VOA: Meet Your New Co-worker: The Robot

NEW YORK— At the RoboUniverse expo in New York City, robots of all shapes and sizes were being put to work. Companies showed off automated machines designed to perform tasks that many humans would consider less than desirable. --“There are certain tasks in our society… that will stay on and not be attractive for humans to do. And we cannot get rid of them if we want to live our lives in the usual fashion,” said Preben Hjørnet, founder and CEO of robotics startup Blue Workforce.

Read more at Voice of America News Read More......

Big Science is broken

(Hat tip: KimR) - Science is broken. That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part. Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken. The WeekRead more at The Week Read More......

What Happened on Oahu Didn’t Stay on Oahu

(Hat tip: KimR) - RE: Bee-pocalypse - If modern activist groups held sway in the mid-nineteenth century, countless multitudes would have died from typhoid fever and cholera. The “miasma” paradigm held that the diseases were caused by foul air arising from putrid matter – and only dogged scientific work by William Budd, John Snow and others finally convinced medical and health authorities that the agent was lethal organisms in drinking water. Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

Methane Madness: Science Does Not Support White House Policy

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 18 August 2015 proposed regulations to reduce emissions of methane. These regulations would be the first to directly restrict methane emissions by the oil and gas industry; they build on a 2012 rule that sought to curb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas. Combined, the two regulations could reduce the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by up to 30% by 2025, compared with 2012 levels, EPA says. --The proposed EPA regs are part of a larger effort by the White House to reduce national methane emissions by 40–45% by 2025. [See go.nature.com/o6uzlj for more detail.] But methane has only negligible influence on climate -- contrary to popular belief and contrary to the claims of the IPCC, the UN’s climate science panel. Basic physics does not support White House policies to control methane emissions.

Read more at American Thinker
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Dr. Mike Newton phone interviews on the Lars Larson Show (Tuesday) and I Spy Radio (Saturday)

FYI (Hat tip: Jane Newton): In a phone interview at 1:06 p.m., Tuesday, March 25th, Lars Larson will be asking Dr. Mike Newton about his findings regarding his systematic studies on streams, water temperatures, fish habitat, and the impact of "buffer strips" on fish food, which he has researched for over 20 years.

Dr. Newton is also scheduled to be on "I Spy" radio this weekend, again a phone interview. Read More......

IBD: Farmers' Almanac More Reliable Than Warming Climate Models

Bad Science: It turns out that a 200-year-old publication for farmers beats climate-change scientists in predicting this year's harsh winter as the lowly caterpillar beats supercomputers that can't even predict the past. ✧ Last fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) predicted above-normal temperatures from November through January across much of the continental U.S. The Farmers' Almanac, first published in 1818, predicted a bitterly cold, snowy winter. ✧ The Maine-based Farmers' Almanac's still-secret methodology includes variables such as planetary positions, sunspots, lunar cycles and tidal action. It claims an 80% accuracy rate, surely better than those who obsess over fossil fuels and CO2.

Read more at Investors Business Daily (Investors.com) Read More......

WUWT: Dr. Vincent Gray on historical carbon dioxide levels

There are two gases in the earth’s atmosphere without which living organisms could not exist. ✧ Oxygen is the most abundant, 21% by volume, but without carbon dioxide, which is currently only about 0.04 percent (400ppm) by volume, both the oxygen itself, and most living organisms on earth could not exist at all. ✧ This happened when the more complex of the two living cells (called “eukaryote”) evolved a process called a “chloroplast” some 3 billion years ago, which utilized a chemical called chlorophyll to capture energy from the sun and convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a range of chemical compounds and structural polymers by photosynthesis. These substances provide all the food required by the organisms not endowed with a chloroplast organelle in their cells. ✧ This process also produced all of the oxygen in the atmosphere. ✧ The relative proportions of carbon dioxide and oxygen have varied very widely over the geological ages.

Read More (with charts): Watts Up With That?

I'm guessing they don't teach this stuff in school. Shameful, if not. --bc Read More......

George F. Will: The sky, apparently, continues to fall

 Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nations’ Rio+20 conference — 50,000 participants from 188 nations — occurred in June, without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue — boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh. Read more at the Columbus Dispatch...

(Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) Read More......

The scientific technological elite [Eisenhower's other warning]

 Republished 6/4/2012
AMERICAN THINKER, 12/7/2009 by Robert W. Ball - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding "military-industrial complex." That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.

"...(In) the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central...complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government...the solitary inventor... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields...

...the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded....we must...be alert to the...danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite." [ii]

Read more at American Thinker... Read More......

Are cancers newly evolved species?

Cancer patients may view their tumors as parasites taking over their bodies, but this is more than a metaphor for Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cancerous tumors are parasitic organisms, he said. Each one is a new species that, like most parasites, depends on its host for food, but otherwise operates independently and often to the detriment of its host.

Read more at University of California, Berkeley
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Gerson: Whose war on science?

WASHINGTON POST, 12/11/2009 by Michael Gerson (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - "...the hacked climate e-mails reveal a scandal, not a hoax. Even if every question raised in these e-mails were conceded, the cumulative case for global climate disruption would be strong. The evidence is found not only in East Anglian computers but also in changing crop zones, declining species, melting ice sheets and glaciers, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. No other scientific theory explains these changes as well as global warming related to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Over millennia, the climate shifts in natural cycles. But we seem to be increasing the pace of change so rapidly that plants, animals and humans may not be able to adequately adjust. Read more at Washington Post...

JDH wrote: Scientists are in the business of creating knowledge. When they jump into politics, they loose their credibility as scientists. Read More......

Eisenhower: The scientific technological elite

AMERICAN THINKER, 12/7/2009 by Robert W. Ball - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1960 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding "military-industrial complex." That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.

"...(In) the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central...complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government...the solitary inventor... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields...

...the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded....we must...be alert to the...danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite." [ii]

Read more at American Thinker...

Arrrghh... we were warned! --bc Read More......

1977 book reveals something about Obama's Science Czar

WASHINGTON EXAMINER, 7/14/2009 by David Freddoso - Internet reports are now circulating that Obama's Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren, penned a 1977 book that approved of and recommended compulsory sterilization and even abortion in some cases, as part of a government population control regime. ∴ Given the general unreliability of Internet quotations, I wanted to go straight to this now-rare text and make sure the reports were both accurate and kept Holdren's writings in context. Generally speaking, they are, and they do. Read more at the Examiner...


Related:
American Thinker, 7/16/2009: Enough is Enough (Hat tip: Patricia Anderson) Read More......

Obama's EPA Quashes Climate Change Science

POWERLINE, 6/28/2009 by John Hinderaker - The Competitive Enterprise Institute has obtained an EPA study of the "endangerment" to human well-being ostensibly caused by carbon dioxide emissions, together with a set of EPA emails indicating that the study, which concludes that carbon dioxide is not a significant cause of climate change, was suppressed by the EPA for political reasons. Read more and find important links at Powerline... Read More......

31,000 Signatures Prove ‘No Consensus’ About Global Warming

AIM Briefing May 22, 2008 - By Melinda Zosh

“Half the world will be hungry.”

Presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Monday that “we have to get used to the idea that we can’t keep our houses at 72, drive our SUVs and eat all we want.” Arthur B. Robinson, president and professor of chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, has a different response.

“I don’t want to give up eating all I want because of a failed hypothesis,” said Robinson at the National Press Club here on May 19. Robinson said global warming is not a threat to America. He said that the global temperature increased by just .5 degrees in the last century.

Robinson spoke about his petition signed by 31,000 U.S. scientists who reject the claims that “human release of greenhouse gases is damaging our climate.”

“World temperatures fluctuate all the time,” said Robinson. “The temperature of the Earth has risen many times, far more times than carbon dioxide could drive it. There is no experimental evidence that humans are changing the environment…”

Robinson said that in recent years the U.N. and a group of 600 scientists, representing less than one percent of the scientific population, reached a “consensus” that global warming is happening. This has never been done before, Robinson insists.

Dennis Avery, Director for the Center of Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, agrees with Robinson. “Nobody can do science by a committee. You do science by testing,” said Avery. “To me it is appalling that an international organization of the stature of the U.N. would ignore the evidence of past climate changing.”
The signers of Robinson’s petition, including 9,000 Ph.Ds, all have one thing in common. They believe that human rights are being taken away. Continued...

Read More......

Bowling with Others

Commentary Magazine.com, October 2007, James Q. Wilson wrote,

In his celebrated book, Bowling Alone (2000), the political scientist Robert D. Putnam argued that America, and perhaps the Western world as a whole, has become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors. We once bowled in leagues; now we bowl alone. We once flocked to local chapters of the PTA, the NAACP, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars; now we stay home and watch television. As a result, we have lost our “social capital”—by which Putnam meant both the associations themselves and the trustworthiness and reciprocity they encourage. For if tools (physical capital) and training (human capital) make the modern world possible, social capital is what helps people find jobs and enables neighborhoods and other small groupings of society to solve problems, control crime, and foster a sense of community.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam devised a scale for assessing the condition of organizational life in different American states. He looked to such measures as the density of civic groups, the frequency with which people participate in them, and the degree to which (according to opinion surveys) people trust one another. Controlling for race, income, education, and the like, he demonstrated that the higher a state’s level of social capital, the more educated and affluent are its children, the lower the murder rate, the greater the degree of public health, and the smaller the likelihood of tax evasion. Nor is that all. High levels of social capital, Putnam showed, are associated with such civic virtues as greater tolerance toward women and minorities and stronger support for civil liberties. But all of these good things have been seriously jeopardized by the phenomenon he identified as “bowling alone.” Continued...

Read More......

Education: Math & Science

The United States has quietly withdrawn from an international study comparing math and science students.
Newsweek Web Exclusive, August 2007 - Peg Tyre wrote,

Americans took note when Bill Gates said last spring that American schools needed to beef up science and math standards if the country was going to maintain a competitive edge in the new century. So did Congress, which last week approved legislation called the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science) Act, which carves out a whopping $43.6 billion for science education and research.

So why did the federal government quietly decide last year to drop out of an international study that would compare U.S. high-school students who take advanced science and math courses with their international counterparts? Continued...

Read More......