Recent breakthroughs by their team at JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, have paved the way on how to build a tabletop X-ray laser that could be used for super high-resolution imaging, while also giving scientists a new way to peer into a single cell and gain a better understanding of the nanoworld.
The role of nanotechnology, biotechnology and synthetic biology roles in future food supply explored
AAAS panel mulls science and public acceptance.
George Will: Time For Some Significant Fact-Checking | The Loom
A year ago this month, George Will wrote a howler of a column in the Washington Post about global warming, loaded with scientific errors and profoundly illogical arguments. It would not have survived even the most perfunctory fact-checking–despite claims from the Washington Post that his columns go through a “multi-layered fact checking process.” In subsequent months, Will has continued to offer new climate howlers, and this Sunday he provided us all with a dubious one-year birthday gift.
In Will’s latest piece, he yet again declares global warming a construction of hysterical climate scientists who, in his words, “compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes.” This time, he claims that climate scientists themselves are finally confessing that it’s all been a whole lot of hooey.
Will backs up this claim with a link to a BBC interview last week with Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia. A BBC journalist asked Jones questions, some of which had been submitted by unnamed climate skeptics, including this one:
Q: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
A: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
This statement then got run through a sausage grinder run by journalists who are apparently both innumerate and illiterate. The Daily Mail declared,
“This week the unit’s former head Professor Phil Jones, performed a majot [sic] u-turn and admitted there had been no ’statistically significant’ global warming in the last 15 years.”
This version of the story, which makes Jones sound like he was making a confession under enhanced interrogation techniques, ended up on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and today in George Will’s column:
Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years.
Will doesn’t tell us exactly who these skeptics are who claimed there had been no “statistically significant warming” for 10 years. I have no way of knowing if they in fact exist. Will himself has been loudly beating the “no-warming-for-a-long-time” drum over the past year. But he has backed up this claim simply by searching for the hottest single year in recent history. “According to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998,” he wrote in April. Will continued to claim that global warming has stopped since 1998 even after the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization wrote into the Post to explain why Will was wrong.
In his latest column, Will added the fancy, shiny new term “statistically significant” to his claim that there has been no global warming. But in doing so, he misleads his readers about what statistical significance actually means.
To see why, take a look at this graph. NASA scientists have been building it for years now, using weather records from around the world. Other graphs built by other teams of scientists have produced similar patterns. If you only look at a small vertical slice of the graph, you’ll see the temperature jump up and down and up again. That’s the sort of pattern you’d expect from a system as big and noisy as the planet’s climate. There are lots of sources of variations in the average global temperature, such as El Nino, a natural oscillation in the movement of heat in the oceans.
Sometimes these hopping temperatures don’t seem to go anywhere in particular. In other cases, there appear to be trends lurking under the noise. To test a hypothesis like this, scientists estimate how likely it would be for an apparent trend to be nothing more than the noise in the climate system. They then set a threshold for those odds.
In many branches of science, researchers set that threshold at 5%. In other words, if there’s only a 5% chance that a particular pattern of temperatures was the result of pure noise, scientists will call the trend “statistically significant.” If, on the other hand, the probability turns out to be 5.1%, the trend is still likely not to be the result of noise, but it’s not officially statistically significant.
“The boundary of .05 should be seen as a guide to interpretation, not as a clear boundary between truth and fiction,” Michael Whitlock and Dolph Schluter write in their book, The Analysis of Biological Data.
Just because a trend over a particular stretch of time doesn’t quite meet the 5% cutoff doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not real. It just means that scientists cannot reject the null hypothesis that noise is the cause. One way scientists can deal with this challenge is to look at longer sets of records. In the case of climate, looking at longer stretches of time reveals that there is indeed a real trend of warming temperatures. Just because the BBC’s questioner arbitrarily set the cutoff for analyzing the climate at 1995 doesn’t change that fact. Jones openly addressed this fact, but George Will conveniently omitted it.
Significance is one of the basic concepts of statistics that everybody should learn about. We rely on these concepts to judge not just the state of the climate, but also the meaning of clinical trials of drugs, the conclusions of psychology experiments that help reveal the inner workings of the mind, and all manner of other discoveries. In today’s column, George Will isn’t just making misleading statements in the service of trying to foster doubt about climate change. He’s also helping to muddle our collective scientific literacy. Why the editors of the Washington Post’s editorial page want to be a party to this is a mystery to me.
[See Skeptical Science and Tamino for more.]
Purpose of Orifice Plate Or Orifice Meter
What is the purpose of Orifice Plate or orifice meter using in pipie line ?
My Knowledge the orifice plate which is using to measure the flow rate.
I have another question also. If it is using for measuring the flow rate, why dont we take directly tapping from the pipe and give flo
Liquid Painting Booth
Q. What is the process to find out the water layer thickness on the screen of liquid painting booth?
Generator +ve Sequence and Zero Sequence Impedance
can we find the positive sequence [X,R] and zero sequence impedance [X,R] from the data generator given ? :-
X/R ratio = 10
MVA = 100
kV =132kV
Fault level = 7200
i'm only get to find their generator sub-transient impedan
Internship Abroad
I wish to apply for an abroad internship. Is anyone out there know any company that are interested to recruit Malaysian intern?
Thank for the help.
Surge Arrester Ratings
How to calculate the rating of Surge Arrester? What factors should be taken care while choosing a surge arrester?
Space Shuttle Endeavour Lands
According to NASA: "Space shuttle Endeavour landed at Kennedy Space Center. A post-landing news conference with managers at Kennedy is expected no earlier than midnight ET on NASA TV and http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. The participants will be: Mike Moses, space shuttle launch integration manager, and Mike Leinbach, shuttle launch director. A welcome ceremony for the crew's return to Houston will be held at Ellington Field's NASA Hangar 990 at 4 p.m. CT on Monday."
Single Phase Drum Heater
I my name is Abel Ouellette electronic technician
I have a question about Star delta configuration to power 3 single phase Drum heater
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240Vac i know the power will be less on 208V supply, but it is ok
3000Watt
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Falcon 9 Moves To The Pad For Checks
Photos of SpaceX's Falcon 9 Vertical at Cape Canaveral
"SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle is now vertical at Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral. Following its mate to the transporter erector, Falcon 9 was rolled from the integration hangar to the launch pad where final checks of the pad hydraulic and pneumatic systems were completed. Falcon 9 is undergoing a checkout of the critical flight connections including fuel, liquid oxygen, and gas pressure systems."
Video: Storming the Suborbital Frontier
"Scientists Alan Stern and Dan Durda describe the coming era of suborbital spaceflight and how it will open up great possibilities for researchers, educators, and the public beginning later this year."
Obama Responds to the Anti-Science Bunch
We all still have to deal with the anti-science people or just the political deniers who are frightened of progress on anything. Now President Obama is getting involved in explaining the science of storms to the American people, and how more storms are the result of growing global warming, not less global warming. If he can do this, anyone can, mainly because the concept is quite simple and you don’t have to be a scientist to explain it. Communicating climate change and its effects should not be left up to the scientists. Here is Obama last week:
He is also right to emphasize jobs and how the new energy revolution is going to be a huge money maker for people who get involved right away (like now). I guess Republicans deniers will lose out on the energy revolution, which is ironic since they have traditionally been so interested in making money from everything possible, even exotic financial “instruments” that exist only on paper. Why would they reject a huge money-making opportunity that is actually something real and useful? (We don’t know. It defies all logic.)
I call the deniers the anti-science bunch because “group” seems too large. People who reject the concept of man-made climate change are actually only a tiny, noisy, mostly partisan minority of people. For this tiny minority, and the larger group of skeptics, it does help to emphasize that the clean energy revolution will create jobs – millions of them eventually, and that’s largely because we need to rely on a mix of new renewable types of energy, not just one thing. This is already a tech boom in parts of the U.S. (like Silicon Valley). If Republicans deniers want to miss out, well, that’s their decision.
This is a nice summary of Obama’s recent efforts at educating the denier movement by Think Progress:
“The anti-science crowd has been doing a killer job pushing the myth that the big recent snowstorms somehow undercut our understanding of human-caused global warming,” writes ClimateProgress’ Joe Romm. Indeed, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Sean Hannity, and even Donald Trump have found great pleasure in mocking Al Gore over the snowy winter storms. Today in a Nevada town hall meeting, President Obama took on the global warming deniers, explaining in straightforward language how record snowstorms in the nation’s capital are connected to manmade climate change. . . “
Read more here and get to work! We all have to help educate the public. And President Obama and others in our government have to do a much better job of doing this more too. I think that instead of telling people what we have to do, they should emphasize how this is in peoples’ best interests because it will create thousands of U.S. jobs and will make us less reliant on oil and gas and less reliant on other countries, and make some people very wealthy. There is a lot of money [...]
NCBI ROFL: This biological weapon stinks. | Discoblog
GC/MS based identification of skunk spray maliciously deployed as “biological weapon” to harm civilians.
“Our laboratory has been asked to elucidate the origin of a strong “toxic smell” present in a prominent politician’s office, private house and motorcar. This stinky and pungent atmosphere has caused serious nausea and vomiting to several individuals. Urine samples were collected from the persons presenting symptoms of nausea for toxicological analysis. Drops, paper and cotton swabs of an oily liquid found at the implicated places were submitted by police to our laboratory for investigation… Several volatile sulphur-containing compounds have been identified with the HS-GC/MS system. Detailed examination of the spectra as well as GC/MS analysis of commercially available skunk secret allowed us to relate the identified compounds to those present in the defence spray of skunks. No health sequels were observed for any of the persons implicated in this case.”
Photo: flickr/artindeepkoma
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Molten gold was poured down his throat until his bowels burst.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Phase 1: Build army of alligators that can run on land. Phase 2: Take over the world!
OpEd’s Around the U.S. Take Issue With Obama Plan
Farewell to NASA's Glory Days, opinion, NY Times
"One of the most important attributes of a manned space program is its ability to inspire young people to pursue careers in science. As someone who came to power on a platform of inspiration, President Obama knows about the importance of rekindling hope. Killing NASA's storied manned space program and doing away with a timeline for space travel will snuff out much of inspiration and awe that has come to be associated with NASA's endeavors."
Obama must reconsider space mission, Times Leader
"Rarely have we seen such an about-face on an imperative national initiative. Congressional resuscitation is virtually impossible. Who wants to work for, train for and possibly die for the Moon and Mars when our national leader isn't at your side and doesn't have your back? Perhaps Obama thinks we've done that, been there. Or maybe he's not thinking at all."
Space race no longer being run, Walton Tribune
"American space exploration, however, as funded by the government is essentially gone. Obama - or at least his advisors, because I'm not even sure he remembers there is a NASA -- says the future of manned space travel lies in private industry, which is funny from the man who owns General Motors. Apparently, free enterprise is best condoned when it's something you don't want."
Suborbital Researchers Conference Was A Hit
Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference a hit, 2011 follow up conference planned, SwRI
"When we conceived the idea for NSRC last summer, many people were skeptical that such a meeting would generate much interest. Honestly, some thought the research and education communities were simply not interested in suborbital science," says meeting organizer Dr. Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute. "But people voted with their feet and came to NSRC, over 250 of them, and we heard an amazing variety of proposals to exploit the capabilities of next-gen suborbital spaceflight."
Various Alliances Forming in Congress
Olson vows to oppose Obama's NASA budget, Houston Chronicle
"During and after the meeting, the U.S. representative whose district includes Johnson Space Center, Republican Pete Olson, vowed to fight the president's plan to dramatically alter NASA human spaceflight plans. "Congress is going to challenge this plan," Olson said."
Senator Richard Shelby on Iran and NASA
"And speaking of our best interest, Senator Shelby plans to fight for the budget of NASA. With budget cuts virtually impacting all areas of our economy, NASA has felt the pinch as well. It's an element of our community that Senator Shelby stands behind. "Mississippi and Alabama are both very involved in NASA and the future of NASA. And we're going to fight that. Senator Cochran is in position in the Appropriations Committee and so am I to fight that. We haven't given up on that yet."
Mikulski slips Nelson a note on NASA, Orlando Sentinel
"Earlier this week, Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland sent a two-page letter to Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida that attempts to outline her vision for NASA and notes that it is "more important than ever" that the two lawmakers "work on consultation" to consider the White House plan."
Shuttle's extension in works, Florida Today
"U.S. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas said a bipartisan plan is in the works in Congress that would call for extending the shuttle program another five years. The plan would require adding another $200 million to the NASA budget for 2010 and $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year starting in the 2011-12 budget year. The goal would be one to two shuttle flights a year through 2015, if it could be done safely."
A Kiss That Tells A Story | The Intersection
This week’s submission to the Science of Kissing Gallery features a special story that makes me smile. Steve Silberman is a science writer for Wired and other magazines, and his husband Keith is a middle-school science teacher in the Bay Area. This kiss took place during their marriage, which Steve describes in his piece Happily Ever After featured in the Shambhala Sun. Here’s an excerpt:
Suddenly Keith and I found ourselves at the flash point of a raging culture war. Did we have to call it marriage? Wasn’t that an unnecessary provocation for those who take that word to mean getting to the church on time? What about framing our commitment with a less confrontational term like “civil union?”
Certain words, however, have alchemical power. A humble noun or verb can become a transformative mantra. Embracing the word “marriage” had a subtle but profound effect on our relationship, like unlocking a door to a secret garden that only other married people know about. Now our job was to care for that garden together—to nourish it, weed it when necessary, and give it the compassion and space it needs to grow and flourish.
Read the full piece–and happy ending–here. Congratulations Steve and Keith!
Submit your photograph or artwork to the Science of Kissing Gallery and remember to include relevant links.
Spirit of Harmony Fiji
Patterson Brothers Shipping is one of the oldest transportation companies in Fiji, founded by Levuka planter Reg Patterson and his brother just after World War I. Since 2007 Patterson Brothers has been using the 385-passenger car ferry Spirit of Harmony on its routes.
The Jaguars have struggled wandering Mathis
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