Hmm. I've read Spencer's retort and the comments that follow. He issued a ban on a *single* individual on this topic. More to the point, I could barely find any cogent criticism of his work in that discussion. The one half-way salient link I did see was from William Connolley [google for this guy's history on Wikipedia for some fun] to a realclimate.org article, a site so infamous for selective editing and outright censorship of awkward questions that people have had to set up other sites to fully record discussions held there. Having put that in context, I urge people to follow the discussion chain regarding Spencer's paper and make up their own minds.
I would also point out that this whole brouhaha concerns an editor apparently upset about a paper that was published in his own journal after peer review. Remember this: it happened on this editor's watch and went through the standard process (and if you've followed the climate debate for any length of time, apparently peer review conveys the status of holy writ -- having been on both sides of the process myself, I can assure people that PR is actually the very weakest of sanity checks in the scientific process). Traditionally, scientific arguments are overturned by publishing an incontrovertible counterargument, but, hey, maybe this journal editor has a better idea.
Now, given all that and the quite amazing array of logical fallacies you've employed here I can only conclude that either you don't understand scientific debate or you're so opposed to any counterargument to your obviously deeply held position that you're prepared to be poisonously dishonest.
Er, the models even *hindcast* wilder weather: their variance seems to be substantially greater than what is observed (not to mention they're mostly way off base when it comes to getting absolute temperatures right). See this ensemble graph: http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/temperatures_absolute.jpg
The thing is, we've "observed" about 0.7'C of warming over a century and most of that seems to have happened in Siberia and the Arctic. Given the huge usual temperature variations over any sub-decadal time scale, there is just no way you would be able to notice that change without a lot of time and careful measurement.
Ha ha, when I was an undergrad my friend's supervisor for one course told his students, "Most supervisors do not realise you have other courses to study for and expect you to spend 100% of your time on their course alone. I do understand, and only expect you to spend 80% of your time on mine."
This is just wrong. The act of writing and rewriting your notes makes a major contribution to learning the material. Pen and paper forces you to do this. It has other benefits, too, including not being connected to the internet and not being able to play minesweeper.
Well, it's more efficient for a start since generics are part of the IL. Java generics, as I understand it, allow extra checks by the compiler, but still result in dynamic type cast instructions in the generated bytecode.
"In designing an operating system one needs both theoretical insight and horse sense. Without the former, one designs an ad hoc mess; without the latter one designs an elephant in best Carrara marble (white, perfect, and immobile)."
-- Needham & Hartley, 1969
Applies to everything else, too, in my experience.
You probably want something small and imperative. I'd recommend either Python or some not-too-clever dialect of BASIC. Either will do fine for one-page programs, which sounds like what your students will be writing.
My experience is that strong static typing is vital for programming in the large, but is a serious impediment to beginners. The extra protection and performance it offers usually isn't neccessary for one-page programs.
I have read his book, but I wonder whether you have. I've seen much emotional criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist, but nothing of substance. At most a few trivial errors have been pointed out which Lomborg has acknowledged and corrected.
Charming. But let me address what you said anyway. Consider a paper X.
(1) Verification is the first step one takes before moving on to replication. That is, you check that X's conclusion is supported by the data and methods. If it isn't, you don't need to take X seriously any more. There may be other papers with similar conclusions, but that in no way makes X's "(presumed?) right answer, wrong method" a contribution to our understanding of nature. Similarly, if the authors of X make verification impossible by refusing access to their data or code, I can't honestly build an argument on X (science is not about taking each other's word for things).
(2) If I find that paper X is substantially flawed or simply cannot be verified, then my confidence in other papers that build on X or use X as a supporting argument is likewise reduced.
(3) If there are enough flawed papers like X or papers that depend on X then I might start to wonder whether the scientific method is being properly applied (clearly peer review or verification hasn't worked in these cases).
(4) I am not out to disprove AGW. It is, however, up to the people advancing AGW as a theory to present a convincing case. I do not consider talk of concensus to be serious argument; I would be swayed by a coherent theory backed up by experimental evidence (and when I say backed up, I mean strongly so, not just plausibly within some huge error bounds).
For what it's worth, I don't have a problem with the A in AGW; what I have yet to see defended to my satisfaction is the work used to justify the scare stories motivating what seems to me to be a lot of very expensive legislation which will leave all of us worse off.
I think you're confusing verification ("you did what you claimed you did") with reproduction ("I tried my own experiment and got similar results").
Put it another way, if I write a paper saying, "I have solved this [very difficult experimental problem]. The answer is seven." You have every right to ask me to show my working. If you can find an error in that then you know you don't have to move on to the much harder task of independently reproducing my result. Of course, the answer could still be seven, but not on the basis of my faulty reasoning.
If, on the other hand, I refuse to show you my working, you have to take it on faith that seven really is the answer I got. Even if you try your own experiment and also get seven, that isn't really reproduction.
I find it hard to believe you actually understood what you were doing with functional programming.
FPLs have, for decades, offered a level of safety, precision, and brevity that simply hasn't been matched in any imperative language. For my money, OO has mainly been a poor-man's effort at adding limited polymorphism to imperative languages.
I code daily in a range of these languages (functional/logical, imperative, OO) and the amount of verbiage required to do the simplest things in the non-functional languages never ceases to amaze me. Plus, I have nothing like the faith in the OO and imperative programs that experience has given me with functional languages - that is, the vast majority of my functional programs do exactly what I intend them to do first time.
One benefit of the pencil-and-paper approach (other than its immediacy and simplicity) is that you invariably have to rewrite your lecture notes soon after the lecture to get them into a form suitable for rereading later on when doing coursework and revising for exams. This extra step is vital (a) to embed the information in your brain and (b) to help you identify the material that you haven't fully understood. I don't really see this happening with people who take notes on their computers.
[While I'm dispensing advice: highlighting chunks of prose in your textbooks is no good. Take separate notes on what you read for the same reasons you need to rewrite notes taken during lectures.]
My experience of obtaining a Ph.D was vastly different. A Ph.D is supposed to be a significant contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Moreover, if you can't write at a fairly sophisticated level, there's no way you'll be able to express your ideas within the word limit or in such a way as to be acceptable to your examiners. If you attend a university that will award you a higher degree on the basis of regurgitating known stuff then you might as well save yourself the time and effort and just buy a $20 degree off the internet (frankly, any establishment awarding even a first degree for simple regurgitation is a joke).
Oh, what I would have given for a bit of hand-holding while I was doing my Ph.D research.
It would be far better to create and use a new and actually gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun.
Back in the early nineties a bunch of PC fanatics tried this out and came up with such gems as 'sie' (he/she), 'hir' (her/his). The same crowd also tried introducing words such as 'waitron' (waiter/waitress). It always amazed me that people could do this with a straight face.
Here are my handy hints from having given a number of talks and lecture courses:
Read Simon Peyton-Jones' "How to give a good research talk" notes. SPJ is one of the most lucid and entertaining speakers to whom I've had the pleasure of listening.
A talk is essentially a one-sided conversation with the audience. If you read from the slides or from prepared notes then your talk will be awful: the audience can read things for themselves.
Relax; be somewhat casual. The audience is on your side. (Except for undergraduates: these guys will just stare at you for weeks, like an inert zombie horde, until you finally connect with them.)
If you are interrupted with many questions then this is a sign of success: you are engaging the audience.
Avoid slides full of bullet points. It's much better to put up some example code or a diagram and talk around that.
I loathe slides that incrementally reveal points. Don't patronise the audience.
Be careful when attempting humour: if you're not sure it's funny, don't say it.
In a half-hour talk, you can get one key point across. Let the full paper provide all the other details.
Ah, "disingenuous", "debunked" - all charming parts of the catechism.
Because some of what Watts has reported has been simply contradicted by the people who did the original research doesn't mean that a compelling rebuttal has been presented. I don't know about you, but I urge people to look at both sides of the argument (including the claim, the criticism, and the response to some interpretation of the criticism, etc. etc.) and draw their own conclusions.
Further, while I'm not aware of Watts claiming any significant cooling trend, I see no problem with a question along the lines of "even were I to accept credibility of the surface temperature record, why has the trend plateaued over the last N years despite increasing CO2 levels?"
Is there anybody who doesn't sing from the RealClimate song sheet that you consider listening to?
It matters because science is about reproducability: one shouldn't have to make guesses. You should read the attempts people have made to reverse-engineer claims made in the more controversial climate papers before concluding that the papers provided an adequate description of the method. The code and data should be released so that others can check that what is claimed matches up with what was done. This verification step is the first sanity check you do before embarking on independent reproduction (which hasn't really happened in the climate literature: people in the club get the data, people not in the club don't). If the verification step fails then the original authors can't defend their work by claiming you made a mistake in your reproduction.
But this is neither here nor there. Journals generally require the code and data for publications be made available; that the climate journals have refused to enforce their own conditions of publication is not a mark in their favour.
a) So what? b) That's the point: you want to verify the work that was done (before trying to reproduce it).
This is how unconvincing science is done: A: "Behold, I have arrived at a shocking result which I have published in this paper!" B: "How did you do it?" A: "I won't tell you. You'll have to guess." B: "And where is the data you used?" A: "I won't give them to you. You'll have to guess." B: "You have to be kidding."
Here's an analysis of the number and response to reviewers' comments.
You ought to read a book on the philosophy of science: concensus plays no part in the process. Real scientists talk of experimental evidence when presenting a case.
Speaking of concensus, you realise that the existence of the MWP was almost universally held to be true until MBH produced their hockey stick graph. And even though the hockey stick work has been shown to be wrong by McIntyre & McKitrick and Wegman and the NAS, Mann et al are still trotting out variations on the theme. Now some persist in the belief that the NAS panel supported the hockey stick; I refer them to the following exchange with Dr North, the chair of the NAS panel:
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman's report?
DR. NORTH. No, we don't. We don't disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. I've read Spencer's retort and the comments that follow. He issued a ban on a *single* individual on this topic. More to the point, I could barely find any cogent criticism of his work in that discussion. The one half-way salient link I did see was from William Connolley [google for this guy's history on Wikipedia for some fun] to a realclimate.org article, a site so infamous for selective editing and outright censorship of awkward questions that people have had to set up other sites to fully record discussions held there. Having put that in context, I urge people to follow the discussion chain regarding Spencer's paper and make up their own minds.
I would also point out that this whole brouhaha concerns an editor apparently upset about a paper that was published in his own journal after peer review. Remember this: it happened on this editor's watch and went through the standard process (and if you've followed the climate debate for any length of time, apparently peer review conveys the status of holy writ -- having been on both sides of the process myself, I can assure people that PR is actually the very weakest of sanity checks in the scientific process). Traditionally, scientific arguments are overturned by publishing an incontrovertible counterargument, but, hey, maybe this journal editor has a better idea.
Now, given all that and the quite amazing array of logical fallacies you've employed here I can only conclude that either you don't understand scientific debate or you're so opposed to any counterargument to your obviously deeply held position that you're prepared to be poisonously dishonest.
Er, the models even *hindcast* wilder weather: their variance seems to be substantially greater than what is observed (not to mention they're mostly way off base when it comes to getting absolute temperatures right). See this ensemble graph: http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/temperatures_absolute.jpg
The thing is, we've "observed" about 0.7'C of warming over a century and most of that seems to have happened in Siberia and the Arctic. Given the huge usual temperature variations over any sub-decadal time scale, there is just no way you would be able to notice that change without a lot of time and careful measurement.
Ha ha, when I was an undergrad my friend's supervisor for one course told his students, "Most supervisors do not realise you have other courses to study for and expect you to spend 100% of your time on their course alone. I do understand, and only expect you to spend 80% of your time on mine."
You've forgotten to take your pills again, haven't you?
This is just wrong. The act of writing and rewriting your notes makes a major contribution to learning the material. Pen and paper forces you to do this. It has other benefits, too, including not being connected to the internet and not being able to play minesweeper.
Well, it's more efficient for a start since generics are part of the IL. Java generics, as I understand it, allow extra checks by the compiler, but still result in dynamic type cast instructions in the generated bytecode.
"In designing an operating system one needs both theoretical insight and horse sense. Without the former, one designs an ad hoc mess; without the latter one designs an elephant in best Carrara marble (white, perfect, and immobile)."
-- Needham & Hartley, 1969
Applies to everything else, too, in my experience.
You probably want something small and imperative. I'd recommend either Python or some not-too-clever dialect of BASIC. Either will do fine for one-page programs, which sounds like what your students will be writing.
My experience is that strong static typing is vital for programming in the large, but is a serious impediment to beginners. The extra protection and performance it offers usually isn't neccessary for one-page programs.
I wonder why this post was modded down?
I have read his book, but I wonder whether you have. I've seen much emotional criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist, but nothing of substance. At most a few trivial errors have been pointed out which Lomborg has acknowledged and corrected.
TapeCutter, do feel free to jump into the discussion any time you have a substantive point to make.
I'm sure everybody here will be interested in reading Lomborg's response before forming an opinion.
Charming. But let me address what you said anyway. Consider a paper X.
(1) Verification is the first step one takes before moving on to replication. That is, you check that X's conclusion is supported by the data and methods. If it isn't, you don't need to take X seriously any more. There may be other papers with similar conclusions, but that in no way makes X's "(presumed?) right answer, wrong method" a contribution to our understanding of nature. Similarly, if the authors of X make verification impossible by refusing access to their data or code, I can't honestly build an argument on X (science is not about taking each other's word for things).
(2) If I find that paper X is substantially flawed or simply cannot be verified, then my confidence in other papers that build on X or use X as a supporting argument is likewise reduced.
(3) If there are enough flawed papers like X or papers that depend on X then I might start to wonder whether the scientific method is being properly applied (clearly peer review or verification hasn't worked in these cases).
(4) I am not out to disprove AGW. It is, however, up to the people advancing AGW as a theory to present a convincing case. I do not consider talk of concensus to be serious argument; I would be swayed by a coherent theory backed up by experimental evidence (and when I say backed up, I mean strongly so, not just plausibly within some huge error bounds).
For what it's worth, I don't have a problem with the A in AGW; what I have yet to see defended to my satisfaction is the work used to justify the scare stories motivating what seems to me to be a lot of very expensive legislation which will leave all of us worse off.
Hmm, you should contact the econometrics journals which require all code and data to be submitted alongside articles.
As I understand it, even Nature requires something similar, although for some reason climate scientists seem to be given a free pass.
I think you're confusing verification ("you did what you claimed you did") with reproduction ("I tried my own experiment and got similar results").
Put it another way, if I write a paper saying, "I have solved this [very difficult experimental problem]. The answer is seven." You have every right to ask me to show my working. If you can find an error in that then you know you don't have to move on to the much harder task of independently reproducing my result. Of course, the answer could still be seven, but not on the basis of my faulty reasoning.
If, on the other hand, I refuse to show you my working, you have to take it on faith that seven really is the answer I got. Even if you try your own experiment and also get seven, that isn't really reproduction.
I find it hard to believe you actually understood what you were doing with functional programming.
FPLs have, for decades, offered a level of safety, precision, and brevity that simply hasn't been matched in any imperative language. For my money, OO has mainly been a poor-man's effort at adding limited polymorphism to imperative languages.
I code daily in a range of these languages (functional/logical, imperative, OO) and the amount of verbiage required to do the simplest things in the non-functional languages never ceases to amaze me. Plus, I have nothing like the faith in the OO and imperative programs that experience has given me with functional languages - that is, the vast majority of my functional programs do exactly what I intend them to do first time.
One benefit of the pencil-and-paper approach (other than its immediacy and simplicity) is that you invariably have to rewrite your lecture notes soon after the lecture to get them into a form suitable for rereading later on when doing coursework and revising for exams. This extra step is vital (a) to embed the information in your brain and (b) to help you identify the material that you haven't fully understood. I don't really see this happening with people who take notes on their computers.
[While I'm dispensing advice: highlighting chunks of prose in your textbooks is no good. Take separate notes on what you read for the same reasons you need to rewrite notes taken during lectures.]
My experience of obtaining a Ph.D was vastly different. A Ph.D is supposed to be a significant contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Moreover, if you can't write at a fairly sophisticated level, there's no way you'll be able to express your ideas within the word limit or in such a way as to be acceptable to your examiners. If you attend a university that will award you a higher degree on the basis of regurgitating known stuff then you might as well save yourself the time and effort and just buy a $20 degree off the internet (frankly, any establishment awarding even a first degree for simple regurgitation is a joke).
Oh, what I would have given for a bit of hand-holding while I was doing my Ph.D research.
It would be far better to create and use a new and actually gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun.
Back in the early nineties a bunch of PC fanatics tried this out and came up with such gems as 'sie' (he/she), 'hir' (her/his). The same crowd also tried introducing words such as 'waitron' (waiter/waitress). It always amazed me that people could do this with a straight face.
Here are my handy hints from having given a number of talks and lecture courses:
Ah, "disingenuous", "debunked" - all charming parts of the catechism.
Because some of what Watts has reported has been simply contradicted by the people who did the original research doesn't mean that a compelling rebuttal has been presented. I don't know about you, but I urge people to look at both sides of the argument (including the claim, the criticism, and the response to some interpretation of the criticism, etc. etc.) and draw their own conclusions.
Further, while I'm not aware of Watts claiming any significant cooling trend, I see no problem with a question along the lines of "even were I to accept credibility of the surface temperature record, why has the trend plateaued over the last N years despite increasing CO2 levels?"
Is there anybody who doesn't sing from the RealClimate song sheet that you consider listening to?
It matters because science is about reproducability: one shouldn't have to make guesses. You should read the attempts people have made to reverse-engineer claims made in the more controversial climate papers before concluding that the papers provided an adequate description of the method. The code and data should be released so that others can check that what is claimed matches up with what was done. This verification step is the first sanity check you do before embarking on independent reproduction (which hasn't really happened in the climate literature: people in the club get the data, people not in the club don't). If the verification step fails then the original authors can't defend their work by claiming you made a mistake in your reproduction.
But this is neither here nor there. Journals generally require the code and data for publications be made available; that the climate journals have refused to enforce their own conditions of publication is not a mark in their favour.
a) So what?
b) That's the point: you want to verify the work that was done (before trying to reproduce it).
This is how unconvincing science is done:
A: "Behold, I have arrived at a shocking result which I have published in this paper!"
B: "How did you do it?"
A: "I won't tell you. You'll have to guess."
B: "And where is the data you used?"
A: "I won't give them to you. You'll have to guess."
B: "You have to be kidding."
Er, why do you care about Watts' motives? Aren't the points raised on his site serious enough to merit consideration?
Here's an analysis of the number and response to reviewers' comments.
You ought to read a book on the philosophy of science: concensus plays no part in the process. Real scientists talk of experimental evidence when presenting a case.
Speaking of concensus, you realise that the existence of the MWP was almost universally held to be true until MBH produced their hockey stick graph. And even though the hockey stick work has been shown to be wrong by McIntyre & McKitrick and Wegman and the NAS, Mann et al are still trotting out variations on the theme. Now some persist in the belief that the NAS panel supported the hockey stick; I refer them to the following exchange with Dr North, the chair of the NAS panel:
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman's report?
DR. NORTH. No, we don't. We don't disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.