Science and Technology

Natural philosophy or science and technology are the reasons why we have a decent standard of living. Earlier generations knew about back breaking toil. We have forgotten. Peasant is a term of contempt for a reason. Do scientists and engineers get any thanks? No, apart from the occasional public relations mention. None of it translates into decent pay. There are other studies referred to by proponents as Social Science or soft science. They have a degree of validity, which is strongly worsened by their corruption. Being taken over by the Lunatic Fringe & Lenin's Useful Idiots as part of the Long March Through The Institutions means they are being manipulated by the Puppet Masters, not merely Marxists but Zionist crazies.

I Would Prefer to Trust Science
QUOTE
I'd like to trust science, and generally I do.

But, it seems that, whenever I get curious about a particular point of science, I have to track down the actual paper or study that was published, and research the backgrounds of the scientists who wrote the paper one by one for undeclared conflicts of interest. Then I have to find out who funded the study and whether or not the funders are in a conflict of interest on the topic in question. Then I have to read the paper and sort out the methodology and data and try to ascertain whether or not it makes scientific, or statistical, or plain old common sense. Then I have to compare the findings to existing science and see if there are contrary views and the reasons why. Then I may be able to draw a conclusion as to whether or not the science holds up...........

I'd like to trust science. But when the background of the alarmist scientists all contain egregious inherent global warming research conflicts of interest. And the funders of the studies are in blatant conflicts of interest. And the methodologies and data do not make scientific, or statistical, or physical, or mathematical, or plain old common sense, or are born from processes that don't even come close to standard scientific practices. And when there is nothing even remotely resembling a consensus in the science. And when the journals who publish the alarmist research fails to flag basic scientific flaws in the research. Well, the climate science cannot be trusted.

I would honestly rather trust science, but insofar as the climate science goes, I simply can't.
UNQUOTE
An honest man writes. Scientific fraud is the subject especially the Global Warming racket.

 

Ernst Mayr
Was a rather good scientist in his day. His field was biology.

 

National Technical Information Service
QUOTE
The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) is an agency within the United States Department of Commerce that serves as the U.S. government repository for research and development results and for other information produced by and for the government as well as a variety of public and private sources worldwide.

The NTIS serves the United States as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information available today. For more than 60 years NTIS has assured businesses, universities, and the public timely access to approximately 3 million publications covering over 350 subject areas. The stated aim of the NTIS is to support the Department of Commerce mission to promote the nation's economic growth by providing access to information that stimulates innovation and discovery. (Public Law 102-245, Section 108 American Technology Preeminence Act of 1991).

NTIS is also recognized as an approved Office of Personnel Management e-training service provider of secure learning management systems and knowledge management solutions for U.S. Federal agencies.
UNQUOTE
NTIS is a first class source which would be better if it did not charge money for access. Their home page is at https://www.ntis.gov/

  

Organic Solar Cell Breakthrough
QUOTE
Solar cell technology developed by the Massey University’s Nanomaterials Research Centre will enable New Zealanders to generate electricity from sunlight at a 10th of the cost of current silicon-based photo-electric solar cells. Dr Wayne Campbell and researchers in the centre have developed a range of coloured dyes for use in dye-sensitised solar cells.

The synthetic dyes are made from simple organic compounds closely related to those found in nature. The green dye Dr Campbell (pictured) is synthetic chlorophyll derived from the light-harvesting pigment plants use for photosynthesis.
UNQUOTE ex http://gosunsolutions.com/home/content/view/46/2/
Well done New Zealand. Silicon is the standard at the moment but expensive.

 

Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle
This is from the Jew, Richard Feynman. He makes a lot of sense.

 

Bogus Science Conferences Exposed   [ 19 October 2018 ]
QUOTE
On June 21, 2018, a dozen self-declared scholars gathered in a small meeting room of a hotel in Venice, Italy. As the session began, they sat in silence and listened to the presenter.

“Close your eyes,” said a woman identified as Rebecca Ellis, from the University of New Orleans. “Right now, I want you to think of your favorite color and picture in your head.”

This was not a meditation class but one of the sessions of a scientific conference organized by the questionable World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, or Waset.

In the audience, among students and professors ready to speak on topics ranging from criminal law to mental health and mineralogy, was a group of South Korean reporters from Newstapa, a Seoul-based investigative journalism center and partner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.............

Having submitted a paper created using SCIGen, a joke program which generates random scientific essays with charts and figures, the journalists were invited to present on telecommunications. Their pseudo-scientific talk was warmly received.

The Venice event was just one of hundreds of fake scientific conferences that Waset holds every year, according to the Newstapa investigation.

Participants include professors working for renowned universities to students who want to practice their presentation skills. Their motives range from career advancement to meeting deadlines for research expenses, or simply traveling to exotic destinations on their universities’ dime. The only requirement to be accepted as a speaker is a participation fee.
UNQUOTE
The Science Industry has attracted its fair share of liars, layabouts, chancers, thieves and frauds. The Wikipedia fingers the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology as an example. It is run by Cemal Ardil from Azerbaijan. Is the man a crook on the make? The Wiki does not quite say so. However WASET Watch leaves little room for doubt. Publishing an article generated by SCIgen, the programme designed to generate random nonsense that looks as though it might be real science proves it. The Guardian does a good overview at  Predatory publishers the journals that churn out fake science.

 

Alleged Expert Gets It Seriously Wrong
QUOTE
Code Review of Ferguson’s Model [ on ] 6 May 2020. Updated 10 May 2020.

by Sue Denim (not the author’s real name)  [Please note: a follow-up analysis is now available here.]
Imperial finally released a derivative of Ferguson’s code. I figured I’d do a review of it and send you some of the things I noticed. I don’t know your background so apologies if some of this is pitched at the wrong level.

My background. I have been writing software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company’s database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years. Obviously I’m giving only my own professional opinion and not speaking for my current employer.

The code. It isn’t the code Ferguson ran to produce his famous Report 9. What’s been released on GitHub is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others. This revised codebase is split into multiple files for legibility and written in C++, whereas the original program was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade” (this is considered extremely poor practice). A request for the original code was made 8 days ago but ignored, and it will probably take some kind of legal compulsion to make them release it.  Clearly, Imperial are too embarrassed by the state of it ever to release it of their own free will, which is unacceptable given that it was paid for by the taxpayer and belongs to them.

The model.  What it’s doing is best described as “SimCity [ a video game ] without the graphics”. It attempts to simulate households, schools, offices, people and their movements, etc. I won’t go further into the underlying assumptions, since that’s well explored elsewhere.

Non-deterministic outputs. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results given identical inputs. They routinely act as if this is unimportant.

This problem makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, given that a key part of the scientific method is the ability to replicate results. Without replication, the findings might not be real at all – as the field of psychology has been finding out to its cost. Even if their original code was released, it’s apparent that the same numbers as in Report 9 might not come out of it...............

The documentation says:

The model is stochastic. Multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behaviour.

“Stochastic” is just a scientific-sounding word for “random”.
UNQUOTE
"Random results". Perhaps that is all you really need to know about Ferguson's efforts but notice what the Wiki tells us. "Professor" Ferguson is one of the comedians that Blair relied on to sort out the 2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak. Ferguson worked on the team, led by Roy M. Anderson of Imperial College, creating mathematical models used to inform the UK Government of the most effective methods of preventing the spread of foot-and-mouth-disease. The results were appalling. Millions of millions of cows, sheep and pigs were slaughtered and the countryside was shut down for months, or was it only weeks? He got away with it that time.
PS Ferguson was too important to obey the rules he created so he ignored the lockdown to see his fancy woman. Ferguson Ignored Lockdown Rules.

 

 Can we trust Neil Ferguson’s computer code?
The Spectator sounds relaxed about Ferguson's fornication and relatively nonchalant about his gross incompetence, saying that real problems were higher up the chain of command. I am not convinced. So the real scandal is: Why did anyone ever listen to this guy?  
This really is the right question.  Andrew goes through the possibilities. He is on the ball.

 

Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College
Is a very wonderful human being say Imperial. Believe them if you want. He tells us that:-
QUOTE
My research aims to improve understanding of the epidemiological factors and population processes shaping infectious disease spread in human and animal populations. A key practical focus is the analysis and optimisation of intervention strategies aimed at reducing transmission or disease burden. Much of my work is applied, informing disease control policy-making by public and global health institutions.

With recent advances in data availability (both epidemiological and molecular) and affordable high-performance computing, mathematical models of infectious disease spread now offer the potential to provide predictive, quantitative analyses of alternative disease control and treatment strategies, as well as qualitative insight into the complex non-linear processes shaping pathogen replication and evolution. An important strand of my research program is therefore to develop the statistical and mathematical tools necessary for such increasingly sophisticated models to be rigorously tested and validated against epidemiological, molecular and experimental data. The breadth of my research interests reflects my belief that comparative analyses of different host-pathogen systems can provide powerful insights into the population processes common to many infectious diseases, while highlighting how key differences in disease biology, route of transmission or host population structure determine observed differences in patterns of infection.
UNQUOTE
High-performance or something he has been messing about with for many years? This sales pitch is still there on 2010-05-14, long after he was exposed for a third rater/charlatan/dangerous fool/whatever. As they used to say: GIGO - garbage in - garbage out.

 

Neil Ferguson ex Wiki      
Neil Morris Ferguson OBE FMedSci (born 1968) is a British epidemiologist^[3] and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA), head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College, London.

Ferguson has used mathematical modelling to provide data on several disease outbreaks including the 2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak, the swine flu outbreak in 2009 in the UK, the 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak and the ebola epidemic in Western Africa in 2016. His work has also included research on mosquito-borne diseases including zika fever, yellow fever, dengue fever and malaria.

In February 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was first detected in China, Ferguson and his team used statistical models to estimate that cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were significantly under-detected in China. He is part of UK's Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team.

 

Arming America
Is a book written by Michael Bellesiles, a corrupt liar with an agenda. He claims that guns are nasty, dangerous things inflicted on Americans by corrupt interests. Other liars said he was right until he was exposed. Then they went quiet or started marketing another fantasy. To be fair Emory University, his employer did an honest investigation then released him into the community. He now has a job as a bartender. This case shows that all sorts of people in the Education Industry are liars or incompetent chancers.

 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/tony-thomas/2014/09/obamas-man-runs-cold-warming/

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/tony-thomas/2014/09/obamas-man-runs-cold-warming/  
Or does he? Dr Steven E. Koonin (inset) was Undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department during Obama’s first term. Koonin is sceptical about the alarmist case, so much so that he calls for serious independent reviews of the IPCC’s forecasts and methodology, along with a close look at other scientists’ prognostications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Koonin

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.8071/full/

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.8071/full/

 

https://www.unz.com/freed/stephen-c-meyer-douglas-axe-chuck-darwin-and-me/

Fred Explains Scientists
“A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck [ a Jew in fact - Editor ]  called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.

This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.”

 

Thought Collective
A thought collective, a term originated in German as "Denkkollektiv" by the Polish and Israeli physician Ludwik Fleck, is a community of researchers who interact collectively towards the production or elaboration of knowledge using a shared framework of cultural customs and knowledge acquisition.^[1] In his 1935 book Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache; Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv, Fleck identified the scientific production of knowledge as primarily a social process that hinges upon prior discoveries and practices in a way that constrains and preconditions new ideas and concepts. He termed this shared collection of preexisting knowledge a "Denkstil" or thought style and formulated a comparative epistemology of science using these two ideas.