Is it just me who is shocked, shocked by how little it takes to buy a Congressman these days? I mean, in days gone by it would have been hundreds of thousands, a job for the kid to allow him to work through college, a few first class tickets to somewhere nice...
Now its like $1000-9000. I mean I could buy a Congressman for that amount of money. If Slashdotters just collaborate then for $50 a head we could get Congress to ban Microsoft...
Either the RIAA is stingy or Congressmen are desperate for extra cash.
While it is well known that boys have longer ring fingers as compared to index fingers, now some researchers say that the longer the ring finger ratio to index finger, the better boys are at math. In girls, the shorter the ring finger to index finger ratio, the better is their verbal skills. 'The link, according to the researchers, is that testosterone levels in the womb influence both finger length and brain development.'
Nope. it doesn't matter how many times you say it. It's an incorrect answer.
Ask Lawrence Summers.
Bending spacetime in the basement
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't know if this is mentioned in the article above (which appears to be slashdotted) but here's a scientist showing the force of gravity by creating a torsion balance using a ladder, fishing line and a few extras including two boules. (Yes, they're spelled 'boules')
The reason why those other studies all "back up" the Hockey Stick is caused by the facts that they all use a large number of the same proxies AND use Mann's PC1 as a proxy in its own right, with its massive overweghting of bristlecones intact. Since they use the same linear algebra as well, trained to the instrumental record, then its not surprising that they look similar.
No you haven't read the NAS Panel - you've parrotted the lies put on RealClimate, not even guessing that the objection made by qualified scientists were all censored.
If you had read the NAS Panel report, despite its flowerey language and bending over backwards to not reject the Hockey Stick, it upheld every single criticism made by Steve McIntyre: the non-independence of proxies, the inappropriateness of using PCA, the lack of transparency of data and methodology, the failure of the statistical significances, the lack of empirical demonstration that trees respond to temperature in the linear fashion assumed.
So those "other" studies all use the same flawed proxies, use flawed methodologies, hide their lack of statistical significance, misstate their true error bars ("floor to ceiling") and it doesn't matter because you'll believe every word.
I'm not parrotting Climate Audit - I've read the very reports that you are too afraid of reading for yourself, like the Wegman Report which called the Hockey Stick simply "Bad Science".
The correct response would be to dismiss the Hockey Stick and the other iterations and start again, but you're not going to. It's much easier going with the flow of sewage than getting out of it, isn't it?
Would that be the same McKitrick whose research is funded by the Fraser Institute, whose main benefactors are the oil and gas industries, particlucarly ExxonMobil, who stipulated that the funds they donate are for research of climate change? FYI, The Fraser Institute has collected over $400k since its inception, and over half that has been from ExxonMobil ($120,000 in 2003-4 alone).
That would be Ross McKitrick , an UNPAID associate for the Fraser Institute.
But don't let facts get in the way of a good smear and a conspiracy theory to boot. After all if you don't have to smear the man, then you would have to tackle what he said, and that would never do.
And the same Stephen McIntyre who holds no advanced degree and has never been published in an ISI peer-reviewed journal?
What about Geophysical Research Letters? Oh shit, it demolishes your smear job. Shame about that.
No, you wouldn't be close. Further research and sampling will (surprise, surprise) cause people to update their data sets to reflect the further research. The hockey stick model still fits, though possibly not as dramatically as Mann's original model.
The HS stick model is bad statistics, bad math, and bad data control. All of which has been published in peer-reviewed literature.
In point of fact, the independent NAS review panel found that when you correct Mann's hockey stick you get... a hockey stick: they concluded that the recent warming is a robust feature of the data, although they said the error bars on the earlier reconstructions should be widened. And that doesn't even begin to address all of the other paleoclimate reconstructions by other researchers, using different and independent methods, which also found hockey sticks.
That Panel also recommended that bristlecones should not be used as they were not a robust temperature proxy - but all of them included Mann's PC1 with its heavy overweighting of bristlecones, as a Proxy. They all failed tests for statistical significance, just like the HS.
In no sense were the others "independent". They used the same set of proxies over and over again.
Skeptics like to hold up Mann (or Hansen, or Gore) as some kind of archetype, who if knocked down would bring down the whole scientific theory of global warming with them, but that is far from true. The scientific case for global warming does not rest on any one individual.
The archetype is the complete lack of ethics by any of them as well as a willingness to exaggerate their asses off. ALl of this has been documented.
The error bars are simply double the standard deviation, but the error analysis was wrong. Because the R2 metric was zero, the true error bars should be "floor to ceiling" according to testimony given to that same Panel.
Don't you read ANYTHING or is it just parrotted off RealClimate?
And yet the removal of the bristlecone pines is the main thing that keeps McIntyre & McKintick's analysis from showing the same results as Mann's. So their analysis is not sensitive to the inclusion of the pines.
What ARE you talking about? The HS was replicated by McIntyre. The HS was the result of the massive overweighting of bristlecone pines, a proxy known to be NOT a temperature proxy. McIntyre showed that without the bristlecones, the HS shape disappeared.
Their analysis should that with or without the bristlecones, the HS failed multiple statistical tests for significance.
Oh? Please explain how it is statistically insignificant? No one, not even McIntyre & Mckintick, claimed that the findings were statistically insignificant -- they just disputed the data samples and reconstructed the graph according to their own cherry-picked data. Note that even when analyzed over the 1000-year mean, instead of Mann's original 20-year mean, the hockey stick still appears, and is still statistically significant.
It fails two key tests, R2 and the Durbin-Watson. Both showed zero significance.
M&M DID claim that the findings were statistically insignificant. And just in case you think its a fluke, a replication by friends of Mann, Wahl and Ammann also showed zero significance for the R2 test.
No disinfomation at all. The Mann Hockey Stick remains as devoid of statistical significance as it always has been. It's also not sensitive to the removal of dendroclimatological proxies, especially the bristlecone pines of Colorado, without which it loses its Hockey Stick shape.
Oh and the others? All of the others have similar negligible statistical significance and nearly all of them use Mann's PC1 as a proxy.
It ain't just debunked. What we have here is the "walking undead" of climate science.
Lets see Slashdot's censorship system work its magic:
Many leading scientists have come to believe that human activity is contributing to warming of the planet.
"I see it in some ways as similar to the sort-of debate that has taken place with regard to the science of evolution," said Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. "Just as I would hope that the Smithsonian would stand firmly behind the science of evolution, it would also be my hope that they would stand firmly behind the science that supports influence on climate. Politically, they may be controversial, but scientifically they are not."
So let me guess - they put in the Hockey Stick and then someone pointed out that its a scientific crock of shit. So they hid it behind spaghetti and made it fuzzy like they did in the IPCC 4th Assessment. Would I be close?
If I was you Dr Mann, I'd be hoping for the fuzzy version because the sharp version is a demonstrated pile of crap.
Shall we see who is the biggest abuser of censorship? Step right up.
They are at it again. Snob, uppish, wants whole world do things in their own way, learn french and whatnot. They isolate themselves, dont join in the international community, and they want whole 250+ countries in the world to listen to what they say.
I'm sorry, were we talking about France or the US?
Now they found a "anti spam" organization as if anti spam organizations do not exist. In at most 2 years i assure you they will be proposing laws to eu that every eu member should mandatorily use their anti spam shit. This is the french way.
Come back in two years to discover...that you're dreaming.
You know what fucking morons, we dont care about your delusions de grandeur. Shove your "own way" up your own arses. Theres spamcop, we will use it, and we will ignore whatever shit you "invent" as if new.
Ocean refers to the watery area between continents. Oceans are very big and they connect smaller seas together. It is okay to speak of the ocean as a single body of water because all named "oceans" are connected. Oceans are made of salt water. There are five main oceans. They are all huge.
None of those diseases are exclusively tropical. Malaria, for example, was endemic in England and Russia two hundred years ago when it was much colder. It has a lot less to do with warmth and a lot more to do with first world sanitation.
Lets consider Bangladesh you say? What about the Netherlands where most of the country is below sea-level? Not only is the Netherlands vulnerable to sea-level rise but more importantly to the fact that the land is falling due to isostatic rebound from the last Ice Age. Yet the Dutch keep the sea out by constantly remodeling the landscape and pumping out water, and all of this is done by heavy machinery powered by fossil fuels.
I don't think you give a shit about Bangladesh or the grinding poverty of its people. The plain fact is that to "save the earth" you want them to stay extremely vulnerable and extremely poor. Bangladeshis want economic growth and first world eco-imperialists like you are in their way.
So the answer is that you've swallowed lies and propaganda about global warming and repeat them as fact. This sort of propaganda repeats endlessly a litany of doom that bears no resemblance to reality.
If only that were true. Unfortunately I have seen administrators delete edit histories right before my eyes. Not only was history edited in a mouse click, but all evidence of the edit was removed as well.
Nature's survey was concocted to show Wikipedia in the best possible light and Britannica in the worst possible light. The "mistakes" of Britannica turned out to be nothing of the kind. Even so, Wikipedia was significantly less accurate than Britannica.
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of The Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.
Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy."
Is something written on paper better reviewed, researched or accurate. Most schools libraries are underfunded and out of date.
The answer is that unlike Wikipedia, books have known authors (and I'm talking about factual books here), known publishers and editors who are answerable for errors of fact, and do not change moment by moment in response to ignorance, prejudice, "the wisdom of crowds" or whatever bullshit arguments are used including appeals to "community", appeals to authority, appeals to popularity, appeals to bizarre and slippery concepts like NPOV, "notability" or anything else.
That isn't to say that books are perfect or that they are not in need of revision and update, but its a whole lot better than the spectacular MMORPG of human knowledge known as Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me who is shocked, shocked by how little it takes to buy a Congressman these days? I mean, in days gone by it would have been hundreds of thousands, a job for the kid to allow him to work through college, a few first class tickets to somewhere nice...
Now its like $1000-9000. I mean I could buy a Congressman for that amount of money. If Slashdotters just collaborate then for $50 a head we could get Congress to ban Microsoft...
Either the RIAA is stingy or Congressmen are desperate for extra cash.
While it is well known that boys have longer ring fingers as compared to index fingers, now some researchers say that the longer the ring finger ratio to index finger, the better boys are at math. In girls, the shorter the ring finger to index finger ratio, the better is their verbal skills. 'The link, according to the researchers, is that testosterone levels in the womb influence both finger length and brain development.'
Nope. it doesn't matter how many times you say it. It's an incorrect answer.
Ask Lawrence Summers.
I don't know if this is mentioned in the article above (which appears to be slashdotted) but here's a scientist showing the force of gravity by creating a torsion balance using a ladder, fishing line and a few extras including two boules. (Yes, they're spelled 'boules')
Bending spacetime in the basement"
Check out the timelapse movies at the bottom of the page to see gravity in action.
The reason why those other studies all "back up" the Hockey Stick is caused by the facts that they all use a large number of the same proxies AND use Mann's PC1 as a proxy in its own right, with its massive overweghting of bristlecones intact. Since they use the same linear algebra as well, trained to the instrumental record, then its not surprising that they look similar.
No you haven't read the NAS Panel - you've parrotted the lies put on RealClimate, not even guessing that the objection made by qualified scientists were all censored.
If you had read the NAS Panel report, despite its flowerey language and bending over backwards to not reject the Hockey Stick, it upheld every single criticism made by Steve McIntyre: the non-independence of proxies, the inappropriateness of using PCA, the lack of transparency of data and methodology, the failure of the statistical significances, the lack of empirical demonstration that trees respond to temperature in the linear fashion assumed.
So those "other" studies all use the same flawed proxies, use flawed methodologies, hide their lack of statistical significance, misstate their true error bars ("floor to ceiling") and it doesn't matter because you'll believe every word.
I'm not parrotting Climate Audit - I've read the very reports that you are too afraid of reading for yourself, like the Wegman Report which called the Hockey Stick simply "Bad Science".
The correct response would be to dismiss the Hockey Stick and the other iterations and start again, but you're not going to. It's much easier going with the flow of sewage than getting out of it, isn't it?
As I predicted, censorship is the way to go. Well done those slashdot cowards.
Would that be the same McKitrick whose research is funded by the Fraser Institute, whose main benefactors are the oil and gas industries, particlucarly ExxonMobil, who stipulated that the funds they donate are for research of climate change? FYI, The Fraser Institute has collected over $400k since its inception, and over half that has been from ExxonMobil ($120,000 in 2003-4 alone).
That would be Ross McKitrick , an UNPAID associate for the Fraser Institute.
But don't let facts get in the way of a good smear and a conspiracy theory to boot. After all if you don't have to smear the man, then you would have to tackle what he said, and that would never do.
And the same Stephen McIntyre who holds no advanced degree and has never been published in an ISI peer-reviewed journal?
What about Geophysical Research Letters? Oh shit, it demolishes your smear job. Shame about that.
No, you wouldn't be close. Further research and sampling will (surprise, surprise) cause people to update their data sets to reflect the further research. The hockey stick model still fits, though possibly not as dramatically as Mann's original model.
The HS stick model is bad statistics, bad math, and bad data control. All of which has been published in peer-reviewed literature.
In point of fact, the independent NAS review panel found that when you correct Mann's hockey stick you get ... a hockey stick: they concluded that the recent warming is a robust feature of the data, although they said the error bars on the earlier reconstructions should be widened. And that doesn't even begin to address all of the other paleoclimate reconstructions by other researchers, using different and independent methods, which also found hockey sticks.
That Panel also recommended that bristlecones should not be used as they were not a robust temperature proxy - but all of them included Mann's PC1 with its heavy overweighting of bristlecones, as a Proxy. They all failed tests for statistical significance, just like the HS.
In no sense were the others "independent". They used the same set of proxies over and over again.
Skeptics like to hold up Mann (or Hansen, or Gore) as some kind of archetype, who if knocked down would bring down the whole scientific theory of global warming with them, but that is far from true. The scientific case for global warming does not rest on any one individual.
The archetype is the complete lack of ethics by any of them as well as a willingness to exaggerate their asses off. ALl of this has been documented.
The error bars are simply double the standard deviation, but the error analysis was wrong. Because the R2 metric was zero, the true error bars should be "floor to ceiling" according to testimony given to that same Panel.
Don't you read ANYTHING or is it just parrotted off RealClimate?
And yet the removal of the bristlecone pines is the main thing that keeps McIntyre & McKintick's analysis from showing the same results as Mann's. So their analysis is not sensitive to the inclusion of the pines.
What ARE you talking about? The HS was replicated by McIntyre. The HS was the result of the massive overweighting of bristlecone pines, a proxy known to be NOT a temperature proxy. McIntyre showed that without the bristlecones, the HS shape disappeared.
Their analysis should that with or without the bristlecones, the HS failed multiple statistical tests for significance.
Oh? Please explain how it is statistically insignificant? No one, not even McIntyre & Mckintick, claimed that the findings were statistically insignificant -- they just disputed the data samples and reconstructed the graph according to their own cherry-picked data. Note that even when analyzed over the 1000-year mean, instead of Mann's original 20-year mean, the hockey stick still appears, and is still statistically significant.
It fails two key tests, R2 and the Durbin-Watson. Both showed zero significance.
M&M DID claim that the findings were statistically insignificant. And just in case you think its a fluke, a replication by friends of Mann, Wahl and Ammann also showed zero significance for the R2 test.
The rest of your statements are simply rubbish.
No disinfomation at all. The Mann Hockey Stick remains as devoid of statistical significance as it always has been. It's also not sensitive to the removal of dendroclimatological proxies, especially the bristlecone pines of Colorado, without which it loses its Hockey Stick shape.
Oh and the others? All of the others have similar negligible statistical significance and nearly all of them use Mann's PC1 as a proxy.
It ain't just debunked. What we have here is the "walking undead" of climate science.
Lets see Slashdot's censorship system work its magic:
Many leading scientists have come to believe that human activity is contributing to warming of the planet.
"I see it in some ways as similar to the sort-of debate that has taken place with regard to the science of evolution," said Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. "Just as I would hope that the Smithsonian would stand firmly behind the science of evolution, it would also be my hope that they would stand firmly behind the science that supports influence on climate. Politically, they may be controversial, but scientifically they are not."
Would this be the same Michael Mann, author of the incredibly flawed and fraudulent "Mann Hockey Stick" which has been extensively debunked by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick?
Yes it is.
So let me guess - they put in the Hockey Stick and then someone pointed out that its a scientific crock of shit. So they hid it behind spaghetti and made it fuzzy like they did in the IPCC 4th Assessment. Would I be close?
If I was you Dr Mann, I'd be hoping for the fuzzy version because the sharp version is a demonstrated pile of crap.
Shall we see who is the biggest abuser of censorship? Step right up.
Too complicated for Simple Wikipedia.
They are at it again. Snob, uppish, wants whole world do things in their own way, learn french and whatnot. They isolate themselves, dont join in the international community, and they want whole 250+ countries in the world to listen to what they say.
I'm sorry, were we talking about France or the US?
Now they found a "anti spam" organization as if anti spam organizations do not exist. In at most 2 years i assure you they will be proposing laws to eu that every eu member should mandatorily use their anti spam shit. This is the french way.
Come back in two years to discover...that you're dreaming.
You know what fucking morons, we dont care about your delusions de grandeur. Shove your "own way" up your own arses. Theres spamcop, we will use it, and we will ignore whatever shit you "invent" as if new.
Who is this "we", paleface?
From the Simple Wikipedia:
Ocean
Ocean refers to the watery area between continents. Oceans are very big and they connect smaller seas together. It is okay to speak of the ocean as a single body of water because all named "oceans" are connected. Oceans are made of salt water. There are five main oceans. They are all huge.
None of those diseases are exclusively tropical. Malaria, for example, was endemic in England and Russia two hundred years ago when it was much colder. It has a lot less to do with warmth and a lot more to do with first world sanitation.
Lets consider Bangladesh you say? What about the Netherlands where most of the country is below sea-level? Not only is the Netherlands vulnerable to sea-level rise but more importantly to the fact that the land is falling due to isostatic rebound from the last Ice Age. Yet the Dutch keep the sea out by constantly remodeling the landscape and pumping out water, and all of this is done by heavy machinery powered by fossil fuels.
I don't think you give a shit about Bangladesh or the grinding poverty of its people. The plain fact is that to "save the earth" you want them to stay extremely vulnerable and extremely poor. Bangladeshis want economic growth and first world eco-imperialists like you are in their way.
So the answer is that you've swallowed lies and propaganda about global warming and repeat them as fact. This sort of propaganda repeats endlessly a litany of doom that bears no resemblance to reality.
Mod parent +1 sad
Hopefully they mention this in the book, but just in case:
Bad behavior: kills 99% of all spam on contact
Spam Karma: kills the other 1%
If only that were true. Unfortunately I have seen administrators delete edit histories right before my eyes. Not only was history edited in a mouse click, but all evidence of the edit was removed as well.
Memory holes, indeed.
Yet again the same canard repeated over and over.
Nature's survey was concocted to show Wikipedia in the best possible light and Britannica in the worst possible light. The "mistakes" of Britannica turned out to be nothing of the kind. Even so, Wikipedia was significantly less accurate than Britannica.
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of The Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.
Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy."
- 1984 by George Orwell.
Is something written on paper better reviewed, researched or accurate. Most schools libraries are underfunded and out of date.
The answer is that unlike Wikipedia, books have known authors (and I'm talking about factual books here), known publishers and editors who are answerable for errors of fact, and do not change moment by moment in response to ignorance, prejudice, "the wisdom of crowds" or whatever bullshit arguments are used including appeals to "community", appeals to authority, appeals to popularity, appeals to bizarre and slippery concepts like NPOV, "notability" or anything else.
That isn't to say that books are perfect or that they are not in need of revision and update, but its a whole lot better than the spectacular MMORPG of human knowledge known as Wikipedia.
Thirty years ago, we were worried about global cooling, nuclear winter and nuclear proliferation. Now its global warming and nuclear proliferation.
Oh yes, and none of the above came to pass.
Pedant point: there's no such word in English as "irregardless"
What I was actually thinking of was: why isn't the site hosted on Apple hardware?
It was posted on April 1st. On April 2nd it was slashdotted.
The webpage doesn't exist and the home page is an Apache webserver running on CentOS (linux). What are the chances?