1) The panel did not say the CRU's conclusions were correct, it said it could find no evidence of deliberate fraud and believed it would have found it if it existed.
2) Yes, they are saying that no clearly inappropriate methods were used, but that in some cases more appropriate methods were available. Repeating the analysis would be unlikely to change the result but might improve confidence.
4) FoI obstruction is not scientific fraud (the main charge that was being investigated), technically anyway, heh.
5) The CRU are supposed to be working towards release of their data. A lot of it comes from other organisations and rights need to be negotiated, apparently. In the meantime, a great deal of climate data is available from many sources.
6) You select a statistical tool based on the type of data and the sort of answer you need rather than on the data itself. The committee could make a fair judgement without seeing all the numbers.
Finally, the CRU's reconstructions broadly agree with other reconstructions (eg. the NASA data) which gives at least some validation of their results.
So they created a nice little "World University Ranking" that places almost half the value on the presence of foreign students and faculty while largely ignoring usual measures like student and faculty achievements.
Your post makes no sense. You agree that scientists who fail to beat competing groups to publication will lose grant money and generally be failures, but you then bizarrely claim that scientific success comes from hob-nobbing with chums in some kind of fantasy old-boy's club. Science is very competitive and you won't get anywhere much by schmoozing. If you win grants but don't deliver results, you will lose funding.
As an example, I work the #6 university in the world (arguably). The department next door was recently downsized due to anticipated cuts in core funding. They did it very scientifically: there was an equation with inputs for number of phd students, number of publications in top journals in the last 5 years, and grant income generated in the last 5 years. The researchers were sorted by score and the bottom 25% kicked out.
It doesn't change the association, it adds a new one.
For example,.xls files can be opened by Gnumeric, OpenOffice and no doubt some others too. If you right-click on a.xls file, select "open with other application" and pick gedit, you'll find all.xls files now have an "open with gedit" item in their right-click menu but the default handler will remain OpenOffice (on Ubuntu anyway). I guess this is a safety thing: you don't want to be able to break associations too easily.
If you want to change the default association, right click on an.xls file, select Properties, pick the Open With panel, and pick the radiobutton next to gedit. Now doubleclicking on.xls files will open them (uselessly, heh) with that program.
At least there should be an "Always open with this" checkbox in the Open with... dialog.
That's how it works, doesn't it? Open With adds an application as a handler for all files of that type, not just this file.
If you right-click and select "Open With Other Application" you can quickly add a new type-handler association, if you right-click and select properties you can edit all type-handler associations.
I'm not sure how you add a new file type through the GUI though. I think.desktop files have to do it for you (erm, I think).
Maximise vertically is in (on Ubuntu anyway) System / Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts. Scroll down to Window Management and you'll find lots of useful shortcuts you can use and configure.
What's difficult about setting an app to handle movies? You can either click System / Preferences / Preferred Application and pick a generic "multimedia" application, or you can right-click on a particular file and set the program you want to use for that exact file type (it's in properties, under Open With).
I'm not sure what the situation with gnome-session is.
In what way is Gnome slower? The file manager is much, much faster, Startup is much faster. The filechooser dialog (which everyone still hates, hehe) is much faster. Gnome-terminal is finally faster than xterm, phew.
Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.
What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.
If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1C of warming due to atmospheric CO2.
Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by roughly 40% since the industrial revolution, so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output. We know that the observed CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel burning thanks to the radioisotope ratios we can see in the atmosphere today.
Of course that's a very, very crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, but the result is approximately in line with the IPCC reports.
Here's another version of the same calculation (but a bit more complex), with full references and some maths you can download and try out yourself:
This suggests that AGW is a plausible explanation for the temperature and atmospheric changes we are observing. But is it correct?
If human CO2 output is not responsible for the observed temperature rise, we need to find two things: a strong cooling effect to counter the increase that we know rising CO2 must be causing, and a second strong warming effect to be behind the observed temperature rise. This sounds unlikely (and as yet no one has been able to make a convincing case for what these alternatives might be in 40+ years of research), therefore it is probable that the temperature increases we are seeing are largely caused by fossil fuel use.
(I think I posted this before, but I can't find it in my comment search history now, ah well)
LZW was used in TIFF as well, for a while. When Unisys started moaning everyone switched to Deflate (zip) compression instead, which actually works better.
So in this case at least patents did encourage innovation, not because the holders had divulged their secrets (it was all published anyway), but by simply stopping everyone from using a certain simple algorithm. It generated pretty much no income for the patent holder, ironically. Anyway, a comically stupid piece of history.
That's right, rather like domain squatting, people have been randomly patenting stuff in the hope that they might have something valuable once software patents are allowed in the UK.
Fortunately (from my point of view, anyway, as an independent developer) software patents in Europe have been knocked on the head and these things will remain worthless for a few more years at least.
I think the parent meant that as a dev you can put whatever code you like on.
You need Apple's approval to get on the marketplace, but businesses can get an Enterprise License and then put private apps on without needing Apple's say-so if they like. Google suggests this article if you're curious:
For example, consider a large North American city like New York. Very high population density, very wealthy, lots of demand. By your logic, broadband there should be cheap and fast, but it isn't (or not at Scandinavian levels anyway).
(don't worry about moral superiority, this debate is really just frustration almost everywhere that we can't get the astonishing service they have in Sweden, argh)
You'd do it the way Debian does, allow multiple independent repositories.
When you install Flash (for example), the installer adds adobe.com/repos to the list of package repositories that Windows Update checks. Now when your machine checks for updates at 2am it'll patch not just MS packages, but all installed packages too.
You could get fancy and allow packages to depend on each other as well. So Adobe (for example) could make a package called "tiff" which other suppliers depend on. Now when libtiff is patched for yet another security vulnerability and updated, all apps which use it automatically get the fix too. Imagine that, shared libraries which are shared, heh.
I think MS will do this fairly soon and called it "Windows Application Store" or something like that. It'll be a giant leap forward, I hope. It would certainly fix a large problem with the platform.
Yes, it depends on the colourspace you use for the resize. If you resize in a non-linear colourspace, you will get (usually) tiny errors.
I'm the author of one of the programs listed as defective (nip2). If you care about this issue, all you need to do is work in a linear space, such as XYZ (Click Colour / Colourspace / XYZ).
You're jumping the gun: for now at least the CRU (mostly) retains the trust of the funders. There's to be an investigation. If it finds that the CRU published dodgy science, they are finished:
I'm waiting until that investigation produces its report before I make a judgement. My guess is that they will be criticised for poor handling of FoI requests, for lack of transparency and for poor archive management, but that the basic science will be upheld. But we'll see!
If a rival research group finds an error in the CRU's work, they will publish a paper detailing this. You can describe an error or omission in someone's work perfectly neutrally, all you need to say is "equation 6 on page 14 is incorrect", or perhaps "no account has been taken of factor z, here is an estimate of its magnitude, the effect is significant". If the CRU's work is exposed as faulty they will lose the confidence of the funding bodies and they will close very rapidly.
I work in medical research, by coincidence, so I'm very aware of the issues surrounding drug company funding. Yet despite these problems somehow medicine seems to struggle on.
If the CRU is discredited, they won't get funding. If they don't get funding, they will close in very short order, heh.
There are many other climate research groups who would I'm sure be very happy to hoover up any money that might become available as a result of CRU's demise.
Even if the CRU did fiddle its numbers, it's still in competition with other research groups for funding. Any of them could publish a critique of the CRU's work, and if it was effective, nick all their money and doom them. If there was a single research group then yes I suppose you could get collusion to shut down opposition, but it's not like that.
It seems daft to me to claim that the whole thing is a hoax to get funding. All science is funded somehow, and yet this insult is only thrown at the people working on climate.
In my experience (I'm a working scientist, though not in climate), science is very, very competitive. Just brutal, in fact. It's full of mildly Aspergers people who delight in other's discomfort and are convinced (almost) all other researchers are idiots. If you have a clever idea that cuts your rival's work off at the knees, by God, you're going to publish, and you're going to rub their face in it as you do.
I find it impossible to believe that good anti-AWG ideas really have been suppressed for 50 years or however long it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I can answer some of your points:
1) The panel did not say the CRU's conclusions were correct, it said it could find no evidence of deliberate fraud and believed it would have found it if it existed.
2) Yes, they are saying that no clearly inappropriate methods were used, but that in some cases more appropriate methods were available. Repeating the analysis would be unlikely to change the result but might improve confidence.
4) FoI obstruction is not scientific fraud (the main charge that was being investigated), technically anyway, heh.
5) The CRU are supposed to be working towards release of their data. A lot of it comes from other organisations and rights need to be negotiated, apparently. In the meantime, a great deal of climate data is available from many sources.
6) You select a statistical tool based on the type of data and the sort of answer you need rather than on the data itself. The committee could make a fair judgement without seeing all the numbers.
Finally, the CRU's reconstructions broadly agree with other reconstructions (eg. the NASA data) which gives at least some validation of their results.
They don't have much credibility in the UK either, hehe. The university I work at is apparently in the world's top ten, which is rather o.O.
No they didn't, please check your facts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education_World_University_Rankings
You're right that the THES ranking has been criticised. You'll note that they will be using a new methodology for this autumn's table.
Adobe have demoed outputting simple animations has html5 canvas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v69S22ZBBqA
It's half the weight of a typical netbook: 600g vs. 1,200g for a Dell mini 10v.
Your post makes no sense. You agree that scientists who fail to beat competing groups to publication will lose grant money and generally be failures, but you then bizarrely claim that scientific success comes from hob-nobbing with chums in some kind of fantasy old-boy's club. Science is very competitive and you won't get anywhere much by schmoozing. If you win grants but don't deliver results, you will lose funding.
As an example, I work the #6 university in the world (arguably). The department next door was recently downsized due to anticipated cuts in core funding. They did it very scientifically: there was an equation with inputs for number of phd students, number of publications in top journals in the last 5 years, and grant income generated in the last 5 years. The researchers were sorted by score and the bottom 25% kicked out.
The UK FoI act was passed in 2000, here's the page for making requests:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/requestinginformation.htm
It doesn't change the association, it adds a new one.
For example, .xls files can be opened by Gnumeric, OpenOffice and no doubt some others too. If you right-click on a .xls file, select "open with other application" and pick gedit, you'll find all .xls files now have an "open with gedit" item in their right-click menu but the default handler will remain OpenOffice (on Ubuntu anyway). I guess this is a safety thing: you don't want to be able to break associations too easily.
If you want to change the default association, right click on an .xls file, select Properties, pick the Open With panel, and pick the radiobutton next to gedit. Now doubleclicking on .xls files will open them (uselessly, heh) with that program.
That's how it works, doesn't it? Open With adds an application as a handler for all files of that type, not just this file.
If you right-click and select "Open With Other Application" you can quickly add a new type-handler association, if you right-click and select properties you can edit all type-handler associations.
I'm not sure how you add a new file type through the GUI though. I think .desktop files have to do it for you (erm, I think).
Gnome has these features, or mostly anyway.
Maximise vertically is in (on Ubuntu anyway) System / Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts. Scroll down to Window Management and you'll find lots of useful shortcuts you can use and configure.
What's difficult about setting an app to handle movies? You can either click System / Preferences / Preferred Application and pick a generic "multimedia" application, or you can right-click on a particular file and set the program you want to use for that exact file type (it's in properties, under Open With).
I'm not sure what the situation with gnome-session is.
In what way is Gnome slower? The file manager is much, much faster, Startup is much faster. The filechooser dialog (which everyone still hates, hehe) is much faster. Gnome-terminal is finally faster than xterm, phew.
Here's a very simple physics argument for AGW.
Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.
What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.
If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1C of warming due to atmospheric CO2. Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by roughly 40% since the industrial revolution, so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output. We know that the observed CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel burning thanks to the radioisotope ratios we can see in the atmosphere today.
Of course that's a very, very crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, but the result is approximately in line with the IPCC reports.
Here's another version of the same calculation (but a bit more complex), with full references and some maths you can download and try out yourself:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing
This suggests that AGW is a plausible explanation for the temperature and atmospheric changes we are observing. But is it correct?
If human CO2 output is not responsible for the observed temperature rise, we need to find two things: a strong cooling effect to counter the increase that we know rising CO2 must be causing, and a second strong warming effect to be behind the observed temperature rise. This sounds unlikely (and as yet no one has been able to make a convincing case for what these alternatives might be in 40+ years of research), therefore it is probable that the temperature increases we are seeing are largely caused by fossil fuel use.
(I think I posted this before, but I can't find it in my comment search history now, ah well)
Nitpick: the GIF patent wasn't on the format, but on LZW compression:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch
LZW was used in TIFF as well, for a while. When Unisys started moaning everyone switched to Deflate (zip) compression instead, which actually works better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFLATE
So in this case at least patents did encourage innovation, not because the holders had divulged their secrets (it was all published anyway), but by simply stopping everyone from using a certain simple algorithm. It generated pretty much no income for the patent holder, ironically. Anyway, a comically stupid piece of history.
That's right, rather like domain squatting, people have been randomly patenting stuff in the hope that they might have something valuable once software patents are allowed in the UK.
Fortunately (from my point of view, anyway, as an independent developer) software patents in Europe have been knocked on the head and these things will remain worthless for a few more years at least.
I think the parent meant that as a dev you can put whatever code you like on.
You need Apple's approval to get on the marketplace, but businesses can get an Enterprise License and then put private apps on without needing Apple's say-so if they like. Google suggests this article if you're curious:
http://iphonecto.com/2009/09/09/deploying-internal-enterprise-application-iphone
Or of course you can jailbreak it, heh.
Hyperthreading used to suck, but it works pretty well now. In the benchmarks I've done with my code I see about a 60% speedup.
http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Benchmarks#Results_summary
It's not just size and population density.
For example, consider a large North American city like New York. Very high population density, very wealthy, lots of demand. By your logic, broadband there should be cheap and fast, but it isn't (or not at Scandinavian levels anyway).
(don't worry about moral superiority, this debate is really just frustration almost everywhere that we can't get the astonishing service they have in Sweden, argh)
If you're less than 50 users, google apps for your domain is free.
$50/user is for the google apps 'premier edition', which includes 25gb of storage, tech support, 10 year archive, 99.9% sla and other stuff like that.
You'd do it the way Debian does, allow multiple independent repositories.
When you install Flash (for example), the installer adds adobe.com/repos to the list of package repositories that Windows Update checks. Now when your machine checks for updates at 2am it'll patch not just MS packages, but all installed packages too.
You could get fancy and allow packages to depend on each other as well. So Adobe (for example) could make a package called "tiff" which other suppliers depend on. Now when libtiff is patched for yet another security vulnerability and updated, all apps which use it automatically get the fix too. Imagine that, shared libraries which are shared, heh.
I think MS will do this fairly soon and called it "Windows Application Store" or something like that. It'll be a giant leap forward, I hope. It would certainly fix a large problem with the platform.
I'm not defending Woss, but his annual salary before the sacking^Wnon-renewal was around £6m. The £18m figure was for a three-year deal.
See (for example) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/17/jonathan-ross-bbc-pay-deal
Yes, it depends on the colourspace you use for the resize. If you resize in a non-linear colourspace, you will get (usually) tiny errors.
I'm the author of one of the programs listed as defective (nip2). If you care about this issue, all you need to do is work in a linear space, such as XYZ (Click Colour / Colourspace / XYZ).
You're jumping the gun: for now at least the CRU (mostly) retains the trust of the funders. There's to be an investigation. If it finds that the CRU published dodgy science, they are finished:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8510498.stm
I'm waiting until that investigation produces its report before I make a judgement. My guess is that they will be criticised for poor handling of FoI requests, for lack of transparency and for poor archive management, but that the basic science will be upheld. But we'll see!
No need to be rude.
If a rival research group finds an error in the CRU's work, they will publish a paper detailing this. You can describe an error or omission in someone's work perfectly neutrally, all you need to say is "equation 6 on page 14 is incorrect", or perhaps "no account has been taken of factor z, here is an estimate of its magnitude, the effect is significant". If the CRU's work is exposed as faulty they will lose the confidence of the funding bodies and they will close very rapidly.
I work in medical research, by coincidence, so I'm very aware of the issues surrounding drug company funding. Yet despite these problems somehow medicine seems to struggle on.
If the CRU is discredited, they won't get funding. If they don't get funding, they will close in very short order, heh.
There are many other climate research groups who would I'm sure be very happy to hoover up any money that might become available as a result of CRU's demise.
Even if the CRU did fiddle its numbers, it's still in competition with other research groups for funding. Any of them could publish a critique of the CRU's work, and if it was effective, nick all their money and doom them. If there was a single research group then yes I suppose you could get collusion to shut down opposition, but it's not like that.
It seems daft to me to claim that the whole thing is a hoax to get funding. All science is funded somehow, and yet this insult is only thrown at the people working on climate.
In my experience (I'm a working scientist, though not in climate), science is very, very competitive. Just brutal, in fact. It's full of mildly Aspergers people who delight in other's discomfort and are convinced (almost) all other researchers are idiots. If you have a clever idea that cuts your rival's work off at the knees, by God, you're going to publish, and you're going to rub their face in it as you do.
I find it impossible to believe that good anti-AWG ideas really have been suppressed for 50 years or however long it is.