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I have a daughter in grad school at Yale. More conservative than me (I'm a bleeding heart conservative). Yale has focused too much on SAT scores and PC considerations in their students and their research and teaching staff.

Some of her profs don't know whether W. was involved in the 9-11 attack, and others still can't tie their own shoes.

The Hidden Pope is an interesting book about the lives of Karol Wojtyla and Jerzy Kluger from their childhood in pre-WWII Poland through their collaboration as Pope John Paul II and Kluger. This collaboration helped facilitate the Vatican's official recognition of Israel in 1994.

Before the howling about how grand this whole scenario of "private" health care begins, remember that Alberta tried to allow this EXACT scenario several years ago, and was severely chastized by the LSM and the FedGov.

Yes, but....(from the article)
"The federal government and [Prime Minister] Paul Martin will never hit on Quebec in the way that he will hit on Alberta and British Columbia."

I guess we'll find out if that's true.

Patients from as far away as Vancouver Island are attracted to the city's blossoming private health care network. "The province that's going to lead the change in the Canadian health system is Quebec, because it's the only province that has the autonomy to do it," said Brian Day, a Vancouver orthopedic surgeon and proponent of private health care.

"The federal government and [Prime Minister] Paul Martin will never hit on Quebec in the way that he will hit on Alberta and British Columbia."

A study by The Gazette, along with interviews with doctors and health ministry officials across Canada, show Montreal is clearly more advanced in private medicine than any other city. Among the examples uncovered:

- Ninety doctors -- most of them practising in Montreal -- have opted out of medicare, far more than all the other provinces combined. Many are plastic surgeons who conduct uninsured cosmetic operations, but a growing number are orthopedic surgeons, emergency specialists, ophthalmologists, and general practitioners who bill patients for procedures that are medically necessary and normally covered under medicare.

- Montreal has a dozen private medical-imaging clinics, far more than any other city in the country. Such is the city's reputation that Ontario patients regularly travel to Montreal to pay $800 for a magnetic resonance imaging scan. Ontario, by law, does not permit such clinics.

- Quietly, without fanfare, the Westmount Square Surgical Centre opened in August, charging $2,000 to repair shoulder and knee injuries. Despite no advertising campaign, the centre is doing a brisk business, performing 15 to 20 paid procedures a week. The centre's orthopedic surgeons have not opted out of medicare, and therefore, straddle both the public and private systems.

- Next door, MD Specialists charge patients up to $600 for a colonoscopy and the surgical removal of pre-cancerous polyps.

- Montreal is home to probably the country's only truly private orthopedic hospital, where patients pay up to $12,000 for a hip or knee replacement -- surgery requiring overnight stays and a 10-day convalescence.

The Duval Orthopedic Clinic is a hospital on two sites - in north-end Montreal, where Dr. Nicolas Duval performs the operations at a private plastic-surgery centre, and in Laval, where patients recover in a former nursing home.

Dr. Duval has opted out of medicare and his hospital receives no government funding. In contrast, the Cambie Surgery Centre in Vancouver, where Dr. Day works, carries out partial knee replacements, but the surgeons there still bill medicare.

- Montreal is also home to Canada's first private emergency clinic. Since opening in October, the MD Plus Medical Clinic has tended to nearly 500 paying customers. About 30% of the cases are emergencies -- from patients complaining of chest pain to a woman with flesh-eating disease. © National Post 2005

Infant mortality rate: total: 6.63 deaths/1,000 live births male: 7.31 deaths/1,000 live births female: 5.91 deaths/1,000 live births (2004 est.)

Life expectancy at birth: total population: 77.43 years male: 74.63 years female: 80.36 years (2004 est.)

Remind me again about the desperate straits of the British NHS? The statistics can be found at this well known Commie organization.

How about providing us a link to those stats?

My Grandmother was 1/2 Cherokee and my Grandfather was full Cherokee...Maybe I can become a Cherokee and get some of that casino money?

Do the math. One little, two little, three little Indians (outa four). Go for it.

As H.W. Fowler wrote in his "Modern English Usage":

"gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine g[ender], meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder."

What edition would that have been? See sex and gender

OTOH, see Humpty Dumpty. "When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean—nothing more and nothing less."

To: rhema Use of the word gender is for Latin languages and plants--not several extra, imagined sexes. Linguistic activism to use it to refer to the two sexes of men and women is anti-family. 10 posted on 02/07/2005 3:57:20 PM PST by familyop ("Let us try" sounds better, don't you think? "Essayons" is so...Latin.)

See gender, and sex. OTOH, "When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean—nothing more and nothing less." Humpty Dumpty.

The USB-IDE adapters sound pretty interesting. And thanks for reorienting this thread.

For anyone interested in the ongoing debates about "climate science", junkscience.com is the place to go.

Mann used normalization.
He made his data conform to his own opinion.

Muller did not criticize Mann for normalizing the data sets, but for using an incorrect normalization procedure.

In the paragraph preceeding the the one you quote back to me Muller goes to some length not to accuse Mann of deliberate falsification (or so it seems to me)

Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place.

I interpret this as a hint to Mann to let it go.

Later in the article he is more direct: it's time to move on.

A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one--if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution.

We know that McIntyre and McKitrick were turned down by Nature (as I recall), that they did an end run around Nature by posting all the info on their own web site (a part of which you link to me in your second post), and that now their work has been accepted for publication in a major peer reviewed journal. And that takes us back to where we started with Terence Corcoran: Let science debate begin

The first publicity I saw about the Canadians work was in MIT's Technology Review. Was this an independent report or one based on these articles, if you know?

The Technology Review article was dated October 15, 2004. The two National Post articles by Marcel Crok seem to have been written this year. (The Jan 27 and 28 dates are the dates of appearance in The National Post)

Yearly temperature graphs:

Top one is Mann's bogus one. Bottom one is the corrected one, using correct statistical analysis.

Thanks for the graphs.

McIntyre & McKitrick found that the Mann et al. methodology included a data pre-processing step, ...

Muller, in his Technology Review article, gives a brief description of PCA and of Mann's flawed procedure that yielded the hockey stick.

.... McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place.

In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)

The net result: the “principal component” will have a hockey stick shape even if most of the data do not.

Perhaps, the 'hockey stick' has even more meaning, the global warming claims are all pucked-up.

A bun is the lowest form of bread. ;-)

I don’t follow this too closely, but it looks like you two do.

I haven't followed the issues closely for a few years, since it seemed that politics was likely to continue to trump science.

Can I ask, are you familiar with any good studies that question if long term CO2 increases are even possible?

So wouldn’t oxygen be created that brings CO2 levels back down again? Do you think that this balance is adequately addressed in global warming/climate change models?

I can't answer either question. But you might check out www.co2science.org for those specific questions, and www.junkscience.com and www.john-daly.com for more general information. John Daly died last year, and his site, though still maintained, is not as active as before. Not sure if all his work is still available there.

Ah. Science. My favorite topic. I hope you relish it as much as I.

Part 1. Breaking the Hockey Stick
Part 2. The lone Gaspe cedar

The Hockey Stick. john-daly.com
Long article. Scroll down about 1/5 of the way if you've never seen the Hockey Stick (Fig.4).

Please delete the post if it isn't acceptable.

I was working in SF about 10 years ago when a cyclist with a handgun was accosted by a couple of muggers in Golden Gate Pak. He shot one of them, and the other was charged with murder. Cops just shrugged about the cyclist, who disappeared. Times change.

Comforting thought for Warren, I suppose, but incorrect. Every version of evolution of which I'm aware predicts that no fossil bones of a modern human will ever be discovered by digging into rock or sediment layers that are previously untouched by human activity and are older than, say, 50 million years. Should such a thing happen (and should it be shown that no hoax was involved), all current versions of evolution would immediately be falsified. And that's just one of many reasons why evolution (in any of its flavors) is a scientific theory and not an ideological (i.e., refutation-proof) belief system.

wow