52642127
submission
knorthern knight writes:
James Hansen, in a 1988 speech speech to the US Congress, claimed that 10 years of rising temperatures proved that the earth was warming. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/23/climatechange.carbonemissions2 But in 2008, a 10 year pause was not considered sufficient to show that it had stopped. In a 2011 news release https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2011/Nov/NR-11-11-03.html Ben Santer said a minimum 17 year pause was required before claiming that it was more than statistical noise. The November 4 update of RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) monthly temperature anomalies to the end of October ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_3.txt shows that over a 204 month period (Nov 1996 to Oct 2013) there has been no warming. Indeed, the slope is very slightly negative for that period. A more detailed story at skeptical site http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/04/rss-reaches-santers-17-years/
49045855
submission
knorthern knight writes:
Most major weather services (US NWS, Britain's Met Office, etc) have their own supercomputers, and their own weather models. But there are some models which are used globally. A new paper has been published, comparing outputs from one such program on different machines around the world. Apparently, the same code, running on different machines, can produce different outputs due to accumulation of differing round-off errors. The handling of floating-point numbers in computing is a field in its own right http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html
The paper apparently deals with 10-day weather forecasts. Weather forecasts are generally done in steps of 1 hour. I.e. the output from hour 1 is used as the starting condition for the hour 2 forecast. The output from hour 2 is used as the starting condition for hour 3, etc.
The paper is paywalled, but the abstract at http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-12-00352.1 says...
The global model program (GMP) of the Global/Regional Integrated Model system (GRIMs) is tested on 10 different computer systems having different central processing unit (CPU) architectures or compilers. There exist differences in the results for different compilers, parallel libraries, and optimization levels, primarily due to the treatment of rounding errors by the different software systems. The system dependency, which is the standard deviation of the 500-hPa geopotential height averaged over the globe, increases with time. However, its fractional tendency, which is the change of the standard deviation relative to the value itself, remains nearly zero with time. In a seasonal prediction framework, the ensemble spread due to the differences in software system is comparable to the ensemble spread due to the differences in initial conditions that is used for the traditional ensemble forecasting.
34629723
submission
knorthern knight writes:
The second used to be defined as 1/86,400 th of a 24-hour day. But ocean tides, pounding against shorelines, slow down earth's rotation, so that a day gets 1.4 milliseconds longer each century. This seems small, but it would affect scientific constants (speed of light, etc). Since 1967, the International System of Units (SI) has defined the second as the duration of 9192631770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock#Mechanism Every few years, a "leap second" is added as necessary, either on June 30th or December 31st. Enjoy that extra second of sleep.
33571455
submission
knorthern knight writes:
When 2 light civilian planes collide in US airspace in Virginia, the usual response includes calling in the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) to investigate and make recommendations based on their results. But what do you do when the crash involves two planes piloted by a crash investigator with the FAA and the chief medical officer with the NTSB? In order to avoid conflict of interest by American investigators working for these agencies, the investigation has been turned over to to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada as a neutral 3rd party.
10906210
submission
knorthern knight writes:
Story at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174220/Is_your_mobile_phone_giving_out_your_phone_number_ says that
* SOME "medium-price-ranged" phones need a Web proxy to reformat Web pages for their smaller displays.
* The cellphone service provider's web proxy modifies the outgoing HTTP-headers to include unique identifiers such as the International Mobile Subscriber Identity number, customer account numbers and — most troubling — the actual mobile phone numbers.
* the webserver can log this info, and data-mine it. The possibilities are endless.
* Amongst the cellphone providers doing this are Orange (UK) and Rogers (Canada)
321083
submission
knorthern knight writes:
A weird intersection of copyright/trademark with Canadian politics. Short background. Various Canadian cities and municipalities have launched a publicity/lobbying campaign seeking a fixed take from the GST (Goods and Services Tax, a national Canadian sales tax similar to European VAT). The amount sought is 1 cent for each dollar of the purchase price. This is summarized by the slogan "One Cent of the GST NOW". Acoording to this press release, the Royal Canadian Mint (the federal agency that prints Canadian paper currency and stamps Canadian coins) has demanded royalties for use of the phrase "one cent", and the image of the Canadian penny. The Royal Canadian Mint, a corporation of the federal government, has now demanded that the City of Toronto pay $47,680 for the public education campaign. Included in this amount is a request for $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the campaign website address (www.onecentnow.ca) and the campaign email address (onecentnow@toronto.ca), and an additional $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the campaign phone number (416-ONE CENT). The remaining $27,680 has been assessed against the City for the use of the image of the Canadian penny in printed materials such as pins and posters.
