If I can take one thing away from what's being said without managing to actually get to the point it's that apparently what we really need is to do a better job of teaching mathematics.
I mean, that's really what it all comes down to.
Programming is ultimately just an application of that. The reasons for needing to teach it universally ultimately seem to fall back to the simple fact that current methods of, and the areas of mathematics teaching are currently failing kids.
So rather than recognising that giving students a book with 40 math problems to shut up and solve in silence which is far too prevalent still it seems what we really need is to give them real world problems to solve and explain how to use mathematical underpinnings of modelling, logic, and philosophy to achieve that.
Unfortunately the people coming up with these ideas of coding for all themselves never managed to self-educate in mathematics to see past the flawed system of teaching it upto the age of about 18 and don't realise that's what they're basically asking for.
Teach kids a broader understanding of mathematics than just how to repeat algorithms blindly without truly understanding the what's, why's, or how's and everything from making a logical argument in politics through to doing programming will come easily.
Keep teaching maths in the shoddy way it's often currently taught though and it wont matter how much half-arsed coding you've taught, you still wont have gotten anywhere.
Frankly even history as a subject could be made far more useful if kids had to do a module on the history of mathematics and the evolution of mathematical achievements - you don't even need to cover the math itself, just explaining who came up with what, and why is an eye opener in itself and ties in with some important advances in human philosophy, physics and other key milestones of humanity too.
Agreed, but it's worth noting that they're very US-centric (and that's not a criticism, just a statement of fact) so if you're not from the US you may find your money better spent elsewhere.
For example, in the UK, the Open Rights Group is far more relevant and helpful towards dealing with these issues in the UK than the EFF is. Presumably the options in countries like Sweden and Germany would be the much better organised respect Pirate parties there.
So now it's onto the victim card is it? Oh you're so hard done by, it must be awful failing to follow a conversation, jumping in with insults and acting like an ass, having it pointed out to you that you failed to follow the conversation, and then having to play the victim because it's everyone elses fault but yours.
I mean, you were such a victim in your initial reply, you were so pleasant and so hard done by! -
"Wow. You really are confused if you think linux is still a small teaching tool and minux is no longer a small teaching tool. If you really are that confused and it's a serious suggestion why are you bothering to comment on this thread at all if it's so far beyond the realms of what you know? What motivates you to make noise with no substance in this situation?"
If you can't take the heat then don't act like an ass, especially when you were wrong in the first place.
You've not really clarified why they're a problem though, you're suggesting they are without justifying it. Are you afraid of needles or something? Getting a jab once a year is way easier than trying to install anti-bacterial handwash installations at every door in the world.
Even this does little though, as it's not just being spread based on touch, you could make everyone wear masks to prevent sneezes or coughs or just general breathing from spreading the disease, but all that does in absence of vaccination is means that we'll suffer even harder when we inevitably face a strain of flu that does work it's way around the things you put in place.
Long story short, vaccinations are the only real answer, and they have other benefits of generally improving your immune response to boot. They're win-win and the only reason to be against them is if you're one of those crackpot anti-vaccination types that thankfully only really seem to infest America.
The odds of getting the flu can be as low as 5%, so you can go 20 years without catching it on average.
Just because you've apparently never had it judging by your incorrect comments, doesn't mean you can't get it or wont get it.
Besides, why do you fear getting it? It's really not going to hurt you, but it will protect you and if you are really fortunate enough to be apparently immune to developing flu symptoms from the flu as you imply then it will still prevent you passing it on to others meaning it's still a good thing.
Increasing the range of illnesses your immune system has been trained to cope with is never a bad thing - learn about the history of the smallpox vaccine - someone noticed that milk maids were the only ones not dropping dead left and right to smallpox, this is because they'd mostly all already contracted cowpox at some point which was similar but relatively harmless compared to smallpox. Nevertheless, their bodies gaining immunity to cowpox with little illness also made them immune to smallpox which could've otherwise killed them.
So what possible benefit do you perceive from not getting the flu jab? Whether you feel you need it or not it's still beneficial to you and others either way.
You're not being forced. You're perfectly able to choose not to take the job or to quit instead of taking the test if you so choose.
Some jobs require further vetting of candidates, people working in the financial sector typically have to go through credit reference checks to ensure they're unlikely to commit fraud, people in the defence sector often have to go through national security vetting to ensure they're not a security threat, people working with children have to go through criminal records checks to ensure they've got no convictions, people driving company vehicles have to show that their driving record is clean and they're not a reckless driver.
If you don't want to go through these things, then don't go for those jobs.
As much as I hate to defend Disney, it should be well within it's right to ensure the kids are safe from employees who might fuck up and put them in danger because they have a drug problem and brought it to work. It's going to cost them dearly if such an incident does occur so why shouldn't they be able to protect themselves from someone elses problem?
So I guess you fail even basic literacy then given that you don't know what the word "had" means in the context I quoted?
Are you sure you're not a child? I thought adult illiteracy was largely solved now in the developed world, but you seem to be trying very hard to prove otherwise.
Quite how you continue to interpret "had" as anything else than what it actually means I've no idea. I you're so desperate to refuse to admit you made a stupid comment that you're now willing to completely try and redefine basic English words. I know people on Slashdot often can't admit when they're wrong, but you've taken it to a new level of absurdity. You're so desperate to avoid admitting you went completely off track, got confused and flew off the handle as a result that you're willing to instead make yourself entirely illiterate instead.
You either need psychiatric help, or basic literacy classes. Whichever it is doesn't bode well for you as a supposed grown up adult.
Sure, but it's clear they deprioritise some services and that you have to pay more to have them prioritised on their otherwise oversubscribed service which is exactly the thing net neutrality is designed to stop.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at you now trying to reframe the discussion as one about the current state of things and then trying to accuse me of not following the discussion. Here's the core discussion on Minix in the post you replied to originally:
"But had we all moved to Minix, we would probably not be hearing that much swearing by Andrew Tanenbaum or other Minix kernel maintainers compared to Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel maintainers, as with so few core lines, there is not much to maintain in the Minix kernel, and so it is easier to test and debug."
What do you think that second word means? What do you think the word "had" actually means? He's talking about precisely that alternative reality you dismiss my comment for and instead try to reframe the discussion as being about the current state of Linux.
Please, try and keep up in future before going off the rails and making a fool of yourself.
I guess the code is a complete whitewash to avoid legislation on the issue then?
The reason I say this is that I have a line with PlusNet and they most definitely do not support net neutrality. Service throttling is a stated part of what they do:
Whatever this code is, it clearly doesn't do what it claims to. If an ISP is intentionally slowing down certain traffic (and charging you more to have lower priority traffic increased on your line as PlusNet does - £5 for their "pro addon" which increases priority of deprioritised traffic) then this is most definitely not net neutrality whatever they say.
"so that little weasel trick merely shows your own retained childishness."
Actually no, it makes things even more embarrassing for you. Typically to retain a trait well into adulthood that could be forgiven as inexperience amongst someone young is not a good thing. Most people wouldn't be proud to still be wearing diapers at 50.
"What exactly is the point of your attempt to compare what is now two very different things as if they are equivalent?"
The point is that something being a teaching tool vs. a production worthy tool is really only dependent on the amount of effort expended on it. Linux has lots of effort expended on it because rightly or wrongly it won the battle for uptake early on. Minix can therefore be just as capable with equivalent effort poured into it, the fact it's merely used as a teaching tool has little bearing on that.
The point being that something being a teaching tool isn't a barrier to it becoming a production tool, as Linux very well proved.
"The moment you introduce variation in skill sets among the team members, agile for software breaks down."
Out of interest, why? and what particular part of agile given that it's a broad topic with lots of methodologies?
I don't see how speciality requirements causes an issue, agile doesn't remove the necessity to ensure a team is competent in having the required skillset for the task at hand.
Agile isn't magic, many things from the past are still relevant, if you don't have enough French translators to do the work your translation project is going to fail whatever the methodology being used.
I didn't say anything about Linux still being a small teaching tool and Minix not. I merely pointed out that just because something starts out as something, doesn't mean it has to always be that way with a bit of support to help it grow up.
Speaking of needing support to help grow up, shall I call your mother now or are you at least old enough to make your own way home to her?
You realise that Linux started out as a small teaching tool right? Linus himself said he started it to teach himself about operating system development.
High standards of journalistic understanding in that article I see:
"Robert and Carol Cameron and their 16-year-old son Jordan had their lives turned upside down when he was implicated as the supposed mastermind behind the attacks on Xbox and PlayStation networks which left gamers unable to play their consoles online.
Ironically, he does not even own an Xbox."
Why is that ironic? They think you need an Xbox to be able to take down Xbox Live and Playstation Network? What?
You're still failing to grasp the difference between what a published paper says, and what a scientist believes. These are two distinct things yet you're repeatedly conflating them.
"What the media states is that 97% of the climate scientists believe anthropogenic sources cause climate change, where the majority do not state it explicitly."
No, the majority do not state it explicitly in scientific papers. This says nothing about what they've stated their beliefs are elsewhere.
"Your statement is implying that those that stated no opinion really believe in it but withhold for more evidence, my statement states they didn't make a statement, it could be either way. Which position is more distorting?"
Yours is still more distorting for the aforementioned reason that it's a misleading by omission. My statement paints a balanced picture, as it provides a fuller set of information to the reader to make up their own mind, there is no omission.
But back to my original argument, and why the 97% figure can't be inherently written off is because we can still treat the papers as equivalent to a poll. We know that the papers that have expressed certainty will pretty much guarantee that their authors will fall on that side of the fence, but we don't know what the others think. If we were to ask the question "If you had to decide that either climate change is man made, or isn't man made, what would you choose?" forcing them to choose, then the 31.6% vs. 0.7% is equivalent to a poll of a large enough sample size that you'd expect the outcome to be 97.8% support vs. 2.16% deny with a margin of error for that sort of poll typically around 3%.
So saying 97% of climate scientists is quite a reasonable assertion statistically. I personally prefer to er on the side of caution and pick the lower bound when making an argument and even then give a bit more leeway, I think 90% gives ample room for statistical error whilst still making the same underlying point.
Again, this is how election polling works, this is how we know give or take a few percent what the outcomes are going to be, and yes election polling is maybe a poor example given how many fake polls there are out there (YouGov is notorious for doing polls for hire) but we're not talking about a slanted poll here that's had any kind of weighting applied, we're talking about the raw numbers being calculated directly.
So to argue against the suggestion that roughly 97% of scientist agree that climate change is man-made you need to provide a compelling argument as to why the statistical method is wrong, and why all those scientists who didn't express a view in the paper would, if asked to decide on the balance of evidence one way or the other what they believe would swing towards the not man-made camp when the vast majority of evidence swings towards the man-made camp.
Is there a good reason to believe that don't knows would turn into no it's not man-made in a drastically more prevalent fashion more so than yes it is man-made given the outcomes that we do actually know?
But this is already what is happening precisely because religion has equal protection to natural traits.
In the UK it is typically illegal to discriminate employment or provision of services based on sex or sexuality, yet religious institutions are allowed to exactly these things.
Which is why I suggested at an absolute minimum that even if you do protect religion it has to come secondary to natural traits. We should not in this day and age be allowing organisations to discriminate on sex or sexuality any more than we should on race.
But atheism isn't a religion so isn't typically as well protected anyway.
In fact, atheists are already prevented from working in some jobs, for example you can be discriminated against as a teacher seeking employment as a teacher at a Catholic school for example.
So this really flows into a further question about why religious folk should get protections over and above atheists also. You cannot for example run an atheist school and refuse a teacher employment for being religious, but you can run a religious school and refuse a teacher employment for not practicing that religion.
Our current funding comes from the Cabinet Officeâ(TM)s Release of Data Fund. This fund is administered by the Open Data User Group and agreed by the Public Sector Transparency Board."
Oh how they take with one hand and give with the other!
They're only doing addresses by the looks, not names and addresses, so professions and so forth make no sense.
But most importantly it'd breach the Data Protection Act and be shut down with massive fines if it started bundling personal data like names of occupants along with addresses.
This is basically just a free competitor to the likes of Experian's QuickAddress service.
Yes, but this is a problem that's exacerbated even by governments.
For example, in most human rights legislation across the globe, religion, which is wholly a choice, is given the same level of protection as genetic traits that you do not choose such as race, sex, sexuality and so forth.
This is an inherently bad idea. Nothing that you can choose should ever be given the same level of protection as something that you cannot choose because it creates a paradox - how can you treat freedom of religious belief with equal protection as sex or sexuality when religious belief often preaches discrimination against them? Inherent natural traits are never in contradiction with each other, but choices are.
Thus the world desperately needs to erase protection of religion from all human rights legislation that places it alongside natural traits, or at least, demote it into it's own lesser category of protection where considerations are secondary to those of natural traits. It's the only sane way to solve the nonsense paradox that treating the choice of religion equal to natural traits creates.
Law should never be written to create a paradox else it becomes meaningless as it's then wholly arbitrary as to which way you decide to apply it making it no different to not having it written in law at all, yet that's exactly what legal protection of religion placed alongside natural traits grants.
"Of the 32.6%, 97% said humans were responsible, which yields 31.6% believe humans are causing global warming, or less than one-third."
Your implication is clearly that less than one third of scientists believe humans cause global warming. That's clearly not a fact based on the data you provided. Less than 1 third of scientific papers explicitly claim that humans cause global warming, but that tells us nothing about what the people who wrote those papers think.
Scientific conclusion requires a far higher standard of evidence than personal opinion, so even if a scientist is 95% confident that humans cause global warming then many will avoid explicitly concluding this in a scientific paper until there is a much higher degree of certainty based on their explicit experiment.
But as I said, more fundamentally what your figures show is that there is a massive trend amongst scientists towards believing global warming is man made rather than against. It's very clear that the scientific community is swayed far more towards it being a man made problem than against. So even if your interpretation of the figures was correct, you still have a problem of making a misleading statement by omission - yes if your original premise was correct it would indeed mean that less than 1/3rd believed that it was man-made, but it'd also mean that less than 0.7% believed it was definitely not man-made. When you include that latter factoid in the sentence it creates a completely different impression. It goes from making the impression that a minority of scientists believe it'd man-made and that the amount that believe it's not man-made is an unknown that may be higher, to making it clear that the amount of scientists who believe it's definitely not man-made are an order of magnitude smaller again in number.
Yes exactly. Chemical production in plants doing things based on time of day such as opening flowers or generating nectar is typically based on levels of light of particular wavelengths that will change throughout the day as the sun rises and sets.
So the mechanism here is almost certainly simply that some members of this species weren't producing nectar until they got more light in a particular wavelength (probably red) than others. Those plants just happened to get more nutrients as a result and simply grew stronger, bloomed better and spread their seed more successfully as a result of that increased nutrient intake from the ants making this the increasingly dominant trait in the population.
The mutation will likely therefore have been one that simply requires an increased (or decreased) amount of light of a certain wavelength required to trigger nectar production delaying the time at which production typically began to a point in the day where the required wavelength was more (or less) prevalent and nothing more than that. As you suggest, it's likely this wasn't a single mutation, but simply the genetic drift of the population as random variation led those that produced nectar ever later to be more successful than those that produced earlier.
Because it's all part of the fundamental question of what thinking really is.
You might equally argue that when someone "thinks" they're hungry it's actually just a natural chemical change in the brain to a change in chemicals in the body so they're not actually thinking at all.
It's all just chemistry at the end of the day, when does chemistry change from just chemistry to thinking? The only difference is complexity of the system and where does level of complexity cross the line from being simple chemical reaction to being "thought"?
There's actually a deeper point to the use of the word thinking here, and it's something professional biologists through to neuroscientists through to AI researchers will sometimes equally use given the unsolved nature of the question of when we deem something to be thought as opposed to merely chemical reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
If I can take one thing away from what's being said without managing to actually get to the point it's that apparently what we really need is to do a better job of teaching mathematics.
I mean, that's really what it all comes down to.
Programming is ultimately just an application of that. The reasons for needing to teach it universally ultimately seem to fall back to the simple fact that current methods of, and the areas of mathematics teaching are currently failing kids.
So rather than recognising that giving students a book with 40 math problems to shut up and solve in silence which is far too prevalent still it seems what we really need is to give them real world problems to solve and explain how to use mathematical underpinnings of modelling, logic, and philosophy to achieve that.
Unfortunately the people coming up with these ideas of coding for all themselves never managed to self-educate in mathematics to see past the flawed system of teaching it upto the age of about 18 and don't realise that's what they're basically asking for.
Teach kids a broader understanding of mathematics than just how to repeat algorithms blindly without truly understanding the what's, why's, or how's and everything from making a logical argument in politics through to doing programming will come easily.
Keep teaching maths in the shoddy way it's often currently taught though and it wont matter how much half-arsed coding you've taught, you still wont have gotten anywhere.
Frankly even history as a subject could be made far more useful if kids had to do a module on the history of mathematics and the evolution of mathematical achievements - you don't even need to cover the math itself, just explaining who came up with what, and why is an eye opener in itself and ties in with some important advances in human philosophy, physics and other key milestones of humanity too.
Agreed, but it's worth noting that they're very US-centric (and that's not a criticism, just a statement of fact) so if you're not from the US you may find your money better spent elsewhere.
For example, in the UK, the Open Rights Group is far more relevant and helpful towards dealing with these issues in the UK than the EFF is. Presumably the options in countries like Sweden and Germany would be the much better organised respect Pirate parties there.
*facepalm*
So now it's onto the victim card is it? Oh you're so hard done by, it must be awful failing to follow a conversation, jumping in with insults and acting like an ass, having it pointed out to you that you failed to follow the conversation, and then having to play the victim because it's everyone elses fault but yours.
I mean, you were such a victim in your initial reply, you were so pleasant and so hard done by! -
"Wow. You really are confused if you think linux is still a small teaching tool and minux is no longer a small teaching tool. If you really are that confused and it's a serious suggestion why are you bothering to comment on this thread at all if it's so far beyond the realms of what you know? What motivates you to make noise with no substance in this situation?"
If you can't take the heat then don't act like an ass, especially when you were wrong in the first place.
You've not really clarified why they're a problem though, you're suggesting they are without justifying it. Are you afraid of needles or something? Getting a jab once a year is way easier than trying to install anti-bacterial handwash installations at every door in the world.
Even this does little though, as it's not just being spread based on touch, you could make everyone wear masks to prevent sneezes or coughs or just general breathing from spreading the disease, but all that does in absence of vaccination is means that we'll suffer even harder when we inevitably face a strain of flu that does work it's way around the things you put in place.
Long story short, vaccinations are the only real answer, and they have other benefits of generally improving your immune response to boot. They're win-win and the only reason to be against them is if you're one of those crackpot anti-vaccination types that thankfully only really seem to infest America.
The odds of getting the flu can be as low as 5%, so you can go 20 years without catching it on average.
Just because you've apparently never had it judging by your incorrect comments, doesn't mean you can't get it or wont get it.
Besides, why do you fear getting it? It's really not going to hurt you, but it will protect you and if you are really fortunate enough to be apparently immune to developing flu symptoms from the flu as you imply then it will still prevent you passing it on to others meaning it's still a good thing.
Increasing the range of illnesses your immune system has been trained to cope with is never a bad thing - learn about the history of the smallpox vaccine - someone noticed that milk maids were the only ones not dropping dead left and right to smallpox, this is because they'd mostly all already contracted cowpox at some point which was similar but relatively harmless compared to smallpox. Nevertheless, their bodies gaining immunity to cowpox with little illness also made them immune to smallpox which could've otherwise killed them.
So what possible benefit do you perceive from not getting the flu jab? Whether you feel you need it or not it's still beneficial to you and others either way.
You're not being forced. You're perfectly able to choose not to take the job or to quit instead of taking the test if you so choose.
Some jobs require further vetting of candidates, people working in the financial sector typically have to go through credit reference checks to ensure they're unlikely to commit fraud, people in the defence sector often have to go through national security vetting to ensure they're not a security threat, people working with children have to go through criminal records checks to ensure they've got no convictions, people driving company vehicles have to show that their driving record is clean and they're not a reckless driver.
If you don't want to go through these things, then don't go for those jobs.
As much as I hate to defend Disney, it should be well within it's right to ensure the kids are safe from employees who might fuck up and put them in danger because they have a drug problem and brought it to work. It's going to cost them dearly if such an incident does occur so why shouldn't they be able to protect themselves from someone elses problem?
So I guess you fail even basic literacy then given that you don't know what the word "had" means in the context I quoted?
Are you sure you're not a child? I thought adult illiteracy was largely solved now in the developed world, but you seem to be trying very hard to prove otherwise.
Quite how you continue to interpret "had" as anything else than what it actually means I've no idea. I you're so desperate to refuse to admit you made a stupid comment that you're now willing to completely try and redefine basic English words. I know people on Slashdot often can't admit when they're wrong, but you've taken it to a new level of absurdity. You're so desperate to avoid admitting you went completely off track, got confused and flew off the handle as a result that you're willing to instead make yourself entirely illiterate instead.
You either need psychiatric help, or basic literacy classes. Whichever it is doesn't bode well for you as a supposed grown up adult.
Sure, but it's clear they deprioritise some services and that you have to pay more to have them prioritised on their otherwise oversubscribed service which is exactly the thing net neutrality is designed to stop.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at you now trying to reframe the discussion as one about the current state of things and then trying to accuse me of not following the discussion. Here's the core discussion on Minix in the post you replied to originally:
"But had we all moved to Minix, we would probably not be hearing that much swearing by Andrew Tanenbaum or other Minix kernel maintainers compared to Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel maintainers, as with so few core lines, there is not much to maintain in the Minix kernel, and so it is easier to test and debug."
What do you think that second word means? What do you think the word "had" actually means? He's talking about precisely that alternative reality you dismiss my comment for and instead try to reframe the discussion as being about the current state of Linux.
Please, try and keep up in future before going off the rails and making a fool of yourself.
I guess the code is a complete whitewash to avoid legislation on the issue then?
The reason I say this is that I have a line with PlusNet and they most definitely do not support net neutrality. Service throttling is a stated part of what they do:
http://www.plus.net/support/br...
Whatever this code is, it clearly doesn't do what it claims to. If an ISP is intentionally slowing down certain traffic (and charging you more to have lower priority traffic increased on your line as PlusNet does - £5 for their "pro addon" which increases priority of deprioritised traffic) then this is most definitely not net neutrality whatever they say.
"so that little weasel trick merely shows your own retained childishness."
Actually no, it makes things even more embarrassing for you. Typically to retain a trait well into adulthood that could be forgiven as inexperience amongst someone young is not a good thing. Most people wouldn't be proud to still be wearing diapers at 50.
"What exactly is the point of your attempt to compare what is now two very different things as if they are equivalent?"
The point is that something being a teaching tool vs. a production worthy tool is really only dependent on the amount of effort expended on it. Linux has lots of effort expended on it because rightly or wrongly it won the battle for uptake early on. Minix can therefore be just as capable with equivalent effort poured into it, the fact it's merely used as a teaching tool has little bearing on that.
The point being that something being a teaching tool isn't a barrier to it becoming a production tool, as Linux very well proved.
"The moment you introduce variation in skill sets among the team members, agile for software breaks down."
Out of interest, why? and what particular part of agile given that it's a broad topic with lots of methodologies?
I don't see how speciality requirements causes an issue, agile doesn't remove the necessity to ensure a team is competent in having the required skillset for the task at hand.
Agile isn't magic, many things from the past are still relevant, if you don't have enough French translators to do the work your translation project is going to fail whatever the methodology being used.
Are you stupid?
I didn't say anything about Linux still being a small teaching tool and Minix not. I merely pointed out that just because something starts out as something, doesn't mean it has to always be that way with a bit of support to help it grow up.
Speaking of needing support to help grow up, shall I call your mother now or are you at least old enough to make your own way home to her?
It's called having a low tolerance for bullshit, and so no, there's nothing wrong with you.
You realise that Linux started out as a small teaching tool right? Linus himself said he started it to teach himself about operating system development.
High standards of journalistic understanding in that article I see:
"Robert and Carol Cameron and their 16-year-old son Jordan had their lives turned upside down when he was implicated as the supposed mastermind behind the attacks on Xbox and PlayStation networks which left gamers unable to play their consoles online.
Ironically, he does not even own an Xbox."
Why is that ironic? They think you need an Xbox to be able to take down Xbox Live and Playstation Network? What?
You're still failing to grasp the difference between what a published paper says, and what a scientist believes. These are two distinct things yet you're repeatedly conflating them.
"What the media states is that 97% of the climate scientists believe anthropogenic sources cause climate change, where the majority do not state it explicitly."
No, the majority do not state it explicitly in scientific papers. This says nothing about what they've stated their beliefs are elsewhere.
"Your statement is implying that those that stated no opinion really believe in it but withhold for more evidence, my statement states they didn't make a statement, it could be either way. Which position is more distorting?"
Yours is still more distorting for the aforementioned reason that it's a misleading by omission. My statement paints a balanced picture, as it provides a fuller set of information to the reader to make up their own mind, there is no omission.
But back to my original argument, and why the 97% figure can't be inherently written off is because we can still treat the papers as equivalent to a poll. We know that the papers that have expressed certainty will pretty much guarantee that their authors will fall on that side of the fence, but we don't know what the others think. If we were to ask the question "If you had to decide that either climate change is man made, or isn't man made, what would you choose?" forcing them to choose, then the 31.6% vs. 0.7% is equivalent to a poll of a large enough sample size that you'd expect the outcome to be 97.8% support vs. 2.16% deny with a margin of error for that sort of poll typically around 3%.
So saying 97% of climate scientists is quite a reasonable assertion statistically. I personally prefer to er on the side of caution and pick the lower bound when making an argument and even then give a bit more leeway, I think 90% gives ample room for statistical error whilst still making the same underlying point.
Again, this is how election polling works, this is how we know give or take a few percent what the outcomes are going to be, and yes election polling is maybe a poor example given how many fake polls there are out there (YouGov is notorious for doing polls for hire) but we're not talking about a slanted poll here that's had any kind of weighting applied, we're talking about the raw numbers being calculated directly.
So to argue against the suggestion that roughly 97% of scientist agree that climate change is man-made you need to provide a compelling argument as to why the statistical method is wrong, and why all those scientists who didn't express a view in the paper would, if asked to decide on the balance of evidence one way or the other what they believe would swing towards the not man-made camp when the vast majority of evidence swings towards the man-made camp.
Is there a good reason to believe that don't knows would turn into no it's not man-made in a drastically more prevalent fashion more so than yes it is man-made given the outcomes that we do actually know?
But this is already what is happening precisely because religion has equal protection to natural traits.
In the UK it is typically illegal to discriminate employment or provision of services based on sex or sexuality, yet religious institutions are allowed to exactly these things.
Which is why I suggested at an absolute minimum that even if you do protect religion it has to come secondary to natural traits. We should not in this day and age be allowing organisations to discriminate on sex or sexuality any more than we should on race.
But atheism isn't a religion so isn't typically as well protected anyway.
In fact, atheists are already prevented from working in some jobs, for example you can be discriminated against as a teacher seeking employment as a teacher at a Catholic school for example.
So this really flows into a further question about why religious folk should get protections over and above atheists also. You cannot for example run an atheist school and refuse a teacher employment for being religious, but you can run a religious school and refuse a teacher employment for not practicing that religion.
Not to intentionally defend the Tories, but this project also only exists thanks to the Tories:
http://alpha.openaddressesuk.o...
"How are you funded now?
Our current funding comes from the Cabinet Officeâ(TM)s Release of Data Fund. This fund is administered by the Open Data User Group and agreed by the Public Sector Transparency Board."
Oh how they take with one hand and give with the other!
They're only doing addresses by the looks, not names and addresses, so professions and so forth make no sense.
But most importantly it'd breach the Data Protection Act and be shut down with massive fines if it started bundling personal data like names of occupants along with addresses.
This is basically just a free competitor to the likes of Experian's QuickAddress service.
Yes, but this is a problem that's exacerbated even by governments.
For example, in most human rights legislation across the globe, religion, which is wholly a choice, is given the same level of protection as genetic traits that you do not choose such as race, sex, sexuality and so forth.
This is an inherently bad idea. Nothing that you can choose should ever be given the same level of protection as something that you cannot choose because it creates a paradox - how can you treat freedom of religious belief with equal protection as sex or sexuality when religious belief often preaches discrimination against them? Inherent natural traits are never in contradiction with each other, but choices are.
Thus the world desperately needs to erase protection of religion from all human rights legislation that places it alongside natural traits, or at least, demote it into it's own lesser category of protection where considerations are secondary to those of natural traits. It's the only sane way to solve the nonsense paradox that treating the choice of religion equal to natural traits creates.
Law should never be written to create a paradox else it becomes meaningless as it's then wholly arbitrary as to which way you decide to apply it making it no different to not having it written in law at all, yet that's exactly what legal protection of religion placed alongside natural traits grants.
No, you absolutely did distort, to quote again:
"Of the 32.6%, 97% said humans were responsible, which yields 31.6% believe humans are causing global warming, or less than one-third."
Your implication is clearly that less than one third of scientists believe humans cause global warming. That's clearly not a fact based on the data you provided. Less than 1 third of scientific papers explicitly claim that humans cause global warming, but that tells us nothing about what the people who wrote those papers think.
Scientific conclusion requires a far higher standard of evidence than personal opinion, so even if a scientist is 95% confident that humans cause global warming then many will avoid explicitly concluding this in a scientific paper until there is a much higher degree of certainty based on their explicit experiment.
But as I said, more fundamentally what your figures show is that there is a massive trend amongst scientists towards believing global warming is man made rather than against. It's very clear that the scientific community is swayed far more towards it being a man made problem than against. So even if your interpretation of the figures was correct, you still have a problem of making a misleading statement by omission - yes if your original premise was correct it would indeed mean that less than 1/3rd believed that it was man-made, but it'd also mean that less than 0.7% believed it was definitely not man-made. When you include that latter factoid in the sentence it creates a completely different impression. It goes from making the impression that a minority of scientists believe it'd man-made and that the amount that believe it's not man-made is an unknown that may be higher, to making it clear that the amount of scientists who believe it's definitely not man-made are an order of magnitude smaller again in number.
Yes exactly. Chemical production in plants doing things based on time of day such as opening flowers or generating nectar is typically based on levels of light of particular wavelengths that will change throughout the day as the sun rises and sets.
So the mechanism here is almost certainly simply that some members of this species weren't producing nectar until they got more light in a particular wavelength (probably red) than others. Those plants just happened to get more nutrients as a result and simply grew stronger, bloomed better and spread their seed more successfully as a result of that increased nutrient intake from the ants making this the increasingly dominant trait in the population.
The mutation will likely therefore have been one that simply requires an increased (or decreased) amount of light of a certain wavelength required to trigger nectar production delaying the time at which production typically began to a point in the day where the required wavelength was more (or less) prevalent and nothing more than that. As you suggest, it's likely this wasn't a single mutation, but simply the genetic drift of the population as random variation led those that produced nectar ever later to be more successful than those that produced earlier.
Because it's all part of the fundamental question of what thinking really is.
You might equally argue that when someone "thinks" they're hungry it's actually just a natural chemical change in the brain to a change in chemicals in the body so they're not actually thinking at all.
It's all just chemistry at the end of the day, when does chemistry change from just chemistry to thinking? The only difference is complexity of the system and where does level of complexity cross the line from being simple chemical reaction to being "thought"?
There's actually a deeper point to the use of the word thinking here, and it's something professional biologists through to neuroscientists through to AI researchers will sometimes equally use given the unsolved nature of the question of when we deem something to be thought as opposed to merely chemical reaction.