You are wise to be skeptical of any graph where the source of data changes right when the data gets interesting.
I did some quick searching and cannot find the desired data either, but here is where I tend to trust the independent review of the IPCC of the methods. I doubt that you're the first person to question the change in data source, so presumably there is also data out there (that I can't put my hands on) that shows that these two ways of measuring temperature are equivalent.
Basically, though, my thinking says that if the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe something, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Let's stop arguing and look at the data. Specifically, let us look at global temperature (note that we can see tabular data as well as the plots).
One thing that is plotted in these graphs is a running 5-year average, which helps separate the general trend from the local noise. Not surprisingly, this 5-year average tends to be a lot less volatile than each year, and we see points appearing above and below this line.
You with me so far?
Now, let's look closely at the temperature data. When you look at these points, 1998 was, quite frankly, an outlier. In a long series of points, it was much higher than the 5 year average, and most of the years since 1998 (excluding 2005 and 2007), were cooler. So, yeah, you can make the statement that the average temperature is cooler than in 1998.
Let's look a bit closer at the 5 year average. Since 1998, this value has gone up almost every year since 1998. The one exception is 2006, which is still higher than 1998.
Thus, we don't see a "10 years of cooling". We see that 10 years ago, we had an abnormally warm year and that over 10 years, the 5-year average has continued to rise.
Further to my previous post, something that both sides of this issue often miss is that the issue of global warming is a large, long-term issue. As such, it is completely irresponsible to claim that any one event was or was not caused by global warming.
For example, if I claimed that hurricane Katrina was a direct consequence of global warming, somebody should tell me to shut the hell up. On the other hand, if you look at the frequency of category 5 hurricanes, you can see that it has increased.
The same kind of logic applies to all climate observations. Saying that this year was hotter or cooler than last doesn't matter. Saying that the hottest years on record all happened recently is significant.
In fact, most of the year-to-year variability in surface temperatures is due to heat sloshing back and forth between the oceans and atmosphere, rather than to the planet as a whole gaining or losing heat.
You can not deny that the article virtually dismisses any trends in surface temperature as unimportant and unreliable. I do not care if it goes on to list other reasons for warming, I care about the fact it is dismissing the surface temperature record.
Perhaps you need to brush up on your reading comprehension and science skills. The sentence does not undermine surface temperature as a valid metric. It is simply pointing out that because year-to-year variability is driven by heat exchange between the atmosphere and the oceans, there will be noise in this metric.
Or, to put it even more simply, you gotta look at the long-term trend and not just a few years.
Another interesting take on the wage gap comes from the BBC.
When I posted this link on Facebook a while back, some of my very feminist friends got very upset, claiming that it sounded like women were being blamed.
I think the safe conclusion is that it is a complex issue, but that stance lends itself very poorly to internet sound-bytes.
This whole line of thought reminds me of a talk I saw several years ago.
At the beginning of the talk, he showed the classic picture of how the different visual processing components of the human brain talk to one another. I can't seem to find the image with a quick google search, but it is essentially a big mess of lines showing this is connected to that one, with feedback loops everywhere, etc.
The whole point of his talk was that this model was probably an oversimplification.
So, yeah, the brain is really, really hard to understand.
Okay, so back to the main article's question - how do you teach them statistics?
I work with a lot of biologists and other people who don't have a clear understanding of probability theory, statistics, etc. and one thing that I've found works very well is to make very clear analogies to simple probabilistic systems that they can understand.
For example, going back to the 90% effective test, imagine that you have a wheel with an arrow on it which is the test. On this wheel, there are 10 boxes, 9 of which say "Not a terrorist" and 1 of which says "You're a terrorist." Now, hand this wheel out to 100s of people and tell them that anyone who lands on "You're a terrorist" gets locked in prison.
A surprisingly large amount of probability theory can be expressed in simple terms like this.
Half the time when im [sic] out, I have no idea where I am.
Maybe this is a sign that I'm getting old, but I find this to be very, very scary.
GPS devices are excellent for driving in unknown cities, but to have no idea where you are half the time!?!?
What happens when the battery dies or when you accidentally drop the device?
If you know where you're going, you can anticipate turns, etc. as well as give all of your attention to the road. If you are waiting the magic voice out of the box to tell you what to do, you're going to drive like crap.
Am I the only one who thinks this attitude is scary?
What's the "guilty conscience" wisecrack for? This thing is not only incredibly cool, but if you can afford it, you already pay enough taxes to support a small mid-American city. Get over it.
Is this an incredibly cool engineering achievement? Yes.
Would this car be an absolute wonder and joy to drive? I can't imagine not.
That said, I find the existence of such a thing to be an ugly disappointment. In my mind, it all boils down to a value judgment:
On the one hand, we have the incremental pleasure that the owners of these cars will have vs. them driving around a ~$100,000 car.
On the other hand, there is the opportunity cost for investing that kind of money into something that helps society.
For some (including me), the whole argument boils down to these two potential options. If you can accept that the former is something preferable to the latter through some kind of convoluted logic, fine. I can't.
Yeah, but is that such a bad thing? Maybe he doesn't just want a mundane, he wants a relationship with a female geek.
This attitude is potentially crippling.
Knowledge of the specific term "meatspace" should not be confused with the real goal - finding someone who has enough shared interest to build a friendship and who is accepting of the geek in question.
It is damn near impossible to find someone who shares all of your interests. That is also a potentially huge mistake. One of the major joys in a relationship is being exposed to new things and growing as a person.
Spewing off-putting tech jargon is not a good way to woo.
I think that the only really safe assumption about a potential alien contact is that the aliens will be different in ways that we can't really even begin to consider. This will be the case for biology, philosophy, ethics, society (if they even have any such thing), etc. in addition to the obvious points about technology.
Any contact would be weird.
It would also be fabulously interesting, if we survived.
In order for something to be a crime, it must be demonstrated that it causes harm, suffering, or loss. There has to be a victim.
This would be a good rule, if only it were true. There are a lot of actions that have no victim and that are still illegal. Prostitution and drug laws come to mind. Even avoiding those hot-button topics, what about jaywalking on a deserted street? What about seat belt laws?
Also, even though this is a good rule, how do you define "victim"? In cases like murder, rape, assault, it is pretty clear, but what about things like noise laws?
Some people are upset by clowns, so dressing like a clown can be considered criminal at times.
Unfortunately, I don't think that there are any clear rules for defining laws. It is by necessity an ugly process that should require a lot of debate. Unfortunately, though, it seems that creating laws is also a lot easier than getting rid of them.
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at... Sure, I'd love to get paid more, but I also want kids to learn from people who LOVE teaching.
Can we please drop this whole "low pay guarantees that it will only be people who LOVE teaching" nonsense? Some points to thing about:
Would raising the pay of teachers discourage any of the great people who LOVE teaching from going into that career?
Does loving to do something automatically make you good at it?
Would raising the pay attract more people to the job? Isn't it possible that some of these people would make excellent teachers?
Do you have to hire everybody who tries to be a teacher or can you screen them out with job interviews?
I submit to you that stating "well trained and silent" before "ninja" is redundant. If one is lacking in either training or the ability to be silent, it precludes one's propensity for ninja-ness.
Presumably, giving someone a little bit of ninja training will cost a lot less than giving someone a lot of ninja training, so depending on your budget, it may be conceivable that you'll choose to hire a poorly trained ninja in order to save money.
Personally, though, I would consider the poorly trained ninja to be more of "decorative" ninja, which are useful for spicing up parties but not much else.
Following same logic, bin Laden should be named as anti-terrorist chief of operations. Who knows better how terrorists plan their attacks on innocent people?
I think that we need to institute a version of Godwin's law for terrorism.
If this ever happens, you're going to have an extremely large number of angry, desperate, highly motivated people looking, in order, for (a) somewhere to live and (b) someone to blame.
There. Fixed that for you.
If this happens, fierce debate and political problems will not be the response. Think mass starvation and war anywhere there is a large coastal population.
3D pie charts that show only 2 numbers are the devil's work.
What this tells me more than anything else is that although they want to be transparent, the people who put this together know almost nothing about presentation of data.
Please, everybody, read Tufte. Even if you don't agree with everything that he says, think about his points.
Then, for the love of God, never, ever, create a 3D pie chart again.
Slashdot Mirror
You are wise to be skeptical of any graph where the source of data changes right when the data gets interesting.
I did some quick searching and cannot find the desired data either, but here is where I tend to trust the independent review of the IPCC of the methods. I doubt that you're the first person to question the change in data source, so presumably there is also data out there (that I can't put my hands on) that shows that these two ways of measuring temperature are equivalent.
Basically, though, my thinking says that if the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe something, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Let's stop arguing and look at the data. Specifically, let us look at global temperature (note that we can see tabular data as well as the plots).
One thing that is plotted in these graphs is a running 5-year average, which helps separate the general trend from the local noise. Not surprisingly, this 5-year average tends to be a lot less volatile than each year, and we see points appearing above and below this line.
You with me so far?
Now, let's look closely at the temperature data. When you look at these points, 1998 was, quite frankly, an outlier. In a long series of points, it was much higher than the 5 year average, and most of the years since 1998 (excluding 2005 and 2007), were cooler. So, yeah, you can make the statement that the average temperature is cooler than in 1998.
Let's look a bit closer at the 5 year average. Since 1998, this value has gone up almost every year since 1998. The one exception is 2006, which is still higher than 1998.
Thus, we don't see a "10 years of cooling". We see that 10 years ago, we had an abnormally warm year and that over 10 years, the 5-year average has continued to rise.
Further to my previous post, something that both sides of this issue often miss is that the issue of global warming is a large, long-term issue. As such, it is completely irresponsible to claim that any one event was or was not caused by global warming.
For example, if I claimed that hurricane Katrina was a direct consequence of global warming, somebody should tell me to shut the hell up. On the other hand, if you look at the frequency of category 5 hurricanes, you can see that it has increased.
The same kind of logic applies to all climate observations. Saying that this year was hotter or cooler than last doesn't matter. Saying that the hottest years on record all happened recently is significant.
Perhaps you need to brush up on your reading comprehension and science skills. The sentence does not undermine surface temperature as a valid metric. It is simply pointing out that because year-to-year variability is driven by heat exchange between the atmosphere and the oceans, there will be noise in this metric.
Or, to put it even more simply, you gotta look at the long-term trend and not just a few years.
Another interesting take on the wage gap comes from the BBC.
When I posted this link on Facebook a while back, some of my very feminist friends got very upset, claiming that it sounded like women were being blamed.
I think the safe conclusion is that it is a complex issue, but that stance lends itself very poorly to internet sound-bytes.
Along those same lines, there are plenty of examples of completely paralyzed people having forming new long-term, meaningful relationships.
As far as I know, there are no examples of comatose people forming new relationships.
In other words, the mind can thrive without the body, but without the mind, the body is just meat.
This whole line of thought reminds me of a talk I saw several years ago.
At the beginning of the talk, he showed the classic picture of how the different visual processing components of the human brain talk to one another. I can't seem to find the image with a quick google search, but it is essentially a big mess of lines showing this is connected to that one, with feedback loops everywhere, etc.
The whole point of his talk was that this model was probably an oversimplification.
So, yeah, the brain is really, really hard to understand.
Okay, so back to the main article's question - how do you teach them statistics?
I work with a lot of biologists and other people who don't have a clear understanding of probability theory, statistics, etc. and one thing that I've found works very well is to make very clear analogies to simple probabilistic systems that they can understand.
For example, going back to the 90% effective test, imagine that you have a wheel with an arrow on it which is the test. On this wheel, there are 10 boxes, 9 of which say "Not a terrorist" and 1 of which says "You're a terrorist." Now, hand this wheel out to 100s of people and tell them that anyone who lands on "You're a terrorist" gets locked in prison.
A surprisingly large amount of probability theory can be expressed in simple terms like this.
Maybe this is a sign that I'm getting old, but I find this to be very, very scary.
GPS devices are excellent for driving in unknown cities, but to have no idea where you are half the time!?!?
What happens when the battery dies or when you accidentally drop the device?
If you know where you're going, you can anticipate turns, etc. as well as give all of your attention to the road. If you are waiting the magic voice out of the box to tell you what to do, you're going to drive like crap.
Am I the only one who thinks this attitude is scary?
Is this an incredibly cool engineering achievement? Yes.
Would this car be an absolute wonder and joy to drive? I can't imagine not.
That said, I find the existence of such a thing to be an ugly disappointment. In my mind, it all boils down to a value judgment:
On the one hand, we have the incremental pleasure that the owners of these cars will have vs. them driving around a ~$100,000 car.
On the other hand, there is the opportunity cost for investing that kind of money into something that helps society.
For some (including me), the whole argument boils down to these two potential options. If you can accept that the former is something preferable to the latter through some kind of convoluted logic, fine. I can't.
Then, even if your super-tight pants were about to fall off, you had not one, but TWO belts holding them up.
If you think it interrupts the flow, have your partner put it on you and make the act of putting it on part of the fun.
This attitude is potentially crippling.
Knowledge of the specific term "meatspace" should not be confused with the real goal - finding someone who has enough shared interest to build a friendship and who is accepting of the geek in question.
It is damn near impossible to find someone who shares all of your interests. That is also a potentially huge mistake. One of the major joys in a relationship is being exposed to new things and growing as a person.
Spewing off-putting tech jargon is not a good way to woo.
Well said.
I think that the only really safe assumption about a potential alien contact is that the aliens will be different in ways that we can't really even begin to consider. This will be the case for biology, philosophy, ethics, society (if they even have any such thing), etc. in addition to the obvious points about technology.
Any contact would be weird.
It would also be fabulously interesting, if we survived.
This would be a good rule, if only it were true. There are a lot of actions that have no victim and that are still illegal. Prostitution and drug laws come to mind. Even avoiding those hot-button topics, what about jaywalking on a deserted street? What about seat belt laws?
Also, even though this is a good rule, how do you define "victim"? In cases like murder, rape, assault, it is pretty clear, but what about things like noise laws?
Some people are upset by clowns, so dressing like a clown can be considered criminal at times.
Unfortunately, I don't think that there are any clear rules for defining laws. It is by necessity an ugly process that should require a lot of debate. Unfortunately, though, it seems that creating laws is also a lot easier than getting rid of them.
Put in this context, I can understand much better how my life went awry...
Can we please drop this whole "low pay guarantees that it will only be people who LOVE teaching" nonsense? Some points to thing about:
Would raising the pay of teachers discourage any of the great people who LOVE teaching from going into that career?
Does loving to do something automatically make you good at it?
Would raising the pay attract more people to the job? Isn't it possible that some of these people would make excellent teachers?
Do you have to hire everybody who tries to be a teacher or can you screen them out with job interviews?
Presumably, giving someone a little bit of ninja training will cost a lot less than giving someone a lot of ninja training, so depending on your budget, it may be conceivable that you'll choose to hire a poorly trained ninja in order to save money.
Personally, though, I would consider the poorly trained ninja to be more of "decorative" ninja, which are useful for spicing up parties but not much else.
And, of course, the obvious foreign substance routinely permanently inserted into the body - tattoo ink.
I think that we need to institute a version of Godwin's law for terrorism.
So... you propose deliberately making something that lives above ground, is intensely radioactive, and is designed to attract visitors?
What could possibly go wrong?
If we accept this statement as true, how can we universally define when someone is a "Monster"?
Then, how can we take that definition and roll it into a system of laws and government without it becoming corrupted?
There. Fixed that for you.
If this happens, fierce debate and political problems will not be the response. Think mass starvation and war anywhere there is a large coastal population.
3D pie charts that show only 2 numbers are the devil's work.
What this tells me more than anything else is that although they want to be transparent, the people who put this together know almost nothing about presentation of data.
Please, everybody, read Tufte. Even if you don't agree with everything that he says, think about his points.
Then, for the love of God, never, ever, create a 3D pie chart again.
This is, in my mind, key for an energy solution. Increasing suburban sprawl is horrible for the environment in almost all ways.