I would consider Yau's attitude, if the New Yorker piece is accurate, to be academic fraud, plagarism and the wilfull falsifying of results
Your post is full of hyperbole and flamebait. There is no falsifying of results or fraud here. There is no plagiarism - sources are completely referenced and acknowledged. No-one doubts the immense value of Cao-Zhu's (or Morgan/Tian's) work as a exposition, especially given the sketchy nature of the arXiv preprints - the dispute centres around whether their own (and implicitly, Yau's) valuation of their contribution is justified.
Yau has claimed that he does not understand the proof. So where does the problem lie - with pto proof or Yau? Well, obviously Yau. If the problem was the proof, then Yau could establish where the error was that resulted in the proof being nonsense. The inability to establish such a proof does not mean that Perelman's work is perfect, only that it is beyond Yau to make any claims about it whatsoever.
The notion of "correctness" of a proof is not always as clear-cut as you might think, because different things are obvious and taken as granted at different levels. Being able to prove is different to communicating a proof. Yau obviously takes the idea of accessibility of a proof seriously - which is no bad thing.
Yau is without question amongst the greatest geometers alive. He proved Calabi's conjecture about Ricci-flat metrics on kahler manifolds with zero first Chern class. He proved the positive energy theorem in general relativity. He proved Severi's conjecture (the complex projective version of the Poincare conjecture). He pioneered the use of methods from the analysis of elliptic differential equations in differential geometry. To use a programming analogy, what Yau claims happened would be like Andrew Morton submitting a kernel patch which Alan Cox was not able to understand. In these circumstances there is clearly a problem.
This is not to say that Yau has not blown the problem up out of all proportion. This does not negate his flaws of ego and wanting "too much credit". This does not excuse his ridiculous political games. This doesn't have anything to do with the fact that Yau probably isn't a very nice person. But you should realise that now the dust is settling nobody disputes the validity of the actual mathematics.
You can clearly see Yau's dismissive attitude in the slides of his own talk. But the dispute here is human, not scientific. Suggesting that the IMU should revoke Yau's Field's medal makes you sound like an idiot.
Perhaps it would be more productive to consider awards in math and science for people who do an excellent job of popularising or explaining existing material
Such prizes already exist (though are not well known outside the mathematical/scientific community). Most famous is probably the Kalinga prize. Other examples include the Michael Faraday medal, the Peano prize, and at a undergraduate level the AMS Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. There are almost certainly many others I don't know.
Citation and statistics obviously help. But they aren't the be-all and end-all.
Example 1: Interest Rate Prediction Markets Traders make judgements based on lots of market data - consumer confidence surveys, growth predictions, oil/stock/property price trends, major company results, etc. When you have a particular outlook it is almost always easy to come up with LOTS of figures to support that position. These are all verifiable statistics! To objectively ensure you are taking into account a representative sample when making your decision is what separates the good traders from those who (often unknowingly!) rely only on luck.
Example 2: Microsoft vs GPL Imagine the following argument from Microsoft to a PHB. Microsoft: "If a GPL component takes up even 0.1% of your (binary linked) codebase your entire codebase must be GPL licensed when you distribute. Therefore the GPL is a disproportionate license." This is verifiable and true, and seems on the surface to be a perfectly cogent (economic) argument against using GPL'd components. Asking yourself "why is this information coming from Microsoft" helps understand things far more clearly.
Example 3: Groklaw vs SCO The magistrate judge granted SCO's motion for ridiculously wide discovery. PJ gave all sorts of plausible legal and technical arguments why this wouldn't happen. She backed this up meticulously with quotations, citations, etc. And yet, by not looking at the bigger picture - namely, that discovery is almost always broadly interpreted, many (myself included) were shocked at this decision which in retrospect seems obvious.
Example 4: Dihydrogen Monoxide OK, this one is stupid, but it shows how easy it is to misattribute symptoms for the cause.
Now, back on-topic, I know next to nothing about the LSB beyond 'it seeks to make to distribute software cross-distro'. Ulrich's arguments seem excellent to me. But without any deep domain knowledge, it would be foolish not to ask questions like "Does RedHat have business reasons for disliking the LSB?", "Does RedHat seek to be a controlling influence on the direction of the LSB?", etc.
It's perfectly reasonable to suppose that there is no agenda here - after all, RedHat aren't known for widespread FUDing. But facts can easily be twisted/cleverly presented to suit an agenda, and so it is advisable to consider side-channels too.
Unfortunately this is no longer true. I tried for many years to adopt a "judge by content, not by source" policy, but have realised it's just hopeless idealism.
There has always been spin and FUD, but these days it has developed a very organised, very slick phenomenon. This means that you need to give increasing weight to background motivations to pierce the veil.
It's been done, welcome to Uncyclopedia, and no, it doesn't keep trolls away from Wikipedia in the slightest, but is surprisingly comprehensive and always good for a chuckle.
That commenter does seem pretty over the top in her praise of Microsoft's practices!
Having said which, she has an excellent point. Your average user won't care about what's under the hood unless it directly affects their experience.
And UI is very important - one of the core differentiators between browsers. Let's see why I like Firefox:
- Tabbed Browsing (UI)
- Find as you Type (UI)
- Live Bookmarks (UI)
- Integrated Search (UI)
- Smart Keywords (UI)
- Download Manager (UI - OK, needs a lot of work)
- about:config (UI - OK, this is stretching it...)
Also, UI is crucial to security. It might not prevent buffer overflows but it can help prevent phishing:
- Gold address bar for secure sites (UI)
- Punycoding IDN domain names (UI)
- SSL certificates (UI - if they aren't displayed in a usable way, then no-one will use them)
- Extension installs (UI - it waits for a few seconds before allowing you to click 'yes')
To the end user (not web developers) UI is one of the few things that makes one browser different to another. Of course, this changes when they can't access their favourite certain sites because they
use some obscure plugin, but even then, how to install the plugin becomes a matter of UI!
Of course to the technically inclined things like support for MathML, SVG, and other rendering IS important.
BTW what criteria do you use when selecting your browser?
Lie Groups aren't necessarily matrices, although matrix groups like GL(n,C) and various subgroups do provide the canonical examples.
A Lie Group is simultaneously: 1) a manifold - basically, a infinitely differentiable (smooth) surface that locally looks like Euclidean space at every point) and 2) an abstract group with the group operations of composition and inversion smooth (infinitely differentiable).
The basic reason that Lie Groups are so important as a class of manifolds is that properties like left multiplication or conjugation by group elements automatically give you a mechanism to "travel around" the surface easily.
There is a very strong representation theory of Lie Groups, (and also of Lie Algebras, which are closely related).
PS Thanks for mathforge.net! Keep up the good work.
Um, if you read the Mozilla Prefetch FAQ, you'll learn that this only happens when you are not using bandwidth for something else initiated by the current Mozilla application. Worry:-)
Although it could do with some severe usability improvements - why can't I select searches in more than one language or license at a time? Have sent them feedback.
bugzilla.mozilla.org (no links from/. allowed) also has excellent code search ideas WITHIN products, some of which may be amenable to switching between products.
Hmmm... I was hoping it would be Google helping you search through Sourceforge and other open repositories in a more directed way... improved code search tools would be great, but this isn't bad!
Credit cards are trivial to track anyway, so no immediate extra privacy implications as long as the data isn't retained for too long.
This way, if someone steals your card info and puts their own fingerprint info on it (or onto the back-end database, or whatever), there is an immediate method to start tracking them.
Of course, there are ways to defeat fingerprint scanners, see Schneier for a starting point.
I therefore think that the danger here isn't in the fingerprinting itself, which is just another way of tracking usage. It is that cost/risk of fraud will be passed on from the banks to the consumer (or possibly stores).
On a more interesting note, I couldn't find many of the big 'known names' in the FLOSS world. OK, my search was rather quick and dirty, but I couldn't find RMS/Perens/ESR/Moglen/Lessig etc...
Maybe they realised that trying to outcompete Microsoft when it comes to traditional advertising is hard? That evangelism has a far higher return?
Of course, it might just be that the reason they all like FLOSS is because they are stingy;-)
So I see what you mean, but it is not interesting: the point is not the data, it's the theories about what caused it and the predictions about what it will lead to.
True. But I would argue that the weight of evidence strongly suggests that current models are usably accurate if not entirely so.
No, the point of the story is that many scientists accept it as fact, not that there is no contrary evidence.
You are certainly entitled to believe this, but remember that whilst a lot of these experiments will require expensive equipment etc, a lot won't - there will almost certainly be a few you can go out and verify yourself! The same is true of studies which may point in the opposite direction too! This is what peer review is all about.
OK, funding etc muddies waters about motive, but I believe that the majority (and certainly enough!) accredited scientists are genuinely interested in digging into the truth rather than propogating their pet theory, and so peer review works. That isn't to say that there aren't unscrupulous scientists out there, or ones who use their experience, expertise and reputation to promulgate their viewpoints unscientifically as fact. But more or less, the system works. There has almost certainly been enough independent peer review over the last 10 years to have reasonable confidence in these studies. Note: I did not say, that this means we can have ABSOLUTE confidence in their modelling, indeed, such a thing is impossible. But the models are probably pretty usable.
And once again - if we don't trust the peer review process we can always replicate their results (given enough money, time, etc;-)... There are enough people who care sufficiently much on both sides of this issue to keep things (largely) honest, I think.
Of course, I could be wrong, it could all be part of a huge conspiracy by the hydrogen cell manufacturers;-)
So I can be skeptical about it, but I should accept it? Huh?
It is foolish to ignore effects. Causes and causation mechanisms are far more complicated. As the weight of evidence for causation grows, you should become increasingly comfortable with the concept that it is a plausible model, even if the mechanisms underlying it turn out to be off or wrong. Note: this does not mean you can't continue to be sceptical about this being the actual model, indeed, scientific history is peppered with examples of this turning out to be untrue, and we don't have 'actual' models for anything. Nevertheless, it is a usable model.
That's just plain deceitful.
That there is no real evidence to the contrary seems to be the entire point of this story (unless all the relevant papers are more than 10 years old)! If you are sufficiently sceptical you should be able to replicate most of these experiments yourself, and verify the effects - this is exactly why peer review is important. If you have control of the environment, you should also be able to verify (certain) causations. You will never be able to determine whether the proposed mechanisms for this causation are true or not, or whether they entirely represent the 'real' situation, but it is perfectly possible to model very closely.
It is wise to act 'as though it were true' even if it doesn't show the whole picture. You can be sceptical about the theory in its entirety. This does not mean you should not accept that there is a demonstrated causation effect.
We DO have studies showing there is (almost certainly) a real world causation effect. One that comes to mind, which I have posted in another comment, is that there was perceptible climate change in the three days after September 11. The reason for the 'almost' is that it is (just about) possible for the change to be due to something OTHER than the lack of aircraft flying around. But Cartesian doubt isn't really a worthwhile way to practically live your life either;-)
The simplest demonstrations, in actual greenhouses, are readily testable by all. OK, there are certain chemicals man produces which have been shown to REDUCE global warming too, which cloud the picture, and need to be studied far more. But to my mind, there is no point in being sceptical about the EFFECTS of readily replicable experiments, even if you don't have faith the cause.
You can say, 'OK, this might not be the whole picture' but you can't ignore the fact that it might be, and there is no real evidence to the contrary.
If we had to go and land on a faraway planet we could probably happily use Newtonian theory to 'almost' get there, ignoring GR. That isn't to say that we shouldn't be sceptical of Newtonian theory!
We don't quite have the same volume of evidence about global warming as we do for Newtonian mechanics, but it is certainly very substantial, and provides a very solid case for it being 'close' to a 'complete' answer.
Studies (with all aircraft grounded for 3 days) after September 11 2001, showed noticeable climate differences during those days. These show that (a) at least some of the effects are reversible (b) relatively small changes can have a relatively big impact on the climate relatively quickly.
Here is one news article about this, there are lots more out there just waiting to be searched for.
An ideal opportunity for Yahoo, Teoma (or even MSN) to launch their own USENET archive. This shows how a Google monopoly will result in just as much stupidity as an MS one. If others can win over the early adopters, they have a good chance of getting extra market share for their other search functions too.
Where else but Japan would you be able to find a Thanks Tail for your car, letting you wag your car's tail like a dog when someone lets you change lane? You can watch the advert here. Try the Coral cache first.
Slashdot Mirror
Seventh-graders have demonstrated that you are completely and utterly wrong .
Sick Transit's Glorious Monday.
Such prizes already exist (though are not well known outside the mathematical/scientific community). Most famous is probably the Kalinga prize. Other examples include the Michael Faraday medal, the Peano prize, and at a undergraduate level the AMS Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. There are almost certainly many others I don't know.
Citation and statistics obviously help. But they aren't the be-all and end-all.
Example 1: Interest Rate Prediction Markets
Traders make judgements based on lots of market data - consumer confidence surveys, growth predictions, oil/stock/property price trends, major company results, etc. When you have a particular outlook it is almost always easy to come up with LOTS of figures to support that position. These are all verifiable statistics! To objectively ensure you are taking into account a representative sample when making your decision is what separates the good traders from those who (often unknowingly!) rely only on luck.
Example 2: Microsoft vs GPL
Imagine the following argument from Microsoft to a PHB. Microsoft: "If a GPL component takes up even 0.1% of your (binary linked) codebase your entire codebase must be GPL licensed when you distribute. Therefore the GPL is a disproportionate license." This is verifiable and true, and seems on the surface to be a perfectly cogent (economic) argument against using GPL'd components. Asking yourself "why is this information coming from Microsoft" helps understand things far more clearly.
Example 3: Groklaw vs SCO
The magistrate judge granted SCO's motion for ridiculously wide discovery. PJ gave all sorts of plausible legal and technical arguments why this wouldn't happen. She backed this up meticulously with quotations, citations, etc. And yet, by not looking at the bigger picture - namely, that discovery is almost always broadly interpreted, many (myself included) were shocked at this decision which in retrospect seems obvious.
Example 4: Dihydrogen Monoxide
OK, this one is stupid, but it shows how easy it is to misattribute symptoms for the cause.
Now, back on-topic, I know next to nothing about the LSB beyond 'it seeks to make to distribute software cross-distro'. Ulrich's arguments seem excellent to me. But without any deep domain knowledge, it would be foolish not to ask questions like "Does RedHat have business reasons for disliking the LSB?", "Does RedHat seek to be a controlling influence on the direction of the LSB?", etc.
It's perfectly reasonable to suppose that there is no agenda here - after all, RedHat aren't known for widespread FUDing. But facts can easily be twisted/cleverly presented to suit an agenda, and so it is advisable to consider side-channels too.
Unfortunately this is no longer true. I tried for many years to adopt a "judge by content, not by source" policy, but have realised it's just hopeless idealism.
There has always been spin and FUD, but these days it has developed a very organised, very slick phenomenon. This means that you need to give increasing weight to background motivations to pierce the veil.
It's been done, welcome to Uncyclopedia, and no, it doesn't keep trolls away from Wikipedia in the slightest, but is surprisingly comprehensive and always good for a chuckle.
You can see Firefox discussion about this at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23675 5, copy and paste the URL as Bugzilla won't accept /. referrals.
In particular, it seems like this is a Google Summer of Code submission (see comment 68. If this is accepted we could see integrated BT in FF1.5!
That commenter does seem pretty over the top in her praise of Microsoft's practices! Having said which, she has an excellent point. Your average user won't care about what's under the hood unless it directly affects their experience. And UI is very important - one of the core differentiators between browsers. Let's see why I like Firefox: - Tabbed Browsing (UI) - Find as you Type (UI) - Live Bookmarks (UI) - Integrated Search (UI) - Smart Keywords (UI) - Download Manager (UI - OK, needs a lot of work) - about:config (UI - OK, this is stretching it...) Also, UI is crucial to security. It might not prevent buffer overflows but it can help prevent phishing: - Gold address bar for secure sites (UI) - Punycoding IDN domain names (UI) - SSL certificates (UI - if they aren't displayed in a usable way, then no-one will use them) - Extension installs (UI - it waits for a few seconds before allowing you to click 'yes') To the end user (not web developers) UI is one of the few things that makes one browser different to another. Of course, this changes when they can't access their favourite certain sites because they use some obscure plugin, but even then, how to install the plugin becomes a matter of UI! Of course to the technically inclined things like support for MathML, SVG, and other rendering IS important. BTW what criteria do you use when selecting your browser?
Lie Groups aren't necessarily matrices, although matrix groups like GL(n,C) and various subgroups do provide the canonical examples.
A Lie Group is simultaneously:
1) a manifold - basically, a infinitely differentiable (smooth) surface that locally looks like Euclidean space at every point) and
2) an abstract group with the group operations of composition and inversion smooth (infinitely differentiable).
The basic reason that Lie Groups are so important as a class of manifolds is that properties like left multiplication or conjugation by group elements automatically give you a mechanism to "travel around" the surface easily.
There is a very strong representation theory of Lie Groups, (and also of Lie Algebras, which are closely related).
PS Thanks for mathforge.net! Keep up the good work.
Most models of the universe are mixed signature, (normally Lorentzian), so they can approximate special relativity in the limiting cases.
Um, if you read the Mozilla Prefetch FAQ, you'll learn that this only happens when you are not using bandwidth for something else initiated by the current Mozilla application. Worry :-)
This isn't for pages WITHIN a site, where determining what is 'next' may be problematic. This is for search results.
Here there is a logical choice to prefetch, namely, the top search result. This just autoloads the page to which "I'm feeling lucky" points.
I still don't necessarily like it, it wastes bandwidth. Yes, I know I can turn prefetching off in about:config, but most people won't.
BTW, your nym is a reference to Children's BBC?
;-)
Yes, but shhh! It probably counts as trademark dilution or something - I wouldn't want Gordon the Gopher coming after me
Thanks, that's fantastic!
/. allowed) also has excellent code search ideas WITHIN products, some of which may be amenable to switching between products.
Although it could do with some severe usability improvements - why can't I select searches in more than one language or license at a time? Have sent them feedback.
bugzilla.mozilla.org (no links from
No. I was referring to tools specially adapted to searching through code itself.
Hmmm... I was hoping it would be Google helping you search through Sourceforge and other open repositories in a more directed way... improved code search tools would be great, but this isn't bad!
Credit cards are trivial to track anyway, so no immediate extra privacy implications as long as the data isn't retained for too long.
This way, if someone steals your card info and puts their own fingerprint info on it (or onto the back-end database, or whatever), there is an immediate method to start tracking them.
Of course, there are ways to defeat fingerprint scanners, see Schneier for a starting point.
I therefore think that the danger here isn't in the fingerprinting itself, which is just another way of tracking usage. It is that cost/risk of fraud will be passed on from the banks to the consumer (or possibly stores).
On a more interesting note, I couldn't find many of the big 'known names' in the FLOSS world. OK, my search was rather quick and dirty, but I couldn't find RMS/Perens/ESR/Moglen/Lessig etc...
;-)
Maybe they realised that trying to outcompete Microsoft when it comes to traditional advertising is hard? That evangelism has a far higher return?
Of course, it might just be that the reason they all like FLOSS is because they are stingy
So I see what you mean, but it is not interesting: the point is not the data, it's the theories about what caused it and the predictions about what it will lead to.
;-)... There are enough people who care sufficiently much on both sides of this issue to keep things (largely) honest, I think.
;-)
True. But I would argue that the weight of evidence strongly suggests that current models are usably accurate if not entirely so.
No, the point of the story is that many scientists accept it as fact, not that there is no contrary evidence.
You are certainly entitled to believe this, but remember that whilst a lot of these experiments will require expensive equipment etc, a lot won't - there will almost certainly be a few you can go out and verify yourself! The same is true of studies which may point in the opposite direction too! This is what peer review is all about.
OK, funding etc muddies waters about motive, but I believe that the majority (and certainly enough!) accredited scientists are genuinely interested in digging into the truth rather than propogating their pet theory, and so peer review works. That isn't to say that there aren't unscrupulous scientists out there, or ones who use their experience, expertise and reputation to promulgate their viewpoints unscientifically as fact. But more or less, the system works. There has almost certainly been enough independent peer review over the last 10 years to have reasonable confidence in these studies. Note: I did not say, that this means we can have ABSOLUTE confidence in their modelling, indeed, such a thing is impossible. But the models are probably pretty usable.
And once again - if we don't trust the peer review process we can always replicate their results (given enough money, time, etc
Of course, I could be wrong, it could all be part of a huge conspiracy by the hydrogen cell manufacturers
So I can be skeptical about it, but I should accept it? Huh?
It is foolish to ignore effects. Causes and causation mechanisms are far more complicated. As the weight of evidence for causation grows, you should become increasingly comfortable with the concept that it is a plausible model, even if the mechanisms underlying it turn out to be off or wrong. Note: this does not mean you can't continue to be sceptical about this being the actual model, indeed, scientific history is peppered with examples of this turning out to be untrue, and we don't have 'actual' models for anything. Nevertheless, it is a usable model.
That's just plain deceitful.
That there is no real evidence to the contrary seems to be the entire point of this story (unless all the relevant papers are more than 10 years old)! If you are sufficiently sceptical you should be able to replicate most of these experiments yourself, and verify the effects - this is exactly why peer review is important. If you have control of the environment, you should also be able to verify (certain) causations. You will never be able to determine whether the proposed mechanisms for this causation are true or not, or whether they entirely represent the 'real' situation, but it is perfectly possible to model very closely.
I hope this clears up what I was trying to say!
It is wise to act 'as though it were true' even if it doesn't show the whole picture. You can be sceptical about the theory in its entirety. This does not mean you should not accept that there is a demonstrated causation effect.
;-)
We DO have studies showing there is (almost certainly) a real world causation effect. One that comes to mind, which I have posted in another comment, is that there was perceptible climate change in the three days after September 11. The reason for the 'almost' is that it is (just about) possible for the change to be due to something OTHER than the lack of aircraft flying around. But Cartesian doubt isn't really a worthwhile way to practically live your life either
The simplest demonstrations, in actual greenhouses, are readily testable by all. OK, there are certain chemicals man produces which have been shown to REDUCE global warming too, which cloud the picture, and need to be studied far more. But to my mind, there is no point in being sceptical about the EFFECTS of readily replicable experiments, even if you don't have faith the cause.
You can say, 'OK, this might not be the whole picture' but you can't ignore the fact that it might be, and there is no real evidence to the contrary.
If we had to go and land on a faraway planet we could probably happily use Newtonian theory to 'almost' get there, ignoring GR. That isn't to say that we shouldn't be sceptical of Newtonian theory!
We don't quite have the same volume of evidence about global warming as we do for Newtonian mechanics, but it is certainly very substantial, and provides a very solid case for it being 'close' to a 'complete' answer.
Studies (with all aircraft grounded for 3 days) after September 11 2001, showed noticeable climate differences during those days. These show that (a) at least some of the effects are reversible (b) relatively small changes can have a relatively big impact on the climate relatively quickly.
Here is one news article about this, there are lots more out there just waiting to be searched for.
An ideal opportunity for Yahoo, Teoma (or even MSN) to launch their own USENET archive. This shows how a Google monopoly will result in just as much stupidity as an MS one. If others can win over the early adopters, they have a good chance of getting extra market share for their other search functions too.
Where else but Japan would you be able to find a Thanks Tail for your car, letting you wag your car's tail like a dog when someone lets you change lane? You can watch the advert here. Try the Coral cache first.