Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Improving data [Re:The Gods] (Score 1) 385

... Karl et al. conclusion is an outlier. And you don't have to be a scientist to know it... if it weren't, there wouldn't have been news media all over the place reporting "No 'Hiatus' After All". Outliers are outliers. They can be recognized from their conclusions, as I did, but by lay people they can also often be recognized by the media uproar they stir. Simple logic says that if it hadn't been NEWS, it wouldn't have made a stir in the news. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-07-23]

Jane's method of spotting outliers via media uproar is cute, but it would be more rigorous to actually look at Fig 1 (a) and (b). The new global trend's central estimate is within the error bars of the old estimate. ... [Dumb Scientist]

... All it takes is simple logic to clearly show that Karl et al. results are an outlier. I didn't exactly make this up, either. Lots of others have been saying it. In fact, even many of the big news sources haven't dared to touch Karl with a 10-foot pole. It's just that -- ahem -- "credible". ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-07-28]

Again, spotting outliers via media uproar isn't as rigorous as actually looking at the data. So let's reproduce Fig 1(b) in Karl et al. 2015, which shows trends from 1998 to 2012. Let's calculate those trends for all the land/ocean, global, and satellite datasets listed here:

HadCRUT4 trend: +0.050 ± 0.139 C/decade (2 sigma)

NOAA trend: +0.079 ± 0.131 C/decade (2 sigma)

Karl(2015) trend: +0.086 ± 0.148 C/decade (2 sigma)

GISTEMP trend: +0.100 ± 0.141 C/decade (2 sigma)

Berkeley trend: +0.096 ± 0.137 C/decade (2 sigma)

HadCRUT4 krig v2 trend: +0.111 ± 0.152 C/decade (2 sigma)

Karl(2015) krig trend: +0.111 ± 0.157 C/decade (2 sigma)

RSS trend: -0.055 ± 0.246 C/decade (2 sigma)

UAH trend: +0.054 ± 0.251 C/decade (2 sigma)

All these trend estimates are consistent with my previous statement: there hasn't been a statistically significant change in the warming rate, and there isn't a statistically significant difference between the projected and observed trends.

Do these results support Jane's claim that Karl et al. 2015 is somehow an "outlier"?

Comment Re:Editors : WTF (Score 0) 307

Technically it's giving smaller amounts of something, not taking anything away. Nonetheless marginally it makes perfect sense to talk about "doling out cuts". It means starting with a total net cut and dividing the marginal impact among several parties.

Yes, it will raise a few eyebrows among editorial prigs, but it's perfectly clear what "doling out cuts" means.

Comment Re:Batteries in Cold Weather? (Score 1) 904

If you add up all the auxiliary stuff you need to power with electricity and round up generously, it's maybe 2000 watts load. The very best commercially available technology of today can run that load for 45 hours. So the impact of the auxiliary system load is marginal. That means it's only a concern if you're contemplating using close to the maximum range of your car. If you're traveling 15 miles each way in an 84 mile range Leaf, or 80 miles each way in a 250 mile range Tesla S, you don't really need to worry about running the heater and lights, even counting diminished battery capacity.

The average American spends 25 minutes each way commuting; even in NYC the average figure is 34.6. Even double or tripling that commute time due to bad weather and halfing the range due to cold, that's still easy for the Tesla. It's a bit of challenge for the Leaf with its 24 kwh battery and 84 mile range.

If the typical electric cars of ten years from now perform close to the high end of today, then the vast majority of people won't have to worry about cold weather's effect on range. But a sizable minority of Americans are what the US Census characterizes as "extreme commuters": people whose commute takes more than 90 minutes or fifty miles each way. Even at the low end of that spectrum cold weather range won't be an issue, but if you commute from Fargo to Bismarck ND every day it's safe to say you aren't going to be going electric any time soon.

Comment Re:And the NSA? (Score 1) 223

Probably none at all. If you want to break today's encryption/hashing algorithms you would probably be using ASICs if not those then FPGAs with GPU compute being your last choice.
Dedicated hardware is the most efficient when you are dealing with a well known standard. For all we know IBM is still in business because it is building NSA ASICs using that 7nm process they showed.

Also time on this beast will be extremely expensive if they use it for any kind of code breaking it will not be for random slashdot users.

Comment Re:100 times better, but 20% energy savings? (Score 1) 90

I would ass-u-me that this would mean that over a period of time X, a current generation chip would process Y commands consuming N units of energy.

The new chip would perform 2Y commands over X time while only consuming .8N units of energy.

Or that each command execution would take 80% of the energy of a current gen chip, but that it could complete twice as many of them in the same time period, meaning a net increase of ~60% energy consumption at sustained max load.

Tons of ways to play with the statistics on this one, and the 100% performance improvement and 20% energy efficiency improvement are not mutually exclusive. But the summary doesn't give any context or detail, so without RTFA, it should be considered nothing more than marketing speak.

-Rick

Comment Re:Sounds like he was arrested for shooting. (Score 1) 1197

In general anything that creates a hazard for bystanders would be a bad idea. So even if there isn't a specific ordinance against shooting bows-and-arrows in the city limits, I'm sure the authorities would take a dim view of your clout shooting into your neighbors' yards.

What there should be is a legally mandated remote radio kill switch anyone can trigger that will cause the drone to land, or in the case of the more sophisticated models to return to base. If the switch worked within say a 50' radius it'd pretty much only work on drones buzzing your residence.

Slashdot Top Deals

Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.

Working...