Indeed. Headline: "Signs of Subsurface 'Alien' Life Found in Antarctica"
Summary of actual article:
Alien life? No
Any kind of life? No
Briny water? No
Anomalies in electrical resistance? Yes. "We interpret these results as an indication that liquid, with sufficiently high solute content, exists at temperatures well below freezing and considered within the range suitable for microbial life. These inferred brines...."
But the original headline is much more click-bait-y than, you know, truth.
That should be probably further, but anyway, c'mon, it could be a lot further from the truth. They could have claimed to have encrypted the documents using a slice of lemon wrapped around a hamster.
I had exactly the same two thoughts, which probably should be frightening to both of us. Except that I thought it would be further from the truth to say they had encrypted without actually doing any encrypting at all. (I've also been reading about string theory, so now I'm trying to picture a six-dimensional Calabi-Yau hamster wrapped by a lemon slice.)
Excessively exaggerated hyperbole is the greatest threat the human species has ever faced.
"The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG)... estimates that 15% of drivers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes aren't supposed to be there."
Apparently there's 85% compliance even without this particular means of enforcement. Is possibly gaining another 15% worth the cost? (Where "cost" includes money, privacy, increased government, etc.)
In Ferguson we see that blacks have "contraband" in their vehicles at a lower rate than whites, yet black cars still get searched more.
Happens in Illinois, too, according to on-going reporting by the ACLU. "Statewide in 2013, black and Hispanic motorists were nearly twice as likely as white motorists to have their vehicles consent searched during traffic stops. Specifically, black motorists were 95% more likely, and Hispanic motorists were 89% more likely. There are similar disparities every year such data has been collected starting in 2004.... On the other hand, when police in Illinois performed a consent search in 2013, white motorists were far more likely than minority motorists to be found with contraband. Specifically, white motorists were 49% more likely than black motorists, and 56% more likely than Hispanic motorists. Again, there are similar disparities every year such data has been collected starting in 2004."
I agree that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they tend to be lower income than whites. They're also scrutinized more as you can see in Ferguson.... The bottom line is that blacks who commit the same crimes are more likely to be convicted and get harsher punishment.
That is one of the problems with interpreting statistics. As an example, suppose someone looks at prison records and find that the proportion of Black inmates is double the proportion in the population: that is, there are twice as many Black prisoners as there should be. Does that mean Blacks are inherently more criminal, or does it mean they get, on average, sentences twice as long for the same crimes? Either interpretation is valid, given only that one piece of information.
Another example: in Ferguson, the proportion of Blacks pulled over for traffic stops is higher than the proportion of Blacks in the population. Looks like selective enforcement -- unless you know that Ferguson is also on the main path between the airport and St Louis. How many of the people pulled over actually live in Ferguson compared to the number just passing through? I don't know.
Getting to the truth by way of statistics is a long, hard, winding road.Consequently, I sometimes feel rather testy toward people who make assertions like this: "Blacks commit crimes at rates higher than whites."
There's also a long distance between "convicted of committing a crime" and "inherently criminal", with a lot of confounding variables: exposure to lead is a big one, which has mostly been fixed in the US; also poverty, disparities in education, employment, diet, pre-natal care, child care, exposure to violence, differential policing (more scrutiny of poor neighborhoods); selective enforcement (do the police arrest both drug seller and drug buyer?); racial bias in sentencing, whether direct or incidental (such as the difference in mandatory sentences for powder cocaine as compared to crack); and many others.
In some cases, the law itself is biased: to borrow from Anatole France, in The Red Lily: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." (Wikiquote)
Illinois had a "two-party consent" law which prohibited audio recording, even in public, without the consent of all parties involved. That law was struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2014, but until then it was used by police to suppress both audio and video recordings. That particular law was also packaged in both misdemeanor and felony sizes for convenient plea bargaining. Technically, the law didn't prohibit video recording without audio, but the police didn't necessarily make that clear when confiscating recording devices.
I'm reluctant to make blanket statements about all 50 states.
Exactly. I think the whole wave/particle description does people a real disservice. Light IS NOT a particle and IS NOT a wave. Sometimes it's convenient to pretend it's a particle and other times it's more convenient to pretend it's a wave, but it is what it is. "The map is not the territory." Obviously, the same goes for other quantum models, such as electrons.
But the US did invade Afghanistan and Iraq. So where does the logic lead us?
The calculus here seems to be that the indiscriminate killing of civilians is justified if it, ultimately, saves lives by shortening the war. Is that right? So, if the 9/11 attacks had saved some number of lives, would they have been justified? Can morality be determined only in hindsight? Or is the winning side always right?
If you are stupid and idiotic enough to accept the premise that Al Qaida and the US are morally equivalent actors in some Islamic holy war then you have a point. If the Nazi's were morally equivalent to the allies, then you have a point.
If you accept either of those premises though, you are an idiot, a fool, or a deliberately malicious and hateful person. Your entire POV and argument is based upon an assumption that both parties in any war are morally equal.
I suspect I can be far more stupid than you can imagine. For a start, I can't find anything in your response that addresses my questions. As far as I can tell, you seem to be saying that it's okay for the US to invade sovereign nations, overthrow governments, and kill, injure, maim, and render homeless various people, because the US is morally superior to its enemies. Is that right? One problem with that argument is that it's symmetrical: the US can say its okay to do evil things in order to defeat Al Qaeda, because Al Qaeda is evil, and Al Qaeda can say it's okay to do evil things to defeat the US, because the US is evil. So how would an objective observer decide who's right?
There are some objective facts: the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan and Iraq did not invade the US. So who has the moral high ground? Al Qaeda attacked the US, for reasons they probably found as compelling as the reasons you would give for why the US is more moral than its opponents. (See interview with Osama bin Laden, starting around 5m41s.) Al Qaeda is also, as I understand it, a successor to the mujahideen the US supported in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion. Apparently, because Al Qaeda attacked the US, the US responded by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. I see the attacks by Al Qaeda as morally wrong, but I also see the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US as morally wrong.
I'm not sure what "moral equivalence" means. You seem to be suggesting that the Islamic State, controlling a small amount of territory in the Middle East, is somehow equivalent to Nazi Germany, a modern, industrial nation-state controlling much larger territories and which posed a direct threat to the United States. As far as I can tell, the Islamic State exists because the US overthrew and occupied regions of the Middle East, so what reason do we have to believe that further military intervention by the US will make things better, rather than worse?
It also appears that your definition of "moral" and mine may be different, but this may be due to different perspectives; in part, when we start history. Do we start before Saddam Hussein became ruler of Iraq, or do we start while Saddam Hussein was ruler of Iraq and a friend of the US, or do we start when Saddam Hussein became a Designated Enemy of the US?
Let's stipulate that Saddam Hussein was entirely evil and needed to be removed. But why was Saddam Hussein the ruler of Iraq? Because the US helped him gain and keep that position. So where does that leave us? Who is the more evil? Who is evil here, and who is good, and is there a more sophisticated way to decide than "my side is good, therefore our opponents must be evil"?
That's a good summary, but you left out the part where the US was supporting Saddam Hussein through that whole period, playing the "offshore balancer" between Saddam, Friend of America, against Iran, Designated Enemy of America. Also omitted is mention that life for most people in Iraq was better in 1990 than at any time since then. People in Iraq were harmed by Saddam Hussein, definitely. People in Iraq were also harmed by the US-supported sanctions and by the US invasion and its consequences.
Which is more anti-muslim? Getting involved and generating "hate" against you from the region for interfering? Or not getting involved and letting thousands of Muslim women and children be tortured and executed?
That's a false dichotomy, based on the assumption that "getting involved" will somehow make things better. If nothing else, the history of the past 25 years should show that the US "getting involved" in the Middle East always makes things worse.
Just to add, Mohammad did some pretty awful things and commands others to do the same in Allah's name to this day...
And the Catholics burned Protestants at the stake for heresy, until the Protestants got the upper hand and started burning Catholics. All to the greater glory of God.
Entirely as an exercise in maintaining mental flexibility, absolutely and certainly not as a viable hypothesis describing reality, one might consider the possibility of a false-flag operation. How do we know whether the video really came from the Islamic State? What is the Islamic State, anyway? Is it an authoritarian hierarchy, like General Motors? Or could it be a loose coalition of semi-autonomous groups? What does it mean to say "the Islamic State did X", rather than "certain individuals did X"?
But the US did invade Afghanistan and Iraq. So where does the logic lead us?
Yes,. the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were horrible, but if the purpose was demoralization of failing military powers to bring the two theaters to a faster conclusion, then so be it.
The calculus here seems to be that the indiscriminate killing of civilians is justified if it, ultimately, saves lives by shortening the war. Is that right? So, if the 9/11 attacks had saved some number of lives, would they have been justified? Can morality be determined only in hindsight? Or is the winning side always right?
What makes you think the Muslim nutjobs need any provocation from the West to attack the West?
You mean "any MORE provocation", after, just to make a quick list, the US overthrew the government of Iran and supported the Shah for 25 years, and support Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, and supported Saddam Hussein at the time he was using poison gas against the Kurds, and imposed sanctions against Iraq that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 children, and then invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, and started a civil war that caused another 600,000 or so "excess deaths", and, in turn, resulted in the development of ISIS? Are you saying they don't need any more provocations than those?
Students that raise their hands are not always those in most need of help. Some students will never raise their hand. I went from kindergarten through college, and the number of times I raised my hand in class and drew attention to myself during those 17 years was exactly zero.
Beware of generalizing from insufficient data. What was best for you might not be best for everyone; in fact, what you thought was best for you might not actually have been best for you. Maybe (hypothetically) it would have been better to find a way to get past whatever prevented you from asking for help. In any case, wouldn't having the teacher just show up be just as bad as having to ask for help? Either would call attention to the student. That's one of the things I don't like about the proposal: instead of the student having the power to decide when and whether to ask for help, some anonymous system is in charge of deciding when the student needs help. Haven't people lost enough autonomy, agency, and initiative already?
... and sometimes made it through the whole semester without the teacher even knowing my name.
Sounds like a failure of the education system and the teacher. I'm suspicious of technical solutions to social problems.
So a system that automatically alerts the teacher when a student is struggling works better.
Might work better, for some students, in some contexts, by some metric.
These already exist, but they work on a desktop dashboard, which the teacher may only occasionally check. By alerting the teacher with a popup notification, the feedback is immediate.
Come to think of it, 'way back in the Olden Times, we had these things called "pagers", which you seem to be re-inventing. They also provided "pop-up notifications". Of course, they did have the disadvantage of forcing their users to expend the enormous effort required to look down at the display, rather than having it in front of their faces all the time.
The teacher wears the GG, and sees a "popup" whenever a student is stuck. The student could indicate this by using a clicker, or it could be indicated automatically if the student has several consecutive failures while using computerized learning
Just as a personal opinion, I would hate to have a teacher proffer unasked help whenever I seem to be "stuck". I'd rather figure it out for myself. There is also some value in teaching students how to know when they need help and how to ask for it. As for using a clicker: just how big are these flipped classrooms? Too big for a teacher to see a raised hand?
The applications mentioned also could be done with a wearable HUD with no camera. Maybe that could be Google Glass, Privacy-Preserving Option.
If Americans don't trust scientists, then who do they trust? Politicians? Celebrities? Talk-radio hosts? One of the reasons people don't like science is that it often tells them things they don't like. Reality is harsh, and most people would much rather believe comforting lies than unpleasant truths. Clearly, More Research is Needed.
If the US spent six times as much in order to reduce the risk of failure, that would be STUPID.
It would make much more sense to send two cheap probes and have one fail. That would be one third the cost.
Except there are non-monetary costs to failure, including reputation. Ask Congress for funding: "Yes, our previous mission to Mars failed, and we don't know what happened to it, but we kinda think this one might work. So please give us another hundred million dollars." Or ask them for two hundred million up front: "We're going to build and send two spacecraft, because we expect at least one will fail." It worked for Spirit and Opportunity, but neither of them failed.
Then there's the case of the Space Shuttle prior to the Challenger disaster: the administrators were telling Congress the risk of catastrophic failure was less than 1/100,000, while the engineers were saying it was more like 1:83.
Hm. Right now, space exploration is being done by robots. Maybe the robots will take over all the other planets (and stuff), leaving Earth as a kind of poor-house for humans.
"Clearance" has always been a major part of making movies and TV shows. (You know why the little kid in E.T. ate Reese's Pieces? They couldn't get permission to use Skittles.)
Actually, it was M&M's, not Skittles. It is true that, now, the process of clearing rights to use materials or products that may be copyrighted or trademarked is a big part of making movies and TV shows. (Whether this has "always" been true, I don't know.) One problem is that most producers have given up on the concept of fair use: rather than risking complaints from copyright or trademark holders, the producers arrange clearance or make product-placement deals. This dilutes the concept of "fair use", because no one ever claims fair use any more.
Example: a documentary which included a cell phone ring-tone using the theme from the movie "Rocky". The film-maker ended up paying 2500 US dollars to include the "Rocky" ring-tone in the movie, even though from a legal perspective it was clearly fair use, because paying the money was less of a hassle than fighting. (From the radio program
"On the Media".)
And this is one way rights get lost. Lawrence Lessig has written extensively on this topic.
Almost every criminal act can also be legal, involuntary, informed consent of the "victim".
Should that be "voluntary"?
But rape is pretty unique jn the prevalence of consensual sex. If a person has a black eye, and their attacker admits to doing it, but says they asked or consented to be hit, they don't have much credibility, because we know that rarely happens (outside sport fighting rings).
For what it's worth, based on visits to hospital emergency rooms, this is rather common: unsanctioned fights, impromptu brawls, and bets (generally involving intoxication). (Unless you specifically meant cases in which the attacker says it was consensual and the victim says it wasn't.) Worst case: someone makes a bet, either "I can take a punch" or "I'll pay you to let me punch you", things happen, punchee dies (possibly hours or days later), puncher is tried for murder. Those aren't common, but they happen (Example 1Example 2).
Seems to me this should be a tragic accident or involuntary manslaughter at worst, but I am not a prosecutor. I think they get extra points for more-serious charges, so verbum sapiens.
... the cases where someone has stopped an incident by having a concealed carry weapon is minimal vs the times a lot of people have gotten killed or injured by a crazy person that is armed."
Estimates for the number of Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) in the United States, per year, range from a low of 50,000 through two million (Gary Kleck, 1993, see Guncite.com), up to more than 4 million in 1994 (National Survey of the Private Ownership of Fireams, a study commissioned by the Police Foundation). Even the low-end estimates are higher than the number of people who "have gotten killed or injured by a crazy person that is armed."
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Headline: "Signs of Subsurface 'Alien' Life Found in Antarctica"
Summary of actual article:
Alien life? No
Any kind of life? No
Briny water? No
Anomalies in electrical resistance? Yes. "We interpret these results as an indication that liquid, with sufficiently high solute content, exists at temperatures well below freezing and considered within the range suitable for microbial life. These inferred brines ...."
But the original headline is much more click-bait-y than, you know, truth.
That should be probably further, but anyway, c'mon, it could be a lot further from the truth. They could have claimed to have encrypted the documents using a slice of lemon wrapped around a hamster.
I had exactly the same two thoughts, which probably should be frightening to both of us. Except that I thought it would be further from the truth to say they had encrypted without actually doing any encrypting at all. (I've also been reading about string theory, so now I'm trying to picture a six-dimensional Calabi-Yau hamster wrapped by a lemon slice.)
Excessively exaggerated hyperbole is the greatest threat the human species has ever faced.
No enforcement = no compliance.
"The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) ... estimates that 15% of drivers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes aren't supposed to be there."
Apparently there's 85% compliance even without this particular means of enforcement. Is possibly gaining another 15% worth the cost? (Where "cost" includes money, privacy, increased government, etc.)
In Ferguson we see that blacks have "contraband" in their vehicles at a lower rate than whites, yet black cars still get searched more.
Happens in Illinois, too, according to on-going reporting by the ACLU. "Statewide in 2013, black and Hispanic motorists were nearly twice as likely as white motorists to have their vehicles consent searched during traffic stops. Specifically, black motorists were 95% more likely, and Hispanic motorists were 89% more likely. There are similar disparities every year such data has been collected starting in 2004. ... On the other hand, when police in Illinois performed a consent search in 2013, white motorists were far more likely than minority motorists to be found with contraband. Specifically, white motorists were 49% more likely than black motorists, and 56% more likely than Hispanic motorists. Again, there are similar disparities every year such data has been collected starting in 2004."
I agree that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they tend to be lower income than whites. They're also scrutinized more as you can see in Ferguson. ... The bottom line is that blacks who commit the same crimes are more likely to be convicted and get harsher punishment.
That is one of the problems with interpreting statistics. As an example, suppose someone looks at prison records and find that the proportion of Black inmates is double the proportion in the population: that is, there are twice as many Black prisoners as there should be. Does that mean Blacks are inherently more criminal, or does it mean they get, on average, sentences twice as long for the same crimes? Either interpretation is valid, given only that one piece of information.
Another example: in Ferguson, the proportion of Blacks pulled over for traffic stops is higher than the proportion of Blacks in the population. Looks like selective enforcement -- unless you know that Ferguson is also on the main path between the airport and St Louis. How many of the people pulled over actually live in Ferguson compared to the number just passing through? I don't know.
Getting to the truth by way of statistics is a long, hard, winding road.Consequently, I sometimes feel rather testy toward people who make assertions like this: "Blacks commit crimes at rates higher than whites."
There's also a long distance between "convicted of committing a crime" and "inherently criminal", with a lot of confounding variables: exposure to lead is a big one, which has mostly been fixed in the US; also poverty, disparities in education, employment, diet, pre-natal care, child care, exposure to violence, differential policing (more scrutiny of poor neighborhoods); selective enforcement (do the police arrest both drug seller and drug buyer?); racial bias in sentencing, whether direct or incidental (such as the difference in mandatory sentences for powder cocaine as compared to crack); and many others.
In some cases, the law itself is biased: to borrow from Anatole France, in The Red Lily: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." (Wikiquote)
"Two-party consent" in Illinois
Decision in People v. Clark (PDF)
Oh, I get it: it's a photography reference, right? You must be really old, to remember film.
Or this.
Exactly. I think the whole wave/particle description does people a real disservice. Light IS NOT a particle and IS NOT a wave. Sometimes it's convenient to pretend it's a particle and other times it's more convenient to pretend it's a wave, but it is what it is. "The map is not the territory." Obviously, the same goes for other quantum models, such as electrons.
But the US did invade Afghanistan and Iraq. So where does the logic lead us?
The calculus here seems to be that the indiscriminate killing of civilians is justified if it, ultimately, saves lives by shortening the war. Is that right? So, if the 9/11 attacks had saved some number of lives, would they have been justified? Can morality be determined only in hindsight? Or is the winning side always right?
If you are stupid and idiotic enough to accept the premise that Al Qaida and the US are morally equivalent actors in some Islamic holy war then you have a point. If the Nazi's were morally equivalent to the allies, then you have a point.
If you accept either of those premises though, you are an idiot, a fool, or a deliberately malicious and hateful person. Your entire POV and argument is based upon an assumption that both parties in any war are morally equal.
I suspect I can be far more stupid than you can imagine. For a start, I can't find anything in your response that addresses my questions. As far as I can tell, you seem to be saying that it's okay for the US to invade sovereign nations, overthrow governments, and kill, injure, maim, and render homeless various people, because the US is morally superior to its enemies. Is that right? One problem with that argument is that it's symmetrical: the US can say its okay to do evil things in order to defeat Al Qaeda, because Al Qaeda is evil, and Al Qaeda can say it's okay to do evil things to defeat the US, because the US is evil. So how would an objective observer decide who's right?
There are some objective facts: the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan and Iraq did not invade the US. So who has the moral high ground? Al Qaeda attacked the US, for reasons they probably found as compelling as the reasons you would give for why the US is more moral than its opponents. (See interview with Osama bin Laden, starting around 5m41s.) Al Qaeda is also, as I understand it, a successor to the mujahideen the US supported in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion. Apparently, because Al Qaeda attacked the US, the US responded by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. I see the attacks by Al Qaeda as morally wrong, but I also see the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US as morally wrong.
I'm not sure what "moral equivalence" means. You seem to be suggesting that the Islamic State, controlling a small amount of territory in the Middle East, is somehow equivalent to Nazi Germany, a modern, industrial nation-state controlling much larger territories and which posed a direct threat to the United States. As far as I can tell, the Islamic State exists because the US overthrew and occupied regions of the Middle East, so what reason do we have to believe that further military intervention by the US will make things better, rather than worse?
It also appears that your definition of "moral" and mine may be different, but this may be due to different perspectives; in part, when we start history. Do we start before Saddam Hussein became ruler of Iraq, or do we start while Saddam Hussein was ruler of Iraq and a friend of the US, or do we start when Saddam Hussein became a Designated Enemy of the US?
Let's stipulate that Saddam Hussein was entirely evil and needed to be removed. But why was Saddam Hussein the ruler of Iraq? Because the US helped him gain and keep that position. So where does that leave us? Who is the more evil? Who is evil here, and who is good, and is there a more sophisticated way to decide than "my side is good, therefore our opponents must be evil"?
That's a good summary, but you left out the part where the US was supporting Saddam Hussein through that whole period, playing the "offshore balancer" between Saddam, Friend of America, against Iran, Designated Enemy of America. Also omitted is mention that life for most people in Iraq was better in 1990 than at any time since then. People in Iraq were harmed by Saddam Hussein, definitely. People in Iraq were also harmed by the US-supported sanctions and by the US invasion and its consequences.
There are intentional discharges and negligent discharges. There are no accidental discharges.
Which is more anti-muslim? Getting involved and generating "hate" against you from the region for interfering? Or not getting involved and letting thousands of Muslim women and children be tortured and executed?
That's a false dichotomy, based on the assumption that "getting involved" will somehow make things better. If nothing else, the history of the past 25 years should show that the US "getting involved" in the Middle East always makes things worse.
Just to add, Mohammad did some pretty awful things and commands others to do the same in Allah's name to this day...
And the Catholics burned Protestants at the stake for heresy, until the Protestants got the upper hand and started burning Catholics. All to the greater glory of God.
Entirely as an exercise in maintaining mental flexibility, absolutely and certainly not as a viable hypothesis describing reality, one might consider the possibility of a false-flag operation. How do we know whether the video really came from the Islamic State? What is the Islamic State, anyway? Is it an authoritarian hierarchy, like General Motors? Or could it be a loose coalition of semi-autonomous groups? What does it mean to say "the Islamic State did X", rather than "certain individuals did X"?
"My side" in the WWII didn't invade France.
But the US did invade Afghanistan and Iraq. So where does the logic lead us?
Yes,. the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were horrible, but if the purpose was demoralization of failing military powers to bring the two theaters to a faster conclusion, then so be it.
The calculus here seems to be that the indiscriminate killing of civilians is justified if it, ultimately, saves lives by shortening the war. Is that right? So, if the 9/11 attacks had saved some number of lives, would they have been justified? Can morality be determined only in hindsight? Or is the winning side always right?
What makes you think the Muslim nutjobs need any provocation from the West to attack the West?
You mean "any MORE provocation", after, just to make a quick list, the US overthrew the government of Iran and supported the Shah for 25 years, and support Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, and supported Saddam Hussein at the time he was using poison gas against the Kurds, and imposed sanctions against Iraq that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 children, and then invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, and started a civil war that caused another 600,000 or so "excess deaths", and, in turn, resulted in the development of ISIS? Are you saying they don't need any more provocations than those?
Students that raise their hands are not always those in most need of help. Some students will never raise their hand. I went from kindergarten through college, and the number of times I raised my hand in class and drew attention to myself during those 17 years was exactly zero.
Beware of generalizing from insufficient data. What was best for you might not be best for everyone; in fact, what you thought was best for you might not actually have been best for you. Maybe (hypothetically) it would have been better to find a way to get past whatever prevented you from asking for help. In any case, wouldn't having the teacher just show up be just as bad as having to ask for help? Either would call attention to the student. That's one of the things I don't like about the proposal: instead of the student having the power to decide when and whether to ask for help, some anonymous system is in charge of deciding when the student needs help. Haven't people lost enough autonomy, agency, and initiative already?
... and sometimes made it through the whole semester without the teacher even knowing my name.
Sounds like a failure of the education system and the teacher. I'm suspicious of technical solutions to social problems.
So a system that automatically alerts the teacher when a student is struggling works better.
Might work better, for some students, in some contexts, by some metric.
These already exist, but they work on a desktop dashboard, which the teacher may only occasionally check. By alerting the teacher with a popup notification, the feedback is immediate.
Come to think of it, 'way back in the Olden Times, we had these things called "pagers", which you seem to be re-inventing. They also provided "pop-up notifications". Of course, they did have the disadvantage of forcing their users to expend the enormous effort required to look down at the display, rather than having it in front of their faces all the time.
The teacher wears the GG, and sees a "popup" whenever a student is stuck. The student could indicate this by using a clicker, or it could be indicated automatically if the student has several consecutive failures while using computerized learning
Just as a personal opinion, I would hate to have a teacher proffer unasked help whenever I seem to be "stuck". I'd rather figure it out for myself. There is also some value in teaching students how to know when they need help and how to ask for it. As for using a clicker: just how big are these flipped classrooms? Too big for a teacher to see a raised hand? The applications mentioned also could be done with a wearable HUD with no camera. Maybe that could be Google Glass, Privacy-Preserving Option.
If Americans don't trust scientists, then who do they trust? Politicians? Celebrities? Talk-radio hosts? One of the reasons people don't like science is that it often tells them things they don't like. Reality is harsh, and most people would much rather believe comforting lies than unpleasant truths. Clearly, More Research is Needed.
If the US spent six times as much in order to reduce the risk of failure, that would be STUPID. It would make much more sense to send two cheap probes and have one fail. That would be one third the cost.
Except there are non-monetary costs to failure, including reputation. Ask Congress for funding: "Yes, our previous mission to Mars failed, and we don't know what happened to it, but we kinda think this one might work. So please give us another hundred million dollars." Or ask them for two hundred million up front: "We're going to build and send two spacecraft, because we expect at least one will fail." It worked for Spirit and Opportunity, but neither of them failed.
Then there's the case of the Space Shuttle prior to the Challenger disaster: the administrators were telling Congress the risk of catastrophic failure was less than 1/100,000, while the engineers were saying it was more like 1:83.
Hm. Right now, space exploration is being done by robots. Maybe the robots will take over all the other planets (and stuff), leaving Earth as a kind of poor-house for humans.
"Clearance" has always been a major part of making movies and TV shows. (You know why the little kid in E.T. ate Reese's Pieces? They couldn't get permission to use Skittles.)
Actually, it was M&M's, not Skittles. It is true that, now, the process of clearing rights to use materials or products that may be copyrighted or trademarked is a big part of making movies and TV shows. (Whether this has "always" been true, I don't know.) One problem is that most producers have given up on the concept of fair use: rather than risking complaints from copyright or trademark holders, the producers arrange clearance or make product-placement deals. This dilutes the concept of "fair use", because no one ever claims fair use any more.
Example: a documentary which included a cell phone ring-tone using the theme from the movie "Rocky". The film-maker ended up paying 2500 US dollars to include the "Rocky" ring-tone in the movie, even though from a legal perspective it was clearly fair use, because paying the money was less of a hassle than fighting. (From the radio program "On the Media".)
And this is one way rights get lost. Lawrence Lessig has written extensively on this topic.
Almost every criminal act can also be legal, involuntary, informed consent of the "victim".
Should that be "voluntary"?
But rape is pretty unique jn the prevalence of consensual sex. If a person has a black eye, and their attacker admits to doing it, but says they asked or consented to be hit, they don't have much credibility, because we know that rarely happens (outside sport fighting rings).
For what it's worth, based on visits to hospital emergency rooms, this is rather common: unsanctioned fights, impromptu brawls, and bets (generally involving intoxication). (Unless you specifically meant cases in which the attacker says it was consensual and the victim says it wasn't.) Worst case: someone makes a bet, either "I can take a punch" or "I'll pay you to let me punch you", things happen, punchee dies (possibly hours or days later), puncher is tried for murder. Those aren't common, but they happen (Example 1 Example 2).
Seems to me this should be a tragic accident or involuntary manslaughter at worst, but I am not a prosecutor. I think they get extra points for more-serious charges, so verbum sapiens.
... the cases where someone has stopped an incident by having a concealed carry weapon is minimal vs the times a lot of people have gotten killed or injured by a crazy person that is armed."
Estimates for the number of Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) in the United States, per year, range from a low of 50,000 through two million (Gary Kleck, 1993, see Guncite.com), up to more than 4 million in 1994 (National Survey of the Private Ownership of Fireams, a study commissioned by the Police Foundation). Even the low-end estimates are higher than the number of people who "have gotten killed or injured by a crazy person that is armed."