sethjohn

You have hit upon a key distinction, unfortunately the author is intentionally muddling these two issues of 1)scientific data is missing or being withheld and 2) global warming or the skepticism thereof.

"the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared" "If there are no data, there’s no science."

There are plenty of mundane explainations for why scientists aren't providing data to people like Warwick Hughes. Perhaps Jones thought Hughes was a crank. Perhaps assembling the data was a lot of work and Jones didn't feel like going through all that work for someone he thought was just trying to raise trouble. Perhaps there were legal issues to providing the data publicly (as the article notes) that hadn't been resolved yet.

Of course Jones was wrong, all scientists should make every effort to provide data to anyone and everyone who wants it, even people they think are 'cranks'. In fact, Jones' reluctance to provide data to climate skeptics only fuels the fire of skepticism. But for the author to argue that this single act casts any serious doubt on the science of global warming is giving this incident far more importance than it deserves.

Teach for America and Teach First (the British equivalent) are actually doing a great job at addressing this problem. They are able to recruit teachers from top universities to work in some of the worst schools, precisely by focussing on the difficulties and challenges of the job.

From a different economist article: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor... "Nearly a tenth of Oxford’s class of 2009 will be Teaching First this autumn."

I've heard the statistics are similar with a huge percentage of Harvard's graduating class going into Teach for America.

I thought through this with a friend a while ago.

The problem isn't getting the bandwidth to upload the content, the problem is getting access to content in the first place. In order to download PDFs of these papers, you need to have a subscription through your school/institution. The publishers will notice very quickly if someone starts downloading an entire journal's worth of articles.

There is something about the silver-blue glow of a Mac and it's zippy lines that seems to borrow from the hallucinogenic experience. Certainly, I've never seen while on halluginogens anything as garish, discordant, and downright ugly as the Windows primary-color scheme.

Of course, there's also the experience of seeing the world turned upside down and inside out that, in small doses, is probably good encouragement for creativity.

I am a chemist, and I like it.

I used to use webelements.com, which has the same information but is becoming more and more difficult to navigate with all the ads and subsections. I need a site that serves the same purpose as glancing up at the periodic table on my wall...except that I don't have a periodic table on my wall...so the lighting-fastness of it is great.

Your periodic table links to Wikipedia, which I just realized today has wonderful information on the elements. At first I assumed this was kind of a problem business-wise...you're linking to a competitor with much better information. Then I realized what a great tool this is as an interface for the wikipedia information on the elements. So, I've replaced the Webelements link in my bookmark bar with the Touchspin periodic table, which I will use as an interface to link to the wikipedia pages for more detailed information.

A few small points: -When I minimized the window with the elemental information in it, I couldn't ever figure out how to make it bigger again. -Some of the data is missing (% crustal abundance for Zn and many other elements). -No isotopic data which is what I am usually looking for.

Major props, in advance, to whomever can manage a high-quality recording of the talks. The podcasts are a great service for those of us who can't make it in person!

So lets assume that the costs for a successful web company are a small fraction of revenue (maybe 20%?). That's profits of 100 million a year for last-year's-Facebook.

So if this company makes 1/10th the profits of Facebook, it will take 50 years to make enough profits to cover it's current valuation. Of course, if this company is as profitable as last-year's-Facebook then their total profits will exceed their valuation after 5 years.

So I guess the question then is whether social-networking apps have the potential to generate similar revenues to the big social networking sites.

I've been frustrated lately at humorous comments and the rapid rate at which they are upmodded. A quick bit of humour can be great at cutting to the heart of the issue, but it often seems like humour comes at the expense of over-simplification. Apologies for taking it out on you though!

Yes, in fact web advertising has proved to be deep enough to support all of Google!

Of course there is a limit to the total amount of advertising dollars available and many half-good companies may not be good enough to support themselves with advertising, but there is no question that a good company can do very well on advertising alone.

Don't make too much fun unless you know the numbers. For all I know they might be generating huge profits. What makes you think their valuation is too high?

Come on, the laptops are not being given people for whom access to food, water, and protection from the elements is a problem. The point is to provide the educated working poor in 2nd/3rd world countries access to tools so that they can improve their lives.

And for these people, access to education and communication is very, very important. To take one example: farmers in rural India have a very hard time getting a fair price for their crops because they can't access price information before harvest, they basically have to just hop on a bus to the nearest big village and take whatever price is offered by the middleman that day. Poor communication leads to an inefficient economy.

If you don't think that laptops are the most efficient way to help these people out, what are you proposing instead?

Laptops provide people the means to educate themselves and communicate with each other in new ways.

Education and communication are among the best tools available to address problems such as fighting government corruption and clarifying land-ownership rights.

To protect our valued customers from the dastardly practice of "Front Running", we engage in exactly this practice but do not refer to it as "Front Running" when we do it.

All this talk about the Terms Of Service agreements misses the fundamental point that it's what people CAN DO (technologically) and what they WILL DO (including breaking rules) that determines how this will unfold...not whatever is written in small print in the Facebook TOS.

Like a hot night spot, each social networking site will eventually fall out of favor to the next cool place.

The business-arc of social networking sites will be much shorter than for non-social applications, and I'm not sure how anyone can ever build a decades-long success on social networking.

T

What is true 'de jure' may not be true 'de facto'.

With technologies available to suck your information back out of Facebook (the new versions of which will presumably evade detection), and plenty of people happy to use them, the legalities of information ownership will be irrelevant.

Again, the future of the web is being written by petty acts of criminality. (aka civil disobedience, aka breaking stupid rules)

Just as the entertainment industry will eventually have to adapt to the reality of file-sharing, regardless of the fact that the law is on their side...the future of data portability will be driven by technology development and people's willingness to break the rules, not by the Facebook TOS.

It's been interesting to notice over the course of this morning the modding activity on this subject. Seems like comments on both sides of the issue are being both up-modded and down-modded at a furious pace!

There was no '5 year window', but the discount rate was a subject of much debate. Actually, to get climate change out of last place, they had to apply a much smaller discount rate than for any other subject.

I would argue that the consequences in breakdown of African civil society due to a continuing AIDS epidemic will have a similarly long-term consequences as climate change...and thus a similar discount rate should apply to both.

Some of the most interesting writing on this subject was the Copenhagen Consensus (www.copenhagenconsensus.com), and the critical responses to the Copenhagen Consensus.

The CC was a group of economists who got together and tried to figure out which world-problems were most economical to solve. I.e., if you had a fixed amount of money where would you spend it to do the most good. The list was something like: 1. AIDS prevention in Africa. 2. AIDS treatment in Africa. 3. Generalized healthcare in the 3rd world. etc etc. Last. Climate change

There are a lot of problems with the approach they took (considering only at the monetary value of lives not the "spiritual" value, assuming that charitable giving is a finite resource), but their approach of trying to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis yields some very interesting results.

If I really thought the cost was equivalent to "counting beans" and the benefit was avoiding a situation where we could no longer find arable land, I would agree that we should act quickly and strongly to halt CO2 emissions. In fact, I suspect that allowing the third-world access to cheap (fossil fuel) energy will benefit them more than avoiding small changes in climate.

Of course, when it comes to American's perceived god-given right to drive around in monsterous SUVs...I come down firmly on the side of the environmentalists!

"What's the worst case scenario" may be a valid question, but it's not a very helpful question...particularly not in a mass-market film where the caveat 'this is extremely unlikely' will be forgotten and the take-home message is that Florida is about to disappear.

People should be informed about the issues in a manner that is as honest and realistic as possible, particularly when the uncertainties are so great.

"We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming."

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC"

"carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else"

This is the sort of nonsense that makes me ashamed to call myself a 'climate skeptic'. Then of course, I watch Al Gore's film where he shows Florida sinking under the ocean and that is ridiculous as well. Climate change is a potential-problem about which there are great (truly gigantic!) uncertainties and therefore no easy answers.

Yeah, that could be right. Of course, "intact" doesn't mean that they will have a profitable exit.

I was thinking the other day about why American scientists are so successful, given that they tend to work much less diligently than the Chinese or Indian scientists I've known. Of course issues of funding and infrastucture have a lot to do with it, but I think there's something else as well...

As a lazy American I spend a lot of time wandering around campus or at home not-working, instead I dream up new ways to adjust my methods so that they take less time and effort. In the long run, tinkering with methods leads to a lot of innovation. It's this link between a tolerance for laziness and creativity that has made American science so successful.

"- Warranty (can you extend it?)"

Generally electronics warranties are an overpriced scam (sort of like the insurance car rental agencies try to talk you into). I've heard from several places, though, that the Apple warranties are a great deal.

How will the YC model compare?

I'd guess a higher percentage of failures and higher average return on the successful companies. (It's a lot easier to get 50X when you only invest $15K to start with!)