And how many times have you read that "being hungry", or that you have no other option than to succeed, being a driving factor in the success of a new business?
Such simple truths will be met with limitless rage.
Basically you need to feel like an outsider and feel like you're better than everyone else to be truly successful.
This is true. I have both of these things (though I lack impulse control hence posting comments on slashdit when I should be working). But insecurity does make people unhappy - even though it drives success. I whether you'd rather be successful and anxious, or relaxed and 'mediocre' in your achievements. Perhaps that is to question to meaning of 'success'.
Given the amounts involved (it averages $100 per month) it might be that they assumed it was some blanket program. Some of it might be the state reclaiming money from blanket programs for everyone under a certain income threshold, things like free shots. It's not obvious.
Very true - also a lot of people here forget that circumstances can easily change. You could lose your job, become sick etc so that you need child support where you didn't previously. Claiming benefits does not automatically make you a greedy feckless scrounger.
So, add appropriate amounts of soluble and insoluble fiber to the mix... it would even be easy enough to give flexibility in the ratio of the two to adjust to your system and diet's needs, like many people already do with fiber products.
There's also now evidence that the action of chewing is important for maintaining cerebral blood flow. I guess you could also add a stick of chewing gum but the point is that the human body is a very complex system and its not obvious what the consequences of trying to replace the function of one part of it are. The whole process of eating probably has other important effects that we don't understand.
That's fine so long as you're telling people how things are, but very limited if you want to think about how they should be. The problem with abdicating from advocacy is that there are plenty of people without your knowledge, understanding or benevolence who are prepared to fill in the gaps for you. This is why 'promoting societal good' is rightly now a key aspect of scientific endeavour.
Also...It sometimes help to remember that half of us have below average intelligence. It follows then that some of us are incapable of objective reasoning. Many of us who are capable of rational thought are just plain intellectually lazy. And many of us who are intellectually challenged put a lot of effort into trying to figure things out. It is a complicated issue.
That was just about the most intellectually lazy comment I have ever seen.
I was going to post a point by point rebuttal....but I couldn't be bothered.
This gets fixed by developing a better bag. Better means comparable cost and strength, with handles and environmentally safe.
Jumping straight away to a tax makes it look like nothing more than a money grab.
Maybe - but it works in the short term. I lived in Ireland for a few years, the 22c was enough to make me (and most people) take my own bags shopping so far fewer bags were used. Now I'm back in free bag country and it feels weird and unnecessary to be given a load of new bags every time I go shopping.
I agree though that even an 80% reduction doesn't solve the problem, an environmentally safe bag would be the best solution.
Exactly, it shouldn't be what Scott or the doctors want, it should be down to what his father wants... And if he's no longer capable of making or expressing his desires, then we have to go based on what he stated he would want when he was able to say so. If he has never expressed a desire to die rather than go on living in pain, then it isn't anyone else's decision to end his life. And as for the talk of torture, if he truly was as far gone as the article claims it's unlikely that he was actually experiencing any of that pain.
That's also a tricky solution, how can you know what you would want when in a certain set of circumstances? People adapt very quickly in chronic illness, such that quality of life is maintained to degree that would be surprising to the 'healthy' individual. I would certainly never leave instructions for my own killing under any circumstances, because I know how quickly I can change my mind. Would you trust your 20 year old self to end your 80 year old self's life if it's not up to his youthful standards?
Also - the experience from the Netherlands is that advance directives for physician assisted suicide are almost never acted on for one reason or another. (Can't find the reference for that at the moment).
Agree that torture is a ridiculous word to use in this case, especially for somebody with no ability to communicate. I wonder how much the suffering of the patient is conflated with the suffering of the family, or the perception of what it might be like to be in that situation (without actually knowing).
Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.
But this is pretty much exactly what we have at the moment. Most journals will let you read papers online in this way, and provide a list of citing articles and hyperlinks to citations. Most journals accept comments, BMJ even has these as online comments. Look at PubReader for other innovations in this area. I don't think anybody has a serious complaint that academic research is organised badly, its just the cost issue that winds people up.
Academic research at the coal face is necessarily sprawling. The line in TFA that is telling is
If you’re an established researcher interested in summarizing an area of your expertise, or if you would like to write an article in collaboration with someone who is, we’d love to see you propose an article.
Which shows a fundemental misunderstanding of what research writing is. The author is asking for encylopedia or textbook articles, for which there are already plenty of outlets (these are called 'encyclopedias' or 'textbooks'). So fine if they are proposing a new encyclopedia, though god knows why we need a new one, and I'm don't see how one could or should ever become definitive. To suggest that this will replace any part of existing scientific writing is a bit misguided. Two scientists can produce reviews on the same subject given the same source material with vastly different conclusions, its important that all voices can be heard, and 'curation by a community of experts' seems like the antithesis of this.
I say - arm everyone. Every passenger can carry a weapon. Shut down the checkpoints. Anyone who comes through, just comes through. If EVERYONE has a weapon, then everyone is safe.
Well that is the position on just about every other mode of transport.
After you read Dr.Johnson's titillating study on the asexual behavior of female ants among all male colonies, why on earth would I want to read koolguydouch3's comment "cool study bro"?
Correct me if I am wrong, but PubMed is a place for publishing papers, studies, etc.; why would you want to read nobody's comments?
The comments are often very useful when posted against articles on specific journal websites. Like all academic publishing, you'll have to use some critical faculty to separate the wheat from the chaff.
No, it'll more likely end up not used at all. It sounds like they throw up so many hurdles, if I were one of the eligible people to comment, I wouldn't.
The British Medical Journal (and I'm sure other journals) have done this for a while, and it is used and is useful. People tend to use it as publishing a 'letter to the editor', but its a lot less selective.
"If the rules were different, would this suffering still happen?"
Suffering is well defined in dictionaries,Wikipedia, etc. Trying to make a simplistic economic definition is missing the point entirely.
So are you saying that your rules have to minimize net suffering across people (a utilitarian perspective) or that any rule that creates suffering in an individual, however small, can't be acceptable despite how much suffering it might alleviate in others?
Also - does inaction that leads to suffering (ie not banning cigarette advertising) count as causing suffering?
I have a simple litmus test for a person's belief system. I ask the following question:
"Does your system require that people suffer, not because they would have anyway, but because of the rules of the system?"
It obviously immediately eliminates American Capitalism and Soviet Communism as thoroughly immoral - though I can hear the ideologues right now prepare themselves to explain why some suffering MUST happen (although conveniently it won't much suffering for them, only for someone else in the system) - but it can also be applied to features of subsystems.
In this case, the NSA is immoral on several counts - one of which, as you rightly point out, is that merely because of this mindless obsession with data-gathering, resources must be taken away from other facilities which benefit people.
How do you distinguish suffering because of the rules from suffering that would have happened anyway? And what do you mean by 'suffer'? I think it has to be defined in terms of a deprivation or loss, but that could only really be a consequence of something that you had in the first place because of the social or economic system you were living in - so separating having whatever it is to losing whatever it is would be difficult.
Just a correction, in Canada, the health care systems are run by the province. It is not at the federal level. (I think) The federal government sets standards for who services must be provided, but each province manages their own health care system. Not sure how it works in Europe, but it's entirely possible than healthcare could be managed at the state level.
The UK has just undergone a massive reorganisation - and different aspects of healthcare are run and funded at different government levels. Public health is locally (at the county level) funded and organised (but with some central funding contingent on meeting specific targets), primary care is centrally funded but locally organised (by areas that are not co-terminus with any local government region), and hospital services are nationally funded but hospitals run pretty much independently (i think - i don't know a lot about hospitals). There's still a central government department for health sort of setting the agenda, and the national institute for clinical excellence making guidelines that other groups are supposed to follow. So your healthcare can vary a lot depending on where you live, which I guess is a reasonable definition for something which is not nationally organised.
There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees.
From the summary of the article::
'Well my basic hypothesis was that trees improve people's health.
Yes - that's the hypothesis, but the evidence to support it doesn't come from an observed correlation between trees and health, as previous people have said that would be confounded will all kinds of other factors which would be impossible to measure. The evidence comes from the observed correlation between the pest and health, which is presumably (and this is big assumption) not confounded with other factors, with the presence of trees as the only possible mediating factor.
There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees. The claim is that health is correlated with the presence of something that kills the trees, effectively at random (or at least in a way which is uncorrelated with anything that also directly affects human health) making this quite a neat natural experiment. Your arguments about other confounding factors don't hold in this case. look up natural experiments or instrumental variables if you want to know more about the method.
1) Other people's money: Most open access journals I've come across in my field charge >$1000 to let you publish in them (as opposed to traditional journals which generally charge nothing). This is pretty much not an option in the current cash-strapped academic environment, funding bodies don't like to see their money spent on things like this, they want to pay for research.
I don't know about other funding bodies but every project funded by the EU framework program I've been involved with had a budget for dissemination which covers things like conferences, exhibitions and publication of papers and books.
Most charity funders refuse to pay these - also the Medical Research Council as of this year stopped people putting open access fees explicitly into budgets (even though they mandate open access). The universities have to find the money themselves.
and what field are you in? Sharing culture varies radically depending on discipline.
Medicine. I agree it's less open that many disciplines. Like I said, I think open access is generally a good thing. But in my vast experience, people actually doing research genuinely don't care, as they know that people at other universities will be able to read their work whether its open or not.
As an aside - a lot of universities are rejecting the 'Gold' open access standard (the author pays version) because it is horrendously expensive for authors (usually 1000-2000 per article). They are instead preferring the 'Green' open access model, where the journal keeps the copyright to the final copyedited version, but lets researchers distribute their own version on a personal or institutional website. This is probably the way of the future because we can't keep paying stupidly high open access publishing fees.
This will change once they realize that their number (1) is positively correlated with open access; more easily available equals more read equals more citations equals higher impact.
Well of course. As I said its about impact factor. If and when open access journals get decent impact factors, researchers will be more inclined to use them.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many times have you read that "being hungry", or that you have no other option than to succeed, being a driving factor in the success of a new business?
Such simple truths will be met with limitless rage.
Never?
Basically you need to feel like an outsider and feel like you're better than everyone else to be truly successful.
This is true. I have both of these things (though I lack impulse control hence posting comments on slashdit when I should be working). But insecurity does make people unhappy - even though it drives success. I whether you'd rather be successful and anxious, or relaxed and 'mediocre' in your achievements. Perhaps that is to question to meaning of 'success'.
Given the amounts involved (it averages $100 per month) it might be that they assumed it was some blanket program. Some of it might be the state reclaiming money from blanket programs for everyone under a certain income threshold, things like free shots. It's not obvious.
Very true - also a lot of people here forget that circumstances can easily change. You could lose your job, become sick etc so that you need child support where you didn't previously. Claiming benefits does not automatically make you a greedy feckless scrounger.
So, add appropriate amounts of soluble and insoluble fiber to the mix... it would even be easy enough to give flexibility in the ratio of the two to adjust to your system and diet's needs, like many people already do with fiber products.
There's also now evidence that the action of chewing is important for maintaining cerebral blood flow. I guess you could also add a stick of chewing gum but the point is that the human body is a very complex system and its not obvious what the consequences of trying to replace the function of one part of it are. The whole process of eating probably has other important effects that we don't understand.
That's fine so long as you're telling people how things are, but very limited if you want to think about how they should be. The problem with abdicating from advocacy is that there are plenty of people without your knowledge, understanding or benevolence who are prepared to fill in the gaps for you. This is why 'promoting societal good' is rightly now a key aspect of scientific endeavour.
I think this isn't about race more nationality.
Nationality is an aspect of race, at least in UK law. US may be different but we do nominally speak the same language
Amnesia is most often associated with major brain damage, which means you have a lot more to worry about than your passwords.
Also with ageing - not just in dementia. My parents in their 60s/70s both struggle with remembering secure passwords.
Also...It sometimes help to remember that half of us have below average intelligence. It follows then that some of us are incapable of objective reasoning. Many of us who are capable of rational thought are just plain intellectually lazy. And many of us who are intellectually challenged put a lot of effort into trying to figure things out. It is a complicated issue.
That was just about the most intellectually lazy comment I have ever seen.
I was going to post a point by point rebuttal....but I couldn't be bothered.
This gets fixed by developing a better bag. Better means comparable cost and strength, with handles and environmentally safe.
Jumping straight away to a tax makes it look like nothing more than a money grab.
Maybe - but it works in the short term. I lived in Ireland for a few years, the 22c was enough to make me (and most people) take my own bags shopping so far fewer bags were used. Now I'm back in free bag country and it feels weird and unnecessary to be given a load of new bags every time I go shopping.
I agree though that even an 80% reduction doesn't solve the problem, an environmentally safe bag would be the best solution.
Exactly, it shouldn't be what Scott or the doctors want, it should be down to what his father wants... And if he's no longer capable of making or expressing his desires, then we have to go based on what he stated he would want when he was able to say so.
If he has never expressed a desire to die rather than go on living in pain, then it isn't anyone else's decision to end his life. And as for the talk of torture, if he truly was as far gone as the article claims it's unlikely that he was actually experiencing any of that pain.
That's also a tricky solution, how can you know what you would want when in a certain set of circumstances? People adapt very quickly in chronic illness, such that quality of life is maintained to degree that would be surprising to the 'healthy' individual. I would certainly never leave instructions for my own killing under any circumstances, because I know how quickly I can change my mind. Would you trust your 20 year old self to end your 80 year old self's life if it's not up to his youthful standards?
Also - the experience from the Netherlands is that advance directives for physician assisted suicide are almost never acted on for one reason or another. (Can't find the reference for that at the moment).
Agree that torture is a ridiculous word to use in this case, especially for somebody with no ability to communicate. I wonder how much the suffering of the patient is conflated with the suffering of the family, or the perception of what it might be like to be in that situation (without actually knowing).
Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.
But this is pretty much exactly what we have at the moment. Most journals will let you read papers online in this way, and provide a list of citing articles and hyperlinks to citations. Most journals accept comments, BMJ even has these as online comments. Look at PubReader for other innovations in this area. I don't think anybody has a serious complaint that academic research is organised badly, its just the cost issue that winds people up.
Academic research at the coal face is necessarily sprawling. The line in TFA that is telling is
If you’re an established researcher interested in summarizing an area of your expertise, or if you would like to write an article in collaboration with someone who is, we’d love to see you propose an article.
Which shows a fundemental misunderstanding of what research writing is. The author is asking for encylopedia or textbook articles, for which there are already plenty of outlets (these are called 'encyclopedias' or 'textbooks'). So fine if they are proposing a new encyclopedia, though god knows why we need a new one, and I'm don't see how one could or should ever become definitive. To suggest that this will replace any part of existing scientific writing is a bit misguided. Two scientists can produce reviews on the same subject given the same source material with vastly different conclusions, its important that all voices can be heard, and 'curation by a community of experts' seems like the antithesis of this.
I say - arm everyone. Every passenger can carry a weapon. Shut down the checkpoints. Anyone who comes through, just comes through. If EVERYONE has a weapon, then everyone is safe.
Well that is the position on just about every other mode of transport.
After you read Dr.Johnson's titillating study on the asexual behavior of female ants among all male colonies, why on earth would I want to read koolguydouch3's comment "cool study bro"?
Correct me if I am wrong, but PubMed is a place for publishing papers, studies, etc.; why would you want to read nobody's comments?
The comments are often very useful when posted against articles on specific journal websites. Like all academic publishing, you'll have to use some critical faculty to separate the wheat from the chaff.
No, it'll more likely end up not used at all. It sounds like they throw up so many hurdles, if I were one of the eligible people to comment, I wouldn't.
The British Medical Journal (and I'm sure other journals) have done this for a while, and it is used and is useful. People tend to use it as publishing a 'letter to the editor', but its a lot less selective.
"If the rules were different, would this suffering still happen?"
Suffering is well defined in dictionaries,Wikipedia, etc. Trying to make a simplistic economic definition is missing the point entirely.
So are you saying that your rules have to minimize net suffering across people (a utilitarian perspective) or that any rule that creates suffering in an individual, however small, can't be acceptable despite how much suffering it might alleviate in others?
Also - does inaction that leads to suffering (ie not banning cigarette advertising) count as causing suffering?
You are quite right. What I said only applies to 85% of the UK population.
I have a simple litmus test for a person's belief system. I ask the following question:
"Does your system require that people suffer, not because they would have anyway, but because of the rules of the system?"
It obviously immediately eliminates American Capitalism and Soviet Communism as thoroughly immoral - though I can hear the ideologues right now prepare themselves to explain why some suffering MUST happen (although conveniently it won't much suffering for them, only for someone else in the system) - but it can also be applied to features of subsystems.
In this case, the NSA is immoral on several counts - one of which, as you rightly point out, is that merely because of this mindless obsession with data-gathering, resources must be taken away from other facilities which benefit people.
How do you distinguish suffering because of the rules from suffering that would have happened anyway? And what do you mean by 'suffer'? I think it has to be defined in terms of a deprivation or loss, but that could only really be a consequence of something that you had in the first place because of the social or economic system you were living in - so separating having whatever it is to losing whatever it is would be difficult.
Just a correction, in Canada, the health care systems are run by the province. It is not at the federal level. (I think) The federal government sets standards for who services must be provided, but each province manages their own health care system. Not sure how it works in Europe, but it's entirely possible than healthcare could be managed at the state level.
The UK has just undergone a massive reorganisation - and different aspects of healthcare are run and funded at different government levels. Public health is locally (at the county level) funded and organised (but with some central funding contingent on meeting specific targets), primary care is centrally funded but locally organised (by areas that are not co-terminus with any local government region), and hospital services are nationally funded but hospitals run pretty much independently (i think - i don't know a lot about hospitals). There's still a central government department for health sort of setting the agenda, and the national institute for clinical excellence making guidelines that other groups are supposed to follow. So your healthcare can vary a lot depending on where you live, which I guess is a reasonable definition for something which is not nationally organised.
There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees.
From the summary of the article::
'Well my basic hypothesis was that trees improve people's health.
Yes - that's the hypothesis, but the evidence to support it doesn't come from an observed correlation between trees and health, as previous people have said that would be confounded will all kinds of other factors which would be impossible to measure. The evidence comes from the observed correlation between the pest and health, which is presumably (and this is big assumption) not confounded with other factors, with the presence of trees as the only possible mediating factor.
There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees. The claim is that health is correlated with the presence of something that kills the trees, effectively at random (or at least in a way which is uncorrelated with anything that also directly affects human health) making this quite a neat natural experiment. Your arguments about other confounding factors don't hold in this case. look up natural experiments or instrumental variables if you want to know more about the method.
Norwich is actually a city. It's like saying "The town of New York". Norwich-fag here.
I remember just after I moved to Norwich a bus driver refusing to understand what I meant when I said 'town'. Its a city! And a fine one at that.
Hang out with computer science or math people for a while. It'll blow your mind. A culture that produced RMS would have to ;)
I'm reading Slashdot! And I used to be a mathematician back when you had to submit papers to journals by mail.
1) Other people's money: Most open access journals I've come across in my field charge >$1000 to let you publish in them (as opposed to traditional journals which generally charge nothing). This is pretty much not an option in the current cash-strapped academic environment, funding bodies don't like to see their money spent on things like this, they want to pay for research.
I don't know about other funding bodies but every project funded by the EU framework program I've been involved with had a budget for dissemination which covers things like conferences, exhibitions and publication of papers and books.
Most charity funders refuse to pay these - also the Medical Research Council as of this year stopped people putting open access fees explicitly into budgets (even though they mandate open access). The universities have to find the money themselves.
and what field are you in? Sharing culture varies radically depending on discipline.
Medicine. I agree it's less open that many disciplines. Like I said, I think open access is generally a good thing. But in my vast experience, people actually doing research genuinely don't care, as they know that people at other universities will be able to read their work whether its open or not.
As an aside - a lot of universities are rejecting the 'Gold' open access standard (the author pays version) because it is horrendously expensive for authors (usually 1000-2000 per article). They are instead preferring the 'Green' open access model, where the journal keeps the copyright to the final copyedited version, but lets researchers distribute their own version on a personal or institutional website. This is probably the way of the future because we can't keep paying stupidly high open access publishing fees.
This will change once they realize that their number (1) is positively correlated with open access; more easily available equals more read equals more citations equals higher impact.
Well of course. As I said its about impact factor. If and when open access journals get decent impact factors, researchers will be more inclined to use them.