Aircraft. Computer Networks. US Agriculture. One could go on, there is a fairly long list. The problem you talk about is in the manufacture of consumer goods and basic commodities, most notably OIL, which we import at higher and higher prices, ironically because the government is too broke to support further subsidies to our oil/gas/coal industries.
If we stop subsidizing oil, coal, and gas and instead built a high-tech green energy industry and a non-oil based transportation infrastructure, we would climb, like a rocket, out the hole we have been digging for ourselves since the 1960's and 1970's, when we pretty much began to start turning over the keys to the keys to the treasury to the oil/gas/coal/MIC. A further obvious benefit is that we won't fry our agricultural land with higher temperatures and dramatically reduce the overall costs of additional pollution directly and indirectly related to these industries in terms of the massive negative financial impact associated with their extraction, pollution, regulation, transportation, health related costs, etc.
Its a no brainer from a science and economics perspective. The only problem is that 1/3 of the country watches FOX News as remains uneducated and fooled by self-interest advertising and oil/coal/gass industry punditry designed to block change in industrial policies that could quickly solve the problem. So in the meantime we further subsidize oil/gas/coal/MIC and financial fraud made legal by the absence of effective governmental regulation and keep on digging making the hole deeper.
Funny you should mention it. I pointed this out, using precisely this phraseology on the HuffPost blog during the 2008 election.
The US is reaching a critical junction, where it will have to decide if it wasn't to go forward as a leader in science and technology or in the spewing of T-party and republican anti-science, destroy-the-government rhetoric. It won't be able to do both. The fact that we will have to wait another 1 1/2 until November 2012 to decide and then another 2-3 years after that, assuming it is the former just to get things going again, is not a particularly good sign for our economy or our future.
Technology companies of all kinds will need to soon quickly weigh into this debate in a serious way to either massively fund politicians who support education, science and technology programs or face the prospects of off-shoring all of their operations to remain in business.
Your comments are little more than "More government is the problem" BS.
If you really want to talk about talk about the source of budget deficits you need to look at stock-options, since they allow corporate insiders to pay tax on income at vastly lower rates, especially when coupled with insider leverage from the tax expense the rest of us get to pay for corporate tax deductions of all kinds. It isn't your government that is ripping you off, its corporate insiders who have used stock-options to largely fund their take over of government to buy politicians who spew the "government is the problem" rhetoric their by giving them even more power to set up a "government within the government"
For example, your comments on "green energy" technology are just pure fantasy. It falsely assumes that industries competing against green energy (oil, gas, coal) are not getting any government subsidies. Perhaps your ignorance stems from your lack of familiarity with the US tax code. Do you pay at a roughly 35% rate or are you one of those who fills out the hundreds of special forms providing you with an 15% tax on the preponderance of your income that derives from stock options, which are taxes as capital gains, than can be further reduced in some cases to zero, by special deductions for "rolling stock", "ethanol and gasoline additive credits", "coal-gasification" credits, etc. [or add your favorite corporate tax-giveaway here], which amount to roughly 5T$ per year and not available to the average taxpayer.
I won't even bother to address your canard with respect to STEM education, since you don't seem to understand that training and education and "innovation" are not entirely separable activities, and even much less so in STEM, where you can't even understand the issues unless you have been sufficiently educated (trained).
To put it another way, you have been had by watching too much Fox News and being fooled by those pundits, who, to use your expression, have been "busy pissing in your pocket".
That regulation leads to more "financial hardship" is the most bogus argument out there. If one looks closely at the accounting of the costs, it NEVER is a full accounting and just takes into account the costs to those arguing against regulation. For example, this kind of argument was used to do away with the regulations on Wall Street, but failed to account, by several orders of magnitude, the costs to the entire financial and economic system. Rest assured that it wasn't environmental and safety regulations on off-shore oil drillers that created the cost of Deepwater Horizon, which will largely be born not by BP, Halliburton, or Transocean, but rather the residents of the Gulf of Mexico and those who eat and make their livelihoods from its former bounty.
The use of stock options as a legal instrument for doing business is another, as it is just an invitation for non-governmental actors to manipulate and pass off the unseen costs to non-insider shareholders and ultimately the public at large. Want to talk about what has lead to the huge budget deficits? It is the cost of stock-options, since they permit insiders to pay a tiny fraction of their earnings in taxes, since the tax rates for capital gains is a small fraction of the tax on incomes, taking into account all the special kick-backs in other deductions available to insiders who dispense the proceeds among themselves. However, the FULL cost of legislation (regulations) overseeing or allowing stock-options is nowhere to be found in discussions of their consequences.
Be highly suspicious of those who argue against regulations because "they cost too much". Their accounting and math skills are usually extremely bad and their knowledge of biology and human ecology is almost always much, much worse.
There is plenty greatness and technological leadership of all kinds in the US. The problem has been the rise of anti-government, anti-science rhetoric and budgeting that is hollowing out any opportunity for the scientific community to lead and be listened to. Consequently, what you see on the political and social front is stagnation and the rest of the world catching up or passing us in many fields of endeavor.
Unfortunately, we are in that period of "currency destabilization" or to put it more precisely "dollar devaluation" now, not 20 years from now. The collapse won't bring with it opportunity here, only a much higher prices and scarce government resources for doing most anything technological or not going forward. Instead of supporting science and technology T-party and republican rhetoric, which makes up 1/3 of our government and the body politic these days, is hell bent on diminishing it. You can see this in the insane notion that we can default on our debts to force their ideology on the other 2/3rds. They seem more intent on breaking wind rather than addressing the consequences of the issue.
We like to think our economy is dominant because of our military, but both are highly dependent on foreign resources and brain power, not to mention capital. Our economy has largely specialized in financial transactions, which as we learned with credit default swaps, much of the derivatives-based speculation is little more than an unstable, government sanctioned Ponzi scheme that produces little in the way of social or technological advance.
You lost me with your comments on "bureaucratic nonsense" and "strangling ideas", the later to me just an empty sophism. I doubt the Patent Office or the Intellectual Property Courts and Law are at the heart of our problem, which ultimately is one of the inability of about 1/3 of the country not being able to reason effectively nor see the adverse consequences of that. Much of this comes from poor education and direct efforts by some to distort the truth about a broad range of science and technology issues from global climate change to regulation of the internet. With respect to the latter, it is hard to argue that its the bureaucrats that are the problem, as essential current efforts and policy are to keep things as they are. It is special interests who want to be able to be granted special rights to manipulate the infrastructure to control the flow of information through the "tubes" and legislators with such poor educations in science and technology that they haven't any idea of what it is they are doing, not necessarily that the are not well-intentioned.
This is symptomatic of a much larger issue, namely that science has given the average man and woman great powers and capabilities, but who are unable to think clearly or cogently enough about the consequences of what they are doing with that power.
You can see it from Fukushima, to global warming, to the computation of derivatives on mortgage backed securities, and just about every other problem humanity has. Without science there was relatively little damage such thoughtless individuals could do the planet, but that is no longer the case. With 7 billion humans now inhabiting the earth that problem becomes so large as to overwhelm what good science can achieve.
With the high prices of gasoline, it looks as if Roswell is getting desperate for tourists.
If they want to save their industry, they need to hurry up and find the bodies. Lack of bodies clear demonstrates that the entire thing is a scam, but hey that pretty well sums up business practices in the US these days.
There is a very big difference between being able to spout off your opinions on any topic you like and quite another to pass them off as credible science.
Allowing non-science to be taught as science is nothing more than forced indoctrination; in this case religious indoctrination. Tennessee legislators would be more honest to simply outlaw the teaching of science in their state, rather than trying to simply bear false witness and pass it off as science.
You have to understand that the teaching of evolution directly undermines the business model of many fundamental religions. If people were to spend their time thinking and exploring the consequences of how humans evolved over the past 2.7 million years, a lot of money wouldn't wind up in the collection plate and a lot of the political force behind the injection of religion into the affairs of state would dissipate.
The way to respond to this for universities in other states to recognize Tennessee high school students as not necessarily qualified for admission until remedial courses in the theory of evolution have been passed. There is little point in wasting limited educational dollars on students who are not adequately prepared to understand fundamental theories that underpin all of biological and medical science. Federal science funding should also be denied to schools whose students are unable to demonstrate that they have a minimum levels of understanding of evolutionary theory. If the people of Tennessee vote to return their state to pre-1925 standards, that is their choice, but taxpayers elsewhere should not be expected to subsidize "educational" spending of limited federal dollars that is used for proselytizing religion in the science classroom.
No not at all, unless you accept it (some proposition) as true without condition or test. One can assert a scientific "fact" true and act accordingly exploring the consequences or one can question it and assert that it may not always be true (ie false under various conditions) that have yet to be tested. In either case, the fundamental difference is that science requires a test, at least in principle, whereas faith does not.
Your conception is just a simple misunderstanding of what constitutes science. Don't feel bad, you are often not alone and quite often scientific debates rage on for some time until someone carefully enough thinks through what a test might be (to distinguish if an assertion of fact is in fact true or false and under what conditions) for the debate to be put into a scientific context, tested and potentially resolved once and for all.
From your post, its fairly obvious you are not a biologist.
The application to a "more mathematical framework" merely reflects the reality that in most areas of biology the mathematics involved can often be quite intractable, even to professional mathematicians. The core of biology as a science has been about putting observations and descriptions into a conceptual context.
To make matters worse for your oversimplification, t-tests are almost never appropriate in biological questions as they assume independently drawn samples and uniform variances, a condition that almost never exists in biological (ie "real-world") studies. Indeed, it is usually a simplifying assumption to assume that spaitial and or temporal autocorrelation do not exist in ones data and too often it is unclear if such an assumption is even warranted, or if rejected just how much error needs to be regressed out as a result of such effects to make a particular set of error bounds meaningful.
Certainly, Einstein's dictum that one's theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler clearly applies in biology. However, that does not make it any easier to demonstrate that one has accurately modeled a biological problem with the level of simplicity required to make it meaningful from the perspective of the nature of the biology being investigated.
One of the very first lessons biologists learn is that life in general involves highly interconnected macromolecular systems, each of which is itself highly complicated.
The best mathematicians from Archimedes to Zarski tend to cut their teeth on problems involving a few variables and structures with the expectation, but unproven assertion, that more complicated systems can be viewed as direct extensions. Biologists must confront the sad and confusing reality that to study life in a realistic way, one must concern themselves with the results of complexity involving tens of thousands if not hundreds of millions of variables. Biologists have no choice but to confront this "all encompassing" morass of myriads and myriads of dependent and independent variables as best they can. To make matters worse because biological systems evolve through time, most statistical problems need to account for both simultaneous spatial and temporal autocorrelation and must be solved within the context of considerably stochasticity that is not entirely random. Although mathematicians and statisticians can suggest simplifying assumptions, say noting the dominance or primary eigenvalues, they are just that, assumptions until demonstrated otherwise.
Consequently, to say that biologists are poorly trained to cope with the mathematical challenges that confront them, doesn't really say much. So is everyone else.
Your comment makes the questionable assumption that there is actually some science or math that could be taught to say cure you of AIDS or other currently untreatable disease. Just as in other sciences, there are many things that are simply not yet known.
That mathematicians and computer scientists are becoming useful participants in larger biological questions and training in biology is a good thing. A major impediment, however, is that those with some familiarity with these disciplines too often fail to recognize is that MOST realistic biological problems are extremely hard, when placed into the context of mathematical modeling. Realistic modeling requires in general the ability to effectively solve partial differential equations of hundreds or perhaps tens of thousands or millions of simultaneous variables, without anyone really having a clear conception of just what variables may prove to be the most important or even how they might be identified as distinct before such a model is constructed. The algorithms required are quite often NP complete and there is seldom reason to expect that exact answers can be found even if one has a specific realistic model in hand.
When one is working with millions of organisms each of which may have millions of base pairs in their DNA, the number of permutations that might shift the representation of a given problem into an ill-conditioned system, defective systems of equations, or toward algorithmic intractability without warning is not only enormous, but largely not-computable, except for the grossest of simplifications. The notion that the current state of CS and mathematical statistics provides a paradigm for biologists to solve all their conceptual and computations problems is both laughable and remarkably naive. In general the leading edge of biology is not rocket science. It is far more complicated than rocket science. For example, just trying to establish the phylogeny of a small group of organisms say 500 in number will require identification one out of more possible permutations than their are electrons in the know universe. To make matters worse, routine statistical methods are not appropriate for comparisons across organisms, because the slight changes between combinations of base-pairs that ultimately encode for a particular behavior, physiology, function, or structure are not independent of one another and can not be independently sampled, but are instead a product of phylogeny and evolutionary events that took place in the past that are not amenable to direct testing. To make matters worse, the results of such computations often involve outcomes that may mean the difference between life or death of both individuals as well as entire ecosystems that can not be reversed engineered because of the sheer number of co-evolutionary and interrelated events.
Although I too remember the trials and tribulations of being a biology grad student and in general agree that University administrators are by and large a pathetic lot, this is a gross oversimplification of the problem facing the biological sciences and a highly self-centric viewpoint. The real problem is that the vast majority of the electorate (and humanity in general) is illiterate when it comes to biology and the environment. The problem is that society is not utilizing what biology has taught mankind about its place in and its accumulative effects on the planetary ecosystem. Consequently, it is easy for those in exploitative industries, short-sighted politicians who will happily give away what little environment is left to stay in power, and those against "big government" (ie civilization) to dupe people into not recognizing the urgent need to construct a science based economy that will not further erode what little of the carrying capacity of the environment that is still left. People in general do not realize how perilously close to future extinction humans are moving as they ignore biological realities in their search for cash and personal gratification. For example, they read stories of the Fukushima catastrophe, and believe those who tell them that release of radiation 1.7 million times baseline levels will have no effect on them and hence can be ignored when they eat their salmon and oysters, just as the effects of the Deepwater Horizion spill in the Gulf of Mexico can likely be readily forgotten as can the accumulative effects of the myriad other small knicks and cuts to world ecosystems that are daily inflicted by what we call our "economy". Hence, they see no need to invest in either protecting the environment upon which they depend or developing ultimately ecologically sustainable alternative industries to power the economy. Too many erroneously think the big guy in the sky will come down and save them, just in the knick of time because there is some entirely irrational and unfounded reason to do so. They also fail to see that by the time they figure this out the dynamics of world ecosystems and the constraints imposed by genetics will make it too late for them to do anything about it (eg. by the time ocean pH drops enough as a result of increased atmospheric CO2 no technological fix will save marine biodiversity and hence future breaths, not to mention 1/3 of all protein consumed by humanity).
Not all PhD's go into academia, although a large part of what is left of science funding is as you note funded by the government (you should have also included a host of other disciplines FDA/NOAA/FBI/USDA/pieces of former USFWS, etc.). The government is the "profit center" for Universities, just as it is for nearly every corporation in the US as it is the largest customer either directly or indirectly, so take it out and you take out the economy as a prolonged government "shutdown" will demonstrate. Although this is lost on those eager to return to the ideologies of the 4th and 5th centuries, it is a fact nonetheless. The major problem is that in the rush to glorify "privatization", corporate captains are not taking the government's place regarding research on the long term biological effects of their own operations, since they erroneously believe that such problems are really going to effect only those of those living next to the sewer pipe and not them and that spending such monies dents the short-term quarterly profit and loss statements.
It is not all surprising that biologists are at the bleeding edge, since other scientific disciplines are more readily seen as quick routes to more technology and greater profit and are not seen within the larger context of human ecology. Of course, in the long run when the air is unfit to breath, toxicity so high that human reproduction becomes impossible, or the waters and soils too polluted or too hot or too dry to grow anything edible, etc. the latest cool algorithm or internet craze will largely be irrelevant. I would agree that biologists in
Ultimately it may be necessary for ordinary citizens to set up workgroups and consistently monitor, file freedom of information requests, obtain data from their friends who work in the government on an unofficial basis, just so that the citizenry can keep track of what the republicans are really up to. Personally, I'm not at all excited about their efforts to hide what they are doing, drastically slashing our rights to know, as well as our ability to act collectively, such as the plan to allow children under 16 to work during school hours for lower pay than adults just so that they can provide cheap labor to corporations and undercut worker's ability to bargain collectively. This is the kind of stuff they used to do in the old Soviet Union that all these so-called conservatives used to be heard complaining about, but are now silent because uncle Joe is now a capitalist.
Given all the regulations regarding government procurement your figure of 20K for hundreds of thousands of offices that must communicate the information for release is remarkably low. Likewise you only have 1 person handling content. That would be like asking someone to drink from a firehose. I would imagine a staff of about 20 would cover it for coordinating data input from so many agencies and inputs around the country.
It is always remarkable how people think they can expect a major project on a shoestring and then complain when it fails. Nonetheless, I like your basic premise. Democrats could gain a lot by farming this work out to open-government advocates, who would be willing to do it on a shoestring just to see it happen.
this is precisely what republicanism and "shrinking the government" is all about. Of course, they are even more clever by slipping in all their favorite kickback schemes into the defense budget that no one dares touch for fear of being labeled anti-American. Its the perfect scam. No or a shrinking government lets them get away with anything they want and you and I get to pay for it in further reductions in regulations and services that may potentially save the lives of millions. Republicans are good at recognizing that millions can starve or die as long as they get their millions.
What the poster is trying to say is that it is impossible for republicans to represent the poor and the middle class because frankly they can't afford to pay them enough to meet the market rates needed to buy politicians these days. I think he has a point. The poor and the middle class have been priced out of the market and really only now exist to serve as captive markets for corporations to harvest whenever they feel they need an increase in profits.
"Remember also that, while today we think that we have an impossible mound of bureauratic record-keeping, in 100 years time computer systems may be able to intelligently search and analyse more text than we have ever created."
Yes, but by then we will be dead and unable to learn anything from it. Those who follow us will, in large measure, continue to learn about their immediate situation themselves and what little we might be able to convey to them after our death.
If you turn it off, you will be unable to receive calls, some of which may be of an emergency nature.
The solution to the potential privacy and political issues involved is to make it a felony for anyone, including phone company employees, and FBI and CIA agents, to retain more than a few seconds each week in any particular individuals life a record of the location at which that particular phone is and what voice or data it might be transmitting. If there is probable cause, then appropriate law enforcement may be able to obtain a court order to record for longer periods of time, but this too should be expressly limited in nature and directly associated with the investigation of a potentially ongoing crime.
Any other solution is effectively turning such a system over to Big Brother and the only other debate left is who gets to be Big Brother.
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Aircraft. Computer Networks. US Agriculture. One could go on, there is a fairly long list. The problem you talk about is in the manufacture of consumer goods and basic commodities, most notably OIL, which we import at higher and higher prices, ironically because the government is too broke to support further subsidies to our oil/gas/coal industries.
If we stop subsidizing oil, coal, and gas and instead built a high-tech green energy industry and a non-oil based transportation infrastructure, we would climb, like a rocket, out the hole we have been digging for ourselves since the 1960's and 1970's, when we pretty much began to start turning over the keys to the keys to the treasury to the oil/gas/coal/MIC. A further obvious benefit is that we won't fry our agricultural land with higher temperatures and dramatically reduce the overall costs of additional pollution directly and indirectly related to these industries in terms of the massive negative financial impact associated with their extraction, pollution, regulation, transportation, health related costs, etc.
Its a no brainer from a science and economics perspective. The only problem is that 1/3 of the country watches FOX News as remains uneducated and fooled by self-interest advertising and oil/coal/gass industry punditry designed to block change in industrial policies that could quickly solve the problem. So in the meantime we further subsidize oil/gas/coal/MIC and financial fraud made legal by the absence of effective governmental regulation and keep on digging making the hole deeper.
Funny you should mention it. I pointed this out, using precisely this phraseology on the HuffPost blog during the 2008 election.
The US is reaching a critical junction, where it will have to decide if it wasn't to go forward as a leader in science and technology or in the spewing of T-party and republican anti-science, destroy-the-government rhetoric. It won't be able to do both. The fact that we will have to wait another 1 1/2 until November 2012 to decide and then another 2-3 years after that, assuming it is the former just to get things going again, is not a particularly good sign for our economy or our future.
Technology companies of all kinds will need to soon quickly weigh into this debate in a serious way to either massively fund politicians who support education, science and technology programs or face the prospects of off-shoring all of their operations to remain in business.
Your comments are little more than "More government is the problem" BS.
If you really want to talk about talk about the source of budget deficits you need to look at stock-options, since they allow corporate insiders to pay tax on income at vastly lower rates, especially when coupled with insider leverage from the tax expense the rest of us get to pay for corporate tax deductions of all kinds. It isn't your government that is ripping you off, its corporate insiders who have used stock-options to largely fund their take over of government to buy politicians who spew the "government is the problem" rhetoric their by giving them even more power to set up a "government within the government"
For example, your comments on "green energy" technology are just pure fantasy. It falsely assumes that industries competing against green energy (oil, gas, coal) are not getting any government subsidies. Perhaps your ignorance stems from your lack of familiarity with the US tax code. Do you pay at a roughly 35% rate or are you one of those who fills out the hundreds of special forms providing you with an 15% tax on the preponderance of your income that derives from stock options, which are taxes as capital gains, than can be further reduced in some cases to zero, by special deductions for "rolling stock", "ethanol and gasoline additive credits", "coal-gasification" credits, etc. [or add your favorite corporate tax-giveaway here], which amount to roughly 5T$ per year and not available to the average taxpayer.
I won't even bother to address your canard with respect to STEM education, since you don't seem to understand that training and education and "innovation" are not entirely separable activities, and even much less so in STEM, where you can't even understand the issues unless you have been sufficiently educated (trained).
To put it another way, you have been had by watching too much Fox News and being fooled by those pundits, who, to use your expression, have been "busy pissing in your pocket".
That regulation leads to more "financial hardship" is the most bogus argument out there. If one looks closely at the accounting of the costs, it NEVER is a full accounting and just takes into account the costs to those arguing against regulation. For example, this kind of argument was used to do away with the regulations on Wall Street, but failed to account, by several orders of magnitude, the costs to the entire financial and economic system. Rest assured that it wasn't environmental and safety regulations on off-shore oil drillers that created the cost of Deepwater Horizon, which will largely be born not by BP, Halliburton, or Transocean, but rather the residents of the Gulf of Mexico and those who eat and make their livelihoods from its former bounty.
The use of stock options as a legal instrument for doing business is another, as it is just an invitation for non-governmental actors to manipulate and pass off the unseen costs to non-insider shareholders and ultimately the public at large. Want to talk about what has lead to the huge budget deficits? It is the cost of stock-options, since they permit insiders to pay a tiny fraction of their earnings in taxes, since the tax rates for capital gains is a small fraction of the tax on incomes, taking into account all the special kick-backs in other deductions available to insiders who dispense the proceeds among themselves. However, the FULL cost of legislation (regulations) overseeing or allowing stock-options is nowhere to be found in discussions of their consequences.
Be highly suspicious of those who argue against regulations because "they cost too much". Their accounting and math skills are usually extremely bad and their knowledge of biology and human ecology is almost always much, much worse.
There is plenty greatness and technological leadership of all kinds in the US. The problem has been the rise of anti-government, anti-science rhetoric and budgeting that is hollowing out any opportunity for the scientific community to lead and be listened to. Consequently, what you see on the political and social front is stagnation and the rest of the world catching up or passing us in many fields of endeavor.
Unfortunately, we are in that period of "currency destabilization" or to put it more precisely "dollar devaluation" now, not 20 years from now. The collapse won't bring with it opportunity here, only a much higher prices and scarce government resources for doing most anything technological or not going forward. Instead of supporting science and technology T-party and republican rhetoric, which makes up 1/3 of our government and the body politic these days, is hell bent on diminishing it. You can see this in the insane notion that we can default on our debts to force their ideology on the other 2/3rds. They seem more intent on breaking wind rather than addressing the consequences of the issue.
We like to think our economy is dominant because of our military, but both are highly dependent on foreign resources and brain power, not to mention capital. Our economy has largely specialized in financial transactions, which as we learned with credit default swaps, much of the derivatives-based speculation is little more than an unstable, government sanctioned Ponzi scheme that produces little in the way of social or technological advance.
You lost me with your comments on "bureaucratic nonsense" and "strangling ideas", the later to me just an empty sophism. I doubt the Patent Office or the Intellectual Property Courts and Law are at the heart of our problem, which ultimately is one of the inability of about 1/3 of the country not being able to reason effectively nor see the adverse consequences of that. Much of this comes from poor education and direct efforts by some to distort the truth about a broad range of science and technology issues from global climate change to regulation of the internet. With respect to the latter, it is hard to argue that its the bureaucrats that are the problem, as essential current efforts and policy are to keep things as they are. It is special interests who want to be able to be granted special rights to manipulate the infrastructure to control the flow of information through the "tubes" and legislators with such poor educations in science and technology that they haven't any idea of what it is they are doing, not necessarily that the are not well-intentioned.
This is symptomatic of a much larger issue, namely that science has given the average man and woman great powers and capabilities, but who are unable to think clearly or cogently enough about the consequences of what they are doing with that power.
You can see it from Fukushima, to global warming, to the computation of derivatives on mortgage backed securities, and just about every other problem humanity has. Without science there was relatively little damage such thoughtless individuals could do the planet, but that is no longer the case. With 7 billion humans now inhabiting the earth that problem becomes so large as to overwhelm what good science can achieve.
No bodies, no story.
No story, no UFO industry.
No UFO industry, no Roswell.
Therefore by staying home, space aliens have destroyed Roswell, New Mexico. I get it now.
With the high prices of gasoline, it looks as if Roswell is getting desperate for tourists.
If they want to save their industry, they need to hurry up and find the bodies. Lack of bodies clear demonstrates that the entire thing is a scam, but hey that pretty well sums up business practices in the US these days.
Where are the bodies?
There is a very big difference between being able to spout off your opinions on any topic you like and quite another to pass them off as credible science.
Allowing non-science to be taught as science is nothing more than forced indoctrination; in this case religious indoctrination. Tennessee legislators would be more honest to simply outlaw the teaching of science in their state, rather than trying to simply bear false witness and pass it off as science.
You have to understand that the teaching of evolution directly undermines the business model of many fundamental religions. If people were to spend their time thinking and exploring the consequences of how humans evolved over the past 2.7 million years, a lot of money wouldn't wind up in the collection plate and a lot of the political force behind the injection of religion into the affairs of state would dissipate.
The way to respond to this for universities in other states to recognize Tennessee high school students as not necessarily qualified for admission until remedial courses in the theory of evolution have been passed. There is little point in wasting limited educational dollars on students who are not adequately prepared to understand fundamental theories that underpin all of biological and medical science. Federal science funding should also be denied to schools whose students are unable to demonstrate that they have a minimum levels of understanding of evolutionary theory. If the people of Tennessee vote to return their state to pre-1925 standards, that is their choice, but taxpayers elsewhere should not be expected to subsidize "educational" spending of limited federal dollars that is used for proselytizing religion in the science classroom.
"then you must take on faith"
No not at all, unless you accept it (some proposition) as true without condition or test. One can assert a scientific "fact" true and act accordingly exploring the consequences or one can question it and assert that it may not always be true (ie false under various conditions) that have yet to be tested. In either case, the fundamental difference is that science requires a test, at least in principle, whereas faith does not.
Your conception is just a simple misunderstanding of what constitutes science. Don't feel bad, you are often not alone and quite often scientific debates rage on for some time until someone carefully enough thinks through what a test might be (to distinguish if an assertion of fact is in fact true or false and under what conditions) for the debate to be put into a scientific context, tested and potentially resolved once and for all.
From your post, its fairly obvious you are not a biologist.
The application to a "more mathematical framework" merely reflects the reality that in most areas of biology the mathematics involved can often be quite intractable, even to professional mathematicians. The core of biology as a science has been about putting observations and descriptions into a conceptual context.
To make matters worse for your oversimplification, t-tests are almost never appropriate in biological questions as they assume independently drawn samples and uniform variances, a condition that almost never exists in biological (ie "real-world") studies. Indeed, it is usually a simplifying assumption to assume that spaitial and or temporal autocorrelation do not exist in ones data and too often it is unclear if such an assumption is even warranted, or if rejected just how much error needs to be regressed out as a result of such effects to make a particular set of error bounds meaningful.
Certainly, Einstein's dictum that one's theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler clearly applies in biology. However, that does not make it any easier to demonstrate that one has accurately modeled a biological problem with the level of simplicity required to make it meaningful from the perspective of the nature of the biology being investigated.
One of the very first lessons biologists learn is that life in general involves highly interconnected macromolecular systems, each of which is itself highly complicated.
The best mathematicians from Archimedes to Zarski tend to cut their teeth on problems involving a few variables and structures with the expectation, but unproven assertion, that more complicated systems can be viewed as direct extensions. Biologists must confront the sad and confusing reality that to study life in a realistic way, one must concern themselves with the results of complexity involving tens of thousands if not hundreds of millions of variables. Biologists have no choice but to confront this "all encompassing" morass of myriads and myriads of dependent and independent variables as best they can. To make matters worse because biological systems evolve through time, most statistical problems need to account for both simultaneous spatial and temporal autocorrelation and must be solved within the context of considerably stochasticity that is not entirely random. Although mathematicians and statisticians can suggest simplifying assumptions, say noting the dominance or primary eigenvalues, they are just that, assumptions until demonstrated otherwise.
Consequently, to say that biologists are poorly trained to cope with the mathematical challenges that confront them, doesn't really say much. So is everyone else.
Your comment makes the questionable assumption that there is actually some science or math that could be taught to say cure you of AIDS or other currently untreatable disease. Just as in other sciences, there are many things that are simply not yet known.
That mathematicians and computer scientists are becoming useful participants in larger biological questions and training in biology is a good thing. A major impediment, however, is that those with some familiarity with these disciplines too often fail to recognize is that MOST realistic biological problems are extremely hard, when placed into the context of mathematical modeling. Realistic modeling requires in general the ability to effectively solve partial differential equations of hundreds or perhaps tens of thousands or millions of simultaneous variables, without anyone really having a clear conception of just what variables may prove to be the most important or even how they might be identified as distinct before such a model is constructed. The algorithms required are quite often NP complete and there is seldom reason to expect that exact answers can be found even if one has a specific realistic model in hand.
When one is working with millions of organisms each of which may have millions of base pairs in their DNA, the number of permutations that might shift the representation of a given problem into an ill-conditioned system, defective systems of equations, or toward algorithmic intractability without warning is not only enormous, but largely not-computable, except for the grossest of simplifications. The notion that the current state of CS and mathematical statistics provides a paradigm for biologists to solve all their conceptual and computations problems is both laughable and remarkably naive.
In general the leading edge of biology is not rocket science. It is far more complicated than rocket science. For example, just trying to establish the phylogeny of a small group of organisms say 500 in number will require identification one out of more possible permutations than their are electrons in the know universe. To make matters worse, routine statistical methods are not appropriate for comparisons across organisms, because the slight changes between combinations of base-pairs that ultimately encode for a particular behavior, physiology, function, or structure are not independent of one another and can not be independently sampled, but are instead a product of phylogeny and evolutionary events that took place in the past that are not amenable to direct testing. To make matters worse, the results of such computations often involve outcomes that may mean the difference between life or death of both individuals as well as entire ecosystems that can not be reversed engineered because of the sheer number of co-evolutionary and interrelated events.
Sorry but Fortran IV code is seldom compilable with later versions of the language as too much is now deprecated.
Although I too remember the trials and tribulations of being a biology grad student and in general agree that University administrators are by and large a pathetic lot, this is a gross oversimplification of the problem facing the biological sciences and a highly self-centric viewpoint. The real problem is that the vast majority of the electorate (and humanity in general) is illiterate when it comes to biology and the environment. The problem is that society is not utilizing what biology has taught mankind about its place in and its accumulative effects on the planetary ecosystem. Consequently, it is easy for those in exploitative industries, short-sighted politicians who will happily give away what little environment is left to stay in power, and those against "big government" (ie civilization) to dupe people into not recognizing the urgent need to construct a science based economy that will not further erode what little of the carrying capacity of the environment that is still left. People in general do not realize how perilously close to future extinction humans are moving as they ignore biological realities in their search for cash and personal gratification. For example, they read stories of the Fukushima catastrophe, and believe those who tell them that release of radiation 1.7 million times baseline levels will have no effect on them and hence can be ignored when they eat their salmon and oysters, just as the effects of the Deepwater Horizion spill in the Gulf of Mexico can likely be readily forgotten as can the accumulative effects of the myriad other small knicks and cuts to world ecosystems that are daily inflicted by what we call our "economy". Hence, they see no need to invest in either protecting the environment upon which they depend or developing ultimately ecologically sustainable alternative industries to power the economy. Too many erroneously think the big guy in the sky will come down and save them, just in the knick of time because there is some entirely irrational and unfounded reason to do so. They also fail to see that by the time they figure this out the dynamics of world ecosystems and the constraints imposed by genetics will make it too late for them to do anything about it (eg. by the time ocean pH drops enough as a result of increased atmospheric CO2 no technological fix will save marine biodiversity and hence future breaths, not to mention 1/3 of all protein consumed by humanity).
Not all PhD's go into academia, although a large part of what is left of science funding is as you note funded by the government (you should have also included a host of other disciplines FDA/NOAA/FBI/USDA/pieces of former USFWS, etc.). The government is the "profit center" for Universities, just as it is for nearly every corporation in the US as it is the largest customer either directly or indirectly, so take it out and you take out the economy as a prolonged government "shutdown" will demonstrate. Although this is lost on those eager to return to the ideologies of the 4th and 5th centuries, it is a fact nonetheless. The major problem is that in the rush to glorify "privatization", corporate captains are not taking the government's place regarding research on the long term biological effects of their own operations, since they erroneously believe that such problems are really going to effect only those of those living next to the sewer pipe and not them and that spending such monies dents the short-term quarterly profit and loss statements.
It is not all surprising that biologists are at the bleeding edge, since other scientific disciplines are more readily seen as quick routes to more technology and greater profit and are not seen within the larger context of human ecology. Of course, in the long run when the air is unfit to breath, toxicity so high that human reproduction becomes impossible, or the waters and soils too polluted or too hot or too dry to grow anything edible, etc. the latest cool algorithm or internet craze will largely be irrelevant. I would agree that biologists in
Ultimately it may be necessary for ordinary citizens to set up workgroups and consistently monitor, file freedom of information requests, obtain data from their friends who work in the government on an unofficial basis, just so that the citizenry can keep track of what the republicans are really up to. Personally, I'm not at all excited about their efforts to hide what they are doing, drastically slashing our rights to know, as well as our ability to act collectively, such as the plan to allow children under 16 to work during school hours for lower pay than adults just so that they can provide cheap labor to corporations and undercut worker's ability to bargain collectively. This is the kind of stuff they used to do in the old Soviet Union that all these so-called conservatives used to be heard complaining about, but are now silent because uncle Joe is now a capitalist.
Given all the regulations regarding government procurement your figure of 20K for hundreds of thousands of offices that must communicate the information for release is remarkably low. Likewise you only have 1 person handling content. That would be like asking someone to drink from a firehose. I would imagine a staff of about 20 would cover it for coordinating data input from so many agencies and inputs around the country.
It is always remarkable how people think they can expect a major project on a shoestring and then complain when it fails. Nonetheless, I like your basic premise. Democrats could gain a lot by farming this work out to open-government advocates, who would be willing to do it on a shoestring just to see it happen.
this is precisely what republicanism and "shrinking the government" is all about. Of course, they are even more clever by slipping in all their favorite kickback schemes into the defense budget that no one dares touch for fear of being labeled anti-American. Its the perfect scam. No or a shrinking government lets them get away with anything they want and you and I get to pay for it in further reductions in regulations and services that may potentially save the lives of millions. Republicans are good at recognizing that millions can starve or die as long as they get their millions.
What the poster is trying to say is that it is impossible for republicans to represent the poor and the middle class because frankly they can't afford to pay them enough to meet the market rates needed to buy politicians these days. I think he has a point. The poor and the middle class have been priced out of the market and really only now exist to serve as captive markets for corporations to harvest whenever they feel they need an increase in profits.
If they can now just loose 63 million more, Ruppert Murdoch will get what he deserves.
"Remember also that, while today we think that we have an impossible mound of bureauratic record-keeping, in 100 years time computer systems may be able to intelligently search and analyse more text than we have ever created."
Yes, but by then we will be dead and unable to learn anything from it. Those who follow us will, in large measure, continue to learn about their immediate situation themselves and what little we might be able to convey to them after our death.
If you turn it off, you will be unable to receive calls, some of which may be of an emergency nature.
The solution to the potential privacy and political issues involved is to make it a felony for anyone, including phone company employees, and FBI and CIA agents, to retain more than a few seconds each week in any particular individuals life a record of the location at which that particular phone is and what voice or data it might be transmitting. If there is probable cause, then appropriate law enforcement may be able to obtain a court order to record for longer periods of time, but this too should be expressly limited in nature and directly associated with the investigation of a potentially ongoing crime.
Any other solution is effectively turning such a system over to Big Brother and the only other debate left is who gets to be Big Brother.
No. The other 12,999 are to assure defense contractor profits. But remember, it was a volume sale so we really got a discount.