Look -- I was trying to make a rough analogy in common language...OBVIOUSLY the statement "the sky is blue" is not true at night or when it's cloudy or whatever. Duh. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
Sometimes when dealing with General Ignorance you have to be Captain Obvious although here apparently not obvious enough. I understood your rough analogy for what it was and was extending it to explain to you the difference between a scientific theory and a mathematical proof. It doesn't matter what scientific statement you make you can never prove it is always true under all circumstances. The best you can say is that every time you have tested it the statement has proved to be correct.
So, you're stuck with a couple of possibilities...
No actually you are not. There is another possibility: mathematics is a precise, logical language which we can use to describe worlds which may or may not be real. This is precisely how we use maths in physics. When theorists construct a mathematical model of some new set of fundamental fields they have no idea whether such fields exist in reality and yet they can derive a mathematical model for them and use it to make predictions about what we should see if they did exist. This then allows experimental determination about whether the field exists which is exactly how we found the Higgs boson.
So maths exists apart from the real world but is an incredibly useful tool for describing it. The perfection of the maths does not fail when describing the real world it is simply that the mathematical model used was not a perfect representation. This means that the model is wrong, not the maths which underlies that model.
I can still prove that the sky IS blue (not that it "will be blue" at some future time) by measuring the sky outside MY house RIGHT NOW. That is an assertion of fact regarding a specific measurement I took, NOT a scientific hypothesis expected to be valid at all times and in all places.
Actually you can go further and say that is it not a scientific hypothesis at all because it has zero power of prediction. In science we actually just call what you did a measurement because that is all it is. Even then you still have to be careful because scientific measurements always contain some degree of uncertainty. Really the statement you can make is that whatever sensor you used indicated that the sky was blue at that time. If the sensor is faulty or there was data corruption etc. then it might give a blue reading even if the sky was white.
I would have thought the Oxford English Dictionary was the usual arbiter of the English language. They actually make note of the difference between its use without a capital letter and with:
Originally (with lower-case initial): a computer network comprising or connecting a number of smaller networks, such as two or more local area networks connected by a shared communications protocol; an internetwork; spec. such a network (called ARPANET) operated by the United States Department of Defence. In later use (usually the Internet): the global network comprising a loose confederation of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols...
This is far better researched than a style guide used by US journalists which seems to have made the change entirely for arbitrary reasons. It also makes sense to capitalize it since there is only one, well unless you get your language from George Bush but I'd hate to think they are using him as an inspiration.
These are all very interesting questions, but they are irrelevant to the fact that the sky IS blue and one can prove it by measuring the frequency and correlating it with what humans call "blue."
This is not a mathematical proof but a scientific theory supported by evidence. A mathematical proof, if correct, is always and absolutely true. The major difference is that suppose I did your experiment at night, or at sunrise/sunset, or on a cloudy day? I could get red, black, white or grey for the colour of my sky. All you can do in science is take data, come up with a thoery to explain that data and then test the predictions of that theory under conditions where nobody has tested it before to see whether it works. In your case it is very easy to disprove the theory that the sky is blue.
In fact you can never really prove a scientific theory - all you can say is that it works in all the situations it has been tested under. That's good enough to be extremely useful and to advance our understanding about how the universe works but it is not the same thing as a mathematical proof. This is why scientists spend time confirming that existing theories work in new situations but you never hear of mathematicians checking the pythagorus theorem again to confirm that it still works with new right-angled triangles.
The pay off is that you get a better job, can manage you finances more effectively and generally have a better chance at a good standard of living. Part of the education process needs to teach students that although summer jobs somewhere like McDonalds would be an effective, but not fun, way to do that. See you can learn something valuable even while not having fun!;-)
I'd rather a dumb kid have fun with math and learn something...
That's a great ideal but the problem is that the smart kid who would like to learn more maths and science does not because of the song and dance required to entertain the less gifted kid (I assume you actually meant 'dum' and not that he had a disabling speech impediment). The problem with this is that the smart kids are the ones who grow up to be doctors, engineers, scientists etc and are the ones more likely to have amazing ideas and innovations which improve everyone's lives, including the less gifted kid's. They can result in better medical care or even provide nicer, better paid jobs.
If you insist on treating them to a song and dance routine the smart kids are likely to end up being the ones who tune out and think school is a waste of time. So if you are going to have one lot tuning out of school the question is which one is the least damaging for society? I would argue that it is very clearly the smart kids which you need to teach and keep engaged. The less gifted kids are not likely to end up with jobs that need an education as much as the smart kids, well except for those who become politicians but that's a different discussion.
It would certainly be beneficial for society to educate everyone as much as possible but that requires streaming and every time I suggest that there are a series of posts declaring how unfair it is....and yet people are still happy to allow streaming for school sports and not insist that the level of sports education is kept low enough that even the most sport-inept student finds it fun. So if streaming is bad lets at least apply it fairly everywhere and when the standards of professional sport teams starts to decline perhaps then we can have a sensible discussion about differing educational needs.
although the results showed that 3W/kg GSM is more harmful than 6W/kg GSM
The results did NOT show that. All the results show is that if you take a small sample size and take a large number of measurements you can find a noticeable fluctuation. Suppose I told you that I took a coin and tossed it 10 times and got heads every time. With this result you might start to think that the coin is weighted somehow to give more heads. However supposed I told you that I had done that experiment 100 times with statistically identical coins and only once got 10 heads? Suddenly it becomes a lot less statistically significant. This is exactly what they have done here. They have taken 4 small samples and tested for multiple different conditions which is equivalent to make over 100 measurements. That they then find that a few of these are 5% likely (more like only 7-8 heads in our example) is not at all surprising.
People who walk about with their noses in their screens will stand a much higher chance of dying like a bug on a windshield than from radiation.
I doubt you would get that result if you let the people who did this study test that hypothesis. There is not a single uncertainty on a measurement shown in the paper as far as I can tell and they are dealing with tiny statistics which are prone to large fluctuations. Their most statistically significant result seems to by about 5% likely to occur by random chance (based on their own statistical calculation which frankly I would not trust at this point) but with just over 100 measurements it seems very reasonable that this would occur by chance. Indeed they even point out that this rate was achieved in one of the 13 control samples they list in the appendix D!
With a sample size of 90 differences of a few incidents are not statistically significant when you are making lots of measurements and there is a high degree of correlation which has to be taken into account since all comparisons are made to a single control group so a statistical fluctuation there affects all measurements. As the saying goes there are lies, damn lies and statistics and this paper is very much lacking in statistics...not that the authors are deliberately lying but their conclusions do not seem statistically valid.
You'll need to read the EULA to determine if you have been granted a right to resell.
That depends on the country. If you cannot see and agree to the EULA before purchase then it in places like the UK it is totally unenforceable because the sale has already taken place and was agreed to without the EULA.
It's about progression and self motivation at an appropriate level.
True but it must also be educational at an appropriate level of rigour. The problem with a lot of school education today is that making it fun becomes the primary goal and maintaining educational standards comes in second. This leads to the erosion of educational standards very rapidly - just look at the appalling level of maths education in schools in the UK, Canada and the US today. The correct order of priority is to determine what needs to be taught and after that determine how to teach it in the most engaging way possible: this last part is where the teachers are the experts. If you can't come up with an engaging way to teach it then you just do the best you can.
...and yet strangely I have written papers and been peer reviewed which seems like more relevant experience than knowing about a national organization in a country of which I am not a citizen. The link the other poster provided did show that they are responsible for PNAS which I have heard of in the context of biology but since I'm not a biologist and not American and I am not aware of anyone publishing in PNAS in my field the US National Academy of Sciences is not really that relevant.
Actually my first concern would be about diseases. Does having animals with human-like organs inside them make it easier for diseases which affect that animal to mutate into a version which will infect humans? Since we are talking pigs the example that comes to mind immediately is something like swine flu.
Congratulations, I think that you've managed to find an even worse reason than just being greedy! If we have companies that just act like jerks for no reason at all because the are so used to doing so that they can't stop we have a real problem.
This wasn't really a study in a journal; it was a synthesis of many published studies into an over 400 page report. Not exactly the sort of thing to be published in your average journal yeah?
No, aggregation of multiple other studies is exactly the sort of thing which gets published in journals. I've seen these sorts of papers in both medical and education journals. In fact in particle physics we have the Particle Data Group who collect the latest analyses from the field and publish a full journal volume every few years with a statistical combination of all the results. However this is a bit different since most of it does not change between publications and it is intended to act as a reference book for particle properties.
...and no I've never heard of the US national academy of sciences. I'm not American but I was in the US for a few years. I guess they are not as important in physics as you seem to think.
Keeping back seed died on most farms in the USA quite some time before GMO became a thing.
So why do the companies selling GMO seed need to prevent farmers from doing this then? If nobody does it then it won't hurt their profits at all. The only reason which makes sense is that it would prevent them from jacking up prices to obscene levels sometime in the future when there are no alternatives left.
Disclosure is good but there is more than that to good science: it needs to be independently peer reviewed. Unfortunately they seem to have avoided going the usual peer-reviewed journal route and have arranged their own reviewers themselves which is unusual. I've also never heard of this group before despite being a physicist who worked in the US for a few years.
That's not to say that the science in the report is wrong it's just when a group you have never heard of publishes it's own report without going through a well known and respected peer reviewed journal which is how science is typically published it raises a few red flags of concern. This could have been largely avoided by publishing the report as a peer reviewed paper.
The cheap option is to make sure the exam invigilator is not asleep and have strict rules of what devices are allowed in exams i.e. ones with zero remote communication abilities. It's not hard to do.
Actually I would be a lot more worried with self driving cars if I were an Uber driver. They may have courted technology to the point where they are replacing traditional taxis but technology is a fickle mistress and will probably soon be dumping them soon too.
The airline industry may contract somewhat but lets face it they don't make most of their money from short hops between cities within a few hours drive of each other. In fact if they are smart about it and run a self-driving airport bus service they can probably collect passengers from a wider area into a single airport and gain economies of scale.
I hope they billed the idiot for the inconvenience, expense and defamation...
Everyone here keeps blaming the idiot who made the complaint but what about those who investigated it? It's well known that there are idiots out there so when someone comes forward with words to the effect of "I think the person next to me is a terrorist because they are writing something I don't understand on paper." the correct response from the authorities should be to ignore it because they are clearly talking to one of those idiots. If they don't exercise some judgment as to which complaints are credible and which are just nuts then there is a good chance real terrorists will be able to use this to distract them.
it's "fewer votes" not "less votes"
the same way you say "greater than" not "greater then"
It's also customary to start sentences with capital letters and end them with a full stop. When it comes to your own posts it seems that you grasp the idea that an internet post does not have to contain precisely correct English (mine certainly don't). So it is rather strange that you won't let similar lapses in other people's posts pass without criticism.
The "massive" subsidies for solar/wind turn out to be small compared to the subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel industry.
What really matters is the subsidy per unit of energy. Currently solar, wind and hydro are a far smaller industries than coal, oil and gas so I would expect the subsidy to be far smaller in overall terms.
Would a reasonable person believe that people would stay within the bounds of the law in such a competition?
The standard should be would a reasonable person believe that another reasonable person would stay within the bounds of the law for such a competition. If we have to start worrying about what the stupidest, most irresponsible person out there might do we are in real trouble as a society.
But I will not disagree that a jury might find them liable which is why they will pay out. I am just arguing that this in no way matches any sense of justice but sadly justice seems to have very little to do with courts nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
The flux of photons in space is about 1/3 more than than on earth (1366W/sq. meter in space vs 1000W/sq. meter on earth).
Not at night which, to be fair, was his point.
Look -- I was trying to make a rough analogy in common language...OBVIOUSLY the statement "the sky is blue" is not true at night or when it's cloudy or whatever. Duh. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
Sometimes when dealing with General Ignorance you have to be Captain Obvious although here apparently not obvious enough. I understood your rough analogy for what it was and was extending it to explain to you the difference between a scientific theory and a mathematical proof. It doesn't matter what scientific statement you make you can never prove it is always true under all circumstances. The best you can say is that every time you have tested it the statement has proved to be correct.
So, you're stuck with a couple of possibilities...
No actually you are not. There is another possibility: mathematics is a precise, logical language which we can use to describe worlds which may or may not be real. This is precisely how we use maths in physics. When theorists construct a mathematical model of some new set of fundamental fields they have no idea whether such fields exist in reality and yet they can derive a mathematical model for them and use it to make predictions about what we should see if they did exist. This then allows experimental determination about whether the field exists which is exactly how we found the Higgs boson.
So maths exists apart from the real world but is an incredibly useful tool for describing it. The perfection of the maths does not fail when describing the real world it is simply that the mathematical model used was not a perfect representation. This means that the model is wrong, not the maths which underlies that model.
I can still prove that the sky IS blue (not that it "will be blue" at some future time) by measuring the sky outside MY house RIGHT NOW. That is an assertion of fact regarding a specific measurement I took, NOT a scientific hypothesis expected to be valid at all times and in all places.
Actually you can go further and say that is it not a scientific hypothesis at all because it has zero power of prediction. In science we actually just call what you did a measurement because that is all it is. Even then you still have to be careful because scientific measurements always contain some degree of uncertainty. Really the statement you can make is that whatever sensor you used indicated that the sky was blue at that time. If the sensor is faulty or there was data corruption etc. then it might give a blue reading even if the sky was white.
Originally (with lower-case initial): a computer network comprising or connecting a number of smaller networks, such as two or more local area networks connected by a shared communications protocol; an internetwork; spec. such a network (called ARPANET) operated by the United States Department of Defence. In later use (usually the Internet): the global network comprising a loose confederation of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols...
This is far better researched than a style guide used by US journalists which seems to have made the change entirely for arbitrary reasons. It also makes sense to capitalize it since there is only one, well unless you get your language from George Bush but I'd hate to think they are using him as an inspiration.
These are all very interesting questions, but they are irrelevant to the fact that the sky IS blue and one can prove it by measuring the frequency and correlating it with what humans call "blue."
This is not a mathematical proof but a scientific theory supported by evidence. A mathematical proof, if correct, is always and absolutely true. The major difference is that suppose I did your experiment at night, or at sunrise/sunset, or on a cloudy day? I could get red, black, white or grey for the colour of my sky. All you can do in science is take data, come up with a thoery to explain that data and then test the predictions of that theory under conditions where nobody has tested it before to see whether it works. In your case it is very easy to disprove the theory that the sky is blue.
In fact you can never really prove a scientific theory - all you can say is that it works in all the situations it has been tested under. That's good enough to be extremely useful and to advance our understanding about how the universe works but it is not the same thing as a mathematical proof. This is why scientists spend time confirming that existing theories work in new situations but you never hear of mathematicians checking the pythagorus theorem again to confirm that it still works with new right-angled triangles.
Everything needs to have a payoff.
The pay off is that you get a better job, can manage you finances more effectively and generally have a better chance at a good standard of living. Part of the education process needs to teach students that although summer jobs somewhere like McDonalds would be an effective, but not fun, way to do that. See you can learn something valuable even while not having fun! ;-)
I'd rather a dumb kid have fun with math and learn something...
That's a great ideal but the problem is that the smart kid who would like to learn more maths and science does not because of the song and dance required to entertain the less gifted kid (I assume you actually meant 'dum' and not that he had a disabling speech impediment). The problem with this is that the smart kids are the ones who grow up to be doctors, engineers, scientists etc and are the ones more likely to have amazing ideas and innovations which improve everyone's lives, including the less gifted kid's. They can result in better medical care or even provide nicer, better paid jobs.
If you insist on treating them to a song and dance routine the smart kids are likely to end up being the ones who tune out and think school is a waste of time. So if you are going to have one lot tuning out of school the question is which one is the least damaging for society? I would argue that it is very clearly the smart kids which you need to teach and keep engaged. The less gifted kids are not likely to end up with jobs that need an education as much as the smart kids, well except for those who become politicians but that's a different discussion.
It would certainly be beneficial for society to educate everyone as much as possible but that requires streaming and every time I suggest that there are a series of posts declaring how unfair it is....and yet people are still happy to allow streaming for school sports and not insist that the level of sports education is kept low enough that even the most sport-inept student finds it fun. So if streaming is bad lets at least apply it fairly everywhere and when the standards of professional sport teams starts to decline perhaps then we can have a sensible discussion about differing educational needs.
although the results showed that 3W/kg GSM is more harmful than 6W/kg GSM
The results did NOT show that. All the results show is that if you take a small sample size and take a large number of measurements you can find a noticeable fluctuation. Suppose I told you that I took a coin and tossed it 10 times and got heads every time. With this result you might start to think that the coin is weighted somehow to give more heads. However supposed I told you that I had done that experiment 100 times with statistically identical coins and only once got 10 heads? Suddenly it becomes a lot less statistically significant. This is exactly what they have done here. They have taken 4 small samples and tested for multiple different conditions which is equivalent to make over 100 measurements. That they then find that a few of these are 5% likely (more like only 7-8 heads in our example) is not at all surprising.
People who walk about with their noses in their screens will stand a much higher chance of dying like a bug on a windshield than from radiation.
I doubt you would get that result if you let the people who did this study test that hypothesis. There is not a single uncertainty on a measurement shown in the paper as far as I can tell and they are dealing with tiny statistics which are prone to large fluctuations. Their most statistically significant result seems to by about 5% likely to occur by random chance (based on their own statistical calculation which frankly I would not trust at this point) but with just over 100 measurements it seems very reasonable that this would occur by chance. Indeed they even point out that this rate was achieved in one of the 13 control samples they list in the appendix D!
With a sample size of 90 differences of a few incidents are not statistically significant when you are making lots of measurements and there is a high degree of correlation which has to be taken into account since all comparisons are made to a single control group so a statistical fluctuation there affects all measurements. As the saying goes there are lies, damn lies and statistics and this paper is very much lacking in statistics...not that the authors are deliberately lying but their conclusions do not seem statistically valid.
Sound good?
No but it does sound like you are already well on the way to becoming a politician.
You'll need to read the EULA to determine if you have been granted a right to resell.
That depends on the country. If you cannot see and agree to the EULA before purchase then it in places like the UK it is totally unenforceable because the sale has already taken place and was agreed to without the EULA.
It's about progression and self motivation at an appropriate level.
True but it must also be educational at an appropriate level of rigour. The problem with a lot of school education today is that making it fun becomes the primary goal and maintaining educational standards comes in second. This leads to the erosion of educational standards very rapidly - just look at the appalling level of maths education in schools in the UK, Canada and the US today. The correct order of priority is to determine what needs to be taught and after that determine how to teach it in the most engaging way possible: this last part is where the teachers are the experts. If you can't come up with an engaging way to teach it then you just do the best you can.
...and yet strangely I have written papers and been peer reviewed which seems like more relevant experience than knowing about a national organization in a country of which I am not a citizen. The link the other poster provided did show that they are responsible for PNAS which I have heard of in the context of biology but since I'm not a biologist and not American and I am not aware of anyone publishing in PNAS in my field the US National Academy of Sciences is not really that relevant.
A pig with human consciousness? They've already succeeded! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Donald Trump.
I thought his problem is that he lacked a human conscience?
Actually my first concern would be about diseases. Does having animals with human-like organs inside them make it easier for diseases which affect that animal to mutate into a version which will infect humans? Since we are talking pigs the example that comes to mind immediately is something like swine flu.
Force of habit
Congratulations, I think that you've managed to find an even worse reason than just being greedy! If we have companies that just act like jerks for no reason at all because the are so used to doing so that they can't stop we have a real problem.
This wasn't really a study in a journal; it was a synthesis of many published studies into an over 400 page report. Not exactly the sort of thing to be published in your average journal yeah?
No, aggregation of multiple other studies is exactly the sort of thing which gets published in journals. I've seen these sorts of papers in both medical and education journals. In fact in particle physics we have the Particle Data Group who collect the latest analyses from the field and publish a full journal volume every few years with a statistical combination of all the results. However this is a bit different since most of it does not change between publications and it is intended to act as a reference book for particle properties.
...and no I've never heard of the US national academy of sciences. I'm not American but I was in the US for a few years. I guess they are not as important in physics as you seem to think.
Keeping back seed died on most farms in the USA quite some time before GMO became a thing.
So why do the companies selling GMO seed need to prevent farmers from doing this then? If nobody does it then it won't hurt their profits at all. The only reason which makes sense is that it would prevent them from jacking up prices to obscene levels sometime in the future when there are no alternatives left.
How much more can they disclose?
Disclosure is good but there is more than that to good science: it needs to be independently peer reviewed. Unfortunately they seem to have avoided going the usual peer-reviewed journal route and have arranged their own reviewers themselves which is unusual. I've also never heard of this group before despite being a physicist who worked in the US for a few years.
That's not to say that the science in the report is wrong it's just when a group you have never heard of publishes it's own report without going through a well known and respected peer reviewed journal which is how science is typically published it raises a few red flags of concern. This could have been largely avoided by publishing the report as a peer reviewed paper.
This is the cheap option.
The cheap option is to make sure the exam invigilator is not asleep and have strict rules of what devices are allowed in exams i.e. ones with zero remote communication abilities. It's not hard to do.
His philanthropy may even be what is irritating them, who knows?
Actually given how out of date they seem I suspect that it may be because they have only just upgraded to Vista.
Actually I would be a lot more worried with self driving cars if I were an Uber driver. They may have courted technology to the point where they are replacing traditional taxis but technology is a fickle mistress and will probably soon be dumping them soon too.
The airline industry may contract somewhat but lets face it they don't make most of their money from short hops between cities within a few hours drive of each other. In fact if they are smart about it and run a self-driving airport bus service they can probably collect passengers from a wider area into a single airport and gain economies of scale.
That's why the the kid won a Maths B. Those who win real maths competitions tend to get As.
I hope they billed the idiot for the inconvenience, expense and defamation...
Everyone here keeps blaming the idiot who made the complaint but what about those who investigated it? It's well known that there are idiots out there so when someone comes forward with words to the effect of "I think the person next to me is a terrorist because they are writing something I don't understand on paper." the correct response from the authorities should be to ignore it because they are clearly talking to one of those idiots. If they don't exercise some judgment as to which complaints are credible and which are just nuts then there is a good chance real terrorists will be able to use this to distract them.
it's "fewer votes" not "less votes"
the same way you say "greater than" not "greater then"
It's also customary to start sentences with capital letters and end them with a full stop. When it comes to your own posts it seems that you grasp the idea that an internet post does not have to contain precisely correct English (mine certainly don't). So it is rather strange that you won't let similar lapses in other people's posts pass without criticism.
The "massive" subsidies for solar/wind turn out to be small compared to the subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel industry.
What really matters is the subsidy per unit of energy. Currently solar, wind and hydro are a far smaller industries than coal, oil and gas so I would expect the subsidy to be far smaller in overall terms.
Would a reasonable person believe that people would stay within the bounds of the law in such a competition?
The standard should be would a reasonable person believe that another reasonable person would stay within the bounds of the law for such a competition. If we have to start worrying about what the stupidest, most irresponsible person out there might do we are in real trouble as a society.
But I will not disagree that a jury might find them liable which is why they will pay out. I am just arguing that this in no way matches any sense of justice but sadly justice seems to have very little to do with courts nowadays.