I was under the impression there are designs available for coal plants* that don't emit anything but CO2?
I think that's the point. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and trying to avoid pumping lots of it into the atmosphere is probably a good idea since there is an increasing body of evidence that it is impacting our climate.
Nope. Fossil fuel add to GHGs in the atmosphere. Biomass can be neutral.
Technically fossil fuels can be carbon neutral too if you look at million year timescales and take efforts to preserve peat bogs and the like which will become coal in a few millions years from now. The problem is that this sort of timescale involves a lot of carbon stored in the atmosphere in the form of CO2 which will trigger significant climate change. What we need are power sources which are carbon dioxide neutral on short timescales which is what biomass is and fossil fuels are not.
i'm so sick of anonymous. they may have strong opinions, but the US election is an internal matter. we'll sort it out ourselves. butt out.
Perhaps you would like to share that point of view with your current government which seems intent on telling Britain how it should vote in the upcoming EU referendum.
You are missing the point. I'm not saying that a computer will not be a better driver on average than a human what I am saying is that it will not be a perfect driver either because it was programmed by a human. Therefore when the rare occasion occurs when the computer does something stupid I want manual controls so I can take over. I do not want to be sitting their helpless cursing some nameless programmer with my last breath because the car has suddenly switched to British locale and now thinks it has to drive on the left hand side of the road!
Why would you need to buy roadside assistance when you are buying a car *service*?
Why would I buy a car service instead of a car? You have no guarantee of availability, no guarantee of the cleanliness of the vehicle and no guarantee of reliability. If a car service were such a great idea then why do people own cars today instead of use taxis and car rentals? Having autonomous cars does very little to change this other than replace taxi drivers with computers.
Some 99% of accidents are caused by human error. An autonomous vehicle will be able to prevent almost all of those errors
I somehow doubt this. Initially many of the vehicles on the road will be human controlled. In an autonomous vs. human driver vehicle accident it is not always going to be possible for the computer to avoid an accident if the human does something stupid. In addition it is unlikely that early autonomous vehicles will be sophisticated enough to identify erratic drivers and realize that they may be more likely to do something strange like a human river would.
So while I think that autonomous cars will be safer than average it is still not clear to me how much safer than average they will be and until there is some hard data rather that just our suppositions people will naturally think that they are above average drivers and so therefore potentially better than the computer no matter how erroneous that conclusion is.
Instead the autonomous vehicle is already many crashes behind on the average human driver...
When purchasing such a car though the question I really want to know is not whether it is better than the average human driver but whether it is better than me. Being simply "better than average" does not inspire much confidence when you see what the "average" driver is like sometimes. Is it safer than 75% of people? 90%? 99? 99.999%? etc.
If it is only better than 75% of drivers I'm probably going to tell myself that I can drive better than it can. However if it is better than 99.999% of drivers even if I try hard I'm never really going to convince myself that I'm that good a driver. However to know to that degree of accuracy I expect that you still need higher statistics.
..for the first time in history this will be a shift removing the fundamental freedom of travel from control of the people on board.
You mean like the Docklands Light Railway? or before that the Victoria line which has been fully automated for 53 years (although it still carries drivers as a union requirement)? or the countless automatic trains between airport terminals?
There is nothing fundamental about computer driven cars but it would be an incredibly useful technology to have.
Yes, their current safety record is impressive, but it's fake.
It's not fake it is just statistically limited in the same way that Concorde went from being the safest commercial passenger plane on record to the most dangerous with one crash.
My car insurance already includes the important part of what AAA offers: Roadside assistance.
Actually rather than the AA/CAA/AAA (*AA) being redundant it will surely be insurers who become unnecessary. If your car is being driven by some Google algorithm then how can you be liable for a crash? The car should probably come with insurance, at least while driven under the supplied algorithm. I would expect that the *AA will actually do better out of this because people will not get roadside assistance with their insurance and will need to purchase it separately.
Even modern airline pilots don't like the idea of not having overrides on their planes.
I'd not trust an autonomous car if there were no manual override. Computers may be able to drive better than the average human but the human brain is less prone to a spontaneous crash from an errant cosmic ray flipping a bit when doing 110 km/h down the motorway.
How will that solve anything though? Once an alternative gets popular enough the same people will come after them with the same frivolous claims. The problem is the US law which lets them do this with impunity, not the particular website which gets targeted by these idiots.
Why? How is a "president" more valuable to a university than a "professor"?
Look at it the other way around. If I screw up as a professor then only the students in the courses I teach are affected. If you screw up as University president then everyone in the University is affected so you need to attract competent faculty to consider the position. The other issue is that unlike a regular faculty position which has tenure and so it is hard to fire you even if you do screw up as a president if you screw up once you can get immediately fired. If you want a faculty member to consider that increased level of insecurity there needs to be some reward.
If the university president manages to raise $50million in donations, he's worth the $1million salary. You justify it in practical terms.
That is simply not true for two very good reasons. First the question you have to ask is if you paid the president $500k/year would you still get someone who can bring in $50m in donations? You are only getting value for money if the inflated salary results in significant gains over what someone willing to accept a more reasonable salary would bring in. This type of discussion seems to be completely lacking when it comes to hiring University admin.
The second problem is that unlike private companies Universities do not have a single pot of money for a budget but instead they have many pots of money which may each have restrictions on what they can be spent on. This has resulted in a significant problem in the university where I work in that lots of money from the operating budget (which can pay for just about anything) has been spent on bringing in donations. However the donors do not want to support the general operation of the University but rather want to see their money going to specific items such as student grants, named chairs etc. While it may be true that more money was brought in than was spent the money that came in could only be spent on specific things. The result was that it exacerbated an already tight budget situation by siphoning money from operating and returning it in a way which was restricted to things that were nice but not essential to the University.
However, besides all this, one of the things which people in business typically forget is that what is most important to a University is not the money but the research and teaching which goes on. University administration should not be judged on how much money they bring in but on how they have managed to improve the quality of research and teaching which the University does. There may be a correlation between funding and this but I expect that you will find that it is the research and teaching which drives the funding and not the reverse.
It's not about it being a robot or about pushing blame. In an emergency a sub-optimal percentage of people take charge
It can't be that because as we have seen before people will quite happily follow their car's GPS instructions even if it leads them down a cart track in Swaledale - and that is far from the only example of people following their GPS when it is very clearly wrong.
I think it would fall foul of discrimination laws in Europe and maybe the US. For example, someone with a medical condition that causes weight gain...
They have already had that lawsuit in Canada and so now the airlines have to accommodate extremely obese people with extra seats due to human rights laws. I'm just waiting for a tall person to sue them for free access to exit row seats and then I'll be set...but apparently us tall people seem to be far less litigious although with the new long distance cabins Air Canada is introducing I expect the reduction in legroom those have might be the tipping point...
Why are you bringing facts into a greed and envy discussion? It's supposed to be about how we should hate the 1% and want to rob them blind.
Well one of the facts is that not all of there are actually in the 1%. If you look at the distribution some are below $50k although I do have to wonder exactly what university/college they are president of at that salary level.
You can actually see this in the >a href="https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-trends/2016-economic-trends/et-20160224-salaries-of-private-college-presidents.aspx">article data. The bulk of the population lies between 0-$500k (I do wonder exactly where they found those getting under $50k) and there is a tail out to insane $1m+ salaries.
The statistical analysis in this article is absolutely appalling. First you are right that they are not comparing to real CEOs. If you look at the data they use for the CEOs this apparently includes local and state government managers and, even worse, primary/elementary and secondary/high schools by which I presume they mean the head teacher which I don't think anyone thinks off when you say 'CEO'.
If you just look at the "Management of Companies and Enterprises" category then the average wage amount increases significantly to $210,120 but as you note there is no mention anywhere in the article at all about bonuses and it specifically mentions "wages" so I doubt that this is in any way representative of the actual compensation a CEO gets while the article clearly states that they included all bonuses paid to university presidents. This is clearly an appalling abuse of statistics and so any conclusions the article draws cannot be trusted.
...which is sad because I actually think they have a point which their article actually does contain the evidence for if only they knew how to analyse it. If you look at the distribution of compensation then you will note that there is a significant tail out to insanely high values and this is where the problem lies. University presidents should get a high salary - certainly higher than the faculty and staff that they manage unless there are exceptional circumstances e.g. Nobel prize winner - but I fail to see how $1m+ salaries can be justified.
In fact the last time the university where I worked advertized for a president four faculty from Arts wrote a joint, open application for the job (which was shared with the local media) to protest against these ridiculously high presidential salaries. As they pointed out you could hire all four of them, give them each a very significant raise (IIRC 50%) and still save money over the out going president's salary and this way they would be able to do four times as much work. Needless to say they were not offered the job!
Inferring things about populations from tiny samples is kind of how statistics works.
Yes but you are limited in what you can infer by the ratio of your sample size to the entire population even if you have a random sample to start with. If you ask one US voter which presidential candidate they are going to vote for and they say X you cannot then infer that X will win the election because there are a few hundred million more voters out there. The best you can do with such tiny statistics is set a limit on the number of Earths out there and it will not be a very good one!
Why can't a single massive star collapsing into a black hole not trigger gravitational waves
It's not just a matter of producing the waves you need to produce a large enough amplitude that you can detect it. Planets orbiting stars should in theory produce gravitational waves too but the masses and accelerations involved create such a tiny amplitude at such a low frequency that even within the solar system we can't detect that source.
There was also no neutrino pulse detected which the literature suggests should exist if the merger took place near matter. However what I don't understand is the mass of the black holes. I understood that supernovae generated black holes of only a few solar masses, far less than 20+. Now I suppose it's possible that each one had merged before but if they have been wandering around in a region of space filled with stellar remnants surely they would have also picked up an accretion disk too in which case why no neutrinos?
That's not what he's saying. He says that earths are statistically rare.
And how can he possibly know that given the tiny sample size of solar systems we have seen so far compared to the number in the universe? Suppose the chance of an Earth-like world forming is one in a billion. Given the number of solar systems we have studied so far it would be entirely possible that we had not seen one so far and yet with 400 billion stars there would be 400 "Earths" in the Milky-way alone let alone in the billions of galaxies in the universe.
Extrapolating to a universe of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars using a sample size of what, a few thousand?, ten thousand?, is statistically daft...and having a model which agrees with your statistically insignificant sample does not make it any better.
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I was under the impression there are designs available for coal plants* that don't emit anything but CO2?
I think that's the point. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and trying to avoid pumping lots of it into the atmosphere is probably a good idea since there is an increasing body of evidence that it is impacting our climate.
Nope. Fossil fuel add to GHGs in the atmosphere. Biomass can be neutral.
Technically fossil fuels can be carbon neutral too if you look at million year timescales and take efforts to preserve peat bogs and the like which will become coal in a few millions years from now. The problem is that this sort of timescale involves a lot of carbon stored in the atmosphere in the form of CO2 which will trigger significant climate change. What we need are power sources which are carbon dioxide neutral on short timescales which is what biomass is and fossil fuels are not.
i'm so sick of anonymous. they may have strong opinions, but the US election is an internal matter. we'll sort it out ourselves. butt out.
Perhaps you would like to share that point of view with your current government which seems intent on telling Britain how it should vote in the upcoming EU referendum.
You are missing the point. I'm not saying that a computer will not be a better driver on average than a human what I am saying is that it will not be a perfect driver either because it was programmed by a human. Therefore when the rare occasion occurs when the computer does something stupid I want manual controls so I can take over. I do not want to be sitting their helpless cursing some nameless programmer with my last breath because the car has suddenly switched to British locale and now thinks it has to drive on the left hand side of the road!
Why would you need to buy roadside assistance when you are buying a car *service*?
Why would I buy a car service instead of a car? You have no guarantee of availability, no guarantee of the cleanliness of the vehicle and no guarantee of reliability. If a car service were such a great idea then why do people own cars today instead of use taxis and car rentals? Having autonomous cars does very little to change this other than replace taxi drivers with computers.
Some 99% of accidents are caused by human error. An autonomous vehicle will be able to prevent almost all of those errors
I somehow doubt this. Initially many of the vehicles on the road will be human controlled. In an autonomous vs. human driver vehicle accident it is not always going to be possible for the computer to avoid an accident if the human does something stupid. In addition it is unlikely that early autonomous vehicles will be sophisticated enough to identify erratic drivers and realize that they may be more likely to do something strange like a human river would.
So while I think that autonomous cars will be safer than average it is still not clear to me how much safer than average they will be and until there is some hard data rather that just our suppositions people will naturally think that they are above average drivers and so therefore potentially better than the computer no matter how erroneous that conclusion is.
Instead the autonomous vehicle is already many crashes behind on the average human driver...
When purchasing such a car though the question I really want to know is not whether it is better than the average human driver but whether it is better than me. Being simply "better than average" does not inspire much confidence when you see what the "average" driver is like sometimes. Is it safer than 75% of people? 90%? 99? 99.999%? etc.
If it is only better than 75% of drivers I'm probably going to tell myself that I can drive better than it can. However if it is better than 99.999% of drivers even if I try hard I'm never really going to convince myself that I'm that good a driver. However to know to that degree of accuracy I expect that you still need higher statistics.
..for the first time in history this will be a shift removing the fundamental freedom of travel from control of the people on board.
You mean like the Docklands Light Railway? or before that the Victoria line which has been fully automated for 53 years (although it still carries drivers as a union requirement)? or the countless automatic trains between airport terminals?
There is nothing fundamental about computer driven cars but it would be an incredibly useful technology to have.
Yes, their current safety record is impressive, but it's fake.
It's not fake it is just statistically limited in the same way that Concorde went from being the safest commercial passenger plane on record to the most dangerous with one crash.
My car insurance already includes the important part of what AAA offers: Roadside assistance.
Actually rather than the AA/CAA/AAA (*AA) being redundant it will surely be insurers who become unnecessary. If your car is being driven by some Google algorithm then how can you be liable for a crash? The car should probably come with insurance, at least while driven under the supplied algorithm. I would expect that the *AA will actually do better out of this because people will not get roadside assistance with their insurance and will need to purchase it separately.
Even modern airline pilots don't like the idea of not having overrides on their planes.
I'd not trust an autonomous car if there were no manual override. Computers may be able to drive better than the average human but the human brain is less prone to a spontaneous crash from an errant cosmic ray flipping a bit when doing 110 km/h down the motorway.
Can't we just promote the alternatives?
How will that solve anything though? Once an alternative gets popular enough the same people will come after them with the same frivolous claims. The problem is the US law which lets them do this with impunity, not the particular website which gets targeted by these idiots.
Why? How is a "president" more valuable to a university than a "professor"?
Look at it the other way around. If I screw up as a professor then only the students in the courses I teach are affected. If you screw up as University president then everyone in the University is affected so you need to attract competent faculty to consider the position. The other issue is that unlike a regular faculty position which has tenure and so it is hard to fire you even if you do screw up as a president if you screw up once you can get immediately fired. If you want a faculty member to consider that increased level of insecurity there needs to be some reward.
If the university president manages to raise $50million in donations, he's worth the $1million salary. You justify it in practical terms.
That is simply not true for two very good reasons. First the question you have to ask is if you paid the president $500k/year would you still get someone who can bring in $50m in donations? You are only getting value for money if the inflated salary results in significant gains over what someone willing to accept a more reasonable salary would bring in. This type of discussion seems to be completely lacking when it comes to hiring University admin.
The second problem is that unlike private companies Universities do not have a single pot of money for a budget but instead they have many pots of money which may each have restrictions on what they can be spent on. This has resulted in a significant problem in the university where I work in that lots of money from the operating budget (which can pay for just about anything) has been spent on bringing in donations. However the donors do not want to support the general operation of the University but rather want to see their money going to specific items such as student grants, named chairs etc. While it may be true that more money was brought in than was spent the money that came in could only be spent on specific things. The result was that it exacerbated an already tight budget situation by siphoning money from operating and returning it in a way which was restricted to things that were nice but not essential to the University.
However, besides all this, one of the things which people in business typically forget is that what is most important to a University is not the money but the research and teaching which goes on. University administration should not be judged on how much money they bring in but on how they have managed to improve the quality of research and teaching which the University does. There may be a correlation between funding and this but I expect that you will find that it is the research and teaching which drives the funding and not the reverse.
It's not about it being a robot or about pushing blame. In an emergency a sub-optimal percentage of people take charge
It can't be that because as we have seen before people will quite happily follow their car's GPS instructions even if it leads them down a cart track in Swaledale - and that is far from the only example of people following their GPS when it is very clearly wrong.
So essentially, if you have someone next to you who's eaten all the pies, you get a smaller seat?
No they solved that - they no longer serve food either.
I think it would fall foul of discrimination laws in Europe and maybe the US. For example, someone with a medical condition that causes weight gain...
They have already had that lawsuit in Canada and so now the airlines have to accommodate extremely obese people with extra seats due to human rights laws. I'm just waiting for a tall person to sue them for free access to exit row seats and then I'll be set...but apparently us tall people seem to be far less litigious although with the new long distance cabins Air Canada is introducing I expect the reduction in legroom those have might be the tipping point...
Actually there are even better drawings in the other crazy idea Airbus came up with: stacking passengers.
Why are you bringing facts into a greed and envy discussion? It's supposed to be about how we should hate the 1% and want to rob them blind.
Well one of the facts is that not all of there are actually in the 1%. If you look at the distribution some are below $50k although I do have to wonder exactly what university/college they are president of at that salary level.
Same rational as above.
You can actually see this in the >a href="https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-trends/2016-economic-trends/et-20160224-salaries-of-private-college-presidents.aspx">article data. The bulk of the population lies between 0-$500k (I do wonder exactly where they found those getting under $50k) and there is a tail out to insane $1m+ salaries.
The statistical analysis in this article is absolutely appalling. First you are right that they are not comparing to real CEOs. If you look at the data they use for the CEOs this apparently includes local and state government managers and, even worse, primary/elementary and secondary/high schools by which I presume they mean the head teacher which I don't think anyone thinks off when you say 'CEO'.
...which is sad because I actually think they have a point which their article actually does contain the evidence for if only they knew how to analyse it. If you look at the distribution of compensation then you will note that there is a significant tail out to insanely high values and this is where the problem lies. University presidents should get a high salary - certainly higher than the faculty and staff that they manage unless there are exceptional circumstances e.g. Nobel prize winner - but I fail to see how $1m+ salaries can be justified.
If you just look at the "Management of Companies and Enterprises" category then the average wage amount increases significantly to $210,120 but as you note there is no mention anywhere in the article at all about bonuses and it specifically mentions "wages" so I doubt that this is in any way representative of the actual compensation a CEO gets while the article clearly states that they included all bonuses paid to university presidents. This is clearly an appalling abuse of statistics and so any conclusions the article draws cannot be trusted.
In fact the last time the university where I worked advertized for a president four faculty from Arts wrote a joint, open application for the job (which was shared with the local media) to protest against these ridiculously high presidential salaries. As they pointed out you could hire all four of them, give them each a very significant raise (IIRC 50%) and still save money over the out going president's salary and this way they would be able to do four times as much work. Needless to say they were not offered the job!
Inferring things about populations from tiny samples is kind of how statistics works.
Yes but you are limited in what you can infer by the ratio of your sample size to the entire population even if you have a random sample to start with. If you ask one US voter which presidential candidate they are going to vote for and they say X you cannot then infer that X will win the election because there are a few hundred million more voters out there. The best you can do with such tiny statistics is set a limit on the number of Earths out there and it will not be a very good one!
Why can't a single massive star collapsing into a black hole not trigger gravitational waves
It's not just a matter of producing the waves you need to produce a large enough amplitude that you can detect it. Planets orbiting stars should in theory produce gravitational waves too but the masses and accelerations involved create such a tiny amplitude at such a low frequency that even within the solar system we can't detect that source.
There was also no neutrino pulse detected which the literature suggests should exist if the merger took place near matter. However what I don't understand is the mass of the black holes. I understood that supernovae generated black holes of only a few solar masses, far less than 20+. Now I suppose it's possible that each one had merged before but if they have been wandering around in a region of space filled with stellar remnants surely they would have also picked up an accretion disk too in which case why no neutrinos?
That's not what he's saying. He says that earths are statistically rare.
And how can he possibly know that given the tiny sample size of solar systems we have seen so far compared to the number in the universe? Suppose the chance of an Earth-like world forming is one in a billion. Given the number of solar systems we have studied so far it would be entirely possible that we had not seen one so far and yet with 400 billion stars there would be 400 "Earths" in the Milky-way alone let alone in the billions of galaxies in the universe.
Extrapolating to a universe of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars using a sample size of what, a few thousand?, ten thousand?, is statistically daft...and having a model which agrees with your statistically insignificant sample does not make it any better.