You mean Cuccinelli's blatant fishing expedition/attempt to intimidate researchers?
What exactly is supposed to be in those documents that's so damaging? You know the documents that are important? The scientific papers, the code for the models, and the data for the models. And those are all publicly available with a few minor exceptions that don't actually change the results whether you use them or not.
And it's not like all of AGW rests on Mann's conclusions, this research has been widely replicated by researchers all over the world. Even if Mann had been faking all his results while it would be a major scientific scandal, it wouldn't really cast that much doubt on AGW from a purely scientific perspective.
I took a quick look at his blog. He looks a bit like a skeptic to me, I haven't read enough to be sure but he certainly doesn't look unbiased and just the style of articles I saw set off several alarm bells that tend to make me drop bloggers from my RSS feed (regardless of whether they agree with me).
And either way I see no evidence that he actually has the scientific expertise to critique Mann's research. There's a huge gap between blogging about climate change, and actually understanding all the math, statistics, temperature records, satellite imagery, etc, to independently tell if someone is handling the data properly.
Even assuming Dvorak is impartial what bad things do you think Mann did that Dvorak would be able to effectively evaluate?
It there anyone in your opinion who would be qualified, equipped, and impartial enough to do an investigation and convince you that Michael Mann did nothing wrong?
And true to their word Fox posted the AP story relating that, of course the AP story is just facts and doesn't really have any of the reporter interpretations/endorsements offered in the other article.
Now I'm not a huge apple fan, I don't like how they lock down their systems, particularly how they're building this walled garden when you're going to find yourself with Apple storing all your data and deciding what programs you can run, and Steve Jobs is responsible for that vision.
But I truly believe he's a good man trying to make the world better, and even when I disagree with what he's doing I think the world is a lot better with him than without him, and I hope he sticks around.
This announcement reminds me of the recent passing of another charasmatic leader who provided a huge boost to his organization, had a struggle with cancer, and stepped down from his post.
Neither the article nor the summary accused him of being a hypocrite.
The complaint is that there's a lot of quackery surrounding stem cell treatments, and Perry's procedure could be seen as an endorsement of those quack treatments.
Now I don't know enough about Perry's specific treatment to know if his treatment is legit, or how much it might fuel the quacks, but there's no hypocrisy with the embryonic stem cell debate.
On the drug angle if you don't ban drugs you have people taking more and more extreme substances until you have a significantly shortened lifespan as a prerequisite for sport.
On the Pistorius angle you have the fact that technology will continue to improve and able-bodied people will be at a growing disadvantage.
I think one of the societal benefits of elite athletics is in inspiring regular people to be active. If the competition becomes dominated by disabled athletes with technological advantages (or obvious dopers) those competitions are going to be a lot less inspiring.
Who cares about the venue they're writing in? Yes it's a blog post, but its by a respected scientist, linking to other respected scientists who are experts in that field, and who all have professional reputations to protect and aren't going to be spouting BS.
Yes I found it interesting and yes I find it annoying when all I get from and expert is "This is wrong and you should believe me." They may have good reasons to say that and probably do but how about saying what they are. And what are the massive problems? Do you know? I have not seen those published. You are still taking it on faith. You may have believed right but that is just luck not science.
Did you read the Bad Astronomy post? They most assuredly did not say "This is wrong and you should believe me". They tear apart, in detail, Spencer's models, his interpretations, his use of others models. They have graphs, counter examples, references, etc. Now it's possible all those scientists might be BSing me, as I said I'm not really qualified to critique their scientific arguments. But even writing on a blog they have a hell of a lot more credibility than a known crank, even if that crank did manage to slip something into a journal in a different field.
You seemed to indicate that you believed the paper raised some valid problems with AWG, and you seemed to base this on your understanding of the paper.
I said that neither of us was qualified to evaluate the paper, and we should rely on other indicators, such big red flags surrounding the authors scientific reputation.
I also said that the problems described in the paper either didn't exist or were heavily overstated, and I would hold that position until I got information from qualified parties to the contrary.
It may be that you don't believe the anti-AGW crowd, but the fact remains that my heuristic worked, and I didn't have to spend time reading what is apparently a junk paper to reach the proper conclusion. In your summaries of the paper you never mentioned the supposedly massive problems that the actual researchers noticed.
And if this wasn't the type of verification you were talking about than what did you intend for verification? Btw,
Frankly those dismissals are a bit annoying but then again they are in "popular press"
Are you referring to the Phil Plait article? If so I'd say an astronomer, referring to detailed posts by qualified researchers, counts far higher than most newspaper articles, even if they are just blog posts.
Btw, it's really hard to read your comment without quote or italics tags.
I should have been more specific but I never said anything about the article, everything I said was only about the paper.
Also you might have already seen the link in the latest/. story that explains how qualified scientists have now declared this paper to be crap.
Now to me this brings up two main scenarios. a) Either the bad astronomer (Phil Plait) and the scientists he cites are wrong/unqualified/biased and are somehow wrong about the paper.
b) Or the paper is crap, in which case I was right about it being crap and you (if I read you properly) were wrong.
If you accept a, and hold that you were qualified to assess the quality and significance of the paper, than how do you respond to the specific criticisms mentioned in the BA article?
If you accept b, that my opinion of the paper being junk was correct, than do you think I just got lucky or was my heuristic broadly correct?
Again attack the person and ignore the data. Now you challenge the validity of the peer review process because the results threaten your faith.
Really? "the results threaten your faith"?
Peer review is a single step in a larger process. It's good, it's not perfect, and you can't use it to make some logical trap "aha! AWG weenies are always saying use peer reviewed literature and now we have one!"
Really just step back and forget everything but the data. The study says that several satellites are showing that the Earth is re radiation more long wave IR than is predicted by the current models. That is the key statment here. And it is not something that is really open to opinion or interpretation. For that key fact all the peer review needs to do is take a look at the satellite data which is available from NASA and compare it to the climate models.
That is an interesting observation and easy to verify. The only logical, rational, and scientific reaction to that is this. We need to verify these observations. No attack on the source because of unrelated writings but an open and rational look at the data. Anything else is an emotional reaction to having a belief threatened. There is zero room in scientific and rational thought for personal attacks and name calling.
Did the authors do the analysis correctly? Are they missing coverage from some areas that would be expected to make up the difference? Are they looking at the right radiation? Do the models really not take this into account? Does the extra heat given off actually make a significant dent in AGW?
Any of these or a dozen other questions could completely change the interpretation or significance of this paper, and I really doubt you or I have the ability to answer them. And given this guy has a proven track record of misrepresenting scientific data (ID) I don't trust him to have given the correct answers.
Let me clue you in on a common human failing. Really smart people and some not so smart people fall in this trap. "I am smart because I am an expert in X so I can understand Y with no problem." You see it on slashdot all the time. I am an expert in computers so I will spout off about biology, chemistry. politics, and or economics! Often the spout is pure manure.
Not to be harsh, but this is almost exactly what I think is happening when I read most of the AGW-denialists on/., including you. I mean in the first paragraph you suggest I should evaluate the study directly, but I see no evidence that you or I have the expertise necessary to do that.
Which may be the case for this gentleman. Sometimes really smart even brilliant people will believe really odd stuff outside the field. A prime example was Tesla. That man was brilliant but also bat crap crazy. Actually I would guess that he suffered real mental health problems involving OCD combined with almost pathological narcissism. That doesn't mean you can ignore all that he did or should. Of course even some of his "science" got way off into the land of crazy. The sad thing IMHO is that way to many of his fans ignore his real contributions for his fantasy works, but that is another subject.
Tesla did some crazy stuff and some brilliant stuff. All we know is this guys done some crazy stuff. He's spouted some really crappy science in favour of one right-wing agenda. Now he's working for a right wing think tank, who in the past has published research questioning the second-hand smoke cancer link (with funding from Phillip Morris), and now has a history of publishing anti-AGW research. And again he's publishing conclusions that contradict the vast majority of scientists.
All I see is reasons to dismiss this guy and no evidence of why I should take him seriously.
Yes I did. And I know from experience I don't have the expertise to separate the BS from the facts when given a source like that.
And B."If some qualified and credible scientists investigate and vouch for his paper than I may be willing to give it a second thought. " Well again if you had read the link with an open mind. In the first paragraph ", reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. " A peer reviewed journal means that the paper was reviewed by a panel of qualified and credible scientists!
As I noted in another comment there's plenty of crank papers that have made it into peer reviewed journals, the question is how its received once it's given a wider exposure.
I really think that the term alarmist should be be used because it is an un needed and dismissive term that shows a bias. It is almost as bad as your personal attack on the author and the use of the term Quack and other personal attacks because you have "faith" in the global warming caused by increased man made CO2.
Let me make this one thing clear. Any personal attacks on the author completely blows any creditability you have as a so called "rational" thinker. Being a true rational thinker means just looking at the data in a scientific way.
If I attacked the author because he liked to dance around in pink women's undergarments that would be poor thinking.
But if I attack the author because he has a proven record of pushing bad science when it comes to evolution that's just common sense. If you disagree with me than go hire Bernie Madoff as your accountant, I'm sure he can give you a very convincing argument of why he's a good hire.
Rational thinking doesn't mean doing a complete and rigorous study of ever single question you encounter. It means making the best use of the information you have. And in this case I have more than enough data to suggest I can write this paper off as a crank until I see evidence from people qualified to review it that it's not BS. Spending the months/years of research required to definitively tell if the paper was good on my own would be frankly insane.
Sorry to be blunt but "I don't know enough to question this but I will dismiss this study because the author believes this unrelated thing" is just wrong. Just read the meat of article and toss out the journalistic "spice" and you may actually find it interesting.
Did you read the guys raving about ID? Imagine you don't know anything about evolution or biology. Would you really be able to call out all the BS in that?
You KNOW he distorts scientific facts, you KNOW he comes to bad conclusions. Do you really think you have the knowledge and training to read his paper and identify which statements are BS? Unless you already have some expertise in that field, or are looking to develop some, reading that paper is just a waste of time.
Were the reviewers qualified to review this paper? I don't know.
Is this a high quality journal? I don't know.
Did he submit this to a zillion journals until he got lucky and one finally accepted it? I don't know.
What I do know is that if it is a crank paper, it wouldn't be the first one to get into a peer reviewed journal. Peer-review doesn't automatically make something "science", standing up to continued scrutiny by critical and qualified people makes something science. Peer-review is just one of many filters.
I don't have the scientific background to assess his work on climate change.
But I do have the scientific background to assess his work on evolution, and from that I know he is some combination of a) a really crappy scientist, and/or b) someone willing to lie/misrepresent science to further their own beliefs.
Either criteria gives me ample reason to doubt any article he's published. If some qualified and credible scientists investigate and vouch for his paper than I may be willing to give it a second thought. But until then I'm not going to take the word of a known quack just because I'm not trained to disprove his particular brand of quackery.
First you encrypt the sensitive bits on the android (ie passwords) with a master key.
Then you store the master key on an external server.
When you check your email the phone automatically sends the encrypted password to the server, gets back a decrypted password, and uses that to check your email. So there's no loss in convenience.
But if you lose your phone you can de-authorize it at the server level so the phone can no longer access the passwords and other encrypted data that was stored on it. This also means you'll be able to see which passwords were compromised (ie, accessed after you lost the phone, and before you de-authorized it).
It's not a perfect system but I think it would give decent security, no idea if anyone has done it of course.
Here's the secret of/., we all think we're smarter than everyone else. In school we were probably among the smartest in the class, and now many of us specialize in IT, which means we have a far greater ability to retrieve and consume information than the vast majority of the population, which makes us feel any smarter.
Of course a lot of us are programmers, not researchers, which puts us a rung down on the intellectual totem poll and we feel we don't get the respect we deserve. So how do we get that respect? We say, "oh, not only am I an expert programmer, I think I'm also an expert biologist, doctor, economist, climatologist, politician, etc". Sometimes we agree with the real experts, but when it comes to climatology we go "oh no, you guys are corrupt/doing it wrong and this is the real answer", and try to show how smart we are with our ability to retrieve endless facts.
I might be wrong here, after all I'm not actually a psychologist or sociologist so I could be completely wrong about the factors in play. And I'm not saying you shouldn't try to educate yourself and share that knowledge, but I'm tired of people forgetting just how much they don't know and don't understand, and spreading a lot of BS as a result.
Hmm, I think it's accurate to say their position is that the brains are bigger, but this is explained by the larger vision processing centres (I didn't read the paper but I assume they checked that the increased volume was in these areas), and thus isn't evidence of increased intelligence overall.
I assume the original poster was thinking bigger -> smarter, therefore smarter -> racist scientists. Even if the scientists are incorrect in assuming this means no increase in intelligence it's certainly demonstrates there was no racist motive on the part of the scientists.
ps. Going by your nick I know you in real life, though I don't really associate this nick with my name so you may not be able to make the reverse connection (hints: several years ago, volleyball, curling).
Your comment just suggests you didn't bother to RTFA.
"In the paper, we argue that having bigger brains doesn't mean that high-latitude humans are necessarily smarter. It's just they need bigger eyes and brains to be able to see well where they live."
They're saying that the extra cranial capacity is being used by the visual processing centres of the brain.
And to be honest, your comment isn't combating racism, it's reinforcing it.
During a boom you should balance your books and pay off your debts.
And during a bust you may need to go into debt in order to keep things running.
Also it's one thing to score some political points when raising the debt ceiling, that's why they came up with the law in the first place, to make people do a little shame dance when they borrowed too much. I doubt the intent was ever to force the country into default.
I'm sorry but this isn't a "oh, both sides have been naughty and hypocritical" scenario. Yeah, the dems, Obama included, aren't perfect. But in my opinion the Republicans are holding a gun to your country's head and are apparently willing to pull the trigger. I always knew the American political environment was a little screwed up, but I always thought the actual elected officials were rational human beings cynically playing the public. Now I'm starting to suspect that the elected Tea Party Republicans really don't care or understand much about the actual country they're supposed to govern, and are willing to screw the whole thing if they think it will help them at the polls.
because the others still suck
on
The Rise of Git
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· Score: 1
I switched away from git to svn for a while since the "store the entire repository in your local project" design was killing my disk quotas, and I just didn't need all the fork/merge functionality so svn seemed simpler.
After the half dozenth time of blowing away my local svn project because something was royally screwed up again I decided to go back to git.
There's something to be said for a system that just works and doesn't end up with you spending hours screwing around with your version control system instead of getting your work done.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean Cuccinelli's blatant fishing expedition/attempt to intimidate researchers?
What exactly is supposed to be in those documents that's so damaging? You know the documents that are important? The scientific papers, the code for the models, and the data for the models. And those are all publicly available with a few minor exceptions that don't actually change the results whether you use them or not.
And it's not like all of AGW rests on Mann's conclusions, this research has been widely replicated by researchers all over the world. Even if Mann had been faking all his results while it would be a major scientific scandal, it wouldn't really cast that much doubt on AGW from a purely scientific perspective.
Really?
I took a quick look at his blog. He looks a bit like a skeptic to me, I haven't read enough to be sure but he certainly doesn't look unbiased and just the style of articles I saw set off several alarm bells that tend to make me drop bloggers from my RSS feed (regardless of whether they agree with me).
And either way I see no evidence that he actually has the scientific expertise to critique Mann's research. There's a huge gap between blogging about climate change, and actually understanding all the math, statistics, temperature records, satellite imagery, etc, to independently tell if someone is handling the data properly.
Even assuming Dvorak is impartial what bad things do you think Mann did that Dvorak would be able to effectively evaluate?
It there anyone in your opinion who would be qualified, equipped, and impartial enough to do an investigation and convince you that Michael Mann did nothing wrong?
And true to their word Fox posted the AP story relating that, of course the AP story is just facts and doesn't really have any of the reporter interpretations/endorsements offered in the other article.
Also of note the story isn't found on their Science & Technology section, you have to go straight to the Planet Earth section.
How can you even compare a damn CEO with someone who dedicated their life to making the world a better place?
There are good pols and bad pols, just like there are good businessmen and bad businessmen.
I didn't agree with a lot of Layton's policies though you have to hand it to a politician who came out in support of same sex marriage in 1988!
The fact is he's someone who went into politics for the right reasons, to help people, and he never lost his integrity or his courage.
Now I'm not a huge apple fan, I don't like how they lock down their systems, particularly how they're building this walled garden when you're going to find yourself with Apple storing all your data and deciding what programs you can run, and Steve Jobs is responsible for that vision.
But I truly believe he's a good man trying to make the world better, and even when I disagree with what he's doing I think the world is a lot better with him than without him, and I hope he sticks around.
This announcement reminds me of the recent passing of another charasmatic leader who provided a huge boost to his organization, had a struggle with cancer, and stepped down from his post.
I really hope this turns out better for Jobs.
Neither the article nor the summary accused him of being a hypocrite.
The complaint is that there's a lot of quackery surrounding stem cell treatments, and Perry's procedure could be seen as an endorsement of those quack treatments.
Now I don't know enough about Perry's specific treatment to know if his treatment is legit, or how much it might fuel the quacks, but there's no hypocrisy with the embryonic stem cell debate.
On the contrary there is good evidence that he does have an advantage.
On the drug angle if you don't ban drugs you have people taking more and more extreme substances until you have a significantly shortened lifespan as a prerequisite for sport.
On the Pistorius angle you have the fact that technology will continue to improve and able-bodied people will be at a growing disadvantage.
I think one of the societal benefits of elite athletics is in inspiring regular people to be active. If the competition becomes dominated by disabled athletes with technological advantages (or obvious dopers) those competitions are going to be a lot less inspiring.
A blog posting over a peer reviews journal?
Who cares about the venue they're writing in? Yes it's a blog post, but its by a respected scientist, linking to other respected scientists who are experts in that field, and who all have professional reputations to protect and aren't going to be spouting BS.
Yes I found it interesting and yes I find it annoying when all I get from and expert is "This is wrong and you should believe me." They may have good reasons to say that and probably do but how about saying what they are. And what are the massive problems? Do you know? I have not seen those published.
You are still taking it on faith. You may have believed right but that is just luck not science.
Did you read the Bad Astronomy post? They most assuredly did not say "This is wrong and you should believe me". They tear apart, in detail, Spencer's models, his interpretations, his use of others models. They have graphs, counter examples, references, etc. Now it's possible all those scientists might be BSing me, as I said I'm not really qualified to critique their scientific arguments. But even writing on a blog they have a hell of a lot more credibility than a known crank, even if that crank did manage to slip something into a journal in a different field.
There's way to much data in the world to accurately decide things on your own. So here's my heuristic in a nutshell.
1) So find trusted sources, such as Phil Plait, people who are well qualified to give accurate interpretations in a certain area.
2) Thoroughly vet those sources for evidence of bias or shoddy thinking (there's a reason I don't read Freakonomics).
3) Build a rough mental model of their opinions and stances to use as a guide when presented with information from their field.
4) Regularly recheck your source, particularly if their response to a certain piece of information doesn't sound right
5) Return to step 1)
You seemed to indicate that you believed the paper raised some valid problems with AWG, and you seemed to base this on your understanding of the paper.
I said that neither of us was qualified to evaluate the paper, and we should rely on other indicators, such big red flags surrounding the authors scientific reputation.
I also said that the problems described in the paper either didn't exist or were heavily overstated, and I would hold that position until I got information from qualified parties to the contrary.
It may be that you don't believe the anti-AGW crowd, but the fact remains that my heuristic worked, and I didn't have to spend time reading what is apparently a junk paper to reach the proper conclusion. In your summaries of the paper you never mentioned the supposedly massive problems that the actual researchers noticed.
And if this wasn't the type of verification you were talking about than what did you intend for verification?
Btw,
Frankly those dismissals are a bit annoying but then again they are in "popular press"
Are you referring to the Phil Plait article? If so I'd say an astronomer, referring to detailed posts by qualified researchers, counts far higher than most newspaper articles, even if they are just blog posts.
Btw, it's really hard to read your comment without quote or italics tags.
I should have been more specific but I never said anything about the article, everything I said was only about the paper.
Also you might have already seen the link in the latest /. story that explains how qualified scientists have now declared this paper to be crap.
Now to me this brings up two main scenarios.
a) Either the bad astronomer (Phil Plait) and the scientists he cites are wrong/unqualified/biased and are somehow wrong about the paper.
b) Or the paper is crap, in which case I was right about it being crap and you (if I read you properly) were wrong.
If you accept a, and hold that you were qualified to assess the quality and significance of the paper, than how do you respond to the specific criticisms mentioned in the BA article?
If you accept b, that my opinion of the paper being junk was correct, than do you think I just got lucky or was my heuristic broadly correct?
Again attack the person and ignore the data. Now you challenge the validity of the peer review process because the results threaten your faith.
Really? "the results threaten your faith"?
Peer review is a single step in a larger process. It's good, it's not perfect, and you can't use it to make some logical trap "aha! AWG weenies are always saying use peer reviewed literature and now we have one!"
Really just step back and forget everything but the data. The study says that several satellites are showing that the Earth is re radiation more long wave IR than is predicted by the current models. That is the key statment here. And it is not something that is really open to opinion or interpretation. For that key fact all the peer review needs to do is take a look at the satellite data which is available from NASA and compare it to the climate models.
That is an interesting observation and easy to verify. The only logical, rational, and scientific reaction to that is this. We need to verify these observations. No attack on the source because of unrelated writings but an open and rational look at the data. Anything else is an emotional reaction to having a belief threatened. There is zero room in scientific and rational thought for personal attacks and name calling.
Did the authors do the analysis correctly? Are they missing coverage from some areas that would be expected to make up the difference? Are they looking at the right radiation? Do the models really not take this into account? Does the extra heat given off actually make a significant dent in AGW?
Any of these or a dozen other questions could completely change the interpretation or significance of this paper, and I really doubt you or I have the ability to answer them. And given this guy has a proven track record of misrepresenting scientific data (ID) I don't trust him to have given the correct answers.
Let me clue you in on a common human failing. Really smart people and some not so smart people fall in this trap. "I am smart because I am an expert in X so I can understand Y with no problem." You see it on slashdot all the time. I am an expert in computers so I will spout off about biology, chemistry. politics, and or economics! Often the spout is pure manure.
Not to be harsh, but this is almost exactly what I think is happening when I read most of the AGW-denialists on /., including you. I mean in the first paragraph you suggest I should evaluate the study directly, but I see no evidence that you or I have the expertise necessary to do that.
Which may be the case for this gentleman. Sometimes really smart even brilliant people will believe really odd stuff outside the field. A prime example was Tesla. That man was brilliant but also bat crap crazy. Actually I would guess that he suffered real mental health problems involving OCD combined with almost pathological narcissism. That doesn't mean you can ignore all that he did or should. Of course even some of his "science" got way off into the land of crazy. The sad thing IMHO is that way to many of his fans ignore his real contributions for his fantasy works, but that is another subject.
Tesla did some crazy stuff and some brilliant stuff. All we know is this guys done some crazy stuff. He's spouted some really crappy science in favour of one right-wing agenda. Now he's working for a right wing think tank, who in the past has published research questioning the second-hand smoke cancer link (with funding from Phillip Morris), and now has a history of publishing anti-AGW research. And again he's publishing conclusions that contradict the vast majority of scientists.
All I see is reasons to dismiss this guy and no evidence of why I should take him seriously.
A did you read the link?
Yes I did. And I know from experience I don't have the expertise to separate the BS from the facts when given a source like that.
And B."If some qualified and credible scientists investigate and vouch for his paper than I may be willing to give it a second thought. "
Well again if you had read the link with an open mind.
In the first paragraph ", reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. " A peer reviewed journal means that the paper was reviewed by a panel of qualified and credible scientists!
As I noted in another comment there's plenty of crank papers that have made it into peer reviewed journals, the question is how its received once it's given a wider exposure.
I really think that the term alarmist should be be used because it is an un needed and dismissive term that shows a bias. It is almost as bad as your personal attack on the author and the use of the term Quack and other personal attacks because you have "faith" in the global warming caused by increased man made CO2.
Let me make this one thing clear. Any personal attacks on the author completely blows any creditability you have as a so called "rational" thinker. Being a true rational thinker means just looking at the data in a scientific way.
If I attacked the author because he liked to dance around in pink women's undergarments that would be poor thinking.
But if I attack the author because he has a proven record of pushing bad science when it comes to evolution that's just common sense. If you disagree with me than go hire Bernie Madoff as your accountant, I'm sure he can give you a very convincing argument of why he's a good hire.
Rational thinking doesn't mean doing a complete and rigorous study of ever single question you encounter. It means making the best use of the information you have. And in this case I have more than enough data to suggest I can write this paper off as a crank until I see evidence from people qualified to review it that it's not BS. Spending the months/years of research required to definitively tell if the paper was good on my own would be frankly insane.
Sorry to be blunt but "I don't know enough to question this but I will dismiss this study because the author believes this unrelated thing" is just wrong. Just read the meat of article and toss out the journalistic "spice" and you may actually find it interesting.
Did you read the guys raving about ID? Imagine you don't know anything about evolution or biology. Would you really be able to call out all the BS in that?
You KNOW he distorts scientific facts, you KNOW he comes to bad conclusions. Do you really think you have the knowledge and training to read his paper and identify which statements are BS? Unless you already have some expertise in that field, or are looking to develop some, reading that paper is just a waste of time.
Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292), an open access journal about the science and application of remote sensing technology, is published by MDPI online monthly.
Were the reviewers qualified to review this paper? I don't know.
Is this a high quality journal? I don't know.
Did he submit this to a zillion journals until he got lucky and one finally accepted it? I don't know.
What I do know is that if it is a crank paper, it wouldn't be the first one to get into a peer reviewed journal. Peer-review doesn't automatically make something "science", standing up to continued scrutiny by critical and qualified people makes something science. Peer-review is just one of many filters.
I don't have the scientific background to assess his work on climate change.
But I do have the scientific background to assess his work on evolution, and from that I know he is some combination of a) a really crappy scientist, and/or b) someone willing to lie/misrepresent science to further their own beliefs.
Either criteria gives me ample reason to doubt any article he's published. If some qualified and credible scientists investigate and vouch for his paper than I may be willing to give it a second thought. But until then I'm not going to take the word of a known quack just because I'm not trained to disprove his particular brand of quackery.
First you encrypt the sensitive bits on the android (ie passwords) with a master key.
Then you store the master key on an external server.
When you check your email the phone automatically sends the encrypted password to the server, gets back a decrypted password, and uses that to check your email. So there's no loss in convenience.
But if you lose your phone you can de-authorize it at the server level so the phone can no longer access the passwords and other encrypted data that was stored on it. This also means you'll be able to see which passwords were compromised (ie, accessed after you lost the phone, and before you de-authorized it).
It's not a perfect system but I think it would give decent security, no idea if anyone has done it of course.
Did they share every last bit of data and code? No.
Did they have good legal/IP reasons for not sharing every last bit? Yes.
Did they share more than enough code and data to justify their conclusions? Yes.
Did the results change when you used only the public data? No.
Did they stop testing their theories? No.
If a scientific group was found to be falsifying their relativity experiments would that falsify relativity? No.
If CRU was actually found to be falsifying their climate research would that falsify climate change? No.
Does the scientific consensus on climate change vanish if you wipe CRU off the planet? No.
Do your criticisms bear up to scrutiny? No.
Here's the secret of /., we all think we're smarter than everyone else. In school we were probably among the smartest in the class, and now many of us specialize in IT, which means we have a far greater ability to retrieve and consume information than the vast majority of the population, which makes us feel any smarter.
Of course a lot of us are programmers, not researchers, which puts us a rung down on the intellectual totem poll and we feel we don't get the respect we deserve. So how do we get that respect? We say, "oh, not only am I an expert programmer, I think I'm also an expert biologist, doctor, economist, climatologist, politician, etc". Sometimes we agree with the real experts, but when it comes to climatology we go "oh no, you guys are corrupt/doing it wrong and this is the real answer", and try to show how smart we are with our ability to retrieve endless facts.
I might be wrong here, after all I'm not actually a psychologist or sociologist so I could be completely wrong about the factors in play. And I'm not saying you shouldn't try to educate yourself and share that knowledge, but I'm tired of people forgetting just how much they don't know and don't understand, and spreading a lot of BS as a result.
Hmm, I think it's accurate to say their position is that the brains are bigger, but this is explained by the larger vision processing centres (I didn't read the paper but I assume they checked that the increased volume was in these areas), and thus isn't evidence of increased intelligence overall.
I assume the original poster was thinking bigger -> smarter, therefore smarter -> racist scientists. Even if the scientists are incorrect in assuming this means no increase in intelligence it's certainly demonstrates there was no racist motive on the part of the scientists.
ps. Going by your nick I know you in real life, though I don't really associate this nick with my name so you may not be able to make the reverse connection (hints: several years ago, volleyball, curling).
Your comment just suggests you didn't bother to RTFA.
"In the paper, we argue that having bigger brains doesn't mean that high-latitude humans are necessarily smarter. It's just they need bigger eyes and brains to be able to see well where they live."
They're saying that the extra cranial capacity is being used by the visual processing centres of the brain.
And to be honest, your comment isn't combating racism, it's reinforcing it.
Don't see anything wrong here.
During a boom you should balance your books and pay off your debts.
And during a bust you may need to go into debt in order to keep things running.
Also it's one thing to score some political points when raising the debt ceiling, that's why they came up with the law in the first place, to make people do a little shame dance when they borrowed too much. I doubt the intent was ever to force the country into default.
I'm sorry but this isn't a "oh, both sides have been naughty and hypocritical" scenario. Yeah, the dems, Obama included, aren't perfect. But in my opinion the Republicans are holding a gun to your country's head and are apparently willing to pull the trigger. I always knew the American political environment was a little screwed up, but I always thought the actual elected officials were rational human beings cynically playing the public. Now I'm starting to suspect that the elected Tea Party Republicans really don't care or understand much about the actual country they're supposed to govern, and are willing to screw the whole thing if they think it will help them at the polls.
I switched away from git to svn for a while since the "store the entire repository in your local project" design was killing my disk quotas, and I just didn't need all the fork/merge functionality so svn seemed simpler.
After the half dozenth time of blowing away my local svn project because something was royally screwed up again I decided to go back to git.
There's something to be said for a system that just works and doesn't end up with you spending hours screwing around with your version control system instead of getting your work done.
This is news for everyone.
Nerds are just a subset.