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Contents contributed and discussions participated by sgardner35

sgardner35

Upon closer look, a global warming hiatus is ruled out, U.S. scientists say - LA Times - 0 views

  • fresh look at the way sea temperatures are measured has led government scientists to make a surprising claim: The puzzling apparent hiatus in global surface warming never really happened
  • Mainstream scientists have struggled to explain to the public how climate change can be getting worse if the warming of the planet's surface slowed at the turn of the century. Their various theories have chalked it up to dust and ash blasted into the sky by volcanic eruptions, a rare period of calm in the solar cycle, and heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean and other waters.
  • “I don't find this analysis at all convincing,” said Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech who argues that natural variability in climate cycles dominates the impact of industrial emissions and other human actions. “While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”
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  • In the study, the NOAA researchers argue that long-standing problems with the way temperatures are measured have masked years of sea surface warming. Once those problems are corrected for, “this hiatus or slowdown simply vanishes,” said lead study author Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
  • Although researchers have long known that sea surface temperatures measured by autonomous buoys run cooler than temperatures measured by ships, they have failed to account for this as they expanded their use of buoy readings over the last two decades, the study authors argued.
  • “The buckets, when you pull them up, tend to evaporate their water, and if they're canvas there's even more evaporation,” Karl said. “By the time people stick a thermistor in the bucket to measure temperature, it's already slightly cool.”
  • “If you start a short-time series on an anomalous value, you tend to get an anomalous trend,” Karl said.
  • A growing number of climate scientists have argued that this phenomenon, as well as other hiatus effects, are evidence of a poorly understood pattern of wind, ocean current and temperature variations that have far-reaching effects on global climate. They say the oceans have absorbed heat energy from the sun, causing Arctic ice to melt and sea levels to rise.
  • “One way to think about it is that global warming continued, but the oceans just juggled a bit of heat around and made the surface seem cooler for a while,” said Joshua Willis, another climate scientist at JPL.
  • “All of those factors are real,” Karl said. “If those factors had not occurred, the warming rate would have been even greater. … If anything we may still be underestimating the trend.” 
sgardner35

Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030 - Jun. 3, 2015 - 0 views

  • The bigger and more complex the cloud, the more advanced our thinking. By the time we get to the late 2030s or the early 2040s, Kurzweil believes our thinking will be predominately non-biological.
sgardner35

Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • MOSCOW — TWO years ago today, three journalists and I worked nervously in a Hong Kong hotel room, waiting to see how the world would react to the revelation that the National Security Agency had been making records of nearly every phone call in the United States. In the days that followed, those journalists and others published documents revealing that democratic governments had been monitoring the private activities of ordinary citizens who had done nothing wrong.
  • Privately, there were moments when I worried that we might have put our privileged lives at risk for nothing — that the public would react with indifference, or practiced cynicism, to the revelations.
  • Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed new restrictions on future activities. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights. In Latin America, the efforts of citizens in Brazil led to the Marco Civil, an Internet Bill of Rights. Recognizing the critical role of informed citizens in correcting the excesses of government, the Council of Europe called for new laws to protect whistle-blowers.
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  • are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private. Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the arbitrary passage of anti-privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.
  • Spymasters in Australia, Canada and France have exploited recent tragedies to seek intrusive new powers despite evidence such programs would not have prevented attacks. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain recently mused, “Do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?” He soon found his answer, proclaiming that “for too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: As long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.”
sgardner35

Unions Subdued, Scott Walker Turns to Tenure at Wisconsin Colleges - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • CHICAGO — Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who began building a national profile four years ago by sharply cutting collective bargaining rights for most government workers, has turned his sights to a different element of the public sector: state universities.
  • As a new and unknown governor in 2011, Mr. Walker quickly drew national attention by announcing legislation to limit collective bargaining rights for most public-sector unions and require workers to pay more for their health care and pensions.
  • “It’ll be impossible for us to attract and retain people if we’re the only one that has such a weak protection of tenure,” said Donald Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has been at the institution for 10 years and was among hundreds of faculty members in recent days to sign a letter opposing the changes.
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  • “The reality is that we are not eliminating tenure,” said Senator Sheila Harsdorf, a Republican, adding that she believed the effort had been misunderstood as a broad condemnation of tenure.
  • All of the changes still require a vote by the state’s full Senate and House. The proposal is expected to come to the full chambers later this month as part of the state’s budget for the next two years.
  • Mr. Walker has called for still more sweeping changes to the state university system. As part of his budget proposal in February, the governor said he wanted to shift the entire university system out from under direct state oversight. He called for the creation of a “quasi-governmental” authority that could act on its own on issues of personnel, purchasing, capital projects and tuition. He also wanted to cut state spending on the system by about $300 million, or 13 percent, as part of his answer to an anticipated budget shortfall.
  • Wisconsin has hardly been the only place where public universities have struggled in relationships with their states, and leaders elsewhere have been closely watching the events unfold in Wisconsin. As state funding for higher education has dwindled in recent years, public universities in several states have been involved in discussions over cutting, or loosening, their ties with state government, so they would not have to comply with state regulations governing areas like purchasing and construction.
  • “We are as a board and always have been and always will be supportive of tenure,” Regina Millner, the regents’ vice president, said in an interview. “Our commitment to tenure, our commitment to academic freedom, our commitment to a strong faculty with secure support for the work they do, it’s absolute.
  • “Increasingly, the excuse of financial difficulty has been used as a reason to overpower the faculty, with a lot of people in administration saying we need to be flexible,” said Henry Reichman, vice president of the American Association of University Professors. “If you just took the Wisconsin language on eliminating tenure, and moved it from the statute into board policy, you could argue that there would be no problem. But the shared governance change seems to undermine the whole structure.”
sgardner35

In Trinidad, Former FIFA Executive Seen as 'Our Robin Hood' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Interesting how he says the worlds perception of him isn't close to the reality. 
sgardner35

U.S. Surveillance in Place Since 9/11 Is Sharply Limited - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The passage of the bill — achieved over the fier
  • ce opposition of the Senate majority leader — will allow the government to restart surveillance operations, but with new restrictions.
sgardner35

Death toll from capsized China ship rises to 65, families demand answers | Reuters - 0 views

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    Another very interesting article about a perception of a situation and how people begin to speculate and place blame on a person or people without knowing the full story. 
sgardner35

Shooting of Boston Terror Suspect Highlights Concerns Over Reach of ISIS - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Relates to history and TOK because I found it interesting on the different conclusions the eye witnesses came to after the man with the knife was shot. His close friends thought it was unjustified because he was shot in the back even though he pulled a knife on officers 
sgardner35

The $179 Million Picasso That Explains Global Inequality - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The astronomical rise in prices for the most-sought-after works of art over the last generation is in large part the story of rising global inequality
  • One of the most important findings of the leading economists who study inequality is that wealth and incomes at the very top are “fractal.” What they mean is that when you zoom in on the upper end of wealth distribution, patterns repeat themselves in an ever more finely grained pattern.
  • Partners at law firms who are in the top 1 percent of all earners have seen their incomes rise faster than successful dentists who are in the top 10 percent
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  • And the kind of people who can comfortably afford to pay a nine-figure sum for a Picasso, the top 0.001 percent, say, are doing still better than that. You can draw that conclusion by reading the work of the French economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Or you can form it by looking carefully at the market for the work of a certain Spanish painter.
  • After adjusting for inflation and using our 1 percent of net worth premise, a person would have needed $12.3 billion of wealth in 1997 dollars to afford the painting
  • In other words, the number of people who, by this metric, could easily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso has increased more than fourfold since the painting was last on the market
  • American and European authorities may wish to put further effort into preventing art transactions from being used to launder money or evade taxes, as the economist Nouriel Roubini has argued is commonplace
  • l sums for a painting or sculpture should hope most of all that this basic global inequality trend — of the wealth of the ultrarich growing faster than the world population overall economy — remains intact
sgardner35

A High School Is Making All Of Its Female Students Get Their Prom Dresses 'Pre-Approved... - 0 views

  • While students at Delone Catholic High School in Pennsylvania will have a prom to attend, they will not necessarily
  • be allowed to wear what they want. The school has a new policy—instated this year—that requires “all young women” who plan on attending the prom—whether they attend the school or are the guest of student—to “submit a photo of the gown that will be worn to the prom for pre-approval.”
  • The petition reads, “Our children will not undergo scrutiny of prom gowns based on outdated, unrealistic expectations and rules implemented at such short notice.”
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  • “distracting” and “unacceptable” and the #ClothingHasNoGender campaign that was launched by his friends in response.
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