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Comment Re:UK Government Hinders WiFi (Score 1) 280

Firstly, skepticalscience is anything but. It's a shill website, so -1 for referencing it. Secondly, the correlation is almost certainly more complex than the simple-minded one demonstrated there. For example, there's a definite correlation between cosmic rays and stratospheric temperature. Moreover, atmospheric temperature is closely related to sea surface temperature (particularly through El Nino and La Nina), so the correlation is more likely to be something like cosmic rays -> cloud cover -> sea temperature -> atmospheric temperature (the heat capacity of the oceans being 1,000 x greater than that of the atmosphere). As I say, you don't know all of the facts and neither does the propagandist who maintains the skepticalscience website.

Comment Re:UK Government Hinders WiFi (Score 1) 280

You are basing your assumption on all the facts being known. This is a huge mistake, and it's one that the environmental movement and these activist "post-normal" scientists have been making for decades. I would, for example, wait for the CLOUD experiment at CERN to complete before coming to any conclusions.

Comment Re:"irrelevant to the world beyond academia" (Score 1) 487

A Ph.D. will immediately get out a hammer and beat on it to see if any rotten pieces fly off

I think you've missed off something important from your analysis: group-think. That is to say, the Ph.D. is something of a course of indoctrination into a paradigm, moderated by fellow believers. It isn't for nothing they say that science progresses one funeral at a time.

Comment Re:Another drive by hit piece (Score 1) 962

The article is talking about those who completely deny all facts

Yet it starts by talking about Senator Infhoe, who "believes" that doubling CO2 will cause an increase of around ~1C, but that all the other computer model predictions are bollocks. So how is Infhoe an idiot when an eminent scientist like Richard Lindzen and many others hold the same view? The article should be turned around because it's clearly about activist scientists using science to promote a political agenda and how the public are getting wise to this. In reality, scientists themselves are destroying public trust in science by "marketing" their work for personal or professional gain.

Earth

Scientists Cleared of Misusing Global Warming Data 541

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times reports that an inquiry by the Commerce Department's inspector general has found no evidence that NOAA scientists manipulated climate data (reg. may be required) to buttress evidence in support of global warming after climate change skeptics contended that e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity. 'None of the investigations have found any evidence to question the ethics of our scientists or raise doubts about NOAA's understanding of climate change science,' says Mary Glackin, the agency's deputy undersecretary for operations. The inquiry, requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change, comes at a critical moment for NOAA, as some newly empowered Republican House members seek to rein in the EPA's plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, often contending that the science underpinning global warming is flawed. Inhofe says the report (PDF) was far from a clean bill of health for the agency, and that contrary to its executive summary, showed that the scientists 'engaged in data manipulation.'"

Comment Re:NLP + sEnglish != thinking (Score 1) 128

Deep Blue was programmed to do nothing but play chess. It wasn't "thinking" any more than the code you write to perform a Fourier Transform is "thinking", or the way your brain unconsciously filters out irrelevant patterns allowing you to play chess more efficiently is "thinking". Thinking is an intentional, conscious act. Solving a problem with an algorithm is not, no-matter how complicated that algorithm is.

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