Scientist speaking here. One finding in no finding. It's luck or mistake. If there's just one "finding" you're "comfortable with", it's not publication you should think about, it's changing what you do and how you do it.
Whether it's one finding supporting your theory or one hundred findings really makes no statistical difference when your approach is to keep doing experiments until you get the results you want. And, sadly, that is what academics generally do: they vary experimental conditions, parameters, samples, and approaches until they get the results they expect and their peers are likely to accept for publication. Statistically, "one finding" supporting a theory can actually be a lot more meaning full than many findings supporting a theory, if you got your "one finding" on the first try without any selection.
I think a concerning matter is that journalists (not science journals necessarily) also destroy the credibility of science by taking these observations ("according to a recent study...") and running with the "results" as news.
That's what current is happening. Researchers generally are allowed a certain degree of speculation in the conclusions of their papers, speculation that goes far beyond what the data actually shows. That's what journalists often "run with" and publish as "peer reviewed fact".
But the thing is: scientists themselves often fall into the same trap, in particular when they are not intimately familiar with the area that a paper has been published about. I don't think this journal will do much to break the news cycle, but it may be a start towards getting "legitimate scientists" themselves to act a bit more responsibly and carefully.
Of course, despite the hype, current AI research doesn't attempt to reach human-level intelligence. AI research proceeds incrementally, from improved solutions to one practical problem after another. That's not just because there is tons more funding for practical problems, it's because it's less risky for students and researchers to solve actual problems and to take research one step at a time.
It's not all that different in biomedical research either: much of that is driven again either by practical problems or incremental progress. A lot of the game changers in biomedical research came out of otherwise fairly pedestrian research on bacteria or specific diseases, and people discovered only during that research that what they were doing was much more widely applicable. Huge, targeted research programs are the exception, not the norm: fusion reactors, large particle colliders, human genome sequencing; and they are often more for show than rational allocation of scarce research funds.
Looking at the trend lines, though, the rate of growth is _2x_ whatever it was prior to the announcement AND profits doubled. That's impressive no matter how you look at it.
There are no "trend lines" or "graphs" or numbers in that article. There are no cold, hard, verifiable financial facts about growth or profits in that article at all.
One fact that is quite clear is: the $70000 salary isn't in effect yet for many employees because it is being "phased in over the next three years". So, while the anticipation of a higher salary might have led to a growth spurt, it isn't an actually higher salary that caused growth. That means that there is a good chance that when the actual salaries go into effect for everybody, the company will be stuck with high salaries and the same or lower productivity it had before. On the other hand, Price immediately invested another $3 million in the company, which may be the real reason for faster growth.
I think the whole thing stinks to high heaven. In any case, nobody has shown any hard facts supporting the idea that paying higher salaries benefits a company like this in the long term.
The more obvious reason is that settling them requires seafaring craft, which requires a sufficiently advanced technological society to produce.
That may be obvious to you, but it's wrong. The technology to settle these islands has existed for many thousands of years, but people only attempted to move on to new islands once population pressures on old islands forced them to. That's because these voyages are arduous and dangerous, and that's why the settlement of the Polynesian islands was spread out over thousands of years.
CAF was originally created to fight the mafia and rich drug dealers who had the money to hire the best lawyers and to take their assets away so they wouldn't have anything to come back to after jail. it's like everything, after the problem goes away you find new ways to enforce laws
Giving the executive branch more powers to fix such problems is a really, really bad idea.
It was a fast growing company before, so we don't know what it would have been otherwise. In addition, it's easy to increase short term profits, in particular in a company like this. The question is whether the company will survive the next few years.
If she wants treatment for mental illness, she should be able to get it through her insurance company. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in the US.
Sadly, Obamacare has made mental illness coverage mandatory, meaning that others are now forced to pay for her delusions.
It could be, but the school system happens to have chosen Chromebooks and cloud services, and that means that the data goes to Google. You may feel that Chromebooks are the wrong product for schools, but that's not Google's fault; you have to take that up with the school administrators.
She is an adult. It's her responsibility to figure out cause and effect, make the right choices, and determine what medical treatments she needs and wants. The choice she made is to blame WiFi, which is silly and should be thrown out of court. Beyond that, nobody else has any obligation or even right to impose medical treatments on her.
I think the point is we need better treatments for mental illnesses. Seeing hallucinations for instance, you can easily say "Well its not there". But the person still needs treatments.
What does "needs treatment" mean? Are you going to strap her down and force various drugs into her? Lock her up? Are you going to do that only for unscientific beliefs in "WiFi allergies", or are you going to extend mandatory treatments for mental illness to any belief a panel of experts deems "unscientific"? Think through what you're actually saying!
If she wants treatment for mental illness, she should get it through her insurance company. But it's pretty clear she doesn't want treatment. At that point, you have no right to impose your beliefs on her; neither do you have an obligation to cater to her delusions. If she wants to avoid exposure to WiFi, she'll have to move.
Kids are effectively forced to attend government-run schools and be subjected to government imposed curricula, and you worry about whether their devices run Linux or ChromeOS? You need to get your priorities straight.
EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for [...] Despite publicly promising not to, Google mines students’ browsing data and other information, and uses it for the company’s own purposes
Google syncs student data to their servers, including web searches, because Chromebooks back up everything to the cloud. If you back up your Windows machine to the cloud, you back up your search history as well. Nothing in the EFF's press release suggests that they have shown that Google does anything more than this, let alone "mines" that data or "uses it for the company's own purposes".
Giving the money to non-profits is largely going to be a waste. Zuckerberg would do much better to pick another big commercial project and focus on that: space travel, asteroid mining, human cloning, nanotech, whatever.
There are 7.3 million people in Papua New Guinea alone—almost 10 million in Melanesia altogether.
Obviously, I was excluding New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, which is where the 3 million figure comes from.
Anyway, far less than half of all Pacific islanders live on low-lying atolls.
Hence, the 3 million is an upper bound. Great, you're at least thinking along...
But if the measure of importance is that they're the proverbial canary in the coal mine (sorry), then yeah, they kind of matter. And how we treat them is going to set a precedent for how we treat the hundreds of millions who will quickly follow—most of whom are likely to be domestic climate refugees.
Low-lying atolls are a special case: they are temporary to begin with and have always had marginal living conditions. They aren't a "canary in a coal mine" for anything.
the hundreds of millions who will quickly follow—most of whom are likely to be domestic climate refugees.
That's ludicrous. At about half a meter per century sea level rise, nobody becomes a "climate refugee"; as people's homes age, they will simply rebuild a little further from the coast.
For 10 TW of clean power I think that displacing 1.5 billion people is a damn bargain.
The Three Gorges Damn also wreaked environmental havoc. And it's not sustainable power either.
But thanks for showing your true colors: when people push climate change legislation, they really don't care about the environment or human suffering, it's all about a political agenda.
Your flaw: Corporations only exist by the consent of the government, thus the people.
Private property and the ability to engage in private business transactions are fundamental human rights and are Constitutionally guaranteed; they do not require "consent of the government" or "consent of the people".
The problem with global warming is its not localized to atolls in the south pacific. 40% of all humans live within 100km of a coastline.
Well, since you are changing the subject, you apparently concur as far as the Marshall Islands go.
Now, what about those 40% that live within 100km of a coast line? They are in an entirely different situation than pacific islanders. Pacific island nations are susceptible to sea level rise because their entire nations are within a few meters of sea level and because their entire nation is built on (geologically) temporary islands. Few other countries are in that situation. So for people in those other countries, even if sea level rise causes a gradual loss of coastal lands, populations will just shift slightly inland. That process is so slow that most people won't even notice; mostly, old homes will simply not get rebuilt in the same spot. Of course, many coastal areas on continents are formed from sediments and have been shifting around since long before climate change; in addition, many may actually gain area due to climate change.
It's a big ass dam dude, it's 5 times the size of the Hoover dam and stretches for over 600 kilometers.
The Three Gorges Dam generates about 10GW and displaced upwards of 1.5 million people. Total world energy generation from fossil fuels is about 10TW. So, if you accept the displacement of at least 1.5 million people for the Three Gorges Dam, you should be willing to accept the displacement of at least 1.5 billion people for fossil fuel consumption, right?
Oh, and the figure I read was 1.6 million displaced, but the article was a bit old.
Hence my statement of more than 1.5 million. In fact, it's probably several million, but Chinese propaganda likes to play it down.
It very well may be, but it's probably also true that you've drank the corporate kool-aid.
I'm under no illusions about what corporations are and what they want. However, I'm also under no illusion about what governments are and what they want. And when it comes right down to it, corporations can't force you to do anything you don't want to; only government can.
You need to lay off the statist and totalitarian cool-aid.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it's one finding supporting your theory or one hundred findings really makes no statistical difference when your approach is to keep doing experiments until you get the results you want. And, sadly, that is what academics generally do: they vary experimental conditions, parameters, samples, and approaches until they get the results they expect and their peers are likely to accept for publication. Statistically, "one finding" supporting a theory can actually be a lot more meaning full than many findings supporting a theory, if you got your "one finding" on the first try without any selection.
That's what current is happening. Researchers generally are allowed a certain degree of speculation in the conclusions of their papers, speculation that goes far beyond what the data actually shows. That's what journalists often "run with" and publish as "peer reviewed fact".
http://www.phdcomics.com/comic...
But the thing is: scientists themselves often fall into the same trap, in particular when they are not intimately familiar with the area that a paper has been published about. I don't think this journal will do much to break the news cycle, but it may be a start towards getting "legitimate scientists" themselves to act a bit more responsibly and carefully.
Of course, despite the hype, current AI research doesn't attempt to reach human-level intelligence. AI research proceeds incrementally, from improved solutions to one practical problem after another. That's not just because there is tons more funding for practical problems, it's because it's less risky for students and researchers to solve actual problems and to take research one step at a time.
It's not all that different in biomedical research either: much of that is driven again either by practical problems or incremental progress. A lot of the game changers in biomedical research came out of otherwise fairly pedestrian research on bacteria or specific diseases, and people discovered only during that research that what they were doing was much more widely applicable. Huge, targeted research programs are the exception, not the norm: fusion reactors, large particle colliders, human genome sequencing; and they are often more for show than rational allocation of scarce research funds.
There are no "trend lines" or "graphs" or numbers in that article. There are no cold, hard, verifiable financial facts about growth or profits in that article at all.
One fact that is quite clear is: the $70000 salary isn't in effect yet for many employees because it is being "phased in over the next three years". So, while the anticipation of a higher salary might have led to a growth spurt, it isn't an actually higher salary that caused growth. That means that there is a good chance that when the actual salaries go into effect for everybody, the company will be stuck with high salaries and the same or lower productivity it had before. On the other hand, Price immediately invested another $3 million in the company, which may be the real reason for faster growth.
I think the whole thing stinks to high heaven. In any case, nobody has shown any hard facts supporting the idea that paying higher salaries benefits a company like this in the long term.
That may be obvious to you, but it's wrong. The technology to settle these islands has existed for many thousands of years, but people only attempted to move on to new islands once population pressures on old islands forced them to. That's because these voyages are arduous and dangerous, and that's why the settlement of the Polynesian islands was spread out over thousands of years.
Giving the executive branch more powers to fix such problems is a really, really bad idea.
It was a fast growing company before, so we don't know what it would have been otherwise. In addition, it's easy to increase short term profits, in particular in a company like this. The question is whether the company will survive the next few years.
I doubt they'd do anything so blatant; they'd more likely just do data mining on the client and then send the mining results back to the server.
Sadly, Obamacare has made mental illness coverage mandatory, meaning that others are now forced to pay for her delusions.
It could be, but the school system happens to have chosen Chromebooks and cloud services, and that means that the data goes to Google. You may feel that Chromebooks are the wrong product for schools, but that's not Google's fault; you have to take that up with the school administrators.
If you don't trust Google how does that help? They still control the browser, the OS, and the encryption. And they still store all the files.
I think the mother is as crazy as the daughter. Obviously, the mother is responsible both for herself and her daughter.
I'm allergic to 3G: it is damned slow!
She is an adult. It's her responsibility to figure out cause and effect, make the right choices, and determine what medical treatments she needs and wants. The choice she made is to blame WiFi, which is silly and should be thrown out of court. Beyond that, nobody else has any obligation or even right to impose medical treatments on her.
What does "needs treatment" mean? Are you going to strap her down and force various drugs into her? Lock her up? Are you going to do that only for unscientific beliefs in "WiFi allergies", or are you going to extend mandatory treatments for mental illness to any belief a panel of experts deems "unscientific"? Think through what you're actually saying!
If she wants treatment for mental illness, she should get it through her insurance company. But it's pretty clear she doesn't want treatment. At that point, you have no right to impose your beliefs on her; neither do you have an obligation to cater to her delusions. If she wants to avoid exposure to WiFi, she'll have to move.
Kids are effectively forced to attend government-run schools and be subjected to government imposed curricula, and you worry about whether their devices run Linux or ChromeOS? You need to get your priorities straight.
Google syncs student data to their servers, including web searches, because Chromebooks back up everything to the cloud. If you back up your Windows machine to the cloud, you back up your search history as well. Nothing in the EFF's press release suggests that they have shown that Google does anything more than this, let alone "mines" that data or "uses it for the company's own purposes".
He probably doesn't own even a few million dollars. What he owns is shares in companies, companies that produce useful stuff.
Selling those shares and putting the money into non-profits is not necessarily good for society.
Giving the money to non-profits is largely going to be a waste. Zuckerberg would do much better to pick another big commercial project and focus on that: space travel, asteroid mining, human cloning, nanotech, whatever.
Obviously, I was excluding New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, which is where the 3 million figure comes from.
Hence, the 3 million is an upper bound. Great, you're at least thinking along...
Low-lying atolls are a special case: they are temporary to begin with and have always had marginal living conditions. They aren't a "canary in a coal mine" for anything.
That's ludicrous. At about half a meter per century sea level rise, nobody becomes a "climate refugee"; as people's homes age, they will simply rebuild a little further from the coast.
The Three Gorges Damn also wreaked environmental havoc. And it's not sustainable power either.
But thanks for showing your true colors: when people push climate change legislation, they really don't care about the environment or human suffering, it's all about a political agenda.
Private property and the ability to engage in private business transactions are fundamental human rights and are Constitutionally guaranteed; they do not require "consent of the government" or "consent of the people".
Well, since you are changing the subject, you apparently concur as far as the Marshall Islands go.
Now, what about those 40% that live within 100km of a coast line? They are in an entirely different situation than pacific islanders. Pacific island nations are susceptible to sea level rise because their entire nations are within a few meters of sea level and because their entire nation is built on (geologically) temporary islands. Few other countries are in that situation. So for people in those other countries, even if sea level rise causes a gradual loss of coastal lands, populations will just shift slightly inland. That process is so slow that most people won't even notice; mostly, old homes will simply not get rebuilt in the same spot. Of course, many coastal areas on continents are formed from sediments and have been shifting around since long before climate change; in addition, many may actually gain area due to climate change.
The Three Gorges Dam generates about 10GW and displaced upwards of 1.5 million people. Total world energy generation from fossil fuels is about 10TW. So, if you accept the displacement of at least 1.5 million people for the Three Gorges Dam, you should be willing to accept the displacement of at least 1.5 billion people for fossil fuel consumption, right?
Hence my statement of more than 1.5 million. In fact, it's probably several million, but Chinese propaganda likes to play it down.
I'm under no illusions about what corporations are and what they want. However, I'm also under no illusion about what governments are and what they want. And when it comes right down to it, corporations can't force you to do anything you don't want to; only government can.
You need to lay off the statist and totalitarian cool-aid.