Above I posted a little snippet of what I know, as a PhD student in an area tied to climate modeling. There seems to be a massive misconception of who "they" are here.
A massive amount of data is available to everyone. There are terabytes and terabytes of data online, that you, personally, can freely download. Sure, there are some shitheads hoarding data, fudging numbers, and playing politics. However, the rest of us never get mentioned in print, so unless you are actually in the business, you'll never hear about all the good science being done. The media loves a scandal. It doesn't love solid, boring work.
The biggest issue is not the data, but what you do with the data. I could give you access to a terabyte of climatological data from an ocean modeling project my group has worked on. It's a series of four dimensional arrays, containing a mind-boggling amount of data. So....then what? Where do you start? What does it mean? Is it statistically significant?
Personally, I'm blown away by the amount of data available. Did you know that you can download sea surface temperatures, pressures, salinities, and pCO2 for several decades, with measurements from all over the globe? Did you know that you can get decades worth of ozone measurements from over Antarctica? Satellite measurements of chlorophyll concentrations in the oceans? Yes, you personally can get this data!
But if you do get it, what the fuck do you do with it? You need a background in statistics to be able to pick out significant trends. You need a background in some area of climate science to have any idea what those trends mean. To some small amount, I can emphasize with scientists keeping data from the general public. Science gets burned by malevolent individuals with soapboxes on a regular basis. At the same time, most good scientists are sharing their data with the rest of the field. I've got access to a staggering amount of data. Far more than I would ever be able to work through in my lifetime.
I'm right in the middle of ongoing weather prediction and climate modeling. I don't see really any of the BS that the media keeps digging up. If I had colleagues pulling shit like this, I'd be pissed. Luckily, 95% of the scientists in this field are doing solid, albeit boring work. Good luck getting a story about that on any newspaper, except maybe The Onion.
Did you not read the first page of that PDF at all?
Regardless, I'll admit that should that be accurate data, it's yet more noise that needs to be dealt with in an already very noisy dataset. However, I'd very much like to see such research done by respected scientists and published in respectable, peer-reviewed journals. A book being sold by the Hartland Institute comes nowhere close to being a respectable publication.
If it's true that those stations are in such bad positions, it still doesn't invalidate climate change. The trends will still be there, despite the extra noise. It's not like 800 thermometers were suddenly moved from cold, dark places to hot steamy ones, and that's the sole basis for climate change. Even if they are located poorly, year after year they should have the same operating conditions. And if year after year they show consistent temperature changes, that's still a signal that you can pick out of the noise.
I'm pretty well acquainted with people who make use of the network of weather stations around the US. They know which ones are consistently abnormal, since they pour through the data every single day. I'm skeptical that there is any such major issue in the US because of that. While I'm sure there are some bad weather stations, the scale in that book is unlikely. Meteorologists track weather systems. If a pocket of air suddenly rose 10 degrees when it passed over a weather station, then dropped on the other side, it would be very obvious.
A link from an untrustworthy source combined with my experience dealing with experts in the field makes me very skeptical indeed.
Transparency would be fantastic. I'd pay money if we could get such transparency. In fact, I'm doing a PhD and working with one such model right now. However, I have no idea how I would be transparent about what I'm doing. It's so complicated, and so overwhelming, that unless you're doing this for a living, it won't mean shit to you. Some general observations:
1) Just about nobody has the computing power to run a real, decent climate simulation. You really need a nice cluster to crank through stuff. Running a 6 year sea temperature simulation as a test of our newest model took me 4-5 days on our cluster. That's just temperature - nothing else. No pressure, biology, or any of the stuff dissolved in the ocean. And it's only for about a quarter of one ocean. Each year is about 30gb of data, for just the temperature at the longitude and latitudes and the different depths of the ocean. A "real" run, when we do one, takes a month on our cluster, and produces about a terabyte of data.
2) That data is just a big fucking dump of numbers. If you don't have an understanding of how the model works, and what the data structure is, it's meaningless. All the charts and graphs and all that other fancy stuff that people publish are the result of months and months of post-processing. Models don't dump out line graphs and pie charts - they dump out terabytes of numbers in things like four dimensional arrays. Of course, in this analysis, you run into the standard issues with statistics. What's statistically significant? How do you prove it? A lot of the conspiratorial public gets their shorts in a knot when they hear scientists discussing what's significant. It sounds like they're choosing the answers they want. In reality, most of the time, there's a lot of pressure put on publications to make absolutely sure that they can statistically prove what they're claiming. Given that you have the hardware to run a model, the chance you have the software and know-how to analyze the data is unlikely unless you do that sort of thing for a living.
3) The models are complicated as all hell. I'm nowhere understanding the one I'm using, even after a couple of walkthroughs by someone who knows it fairly well. There are hundreds of checks and balances for things. There are arrays of real, measured data, to force the model to stay within certain bounds. There are estimations for various boundaries, etc. It's a lot of black magic.
4) Analysis is ridiculously hard. The feedbacks within the climate system are insane. If someplace heats up, it may result in net cooling. If some other place cools, it might result in net warming. Even if you ran a model, and successfully analyzed the data, interpreting it is a bitch. So you get more clouds in your model. Do you have an understanding of how that will affect the earth? Clouds can trap heat, or reflect sunlight. It depends on the type of cloud, moisture content, and location. That's just the tip of the iceberg for climate feedback processes.
In short, transparency would be nice, but how do you overcome these barriers?
That said, there's plenty of transparency if you have the above things. Many models are available for download. Go look for them. Regardless of the black magic behind the models, there are plenty of studies which compare different climate models. Even if you don't know how they work under the hood, you can compare their results to each other, and to observations. Go look. There are hundreds of publications doing this.
Lastly, if you want to play around with a very simple climate model, check out the EdGCM from Columbia. It's missing 75% of what real climate models do, but it can give somewhat-reliable estimates over large areas. You should be able to tear through a 150 year climate simulation in day or so on a quad core desktop. It even does some basic analysis for you.
Climate modeling is god damn hard. While there are some bad eggs
And I'll add one follow-up to this post, which got a couple of pretty hostile replies:
It's mostly sense. Yes, as a previous poster noted, it's got some flamebait-like language, but it's not all wrong.
As a kid, my family went on a "Monday Night Walk" during all but the bitterest winter months. We'd drive somewhere, and go explore nature. I'd ask questions. I'd see things I had never seen before. I watched my dad get a massive (I was like 8, so no idea how massive it really was) snapping turtle to bite onto a big branch. He then lifted it out of the water, with it's beak firmly attached to the branch. When he set it down, and we walked back a bit and waited, it finally let go and slipped back into the water.
I had stick collections, rock collections, and whenever I asked my parents "why..", they either had the correct answer, or they said, "I don't know. Let's find out!" We had a house full of books, and hit the library multiple times a week. Until I could read myself to sleep, I was read a story every night.
You are spot on that science comes from the parents. I went on to get a BA in Physics, and am working on a PhD in yet more hard science. In between, I was a programmer and taught high school science. (But teaching didn't let me do enough science, so it was back to school for me.) Two of us three siblings are scientists. The third isn't far off, dealing in IT infrastructure.
Disregard ScentCone's obvious politics, and the heart of the message is true. You can throw all sorts of money at the states, and it won't make any difference. Until we're getting parents to inspire their kids to find out new things, nothing is going to get better.
The problem isn't with teachers or schools. It's with the public perception that science is boring and hard, and that school isn't that important. Fix that, and you fix everything.
It depends on what you study, and where you study it. If you study Biology at a small university, you'll be one of a million biologists looking for work which doesn't involve biology.
For the last five or so years, I've been saying that what we need is someone (Obama, but that's a pipe dream) to dump a couple hundred billion into renewable energy projects. Compared to what we spend on everything else, it's a drop in a bucket.
But the results? At bare minimum, it puts a science or engineering degree at a premium. That pumps more people through college, increases our overall education level, and stimulates the economy as people invest into this. On the chance that it actually produces some really good new technologies, it helps secure our energy future, and gives us a technological leap over other countries. It also gives us a commercial export for the first time in a very, very long time.
That's my dream. My back-up plan is to move to some Northern European country.
You hit +5, so I won't try to upmod you anymore. I taught HS science for 5 years. You hit the nail on the head. There are lots of other issues, but that was the primary one I saw.
The kids who's parents demanded they get a good education did. The other kids, the majority, did not. Intelligence was only part of the equation, for sure.
Heh...that's very much not true. I'm using one now that was recently taken apart and cleaned.
It's now rubber-cemented back together, so the next time it doesn't take half an hour and severe risk to life and limb hacking at it with a sharp knife to service.
Best of all, it works great for the first time in 6 months!
Meh - it was for an Education MaE, and thus it sucked. Nothing like the hard science I'm doing now. However, the summary:
105 out of 110 surveys were completed, with 98 being internally consistent and free from obvious vandalism. About 75% of students didn't try on standardized tests, because they realized they didn't count, and nobody would ever see the scores. About 25% tried, because they did their best on everything. 72% reported that their parents' didn't care about the NCLB required tests, and 85% reported that their teachers didn't really care about them either. 48% were motivated enough to leave negative comments about standardized testing.
When almost 50% of students are willing to write extra after a 2-day test, you know there is a problem. The feedback I got was venomous. Kids do NOT like the NCLB required tests. They realize that nobody really sees their score, and nobody cares. Thus, they, by and large, don't try.
I've got a Master's thesis that shows that the NCLB testing we do is a load of crap, and the kids don't care about it. The response? "Business as usual." And that's the reason I've bailed on education for a career.
I've had PhDs in Education tell me the same thing. Something to consider once I have a bit more free time.
However, the major issue is that they all know what the problems are. But we've mired education in so many layers of bureaucracy that nobody has the power to change anything. The local school board is more powerful than the state, but the state determines funding. To get a policy change, you need to check federal law, state law, get approval from the school board, and then get the administrators to implement it correctly. That is, if you can get the funding to do it. Of course, I've left out unions, PTAs, etc. There are far too many players now for anyone to get anything done.
And that's what the NCLB act was supposed to do. Witness the ability of political bureaucracy to solve problems.
All the problems are solvable - the issue is that there are too many non-education people trying to make education decisions, and too little money to do what needs to be done. Combine that with the public "it worked for me, so why doesn't the same stuff fork for my kids" attitude, and you get the current mess.
That was the hidden point I was making. The dirty secret of education is that you can't assess teachers. You can either do a poor job cheaply, or you can do a fantastic job for a lot of money. What this turns into is no real assessment. Most schools have an administrator sit in on one class each year to see how the teacher teaches. This is ridiculous on its face, as one class on one day has no real bearing on overall performance. It doesn't show that the students are learning anything. Additionally, administrators don't have teaching certifications most of the time, and may have no teaching background.
You can try to indirectly do it by assessing students, but that's fraught with issues. If I had a solution, I'd be very rich now.
I'm now at one of the biggest ($) research schools in the US. I have to say, it's ball-bustingly hard. Who do we "cheat" from? Last year's students. Who did the same with those from the year before, and the year before. Having a masters in Education makes me look at the entire system differently. I'm not just learning from my professors. There's a metric fuckton of institutional knowledge passed down among the student body. If we didn't have access to that, we'd all fail. That body of knowledge is as important as any we get in the classroom. Perhaps more-so, because it's practical knowledge rather than theoretical.
Students from the previous years tell us what's important to study. They hand us their tests, and show us where they went wrong. They tell us what they learned from students the year before. When we get together to study and do homework, we build upon that knowledge. We're organizing our own tests for the students next year. We're documenting what's important, and where we went wrong. We're a bunch of brains trying to assimilate the collective knowledge of a bunch of other ones, to be able to pass it on to future ones. It's education on a scale I never really considered before.
To assume that an education means someone is more skilled than another is generally a pretty good assumption. If they made it through a major university, especially a PhD, there are only two possible ways:
1)They are fucking brilliant. 2)They are pretty smart, and good at organizing with their peers to filter massive amounts of information in a quest to pull out what's important.
From a working standpoint, either is good. The latter is preferred, because few things in life are accomplished by one person working alone. One student I'm in school with falls in the former category. Universally reviled due to exceptionally poor social skills and a general disdain for those around him. But he's making it through on his own, because he's truly brilliant.
The one thing I haven't seen here is true mediocrity. Everyone is exceptional in some way. The least amazing kids are bailing out after 2-3 years with a master's degree. The ones staying are really, really smart people. If you're just persistent, you'll get ground up and spit out in a good college. One of my friends is on the border of that happening. Lots of persistence, but lacks the skill to make use of it. Will he make a good hire somewhere? Probably, provided you're willing to teach all his skills. But you'll know that ahead of time, because he won't have a higher degree from a big University.
Somebody who believes educational success is all about social status in technical subjects is probably somebody who was lazy and prefers to say stuff like "Persistance and skill are often confused."
Spot on. Sure, the social ties I'm making here are important. They're keeping me sane and allowing me to learn more. GP is obviously clueless about how big universities work, and what a technical degree is all about.
I taught high school for five years, and that was what I saw. Because all kids were tracked according to age rather than ability, you had a wide range of ability in every class. As a teacher, you've got a few choices:
1) Teach to the middle. Too hard for the dumb kids, to easy for the smart kids, but most kids get something out of it. 2) Teach too easy or two hard. 3) Try to teach to each kid's needs.
#3 is the one everyone would like to do. But it's ridiculously hard to do. I had kids in a class who were taking geometry and had algebra under their belt, and kids who couldn't multiply even with a calculator. Kids who didn't really understand what decimal places were all about. If I stop to give them instruction in the basic things that they need to learn the material I'm actually supposed to be teaching, I get questioned as to why I'm not teaching it. If your lessons are different for every kid, suddenly you need to prove that they're fair and appropriate for every kid. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up for a lawsuit when you fail Johnny but pass Timmy, and they were learning different material.
My most successful classes were ones filled with homogeneous populations of kids. When they were all at about the same level, I could teach a lot of material very quickly. Treating all kids the same is a terrible failing in the US today. It's not the only one, but it's one of the leading causes of our issues.
As secondary cause is that teachers are given a tough job, but not the freedom to do it as it needs to be done. If I taught all the kids in my classes how to actually do science, they would have all failed the government-mandated science test. Why? Because it doesn't test whether or not you can do science, it tests whether or not you're motivated to remember facts about science that you have been exposed to and then scribble in a bubble.
What's the motivation for kids to do that? There isn't any. My master's thesis was on that very topic. Their test scores don't get sent to their parents, don't go on transcripts, and most of the time, don't even go back to their teachers. Yet those scores determine how well a school is functioning, from a government standpoint.
There are a lot of things broken about the US educational system. The top issue is that teachers can't just teach what kids need to learn. We have to jump through all these ridiculous hoops, and prove that we're poor teachers, because that what the test requires.
A good science teacher is not one who teaches kids to be masters at filling in bubbles on a sheet of paper with the wrote memory of facts. Fix the current methods of assessing teaching, and you're getting much closer to solving the root of the problem.
That's a good point. And for that sort of water, how much ACTUAL water could you send up in place of the industry needed to extract it from the soil? Last I knew, water was pretty recyclable.
25 tons of machinery to process lunar regolith to extract water, or 25 tons of water? Given how machinery is prone to fail at times, I'd go with the water and an aggressive recycling program. Hell, for the cost of the machinery, you could easily send more water. That stuffs pretty much free on earth. I bet you'd be far better off just sending tanks of water instead of budgeting for the design, testing, shipping, and maintenance of a lunar water extractor.
You don't really have to worry about the loss of a rocket filled with water, nor the vibrational and g-force stress on it.
The moon is NOT "composed of largely the same minerals as those on earth". It's got far less metals and useful stuff than earth. As far as we can tell, the moon is the splashed-off surface of the earth, after an impact with another body.
The heavy, useful stuff like metal didn't really make it to the moon in any good quantity - it's mostly the lighter silica that the upper crust is made up of. Recall that most of our metals come from mines - those holes which go deep into the ground.
If you want to make glass and ceramics, maybe the moon would be an ok source for materials. But for anything else, it's terrible.
And you thought paleontology was a bitch already....imagine finding these fuckers buried a thousand years from now, the plastic all gone, and the raw bits laying in the dirt.
Instead of using a brush to dust off an old carved stone, we'll be using a single carbon-nanotube fiber to dislodge individual grains of sand, hoping not to disturb the data under them.
Pretty much. I try to update my system, I get a box saying, "Please type your password here to sudo so I can complete this". Ubuntu has been doing that for years now.
Man, if that isn't a clue that I need to think about astronomy more than once every decade. That's about the most elementary bit of failure a former astronomer could manage, I think. Thanks for the correction.
In college, we had a pretty sweet 0.8m diameter scope. The limiting resolution of that was about 12 magnitude. Magnitude goes up as powers of ten. So 16th magnitude would be 10^4 times dimmer than what we could see with that scope. Even a 1m scope would have issues with that. You'd need fantastic conditions and very, very good mechanics to be able to take exposures long enough to reliably capture 16 magnitude.
Take into account that we can only reliably detect asteroids based on lateral movement against the constant stars in the background, and you have situations like this where the asteroid is nearly undetectable. Keep in mind that the only light is from the sun, and the asteroid is likely as reflective as pavement. Then that reflected light radiates out spherically, and the intensity fades out as one over the square of the distance between the asteroid and the telescope.
There are plenty of asteroids we'll never be able to reliably detect and track. As long as we do so with the ones over 20m, we should be ok. We'll definitely see most of those in time to wring our hands and turn to prayer, for lack of any better way to deal with them.
Correct. We fooled around with this in college at the observatory. We'd take 3 images of the same area of the sky at 3 intervals, say 2 hrs apart. This was on a straight CCD - just pixel values from 0 to 65535, We'd then color all the first one blue, all the second green, and all the third red. We'd overlay them, and everything stationary was whiteish, and anything moving showed up as a series of blue, green, red pixels, all in a line pointing its direction. If we had stray data from stuck pixels or cosmic ray strikes or heat issues, it'd usually show up as one color, as over that time period the orientation of the telescope changed, the temperature changed, etc.
If there's something coming right at us, we're screwed. We'll never see it. However, conservation of angular momentum means that such objects are exceedingly rare. They have to have been perturbed by something else (Jupiter, mostly) to have their orbits changed to something very-non circular. And of course, such a path means it either impacts the sun, gets thrown out of the solar system, or has a massively long orbit. Think comets in that case.
Aside from the lateral motion, the other advantage to spotting them when they are close is that they are brighter. Since space rocks don't glow, the only light we see from them is what's reflected from the sun. How much light does a hunk of rock reflect? Not very much. Now imagine it radiating out in all directions back towards the source. The further away it is, the less light per area impacts your collector. (For comparison, the moon reflects about as much light as pavement does. It's just big and close by, which is why it looks so bright. )
I'm a 30 year old, college educated male. I'm seriously not their target audience?
I don't have a webcam. While I run linux, I have Windows and Mac available to me. But I'm still not going to download some random-ass application which requires a webcam to view whatever shit they are offering me.
If you're offering something other than The Internet, you damn well better have a FANTASTIC bit of information about how it benefits me. Esquire doesn't have that.
Download the software here to make Robert Downey Jr. pop to life on our cover and see other things in the magazine start talking and moving.
Really? That's your fucking hook? It's about a blowjob short of what I'd need to go for it. We have something called Flash which already does that. Tell me why again I need to download software for that?
Slashdot Mirror
Above I posted a little snippet of what I know, as a PhD student in an area tied to climate modeling. There seems to be a massive misconception of who "they" are here.
A massive amount of data is available to everyone. There are terabytes and terabytes of data online, that you, personally, can freely download. Sure, there are some shitheads hoarding data, fudging numbers, and playing politics. However, the rest of us never get mentioned in print, so unless you are actually in the business, you'll never hear about all the good science being done. The media loves a scandal. It doesn't love solid, boring work.
The biggest issue is not the data, but what you do with the data. I could give you access to a terabyte of climatological data from an ocean modeling project my group has worked on. It's a series of four dimensional arrays, containing a mind-boggling amount of data. So....then what? Where do you start? What does it mean? Is it statistically significant?
Personally, I'm blown away by the amount of data available. Did you know that you can download sea surface temperatures, pressures, salinities, and pCO2 for several decades, with measurements from all over the globe? Did you know that you can get decades worth of ozone measurements from over Antarctica? Satellite measurements of chlorophyll concentrations in the oceans? Yes, you personally can get this data!
But if you do get it, what the fuck do you do with it? You need a background in statistics to be able to pick out significant trends. You need a background in some area of climate science to have any idea what those trends mean. To some small amount, I can emphasize with scientists keeping data from the general public. Science gets burned by malevolent individuals with soapboxes on a regular basis. At the same time, most good scientists are sharing their data with the rest of the field. I've got access to a staggering amount of data. Far more than I would ever be able to work through in my lifetime.
I'm right in the middle of ongoing weather prediction and climate modeling. I don't see really any of the BS that the media keeps digging up. If I had colleagues pulling shit like this, I'd be pissed. Luckily, 95% of the scientists in this field are doing solid, albeit boring work. Good luck getting a story about that on any newspaper, except maybe The Onion.
Did you not read the first page of that PDF at all?
Regardless, I'll admit that should that be accurate data, it's yet more noise that needs to be dealt with in an already very noisy dataset. However, I'd very much like to see such research done by respected scientists and published in respectable, peer-reviewed journals. A book being sold by the Hartland Institute comes nowhere close to being a respectable publication.
If it's true that those stations are in such bad positions, it still doesn't invalidate climate change. The trends will still be there, despite the extra noise. It's not like 800 thermometers were suddenly moved from cold, dark places to hot steamy ones, and that's the sole basis for climate change. Even if they are located poorly, year after year they should have the same operating conditions. And if year after year they show consistent temperature changes, that's still a signal that you can pick out of the noise.
I'm pretty well acquainted with people who make use of the network of weather stations around the US. They know which ones are consistently abnormal, since they pour through the data every single day. I'm skeptical that there is any such major issue in the US because of that. While I'm sure there are some bad weather stations, the scale in that book is unlikely. Meteorologists track weather systems. If a pocket of air suddenly rose 10 degrees when it passed over a weather station, then dropped on the other side, it would be very obvious.
A link from an untrustworthy source combined with my experience dealing with experts in the field makes me very skeptical indeed.
You linked to a Hartland Institute report and got modded up? Seriously?
Apparently the mods don't realize who that group is....or you've got some help trolling.
Transparency would be fantastic. I'd pay money if we could get such transparency. In fact, I'm doing a PhD and working with one such model right now. However, I have no idea how I would be transparent about what I'm doing. It's so complicated, and so overwhelming, that unless you're doing this for a living, it won't mean shit to you. Some general observations:
1) Just about nobody has the computing power to run a real, decent climate simulation. You really need a nice cluster to crank through stuff. Running a 6 year sea temperature simulation as a test of our newest model took me 4-5 days on our cluster. That's just temperature - nothing else. No pressure, biology, or any of the stuff dissolved in the ocean. And it's only for about a quarter of one ocean. Each year is about 30gb of data, for just the temperature at the longitude and latitudes and the different depths of the ocean. A "real" run, when we do one, takes a month on our cluster, and produces about a terabyte of data.
2) That data is just a big fucking dump of numbers. If you don't have an understanding of how the model works, and what the data structure is, it's meaningless. All the charts and graphs and all that other fancy stuff that people publish are the result of months and months of post-processing. Models don't dump out line graphs and pie charts - they dump out terabytes of numbers in things like four dimensional arrays. Of course, in this analysis, you run into the standard issues with statistics. What's statistically significant? How do you prove it? A lot of the conspiratorial public gets their shorts in a knot when they hear scientists discussing what's significant. It sounds like they're choosing the answers they want. In reality, most of the time, there's a lot of pressure put on publications to make absolutely sure that they can statistically prove what they're claiming. Given that you have the hardware to run a model, the chance you have the software and know-how to analyze the data is unlikely unless you do that sort of thing for a living.
3) The models are complicated as all hell. I'm nowhere understanding the one I'm using, even after a couple of walkthroughs by someone who knows it fairly well. There are hundreds of checks and balances for things. There are arrays of real, measured data, to force the model to stay within certain bounds. There are estimations for various boundaries, etc. It's a lot of black magic.
4) Analysis is ridiculously hard. The feedbacks within the climate system are insane. If someplace heats up, it may result in net cooling. If some other place cools, it might result in net warming. Even if you ran a model, and successfully analyzed the data, interpreting it is a bitch. So you get more clouds in your model. Do you have an understanding of how that will affect the earth? Clouds can trap heat, or reflect sunlight. It depends on the type of cloud, moisture content, and location. That's just the tip of the iceberg for climate feedback processes.
In short, transparency would be nice, but how do you overcome these barriers?
That said, there's plenty of transparency if you have the above things. Many models are available for download. Go look for them. Regardless of the black magic behind the models, there are plenty of studies which compare different climate models. Even if you don't know how they work under the hood, you can compare their results to each other, and to observations. Go look. There are hundreds of publications doing this.
Lastly, if you want to play around with a very simple climate model, check out the EdGCM from Columbia. It's missing 75% of what real climate models do, but it can give somewhat-reliable estimates over large areas. You should be able to tear through a 150 year climate simulation in day or so on a quad core desktop. It even does some basic analysis for you.
Climate modeling is god damn hard. While there are some bad eggs
And I'll add one follow-up to this post, which got a couple of pretty hostile replies:
It's mostly sense. Yes, as a previous poster noted, it's got some flamebait-like language, but it's not all wrong.
As a kid, my family went on a "Monday Night Walk" during all but the bitterest winter months. We'd drive somewhere, and go explore nature. I'd ask questions. I'd see things I had never seen before. I watched my dad get a massive (I was like 8, so no idea how massive it really was) snapping turtle to bite onto a big branch. He then lifted it out of the water, with it's beak firmly attached to the branch. When he set it down, and we walked back a bit and waited, it finally let go and slipped back into the water.
I had stick collections, rock collections, and whenever I asked my parents "why..", they either had the correct answer, or they said, "I don't know. Let's find out!" We had a house full of books, and hit the library multiple times a week. Until I could read myself to sleep, I was read a story every night.
You are spot on that science comes from the parents. I went on to get a BA in Physics, and am working on a PhD in yet more hard science. In between, I was a programmer and taught high school science. (But teaching didn't let me do enough science, so it was back to school for me.) Two of us three siblings are scientists. The third isn't far off, dealing in IT infrastructure.
Disregard ScentCone's obvious politics, and the heart of the message is true. You can throw all sorts of money at the states, and it won't make any difference. Until we're getting parents to inspire their kids to find out new things, nothing is going to get better.
The problem isn't with teachers or schools. It's with the public perception that science is boring and hard, and that school isn't that important. Fix that, and you fix everything.
That's partially true.
It depends on what you study, and where you study it. If you study Biology at a small university, you'll be one of a million biologists looking for work which doesn't involve biology.
For the last five or so years, I've been saying that what we need is someone (Obama, but that's a pipe dream) to dump a couple hundred billion into renewable energy projects. Compared to what we spend on everything else, it's a drop in a bucket.
But the results? At bare minimum, it puts a science or engineering degree at a premium. That pumps more people through college, increases our overall education level, and stimulates the economy as people invest into this. On the chance that it actually produces some really good new technologies, it helps secure our energy future, and gives us a technological leap over other countries. It also gives us a commercial export for the first time in a very, very long time.
That's my dream. My back-up plan is to move to some Northern European country.
You hit +5, so I won't try to upmod you anymore. I taught HS science for 5 years. You hit the nail on the head. There are lots of other issues, but that was the primary one I saw.
The kids who's parents demanded they get a good education did. The other kids, the majority, did not. Intelligence was only part of the equation, for sure.
Heh...that's very much not true. I'm using one now that was recently taken apart and cleaned.
It's now rubber-cemented back together, so the next time it doesn't take half an hour and severe risk to life and limb hacking at it with a sharp knife to service.
Best of all, it works great for the first time in 6 months!
Don't get me wrong -- you can find a failure to stop for every caliber on the market.
I think 120mm gets you out of this range.
(Yeah, I wish one of those suckers was on the market....)
That's NORAD.
Meh - it was for an Education MaE, and thus it sucked. Nothing like the hard science I'm doing now. However, the summary:
105 out of 110 surveys were completed, with 98 being internally consistent and free from obvious vandalism. About 75% of students didn't try on standardized tests, because they realized they didn't count, and nobody would ever see the scores. About 25% tried, because they did their best on everything. 72% reported that their parents' didn't care about the NCLB required tests, and 85% reported that their teachers didn't really care about them either. 48% were motivated enough to leave negative comments about standardized testing.
When almost 50% of students are willing to write extra after a 2-day test, you know there is a problem. The feedback I got was venomous. Kids do NOT like the NCLB required tests. They realize that nobody really sees their score, and nobody cares. Thus, they, by and large, don't try.
I've got a Master's thesis that shows that the NCLB testing we do is a load of crap, and the kids don't care about it. The response? "Business as usual." And that's the reason I've bailed on education for a career.
I've had PhDs in Education tell me the same thing. Something to consider once I have a bit more free time.
However, the major issue is that they all know what the problems are. But we've mired education in so many layers of bureaucracy that nobody has the power to change anything. The local school board is more powerful than the state, but the state determines funding. To get a policy change, you need to check federal law, state law, get approval from the school board, and then get the administrators to implement it correctly. That is, if you can get the funding to do it. Of course, I've left out unions, PTAs, etc. There are far too many players now for anyone to get anything done.
And that's what the NCLB act was supposed to do. Witness the ability of political bureaucracy to solve problems.
All the problems are solvable - the issue is that there are too many non-education people trying to make education decisions, and too little money to do what needs to be done. Combine that with the public "it worked for me, so why doesn't the same stuff fork for my kids" attitude, and you get the current mess.
That was the hidden point I was making. The dirty secret of education is that you can't assess teachers. You can either do a poor job cheaply, or you can do a fantastic job for a lot of money. What this turns into is no real assessment. Most schools have an administrator sit in on one class each year to see how the teacher teaches. This is ridiculous on its face, as one class on one day has no real bearing on overall performance. It doesn't show that the students are learning anything. Additionally, administrators don't have teaching certifications most of the time, and may have no teaching background.
You can try to indirectly do it by assessing students, but that's fraught with issues. If I had a solution, I'd be very rich now.
I'm now at one of the biggest ($) research schools in the US. I have to say, it's ball-bustingly hard. Who do we "cheat" from? Last year's students. Who did the same with those from the year before, and the year before. Having a masters in Education makes me look at the entire system differently. I'm not just learning from my professors. There's a metric fuckton of institutional knowledge passed down among the student body. If we didn't have access to that, we'd all fail. That body of knowledge is as important as any we get in the classroom. Perhaps more-so, because it's practical knowledge rather than theoretical.
Students from the previous years tell us what's important to study. They hand us their tests, and show us where they went wrong. They tell us what they learned from students the year before. When we get together to study and do homework, we build upon that knowledge. We're organizing our own tests for the students next year. We're documenting what's important, and where we went wrong. We're a bunch of brains trying to assimilate the collective knowledge of a bunch of other ones, to be able to pass it on to future ones. It's education on a scale I never really considered before.
To assume that an education means someone is more skilled than another is generally a pretty good assumption. If they made it through a major university, especially a PhD, there are only two possible ways:
1)They are fucking brilliant.
2)They are pretty smart, and good at organizing with their peers to filter massive amounts of information in a quest to pull out what's important.
From a working standpoint, either is good. The latter is preferred, because few things in life are accomplished by one person working alone. One student I'm in school with falls in the former category. Universally reviled due to exceptionally poor social skills and a general disdain for those around him. But he's making it through on his own, because he's truly brilliant.
The one thing I haven't seen here is true mediocrity. Everyone is exceptional in some way. The least amazing kids are bailing out after 2-3 years with a master's degree. The ones staying are really, really smart people. If you're just persistent, you'll get ground up and spit out in a good college. One of my friends is on the border of that happening. Lots of persistence, but lacks the skill to make use of it. Will he make a good hire somewhere? Probably, provided you're willing to teach all his skills. But you'll know that ahead of time, because he won't have a higher degree from a big University.
Somebody who believes educational success is all about social status in technical subjects is probably somebody who was lazy and prefers to say stuff like "Persistance and skill are often confused."
Spot on. Sure, the social ties I'm making here are important. They're keeping me sane and allowing me to learn more. GP is obviously clueless about how big universities work, and what a technical degree is all about.
I taught high school for five years, and that was what I saw. Because all kids were tracked according to age rather than ability, you had a wide range of ability in every class. As a teacher, you've got a few choices:
1) Teach to the middle. Too hard for the dumb kids, to easy for the smart kids, but most kids get something out of it.
2) Teach too easy or two hard.
3) Try to teach to each kid's needs.
#3 is the one everyone would like to do. But it's ridiculously hard to do. I had kids in a class who were taking geometry and had algebra under their belt, and kids who couldn't multiply even with a calculator. Kids who didn't really understand what decimal places were all about. If I stop to give them instruction in the basic things that they need to learn the material I'm actually supposed to be teaching, I get questioned as to why I'm not teaching it. If your lessons are different for every kid, suddenly you need to prove that they're fair and appropriate for every kid. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up for a lawsuit when you fail Johnny but pass Timmy, and they were learning different material.
My most successful classes were ones filled with homogeneous populations of kids. When they were all at about the same level, I could teach a lot of material very quickly. Treating all kids the same is a terrible failing in the US today. It's not the only one, but it's one of the leading causes of our issues.
As secondary cause is that teachers are given a tough job, but not the freedom to do it as it needs to be done. If I taught all the kids in my classes how to actually do science, they would have all failed the government-mandated science test. Why? Because it doesn't test whether or not you can do science, it tests whether or not you're motivated to remember facts about science that you have been exposed to and then scribble in a bubble.
What's the motivation for kids to do that? There isn't any. My master's thesis was on that very topic. Their test scores don't get sent to their parents, don't go on transcripts, and most of the time, don't even go back to their teachers. Yet those scores determine how well a school is functioning, from a government standpoint.
There are a lot of things broken about the US educational system. The top issue is that teachers can't just teach what kids need to learn. We have to jump through all these ridiculous hoops, and prove that we're poor teachers, because that what the test requires.
A good science teacher is not one who teaches kids to be masters at filling in bubbles on a sheet of paper with the wrote memory of facts. Fix the current methods of assessing teaching, and you're getting much closer to solving the root of the problem.
That's a good point. And for that sort of water, how much ACTUAL water could you send up in place of the industry needed to extract it from the soil? Last I knew, water was pretty recyclable.
25 tons of machinery to process lunar regolith to extract water, or 25 tons of water? Given how machinery is prone to fail at times, I'd go with the water and an aggressive recycling program. Hell, for the cost of the machinery, you could easily send more water. That stuffs pretty much free on earth. I bet you'd be far better off just sending tanks of water instead of budgeting for the design, testing, shipping, and maintenance of a lunar water extractor.
You don't really have to worry about the loss of a rocket filled with water, nor the vibrational and g-force stress on it.
The moon is NOT "composed of largely the same minerals as those on earth". It's got far less metals and useful stuff than earth. As far as we can tell, the moon is the splashed-off surface of the earth, after an impact with another body.
The heavy, useful stuff like metal didn't really make it to the moon in any good quantity - it's mostly the lighter silica that the upper crust is made up of. Recall that most of our metals come from mines - those holes which go deep into the ground.
If you want to make glass and ceramics, maybe the moon would be an ok source for materials. But for anything else, it's terrible.
And you thought paleontology was a bitch already....imagine finding these fuckers buried a thousand years from now, the plastic all gone, and the raw bits laying in the dirt.
Instead of using a brush to dust off an old carved stone, we'll be using a single carbon-nanotube fiber to dislodge individual grains of sand, hoping not to disturb the data under them.
Actually, I think water beats them all, given enough time.
The next time somebody challenges me to rock, paper, scissors, screw Spock and lizard. I'm going with water!
Pretty much. I try to update my system, I get a box saying, "Please type your password here to sudo so I can complete this". Ubuntu has been doing that for years now.
Man, if that isn't a clue that I need to think about astronomy more than once every decade. That's about the most elementary bit of failure a former astronomer could manage, I think. Thanks for the correction.
As a comparison for the non-astronomers:
In college, we had a pretty sweet 0.8m diameter scope. The limiting resolution of that was about 12 magnitude. Magnitude goes up as powers of ten. So 16th magnitude would be 10^4 times dimmer than what we could see with that scope. Even a 1m scope would have issues with that. You'd need fantastic conditions and very, very good mechanics to be able to take exposures long enough to reliably capture 16 magnitude.
Take into account that we can only reliably detect asteroids based on lateral movement against the constant stars in the background, and you have situations like this where the asteroid is nearly undetectable. Keep in mind that the only light is from the sun, and the asteroid is likely as reflective as pavement. Then that reflected light radiates out spherically, and the intensity fades out as one over the square of the distance between the asteroid and the telescope.
There are plenty of asteroids we'll never be able to reliably detect and track. As long as we do so with the ones over 20m, we should be ok. We'll definitely see most of those in time to wring our hands and turn to prayer, for lack of any better way to deal with them.
Correct. We fooled around with this in college at the observatory. We'd take 3 images of the same area of the sky at 3 intervals, say 2 hrs apart. This was on a straight CCD - just pixel values from 0 to 65535, We'd then color all the first one blue, all the second green, and all the third red. We'd overlay them, and everything stationary was whiteish, and anything moving showed up as a series of blue, green, red pixels, all in a line pointing its direction. If we had stray data from stuck pixels or cosmic ray strikes or heat issues, it'd usually show up as one color, as over that time period the orientation of the telescope changed, the temperature changed, etc.
If there's something coming right at us, we're screwed. We'll never see it. However, conservation of angular momentum means that such objects are exceedingly rare. They have to have been perturbed by something else (Jupiter, mostly) to have their orbits changed to something very-non circular. And of course, such a path means it either impacts the sun, gets thrown out of the solar system, or has a massively long orbit. Think comets in that case.
Aside from the lateral motion, the other advantage to spotting them when they are close is that they are brighter. Since space rocks don't glow, the only light we see from them is what's reflected from the sun. How much light does a hunk of rock reflect? Not very much. Now imagine it radiating out in all directions back towards the source. The further away it is, the less light per area impacts your collector. (For comparison, the moon reflects about as much light as pavement does. It's just big and close by, which is why it looks so bright. )
I'm a 30 year old, college educated male. I'm seriously not their target audience?
I don't have a webcam. While I run linux, I have Windows and Mac available to me. But I'm still not going to download some random-ass application which requires a webcam to view whatever shit they are offering me.
If you're offering something other than The Internet, you damn well better have a FANTASTIC bit of information about how it benefits me. Esquire doesn't have that.
Download the software here to make Robert Downey Jr. pop to life on our cover and see other things in the magazine start talking and moving.
Really? That's your fucking hook? It's about a blowjob short of what I'd need to go for it. We have something called Flash which already does that. Tell me why again I need to download software for that?