Another plausible scenario is that that one document was leaked first, in the form of a paper copy (or scan of one), and it was the information of that document that inspired those who received it to seek further corroborative evidence via "social engineering."
Looks like I may have guessed right. Peter Gleick has now admitted that he received one document through the mail, and obtained the emails himself by misrepresenting his identity in order to confirm the information in the document that he was sent.
Another plausible scenario is that that one document was leaked first, in the form of a paper copy (or scan of one), and it was the information of that document that inspired those who received it to seek further corroborative evidence via "social engineering."
Yeah, right. Research for what? To discover that the iPhone's signal is weakened when you hold it a certain way? Like every other such personal electronics class action suit I've heard of, the "flaw" was already public knowledge when the suit was filed. But I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that exaggerated costs are part of the scam. No wonder the settlement to the individual class member almost always turns out to be not worth the time it takes to fill out the paperwork. Not if the law firm is taking out costs based on charging $500 an hour for the time its employees spend trolling the web for news of product "flaws" that can be trumped up into one of these legal-extortion lawsuits.
Class action suits over consumer electronics are basically an extortion scam (albeit a legal one) perpetrated by lawyers. It works as follow:
1. Contact the media, announce a class action lawsuit demanding a huge amount of money over a "flaw" in a widely sold product. 2. Contact the company, offer to settle for pennies on the dollar. The company nearly always settles, regardless of the merits, because it would cost more to fight the suit. 3. The members of the class (i.e. the customers) get a pittance, often hardly enough to pay them for the time to fill out the paperwork. 4. But the lawyer gets a slice of every one of those piddly little settlements, which adds up to a nice chunk of change for hardly any work.
Nah; that's only true for the "common speech" usage of the term "theory". In scientific terminology, most generalization and/or explanations are called "conjectures" or "hypotheses". The term "theory" is usually reserved for conjectures and hypotheses that have been fairly well tested (and have passed all the tests;-).
Nonscientists often imagine that there is some sort of taxonomy of generalizations based upon the quality of evidence, perhaps proceeding from "hypothesis," to "theory," to "law." In fact, these are only informal; there is no such well defined hierarchy. You study the evidence and make up your own mind about how "strong" a particular theory is. So while we may use "conjecture" or "hypothesis" to distinguish a theory that is particularly tentative and has at that point very limited evidence to support it, there's no hard and fast rule as to when a theory loses that qualification, and it is not at all uncommon to hear a scientist call something a "hypothesis" and then call it a "theory" in the next breath. Moreover, scientists routinely continue refer to long-disproved concepts as "theories." And the scientific usage of "law" is actually more along the lines of "rule of thumb" -- a conceptually simple guideline that may or may not be entirely correct, but that is close enough for most uses. So however convenient it may be for rhetorical purposes to imagine that the word "theory" carries some connotation of validation, it does not really correspond to the way that scientists use the word in practice.
So the real reason that things like "there is a force that attracts masses together" can't be proved is that science doesn't even try to do that. Science tries to disprove the statement.
Absolute proof of a generalization about the real world is logically impossible, because you can never examine every possible instance to which that statement might apply. Thus, the idea that there is an attractive force between masses will forever remain theory, and never fact (and of course, one can construct more detailed theories about the origin and behavior of that theoretical force). Nevertheless, you might sometimes hear a scientist say that a theory has been "proved," but the usage is not in the mathematical sense of absolute proof, in which a statement can be shown either to follow from a set of premises. Rather, it is in the sense of "proving ground." So the term may occasionally be applied to a theory that has been extensively tested over many years, and has held up to the challenge and successfully predicted many observations that would not otherwise have been anticipated--but with the full awareness that there is some possibility that it will ultimately turn out to be wrong, or (as is more commonly the case) incomplete.
We have a huge number of locations on earth and in the atmosphere where we can make observations to test theories of current climate and how and why it has changed in the past. We have other planets that we can study from a distance to test predictions of how climate will differ with different atmospheres and different solar irradiance. Although our gravitational models of how planets and stars move cannot be tested experimentally, we can carry out small scale experiments in the lab to test the fundamental physics on which models of planetary motion are based. Similarly, while we cannot carry out planetary scale climate experiments, we can carry out laboratory experiments to test the fundamental physics on which climate models are based, such as radiation absorption and emission by atmospheric gasses. In both cases we have computer models that can be used to make predictions about "natural experiments"--climate models, for example, make predictions about how climate will be affected by volcanic eruptions.
In the case of evolution, we can carry out laboratory experiments with microorganisms to test whether genetic change as a result of selection over hundreds of thousands of generations matches the predictions of evolutionary theory. We can also sequence the genes of the immense number of kinds of living things on earth (including, with modern genetic technology, ones that are long extinct) to test whether their similarity at the genetic level is consistent with the patterns of descent predicted from evolutionary theory. We can examine the genetic changes that divide species and test whether they agree with kinds of genetic changes that arise as a result of selection in the laboratory or in in the wild. We can observe the emergence of new species in the wild, and study the conditions under which they arise.
All theories, from gravity to evolution generalizations that can never be exhaustively tested, but that are to some degree accepted because they make testable predictions that have turned out to be correct. For example, we theorize that all masses, past, present, and future exert a gravitational force on all other masses, but almost all of the masses in the universe are not directly accessible for testing--we have tested only an insignificant fraction of them.
Of course gravity is a theory. All scientific generalizations are theory. The facts or the observation. "I dropped this ball and it fell to the floor" may be a factual observation. "Balls fall when dropped" or "there is a force that attracts masses together" are theories--they can never be proved, because they are generalizations: you can never test every ball, or every pair of masses.
In my field, I usually end up struggling prior to submission to cut references, because many of the journals I submit to have limits on the numbers of citations. Often, this means citing a review rather than the primary literature (because one review can take the place of multiple primary papers), or citing a recent work using the most current methods and dropping citations of the earlier ground-breaking work in the field
Truth is binary, not analog. And there is no valid method of setting a numerical value on the truth probability of a theory. To do so, one would have to enumerate all possible theories, which is impossible.
In a formal, logical sense, no theory is ever proven, and no generalization about the physical world can ever be anything other than a theory, no matter how strongly we may believe it.
Yes, and we defined the name of the theoretical force to be "gravity". Therefore, gravity exists. Stop trying to be clever. You aren't.
You are missing the point that a theory is inherently tentative, because it is a generalization that cannot be exhaustively verified. So our theoretical force can never be proved to exist. The fact that we have named it does not alter that (at least for those of us who believe that there is such a thing as an external reality that exists outside of our mind).
What we have observed is a lot of individual events. I dropped this object and it fell. I dropped that object and it fell. This astronomical body moved in this way over this period of time.
What we theorize is that all of these individual events reflect a common, universal phenomenon due to an attraction between masses.
No, it's just that observing falling apples won't tell us what CAUSES gravity. We have DEFINED gravity as a the force between two objects with mass. The fact is there is a force between massive objects, and that effect is defined as gravity. Period.
Unfortunately, we don't have the power to define something into existence. So defining gravity as the force between two objects with mass does not establish that such a force exists. To do that, you would have to measure the force between every pair of objects in the universe, an impossibility. So while we may speculate that any pair of objects with mass will exhibit such a force, and even believe it to be true, we cannot establish it as truth--technically it will forever remain theory, not fact.
No, technically it is correct. We can observe any number of apples fall to the earth, and calculate its rate of acceleration to whatever precisions we wish, but logically that will never prove that there is a force called gravity that will affect every apple that we could possibly drop in the future. All explanations and generalizations are theory, and inherently tentative.
But so what? We can't even disprove solipsism, yet we procede to act upon the assumption that there is an external reality that has regularities that we can deduce, even if we can never be absolutely 100% sure that we've got them right. Fundamentally, that can never be more than a working assumption. But making the opposite assumption never seems to lead anywhere interesting.
The silly notion that Siri is a data hog has been all over the internet, although if you think about it, it is obviously ridiculous. All Siri sends upstream some highly compressed voice, which doesn't take much bandwidth, and all it gets back is text and some simple commands to Apple's apps, which also doesn't take much bandwidth. Ars Technica measured the amount of data Siri sends back and forth, and it's just as modest as you'd expect.
So why are owners of the iPhone 4s using more data? Apples latest version of iOS, which was released about the same time as the 4s, dispenses with the requirement to tether the iPhone to a computer running iTunes, for the first time making it possible to use an iPhone as a stand-alone device. You can back up your iPhone and even install iOS updates wirelessly. In addition, Apple's Match service will stream your entire music library to your iPhone wirelessly via Apple's iCloud. Owners of earlier iPhone models are already set up to do these things via a wired connection to iTunes, and many of them doubtless have continued to do it this way even if they've upgraded to iOS version 5. But new owners of the iPhone 4s (of which there are a great number, based on Apple's quarterly report) are probably mostly using their iPhones as stand-alone devices, which is now the default. And of course, this involves more data usage, of which the biggest contributor is likely music streaming.
So Siri has almost nothing to do with the increased data usage of iPhone 4s owners--it just happens to correlates with people who are using their iPhones untethered.
If your book doesn't make use of the proprietary enhancements that the iBooks Author format offers over ePub, then just use a generic iPub authoring program. You can still publish through Apple, and you are saved the extra work of reformatting your book if you want to publish your work by other routes.
Authors can still do everything they could before, but now they have an additional option. Nobody is required to use iBooks Author, even to publish through Apple. It seems like we are in a looking glass world where giving authors additional options that they did not have previously is seen as "limiting their rights." How can more be less?
It will depend upon whether you use the special features of iBooks Author. What probably makes the most sense is to think about what you want to do, and whether it can be done with a generic book format. If the enhancements added by iBooks Author will significantly improve your book, then it may make sense to use it to produce an enhanced edition even though it means extra work.
WebOS was just a bit too late. Apple had already sewn up the high end and Android owned the low end of the market. And Palm didn't have the resources (and HP didn't have the will) to hang on for the long haul.
And if I go through a conventional book publisher, I am locked into their distribution channel and their printing schedule. I can't even turn around an offer the same book through another publisher. On the other hand, Apple's EULA controls only the format produced by their software; it does not prohibit me from offering the same content via another electronic book format in addition to Apple's.
But don't the colleges already have you locked in? "Buy this and this and this for the courses you've signed up for this semester". OK, what are your options?
You can 1. Ignore the recommendation and try to get by on your class notes, with maybe a bit of help from Wikipedia and other internet sources. A surprising number of students do this successfully--not just undergraduates, but in graduate school as well. 2. Buy the previous edition used. Often, it's close enough. 3. Buy another, cheaper text covering the same material. 4. Hang out in the library a lot and read the reserve copies.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like I may have guessed right. Peter Gleick has now admitted that he received one document through the mail, and obtained the emails himself by misrepresenting his identity in order to confirm the information in the document that he was sent.
Another plausible scenario is that that one document was leaked first, in the form of a paper copy (or scan of one), and it was the information of that document that inspired those who received it to seek further corroborative evidence via "social engineering."
Yeah, right. Research for what? To discover that the iPhone's signal is weakened when you hold it a certain way? Like every other such personal electronics class action suit I've heard of, the "flaw" was already public knowledge when the suit was filed. But I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that exaggerated costs are part of the scam. No wonder the settlement to the individual class member almost always turns out to be not worth the time it takes to fill out the paperwork. Not if the law firm is taking out costs based on charging $500 an hour for the time its employees spend trolling the web for news of product "flaws" that can be trumped up into one of these legal-extortion lawsuits.
You'd have to be very conspiracy-minded indeed to think that there are so few unethical lawyers around that Apple would need to invent some
Class action suits over consumer electronics are basically an extortion scam (albeit a legal one) perpetrated by lawyers. It works as follow:
1. Contact the media, announce a class action lawsuit demanding a huge amount of money over a "flaw" in a widely sold product.
2. Contact the company, offer to settle for pennies on the dollar. The company nearly always settles, regardless of the merits, because it would cost more to fight the suit.
3. The members of the class (i.e. the customers) get a pittance, often hardly enough to pay them for the time to fill out the paperwork.
4. But the lawyer gets a slice of every one of those piddly little settlements, which adds up to a nice chunk of change for hardly any work.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Nonscientists often imagine that there is some sort of taxonomy of generalizations based upon the quality of evidence, perhaps proceeding from "hypothesis," to "theory," to "law." In fact, these are only informal; there is no such well defined hierarchy. You study the evidence and make up your own mind about how "strong" a particular theory is. So while we may use "conjecture" or "hypothesis" to distinguish a theory that is particularly tentative and has at that point very limited evidence to support it, there's no hard and fast rule as to when a theory loses that qualification, and it is not at all uncommon to hear a scientist call something a "hypothesis" and then call it a "theory" in the next breath. Moreover, scientists routinely continue refer to long-disproved concepts as "theories." And the scientific usage of "law" is actually more along the lines of "rule of thumb" -- a conceptually simple guideline that may or may not be entirely correct, but that is close enough for most uses. So however convenient it may be for rhetorical purposes to imagine that the word "theory" carries some connotation of validation, it does not really correspond to the way that scientists use the word in practice.
Absolute proof of a generalization about the real world is logically impossible, because you can never examine every possible instance to which that statement might apply. Thus, the idea that there is an attractive force between masses will forever remain theory, and never fact (and of course, one can construct more detailed theories about the origin and behavior of that theoretical force). Nevertheless, you might sometimes hear a scientist say that a theory has been "proved," but the usage is not in the mathematical sense of absolute proof, in which a statement can be shown either to follow from a set of premises. Rather, it is in the sense of "proving ground." So the term may occasionally be applied to a theory that has been extensively tested over many years, and has held up to the challenge and successfully predicted many observations that would not otherwise have been anticipated--but with the full awareness that there is some possibility that it will ultimately turn out to be wrong, or (as is more commonly the case) incomplete.
We have a huge number of locations on earth and in the atmosphere where we can make observations to test theories of current climate and how and why it has changed in the past. We have other planets that we can study from a distance to test predictions of how climate will differ with different atmospheres and different solar irradiance. Although our gravitational models of how planets and stars move cannot be tested experimentally, we can carry out small scale experiments in the lab to test the fundamental physics on which models of planetary motion are based. Similarly, while we cannot carry out planetary scale climate experiments, we can carry out laboratory experiments to test the fundamental physics on which climate models are based, such as radiation absorption and emission by atmospheric gasses. In both cases we have computer models that can be used to make predictions about "natural experiments"--climate models, for example, make predictions about how climate will be affected by volcanic eruptions.
In the case of evolution, we can carry out laboratory experiments with microorganisms to test whether genetic change as a result of selection over hundreds of thousands of generations matches the predictions of evolutionary theory. We can also sequence the genes of the immense number of kinds of living things on earth (including, with modern genetic technology, ones that are long extinct) to test whether their similarity at the genetic level is consistent with the patterns of descent predicted from evolutionary theory. We can examine the genetic changes that divide species and test whether they agree with kinds of genetic changes that arise as a result of selection in the laboratory or in in the wild. We can observe the emergence of new species in the wild, and study the conditions under which they arise.
All theories, from gravity to evolution generalizations that can never be exhaustively tested, but that are to some degree accepted because they make testable predictions that have turned out to be correct. For example, we theorize that all masses, past, present, and future exert a gravitational force on all other masses, but almost all of the masses in the universe are not directly accessible for testing--we have tested only an insignificant fraction of them.
Here's a list of some of the predictions of climate science that have been tested and have turned out to be correct
Of course gravity is a theory. All scientific generalizations are theory. The facts or the observation. "I dropped this ball and it fell to the floor" may be a factual observation. "Balls fall when dropped" or "there is a force that attracts masses together" are theories--they can never be proved, because they are generalizations: you can never test every ball, or every pair of masses.
In my field, I usually end up struggling prior to submission to cut references, because many of the journals I submit to have limits on the numbers of citations. Often, this means citing a review rather than the primary literature (because one review can take the place of multiple primary papers), or citing a recent work using the most current methods and dropping citations of the earlier ground-breaking work in the field
Truth is binary, not analog. And there is no valid method of setting a numerical value on the truth probability of a theory. To do so, one would have to enumerate all possible theories, which is impossible.
In a formal, logical sense, no theory is ever proven, and no generalization about the physical world can ever be anything other than a theory, no matter how strongly we may believe it.
You are missing the point that a theory is inherently tentative, because it is a generalization that cannot be exhaustively verified. So our theoretical force can never be proved to exist. The fact that we have named it does not alter that (at least for those of us who believe that there is such a thing as an external reality that exists outside of our mind).
What we have observed is a lot of individual events. I dropped this object and it fell. I dropped that object and it fell. This astronomical body moved in this way over this period of time.
What we theorize is that all of these individual events reflect a common, universal phenomenon due to an attraction between masses.
Unfortunately, we don't have the power to define something into existence. So defining gravity as the force between two objects with mass does not establish that such a force exists. To do that, you would have to measure the force between every pair of objects in the universe, an impossibility. So while we may speculate that any pair of objects with mass will exhibit such a force, and even believe it to be true, we cannot establish it as truth--technically it will forever remain theory, not fact.
No, technically it is correct. We can observe any number of apples fall to the earth, and calculate its rate of acceleration to whatever precisions we wish, but logically that will never prove that there is a force called gravity that will affect every apple that we could possibly drop in the future. All explanations and generalizations are theory, and inherently tentative.
But so what? We can't even disprove solipsism, yet we procede to act upon the assumption that there is an external reality that has regularities that we can deduce, even if we can never be absolutely 100% sure that we've got them right. Fundamentally, that can never be more than a working assumption. But making the opposite assumption never seems to lead anywhere interesting.
The silly notion that Siri is a data hog has been all over the internet, although if you think about it, it is obviously ridiculous. All Siri sends upstream some highly compressed voice, which doesn't take much bandwidth, and all it gets back is text and some simple commands to Apple's apps, which also doesn't take much bandwidth. Ars Technica measured the amount of data Siri sends back and forth, and it's just as modest as you'd expect.
So why are owners of the iPhone 4s using more data? Apples latest version of iOS, which was released about the same time as the 4s, dispenses with the requirement to tether the iPhone to a computer running iTunes, for the first time making it possible to use an iPhone as a stand-alone device. You can back up your iPhone and even install iOS updates wirelessly. In addition, Apple's Match service will stream your entire music library to your iPhone wirelessly via Apple's iCloud. Owners of earlier iPhone models are already set up to do these things via a wired connection to iTunes, and many of them doubtless have continued to do it this way even if they've upgraded to iOS version 5. But new owners of the iPhone 4s (of which there are a great number, based on Apple's quarterly report) are probably mostly using their iPhones as stand-alone devices, which is now the default. And of course, this involves more data usage, of which the biggest contributor is likely music streaming.
So Siri has almost nothing to do with the increased data usage of iPhone 4s owners--it just happens to correlates with people who are using their iPhones untethered.
If your book doesn't make use of the proprietary enhancements that the iBooks Author format offers over ePub, then just use a generic iPub authoring program. You can still publish through Apple, and you are saved the extra work of reformatting your book if you want to publish your work by other routes.
Authors can still do everything they could before, but now they have an additional option. Nobody is required to use iBooks Author, even to publish through Apple. It seems like we are in a looking glass world where giving authors additional options that they did not have previously is seen as "limiting their rights." How can more be less?
It will depend upon whether you use the special features of iBooks Author. What probably makes the most sense is to think about what you want to do, and whether it can be done with a generic book format. If the enhancements added by iBooks Author will significantly improve your book, then it may make sense to use it to produce an enhanced edition even though it means extra work.
WebOS was just a bit too late. Apple had already sewn up the high end and Android owned the low end of the market. And Palm didn't have the resources (and HP didn't have the will) to hang on for the long haul.
the app is free.
And if I go through a conventional book publisher, I am locked into their distribution channel and their printing schedule. I can't even turn around an offer the same book through another publisher. On the other hand, Apple's EULA controls only the format produced by their software; it does not prohibit me from offering the same content via another electronic book format in addition to Apple's.
Look up the chemicals that are used in the manufacture of paper. Also consider the environmental cost of chopping down trees.
You can
1. Ignore the recommendation and try to get by on your class notes, with maybe a bit of help from Wikipedia and other internet sources. A surprising number of students do this successfully--not just undergraduates, but in graduate school as well.
2. Buy the previous edition used. Often, it's close enough.
3. Buy another, cheaper text covering the same material.
4. Hang out in the library a lot and read the reserve copies.