Archaeologica.org

The simple answer to that FT is that it is not taught, and with a generation of non readers who get all their info through the mass media these things get lost.
Man made GW is the BIG lie, and as Herr Goebels pointed out the bigger the lie the easier it is to sell it.
When I was at school a degree was needed to be a teacher, now, despite Blair saying otherwise we have 'assistants' teaching in class rooms whose qualifications wouldn't get them onto a training course in industry.
They know nothing and teach nothing!

Yep... same here: first year students-to-be-teachers (av. 18 yrs) fail eighth grade levels on arithmatic, Dutch, history, and geography.

Whatever is the world coming to . . .

Some time ago I purchased some diodes from a shop RS, 6 in total at 10 pence each, as I stood there with the money in my hand the young chap serving whipped out a calculater to add up the cost!
I asked him what he would do if the batteries went flat!

One problem i see often with the internet is it is too information heavy i end up in endless debates with internet self taught people quite often.
It is hard to explain to such self taught folks that yes there are problems within academia however the basic knowledge picked up with that system just isnt available online.
It is frustrating to attempt to explain to someone who went from point A to point Z without the inbetween learning mainly because when for example i talk to my fellow researchers we dont have to stop and explain the stuff we learnt in class 101.
Making a pretty web site up and typing well are useful attributes but neither one of these things adds to the content of a site one of my lecturers told me my work is first rate but i have crappy syntax lol i told him maybe so but the day i write something amazing if i write it in chinese i bet you learn chinese to read it he laughed and agreed.
I think it the old tale of learning to walk before attempting to run it frustrating and slow but in the end it works.

Imo it is plain, simple, basic courtesy to your reader to make an effort to use proper grammar, syntax, capitalisation and interpunction. They make reading and comprehension easier and clearer.
Failing to make that effort says a lot.

The above title said with a midlands accent.
You missed the point Rokcet only by a million miles though fairly close for you actuallylol.
The point is wrap it up in lovely syntax pretty pictures etc if it has no worthwhile content a skunk still a skunk even if wrapped in mink.
Or just for you rokcet i type slow ok ? If it pretty and got nice pictures it maybe just a cartoon lol.

'nuff said.

Just to satisfy my curiosity why did Charlie spit the dummy????

That is perfectly true FT but not limited to your discipline. I served a craft apprenticeship whilst also studying for a degree, my social life was non-existant!
BUT, engineering is not something you know all the answers too simply because of that training period, things change!
Archaeology appears to be stuffed full of 'experts' who act as though they know all the answers when the hall's doors slam behind them and that nothing will change in the future.
This attitude is not unfortunately limited to this discipline, just look at GW, and the Web, for all its short comings, is still the best window on the world currently available to us.
It is certainly better in getting at the details than the page 7 blurb in the national press!
The first thing a reporter does is to check the story with the expert of the day, who frequently is still living 10 yrs behind the real world and will simply trot out the 'conventional' truism, such as 'no human could survive such speed as the flesh will flayed from their very bodies!'
(40 mph on a steam loco.) etc etc etc!

Digit wrote:
'no human could survive such speed as the flesh will flayed from their very bodies!'
(40 mph on a steam loco.) etc etc etc!

40 mph?
You guys lived very dangerously!
LOL!
Overhere the conventional wisdom (in 1830) was that people would suffocate when the steam train attained speeds of over 22 mph!

In the engineering game RS there are numerous examples of statements like that one that have been made in all seriousness by 'experts' who should have known better.
When the first atomic bomb test was due Enrico Fermi was running a book on whether the detonation would destroy the atmosphere and kill us all.
The scientists involved so underestimated the power of the explosive that their recording instruments were placed to close to the device and were destroyed.
The calculation of the explosive power was finally accomplished by Fermi throwing his note book into the air and noting how far the blast carried it.
Frightening aren't they?

Al Gore has egg on his face in today's Sunday Telegraph.
My computer skills aren't upto posting the article but for someone whose skills are, Google Sunday Telegraph and open the home page and where it says 'Search' type 'Christopher Booker' and read the article for your selves, or post it please.

Per Digits request:

This upsets the whole apple cart.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ook119.xml




Christopher Booker's notebook

By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 4:00am BST 20/08/2007

Inconveniently, the 1930s were the hottest decade
Recent days have brought to light four more highly "inconvenient truths" for our global warming alarmists. The first caused acute embarrassment to Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), exposing a serious flaw in its record of US surface temperatures since 1880.

The error was so glaring that, on August 7, GISS had to post revised figures which show, instead of temperatures reaching their highest level in the past decade, that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the 10 warmest years since 1880, it turns out that four were in the 1930s and only three in the past decade.

The significance of this is that James Hansen, the head of GISS, has been Al Gore's closest scientific ally for nearly 20 years in promoting the global warming scare. The revised figures relate only to temperatures in North America but the fact that the pre-eminent scientific champion of the orthodoxy has been promoting erroneous data has considerable implications.

The expert responsible for spotting GISS's error was Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst who four years ago scored the greatest coup in the history of this debate by demolishing the notorious "hockey stick" - the graph which purported to show temperatures flat-lining for centuries until they suddenly began an exponential rise in the late 20th century.

The "hockey stick" was adopted as the supreme icon of the global warming lobby, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which reproduced it no fewer than five times in its 2001 report. Since McIntyre exposed the mass of basic computer errors on which it was based, the IPCC in its most recent report quietly dropped it.

The new GISS graph, conceding that the last decade may not have seen the hottest years of the past century, follows the latest satellite figures from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showing that in recent years global temperatures have not continued to rise (as orthodox CO2 warming theory would suggest) but have flattened out at a level significantly lower than in 1998.


The other "inconvenient truths" all relate to the astronomic cost of measures now being proposed to tackle our supposed "warming".

One was a study reported in Science which finds that the increasing production of biofuels to combat climate change will release between two and nine times more CO2 into the atmosphere in the next 30 years than generating the same energy from fossil fuels. To meet the EU's target of substituting 10 per cent of transport fuel with biofuel by 2020 would take up 40 per cent of all the EU's farmland, unless much of it was imported, at devastating cost to the world's rainforests and wildlife.

The second was a leaked memorandum in which officials of the DTI ( now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) briefed ministers on how to explain to the EU's energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, that the UK will not be able to comply with a European Council decision last March that the EU must derive 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. The officials have calculated that this could cost UK electricity users alone an additional £22 billion a year, nearly £1,000 a year for every household. This is 2 per cent of GDP, and double Sir Nicholas Stern's estimate for the entire cost of halting global warming. The officials predicted that the target is not remotely achievable anyway.

A final awkward finding comes from the world's leading expert on the financial costs of tackling global warming. Prof William Nordhaus, of Yale, has just published calculations showing that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the scale proposed by Gore might possibly save $12 trillion (£12,000bn) - but that their cost would be nearly three times as much, $34 trillion, more than half the world's GDP. Even for those who still believe the likes of Gore and Hansen, it hardly sounds like the bargain of the century.

Ta! I must do some more computer practise.