Well yes that's in fact what they did. The problem is deciding how much of the less reliable data to throw out. Upon discovering that a (small) number of trees displayed anomalous results in the 1960s, they could have i) decided there was something wrong (eg. chemical treatment) with these particular trees and excluded these trees only. ii) decide that a small number of anomalous trees invalidated dendrochronology and throw out all tree-ring data or iii) excluded that data from the years which included the anomalous tree ring data given that the instrumental record rendered it unnecessary anyway. The first would have been cherry picking and the second deliberately blinding oneself. Sensibly they chose the last option.
That this post has a zero score and its parent is marked as score 5 seems to indicate the perversity of the moderation here. It seems that it is good enough here to appear to be correct, to speak with a tone of righteous indignation, without actually giving a valid argument. Black is white and 2+2=5. The above quotation hits the nail on the head. If your goal is to reconstruct temperatures, then it makes sense to use the best data available; if a few tree ring measurements show a temperature decline while a widespread calibrated temperature monitoring system says temperatures rose, I'll take the thermometer measurements. Shame on Arker (91948) for being either willfully ignorant, logically impaired, or extremely gullible.
Exactly. Once you get caught brazenly lying your ass off the Fool me twice, shame on me rule kicks in.
All of these guys get caught over and over cooking data and not only keep their jobs, the media expect us to actually listen to the crooks and liars.
So to use you logic, I shouldn't listen to you, since the oft repeated assertions of "data cooking" are erroneous at best, and lies at worst. First off, you don't mention any specific names or incidents. Nor do you give any background information so a poster can judge your assertions. I can only assume you are referring to the "hide the decline" comments in the stolen emails, regarding the substitution of more reliable thermometer data for less reliable tree ring temperature proxy data. It seems that an unfortunately phrased text snippet can outweigh a strong body of rigorous observation and logical argument.
Posts like yours show a disturbingly casual disregard for any semblance of truth. You are trolling, pure and simple.
A non-squeamish person sometime in the future: "Hey wait a minute guys! This tastes just like chicken!"
Actually, I saw a documentary in which a westerner went along with some jungle dwellers on a tarantula "hunt". They captured the tarantulas and kept them until they were cooked. They placed the spiders in the fire to burn off the nasty inhale-able hairs and then ate them. The westerner said it tasted like lobster. Not surprising given the fact that they are both arthropods.
Ask the students why scientists perform experiments. Ask them what the role of an hypothesis is. Ask them about the certainty of scientific theories. Ask them what a scientific theory actually is. Ask them if we know everything. Ask them about the limitations of human knowledge. Ask them why an experiment will never prove an hypothesis. Then you will see what I mean.
And this won't be "fixed" by giving them yet another series of philosophical facts and definitions to memorize.
Philosophy of science is a joke. With one exception, all of my physics professors thought it was a joke. Well all but the one idiot who didn't actually do any research.
You exhibit the "appeal to authority" fallacy, especially since you do not elaborate on what you mean but only refer to you purported professors' views, which you don't elaborate on either.
And as for physics, I think that in ways it is the most philosophic of all sciences. How can you consider the topsy turvy world of quantum mechanics without a dose of philosophy? To appreciate quantum mechanics you have to realize what it is telling you, what it means, and what its limitations are. Fire a beam of electrons through two closely spaced slits, and they will exhibit an interference pattern which corresponds to wavelike behavior. This seems to happen even if the rate at which electrons is slowed such that only single electrons are passing through the two slits. Measure the slit each electron passes through and the electrons no longer behave like waves, but instead act like bullets. Were the electrons really waves? Or were they merely behaving like waves? What are the electrons? How can our observations change the electrons? Is Schroedinger's equation merely descriptive and predictive, or do we take it literally and accept the existence of Schroedinger's Cat? To truly appreciate these issues you must consider philosophy. You must consider how our theories are mathematical hypotheses that may either be supported or refuted by observation. You must remember, as Kant said that science is not certain, but only inductive, that all our knowledge is merely probable.
I would speculate that at a logical philosophical level, a large number of students are ignorant of what science actually is. Science is often taught as a series of completed results, as a series of facts to be memorized. While to some extent this is difficult to avoid when teaching base knowledge, I suspect many students concentrate on what "gets them the grade", which is demonstrated knowledge of specific material, often memorized. In most high school programs, students are not adequately taught the reasons for knowledge (the International Baccalaureate program is often an exception to this). They are not explicitly taught logic and reason. And since the root of science is logic and reason, I would argue that most students are hobbled in their studies.
I think I'm beginning to get a handle on the damage 3D could do. Our everyday vision depends on our eyes maintaining the correct alignment (parallel I think, though I'm not absolutely sure about that). The brain then uses the differences in the images from eye to another to infer the distances to various objects, creating our sense of dimensionality. With real physical objects, if one eye goes out of alignment, the brain will immediately get a sense of this, causing the eye to go back into alignment. When watching 3D movies, each eye receives a different picture, thanks to the polarized glasses, and the brain interpolates dimension out of this. If say, the left eye goes out of alignment, then the left eye will still receive nearly the same picture, except that it will be laterally displaced. I can imaging that the brain would be able to shift the picture laterally back in order to produce a 3D effect. Thus, the eyes and brain could successfully build a 3D image even though the eyes are misaligned. If our visual system became habitualized to this, it could result in a lazy eye in some susceptible people.
Since TV news is how most people become informed, I would argue that on the correlation to causation scale, this would lean towards the causation side.
It is interesting to watch the development of this story. Firstly, the leaks were properly reported on. However, now, even as leaks are being continually released, the story is insensibly shifting into one of the personal drama of Assange. I just read a posting about US diplomats musing about the possibility for a coup in Nigeria in response to increased costs of operation to Shell Oil. And do we see any mention of this in the major newspapers? This cannot simply be about the mythical "limited attention span" of the public. The material in the cables is simply not being emphasized or covered with any degree of vigor. I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when shocking disclosures in cable leaks will not warrant any mention on the part of the media. It will be "yesterday's story". Thus we are played.
Most if not all of the comments here should carry a subtext, stating "This message contains my opinions, which have almost no bearing on scientific truth, since I don't read original scientific research, and I have no real conception of the technical realities of the theories I am discussing. "
Don't worry about, politicians aren't truthful about their intentions or what they're capable of when they run for office. That means democracy is doomed to fail regardless of whether or not they manage keep secrets from you.
The perfect is the enemy of the possible. Go visit North Korea. There you will find out what a totalitarian state looks like. Our democracy, for all its flaws is infinitely better than the alternatives. If you think democracy is under threat, then get out and fight for it, instead of putting up a white flag.
...while Jefferson would be labeled an anti-government anarchist (like Ron Paul gets labeled)...
Ummmmmm...no. Thomas Jefferson was a European style intellectual, a renaissance man well read in classics, in John Locke, in Rousseau, in Voltaire. Ron Paul is a rabid ideologue who tries to shoehorn what he sees in the world into his narrow libertarian ideology.
I think you and I have rather different conceptions of education.
Einstein and the others had completed their education, and were driving forward the boundaries of knowledge. Aka scientists.
I think the above statement indicates your conception of the purpose of education. You imply that the purpose of a scientific education is to "drive forward the boundaries of knowledge". At first this sounds very much like what I think. However, I believe there is an implicit assumption that the sole purpose of "driving forward the boundaries of knowledge" is to increase the material well being of society; aka to make money. If you do believe that, then our ideas of education differ greatly.
While education can and does increase the material well being of society, this cannot be its only purpose. If I were Socrates, I would probably be able to ask you a series of questions that would lead you to realize that the assumption that education is only for material gain leads to logically fatal self-contradictions. But I am not Socrates. So I am left to give some quotations from Greek philosophers:
"The purpose of education is to teach us to love beauty." Plato
"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead." Aristotle
"The un-considered life is not worth living." Socrates
The above quotations point to a type of education which I believe is increasingly foreign to contemporary students. You see glimpses of it, in passionate scientists like Carl Sagan, or Richard Feynman. However, I believe that most students today receive an education that seems intended to make them into drones, drifting through life with no other purpose than to fulfill a role in a huge bureaucratic machine.
The fact that in the public sphere we have largely ceded education to the purpose of wealth creation is disturbing to me. By your comment I can tell that you didn't have a conception of what I meant from my original comment. Many of my educational ideals are gained by reading the writings of the ancient Greeks.
I believe that it is very important for more of us to begin reading the Greek Philosophers again. Their ideas, their ideals were what lifted civilization out of the Dark Ages. Greek philosophy is what sparked the modern scientific revolution. The Greeks gave us our ideals of law and justice. They were the first moneyed society, and many of their tragic plays can be seen as warnings about the perils of money. The Greeks created the first recognizable universities, and our modern educational system is largely modelled after Greek institutions.
So if you really want to understand my ideas of education, read some Greek literature. Read Plato's "The Apology". Read some tragedies by Sophocles. Read the Iliad. Twice. Read some Aristotle. Study some philosophy. Read Kant. Read Locke. Then come back and tell me that we should educate the vast majority of citizens to be corporate drones.
No the source of the problem is the value of the degree exceeds the value of the courses.
The piece of paper at the end is the important part, the classes leading to that piece of paper are failing to provide sufficient benefit to the students.
The "source" of the problem, in my opinion, is the shifting of education from being something of value in and of itself, to it becoming something of value largely based on the future financial gain to the student. This corrupts the purpose of education, making it a selfish pursuit instead of a noble search for truth. When education becomes a selfish pursuit, it subconsciously licences the student to use whatever means are necessary to receive the credential. Do you think Einstein sought his theory for money? Newton? Galileo? Aristotle? Plato? Socrates? Most of the posts I read here circle around the real philosophical issues without directly addressing them.
Recently, french president Nicolas Sarkozy has been announcing new trade deals with China. The trade deals cover things such as nuclear energy, and Airbus airplane sales. If I am not mistaken, some of the deals involve China manufacturing parts of the airplanes in China. It is not hard to imagine Chinese workers using workers surreptitiously learning and then transferring important Airbus technology to the Chinese airplane manufacturing industry. I am beginning to become anxious about China and its motives.
China's recent moves to restrict export of rare earth elements demonstrates its desire and ability to throw its weight around to achieve its ends. I don't think this bodes well for future relations with the West. If China is willing to cut off exports of an important commodity to Japan over a territorial dispute, what else is it capable of doing? Has it really been an intelligent policy decision to cede North America's manufacturing base to China? We have replaced manufacturing jobs with "service industry" jobs. The wealth gained by service industry jobs in areas such as engineering and design are largely dependent on other countries respecting "intellectual property" provisions. If China holds the power in manufacturing, what is to stop them from simply lifting our expertise and ideas and profiting from them without compensating us?
Above all, I believe China's rapid growth, largely at our expense, shows the intellectual vacuousness modern free trade theory. The standard line of those who expound the virtues of modern neoliberal economics is that nations that trade with each other do not go to war. Though there is some truth to this, I believe those who believe that trade prevents war ignore many important lessons from history. They ignore human nature. They miss the fact that China is not a democracy, that it does not play by the same rules we play by. They ignore the fact that China is displaying signs of increasing nationalism. They ignore the fact that military dictatorships are often unpredictable, that powerful rulers often fall victim the darker side of human nature and that power corrupts.
Most people I tell are shocked when I tell them that the income tax rates on individual income over $200000 was 92%, according to this Tax Foundation pdf file. This would be the equivalent of taxing millionaires at 92% today. The interesting thing is that the period from 1945 to 1963 was one of profound middle class economic security. When I read about Mr. Balmer's income tax shenanigans, I am reminded how much times have changed.
I'm sorry, but you have an awfully insulting view of human nature. Greed is a quality that is encouraged by the type of thinking displayed in your comment. And while humans tend to be greedy if we are encouraged to do so, we are also capable of great and noble altruism. To say that self-interest and greed are the core motivators in human nature is to encourage us to wallow in our most negative characteristics instead of pushing us to better ourselves.
Economics is not a scientific discipline. Those studies are not very credible.
I'm not sure if I would to that far as to say that economics isn't a science. It does follow the scientific method in that it has hypotheses that are intended to model human economic behavior. The experiments done to support or refute the hypotheses can consist of measurements of different economic parameters.
All science is inductive, that is, it only gives probabilities of truth. It is only probable and not certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only know the sun will rise because it always has. Bertrand Russell wrote about this, giving a story of a chicken who every day of its life saw the farmer coming and was then fed. One day, the chicken saw the farmer coming and inductively concluded that it was going to be fed, only to have its neck wrung. Science is never absolutely certain.
So then, if science is inductive, this provides us with a means of judging the "quality" of particular scientific hypotheses. Newton's Laws are highly accurate in their predictions of motion for speeds sufficiently slower than the speed of light. We might say that Newton's laws have a high degree of inductive validity within a particular type of motion. Can we say the same about one of the primary hypotheses of economics, the "Efficient Market Hypothesis"?
In a nutshell, the Efficient Market Hypothesis implies that the price a market decides for a particular good, service, or security ALWAYS reflects ALL available information. This implies that price distortions such as speculative bubbles or panicked market collapses are impossible. I think that the recent real estate collapse poses substantial problems for the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Does the EMH meet the standards of high inductive validity or probability? Questions and problems like this often lead thinkers to label economics as the "Dismal Science".
I think another serious issue is the textbooks will likely not be accessible for the student down the road. I kept many of my books from useful courses. I found that if I didn't keep them, it was almost as if I didn't take the course. I regularly refer back to many of them. This would likely become more difficult and unlikely if digital textbooks became common. My suspicion is that you would buy access to the textbooks only for the year you are taking the course.
We can be very clever. We can find ways to use fewer resources, to recycle, to keep a good standard of living in a world of diminishing resources. But our ability to adapt can be taxed. That ability to adapt depends largely on a stable society, where cities can exist because food production is large enough to produce a surplus. If this starts to change, it is possible to imagine a case where our cleverness will be irrelevant, because each person is expending most of their effort scratching a living from nothing.
The fact that it takes 100 days to simulate a few milliseconds of molecular activity hints at the potential speed of future computers. I know the actual process isn't precisely analogous to the computation, but I suspect there are more elegant ways to compute than the methods we use today. Our brains "outperform" the best supercomputers, with energy requirements supplied by a bowl of oatmeal for a few hours of activity. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
What about South America? What about Argentina, or Chile, or Venezuela, or Peru? It seems likely the US has at least done some "nudging" with regards to South American governments in the past few decades. After all, in Cold War parlance, South America was and is in America's "sphere of influence".
I don't think that what SS2 does can really be called space flight in the proper sense. Firstly, it goes nowhere near the altitudes that even the Space Shuttle reaches. Secondly, the speeds it reaches are nowhere near what is necessary for orbit at any altitude. Sure you might get the sensation of being "in space", with the experience of weightlessness and the blackness of space. And to many non-scientists, this will be enough. However, in terms of energy and difficulty, SS2 is an order of magnitude or two (or three?) smaller than the Space Shuttle. This ship is pure marketing. It gives the illusion of actual space flight, without actually solving the real problems of reaching orbit, and of returning from orbit. Not that it wouldn't be fun. But SS2 fans should get some perspective on the true difficulties of orbital space flight.
Slashdot Mirror
Well yes that's in fact what they did. The problem is deciding how much of the less reliable data to throw out. Upon discovering that a (small) number of trees displayed anomalous results in the 1960s, they could have i) decided there was something wrong (eg. chemical treatment) with these particular trees and excluded these trees only. ii) decide that a small number of anomalous trees invalidated dendrochronology and throw out all tree-ring data or iii) excluded that data from the years which included the anomalous tree ring data given that the instrumental record rendered it unnecessary anyway. The first would have been cherry picking and the second deliberately blinding oneself. Sensibly they chose the last option.
That this post has a zero score and its parent is marked as score 5 seems to indicate the perversity of the moderation here. It seems that it is good enough here to appear to be correct, to speak with a tone of righteous indignation, without actually giving a valid argument. Black is white and 2+2=5. The above quotation hits the nail on the head. If your goal is to reconstruct temperatures, then it makes sense to use the best data available; if a few tree ring measurements show a temperature decline while a widespread calibrated temperature monitoring system says temperatures rose, I'll take the thermometer measurements. Shame on Arker (91948) for being either willfully ignorant, logically impaired, or extremely gullible.
Exactly. Once you get caught brazenly lying your ass off the Fool me twice, shame on me rule kicks in.
All of these guys get caught over and over cooking data and not only keep their jobs, the media expect us to actually listen to the crooks and liars.
So to use you logic, I shouldn't listen to you, since the oft repeated assertions of "data cooking" are erroneous at best, and lies at worst. First off, you don't mention any specific names or incidents. Nor do you give any background information so a poster can judge your assertions. I can only assume you are referring to the "hide the decline" comments in the stolen emails, regarding the substitution of more reliable thermometer data for less reliable tree ring temperature proxy data. It seems that an unfortunately phrased text snippet can outweigh a strong body of rigorous observation and logical argument.
Posts like yours show a disturbingly casual disregard for any semblance of truth. You are trolling, pure and simple.
A non-squeamish person sometime in the future: "Hey wait a minute guys! This tastes just like chicken!"
Actually, I saw a documentary in which a westerner went along with some jungle dwellers on a tarantula "hunt". They captured the tarantulas and kept them until they were cooked. They placed the spiders in the fire to burn off the nasty inhale-able hairs and then ate them. The westerner said it tasted like lobster. Not surprising given the fact that they are both arthropods.
There are consequences to the vitriol spouted on the right. There are always wingnuts. Say the right things and and the results are predictable.
Ask the students why scientists perform experiments. Ask them what the role of an hypothesis is. Ask them about the certainty of scientific theories. Ask them what a scientific theory actually is. Ask them if we know everything. Ask them about the limitations of human knowledge. Ask them why an experiment will never prove an hypothesis. Then you will see what I mean.
And this won't be "fixed" by giving them yet another series of philosophical facts and definitions to memorize.
Philosophy of science is a joke. With one exception, all of my physics professors thought it was a joke. Well all but the one idiot who didn't actually do any research.
You exhibit the "appeal to authority" fallacy, especially since you do not elaborate on what you mean but only refer to you purported professors' views, which you don't elaborate on either.
And as for physics, I think that in ways it is the most philosophic of all sciences. How can you consider the topsy turvy world of quantum mechanics without a dose of philosophy? To appreciate quantum mechanics you have to realize what it is telling you, what it means, and what its limitations are. Fire a beam of electrons through two closely spaced slits, and they will exhibit an interference pattern which corresponds to wavelike behavior. This seems to happen even if the rate at which electrons is slowed such that only single electrons are passing through the two slits. Measure the slit each electron passes through and the electrons no longer behave like waves, but instead act like bullets. Were the electrons really waves? Or were they merely behaving like waves? What are the electrons? How can our observations change the electrons? Is Schroedinger's equation merely descriptive and predictive, or do we take it literally and accept the existence of Schroedinger's Cat? To truly appreciate these issues you must consider philosophy. You must consider how our theories are mathematical hypotheses that may either be supported or refuted by observation. You must remember, as Kant said that science is not certain, but only inductive, that all our knowledge is merely probable.
I would speculate that at a logical philosophical level, a large number of students are ignorant of what science actually is. Science is often taught as a series of completed results, as a series of facts to be memorized. While to some extent this is difficult to avoid when teaching base knowledge, I suspect many students concentrate on what "gets them the grade", which is demonstrated knowledge of specific material, often memorized. In most high school programs, students are not adequately taught the reasons for knowledge (the International Baccalaureate program is often an exception to this). They are not explicitly taught logic and reason. And since the root of science is logic and reason, I would argue that most students are hobbled in their studies.
I think I'm beginning to get a handle on the damage 3D could do. Our everyday vision depends on our eyes maintaining the correct alignment (parallel I think, though I'm not absolutely sure about that). The brain then uses the differences in the images from eye to another to infer the distances to various objects, creating our sense of dimensionality. With real physical objects, if one eye goes out of alignment, the brain will immediately get a sense of this, causing the eye to go back into alignment. When watching 3D movies, each eye receives a different picture, thanks to the polarized glasses, and the brain interpolates dimension out of this. If say, the left eye goes out of alignment, then the left eye will still receive nearly the same picture, except that it will be laterally displaced. I can imaging that the brain would be able to shift the picture laterally back in order to produce a 3D effect. Thus, the eyes and brain could successfully build a 3D image even though the eyes are misaligned. If our visual system became habitualized to this, it could result in a lazy eye in some susceptible people.
Since TV news is how most people become informed, I would argue that on the correlation to causation scale, this would lean towards the causation side.
It is interesting to watch the development of this story. Firstly, the leaks were properly reported on. However, now, even as leaks are being continually released, the story is insensibly shifting into one of the personal drama of Assange. I just read a posting about US diplomats musing about the possibility for a coup in Nigeria in response to increased costs of operation to Shell Oil. And do we see any mention of this in the major newspapers? This cannot simply be about the mythical "limited attention span" of the public. The material in the cables is simply not being emphasized or covered with any degree of vigor. I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when shocking disclosures in cable leaks will not warrant any mention on the part of the media. It will be "yesterday's story". Thus we are played.
Most if not all of the comments here should carry a subtext, stating "This message contains my opinions, which have almost no bearing on scientific truth, since I don't read original scientific research, and I have no real conception of the technical realities of the theories I am discussing. "
Don't worry about, politicians aren't truthful about their intentions or what they're capable of when they run for office. That means democracy is doomed to fail regardless of whether or not they manage keep secrets from you.
The perfect is the enemy of the possible. Go visit North Korea. There you will find out what a totalitarian state looks like. Our democracy, for all its flaws is infinitely better than the alternatives. If you think democracy is under threat, then get out and fight for it, instead of putting up a white flag.
...while Jefferson would be labeled an anti-government anarchist (like Ron Paul gets labeled)...
Ummmmmm...no. Thomas Jefferson was a European style intellectual, a renaissance man well read in classics, in John Locke, in Rousseau, in Voltaire. Ron Paul is a rabid ideologue who tries to shoehorn what he sees in the world into his narrow libertarian ideology.
I think you and I have rather different conceptions of education.
Einstein and the others had completed their education, and were driving forward the boundaries of knowledge. Aka scientists.
I think the above statement indicates your conception of the purpose of education. You imply that the purpose of a scientific education is to "drive forward the boundaries of knowledge". At first this sounds very much like what I think. However, I believe there is an implicit assumption that the sole purpose of "driving forward the boundaries of knowledge" is to increase the material well being of society; aka to make money. If you do believe that, then our ideas of education differ greatly.
While education can and does increase the material well being of society, this cannot be its only purpose. If I were Socrates, I would probably be able to ask you a series of questions that would lead you to realize that the assumption that education is only for material gain leads to logically fatal self-contradictions. But I am not Socrates. So I am left to give some quotations from Greek philosophers:
"The purpose of education is to teach us to love beauty." Plato
"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead." Aristotle
"The un-considered life is not worth living." Socrates
The above quotations point to a type of education which I believe is increasingly foreign to contemporary students. You see glimpses of it, in passionate scientists like Carl Sagan, or Richard Feynman. However, I believe that most students today receive an education that seems intended to make them into drones, drifting through life with no other purpose than to fulfill a role in a huge bureaucratic machine.
The fact that in the public sphere we have largely ceded education to the purpose of wealth creation is disturbing to me. By your comment I can tell that you didn't have a conception of what I meant from my original comment. Many of my educational ideals are gained by reading the writings of the ancient Greeks.
I believe that it is very important for more of us to begin reading the Greek Philosophers again. Their ideas, their ideals were what lifted civilization out of the Dark Ages. Greek philosophy is what sparked the modern scientific revolution. The Greeks gave us our ideals of law and justice. They were the first moneyed society, and many of their tragic plays can be seen as warnings about the perils of money. The Greeks created the first recognizable universities, and our modern educational system is largely modelled after Greek institutions.
So if you really want to understand my ideas of education, read some Greek literature. Read Plato's "The Apology". Read some tragedies by Sophocles. Read the Iliad. Twice. Read some Aristotle. Study some philosophy. Read Kant. Read Locke. Then come back and tell me that we should educate the vast majority of citizens to be corporate drones.
No the source of the problem is the value of the degree exceeds the value of the courses.
The piece of paper at the end is the important part, the classes leading to that piece of paper are failing to provide sufficient benefit to the students.
The "source" of the problem, in my opinion, is the shifting of education from being something of value in and of itself, to it becoming something of value largely based on the future financial gain to the student. This corrupts the purpose of education, making it a selfish pursuit instead of a noble search for truth. When education becomes a selfish pursuit, it subconsciously licences the student to use whatever means are necessary to receive the credential. Do you think Einstein sought his theory for money? Newton? Galileo? Aristotle? Plato? Socrates? Most of the posts I read here circle around the real philosophical issues without directly addressing them.
Recently, french president Nicolas Sarkozy has been announcing new trade deals with China. The trade deals cover things such as nuclear energy, and Airbus airplane sales. If I am not mistaken, some of the deals involve China manufacturing parts of the airplanes in China. It is not hard to imagine Chinese workers using workers surreptitiously learning and then transferring important Airbus technology to the Chinese airplane manufacturing industry. I am beginning to become anxious about China and its motives.
China's recent moves to restrict export of rare earth elements demonstrates its desire and ability to throw its weight around to achieve its ends. I don't think this bodes well for future relations with the West. If China is willing to cut off exports of an important commodity to Japan over a territorial dispute, what else is it capable of doing? Has it really been an intelligent policy decision to cede North America's manufacturing base to China? We have replaced manufacturing jobs with "service industry" jobs. The wealth gained by service industry jobs in areas such as engineering and design are largely dependent on other countries respecting "intellectual property" provisions. If China holds the power in manufacturing, what is to stop them from simply lifting our expertise and ideas and profiting from them without compensating us?
Above all, I believe China's rapid growth, largely at our expense, shows the intellectual vacuousness modern free trade theory. The standard line of those who expound the virtues of modern neoliberal economics is that nations that trade with each other do not go to war. Though there is some truth to this, I believe those who believe that trade prevents war ignore many important lessons from history. They ignore human nature. They miss the fact that China is not a democracy, that it does not play by the same rules we play by. They ignore the fact that China is displaying signs of increasing nationalism. They ignore the fact that military dictatorships are often unpredictable, that powerful rulers often fall victim the darker side of human nature and that power corrupts.
Most people I tell are shocked when I tell them that the income tax rates on individual income over $200000 was 92%, according to this Tax Foundation pdf file. This would be the equivalent of taxing millionaires at 92% today. The interesting thing is that the period from 1945 to 1963 was one of profound middle class economic security. When I read about Mr. Balmer's income tax shenanigans, I am reminded how much times have changed.
Exactly. There are 2 motivators for people :
a. money
b. power
I'm sorry, but you have an awfully insulting view of human nature. Greed is a quality that is encouraged by the type of thinking displayed in your comment. And while humans tend to be greedy if we are encouraged to do so, we are also capable of great and noble altruism. To say that self-interest and greed are the core motivators in human nature is to encourage us to wallow in our most negative characteristics instead of pushing us to better ourselves.
Economics is not a scientific discipline. Those studies are not very credible.
I'm not sure if I would to that far as to say that economics isn't a science. It does follow the scientific method in that it has hypotheses that are intended to model human economic behavior. The experiments done to support or refute the hypotheses can consist of measurements of different economic parameters.
All science is inductive, that is, it only gives probabilities of truth. It is only probable and not certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only know the sun will rise because it always has. Bertrand Russell wrote about this, giving a story of a chicken who every day of its life saw the farmer coming and was then fed. One day, the chicken saw the farmer coming and inductively concluded that it was going to be fed, only to have its neck wrung. Science is never absolutely certain.
So then, if science is inductive, this provides us with a means of judging the "quality" of particular scientific hypotheses. Newton's Laws are highly accurate in their predictions of motion for speeds sufficiently slower than the speed of light. We might say that Newton's laws have a high degree of inductive validity within a particular type of motion. Can we say the same about one of the primary hypotheses of economics, the "Efficient Market Hypothesis"?
In a nutshell, the Efficient Market Hypothesis implies that the price a market decides for a particular good, service, or security ALWAYS reflects ALL available information. This implies that price distortions such as speculative bubbles or panicked market collapses are impossible. I think that the recent real estate collapse poses substantial problems for the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Does the EMH meet the standards of high inductive validity or probability? Questions and problems like this often lead thinkers to label economics as the "Dismal Science".
I think another serious issue is the textbooks will likely not be accessible for the student down the road. I kept many of my books from useful courses. I found that if I didn't keep them, it was almost as if I didn't take the course. I regularly refer back to many of them. This would likely become more difficult and unlikely if digital textbooks became common. My suspicion is that you would buy access to the textbooks only for the year you are taking the course.
We can be very clever. We can find ways to use fewer resources, to recycle, to keep a good standard of living in a world of diminishing resources. But our ability to adapt can be taxed. That ability to adapt depends largely on a stable society, where cities can exist because food production is large enough to produce a surplus. If this starts to change, it is possible to imagine a case where our cleverness will be irrelevant, because each person is expending most of their effort scratching a living from nothing.
The fact that it takes 100 days to simulate a few milliseconds of molecular activity hints at the potential speed of future computers. I know the actual process isn't precisely analogous to the computation, but I suspect there are more elegant ways to compute than the methods we use today. Our brains "outperform" the best supercomputers, with energy requirements supplied by a bowl of oatmeal for a few hours of activity. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
What about South America? What about Argentina, or Chile, or Venezuela, or Peru? It seems likely the US has at least done some "nudging" with regards to South American governments in the past few decades. After all, in Cold War parlance, South America was and is in America's "sphere of influence".
The summary didn't mention how many MeV's the particles had. Is it that they weren't colliding the beams?
I don't think that what SS2 does can really be called space flight in the proper sense. Firstly, it goes nowhere near the altitudes that even the Space Shuttle reaches. Secondly, the speeds it reaches are nowhere near what is necessary for orbit at any altitude. Sure you might get the sensation of being "in space", with the experience of weightlessness and the blackness of space. And to many non-scientists, this will be enough. However, in terms of energy and difficulty, SS2 is an order of magnitude or two (or three?) smaller than the Space Shuttle. This ship is pure marketing. It gives the illusion of actual space flight, without actually solving the real problems of reaching orbit, and of returning from orbit. Not that it wouldn't be fun. But SS2 fans should get some perspective on the true difficulties of orbital space flight.