As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined. As we all now know, they were, in fact, once joined.
Don't confuse scientists with science teachers. Science teachers generally stop their science training before getting beyond the repeating stuff from textbooks phase, so they have never been scientists in any real sense. Science training in schools is pretty limited in that regard, you will learn a lot of scientific facts, but you never do an experiement where you don't already know the answer.
Also in my experience scientists are often criticised for not holding their opinions firmly enough.
Don't forget that we still pay for open-access, but the submitter pays and not the reader. If you don't pay for each article you print through PLoS then it's likely that your institute has bought a subscription to cover your charges.
I agree. If Slashdot stories were peer-reviewed and not just put on the front page on an editor's whim then we wouldn't get factually incorrect trollish crap like this.
There is an interesting debate going on regarding the future of academic publishing, but it centers more around the question of how the dissemination of science should be funded, ie by researchers themselves or by the readers. Nobody seriously thinks that peer-reviewed journals are a bad thing.
You might be right but I always thought that was probably something to do with the Irish situation, there was a lot of allegations of a pro-Cathloic bias in Blair's government and Blair coming out as a Catholic might have made things a lot worse.
I also hear some people also have entire rooms in their house dedicated to the preparation of food - and even a separate room where they eat it, complete with sets of chairs situated around a table. Surely the end of the restaurant as we know it.
BMI is a useful measure for the majority of the population, in fact it's about as good as a one-dimensional measure of obesity is ever going to be. Its simplicity means also it can actually be used and understood by people, which is important. Obviously if you are a professional footballer you know that your BMI is not very informative, and you probably wouldn't use your Wii to tell you about your fitness.
Your answers are mostly thoughtless rhetoric but until you sign your post I won't waste time rebutting them, except for two.
First, people being of generally the same mindset (which is probably true) is not the same as them having a collective will (which is clearly false).
Second, I do have things to hide from certain people, which is why I don't wave them around in public. By the way hiding is a binary operator (or whatever the proper linguistic term is), you hide things from some people, and not from others. This argument is restricted to public spaces, unless you get desparate enough to try a 'slippery slope' argument.
The concern is not merely being "caught on CCTV", but actual active surveillance of citizens. Such surveillance has been used by governments in the past to quash political dissent by directly spying on the opposition, and indirectly by creating a "chilling effect" . The widespread deployment of surveillance equipment makes the choice to engage in surveillance very very cheap.
The mere presence of such cameras turns a city into a Panopticon prison. Bentham, the inventor of the Panopticon, called it "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind". Do you think the "mind" of the government should have power over the minds of the citizens?
I think the premise of your question is false. I think of the government as a loose collection of individuals employed by me, paid out of my taxes to run my country. They aren't separate from the citizenry, they are a part of it. Obviously they have power over me. They do not have power over my mind, as is shown by the relative failure of public health campaigns when compared to the power exerted over our minds by advertising or by the media.
The government also does not have a collective will (or a 'mind'). Everybody I've ever met including those in government is concerned by both keeping or advancing own position, and by generally doing a good job of whatever they are being paid to do. Strongly self interested people do not go into government, it really isn't worth it.
Also I think a major feature of the Panopticon prison was that every cell could be easily seen into. Without cameras in private places that analogy holds no water.
I suppose as a disclaimer I should add that I usually identify as a utilitarian, and I've met the corpse of Jeremy Bentham.
For one reason its none of their business.
If you honestly don't see a problem, then you deserve what little privacy / security you end up with at the end of the day..
Well thanks for your insightful analysis, but that's not really an answer. I have my house, where I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but on a public street anything I do can be seen by anybody who is around, whether or not it's 'their business'. People often complain when there aren't enough police on the beat. What's the difference?
I'll ask again, what possible difference can it make to me if I'm caught on CCTV when I'm going to work or if I'm out shopping or whatever? Do you expect any actual bad consequences? Or is it just a vague bad feeling you have about being seen in the street?
Re:Repeating the question - why should that work?
on
China's All-Seeing Eye
·
· Score: 1
I agree with your analysis. I really don't understand how the cameras can actually be used by the state for evil, and I've never seen a real example cited.
That is because they have been trained/frightened for generations to accept this.
They just don't know any better. Or maybe they just aren't so paranoid. Seriously I don't think many of the people of London are particularly bothered by the numbers of cameras around. I certainly don't care that HM Government can follow me around if they choose to. Can you explain to me why I should?
All the drop tests in the video showed the units being dropped onto a soft mat. Where's the drop onto the tile floor? Where's the drop onto parking lot asphalt? From a moving rental car? Landing under the wheels?
Woah there! You might break one doing that. Those things is expensive. Here's some other advice: if you accidentally drop your laptop, try not to drop your laptop.
One of the big concerns about the Chinese system is interference with the US and European GPS systems, and up until now there haven't been any set specs to start a meaningful discussion over. [Citation needed]
How can you expect anybody to cite the lack of published specs?
Unless of course its in the Big Book of Unpublished Specifications, which causes any reader to disappear in a puff of paradoxical smoke.
What great discovery is waiting on just some little tidbit of data being seen in a different light by someone other than the one who gathered it.
Probably many great discoveries are waiting here, but also many many false positives. Peer review is a way to try to increase the signal to noise ratio in the scientific world, which is low enough as it is. Take that away and you'll maybe get a bit more useful stuff coming through, but you'll never be able to find it amongst all the crap.
People complain at the moment about the conflicting messages coming out of science. When the media can get their hands on anything any student or scientist wants to put online, it's going to get far far worse. Hopefully the market will still demand an authoratative source of information, and scientists will still seek the recognition of a good quality publication, so the current model won't disappear entirely.
The only reason I would publish in a non peer reviewed way is if I think a particular piece of work is not of sufficient general interest.
Hmm. I think your definition would depend on who the end user is. A system that can have the OS recovered using a Live CD *is* bricked if I don't have a live CD, or more accurately if I don't know what a live CD and there's nobody I can call who does.
On the other hand, if the manufacturer can fix it, it isn't bricked, you just don't have the right tools or knowledge at home to fix it yourself.
So being bricked is a function of both the system and the highest level of expertise currently to hand.
Loads of songs, even brilliantly original songs have a 1-4-5 progression. Look through a Dylan or Beatles songbook and you'll find hundreds. That doesn't make them bad or not worth listening too.
The thing is, race does matter, and you can't make racism go away by pretending it doesn't exist, or saying it shouldn't exist (which of course it shouldn't). Issues do affect different racial groups in different ways. By denying this you prevent the application of solutions where problems arise, making them far worse.
Hmm. I've obviously trodden on a personally sensitive issue with you so I'll leave it, except to mention that the French government does not allow the collection of any details of race at all, for any reason. This is thought to have been a contributing factor in the recent riots in Paris, caused because the increasing disenfranchisement of an entire community had gone essentially unnoticed. The French cannot see problems or target social interventions within racial groups, because they don't know who or where they are. I think this is a problem, although I do understand the argument that the data has potential to be used in a racist way.
The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address. Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).
I'm from the UK. The local authority has nothing to do with my utilities. Imagine the row if utility companies started supplying records to the government.
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.
Building permits and real estate records tell you nothing about the use of homes, ie who lives there. Electoral records don't count the number of children or cover the needs of the community (for school/hospital planning etc).
Besides which, tax records, health service and insurance records cannot be shared across departments because of privacy laws, much less made publically available, whereas the census information is all publically available at the community level (see www.statistics.gov.uk).
For some reason TimeWarner is apparently convinced that there are enough of them to put on EXTRA Spanish language channels though. Wonder how they knew that without accurate census data?
Market research will tell TimeWarner a lot of things. Think of the census as market reserach for the unprofitable services you take for granted, then tell me it's unnecessary.
Up here in Canuckistan (you know, Canada..) the last 2 census (censii?) I've received the detailed long questionaire. Both times, I've refused to fill them in because there are questions that are either racist or illegal, or both.
That's just stupid. We need census information for service provision. If a significant proportion of people withhold their details, they have no right to complain when there aren't enough schools or hospital beds or even houses in the right places. How else are governments supposed to get demographic information?
If you don't want to include race information, just put 'Jedi' like everybody else.
A quick look through the medical literature reveals no strong evidence concerning the effects of caffeine on dementia. It's not something that will have been included in most major long term dementia studies. It is possible that a large study like the Cardiovascular Health Study or Rochester could examine this issue in detail.
However, we know that a lot of dementia is caused by vascular disease in the brain, and by high blood pressure leading to stroke, and since we know that caffeine causes high blood pressure, it probably isn't a good idea to drink coffee as a preventive measure for anything.
The hard part is getting a representative sample of the world's population to accurately tell you how much coffee they drink - then to find them all again in 40 years to see how many got dementia.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't confuse scientists with science teachers. Science teachers generally stop their science training before getting beyond the repeating stuff from textbooks phase, so they have never been scientists in any real sense. Science training in schools is pretty limited in that regard, you will learn a lot of scientific facts, but you never do an experiement where you don't already know the answer.
Also in my experience scientists are often criticised for not holding their opinions firmly enough.
Don't forget that we still pay for open-access, but the submitter pays and not the reader. If you don't pay for each article you print through PLoS then it's likely that your institute has bought a subscription to cover your charges.
I agree. If Slashdot stories were peer-reviewed and not just put on the front page on an editor's whim then we wouldn't get factually incorrect trollish crap like this.
There is an interesting debate going on regarding the future of academic publishing, but it centers more around the question of how the dissemination of science should be funded, ie by researchers themselves or by the readers. Nobody seriously thinks that peer-reviewed journals are a bad thing.
You might be right but I always thought that was probably something to do with the Irish situation, there was a lot of allegations of a pro-Cathloic bias in Blair's government and Blair coming out as a Catholic might have made things a lot worse.
I also hear some people also have entire rooms in their house dedicated to the preparation of food - and even a separate room where they eat it, complete with sets of chairs situated around a table. Surely the end of the restaurant as we know it.
Are you suggesting that sports and fitness equipment manufacturers are fascist tools of the state?
I think you're confusing 'the range most people are in' and 'the range it should be'. Normal and healthy are not the same.
BMI is a useful measure for the majority of the population, in fact it's about as good as a one-dimensional measure of obesity is ever going to be. Its simplicity means also it can actually be used and understood by people, which is important. Obviously if you are a professional footballer you know that your BMI is not very informative, and you probably wouldn't use your Wii to tell you about your fitness.
Actually we got India because we had a flag
Your answers are mostly thoughtless rhetoric but until you sign your post I won't waste time rebutting them, except for two.
First, people being of generally the same mindset (which is probably true) is not the same as them having a collective will (which is clearly false).
Second, I do have things to hide from certain people, which is why I don't wave them around in public. By the way hiding is a binary operator (or whatever the proper linguistic term is), you hide things from some people, and not from others. This argument is restricted to public spaces, unless you get desparate enough to try a 'slippery slope' argument.
The concern is not merely being "caught on CCTV", but actual active surveillance of citizens. Such surveillance has been used by governments in the past to quash political dissent by directly spying on the opposition, and indirectly by creating a "chilling effect" . The widespread deployment of surveillance equipment makes the choice to engage in surveillance very very cheap.
The mere presence of such cameras turns a city into a Panopticon prison. Bentham, the inventor of the Panopticon, called it "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind". Do you think the "mind" of the government should have power over the minds of the citizens?
I think the premise of your question is false. I think of the government as a loose collection of individuals employed by me, paid out of my taxes to run my country. They aren't separate from the citizenry, they are a part of it. Obviously they have power over me. They do not have power over my mind, as is shown by the relative failure of public health campaigns when compared to the power exerted over our minds by advertising or by the media.
The government also does not have a collective will (or a 'mind'). Everybody I've ever met including those in government is concerned by both keeping or advancing own position, and by generally doing a good job of whatever they are being paid to do. Strongly self interested people do not go into government, it really isn't worth it.
Also I think a major feature of the Panopticon prison was that every cell could be easily seen into. Without cameras in private places that analogy holds no water.
I suppose as a disclaimer I should add that I usually identify as a utilitarian, and I've met the corpse of Jeremy Bentham.
Well thanks for your insightful analysis, but that's not really an answer. I have my house, where I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but on a public street anything I do can be seen by anybody who is around, whether or not it's 'their business'. People often complain when there aren't enough police on the beat. What's the difference?
I'll ask again, what possible difference can it make to me if I'm caught on CCTV when I'm going to work or if I'm out shopping or whatever? Do you expect any actual bad consequences? Or is it just a vague bad feeling you have about being seen in the street?
I agree with your analysis. I really don't understand how the cameras can actually be used by the state for evil, and I've never seen a real example cited.
All the drop tests in the video showed the units being dropped onto a soft mat. Where's the drop onto the tile floor? Where's the drop onto parking lot asphalt? From a moving rental car? Landing under the wheels?
Woah there! You might break one doing that. Those things is expensive. Here's some other advice: if you accidentally drop your laptop, try not to drop your laptop.
Also, why specifically a rental car?
How can you expect anybody to cite the lack of published specs?
Unless of course its in the Big Book of Unpublished Specifications, which causes any reader to disappear in a puff of paradoxical smoke.
Probably many great discoveries are waiting here, but also many many false positives. Peer review is a way to try to increase the signal to noise ratio in the scientific world, which is low enough as it is. Take that away and you'll maybe get a bit more useful stuff coming through, but you'll never be able to find it amongst all the crap.
People complain at the moment about the conflicting messages coming out of science. When the media can get their hands on anything any student or scientist wants to put online, it's going to get far far worse. Hopefully the market will still demand an authoratative source of information, and scientists will still seek the recognition of a good quality publication, so the current model won't disappear entirely.
The only reason I would publish in a non peer reviewed way is if I think a particular piece of work is not of sufficient general interest.
Hmm. I think your definition would depend on who the end user is. A system that can have the OS recovered using a Live CD *is* bricked if I don't have a live CD, or more accurately if I don't know what a live CD and there's nobody I can call who does.
On the other hand, if the manufacturer can fix it, it isn't bricked, you just don't have the right tools or knowledge at home to fix it yourself.
So being bricked is a function of both the system and the highest level of expertise currently to hand.
Loads of songs, even brilliantly original songs have a 1-4-5 progression. Look through a Dylan or Beatles songbook and you'll find hundreds. That doesn't make them bad or not worth listening too.
The thing is, race does matter, and you can't make racism go away by pretending it doesn't exist, or saying it shouldn't exist (which of course it shouldn't). Issues do affect different racial groups in different ways. By denying this you prevent the application of solutions where problems arise, making them far worse.
Hmm. I've obviously trodden on a personally sensitive issue with you so I'll leave it, except to mention that the French government does not allow the collection of any details of race at all, for any reason. This is thought to have been a contributing factor in the recent riots in Paris, caused because the increasing disenfranchisement of an entire community had gone essentially unnoticed. The French cannot see problems or target social interventions within racial groups, because they don't know who or where they are. I think this is a problem, although I do understand the argument that the data has potential to be used in a racist way.
I'm from the UK. The local authority has nothing to do with my utilities. Imagine the row if utility companies started supplying records to the government.
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.Building permits and real estate records tell you nothing about the use of homes, ie who lives there. Electoral records don't count the number of children or cover the needs of the community (for school/hospital planning etc).
Besides which, tax records, health service and insurance records cannot be shared across departments because of privacy laws, much less made publically available, whereas the census information is all publically available at the community level (see www.statistics.gov.uk).
For some reason TimeWarner is apparently convinced that there are enough of them to put on EXTRA Spanish language channels though. Wonder how they knew that without accurate census data?Market research will tell TimeWarner a lot of things. Think of the census as market reserach for the unprofitable services you take for granted, then tell me it's unnecessary.
Up here in Canuckistan (you know, Canada ..) the last 2 census (censii?) I've received the detailed long questionaire. Both times, I've refused to fill them in because there are questions that are either racist or illegal, or both.
That's just stupid. We need census information for service provision. If a significant proportion of people withhold their details, they have no right to complain when there aren't enough schools or hospital beds or even houses in the right places. How else are governments supposed to get demographic information?
If you don't want to include race information, just put 'Jedi' like everybody else.
A quick look through the medical literature reveals no strong evidence concerning the effects of caffeine on dementia. It's not something that will have been included in most major long term dementia studies. It is possible that a large study like the Cardiovascular Health Study or Rochester could examine this issue in detail.
However, we know that a lot of dementia is caused by vascular disease in the brain, and by high blood pressure leading to stroke, and since we know that caffeine causes high blood pressure, it probably isn't a good idea to drink coffee as a preventive measure for anything.
The hard part is getting a representative sample of the world's population to accurately tell you how much coffee they drink - then to find them all again in 40 years to see how many got dementia.