Of course I can't find the questionaire for this study, but if it is anything like this study, the phrasing definitely adresses the causation.
It's really a classic problem in the social sciences that peoples answers can depend on the phrasing of logically equivalent questions, or the order the questions are presented in. If the study asked if the subject bought more or less cd's after starting to fileshare, that's one thing. If the study asked first how many cd's I bought last year, then how many cd's I bought this year and finally if I've downloaded more or less music off the net in the past year, then you are right... but judging from earlier studies I don't think they phrased it that way.
AFAIK no-one has ever argued that file-sharing helps record sales.
actually the article you (and the moderators) just read, does.:)
But what about our research, I hear the record companies scream. ARIA paid a research company to survey music consumers. The survey results suggest there's been a 12 per cent decrease in CD purchases by people who are into file-sharing. The greatest percentage is with the under-17s - people who don't have much money. But the research suggests those with the money, the 45 and overs, are buying more CDs after file-sharing. Now that's a statistic we never hear quoted.
No intention to abide by it?
What secret knowledge do you have of the evil european conspiracy that the rest of us (europeans) haven't got access to?
The Kyoto treaty was specifically designed to hamstring the American economy. Its stated purpose, to reduce world pollution, is nothing more than a cover story.
Com'on drop the "the rest of the world hates USA because you love freedom" routine...
The American manufacturing industry might suffer if they are not able to adapt, but it's really your own fault that you haven't chosen to focus on alternative energy sources.
The windmill and fuel cell companies in my country don't seem to think that the kyoto agreement is in any way hampering them... but maybe that's just because they don't understand capitalism.
Their preliminary data suggest that a coin will land the same way it started about 51 percent of the time. It would take about 10,000 tosses before a casual observer would become aware of such a small bias
What they mean is probably that you have to do 10000 tosses before the bias manifests itself into something that is statistically significant...
I'm pretty confident that a casual observer would fall asleep long before 10,000 tosses without noticing anything;)
You are of course right, you can get enourmously wrong results with that dating method, but the relative error will probably be smaller for older samples... But it doesn't really matter much for my argument.
Kelvin had vastly simplified model of the cooling of earth, he estimated estimated that the age of earth was 100-200 million years old.
The thickness of the sediments suggests that the age of earth is 1.6 billion years old.
Radioactivity gives from 500 million to 4 billion.
(studying the rate of evolution in fossils of marine mollusks actually gives some hints too - that lands us in the same order of magnitude as everything else, but I can't really use that argument if you don't beleive in evolution;)
So a lot of different methods and none of them gives us an estimate thats much more than an order of magnitude faster than the my 3.5 billion years. And the ones that are are based on very simple models. So I'm not really worried that THAT estimate is completely off. It would be really surprising if all the methods had systematic errors pointing in the wrong direction overestimating the age of earth by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
Anyway... my point is that even if they did and that number was off by a factor of 1000 it really wouldnt have an effect on my numbers... they are so big that you can easily dividide by that and still have an incomprehensibly large number.
And just to give you an idea of how fast mutation rates are in living organisms, look at this: Luria and Delbruck. 1943. Genetics 28: 491-511]
The experiment is pretty cool, and (in my eyes) it actually makes it pretty clear that e. coli mutate to adapt to an outside pressure in much the same way that darwin described. What really should get you thinking about how fast evolution is, is this: The experiments were set up so that only a mutation in one specific gene could make the cells avoid being eaten by a specific T1 phage. The interesting thing is that the timescale for that mutation to occur is days... and that's just in a very small population in a lab. (and the paper proves that it's random mutations and not adaption).
With viable mutations happening THAT fast, I can't see how you can argue that mutations are too slow to give a sufficient diversity to drive evolution (over millions of years).
I'd really like to see the calculation you've done though... The numbers I come up with are at least 1E20 too high, even if you wanted to explain evolution as just random mutations, selective pressure is supposed to speed things up enourmously.
If you get a number that indicates that it absolutely can't be done then you would have to get a result that's a factor of 1E30 slower than my calculation... Every estimate I made has to have been too high by 2 orders of magntude to make evolution as slow as nature shows us it is... I Can't really see that happening, so if you are right I have to have made some gigantic blunder somewhere... You say you've considered these things, so where is it?
well sorry then.. you made it sound like you didn't know anything about mutation rates, so what good will your knowledge of time do you?
I've tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see how everything adds up... sure it took me half an hour (and you are probably not even serious about your claims, just trolling), and nobody else than you are going to read this.
But I think it was a healthy exercise for me anyway... you have to do this kinda thing once in a while. Here we go: For eukaryotes and procaryotes alike the mutation rate turns out to be one 1E-6 to 1E-7 mutations per gene per generation. That's actually pretty fast; a laboratory petridish with a single culture can easily hold 1E9 to 1E10 e.coli bacteria... The cell division cycle in e. coli takes app. half an hour... you can probably do the math.... how many mutations is that per hour? Lets assume a steady state population... thats 1E4 mutations per hour. how many hours have passed since the the beginning of life (you've studied time, you would probably agree that 2.5E13 hours isn't a high estimate?)? It adds up to a darn lot of mutations... right? 2.5E17 mutations in a single petri dish. Now that was one petri dish... how many more single celled organism do you think you can have in the WHOLE WORLD compared to *one* small petridish? well...
The volume of the earths oceans is approximately 10E21 liters... the volume of a 60mm petridish with a 1mm layer is app. 1E-2 liters... then we probably have to multiply that again by some large factor because some research actually suggests that the vast majority of earths biomass isn't actually in the oceans or on the surfase but buried deep in the earths crust... lets round a couple of orders of magnitude down... lets say 1E22. Thats an incomprehensibly large number(!) multiply that by your extremely large number of mutations in e. coli in a single petridish from before... now you should get a compldetely incomprehensible number of mutations something like 2.5E39 mutations... try to comprehend this number! It is absolutely e-bloddy-nourmous... you cannot begin to imagine how large that number is.
ok... this was a low estimate... e. coli has some pretty advanced mechanism for repairing DNA that definitely wasn't around in the begininning... add a couple of magnitudes.
How does this add up for more complex organism? Lets go back to the original number of mutations for eukaryotes: 1E6 to 1E7 mutations per gene per generation... thats one mutation per gamete. How many are viable? Well... look around, with one mutation per gamete and a lot of living complex organisms all around you, most of the people you know have a viable mutation in their genome.. Good... so what can we use as an estimate for the life cycle of a complex organism... lets say 24hours... thats setting it really high. the first complex organisms that everything evolved from probably lived much shorter than this, and most of the complexity we're lugging around has probably just been fine tuned ever since. thats approximately 2E11 generations of a single organism since the estimated emergance of complex life. How many complex life forms are there on earth... I've got no idea... lets say 1e16 it's a shot in the dark, but counting everything it's probably not far off... that's 2E27 mutations (most of them viable) since the emergence of complex life... lets estimate a couple of thousand genes to a simple complex organism. That means that the entire genome could undergo 1E24 mutations of all genes since the emergence of complex life... That's a lot of iterations... easily enough to explain darwinism, I'm sure you'll agree if you stop to ponder the size of that number.
So what about evolving from apes to humans... (that's replacing just a few percent of the genome as I'm sure you know). well the earliest monkey skull is, what, 15 milion years old? thats 2 orders of magnitude shorter than since the emergence of complex life, apes live what 13-14 years before th
ahok... so it's just because you have no idea how many mutations are actually viable and no comprehension of the time this has taken place?
Do you wan't me to find lookup the information for you, can you do it yourself or would you prefer to continue living in ignorance?
I think that within 100 years English will be the primary language of everybody.
Why?
It's hardly the largest language in the world theres not really any evidence that America and Europe will be able to hold on to the advantage that other cultures have had before them...
I hope you're right about nation states, but I don't think that invading other countries and forcing them to adhere to your standards is viable for the whole world.
What's your definition of race? The biologists have defined it as the subpopulations that don't interbreed, and they've done created those...
Besides I can't see the difference between natural selection and evolution? Surely you have to admit that mutations occur and that many of them are viable, right? This happens ALL the time... it has to DNA relpication isn't perfect, that been proven time and time again in the lab and by experiments with DNA and by examining the DNA of living families, and it makes sense from purely chemical arguments... no denying viable mutations.
And you apparantly don't think that natural selection is strange... why do you need to have a god to explain evolution? mutations + natural selection = evolution
Actually you CAN make experiments that prove that evolution takes place, fruit-flies easily evolve fast enought that you can turn one population of fruit flies into two seperate races by exerting two different evolutionary pressures on them.
It's been done... that's an experiment, and it proves the predictive power of the theory?
I know plenty of projects that get far fewer eyes and have TONS of bugs.
it's a pretty moot point
The impact of a bug i probably inversely proportional to the amount of people auditing the code in an open source project... Sure, there are a lot of small projects that nobody really uses, so there aren't that many eyes for auditing the code... but so what?
The projects are unpopular, so if somebody found a security bug it wouldn't affect that many people (and is it really worthwhile spending the time making an exploit that will affect 1000 users worldwide?)
As long as the popular projects are safe then I don't really care.
1) Because you can use god to explain everything... but doing so would bring science to a grinding halt.
2) There are no double standards, Darwinism has to be proven wrong because it's the theory everyone believes in (not without reason).
3) Darwinsm is the better theory of the two, it explains the most experimental data without invoking anything but easy to understand mechanisms. Creationism can be made to fit a few irregularities and the only explanation for the vast majority of data is "the hand of god".
4) Why should I choose to beleive the theory that involves some strange, complex omnipotent being that I dont understand, when I can can choose Darwinism that is simple.
I guess that Galilei could have explained everything by simply invoking god and accepting that the earth was the center of the universe like the bible said... but where would we be today?
don't think theres any reason to beleive that that the current president is of any other persuasion though!
And I guess that everything the parent said about the pledge of allegiance is still true.
It kinda makes America look like the land of the not so free...
hell, the moz project could raise funds by makign the default search engine and the host-not-found search engine a contract to the highest bidder. Not that we'd like that, but they could.
You said it yourself...
If people didn't like it the moz project would fork, so in reallity they can't.
Exactly... besides making programming extremely difficult to learn would do more harm than good.
Programming is a skill used outside CS circles; keeping bioinformatics, systems biology, engineers, chemists, physicists, etc., etc. from using easy to learn scripting languages would bomb them back 30 years.
desire is not the issue. If you know how easy it is to run people over, you would realize that by teaching driving to anyone even vaguely interested in it, we are harming our own community. Driving is a dangerous skill and should only be used by people mature enough to use it responsibly. The best way to make sure they are mature enough is to make learning hard enough that all of those irresponsible drivers will run off to download pr0n instead of learning to drive.
all major libraries and systems have quirks, so sometimes it's pretty darn near impossible to figure out why something works sometimes and not others...
of course computers are deterministic, sometimes it's just difficult to see it.
Heck, maybe women are deterministic (yeah right!) - just too to complicated to tell.
So if we had a pole inversion, the north magnetic pole of earth would finally be at the geographical northpole...
except for all the other problems associated with pole inversions that would be kinda practical.;-)
ThenAgain is actually a spammer... he figured out that rather than learning perl in order to harvest e-mail adresses more efficiently, he could simply post the question to slashdot and someone would do it for him;)
Actually part of the reason they are so expensive is because they have spend an enormous amount of resources to get the best tolerance on their machines.
Lego is legendary among plastic engineers (in denmark anyway:P ), because the blocks ALWAYS fit together, if you take a 20 year old block and a new block you *know* they'll fit. That doesn't come cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course I can't find the questionaire for this study, but if it is anything like this study, the phrasing definitely adresses the causation.
It's really a classic problem in the social sciences that peoples answers can depend on the phrasing of logically equivalent questions, or the order the questions are presented in.
If the study asked if the subject bought more or less cd's after starting to fileshare, that's one thing. If the study asked first how many cd's I bought last year, then how many cd's I bought this year and finally if I've downloaded more or less music off the net in the past year, then you are right... but judging from earlier studies I don't think they phrased it that way.
AFAIK no-one has ever argued that file-sharing helps record sales.
:)
actually the article you (and the moderators) just read, does.
But what about our research, I hear the record companies scream. ARIA paid a research company to survey music consumers. The survey results suggest there's been a 12 per cent decrease in CD purchases by people who are into file-sharing. The greatest percentage is with the under-17s - people who don't have much money. But the research suggests those with the money, the 45 and overs, are buying more CDs after file-sharing. Now that's a statistic we never hear quoted.
No intention to abide by it? What secret knowledge do you have of the evil european conspiracy that the rest of us (europeans) haven't got access to?
The Kyoto treaty was specifically designed to hamstring the American economy. Its stated purpose, to reduce world pollution, is nothing more than a cover story.
Com'on drop the "the rest of the world hates USA because you love freedom" routine... The American manufacturing industry might suffer if they are not able to adapt, but it's really your own fault that you haven't chosen to focus on alternative energy sources.
The windmill and fuel cell companies in my country don't seem to think that the kyoto agreement is in any way hampering them... but maybe that's just because they don't understand capitalism.
And THAT'S why imperial units is superior to metric! ;)
Their preliminary data suggest that a coin will land the same way it started about 51 percent of the time. It would take about 10,000 tosses before a casual observer would become aware of such a small bias
;)
What they mean is probably that you have to do 10000 tosses before the bias manifests itself into something that is statistically significant...
I'm pretty confident that a casual observer would fall asleep long before 10,000 tosses without noticing anything
Yes I used 3 billion years
;)
You are of course right, you can get enourmously wrong results with that dating method, but the relative error will probably be smaller for older samples...
But it doesn't really matter much for my argument.
Kelvin had vastly simplified model of the cooling of earth, he estimated estimated that the age of earth was 100-200 million years old.
The thickness of the sediments suggests that the age of earth is 1.6 billion years old.
Radioactivity gives from 500 million to 4 billion.
(studying the rate of evolution in fossils of marine mollusks actually gives some hints too - that lands us in the same order of magnitude as everything else, but I can't really use that argument if you don't beleive in evolution
So a lot of different methods and none of them gives us an estimate thats much more than an order of magnitude faster than the my 3.5 billion years.
And the ones that are are based on very simple models.
So I'm not really worried that THAT estimate is completely off. It would be really surprising if all the methods had systematic errors pointing in the wrong direction overestimating the age of earth by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
Anyway... my point is that even if they did and that number was off by a factor of 1000 it really wouldnt have an effect on my numbers... they are so big that you can easily dividide by that and still have an incomprehensibly large number.
And just to give you an idea of how fast mutation rates are in living organisms, look at this:
Luria and Delbruck. 1943. Genetics 28: 491-511]
The experiment is pretty cool, and (in my eyes) it actually makes it pretty clear that e. coli mutate to adapt to an outside pressure in much the same way that darwin described.
What really should get you thinking about how fast evolution is, is this:
The experiments were set up so that only a mutation in one specific gene could make the cells avoid being eaten by a specific T1 phage. The interesting thing is that the timescale for that mutation to occur is days... and that's just in a very small population in a lab. (and the paper proves that it's random mutations and not adaption).
With viable mutations happening THAT fast, I can't see how you can argue that mutations are too slow to give a sufficient diversity to drive evolution (over millions of years).
I'd really like to see the calculation you've done though... The numbers I come up with are at least 1E20 too high, even if you wanted to explain evolution as just random mutations, selective pressure is supposed to speed things up enourmously.
If you get a number that indicates that it absolutely can't be done then you would have to get a result that's a factor of 1E30 slower than my calculation...
Every estimate I made has to have been too high by 2 orders of magntude to make evolution as slow as nature shows us it is... I Can't really see that happening, so if you are right I have to have made some gigantic blunder somewhere... You say you've considered these things, so where is it?
well sorry then.. you made it sound like you didn't know anything about mutation rates, so what good will your knowledge of time do you?
I've tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see how everything adds up... sure it took me half an hour (and you are probably not even serious about your claims, just trolling), and nobody else than you are going to read this.
But I think it was a healthy exercise for me anyway... you have to do this kinda thing once in a while.
Here we go:
For eukaryotes and procaryotes alike the mutation rate turns out to be one 1E-6 to 1E-7 mutations per gene per generation.
That's actually pretty fast; a laboratory petridish with a single culture can easily hold 1E9 to 1E10 e.coli bacteria... The cell division cycle in e. coli takes app. half an hour... you can probably do the math.... how many mutations is that per hour?
Lets assume a steady state population... thats 1E4 mutations per hour.
how many hours have passed since the the beginning of life (you've studied time, you would probably agree that 2.5E13 hours isn't a high estimate?)? It adds up to a darn lot of mutations... right?
2.5E17 mutations in a single petri dish.
Now that was one petri dish... how many more single celled organism do you think you can have in the WHOLE WORLD compared to *one* small petridish? well...
The volume of the earths oceans is approximately 10E21 liters... the volume of a 60mm petridish with a 1mm layer is app. 1E-2 liters... then we probably have to multiply that again by some large factor because some research actually suggests that the vast majority of earths biomass isn't actually in the oceans or on the surfase but buried deep in the earths crust... lets round a couple of orders of magnitude down... lets say 1E22.
Thats an incomprehensibly large number(!) multiply that by your extremely large number of mutations in e. coli in a single petridish from before... now you should get a compldetely incomprehensible number of mutations something like 2.5E39 mutations... try to comprehend this number!
It is absolutely e-bloddy-nourmous... you cannot begin to imagine how large that number is.
ok... this was a low estimate... e. coli has some pretty advanced mechanism for repairing DNA that definitely wasn't around in the begininning... add a couple of magnitudes.
How does this add up for more complex organism?
Lets go back to the original number of mutations for eukaryotes: 1E6 to 1E7 mutations per gene per generation... thats one mutation per gamete.
How many are viable?
Well... look around, with one mutation per gamete and a lot of living complex organisms all around you, most of the people you know have a viable mutation in their genome..
Good... so what can we use as an estimate for the life cycle of a complex organism... lets say 24hours... thats setting it really high. the first complex organisms that everything evolved from probably lived much shorter than this, and most of the complexity we're lugging around has probably just been fine tuned ever since.
thats approximately 2E11 generations of a single organism since the estimated emergance of complex life.
How many complex life forms are there on earth... I've got no idea... lets say 1e16 it's a shot in the dark, but counting everything it's probably not far off... that's 2E27 mutations (most of them viable) since the emergence of complex life... lets estimate a couple of thousand genes to a simple complex organism. That means that the entire genome could undergo 1E24 mutations of all genes since the emergence of complex life...
That's a lot of iterations... easily enough to explain darwinism, I'm sure you'll agree if you stop to ponder the size of that number.
So what about evolving from apes to humans... (that's replacing just a few percent of the genome as I'm sure you know).
well the earliest monkey skull is, what, 15 milion years old? thats 2 orders of magnitude shorter than since the emergence of complex life, apes live what 13-14 years before th
ahok... so it's just because you have no idea how many mutations are actually viable and no comprehension of the time this has taken place? Do you wan't me to find lookup the information for you, can you do it yourself or would you prefer to continue living in ignorance?
I think that within 100 years English will be the primary language of everybody.
Why?
It's hardly the largest language in the world theres not really any evidence that America and Europe will be able to hold on to the advantage that other cultures have had before them...
I hope you're right about nation states, but I don't think that invading other countries and forcing them to adhere to your standards is viable for the whole world.
What's your definition of race?
The biologists have defined it as the subpopulations that don't interbreed, and they've done created those...
Besides I can't see the difference between natural selection and evolution?
Surely you have to admit that mutations occur and that many of them are viable, right? This happens ALL the time... it has to DNA relpication isn't perfect, that been proven time and time again in the lab and by experiments with DNA and by examining the DNA of living families, and it makes sense from purely chemical arguments... no denying viable mutations.
And you apparantly don't think that natural selection is strange... why do you need to have a god to explain evolution?
mutations + natural selection = evolution
Actually you CAN make experiments that prove that evolution takes place, fruit-flies easily evolve fast enought that you can turn one population of fruit flies into two seperate races by exerting two different evolutionary pressures on them.
It's been done... that's an experiment, and it proves the predictive power of the theory?
What more do you want?
I know plenty of projects that get far fewer eyes and have TONS of bugs.
it's a pretty moot point
The impact of a bug i probably inversely proportional to the amount of people auditing the code in an open source project...
Sure, there are a lot of small projects that nobody really uses, so there aren't that many eyes for auditing the code... but so what?
The projects are unpopular, so if somebody found a security bug it wouldn't affect that many people (and is it really worthwhile spending the time making an exploit that will affect 1000 users worldwide?)
As long as the popular projects are safe then I don't really care.
lol... you're joking... right? :-D
1) Because you can use god to explain everything... but doing so would bring science to a grinding halt.
2) There are no double standards, Darwinism has to be proven wrong because it's the theory everyone believes in (not without reason).
3) Darwinsm is the better theory of the two, it explains the most experimental data without invoking anything but easy to understand mechanisms. Creationism can be made to fit a few irregularities and the only explanation for the vast majority of data is "the hand of god".
4) Why should I choose to beleive the theory that involves some strange, complex omnipotent being that I dont understand, when I can can choose Darwinism that is simple.
I guess that Galilei could have explained everything by simply invoking god and accepting that the earth was the center of the universe like the bible said... but where would we be today?
Does anyone see anything oxymoronic about the people that gave us the Patriot Act talking about privacy?
Yes, I'm sure you're the only one.
And I think it's double plus good that they have a privacy officer!
don't think theres any reason to beleive that that the current president is of any other persuasion though!
And I guess that everything the parent said about the pledge of allegiance is still true.
It kinda makes America look like the land of the not so free...
hell, the moz project could raise funds by makign the default search engine and the host-not-found search engine a contract to the highest bidder. Not that we'd like that, but they could.
You said it yourself...
If people didn't like it the moz project would fork, so in reallity they can't.
That's the nice thing about it...
Exactly...
besides making programming extremely difficult to learn would do more harm than good.
Programming is a skill used outside CS circles; keeping bioinformatics, systems biology, engineers, chemists, physicists, etc., etc. from using easy to learn scripting languages would bomb them back 30 years.
desire is not the issue. If you know how easy it is to run people over, you would realize that by teaching driving to anyone even vaguely interested in it, we are harming our own community. Driving is a dangerous skill and should only be used by people mature enough to use it responsibly. The best way to make sure they are mature enough is to make learning hard enough that all of those irresponsible drivers will run off to download pr0n instead of learning to drive.
:)
I could go on... but I think my point is clear
uhmm... even programmers get that feeling sometimes.
ever heard of voodoo programming
all major libraries and systems have quirks, so sometimes it's pretty darn near impossible to figure out why something works sometimes and not others...
of course computers are deterministic, sometimes it's just difficult to see it.
Heck, maybe women are deterministic (yeah right!) - just too to complicated to tell.
So if we had a pole inversion, the north magnetic pole of earth would finally be at the geographical northpole... except for all the other problems associated with pole inversions that would be kinda practical. ;-)
lol... right :-D
ThenAgain is actually a spammer... ;)
:P
he figured out that rather than learning perl in order to harvest e-mail adresses more efficiently, he could simply post the question to slashdot and someone would do it for him
think about it
Actually part of the reason they are so expensive is because they have spend an enormous amount of resources to get the best tolerance on their machines.
:P ), because the blocks ALWAYS fit together, if you take a 20 year old block and a new block you *know* they'll fit. That doesn't come cheap.
Lego is legendary among plastic engineers (in denmark anyway