As someone pointed out: building a fusion reactor, while not trivial, is routinely done by tinkerers worldwide: see e.g. this Instructables guide .
No, the truly amazing thing here is what I found when I clicked through to the original story (as usual, not linked in the summary):
... here in Reno, we have the University of Nevada-Reno, and I went to the physics department. They offered to give me a bunch of parts, and after I got fusion, they offered to give me my own lab here to work in. So that was very helpful.
Allow me to be the first to say, WHAT THE YELLOW RUBBERY FUCK? In every university department I've ever had experience of, researchers and grad students fight tooth and nail to get funding for anything more expensive than an alligator clip. Meanwhile, these guys have sufficient resources to start handing out equipment and lab space to enterprising teenagers for science fair projects! Hmm, time to start looking for a postdoc position there, I think...
The government creates a legal code which defines the very concept of "legitimacy" within a state; I would have thought that a government is almost the only entity which could be said to be a "legitimate entity unto itself". Repressive dictatorial regime? Might be illegitimate according to a UN ruling, but it's still legitimate unto itself. A private firm in a governed state? Legitimate, but not unto itself, since it did not create the laws.
Perhaps we have different interpretations of "legitimate unto itself"; the Oxford English Dictionary lists 29 separate definitions for "unto", not counting sub-definitions, so it would hardly be surprising. I imagine some misunderstanding was involved, since RobinEggs subsequently called the government "legitimate". I was just enlightening RobinEggs as to how ktappe read "illegitimate government" into his or her statements.
... I do not think it means what you think it means. This is a story about an emulator which runs client-side and can read local ROMs. Just because the magic words "Javascript" and "HTML" are in there doesn't mean it's "in the cloud".
I find print-to-PDF works as a print preview, albeit less convenient. But for a long time Chrome couldn't print to anything but US letter, which was a showstopper for me. (My Firefox still resets the page size to US letter once in a while, for unknown reasons.) Frankly I find that printing sucks on every web browser I've used -- if I want a half-decent printout, I paste the content into an OOWriter document and tweak it by hand.
Yes, you can ban that asshole -- although, since you're offering financial incentives for assholery, you're going to end up with an inconveniently long blacklist -- but the world has a pretty large supply of assholes, and it only takes one to disrupt a film for the entire rest of the audience. And if your cinema is advertising "free movies for assholes", even if it's only one per asshole, you're bound to get at least one per showing.
The customer for disturbing the movie, and the management for not putting their money where their mouth is and giving her a refund along with a written notice that she's barred from attending again.
Well, first up, "Money where their mouth is"? Their mouth says "act like a fuckwit, we'll throw you out with no refund." Their money says the same. So they are indeed putting their money where their mouth is.
Second, I can see a glaring flaw or three in this plan.
-- "Hey, I'm bored of this movie. Let's walk out and skip the last twenty minutes." -- "Wait, I've got a better idea. Let's act obnoxiously and get thrown out, then we get a refund!"
Or:
-- "Dude, I'm bored, there's nothing to do, and we haven't got much money." -- "Let's go watch some dumb movie at the Drafthouse. Fifteen minutes in we can start screaming like gibbons, get thrown out, and have our money back!"
Seriously, you're proposing an *incentive* for people to ruin the movie. They may as well put up a sign saying "Don't like the film? Act like an asshole and get your money back!"
In her message she says she was using her phone as a flashlight to find her seat (one of the most annoying things you can do in a theater)
... and shortly thereafter says that she didn't know she wasn't meant to be texting. And then proudly declares that she's texted in every other cinema in the area. So I'm going to go right ahead and sound the bullshit horn on this one...
I was given an iPod a few years ago. It came with an Apple logo sticker. I didn't really know what to do with it, so I stuck it on the (somewhat nasty) toilet of the house I was living in, along with a printed label reading "iPoo".
Solar panels take 8-10 years, in direct sunlight in most ideal locations available to simply produce the energy required to manufacture them in the first place (maybe a year less in a desert).
"Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1)." -- says the US Department of Energy. They cite references, too.
Even accepting that this book is intended for kids it's still amazingly over simplified.
You're too kind. It's plain wrong, as is their CYA explanation on their website. They point out that we can't see electricity (true) and infer that therefore nobody can understand electricity (false). I mean, "We cannot even say where electricity comes from. Some scientists think that the sun may be the source of most electricity. Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it." There's no way to recontextualize that to make it anything other than just plain wrong. As you say, it's basically The Force, or Magic in any crappy fantasy novel (*good* fantasy novels tend to have a more coherent model for any magic than the one these guys put forward for electricity).
The point is: it is EASIER and FASTER to just move object with a mouse from point A to point B, rather then type a code statements and render.
Fortunately LaTeX already placed the object at point B for me, so I don't have to move it at all. Still, as long as you got a money without typing a code statements, that's all good, and I'm sure your book's a great read.
(Aside: I don't actually use LaTeX any more; I've moved on to ConTeXt, which I heartily recommend.)
Thank you; I was about to point this out. Mod Parent Up, as the saying goes.
This is how science works, and how it has always worked. You hang your theory out and the rest of the scientific community goes for it with machetes and chainsaws, which either kills it or makes it stronger. That's how we sift the truth from the wishful thinking (and, more rarely, deliberate fraud). That's also why the idea of a "vast conspiracy of scientists" occasionally mooted by (cough) certain persons is so hilarious. It's about as feasible as throwing a dozen pissed-off cats into a large sack and finding that they all decided to enter into a conspiracy.
And thanks for reminding me about the N-rays; I read the famous Nature paper the other week, and (being a scientist) had great fun watching the poor bastards' theories being shredded in deceptively bland scientific prose.
Dr Sarah Parcak should study her history - because she's "pioneered" a technique first used in the 30's from aircraft and more recently from any number of orbital platforms.
Absolutely! She should, for example, read the 28-page historical introduction and 32-page bibliography of the excellent book Satellite remote sensing for archaeology by... oh look, it's by Dr Sarah Parcak. Turns out she literally wrote the book on this stuff. Seriously, do you think she's spent a scientific career doing this work without bothering to check what's been done before? If someone is a "Dr", they have written a doctoral dissertation, which means they know how to review literature.
Yes, the BBC article (not the researcher) used the word "pioneered". I imagine there must be some pioneering about work that located several thousand hitherto unknown structures and seventeen pyramids. (If it's all old hat, why didn't someone find them "in the 30's from aircraft?") Even if it's not "pioneering", the fault is with the reporter who chose to use that word.
Sure-fire recipe for a snarky Slashdot reply: if it's successful work building on previous accomplishments, say "huh, that's not new, she's just repeating what someone else did". If it's groundbreaking work previously unachieved by anyone else, say "huh, that's just ivory-tower tinkering, nobody's replicated it and it'll never work in the real world".
Congratulations! You have achieved (at the time of my reading) the coveted "Score: -1, Funny". It would be interesting to know what proportion of jokes about Apple end up with that rating...
Yes, TFA doesn't make that clear and I had to read the paper to resolve it: it turns out that the 80 kcal is consumed in the lunch immediately after the test condition, and the rest is excess food consumed over the remainder of the day. Which is pretty interesting -- even hours later the game affects food consumption.
The game was FIFA 09, which is consistent with your theory -- personally I find football exhausting. Would be interesting to compare with a more sedentary-themed game; they don't consider this aspect, and just selected FIFA 09 because "the game is easy to learn, is popular, and can be played in 1 h".
Tell me, does the paper say whether or not snacks were provided for the test subjects?
It spends about a page going into excruciating detail about exactly what they were fed at what points and under what conditions (unsurprising since it's pretty central to the study!). But in short: no snacks. They turned up in the morning in a fasting state, were fed a standard sized breakfast, experienced the experimental condition (sitting in a chair, or sitting in a chair playing on an Xbox), and were given an ad libitum (i.e. eat as much as you like) lunch. Xbox players ate more, and the increase was not cancelled out by the extra calories expended playing.
I don't really know what your problem with the sample size is. Here's the relevant part of the statistical discussion from the paper:
The power calculation analysis showed that data from 22 subjects gave us a power (1 - beta) of 0.9, which was sufficient to show changes in energy intake as low as 5%, with an a of 0.05 (repeated-measures analysis of variance; ANOVA). Before the statistical analysis was conducted, all data were tested for normality by using the Shapiro-Wilk W test and variance homogeneity. A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted on the means of all variables. Analyses of glucose and hormonal data were based on repeated-measures ANOVA, including the factors “condition” (video game playing compared with resting) and “time” (7 time points). Pairwise comparisons of single time point values were performed by using a paired Student’s t test. Correlation analyses were used to explore the relation between ad libitum energy intake and different variables. Effect sizes were examined by using Cohen’s d method, reflecting the magnitude of the difference between groups in SD units.
So it looks to me as though 22 is sufficient for the power required here. If you've got a specific problem with the statistical techniques employed, could you walk me through it please? I am a scientist who uses statistics rather than a full-time statistician, so I accept that I might have missed something here.
...it can't be related to the general population.
They're fairly upfront about the fact that the test subjects were all teenage males. Obviously, yes, you'd want to replicate it with other sex and age groups, but you have to start somewhere.
Can't really blame you in this case -- TFA doesn't seem to give the title, journal, or the names of any of the institutions or researchers involved! I had to do some googling to track it down... and even then I don't know if it's open access (I'm reading from a university network with lots of big juicy e-journal subscriptions).
Did they attempt to measure calorific expenditure? Calories burned when playing xbox are higher than that when sitting doing nothing.
Yes, that's actually mentioned in the press release too -- "Energy expenditure was 21 kcal/h higher during video game play than during the resting condition. However, subjects ate 80 more kilocalories after playing the video games than they did after the control period. This resulted in a net positive energy of 163 kcal during the entire day when video games were played compared with when subjects rested, despite the fact that the subjects reported similar appetite ratings during these periods."
Oh, and to save anyone else the legwork of tracking it down: Video game playing increases food intake in adolescents: a randomized crossover study. Jean-Philippe Chaput, Trine Visby, Signe Nyby, Lars Klingenberg, Nikolaj T Gregersen, Angelo Tremblay, Arne Astrup, and Anders Sjödin. Am J Clin Nutr, doi: 10.3945/ajcn.110.008680, First published ahead of print April 13, 2011.
The researchers collected a very small collection of similar anecdotes
No, they conducted a scientific randomized crossover study where they actually applied video game playing as a controlled intervention and measured caloric intake. That's very different from collecting 22 slashdot posts of "OMG I played games and got fat". As to "very small" -- the results for the two experimental runs were significant at P-values of 0.01 and 0.05; it's pretty clear-cut.
There is no indication of what kind of games were played
"The video game FIFA 09, a soccer video game played on Xbox 360 (Microsoft, Redmond, WA), was selected on the basis that the game is easy to learn, is popular, and can be played in 1 h." (p. 2 of the paper).
or what long-term effects might be
No, because that's not what they were studying. You can't cover everything in a single paper.
The results apply only to a single session of gaming, and not to habitual gamers.
Sure. This is an 8-page report on a single experiment. It's not a review paper. At some point there will be enough data from various studies to synthesize a systematic review, but someone has to publish the data from the individual experiments first!
The headline is crap as usual
No, the headline is consistent with the conclusion of the paper. Playing the video game did indeed increase the food intake of the subjects.
the study doesn't really involve correlation vs. causation at all.
True, the issue of correlation vs. causation is not discussed in the study, presumably because it's fairly well-known that a crossover randomized controlled intervention study like this is precisely what you do to establish causation (since there's already plenty of data on correlation out there). But perhaps you have some comments on deficiencies in the experimental design?
Slashdot Mirror
As someone pointed out: building a fusion reactor, while not trivial, is routinely done by tinkerers worldwide: see e.g. this Instructables guide .
No, the truly amazing thing here is what I found when I clicked through to the original story (as usual, not linked in the summary):
Allow me to be the first to say, WHAT THE YELLOW RUBBERY FUCK? In every university department I've ever had experience of, researchers and grad students fight tooth and nail to get funding for anything more expensive than an alligator clip. Meanwhile, these guys have sufficient resources to start handing out equipment and lab space to enterprising teenagers for science fair projects! Hmm, time to start looking for a postdoc position there, I think...
For my part, I became suspicious when they dropped the "one button good, three buttons bad" mantra.
The government creates a legal code which defines the very concept of "legitimacy" within a state; I would have thought that a government is almost the only entity which could be said to be a "legitimate entity unto itself". Repressive dictatorial regime? Might be illegitimate according to a UN ruling, but it's still legitimate unto itself. A private firm in a governed state? Legitimate, but not unto itself, since it did not create the laws.
Perhaps we have different interpretations of "legitimate unto itself"; the Oxford English Dictionary lists 29 separate definitions for "unto", not counting sub-definitions, so it would hardly be surprising. I imagine some misunderstanding was involved, since RobinEggs subsequently called the government "legitimate". I was just enlightening RobinEggs as to how ktappe read "illegitimate government" into his or her statements.
Uh...yeah. Just how you read "illegitimate government" into my statements I don't know.
You wrote "the government is not a legitimate entity", leaving two interpretations of your position:
1. The government is an entity, but it is not legitimate.
2. The government is not an entity.
ktappe charitably went for the first, slightly less nutty reading.
... I do not think it means what you think it means. This is a story about an emulator which runs client-side and can read local ROMs. Just because the magic words "Javascript" and "HTML" are in there doesn't mean it's "in the cloud".
I find print-to-PDF works as a print preview, albeit less convenient. But for a long time Chrome couldn't print to anything but US letter, which was a showstopper for me. (My Firefox still resets the page size to US letter once in a while, for unknown reasons.) Frankly I find that printing sucks on every web browser I've used -- if I want a half-decent printout, I paste the content into an OOWriter document and tweak it by hand.
Yes, you can ban that asshole -- although, since you're offering financial incentives for assholery, you're going to end up with an inconveniently long blacklist -- but the world has a pretty large supply of assholes, and it only takes one to disrupt a film for the entire rest of the audience. And if your cinema is advertising "free movies for assholes", even if it's only one per asshole, you're bound to get at least one per showing.
The customer for disturbing the movie, and the management for not putting their money where their mouth is and giving her a refund along with a written notice that she's barred from attending again.
Well, first up, "Money where their mouth is"? Their mouth says "act like a fuckwit, we'll throw you out with no refund." Their money says the same. So they are indeed putting their money where their mouth is.
Second, I can see a glaring flaw or three in this plan.
-- "Hey, I'm bored of this movie. Let's walk out and skip the last twenty minutes."
-- "Wait, I've got a better idea. Let's act obnoxiously and get thrown out, then we get a refund!"
Or:
-- "Dude, I'm bored, there's nothing to do, and we haven't got much money."
-- "Let's go watch some dumb movie at the Drafthouse. Fifteen minutes in we can start screaming like gibbons, get thrown out, and have our money back!"
Seriously, you're proposing an *incentive* for people to ruin the movie. They may as well put up a sign saying "Don't like the film? Act like an asshole and get your money back!"
Maybe I'm nuts to care about protecting my entertainment time,...
You are a bulwark of civilization. Keep up the good work!
In her message she says she was using her phone as a flashlight to find her seat (one of the most annoying things you can do in a theater)
... and shortly thereafter says that she didn't know she wasn't meant to be texting. And then proudly declares that she's texted in every other cinema in the area. So I'm going to go right ahead and sound the bullshit horn on this one...
I was given an iPod a few years ago. It came with an Apple logo sticker. I didn't really know what to do with it, so I stuck it on the (somewhat nasty) toilet of the house I was living in, along with a printed label reading "iPoo".
Even for Slashdot, this is a little pathetic: the link is to a ZDNet article, which regurgitates a PCPro article, which in turn regurgitates a blog post by the guy who actually ran the tests, Vijay Devakumar. And here's Ivan Golubev, who wrote the cracking tool.
Still, ZDNet's advertisers thank you for the hits!
Blimey, 2004 -- I didn't even see that. I must have a trawl for some more recent studies when I get the time...
Solar panels take 8-10 years, in direct sunlight in most ideal locations available to simply produce the energy required to manufacture them in the first place (maybe a year less in a desert).
"Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1)." -- says the US Department of Energy. They cite references, too.
Even accepting that this book is intended for kids it's still amazingly over simplified.
You're too kind. It's plain wrong, as is their CYA explanation on their website. They point out that we can't see electricity (true) and infer that therefore nobody can understand electricity (false). I mean, "We cannot even say where electricity comes from. Some scientists think that the sun may be the source of most electricity. Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it." There's no way to recontextualize that to make it anything other than just plain wrong. As you say, it's basically The Force, or Magic in any crappy fantasy novel (*good* fantasy novels tend to have a more coherent model for any magic than the one these guys put forward for electricity).
The point is: it is EASIER and FASTER to just move object with a mouse from point A to point B, rather then type a code statements and render.
Fortunately LaTeX already placed the object at point B for me, so I don't have to move it at all. Still, as long as you got a money without typing a code statements, that's all good, and I'm sure your book's a great read.
(Aside: I don't actually use LaTeX any more; I've moved on to ConTeXt, which I heartily recommend.)
Thank you; I was about to point this out. Mod Parent Up, as the saying goes.
This is how science works, and how it has always worked. You hang your theory out and the rest of the scientific community goes for it with machetes and chainsaws, which either kills it or makes it stronger. That's how we sift the truth from the wishful thinking (and, more rarely, deliberate fraud). That's also why the idea of a "vast conspiracy of scientists" occasionally mooted by (cough) certain persons is so hilarious. It's about as feasible as throwing a dozen pissed-off cats into a large sack and finding that they all decided to enter into a conspiracy.
And thanks for reminding me about the N-rays; I read the famous Nature paper the other week, and (being a scientist) had great fun watching the poor bastards' theories being shredded in deceptively bland scientific prose.
Dr Sarah Parcak should study her history - because she's "pioneered" a technique first used in the 30's from aircraft and more recently from any number of orbital platforms.
Absolutely! She should, for example, read the 28-page historical introduction and 32-page bibliography of the excellent book Satellite remote sensing for archaeology by... oh look, it's by Dr Sarah Parcak. Turns out she literally wrote the book on this stuff. Seriously, do you think she's spent a scientific career doing this work without bothering to check what's been done before? If someone is a "Dr", they have written a doctoral dissertation, which means they know how to review literature.
Yes, the BBC article (not the researcher) used the word "pioneered". I imagine there must be some pioneering about work that located several thousand hitherto unknown structures and seventeen pyramids. (If it's all old hat, why didn't someone find them "in the 30's from aircraft?") Even if it's not "pioneering", the fault is with the reporter who chose to use that word.
Sure-fire recipe for a snarky Slashdot reply: if it's successful work building on previous accomplishments, say "huh, that's not new, she's just repeating what someone else did". If it's groundbreaking work previously unachieved by anyone else, say "huh, that's just ivory-tower tinkering, nobody's replicated it and it'll never work in the real world".
Congratulations! You have achieved (at the time of my reading) the coveted "Score: -1, Funny". It would be interesting to know what proportion of jokes about Apple end up with that rating...
Yes, TFA doesn't make that clear and I had to read the paper to resolve it: it turns out that the 80 kcal is consumed in the lunch immediately after the test condition, and the rest is excess food consumed over the remainder of the day. Which is pretty interesting -- even hours later the game affects food consumption.
The game was FIFA 09, which is consistent with your theory -- personally I find football exhausting. Would be interesting to compare with a more sedentary-themed game; they don't consider this aspect, and just selected FIFA 09 because "the game is easy to learn, is popular, and can be played in 1 h".
Tell me, does the paper say whether or not snacks were provided for the test subjects?
It spends about a page going into excruciating detail about exactly what they were fed at what points and under what conditions (unsurprising since it's pretty central to the study!). But in short: no snacks. They turned up in the morning in a fasting state, were fed a standard sized breakfast, experienced the experimental condition (sitting in a chair, or sitting in a chair playing on an Xbox), and were given an ad libitum (i.e. eat as much as you like) lunch. Xbox players ate more, and the increase was not cancelled out by the extra calories expended playing.
I don't really know what your problem with the sample size is. Here's the relevant part of the statistical discussion from the paper:
The power calculation analysis showed that data from 22 subjects gave us a power (1 - beta) of 0.9, which was sufficient to show changes in energy intake as low as 5%, with an a of 0.05 (repeated-measures analysis of variance; ANOVA). Before the statistical analysis was conducted, all data were tested for normality by using the Shapiro-Wilk W test and variance homogeneity. A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted on the means of all variables. Analyses of glucose and hormonal data were based on repeated-measures ANOVA, including the factors “condition” (video game playing compared with resting) and “time” (7 time points). Pairwise comparisons of single time point values were performed by using a paired Student’s t test. Correlation analyses were used to explore the relation between ad libitum energy intake and different variables. Effect sizes were examined by using Cohen’s d method, reflecting the magnitude of the difference between groups in SD units.
So it looks to me as though 22 is sufficient for the power required here. If you've got a specific problem with the statistical techniques employed, could you walk me through it please? I am a scientist who uses statistics rather than a full-time statistician, so I accept that I might have missed something here.
...it can't be related to the general population.
They're fairly upfront about the fact that the test subjects were all teenage males. Obviously, yes, you'd want to replicate it with other sex and age groups, but you have to start somewhere.
Being too lazy to read the original paper.
Can't really blame you in this case -- TFA doesn't seem to give the title, journal, or the names of any of the institutions or researchers involved! I had to do some googling to track it down... and even then I don't know if it's open access (I'm reading from a university network with lots of big juicy e-journal subscriptions).
Did they attempt to measure calorific expenditure?
Calories burned when playing xbox are higher than that when sitting doing nothing.
Yes, that's actually mentioned in the press release too -- "Energy expenditure was 21 kcal/h higher during video game play than during the resting condition. However, subjects ate 80 more kilocalories after playing the video games than they did after the control period. This resulted in a net positive energy of 163 kcal during the entire day when video games were played compared with when subjects rested, despite the fact that the subjects reported similar appetite ratings during these periods."
Oh, and to save anyone else the legwork of tracking it down: Video game playing increases food intake in adolescents: a randomized crossover study. Jean-Philippe Chaput, Trine Visby, Signe Nyby, Lars Klingenberg, Nikolaj T Gregersen, Angelo Tremblay, Arne Astrup, and Anders Sjödin. Am J Clin Nutr, doi: 10.3945/ajcn.110.008680, First published ahead of print April 13, 2011.
The researchers collected a very small collection of similar anecdotes
No, they conducted a scientific randomized crossover study where they actually applied video game playing as a controlled intervention and measured caloric intake. That's very different from collecting 22 slashdot posts of "OMG I played games and got fat". As to "very small" -- the results for the two experimental runs were significant at P-values of 0.01 and 0.05; it's pretty clear-cut.
There is no indication of what kind of games were played
"The video game FIFA 09, a soccer video game played on Xbox 360 (Microsoft, Redmond, WA), was selected on the basis that the game is easy to learn, is popular, and can be played in 1 h." (p. 2 of the paper).
or what long-term effects might be
No, because that's not what they were studying. You can't cover everything in a single paper.
The results apply only to a single session of gaming, and not to habitual gamers.
Sure. This is an 8-page report on a single experiment. It's not a review paper. At some point there will be enough data from various studies to synthesize a systematic review, but someone has to publish the data from the individual experiments first!
The headline is crap as usual
No, the headline is consistent with the conclusion of the paper. Playing the video game did indeed increase the food intake of the subjects.
the study doesn't really involve correlation vs. causation at all.
True, the issue of correlation vs. causation is not discussed in the study, presumably because it's fairly well-known that a crossover randomized controlled intervention study like this is precisely what you do to establish causation (since there's already plenty of data on correlation out there). But perhaps you have some comments on deficiencies in the experimental design?