You mean safety instructions like "do not allow your hand to contact the blade?" Even skilled people occasionally make errors. A well designed piece of equipment is tolerant to small errors. A dangerous piece of equipment is one in which a small error can have drastic consequences. Prior to development of this technology, the argument could be made that this kind of equipment is unavoidably dangerous and that it is technologically impossible to make it significantly safer, but that argument no longer holds water.
False positive rate my friend. Decision theory (signal processing) says that since the cost of a false negative is high, the decision point to trigger an action must be placed conservatively, which will increase the false positive rate.
Which is why our airbags in our cars are constantly going off when we bump a car while parking? Oh wait, they aren't.
Vague words like "increase" and "high" are meaningless in the absence of actual numbers. Is a "high" rate 1 in 1000? 1 in one million? Some technologies actually are highly reliable. That you would engage in such an argument reveals that you are rationalizing rather than reasoning.
This is really weird reasoning. If saws are so safe that such a device is really unnecessary, then the cost each time it triggers (which requires contact of finger and blade) is irrelevant, because it will almost never trigger. And if it does trigger, $170 is cheap compared to the likely medical bill if you didn't have it.
Such an argument could be made if these were rare injuries that only happened to unskilled people or when the equipment suffered a mechanical failure. But that is not true. That implies that the flaw is indeed in the technology, not the person.
A mouse and keyboard is very powerful, but not really very efficient in terms of resource utilization--it takes a lot of space and both hands, and you don't need all of that power to do the things that people do most on the web most of the time. On the other hand, touchscreens offer gestures, which can be extremely efficient, and need only one hand and a little patch of space.
Actually, I think it probably went more like, "It's been years, and Adobe still hasn't been able to fix Flash so it doesn't crash browsers. We had to rework Safari in Snow Leopard just so that Flash couldn't bring down the entire browser when it crashes. Do we really want to get into that with the iPhone? Not to mention the security issues. What do we lose by leaving out Flash, anyway? The stuff that works well on a touchscreen can be done just as well by other methods that don't have Flash's liabilities."
Darwin never specified how inheritable traits arise. He knew nothing of genes, other than that his theory required the units of inheritance to be discrete. So whether or not genes are transferred horizontally has nothing to do with whether it is Darwinian evolution. The key issue is whether organisms that acquired the trait tended to propagate more successfully and pass the trait onto their descendants, thereby increasing the frequency of that trait in the population. If that is the case, then it is Darwinian evolution.
It's certainly true that many modern scientists have tended to assume that the major source of genetic generation of diversity was spontaneous mutations in an organisms DNA, but the idea of a contribution from gene transfer is not itself particularly novel.
It's not very profitable now, at least on the scale of a giant company like Google, but it will become more so. Remember that Google does not sell computers; its advertising-based income model will work with internet cafes. And Google has been moving in the direction of cloud computing, which is a good match to third world countries like China, because the clients can be very cheap.
More likely, they decided that if they were going to get out, they'd better do it now, because in a few years they'd be locked in--any attempt to exit the Chinese market would be so financially damaging to the company that they'd face a shareholder revolt.
Google is perhaps justified in taking SOME kind of knee-jerk action to protect itself, temporarily at least, in the absence of knowing the real cause or source, but what's your justification? You have nothing to protect, do you? Are you protecting a blind faith in Google and by extension the rightness of its actions?
That's an odd question. Are you asserting that nobody should have opinions on topics such as political censorship, human rights, or the relationships between information-based corporations and governmental entities unless they have some kind of "justification" in the form of a personal interest to protect?
Except that the scale of the attacks, the targets of the attacks, and the fact that they went on in a country that is fanatical about monitoring internet use, strongly suggests that the Chinese government either conducted or encouraged the attack. So it is reasonable for Google to hold the Chinese government responsible. Clearly Google's view is, "We try to cooperate with your unreasonable censorship rules, we expect you not to try to crack into our systems. You didn't hold up your end of the bargain, so the deal is off. If you don't like it, we'll take our ball and go home."
Also, it's hard to see the payoff. Even with censorship, Google in China seems to be more independent than Baidu, so it's hard to see how Human Rights groups would benefit by driving Google out of China.
I would argue that most Apple fanboys (the real hardcore ones anyway) only THINK they're "free-thinking."
Does anybody older than a high school student actually buy a product in hopes of attesting to their own intellectual virtues?
Yes, Apple clearly puts a lot of effort into rethinking outmoded design conventions, and in the process they have come up with products that are far more appealing than existing products designed to accomplish much the same task. But I don't need to be "free-thinking" to choose an Apple; I just need to have an appreciation for a tool that lets me accomplish what I want to do without getting in my way.
Doesn't this happen anytime anybody releases a smartphone that is easy to use? All of a sudden, people are actually using the web browser in their phones, and complaining when their internet access is slow. And the demand for bandwidth goes up, and the weaknesses in coverage and the algorithms the phones use to lock onto the network start to stand out. If history is any guide, these problems will gradually subside after a few months and a couple of system upgrades.
And actually, I just did a quick Google search... Navier-Stokes equations are featured very prominently in climate modeling. Fluid simulations based on Navier-Stokes equations are inherently chaotic.
And what climate simulations show is chaos on a short time scale, superimposed upon deterministic change on a longer time scale. This is hardly unusual; chaotic systems may be difficult to predict on one spacial or temporal scale, yet orderly on another. For example, fluid moving through a pipe under pressure with a high Reynolds number will exhibit turbulence, with a lot of variation in velocity on a small scale, yet regular net fluid flow on a larger scale.
Why should I believe models that have never proven themselves trustworthy?
You made the assertion that climate is chaotic. I asked you for evidence to support your assertion. Attacking the evidence that climate is not chaotic on multi-decade time scales is not the same thing as offering evidence that it is chaotic.
I already addressed that in another commenter's response. Games of chance are based on simple statistics - they become easier and easier to predict with a larger number of samples. The climate is a chaotic system
An assertion does not constitute evidence. Physical models of climate do not exhibit chaotic behavior, so what is your evidence that actual climate is chaotic? Or is it just that you would prefer to believe that climate (as opposed to weather) is chaotic because you would rather not believe the predictions of climate models?
What about a year from now? You have no idea, and neither does anybody else. Predicting that summer will be warmer than winter is a no-brainer, seeing as how the Earth operates on a clear one-year cycle.
The point remains that the 6-month prediction is a counterexample to the claim that inability to make a short term prediction implies inability to make a long term prediction. As you acknowledge, a 6-month prediction is more reliable than a one-week one, because there is a predictable trend over this time interval. So if you want to argue that there can be no predictable trends over a multi-decade time interval, the uncertainty of next week's weather does not constitute evidence of any kind (and it is more than a little deceptive to present it as though it were).
Climate models, which simulate the physical processes that determine climate, do not exhibit chaotic behavior. So based upon everything we know about the physics of climate, there is no basis to assert that climate is chaotic. Here, for example, is a plot showing superimposed multiple runs of a climate model with different starting conditions. If climate (as opposed to weather) were chaotic, then the curves should diverge from one another exponentially over time, yet this is not observed. Instead, while the predictions of this model show substantial divergence on a short time scale of a decade or so, over multiple decades they remain clustered together.
And in fact, there is no evidence that climate is chaotic on the multi-decade time scale at which climate models work, and good scientific reasons to think that this is not the case. Notable, climate models that simulate the physical processes that control the earth's energy balance do not exhibit chaotic behavior on multi-decade time scales. The analogy to roulette is a good one--the bouncing of a round ball is chaotic, yet the outcome of thousands of spins of the wheel is highly predictable.
Hell, we can't even predict next week's weather with any degree of certainty.
This has to be the most foolish argument being made by those who wish to deny the reality of global warming. What reasonable basis is there to suppose that it should be easier to predict weather patterns over the short term than the long term? Would you argue that it is impossible for a casino to predict whether its dice games will make money if it cannot predict the outcome of the next role of the dice?
Besides, even with temperature it is easy to think of examples in which long-term prediction is more reliable than short term. I would not bet on whether it will be warmer or cooler a week from now, but I'd place a substantial sum of money on the bet that it will be warmer 6 months from now.
No climatologist is saying the only reason temperature changes is because of CO2. it's and increase on top of the normal rising and falling of temperature
What the climatologists are saying is that the normal rising and falling of temperature, which takes place on a typical time scale of a decade or so, is riding on top of on a long-term, multi-decadal rising trend of temperature that is due to CO2
Then they are likely to be equally as flawed as Arrhenius's work was...but for different reasons. The only major driver of global climate is solar input...rather from orbital oscillations, solar cycles, or unusual solar activity. We can twirl the knob on the CO2-concentration-controller but we are no different than the kid driving the shopping cart steering wheel in the supermarket...it will have no effect.
Based upon the fundamental physical principle that Arrhenius discovered, a change in CO2 concentration has to have an effect, so the only valid question is: how large? The existence of a positive feedback between CO2 and water vapor offers a reason to suspect that the effect could be large, and detailed calculations to model the effect support that expectation. So it is certainly a testament to your optimism that you imagine that as-yet undiscovered mechanisms will somehow cancel out the effect of CO2. Of course, you are left with the problem of how it is that global temperatures have increased so substantially in the absence of any appreciable increase in measured solar output.
To verify that the methods they said they used produce the same results when you do it with the same data. A basic double check.
But we aren't interested in whether they did it perfectly correctly, we are interested in whether their conclusions are correct. Every experimental approach has its own pitfalls and sources of error. Particularly in a large experiment examining real-world data, it is almost inevitable that some poor decisions, and quite probably errors, in manipulation of data will have been made. Fortunately, the random nature of error means that in a robust experimental design, errors will tend to cancel out, and will not affect the conclusions. But even in the unlikely event that no errors in data handling were made at all, if their conclusion is dependent upon using exactly the same data sets that they did, it is not reliable. So getting the same result would not prove that their conclusions are right, it would only prove that they (and you) made no mistakes in the calculations.
There are good reasons why scientists virtually never repeat somebody else's experiment exactly, and why the descriptions of experimental methods in scientific papers may seem to the layman to be somewhat lacking in detail--because if the method is a good one, the fine details should not matter. Far more information is obtained by carrying out what should be an equivalent experiment than be carrying out the same experiment exactly. On occasion, experiments that should have been equivalent yield different conclusions, and this often leads to significant scientific insights.
Of course, in this case, multiple independent research groups have already carried out similar, but not identical, analyses of the climate data and have reached similar conclusions, so there is not really any appreciable doubt--among scientists at least--that the conclusions are broadly correct. Still, if for whatever reasons you doubt those results, plenty of data is available for you to do you own independent study.
I can't think of any reasonable scientific justification for demanding the exact details of how the calculations were done in every particular, unless the true goal is to divert the scientists involved from their actual research, and burden them with digging through their archives for inconsequential details that will ultimately yield no scientific insights.
If someone claimed in a paper that they just added two integers together and got a fraction you could either say 'Impossible' and leave (ignoring the possibility that they have legitimately discovered something new about addition) or try it and see for yourself.
There exists mathematical proof that adding two integers cannot yield a non-integer, so adding two integers and coming out with a fraction is itself evidence that an error has been made. No additional investigation is required, unless one is curious as to precisely what error was made. Most of the time, the details of how an error was made are of little interest to anybody except perhaps the person who made the error.
It's impossible to try and recreate their model and their results without knowing which data it's based on. Just saying, "All the data is available somewhere, but we won't tell you which parts of it we actually used" doesn't respond to what is a legitimate request from someone trying to fairly reproduce their results.
Why would anybody try to recreate their analysis exactly? That's a complete waste of time. When you recreate somebody else's analysis, you are likely to end up simply recreating their errors. A more scientific approach is to do your own independent analysis using the available data. There is certainly plenty available. If the conclusions are at all robust, they should not depend on the fine details of exactly which data was used.
Yes, there has been some progress in a century. Modern physical models are more sophisticated and provide more accurate numbers, particularly with respect to calculating the positive feedback between water vapor and CO2 with respect to increasing temperature, but the basic principle articulated by Arrhenius, including the logarithmic relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature, remains central to modern climate models. Modern models agree with Arrhenius that CO2 is a major driver of global climate.
Arrhenius was not concerned with the increase in CO2, but his model nevertheless supports the conclusion that increased CO2 will result in increased temperatures.
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You mean safety instructions like "do not allow your hand to contact the blade?" Even skilled people occasionally make errors. A well designed piece of equipment is tolerant to small errors. A dangerous piece of equipment is one in which a small error can have drastic consequences. Prior to development of this technology, the argument could be made that this kind of equipment is unavoidably dangerous and that it is technologically impossible to make it significantly safer, but that argument no longer holds water.
Which is why our airbags in our cars are constantly going off when we bump a car while parking? Oh wait, they aren't.
Vague words like "increase" and "high" are meaningless in the absence of actual numbers. Is a "high" rate 1 in 1000? 1 in one million? Some technologies actually are highly reliable. That you would engage in such an argument reveals that you are rationalizing rather than reasoning.
This is really weird reasoning. If saws are so safe that such a device is really unnecessary, then the cost each time it triggers (which requires contact of finger and blade) is irrelevant, because it will almost never trigger. And if it does trigger, $170 is cheap compared to the likely medical bill if you didn't have it.
Such an argument could be made if these were rare injuries that only happened to unskilled people or when the equipment suffered a mechanical failure. But that is not true. That implies that the flaw is indeed in the technology, not the person.
A mouse and keyboard is very powerful, but not really very efficient in terms of resource utilization--it takes a lot of space and both hands, and you don't need all of that power to do the things that people do most on the web most of the time. On the other hand, touchscreens offer gestures, which can be extremely efficient, and need only one hand and a little patch of space.
Actually, I think it probably went more like, "It's been years, and Adobe still hasn't been able to fix Flash so it doesn't crash browsers. We had to rework Safari in Snow Leopard just so that Flash couldn't bring down the entire browser when it crashes. Do we really want to get into that with the iPhone? Not to mention the security issues. What do we lose by leaving out Flash, anyway? The stuff that works well on a touchscreen can be done just as well by other methods that don't have Flash's liabilities."
Apple has an ad hoc distribution system intended for distributing apps in developments to beta testers.
Darwin never specified how inheritable traits arise. He knew nothing of genes, other than that his theory required the units of inheritance to be discrete. So whether or not genes are transferred horizontally has nothing to do with whether it is Darwinian evolution. The key issue is whether organisms that acquired the trait tended to propagate more successfully and pass the trait onto their descendants, thereby increasing the frequency of that trait in the population. If that is the case, then it is Darwinian evolution.
It's certainly true that many modern scientists have tended to assume that the major source of genetic generation of diversity was spontaneous mutations in an organisms DNA, but the idea of a contribution from gene transfer is not itself particularly novel.
It's not very profitable now, at least on the scale of a giant company like Google, but it will become more so. Remember that Google does not sell computers; its advertising-based income model will work with internet cafes. And Google has been moving in the direction of cloud computing, which is a good match to third world countries like China, because the clients can be very cheap.
More likely, they decided that if they were going to get out, they'd better do it now, because in a few years they'd be locked in--any attempt to exit the Chinese market would be so financially damaging to the company that they'd face a shareholder revolt.
That's an odd question. Are you asserting that nobody should have opinions on topics such as political censorship, human rights, or the relationships between information-based corporations and governmental entities unless they have some kind of "justification" in the form of a personal interest to protect?
Except that the scale of the attacks, the targets of the attacks, and the fact that they went on in a country that is fanatical about monitoring internet use, strongly suggests that the Chinese government either conducted or encouraged the attack. So it is reasonable for Google to hold the Chinese government responsible. Clearly Google's view is, "We try to cooperate with your unreasonable censorship rules, we expect you not to try to crack into our systems. You didn't hold up your end of the bargain, so the deal is off. If you don't like it, we'll take our ball and go home."
Also, it's hard to see the payoff. Even with censorship, Google in China seems to be more independent than Baidu, so it's hard to see how Human Rights groups would benefit by driving Google out of China.
Does anybody older than a high school student actually buy a product in hopes of attesting to their own intellectual virtues?
Yes, Apple clearly puts a lot of effort into rethinking outmoded design conventions, and in the process they have come up with products that are far more appealing than existing products designed to accomplish much the same task. But I don't need to be "free-thinking" to choose an Apple; I just need to have an appreciation for a tool that lets me accomplish what I want to do without getting in my way.
Doesn't this happen anytime anybody releases a smartphone that is easy to use? All of a sudden, people are actually using the web browser in their phones, and complaining when their internet access is slow. And the demand for bandwidth goes up, and the weaknesses in coverage and the algorithms the phones use to lock onto the network start to stand out. If history is any guide, these problems will gradually subside after a few months and a couple of system upgrades.
And what climate simulations show is chaos on a short time scale, superimposed upon deterministic change on a longer time scale. This is hardly unusual; chaotic systems may be difficult to predict on one spacial or temporal scale, yet orderly on another. For example, fluid moving through a pipe under pressure with a high Reynolds number will exhibit turbulence, with a lot of variation in velocity on a small scale, yet regular net fluid flow on a larger scale.
You made the assertion that climate is chaotic. I asked you for evidence to support your assertion. Attacking the evidence that climate is not chaotic on multi-decade time scales is not the same thing as offering evidence that it is chaotic.
An assertion does not constitute evidence. Physical models of climate do not exhibit chaotic behavior, so what is your evidence that actual climate is chaotic? Or is it just that you would prefer to believe that climate (as opposed to weather) is chaotic because you would rather not believe the predictions of climate models?
The point remains that the 6-month prediction is a counterexample to the claim that inability to make a short term prediction implies inability to make a long term prediction. As you acknowledge, a 6-month prediction is more reliable than a one-week one, because there is a predictable trend over this time interval. So if you want to argue that there can be no predictable trends over a multi-decade time interval, the uncertainty of next week's weather does not constitute evidence of any kind (and it is more than a little deceptive to present it as though it were).
Climate models, which simulate the physical processes that determine climate, do not exhibit chaotic behavior. So based upon everything we know about the physics of climate, there is no basis to assert that climate is chaotic. Here, for example, is a plot showing superimposed multiple runs of a climate model with different starting conditions. If climate (as opposed to weather) were chaotic, then the curves should diverge from one another exponentially over time, yet this is not observed. Instead, while the predictions of this model show substantial divergence on a short time scale of a decade or so, over multiple decades they remain clustered together.
And in fact, there is no evidence that climate is chaotic on the multi-decade time scale at which climate models work, and good scientific reasons to think that this is not the case. Notable, climate models that simulate the physical processes that control the earth's energy balance do not exhibit chaotic behavior on multi-decade time scales. The analogy to roulette is a good one--the bouncing of a round ball is chaotic, yet the outcome of thousands of spins of the wheel is highly predictable.
This has to be the most foolish argument being made by those who wish to deny the reality of global warming. What reasonable basis is there to suppose that it should be easier to predict weather patterns over the short term than the long term? Would you argue that it is impossible for a casino to predict whether its dice games will make money if it cannot predict the outcome of the next role of the dice?
Besides, even with temperature it is easy to think of examples in which long-term prediction is more reliable than short term. I would not bet on whether it will be warmer or cooler a week from now, but I'd place a substantial sum of money on the bet that it will be warmer 6 months from now.
The notion that the upward trend is due to the sun is wishful thinking. The evidence is unambiguous that solar output has not increased appreciably over this period. In addition, there is no evidence that the long-term warming trend predicted by climate models has slackened.
What the climatologists are saying is that the normal rising and falling of temperature, which takes place on a typical time scale of a decade or so, is riding on top of on a long-term, multi-decadal rising trend of temperature that is due to CO2
Based upon the fundamental physical principle that Arrhenius discovered, a change in CO2 concentration has to have an effect, so the only valid question is: how large? The existence of a positive feedback between CO2 and water vapor offers a reason to suspect that the effect could be large, and detailed calculations to model the effect support that expectation. So it is certainly a testament to your optimism that you imagine that as-yet undiscovered mechanisms will somehow cancel out the effect of CO2. Of course, you are left with the problem of how it is that global temperatures have increased so substantially in the absence of any appreciable increase in measured solar output.
But we aren't interested in whether they did it perfectly correctly, we are interested in whether their conclusions are correct. Every experimental approach has its own pitfalls and sources of error. Particularly in a large experiment examining real-world data, it is almost inevitable that some poor decisions, and quite probably errors, in manipulation of data will have been made. Fortunately, the random nature of error means that in a robust experimental design, errors will tend to cancel out, and will not affect the conclusions. But even in the unlikely event that no errors in data handling were made at all, if their conclusion is dependent upon using exactly the same data sets that they did, it is not reliable. So getting the same result would not prove that their conclusions are right, it would only prove that they (and you) made no mistakes in the calculations.
There are good reasons why scientists virtually never repeat somebody else's experiment exactly, and why the descriptions of experimental methods in scientific papers may seem to the layman to be somewhat lacking in detail--because if the method is a good one, the fine details should not matter. Far more information is obtained by carrying out what should be an equivalent experiment than be carrying out the same experiment exactly. On occasion, experiments that should have been equivalent yield different conclusions, and this often leads to significant scientific insights.
Of course, in this case, multiple independent research groups have already carried out similar, but not identical, analyses of the climate data and have reached similar conclusions, so there is not really any appreciable doubt--among scientists at least--that the conclusions are broadly correct. Still, if for whatever reasons you doubt those results, plenty of data is available for you to do you own independent study.
I can't think of any reasonable scientific justification for demanding the exact details of how the calculations were done in every particular, unless the true goal is to divert the scientists involved from their actual research, and burden them with digging through their archives for inconsequential details that will ultimately yield no scientific insights.
There exists mathematical proof that adding two integers cannot yield a non-integer, so adding two integers and coming out with a fraction is itself evidence that an error has been made. No additional investigation is required, unless one is curious as to precisely what error was made. Most of the time, the details of how an error was made are of little interest to anybody except perhaps the person who made the error.
Why would anybody try to recreate their analysis exactly? That's a complete waste of time. When you recreate somebody else's analysis, you are likely to end up simply recreating their errors. A more scientific approach is to do your own independent analysis using the available data. There is certainly plenty available. If the conclusions are at all robust, they should not depend on the fine details of exactly which data was used.
Yes, there has been some progress in a century. Modern physical models are more sophisticated and provide more accurate numbers, particularly with respect to calculating the positive feedback between water vapor and CO2 with respect to increasing temperature, but the basic principle articulated by Arrhenius, including the logarithmic relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature, remains central to modern climate models. Modern models agree with Arrhenius that CO2 is a major driver of global climate.
Arrhenius was not concerned with the increase in CO2, but his model nevertheless supports the conclusion that increased CO2 will result in increased temperatures.