Latour is a chemical process engineer trying to explain thermodynamics to a climate scientist. His "rebuttal" is full of basic misunderstandings and laughable examples (that headlights example still makes me grin). He flatly declares (without backing evidence of course) that warmer bodies cannot possibly absorb any energy from cooler bodies (guess what? it slows cooling!), which directly contradicts nearly two centuries of well-established greenhouse theory and countless observations (starting with Fournier in 1824). He does not even try to address the primary issue of disparate absorption of thermal radiation from the Sun and Earth. And he then has the gall to accuse climate scientists of not understanding the difference between radiation and convection.
When (to cut through the misunderstandings) Spencer offers him a simple observational experiment he can do himself to prove the theory, he dodges it and accuses Spencer of shifting the goalposts. It's no wonder Spencer (a practicing climatologist with better things to do) didn't bother to engage further.
If you still think greenhouse theory is nonsense, read this. If you think greenhouse theory somehow violates thermodynamics, read this.
I suspect when he says 'former-skeptic' he is trying to imply that he doubted the reality of AGW
That sounded to me like he used to doubt the prevailing conclusions (e.g. the hockey stick), but now that he's worked through it himself, he's convinced that those conclusions are valid, and he's no longer interested in going back over the same ground again and again.
There comes a time when, having satisfied oneself of the broad outlines, and in absence of strong evidence to the contrary, it's better to accept the consensus and move on to new work. You can always change your conclusions if counter-evidence does arise, but only if it's pretty solid - to do otherwise is just wasting time better spent improving your knowledge further.
So long as "distrust" doesn't step over the line into "refusal to accept the evidence". I see a distressingly large number of people who blithely dismiss paper after peer-reviewed paper, preferring to cherry-pick data that supports their preconceptions or even posit a massive conspiracy, rather than tackle the papers' methodology with any expertise.
I thought the definition of a skeptic was someone who questioned the accepted opinion, evaluated the evidence for himself, and reached his own conclusion. Did Muller not do exactly that?
The BEST study confirmed that the heat-island effect is "nearly negligible". That link has a good discussion of the analysis and related criticism.
If you read the next paragraph of my original link, you'll see that the BEST heat-island paper in particular was "technically rejected", but was encouraged to re-submit the paper with suggested changes that do not affect the basic results. There is no reason to doubt their analysis at this time.
Unless of course you are in the habit of automatically distrusting anyone who says something you don't like, as it appears. It's ironic that you accuse them of propaganda for releasing their results before full peer review, as Watts and most other deniers have been doing exactly that all along.
“All of the articles have been submitted to journals, and we have received substantial journal peer reviews. None of the reviews have indicated any mistakes in the papers; they have instead been primarily suggestions for additions, further citations of the literature. One review had no complaints about the content of the paper, but suggested delaying the publication until the long background paper, describing our methods in detail, was actually published.”
The search engine is not incorrect - there are indeed pages that mention both "Trkulja" and "criminal". Mr Trkulja is incorrect to believe that Google is "tagging" him in any way. Google is merely presenting the results of a keyword search, not offering some value judgement.
Mr Trkulja's name *is* in the context of criminals - he is the victim of a criminal attack. That does not make him a criminal himself.
What error? Google isn't claiming that Trkulja may or may not be a gangster. They're claiming that there are pages that mention Trkjula in the context of gangsters, and here are the URLs.
Indeed, though that was a couple years after the lawsuit, IIRC. And Microsoft sold that stock in 2003, but still produces Office etc for Mac, while Apple offers iTunes and QuickTime for Windows.
They might be OS competitors, but they'll support each other where it benefits them.
Well, Apple would have benefited too, you see. It's called a business deal - lots of companies do it, even if they compete in some markets. Still, it's clear that Apple felt it was worth spending millions on mapping companies and mapping development rather than give Google any more presence on their platform. Obviously the disagreement wasn't about cost.
It's interesting that while Apple may see Google as a competitor (and Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon etc etc), and may refuse to have anything to do with them outside the courtroom, Google has no problems working with Apple. Google make many iOS apps, they optimise their web services for Apple products, their employees are free to use iPhones and iMacs etc (and many do).
The comparison with Microsoft is also interesting. Apart from the infamous "look and feel" lawsuit in 1994, Apple has been far less antagonistic towards Microsoft than they are with Google, despite a number of similarities in the relationships.
They are a group of thoughtful, intelligent and passionate people who value the beauty and majesty of beercans a thousand times more than you or I ever will.
The one with the most incentive is the one receiving the money; i.e. the author, the author's publisher, and possible any guilds to which the author may pay dues. As with most fields of business, if you want to collect money owed to you, you occasionally need to chase it up yourself (as your example demonstrates, if the putative author is having difficulty getting royalties from his existing publisher; maybe he'll have more luck if he contacts Google).
And I think quite a few Googlers might take exception to your characterising Google as "a money-making machine, period"; particularly Larry and Sergey. They've sunk a fair bit of cash into risky, public-benefit projects with no guaranteed return.
A major aim of the project was to digitally preserve books that are out of print. Most of these can't be bought, by anyone.
Also, the authors of a significant fraction of these books cannot be located. So while many of these books are still covered by copyright, there's nobody available to pay anything to, or to get consent from (well, the Authors Guild might nominate themselves as "default" copyright holders somehow). For these books, proceeds from sales are held separately in trust, against future claims if the authors are eventually located. For the rest, identified authors naturally get the lion's share of sales. Google also profits from advertising, but authors are entitled to a 63% share of this too. And under various versions of the settlement, authors could even claim $60 per book, while Google does the all work of making their books more available to the public.
Money is not the issue; it's control - the Guild (and some actual authors) are mostly objecting that Google didn't ask first.
As you say, while the S3 has a consistent edge elsewhere, the iPhone destroys the S3 in the memory bandwidth tests. But those tests are strangely inconsistent, for both devices.
The S3 is a lot slower for sequential read bandwidth (578MB/s vs 1.73GB/s), but actually faster for sequential writes (1.53GB/s vs 1.35/GB/s). It's interesting that write speed is so much faster than reading; usually read speeds are faster than writes (as with the iPhone). This appears common to many Android devices though.
OTOH, the iPhone 5 is ridiculously fast in the stdlib write test - over 6GB/s. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the tests, but I don't see how this result can be three times higher than sequential writes; I'd expect a little slower. Perhaps the iPhone has a large enough cache that the test fits within it?
Once the program has loaded, sure. But for the user, more RAM in a phone still means more caching, which means more responsiveness. Not just filesystem caching either - programs don't have to be closed and re-opened as often, and browsers can cache more page elements without re-fetching them. RAM in a phone can make a huge difference.
This looks like a job for Captain Obvious Solution! All you have to do is... oh right, you guys both figured it out already.
No matter, millions still need saving from the evil First World Problems gang! Let's go, Private Pebkac, someone in the city of YouTube hasn't found the Close Tab button yet.
Right, just ignore the obvious downward trend for the previous 30 years on the graph; go ahead and cherry-pick your data so you can declare a 5 year upward trend! It's all so much simpler when you sweep things under the Seasonal Variability rug, isn't it?
It's promotion, pure and simple. They sell more iPhones as a result.
Apple customers want to feel they're being looked after; protected from malware, objectionable content, and any other potentially poor experiences. They're willing to pay extra for that.
Apple is taking sides based on the American PR it might get. The rest of the world (arguably the larger portion of the market) is probably a lot more interested in a list of US drone strikes.
Intentionally or not, their image-centred policies may be causing them more harm than good.
Slashdot Mirror
Latour is a chemical process engineer trying to explain thermodynamics to a climate scientist. His "rebuttal" is full of basic misunderstandings and laughable examples (that headlights example still makes me grin). He flatly declares (without backing evidence of course) that warmer bodies cannot possibly absorb any energy from cooler bodies (guess what? it slows cooling!), which directly contradicts nearly two centuries of well-established greenhouse theory and countless observations (starting with Fournier in 1824). He does not even try to address the primary issue of disparate absorption of thermal radiation from the Sun and Earth. And he then has the gall to accuse climate scientists of not understanding the difference between radiation and convection.
When (to cut through the misunderstandings) Spencer offers him a simple observational experiment he can do himself to prove the theory, he dodges it and accuses Spencer of shifting the goalposts. It's no wonder Spencer (a practicing climatologist with better things to do) didn't bother to engage further.
If you still think greenhouse theory is nonsense, read this. If you think greenhouse theory somehow violates thermodynamics, read this.
The DC3217IYE version trades the Thunderbolt port for GigE and a second HDMI. Still no audio ports though.
I suspect when he says 'former-skeptic' he is trying to imply that he doubted the reality of AGW
That sounded to me like he used to doubt the prevailing conclusions (e.g. the hockey stick), but now that he's worked through it himself, he's convinced that those conclusions are valid, and he's no longer interested in going back over the same ground again and again.
There comes a time when, having satisfied oneself of the broad outlines, and in absence of strong evidence to the contrary, it's better to accept the consensus and move on to new work. You can always change your conclusions if counter-evidence does arise, but only if it's pretty solid - to do otherwise is just wasting time better spent improving your knowledge further.
Right now, you have to learn another language if you want exposure to people from foreign cultures. This will lower that barrier.
So long as "distrust" doesn't step over the line into "refusal to accept the evidence". I see a distressingly large number of people who blithely dismiss paper after peer-reviewed paper, preferring to cherry-pick data that supports their preconceptions or even posit a massive conspiracy, rather than tackle the papers' methodology with any expertise.
I thought the definition of a skeptic was someone who questioned the accepted opinion, evaluated the evidence for himself, and reached his own conclusion. Did Muller not do exactly that?
Maybe you missed how the previous "Thief in Chief" almost doubled the deficit, and tripled its growth rate.
If only they'd had a better ERP system, they could've planned this project more carefully, and put all those resources to better use.
The BEST study confirmed that the heat-island effect is "nearly negligible". That link has a good discussion of the analysis and related criticism.
If you read the next paragraph of my original link, you'll see that the BEST heat-island paper in particular was "technically rejected", but was encouraged to re-submit the paper with suggested changes that do not affect the basic results. There is no reason to doubt their analysis at this time.
Unless of course you are in the habit of automatically distrusting anyone who says something you don't like, as it appears. It's ironic that you accuse them of propaganda for releasing their results before full peer review, as Watts and most other deniers have been doing exactly that all along.
As for the BEST dataset, it's been available for many months. As has the data of the other major studies, all of which agree. How many more lines of evidence do you need?
From Nature :
“All of the articles have been submitted to journals, and we have received substantial journal peer reviews. None of the reviews have indicated any mistakes in the papers; they have instead been primarily suggestions for additions, further citations of the literature. One review had no complaints about the content of the paper, but suggested delaying the publication until the long background paper, describing our methods in detail, was actually published.”
The search engine is not incorrect - there are indeed pages that mention both "Trkulja" and "criminal". Mr Trkulja is incorrect to believe that Google is "tagging" him in any way. Google is merely presenting the results of a keyword search, not offering some value judgement.
Mr Trkulja's name *is* in the context of criminals - he is the victim of a criminal attack. That does not make him a criminal himself.
What error? Google isn't claiming that Trkulja may or may not be a gangster. They're claiming that there are pages that mention Trkjula in the context of gangsters, and here are the URLs.
Indeed, though that was a couple years after the lawsuit, IIRC. And Microsoft sold that stock in 2003, but still produces Office etc for Mac, while Apple offers iTunes and QuickTime for Windows.
They might be OS competitors, but they'll support each other where it benefits them.
Well, Apple would have benefited too, you see. It's called a business deal - lots of companies do it, even if they compete in some markets. Still, it's clear that Apple felt it was worth spending millions on mapping companies and mapping development rather than give Google any more presence on their platform. Obviously the disagreement wasn't about cost.
It's interesting that while Apple may see Google as a competitor (and Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon etc etc), and may refuse to have anything to do with them outside the courtroom, Google has no problems working with Apple. Google make many iOS apps, they optimise their web services for Apple products, their employees are free to use iPhones and iMacs etc (and many do).
The comparison with Microsoft is also interesting. Apart from the infamous "look and feel" lawsuit in 1994, Apple has been far less antagonistic towards Microsoft than they are with Google, despite a number of similarities in the relationships.
They are a group of thoughtful, intelligent and passionate people who value the beauty and majesty of beercans a thousand times more than you or I ever will.
The one with the most incentive is the one receiving the money; i.e. the author, the author's publisher, and possible any guilds to which the author may pay dues. As with most fields of business, if you want to collect money owed to you, you occasionally need to chase it up yourself (as your example demonstrates, if the putative author is having difficulty getting royalties from his existing publisher; maybe he'll have more luck if he contacts Google).
And I think quite a few Googlers might take exception to your characterising Google as "a money-making machine, period"; particularly Larry and Sergey. They've sunk a fair bit of cash into risky, public-benefit projects with no guaranteed return.
A major aim of the project was to digitally preserve books that are out of print. Most of these can't be bought, by anyone.
Also, the authors of a significant fraction of these books cannot be located. So while many of these books are still covered by copyright, there's nobody available to pay anything to, or to get consent from (well, the Authors Guild might nominate themselves as "default" copyright holders somehow). For these books, proceeds from sales are held separately in trust, against future claims if the authors are eventually located. For the rest, identified authors naturally get the lion's share of sales. Google also profits from advertising, but authors are entitled to a 63% share of this too. And under various versions of the settlement, authors could even claim $60 per book, while Google does the all work of making their books more available to the public.
Money is not the issue; it's control - the Guild (and some actual authors) are mostly objecting that Google didn't ask first.
As you say, while the S3 has a consistent edge elsewhere, the iPhone destroys the S3 in the memory bandwidth tests. But those tests are strangely inconsistent, for both devices.
The S3 is a lot slower for sequential read bandwidth (578MB/s vs 1.73GB/s), but actually faster for sequential writes (1.53GB/s vs 1.35/GB/s). It's interesting that write speed is so much faster than reading; usually read speeds are faster than writes (as with the iPhone). This appears common to many Android devices though.
OTOH, the iPhone 5 is ridiculously fast in the stdlib write test - over 6GB/s. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the tests, but I don't see how this result can be three times higher than sequential writes; I'd expect a little slower. Perhaps the iPhone has a large enough cache that the test fits within it?
Once the program has loaded, sure. But for the user, more RAM in a phone still means more caching, which means more responsiveness. Not just filesystem caching either - programs don't have to be closed and re-opened as often, and browsers can cache more page elements without re-fetching them. RAM in a phone can make a huge difference.
This looks like a job for Captain Obvious Solution! All you have to do is... oh right, you guys both figured it out already.
No matter, millions still need saving from the evil First World Problems gang! Let's go, Private Pebkac, someone in the city of YouTube hasn't found the Close Tab button yet.
Then again, there's a lot of interest in reversible computing, which sidesteps Laundauer's limit to some extent.
We don't even need force fields, just programmable matter. Check out Utility Fog.
Right, just ignore the obvious downward trend for the previous 30 years on the graph; go ahead and cherry-pick your data so you can declare a 5 year upward trend! It's all so much simpler when you sweep things under the Seasonal Variability rug, isn't it?
Ever heard of the "Escalator Graph"? Yes, that's what you just did.
Actually, the remaining 3% don't even disagree; they want more data before they decide.
It's promotion, pure and simple. They sell more iPhones as a result.
Apple customers want to feel they're being looked after; protected from malware, objectionable content, and any other potentially poor experiences. They're willing to pay extra for that.
Apple is taking sides based on the American PR it might get. The rest of the world (arguably the larger portion of the market) is probably a lot more interested in a list of US drone strikes.
Intentionally or not, their image-centred policies may be causing them more harm than good.