Please don't try to shift the grounds of the argument here. Let's dispose of one point first before we raise a different point.
I'm addressing the assertion that anthropogenic climate change driven by CO2 was something that was cooked up for political purposes in the 1990s. The literature search clearly shows that this is false as anybody who was alive and paying attention at the time could tell you.
Now, on to your assertion. It sounds like an unassailable philosophical proposition to say that anthropogenic (I'm glad climate change "skeptics" have relented that much at least) climate change is an untestable proposition because we don't have a control Earth in which humanity was magically whisked away in 1990.
But it's not.
It is true that having a control subject is the most reliable way of ensuring a hypothesis is falsifiable. In fact the basic design of a controlled experiment revolves around trying. The essence here is making predictions. If you check the bit I quoted above, one of the predictions made in 1983 was that the 1990s would be exceptionally warm. Had they been cool, or about the same, then the CO2 generated climate change hypothesis would have been shown false.
The question is not whether anthropogenic greenhouse effect climate change is falsifiable, the question is how much confidence we should have in the evidence so far. A priori the we can attack the claim on three fronts. First the climate might not be getting warmer; if not then we have no evidence. Second, the concentrations of CO2 might not be increasing, or they might not be increasing in a way that can be correlated to climate change. Finally, humans might not be contributing to CO2.
All these approaches have been tried, and will continue to be tried, with great vigor. If you know any Earth scientists, you'd realize they'd love to be able to knock a link out of the chain, simply because so many scientists have tried and thus far failed.
It's really time we start to call global warming, not a hypothesis, but a theory, like evolution. Nearly every biologist believes in the theory of evolution. However, if you look carefully, experiments and studies of evolution still have vestigial attempts to disprove evolution built into their methods. If you want to show that natural selection functions in a certain way, you still end up attempting to show it is not functioning at all in this particular case. The same goes for Earth sciences. Very few Earth scientists disbelieve in climate change; but disproving there is a change in anything you are measuring is always going to be the first thing you do, even if you are quite confident.\
The issue is whether man-produced carbon emissions are having an impact on global temperature-- and many of the un-fudged numbers say no.
OF COURSE THEY DO! If they didn't, then you'd really have reason to believe the numbers were cooked. I'm married to a scientist, and she sometimes says (in private, because people latch onto these things the wrong way) that the data for global warming is "too good". This doesn't mean she disbelieves the existing data, it's just that she's itching to see more contrary data. It's the nature of the animal. I can tell you if I confidently stated that day follows night she'd automatically stay up all night to make sure. It's drilled into them until its second nature. Finding something somebody forgot to check is how you make your reputation.
It is still within the bounds of possibility somebody make make his scientific reputation by disproving the anthropogenic link, although in light of how well this hypothesis has held up over the last forty years, you can't say this viewpoint represent the balance of evidence. It only represents carefully selected evidence.
What may be more likely (and relevant from a policy standpoint) is the idea it's too late for humans to do anything about it.
But why are there never enough good people, if you set the bar for "good" high enough?
Simple. Because at some level of talent and skill they become net creators of jobs, even for the people they're competing with directly. In fact, especially for those people, because if you are a firm that knows your competitor is using PhD level mathematicians to underbid you, the first thing you do is go out and hire your own ubergeeks.
You could look over the last 100 years, and find thousands of studies, but they would all be since the 1950s, and most of them would be after 1980. It was the space race that created a boom in planetary science. In order to answer questions like "Why are Earth and Venus so different?" scientists really began to ponder how Earth and Venus were different. Obviously, Venus is closer to the Sun, but is that enough to give it a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead?
Naturally, once it seems likely that CO2 is the major source of difference, you begin to look at CO2 and temperature. So you look at the two bodies of preexisting literature: the literature on terrestrial atmospheric concentrations, and the literature on climate; ideally for papers in the intersection of the two. Put them together, and there you have your "global warming" hypothesis, ripe for the plucking.
Naturally, for the global warming hypothesis even to be formed, this preexisting literature (and literature on the physical properties of CO2) had to already be in existence. It is this trail of literature that goes back for over a century. The literature on CO2 driven climate change only goes back a mere half century.
Just searching the NY Times, for the dates between 1970 and 1989, there are almost two hundred hits on "Carbon dioxide AND Global Warming", such as this, from the October 18, 1983 issue entitled: "E.P.A. REPORT SAYS EARTH WILL HEAT UP BEGINNING IN 1990'S"
The Environmental Protection Agency warned in a report made available today that the warming of the earth known as the ''greenhouse effect'' will begin in the 1990's.
John S. Hoffman, director of strategic studies for the agency, said in an interview today: ''We are trying to get people to realize that changes are coming sooner that they expected. Major changes will be here by the years 1990 to 2000, and we have to learn how to live with them.''
The report, which was completed last month by Mr. Hoffman's office, said the warming trend, the result of a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is both imminent and inevitable. In the next century, it warns, the world will have to learn to deal with major changes in climate patterns, with disrupted food production and with significantly higher coastal waters.
Hmm. Looks like the EPA was right.
Of course, having lived through that period married to an Earth scientist, I know first hand this was a hot topic even at the start of the 1980s, but you can see it's not hard to find citations in the popular press. There are over seven hundred newswire articles found by Lexis Nexis over this period for "global warming" plus "carbon dioxide".
If you don't have access to online abstract databases, you could try Google Scholar, which finds cited literature; it finds papers on CO2 induced global warming as far back as 1961. Once you pull out one article article from the 1980s, it cites earlier and earlier ones. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic climate change was a hotly contested research topic in the 1980s, and papers had been snowballing for the prior two decades.
Of course, in planetary science it certainly has been known that CO2 traps heat, probably for over a century. In fact it was known in the 1950s that CO2 is what makes Venus so hot; it was space science that prompted planetary scientists to compare Venus and Earth, and wonder whether CO2 on Earth was increasing as a result of human activities.
Let me suggest that if you tried really hard, and found NO pre 1990 references, then there is something very wrong with the way you are doing the search. I suppose if your wife was cheating on you and you didn't want to believe it, you could look thousands of places for evidence where you'd never find it.
When you bring lots of good people into an area, you don't take jobs away from the less skillful, you create new jobs.
The problem with the H1B program is that it is structured, not just to bring in already abundant entry level labor, but to prime offshoring efforts by kicking that labor out of the country once it's obtained enough experience to be really useful. At the very least, we should not have a guest worker program for highly skilled workers, but one that clears the way for permanent residency and citizenship.
Even better, we should scrap the whole thing and fund a massive postgraduate fellowship program in a variety of technology areas, each fellowship accompanied with a handsome stipend and an invitation at the end to become a permanent resident. Of course, some knuckleheads would say it's unfair to tax Americans to pay for fellowships they can't apply for, which completely misses the point. I'm not talking about people of the caliber that are going to have trouble finding a job. I'm talking about people whose presence will create wealth and jobs.
You should allow the trivial, if you ever want to see the back side of the controversy.
That's because the boundary between trivial and non-trivial is fractal, just like the boundary between the complex numbers inside and outside the Mandelbrot set. You can zoom in indefinitely and the boundary never looks simpler. And that's presuming that people can agree on criteria for what is "too trivial".
Personally, I think that a permissive attitude opens up the most promising avenue for Wikipedia's future: it's potential as a killer social networking application.
Social networking strikes me a great deal like e commerce was in the mid 90s. It's hot, but enthusiasm has outstripped the supply of really good ideas. In the end, the biggest drawback to social networking the the scarcity of interesting people. However, even uninteresting can have interesting things to say if they're writing about something other than themselves, especially when you consider them as a group.
A case in point, consider "Conservapedia", a right wing religious fundamentalist "fork" of Wikipedia. What this really is, is an attempt to capture a community of Wikipedia users, coalesced around a set of editorial policies that wouldn't satisfy most Wikipedia users. Set aside your view of their specific editorial slant for a moment and ask: is it valuable to allow groups to "fork" Wikipedia for their own ends? Does it hurt?
I think the best policy would be to recognize the inevitability, and in some cases usefulness of this. If you are looking at a weight loss article; it would be helpful to know there were forks of the article endorsed by the American Dietetic Association. Although there will never be an end to revert wars, it should be possible to channel some of this energy by recognizing that the views o the American Diatetic Association and Atkins Nutritionals Inc. aren't going converge anytime soon.
don't see how a plastic bag makes make-up less dangerous though
Actually there is a good reason for the plastic bag.
The plastic bag is used as a quick way to confirm that the passenger is bringing on less than a certain total volume of liquids. You are allowed a single one quart bag, therefore it is obvious at a glance that you are carrying on considerably less than a quart of liquids or gel.
It's not a foolproof way to keep terrorists from assembling a liquid bomb on board. It just means you need a larger number of suicide bombers at a go. If you reckon that you're most concerned with bombs made from a gallon or so, you theoretically could face four terrorists with quart bags stuffed to the gills with flexible 3 fl oz sachets of explosive gel. However it's pretty certain they'd attract attention. With "normal" payloads of toothpaste and and aftershave, you might need a lot more than four conspirators.
This points out another aspect of the "mindless" security procedures. "Mindless" has its obvious disadvantages, as in the case of the elderly lady I once saw having her mascara confiscated, as if a couple cc of liquid was a deadly threat. On the other hand, the screeners are supposed to recognize that this is fifth or six guy they've checked in with a baggie stuffed full of trial size after shaves. Attention and judgment, like anything else, is a limited commodity, and it's not to be wasted on granting exceptions -- even reasonable exceptions -- to the rules. In fact, in a busy check-in, it's not really appropriate to chat up the screeners, much less engage them in a debate about whether the rules ought to apply to your mascara. It's not that you aren't right, it's that society can't afford to hire enough screeners to debate whether the rules should not apply to individual things.
The place to debate this is where the rules are made, not where they are applied. In fact, rules tend to start out more inflexible than they need to be, because more flexible rules are more complex and have more borderline cases that could result in checkpoint debates.
It comes down, in the end, to economics, and that's what people miss when they get frustrated by the absurdity of the rules. The point of the rules is to keep flying cheap as much as it is to keep it safe. That's the trade-off. Sure, we could dispense with the 3 fl oz container in a baggie rule and be just as safe,but we'd be paying somebody to open up that sixteen ounce bottle of pantene and sniff it. Sure, we could allow a half empty six fl oz bottle in the baggie, but then we'd have to pay the screener to eyeball it, and then argue with the passenger whether it's more than half empty or not.
I don't buy the "focusing on many things" argument. It's really the number of parameters the screener must handle. The early version of the liquids rule was "no liquids at all"; logically, the class of banned items was larger, but the screener had only a single question to answer: is it liquid? For the convenience of the passengers, we now allow 3 fl oz bottles, and it's the relaxation of the rule that makes the inspection more complex. Taken to its extreme, the rule becomes simply, "don't let anything on the plane that might be dangerous." That rule goes without saying, but it's not an easy one to apply. Your anecdote of getting something through in your jacket doesn't prove anything, other than that things get through, which of course is true. It was true when the rules were much simpler, as on 9/11 when the box cutters didn't trigger anybody's suspicion.
The truth is, if you wanted inspections to be more effective and cheaper, you'd just get tougher on the passengers. If they've got a 4 fl oz bottle, it goes right in the trash; if they argue, you assume they are creating a diversion and you give them and their companions a thorough inspection, even if it slows the line to a halt. Eventually, people would lea
But DEC wasn't as pivotal in the development of the Boston area technology scene the way Shockley was in the Valley. Computers were being built and the technology to control them developed in the 1940s; earlier if you count special purpose devices.
Actually Boston was a center of computer technology when Silicon Valley was just cheap farmland.
The thing that happened was that the Boston area IT firms were largely minicomputer outfits (like DEC and Prime) or special purpose engineering workstations (Apollo, Symbolics), not to mention many spin-offs and laboratories involved in advanced CS work. The thing was the area's IT market got hit by a kind of perfect storm in the late 80s and early 90s: the collapse of the minicomputer market segment, the flagging of investor interest in artificial intelligence, the weakening of the workstation market, and a post Soviet Union drop off in government spending on the ultra-high-tech defense research that was a regular source of business creation in the university rich Boston area. At the same time, continued high property values made it less attractive for young engineers graduating from Boston schools to stay here.
Still, the Boston area continues to grow high tech startups in a variety of technical fields because of the sheer volume of academic research here; it's just that we haven't experienced the next big thing after the informatics boom of the 70s and 80s, and we missed out largely on the Internet bubble of the 90s. When the next thing happens, say if biotech takes off like informatics did in the 70s, we'll probably see Boston as an early hot spot, as it was in the 40s through 80s for computers.
Well, I've often reflected that only an atheist could be as funny as Douglas Adams, which in a sense makes his books spiritual.
It's not that atheists are automatically funny, quite the opposite. Most are drearily dull as any priest. If you want to be a bore, be deeply and earnestly concerned that other people might commit, speak, or think an error.
For Adams, life consists of a series of wrong turns that lead you to places you never intended to be. In that he's not too far from the most interesting religious thinkers; the Buddha once compared his teaching to a raft you might throw together to cross a river. Once you're over, you have no use for it, so you throw it away. In Adams books, you might say the characters are constantly struggling with the question of "why am I here?" because they're never quite where they expected to go.
Given the perverse randomness of the universe, it's rather quixotic to be obsessed with the errors of thought other people make. Somehow, it all feels like a big mistake, at least if you're paying attention.
I'd say the world could use more of that kind of elitism.
It's the elitism which attaches more weight to the opinions of people who know certain other people, or who have lots of money, or who have admittedly impressive accomplishments in other fields that is questionable.
While I agree with you, there is a kernel of truth (as there almost always is) in the Great Man model.
Also, status and recognition are very important motivators.
And we mustn't forget the egos of the donors, who'd much rather have their name associated with a big time award than a useful fund that doles out modest amounts of money to deserving proposals.
So let me suggest a new kind of prize, that recognizes the author of major scientific results, and comes with a massive cash award which he must give away as grants to researchers (not affiliated with himself) doing new work he finds most promising. The money does double duty then; it confers status and recognition on people who do important work (although that work may largely be in the past), and it goes to fund new work where a small marginal change in funding might make a large difference.
Adams didn't just poke fun at his characters, he wrote with a real sympathy for them. Well, just look at the man, he was a person who cared about things like the extinction of bizarre species that the vast majority of humanity has never heard of, much less seen for themselves. Empathy. That's the secret of reaching the apex of funniness. When the reader in his imagination steps into a character's shoes, he takes the metaphorical pies in the face personally.
Adams wrote as if the way the universe is mattered.
He also wrote as if the way the universe is happens to be funny.
The fact that the way things are both matters and is funny isn't exactly funny itself. Or rather it's very funny, and it's very something else, which there isn't a perfect word for. To capture that something else, you'd have to write a bunch of books.
IANAA, but I think the advantage of the binocular telesecope is resolving power, not light gathering power.
With conventional telescopes, a bigger telescope doesn't just "see" dim objects; it sees objects that are closer to each other (that is they have a small angular separation in the sky) than smaller telescope. So generally, bigger is better. The problem is that the difficulty of making precise optical components goes up very rapidly in size. The 200 inch Pyrex blank used to make the Hale telescope at Mt. Palomar weighed 40,000 pounds, and took a year to cool after it was cast. Naturally, it had to be figured to optical perfection, a process that took many years, and involved removing 10,000 lb of glass.
The idea here, I think, is to get the resolving power of a very large disk without the engineering complexities and cost. You do that but taking two largish but not heroically large mirrors, placing them 75' apart; then you carefully combine the light from each mirror to get the resolving power of a 75' mirror. This last process is tricky, but nothing compared to casting a 75' mirror, which would be over eight times the diameter and thus 64x the weight. It would take decades to create the blank, much less grid it.
I suppose you could add more mirrors than two, and there might be some advantages, but the chief advantage of the binocular arrangement is to get more resolving power for less (net) engineering cost. Since doing this kind of thing on this kind of scale is novel, and it's always a kind of bet when you do something new. Probably the best bet was to make two mirrors as large as you can afford then connect them in the simplest possible way that does the job, which rules out more mirrors.
For years, the U of Arizona had a telescope that combined the light from six 1.5m mirrors to make the equivalent of a single 4.5m telescope, so I suppose it's possible to use even more mirrors than two. The MMT arrangement was upgraded a few years ago to a single 6.5m primary mirror constructed from a hollow honeycomb matrix rather than a single massive Pyrex blank, and they recently added an adaptive optics secondary to improve the practical resolution of the telescope, so there's still some room to improve "conventional" ground based telescopes.
It's easy to imagine that in this century we'll see astronomical instruments an order of magnitude better than any currently in existence.
The problem is that the UN lacks an army of its own and the will to enforce its own edicts, probably because there are so many nations with so many conflicting interests with so many ways for a single nation to gum up the works.
Which of course is entirely intentional. The League of Nations failed miserably at averting war, of course. The UN embodies the lessons of the League of Nations which is -- don't bother trying.
If the UN were about ending war, it'd have to be a world government with an army. But it's not. It just reduces the number, size and scope of wars, and by trying less hard, it succeeds more often.
The way the UN does this is by ratifying the imposition of the strong upon the weak, which is going to happen anyway. Thats why there are permanent security council members with a veto. Say you are superpower and you want some small country to do something or else. If you really want to do it, the security council can't stop you, because you've got a veto. But the other countries on the security council will be pissed at you, and you want things from them like having them lower barriers to your country's goods, or their support on some treaty or another. So you think twice about whether it's really worth your while. If you're smart that is. If you're really incredibly stupid, you believe your own rhetoric about how the UN is encroaching on your Liebensraum, which means you end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Contrarywise, lets say the rest of the security council is cool with your invading the little country to get what you want from them. Its like Koko says in the Mikado; it's all over for them, and the actual execution is a mere formality that, on balance, everybody would rather forgo.
An organization like the UN is exactly what is wanted here. But not the UN. It's too much of a political punching bag already. So you make another international organization that pretty much runs the same way: it appears to be for fairness, but really it just slows down rash actions enough so they can be reconsidered in terms of enlightened self interest.
Well, that's really a different question altogether. It is, of course, to reach wrong conclusions by a process that is mathematically unimpeachable, simply by starting with questionable data.
This is a problem for the peer review process; you have to disclose how you got the data and people take turns sneering at you for being too stupid to count those fellows smudgy nosed guys running out the door. You of course have to disclose that you lost some, because they know you did, and probably have a pretty good idea of roughly how many you probably lost. When it's your turn you return the favor to them.
In any case, there is one ready answer always appropriate to this kind of question: it needs more study.
People who earn their bread by publishing aren't really keen on giving out their data before it's properly published. That's because journals aren't keen on publishing studies where the data is in the public domain. So authors tend to be secretive about articles they're getting ready to publish, although they sometimes (often) can't resist blabbing a bit about their conclusions.
I see this sort of thing all the time.
I'm sure our AC would be glad to give us some referenes to published studies, if you promise to look them up and read them.
Well, that happens to be one of those funny ways that mathematics likes to grab your intuition by the red rubber nose and give it a resounding snap.
IANAS (I Am Not A Statistician), but this is the situation as I understand it.
Suppose I have a room with a hundred people in it. Some of them are mathematicians, whose noses I've blackened with a magic marker. Everybody is wearing red rubber clown noses. Your job is to snap enough noses that you have a reasonable estimate of what proportion of them are mathematicians. Let's say you check five people, and two have smudgy noses. That gives you an estimate of 40%, but it's not very reliable, so you continue checking until you have snapped 50 rubber noses, and found twenty mathematicians. Now you're pretty confident the ration is about 40%, right?
Now suppose there were a thousand people in the room. You're a bit less confident in your 40% effort, but you're still almost as confident. But look: increasing the sample by a factor of ten made you a LOT more confident; increasing the population by a factor of 10 makes almost no difference (at least with these numbers; a 1 in 50 result would be a different kettle of fish).
Samples over a certain range get rapidly better -- much faster than linearly, and then they kind of run out of steam because they can't really get much better or they'd be perfect. The upshot is that for many experimental designs you aren't much better off having 500 subjects over having 50, whether the population you are sampling is 10,000 or 100,000,000. In fact you might be worse off it the population size is, say, 500 -- at least if you are interested in gaining any insights about your null hypothesis.
It's a good thing too. If you think about it, if you do something like a drug trial with a hundred or so subjects in it are supposed to stand in for all of the 6.7 billion people on the planet.
In any case, I'm always a bit skeptical when I see studies with sample sizes in the thousands. It's not financially efficient to conduct real studies this size, so they tend to be hashing together data from sources collected for other purposes. Such studies have their place, of course. They also have their limitations.
The guy who wrote that article is an idiot. He talks about the "transparent society" without considering that other things in society are going to have to change alongside.
Well, I think it is fairly certain that Bruce Schneier is smarter than most of the people here, probably including you and certainly including me.
I'll grant that that doesn't preclude him being an idiot as well, but not in this case. It is wise to be a bit skeptical about the possibility of putting a utopian scheme like a transparent society into effect. It's all very well to say that we give up our privacy and the people with power give up their power, but they can verify that we're giving up our privacy a lot more easily than we can verify they're giving up their power -- at least until its too late.
It's the Achilles' heel of most utopian schemes; even if you can imagine them working, it's hard to believe the transition from the status quo could take place without the whole thing running off the rails.
In any case, anybody who's seriously talking about a transparent society outside the context of a philosophical thought experiment is either a fool or a liar, often a bit of both. When the idea we can get along without privacy comes out of the mouth of business or political leaders, it's never followed by a shout of "and I'll be the first!" In fact, it tends to be defending some loss of privacy by somebody else that particularly benefits them is in reality good for everybody.
Right.
I think you've grasped the essential point: privacy is tied up with power. We can imagine a transparent society, and I think if it were not a dystopia, it must necessarily be a radically egalitarian one. However, there are a number of significant dystopic scenarios to be considered in a transparent society, such as the tyranny of a majority over a minority. One might argue that these scenarios are in fact impossible, but it's a purely theoretical argument. I believe I'll remain skeptical of any plans to put such a utopia into effect for now.
However, our society is based on restraining the powerful -- at least the politically powerful. More transparency, I do not doubt, would be better when applied to the workings of power.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude -- I was born in Somerville hospital.
I agree, DEC was huge; but it wasn't the beginning.
Personally, I think Biotech will be huge. But I think the same thing will happen with it here as with computers.
I'm addressing the assertion that anthropogenic climate change driven by CO2 was something that was cooked up for political purposes in the 1990s. The literature search clearly shows that this is false as anybody who was alive and paying attention at the time could tell you.
Now, on to your assertion. It sounds like an unassailable philosophical proposition to say that anthropogenic (I'm glad climate change "skeptics" have relented that much at least) climate change is an untestable proposition because we don't have a control Earth in which humanity was magically whisked away in 1990.
But it's not.
It is true that having a control subject is the most reliable way of ensuring a hypothesis is falsifiable. In fact the basic design of a controlled experiment revolves around trying. The essence here is making predictions. If you check the bit I quoted above, one of the predictions made in 1983 was that the 1990s would be exceptionally warm. Had they been cool, or about the same, then the CO2 generated climate change hypothesis would have been shown false.
The question is not whether anthropogenic greenhouse effect climate change is falsifiable, the question is how much confidence we should have in the evidence so far. A priori the we can attack the claim on three fronts. First the climate might not be getting warmer; if not then we have no evidence. Second, the concentrations of CO2 might not be increasing, or they might not be increasing in a way that can be correlated to climate change. Finally, humans might not be contributing to CO2.
All these approaches have been tried, and will continue to be tried, with great vigor. If you know any Earth scientists, you'd realize they'd love to be able to knock a link out of the chain, simply because so many scientists have tried and thus far failed.
It's really time we start to call global warming, not a hypothesis, but a theory, like evolution. Nearly every biologist believes in the theory of evolution. However, if you look carefully, experiments and studies of evolution still have vestigial attempts to disprove evolution built into their methods. If you want to show that natural selection functions in a certain way, you still end up attempting to show it is not functioning at all in this particular case. The same goes for Earth sciences. Very few Earth scientists disbelieve in climate change; but disproving there is a change in anything you are measuring is always going to be the first thing you do, even if you are quite confident.\
OF COURSE THEY DO! If they didn't, then you'd really have reason to believe the numbers were cooked. I'm married to a scientist, and she sometimes says (in private, because people latch onto these things the wrong way) that the data for global warming is "too good". This doesn't mean she disbelieves the existing data, it's just that she's itching to see more contrary data. It's the nature of the animal. I can tell you if I confidently stated that day follows night she'd automatically stay up all night to make sure. It's drilled into them until its second nature. Finding something somebody forgot to check is how you make your reputation.
It is still within the bounds of possibility somebody make make his scientific reputation by disproving the anthropogenic link, although in light of how well this hypothesis has held up over the last forty years, you can't say this viewpoint represent the balance of evidence. It only represents carefully selected evidence.
What may be more likely (and relevant from a policy standpoint) is the idea it's too late for humans to do anything about it.
But why are there never enough good people, if you set the bar for "good" high enough?
Simple. Because at some level of talent and skill they become net creators of jobs, even for the people they're competing with directly. In fact, especially for those people, because if you are a firm that knows your competitor is using PhD level mathematicians to underbid you, the first thing you do is go out and hire your own ubergeeks.
You could look over the last 100 years, and find thousands of studies, but they would all be since the 1950s, and most of them would be after 1980. It was the space race that created a boom in planetary science. In order to answer questions like "Why are Earth and Venus so different?" scientists really began to ponder how Earth and Venus were different. Obviously, Venus is closer to the Sun, but is that enough to give it a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead?
Naturally, once it seems likely that CO2 is the major source of difference, you begin to look at CO2 and temperature. So you look at the two bodies of preexisting literature: the literature on terrestrial atmospheric concentrations, and the literature on climate; ideally for papers in the intersection of the two. Put them together, and there you have your "global warming" hypothesis, ripe for the plucking.
Naturally, for the global warming hypothesis even to be formed, this preexisting literature (and literature on the physical properties of CO2) had to already be in existence. It is this trail of literature that goes back for over a century. The literature on CO2 driven climate change only goes back a mere half century.
Just searching the NY Times, for the dates between 1970 and 1989, there are almost two hundred hits on "Carbon dioxide AND Global Warming", such as this, from the October 18, 1983 issue entitled: "E.P.A. REPORT SAYS EARTH WILL HEAT UP BEGINNING IN 1990'S"
Hmm. Looks like the EPA was right.
Of course, having lived through that period married to an Earth scientist, I know first hand this was a hot topic even at the start of the 1980s, but you can see it's not hard to find citations in the popular press. There are over seven hundred newswire articles found by Lexis Nexis over this period for "global warming" plus "carbon dioxide".
If you don't have access to online abstract databases, you could try Google Scholar, which finds cited literature; it finds papers on CO2 induced global warming as far back as 1961. Once you pull out one article article from the 1980s, it cites earlier and earlier ones. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic climate change was a hotly contested research topic in the 1980s, and papers had been snowballing for the prior two decades.
Of course, in planetary science it certainly has been known that CO2 traps heat, probably for over a century. In fact it was known in the 1950s that CO2 is what makes Venus so hot; it was space science that prompted planetary scientists to compare Venus and Earth, and wonder whether CO2 on Earth was increasing as a result of human activities.
Let me suggest that if you tried really hard, and found NO pre 1990 references, then there is something very wrong with the way you are doing the search. I suppose if your wife was cheating on you and you didn't want to believe it, you could look thousands of places for evidence where you'd never find it.
of the best people.
When you bring lots of good people into an area, you don't take jobs away from the less skillful, you create new jobs.
The problem with the H1B program is that it is structured, not just to bring in already abundant entry level labor, but to prime offshoring efforts by kicking that labor out of the country once it's obtained enough experience to be really useful. At the very least, we should not have a guest worker program for highly skilled workers, but one that clears the way for permanent residency and citizenship.
Even better, we should scrap the whole thing and fund a massive postgraduate fellowship program in a variety of technology areas, each fellowship accompanied with a handsome stipend and an invitation at the end to become a permanent resident. Of course, some knuckleheads would say it's unfair to tax Americans to pay for fellowships they can't apply for, which completely misses the point. I'm not talking about people of the caliber that are going to have trouble finding a job. I'm talking about people whose presence will create wealth and jobs.
You should allow the trivial, if you ever want to see the back side of the controversy.
That's because the boundary between trivial and non-trivial is fractal, just like the boundary between the complex numbers inside and outside the Mandelbrot set. You can zoom in indefinitely and the boundary never looks simpler. And that's presuming that people can agree on criteria for what is "too trivial".
Personally, I think that a permissive attitude opens up the most promising avenue for Wikipedia's future: it's potential as a killer social networking application.
Social networking strikes me a great deal like e commerce was in the mid 90s. It's hot, but enthusiasm has outstripped the supply of really good ideas. In the end, the biggest drawback to social networking the the scarcity of interesting people. However, even uninteresting can have interesting things to say if they're writing about something other than themselves, especially when you consider them as a group.
A case in point, consider "Conservapedia", a right wing religious fundamentalist "fork" of Wikipedia. What this really is, is an attempt to capture a community of Wikipedia users, coalesced around a set of editorial policies that wouldn't satisfy most Wikipedia users. Set aside your view of their specific editorial slant for a moment and ask: is it valuable to allow groups to "fork" Wikipedia for their own ends? Does it hurt?
I think the best policy would be to recognize the inevitability, and in some cases usefulness of this. If you are looking at a weight loss article; it would be helpful to know there were forks of the article endorsed by the American Dietetic Association. Although there will never be an end to revert wars, it should be possible to channel some of this energy by recognizing that the views o the American Diatetic Association and Atkins Nutritionals Inc. aren't going converge anytime soon.
Actually there is a good reason for the plastic bag.
The plastic bag is used as a quick way to confirm that the passenger is bringing on less than a certain total volume of liquids. You are allowed a single one quart bag, therefore it is obvious at a glance that you are carrying on considerably less than a quart of liquids or gel.
It's not a foolproof way to keep terrorists from assembling a liquid bomb on board. It just means you need a larger number of suicide bombers at a go. If you reckon that you're most concerned with bombs made from a gallon or so, you theoretically could face four terrorists with quart bags stuffed to the gills with flexible 3 fl oz sachets of explosive gel. However it's pretty certain they'd attract attention. With "normal" payloads of toothpaste and and aftershave, you might need a lot more than four conspirators.
This points out another aspect of the "mindless" security procedures. "Mindless" has its obvious disadvantages, as in the case of the elderly lady I once saw having her mascara confiscated, as if a couple cc of liquid was a deadly threat. On the other hand, the screeners are supposed to recognize that this is fifth or six guy they've checked in with a baggie stuffed full of trial size after shaves. Attention and judgment, like anything else, is a limited commodity, and it's not to be wasted on granting exceptions -- even reasonable exceptions -- to the rules. In fact, in a busy check-in, it's not really appropriate to chat up the screeners, much less engage them in a debate about whether the rules ought to apply to your mascara. It's not that you aren't right, it's that society can't afford to hire enough screeners to debate whether the rules should not apply to individual things.
The place to debate this is where the rules are made, not where they are applied. In fact, rules tend to start out more inflexible than they need to be, because more flexible rules are more complex and have more borderline cases that could result in checkpoint debates.
It comes down, in the end, to economics, and that's what people miss when they get frustrated by the absurdity of the rules. The point of the rules is to keep flying cheap as much as it is to keep it safe. That's the trade-off. Sure, we could dispense with the 3 fl oz container in a baggie rule and be just as safe,but we'd be paying somebody to open up that sixteen ounce bottle of pantene and sniff it. Sure, we could allow a half empty six fl oz bottle in the baggie, but then we'd have to pay the screener to eyeball it, and then argue with the passenger whether it's more than half empty or not.
I don't buy the "focusing on many things" argument. It's really the number of parameters the screener must handle. The early version of the liquids rule was "no liquids at all"; logically, the class of banned items was larger, but the screener had only a single question to answer: is it liquid? For the convenience of the passengers, we now allow 3 fl oz bottles, and it's the relaxation of the rule that makes the inspection more complex. Taken to its extreme, the rule becomes simply, "don't let anything on the plane that might be dangerous." That rule goes without saying, but it's not an easy one to apply. Your anecdote of getting something through in your jacket doesn't prove anything, other than that things get through, which of course is true. It was true when the rules were much simpler, as on 9/11 when the box cutters didn't trigger anybody's suspicion.
The truth is, if you wanted inspections to be more effective and cheaper, you'd just get tougher on the passengers. If they've got a 4 fl oz bottle, it goes right in the trash; if they argue, you assume they are creating a diversion and you give them and their companions a thorough inspection, even if it slows the line to a halt. Eventually, people would lea
But DEC wasn't as pivotal in the development of the Boston area technology scene the way Shockley was in the Valley. Computers were being built and the technology to control them developed in the 1940s; earlier if you count special purpose devices.
Actually Boston was a center of computer technology when Silicon Valley was just cheap farmland.
The thing that happened was that the Boston area IT firms were largely minicomputer outfits (like DEC and Prime) or special purpose engineering workstations (Apollo, Symbolics), not to mention many spin-offs and laboratories involved in advanced CS work. The thing was the area's IT market got hit by a kind of perfect storm in the late 80s and early 90s: the collapse of the minicomputer market segment, the flagging of investor interest in artificial intelligence, the weakening of the workstation market, and a post Soviet Union drop off in government spending on the ultra-high-tech defense research that was a regular source of business creation in the university rich Boston area. At the same time, continued high property values made it less attractive for young engineers graduating from Boston schools to stay here.
Still, the Boston area continues to grow high tech startups in a variety of technical fields because of the sheer volume of academic research here; it's just that we haven't experienced the next big thing after the informatics boom of the 70s and 80s, and we missed out largely on the Internet bubble of the 90s. When the next thing happens, say if biotech takes off like informatics did in the 70s, we'll probably see Boston as an early hot spot, as it was in the 40s through 80s for computers.
Well, I've often reflected that only an atheist could be as funny as Douglas Adams, which in a sense makes his books spiritual.
It's not that atheists are automatically funny, quite the opposite. Most are drearily dull as any priest. If you want to be a bore, be deeply and earnestly concerned that other people might commit, speak, or think an error.
For Adams, life consists of a series of wrong turns that lead you to places you never intended to be. In that he's not too far from the most interesting religious thinkers; the Buddha once compared his teaching to a raft you might throw together to cross a river. Once you're over, you have no use for it, so you throw it away. In Adams books, you might say the characters are constantly struggling with the question of "why am I here?" because they're never quite where they expected to go.
Given the perverse randomness of the universe, it's rather quixotic to be obsessed with the errors of thought other people make. Somehow, it all feels like a big mistake, at least if you're paying attention.
that contributing more makes you elite.
I'd say the world could use more of that kind of elitism.
It's the elitism which attaches more weight to the opinions of people who know certain other people, or who have lots of money, or who have admittedly impressive accomplishments in other fields that is questionable.
While I agree with you, there is a kernel of truth (as there almost always is) in the Great Man model.
Also, status and recognition are very important motivators.
And we mustn't forget the egos of the donors, who'd much rather have their name associated with a big time award than a useful fund that doles out modest amounts of money to deserving proposals.
So let me suggest a new kind of prize, that recognizes the author of major scientific results, and comes with a massive cash award which he must give away as grants to researchers (not affiliated with himself) doing new work he finds most promising. The money does double duty then; it confers status and recognition on people who do important work (although that work may largely be in the past), and it goes to fund new work where a small marginal change in funding might make a large difference.
But it's more than just geek humor.
Adams didn't just poke fun at his characters, he wrote with a real sympathy for them. Well, just look at the man, he was a person who cared about things like the extinction of bizarre species that the vast majority of humanity has never heard of, much less seen for themselves. Empathy. That's the secret of reaching the apex of funniness. When the reader in his imagination steps into a character's shoes, he takes the metaphorical pies in the face personally.
Adams wrote as if the way the universe is mattered.
He also wrote as if the way the universe is happens to be funny.
The fact that the way things are both matters and is funny isn't exactly funny itself. Or rather it's very funny, and it's very something else, which there isn't a perfect word for. To capture that something else, you'd have to write a bunch of books.
Which is just what Douglas Adams did.
IANAA, but I think the advantage of the binocular telesecope is resolving power, not light gathering power.
With conventional telescopes, a bigger telescope doesn't just "see" dim objects; it sees objects that are closer to each other (that is they have a small angular separation in the sky) than smaller telescope. So generally, bigger is better. The problem is that the difficulty of making precise optical components goes up very rapidly in size. The 200 inch Pyrex blank used to make the Hale telescope at Mt. Palomar weighed 40,000 pounds, and took a year to cool after it was cast. Naturally, it had to be figured to optical perfection, a process that took many years, and involved removing 10,000 lb of glass.
The idea here, I think, is to get the resolving power of a very large disk without the engineering complexities and cost. You do that but taking two largish but not heroically large mirrors, placing them 75' apart; then you carefully combine the light from each mirror to get the resolving power of a 75' mirror. This last process is tricky, but nothing compared to casting a 75' mirror, which would be over eight times the diameter and thus 64x the weight. It would take decades to create the blank, much less grid it.
I suppose you could add more mirrors than two, and there might be some advantages, but the chief advantage of the binocular arrangement is to get more resolving power for less (net) engineering cost. Since doing this kind of thing on this kind of scale is novel, and it's always a kind of bet when you do something new. Probably the best bet was to make two mirrors as large as you can afford then connect them in the simplest possible way that does the job, which rules out more mirrors.
For years, the U of Arizona had a telescope that combined the light from six 1.5m mirrors to make the equivalent of a single 4.5m telescope, so I suppose it's possible to use even more mirrors than two. The MMT arrangement was upgraded a few years ago to a single 6.5m primary mirror constructed from a hollow honeycomb matrix rather than a single massive Pyrex blank, and they recently added an adaptive optics secondary to improve the practical resolution of the telescope, so there's still some room to improve "conventional" ground based telescopes.
It's easy to imagine that in this century we'll see astronomical instruments an order of magnitude better than any currently in existence.
You can't use a TARDIS to witness the birth of the universe any more than you can use an airplane to see what's north of the North Pole.
It's not 100% successful of course, but it really is marvelous that an institution designed so cynically can aid the cause of humanity so effectively.
Just goes to show the world needs its cynics too. It may need them more even more than it needs its idealists.
Which of course is entirely intentional. The League of Nations failed miserably at averting war, of course. The UN embodies the lessons of the League of Nations which is -- don't bother trying.
If the UN were about ending war, it'd have to be a world government with an army. But it's not. It just reduces the number, size and scope of wars, and by trying less hard, it succeeds more often.
The way the UN does this is by ratifying the imposition of the strong upon the weak, which is going to happen anyway. Thats why there are permanent security council members with a veto. Say you are superpower and you want some small country to do something or else. If you really want to do it, the security council can't stop you, because you've got a veto. But the other countries on the security council will be pissed at you, and you want things from them like having them lower barriers to your country's goods, or their support on some treaty or another. So you think twice about whether it's really worth your while. If you're smart that is. If you're really incredibly stupid, you believe your own rhetoric about how the UN is encroaching on your Liebensraum, which means you end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Contrarywise, lets say the rest of the security council is cool with your invading the little country to get what you want from them. Its like Koko says in the Mikado; it's all over for them, and the actual execution is a mere formality that, on balance, everybody would rather forgo.
An organization like the UN is exactly what is wanted here. But not the UN. It's too much of a political punching bag already. So you make another international organization that pretty much runs the same way: it appears to be for fairness, but really it just slows down rash actions enough so they can be reconsidered in terms of enlightened self interest.
Well, that's really a different question altogether. It is, of course, to reach wrong conclusions by a process that is mathematically unimpeachable, simply by starting with questionable data.
This is a problem for the peer review process; you have to disclose how you got the data and people take turns sneering at you for being too stupid to count those fellows smudgy nosed guys running out the door. You of course have to disclose that you lost some, because they know you did, and probably have a pretty good idea of roughly how many you probably lost. When it's your turn you return the favor to them.
In any case, there is one ready answer always appropriate to this kind of question: it needs more study.
People who think that way don't do things like this. Or if the do, it's with a hearty "MWAHAHAHAHA!"
People who earn their bread by publishing aren't really keen on giving out their data before it's properly published. That's because journals aren't keen on publishing studies where the data is in the public domain. So authors tend to be secretive about articles they're getting ready to publish, although they sometimes (often) can't resist blabbing a bit about their conclusions.
I see this sort of thing all the time.
I'm sure our AC would be glad to give us some referenes to published studies, if you promise to look them up and read them.
Well, that happens to be one of those funny ways that mathematics likes to grab your intuition by the red rubber nose and give it a resounding snap.
IANAS (I Am Not A Statistician), but this is the situation as I understand it.
Suppose I have a room with a hundred people in it. Some of them are mathematicians, whose noses I've blackened with a magic marker. Everybody is wearing red rubber clown noses. Your job is to snap enough noses that you have a reasonable estimate of what proportion of them are mathematicians. Let's say you check five people, and two have smudgy noses. That gives you an estimate of 40%, but it's not very reliable, so you continue checking until you have snapped 50 rubber noses, and found twenty mathematicians. Now you're pretty confident the ration is about 40%, right?
Now suppose there were a thousand people in the room. You're a bit less confident in your 40% effort, but you're still almost as confident. But look: increasing the sample by a factor of ten made you a LOT more confident; increasing the population by a factor of 10 makes almost no difference (at least with these numbers; a 1 in 50 result would be a different kettle of fish).
Samples over a certain range get rapidly better -- much faster than linearly, and then they kind of run out of steam because they can't really get much better or they'd be perfect. The upshot is that for many experimental designs you aren't much better off having 500 subjects over having 50, whether the population you are sampling is 10,000 or 100,000,000. In fact you might be worse off it the population size is, say, 500 -- at least if you are interested in gaining any insights about your null hypothesis.
It's a good thing too. If you think about it, if you do something like a drug trial with a hundred or so subjects in it are supposed to stand in for all of the 6.7 billion people on the planet.
In any case, I'm always a bit skeptical when I see studies with sample sizes in the thousands. It's not financially efficient to conduct real studies this size, so they tend to be hashing together data from sources collected for other purposes. Such studies have their place, of course. They also have their limitations.
Yes, but Microsoft has a checkered past...
when the trespassers aren't carrying a weapon.
Well, I think it is fairly certain that Bruce Schneier is smarter than most of the people here, probably including you and certainly including me.
I'll grant that that doesn't preclude him being an idiot as well, but not in this case. It is wise to be a bit skeptical about the possibility of putting a utopian scheme like a transparent society into effect. It's all very well to say that we give up our privacy and the people with power give up their power, but they can verify that we're giving up our privacy a lot more easily than we can verify they're giving up their power -- at least until its too late.
It's the Achilles' heel of most utopian schemes; even if you can imagine them working, it's hard to believe the transition from the status quo could take place without the whole thing running off the rails.
In any case, anybody who's seriously talking about a transparent society outside the context of a philosophical thought experiment is either a fool or a liar, often a bit of both. When the idea we can get along without privacy comes out of the mouth of business or political leaders, it's never followed by a shout of "and I'll be the first!" In fact, it tends to be defending some loss of privacy by somebody else that particularly benefits them is in reality good for everybody.
Right.
I think you've grasped the essential point: privacy is tied up with power. We can imagine a transparent society, and I think if it were not a dystopia, it must necessarily be a radically egalitarian one. However, there are a number of significant dystopic scenarios to be considered in a transparent society, such as the tyranny of a majority over a minority. One might argue that these scenarios are in fact impossible, but it's a purely theoretical argument. I believe I'll remain skeptical of any plans to put such a utopia into effect for now.
However, our society is based on restraining the powerful -- at least the politically powerful. More transparency, I do not doubt, would be better when applied to the workings of power.