You can follow the original link to realclimate.org to find many other links to data sources. I have posted the data sources above only because many critics of AGW won't even bother with realclimate.org as they are thought to be part of the conspiracy. The data exists and is public as is the source code.
The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data. There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question. Furthermore, many critics of Mann et al. have ignored the fact that this was a single line of data turning a blind eye to the numerous other data sets and proxies that support the same conclusions. I find it disingenuous to claim that all climatology is now in question due to this "trick". I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.
If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands to the melting of the arctic tundra to the loss of glaciation document global warming independently of these scientists' data. All the data seem to indicate is that the warming is happening on a scale that it has not before. By itself, this should indicate that the hockey stick curve is real. But is this warming due to humans?
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) critics seem to espouse ideas such as the solar cycle hypothesis or Milankovich hypothesis rather than admit that humans can change the atmosphere. On the BBC this morning I even heard a listener letter that explained how volcanoes were the cause of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. This ignores some of the more obvious ways in which humans can change the atmosphere. This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.
Are you confusing me with the parent poster? I just said that people who take notes do better. If it was not clear:
Copying is better than watching
Deriving (that is thinking as you go) is better than copying
Seriously, I was disagreeing with the parent. I think you just focused on the word "copying" and stopped reading.
Furthermore, I do NOT ban people from taking notes in class, nor do I force them to take notes. I do provide copies of my lectures regardless of their learning style.
While I have heard this theory, there is also the act of deriving in real time. My mother-in-law, the educational psychologist, says:
Doing is better than watching. Students are more likely to catch errors as they go (this is good!) and are more likely to be engaged. Class becomes more of an activity and less like just watching a movie.
With languages and maths, copying stimulates kinesthetic memory and makes it more likely that students recall what was said. (note that deriving is even better).
Although I do provide all of my notes to my students, my experience is that students who take notes in class do better. (I too have tracked this - it would be interesting to see what we are doing differently in each of our cases.)
My physics class turns in their labs digitally. Some of them have really struggled trying to insert equations. Some of them had scanned their notes and then cropped various equations out. Some had tried building equations via manual formatting supplemented via underlining and super/subscripting. To a person, they seem to hate MS Office's equation editor as it takes too long to point and click your way through (and if there's another way with their editor, enlighten me).
Yesterday, I popped up OpenOffice's equation editor (ALT-I-O-F -> for ALT-Insert-Object-Formula) and started typing. As we were doing parallel and series circuits, I took an equation from the recent lab: R_net = 1 over { 1 over R_1 + 1 over R_2} + R_3. Almost to a person, they were agog that I could type it as fast as I could write it on the board. I did suggest alternates such as MathType, MathML, and LaTeX, but I don't think they heard me after that.
While I am able to quickly produce copious amounts of equations using OO.org's editor, the usual disclaimer applies: use what works for you.
I know the argument, but with people going with wide-screen laptops and the like, screen real-estate is at a premium, especially at the top of the screen. The menu-bar is small and compact, The ribbon is not. Even if the ribbon goes on the left or the right, it still eats up pixels. I much prefer right clicking for context, but that's just me.
Here's another relatively good explanation of why linux laptops have such poor battery life. The summary is (in order):
Linux does much more in the way of disk IO than Windows due to how data is written out of the page cache using pdflush
Those of us who run journaling file systems will have more disk IO than those who don't
Memory management has generally done little to no prioritization of which pages are written to disk
This is, of course a vast simplification, but it gets the point across. The linked to article also shows how to use laptop mode to address these issues and extend batterly life (although, it seems to me that there is a trade off in the ability of journaled file systems to perform correctly).
Yeah, I have a crazy relative who is just fine around these things until he notices them. He's great around traditional 60 W lightbulbs (powered by AC voltage at 60 Hz), but show him an LED, say the green one that turns on when you turn on certain devices, and he is being poisoned. He often leaves the house to avoid E&M fields, and because it's so cold outside, takes a plugin space heater with him (giant extension cord and all).
So this gets me thinking about Star Trek. Presumably, the teleporters had to be able to make perfect copies of the human system at the moment of teleportation in order to be able to effect the transfer with memories intact. This means that at some point, the complete blueprint of a given human was in memory. So, presuming they have terabytes upon terabytes of storage capacity (what being in the future and all), it makes one wonder why all those red-shirts had to die when they could be reproduced with the press of a button.
My bad. I was looking at specs like 28K and thinking 28 kilopixels (bleah!) total not width. The only place it mentioned the 261 mpix was in regard to still photography. So again, my bad.
Am I missing something here? In my current lab, we're using 8 of MAC's Eagle cameras at the relatively low frame rate of 200 fps.
The Eagle Digital Camera, with a resolution of 1.3 million pixels at 1280 x 1024 full resolution at up to 500 frames per second, 1280 x 512 at 1000 frames per second, 1280 x 256 at 2000 frames per second, and a processing rate of 600 million pixels per second, revolutionizes the motion capture industry with its extreme resolution, unprecedented high frame rate, upgradeable functionality, and ease of use.
The Raptor-4 uses the Micron Corporation MI-MV40 sensor and operates up to 200 fps at a full resolution of 2352 x 1728 pixels, and up to 10,000 fps at reduced resolutions. The Raptor-4 Digital Cameras provide today's motion capture technicians with a tool that assures reliable and accurate data. With digital technology there is no degradation of the signal over distance, less noise, and no resampling of data on another piece of electronics.
These have onboard tracking technology which allows for auto identification of shapes (usually circular markers) in 2/500 of a second.
It seems like this RED camera under-performs in all categories.
Also, having inquired with my insurance company about such things, I was told that if I did it myself, no matter how competently, I would not qualify for a reduction in homeowner's insurance. I could only qualify if a "professional" company did the job. I suspect this gets to the point of having some third party able to validate that your home was indeed broken into and that you didn't just trigger the alarm yourself for *profit*.
See here about some of the points you've raised. It may be that you don't believe them, but I think that this page, straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, addresses most of your points. Here are a couple key points:
Give all small businesses a $3,000 new jobs tax credit for each additional employee hired in 2009 and 2010.
Help small businesses raise capital and increase growth by exempting all investments in small and start up businesses from capital gains taxes.
Offer all small business owners a healthcare tax credit equal to 50% of the premiums paid for employee health benefits each year.
Of the people, by the people, for the people. Not last resort. Corporations are only beholden unto their stockholders, not the public. Go figure why some of us don't trust them to do what's right for the public interest.
Regarding point 3), let me remind you of Clinton's record on the economy. For that matter, let me remind you of how democrats do in general. Even the GDP seems to do better under democrats than republicans. Yes, these are partisan sites, but I couldn't find any sites on the opposite side of things that would even bring up the issue.
OK, I'll bite. I've got a couple of points regarding taxation of the wealthy.
Considering that the average CEO makes something like 400x the average worker in America, has been raiding pension plans, and the like, and has been getting away with it for the last eight years (or more), I'm not sure that wealth redistribution, as you call it, is that big a problem. The workers are putting in tons of work (albeit of a different expertise), and being cheated of overtime pay, healthcare and the works, while the executives in suits are riding high. Why is it such a problem that workers get something back from the government when companies are too greedy to give it to them in the first place? None of the wealthy seem to be complaining that the government just poured $700 billion into bailing them out on trickle-down economic theory.
As someone who once worked in an accounting shop, I can tell you that I worked on the taxes of people who were making many times more than I was (as a graduate student) and who paid much less because of tax loopholes. The larger tax-rates applied to wealthy people was sometimes rationalized by my employers as being a way to get *something* out of the wealthy at all.
Most FDCDs and USCCs (US Controlled Corporations) that reported no tax liabilities in 2005 also reported that they had no current-year income.
At the bottom of this first page of the report is a graph showing what "most" actually is, 70%. So only 30% of US corporations generally pay ANY tax in a given year according to the GAO.
So again, why shouldn't we be clamouring for rich people and corporations to be paying up like the rest of us?
You've basically put this very elegantly. When I try to communicate this to non-programmers, they basically say: "But how can you tell someone that they voted one way, but count it the other way?" It's essentially one line of code and trivial to implement. This is why election recount laws to the effect of "recounts will only happen if the vote is *this* close" are meaningless with computer voting. Additionally, the issue of what you are actually recounting arises when there is no paper-trail.
Interestingly enough, it's related a problem we're going to have to start dealing with. Let me explain. I tend to promote OSS to students, largely because they are too poor to afford anything better. Many have MSWorks and NOT MSOffice on their computers or other limitations. So I recommend products like OpenOffice.org or VLC player (among others dependent on the need). Some of these folks, instead of following my links to the real websites, Google OpenOffice and are finding third party knock-offs, that they claim are installing viruses/spyware on their machines.
So the free-software community's problem is that while we generally tell people to take our source code and do *whatever* with it, some malware writers (on Windows, at least), have noted that this provides an opportunity to them. Is a good anti-virus a fix? Probably not. Rather, there needs to be a way for non-discriminating users to tell that they don't have the original distribution. I can't think of how to do this off the top of my head, but suspect it may mean that code is cryptographically certified before it can be considered to be secure. And of course, this opens up a huge can of worms.
Are you ready for the inevitable conspiracy theory? Here it is, cooked up between my wife and myself after discussing the implications of renewing our passports shortly.
The problems are actually a feature. Let me explain. Remember how the old Soviet-bloc countries didn't like their nationals traveling because they would see how much better the rest of the world was? (Don't get me wrong, I like it here just fine.) Well, if everyone who hears about this says "I guess I won't be traveling any time soon", it effectively stops travel (usually by the intelligentia) all the while allowing the govt to say "We have no travel restrictions on our own citizens".
So in short, I'm not sure which it is, but the bottom line for me is that I'm waiting until the last minute in the hopes that some of the recommended features are implemented by then.
Other statistics and confirmation that "Space pays" may also be found in the 1976 Chase Econometrics Associates, Inc. reports ("The Economic Impact of NASA R&D Spending: Preliminary Executive Summary.", April 1975. Also: "Relative Impact of NASA Expenditure on the Economy.", March 18, 1975) and backed by the 1989 Chapman Research report, which examined just 259 non-space applications of NASA technology during an eight year period (1976-1984) and found more than:
$21.6 billion in sales and benefits;
352,000 (mostly skilled) jobs created or saved,and;
$355 million in federal corporate income taxes
Now, that said, it doesn't mean that the Indian program will be nearly as successful. But it does point out that these benefits are real and have been documented. Since some of the benefits are jobs creation, this can go towards benefiting people other than the upper class.
On the other hand, people never seem to complain when the government buys expensive airplanes. The Indian airforce decided in 2005 to upgrade its aging planes and buy 126 new multi-role fighter jets. If we use an estimate from this contract, in 2003 dollars this comes out to 126*$72.9 million per plane = $1.2 billion for the upgrade, approximately. Here, we're presuming that if they didn't choose F-16s, whatever they chose was of a commensurate cost. By contrast, the space mission which has many indirect benefits (as pointed out by other/. readers) for India only costs $100 million in *today's* dollars. Now I know that militaries need to keep current with the latest, greatest hardware, but the contrast in cost is striking. It seems that people love to pick on space programs as if they are the only other source of funding for poverty programs when there are clearly other contenders for the expenditures.
In this country we've had the foxes watching the hen-houses for the last eight years. I can't recall any enforcement action (from EPA to anti-trust) over that period although rulings were made. Hopefully this will change shortly, no matter who wins in November.
That said, this is only peripherally a MS anti-trust issue in that if MS wasn't so big (and felt that it could get away with murder), perhaps it wouldn't be on their agenda. It's really more of an ISO issue, as others before have said.
On the other hand, considering this is Slashdot, you might find that the audience here actually does find fiddling with their TVs to be more entertaining than actually watching.:-)
How complete is this? It sounds like I would have to build many of the packages using gcc rather than just using my package manager to download them. Is there some advantage gained by using this over running a full *nix OS in virtualized mode using Qemu or Vmware?
Slashdot Mirror
You can follow the original link to realclimate.org to find many other links to data sources. I have posted the data sources above only because many critics of AGW won't even bother with realclimate.org as they are thought to be part of the conspiracy. The data exists and is public as is the source code.
The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data. There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question. Furthermore, many critics of Mann et al. have ignored the fact that this was a single line of data turning a blind eye to the numerous other data sets and proxies that support the same conclusions. I find it disingenuous to claim that all climatology is now in question due to this "trick". I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.
If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands to the melting of the arctic tundra to the loss of glaciation document global warming independently of these scientists' data. All the data seem to indicate is that the warming is happening on a scale that it has not before. By itself, this should indicate that the hockey stick curve is real. But is this warming due to humans?
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) critics seem to espouse ideas such as the solar cycle hypothesis or Milankovich hypothesis rather than admit that humans can change the atmosphere. On the BBC this morning I even heard a listener letter that explained how volcanoes were the cause of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. This ignores some of the more obvious ways in which humans can change the atmosphere. This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.
Are you confusing me with the parent poster? I just said that people who take notes do better. If it was not clear:
Seriously, I was disagreeing with the parent. I think you just focused on the word "copying" and stopped reading.
Furthermore, I do NOT ban people from taking notes in class, nor do I force them to take notes. I do provide copies of my lectures regardless of their learning style.
Although I do provide all of my notes to my students, my experience is that students who take notes in class do better. (I too have tracked this - it would be interesting to see what we are doing differently in each of our cases.)
My physics class turns in their labs digitally. Some of them have really struggled trying to insert equations. Some of them had scanned their notes and then cropped various equations out. Some had tried building equations via manual formatting supplemented via underlining and super/subscripting. To a person, they seem to hate MS Office's equation editor as it takes too long to point and click your way through (and if there's another way with their editor, enlighten me).
Yesterday, I popped up OpenOffice's equation editor (ALT-I-O-F -> for ALT-Insert-Object-Formula) and started typing. As we were doing parallel and series circuits, I took an equation from the recent lab: R_net = 1 over { 1 over R_1 + 1 over R_2} + R_3. Almost to a person, they were agog that I could type it as fast as I could write it on the board. I did suggest alternates such as MathType, MathML, and LaTeX, but I don't think they heard me after that.
While I am able to quickly produce copious amounts of equations using OO.org's editor, the usual disclaimer applies: use what works for you.
I know the argument, but with people going with wide-screen laptops and the like, screen real-estate is at a premium, especially at the top of the screen. The menu-bar is small and compact, The ribbon is not. Even if the ribbon goes on the left or the right, it still eats up pixels. I much prefer right clicking for context, but that's just me.
This is, of course a vast simplification, but it gets the point across. The linked to article also shows how to use laptop mode to address these issues and extend batterly life (although, it seems to me that there is a trade off in the ability of journaled file systems to perform correctly).
Yeah, I have a crazy relative who is just fine around these things until he notices them. He's great around traditional 60 W lightbulbs (powered by AC voltage at 60 Hz), but show him an LED, say the green one that turns on when you turn on certain devices, and he is being poisoned. He often leaves the house to avoid E&M fields, and because it's so cold outside, takes a plugin space heater with him (giant extension cord and all).
So this gets me thinking about Star Trek. Presumably, the teleporters had to be able to make perfect copies of the human system at the moment of teleportation in order to be able to effect the transfer with memories intact. This means that at some point, the complete blueprint of a given human was in memory. So, presuming they have terabytes upon terabytes of storage capacity (what being in the future and all), it makes one wonder why all those red-shirts had to die when they could be reproduced with the press of a button.
My bad. I was looking at specs like 28K and thinking 28 kilopixels (bleah!) total not width. The only place it mentioned the 261 mpix was in regard to still photography. So again, my bad.
Am I missing something here? In my current lab, we're using 8 of MAC's Eagle cameras at the relatively low frame rate of 200 fps.
MAC has just put out their Raptor camera:
These have onboard tracking technology which allows for auto identification of shapes (usually circular markers) in 2/500 of a second.
It seems like this RED camera under-performs in all categories.
Also, having inquired with my insurance company about such things, I was told that if I did it myself, no matter how competently, I would not qualify for a reduction in homeowner's insurance. I could only qualify if a "professional" company did the job. I suspect this gets to the point of having some third party able to validate that your home was indeed broken into and that you didn't just trigger the alarm yourself for *profit*.
Of the people, by the people, for the people. Not last resort. Corporations are only beholden unto their stockholders, not the public. Go figure why some of us don't trust them to do what's right for the public interest.
Regarding point 3), let me remind you of Clinton's record on the economy. For that matter, let me remind you of how democrats do in general. Even the GDP seems to do better under democrats than republicans. Yes, these are partisan sites, but I couldn't find any sites on the opposite side of things that would even bring up the issue.
At the bottom of this first page of the report is a graph showing what "most" actually is, 70%. So only 30% of US corporations generally pay ANY tax in a given year according to the GAO.
So again, why shouldn't we be clamouring for rich people and corporations to be paying up like the rest of us?
You've basically put this very elegantly. When I try to communicate this to non-programmers, they basically say: "But how can you tell someone that they voted one way, but count it the other way?" It's essentially one line of code and trivial to implement. This is why election recount laws to the effect of "recounts will only happen if the vote is *this* close" are meaningless with computer voting. Additionally, the issue of what you are actually recounting arises when there is no paper-trail.
Interestingly enough, it's related a problem we're going to have to start dealing with. Let me explain. I tend to promote OSS to students, largely because they are too poor to afford anything better. Many have MSWorks and NOT MSOffice on their computers or other limitations. So I recommend products like OpenOffice.org or VLC player (among others dependent on the need). Some of these folks, instead of following my links to the real websites, Google OpenOffice and are finding third party knock-offs, that they claim are installing viruses/spyware on their machines.
So the free-software community's problem is that while we generally tell people to take our source code and do *whatever* with it, some malware writers (on Windows, at least), have noted that this provides an opportunity to them. Is a good anti-virus a fix? Probably not. Rather, there needs to be a way for non-discriminating users to tell that they don't have the original distribution. I can't think of how to do this off the top of my head, but suspect it may mean that code is cryptographically certified before it can be considered to be secure. And of course, this opens up a huge can of worms.
Are you ready for the inevitable conspiracy theory? Here it is, cooked up between my wife and myself after discussing the implications of renewing our passports shortly.
The problems are actually a feature. Let me explain. Remember how the old Soviet-bloc countries didn't like their nationals traveling because they would see how much better the rest of the world was? (Don't get me wrong, I like it here just fine.) Well, if everyone who hears about this says "I guess I won't be traveling any time soon", it effectively stops travel (usually by the intelligentia) all the while allowing the govt to say "We have no travel restrictions on our own citizens".
Of course, all this is nonsense. Our current administration would never feign incompetence to obtain other goals. Yet there's plenty of other information that suggests there's no tom-foolery about this and that the incompetence is real.
So in short, I'm not sure which it is, but the bottom line for me is that I'm waiting until the last minute in the hopes that some of the recommended features are implemented by then.
Now, that said, it doesn't mean that the Indian program will be nearly as successful. But it does point out that these benefits are real and have been documented. Since some of the benefits are jobs creation, this can go towards benefiting people other than the upper class.
Whoops, thats $9.2 billion for the cost. I read the result out of the wrong calculation window. I am such a nerd.
On the other hand, people never seem to complain when the government buys expensive airplanes. The Indian airforce decided in 2005 to upgrade its aging planes and buy 126 new multi-role fighter jets. If we use an estimate from this contract, in 2003 dollars this comes out to 126*$72.9 million per plane = $1.2 billion for the upgrade, approximately. Here, we're presuming that if they didn't choose F-16s, whatever they chose was of a commensurate cost. By contrast, the space mission which has many indirect benefits (as pointed out by other /. readers) for India only costs $100 million in *today's* dollars. Now I know that militaries need to keep current with the latest, greatest hardware, but the contrast in cost is striking. It seems that people love to pick on space programs as if they are the only other source of funding for poverty programs when there are clearly other contenders for the expenditures.
In this country we've had the foxes watching the hen-houses for the last eight years. I can't recall any enforcement action (from EPA to anti-trust) over that period although rulings were made. Hopefully this will change shortly, no matter who wins in November.
That said, this is only peripherally a MS anti-trust issue in that if MS wasn't so big (and felt that it could get away with murder), perhaps it wouldn't be on their agenda. It's really more of an ISO issue, as others before have said.
On the other hand, considering this is Slashdot, you might find that the audience here actually does find fiddling with their TVs to be more entertaining than actually watching. :-)
How complete is this? It sounds like I would have to build many of the packages using gcc rather than just using my package manager to download them. Is there some advantage gained by using this over running a full *nix OS in virtualized mode using Qemu or Vmware?