This is half no-brainer and half silliness. Any time there's a communication break-down*, you can blame it on the speaker or the audience. In some cases, it makes more sense to blame one or the other (eg, students come to class without having read the Shakespeare play under discussion or speaker so confused that the entire audience cannot follow), but in general, it's difficult to assign blame cleanly. It's easy to point the finger at one or the other, but that's probably not very accurate.
Are scientists generally not good at communicating ideas to the public? Yeah, it seems likely. But would it work better of the public were more science literate (and would it be a good idea in today's science-based world)? Yep, also almost certainly true.
To be fair, you can't judge a scientist's ability to communicate to the public very well based solely on an abstract in Science. It's all about the audience and your goals, and the audience in a Science paper (even more than most papers) and the goals are very different from those of a public piece. If they wrote remotely the same way in both cases, they'd be truly bad communicators.
By the way, Science is the journal of AAAS, but that's the American Association of the Advancement of Science. I hope you're not confusing it with the American Academy of Arts and Science above.
Wait, so the GP commented on "uneducated crazies" and you take this to be identical to Christians (as opposed to this particular instance of crazies who happen to be Christians)? Sounds like you're the bigot here, not the GP.
Incidentally, the Roman Republic was never a democracy in any true sense. When it functioned, it was an oligarchy. (The Plebs' influence was, by design, vanishingly small compared to the nobility.) Initially, they had no power whatever.
So the original paper on 1RXS 1609 is from December 2008... the end of the same year that the original paper on Fomalhaut was published? (So a month later, according to your links.)
I'm sorry, I'm just seriously confused as to why you say Phil is wrong. What am I missing?
First of all, you're changing the argument. You never said "boo" about published papers before, just when the observations were made/analyzed. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first publication of the 1RXS 1609 result? (Actually, it doesn't even appear to be published yet.) If so, aren't you still wrong?
The thing is that this planet was only found last year, in a recent Hubble image. Astrophysicists saw it in the recent image and went back to the archives and also identified it in the 1995 archive image.
2004, according to Phil. And unless he's deliberately being misleading, they were in fact looking for the planet:
OK, but a planet already has been directly imaged orbiting the star Fomalhaut. That star is hotter and more massive than the Sun, but is far more sun-like than a brown dwarf. The first image of the planet Fomalhaut b was taken in 2004 using Hubble Space Telescope, and the second confirming image in 2006. It took two more years to make sure everything was correct, and the news announced in 2008. So while this was announced after the image of 1RXS 1609b was first taken in 2008, the first image of Fomalhaut b was taken in 2004, four years earlier.
(I, for one, can recall people identifying locations where a planet ought to be in that disk as early as Fall 2002. So it's credible to me that they'd be looking with HST in 2004.)
Granted, they didn't announce it right away. But, then, that's also the basis for you claim for priority of 1RXS 1609, so it seems like Phil is still right.
Wow, you didn't even read the summary above, did you? The summary pretty nicely explains what's been done and what's new here, even without reading the linked piece Phil wrote. It really doesn't take much effort in this case.
Also: insulting Phil Plait's ability to get to the real source and read it makes you look like a fool. Phil is a PhD'ed astronomer and one of the most active and followed astronomy popularizers in the field today. Telling him to go to S&T or Astronomy is insulting.
Read the article more carefully. They're saying that the state's constitution specifically delegates selection of franchises to the municipalities, yet the state also awarded a franchise to Comcast, overriding Detroit's existing franchise with the same. The article clearly cites chapter and verse of the Michigan constitution that's relevant here, so it's hard to see what the state thought it was doing.
The US constitution bit has to do with the laws the govern the contract signed by Detroit and Comcast. It sounds very much like a secondary point.
Facebook (and Google) have been getting a ton of flack for this, too. Your example is poorly chosen if you really want to argue that this isn't a big deal.
OK, first of all, never trust a press-release, especially from the researcher's own college or university. No one in research is more self-aggrandizing than those offices are. (The researchers have to face their colleagues later, so tend to be more careful.) If they could get away with it, I'm sure that every press-release would claim a Nobel prize was pending for every discovery.
Second, is the discovery here just that Plato likes math? Because if so... duh? He didn't bury that in his writing, he was pretty clear about that. He loved abstract material. What he was contemptuous of, as I recall, was more "applied" disciplines, like what we'd now call Physics. (He liked Astronomy because it was like math and music. The fact that he made that distinction over Physics tells you how well he grasped how important math was in understanding Nature on Earth as well as in the sky.)
Also, in no way does say, "Hey, math is useful for understanding Nature!" predate Newton. That wasn't Newton's discovery. That wasn't any of his discoveries, in fact. Quite a few Greeks had the notion that mathematics was important to understanding Nature. Pythagoras comes to mind (in his own eccentric was). Heck, the quote about nature being written in mathematics isn't even from Newton, it's a paraphrasing of a well-known quote of Galileo's. (The significance of that distinction is this: Galileo recognized the importance, but he didn't invent Newtonian mechanics. Why? That math is helpful wasn't the important discovery.)
Er, sorry, 2-cent increase would erase it. Point is, the overall shortfall is recent (past two years) and in the few-percent range. That doesn't seem like much to panic about.
Although if you read down, it kind of looks like they're losing money thanks to a congressional mandate to pre-pay retirement funds. (They're losing a few billion a year and the fund seems to cost $5-6 billion/yr.)
For that matter, if they're carrying around 150 billion pieces of mail per year (based on their numbers), it seems like raising the price of a stamp one lousy cent would more than erase a piddling $2 billion shortfall.
In the past, Amazon has argued that it should not have to help support public services in states in which it has no physical presence.
I'm having trouble seeing exactly why this is relevant, other than innuendo. State taxes don't pay for mail delivery, that's a federal function. Amazon's stance is consistent. (Whether it's morally right or wrong is a separate issue, mind you.)
Most? By what measure? Of the 80-something incumbents running in primaries last week, 2 didn't win. One made it to a run-off and one had a list of pending criminal charges as long as my arm.
Just because the news channels have a favorite narrative, it doesn't mean it's real.
I wouldn't say so. Everyone's told they must go to university or college to get a good job, so if the university has a captive audience, why wouldn't they charge what they can get away with?
Competition? Not really caring about profits? (Please note that I wasn't talking about bookstores, but, rather, the universities, as noted in the parent post. Campus bookstores vary wildly in policies and practices. I know for a fact that many of them, perhaps most, barely break even, however.)
The publishing houses are not, as far as I am aware, generally really attached to the universities anymore.
Universities themselves aren't interested in profit, really. They don't want to hemorrhage money, to be sure. They'd rather accrue it, definitely. But without shareholders, there's not much incentive to make obscene profits off of their students. (In fact, the opposite is true: they'd rather keep fees lower and make students happier/open their student base up to the best students rather than the most affluent.) So while I'm sure most of us have been nickel-and-dimed by a university at some point, I doubt any of us have even paid for the full cost of our college education (which frequently runs 2-3 times the full tuition cost).
Publishers are a totally different story, in my experience.
Re:Student loan debt not worth it
on
The Real Science Gap
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· Score: 4, Informative
Most people in the sciences don't pay their way through grad school. It's generally covered by grants already.
In fact the very founding of the nation was over tax laws, so pretending like the Teabaggers are crazy on this is really unfair and inaccurate.
Er, it was about taxation without representation. Please don't re-write history to ignore that part of it. The FFs were upset that they were being taxed with no say as to how they were taxed. The Tea Party folks, by contrast aren't upset about the representation and are upset about the fact that this is a democracy and the fact that they didn't get their way in the past two elections*. The taxes they get are appointed via our representatives, voted in by them.
So, basically, they're 180 degrees out of phase with the Founding Fathers.
* Witness the fact that taxes are at their lowest in a long while right now, yet their outrage is apparently at an all-time high. Perspective, among other things, is lacking.
Slashdot Mirror
This is half no-brainer and half silliness. Any time there's a communication break-down*, you can blame it on the speaker or the audience. In some cases, it makes more sense to blame one or the other (eg, students come to class without having read the Shakespeare play under discussion or speaker so confused that the entire audience cannot follow), but in general, it's difficult to assign blame cleanly. It's easy to point the finger at one or the other, but that's probably not very accurate.
Are scientists generally not good at communicating ideas to the public? Yeah, it seems likely. But would it work better of the public were more science literate (and would it be a good idea in today's science-based world)? Yep, also almost certainly true.
To be fair, you can't judge a scientist's ability to communicate to the public very well based solely on an abstract in Science. It's all about the audience and your goals, and the audience in a Science paper (even more than most papers) and the goals are very different from those of a public piece. If they wrote remotely the same way in both cases, they'd be truly bad communicators.
By the way, Science is the journal of AAAS, but that's the American Association of the Advancement of Science. I hope you're not confusing it with the American Academy of Arts and Science above.
Wait, so the GP commented on "uneducated crazies" and you take this to be identical to Christians (as opposed to this particular instance of crazies who happen to be Christians)? Sounds like you're the bigot here, not the GP.
Incidentally, the Roman Republic was never a democracy in any true sense. When it functioned, it was an oligarchy. (The Plebs' influence was, by design, vanishingly small compared to the nobility.) Initially, they had no power whatever.
So the original paper on 1RXS 1609 is from December 2008... the end of the same year that the original paper on Fomalhaut was published? (So a month later, according to your links.)
I'm sorry, I'm just seriously confused as to why you say Phil is wrong. What am I missing?
First of all, you're changing the argument. You never said "boo" about published papers before, just when the observations were made/analyzed. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first publication of the 1RXS 1609 result? (Actually, it doesn't even appear to be published yet.) If so, aren't you still wrong?
The thing is that this planet was only found last year, in a recent Hubble image. Astrophysicists saw it in the recent image and went back to the archives and also identified it in the 1995 archive image.
2004, according to Phil. And unless he's deliberately being misleading, they were in fact looking for the planet:
OK, but a planet already has been directly imaged orbiting the star Fomalhaut. That star is hotter and more massive than the Sun, but is far more sun-like than a brown dwarf. The first image of the planet Fomalhaut b was taken in 2004 using Hubble Space Telescope, and the second confirming image in 2006. It took two more years to make sure everything was correct, and the news announced in 2008. So while this was announced after the image of 1RXS 1609b was first taken in 2008, the first image of Fomalhaut b was taken in 2004, four years earlier.
(I, for one, can recall people identifying locations where a planet ought to be in that disk as early as Fall 2002. So it's credible to me that they'd be looking with HST in 2004.)
Granted, they didn't announce it right away. But, then, that's also the basis for you claim for priority of 1RXS 1609, so it seems like Phil is still right.
I figured it was insulting in that you were certainly aware of both magazines, not that they're not worthy. :-)
Wow, you didn't even read the summary above, did you? The summary pretty nicely explains what's been done and what's new here, even without reading the linked piece Phil wrote. It really doesn't take much effort in this case.
Also: insulting Phil Plait's ability to get to the real source and read it makes you look like a fool. Phil is a PhD'ed astronomer and one of the most active and followed astronomy popularizers in the field today. Telling him to go to S&T or Astronomy is insulting.
Read the article more carefully. They're saying that the state's constitution specifically delegates selection of franchises to the municipalities, yet the state also awarded a franchise to Comcast, overriding Detroit's existing franchise with the same. The article clearly cites chapter and verse of the Michigan constitution that's relevant here, so it's hard to see what the state thought it was doing.
The US constitution bit has to do with the laws the govern the contract signed by Detroit and Comcast. It sounds very much like a secondary point.
Holy cow, this sentence was unclear: 'Also, in no way does say, "Hey, math is useful for understanding Nature!" predate Newton.'
That should have been something like, "In no way does "Hey, math is useful for understanding Nature!" mean Plato anticipated Newton."
Sorry about that.
Facebook (and Google) have been getting a ton of flack for this, too. Your example is poorly chosen if you really want to argue that this isn't a big deal.
OK, first of all, never trust a press-release, especially from the researcher's own college or university. No one in research is more self-aggrandizing than those offices are. (The researchers have to face their colleagues later, so tend to be more careful.) If they could get away with it, I'm sure that every press-release would claim a Nobel prize was pending for every discovery.
Second, is the discovery here just that Plato likes math? Because if so... duh? He didn't bury that in his writing, he was pretty clear about that. He loved abstract material. What he was contemptuous of, as I recall, was more "applied" disciplines, like what we'd now call Physics. (He liked Astronomy because it was like math and music. The fact that he made that distinction over Physics tells you how well he grasped how important math was in understanding Nature on Earth as well as in the sky.)
Also, in no way does say, "Hey, math is useful for understanding Nature!" predate Newton. That wasn't Newton's discovery. That wasn't any of his discoveries, in fact. Quite a few Greeks had the notion that mathematics was important to understanding Nature. Pythagoras comes to mind (in his own eccentric was). Heck, the quote about nature being written in mathematics isn't even from Newton, it's a paraphrasing of a well-known quote of Galileo's. (The significance of that distinction is this: Galileo recognized the importance, but he didn't invent Newtonian mechanics. Why? That math is helpful wasn't the important discovery.)
Er, sorry, 2-cent increase would erase it. Point is, the overall shortfall is recent (past two years) and in the few-percent range. That doesn't seem like much to panic about.
Although if you read down, it kind of looks like they're losing money thanks to a congressional mandate to pre-pay retirement funds. (They're losing a few billion a year and the fund seems to cost $5-6 billion/yr.)
For that matter, if they're carrying around 150 billion pieces of mail per year (based on their numbers), it seems like raising the price of a stamp one lousy cent would more than erase a piddling $2 billion shortfall.
In the past, Amazon has argued that it should not have to help support public services in states in which it has no physical presence.
I'm having trouble seeing exactly why this is relevant, other than innuendo. State taxes don't pay for mail delivery, that's a federal function. Amazon's stance is consistent. (Whether it's morally right or wrong is a separate issue, mind you.)
It seems that acting can lead to the highest offices in places other than California."
Like... the United States (which isn't entirely composed of California, in spite of rumors)?
The age discrimination act was passed in 1967, but I'm not sure how well it was followed or enforced in the 80s.
Yeah, although not in that case. Age discrimination kicks in (legally) at 40 years old. Still a stupid thing to say, though.
Well, there's this poll suggesting that Rawl was within 7 points of DeMint. DeMint is (evidently?) not as secure in his re-election as is thought.
Most? By what measure? Of the 80-something incumbents running in primaries last week, 2 didn't win. One made it to a run-off and one had a list of pending criminal charges as long as my arm.
Just because the news channels have a favorite narrative, it doesn't mean it's real.
Certainly, some people do. Note that I said "most", recognizing that there are exceptions to the rule.
I wouldn't say so. Everyone's told they must go to university or college to get a good job, so if the university has a captive audience, why wouldn't they charge what they can get away with?
Competition? Not really caring about profits? (Please note that I wasn't talking about bookstores, but, rather, the universities, as noted in the parent post. Campus bookstores vary wildly in policies and practices. I know for a fact that many of them, perhaps most, barely break even, however.)
The publishing houses are not, as far as I am aware, generally really attached to the universities anymore.
Universities themselves aren't interested in profit, really. They don't want to hemorrhage money, to be sure. They'd rather accrue it, definitely. But without shareholders, there's not much incentive to make obscene profits off of their students. (In fact, the opposite is true: they'd rather keep fees lower and make students happier/open their student base up to the best students rather than the most affluent.) So while I'm sure most of us have been nickel-and-dimed by a university at some point, I doubt any of us have even paid for the full cost of our college education (which frequently runs 2-3 times the full tuition cost).
Publishers are a totally different story, in my experience.
Most people in the sciences don't pay their way through grad school. It's generally covered by grants already.
In fact the very founding of the nation was over tax laws, so pretending like the Teabaggers are crazy on this is really unfair and inaccurate.
Er, it was about taxation without representation. Please don't re-write history to ignore that part of it. The FFs were upset that they were being taxed with no say as to how they were taxed. The Tea Party folks, by contrast aren't upset about the representation and are upset about the fact that this is a democracy and the fact that they didn't get their way in the past two elections*. The taxes they get are appointed via our representatives, voted in by them.
So, basically, they're 180 degrees out of phase with the Founding Fathers.
* Witness the fact that taxes are at their lowest in a long while right now, yet their outrage is apparently at an all-time high. Perspective, among other things, is lacking.