I think "more scientifically inclined" might help.
Ethical malfeasance when selecting your subjects casts serious doubt on your conclusions. For the most part, people can't actually verify your original data. They can replicate your study by gathering their own data, and then can verify your analytical methods (to the extent you provide original data), but it's basically impossible to verify that your original data were taken properly. Readers and reviewers rely on your honesty in data collection (knowing that when experiments are rerun in the future, you may well be shown to be wrong).
In a medical study, selecting subjects is part of taking your data. If that part is not done honestly, it casts doubt on the entirety of your results.
Most current desertification, yes. One of the identified potential "tipping points" of climate change is the transition of a large fertile region of Africa into desert.
That's not actually true -- most vaccines do not convey high-reliability immunity. They convey low-reliability immunity. A major mechanism of the vaccine is that by making it more difficult for diseases to infect people you come in contact with, their ability to spread is significantly limited. So you're exposed, on average, to the disease much less -- which makes the vaccine effective. This is "herd immunity".
Yes. In fact, the common myth is that the Amish, who don't vaccinate their children, also don't get autism. Those who study autism know this isn't true: the Amish are useful as a study population because of their limited interaction with modern medicine, and there are still Amish with autism.
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
It doesn't. The OSHA limit is for chronic exposure to methylmercury. Thimerosal exposes you (via breakdown) to ethylmercury, and only once. It's the wrong substance and is a non-chronic exposure. There is not an established toxicity for ethylmercury, as far as I recall -- it is generally thought that the toxicity is lower than methylmercury, and so the limits for methylmercury are used. (But again, the limit you are referring to is the chronic-exposure limit.)
There are plenty of things wrong with this: * A large volume of anecdotal evidence is still worthless, except as an impetus to do a study or survey, or unless you have a known mechanism associated with the evidence * Even if a study indicates a risk with the vaccine, there's nothing indicating that thimerosal is the problem, so removing it isn't necessarily helping anything * The vaccines haven't contained thimerosal for quite some time now; removing it *definitely* won't help anything.
The primary reason thimerosal is mentioned is that it contains mercury. But the effects of mercury are not similar to autism. "Mercury causes brain problems, and autism is a brain problem" does not mean "mercury causes autism".
You're supposed to flock to the theoretical Libertarian ideal that provides exactly what you want at a reasonable price. Barring that, stick with something you don't like and complain on the Internet that government regulation must be responsible for the situation.
Bear in mind that the 12 months includes 11.5 months of sitting in a pile somewhere while it works it way to the front of the backlog, 5 minutes of finding files in the recycle bin, a couple of days of searching everywhere else (you don't stop once you've found one file), and the rest of the remaining two weeks doing procedural tasks (duplication, documentation, etc.) that are required in order for it to be valid evidence.
Easy: because the idea of going to prison for a small collection of cartoon child porn is ridiculous enough that the prosecutor offered him a good deal.
I know you think you're clever, but: * it's not cryptoanalysis, it's forensic analysis * he probably spent the hour and a half actually deleting the images and sabotaging the computer * the gross majority of that 12 months was assuredly spent with the evidence sitting in a forensic examiner's "to do" pile -- backlogs are 3-12 months, depending on where you are, and evidence processing time is usually 1-2 weeks
EM radiation happens to be just about the only thing that propagates across the distances necessary to investigate even neighboring stars. If there was an alien civilization out there that did not emit EM radiation, then there is no reasonable way to detect it.
What's your point? That temperature is a noisy signal? Have you bothered to eyeball what the best-fit trend is for the figure you linked? (It's only 12 years, so it's a reasonably short trend, but 11 is enough to eliminate most of the year-to-year variation if you use running averages.)
Yes, one is a scientist and the other is a cardiologist. And they may well be right. (In fact, it's probably more likely that they're right than that they're wrong.) But that doesn't mean that there's any motivation to believe their blogs. If their information is worth anything, they're either getting it from (or much less likely, publishing it in) actual research journals, which is what you ought to reference. (Or, at the least, reference people who refer to the research itself.)
You joke, but in college I was in a gaming club (as in, D&D) that got funding specifically because it provided an alternative to getting plastered on a Friday evening.
It was effective, too. We restricted our drinking to Saturday and Sunday.
Way back when, I had a version of Wii Sports Tennis that you could play outdoors. The controllers were a lot heavier back then, though, and the game only worked properly in certain areas.
Slashdot Mirror
I think "more scientifically inclined" might help.
Ethical malfeasance when selecting your subjects casts serious doubt on your conclusions. For the most part, people can't actually verify your original data. They can replicate your study by gathering their own data, and then can verify your analytical methods (to the extent you provide original data), but it's basically impossible to verify that your original data were taken properly. Readers and reviewers rely on your honesty in data collection (knowing that when experiments are rerun in the future, you may well be shown to be wrong).
In a medical study, selecting subjects is part of taking your data. If that part is not done honestly, it casts doubt on the entirety of your results.
I don't think global warming was being studied 40 years ago.
It was first studied in the late 19th century, but not seriously until the early 50s. That's almost 60 years ago.
Most current desertification, yes. One of the identified potential "tipping points" of climate change is the transition of a large fertile region of Africa into desert.
That's not actually true -- most vaccines do not convey high-reliability immunity. They convey low-reliability immunity. A major mechanism of the vaccine is that by making it more difficult for diseases to infect people you come in contact with, their ability to spread is significantly limited. So you're exposed, on average, to the disease much less -- which makes the vaccine effective. This is "herd immunity".
Yes. In fact, the common myth is that the Amish, who don't vaccinate their children, also don't get autism. Those who study autism know this isn't true: the Amish are useful as a study population because of their limited interaction with modern medicine, and there are still Amish with autism.
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
It doesn't. The OSHA limit is for chronic exposure to methylmercury. Thimerosal exposes you (via breakdown) to ethylmercury, and only once. It's the wrong substance and is a non-chronic exposure. There is not an established toxicity for ethylmercury, as far as I recall -- it is generally thought that the toxicity is lower than methylmercury, and so the limits for methylmercury are used. (But again, the limit you are referring to is the chronic-exposure limit.)
There are plenty of things wrong with this:
* A large volume of anecdotal evidence is still worthless, except as an impetus to do a study or survey, or unless you have a known mechanism associated with the evidence
* Even if a study indicates a risk with the vaccine, there's nothing indicating that thimerosal is the problem, so removing it isn't necessarily helping anything
* The vaccines haven't contained thimerosal for quite some time now; removing it *definitely* won't help anything.
The primary reason thimerosal is mentioned is that it contains mercury. But the effects of mercury are not similar to autism. "Mercury causes brain problems, and autism is a brain problem" does not mean "mercury causes autism".
The harness of the fat suit that keeps it from falling off might well give you away.
If his DNA is on her clothing from helping her up, he's doing it wrong. You watch too many crime dramas.
I would contend that voter action in controlling government has an effectiveness that is on par with mass consumer action in controlling businesses.
But that might actually be effective, which doesn't seem to be the tactic people tend to go with.
You're supposed to flock to the theoretical Libertarian ideal that provides exactly what you want at a reasonable price. Barring that, stick with something you don't like and complain on the Internet that government regulation must be responsible for the situation.
Bear in mind that the 12 months includes 11.5 months of sitting in a pile somewhere while it works it way to the front of the backlog, 5 minutes of finding files in the recycle bin, a couple of days of searching everywhere else (you don't stop once you've found one file), and the rest of the remaining two weeks doing procedural tasks (duplication, documentation, etc.) that are required in order for it to be valid evidence.
Easy: because the idea of going to prison for a small collection of cartoon child porn is ridiculous enough that the prosecutor offered him a good deal.
I know you think you're clever, but:
* it's not cryptoanalysis, it's forensic analysis
* he probably spent the hour and a half actually deleting the images and sabotaging the computer
* the gross majority of that 12 months was assuredly spent with the evidence sitting in a forensic examiner's "to do" pile -- backlogs are 3-12 months, depending on where you are, and evidence processing time is usually 1-2 weeks
It's not suddenly their job; the Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been doing it for quite a while: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/about/
EM radiation happens to be just about the only thing that propagates across the distances necessary to investigate even neighboring stars. If there was an alien civilization out there that did not emit EM radiation, then there is no reasonable way to detect it.
What's your point? That temperature is a noisy signal? Have you bothered to eyeball what the best-fit trend is for the figure you linked? (It's only 12 years, so it's a reasonably short trend, but 11 is enough to eliminate most of the year-to-year variation if you use running averages.)
Or units.
Yes, one is a scientist and the other is a cardiologist. And they may well be right. (In fact, it's probably more likely that they're right than that they're wrong.) But that doesn't mean that there's any motivation to believe their blogs. If their information is worth anything, they're either getting it from (or much less likely, publishing it in) actual research journals, which is what you ought to reference. (Or, at the least, reference people who refer to the research itself.)
And they're completely legitimate and trustworthy sources of information. After all, nothing on the Internet is wrong, especially blogs.
Incidentally, only one of the two appears to be a scientist.
You joke, but in college I was in a gaming club (as in, D&D) that got funding specifically because it provided an alternative to getting plastered on a Friday evening.
It was effective, too. We restricted our drinking to Saturday and Sunday.
I believe that...
Research: you're doing it wrong.
Way back when, I had a version of Wii Sports Tennis that you could play outdoors. The controllers were a lot heavier back then, though, and the game only worked properly in certain areas.
Sources: blogs!