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How can a journal charging $15 to read a retractation notice can be considered nonprofit http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6041/404.1.full. So pay per article user must first pay to read the paper then pay $15 to read why it was retracted. They might be technically and legally non profit but they're certainly not non profit in spirit.

Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean that its budget appears out of thin air. Every publisher, including the academic publishers, charges either the readers of the journal, or the authors. The costs tend to be grossly inflated by the purely commercial journals (Elsevier is notorious for their 37% profit margin), but there are still editorial and production costs to cover. I think these could also be shaved down quite a bit, but even a journal like PLoS ONE, which is a fairly low-frills operation, charges upwards of $1000 per article.

(The practice of charging for retraction notices is insane, and another matter entirely.)

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/07/06/science.1219861 and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/07/06/science.1218455

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/07/06/science.1219861 and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/07/06/science.1218455

wouldn't all matter collapse into a common gravitational center?

Yes, assuming it's not ripped apart by the expansion of space and assuming there is enough mass in the cloud for gravity to eventually dominate the other forces. Note that some of these filiments are long enough that the two ends are not gavitationally bound (due to the exansion of space).

As I understand it the reason that DM comes in filaments between galaxies rather than seperate blobs has something to do with quantum fluctuations when our observable universe was compresed into a point particle, it also appears that the bulk of the normal matter (galaxy clusters) occurs where these filaments meet (although I don't know of a explaination as to why), the rest of the normal matter (lone galaxies and primordial gas) coincides with the dark matter filaments. In simplistic terms the matter in the universe is arranged like swiss cheese but the space containing the cheese is expanding to rapidly for the cheese to sucumb to gravity and lump together at a central point. Supercomputer models of the 14Gyr evolution of the universe that include dark matter are consistent with observations, models that only use normal matter are not as skillfull in reproducing ALL the observations.

And for all the metaphysics types out there it's been pointed out a map of the universe at the largest scale looks remarkably like the nuron network in a brain

A few months ago an entire high-quality 30,000-year old Denisovan genome was published.

Judging by the 'tweets', what seems to be the original has been made 'private', i.e. taken-down. (I'm assuming that was the official YouTube posting - I can't find anything more official looking.)

As well as the mirror linked in the summary, we have a Youtube mirror, and another non-Youtube mirror.

Why would they bother? Do they really not realise that if you release something high-profile on the web, it's out for good?

Oh, it did. See for example here.

Look up 'rafflesia', it's a plant that exchanges DNA with the organism it's a parasite on.

You don't even have to get that exotic. Plants can exchange genes via graft unions. Most all fruit you eat is propagated by grafting, so it may be that every grafted plant has some gene transfer going on. Or to get even closer, here's a good example. Turns out the Syncytin genes critical for human reproduction probably came from a virus. Everyone who says transgenes don't occur in nature had their syncytiotrophoblast made by one.

Yup, the head of the House Appropriations CJS subcommittee in charge of NASA, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va) actually attached a clause to NASA's funding bill last year that explicitly prohibits any NASA collaboration with China.

Of course, ITAR restrictions would have prohibited most of the collaboration even without this new clause.

Yup, the head of the House Appropriations CJS subcommittee in charge of NASA, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va) actually attached a clause to NASA's funding bill last year that explicitly prohibits any NASA collaboration with China. Of course, this was the same Rep. Wolf who raised a media ruckus back in 1995 when he demanded that the Clinton administration investigate claims that human fetuses were being sold in China as a health food.

First a designer is free to reuse pieces and parts of past designs in new ones.

Most of these viral copies have been completely deactivated over time via various mutations (not necessarily within the copy of virus DNA, but also in the regions around it), which is why we no longer suffer from effects of those viruses. In the chimp case, every copy of PtERV1 has been deactivated. So this is not a case of reuse, we are talking about extinct viruses that are present in both chimp and human DNA.

there has obviously been interactions between virus and other species that has occurred in the past.

So you are willing to accept that viruses can insert genes into DNA, and extract genes from DNA, and thus gene transfer occurs between species? And that genes become mutated over generations? Sounds a lot like evolution. But anyway, this still does not explain why chimps and humans have the same inactive viruses in the same places in their DNA...

Third, finding small sequences of DNA that match when you only have 4 building blocks is not so hard to imagine given that they are not claiming a full copy of the virus, only small fragments.

Actually, some of the copies are complete enough that the researchers have extracted the virus and resurrected the extinct virus. We are not talking about a few base pairs that happen to correspond between human and chimp DNA, we are talking about hundreds of copies of endogenous retroviruses (each ~500 base pairs long) occurring in the same place in human and chimp DNA. 40 out of the 42 viruses found in chimp DNA are also found in humans. The probability of that occurring by chance is infinitesimally small. The answer is either common descent, or that your designer deliberately put deactivated copies of the same viruses in the same places in both chimp and human DNA. Which brings me back to the question, if that is what you believe, then why would he do that? Why would an omnipotent creator put hundreds of the same copies of deactivated viruses into both chimp and human DNA?

First, genetic engineering is a way of improving a plant. A monoculture is growing all the same thing. these are entirely different concepts. Trying to link the two only makes it look like you don't know the definition of either.

Second, how are Monsanto's seeds wrong? sure, the make Monsanto a profit, but there's nothing wrong with that. The insect resistant ones have feared pretty well, reducing pesticides and even benefiting farms that don't grow them. The herbicide tolerant ones have, for all their ill will, been environmentally positive, having reduced the need for tillage to control weeds (tillage degrades the soil quality and promotes fertilizer runoff into water systems), reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and replaced harsher herbicides.

Monsanto? Is that why anti-GE groups are protesting the publicly funded Rothamsted GE wheat trial in the UK? Is that why they complain about the Rainbow papaya, Arctic apples, Golden Rice, and BioCassava, or why groups destroyed the GE grapes in French, GE wheat in Australia, GE potatoes in the Netherlands, and GE wheat in the UK? It might be true for you, but that is minority thought. You can not play that card while the vast majority of the protest against GE crops is also applied to those that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

In this article the scale of the gravity comes into focus:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/giant-black-hole-shreds-and-swal.html?ref=hp

"Before its fiery demise, when the star was about as far from its nemesis as Pluto is from the sun, the black hole stripped off its hydrogen envelope."

At 3.5 billion miles the black hole is able to out-gravity a star of its own hydrogen atmosphere. Am I reading that right?

Actually, the article does point out: "From the records they had, the researchers could not tell which traits were being selected for ..." http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/natural-selection-is-still-with-.html

This sentence already assumes the conclusion of the whole article, namely that *some* traits where in fact being selected for.

So kind of weak.

however, during that same time period, the sea ice in the Antarctic, you know, at the other end of the planet, has been increasing. uh oh.

First of all, it's important that people know what "sea ice" is and its not. It *is* frozen sea water, which in the Antarctic mostly melts in the summer. It is *not* the permanent Antarctic ice sheets, which originate in glaciers (land ice, not sea ice, even though it is on the sea). The ice sheets are losing about 40 gigtons of mass per year[5].

Second, the gain in sea ice in the Antarctic is tiny, and it is not the result of atmospheric temperature decreases. There has been an increase in Antarctic atmosphere temperatures [1], accompanied by a stronger winds blowing cold surface water to the northwest which produces the increase in winter sea ice extent [2]. In the lee of the Antarctic Peninsula, which blocks this surface movement, there has been a dramatic decrease in sea ice [3]. Another factor is that slightly warmer surface temperatures can actually lead to an increase in ice extent by reducing the salinity of water near the edge of ice-formation[6].

Overall, the changes in polar sea ice are consistent with models predicting CO2 induced global warming [2][4], and in any case land ice is a much better indication of antarctic temperature changes, and that has being lost; if the small sea ice increases we've been seeing were due to cooling, we would see an equilibrium or gain in land ice.

CITATIONS:
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/abs/nature07669.html
[2] http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#wintertimeantarctic
[3] http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/278/5340/1104.short
[5] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010EGUGA..12.6127I
[6] http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf

That's one way to look at it. Another way is that there's nothing we can do about it if it does, so why even bother to plan for it? If you mention it people will simply call you names, and say you're trying to scare people.

You haven't been around long, have you. Do you remember when they were saying the ice would all melt, and water would rise up and cover most of the planet? Do you remember when they were talking about the equator turning into a fire zone? This crap was in the 90s.

That unimportant. There are reasons to believe the clathrate gun is not a serious threat. The IPCC stated why they didn't include the runaway Venus effect in the latest report, "On the Earth, the IPCC states that a “runaway greenhouse effect” — analogous to Venus - appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic [human] activities."

Besides, have you read WG2? It's not like they aren't trying to find the worst effects of global warming that are remotely possible.

Conveniently, NASA's latest budget request quadruples the asteroid detection budget.

However, this asteroid is too small to have been in scope for NASA's asteroid detection. NASA's asteroid detection is focused on objects 1 kilometer or larger. As others pointed out, the much smaller obejcts that NASA does track are in Earth orbit. Tracking small objects in Earth orbit is both more achievable (they're always relatively close to Earth!) and more important (they pose a ongoing hazard to spacecraft, both manned and robotics.) Small asteroids pose relatively little threat -- they burn up in the atmosphere in a single pass. And they're really hard to detect. So NASA doesn't even try.

[Posting in part to undo a bad moderation.]

Sigh. You're probably right. Still, I've been fascinated by the tantalizing possibility of using quantum effects for communication since reading this: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5897/1812.short

Ninety-three percent of the heat trapped by increasing greenhouse gases goes into warming the ocean, not the atmosphere. So taking the ocean's temperature is the most comprehensive way to monitor global warming.

Agreed, atrocious summary and terrible title. Here's an alternate.

Survey Finds Too Little Dark Matter Near Solar System

The existence and approximate distribution of dark matter have become standard assumptions in cosmology. According to Nature, it "explains how structure arose in the Universe, how galaxies formed and how the rapidly spinning Milky Way manages to keep from flying apart." However, a paper recently accepted by the Astrophysical Journal studied stellar velocities in our part of the galaxy in an attempt to infer the amount of dark matter present near our solar system and came up with unsettling results. Moni Bidin, the study's lead author, concluded that "at most, only about one-tenth the amount of dark matter predicted by models could exist in the volume of space they examined." Astronomer Frederic Hessman, who is uninvolved in the study, put things bluntly: "If this is right, it turns everything totally upside-down." Physicists are calling for caution and several note the difficulty and sensitivity to error of the present results. Astronomer Chris Flynn, who approved Bidin's paper for publication, cautioned, "I wouldn’t throw out nearby dark matter quite yet” and “The measurement being made is very challenging, and there are a number of ways for it to miss the dark matter even if is there.”

The scientific quality of WG2 is unfortunately rather low

Thanks for your blithe dismissal of that, but I think the many climate experts and scientific bodies who contributed to and reviewed it have a more credible opinion.

it's easier to just quote some scientists who are typically described as skeptics [wsj.com]

Well, if that's your best source for your opinions, it's no wonder you're labouring under this misapprehension. Maybe you should be listening to actual climate scientists? Or if you just want to see a bunch of signatures, try this letter, signed by 255 scientists.

If you want us to believe that WG2's conclusions are inaccurate and can be safely ignored, you're going to need much more credible evidence than that.

There may be an almost consensus that climate change is happening, but there is far from a consensus that it is caused by man's actions or inactions.

This is simply untrue. We are 90% certain that warming is anthropogenic, and furthermore, 97% of climate scientists support that figure.

You obviously formed this opinion by reading someones blog, or something like that. Climate change is the most well studied phenomenon in the history of the world. Go read what actual scientists have to say on the issue.

Yeah 97% like in 76 scientists out of 78. That statistics is bogus selection of answers on loaded questions.

There may be an almost consensus that climate change is happening, but there is far from a consensus that it is caused by man's actions or inactions.

This is simply untrue. We are 90% certain that warming is anthropogenic, and furthermore, 97% of climate scientists support that figure.

You obviously formed this opinion by reading someones blog, or something like that. Climate change is the most well studied phenomenon in the history of the world. Go read what actual scientists have to say on the issue.

"Funny how the chicken little's so easily dismiss all the climate scientists that disagree with the claim that the sky is falling and demonize anyone who attempts to point them out."

What's funny how all those alleged "climate scientists" cited in this letter have yet to publish a single paper that contradicts the consensus view that global warming is real and man-made: "That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change... Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position." -- http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full

I have to say time management is an issue in theoretical physics, too. There's a strong culture of extremely long hours, but when you look at how people are using those hours, they could be at least as productive (and most likely more so) if they just got into work at 9, left at 5 or 5:30, and applied themselves during that time. There's enormous amounts of time-wasting, goofing off, scanning the internet etc etc -- no different from many office jobs, I know, but unacceptable when you're judged on results and there's such a push for frequent, well-cited papers, which is why you see so many people working late and working weekends. (And I'm no better than many others; this Easter break is the first protracted break from work -- by which I mean more than 15 hours or so -- that I've had in months. This will change, though, I'm fed up of it.)

There's an interesting article on this by Sarah Bridle, a lecturer at University College London, I'll try and find it.

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2010_08_20/caredit.a1000082

That might be what I was thinking of - it's not actually by Sarah Bridle but it's the result of an interview with her. It's discussing the gender imbalance and the stupid work hours that are very common in our field (cosmology). Actually a very interesting read. She's always refused to play the game the way so many of us have, and she's more successful than many of us, too...

I mentioned colony collapse both due to various mainstream news articles mentioning it, and because when looking to find links to the papers the first thing I came across was another article from the same issue, mentioning colony collapse and talking about these papers. I do not have access to Science so I cannot see the full text, but I assumed the newspapers were drawing from this guy's report. The summary provided does not explicitly connect these studies to CCD, so it would be helpful if someone with access could let us know if the newspapers were overdoing the CCD angle.

That said, if these pesticides are widely used, and they do cause navigation problems for bees, it would make sense that they would be at least aggrevating the CCD problem, if not a root cause.

There's a very good, highly readable article about ocean acidification from 2007 in Science. If you have access to a subscription, you can see the article here.

If you don't have access to a subscription, you can find lots of research about ocean acidification in the freely-accessible pubmed central database. this article looks like it gives a good overview of ocean acidification.

The short answer is that the pH of the ocean has changed measurably since the industrial revolution, and the current pH is far outside the values that have been historically observed. Even based on conservative estimates of future CO2 emissions, it looks like hydrogen ion concentrations in the ocean (remember pH is a log scale) will more than double by 2100. Ocean acidification has a number of impacts on the marine environment, but most notably it increases dissolution of the CaCO3 deposits that make up coral reefs and decreases the rate at which new shells and reefs can be formed.

the link to the abstract is in the summary; here's the link to the full text: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1596.full

my knowledge of organic chemistry is very bad, so I can't go through the details. what I see is "we have a process that takes in energy and can convert atmospheric CO2 into fuel", which basically means that we no longer need oil for burning (I don't know about plastics). this would be very nice because we could in principle reach an equilibrium between burning fuel and eating up CO2.

couple this with the research from a few weeks ago that allowed "heat extraction" with tiny LEDs, and we may just solve the big problem: nuclear fusion/fission to generate electricity which is then used for a carbon neutral industry/transport, and eliminate extra heat by pointing LEDs at the sky; basically we could have a society that uses a lot of energy, but we don't produce any extra heat or CO2 on average.

Scientists are currently trying, albeit with somewhat smaller objects than a person. What you should understand is that the tunneling probability is exponentially damped in both the width of the barrier and the size of the object.

Already for a hydrogen nucleus tunneling through the (electrostatic) potential barrier presented by another hydrogen nucleus, the probability is around 10^-30 (if memory serves correctly). This fact is what keeps the sun burning for billions of years, and not exploding like a hydrogen bomb in a split second, since it limits the rate of fusion processes in the sun.

Recent re-analysis of lunar volcanic samples shows the interior of the Moon is allot wetter then we thought. Some parts of the Moon interior, at least, contain as much water as the Earth's upper mantle, far wetter than predicted by the Giant Impact Hypothesis (the water should have boiled off).

Less sophisticated analysis in the 1970s indicated the Moon is very dry (less than 50 parts per million water). But water was lost to the vacuum of space during lunar volcanic eruptions, giving a false impression the Moon was dry. New techniques detected water trapped inside fluid inclusions (bubbles) in olivine crystals, showing the interior of the moon is quite wet. Zhang at al. 2012 is one of several resent studies that calls the Giant Impact Hypothesis into question.

Hauri et al., 2011. "High Pre-Eruptive Water Contents Preserved in Lunar Melt Inclusions" 333(6039), 213-215.

Is $4B really that hard

It is really hard to let that money go to LLNL and NIF where it might produce one or two domestic press releases in a year when, instead, a big check could be given to the EU and produce an international photo op. When you see it this way, that $4e9 is much better spent in France and Japan on ITER.

Obama and the DOE have no love for NIF and they'll shut it down at the first opportunity. Energy Secretary Richardson doesn't hesitate to publicly criticize the project. This, from the administration that gave us Solyndra.

The program is fundamentally out of step with contemporary US culture as well. Actually solving energy problems does nothing to empower statists as they size us for our conservation hairshirts. The NRDC, for instance, has made a special point of criticizing the NIF project and providing the administration with ammo to kill it.

I mentioned in my comment that group think could be related to both mainstream science and alternatives. As for the rest of your reply, I think you may want to consider a few key ideas;
* The placebo effect is real, it is actually getting stronger, and MDs regularly use it. So how can you say homeopathy, even if it were to be nothing more than the placebo effect, does not work?
* Nutrition and lifestyle choices are probably the major determinant of good health most of the time for most people, yet MDs have next-to-no training in understanding or discussing that, and they spend little time with patients counseling on those things in practice, and so if an alternative medical care provider like a homeopath spends an hour with someone and talks about those things, that customer is going to be way ahead in health compared to going to an MD in many (not all) situations.
* in practice, the Reagans (US president and first lady) turned to Astrology to set US policies for many years; I'm not saying that made it better, but it is funny in relation to that cartoon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Reagan

To substantiate one other of those points:
"Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why."
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all

Rossi may indeed have fooled himself (it remains to be seen), but there are many other much more reputable and experienced scientific staffers who have found similar effects. These people are not yet right because the money dynamics of basic research (fraught with much uncertainty) don't work that way. Even Bell Labs probably never made a dollar directly on inventing the transistor. People rarely make money from basic research because any related patents tend to expire before the multi-decade commercialization process for any truly new technology gets going. What is evil about what happened is the way the hot fusion scientists did bad science to discredit the cold fusion ones and keep the public funding for themselves. Yet another LENR claim:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/03/dr-george-miley-to-present-on-lenr-at-march-23-conference-will-awareness-of-new-energy-source-spread/
"Excess heat generation from our gas-loading LENR power cell (Figure 1) has been verified, confirming nuclear reactions provide output energy."
That success is after having skeptics cut his approved funding over a decade ago:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/1999/09/21-03.html

Perhaps the biggest issue is that you are looking at this situation very narrowly -- is there currently a reliable materialistic scientific explanation for a specific practice? Real treatments always exist in the context of a practitioner/customer relationship (or friend-to-friend, or parent-to-child, etc.), which can affect the outcome. I'd encourage you to look holistically at the issue of overall systemic outcomes for homeopathy (including the psychological benefits of people being listened to and informed about some basics by someone who is compassionate, even if that person they are paying may indeed believe in what may be a bunch of nonsense). If you look a bit more holistically, you will have to admit that mainstream MD doctors spending ten minutes with patients with diseases caused by nutritional and lifestyle issues and then proceeding to prescribe some medication as a "permission slip" to keep doing the bad behavior is the worst kind of harmful pseudoscience, and yet, in practice, that is the system you are defending.

Examples:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/BloodPressure.aspx

Ahh... No. And take a look at this persons picture http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/assets/2012/03/16/sn-snyder.jpg for proof.

Too bad that with all the resources available today we still can not cure the stupid commenter on Slashdot.

We've already got suspicions in that regard as well, including a loose connector cable:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/official-word-on-superluminal-ne.html?ref=hp

In a perfect world they'd loosen the cable again to see if they can reproduce the same results, but I don't know if they can rustle up the funds for it. Some days, you just recognize that the bug is fixed, commit the code, and go home for the weekend.

From the fine (real article)

Our new method (i) accomplishes the goals of stratification, dampening or removing the effect of covariates, without the need to divide drug-exposed reports into strata; (ii) is both adaptive (it removes different covariates for different drugs) and appropriate for systematic application and routine analysis; and (iii) is designed to complement modern signal detection approaches and thus extends the applicability and power of existing methods. Our model is inspired by the case-control approach to cohort selection in observational clinical studies. Each drug-exposed patient is matched to one (or more) nonexposed patients (controls). The nonexposed patients are selected on the basis of how well they match an exposed patient on a set of predefined covariates. Propensity score matching (PSM)—a statistical method designed to yield an unbiased estimate of treatment effects—has emerged as the preferred method of matching exposed and nonexposed patients in observational cohort studies and has yielded similar estimates of effects when compared to the results of randomized control trials (9–11). However, like other confounder controlling methods, PSM requires the covariates to be both known and measured; neither parameter is guaranteed to be present in spontaneous reporting systems. Instead, to match patients, we adapted PSM to use only the co-reported drugs and co-reported indications. We hypothesize that many confounders correlate with these key variables and do not need to be modeled.

As usual with these sorts of studies, my head asplode.

As usual, Science&Nature only provide high-level info, so you'll have to dig deeper than the article ( http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/125/125ra31.full )
On the authors website, http://www.tatonetti.com/cv.html there is a paper that describes the machine-learning algorithms used:
Tatonetti, N.P., Fernald, G.H. & Altman, R.B. A novel signal detection algorithm for identifying hidden drug-drug interactions in adverse event reports. J Am Med Inform Assoc (2011) DOI:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000214

Citation for the parent: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5999/

n.b. the work [1] by Müller, Chu et al is related, but different, and the interpretation is strongly contested (e.g. [2])
[1] http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/02/17/gravitational_redshift/
[2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7311/full/nature09340.html

And did the journals ever reach a courtroom with this? This was all simply a threat made to intimidate scientific journals and prevent the paper from being published. Even the issues that did reach the courtroom were procedural arguments over the release of data for review before publication. Those proceedings did not involve the journals, just the scientists working for the government themselves. Essentially, in those proceedings, the Mining Group and the House Committee argued that they had the right to review all data 90 days prior to publication, since the data were obtained by scientists working for government agencies funded with taxpayer dollars.

What I was talking about were the sinister letters sent out to journals that did not even have a thought of publishing such data and warning them that there would be "consequences" if they did. You can read about that here at sciencemag.org

Actually recent information would indicate that perhaps the regulations aren't so stupid after all.

This is the right link: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/DEMS documents.pdf

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/DEMS%20documents.pdf

Document link:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/DEMS%20documents.pdf

Here.

URL was hosed. Pulled it from the link.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/DEMS%20documents.pdf

I put this out to provoke discussion only. I does not represent our views, which take no stand on the questions raised below...

Nearly every book you read, every song you sing, every poem, thesis, play, movie, dance, audio recording, painting, drawing, sculpture, photograph, radio and television broadcast, and even the software on your computer "belongs" to somebody. All our academic knowledge is locked behind paywalls. Your entire culture has been commercialized and sold to the highest bidder. Did anybody ask you if this is what you wanted?

While copyrights may have been a workable notion at one time "To promote the Progress of ... the useful Arts", the interpretation of that has broadened to encompass almost all forms of expression written or recorded on some physical medium, utilitarian or not. This has produced a vast artificial economy that seeks to grow and perpetuate itself at the expense of the potential of modern technologies. The whole idea of parceling up the creative commons and granting monopolies on the fragments of our culture to individuals and corporations needs to be rethought.

We have lost our way. The institutionalized Ferengi culture imposed by copyright legislation has created a hideous distortion of human values. It is an anathema to genuine human culture, which is at its base freely shared experience and expression. We must renounce this mercantile obsession with profit and trade and find our way back to innocence and truth.

If copyrights were dismantled tomorrow, would people suddenly stop singing, writing books, or quit participating in the multitude of forms of cultural expression available? Do we need to provide financial incentives to grow our own culture? Is it heresy to ask such questions, or even useful? It certainly is useful as a thought experiment even if just to overcome the propaganda the rights groups have been feeding us all these years. Beyond that, though copyright is already enshrined in our constitutions, these rights can be pared back just as easily as they were expanded previously.

Please see our manifesto at http://whynotaskme.org/

Some new study. It was "new" when it was first published in Science in 2001? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5520/1367.short

This is one of many papers showing that 1. The Mayan empire was subject to a series of droughts that finally offed them, and 2. That variations of solar activities caused these droughts.

It doesn't "suggest" anything, it forcibly affirms it with tons of data to accompany it.

Erratum
Post date 21 January 2005
Essays: "The scientific consensus on climate change" by N. Oreskes (3 Dec. 2004, p. 1686). The final sentence of the fifth paragraph should read "That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords 'global climate change' (9)." The keywords used were "global climate change," not "climate change." [emphasis added]

In any case, here are the problems. That page explains it at least as well as any other single source. But one point should be clarified, and that is what I stated about "self-selection" because of her search terms. You see, of all the climate papers written during that period, the only papers out of the whole bunch that were likely to mention "global climate change" at all, were papers specifically about AGW, by researchers who were pushing that very same idea. The rest were simply not likely to use that phrase, either positively or negatively. It simply didn't appear.

Also, if you go looking for information on this, I would be skeptical of the website "skeptical science". It lies by omission. For example, one page devoted to AGW "consensus" states that Benny Peiser retracted his criticisms of Oreskes' essay, and it links to another source that makes the same claim. But in fact Peiser had only retracted one of his many criticisms, which had to do with the particular number of documents found in the search. He maintained all his other assertions that Oreskes did not in fact show what her paper claimed to show.

To summarize: (a) Oreskes had mischaracterized what she had actually looked for, and in fact did not explain her full selection criteria until later. (b) Oreskes could not have examined the 928 abstracts she claimed, because there were only 905 abstracts with those keywords in he ISI database. (c) Her actual search criteria were self-selecting for materials that supported her premise. This alone invalidates her findings. (d) If she had used more representative search terms, he numbers would have been vastly different.

Erratum
Post date 21 January 2005
Essays: "The scientific consensus on climate change" by N. Oreskes (3 Dec. 2004, p. 1686). The final sentence of the fifth paragraph should read "That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords 'global climate change' (9)." The keywords used were "global climate change," not "climate change." [emphasis added]

In any case, here are the problems. That page explains it at least as well as any other single source. But one point should be clarified, and that is what I stated about "self-selection" because of her search terms. You see, of all the climate papers written during that period, the only papers out of the whole bunch that were likely to mention "global climate change" at all, were papers specifically about AGW, by researchers who were pushing that very same idea. The rest were simply not likely to use that phrase, either positively or negatively. It simply didn't appear.

Also, if you go looking for information on this, I would be skeptical of the website "skeptical science". It lies by omission. For example, one page devoted to AGW "consensus" states that Benny Peiser retracted his criticisms of Oreskes' essay, and it links to another source that makes the same claim. But in fact Peiser had only retracted one of his many criticisms, which had to do with the particular number of documents found in the search. He maintained all his other assertions that Oreskes did not in fact show what her paper claimed to show.

To summarize: (a) Oreskes had mischaracterized what she had actually looked for, and in fact did not explain her full selection criteria until later. (b) Oreskes could not have examined the 928 abstracts she claimed, because there were only 905 abstracts with those keywords in he ISI database. (c) Her actual search criteria were self-selecting for materials that supported her premise. This alone invalidates her findings. (d) If she had used more representative search terms, he numbers would have been vastly different.

This was a really stupid thing for Dr. Gleick to do because it diminishes his cause substantially. For example, he was the lead author of the recent Science paper that everyone was making a big stink about having so many National Academy members on. I'm no (anthropogenic or not)-climate change denier, but this is bad. On a similar note, he also wrote this Forbes piece that mysteriously did not mention he was the lead author of the Science paper.

This and this should clear up the confusion. NIST got a huge boost of funding, as well as renewable energy programs at the DOE.

This and this should clear up the confusion. NIST got a huge boost of funding, as well as renewable energy programs at the DOE.