I entirely agree that American attitudes towards the French are somewhat mystifying, but your analogy doesn't really hold up. I mean, the US sold arms to Iraq in the '80s. That means that we should be best buddies, right?
Intelligence is roughly normal (by any measure that has been invented, assuming that you can actually measure intelligence). As it is normal, the average (or mean) and the median are very, very close (in an ideal normal distribution, the median is the mean, but we, perhaps, can assume some variation for the real world). Thus, when George Carlin mentions the average intelligence of people, he is referring to both the mean and the median, because they are basically equivalent. Income distribution is probably log normal or, more likely, exponential. Both distributions are heavy tailed -- that is, there are a lot of outliers to the right. The mean is not a resistant measure of center, so as you get more outliers, the mean moves fairly readily. Your joke takes advantage of the fact that the average is not resistant, but fails to take into account the original context in which Carlin was speaking. Thus, just as using the mean in the wrong context can lead to poor results, your joke falls flat.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't actually have anything to do with what I was responding to. The grandparent made the assertion that (among other things), under the Constitution, Congress alone can make and pass laws, and that Congress alone has the power to create regulation. This statement is false. Congress does make the laws, but it is up to the Executive to enact those laws, through regulation. I was merely correcting his assertion. If you want to debate the merits of a representative democracy, that is all well and good, but it is not germane to the current discussion.
If the citizenry of the US revolted, we would either be in a situation where the army (a) supported the government, (b) split, or (c) supported the populace.
In the case of (a), it would look a lot like Iraq -- poorly armed and poorly trained civilians (whether or not there are gun laws, the citizenry is going to be comparatively poorly armed and trained) against a well armed, well equipped, well trained army. In that case, non-military rebels would probably be killed off in similar numbers to "insurgents" or "terrorists" (or whatever we are supposed to call them now) in Iraq (not to mention non-combatant deaths). The best case scenario in this case is chaos and anarchy.
In either of the other two cases, it is the military fighting against itself, or the military fighting the government. In neither case can an armed citizenry hope to contribute much. In no case do I see how an armed citizenry is useful against a better armed, better equipped, better trained military. The days of a civilian revolt are long behind us. Fortunately, we have better tools at our disposal (i.e. "Hey, democracy works pretty well almost all of the time!").
I'm glad you bring up Iraq, because if the US did devolve into some kind of revolution, that is exactly what it would look like. It is funny how the off-handed comment that you made so aptly describes exactly why an armed populace is pretty useless for overthrowing the US government.
It is the job of Congress to create laws. It is the job of the Executive Branch (i.e. the President) to enforce laws, and regulation is part of that (regulations are basically statements about how laws are to be enforced). It is the job of the Supreme Court to interpret the law. In this case, Congress passed a law (the Clean Air Act), and the Executive created regulations outlining how the law was to be enforced. The Supreme Court determined that those regulations did not sufficiently uphold the law, and told them to try again. This is a case where the Executive did not act according to the will of the people, as enacted by Congress; was slapped down by the Supreme Court for it; and is now trying to pretend that the issue never existed.
Congress voted on the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act outlined duties for the EPA. The Supreme Court found that the EPA was not properly following the guidelines of the Clean Air Act, and told them to fix it. So, um... Congress did vote on this, and approved of it. Otherwise, you had better bet that Congress would have repealed the law by now. If you don't like the law, vote for a representative or senator who is willing to repeal it. Otherwise, the checks and balances seem to be working properly (aside from the fact that the Chief Executive is ignoring the findings of his Cabinet).
I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.
This is a modern version of the Hippocratic Oath, taken from medterms.com. Can you please point out to me where this prohibits abortion or euthanasia? According to the linked website, this version was written in 1964, by Louis Lasagna (Dean of Medicine at Tufts). So, for at least 40 years, this alternative has been around.
That is part of the original or classical oath. I think that you will find that most modern versions leave that line out. See NOVA or medterms.com. The science of medicine has changed quite a bit in the couple of thousand years since Hippocrates' time. The oath has been updated in accordance with modern science.
[blockquote]2) Which is exactly how you should use wikipedia.[/blockquote]
Or any encyclopedia, for that matter. The problem is less with Wikipedia itself (though I generally don't trust it all that far for research purposes, and am glad that I have access to a wealth of peer-reviewed work and print encyclopedias through the school district) than it is with any encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are written to be very general references for the lay-person. If you are researching in a field, you really shouldn't need things written for the lay-person -- even at an introductory level, you should be using references from the field that you are studying, whether it be peer-reviewed work, textbooks, or other similar sources. Anyone referencing an encyclopedia past their sophomore or junior year of high school should be told not to in an appropriately strong manner.
Not really. Often, a sample size of only 30-40 will be sufficient to draw conclusions of statistical significance. Even if we assume a moderately heterogenous population, a sample size of 300 ought to be fine, especially to draw the kind of conclusion that the article draws, namely that "many admins snoop" -- not all, or even necessarily a majority, but a large number. Thought of another way, when polling organizations like Gallup conduct a survey, their sample sizes are often right around 1,000, and they are modeling the entire population of the US, which is both larger and more heterogeneous than the population of admins in the US. You don't need super-large samples to get good data, and the utility of adding one more data point into a sample decays exponentially.
Indeed. I really love my cast iron, even if the wife can't cook with the 10" or 12" pans -- they are just a little too heavy for her. I was only pointing out a couple of many reasons to prefer cast iron to steel.
A well seasoned cast iron implement also has the advantage of being relatively non-stick without the use of teflon or anything else which tends to flake off into food or otherwise degrade, which is, in my opinion, useful.
The problem is that "teaching the test" does not mean teaching the material that is on the test. It generally means teaching students how to take tests (if you don't know the answer, pick C; try to eliminate one or two wrong answers first; options with "always" or "never" are probably wrong; &c.). Students learn a lot of tips and tricks for taking bubble tests, and they learn facts about the subject areas, but they are unable to synthesize that material in any way. So, occasional standardized testing to ensure that basic facts are present is acceptable, but relying on standardized tests alone is no way to determine whether or not students are actually learning the material, or that they are capable of thinking about it abstractly.
If that is your response, then it is clear that you didn't read the article (surprise, surprise -- this is Slashdot, after all). The point of the article was that there are a lot of games out there where the claim is that there is a great story, but that you can skip the story without altering the gameplay experience. Thus, the story doesn't add to gameplay, and may actually detract from it. His argument was that if a game is to have a story, then that story should be more tightly integrated into gameplay, so that it is not distracting or irrelevant.
You know, in today's Slashdot comments, both [i]Star Trek: The Motion Picture[/i] and the original [i]Starship Troopers[/i] films have been mocked and ridiculed. It is nice to find someone who agrees with me on at least one of the two films. I was starting to get depressed.;)
This mission is supposed to last 90 days, and there is very little chance it will go much longer. The rovers have the good fortune of being on a part of Mars that receives some sunlight year round. The Phoenix lander is near the north pole, where it will be getting very, very dark soon.
Now you are running into the problem of self-selecting sample bias. The people that would choose to vote for or against a particular bill are only going to be those that have a strong opinion on the matter. So, for instance, a bill allowing same sex marriage would likely only be voted on by religious fundamentalists, and gays that want to get married. The passage of the bill comes down to whether or not gays outnumber fundamentalists, not what what the "will of the people" is. Again, that is not how I want my government run. The system we have is not perfect, but it is better than mob rule, which is what this basically boils down to.
You seriously want the people to vote on every single bill that is signed into law? Nothing would ever get done. The entire budget would be spent on elections. And no one has time to read through every bill that goes before congress and understand it. That is why congressmen have huge staffs -- to help them wade through the legislation that they have to deal with. I'm sorry, but your system is completely impractical.
Actually, you may not be too far off. Anyone else remember Jon Katz, and his book on Columbine? "Voices from the Hellmouth," or something like that -- it was a bunch of Slashdot comments slapped between two covers...
The creation of the OED was certainly in interesting effort, but I would not go so far as to say it is like the Wikipedia of its time. The OED was edited an compiled by a very small group of people, who had complete editorial control. Certainly, volunteers submitted words and quotes to the editors, but the editors were ultimately in control over which words and quotes ended up in the dictionary. This is in stark contrast to Wikipedia, where there really isn't any centralized control.
Re:It also lacked wireless..
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
Minor point: unless your ISP is run by or funded by the the government (federal, state, or local), you would win a first amendment suit. The first amendment controls what congress can do, and is applied to the states by way of the fourteenth amendment. That is not to say that you wouldn't be hit by problems with common carrier laws, but the constitution has very little, if anything, to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I entirely agree that American attitudes towards the French are somewhat mystifying, but your analogy doesn't really hold up. I mean, the US sold arms to Iraq in the '80s. That means that we should be best buddies, right?
Intelligence is roughly normal (by any measure that has been invented, assuming that you can actually measure intelligence). As it is normal, the average (or mean) and the median are very, very close (in an ideal normal distribution, the median is the mean, but we, perhaps, can assume some variation for the real world). Thus, when George Carlin mentions the average intelligence of people, he is referring to both the mean and the median, because they are basically equivalent. Income distribution is probably log normal or, more likely, exponential. Both distributions are heavy tailed -- that is, there are a lot of outliers to the right. The mean is not a resistant measure of center, so as you get more outliers, the mean moves fairly readily. Your joke takes advantage of the fact that the average is not resistant, but fails to take into account the original context in which Carlin was speaking. Thus, just as using the mean in the wrong context can lead to poor results, your joke falls flat.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't actually have anything to do with what I was responding to. The grandparent made the assertion that (among other things), under the Constitution, Congress alone can make and pass laws, and that Congress alone has the power to create regulation. This statement is false. Congress does make the laws, but it is up to the Executive to enact those laws, through regulation. I was merely correcting his assertion. If you want to debate the merits of a representative democracy, that is all well and good, but it is not germane to the current discussion.
If the citizenry of the US revolted, we would either be in a situation where the army (a) supported the government, (b) split, or (c) supported the populace.
In the case of (a), it would look a lot like Iraq -- poorly armed and poorly trained civilians (whether or not there are gun laws, the citizenry is going to be comparatively poorly armed and trained) against a well armed, well equipped, well trained army. In that case, non-military rebels would probably be killed off in similar numbers to "insurgents" or "terrorists" (or whatever we are supposed to call them now) in Iraq (not to mention non-combatant deaths). The best case scenario in this case is chaos and anarchy.
In either of the other two cases, it is the military fighting against itself, or the military fighting the government. In neither case can an armed citizenry hope to contribute much. In no case do I see how an armed citizenry is useful against a better armed, better equipped, better trained military. The days of a civilian revolt are long behind us. Fortunately, we have better tools at our disposal (i.e. "Hey, democracy works pretty well almost all of the time!").
I'm glad you bring up Iraq, because if the US did devolve into some kind of revolution, that is exactly what it would look like. It is funny how the off-handed comment that you made so aptly describes exactly why an armed populace is pretty useless for overthrowing the US government.
It is the job of Congress to create laws. It is the job of the Executive Branch (i.e. the President) to enforce laws, and regulation is part of that (regulations are basically statements about how laws are to be enforced). It is the job of the Supreme Court to interpret the law. In this case, Congress passed a law (the Clean Air Act), and the Executive created regulations outlining how the law was to be enforced. The Supreme Court determined that those regulations did not sufficiently uphold the law, and told them to try again. This is a case where the Executive did not act according to the will of the people, as enacted by Congress; was slapped down by the Supreme Court for it; and is now trying to pretend that the issue never existed.
Congress voted on the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act outlined duties for the EPA. The Supreme Court found that the EPA was not properly following the guidelines of the Clean Air Act, and told them to fix it. So, um... Congress did vote on this, and approved of it. Otherwise, you had better bet that Congress would have repealed the law by now. If you don't like the law, vote for a representative or senator who is willing to repeal it. Otherwise, the checks and balances seem to be working properly (aside from the fact that the Chief Executive is ignoring the findings of his Cabinet).
That is part of the original or classical oath. I think that you will find that most modern versions leave that line out. See NOVA or medterms.com. The science of medicine has changed quite a bit in the couple of thousand years since Hippocrates' time. The oath has been updated in accordance with modern science.
[blockquote]2) Which is exactly how you should use wikipedia.[/blockquote] Or any encyclopedia, for that matter. The problem is less with Wikipedia itself (though I generally don't trust it all that far for research purposes, and am glad that I have access to a wealth of peer-reviewed work and print encyclopedias through the school district) than it is with any encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are written to be very general references for the lay-person. If you are researching in a field, you really shouldn't need things written for the lay-person -- even at an introductory level, you should be using references from the field that you are studying, whether it be peer-reviewed work, textbooks, or other similar sources. Anyone referencing an encyclopedia past their sophomore or junior year of high school should be told not to in an appropriately strong manner.
Not really. Often, a sample size of only 30-40 will be sufficient to draw conclusions of statistical significance. Even if we assume a moderately heterogenous population, a sample size of 300 ought to be fine, especially to draw the kind of conclusion that the article draws, namely that "many admins snoop" -- not all, or even necessarily a majority, but a large number. Thought of another way, when polling organizations like Gallup conduct a survey, their sample sizes are often right around 1,000, and they are modeling the entire population of the US, which is both larger and more heterogeneous than the population of admins in the US. You don't need super-large samples to get good data, and the utility of adding one more data point into a sample decays exponentially.
Indeed. I really love my cast iron, even if the wife can't cook with the 10" or 12" pans -- they are just a little too heavy for her. I was only pointing out a couple of many reasons to prefer cast iron to steel.
A well seasoned cast iron implement also has the advantage of being relatively non-stick without the use of teflon or anything else which tends to flake off into food or otherwise degrade, which is, in my opinion, useful.
The problem is that "teaching the test" does not mean teaching the material that is on the test. It generally means teaching students how to take tests (if you don't know the answer, pick C; try to eliminate one or two wrong answers first; options with "always" or "never" are probably wrong; &c.). Students learn a lot of tips and tricks for taking bubble tests, and they learn facts about the subject areas, but they are unable to synthesize that material in any way. So, occasional standardized testing to ensure that basic facts are present is acceptable, but relying on standardized tests alone is no way to determine whether or not students are actually learning the material, or that they are capable of thinking about it abstractly.
If that is your response, then it is clear that you didn't read the article (surprise, surprise -- this is Slashdot, after all). The point of the article was that there are a lot of games out there where the claim is that there is a great story, but that you can skip the story without altering the gameplay experience. Thus, the story doesn't add to gameplay, and may actually detract from it. His argument was that if a game is to have a story, then that story should be more tightly integrated into gameplay, so that it is not distracting or irrelevant.
You know, in today's Slashdot comments, both [i]Star Trek: The Motion Picture[/i] and the original [i]Starship Troopers[/i] films have been mocked and ridiculed. It is nice to find someone who agrees with me on at least one of the two films. I was starting to get depressed. ;)
This mission is supposed to last 90 days, and there is very little chance it will go much longer. The rovers have the good fortune of being on a part of Mars that receives some sunlight year round. The Phoenix lander is near the north pole, where it will be getting very, very dark soon.
Boy, you're a cynical fuck, aren't you?
Now you are running into the problem of self-selecting sample bias. The people that would choose to vote for or against a particular bill are only going to be those that have a strong opinion on the matter. So, for instance, a bill allowing same sex marriage would likely only be voted on by religious fundamentalists, and gays that want to get married. The passage of the bill comes down to whether or not gays outnumber fundamentalists, not what what the "will of the people" is. Again, that is not how I want my government run. The system we have is not perfect, but it is better than mob rule, which is what this basically boils down to.
You seriously want the people to vote on every single bill that is signed into law? Nothing would ever get done. The entire budget would be spent on elections. And no one has time to read through every bill that goes before congress and understand it. That is why congressmen have huge staffs -- to help them wade through the legislation that they have to deal with. I'm sorry, but your system is completely impractical.
Actually, you may not be too far off. Anyone else remember Jon Katz, and his book on Columbine? "Voices from the Hellmouth," or something like that -- it was a bunch of Slashdot comments slapped between two covers...
The creation of the OED was certainly in interesting effort, but I would not go so far as to say it is like the Wikipedia of its time. The OED was edited an compiled by a very small group of people, who had complete editorial control. Certainly, volunteers submitted words and quotes to the editors, but the editors were ultimately in control over which words and quotes ended up in the dictionary. This is in stark contrast to Wikipedia, where there really isn't any centralized control.
...lame.
Ah. I see. That makes sense. That must suck. ;)
Minor point: unless your ISP is run by or funded by the the government (federal, state, or local), you would win a first amendment suit. The first amendment controls what congress can do, and is applied to the states by way of the fourteenth amendment. That is not to say that you wouldn't be hit by problems with common carrier laws, but the constitution has very little, if anything, to do with it.