That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change"
So they just grabbed everything, and evaluated the papers' position on the consensus view of global warming. 75% Implictly or explicitly supported it, 25% did not offer a position (mostly these were methods papers detailing a method not a result, or paleoclimate papers that did not deal with current climate issues), and 0% disagreed with the consensus view.
And to be specific, the consensus view is "Human activities... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents... that absorb or scatter radiant energy.... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), or equivalently, "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." from the National Academy of Sciences. Additionally, the National Academy of Sciences, The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all have issued statements that agree with the IPCC. These aren't rinky-dink outfits, they are the cream of the crop of academic science, noble laureates, etc.
The fact that you can find a small number of cranks to claim that global warming is "debatable" really means very little, see Flat Earth Society, etc etc. The scientific community as a whole has made up their mind, and it is clear that global warming caused by humans is occuring.
Perhaps scientists should leave politics to politians (which they mostly do) and, indeed, politicians should leave science where it belongs too.
Except that policy should be informed by science. There has to be transfer of knowledge from research to policy, otherwise what is the point of knowing stuff?
There are plenty of other reasons to want to end the usage of fossil fuels without mentioning global warming. Mr. Gore, please stick to what's sure and not what's "the buzz"....
While it is true that there are many reasons to reduce fossil fuel usage, the rest of your comment is ignorant. There is no meaningful debate about global warming amongst the credible scientific community. This article is from a noted corporate shill doing his job (apparently) very well. Gore has been banging on this drum for decades, and with very good reason and scientific backing.
Back in the 40s, there wasn't pin-point accuracy bombing. War was all about carpet-bombing your enemies industries, population, etc. The only alternative was to sit around and do nothing as your enemy bombed your country instead.
Yeah, we sure were getting the shit bombed out of us by japanese air power in 1945.
People look at the first atomic bombs in terms of the modern day, but that's just not the way it was. Looking at the evidence, even in hindsight, it was the least-terrible option.
Actually, I think a lot of people would disagree with you now, as well as then (including a large number of the scientists involved in the manhattan project). The geopolitical calculation that led to two bombs being dropped was a very complicated, controversial one that still prompts debate.
In fact, even today, when faced with the option of droping atomic bombs on a waring country, or losing millions of American lives, droping the bomb would still be the better option, and nobody would argue, until 50 years later, when some idiot will post some brainless comment on the web about it.
A lot? Didn't the original mini start at $499? And the intel core at $599? And, the intel mini has standard bluetooth and airport extreme, which together were a $99 extra for the original mini?
Were these others random people who you did not know, nor knew you? Would you have been just as happy if the people had told you directly that they care about you? I don't think there is any doubt that the patient's mental state effects things, but involving anonymous prayers seems like an absurdly roundabout way of getting there.
Try telling people Jesus of Nazareth came to you this morning and made you breakfast, and told you everything would be OK.
Better yet, try telling people that God came to you and told you to invade another country, and everything would be ok. Oh, right we'd re-elect you president.
The King of the Potato People, if he existed.... well, unless you argue that he was Creator (and therefore, by definition, be God), what power would he have to heal?
Duh, that was the power he got when Santa got that really cool sleigh & reindeer, Vishnu got the extra arms, the leprechauns got all that gold, and Easter Bunny got those wacky colored eggs.
Thus far, there have been two studies on this topic, and the results contradicted each other, so unless you're just an antagonist who exists solely to rant against religion every time you get the chance, you'll suspend judgement for now. That's just the obvious conclusion of anyone with a good, scientific mindset.
Actually, if you read through the two studies, you find the situation is a bit less conflicted. The same group performed both studies, and even in the former the differences between treatment groups were not statistically significant. From the first study's abstract: "No outcomes differences were significant; however, index hospitalization data consistently suggested a therapeutic benefit with noetic therapy." They go on to say that a sample size 4x bigger would be able to show significant differences if the effect were real, and of similar effect. Thus they did the second study with a much bigger sample size to either help support of refute the prior study. The second study again, showed no significant differences, despite the larger sample size.
So, Study 1 suggests there is a suggestion of an effect, but nothing significant enough to be considered real. Study 2 tries to find that effect and again fails to. Doesn't seem that contradictory to me.
If there are so many promising avenues out there, just begging to be investigated, so they can yield fabulous, cheap treatments, then private reseach, funded by private dollars will find them.
Baloney. Private industry, by and large, does not fund basic research. They wait for governmentally funded research to get to a nearly-marketable place, and then take it up. Stem cell research is still a long way from being marketable, and thusly, big pharma is happy to sit around making obscene amounts of money from cialis, vioxx (doh), etc etc until we're 10 years down the road researchwise.
Anyone that thinks that a government operation funded by someone elses money can make more rational decisions that a private company investing it's hard earned $$ needs to have their head examined.
Anyone who thinks private companies spend more than a pittance on basic research needs to have their head examined. Speaking as a biomedical researcher, I can assure you that the vast majority of basic reasearch occurs in publically funded labs. The non-linear nature of basic scientific research means for-profit companies have little patience with it.
If the market says that it's a losing bet, I don't want to fund that bet w/ my tax dollars instead. Unfortunately, my fellow voters in this state, aren't as smart.
This fallacy of the market as an all-knowing, all-powerful, most-efficient means of everything, though accepted by you, is not accepted by everyone (including, fortunately, the majority of our fellow californians). There are many areas where market forces are applicable and positive...but basic biomedical research, like law enforcement, like road-building, like military protection, like public health, is simply not one of them.
it will be difficult to perform the statistical (as clarified now) data collection and analysis that Apple does.
What collection and analysis? From everything I've seen, they collect nothing, but query a server that uses the ITMS data set to retrieve recommendations.
it phoned home when you played DVDs, and was resoundly condemded in many circles
Why was WMP sending that information? With itunes, it is for a pretty clear reason, i.e. to get recommendaions for the ministore. There is pretty clearly there to enhance the user's experience (and sell more songs). Furthermore, Apple has a huge dataset of music associations through the hundreds of millions of IMS sales, so it has no need to save the requests it is phoning home for (nor would the data be terribly useful for such analysis).
This is rather different from the case with WMP, where it appears to be telling microsoft that I like watching Backdoor Sluts IX just for the sake of posterity, or, more likely, to utilize that data is some way I will never know about. (If they developed a association-based DVD recommending system, then we would be in a different scenario.)
So while there is doubtless some amount of Apple:Good, Microsoft:Bad heuristic going on here, that does not mean that completely explains the different reactions. The details of a situaion are very important when forming an opinion.
Under what circumstances can that statement be true? The 'intelligent' in intelligent design refers to some supernatural entity. Be definition, ID implies a being outside the realm of scientific understanding (which is pretty much the definition of supernatural). That is, unless you have some scientific proof of (a) god that you want to share.
Whether ID requires the god-like entity to be involved at the beginning, the end, continuously throughout, or at certain specific times, is irrelevant. The supernatual god-like entity is a required part of the belief system. ID is predicated on supernatural belief, while science, by definition, does not accept supernatural explanations.
ID proponents are not looking outside of science to explain how the natural world works.
Bullshit. That is just stupid. When you assume a supernatural creator as the explanation of why eyes are eyes, you are most definitely looking outside of science.
What they are doing is questioning how the natural order came to be.
If only that were true. Origin of life is something science does not speak to. There is no way to observe or study the question, and thus is not a target for science. If ID were limited to the metaphysical argument of 'how did it all start' then it would not run afoul of the rational scientist crowd. Trying to pass off warmed over creationism as an alternative to evolution, however, goes leaps and bounds beyond the mysticism ID truly is.
But so far, connections between IQ and specific genes have been just correlations, with little supporting evidence. The new research, Jirtle and other experts said, will need to be replicated before it is considered definitive.
And even supposing it is replicated, that does not change the fact that it is also just a correlation.
Unfortunately, I know of no news program on television that really displays such a thing.
Check out PBS's offerings. Thereare a number of programs that tend to be quite informative, and less infotainment. Granted, some aren't strictly news in the "Film at eleven" sense of the term, but then again, if you want any kind of depth you are pretty much going to have to wait a little while.
I also read during the 2004 election, that the people that were most informed about the election were people that got their news from places like the "Daily Show"
Better than that, The Daily Show won a Peabody award. Twice. I agree, that is pretty sad statement on contemporary journalism when a self-described "fake news show" wins over real news shows.
It grows, has the potential to reproduce(species requirement), posesses a metabolism, responds to some stimuli, and posesses mecahnisms for controlled (internal) motion. Yup, that would be life.
By that definition, pretty much every cell in your body qualifies. If you are equating a fertilized egg and a skin cell and (to be relevant) an umbilical cord stem cell, then you've pretty much lost the debate about why a blasocyst is special.
Of course, I'm assuming you want to be consistent in your definitions: i.e. that, using the biological sciences consensus of what constitutes an 'embryo', you'd also use the same consensus definition of life.
I'm not sure there is a consensus definition of life. That's the problem.
Life in prison != death (and likewise, forced medical testing != life in prison).
Criminal justice system is not infallible, thus punishment with non-reversible methods is problematic
If you argue that 8-10 cell cluster == person == prisoner, and they all require equal treatment, you are necessarily opposed to IVF anyway.
The ethical question is of using materials otherwise intended for disposal for research purposes, assuming you've accepted a use of the materials for one situation already.
in fact there are almost no medical discoveries that can be associated with federal studies.
I'm not sure what you are smoking, but it's clearly some strong stuff. Or I suppose, you could just be terribly ignorant.
I think maybe you are confusing "medical discoveries" with "drug formulations." Please, point me to a "medical discovery" that was a completely commercial endeavor. I would submit that the vast majority of medical discoveries are by-products of state, non-profit and federally funded research. Biomedical companies do not do basic research.
Medical research thrives on competition;
Actually, research of all types thrives on cooperation. Ask a research scientist if competition or cooperation is more important. The free market does not work in every situation.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Science article:
So they just grabbed everything, and evaluated the papers' position on the consensus view of global warming. 75% Implictly or explicitly supported it, 25% did not offer a position (mostly these were methods papers detailing a method not a result, or paleoclimate papers that did not deal with current climate issues), and 0% disagreed with the consensus view.
And to be specific, the consensus view is "Human activities
The fact that you can find a small number of cranks to claim that global warming is "debatable" really means very little, see Flat Earth Society, etc etc. The scientific community as a whole has made up their mind, and it is clear that global warming caused by humans is occuring.
-Ted
Except that policy should be informed by science. There has to be transfer of knowledge from research to policy, otherwise what is the point of knowing stuff?
There are plenty of other reasons to want to end the usage of fossil fuels without mentioning global warming. Mr. Gore, please stick to what's sure and not what's "the buzz"....
While it is true that there are many reasons to reduce fossil fuel usage, the rest of your comment is ignorant. There is no meaningful debate about global warming amongst the credible scientific community. This article is from a noted corporate shill doing his job (apparently) very well. Gore has been banging on this drum for decades, and with very good reason and scientific backing.
-Ted
Yeah, we sure were getting the shit bombed out of us by japanese air power in 1945.
People look at the first atomic bombs in terms of the modern day, but that's just not the way it was. Looking at the evidence, even in hindsight, it was the least-terrible option.
Actually, I think a lot of people would disagree with you now, as well as then (including a large number of the scientists involved in the manhattan project). The geopolitical calculation that led to two bombs being dropped was a very complicated, controversial one that still prompts debate.
In fact, even today, when faced with the option of droping atomic bombs on a waring country, or losing millions of American lives, droping the bomb would still be the better option, and nobody would argue, until 50 years later, when some idiot will post some brainless comment on the web about it.
Actually, I would argue.
-Ted
Wow, I wonder what the video games were like in 1890.
A lot? Didn't the original mini start at $499? And the intel core at $599? And, the intel mini has standard bluetooth and airport extreme, which together were a $99 extra for the original mini?
-Ted
-Ted
Seriously, where's the giant bowl of popcorn?
-Ted
-Ted
Better yet, try telling people that God came to you and told you to invade another country, and everything would be ok. Oh, right we'd re-elect you president.
-Ted
Duh, that was the power he got when Santa got that really cool sleigh & reindeer, Vishnu got the extra arms, the leprechauns got all that gold, and Easter Bunny got those wacky colored eggs.
-Ted
Actually, if you read through the two studies, you find the situation is a bit less conflicted. The same group performed both studies, and even in the former the differences between treatment groups were not statistically significant. From the first study's abstract: "No outcomes differences were significant; however, index hospitalization data consistently suggested a therapeutic benefit with noetic therapy." They go on to say that a sample size 4x bigger would be able to show significant differences if the effect were real, and of similar effect. Thus they did the second study with a much bigger sample size to either help support of refute the prior study. The second study again, showed no significant differences, despite the larger sample size.
So, Study 1 suggests there is a suggestion of an effect, but nothing significant enough to be considered real. Study 2 tries to find that effect and again fails to. Doesn't seem that contradictory to me.
-Ted
Except, I guess, when we call for the health of others.
-Ted
Baloney. Private industry, by and large, does not fund basic research. They wait for governmentally funded research to get to a nearly-marketable place, and then take it up. Stem cell research is still a long way from being marketable, and thusly, big pharma is happy to sit around making obscene amounts of money from cialis, vioxx (doh), etc etc until we're 10 years down the road researchwise.
Anyone that thinks that a government operation funded by someone elses money can make more rational decisions that a private company investing it's hard earned $$ needs to have their head examined.
Anyone who thinks private companies spend more than a pittance on basic research needs to have their head examined. Speaking as a biomedical researcher, I can assure you that the vast majority of basic reasearch occurs in publically funded labs. The non-linear nature of basic scientific research means for-profit companies have little patience with it.
If the market says that it's a losing bet, I don't want to fund that bet w/ my tax dollars instead. Unfortunately, my fellow voters in this state, aren't as smart.
This fallacy of the market as an all-knowing, all-powerful, most-efficient means of everything, though accepted by you, is not accepted by everyone (including, fortunately, the majority of our fellow californians). There are many areas where market forces are applicable and positive...but basic biomedical research, like law enforcement, like road-building, like military protection, like public health, is simply not one of them.
-Ted
What collection and analysis? From everything I've seen, they collect nothing, but query a server that uses the ITMS data set to retrieve recommendations.
-Ted
Why was WMP sending that information? With itunes, it is for a pretty clear reason, i.e. to get recommendaions for the ministore. There is pretty clearly there to enhance the user's experience (and sell more songs). Furthermore, Apple has a huge dataset of music associations through the hundreds of millions of IMS sales, so it has no need to save the requests it is phoning home for (nor would the data be terribly useful for such analysis).
This is rather different from the case with WMP, where it appears to be telling microsoft that I like watching Backdoor Sluts IX just for the sake of posterity, or, more likely, to utilize that data is some way I will never know about. (If they developed a association-based DVD recommending system, then we would be in a different scenario.)
So while there is doubtless some amount of Apple:Good, Microsoft:Bad heuristic going on here, that does not mean that completely explains the different reactions. The details of a situaion are very important when forming an opinion.
-Ted
ID != Supernaturalism.
Under what circumstances can that statement be true? The 'intelligent' in intelligent design refers to some supernatural entity. Be definition, ID implies a being outside the realm of scientific understanding (which is pretty much the definition of supernatural). That is, unless you have some scientific proof of (a) god that you want to share.
Whether ID requires the god-like entity to be involved at the beginning, the end, continuously throughout, or at certain specific times, is irrelevant. The supernatual god-like entity is a required part of the belief system. ID is predicated on supernatural belief, while science, by definition, does not accept supernatural explanations.
ID proponents are not looking outside of science to explain how the natural world works.
Bullshit. That is just stupid. When you assume a supernatural creator as the explanation of why eyes are eyes, you are most definitely looking outside of science.
What they are doing is questioning how the natural order came to be.
If only that were true. Origin of life is something science does not speak to. There is no way to observe or study the question, and thus is not a target for science. If ID were limited to the metaphysical argument of 'how did it all start' then it would not run afoul of the rational scientist crowd. Trying to pass off warmed over creationism as an alternative to evolution, however, goes leaps and bounds beyond the mysticism ID truly is.
-Ted
And even supposing it is replicated, that does not change the fact that it is also just a correlation.
-Ted
Yeah, I can't count the number of people who just haven't been able to grasp the whole 'move your finger in a circle' concept.
-Ted
Check out PBS's offerings. There are a number of programs that tend to be quite informative, and less infotainment. Granted, some aren't strictly news in the "Film at eleven" sense of the term, but then again, if you want any kind of depth you are pretty much going to have to wait a little while.
I also read during the 2004 election, that the people that were most informed about the election were people that got their news from places like the "Daily Show"
Better than that, The Daily Show won a Peabody award. Twice. I agree, that is pretty sad statement on contemporary journalism when a self-described "fake news show" wins over real news shows.
-Ted
And that makes, say Josh Marshall different from, say this or this how? I don't think I buy the 'but more people read us' argument.
-Ted
And even better, commentary article from Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051003/full/437794 a.html.
-Ted
By that definition, pretty much every cell in your body qualifies. If you are equating a fertilized egg and a skin cell and (to be relevant) an umbilical cord stem cell, then you've pretty much lost the debate about why a blasocyst is special.
Of course, I'm assuming you want to be consistent in your definitions: i.e. that, using the biological sciences consensus of what constitutes an 'embryo', you'd also use the same consensus definition of life.
I'm not sure there is a consensus definition of life. That's the problem.
-Ted
Is life? Really? Based on what (& therefore, whos) definition?
-Ted
The ethical question is of using materials otherwise intended for disposal for research purposes, assuming you've accepted a use of the materials for one situation already.
-Ted
I'm not sure what you are smoking, but it's clearly some strong stuff. Or I suppose, you could just be terribly ignorant.
I think maybe you are confusing "medical discoveries" with "drug formulations." Please, point me to a "medical discovery" that was a completely commercial endeavor. I would submit that the vast majority of medical discoveries are by-products of state, non-profit and federally funded research. Biomedical companies do not do basic research.
Medical research thrives on competition;
Actually, research of all types thrives on cooperation. Ask a research scientist if competition or cooperation is more important. The free market does not work in every situation.
-Ted