60's. Citation please. In the 50's, the companies were not laughing in the least, though they were questioning the data (some of which had some quite big holes in it).
Hell, people were complaining about the health effects of cigarette smoke in the 1700's, if not before.
These kids are really smart. But they are not smart enough that they are really doing original research at age 17. Instead, they are being dragged around by graduate students and post-docs, given orders as to what to do, and if they are really good, may actually produce enough grunt labor for the grad student that the grad student feels he or she may have gotten a good deal. Most of the time this is not the case, and these high school kids require more input than they provide in output. This is true for undergraduates coming through on one-semester research projects, too. At least in my experience, any student who is in the lab for less than 4 months full-time or a school-year half time is a burden on the research, not a bonus. Even then, it takes nearly double that time for the student to contribute much beyond grunt work.
Whether we like it or not, doing real research is hard and takes a lot of knowledge and preparation. The giants whose shoulders we must climb are very tall and growing by the minute. These 17 year olds are not there. Hell, I am 31 and not there.
Perhaps the head article is right about one thing, though - scientific "merit" too often depends on which research group you hitch yourself to rather than the quality of your own thinking.
Buzzwords mean everything in science. If I hear "nano" one more time I am going to puke (and "nano" is my own darned field!). You are also wrong about corporations. They are less like to give into BS buzzwords and actually ask the most important question - what you you do for us?
The same crowd that champions the causes of transexuals and gays by claiming their behavior is biologically based (this is correct) is the same crowd that throws a hissy fit when someone suggests that women on the average are willing to make more sacrifices for their children and therefore will not be as likely to take up jobs that require absurd hours (like a Harvard professor), even though this is just as true and the logic is the same. It is also funny watching them squeal when someone claims that there is a wider distribution of mathematical ability for men than women which may cause the dominance of males in the upper eschelons of math, even though this also implies that there are more male idiots. I didn't hear anyone complain about that.
plenty of corporate ones. The only difference is one has a purpose and the other is a bunch of people playing around with other peoples' money. When I switch from one type of project, neither my way of thinking nor my methods change - only the goal of the research.
I'd estimate that only about 1% of the academic articles I run across will have any impact on any normal person ever. Most of them are just "Variation #23452 on Theme #964, Hey, No One Has Done This Before!"
No one would deny their are biological sex differences. Men have penises. Women have vaginas and breasts. There are not many exceptions or indistinct cases.
However, suggesting that gender differences have roots in biology will get you into some hot water really quick if you are in the wrong crowd. This group of people want gender to be completely divorced from biological reality, so they can shape it to their will. Telling them that their dream is not possible makes them very upset.
It is any research that no one would spend their own money doing. That's pretty telling to me. If stem-cell research offered a fraction of what the hype promised, then there would be plenty of reasons for evil, greedy corporations to jump on the bandwagon. They aren't.
The distinction between "basic" and "applied" research is a myth perpetuated by people that can't get others to fund their research voluntarily. If there ever was such a distinction, it has blurred beyond any hope of recoginition.
This was not an isolated incident, either. This has an effect on our public policy as well. If one posits that men/women or blacks/whites/reds/greens/oranges are all exactly equal on average and in distribution, then one can infer that a fair system will produce equal outcomes. Therefore, one can measure "bias" in the system by noting unequal outcomes. However, if the inputs are not exactly equal, then a difference in outcome may not be indicative of a problem with the system.
Trying to root out biases is important. We cannot do this if we start with false assumptions about our inputs, leading us to waste energy trying to eliminate biases that may not even exist. We should be able to have rational discussions about racial differences in various intelligences (the evidence is strong) and gender differences (the evidence is overwhelming). The incident at Harvard proves we are incapable of this as yet.
The GMO foods issue is an even bigger problem. People, right now, are starving because of the left's anti-scientific worry over GMO foods. Take anything bad you can say about the right's objection to stem cells and multiply it by a thousand.
I hate all science that appears in the mass media, because it is overhyped to the extreme - and that is before politics. Why? Because the scientists who study it are self-selected (bias). Then they have every reason to hype their work to get funding (bias). Then they cherry-pick data (bias). Then the news selects the most outlying data to present (bias) and then hypes it (bias). If you add politics, you get yet another layer of mega bias.
Stem-cells only look so promising because you are seeing them through about a dozen hype filters. Down in the trenches, they are one technology out of many. There are tens of thousands of biomedical research groups, and probably only a few hundred do work related to stem cells. If they are such a miracle, why is this so? Why is there virtually no major corporate research, given that corporations do half the research)?
and uselessly burn the oil yourself. It might even be more efficient. Or better yet, spend your money on a bit of gasoline and start torching national forests. That'll really get you a good ratio!
In any case, unless your real spending habits are far different from the average person's (ie, you don't spend your money on consumer goods, your home, car, services, etc) your emission profile is the same, multiplied by your spending vs the average.
Cosmology: Getting away from the earth is too darned expensive and will be for quite a long time. What difference is worrying about dark matter or cosmic background raditation going to make in our daily lives?
String theory: Speculation on paper. We are a long way from even being able to test it in our mega mega colliders. No one is going to make a better widget based on string theory in the foreseeable future.
Stem cells: Stems cells are a road, not a destination. They are clunky to work with and have all sorts of ethical concerns. We will have better methods without the ethical issues long before 2100.
In any case, stem cell research has been vastly overblown because of the political controversy. Stem cells are one possible technology out of thousands. Who knows which ones will actually provide the breakthroughs.
That would be both absurd and impossible to prove. How could one demonstrate that there is no underlying natural trend?
However, there is broad consensus across the scientific community that temperatures are rising and we are a significant, if not the sole, cause. If you need details, there are plenty of freebies at Nature and Science. That should get you started.
Arguing that we aren't causing global warming is little different than claiming the earth is 6000 years old and that we are all decended from Adam and Eve.
Btw, there is plenty of scientific and economic support for Lomborg as well. Yes, he touched off a firestorm by daring to touch a sacred taboo. God bless him for that.
Three nobel prize winners contributed to GCGS. I bet they are all crocks.
and we will spend a lot of time trying to find our ghosts.
The problem now is not lack of information, or lack of access, but indeed the opposite. There is far, far too much of it! I am a scientist. Papers in my sub-sub-sub specialty are now being produced so fast that I can no longer read them all, or even give them more than a glance. I do not think there is much hope in "augmenting" our abilities without completely moving them outside of our bodies. Our brains are pretty well optimized for their jobs as is. But if the augmentation is outside, why not replace the whole? We will. In any case, I think if you have any machine that is close to real AI, it will have a survival instinct. Indeed, this may be one of the defining characteristics.
GMO scare stories hurt our farmers overseas, and the refusal to have honest discussions about race and gender are strongly affecting our education policies. Likewise, the hard left's refusal to put values on human rights causes us to waste huge amounts of money on preventing minor risks.
and Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions". Numerous experts were invited to address these various issues and debate one another. When you read the Global Warming chapter, it becomes pretty obvious that unless you make some really outlying assumptions (both scientific and philosophical) there is not a whole lot we can do about global warming that is worth the price. Meanwhile, the chapters on such things as malaria mitigation come up tremendously positive. As one economist put it, would you rather pay $400 to buy an African family a solar-powered cooking stove and do them a little bit of good, or would you rather pay $10 and buy them a mosquito net, and do them a lot of good? The choice should be obvious.
Now why on earth would global warming reduce GDP by 20%? Not even the whacky whackies would predict that much. How would a 3C rise in temperature reduce your work output by 20%? Seriously.
When the economist crunch the numbers, it comes out as a wash at best. We can do better with things with the money.
It's interesting to note that the "hot-button" issues you listed are all ones where the opponents are on the political right, while you ignore the "hot-button" issues where the opponents are on the left. Which would you rather do?
1: Walk into your local church and try to have a reasonable discussion about evolution
2: Walk into Harvard and try to have a reasonable discussion about biological gender differences
The left has as many scientific taboos as the right (race and sex with respect to genetics, genetically modified foods, pretty much anything to do with economics when human lives are factored into the equation, etc). Both sides ignore evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
keeps screwing up their argument. When they argue that global warming isn't happening, or man is not causing it, they are being flat-out stupid. There is no scientific debate at all about either of those two points. The only debate now is to what extent it is going to happen, and what damages (and benefits) will it bring.
However, the anti crowd does have a good argument that they do not utilize fully - an economic argument. It is not at all clear that any potential global warming mitigation is beneficial. In almost all cases, either the cost-benefits come up negative, or just slightly positive. In the latter case, there are many other humanitarian issues with superb cost-benefits (50:1), so again, it is not clear that any government action to mitigate global warming is justified.
Sometimes, global warming activists will make claims like "we can mitigate global warming by X percent with only 2% of the world's projected GDP", to which a wise person would respond that with 2% of the world's GDP, we could provide food and clean water to everyone who does not currently have it, along with providing basic health care and making massive inroads against HIV and malaria. Which is more important?
Anything to do with cosmology and string theory will have no impact on our daily lives by 2100. Stem cells, while interesting, have been blown way out of proportion relative to their actual importance. They will (in some incarnation) probably play a role in the only point I agree with here - the biotechnical merging of man and machine. I think the anime series "Ghost in the Shell" is not terribly far off the mark with respect to how this will transform our lives.
On the other hand, there are two big technological transformations that were completely missed that I am convinced will happen this century:
1: AI. It's always 30 years away. But it is much less than 100 years away. Computers will be as smart as us by mid-century and much smarter by 2100, by when we will have the MotherBrainSkyNet.
2: The energy revolution. A combination of rising dinofuel prices, falling renewable prices, and mid-century industrial fusion will completely change our use of energy. Global warming will be large averted.
The world of 2100 will be richer, cleaner, and more peaceful than that of today. The biggest problem will be convincing people to have enough babies.
this being possible in principle. When someone builds a "cable" of a few microns strong enough to support its own weight if scaled to space-elevator size, then I agree, this becomes an engineering problem.
So far, no one has demonstrated that such a cable exists.
Unlike the vast majority of science articles I read here on Slashdot, this new device appears to be the real deal, will be in actual use very quickly, and will make a difference in the relevant scientific community.
Most of the articles here are either pseudo-science or random articles with no particular scientific significance but some controversial or funny element.
did. I can't remember a car accident, but I do remember hearing about deaths and rapes in Japan. You are right, the crime rate for the soldiers here in Japan is typical for their age group. People who blather about this stuff are falling for typical anti-American crap. (Not that there are not legitimate reasons to criticize the US, but it drives me nuts that 90% of anti-American arguments are such childish nonsense that I can find no other words for it but bigotry and hypocrisy).
Slashdot Mirror
60's. Citation please. In the 50's, the companies were not laughing in the least, though they were questioning the data (some of which had some quite big holes in it).
Hell, people were complaining about the health effects of cigarette smoke in the 1700's, if not before.
These kids are really smart. But they are not smart enough that they are really doing original research at age 17. Instead, they are being dragged around by graduate students and post-docs, given orders as to what to do, and if they are really good, may actually produce enough grunt labor for the grad student that the grad student feels he or she may have gotten a good deal. Most of the time this is not the case, and these high school kids require more input than they provide in output. This is true for undergraduates coming through on one-semester research projects, too. At least in my experience, any student who is in the lab for less than 4 months full-time or a school-year half time is a burden on the research, not a bonus. Even then, it takes nearly double that time for the student to contribute much beyond grunt work.
Whether we like it or not, doing real research is hard and takes a lot of knowledge and preparation. The giants whose shoulders we must climb are very tall and growing by the minute. These 17 year olds are not there. Hell, I am 31 and not there.
Perhaps the head article is right about one thing, though - scientific "merit" too often depends on which research group you hitch yourself to rather than the quality of your own thinking.
Buzzwords mean everything in science. If I hear "nano" one more time I am going to puke (and "nano" is my own darned field!). You are also wrong about corporations. They are less like to give into BS buzzwords and actually ask the most important question - what you you do for us?
The same crowd that champions the causes of transexuals and gays by claiming their behavior is biologically based (this is correct) is the same crowd that throws a hissy fit when someone suggests that women on the average are willing to make more sacrifices for their children and therefore will not be as likely to take up jobs that require absurd hours (like a Harvard professor), even though this is just as true and the logic is the same. It is also funny watching them squeal when someone claims that there is a wider distribution of mathematical ability for men than women which may cause the dominance of males in the upper eschelons of math, even though this also implies that there are more male idiots. I didn't hear anyone complain about that.
plenty of corporate ones. The only difference is one has a purpose and the other is a bunch of people playing around with other peoples' money. When I switch from one type of project, neither my way of thinking nor my methods change - only the goal of the research.
I'd estimate that only about 1% of the academic articles I run across will have any impact on any normal person ever. Most of them are just "Variation #23452 on Theme #964, Hey, No One Has Done This Before!"
No one would deny their are biological sex differences. Men have penises. Women have vaginas and breasts. There are not many exceptions or indistinct cases.
However, suggesting that gender differences have roots in biology will get you into some hot water really quick if you are in the wrong crowd. This group of people want gender to be completely divorced from biological reality, so they can shape it to their will. Telling them that their dream is not possible makes them very upset.
It is any research that no one would spend their own money doing. That's pretty telling to me. If stem-cell research offered a fraction of what the hype promised, then there would be plenty of reasons for evil, greedy corporations to jump on the bandwagon. They aren't.
The distinction between "basic" and "applied" research is a myth perpetuated by people that can't get others to fund their research voluntarily. If there ever was such a distinction, it has blurred beyond any hope of recoginition.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml;js essionid=R2SCQNKZZJTYJQFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/con nected/2006/02/07/ecnthink07.xml&%5C1sSheet=/conne cted/2006/02/07/ixconn.html
Even the editors of Science are not immune to the fear of being tarred and feathered for daring to be un-PC.
This was not an isolated incident, either. This has an effect on our public policy as well. If one posits that men/women or blacks/whites/reds/greens/oranges are all exactly equal on average and in distribution, then one can infer that a fair system will produce equal outcomes. Therefore, one can measure "bias" in the system by noting unequal outcomes. However, if the inputs are not exactly equal, then a difference in outcome may not be indicative of a problem with the system.
Trying to root out biases is important. We cannot do this if we start with false assumptions about our inputs, leading us to waste energy trying to eliminate biases that may not even exist. We should be able to have rational discussions about racial differences in various intelligences (the evidence is strong) and gender differences (the evidence is overwhelming). The incident at Harvard proves we are incapable of this as yet.
The GMO foods issue is an even bigger problem. People, right now, are starving because of the left's anti-scientific worry over GMO foods. Take anything bad you can say about the right's objection to stem cells and multiply it by a thousand.
journal articles. How many more do you need?
You have some interesting logical issues. You should know that your request that I prove a negative (that no other source exists) is impossible.
Here are the three major facts:
1: We are releasing greenhouse gases
2: Models predict releasing greenhouse gases on this scale will cause warming
3: The earth is warming
What else do you need? What would consititute "proof" in your opinion?
I hate all science that appears in the mass media, because it is overhyped to the extreme - and that is before politics. Why? Because the scientists who study it are self-selected (bias). Then they have every reason to hype their work to get funding (bias). Then they cherry-pick data (bias). Then the news selects the most outlying data to present (bias) and then hypes it (bias). If you add politics, you get yet another layer of mega bias.
Stem-cells only look so promising because you are seeing them through about a dozen hype filters. Down in the trenches, they are one technology out of many. There are tens of thousands of biomedical research groups, and probably only a few hundred do work related to stem cells. If they are such a miracle, why is this so? Why is there virtually no major corporate research, given that corporations do half the research)?
and uselessly burn the oil yourself. It might even be more efficient. Or better yet, spend your money on a bit of gasoline and start torching national forests. That'll really get you a good ratio!
In any case, unless your real spending habits are far different from the average person's (ie, you don't spend your money on consumer goods, your home, car, services, etc) your emission profile is the same, multiplied by your spending vs the average.
What do you spend your money on, if not a car? A computer? Well, a ton of energy went into making that. Lots of CO2.
The most accurate measure of how much CO2 you emit is probably how much money you spend, regardless of what you spend it on.
Cosmology: Getting away from the earth is too darned expensive and will be for quite a long time. What difference is worrying about dark matter or cosmic background raditation going to make in our daily lives?
String theory: Speculation on paper. We are a long way from even being able to test it in our mega mega colliders. No one is going to make a better widget based on string theory in the foreseeable future.
Stem cells: Stems cells are a road, not a destination. They are clunky to work with and have all sorts of ethical concerns. We will have better methods without the ethical issues long before 2100. In any case, stem cell research has been vastly overblown because of the political controversy. Stem cells are one possible technology out of thousands. Who knows which ones will actually provide the breakthroughs.
That would be both absurd and impossible to prove. How could one demonstrate that there is no underlying natural trend?
However, there is broad consensus across the scientific community that temperatures are rising and we are a significant, if not the sole, cause. If you need details, there are plenty of freebies at Nature and Science. That should get you started.
Arguing that we aren't causing global warming is little different than claiming the earth is 6000 years old and that we are all decended from Adam and Eve.
Btw, there is plenty of scientific and economic support for Lomborg as well. Yes, he touched off a firestorm by daring to touch a sacred taboo. God bless him for that.
Three nobel prize winners contributed to GCGS. I bet they are all crocks.
and we will spend a lot of time trying to find our ghosts.
The problem now is not lack of information, or lack of access, but indeed the opposite. There is far, far too much of it! I am a scientist. Papers in my sub-sub-sub specialty are now being produced so fast that I can no longer read them all, or even give them more than a glance. I do not think there is much hope in "augmenting" our abilities without completely moving them outside of our bodies. Our brains are pretty well optimized for their jobs as is. But if the augmentation is outside, why not replace the whole? We will. In any case, I think if you have any machine that is close to real AI, it will have a survival instinct. Indeed, this may be one of the defining characteristics.
GMO scare stories hurt our farmers overseas, and the refusal to have honest discussions about race and gender are strongly affecting our education policies. Likewise, the hard left's refusal to put values on human rights causes us to waste huge amounts of money on preventing minor risks.
and Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions". Numerous experts were invited to address these various issues and debate one another. When you read the Global Warming chapter, it becomes pretty obvious that unless you make some really outlying assumptions (both scientific and philosophical) there is not a whole lot we can do about global warming that is worth the price. Meanwhile, the chapters on such things as malaria mitigation come up tremendously positive. As one economist put it, would you rather pay $400 to buy an African family a solar-powered cooking stove and do them a little bit of good, or would you rather pay $10 and buy them a mosquito net, and do them a lot of good? The choice should be obvious.
Now why on earth would global warming reduce GDP by 20%? Not even the whacky whackies would predict that much. How would a 3C rise in temperature reduce your work output by 20%? Seriously.
When the economist crunch the numbers, it comes out as a wash at best. We can do better with things with the money.
It's interesting to note that the "hot-button" issues you listed are all ones where the opponents are on the political right, while you ignore the "hot-button" issues where the opponents are on the left. Which would you rather do?
1: Walk into your local church and try to have a reasonable discussion about evolution
2: Walk into Harvard and try to have a reasonable discussion about biological gender differences
The left has as many scientific taboos as the right (race and sex with respect to genetics, genetically modified foods, pretty much anything to do with economics when human lives are factored into the equation, etc). Both sides ignore evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
keeps screwing up their argument. When they argue that global warming isn't happening, or man is not causing it, they are being flat-out stupid. There is no scientific debate at all about either of those two points. The only debate now is to what extent it is going to happen, and what damages (and benefits) will it bring.
However, the anti crowd does have a good argument that they do not utilize fully - an economic argument. It is not at all clear that any potential global warming mitigation is beneficial. In almost all cases, either the cost-benefits come up negative, or just slightly positive. In the latter case, there are many other humanitarian issues with superb cost-benefits (50:1), so again, it is not clear that any government action to mitigate global warming is justified.
Sometimes, global warming activists will make claims like "we can mitigate global warming by X percent with only 2% of the world's projected GDP", to which a wise person would respond that with 2% of the world's GDP, we could provide food and clean water to everyone who does not currently have it, along with providing basic health care and making massive inroads against HIV and malaria. Which is more important?
Anything to do with cosmology and string theory will have no impact on our daily lives by 2100. Stem cells, while interesting, have been blown way out of proportion relative to their actual importance. They will (in some incarnation) probably play a role in the only point I agree with here - the biotechnical merging of man and machine. I think the anime series "Ghost in the Shell" is not terribly far off the mark with respect to how this will transform our lives.
On the other hand, there are two big technological transformations that were completely missed that I am convinced will happen this century:
1: AI. It's always 30 years away. But it is much less than 100 years away. Computers will be as smart as us by mid-century and much smarter by 2100, by when we will have the MotherBrainSkyNet.
2: The energy revolution. A combination of rising dinofuel prices, falling renewable prices, and mid-century industrial fusion will completely change our use of energy. Global warming will be large averted.
The world of 2100 will be richer, cleaner, and more peaceful than that of today. The biggest problem will be convincing people to have enough babies.
this being possible in principle. When someone builds a "cable" of a few microns strong enough to support its own weight if scaled to space-elevator size, then I agree, this becomes an engineering problem.
So far, no one has demonstrated that such a cable exists.
Unlike the vast majority of science articles I read here on Slashdot, this new device appears to be the real deal, will be in actual use very quickly, and will make a difference in the relevant scientific community.
Most of the articles here are either pseudo-science or random articles with no particular scientific significance but some controversial or funny element.
did. I can't remember a car accident, but I do remember hearing about deaths and rapes in Japan. You are right, the crime rate for the soldiers here in Japan is typical for their age group. People who blather about this stuff are falling for typical anti-American crap. (Not that there are not legitimate reasons to criticize the US, but it drives me nuts that 90% of anti-American arguments are such childish nonsense that I can find no other words for it but bigotry and hypocrisy).