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https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.e... Paragraph 1 of the introduction: "In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), the United States Supreme Court ruled that government could not limit corporate political spending in elections arguing that such limitations would violate the free speech rights of corporations. With this ruling, the Court has set a new standard for corporate First Amendment rights. " Long story short, the court chose to err on the side of caution, which is understandable...but it doesn't change the fact that the brand power of a corporation can have a disproportionate impact on the political process. There's no easy way to solve the problem, and I have no suggestions. I just know that it's wrong to give a company effectively unlimited voice in elections.

Do you have evidence to support any of your opinions? People have been looking at the relationship between applicant selection methods and job performance for as long as statistical tests have been around, and there are no compellingly good methods. People think it's easy until we go to the data and see how their preferred methods worked out objectively over a decent number of hires. Have you done this? How many people have you hired, how was their performance measured, how did they work out?

That would be the whole thrust of the article actually (although the stuff about Google's process being ineffective is all from 2009 which makes it quite old news): Google thought that gauntlet interviewing using methods quite similar to what you're advocating was giving them the world's best employees, because it felt like something that would be effective... but measurement showed that it wasn't.

It's been known to organisational psychologists for ages that the least-worst method is to observe candidates' performance in the actual job environment or a good simulation of it for a week or two. From reading the article and some of the things linked from it, it seems like IT hirers have begun to work this out independently.

I like it when people who make claims provide citations so here's a good entry point to the research: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf

{citation needed]

Only by uninformed basement dwellers, anyone who's been even casually following "the news" for the past five years would know it's true.

That's the problem. "The news" broadcasts controversial events and propaganda and anecdotal evidence and videos of stupid hippies yelling at cops because they hate cops and unruly college students refusing to comply with peace officer demands at public speaking events and then whining when they get tazed. That's all I've ever seen on "the news". How about some actual data? How about some real statistics? Here's an irl scientific study which stated that out of the nearly 1000 cases of Taser use studied, 99.7% resulted in minor to no injury (as in, fall and scratch yourself on the concrete or similar), three hospitalizations, and two deaths which were found to not have been the result of Taser use: Taser Medical Safety: the state of the science - William P. Bozeman, MD, FACEP, FAAEM (PDF of a slideshow presentation made at University of Florida), Study: Tasers are safe to use - Physorg, Independent studies could answer questions about Tasers. I can't seem to locate a published record of that particular study, but here is another paper by Dr Bozeman that compares Tasers to other methods of incapacitation: Medical Aspects of Less Lethal Weapons.

Your turn.

Piaget published his first paper, also on biology, at ten. He could not get into the local scientific library without being a scholar. He asked what it takes, and the librarian said "a publication" - so he did just that.
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/piaget_jean.html

I wonder if his early problems led him to study what children are capable of later. Ironically, his developmental theories were often misinterpreted to mean that children should be restricted from some studies, especially in mathematics. There are some videos of Piaget yelling at people for that, at conferences. He has fun studies on toddlers doing proportional reasoning and what not.

...ever since Galileo observed that there were sunspots, scientists have observed the sun to be on a fairly regular 11 year cycle of maxima and minima...

Where did that "fairly regular" assertion come from?
The cycle is on average just under 11 years in duration, but is somewhat irregular. Individual cycles have varied between 9 and 14 years in duration in the couple of dozen cycles for which adequate observations are available. See http://www.infiniteunknown.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/sunspot-observations.png or http://odin.physastro.mnsu.edu/~eskridge/astr102/bfly.gif for example. The variations in sunspot cycle duration do not appear to be related in any simple way to the variations in amplitude.

The health effects of millimeter wave scanning are what we should be worried about - there's an unknown risk but a high possible impact: imagine if in 10 years time millions of people start developing melanomas as a result of being scanned.

The x-ray backscatter machines are much less worrying; we've had 100(?) years of experience with X-rays and we understand what x-rays can do to DNA.

But we have very little experience of mm level radiation.

What I've seen in the press is cheerleading. 'Experts say there is little cause to worry' with unknown experts talking in vague generalities. I've seen articles saying that the energy involved is less than the energy emitted by a cell-phone. That may well be the case, but it's not in the cell-phone spectrum, and even a little energy in the wrong place can do a lot of damage. Just see what a match can do to a pile of paper*.

Of course it's impossible to completely prove something is safe. But I don't think we don't have empirical evidence that it's safe. Or at least - I've not seen it.

I absolutely have not made an exhaustive search for literature on the health effects of mm radiation, and I'm not an expert. In the brief searches I have made I have seen that there's a lot of scare-noise based on what seems like only a few sources which imo are not applicable. What I don't see is a long list of studies. And even more striking is that that non-existent list of studies is not full of papers saying 'we found no observable effects'**.

But I have found that it's possible to cook bacteria with mm waves! Maybe this is a hint that there's a potential problem. And in the diagrams of atmospheric absorption of radiation that I've looked at, for example, it looks like mm waves are mostly absorbed, which suggests that we'd have little evolved defense to mm wave damage.

What I'd really like to see is a series of mm wave experts saying things like 'we've studied the health effects of mm wave scanners for 10 years now, and I'd have no qualms about subjecting my three month old baby to a scan because I'm confident that there's no health risk associated.'

* Pedants: yes, I know the energies involved are different orders of magnitude - it's a metaphor.

** It's quite possible I was looking in the wrong place. I'd be very pleased to see a detailed response with a link to this list.

yeah...one primate did...learned some sign language and passed it to her adopted son. http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/chimpanzee.html

"World (Human Powered Boat) Record Broken", "Human Powered Boat World Record Broken" or the slightly longer "World Record Broken for Human Powered Boat".

AwkwardTitle would be a suitable tag - not strictly incorrect, just a bit much to get your head around.

On the content of the post: According to this site, the shortest distance across the Atlantic is between Senegal and Brazil at 2,575 km. If he could keep up his rate of 245.16 km / 24 hours, he'd get across that distance in around 250 hours, or around 10.5 days. But he has to sleep sometime, unless stimulants aren't banned in such time trials, and even then, 10 days is a long haul for some serious physical work.

Every year, it sounds like a collection of trolls interspersed with a few insightful individuals. Some of these trolls use this annual interview as a platform for their beliefs, usually anti-faith. Yes, we realize that most scientists and "thinkers" are agnostics or atheists, and they are every year. How is this a change? We have David Bodanis calling the Bible "inane" based on an belief about the city of Jericho that is actually still subject to debate. We have Patrick Bateson begging questions about alleged biblical inconsistencies. And what is Alan Alda doing in there? I suppose they wanted a celebrity affirmation of their attitudes. It really doesn't make any sense; as the only person that doesn't seem to know that Alan Alda is, has been, and probably always will be agnostic, is Alan Alda. This isn't news.

While the growth rate may have been slower at the beginning, it would have to be virtually non-existent for twenty five times longer than our current technological growth rate.

We'd love George Bush to throw himself off a tall building. The cnut.

Are you suggesting George Bush is related to King Cnut? "Crowned in the turmoil of war and conquest, Cnut quickly established an era of peace and prosperity."

Flinders Petrie certainly qualifies as Victorian, and he essentially gave archaeology its modern methods. Howard Carter applied these and it took him three seasons to painstakingly survey and document Tutankhamun's grave.

The recent press releases also talk of workmen's huts, so the excavators knew what they were removing, and I bet they took records.

Most Chinese believe that our civilisation today can be dated back to 4000-5000 years. Written character was invented and preserved since Shang Dynasty (about 2000BC). But, the historical records were a bit sketchy. Starting from Zhou Dynasty (1040 B.C), the records were much more concrete.

>>given the size of the landmass were likely to be linguistically, culturally
>>and ethnically diverse.If you call that kind of entity a society contiguous >>with unified China, then you might as well call pre-historic Europe a society >>contiguous with the Roman
In Zhou Dynasty, there was a single ruling family. The powerful states were supposed to be governed on behalf of the figurehead king. Actually, Confucianism and Taoism were developed in that period. Judging from the fact that the leading scholar of the time can travel around the different states to teach is a strong indication that they share the same language. In fact, educated people today can still read the same text. There was a consensus about who were the "barbarians" at that time. The people in those rivaling states were not classified as the barbarians. Because of these reasons, at least the Zhou dynasty should be marked as the start of the Chinese civilisation, as we see now.
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/china/ancie nt_china/zhou.html

The unification in 221 BC by Qin Dynasty merely marked the established the first empire, which started to centralise the power back to a single ruler.

Like I said, Darwin's geology was garbage,

Well, I'm not so sure it was his but more Lyell's geology.

In that light, are the various theories of intelligent design novel or valid? Well, definitely not novel. They could be seen as valid theories, but they are very poorly supported, since the only way to show that such things occur would be to have a lot of people witness an ex nihilio creation of a new form of life. Unlikely.

The scenario you posit is one of proving a negative, which is fundamentally 'unscientific'. As I mentioned in another post, what is necessary for ID to gain any credibility is at least two foundation elements:

1) a scientific definition of what constitutes 'irreducible complexity'

Irreducible complexity is the core of the ID argument. There is no way to construct a hypothesis that supports Intelligent Design without relying on the idea that there was intervention that circumvented radom processes to *create* the world as we see it. To date, the definition of irreducible complexity is about as workable as SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: "...I know it when I see it..". There is no way to create an experiment with such a loosely constructed nomenclature. Until we know what we are looking for, everyone can claim to have found evidence supporting ID.

2) identifying intelligent design components

This second part is the testable part of ID. When there is a working definition of what constitutes irreducible complexity, then the job of separating those elements of nature that were intelligently designed, as opposed to those which grew from random processess, can begin in ernest. Whether it is the binding force of the atom 10E-22 seconds after the Big Bang, or genetic coding that jumpstarted the development of an organism, an intelligently designed natural phenomenon (which I contend is an oxymoron) can be cataloged and an actual experiment is constructed from a hypothesis.

Ten years after Behe's book, there neither of these founding elements can be found in any of the thousands of pages published by the concept's proponents.

Nor do I believe they will they ever emerge.

Hell, even the word 'China' refers to the 'Chin' dynasty - a bunch of semi-literate barbarians who overthrew the Ming Dynasty about the time America was being settled.

Actually, "Chin" is from Qin Dynasty 221BC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Dynasty:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/china/early _imperial_china/qin.html:

Also check CIA's website:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ ch.html
You can find this line:
  221 BC (unification under the Qin or Ch'in Dynasty);

There is no scientific proof for the theistic or the atheistic view on the origin of life. Why the atheistic gets the favored son status in schools is beyond me, when both viewpoints have the same credentials scientifically.

A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

Another thing supporting Evolution is the analysis of DNA.

The speciation that is predicted by the theory of evolution has been observed. We explore natural selection and evolution in animal breeding all over the world and have for centuries.

Creationists (who prefer to take God out of their own theories to try and insinutate them into schools) basically say that life is too complicated for us to understand, so a higher being must have created it. They offer no theory as to how this occurred, just that it was "designed". A proper theory would have to explain the supernatural powers of god and how they are at work in the universe now, as well as make predictions about the future, which they cannot.

The typical Intelligent Design argument is that if you come across a watch laying on the ground, do you think it "evolved" or was created? With a watch, we could see the manufacturer, tavel to their plant, and actually see one being assembled. We could then find their parts and go to the plants they were made at and see them being made. There are physical processes for the making of the watch and we could examine them all. If you come across a watch laying on the ground, you don't just assume that God created it out of thin air and placed it on the ground.

What are the physical processes that the "Intelligent Designer" used to create life? What force caused the atoms to form in the correct way to make the first living cell? Where did that power come from? Did the "Designer" use a machine he build or did he use some kind of supernatural powers that we have no description of? The reason "Intelligent Design" should not be on the same ground as evolution is that it is not a well formed theory. It doesn't explain how life came to be, it just says that it "must" have been designed by someone because it is so complex. To find out how it came to be you must look to Genesis, which just says God created the earth and life in 6 days. No thoeries on how that feat was accomplished.

Intelligent Design is a joke. It belongs right up there with meteorologists predicting the weather based on how angry they think Thor is.

So extensive were the cumulative effects of these modifications that it may be said that the general consequence of the Indian occupation of the New World was to replace forested land with grassland or savannah, or, where the forest persisted, to open it up and free it from underbrush. Most of the impenetrable woods encountered by explorers were in bogs or swamps from which fire was excluded; naturally drained landscape was nearly everywhere burned. Conversely, almost wherever the European went, forests followed. The Great American Forest may be more a product of settlement than a victim of it."
-- Stephen Pyne, 1982. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 79-80

Don't tell the straights, but someone from the cook brigade ac'lly found Troy (or something).

Oddly enough, we have to sacrifice Ben and JLo.

The Mayan line in question is "Big head, snake, rock shaped thing, potato with teeth, something that looks like a broken Trane air conditioning unit, something with three legs and four ears, a bigger potato with teeth and breasts, Jabba The Hut, another big head, a pile of little tiny heads, a medium sized head with a smaller head next to it, an aborted fetus someone inflated with an air pump."

The rough translation is "annoying couple (in unity) with mighty hair and (ass) who commit crime of that (terrible) Gigli."

Yes, there's a heiroglyph for "Gigli".

Hey, they were WAY ahead of their time.

Related Link

Tyreth wrote:

This is something that would be a lack of evidence for. Couldn't it always be said "we simply have not seen mutations result in a new species"?

You could say it, but you would be wrong. We have seen mutations result in a new species, we have seen it often, both in the wild and in the laboratory. The talk.origins site has a page devoted to speciation evidence.

Well then call me an evolutionist. I still believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and that all creatures originated from an initial kind (humans from Adam & Eve). Do I still qualify as an evolutionist?

If you are asking whether you can simultaneously believe in your view of Creation, and accept the theory of evolution as valid, you most certainly can. Remember, science is incapable of producing truth, merely increasingly accurate predictions. There is nothing stopping you from saying "I believe the Truth is, God created the Earth 6000 years ago, but I accept Evolution theory as a useful and valid means of predicting biological events, even though it implies things that I consider untrue."

Please, however, keep in mind that we don't get the age of the universe from the Theory of Evolution. You would need to say similar things regarding: Astrophysics, Astronomy, Geology, Paleontology, Archaeology, Anthropology, and probably many other sciences I haven't thought of.

If you are concerned with more aspects of Creationism than the age of the universe, keep in mind that it also says things like we are all descended from eight people (Noah, his three sons and their wives) who, according to Ussher, didn't land in the Arc until Wednesday, May 5, 1491BCE. According to historians, the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt was thriving before, during and after the period of time that Bishop Ussher claims the world was underwater and the only survivors were non-Egyptians.

I would also point out that many people who believe in God and the Bible are quite willing to accept that the word commonly translated as "day" in the Book of Genesis does not necessarily equal a 24 hour day-night cycle, that a "year" in the ages of biblical figures does not necessarily equal a 12 month year as we currently understand it, and that admitting that the Bible does not clearly define a specific moment as when the universe begins is not contrary to a faith in God. Some parts of the Bible are clearly and explicitly metaphors, why not the Book of Genesis too?

A metaphor isn't false, it's merely trying to explain something hard to understand using terms that are easier to understand, I think it goes without saying that most versions of the Creation of the Universe are pretty hard to understand.

You sound like a reasonable person. I haven't felt insulted by you or mistreated, which I commend you for. Usually I find evolutionist to be mocking, sometimes disguised, sometimes very openly. But I've yet to find one that understands the creationist position, and I wonder if that's why they (you) are so quick to reject it?

I find no need to insult or mock, and you are clearly a thinking person, even though some of your beliefs don't match mine. However, you would find me a lot harder to get along with if you were actually threatening me with Creationism. Far too often, lately, Creationism hasn't come up as a matter of personal belief, but in terms of "Creation Science", and in school boards being pressured to teach "Creation Science" to their students as science (along with or instead of Evolution). Not only do I object to the views of Creationism being presented as science to impressionable minds, when it is not science, but I also strenuously object to the political movement that is trying to get Christianity taught in our public schools, in direct contradiction to the Establishment clause. I think this movement is unhealthy

I was able to grab the html only. None of the PDFs or PPTs linked to it:
The mirror is here:
http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~workmj/cryptome.org/rfid- docs.htm

I have mirrored the page here:
http://kr.mnsu.edu/~workmj/www.kuwan.net/scoAntiPr otest/index.html

They'll figure out that the reason there are so many cities under water and so many civilizations have stories of massive floods about the same time is because there really was a Noah and he really built an ark.

Go and read about the canopy theory if you want to know what many creationists believe was the source for the majority of the water released in this flood.

This theory also explains why bones of pre-flood animals and civilizations would appear to be much older by our carbon dating standards. The reason is because carbon 14 is created by radiation bombarding carbon in our atmosphere and then being ingested or breated into the bodies of living creatures. Ask your average old-earth-theory carbon-dating scientist why C14, with a half-life of only 5730 years, is still found in all bones collected, no matter how old they are conjectured to be by some scientists. That's not supposed to be possible, but it makes sense when you consider the biblical view of the earths age at about 14,000 years max. The canopy would have blocked much more radiation than is blocked today, making radiocarbon levels much much lower.

It's not exactly carbon 14 dating; it's analysis of coral structures and related debris. Basically, it has to do with the rate of changes in coral structures over time, as well as sedimentation and things of that nature. Information about coral dating can be found here and here. Uranium/Thorium dating can be used on marine sediment (info here). Actually, the entire "Dating Exibit" site has a simplistic but good explanation of various relative and absolute dating techniques.

It's not exactly carbon 14 dating; it's analysis of coral structures and related debris. Basically, it has to do with the rate of changes in coral structures over time, as well as sedimentation and things of that nature. Information about coral dating can be found here and here. Uranium/Thorium dating can be used on marine sediment (info here). Actually, the entire "Dating Exibit" site has a simplistic but good explanation of various relative and absolute dating techniques.

An analogy would be to compare primitive Mesopotamian clay sculptures to more modern artwork. No-one goes around claiming that the Venus of Willendorf is immeasurably superior to, say, Henry Moore's work - although for their time, those Venuses were pretty cutting-edge.

And in defense of science fiction, it's one of the only genres which allows themes to be explored that go beyond the mundane and boring details of current human existence. If it weren't for the pretensions of the aforementioned individuals, this would be more recognized. Some amazing work of great literary significance has been done in SF, but often has not received the recognition it deserves because of the limited perspective of those literary critics who believe that if it's not dealing with the petty trivia that fills their dreary existence, it's not relevant to their lives.

Don't allow yourself to be constrained by the tunnel-visioned, small-minded parrots who can only repeat how great someone who lived hundreds of years ago was, and how everything that's new and that's now pales in comparison! What we create in our time will become the legends and greatness of the future - appreciate our creations for the human genius that they embody, the equal or better of anything that has come before!