Sorry, but this is bollocks. Road designers know very well about the importance of speed in road accidents. The safest roads all around the world are motorways. The issue isn't about how to make motorways safe, it's how to make other roads safe -- ones where there are soft fleshy human pedestrians about. Little kids get killed in urban settings by cars going at 40 when they should have been going at 30 -- there's less time to course-correct and avoid a collision, and the consequences are significantly more damaging when the collisions happen. That's what this study was about.
The fundamental question is, "what is the most optimal design to reduce both the rate of accidents occurring and the harm caused by those accidents, while balancing for other important considerations (eg pedestrians' ability to move freely". Some of the levers to reduce accident rates are in tension with some of the levers to reduce harm, because road user behaviours change as perceptions of risk change. The optimal outcome is neither obvious nor well established.
Christianity is more than a synthesis of Greek and Judaic thought. Judaism has lots of faults of its own re sex, but I merely claimed that relative to Christianity, it has a rather more pragmatic view of sex.
Sorry, I see you were making a subtler use of the term "for a good reason" than typical slashdotters -- ie not implying a moral judgement behind "good", but simply saying that X tends to make Y more likely. The rest of your post now makes sense to me. I broadly agree. And I also feel sorry for you vis-a-vis your brother-in-law (and even more sorry for his kids, fwiw)
What is it with people's reading comprehension today? I did *not* say that waiting before having sex was a bizarre Christian attitude. I said that fathers expressing horror at boys pawing their daughters was a bizarre Christian attitude. I even then went on to say that this should not be taken as an indication that I thought licentiousness was a good thing.
No. I said the *novels* struck me as a clear demo of bizarre Christian attitudes to sex. But that attitude is *not* shared by Judaism, which has a rather more pragmatic view of sex. It *is* shared by some other cultures, but far from all.
What a stupid fucking comment. One of the reasons that people read novels is because they provide insight into how others think and behave. If you're going to proclaim that the novel doesn't provide such insight, you will need to assert that there are *not* lots of Christian fathers out there who hold the attitudes I describe. That makes you dumber than a dumb turd who can't do basic fucking research. As you go on to demonstrate very neatly through your trump card, wherein you proudly proclaim that you don't know whether or not I'm right to say that Jack Ryan is depicted as Christian, 'cos you've not read the novels. Is that supposed to make you some kind of hero? Are you trying to insinuate that I might be wrong? Cos it takes all of 2 minutes research to confirm that I am right. Specifically, Ryan is portrayed as a Catholic. Of course, if you're the right kind of foaming at the mouth sectarian, that won't be good enough for you. In which case, why don't you piss off to a Wee Free website and mutter dark imprecations about the Whore of Rome.
"Cultural norms with regards to age of consent, and age appropriate behavior evolved over time for a reason."
You want to revisit that thinking maybe? Which particular cultural norms? And why are the norms you pick self-evidently the "right" norms and the other ones "wrong"? There have been (and still are) lots of cultures where people start having sex from early puberty.
I remember when I read Tom Clancy for the first time and saw this kind of fucked-up attitude expressed by Jack Ryan -- horror at the idea of some teenage boy pawing at his daughter. It struck me then, and strikes me still now, as being a clear demonstration of sexism and bizarre Christian attitudes to sex: the daughter as father's property who needs to be "preserved" in her "innocence" and a ridiculous failure to acknowledge young women as sexual beings. You don't have to be a fan of sexual licentiousness to see this kind of attitude as deeply damaged and damaging. I think it's on a continuum with sex-related violence ("jealousy" and "honour" violence). People need to grow up. I can comfortably cope with the idea that both my son and daughter will be sexual beings. All I care about is that, as far as possible, their sexual encounters are positive: enjoyable without negative consequences.
Did you just argue -- apparently in all seriousness -- that patients who are being treated in competitive health markets are never the subject of arbitrary and unfair rationing decisions? Really? If so, where can I get some of your health insurance, it sounds super! Back in the real world, every health system I know of, whether public or private, sets limits on what will be treated. Those limits are sometimes fair, sometimes unfair; sometimes sensible, sometimes stupid.
What's really funny about your post, though, is the idea that direct competition for patients would drive quality improvements in this arena. It is notoriously the case that elective care is more responsive to competition as a driver for improvement than non-elective (unplanned) care, and that emergency care is top of the list -- because people in an emergency don't have time to make choices. That's why you call 911, and not 911 option 1 for Ambulance Service A, option 2 for Ambulance Service B, etc.
You know, I really believe in competition, and the UK could certainly use a bit more of it. But there's nothing like listening to US slashdotters bang on with nonsensical comparisons / complaints about the so-called socialized UK health system to remind me of the core sensible-ness of the UK system: pay via taxes, and by-and-large, get the care you need a *great* deal more reliably for the average Joe than you would in the US.
"Since the Talmud (Nedarim 64b) declares suma kamet (a blind person is akin to a dead person), Rabbi Israel Unterman, former Chief Rabbi of Israel, and other Rabbinic authorities have ruled that in saving someone from blindness it is as if you were actually saving someone from a life-threatening disease. Accordingly, Rabbi Unterman ruled that donating corneas to give a person sight is halachicly considered saving a life. In addition, the surroundings of a blind person are dangerous and may possibly cause death. There have been several studies that document the association between blindness and early mortality (Study 1, Study 2)."
The first reference you gave discusses multiple reasons why there *is* no halacha against donating to non-Jews. It also emphasises that technical discussions of halacha should not be used to disguise simple racism. You risk looking like that injunction applies to you, too.
The second reference is anonymous -- being on Wikipedia, and contains not a single reference for any of its assertions. I'll stick with HODS, I think.
Lots of the British constitution is not written down, but not much of those parts is relevant to criminal law. Examples include how hung parliaments are resolved -- not much is written down, and most of what is written, is in the form of a letter to the Queen dating from 1974 from the Cabinet Secretary (if memory serves).
Ironic when you consider the part that the author of that particularly vile erosion of our liberty had to play in instigating a criminal war, and the wild unlikelihood of ever seeing him being questioned by the police for his part in the killing of hundreds of thousands.
Aesthetic is a subset of user experience. How closely a device's interaction patterns mirror the bulk of user's expectations is the more significant part. And you only have to watch a baby flick through photos on an iPod to see how good Apple are at this. I defy you to find a video of a baby doing the same with the photos on a netbook.
Erm, you are very definitive in your statement, but you are also definitively wrong. The Health Professions Council regulates physiotherapy in the UK and there are two protected titles: physiotherapist and physical therapist. Using either of them when you're not on the register will get you into a whole heap of trouble.
I don't know how you can be so definitive about acupuncture being nothing more than an invasive placebo -- it doesn't tally with the literature. Have a look at the excellent reviews on the fabulous Cochrane website. http://www.cochrane.org/
See the review of trials looking at the P6 point and post-operative nausea, for example.
It's currently in the category of "seems to work for certain things, but we don't really know why".
Quite different from chiropractic, which has bugger all evidence of efficacy.
For an erudite discussion of the challenges of applying the scientific method to historical sciences, I suggest you read Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful book "Wonderful life".
Who's been complaining that they've written strong papers that have been turned down for publication unfairly because of the view they promote? Name names -- it shouldn't be difficult, they're presumably shouting from the rooftops about it. Do they number in the dozens, hundreds or thousands? Did they put their work up on the web so that it could be read anyway?
Are you really saying that tens of thousands of scientists are all politically correct and producing only the results that support AGW? What about the rest of their output -- most of these scientists will be working on topics that are from time to time relevant to AGW, but oftentimes are not (like ursine ecology, for example, or fluid dynamics, or biochemistry, etc etc) -- is all that output also just politically correct rubbish? How much of science needs to be chucked out? And, Sir, Can You Help? We need a Hero, and it sounds like that could be You.
1) That clears it up for me, but I'm not sure I understand its relevance, even after you've explained the relevance as you see it. 2) It's bad stuff. But the whole of climate science is not built around that one dataset. Not even close. 3) Rhetorical flourish. My apologies.
I'm struck by your choice of words in your final paragraph: " I also think that making global changes to a system without understanding it can have unintended consequences, potentially worse than the problem we are trying to avert." Do you not see? Pouring gigatonnes of CO2, CH4 into the atmosphere each year is a perfect example of "making global changes to a system without understanding it". The unintended consequences are the effects of climate change on us. And the problem we were trying to avert was an inability to easily heat and transport ourselves, manufacture goods etc etc. We did it to move ourselves away from the misery of pre-industrial life. Now we need to hang on to our hats and do our damndest to make sure that the species doesn't end up with something *worse* than pre-industrial life.
1) I hate to break it to ya, but whatever this Slashdot debate is, it's not the scientific peer review process at work. Where is the evidence of even an appreciable fraction of the scientists working on climate change saying that their work must be above criticism? Provide some links: put some evidence on the table to bolster your assertions.
2) Science selectively incorporates criticism. It looks at both assertion and critique to say "is this valid?". If yes, then incorporate; if not, then no. I can criticise gravitational field theory as much as I like, but the relevant scientists would be failing in their duty if they took any notice, given that I know fuck all about it and my criticisms are made up. Similarly, if I criticise a scientific paper, saying that it is wrong in its claim that polar bear numbers are falling, but provide no credible evidence for my critique, my criticisms will not be incorporated into the scientific knowledge base. Particularly if I'm an economist who hasn't actually made the study of polar bears a significant part of my life's work, in contrast to the people who wrote and reviewed the original paper.
Most of the skeptics on this slashdot thread certainly don't think that additional CO2 has an effect. See above!
Re mitigation -- cap-and-trade is one of a large number of policy levers being discussed. Have a look at a carbon cost-curve.
I just don't buy that AGW proponents "steadfastly refuse to consider the benefits of higher CO2 and a warmer planet". Where are the sound scientific articles that were written on this topic and then rejected? Studies into the effects of C02 on human mortality, for example, will review *all* the likely impacts, both positive and negative, and try to come to a view on the net effect.
My analogy's not great, but yours is worse. Paleoanthropology is a narrow field. Alternative theories don't typically require revisiting most of the other sciences.
Climate science is a broad field. You need to find alternative mechanisms to explain thousands of physical pieces of evidence, from sea levels and temperatures, through to basics like greenhouse gases.
Re horror. Undoubtedly some of the horror comes from the fact that it is mostly working scientists being challenged by either non-scientists or scientists from completely unrelated disciplines. If you or I, as non-paleoanthropologists, read a scholarly article in the field and suggested an alternative theory based on our reading of the facts, those working in the field would not be particularly inclined to spend much time considering it -- and that's quite reasonable, given that they've devoted years of intense study to the science, understand the limits of the knowledge, and we haven't. From time to time, that'll be the wrong call, but it's pretty damned rare.
1. Oops! You used the wrong word there -- you said there are *rates* of increase / decrease that overwhelm anything we've seen in modern times. I'm aware that the *total change* was much larger, but not that the *change per unit of time* was much larger. Rate is important, as faster rates reduce the time for species to adapt. 2. What is this rubbish about little old us? There are more than 6 billion of us on the planet. Why wouldn't a very large number of resource-using large mammals be able to affect the planet? We can and do change physical geography on an ongoing basis -- there's virtually no square inch of England that isn't different from its "natural" state due to active management by humans. We can and do deplete resources or poison environments so that they are uninhabitable. 3. What is this rubbish about "trace gas" and "parts per million"? What is inherently implausible about changes in the quantum of trace gases (it's not just CO2, y'know) having real effects on physical systems? 4. Overall, you've missed the point: there's a ton of physical evidence that climate change is happening (and quite a bit for it having an impact on ecosystems too), plus well-worked through theory with good evidence for how ("the greenhouse effect"). *That's* what will need reconciliation with an assertion that there is no climate change. In the end, there are two arguments to be discussed: 1) Is it happening? 2) What do we do? -- ranging from nothing to something.
I assure you that I'm quite as attached to home comforts as you -- I just happen to believe that the answers are pretty clear: 1) Yes, it is 2) Doing something is more likely to preserve more of my comforts (and fellow human beings) than doing nothing. You clearly take the opposite view.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but this is bollocks. Road designers know very well about the importance of speed in road accidents. The safest roads all around the world are motorways. The issue isn't about how to make motorways safe, it's how to make other roads safe -- ones where there are soft fleshy human pedestrians about. Little kids get killed in urban settings by cars going at 40 when they should have been going at 30 -- there's less time to course-correct and avoid a collision, and the consequences are significantly more damaging when the collisions happen. That's what this study was about.
The fundamental question is, "what is the most optimal design to reduce both the rate of accidents occurring and the harm caused by those accidents, while balancing for other important considerations (eg pedestrians' ability to move freely". Some of the levers to reduce accident rates are in tension with some of the levers to reduce harm, because road user behaviours change as perceptions of risk change. The optimal outcome is neither obvious nor well established.
Christianity is more than a synthesis of Greek and Judaic thought. Judaism has lots of faults of its own re sex, but I merely claimed that relative to Christianity, it has a rather more pragmatic view of sex.
Sorry, I see you were making a subtler use of the term "for a good reason" than typical slashdotters -- ie not implying a moral judgement behind "good", but simply saying that X tends to make Y more likely. The rest of your post now makes sense to me. I broadly agree. And I also feel sorry for you vis-a-vis your brother-in-law (and even more sorry for his kids, fwiw)
What is it with people's reading comprehension today? I did *not* say that waiting before having sex was a bizarre Christian attitude. I said that fathers expressing horror at boys pawing their daughters was a bizarre Christian attitude. I even then went on to say that this should not be taken as an indication that I thought licentiousness was a good thing.
Way to miss the fucking point, there.
As for the point about novels, see my other post.
No. I said the *novels* struck me as a clear demo of bizarre Christian attitudes to sex. But that attitude is *not* shared by Judaism, which has a rather more pragmatic view of sex. It *is* shared by some other cultures, but far from all.
What a stupid fucking comment. One of the reasons that people read novels is because they provide insight into how others think and behave. If you're going to proclaim that the novel doesn't provide such insight, you will need to assert that there are *not* lots of Christian fathers out there who hold the attitudes I describe. That makes you dumber than a dumb turd who can't do basic fucking research. As you go on to demonstrate very neatly through your trump card, wherein you proudly proclaim that you don't know whether or not I'm right to say that Jack Ryan is depicted as Christian, 'cos you've not read the novels. Is that supposed to make you some kind of hero? Are you trying to insinuate that I might be wrong? Cos it takes all of 2 minutes research to confirm that I am right. Specifically, Ryan is portrayed as a Catholic. Of course, if you're the right kind of foaming at the mouth sectarian, that won't be good enough for you. In which case, why don't you piss off to a Wee Free website and mutter dark imprecations about the Whore of Rome.
Jeesus fucking wept.
"Cultural norms with regards to age of consent, and age appropriate behavior evolved over time for a reason."
You want to revisit that thinking maybe? Which particular cultural norms? And why are the norms you pick self-evidently the "right" norms and the other ones "wrong"? There have been (and still are) lots of cultures where people start having sex from early puberty.
I remember when I read Tom Clancy for the first time and saw this kind of fucked-up attitude expressed by Jack Ryan -- horror at the idea of some teenage boy pawing at his daughter. It struck me then, and strikes me still now, as being a clear demonstration of sexism and bizarre Christian attitudes to sex: the daughter as father's property who needs to be "preserved" in her "innocence" and a ridiculous failure to acknowledge young women as sexual beings. You don't have to be a fan of sexual licentiousness to see this kind of attitude as deeply damaged and damaging. I think it's on a continuum with sex-related violence ("jealousy" and "honour" violence). People need to grow up. I can comfortably cope with the idea that both my son and daughter will be sexual beings. All I care about is that, as far as possible, their sexual encounters are positive: enjoyable without negative consequences.
All very well, but I'd prefer to read what Atul Gawande has to say about the value of rules and lists.
I beg your pardon?
Did you just argue -- apparently in all seriousness -- that patients who are being treated in competitive health markets are never the subject of arbitrary and unfair rationing decisions? Really? If so, where can I get some of your health insurance, it sounds super! Back in the real world, every health system I know of, whether public or private, sets limits on what will be treated. Those limits are sometimes fair, sometimes unfair; sometimes sensible, sometimes stupid.
What's really funny about your post, though, is the idea that direct competition for patients would drive quality improvements in this arena. It is notoriously the case that elective care is more responsive to competition as a driver for improvement than non-elective (unplanned) care, and that emergency care is top of the list -- because people in an emergency don't have time to make choices. That's why you call 911, and not 911 option 1 for Ambulance Service A, option 2 for Ambulance Service B, etc.
You know, I really believe in competition, and the UK could certainly use a bit more of it. But there's nothing like listening to US slashdotters bang on with nonsensical comparisons / complaints about the so-called socialized UK health system to remind me of the core sensible-ness of the UK system: pay via taxes, and by-and-large, get the care you need a *great* deal more reliably for the average Joe than you would in the US.
From HODS:
"Since the Talmud (Nedarim 64b) declares suma kamet (a blind person is akin to a dead person), Rabbi Israel Unterman, former Chief Rabbi of Israel, and other Rabbinic authorities have ruled that in saving someone from blindness it is as if you were actually saving someone from a life-threatening disease. Accordingly, Rabbi Unterman ruled that donating corneas to give a person sight is halachicly considered saving a life. In addition, the surroundings of a blind person are dangerous and may possibly cause death. There have been several studies that document the association between blindness and early mortality (Study 1, Study 2)."
Right then.
The first reference you gave discusses multiple reasons why there *is* no halacha against donating to non-Jews. It also emphasises that technical discussions of halacha should not be used to disguise simple racism. You risk looking like that injunction applies to you, too.
The second reference is anonymous -- being on Wikipedia, and contains not a single reference for any of its assertions. I'll stick with HODS, I think.
Lots of the British constitution is not written down, but not much of those parts is relevant to criminal law. Examples include how hung parliaments are resolved -- not much is written down, and most of what is written, is in the form of a letter to the Queen dating from 1974 from the Cabinet Secretary (if memory serves).
Ironic when you consider the part that the author of that particularly vile erosion of our liberty had to play in instigating a criminal war, and the wild unlikelihood of ever seeing him being questioned by the police for his part in the killing of hundreds of thousands.
Actually, that's potentially illegal too ("passing off"). If you see someone do it, call the police or call the HPC and ask them to do it!
Aesthetic is a subset of user experience. How closely a device's interaction patterns mirror the bulk of user's expectations is the more significant part. And you only have to watch a baby flick through photos on an iPod to see how good Apple are at this. I defy you to find a video of a baby doing the same with the photos on a netbook.
Erm, you are very definitive in your statement, but you are also definitively wrong. The Health Professions Council regulates physiotherapy in the UK and there are two protected titles: physiotherapist and physical therapist. Using either of them when you're not on the register will get you into a whole heap of trouble.
More here:
http://www.hpc-uk.org/aboutregistration/protectedtitles/
I don't know how you can be so definitive about acupuncture being nothing more than an invasive placebo -- it doesn't tally with the literature. Have a look at the excellent reviews on the fabulous Cochrane website. http://www.cochrane.org/
See the review of trials looking at the P6 point and post-operative nausea, for example.
It's currently in the category of "seems to work for certain things, but we don't really know why".
Quite different from chiropractic, which has bugger all evidence of efficacy.
For an erudite discussion of the challenges of applying the scientific method to historical sciences, I suggest you read Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful book "Wonderful life".
Huh?
Who's been complaining that they've written strong papers that have been turned down for publication unfairly because of the view they promote? Name names -- it shouldn't be difficult, they're presumably shouting from the rooftops about it. Do they number in the dozens, hundreds or thousands? Did they put their work up on the web so that it could be read anyway?
Are you really saying that tens of thousands of scientists are all politically correct and producing only the results that support AGW? What about the rest of their output -- most of these scientists will be working on topics that are from time to time relevant to AGW, but oftentimes are not (like ursine ecology, for example, or fluid dynamics, or biochemistry, etc etc) -- is all that output also just politically correct rubbish? How much of science needs to be chucked out? And, Sir, Can You Help? We need a Hero, and it sounds like that could be You.
1) That clears it up for me, but I'm not sure I understand its relevance, even after you've explained the relevance as you see it.
2) It's bad stuff. But the whole of climate science is not built around that one dataset. Not even close.
3) Rhetorical flourish. My apologies.
I'm struck by your choice of words in your final paragraph: " I also think that making global changes to a system without understanding it can have unintended consequences, potentially worse than the problem we are trying to avert." Do you not see? Pouring gigatonnes of CO2, CH4 into the atmosphere each year is a perfect example of "making global changes to a system without understanding it". The unintended consequences are the effects of climate change on us. And the problem we were trying to avert was an inability to easily heat and transport ourselves, manufacture goods etc etc. We did it to move ourselves away from the misery of pre-industrial life. Now we need to hang on to our hats and do our damndest to make sure that the species doesn't end up with something *worse* than pre-industrial life.
1) I hate to break it to ya, but whatever this Slashdot debate is, it's not the scientific peer review process at work. Where is the evidence of even an appreciable fraction of the scientists working on climate change saying that their work must be above criticism? Provide some links: put some evidence on the table to bolster your assertions.
2) Science selectively incorporates criticism. It looks at both assertion and critique to say "is this valid?". If yes, then incorporate; if not, then no. I can criticise gravitational field theory as much as I like, but the relevant scientists would be failing in their duty if they took any notice, given that I know fuck all about it and my criticisms are made up. Similarly, if I criticise a scientific paper, saying that it is wrong in its claim that polar bear numbers are falling, but provide no credible evidence for my critique, my criticisms will not be incorporated into the scientific knowledge base. Particularly if I'm an economist who hasn't actually made the study of polar bears a significant part of my life's work, in contrast to the people who wrote and reviewed the original paper.
Most of the skeptics on this slashdot thread certainly don't think that additional CO2 has an effect. See above!
Re mitigation -- cap-and-trade is one of a large number of policy levers being discussed. Have a look at a carbon cost-curve.
I just don't buy that AGW proponents "steadfastly refuse to consider the benefits of higher CO2 and a warmer planet". Where are the sound scientific articles that were written on this topic and then rejected? Studies into the effects of C02 on human mortality, for example, will review *all* the likely impacts, both positive and negative, and try to come to a view on the net effect.
My analogy's not great, but yours is worse. Paleoanthropology is a narrow field. Alternative theories don't typically require revisiting most of the other sciences.
Climate science is a broad field. You need to find alternative mechanisms to explain thousands of physical pieces of evidence, from sea levels and temperatures, through to basics like greenhouse gases.
Re horror. Undoubtedly some of the horror comes from the fact that it is mostly working scientists being challenged by either non-scientists or scientists from completely unrelated disciplines. If you or I, as non-paleoanthropologists, read a scholarly article in the field and suggested an alternative theory based on our reading of the facts, those working in the field would not be particularly inclined to spend much time considering it -- and that's quite reasonable, given that they've devoted years of intense study to the science, understand the limits of the knowledge, and we haven't. From time to time, that'll be the wrong call, but it's pretty damned rare.
1. Oops! You used the wrong word there -- you said there are *rates* of increase / decrease that overwhelm anything we've seen in modern times. I'm aware that the *total change* was much larger, but not that the *change per unit of time* was much larger. Rate is important, as faster rates reduce the time for species to adapt.
2. What is this rubbish about little old us? There are more than 6 billion of us on the planet. Why wouldn't a very large number of resource-using large mammals be able to affect the planet? We can and do change physical geography on an ongoing basis -- there's virtually no square inch of England that isn't different from its "natural" state due to active management by humans. We can and do deplete resources or poison environments so that they are uninhabitable.
3. What is this rubbish about "trace gas" and "parts per million"? What is inherently implausible about changes in the quantum of trace gases (it's not just CO2, y'know) having real effects on physical systems?
4. Overall, you've missed the point: there's a ton of physical evidence that climate change is happening (and quite a bit for it having an impact on ecosystems too), plus well-worked through theory with good evidence for how ("the greenhouse effect"). *That's* what will need reconciliation with an assertion that there is no climate change.
In the end, there are two arguments to be discussed:
1) Is it happening?
2) What do we do? -- ranging from nothing to something.
I assure you that I'm quite as attached to home comforts as you -- I just happen to believe that the answers are pretty clear:
1) Yes, it is
2) Doing something is more likely to preserve more of my comforts (and fellow human beings) than doing nothing. You clearly take the opposite view.