Sure. It may seem like just a matter of emphasis, but the bottom line is whether you reward good science, or whether you reward someone who produces a scientific-looking piece of mumbo-jumbo that supports the platform toy want to push.
The essential point is (1) peer review, and (2) people not trying to actively subvert the system. The occasional scientific fraud that gets exposed now and then shows just how difficult it is for peer review alone to detect deliberate fraud. Peer review is good at picking up things you might have missed, or accidental mistakes. Someone trying to game the system can get away with it for a long time, as various fraud cases have shown.
In any case where you can say "prove this" in a rigorous way, it is pretty safe. But that is limited to mathematics, and not much else. That particular example is not a problem, nor really are one-off prizes. The issue is things like the case in the article: a system of bounties for producing reports that meet a specified conclusion, with either no peer review, or an unstated invitation to attempt to defraud the review process. Pretty much all scientific fraud gets found out eventually and exposed in the academic literature. But the time-frame for this is irrelevant for something like climate change, where the media can't distinguish good science from bad and will jump on anything that sounds like a good story and can. In many cases, these articles are not published in academic literature to begin with.
When setting up a scheme for rewarding research, you need to be extremely careful that there is an appropriate feedback loop to make sure you are rewarding real research, not someone who just sounds like they are doing real research.
If there are errors in the report that other scientists can find, there is now incentive to find them and weed them out. It's the scientific process pushed forward by money.
But you never said what this incentive is. The mechanism you propose - a bounty/bribe on scientists producing (faux) research that conforms to the agenda specified by the funding body - would be completely useless for uncovering what is truth in research and what isn't. Granted, you did qualify your original statement by "If (and this is a very strong IF) they do this right" - but the whole premise is based on doing science that has predetermined conclusions and is therefore wrong (or if it is right, it is only by accident and still useless because there is no mechanism for determining what is, and isn't, correct).
If you are a climatologist and get a grant to study the effects of human-produced CO2 on climate, and you found that the effects were negligible and that reducing emissions wouldn't have an impact, then you WOULD most certainly have trouble getting grants. If there was nothing more we could do, why would the government spend money on even more research?
To the extent that this is true, it works both ways: Firstly, there are many possible avenues for research. If you found that one particular effect was not important, then there are likely to be other effects that would make intersting study (in your hypothetical example, if CO2 turns out to be not interesting, then how about NO2 instead? or CH4 ? or SO2 ? or...).
On the other hand, continuing your hypothetical, research that conclusively showed that CO2 effects were important and quantitively determined how much emissions need to be reduced, could also have the effect of causing future grant trouble. After all, once the research has been done and the results are in, why continue funding?
In other words, I don't see why there would be any connection at all between future grant funding and whether the results of the previous research were pro or anti global warming. In practice, grant funding is (or ought to be) determined by how interesting and important the remaining unresolved issues are. This could go either way.
You are also confusing public policy with scientific bias. Just because public policy is biased against stem cell research does not suggest anything in the way of bias by scientists working in the field (eg, to come up with findings that 'validate' the Whitehouse's `moral' views). In fact, I would suggest that stem cell researchers don't give a damn about the moral views of the Whitehouse one way or the other, save for the occasional curse if it gets in the way of their research.
Non-patentable pharmaceuticals are a different issue - this is purely a business decision by the pharma companies, nothing to do with science. In fact, academic research (where most of the initial discoveries occur anyway) is certainly still interested and able to work on these drugs. The problem is in getting someone to bring them to market. But again there is no suggestion here that the conclusions made by scientists working for big pharma are producing biased or incorrect results when issues of patentability of products are concerned. I wouldn't put it past a PR company though. And unfortunately, often a PR company is the mouthpiece through which pharma scientists speak to the public.
Now you are talking about something different. You started off saying it was a good thing for people to be rewarded/bribed into producing biased reports. Are you now saying that you want people to be rewarded for exposing biased reports for what they are? Yes, this is closer to the spirit of peer review, but it is a completely different notion that has nothing to do with your original post!
Can you elaborate? Every grant process I have been involved in has been focused on providing research, with the aim of finding out whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence or not. If there are any organizations supplying grant money on the condition that the final report contains a conclusion that is pre-determined, then for sure the people they are funding are not scientists, and for sure organizations such as the NSF would disown both the `scientists' and the funding body in a heartbeat.
That doesn't mean that paid shills pushing an agenda onto an unsuspecting public (or politician!) don't exist. But don't confuse this with legitimate science!
The downside of it will, of course, be that a lot of "scientists" will make wild claims in an attempt to collect on this cash and muddy the waters. But I think in the long run this might actually speed up the process by which we arrive at a definite conclusion to the debate and finally start seriously working on solutions.
Are you nuts? Sorry, but can you explain how exactly such wild claims and confused/biased studies produced by this scheme would help in the long term? Piling crap upon crap does not spontaneously produce a miracle.
This, and the rest of your post where you refer to 'tubes' again, suggests you actually believe this. Interesting how internet jokes make their own reality;-)
The US could exert control by threatening to remove TLD's from the root name servers. This would be (I think) unprecedented, and make the USA rather unpopular, but in theory they do have the power.
Hmm, I doubt the rest of the world would appreciate the ISA Department of Commerce dictating to them what is, and is not, porn. Especially considering how puritanical the USA is compared with Europe, and similarly how puritanical the Middle East is compared with everyone else.
The Europeans will be saying breasts, even full-frontal nakedness, isn't necessarily porn,
The Americans can't tell the difference between even partial nakedness and sex, so will force half of.eu to be under.xxx instead
The Muslims will continue to he shocked at all the women not wearing Burkhas.
See my other reply to the GP, the security hole is that the key is make up of information that is not single-purpose. The expiry date of your passport, you date of birth, and your passport number. None of these are particularly secret, and someone could obtain them without arousing any suspicion and read the passport from your pocket (or the envelope it was posted in....).
If, alternatively, the key was some random string that was ONLY used for the key, then (1) it wouldn't be possible to guess it without opening the passport, and (2) it would be hard for someone to get the key without attracting interest.
The receptionist at the youth hostel asking for your passport number, expiry and date of birth is not suspicious - indeed in some countries they are required to collect this information anyway. Then the bad guy doesn't even need to see your passport, it can be cloned while it remains in your back pocket. On the other hand, if the key was some random string then it would be a bit harder for the bad guy to obtain (although still not too hard).
The new passports probably make it very difficult, if not impossible, to copy/steal a passport and substitute a different photo. But it sounds like they are ridiculously easy to clone, so instead of taking at minimum a few minutes with physical access to the passport, it now takes a few seconds with a remote scanner. If the bad guys work somewhere where lots of people are passing by (the reception of a youth hostel, for instance!), they can just wait until someone goes by who looks similar to the person they want the fake passport for. This is much harder to detect.
I can see this as leading to a big push for more biometrics, in fact. "The terrorists have started cloning passports of similar looking people, to stop this we need to put your fingerprints and iris scan on the passport too!". Was this always the plan?
Well, the key needs to be printed somewhere on the passport.
The big, huge security hole though, is that the key is made up of the passport number, the date of birth of the holder, and the expiry date, none of which are hard to come by. For example, the postman delivering your new passport can probably find your date of birth (when did you late get a birthday card?), and can make a pretty good guess as to when it expires (10 years plus or minus a few days), so if he can guess what the passport number is, then he can read and clone your passport without even opening the envelope!
I don't know what idiot dreamed up using that particular data as the 'secret' key, they deserve to be shot. Why not make the key some random digit string, printed inside the passport in machine-readable text? Then it would at least be impossible to read the passport without opening it.
As a result of this, there is either a unit of distance that cannot be divided further, or a unit of time.
That doesn't follow. Zeno's `paradox' is easily resolved using only continuous functions. No need at any point to resort to any kind of quantized spacetime.
The real question becomes, how does Achilles cross an infinite number of points, in a finite time? Since it takes a finite amount of time to move between any two points, it should take him an infinite amount of time to travel any given distance.
That doesn't work either; if time is continuous then there is an infinite number of points in time that Achilles is crossing. You could say, that he crosses an infinite number of points, but he has an infinite number of 'time points' to do it in. But that is rather sloppy notation, better to define it in terms of limits, in which case you end up rediscovering differential calculus of continuous functions;)
Indeed, the equivalence principle implies that something like this should exist, by replacing the gravitational acceleration by accelerating spaceships.
There are three options: 1) the universe could be finite and have positive curvature. This would be like a 4-dimensional analogue of travelling on the surface of the earth; you never reach a boundary but eventually you get back to where you started. This is the case relevant to the article, although they are talking about a case where the geometry is not spherical but some polyhedra.
2) If the curvature is overall negative, the universe must be infinite because in this geometry a straight line never returns to its starting point. Instead, the curvature at each point is locally like a saddle.
3) In between the last two, if the curvature is exactly zero then the universe is flat (Euclidean).
In principle, these three cases can be distinguished by experiment. A triangle constructed on the surface of a sphere is characterized by having the sum of angles be greater than 180 degrees. Similarly, a triangle constructed in negatively curved space has angles that sum to less than 180 degrees, and in the Euclidean case they sum to exactly 180 degrees.
No, that is completely incorrect. The whole point of Relativity is that nothing can exceed the speed of light, in any frame of reference. The situation that you describe, where Newton's laws of motion would imply the relative speed of the two observers is greater than the speed of light, never occurs because instead the passage of time is affected by the motion. If you had a clock, and were transmitting to me what the current time was, your clock would appear to me to be running too slow. And vice versa, you would think that my clock was running too slow.
The only situation in which the photons can never catch up, is if they pass the event horizon of a black hole;)
The problem is, wew can't be moving at exactly the speed of light; that is impossible for objects that have non-zero mass. But if there was a continuous big-bang moving away from us at anything less than the speed of light, then we would see remenant radiation from it, it would show up as a (big) spike in the cosmic microwave background.
Who says that material can't get relatively further apart from itself?
Of course it can, and the universe is expanding in exactly this way.
Isn't there a multi-big bang theory that states that new material can enter our Universe in this fashion? Perhaps our current Universe had no single beginning, but new stuff is being added to it all the time.
The steady-state theory proposed that new matter was being created all the time, at a very slow rate. This was disproved by the cosmic microwave background, that instead agrees exactly with the preductions of the big-bang theory. I think, the inflation theories allow new material to enter at any time, but the idea there is that the initial expansion of the universe was so fast, that any other matter (say, from another big-bang) would be so far away that it would not ever be possible to detect it. But if the universe is finite, and it is possible to see the periodic boundaries, then surely it disproves inflation? cosmologists out there?
Doesn't matter, when you replied, you undid the moderation (and wasted the points). Replying as AC isn't enough, you need to delete some cookies, and maybe use a different IP address?
I forgot to mention... Dakota was irradiated in a nuclear accident in 2034, by DoE agents performing unsanctioned tests with a new experimental crowd control device.
Where did you pull that from? While that scenario would be nice, the chances of it happening that way are practically zero. Try another:
In the last 60 years, after the permanent sea ice melted in 2040, continued violence on the Canada-USA border have finally led to military intervention to force the Canadian government to keep the border open to refugees from the lowlands of Florida and the East Coast, now numbering in excess of 20 million. Meanwhile, the loss of the Greenland ice sheet, besides contributing significantly to the rise in sea level, has dumped millions of tons of fresh water into the North Atlantic and slowed subtantially the Gulfstream Current. While winter temperatures in northern Europe never reach the extremes they used to, the lack of warm offshore currents mean that summer temperatures now rarely increase beyond 50F, and for a large proportion of Europe the heating bills are becoming impossible to keep up with. Rumors abound of an impending UN intervention force destined for Zimbabwe, known until the late 20th century as the food bowl of Africa but economically ruined in recent years by a series of corrupt presidents, in order to secure additional agricultural land and allow a desperate last attempt to halt the northern progress of the Sahara.
Both these scenarios have an equally improbable liklihood of occuring. The overwhelming likelihood is something in between.
We were arguing against you. Now you say you were being sarcastic? To differentiate 'sarcasm' from 'clueless', you need to do better than that! The 'interesting' mods are justified, because your post is interesting. Not because the mods somehow read between the lines to somehow divine a point that you didn't make.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. It may seem like just a matter of emphasis, but the bottom line is whether you reward good science, or whether you reward someone who produces a scientific-looking piece of mumbo-jumbo that supports the platform toy want to push.
The essential point is (1) peer review, and (2) people not trying to actively subvert the system. The occasional scientific fraud that gets exposed now and then shows just how difficult it is for peer review alone to detect deliberate fraud. Peer review is good at picking up things you might have missed, or accidental mistakes. Someone trying to game the system can get away with it for a long time, as various fraud cases have shown.
In any case where you can say "prove this" in a rigorous way, it is pretty safe. But that is limited to mathematics, and not much else. That particular example is not a problem, nor really are one-off prizes. The issue is things like the case in the article: a system of bounties for producing reports that meet a specified conclusion, with either no peer review, or an unstated invitation to attempt to defraud the review process. Pretty much all scientific fraud gets found out eventually and exposed in the academic literature. But the time-frame for this is irrelevant for something like climate change, where the media can't distinguish good science from bad and will jump on anything that sounds like a good story and can. In many cases, these articles are not published in academic literature to begin with.
When setting up a scheme for rewarding research, you need to be extremely careful that there is an appropriate feedback loop to make sure you are rewarding real research, not someone who just sounds like they are doing real research.
Funny, I thought it was a long-standing practice to offer rewards for proof or disproof of something in science..
Right. Typically in the form of a prize for "prove or disprove the following theorem ...."
What does this have to do with paying bribes to produce `research' with a fixed, pre-determined conclusion that has nothing to do with reality?
If there are errors in the report that other scientists can find, there is now incentive to find them and weed them out. It's the scientific process pushed forward by money.
But you never said what this incentive is. The mechanism you propose - a bounty/bribe on scientists producing (faux) research that conforms to the agenda specified by the funding body - would be completely useless for uncovering what is truth in research and what isn't. Granted, you did qualify your original statement by "If (and this is a very strong IF) they do this right" - but the whole premise is based on doing science that has predetermined conclusions and is therefore wrong (or if it is right, it is only by accident and still useless because there is no mechanism for determining what is, and isn't, correct).
If you are a climatologist and get a grant to study the effects of human-produced CO2 on climate, and you found that the effects were negligible and that reducing emissions wouldn't have an impact, then you WOULD most certainly have trouble getting grants. If there was nothing more we could do, why would the government spend money on even more research?
To the extent that this is true, it works both ways: Firstly, there are many possible avenues for research. If you found that one particular effect was not important, then there are likely to be other effects that would make intersting study (in your hypothetical example, if CO2 turns out to be not interesting, then how about NO2 instead? or CH4 ? or SO2 ? or ...).
On the other hand, continuing your hypothetical, research that conclusively showed that CO2 effects were important and quantitively determined how much emissions need to be reduced, could also have the effect of causing future grant trouble. After all, once the research has been done and the results are in, why continue funding?
In other words, I don't see why there would be any connection at all between future grant funding and whether the results of the previous research were pro or anti global warming. In practice, grant funding is (or ought to be) determined by how interesting and important the remaining unresolved issues are. This could go either way.
You are also confusing public policy with scientific bias. Just because public policy is biased against stem cell research does not suggest anything in the way of bias by scientists working in the field (eg, to come up with findings that 'validate' the Whitehouse's `moral' views). In fact, I would suggest that stem cell researchers don't give a damn about the moral views of the Whitehouse one way or the other, save for the occasional curse if it gets in the way of their research.
Non-patentable pharmaceuticals are a different issue - this is purely a business decision by the pharma companies, nothing to do with science. In fact, academic research (where most of the initial discoveries occur anyway) is certainly still interested and able to work on these drugs. The problem is in getting someone to bring them to market. But again there is no suggestion here that the conclusions made by scientists working for big pharma are producing biased or incorrect results when issues of patentability of products are concerned. I wouldn't put it past a PR company though. And unfortunately, often a PR company is the mouthpiece through which pharma scientists speak to the public.
Now you are talking about something different. You started off saying it was a good thing for people to be rewarded/bribed into producing biased reports. Are you now saying that you want people to be rewarded for exposing biased reports for what they are? Yes, this is closer to the spirit of peer review, but it is a completely different notion that has nothing to do with your original post!
Can you elaborate? Every grant process I have been involved in has been focused on providing research, with the aim of finding out whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence or not. If there are any organizations supplying grant money on the condition that the final report contains a conclusion that is pre-determined, then for sure the people they are funding are not scientists, and for sure organizations such as the NSF would disown both the `scientists' and the funding body in a heartbeat.
That doesn't mean that paid shills pushing an agenda onto an unsuspecting public (or politician!) don't exist. But don't confuse this with legitimate science!
The downside of it will, of course, be that a lot of "scientists" will make wild claims in an attempt to collect on this cash and muddy the waters. But I think in the long run this might actually speed up the process by which we arrive at a definite conclusion to the debate and finally start seriously working on solutions.
Are you nuts? Sorry, but can you explain how exactly such wild claims and confused/biased studies produced by this scheme would help in the long term? Piling crap upon crap does not spontaneously produce a miracle.
and it's tubes, not pipes you moron
This, and the rest of your post where you refer to 'tubes' again, suggests you actually believe this. Interesting how internet jokes make their own reality ;-)
The US could exert control by threatening to remove TLD's from the root name servers. This would be (I think) unprecedented, and make the USA rather unpopular, but in theory they do have the power.
The Europeans will be saying breasts, even full-frontal nakedness, isn't necessarily porn,
The Americans can't tell the difference between even partial nakedness and sex, so will force half of .eu to be under .xxx instead
The Muslims will continue to he shocked at all the women not wearing Burkhas.
The operator will never normally need to enter the data, it is in the machine-readable (optical) section of the passport.
See my other reply to the GP, the security hole is that the key is make up of information that is not single-purpose. The expiry date of your passport, you date of birth, and your passport number. None of these are particularly secret, and someone could obtain them without arousing any suspicion and read the passport from your pocket (or the envelope it was posted in....).
If, alternatively, the key was some random string that was ONLY used for the key, then (1) it wouldn't be possible to guess it without opening the passport, and (2) it would be hard for someone to get the key without attracting interest.
The receptionist at the youth hostel asking for your passport number, expiry and date of birth is not suspicious - indeed in some countries they are required to collect this information anyway. Then the bad guy doesn't even need to see your passport, it can be cloned while it remains in your back pocket. On the other hand, if the key was some random string then it would be a bit harder for the bad guy to obtain (although still not too hard).
The new passports probably make it very difficult, if not impossible, to copy/steal a passport and substitute a different photo. But it sounds like they are ridiculously easy to clone, so instead of taking at minimum a few minutes with physical access to the passport, it now takes a few seconds with a remote scanner. If the bad guys work somewhere where lots of people are passing by (the reception of a youth hostel, for instance!), they can just wait until someone goes by who looks similar to the person they want the fake passport for. This is much harder to detect.
I can see this as leading to a big push for more biometrics, in fact. "The terrorists have started cloning passports of similar looking people, to stop this we need to put your fingerprints and iris scan on the passport too!". Was this always the plan?
Well, the key needs to be printed somewhere on the passport.
The big, huge security hole though, is that the key is made up of the passport number, the date of birth of the holder, and the expiry date, none of which are hard to come by. For example, the postman delivering your new passport can probably find your date of birth (when did you late get a birthday card?), and can make a pretty good guess as to when it expires (10 years plus or minus a few days), so if he can guess what the passport number is, then he can read and clone your passport without even opening the envelope!
I don't know what idiot dreamed up using that particular data as the 'secret' key, they deserve to be shot. Why not make the key some random digit string, printed inside the passport in machine-readable text? Then it would at least be impossible to read the passport without opening it.
That doesn't follow. Zeno's `paradox' is easily resolved using only continuous functions. No need at any point to resort to any kind of quantized spacetime.
That doesn't work either; if time is continuous then there is an infinite number of points in time that Achilles is crossing. You could say, that he crosses an infinite number of points, but he has an infinite number of 'time points' to do it in. But that is rather sloppy notation, better to define it in terms of limits, in which case you end up rediscovering differential calculus of continuous functions ;)
Indeed, the equivalence principle implies that something like this should exist, by replacing the gravitational acceleration by accelerating spaceships.
There are three options: 1) the universe could be finite and have positive curvature. This would be like a 4-dimensional analogue of travelling on the surface of the earth; you never reach a boundary but eventually you get back to where you started. This is the case relevant to the article, although they are talking about a case where the geometry is not spherical but some polyhedra.
2) If the curvature is overall negative, the universe must be infinite because in this geometry a straight line never returns to its starting point. Instead, the curvature at each point is locally like a saddle.
3) In between the last two, if the curvature is exactly zero then the universe is flat (Euclidean).
In principle, these three cases can be distinguished by experiment. A triangle constructed on the surface of a sphere is characterized by having the sum of angles be greater than 180 degrees. Similarly, a triangle constructed in negatively curved space has angles that sum to less than 180 degrees, and in the Euclidean case they sum to exactly 180 degrees.
No, that is completely incorrect. The whole point of Relativity is that nothing can exceed the speed of light, in any frame of reference. The situation that you describe, where Newton's laws of motion would imply the relative speed of the two observers is greater than the speed of light, never occurs because instead the passage of time is affected by the motion. If you had a clock, and were transmitting to me what the current time was, your clock would appear to me to be running too slow. And vice versa, you would think that my clock was running too slow.
The only situation in which the photons can never catch up, is if they pass the event horizon of a black hole ;)
The problem is, wew can't be moving at exactly the speed of light; that is impossible for objects that have non-zero mass. But if there was a continuous big-bang moving away from us at anything less than the speed of light, then we would see remenant radiation from it, it would show up as a (big) spike in the cosmic microwave background.
Of course it can, and the universe is expanding in exactly this way.
The steady-state theory proposed that new matter was being created all the time, at a very slow rate. This was disproved by the cosmic microwave background, that instead agrees exactly with the preductions of the big-bang theory. I think, the inflation theories allow new material to enter at any time, but the idea there is that the initial expansion of the universe was so fast, that any other matter (say, from another big-bang) would be so far away that it would not ever be possible to detect it. But if the universe is finite, and it is possible to see the periodic boundaries, then surely it disproves inflation? cosmologists out there?
Doesn't matter, when you replied, you undid the moderation (and wasted the points). Replying as AC isn't enough, you need to delete some cookies, and maybe use a different IP address?
I forgot to mention... Dakota was irradiated in a nuclear accident in 2034, by DoE agents performing unsanctioned tests with a new experimental crowd control device.
Where did you pull that from? While that scenario would be nice, the chances of it happening that way are practically zero. Try another:
In the last 60 years, after the permanent sea ice melted in 2040, continued violence on the Canada-USA border have finally led to military intervention to force the Canadian government to keep the border open to refugees from the lowlands of Florida and the East Coast, now numbering in excess of 20 million. Meanwhile, the loss of the Greenland ice sheet, besides contributing significantly to the rise in sea level, has dumped millions of tons of fresh water into the North Atlantic and slowed subtantially the Gulfstream Current. While winter temperatures in northern Europe never reach the extremes they used to, the lack of warm offshore currents mean that summer temperatures now rarely increase beyond 50F, and for a large proportion of Europe the heating bills are becoming impossible to keep up with. Rumors abound of an impending UN intervention force destined for Zimbabwe, known until the late 20th century as the food bowl of Africa but economically ruined in recent years by a series of corrupt presidents, in order to secure additional agricultural land and allow a desperate last attempt to halt the northern progress of the Sahara.
Both these scenarios have an equally improbable liklihood of occuring. The overwhelming likelihood is something in between.
And he would surely have thrown in the software to run the spacecraft, for free!
We were arguing against you. Now you say you were being sarcastic? To differentiate 'sarcasm' from 'clueless', you need to do better than that! The 'interesting' mods are justified, because your post is interesting. Not because the mods somehow read between the lines to somehow divine a point that you didn't make.