So the only place for the profits to go is to bonuses or shareholder profits.
How about put it in the friggin' bank so we don't have to use taxpayer money to bail you out when there's a bust in the market that you're gambling in?
Although I read and enjoyed much of the early WoT and find the mythos of the world interesting, in the end the lack of good editing and plot resolution leaves it out of the running for great fantasy. GRR Martin's Song of Fire and Ice is a much, much better literary series than Jordan's, although it may cross a boundary of what's "acceptable" to be taught in many school settings.
But series may not be what you want to use if you are going for breadth. Instead, I'd strongly recommend GG Kay's Tigana and Lions of Al-Rassan as excellent, single-novel works that are probably better being self-contained for a class. For a change of pace, Pratchett's Discworld series is perfect for introducing a bit of comedic parody to the otherwise dominantly dramatic genre. The books are self-contained and many parallel other literature, which may be fun to explore. His co-authored Good Omens is another great option for a class being self contained, which reminds me that Gaiman's American Gods is probably another good suggestion...
... he's dangerously skirting the outer edges of propaganda...
I get plenty of propaganda from the healthcare system already, so what's wrong with a little counter-propaganda to muddle that safe, warm, fuzzy feeling they give me for being among the privileged to pay lots of money for my non-universal care network?
Yes it did invalidate Newton's laws. Einstein's relativity completely invalidated the newtonian view of gravity. Sure, its used still, but in every case, Einstein's predictions about what a couple of bodies will do, no matter how massive, is more accurate than Newton's.
I was talking specifically about the universal law of gravity, and no, Einstein's GR does not invalidate Newton's equation. In the limit of weak gravitational fields and non-relatavistic speeds, the GR equations are required to converge to exactly Newton's equation. It's a special case of the more general theory. And it is right (or, I would say valid) for those conditions.
Yes, Newton's (and the others' that helped lead to it's formulation) idea behind a gravitational force is tremendously less complete than Einstein's GR, a more complete description of space-time. If something comes along that describes these effects even better than GR, we will have a new theory, but the formulation of GR will still be valid when the conditions hold for which it was designed and rigorously, experimentally tested.
Maybe it's semantics, but in my mind using right and wrong for scientific theories just promotes the idea that nothing we're claiming as a theory at the moment is right and opens the door to someone then inferring that they aren't valid and that their preferred alternative is just as good.
Mass. What's your point? Photons don't have mass. That equation is for the rest mass energy equivalence of massive bodies. In general, it doesn't work the other way around.
I think the scientific method is one of the best detectors of rubbish-disguised-as-truth there is. All I am saying is that I hope it's being adhered to. I hope people don't blindly push evolution like some people blindly push religion.
Typically, and especially in our modern era where the method has been practiced for many decades now, seasoned scientific theories are not radically overturned. There may be grand new insights into the underlying reason why a current theory works as well as it did before the new discovery, but that "old" version of our understand still works to explain the same things it did before. We just might understand even better why it worked so well for the conditions or environment we were trying to describe at the time.
Newton's universal law of gravity still is a great description of how massive bodies respond to each other, but it doesn't say anything about how photons--massless particles--respond to massive bodies. Einstein gave us a deeper understanding of gravity that applied even more universally than Newton's law, but it didn't invalidate Newton's law. It's still the best formulation to use for non-relatavistic, massive bodies.
Evolution is a sound scientific theory because it has made predictions and stood the testing of those predictions. When new discoveries are made outside of those predictions, it has still held up as the best theory to explain the similarity and diversity of life on the planet. When we discovered what makes life distinct through DNA and genetics, we didn't throw out our idea of evolution at the species-scale. Instead, we gained a deeper understanding of how the more obvious physical differentiations happen through the everyday chemistry that drives living things.
"John Dvorak is advising Apple to cease all efforts on the Macintosh, citing the personal computer business as a 'buzz saw waiting to chop up newcomers.' With Apple's image as a 'self-starter company that can do no wrong' on the line, Dvorak warns that the extremely stodgy marketplace for personal computers will quickly turn the 'novel' Macintosh passe'. Unless the company has something that does more than just doodle in black & white in the pipeline to release after the original offering, he says, they're likely to fail. 'If it's smart it will call the Macintosh a "reference design" and pass it to Microsoft to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.'"
You're implying that no work is being done taming H-fusion? I think if you compare the funding for fusion research to what astronomers do, you might feel that the ratio is pretty "reasonable".
Plus, keep in mind that this center gets funding from the DoE. I'm sure you can creatively think of other uses for exploring high-energy thermonuclear reactions in high-resolution detail.
The word nova in the astronomical context comes from Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer who was writing in Latin at the time. The plural is novae, not novas. Although supernova is an English construction, the etymology is derived more directly from this Latin word than other modern inventions. Although both plural forms are strictly correct due to the artificial construction, supernovae is used predominantly in our field.
Also, because of the atmosphere, from the ground, we cannot observe all the infrared wavelengths that James Webb will be able to.
But even with ground-based AO and JWST, we will have no access to the UV after Hubble signs off. Although Hubble doesn't do a lot of UV imaging (see GALEX for that), the UV spectroscopy from it has taught us a fantastic amount about the composition, motion, and physical conditions of tons of astronomical objects including nearby interstellar gas and hot stars as well as distant active regions inside the cores of galaxies and the tenuous filaments of intergalactic gas that make up the cosmic web.
These kinds of studies will be impossible to do from the ground and JWST will be no help.:(
What? We are the program. We made it, we run it, we sell it. Free market, baaay-beee! Get with the program!
I mean look at our cable, land-line, and internet markets. It's all about competition and survival-of-the-fittest over here. The consumer rules! We have the best services for the best prices anywhere in the world. By definition. Anything, anywhere else is just some mock-up of the free market we have in place here in the U-S-of-A, likely held together with some pseudo-socialist glue. Our companies live and die in the market trenches without any pansy help from the government. Sheee-ooot.
From the study you linked, the top 20% pull in 54% of the total income (last chart). They pay 65% of the tax burden (4th-to-last chart). Tell me again why this is so far off from "fair"? This was projected for 1999, but I looked at these numbers for 2004 or 2005 from the IRS to answer a similar selective stat posting like yours some time ago and came up with the same kind of numbers.
And when you look at wealth, like this post started with, it really gets quite "fair". The bottom 50% have about zero of that going toward any sort of long-term investment. Most of them don't even own property. Every single penny they get, they spend on living now. So, every single tax penny you can afford to give them a break on goes toward living expenses now. From an individual economic standpoint, it makes a huge difference in standard of living and quality of life (and we're talking about food on the table here, not an extra Lexus). From a whole-soceity economic standpoint those pennies flow right back into the system rather than being locked away in investments.
I don't buy the "but we supply the jobs" argument. In my state, 2/3 of the companies didn't pay a single penny of income tax. So, while the top few percent are whining about paying their fair share in personal income tax (as we see above, not much different than the rest of us), the businesses they own or run aren't ponying up.
Now, our public school system as a whole is very corrupted, but I think that the tenure system put in place by teachers unions is the root of the problem. Young, freshly educated teachers are put in the worst possible situations and have to spend years to get anywhere in the system, while old crotchety dinosaurs climb the ranks and get the raises merely because they have been there the longest... not exactly a good formula for growth and development, eh? Also, it leads to a lot of "I put my time in, I'm getting mine" behavior - there was a scandal around here with teachers 'retiring' and getting rehired immediately so that they could be drawing pensions AND getting paid their salaries.. its stealing, plain and simple. Taking twice the paycheck for doing the same amount of work, taking money away from the education system in the process. SOMETHING needs to change, but I don't feel like a Free Market system would be the right choice.
Im all for a free-market TEACHER system with standardized testing. Maybe try and adjust it with a baseline score to reflect improvement versus just raw scores to avoid punishing educators in less educated-oriented environments.. Give raises to the teachers who TEACH. Just make sure they dont take a dive for the pre-test...
Just wanted to add my support here with some tweaks. The union idea is good in general to give workers a chance against the big system, but some of them are driving certain sectors toward mediocrity by using job security as a rationale. Outside of the public services sector the global economy is gradually punishing this model now. But in the US public school system, there's not much yet to put pressure on this model to evolve. There certainly are areas of the country where the infrastructure (buildings, resources, etc.) is dismal, and more raw funding is needed. But the current teacher model is a general, nation-wide problem.
I'd love to see the current pay system and structure scrapped. Let's hire teachers for 12 months at better starting salaries and fill the summer months with education--for them. Why should in-service training be during the school year? An extended period of training and learning seems to be a better idea for most fields and reflects what they are trying to deliver to kids. Develop partnerships among school systems and nearby universities and companies to bring in additional eductaional-related perspectives while giving teachers an opportunity to offer their own perspectives to the same organizations on the evolving student body and how what they are teaching applies (or isn't) to students' futures.
And--most importantly--as you point out link pay to good teaching. I'm not for linking that primarily to test scores or grades, but that should be a component. Broad-based peer review and student/parent surveys should also be a part of the mix. Good teaching doesn't always generate immediate results and it doesn't always make everyone happy (students, parents, administrators, etc.), but we need to come up with something better to reward than just how long you've been teaching. We need something to inspire more great potential teachers to consider and to stay in teaching.
These factors and many more are reviewed extensively every few years to make sure the project is on track with the goals. If the project has weaknesses, they are notified, and given time to fix the weaknesses. If they still cannot fix problems with the project, the review board will recommended that the project be cut. Most likely (IMHO) the project is failing due to poor management/leadership. The Lead PI is not able to inspire the other investigators to find alternative grant sources, and thus they are not meeting the NSF requirements.
While you point out good things for everyone to keep in mind about how general grants are awarded, this particular review process had little to do with those elements. It was not a normal review, but a special review called by the Astronomy division of NSF to address the looming challenge of funding the large telescope projects on the immediate horizon (ALMA, GST, LST, and maybe SKA). To meet its current commitments, it needed to recover about 30M by 2011 from the operations costs of the current facilities. It put all of its national facilities on the table for cuts and the recommendation really cuts into every one of them. Each facility had to submit reports on how it operated, what its future (and future budget) looked like, and what it would take and cost to close the facility.
I think most of us in the community knew that there would be serious cuts as a result of the ambitious plan that the community decadal plan has set for us. This NSF AST review is a direct result of this plan. Right or not, these are the same priorities that NASA administrators have been using to retain funding for the large next generation space instruments (like JWST) at the expense of support for the diversity of small- and mid-sized experiments that they once fielded. These are tough choices to make--and I don't envy any of the people who have to make them. But I do like the very open and community-based nature that this NSF review has taken. They have sought a ton of input from all of us in the field before doing this report. They claim they will continue to do so as they close in on an implementation for the plan.
Apple's cases have a small feature that allows you not to have to run Windows if you don't want to. And still get everything done. In less time. Without viruses, adware, or spyware.
One of my disappointments in college was to find that every professor has their own theory of what they are "obligated" to offer as professor at a university. Some professors see classes as an obligatory tax paid in return for support from the university; they see themselves first and foremost as scholars in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and classes are a burden yet a formality of the lifestyle which they choose.
We as a society (in the US, at least) have chosen not to reward good teaching as we do nearly every other skill that can be used in a business environment. I'm being overly general here, but from K-12, especially in the public sector, we have a system set up to reward years of service with little incentive to improve one's ability to teach. Dedication to one's field should only be one part of the compensation equation. About all an excellent, beginning teacher can look forward to is maybe choosing which school they want to teach at (which is maybe not the school that really needs a great teacher) or looking to the private sector where there is more flexibility for personal reward.
At the college and university level, jobs that are teaching-only get paid 2-3 times less than those that involve research and/or administration. Even at this level, there is little incentive to be a great teacher at most (not all) institutions aside from the ego of good reviews, full enrollments, and the occasional pat on the head for an award you can stick on your wall. There are glimmers of change here and there, which is encouraging, but it's more grassroots from the inside among faculty and lecturers who are appalled at the state of teaching than it is from the top down, where positions, salaries, and job security are determined.
I taught my first full course last semester. The amount I got paid for the actual teaching was below the poverty level for my family of four--thankfully I have research I'm involved in too, which covered the gap. I loved doing it, and based on what I heard from students and reviews, I think I did a pretty good job. I was putting in 50-70 hours a week on teaching alone doing all these extras that enhance class thesedays. Of course I'm a techie, so I enjoyed doing some of those extras for the most part too. But don't expect everyone to be doing it (or able to do it) out of the goodness of their hearts.
Although I agree with you in theory on what obligations should be, we need to change a lot more than just a set of policies to get better teaching into our classrooms. We need to inspire people into the profession who are willing to challenge themselves and their students, and we need to figure out how to keep them there. We need to inspire institutions from K up to college to seriously reward good teaching from year 1 to retirement. Whether that involves more resources or a reallocation of resources is the hard debate, but the system is pretty broken right now for anything but a baseline of education that seriously favors those with internal motivation and/or money.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all in your mind anyway. Get over it.
Here, watch some Sesame Street that is surely safe for you and your kids...
How about put it in the friggin' bank so we don't have to use taxpayer money to bail you out when there's a bust in the market that you're gambling in?
Although I read and enjoyed much of the early WoT and find the mythos of the world interesting, in the end the lack of good editing and plot resolution leaves it out of the running for great fantasy. GRR Martin's Song of Fire and Ice is a much, much better literary series than Jordan's, although it may cross a boundary of what's "acceptable" to be taught in many school settings.
But series may not be what you want to use if you are going for breadth. Instead, I'd strongly recommend GG Kay's Tigana and Lions of Al-Rassan as excellent, single-novel works that are probably better being self-contained for a class. For a change of pace, Pratchett's Discworld series is perfect for introducing a bit of comedic parody to the otherwise dominantly dramatic genre. The books are self-contained and many parallel other literature, which may be fun to explore. His co-authored Good Omens is another great option for a class being self contained, which reminds me that Gaiman's American Gods is probably another good suggestion...
Gives a new meaning to DPS...
I get plenty of propaganda from the healthcare system already, so what's wrong with a little counter-propaganda to muddle that safe, warm, fuzzy feeling they give me for being among the privileged to pay lots of money for my non-universal care network?
I was talking specifically about the universal law of gravity, and no, Einstein's GR does not invalidate Newton's equation. In the limit of weak gravitational fields and non-relatavistic speeds, the GR equations are required to converge to exactly Newton's equation. It's a special case of the more general theory. And it is right (or, I would say valid) for those conditions.
Yes, Newton's (and the others' that helped lead to it's formulation) idea behind a gravitational force is tremendously less complete than Einstein's GR, a more complete description of space-time. If something comes along that describes these effects even better than GR, we will have a new theory, but the formulation of GR will still be valid when the conditions hold for which it was designed and rigorously, experimentally tested.
Maybe it's semantics, but in my mind using right and wrong for scientific theories just promotes the idea that nothing we're claiming as a theory at the moment is right and opens the door to someone then inferring that they aren't valid and that their preferred alternative is just as good.
Among other things...
Mass. What's your point? Photons don't have mass. That equation is for the rest mass energy equivalence of massive bodies. In general, it doesn't work the other way around.
Typically, and especially in our modern era where the method has been practiced for many decades now, seasoned scientific theories are not radically overturned. There may be grand new insights into the underlying reason why a current theory works as well as it did before the new discovery, but that "old" version of our understand still works to explain the same things it did before. We just might understand even better why it worked so well for the conditions or environment we were trying to describe at the time.
Newton's universal law of gravity still is a great description of how massive bodies respond to each other, but it doesn't say anything about how photons--massless particles--respond to massive bodies. Einstein gave us a deeper understanding of gravity that applied even more universally than Newton's law, but it didn't invalidate Newton's law. It's still the best formulation to use for non-relatavistic, massive bodies.
Evolution is a sound scientific theory because it has made predictions and stood the testing of those predictions. When new discoveries are made outside of those predictions, it has still held up as the best theory to explain the similarity and diversity of life on the planet. When we discovered what makes life distinct through DNA and genetics, we didn't throw out our idea of evolution at the species-scale. Instead, we gained a deeper understanding of how the more obvious physical differentiations happen through the everyday chemistry that drives living things.
Found this on the wayback machine:
"John Dvorak is advising Apple to cease all efforts on the Macintosh, citing the personal computer business as a 'buzz saw waiting to chop up newcomers.' With Apple's image as a 'self-starter company that can do no wrong' on the line, Dvorak warns that the extremely stodgy marketplace for personal computers will quickly turn the 'novel' Macintosh passe'. Unless the company has something that does more than just doodle in black & white in the pipeline to release after the original offering, he says, they're likely to fail. 'If it's smart it will call the Macintosh a "reference design" and pass it to Microsoft to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.'"
You're implying that no work is being done taming H-fusion? I think if you compare the funding for fusion research to what astronomers do, you might feel that the ratio is pretty "reasonable".
Plus, keep in mind that this center gets funding from the DoE. I'm sure you can creatively think of other uses for exploring high-energy thermonuclear reactions in high-resolution detail.
Um, hi. Astronomer here (not that it matters).
The word nova in the astronomical context comes from Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer who was writing in Latin at the time. The plural is novae, not novas. Although supernova is an English construction, the etymology is derived more directly from this Latin word than other modern inventions. Although both plural forms are strictly correct due to the artificial construction, supernovae is used predominantly in our field.
I know. It's not like most of the bright stars in the sky have Arabic names or anything.
No, but you probably pay taxes which fund the FAA. They worry for you so you don't have to.
Because all the other countries are busy worrying about whether we are going to destroy them first.
Also, because of the atmosphere, from the ground, we cannot observe all the infrared wavelengths that James Webb will be able to.
:(
But even with ground-based AO and JWST, we will have no access to the UV after Hubble signs off. Although Hubble doesn't do a lot of UV imaging (see GALEX for that), the UV spectroscopy from it has taught us a fantastic amount about the composition, motion, and physical conditions of tons of astronomical objects including nearby interstellar gas and hot stars as well as distant active regions inside the cores of galaxies and the tenuous filaments of intergalactic gas that make up the cosmic web.
These kinds of studies will be impossible to do from the ground and JWST will be no help.
The new WFC3 will be installed in place of the now-inoperative Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) instrument.
WFC3 replaces WFPC2.
COS (UV spectroscopy) replaces COSTAR (the original optics fix package; all the new instruments have this correction built in).
STIS will have an attempted repair to get it going again. It's a tough job, but we astro spectral-types have our fingers crossed.
Americans need to get with the program.
What? We are the program. We made it, we run it, we sell it. Free market, baaay-beee! Get with the program!
I mean look at our cable, land-line, and internet markets. It's all about competition and survival-of-the-fittest over here. The consumer rules! We have the best services for the best prices anywhere in the world. By definition. Anything, anywhere else is just some mock-up of the free market we have in place here in the U-S-of-A, likely held together with some pseudo-socialist glue. Our companies live and die in the market trenches without any pansy help from the government. Sheee-ooot.
Cheney/Lay 2008!
From the study you linked, the top 20% pull in 54% of the total income (last chart). They pay 65% of the tax burden (4th-to-last chart). Tell me again why this is so far off from "fair"? This was projected for 1999, but I looked at these numbers for 2004 or 2005 from the IRS to answer a similar selective stat posting like yours some time ago and came up with the same kind of numbers.
And when you look at wealth, like this post started with, it really gets quite "fair". The bottom 50% have about zero of that going toward any sort of long-term investment. Most of them don't even own property. Every single penny they get, they spend on living now. So, every single tax penny you can afford to give them a break on goes toward living expenses now. From an individual economic standpoint, it makes a huge difference in standard of living and quality of life (and we're talking about food on the table here, not an extra Lexus). From a whole-soceity economic standpoint those pennies flow right back into the system rather than being locked away in investments.
I don't buy the "but we supply the jobs" argument. In my state, 2/3 of the companies didn't pay a single penny of income tax. So, while the top few percent are whining about paying their fair share in personal income tax (as we see above, not much different than the rest of us), the businesses they own or run aren't ponying up.
Get over it cry babies.
Just wanted to add my support here with some tweaks. The union idea is good in general to give workers a chance against the big system, but some of them are driving certain sectors toward mediocrity by using job security as a rationale. Outside of the public services sector the global economy is gradually punishing this model now. But in the US public school system, there's not much yet to put pressure on this model to evolve. There certainly are areas of the country where the infrastructure (buildings, resources, etc.) is dismal, and more raw funding is needed. But the current teacher model is a general, nation-wide problem.
I'd love to see the current pay system and structure scrapped. Let's hire teachers for 12 months at better starting salaries and fill the summer months with education--for them. Why should in-service training be during the school year? An extended period of training and learning seems to be a better idea for most fields and reflects what they are trying to deliver to kids. Develop partnerships among school systems and nearby universities and companies to bring in additional eductaional-related perspectives while giving teachers an opportunity to offer their own perspectives to the same organizations on the evolving student body and how what they are teaching applies (or isn't) to students' futures.
And--most importantly--as you point out link pay to good teaching. I'm not for linking that primarily to test scores or grades, but that should be a component. Broad-based peer review and student/parent surveys should also be a part of the mix. Good teaching doesn't always generate immediate results and it doesn't always make everyone happy (students, parents, administrators, etc.), but we need to come up with something better to reward than just how long you've been teaching. We need something to inspire more great potential teachers to consider and to stay in teaching.
While you point out good things for everyone to keep in mind about how general grants are awarded, this particular review process had little to do with those elements. It was not a normal review, but a special review called by the Astronomy division of NSF to address the looming challenge of funding the large telescope projects on the immediate horizon (ALMA, GST, LST, and maybe SKA). To meet its current commitments, it needed to recover about 30M by 2011 from the operations costs of the current facilities. It put all of its national facilities on the table for cuts and the recommendation really cuts into every one of them. Each facility had to submit reports on how it operated, what its future (and future budget) looked like, and what it would take and cost to close the facility.
I think most of us in the community knew that there would be serious cuts as a result of the ambitious plan that the community decadal plan has set for us. This NSF AST review is a direct result of this plan. Right or not, these are the same priorities that NASA administrators have been using to retain funding for the large next generation space instruments (like JWST) at the expense of support for the diversity of small- and mid-sized experiments that they once fielded. These are tough choices to make--and I don't envy any of the people who have to make them. But I do like the very open and community-based nature that this NSF review has taken. They have sought a ton of input from all of us in the field before doing this report. They claim they will continue to do so as they close in on an implementation for the plan.
... that pre-dated the MAC, but why quibble. (Oh wait, right, this is slashdot.)
Yup. And you loose a ton of points for writing "MAC".
5. (or is it 6.?)
Apple's cases have a small feature that allows you not to have to run Windows if you don't want to. And still get everything done. In less time. Without viruses, adware, or spyware.
What does T-Rex tast[e] like?
Duh.
Chicken.
We as a society (in the US, at least) have chosen not to reward good teaching as we do nearly every other skill that can be used in a business environment. I'm being overly general here, but from K-12, especially in the public sector, we have a system set up to reward years of service with little incentive to improve one's ability to teach. Dedication to one's field should only be one part of the compensation equation. About all an excellent, beginning teacher can look forward to is maybe choosing which school they want to teach at (which is maybe not the school that really needs a great teacher) or looking to the private sector where there is more flexibility for personal reward.
At the college and university level, jobs that are teaching-only get paid 2-3 times less than those that involve research and/or administration. Even at this level, there is little incentive to be a great teacher at most (not all) institutions aside from the ego of good reviews, full enrollments, and the occasional pat on the head for an award you can stick on your wall. There are glimmers of change here and there, which is encouraging, but it's more grassroots from the inside among faculty and lecturers who are appalled at the state of teaching than it is from the top down, where positions, salaries, and job security are determined.
I taught my first full course last semester. The amount I got paid for the actual teaching was below the poverty level for my family of four--thankfully I have research I'm involved in too, which covered the gap. I loved doing it, and based on what I heard from students and reviews, I think I did a pretty good job. I was putting in 50-70 hours a week on teaching alone doing all these extras that enhance class thesedays. Of course I'm a techie, so I enjoyed doing some of those extras for the most part too. But don't expect everyone to be doing it (or able to do it) out of the goodness of their hearts.
Although I agree with you in theory on what obligations should be, we need to change a lot more than just a set of policies to get better teaching into our classrooms. We need to inspire people into the profession who are willing to challenge themselves and their students, and we need to figure out how to keep them there. We need to inspire institutions from K up to college to seriously reward good teaching from year 1 to retirement. Whether that involves more resources or a reallocation of resources is the hard debate, but the system is pretty broken right now for anything but a baseline of education that seriously favors those with internal motivation and/or money.