Slashdot Mirror

If you read the abstract of the article then it states that the tasks presented to the subjects where -"tasks requiring social cognition, i.e., reasoning about the mental states of other persons, and tasks requiring physical cognition, i.e., reasoning about the causal/mechanical properties of inanimate objects". Social reasoning does not equal empathy. Empathy requires one to share and understand others feelings while social reasoning is something a sociopath could do.

Doing controlled studies of the effects of parental neglect in humans would require a horribly un-ethical study, but the findings in controlled studies of rats and monkeys have been consistent. Leaving your baby stuck in a crib all day until it forgets how to cry for help is not something you want to do.

The Flynn effect is cross-cultural though, not just the United States, but essentially global. That's not consistent with the US increased emphasis on test taking. See for example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604000522, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886905000711 for Norway and Australia as two example countries. Moreover, if this were caused by increased emphasis on test-taking you'd expect to see the entire bell-curve move up whereas most of the movement is on the lower end. Moreover, if testing were what mattered then the US military would have seen a decreased usefulness in IQ testing as an estimate for whether people will make good soldiers, and yet they haven't seen any decline in usefulness of the ASVAB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery.

The Flynn effect is cross-cultural though, not just the United States, but essentially global. That's not consistent with the US increased emphasis on test taking. See for example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604000522, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886905000711 for Norway and Australia as two example countries. Moreover, if this were caused by increased emphasis on test-taking you'd expect to see the entire bell-curve move up whereas most of the movement is on the lower end. Moreover, if testing were what mattered then the US military would have seen a decreased usefulness in IQ testing as an estimate for whether people will make good soldiers, and yet they haven't seen any decline in usefulness of the ASVAB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery.

Many researchers disagree with Flynn about the cause of the Flynn effect. Two other common hypotheses are that lower parasite load in children leads to better functioning brains and older people will have bodies under less stress. Better nutrition does essentially the same thing. There's a fair bit of evidence for these hypotheses. For example, if nutrition levels matter then one would expect a lot more movement on the low end of IQ than on the high end and that's exactly what we see. http://synapse.princeton.edu/~brained/chapter15/colom_andres-pueyo05_intelligence_Spanish-schoolchildren-nutrition-hypothesis.pdf. Meanwhile, a good case for the parasite load hypothesis can be found http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611000286.

Wrong.
  http://www.comppsychjournal.com/article/S0010-440X(01)66889-5/abstract
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6T4S-4T5S4KJ-3/2/b0bdb571fc6e91f190ced29fe12dd7b7
  http://www.annfammed.org/content/8/3/206.short

There are plenty more. Educate yourself before making blanket statements.

If we started feeding fish on pig feces...

If? I refer you to these 1979 paper which documents how this has been done for centuries...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/014146077990012X

The Laffer Curve is real. The debate is about where we are on that curve. All the Laffer Curve theory states is that with 0% tax there is no revenue. At 100% tax, there is also no revenue (since no one will work). Therefore, there must be a maximum revenue tax rate.

Bullshit: It is shown that, in a general equilibrium model with one private good, one public good, labour and an income tax, certain widely-assumed properties of the Laffer curve do not necessarily hold. For well-behaved functional forms it may not be continuous and may not have an interior maximum. Its slope depends on technology as well as on the tax elasticity of labour supply. For certain technologies, a more negative elasticity may imply a more positive slope. Moreover, the relevant tax elasticity is a general equilibrium one which may differ in sign from the widely- quoted partial equilibrium one.

There's no presumably about it. When White Men Can't Do Math, Stereotype threat and the intellectual performance of African Americans (and pdf). Stereotype threat and the academic underperformance of minorities and women.

You can put anyone down, make them feel bad, and make them less than they are. And then we all lose what they could be contributing.

• American Cancer Society
• CDC
• Surgeon General's Office
• Zhu et al. "Secondhandsmoke stimulates tumor angiogenesis and growth" Cancer Cell (2003)

That's a logical fallacy, just because your helmet broke does NOT mean your head would have. The helmet is, ofcourse, larger than the head, meaning things that wouldn't have touched the head, will still hit the helmet. Reflex actions that instinctively protect the head are hampered by the helmet, twisting forces can actually be made worse by a helmet.

Then there's the whole subconscious "I feel safe so I can act more dangerously" aspect, car drivers perceiving you as safe so give you less room, and the tragic cases of children strangled by their cycle helmets [92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103]

Cyclists should wear helmets because it can save their life if hit by a car, not to stop a bruise when they fall over at traffic lights because their fancy shoes didn't unclip.

Actually, helmets will protect against bruises or cranial fracture, but not against concussions. The problem with concussions is that they are caused by rotational movements (which cause shear) of the head, and a hit perpendicular to the cranium, while painful, won't cause brain-cell damage, or at least, the damage will be much lesser to none.

Good meta-studies (i.e. a study which systematically searches the literature for primary research on a topic, and then aggregates the results - in order to cancel out biases) suggest there is no significant overall injury/death mitigation benefit to cyclists from wearing helmets. There is a benefit in terms of head trauma, however it appears to be cancelled out by increases in other trauma. See: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000145751100008X (and unfortunately, you need to pay to read the full text or have access to a university subscription, but you can see the blob-charts for free).

There have been attempts to smelt metals in space, and in fact such efforts may even be beneficial for terrestrial applications. So successful that it may even be possible to suggest an economic role for shipping ores and elemental feed stocks from the Earth into orbit, perform the smelting and manufacturing in space, and then shipping finished products back to the Earth again for use here.

That you might be able to extract those elements in space even cheaper than you can ship them up from the surface of the Earth seems to be icing on the cake. Certainly whole new classes of materials are likely going to be created in space simply because a major factor that influences all manufacturing process here on the Earth will be removed.

As far as finding materials and devices that can work in space, of course it is something that takes time to discover and to work out all of the issues. It should be pointed out that we as a species has been working and doing stuff in space for more than 50 years, and that materials as well as equipment to be working in space has been developed. This isn't even really new technology in a great many cases.

The largest problem seems to be simply somebody having the will to go up and bother trying. Luckily there are several different companies who are willing to put up or shut up on the prospect as well. They are putting their money where their mouth is at and really try. I would even dare to suggest that other companies are going to show up eventually with this emerging industrial sector.

The largest problem they are facing right now is that these places in space are on the frontier of human endeavors. This means they are still trying to design the tools which make the tools producing the tools needed for those environments. Those working toward developing the resources in space still need to design the things that are the equivalent of the machine screw, lathe, and drill press that are so necessary for making so many other kinds of tools and being able to harvest resources in an extra-terrestrial setting.

Still, I agree with your basic premise that the best way to open up the Solar System and get humanity out there is to simply turn people loose and to let them try thousands or even millions of different ideas and let the successful ideas come forward as well as forget the millions of mistakes that didn't work. Trying to force everything through some sort of committee who is going to make a grand plan for how everything will work and get clearance before even acting is real silly.

Then again, for some time I've suggested that CNN will cover NASA astronauts landing on Mars for the first time by having one of their reporters on site filming the landing and interviewing the astronauts when they arrive.

Furthermore, they observe the same health effects in the roundup group, the GM corn group, and the GM+R (both) group, AND these effects are not dose-dependent. Combine this with the small sample size, and the fact they're using a tumor-prone rat breed, you have a paper that's going to be crucified by peer review.

This article was peer reviewed and published.

Again, here is the PRIMARY ARTICLE that the articles reference:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637

I'd like to point out the Herald Article is a press release written by the "Sustainable Food Trust"- which is an organic foods movement group:
http://www.sustainablefoodtrust.org/

So, let's assume the Press Release is fairly biased and that those that wrote it have modest scientific literacy.

On to the paper!

Compressing the whole thing into a few digestible sentences isn't doing anyone favors, but that's what I'll try to do. I'd encourage people to read the actual article.
I think the idea of growing corn, spraying it, and feeding animals diets consisting of 11, 22, and 33% of that corn is gimmicky. If the hypothesis is: "Round-up is cytotoxic and carcinogenic at currently consumed levels" then you feed them controlled doses of Round-up and an identical balanced diet - which they did in addition to the silly corn experiments, which don't account for the difference in nutrient intake over 2 years.

So anyhow, I think that part of the study is uncontrolled. They also looked at "200 rats", but broken into 10 rats / group, where group is feed-type and sex split. So for any given treatment they only have 10 rats to gain statistics on, which anyone with a relative statistical background can tell you is insufficient for any analysis if your control group is also presenting with effects (untreated rats died and acquired tumors during the study). Also if you look REAL CLOSE you'll realize that they only actually tested 10 rats of each sex for the "no treatment" subgroup. It's the same "0" treatment data on each graph. So in total they looked at 20 rats for the null treatment to compare to 180 rats of various other treatment types. Bummer.

So if we discount that any given dose-set is the sum of 10 animals of the same sex, and want to get anything out of this study, we want to look at the animals fed water laced with Round-Up. That's where the data is useful. So let's look at that.

Group A: Water + .00000001% Round-Up [amount found in some tap waters]
Group B: Water + .09% Round-Up [amount found in some US feed]
Group C: Water + .5% Round-Up [working dilution used to spray crops directly]


I'm not crazy about the idea of feeding animals straight from the crop-duster dilutions for two years to prove a point (group C), but I see where they're going with A and B. I'm not sure that Group C has any real-world relevance, unless some farmer is getting really thirsty out in the field. Also, this brings me to an aside regarding controls. Untreated is great, but positive and negative controls are also informative. I imagine feeding rats Water + 0.5% mineral oil for 2 years would cause oncogenic phenotypes. The best experiment would have been to feed mice known environmental carcinogens or inert substances at the same doses and compared the relative carcinogenic index of Round-Up.

For males there's no real effect. Straight off the plane pesticide for two years caused metastasis in 1-2 rats. Not sure what the spontaneous metastasis rate in these rats is, would need more untreated control mice to know if that's even relevant. Something odd to note. Figure 1 shows 1 rat in Group A needing to be put down due to huge tumor growth, but in Figure 2 none of the Group A mice were documented as acquiring anything apart from small internal tumors. So there's a data disconnect there.

The female rats are weird. Even untreated rats acquired tumors so large they had to be put down before the 2 year period was up. This isn't exactly the "control" group I'd want to use to prove carcinogenicity of a substance. Even so, there's no real difference between trace amounts of Round-Up and 100,000x that amount, some metastasis in the

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637
From what I can tell in the first graph, the results are pretty sketchy. There are just 10 male rats and 10 female rats per group. There are 10 groups with different levels of exposure, but the margin of error seems pretty large. I'm no expert in statistics, but the male control group has 3 deaths before 600 days (out of 10 rats), so +- 2 deaths is statistically insignificant. The 33% GMO male group has less mortality than the control, while the 11% GMO group has much more. That sounds like a fluke to me.

Here's the link for the article. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637

I'm fairly underwhelmed with it. First is the issue you mention of "how many negative results did he not publish?" that is rather insidious. Then there's all the issues that come from his small data set size, and the fact that he did not use large portions of his actual data. And can't be bothered to report it. Or provide it. But it just wasn't useful data, for reasons not explained. I wouldn't accuse the authors of misconduct (no doubt the authors believe their ms is true), but the practices described is definitely a great way to get a false positive. Briefly skimming the interwebs show other people have some statistical issues with this too. http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/gm_maize_causes_tumors_rats_here_how_experts_responded-94259

Sadly, only "GM crops evil!" will get reported, because it plays into a social narrative. Not "shitty stats continues to be shitty!"

IANAV but like everyone else on /. I sometimes indulge in armchair quarterbacking... The simple answer is that Japanese science and engineering--which is incomparable on the subjects of seismology and volcanology--isn't up to the task. Japanese scientists suspect that there are at least two magma chambers. A deeper one at around 20km and a shallower one around 8 or 9km. They're still talking about suspicions of what the magma system looks like. Even if you could overcome the engineering hurdles of drilling a hole into the magma system that doesn't seal itself back up right away or worse be faced with the opposite problem and piercing the system would cause it to pop like a balloon you still need to know where to drill. That answer is probably not magma chamber(s) itself anyway.

You are aware that GCMs distribution predictions are completely unreliable, right?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0921818192900142

"Current climate change experiments, however, are limited by the inability of the models to produce accurate simulations of the regional climate."

Perhaps you have a GCM regional prediction from say, a 1990 model for 2012 actuals that you'd like to cite as being particularly accurate? Heck, maybe you have a cite for a 2010 model that predicted 2012 regional actuals accurately?

{/crickets}

They telephone interviewed the same 4000 women once a year for 3 years (By the third year, only 3000 of the original 4000 women were still participating. During these interviews 404 incidents of rape were reported with 20 incidents of pregnancy due to the rape, which gives 5%. The numbers used in this paper had nothing to do with the number of reported rapes in the United States, or the expected number of unreported rapes, or number of pregnancies. The data used in this paper comes directly from the telephone interviews.

What I found most interesting is how they defined rape: "Within the interview, sexual assault (”rape”) was defined as nonconsensual assault with force or threat of force and some type of sexual penetration of the victim's vagina, rectum, or mouth."

Of course, this is the standard accepted definition, but I would think that when considering the rate of pregnancy due to rape, only vaginal rape would be considered. Obviously oral rape does not produce pregnancies at a rate of 5%, or any % greater than 0. This implies that the rate of vaginal rape is actually higher than 5%.

This is the actual article. I don't know if I can see it because I'm on a university campus at the moment, but the summary only points to the abstract.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002937896701412

Not a big surprise considering development of pesticide resistance has been going on for a very long time. In fact since the evolution of insects in the first place. About 400 million years ago.

Plants themselves evolved natural pesticides such as various phenolics to protect themselves from the insects; in fact some of the most widely used insecticides are plant derivatives like pyrethins.

Of course insects evolved in response to these, and the war was on.

Resistance to man made insecticides was first noted in science literature about 100 years ago.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0048357584900877

Rodale's article is blissfully missing any sort of context; not too surprising since they are pushing an agenda.

IQ is basically a novelty in today's society, it doesn't give that much of an advantage.

IQ is correlated highly with income. Each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year.

Indeed I can.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312002341...

Thank you! That's an excellent counter-argument.

A quick look at the linked paper shows that they have covered all the bases - temperature, pressure, background radiation, radon, and so on. Their analysis appears to be spot-on, but at the same time I hope that they continue the experiment in order to really pound the last nail in the coffin.

From that same article:

Some of the measurements and analysis conrm the existence of oscillations [6, 7] whereas others contradict this hypothesis [8, 9, 10].

Note that this paper is fairly recent (published at the end of March) and is only one such paper which notes the caveats mentioned in the quote above. If we are keeping score, then there are 2 papers which see correlations and 4 which do not.

I am now cautiously optimistic about the [lack of] results, but in light of the recent findings by Jere Jenkins et al and the fact that other studies appear to find similar correlations, it might be good to actually identify the source of systemic error.

If for no better reason than to document the source of the problem to allow for better measurements in the future.

One of the references from that preprint is particularly enlightening:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969804397100823

They measured radon decay (which dispenses with the explanation that not all isotopes are the same) over twenty years. They saw a seasonal variation, just like Jenkins does. But when they measured the ratio of radon decay with europium decay, the variation went away. It turned out their detector also had a seasonal variation.

The paper cited in the summary shows they do have a seasonal variation in line voltage to their experimental apparatus. They hand wave that away, but if there's that much variation in something as simple as the power supply to their instruments, what else might they not be controlling?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312002341

from the article itself.

It looks very much like an experimental error. The fact they didn't use a multichannel analyser to look at the energy of the signal makes it very hard to exclude background signal (like from the sun, a massive radiation source).

They didn't even use much of a lead shield - 5mm, which is hardly anything for higher energy photons.

Placebos and nocebos have only EVER been shown to affect SUBJECTIVE factors.

Not true.

Placebos can affect healing of duodenal ulcers:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/649462?uid=3737496&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21100974892383
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2014313/

Naloxone can block the effects of pain-reduction placebos in some cases.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/45/10390.full

The mind affects the body in many ways.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159112001936

Sorry, there were 2 North Sea references from the same research group, that was the earlier one, here is the later one:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969702000645

Hey, I'm just quoting the paper. These amounts are referenced from other papers, which may have been using different techniques for measuring the concentrations.
Here's the North Sea one: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021967301005295
Here's the Mediterranean: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es020125z
Here's Hawaii: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X10001839

Hey, I'm just quoting the paper. These amounts are referenced from other papers, which may have been using different techniques for measuring the concentrations.
Here's the North Sea one: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021967301005295
Here's the Mediterranean: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es020125z
Here's Hawaii: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X10001839

Neither the summary nor the linked article said the amounts, but they are listed in the original paper. In the ocean, they found 44.7 ng/L. "Caffeine concentrations in rivers and estuaries draining to the coast measured up to 152.2 ng/L." For those who like their numbers in ppm, I believe that's .0447 ppm and .1522 ppm, respectively. Sometimes I fail at math, though.

See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.

Thanks!

See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.

BAS push a similar argument that Vattenfall does. If you were to look at the IPCC 4th assessment report, working group 3, chapter 4 "Energy Supply" (In particular 4.3.2 pp. 269-270 "Nuclear Power", and also the summary graph Figure 4.19 on page 283, which compares the lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit energy of different primary source) you would find the conclusions reached in that chapter are based on Vattenfall and they build nuclear power plants so it's not surprising the results favor nuclear power. Whilst they are the best run nuclear reactors in the world and an example of what a *baseline* nuclear program should look like, U.S reactors fall dreadfully short.

The work of Vattenfall *and* Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, upon which that chapter cites as references, both use the same method to calculate energy consumption funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and are used in 80 odd industry sectors. The exceptionally detailed work of Dr Phillip Smith, Nuclear Physicist and Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (MSc) (Stormsmith.nl), who both work in the nuclear industry and have specialisation on energy system analysis, is mostly ignored in the IPCC report. They have no vested interest in the outcome whilst Vattenfall does.

Their criticisms of Vattenfall include "Process analysis leads to a large underestimation of the total construction energy requirements when labor and supporting activities of the construction are not included".

When considering the energy density of the enriched uranium isotope you find that Pressure Water Reactors use 0.3% of the available energy density. This brings us back to Storm van Leeuwen and Smith whose analysis was to asses the Net Energy Return of the Nuclear industry.

For example, for the expected 300TWh's output of a new AP-1000 (low side Vattenfall, high side Storm/Smith) energetic estimates for construction of a nuclear power plant is somewhere between 11TWh and 35TWh, energy cost for demolition around 55TWh to 70TWh, that's around a third before you start. Yet you still have to factor dismantling and clean up of the core alone 5.6TWh's - 16TWh's. They talk in Peta-joules but I've done the conversions to put it in a frame of reference that will be easier to understand.

Using a conservative energy expenditure of 1528Kwh per ton of rock (containing Uranium) you have to process 500 tons of rock, that's 763500Kwh's, to produce one kilo of Uranium. Assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assuming you have a high grade ore that's roughly 763Gwh's per ton and you need 160tons for your first core. Even before enrichment you've consumed over 100TWhs without a 1/3 core refuel every ten years for forty and we haven't even factored energetic costs of a spent fuel containment facility or the logistics of moving spent fuel safely.

I'm not saying we shouldn't develop nuclear power plants as I think this is an essential step to dealing with Pu-239 and U-238 - but that's another conversation (also touched on by the IPCC in that chapter). The peer-reviewed data based on scientific approach to energy use calculation shows the energetic returns for PWR in this Nuclear Industry do not exist no matter how much carbon they displace and all that is happening is the IPCC is trading one externality (Carbon Dioxide) for another (Radioactive isotopes).

This is the reality anyone will uncover if you explore the subject of Nuclear Power.

The problem with the Nuclear power debate is that it is so polarised. As soon as you talk about solving it's problems your labeled as 'anti-nuclear' by the 'pro-nuclear' people for mentioning the problems and labeled as 'pro-nuclear' by the 'anti-nuclear' people for actually talking about a solution. Either way there seems to be little room for the responsible nuclear advocacy required to move the industry forward.

Your answer is very utilitarian. What's going to be the penalty for breaking the rules and having an unauthorized child? What about two unauthorized children, or three? Speaking of utilitarian thought, here's the abstract from a recent paper on the subject (the full version is paywalled, here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711001351) ---> "Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral."

Do you have links to anything that documents Jupiter and Venus being out of chemical equilibria? I searched for a while, but couldn't find much more than a few lines, and I'd be very interested to know more.

For Venus, you have to look at the Soviet literature, as they did most of the exploration, and much of that is not on-line. See, e.g., Volkov, 1991. There is an interesting "tri-modal" distribution of cloud droplet diameters, and Iron, Phosphorus, Sulphur and Chorline have all been detected at altitude.

For Jupiter, look at any of the color images returned by spacecraft. All those different colors are different materials, probably polysufides, although AFAIK there is no consensus as to exactly which material makes each color. Whatever makes the colors, it must be operational on a grand scale, as the colors are consistent over at least a century, and the residence times in the visible layers of the atmosphere are much shorter than that. Perhaps the best evidence is the change in the color of Oval BA, where in less than a year a storm complex the size of the Earth significantly reddened with nothing else apparently changing. The authors of the above paper postulate an unobservable change in global temperature but, who knows, maybe there is a biosystem that thrives in and colonizes the large storms, and the reddening is byproduct of that. That at least has the advantage of being testable (by seeing if the reddening is a general, but delayed, feature of new mega storm systems).

Now, none of this is proof of anything biological on Jupiter, but if you want to take the opposite viewpoint, the Jupiter biosphere could be immense (comparable to or larger than the mass of the Earth), and still be consistent with our available data. For Venus, a biosphere could be a remnant from the age before the run-away Greenhouse, and could easily be comparable in mass to the maximum biosphere that currently could be active on Mars. Neither has gotten much spacecraft attention; I guess bugs in the air aren't as sexy as bugs in the permafrost.

A classic problem with fuel cells is extreme intolerance to contaminants. Even trace amounts of contaminants tend to damage fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells need cleaner hydrogen than is normally available commercially. Research continues on making fuel cells more tolerant of contaminants, but it's hard. Fuel cells are surface chemistry systems. 40 years of research hasn't solved this problem.

Reverse osmosis water purification systems once had the same problem. Today they routinely take in raw seawater and pump out clear water. They just need a backflush cycle once in a while to flush the crud off the membranes. Fuel cells aren't there yet.

Fair enough - and I certainly support your skeptical point of view. One would be remiss to NOT fact check.

That said, I consider my point of view on Monsanto to be informed. You may or may not choose to agree - but there are certain points which are troubling for me.

To answer your quotes, I've tried to use neutral news - but I admit that some of these sources are biased.

That's amazing to me. BP fucks the ocean, and Haliburton makes money disappear for a war, and the guys who sell this [nature.com] are the evil ones.

Corporate evil is nothing new - my first exposure was the Bhopal disaster.
Concerning BT Cotton - well - that rosy success is turning out to be a washout. The Maharashta government has had to bailout the cotton industry, and studies are showing that BT Cotton is depleting the soil of minerals (Roundup chelates minerals, making them metabolically unavailable for some period of time).
http://digitaljournal.com/article/321958

Ah, that explains why they are selling the insecticide reducing Bt crops in the above link.

In fact Monsanto said themselves that BT cotton has failed in India for bollworm protection.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/Bt+cotton+has+failed+admits+Monsanto/1/86939.html

And also the usage of pesticide in Indian BT cotton has returned to normal levels after the initial lowering.
http://indiagminfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Bt-Cotton-False-Hype-and-Failed-Promises-Final.pdf
(see section CONSUMPTION OF PESTICIDES IN VARIOUS STATES DURING THE LAST FIVE YEARS 2005-06 to 2009-10 )
http://ppqs.gov.in/IpmPesticides.htm

How so? Let me guess, 'superweeds' and 'superpests'? Please, resistance breakdown and herbicide resistance are nothing new, are more cultivation issues than crop issues (particularly the resistant pests) and worst case scenario is you lose the benefits already provided.

Yes - those are problems, but problems that are solvable with traditional cultivation. My main concern with Roundup is the reduction in essential and rare minerals in foodcrop, thus requiring remediation and supplements. I'm concerned that there may be long-term effects in human and animal health.
http://www.agweb.com/assets/import/files/58P20-22.pdf

I also think that the most important research performed by Princeton's Dr. Huber deserves scientific evaluation. He is a true expert and has made some striking claims on the danger of Roundup-ready crops. Perhaps this is somewhat biased, but his resume is certainly impeccable.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1161030109000628
And an overview of Dr. Huber's presentation
http://www.greenpasture.org/fermented-cod-liver-oil-butter-oil-vitamin-d-vitamin-a/dr-huber-and-the-impact-of-glyphosate-in-the-food-chain/
And Monsanto's rebuttal:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/huber-pathogen-roundup-ready-crops.aspx

That must be why farmers willingly buy them, why farmers in developing countries wait in lines to get their bag of GE seed.

There are plenty of good GE seeds!! I think there are specific problems with some glyphosate-ready crops and neonicotinoid-treated seeds (which are being linked to CCD in bees). That said

Let's have a look at the numbers.

Having heard that road wear is proportional to the fifth power of axle weight, I thought I would see what wear proportion that works out as, given that there are presumably more cars than trucks, and the differing mileages of these types of vehicle. As I write this, I have not done the final calculation. I will use a couple of papers and some government statistics.

Looking at a couple of papers (The economic and environmental benefits of increasing maximum truck weight: the British experience, Alan C. McKinnon, 2005. The cost of relying on the wrong power—road wear and the importance of the fourth power rule (TP446), Richard Johnsson, 2004, Impacts of Increased Goods Vehicle Weight Limits - A European Case Study, Proceedings of Fourth International Symposium on Heavy Vehicle Weights and Dimensions, 1995, the exact proportion of axle weight to road wear varies depending on factors including road surface type, anywhere from 3rd or 4th power of axle weight, all the way up to the 9th power. I chose 4 as a lowish-average.

Taking a Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) weight of 15 tons and an average of 4 axles (HGV maximum weights: a brief guide gives a maximum for HGVs of 44 tons over 6 axles, and I don't have a good source, but the minimum to count as a HGV is 7.5 tons, presumably with 2 axles), this gives 3.75 tons/axle. For cars I assumed 1.5 tons and two axles; 0.75 tons per axle. The ratio of these figures is 5. 5^4 = 625 times as much road wear per axle.

Traffic statistics are in vehicle-kilometres, so to use these we need to multiply this back up by the number of axles per vehicle. 4 for trucks and 2 for cars gives 625*(4/2) = 1250 times as much road wear per vehicle per kilometre.

Keeping with the euro theme, I got transport statistics from the UK department for transport. 240 billion miles driven in the UK in 2011 by cars/taxis, heavy goods vehicles 16.4 billion. 240/16.4 = 14.63 times as many miles driven by cars, compared to heavy goods vehicles (I have deliberately left out 'vans', or other vehicles that carry smaller loads than the HGVs that my axle weights are for). So now we have 1250 times as much road wear per vehicle for HGVs, divided by 14.63 as the ratio of cars-HGVs, gives 85.4 times as much road wear by HGVs. Take the reciprocal and subtract from 1 to get that as a proportion, 0.988, or 98.9%.

Wow, I really didn't expect to get so close to the GP's guess. My estimate for axle weight for HGVs I think is low if anything; I could easily have gone for 20 tons over 4 axles, which would have given 99.6%. I have also assumed that HGV weight is evenly spread over the axles; it strikes me that the rear axles will carry more weight, and so since the road wear varies with the 4th power of this, the real figure is probably higher.

Let's have a look at the numbers.

Having heard that road wear is proportional to the fifth power of axle weight, I thought I would see what wear proportion that works out as, given that there are presumably more cars than trucks, and the differing mileages of these types of vehicle. As I write this, I have not done the final calculation. I will use a couple of papers and some government statistics.

Looking at a couple of papers (The economic and environmental benefits of increasing maximum truck weight: the British experience, Alan C. McKinnon, 2005. The cost of relying on the wrong power—road wear and the importance of the fourth power rule (TP446), Richard Johnsson, 2004, Impacts of Increased Goods Vehicle Weight Limits - A European Case Study, Proceedings of Fourth International Symposium on Heavy Vehicle Weights and Dimensions, 1995, the exact proportion of axle weight to road wear varies depending on factors including road surface type, anywhere from 3rd or 4th power of axle weight, all the way up to the 9th power. I chose 4 as a lowish-average.

Taking a Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) weight of 15 tons and an average of 4 axles (HGV maximum weights: a brief guide gives a maximum for HGVs of 44 tons over 6 axles, and I don't have a good source, but the minimum to count as a HGV is 7.5 tons, presumably with 2 axles), this gives 3.75 tons/axle. For cars I assumed 1.5 tons and two axles; 0.75 tons per axle. The ratio of these figures is 5. 5^4 = 625 times as much road wear per axle.

Traffic statistics are in vehicle-kilometres, so to use these we need to multiply this back up by the number of axles per vehicle. 4 for trucks and 2 for cars gives 625*(4/2) = 1250 times as much road wear per vehicle per kilometre.

Keeping with the euro theme, I got transport statistics from the UK department for transport. 240 billion miles driven in the UK in 2011 by cars/taxis, heavy goods vehicles 16.4 billion. 240/16.4 = 14.63 times as many miles driven by cars, compared to heavy goods vehicles (I have deliberately left out 'vans', or other vehicles that carry smaller loads than the HGVs that my axle weights are for). So now we have 1250 times as much road wear per vehicle for HGVs, divided by 14.63 as the ratio of cars-HGVs, gives 85.4 times as much road wear by HGVs. Take the reciprocal and subtract from 1 to get that as a proportion, 0.988, or 98.9%.

Wow, I really didn't expect to get so close to the GP's guess. My estimate for axle weight for HGVs I think is low if anything; I could easily have gone for 20 tons over 4 axles, which would have given 99.6%. I have also assumed that HGV weight is evenly spread over the axles; it strikes me that the rear axles will carry more weight, and so since the road wear varies with the 4th power of this, the real figure is probably higher.

A friend of mine works in radiology research. He holds the same opinion.

I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Okay, if you prefer:

http://radiology.rsna.org/content/259/1/6.extract
http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/145/1/75
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/171/12/1129
http://www.propublica.org/article/scientists-cast-doubt-on-tsa-tests-of-full-body-scanners
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364908000708

Find me similar articles from professionals in the relevant fields and not associated with the TSA that say the opposite.

Just a few years ago, a Canadian study using baseball stats (because they tracked handiness closely) concluded that lefties were far more likely to die, ( http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199110033251412) this was later shown to have suffered a seemingly paradoxical sampling error (not controlling adequately for those that didn't die). Then there was another study that concluded that left-handedness was likely the result of anoxia in the womb ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/002839327390050X). It was discounted for similar sampling error problems. Neurological "wiring error"; perhaps a mutation with few consequences; advantages in the mathematical world (presumably via having a screwy mindset); Language disadvantages; Language *advantages*; high proportion of left-handed (possibly suppressed) American presidents http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/presidents.html (Clinton, Bush, Obama ... ). So... run a elaborate predator/prey model applied to sports and see an advantage for the 10% that are different; sounds like rediscovery of Perato distribution to me, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution I'm just not convinced that there's been a proper scientific approach to this issue to date, and until then i'm still stuck with a twisted spine in most college classrooms.

Or you could skip the photo-voltaic effect completely:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111110125955.htm

and/or add a coating that converts uv to visible light so you can harvest that too:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927024898001056

I would like to find a few that aren't pulled down or behind a paywall myself. This is at least a related abstract. This touches on the combination therapy as well.

In any event, the idea is that "fake it till you make it" really works, but it's between really hard and impossible to fake it with any enthusiasm when you're clinically depressed.

FreeCell is not np-anything. It's a finite tree that can be exhaustively searched.

Generalized FreeCell is NP-Complete.

Here are a handful, there are lots:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1750946710000498
http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/31/3/264.short
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1985.tb01641.x/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1310767/

And so on. The list goes on and on really, there are literally hundreds of studies on IQ and how to improve it. IQ scores as a metric of pure cognitive ability divorced from education is just fundamentally debunked, and actually has been for some time.

I'll try to resume some data in this message.

Vitamin D supplementation was found in years-long, randomized interventional trials, to slash cancer incidence - by, for example, 77%. ( http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/6/1586.short [ajcn.org] , http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/7/451.short [oxfordjournals.org] ) Even mechanisms of action are known ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076010001822 [sciencedirect.com] , http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.24762/full [wiley.com] , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20936945 [nih.gov] ), althought not all are fully understood.

Vitamin D RDA was 200 IU, which is a joke, almost the same thing as nothing. Specially if we consider the human body will produce 10.000 IU in a 15-minute tropical noon-day sun full-body exposure ( http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/3a0/1e8/00e/Cannell-Vitamin-D-study.pdf [nccdn.net] The FDA was faced with this new Vitamin D pleiotropic effects, and given that the RDA was old and obviusly innadequate, it asked the IOM (Institute of Medicine) to review it. They dismissed a Vitamin-D -cancer connection in a completely biased, and non-scientific report, cherry picked some articles, ignored many articles. It shocked the vitamin-D research community, as this link is more than clear. ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.328/full [wiley.com] , http://brn.sagepub.com/content/13/2/117 [sagepub.com] ). The committee had conflicts of interest, and deliberately suppressed the favourable studies ( http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8225367 [cambridge.org] , http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/today-the-food-and-nutrition-board-has-failed-millions-111112159.html [prnewswire.com])

It's interesting to note that people in the committee were hand-picked to have conclicts of interest and are developing vitamin D analogs (that work the same way, but are patenteable), so their best interest is to keep natural vitamin D the lowest level possible. Like Glenville Jones, from Cytachroma, developing CTAP101, a medicine to treat vitamin D insufficiency. Or Hector F. DeLuca, that has 101 patents of vitamin D analogs. Or J. Christopher Gallagher, working for GlaxoSmithKline, that develops Sirilux, a vitamin D analog to treat psoryasis. There are other to cite, but you got the point.

Links or it didn't happen.

I'll try to resume some data in this message.

Vitamin D supplementation was found in years-long, randomized interventional trials, to slash cancer incidence - by, for example, 77%. ( http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/6/1586.short , http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/98/7/451.short ) Even mechanisms of action are known ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076010001822 , http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.24762/full , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20936945 ), althought not all are fully understood.

Vitamin D RDA was 200 IU, which is a joke, almost the same thing as nothing. Specially if we consider the human body will produce 10.000 IU in a 15-minute tropical noon-day sun full-body exposure ( http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/3a0/1e8/00e/Cannell-Vitamin-D-study.pdf
The FDA was faced with this new Vitamin D pleiotropic effects, and given that the RDA was old and obviusly innadequate, it asked the IOM (Institute of Medicine) to review it.

They dismissed a Vitamin-D -cancer connection in a completely biased, and non-scientific report, cherry picked some articles, ignored many articles. It shocked the vitamin-D research community, as this link is more than clear. ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.328/full , http://brn.sagepub.com/content/13/2/117 ). The committee had conflicts of interest, and deliberately suppressed the favourable studies ( http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8225367 , http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/today-the-food-and-nutrition-board-has-failed-millions-111112159.html)

It's interesting to note that people in the committee were hand-picked to have conclicts of interest and are developing vitamin D analogs (that work the same way, but are patenteable), so their best interest is to keep natural vitamin D the lowest level possible. Like Glenville Jones, from Cytachroma, developing CTAP101, a medicine to treat vitamin D insuficiency.

Or Hector F. DeLuca, that has 101 patents of vitamin D analogs. Or J. Christopher Gallagher, working for GlaxoSmithKline, that develops Sirilux, a vitamin D analog to treat psoryasis. There are other to cite, but you got the point.

Whatever Excel was "for", it has become a jack of all trades. It is often the quick dirty way to look at some data. And some of it's features, like pivot tables, make it even more powerful than some of the "additional pieces of software" you mention. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty with Matlab - but Matlab is really more suited to analyzing the same kind of data set over and over. Excel is far more flexible, even though it is not nearly as powerful overall.

The only place I would caution people away from Excel is in statistical analysis. Until very recently, some of the basic functions were simply broken. Even now, I don't always trust the results (though that may not be fair to the current version). Let's just say there has been a long history of problems.

I apologize if I was not clear but I absolutely agree that the collection of fingerprints is motivated by the arrest and investigation; it is only the retention that is motivated in part by possible future crimes. The DNA legislations seems somewhat milder than the fingerprint case in that collection occurs at conviction, not as a routine part of the arrest.

Like fingerprints, DNA is routinely left behind as a person moves about in general society. Glasses, bottles and cans we drink from; even object that we handle or touch briefly. I did a quick google and found:
"[DNA] Profiles recovered from wallets stolen in a simulated robbery were in the majority mixtures, however the robber was a major component of the mixture or a single source profile in 40% of the profiles."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875176809000742