temperatures in Europe were equal to or higher than todays ~1000 years ago.

(And, for that matter, ~2000 and ~3000 years ago as well. You'll know these as the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period)

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.html
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/26/0959683612460791.abstract
http://www.wsl.ch/fe/landschaftsdynamik/dendroclimatology/Publikationen/Esper_etal.2012_GPC

Or just deny the science and, like the article, repeat activist mantras - no matter the factual content.

Thanks for the links filled with zero summary and loads of waffle. Now that I've read all that dreary shit, I feel like I'm in a much better position to compare the very well documented death rates that appeared nowhere in the abundance of bullshit you just linked, with the ones we experience today.

Feel free to read any one of the scientific papers on how the temperatures in Europe were equal to or higher than todays ~1000 years ago.

(And, for that matter, ~2000 and ~3000 years ago as well. You'll know these as the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period)

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.html
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/26/0959683612460791.abstract
http://www.wsl.ch/fe/landschaftsdynamik/dendroclimatology/Publikationen/Esper_etal.2012_GPC

Or just deny the science and, like the article, repeat activist mantras - no matter the factual content.

I'm not going to deny that nuclear has a tremendous ability to scale up. I know it can!

[...] Oh, are you talking about thorium reactors? I think a lot of your arguments against renewables (too expensive, too much research required, not feasible, blah blah blah) would also apply to this technology. Doubt my opinion? Perhaps you'd like to refer to the report from the Union of Atomic Scientists entitled Thorium: Not a near-term commercial nuclear fuel." You have to admit that at this point commercially viable thorium-generated power is vapor ware.

[...] You no doubt think I'm a knee-jerk partisan relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data.

Well I most certainly do not. You present yourself well and your aversion to nuclear energy and desire to jump into and 'crack' the remaining hurdles to solar is very clear.

There is a tremendous difference between the way the world was burning coal in the previous two centuries and the way it is burned today. Likewise nuclear fission needs a serious 'tune up'. Our light and heavy water reactors extract dismally small amounts of energy from fuel and leave long-term actinides in their wake.

But in my opinion the LFTR designs being proposed are so radically different in terms of efficiency, safety, containment and (with active processing) residual waste that it is a tragedy for me to see people draw straight line comparisons between LFTR and 'present day commercial nuclear power'. If it were not for the nuclear weapons program and its mandates nuclear would mean LFTR already, today.

I do not advocate solar and wind for base load energy ON ANY SCALE (as in, abort!) and I do want to see LFTR developed quickly to commercial deployment. I come to this conclusion on one single criteria only.

SURVIVAL.

With LFTR technology we can achieve a single building that will withstand any weather or seismic conditions (and no, it need not be sited near a large body of water) that will generate gigawatts of power, with years' worth of barely-radioactive thorium seed fuel stored in the closet. With active processing none of the long-lived isotopes will form and the harmful lifespan of this waste (of greatly reduced volume compared with spent solid fuel) is ~300 years. This is a BEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION.

With wind and solar -- even once we develop more efficient heat transfer or photovoltaics and more efficient turbines, there is a certain energy storage problem which I might refer to as vaporware. All the batteries presently in the world might power our grids for ten minutes. But okay, I will grant you as-yet-undeveloped storage battery tech, giant lithium chocolate bars the size of skyscrapers.

All of these solar/wind/storage 'solutions' collectively contain millions of discrete and precision parts spread over a large area that must (by their nature) be completely exposed to the elements. As opposed to a single self-contained building that merely outputs process heat or electricity.

What a logistical nightmare wind and solar are, even when they are working. Imagine trying to light a sports arena with Christmas lights. Only now imagine this on the supply side. It is mad in a way that has nothing to do with the 'ultimate promise' of these energy sources. It is a logistical nightmare. Nay, impossibility.

But okay I'll grant you the (remote) possibility that this will all fall into place within 50 years or so, who knows how many open pit rare earth mines will be opened up to achieve the chemical storage feat. Or hydrological or compressed air 'storage' with its laughable efficiency (how many million acres of solar panels again?) or environmental blights. Let's say it's all good, and it's done. There are now one hundred million discrete parts in our base load energy system that are somehow working in concert (again, as opposed to a few LFTR buildings) We are now 100% solar and wind, day and (one, two) nights. That was hard.

There are a lot of aging, crappy nuclear plants because politicians chicken out the minute people like you embrace FUD

How do you figure? The way I see it is that there are a lot of crappy nuclear plants out there because our ancestors were short-sighted enough to build them. And now the task of cleaning up the mess, which was never factored into the cost of the electricity they generated, is left to us. I'm happy France is exporting something besides their delicious wine and cheese and noxious sentimentality, but I expect their waste will end up somewhere that is not France.

And, well, there is the usual FUD which "people like me" embrace. It's a self-evident fact that nuclear power has associated risks and that history has shown that these risks occasionally result in catastrophe. I'm no actuary so I can't put odds to it, but there are certain similarities between SoCal and Fukushima: old coastal powerplant with creaky design, on a fault line, etc. I'd rather pay a little extra for my energy so I don't have to die of radiation sickness or see my property rendered worthless by a disaster that could have been easily averted.

But the math on this one isn't even close...The sun just ain't hot enough for long enough.

What math are you referring to (your article is TL;DR)? Do you mean the math that shows a rapid decline in the cost of PV systems and a dramatic increase in installations of 60% globally? Or the The math Steve Chu used to predict that renewable energy will be cost-competitive within 10 years? As for the second statement, the current insolation of the earth at the ground is about 7 times total power consumption -- to say nothing of wind or tidal power.

You no doubt think I'm a knee-jerk partisan relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data. I certainly think you're a knee jerk partisan (and pessimist) relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data. I personally would support spending on research on thorium reactors. I'd much prefer fusion (not likely very soon and already pretty well funded) and would pref

The actual paper, in PDF format, can be found here.

Mod parent down:

>you can't teach empathy

I call bullshit. For example, http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/05/20/0956797612469537.short and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2333803

There are several dozen other studies you can find that show emapthy can be taught in cooperating subjects. Note, especially, that in the second link, it was the affective part of empathy that was increased rather than the cognitive aspect of empathy--the very thing that the doubters presume cannot be influenced (affective part of empathy is usually associated with antisocials/narcissists/etc., whereas cognitive empathy is more affected in autism spectrum disorders and such).

Even in psychopaths, empathy can be increased (as measured directly by imaging of brain activation, rather than relying on self-reporting from unreliable subjects): http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/136/8/2550.full?sid=a0dd82b4-a4aa-4af8-a9d2-e3d1ad6d2e97

>Two year olds are sociopaths. Fourteen year olds shouldn't be- they can sometimes be stereotypically *insensitive* due to their brains still developing

More bullshit. The prefrontal cortex doesn't complete development until early 20s and in adults its dysfunction is closely associated with antisocial behavior. There was a study some years ago that showed most children and adolescents, compared to normal adults, have significant impairment in recognizing facial expressions of fear (confusing it with things like surprise or disgust)--just like psychopaths, and that was also linked to incomplete prefrontal cortex development.

From TFA:"Two papers published today present the first evidence for clocks independent of the circadian one:"

Plenty of people have been doing non-circadian clock work for years; I briefly worked in such a lab that had been investigating food- and sex-based timing mechanisms, but the non-circadian clock idea is at least as old as the seventies.[1][2]

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/197/4301/398?ijkey=759219d8ce9c087620c8d8237098ff5956eeb489&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
[2] http://jbr.sagepub.com/content/17/4/284?ijkey=4a9dd94e238a2aa60198739e7ea26d75ecdd3b5c&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha

I think this may be in response to at least one other study showing a similar effect when subjects were primed with religious concepts: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/9/803.abstract

I agree that it must be the paint chips then. I'm just not sure which of us is affected. :-) The author of that article is trying to explain why the lead-crime relationship is pretty much bunk. The stuff you quoted even says that, in a more nuanced way.

NOTE: I found the article you referred to here: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/lead-and-crime/. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the article they used as a reference: http://hsb.sagepub.com/content/45/2/214.full.pdf Maybe I'll pay the $32 for it just so I can put this to bed.

If we accept the 20% figure (crime that is lead related), which seems plausible, then this indicates a significant role for lead, but lead is certainly not the only important factor.

Is that plausible? Why do we think that 20% of crime is related to lead? The commentator bases that figure on an article that he quotes as saying:

“as much as 20%” of crime is “lead related.”

Wait! So not 20%... less than 20%. Then he goes on to say in his comments section:

I don’t know how reliable the 20% figure is... taking all this at face value.

So does this idea really have merit? Well, lets read the entire article. It explains how at first, the lead-crime figure was 90% (Mother Jones article) then it was revised to 50% (after criticism)... then it was <20% (the linked PDF). So really... for real... what percentage of crime is caused by lead?

ANSWER: We don't know!

The sensationalistic article that Slashdot linked to is trying to say: poor people commit crimes... and poor people have less healthcare access... so they are more likely to have lead poisoning... so therefore, lead poisoning must be the cause of their crimes. By juxtaposing that with the statement that the NRA is pro-lead, the submitter is implying that the NRA is evil. That is hyperbole, and editorializing, and it shouldn't be in the Slashdot summary. Lead in bullets is not part of the discussion about crime.

Here's a more recent study with similar conclusions, studying high-school students in Taiwan. However another study, testing something slightly different, found that when students were given a quiz after reading a chapter in either a paper or electronic textbook, they did equally well.

No one, and I mean no one, who is paying attention and able to parse the audience interaction could possibly mistake Colbert for the right wing nut job that he is parodying.

Well, a detailed academic study of hundreds of people who were shown parts of the Colbert Report demonstrated that you're wrong about this. From the abstract:

conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

I personally find it hard to believe that no one involved in inviting him to a White House event would have realized the extent of Colbert's sarcasm. But clearly many "normal" conservatives don't get it....

Anyway my outcomes will be better by having a gun.

Statistically speaking, you are more likely to kill yourself in moment of depression, a family member in the heat of anger, or a family member in an accident, rather than a criminal seeking to do you harm.

Fact: If you have a gun, everybody in your home is more likely than your non-gun-owning neighbors and their families to die in a gun-related accident, suicide or homicide.

Citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9715182
Citation: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/105/4/888.full
Citation: http://ajl.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/02/01/1559827610396294

Saying my argument is retarded is ignoring the clear and well establishing science. Rejecting the evidence with anger and namecalling does nothing to support your side that you will react with calm rationality in all situations, and never snap.

There's been other similar prior work. For example, there's evidence that gamers can quickly allocate their attention in an efficient fashion. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680769/ and that gamers have faster reaction times for a large variety of tasks http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/18/6/321.short.

No, no, no.

We all know that gaming is the work of the devil and teaches our chillin' nothing good.

Both Fox News and the Pastor told me so.

This "research" must be suppressed.

There's been other similar prior work. For example, there's evidence that gamers can quickly allocate their attention in an efficient fashion. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680769/ and that gamers have faster reaction times for a large variety of tasks http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/18/6/321.short.

Indeed, I'd have modded you up if I'd have mod points.

This study is yet another one showing these effects, but is by far not the first. The effects of video-game playing, in particular action video-game playing, on various part of the decision making process have been studied extensively. The whole research was kicked off by the publication of

Green, C.S. & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video games modify visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534-537

with more publications related to that topic available on the lab page of Daphne Bavelier.

Disclaimer: I was working in the same department as the above-mentioned lab some years ago

There's been other similar prior work. For example, there's evidence that gamers can quickly allocate their attention in an efficient fashion. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680769/ and that gamers have faster reaction times for a large variety of tasks http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/18/6/321.short.