Slashdot Mirror

By the way, while checking my facts I found this humorous article from the Brookings Institute in 1987 slamming government regulatory action in breaking up AT&T claiming it was causing telephone rates to rise. Ha ha.

Original search that sparked off the research described in the two links below:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/204499

The followup:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/17/black-death-rats-off-hook
http://www.history.com/news/2011/08/18/can-we-stop-blaming-rats-for-the-black-death/

Related:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/12/black-death-genome-sequenced-dna?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

If you don't like my term of 'defect' for someone who takes themselves out of the gene pool please supply a better term.

So those who choose to pursue science or literature for instance instead of child rearing are defective? How about those who go into teaching and don't have children of their own? Maybe they do more for *society* and the advancement of the human race than popping out a baby.

Working in a library I would assume that the works of Walt Whitman. Or perhaps you think George Washington was "Defective" since he never fathered any children.

Why do people insist that we don't allow them to redefine perfectly good words that we are bigots. Find a definition of the word 'marriage', or heck the equivilent word in any human language, older than a hundred years (or fifty) that includes two men or two women. Yes some definitions do include more thab one woman and one man.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2844434

There are far more. And in fact until recently marriage had little to do with love, but was essentially an exchange of goods and services or a reasonable arrangement to run a household and farm.

But all of that is irrelevant. You don't have to "accept them". Southerners didn't accept Slaves as human beings by any definition of the word in the English language. But we did right by them. So too will the country move on without you and recognize your fellow citizens and bestow upon them the legal rights they deserve--regardless if you want to recognize them.

The article lists five hypotheses:

• 1 greater male variability
• 2 gender-stratified
• 3 gap due to inequity
• 4 Muslim culture
• 5 single-gender classroom

They claim that all but #2 are ruled out by their data. What I can't figure out is the distinction between 2 and 3. 3 is that the gap is "due to differences in opportunities available to males versus females." 2 is defined in their reference [2] http://www.jstor.org/pss/2112795 as being about access to jobs and higher education. I don't understand the distinction.

I got interested in this stuff recently because I teach physics, and our statistics showed that women had a lower success rate in our classes than men. This was kind of worrisome, since women generally do better than men in college, and women do better than men at our school in math, and in the other sciences besides physics. Turned out that if we controlled for what class they were taking, the effect vanished. Lots of women were taking the physics class for biology majors, which has a low success rate. Almost no women take the physics class fo engineering majors, which has a higher success rate. In the class for biology majors, women actually did better than men. It impressed me with how subtle this kind of thing can be.

Certainly not daylight, but probably quite visible to any decent gamma ray detector. If you did a Google Earth but at the gamma or x-ray frequencies, the Irish Sea would certainly be the brightest mass of water anywhere in the world and quite possibly THE brightest mass of anything outside of the remnants of nuclear test sites.

Well, the one from the NRPB might be a better one to look at. There have certainly been more than 5 cases - indeed the only 5 I could see in this report is to a specific section in the references. The Gardner Report, which DOES mention 5 cases, refers to 5 cases that occurred in a specific time interval over the entire nation where 4 of those occurred in Seascale. The Gardner Report is the one which is the most-cited reference to childhood leukemia in Britain.

In fact, the table at the bottom-right for the Gardner Report is the most interesting for this purpose - a six-fold rise in leukemia incidents in the region surrounding Seascale with levels of leukemia remaining (a) constant and (b) at expected levels everywhere else over the same time period.

Radionuclide research groups *fried* the attempts by BNFL to conceal the link at the time and would doubtless be disgusted by the other posters here trying to attribute the cancers to "natural lead poisoning". I look forward to seeing these alleged papers "proving" that these distinguished experts were wrong and that a pseud-anonymous Slashdot poster is so vastly better and brighter that they can identify a wholly imagined lead isotope as the cause without having done an ounce of legwork.

Other links to papers that may be of interest:

• The Seascale childhood leukaemia cases-the mutation rates implied by paternal preconceptional radiation doses
• Childhood leukemia and radioactive discharges at Seascale
• Leukemia Clusters Near La Hague and Sellafield
• The CERRIE Report
• An index of anything I might have forgotten

See Conspiracy to Purchase Stolen Goods.

Again, I noted receipt of stolen goods, and possession of stolen goods. Both of those crimes are however not accessory to theft, and neither is Conspiracy to Purchase Stolen Goods.

In fact, the link you provided would be a good case to use in NY law against someone attempting to charge a receiver of stolen goods who was unconnected with the original theft with accessory to theft.

See Conspiracy to Purchase Stolen Goods.

A few educated instances doesn't gainsay the matter that slaves were for the most part, not educated:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/283628

(or do you really think the mine owner was putting educated men down into the pit?)

or

``The goal of education in the Greek city-states was to prepare the child for adult activities as a citizen.'' http://www.crystalinks.com/greekculture.html

Slaves aren't citizens, and for the most part, weren't educated.

You're a conservative and this is how you and many conservatives really think, if allowed to express your views annoymously and privately:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2998167

And you're an asshole who refuses to take a man at his word and instead accuses him of racism because of his self-declared political views.

Why not treat others with respect? Whether you agree with his take on affirmative action or not, there is no need to claim that the man is a racist. Well-meaning, enlightened persons of good will can disagree whether affirmative action is either fair or well-suited for its end. There is no reason to pretend that any such doubt is the sign of a closet racist.

Respect in political disagreements is a good thing.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2998167

Racism is very much prevalent in the US and especially amongst conservatives. It has simply become socially undesirable to express it. Hence racists have come up with a great number of euphemisms and a great many rationalisations to justify the fact that they are still terrified of a black family moving into the neighbourhood, let alone hire a black person, recruit a black student, etc etc.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3125034

Yes, it's jstor, complete with the idiotic paywall. But, the summary gets right to the point.

You may well ask, "What's that got to do with Ben?" Well - hit this link next: http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_wit_name.html

Yes, I really believe that old Ben would qualify anonymity as an "Essential Liberty".

JSTOR doesn't want it prosecuted

That's according to Swartz's own Think Progress. JSTOR's statement is more ambiguous.

Clearly, if the Gray whales migrated back in the 1800's to the northern Atlantic. And they're "just now" doing it again. Then our global temperatures have really just become on par with the 1800's again.

Grey Whales didn't "migrate" to the North Atlantic in the 1800s; there was a pre-existing native population there which died out in the 18th century (probably due to whaling). Reference here. Temperature didn't have anything to do with it.

Hmm...food for thought rather than hysteria.

I didn't see any hysteria in the article.

Well, what they told you is partly wrong.

Human teeth weren't perfect by any means. Cavities did occur, and when they did it frequently ended in abscesses and eventual loss of the tooth. What the records do show is that the number of cavities per capita was much less than your typical agrarian society (even the British have fewer cavities than Americans, despite the GP's tired crack).

The basic process of cavity formation is this: two types of bacteria feed on the sticky carbohydrates (corn-based products are particularly sticky), extracting simple sugars (sucrose, glucose, etc) from the deposits. The byproduct of metabolizing these sugars is the release of acid which lowers the pH on the surface of the tooth. When the pH drops below a certain point (5-6 IIRC) the teeth demineralize and a cavity begins.

Pre-farming, a typical human wouldn't be consuming many carbohydrates, so there would be less food for the bacteria to feast on. Consequently, you would likely have fewer cavities. You can find references to a lot of the studies on the correlation between agriculture and cavities in the abstract from this paper: http://www.jstor.org/pss/279500

Early humans did practice basic dental hygiene, though. Simple tools like chewing sticks (miswaks, neems, etc) are very effective at removing plaque when used properly (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15643758).

I already graduated from the institution listed on the login page and therefore have no access to an active JSTOR account with which to read the article that you cited.

Any research on the subject of deactivating and then, at a later time, reactivating memories embedded in the subject should have been done on Manchurian Hamsters, not rats...

Your rant would make perfect sense if all rich people are rich for life and all poor people are poor for life. Fortunately for us, that's not the case in America as opposed to some other countries. Do some reading http://www.jstor.org/stable/2646760, http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/income_mobility_in_the_united_states/.

Of particular note from the Treasury Department's report on Income Mobility are (taken from the second link above)

There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within 10 years.

About 55 percent of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile within 10 years.

Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 — the top 1/100 of 1 percent — only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period.

The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).

Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the period from 1996 to 2005. Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.

The major gem in this is

More than half (57.4 percent = 100 — 42.6) of the top 1 percent of households in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005

So while you bemoan income inequality, over half of those top 1% earners are dropping out of that group, meaning that others have moved up from below.

Keep up your class warfare. You'll find that this mobility decreases as you fight to take more from the top and give it to the bottom. Instead, try to educate yourself, work hard, save and make wise investments, and you might just find yourself in that top 1% some day instead.

There shouldn't be any fucking choice about whether you "expose" income to taxation! If it's income, it gets taxed.

I think your Congressional representative would disagree with you there. It's called a tax code and it's full of exemptions that people use to legally reduce their tax burden. We can probably agree that these exemptions shouldn't exist, but to villify "the rich" for minimizing their losses legally is ludicrous. Case in point, I bet you probably made a charitable donation or two last tax year and claimed in on your return, or perhaps you deducted mortgage interest - either way, that means you're just part of the problem you hate. The tax code is, and always has been, a tool for modifying behavior. The problem is that the law of unintended consequences always bites even the best of intentions in the ass.

Most people now consider 18, 19, 20 year olds as "kids".

Age of majority has been 21 in many countries for centuries. Your impression that there is a "new" effort to deprive people younger than 21 years of historical rights is not founded in fact.

Somewhere between Google's researchers and the Slashdot editors, someone must have messed something up. If Google actually thinks that the concept of regret is new (and I don't think they do), than they hired the wrong guys.

By the standards of Computer Science, regret is an ancient concept. Here's a paper from 1995. By that time, the concept was established enough that the author used the word "regret" in the title of his paper without any further explanations.
There is really nothing new here.

The PhD level quote you gave was from "clinical neurophysiologist Carl S. Hale". To outsiders, graduate/PhD level and undergraduate level math look pretty much equally inscrutable (eg. this vs. this). None of the information in the two articles (TFA's or The Indianapolis Star's) or in the video suggests to me that this assessment is accurate. Perhaps they just left it out, but in the video Jacob doesn't give me the sense of "this is incredibly basic; my goodness this is basic; I've gone so much further than this" that I'd expect if he were really at the graduate/PhD level.

He also made more mistakes than I would expect--messing up dx's, messing up constants, and messing with notation. I didn't get the sense that he understood the underlying real analysis backing up his calculus, or that he was as familiar with formal proofs as he would need to be to actually be at the graduate/PhD level. He seemed to be performing the usual algorithmic manipulations and modifying part of a lecture he was given. Certainly he understood the basic calculus he was describing, but it's unclear to me how deep it goes. Relatively few people are qualified to judge his ability, so it would be easy to overstate when faced with lots of magic symbols. I wish I could talk to him for 5 minutes and just determine his general ability level myself.

I searched and I couldn't find anything. Maybe I misunderstood my teacher (I was 11 or 12). The only reference to a lake of mercury that I could find was in this article http://www.jstor.org/stable/3915188, where they say there was a legend about a lake of mercury in California...
I find it strangest that I've never looked it up properly before.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2117312
http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Guide/Overview.html
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

Enjoy, there are lots more.

If the opponents of software patentability had a strong case that software patents really do a lot of harm and cause a lot of economic suffering (companies going out of business, having to lay off large numbers of people etc.), politicians would certainly act.

Like the economists who have studied the economics of patents and concluded they do not help?

Falcon

I didn't realize that. I was just glancing over a 1965 paper describing germ-free animals. It sounds like something that can actually be done with humans (and actually has been with apparently lousy outcome).

Future taxes immediately introduce uncertainty in the economy. Personal savings rates go up. Business investment goes down. Risk taking behavior increases. http://www.jstor.org/pss/248251 Bond yields change and this in turn affects the income of many people (primarily retired people or people near the retirement age) as we are seeing now. These changes lead to money flowing out of the economy (and the country) in an effort to avoid the eventual increase in taxes. http://investoffshore.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/whither-future-tax-rates-hint-they-are-not-headed-downward/

I wish I could provide a more "free" source, but at least one citation I found here that talks about a couple of different toy guns that were modified in the 1960's:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1142105

This is even a refereed journal and a formal publication on the topic. There are also some informal publication about this issue, including some documentaries about the topic.

An interesting TV commercial that shows one of these toy guns in action can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR9ojNddiSI

It is a fun commercial to watch just for the nostalgia, and it even shows how kids "reload" the gun and make it fire. Apparently some rubber bands and other very minor (and inexpensive) modifications were done to the gun to make it work with real bullets instead (to make the hammer hit the bullet primer harder).

I'm not saying that it is perfect, and I sure as heck would never actually use the gun in this manner as more than a few would-be bank robbers did have the gun misfire and basically do self-inflicted harm. You are correct that the gun wasn't really designed to take this damage, and it was a danger to somebody who tried. I think it was made out of stamped steel, so there may have been a little more structural strength with this toy than a more "modern" plastic gun.

If you are trying to use it for something more serious as a real gun with some safety margin to keep it from removing digits on your hand, I would recommend some kevlar/carbon-fiber type of reinforcing too. The point here is that the gun was used in this manner, not that it was a particularly good application of the technology.

As the article cited briefly mentions, it was a .22 round that went into the chamber, even though the gun itself was modeled after a Colt .45 gun. My bad on that one, but I was going only on memory on that point. I could dig further as I think Mattel did end up settling on a wrongful death lawsuit, which is one of the reasons they no longer make the toy together with legislation that requires toys to literally be incapable of being able to do this as well.

Thanks for the reply. I don't mind providing an article. Please note I wasn't saying that it is incorrect to use SLBM as a descriptor. I was merely defending the right to describe it as an ICBM. The two descriptions are not mutually exclusive so fas describing it one way does not prove that it can not be described the other way, as well.
Here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile#Modern_ICBMs; uses the Trident as an example for ICBMs and SLBMs.
And just to be fair if you consider wikipedia as an unreliable source; http://www.jstor.org/stable/2538595?seq=2; describes the Trident as a ICBM-range SLBM, which is what I am trying to explain.

It isn't "my" semicolon notation, it's called lightstone's notation. That said, I probably bastardized it. I believe, but could be wrong, it's discussed here:

        * Infinitesimals and Integration
        * A. H. Lightstone
        * Mathematics Magazine
            Vol. 46, No. 1 (Jan., 1973), pp. 20-30
            (article consists of 11 pages)
        * Published by: Mathematical Association of America
        * Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2688575

Second, the Holocaust was not a Christian thing

I suggest you visit the Holocaust Museum in Berlin and become educated about the history of German anti-semitism. Germany has historically been a Christian nation, and the anti-semitic history of its Christian people has been well documented. Please don't try to rewrite history by pretending that religion was not involved. The Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer frequently invoked stories and images of supposed Jewish assaults and plots against Christians. There were numerous pro-Nazi Christian groups that wove Nazi propaganda into their theology (Rexists, etc.)

"Christianity, however, did play a critical role, not perhaps in motivating the top decision makers, but in making their commands comprehensible and tolerable to the rank-and-file - the people who actively carried out the measures against the Jews as well as those who passively condoned their implementation.... The old antisemitism had created a climate in which the 'new' antisemitism was, at the very least, acceptable to millions of Germans." - Catholics, Protestants and Christian Antisemitism in Nazi Germany

Some of the top Christian leaders actively supported the Holocaust:

"The duty of a Christian is to love himself first and to see that his needs are satisfied. Only then can he help his neighbor... Why should we not get rid of these parasites [Jews] who suck Rumanian Christian blood? It is logical and holy to react against them." - Patriarch Miron Cristea

Crocodiles show some ability to regenerate certain tissues:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1563441

Teeth regrow in healthy individuals, too. The larger species are thought to live 70 to 100 years, and the animal isn't known to suffer unduly from cancer.

It does have an awful time in the everglades working out what sex it is. (Oestrogenic pollutants)

Because that's not what we want to do. ISS resupply is for commercial endeavours. Moon, Mars, BEO: that's what we're supposed to be shooting for.

But we shouldn't be shooting for the moon in a giant rocket. That's a recipe for re-creating Apollo, the most useless endeavor I can imagine for the space program. Instead we should be first developing the orbital technology where we can get mass to orbit cheaply, then refuel in orbit for the next stage. Bring crew up separately. Assemble a lunar vehicle in orbit. And so on. So that we don't need a single rocket that lifts everything needed to go to the moon and return in one shot. So that once we arrive at the moon, we'll have supplies and even habitats waiting for our astronauts there. That's what we're supposed to be shooting for, and neither Constellation nor DIRECT get us there. They get us DIRECTly to a mid-life-crisis re-enactment of our glory days. But guess what? Re-creating our glory days does not recreate the glory. It does nothing to advance us.

The only way we're going to do Mars is if we do it in a piecemeal fashion. The impetus and more importantly funds for a one-shot mission are never going to actually appear -- even before Bush left office his "Mars, Bitches!" plan had been reduced to "Apollo again, maybe!". Constellation isn't going to be able to do it. And even if we could, all we'd do is put boot-prints on the red planet. Woopty-fucking-do.

What?!? Apart from one catastrophic O-ring problem the SRBs have performed flawlessly.

Yeah, aside from that. Oh and except for cost and reuse, which once upon a time were actually part of the supposed features. They do actually haul the SRBs out of the ocean, but it's not even worth it. The main cost is in the fuel. As is all the unreliability and limitations. A flawless solid rocket still can't be shut off or throttled or refueled except on the ground at great expense. But let's not pretend SRBs are flawless anyway.

There's a place for solid rockets, but there's no reason they need to be SSRBs specifically as newer designs exist, and even less reason they need to be used on a manned craft. Even less reason they need to be the only choice of launch vehicle. Strap solid fuel boosters on a Delta, Falcon, or Ariane if you must, but don't require them especially if we're operating under the "only enough budget for one vehicle" regime you suggest.

Can't really argue with that. NASA should work like the army. The army doesn't design tanks. They say "we need a tank that does this". The various companies submit bids and the army picks one. NASA should just say "we need a rocket that can lift x tons into such and such an orbit."

Which is what they're going to be doing if the plan takes effect. They'll be paying contracts to perform X task, not contracts to develop a vehicles with specified features where the government ends up paying for the inevitable cost overruns.

Everything about the new plan is better than the old. The giant rocket is going to castrate NASAs ability to do new and important things. Things that will largely obviate the giant rocket. If we could do both, that'd be great, but that's not the way it's turning out, is it? So we can keep NASA with basically the same capabilities it used to have -- a space-SUV that's crazy expensive and operates infrequently -- or we can do something new and better. It's not a tough call for me, nostalgia, "prestige", or any of that notwithstanding one bit.

And segregation didn't exist as a concept in 1600s, 1700s, or early 1800s america. The southern states treated blacks as slaves, and the northern states treated "freemen" blacks the same as whites

You mention the southern states as if they were a different country. I think you're exaggerating about how many free blacks there were, and about the rights they enjoyed. Free blacks were the exception, not the rule.

A few states adopted "gradual emancipation" laws in the 1780s, and by 1800 only ten percent of blacks were free. This hardly sounds like racial equality.

The scarcity of free blacks isn't surprising, however, considering that the vast majority of blacks were concentrated in the South until the Great Migration of the 20th century.

"They discovered a large herd of animals which died in a a large flood event.

What did this remind you of? "

Ordinary modern times, during which herds of animals can also be killed by river floods and storm surges, to leave their rotting corpses behind, which will get scavenged by carnivores just like these fossil carcasses were afterwards.

Big river and storm surge floods happen today. Big floods today kill many creatures. Big floods of today could preserve as fossils in the right conditions. Surprise -- big flood deposits are found in Alberta. Actually, no, not a surprise. Not for geologists, anyway. This is more or less what one would expect, unless the Earth of the Cretaceous Period somehow didn't have hurricanes, which seems rather unlikely.

The real puzzle for the people who are "reminded" of the biblical flood story is why these bone-bed flood deposits in Alberta are intercalated with river channels and fossil soil horizons with plant roots. These Centrosaurus bone beds are typically found in the bottom of ancient river channel deposits. That's not exactly expected in deposits of a global flood. And why should this particular horizon be interpreted as THE flood when there are plenty of other fossils found in layers above and below it, and this point does NOT mark any particularly notable extinction (the big extinction that killed off the dinosaurs is higher up, stratigraphically)? Centrosaurus, the main dinosaur found in these bone beds, doesn't even go extinct at this point. And there's ample evidence that the carcasses were subsequently scavenged by another dinosaur, Albertosaurus, as they lay on the banks of the river. How could this event possibly be THE flood that bible-believing literalists have been vainly searching for in the Earth's geology for the last 200 years or so?

If you want to say the Earth's geology contains evidence of flood deposits: big deal. We already know it should. Where is the GLOBAL flood deposit?

Believe what you like, but 2 centuries of geologists, some of them deeply religious, have gone looking for evidence of a GLOBAL flood, and found nothing of the sort. In fact, they found evidence contrary to such an event ever occurring in Earth history. There is nothing in this recent discovery to suggest otherwise, but it is a good example of the kind of "any flood evidence is global flood evidence" straw that some people will desperately grasp at in the hopes of not having to reconsider what they already "know" to be true. It's you that should be looking at the evidence honestly. If you dug into the details of the way these bone beds occur you would find plenty of evidence they can't be from THE biblical flood. But that's okay, as long as the word "flood" is mentioned in a news summary you can still make your smug "What did this remind you of?" comments unimpeded by the inconvenient details.

"Guess what happened then, we turned into a stable democratic society. It stands to reason that any society below a certain wealth/developmental level will tend towards fundamentalism of various kinds and as wealth and developmental level increase in society freedoms starts to emerge."

That is not true. It has been shown that oil and other point resources do in fact hinder democratic development (in less developed countries):

http://www.jstor.org/pss/25054153

(see abstract at bottom of page)

Furthermore the relationship between wealth and freedom has casaulity pointing in both directions. Economic freedom and property rights are definitely driving wealth. So by providing a framework for that you can of course increase the (pluralistic, not the oil type) economical growth and thus the democratization rate. A good example: Hong Kong.

When did "anymore" start to mean "these days"?

There are two answers to that.

1. In standard English, it doesn't mean that. Anyone using it in that sense in formal writing is asking for trouble.

2. In many American dialects, that sense has been common for a very long time. A quick Google shows up this paper from 1975 that says it attracted widespread attention in the 1930s, and it's bound to have been around for many years before that.

Not all plants react the same way .

I also have religious beliefs, like you. I believe in pink unicorns and fairies.

There's a lot of both economic theory and empirical data backing up that cap and trade systems are more efficient. See for example this study showing that cap and trade would very well for handling levels of sulfur dioxide pollution in the US http://www.jstor.org/pss/2647033.

Pollution is wasted energy, technology will eventually catch up with it and make great progress.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. In the most efficient burning of a fossil fuel, the result is CO2 and water. There's no way to make the CO2 not be there. There's no wasted energy. Moreover, added CO2 is an externality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality so individuals have no incentive to reduce the creation of CO2. This is true with pollutants in general. As with most difficult externalities, the impact of the pollution is not directly on the individual who created it, and it is diffuse enough that one cannot easily trace any specific bit of pollution back to any specific source. That's precisely why we have the government regulate the sources. Cap and trade is a very efficient system which takes advantage of market forces to more efficiently reduce pollution.

This case illustrates very clearly the "Goat Problem", where an open and defined process is perhaps considered more important than the right answer. The "Goat Problem" is actually an ancient Chinese legend and the University of Pennsylvania's law school has this as their mascot[1]. Is it the right call? Perhaps, for accepting this kind of technology is a slippery slope down to the all-knowing goat. [1]: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3311295

Far more recently (the 60s and 70s), government doctors sterilized approximately 25% of all Native American women frequently without consent or though coercion and deception. For further reading: Native women sterilized.

Our history is ripe with examples of genocide.

Here is a citation with several citations within it. Here is another and yet another..

I'm willing to bet that most high dollar educations didn't involve simple google skills as it took me all of a couple of minutes to find those references.

Here is a PDF report that ties a bunch of numbers together as late as 2008. Unfortunately, it's in book form so you will probable need to print it and assemble the pages to keep the lines straight with the tables.

First of all, the radiation from these towers is often strong enough to vibrate your brain waves making you imagine that you are hearing it. Interestingly the subject always hears the sounds as if they are right behind their head. The army has investigated using this technology to confuse enemy troops by inducing the sound of voices behind their enemy's heads.

Here's are some more scientific publications to "ease your mind" on the subject:

Magnetic-Field: Induced DNA Strand Breaks in Brain Cells of the Rat
Author(s): Henry Lai and Narendra P. Singh
Source: Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 112, No. 6 (May, 2004), pp. 687-694
Published by: Brogan & Partners
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3435995

Nerve Cell Damage in Mammalian Brain after Exposure to Microwaves from GSM Mobile
Phones
Author(s): Leif G. Salford, Arne E. Brun, Jacob L. Eberhardt, Lars Malmgren, Bertil R. R.
Persson
Source: Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 111, No. 7 (Jun., 2003), pp. 881-883
Published by: Brogan & Partners
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3435159

NEURAL FUNCTION AND BEHAVIOR:
DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP
Allan H. Frey, Sondra R. Feld, and Barbara Frey

SECTION 6
EVIDENCE FOR GENOTOXIC EFFECTS
(RFR AND ELF Genotoxicity)
Henry Lai, PhD
Department of Bioengineering
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
USA

First of all, the radiation from these towers is often strong enough to vibrate your brain waves making you imagine that you are hearing it. Interestingly the subject always hears the sounds as if they are right behind their head. The army has investigated using this technology to confuse enemy troops by inducing the sound of voices behind their enemy's heads.

Here's are some more scientific publications to "ease your mind" on the subject:

Magnetic-Field: Induced DNA Strand Breaks in Brain Cells of the Rat
Author(s): Henry Lai and Narendra P. Singh
Source: Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 112, No. 6 (May, 2004), pp. 687-694
Published by: Brogan & Partners
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3435995

Nerve Cell Damage in Mammalian Brain after Exposure to Microwaves from GSM Mobile
Phones
Author(s): Leif G. Salford, Arne E. Brun, Jacob L. Eberhardt, Lars Malmgren, Bertil R. R.
Persson
Source: Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 111, No. 7 (Jun., 2003), pp. 881-883
Published by: Brogan & Partners
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3435159

NEURAL FUNCTION AND BEHAVIOR:
DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP
Allan H. Frey, Sondra R. Feld, and Barbara Frey

SECTION 6
EVIDENCE FOR GENOTOXIC EFFECTS
(RFR AND ELF Genotoxicity)
Henry Lai, PhD
Department of Bioengineering
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
USA

Although Mikkeles does cover the concept, he doesn't specify that this process is called "subitizing" (as referred to TFS) and has to do with the underlying method in which the human brain interprets data. See The Discrimination of Visual Number, Kaufman et al.

(College today is comparable to high school 50 years ago.)

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but I can't let it stand, because it's wrong on just about all counts, unless you just mean "the percentage of the US population holding a BA/BS is now approaching HS graduation rates from 1950", which is absolutely true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States

The typical high-school student 50 years ago did not take calculus or any other undergrad-level studies. In fact, in the late 50s/early 60s AP programs were just being introduced -- just like today, a move that copied what we saw working in Europe -- and colleges had to adapt to the new, better-educated students. Those programs are still in place today, and there are a non-trivial number of college freshmen that are significantly advanced from their peers of 50 years ago. See JH Neelley -- http://www.jstor.org/pss/2311818

I'll give you that completion rates in college have dropped, which is likely indicative of the admittance of students not willing or able to handle the rigors of college. That could be caused by inferior preparation in high school. But it could also be caused by the higher demand for college education, which itself could be caused by all sorts of things, including better funding for college education, less discriminatory admissions standards (and I mean "discriminatory" as in "no black allowed"), an increase in demand for a college-educated workforce, and possibly even higher academic standards in high school. It could also be caused by lax academic admissions standards, which may or may not impact the quality of education for those that do go on to graduate, or any of a dozen other things. In any case, it's poor evidence of a decrease in the quality of high-school education.

And before you go citing increasing educational attainment as evidence of reduced academic standards, bear in mind that the number of years of education and the baseline IQ have also both been steadily increasing over the years. So unless smarter people are taking longer to achieve the same thing as the last generation, it's probably representative of an overall increase in effective education. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I'm sure you could come up with a couple of specific examples of how high school today is terrible compared to when you walked there uphill both ways, but I'll bet I can match each of those deficiencies blow for blow with citations of how today's high school is better.

Notice when there are outbreaks of measles, etc. they never tell you what percentage of those infected were 'vaccinated', do they... I wonder why...

Rubbish.

They most certainly do. Around a third of children infected with measles will have been vaccinated but they have milder infections and are far less likely to die of them. Take a look at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14506371, http://www.jstor.org/pss/30106702, and http://www.springerlink.com/content/wv6714265t3l8150/ for some examples.

Your statement is even more absurd when you consider the research that must be done to determine the probability of successful vaccination. In the case of the MMR vaccine it's only around 80%, IIRC. Luckily most children are surrounded by vaccinated people who wont spread it to them.

I don't know if you're trolling or honestly believe a big medical conspiracy is out to kill you but either way, you're wrong.

I don't know what country you come from, but in the US it's been illegal for companies to give IQ tests since the 1970's. So employers are forced to find another proxy to measure aptitude. Of course, IQ tests were deemed "discriminatory" because the subject matter was not deemed directly related to job qualifications. Of course, frequently enough, neither are college degrees. The value of the college degree isn't so much the subject matter mastered, but as a signal that the holder has the aptitude and perseverance necessary to succeed in the job.

Care to cite any of these?

Sure. Here's a few:

Richard A. Posner, An Economic Approach to Legal Procedure and Judicial Administration , 2 J. Legal Stud. 399 (June 1973).
John Leubsdorf, Toward a History of the American Rule on Attorney Fee Recovery , 47 L. & Contemp. Prob. (1984).
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., The Legal Theory of Attorney Fee Shifting: A Critical Overview , 1982 Duke L.J. 651.
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., Predicting the Effects of Attorney Fee Shifting, 47 Law & Contemp. Probs. 139 (1984)

But just search law journals and economic journals for terms like "American rule," "English rule," "loser pays," and "attorney fee shifting." You'll get thousands of hits. This is an extremely thoroughly studied problem whose roots go back centuries. It's also one with no clear solution, either theoretically or in practice.

Care to cite any of these?

Sure. Here's a few:

Richard A. Posner, An Economic Approach to Legal Procedure and Judicial Administration , 2 J. Legal Stud. 399 (June 1973).
John Leubsdorf, Toward a History of the American Rule on Attorney Fee Recovery , 47 L. & Contemp. Prob. (1984).
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., The Legal Theory of Attorney Fee Shifting: A Critical Overview , 1982 Duke L.J. 651.
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., Predicting the Effects of Attorney Fee Shifting, 47 Law & Contemp. Probs. 139 (1984)

But just search law journals and economic journals for terms like "American rule," "English rule," "loser pays," and "attorney fee shifting." You'll get thousands of hits. This is an extremely thoroughly studied problem whose roots go back centuries. It's also one with no clear solution, either theoretically or in practice.

That's certainly the precedent set by JSTOR, a more traditional non-profit initiative with closer ties to libraries. An individual not affiliated with a subscribing institution basically can't get access, outside a few narrow exceptions (like access to a specific journal if you're an individual subscriber to the paper version of the journal). They won't even allow public access to old journals that are in the public domain! Google so far is being much more public-friendly.