His criticism of SERI is basically saying "the hypothesis that the neutrino has a rest mass of zero is scientific, but the hypothesis that a neutrino has a rest mass that is not zero is unscientific." This is silly; the same experiments would be used to test either hypothesis.
No, Chriton is right. Assuming your experiments measure the mass of the neutrino with some error, then you can never falsify the hypothesis "neutrinos have nonzero rest mass." All the experiments can do is push the upper bound on the mass closer to zero*. Falsifiability is one of the requirements for a hypothesis to be scientific. Since your experiment can't establish the mass as zero, only require it to be closer to zero than the last experiment, no experiment you do can contradict the hypothesis. OTOH, an hypothesis that "the rest mass of the neutrino is at least X" is scientific for any X, as long as it is possible to conduct an experiment with that degree of accuracy (even if it's impractical). Similarly, the hypothesis that neutrinos have zero rest mass is scientific -- it would be easy to falsify, with any experiment that showed a nonzero mass.
* (IANAPP, there may be experiments that distinguish between exactly zero and not quite zero that don't put an error bar around the measurement of mass. If that's the case, then either hypothesis is falsifiable.)
No, that's an idiotic misreading of what Popper said about falsifiability.
Saying "I'm doing an experiment to test whether the neutrino has mass" and saying "I'm doing an experiment to test whether the neutrino has no mass" is exactly the same thing. It is silly to think that this is scientific if it's phrased one way, and unscientific if the exact same thing is said with equivalent, but slightly different phrasing.
His criticism of the Drake equation is even less well informed, in that he's criticising the equation itself, not the parameters that go into it. But the equation is trivially true; it's nearly a tautology. If the correct statement is "we don't know", it's not because the equations wrong, it's because we don't know what values go on the right side.
From Crichton's piece:
"The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses."
He IS talking about the parameters (on the right side). Your criticism is meaningless.
Nope. Crichton said, direct quote, "the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science."
Not the values of terms that compose it. The equation itself.
Crichton's criticism is literaly meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. In short, Crichton should stick with novels, which he's good at, and not critiquing SETI, something he seems to know little about.
âoeThe results of simulations like this are no better than than the assumptions you make in developing them. And these, of course, are based on our manifestly imperfect but rapidly improving knowledge of the heavens.â
Right. That's the key point. The knowledge may be "improving"â" and some of the parameters are now becoming knownâ" but many of the numbers that go into the Drake equation have an uncertainty of "nobody knows" or, "there are a lot of different speculations that can answer that question, but nobody has any good data to favor one hypothesis over another."
Michael Crichton's criticism, unfortunately, is uninformed.
His criticism of SERI is basically saying "the hypothesis that the neutrino has a rest mass of zero is scientific, but the hypothesis that a neutrino has a rest mass that is not zero is unscientific." This is silly; the same experiments would be used to test either hypothesis. Likewise, it's silly to criticise SETI by saying it's scientific to listen for radio signals if you're trying to show that there aren't any, but it's not scientific to listen for radio signals if you're trying to see if there are any. It's the same experiment either way.
His criticism of the Drake equation is even less well informed, in that he's criticising the equation itself, not the parameters that go into it. But the equation is trivially true; it's nearly a tautology. If the correct statement is "we don't know", it's not because the equations wrong, it's because we don't know what values go on the right side. But the answer "we don't know how many civilizations are in the univererse because we don't know what the probability is that a planet with life develops a lifeform with intelligence still bounds the question-- it tells us more precisely what we don't know.
In short, Crichton should stick with novels, which he's good at, and not critiquing SETI, something he seems to know little about.
... Google kill switch only work for app that come from Googles App store
Is there a source for this statement? People in the comment threads have said this a dozen times, but nobody's mentioned why they believe this is true.
A paper that was published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine has now examined scientific publishing using economic concepts and concluded that the way things are done now is inevitably problematic.
Seems a bit of a conflict of interest here. Of course the open-access journals are going to suggest that "the way things are done now" --i.e., traditional journals-- are "oligarchic" and "distort science".
Amazing how the blindingly obvious can get headlines.
If all the different criteria all gave the same result, then there would be no need to make a weighted average; you could just look at any single one.
If they give different results, then of course the result will depend on how you weigh them. In fact, if a college ranks number one on any of the criteria, clearly a weighting exists to rank that college number one overall (just rate that one factor 100%...)
You don't need "a pair of mathematicians" to show that. A pair of high-school freshmen could do it.
Peer review is great for some things, but just ask Galileo how 'peer review' worked for him. 7 years in a prison as a part of the inquisition. I do realize, that today scientific breakthroughs are treate
Just a note, Galileo's trial by the inquisition was not a problem of peer reviewing: it wasn't that he couldn't get his work published; it was what happened after it was published.
By the way, who moderated the post pointing out that the comma was in the wrong place as "offtopic"?? The proper moderation is "insightful", since at least half the commenters in the discussion following seem to think that the comma was right and the extra zero at the end wrong.
Who cares who spammers want to be President? In a perfect world, their right to vote would be forfeited and they would be in a 10'x12' cell.
This has nothing to do with who spammers want to be president. This has to do with whose name spammers think will get somebody to click on a link.
My estimate is, they're probably right. Obama supporters will clilck to see what their candidate is up to, and Obama opposers will click to see what their opposition is up to.
McCain, on the other hand, usually isn't up to anything much. I doubt either side would be easily lured into clicking a link, because he's pretty boring.
The same people that cry for the dolphin safe nets demand the government go on a fishing expedition for terrorists, drug dealers and drinkers with a far worse net.
The no fly list doesn't identify people, just names, and it's very exact, so changing charles to chuck will defeat it.
No, actually it won't. The newspapers are full of stories of people who were detained or forbidden from flying because their name was similar to a name on the list, or a nickname of a name on the list, or a possible alternative spelling of a name on the list, or names that had once been used as an alias of names on the list.
for example, the name "T. Kennedy" was on the list. Senator Edward Kennedy (whose name does not begin with "T", but who is nicknamed "Teddy") was stopped:
from Wikipedia
"In August 2004, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) told a Senate Judiciary Committee discussing the No Fly List that he had appeared on the list and had been repeatedly delayed at airports. He said it had taken him three weeks of appeals directly to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to have him removed from the list. Kennedy said he was eventually told that the name "T Kennedy" was added to the list because it was once used as an alias of a suspected terrorist. There are an estimated 7,000 American men whose legal names correspond to "T Kennedy". (Senator Kennedy, whose first name is Edward and for whom "Ted" is only a nickname, would not be one of them.)"
Except if we do Approval based voting, the lowest common denominator will win....
Well, it tends to pick the candidate disliked by fewest voters, instead of the candidate liked by most-- if that's the "least common denominator," actually, I still think that would be an improvement.
(obviously in the case of only two candidates, "disliked by fewest" and "liked by most" become the very similar.)
As an Indian, its kinda disheartening that Bose didn't get the Nobel.
Well, Satyendra Nath Bose died in 1974... one of the rules of the Nobel prize that they don't break is that it only goes to living scientists, so they were hardly likely to give the 2008 prize to him.
(The dead scientists can't appreciate the honor, so it makes sense to give it to them while they're alive.)
While your reply is interesting in itself, it is offtopic reguarding its parent post. Yes, most children watch too much crapy TV, but not having a TV is not a valid answer to the concern of censorship by a central authority in the name of the children.
While your reply is interesting in itself, it is offtopic regarding the parent topic, which is tools for parents to control the viewing of theit children, not giving power to "central authority."
Slashdot is a place that is strongly in favor of open software, open government, and full disclosure of software vulnerabilities. Haven't you noticed? It's no surprise that slashdotters will be outraged a gag order preventing disclosure of voting-machine vulnerabilities.
And, as it happens, when it comes to voting, I agree.
Voting counting should be verifiable. There is no room for "trade secret" software, and in particular there is no room for "trade secret" software in voting machines that have already demonstrated errors. If you can't inspect and verify that it counts votes without any secret manipulation, it should not be used in elections.
The whole question should be irrelevant - you should not be able to run something as vital as election using a piece of proprietary software. If they don't want to show the code - they should have no chance at getting the contract in a first place. But thanks to narrow-minded (at best) choices made by politicians we are now in a position where we have to choose between due process and fair election. Disgraceful!
Yes, I agree with that completely. Source code for vote counting should be available for any citizen to inspect, at any time, for any reason, without a court order.
Addition is not a trade secret.
However, given that we don't live in a world where the source code can be inspected without a court order, having an expert witness violate an explicit court order would, almost certainly, result in a world where the source code wouldn't be available for inspection even with a court order.
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She could file a john doe lawsuit and get the CDRs via subpoena ala RIAA...
File a lawsuit for what? Did she copyright her phone number?
You can't just "file a lawsuit," you have to allege some particular violation of civil law.
His criticism of SERI is basically saying "the hypothesis that the neutrino has a rest mass of zero is scientific, but the hypothesis that a neutrino has a rest mass that is not zero is unscientific." This is silly; the same experiments would be used to test either hypothesis.
No, Chriton is right. Assuming your experiments measure the mass of the neutrino with some error, then you can never falsify the hypothesis "neutrinos have nonzero rest mass." All the experiments can do is push the upper bound on the mass closer to zero*. Falsifiability is one of the requirements for a hypothesis to be scientific. Since your experiment can't establish the mass as zero, only require it to be closer to zero than the last experiment, no experiment you do can contradict the hypothesis. OTOH, an hypothesis that "the rest mass of the neutrino is at least X" is scientific for any X, as long as it is possible to conduct an experiment with that degree of accuracy (even if it's impractical). Similarly, the hypothesis that neutrinos have zero rest mass is scientific -- it would be easy to falsify, with any experiment that showed a nonzero mass.
* (IANAPP, there may be experiments that distinguish between exactly zero and not quite zero that don't put an error bar around the measurement of mass. If that's the case, then either hypothesis is falsifiable.)
No, that's an idiotic misreading of what Popper said about falsifiability.
Saying "I'm doing an experiment to test whether the neutrino has mass" and saying "I'm doing an experiment to test whether the neutrino has no mass" is exactly the same thing. It is silly to think that this is scientific if it's phrased one way, and unscientific if the exact same thing is said with equivalent, but slightly different phrasing.
His criticism of the Drake equation is even less well informed, in that he's criticising the equation itself, not the parameters that go into it. But the equation is trivially true; it's nearly a tautology. If the correct statement is "we don't know", it's not because the equations wrong, it's because we don't know what values go on the right side.
From Crichton's piece: "The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses." He IS talking about the parameters (on the right side). Your criticism is meaningless.
Nope. Crichton said, direct quote, "the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science."
Not the values of terms that compose it. The equation itself.
Crichton's criticism is literaly meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. In short, Crichton should stick with novels, which he's good at, and not critiquing SETI, something he seems to know little about.
âoeThe results of simulations like this are no better than than the assumptions you make in developing them. And these, of course, are based on our manifestly imperfect but rapidly improving knowledge of the heavens.â
Right. That's the key point. The knowledge may be "improving"â" and some of the parameters are now becoming knownâ" but many of the numbers that go into the Drake equation have an uncertainty of "nobody knows" or, "there are a lot of different speculations that can answer that question, but nobody has any good data to favor one hypothesis over another."
His criticism of SERI is basically saying "the hypothesis that the neutrino has a rest mass of zero is scientific, but the hypothesis that a neutrino has a rest mass that is not zero is unscientific." This is silly; the same experiments would be used to test either hypothesis. Likewise, it's silly to criticise SETI by saying it's scientific to listen for radio signals if you're trying to show that there aren't any, but it's not scientific to listen for radio signals if you're trying to see if there are any. It's the same experiment either way.
His criticism of the Drake equation is even less well informed, in that he's criticising the equation itself, not the parameters that go into it. But the equation is trivially true; it's nearly a tautology. If the correct statement is "we don't know", it's not because the equations wrong, it's because we don't know what values go on the right side. But the answer "we don't know how many civilizations are in the univererse because we don't know what the probability is that a planet with life develops a lifeform with intelligence still bounds the question-- it tells us more precisely what we don't know.
In short, Crichton should stick with novels, which he's good at, and not critiquing SETI, something he seems to know little about.
As always, the question comes down to, who will watch the watchers?
Many other people are explaining the article. They don't cite sources either.
In fact, as far as I can tell, people are simply making things up based on wishful thinking.
This haiku grocery list (C) 2008, all rights reserved.
No, no, no! It's not a haiku unless it has a seasonal word.
bacon eggs bread milk
pumpkins mayonaise swiss cheese
butter sugar spam
There, fixed it for you!
(You need to get spam at the grocery? I have all the spam I need; give me your email address and I'll send you some).
... Google kill switch only work for app that come from Googles App store
Is there a source for this statement? People in the comment threads have said this a dozen times, but nobody's mentioned why they believe this is true.
A paper that was published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine has now examined scientific publishing using economic concepts and concluded that the way things are done now is inevitably problematic.
Seems a bit of a conflict of interest here. Of course the open-access journals are going to suggest that "the way things are done now" --i.e., traditional journals-- are "oligarchic" and "distort science".
If all the different criteria all gave the same result, then there would be no need to make a weighted average; you could just look at any single one. If they give different results, then of course the result will depend on how you weigh them. In fact, if a college ranks number one on any of the criteria, clearly a weighting exists to rank that college number one overall (just rate that one factor 100%...)
You don't need "a pair of mathematicians" to show that. A pair of high-school freshmen could do it.
I thought it was the third zero that was wrong.
Looks like a lot of people thought the same thing.
In fact, though, it was the comma that was wrong, the zeros that were right.
Peer review is great for some things, but just ask Galileo how 'peer review' worked for him. 7 years in a prison as a part of the inquisition. I do realize, that today scientific breakthroughs are treate
Just a note, Galileo's trial by the inquisition was not a problem of peer reviewing: it wasn't that he couldn't get his work published; it was what happened after it was published.
By the way, who moderated the post pointing out that the comma was in the wrong place as "offtopic"?? The proper moderation is "insightful", since at least half the commenters in the discussion following seem to think that the comma was right and the extra zero at the end wrong.
>that comma is in the wrong place
Right. The correct number is 500,000 (not "50,0000").
arxiv.org actually says 497,649 as of a moment ago).
Who cares who spammers want to be President? In a perfect world, their right to vote would be forfeited and they would be in a 10'x12' cell.
This has nothing to do with who spammers want to be president. This has to do with whose name spammers think will get somebody to click on a link.
My estimate is, they're probably right. Obama supporters will clilck to see what their candidate is up to, and Obama opposers will click to see what their opposition is up to.
McCain, on the other hand, usually isn't up to anything much. I doubt either side would be easily lured into clicking a link, because he's pretty boring.
The same people that cry for the dolphin safe nets demand the government go on a fishing expedition for terrorists, drug dealers and drinkers with a far worse net.
As far as I can tell, it's different people.
The no fly list doesn't identify people, just names, and it's very exact, so changing charles to chuck will defeat it.
No, actually it won't. The newspapers are full of stories of people who were detained or forbidden from flying because their name was similar to a name on the list, or a nickname of a name on the list, or a possible alternative spelling of a name on the list, or names that had once been used as an alias of names on the list.
for example, the name "T. Kennedy" was on the list. Senator Edward Kennedy (whose name does not begin with "T", but who is nicknamed "Teddy") was stopped:
from Wikipedia
Except if we do Approval based voting, the lowest common denominator will win....
Well, it tends to pick the candidate disliked by fewest voters, instead of the candidate liked by most-- if that's the "least common denominator," actually, I still think that would be an improvement.
(obviously in the case of only two candidates, "disliked by fewest" and "liked by most" become the very similar.)
As an Indian, its kinda disheartening that Bose didn't get the Nobel.
Well, Satyendra Nath Bose died in 1974... one of the rules of the Nobel prize that they don't break is that it only goes to living scientists, so they were hardly likely to give the 2008 prize to him. (The dead scientists can't appreciate the honor, so it makes sense to give it to them while they're alive.)
The pointlessness of a two-party system based on false antagonisms and dichotomies. Sadly, there seems to be no hope in sight.
Either approval voting or range voting (aka score votingwould break the forced two-valued dichotomy of the current system.
(In fact, approval voting is just one version of range voting-- in games theory, they are identical).
While your reply is interesting in itself, it is offtopic reguarding its parent post. Yes, most children watch too much crapy TV, but not having a TV is not a valid answer to the concern of censorship by a central authority in the name of the children.
While your reply is interesting in itself, it is offtopic regarding the parent topic, which is tools for parents to control the viewing of theit children, not giving power to "central authority."
And, as it happens, when it comes to voting, I agree.
Voting counting should be verifiable. There is no room for "trade secret" software, and in particular there is no room for "trade secret" software in voting machines that have already demonstrated errors. If you can't inspect and verify that it counts votes without any secret manipulation, it should not be used in elections.
I've never needed help forgetting passwords and stuff. I can do that on my own.
The whole question should be irrelevant - you should not be able to run something as vital as election using a piece of proprietary software. If they don't want to show the code - they should have no chance at getting the contract in a first place. But thanks to narrow-minded (at best) choices made by politicians we are now in a position where we have to choose between due process and fair election. Disgraceful!
Yes, I agree with that completely. Source code for vote counting should be available for any citizen to inspect, at any time, for any reason, without a court order.
Addition is not a trade secret.
However, given that we don't live in a world where the source code can be inspected without a court order, having an expert witness violate an explicit court order would, almost certainly, result in a world where the source code wouldn't be available for inspection even with a court order.