Never mind how stupid, arrogant or evil this. How come it's even possible? If nobody gets to run a server, where will the content come from?
Surely there is some sort of exception to this rule? What defines an "ISP"? What defines an "ISP customer"?
I must be missing something. The proposal reads to me to say "companies providing internet service agree to stop providing internet service to anyone providing internet content". I'm sure that isn't the intent, but can someone explain to me how this doesn't amount to shutting the net down completely?
This isn't intended as humor; I really am missing something here. How do they propose to draw the line between bad running-a-server and okay running-a-server?
the link you provided does not support your position (that the hocky-stick function was objectively detected by a meaninful, unbiased automatic process)
The link provided an elementary description of the algorithm and could not be expected to have anything to say about a particular application. Your three points show no increase in understanding of the method or the circumstances under which it might be applied. All three assertions are incorrect.
I am not a "proponent" of EOF analysis. It is an algorithm, bit a hypothesis.
Such a process is in priciple impossible.
How do you distinguish this claim from a claim that objective conclusions based on observation are impossible in general?
Are you saying that there is no such thing as observational science?
The concluding paragraph of your latest posting demonstrates quite effectively that you don't.
I just dispute its validity on principle. Why? Because it claims (or rather, its proponents claim) that the functions are chosen "objectively, by the data"
It's not a claim, it's a fact. The orthogonal functions are generated automatically by the algorithm.
with the implication that they are therefore "correct"
And that's a straw man argument.
I'm not inclined to try to explain it to you at this point, Here's a nice link to get you started in the event you or an interested reader decides to get serious about this.
From the linked article; "Who wants the $500 iPod phone when you could buy a phone and an iPod for that much?" says analyst Tole Hart of researcher Gartner.
Does anybody else not understand the question? Is this guy saying I'd rather carry two gizmos than one because, I'd have, like, more stuff?
Given that there are infinitely many ways to decompose a finite sample into orthagonal functions (and in general they do not have the same extrapolation), simply picking one assumes a shape for the data.
Empirical orthogonal functions are chosen objectively by the data. That's why they are "empirical". They are the patterns that best match the data.
I said: It's a pretty interesting exercise to code this with synthetic data, actually. You replied:
And when you did this yourself, you found...what?
The synthetic data of course. It was an interesting exercise.
I'm a big fan of peer review, but I have even more faith in logic
I'm a big fan of not quoting out of context.
you didn't seem to know what I was refering to ('I am not sure what you mean by "imaginary periods"').
I don't know about that. Both in EE and in geophysics we would consider the "period" to be directly related to the real part of the exponent, but I suppose that's quibbling.
Perhaps if you backed off from the ad hominem attitude...
I'm sorry, I don't think you've made a cogent argument against the application of EOF analysis in this case. Indeed, you continue to present evidence that you don't know what EOF analysis is. I'm not sure that me saying so shows an "ad hominem attitude". It's not a crime not to know some fairly abstruse statistical technique, but you don't have much standing to criticize its use if you don't know what it is about.
The graph that the link took me to showed CO2 concentration and not temperature. You seemed to be claiming that the data showeed warming. Only a few idiots are claiming that CO2 isn;t accumulating. I agree that there is a problem, but I don't see how your link showed it.
No, they were doing principal components a.k.a. empirical orthogonal functions. In that method there is no assumed shape to the data. Look it up.
It's a pretty interesting exercise to code this with synthetic data, actually.
Of course as you say there's inevitably a nonzero projection of noisy data onto any arbitrary function. However, since this work passed peer review in Nature you might consider that nothing so stupid is likely to be happening here.
The fact that sinusoids and exponential growth curves are both exponential functions on the complex plane may take you by surprise but I've been aware of it for decades. I fail to see the relevance of this fact even to what you seem to think is happening.
I agree that publicly funded scientific code and data can and in most cases should be publicly available.
That doesn't change the fact that Mann's results are essentially in line with everyone else's, and that the published McIntyre & McKitrick stuff appears to be completely uninformed by very much relevant skill. Open source code isn't always good code.
I don't know why Mann's complete code isn't published. Possibly the computers have all been surplused and the backup tapes misplaced, so he can't get bit-for-bit what he published. There's no sign that Mann behaved in any way other than up to the standards of the day, and their work is still in play in the discussion of the millenial reconstructions.
I think the only good thing to come out of MacIntyre & McKitrick's "work" is that it motivates support for open source. Unfortunately, the usual lies about global warming being an argument between two equally sound scientific camps gets reinforced in the bargain. On the whole, we're probably worse off, but the demand for open source from the Wall Street Journal crowd is certainly a silver lining.
you can't just extend Fourier analysis to imaginary periods
I am not sure what you mean by "imaginary periods" but I can tell you that there's no Fourier series involved in this analysis, so I think your comments are not relevant.
Can you back up that assertion? I understood it was McKitrick & MacIntyre who had to filter out significant data to get a noisy enough record that the hockey stiuck didn't show up.
the computermodel in this case is known to include a rather lacking model of rainfall, which seems like a pretty big omision in a climate model to me.
There is no climate model in this study. It is an effort to reconstrruct global mean temperature from proxy data. The only sorts of modeling invlved are implicit models, like how different species of tree grow under different conditions.
Scientists who get published in _Nature_ are not idiots. They are sometimes wrong but they are not stupid.
The Wall Street Journal has a short history of the hocky stick dispute here here.
The Wall Street Journal article woefully misrepresents the situation, unfortunately. See this link and compare with the article's claim that In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.
This is plainly wrong. The ewditors found themselves resigning because the journal refused to retract the article, which they believed was not up to scientific standrads. They were not fired because they published the article. They quit becuase the journal prevented them form retracting it!
The rest of the article is just as misleading, though not in ways that can be summarized as quickly.
Unfortunately the editorial page of the WSJ has been consistently irresponsible on this matter. This is hardly the first time they have published anti-scientific nonsense about climate change. Having such an influential platform, one would hope for more responsible behavior from the editorial staff.
If I were an applicant, my impression is that I would constrye the information as saying that "the university for some reason doesn't send you the URL right away, but if you have an admissions letter it may already be at $BASE_URL + "?" + "foo". I would have logged in and typed the URL without hesitation.
Based on your strong statements, I begin to see that the admissions committees would consider this cheating. I still have seen no explanation as to why this is the case, still less why the applicants would necessarily think this.
Unless any instruction to the contrary was very prominently stated in the login screen or terms of use, I see no reason for the applicant to have any presumption that typing in such a URL would be construed as even slightly inappropriate, much less rising to the level of obviously unethical.
For what it's worth I consider myself a highly ethical person. I am a person who has on several occasions acted significantly against my own interests on ethical grounds. Nevertheless, based on the information I've seen so far, I don't believe I would have even hesitated to type in the purportedly secret URL variable. I would not have had a moment's concern about being "caught" because I would have no expectation that what I was doing was even remotely inappropriate. I would also have been perfectly aware that my action would be unambiguously recorded in the server log.
I think it's very different to accuse someone of behaving contrary to *your own* ethics than to accuse them of behaving contrary to *generally accepted* ethics. It's simply not at all clear that the applicant would even have considered the matter to be ethically problematic, as is evidenced by the fact that they were logged into the system at the time!
Even if "ignorance of the law is no excuse" this seems like a prohibition promulgated retroactively.
Unless you can explain to me why the applicant should have known that the behavior was a violation of either an explicit agreement or an implicit trust, I conclude that it is the behavior of the university that is unethical. It is unconscionably unfair and arbitrary.
I didn't say it was easy to predict climate. I said it was impossible to predict a fair roulette wheel. Therefore the argument from chaos is wrong.
In your reply, you don't address my answer to your point. You simply throw in external forcings. It's true that a climate model can't predict what the sun will do, or what volcanoes will do, or, for that matter, what humans will do. Ultimately those are all important.
The models have many purposes, but the one that the public thinks about all the time is "climate prediction". This use is intended simply to say what will happen *given* the forcings.
Chaos theory is no barrier to that sort of prediction.
Climate models can be tested against paleoclimatic evidence. In that context they have already yielded many useful results. Consequently we can conclude that they do have some predictive power.
By the way, how do you expect magnetic reversals to impact climate? I don't know of any theory that it would matter.
The point, though, is that the little bit of greenhouse gas we have allows only 30% of the infrared energy at the surface to escape directly into space. The rest has to bounce around a bit first, and that turns out to change the temperature of the atmosphere substantially. In terms of optical depth at the wavelengths that matter for outbount infrared radiation, the quantity of greenhouse gases is not all that small, even though it is tiny in terms of relative mass.
Global warming results from the anticipated doubling or tripling of CO2 content in the atmosphere, which is much bigger than the CO2 shift between the recent warm period and the slightly less recent "ice age" glacial maximum (20,000 years ago).
I contend that your argument makes no sense. 6 Billion humans put CO2 into the atmosphere MUCH faster than plant life can take it out.
This is obviously impossible since no transubstantiation of elements takes place in the human body. Exactly where do you propose the carbon we exhale came from if not from plants?
humans introduce so much more CO2 into the atmosphere than fossil fuels
As I said above, this is both wrong and irrelevant. Per capita carbon emissions by Americans are about 20 tons/year or about 100 pounds of carbon a day. This would amount to about 500 pounds of food to match, even if it mattered, which it doesn't, because that isn't new carbon. As I tried to explain to you.
to state that the problem is solely due to fossil fuels is equally inconclusive.
There is the isotopic evidence that nails it if that isn't enough for you.
course you doubt my calculation is correct, because you do not agree with me politically.
Look, politics don't enter into it, mate. We're disagreeing about arithmetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind how stupid, arrogant or evil this. How come it's even possible? If nobody gets to run a server, where will the content come from?
Surely there is some sort of exception to this rule? What defines an "ISP"? What defines an "ISP customer"?
I must be missing something. The proposal reads to me to say "companies providing internet service agree to stop providing internet service to anyone providing internet content". I'm sure that isn't the intent, but can someone explain to me how this doesn't amount to shutting the net down completely?
This isn't intended as humor; I really am missing something here. How do they propose to draw the line between bad running-a-server and okay running-a-server?
I agree that any flight lasting over a month should definitely provide an AC outlet.
s/bit/not/ . Should say "not a hypothesis". Sorry for the typo.
The link provided an elementary description of the algorithm and could not be expected to have anything to say about a particular application. Your three points show no increase in understanding of the method or the circumstances under which it might be applied. All three assertions are incorrect.
I am not a "proponent" of EOF analysis. It is an algorithm, bit a hypothesis.
Such a process is in priciple impossible.
How do you distinguish this claim from a claim that objective conclusions based on observation are impossible in general? Are you saying that there is no such thing as observational science?
The concluding paragraph of your latest posting demonstrates quite effectively that you don't.
It's not a claim, it's a fact. The orthogonal functions are generated automatically by the algorithm.
And that's a straw man argument.
I'm not inclined to try to explain it to you at this point, Here's a nice link to get you started in the event you or an interested reader decides to get serious about this.
Does anybody else not understand the question? Is this guy saying I'd rather carry two gizmos than one because, I'd have, like, more stuff?
Empirical orthogonal functions are chosen objectively by the data. That's why they are "empirical". They are the patterns that best match the data.
I said: It's a pretty interesting exercise to code this with synthetic data, actually. You replied:
The synthetic data of course. It was an interesting exercise.
I'm a big fan of not quoting out of context.
I don't know about that. Both in EE and in geophysics we would consider the "period" to be directly related to the real part of the exponent, but I suppose that's quibbling.
I'm sorry, I don't think you've made a cogent argument against the application of EOF analysis in this case. Indeed, you continue to present evidence that you don't know what EOF analysis is. I'm not sure that me saying so shows an "ad hominem attitude". It's not a crime not to know some fairly abstruse statistical technique, but you don't have much standing to criticize its use if you don't know what it is about.
The graph that the link took me to showed CO2 concentration and not temperature. You seemed to be claiming that the data showeed warming. Only a few idiots are claiming that CO2 isn;t accumulating. I agree that there is a problem, but I don't see how your link showed it.
No, they were doing principal components a.k.a. empirical orthogonal functions. In that method there is no assumed shape to the data. Look it up.
It's a pretty interesting exercise to code this with synthetic data, actually.
Of course as you say there's inevitably a nonzero projection of noisy data onto any arbitrary function. However, since this work passed peer review in Nature you might consider that nothing so stupid is likely to be happening here.
The fact that sinusoids and exponential growth curves are both exponential functions on the complex plane may take you by surprise but I've been aware of it for decades. I fail to see the relevance of this fact even to what you seem to think is happening.
sorry, meant to reply to the comment above yours... mt
That doesn't change the fact that Mann's results are essentially in line with everyone else's, and that the published McIntyre & McKitrick stuff appears to be completely uninformed by very much relevant skill. Open source code isn't always good code.
I don't know why Mann's complete code isn't published. Possibly the computers have all been surplused and the backup tapes misplaced, so he can't get bit-for-bit what he published. There's no sign that Mann behaved in any way other than up to the standards of the day, and their work is still in play in the discussion of the millenial reconstructions.
I think the only good thing to come out of MacIntyre & McKitrick's "work" is that it motivates support for open source. Unfortunately, the usual lies about global warming being an argument between two equally sound scientific camps gets reinforced in the bargain. On the whole, we're probably worse off, but the demand for open source from the Wall Street Journal crowd is certainly a silver lining.
I am not sure what you mean by "imaginary periods" but I can tell you that there's no Fourier series involved in this analysis, so I think your comments are not relevant.
You didn't show any temperature data. The data are compelling, but not as much as you imply with that figure.
If you have the patience for a little bit of careful exposition, see this article on realclimate.org.
There is no climate model in this study. It is an effort to reconstrruct global mean temperature from proxy data. The only sorts of modeling invlved are implicit models, like how different species of tree grow under different conditions.
Scientists who get published in _Nature_ are not idiots. They are sometimes wrong but they are not stupid.
Nice straw man you got there.
Just because fools believe that global warming is a problem doesn't mean it isn't one.
The Wall Street Journal article woefully misrepresents the situation, unfortunately. See this link and compare with the article's claim that In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.
This is plainly wrong. The ewditors found themselves resigning because the journal refused to retract the article, which they believed was not up to scientific standrads. They were not fired because they published the article. They quit becuase the journal prevented them form retracting it!
The rest of the article is just as misleading, though not in ways that can be summarized as quickly.
Unfortunately the editorial page of the WSJ has been consistently irresponsible on this matter. This is hardly the first time they have published anti-scientific nonsense about climate change. Having such an influential platform, one would hope for more responsible behavior from the editorial staff.
What the hell does this mean and why is it considered insightful?
Software is the most flexible artifact in history. It can be patched. Hardware, basically, can't.
If I were an applicant, my impression is that I would constrye the information as saying that "the university for some reason doesn't send you the URL right away, but if you have an admissions letter it may already be at $BASE_URL + "?" + "foo". I would have logged in and typed the URL without hesitation.
Based on your strong statements, I begin to see that the admissions committees would consider this cheating. I still have seen no explanation as to why this is the case, still less why the applicants would necessarily think this.
Unless any instruction to the contrary was very prominently stated in the login screen or terms of use, I see no reason for the applicant to have any presumption that typing in such a URL would be construed as even slightly inappropriate, much less rising to the level of obviously unethical.
For what it's worth I consider myself a highly ethical person. I am a person who has on several occasions acted significantly against my own interests on ethical grounds. Nevertheless, based on the information I've seen so far, I don't believe I would have even hesitated to type in the purportedly secret URL variable. I would not have had a moment's concern about being "caught" because I would have no expectation that what I was doing was even remotely inappropriate. I would also have been perfectly aware that my action would be unambiguously recorded in the server log.
I think it's very different to accuse someone of behaving contrary to *your own* ethics than to accuse them of behaving contrary to *generally accepted* ethics. It's simply not at all clear that the applicant would even have considered the matter to be ethically problematic, as is evidenced by the fact that they were logged into the system at the time!
Even if "ignorance of the law is no excuse" this seems like a prohibition promulgated retroactively.
Unless you can explain to me why the applicant should have known that the behavior was a violation of either an explicit agreement or an implicit trust, I conclude that it is the behavior of the university that is unethical. It is unconscionably unfair and arbitrary.
That's all pretty thin stuff. I can't help but wonder, though, whether this physics coprocessor will be of any use in doing, um, physics...
Well, they said it was a check for six figures, but I'm having trouble avoiding the conclusion that the amount was exactly UKP 000,000
I didn't say it was easy to predict climate. I said it was impossible to predict a fair roulette wheel. Therefore the argument from chaos is wrong.
In your reply, you don't address my answer to your point. You simply throw in external forcings. It's true that a climate model can't predict what the sun will do, or what volcanoes will do, or, for that matter, what humans will do. Ultimately those are all important.
The models have many purposes, but the one that the public thinks about all the time is "climate prediction". This use is intended simply to say what will happen *given* the forcings.
Chaos theory is no barrier to that sort of prediction.
Climate models can be tested against paleoclimatic evidence. In that context they have already yielded many useful results. Consequently we can conclude that they do have some predictive power.
By the way, how do you expect magnetic reversals to impact climate? I don't know of any theory that it would matter.
The point, though, is that the little bit of greenhouse gas we have allows only 30% of the infrared energy at the surface to escape directly into space. The rest has to bounce around a bit first, and that turns out to change the temperature of the atmosphere substantially. In terms of optical depth at the wavelengths that matter for outbount infrared radiation, the quantity of greenhouse gases is not all that small, even though it is tiny in terms of relative mass.
Wikipedia has a nice introduction.
Global warming results from the anticipated doubling or tripling of CO2 content in the atmosphere, which is much bigger than the CO2 shift between the recent warm period and the slightly less recent "ice age" glacial maximum (20,000 years ago).
This is obviously impossible since no transubstantiation of elements takes place in the human body. Exactly where do you propose the carbon we exhale came from if not from plants?
humans introduce so much more CO2 into the atmosphere than fossil fuels
As I said above, this is both wrong and irrelevant. Per capita carbon emissions by Americans are about 20 tons/year or about 100 pounds of carbon a day. This would amount to about 500 pounds of food to match, even if it mattered, which it doesn't, because that isn't new carbon. As I tried to explain to you.
to state that the problem is solely due to fossil fuels is equally inconclusive.
There is the isotopic evidence that nails it if that isn't enough for you.
course you doubt my calculation is correct, because you do not agree with me politically.
Look, politics don't enter into it, mate. We're disagreeing about arithmetic.
This forcing is under consideration. Current evidence indicates it is small. By comparison the greenhouse gas forcing is currently about 2 W/m^2 .