I think the XBox mkII and PS3 are in trouble before they start. Is "more polygons" the reason to throw out your game library and start again?
I don't throw out my game library. I still have my SNES and Genesis games and they still work just fine. But I am looking forward to a system that supports wide-screen HD quality graphics out of the box.
Well, they came close. I already have an iPod, but carrying around one device instead of two has its appeal. I always use shuffle mode anyway, so the fact that it works like a shuffle is OK with me. The capacity is a bit small, but OK.
In the end, it came down to two factors:
1) I really prefer flip phones
2) I want to be able to use my library for ringtones. Let me tell you about ringtones. I basically don't care all that much about them. I certainly wouldn't pay for a ringtone. But it would be kind of cool if I could select a ringtone from any song in my library (or even if limited to the first few bars)--that would get me interested in ringtones. Unfortunately, it looks like you can't use a song for a ringtone. For me, that is a killer non-feature.
While games have often regarded more as promotion for movies than as products in themselves, it is becoming clear that a successful game can be a major source of profit. A positive aspect of this is that game releases are no longer so tightly coupled to major movie releases. The rush to release a game in synchrony with the movie often results in mediocre titles.
There was indeed a Hulk game released with the movie, but it was rather undistinguished and generic, like so many releases linked to movies. Like the Spiderman 2 game, it finally manages to capture the exciting feeling of "being the character." Unfortunately, like the Spiderman2 game, it also seems to have a rather indifferent story. The "bull in a china shop" sense of controlling the rampaging Hulk in the city is an undeniable thrill, although it is also the source of one of the biggest problems with the plot, which has Doc Samson sending the Hulk on missions in the city. In the course of completing his missions the Hulk inevitably causes incredible destruction, leaving hundreds of police and civilian casualties in his wake. Perhaps wisely, human beings struck by the Hulk discretely vanish, rather than turning into bloody pulp. Still, it is somewhat difficult to imagine Doc Samson encouraging the Hulk to undertake missions with such an inevitably large death toll. Unlike most Hulk comic books stories, which gloss over the human toll of the Hulk's activities, it is hard to be unaware of just how high the body count is as you complete the game's missions. The game really needs a darker plot, more on the level of the Marvel's MAX Hulk miniseries, or the way the Hulk is treated in Marvel's "Ultimates" title.
Unfortunately socialist governments are a recent invention, and they're quickly undoing what natural selection used to take place in the wild. With massive welfare systems now in place in many countries, the dumbest people can now breed out of control, and you're paying for it. They might lack the genes to effectively compete in modern society, but it doesn't matter as long as you're paying for their house, food, healthcare, and kids.
Socialist governments provide, for people in large groups, the sort of community support that smaller communities provide out of a web of relationships.
It's is likely that highly intelligent people have always tended to have less children than average. They are too likely to get distracted by activities other than breeding. We may well be at or close to steady-state with respect to selection for intelligence. While bright parents are more likely to have bright children, there aren't that many of them. So a lot bright kids are simply the offspring of average parents who happen to have "won" the genetic lottery. While average parents produce brilliant kids less frequently, there are a lot more average people.
First off, it's hard to see *any* species as being in anything other than a state of evolution. To suggest otherwise implies a superficial understand of what evolution is about.
While evolution never completely stops, it is possible for a species to get "stuck" in a "local optimum," such that any change reduces fitness, in which case evolution will proceed only in response to external perturbation, such as a new disease.
It is far from obvious that evolution will favor continued increase in intelligence. After all, highly intelligent people, while they may be more successful in certain endeavors, are also more prone to get distracted into endeavors that interfere with their primary job (as far as natural selection is concerned) of spreading their genes as widely as possible.
However, considering how much we have modified our own environment over the past several thousand years, it seems likely that there would be evolutionary changes in the brain to adapt. I would be hesitant to seize on intelligence as the most likely factor to evolve. Another possibility might be emotional changes that make people better adapted to living in large groups.
One of my friends thinks a good candidate for selection would be avoidance of cities, since these were cholera-ridden population sinks for most of history.
In practice, however, all human populations show a high tendency to congregate in cities when given the opportunity to do so. So it suggests that the advantages to large groups outweigh the hazards. Remember, for a gene to propagate, it doesn't have to improve long-term survival, just reproductive success.
I think the lesson is that if you use third world style cronyism you have to be ready for third world quality results.
Well, yes, although I think it is putting on airs a bit to speak of "third world style cronyism." Cronyism has a long, long history in American politics and tends to be more the rule than the exception. Still, it bespeaks a remarkable level of contempt for the public welfare when such cronyism is extended to a crucial post such as head of FEMA, where large numbers of human lives are at stake.
Bush appoints the (completely unqualified, but old-boy friend of Bush) head of FEMA.
Even worse, Bush fired Clinton appointee James Lee Witt, who came to the job with several years of experience as head of disaster management in Arkansas. Witt revitalized FEMA, and was highly respected by both Republicans and Democrats, but Bush chose to replace Witt with Joe Allbaugh, Bush's campaign manager. When Allbaugh left the job, Bush appointed Brown to this crucial post--another man with no experience in disaster management (or indeed, any evidence of competence of any kind).
Visicalc had nothing to do with the Apple II. It was available for the TRS-80 as well, a far more capable business machine.
I found the Apple II far more capable, because it was the only computer of its day with a high (well, for its time, anyway) resolution bit-mapped display.
Imagine if the folks that came up with Visicalc had gotten a software patent for it?... Which big software and OS manufacturer wouldn't have a huge chunk of their current profits and wouldn't have at least one of the apps in their office pack?... How might the software landscape be different today?
Probably better. The Visicalc company had innovative interface designs that anticipated modern GUI's. Unfortunately, they were a bit ahead of the hardware, and while they were working on that, Lotus stole their market with a knock-off.
It's graphing package is horrible--unintuitive and obscure, with ugly defaults, and requiring a large number of actions for simple modifications. Even something that seems simple, like adding error bars, turns into an ordeal. Every single graphing package that I've used--Prism, Kaleidagraph, Pro-fit, Deltagraph, even the venerable Cricket Graph--is enormously superior to Excel.
I've used Excel's Solver package for years to do complex curve fitting, such as simultaneously fitting multiple curves with one or more shared parameters, which can be extremely useful. Until Harvey Motulsky added this feature to Prism, none of the commercial packages would do it. But I still find Excel to be the most convenient for doing a large number of curve fits simultaneously.
The last time I checked out the Open Office equivalent of Excel, it didn't seem to have anything like the Solver.
Occam's Razor is often misunderstood as offering a way to choose which of two theories is better. But in fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that simple theories are more likely to be correct--if anything, the trend of history seems to be that simple theories eventually get rejected in favor of more complex ones.
A better way of thinking of Occam's Razor is as a rule of thumb for ordering the universe of possible hypotheses for investigation. Simple theories have fewer free variables, which generally makes them easier to test. So it is most efficient to eliminate the simple theories first before proceeding to the more complex ones.
This actually seems like a rather good theory, in that it offers testable predictions.
Plenty of people run OS X Server on Apple's tower computers (we do, in fact). These are general-purpose computers, not "desktop" models like the iMac. OS X Server predates XServe, and is marketed as compatible with any Mac system.
Put yourself in the position of a lower-income family, perhaps a single parent with two or three kids, working a minimum wage job. Missing even a couple of days of work puts you in danger of being evicted from your apartment. Perhaps you evacuated for Ivan, which turned out to be a fizzle, and barely survived the financial hit. Don't you think that you might decide to bet that this one would miss, too?
It is basically a review. The fundamental statistical argument is well known and has been published elsewhere. It is mainly applicable to a tiny minority of studies--the sort commonly regarded as "fishing expeditions" in which one is trying to find which of a large number of possible factors is associated with a particular phenomenon, knowing that most of them probably are not.
In my field, I've found that false results are not much of a problem. Generally, results that are published in good peer-reviewed journals and that appear statistically robust tend to hold up well over time.
In my experience, the primary source of error is not incorrect results, but incorrect conclusions--the results are correct, but they don't mean what you think they do, because the true situation is more complex than you think: there is some confounding factor, or none of the hypotheses considered are quite correct, and a more complex hypothesis is required.
All that is true. But you left out possibly the worst effect of false papers - the effect they can have on the funding gatekeepers. A handful of just BAD research papers, all claiming to show what those that hold the pursestrings want to hear, and suddenly that false conclusion is a 'scientific fact' and anyone that wants their studies to be funded in the future had damn well better agree with that. Which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
While I have not found this to be a common problem, it does happen. Often, the original paper will be quite reasonable, pointing out the potential weaknesses in the reasoning. But then the conclusion gets repeated in reviews and cited in other papers, shorn of those qualifications.
At this point, it becomes hard to study the topic. You can't get grant money for it, because the question is widely regarded as already settled. If you do the study properly and confirm the original result, you have trouble getting it published in a decent journal, because you are only confirming what people think they know. If you show that it is wrong (probably while trying to do something else that you could get funded), you need to provide a higher level of evidence, because you need to overcome everybody's preconceptions.
Is there reason to believe that this hypothetical creator should have designed brains incapable of being tricked? Why didn't this creator make us able to fly, breath underwater, or stick to the walls? What else are you going to ask me to explain, and why should I be obligated to provide an answer?
These are the sort of questions that a real scientific theory of Intelligent Design would have to answer. A scientific theory must make strong predictions that are testable, and that if proved false will lead to the rejection of the theory. So any scientific theory of Intelligent Design must confront the motivations and limitations of the hypothesized creator. In the absence of predictions, a hypothesis is scientifically sterile--it leads to no progress.
What religious zealots don't understand about science is that the most important thing about a theory is not truth--truth is for philosophers, not scientists--but it's value as a tool to lead to increased knowledge. The worthlessness of ID as a theory is evinced by the fact that nobody--not even the tiny handful of scientists who style themselves as ID advocates--actually uses ID to guide their research, because there is no theory of ID. ID scientists use evolutionary theory, just like everybody else.
I definitely can't prove that wrong. But if Plantinga's argument is true, then that statement is preferable to the theory of evolution because it at least is not self-defeating. It may not be the best theory for one reason or another, but it is at least logically consistent.
However, it is useless as a scientific theory, because it is an intellectual dead end--there are not predictions that can be derived, no experiments or observations that can be suggested. The value of a scientific theory is that if it is wrong, we will eventually find out, and in the meantime we learn a lot more about nature from trying to test it. A false theory that makes definite predictions is a useful scientific tool. A true idea that makes no predictions is scientifically worthless.
Frequently made but false assertion. Yes, we can make up stories like yours that can never be falsified. But that doesn't mean that every explanation involving a creator is unfalsifiable. Dembski, for example, argues for a creator on the basis of what he calls complex specified information.
Demski's argument is a critique of evolutionary theory. He does not derive any falsifiable predictions from ID. He can't; there is no theory of ID. Demski's only argument is essentially the fallacy of the excluded middle--i.e. he argues that natural selection is false, and that therefore ID must be true. That presumes that there is no other possible explanation aside from natural selection and ID. In fact, other theories have been proposed, such as Sheldrake's morphogenetic field hypothesis--they just haven't attracted much interest because natural selection has been so successful.
I'd say that this one falls into the group that are probably wrong.
The problem with the paper is that it is based on the rather trivial point that for a single result, obtained with a statistical P = 0.05, where the prior probability of the hypothesis being correct is low (i.e. most of the time the null hypothesis is true), obtaining that positive result does not give you a very high net probability that the hypothesis is correct.
This is all quite true, but scientists are quite aware of it. This is why it is hard to get a paper published if a major conclusion depends upon a single result with P = 0.05. Generally, the important results in a paper are based on multiple experiments, and often with P much less than 0.05. P = 0.05 is, after all, by convention merely a minimal criterion for an experimental result to be taken seriously--even under the most optimistic circumstances, there is a 1 in 20 chance that the result could have occurred by chance. Even then, few scientists will consider a question entirely settled if the results are all from a single paper, or even a single research group. Scientists are fully aware of the fact that the P value is typically optimistic, since it doesn't take into account systematic error, bias, or artifact, and is often based on unverified assumptions as to the nature of the statistical distribution. So it is misleading to think of a research paper as representing one or more conclusions that are either true or false--it should rather be thought of as a narrative of a series of observations, with the statistics used to provide a general estimate of the level of "noise" present in the system. A published result is simply one more data point which a scientist will take into account in evaluating whether a hypothesis is likely to be correct.
Moreover, the model in which there are a large number of possible conclusions, of which only one can be true (so that the prior probability is small) often doesn't apply. Very many research questions are binary--i.e. there are only two possibilities, true or false, and there is no strong prior reason to prefer one over the other.
You spend all this money on a device that's only going to last you two or three years at best.
So what? Many people use their iPods and cellphones every day. So amortized over a two or three year life, that probably works out to about a penny a day.
Do you really NEED a music player combined with your cell phone? You've been getting along without one all this time. Why the sudden change? I'll tell you why. Because your mind is owned by the business who want (and don't deserve) access to your money!
Not particularly. In fact, I don't NEED a cell phone or music player at all. But they certainly make life more pleasant, just as it would be more pleasant and simpler to have only one device to carry around instead of two. And if that is worth a penny a day to me, why is it so terrible for businesses to offer me that option?
Actually, it is mute. Moot, while spelled the same, usually refers to imaginary cases given to law students to argue. Its a very profession-specific term.
Mute, pronounced moot, means expressed without spoken.
No. I consider this the second most annoying modern misspelling (after "phased" for "fazed"). When referring to a point, the only correct spelling is "moot." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a nice explanation of the derivation.
From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
Usage Note: The adjective moot is originally a legal term going back to the mid-16th century. It derives from the noun moot, in its sense of a hypothetical case argued as an exercise by law students. Consequently, a moot question is one that is arguable or open to debate. But in the mid-19th century people also began to look at the hypothetical side of moot as its essential meaning, and they started to use the word to mean "of no significance or relevance." Thus, a moot point, however debatable, is one that has no practical value. A number of critics have objected to this use, but 59 percent of the Usage Panel accepts it in the sentence The nominee himself chastised the White House for failing to do more to support him, but his concerns became moot when a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would oppose the nomination. When using moot one should be sure that the context makes clear which sense is meant.
It's modern legal meaning is consistent with this: "Without legal significance, through having been previously decided or settled."
"Mute" of course, does not mean expressed without being spoken. It means "unable to speak," although like "moot" it also has a specialized legal meaning of "refusing to enter a plea."
I believe the reference was to the weird little GameBoy Micro they just released; and I'm inclined to agree with the Sony guy actually, it is a gimmick.
No, if you RTFA, you'll see that he was specifically talking about the touch screen on the DS.
As for the GBA Micro, it is not a gimmick, but it is nothing special--merely another edition of the GBA that offers a more convenient size--small enough for people to carry around routinely, like they do a cell phone. As such, it will compete with the cell phone gaming market, which Nintendo may see as more significant competition for the GBA than the Sony PSP. The Micro also differentiates the GBA from the DS, and demonstrates to developers Nintendo's continuing support of the GBA platform.
That being said, the IQ test is rather old and comes from a day when mostly men were controlling academia and things like IQ testing. The tests were designed by men. If men were designing the tests, would it not then be reasonable to assume that the tests might be more geared towards men?
IQ tests are designed not to show much gender bias, balancing questions that men do well on with questions women do well on. As such, they are not designed to measure differences between men and women, and the small 5 point difference mainly reflects how well the test is balanced, providing no meaningful information about the magnitude of sex related differences in intelligence. It would not be hard to come up with a test that favored either men or women.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the XBox mkII and PS3 are in trouble before they start. Is "more polygons" the reason to throw out your game library and start again?
I don't throw out my game library. I still have my SNES and Genesis games and they still work just fine. But I am looking forward to a system that supports wide-screen HD quality graphics out of the box.
Well, they came close. I already have an iPod, but carrying around one device instead of two has its appeal. I always use shuffle mode anyway, so the fact that it works like a shuffle is OK with me. The capacity is a bit small, but OK.
In the end, it came down to two factors:
1) I really prefer flip phones
2) I want to be able to use my library for ringtones. Let me tell you about ringtones. I basically don't care all that much about them. I certainly wouldn't pay for a ringtone. But it would be kind of cool if I could select a ringtone from any song in my library (or even if limited to the first few bars)--that would get me interested in ringtones. Unfortunately, it looks like you can't use a song for a ringtone. For me, that is a killer non-feature.
While games have often regarded more as promotion for movies than as products in themselves, it is becoming clear that a successful game can be a major source of profit. A positive aspect of this is that game releases are no longer so tightly coupled to major movie releases. The rush to release a game in synchrony with the movie often results in mediocre titles.
There was indeed a Hulk game released with the movie, but it was rather undistinguished and generic, like so many releases linked to movies. Like the Spiderman 2 game, it finally manages to capture the exciting feeling of "being the character." Unfortunately, like the Spiderman2 game, it also seems to have a rather indifferent story. The "bull in a china shop" sense of controlling the rampaging Hulk in the city is an undeniable thrill, although it is also the source of one of the biggest problems with the plot, which has Doc Samson sending the Hulk on missions in the city. In the course of completing his missions the Hulk inevitably causes incredible destruction, leaving hundreds of police and civilian casualties in his wake. Perhaps wisely, human beings struck by the Hulk discretely vanish, rather than turning into bloody pulp. Still, it is somewhat difficult to imagine Doc Samson encouraging the Hulk to undertake missions with such an inevitably large death toll. Unlike most Hulk comic books stories, which gloss over the human toll of the Hulk's activities, it is hard to be unaware of just how high the body count is as you complete the game's missions. The game really needs a darker plot, more on the level of the Marvel's MAX Hulk miniseries, or the way the Hulk is treated in Marvel's "Ultimates" title.
Unfortunately socialist governments are a recent invention, and they're quickly undoing what natural selection used to take place in the wild. With massive welfare systems now in place in many countries, the dumbest people can now breed out of control, and you're paying for it. They might lack the genes to effectively compete in modern society, but it doesn't matter as long as you're paying for their house, food, healthcare, and kids.
Socialist governments provide, for people in large groups, the sort of community support that smaller communities provide out of a web of relationships.
It's is likely that highly intelligent people have always tended to have less children than average. They are too likely to get distracted by activities other than breeding. We may well be at or close to steady-state with respect to selection for intelligence. While bright parents are more likely to have bright children, there aren't that many of them. So a lot bright kids are simply the offspring of average parents who happen to have "won" the genetic lottery. While average parents produce brilliant kids less frequently, there are a lot more average people.
First off, it's hard to see *any* species as being in anything other than a state of evolution. To suggest otherwise implies a superficial understand of what evolution is about.
While evolution never completely stops, it is possible for a species to get "stuck" in a "local optimum," such that any change reduces fitness, in which case evolution will proceed only in response to external perturbation, such as a new disease.
It is far from obvious that evolution will favor continued increase in intelligence. After all, highly intelligent people, while they may be more successful in certain endeavors, are also more prone to get distracted into endeavors that interfere with their primary job (as far as natural selection is concerned) of spreading their genes as widely as possible.
However, considering how much we have modified our own environment over the past several thousand years, it seems likely that there would be evolutionary changes in the brain to adapt. I would be hesitant to seize on intelligence as the most likely factor to evolve. Another possibility might be emotional changes that make people better adapted to living in large groups.
One of my friends thinks a good candidate for selection would be avoidance of cities, since these were cholera-ridden population sinks for most of history.
In practice, however, all human populations show a high tendency to congregate in cities when given the opportunity to do so. So it suggests that the advantages to large groups outweigh the hazards. Remember, for a gene to propagate, it doesn't have to improve long-term survival, just reproductive success.
I think the lesson is that if you use third world style cronyism you have to be ready for third world quality results.
Well, yes, although I think it is putting on airs a bit to speak of "third world style cronyism." Cronyism has a long, long history in American politics and tends to be more the rule than the exception. Still, it bespeaks a remarkable level of contempt for the public welfare when such cronyism is extended to a crucial post such as head of FEMA, where large numbers of human lives are at stake.
Bush appoints the (completely unqualified, but old-boy friend of Bush) head of FEMA.
Even worse, Bush fired Clinton appointee James Lee Witt, who came to the job with several years of experience as head of disaster management in Arkansas. Witt revitalized FEMA, and was highly respected by both Republicans and Democrats, but Bush chose to replace Witt with Joe Allbaugh, Bush's campaign manager. When Allbaugh left the job, Bush appointed Brown to this crucial post--another man with no experience in disaster management (or indeed, any evidence of competence of any kind).
Visicalc had nothing to do with the Apple II. It was available for the TRS-80 as well, a far more capable business machine.
I found the Apple II far more capable, because it was the only computer of its day with a high (well, for its time, anyway) resolution bit-mapped display.
Imagine if the folks that came up with Visicalc had gotten a software patent for it?... Which big software and OS manufacturer wouldn't have a huge chunk of their current profits and wouldn't have at least one of the apps in their office pack?... How might the software landscape be different today?
Probably better. The Visicalc company had innovative interface designs that anticipated modern GUI's. Unfortunately, they were a bit ahead of the hardware, and while they were working on that, Lotus stole their market with a knock-off.
It's graphing package is horrible--unintuitive and obscure, with ugly defaults, and requiring a large number of actions for simple modifications. Even something that seems simple, like adding error bars, turns into an ordeal. Every single graphing package that I've used--Prism, Kaleidagraph, Pro-fit, Deltagraph, even the venerable Cricket Graph--is enormously superior to Excel.
I've used Excel's Solver package for years to do complex curve fitting, such as simultaneously fitting multiple curves with one or more shared parameters, which can be extremely useful. Until Harvey Motulsky added this feature to Prism, none of the commercial packages would do it. But I still find Excel to be the most convenient for doing a large number of curve fits simultaneously.
The last time I checked out the Open Office equivalent of Excel, it didn't seem to have anything like the Solver.
Occam's Razor is often misunderstood as offering a way to choose which of two theories is better. But in fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that simple theories are more likely to be correct--if anything, the trend of history seems to be that simple theories eventually get rejected in favor of more complex ones.
A better way of thinking of Occam's Razor is as a rule of thumb for ordering the universe of possible hypotheses for investigation. Simple theories have fewer free variables, which generally makes them easier to test. So it is most efficient to eliminate the simple theories first before proceeding to the more complex ones.
This actually seems like a rather good theory, in that it offers testable predictions.
Testing an XServe, and not a desktop model.
Plenty of people run OS X Server on Apple's tower computers (we do, in fact). These are general-purpose computers, not "desktop" models like the iMac. OS X Server predates XServe, and is marketed as compatible with any Mac system.
Put yourself in the position of a lower-income family, perhaps a single parent with two or three kids, working a minimum wage job. Missing even a couple of days of work puts you in danger of being evicted from your apartment. Perhaps you evacuated for Ivan, which turned out to be a fizzle, and barely survived the financial hit. Don't you think that you might decide to bet that this one would miss, too?
It is basically a review. The fundamental statistical argument is well known and has been published elsewhere. It is mainly applicable to a tiny minority of studies--the sort commonly regarded as "fishing expeditions" in which one is trying to find which of a large number of possible factors is associated with a particular phenomenon, knowing that most of them probably are not.
In my field, I've found that false results are not much of a problem. Generally, results that are published in good peer-reviewed journals and that appear statistically robust tend to hold up well over time.
In my experience, the primary source of error is not incorrect results, but incorrect conclusions--the results are correct, but they don't mean what you think they do, because the true situation is more complex than you think: there is some confounding factor, or none of the hypotheses considered are quite correct, and a more complex hypothesis is required.
All that is true. But you left out possibly the worst effect of false papers - the effect they can have on the funding gatekeepers. A handful of just BAD research papers, all claiming to show what those that hold the pursestrings want to hear, and suddenly that false conclusion is a 'scientific fact' and anyone that wants their studies to be funded in the future had damn well better agree with that. Which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
While I have not found this to be a common problem, it does happen. Often, the original paper will be quite reasonable, pointing out the potential weaknesses in the reasoning. But then the conclusion gets repeated in reviews and cited in other papers, shorn of those qualifications.
At this point, it becomes hard to study the topic. You can't get grant money for it, because the question is widely regarded as already settled. If you do the study properly and confirm the original result, you have trouble getting it published in a decent journal, because you are only confirming what people think they know. If you show that it is wrong (probably while trying to do something else that you could get funded), you need to provide a higher level of evidence, because you need to overcome everybody's preconceptions.
Is there reason to believe that this hypothetical creator should have designed brains incapable of being tricked? Why didn't this creator make us able to fly, breath underwater, or stick to the walls? What else are you going to ask me to explain, and why should I be obligated to provide an answer?
These are the sort of questions that a real scientific theory of Intelligent Design would have to answer. A scientific theory must make strong predictions that are testable, and that if proved false will lead to the rejection of the theory. So any scientific theory of Intelligent Design must confront the motivations and limitations of the hypothesized creator. In the absence of predictions, a hypothesis is scientifically sterile--it leads to no progress.
What religious zealots don't understand about science is that the most important thing about a theory is not truth--truth is for philosophers, not scientists--but it's value as a tool to lead to increased knowledge. The worthlessness of ID as a theory is evinced by the fact that nobody--not even the tiny handful of scientists who style themselves as ID advocates--actually uses ID to guide their research, because there is no theory of ID. ID scientists use evolutionary theory, just like everybody else.
I definitely can't prove that wrong. But if Plantinga's argument is true, then that statement is preferable to the theory of evolution because it at least is not self-defeating. It may not be the best theory for one reason or another, but it is at least logically consistent.
However, it is useless as a scientific theory, because it is an intellectual dead end--there are not predictions that can be derived, no experiments or observations that can be suggested. The value of a scientific theory is that if it is wrong, we will eventually find out, and in the meantime we learn a lot more about nature from trying to test it. A false theory that makes definite predictions is a useful scientific tool. A true idea that makes no predictions is scientifically worthless.
Frequently made but false assertion. Yes, we can make up stories like yours that can never be falsified. But that doesn't mean that every explanation involving a creator is unfalsifiable. Dembski, for example, argues for a creator on the basis of what he calls complex specified information.
Demski's argument is a critique of evolutionary theory. He does not derive any falsifiable predictions from ID. He can't; there is no theory of ID. Demski's only argument is essentially the fallacy of the excluded middle--i.e. he argues that natural selection is false, and that therefore ID must be true. That presumes that there is no other possible explanation aside from natural selection and ID. In fact, other theories have been proposed, such as Sheldrake's morphogenetic field hypothesis--they just haven't attracted much interest because natural selection has been so successful.
I'd say that this one falls into the group that are probably wrong.
The problem with the paper is that it is based on the rather trivial point that for a single result, obtained with a statistical P = 0.05, where the prior probability of the hypothesis being correct is low (i.e. most of the time the null hypothesis is true), obtaining that positive result does not give you a very high net probability that the hypothesis is correct.
This is all quite true, but scientists are quite aware of it. This is why it is hard to get a paper published if a major conclusion depends upon a single result with P = 0.05. Generally, the important results in a paper are based on multiple experiments, and often with P much less than 0.05. P = 0.05 is, after all, by convention merely a minimal criterion for an experimental result to be taken seriously--even under the most optimistic circumstances, there is a 1 in 20 chance that the result could have occurred by chance. Even then, few scientists will consider a question entirely settled if the results are all from a single paper, or even a single research group. Scientists are fully aware of the fact that the P value is typically optimistic, since it doesn't take into account systematic error, bias, or artifact, and is often based on unverified assumptions as to the nature of the statistical distribution. So it is misleading to think of a research paper as representing one or more conclusions that are either true or false--it should rather be thought of as a narrative of a series of observations, with the statistics used to provide a general estimate of the level of "noise" present in the system. A published result is simply one more data point which a scientist will take into account in evaluating whether a hypothesis is likely to be correct.
Moreover, the model in which there are a large number of possible conclusions, of which only one can be true (so that the prior probability is small) often doesn't apply. Very many research questions are binary--i.e. there are only two possibilities, true or false, and there is no strong prior reason to prefer one over the other.
You spend all this money on a device that's only going to last you two or three years at best.
So what? Many people use their iPods and cellphones every day. So amortized over a two or three year life, that probably works out to about a penny a day.
Do you really NEED a music player combined with your cell phone? You've been getting along without one all this time. Why the sudden change? I'll tell you why. Because your mind is owned by the business who want (and don't deserve) access to your money!
Not particularly. In fact, I don't NEED a cell phone or music player at all. But they certainly make life more pleasant, just as it would be more pleasant and simpler to have only one device to carry around instead of two. And if that is worth a penny a day to me, why is it so terrible for businesses to offer me that option?
Imagine some idiot having ~500 minutes worth of ringtones!
Shuffle ringtones!
"Is that me?"
"No, wait, that's one of my favorite songs, it must be me."
Mute, pronounced moot, means expressed without spoken.
No. I consider this the second most annoying modern misspelling (after "phased" for "fazed"). When referring to a point, the only correct spelling is "moot." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a nice explanation of the derivation.
From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
It's modern legal meaning is consistent with this: "Without legal significance, through having been previously decided or settled."
"Mute" of course, does not mean expressed without being spoken. It means "unable to speak," although like "moot" it also has a specialized legal meaning of "refusing to enter a plea."
I believe the reference was to the weird little GameBoy Micro they just released; and I'm inclined to agree with the Sony guy actually, it is a gimmick.
No, if you RTFA, you'll see that he was specifically talking about the touch screen on the DS.
As for the GBA Micro, it is not a gimmick, but it is nothing special--merely another edition of the GBA that offers a more convenient size--small enough for people to carry around routinely, like they do a cell phone. As such, it will compete with the cell phone gaming market, which Nintendo may see as more significant competition for the GBA than the Sony PSP. The Micro also differentiates the GBA from the DS, and demonstrates to developers Nintendo's continuing support of the GBA platform.
That being said, the IQ test is rather old and comes from a day when mostly men were controlling academia and things like IQ testing. The tests were designed by men. If men were designing the tests, would it not then be reasonable to assume that the tests might be more geared towards men?
IQ tests are designed not to show much gender bias, balancing questions that men do well on with questions women do well on. As such, they are not designed to measure differences between men and women, and the small 5 point difference mainly reflects how well the test is balanced, providing no meaningful information about the magnitude of sex related differences in intelligence. It would not be hard to come up with a test that favored either men or women.