Other commenters have mentioned that teachers don't get paid well. That's not true of some professors, who get paid very well. The difference between a highschool teacher and a professor, however, is that the teacher has actual training, while the professor had to wing it when he first started and may still be totally winging it. In major universities, professors are hired to do research, and teaching is secondary at best. So even lousy instructors get tenure if they bring in grant money. And yes, I've encountered plenty of lousy instructors, along with some absolutely astounding ones. The problem with professors is that although their dissertations "prove" that they are experts in their field, they often lack the talent (and also the training) to convey the subject well.
The point is that being an expert in a field says nothing about whether or not you can teach. And people who think that they can teach anything they want are idiots. My doctorate is in computer engineering. But having a background in Linguistics and being a fairly decent writer, I may know more about English than many highschool English teachers (I suck at literary analysis, but just go with me on this). I can assure you that I still would not teach English as well as your average English teacher, because I'm not trained in instruction. My only advantage is that I have a wife and mother-in-law who do have training in instruction, and they have been willing to instruct me in it.:)
While it's still not such a great idea to gulping down tons of sucrose, the bigger culprit here is fructose. Fructose isn't detected the same as sucrose or glucose, so you don't feel satisfied. Also, fructose is metabolized by the liver, which means that organ is tied up working on fructose rather than all the other pollutants that you're bringing into your body. There's a reason why detox suplements prefer the biologically active forms of nutrients, so the liver doesn't have to convert them, freeing the liver for breaking down other toxins in your system. Your liver has limited capacity. Use it wisely.
It always bugs me how people seem to often use the term Scientist for someone who is actually doing Engineering. There's no shame in engineering. I'm an engineer, and engineering is no trivial job. But as I understand it, it is the scientists that figure out how the world works, and the engineers use that knowledge to design new things. Both require serious insightfulness and creativity.
Like in Venture Brothers, Rusty Venture calls himself a "super scientist." Indeed if this were reality, he would have to do a heck of a lot of science. But in fact, the majority of what he does is engineering, building huge mechanical whatzits and stuff.
Why do scientists get all the credit?
(P.S. I think technically I'm a scientist also, because I have a Ph.D. (optional) and conduct and publish research. But I don't think I'm as good a scientst as many of my colleagues. What makes me competitive is that I have very strong engineering skills, which makes my experimental systems and experiments more robust.)
A member of the American Chemical Society once noted the negative connotations surrounding the term "chemical" and suggested that they start referring to them as "substances." Others weren't so thrilled with what that would do to their acronym.
As much as they want to call it "Sci Fi," Doctor Who is fantasy, and the sonic screwdriver is nothing short of a magic wand.
The whole of Series 5 should have clinched that for anyone paying attention. In order to save the universe, the Doctor had to reboot it, requiring him to cease to exist, although he could be brought back as soon as Amy remembered him? It was even openly admitted that it was a Fairy Tail. This isn't sci fi. As soon as you let go of that, you can start to enjoy it again, like pure fantasy or perhaps some combo like what Piers Anthony liked to write about.
If a sociologist were to get hold of this it would be interesting. Foxconn China vs. Foxconn Brazil. The parent company and the products remain constant, as do the sources of most of the parts, while what changes are local management, local laws, and local workers. So, if there were any systematic difference in manufacturing quality between the two locations, it might tell is some interesting things about differences in culture. Do workers in China or Brazil have better attention to detail? Better concern for precision? Better concern for what the inside of a product looks like vs. the outside, where tolerances allow differences?
My iPad 2, for instance, has a very minor manufacturing flaw. There is a plastic seal between the front glass and the metal that wraps around the sides, where along one bottom corner, the plastic protrudes slightly more. So there is room for variability in assembly that would be interesting to look at.
For Foxconn's sake, they could turn this into a benefit. Hey personnel A! Why aren't we doing better than personnel B?
In the US, we've kinda lost that competitive drive; we've adopted a culture of doing the minimum work for the maximum pay, but maybe Brazil and China have different values.
I didn't RTFM, but on the surface, although this looks like evolution and symbiosis, it doesn't look like symbiotic evolution. The insect didn't change. The bacteria did, and the bacteria is living in the insect. The bacteria didn't cause the insect to develop a resistance. The bacteria is PROVIDING the resistance. If you were to remove the bacteria from the insect, the insect would be vulnerable again.
You know how every email program and every other email service in the world lets you quote the email you're replying to with '>' characters or similar, so you can interleave your replies with what you're replying to?
It is incredibly unlikely that a console system will use less power while active than while playing a game. However, because the idle power is still high, these systems use most of their ENERGY while idle.
Interestingly, when it comes to efficiency, they get the units right. The unit is gigaflops per watt. In each of these units, the seconds cancel out, giving us billions of operations per joule, which is what we want.
Silicon AREA is cheap, and it's getting cheaper. Today's processors dedicate half their die space to CACHE. Transistors per die, cores per die, and transistors per core are all increasing at (different) exponential rates. And with power density increasing at a quadratic rate, we're already facing the dark silicon problem, where if we power on the entire chip at nominal voltage, we have trouble delivering the power, and we can't dissipate the heat.
With 16 cores, a bus is tolerable. At 64, it's a liability, and we NEED a more sophisticated network.
The Network on Chip has been around as a concept so long we even have an abbreviation (NoC). Maybe this isn't in commodity products, but basically if you want to do an NoC, you don't have to invent anything yourself. There are several conferences and journals that have been publishing papers on this for decades. But, OH, if a professor from MIT mentions it, it must be something NEW. Sheesh.
This study seems to be making the assumption that we all put the same brain functions in precisely the same places. But each individual has different intellectual strengths, weaknesses, and talents. Although I wouldn't say they shouldn't do this study, I fail to see how it would give us more than the coarsest understanding, biased based on the individual personalities of those tested.
Do I think that homosexuals should have the right to marry? Yes. But this issue is complex.
One issue is that heterosexual marriages are backed by thousands upon thousands of year of tradition, while homosexual marriages are not. Those traditions touch on a wife variety of things. Subjugation of women. Production of children. Contracts between families. Et cetera.
Now, many heterosexual marriages are "modern", being not bound by many of those traditions. But homosexual marrages are an entirely modern construction and are, by definition, not bound by those traditions. So by insisting on calling their relationships "marriage," they are awkwardly insinuating themselves into that traditional framework.
Personally, I think that the legal and traditional frameworks should be completely separated. The legal framework ("civil union") should be open to anyone, making heterosexual marriages the same kind of civil union under the law. Now, if you want to turn around and call it a "marriage," then that's up to you, based on whatever tradition you choose. Someone can object to you calling it a marriage if they want, but in this way, their objection cannot interfere with your civil rights.
BTW, if you want to expore other complications of gay marriage, consider child custody law. In most jurisdictions, you cannot have more than one legal guardian of the same gender. This is a technical issue. My main point is that to adapt to modern reality, it is not a simple matter of semantics. LOTS of laws have to be changed, and that takes time and effort and patience.
There's being open about your sexuality and then there's being TOO open about your sexuality.
Good: Hi, meet my partner Sam. We're in a committed relationship. Unwelcome: My partner Sam and I had some fantastic sex last night. Really Bad: Hi. Would you like to watch me and my partner Sam have sex in the street?
This is the same for me regardless of Sam's gender and Sam's partner's gender. Taking it as a given that homosexuals should not have to struggle for basic human rights, one thing I really don't like is (most) gay pride parades. This is because there's the inevitable group in the parade that insists on engaging in overt sexual behavior as part of the parade. I don't want to see that. Actually, if they're lesbians, I DO want to see that, but that's my personal sin, and it is still inappropriate to be doing that in public. But mostly they bother me because it makes gay people look like a bunch of perverted assholes, and that's not fair to the vast majority of gay people. Most gay people just want to be left alone, but their freedoms are threatened as much by anti-gay bogots as they are by gay people who put perverted images into the minds of anti-gay bigots.
In other words: If you are human, try to use some discretion.
BTW, what would be great is if we could put behind all of this "gay is sin" crap and focus on some real problems, like how unprotected sex is a disease risk and how rectal contact is even worse, because intestines are full of germs. This applies equally to gay men, heterosexuals, and lesbians with exploratory fingers. We should be able to talk frankly about medical, social, and emotional risks inherent in all sexual encounters, without certain groups squelching it for one reason or another. And every activist group, religious, pro-LGBT, whatever, are all guilty of interfering in this somehow. For instance, religious groups often squelch sexual discussions entirely, leading kids to be ignorant of safe-sex practices. And LGBT groups are so adamant about their "rights" to do what they want that they advocate risky behaviors that have nothing really to do with being LGBT. In my opinion, no one has the right to be indiscriminately promiscuous, because that makes you a disease vector, and you do not have the right to spread disease to innocent victims. I had once assumed that condom use would be ubiquitous in the gay community. Sadly, it is not, and that's really really bad. (Of course, homosexuals are not at all unique in this sin.)
Personally, I'm not a prude. When my kids ask me about sex, I'm going to just tell them. And the main things I'm going to warn them about are pregnancy and disease, the latter of which applies regardless of the type of sexual relationship. If my any of my kids turn out gay, I'm just going to explain to them the social challenges, in an effort to help them navigate the minefields they might otherwise encounter. And the fact is, that is only one out of countless other things that people get persecuted for. How about being geeky? Or fat? Or short? Or even just female (in certain cultures)? In that regard being gay isn't any different.
However, there are many people who get all bothered by talk of sex for kids who are "too young" or whatever. Culturally, for the sake of kids, we have separated romance from sex. Heterosexual relationships are ubiquitous, and everyone sees that there are families with kids. Exactly how those kids came to be may be left as a mystery for some kids until they're "old enough", but you can't exactly ignore the existance of the families. And even in elementary school, you sometimes find kids pairing off and having little mini romances, that are effectively platonic. But the tricky part is when you get into homosexual relationships, because, culturally, we're programmed to think of them in terms of sex, not in terms of romance. That's obviously bullshit; homosexuals are like anyone else, wanting romance (or not) on an individual basis. But that's not how certain vocal people see it.
So there are actually two issues here. One is sex, and the other is homosexual relationships. Certain overlapping groups want both of those stricken from "material suitable for kids."
This is a challenge for a company like EA who wants to make money, and they do so by appealing to people's interests. The instant they add relationships of ANY KIND to their games, they get caught between the group that find a lack of gay relationships to be unfair and the group that finds homosexuality to be objectionable. Personally, I think the latter group can go screw themselves. It's the 21st century, and we know damn well that homosexuality is a normal part of not just human existance but much of the rest of the animal kingdom. But for EA, that's a connundrum, because they're actually entirely amoral about it. They don't care whether something is in the game or not. They just want to sell software, and they maximize their revenue by adding features that people find appealing. The last thing they need is two warring groups causing them equal amounts of trouble.
What EA should do is tell these groups to get together and hash it out, and whatever they collectively decide, EA will do. Meanwhile, until they manage that, these activists can shut up and leave EA alone to do their business.
There are medical researchers finding that high sugar intake fosters cancer growth, finding this to be particularly evident in those who have cancer. Will the FDA ever label sugar appropriately? Nope. There's even less a chance they'll do this with corn syrup, given the corn lobbyists.
Speaking of corn, imagine having a corn allergy. Actually, it's not necessarily corn per se, but expressions of certain genetic modifications and some of the molds that grow on corn. But basically every processed food has corn derivatives in it. You name it, it's derived from corn. Citric acid (a common preservative used in just about everything), ascorbic acid, microcrystaline cellulose, xanthan gum (a common thickener, derived from an organism grown on corn), fructose, dextrose, "natural flavors", MSG, etc. And they're added to everything from table salt to orange juice. (Why the hell they would need to add corn-derived citric acid to orange juice beats the hell out of me.) And if you search the web for "corn allergy", you'll get the impression that a corn allergy isn't incredibly rare, and there are communities of people who work really hard to figure out which food products aren't treated with corn products. Imagine being unable to buy CHICKEN without being at risk. That's right, almost all chicken sold in grocery stores has corn-based additives. A corn allergy may be rare, but the sheer ubiquity of corn products makes it so that absolutely everyone with a corn allergy in the U.S. will suffer. Nevertheless, the FDA flatly refuses to even create a legal definition of corn, let alone require products to mention it on the label. Even organic farmers spray their produce with corn derivatives as a sort of non-toxic enrivonmentally friendly pest deterrent.
If you have a corn allergy, you are royally fucked.
I'm sure someone is going to try to make the same argument about a hard-back book, but in general, the things people hold in their hands on planes (paperback books, magazines, newspapers, etc.) are light and soft, so if the plane were to lurch suddenly, and they were to go flying through the cabin and hit someone in the head, it wouldn't hurt. On the other hand, an iPhone, iPad, Nook, etc. are rigid objects, and some of these things are moderately heavy too, making them potentially dangerous should they impact another passenger. This is why they want your belongings tucked under the seat in front of you during takeoff and landing, so they don't go moving around in unwanted ways.
The paying attention thing is moot, because once you've flown a few times, you know the procedures and are already aware of where the exits are before you sit down, because most reasonably intelligent people NOTICE THEIR SURROUNDINGS.
That isn't much of a pull quote. What you stated is something that's been understood for a LONG TIME. What I want to know is what is NEW that we didn't know before.
It essentially makes an information theoretic argument that some unspecified designer may need to be invoked to better explain modern observations of biological complexity. That is, they claim (but I don't see the evidence) that certain biological configurations are better or more easily explained or explainable at all if we assume that there was some intent behind some aspect of resulting organisms. I skimmed the article, but I didn't notice it saying anything at all about irreducible complexity. It simply mentions that some things have much too high of an information content to be plausibly the result of evolution according to completely natural processes.
As I see it, the assumption that the governing processes are entirely natural is simpler, because it does not invoke the requirement for some external influence. They also make no claims in regard to the nature of these outside influences. Moreover, evolutionary theory doesn't preclude that some aliens or something may have had influence. It simply declines to explain in those terms, because there's no difference between an intelligent alien tweaking things in some imperceptible way versus some extra radiation causing some mutations and some specific ecological niche favoring certain traits. They seem to be implying that they can CALCULATE that certain biological complexity is extremely unlikely given our basic understanding of mutation and selection. But then again, everything we observe is a priori extremely improbable it's just that we have inordinate amounts of time and space for those improbable events to become probable, and we have evidence of the time scale from geology. We don't, however, have any direct evidence that there was anything other than planet-local natural influences behind evolution, and it's hard to define what exactly is and is not "natural."
So, is this ID article just being vague? Or are they making some interesting point? I don't just want to dismiss it as creationist dogma. I think that an information theoretic analysis is warranted. I just don't trust their understanding of the science or their underlying motivations.
I interviewed for a position at Buffalo, and I had dinner with Ken Regan there. Fascinating guy, with a lot of varied interests and a lot of depth. He had some interesting stories to tell about alledged cheating at chess.
I'm allergic to soy, and soy is one of the most important dietary staples of vegetarians and vegans. Of course, there are other things like quinoa, which is also high in protein. And if I weren't a strict vegan, I could eat whey protein and eggs. Maybe fish too, depending on the "rules."
Alternatively, if they could cure my soy allergy, then I'd be happy to eat less meat or none at all.
One of the problems with people who want to revolutionize our diet is that they're clueless about food sensitivities, just like every MD I've ever met. Hell, they generally don't know much about nutrition in general. It's like those people who keep trying to reinvent the calendar, who seem inexplicably ignorant of the reasons that all of the past calendar revamps failed.
Besides the milking that some writer try to do, getting tons of papers out of one idea, it's actually not a terrible idea to try to break up a complex problem into some smaller steps, especially if each one is a pretty good discovery on its own.
Anyhow, I've had papers rejected because the reviewers clearly did not understand. So we rewrote it, taking into account many of the disconnects they obviously had, did a better job of explaining, and did a more thorough experimental analysis. Every such paper got accepted the next time around.
In fact, the only papers accepted the first time around were published in workshops, which accept most of their submissions anyhow. Every other one has been rejected at least the first time around. I always count on being reject the first time. It's unfortunate, but I also learn a lot every time and do a much better job the next time around. Of course, none of my work is so earth-shattering that it needs to be published RIGHT NOW, but some of it has been a bit time-sensitive, in relation to "competing" work.
Now that I think about it, there's this one paper, that I'm presenting at HPCA on Monday, which DID get accepted the first time around. Sortof. In 2010, we were going to submit it to another conference but decided to withdraw it at the last minute because we found serious flaws in our experimental analysis. Two years later, a fixed and revised version of the paper got accepted on the first pass. And we were surprised, because the reviews didn't look that positive. Not that we don't think it's a good idea. We just never expected it to catch all of the issues that the reviewers would raise. And it didn't. But we were fortunate, and we did address all their concerns in the camera-ready which is significantly improved from the original submission.
As I say, I don't know what it's like in other fields. Maybe it's common for reviewers to be assholes. But in my area, we get two kinds of reviewers. (a) Those who don't get it, and (b) those that have seriously legitimate criticisms. We learn a lot from both. The (a) group tells us where we didn't explain well, and the (b) group tells us where we just did things wrong. As long as you are open-minded and willing to take criticism, you can learn from it and improve your work. If you think you're above all that, as if you're better than the people reviewing your paper, then your arrogance will be your ruin.
I have to agree with you on the issue of teaching. Some professors are brilliant at teaching, but they're looked down upon because they've taught at the expense of research.
As for getting papers published, I don't know how it is in your area, but I'm in Computer Architecture, and I haven't seen any problems with bias towards big names. My advisor's former advisor is on the boards of some conferenes. But how can anyone tell when all of the submissions are double-blind? We actually try to figure out who some of our reviewers are based on the writing style of their comments, and perhaps some of that is done by reviewers looking at papers. But my papers are far more my own writing style (me being a nobody) than my advisor's, so they're unlikely to make the connection.
For those who gripe about being rejected based on bias, I think the main problem is that they haven't done enough reviewing themselves. If you did, you'd understand what a reviewer goes through. They get a stack of papers to review from multiple conferences, and based on experience, they know that all but MAYBE one of them is going to be truly awful. Since they don't know which one, they're going to read every one of them with the assumption that it's going to suck. If you can empathize with that attitude, then you can get a better handle on how to succeed at publishing.
You can't publish without doing good science. I've had papers rejected where the reviewers said the writing quality and organization were fantastic, but our work was just too incremental or the experimentation wasn't thorough enough, leaving too many unanswered questions. However, even if you do good science, if you don't package it well, it's going to get overlooked. The truly successful authors are the ones who not only do interesting work but also know how to present it clearly in a way that grabs the readers attention and tells them exactly what they want to know. The number one thing you have to get right is your abstract. A lot of reviewers jump from there to the conclusions. Some MAY read the intro. Then they look at the experimental evaluation. If that tells them something interesting, they'll go back and look at the meat of the paper that explains the innovation that lead to the results. One of the "tricks" is to spoon-feed the reader what kinds of conclusions you want them to draw. If you're being accurate, then they'll appreciate that. If you're full of crap, they'll figure it out and give you a terrible review.
I've heard two sides of the "jargon" argument, regarding obfuscating terminology and background knowledge. On the one hand, scientists want to be concise, so they use big words and refer to concepts that "everyone" in their area "should know." But when a networking paper gets reviewed by a top expert in GPUs, those kinds of shortcuts aren't going to work. If you can manage to lay out your paper so an undergrad can understand it, then you're going to get better reviews, because the BIGNAME reviewers in fields tangent to your own will understand what you wrote and be able to appreciate what your contribution is.
To put it another way, a publication is 10% science and 90% conveying to others what that science is. If you recognize that the paper is almost entirely about good writing, then you'll be a lot more successful.
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Other commenters have mentioned that teachers don't get paid well. That's not true of some professors, who get paid very well. The difference between a highschool teacher and a professor, however, is that the teacher has actual training, while the professor had to wing it when he first started and may still be totally winging it. In major universities, professors are hired to do research, and teaching is secondary at best. So even lousy instructors get tenure if they bring in grant money. And yes, I've encountered plenty of lousy instructors, along with some absolutely astounding ones. The problem with professors is that although their dissertations "prove" that they are experts in their field, they often lack the talent (and also the training) to convey the subject well.
The point is that being an expert in a field says nothing about whether or not you can teach. And people who think that they can teach anything they want are idiots. My doctorate is in computer engineering. But having a background in Linguistics and being a fairly decent writer, I may know more about English than many highschool English teachers (I suck at literary analysis, but just go with me on this). I can assure you that I still would not teach English as well as your average English teacher, because I'm not trained in instruction. My only advantage is that I have a wife and mother-in-law who do have training in instruction, and they have been willing to instruct me in it. :)
While it's still not such a great idea to gulping down tons of sucrose, the bigger culprit here is fructose. Fructose isn't detected the same as sucrose or glucose, so you don't feel satisfied. Also, fructose is metabolized by the liver, which means that organ is tied up working on fructose rather than all the other pollutants that you're bringing into your body. There's a reason why detox suplements prefer the biologically active forms of nutrients, so the liver doesn't have to convert them, freeing the liver for breaking down other toxins in your system. Your liver has limited capacity. Use it wisely.
Hey! I was going to do that!
It always bugs me how people seem to often use the term Scientist for someone who is actually doing Engineering. There's no shame in engineering. I'm an engineer, and engineering is no trivial job. But as I understand it, it is the scientists that figure out how the world works, and the engineers use that knowledge to design new things. Both require serious insightfulness and creativity.
Like in Venture Brothers, Rusty Venture calls himself a "super scientist." Indeed if this were reality, he would have to do a heck of a lot of science. But in fact, the majority of what he does is engineering, building huge mechanical whatzits and stuff.
Why do scientists get all the credit?
(P.S. I think technically I'm a scientist also, because I have a Ph.D. (optional) and conduct and publish research. But I don't think I'm as good a scientst as many of my colleagues. What makes me competitive is that I have very strong engineering skills, which makes my experimental systems and experiments more robust.)
As far as I know, this discussion actually happened.
A member of the American Chemical Society once noted the negative connotations surrounding the term "chemical" and suggested that they start referring to them as "substances." Others weren't so thrilled with what that would do to their acronym.
As much as they want to call it "Sci Fi," Doctor Who is fantasy, and the sonic screwdriver is nothing short of a magic wand.
The whole of Series 5 should have clinched that for anyone paying attention. In order to save the universe, the Doctor had to reboot it, requiring him to cease to exist, although he could be brought back as soon as Amy remembered him? It was even openly admitted that it was a Fairy Tail. This isn't sci fi. As soon as you let go of that, you can start to enjoy it again, like pure fantasy or perhaps some combo like what Piers Anthony liked to write about.
If a sociologist were to get hold of this it would be interesting. Foxconn China vs. Foxconn Brazil. The parent company and the products remain constant, as do the sources of most of the parts, while what changes are local management, local laws, and local workers. So, if there were any systematic difference in manufacturing quality between the two locations, it might tell is some interesting things about differences in culture. Do workers in China or Brazil have better attention to detail? Better concern for precision? Better concern for what the inside of a product looks like vs. the outside, where tolerances allow differences?
My iPad 2, for instance, has a very minor manufacturing flaw. There is a plastic seal between the front glass and the metal that wraps around the sides, where along one bottom corner, the plastic protrudes slightly more. So there is room for variability in assembly that would be interesting to look at.
For Foxconn's sake, they could turn this into a benefit. Hey personnel A! Why aren't we doing better than personnel B?
In the US, we've kinda lost that competitive drive; we've adopted a culture of doing the minimum work for the maximum pay, but maybe Brazil and China have different values.
I didn't RTFM, but on the surface, although this looks like evolution and symbiosis, it doesn't look like symbiotic evolution. The insect didn't change. The bacteria did, and the bacteria is living in the insect. The bacteria didn't cause the insect to develop a resistance. The bacteria is PROVIDING the resistance. If you were to remove the bacteria from the insect, the insect would be vulnerable again.
You know how every email program and every other email service in the world lets you quote the email you're replying to with '>' characters or similar, so you can interleave your replies with what you're replying to?
Only Hotmail lacks that feature.
It is incredibly unlikely that a console system will use less power while active than while playing a game. However, because the idle power is still high, these systems use most of their ENERGY while idle.
Interestingly, when it comes to efficiency, they get the units right. The unit is gigaflops per watt. In each of these units, the seconds cancel out, giving us billions of operations per joule, which is what we want.
Silicon AREA is cheap, and it's getting cheaper. Today's processors dedicate half their die space to CACHE. Transistors per die, cores per die, and transistors per core are all increasing at (different) exponential rates. And with power density increasing at a quadratic rate, we're already facing the dark silicon problem, where if we power on the entire chip at nominal voltage, we have trouble delivering the power, and we can't dissipate the heat.
With 16 cores, a bus is tolerable. At 64, it's a liability, and we NEED a more sophisticated network.
The Network on Chip has been around as a concept so long we even have an abbreviation (NoC). Maybe this isn't in commodity products, but basically if you want to do an NoC, you don't have to invent anything yourself. There are several conferences and journals that have been publishing papers on this for decades. But, OH, if a professor from MIT mentions it, it must be something NEW. Sheesh.
This study seems to be making the assumption that we all put the same brain functions in precisely the same places. But each individual has different intellectual strengths, weaknesses, and talents. Although I wouldn't say they shouldn't do this study, I fail to see how it would give us more than the coarsest understanding, biased based on the individual personalities of those tested.
Do I think that homosexuals should have the right to marry? Yes. But this issue is complex.
One issue is that heterosexual marriages are backed by thousands upon thousands of year of tradition, while homosexual marriages are not. Those traditions touch on a wife variety of things. Subjugation of women. Production of children. Contracts between families. Et cetera.
Now, many heterosexual marriages are "modern", being not bound by many of those traditions. But homosexual marrages are an entirely modern construction and are, by definition, not bound by those traditions. So by insisting on calling their relationships "marriage," they are awkwardly insinuating themselves into that traditional framework.
Personally, I think that the legal and traditional frameworks should be completely separated. The legal framework ("civil union") should be open to anyone, making heterosexual marriages the same kind of civil union under the law. Now, if you want to turn around and call it a "marriage," then that's up to you, based on whatever tradition you choose. Someone can object to you calling it a marriage if they want, but in this way, their objection cannot interfere with your civil rights.
BTW, if you want to expore other complications of gay marriage, consider child custody law. In most jurisdictions, you cannot have more than one legal guardian of the same gender. This is a technical issue. My main point is that to adapt to modern reality, it is not a simple matter of semantics. LOTS of laws have to be changed, and that takes time and effort and patience.
There's being open about your sexuality and then there's being TOO open about your sexuality.
Good: Hi, meet my partner Sam. We're in a committed relationship.
Unwelcome: My partner Sam and I had some fantastic sex last night.
Really Bad: Hi. Would you like to watch me and my partner Sam have sex in the street?
This is the same for me regardless of Sam's gender and Sam's partner's gender. Taking it as a given that homosexuals should not have to struggle for basic human rights, one thing I really don't like is (most) gay pride parades. This is because there's the inevitable group in the parade that insists on engaging in overt sexual behavior as part of the parade. I don't want to see that. Actually, if they're lesbians, I DO want to see that, but that's my personal sin, and it is still inappropriate to be doing that in public. But mostly they bother me because it makes gay people look like a bunch of perverted assholes, and that's not fair to the vast majority of gay people. Most gay people just want to be left alone, but their freedoms are threatened as much by anti-gay bogots as they are by gay people who put perverted images into the minds of anti-gay bigots.
In other words: If you are human, try to use some discretion.
BTW, what would be great is if we could put behind all of this "gay is sin" crap and focus on some real problems, like how unprotected sex is a disease risk and how rectal contact is even worse, because intestines are full of germs. This applies equally to gay men, heterosexuals, and lesbians with exploratory fingers. We should be able to talk frankly about medical, social, and emotional risks inherent in all sexual encounters, without certain groups squelching it for one reason or another. And every activist group, religious, pro-LGBT, whatever, are all guilty of interfering in this somehow. For instance, religious groups often squelch sexual discussions entirely, leading kids to be ignorant of safe-sex practices. And LGBT groups are so adamant about their "rights" to do what they want that they advocate risky behaviors that have nothing really to do with being LGBT. In my opinion, no one has the right to be indiscriminately promiscuous, because that makes you a disease vector, and you do not have the right to spread disease to innocent victims. I had once assumed that condom use would be ubiquitous in the gay community. Sadly, it is not, and that's really really bad. (Of course, homosexuals are not at all unique in this sin.)
Personally, I'm not a prude. When my kids ask me about sex, I'm going to just tell them. And the main things I'm going to warn them about are pregnancy and disease, the latter of which applies regardless of the type of sexual relationship. If my any of my kids turn out gay, I'm just going to explain to them the social challenges, in an effort to help them navigate the minefields they might otherwise encounter. And the fact is, that is only one out of countless other things that people get persecuted for. How about being geeky? Or fat? Or short? Or even just female (in certain cultures)? In that regard being gay isn't any different.
However, there are many people who get all bothered by talk of sex for kids who are "too young" or whatever. Culturally, for the sake of kids, we have separated romance from sex. Heterosexual relationships are ubiquitous, and everyone sees that there are families with kids. Exactly how those kids came to be may be left as a mystery for some kids until they're "old enough", but you can't exactly ignore the existance of the families. And even in elementary school, you sometimes find kids pairing off and having little mini romances, that are effectively platonic. But the tricky part is when you get into homosexual relationships, because, culturally, we're programmed to think of them in terms of sex, not in terms of romance. That's obviously bullshit; homosexuals are like anyone else, wanting romance (or not) on an individual basis. But that's not how certain vocal people see it.
So there are actually two issues here. One is sex, and the other is homosexual relationships. Certain overlapping groups want both of those stricken from "material suitable for kids."
This is a challenge for a company like EA who wants to make money, and they do so by appealing to people's interests. The instant they add relationships of ANY KIND to their games, they get caught between the group that find a lack of gay relationships to be unfair and the group that finds homosexuality to be objectionable. Personally, I think the latter group can go screw themselves. It's the 21st century, and we know damn well that homosexuality is a normal part of not just human existance but much of the rest of the animal kingdom. But for EA, that's a connundrum, because they're actually entirely amoral about it. They don't care whether something is in the game or not. They just want to sell software, and they maximize their revenue by adding features that people find appealing. The last thing they need is two warring groups causing them equal amounts of trouble.
What EA should do is tell these groups to get together and hash it out, and whatever they collectively decide, EA will do. Meanwhile, until they manage that, these activists can shut up and leave EA alone to do their business.
There are medical researchers finding that high sugar intake fosters cancer growth, finding this to be particularly evident in those who have cancer. Will the FDA ever label sugar appropriately? Nope. There's even less a chance they'll do this with corn syrup, given the corn lobbyists.
Speaking of corn, imagine having a corn allergy. Actually, it's not necessarily corn per se, but expressions of certain genetic modifications and some of the molds that grow on corn. But basically every processed food has corn derivatives in it. You name it, it's derived from corn. Citric acid (a common preservative used in just about everything), ascorbic acid, microcrystaline cellulose, xanthan gum (a common thickener, derived from an organism grown on corn), fructose, dextrose, "natural flavors", MSG, etc. And they're added to everything from table salt to orange juice. (Why the hell they would need to add corn-derived citric acid to orange juice beats the hell out of me.) And if you search the web for "corn allergy", you'll get the impression that a corn allergy isn't incredibly rare, and there are communities of people who work really hard to figure out which food products aren't treated with corn products. Imagine being unable to buy CHICKEN without being at risk. That's right, almost all chicken sold in grocery stores has corn-based additives. A corn allergy may be rare, but the sheer ubiquity of corn products makes it so that absolutely everyone with a corn allergy in the U.S. will suffer. Nevertheless, the FDA flatly refuses to even create a legal definition of corn, let alone require products to mention it on the label. Even organic farmers spray their produce with corn derivatives as a sort of non-toxic enrivonmentally friendly pest deterrent.
If you have a corn allergy, you are royally fucked.
I'm sure someone is going to try to make the same argument about a hard-back book, but in general, the things people hold in their hands on planes (paperback books, magazines, newspapers, etc.) are light and soft, so if the plane were to lurch suddenly, and they were to go flying through the cabin and hit someone in the head, it wouldn't hurt. On the other hand, an iPhone, iPad, Nook, etc. are rigid objects, and some of these things are moderately heavy too, making them potentially dangerous should they impact another passenger. This is why they want your belongings tucked under the seat in front of you during takeoff and landing, so they don't go moving around in unwanted ways.
The paying attention thing is moot, because once you've flown a few times, you know the procedures and are already aware of where the exits are before you sit down, because most reasonably intelligent people NOTICE THEIR SURROUNDINGS.
That isn't much of a pull quote. What you stated is something that's been understood for a LONG TIME. What I want to know is what is NEW that we didn't know before.
One of the commenters pointed to this article:
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/832
It essentially makes an information theoretic argument that some unspecified designer may need to be invoked to better explain modern observations of biological complexity. That is, they claim (but I don't see the evidence) that certain biological configurations are better or more easily explained or explainable at all if we assume that there was some intent behind some aspect of resulting organisms. I skimmed the article, but I didn't notice it saying anything at all about irreducible complexity. It simply mentions that some things have much too high of an information content to be plausibly the result of evolution according to completely natural processes.
As I see it, the assumption that the governing processes are entirely natural is simpler, because it does not invoke the requirement for some external influence. They also make no claims in regard to the nature of these outside influences. Moreover, evolutionary theory doesn't preclude that some aliens or something may have had influence. It simply declines to explain in those terms, because there's no difference between an intelligent alien tweaking things in some imperceptible way versus some extra radiation causing some mutations and some specific ecological niche favoring certain traits. They seem to be implying that they can CALCULATE that certain biological complexity is extremely unlikely given our basic understanding of mutation and selection. But then again, everything we observe is a priori extremely improbable it's just that we have inordinate amounts of time and space for those improbable events to become probable, and we have evidence of the time scale from geology. We don't, however, have any direct evidence that there was anything other than planet-local natural influences behind evolution, and it's hard to define what exactly is and is not "natural."
So, is this ID article just being vague? Or are they making some interesting point? I don't just want to dismiss it as creationist dogma. I think that an information theoretic analysis is warranted. I just don't trust their understanding of the science or their underlying motivations.
I interviewed for a position at Buffalo, and I had dinner with Ken Regan there. Fascinating guy, with a lot of varied interests and a lot of depth. He had some interesting stories to tell about alledged cheating at chess.
I'm allergic to soy, and soy is one of the most important dietary staples of vegetarians and vegans. Of course, there are other things like quinoa, which is also high in protein. And if I weren't a strict vegan, I could eat whey protein and eggs. Maybe fish too, depending on the "rules."
Alternatively, if they could cure my soy allergy, then I'd be happy to eat less meat or none at all.
One of the problems with people who want to revolutionize our diet is that they're clueless about food sensitivities, just like every MD I've ever met. Hell, they generally don't know much about nutrition in general. It's like those people who keep trying to reinvent the calendar, who seem inexplicably ignorant of the reasons that all of the past calendar revamps failed.
Besides the milking that some writer try to do, getting tons of papers out of one idea, it's actually not a terrible idea to try to break up a complex problem into some smaller steps, especially if each one is a pretty good discovery on its own.
Anyhow, I've had papers rejected because the reviewers clearly did not understand. So we rewrote it, taking into account many of the disconnects they obviously had, did a better job of explaining, and did a more thorough experimental analysis. Every such paper got accepted the next time around.
In fact, the only papers accepted the first time around were published in workshops, which accept most of their submissions anyhow. Every other one has been rejected at least the first time around. I always count on being reject the first time. It's unfortunate, but I also learn a lot every time and do a much better job the next time around. Of course, none of my work is so earth-shattering that it needs to be published RIGHT NOW, but some of it has been a bit time-sensitive, in relation to "competing" work.
Now that I think about it, there's this one paper, that I'm presenting at HPCA on Monday, which DID get accepted the first time around. Sortof. In 2010, we were going to submit it to another conference but decided to withdraw it at the last minute because we found serious flaws in our experimental analysis. Two years later, a fixed and revised version of the paper got accepted on the first pass. And we were surprised, because the reviews didn't look that positive. Not that we don't think it's a good idea. We just never expected it to catch all of the issues that the reviewers would raise. And it didn't. But we were fortunate, and we did address all their concerns in the camera-ready which is significantly improved from the original submission.
As I say, I don't know what it's like in other fields. Maybe it's common for reviewers to be assholes. But in my area, we get two kinds of reviewers. (a) Those who don't get it, and (b) those that have seriously legitimate criticisms. We learn a lot from both. The (a) group tells us where we didn't explain well, and the (b) group tells us where we just did things wrong. As long as you are open-minded and willing to take criticism, you can learn from it and improve your work. If you think you're above all that, as if you're better than the people reviewing your paper, then your arrogance will be your ruin.
I have to agree with you on the issue of teaching. Some professors are brilliant at teaching, but they're looked down upon because they've taught at the expense of research.
As for getting papers published, I don't know how it is in your area, but I'm in Computer Architecture, and I haven't seen any problems with bias towards big names. My advisor's former advisor is on the boards of some conferenes. But how can anyone tell when all of the submissions are double-blind? We actually try to figure out who some of our reviewers are based on the writing style of their comments, and perhaps some of that is done by reviewers looking at papers. But my papers are far more my own writing style (me being a nobody) than my advisor's, so they're unlikely to make the connection.
For those who gripe about being rejected based on bias, I think the main problem is that they haven't done enough reviewing themselves. If you did, you'd understand what a reviewer goes through. They get a stack of papers to review from multiple conferences, and based on experience, they know that all but MAYBE one of them is going to be truly awful. Since they don't know which one, they're going to read every one of them with the assumption that it's going to suck. If you can empathize with that attitude, then you can get a better handle on how to succeed at publishing.
You can't publish without doing good science. I've had papers rejected where the reviewers said the writing quality and organization were fantastic, but our work was just too incremental or the experimentation wasn't thorough enough, leaving too many unanswered questions. However, even if you do good science, if you don't package it well, it's going to get overlooked. The truly successful authors are the ones who not only do interesting work but also know how to present it clearly in a way that grabs the readers attention and tells them exactly what they want to know. The number one thing you have to get right is your abstract. A lot of reviewers jump from there to the conclusions. Some MAY read the intro. Then they look at the experimental evaluation. If that tells them something interesting, they'll go back and look at the meat of the paper that explains the innovation that lead to the results. One of the "tricks" is to spoon-feed the reader what kinds of conclusions you want them to draw. If you're being accurate, then they'll appreciate that. If you're full of crap, they'll figure it out and give you a terrible review.
I've heard two sides of the "jargon" argument, regarding obfuscating terminology and background knowledge. On the one hand, scientists want to be concise, so they use big words and refer to concepts that "everyone" in their area "should know." But when a networking paper gets reviewed by a top expert in GPUs, those kinds of shortcuts aren't going to work. If you can manage to lay out your paper so an undergrad can understand it, then you're going to get better reviews, because the BIGNAME reviewers in fields tangent to your own will understand what you wrote and be able to appreciate what your contribution is.
To put it another way, a publication is 10% science and 90% conveying to others what that science is. If you recognize that the paper is almost entirely about good writing, then you'll be a lot more successful.