jadero

I don't think that the uniqueness of fingerprints is in doubt, but their analysis and use might not be up to snuff. I've read numerous articles over the last couple of decades that call into question at least the statistical underpinnings of what it means to declare a match.

But law enforcement in general seems to be filled with pseudoscience, from profiling and interview techniques to body language and lie detection.

There is a lot of good discussion here, but I'd like to toss in something else. Look around at the society we live in. Corporations don't care about health and well-being. Insurance companies don't care about health and well-being. Political leaders don't care about health and well-being. Pundits and think tanks don't care about health and well-being.

Caring, volunteering, and donation all require the right frame of mind. Between the stress of daily survival and the messages we get from the people with the most power and the loudest voices, it surprises me that anyone is still donating.

I also prefer thematic instances, but try to find appropriate communities within those instances. Just because it's coming from NASA, doesn't make it astronomy.

Depending on which aspects of the project you think are important and want to discuss there are a few communities here that might be relevant.

Earth Science includes environment, and environmental impact seems to be the most popular talking point so far.

Noise and other forms of pollution are public health issues and there is a local community for that, although I'm not sure it's really a great fit there.

Physics might be another choice due to the fact that a lot of physics is going into the engineering of something that reduces sonic booms.

Or maybe you just need to find the right thematic instance. For example, I'm registered on slrpnk for my climate, energy efficiency, and anarchism fixes.

On the grounds that a big and valuable chunk of territory that is currently being shared shows signs of being unilaterally fenced off. I'm not suggesting that Canada has a better claim, but it's important for procedures to be followed.

Edit: I wanted to get my wording right, so I went back to the article:

The legality of all this is a bit hazy, Treadwell explains in a post for the Wilson Center. To make the definition official, the US has to submit data and reports to the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). However, the US has not ratified UNCLOS due to complex political disagreements (the agreement has been ratified by 168 states and the European Union).

This leaves some uncertainty around how the proposition will be accepted under international law.

I hope Canada at least pretends to push back.

There is a toggle in the admin settings to enable/disable downvotes, and several instances do disable them.

I didn't realize that.

Strictly as a user, from what I can tell, there doesn't seem to be anything that resembles rampant abuse of downvotes. I'm glad that is what is visible at the admin level.

Carry on, you're doing great work as a community builder/manager.

I've long had concerns with up/down votes and like/dislike, especially the down/dislike. Nothing major, and I have no real solutions.

My concerns are only to do with the ambiguity. There are so many different reasons why someone might vote one way or the other or even just not vote at all that I think it's kind of weird that compiling the votes into a score seems to mostly work pretty good. That ambiguity means that it's difficult to derive meaning from any individual vote, which I think argues in favour of keeping it somewhat private. Just because a non-admin can jump through hoops to get someone's voting history, doesn't mean it should be deliberately made public.

As for keeping down votes, I'd be reluctant to mess with a system that works as well as it seems to. Personally, I very rarely downvote, as even that is more engagement than I'm willing to provide. In fact, one of the things I like about the client I use, Thunder, is that I have to long press a comment in order to vote. That little bit of friction means that I vote less often. When I vote, it's because I really mean whatever I intend the vote to mean.

I'm more interested in the magical appearance of four states in "southeast" Canada than yet another solar eclipse.

Did someone forget to vet the AI's output?

My first thought was "wait, people still think it's psychosomatic?" Then I read the article and realized that they were not referring to people in general, but to actual doctors!

It never fails to amaze -- and annoy! -- me how often simple curiosity and wide-ranging reading leaves me better informed than many actual professionals. It's almost like they got their education and training, then stopped engaging.

Anyway, rant over. I'm glad there are people out there taking things seriously and I hope you continue to meet with success in your treatment.

Too bad about the paywall. I did a web search, picked a few likely looking sites, and linked what I thought was the best one.

Your rebuttal seems sound on the face of it.

I would point out that people and organizations commonly promote things that seem like they should be counterproductive.

That smoking causes cancer is not purely statistical correlation. This article gives a good overview and is aimed at a general audience. It has a section acknowledging that we do not yet have all of details nailed down, but my reading of that is that it's more about "how exactly do carcinogens work" rather than leaving us with only a pure statistical correlation.

It's also worth noting that, as powerful as statistics can be, most of the best science uses initial statistical correlation as a clue that there is something worth investigating, not as an end in itself. Sometimes, of course, statistics is all there is, which is why so many things have to be investigated using many carefully designed, carefully controlled trials. When the people publishing these papers start proposing and investigating mechanisms or designing and conducting such trials, they will get much more positive attention from the scientific community.

In the absence of that, my bet is that there is some combination of ulterior motives, misunderstandings, and unaccounted confounding factors.

I used to get occasional work helping farm kids pick rocks. We don't seem to have built any fences in Saskatchewan, preferring instead to just pile them up or bury them.

Never underestimate what happens when thousands of individual people do one thing over and over again, rock by rock, step by step, day in and day out, year after year. Whether it's building fences, depleting resources, or putting waste into the environment, we always manage to more collectively than we can imagine as individuals.