Corporations should learn from that: if you treat your customers like second class citizens because they're not "business" customers, they might get fed up with you and buy somewhere else.
Didn't read the article hey? It's possible Kashefi does actual research with these bacteria, using their tolerance for heavy metals, but this ain't it. This is an example of an art professor who wandered into a research lab (maybe, Kashefi doesn't seem to know much about gold either) and created his next art project by putting bacteria to work doing something absolutely useless.
From the article:
"He [Kashefi] and Adam Brown, associate professor of electronic art and intermedia, found the metal-tolerant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans can grow on massive concentrations of gold chloride" The senior person on the project is a professor of art.
"the bacteria are at least 25 times stronger than previously reported among scientists, the researchers determined in their art installation, "The Great Work of the Metal Lover," which uses a combination of biotechnology, art and alchemy to turn liquid gold into 24-karat gold."
"The artwork contains...."
""The Great Work of the Metal Lover" uses a living system as a vehicle for artistic exploration...."
"Using ancient gold illumination techniques, Brown applied 24-karat gold leaf to regions of the prints where a bacterial gold deposit had been identified so that each print contains some of the gold produced in the bioreactor."
""This is neo-alchemy. Every part, every detail of the project is a cross between modern microbiology and alchemy," Brown said. "Science tries to explain the phenomenological world. As an artist, I'm trying to create a phenomenon. Art has the ability to push scientific inquiry.""
""Art has the ability to probe and question the impact of science in the world, and 'The Great Work of the Metal Lover' speaks directly to the scientific preoccupation while trying to shape and bend biology to our will within the postbiological age," Brown said."
Correlation: the tendency of two things to vary together. Establishing a significant correlation requires that two variables track each other through much more than a single "a changed and B changed too!" Note that A is correlated with B but B is equally correlated with A. There is no direction to the relationship, nor is the relationship sometimes there and sometimes not. Correlation absolutely implies that there is a causal relationship of some type between A and B. There are three possibilities: A causes B, B causes A or C causes A and B.
Causation: There is a mechanism whereby changes in D create changes in E.
If you find a correlation between wealth and people living in penthouses, there are three possibilities. Living in a penthouse causes people to be more likely to be wealthy (the conclusion you jump to in order to ridicule the idea), being wealthy causes people to be more likely to live in penthouses (the conclusion I find more likely) and being wealthy and living in a penthouse are both caused by some third factor.
Gold Chloride is not naturally occurring and expensive to make. If you managed to get hold of some gold chloride and decided for some reason you wanted the gold metal out of it, you could mix it with hydrogen peroxide or pretty much any reducing agent and get gold without having to wait a week. Or you could just heat it up on an ordinary stove (but don't breathe in).
Nonsense. Statistical analysis of observational data can show correlation, which implies a causal relationship but can't specify the nature of that relationship. Statistical analysis of experimental data, where you manipulate a variable in a controlled way, can show correlation with the manipulation, which, if the experiment is done properly, narrows down the choices of causal relationship to one.
TFA is wrong. Correlation implies causation. The phrase, which is inaccurate as so many sound bite phrases are, is trying to say that A being correlated with B does not imply that A causes B. It DOES imply that there is a causal relationship between A and B, it's just not specific as to the type.
Correlation doesn't suggest causation, it "proves" it. Correlation implies causation. Just not the type.
If there is no causal relationship between two things, there is no correlation between them either. There may APPEAR to be a correlation, but there isn't actually one.
Nope. You're closer to the truth than the average Slashdotter, but not quite there.
Correlation absolutely implies causation. It doesn't specify the precise form of causation. If there is a correlation between two things, there is one of three general types of causal relationship between those two things.
Yes, a decline in the teaching of dead languages and vague logical fallacies, and the increase in teaching of formal statistical techniques and their logical interpretation, is a causal factor in a shift from references to a vague Latin phrase to a (probably equally misunderstood but more precise) English one.
The summary is making a common mistake (particularly common among people who like to parrot "correlation does not imply causation!" in arguments. Correlation does not imply causation has nothing to do with whether a correlation is real or not. A true correlation implies that there IS a causal link, it just doesn't specify which of three general types it might be (reverse, forward or common).
It's definitely not straightfoward. You want to draw the boundaries between political alignments though, not race or income necessarily. So you'd choose the option that kept the most politically similar people together, whether that ended up being the economic division or the racial one.
No, my post discusses a common method for improving the equality of political power if you already have a segregated minority (or more than one). I don't think any group says "oh, we should all move into this electoral district together!"
The US DOES have geographically segregated minorities. I'm not American, and I was a bit shocked at how segregated it was when a law student friend of mine pointed out a cool interactive census data browser. I completely agree with you, ethnic segregation is bad.
However, if it exists, intelligent drawing of electoral districts can at least make sure everyone is heard. It's also useful in other circumstances too. For example, the concerns of farmers and urbanites are often different, so electoral districts that don't lump large rural regions in with urban areas are a good idea.
Actually, in the US at least, minorities tend to be very well (many non Americans find it disturbingly well) geographically segregated. There are black neighbourhoods, white neighbourhoods, hispanic neighbourhoods, rich neighbourhoods, poor neighbourhoods, etc., with little mixing.
You'll have to specify what my "whole assumption" is, and precisely what my "assumption of racism" is. I suspect you've completely misunderstood what I've said.
Yes. We were discussing whether ballistic rounds still have an appreciable amount of kinetic energy when they arrive at their destinations. They do.
Interestingly, a direct fired WWII battleship round was quite capable of penetrating the thick side armour of an opposing battleship, going right through, and penetrating the armour on the other side. Investigations of the Bismarck wreck found matched entry and exit holes suggesting that the close range and low gun elevation caused many shells to go right through the ship, leaving holes above the water line and causing comparatively little damage. A ballistically fired round could probably do the same thing (they did penetrate the thickest armour on the ship, on the turrets) but, as you point out, it doesn't have to.
Many countries that have directly elected representative systems have more than two parties. That seems to be a peculiarity of the US, and is most evident in the direct presidential elections. Also, poorly drawn electoral districts leave the government MORE beholden to the majority, not less. The things you're complaining about stem from the prevailing belief in the US that a vote for anything but the Democrats or Republicans is a wasted vote, and the habit of a large proportion of the population to belong to a political party and vote for that party no matter what. I don't know how those things arose, but it's not the fault of representative democracy.
I'm not talking about changing electoral lines right before an election, but when they're set up or (very occasionally) changed, they can be drawn to minimize potential tyranny of the majority issues. I'm not saying it's a universally good or bad thing, but it's not fraud and it's not a racist "they can't succeed on their own" motivation as the AC assumed.
The motivation behind drawing electoral boundaries to take into account geographically localized minorities (of any type) is to avoid their proportional political power being reduced through dilution by the majority. For that to be a concern, the particular group has to be a minority. Suppose there is a highly educated, professional neighbourhood next to a lower educated, working class neighbourhood. The population of the professional neighbourhood is greater than that of the working class neighbourhood. Both together justify two electoral districts. You can draw two districts each encompassing half of each neighbourhood, or two districts that each mostly encompasses one of the neighbourhoods.
In the first case the working class in both districts will be outnumbered by the professionals and so may never elect a representative if their views tend not to be shared by the professionals. The professionals will gain a disproportionate share of political power at the workers' expense. On the other hand, in the second case, both the professionals and workers are the majorities in their respective districts and both voting blocs will have political power more proportional to their population.
I'm not sure of the process when there's a lawsuit against a drug company, but I very much doubt the court would ask for the raw data. It's protected by some very strong privacy laws, both at the national and international level, and a lot of it doesn't mean much in raw form anyway. I suspect the FDA (in the US) would investigate and their results might be used, and the processed but rawer-than-published results might be released to the plaintiff or prosecutor.
Life sciences. Not medical. That was in the first sentence of the summary.
Yes, math and physics have issues with misconduct. The article you link to mentions several physical scientists who think it's a problem. You identified a famous one. Retraction Watch lists others, quit a few in chemistry for some reason. Complete fabrication might be a bit less common for the reasons mentioned in your article, but I have no doubt that there's data pruning, faking extra results because you don't have time to do the experiments, plagiarism, dodgy stats, etc. From the sounds of it, the problem might be worse because the physical sciences haven't faced as many high profile scandals as the life sciences and don't have the same controls in place.
That's not the point. The point is that journals need to be clearer about why a paper is retracted. Fraudsters shouldn't be able to hide behind the assumption that a vague retraction notice means someone made an honest error. The authors specifically state that they cannot make statements about the fraud rate because they don't have a good measure of the total number of papers published.
Slashdot Mirror
Because almost everyone who uses a notebook doesn't need specs better than that and is much better served by the lighter form factor.
Corporations should learn from that: if you treat your customers like second class citizens because they're not "business" customers, they might get fed up with you and buy somewhere else.
There were lots of Windows machines sold right before Vista's launch that couldn't run it. But hey, three months life out of a computer isn't bad!
Summary: you're cherry picking.
Sure. Especially if you're Google. Why do you think Google puts so much effort into Android just to give it away?
How's that saying go? Something about if you get something for free (or below cost), you're not the customer, you're the product?
Didn't read the article hey? It's possible Kashefi does actual research with these bacteria, using their tolerance for heavy metals, but this ain't it. This is an example of an art professor who wandered into a research lab (maybe, Kashefi doesn't seem to know much about gold either) and created his next art project by putting bacteria to work doing something absolutely useless.
From the article:
"He [Kashefi] and Adam Brown, associate professor of electronic art and intermedia, found the metal-tolerant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans can grow on massive concentrations of gold chloride" The senior person on the project is a professor of art.
"the bacteria are at least 25 times stronger than previously reported among scientists, the researchers determined in their art installation, "The Great Work of the Metal Lover," which uses a combination of biotechnology, art and alchemy to turn liquid gold into 24-karat gold."
"The artwork contains...."
""The Great Work of the Metal Lover" uses a living system as a vehicle for artistic exploration...."
"Using ancient gold illumination techniques, Brown applied 24-karat gold leaf to regions of the prints where a bacterial gold deposit had been identified so that each print contains some of the gold produced in the bioreactor."
""This is neo-alchemy. Every part, every detail of the project is a cross between modern microbiology and alchemy," Brown said. "Science tries to explain the phenomenological world. As an artist, I'm trying to create a phenomenon. Art has the ability to push scientific inquiry.""
""Art has the ability to probe and question the impact of science in the world, and 'The Great Work of the Metal Lover' speaks directly to the scientific preoccupation while trying to shape and bend biology to our will within the postbiological age," Brown said."
A set of samples cannot be statistically significant. The difference between two sets of samples can be.
Your definitions are not correct.
Correlation: the tendency of two things to vary together. Establishing a significant correlation requires that two variables track each other through much more than a single "a changed and B changed too!" Note that A is correlated with B but B is equally correlated with A. There is no direction to the relationship, nor is the relationship sometimes there and sometimes not. Correlation absolutely implies that there is a causal relationship of some type between A and B. There are three possibilities: A causes B, B causes A or C causes A and B.
Causation: There is a mechanism whereby changes in D create changes in E.
If you find a correlation between wealth and people living in penthouses, there are three possibilities. Living in a penthouse causes people to be more likely to be wealthy (the conclusion you jump to in order to ridicule the idea), being wealthy causes people to be more likely to live in penthouses (the conclusion I find more likely) and being wealthy and living in a penthouse are both caused by some third factor.
Yes, Slashdot editors aren't the brightest. That would be some super bacteria though.
Gold Chloride is not naturally occurring and expensive to make. If you managed to get hold of some gold chloride and decided for some reason you wanted the gold metal out of it, you could mix it with hydrogen peroxide or pretty much any reducing agent and get gold without having to wait a week. Or you could just heat it up on an ordinary stove (but don't breathe in).
This is performance art, nothing more.
You thought they'd found bacteria that can do nuclear fusion maybe?
Nonsense. Statistical analysis of observational data can show correlation, which implies a causal relationship but can't specify the nature of that relationship. Statistical analysis of experimental data, where you manipulate a variable in a controlled way, can show correlation with the manipulation, which, if the experiment is done properly, narrows down the choices of causal relationship to one.
TFA is wrong. Correlation implies causation. The phrase, which is inaccurate as so many sound bite phrases are, is trying to say that A being correlated with B does not imply that A causes B. It DOES imply that there is a causal relationship between A and B, it's just not specific as to the type.
Correlation doesn't suggest causation, it "proves" it. Correlation implies causation. Just not the type.
If there is no causal relationship between two things, there is no correlation between them either. There may APPEAR to be a correlation, but there isn't actually one.
Nope. You're closer to the truth than the average Slashdotter, but not quite there.
Correlation absolutely implies causation. It doesn't specify the precise form of causation. If there is a correlation between two things, there is one of three general types of causal relationship between those two things.
Yes, a decline in the teaching of dead languages and vague logical fallacies, and the increase in teaching of formal statistical techniques and their logical interpretation, is a causal factor in a shift from references to a vague Latin phrase to a (probably equally misunderstood but more precise) English one.
The summary is making a common mistake (particularly common among people who like to parrot "correlation does not imply causation!" in arguments. Correlation does not imply causation has nothing to do with whether a correlation is real or not. A true correlation implies that there IS a causal link, it just doesn't specify which of three general types it might be (reverse, forward or common).
It's definitely not straightfoward. You want to draw the boundaries between political alignments though, not race or income necessarily. So you'd choose the option that kept the most politically similar people together, whether that ended up being the economic division or the racial one.
No, my post discusses a common method for improving the equality of political power if you already have a segregated minority (or more than one). I don't think any group says "oh, we should all move into this electoral district together!"
The US DOES have geographically segregated minorities. I'm not American, and I was a bit shocked at how segregated it was when a law student friend of mine pointed out a cool interactive census data browser. I completely agree with you, ethnic segregation is bad.
However, if it exists, intelligent drawing of electoral districts can at least make sure everyone is heard. It's also useful in other circumstances too. For example, the concerns of farmers and urbanites are often different, so electoral districts that don't lump large rural regions in with urban areas are a good idea.
Actually, in the US at least, minorities tend to be very well (many non Americans find it disturbingly well) geographically segregated. There are black neighbourhoods, white neighbourhoods, hispanic neighbourhoods, rich neighbourhoods, poor neighbourhoods, etc., with little mixing.
You'll have to specify what my "whole assumption" is, and precisely what my "assumption of racism" is. I suspect you've completely misunderstood what I've said.
Yes. We were discussing whether ballistic rounds still have an appreciable amount of kinetic energy when they arrive at their destinations. They do.
Interestingly, a direct fired WWII battleship round was quite capable of penetrating the thick side armour of an opposing battleship, going right through, and penetrating the armour on the other side. Investigations of the Bismarck wreck found matched entry and exit holes suggesting that the close range and low gun elevation caused many shells to go right through the ship, leaving holes above the water line and causing comparatively little damage. A ballistically fired round could probably do the same thing (they did penetrate the thickest armour on the ship, on the turrets) but, as you point out, it doesn't have to.
Many countries that have directly elected representative systems have more than two parties. That seems to be a peculiarity of the US, and is most evident in the direct presidential elections. Also, poorly drawn electoral districts leave the government MORE beholden to the majority, not less. The things you're complaining about stem from the prevailing belief in the US that a vote for anything but the Democrats or Republicans is a wasted vote, and the habit of a large proportion of the population to belong to a political party and vote for that party no matter what. I don't know how those things arose, but it's not the fault of representative democracy.
I'm not talking about changing electoral lines right before an election, but when they're set up or (very occasionally) changed, they can be drawn to minimize potential tyranny of the majority issues. I'm not saying it's a universally good or bad thing, but it's not fraud and it's not a racist "they can't succeed on their own" motivation as the AC assumed.
The motivation behind drawing electoral boundaries to take into account geographically localized minorities (of any type) is to avoid their proportional political power being reduced through dilution by the majority. For that to be a concern, the particular group has to be a minority. Suppose there is a highly educated, professional neighbourhood next to a lower educated, working class neighbourhood. The population of the professional neighbourhood is greater than that of the working class neighbourhood. Both together justify two electoral districts. You can draw two districts each encompassing half of each neighbourhood, or two districts that each mostly encompasses one of the neighbourhoods.
In the first case the working class in both districts will be outnumbered by the professionals and so may never elect a representative if their views tend not to be shared by the professionals. The professionals will gain a disproportionate share of political power at the workers' expense. On the other hand, in the second case, both the professionals and workers are the majorities in their respective districts and both voting blocs will have political power more proportional to their population.
I'm not sure of the process when there's a lawsuit against a drug company, but I very much doubt the court would ask for the raw data. It's protected by some very strong privacy laws, both at the national and international level, and a lot of it doesn't mean much in raw form anyway. I suspect the FDA (in the US) would investigate and their results might be used, and the processed but rawer-than-published results might be released to the plaintiff or prosecutor.
Life sciences. Not medical. That was in the first sentence of the summary.
Yes, math and physics have issues with misconduct. The article you link to mentions several physical scientists who think it's a problem. You identified a famous one. Retraction Watch lists others, quit a few in chemistry for some reason. Complete fabrication might be a bit less common for the reasons mentioned in your article, but I have no doubt that there's data pruning, faking extra results because you don't have time to do the experiments, plagiarism, dodgy stats, etc. From the sounds of it, the problem might be worse because the physical sciences haven't faced as many high profile scandals as the life sciences and don't have the same controls in place.
That's not the point. The point is that journals need to be clearer about why a paper is retracted. Fraudsters shouldn't be able to hide behind the assumption that a vague retraction notice means someone made an honest error. The authors specifically state that they cannot make statements about the fraud rate because they don't have a good measure of the total number of papers published.