Slashdot Mirror

https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/03/04...

Looks like the editors did not even look at it and just "aggregated" the content from some random news site that also was no capable of summarizing the hart of the matter in a subject line.

The age of "racist drug policy" is long gone;

False.

the urge to ban substances is based on authoritarianism and dogooderism.

And it disproportionately targets blacks and other minorities (but especially blacks.)

Accusing people of racism where none exists weakens your case and makes you look like a fool.

Pretending racism doesn't exist where it totally does exist weakens your case and makes you look like a white supremacist.

Yes the Operation Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and the Mighty Wurlitzer.
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/4...

You need to read up on Kate Wagner: https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2...

The C Programming Language - Kernighan and Ritchie: http://www.cprogramming.com/bo...

Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/2981...

What you describe in your last paragraph is "Stockholm Syndrome." Retarded, but I guess employers WANT employees who feel they are hostages to their jobs.

Not my definition. It is the definition used in chemistry, AND material science.

No silicon to be found in "metallic glass" for instance.

http://engineering.jhu.edu/mat...

The requirement that it be silica glass to be called "glass" is a fabrication made entirely by yourself. I used the term correctly. A glass is any solid substance lacking an orderly molecular arrangement. That's why metals can be glasses, as noted above.

However, powershell *puroports* to have security features like execution policies and signing, so it draws more scrutiny.

Both terrible "security" policies. What would a signature possibly mean to me as a user if I don't know you? With or without a signature, my choice is still: either I run this script I need to my job, or I don't and I can't do my job (or it gets much, much harder). So basically PowerShell's security is no better than any other shell that's come before it; it projects a false sense of security, and like UAC before it, it just gets in your way.

So given the fact that getting a job done is king, and running scripts or programs written by potentially malicious people is the only reasonable way to do your job, then running arbitrary scripts must be made safe. The means to achieve this is the Principle of Least Authority (POLA), and POLA environments can and have been done before, even within commodity POSIX and Windows systems.

The earliest secure POSIX shell that I recall was Plash. Now we also have Shill (requires a kernel module) and the Capsicum shell (also requires kernel modules). Windows can be made POLA secure out of the box as was demonstrated with Polaris.

It's just amazing that we fail to learn the mistakes of the past even when solutions are available.

They're going to set up their own floating kingdom

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/593369/summary

The phrase "Eurocentric knowledges" often, in this context, means "Eurocentric ways of knowing things" i.e. science.

It specifically complains that scientists are classifying, measuring, and mapping at all because this is supposedly a "masculine" way of doing science. Furthermore, I don't hate (most) feminists; I think the movement currently is spreading some misinformation and is misguided, but most of them have good intentions.

If you show a group of scientists a particular chemical reaction the physicist will try to measure the pressure wave, the chemist will try to figure out the chemical reaction that caused the phenomena, the biologist will freak out about the poor tree leveled by said phenomena, etc.

In other words:
Scientist studying different fields measure different shit, most of them actually measure shit that is unmeasurable (for example, it is actually impossible to know the average weight of a rat, you can kill a bunch of them and extrapolate from the average, but you can't actually know that number). Others deal with things that be described in words, but not actually measured.

Feminists go a little overboard with the unmeasurable rhetoric, but scientists, particularly social scientists, really need non-mathematical models of data because humans are fucking complicated. Linguistics, for example, is frequently written semi-mathematically but it isn't actually math. That doesn't mean the linguistically model of Proto-Indo-European hasn't produced testable hypotheses that turned out to be true.

Don't get me wrong, at some point everything in science actually has to be brought into the standard, highly measured, statistically proven, format. But if you're trying to anticipate how climate change will affect a bunch of Afghani herders whose idea of literacy is learning to recite the Koran from heart, and whose idea of numeracy is being able to calculate complex fractions in your head really fast; the data they give you is not gonna start in a science-friendly format.

Sure, I agree with that. However, that isn't what the paper is complaining about.

I said the article points out the author's intentions; it does this by quoting him in an interview he gave.

Reread it.

To quote the piece from reason.com on the press release: "I'm sure Carey is well-intentioned, but if his goal was to put a human face on climate change, he failed."

The rest of the article is quoting the abstract and then calling it ridiculous without engaging any of the ideas in it.

Don't get me wrong, at some point everything in science actually has to be brought into the standard, highly measured, statistically proven, format. But if you're trying to anticipate how climate change will affect a bunch of Afghani herders whose idea of literacy is learning to recite the Koran from heart, and whose idea of numeracy is being able to calculate complex fractions in your head really fast; the data they give you is not gonna start in a science-friendly format.

Sure, I agree with that. However, that isn't what the paper is complaining about.

I said the article points out the author's intentions; it does this by quoting him in an interview he gave.

My problem with them is actually precisely what you accuse me of: they have an ideological preconception that anyone using terminology they associate with their political opponents by definition has no point to make.

And this is a fine point in general; I don't think it's valid in this situation, but in general I agree.

I was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day for 30 years, and I was also reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan's books, which is where this stuff about bad life choices and low expectations came from.

I don't believe there's any evidence for it. Social scientists like Kathryn Edin http://soc.jhu.edu/directory/k... who have studied the poor -- by living with them, following them for years, and examining their actual budgets and spending, have seen that the poor make pretty good life choices, given their limited options. For example, girls in black communities who get pregnant as teenagers usually get jobs and do pretty well, contrary to myth.

According to what I read in the news sections of the Wall Street Journal -- as opposed to the editorial page -- low-income people actually work long hours, but when you run the numbers, they don't make enough to survive, and a family crisis like a sickness or the loss of a car can throw them into the shelter system.

There were studies of the results of Clinton's welfare reforms, and it turned out that when the economy was good and they could get jobs, they did get jobs, and survived. When the economy turned down, and even middle-class people were getting laid off, the poor were devastated.

I guarantee you Moynihan never spent a month with a poor black family and looked at their budget.

The "broadband" here simply refers to Internet access. Nobody provides cheap "narrowband."

Today, you need Internet access to live a normal life. You need the Internet to apply for Medicaid and Obamacare. You need the Internet to find out about and apply for jobs. Schools contact parents on the Internet. Kids can't do elementary school assignments without the Internet. Public libraries have been cut back from 90 hours a week to 30 hours a week in most low-income areas here in New York, because we're supposed to do our reading on the Internet.

There are people on Slashdot who say that we should shut down the post office -- they don't need it because they use the Internet.

Amen to this.

I am a "homeschooling" parent. This does NOT mean my children are taught solely by myself and/or my wife, and it does NOT mean they are taught solely at home. It DOES mean that we have personally selected and combined a number of different educational opportunties for them. These include (but are not limited to):

Enrolling in college coursework while still in high school. Example: Harvard Math 23b. The majority of students in this class are admitted Harvard freshmen, but it is also available in an open enrollment capacity through Extension for anyone of any age willing to pay tuition. I like that peer group for "socialization" a whole lot better than the kids at my local public high school.

Hiring the chair of the language department at a local private high school to come to our home to provide personalized one-on-one instruction in classical Greek and Latin.

Hiring multiple music teachers for piano, guitar, theory, and composition.

Participation in team sports at the local health club.

Engaging a flight instructor for our son to earn a private pilot's rating.

Successfully completing qualifying flights for TARC

The Internet (Obviously). Taking advantage of online educational programs such as AOPS and edX and Open Courseware

Stocking our home with thousands of quality print books and plenty of subscriptions to lots of quality print journals (e.g. Economist, Nature, Lapham's Quarterly, IEEE publications, etc.)

Buying a whole bunch of the Great Courses

Joining CTY

Plenty of socratic dialogue with Mom & Dad. And plenty of unstructured time.

Flexibility to travel (including abroad) during the school year.

Concrete advice for OP: First, read The Underground History of American Education. Make of it what you will --- just include it (or criticisms of it) as a data point. Next, decide if any your local school choices (either public or private) are awesome. Do they approach the quality of Exeter or Boston Latin or Bronx Science? Understand the concept of a feeder school and that this concept can start at the elementary level. Got great public or private school options you like and can afford? Go for it. Not so much? Then go ahead and homeschool kindergarten. I guarantee you that your drop-out wife is capable of teaching your child to read and anything else they are supposed to learn in kindergarten. I guarantee you that unless you are completely negligent that your child will (if you choose) be able to enter first grade after a year of homeschooling and do fine. And I guarantee you that after a year you will be in a much better position to understand if more homeschooling is the right choice.

What works is the "tinkerer's blessing" (opposite of the curse of natural resources). Chronicled in Yuzo Takahashi's history of Japanese radio technicians https://muse.jhu.edu/login?aut... , development is best done through normal trade with geeks and technicians. South Korea, Singapore, Guangdong, Taiwan, etc. all developed from refurbishing and reverse engineering used technology. Benjamin Franklin was engaged in buying used surplus printing machines and textile machines for reassembly in the USA, Technicians, nerds, repairers, fixers tend to be smart quiet truthful people, and when economies grow from talented knock off (Shanzai in Chinese) to outsourced contracting to ODM, you wind up with Terry Gou, Simon Lin, and Lee Byung-chul.

What has tragically happened in Africa and India is that do gooders and celebrities like Annie Leonard have found a recipe of white guilt and created a bogus "e-waste" crisis which puts African geeks and nerds in prison. FreeHurricaneBenson. Forums like Slashdot, where repair and tinkerers gather, have been important places to assess the ewaste hoax. http://retroworks.blogspot.com... I lived in Africa in the mid 1980s and have been finding win-win trade with display devices for almost two decades, and see Africans getting increasingly furious at the people making up fake stats, taking pictures of kids at dumps, and making money without sharing. Search Heather Agyepong's "The Gaze on Agbogbloshie", or read Emmanuel Nyaletey's "My Reaction to The E-Waste Tragedy" http://www.isri.org/news-publi... Emmanuel is an electronics repair technician who grew up a few blocks from Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the scrapyard in a city of 4 million people (Ghana). currently on scholarship for coding at Georgia Tech. I'll put my money on geeks like Emmanuel and the free market over anti-trade rantists and celebrity AID show Bob Geldoffs all day long.

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

Bill died from cancer of the pancreas that spread to his liver, pancreatic cancer is strongly associated with smoking, true, but 80% of victims are above the age of 60, note: What Causes Pancreatic Cancer? Perhaps he just drew a bad set of cards, a bit of irony which would be very apropos.

His routine contrasting the fates of Fixx and Yul Brynner is, hands down, the funniest bit of stand up comedy I've ever heard.

So just who the heck is Informational Security? http://muse.jhu.edu/about/cont...

So they're at John Hopkins? And what would be their motivations?

When considering something like this report, it's useful to understand its provenance. Esp on such a politically-charged issue.

The article in the 2nd link (1st link only says "abstract" in the link) is a joke. Well, the people who wrote it are serious, but it's a joke. They honestly cited The Onion as a source for one of their points without mentioning that The Onion is a satirical site. Do they even know that? They offer no alternative. They only say that the whole drone strike idea isn't working.

Ert, ert, shill alert! You just redlined my shillmeter there. What you're doing is a common misdirection tactic that is almost exclusive used by shills: if a source illustrates an otherwise well-founded argument with a light-hearted aside, an opposing shill will never fail to rip the light-hearted aside out of context, claim it's the only source of data the argument is built on, and thereby dismiss the whole article, including all of its other sources. Shame until the 7th generation upon the moderators who modded this turd up.

The real point is to kill bad guys. (...) Killing some of them may convince some people who haven't joined that joining them may be a really bad idea. There's value in that.

Oh please grow up. The real world is not about "good guys" and "bad guys". In fact, bad guys don't actually exist, and killing those who you think are bad only makes them stronger.

"Honey Encryption" to Bamboozle Attackers with Fake Secrets

Tom Simonite writes at MIT Technology Review that security researcher Ari Juels says that trickery is the missing component from the cryptography protecting sensitive data and proposes a new encryption system with a devious streak. It gives encrypted data an additional layer of protection by serving up fake data in response to every incorrect guess of the password or encryption key. If the attacker does eventually guess correctly, the real data should be lost amongst the crowd of spoof data. The new approach could be valuable given how frequently large encrypted stashes of sensitive data fall into the hands of criminals. Some 150 million usernames and passwords were taken from Adobe servers in October 2013, for example. If an attacker uses software to make 10,000 attempts to decrypt a credit card number, for example, they would get back 10,000 different fake credit card numbers. "Each decryption is going to look plausible," says Juels. "The attacker has no way to distinguish a priori which is correct." Juels previously worked with Ron Rivest, the "R" in RSA, to develop a system called Honey Words to protect password databases by also stuffing them with false passwords. Juels says that by now enough password dumps have leaked online to make it possible to create fakes that accurately mimic collections of real passwords and is currently working on creating the fake password vault generator needed for Honey Encryption to be used to protect password managers. This generator will draw on data from a small collection of leaked password manager vaults, several large collections of leaked passwords, and a model of real-world password use built into a powerful password cracker. "Honeywords and honey-encryption represent some of the first steps toward the principled use of decoys, a time-honored and increasingly important defense in a world of frequent, sophisticated, and damaging security breaches."

I could see this being useful for a high-school variation on the Johns Hopkins undergraduate spaghetti bridge contest.
http://www.jhu.edu/virtlab/spa...

Yes this is pre-secondary education, but these kids could make a bridge of popsicle sticks and elmers - they get the fundamentals.

They should be given a budget of "plastic weight" for a makerbot fabricated bridge. This would add things like "dispense speed" and such to the overall bridge, but the manufacturing would be consistent across all bridges. It would also allow something a spaghetti bridge contest could not allow: measurement of uncertainty by replication. You could exactly replicate a bridge and determine not only a single sample of its performance but its mean and variance.

I think statistical design of experiments is amazingly accessible - I could have understood it in 3rd grade - but it is not taught there. It is the (THE) fundamental course for science ... all of science. Nobody is teaching it to third graders and they should be. A maker-space in a public school, especially accessible to science teachers - would be highly valuable for hands-on practice in something like statistical design of experiments.

Ideas like "central tendency" and "spreading tendency" are accessible to a kid with a slingshot. If they can shoot a slingshot they can understand the idea. If they can be made to practice the idea early, that can be very empowering for STEM careers later.

Yes, I am commenting on my comment. I just really am inspired by the utility of this idea.

The vascular part I am guessing / noting / observing.. it's a ,thing I noted a long time ago is all.

  The rest of it is information readily available . The general topic goes by the name of neural plasticity which is broken down into functional and structural .

It's not the thing I research specifically so I am not loaded down with bookmarks for you but I know all about it from undergrad

For people with no neuroscience background there's books like The Brain That Changes Itself and of course it's a big area of research- pulled from the web without much effort:

http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/Neurosciences/articles/Response%20of%20the%20Brain%20to%20Enrichment/

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/10/3019.full.pdf

http://psyserv06.psy.sbg.ac.at:5916/fetch/PDF/21906988.pdf

http://www.medicaldaily.com/talk-therapy-reverses-biological-structural-brain-changes-ptsd-patients-264229

Some notes on one methodology:

http://dbm.neuro.uni-jena.de/pdf-files/May-TICS11.pdf

Aside from that, what exactly do you think phenomena like PTSD are? Purely disembodied psychological issues? If you've were or have ever repeatedly sustained hard study, you'd notice that your whole "self" changes in response to your efforts. You're smarter, your experience of everyday life is richer etc etc. This goes on as long as you're willing to inflict a good measure of discomfort on yourself.

By the same token, leaving your studies for a time then coming back is an extraordinarily punishing affair. Along with feelings of inadequacy and bewilderment when faced with the same material you left even a few short weeks ago, there's a sense of awe at your own former self's output and level of functioning.

Like the song says:

When you're up / looks like a long ways down
When you're down / looks like a long ways up

Cheers

I think the most interesting thought in the article was about the author's observation of contempt between modern managers (in the example in the publishing business) and the engineers who actually create and manage systems.

I know why this is: A vice president of a staffing firm is in my social circle. A group of us were talking about a website idea. The VP and some quasi technical managers assured me that the solution was commoditized - already done before, available off the shelf as components. Nothing new, just need to get qualified people and equipment to plug and play. Very straightforward.

So, while that is technically true... it is an utterly different and vastly more difficult matter to be able to identify the right people and create an environment where they can obtain the right equipment and room to maneuver. So, while the CTO of Google might be able to snap his fingers and create the website in a few weeks, a staffing company doesn't have access to that specific elite experience, or that development environment.

Managers want to look at us - programmers, software engineers - as totally fungible, mere factory robots. Identical units which can quickly be obtained off the shelf and who can then implement a solution as long as it's kind of similar to any existing solution. HOWEVER - we're more like doctors and hospitals, where, despite having the same title, the variation in ability and intelligence and tools is quite high. Think about the medical stories you read about where the person goes through doctor after doctor trying to cure a malady, until they find the right doctor. Or where a person has a rare malady and serendipitously finds a doctor researching this issue and obtains a cure. I think this dynamic exists in all professions but it's quite emphasized in programming.

So, that's why there might be contempt - both sides really don't understand what they're dealing with. Managers looking at people who inexplicably can't just "do it" - they look at programmers like fungible factory robots (I don't say workers because even unskilled labor has variations in ability) turning bolts to put together pre-existing solutions. And programmers thrown into hidebound, designed-to-thwart-change development environments while trying to learn new concepts and put together novel solutions in a designed-to-fail environment.
 

There's a tremendous amount of research that has been done on this very question. I refer you to Pascarella and Terinzini's 2005 book: How College Affects Students. At 848 pages, it comprehensively covers studies on every imaginable aspect of the college experience, summarizing how it affects students (it's not just a catchy title).

The short summary? College matters. And not just STEM degrees, either.

Here's a link to more information about the book. You can find it in your local library, too.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_college_student_development/v047/47.5davis.html

I wanted to validate the claims that Gates is guilty. Gates related money is actually limiting the health of people in nations the West considers poor. If Bill Gates really wanted to save the lives of people in poverty he would agree that patents don't matter for medicine in many situations. It's a myth that progress in medicine depends on putting patents before people. We must allow generic and patent free drugs to reach more people, and it would not cut into the massive profits of the drug company stocks held by the Gates Foundation.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/06/mother-jones-daily-briefing-0?page=3
>> see the reporting by John Litchfield of the London Independent 2003
Litchfield quotes Doctors without borders and notes the lack of affordable generics

>> Read reporter Greg Palast
"let me let you in on a little secret about Bill and Melinda Gates so-called "Foundation." Gate's demi-trillionaire status is based on a nasty little monopoly-protecting trade treaty called "TRIPS" - the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organization. TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him a monopoly that the Robber Barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4103.htm

"The Bush Administration has also prevented a positive resolution to one crucial issue left unresolved at Doha. Currently, TRIPS allows countries to produce generic drugs through compulsory licensing, but requires that such drugs be used predominantly for the country's domestic market. That means that countries cannot export generic products thus produced - even to countries where there are no patents"
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/vi/node/285

As an English intellectual property and antitrust lawyer I read the piece by David Resnik and Kenneth De Ville (2002) with both interest and surprise. It is startling to suggest that a country with the democratic credentials of the United States should, as a matter of public policy and indeed on apparently "moral" grounds, prefer private monopoly rights to the lives and welfare of its citizens.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ajb/summary/v002/2.3smith.html

By pouring most contributions into the fight against such high-profile killers as AIDS, Gates grantees have increased the demand for specially trained, higher-paid clinicians, diverting staff from basic care. The resulting staff shortages have abandoned many children of AIDS survivors to more common killers: birth sepsis, diarrhea and asphyxia.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gates16dec16,0,3743924.story

http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html

JHU has an online program for exactly the use cae you're describing: http://ep.jhu.edu/

Decent program, can get the whole degree online, and it's obviously a well known institute.

The API has two padding modes for RSA, PKCS#1v1.5 and OAEP. OAEP is provably secure. That is, if the underlying scheme (RSA) is a secure public key cipher, then RSA combined with OAEP is a semantically secure encryption scheme that is resistant to chosen-plaintext attacks. On the other hand, not only is PKCS#1v1.5 not provably secure, it has been known for years to be vulnerable to real world attacks.

Most of the time when you see people using it today it is for backwards compatibility, but in this case they are designing a brand new API. Why not go with the one which we know to be secure instead of encouraging the use of a dangerously vulnerable scheme?

How did he even get access to pancreatic cancer urine samples?

Jack Andraka is a high school research intern at The Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland. The lab of Anirban Maitra, Associate Professor of Pathology and Oncology. Four students honored at INBT research symposium [NanoBioTechnology]

A MathMovesU Middle School Scholarship winner, Jack Andraka of Crownsville, Md., rode his way to a $1,000 campership courtesy of Raytheon to camp Awesome Math, where he can hone his problem-solving skills with students from around the world. Jack wrote about his love of mountain biking for Raytheon's MathMovesU Middle School Scholarship and Grant Program, which honors students and teachers who are passionate about science, technology, engineering and math.

Jack Andraka: Math and Mountain Biking Create Eureka Moment

I-SWEEEP 2010 Special Awards [Certificate of Achievement and Office of Naval Research Medallion]

Heh, I was actually a "substitute counselor" at Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth for a couple weeks about 15 years ago... It was more of an academic camp but that seems to be exactly what the asker is looking for. Also it's quite selective, but hopefully that works in your favor. I would readily admit without shame that some of those middle-school-aged kids were way smarter than my ivy-league-college-aged ass.

The self-paced math class I was tutoring was admittedly kind of silly, but it was a good format to allow all the students to proceed as fast as they individually could, while the instructional team would go around and help explain and provide motivation when necessary to keep the kids progressing. Once in a while we'd present a challenge or puzzle for the group. My dorm roommate was one of the CS instructors, and he would spend his evenings hacking away at some obscure vulnerabilities in the Linux TCP/IP stack.

Anyway, my substitute self excluded, I was certainly amazed by the quality of both the instructional counselors and students in the CTY program, it was certainly an exceptional summer school for geniuses camp program, should your kid be stimulated by that kind of challenge and good company.

Oblig link: http://cty.jhu.edu/

Odd, you mean Johns Hopkins ?! http://www.jhu.edu/

If you want to do just one course for three weeks, find out if you're eligible for CTY, which does do an international talent search, though you may be too late for Summer 2012

If you want to do just one course for three weeks, find out if you're eligible for CTY, which does do an international talent search, though you may be too late for Summer 2012

Checking #6 at the second link, they're clearly using Fortran. After seeing "Xtr" used to condense "Extra", I was surprised to see "idays" and "nweeks" instead of old-timer "idys" and "iwks" in the subroutine. As a Fortran snob, I hope the poor use of indentation and lack of whitespace is simply a result of the conversion to HTML.

I clicked through TFA to the website about the calendar. Apparently the most important feature (at least, the only one mentioned on the homepage) is the fact that the calendar meets biblical requirements.

If that's the way they feel, their credibility is zero. No need to look any further...

There have been many calendar-reform systems proposed, and "leap-weeks" are a common solution. Wikipedia has an article on leap week calendars and lists five advantages and three disadvantages. It, in turn, points to a web page about leap week calendars that details nine of them.

Henry's own web page doesn't mention the existence of other leap week calendars. It merely says the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar is better than the Gregorian calendar, not why it is better than the nine other leap week calendars. And it doesn't seem to present any particular plan for getting it adopted, beyond saying "It CAN be done, folks, and the decision is YOURS, not mine. Each of you," and the proof that it's feasible is that his mother has adapted to quoting Celsius temperatures. But what's needed is not a better calendar, but a better plan than anyone has heretofore come up with for getting it adopted.

http://www.las.illinois.edu/news/2010/phones/

http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home05/jun05/yantis.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12710835

I would imagine so lol, the wiki says it's the 2nd oldest OOP, language technology progress tends to be a grab the best and most features you can out of what exists, add a few of your own and name the sucker. Thus why we have a ton of programming languages that are used every day to do the same things differently. Also, it's not very easy to depreciate languages when there are million dollar apps written in them.

The syntax for LISP is ehm less then elegant though http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/lisp.html a small factor to someone who's been using it for a couple of decades, but unattractive to somebody thinking about learning it.

I used Google rat farming site:wikipedia.org to find a citation in the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives. I didn't read the original source because it appears to be paywalled and in French, and I am not affiliated with any of these subscribing institutions.

I used Google rat farming site:wikipedia.org to find a citation in the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives. I didn't read the original source because it appears to be paywalled and in French, and I am not affiliated with any of these subscribing institutions.

No. He HAD pancreatic cancer which (probably) spread to his liver. He has a new liver and as a result has to (or had to) take anti-rejection drugs, and no pancreas and a bunch of other missing stuff due the whipple procedure used to remove the pancreas, etc. He probably has a hell of a time absorbing nutrients, maintaining his blood sugar, etc. I respect the man for continuing to get out of bed every day.

I thought a Whipple was the procedure that most people have for bariatric surgery, and involves the duodenum, not the liver. Maybe you were thinking of his Pancreas instead?

Although I certainly will agree that the removal of one's duodenum is certainly a cause of malabsorption of many nutrients.

What is justice? What is right or is corrected. Eliminate many of the laws on the books. For instance victimless crime laws. The War on Drugs? A big waste of tyme, money, and resources. Laws against prostitution? Where are the victims? Laws against fornication? Against sodomy? Against oral sex? Where are the victims? Getting rid of these laws will dramatically reduce the need for a justice system. Laws and law enforcement should be working on the harm personal acts afflict on the unwilling. Should there be a Law? is an excellent flowchart depicting the flow of reason that should occur in deciding what laws there will be.

I'd rather have power wielded by a democratic government - which I can influence - than corporations (which I can't).

I will handle this in two different ways. The first one being who gives corporations their power? Government does. If corporations have too much power it's because government gave them that power. Thirty years after Thomas Jefferson drafted the "Declaration of Independence" he wrote this warning:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
However there was a reason the first corporate charters were granted, yes they are granted by government. The first businesses to be granted a charter was the British East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Both were shipping companies, as hinted by their names, but shipping was a risky business. If either cargo, crew, or passengers were lost the ship's owners were liable. If pirates captured the ship killing people, or just stole the cargo, the owners had to pay for their loss. The same with sinkings such as caused by hurricanes. So if I as a small investor wanted to and had the money to invest in a ship, if that ship was lost I would be financially liable. Not only would I lose the money I invested but I could lose my home and everything I owned. So the British and Dutch crowns decided to grant some businesses a corporate charter giving investors limited liability. With these charters I could invest money in a ship and if the ship was lost all I'd lose was the money I invested. This allows society and many people to benefit, international trade is a common or public good.

I could go on but you should now have a clear idea why corporations exist. Now onto the second way. So you trust government more than businesses? Has any business, or group of businesses, killed as many people as governments have? The greatest number of deaths all at once I know of was Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster in India. The estimate with the highest number of deaths from it is 15,000, with an estimate of less than 600,000 injured.

Now how many people have governments killed or violated the rights of? NAZI Germany, over 600,000. Stalin's Russia, 20,000,000. Mao's China, 50,000,000. The US isn't guilt free either. The US, and state governments, have killed people and violated many more people's rights. Those in US prisons for non-violent drug offenses, and the US has the world's largest prison population? Their rights are violated on a daily basis. Throughout it's history the US massacred American Indian tribes. Up through the 1970s the US government's Indian Health Service had doctors sterilize Native American Women, forcefully and

As a kid in 7th grade I took the CTY Spatial Test Battery. One of the tests, the Visual Memory subtest involved memorizing some shapes, then, after taking 2 other 30-minute subtests, picking those shapes out of other groups. The STB is scored like the SATs, I was one of 2 kids in California that year to score over a 610 (I got 690). I missed only one of the visual memory questions. I wouldn't say I have a perfect photographic memory, but I do have a very good visual memory. Perfect memory does seem to be a myth, but some people can get close enough that careless observation makes one think they are perfect.
It does come in useful for remembering non-visual things, just write it out and take a minute to memorize the image of the page. Then read the text back when needed.

As a kid in 7th grade I took the CTY Spatial Test Battery. One of the tests, the Visual Memory subtest involved memorizing some shapes, then, after taking 2 other 30-minute subtests, picking those shapes out of other groups. The STB is scored like the SATs, I was one of 2 kids in California that year to score over a 610 (I got 690). I missed only one of the visual memory questions. I wouldn't say I have a perfect photographic memory, but I do have a very good visual memory. Perfect memory does seem to be a myth, but some people can get close enough that careless observation makes one think they are perfect.
It does come in useful for remembering non-visual things, just write it out and take a minute to memorize the image of the page. Then read the text back when needed.

Good points.

If you look at this evolutionarily, humans are adapted for hundreds of thousands of years to living in small groups or tribes (of mostly family or more distant relatives). Living in cities is only a few thousand years old (and old cities were more like today's towns of 50,000 people). And living on the internet is only a decade or so old for most people. So, we are not adapted to it at all. So, we can either adapt to it or we can adapt it to us. :-) Or we can let things fall apart. Or we can do some mix of all three? :-)

My wife made a related point here about Facebook:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
"I got off Facebook today. I was only on it for about a month, but I learned some interesting things from the experience about the internet and social connections, some of which will help me improve my own social web application (Rakontu), and some of which may be useful to others. ..."

There is yet another trend that I mention here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

I'm a trustee of a small non-profit organization (a historical society) and I have been talking some with the board about how, like with fire, we can in theory use computers effectively without getting burned by them. But, to get a lot more good than bad out of computers (relative to who we are or who we want to be), we really have to ask first, what are our values, goals, and priorities and how can we create a technical infrastructure out of all the possibilities that reflects those values.

Political scientist Langdon Winner raised this sort of issue in "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought" from 1978. From:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aq/summary/v058/58.3pena.html
"Langdon Winner ends his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought with a corrective to what he believes is an inaccurate popular understanding of the message in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It is not, he argues, a monster story of the inevitable dangers of technological wizardry. Rather, it is a story of "the plight of things that have been created but not in the context of suffic

Combine this with feminism's known class and race issues, and things start to look interesting...

I partially agreed with what you said, until I got here. Perhaps you mean feminism in the so called west but there are feminists all over the world. There are even African, Chinese, Muslim, and South American feminists.

Falcon

Your post insightfully points out that it's not trivial (at all!) to distinguish between compressed and encrypted data, but ignores the well-known fact that even totally encrypted channels can leak protocol-identifying information via traffic analysis.

See: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/ and http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/13/1449232

But, of course, as usual, this is cat-and-mouse. Once some kind of disguise for encrypted traffic is discovered and blocked, another one will pop up. In the long term, the advance of bandwidth will make even inefficient cloaking a viable proposition for some applications.

Pancreatic cancer can indeed be smoking-related.

Cigarette smoke contains a huge range of nasty chemicals. Those chemicals aren't blocked from the rest of your body your lungs. They seep in through your lungs. Although the chemicals are most likely to cause lung cancer because that tissue is heavily exposed, the carcinogens are quite free to do damage to other tissues in your body.

http://pathology.jhu.edu/pancreas/BasicCauses.php?area=ba

"Smoking doubles the risk of pancreatic cancer. Smoking is also associated with early age at diagnosis, and, very importantly, the risk of pancreatic cancer drops close to normal in people who quit smoking. Simply put, cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of pancreatic cancer. In fact, some scientists have estimated that one in four, or one in five cases of pancreatic cancer are caused by smoking cigarettes."

See : http://quitsmoking.about.com/od/tobaccostatistics/a/cancerstats.htm for details about other types of cancer you are at increased risk of from smoking.

> We live in the present. The sons/daughters are not responsible for the sins of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers/mothers.

This would be true, if the crimes committed against American Indians were actually in the past. In my lifetime, the federal government (through the Indian Health Service) forcibly sterilized American Indian women:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v024/24.3lawrence.html

And by the way, I do believe the individuals are culpable for sins committed by the societies to which they belong, so we, collectively, as Americans, do bare the stain of those crimes.

Yes. There is a large focus on two different aspects in a lab I used to work with a few years ago:
(1) Retinopathies (problems of the eye);
(2) Preventative treatments for cancer.

Here are some links:
[1] http://inbt.jhu.edu/biosensor-targets-retina-cells/2006/11/15 -- a multilayer "machine" which executes a biochemical program;
[2] http://nanohub.org/resources/3541/download/2007.10.15-leary-nt501.pdf -- lecture notes on the state-of-the-art nano- magneto- and silicon particle drug delivery as of late 2007.

Actually, from the article's links, he's a phd working with MRI technology. i.e. he's most likely a physicist, not a physician. Though no doubt he has a certain amount of cross domain knowledge.