Quoting from a post on vampires, “In Bayesian inference, you start with some initial beliefs (called ‘Bayesian priors’ or just ‘priors’), and then you ‘update’ them as you receive new evidence.”

This is the standard metaphor, and it’s not so much wrong as unhelpful, misleading, and restricting. The metaphor derives from Bayes’s rule (details which can be looked up anywhere) and which gives a formula which on the right-hand-side is supposed to be an element representing “prior beliefs.” The formula itself is correct, as most math is. But because math is correct does not mean that it means what you think it means.

(Incidentally, all (as in all) frequentist methods should be dumped forthwith: no hypothesis testing, no p-values, no parameters, no infinities. It is a false dichotomy to suppose that if not Bayes then frequentist, and vice versa.)

Do you recall how the experts wanted to tell us that cold winters were linked to global warming? For example Spiegel Online wrote on 27 October 2014:

“Weather bridge: Ice melt in the Arctic cooling winters in Europe
Climate scientists have discovered a meteorological remote link: When the sea ice melts in the Arctic, atmospheric currents get shifted – winters in Europe and Asia get cooler.
According to a study, ice melt over the past decades has led to especially harsh winters in Europe and Asia.

Scientists at the UK Meteorological Office (Met Office) have released a new paper this week indicating the recent slowdown of the North Atlantic Ocean current system is natural, and not due to man-made global warming.

Over the past ten years, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, appeared to be decelerating, causing scientists to worry that this was a result of climate change. Al Gore even proselytized this event happening in hi documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”.

This new Met Office research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shows that the slowdown trend is likely due to the current’s natural recovery from an earlier acceleration. Laura Jackson, the lead author of the paper, said in a press release that the AMOC plays a vital role in the climate because it carries heat north, keeping Europe relatively warm.

The science behind the research…

Read the full article here: us.blastingnews.com

Newly released internal e-mails show George Mason University climate professors plotting a petition calling on government to prosecute skeptics of global warming using RICO laws designed to go after the mob. They got 20 scientists to sign their petition and sent it to government officials before withdrawing in the face of controversy.

The new emails show GMU professors Jagadish Shukla and Edward Maibach discussing everything from how to craft their petition to appeal to conservatives, to getting warnings from others that the petition would go over poorly, to evading media questions.

The spectacular, flat landscape that dominates the left side of Pluto’s icy “heart” can now be explained, say scientists.

Sputnik Planum is the most prominent feature on the diminutive world, covering 900,000 square km.

Broken into an array of polygons, it is devoid of any impact craters.

Reporting in the journal Nature, the researchers say that roiling cells of nitrogen ice remove any blemishes, maintaining a super-smooth appearance.

Scientists lost the scientific script somewhere in the 20^th century. The major loss involved the fact that correlation is not cause and effect. It was lost for several reasons:

• Failure to know or consistently apply scientific methods;
• Lack of ethics as the end justifies the means;
• Methods and process are not taught or emphasized;
• People are more willing to bypass or ignore everything for funding;
• Too many are willing to subjugate or exploit research for a political agenda;
• Achieving results to advance a career is more important;
• A person gets caught up in Groupthink as they go along to get along;
• and scientists are unwilling to look to themselves to stop the rot.

All of these reasons were on display in the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

An example of the problem of correlation occurred recently on TV screen when a medical doctor was asked about the research evidence for a claim about the relationship between two phenomena. The interviewer clearly wanted to know about the cause/effect proof. The doctor replied that there was an “association” between them. Did the doctor know that this is just another word for correlation and that it must not be substituted for cause and effect? Who knows? All I know is the news is replete with claims of correlations implying cause and effect. It is undermining the credibility of science.

An enormous black hole has been spotted in the sun – but do not fear, it doesn’t spell the end of our solar system.

Instead the giant dark spot is a gap in the sun’s corona – its scorching hot atmosphere.

Holes in the sun’s atmosphere are a regular feature and Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has detected a particularly large one covering the northern hemisphere of our star. 

The coronal hole was spotted using the orbiting telescope, which stares constantly at the sun to monitor its activity, earlier this month.

Coronal holes are regions of the corona – the aura of plasma surrounding the sun – where the magnetic field reaches out into space rather than looping back down onto the sun’s surface. 

Modern technology is so wonderful. Among the latest inventions patented is a way to get glued to a car’s hood—in the event of being scooped up (unintentionally of course) by an autonomous vehicle. As pointed out by Michael Irving (who also introduced the term “Gloogle”) in a post at gizmag.com, the U.S. Patent 9,340,178 B1, awarded on May 17, 2016, explains it all in detail.

The Patent

If you happen to take a leisurely stroll along the road, as shown in the graph 6A, and get “rear-ended” you’ll end up like shown in graph 6B—firmly (?) glued to the hood of the vehicle.

Among the claims of this patent is “A method for protecting a colliding object from a secondary impact….” Well, that’s fine and dandy but better yet is to avoid any impact at all if possible. This could involve not walking along the middle of the lane—or hiding behind the bushes when you see an autonomous car approaching.

A flat lens made of paint whitener on a sliver of glass could revolutionise optics, according to its US inventors.

Just 2mm across and finer than a human hair, the tiny device can magnify nanoscale objects and gives a sharper focus than top-end microscope lenses.

It is the latest example of the power of metamaterials, whose novel properties emerge from their structure.

Shapes on the surface of this lens are smaller than the wavelength of light involved: a thousandth of a millimetre.

“In my opinion, this technology will be game-changing,” said Federico Capasso of Harvard University, the senior author of a report on the new lens which appears in the journal Science.

The Antarctic Ocean has remained unchanged by global warming due to the Deep Ocean water that is constantly pulled to the surface in a centuries-long pas de deux, a new study has found. The University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s latest research discovered that ocean currents and strong winds keep the seawater around Antarctica at nearly the same temperature, despite some warming in other bodies of seawater.

Climate models

Climate models and satellite imagery show that the unique currents around Antarctica are constantly pulling seawater up to the surface, which last touched the Earth’s atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution. The paper was published online May 30 in the journal Science Direct in Remote Sensing of Environment. It shows gale-force westerly winds are constantly whipping around Antarctica and pushing surface water north, continuously drawing up water from far below. The Southern Ocean’s water comes from such great depths, and from sources that are so deep, that it takes centuries before the water reaches the surface and interacts with the atmosphere. Even if it does, the average temperature above the Southern Ocean is so cold that its impact is insignificant.

Read the full article here: us.blastingnews.com

PSI ASSOCIATES are steadfast in their support of the traditional scientific method as encapsulated  in the ideas of Karl Popper.

PSI opposes post-normalism and endeavors to provide society with an antidote (from the Greek αντιδιδοναι antididonai, “given against”) to the seemingly gargantuan and pervasive rise of post-normal science by way of our publishing, educational and media-focused materials and presentations. For, as Karl Popper advocated, any hypothesis that does not make testable predictions is simply not science. Such a hypothesis may be useful or valuable, but it cannot be said to be science.

Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes is best known to climate realists by her 2010 book,Merchants of Doubt and its scurrilous demonization of climate skeptics as paid hacks parroting the fossil-fuel industry’s self-serving opposition to the “consensus view” of man-made climate catastrophe, but that screed doesn’t reveal the flaws in her work.

A short, obscure, error-riddled essay titled, “My Science is Better than Your Science,” that she wrote in 2011 is more significant. It was a chapter in a book titled, How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge, and examined the 1991 origin of the “skeptics are paid industry shills” narrative supposedly found in a legendary set of “leaked Western Fuels memos.”

That short chapter is important because Oreskes totally misinterprets the “memos” as Big Coal’s plan for a vast national campaign with paid climate scientists that created the lasting public doubt about global warming. That’s the very same interpretation repeated endlessly by climate alarmists including Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan (1997’s The Heat Is On), Canadian public relations flak James Hoggan ’s attack website DeSmogBlog, and many others.

The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.

If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.

But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.

Regulators have given one of the world’s largest drug companies approval to sell a new gene therapy.

The treatment is for an illness called ADA-SCID which prevents babies from fighting off everyday infections.

This is the first approval for a genetic therapy granted to a large multinational drug company, GSK.

Commentators say the development marks the beginning of many more genetic medicines from so-called “Big Pharma”.

It is said that Galileo’s middle finger is displayed in Florence, Italy, thus in death “giving the finger” to those who put him under house arrest for daring to claim the Earth was not the centre of the universe. That the sun orbited the Earth was the scientific consensus of the time, backed by Biblical texts.

The penalty for Galileo’s effrontery in saying otherwise was not only prison and then house arrest. He was also forbidden to claim the obvious as fact. He could claim it only as theory.

Time has proved the 16th century scientific-religious consensus spectacularly wrong. Galileo was right. Reason triumphed over superstition.

Meanwhile, in the 21st century, we are asked to wait another 100 years before the truth or fallacy of the prevailing climate theory is proven true or false. Meanwhile, as the Pope once demanded, mouths and minds must be securely shut.

Cambridge University electrical engineering professor Dr. M.J. Kelly concluded in a peer-reviewed journal article that attempts to fight global warming with green energy will impoverish the world.

The Monday article found reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions enough to actually slow global warming in a measurable way simply isn’t possible without significantly reducing standards of living by plunging most of the world into poverty, destitution and starvation.

“Over the last 200 years, fossil fuels have provided the route out of grinding poverty for many people in the world,” states the article. “This trend is certain to continue for at least the next 20 years based on the technologies of scale that are available today. A rapid decarbonization is simply impossible over the next 20 years unless the trend of a growing number who succeed to improve their lot is stalled by rich and middle class people downgrading their own standard of living.”