We don't know for sure how fast a sauropod's metabolism was compared to an elephant's. If their metabolisms were similar to those of modern reptiles, then it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that they could survive on an order of magnitude less food. From WP: "A crocodile needs from a tenth to a fifth of the food necessary for a lion of the same weight and can live half a year without eating." During the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the climate was very warm and humid, there were no polar ice caps, and a much higher proportion of the world's surface area was covered with rainforest compared to today. There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about productivity of the ancient forests, but this paper says that in the Cretaceous it was probably double that of today. Believe it or not, the scientist who did this work may not have been a complete idiot. In fact, he may know more about his subject than you do, and may have made his estimates based on knowledge of his field. In fact, his publication list contains papers with titles like "The energetics of low browsing in sauropods."
The Beyea paper discusses human epidemiology. This is a completely fruitless endeavor. People have been trying for 60 years to determine the human body's response to low levels of ionization, and they've failed competely. The reasons for the failure are simple. Scientists can't do controlled experiments with human subjects, and scientists can't knowingly subject human subjects to harm.
Since you can't do good science with human test subjects, the obvious alternative is to use animals. Animal studies have been done, and they generally suggest that LNT is wrong, and that radiation hormesis occurs at low dose rates.
What is the point of expending so much effort endlessly rehashing garbage data from humans when good data are available from animals? I suspect that the point is either (a) to keep epidemiologists employed, or (b) that we don't want to compare ourselves to animals.
We've seen the same kind of junk science from epidemiologists when it comes to nonionizing radiation, such as the radiation from cell phones. Another good example of junk epidemiology is the recent high-profile media coverage of junk-science claims that eating red meat vastly increases your risk of death. (Hint: you can't control for the other variables that differ between steak-eating construction workers and arugula-nibbling lawyers from Beverly Hills.)
All this study did was establish that some people have more children than other people, and that some people starve. Hey, no shit. They didn't establish *at all* that there was any impact, or that the genetic selection made future generations more hardy against...anything, including starving.
Exactly. The abstract says, "Individual differences in early survival and fertility (natural selection) were responsible for most variation in fitness..." That is, they equate differences in reproductive success with natural selection. The word "selection" implies that something is being selected for, and that something has to be genetic, or else there's no selective pressure and no process of evolution.
As a random example, let's say that one of these little kids in Finland has eleven brothers and sisters, and grows up in a chaotic, abusive family environment. It sours him on the whole idea of having children. He doesn't reproduce. The cause of his failure to reproduce is his environment, not his genes. Dynamics like this won't lead to any change in the frequency of genes over time, i.e., no selection for one gene over another.
If all you want to do is prove that humans have differing reproductive success, that's pretty trivial. Why bother with 18th-century records? We can easily demonstrate the same thing from modern data. Some people have a lot of kids today. Some don't.
Some of these are studies of twins raised separately by people other than their biological parents, which basically makes them immune to this objection.
Latest news from the causation camp is that they have found the "intelligence gene". However, they say it's only responsible for 1.29 IQ points. That's 1.29% , not 85%.
Nobody is claiming they've found "the" gene for intelligence. You seem to be misinterpreting what you've read, or maybe what you've read is a popularization that misinterprets the science. The fact that a particular gene only explains a small amount of variance doesn't mean what you seem to assume it means, which is that there are no other genes affecting intelligence.
I also don't know what studies you're reading. The ones I've read reach nearly the opposite conclusion. So at best we could chalk this up to 'science in the field is unclear'.
Nor do I know where the AC was getting his info, but he's right and you're wrong. IQ is highly heritable. WP has a detailed article on this.
Reference 7 in the WP article is to a 2004 meta-analysis that puts the heritability figure at about 85% (meaning that heredity explains about 85% of the variance in adult IQ).
I also don't see what this has to do with the movie. There is a very simple explanation for the fact that, for example, most Nobel prize winners are white. It's because access to education is highly correlated with being white. You don't have to invoke any hypothetical cause and effect relationship between early childhood education and intelligence. There are just a lot of dark-skinned kids in places like Brazil and Tanzania who have zero chance of becoming professional scientists.
The book chapter "How Science Works" by Goodstein is available here from the author's CalTech web page.
Goodstein is a physicist, and so am I. I read the chapter and found myself agreeing with it completely...
BUT
...the examples he uses are almost all examples from physics, and a lot of his analysis isn't really applicable to science in general.
The central issue he examines is the picture of science as an enterprise involving powerful theories that make predictions, which are then tested. This is a lot more applicable to physics than to other physical sciences, less applicable to the life scienes, and even less applicable to medicine or clinical psychology, which aren't really sciences at all.
IMO he correctly depicts physics as an enterprise where scientists behave adversarially (not impartially as depicted in high school science textooks), but the truth eventually becomes known, and the result is a theory that is absolutely known to be correct within its sphere of applicability. On p. 13 he discusses the myth that "Scientific theories are just that: theories. All scientific theories are eventually proved wrong and are replaced by other theories." IMO he's right that this is a myth -- in physics. For example, relativity didn't show that Newtonian mechanics was wrong, it showed that it was right only within a certain domain, where it had already been thoroughly tested.
But this is nothing like how things work in a field like clinical psychology.
Ultimately it comes right out of our power bills or tax dollars.
Yes, but you need to compare apples and apples. When my neighbor keeps on using a low-efficiency incandescent bulb, they're putting more CO2 in the atmosphere, because where I live, the source of energy is virtually all fossil fuels. That means that my kids and grandkids are subsidizing my neighbor, who doesn't have to pay the real cost of global warming. We also wouldn't have fought the last three wars if there wasn't oil in the middle east, so when I pay my income taxes this week, I'm subsidizing the use of fossil fuels by paying the ruinous costs of those wars.
It also only propagates our short-sighted obsession with up front costs.
You've got this precisely backwards. Using an incandescent bulb is a short-sighted decision based on ignoring the long-term consequences of global warming.
I believe your claim that this particular phishing attack has had negative effects on various people. What I don't believe is that (1) this has anything to do with the article linked to from the slashdot summary, or (2) that these negative effects are in any way quantifiable (which is basically the point of the article). The problems you're citing are like broken windows, graffiti, or finding used condoms in your front yard when you go out to get the morning paper; they're a bummer, but they're not quantifiable economic losses.
Government, in particular, has some stringent blacklists that we made following the recent spate of spam originating from our server. That's tough for a lot of our researchers who are working with the government on various and sundry projects. Or for students who are waiting to hear back on research grants.
This sounds to me like something that is clearly your fault. Why are you allowing these accounts to send large numbers of emails per unit time?
Over reported? Possibly. Is it still a problem that is a long way from being solved? Yes.
Your post, and every other slashdot comment I've read so far on this article, misses the two main points of the article and talks about something else instead. The two main points of the article are:
(1) The monetary damage to victims of cybercrime has been wildly overestimated.
(2) The profitability of cybercrime is extremely low.
Your anecdote about the phishing scam hitting your university doesn't contradict either of these points. From your description, it sounds like there were a lot of hassles created for students and IT staff at your school, but you don't describe any monetary damage to the victims. It also doesn't contradict point 2; although the criminals sent spams, the profitability of sending those spams was probably extremely low.
Cybercrime is a lot like selling heroin on the street. Dealing is surprisingly unprofitable for a street dealer, it causes basically no concrete economic damage to anyone, and yet it creates massive hassles for lots of innocent people who just happen to live in the neighborhood.
What boggles my mind is low adoption of DKIM. Google and Yahoo use it, and quite a few banks and other big-money businesses use it. But what's bizarre is that anybody doesn't use it. It's easy to set up, and results in a net economic benefit to the person setting it up on their server. It doesn't make anything harder for the end user. If we could get the adoption rate up to 90% or something, phishing would get really easy to handle. All you'd have to do is train users not to believe the authenticity of mail that isn't properly DKIM-signed. Once it got to 90% of servers, many businesses would stop accepting email that wasn't DKIM-signed, and acceptance would rapidly become 100%.
>> I'm a dental student, and I have been taught that - with modern equipment - exposure to radiation from 2 bitewings is about the same as half a day of ski holiday.
>These comparisons are always misleading, because they ignore the density of the radiation received. Radiation from half a day of ski holiday is diffused over your entire body. The radiation from bite wing X-rays is concentrated on your teeth and skull. The concentration matters. Let's use a better analogy. The energy at the focal point of a magnifying glass might be one-hundredth the amount of energy you get from standing out in the sunshine. But because that energy is concentrated into a small point, it will burn your skin.
Unsurprisingly, the dental student's professor knows more about this than you do. The professor's analogy is the correct one. Yours is the incorrect one.
When x-rays cause cancer, it's a statistical process. Each x-ray photon has some small probability P of damaging a cell's DNA in such a way as to make it cancerous.
When you go skiing in the mountains, you're exposing yourself to more cosmic rays than you get at sea level. These are high-energy charged particles, not x-ray photons, but the statistical nature of the process is the same.
When you burn your skin with a magnifying glass, there is nothing statistical about the process. The outcome is deterministic. You're simply transporting x amount of energy into a certain piece of your flesh, raising its temperature by y degrees.
In case it matters, I have a PhD in physics, my field is nuclear physics, and I have worked with ionizing radiation a lot.
The only thing I would add to the correct information that the GP related from his/her professor is that in addition to the possibility of causing cancer, radiation can also make you healthier, via a well-documented effect called radiation hormesis. The usual interpretation (which is hard to test empirically) is that the radiation stimulates your cells' damage-control mechanisms. At the very low doses we're talking about, the evidence from controlled animal studies is that the net effect on your health is positive, because the hormesis effect is orders of magnitude stronger than the negative effects of the radiation.
The cost difference between a regular gas sedan and a hybrid of the same size is generally not offset by the savings in fuel costs for driving it. Why do it again if it didn't work the first time?
It depends on the car, it depends on how long you own it, and it depends on the cost of gas in the future, which we can't predict. It also depends on how many miles you drive per year, and on how your local cost of gas differs from the price of gas elsewhere.
The NY Times has a nice chart showing how long it takes for various hybrids to pay for themselves, compared to the similar gas-only model, assuming gas at $3.85/gal.
For example, they compare a Toyota Prius (which I own) against a Toyota Camry, and find that it only took my family 1.8 years before our purchase of the Prius paid for itself.
I like the concept of openstreetmap, I have an account, and I've contributed a couple of edits for the area where I live. However, what really seems to be missing is a decent way of getting directions. The only service for this that I know of based on OSM is yournavigation.org, and the quality of its results is simply unusable.
As an example, try the following in both yournavigation.org and google maps:
from: 2233 west loma alta drive, fullerton, ca, usa
to: north mount baldy road, san bernardino county, california, usa
Google maps does it in 12 steps, and the directions are totally intelligible. Yournavigation breaks it down into 30 steps, many of which are totally unintelligible.
There is also a usability barrier, because OSM's user interface doesn't provide any hint of how to get to a navigation site such as yournavigation.org.
There are various other usability issues with OSM. For example, it took me a really long time to figure out why it couldn't locate my house's address. The reason was that my street is officially "west loma alta dr," and I had to edit the map in order to tell it that an alternate name was "loma alta dr." The search engine for google maps was smart enough that it just matched without the "west." (There isn't any "east loma alta drive.")
This doesn't seem difficult to me. You have a month's free hosting. That's the time window you need in order to find new hosting and make sure the transition goes smoothly.
You should also post descriptions of your experiences in relevant forums like webhostingtalk.com and hostingdiscussion.com.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, he hasn't been fired. He still has a job and a paycheck. He is simply no longer the spokesperson for the collaboration. That makes a lot of sense. Apparently roughly half the people in the collaboration don't have confidence in him to speak for them.
I do not believe in particle-wave duality. I believe in Feynman's path integral formulation.
This is total nonsense. You might as well say that you don't believe in addition, you believe in electronic calculators instead. A calculator is one method for adding numbers. The Feynman path integral formulation is one method for doing calculations in quantum mechanics, which has wave-particle duality.
>>Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand.
>This is not insoluble. We can and should increase demand for talented young researchers. Basic science is the best investment we can as a society, in terms of ROI. The problem is that the returns are enormous but infrequent, and not just limited to the funding body.
I disagree. One of the problems described in TFA is that there is a large number of researchers churning out papers that are either of low quality or simply unimportant. They're describing the life sciences, but this is also my experience in physics. There are already too many people scouring the same scientific hunting grounds at the same time.
The other reason I disagree is that I wasn't kidding about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude. Seriously. There are literally 10 to 100 times more people who would like these careers than there are jobs. It's simply not possible to scale up scientific research by a factor of 100. For example, the University of California system has 10 campuses. What are we going to do, build the UC system up to 1000 campuses?
A lot of the issues discussed here are only relevant in the life sciences, and especially in medicine. Retractions are not a big phenomenon in the physical sciences. Ditto for publication bias (refusal by journals to publish negative results or failed attempts to replicate published results). This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand. There are many, many very talented people who would like to spend their careers doing fundamental scientific research. The number of such people is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of jobs available. This isn't a new phenomenon, although in the past the problem may have been hidden more, because, e.g., up until about 1950, only white, affluent, European and American males were considered prospects for a career in science.
This is incorrect. People in good health can breathe just fine at 14,000'. You will definitely feel more aerobically challenged for a given level of exertion. Many unacclimatized people will experience mild altitude sickness (headache), and a few will get sick enough that they need to descend immediately for safety.
People routinely summit Kilimanjaro, which is 19,000', without supplementary oxygen -- in fact, I've never heard of anyone using oxygen at that altitude. The altitude where it's really impossible to breathe, even if you're healthy and thoroughly acclimatized, is more like 25,000' to 29,000' (the top of Everest). Some people do summit Everest without oxygen.
TFA makes it sound as if keeping the ban is simply a nice way to preserve some "spiritual" time for yourself when you aren't tempted to use gadgets. That's not nearly as important as the effect on the person sitting next to the gadget user. Flying on airplanes has already become a really miserable experience these days. If I had to sit next to someone yakking nonstop on their cell phone for a 10-hour flight, I would go absolutely nuts. Even in places like the public library or the waiting room for jury duty, there are cell phone blabberers who simply cannot be convinced that their conversation is anappropriate and bothersome to others.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't know for sure how fast a sauropod's metabolism was compared to an elephant's. If their metabolisms were similar to those of modern reptiles, then it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that they could survive on an order of magnitude less food. From WP: "A crocodile needs from a tenth to a fifth of the food necessary for a lion of the same weight and can live half a year without eating." During the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the climate was very warm and humid, there were no polar ice caps, and a much higher proportion of the world's surface area was covered with rainforest compared to today. There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about productivity of the ancient forests, but this paper says that in the Cretaceous it was probably double that of today. Believe it or not, the scientist who did this work may not have been a complete idiot. In fact, he may know more about his subject than you do, and may have made his estimates based on knowledge of his field. In fact, his publication list contains papers with titles like "The energetics of low browsing in sauropods."
The Beyea paper discusses human epidemiology. This is a completely fruitless endeavor. People have been trying for 60 years to determine the human body's response to low levels of ionization, and they've failed competely. The reasons for the failure are simple. Scientists can't do controlled experiments with human subjects, and scientists can't knowingly subject human subjects to harm.
Since you can't do good science with human test subjects, the obvious alternative is to use animals. Animal studies have been done, and they generally suggest that LNT is wrong, and that radiation hormesis occurs at low dose rates.
What is the point of expending so much effort endlessly rehashing garbage data from humans when good data are available from animals? I suspect that the point is either (a) to keep epidemiologists employed, or (b) that we don't want to compare ourselves to animals.
We've seen the same kind of junk science from epidemiologists when it comes to nonionizing radiation, such as the radiation from cell phones. Another good example of junk epidemiology is the recent high-profile media coverage of junk-science claims that eating red meat vastly increases your risk of death. (Hint: you can't control for the other variables that differ between steak-eating construction workers and arugula-nibbling lawyers from Beverly Hills.)
All this study did was establish that some people have more children than other people, and that some people starve. Hey, no shit. They didn't establish *at all* that there was any impact, or that the genetic selection made future generations more hardy against...anything, including starving.
Exactly. The abstract says, "Individual differences in early survival and fertility (natural selection) were responsible for most variation in fitness..." That is, they equate differences in reproductive success with natural selection. The word "selection" implies that something is being selected for, and that something has to be genetic, or else there's no selective pressure and no process of evolution.
As a random example, let's say that one of these little kids in Finland has eleven brothers and sisters, and grows up in a chaotic, abusive family environment. It sours him on the whole idea of having children. He doesn't reproduce. The cause of his failure to reproduce is his environment, not his genes. Dynamics like this won't lead to any change in the frequency of genes over time, i.e., no selection for one gene over another.
If all you want to do is prove that humans have differing reproductive success, that's pretty trivial. Why bother with 18th-century records? We can easily demonstrate the same thing from modern data. Some people have a lot of kids today. Some don't.
Correlation is not causation.
Some of these are studies of twins raised separately by people other than their biological parents, which basically makes them immune to this objection.
Latest news from the causation camp is that they have found the "intelligence gene". However, they say it's only responsible for 1.29 IQ points. That's 1.29% , not 85%.
Nobody is claiming they've found "the" gene for intelligence. You seem to be misinterpreting what you've read, or maybe what you've read is a popularization that misinterprets the science. The fact that a particular gene only explains a small amount of variance doesn't mean what you seem to assume it means, which is that there are no other genes affecting intelligence.
I also don't know what studies you're reading. The ones I've read reach nearly the opposite conclusion. So at best we could chalk this up to 'science in the field is unclear'.
Nor do I know where the AC was getting his info, but he's right and you're wrong. IQ is highly heritable. WP has a detailed article on this. Reference 7 in the WP article is to a 2004 meta-analysis that puts the heritability figure at about 85% (meaning that heredity explains about 85% of the variance in adult IQ).
I also don't see what this has to do with the movie. There is a very simple explanation for the fact that, for example, most Nobel prize winners are white. It's because access to education is highly correlated with being white. You don't have to invoke any hypothetical cause and effect relationship between early childhood education and intelligence. There are just a lot of dark-skinned kids in places like Brazil and Tanzania who have zero chance of becoming professional scientists.
The book chapter "How Science Works" by Goodstein is available here from the author's CalTech web page.
Goodstein is a physicist, and so am I. I read the chapter and found myself agreeing with it completely...
BUT
The central issue he examines is the picture of science as an enterprise involving powerful theories that make predictions, which are then tested. This is a lot more applicable to physics than to other physical sciences, less applicable to the life scienes, and even less applicable to medicine or clinical psychology, which aren't really sciences at all.
IMO he correctly depicts physics as an enterprise where scientists behave adversarially (not impartially as depicted in high school science textooks), but the truth eventually becomes known, and the result is a theory that is absolutely known to be correct within its sphere of applicability. On p. 13 he discusses the myth that "Scientific theories are just that: theories. All scientific theories are eventually proved wrong and are replaced by other theories." IMO he's right that this is a myth -- in physics. For example, relativity didn't show that Newtonian mechanics was wrong, it showed that it was right only within a certain domain, where it had already been thoroughly tested.
But this is nothing like how things work in a field like clinical psychology.
Ultimately it comes right out of our power bills or tax dollars.
Yes, but you need to compare apples and apples. When my neighbor keeps on using a low-efficiency incandescent bulb, they're putting more CO2 in the atmosphere, because where I live, the source of energy is virtually all fossil fuels. That means that my kids and grandkids are subsidizing my neighbor, who doesn't have to pay the real cost of global warming. We also wouldn't have fought the last three wars if there wasn't oil in the middle east, so when I pay my income taxes this week, I'm subsidizing the use of fossil fuels by paying the ruinous costs of those wars.
It also only propagates our short-sighted obsession with up front costs.
You've got this precisely backwards. Using an incandescent bulb is a short-sighted decision based on ignoring the long-term consequences of global warming.
I believe your claim that this particular phishing attack has had negative effects on various people. What I don't believe is that (1) this has anything to do with the article linked to from the slashdot summary, or (2) that these negative effects are in any way quantifiable (which is basically the point of the article). The problems you're citing are like broken windows, graffiti, or finding used condoms in your front yard when you go out to get the morning paper; they're a bummer, but they're not quantifiable economic losses.
Government, in particular, has some stringent blacklists that we made following the recent spate of spam originating from our server. That's tough for a lot of our researchers who are working with the government on various and sundry projects. Or for students who are waiting to hear back on research grants.
This sounds to me like something that is clearly your fault. Why are you allowing these accounts to send large numbers of emails per unit time?
Over reported? Possibly. Is it still a problem that is a long way from being solved? Yes.
Your post, and every other slashdot comment I've read so far on this article, misses the two main points of the article and talks about something else instead. The two main points of the article are:
(1) The monetary damage to victims of cybercrime has been wildly overestimated.
(2) The profitability of cybercrime is extremely low.
Your anecdote about the phishing scam hitting your university doesn't contradict either of these points. From your description, it sounds like there were a lot of hassles created for students and IT staff at your school, but you don't describe any monetary damage to the victims. It also doesn't contradict point 2; although the criminals sent spams, the profitability of sending those spams was probably extremely low.
Cybercrime is a lot like selling heroin on the street. Dealing is surprisingly unprofitable for a street dealer, it causes basically no concrete economic damage to anyone, and yet it creates massive hassles for lots of innocent people who just happen to live in the neighborhood.
What boggles my mind is low adoption of DKIM. Google and Yahoo use it, and quite a few banks and other big-money businesses use it. But what's bizarre is that anybody doesn't use it. It's easy to set up, and results in a net economic benefit to the person setting it up on their server. It doesn't make anything harder for the end user. If we could get the adoption rate up to 90% or something, phishing would get really easy to handle. All you'd have to do is train users not to believe the authenticity of mail that isn't properly DKIM-signed. Once it got to 90% of servers, many businesses would stop accepting email that wasn't DKIM-signed, and acceptance would rapidly become 100%.
Nothing in this post provides any logical support for the completely erroneous statements made in your earlier posts.
>> I'm a dental student, and I have been taught that - with modern equipment - exposure to radiation from 2 bitewings is about the same as half a day of ski holiday.
>These comparisons are always misleading, because they ignore the density of the radiation received. Radiation from half a day of ski holiday is diffused over your entire body. The radiation from bite wing X-rays is concentrated on your teeth and skull. The concentration matters. Let's use a better analogy. The energy at the focal point of a magnifying glass might be one-hundredth the amount of energy you get from standing out in the sunshine. But because that energy is concentrated into a small point, it will burn your skin.
Unsurprisingly, the dental student's professor knows more about this than you do. The professor's analogy is the correct one. Yours is the incorrect one.
When x-rays cause cancer, it's a statistical process. Each x-ray photon has some small probability P of damaging a cell's DNA in such a way as to make it cancerous.
When you go skiing in the mountains, you're exposing yourself to more cosmic rays than you get at sea level. These are high-energy charged particles, not x-ray photons, but the statistical nature of the process is the same.
When you burn your skin with a magnifying glass, there is nothing statistical about the process. The outcome is deterministic. You're simply transporting x amount of energy into a certain piece of your flesh, raising its temperature by y degrees.
In case it matters, I have a PhD in physics, my field is nuclear physics, and I have worked with ionizing radiation a lot.
The only thing I would add to the correct information that the GP related from his/her professor is that in addition to the possibility of causing cancer, radiation can also make you healthier, via a well-documented effect called radiation hormesis. The usual interpretation (which is hard to test empirically) is that the radiation stimulates your cells' damage-control mechanisms. At the very low doses we're talking about, the evidence from controlled animal studies is that the net effect on your health is positive, because the hormesis effect is orders of magnitude stronger than the negative effects of the radiation.
go ahead, try their online comparitor
URL?
The press releases linked to from the /. summary are pretty thin. The Wikipedia article
is a lot better. Here are the two papers: [1], [2].
The cost difference between a regular gas sedan and a hybrid of the same size is generally not offset by the savings in fuel costs for driving it. Why do it again if it didn't work the first time?
It depends on the car, it depends on how long you own it, and it depends on the cost of gas in the future, which we can't predict. It also depends on how many miles you drive per year, and on how your local cost of gas differs from the price of gas elsewhere. The NY Times has a nice chart showing how long it takes for various hybrids to pay for themselves, compared to the similar gas-only model, assuming gas at $3.85/gal. For example, they compare a Toyota Prius (which I own) against a Toyota Camry, and find that it only took my family 1.8 years before our purchase of the Prius paid for itself.
Aha -- yes, that is much, much better than yournavigation.org. Thanks!
I like the concept of openstreetmap, I have an account, and I've contributed a couple of edits for the area where I live. However, what really seems to be missing is a decent way of getting directions. The only service for this that I know of based on OSM is yournavigation.org, and the quality of its results is simply unusable.
As an example, try the following in both yournavigation.org and google maps:
from: 2233 west loma alta drive, fullerton, ca, usa
to: north mount baldy road, san bernardino county, california, usa
Google maps does it in 12 steps, and the directions are totally intelligible. Yournavigation breaks it down into 30 steps, many of which are totally unintelligible.
There is also a usability barrier, because OSM's user interface doesn't provide any hint of how to get to a navigation site such as yournavigation.org.
There are various other usability issues with OSM. For example, it took me a really long time to figure out why it couldn't locate my house's address. The reason was that my street is officially "west loma alta dr," and I had to edit the map in order to tell it that an alternate name was "loma alta dr." The search engine for google maps was smart enough that it just matched without the "west." (There isn't any "east loma alta drive.")
Give some money to his defense fund: defendjohnk.com.
This doesn't seem difficult to me. You have a month's free hosting. That's the time window you need in order to find new hosting and make sure the transition goes smoothly.
You should also post descriptions of your experiences in relevant forums like webhostingtalk.com and hostingdiscussion.com.
There is no reason I know of for anyone to be using lariam anymore, except possibly for cost. Malarone(=atovaquone=proguanil) is much safer.
I can't actually see any wrongdoing here.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, he hasn't been fired. He still has a job and a paycheck. He is simply no longer the spokesperson for the collaboration. That makes a lot of sense. Apparently roughly half the people in the collaboration don't have confidence in him to speak for them.
I do not believe in particle-wave duality. I believe in Feynman's path integral formulation.
This is total nonsense. You might as well say that you don't believe in addition, you believe in electronic calculators instead. A calculator is one method for adding numbers. The Feynman path integral formulation is one method for doing calculations in quantum mechanics, which has wave-particle duality.
>>Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand.
>This is not insoluble. We can and should increase demand for talented young researchers. Basic science is the best investment we can as a society, in terms of ROI. The problem is that the returns are enormous but infrequent, and not just limited to the funding body.
I disagree. One of the problems described in TFA is that there is a large number of researchers churning out papers that are either of low quality or simply unimportant. They're describing the life sciences, but this is also my experience in physics. There are already too many people scouring the same scientific hunting grounds at the same time.
The other reason I disagree is that I wasn't kidding about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude. Seriously. There are literally 10 to 100 times more people who would like these careers than there are jobs. It's simply not possible to scale up scientific research by a factor of 100. For example, the University of California system has 10 campuses. What are we going to do, build the UC system up to 1000 campuses?
A lot of the issues discussed here are only relevant in the life sciences, and especially in medicine. Retractions are not a big phenomenon in the physical sciences. Ditto for publication bias (refusal by journals to publish negative results or failed attempts to replicate published results). This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand. There are many, many very talented people who would like to spend their careers doing fundamental scientific research. The number of such people is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of jobs available. This isn't a new phenomenon, although in the past the problem may have been hidden more, because, e.g., up until about 1950, only white, affluent, European and American males were considered prospects for a career in science.
and below the 14,000 where you can't breath,
This is incorrect. People in good health can breathe just fine at 14,000'. You will definitely feel more aerobically challenged for a given level of exertion. Many unacclimatized people will experience mild altitude sickness (headache), and a few will get sick enough that they need to descend immediately for safety.
People routinely summit Kilimanjaro, which is 19,000', without supplementary oxygen -- in fact, I've never heard of anyone using oxygen at that altitude. The altitude where it's really impossible to breathe, even if you're healthy and thoroughly acclimatized, is more like 25,000' to 29,000' (the top of Everest). Some people do summit Everest without oxygen.
TFA makes it sound as if keeping the ban is simply a nice way to preserve some "spiritual" time for yourself when you aren't tempted to use gadgets. That's not nearly as important as the effect on the person sitting next to the gadget user. Flying on airplanes has already become a really miserable experience these days. If I had to sit next to someone yakking nonstop on their cell phone for a 10-hour flight, I would go absolutely nuts. Even in places like the public library or the waiting room for jury duty, there are cell phone blabberers who simply cannot be convinced that their conversation is anappropriate and bothersome to others.