Lovelock was on "Start the Week" this morning, (BBC Radio 4), plugging his latest book.
What he said was that global warming is unstoppable, as far as the UK is concerned: we don't contribute enough to the problem to make a difference by reducing our own carbon emissionis. Therefore what the UK Government should be doing is taking steps to alleviate the inevitable effects of climate change. e.g. Improving flood defences, moving populations out of low-lying areas such as London, moving away from reliance on imports.
There is still some dispute over whether human activity is contributing significantly to global warming but surely there cannot be much doubt that it is taking place. And whatever the reasons the effects will be the same and we should be prepared to deal with them.
Is it this or mashing biology, chemistry and physics into a half baked mash called "Science"?
Hasn't this always been the case when teaching to 11-year-olds? In grade school, we never had anything besides "science". It wasn't until jr. high that it got separated a little, and high school when it finally fully separated. (This was in the US, though, it may be different in the UK)
Back when I was a lad, there was just science at Junior school (7-11) - and not too much of it. At the secondary school (11-16) we still just had a general Science class to start with but there was a lot more of it in the timetable. At age 13 it got split up into Biology, Physics and Chemistry. (There were a couple of other more specialist courses, like Human Biology, but they weren't heavily subscribed.)
I'm not too bothered about whether or not science teaching is split into those three traditional branches. Although the distinction between them is not entirely arbitrary there is considerable overlap. Providing the quality of the teaching and syllabus is OK I'd be happy. of course, whether that is the case is debatable.
Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.
I'm not sure that's correct. In my (admittedly limited) experience although kids will asemble the Lego kits according to the instructions they seldom stay assembled for long. Eventually all the bricks end up in one big box and get used to make new and original things from the child's immagination; or their best attempt at modelliing something they've seeen, but without instructions.
(I have a young nephew and great-nephew and I often buy them Lego and other construction toys because I remember how much I enjoyed them myself.)
What I was trying to get at was more to do with the concept of scientific theories. Each is just the current best approximation of how things work. Modern evolutionary theory does an excellent job but like any theory it's subject to refinement or even - though I think it unlikely - replacement by a new theory which does a better job. It's something that the Creationists and IDists just can't - or won't - understand, whilst at the same time being one of the great strengths of the scientific method.
You appear to have misunderstood my post. Or I have misunderstood yours. I am whole-heartedly opposed to ID or anything like it: I merely corrected an error in the previous post. Religious (and other) idiots tend to pick on small mistakes by their opponents in order to draw attention away from their own much greater ones.
ID is about the creation of life by an intelligence which could be anything from the God of the Bible to slimy tentacled aliens from a planet orbiting Betelgeuse.
There ARE problems with current theories of gravity. Check Slashdot over the last few days and you'll find some of them. Or JFGI.
However, like evolution, our theories are the best we've got at the moment. They both probably need a bit of fine-tuning but it's unlikely that they need wholesale revision.
One thing that we can say with some confidence is that whatever its flaws, modern evolutionary theory is vastly superior to ID/Creationism.
Without knwoing a lot more about what was asked, to whom, and what they actually replied it's hard to be sure. However, I'm pretty sure you're right, that it indicates a general ignorance, (and likely indifference) of the subject. It really hasn't been an issue over here and the controvorsy in the USA hasn't received a lot of general news coverage. Unless one is already interested in science, or pays some attention to US news one is unlikely to know what all the fuss is about.
That said, although the mainstream religions appear to be in decline here - with the possible exception of Islam, which I think is as much for social and political as theological reasons - there do seem to be a depressing number of people with very muddled spiritual and superstitious beliefs, who ust thinkg that there must be something more, some ill-defined guiding force or some-such nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if they liked the idea of Intelligent Design, but with a much more nebulous designer behind it than its US proponents, (who are almost to a man Christians).
EDS tried this some time ago, (15-20 years ago?). Anyone who left the company after receiving training was required to pay back part of the cost of that training.
It wasn't popular. I expect to be trained by my employer: it's one of the things I would look for if I were changing job. In the past, I've stuck with a company I didn't like because the training was so good. (The job itself was OK, but it was in a place I didn't like. It got too much for me eventually so I moved to a job in a nicer location.)
If I knew I wasn't going to receive training I would want to negotiate a higher salary and some arrangement for extra time off work to receive training. Two or three weeks training time and an extra 5k, or thereabouts; more if the time off was unpaid.
In the UK, it seems that people get training and the employers figure that it'll all work out in the end: you poach my staff, I poach yours.
It's not entirely tue, (hence not entirely UNtrue - take what you're offerred!), because a bad driver going slowly is much worse than a good driver going fast.
Yes: more kinetic energy means more damage. Around urban areas this may be important as the difference betweewn 30mph and 40 mph can be significant. In more open areas it's less important. The difference between getting hit by a car at 60 and one at 80 is not so great because the "lesser" impact will already be enough to wipe out a pedestrian: anything more is literally overkill.
Far better is to prevent the impact in the first place. Speed can play a part in that, but not many people actually lose control and crash because of their speed: it's more down to lack of reaction time, which is in turn more a result of poor observation by the driver. The usual example given is the child being hit in a residential street. Most drivers, unfortuantely, are so shit that they'd hit the child at whatever speed they were travelling. Why not train them so they spot the problem well in advance and don't have to panic. (In the well-known TV add, the car with its wheels locked is a clear demonstration of rather poor driving. And lack of ABS, come to that.)
The motorway example is not great I'll admit. But it was intended to show that the key factor in the two examples was not the speed but the bad driving. Doing 100 (or even more) on an empty motorway in good conditions is pretty safe. So does that mean that 100 mph is a "safe" speed? Sticking to the speed limit but driving badly is clearly dangerous.
There are people who drive too fast, and there are occasions when it contributes to or exacerbates accidents and injuries. But the "road safety" lobby in this country places far too much emphasis on speeding to the detriment of driving standards in general. It's an easy target for them - and for the police. We would be far better off if instead of calling for more and more stringent speed limits, backed by oodles of speed cameras they instead lobbied for more traffic police.
The number of dedicated traffic officers has dropped dramatically in the past few years. Some forces no longer even have a traffic division! Much of this is due to the perceived benefits of speed cameras and the like. But those are very limited in what they can do. An actual traffic officer might let someone off - or choose to give them a good telling-off - for driving fast but safely. The same officer can also spot the driver who's going slowly but dangerously and take action, something which a speed camera can never do.
Well this biker knows that failing to display a plate can actually lead to prosecution for Attempting to pervert the Course of Justice, which carries much more sever penalties.
Unlikely to happen for a first offence but repeat offenders face jail time, big fines, confiscation of the vehicle...
That's just not true. Well... not entirely, anyway.
People get killed by bad drivers, who may or may not be speeding. But speeding is easy to detect and easy for the frothing safety-lobby to hang their argument on. It's one of the reasons I dislike them, (although their stated aims are usually laudable).
Who is more dangerous? The motorist driving at 60mph on a motorway, (speed limit 70mph), just 3m behind the car in front? Or someone doing 100mph on the same motorway when it's deserted?
One way around the problem of duplicates is to steal a car, then swap its plates with another. Not a long-term solution but it would avoid drawing attention to the stolen vehicle.
But when you couple that with cellphone records, ISP records etc., I think such pervasive surveillance will net significant intelligence data on the people who support the bombers.
There's some truth in that but there's also a high risk of perfectly innocent people being implicated simply because they associated with the terrorist, particularly if they are politically active. And these are exactly the sort of folk terrorists are likely to be associating with.
So the intelligence agencies get pointed to a load of people they already knew about, (because they're politically active). And if they pursue investigations against these people they risk alienating them and their communities and making it more likely that they, too, will turn to violence.
If there really is a way in which this new tehcnology would be beneficial, I'd like to hear it. It's a significant development that ought to be discussed properly in Parliament and elsewhere before being implemented, not simply sneaked in without proper oversight.
Tamper-proof plates would be a pain in the arse for me as I have to remove my licence plate to re-fill the Scottoiler on my bike. There are plenty of other legitimate reasons for wanting to remove the plate on both bikes and cars.
All of the documents involved are perfectly legitimate so there's no way to spot the fraud without examining the vehicle in question.
This sort of cime is helped an awful lot by insurance companies selling wrecks complete with documents. Such vehicles are worth way more than scrap value, yet if the vehicle is not economically repairable there is no legitimate use for the documents.
If insurance companies scrapped written-off cars and destroyed documents instead of selling them this sort of crime would become much more difficult and less common, which would lower the amount they pay out on theft claims.
There is a very real problem at the moment with stolen licence plates. They are desirable to avoid speed cameras, and also the London congestion charge. Many people who find their plates missing - or often just one: most cameras look at the back of the car/bike - don't bother reporting it.
This will, of course, make such thefts more common.
Of course, it would be possible to detect that there is a duplicate plate around, but not easy. For a start, having stolen a plate the thief will have several days' grace until the victim purchases another plate. For normal criminals that would be sufficient for their purposes.
For terrorists - especially suicide bombers - they're not worried about capture and are seldom known to the security services until after their attack, so this technology would be of little use for prevention. The only value it would have is to track their movements after the fact and build maps of their relationships, and I'm far from convinced that this would be terribly useful if the terrorists took a few elementary precautions.
Specific goals are difficult to identify without knowing more about the poster's situation but some areas which I think bear further investigation are...
Audit compliance. Can you meet all the requirements of Sarbannes-Oxley and the like? Tight IS/IT controls help a lot in this area and it's not something that can be ignored. (If you're not a US company, and don't work with the USA you'll still have local equivilants, I guess.)
Cost savings through central purchasing of equipment and software. Can you get better deals from suppliers? Can you take tighter control of the specification so that folk get what they need, not simply the latest and greatest (and most costly) new piece of kit? And so everybody gets the same version/model rather than eight different people having eight different PCs/databases/whatever.
Both of those usually require an accurate hardware and software inventory, something which is quite tricky to do if there's no central control.
Quantify the effort you're putting into support. The total hours worked then broken down into categories, (mainly to distinguish between inevitable problems like a disk crash and avoidable problems like a virus infection). To make this work you need to be adequately compensated for work outside your normal hours. If your contract says you do whatever's necessary, whenever it's necessary, with no call-out or overtime payments, (sucker!) give them a chance to change things - more money or less hours - then look for another job. (If you're doing loads and loads of unpaid work, there's little incentive for the company to change. If every support call in the evening costs them money it's a good argument for making changes to remove those calls.)
We've had a lot of very good people from sandwich courses. (Four-year computing degrees including one year working in industry.) They'd cost a bit more than interns, (which we don't really have in the UK) but come with more training and are usually enthusiastic and keen to be involved in anything you care to throw at them.
That would be one of my first concerns. In my company, IS and IT are two different things, (but related and somewhat overlapping).
Broadly, IS is the applications the users are using and IT is the infrastructure that supports IS: primarily server hardware and operating systems, networks and general services such as email.
Things like databases and SAP Basis could go either way but in our case are covered by IT, mostly.
Slashdot Mirror
Lovelock was on "Start the Week" this morning, (BBC Radio 4), plugging his latest book.
What he said was that global warming is unstoppable, as far as the UK is concerned: we don't contribute enough to the problem to make a difference by reducing our own carbon emissionis. Therefore what the UK Government should be doing is taking steps to alleviate the inevitable effects of climate change. e.g. Improving flood defences, moving populations out of low-lying areas such as London, moving away from reliance on imports.
There is still some dispute over whether human activity is contributing significantly to global warming but surely there cannot be much doubt that it is taking place. And whatever the reasons the effects will be the same and we should be prepared to deal with them.
Back when I was a lad, there was just science at Junior school (7-11) - and not too much of it. At the secondary school (11-16) we still just had a general Science class to start with but there was a lot more of it in the timetable. At age 13 it got split up into Biology, Physics and Chemistry. (There were a couple of other more specialist courses, like Human Biology, but they weren't heavily subscribed.)
I'm not too bothered about whether or not science teaching is split into those three traditional branches. Although the distinction between them is not entirely arbitrary there is considerable overlap. Providing the quality of the teaching and syllabus is OK I'd be happy. of course, whether that is the case is debatable.
I'm not sure that's correct. In my (admittedly limited) experience although kids will asemble the Lego kits according to the instructions they seldom stay assembled for long. Eventually all the bricks end up in one big box and get used to make new and original things from the child's immagination; or their best attempt at modelliing something they've seeen, but without instructions.
(I have a young nephew and great-nephew and I often buy them Lego and other construction toys because I remember how much I enjoyed them myself.)
Just because nobody's found one yet doesn't mean they don't exist. I think this is a valuable area of research.
What I was trying to get at was more to do with the concept of scientific theories. Each is just the current best approximation of how things work. Modern evolutionary theory does an excellent job but like any theory it's subject to refinement or even - though I think it unlikely - replacement by a new theory which does a better job. It's something that the Creationists and IDists just can't - or won't - understand, whilst at the same time being one of the great strengths of the scientific method.
Did you even bother to read my post? Or was it just too difficult for you?
No: I am not denying gravity exists. I am, in fact, supporting the validity of the currently accepted theory of gravity, and evolutionary theory.
You appear to have misunderstood my post. Or I have misunderstood yours. I am whole-heartedly opposed to ID or anything like it: I merely corrected an error in the previous post. Religious (and other) idiots tend to pick on small mistakes by their opponents in order to draw attention away from their own much greater ones.
ID is about the creation of life by an intelligence which could be anything from the God of the Bible to slimy tentacled aliens from a planet orbiting Betelgeuse.
Names changed to protect the guilty.
There ARE problems with current theories of gravity. Check Slashdot over the last few days and you'll find some of them. Or JFGI.
However, like evolution, our theories are the best we've got at the moment. They both probably need a bit of fine-tuning but it's unlikely that they need wholesale revision.
One thing that we can say with some confidence is that whatever its flaws, modern evolutionary theory is vastly superior to ID/Creationism.
Without knwoing a lot more about what was asked, to whom, and what they actually replied it's hard to be sure. However, I'm pretty sure you're right, that it indicates a general ignorance, (and likely indifference) of the subject. It really hasn't been an issue over here and the controvorsy in the USA hasn't received a lot of general news coverage. Unless one is already interested in science, or pays some attention to US news one is unlikely to know what all the fuss is about.
That said, although the mainstream religions appear to be in decline here - with the possible exception of Islam, which I think is as much for social and political as theological reasons - there do seem to be a depressing number of people with very muddled spiritual and superstitious beliefs, who ust thinkg that there must be something more, some ill-defined guiding force or some-such nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if they liked the idea of Intelligent Design, but with a much more nebulous designer behind it than its US proponents, (who are almost to a man Christians).
EDS tried this some time ago, (15-20 years ago?). Anyone who left the company after receiving training was required to pay back part of the cost of that training.
It wasn't popular. I expect to be trained by my employer: it's one of the things I would look for if I were changing job. In the past, I've stuck with a company I didn't like because the training was so good. (The job itself was OK, but it was in a place I didn't like. It got too much for me eventually so I moved to a job in a nicer location.)
If I knew I wasn't going to receive training I would want to negotiate a higher salary and some arrangement for extra time off work to receive training. Two or three weeks training time and an extra 5k, or thereabouts; more if the time off was unpaid.
In the UK, it seems that people get training and the employers figure that it'll all work out in the end: you poach my staff, I poach yours.
It's not entirely tue, (hence not entirely UNtrue - take what you're offerred!), because a bad driver going slowly is much worse than a good driver going fast.
Yes: more kinetic energy means more damage. Around urban areas this may be important as the difference betweewn 30mph and 40 mph can be significant. In more open areas it's less important. The difference between getting hit by a car at 60 and one at 80 is not so great because the "lesser" impact will already be enough to wipe out a pedestrian: anything more is literally overkill.
Far better is to prevent the impact in the first place. Speed can play a part in that, but not many people actually lose control and crash because of their speed: it's more down to lack of reaction time, which is in turn more a result of poor observation by the driver. The usual example given is the child being hit in a residential street. Most drivers, unfortuantely, are so shit that they'd hit the child at whatever speed they were travelling. Why not train them so they spot the problem well in advance and don't have to panic. (In the well-known TV add, the car with its wheels locked is a clear demonstration of rather poor driving. And lack of ABS, come to that.)
The motorway example is not great I'll admit. But it was intended to show that the key factor in the two examples was not the speed but the bad driving. Doing 100 (or even more) on an empty motorway in good conditions is pretty safe. So does that mean that 100 mph is a "safe" speed? Sticking to the speed limit but driving badly is clearly dangerous.
There are people who drive too fast, and there are occasions when it contributes to or exacerbates accidents and injuries. But the "road safety" lobby in this country places far too much emphasis on speeding to the detriment of driving standards in general. It's an easy target for them - and for the police. We would be far better off if instead of calling for more and more stringent speed limits, backed by oodles of speed cameras they instead lobbied for more traffic police.
The number of dedicated traffic officers has dropped dramatically in the past few years. Some forces no longer even have a traffic division! Much of this is due to the perceived benefits of speed cameras and the like. But those are very limited in what they can do. An actual traffic officer might let someone off - or choose to give them a good telling-off - for driving fast but safely. The same officer can also spot the driver who's going slowly but dangerously and take action, something which a speed camera can never do.
Where did I say that this new initiative would improve the situation? On the contrary, I explicitly said that it would only make matters worse.
Have you started your Christmas celebrtions early?
Well this biker knows that failing to display a plate can actually lead to prosecution for Attempting to pervert the Course of Justice, which carries much more sever penalties.
Unlikely to happen for a first offence but repeat offenders face jail time, big fines, confiscation of the vehicle...
No points on their licence though, so that's OK.
People get killed by speeding...
That's just not true. Well... not entirely, anyway.
People get killed by bad drivers, who may or may not be speeding. But speeding is easy to detect and easy for the frothing safety-lobby to hang their argument on. It's one of the reasons I dislike them, (although their stated aims are usually laudable).
Who is more dangerous? The motorist driving at 60mph on a motorway, (speed limit 70mph), just 3m behind the car in front? Or someone doing 100mph on the same motorway when it's deserted?
Not 100% reliable. With roadside cameras your plate may be obscured by another vehicle - if you're overtaking a large truck, for example.
To avoid these false positives you'd end up increasing the number of false negatives.
One way around the problem of duplicates is to steal a car, then swap its plates with another. Not a long-term solution but it would avoid drawing attention to the stolen vehicle.
But when you couple that with cellphone records, ISP records etc., I think such pervasive surveillance will net significant intelligence data on the people who support the bombers.
There's some truth in that but there's also a high risk of perfectly innocent people being implicated simply because they associated with the terrorist, particularly if they are politically active. And these are exactly the sort of folk terrorists are likely to be associating with.
So the intelligence agencies get pointed to a load of people they already knew about, (because they're politically active). And if they pursue investigations against these people they risk alienating them and their communities and making it more likely that they, too, will turn to violence.
If there really is a way in which this new tehcnology would be beneficial, I'd like to hear it. It's a significant development that ought to be discussed properly in Parliament and elsewhere before being implemented, not simply sneaked in without proper oversight.
Tamper-proof plates would be a pain in the arse for me as I have to remove my licence plate to re-fill the Scottoiler on my bike. There are plenty of other legitimate reasons for wanting to remove the plate on both bikes and cars.
No. They're just doing some paperwork.
All of the documents involved are perfectly legitimate so there's no way to spot the fraud without examining the vehicle in question.
This sort of cime is helped an awful lot by insurance companies selling wrecks complete with documents. Such vehicles are worth way more than scrap value, yet if the vehicle is not economically repairable there is no legitimate use for the documents.
If insurance companies scrapped written-off cars and destroyed documents instead of selling them this sort of crime would become much more difficult and less common, which would lower the amount they pay out on theft claims.
There is a very real problem at the moment with stolen licence plates. They are desirable to avoid speed cameras, and also the London congestion charge. Many people who find their plates missing - or often just one: most cameras look at the back of the car/bike - don't bother reporting it.
This will, of course, make such thefts more common.
Of course, it would be possible to detect that there is a duplicate plate around, but not easy. For a start, having stolen a plate the thief will have several days' grace until the victim purchases another plate. For normal criminals that would be sufficient for their purposes.
For terrorists - especially suicide bombers - they're not worried about capture and are seldom known to the security services until after their attack, so this technology would be of little use for prevention. The only value it would have is to track their movements after the fact and build maps of their relationships, and I'm far from convinced that this would be terribly useful if the terrorists took a few elementary precautions.
There's an interesting discussion of Atheism on the BBC web site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/atheism/
I'd go along with most of that.
Specific goals are difficult to identify without knowing more about the poster's situation but some areas which I think bear further investigation are...
Audit compliance. Can you meet all the requirements of Sarbannes-Oxley and the like? Tight IS/IT controls help a lot in this area and it's not something that can be ignored. (If you're not a US company, and don't work with the USA you'll still have local equivilants, I guess.)
Cost savings through central purchasing of equipment and software. Can you get better deals from suppliers? Can you take tighter control of the specification so that folk get what they need, not simply the latest and greatest (and most costly) new piece of kit? And so everybody gets the same version/model rather than eight different people having eight different PCs/databases/whatever.
Both of those usually require an accurate hardware and software inventory, something which is quite tricky to do if there's no central control.
Quantify the effort you're putting into support. The total hours worked then broken down into categories, (mainly to distinguish between inevitable problems like a disk crash and avoidable problems like a virus infection). To make this work you need to be adequately compensated for work outside your normal hours. If your contract says you do whatever's necessary, whenever it's necessary, with no call-out or overtime payments, (sucker!) give them a chance to change things - more money or less hours - then look for another job. (If you're doing loads and loads of unpaid work, there's little incentive for the company to change. If every support call in the evening costs them money it's a good argument for making changes to remove those calls.)
We've had a lot of very good people from sandwich courses. (Four-year computing degrees including one year working in industry.) They'd cost a bit more than interns, (which we don't really have in the UK) but come with more training and are usually enthusiastic and keen to be involved in anything you care to throw at them.
That would be one of my first concerns. In my company, IS and IT are two different things, (but related and somewhat overlapping).
Broadly, IS is the applications the users are using and IT is the infrastructure that supports IS: primarily server hardware and operating systems, networks and general services such as email.
Things like databases and SAP Basis could go either way but in our case are covered by IT, mostly.