Yes, we here at Slashdot do know what "not statistically significant at the 95% confidence level" means, and unfortunately it means that the data does not support the thesis that that there has been warming from 1995-present.
If a trend found in data were significant at 95% confidence, it would mean that there was only a 1-in-20 chance that the trend observed was actually just random chance. This probability is given by assuming a distribution of probability, usually a 'normal' distribution. It is unclear what distribution Professor Jones is using, and I'm not sure whether error in climate data is normally distributed (you would have to ask a climate scientist).
Achieving 95% confidence is really not very impressive. Even in the social sciences, a 95% confidence level is the lowest degree of statistical significance considered valid. My guess is that natural sciences aim for 99% or 99.9% more frequently (again, you would have to ask a climate scientist).
So, if Professor Jones says that the warming trend is not significant at 95% confidence, that means that the warming trend cannot be distinguished from random chance (given a certain distribution of probability).
He does, however, note that the small sample size makes it more difficult to achieve statistical significance. Validity of scientific data is obviously going to be higher if you have more observations to work with. A claim based on 15 pieces of data will be more dubious than a claim based on 150 pieces of data. (Statisticians will usually use a different probability distribution when dealing with small data sets, such as the Student's t distribution, rather than the normal distribution.) So, Professor Jones gives the caveat:
Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
This is true, and given the (relatively) short time period posed by the question, Professor Jones will be working from fewer observations than if observing trends over longer time periods. So it may be possible that the trend Jones observes over the 1995-present time period is real, but in order to claim statistical significance at a 95% confidence level he would need more observations. Two options are open: collect more data from the 1995-present time period in order to increase the number of observations and therefore the significance; or, wait for several more years (thereby increasing the number of observation) until the number of years is large enough to achieve a significant result.
Bottom line: Professor Jones cannot make a statistically significant claim to global warming over the past 15 years until he has more data. More data may confirm or disconfirm his thesis, but we won't know until we have that data.
For two reasons: NOTHING will ever PROVE any scientific theory. The same way that nothing will ever prove gravity - merely that datapoints keep supporting our current scientific model.
You're 100% right that no theory is ever proven true. That's why falsification was put forward by Popper as a standard for scientific veracity. The most important thing for a rigorous scientific theory is to be able to make falsifiable claims. If a theory cannot be falsified, it is not a scientifically valid or rigorous theory. Making predictions on the basis of a scientific model is one way to test a theory.
Second, climatologists are as of now unable to predict something as localized as a specific snow storm in a specific area at a specific time more than a few days out. You are working with a two-body gravitational model, they are working with a trillion-body feedback loop. Give a bit of respect to the complexity here.
One gets the impression that while AGW skeptics don't appreciate the complexity of the task, people making political claims on the basis of AGW predictions don't appreciate the complexity of the system they're studying either. In the past, the Earth has experienced dramatic warming and cooling, far outstripping the fluctuations we've experienced since the Industrial Revolution. We don't fully understand how those fluctuations came about, in the absence of humans and (later) petroleum-based economic systems. It seems slightly hubristic to claim that despite not perfectly understanding the larger fluctuations of the past, we can confidently trace the current smaller fluctuations back to the principal causal influence of human society (among all the other causes in the "trillion-body feedback loop"), and we can confidently project "catastrophic" future outcomes from a highly complex, non-linear, chaotic system.
You're implying that Jesus would not view lustful gazes between the unmarried as "committing fornication with her already in your heart." I find that to be a pretty unsupportable position to take. The only distinction the Bible makes between adultery and fornication is the issue of marriage, and I don't think fornication is considered any less grievous a sin. If your approach to Christianity is to play "rules lawyer" with God, good luck.
People learning English as a foreign language get taught proper grammar and only learn the vernacular later.
Would it be a good idea to simply scrap our current system of teaching English to native speakers, and then just replace it with ESL coursework? If ESL courses can teach non-native speakers correct English, perhaps it will work on native speakers (if you catch them early enough).
Slavoj Zizek has been proposing a very interesting hypothesis recently - that the Chinese have actually discovered a system that is more efficient, and more productive, than the capitalist liberal democracy
Marxist philosopher praises authoritarian communist country, saying that their system is better than capitalist liberal democracy. A shocking indictment that I'm sure will ring through the capitals of the world.
Why so passive about it? I say, when old people start becoming a drain on society we ought to just get rid of them. Why do we spend so much money keeping these useless bags on life support from age 60 to age 90? Especially the Baby Boomer generation—arguably the worst, most destructive, most self-righteous, entitled, self-centered, short-sighted generation in U.S. history. Good riddance!
I too carry around a Scrabble and Risk board with me everywhere I go. It may be a pain to carry the large boxes and bags of tiny pieces to work, out at a bar with friends, to the park, out on dates and whatnot. But at least I'm not one of those suckers with an iPad—they can play board games anywhere at any time with their friends, but they had to pay so much. They probably don't use their iPads for anything other than board games. Like yourself, I don't want to give up carrying around board game boxes everywhere just to look 'cool' or to 'fit in' like those Mac cultists.
Oh man, I didn't realize anyone else knew about Hero Quest. I just got incredible nostalgia from your post. I used to make all my non-nerd friends come over and play Hero Quest for my birthdays when I was a kid. Either that or the board game version of Civilization.
Eventually the computer version of Civilization came out, but I still prefer the board game format to be honest. I'm not sure how well Hero Quest would survive the transition to an iPad, given that the plastic figurines were half the visual/tactile appeal of the game.
...the United States is pretty unmatched in agricultural exports because of the natural resources at its disposal. China seems to be the biggest importer of agricultural goods from the U.S.
That's not an unreasonable speculation. The United States is one of the most efficient agricultural producers in the world, we have a tremendous amount of arable land, and are only employing less than 2% of our population in the agricultural sector. To compare, the real population density (population per km^2 of arable land) for the U.S. is 179, whereas for the PRC it is 943. Every year China is losing more and more of its arable land due to pollution and desertification.
During the end stages of the Cold War ('87-'89), the United States was one of the largest exporters of wheat to the USSR, which was incapable of growing a sufficient amounts to feed its population. A similar type of agricultural dependency could develop between China and the United States in the future.
They did make big breakthroughs, but they also took huge steps backwards. A good case study would be the predominance of Lamarckian genetics. Their proponent in the USSR was Trofim Lysenko. The agricultural policies based on his ideas—ideas that were favored by political elites for reasons of internal ideological maneuvering—were outright failures. Biologists and geneticists were purged because of the ideological implications of Lysenko, even though his agricultural policies were bunk. Moreover, his policies spread from the USSR to China, where they persisted even longer than they did in the USSR.
The overall message is that when you live in a society in which the free exchange of ideas is suppressed for political/ideological reasons, you may produce some successes, but you may also institutionalize disastrous ideas for essentially non-scientific reasons.
...I know that the Reagan/Thatcher concept is popular, but increased trade...
Funny, I don't recall any major trade agreements signed by the Reagan administration. I do remember the Clinton administration pushing NAFTA through and extending Most Favored Nation status to China.
In any case, free trade is not a "Reagan/Thatcher concept." It's a concept put forward most famously by Adam Smith, and then theorized by David Ricardo (who subsequently pushed for the repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in the mid-1840s). Their idea was that authoritarianism at home would be weakened by the reduction of government control over trade, and free trade would make British gains from trade greater.
As far as I know, Reagan and Thatcher (and in all fairness, Deng Xiaoping ought to be thrown in for the trifecta) were rhetorically for free trade, but did not make major pushes for free trade in practice.
The first fruit of the Electrolysis project is supposed to be pushed out as Fx3.6.2 (codename "Lorentz"). Plugins are going to be moved into their own process, kind of like what Safari already does with Flash.
Apple's partnerships with Microsoft have always ended badly.
Do you not remember the 1997 agreement between Apple and Microsoft that ended their legal disputes and injected $150 million of badly needed cash into Apple which was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy? Seems like that partnership worked out pretty well--Apple survived and prospered, and Microsoft preserved a legitimate competitor so that it wasn't a complete monopoly sitting duck for the DOJ.
Slashdot Mirror
For Mac users, there are Pixelmator and Acorn. For web users in general, there is Aviary.
Yes, we here at Slashdot do know what "not statistically significant at the 95% confidence level" means, and unfortunately it means that the data does not support the thesis that that there has been warming from 1995-present.
If a trend found in data were significant at 95% confidence, it would mean that there was only a 1-in-20 chance that the trend observed was actually just random chance. This probability is given by assuming a distribution of probability, usually a 'normal' distribution. It is unclear what distribution Professor Jones is using, and I'm not sure whether error in climate data is normally distributed (you would have to ask a climate scientist).
Achieving 95% confidence is really not very impressive. Even in the social sciences, a 95% confidence level is the lowest degree of statistical significance considered valid. My guess is that natural sciences aim for 99% or 99.9% more frequently (again, you would have to ask a climate scientist).
So, if Professor Jones says that the warming trend is not significant at 95% confidence, that means that the warming trend cannot be distinguished from random chance (given a certain distribution of probability).
He does, however, note that the small sample size makes it more difficult to achieve statistical significance. Validity of scientific data is obviously going to be higher if you have more observations to work with. A claim based on 15 pieces of data will be more dubious than a claim based on 150 pieces of data. (Statisticians will usually use a different probability distribution when dealing with small data sets, such as the Student's t distribution, rather than the normal distribution.) So, Professor Jones gives the caveat:
This is true, and given the (relatively) short time period posed by the question, Professor Jones will be working from fewer observations than if observing trends over longer time periods. So it may be possible that the trend Jones observes over the 1995-present time period is real, but in order to claim statistical significance at a 95% confidence level he would need more observations. Two options are open: collect more data from the 1995-present time period in order to increase the number of observations and therefore the significance; or, wait for several more years (thereby increasing the number of observation) until the number of years is large enough to achieve a significant result.
Bottom line: Professor Jones cannot make a statistically significant claim to global warming over the past 15 years until he has more data. More data may confirm or disconfirm his thesis, but we won't know until we have that data.
You're 100% right that no theory is ever proven true. That's why falsification was put forward by Popper as a standard for scientific veracity. The most important thing for a rigorous scientific theory is to be able to make falsifiable claims. If a theory cannot be falsified, it is not a scientifically valid or rigorous theory. Making predictions on the basis of a scientific model is one way to test a theory.
One gets the impression that while AGW skeptics don't appreciate the complexity of the task, people making political claims on the basis of AGW predictions don't appreciate the complexity of the system they're studying either. In the past, the Earth has experienced dramatic warming and cooling, far outstripping the fluctuations we've experienced since the Industrial Revolution. We don't fully understand how those fluctuations came about, in the absence of humans and (later) petroleum-based economic systems. It seems slightly hubristic to claim that despite not perfectly understanding the larger fluctuations of the past, we can confidently trace the current smaller fluctuations back to the principal causal influence of human society (among all the other causes in the "trillion-body feedback loop"), and we can confidently project "catastrophic" future outcomes from a highly complex, non-linear, chaotic system.
The phenomena you're talking about are called overfitting and confirmational holism.
Please, we all know that podiatrists' "research" is funded by BigFoot.
You fail it. (It is: getting the Calvin and Hobbes reference.)
You're implying that Jesus would not view lustful gazes between the unmarried as "committing fornication with her already in your heart." I find that to be a pretty unsupportable position to take. The only distinction the Bible makes between adultery and fornication is the issue of marriage, and I don't think fornication is considered any less grievous a sin. If your approach to Christianity is to play "rules lawyer" with God, good luck.
As usual, The Onion nails it.
Would it be a good idea to simply scrap our current system of teaching English to native speakers, and then just replace it with ESL coursework? If ESL courses can teach non-native speakers correct English, perhaps it will work on native speakers (if you catch them early enough).
No, I think you'll find a similar reaction in many parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Marxist philosopher praises authoritarian communist country, saying that their system is better than capitalist liberal democracy. A shocking indictment that I'm sure will ring through the capitals of the world.
Why so passive about it? I say, when old people start becoming a drain on society we ought to just get rid of them. Why do we spend so much money keeping these useless bags on life support from age 60 to age 90? Especially the Baby Boomer generation—arguably the worst, most destructive, most self-righteous, entitled, self-centered, short-sighted generation in U.S. history. Good riddance!
Looks like you accidentally the whole iPad.
I too carry around a Scrabble and Risk board with me everywhere I go. It may be a pain to carry the large boxes and bags of tiny pieces to work, out at a bar with friends, to the park, out on dates and whatnot. But at least I'm not one of those suckers with an iPad—they can play board games anywhere at any time with their friends, but they had to pay so much. They probably don't use their iPads for anything other than board games. Like yourself, I don't want to give up carrying around board game boxes everywhere just to look 'cool' or to 'fit in' like those Mac cultists.
Oh man, I didn't realize anyone else knew about Hero Quest. I just got incredible nostalgia from your post. I used to make all my non-nerd friends come over and play Hero Quest for my birthdays when I was a kid. Either that or the board game version of Civilization.
Eventually the computer version of Civilization came out, but I still prefer the board game format to be honest. I'm not sure how well Hero Quest would survive the transition to an iPad, given that the plastic figurines were half the visual/tactile appeal of the game.
That's not an unreasonable speculation. The United States is one of the most efficient agricultural producers in the world, we have a tremendous amount of arable land, and are only employing less than 2% of our population in the agricultural sector. To compare, the real population density (population per km^2 of arable land) for the U.S. is 179, whereas for the PRC it is 943. Every year China is losing more and more of its arable land due to pollution and desertification.
During the end stages of the Cold War ('87-'89), the United States was one of the largest exporters of wheat to the USSR, which was incapable of growing a sufficient amounts to feed its population. A similar type of agricultural dependency could develop between China and the United States in the future.
They did make big breakthroughs, but they also took huge steps backwards. A good case study would be the predominance of Lamarckian genetics. Their proponent in the USSR was Trofim Lysenko. The agricultural policies based on his ideas—ideas that were favored by political elites for reasons of internal ideological maneuvering—were outright failures. Biologists and geneticists were purged because of the ideological implications of Lysenko, even though his agricultural policies were bunk. Moreover, his policies spread from the USSR to China, where they persisted even longer than they did in the USSR.
The overall message is that when you live in a society in which the free exchange of ideas is suppressed for political/ideological reasons, you may produce some successes, but you may also institutionalize disastrous ideas for essentially non-scientific reasons.
Funny, I don't recall any major trade agreements signed by the Reagan administration. I do remember the Clinton administration pushing NAFTA through and extending Most Favored Nation status to China.
In any case, free trade is not a "Reagan/Thatcher concept." It's a concept put forward most famously by Adam Smith, and then theorized by David Ricardo (who subsequently pushed for the repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in the mid-1840s). Their idea was that authoritarianism at home would be weakened by the reduction of government control over trade, and free trade would make British gains from trade greater.
As far as I know, Reagan and Thatcher (and in all fairness, Deng Xiaoping ought to be thrown in for the trifecta) were rhetorically for free trade, but did not make major pushes for free trade in practice.
All of their recent codenames have been parks: Shiretoko, Namoroka, and now Lorentz.
The Firefox team is aware of the problem and they're working on eliminating as many of these as possible.
The first fruit of the Electrolysis project is supposed to be pushed out as Fx3.6.2 (codename "Lorentz"). Plugins are going to be moved into their own process, kind of like what Safari already does with Flash.
Whoosh
Do you not remember the 1997 agreement between Apple and Microsoft that ended their legal disputes and injected $150 million of badly needed cash into Apple which was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy? Seems like that partnership worked out pretty well--Apple survived and prospered, and Microsoft preserved a legitimate competitor so that it wasn't a complete monopoly sitting duck for the DOJ.
How sure are we this whole article isn't propaganda (from the Lizard People)? /Trust no one