He testified in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial against intelligent design. So yes, ID is just a variant of creationism and Haught is an ID opponent.
Again, Haught is deluded and veritable magic 8 ball of deepities. But he's no creationist.
No, he's not a fine and reasonable man in terms of science's relationship to religion. He's a deluded woo-meister. But not a creationist. A small consolation.
Richard Dawkins, for instance, who is by now a champion of atheism, and has absolutely no need to do so, *still* resorts almost continuously to ad hominem attacks in his debates; the man does his homework (and rather seems to enjoy it, in fact).
I dispute this is the case. In no event of which I'm aware did Dawkins dispute a point by way of insulting his interlocutor. Go ahead and find a few examples and I'll consider relenting.
In short, "Citation needed."
So what is a state representative in an interior district of an interior state supposed to do about immigration policy exactly?
At best, the state house can decide what to do with those immigrants which are deemed illegal by federal law. Sure he has wiggle room there for some sort of policy. He could support draconian measures to kick everyone out or support "sanctuary" status for his jurisdiction. But really, Sean won't have much impact on this. The US Congress is where to go for that action.
Did we read the same article? Because my reading of it was very different than yours. And you even suggest I didn't read it. Anyway, I'll try to be constructive to the rest of the/. readers while schooling you in your credulous reading of science journalism and hollow admonishment of my comments.
TFA is a ScienceNOW Daily news brief summarizing information from the investigation, relying heavily on what can be implied from the content of an affidavit released in late 2007 and just recently unsealed. What followed was a bunch of speculation by a professional scientific journalist, Martin Enserink, who did a rather good job lining everything up for us with good old fashioned journalism. His well-informed speculation is based on interviews and 4 paragraphs of the affidavit.
Your criticisms don't even make sense or are completely false. What were the 4 markers? Were they SNPs? Tandem repeats? Where? Tell me where I can download that data you talked about? If you know, I think you could really break this story open. As a matter of fact, the work referenced in TFA is not published nor was it peer reviewed. Perhaps you can start here and get back to me when you've found anything informative:
http://pathema.jcvi.org/pathema/anthrax_resources.shtml
For your information, genomics is my field, and I'm published in the area of studying genetic markers in populations. I stand by my suggestion that there is something sloppy here. If you'd read either TFA or MFC (my comment) then you'd know a major issue discussed was the opaqueness of what little we know. Either the FBI's organizing of the work was sloppy (perhaps due to it being "highly compartmentalized" according to TFA) or their release of the information was sloppy. No, I don't believe my suggestion that this was sloppy work is insulting to my field, nor do I think that what I do as a career is just dice throwing without hope for knowledge.
Before casting aspersions on others who have read TFA, you might actually try R-ing TFA yourself. And hiding behind anonymity? Classy.
It is certainly possible that enough evidence has been collected to nail Ivins. However, the evidence so far produced is far, far from convincing, especially the explanation of the TIGR data. It does seem like they've used a relatively small number of markers to identify the strain. If these markers are SNPs, then there is a fairly non-trivial chance that parallel mutations could cause false positives and that further mutations on the original strain could cause false negatives. And by what criteria did they choose only 4 of the mutations they successfully found? Even if they are less common mutations, there is abundant evidence that mutations of all kinds (duplications, deletions, even inversions) can happen rather frequently. But with no information, we're left wondering.
The interpretation of polymorphism data through ad hoc statistics compounded with arbitrary ascertainment bias could potentially allow the FBI to implicate anyone. If they were malicious (or trying to perform some CYA) they could even choose which markers to use and whatever hand-wavy analyses they wanted to implicate particular strains. Perhaps the research is completely above-board and is rigorous and implicates Ivins beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm very much open to that possibility. However, two things give me pause. First, the sketchy details we have concerning the data render them highly suspect. Specifically, if I'm to take literally everything I've read as being the essence of the most convincing evidence the FBI has, then I'd have to say they don't have a scientific case. (Convincing a credulous jury is another issue. See Simpson, O.J.) Secondly, the way they present the evidence is highly suspect. As one commenter suggested, what does the shoddy description of the details of the case tell us about the FBI's understanding of the relevant issues? As a scientist, I can say that I'm underwhelmed by their ability to communicate basic ideas.
Whether this is the FBI being secretive and leaving out key details or this is just incompetence, I can't tell. In either event, the cloudy picture currently painted in the public sphere is so suspect as to make anyone who knows anything about population variation to hear loud alarm bells regarding this case.
I have a great deal of respect for this approach to science, but interestingly not for any of the reasons you cite.
I believe that broadening collaboration (expanding collective knowledge) and rapid development (increasing the "effective population size" of a meme pool to use a popgen analogy) are much more compelling arguments for adopting this type of science than are problems publicizing work. If the "Science 2.0" becomes the norm, it is anybody's guess if the signal (work of students wanting their science to be heard) will increase faster than the noise (work of competing students). For early adopters in appropriate fields, they may very well catapult themselves to fame through avenues previously unavailable. However, this seems to be only possible during the transition to "Science 2.0". After attaining equilibrium, I suspect the new system will provide analogous challenges to being heard above everyone else. The advantage of the new system won't be promotion of science of an individual. I think instead (in an ideal world), it will be a more efficient mechanism of promoting good work, faster, and in a more egalitarian way.
I also think that any work worth doing is worth rewarding and/or scooping. Just because a young scientist may not have a thesis or project "worthy" of publishing in Science or Nature, doesn't mean other scientists in similar situations wouldn't be interested in reading that work or getting credit for it. A publication in a medium to low impact factor journal can count towards graduation in most places, and therefore is VERY valuable to an individual student. And most of these journals have ambiguous policies with regard to novelty and its intersection with "Science 2.0". As a result, even with "unworthy" publications, there is significant risk to going open source if there is ambiguity as to how the work will eventually be disseminated.
I think it is essential that the incentive and reward systems for science should definitely change to incorporate this framework. Science can and has changed in the very recent past, and I don't think requiring this sort of organizational change to promote open source science is a deal-breaker at all.
This is another train of thought that doesn't feed directly into my arguments, but here goes. I disagree that going completely open-source science for most projects at all stages of development is ultimately healthy for science. I would tend to think that this would create one huge echo-chamber that is extremely efficient at amplifying its own dogma. I very much think that the interplay between multiple schools of thought is very useful, as they tend to have different biases, and explore different issues frequently ignored by other schools. This is no argument for not using open-source collaboration. However, I do think that this sort of collaboration does break down so many barriers to migration of ideas that it has the potential to create one large "panmictic" population of ideas, leading to the echo-chamber trap. I suspect that a model where everyone instantly accesses everyone else's ideas isn't optimal for good science, as anyone who works in science knows that successful ideas frequently aren't the best ideas. (I mean successful in the popularity sense.) They frequently are the "coolest" fads or the incremental advances that flatter "poobahs" of the field without challenging dogma. Amplifying these ideas will impose a cost. I also think that, in such an environment, it might even be more difficult to promote science that challenges the conventional wisdom. If your new idea is immediately challenged by the community before you've had time to develop it fully, would you not be less likely to pursue it?
The benefits of "Science 2.0" are legion and probably outnumber the costs. But I think adopting and promoting it can be done cautiously. After all, even if it takes 10-20 years to fully integrate these advances, we've really only lost the blink of an eye. And when I'm advising students, I'll certainl
As a professional academic scientist who does both experimental and computational projects, I think there is a very good argument that for many types of science, this sort of approach will fail miserably, even after the technology to take care of it is completely mature.
For example, take a genomics project of moderate complexity and moderately broad interest. Such a project may not be SO important or SO interesting or SO difficult as to require an entire consortium of scientists to complete. However, it may be sufficiently complex that it will require coordinated experiments that will cost into the 10s of thousands of dollars and require more than a man year of work to complete. In such cases, it is almost always best for a single lab to do all experiments (for quality control reasons). If a lab were to complete all experiments at great expensive (for a regular lab), why would they then give up that data immediately for others to work on?
Sure, it would be quicker, and more insights would come faster. But to be perfectly honest, this would probably decrease the ability for that lab to promote its members by getting priority with good publications. Currently (at least in genomics) there is no way to reward a scientist through contribution to the community in this way. Now, if a way to award credit for this type of work were to be created that allowed:
students to apply such work to graduation requirements;
postdocs to apply the work to faculty job applications;
junior faculty to apply their contributions to tenure review;
then I think this could be a viable system. However, in academia, this is very unlikely for a very long time. It is amazing and wonderful that journals like PLoS are trending in that direction. And it is even better that MIT is pushing from the University side of the equation. But until Science 2.0 methods are explicitly taken into the incentive system of academic review, this type of approach is a non-starter for expensive, time consuming, experimental science.
On the other hand, I could see this sort of approach being very useful for computational science. With much data already freely available, it is usually super quick to get certain types of data analyses done, though quality is frequently questionable. (Go to a journal club on a bioinformatics paper if you want hear academic work seriously shredded.) However, this kind of work responds rapidly to the sort of peer review described in TFA. So, perhaps science could start with the bioinformatics model and figure out how to meaningful track credit in that arena before applying the model to experimental work?
...we were recently introduced to our office's new cluster of 36 dual quadcores, primarily slated for use in bioinformatics. The kinds of applications we do in our lab are highly suited to breaking up over many machines and wouldn't particularly benefit (or suffer) for explicitly coding them for multicore processors. We have Torque installed. However, at the training session, more time was spent discussing how to configure job submissions for parallel programs (including even a "Hello world" intro program demo for the truly clueless about parallel programming, ie me and those like me) than more useful things, like how to delete all jobs at once.
Does market share have anything to do with SP1? Anyway, your argument sounds a bit like Bill O'Reilly. Whenever he's challenged on anything of substance, he just repeats that his show has the highest ratings. Doesn't argue much for the quality though.
Even though your discourse lacks the most basic conventions of debate or decorum and you confound insults with substance, I feel compelled to respond because my point still stands, un-addressed by your non sequiturs and ad hominem asides.
My original contention was that, the law..., yes, the law (readily acknowledged) in this area seems to give special attention to unlocking of cellular devices. Other computing devices of various sizes with analogous abilities are not so regulated. Moreover, I also expressed the desire that such challenges will push a change in the law. I'd be equally satisfied if the obvious dissatisfaction of users would push for a change by Apple itself.
Moreover, I don't dispute many of the elegantly and oh so subtly disseminated points you support. They are simply irrelevant to my post. Sure, Apple warned, sure Apple probably can't be shown to have broken the law. But what does that have to do with my comments? Quite frankly, Apple (and most hardware companies) as a matter of course make special effort to make sure that their mass-market consumer devices are bullet-proof and idiot-proof. And that's at the very least. In fact, many competitors in the very same market as the iPhone encourage 3rd party development and freely sell unlocked phones. Notably, their updates never brick their products. Sure, at this juncture, Apple is free to inconvenience as many or as few customers as it chooses. If this behavior (callous at best and malicious at worst) is what we can expect from Apple (and in general, they do much better than this, and in fact are better than most companies), then there will be no "whining", just a change in consumer preference, at least on my part.
And yes you did misspeak, and continue to do so. You are not contractually obliged to use any hardware capabilities in any particular way. If you decided to use them with T-Mobile (even, -gasp-, the cellular capabilities) you wouldn't be breaking any contract. (Although, as an aside, if you could provide contradictory evidence in the form of a link to such a contract and a legal interpretation by a disinterested party, I'd be obliged.)
In conclusion, I reiterate my point that this an issue larger than the law. It is about the viability of particular strategies for Apple's iPhone, of which the narrow legalistic interpretation that you take is only a small part. So, while your assertions regarding your own chosen "walled garden" of argument may in some abstract sense be "true" (although this is by no means guaranteed), they in no way impact the bigger and more interesting picture. Even if the lawsuit fails miserably, I think the minor revolt by its customers has already been duly noted by Apple and will become an important part of their calculus in their future development of this product.
Your first mistake is that you speak of this as if it is only a matter of law. Clearly, this is about more than that. There is a huge population that sees the phone market as something more than an embedded system. And they want products that act as more than embedded systems. So, while this may or may not be settled in Apple's favor in the courts, there can be little doubt that handheld computers with cellular service will be a market force to be reckoned with in the not too distant future. If Apple succeeds in rebuffing people who would push the iPhone closer to that goal, then they are quite simply backpedaling from something the market desires.
Secondly, there is an issue of intentionally breaking the iPhone. So far Apple is just playing as if is an "unfortunate" side-effect. However, if it can be shown that such updates could easily avoid bricking the iPhones, then I think Apple should be sued. Think about it. If you take your Buick into a Buick dealership to get work done, and you sign a release form saying "If there are any non-Buick parts, you agree that we me return your car in non-working condition" that would be completely ridiculous. Even if this is lawful, it should receive a lot of bad publicity. This is simply anti-consumer. Even a failed lawsuit is a loss for Apple in this case. It brings attention to Apple's practice of bricking iPhones.
Finally, please cite where law requires a subscription to AT&T? Seriously. You are not required to activate your iPhone with AT&T. If I wanted to buy an iPhone for an art project, a paperweight, for a prop in a play or movie, or any other weird reason, I seriously doubt I would be contractually obligated to sign up with AT&T. Why would this be any different if instead of hooking it to AT&T, I decided to use T-Mobile? There is no law forbidding this. The only possible problem is distributing the unlock, which may (but probably doesn't) violate the DMCA:
"Individuals or companies that might help them are still prohibited from doing so. Thus, in many ways, the rule-making is an empty promise: giving a legal right to circumvent, without protecting access to the tools necessary to make that right a reality," she wrote.
Another issue is the Terms of Service (TOS) from AT&T. AT&T has a legal argument that the phone may not be operated on another network by the TOS -- assuming the customer has activated their iPhone.
Ms. Granick expressed the hope that this furor will change the future of mobile phones: "Perhaps the iPhone will awaken a consumer revolution, though not necessarily the one envisioned by Apple or AT&T."
So, if you decide not to accept AT&T's TOS by never activating your phone with AT&T, then I don't see how their TOS applies to you. And no contract is signed by buying the iPhone.
I see where you are coming from. However, your analogy is not a fair comparison. You are most certainly not renting the iPhone. It is yours. By the very nature of rental agreement, you do not own anything at all. But by purchasing the iPhone, you have only exchanged money with the vendor in exchange for a piece of hardware. If you want to blend it, unlock it, or even use it with AT&T's rate plan, you can. There is no obligation to do anything with your phone. You could even use it as a paperweight after you've bought it.
But, just to play devil's advocate on your behalf, perhaps the analogy should be with a condo and a house. You do own a condo, but you are bound by certain agreements that limits your freedom. The logic behind these limitations is usually in order to foster a certain type of community for the all condo owners. In fact, Apple's own justification about limiting 3rd party development invokes a desire to avoid "gum[ming] up" the network:
But it's not like the walled garden has gone away. "You don't want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."
But I believe that's bullshit. Everybody and their brother is allowing development on their phones. Also, in line with this, the U.S. is virtually alone in the world with locked phones. For the beacon of capitalism in the world that the U.S. supposedly represents, we sure don't offer the myriad choices that demand and an free market would dictate must exist. I'm even more impatient with this crap, after living in Asia. I can get cheap, unlocked phones very easily here that will work both in the U.S. and all over the world. And the incentives built-in with providers isn't very convincing except for the most frugal buyer, or perhaps for the the very first-time buyer. Nope, this locking crap (both software and carrier) is for the birds.
I really see no true difference between using your iPhone (with a carrier OF YOUR CHOICE) and hooking your landline (with a carrier OF YOUR CHOICE) through your computer's modem so you can use a software phone and answering machine. Also, how is it any different from using your laptop with a cellular card (with a carrier OF YOUR CHOICE) to get internet connectivity on the go?
To my layman eyes, the law in this area seems ad hoc and gives special attention to handheld cellular devices. Fortunately, it seems likely that unlocking is legal. I seriously hope this case will be the first of many to push regulation of companies that maliciously sabotage their customers after they bought the product to maximize profit.
I'm currently a very satisfied Mac user (I'm writing this post from a 3 year old PowerBook G4 17" that still runs like a spotted assed ape) but these sorts of moves sour me on AAPL. I'll give them a few chances to mess up and be forgiven, but as a computer savvy person who's primary love of Apple is for how they've beautifully wrapped what's under the hood, I can just as easily go right back to Linux where I came from. After all, that's what I use on the desktop and in the server rack already.
Why is it, just when Microsoft seems to have shot itself in the foot with Vista and controlling what users do with their hardware, that Apple jumps right of the cliff with them?
Despite some of my reservations (some of them in common with Pogue) I really hope that this "little laptop that could" becomes widely adopted. If it is, it will be game changing on so many levels. It is so much more than a teaching tool. Not only will it redefine who gets to participate in the market of ideas, it will change the pricing for laptop prices across the board. Perhaps even quicken the convergence between cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other media centers. The little device is just wicked cool.
However, there are some darker sides to it. Online addiction is epidemic in China. Also, if the OLPC is actually successful, some suggest that their owners would man a CAPTCHA solving army.
In the end, I think these risks are worth the benefits. And wide adoption is the least of the project's worries. It seems as if adoption is taking off a little too slowly.
Hmm R-ingTFA is highly recommended in these environs.
In fact, this particular topic isn't at all settled. It has been a very active area of research for decades, and questions related to this have spawned field changing debates. In a nutshell, before molecular biology, people thought all change was bad or adaptive. Then a dude named Kimura suggested that a lot of DNA change has very little consequence to survival. If most DNA changes are largely irrelevant to survival, then mutation rates largely dictate evolution. If mutation is dependent on metabolism, the voila! You get the result you see in the article.
However, another unrelated explanation with the very same prediction was made 34 years ago by a Tomoko Ohta, a student of Kimura's. If a lot of mutations have very small effects, then these very small effects can only be fully realized in large populations because of genetic drift. Thus, these small changes can be seen easiest in the larger population, which incidentally tend to be smaller and have higher metabolisms. Again, voila, you get the result you see in the article. In fact, the authors even admit as much:
...larger organisms
generally have smaller effective population sizes (Lynch & Conery 2003), we cannot rule out the possible influence of effective population size, as predicted by the 'nearly neutral' theory (Ohta 1973).
Ultimately, the authors have added to the debate and have by no means closed it. But that's what's fun, isn't it?
There is a lot of blame to go around for the state of scientific journalism. Because I am a scientist, and because I've been involved in a (relatively minor) journalistic "frenzy" concerning one of my papers, I can best speak about the inadequacies that we scientists add to the mix. In fact, most things that get even a minor note in a major city newspaper seem to the average scientist to be a journalistic feeding frenzy. When at work, we usually stay cloistered in our labs and offices working or reading Slashdot. We're not usually used to attention.
The biggest problem is, who wants to read something boring? Nobody. We scientists (and we Slashdotters, etc) may have a different idea of what is interesting and what isn't but we have a pretty good feel for what the "general public" likes. So, whenever a scientist discovers something that merits a high profile publication and media coverage, that person tends to want to make it interesting and exciting. After all, if the scientist spent years of their life doing the work, maybe people just like Mom and Dad might like to read about it for 2 minutes in the paper. And here is a problem. If the scientist is perfectly scrupulous and cautious to the extreme, then when that scientist talks to journalists, the caveats and assumptions overwhelm the discovery, and the result appears to be a boring piece of work and won't get reported. After all, it no longer even seems like a breakthrough. It will be in a journal, so why waste newsprint?
On the other hand, if, when the journalist asks a scientist about the work, the scientists sings the praises of the conclusions, downplays the caveats, and overstates its significance, it certainly sounds fancy. And it has a greater chance of being published. While most scientists wouldn't want their work mischaracterized, in their zeal to make their work interesting and relevant, they easily fall prey to simplifications that are wrought to aid the layman's understanding, but may take on a dimension of their own.
So, from the very beginning, there is a bias in what actually gets reported; the exciting stuff. And I can speak from first hand knowledge, when talking to reporters, trying to make your years of effort on a complex problem that is only completely understandable to a handful of peers is quite difficult. It is no wonder that, even when the scientists who do the work are consulted, that the work is often poorly represented. Of course, when the scientists aren't consulted or when they are more self-serving than average, the results can be disastrous for the quality of the journalism.
Of course, if you come up with the cure for cancer or the structure of DNA, you don't really need "talk up" the results. They speak for themselves. But if this is all that scientific journalism consisted of, then we'd only read two pages a year in the papers.
All isn't always as it seems. And if something seems too preposterous to be true, then it probably is. Before believing chicken little that the sky is falling, we should first look up and see for ourselves. So, to my mind, the weakest link in this chain of "the sky is falling, we are being censored" is the posting.
I would suggest that before any of us pile on to the discussion with knee-jerk agreement or disagreement, that we first do a little bit of cross-validation to see if the poster (and/or respondents) have given us enough information to respond intelligently. Most of us are saying perfectly reasonable things under one scenario or other. But here, there is only one scenario, the one that elicited the post. So let's restrict our comments only to what actually has happened and forget the rest. Let's break it down:
Here are the main claims:
Headline: Expert wants to decertify global warming skeptics
"Skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming" was specifically targeted for censorship.
A scientist in the senate is taking action to silence skeptics
The Weather Channel's most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to "Holocaust Deniers" and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.
That sounds dire indeed, and if true IS inflamatory! So, what certification would they lose? If we click through to one more line to the original comments by Dr. Cullen that elicited the accusation of censorship, we will find a link to the AMS certifcation page.
After reading from these two links, we learn from by Dr. Cullen on her blog that this is her opinion about certain meteorologists:
If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval.
Furthermore by looking reading the AMS link we learn that their certification is only a positive affirmation of their qualifications. There is no indication at all that lacking a "Seal of Approval" will legally interfere with the abilities of anyone (you or me, for example) from broadcasting the weather on any station who will have them (or us!). So, right out of the gate, the headline is disingenuous.
Does this amount to censorship?
I see no evidence that lacking a seal of approval will effectively silence anyone. But that's beside the point. This was merely an opinion by Dr. Cullen as to what standards the AMA should have. Notably, Dr. Cullen is not the AMA. Again, this implication (noted prominently with the censored icon) is dubious at the very least. Who is being censored and how will they be censored? Reading the source links provides no evidence whatsoever to answer either question.
But this is serious! Isn't the senate taking action to censor debate?
This implication is more than merely disingenuous. It is at best hastily posted and poorly considered and at worst an outright lie. But by now, we already know that. Since we read the original post, we know that this is merely the comments made on a blog on a senate.gov server
Slashdot Mirror
He testified in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial against intelligent design. So yes, ID is just a variant of creationism and Haught is an ID opponent. Again, Haught is deluded and veritable magic 8 ball of deepities. But he's no creationist.
No, he's not a fine and reasonable man in terms of science's relationship to religion. He's a deluded woo-meister. But not a creationist. A small consolation.
While I'm in favor of piling onto Haught, he isn't a creationist.
I dispute this is the case. In no event of which I'm aware did Dawkins dispute a point by way of insulting his interlocutor. Go ahead and find a few examples and I'll consider relenting. In short, "Citation needed."
So what is a state representative in an interior district of an interior state supposed to do about immigration policy exactly?
At best, the state house can decide what to do with those immigrants which are deemed illegal by federal law. Sure he has wiggle room there for some sort of policy. He could support draconian measures to kick everyone out or support "sanctuary" status for his jurisdiction. But really, Sean won't have much impact on this. The US Congress is where to go for that action.
Did we read the same article? Because my reading of it was very different than yours. And you even suggest I didn't read it. Anyway, I'll try to be constructive to the rest of the /. readers while schooling you in your credulous reading of science journalism and hollow admonishment of my comments.
TFA is a ScienceNOW Daily news brief summarizing information from the investigation, relying heavily on what can be implied from the content of an affidavit released in late 2007 and just recently unsealed. What followed was a bunch of speculation by a professional scientific journalist, Martin Enserink, who did a rather good job lining everything up for us with good old fashioned journalism. His well-informed speculation is based on interviews and 4 paragraphs of the affidavit.
Your criticisms don't even make sense or are completely false. What were the 4 markers? Were they SNPs? Tandem repeats? Where? Tell me where I can download that data you talked about? If you know, I think you could really break this story open. As a matter of fact, the work referenced in TFA is not published nor was it peer reviewed. Perhaps you can start here and get back to me when you've found anything informative: http://pathema.jcvi.org/pathema/anthrax_resources.shtml
For your information, genomics is my field, and I'm published in the area of studying genetic markers in populations. I stand by my suggestion that there is something sloppy here. If you'd read either TFA or MFC (my comment) then you'd know a major issue discussed was the opaqueness of what little we know. Either the FBI's organizing of the work was sloppy (perhaps due to it being "highly compartmentalized" according to TFA) or their release of the information was sloppy. No, I don't believe my suggestion that this was sloppy work is insulting to my field, nor do I think that what I do as a career is just dice throwing without hope for knowledge.
Before casting aspersions on others who have read TFA, you might actually try R-ing TFA yourself. And hiding behind anonymity? Classy.
It is certainly possible that enough evidence has been collected to nail Ivins. However, the evidence so far produced is far, far from convincing, especially the explanation of the TIGR data. It does seem like they've used a relatively small number of markers to identify the strain. If these markers are SNPs, then there is a fairly non-trivial chance that parallel mutations could cause false positives and that further mutations on the original strain could cause false negatives. And by what criteria did they choose only 4 of the mutations they successfully found? Even if they are less common mutations, there is abundant evidence that mutations of all kinds (duplications, deletions, even inversions) can happen rather frequently. But with no information, we're left wondering.
The interpretation of polymorphism data through ad hoc statistics compounded with arbitrary ascertainment bias could potentially allow the FBI to implicate anyone. If they were malicious (or trying to perform some CYA) they could even choose which markers to use and whatever hand-wavy analyses they wanted to implicate particular strains. Perhaps the research is completely above-board and is rigorous and implicates Ivins beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm very much open to that possibility. However, two things give me pause. First, the sketchy details we have concerning the data render them highly suspect. Specifically, if I'm to take literally everything I've read as being the essence of the most convincing evidence the FBI has, then I'd have to say they don't have a scientific case. (Convincing a credulous jury is another issue. See Simpson, O.J.) Secondly, the way they present the evidence is highly suspect. As one commenter suggested, what does the shoddy description of the details of the case tell us about the FBI's understanding of the relevant issues? As a scientist, I can say that I'm underwhelmed by their ability to communicate basic ideas.
Whether this is the FBI being secretive and leaving out key details or this is just incompetence, I can't tell. In either event, the cloudy picture currently painted in the public sphere is so suspect as to make anyone who knows anything about population variation to hear loud alarm bells regarding this case.
I have a great deal of respect for this approach to science, but interestingly not for any of the reasons you cite.
I believe that broadening collaboration (expanding collective knowledge) and rapid development (increasing the "effective population size" of a meme pool to use a popgen analogy) are much more compelling arguments for adopting this type of science than are problems publicizing work. If the "Science 2.0" becomes the norm, it is anybody's guess if the signal (work of students wanting their science to be heard) will increase faster than the noise (work of competing students). For early adopters in appropriate fields, they may very well catapult themselves to fame through avenues previously unavailable. However, this seems to be only possible during the transition to "Science 2.0". After attaining equilibrium, I suspect the new system will provide analogous challenges to being heard above everyone else. The advantage of the new system won't be promotion of science of an individual. I think instead (in an ideal world), it will be a more efficient mechanism of promoting good work, faster, and in a more egalitarian way.
I also think that any work worth doing is worth rewarding and/or scooping. Just because a young scientist may not have a thesis or project "worthy" of publishing in Science or Nature, doesn't mean other scientists in similar situations wouldn't be interested in reading that work or getting credit for it. A publication in a medium to low impact factor journal can count towards graduation in most places, and therefore is VERY valuable to an individual student. And most of these journals have ambiguous policies with regard to novelty and its intersection with "Science 2.0". As a result, even with "unworthy" publications, there is significant risk to going open source if there is ambiguity as to how the work will eventually be disseminated.
I think it is essential that the incentive and reward systems for science should definitely change to incorporate this framework. Science can and has changed in the very recent past, and I don't think requiring this sort of organizational change to promote open source science is a deal-breaker at all.
This is another train of thought that doesn't feed directly into my arguments, but here goes. I disagree that going completely open-source science for most projects at all stages of development is ultimately healthy for science. I would tend to think that this would create one huge echo-chamber that is extremely efficient at amplifying its own dogma. I very much think that the interplay between multiple schools of thought is very useful, as they tend to have different biases, and explore different issues frequently ignored by other schools. This is no argument for not using open-source collaboration. However, I do think that this sort of collaboration does break down so many barriers to migration of ideas that it has the potential to create one large "panmictic" population of ideas, leading to the echo-chamber trap. I suspect that a model where everyone instantly accesses everyone else's ideas isn't optimal for good science, as anyone who works in science knows that successful ideas frequently aren't the best ideas. (I mean successful in the popularity sense.) They frequently are the "coolest" fads or the incremental advances that flatter "poobahs" of the field without challenging dogma. Amplifying these ideas will impose a cost. I also think that, in such an environment, it might even be more difficult to promote science that challenges the conventional wisdom. If your new idea is immediately challenged by the community before you've had time to develop it fully, would you not be less likely to pursue it?
The benefits of "Science 2.0" are legion and probably outnumber the costs. But I think adopting and promoting it can be done cautiously. After all, even if it takes 10-20 years to fully integrate these advances, we've really only lost the blink of an eye. And when I'm advising students, I'll certainl
- students to apply such work to graduation requirements;
- postdocs to apply the work to faculty job applications;
- junior faculty to apply their contributions to tenure review;
then I think this could be a viable system. However, in academia, this is very unlikely for a very long time. It is amazing and wonderful that journals like PLoS are trending in that direction. And it is even better that MIT is pushing from the University side of the equation. But until Science 2.0 methods are explicitly taken into the incentive system of academic review, this type of approach is a non-starter for expensive, time consuming, experimental science. On the other hand, I could see this sort of approach being very useful for computational science. With much data already freely available, it is usually super quick to get certain types of data analyses done, though quality is frequently questionable. (Go to a journal club on a bioinformatics paper if you want hear academic work seriously shredded.) However, this kind of work responds rapidly to the sort of peer review described in TFA. So, perhaps science could start with the bioinformatics model and figure out how to meaningful track credit in that arena before applying the model to experimental work?...we were recently introduced to our office's new cluster of 36 dual quadcores, primarily slated for use in bioinformatics. The kinds of applications we do in our lab are highly suited to breaking up over many machines and wouldn't particularly benefit (or suffer) for explicitly coding them for multicore processors. We have Torque installed. However, at the training session, more time was spent discussing how to configure job submissions for parallel programs (including even a "Hello world" intro program demo for the truly clueless about parallel programming, ie me and those like me) than more useful things, like how to delete all jobs at once.
Does market share have anything to do with SP1? Anyway, your argument sounds a bit like Bill O'Reilly. Whenever he's challenged on anything of substance, he just repeats that his show has the highest ratings. Doesn't argue much for the quality though.
Even though your discourse lacks the most basic conventions of debate or decorum and you confound insults with substance, I feel compelled to respond because my point still stands, un-addressed by your non sequiturs and ad hominem asides.
My original contention was that, the law..., yes, the law (readily acknowledged) in this area seems to give special attention to unlocking of cellular devices. Other computing devices of various sizes with analogous abilities are not so regulated. Moreover, I also expressed the desire that such challenges will push a change in the law. I'd be equally satisfied if the obvious dissatisfaction of users would push for a change by Apple itself.
Moreover, I don't dispute many of the elegantly and oh so subtly disseminated points you support. They are simply irrelevant to my post. Sure, Apple warned, sure Apple probably can't be shown to have broken the law. But what does that have to do with my comments? Quite frankly, Apple (and most hardware companies) as a matter of course make special effort to make sure that their mass-market consumer devices are bullet-proof and idiot-proof. And that's at the very least. In fact, many competitors in the very same market as the iPhone encourage 3rd party development and freely sell unlocked phones. Notably, their updates never brick their products. Sure, at this juncture, Apple is free to inconvenience as many or as few customers as it chooses. If this behavior (callous at best and malicious at worst) is what we can expect from Apple (and in general, they do much better than this, and in fact are better than most companies), then there will be no "whining", just a change in consumer preference, at least on my part.
And yes you did misspeak, and continue to do so. You are not contractually obliged to use any hardware capabilities in any particular way. If you decided to use them with T-Mobile (even, -gasp-, the cellular capabilities) you wouldn't be breaking any contract. (Although, as an aside, if you could provide contradictory evidence in the form of a link to such a contract and a legal interpretation by a disinterested party, I'd be obliged.)
In conclusion, I reiterate my point that this an issue larger than the law. It is about the viability of particular strategies for Apple's iPhone, of which the narrow legalistic interpretation that you take is only a small part. So, while your assertions regarding your own chosen "walled garden" of argument may in some abstract sense be "true" (although this is by no means guaranteed), they in no way impact the bigger and more interesting picture. Even if the lawsuit fails miserably, I think the minor revolt by its customers has already been duly noted by Apple and will become an important part of their calculus in their future development of this product.
Your first mistake is that you speak of this as if it is only a matter of law. Clearly, this is about more than that. There is a huge population that sees the phone market as something more than an embedded system. And they want products that act as more than embedded systems. So, while this may or may not be settled in Apple's favor in the courts, there can be little doubt that handheld computers with cellular service will be a market force to be reckoned with in the not too distant future. If Apple succeeds in rebuffing people who would push the iPhone closer to that goal, then they are quite simply backpedaling from something the market desires.
Secondly, there is an issue of intentionally breaking the iPhone. So far Apple is just playing as if is an "unfortunate" side-effect. However, if it can be shown that such updates could easily avoid bricking the iPhones, then I think Apple should be sued. Think about it. If you take your Buick into a Buick dealership to get work done, and you sign a release form saying "If there are any non-Buick parts, you agree that we me return your car in non-working condition" that would be completely ridiculous. Even if this is lawful, it should receive a lot of bad publicity. This is simply anti-consumer. Even a failed lawsuit is a loss for Apple in this case. It brings attention to Apple's practice of bricking iPhones.
Finally, please cite where law requires a subscription to AT&T? Seriously. You are not required to activate your iPhone with AT&T. If I wanted to buy an iPhone for an art project, a paperweight, for a prop in a play or movie, or any other weird reason, I seriously doubt I would be contractually obligated to sign up with AT&T. Why would this be any different if instead of hooking it to AT&T, I decided to use T-Mobile? There is no law forbidding this. The only possible problem is distributing the unlock, which may (but probably doesn't) violate the DMCA:
So, if you decide not to accept AT&T's TOS by never activating your phone with AT&T, then I don't see how their TOS applies to you. And no contract is signed by buying the iPhone.
I see where you are coming from. However, your analogy is not a fair comparison. You are most certainly not renting the iPhone. It is yours. By the very nature of rental agreement, you do not own anything at all. But by purchasing the iPhone, you have only exchanged money with the vendor in exchange for a piece of hardware. If you want to blend it, unlock it, or even use it with AT&T's rate plan, you can. There is no obligation to do anything with your phone. You could even use it as a paperweight after you've bought it.
But, just to play devil's advocate on your behalf, perhaps the analogy should be with a condo and a house. You do own a condo, but you are bound by certain agreements that limits your freedom. The logic behind these limitations is usually in order to foster a certain type of community for the all condo owners. In fact, Apple's own justification about limiting 3rd party development invokes a desire to avoid "gum[ming] up" the network:
But I believe that's bullshit. Everybody and their brother is allowing development on their phones. Also, in line with this, the U.S. is virtually alone in the world with locked phones. For the beacon of capitalism in the world that the U.S. supposedly represents, we sure don't offer the myriad choices that demand and an free market would dictate must exist. I'm even more impatient with this crap, after living in Asia. I can get cheap, unlocked phones very easily here that will work both in the U.S. and all over the world. And the incentives built-in with providers isn't very convincing except for the most frugal buyer, or perhaps for the the very first-time buyer. Nope, this locking crap (both software and carrier) is for the birds.
I really see no true difference between using your iPhone (with a carrier OF YOUR CHOICE) and hooking your landline (with a carrier OF YOUR CHOICE) through your computer's modem so you can use a software phone and answering machine. Also, how is it any different from using your laptop with a cellular card (with a carrier OF YOUR CHOICE) to get internet connectivity on the go?
To my layman eyes, the law in this area seems ad hoc and gives special attention to handheld cellular devices. Fortunately, it seems likely that unlocking is legal. I seriously hope this case will be the first of many to push regulation of companies that maliciously sabotage their customers after they bought the product to maximize profit.
I'm currently a very satisfied Mac user (I'm writing this post from a 3 year old PowerBook G4 17" that still runs like a spotted assed ape) but these sorts of moves sour me on AAPL. I'll give them a few chances to mess up and be forgiven, but as a computer savvy person who's primary love of Apple is for how they've beautifully wrapped what's under the hood, I can just as easily go right back to Linux where I came from. After all, that's what I use on the desktop and in the server rack already. Why is it, just when Microsoft seems to have shot itself in the foot with Vista and controlling what users do with their hardware, that Apple jumps right of the cliff with them?
Despite some of my reservations (some of them in common with Pogue) I really hope that this "little laptop that could" becomes widely adopted. If it is, it will be game changing on so many levels. It is so much more than a teaching tool. Not only will it redefine who gets to participate in the market of ideas, it will change the pricing for laptop prices across the board. Perhaps even quicken the convergence between cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other media centers. The little device is just wicked cool.
However, there are some darker sides to it. Online addiction is epidemic in China. Also, if the OLPC is actually successful, some suggest that their owners would man a CAPTCHA solving army.
In the end, I think these risks are worth the benefits. And wide adoption is the least of the project's worries. It seems as if adoption is taking off a little too slowly.
Hmm R-ingTFA is highly recommended in these environs.
In fact, this particular topic isn't at all settled. It has been a very active area of research for decades, and questions related to this have spawned field changing debates. In a nutshell, before molecular biology, people thought all change was bad or adaptive. Then a dude named Kimura suggested that a lot of DNA change has very little consequence to survival. If most DNA changes are largely irrelevant to survival, then mutation rates largely dictate evolution. If mutation is dependent on metabolism, the voila! You get the result you see in the article.
However, another unrelated explanation with the very same prediction was made 34 years ago by a Tomoko Ohta, a student of Kimura's. If a lot of mutations have very small effects, then these very small effects can only be fully realized in large populations because of genetic drift. Thus, these small changes can be seen easiest in the larger population, which incidentally tend to be smaller and have higher metabolisms. Again, voila, you get the result you see in the article. In fact, the authors even admit as much:
Ultimately, the authors have added to the debate and have by no means closed it. But that's what's fun, isn't it?
There is a lot of blame to go around for the state of scientific journalism. Because I am a scientist, and because I've been involved in a (relatively minor) journalistic "frenzy" concerning one of my papers, I can best speak about the inadequacies that we scientists add to the mix. In fact, most things that get even a minor note in a major city newspaper seem to the average scientist to be a journalistic feeding frenzy. When at work, we usually stay cloistered in our labs and offices working or reading Slashdot. We're not usually used to attention.
The biggest problem is, who wants to read something boring? Nobody. We scientists (and we Slashdotters, etc) may have a different idea of what is interesting and what isn't but we have a pretty good feel for what the "general public" likes. So, whenever a scientist discovers something that merits a high profile publication and media coverage, that person tends to want to make it interesting and exciting. After all, if the scientist spent years of their life doing the work, maybe people just like Mom and Dad might like to read about it for 2 minutes in the paper. And here is a problem. If the scientist is perfectly scrupulous and cautious to the extreme, then when that scientist talks to journalists, the caveats and assumptions overwhelm the discovery, and the result appears to be a boring piece of work and won't get reported. After all, it no longer even seems like a breakthrough. It will be in a journal, so why waste newsprint?
On the other hand, if, when the journalist asks a scientist about the work, the scientists sings the praises of the conclusions, downplays the caveats, and overstates its significance, it certainly sounds fancy. And it has a greater chance of being published. While most scientists wouldn't want their work mischaracterized, in their zeal to make their work interesting and relevant, they easily fall prey to simplifications that are wrought to aid the layman's understanding, but may take on a dimension of their own.
So, from the very beginning, there is a bias in what actually gets reported; the exciting stuff. And I can speak from first hand knowledge, when talking to reporters, trying to make your years of effort on a complex problem that is only completely understandable to a handful of peers is quite difficult. It is no wonder that, even when the scientists who do the work are consulted, that the work is often poorly represented. Of course, when the scientists aren't consulted or when they are more self-serving than average, the results can be disastrous for the quality of the journalism.
Of course, if you come up with the cure for cancer or the structure of DNA, you don't really need "talk up" the results. They speak for themselves. But if this is all that scientific journalism consisted of, then we'd only read two pages a year in the papers.
All isn't always as it seems. And if something seems too preposterous to be true, then it probably is. Before believing chicken little that the sky is falling, we should first look up and see for ourselves. So, to my mind, the weakest link in this chain of "the sky is falling, we are being censored" is the posting.
I would suggest that before any of us pile on to the discussion with knee-jerk agreement or disagreement, that we first do a little bit of cross-validation to see if the poster (and/or respondents) have given us enough information to respond intelligently. Most of us are saying perfectly reasonable things under one scenario or other. But here, there is only one scenario, the one that elicited the post. So let's restrict our comments only to what actually has happened and forget the rest. Let's break it down:
Here are the main claims:
Now let's dissect each claim:
That sounds dire indeed, and if true IS inflamatory! So, what certification would they lose? If we click through to one more line to the original comments by Dr. Cullen that elicited the accusation of censorship, we will find a link to the AMS certifcation page.
After reading from these two links, we learn from by Dr. Cullen on her blog that this is her opinion about certain meteorologists:
Furthermore by looking reading the AMS link we learn that their certification is only a positive affirmation of their qualifications. There is no indication at all that lacking a "Seal of Approval" will legally interfere with the abilities of anyone (you or me, for example) from broadcasting the weather on any station who will have them (or us!). So, right out of the gate, the headline is disingenuous.
I see no evidence that lacking a seal of approval will effectively silence anyone. But that's beside the point. This was merely an opinion by Dr. Cullen as to what standards the AMA should have. Notably, Dr. Cullen is not the AMA. Again, this implication (noted prominently with the censored icon) is dubious at the very least. Who is being censored and how will they be censored? Reading the source links provides no evidence whatsoever to answer either question.
This implication is more than merely disingenuous. It is at best hastily posted and poorly considered and at worst an outright lie. But by now, we already know that. Since we read the original post, we know that this is merely the comments made on a blog on a senate.gov server