OTOH, the Chinese classic - the "Tao teh Ching" positively prohibits cunning and urges people to stop being too smart. It also talks about how the government should never interfere with the people and never to make too much of a commotion about anything.
I never knew Ayn Rand plagiarized her screed from the ancient Chinese.
DNA by itself should never be used as the sole evidence to convict someone. It can be a useful indicator for finding suspects, but there always needs to be more direct evidence to provide a conviction. It is not just that people who don't have twins can be convicted solely based on DNA evidence, while people who do have twins cannot because of the possibility of convicting an innocent person. And that is not even going into DNA collisions or tainted samples.
"Does the resulting CO2 from burning methane contribute less to greenhouse effect then the pure methane?"
Very much so. It really is a win win.
Except that the water vapor released is an even more potent greenhouse gas. The catastrophic AGW scenario of CO2 is entirely dependent on the greenhouse effect caused by water vapor that is accelerated by CO2 induced warming, not by the greenhouse effect caused by CO2 alone. Depending on who you ask, the increase of water vapor will either accelerate the warming or stop it due to the extra cloud formation blocking the radiation.
Eighty years ago the French engineers built a wall to protect France from Germans. The Germans walked around it and invaded the country.
Ten years ago the French engineers built a nuclear aircraft carrier that was too short to allow planes to land on it. It was also exposing the crew to radiation.
Now they designed a network-based DRM, which was cracked almost immediately, until (surprise!) the servers went down in flame.
Bunch of buffoons.
And 123 years they built the Eiffel Tower.
Bush is gone, the French are no longer the enemy. Give it up.
Does this only apply to image data, or will we be able to use this to clean up other databases? Will it work with sampled sounds? Names and addresses and inventory?
Of course not. It's not magic. There are certain assumptions that can be made about most real-life images, mainly that they have small total variance. That means they have large areas of near-constant intensity/color distribution separated by interfaces with large jumps (like a cartoon image would have).
Though this method uses the l_1 norm and not total variation.
Listen, you can either drop everything and study your ass off for the better part of a decade to get a PhD in atmospheric science, or listen to the people who have them.
By that I mean there will be people that believe what they want no matter what the evidence. To be clear I mean there's zero solid evidence of Bigfoot yet some will always believe in it.
I think you got your analogies screwed up. Or do you compare AGW to Bigfoot?
I find it bizarre that people refuse to accept we are having an impact on the environment. The evidence is everywhere. I'm not talking global warming both sides of that argument are bordering on religion I'm talking how much the world has changed. Look at common resources. Ever watch any of the logging shows? What they are cutting now are so small no one would have bothered with them 20 or 30 years ago but in many areas it's all that's left and it's so bad that when they do find old growth trees the lumber mills aren't even set up for them. They are simply too rare to bother with.
Deforestation and overlogging are problems that do not depend on the AGW hypothesis. You're making the green fallacy of equating any and all negative changes in the environment to CO2.
Look at swordfish. They said 200 years ago you could all but walk across the Grand Banks because of all the fish. Now the swordfish they take are virtually all immature fish that have yet to reproduce. Most fisheries have collapsed, a fact. When was the last time you saw a butterfly? How many and how often? When I was growing up you'd see them by the hundreds virtually any summer day. Now I see a few a year. Same with frogs.
Speak for yourself. There might be variations in local spiecies populations due to human actions. That has nothing to do with whether CO2 is causing global changes.
Most great apes are down to a few percent of their original populations. It'd take a good sneeze to wipe them out and they are our closest relatives.
Again, caused by deforestation and expanding human land use, not CO2.
People say the snow storms proved global warming was a hoax. Well guess what I live in central Maine and we have already lost most of our snow and it's getting up into the 50s. This is supposed to be the worst time of year for snow and cold. Don't believe anyone or any study if you want.
Individual weather phenomena are never evidence for, or against, AGW.
Trust your eyes. I see radical change everywhere I look.
It's surprising how much "evidence" you can see proving something you've already made your mind up about being real. The same way only deeply religious people ever seem to find evidence by God.
What people still can't get through their heads is the warming is overall and we are experiencing both extreme hot and cold days. It's the average that is towards warming.
No one is really disputing the warming. What is being disputed is how much of it is due to CO2 and what will be the effect in the future.
The real point is we are headed for more extreme weather and that is very bad.
The claim that AGW causes extreme weather is highly disputed even among genuine climatologists.
With species extinction people need to understand it took hundreds of millions of years to create this much diversity and it will take that long to restore it. Even if it came back in a few million years look at it this way we've been around for 200,000. That means no human will ever see it this diverse again.
Statements without evidence based on hubris.
We are in the middle of one of the worst extinction events in Earth's history and we are the cause and there's no debate about that one.
Blatant lie wrapped up in an assertion of absolute truth.
Most species are dying from habitat loss, we call them cities.
Do you even know how many species there exist in the entire world?
Switzerland is what would happen if a bunch of libertarian-leaning Republicans went out and started their own little country. Every free man has a gun for national defense, privacy is respected, most people are very conservative and suspicious of foreigners, business is very loosely constrained (to the point of encouraging money laundering and tax fraud), and the country consists of a federation of autonomous cantons and a federal government with little power.
Which makes it odd that Republicans always rail against direct democracy as some kind of precursor to tyranny. Seems to work fine for Switzerland.
The reason many researchers, especially climate scientists, are not so happy about divulging their models and data is that they can be sued by crackpots, as it has already happened.
If it has already happened, what additional harm can come from disclosure?
In the US you can sue anybody at any time for any reason whatsoever.
–noun
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly
suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive
nationalism and often racism.
The scenario which scares me is: the idiots vote Sarah Palin into office, and she prevents control of greenhouse gases until a massive global catastrophe
Unlike the Obama administration, Sarah Palin supports nuclear power, which is currently the best way we have to reduce greenhouse gases.
I doubt Sarah Palin supports anything, she will playback any tape inserted into her drive by the conservative thinktanks (as long as it doesn't interfere with her down-to-earth common sense mavericky image). Government bad, businesses good...
For a wonderful introduction to peer review, you could do worse than read this:
http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/corres.pdf
It is an exchange, carried out over several years, between a man who believes he has solved quantum field theory, and the reviewers who carefully look through his papers when he tries to publish. They come up with good points and ways to improve the paper, but he resubmits and resubmits until he finds somewhere that accepts it. Along the way, he gets increasingly rude and angry, while the reviewers remain polite and engage carefully with him.
My favourite part is that it's published on the guy's personal website, although he really doesn't come out of it well.
Some of the reviewers don't seem too polite:
In spite of its pompous language, this paper is, in fact, less rigorous, from the mathematical point of view, than ordinary perturbation theory which can be found in any good textbook or review article.
No relevant problems of contemporary QFT are considered in this paper. I recommend its rejection.
Anyone who has attempted to get a scientific paper published has run into these guys - rude, opinionated, and lazy reviewers.
It's not just cranks who get these responses, either.
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
Climate science is not nearly as hard as modern physics. A mining engineer with a BA in math can poke holes in climate science papers. It seems to me many of their problems arise from bad use of statistics and mathematics, which are not fields where climatologists are experts.
But in doing so, they've removed the global-warming signal (the long-term trend)!
In time series analysis all trends and other nonstationarities in the series must be either explained or removed by preprocessing before regression can be attempted. Because they don't have anything that would explain the warming trend they filter it out then obtain a good model for the rest of the variation of global temperature by correlating it with the ENSO phenomenon with lag 7.
Of course the slight warming trend is still there. This just means it's not explained by El Nino. I don't really see how this contradicts any climate change science.
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!
Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
Removing noise doesn't sound right, but differencing time series is a legitimate technique for processing time series in order to remove autocorrelation so that the resulting time series is stationary (has statistical properties that are constant in time). Notice that at that point they are working with 12-month running mean data, so have effectively integrated their time series to remove some of the noise.
I know sports games are popular, but MMOs require a lot of time and devotion. If you care enough about a sport to play it with others online and devote months or years of your life playing it, why not pick up a ball a play the real thing outside, with friends?
Because playing a sports game is not the same as playing the sport. Many people like sports that in reality they have no physical ability or coordination for.
Am I the only one here who doesn't want the collective impulses of 1 million 15 year olds impacting my game experience? Instead of theorizing about how awesome it would be to have a server with 5 million people on it at the same time, why don't they try to design a game that would actually be fun to play with 5 million other people on your server.
The same reason they can't design a game that's fun to play with 5 people on the same server without one of them being a spambot, one of them using a trainer to cheat, one of them only speaking in Chinese, one of them being +20 lvl higher but constantly killing you just for fun, and one of them bombarding you with racist abuse.
I busted my ass at Georgia Tech, took an average of 18+ hours, and graduated in 8 semesters in mechanical engineering (which is virtually unheard of, it is a defacto 5 year program for all engineering degrees) with a 2.2ish GPA. Which is really more of a testament of the classes I failed because I didn't have to pass them that semester to stay on track (and I didn't drop anything) and my NO HOMEWORK policy (which basically started me at a 'B' or 'C' in every single class I took). I also spent almost every weekend racing bicycles for Georgia Tech, and drinking copious amounts of beer.
That sounds like you didn't work hard at all and graduated with very average grades. Is it surprising someone who actually does their homework and doesn't spend all their weekends on extra-curricular activities can get better grades?
How about teaching children about all the ways mathematics is useful in the sciences, engineering, public policy making, risk analysis, investments etc. rather than advocating pointless numerology that makes "mathematicians" look more like deranged Pythagoreans who worship numbers?
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, the Chinese classic - the "Tao teh Ching" positively prohibits cunning and urges people to stop being too smart. It also talks about how the government should never interfere with the people and never to make too much of a commotion about anything.
I never knew Ayn Rand plagiarized her screed from the ancient Chinese.
The key part was "Of all the ways they could screw up". And for many, not being able to buy groceries for 2 weeks is pretty damned bad.
I suppose they could have accidentally mailed fliers laced with ricin and DMSO, but that's a bit of a stretch.
Yeah, only Ubisoft does that to their customers.
DNA by itself should never be used as the sole evidence to convict someone. It can be a useful indicator for finding suspects, but there always needs to be more direct evidence to provide a conviction. It is not just that people who don't have twins can be convicted solely based on DNA evidence, while people who do have twins cannot because of the possibility of convicting an innocent person. And that is not even going into DNA collisions or tainted samples.
"Does the resulting CO2 from burning methane contribute less to greenhouse effect then the pure methane?"
Very much so. It really is a win win.
Except that the water vapor released is an even more potent greenhouse gas. The catastrophic AGW scenario of CO2 is entirely dependent on the greenhouse effect caused by water vapor that is accelerated by CO2 induced warming, not by the greenhouse effect caused by CO2 alone. Depending on who you ask, the increase of water vapor will either accelerate the warming or stop it due to the extra cloud formation blocking the radiation.
Eighty years ago the French engineers built a wall to protect France from Germans. The Germans walked around it and invaded the country.
Ten years ago the French engineers built a nuclear aircraft carrier that was too short to allow planes to land on it. It was also exposing the crew to radiation.
Now they designed a network-based DRM, which was cracked almost immediately, until (surprise!) the servers went down in flame.
Bunch of buffoons.
And 123 years they built the Eiffel Tower.
Bush is gone, the French are no longer the enemy. Give it up.
Does this only apply to image data, or will we be able to use this to clean up other databases? Will it work with sampled sounds? Names and addresses and inventory?
Of course not. It's not magic. There are certain assumptions that can be made about most real-life images, mainly that they have small total variance. That means they have large areas of near-constant intensity/color distribution separated by interfaces with large jumps (like a cartoon image would have).
Though this method uses the l_1 norm and not total variation.
More importantly, HOW does it work?
See here.
A good headline would be, "Half of Apple's Shareholders Are Dead Wrong But Vehemently Certain They Are Correct". ;)
Doesn't have to specify which side is which ;)
Seeing as they're probably mostly Apple users, both halves of them are.
Listen, you can either drop everything and study your ass off for the better part of a decade to get a PhD in atmospheric science, or listen to the people who have them.
Indeed you should.
By that I mean there will be people that believe what they want no matter what the evidence. To be clear I mean there's zero solid evidence of Bigfoot yet some will always believe in it.
I think you got your analogies screwed up. Or do you compare AGW to Bigfoot?
I find it bizarre that people refuse to accept we are having an impact on the environment. The evidence is everywhere. I'm not talking global warming both sides of that argument are bordering on religion I'm talking how much the world has changed. Look at common resources. Ever watch any of the logging shows? What they are cutting now are so small no one would have bothered with them 20 or 30 years ago but in many areas it's all that's left and it's so bad that when they do find old growth trees the lumber mills aren't even set up for them. They are simply too rare to bother with.
Deforestation and overlogging are problems that do not depend on the AGW hypothesis. You're making the green fallacy of equating any and all negative changes in the environment to CO2.
Look at swordfish. They said 200 years ago you could all but walk across the Grand Banks because of all the fish. Now the swordfish they take are virtually all immature fish that have yet to reproduce. Most fisheries have collapsed, a fact. When was the last time you saw a butterfly? How many and how often? When I was growing up you'd see them by the hundreds virtually any summer day. Now I see a few a year. Same with frogs.
Speak for yourself. There might be variations in local spiecies populations due to human actions. That has nothing to do with whether CO2 is causing global changes.
Most great apes are down to a few percent of their original populations. It'd take a good sneeze to wipe them out and they are our closest relatives.
Again, caused by deforestation and expanding human land use, not CO2.
People say the snow storms proved global warming was a hoax. Well guess what I live in central Maine and we have already lost most of our snow and it's getting up into the 50s. This is supposed to be the worst time of year for snow and cold. Don't believe anyone or any study if you want.
Individual weather phenomena are never evidence for, or against, AGW.
Trust your eyes. I see radical change everywhere I look.
It's surprising how much "evidence" you can see proving something you've already made your mind up about being real. The same way only deeply religious people ever seem to find evidence by God.
What people still can't get through their heads is the warming is overall and we are experiencing both extreme hot and cold days. It's the average that is towards warming.
No one is really disputing the warming. What is being disputed is how much of it is due to CO2 and what will be the effect in the future.
The real point is we are headed for more extreme weather and that is very bad.
The claim that AGW causes extreme weather is highly disputed even among genuine climatologists.
With species extinction people need to understand it took hundreds of millions of years to create this much diversity and it will take that long to restore it. Even if it came back in a few million years look at it this way we've been around for 200,000. That means no human will ever see it this diverse again.
Statements without evidence based on hubris.
We are in the middle of one of the worst extinction events in Earth's history and we are the cause and there's no debate about that one.
Blatant lie wrapped up in an assertion of absolute truth.
Most species are dying from habitat loss, we call them cities.
Do you even know how many species there exist in the entire world?
Switzerland is what would happen if a bunch of libertarian-leaning Republicans went out and started their own little country. Every free man has a gun for national defense, privacy is respected, most people are very conservative and suspicious of foreigners, business is very loosely constrained (to the point of encouraging money laundering and tax fraud), and the country consists of a federation of autonomous cantons and a federal government with little power.
Which makes it odd that Republicans always rail against direct democracy as some kind of precursor to tyranny. Seems to work fine for Switzerland.
The reason many researchers, especially climate scientists, are not so happy about divulging their models and data is that they can be sued by crackpots, as it has already happened.
If it has already happened, what additional harm can come from disclosure? In the US you can sue anybody at any time for any reason whatsoever.
fascism
/fæzm/ Spelled Pronunciation [fash-iz-uhm]
–noun
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
Courtesy of Dictionary.com
Lack of brain function courtesy of Fox News.
Unlike the Obama administration, Sarah Palin supports nuclear power, which is currently the best way we have to reduce greenhouse gases.
I doubt Sarah Palin supports anything, she will playback any tape inserted into her drive by the conservative thinktanks (as long as it doesn't interfere with her down-to-earth common sense mavericky image). Government bad, businesses good...
For a wonderful introduction to peer review, you could do worse than read this:
http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/corres.pdf It is an exchange, carried out over several years, between a man who believes he has solved quantum field theory, and the reviewers who carefully look through his papers when he tries to publish. They come up with good points and ways to improve the paper, but he resubmits and resubmits until he finds somewhere that accepts it. Along the way, he gets increasingly rude and angry, while the reviewers remain polite and engage carefully with him.
My favourite part is that it's published on the guy's personal website, although he really doesn't come out of it well.
Some of the reviewers don't seem too polite:
In spite of its pompous language, this paper is, in fact, less rigorous, from the mathematical point of view, than ordinary perturbation theory which can be found in any good textbook or review article.
No relevant problems of contemporary QFT are considered in this paper. I recommend its rejection.
Anyone who has attempted to get a scientific paper published has run into these guys - rude, opinionated, and lazy reviewers. It's not just cranks who get these responses, either.
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
Climate science is not nearly as hard as modern physics. A mining engineer with a BA in math can poke holes in climate science papers. It seems to me many of their problems arise from bad use of statistics and mathematics, which are not fields where climatologists are experts.
But in doing so, they've removed the global-warming signal (the long-term trend)!
In time series analysis all trends and other nonstationarities in the series must be either explained or removed by preprocessing before regression can be attempted. Because they don't have anything that would explain the warming trend they filter it out then obtain a good model for the rest of the variation of global temperature by correlating it with the ENSO phenomenon with lag 7. Of course the slight warming trend is still there. This just means it's not explained by El Nino. I don't really see how this contradicts any climate change science.
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!
Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
Removing noise doesn't sound right, but differencing time series is a legitimate technique for processing time series in order to remove autocorrelation so that the resulting time series is stationary (has statistical properties that are constant in time). Notice that at that point they are working with 12-month running mean data, so have effectively integrated their time series to remove some of the noise.
I know sports games are popular, but MMOs require a lot of time and devotion. If you care enough about a sport to play it with others online and devote months or years of your life playing it, why not pick up a ball a play the real thing outside, with friends?
Because playing a sports game is not the same as playing the sport. Many people like sports that in reality they have no physical ability or coordination for.
Am I the only one here who doesn't want the collective impulses of 1 million 15 year olds impacting my game experience? Instead of theorizing about how awesome it would be to have a server with 5 million people on it at the same time, why don't they try to design a game that would actually be fun to play with 5 million other people on your server.
The same reason they can't design a game that's fun to play with 5 people on the same server without one of them being a spambot, one of them using a trainer to cheat, one of them only speaking in Chinese, one of them being +20 lvl higher but constantly killing you just for fun, and one of them bombarding you with racist abuse.
I busted my ass at Georgia Tech, took an average of 18+ hours, and graduated in 8 semesters in mechanical engineering (which is virtually unheard of, it is a defacto 5 year program for all engineering degrees) with a 2.2ish GPA. Which is really more of a testament of the classes I failed because I didn't have to pass them that semester to stay on track (and I didn't drop anything) and my NO HOMEWORK policy (which basically started me at a 'B' or 'C' in every single class I took). I also spent almost every weekend racing bicycles for Georgia Tech, and drinking copious amounts of beer.
That sounds like you didn't work hard at all and graduated with very average grades. Is it surprising someone who actually does their homework and doesn't spend all their weekends on extra-curricular activities can get better grades?
Yes! God forbid anyone worry about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's diameter.
Obsessing over the decimal digits of pi won't teach the students anything. It also makes math teachers look like morons.
How about teaching children about all the ways mathematics is useful in the sciences, engineering, public policy making, risk analysis, investments etc. rather than advocating pointless numerology that makes "mathematicians" look more like deranged Pythagoreans who worship numbers?
Don't expect that your users stay in one place. Do expect that they sometimes travel to other countries.
I was going to suggest this, then realized his users are likely to be Americans.
Just install Cygwin and run Emacs.
The next step is obviously to let PageRank select the Nobel winners and cut out the middleman.
I can't wait for my first Nobel Prize Optimization spam.