Given the price of tuition and textbooks at almost all colleges, adding in the price of an iPad would have negligible impact. Or the school could just decide to give every student an iPad, and roll the price into tuition. And electronic textbooks would not have to be much cheaper than physical ones for the savings to pay the cost of an iPad.
I wouldn't require that book for the classes I teach. I think that most university professors would do the same. There's no point in requiring a book that expensive. The students wouldn't buy it, anyway. They would get by as best they could on lecture notes and other resources.
This is fairly typical of the kind of clutching at straws that one hears from people who are desperate to reject global warming. They reject the consensus of 97% of climate scientists and seize upon the creationist scientist Spencer, who has rather weak credentials in the climate science field, and who is best known for making basic errors in mathematics and for over fitting overly simplistic models.
Spencer, while not particularly accomplished, seems to be a real scientist. As scientists go, he falls into the category of "lonely guy with a pet theory." There are always one or two guys like this on the periphery of a field--guys who have some oddball theory that they haven't been able to convince much of anybody else of. While they almost always turn out to be wrong, they can occasionally serve a useful role as gadflies.
All the links I checked work fine. There is no "single most important link." In climate science, as in any field of science, no important conclusion is critically dependent upon any single data set.
Anybody can file a FOIA request over anything, so the existence of a FOIA demand proves nothing. Many of the FOIA demands were for data that labs in question did not even own (for example, CRU does not own any primary data. Some were over agreements with data providers rather than data.
The BEST results are not even published yet. But they are only the latest group to examine the data and conclude that global warming is real. All of the data are available from the National Weather Services that acquired and own it (although some of them charge a fee for access). The Muir Russell review even went so far as to request the original data from the actual owners and reproduce CRU's conclusions.
Now, I'm not saying AGW is real or unreal. What I am saying is that to even presume to be in the same category as Darwin you must FIRST disclose the raw data. Now. Just do it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain if you're right. The only reason to not release the data is if you're in fact hiding something or there are many different wants to interpret the data. That leads us to methodology. You then have to explain exhaustively why your method of handling the data is correct. Then after both data and methodology are verified we can look at the conclusions.
As a scientist, I can tell you that climate science is one of the most open fields of science in making raw data available to the public. There is more than enough data available so that anybody willing to spend a few years developing the appropriate expertise can verify the major conclusions of climate science. Here's a starting point
So how do you test gravity? OK, you dropped that thing and it fell. But will it fall tomorrow? Or a hundred years from now? Or on another planet? Prove it! Why did it fall? How will it fall when conditions change? OK, well there are a number of mathematical theories--but they all predict pretty much the same thing for all of the experiments that you can do conveniently.
Theories of climate change are tested exactly the same way you test gravity. You create a model, you make predictions, and you make observations to see if those predictions are correct. And if you read the scientific literature, you'll find that a huge amount of observations have already been accumulated testing the predictions of climate theory.
Science works by what can be empirically proven. When you've got experimental proof, it doesn't matter what the "consensus" is.
Correct. Of course, in science, as in just about any technically sophisticated field, it typically takes 5-10 years to acquire the background knowledge and expertise required to evaluate the evidence, not to mention reading through the literature and inspecting it.
So what do you do if you lack the time or the inclination to become an expert? The next best thing is to look at the consensus of the experts--they guys who have formed their opinions based upon personal study of the evidence. Consensus is not science--but when science is properly done, a consensus emerges, because intelligent, knowledgeable people studying the same evidence tend to reach similar conclusions.
But of course, there are always some people who are of a paranoid frame of mind, and who are pathologically suspicious of people who have knowledge that they lack, constantly suspecting that the experts are colluding to gull them, particularly when the experts are telling them something that they don't want to hear. So instead of accepting the consensus, they latch on to some guy who looks a little bit like an expert but who rejects the expert consensus--often a retired expert, or some guy with expertise in a peripherally related field (a weatherman or engineer instead of a climate scientist, for example)--and acclaiming that guy as their guru.
In science, we have a technical term for people like this. We call them cranks.
Science is always open to intelligent revision and dispute. But some things are settled enough that the chances that they will change in a major way are pretty much negligible. For example, it is extraordinarily unlikely that any future physics will conclude that there is no such thing as gravity. Einstein didn't come up with his theory by rejecting Newtonian physics--rather, he took that as a basis and built upon it and elaborated it. This is more commonly the way in which science is revised.
Similarly, there will doubtless be revisions in climate science and evolutionary theory. But the notion that those revisions will include abandonment of the idea that species evolved from a common ancestor, or the idea that increasing CO2 warms climate is about as reasonable as expecting physicists to decide that they were wrong about the existence of gravity
I wouldn't pay $175 for a time-limited e-book. But I might pay something like that for a major textbook if I got updates to future editions as part of the bargain.
With Apple it can actually get worse -- if you make the Apple device the dominant way you access information. That's fine and dandy, until you consider that when you buy the shiny little toy, you only get permission to access the world through it the way the designers of the technology believe it should be accessed, through their "approved" modes.
I don't see how this is any different. When I buy a physical book, my access is limited by how the publishers thought it should be accessed. Want to search for a topic? Only if the publisher saw fit to add an index, and only if the search terms you have in mind are among the ones tabulated. Want to compare the discussion in two different parts of the book? You are stuck flipping back and forth.
Antibiotics are a big problem with our system of commercial drug development.
1. We've got lotsa antibiotics. Most of them are generic and cheap. Nobody wants to buy a new, expensive antibiotic until the old ones stop working. Then you want it in a hurry. But drug development takes years. 2. New drugs only make significant money for the discoverer until they go out of patent. And much of the patent term is used up in testing before the drug even gets onto the market. So from a business point of view, it doesn't make sense to invest in developing a new antibiotic until the old ones stop working and there is a large demand (see #1) 3. It is hard to make a lot of money from antibiotics, because they are curative--people take them only for a short time, and then they get well. If you charge enough money per dose to make back your development costs, it looks like you are profiteering on human misery. So while pharmaceutical companies may invest a bit in antibiotics, but it simply does not make a lot of business sense to invest heavily in that direction. 4. Antibiotic development is hard, which means expensive. We think of bacteria as primitive, but in reality they are some of the most evolutionarily advanced things on the planet. They have a short generation time, so they evolve fast. Rather than primitive, they are stripped down for performance--more like the latest Formula race car than a model T. Bacteria been fighting a pitched battle with other bacteria, fungi, and viruses since before we crawled out of the ooze. They're gotten very good at offensive and defensive chemical warfare, and they are hard to hurt. Most of the stuff we've got that works, we swiped from the fungi (who also evolve fast), and maybe tweaked a bit.
I think that what we need is a publicly funded not-for-profit vaccine development enterprise. But we have to approach it realistically, in full awareness of the pitfalls of drug discovery and the fact that often you'll spend a billion dollars developing a new drug, only to find out when you finally get it into human testing that it doesn't work very well, or else has some unanticipated horrible toxic effect.
Antibiotic rotation is an idea that sounds good but that doesn't seem to work well in practice. What seems to happen is that microorganisms evolve in such a way as to neutralize the cost of being resistant. Usually, the initial mutation reduces fitness in the absence of the antibiotic, but then there is selective pressure to accumulate compensatory mutations that eliminate that cost. Once that happens, there is no longer selective pressure to revert to sensitivity even if the use of that antibiotic is discontinued. Moreover, with the compensatory mutations in place, it is possible that reversion of the original resistance mutation may reduce fitness. In this case, resistance becomes "locked in," and reversion is unlikely to happen even over an extended period of non-use of the antibiotic.
If manufacturers think they will be able to charge more money for a smart TV, they will find that they are sadly mistaken. We already saw this with 3D. They tried to sell 3D TVs at a high price, nobody bought them, so now 3D is just a standard feature expected of all TVs. Same for blu-ray players. Consumers liked blu-ray, but not so much that they were willing to pay much more than they paid for DVDs. Similarly, almost all quality TVs now have some kind of internet connectivity, although the interface is often clumsy and poorly thought-out.
The great virtue of the Harmony remotes is that they will work even if some of the components do not support state-independent switching, because the remote remembers the state. But it is possible for the remote and the device to get out of sync, say if somebody walks between the remote and the device while the switching is going on. The Harmony remotes provide a way to fix this, but nevertheless they work faster and more reliably if there are discrete commands for each input.
Fragmentation is not considered a form of reproduction. The pieces do not reproduce the "parent"--they are smaller and never grow to be like the original rock
If your computer reproduces, and has heritable mutations that affect reproductive success, so that it is subject to Darwinian evolution, then I would consider it to be life, whatever the its form or behavior.
The answer to the question, "what makes us humans different from animals?" is of course "nothing," because we are animals. If you mean, "what makes us different from other species of animals?," the answer is different genes.
If you ask, "what about our behavior is different from other animals?" there is a long list, although some of the answers are quantitative rather than qualitative. However, I doubt that it is meaningful to talk about "taking culture away." Culture likely co-evolved with our biology and is closely linked to biology. So this is a bit like asking, "what would make humans different from other animals if we weren't humans?"
If their heritable mutation affects their probability of reproduction, so that it is capable of evolving in a Darwinian fashion. There is a theory that the earliest form of life might have been crystalline.
To a biologist, "evolution" refers to the Darwinian variety. Basically, that means reprodcvtion with heriditable variation. On that basis, I consider viruses to be life, but not rocks
I drove a first generation Prius, and you pretty much had to keep it under 55 mph to get good milage. But I've also the current model, and that no longer seems to be true. It cruises comfortably at 70 at better than 50 mpg. It is easy to consistently average 50 mpg in city driving, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the efficiency of the engine, and how much is due to the fact that the realtime display of mpg has modified my driving habits. You quickly discover it is acceleration that really costs you money, and you learn to avoid unnecessarily high acceleration. If the light ahead is going to be red when you get there anyway, why stomp on the accelerator to get there sooner?
So most TVs that will support this dongle already offer the major features that it provides. So it certainly won't provide a big burst of sales for Roku at the outset. What Roku will need to do to make the product a success is to provide a better user interface to the streaming services that it supports, and do a better job of keeping their device updated than the TV manufacturers do. This might not be too hard. While modern TVs are updatable, TV manufacturers tend to be far more interested in selling new TVs than in enhancing old ones. For example, my Panasonic TV supports Amazon streaming, but there is only a time display when in fast forward or rewind, and only on-screen controls work (even though the TV remote has the buttons), and it doesn't keep track of where you left off if you return to a movie that you previously watched.
It is easy to set up a TiVo WishList to record only new shows. There is no canned option to record only repeats, but you could set up a WishList with the keyword "Repeat" &/or the particular year(s).
Slashdot Mirror
Given the price of tuition and textbooks at almost all colleges, adding in the price of an iPad would have negligible impact. Or the school could just decide to give every student an iPad, and roll the price into tuition. And electronic textbooks would not have to be much cheaper than physical ones for the savings to pay the cost of an iPad.
I wouldn't require that book for the classes I teach. I think that most university professors would do the same.
There's no point in requiring a book that expensive. The students wouldn't buy it, anyway. They would get by as best they could on lecture notes and other resources.
This is fairly typical of the kind of clutching at straws that one hears from people who are desperate to reject global warming. They reject the consensus of 97% of climate scientists and seize upon the creationist scientist Spencer, who has rather weak credentials in the climate science field, and who is best known for making basic errors in mathematics and for over fitting overly simplistic models.
Spencer, while not particularly accomplished, seems to be a real scientist. As scientists go, he falls into the category of "lonely guy with a pet theory." There are always one or two guys like this on the periphery of a field--guys who have some oddball theory that they haven't been able to convince much of anybody else of. While they almost always turn out to be wrong, they can occasionally serve a useful role as gadflies.
All the links I checked work fine. There is no "single most important link." In climate science, as in any field of science, no important conclusion is critically dependent upon any single data set.
Anybody can file a FOIA request over anything, so the existence of a FOIA demand proves nothing. Many of the FOIA demands were for data that labs in question did not even own (for example, CRU does not own any primary data. Some were over agreements with data providers rather than data.
The BEST results are not even published yet. But they are only the latest group to examine the data and conclude that global warming is real. All of the data are available from the National Weather Services that acquired and own it (although some of them charge a fee for access). The Muir Russell review even went so far as to request the original data from the actual owners and reproduce CRU's conclusions.
As a scientist, I can tell you that climate science is one of the most open fields of science in making raw data available to the public. There is more than enough data available so that anybody willing to spend a few years developing the appropriate expertise can verify the major conclusions of climate science. Here's a starting point
So how do you test gravity? OK, you dropped that thing and it fell. But will it fall tomorrow? Or a hundred years from now? Or on another planet? Prove it! Why did it fall? How will it fall when conditions change? OK, well there are a number of mathematical theories--but they all predict pretty much the same thing for all of the experiments that you can do conveniently.
Theories of climate change are tested exactly the same way you test gravity. You create a model, you make predictions, and you make observations to see if those predictions are correct. And if you read the scientific literature, you'll find that a huge amount of observations have already been accumulated testing the predictions of climate theory.
Correct. Of course, in science, as in just about any technically sophisticated field, it typically takes 5-10 years to acquire the background knowledge and expertise required to evaluate the evidence, not to mention reading through the literature and inspecting it.
So what do you do if you lack the time or the inclination to become an expert? The next best thing is to look at the consensus of the experts--they guys who have formed their opinions based upon personal study of the evidence. Consensus is not science--but when science is properly done, a consensus emerges, because intelligent, knowledgeable people studying the same evidence tend to reach similar conclusions.
But of course, there are always some people who are of a paranoid frame of mind, and who are pathologically suspicious of people who have knowledge that they lack, constantly suspecting that the experts are colluding to gull them, particularly when the experts are telling them something that they don't want to hear. So instead of accepting the consensus, they latch on to some guy who looks a little bit like an expert but who rejects the expert consensus--often a retired expert, or some guy with expertise in a peripherally related field (a weatherman or engineer instead of a climate scientist, for example)--and acclaiming that guy as their guru.
In science, we have a technical term for people like this.
We call them cranks.
Science is always open to intelligent revision and dispute. But some things are settled enough that the chances that they will change in a major way are pretty much negligible. For example, it is extraordinarily unlikely that any future physics will conclude that there is no such thing as gravity. Einstein didn't come up with his theory by rejecting Newtonian physics--rather, he took that as a basis and built upon it and elaborated it. This is more commonly the way in which science is revised.
Similarly, there will doubtless be revisions in climate science and evolutionary theory. But the notion that those revisions will include abandonment of the idea that species evolved from a common ancestor, or the idea that increasing CO2 warms climate is about as reasonable as expecting physicists to decide that they were wrong about the existence of gravity
I wouldn't pay $175 for a time-limited e-book. But I might pay something like that for a major textbook if I got updates to future editions as part of the bargain.
I don't see how this is any different. When I buy a physical book, my access is limited by how the publishers thought it should be accessed. Want to search for a topic? Only if the publisher saw fit to add an index, and only if the search terms you have in mind are among the ones tabulated. Want to compare the discussion in two different parts of the book? You are stuck flipping back and forth.
Oops. Title should have been "The pitfalls of antibiotic development"
Antibiotics are a big problem with our system of commercial drug development.
1. We've got lotsa antibiotics. Most of them are generic and cheap. Nobody wants to buy a new, expensive antibiotic until the old ones stop working. Then you want it in a hurry. But drug development takes years.
2. New drugs only make significant money for the discoverer until they go out of patent. And much of the patent term is used up in testing before the drug even gets onto the market. So from a business point of view, it doesn't make sense to invest in developing a new antibiotic until the old ones stop working and there is a large demand (see #1)
3. It is hard to make a lot of money from antibiotics, because they are curative--people take them only for a short time, and then they get well. If you charge enough money per dose to make back your development costs, it looks like you are profiteering on human misery. So while pharmaceutical companies may invest a bit in antibiotics, but it simply does not make a lot of business sense to invest heavily in that direction.
4. Antibiotic development is hard, which means expensive. We think of bacteria as primitive, but in reality they are some of the most evolutionarily advanced things on the planet. They have a short generation time, so they evolve fast. Rather than primitive, they are stripped down for performance--more like the latest Formula race car than a model T. Bacteria been fighting a pitched battle with other bacteria, fungi, and viruses since before we crawled out of the ooze. They're gotten very good at offensive and defensive chemical warfare, and they are hard to hurt. Most of the stuff we've got that works, we swiped from the fungi (who also evolve fast), and maybe tweaked a bit.
I think that what we need is a publicly funded not-for-profit vaccine development enterprise. But we have to approach it realistically, in full awareness of the pitfalls of drug discovery and the fact that often you'll spend a billion dollars developing a new drug, only to find out when you finally get it into human testing that it doesn't work very well, or else has some unanticipated horrible toxic effect.
Antibiotic rotation is an idea that sounds good but that doesn't seem to work well in practice. What seems to happen is that microorganisms evolve in such a way as to neutralize the cost of being resistant. Usually, the initial mutation reduces fitness in the absence of the antibiotic, but then there is selective pressure to accumulate compensatory mutations that eliminate that cost. Once that happens, there is no longer selective pressure to revert to sensitivity even if the use of that antibiotic is discontinued. Moreover, with the compensatory mutations in place, it is possible that reversion of the original resistance mutation may reduce fitness. In this case, resistance becomes "locked in," and reversion is unlikely to happen even over an extended period of non-use of the antibiotic.
If manufacturers think they will be able to charge more money for a smart TV, they will find that they are sadly mistaken. We already saw this with 3D. They tried to sell 3D TVs at a high price, nobody bought them, so now 3D is just a standard feature expected of all TVs. Same for blu-ray players. Consumers liked blu-ray, but not so much that they were willing to pay much more than they paid for DVDs. Similarly, almost all quality TVs now have some kind of internet connectivity, although the interface is often clumsy and poorly thought-out.
The great virtue of the Harmony remotes is that they will work even if some of the components do not support state-independent switching, because the remote remembers the state. But it is possible for the remote and the device to get out of sync, say if somebody walks between the remote and the device while the switching is going on. The Harmony remotes provide a way to fix this, but nevertheless they work faster and more reliably if there are discrete commands for each input.
I am speaking as a biologist
There really is no accepted "biological definition of life." Indeed, the wikipedia page you reference offers numerous candidates.
Fragmentation is not considered a form of reproduction. The pieces do not reproduce the "parent"--they are smaller and never grow to be like the original rock
If your computer reproduces, and has heritable mutations that affect reproductive success, so that it is subject to Darwinian evolution, then I would consider it to be life, whatever the its form or behavior.
The answer to the question, "what makes us humans different from animals?" is of course "nothing," because we are animals. If you mean, "what makes us different from other species of animals?," the answer is different genes.
If you ask, "what about our behavior is different from other animals?" there is a long list, although some of the answers are quantitative rather than qualitative. However, I doubt that it is meaningful to talk about "taking culture away." Culture likely co-evolved with our biology and is closely linked to biology. So this is a bit like asking, "what would make humans different from other animals if we weren't humans?"
If their heritable mutation affects their probability of reproduction, so that it is capable of evolving in a Darwinian fashion. There is a theory that the earliest form of life might have been crystalline.
To a biologist, "evolution" refers to the Darwinian variety. Basically, that means reprodcvtion with heriditable variation. On that basis, I consider viruses to be life, but not rocks
I drove a first generation Prius, and you pretty much had to keep it under 55 mph to get good milage. But I've also the current model, and that no longer seems to be true. It cruises comfortably at 70 at better than 50 mpg. It is easy to consistently average 50 mpg in city driving, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the efficiency of the engine, and how much is due to the fact that the realtime display of mpg has modified my driving habits. You quickly discover it is acceleration that really costs you money, and you learn to avoid unnecessarily high acceleration. If the light ahead is going to be red when you get there anyway, why stomp on the accelerator to get there sooner?
So most TVs that will support this dongle already offer the major features that it provides. So it certainly won't provide a big burst of sales for Roku at the outset. What Roku will need to do to make the product a success is to provide a better user interface to the streaming services that it supports, and do a better job of keeping their device updated than the TV manufacturers do. This might not be too hard. While modern TVs are updatable, TV manufacturers tend to be far more interested in selling new TVs than in enhancing old ones. For example, my Panasonic TV supports Amazon streaming, but there is only a time display when in fast forward or rewind, and only on-screen controls work (even though the TV remote has the buttons), and it doesn't keep track of where you left off if you return to a movie that you previously watched.
It is easy to set up a TiVo WishList to record only new shows. There is no canned option to record only repeats, but you could set up a WishList with the keyword "Repeat" &/or the particular year(s).
Has DirecTV come up with anything to match TiVo's Wishlists yet? I use this feature far more extensively than sharing between TiVo's