...they're getting involved in everything because they've been good at everything*? When they start failing, I guarantee you they'll stick to what they're good at.
*except Google Earth. I still can't find the Sydney Opera House, no matter what keywords I use.
I am apalled by the comments here, especially this one. Fascism? This guy is getting people to find out which professors are spouting (what he deems) absurd or unbalanced ideas and engage in (what he deems) unprofessional behavior, and then getting these people to document it.
And what's wrong with that is... ?
Why are people afraid that others will find out their opinions? If you don't want people to find out your opinions, DON'T VOICE THEM TO A LECTURE HALL FULL OF STUDENTS. If you don't want people to think you act unprofessionally in your position as a professor, DON'T ACT UNPROFESSIONALLY IN YOUR POSITION AS A PROFESSOR.
When did it become damaging to free speech to spread someone's message?
That's not a rhetorical question. Please, tell me.
That's a good point. Plagiarism capability is built right in to the Windows OS. By the DMCA, they need to remove either the ability to copy, or the ability to paste.
I've got an explanation that I think is realistic, but which you may not like (but at least I can't get modded down for). Biologists are far more optimistic than other scientists. They take a small amount of evidence and severely overestimate what it proves, or overestimate the simplicity with which a task will be accomplished. No malice, just perhaps hubris. Perhaps they genuinely believed they could fudge a few corners because "ah, who cares, we're basically right, even if a few results here and there don't totally work out". Evolutionary theory requires scientists to regard biological systems as far less complex than they really are, else how could they come about on their own? Remember the human genome hubbub? Yay, we mapped the human genome! But... that's pretty useless... what we really need is the proteome! Then all our problems will be solved!
They think successes from stem cells will be easy because, you know, they just have to "coax" the cells to do what they want. But they have to gain a much, much, much better understanding of how cells actually work (and I don't mean on an abstracted level, I mean find the prime movers behind all functions) before they can get anything out of stem cells. Now, before you make a bunch of ill-informed flames of me:
-I'm not saying scientists should never study stem cells, just that they have a relatively low rate of return (gain for humanity per dollar invested) under our current knowledge.
-I'm not saying scientists should give up trying to reduce biological systems to simpler laws.
-And, for the love of all that is good, I'm not saying "God did it" is a valid scientific explanation!
I'm just saying, maybe scaling down your appraisal of a cell's complexity is in order before you tell us what results you were "supposed to" get instead of what you "did" get.
The others have pretty thoroughly debunked your statement about what is libel, but I just wanted to add a real world example of the distinction you claim doesn't exist. On Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit!, they make a point of ONLY calling people they don't agree with "assholes" and "motherfuckers" (cf. "cockmaster") rather than "frauds" or "quacks" since the latter two pose a risk of being sued.
Oh. Thanks for the clarification. If the rest of us had heard he was just going ot "use" the internet, we would have -- mistakenly -- assumed he was going to use it, but not in a way intended to help or hurt himself. Since it said "leverage", however, now we know he actually wants to win, and doesn't just intend to dick around with a Wiki.
It takes 75kg of raw materials to make a mobile phone.
It doesn't. You would have to believe ~750x as much raw materials are thrown away to make each phone as is actually part of it. Doesn't pass the laugh test I'm afraid.
About evolution, you're kind of misrepresenting what's been done. Evolution is not nearly as well understood as you're trying to make it out. Genetics is well understood. Allele shift is well understood. But *original* formation of DNA has never been reproduced, and no progress on this has ever been made. None of the mutations that would account for anything in the fossil record has been reproduced either. AND JUST SO YOU DON'T MISINTERPRET ME AS TRYING TO REFUTE MOST OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, that doesn't mean they didn't happen. They are consistent with what we know.
But look at it this way: scientists already accept the methodology of so-called "Intelligent Design". When scientists dig up the earth, they distinguish between designed artifacts and rocks affected by blind, natural processes. If you find something as simple as a cup, "yep, that must have been made by a human". But when they find cells more complex than anything humans have produced (up through and including a Boeing 747), nope, must have happened by accident, anyone who sees design is a religious nut not worthy of refutation.
a rough probability of the likelihood of an animal-based influenza virus getting a mutation that can allow it to spread to animals.
One hundred percent?
Kidding aside, I'm pretty sure that achievement was long before 2005, hence questioning how evolution is an achievement of 2005. And if you meant calculating the probability that a virus in order X will adapt so it can spread to order Y, okay, but that's not incredibly testable. There isn't a large enough class of viruses to test whether these probabilities given of order-skipping are even right. I'm not trying to say "God of the gaps, ID rules" here, but I don't think your specific example is one of the confirmed predictions of evolutionary theory.
Even with all the progress evolution has made, how is it such a great achievement? An achievement means some good you can now do for humankind, or have done, not merely learning stuff. With all the progress in evolutionary theory, what does that allow us to do now? Cure diseases we couldn't before? No, not yet. Predict abnormalities we couldn't before? No, not yet. Genetically modify people? No, not yet. Speed up evolutionary processes? No, not yet. It just seems so many fields are far more worthy.
I mean, we could find the climate history of a distant planet, and that would be a great *intellectual* achiement, but benefit for mankind? Meh. (Unless it was at some point a Terran world.) I think these people need to learn that success in science is defined in what you can *predict* and *produce*, not what you can learn about the past.
I hate to sound like the infamous AI goalpost mover (no AI will beat a grandmaster at chess... okay, that's just an algorithm... no AI will recognize speech... okay, that's just an algorithm), but recognizing an image of yourself doesn't count as AI or any self-awareness in the sense we usually think of it (i.e., more than just "knowing where you are"). All the robot has to do is make motions of its own, and check for a reverse representation of it. Now, unlike a goalpost mover, I'm not going to deny (OR support) the claim that one day, robots can have emotions, etc. But if someone accomplishes that, it will have nothing to do with ability to recognize a mirror image.
Okay, but you have to be careful not to equivocate. What fundamentalists, and many people in general, dispute is that the transition from single-celled organisms, through a series of stages, to birds (for example) occurred. This has not been observed. It is *inferred* from an incomplete fossil record. And don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that infererence is false. But you're dealing with two distinct meanings of evolution: 1) change in allele frequency; 2) descent from one species to a (say) more complex one. You can't just assert the (obvious) (1) and claim it is equivalent to (2). That's just playing fast and loose with facts.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "Natural Selection" being a theory. It's a tautology. Whatever survived -- that was fit. Whatever didn't -- that wasn't fit. Precisely nothing could falsify it. It's true by definition. And it only deals with *removal* of genes, not *changing* or *addition*.
I really don't mean to sound like a fundie here, but you're giving people the wrong idea about what evolutionary theory really says and what really has been observed.
The students did a great job of presenting a possible explanation,
I'm not sure that's what you want to say. When your theory could be dismissed just from finding historical information available on fuckin Wikipedia, that's a few thousand miles from a "great job of presenting a possible explanation". Part of a "great job" is to do your goddamn homework.
How about some even better detective work and someone can find a picture of them so we can posit better theories about what they are. Not denigrating what you presented, of course, but every link so far has either been dead, provided no pictures, or only provided a small, low-res picture which I can't really see too well.
And can someone please reassure me that these "junior scientists" didn't just present and "test" a theory that can't be true, since, as others have well noted, the phenomenon was observed long before cars were in the area?
Google has always been in bed with Microsoft. Google writes products specifically targeted at people who use Windows, which is a Microsoft product, thus supporting the.NET framework. Many of its products, like "Google Earth for Windows" only work in Windows. Google sells AdWord services to Microsoft product vendors. Google's search engine supports searches for Microsoft-related products.
Google and Microsoft have always been joined at the hip, and what's good for one is good for the other.
It'd be nice if I could know what the **** I'm correcting. Where is the list of errors to assure that they are in fact errors? What source did they use to confirm that they are errors? How do they know that source wasn't error-ridden? All I see in TFA is a list a two mistakes on the Mendeleev (sp) article. Why won't they let us confirm the error rate?
Oh, and by the way guys -- yes, adding fluff to an article would decrease the error rate, questioning the use of that statistic. But unless you have reason to believe that the fluff is substantially different between WP and EB, the statistic is much more useful than many of you are making it out to be.
Exactly. Education subsidies don't improve income. Education doesn't give you more job skills. It reveals you had job skills the whole time. So yes, I absolutely agree. And the goal of "getting everyone a college education" is extremely wasteful and counterproductive. It waters down the signaling effect of the degree and pulls millions of people off the job market in their most productive times so that if they have kids, they can't afford it. It almost makes you think it was by design.
You've hit the nail right on the head. What I want to do is offer an explanation why this happens. In most cases, the bachelors has nothing to do with the job you turn out to perform. Even in technical fields, you only use a tiny fraction of your college knowledge. So why do they require it? Signaling. It's hard for them to tell if you're going to be diligent, intelligent, and/or play by the rules. A degree provides some assurance that you're a weighted combination of these.
So why not just hire everyone and sack the ones that suck? Well,
1) It's expensive to retrain. 2) It may be hard to fire without a "good reason" to avoid being sued. 3) They can't do "probationary" periods. and most importantly: 4) The market is already saturated with college graduates, so they might as well cull the field.
4) is due to heavy subsidies for education, which I believe are ultimately counterproductive. Yes, they make it easier for any one person to get an (unnecessary) education, but they also make it so that everyone has to get more education to prove the same thing to potential employers. In their absence, you would see a shift back to on-the-job training and tighter labor markets which keep up wages and make threats of firing all the less threatening.
It used to be that high school educations were so rigorous and had such high standards that they had the same signaling effect that college does now. Then people could make a decent living at 18. So, poor high schools are part of the problem too, and I guess I'll let you guys fight over what the cause of that is. (Creationism in biology class can only explain a tiny portion of the problem, in case you were about to say something like that.)
My recommendation is to remove subsidies for higher education, make it easier to hire *and fire* people, and introduce competition to public high schools. But that's not going to happen any time soon.
...is that some people buy iPods, but fill 'em up with pirated music instead of stuff they paid for at iTunes. I'm thinking about testing this theory soon.
I understand that's the law, but can you or anyone else please assure me that you understand why such a law is a bad idea? It basically means if you did well at your last job, no one can ever find out for sure. That means you get lumped in with all the people who did poorly, and then you get the mother of all adverse selection problems, meaning employers get more reluctant to hire anyone and have to resort to criminal background checks, multiple references, only hiring people with connections, requiring more education than you really need for the job, extensive interviewing, not posting all their available jobs for the public to see, and, everyone's favorite, Googling you.
I can understand why you might like this if you're a really poor worker, but laws that favor shoddy work generally are not a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, that was France, and that was an episode of the Simpsons.
j/k, you're good, man. I've always felt the same way about wine.
...they're getting involved in everything because they've been good at everything*? When they start failing, I guarantee you they'll stick to what they're good at.
*except Google Earth. I still can't find the Sydney Opera House, no matter what keywords I use.
I am apalled by the comments here, especially this one. Fascism? This guy is getting people to find out which professors are spouting (what he deems) absurd or unbalanced ideas and engage in (what he deems) unprofessional behavior, and then getting these people to document it.
... ?
And what's wrong with that is
Why are people afraid that others will find out their opinions? If you don't want people to find out your opinions, DON'T VOICE THEM TO A LECTURE HALL FULL OF STUDENTS. If you don't want people to think you act unprofessionally in your position as a professor, DON'T ACT UNPROFESSIONALLY IN YOUR POSITION AS A PROFESSOR.
When did it become damaging to free speech to spread someone's message?
That's not a rhetorical question. Please, tell me.
CD's don't count as digital because they're technically analog. They store ones and zeros, but the machine that reads them is analog.
That's a good point. Plagiarism capability is built right in to the Windows OS. By the DMCA, they need to remove either the ability to copy, or the ability to paste.
I've got an explanation that I think is realistic, but which you may not like (but at least I can't get modded down for). Biologists are far more optimistic than other scientists. They take a small amount of evidence and severely overestimate what it proves, or overestimate the simplicity with which a task will be accomplished. No malice, just perhaps hubris. Perhaps they genuinely believed they could fudge a few corners because "ah, who cares, we're basically right, even if a few results here and there don't totally work out". Evolutionary theory requires scientists to regard biological systems as far less complex than they really are, else how could they come about on their own? Remember the human genome hubbub? Yay, we mapped the human genome! But... that's pretty useless... what we really need is the proteome! Then all our problems will be solved!
They think successes from stem cells will be easy because, you know, they just have to "coax" the cells to do what they want. But they have to gain a much, much, much better understanding of how cells actually work (and I don't mean on an abstracted level, I mean find the prime movers behind all functions) before they can get anything out of stem cells. Now, before you make a bunch of ill-informed flames of me:
-I'm not saying scientists should never study stem cells, just that they have a relatively low rate of return (gain for humanity per dollar invested) under our current knowledge.
-I'm not saying scientists should give up trying to reduce biological systems to simpler laws.
-And, for the love of all that is good, I'm not saying "God did it" is a valid scientific explanation!
I'm just saying, maybe scaling down your appraisal of a cell's complexity is in order before you tell us what results you were "supposed to" get instead of what you "did" get.
Ellen Fleiss looked stoned in that commercial. Anyone else notice?
The others have pretty thoroughly debunked your statement about what is libel, but I just wanted to add a real world example of the distinction you claim doesn't exist. On Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit!, they make a point of ONLY calling people they don't agree with "assholes" and "motherfuckers" (cf. "cockmaster") rather than "frauds" or "quacks" since the latter two pose a risk of being sued.
Oh. Thanks for the clarification. If the rest of us had heard he was just going ot "use" the internet, we would have -- mistakenly -- assumed he was going to use it, but not in a way intended to help or hurt himself. Since it said "leverage", however, now we know he actually wants to win, and doesn't just intend to dick around with a Wiki.
It doesn't. You would have to believe ~750x as much raw materials are thrown away to make each phone as is actually part of it. Doesn't pass the laugh test I'm afraid.
But look at it this way: scientists already accept the methodology of so-called "Intelligent Design". When scientists dig up the earth, they distinguish between designed artifacts and rocks affected by blind, natural processes. If you find something as simple as a cup, "yep, that must have been made by a human". But when they find cells more complex than anything humans have produced (up through and including a Boeing 747), nope, must have happened by accident, anyone who sees design is a religious nut not worthy of refutation.
a rough probability of the likelihood of an animal-based influenza virus getting a mutation that can allow it to spread to animals.
One hundred percent?
Kidding aside, I'm pretty sure that achievement was long before 2005, hence questioning how evolution is an achievement of 2005. And if you meant calculating the probability that a virus in order X will adapt so it can spread to order Y, okay, but that's not incredibly testable. There isn't a large enough class of viruses to test whether these probabilities given of order-skipping are even right. I'm not trying to say "God of the gaps, ID rules" here, but I don't think your specific example is one of the confirmed predictions of evolutionary theory.
Even with all the progress evolution has made, how is it such a great achievement? An achievement means some good you can now do for humankind, or have done, not merely learning stuff. With all the progress in evolutionary theory, what does that allow us to do now? Cure diseases we couldn't before? No, not yet. Predict abnormalities we couldn't before? No, not yet. Genetically modify people? No, not yet. Speed up evolutionary processes? No, not yet. It just seems so many fields are far more worthy.
I mean, we could find the climate history of a distant planet, and that would be a great *intellectual* achiement, but benefit for mankind? Meh. (Unless it was at some point a Terran world.) I think these people need to learn that success in science is defined in what you can *predict* and *produce*, not what you can learn about the past.
I hate to sound like the infamous AI goalpost mover (no AI will beat a grandmaster at chess... okay, that's just an algorithm... no AI will recognize speech... okay, that's just an algorithm), but recognizing an image of yourself doesn't count as AI or any self-awareness in the sense we usually think of it (i.e., more than just "knowing where you are"). All the robot has to do is make motions of its own, and check for a reverse representation of it. Now, unlike a goalpost mover, I'm not going to deny (OR support) the claim that one day, robots can have emotions, etc. But if someone accomplishes that, it will have nothing to do with ability to recognize a mirror image.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "Natural Selection" being a theory. It's a tautology. Whatever survived -- that was fit. Whatever didn't -- that wasn't fit. Precisely nothing could falsify it. It's true by definition. And it only deals with *removal* of genes, not *changing* or *addition*.
I really don't mean to sound like a fundie here, but you're giving people the wrong idea about what evolutionary theory really says and what really has been observed.
Stephen J. Gould isn't a real scientist? Reference
The students did a great job of presenting a possible explanation,
I'm not sure that's what you want to say. When your theory could be dismissed just from finding historical information available on fuckin Wikipedia, that's a few thousand miles from a "great job of presenting a possible explanation". Part of a "great job" is to do your goddamn homework.
How about some even better detective work and someone can find a picture of them so we can posit better theories about what they are. Not denigrating what you presented, of course, but every link so far has either been dead, provided no pictures, or only provided a small, low-res picture which I can't really see too well.
And can someone please reassure me that these "junior scientists" didn't just present and "test" a theory that can't be true, since, as others have well noted, the phenomenon was observed long before cars were in the area?
Google has always been in bed with Microsoft. Google writes products specifically targeted at people who use Windows, which is a Microsoft product, thus supporting the .NET framework. Many of its products, like "Google Earth for Windows" only work in Windows. Google sells AdWord services to Microsoft product vendors. Google's search engine supports searches for Microsoft-related products.
Google and Microsoft have always been joined at the hip, and what's good for one is good for the other.
It'd be nice if I could know what the **** I'm correcting. Where is the list of errors to assure that they are in fact errors? What source did they use to confirm that they are errors? How do they know that source wasn't error-ridden? All I see in TFA is a list a two mistakes on the Mendeleev (sp) article. Why won't they let us confirm the error rate?
Oh, and by the way guys -- yes, adding fluff to an article would decrease the error rate, questioning the use of that statistic. But unless you have reason to believe that the fluff is substantially different between WP and EB, the statistic is much more useful than many of you are making it out to be.
Exactly. Education subsidies don't improve income. Education doesn't give you more job skills. It reveals you had job skills the whole time. So yes, I absolutely agree. And the goal of "getting everyone a college education" is extremely wasteful and counterproductive. It waters down the signaling effect of the degree and pulls millions of people off the job market in their most productive times so that if they have kids, they can't afford it. It almost makes you think it was by design.
You've hit the nail right on the head. What I want to do is offer an explanation why this happens. In most cases, the bachelors has nothing to do with the job you turn out to perform. Even in technical fields, you only use a tiny fraction of your college knowledge. So why do they require it? Signaling. It's hard for them to tell if you're going to be diligent, intelligent, and/or play by the rules. A degree provides some assurance that you're a weighted combination of these.
So why not just hire everyone and sack the ones that suck? Well,
1) It's expensive to retrain.
2) It may be hard to fire without a "good reason" to avoid being sued.
3) They can't do "probationary" periods.
and most importantly:
4) The market is already saturated with college graduates, so they might as well cull the field.
4) is due to heavy subsidies for education, which I believe are ultimately counterproductive. Yes, they make it easier for any one person to get an (unnecessary) education, but they also make it so that everyone has to get more education to prove the same thing to potential employers. In their absence, you would see a shift back to on-the-job training and tighter labor markets which keep up wages and make threats of firing all the less threatening.
It used to be that high school educations were so rigorous and had such high standards that they had the same signaling effect that college does now. Then people could make a decent living at 18. So, poor high schools are part of the problem too, and I guess I'll let you guys fight over what the cause of that is. (Creationism in biology class can only explain a tiny portion of the problem, in case you were about to say something like that.)
My recommendation is to remove subsidies for higher education, make it easier to hire *and fire* people, and introduce competition to public high schools. But that's not going to happen any time soon.
...is that some people buy iPods, but fill 'em up with pirated music instead of stuff they paid for at iTunes. I'm thinking about testing this theory soon.
I understand that's the law, but can you or anyone else please assure me that you understand why such a law is a bad idea? It basically means if you did well at your last job, no one can ever find out for sure. That means you get lumped in with all the people who did poorly, and then you get the mother of all adverse selection problems, meaning employers get more reluctant to hire anyone and have to resort to criminal background checks, multiple references, only hiring people with connections, requiring more education than you really need for the job, extensive interviewing, not posting all their available jobs for the public to see, and, everyone's favorite, Googling you.
I can understand why you might like this if you're a really poor worker, but laws that favor shoddy work generally are not a good idea.
It matches my theory of the brontosaurus, which goes as follows and begins now:
All brontosauruses are thin on one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again on the other tend.