What could be worse than a manager immersed in the details who really doesn't know his stuff?
I don't know but knowing your stuff probably has a bigger impact than micromanaging.
I'd say that someone who really knows their stuff will have an inherent tendency to micromanage to a certain degree. If you're leading a project and have the big picture about exactly where you want that project to go, you'll want certain things to be done in certain ways just because you know that will work better with what other people are doing or with the things you're planning to try in the future. As long as the micromanager can still keep track of the big picture and give his or her employees a feeling of being trusted, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't mind being micromanaged, provided that the person intruding in my work clearly knows the aspect of the work they're intruding in much better than me. It's great to learn from people who really know their stuff.
You're making a lot of assumptions there:
- as you pointed out yourself, the process takes time; Spiegelman might not have been fairly well-known for this kind of stuff at the time of submission
- even if Spiegelman was fairly well-known for this kind of research, there could easily be 3 other researchers equally qualified to be reviewers
- it is perfectly possible the authors requested to bar Spiegelman from being reviewer process because he's direct competition
- I know researchers who use their gmail account for everything. Add to that the low likelihood of something like this happening (ordinarily, the whole point of going through the agony of publishing a paper is to take credit for the research, which becomes somewhat problematic when using a pseudonym), and I can easily see the editor wasn't exactly worried about verifying the authors' identity. Editors as well as reviewers are typically more worried about the quality of the research...
Bottom line: the research was good, rendering the debate on the quality of the journal's peer-review process moot. This sounds like something that could have happened to any journal, terrible or otherwise. The interesting debate is not about the journal but about the perps. Who were they? People trying to hurt Spiegelman, or industry researchers who were accidentally on the same track and were trying to hurt their company? Or neither? Will they get caught? Will they get punished? What will the "lessons learned" be?
Sure, but did the hypothetical corporate researchers know about Spiegelman's results and patent at the time they submitted their paper? It's a competitive world...
I actually miss the 3 button mice - I wish that clicking the scroll button on the mouse would be the middle click.
Huh? Last time I checked (about 30 seconds ago), it was. In fact, it has been for as long as I've been using Linux. I even deliberately only buy mouses (mice?) on which the scroll wheel cannot swivel left or right, because that makes it more difficult to press the scroll wheel down without unintended consequences.
A lot of the "Linux games" currently offered on Steam actually are just Windows binaries packaged together with a "private" Wine/Cedega/Crossover version. And the added layer of complexity does sometimes cause trouble, too.
Most home networks are wireless these days. Wireless networks are the modern equivalent of the old ethernet collision domains, with nasty unpredictable spikes of latency. For twitchy games (like most FPS), this sounds like a very bad idea. I predict many domestic dramas when little sister fires up Youtube or Skype, or the neighbor pops a meal in the old poorly shielded microwave.
These plants or algae still require an energy source to do that: light. To consume all the CO2 released by, say, a coal-fired power plant, you'd need a huge area full of "algae panels" to catch enough sunlight to do it. Now, if you would fill the same area with solar panels, you'd generate many times more energy than the coal-fired power plant you started with...
And please, nobody dare to reply "well duh we'll simply use artificial lighting". The lights would require many times more electricity than the coal-fired power plant you started with can produce...
Oh yeah, don't dare to reply with "better technology will make net energy profit possible" either. You can change the "many times more" in my post to "a little bit more", but you can't break the laws of thermodynamics.
Oooh I have a better idea! Let's use coal instead of charcoal! They're chemically very similar and the former is much cheaper to obtain in bulk. Or no wait, I'm on a roll here. Let's stick with the coal, but instead of ploughing it into farmland, let's put it into big landfills and fill abandoned mines with it; that way we can sequester so much more!
If you read my post to the letter, that's a just response. However, you're kinda missing my point. $50 worth of the kind of cheap explosives used in e.g. mining will reduce a tank to scrap; it's ridiculously overpowered for bomb disposal applications, and will unnecessary increase the damage done when set off.
You never did a simple analysis of the IR and Raman spectra of CO2, did you? Allow me to clue you in: the smart denialists go out of their way telling people the issue is not as simple as a the spectroscopic properties of CO2 would suggest, because this guy predicted in 1896 that there would be a positive correlation between the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the average temperature. And take one wild guess what that prediction was based on? Bingo, the spectroscopic properties of CO2 !
Your post paints such a stereotype of the ignorant denialist pathetically struggling to formulate a sciency-sounding argument while being miles off the mark, that I re-read it 3 times looking for clues of sarcasm.
That said, yes, ocean acidification is pretty concerning too. Thank you for giving more ammunition to us, evil shills of the huge and mighty solar panel industry lobby. MUHAHAHA! (I really should stop doing that, shouldn't I?)
Oh by the way, it's "disproven". A word a real scientist would never get wrong because they use it so often. Because in spite of popular perception, they're constantly looking to disprove their colleagues' stuff.
So it's not just me. I'm more and more getting the feeling that slashdot moderation seems to have acquired a mean right-wing "-1 disagree" streak over the last several weeks on a diverse set of issues including but not limited to climate change. Call me paranoid, but it looks like someone has figured out a way to game the system. Which is not all that surprising as such; if you think about it a bit, it more becomes a question of "what took them so long?" Maybe the site admins were not always asleep at the steering wheel?
Give me a break. Even you, the AC who may or may not be a sock puppet of a fossil fuel industry shill, are getting doubts because of the way other shills attempt to stir up controversy on an issue that was settled decades ago in the scientific community. It is beyond me how this kind of FUD can be modded "Insightful".
Even if you don't look at the military, I'm pretty sure I flew in an airliner that had a name some time during the last 3 years. I don't remember exactly; it may not have been a big airline and it may not have been in the US, but it had a name written on it in a small yet legible font.
No, the scientific method is you change the model to fit what happens and you get a better model that more closely predicts what happens next. If your model predicts something and it doesn't happen and then you change your model and predict something and it doesn't happen, and you again change your model and it doesn't happen, etc
Luckily that isn't the case for the climate models, which get the majority of their predictions (especially the big trends) right. It's just that "climate models again shown to be mostly right" is a pretty boring headline and the media instead jump on every small detail that is predicted incorrectly, which makes climate scientists look like hacks in the eyes of the general public that doesn't know any better.
A large percentage of the wines sold with a natural cork are not suitable for aging anyway, and a large percentage of their buyers won't even try to age them (if they even have a suitable cellar / cooler). Couldn't we just agree to only put natural corks on the more fancy wines that are meant to be aged and that are likely to fall into the hands of people who actually know what to do with them? And while we're at it, the few wines that are worthy of a natural cork could do with better corks (more carefully selected, cut and sterilized). In this day and age, with all the sanitation/sterilization techniques we have at our disposal (irradiation for example), one would expect a few percent of the price of a really good bottle to buy you a cork that has a reasonable chance not to ruin your wine...
Part of the problem is that, even though the customer base is sufficiently educated to realize they don't need corks, and the winemakers know this better than anyone else, the organizations that control wine "appellations" are often extremely conservative and will kick winemakers out for not using natural cork. I recently read the story of a winemaker who had to give up the "Chianti" name on his label so that he could put a screwcap on his bottles.
Well, the idea that our universe is the 3D hypersurface of an expanding 4D hypersphere that originated from some kind of explosive process in a 4D universe is hardly new or original; though I'm not an astrophysicist, it is my understanding that this is the prevalent view on the big bang and cosmic expansion. The only new thing these guys came up with is explaining the expanding 4D hypersphere as the shockwave (not event horizon) of a 4D supernova. If that's specifically what you've been saying for all these years, then by all means, do feel vindicated.
I see 2 problems with this explanation, however:
(1) It assumes that the laws of physics in the parent 4D universe are somewhat similar to ours, allowing for stars, supernovae and black holes. This seems a bit unlikely because the dimensionality is different, and because explaining our physics in terms of a shockwave of expanding gas would require that shockwave to occur in an universe with laws of physics that are very exotic from our POV.
(2) As pointed out earlier, it is very difficult to prove or falsify with empirical observations. So difficult in fact that I'm sceptical about its viability in the face of Occam's razor.
I haven't RTFA (and I somewhat doubt I would understand it), but if they did manage to come up with a set of laws for the parent 4D universe that would explain our physics as the shock wave of an expanding gas cloud, then the above two points would be at least partially addressed, and they can get in line for a noble price. I somewhat doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
What could be worse than a manager immersed in the details who really doesn't know his stuff?
I don't know but knowing your stuff probably has a bigger impact than micromanaging.
I'd say that someone who really knows their stuff will have an inherent tendency to micromanage to a certain degree. If you're leading a project and have the big picture about exactly where you want that project to go, you'll want certain things to be done in certain ways just because you know that will work better with what other people are doing or with the things you're planning to try in the future. As long as the micromanager can still keep track of the big picture and give his or her employees a feeling of being trusted, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't mind being micromanaged, provided that the person intruding in my work clearly knows the aspect of the work they're intruding in much better than me. It's great to learn from people who really know their stuff.
Yeah, isn't it amazing what kind of leaps of logic otherwise smart people will make just to avoid having to adjust their worldview?
Can you be a bit more specifc? What exactly is crappy about USB?
Also, do you still remember the time before USB? *shudder*
I read your post a few times, and failed to make sense out of it. Who are you saying is profiting from flood damage?
Tip: there's this button labeled "Preview" right under the box where you type stuff...
You're making a lot of assumptions there:
- as you pointed out yourself, the process takes time; Spiegelman might not have been fairly well-known for this kind of stuff at the time of submission
- even if Spiegelman was fairly well-known for this kind of research, there could easily be 3 other researchers equally qualified to be reviewers
- it is perfectly possible the authors requested to bar Spiegelman from being reviewer process because he's direct competition
- I know researchers who use their gmail account for everything. Add to that the low likelihood of something like this happening (ordinarily, the whole point of going through the agony of publishing a paper is to take credit for the research, which becomes somewhat problematic when using a pseudonym), and I can easily see the editor wasn't exactly worried about verifying the authors' identity. Editors as well as reviewers are typically more worried about the quality of the research...
Bottom line: the research was good, rendering the debate on the quality of the journal's peer-review process moot. This sounds like something that could have happened to any journal, terrible or otherwise. The interesting debate is not about the journal but about the perps. Who were they? People trying to hurt Spiegelman, or industry researchers who were accidentally on the same track and were trying to hurt their company? Or neither? Will they get caught? Will they get punished? What will the "lessons learned" be?
And that has exactly what to do with the story? (Other than being the same journal?)
It's the only way I can think of to save science from this immense ball of paper-obsession
Fo a scientist, you have a terrible lack of imagination. ;)
Sure, but did the hypothetical corporate researchers know about Spiegelman's results and patent at the time they submitted their paper? It's a competitive world...
I actually miss the 3 button mice - I wish that clicking the scroll button on the mouse would be the middle click.
Huh? Last time I checked (about 30 seconds ago), it was. In fact, it has been for as long as I've been using Linux. I even deliberately only buy mouses (mice?) on which the scroll wheel cannot swivel left or right, because that makes it more difficult to press the scroll wheel down without unintended consequences.
A lot of the "Linux games" currently offered on Steam actually are just Windows binaries packaged together with a "private" Wine/Cedega/Crossover version. And the added layer of complexity does sometimes cause trouble, too.
Most home networks are wireless these days. Wireless networks are the modern equivalent of the old ethernet collision domains, with nasty unpredictable spikes of latency. For twitchy games (like most FPS), this sounds like a very bad idea. I predict many domestic dramas when little sister fires up Youtube or Skype, or the neighbor pops a meal in the old poorly shielded microwave.
These plants or algae still require an energy source to do that: light. To consume all the CO2 released by, say, a coal-fired power plant, you'd need a huge area full of "algae panels" to catch enough sunlight to do it. Now, if you would fill the same area with solar panels, you'd generate many times more energy than the coal-fired power plant you started with...
And please, nobody dare to reply "well duh we'll simply use artificial lighting". The lights would require many times more electricity than the coal-fired power plant you started with can produce...
Oh yeah, don't dare to reply with "better technology will make net energy profit possible" either. You can change the "many times more" in my post to "a little bit more", but you can't break the laws of thermodynamics.
Perfect! Where do I vote?
Oooh I have a better idea! Let's use coal instead of charcoal! They're chemically very similar and the former is much cheaper to obtain in bulk. Or no wait, I'm on a roll here. Let's stick with the coal, but instead of ploughing it into farmland, let's put it into big landfills and fill abandoned mines with it; that way we can sequester so much more!
If you read my post to the letter, that's a just response. However, you're kinda missing my point. $50 worth of the kind of cheap explosives used in e.g. mining will reduce a tank to scrap; it's ridiculously overpowered for bomb disposal applications, and will unnecessary increase the damage done when set off.
You never did a simple analysis of the IR and Raman spectra of CO2, did you? Allow me to clue you in: the smart denialists go out of their way telling people the issue is not as simple as a the spectroscopic properties of CO2 would suggest, because this guy predicted in 1896 that there would be a positive correlation between the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the average temperature. And take one wild guess what that prediction was based on? Bingo, the spectroscopic properties of CO2 !
Your post paints such a stereotype of the ignorant denialist pathetically struggling to formulate a sciency-sounding argument while being miles off the mark, that I re-read it 3 times looking for clues of sarcasm.
That said, yes, ocean acidification is pretty concerning too. Thank you for giving more ammunition to us, evil shills of the huge and mighty solar panel industry lobby. MUHAHAHA! (I really should stop doing that, shouldn't I?)
Oh by the way, it's "disproven". A word a real scientist would never get wrong because they use it so often. Because in spite of popular perception, they're constantly looking to disprove their colleagues' stuff.
So it's not just me. I'm more and more getting the feeling that slashdot moderation seems to have acquired a mean right-wing "-1 disagree" streak over the last several weeks on a diverse set of issues including but not limited to climate change. Call me paranoid, but it looks like someone has figured out a way to game the system. Which is not all that surprising as such; if you think about it a bit, it more becomes a question of "what took them so long?" Maybe the site admins were not always asleep at the steering wheel?
Give me a break. Even you, the AC who may or may not be a sock puppet of a fossil fuel industry shill, are getting doubts because of the way other shills attempt to stir up controversy on an issue that was settled decades ago in the scientific community. It is beyond me how this kind of FUD can be modded "Insightful".
$50 will buy a *lot* of explosives - chances are that your bomb will be more powerful than his bomb.
Even if you don't look at the military, I'm pretty sure I flew in an airliner that had a name some time during the last 3 years. I don't remember exactly; it may not have been a big airline and it may not have been in the US, but it had a name written on it in a small yet legible font.
No, the scientific method is you change the model to fit what happens and you get a better model that more closely predicts what happens next. If your model predicts something and it doesn't happen and then you change your model and predict something and it doesn't happen, and you again change your model and it doesn't happen, etc
Luckily that isn't the case for the climate models, which get the majority of their predictions (especially the big trends) right. It's just that "climate models again shown to be mostly right" is a pretty boring headline and the media instead jump on every small detail that is predicted incorrectly, which makes climate scientists look like hacks in the eyes of the general public that doesn't know any better.
A large percentage of the wines sold with a natural cork are not suitable for aging anyway, and a large percentage of their buyers won't even try to age them (if they even have a suitable cellar / cooler). Couldn't we just agree to only put natural corks on the more fancy wines that are meant to be aged and that are likely to fall into the hands of people who actually know what to do with them? And while we're at it, the few wines that are worthy of a natural cork could do with better corks (more carefully selected, cut and sterilized). In this day and age, with all the sanitation/sterilization techniques we have at our disposal (irradiation for example), one would expect a few percent of the price of a really good bottle to buy you a cork that has a reasonable chance not to ruin your wine...
Part of the problem is that, even though the customer base is sufficiently educated to realize they don't need corks, and the winemakers know this better than anyone else, the organizations that control wine "appellations" are often extremely conservative and will kick winemakers out for not using natural cork. I recently read the story of a winemaker who had to give up the "Chianti" name on his label so that he could put a screwcap on his bottles.
+1 funny. Brilliant! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the idea that our universe is the 3D hypersurface of an expanding 4D hypersphere that originated from some kind of explosive process in a 4D universe is hardly new or original; though I'm not an astrophysicist, it is my understanding that this is the prevalent view on the big bang and cosmic expansion. The only new thing these guys came up with is explaining the expanding 4D hypersphere as the shockwave (not event horizon) of a 4D supernova. If that's specifically what you've been saying for all these years, then by all means, do feel vindicated.
I see 2 problems with this explanation, however:
(1) It assumes that the laws of physics in the parent 4D universe are somewhat similar to ours, allowing for stars, supernovae and black holes. This seems a bit unlikely because the dimensionality is different, and because explaining our physics in terms of a shockwave of expanding gas would require that shockwave to occur in an universe with laws of physics that are very exotic from our POV.
(2) As pointed out earlier, it is very difficult to prove or falsify with empirical observations. So difficult in fact that I'm sceptical about its viability in the face of Occam's razor.
I haven't RTFA (and I somewhat doubt I would understand it), but if they did manage to come up with a set of laws for the parent 4D universe that would explain our physics as the shock wave of an expanding gas cloud, then the above two points would be at least partially addressed, and they can get in line for a noble price. I somewhat doubt it.
They weren't conceived as approximations, but they do currently serve as approximations in a great many fields. And very good ones at that.