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Category: Science

  • Making Medical Decisions

    George Rebane [This introduction to modern medical decision making is intended as the first of a series of such essays on RR.  Subsequent pieces will cover simplifying nomograms (to avoid the arithmetic), personal utility (always subjective), and planning sequential diagnostics and treatments.  The aim here is to prepare the intelligent healthcare customer to communicate effectively…

  • Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award

    George Rebane The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that it has named Dr Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for 2011.  The announcement itself begins – NEW YORK, March 15, 2012—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University…

  • From Lysenko Loonies to Climate Change Clowns

    George Rebane The 27jan12 WSJ publishes a major piece ‘No Need to Panic About Global Warming’ signed by sixteen science and technology heavyweights.  From my perspective as a systems scientist, I long ago joined the once lonely voices that pointed out that the climate change alarmists (especially of the anthropogenic global warming stripe) were intellectually…

  • The Value of Stereotyping

    George Rebane Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full…

  • Science still says, ‘Creation occurred.’

    George Rebane The best brains in cosmology ranging from Stephen Hawking of Cambridge to Alan Guth of MIT have been trying to munge the equations and the data to come up with some/any kind of support for the proposition that the universe did not have a beginning. NewScientist.com reports in ‘Why physicists can’t avoid a…

  • ‘The Next Grand Minimum’ Launches

    George Rebane Russ Steele, Nevada County blogger extraordinaire, closed down his long running NC Media Watch blog.  He has moved his blogging enterprise to a new blog – 'The Next Grand Minimum' – that was launched today.  In this research and publishing effort he will focus on real climate change backed by science that is…

  • How Social Engineering (almost always) Fails

    George Rebane Big government’s (centrally controlled) social programs have a daunting history of failures that more often than not spill over to spread their hurt into other unintended areas.  An excellent example of this – ‘The State Against Blacks’ – is given by economist Walter Williams in the 22jan11 WSJ.  Today we have entered the epoch…

  • Singularity Signposts – Consciousness and Coprocessors and …

    George Rebane In 1976 Julian Jaynes, the late Princeton psychologist, developed in three volumes his groundbreaking theory of consciousness.  Combined between one set of covers in 1990, it was called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  In this mouthful Dr Jaynes presented a definition of consciousness from which people comprised…

  • God Gets to Stay

    George Rebane This week I finished reading The Grand Design by Drs Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.  I posted earlier on a review of their new book at ‘Evicting God – The Latest Attempt’ which generated an interesting comment thread.   Hawking and Mlodinow have a best seller on their hands (it’s already number one in…

  • Evicting God – The Latest Attempt (updated 18sep2010)

    George Rebane From multiple sources we hear that The Grand Design, the latest offering from Professors Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, will appear a few days from now on 7 September 2010.  This is an essay on their most current theory of the cosmos – we recall that cosmology is science in the large about…

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