- #71
Vanadium 50
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Education Advisor
2023 Award
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David Reeves said:Here is fake Fox news
Where does it say Fox News?
David Reeves said:Here is fake Fox news
Vanadium 50 said:Where does it say Fox News?
Rx7man said:There is nothing as manipulable than a statistic... On Canada's east coast in the 90's I believe it was, they were doing studies on fish populations and looking at different 'fishing holes'.. well, when a place had no fish anymore, it wasn't considered a fishing hole anymore and thus excluded from the data, completely skewing the results...
Then there are the unemployment statistics, where people who've been out of work for a year or are on welfare are no longer considered "Unemployed"...
And the same goes for climate change, For one I think it's such a complex phenomenon that we just CAN'T model it accurately and not impart personal opinion into it somewhere along the way.. Russia's scientists are apparently calling for a mini ice age over the next 50 years based on sunspot activity
Then don't try it.Rx7man said:I don't have the expertise to analyze the data,
Rx7man said:I'm not faulting statistics when they're used correctly, because yes it is just a tool.. it's when they're deliberately misused, misquoted and misinterpreted the problems come up.. Just like using a baseball bat to break kneecaps is a misuse of the tool. Look at the last election when one side was saying unemployment was ~5% while the other was saying 45%, and they were both right.. depending on which statistic you used.
I am pointing out other scientific opinions.. I don't have the expertise to analyze the data, or even know if everyone is working from the same dataset... Recently I've heard a lot about temperatures 20C above normal in the arctic... that sounds a little fishy.. was it for a day or a whole month? I know that in Alaska this winter they had some insanely cold temperatures of -50C... I was looking at the weather near Khabarovsk, Russia and it didn't look like it was warmer this winter than the last few winters.
It's amazing how many studies are misrepresented by the media. Many misunderstandings could be avoided by simply reading the abstract/discussion. Many times the claims being made about the study are not supported by the authors in the conclusion/discussion. Understanding the hierarchy of evidence is also important; placing a case study involving a handful of subjects on the same level as systematic reviews and meta-analyses of "RCTs with definitive results" can lead to mistaking a mere association (which requires further study) with a causative effect/mechanism.dkotschessaa said:BTW, when it comes to medical stuff, i find that I'm able to develop an opinion by reading a few studies about effectiveness, despite the fact that I don't have a medical background. Again, a small amount of quantitative literacy comes into play here. Was it tested? Was there a control group? Peer reviewed? Double blind? How big was the sample? I don't need to know the mechanics of the drug.. just "is there some probability this will work, and does it outweigh the potential complications?"
russ_watters said:This is from a division of the same government agency responsible for collecting, interpreting and disseminating climate data. Which begs the question: is the climate data/warming predictions we get filtered with the same bias?
None of that is completely true/relevant. There exists, in both cases, a necessary connection between the scientists/data and the rest of the government/public. The government collects, analyses, makes predictions from and disseminates weather and climate data not because they are randomly curious about them, but because it has been deemed in the public interest for the public to know and for the government and public to use the information to make policy/action decisions. In neither case are we provided all the details and models and in both cases we are provided the predictions to work from.ZapperZ said:The weather forecast was intended to the general public. It is a forecast/prediction based on the data, and can often change in the last minute.
Climate data are meant for professionals and scientists...
russ_watters said:None of that is completely true/relevant. There exists, in both cases, a necessary connection between the scientists/data and the rest of the government/public. The government collects, analyses, makes predictions from and disseminates weather and climate data not because they are randomly curious about them, but because it has been deemed in the public interest for the public to know and for the government and public to use the information to make policy/action decisions.
Ok...that's all fine, but I don't see how it relates to what we were discussing/what you quoted.ZapperZ said:There was a branch of the National Weather Service at BNL when I was there (it might still be there), and I have chatted with a couple of the scientists there. They will provide the raw data for research because that is part of the requirement for all public-funded work. This is no different than any other public-funded work. In fact, *I* am required to keep and store all experimental data as part of my DOE and NSF grants, and will have to provide them when requested.
I will also state that raw data without context are meaningless numbers. This is especially true in climate science, because certain measurements have more caveats than others. But one has to be well-versed in this field to know that.
russ_watters said:Ok...that's all fine, but I don't see how it relates to what we were discussing/what you quoted.
russ_watters said:I wasn't sure exactly where to put this one (also fits into the "March for Science" thread a bit), but it has been bugging me for a week:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_WINTER_WEATHER_FORECAST?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-03-14-17-17-34
For the un-initiated, a "Nor'easter" is a storm system unique to the northeastern US, where a cold front comes in from the north west and collides with warm, moist air coming up the coast. The collision of the air masses produces a severe and rapidly intensifying storm. In the summer they rival hurricanes and in the winter, they produce massive blizzards along the Washington-Boston corridor.
Because they involve a cold and a warm air mass, there is a potentially wide variation in impacts across the storm from east to west. In the east, you might get all rain and in the west it is all snow. There will be a gradient of each, with the center generally producing the most snow, along a swath 10-50 miles wide and up to several hundred miled long.
Last week's nor'easter was late for a snowstorm, which produced a forecasting problem. Early indications were that it would be a classinc winter nor'easter, almost entirely snow, and cutting straight through the population centers from Philly to Boston. But hours before the snow started (Monday morning), the models started showing the warm air from the east would win and produce mostly rain along the coasts and a snow/sleet mix further inland, only producing all snow much further inland. These models were correct. The National Weather Service held a meeting on Monday afternoon and decided against updating the forecasts, "out of extreme caution" (quote) and "...they didn't want to confuse the public." (AP paraphrase).
Wait, what? A coherent message is more important than the quest for accuracy?
ZapperZ said:There was a branch of the National Weather Service at BNL when I was there (it might still be there), and I have chatted with a couple of the scientists there. They will provide the raw data for research because that is part of the requirement for all public-funded work. This is no different than any other public-funded work. In fact, *I* am required to keep and store all experimental data as part of my DOE and NSF grants, and will have to provide them when requested.
I will also state that raw data without context are meaningless numbers. This is especially true in climate science, because certain measurements have more caveats than others. But one has to be well-versed in this field to know that.
Zz.
More detailed information is available, for example:Rx7man said:Recently I've heard a lot about temperatures 20C above normal in the arctic... that sounds a little fishy.. was it for a day or a whole month? I know that in Alaska this winter they had some insanely cold temperatures of -50C... I was looking at the weather near Khabarovsk, Russia and it didn't look like it was warmer this winter than the last few winters.
A team of physicists at Washington State University have created a fluid that ignores Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion. The fluid has "negative mass." When it's pushed it accelerates backwards.
ZapperZ said:I will call this out as another example of "Fake News". Here, the report on the UPI website went further than what the press release stated, and in the process, made a critical error.
This news article is reporting an interesting experimental result that created objects with "negative effective mass" in a superfluid. From what I can tell, the writer is basing the report not on the original paper, but rather from the press release out of Washington State University.
The error comes in at the very beginning of the news article:
I took a look at the WSU press release and in the paper itself. Nowhere in there was any claim made that this phenomenon "... ignores Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion..." In fact, it HAS to obey the second law for it to have such a direction of acceleration.
The 2nd Law is basically F = ma.
1. For a positive mass, it means that F and a are in the same direction.
2. For a negative mass, then the 2nd law is F = -|m|a. It means that F and a are colinear, but in the opposite direction. In other words, it is the 2nd law that actually tells you that for a negative mass, if you push on it away from you, it will accelerates towards you. This is exactly OBEYING the 2nd law, not ignoring it! In fact, if the negative mass actually moves away from you the way we normally think ordinary mass should, it is only then that this mass is ignoring the 2nd Law!
The claim that this experiment "ignores the 2nd Law" is Fake Science Reporting. It is introduced to possibly make the story sexier and in the process, made a very amateurish mistake.
BTW, negative effective mass isn't new. This is common in condensed matter/solid state physics, because we have positive holes in solids, and on how we define effective mass (the curvature of the dispersion).
Zz.
Written that way, it is wrong in special relativity and we found a counterexample decades ago - while F=ma has a natural equivalent with 4-vectors.Dr. Courtney said:The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.
mfb said:Objects with negative mass do resist acceleration. You have to apply a force to accelerate them, and acceleration will be proportional to the force. It just goes in the opposite direction.
F=ma, Newton's second law, is valid.Written that way, it is wrong in special relativity and we found a counterexample decades ago - while F=ma has a natural equivalent with 4-vectors.
Why should we restrict a general formula like F=ma, that does work with negative masses, to positive masses, and then claim the more general formula would have been violated just because the artificial restriction does not work any more?
Dr. Courtney said:I'm not trying to make the case that we should. But allowing for negative masses seems like a generalization that contradicts the original understanding:
The new understanding IS new physics, just as generalizing Newton's universal law of gravitation to allow for repulsive gravitational forces would be new physics and a contradiction of our current understanding of Newton's universal law of gravitation, even though the math could all be accounted for by reckoning one of the masses as negative.
ZapperZ said:The 2nd law equation is still valid even for negative mass. Nothing that has been discussed so far has pointed to that. It is not being "ignored" as claimed by the news article.
Zz.
Dr. Courtney said:Yes, the equation is still valid. But I've always taught physics and preferred a public understanding of physics as physical meaning beyond the equations.
Are you saying that a repulsive gravitational force would not violate Newton's universal law of gravitation, because the same equation would still work with negative mass?
I would disagree with that, because Newton's universal law of gravitation includes the idea that all gravitational forces are attractive. Reporting a repulsive gravitational force as a violation of Newton's universal law of gravitation would not be "Fake News." At worst, it might be represent a different opinion on a question of semantics. "Fake News" in regard to science reporting is not a different opinion on semantics, it is a skewed view (bad science) that is fundamentally wrong from any perspective.
ZapperZ said:The news article over-reached and stated something incorrect, especially when considering that the 2nd law with negative mass stated exactly what described, not different. This is the definition of an accurate description. It is not the definition of "ignoring".
Zz.
Dr. Courtney said:Your disagreement is with many physics textbooks, not with the news article or with me. The news article and I are consistent with Newton's second law as it is commonly articulated in textbooks, and the new finding of negative mass DOES CONTRADICT the common textbook explanation. Quoting Wilson, Buffa, and Lou:
The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on it and inversely proportional to its mass. The direction of the acceleration is in the direction of the applied net force.
So, is the "Fake News" wrong, or are all the textbooks wrong that say "The direction of the acceleration is in the direction of the applied net force"?
Physics is always more than just the equations. Retaining the equations but changing the understanding of how they apply to reality IS a change in understanding of the underlying physical laws. That is REAL NEWS.
How would such a situation differ from, for example, not knowing about repulsion in magnetism and later discovering it?Dr. Courtney said:Are you saying that a repulsive gravitational force would not violate Newton's universal law of gravitation, because the same equation would still work with negative mass?
I would disagree with that, because Newton's universal law of gravitation includes the idea that all gravitational forces are attractive.
Well isn't that one of the core purposes of a scientific theory? To expand knowledge by making predictions beyond what current experiments show? It's fine to assume mass always must be positive based on a lot of experiments. But it is even better to challenge that assumption by following the math wherever it leads. In that way, some scientists turn over a rock that others just assumed had nothing under it.Yes, the equation is still valid. But I've always taught physics and preferred a public understanding of physics as physical meaning beyond the equations.
This is by no means to say that the result is uninteresting! Indeed, it’s pretty cool that this fluid self-limits its expansion thanks to long-range correlations which come from quantum effects. I’ll even admit that thinking of the behavior as if the fluid had a negative effective mass may be a useful interpretation. But that still doesn’t mean physicists have actually created negative mass.
russ_watters said:I wasn't sure exactly where to put this one (also fits into the "March for Science" thread a bit), but it has been bugging me for a week:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_WINTER_WEATHER_FORECAST?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-03-14-17-17-34
For the un-initiated, a "Nor'easter" is a storm system unique to the northeastern US, where a cold front comes in from the north west and collides with warm, moist air coming up the coast. The collision of the air masses produces a severe and rapidly intensifying storm. In the summer they rival hurricanes and in the winter, they produce massive blizzards along the Washington-Boston corridor.
Because they involve a cold and a warm air mass, there is a potentially wide variation in impacts across the storm from east to west. In the east, you might get all rain and in the west it is all snow. There will be a gradient of each, with the center generally producing the most snow, along a swath 10-50 miles wide and up to several hundred miled long.
Last week's nor'easter was late for a snowstorm, which produced a forecasting problem. Early indications were that it would be a classinc winter nor'easter, almost entirely snow, and cutting straight through the population centers from Philly to Boston. But hours before the snow started (Monday morning), the models started showing the warm air from the east would win and produce mostly rain along the coasts and a snow/sleet mix further inland, only producing all snow much further inland. These models were correct. The National Weather Service held a meeting on Monday afternoon and decided against updating the forecasts, "out of extreme caution" (quote) and "...they didn't want to confuse the public." (AP paraphrase).
Wait, what? A coherent message is more important than the quest for accuracy?
So along the east coast, we went to bed last Monday night expecting to wake up to a foot+ of snow and actually finding totals less than half of the low-end of the forecast (NYC predicted: 18-24", actual: 7"). Scientists can claim somewhat of a win in that the mass of precipitation was actually accurate, it was just denser than predicted, but that difference matters a lot in how you respond to the storm. Particularly when eastern Delaware and NJ saw mostly rain instead of a foot of snow! You can't un-cancel school if it doesn't snow. As for me, I did notice something was off when I woke up, but I was sicklazyand stayed home from work on Tuesday though many of my colleagues ended up going in.
This is from a division of the same government agency responsible for collecting, interpreting and disseminating climate data. Which begs the question: is the climate data/warming predictions we get filtered with the same bias?
Vanadium 50 said:It's a thin line