Have they been good at predicting things, or are the things predicted being 'adjusted' to better match the predictions?

"Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed âoeits hottest March since records began in 1880â. This year, according to âoeUS government scientistsâ, already bids to outrank 2014 as âoethe hottest everâ. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the worldâ(TM)s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAAâ(TM)s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as âoethe hottest year everâ.

Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were âoeClimategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warmingâ and âoeThe fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandalâ.
My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAAâ(TM)s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been âoeadjustedâ, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.
So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...

Difference between raw and final data sets (this is an official graph from NOAA):
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/c...

A lot of people claim the soft sciences are not 'really science' due to the intangibility of their results - and this plays directly into that bias.

However, it's very much not just the softer sciences that have this issue. There's a growing realization that it's pervasive across many hard science disciplines:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... : 64% of pharma trials couldn't be reproduced.

http://retractionwatch.com/201... - half of researchers couldn't reproduce published findings.

We're inundated with data that, due to the specificity of the field or detail of the results, has to come from 'experts' and doesn't lend itself to a sort of common-sense vetting that we can use to filter bullshit in the usual course of our lives. Whether it's from ignorance of statistical methods, poor experimental technique, motivated mendacity (for whatever reason), or simply experimental results that represent only an unusual end of a bell-curve, there are many, many reasons that scientific data has to be taken with a serious grain of salt. It can't be assumed to be conclusive until we've reproduced it in whatever context we're trying to apply it.

...hipster tragedy*:

"Oh no, my trendy tattoo is interfering with my Apple Smart watch! What ever will I do?"

*also called comedy by the rest of us.

Google is now supposed to 'vet' the sites they link to as far as authenticity and "proper" interpretations of highly-disputed events?

How the fuck are they supposed to do that?

(Not to mention, the minute such entities - search engines, ISPs, etc - start value-filtering content, you can kiss the moral justification for net neutrality goodbye.)

...Tribalism is a thing.
If we don't have nationalism (or patriotism as it's sometimes termed) we get irate and defensive over our favorite football team, or whether we liked the Partridge Family more than the Brady Bunch.

We're chimps, that's it.

I'm sure 'caveat emptor' is at least 2000 years old as a phrase, but the concept pretty much dates back to as long as there was commerce.

I think the OP was commenting more about the begged question in the title "how to increase the number of female engineers" - implying that there is some societo-/cultural-/mystical- NEED for more women to be engineers.

My question is that since dwarfism (specifically Diastrophic dysplasia) is believed to occur in about 1 in every 35,000 births, and there are approximately 3.5 million scientists and engineers, are there 100 dwarf engineers? If not, why don't we have more programs to get dwarfs in engineering?

I'm going to posit that engineers in general have been desiring more vaginas in close proximity for pretty much ever.

Wait, that's not what you're saying?
Well, it is in fact exactly what your saying.

Except that:
"...One has to charge, but one never has to go to a gas station, and most people would find plugging in in their garage much more convenient than a special trip to a gas station and standing outside in whatever weather. This leaves open the question of charge times, of course. But if you can drive hundreds of miles on a single charge and charge up on a fast charger during lunch and then take off again, it's pretty irrelevant...."

Aside from the fact that it simply doesn't exist, sure.

Nobody minds plugging in, but when you have to plug in for 2-4x the time you can drive at highway speeds, that's ridiculous.. The tesla model S is the best in class with a range of 265 mi/charge. That's 10-12h at 220V, so a 'drive:charge' time ratio of 1:3. Gas engined cars are ~400 mi tank, what, maybe 5 mins to fill? That's a ratio of 80:1, or what, about 2 orders of magnitude better? That's more than you can hand-wave away.

....that's 100% more than radio stations are paying to play the same songs.

I disagree. They aren't mutual, they are absolute opposites.

Absolute freedom is anarchy - everyone can do what they want, and nobody has security.
Absolute security is freedomless - one's actions are circumscribed in every possible way to reduce risk.

Of course, reality is always a compromise between such theoretical poles.

If you take as a hypothetical the TV show Lost: the characters in that drama had essentially no government, no police, and the freedom to do pretty much what they wanted. Concurrently, they had very little security.
Alternatively, if you have a society in which the government is expected to mitigate every risk, to protect from every harm, you have substantial security (ostensibly) but very limited freedoms (sacrificed on the altar of the "greater good" or "protect the children" or "fighting terror").

We seem to want the latter; we just spent 10 years at war and trillions of dollars over an attack that cost the US a (relatively trivial) 3000 lives. You say the modern police-state has failed? I'd disagree - we are getting *precisely* the state that we as a body public have voted for. I'm a libertarian, I truly would prefer a country with more freedom, cognizant that this means fewer safety nets, but I recognize too that I'm in a far minority, and will be outweighed by the masses that want single-payer health care, massive social safety-nets, and a society that weeps piteously over every sparrow that falls from their nest.

Read up on social contract theory, and then read John Campbell's Tribesman, Barbarian, and Citizen. (I found the full text of the piece quoted at http://www.baenebooks.com/chap... )