It's much cheaper to give every cow a regular dose of antibiotics than it is to identify and treat infected individuals. No need for an agenda here, the long term problems have been well known for decades, it's just another example of the invisible hand fist fucking society for short term gains.
The real question is, how many deniers are secretly believers?
That's not a question it's a definition!
They are called deniers because they are denying what they know to be true, it used to be called "lying". The rest are either plain old wrong, intellectually incurious, or politically distracted. In the case of AGW deniers the last category is a large (but shrinking) army of "useful idiots" who's facts and opinion are fed to them by K street lobbyists such as the Heartland Institute (the deniers) and their dwindling number of friends in the press.
Thing is, a paltry $50 million has been spent over 20yrs by FF companies on these anti-science, anti-intellectual, amoral, propaganda mills but it has bought them the "hearts and minds" of a large chunk of the American public. $50M for getting that many people to vote against their own interests is dirt cheap by anyone standards and it was made possible by a free press where advertising revenue is valued more than content. It's not solely the US media that whores it's opinion pages but that's where it's most obvious and that's where most of the money comes from. Political hacks in other countries (such as Andrew Bolt here in Oz) feed off the material produced by the US lobbyists to push the political agenda of their own sponsors (eg: World's richest woman in the case of Bolt).
Not all FF companies fund this kind of activity, in fact it's now more or less limited to some companies in the coal industry (note Exxon has large coal investments). Most of these companies have a "colourfull billionaire" running the show, the really big FF companies (GE, SHELL, BHP, BP, Ri-Tinto, ect) of the world accept things must change and are looking for a long term predictable legislative path from governments, ie: they want long term stability, a predictable ROI of 10-15% that will attract retirement fund managers to their stock. The "colourfull billionaire" is mainly focused on their personal legacy which is generally measured by the pile of assets they left multiplied by the pile they gave to charity while alive.
Colourfull billionaires are far from stupid (or evil) but like their political counterparts they do and say the most outrageous things out of pure self-interest, so I would have to put them in the denier category along with the lobbyists that feed off them and the politicians riding in their back pocket. Why else would anyone sponsor an Australian speaking tour by Lord Monckton?
Of course they will charge you more, they're a business not the Red Cross, if they go out of business nobody gets paid.
The odd thing here is that people think TFA is news, insurance companies have been including climate change into their risk calculations for at least a decade now (spurred by the 1997 IPCC reports). Insurance companies think long term, a large building can be expected to last a century or more, if "once in a century" floods start appearing once every decade, they will watch the trends and adjust the rates accordingly.
Yes, most people use the same part of the brain to both read an listen to words. Some people are able to do both at once but if your like me (and most other people) there is a "voice in your head" that narrates what you are reading, it's difficult (if not impossible) to "hear" both voices at once. This forces the brain to jump back and forth between the two input streams, it's not dissimilar to disk thrashing on a computer that's running tow apps but only enough to hold one in ram.
People who can read and listen at the same time ( or do math and count at the same time ) are quite rare and can do so because their brain processes the two streams differently, for example some people count by visualizing the numbers rather than silently speaking the numbers to themselves, these people can readily count and add up numbers at the same time. Richard Feynman was fascinated by this, he created some party tricks with it and then found certain people didn't have to train themselves to do the trick, it just came naturally to them because of they way they process information coming from the two basic channels (audio and visual).
Agree with your constructive criticism however contrary to slashdot lore a summary does not have to be in one's own words, cut and paste is a valid summary, even more so if it actually summarises TFA..
There's a good write up on realclimate for anyone interested in what "the scientists" have to say. The write up is by the lead scientist who did the earlier 2009 study. Despite the pile of posts below decrying the "one station" thing, the new study used several lines of evidence. Also both papers were published in Nature, which is not really well known for publishing sloppy statistical papers.
The 2009 study questioned the assumption that WA was neither warming or cooling. This new study extends and refines the first, it has a steeper trend and better confidence levels.
This is good old fashioned, plodding, science that evolved something like this....
Stage 1 - "That's odd" - why is everywhere warming except WA?
Stage 2 - We looked more closely at the numbers for WA, it is warming so the assumption is incorrect.
Stage 3 - We looked again in a different way with cleaner data, we now have a better estimate of how fast it's warming that is at the upper bound of the previous error bars (error bars that IIRC were mercilessly ridiculed by anti-science types as "study shows anything can happen").
Speaking of climate trends, I've personally noticed (as opposed to measured;) a change in the slashdot climate over the last few years, there is much less outright AGW denial on slashdot, my hypothesis is that "teaching the controversy" works against the "teacher" on a site full of amateur and professional nerds. The post with a barrage of well rehearsed talking points is slowly byt surely being replaced with a sort of insolent shrug, almost like as surly teenager's "whatever" when they just lost an argument to a parent, lets hope that in the new year they get over their embarrassment at being duped by amoral lobbyists, drop the defensive behavior, and get angry at the people who deliberately mislead them.
Please tell us what they have "added" and then explain why it's a problem. Fact is the type of analysis they are doing here is the same type of spacial analysis used in every other branch of science that needs to pick meaningful trends from noisy data. It's probably your politics that leads you to assume the numbers are biased toward warming, this is simply not true, the technique smooths out both +ve and -ve noise and is far more reliable than a simple least squares fit.
You can't recalibrate a sensor and apply the correction after the fact as you don't know why the sensor lost calibration
Sure you can, you just need to know how far out it is and for how long it has been wrong, simple instruments usually suffer from simple systematic errors, a thermometer does not normally output totally random data. Another common method (that can handle random as well as systematic errors is using weighted records of nearby stations to fill in or adjust known bad/missing data. They have probably used a sophisticated version of the second technique here since that is how both NASA and the MET office treat their global data sets.
This sounds like really bad science, but it may just be really bad reporting.
It's neither, it's your ignorance of common statistical methods combined with the paranoia displayed in your sig..
Climate is the statistics of weather, you should know that by now you've been corrected enough times in the past. Perhaps you didn't know that weather stations collect historical records that can be statistically analyzed to determine the climate at their particular location?
True, one station's data over time is a climate anecdote for the larger region, but you need only skim the article to determine that the scientists who did the study are well aware of the lack of historical data for the Antarctic mainland and did NOT base the entire study on a single weather station. There has been REAL scientific debate about the West Antarctic ice sheet for the last decade, this is just the latest and greatest attempt with the latest and greatest data, it probably adds little to existing knowledge other than an improved confidence rating
It's more of an opportunity than it is a problem. A few times during my (20yr) career I have brought projects to the point where my job could (and indeed needed to be) split into two or more jobs, the fact management are allocating resources to do so is practically the definition of a successful project. This is an opportunity for the submitter to have some influence on the division of labour and choice of staff. The project itself will benefit if both he and the MBA get the right people in the right pigeon holes. In the MBA's eyes he is in the "architect" pigeon hole right now, his personal influence and control over this particular project is most likely at it's peak.
From a corporate POV, this is the ONLY way to turn an idea into a milk cow, you cannot be exposed to the risk of losing the one guy who knows how to keep to keep the cow alive, so you send in 5 guys to work with him and each picks up 25% of what he knows and adds 10% of his own tweeks. If the corporation is lucky they only lose 50% of the knowledge when the architects brain eventually stops working, or revolts and takes the body job hunting. Believe me it's a lot harder to be one of the 5 guys or the MBA than it is to be "the guy" and it's nowhere near as much "fun".
At the end of the day creating a profitable project is an entirely different ball game to maintaining a profitable project, it sounds to me like the MBA knows exactly what he is doing, he is the grand poohbah and he wants a council of chiefs, the indians are currently busy with the existing wagon train. Talking through those issues one on one with the MBA is sound advise, if the MBA doesn't listen to your concerns the project is in trouble, if he doesn't act on all of your concerns then he is probably just doing his job.
For the submitter my advice is to ask himself three things...
1. Is it still "fun".
2. Do you like training "noobs" to become your peers and quite possibly your future boss.
3. Is the project still "growing".
* - Scare quotes because those words are defined in the mind of the reader.
The laws of thermodynamics back up the GP's statement.
This doesn't explain how some people are able to eat a lot of calories without gaining weight.
He didn't claim that everyone's metabolism was the same, some people have tapeworms, some don't chew their food properly, none of that alters the basic physics.
I'm old enough to remember the last of the Chinese famines. A famine is a catastrophe that all to often befalls large populations, and all too often is a direct result of government policy. Why the hell are westerners all worked up about an "obesity epidemic"? The fact that it is even possible is a good thing, the fact that we are free to stuff our face until we explode is also a good thing. Food abuse, like drug abuse, is a personal "problem" it's not a social engineering problem, I don't need (or want) a war on either kind of coke.
Don't get me wrong, people selling food have some responsibility for their product, I'm all for educational mandates that say you must list the nutritional content,etc. I'm also strongly in favor of health regulations and random kitchen inspections by the health authorities. For example, I know smokes are bad for me, it tells me on the pack but I still buy them. The educational aspect of that is a great example of responsible fact based regulation that still acknowledges the consumer as an adult.
Charles Manson wrote messages on the walls with his victims blood, was that about free speech?/rehtorical
The story says jack shit about the kids behavior, without that you can't make a rational judgement. All it really says is that several adults who are trained to deal with teenagers as part of their job, were concerned. The kid is probably just trying to freak people out, but who knows?
Either way it would reduce reliance on fossil fuel.
I'm all for reducing emissions but I find it difficult in the extreme to believe a modified exhaust pipe can extract significant amounts of electricity from the heat that leaks out of a coal plant. Coal plants are already designed to use the heat as efficiently as possible. The laws of thermodynamics say that nature will never allow you to use 100% of that heat, the laws of economics say it probably not worth the capital expenditure to suck any of the residual energy from the exhaust pipe. There's nothing new about these kind of ideas, I remember hearing about similar ideas as far back as the 70's, the fact is that if it was economical all installed coal plants would already be using it.
OTOH, they have a vortex, and we all know you get a lot more energy from air traveling in circles than you do from air traveling in a straight line, right?.
I would say that Keller already "knew she was", she just didn't have the mental tools to describe it to herself or others, the "internal dialogue" that gives us an ever present narrative in a modern human's mind is impossible without language. If you get into a highly emotional state (such as rage or terror), the narrative is silenced and the senses are more acute, reflexive responses take over, adrenaline pumps through you, pain is suppressed. A champion boxer wins because he is in control of his emotions, if he loses that control for an instant his opponent may very well lose an ear.
What astounds me is the mild interest in IBM's Jeopardy winning computer, to me it's comparable to the moon landing (which I witnessed), when you question the unimpressed it's clear they don't understand the difficulty of the problem or the significance of the win. Sure the game of Jeopardy is a restricted domain, but it's far broader than what's needed for a search engine that is "smart" enough to "understand" it's user and ask pertinent follow up questions. However that's not where I see the biggest impact on society, the most significant impact will come from widely available and "cheap" expert systems that use this technology, an "academic in a box" that professionals can kick under their desk and consult at will (much like software developers use google as their default documentation but with far less frustrations and dead ends). We already have machines that can organise and rummage through the world's knowledge far better than humans can do with a manual system, for instance software developers such as myself are constantly referring to google for advise on esoteric questions.
What we are starting to see are machines that can make sense of that pile of factoids significantly better than humans can, machines that understand natural language (or at worst the subset that is human text), they can relate facts, discover new patterns, create and test novel hypothesis to discover new facts within existing data. Sure it takes 20 tons of air-conditioning alone for a "computer" to beat the speed and accuracy of the small blob of jelly inside the head of a Jeopardy champion but the basic "AI"* problem has been well and truly cracked over the last decade, squeezing it into an iphone or scaling it up to a totalitarian demigod is now an engineering problem.
AI* - as opposed to what is known as the "hard problem of consciousness". The kind of AI that would pass the basic idea of a Turing test for the majority of people, you can claim that such a machine is "intelligent" or argue against it, in a pragmatic sense it's irreverent since there is no agreed definition of "intelligence". Attributes such as intelligence and understanding are applied to computers because we don't have any other words that describe their behavior. Listen to any developer explaining a bug, you will hear expressions such as "it thinks X", "it wants Y", these are universal metaphors for discussing computers, not a description of reality, it's how humans communicate about the behavior of ALL objects (particularly animated ones) and is intimately related to mankind's highly evolved (and innate), "theory of mind".
No other country has to deal with such a mix of cultures as the USA does.
Please travel, or at least watch some travel documentaries. Europe has always been far more culturally diverse than the US, (well...at least since European settlement)., the US culture is a "spin off" from Europe that has evolved over time. Any large land mass will have diverse cultures within it's boundaries. Most mainland Europeans know at least two languages. When Gandhi was kicking up a fuss, there were over 800 native languages in use in India alone. Even China which has retained the same overall system of bureaucracy for 2000yrs has a diverse mix of local cultures wrapped within the state sanctioned one, there are still at least two major versions of the Chinese language in common use today.
Ignoring the native cultures that existed in nations such as the US and Australia (where I live), the younger the nation the more homogenous the culture (birds of a feather and all that). This is simply because the imported culture has not had time to evolve into distinct local cultures. The rise of practical long distance travel and more recently global communications for the masses means that geography now plays a much smaller role in the establishment and maintenance of different cultures. In a historical sense it's a fairly recent development in Europe that normal people are even allowed to move freely between villages and towns, let alone move freely throughout all of Europe. This practice still has strong echos, you can still travel from one town to the next in parts of the UK and find very different cultures, things road signs in Gaelic or Welsh are not uncommon, and nobody has a clue what a "Jordie" is saying except another Jordie. That's not something that's just confined to the UK, the whole of Europe is the same.
And even then the use of those guns in domestic violence is still quite high. Assault weapons are designed for attacking large numbers of adversaries in a war like setting, not for shooting Moose from a helicopter, the Swiss culture understands that but they still have some problems with defective units. It interesting that prior to about 1990 the NRA was all about safety and training for sports shooters, nowadays they are just a mouthpiece for the small arms industry.
The fact that I'm of the opinion that the general public should not have access to assault rifles does not mean I have an anti gun agenda. Putting a simple rule in the constitution was not a stroke of genius, it has stopped Americans from thinking about guns in the same way religious commandments have stop worshipers thinking about morals. The stand out gun problem in the US is the number of massacres by nuts with a semi-autos, here in Australia we fixed that problem by banning semi-auto's. We still have nuts and we still have guns but it's a lot more difficult to go "human hunting" with a bolt action rifle or a double barrel shotgun, so difficult nobody has managed to do it since the laws were introduced almost 20yrs ago.
I suspect the US are going to ban assault rifles and large magazines due to the latest random massacre, but it will do jack shit if the government "grandfathers" existing assault weapons and allows them to stay in private hands, which I'm sure they will do because no US government would have the balls to institute a compulsory buy back. This is because you guys have stopped thinking, you see the choice as guns/no-guns, few people stop to ask if there is a reasonable middle ground that may eliminate or at least drastically reduce the chances of similar massacres. Sure compared to the big picture of violence the number of people killed in those events is miniscule, but as the American people have shown this week, such events are far from insignificant.
The first duty of government is to maintain public order (keeping the peace), it does this mainly through the rule of law. Setting gun laws at the right level is definitely part of that duty. Few people would think it reasonable for a seven year old to carry an uzi at school for self defense. If you dig deep enough virtually all people have a "do not cross" line in relation to the private ownership of weapons. Instead of parroting a constitution (written with an ink pot in the days of muskets) that says anybody can have any weapon they should realise they themselves have a "do not cross" line and perhaps rethink why they draw the line where they do.
Even if you go along with the idea that "self defense" is a legitimate reason to own a gun (and most Europeans and Aussies don't), assault weapons are not even designed for self defense, they are called "assault" weapons for a reason. If people really do want to target shoot with machine guns and rocket launchers then why not allow military amusement parks. The weapons never leave the park and are stored with military style respect and security, you pay you dime, blow some shit up and go home. I believe such places already exist and don't cause any newsworthy problems.
Disclaimer: Just to preempt any remaining teabaggers out there, it was the conservative government of John Howard that instituted the semi-auto ban here in Australia. The dogma that gun control ( and universal health care) are "left wing ideas" is just another contradictory self delusion of the American right wing.
The whole notion of IQ has been discussed ad nauseam here on the boards. We all know it's bullshit, so there's really no point in discussing it further.
I once took part in a training exercise. About 10 of us in a room (all Aussies) were asked to estimate the distance from Melbourne to Perth. The fist thing that surprised me were the number of people who had absolute no idea, the second thing was the average of all guesses was pretty accurate. The fundamental mistake a lot of managers make is they don't ask enough people, often they don't even ask the person doing the work. If a boss tells (as opposed to asks) me how long it will take and it turns out to take longer then that's his problem not mine, provided I've acted in good faith any CIO worth his title will back me up.
In that hour the tech guy nearly tripled his time and cost estimates. After he left the CFO doubled the time and cost estimate for the budget. In the end the CFO was nearly bang on.
Ten bucks says the tech guy was only estimating the time it would take to code. People are usually pretty good at estimating their own work, what they are not good at is estimating the bigger picture. This is not a failing, it's "by design", division of labour and all that. Also, the fool will underestimate to impress, the wise will overestimate for the same reason.
There were a lot of studies done in the early-mid 90's about IT projects, the common wisdom of the time was 3/4 of all commercial IT projects that are started, (ie: get a budget), never actually make it into production, regardless of deadlines. One major reason for that was that upper management would often have 2-3 different teams tackling the same (or similar) problems, as work progresses the "best" team is fed more resources at the expense of the others, I'd be surprised if the "fail" rate has changed much.
The basic principle is easy to understand, if you want the best apple in the orchard you will have to throw the rest of them away in the process of finding it. Often the difficulty is that they don't know exactly what the best apple looks like, they just know they don't have it yet. The IT revolution is over and has been for more than a decade, it's now unthinkable to start/run a company today without some involvement from computers. Once a company has a non-trivial computer system it is never replaced, it evolves, and if your careful how much you feed it, it will evolve with the company and won't turn cancerous.
Spiders are master engineers, there's an Attenbourough clip somewhere of a spider that hoists empty snail shells up into a bush and ties it to a branch as a house. There's another kind that makes a sort of catapult out of silk to shoot down bugs. Some orb weavers put shock absorbers in the center of their webs. You can tell they don't "know" what they are doing because all members of the species build the same structures. I can understand people not wanting to touch them, I can't understand the sheer terror some people display at the sight of them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much cheaper to give every cow a regular dose of antibiotics than it is to identify and treat infected individuals. No need for an agenda here, the long term problems have been well known for decades, it's just another example of the invisible hand fist fucking society for short term gains.
The real question is, how many deniers are secretly believers?
That's not a question it's a definition!
They are called deniers because they are denying what they know to be true, it used to be called "lying". The rest are either plain old wrong, intellectually incurious, or politically distracted. In the case of AGW deniers the last category is a large (but shrinking) army of "useful idiots" who's facts and opinion are fed to them by K street lobbyists such as the Heartland Institute (the deniers) and their dwindling number of friends in the press.
Thing is, a paltry $50 million has been spent over 20yrs by FF companies on these anti-science, anti-intellectual, amoral, propaganda mills but it has bought them the "hearts and minds" of a large chunk of the American public. $50M for getting that many people to vote against their own interests is dirt cheap by anyone standards and it was made possible by a free press where advertising revenue is valued more than content. It's not solely the US media that whores it's opinion pages but that's where it's most obvious and that's where most of the money comes from. Political hacks in other countries (such as Andrew Bolt here in Oz) feed off the material produced by the US lobbyists to push the political agenda of their own sponsors (eg: World's richest woman in the case of Bolt).
Not all FF companies fund this kind of activity, in fact it's now more or less limited to some companies in the coal industry (note Exxon has large coal investments). Most of these companies have a "colourfull billionaire" running the show, the really big FF companies (GE, SHELL, BHP, BP, Ri-Tinto, ect) of the world accept things must change and are looking for a long term predictable legislative path from governments, ie: they want long term stability, a predictable ROI of 10-15% that will attract retirement fund managers to their stock. The "colourfull billionaire" is mainly focused on their personal legacy which is generally measured by the pile of assets they left multiplied by the pile they gave to charity while alive.
Colourfull billionaires are far from stupid (or evil) but like their political counterparts they do and say the most outrageous things out of pure self-interest, so I would have to put them in the denier category along with the lobbyists that feed off them and the politicians riding in their back pocket. Why else would anyone sponsor an Australian speaking tour by Lord Monckton?
Of course they will charge you more, they're a business not the Red Cross, if they go out of business nobody gets paid.
The odd thing here is that people think TFA is news, insurance companies have been including climate change into their risk calculations for at least a decade now (spurred by the 1997 IPCC reports). Insurance companies think long term, a large building can be expected to last a century or more, if "once in a century" floods start appearing once every decade, they will watch the trends and adjust the rates accordingly.
s/ tow app / two apps
Yes, most people use the same part of the brain to both read an listen to words. Some people are able to do both at once but if your like me (and most other people) there is a "voice in your head" that narrates what you are reading, it's difficult (if not impossible) to "hear" both voices at once. This forces the brain to jump back and forth between the two input streams, it's not dissimilar to disk thrashing on a computer that's running tow apps but only enough to hold one in ram.
People who can read and listen at the same time ( or do math and count at the same time ) are quite rare and can do so because their brain processes the two streams differently, for example some people count by visualizing the numbers rather than silently speaking the numbers to themselves, these people can readily count and add up numbers at the same time. Richard Feynman was fascinated by this, he created some party tricks with it and then found certain people didn't have to train themselves to do the trick, it just came naturally to them because of they way they process information coming from the two basic channels (audio and visual).
Agree with your constructive criticism however contrary to slashdot lore a summary does not have to be in one's own words, cut and paste is a valid summary, even more so if it actually summarises TFA..
Metamod a couple of posts, points will arrive in due course.
There's a good write up on realclimate for anyone interested in what "the scientists" have to say. The write up is by the lead scientist who did the earlier 2009 study. Despite the pile of posts below decrying the "one station" thing, the new study used several lines of evidence. Also both papers were published in Nature, which is not really well known for publishing sloppy statistical papers.
;) a change in the slashdot climate over the last few years, there is much less outright AGW denial on slashdot, my hypothesis is that "teaching the controversy" works against the "teacher" on a site full of amateur and professional nerds. The post with a barrage of well rehearsed talking points is slowly byt surely being replaced with a sort of insolent shrug, almost like as surly teenager's "whatever" when they just lost an argument to a parent, lets hope that in the new year they get over their embarrassment at being duped by amoral lobbyists, drop the defensive behavior, and get angry at the people who deliberately mislead them.
The 2009 study questioned the assumption that WA was neither warming or cooling. This new study extends and refines the first, it has a steeper trend and better confidence levels.
This is good old fashioned, plodding, science that evolved something like this....
Stage 1 - "That's odd" - why is everywhere warming except WA?
Stage 2 - We looked more closely at the numbers for WA, it is warming so the assumption is incorrect.
Stage 3 - We looked again in a different way with cleaner data, we now have a better estimate of how fast it's warming that is at the upper bound of the previous error bars (error bars that IIRC were mercilessly ridiculed by anti-science types as "study shows anything can happen").
Speaking of climate trends, I've personally noticed (as opposed to measured
You can't recalibrate a sensor and apply the correction after the fact as you don't know why the sensor lost calibration
Sure you can, you just need to know how far out it is and for how long it has been wrong, simple instruments usually suffer from simple systematic errors, a thermometer does not normally output totally random data. Another common method (that can handle random as well as systematic errors is using weighted records of nearby stations to fill in or adjust known bad/missing data. They have probably used a sophisticated version of the second technique here since that is how both NASA and the MET office treat their global data sets.
This sounds like really bad science, but it may just be really bad reporting.
It's neither, it's your ignorance of common statistical methods combined with the paranoia displayed in your sig..
Climate is the statistics of weather, you should know that by now you've been corrected enough times in the past. Perhaps you didn't know that weather stations collect historical records that can be statistically analyzed to determine the climate at their particular location?
True, one station's data over time is a climate anecdote for the larger region, but you need only skim the article to determine that the scientists who did the study are well aware of the lack of historical data for the Antarctic mainland and did NOT base the entire study on a single weather station. There has been REAL scientific debate about the West Antarctic ice sheet for the last decade, this is just the latest and greatest attempt with the latest and greatest data, it probably adds little to existing knowledge other than an improved confidence rating
The basic science is sound, it's your own layer of politics that's giving you grief.
It's more of an opportunity than it is a problem. A few times during my (20yr) career I have brought projects to the point where my job could (and indeed needed to be) split into two or more jobs, the fact management are allocating resources to do so is practically the definition of a successful project. This is an opportunity for the submitter to have some influence on the division of labour and choice of staff. The project itself will benefit if both he and the MBA get the right people in the right pigeon holes. In the MBA's eyes he is in the "architect" pigeon hole right now, his personal influence and control over this particular project is most likely at it's peak.
From a corporate POV, this is the ONLY way to turn an idea into a milk cow, you cannot be exposed to the risk of losing the one guy who knows how to keep to keep the cow alive, so you send in 5 guys to work with him and each picks up 25% of what he knows and adds 10% of his own tweeks. If the corporation is lucky they only lose 50% of the knowledge when the architects brain eventually stops working, or revolts and takes the body job hunting. Believe me it's a lot harder to be one of the 5 guys or the MBA than it is to be "the guy" and it's nowhere near as much "fun".
At the end of the day creating a profitable project is an entirely different ball game to maintaining a profitable project, it sounds to me like the MBA knows exactly what he is doing, he is the grand poohbah and he wants a council of chiefs, the indians are currently busy with the existing wagon train. Talking through those issues one on one with the MBA is sound advise, if the MBA doesn't listen to your concerns the project is in trouble, if he doesn't act on all of your concerns then he is probably just doing his job.
For the submitter my advice is to ask himself three things...
1. Is it still "fun".
2. Do you like training "noobs" to become your peers and quite possibly your future boss.
3. Is the project still "growing".
* - Scare quotes because those words are defined in the mind of the reader.
You got any evidence to back that up?
The laws of thermodynamics back up the GP's statement.
This doesn't explain how some people are able to eat a lot of calories without gaining weight.
He didn't claim that everyone's metabolism was the same, some people have tapeworms, some don't chew their food properly, none of that alters the basic physics.
I'm old enough to remember the last of the Chinese famines. A famine is a catastrophe that all to often befalls large populations, and all too often is a direct result of government policy. Why the hell are westerners all worked up about an "obesity epidemic"? The fact that it is even possible is a good thing, the fact that we are free to stuff our face until we explode is also a good thing. Food abuse, like drug abuse, is a personal "problem" it's not a social engineering problem, I don't need (or want) a war on either kind of coke.
Don't get me wrong, people selling food have some responsibility for their product, I'm all for educational mandates that say you must list the nutritional content,etc. I'm also strongly in favor of health regulations and random kitchen inspections by the health authorities. For example, I know smokes are bad for me, it tells me on the pack but I still buy them. The educational aspect of that is a great example of responsible fact based regulation that still acknowledges the consumer as an adult.
Charles Manson wrote messages on the walls with his victims blood, was that about free speech? /rehtorical
The story says jack shit about the kids behavior, without that you can't make a rational judgement. All it really says is that several adults who are trained to deal with teenagers as part of their job, were concerned. The kid is probably just trying to freak people out, but who knows?
Either way it would reduce reliance on fossil fuel.
I'm all for reducing emissions but I find it difficult in the extreme to believe a modified exhaust pipe can extract significant amounts of electricity from the heat that leaks out of a coal plant. Coal plants are already designed to use the heat as efficiently as possible. The laws of thermodynamics say that nature will never allow you to use 100% of that heat, the laws of economics say it probably not worth the capital expenditure to suck any of the residual energy from the exhaust pipe. There's nothing new about these kind of ideas, I remember hearing about similar ideas as far back as the 70's, the fact is that if it was economical all installed coal plants would already be using it.
OTOH, they have a vortex, and we all know you get a lot more energy from air traveling in circles than you do from air traveling in a straight line, right?.
He's probably read "Electric universe".
I would say that Keller already "knew she was", she just didn't have the mental tools to describe it to herself or others, the "internal dialogue" that gives us an ever present narrative in a modern human's mind is impossible without language. If you get into a highly emotional state (such as rage or terror), the narrative is silenced and the senses are more acute, reflexive responses take over, adrenaline pumps through you, pain is suppressed. A champion boxer wins because he is in control of his emotions, if he loses that control for an instant his opponent may very well lose an ear.
What astounds me is the mild interest in IBM's Jeopardy winning computer, to me it's comparable to the moon landing (which I witnessed), when you question the unimpressed it's clear they don't understand the difficulty of the problem or the significance of the win. Sure the game of Jeopardy is a restricted domain, but it's far broader than what's needed for a search engine that is "smart" enough to "understand" it's user and ask pertinent follow up questions. However that's not where I see the biggest impact on society, the most significant impact will come from widely available and "cheap" expert systems that use this technology, an "academic in a box" that professionals can kick under their desk and consult at will (much like software developers use google as their default documentation but with far less frustrations and dead ends). We already have machines that can organise and rummage through the world's knowledge far better than humans can do with a manual system, for instance software developers such as myself are constantly referring to google for advise on esoteric questions.
What we are starting to see are machines that can make sense of that pile of factoids significantly better than humans can, machines that understand natural language (or at worst the subset that is human text), they can relate facts, discover new patterns, create and test novel hypothesis to discover new facts within existing data. Sure it takes 20 tons of air-conditioning alone for a "computer" to beat the speed and accuracy of the small blob of jelly inside the head of a Jeopardy champion but the basic "AI"* problem has been well and truly cracked over the last decade, squeezing it into an iphone or scaling it up to a totalitarian demigod is now an engineering problem.
AI* - as opposed to what is known as the "hard problem of consciousness". The kind of AI that would pass the basic idea of a Turing test for the majority of people, you can claim that such a machine is "intelligent" or argue against it, in a pragmatic sense it's irreverent since there is no agreed definition of "intelligence". Attributes such as intelligence and understanding are applied to computers because we don't have any other words that describe their behavior. Listen to any developer explaining a bug, you will hear expressions such as "it thinks X", "it wants Y", these are universal metaphors for discussing computers, not a description of reality, it's how humans communicate about the behavior of ALL objects (particularly animated ones) and is intimately related to mankind's highly evolved (and innate), "theory of mind".
No other country has to deal with such a mix of cultures as the USA does.
Please travel, or at least watch some travel documentaries. Europe has always been far more culturally diverse than the US, (well...at least since European settlement)., the US culture is a "spin off" from Europe that has evolved over time. Any large land mass will have diverse cultures within it's boundaries. Most mainland Europeans know at least two languages. When Gandhi was kicking up a fuss, there were over 800 native languages in use in India alone. Even China which has retained the same overall system of bureaucracy for 2000yrs has a diverse mix of local cultures wrapped within the state sanctioned one, there are still at least two major versions of the Chinese language in common use today.
Ignoring the native cultures that existed in nations such as the US and Australia (where I live), the younger the nation the more homogenous the culture (birds of a feather and all that). This is simply because the imported culture has not had time to evolve into distinct local cultures. The rise of practical long distance travel and more recently global communications for the masses means that geography now plays a much smaller role in the establishment and maintenance of different cultures. In a historical sense it's a fairly recent development in Europe that normal people are even allowed to move freely between villages and towns, let alone move freely throughout all of Europe. This practice still has strong echos, you can still travel from one town to the next in parts of the UK and find very different cultures, things road signs in Gaelic or Welsh are not uncommon, and nobody has a clue what a "Jordie" is saying except another Jordie. That's not something that's just confined to the UK, the whole of Europe is the same.
And even then the use of those guns in domestic violence is still quite high. Assault weapons are designed for attacking large numbers of adversaries in a war like setting, not for shooting Moose from a helicopter, the Swiss culture understands that but they still have some problems with defective units. It interesting that prior to about 1990 the NRA was all about safety and training for sports shooters, nowadays they are just a mouthpiece for the small arms industry.
The fact that I'm of the opinion that the general public should not have access to assault rifles does not mean I have an anti gun agenda. Putting a simple rule in the constitution was not a stroke of genius, it has stopped Americans from thinking about guns in the same way religious commandments have stop worshipers thinking about morals. The stand out gun problem in the US is the number of massacres by nuts with a semi-autos, here in Australia we fixed that problem by banning semi-auto's. We still have nuts and we still have guns but it's a lot more difficult to go "human hunting" with a bolt action rifle or a double barrel shotgun, so difficult nobody has managed to do it since the laws were introduced almost 20yrs ago.
I suspect the US are going to ban assault rifles and large magazines due to the latest random massacre, but it will do jack shit if the government "grandfathers" existing assault weapons and allows them to stay in private hands, which I'm sure they will do because no US government would have the balls to institute a compulsory buy back. This is because you guys have stopped thinking, you see the choice as guns/no-guns, few people stop to ask if there is a reasonable middle ground that may eliminate or at least drastically reduce the chances of similar massacres. Sure compared to the big picture of violence the number of people killed in those events is miniscule, but as the American people have shown this week, such events are far from insignificant.
The first duty of government is to maintain public order (keeping the peace), it does this mainly through the rule of law. Setting gun laws at the right level is definitely part of that duty. Few people would think it reasonable for a seven year old to carry an uzi at school for self defense. If you dig deep enough virtually all people have a "do not cross" line in relation to the private ownership of weapons. Instead of parroting a constitution (written with an ink pot in the days of muskets) that says anybody can have any weapon they should realise they themselves have a "do not cross" line and perhaps rethink why they draw the line where they do.
Even if you go along with the idea that "self defense" is a legitimate reason to own a gun (and most Europeans and Aussies don't), assault weapons are not even designed for self defense, they are called "assault" weapons for a reason. If people really do want to target shoot with machine guns and rocket launchers then why not allow military amusement parks. The weapons never leave the park and are stored with military style respect and security, you pay you dime, blow some shit up and go home. I believe such places already exist and don't cause any newsworthy problems.
Disclaimer: Just to preempt any remaining teabaggers out there, it was the conservative government of John Howard that instituted the semi-auto ban here in Australia. The dogma that gun control ( and universal health care) are "left wing ideas" is just another contradictory self delusion of the American right wing.
They "share" the same way my dog wants to share. I.e. she gets my steak, and I stay the fuck away from her food bowl.
That's not the dog's fault, it's yours for not showing her who's boss, you need to fix that shit now! - Hint: That's also an on-topic metaphor.
The whole notion of IQ has been discussed ad nauseam here on the boards. We all know it's bullshit, so there's really no point in discussing it further.
Yes, but what is stupidity?
I once took part in a training exercise. About 10 of us in a room (all Aussies) were asked to estimate the distance from Melbourne to Perth. The fist thing that surprised me were the number of people who had absolute no idea, the second thing was the average of all guesses was pretty accurate. The fundamental mistake a lot of managers make is they don't ask enough people, often they don't even ask the person doing the work. If a boss tells (as opposed to asks) me how long it will take and it turns out to take longer then that's his problem not mine, provided I've acted in good faith any CIO worth his title will back me up.
In that hour the tech guy nearly tripled his time and cost estimates. After he left the CFO doubled the time and cost estimate for the budget. In the end the CFO was nearly bang on.
Ten bucks says the tech guy was only estimating the time it would take to code. People are usually pretty good at estimating their own work, what they are not good at is estimating the bigger picture. This is not a failing, it's "by design", division of labour and all that. Also, the fool will underestimate to impress, the wise will overestimate for the same reason.
There were a lot of studies done in the early-mid 90's about IT projects, the common wisdom of the time was 3/4 of all commercial IT projects that are started, (ie: get a budget), never actually make it into production, regardless of deadlines. One major reason for that was that upper management would often have 2-3 different teams tackling the same (or similar) problems, as work progresses the "best" team is fed more resources at the expense of the others, I'd be surprised if the "fail" rate has changed much.
The basic principle is easy to understand, if you want the best apple in the orchard you will have to throw the rest of them away in the process of finding it. Often the difficulty is that they don't know exactly what the best apple looks like, they just know they don't have it yet. The IT revolution is over and has been for more than a decade, it's now unthinkable to start/run a company today without some involvement from computers. Once a company has a non-trivial computer system it is never replaced, it evolves, and if your careful how much you feed it, it will evolve with the company and won't turn cancerous.
Spiders are master engineers, there's an Attenbourough clip somewhere of a spider that hoists empty snail shells up into a bush and ties it to a branch as a house. There's another kind that makes a sort of catapult out of silk to shoot down bugs. Some orb weavers put shock absorbers in the center of their webs. You can tell they don't "know" what they are doing because all members of the species build the same structures. I can understand people not wanting to touch them, I can't understand the sheer terror some people display at the sight of them.