You have hit upon a key distinction, unfortunately the author is intentionally muddling these two issues of 1)scientific data is missing or being withheld and 2) global warming or the skepticism thereof.
"the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared"
"If there are no data, there’s no science."
There are plenty of mundane explainations for why scientists aren't providing data to people like Warwick Hughes. Perhaps Jones thought Hughes was a crank. Perhaps assembling the data was a lot of work and Jones didn't feel like going through all that work for someone he thought was just trying to raise trouble. Perhaps there were legal issues to providing the data publicly (as the article notes) that hadn't been resolved yet.
Of course Jones was wrong, all scientists should make every effort to provide data to anyone and everyone who wants it, even people they think are 'cranks'. In fact, Jones' reluctance to provide data to climate skeptics only fuels the fire of skepticism. But for the author to argue that this single act casts any serious doubt on the science of global warming is giving this incident far more importance than it deserves.
Teach for America and Teach First (the British equivalent) are actually doing a great job at addressing this problem. They are able to recruit teachers from top universities to work in some of the worst schools, precisely by focussing on the difficulties and challenges of the job.
Unfortunately, unions strongly oppose Teach for America: "Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. ... Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124061253951954349.html
How many studies have there been of the actual teaching competence (as contrasted with the higher education credentials) of Teach for America teachers? Harvard's admission selection is stringent enough that I could well believe that ANY Harvard graduate in any major can determine the area of a rectangle. But, in general, how many of the graduates of Ivy League universities who go into Teach for America are the graduates who had a strong math background at university? There are some very non-quantitative majors at some of those universities, after all.
Note that I think anyone in Teach for America is probably generally smarter than a random graduate of a teacher training college, but I'm still not sure if every Teach for America teacher without exception has a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics.
The problem isn't getting the bandwidth to upload the content, the problem is getting access to content in the first place. In order to download PDFs of these papers, you need to have a subscription through your school/institution. The publishers will notice very quickly if someone starts downloading an entire journal's worth of articles.
There is something about the silver-blue glow of a Mac and it's zippy lines that seems to borrow from the hallucinogenic experience. Certainly, I've never seen while on halluginogens anything as garish, discordant, and downright ugly as the Windows primary-color scheme.
Of course, there's also the experience of seeing the world turned upside down and inside out that, in small doses, is probably good encouragement for creativity.
I used to use webelements.com, which has the same information but is becoming more and more difficult to navigate with all the ads and subsections. I need a site that serves the same purpose as glancing up at the periodic table on my wall...except that I don't have a periodic table on my wall...so the lighting-fastness of it is great.
Your periodic table links to Wikipedia, which I just realized today has wonderful information on the elements. At first I assumed this was kind of a problem business-wise...you're linking to a competitor with much better information. Then I realized what a great tool this is as an interface for the wikipedia information on the elements. So, I've replaced the Webelements link in my bookmark bar with the Touchspin periodic table, which I will use as an interface to link to the wikipedia pages for more detailed information.
A few small points:
-When I minimized the window with the elemental information in it, I couldn't ever figure out how to make it bigger again.
-Some of the data is missing (% crustal abundance for Zn and many other elements).
-No isotopic data which is what I am usually looking for.
Major props, in advance, to whomever can manage a high-quality recording of the talks. The podcasts are a great service for those of us who can't make it in person!
Yes, in fact web advertising has proved to be deep enough to support all of Google!
Of course there is a limit to the total amount of advertising dollars available and many half-good companies may not be good enough to support themselves with advertising, but there is no question that a good company can do very well on advertising alone.
Don't make too much fun unless you know the numbers. For all I know they might be generating huge profits. What makes you think their valuation is too high?
Max Levchin's name is worth a lot of money, though, so that might have been a major factor in the high valuation. Do you think they deserve half-a-billion valuation while running on the back of Facebook? I don't know their numbers, but 500 million dollars is a lot of money.
It's not overvalued at all. They could probably pull in $50M-$100M a year in revenue right now with their traffic, extrapolating a bit from the revenues we're getting from our single application.
I'm pretty surprised by how many hackers here are completely missing this boat. IMHO it would be worth it to do a little more research before dismissing the entire space - this is going to play a larger and larger role in the future of the internet IMO.
Yeah, the potential for success is huge, but you're operating on the back of FaceBook and you have to learn a new markup language. The latter problem is probably the reason so many hackers are "missing the boat."
But look at facebook right now; its arguably worse with the apps. Companies like Slide hijack your news feed and spam your friends. That's uncool and it puts me off.
A lot of those spamming tactics are how apps get so much exposure, but I don't see Facebook allowing that kind of stuff for very much longer.
My point is, relying on Facebook as your provider is pretty risky. I wish you continued luck, though.
I'm not a fan of the spammy stuff either. Those are tactical methods and apps which rely on those tactics at the expense of actual utility quickly decay. The apps that actually stay at the top are there because there's a demand for them.
Relying on Facebook is pretty risky - but so is doing a startup. The bigger picture is that they (and I) believe that applications built on SOME social platform are going to be the future of web applications. We're barely seeing the hint of that future today, and making a bet early could pay off big or we could all be wrong.
Wow, that's a huge assumption, that the applications of the future will be delivered though Facebook.
That would be an interesting and depressing future, with companies like facebook dictating the rules of the internet. I certainly hope it doesn't come to that.
I've always thought that news sites like digg would become the eqivalent of the Web OS, the gateway to the internet. I can see Bacebook filling that space easily though, now that I think about it. The difference there is that digg is pointing users to other places on the internet, while facebook in that case actually BECOMES the internet for those people.
It'll certainly be interesting to see how it all pans out in 10 years.
Slide is on MySpace too, and they probably make more money there than on Facebook. It's easy for us YC news hackers to forget about MySpace because we probably all use Facebook but MySpace is where most users are.
Let's also not forget that all other social networks are going to open up, creating a massive opportunity for Slide that probably far exceeds what Slide makes on Facebook. $500 mil may not be such a high valuation when you think about it.
So lets assume that the costs for a successful web company are a small fraction of revenue (maybe 20%?). That's profits of 100 million a year for last-year's-Facebook.
So if this company makes 1/10th the profits of Facebook, it will take 50 years to make enough profits to cover it's current valuation. Of course, if this company is as profitable as last-year's-Facebook then their total profits will exceed their valuation after 5 years.
So I guess the question then is whether social-networking apps have the potential to generate similar revenues to the big social networking sites.
Facebook was anticipating on the order of $30 million in profit, as I recall (serving out billions of pageviews is never cheap). Feel free to multiply all of your time estimates by three.
I've been frustrated lately at humorous comments and the rapid rate at which they are upmodded. A quick bit of humour can be great at cutting to the heart of the issue, but it often seems like humour comes at the expense of over-simplification. Apologies for taking it out on you though!
I really wish someone made wise estimates of their current revenue/profit numbers or at least provide the thought process that went behind coming up with $500M+ valuation.
Laptops provide people the means to educate themselves and communicate with each other in new ways.
Education and communication are among the best tools available to address problems such as fighting government corruption and clarifying land-ownership rights.
Come on, the laptops are not being given people for whom access to food, water, and protection from the elements is a problem. The point is to provide the educated working poor in 2nd/3rd world countries access to tools so that they can improve their lives.
And for these people, access to education and communication is very, very important. To take one example: farmers in rural India have a very hard time getting a fair price for their crops because they can't access price information before harvest, they basically have to just hop on a bus to the nearest big village and take whatever price is offered by the middleman that day. Poor communication leads to an inefficient economy.
If you don't think that laptops are the most efficient way to help these people out, what are you proposing instead?
Sure. But once you can survive for the next couple of days - getting market prices without actually physically walking to market town - gets suprisingly useful.
OK, this is more of an explanation for the success of cell phones than laptops.
To protect our valued customers from the dastardly practice of "Front Running", we engage in exactly this practice but do not refer to it as "Front Running" when we do it.
"the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared" "If there are no data, there’s no science."
There are plenty of mundane explainations for why scientists aren't providing data to people like Warwick Hughes. Perhaps Jones thought Hughes was a crank. Perhaps assembling the data was a lot of work and Jones didn't feel like going through all that work for someone he thought was just trying to raise trouble. Perhaps there were legal issues to providing the data publicly (as the article notes) that hadn't been resolved yet.
Of course Jones was wrong, all scientists should make every effort to provide data to anyone and everyone who wants it, even people they think are 'cranks'. In fact, Jones' reluctance to provide data to climate skeptics only fuels the fire of skepticism. But for the author to argue that this single act casts any serious doubt on the science of global warming is giving this incident far more importance than it deserves.