You're wrong. Very wrong. You should really talk to a statistician. Clinical trails use peer-reviewed methods of determining statistical significance. YOU DONT HAVE TO REPEAT A TRIAL to demonstrate this. That would be absurd.
Unfortunately, what you say is not true. You should talk to a statistician. The original reply was correct: if you do a lot of tests, randomly some of them will show false positives at levels of a few standard deviations. This is not news to people who understand statistics.
Two standard deviations is only on the edge of significance-- this one really does need to be confirmed before we believe it.
And, in fact, your statement is generally untrue: replication of results is at the heart of real science.
According to your logic, 1 in 20 drugs on the market actually don't work.
Of the drugs that have had only one clinical trial? That's probably about right.
Yes, although there's an issue of multiple comparisons. There have been a fair number of HIV vaccine trials over the years. This is the first that's found statistically significant results. But if you were to test 20 different non-effective vaccines at a 5% significance level, you'd expect one of the tests to be significant just by chance. This is certainly an intriguing result, but it could be an outlier, and must be replicated.
Almost identical to a ground launch. Getting 100 km up is the easy part (note: they didn't, they got less than 33 km up), getting over 7 km/s of horizontal velocity is the hard part. It's so hard that most boosters start accelerating as soon as they leave the ground.. that makes them supersonic in the low atmosphere, which means they need a fancy aeroshell or they'll burn up.
Right. To be fair, though, although getting to orbital velocity is the hard part, you do gain a bit by starting from outside (the dense part of) the atmosphere. Turns out that, for a SSTO, that's significant (mostly because SSTOs are so sensitive to small variations to start with). Ages ago I calculated that starting out above the atmosphere would give a typical SSTO about a 20% gain in mass to orbit. Interestingly, a significant fraction of this is due to the increased performance of rocket engines in vacuum compared to operating under pressure.
The key word here is "legal". Just because the President says something does not make it legal. Nor does the opinion of three payed for judges make it legal. The Second Circuit made the correct and lawful interpretation on December 18, 2003.
It's too bad that the decision you quote was appealed to the Supreme Court, who ruled that the Second Circuit Court did not have jurisdiction, which means that their decision has no legal standing. When the case was re-filed, and the decision appealed to United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, the court ruled that the president has the right to detail people without trial for indefinite periods of time. That ruling remains the current legal precedent on the case. Note that iit was September 9, 2005, almost two years after the (void) decision you quote.
Well, that's the interesting thing of it. You give one president arbitrary powers, because you trust him to not misuse them, and, you know, you discover that the next president takes those powers, too. And the next. So you have to trust all of them not to misuse them.
Well, it's all perfectly legal. All that stuff about being innocent until proven guilty, constitutional rights-- that's obsolete. The courts said so-- if somebody says the word "terrorism," that word erases any of your so-called "rights".
Contempt of court is the only thing that can legally get you sent to jail indefinitely without a jury trial in the US.
No, in fact, the (former) president of the United States stated that if you are suspected of terrorism, you can be held without charge indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, and without any right to challenge the fact that you were so designated (or even to see any of the evidence used to designate you a terrorist.)
For example, Jose Padilla was a U.S. Citizen, picked up on U.S. territory, and put into solitary confinement without being allowed to see talk to a lawyer and without any charges against him. On September 9, 2005, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit ruled that President Bush indeed has the authority to detain Padilla without charges, in an opinion written by judge J. Michael Luttig.
So, no, contempt of court is not the only thing that can legally get you sent to jail indefinitely without a jury trial in the US.
It's a good article, but it's not a doomsday machine in the Kahn ("Dr. Strangelove") sense, a machine that destroys the world automatically in case of a nuclear attack. What it is is an system that allows retaliation after a nuclear first strike even if the high command is dead.
So the whole "Doomsday Machine" thing was an automated system based on ground sensors to launch the missiles in case US attacks.
No.
If you actually read the article, it's a system that, in the event that it's turned on (and it's normally off) and senses a nuclear strike on Soviet territory, and the lines to Soviet command go dead, automatically gives launch authority of the Russian retaliation force to the humans that are lower down on the chain of command.
It's not "Wargames." It still requires humans to command a nuclear attack.
After a couple times of these calls, IT will eventually get the message that their password policy is ridiculous and unworkable for the average worker.
Not even close. The help desk personnel already know this-- they deal with this problem every day. They aren't the people who make the policies.
UK Gov't Health tells kids to masturbate. Parents pissed.
You aware the the UK meaning of "pissed" is "drunk," right?
Honestly, I'm not surprised people are finding fault with the Drake Equation. I mean, it was written up by Ludwig Von Drake! He's not a proper scientist at all, he's just a cartoon! You can't rely on cartoon characters to do your science for you, it's not sensible...
And it's a good idea not to let cartoon characters do your engineering, either.
Um, sorry, there are lifeforms on earth that do not require water to live.
Sorry, no.
we even have non-carbon based lifeforms.
Sorry, no.
We have lifeforms living in the volcanic vents breathing the "toxic to humans" sulfurous gas in the depths of the oceans.
In the "depths of the oceans" there is, I would think, water.
There appears to be life on some of Jupiter's moons. So you'd want to include them as benign.
This has been speculated, based on the fact that the interiors of Jupiter's icy moons seem to be benign, and to have liquid water. They have liquid water, an energy source (hydrothermal energy), protection from radiation, reasonable pressures-- benign by all the standards of Earth. However, the actual existence of such life is only speculation; there's no evidence for it. If
Certainly, raw materials are required, but carbon based, water based lifeforms aren't the only options.
As yet unknown. My original comment was a reply to the question about "terrestrial extremophiles" (which are carbon based, and do require water), not about life-as-we-don't-know-it. As to life-as-we-don't-know-it, I'd have to say that we don't know, pretty much by definition.
Drake's formula is lacking, but since, we really have little experience in what other possibilities there are, it's a reasonable one to use. Especially if we are looking for places to possibly visit or colonize. Or just looking for those we consider a threat. Depends on you paranoia/socialization levels. not to mention there are lifeforms on earth perfectly happy to live in alcohols
Nothing lives in alcohol that is not extremely dilute, that is to say, mostly water. Alcohol, by itself without being highly diluted with water, is a sterilizing agent.
(No, I'm not referring to that species known as College Students). So solvent required? Yes. Water? No. At least to the depths of our current understanding.
Water, yes, at least to the depths of our current understanding.
Well, true enough; we don't know what life as we don't know it would require.
The question I was replying to was one that began "aren't there extremophiles on Earth that...", but I should have made my reply more explicit, so if my reply was quoted without the original question, it would still be clear.
based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon and whether or no there are benign environmental conditions
Aren't there extremophiles on Earth that already lack some if not all of these attributes?
No.
No life without water and raw materials. And, as for "benign environmental conditions," that's a little under-defined, but in general, the entire Earth should be called "benign" by the standards of the rest of the solar system.
Another poster said something about taxing gas more. Not to say we shouldn't be taxing gas more, but that doesn't really work as gas consumed does not reflect mileage driven.
Well, no, but since the fuel efficiency tends to be inversely proportional to vehicle weight, the wear and tear on the roads is higher with low-fuel-efficiency vehicles.
Good idea! Let's implement a per-mile tax-- makes perfect sense. And, to make it even better, let's make the rate per mile inversely proportional to the fuel efficiency, so that the fewer miles per gallon your car gets, the higher the tax is, so the gas-guzzlers pay a penalty. It could be a simple formula:
Tax = (miles)/(miles per gallon)
That way cars with higher fuel efficiency get a better tax break.
And this way, we don't even need the GPS in the car! We can put the tax at the fuel pump!
We all know which side of the argument is trying to force no end of regulations, beliefs and laws on the other.
Very insightful-- in that this summarizes the thought process of the anti-global warming crew: We don't like the political implications, therefore, the science must be wrong.
Do you see that this argument is a non sequiter?
The universe is the way it is. Your dislike of political implications does not change the science. Carbon dioxide in that atmosphere does what it does, and whether you like or dislike the politial implications does not change its effect on global warming.
The anti global warming fringe, however, isn't actually interested in the science-- they already have their political beliefs, and this has given them their beliefs about science.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong. Very wrong. You should really talk to a statistician. Clinical trails use peer-reviewed methods of determining statistical significance. YOU DONT HAVE TO REPEAT A TRIAL to demonstrate this. That would be absurd.
Unfortunately, what you say is not true. You should talk to a statistician. The original reply was correct: if you do a lot of tests, randomly some of them will show false positives at levels of a few standard deviations. This is not news to people who understand statistics.
Two standard deviations is only on the edge of significance-- this one really does need to be confirmed before we believe it.
And, in fact, your statement is generally untrue: replication of results is at the heart of real science.
According to your logic, 1 in 20 drugs on the market actually don't work.
Of the drugs that have had only one clinical trial? That's probably about right.
Good thing I was successful in my Probability and Statistics class. I scored 31.2% on the final so I totally understood that.
Yes, but how well did the control score?
Yes, although there's an issue of multiple comparisons. There have been a fair number of HIV vaccine trials over the years. This is the first that's found statistically significant results. But if you were to test 20 different non-effective vaccines at a 5% significance level, you'd expect one of the tests to be significant just by chance. This is certainly an intriguing result, but it could be an outlier, and must be replicated.
Good point.
someone do some analysis on the statistics and tell us all something and get +5
Sure. It's Poisson statistics, so the standard deviation is the square root of the count.
placebo: 74 plus or minus 8.6
vaccine: 51 plus or minus 7.1
The statistical significance of the difference (23) is equal to the standard deviation of the sum (not the difference!) of the counts, so:
difference between placebo and vaccine:
23 (=31%) plus or minus 11
= (2.06 standard deviations)
Assuming they set their criteria for statistical significance at two standard deviations, then they are significant.
Almost identical to a ground launch. Getting 100 km up is the easy part (note: they didn't, they got less than 33 km up), getting over 7 km/s of horizontal velocity is the hard part. It's so hard that most boosters start accelerating as soon as they leave the ground.. that makes them supersonic in the low atmosphere, which means they need a fancy aeroshell or they'll burn up.
Right. To be fair, though, although getting to orbital velocity is the hard part, you do gain a bit by starting from outside (the dense part of) the atmosphere. Turns out that, for a SSTO, that's significant (mostly because SSTOs are so sensitive to small variations to start with). Ages ago I calculated that starting out above the atmosphere would give a typical SSTO about a 20% gain in mass to orbit. Interestingly, a significant fraction of this is due to the increased performance of rocket engines in vacuum compared to operating under pressure.
The key word here is "legal". Just because the President says something does not make it legal. Nor does the opinion of three payed for judges make it legal. The Second Circuit made the correct and lawful interpretation on December 18, 2003.
It's too bad that the decision you quote was appealed to the Supreme Court, who ruled that the Second Circuit Court did not have jurisdiction, which means that their decision has no legal standing. When the case was re-filed, and the decision appealed to United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, the court ruled that the president has the right to detail people without trial for indefinite periods of time. That ruling remains the current legal precedent on the case. Note that iit was September 9, 2005, almost two years after the (void) decision you quote.
Good thing the current President has changed all that...
Well, that's the interesting thing of it. You give one president arbitrary powers, because you trust him to not misuse them, and, you know, you discover that the next president takes those powers, too. And the next. So you have to trust all of them not to misuse them.
Well, it's all perfectly legal. All that stuff about being innocent until proven guilty, constitutional rights-- that's obsolete. The courts said so-- if somebody says the word "terrorism," that word erases any of your so-called "rights".
Contempt of court is the only thing that can legally get you sent to jail indefinitely without a jury trial in the US.
No, in fact, the (former) president of the United States stated that if you are suspected of terrorism, you can be held without charge indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, and without any right to challenge the fact that you were so designated (or even to see any of the evidence used to designate you a terrorist.)
For example, Jose Padilla was a U.S. Citizen, picked up on U.S. territory, and put into solitary confinement without being allowed to see talk to a lawyer and without any charges against him. On September 9, 2005, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit ruled that President Bush indeed has the authority to detain Padilla without charges, in an opinion written by judge J. Michael Luttig.
So, no, contempt of court is not the only thing that can legally get you sent to jail indefinitely without a jury trial in the US.
For all solar cells, increasing the intensity (the "amount of light shining on the cell") increases the photocurrent.
It would be nice if the press release had a link to the actual work.
So the whole "Doomsday Machine" thing was an automated system based on ground sensors to launch the missiles in case US attacks.
No.
If you actually read the article, it's a system that, in the event that it's turned on (and it's normally off) and senses a nuclear strike on Soviet territory, and the lines to Soviet command go dead, automatically gives launch authority of the Russian retaliation force to the humans that are lower down on the chain of command.
It's not "Wargames." It still requires humans to command a nuclear attack.
The existence of a long tail doesn't really negate the presence of a fat head as well.
Well, apparently British libel law allows libel suits against people who aren't British posting to servers which aren't in Britain. So why shouldn't the opposite be true as well?
Other than that? Well, tell lots of good stories.
After a couple times of these calls, IT will eventually get the message that their password policy is ridiculous and unworkable for the average worker.
Not even close. The help desk personnel already know this-- they deal with this problem every day. They aren't the people who make the policies.
UK Gov't Health tells kids to masturbate. Parents pissed.
You aware the the UK meaning of "pissed" is "drunk," right?
Horray for common sense! Three cheers for Canada!
Honestly, I'm not surprised people are finding fault with the Drake Equation. I mean, it was written up by Ludwig Von Drake! He's not a proper scientist at all, he's just a cartoon! You can't rely on cartoon characters to do your science for you, it's not sensible...
And it's a good idea not to let cartoon characters do your engineering, either.
(Or, if you do, make sure it's not Roadrunner.)
Um, sorry, there are lifeforms on earth that do not require water to live.
Sorry, no.
we even have non-carbon based lifeforms.
Sorry, no.
We have lifeforms living in the volcanic vents breathing the "toxic to humans" sulfurous gas in the depths of the oceans.
In the "depths of the oceans" there is, I would think, water.
There appears to be life on some of Jupiter's moons. So you'd want to include them as benign.
This has been speculated, based on the fact that the interiors of Jupiter's icy moons seem to be benign, and to have liquid water. They have liquid water, an energy source (hydrothermal energy), protection from radiation, reasonable pressures-- benign by all the standards of Earth. However, the actual existence of such life is only speculation; there's no evidence for it. If
Certainly, raw materials are required, but carbon based, water based lifeforms aren't the only options.
As yet unknown. My original comment was a reply to the question about "terrestrial extremophiles" (which are carbon based, and do require water), not about life-as-we-don't-know-it. As to life-as-we-don't-know-it, I'd have to say that we don't know, pretty much by definition.
Drake's formula is lacking, but since, we really have little experience in what other possibilities there are, it's a reasonable one to use. Especially if we are looking for places to possibly visit or colonize. Or just looking for those we consider a threat. Depends on you paranoia/socialization levels. not to mention there are lifeforms on earth perfectly happy to live in alcohols
Nothing lives in alcohol that is not extremely dilute, that is to say, mostly water. Alcohol, by itself without being highly diluted with water, is a sterilizing agent.
(No, I'm not referring to that species known as College Students). So solvent required? Yes. Water? No. At least to the depths of our current understanding.
Water, yes, at least to the depths of our current understanding.
The question I was replying to was one that began "aren't there extremophiles on Earth that...", but I should have made my reply more explicit, so if my reply was quoted without the original question, it would still be clear.
based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon and whether or no there are benign environmental conditions
Aren't there extremophiles on Earth that already lack some if not all of these attributes?
No.
No life without water and raw materials. And, as for "benign environmental conditions," that's a little under-defined, but in general, the entire Earth should be called "benign" by the standards of the rest of the solar system.
Oregon has one of the better state government systems. He is not the only representative to want to see if this is a viable alternative
These two sentences are mutually contradictory.
(I might believe the first sentence if he were, in fact, the only person proposing this idiotic idea.)
... It could be a simple formula:
Tax = (miles)/(miles per gallon)
Think about it a bit more, this proposed tax makes no sense whatsoever. Let's revisit your formula after one algebraic operation ...
Tax = 1 / per gallon
Right. "per gallon" means "(1/gallon)", so:
Tax = 1/(1/gallon)
Tax is proportional to fuel use.
Another poster said something about taxing gas more. Not to say we shouldn't be taxing gas more, but that doesn't really work as gas consumed does not reflect mileage driven.
Well, no, but since the fuel efficiency tends to be inversely proportional to vehicle weight, the wear and tear on the roads is higher with low-fuel-efficiency vehicles.
Tax = (miles)/(miles per gallon)
That way cars with higher fuel efficiency get a better tax break.
And this way, we don't even need the GPS in the car! We can put the tax at the fuel pump!
(the name means "emperor")
We all know which side of the argument is trying to force no end of regulations, beliefs and laws on the other.
Very insightful-- in that this summarizes the thought process of the anti-global warming crew: We don't like the political implications, therefore, the science must be wrong.
Do you see that this argument is a non sequiter?
The universe is the way it is. Your dislike of political implications does not change the science. Carbon dioxide in that atmosphere does what it does, and whether you like or dislike the politial implications does not change its effect on global warming.
The anti global warming fringe, however, isn't actually interested in the science-- they already have their political beliefs, and this has given them their beliefs about science.