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...and of course that links to a page of a professor who is... a white guy.

The original blurb:

Black scientists, however, fair badly.

It might not be fair how blacks fare, but I'm certain, they're not getting faired

p is less than .05.

We're at the point where consoles have achieved parity with personal computers in all ways except freedom. Which begs the question...

No it doesn't. It raises the question.

http://begthequestion.info/
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html

Don't try and be smart by using fancy buzz-phrases if you don't actually know what they mean. It ends up having the opposite effect, as well as corrupting English language and spreading bad practices like a virus as others become desensitized to the incorrect forms.

On a similar note, you might find this link informative:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/adnauseum.html

I'm going to start by saying English is a fucked up language.

While you normally would use "an" with a word that starts with a vowel there are exceptions. Utopia because it starts with a Y sound means it is one of those exceptions.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/a.html

It looks like there are a few other exceptions based mostly by the way the word is pronounced. Seems if the word starts with a vowel sound you use an. I had always been taught it had to have the vowel, not sound like it.

Sorry, English sucks.
Anon Native English speaker.

The entire point of a college is to make money; even for state schools.

I don't know which college you went to, but the college I went to (Washington State University) is a research college as are all the universities in the Pac-10 (soon to be Pac-12). They don't tend to make money to do anything other than educate and do more research. You don't see a lot of this research as an undergrad unless you ask, or have a professor who talked about it. I fortunately had both.

Also, a lot of people are talking about how expensive college is. I will say that Washington and Oregon are raising tuition, I know that it's about $9k per year for tuition for the state/public schools in both states. Sure it was only $3k when I started college in 1995, but it's still a great deal for a top-quality education. Meanwhile, It's not like ITT or DeVry are cheap alternatives, they are at about $20k per year for tuition. If money is really a problem, you can always go to a community college for the first 2 (or less if you are smart and driven) and then on to a university for the remainder. Even with student loans, you could probably get out of there with less than $20k of debt and a degree from a respected institution.

W.M. Keck Lab

This article and video explains their research: http://wsutoday.wsu.edu/pages/publications.asp?Action=Detail&PublicationID=14531&TypeID=1

W.M. Keck Lab

This article and video explains their research: http://wsutoday.wsu.edu/pages/publications.asp?Action=Detail&PublicationID=14531&TypeID=1

W.M. Keck Lab

This article and video explains their research: http://wsutoday.wsu.edu/pages/publications.asp?Action=Detail&PublicationID=14531&TypeID=1

whatever the root cause is.. here's a huge fucking list of shit people get confused

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

yes, I have seen (in writing) people getting to/too confused and there/their whether or not is a typo or ignorance is irrelevant, I SEE what is wrong, I don't know what THERE thinking.

no, not in conversation because they all sound the same.. and look up Hooked on Phonics - sued for false advertising, they don't even use that name anymore - because Hooked on Phonics is a damaged brand.

U is not a word.. the definintion of U and YOU do not match.

I could care less about WebM or Orbis or other codecs my iGadgets can't play.

Tell us then. How much less could you care?

Hell, Hammurabi's first code of laws included an eye for an eye.

The year is 2010 AD, not the mid-1700s BC. Hammurabi's laws also included such gems as --

The precursor to witch trials: If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.

Promoted eavesdropping: If conspirators meet in the house of a tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court, the tavern-keeper shall be put to death.

And also called for incredibly harsh punishments for children: If a son of a paramour or a prostitute say to his adoptive father or mother: "You are not my father, or my mother," his tongue shall be cut off.

Source. I will admit though, that some of the laws appear to be both well-reasoned and well-thought.

So they should be grouped with their own.

What you say here would be correct if we segregated murderers with murderers, rapists with rapists, thieves with thieves, etc. . . This however, is not the case. The line of thinking is much more akin to a thought of "throw them to the wolves."

And we're not calling for the death penalty for the executives that caused the deaths of 11 workers. . .

Who says some people aren't? Also, there are varying penalties for manslaughter and homicide based on the intent.

. . .possibly caused cancer in thousands of cleanup volunteers. . .

Improper protection and unmitigated exposure is what would cause cancer to cleanup crews, not the executives.

. . .and did incalculable damage to the gulf environment and fishery businesses.

I don't know what a fair penalty would be in this case. Monetary compensation of those whose businesses were hurt would be a start. This is being carried out. It's also akin to the eye-for-an-eye law in Hammurabi's code that you like, no?

I think it's a relatively tame response.

And I think it's a relatively barbaric response.

you no longer need the disk

Uh... the what? I'm sorry, you'll have to remind me. It's been a while. A long while.

For the GP's benefit or anyone else a bit thrown by the parent's response: DISC/DISK.

'Test' firing and attempting to keep a secret immediately off the coast of LA don't jive.

OK, Pedantry first ... it's jibe. ;-)

Sorry, I intended to include intentional saber rattling as part of scenario 1 -- they didn't shoot at anything, so it was more about being seen with the capability.

The fact that it was on the news and fairly visible tells me that someone wasn't trying to really keep it a secret -- merely keeping the who did it secret.

But, yes, I should have articulated that better.

Actually, that's not groupthink but a religious commandment.

No, it's actually quite possible to believe that "murder is bad" for better reasons than "because an all-powerful dude who lives in the sky said so, and is going to punish you if you don't obey."

One thing with those ten commandments, though. Of those that deal with human-human relationships and not the human-god relationship, they sure have stood the test of time.

But that's only 50-60% of those 10 (different Judeo-Christian sects list them differently); and those prohibitions are hardly original to Moses, they're found in other ancient legal texts such as the Code of Hammurabi.

And they're not that good -- one would do better with the Ten Commandments of Solon or the basic Five Precepts of Buddhism.

The Ten Commandments were primarily a source of power for the priestly class, and secondarily a list of basic social prohibitions. As a source of ethical guidance, they fail it.

It seems derring-do is indeed the correct form of the phrase.

Humorous, but pls lrn2grammar:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/acronyms.html :-p :-) :smileynose)

Hey, at least you aren't at that other state university. The one that uses microsoft hosted outlook. If you want an unreliable, insecure, windows only email solution with the same privacy implications as hosted Gmail, Try Outlook Live!

Oh, and just to clarify, this is not an option offered by the university, this is the only option.

Well, we have that as an option too - but it's only an option, and since Gmail has the mindshare most of the students go for that (actually, most just forward everything to their personal Gmail account, honestly).

It is funny how, over the course of the past 5-6 years, Microsoft has lost most of its mindshare - with younger people anyway; but that's who really matters in this.

From what I can tell, the only people choosing the hosted Outlook solution are people directly under soon-to-be-ex-President Emmert's sway. But I'm sure loads o' Microsoft cash had nothing to do with his choice, nor the golf outings with Ballmer...

Hey, at least you aren't at that other state university. The one that uses microsoft hosted outlook. If you want an unreliable, insecure, windows only email solution with the same privacy implications as hosted Gmail, Try Outlook Live!

Oh, and just to clarify, this is not an option offered by the university, this is the only option.

> who can not spell judgment correctly.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/judgement.html

Judgement is British English.
Judgment is American English.

Trust a dumbass journalist to rewrite that to mean that suddenly our electric cars will be powered by Xenon Fluoride compressed by diamond anvils, even though the original research paper doesn't mention anything of the sort!

It wasn't the journalist who wrote the bit about "potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors," it was the university PR office. http://www.wsunews.wsu.edu/pages/Publications.asp?Action=Release&PublicationID=20580 The researcher reviews and approves the press release before the university sends it out.

So you can trust the dumbass scientist to hype his research in the hope of getting more funding.

Remember, that is $9 a hour before federal work study grants! The school pays almost nothing! Gee... That sure sounds like some IT department I've heard of before. Next thing you know the network will barely work!

To help with point 1, people confuse this because they are trying to do the right thing. This is the simplest explanation I've found and it's the first google hit for "is a group singular or plural":

When the group is being considered as a whole, it can be treated as a single entity: "the group was ready to go on stage." But when the individuality of its members is being emphasized, "group" is plural: "the group were in disagreement about where to go for dinner."

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/group.html

One mistake does not an idiot make.

Considering that possessive "it" has a page dedicated itself and it listed as a common mistake I don't feel the slightest guilt to making that mistake.

the effects of addiction of the worst (coke. meth, heroin) is far worse the effects of the war on drugs

you like to point to history. i'm glad your victorian upper middle class examples were able to make positive contributions despite their crippling drug problems (ask them, they would say themselves that the drug use didn't help them: imagine how much they could contribute had they not been so addled)

here's another victorian history lesson for you, that is the real instruction as to what the viral spread of highly addictive substances does to a society:

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/CHING/OPIUM.HTM

"you're willing to point guns at people and lock them in cages to control their behavior. You should be ashamed."

yes, i am willing to lock away mafioso who don't care about destroying lives in order to get a buck, i have no problem with that

you apparently are happy with millions of lives destroyed because you have no appreciation what easy access to a highly addictive substance does to people and the freedom it destroys. you should be ashamed

that if you legalized everything, every single problem you just cited above would be worse?

the best you can do is push back against the growth of the drug addled zombie underclass, and push back against the growth of the mafia, forever. NOT pushing back against these things simply means they grow and proliferate even more, to the destruction of far more rights and freedoms and destroyed lives than the war on drugs itself. you can't ever completely destroy the drug use, but that never was the point: the point is to simply minimize their stink

why can't you see that? why can't you appreciate the damage done by a large underclass of drug zombies and a fattened mafia from their existence? why doesn't your mind perceive of and understand the threat to individual freedom from those things?

here, learn your history:

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/CHING/OPIUM.HTM

here's the problem: teenagers are idiots. they think of themselves as immortal and immune, they don't perceive of the limitations of their willpower when faced, for example, with crippling addiction to something like coke/ heroin/ meth. and so, in an environment of easy access, a heck of a lot of them will try these things, and wind up with a life long crippling addiction

prevent them from accessing to these drugs though, and they mature to the point where they perceive on their own these substances have towards their quality of life and their freedom. of course you won't save everyone, some committed idiots are just hellbent on personal destruction. but a much larger class of casual idiots needs to be given the chance to escape the hell of addiction

i really wish you could understand and appreciate exactly what heroin, coke, and meth do to someone's lives and their minds and their freedom. of course the war on drugs has negative effects. i recognize and acknowledge every single negative you cite. now i wish you would acknowledge what free and unfettered access to heroin/ coke/ meth will cost in wasted lives, and see that it is far worse than the war on drugs

then learn your history, before it is repeated, fool: this is what happens when drug dealing imperialists are allowed to destroy a society by reducing large swaths of its citizens to zombies via drug addiction:

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/CHING/OPIUM.HTM

in the history of the world, the sum total of every fascist, totalitarian, despotic, religious fundamentalist, and autocratic authoritarian law has, by orders of magnitude, never even remotely touched the freedom that was destroyed in terms of wasted lives due to drug addiction. drug addiction is the most potent threat to individual freedom that has ever existed and perhaps ever will exist in the history of mankind

the most fascist totalitarian state possible to be imagined in the furthest reaches of orwell's fantasy life has nothing on the freedom destroying power of drug addiction. unless, of course, such a hypothetical totalitarian government actually force addicted its own citizens. that's the ultimate totalitarian state

Well, since we're being nitpicky: "alot" isn't a word at all.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/alot.html
http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/Pages/UsAlot.html
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/761667.html

According to Associated Press style, to "ensure" that something happens is to make certain that it does, and to "insure" is to issue an insurance policy. Other authorities, however, consider "ensure" and "insure" interchangeable. To please conservatives, make the distinction. However, it is worth noting that in older usage these spellings were not clearly distinguished.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/assure.html

...it ruined China!...

Goddamn the pusher man

good post, but irregardless isn't a word.

FTLOG, virii is not a word.

You're missing the point. That's not how the system is supposed to work, because of:

Maybe I'm missing the point, maybe I'm just not expressing myself correctly. I'll let Thoreau do it:

But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

No. No consequences to them. Yeah, they want to "effect (sic) change".

Off topic, but that was an intentional and valid use of the verb "effect".

If it's so important to leak, why not risk the punishment that society imposes for releasing classified information?

Why should someone have to sacrifice themselves to an unjust system? It's not my fault that the system is unjust, why should I suffer punishment for it? If I can do what is right without suffering, isn't that better than doing what is right and suffering?

Again, such activities in a free[1] society are wholly different than actions in a non-free society.

[1] Yes, I realize no society is completely "free", but I trust you get my point.

Every society is free if you're in the privileged class. Every society is non-free when you're among the oppressed. I don't think there's a fundamental difference, just one of magnitude. China has a constitution guaranteeing many individual rights. But they carve out large exceptions for national security. The only real difference between them and us is the size of the exception. But once you poke a hole in the protections afforded to us by our rights, that hole just gets bigger and bigger.

...what i fear the most is the government that ACTIVELY PROMOTES the use of drugs...

You mean like this?

Alot and a lot are also used differently.

• alot = many
• a lot = a lot, where lot can mean many things, a lot can mean a parcel of land while alot always means many.

Actually, very much no. There is no such English word, "alot". The two words, "a lot", mean many.
From: Re: alot vs. a lot

"alot" is not a word in English and is clearly incorrect. "a lot" is the correct word for most purposes. See below for more details:

"Alot means nothing because it is not a word in the English language and therefore should not to be used." SOURCE: http://www.garypaulson.net/archives/allot-vs-alot-vs-a-lot-spelling/

"A lot (two words) is an informal phrase meaning a large portion or large quantity of something." SOURCE: http://www.garypaulson.net/archives/allot-vs-alot-vs-a-lot-spelling/

"Allot is a verb that means to distribute, to assign a portion, or to divide. Example: The instructor allotted me 20 minutes to take the test." SOURCE: http://www.garypaulson.net/archives/allot-vs-alot-vs-a-lot-spelling/

I invite you to read the full page of information at http://www.garypaulson.net/archives/allot-vs-alot-vs-a-lot-spelling/ for more comprehensive information on this.

Furthermore, From: A Lot or Allot?

A lot (two words) is an informal phrase meaning "many." It can take an adjective, for example, "a sizeable lot."

Example: Karl needed a lot of time for the job.

Allot means "to distribute between or among." It has the same root as lottery.

Example: He allotted three breaks a day to everyone in the department.

Alot does not exist as a word.

In addition, from A LOT / ALOT

Perhaps this common spelling error began because there does exist in English a word spelled "allot" which is a verb meaning to apportion or grant. The correct form, with "a" and "lot" separated by a space is perhaps not often encountered in print because formal writers usually use other expressions such as "a great deal," "often," etc.

You shouldn't write "alittle" either. It's "a little."

Please get a refund from all your English teachers... :-)

Are you going to complain about into also?

Um no, because "into" *is* one word and has been since before the 12th century.
From: into

Main Entry: into
Function: preposition
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English into; from in + to.
Date: before 12th century.

In addition, "into" and "in to" are used differently. From: into/in to

"Into" is a preposition which often answers the question, "where?" For example, "Tom and Becky had gone far into the cave before they realized they were lost." Sometimes the "where" is metaphorical, as in, "He went into the army" or "She went into business." It can also refer by analogy to time: "The snow lingered on the ground well into April." In old-fashioned math talk, it could be used to refer to division: "Two into six is three."

In other instances where the words "in" and "to" just happen to find themselves neighbors, they must remain separate words. For instance, "Rachel dived back in to rescue the struggling boy." Here "to" belongs with "rescue" and means "in order to," not "where." (If the phrase had been "dived back into the water," "into" would be required.)

P.S. My wife was an English teacher.

>>if your in a position of trust

You know what else should carry the death penalty? People who can't spell you're properly.

Your/You're

This random gentlemen on the internet claims that composed would be the correct word in this case (comprised would be a synonym for including, where I was imagining CBS to be clearly made up only of horses).
And he has an entire book published just to explain why everyone is making errors when writing English, so I'm inclined to trust someone with that much dedication.

You're rebutting a statement that the grandparent post doesn't make. (And you're misusing the word comprise.). The topic is not the people involved, but rather the corporations. Maximizing profit is a corporation's primary goal. To do otherwise would be a dereliction of its fiduciary duty to its shareholders.

Dragging up the tired claim that any criticism of these vultures is "offensive to everyone who served" is a pathetic attempt to change the subject. You should do PR work for General Dynamics. Perhaps you already do.

This isn't that hard. Come on, dude.

I hate to be pedantic, but I am. http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/sea.html

It's "Hear! Hear!" like you're saying to listen to the guy.
hear/here

The thing is, simple economics dictates that it would make far more sense to equip the blind people with car proximity sensors of some kind, rather than make every car noisy.

Which just goes to show you that "simple" economics doesn't apply to the real world.

We have a cheap robust solution for putting noisemakers on cars. We don't have any effective solution for equipping the blind with movement detectors, and solution for giving them some sort of gizmos would be less robust -- those would be subject to being lost, whereas it would be amazingly rare for a noisemaker to fall off a car.

Adding a noisemaker to cars would also benefit distracted pedestrians and young children, as well as preventing accidents with animals. If it helps prevent Distracted Dave or Little Bobby or Fido from getting run over, or keeps you from plowing into a deer, that's a benefit that woudn't accrue to giving motion detectors to the blind. (Many people already add "deer whistles" to their vehicles, though evidence for their effectiveness is spotty: see here and here. The study at the second link is interesting, but the test group using the whistles was self-selected and probably represented more cautious drivers.)

Actually, to be technical, there is no such thing as "a virus" -- "virus" is a plural noun much like the English word "water" and meaning "poison".

In other words, you can't "get a virus". Do you "drink a water"? (Ignore for a second the common shorthand speech of "a water" meaning "a container of water".) Similarly, you don't "have two waters", but rather, you have "twice as much water"; likewise, you don't "have two viruses", you have "twice as much virus". (Also ignore the usage of "waters" as a plural-only, non-liquid noun referring to bodies of water, as in, "We sailed the waters of the world" (This example of the less-common usage is like "We met the peoples of the world", except that the root word "water" is an uncountable, liquid noun, whereas "people" is a liquid noun representing a quantity of the atomic "person"))

[Yes, I realize I'm breaking the modern rules of lazy quote printing; see http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/quotation_marks.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#cite_note-11%5D

Yeah, the term dates back at least to the 1990s. The classic survey paper (over 1000 citations!) on the subject is "Ensemble Methods in Machine Learning" [pdf] by Tom Dietterich (2000), for those who want to glance through a survey. Though be warned that some of its specific conclusions are now dated--- e.g. there's been a *lot* written in both statistics and machine learning since then on what boosting "really" is and why it works.

Dietterich presents the more machine-learning view of it, focused on algorithms, combination of predictions, iterative refinement, etc. The best survey from a statistical approach is probably Ch. 16 of this book by three Stanford profs, which you can probably read some of on Google Books.

That's an Americanism. We're talking about Australia. The summary even spells it Defence, and how could that be wrong!?

Even their website is defence.gov.au...

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/couldof.html

Who would have thought
Who'd have thought
Who'd've thought != WHO WOULD OF

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/couldcare.html

Some reputable schools advertise on buses and TV as well. There was a TV commercial here last year for Washington State University where a student was shown opening doors in a school hallway to what were supposed to be different classrooms. When you open the door which was marked "Biology", there were zebras and dinosaurs roaming on a safari. When you open the door which was marked "Science", there were white coats holding test tubes and a space shuttle blasting off in the background. When you open the door to "Western Civilization", you were instantly transported to the Eiffel Tower. (Cue to roll eyes). Disclaimer: I'm a Huskie.