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While probably much safer than traditional cigarettes, electronic cigarettes still carry risks. For starters the flavoured ones produce toxic and carcinogenic compounds when they are vaporized. See following link for peer reviewed paper on the subject.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Here are three peer reviewed papers that show that e-cigarette vapour causes DNA damage

https://academic.oup.com/toxsc...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

http://www.nature.com/ebd/jour...

If you need a low dose of nicotine then I would suggest gum or patches would be safer than e-cigarettes but I doubt even then that it is a zero risk choice because in general there is no such thing as zero risk choice.

In addition to your critique, here is another:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379415001420

This article is a direct response to the one posted by AC, and demonstrates very clearly the poor analysis done in the first paper. The gist of it is that it's hard to use rare events from very large samples to make predictions, particularly when considering that rare events may occur with pretty similar frequency to the error rate.

It is extremely *likely* that a high number of illegals *did* vote. http://www.investors.com/polit... based on research done here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

I have no issue if California and New York want to let undocumented immigrants screw up their own country. But I am very discouraged when they let it affect national elections.

I just read the paper, and it says that MAYBE 38 non-citizens voted in 2008.

And the original research paper is disputed here:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

"The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys"

Can you supply any references for the debunked consensus? When I originally looked into the matter, I found several papers confirming the consensus, but it has been a few years since I looked

Comment on ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
a 2016 survey of american meteorological society members about climate change Initial Findings graph on page 11 shows 33% of AMS members believe the climate change is at least equally or more attributable to natural causes.
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature: A re-analysis
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change
Climate Consensus Con Game
Sorry, global warmists: The ‘97 percent consensus’ is complete fiction
The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up
Global Warming “Consensus”: Cooking the Books
Climategate 3.0: Blogger Threatened for Exposing 97% "Consensus" Fraud

I read the article.

The main problem is that they claim "the problem" with the impact is that we can't find any evidence or residue from Theia. Well, a lot of the models show that the impacter's core (which would have already differentiated and have a metal core) mostly goes into the core of the earth, and the silicate portion mixes with the bulk silicate earth (BSE). The moon is mostly formed from the earth's mantel, not from the impactor, and this is why the moon has the same composition as the BSE. The problem is working out why there is little to no isotopic fractionation between the moon and the earth, since conventional wisdom suggests a hot violent process such as the giant impact would have resulted in such fractionation.

The most useful part of the article is the suggestion that we go to venus. The similarities and differences in isotopic fractionation between the moon and the earth can only really be interpreted with a greater understanding of isotopic variation among the terrestrial planets, and failed planets (e.g. Vesta) in the asteroid belt.

For more information I recommend reading this paper which is fortunately funded to be open access.

I'm curious if you have any examples of the free market creating nationwide scale positive changes to education in modern history.

School vouchers used to promote competition improved education for Sweden.

it seems naive to think there would be a free market solution when every single historical success story was built on massive government spending.

It is also naive to think that the education requirements of yesteryear would be the same for today when the average skillset for a job requires more education and training. IOW, before we were concerned with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now, it is about developing the skills to be competitive in a modern technologically advanced economy. 100 years ago the education goal was literacy. Now, that goal has been achieved and the expectations of education have increased. Those expectations have not been met.

Throwing money at a problem doesn't solve the problem. Especially when deficit spending is the goto method for financing overpriced underwhelming education. There are other financial models that should be considered. Competition seems like a good idea for an institution that has stagnated or declined across many different measures of success.

Sure and that quality requirement should be applied to public institutions that have failed to meet their promises and our expectations. A different financing model doesn't undermine that requirement or that requirements application to different institutions with different financial structures.

That same population makes choices on everything else in their lives why do you think you know better than them? Giving them an opportunity to choose does not fundamentally undermine the education provided. Why did they choose those charter schools to begin with. I am willing to be because the public option wasn't a good option. There is demand for a good education, how that is financed is the point of a voucher system that has evidence of working.

Standards in education are a separate issue in that the state already has to define standards and it is always up for debate. Giving parents a choice in schools doesn't change that.

state SCOTUS said children have no right to be competently taught

Education is a right? Are schools held to different laws that determine a breach of contract?

They are expensive for a variety of reasons one being the lackluster competition and the effects of supply and demand. There is a a lot demand for better education and the supply is limited which increases the price. The demand is there because public education has failed to deliver on its promises and our expectations. I don't think there is a single reason for this but perhaps a different financing model could help market competition to better itself for everyones benefit.

In Sweden, it looks like there was some improvements and benefits to using this kind of system. Competition is a good thing.

She did win the popular vote though.

Go convince them to abolish the Senate and then you can whine about California being underrepresented in the electoral college.

The vote of an illegal immigrant voter in California is worth 10% less for the purpose of selecting a president than the vote of an auto worker in Michigan, but it's worth 75% less when it comes to selecting Supreme Court judges. (And 98.5% less than a Wyoming voter.)

Though there are a variety of non-volatile phosphorus species (e.g. metal phosphides), the presence of phosphorus in the upper atmosphere of Solar System gas giants sufficiently indicates to me that in hydrogen-helium dominated systems, appreciable amounts of phosphorus would be available. Phosphorus might be a limiting nutrient in such an environment, but it is also in some terrestrial environments (that's why farmers apply "NPK" - nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium - fertilizer by the tonne).

the hoopla over supposed replacement of it with arsenic in a certain bacteria has proven to be false.

That was indeed a false result.

Replace phosphorus with arsenic and you get dead organism.

That way of building life without phosphorus doesn't work. That is not a proof that no way of building life without phosphorus works. (But you'd probably have to do a lot more than just a straight swap of P for As.)

I'm just curious, would diamond wafers offer any serious advantages over current silicon? Heat conduction, maybe?

Long version: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369702107703498

Short version:
Diamond promises to be superior in most properties that are important for electronic components.

I would say it definitely warrants caution.

While neodymium, the specific metal being used in the magnetic ink, has not yet been observed in the brain, there is some concern that metallic nanoparticles may have neurological effects after entering the brain through the olfactory bulb after being inhaled into the nasal cavity. With regard to neodymium specifically, the following has been reported: "Breathing the dust can cause lung embolisms, and accumulated exposure damages the liver."

I am honestly completely confused by this topic. The only conclusion I can come to is that C02 is a greenhouse gas and that may or may not be a good thing and that may or may not be statistically significant. Half the people say we're doomed the other half that it is complete bunk and now today I see this story claiming we are entering a little ice age: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

We don't yet have the slightest notion how to make self-replicating robots. Probably the best we could do is to send up the sophisticated parts, but make some of the physical chassis components from available resources, to reduce somewhat the mass required from Earth.

What available resources? Mars has no petrochemicals. It's very rich in iron, which is certainly nice, and I'm sure there are other metals you can find and mine

That's more or less that I was thinking of when I said you'd bring the sophisticated parts from Earth, but might be able to make the physical chassis and the structural components from available materials. Steel, in particular, is easily available on Mars: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457650800266X

If you needed petrochemicals, you can make hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide. But I'm not sure that this would be my first choice for a resource for making things (although it will, of course, be one of the first resources to be exploited: to make rocket fuel.)

- but doing so needs industrial machines, and smelting/refining equipment, and a lot of power.

Well, yes.

It's even worse because there's potential compounding factors on Mars that could make psychological issues even worse. For example, here's one that's little studied: deuterium. Mars's deuterium levels are 5-7 times higher than Earth's (nothing like Venus's 150-240x, but still..). Animals and plants certainly can survive rather high deuterium levels, up to 50% (and bacteria can survive 98% deuterated water); in terms of survival, it poses no threat. However, in terms of effects on long-term health effects, it's much less clear. For example, one study found a 1,8% increase in incidence of depression for every 10ppm increase in deuterium in water (Earth mean = ~155ppm). So when you're talking an ~800ppm increase... the issue of long-term deuterium health effects really warrants more study. Furthermore, microbial food sources that may be used on Mars (either for direct consumption or producing feed for, e.g. aquaponics) can concentrate deuterium even further.

Unlike most isotopes, hydrogen isotopes have rather different properties. Deuterated drugs are a new field of interest, for example, as they can have lifetimes in the body an order of magnitude higher than their non-deuterated equivalents. Deuterated plastics are often dramatically more transparent (and significantly more radiation resistant) than non-deuterated plastics. However, mixtures of deuterated and non-deuterated versions of the same plastic, melted together, often yield an opaque result because the two versions have different melting points and densities, yielding an inhomogenous result.

Although the catch phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is often repeated, it is fundamentally nonsense - unless elaborately qualified.

If you thoroughly search a room looking for a suspect, and do not find him or her, you know they are not in the space searched. Absence of evidence can obviously be extremely strong evidence of absence if you have effective tools to look for the evidence.

We now have the equivalent situation with respect to "Sasquatch".

With the advent of environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring, a technology that has been available now for nearly 20 years, it is possible to survey the animals present in an environment, without ever seeing them, by detecting the traces of DNA they inevitably leave behind. When you consider forensic DNA analysis, analyzing the traces of DNA left on most any object you interact with, the technique is almost 30 years old. No one has ever detected the DNA of an unknown non-human primate in North America.

All of the Sasquatch "evidence" - footprints, disturbed areas, supposed feeding or gathering spots, claimed coprolites, etc. would be loaded with Sasquatch DNA if it was real. Nope, no Sasquatch DNA anywhere. At this point we can close the book on the theory that there is, or has ever been, a Sasquatch.

Ahh, yes; the "Those were only regional variations; there was no effect on global temperatures" handwave. Because of course, research like An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula (published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volumes 325–326, 1 April 2012, Pages 108–115) that show that the effects of the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period reached all the way to Antarctica get swept under the rug for contradicting the pravda about AGW.

Or the 1973 study in China that found warm and cold periods corresponding to periods in Europe: “The world climate during the historical times fluctuated. The numerous Chinese historical writings provide us excellent references in studying the ancient climate of China. The present author testifies, by the materials got from the histories and excavations, that during Yin-Hsu at Anyang, the annual temperature was about 2 higher than that of the, present in most of the time. After that came a series of up and down swings of 2—3 with minimum temperatures occurring at approximately 100 B. C. (about the end of the Yin Dynasty and the beginning of the Chou Dynasty), 400 A. D. (the Six Dynasties), 1200 A. D. (the South Snug Dynasty), and 1700 A. D. (about the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Ching Dynasty). In the Han and the Tang Dynasties (200 B. C.—220 A. D. and 600—900 A. D.) the climate was rather warm." [Chu Ko-Chen 1973: China National Knowledge Infrastructure], also this study by the same author.

Or the Chinese study of tree rings in Tibet that found that current temperatures are part of a normal cycle, and elevated temperatures have appeared repeatedly in the past: Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2,485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau [Chinese Sci Bull].

Or warming in America, across the Atlantic from Europe: 'Holocene Climate and Environmental Change in Central New York': "Working with two sediment cores extracted from the extreme southern end of Cayuga Lake in central New York researchers "found paleolimnological evidence for the Medieval Warm Period (~1.4-0.5 ka), which was warmer and wetter than today." This evidence included weight percent total carbonate, total organic matter, non-carbonate inorganic terrigenous matter, carbonate stable isotopes, carbon isotope values of total organic matter and fossil types (gastropods, ostracods, bivalves, oogonia) and amounts, all of which were used to interpret past climate based on their relationship to modern climate data for the Finger Lakes region of the state. And to make their findings perfectly clear, they repeat that the "data for central New York suggest a warmer, wetter climate than today."" [Henry T. Mullins, William P. Patterson, Mark A. Teece and Adam W. Burnett 2011: Journal of Paleolimnology].

Or in Alaska: 'Six Millennia of Summer Temperature Variation based on Midge Analysis of Lake Sediments from Alaska': "The authors conducted a high-resolution analysis of midge assemblages found in the sediments of Moose Lake in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.....The results of the study are portrayed in the accompanying figure, where it can be seen, in the words of Clegg et al., that "a piecewise linear regression analysis identifies a significant change point at ca 4000 years before present (cal BP)," with "a decreasing trend after this point." And from 2500 cal BP to the present, there is a clear multi-centennial oscillation about the declining trend line, with its peaks and valleys defining the temp

They're already ahead of you :) Clipper will likely include the SUDA instrument for doing just that - roughly equivalent to Cassini's CDA
 

Wait. The official cause of death is listed as Cardiovascular Disease and I'm the one who's reaching? I never said lung cancer didn't contribute to it, just that the official reason is heart failure and saying she died of lung cancer is perpetuating a myth.

There is ample evidence showing smoking increases the risk of Cardiovascular Disease, so it's safe to say that smoking contributed to her death, just not in the manner you described.

I suppose "cardiovascular disease" or "heart failure" don't have the same emotional impact as "lung cancer"...

The Telegraph has a link to the (seemingly very short) paper, which doesn't appear to be restricted: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405722316301177 Displacement and other aspects of language are discussed.

Who needs Brawndo, when you can have Pussy in orbit ( https://www.amazon.com/Pussy-N... )? :-)

In any case, water, carbon, and electrolytes are available in the Chondrite type asteroids ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... ), so at most you would have to supply trace nutrients.

Heavy long range battery cars are worse than ICE on PM.
"Non-exhaust sources account for 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 from traffic."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
That is average, but if you take performance cars with excessive acceleration capability and soft tires, PM emissions are increasing drastically due to acceleration. It may get worse than some "clean diesel" economy car.

This research and its scary implications has been going on for quite some time, and ties to ultrafine particulates that are small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier (e.g., Calderon-Garcuidenas et al, 2008 - , and APA Monitor on Psychology 2012.

Just do a google scholar search for large hardon collider. None of them will ever live that down, doubly so when it's the title

Oh, don't be so hard on them.

Just do a google scholar search for large hardon collider. None of them will ever live that down, doubly so when it's the title

Personally I'm open to nuclear power, where it makes sense - and there are certainly sites where it makes the most sense. However I disagree that it's always the best alternative, and especially that any other option is "suicide".

For one, nuclear isn't as cheap as you seem to think. According to the EIA, (onshore) wind and solar PV both have significantly lower LCOE than nuclear, at $58.5 and $74.2 per MWh, vs $99.7 for nuclear. That's after accounting for their lower capacity factors, and before any tax credits. Wind and solar are cheaper to build, generally cheaper to maintain, and have zero ongoing fuel costs.

And while I agree that modern nuclear has a very low chance of dangerous failure, it's still non-zero, and you have to multiply that chance by the economic costs of consequences, which can be very high. Failure costs aren't factored in to the above numbers, but they can't be dismissed either. Despite that, I think nuclear should still be considered, particularly for more northern sites where solar is less effective and available wind may not be enough.

I'm guessing your objection to solar & wind is the "baseload" concern, where low capacity factors require alternate sources. This isn't a new issue for the energy industry (nothing has a 100% capacity factor), and is traditionally solved by distributing the load over multiple plants. A number of studies show that reliable power is certainly feasible with renewables too. For example, with widely-distributed wind farms, local variations can be spread out over the larger grid, and excess solar can be stored with pumped hydro (where available) or any of a number of commercially-available grid storage technologies, including reflow batteries (which can be easily scaled to almost any desired storage capacity). During the transition (which would likely take decades), existing gas turbines can help cover any shortfalls. I also note that geothermal plants are particularly interesting here, as not only do they have a capacity factor even better than nuclear's, they also have the cheapest LCOE of all.

All this talk of wobbles, but the real nut is here:

[the] high frequency spectrum that the FCC recently said it would open up for 5G purposes is all above 24 GHz.

Above 24 GHz is Ka band, now favored for deep space communication. It has one issue that the article doesn't mention - it is blocked by rain. Look for your 5G bandwidth to drop significantly in a downpour.

Reverse osmosis removes all PFASes [waterrf.org].

According to this publication RO removes 86% of PFAS. It also mentions that the rejected water has considerably higher concentration of PAFS. So anywhere that has a bottling plant with high concentrations is going to continually get worse as the rejected water is dumped into the sewer or directly back into the water table. Regardless it ends up back in the local water supply as standard filtration at sewage treatment plants isn't much help.

But what really matters is standard of living. Sure, they might make less money, but in the 1980s a cell phone cost thousands and barely worked, compared to what you can get for a few hundred bucks and $30 a month. Earning less money != worse life.

Both questionable and wrong.

Questionable: Has standard of living gone up? Sure cell phones are cheaper, but food quality tastes worse (e.g. banana blight destroying certain bananas previously enjoyed by generations, commentary about how early fruit picking leads to worse fruits you hear about all the time around here). It depends on how you measure "quality of life."

What happens if you measure it in terms of "number of hours worked outside the home," and think at both men's work hours and women's working hours? What happens if you measure it in terms of "time of TV programming vs time spent on commercials?" These may or may not be the correct measure to use, but simply saying "cell phones/computers/TVs/etc are cheaper, life is better" is not fair.

Wrong: There is increasing academic research and proof that relative affluence matters as much, or more, than absolute affluence. One such example.

Consider the following two situations.
1) You are only person with a 24" color TV with everybody else having 12" black and white.
2) You have a 42" HDTV, while everybody else in the neighborhood had a 56" one.

I don't know about you, but I know which situation would make me feel more smug and happy. This becomes even more true if nobody knows anything better than a 24" color TV exists, and I think I have the best there is. Sure it's irrational, but humans aren't always rational.

So even if "the average standard of living" has gone up, if the rich get literally exponentially richer and the middle/poor haven't had a pay raise since 1980, then I'd say they have a "worse life" on a relative scale even if it is better on an absolute scale.

Venus is tidally locked to the Sun, and it rotates the opposite direction of all the other planets. Theory is a major impact did this; so that puts comparing it's tilt to Earth and Mars non-comparative. And there is considerable theories that radioactive decay is not enough to explain the total core heat; both radioactive decay AND tidal frictional forces add together. And there is a large difference between "million or billion"; current estimates are that our core won't cool off until long after the Sun is a white dwarf. The axial tilt idea has been verified by hundreds of computer simulations and has been known about for at least few decades now. The core frictional dynamics is far more contested, though.

And their not "statements", but links to sites. If you have a spare $39.99 you can go read the actual paper. Like I said, this is still controversial and even the paper says "we suggest" and "we propose". But as for the axial tilt, even NASA agrees. So, you should show your math and argue with them and not me.

Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.

The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.

% recovery depends on what your denominator is. if you include the folks who die, then that obviously reduces the percentage who regain full function. if you use the patients who recover as your denominator, the incidence of permanent cognitive defects is more like 30%. http://annals.org/article.aspx... http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... and is related to how quickly you get treatment, which is where this app comes in.

the interpretations of QM-influenced infinite universe models. (modified QRE-based. One example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... )

My own personal interpretation of the model is that gravitational thinning between galactic clusters can encourage energetic decay (as-in particle decay) in thin regions between galaxies in order to create new galaxies. Once enough hydrogen has formed to create new stellar mega-nurseries stars form rapidly in proximity, drawing in more void-hydrogen and thus creating more stars. Of course this is purely mathematical since we would be unable to see these extra-galactic nurseries with any current technology.

Of course, I don't buy into Dark Energy or Dark Matter as invented by big-bang cosmologists. Let's face that simple reality right off, BBCs just invented the idea when required by their model breaking under observation by the Hubble telescope. A small modification of the QRE to account for ultra-low mass in neutrinos and photons allows for a higher probability of decay into a stable isotope of hydrogen when gravity and mass are worked in as order-of-magnitude vectors causative to quantum field interactions.

DISCLAIMER: Most of this stuff isn't anywhere near solid enough for publication. I'm no math genus, just barely smart enough to putz about with my own models.

See the Science Direct link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

FTA: "Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic." http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

Over time batteries will get smaller, lighter, and more efficient. So weight on an electric car is not fixed versus on a conventional car.

I could not read the Elsevier (almost synonymous for low impact factor) article, since it's behind a paywall. So I could not see whether the authors had declared conflict of interest in the acknowledgements section of the paper, or by what money the study was funded.

However, I did find the following: Peter A.J. Achten works at INNAS BV, Breda, the Netherlands, a company that manufactures hydraulic systems for hybrids and fuel-efficient cars and free-piston diesel engines.

Let's do some quick calculations.

A standard modern 3MW wind turbine will deliver 6,6 million kWh per year. A turbine has an average lifespan of 20 years, so let's assume 132 million kWh total power produced for a steel wind turbine. That alone should tell you how unlikely it is that your statement is true.

This link http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... tells us that the energy cost for producing rolled steel is 1095 kWh per ton. If we round this to 2000 kWh per ton for a worst-case estimate it means that we need to use 66000 tons of steel for the tower in order to have it come out worse than the original energy cost.

For a comparison, the Burj Al Khalifa skyscraper uses 55000 tonnes of rebar for its entire structure.

You are making a great many unsupported assertions.

They are quite supported; you're simply ignorant of basic facts.

What are these mysterious increased regulations?

Nothing mysterious about it. The size of the Federal Register is a good indicator; there are many other indicators. You have to be living in a fantasy land not to recognize the massive increase in regulations over the last few decades.

Why are the results similar between locations that recently increased the minimum wage and those that didn't?

Minimum wage increases only affect that part of the population that naturally earns less than the minimum wage, usually only a small fraction of the population. When you look at the right populations, the effect is clear.

Your job growth figures don't mean much to economic well being when many of the added jobs don't meet the cost of living and many more don't pay what the jobs that disappeared in the crash did. It's just so much whistling past the graveyard.

Yes, and that economic graveyard is being created by the same people who keep complaining about automation, and jobs being shipped out of the country, and inequality, and the poor economy, and whose solution is more government interference in markets. It's a positive feedback loop of economic destruction, and it has killed democracies before.

Republicans are racist, hateful, simple-minded people who can't sympathize with others. Science has proven this.

Fine - here is the response to Tol, claiming his "rebuttal" contains a basic error itself. Have you read that one? Who do you believe now? Why?

All this shows is that disagreement exists, which we already knew. You can choose to believe one side or the other, whichever fits your existing beliefs, but without expert domain knowledge of your own you can't really judge for certain. But the findings of Cook's paper are corroborated by five other papers, and endorsed by rather more than a single dissenting researcher, so that does tilt the balance somewhat.

And that's the whole point of consensus - when 9 out of 10 doctors of physics agree, it's probably the best available advice for laymen to act on. If more evidence arrives to change the consensus, fine, but it's not wise to delay vital action saying "but it *could* change in the future!", particularly when the consensus has only gotten stronger in the last 10 years.

Here's the article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

Yeah, how dare I say something that contradicts a US government agency, eh?

Maybe you should ask NASA why they would endorse such a terrible study. It should be blatantly obvious to anyone who took a high school science course:

To review, in their paper, they described their method as: "Abstracts were randomly distributed via a web-based system to raters with only the title and abstract visible. All other information such as author names and affiliations, journal and publishing date were hidden. Each abstract was categorized by two independent, anonymized raters."

All three substantive features of their method are false. Raters were not blind to authors (or any of the other info.) Raters were not independent. Raters were not anonymized.

They falsely described their methods. That is a very, very serious thing. There is no science without an accurate description of methods, and this paper, like all papers, was published on the assumption that they followed the methods they described.

Normally the way science works, that's the end. Nothing else needs to be done by anyone. There are no results to evaluate if they didn't follow their methods. Why? Because valid results critically depended on those methods, and when people don't follow their stated methods, we don't know what they did and thus can't rely on the results. Climate science, or its journals, can't be an exception to this basic norm and epistemic requirement of valid science. Why would they be an exception? (This has nothing to do with the truth of AGW or the reality of a consensus -- this is about a fraudulent and invalid study.) (from http://www.joseduarte.com/blog... )

And of course Richard Tol is not to be trusted, even though he apparently agrees with the *result* and is criticizing the method...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

How dare he disagree with the experts in the US government!

Again, you meant to accuse me and NASA [nasa.gov] of apparently not being able to tell how bad a study is.

Apparently not. How bad does this paper have to be before you or NASA criticize it? You might as well have papers that rely on tarot readings - as long as they get the magic 97% result I doubt you or your ilk would complain.

Here's a peer reviewed critique from Richard Tol: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

The little graph you keep posting from their activist blog shows their paper got it wrong 62% of the time?? Is that supposed to be a defense??

As to the Curry post, I said it was "a much better discussion on consensus" than what you were providing. If you want to read into it that's your business. However, I will point out that 67% is not a consensus.

But I'm more interested in the quality of the paper making this 97% claim. Unfortunately it seems global warming activists, scientists, and even NASA (!) will endorse really, really bad papers as long as they produce the 'correct' results. It's a travesty.

not seeing the logistics of a bad guys making your scary "dirty bomb". They are going to get something nasty like say spent nuclear fuel or cesium-137 or strontium-90 ( very traceable as to origin, by the way), then somehow powder that stuff without dying from five or more times lethal dose exposure, then put it in suitcase sufficiently shielded so they don't die transporting it somewhere yet somehow still having enough room for bomb....and then even after detonation it's a very local problem for a very small area. This is why serious studies pooh-pooh the whole concept, like

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

For further reading - rapists enjoy consensual sex more than rape sex, and they enjoy violent rape sex the least. So much for power theories.

Even rapists say it was about sex, not power. Rapists rape for sex, same as bank robbers rob banks for money. Neither does it for power.

A solution for electronics/neuron interface has been around for several years. I know one of the scientists involved, and yes, the research was at least partially funded by DARPA. As I recall, the emphasis was on restoring function to combat-wounded soldiers with brain injury. . .

In fact from the paper (subscription probably required) the efficiency of this cell is about 2.3%, about 1/10 that of conventional silicon solar cells - so per unit area you're much better off with silicon. The watts per gram metric is more about them showing that very little material is needed for this cell which is a component towards achieving low cost.

The idea of this work is that organic cells in principle might be able to become cheaper per unit area than silicon solar cells (they will need to be much cheaper to account for the lower efficiency), and can be laminated onto curved surface and thus integrated more easily into products and more locations. Remains to be seen if that will happen and I'm not familiar enough with organic solar cells to say. And the reliability over time and environmental factors will need to be proven out.

And just to add to all other afflictions plaguing theses Olympics, a reminder that Brazilian beaches have above average (natural) radioactivity (ScienceDirect.com). I think the only thing missing is the announcement of a imminent meteor shower on Rio.

Only because the government has deemed it so. If the government would actually do its job and issue licenses for nuclear power plants then it might not be so expensive.

False. Setting aside the fact that you have no way to demonstrate that the high cost is in any way related to the number of plants being built, the US government has actually been trying to encourage development of civilian nuclear power for the past few decades;

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

If licenses are being withheld it's because of technical and economic deficiencies, not malice.

As opposed to what?

As opposed to renewable alternatives. The elephant in the room is the waste these plants produce, which nobody wants to take responsibility for and we have no reliable way of dealing with. Beyond that, the environmental damage done during the mining and refining of the fuel is often overlooked, as is the immediate local impact of having such a large plant in one location due to thermal pollution.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

I recognize nuclear power as an important component of a sustainable and environmentally conscious future, but it has more than it's fair share of problems that many people are too willing to overlook.

The reason the wall warts are considered inefficient is because they were made cheaper than a more efficient model.

No, the reason wall warts are considered inefficient is because they generally ARE inefficient. Older transformer based units are likely under 50%, while quality switchmode units probably get into the 80% range. That's pretty terrible. Depending on their design they might have horrible power factors, too.

I find your faith in government disturbing. More government is not the solution to every problem.

Neither is deregulation. Of course, if roughly half of the country's population wasn't actively trying to sabotage the government it might actually have a chance to do it s job properly...
=Smidge=

"The article has about as much science as the Discovery channel"

Indeed

Enhance, delete, incept: Manipulating hippocampus-dependent memories : "whether science is able to one day “catch up” to science fiction remains to be seen"

From: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...