Why should we believe you? You claimed to know that Lomborg started with preconceived notions, and then turned out you were simply making that up. From your reply it seems you aren't the least bit ashamed for making up statements.
Now we can see who and what you had in mind when you talked about backwards science.
If anyone has allowed his preconceptions to colour his work, its Lomborg. (Funny, isn't it that Lomborg always "erred" in such a way such that his "facts" supported his thesis. Thats backwards science.)
Now that is what I call a succint collection of lies.
Lomborg started his work as an **environmentalist** trying to debunk some anti-environment statements from an economist. Out the window goes your claim that he was trying to support "his thesis". He sent his graduate students out to search for data that would debunk the economist's statements. They came back empty handed. Actually, worse, they came back with data supporting the economist's views.
Only then --and in view of the facts-- did he change his mind.
In contrast to what you're saying, I found that the majority of responses I read in the provided links pointed out specific problems with Lomborg's diagnoses.
For starters many of them do not even point to the Lomborg's web site where he addresses many of the criticisms (some of them quite convincingly).
Or articles written by prominent environmental scientists (which Lomborg is not, he is a statistician)?
This is an example of a typical hatchet job. If he had written an article in favour of global warming nobody would bring up the fact that he is *gasp* an statistician.
In fact, one could make the argument that, if anything, an statistician is particularly suited to reading trends in ecological data.
As I said, I don't know if his research holds water or not, but pointing out that he is an assistant professor or an statistician only illustrates the dearth of arguments of some of his opponents (and I emphasize the word some).
This is an overstatement of the facts. Many rebuttals take shortcuts in what would otherwise be hard work: debating each of Lomborg points. Those rebuttals overemphasize minor gaffes that are bound to appear in a research piece encompasing such a large subject. (By that count The Evolution of the Species by Darwin has more errors per page than Lomborg).
Reality is the majority of the basic facts are right, it is the interpretation of those basic indicators that needs to be discussed.
Your average environmentalist assumes a priori that the environment is deteriorating. Lomborg accurately points out that prima facie the data is not there.
Btw. this would not be the first time that environmentalists were wrong in something that they took for granted, as they were when they predicted humanity would run out of oil by the mid 90s.
The interpretation of the facts requires further debate though.
Most of the resources you point to are hatchet jobs much like the pie-in-the-face that proudly adorns one of them.
I have not yet Lomborg's book, but have followed the debate in science journals (as well as the Economist). While some scientists have engaged him on intellectual terms, the majority of the opinions have been nothing of the sort, stoopoing down to the questioning of his credentials (which nobody would question if he had just published a pro-global warming article).
Surprisingly few corporations are willing to spend money indexing their internal document set, as other search engine companies discovered.
Excite, Altavista, HotBot, Lycos all at one time or another tried to sell to the corporate market with little success. So either things have changed since, or Google management repeating an old mistake from other companies...
Moreover, companies such as Verity which specialize in corporate search engines have reported falling revenues as of late...
A system for reading e-mail needs to be "always on" to use a phrase from the competition (RIM). As far as I can tell with Treo if you are waiting for an e-mail you would have press receive every five minutes until the e-mail arrived.
One of the sad, unintended consequences of Linux's popularity is that there is a young generation of geeks out there who think that X-windows is something other than a comedy of errors.
The toolkit, the inefficiencies in communication, the lack of intelligent control at the terminal side, and the list goes on and on...
It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk.
He settled the lawsuit with caring what would happen to his friends who were also founders once the VCs owned the majority of the shares. How's that for bastard?
but why is it "de facto" that space research is the Ultimate Science(tm) that needs Billions(tm)?
Today NASA announced they are moving the repairs of the Space shuttle to Florida, thus saving $55mill per year. Think of all the scientific invesitgations that could have been funded just with the wastage of that project alone.
President Bush seems to forget that pure scientific research has been the most productive driver of American prosperity
Indeed but not all scientific endeavours are equally worthy of funding. Some areas of research produce solid, reliable breakthroughs, while others require a budget several times that of the NSF while producing few interesing ideas (forget about applications).
This applies equally to space exploration as to other not so successful approaches to science. If an area does not look ripe for breakthroughs you adjust the funding. This happens in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, CS, you name it. Why not in space too?
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?
Searle's "argument" boils down to "it would be non-sensical to say that the room understands Chinese".
Searly is trying to show that a computer cannot be mental. Then he establishes a-priori that the whole Chinese room system (the room, rule book and person inside) cannot be mental. This is a simple circular argument.
The Chinese room cannot be mental, according to him, as this would be "nonsensical". By that standard of proof the earth is flat, as making it round would be non-sensical and counter to our daily experience.
One would have expected/. nerds could to better at price comparisons than what we have seen so far.
Quick, what is a better price a 1994 Ford Fiesta at $10,000 or a brand new Ferrari at $12,000?
Clearly the Ferrari is a better deal. To do a proper price comparison you have to look beyond the sticker price alone.
What is the performance you get? resale value? maintenance cost? operation costs?
If all you wanted to buy is megabytes of storage you would be better of buying backup tapes. They are hard to beat price wise.
But in all likelihood you need to store that data for some purpose, so depending on frequency of access, latency, total cost of operation (tapes are operator/robot mounted), alternative solutions with higher sticker price, might well end up being cheaper.
What Eric Schmidt claims is that if you have a ton of data and you are accessing it all the time DRAM is more cost effective than (a) a large mirrored RAID array server or (b) a zillion tapes being mounted by operators.
I really think people under-estimate the size of the web, and this only becomes apparent when you try to cache large sites. Sure the majority of websites are pretty small, but more often than not now, government and business websites are used for real data-access solutions.
Indeed, this has been a hot area of debate for the last 7 years or so, when the first paper with a substantially larger web than that indexed by search engines came out.
Usually search engines estimate the web size to be about 15-30% of that claimed by statistical measurements.
Personaly I seriously doubt that all or even close to all the stuff google stores is stores in DRAM
You better believe it. Altavista already did that a long time ago. Hotbot (inktomi) had a similar all-in-memory scheme. Since Google is faster than those two, all the more reason to believe that the data is in DRAM (although surely they have backups in HDs and tape, but that is a different story).
AFAIK, Google does not cache images, only HTML text. The web size is estimated around 5-10 Terabytes, and text size as percentage of the web is between 12-30% depending on whose paper you read.
Hence the size of the cache is somewhere between 500GB and 3TB, plus the index would be another 40% of that.
My best guess is that the google archive is somewhere around a 2-3 terabytes, and that the total amount of DRAM available at google at the present time is somewhere between 5-10 terabytes.
In order to collect the information necessary to do that, you would have to invade people's privacy on a grand scale.
You talk about it as if it was something that has yet to happen. In fact today I can open a "business", pick up the phone and buy your purchase patterns from a credit card company, Price Club, your magazine subscription list or air miles reward programs.
Personally I think this is bad, but this does not make it any less true.
The problem with spam is that it's unsolicited, whether it's useful or not.
This is not quite so simple. In day to day life there is pull content and there is push content. For example a coworker walks into the office in 9/11 and says: "did you hear about what happened in New York?"
That is unsolicited information: in-your-face real-time push content. Yet few people would be upset about it, in fact most would be thankful for the heads up.
On the other hand, one hundred catalogues from golf stores is unfocused spam. Sending an O'Reilly diff file to somebody whose personal paranoia is spam is also unfocused. Sending e-mail in HTML format from.cr with no return address is the epithomy of unfocused spam.
The problem with spam is that is mostly useless. If spammers refined their targeting strategies users would not complain.
A golfer would never consider a cool catalogue with the latest golf toys spam. A hacker would welcome the latest diff of O'Reilly titles.
Instead we get this useless pieces of mail asking to join in some Ponzi scheme, send a penny to Craig, copy DVD movies, and Viagra for St. Valentine day (I'm not making this up).
Ditto for pop-ups, pop-unders and banner ads. The ad-executives seem to think "if only people looked at my ad, we would have great sales".
Sorry but no cigar. Pop-ups/unders advertise mostly useless products and even if we were submitted 24/7 --a la clockwork orange-- to the ads we would still not buy a stupid X whatever video camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should we believe you? You claimed to know that Lomborg started with preconceived notions, and then turned out you were simply making that up. From your reply it seems you aren't the least bit ashamed for making up statements.
Now we can see who and what you had in mind when you talked about backwards science.
. Granted its pie in the sky, but imagine how far along the linux desktop would be if all those developers coded for one and not two projects.
Ii don't agree. Competition keeps people moving. Linux didn't patch the kernel until the major branches became a threat.
Now, if only we could junk X windows and replace it with display postscript and other MacOS X goodies...
If anyone has allowed his preconceptions to colour his work, its Lomborg. (Funny, isn't it that Lomborg always "erred" in such a way such that his "facts" supported his thesis. Thats backwards science.)
Now that is what I call a succint collection of lies.
Lomborg started his work as an **environmentalist** trying to debunk some anti-environment statements from an economist. Out the window goes your claim that he was trying to support "his thesis". He sent his graduate students out to search for data that would debunk the economist's statements. They came back empty handed. Actually, worse, they came back with data supporting the economist's views.
Only then --and in view of the facts-- did he change his mind.
That is what science is, at its very best.
In contrast to what you're saying, I found that the majority of responses I read in the provided links pointed out specific problems with Lomborg's diagnoses.
For starters many of them do not even point to the Lomborg's web site where he addresses many of the criticisms (some of them quite convincingly).
Or articles written by prominent environmental scientists (which Lomborg is not, he is a statistician)?
This is an example of a typical hatchet job. If he had written an article in favour of global warming nobody would bring up the fact that he is *gasp* an statistician.
In fact, one could make the argument that, if anything, an statistician is particularly suited to reading trends in ecological data.
As I said, I don't know if his research holds water or not, but pointing out that he is an assistant professor or an statistician only illustrates the dearth of arguments of some of his opponents (and I emphasize the word some).
Given these choices, in the absence of information, isn't it more logical to bet on the second? Isn't it safer to assume the worst case scenario?
Yes it is and we should definitely err on the side of caution as you suggest. Just don't go around saying that the sky is falling if it ain't.
His research is full of errors,
This is an overstatement of the facts. Many rebuttals take shortcuts in what would otherwise be hard work: debating each of Lomborg points. Those rebuttals overemphasize minor gaffes that are bound to appear in a research piece encompasing such a large subject. (By that count The Evolution of the Species by Darwin has more errors per page than Lomborg).
Reality is the majority of the basic facts are right, it is the interpretation of those basic indicators that needs to be discussed.
Your average environmentalist assumes a priori that the environment is deteriorating. Lomborg accurately points out that prima facie the data is not there.
Btw. this would not be the first time that environmentalists were wrong in something that they took for granted, as they were when they predicted humanity would run out of oil by the mid 90s.
The interpretation of the facts requires further debate though.
Most of the resources you point to are hatchet jobs much like the pie-in-the-face that proudly adorns one of them.
I have not yet Lomborg's book, but have followed the debate in science journals (as well as the Economist). While some scientists have engaged him on intellectual terms, the majority of the opinions have been nothing of the sort, stoopoing down to the questioning of his credentials (which nobody would question if he had just published a pro-global warming article).
Surprisingly few corporations are willing to spend money indexing their internal document set, as other search engine companies discovered.
Excite, Altavista, HotBot, Lycos all at one time or another tried to sell to the corporate market with little success. So either things have changed since, or Google management repeating an old mistake from other companies...
Moreover, companies such as Verity which specialize in corporate search engines have reported falling revenues as of late...
A system for reading e-mail needs to be "always on" to use a phrase from the competition (RIM). As far as I can tell with Treo if you are waiting for an e-mail you would have press receive every five minutes until the e-mail arrived.
X just destroys Windows as a windowing system.
One of the sad, unintended consequences of Linux's popularity is that there is a young generation of geeks out there who think that X-windows is something other than a comedy of errors.
The toolkit, the inefficiencies in communication, the lack of intelligent control at the terminal side, and the list goes on and on...
It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk.
He settled the lawsuit with caring what would happen to his friends who were also founders once the VCs owned the majority of the shares. How's that for bastard?
but why is it "de facto" that space research is the Ultimate Science(tm) that needs Billions(tm)?
Today NASA announced they are moving the repairs of the Space shuttle to Florida, thus saving $55mill per year. Think of all the scientific invesitgations that could have been funded just with the wastage of that project alone.
President Bush seems to forget that pure scientific research has been the most productive driver of American prosperity
Indeed but not all scientific endeavours are equally worthy of funding. Some areas of research produce solid, reliable breakthroughs, while others require a budget several times that of the NSF while producing few interesing ideas (forget about applications).
This applies equally to space exploration as to other not so successful approaches to science. If an area does not look ripe for breakthroughs you adjust the funding. This happens in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, CS, you name it. Why not in space too?
For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?
Searle's "argument" boils down to "it would be non-sensical to say that the room understands Chinese".
Searly is trying to show that a computer cannot be mental. Then he establishes a-priori that the whole Chinese room system (the room, rule book and person inside) cannot be mental. This is a simple circular argument.
The Chinese room cannot be mental, according to him, as this would be "nonsensical". By that standard of proof the earth is flat, as making it round would be non-sensical and counter to our daily experience.
Within 50 years of that (150 years total) we'll have computers that can respond to voice commands like in Star Trek.
Yet apparently even then the computer won't be able to predict that Captain Piccard likes his tea hot...
IANL, but .
One would have expected /. nerds could to better at price comparisons than what we have seen so far.
Quick, what is a better price a 1994 Ford Fiesta at $10,000 or a brand new Ferrari at $12,000?
Clearly the Ferrari is a better deal. To do a proper price comparison you have to look beyond the sticker price alone.
What is the performance you get? resale value? maintenance cost? operation costs?
If all you wanted to buy is megabytes of storage you would be better of buying backup tapes. They are hard to beat price wise.
But in all likelihood you need to store that data for some purpose, so depending on frequency of access, latency, total cost of operation (tapes are operator/robot mounted), alternative solutions with higher sticker price, might well end up being cheaper.
What Eric Schmidt claims is that if you have a ton of data and you are accessing it all the time DRAM is more cost effective than (a) a large mirrored RAID array server or (b) a zillion tapes being mounted by operators.
I really think people under-estimate the size of the web, and this only becomes apparent when you try to cache large sites. Sure the majority of websites are pretty small, but more often than not now, government and business websites are used for real data-access solutions.
Indeed, this has been a hot area of debate for the last 7 years or so, when the first paper with a substantially larger web than that indexed by search engines came out.
Usually search engines estimate the web size to be about 15-30% of that claimed by statistical measurements.
Google does so cache images [google.com]. :)
Cute, but not quite correct. They cache post-stamp sized copies. If you want the full image you have to go to the original web site.
Granted, this does increase somwhat my original estimate of the amount of DRAM required.
Personaly I seriously doubt that all or even close to all the stuff google stores is stores in DRAM
You better believe it. Altavista already did that a long time ago. Hotbot (inktomi) had a similar all-in-memory scheme. Since Google is faster than those two, all the more reason to believe that the data is in DRAM (although surely they have backups in HDs and tape, but that is a different story).
AFAIK, Google does not cache images, only HTML text. The web size is estimated around 5-10 Terabytes, and text size as percentage of the web is between 12-30% depending on whose paper you read.
Hence the size of the cache is somewhere between 500GB and 3TB, plus the index would be another 40% of that.
My best guess is that the google archive is somewhere around a 2-3 terabytes, and that the total amount of DRAM available at google at the present time is somewhere between 5-10 terabytes.
In order to collect the information necessary to do that, you would have to invade people's privacy on a grand scale.
You talk about it as if it was something that has yet to happen. In fact today I can open a "business", pick up the phone and buy your purchase patterns from a credit card company, Price Club, your magazine subscription list or air miles reward programs.
Personally I think this is bad, but this does not make it any less true.
The problem with spam is that it's unsolicited, whether it's useful or not.
.cr with no return address is the epithomy of unfocused spam.
This is not quite so simple. In day to day life there is pull content and there is push content. For example a coworker walks into the office in 9/11 and says: "did you hear about what happened in New York?"
That is unsolicited information: in-your-face real-time push content. Yet few people would be upset about it, in fact most would be thankful for the heads up.
On the other hand, one hundred catalogues from golf stores is unfocused spam. Sending an O'Reilly diff file to somebody whose personal paranoia is spam is also unfocused. Sending e-mail in HTML format from
The problem with spam is that is mostly useless. If spammers refined their targeting strategies users would not complain.
A golfer would never consider a cool catalogue with the latest golf toys spam. A hacker would welcome the latest diff of O'Reilly titles.
Instead we get this useless pieces of mail asking to join in some Ponzi scheme, send a penny to Craig, copy DVD movies, and Viagra for St. Valentine day (I'm not making this up).
Ditto for pop-ups, pop-unders and banner ads. The ad-executives seem to think "if only people looked at my ad, we would have great sales".
Sorry but no cigar. Pop-ups/unders advertise mostly useless products and even if we were submitted 24/7 --a la clockwork orange-- to the ads we would still not buy a stupid X whatever video camera.