"The mounds, which are easily visible on Google Earth, are not nests."
This sentence from the article kindly submitted here ignores that Google Earth imagery includes imagery taken from airplanes as well as from satellites. Statements that such-and-such an object (a classic example is the Great Wall of China) is visible from space, or from the Moon, go back to eras long before human space flight. Most such statements are wrong.
As other comments previous to mine have noted, various specialized imaging devices in satellites (or on airplanes) can have a higher resolution than human-eye vision. But the headline "are visible from space" is surely an exaggeration. Space flight has been going on since 1960s, but there has been no report of the termite mounds till now, it appears.
Most things outdoors are visible from space with a high enough resolution/zoom camera. I’ve always thought the statement “viable from space” was closer to meaningless rather than exaggerated.
“Visible from space with the naked eye” would be more meaningful but rarely is that claim made.
Considering the space shuttle's cargo bay was dimensioned to accomodate Hubble-sized spy satellites to be aimed at earth rather than the cosmos, practically everything on the surface of the planet is visible from space.
I hope there is further work on renewable aviation fuels, as vehicle fuels in general will be a big source of demand for fossil energy extraction for quite a while, and especially for aviation applications.
"Renewable energy in transport" report by IEA (.PDF)
That presentation leans heavily on biofuels/biomass as precursors to liquid fuels. In fact it doesn't mention any non-bio alternatives. That's not surprising given its age. Less than a decade ago biofuel looked cheaper than fully synthetic liquid electrofuels, considering the much higher cost of solar power back then.
I think that "power to liquids" is a much more likely path for large scale replacement of aviation fuel.
See for example "Power-to-Liquids as Renewable Fuel Option
for Aviation: A Review"
The main problem with biomass is land requirements. You can get a little biomass "for free" just by using scrap from existing industries, but it rapidly runs into problems of land availability if you want to make enough carbon-neutral fuel for the world's commercial airlines. There's more than an order-of-magnitude improvement in usable power density if you replace biofuel plantations with an equal area of solar farms for making electrolytic hydrogen from water, plus a synthesis/refiner complex for hydrogenating CO2 and building up liquid hydrocarbons from the resulting methanol. It's also a lot less water-intensive and doesn't require any fertilizer.
Ground transportation is a much larger component than aviation and has known solutions. If we got to 80-100% electric cars and trucks before converting one turbofan to <unknown alternative> it would still be major progress.
And in the worst case there are always biofuels or synthetic non-fossil liquid fuels, which are a lot more carbon neutral after you convert the energy that goes into their production away from fossil sources.
Right, now that ground transportation is close to being solved, we need to get creative with air travel. It's about 2% of global emissions and it's a much harder problem.
If we can cut 98% of emissions we'll be fine. 2% is not worth worrying about. While it may be a sexier engineering problem reality is ground transportation isn't close to being solved.
Gas cars still have huge momentum and infrastructure advatanges. No electric cars is being targeted for the mass low end demographic. We need the Honda civic of electrics.
Hybrid electric jet engines are being developed, and have real potential to improve fuel economy. A substantial improvement in fuel economy could mean carrying less fuel, which in turn improves fuel economy.
But if you’re talking about plug-in electric, the challenge is presumably battery weight versus fuel weight.
Yes, they'll still probably have to carry liquid fuel because nothing else has the energy density required. But maybe we can make this fuel from a carbon-neutral source instead of oil pumped out of the ground.
Research is coming along. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/tonight-a-virgin-atl... It's not at the point yet where we can take CO2 out of the air, but we can probably take exhaust fumes from power plants or steel mills and make something useful out of it.
I know eminent IQ researchers back at the time who declined invitations to sign on to the Gottfredson consensus statement (with good reason, in my opinion). On the other hand, it is still a reasonably fair statement of a lot of the consensus among IQ researchers, but as you say now twenty years out of date. (I read the consensus statement right after it was published.)
Thanks for sharing that link. The underlying paper is (of course) better than the popular article kindly submitted to open the interesting discussion here. In particular, the paper makes clear its own methodological limitations.
Gottfredson's paper is a paper that I have read, and I see it is being used as the analytical framework for criticizing psychology textbooks. I do research for writing popular writings on psychology, so I have a whole bunch of introductory psychology textbooks in the office where I am typing this, and I have to agree that introductory psychology textbooks leave a LOT to be desired in representing the consensus of modern psychology research. That's true about research on human intelligence and true about any other psychology topic: the introductory textbooks only do a so-so job.
That said, one might wonder where to find good information about current psychology research. Sometimes there are review articles that update practitioners on current research, which are incidentally read by scientists in other disciplines. I'll note for the record that not all psychologist agree EITHER with the review article I will link here, but it is a good readable account of current issues in the psychological research on human intelligence and well worth a read for Hacker News participants who are curious about these issues. It refers to many of the most important papers in the field, most of which I have read over the last three decades.
Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67, 130-159. doi:10.1037/a0026699
(Disclaimer: I have met many of the researchers on human intelligence, including Gottfredson, at professional conferences, but my views of what the overall research says and who has the best leads on open research questions are my own.)
The part of the article that says, "Daniel Mansfield, of the university’s school of mathematics and statistics, described the tablet which may unlock some of their methods as 'a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius' – with potential modern application because the base 60 used in calculations by the Babylonians permitted many more accurate fractions than the contemporary base 10" seems to be the basis for that subheadline. But that's ridiculous and shows that the editors of the article (not the quoted scholar, necessarily) are innumerate. (Common, whether proper or improper) fractions written in any numerical base are equally accurate--fractions are exact real numbers. Approximations of a fraction in a place-value notation can be made as accurate as needed with sufficient expressed place values, and since 500 years ago, the Western world has been able to write decimal numerals for rational numbers to any desired degree of accuracy.
I was confused as well. I don't recall seeing this the first time I read the article, but on the second time through, they include this:
"Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles. It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius."
Which is probably where the "more accurate" statement comes from.
For me, the race to the bottom went too far. I try to avoid flying now. The hard and narrow seats, ever-decreasing legroom, lack of recline, constant densification, buy-on-board food, airports disguised as shopping centres, expensive airport parking, fare increases (i.e. same/more money for less). What's the point of a holiday if you dread the beginning and end?
What follow-up has there been on this since the 2012 publication in a rather obscure journal? Most importantly, is there a source of copper vessels in most countries that is as inexpensive as other means of reducing bacterial load in drinking water?
"But all of these genes together account for just a small percentage of the variation in intelligence test scores, the researchers found; each variant raises or lowers I.Q. by only a small fraction of a point.
'It means there’s a long way to go, and there are going to be a lot of other genes that are going to be important,' Dr. Posthuma said."
Indeed. This result is fully predictable from the several previous GWAS studies on IQ that have been done. Any gene that influences IQ in the general population has at most a small effect, and the variance among human individuals in IQ is the result of interaction of hundreds of genes and the environment the individual lives in.
Here's a link to a lot of good writings by one of the leading researchers on human behavior genetics, for more details. I especially like one particular article I'll link just below the link to his collected writings.
I assume the authors (all three of them professors of some renown) did not write this headline, because the piece is far better, more careful, and more comprehensive than the title would suggest (I'm no fan of Murray but this is not a typical Vox hot-take).
> As a response to the podcast the Vox piece is slipshod
Vox is one of my least favorite outlets; not because they're more inaccurate or dishonest than others, but because they intentionally (and somewhat successfully) foster a reputation of facts-first journalism and then use that as a fig leaf for a lot of the same low-quality crap you see everywhere else too.
We can debate as to whether the Vox article is political, but that Medium article certainly is. I feel a bit sick to my stomach after reading the author's Twitter.
* It doesn't refute the scientific claims of the authors, but rather takes them to task for disagreeing with points Murray didn't make --- that's fair rhetorically, but fails to address the central thesis of the Vox piece, which is that popular race/IQ ideas are largely junk science.
* It asserts the authority of Charles Murray (for instance, citing him as having written an article rebutting one of Turkheimer's findings), despite Murray not being an expert on the subject --- his scientist coauthor on The Bell Curve is deceased. At one point, in this very takedown, its author even cites Murray observing that he doesn't understand the science.
* It attempts to dismiss the authors by citing James Flynn's critique of black culture, which is ironic on two levels: first, that itself is an argument that Turkheimer and Nisbett didn't make, so the pot is complaining about the kettle, and second because Nisbett himself has gotten into some trouble for making similar critiques of black culture. Memetics isn't genetics.
* It makes seemingly well-grounded arguments about the statistical validity of interventions Turkheimer talked about which, on a second reading, dissipate into handwaving --- what we're left with is a Medium blogger's conjecture against a working scientist's published results.
Turkheimer and Nisbett are at pains to point out that their views aren't uniformly shared by everyone in the field. Rather, they take Murray (and, by implication, Sam Harris) to task for summarizing a contentious scientific debate as if it were settled, but for hysteria in leftist academia. The Vox piece is far more persuasive and credible in this argument than the "takedown" you cite is in its own argument.
1) Re-read Vox piece again, and you will see that aside from the 100% objectively false claim that "no self-respecting statistical geneticist would undertake a study based only on self-identified racial category as a proxy for genetic ancestry measured from DNA", the entire basis of their objection to group differences in IQ are the 5 facts that I spent most of the article responding to.
2) Never said Murray was an authority. I wrote he rebutted Dickens and Flynn on the non-narrowing of the gap in the last 25 years, which is correct, regardless of whether he's an "authority." Also, I didn't say he "doesn't understand the science," I said he doesn't understand the details of the mathematical techniques in a paper regarding the nature of the Flynn effect. This seems unimportant because Wicherts's conclusion -- that the Flynn effect gains have a different structure than the B-W IQ gap -- is uncontroversial.
3) Not really. I was citing Flynn for making the same point as Wicherts's above re: structure of FE gains, a demonstration that it's not just Wicherts's theory. I quoted him saying un-PC things about black culture just to demonstrate that in order to rebut Murray's unPC claims many scientists come up with different unPC hypotheses.
4) Talk about "handwaving": it would be helpful for you to elaborate what arguments you think actually "dissipate" on a second reading but I doubt you will.
And I would care more about your ad-hominem attack were it not for the Rindermann survey. Which brings me to my final point: you have it completely backwards when you say "Turkheimer and Nisbett are at pains to point out that their views aren't uniformly shared by everyone in the field. Rather, they take Murray (and, by implication, Sam Harris) to task for summarizing a contentious scientific debate as if it were settled." The scientists at Vox rather explicitly say that no credible scientists attribute some group IQ differences to genetics, while the survey I cite in the Medium article is convincing that is an inaccurate assessment of the views of researchers in this field. Moreover it's pretty clear that Harris does not believe the science is settled, and Murray also thinks that we should wait for direct DNA evidence to say that it's settled.
I'm not sure why we are spending so much effort on these other GWAS studies when all we need to do is whole-genome sequence HN to figure out where intelligence comes from. I suppose it would be confounded by other behavioral traits that score high here.
They don't need to be, at sample sizes in the 100,000s. Most of these studies are not even using IQ tests but "years of education" which is a measure of IQ with a laughably large standard error - but with very large sample sizes very precise estimates can be made of the effect of a particular SNA on the affected people's intelligence.
Using "years of education" as a measure seems like it might just end up measuring how well you can use genes to identify whether someone's of the right socioeconomic class to get their children into university. I can't really see any way around this.
Well I believe they control for social status. And also a lot of other things, see gwern's comment above. In any case, I don't expect there to be genes that predict social class. And if there were, that would be super interesting in itself.
This sentence from the article kindly submitted here ignores that Google Earth imagery includes imagery taken from airplanes as well as from satellites. Statements that such-and-such an object (a classic example is the Great Wall of China) is visible from space, or from the Moon, go back to eras long before human space flight. Most such statements are wrong.
As other comments previous to mine have noted, various specialized imaging devices in satellites (or on airplanes) can have a higher resolution than human-eye vision. But the headline "are visible from space" is surely an exaggeration. Space flight has been going on since 1960s, but there has been no report of the termite mounds till now, it appears.