We are doing a BMS upgrade in New York City. Some of the variable air volume boxes do not have covers on them. Can anyone suggest a manufacterer that makes sheet metal or plastic covers for VAVs. Also does anyone know if this is a code issue?(are covers necessary on the VAVs to pass code?)
The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate | Cosmic Variance
Sam Harris gave a TED talk, in which he claims that science can tell us what to value, or how to be moral. Unfortunately I completely disagree with his major point. (Via Jerry Coyne and 3 Quarks Daily.)
He starts by admitting that most people are skeptical that science can lead us to certain values; science can tell us what is, but not what ought to be. There is a old saying, going back to David Hume, that you can’t derive ought from is. And Hume was right! You can’t derive ought from is. Yet people insist on trying.
Harris uses an ancient strategy to slip morality into what starts out as description. He says:
Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures… If we’re more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it’s because we think they are exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. The crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim.
Let’s grant the factual nature of the claim that primates are exposed to a greater range of happiness and suffering than insects or rocks. So what? That doesn’t mean we should care about their suffering or happiness; it doesn’t imply anything at all about morality, how we ought to feel, or how to draw the line between right and wrong.
Morality and science operate in very different ways. In science, our judgments are ultimately grounded in data; when it comes to values we have no such recourse. If I believe in the Big Bang model and you believe in the Steady State cosmology, I can point to the successful predictions of the cosmic background radiation, light element nucleosynthesis, evolution of large-scale structure, and so on. Eventually you would either agree or be relegated to crackpot status. But what if I believe that the highest moral good is to be found in the autonomy of the individual, while you believe that the highest good is to maximize the utility of some societal group? What are the data we can point to in order to adjudicate this disagreement? We might use empirical means to measure whether one preference or the other leads to systems that give people more successful lives on some particular scale — but that’s presuming the answer, not deriving it. Who decides what is a successful life? It’s ultimately a personal choice, not an objective truth to be found simply by looking closely at the world. How are we to balance individual rights against the collective good? You can do all the experiments you like and never find an answer to that question.
Harris is doing exactly what Hume warned against, in a move that is at least as old as Plato: he’s noticing that most people are, as a matter of empirical fact, more concerned about the fate of primates than the fate of insects, and taking that as evidence that we ought to be more concerned about them; that it is morally correct to have those feelings. But that’s a non sequitur. After all, not everyone is all that concerned about the happiness and suffering of primates, or even of other human beings; some people take pleasure in torturing them. And even if they didn’t, again, so what? We are simply stating facts about how human beings feel, from which we have no warrant whatsoever to conclude things about how they should feel.
Attempts to derive ought from is are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake. Or, to choose a different mathematical analogy, any particular judgment about right and wrong is like Euclid’s parallel postulate in geometry; there is not a unique choice that is compatible with the other axioms, and different choices could in principle give different interesting moral philosophies.
A big part of the temptation to insist that moral judgments are objectively true is that we would like to have justification for arguing against what we see as moral outrages when they occur. But there’s no reason why we can’t be judgmental and firm in our personal convictions, even if we are honest that those convictions don’t have the same status as objective laws of nature. In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected — and indeed, may even be hindered — by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true. In the end, we will always be appealing to their own moral senses, which may or may not coincide with ours.
The unfortunate part of this is that Harris says a lot of true and interesting things, and threatens to undermine the power of his argument by insisting on the objectivity of moral judgments. There are not objective moral truths (where “objective” means “existing independently of human invention”), but there are real human beings with complex sets of preferences. What we call “morality” is an outgrowth of the interplay of those preferences with the world around us, and in particular with other human beings. The project of moral philosophy is to make sense of our preferences, to try to make them logically consistent, to reconcile them with the preferences of others and the realities of our environments, and to discover how to fulfill them most efficiently. Science can be extremely helpful, even crucial, in that task. We live in a universe governed by natural laws, and it makes all the sense in the world to think that a clear understanding of those laws will be useful in helping us live our lives — for example, when it comes to abortion or gay marriage. When Harris talks about how people can reach different states of happiness, or how societies can become more successful, the relevance of science to these goals is absolutely real and worth stressing.
Which is why it’s a shame to get the whole thing off on the wrong foot by insisting that values are simply a particular version of empirical facts. When people share values, facts can be very helpful to them in advancing their goals. But when they don’t share values, there’s no way to show that one of the parties is “objectively wrong.” And when you start thinking that there is, a whole set of dangerous mistakes begins to threaten. It’s okay to admit that values can’t be derived from facts — science is great, but it’s not the only thing in the world.
Teenage Girl Gives Herself Carpal Tunnel From Sending 4,000 Texts a Month
From Gizmodo:
Here's a tip for those of you looking to avoid repetitive motion injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome: don't send 100 texts per day. Unfortunately, that's exactly what 16-year-old Annie Levitz from Mundelein, IL did. And now she requires cortisone injections and
Russian Cows Watch Samsung LED TV While You're Stuck With Your 32-Inch Coby
From Gizmodo:
I've heard the one about vegetables growing bigger if you play classical music at them, but cows that watch TV (of the Swiss Alps, no less) makes them "more happy and productive"? One Russian farmer is testing the theory, with half his cows watching the Swiss Alps
A Blazing Hot Helium Rain Falls on Jupiter | 80beats
We silly humans tend to think of rain just in our own terms, the falling water tainted with various toxins that draws out our umbrellas and cancels our baseball games. But across the solar system, it rains on other worlds with thick atmospheres–it’s just not rain we would recognize. On Saturn’s moon Titan, for instance, it rains methane. And now, a group of scientists says in Physical Review Letters, computer simulations have confirmed that it rains helium on Jupiter.
The term “rain” applies loosely here, because the hellfire precipitation happening on Jupiter isn’t much like a pleasant afternoon shower here on Earth. Droplets of helium form thousands of miles below the tops of hydrogen clouds, at temperatures around 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit–the helium stays in its liquid phase because of the planet’s high atmospheric pressure. Pressures and temperatures on Jupiter are so high that the droplets of liquid helium are falling through a fluid of metallic hydrogen [Space.com].
Curiously, the key to figuring out Jupiter’s helium rain was the mystery surrounding the element neon. Since neon is a noble gas that doesn’t react much with other elements, researchers expected to see concentrations of it in the gas giant planet’s atmosphere. But the Galileo probe that plunged into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere Dec. 7, 1995, found only about one-ninth the amount of neon that should have been there. There was also less helium than expected, even though helium and hydrogen are the two main constituents of the planet [Los Angeles Times]. Hugh Wilson and colleagues had suspected that the answer to this puzzle might be helium rain falling out of the atmosphere to the lower depths of the planet, carrying neon with it. And, they say, their simulation of the mixing of gases inside our solar system’s largest planet showed a layer of helium would be formed that would cause this “rain” effect.
That explains the dearth of helium and neon. Unlike rain, fog and other weather systems on Earth, helium droplets on Jupiter don’t cycle through the atmosphere, but instead are being deposited deep into the planet [Discovery News]. The scientists say the effect might not be limited to Jupiter, either. Because Saturn is smaller and colder than Jupiter, the physics suggest that helium rain could be even more widespread there. However, despite Cassini’s continued surveillance of the planet, no probe has dived into Saturn’s atmosphere to take the kind of measurements Galileo took of Jupiter.
Train was wrong, then. Rather than “Drops of Jupiter,” the band should have written “Drops on Jupiter.”
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80beats: Mysterious Smash on Jupiter Leaves an Earth-Sized Scar
Image: NASA; Hugh F. Wilson and Burkhard Militzer, University of California, Berkeley
Paper Manufacturing Equipment
I want to machanaty for paper box&paper cup, lunch packet, etc.
Wired Excerpts Hack the Planet | The Intersection
We're big fans here of Eli Kintisch's new book Hack the Planet...and now you can read some of it, thanks to an exclusive online excerpt over at Wired.com. A brief excerpt of the excerpt: The idea of deliberately manipulating the weather or the climate is an especially powerful notion. We equate weather with mood because our bodies are so affected by temperature and moisture and light. Storms trouble our minds as well as threaten our coasts. Climate is our experience of the weather over time and space, the way weather shapes our summers or our neighborhoods. To control climate — especially now, at a time when it seems so unpredictable — promises stability and peace for us and our children. The seductive idea of weather and climate control has been a constant trope in the human imagination. The sorcerer Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest conjures bad weather to drive his enemy’s boat ashore. In the 1985 film Brewster’s Millions, Montgomery Brewster, played by Richard Pryor, invests in a scheme to haul icebergs to the Middle East to provide water. Advanced societies control the weather as a matter of course in the worlds of Star Trek and Dune. When it comes to our air ...
EFF panel: Architecture is Policy
From Boing Boing:
One of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's founding principles was Mitch Kapor's aphorism, "Architecture is politics." The design of systems determines the kinds of politics that can take place in them, and designing a system is itself a political act. As part of
Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card
From Wired Top Stories:
Lawmakers are proposing a national identification card — what they're calling "high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security cards" — that would be required for all employees in the United States. The proposal by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and
Peering into Jupiter’s red eye | Bad Astronomy
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is perhaps its most iconic feature. It’s a vast storm, a bloody-colored hurricane that is at least four centuries old, and larger in size than several Earths. It can be seen easily even in a small telescope, and is one of the most studied features in the solar system.
Yet for all that, it’s still poorly understood. How has it lasted so long? What is going on inside of it? How did it form in the first place?
New observations using the Very Large Telescope (together with data from the Gemini, Subaru, and IRTF observatories) have taken us a step closer to finding the answers:
Cooooool. On top is an infrared view of the Spot (as well as its little brother, Oval BA, on the left) from the VLT taken in 2008, and on bottom, for comparison, is the same view from Hubble taken just days earlier. The VLT image was taken at a wavelength of 10.8 microns, about 14 times the wavelength our eye can see. Objects at just about the freezing point of water emit IR at that wavelength. On Jupiter, the atmosphere at a pressure about half of Earth’s pressure at sea level emits at that temperature and wavelength.
What these images show is how Jupiter’s atmosphere circulates up and down in the Spot. The core of the Spot, which appears red to our eye, is warm, and dark lanes are where the gas is being drawn down into Jupiter’s depths. Because the center is warmer — by just a few degrees — it provides an upwelling in the middle of the Spot. This upwelling creates a weak clockwise flow of air, despite the storm’s general counter-clockwise rotation.
More importantly, these observations link the color of the Spot to temperature, even if the exact mechanism for this link is unknown. But any clues we can find will help us understand this incredible hurricane bigger than some planets. Mind you, studying them on Jupiter gives us insight into how storms behave on Earth as well. Scientific observations thrive on diversity, on comparing one set of conditions to another, and seeing how the outcome changes.
Jupiter is vastly different than Earth, but by gazing at it we gaze back at ourselves. That’s the way science works.
ADA Alert Day: High Glucose in the Blood
High blood glucose is HYPERglycemia not HYPOglycemia. Through your description of diabetes, you focus on the response to insulin. Try to think of diabetes with the level of blood glucose as the variable to be controlled.
As we eat, nutrients are converted to glucose. Glucose (or dextrose
Heat Transfer in Solar Air Heater
Hello, I am new to cr4. I have a query about Solar Heater. I want to analysis solar air heater in fluent. I designed solar air heater with fins in gambit. I apply heat flux in underside of the absorber plate. I split the solid from fluid volume in gambit. I analysed this problem in fluent and I
Placebo Effects Revisited
In the Wall Street Journal last week was a particularly bad article by Melinda Beck about acupuncture. While there was token skepticism (by Edzard Ernst, of course, who is the media’s go-to expert for CAM), the article credulously reported the marketing hype of acupuncture proponents.
Toward the end of the article Beck admits that “some critics” claim that acupuncture provides nothing more than a placebo effect, but this was followed by the usual canard:
“I don’t see any disconnect between how acupuncture works and how a placebo works,” says radiologist Vitaly Napadow at the Martinos center. “The body knows how to heal itself. That’s what a placebo does, too.”
That is a bold claim, and very common among CAM proponents, especially acupuncturists. As the data increasingly shows that acupuncture (and other implausible treatments) provides no benefit beyond placebo, we hear the special pleading that placebos work also.
But is that true? It turns out there is a literature on the placebo effect itself, and the evidence suggests that placebos generally do not work.
That may seem counter-intuitive, since the gold standard of clinical trials is placebo-controlled, because placebo effects can be quite large. However, most such trials do not contain a no-treatment arm (comparing a placebo intervention to nothing at all). What this means, as I have written about before, is that placebo effects, as measured in clinical trials, includes a host of factors – everything other than a physiological response to an active treatment.
These placebo effects include the bias of the researchers, the desire of the subjects to please the researchers and to get well, non-specific effects of receiving medical intervention and attention, and other artifacts of the research process. When we remove all of these biases and artifacts, is there a real effect left behind – what most people think of when they think of “the” placebo effect: a mind-over-matter but real improvement?
Proponents of so-called CAM would like you to believe that “the” placebo effect is all a real biological effect resulting from the body’s self-healing ability. But it turns out, this is simply not true.
Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche have been studying the placebo effect for years, reviewing the literature, especially for trials that contain a no-treatment arm. Their most recent review is very illuminating. They conclude:
We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed.
Let’s break this down a bit. First, they found that when you look at any objective or clinically important outcome – the kinds of things that would indicate a real biological effect – there is no discernible placebo effect. There is no mind-over-matter self healing that can be attributed to the placebo effect.
What the authors found is also most compatible with the hypothesis that placebo effects, as measured in clinical trials, are mostly due to bias. Specifically, significant placebo effects were found only for subjectively reported symptoms. Further, the size of this effect varied widely among trials.
This latter feature is very important. If there were a significant physiological placebo effect we would expect to see a consistent or baseline effect among trials. The tremendous variability suggests that it was the rigor of trial design that allowed for lesser or greater bias resulting in a measured placebo effect.
Further:
Meta-regression analyses showed that larger effects of placebo interventions were associated with physical placebo interventions (e.g. sham acupuncture), patient-involved outcomes (patient-reported outcomes and observer-reported outcomes involving patient cooperation), small trials, and trials with the explicit purpose of studying placebo.
So the more patients were involved in the reporting of outcomes (as opposed to measuring outcomes) the greater the placebo effect. This is most consistent with bias as a cause. Also, as has been reported before, physical interventions result in a large placebo effect.
Some have hypothesized that time and attention provided by some “alternative” practitioners result in a greater placebo effect, justifying the intervention. However, that was not a factor apparent in this study. Another study, comparing placebo effect sizes for homeopathic treatments and mainstream treatments (which are comparable in terms of the physical intervention) found no difference in placebo effect sizes.
Conclusion
Existing evidence strongly suggests that placebo effects are mostly comprised of bias in reporting and observation and non-specific effects. There is no measurable physiological benefit from placebo interventions for any objective outcome. There is a measured benefit for some subjective outcomes (mostly pain, nausea, asthma, and phobias), but the wide variation in effect size suggests this is due to trial design (and therefore bias) rather than a real effect.
In any case, any perceived benefit in subjective symptoms seems to be greater for physical interventions (perhaps a hands-on benefit) but is the same for mainstream vs novel treatments.
Therefore, there is no justification to be found in the placebo effect for using unscientific or dubious interventions. Placebo medicine is a sham. And any potential placebo benefit worth having can be fully realized with science-based interventions.
Which means that Dr. Napadow may have been unwittingly correct when he said that acupuncture is no different from placebo.
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Specular Reflection vs. Diffuse Reflection
Hi all,
Can anybody explain what exactly does the terms specular reflection,diffuse reflection and absorption of light mean.
Any link to good reading material in Internet will also be helpful.
Thanks in advance.
Beetles and Climate Change Killing Trees
Belize is a little country in Central America next to Guatemala, and I’ve been there twice. You would think Belize would look a lot different than Minnesota, but it has lots of pine trees in the Mountain Pine Ridge area, which reminded me of home.  On the way to ruins called Caracol in the middle of this little country are miles of hills covered with pine trees. In 2005, the first year I was there, we saw so many of these pine trees dead, just trunks standing there stripped on the top half of the tree. Hills and hills full of dead trees. We were told it was caused by pine beetles which were recently infesting the area. It was the first time I had ever seen mass areas of trees being eaten by beetles and it was an eerie sight. Two years ago I saw the same thing in South Dakota, only worse and on different trees. Entire trees, grey and stripped of every leaf, dotted the landscape in small groups. I was entering the Black Hills national park, and was not allowed to bring any wood from anywhere else due to beetles, which were eating trees all over the state. Now these tree-eating beetles are in Minnesota, eating ash trees. And they are all feasting on weakened trees due to climate change.
Central America is fighting back at the beetles with pesticides, and when we went back in 2007, the trees in the same area looked a bit better, though many of them, as you can see in the photo above I took in 2007, were still without foliage in the top portions and appeared to be dying. South Dakota didn’t look like it was successfully fighting the beetles, at least not then. The question is whether or not this is a battle that can even be won. It’s not just North America because I’ve seen this in Central America. And it’s not just America. Trees all over the world are being infested with insects that are killing them. Here’s an article on the latest news on the subject from Yale’s e360:
What’s Killing the Great Forests of the American West?
Across western North America, huge tracts of forest are dying off at an extraordinary rate, mostly because of outbreaks of insects. Scientists are now seeing such forest die-offs around the world and are linking them to changes in climate. by jim robbins
For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That’s when her quarry — tiny, black, mountain pine beetles — hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start their life cycle again.
Now, says Six, the field rules have changed. Instead of just two weeks, the beetles fly continually from May until October, attacking trees, burrowing in, and laying their eggs for half the year. And that’s not [...]
Truck Communication Systems
Hi all .
Which is the right communication radio option to install on a truck fleet and keep in contact between the trucks and central ????
Reciprocating Compressors – Technological Advancements?
Dear All,
I am dealing with reciprocating compressors for quite a longtime and its a quite monotonus. can anyone suggest/tell me about the latest advancement in the field of recip technology.
also, I will request you to share any website/documents/ppts/pdf which will help me digest
Orbit on Your iPhone: A Sign of Things to Come
If you haven’t already heard the big news, today marks the launch of The Planet’s Orbit portal iPhone Web application. By working with customer focus groups and culling survey responses about our portal experience, we have put together an ambitious road map to revamp and improve the way our customers interact with us and our system. A surprisingly large portion of our customer base claim the iPhone as their device of choice, so we set off to work on a tool that could manage Orbit accounts on the Mobile Safari platform.
In our initial release, our focus was to provide customers’ most-used functions and features:
- Basic hardware management
- Ping status
- Power on/off
- Reboot requests
- OS reload
- Bandwidth utilization information
- Escalation procedures
- Ticket management
- Invoice summaries
Enough telling … How about some showing? If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch visit https://iPhone.orbit.theplanet.com, and check it out! If you don’t have access to an iPhone at the moment, we’ve posted a few screenshots on Flickr:
Given the constraints of a mobile app and the fact that the screen real estate is limited to 480×320, the application will be most useful to customers who have less than 25 servers with us. Every Orbit user with an iPhone will find this tool to be a valuable resource.
The iPhone app is merely the first of many new customer-facing systems improvements we have slated to launch this year. Later this spring, we will release a new RESTful API upon which you can build you own feature-rich interfaces. You can also keep an eye out for a new community site — accessible from Orbit — that will take you behind the scenes to grade, rank and comment on our new development ideas. Longer-term projects for 2010 include revamping a number of portal functions, adding more API methods, and updating the user interface based on your feedback.
If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch, check out the app and let us know what you think. We want as much feedback as you can muster, so don’t bite your tongue if you see areas we can improve. Using this app as a test case, we will continue development on other popular mobile platforms like Android and Blackberry, and we’ll update you with that progress.
-Kyle
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Anupam Mishra: The Ancient Ingenuity of Water Harvesting
Follow the link below
Click the open the interactive transcript right of the player