The article has a significant bias that's expressed in the spin it puts on the result. Data showing 54% of Americans think the TSA does a "good or excellent job" is not "Americans secretly do love the TSA." It could just as accurately be summarized "Nearly half of Americans think TSA is not doing a good job."
I hope NASA does the right thing and releases the fellow's name.
While I always love to hear stories where MIT students are the heroes, I find this story a little odd. The lunar-swingby return trajectory was always the abort option. So I'm not sure what this article is implying-- a MIT student said "say, why doesn't NASA implement their backup plan?" and Gene Kranz said "the backup plan! That's it! We never would have thought of that!" ?
With that said, it's worth noting that Apollo 13 had already modified their path from the initial free-return trajectory to one that required an engine burn to put them on the lunar-swingby return, in order to target the desired landing site. The important decision wasn't whether to make a burn to do the return; the real question was which engine to use, since it was not known (at the time) whether the explosion had damaged the main engine on the service module (turns out it had; and they made the right choice.)
See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.
I'll ask the opposite question: why shouldn't aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, and rocket scientists be involved in trying to make unambiguous measurements of a critical issue, to try to resolve key questions in a way that's independent of computer models or temperature measurements? Making an independent measurement of key scientific claims using a different technique is pretty much the gold standard of science.
Because it's not their field of expertise.
Precision measurements of the gravity field of the Earth using spacecraft? It most certainly is their field of expertise.
Because they should be focusing on what my tax dollars pay them to do - develop methods for space exploration and explore space.
Here is the wording of the Space Act of 1958, which established NASA and listed its mission and objectives. After declaring that NASA will be a civilian agency to undertake aeronautical and space activities of the U.S. "for the benefit of all mankind," it states: "The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives: (1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space. (2)..."
Expanding human knowledge of the Earth and phenomena in the atmosphere: yes, the GRACE objectives fit into the mission that NASA is explicitly instructed to do.
I'd be very interested in learning a little bit about the General Relativistic effects observed with GRACE. I hadn't thought about it until you brought it up, but you're right, it does seem to be sensitive enough, and to be observing over a long enough period of time that GR corrections may be observable. Can you observe Lense-Thirring effect? Or are you just correcting geodetic precession?
Why are aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, rocket scientists, etc. involved in perpetuating a political agenda based on bad "science" for an administration that refuses to fund the organization's actual purpose?
I'll ask the opposite question: why shouldn't aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, and rocket scientists be involved in trying to make unambiguous measurements of a critical issue, to try to resolve key questions in a way that's independent of computer models or temperature measurements? Making an independent measurement of key scientific claims using a different technique is pretty much the gold standard of science.
I don't get the article either. Making a gun using 3-D printing would have no more patent implication than making anything else using 3-D printing. The article is just attached to the gun article to make a bigger bang.
But, they didn't print a gun using 3-D printing. They made all of the parts of the gun except the parts that actually fire bullets. According to some idiotic regulation they found somewhere, apparently the part that the bullet shoots out of isn't defined as the "gun," but nevertheless, in no reasonable use of the word did they actually print a gun.
Some biometrics are hard to duplicate, some are easy to trick, and some have a tendency to change over time enough that they are truly worthless as indicators...
It's the first one that is the sticking point. How do you *know* that a biometric is hard to trick with, say, a photograph? What about next year, when the photography gets better?
How does the scheme prevent ``play this game or I'll kill your family''?
Well, it's tough to get an algorithm to implement ``play this game or I'll kill your family'' on five million stolen hashes in order to add a few hundred thousand accounts to their zombie network that sends "make your tool enormous" spam.
Nobody bothers cracking passwords one at a time-- it's all about mass production these days.
How many standard deviations above 'random guessing' are we talking about? Over how many trials? And 2 weeks is fine, but what about 6 months to a year?
You're missing the point. They're missing the point. It's easy to make one password secure against guessing it in a million years of trying.
But I don't need to remember one password. I need to remember thirty passwords (for my most important stuff, plus another fifty for sites I visit once or twice), all different, and a large subset of which have to be changed every 60 days. If it takes "a 45 minute learning session" for "the 30-letter password to be firmly implanted in your subconscious brain" this is purely out of the question.
And if the answer is "well, just use the the one password because it's unguessable and you can use it for everything"-- yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
OK, good enough. You agree that they did not falsify data, and you agree that the fundamental scientific institutions continue to work-- OK, that's fine.
I have no problem with them complaining about harassment. I have problems with them saying they will change peer review because they don't like a paper.
Uh, you are aware that after the peer review the paper in question was published, right? While they may have complained about it (in private), not only did they not in any way "change peer review", they didn't even delay it. It went through the process and was published.
Kind of like you making shit up about what he did? His failing is that he didn't independently verify some of what was reported to him by workers in the factories.
Well, he said he personally met people that he did not meet, and that they told him their stories, when these people did not exist and the stories were things that he made up based on rumors he'd heard.
He also lied about the name of the translator who was with him during these purported interviews, and when "This American Life" asked to contact her to check the facts of the story, he told them she'd moved, changed her phone number, and could not be contacted, when when she had not changed her phone number nor moved nor would have been hard to contact if they knew her name. If his failng had been merely "he failed to independently verify," it seems a bit peculiar that he would lie to the producers and tell them it was impossible to contact his translator.
The take-home lesson is that even if you think you're on the side of the angels, you shouldn't lie, because it makes people disbelieve anything you say. In fact, especially if you think you're on the side of the angels.
To be fair, it turns out that much of the reporting of the "poor working conditions" you refer to was from Mike Daisey, who, as it turns out, just made stuff up because it made a better storyline for his one-man show cf. Slashdot: This American Life Retracts Episode On Apple Factories In China
They just get a little tired by constant harrassment from people who have already made it extremely clear that they don't have the slightest interest in the science, but have a political agenda that they are going to push regardless.
They were clearly attacking other scientists in their emails.
Ah. So I take it you have not actually read the thousand or so e-mails themselves; just a few of the carefully chosen excerpts.
It's interesting to read the actual emails. Even knowing that the emails that were released were a set carefully chosen to make the CRU look bad, the actual picture you get is a bunch of very harrassed scientists.
Spending a couple of minutes flipping through the files, here is one with Phil Jones replying to a question of how many Freedom of Information requests they have gotten from one particular requestor this year:
"So since Feb 2007, CRU is in double figures [of FOI requests]. We never get any thanks for putting
things up - only abuse and threats. The latest lot is up in the last 3-4 threads on CA."
and here's Ben Santer, commenting on the same thread: "I have spent the last two months of my scientific career dealing with multiple requests for these model datasets under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I have been able to do little or no productive research during this time. This is of deep concern to me."
and here's Stephen Schneider's comment in reply; "This continuing pattern of harassment, as Ben rightly puts it in my opinion, in the name of due diligence is in my view an attempt to create a fishing expedition to find minor glitches or unexplained bits of code--which exist in nearly all our kinds of complex work--and then assert that the entire result is thus suspect. Our best way to deal with this issue of replication is to have multiple independent author teams, with their own codes and data sets, publishing independent work on the same topics--like has been done on the "hockey stick". That is how credible scientific replication should proceed."
In some of the other emails they talk about their hate mail and threats they receive.
You may argue about whether they were being harrassed. But there is no question whatsoever, if you read the files, that they perceived themselves as being under a continuous, unrelenting attack. And from some of the emails that they quote from, it's hard to avoid that perception.
The part where you said "they revealed themselves as lousy scientists."
"Good scientists welcome opposition, they love it when someone tries to poke holes in their theory"
Yes, good scientists welcome opposition... when it's from people who have a clue, know something about what you've done, and understand the field and make comments with the genuine intent to understand. It's easy to be patient with people who want to learn. It's harder to be patient with people who come saying "you're a fraud, also you're evil, corrupt and stupid, and I'm going to harrass you and make your life as miserable as I can until I can prove it." They just get a little tired by constant harrassment from people who have already made it extremely clear that they don't have the slightest interest in the science, but have a political agenda that they are going to push regardless.
, or asks "how do you know?"
The scientists in question had written tens of thousands of articles, reports, scientific papers and review articles explaining in great detail how they did their work. They had already spent thousands of hours trying to answer that question for the general public. Unfortunately, in responding to people who didn't have the slightest interest in actually listening, turns out that tens of thousands of articles is not enough, because no amount is going to be enough.
Here's something you need to understand. After the first, say, hundred attacks from people who don't have any interest in actually learning what you're doing because they have already made up their minds on political grounds, you just get tired. It gets a little hard to answer the hundred and first attack, or the hundred and tenth, quite as patiently as you did the first ten or twenty. So, maybe the five hundred and twentieth attack actually was a serious criticism from somebody with an open mind who actually had a serious question and actually wanted to learn. It's just hard to take that one seriously when the previous five hundred and nineteen were simply attacks.
That's a much better analysis, but all it concludes is that either a hacker got administrative privilege on a server ("So given the assumptions listed above, the hacker would have to have access to the gateway mail server and/or the Administration file server where the emails were archived. This machine would most likely be an Administrative file server. It would not be optimal for an Administrator to clutter up a production server open to the Internet with sensitive archives.") or else some administrator had compiled the emails in order to respond to a FOI request, and a hacker-- internal or external-- stole that file, possibly because it wasn't secured in the first place ("the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it."
And even this conclusion is pretty speculative, and I'm not sure I credit the analysis as the only way the emails could be stolen. It's interesting to see all the wrong conclusions that have been lined out. (However, kudos to him for keeping these visible. It's nice to see the dead ends as well as the conclusions).
This is still an analysis that doesn't have any access to the actual machines, or knowledge of what is stored where; it is reverse-engineering file configurations from the emails themselves. An analysis that actually does know what is on what machine-- which the police computer crimes division would have-- would not need to make such guesses.
What I stated was that it doesn't bias the system toward a two party solution. Personally, I don't give a damn whether the voting method finds a condorcet winner or not. That's one nice way to settle a multi-candidate election, but not the only one, and it's not necessarily clear that the approval winner is a worse choice than the condorcet winner, even if they are different (in many, possibly most, reasonable preference matrices, they'd select the same winner.)
Still, though, I agree with you in that a method that finds the condorcet winner is vastly superior to what we have now, and I'd throw in my support for it. If we can change the system to some workable version of condorcet voting, that works for me.
Muller has never been a "skeptic" or proponent of AGW. He's a real scientist and properly excorated Mann for the fakeness of the hockey stick.
I didn't call Muller a skeptic. What I did say was that the data analysis done by the team he led very closely confirms the data analysis that CRU did, as seen e.g., in this comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
The article has a significant bias that's expressed in the spin it puts on the result. Data showing 54% of Americans think the TSA does a "good or excellent job" is not "Americans secretly do love the TSA." It could just as accurately be summarized "Nearly half of Americans think TSA is not doing a good job."
Another simple solution, always capitalize the third-from-last letter of the answer.
Mine is, "What do you hate about c++?" when it is optional.
That's no good, there has to be only one answer !
I hope NASA does the right thing and releases the fellow's name.
While I always love to hear stories where MIT students are the heroes, I find this story a little odd. The lunar-swingby return trajectory was always the abort option. So I'm not sure what this article is implying-- a MIT student said "say, why doesn't NASA implement their backup plan?" and Gene Kranz said "the backup plan! That's it! We never would have thought of that!" ?
With that said, it's worth noting that Apollo 13 had already modified their path from the initial free-return trajectory to one that required an engine burn to put them on the lunar-swingby return, in order to target the desired landing site. The important decision wasn't whether to make a burn to do the return; the real question was which engine to use, since it was not known (at the time) whether the explosion had damaged the main engine on the service module (turns out it had; and they made the right choice.)
It was, of course, actually more complicated than that. IEEE Spectrum has a more detailed timeline and analysis: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/apollo-13-we-have-a-solution-part-2
Who would have thought it?
See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.
Thanks!
I'll ask the opposite question: why shouldn't aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, and rocket scientists be involved in trying to make unambiguous measurements of a critical issue, to try to resolve key questions in a way that's independent of computer models or temperature measurements? Making an independent measurement of key scientific claims using a different technique is pretty much the gold standard of science.
Because it's not their field of expertise.
Precision measurements of the gravity field of the Earth using spacecraft? It most certainly is their field of expertise.
Because they should be focusing on what my tax dollars pay them to do - develop methods for space exploration and explore space.
Here is the wording of the Space Act of 1958, which established NASA and listed its mission and objectives. After declaring that NASA will be a civilian agency to undertake aeronautical and space activities of the U.S. "for the benefit of all mankind," it states: ..."
"The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:
(1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space. (2)
Expanding human knowledge of the Earth and phenomena in the atmosphere: yes, the GRACE objectives fit into the mission that NASA is explicitly instructed to do.
Reference: http://history.nasa.gov/spaceact-legishistory.pdf
I'd be very interested in learning a little bit about the General Relativistic effects observed with GRACE. I hadn't thought about it until you brought it up, but you're right, it does seem to be sensitive enough, and to be observing over a long enough period of time that GR corrections may be observable. Can you observe Lense-Thirring effect? Or are you just correcting geodetic precession?
Why are aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, rocket scientists, etc. involved in perpetuating a political agenda based on bad "science" for an administration that refuses to fund the organization's actual purpose?
I'll ask the opposite question: why shouldn't aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, and rocket scientists be involved in trying to make unambiguous measurements of a critical issue, to try to resolve key questions in a way that's independent of computer models or temperature measurements? Making an independent measurement of key scientific claims using a different technique is pretty much the gold standard of science.
My German friend used the word "Prepone" in conversation not so long back. The opposite of "Postpone", he meant. He made it up.
No, he didn't. That's a common word... in Indian English ("Indian" here to be understood as meaning "from India").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English#Vocabulary_and_colloquialisms
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone
I don't get the article.
I don't get the article either. Making a gun using 3-D printing would have no more patent implication than making anything else using 3-D printing. The article is just attached to the gun article to make a bigger bang.
But, they didn't print a gun using 3-D printing. They made all of the parts of the gun except the parts that actually fire bullets. According to some idiotic regulation they found somewhere, apparently the part that the bullet shoots out of isn't defined as the "gun," but nevertheless, in no reasonable use of the word did they actually print a gun.
Some biometrics are hard to duplicate, some are easy to trick, and some have a tendency to change over time enough that they are truly worthless as indicators...
It's the first one that is the sticking point. How do you *know* that a biometric is hard to trick with, say, a photograph? What about next year, when the photography gets better?
How does the scheme prevent ``play this game or I'll kill your family''?
Well, it's tough to get an algorithm to implement ``play this game or I'll kill your family'' on five million stolen hashes in order to add a few hundred thousand accounts to their zombie network that sends "make your tool enormous" spam.
Nobody bothers cracking passwords one at a time-- it's all about mass production these days.
How many standard deviations above 'random guessing' are we talking about? Over how many trials? And 2 weeks is fine, but what about 6 months to a year?
You're missing the point. They're missing the point. It's easy to make one password secure against guessing it in a million years of trying.
But I don't need to remember one password. I need to remember thirty passwords (for my most important stuff, plus another fifty for sites I visit once or twice), all different, and a large subset of which have to be changed every 60 days. If it takes "a 45 minute learning session" for "the 30-letter password to be firmly implanted in your subconscious brain" this is purely out of the question.
And if the answer is "well, just use the the one password because it's unguessable and you can use it for everything"-- yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
Fail.
OK, good enough. You agree that they did not falsify data, and you agree that the fundamental scientific institutions continue to work-- OK, that's fine.
Enough.
I have no problem with them complaining about harassment. I have problems with them saying they will change peer review because they don't like a paper.
Uh, you are aware that after the peer review the paper in question was published, right? While they may have complained about it (in private), not only did they not in any way "change peer review", they didn't even delay it. It went through the process and was published.
Kind of like you making shit up about what he did? His failing is that he didn't independently verify some of what was reported to him by workers in the factories.
Well, he said he personally met people that he did not meet, and that they told him their stories, when these people did not exist and the stories were things that he made up based on rumors he'd heard.
He also lied about the name of the translator who was with him during these purported interviews, and when "This American Life" asked to contact her to check the facts of the story, he told them she'd moved, changed her phone number, and could not be contacted, when when she had not changed her phone number nor moved nor would have been hard to contact if they knew her name. If his failng had been merely "he failed to independently verify," it seems a bit peculiar that he would lie to the producers and tell them it was impossible to contact his translator.
Some links:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/03/16/148761812/this-american-life-retracts-mike-daiseys-apple-factory-story
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory/
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/theater/defending-this-american-life-and-its-mike-daisey-retraction.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/19/mike_daisey_and_the_inconvenient_truth/
The take-home lesson is that even if you think you're on the side of the angels, you shouldn't lie, because it makes people disbelieve anything you say. In fact, especially if you think you're on the side of the angels.
To be fair, it turns out that much of the reporting of the "poor working conditions" you refer to was from Mike Daisey, who, as it turns out, just made stuff up because it made a better storyline for his one-man show cf. Slashdot: This American Life Retracts Episode On Apple Factories In China
Every public figure gets harassed, dude, even Scientists who are critics of AGW. Get over it, it's not an excuse.
Right. And they complain about it in their private e-mails never intended for public release. Get over it.
They just get a little tired by constant harrassment from people who have already made it extremely clear that they don't have the slightest interest in the science, but have a political agenda that they are going to push regardless.
They were clearly attacking other scientists in their emails.
Ah. So I take it you have not actually read the thousand or so e-mails themselves; just a few of the carefully chosen excerpts.
It's interesting to read the actual emails. Even knowing that the emails that were released were a set carefully chosen to make the CRU look bad, the actual picture you get is a bunch of very harrassed scientists.
Spending a couple of minutes flipping through the files, here is one with Phil Jones replying to a question of how many Freedom of Information requests they have gotten from one particular requestor this year:
"So since Feb 2007, CRU is in double figures [of FOI requests]. We never get any thanks for putting
things up - only abuse and threats. The latest lot is up in the last 3-4 threads on CA."
and here's Ben Santer, commenting on the same thread:
"I have spent the last two months of my scientific career dealing with multiple requests for these model datasets under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I have been able to do little or no productive research during this time. This is of deep concern to me."
and here's Stephen Schneider's comment in reply;
"This continuing pattern of harassment, as Ben rightly puts it in my opinion, in the name of due diligence is in my view an attempt to create a fishing expedition to find minor glitches or unexplained bits of code--which exist in nearly all our kinds of complex work--and then assert that the entire result is thus suspect. Our best way to deal with this issue of replication is to have multiple independent author teams, with their own codes and data sets, publishing independent work on the same topics--like has been done on the "hockey stick". That is how credible scientific replication should proceed."
In some of the other emails they talk about their hate mail and threats they receive.
You may argue about whether they were being harrassed. But there is no question whatsoever, if you read the files, that they perceived themselves as being under a continuous, unrelenting attack. And from some of the emails that they quote from, it's hard to avoid that perception.
Which part did you disagree with
The part where you said "they revealed themselves as lousy scientists."
"Good scientists welcome opposition, they love it when someone tries to poke holes in their theory"
Yes, good scientists welcome opposition... when it's from people who have a clue, know something about what you've done, and understand the field and make comments with the genuine intent to understand. It's easy to be patient with people who want to learn. It's harder to be patient with people who come saying "you're a fraud, also you're evil, corrupt and stupid, and I'm going to harrass you and make your life as miserable as I can until I can prove it." They just get a little tired by constant harrassment from people who have already made it extremely clear that they don't have the slightest interest in the science, but have a political agenda that they are going to push regardless.
, or asks "how do you know?"
The scientists in question had written tens of thousands of articles, reports, scientific papers and review articles explaining in great detail how they did their work. They had already spent thousands of hours trying to answer that question for the general public. Unfortunately, in responding to people who didn't have the slightest interest in actually listening, turns out that tens of thousands of articles is not enough, because no amount is going to be enough.
Here's something you need to understand. After the first, say, hundred attacks from people who don't have any interest in actually learning what you're doing because they have already made up their minds on political grounds, you just get tired. It gets a little hard to answer the hundred and first attack, or the hundred and tenth, quite as patiently as you did the first ten or twenty. So, maybe the five hundred and twentieth attack actually was a serious criticism from somebody with an open mind who actually had a serious question and actually wanted to learn. It's just hard to take that one seriously when the previous five hundred and nineteen were simply attacks.
They didn't falsify data,
Good. I think I'll just say "ok, we agree on that very important point," and leave it at that.
I don't actually agree with most of the rest of what you say, but I'll leave you with your opinion.
That's a much better analysis, but all it concludes is that either a hacker got administrative privilege on a server ("So given the assumptions listed above, the hacker would have to have access to the gateway mail server and/or the Administration file server where the emails were archived. This machine would most likely be an Administrative file server. It would not be optimal for an Administrator to clutter up a production server open to the Internet with sensitive archives.") or else some administrator had compiled the emails in order to respond to a FOI request, and a hacker-- internal or external-- stole that file, possibly because it wasn't secured in the first place ("the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it."
And even this conclusion is pretty speculative, and I'm not sure I credit the analysis as the only way the emails could be stolen. It's interesting to see all the wrong conclusions that have been lined out. (However, kudos to him for keeping these visible. It's nice to see the dead ends as well as the conclusions).
This is still an analysis that doesn't have any access to the actual machines, or knowledge of what is stored where; it is reverse-engineering file configurations from the emails themselves. An analysis that actually does know what is on what machine-- which the police computer crimes division would have-- would not need to make such guesses.
Try advocating approval voting, for example, which is a system that is not biased toward two parties
approval voting is not a condorcet method and does not provide proportional representation
Yes, so?
What I stated was that it doesn't bias the system toward a two party solution. Personally, I don't give a damn whether the voting method finds a condorcet winner or not. That's one nice way to settle a multi-candidate election, but not the only one, and it's not necessarily clear that the approval winner is a worse choice than the condorcet winner, even if they are different (in many, possibly most, reasonable preference matrices, they'd select the same winner.)
Still, though, I agree with you in that a method that finds the condorcet winner is vastly superior to what we have now, and I'd throw in my support for it. If we can change the system to some workable version of condorcet voting, that works for me.
Muller has never been a "skeptic" or proponent of AGW. He's a real scientist and properly excorated Mann for the fakeness of the hockey stick.
I didn't call Muller a skeptic. What I did say was that the data analysis done by the team he led very closely confirms the data analysis that CRU did, as seen e.g., in this comparison.