The person who can come up with that solution and employ it is in line for a Nobel prize.

I wouldn't bet on Trump ever receiving that award.

Theoretically, science works great. However, as has already been noted, in the real world in certain fields, the pressure to publish something "substantial" combined with the inability to get grants for certain experiments because they aren't "trendy" right now causes scientists to self-limit the kinds of research they undertake, which is not at all great for increasing human knowledge.

Another problem is the "expert opinion" problem--when someone with little reputation in the field finds something that directly contradicts the "experts" in the field, they often face ridicule. The most famous recent case of this was 2011 Nobel Prize winner Dan Shechtman, who discovered a new type of crystal structure that was theoretically impossible in 1982 and was roundly criticized and ridiculed for it until a separate group of researchers many years later actually replicated his experiment and realized he had been right all along. This web page lists several more examples of scientists whose breakthrough research was ignored because it didn't match the "expert consensus" of the period.

Finally, in the humanities at least, one of the biggest problems in research that uses a quantitative approach (i.e. statistics) is that researchers apply a statistical method to their data, such a as a t-test, without actually demonstrating that whatever being studied follows a normal distribution (i.e bell curve). Many statistical tests are only accurate if what is being studied is normally distributed, yet I've seen a fair share of papers published in respected journals that apply these tests to objects of study that are quite unlikely to be normally distributed, which makes their claims of being "statistically significant" quite suspect.

There are other statistical methods (non-parametric) that you can use on data that is not normally distributed but generally speaking a test of significance on data taken from a normally distributed pool is going to be more reliable. As is noted in this video, the reason these kinds of mistakes slip through into the peer-reviewed journals is that sometimes the reviewers are not nearly as well-trained in statistical analysis as they are in other methodologies.

It seems really strange from an outside perspective. It isn't all that long ago - at least in my memory - when certain types of American were almost celebrating that they were willing to torture and maim people if they 'got their answers'. Even if some of those people were innocent, it was an acceptable price to pay.

When Ed Snowden came out and told us that our governments were spying on us, trawling through our data and tracking our entire history online and in reality through surveillance cameras. The majority of America was against Snowden (in all the polls I've seen) - in any other day he would have been given the Nobel peace prize and celebrated as an all-time hero that stood up to impossible odds just to give the human race full disclosure on their 'freedom'. That's the stuff of legend, the stuff that people should be talking about in 1000 years time like we talk about Genghis Khan or something. Instead he was treated like a traitor and forced to live in exile in Russia because it was the only country that wouldn't hand him over to the torturing, controlling, law-breaking bastards he'd just made to look very stupid..... Gee, I wonder why he didn't want to face "criminal proceedings"? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear - except if you cross the wrong people?

Not too long ago freedom WAS an acceptable sacrifice for security.

When a lunatic got hold of an automatic rifle, killed 50 people and injured another 50, the prevailing argument seems to be "Hey, hey, let's not over react here, we can't sacrifice our freedom because of one terrorist act."

The only difference in this situation is that it isn't about "other people's" freedom and "my security" any more. It is about "my" freedom and "other people's" security.

You probably weren't one of those people, but I think it's fair to preface my comment with that contradiction.

I accept you have a decent point in this case; people shouldn't lose their freedom because the FBI made a mistake. But that's not the question being asked, let's talk about the general case rather than this specific one. The question is does legislation exist that will make mass shootings less common in the US? And I think the answer is yes, but I also think that culture is the biggest factor, not just access to guns.

As an example of what I mean - what if there were legislation that limited his ability to get hold of the weapon, registered that he had expressed an interest with the FBI who could then investigate based on his history? And maybe some other legislation could make it harder in general for him to just go and borrow one of his friends', or steal one from a local lax firing range, or whatever other illegal means exist to get hold of one.... perhaps because there were less in circulation, or those that were in circulation were more stringently secured?

At the end of the day it might not stop him getting hold of one, but it might make it harder and he might have second thoughts or make a mistake and be caught if it were harder. Hell, at least then the families of the dead would be able to say that a CRIME was committed when this fucking lunatic who had been under investigation was allowed to get access to a weapon that could so easily kill or maim a hundred people.

ive never been to the middle east, but for various reasons had friends from several different countries in and around the area. i think the answer is simple: muslims, like christians, jews, mormons are not all alike (ok not sure about the mormons!), and even if you have a st augustine or a ghazali saying thats how it should be there will always be those who disagree, vocally or quiet like. Hes right that the culture changed, and he's right that its tragic that arab scientists are basically the butt of a joke, but i think its difficult to ommit that the peak of arab science also coincided with a peak in their power and resources. How many african nobel prizes are there in that period? or from indigenous peoples? Im not saying they are stupid, just that its difficult to get an award for cutting edge top notch science when you are at a serious deficit in resources.

I'll cover IUD's first. While there is some evidence that the older style copper ParaGard might have a slightly increase in preventing a fertilized egg from implanting, the evidence for the Mirena. Here are two medical journals documenting as such:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4018277
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/13625180903519885
If those are too much reading, they are summarized in http://videosift.com/video/Myths-About-IUDs

Remember Google gives personalized search results. No two people get the same results, even when signed out of Google... More details at http://videosift.com/video/There-are-no-regular-results-on-Google-anymore

I'd also agree that there are many things America gets right. Overall it's a good country.

And I think I started out by pointing out it isn't about guns, or just about guns.

Now I'm not sure what you mean assigning attributes to the right. I was pointing out policies that are consistent with the conservative right, Republican platform positions that are not pro-life.

The Death Penalty. This is a typically Republican strong stance position. And has been at various times part of the party's official platform. The Democrat party official position supports the death penalty too, after a DNA testing and post-conviction review. The point isn't wither or not the Death Penalty is right or wrong, I'd personally argue it's wrong, it's the claim of being pro-life while supporting the death penalty. There can be no way to reconcile those two positions.

One needs only to look at how Bush and the present day regime of Republicans in Washington think of handling issues in the Middle East to see what that they support a strong military and an interventionist doctrine (http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Republican_Party_War_+_Peace.htm). One of the key factors of the Bush Doctrine is preemptive strikes. While one normally wouldn't cite Wikipedia, I'll let their page on the Bush Doctrine and their references clear things up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Doctrine. Heck Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize largely just because he wasn't Bush... sadly he did little to lower US involvement in the Middle East, a situation we should have left alone ages ago. Again the Democrats aren't as peace loving as they should be, and generally the most peace loving people in Congress tend to be Libertarians (who object more to the expense of war than war itself, and love pointing out how the war in Iraq from 2001 to 2011 cost more than NASA's entire history to that point, even after adjusting for inflation (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)) and Libertarian leaning Republicans like Ron Paul, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/). Again, war isn't pro-life, it is perhaps one of the most anti-life things one can support short of supporting murder itself.

It's also Republicans, aka the right, that are trying to undo the Affordable Health Care Act, a program that ironically enough is modeled after the ones they tried to pass twice under Bush Sr and once under Clinton as to oppose Democrat plans to push for a Single Payer system. Prior to the passing of Obamacare, the US was spending nearly twice as much on healthcare as a percentage of it's GDP than the next nation, and getting only the 37th best results . Just listen to the crowd at the September 12 2008 Republican debate that chant over and over "let him die" as a solution to a guy who needs medical care but elected not to buy private insurance. These same people are the one's who claim to be pro-life. Affordable health care should be a right, as it is in every civilized nation but the US. Obamacare is far from ideal, but much better than the previous policy of only those with good jobs could afford health care everyone else, die or go bankrupt, driving the costs of healthcare up more. One can't say they are pro-life and oppose affordable healthcare, including for services you don't support such as IUDs (it doesn't matter that I object to our overly huge military budget that is much bigger than the next several nations combined, so it shouldn't matter if some medical services such as IUDs are supported), as quality of life matters as much as being alive.

Related to guns however is the Republican stance on stand your ground. Watch Fox News and how they defend the use of guns, or how mass shootings would be avoided if people were carrying concealed weapons and could stop the shooters... again escalating things to a death penalty. Now in the case of a mass shooter, ideally you want to take them down alive, but if death is the only option, then I personally don't object. However stand your ground typically expands to home invasion, where criminals typically aren't looking kill, just rob the place. Here they defend the homeowner's right to shoot to kill (I've been in firearm safety classes, generally the aim is to aim for the center of mass, which will likely result in death, but the odds of making a shot at the legs to impede the crooks is very low, so if you shoot you have to assume it is to kill). This position is contrary to the pro-life stance. All life is equal... which could get into a whole other argument about how they don't value immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, people who just want to improve their lives by moving to what they hope is a better country that will allow for a better opportunity for them and their families, but the Republicans are fighting hard to stop them from improving their lives here just because an accident of birth made them born in another country than the US... heck just look at the way Republicans lined the buses of refugee children fleeing war and gang torn areas of Latin America and they shouted at the children.... children... to go home that nobody wanted them. That isn't a pro-life statement, to tell a child that nobody wants them. The pro-life position would be to want to nurture and protect the children fleeing a dangerous area... We should be moving to a world without borders, as that is the pro-life position, to realize we are all humans, and that we all must share this world, and that we should do all we can to protect one another and this world and all that inhabits it (except mosquitoes, roaches, most parasites, etc... lol)

As to high poverty rates, the Republican policy of trickle down economics helps drive that. Helps spread the ever growing income and wealth gaps in the US. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the US population (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/). Now true, some could argue it isn't trickle down economic that is causing the growing wealth and income gaps, but the correlation is very strong, and one is hard pressed to find any other causative points beyond the rich paying less and less to their workers while taking more and more for themselves while the government eases the tax burden on the rich more and more.

Overall I think it's clear that the people who vote Republican because they are "pro-life" are hypocrites given the party's positions in key issues that aren't pro-life. I'm sure many, especially those on the right would disagree. They'd argue the death penalty is needed to discourage others from killing and therefore protects life, and that preemptive strikes ala the Bush Doctrine keep another 9/11 from happening (although the counter to that is fairly easily that we make more extremist the more we use those strikes). So one's mileage may very. For me, I think they are hypocritical saying they are pro-life if they don't value that life as much as their own after they are born.

and.. now we know , the kid is a troll , His dad is an activist and probably controlled the kid, or the kid is just a good learner (no one said he isn't smart) and trolled on his own.
Obama is inviting the Muslim troll to the white house, maybe Barrack wants another Nobel prize .
"fool me once .. can't get fooled again"

Your video, The Worst Nobel Prize Ever Awarded, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Straight from the Guardian's current article on the most recent shipwreck in the Med:

The deaths are likely to renew calls from campaigners for Europe to reinstate full-scale search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Last October, the EU opted not to replace the Italian-run Operation Mare Nostrum, which saved about 100,000 lives last year, amid fears that it was encouraging smugglers and migrants to organise more trips to Europe.

What they forgot to mention: Italy would have continued Mare Nostrum if the rest of this bloody EU had bothered to pitch in with a few bucks. The total bill was €114 million per year. Petty cash, by any measure.

The replacement, Frontex's Operation Triton, doesn't even have a mandate to save shipwrecked folks, just to keep them away from EU soil.

European values worthy of yet another Nobel Peace Price, I'd say...

Not quite, he (Donald L. Unger) won an Ig Nobel prize, a satirical version of the Nobel prize, given to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". Basically anything that sounds way too silly but can still yield useful knowledge.

While silly, it's still (usually) all based on proper scientific method, and there's even an example of a man who first won the Ig Nobel prize in physics in 2000 (for levitating a frog with magnets), and then later went to win the Nobel prize in physics together with Konstantin Novoselov for their work on graphene. =)

Not quite "Nobel", but.. http://tech.mit.edu/V129/N41/ignobels.html

I believe someone won a Nobel prize for spending several decades of his life cracking the knuckles of one hand and just that one hand every day to see if there are really any negative effects from knuckle-cracking.

In his case there weren't.

Uh, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for discovering the photoelectic effect, and was not the first to propose the idea of wave-particle duality nature of light...

Please enlighten me as to your credentials as a paleontologist. I assume you must have some, given that you feel qualified that your expertise is such as to dismiss millions of man hours of experimental results that support the theory of evolution.

In fact, you should really publish your findings in a peer-reviewed journal. If they are correct (and not, as I suspect, complete bollocks), it will be a revelation! There's almost certainly a Nobel prize in it for you.

If I have to be an expert to dismiss the evidence, why don't you also have to be an expert to accept the evidence? Are you not then at this time simply parroting things to me that you don't really understand, not being a paleontologist yourself?

Sweet. You've accepted the evidence for evolution. "Macroevolution" is just lots of "microevolution". Why are we discussing this?

Why do you have macro and micro evolution in quotations? Do you realize they are scientific terms?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microevolution

They aren't actually the same thing; one has scientific evidence to back it up, the other does not. It does not logically follow that because microevolution takes place, macroevolution also must take place. It is the secular creation story which presupposes it, but isn't supported by the evidence.

You've abandoned science at this point. I could equally say that speciation is caused by invisible pink unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (praise his noodly appendages), but none of it is testable and therefore, it's non-scientific.

Besides, the existing theory explains everything pretty well.

You could say that, but why should it be taken seriously? The flying spaghetti monster, or the flying teapot, have no explanatory power. There are good reasons, philosophically and otherwise, to believe an all powerful being created this Universe. The idea of whether the Universe was designed is not a ridiculous question, and I think it is pretty odd that anyone would rule that explanation out apriori.

That is quite simply untrue. It is lies, falsehood, fiction, fabrication, myth, deceit, distortion and misinformation. In short, it's bullshit.

There is no credible evidence for a young earth. Zero, zip, nada.

Again, have you ever studied the subject? If you have, what evidences have you looked at?

In my study of the evidence from the fossil record, I found more evidence that contradicted the assertions of Darwinian evolution than confirmed it.

Please enlighten me as to your credentials as a paleontologist. I assume you must have some, given that you feel qualified that your expertise is such as to dismiss millions of man hours of experimental results that support the theory of evolution.

In fact, you should really publish your findings in a peer-reviewed journal. If they are correct (and not, as I suspect, complete bollocks), it will be a revelation! There's almost certainly a Nobel prize in it for you.

The evidence for micro evolution is overwhelming.

Sweet. You've accepted the evidence for evolution. "Macroevolution" is just lots of "microevolution". Why are we discussing this?

I purport to say that the idea of a Creator has better explanatory power for what we see than the current scientific theories for origins, not because of what science cannot explain, but for what science has explained.

You've abandoned science at this point. I could equally say that speciation is caused by invisible pink unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (praise his noodly appendages), but none of it is testable and therefore, it's non-scientific.

Besides, the existing theory explains everything pretty well.

Have you ever studied the scientific proofs for both sides? There are some "clocks" which point that way, and there are other clocks that point the other way. The clocks that point to the old Earth have many flaws, and there are simply more evidences that point to a young Earth.

That is quite simply untrue. It is lies, falsehood, fiction, fabrication, myth, deceit, distortion and misinformation. In short, it's bullshit.

There is no credible evidence for a young earth. Zero, zip, nada.

At this point, you would have to either monumentally stupid or willfully ignorant to believe in it.

I think it's very important to recognize that there is more than 1 camp in this that has completely abandoned science. Sure there are plenty denying that things are warming, or that our activity contributes to warming. Don't spend so much time decrying them that you miss the people demanding the science clearly indicates impending catastrophic disaster that only emission reductions can save us from.

Also take note that we are just beginning to move into the measuring the 'real' part of the issue now by satellite for the last few decades. Previously temperature was the only proxy measure for showing increasing energy trapped in the atmosphere. With satellite records though we have been able to directly measure radiation coming in and going out and observe the real trends. The IPCC that shared Al Gore's nobel prize on climate change has this to say on the satellite measured energy budget:
Satellite records of top of the atmosphere radiation fluxes have
been substantially extended since AR4, and it is unlikely that
significant trends exist in global and tropical radiation budgets
since 2000.

It's important to read that closely and correctly. There has been an overall net influx of radiation, as in more energy coming in than going out. The RATE of that increase is the flux they are referring to. The IPCC is stating that since 2000, it is unlikely that the rate of energy being trapped in our atmosphere has been changing.

All that means is that it's not time to panic. If you look at the latest IPCC temperature projections you'll similarly see that the projections are much less scary for 2100 than the first IPCC projections from 1990. Better news still for us, the instrumental record thus far looks to be tracking the lowend of the IPCC projections.

All that is to say that science is agreed things are warming. It is agreed we are contributing. It also agreed that the severity isn't some doom and gloom we are all gonna die in 2050 scenario either.