I agree it's easy to include pointless graphs, but when there are no graphs of the primary effects I don't trust the study. In fact, it makes me think they just looked at the textual output of their stats package and never graphed their own data. It's a cliche, but a graph really is worth a thousand words. If they show the data then you have almost everything you need to make up your own mind. If they show only some numbers in a table then you never know what happened. Was a slope value influenced by an outlier? Who knows. Is there some interesting trend they didn't notice or didn't capture in their stats test? Who knows.
Ultimately, you want a big sample size to convince yourself that your effect is real in the sample in which you're measuring it and that it generalises to the population of interest.
It's very hard to decide what is an adequate sample size. In some studies a sample size of 30 is considered large. In these sorts of survey-type studies, however, a much larger size is called for. 300 or 400 isn't bad but some may have thousands. Cost limits you. To assess if the sample is large enough you really need to look at the data and honestly judge if the effects appear believable. What does the distribution look like? Do you see anything weird, like multiple modes, which you can't explain? That sort of thing. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in a different post, the authors don't provide any graphs so we can't assess their results in any meaningful way.
Apart from sample size, though, it really matters how you select your population. If you do it in a fucked up way then your results may not generalise well. Generalising well is important for obvious reasons.
They're doing a bunch of regression analyses and summarising their results using tables. Not a graph in sight. I have to trawl through the text to find R values. Impossible to really evaluate their data. If a student produced this stuff I'd fail them.
The whole light == security thing is a sales pitch by the power companies who want to sell street lighting.
That's not true: they don't need to "sell" it. People are shit scared of the dark and they want lighting. They see boogie men in every shadow. I used to live in shared house which was located 200 m down a narrow, unlit, footpath. All the girls in that house complained about it. They all thought they were going to get raped. They all moved out within a few months because of the dark path.
Thank you, interesting discussion. I think we mostly agree but are concerned about different things. If I read you correctly, it sounds like you're concerned about knee jerk reactions and feel that inaction may be the best policy as it would decrease the chances of the idiots taking charge. I, on the other hand, am more cautious about inaction (although I'm mindful that poorly thought through actions are bad too). Like you, I think we're smart enough to solve many (maybe all) of the technical problems if we're given enough time. I don't believe, however, that we can solve these problems and maintain our current lifestyles. Managing that aspect correctly is going to be the tough thing, and it's the thing which can lead to conflict. I also agree we shouldn't believe we will fall into the traps past civilizations fell, but also we shouldn't let hubris get in the way of learning from those mistakes and ensuring we don't fall into those traps. Finally, I am more wary than you of the market's ability to regulate resource consumption and allocation.
Here's the US light pollution map: http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/ and here's what the colours mean: http://cleardarksky.com/lp/VndbtPObNYlp.html?Mn=cameras
If you haven't been to a truly dark sky (blue or darker on that map) then you really owe it to yourself to go. Just take yourself and some binoculars and look up. Mind-blowing.
Unfortunately, the skies are just getting brighter the whole time. Whilst LEDs are more directional, they're also brighter and they deliver whiter light that does more harm to your dark adaptation and is harder to filter out. If LEDs were used properly, we might have a chance for getting better illumination and an improvement in light pollution. From what I've been seeing, though, LEDs are just going to make things worse.
It's great that you know about Easter Island and the Anasazis. But there are flaws in those analogies. They couldn't fluidly move from one place to another. They didn't have global extent.
They couldn't develop new technologies to get around their dependency on certain critical resources or adapt to changes in their world. They didn't have a huge, extremely rapid disaster warning and response system.
Sure, those are obvious differences, but it's hubris to think that we're immune to serious collapse just because our civilisation is more advanced and extensive. I wouldn't call comparisons to past past civilisations "analogies", I'd call these a "warning." These are not an apples and oranges comparison: these are all apples, they're just different flavours.
Technology allows you stretch your resources (e.g. modern farming) but if you aren't mindful of what you're doing, things can stretch to breaking point. Again, modern farming is a good case in point--we seem to be hitting the limits of what we can produce per acre. Perhaps proposals for for dealing with finite resources are often poorly though through--I don't know--but that doesn't mean that resources aren't finite and that you shouldn't consider what to do about that. Being bigger just means you risk falling harder. Just my two cents...
It's not easy to support either. It's not easy to deduce anything about climate because of how weak and incomplete our measurements of it are.
But it didn't happen in the US which has a history of serially overusing resources.
Not yet it hasn't happened to the US, but the symptoms are there. Unless you want to pretend that resources are limitless, then you have to accept there is problem that needs solving. The Anasazi were North American and the source of their collapse is worth looking into. Amongst other things they suffered from water shortages, which is something that the Western US is having to deal with right now. There are farmers in California who've realised they will make more money by keeping their fields fallow and selling their water rights than by growing crops. The water table is falling out there and it's costing more and more to pump the stuff up. This is the point: you can argue about climate and incomplete data, yada, yada, but climate is just one thing that can go wrong. Even you forget totally about climate, we have other equally major issues to solve. That's why I brought up Diamond in my original post: he looks at the whole picture and shows you what can wrong when resources run out. He also discusses cases of success, such as Japan's Tokugawa era forest management. It was deforestation that caused Easter Island to collapse...
Leaders of causes are there to present an example. His actually acting as if there is a problem will not cause a huge impact by itself, but could cause millions to act similarly. Lots of people point to his own inaction as a reason to not act, therefore his actions are in fact having a "sod some" level of impact already.
Ghandi didn't do much either all by himself. When millions did the same thing it had an impact.
I don't disagree with you: setting an example is important. Gore should do better. What I'm getting at is that dealing with our environmental impact requires rapid and sweeping changes, and some of these changes aren't palatable. A few greenies being eco-friendly isn't going to cut it. Similarly, people aren't going to make sacrifices just because some rich bloke built an eco-house and stopped flying. Ghandi isn't a great example, since he was promoting a message his countrymen wanted to hear. Nobody wants to hear the climate change message.
Otherwise he would not have a house that uses as much energy as a small town, nor fly constantly on a private jet... his actions are saying more than words ever can.
If he really thought there were negative consequences he would act in ways that helped.
Whilst it's hard to argue that he's not a hypocrite, it's also true that if he stopped doing those things it would have sod all impact on humanity's footprint. The actions of individuals are just too small. What matters now is how governments (and I use the plural pointedly) deal with this. How governments set up energy policies. How governments reconcile capitalism's thirst for limitless growth with the obvious problem that such growth isn't possible. Whether Gore is a hypocrite or not has no bearing on this.
OS projects are volunteer efforts that man hours more than cash. Cash might help buy man hours but it might not. Choosing 4 Kickstarter projects, on the other hand, is a better bet. Kickstarter projects deliver a product and need cash for development. It's not a donation.
I think that's a sign of a research field in need of something new and big.... Whatever your field is, I hope it opens up again soon.
Without getting into details, it's biology with a popular genetic model organism. I think you're right: the problem is to some degree the lack of a big new thing that opens many doors simultaneously. The other problem is that only a restricted range of things are being studied but there is constant development of new tools (which is, of course, a good thing). The result is that the next experiment is always fairly obvious. So lots of low-hanging fruit and you want to be the first to pick. What's really annoying, however, is when someone picks it before you, does a shitty job, and gets their paper published somewhere high profile.
Some of the lecturers in my department are ULTRA paranoid about people stealing their research ideas. They also tend to be the people who work on things which nobody else understands (because it's impossible to have a casual conversation with them about their work and they deliberately hold things back in papers) or who get quietly labelled as crackpots.
On the other hand, people who are quite open about their work tend to get a lot more interest, more input from people with different specialities and more offers of collaboration.
Ideas are indeed a dime a dozen, and execution can be greatly helped by people with different expertise or viewpoints on the matter. People who will outright steal your work are few and far between, and their reputation generally precedes them.
I see this too, but the specifics really depend on the field. In my field it's very competitive and densely packed and most people have become protective and secretive as a result. They don't work on stuff that's weird or unusual, either. When the whole field behaves this way, being secretive doesn't diminish interest in one's work but it does increase the tension between research groups. Knowing who is likely to steal your work doesn't help. Once the field becomes secretive, people are unwilling to even present their data as a talk or poster unless it's either quite near fruition or unless what they're doing is so far-out that nobody else could possibly copy them. Even in the latter situation, though, I've seen people be incredibly secretive about their current projects. Sad, really. We'd all make more progress if we pooled together.
Regardless of how seriously you choose to take Gore's comments, his central message is that humanity changing the climate in ways that will have serious negative implications for ourselves. That is not a message that is easy to dispute. Personally, I find Jared Diamond's approach to communicating these issues to be much more effective (see his book "Collapse"). Diamond is not over the top and frequently tries to be optimistic (which, oddly, makes his message even more hard-hitting). The point is that if you over-use your resources really bad things begin to happen. This has happened many times in the past without fossil fuels. Examples include: Easter Island, the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Sumerians.
Oh, and as for this being an already known phenomenon -- what's really happening* is that your left cortex, which focuses on detail and anchors the "me" in the surge of signals your brain processes, gets overridden by the right cortex, which tends to ignore localities (like your body) and instead focus on piecing together the bigger picture. So if your right cortex takes over driving your consciousness, your body itself is no longer the predominant frame of reference, triggering OBE.
* best theory on what's really happening anyway -- one that's been posited and tested over the past decade by neuroscientists.
Explanations of that sort are, unfortunately, pseudo-explanations. The key terms are not defined (e.g. "surge", "signal", "overridden", "driving consciousness", etc) because we don't know what they actually stand for. So such explanations are, at best, a placeholder until we figure out what's really going on. Placeholders are fine, but its important to place minimal weight on them and not fall into the trap of believing them to be any sort of real explanation.
True, not in the "classic" sense that you're thinking, but the VR manipulation described in TFA led to people reporting that their entire body as in a different part of the room. That certainly sounds like the same class of effect as the traditional OBE. It may be that the researchers have hit on the underlying mechanism that drives OBEs. Taken together, I don't find the title to be all that misleading.
You know what I just discovered? If you press ctrl [PLUS] T then it takes you away form this page and to a new tab. Then you can get BACK to this page by pressing ctrl [PLUS] W. Go on, try it! I dare you!
My gf is into this, but she wants to do it when we're both working but in different countries. Really distracting to have Skype on the whole time when you're trying to do somethig else.
Thanks, I hadn't thought of that. It could be the issue. However, there are two HDDs on the machine and I know spin-ups of the second disk (which I use rarely) are quite salient and I was aware that they led to pauses in the UI. Whilst I didn't hear spin-ups prior to the troublesome moves within the same disk, it's also true that I wasn't looking out them. I shall do so.
Maybe/. this isn't the place for this conversation, but anyway... I haven't logged the events so working from memory here: moves of about 5 or 6 files of size 200 to 500 megs each. Problem may be intermittant (i.e. not all moves show the issue), but all problem moves are to a sub-directory on the same disk and when it happens it's really obvious (the progress bar comes up and slowly chugs along for a few seconds). Weird, but I just ignore it, sftp my data to the Linux box and try to pretend the Windows box doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, this is garbage.
I agree it's easy to include pointless graphs, but when there are no graphs of the primary effects I don't trust the study. In fact, it makes me think they just looked at the textual output of their stats package and never graphed their own data. It's a cliche, but a graph really is worth a thousand words. If they show the data then you have almost everything you need to make up your own mind. If they show only some numbers in a table then you never know what happened. Was a slope value influenced by an outlier? Who knows. Is there some interesting trend they didn't notice or didn't capture in their stats test? Who knows.
Never heard of supporting information?
No. Do you mean supplemental figures? Because there aren't any.
Ultimately, you want a big sample size to convince yourself that your effect is real in the sample in which you're measuring it and that it generalises to the population of interest. It's very hard to decide what is an adequate sample size. In some studies a sample size of 30 is considered large. In these sorts of survey-type studies, however, a much larger size is called for. 300 or 400 isn't bad but some may have thousands. Cost limits you. To assess if the sample is large enough you really need to look at the data and honestly judge if the effects appear believable. What does the distribution look like? Do you see anything weird, like multiple modes, which you can't explain? That sort of thing. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in a different post, the authors don't provide any graphs so we can't assess their results in any meaningful way. Apart from sample size, though, it really matters how you select your population. If you do it in a fucked up way then your results may not generalise well. Generalising well is important for obvious reasons.
They're doing a bunch of regression analyses and summarising their results using tables. Not a graph in sight. I have to trawl through the text to find R values. Impossible to really evaluate their data. If a student produced this stuff I'd fail them.
The whole light == security thing is a sales pitch by the power companies who want to sell street lighting.
That's not true: they don't need to "sell" it. People are shit scared of the dark and they want lighting. They see boogie men in every shadow. I used to live in shared house which was located 200 m down a narrow, unlit, footpath. All the girls in that house complained about it. They all thought they were going to get raped. They all moved out within a few months because of the dark path.
It's interesting that it swims in a wide circle that includes Bermuda. How did it navigate to the island?
It uses GPS. Didn't you read TFA?
Thank you, interesting discussion. I think we mostly agree but are concerned about different things. If I read you correctly, it sounds like you're concerned about knee jerk reactions and feel that inaction may be the best policy as it would decrease the chances of the idiots taking charge. I, on the other hand, am more cautious about inaction (although I'm mindful that poorly thought through actions are bad too). Like you, I think we're smart enough to solve many (maybe all) of the technical problems if we're given enough time. I don't believe, however, that we can solve these problems and maintain our current lifestyles. Managing that aspect correctly is going to be the tough thing, and it's the thing which can lead to conflict. I also agree we shouldn't believe we will fall into the traps past civilizations fell, but also we shouldn't let hubris get in the way of learning from those mistakes and ensuring we don't fall into those traps. Finally, I am more wary than you of the market's ability to regulate resource consumption and allocation.
Here's the US light pollution map: http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/ and here's what the colours mean: http://cleardarksky.com/lp/VndbtPObNYlp.html?Mn=cameras If you haven't been to a truly dark sky (blue or darker on that map) then you really owe it to yourself to go. Just take yourself and some binoculars and look up. Mind-blowing. Unfortunately, the skies are just getting brighter the whole time. Whilst LEDs are more directional, they're also brighter and they deliver whiter light that does more harm to your dark adaptation and is harder to filter out. If LEDs were used properly, we might have a chance for getting better illumination and an improvement in light pollution. From what I've been seeing, though, LEDs are just going to make things worse.
It's great that you know about Easter Island and the Anasazis. But there are flaws in those analogies. They couldn't fluidly move from one place to another. They didn't have global extent.
They couldn't develop new technologies to get around their dependency on certain critical resources or adapt to changes in their world. They didn't have a huge, extremely rapid disaster warning and response system.
Sure, those are obvious differences, but it's hubris to think that we're immune to serious collapse just because our civilisation is more advanced and extensive. I wouldn't call comparisons to past past civilisations "analogies", I'd call these a "warning." These are not an apples and oranges comparison: these are all apples, they're just different flavours.
Technology allows you stretch your resources (e.g. modern farming) but if you aren't mindful of what you're doing, things can stretch to breaking point. Again, modern farming is a good case in point--we seem to be hitting the limits of what we can produce per acre. Perhaps proposals for for dealing with finite resources are often poorly though through--I don't know--but that doesn't mean that resources aren't finite and that you shouldn't consider what to do about that. Being bigger just means you risk falling harder. Just my two cents...
It's not easy to support either. It's not easy to deduce anything about climate because of how weak and incomplete our measurements of it are.
But it didn't happen in the US which has a history of serially overusing resources.
Not yet it hasn't happened to the US, but the symptoms are there. Unless you want to pretend that resources are limitless, then you have to accept there is problem that needs solving. The Anasazi were North American and the source of their collapse is worth looking into. Amongst other things they suffered from water shortages, which is something that the Western US is having to deal with right now. There are farmers in California who've realised they will make more money by keeping their fields fallow and selling their water rights than by growing crops. The water table is falling out there and it's costing more and more to pump the stuff up. This is the point: you can argue about climate and incomplete data, yada, yada, but climate is just one thing that can go wrong. Even you forget totally about climate, we have other equally major issues to solve. That's why I brought up Diamond in my original post: he looks at the whole picture and shows you what can wrong when resources run out. He also discusses cases of success, such as Japan's Tokugawa era forest management. It was deforestation that caused Easter Island to collapse...
Leaders of causes are there to present an example. His actually acting as if there is a problem will not cause a huge impact by itself, but could cause millions to act similarly. Lots of people point to his own inaction as a reason to not act, therefore his actions are in fact having a "sod some" level of impact already.
Ghandi didn't do much either all by himself. When millions did the same thing it had an impact.
I don't disagree with you: setting an example is important. Gore should do better. What I'm getting at is that dealing with our environmental impact requires rapid and sweeping changes, and some of these changes aren't palatable. A few greenies being eco-friendly isn't going to cut it. Similarly, people aren't going to make sacrifices just because some rich bloke built an eco-house and stopped flying. Ghandi isn't a great example, since he was promoting a message his countrymen wanted to hear. Nobody wants to hear the climate change message.
Otherwise he would not have a house that uses as much energy as a small town, nor fly constantly on a private jet... his actions are saying more than words ever can.
If he really thought there were negative consequences he would act in ways that helped.
Whilst it's hard to argue that he's not a hypocrite, it's also true that if he stopped doing those things it would have sod all impact on humanity's footprint. The actions of individuals are just too small. What matters now is how governments (and I use the plural pointedly) deal with this. How governments set up energy policies. How governments reconcile capitalism's thirst for limitless growth with the obvious problem that such growth isn't possible. Whether Gore is a hypocrite or not has no bearing on this.
OS projects are volunteer efforts that man hours more than cash. Cash might help buy man hours but it might not. Choosing 4 Kickstarter projects, on the other hand, is a better bet. Kickstarter projects deliver a product and need cash for development. It's not a donation.
I think that's a sign of a research field in need of something new and big. ... Whatever your field is, I hope it opens up again soon.
Without getting into details, it's biology with a popular genetic model organism. I think you're right: the problem is to some degree the lack of a big new thing that opens many doors simultaneously. The other problem is that only a restricted range of things are being studied but there is constant development of new tools (which is, of course, a good thing). The result is that the next experiment is always fairly obvious. So lots of low-hanging fruit and you want to be the first to pick. What's really annoying, however, is when someone picks it before you, does a shitty job, and gets their paper published somewhere high profile.
Some of the lecturers in my department are ULTRA paranoid about people stealing their research ideas. They also tend to be the people who work on things which nobody else understands (because it's impossible to have a casual conversation with them about their work and they deliberately hold things back in papers) or who get quietly labelled as crackpots.
On the other hand, people who are quite open about their work tend to get a lot more interest, more input from people with different specialities and more offers of collaboration.
Ideas are indeed a dime a dozen, and execution can be greatly helped by people with different expertise or viewpoints on the matter. People who will outright steal your work are few and far between, and their reputation generally precedes them.
I see this too, but the specifics really depend on the field. In my field it's very competitive and densely packed and most people have become protective and secretive as a result. They don't work on stuff that's weird or unusual, either. When the whole field behaves this way, being secretive doesn't diminish interest in one's work but it does increase the tension between research groups. Knowing who is likely to steal your work doesn't help. Once the field becomes secretive, people are unwilling to even present their data as a talk or poster unless it's either quite near fruition or unless what they're doing is so far-out that nobody else could possibly copy them. Even in the latter situation, though, I've seen people be incredibly secretive about their current projects. Sad, really. We'd all make more progress if we pooled together.
Regardless of how seriously you choose to take Gore's comments, his central message is that humanity changing the climate in ways that will have serious negative implications for ourselves. That is not a message that is easy to dispute. Personally, I find Jared Diamond's approach to communicating these issues to be much more effective (see his book "Collapse"). Diamond is not over the top and frequently tries to be optimistic (which, oddly, makes his message even more hard-hitting). The point is that if you over-use your resources really bad things begin to happen. This has happened many times in the past without fossil fuels. Examples include: Easter Island, the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Sumerians.
He says: "Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams"
We say: http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/08/24/1416209/nasa-testing-frickin-laser-communications
Oh, and as for this being an already known phenomenon -- what's really happening* is that your left cortex, which focuses on detail and anchors the "me" in the surge of signals your brain processes, gets overridden by the right cortex, which tends to ignore localities (like your body) and instead focus on piecing together the bigger picture. So if your right cortex takes over driving your consciousness, your body itself is no longer the predominant frame of reference, triggering OBE.
* best theory on what's really happening anyway -- one that's been posited and tested over the past decade by neuroscientists.
Explanations of that sort are, unfortunately, pseudo-explanations. The key terms are not defined (e.g. "surge", "signal", "overridden", "driving consciousness", etc) because we don't know what they actually stand for. So such explanations are, at best, a placeholder until we figure out what's really going on. Placeholders are fine, but its important to place minimal weight on them and not fall into the trap of believing them to be any sort of real explanation.
That's not an out-of-body experience.
True, not in the "classic" sense that you're thinking, but the VR manipulation described in TFA led to people reporting that their entire body as in a different part of the room. That certainly sounds like the same class of effect as the traditional OBE. It may be that the researchers have hit on the underlying mechanism that drives OBEs. Taken together, I don't find the title to be all that misleading.
Michael Knight also did (http://media.joe.ie/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Michael-Knight.jpg) AND he had awesome hair.
You know what I just discovered? If you press ctrl [PLUS] T then it takes you away form this page and to a new tab. Then you can get BACK to this page by pressing ctrl [PLUS] W. Go on, try it! I dare you!
Leave skype on all evening...
My gf is into this, but she wants to do it when we're both working but in different countries. Really distracting to have Skype on the whole time when you're trying to do somethig else.
Thanks, I hadn't thought of that. It could be the issue. However, there are two HDDs on the machine and I know spin-ups of the second disk (which I use rarely) are quite salient and I was aware that they led to pauses in the UI. Whilst I didn't hear spin-ups prior to the troublesome moves within the same disk, it's also true that I wasn't looking out them. I shall do so.
Maybe /. this isn't the place for this conversation, but anyway... I haven't logged the events so working from memory here: moves of about 5 or 6 files of size 200 to 500 megs each. Problem may be intermittant (i.e. not all moves show the issue), but all problem moves are to a sub-directory on the same disk and when it happens it's really obvious (the progress bar comes up and slowly chugs along for a few seconds). Weird, but I just ignore it, sftp my data to the Linux box and try to pretend the Windows box doesn't exist.
and why sometimes when I drag many large files into a new directory does Win 7 spend ages doing a copy then delete?
If it's on the same disk a move is a just a path rename and takes no time at all. If the data is changing hard drives a move is a copy and a delete.
Yeah, I know. Data aren't changing disks in this case. It's move to sub-directory.