Models are neither wrong nor right, they simply have more or less fidelity with the natural system being observed.
It is extremely likely that the models are constructed using implicit assumptions about climate that lead to the conclusion being sought. This is my opinion. You probably disagree. In either case, I do not think they are purposely loaded or that malfeasance occurred in any fashion.
Over time, implicit assumptions that predict disaster are more likely to be accepted into the scientific norm than others. So I'd choose door number 2 -- with the provisio that the models will either a) continue to err on the side of looming disaster, or b) stop receiving funding, in which case they will no longer be fine-tuned.
Once again, over time, most of the models will predict disaster -- slowly converging to reality. This is not due to any conscious decision on the part of any scientist, simply the political nature of research funding.
Is that clear enough? Or do you still want to accuse me of slandering an entire profession?
I am not a shy person. If I wanted to accuse scientists of being greed-driven liars I would do so.
Science is a political profession, as you acknowledge.
I like to think I explain things rather well, but you seem to either want to believe that science is perfect or full of charlatans. Given your logic, anyone who makes a mistake that brings them money must by definition be a scoundrel.
There is a free market at work here. Science that scares people gets more money than science that doesn't.
Does that mean that scientists puposefully scare people? Not in my mind. Not at all. But perhaps you know what I am thinking better than I do myself, as you seem to keep telling me what I mean.
Science is a political activity. Time to acknowledge it as such. It works on the free market, just like anything else that needs money to make happen. Wrapping yourself in indignation will not make the world go away.
Look. My six-year-old thinks there is a monster in the closet ready to get him when the lights go out.
Is he a dishonest charaltan, only existing to prey on my kind nature? Or is he simply making conclusions without a complete grasp of the situation?
One may make an erroneous conclusion, have it reveiwed by peers and published, all in good faith. Nobody is accusing anybody of anything. Calm down a bit. Sometimes scientists are mistaken. I think this happens alot -- especially in new fields of research. You may think it happens infrequently. These are just differences of opinion, not slanders of entire professions. If you took it that way, it was not meant as such and I apologize for not stating so in a better way.
You're sounding very emotional. Maybe a couple of deep breaths might help.
As an architect who has written both simulation engines and created complex models of various systems, I can tell you that the implicit assumptions going into a simulation are the ones that cause poor predictive ability. These are almost never discovered until later when better models are created.
Nobody is accusing the world of science of foul-play. I'm simply pointing out that scientists are people too. And as a system of people, they also have observable behaviour. It might be a better use of one's time to look at the pattern of scientific herd-mentality FIRST, and then take into account individual studies second.
I'm certain that all involved were top-drawer and well-meaning people.
This seems to be the norm rather than the exception, unfortunately.
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal" That must be why, no matter what the scientific endeavor, there's always some cataclysmic disaster looming on the horizon.
So -- using that old razor of Occam's -- either the entire world and every observable natural system is on the brink of an unheard-of disaster, or there is a noticable (and understandable) trend in scientific research to a) follow the herd, and b) doomsay.
Just my opinion. I get paid for these. $.25 will get you another one.
Yes. _Bush_ administration. The orginal article implied that the Bush administration was responsible for the omissions, which is, er non-operative. I called it as flamebait when it first appeared and later was proven correct. Bush and Ashcroft could give a hoot about the indexing strategies of google -- it's just election-year emotions rolling over into other areas.
I asked two questions in my posting on the first slashdot article
1) What does the way slashdot runs their search engine have to do with the administration? Answer: nothing.
2) Does someone have an automated search engine tester?
I'd still like to see the answer to the second question. Now that we have a vast army of search engines competing for our use, who is going to rate and rank them?
Google's indexing problems look like a great opportunity for some of the other engines.
Let's try again. I believe there are implicit and explicit assumptions in any search. An implicit assumption would be that I would want results in the language I speak, or graphic files in the formats my computer displays.
Optiminally, a search system would have a consumer profile on hand to assist with ranking and filtering search results. The more detailed this profile and the more adept the search system is at identifying and adapting to this profile the better value the result set.
My grandma does not want torture pictures from that prison. She does not want them on her computer, and she does not want to see them if she is searching for 1970s prison movies (motion pictures) to watch on late night cable. Now. I am not sure whether my grandma has dreams of world domination or even what her political preferences are, but if I was writing a search engine for my grandma, that's something I would keep in mind.
BTW "complete data set" is an oxymoron. In a search for semantic similarities, there exists no such animal. I really think it is you guys that are expecting google to perform like some giant disk-searching function. Perhaps if you thought through the problem some more?
I can't give you the answer but I can make some observations.
I think if you do the math you realize that with the current power of propellants you can't carry your fuel with you.
Some ideas: earth-based mass drivers, ion scramjet technology, even blimps into space (JP Aerospace) looks interesting. The mass driver and blimp technology involve no (zero) big science acheivements and are both heavy-lift and completely reusable.
I'm saying that a complete search and an useful search are contradictory design goals. The perceived value of any search system is directly related to the intelligence behind the definition of what is "useful" to the user. This definition will vary among competing systems.
I don't know how I could explain that any clearer. Sorry if I failed to communicate effectively last time.
I would like to use a branded search engine that makes intelligent decisions for me on what I want to see or not.
Since I have no desire to see these images, I'm perfectly happy to have them filtered. I have no desre for a mathematically precise web search -- I'm not grepping the whole web. Geesh! I want some neural net fuzzy logic processing going on. Some brains in the picture.
If I don't like the result set, I'll use another service. Very simple to do. It's called the free market, folks. As long as I have the ability to choose vendors freely the vendors must compete for the most useful and complete search (which are contradictory goals, by the way)
While things may or may not appear in a google search, how the heck does that have anything to do with the current administration or national security?
People got a right to run companies the way they want to. If I wrote a search engine, perhaps I wouldn't want anything to do with French fries to appear, or pedophilia, or digestional disorders. The more intersting question is: How do we inform the public what is crossed out?
How did the author determine this? Is there some kind of automated search engine tester? Now THAT would be an intersting slashdot story.
I'm a huge Rutan fan, but it's gotta be orbital or bust.
Creating a huge reverse bungee-jump looks like a hoot, but until you go orbital you are not demonstrating real economic value (over just fun).
Perhaps the industry can survive for several years on 90-minute tourist rides, but I don't know. 1-hour delivery of packages and executives anywhere in the world will change the future.
So instead of one prize for a really large sum and prestige, we'll have an entire program of prizes at all sorts of dollar levels spread across dozens of sub-projects.
Oh sure. That works great. We wouldn't think NASA would take a simple thing and over-engineer it, would we?
I love the space program. Really I do. But NASA has lost all of my respect as an agency. The FAA has a motto of not only regulating air travel but also promoting aviation among regular people. NASA's charter should have been written this way, and half of the money should be spent accordingly. NASA should not own space travel for all Americans. Lower the cost to LEO by a 1000-fold and watch the economics of space travel change. Change the nature of the problem -- stop continuing to frame the problem in terms that make the solutions difficult or impossible.
We could have done this 20 years ago. How many more billions are we going to spend on giant complex fireworks for PhDs and test-pilots to fly?
This article looks like a plant from the Microsoft PR department. There really is not much of a story here.
I know it has to be driving MS nuts that google is getting into the filesystem niche, especially with all the trouble they've had over the years with putting together a database-based filing system. I imagine if they keep on pushing the release out past Longhorn, google is going to overtake them .
It says in the article it can be adjusted to see through plastics, clothes, etc
Clothes! Isn't this the same stuff that was responsible for all the X-Ray vision claims? Do we really want sensor platforms over most all of our major cities with the ability to see through people's clothes? I mean, I'm all for having the government check up on my library habits, but this may be taking it a little too far, no?
After problems with the last satellite, NASA has announced the next satellite to go up will have an AI system to diagnose the existing AI system. This system will bypass all of the diagnostics capability of the first system and instead create a change request and invoice to have the contractor fix the problem.
Is it just me, or instead of lowering cost to LEO, we're paying a bunch of really smart people to play? With cooler stuff than we get to play with?
Aside from all of the obligatory hand-wringing and attacking the USA and the current administration, there is really nothing new here.
The military gets paid to think up stuff. For all of human history, whereever man went, violence followed. So it seems easily predictable that space will become a battlefield.
I would much rather have the Air Force thinking about this stuff now then get blindsided 20 or 40 years into the future. These issues need to be gamed out and risks identified so that the political talking heads can be informed on what the issues are if we were to ever find ourselves in that situation.
Instead of the old model, where one or two people debate and we all watch, why not something new? The old way sounds like client-server, now is the age of P2P!
Sooooo -- we should all debate each other, simultaneously. Then some algorhitm could determine which issues were decided which way. Certainly there are a lot of new models besides client-server, right?
I was just walking when Neil plopped out on the moon, and I remember the last astronauts leaving the moon talking about the space shuttle and skylab. Gee -- those programs really went places.
Personally, I'm still pessimistic. I just think it's a great time to be alive when all of these guys are dumping money into the problem of cost-to-LEO, which is the crimping point of every other space discussion. We're still going to see a lot of failures, IMO, but each time somebody fails we move the ball a little further. It's a technology for the grandkids, no matter what your age.
The cool thing will be watching the human spirit over the next decade. It reminds me of the days of Limburgh, or the old footage of whacky airplanes that never worked. Yes -- people will get killed. No -- we're not going to visit the orbiting Hilton anytime soon. But we will get to see some piece of the adventure. And that beats nothing.
BTW -- read the backup material. This is a really cool story.
What happens if 10 years from now we have a private space station (or, horror of horrors 2 or 3 stations) with tourists going up and still the ISS isn't completed? How are all of us going to feel about all of those tax dollars we're pouring into the shuttle and ISS now?
Wouldn't it be better take a couple of billion right now and set up a series of prizes that take us from suborbital all the way to mars? You could stretch it over 20-30 years, and make the prizes high enough to keep the independents in the game. Isn't this better than putting all of our tax money in one basket and hoping the basket holds up?
Slashdot Mirror
Models are neither wrong nor right, they simply have more or less fidelity with the natural system being observed.
It is extremely likely that the models are constructed using implicit assumptions about climate that lead to the conclusion being sought. This is my opinion. You probably disagree. In either case, I do not think they are purposely loaded or that malfeasance occurred in any fashion.
Over time, implicit assumptions that predict disaster are more likely to be accepted into the scientific norm than others. So I'd choose door number 2 -- with the provisio that the models will either a) continue to err on the side of looming disaster, or b) stop receiving funding, in which case they will no longer be fine-tuned.
Once again, over time, most of the models will predict disaster -- slowly converging to reality. This is not due to any conscious decision on the part of any scientist, simply the political nature of research funding.
Is that clear enough? Or do you still want to accuse me of slandering an entire profession?
I am not a shy person. If I wanted to accuse scientists of being greed-driven liars I would do so.
Science is a political profession, as you acknowledge.
I like to think I explain things rather well, but you seem to either want to believe that science is perfect or full of charlatans. Given your logic, anyone who makes a mistake that brings them money must by definition be a scoundrel.
I find your reasoning rather unusual.
There is a free market at work here. Science that scares people gets more money than science that doesn't.
Does that mean that scientists puposefully scare people? Not in my mind. Not at all. But perhaps you know what I am thinking better than I do myself, as you seem to keep telling me what I mean.
Science is a political activity. Time to acknowledge it as such. It works on the free market, just like anything else that needs money to make happen. Wrapping yourself in indignation will not make the world go away.
I don't want to get into a political discussion with you, but I see it the other way around.
And after all, you seem to be agreeing with the point I am making -- science is also a political profession.
Look. My six-year-old thinks there is a monster in the closet ready to get him when the lights go out.
Is he a dishonest charaltan, only existing to prey on my kind nature? Or is he simply making conclusions without a complete grasp of the situation?
One may make an erroneous conclusion, have it reveiwed by peers and published, all in good faith. Nobody is accusing anybody of anything. Calm down a bit. Sometimes scientists are mistaken. I think this happens alot -- especially in new fields of research. You may think it happens infrequently. These are just differences of opinion, not slanders of entire professions. If you took it that way, it was not meant as such and I apologize for not stating so in a better way.
You're sounding very emotional. Maybe a couple of deep breaths might help.
As an architect who has written both simulation engines and created complex models of various systems, I can tell you that the implicit assumptions going into a simulation are the ones that cause poor predictive ability. These are almost never discovered until later when better models are created.
Nobody is accusing the world of science of foul-play. I'm simply pointing out that scientists are people too. And as a system of people, they also have observable behaviour. It might be a better use of one's time to look at the pattern of scientific herd-mentality FIRST, and then take into account individual studies second.
I'm certain that all involved were top-drawer and well-meaning people.
This seems to be the norm rather than the exception, unfortunately.
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal" That must be why, no matter what the scientific endeavor, there's always some cataclysmic disaster looming on the horizon.
So -- using that old razor of Occam's -- either the entire world and every observable natural system is on the brink of an unheard-of disaster, or there is a noticable (and understandable) trend in scientific research to a) follow the herd, and b) doomsay.
Just my opinion. I get paid for these. $.25 will get you another one.
What a great boon for real estate in Norway! Time to buy up those cottage properties.
Yes. _Bush_ administration. The orginal article implied that the Bush administration was responsible for the omissions, which is, er non-operative. I called it as flamebait when it first appeared and later was proven correct. Bush and Ashcroft could give a hoot about the indexing strategies of google -- it's just election-year emotions rolling over into other areas.
I asked two questions in my posting on the first slashdot article
1) What does the way slashdot runs their search engine have to do with the administration? Answer: nothing.
2) Does someone have an automated search engine tester?
I'd still like to see the answer to the second question. Now that we have a vast army of search engines competing for our use, who is going to rate and rank them?
Google's indexing problems look like a great opportunity for some of the other engines.
Gosh. You guys don't give up, do you?
Let's try again. I believe there are implicit and explicit assumptions in any search. An implicit assumption would be that I would want results in the language I speak, or graphic files in the formats my computer displays.
Optiminally, a search system would have a consumer profile on hand to assist with ranking and filtering search results. The more detailed this profile and the more adept the search system is at identifying and adapting to this profile the better value the result set.
My grandma does not want torture pictures from that prison. She does not want them on her computer, and she does not want to see them if she is searching for 1970s prison movies (motion pictures) to watch on late night cable. Now. I am not sure whether my grandma has dreams of world domination or even what her political preferences are, but if I was writing a search engine for my grandma, that's something I would keep in mind.
BTW "complete data set" is an oxymoron. In a search for semantic similarities, there exists no such animal. I really think it is you guys that are expecting google to perform like some giant disk-searching function. Perhaps if you thought through the problem some more?
I can't give you the answer but I can make some observations.
I think if you do the math you realize that with the current power of propellants you can't carry your fuel with you.
Some ideas: earth-based mass drivers, ion scramjet technology, even blimps into space (JP Aerospace) looks interesting. The mass driver and blimp technology involve no (zero) big science acheivements and are both heavy-lift and completely reusable.
I'm saying that a complete search and an useful search are contradictory design goals. The perceived value of any search system is directly related to the intelligence behind the definition of what is "useful" to the user. This definition will vary among competing systems.
I don't know how I could explain that any clearer. Sorry if I failed to communicate effectively last time.
I would like to use a branded search engine that makes intelligent decisions for me on what I want to see or not.
Since I have no desire to see these images, I'm perfectly happy to have them filtered. I have no desre for a mathematically precise web search -- I'm not grepping the whole web. Geesh! I want some neural net fuzzy logic processing going on. Some brains in the picture.
If I don't like the result set, I'll use another service. Very simple to do. It's called the free market, folks. As long as I have the ability to choose vendors freely the vendors must compete for the most useful and complete search (which are contradictory goals, by the way)
Can we moderate the whole article to flamebait?
While things may or may not appear in a google search, how the heck does that have anything to do with the current administration or national security?
People got a right to run companies the way they want to. If I wrote a search engine, perhaps I wouldn't want anything to do with French fries to appear, or pedophilia, or digestional disorders. The more intersting question is: How do we inform the public what is crossed out?
How did the author determine this? Is there some kind of automated search engine tester? Now THAT would be an intersting slashdot story.
I'm a huge Rutan fan, but it's gotta be orbital or bust.
Creating a huge reverse bungee-jump looks like a hoot, but until you go orbital you are not demonstrating real economic value (over just fun).
Perhaps the industry can survive for several years on 90-minute tourist rides, but I don't know. 1-hour delivery of packages and executives anywhere in the world will change the future.
So instead of one prize for a really large sum and prestige, we'll have an entire program of prizes at all sorts of dollar levels spread across dozens of sub-projects.
Oh sure. That works great. We wouldn't think NASA would take a simple thing and over-engineer it, would we?
I love the space program. Really I do. But NASA has lost all of my respect as an agency. The FAA has a motto of not only regulating air travel but also promoting aviation among regular people. NASA's charter should have been written this way, and half of the money should be spent accordingly. NASA should not own space travel for all Americans. Lower the cost to LEO by a 1000-fold and watch the economics of space travel change. Change the nature of the problem -- stop continuing to frame the problem in terms that make the solutions difficult or impossible.
We could have done this 20 years ago. How many more billions are we going to spend on giant complex fireworks for PhDs and test-pilots to fly?
This article looks like a plant from the Microsoft PR department. There really is not much of a story here.
I know it has to be driving MS nuts that google is getting into the filesystem niche, especially with all the trouble they've had over the years with putting together a database-based filing system. I imagine if they keep on pushing the release out past Longhorn, google is going to overtake them .
Webcam? I would imagine the whole point would be real-time video surveillance of all of that area.
And at those wavelengths, distance would not be a factor, right? So with the right optics you could get as close a picture as you wanted.
This might be a great idea for getting candid photos of OBL, but I don't like the idea of these things hanging over our coastal cities.
THz radiation?
It says in the article it can be adjusted to see through plastics, clothes, etc
Clothes! Isn't this the same stuff that was responsible for all the X-Ray vision claims? Do we really want sensor platforms over most all of our major cities with the ability to see through people's clothes? I mean, I'm all for having the government check up on my library habits, but this may be taking it a little too far, no?
After problems with the last satellite, NASA has announced the next satellite to go up will have an AI system to diagnose the existing AI system. This system will bypass all of the diagnostics capability of the first system and instead create a change request and invoice to have the contractor fix the problem.
Is it just me, or instead of lowering cost to LEO, we're paying a bunch of really smart people to play? With cooler stuff than we get to play with?
Aside from all of the obligatory hand-wringing and attacking the USA and the current administration, there is really nothing new here.
The military gets paid to think up stuff. For all of human history, whereever man went, violence followed. So it seems easily predictable that space will become a battlefield.
I would much rather have the Air Force thinking about this stuff now then get blindsided 20 or 40 years into the future. These issues need to be gamed out and risks identified so that the political talking heads can be informed on what the issues are if we were to ever find ourselves in that situation.
Instead of the old model, where one or two people debate and we all watch, why not something new? The old way sounds like client-server, now is the age of P2P!
Sooooo -- we should all debate each other, simultaneously. Then some algorhitm could determine which issues were decided which way. Certainly there are a lot of new models besides client-server, right?
I was just walking when Neil plopped out on the moon, and I remember the last astronauts leaving the moon talking about the space shuttle and skylab. Gee -- those programs really went places.
Personally, I'm still pessimistic. I just think it's a great time to be alive when all of these guys are dumping money into the problem of cost-to-LEO, which is the crimping point of every other space discussion. We're still going to see a lot of failures, IMO, but each time somebody fails we move the ball a little further. It's a technology for the grandkids, no matter what your age.
The cool thing will be watching the human spirit over the next decade. It reminds me of the days of Limburgh, or the old footage of whacky airplanes that never worked. Yes -- people will get killed. No -- we're not going to visit the orbiting Hilton anytime soon. But we will get to see some piece of the adventure. And that beats nothing.
BTW -- read the backup material. This is a really cool story.
What happens if 10 years from now we have a private space station (or, horror of horrors 2 or 3 stations) with tourists going up and still the ISS isn't completed? How are all of us going to feel about all of those tax dollars we're pouring into the shuttle and ISS now?
Wouldn't it be better take a couple of billion right now and set up a series of prizes that take us from suborbital all the way to mars? You could stretch it over 20-30 years, and make the prizes high enough to keep the independents in the game. Isn't this better than putting all of our tax money in one basket and hoping the basket holds up?
Make chaos work for you, not against you.