Maybe I need to state my point more clearly since I feel I'm loosing track of my argument;). My concern is this: Here (germany) the press is frustratingly one sided. Yes, online they do sometimes provide links for futher research but never do they mention any disputes over the knowledge they present.
It sounds like you have the opposite problem from what we have in the States, where a lot of journalists have the notion that fairness means giving equal time/space to opposing views, even if one is held by all of the leading scientists in a field, and the other is held by a few crackpots, religious extremists, or industry lobbyists. However, it is difficult to say much about scientific disputes. As you say, you can find somebody who disputes virtually any scientific theory. So saying that there is somebody who disagrees with the prevailing view really provides no real information. And to explain comprehensibly why one view is generally held, while the other is a fringe view generally requires hundreds of pages.
Yeah, well my answer was not really refering to those instances of theories. I was just trying to say: look, if there are two theories that are probably wrong but work most of the time, you can just give them equal time unless something better comes along. Except for occams razor of course. From the sound of it, the Ptolemaic theory sort of falls under it. And if it really could make to fit most observations at the same time than it clearly is the superior theory until something simpler with the same abilities (or better) comes along.
This is a common misunderstanding among nonscientists, and one of the reasons why a proper explanation may be lengthy. In fact, a theory that can be made to fit most observations is generally of little value. Indeed, the value of a theory is more closely related to what it excludes than what it embraces. For example, a polynomial of degree n+1 will always fit n datapoints better than the correct theory--because measurement errors will cause deviations from the correct theory, while polynomial curve will pass exactly through every point. The difference, of course, is that the correct theory will have predictive value, while the polynomial will fit anything perfectly after the fact, but has no predictive power.
By the way, I see that I made a misstatement about the Ptolemaic theory before--it was earth-centered, not sun-centered.
The answer is not to 'censor' the 'junk' to 'protect' the unwashed masses by some higher authority (whatever it may be).
Any scientific article in the popular press has to "censor" a lot of material, simply because it would not be understood by the public without hundreds or thousands of pages of background material. Distinguishing between fringe and mainstream theories falls into this category--as a rule it is simply not possible to summarize briefly and comprehensibly the mass of data that lead most scientists to strongly prefer one theory over another. So for most purposes, the best that can be done is to say, "Almost all leading scientists in the field favor theory A" and refer the reader to the scientific literature if they want to understand or critique why this is so.
Concerning the second paragraph, the value of a theory is related to its practicality. How good is it at predicting the future ( future observations of reality)? Futhermore, it is my opinion that theory a) that says the sun orbits earth in an eliptic fashion is equally useless (and wrong) as theory b) that says the earth orbits the sun, describing a circle.
Actually, neither theory used ellipses. Ptolemaic theory used a complicated and arbitrary system of circular orbits running around other circular orbits, with the sun in the middle. It was so complex that it could be made to match virtually any observation. The Copernican system on the other hand, was so simple that the only way for Kepler to bring it into better correspondence with observations was to give up on the circular orbits, even though Kepler hated ellipses, regarding them as imperfect circles. So in that sense, Copernican theory was better, because it was capable of leading scientists to a better understanding, while Ptolemaic theory was a blind alley.
A good theory does not need to fear being presented along side 'junk' science. It will shine because it is so much more coherent than the junk and explains the world so much better.
Actually, it takes a lot of knowledge to distinguish between a "junk" theory and a good theory. A good theory is one that makes strong predictions (i.e. ones that can be tested and that would invalidate the theory if they turned out wrong) and which has already passed many such tests. But without detailed knowledge of the scientific literature and the theory's history, it is difficult to distinguish this from a junk theory that has never made correct predictions, but which has been revised after the fact to bring it into line with current knowledge (e.g. Creationism).
Indeed, a junk theory often seems to fit the data better than a good theory, because it has more degrees of freedom, and can easily be brought into conformity with new observations. The original Copernican theory did not fit the astronomical data as well as the Ptolemeic epicycle theory, because all of those epicycles provided additional free variables that made it possible to adjust the theory to agree with almost any observation, while the Copernican theory had only a few variables (a bit too few; it mad the orbits perfect circles).
The peer review process is still badly broken though - Nature has been burnt a couple times recently over politically correct papers which shouldn't have passed peer review, if I recall correctly.
Peer review is an important control, but it is far from infallible. Some people take publication in a peer reviewed as a certificate of correctness, but it is important to remember that peer review means 2, maybe 3 guys read the paper and commented. That's a pretty small sample. For the major journals, the reviewers are generally good, but they're also busy, and reviewing isn't a paying job.
This system is flawless as the google page rank algorithm pooves daily when the top 50 results to my queries are the exact same dailer pages that don't have anything to do with what I searched for.
Nothing is flawless, but the Citations Index is more reliable than Google for determining who is prominent in a scientific field. Not every good scientist gets a lot of citations, but the ones who do are almost always good.
Your right that this isn't hard to do this - but your missing the point that science isn't about consensus, and truth has nothing to do with popularity contests.
A citation is not a reflection of popularity--it is an acknowledgment that a particular publication provided critical information relevant to the questions being considered in the current paper. Those people who consistently produce information that is valuable to other scientists can justly be regarded as the experts in the field, and are thus best qualified to judge the validity of a particular conclusion in that field. This does not make them infallible arbiters of "Truth," but it does make them the most representative of the best current scientific knowledge (which is not quite the same thing as a consensus)
Pretty much everything which is scientifically orthodox today was, at one time, a heretical afront to established wisdom
Actually, this is not true. We remember these dramatic reversals precisely because they are so unusual. In fact, most scientific work is what Thomas Kuhn calls "normal science"--new discoveries and insights that fit well into what is already understood. Even when there is a dramatic advance, like Einstein's Theory of Gravitation or quantum theory--it often doesn't really overturn the previous theory, but rather encompasses it as a special case.
Most (hell, almost every time) the "lunatic" with a "crackpot" theory is, in fact...a lunatic with a crackpot theory. Sometimes, rarerly...he isn't. Ink is cheap, getting the view of all sides won't hurt
The thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of crackpot theories. For each important theory, there are probably several dozen people propounding some kind of crackpot alternative. And the overwhelming majority of the time, they are talking nonsense. So if you provide "all sides," the correct view gets lost in the noise. There are occasions where it is useful to consider such alternative theories--in a scientific review, for example, with references to the primary literature--but in a short news article they simply confuse matters, because there is no space to explain why one view is accepted by all of the most eminent people in the field, and the other is held by a a couple of guys who've never published anything in a refereed journal.
A lot of people seem to be missing the real problem here. Let's say journalists only report one side - which would, of course, be the "right" side. Except...right according to whom? The journalist who is NOT trained in the field (or they'd be working in a lab, not a newsroom)? The large corporation whom the journalist works for? An opinion poll of some group?
Actually, it doesn't take any special expertise. It's not hard to survey scientific opinion, because good scientists publish, and get cited by other scientists. The best scientists get cited a lot.
So here's how to do it: Pick up a few issues of a prominent journal in the specialty. Make a list of 50 or so authors (especially first and last authors). Look them up in the Citations Index and rank them in terms of number of citations over the last 10 years. Pick the top dozen or so. Call them up and ask their opinion.
The author makes a good case for micro-evolution (the fact that single-celled organisms change over time, not requiring the addition of information), but takes a sudden leap of logic to claim this proves macro-evolution and the formation of complex organisms out of simpler ones.
The notion that there is such a thing as "macro" evolution, which is distinct from "micro" evolution is much beloved of creationists. Of course, they can't tell you how to distinguish between microevolution and macroevolution, because they look exactly the same at the DNA level--the same kinds of sequence changes, duplications, and rearragnements. Basically, it is just a dodge; any evolution demonstrated in laboratory studies is dismissed as microevolution, while everything else is macroevolution and the result of "intelligent design." William of Occam would spin in his grave.
Whether or not you believe the facts point to evolution, National Geographic is not the place to look for scientific, peer-reviewed information. Then again, they have the guts to commit to a single point of view, don't they?
However, when it comes to evolution, they are saying the same thing that you'll read in the peer-reviewed journals. I don't know if it takes that much guts, though, just elementary knowledge of science--to biologists, "Darwin was right," is about as controversial as "Copernicus was right" is to astronomers.
Lets look at the Science game for a moment. Just who are those grant providers you speak of? Major universities and government agencies like the NSF, staffed with academics from the university world. If you haven't figured out yet that universities are 0wn3d by the left/socialists/progressives/whatever they call themselves this week you probably are one of the ones who think the Red states are filled with idiots and want to leave for Canada.
This is kind of foolish. For the most part, the political views of scientists are not know even to the administrators of the university where they work. Most scientists publish scientific papers, not political tracts. I work in a scientific department, and I couldn't tell you where most of my immediate colleagues stand on the political spectrum. I would imagine that on average they are more liberal than the general population, but that's only playing the odds--highly educated people tend, statistically, to be more liberal than average.
Similarly, the granting agencies that fund my research are unlikely to have any idea of what my political views are. I've sat on NIH Study Sections, and I'm hard put just to read all of the grant proposals that I am responsible for--I certainly don't have time to research the politics of the applicants. I have never heard political issues raised in a Study Session discussion. Yes, there are fashions in science, and if you are trying to get support for a proposal that challenges the generally accepted view, you need more compelling evidence than if your work fits with the generally accepted view. But in most cases, that is appropriate--a particular view becomes accepted because there is strong evidence to support it.
In the case of global warming, there's no particular vested interest that wants global warming to be true. Global warming or not, climate modeling and weather prediction is important enough that it will attract research support regardless. On the other hand, there are powerful economic interests that will be hurt by the measures that would be required to control CO2
Most brand name scientists of teh past century were all too eager to sign onto socialist utopian and fascist schemes because they promised a world governed by reason and science, i.e. themselves.
Most scientists, today as in the past, are not interested in running things--if they were, they would have gone into politics or government rather than science. Most are pretty focused on their own research interests, and are primarily concerned with being able to continue their research.
I don't think photorealism was the goal here. Anyone who has read the book to their children will recognize that the animation style attempts to emulate the author/illustrator's style.
Unfortunately, the result is too photorealistic. When a character looks human, but just slightly off, our brain sees it as pathological. Virtually every review of Polar Express that I've seen has used the word "creepy". I wonder if they could have gotten around this by using some kind of "brushstroke" filter to emphasize the "illustration" quality of the film and distance it a bit more from reality?
This is Microsoft's second attempt to crack this market. The first one, Ultimate TV went nowhere. But the reports I've heard from Ultimate TV owners have been pretty positive. So Microsoft isn't exactly going into this from scratch.
waking life was filmed as a movie then 'cartooned.' Nothing new.
I thought "Waking Life" was the only effective use of rotoscoping that I've seen. Usually, rotoscoping is used as a quick and dirty shortcut to animation that ends up with all of the disadvantages of live action (i.e. it's very dependent on the skill of the actors and the quality of the direction) and few of the advantages of animation. In "Waking Life," the artwork was free enough (and the acting good enough) that the combination was really effective
This is a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley, [arclight.net] and there's a good discussion about it here [slashdot.org]. It's the same thing as Finaly Fantasy: Spirits Within, where the backgrounds were fantastic, the people were "best.... humans.... ever!" and they still looked weird.
Thanks for the reference. This describes exactly my reaction to "Spirits Within." I found the realistic human characters distracting in a way that the somewhat caricatured characters of, say, "Shrek" are not, because my brain initially bought the illusion, and then spent the rest of the film trying to figure out what was wrong with them. We are very acute in observing our fellow human beings, and any tiny deviation from perfection tends to come across as sinister or pathological.
From my understanding, nicotine has almost the same affect on the heart as caffine.
Nope. It's a completely different class of drug with a very different mechanism of action. Caffeine is a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, acting by increasing phosphorylation of proteins. Nicotine first activates then depresses a class of acetylcholine receptors that mediate nerve transmission at autonomic ganglia and in the brain by controlling electrical currents across the cell membrane. Both compounds have a wide range of effects on end organs that only partially overlap, and one certainly cannot conclude that their risks will be similar.
It just seems that if nicotine was as harmful as people seem to suggest, you would see and hear alot more warning (and IMO lawsuits) against the producers of quit smoking aids.
Such aids are sold for short-term use to help people reduce their nicotine consumption. The package instructions includes appropriate warnings of potential cardiac risk from nicotine, so it would be hard to succeed in such a lawsuit.
Replace the word nicotine with caffine in your post, and your statement is still a valid one.
Absolutely. While caffeine is not directly comparable to nicotine, as it works in a completely different manner, it does affect the heart, and was therefore at one time considered a reasonable suspect for cardiac risk. However, based on quite a few studies, it does not appear to pose much of a cardiac risk in practice.
Take a guess where the carcinogens stayed after they extracted the nicotine from the tobacco.
Cancer is not the only risk associated with smoking. There is also risk to the heart. Nicotine is active in the brain and the autonomic nervous system, which control such things as heart rate and blood flow to the heart, so nicotine is a reasonable suspect.
Jacob Sullum eviscerates an embarrassingly bad op-ed that the New York Times chose to run yesterday (Rosemary Ellis, "The Secondhand Smoking Gun", Oct. 15) on the issue of smoking in public places, based on the supposed "Helena miracle" -- heart attacks in the Montana capital (population 26,000) are said to have dropped suddenly by 58 percent when smoking in public buildings was banned. The claim, he says, is based on a single unpublished study
However, the original poster provided the citation of published study from the British Medical Journal, with publication date of 5 April 2004.
Funny. I thought confidence intervals were a pretty weak method of testing a hypothesis.
You are mistaken. Showing that the 95% confidence limits excludes the null hypothesis is equivalent to showing that the result is statistically significant at the P 0.05 level.
I don't think that would have worked. There's no market for a low-quality digital camera add-on, I think.
That's what I thought when they started adding cameras to cell phones. Boy, was I wrong. My guess is that Griffin or somebody will market a little plug in camera module for people who don't already have a snapshot digital.
That one person can and should make a non-admin account for everyday use. Then when asked for a password, be suspicious.
Whether you are running from an administrative account or not, you still need to enter the administrator password to install a program. So not using an administrative account does not diminish the risk that a naive single-user will be tricked into installing a Trojan Horse.
A person who has administrator privileges by definition can do *anything* to that computer. That is why on our Macs there is only ONE person who has admin priv. Anyone who knows the admin password should be knowlegeable enough about computers not to wantonly install any unsolicited files.
However, on a single-user personal computer, there is only one person, who must necessarily have the administrator password, whether or not he is knowledgeable enough to recognize a potential trojan horse.
Yes, it is basic, it is just a warhead without a vector, so it doesn't qualify as a virus or worm. It doesn't exploit any OS vulnerabilities that are not universal to all operating systems. Basically, if you can trick somebody with administrator privileges into installing a program, that program can do all sorts of nasty things.
But now that there is a script going around, all that somebody needs to do is package it to look like something else, and they have a ready-made trojan. So the bottom line is that it is necessary to be even more careful about who gets administrator privileges for multiple user Macs. If you have a personal Mac, then you of course have an administrator password, whether your usual account is an administrator account or not, so you have to start being even more careful about installing software from possibly questionable sources.
Seriously though, Neal says that the contrast between popular authors making money and literary authors not making money "IS NOT FAIR and [...] MAKES NO SENSE" but to me it's perfectly logical.
Actually, a lot of perfectly logical stuff is not fair. That is why the world is generally not very fair, because logic often trumps fairness. Not everything of value is popular. Look at some of the more advanced scientific work: there may be only a few dozen people in the world who actually understand it, but they are the right people--the ones who can actually use that information in a productive way that maybe (a few generations of scientists and technologists downstream) will result in something of great value to the public at large.
However, when value is indirect or delayed, it's a lot harder to figure out what is or is not valuable, hence we need the whole apparatus of criticism--basically a bunch of middlemen whose job it is to figure it out. A popular writer has the advantage of cutting out all of these middlemen, because the value in his work is of a type that is directly accessible to a substantial fraction of the public at large.
The word 'meme' comes from some outdated bogus theory that the same ideas that drive genetic traits also drive ideas. While people would agree that there is superficial similarities, the ideas of memetics have largely been discredited for decades... only to have the word 'meme' resurrected by a bunch of "postmodern" pretentious weenies that seem to think that the word meme is hip.
The meme theory, originally proposed by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," has by no means been discredited. In a nutshell, it is that ideas spread in a manner analogous to biological evolution--i.e. they mutate, and those variants that propagate most effectively from mind to mind become most widespread. Phrased this way, it is virtually a truism.
However, it is a concept that so far does not seem to have lead anywhere particularly interesting, probably because, in contrast to biological evolution, we have no notion what "idea traits" favor idea propagation from mind to mind, nor do we have any kind of model of "idea mutation." So while it is probably true, it has no real predictive capability--we have no way to predict which ideas will spread and which will not, aside from the empirical methods of market research, which predate the entire meme concept. Perhaps the use of functional brain imaging will provide a means of developing a more scientifically rigorous version of meme theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I need to state my point more clearly since I feel I'm loosing track of my argument ;). My concern is this: Here (germany) the press is frustratingly one sided. Yes, online they do sometimes provide links for futher research but never do they mention any disputes over the knowledge they present.
It sounds like you have the opposite problem from what we have in the States, where a lot of journalists have the notion that fairness means giving equal time/space to opposing views, even if one is held by all of the leading scientists in a field, and the other is held by a few crackpots, religious extremists, or industry lobbyists. However, it is difficult to say much about scientific disputes. As you say, you can find somebody who disputes virtually any scientific theory. So saying that there is somebody who disagrees with the prevailing view really provides no real information. And to explain comprehensibly why one view is generally held, while the other is a fringe view generally requires hundreds of pages.
Yeah, well my answer was not really refering to those instances of theories. I was just trying to say: look, if there are two theories that are probably wrong but work most of the time, you can just give them equal time unless something better comes along. Except for occams razor of course. From the sound of it, the Ptolemaic theory sort of falls under it. And if it really could make to fit most observations at the same time than it clearly is the superior theory until something simpler with the same abilities (or better) comes along.
This is a common misunderstanding among nonscientists, and one of the reasons why a proper explanation may be lengthy. In fact, a theory that can be made to fit most observations is generally of little value. Indeed, the value of a theory is more closely related to what it excludes than what it embraces. For example, a polynomial of degree n+1 will always fit n datapoints better than the correct theory--because measurement errors will cause deviations from the correct theory, while polynomial curve will pass exactly through every point. The difference, of course, is that the correct theory will have predictive value, while the polynomial will fit anything perfectly after the fact, but has no predictive power.
By the way, I see that I made a misstatement about the Ptolemaic theory before--it was earth-centered, not sun-centered.
The answer is not to 'censor' the 'junk' to 'protect' the unwashed masses by some higher authority (whatever it may be).
Any scientific article in the popular press has to "censor" a lot of material, simply because it would not be understood by the public without hundreds or thousands of pages of background material. Distinguishing between fringe and mainstream theories falls into this category--as a rule it is simply not possible to summarize briefly and comprehensibly the mass of data that lead most scientists to strongly prefer one theory over another. So for most purposes, the best that can be done is to say, "Almost all leading scientists in the field favor theory A" and refer the reader to the scientific literature if they want to understand or critique why this is so.
Concerning the second paragraph, the value of a theory is related to its practicality. How good is it at predicting the future ( future observations of reality)? Futhermore, it is my opinion that theory a) that says the sun orbits earth in an eliptic fashion is equally useless (and wrong) as theory b) that says the earth orbits the sun, describing a circle.
Actually, neither theory used ellipses. Ptolemaic theory used a complicated and arbitrary system of circular orbits running around other circular orbits, with the sun in the middle. It was so complex that it could be made to match virtually any observation. The Copernican system on the other hand, was so simple that the only way for Kepler to bring it into better correspondence with observations was to give up on the circular orbits, even though Kepler hated ellipses, regarding them as imperfect circles. So in that sense, Copernican theory was better, because it was capable of leading scientists to a better understanding, while Ptolemaic theory was a blind alley.
A good theory does not need to fear being presented along side 'junk' science. It will shine because it is so much more coherent than the junk and explains the world so much better.
Actually, it takes a lot of knowledge to distinguish between a "junk" theory and a good theory. A good theory is one that makes strong predictions (i.e. ones that can be tested and that would invalidate the theory if they turned out wrong) and which has already passed many such tests. But without detailed knowledge of the scientific literature and the theory's history, it is difficult to distinguish this from a junk theory that has never made correct predictions, but which has been revised after the fact to bring it into line with current knowledge (e.g. Creationism).
Indeed, a junk theory often seems to fit the data better than a good theory, because it has more degrees of freedom, and can easily be brought into conformity with new observations. The original Copernican theory did not fit the astronomical data as well as the Ptolemeic epicycle theory, because all of those epicycles provided additional free variables that made it possible to adjust the theory to agree with almost any observation, while the Copernican theory had only a few variables (a bit too few; it mad the orbits perfect circles).
The peer review process is still badly broken though - Nature has been burnt a couple times recently over politically correct papers which shouldn't have passed peer review, if I recall correctly.
Peer review is an important control, but it is far from infallible. Some people take publication in a peer reviewed as a certificate of correctness, but it is important to remember that peer review means 2, maybe 3 guys read the paper and commented. That's a pretty small sample. For the major journals, the reviewers are generally good, but they're also busy, and reviewing isn't a paying job.
This system is flawless as the google page rank algorithm pooves daily when the top 50 results to my queries are the exact same dailer pages that don't have anything to do with what I searched for.
Nothing is flawless, but the Citations Index is more reliable than Google for determining who is prominent in a scientific field. Not every good scientist gets a lot of citations, but the ones who do are almost always good.
Your right that this isn't hard to do this - but your missing the point that science isn't about consensus, and truth has nothing to do with popularity contests.
A citation is not a reflection of popularity--it is an acknowledgment that a particular publication provided critical information relevant to the questions being considered in the current paper. Those people who consistently produce information that is valuable to other scientists can justly be regarded as the experts in the field, and are thus best qualified to judge the validity of a particular conclusion in that field. This does not make them infallible arbiters of "Truth," but it does make them the most representative of the best current scientific knowledge (which is not quite the same thing as a consensus)
Pretty much everything which is scientifically orthodox today was, at one time, a heretical afront to established wisdom
Actually, this is not true. We remember these dramatic reversals precisely because they are so unusual. In fact, most scientific work is what Thomas Kuhn calls "normal science"--new discoveries and insights that fit well into what is already understood. Even when there is a dramatic advance, like Einstein's Theory of Gravitation or quantum theory--it often doesn't really overturn the previous theory, but rather encompasses it as a special case.
Most (hell, almost every time) the "lunatic" with a "crackpot" theory is, in fact...a lunatic with a crackpot theory. Sometimes, rarerly...he isn't. Ink is cheap, getting the view of all sides won't hurt
The thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of crackpot theories. For each important theory, there are probably several dozen people propounding some kind of crackpot alternative. And the overwhelming majority of the time, they are talking nonsense. So if you provide "all sides," the correct view gets lost in the noise. There are occasions where it is useful to consider such alternative theories--in a scientific review, for example, with references to the primary literature--but in a short news article they simply confuse matters, because there is no space to explain why one view is accepted by all of the most eminent people in the field, and the other is held by a a couple of guys who've never published anything in a refereed journal.
A lot of people seem to be missing the real problem here. Let's say journalists only report one side - which would, of course, be the "right" side. Except...right according to whom? The journalist who is NOT trained in the field (or they'd be working in a lab, not a newsroom)? The large corporation whom the journalist works for? An opinion poll of some group?
Actually, it doesn't take any special expertise. It's not hard to survey scientific opinion, because good scientists publish, and get cited by other scientists. The best scientists get cited a lot.
So here's how to do it:
Pick up a few issues of a prominent journal in the specialty. Make a list of 50 or so authors (especially first and last authors). Look them up in the Citations Index and rank them in terms of number of citations over the last 10 years. Pick the top dozen or so. Call them up and ask their opinion.
The author makes a good case for micro-evolution (the fact that single-celled organisms change over time, not requiring the addition of information), but takes a sudden leap of logic to claim this proves macro-evolution and the formation of complex organisms out of simpler ones.
The notion that there is such a thing as "macro" evolution, which is distinct from "micro" evolution is much beloved of creationists. Of course, they can't tell you how to distinguish between microevolution and macroevolution, because they look exactly the same at the DNA level--the same kinds of sequence changes, duplications, and rearragnements. Basically, it is just a dodge; any evolution demonstrated in laboratory studies is dismissed as microevolution, while everything else is macroevolution and the result of "intelligent design." William of Occam would spin in his grave.
Whether or not you believe the facts point to evolution, National Geographic is not the place to look for scientific, peer-reviewed information. Then again, they have the guts to commit to a single point of view, don't they?
However, when it comes to evolution, they are saying the same thing that you'll read in the peer-reviewed journals. I don't know if it takes that much guts, though, just elementary knowledge of science--to biologists, "Darwin was right," is about as controversial as "Copernicus was right" is to astronomers.
Lets look at the Science game for a moment. Just who are those grant providers you speak of? Major universities and government agencies like the NSF, staffed with academics from the university world. If you haven't figured out yet that universities are 0wn3d by the left/socialists/progressives/whatever they call themselves this week you probably are one of the ones who think the Red states are filled with idiots and want to leave for Canada.
This is kind of foolish. For the most part, the political views of scientists are not know even to the administrators of the university where they work. Most scientists publish scientific papers, not political tracts. I work in a scientific department, and I couldn't tell you where most of my immediate colleagues stand on the political spectrum. I would imagine that on average they are more liberal than the general population, but that's only playing the odds--highly educated people tend, statistically, to be more liberal than average.
Similarly, the granting agencies that fund my research are unlikely to have any idea of what my political views are. I've sat on NIH Study Sections, and I'm hard put just to read all of the grant proposals that I am responsible for--I certainly don't have time to research the politics of the applicants. I have never heard political issues raised in a Study Session discussion. Yes, there are fashions in science, and if you are trying to get support for a proposal that challenges the generally accepted view, you need more compelling evidence than if your work fits with the generally accepted view. But in most cases, that is appropriate--a particular view becomes accepted because there is strong evidence to support it.
In the case of global warming, there's no particular vested interest that wants global warming to be true. Global warming or not, climate modeling and weather prediction is important enough that it will attract research support regardless. On the other hand, there are powerful economic interests that will be hurt by the measures that would be required to control CO2
Most brand name scientists of teh past century were all too eager to sign onto socialist utopian and fascist schemes because they promised a world governed by reason and science, i.e. themselves.
Most scientists, today as in the past, are not interested in running things--if they were, they would have gone into politics or government rather than science. Most are pretty focused on their own research interests, and are primarily concerned with being able to continue their research.
I don't think photorealism was the goal here. Anyone who has read the book to their children will recognize that the animation style attempts to emulate the author/illustrator's style.
Unfortunately, the result is too photorealistic. When a character looks human, but just slightly off, our brain sees it as pathological. Virtually every review of Polar Express that I've seen has used the word "creepy". I wonder if they could have gotten around this by using some kind of "brushstroke" filter to emphasize the "illustration" quality of the film and distance it a bit more from reality?
This is Microsoft's second attempt to crack this market. The first one, Ultimate TV went nowhere. But the reports I've heard from Ultimate TV owners have been pretty positive. So Microsoft isn't exactly going into this from scratch.
waking life was filmed as a movie then 'cartooned.' Nothing new.
I thought "Waking Life" was the only effective use of rotoscoping that I've seen. Usually, rotoscoping is used as a quick and dirty shortcut to animation that ends up with all of the disadvantages of live action (i.e. it's very dependent on the skill of the actors and the quality of the direction) and few of the advantages of animation. In "Waking Life," the artwork was free enough (and the acting good enough) that the combination was really effective
This is a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley, [arclight.net] and there's a good discussion about it here [slashdot.org]. It's the same thing as Finaly Fantasy: Spirits Within, where the backgrounds were fantastic, the people were "best.... humans.... ever!" and they still looked weird.
Thanks for the reference. This describes exactly my reaction to "Spirits Within." I found the realistic human characters distracting in a way that the somewhat caricatured characters of, say, "Shrek" are not, because my brain initially bought the illusion, and then spent the rest of the film trying to figure out what was wrong with them. We are very acute in observing our fellow human beings, and any tiny deviation from perfection tends to come across as sinister or pathological.
From my understanding, nicotine has almost the same affect on the heart as caffine.
Nope. It's a completely different class of drug with a very different mechanism of action. Caffeine is a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, acting by increasing phosphorylation of proteins. Nicotine first activates then depresses a class of acetylcholine receptors that mediate nerve transmission at autonomic ganglia and in the brain by controlling electrical currents across the cell membrane. Both compounds have a wide range of effects on end organs that only partially overlap, and one certainly cannot conclude that their risks will be similar.
It just seems that if nicotine was as harmful as people seem to suggest, you would see and hear alot more warning (and IMO lawsuits) against the producers of quit smoking aids.
Such aids are sold for short-term use to help people reduce their nicotine consumption. The package instructions includes appropriate warnings of potential cardiac risk from nicotine, so it would be hard to succeed in such a lawsuit.
Replace the word nicotine with caffine in your post, and your statement is still a valid one.
Absolutely. While caffeine is not directly comparable to nicotine, as it works in a completely different manner, it does affect the heart, and was therefore at one time considered a reasonable suspect for cardiac risk. However, based on quite a few studies, it does not appear to pose much of a cardiac risk in practice.
Take a guess where the carcinogens stayed after they extracted the nicotine from the tobacco.
Cancer is not the only risk associated with smoking. There is also risk to the heart. Nicotine is active in the brain and the autonomic nervous system, which control such things as heart rate and blood flow to the heart, so nicotine is a reasonable suspect.
Jacob Sullum eviscerates an embarrassingly bad op-ed that the New York Times chose to run yesterday (Rosemary Ellis, "The Secondhand Smoking Gun", Oct. 15) on the issue of smoking in public places, based on the supposed "Helena miracle" -- heart attacks in the Montana capital (population 26,000) are said to have dropped suddenly by 58 percent when smoking in public buildings was banned. The claim, he says, is based on a single unpublished study
However, the original poster provided the citation of published study from the British Medical Journal, with publication date of 5 April 2004.
Funny. I thought confidence intervals were a pretty weak method of testing a hypothesis.
You are mistaken. Showing that the 95% confidence limits excludes the null hypothesis is equivalent to showing that the result is statistically significant at the P 0.05 level.
Keynote presentations would be a killer app for me and a lot of other academic types.
I don't think that would have worked. There's no market for a low-quality digital camera add-on, I think.
That's what I thought when they started adding cameras to cell phones. Boy, was I wrong. My guess is that Griffin or somebody will market a little plug in camera module for people who don't already have a snapshot digital.
That one person can and should make a non-admin account for everyday use. Then when asked for a password, be suspicious.
Whether you are running from an administrative account or not, you still need to enter the administrator password to install a program. So not using an administrative account does not diminish the risk that a naive single-user will be tricked into installing a Trojan Horse.
A person who has administrator privileges by definition can do *anything* to that computer. That is why on our Macs there is only ONE person who has admin priv. Anyone who knows the admin password should be knowlegeable enough about computers not to wantonly install any unsolicited files.
However, on a single-user personal computer, there is only one person, who must necessarily have the administrator password, whether or not he is knowledgeable enough to recognize a potential trojan horse.
Yes, it is basic, it is just a warhead without a vector, so it doesn't qualify as a virus or worm. It doesn't exploit any OS vulnerabilities that are not universal to all operating systems. Basically, if you can trick somebody with administrator privileges into installing a program, that program can do all sorts of nasty things.
But now that there is a script going around, all that somebody needs to do is package it to look like something else, and they have a ready-made trojan. So the bottom line is that it is necessary to be even more careful about who gets administrator privileges for multiple user Macs. If you have a personal Mac, then you of course have an administrator password, whether your usual account is an administrator account or not, so you have to start being even more careful about installing software from possibly questionable sources.
Seriously though, Neal says that the contrast between popular authors making money and literary authors not making money "IS NOT FAIR and [...] MAKES NO SENSE" but to me it's perfectly logical.
Actually, a lot of perfectly logical stuff is not fair. That is why the world is generally not very fair, because logic often trumps fairness. Not everything of value is popular. Look at some of the more advanced scientific work: there may be only a few dozen people in the world who actually understand it, but they are the right people--the ones who can actually use that information in a productive way that maybe (a few generations of scientists and technologists downstream) will result in something of great value to the public at large.
However, when value is indirect or delayed, it's a lot harder to figure out what is or is not valuable, hence we need the whole apparatus of criticism--basically a bunch of middlemen whose job it is to figure it out. A popular writer has the advantage of cutting out all of these middlemen, because the value in his work is of a type that is directly accessible to a substantial fraction of the public at large.
The word 'meme' comes from some outdated bogus theory that the same ideas that drive genetic traits also drive ideas. While people would agree that there is superficial similarities, the ideas of memetics have largely been discredited for decades... only to have the word 'meme' resurrected by a bunch of "postmodern" pretentious weenies that seem to think that the word meme is hip.
The meme theory, originally proposed by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," has by no means been discredited. In a nutshell, it is that ideas spread in a manner analogous to biological evolution--i.e. they mutate, and those variants that propagate most effectively from mind to mind become most widespread. Phrased this way, it is virtually a truism.
However, it is a concept that so far does not seem to have lead anywhere particularly interesting, probably because, in contrast to biological evolution, we have no notion what "idea traits" favor idea propagation from mind to mind, nor do we have any kind of model of "idea mutation." So while it is probably true, it has no real predictive capability--we have no way to predict which ideas will spread and which will not, aside from the empirical methods of market research, which predate the entire meme concept. Perhaps the use of functional brain imaging will provide a means of developing a more scientifically rigorous version of meme theory.