But then what do you do with the irrelevant people? If we're all actually honest about the situation, we have too many people and not enough for them to do.
This has been my question. You can't run a country like a business, because in a business you can lay off redundant people and they go away. Because of productivity gains, GDP is back where is was before the crash, but we still have 9% (really more like 17%) unemployment. We just don't need those millions of people we laid off back in 2008 for anything, but they stubbornly continue to exist.
My brother is a professional farmer for a big corporate-owned outfit. They just had their entire property (thousands of acres) set up with wireless broadband. He controls and monitors all the irrigation pumps for all the crops and sends/receives GPS map updates to and from their server from a laptop in his pickup. Yeah, I realize that's an intranet, but I know he checks and sends email over that network, so it has to be connected to the outside world, too. Not to mention incorporating the real-time weather into their irrigation planning. Farmers are certainly using the Internet!
I watched the first half season worth of season one (7 episodes), and not a single one was good, or even not bad. Just terrible, really terrible. Painful to watch even.
I thought the same thing. I wouldn't recommend starting here to anyone.
Did it take a radical turn for the better later on?
Like nothing I've ever seen. The quality shot up like a rocket. I would love to hear the inside story of how they turned it around.
I didn't see the "souls" episode of V, but I saw an episode with some bullshit "the aliens can't understand human love" theme. I gave them a chance to get me back for a new season, but there is just no way I'm going to sit through that. At least Fringe got better in season 2 and better still in the 3rd. V was awful in its first season and what I saw there was even worse.
Most of Slashdotters are very Liberal, and the victim was both.
No, Rep. Gifford is not very liberal.
Nobody likes own-side casualties, but politics is war
No, it isn't. Politics is the process by which large organizations make decisions between various options. It's not fucking war!
If someone had whacked a TeaPartista the response here would be more muted.
I doubt this, but I have no way to prove it one way or the other.
It's OK to admit we take sides, have enemies, and cheer their misfortune (or just plain want them to FUCKING DIE!). Human nature, nothing to see here. We should expect those we disagree with to wish us death also. There is no victory without defeat.
That is troublesome, especially since there was also a federal judge and a child among the dead. However, the shooting happened during a public event that she was hosting, so we're assuming (ASS out of U and ME, I know) that she was the primary target.
I love how people on this very forum have had "Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo" at the bottom of every one of their posts for years. And when that shit actually blows up suddenly it "isn't the time for politics."
To their benefit, OLPC has talked about this as part of their mission. They're not ignoring it, but one thing I'm finding is that OLPC is playing a Long Game (possibly because sales of the devices themselves hasn't been lucrative enough to finance the later phases of the rollout as quickly as they'd hoped).
Teacher training is an issue in the developed world as well. I work with assistive tech for kids with disabilities, and I always hold that if I walk into a classroom and the teacher says "Oh, thank God you're here, his device isn't working" means I'm doing something wrong. I spend at least as much time, if not more, with the staff as with the students and their gear.
Of course self-motivated autodidacts are a minority of students anywhere, but without the tools to self-teach, that isn't an advantage and they won't have the opportunity to learn. I'm a lot more willing to roll out the tools to see what happens because to wait until certain that everyone is "ready", it will never happen.
#1 The growth rate of autism also correlates to a decrease in diagnoses of mental retardation. Special education and allied health therapies have improved in the past few decades such that we can more accurately differentially diagnose various types of developmental disorders. #2. And the increased focus on early intervention means we can now mitigate the severity of developmental disorders so that someone born with autism may not necessarily be severely mentally retarded as they would have been in the 1970s or '80s. #3. Finally, we've become so convinced that there is an "epidemic" that there is more money and services available for autism spectrum disorders relative to other developmental disabilities, so that any kid who displays any autistic-like qualities is likely to be identified as ASD because it opens a lot of doors for getting services that might not be otherwise available.
That's not to say it isn't increasing, but the numbers may not be saying what you think they are saying.
Is it reasonable to expect that now that there would be a sizable sample size of "non-immunized" kids, that a study to compare the rates of autism between the two groups will be done? Who would you trust to conduct and publish the results? Big Pharma, AMA ?
The best studies have been done on government data supplied by countries with national healthcare and centralized medical record databases. When your data includes an n of something like the entire newborn population of Denmark* for five years, you get some pretty robust results.
*(I think it was Denmark. Maybe The Netherlands. Can't recall off the top of my head. And the semester doesn't start until Monday, so I'm officially On Strike from doing any MEDLINE or PsychINFO searches until then.)
...Seriously, WTF, do you really care about what might have caused your child's autism or not? I think people have some much time, effort and rage involved in blaming vaccines that they can't allow the cognitive dissonance of accepting the idea that it may have all been a waste of time. Time that could have been spent actually helping their children and looking for the real cause and a cure.
I've got a close friend with a son with autism and this is his take on the subject. He is, perhaps, on some level curious if something environmental caused his autism, but it's not productive in any way for him as a parent to waste a lot of time or attention on it or on chasing some elusive "cure" the likes of which isn't even hinted at thus far. A better use of his time and attention is making sure his kid has the best therapies and education available right now. Even if a stranger had jumped out of the bushes and injected autism into your kid? So what? It's done. Now that he has it, what are you going to do now?
As a researcher myself, this whole thing has pissed me off because of all of the manhours/years and research dollars spent chasing this red herring was wasted and would have been better-spent following more promising, actual leads.
Except that drug trials involve tests against placebos as a matter of course.
Drug trials test against placebo for safety, but not necessarily for effectiveness. This is especially true in cases where withholding treatment would be unethical, such as HIV/AIDS. New drugs in these cases are tested as to whether they are better than existing treatments, rather than better than placebo.
Good points. These are two assumptions inherent in the experimental design. These two concerns could easily have been dismissed with a short literature review, showing how other researchers had proven that bees have sophisticated color vision and that they use their vision more than scent while foraging (both of these are true, IIRC).
Scientists don't need to be statisticians to be able to do good research. They also don't need to be good writers, or good reviewers. These things help, but shouldn't be necessary in order to get results out to the world.
If you could, perhaps, tell this to my advisor/coauthor, that would be great, because I've got a couple of manuscripts that we've been passing back and forth that I'm really sick of and would like to just submit now.
My mom is one of the best mathematics teachers I've ever met. She teachers middle school special education and her kids with learning disabilities often jump up to grade level in her class. She's terrible at math. Barely passed it as a student. She's a better teacher for it because she understands what it means to not understand.
My manuscripts are full of words I never use. (I try to avoid the word "construct" whenever possible, for example). They creep in as my collaborators suggest things. If it's the right word for the concept that needs to be expressed, then that's what you use.
It's in kids' voice more for sentence structure and the manner of description more than the vocabulary.
I think the average person has no idea what useful or good science is. I'm pretty sure that if it isn't directly related to medicine, energy, or climate change (...if they even think it is true...) most people would consider it useless. I do cognitive science/neuroscience research, and all the time people are confused why people pay us to figure out how the brain works without intentions to directly "help people." Hell, even that "soccer efficiency" study or whatever can probably be applied to some other thing our government likes that involves people working in teams, ie the military.
Shit, the average scientist can't evaluate the importance of someone else's research. If I were to summarize my study to a brief paragraph (something teabaggers reading a website can absorb) it wouldn't sound like much. That's why NSF (although my stuff is more likely to be funded through NIH or ED) makes you write long, boring tl;dr grant applications about it (that YouCut visitors certainly won't bother to read).
Could you name a few things that 'public sector research' has come up with 'as the foundations of tomorrow's industries' which private companies wouldn't have done themselves for far less?
Therapy methods and assistive technologies that allow people with developmental disabilities to become educated and employable, thus making many of them contributing members of the economy rather than 100% welfare-dependent wards of the state.
How does it work when someone wants a clarification about expert witness testimony. If twelve people listen to a witness explain some complicated subject, and some interpret it one way and some interpret it another? I know that you can pass questions to the judge on some subjects, but can your question be "what did witness X mean when he said y? Can he provide a clarification?"
If not, then is there a way before the cases have been rested to say "hey, I missed something, can your witness clarify?"
The judge then takes responsibility for making sure the information you get is reliable, rather than some shit you found on the internet.
That doesn't always happen. My last jury stint involved a trial with more than one defendant and an invocation of the so-called "felony murder rule". The judge wanted each jury member to affirm that they would treat the felony murder rule as Gospel, AND made this demand WITHOUT any detailed discussion of its value or history. When I specifically asked for that, the judge flatly denied my request.
What you don't know is whether and how the prosecution and defense argued about that definition while you weren't around. All you get to hear is the final decision. If the judge was wrong about that decision, that's a matter for appeal, not the jury.
...and the TV show Reboot was obviously heavily influenced by TRON itself. It was a cartoon about anthropomorphic programs running around inside a computer where they had to play life-or-death games. No, you definitely wouldn't want to call a TRON movie Reboot.
And now they use bullet-time in television commercials. Ho hum. Need more bread and circus to keep us occupied, otherwise we might pause to think about how fucked up the world is right now!
Two issues with this: 1. I'm pretty sure that the Gap commercial with the swing dancers used essentially the same effect as bullet time a year before The Matrix came out. 2. My parents' parents' parents saw movies to distract them from how fucked up the world was then and, taken on the whole, things are better now than then so I'm confident that this is not the end of the world.
that moving pictures in black and white with no sound were once considered impressive as well.
Buster Keaton still impresses me.
I've seen two Buster Keaton films (The Cameraman and Steamboat Bill Jr) in theaters with a good orchestra and they left me in awe. How the hell did they do that?
Slashdot Mirror
But then what do you do with the irrelevant people? If we're all actually honest about the situation, we have too many people and not enough for them to do.
This has been my question. You can't run a country like a business, because in a business you can lay off redundant people and they go away. Because of productivity gains, GDP is back where is was before the crash, but we still have 9% (really more like 17%) unemployment. We just don't need those millions of people we laid off back in 2008 for anything, but they stubbornly continue to exist.
My brother is a professional farmer for a big corporate-owned outfit. They just had their entire property (thousands of acres) set up with wireless broadband. He controls and monitors all the irrigation pumps for all the crops and sends/receives GPS map updates to and from their server from a laptop in his pickup. Yeah, I realize that's an intranet, but I know he checks and sends email over that network, so it has to be connected to the outside world, too. Not to mention incorporating the real-time weather into their irrigation planning. Farmers are certainly using the Internet!
I watched the first half season worth of season one (7 episodes), and not a single one was good, or even not bad. Just terrible, really terrible. Painful to watch even.
I thought the same thing. I wouldn't recommend starting here to anyone.
Did it take a radical turn for the better later on?
Like nothing I've ever seen. The quality shot up like a rocket. I would love to hear the inside story of how they turned it around.
I didn't see the "souls" episode of V, but I saw an episode with some bullshit "the aliens can't understand human love" theme. I gave them a chance to get me back for a new season, but there is just no way I'm going to sit through that. At least Fringe got better in season 2 and better still in the 3rd. V was awful in its first season and what I saw there was even worse.
Most of Slashdotters are very Liberal, and the victim was both.
No, Rep. Gifford is not very liberal.
Nobody likes own-side casualties, but politics is war
No, it isn't. Politics is the process by which large organizations make decisions between various options. It's not fucking war!
If someone had whacked a TeaPartista the response here would be more muted.
I doubt this, but I have no way to prove it one way or the other.
It's OK to admit we take sides, have enemies, and cheer their misfortune (or just plain want them to FUCKING DIE!). Human nature, nothing to see here. We should expect those we disagree with to wish us death also. There is no victory without defeat.
What the hell is wrong with you?
That is troublesome, especially since there was also a federal judge and a child among the dead. However, the shooting happened during a public event that she was hosting, so we're assuming (ASS out of U and ME, I know) that she was the primary target.
I love how people on this very forum have had "Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo" at the bottom of every one of their posts for years. And when that shit actually blows up suddenly it "isn't the time for politics."
To their benefit, OLPC has talked about this as part of their mission. They're not ignoring it, but one thing I'm finding is that OLPC is playing a Long Game (possibly because sales of the devices themselves hasn't been lucrative enough to finance the later phases of the rollout as quickly as they'd hoped).
Teacher training is an issue in the developed world as well. I work with assistive tech for kids with disabilities, and I always hold that if I walk into a classroom and the teacher says "Oh, thank God you're here, his device isn't working" means I'm doing something wrong. I spend at least as much time, if not more, with the staff as with the students and their gear.
Of course self-motivated autodidacts are a minority of students anywhere, but without the tools to self-teach, that isn't an advantage and they won't have the opportunity to learn. I'm a lot more willing to roll out the tools to see what happens because to wait until certain that everyone is "ready", it will never happen.
#1 The growth rate of autism also correlates to a decrease in diagnoses of mental retardation. Special education and allied health therapies have improved in the past few decades such that we can more accurately differentially diagnose various types of developmental disorders. #2. And the increased focus on early intervention means we can now mitigate the severity of developmental disorders so that someone born with autism may not necessarily be severely mentally retarded as they would have been in the 1970s or '80s. #3. Finally, we've become so convinced that there is an "epidemic" that there is more money and services available for autism spectrum disorders relative to other developmental disabilities, so that any kid who displays any autistic-like qualities is likely to be identified as ASD because it opens a lot of doors for getting services that might not be otherwise available.
That's not to say it isn't increasing, but the numbers may not be saying what you think they are saying.
Is it reasonable to expect that now that there would be a sizable sample size of "non-immunized" kids, that a study to compare the rates of autism between the two groups will be done?
Who would you trust to conduct and publish the results? Big Pharma, AMA ?
The best studies have been done on government data supplied by countries with national healthcare and centralized medical record databases. When your data includes an n of something like the entire newborn population of Denmark* for five years, you get some pretty robust results.
*(I think it was Denmark. Maybe The Netherlands. Can't recall off the top of my head. And the semester doesn't start until Monday, so I'm officially On Strike from doing any MEDLINE or PsychINFO searches until then.)
...Seriously, WTF, do you really care about what might have caused your child's autism or not? I think people have some much time, effort and rage involved in blaming vaccines that they can't allow the cognitive dissonance of accepting the idea that it may have all been a waste of time. Time that could have been spent actually helping their children and looking for the real cause and a cure.
I've got a close friend with a son with autism and this is his take on the subject. He is, perhaps, on some level curious if something environmental caused his autism, but it's not productive in any way for him as a parent to waste a lot of time or attention on it or on chasing some elusive "cure" the likes of which isn't even hinted at thus far. A better use of his time and attention is making sure his kid has the best therapies and education available right now. Even if a stranger had jumped out of the bushes and injected autism into your kid? So what? It's done. Now that he has it, what are you going to do now?
As a researcher myself, this whole thing has pissed me off because of all of the manhours/years and research dollars spent chasing this red herring was wasted and would have been better-spent following more promising, actual leads.
Except that drug trials involve tests against placebos as a matter of course.
Drug trials test against placebo for safety, but not necessarily for effectiveness. This is especially true in cases where withholding treatment would be unethical, such as HIV/AIDS. New drugs in these cases are tested as to whether they are better than existing treatments, rather than better than placebo.
cf. chemotherapy, which makes the cancer go away, but makes the patient feel worse.
Sometimes "cure" means different things to different people.
Good points. These are two assumptions inherent in the experimental design. These two concerns could easily have been dismissed with a short literature review, showing how other researchers had proven that bees have sophisticated color vision and that they use their vision more than scent while foraging (both of these are true, IIRC).
Scientists don't need to be statisticians to be able to do good research. They also don't need to be good writers, or good reviewers. These things help, but shouldn't be necessary in order to get results out to the world.
If you could, perhaps, tell this to my advisor/coauthor, that would be great, because I've got a couple of manuscripts that we've been passing back and forth that I'm really sick of and would like to just submit now.
My mom is one of the best mathematics teachers I've ever met. She teachers middle school special education and her kids with learning disabilities often jump up to grade level in her class.
She's terrible at math. Barely passed it as a student. She's a better teacher for it because she understands what it means to not understand.
I'll bet they use those words now, though.
My manuscripts are full of words I never use. (I try to avoid the word "construct" whenever possible, for example). They creep in as my collaborators suggest things. If it's the right word for the concept that needs to be expressed, then that's what you use.
It's in kids' voice more for sentence structure and the manner of description more than the vocabulary.
I think the average person has no idea what useful or good science is. I'm pretty sure that if it isn't directly related to medicine, energy, or climate change (...if they even think it is true...) most people would consider it useless. I do cognitive science/neuroscience research, and all the time people are confused why people pay us to figure out how the brain works without intentions to directly "help people." Hell, even that "soccer efficiency" study or whatever can probably be applied to some other thing our government likes that involves people working in teams, ie the military.
Shit, the average scientist can't evaluate the importance of someone else's research. If I were to summarize my study to a brief paragraph (something teabaggers reading a website can absorb) it wouldn't sound like much. That's why NSF (although my stuff is more likely to be funded through NIH or ED) makes you write long, boring tl;dr grant applications about it (that YouCut visitors certainly won't bother to read).
Could you name a few things that 'public sector research' has come up with 'as the foundations of tomorrow's industries' which private companies wouldn't have done themselves for far less?
Therapy methods and assistive technologies that allow people with developmental disabilities to become educated and employable, thus making many of them contributing members of the economy rather than 100% welfare-dependent wards of the state.
How does it work when someone wants a clarification about expert witness testimony. If twelve people listen to a witness explain some complicated subject, and some interpret it one way and some interpret it another? I know that you can pass questions to the judge on some subjects, but can your question be "what did witness X mean when he said y? Can he provide a clarification?"
If not, then is there a way before the cases have been rested to say "hey, I missed something, can your witness clarify?"
Acquit. The jury has reasonable doubts.
That doesn't always happen. My last jury stint involved a trial with more than one defendant and an invocation of the so-called "felony murder rule". The judge wanted each jury member to affirm that they would treat the felony murder rule as Gospel, AND made this demand WITHOUT any detailed discussion of its value or history. When I specifically asked for that, the judge flatly denied my request.
What you don't know is whether and how the prosecution and defense argued about that definition while you weren't around. All you get to hear is the final decision. If the judge was wrong about that decision, that's a matter for appeal, not the jury.
Wall Street 2 didn't have a Daft Punk score, however.
...and the TV show Reboot was obviously heavily influenced by TRON itself. It was a cartoon about anthropomorphic programs running around inside a computer where they had to play life-or-death games. No, you definitely wouldn't want to call a TRON movie Reboot.
And now they use bullet-time in television commercials. Ho hum. Need more bread and circus to keep us occupied, otherwise we might pause to think about how fucked up the world is right now!
Two issues with this:
1. I'm pretty sure that the Gap commercial with the swing dancers used essentially the same effect as bullet time a year before The Matrix came out.
2. My parents' parents' parents saw movies to distract them from how fucked up the world was then and, taken on the whole, things are better now than then so I'm confident that this is not the end of the world.
that moving pictures in black and white with no sound were once considered impressive as well.
Buster Keaton still impresses me.
I've seen two Buster Keaton films (The Cameraman and Steamboat Bill Jr) in theaters with a good orchestra and they left me in awe. How the hell did they do that?