Rare as in compared to the number of calls of this nature cops go out on every day your odds of being shot are statistically zero.
Just exactly how often to you think SWAT is called out to raid a house?
Are they like traffic stops? Cuz I gotta say that if there are a dozen people accidentally shot each year by a cop during a traffic stop, then that's too many and not "statistically zero." I'm willing to bet that the number of SWAT raids is substantially less than the number of traffic stops, and the rate of accidental/unnecessary killings orders of magnitude higher.
In fact, why don't you have a look at this blog and think about the "statistically zero" chance of unnecessary deaths. Think about whether terrorists or SWAT kill more US civilians in a year.
Are you saying that if I was shooting up a mall, the police should kill me if they can't reasonably stop me?
If someone is actively firing rounds into a crowd, then violence may be the only answer and dispensing with a trial in the name of safety is probably justified. But how about if he's just got a gun in his hand? What if he's just pulling into the parking lot with a gun in the trunk? What if he's just passing tweets back and forth with some friends about going to buy a gun?
I don't think anyone's arguing against using drones in combat operations against military targets. I think the issue is that under the definition of "imminent threat," you could justify a drone strike on people talking about buying a gun and making a trip to the mall. Wouldn't you like to have that decision run by some third party who wasn't part of the decision to call those particular people "terrorists?" Just in case it's you or your angry brother? Or even just your weird neighbor, cuz if they drop a Hellfire next door, you better believe your property value is going to drop precipitously.
You cannot just declare it to be so and make it so - prestige is gained by a long track record of quality publications, and so cannot be gained overnight.
You would think, though, that the academic societies, many of whom run the prestigious journals, would be willing to consider converting to an Open model. I mean, those societies are funded by membership fees, they mostly profess a goal of education and advocacy, and should be highly responsive to the will of their academic community. But it doesn't happen very often. Some, like the Physiological Society (London) have made the decision to make all of their archival content (for J Physiol, back to 1878) free online, but most (eg, the American Physiological Society) prefer to leave it all behind paywalls, fought against the NIH's public repository, and generally seem as closed as any for-profit journal.
If you're an academic, ask your favorite society why their journal has not moved to an Open Access model.
If they want to get you they'll find something on you until they get you. The point is this, if you're a political activist then you gotta plan on getting got. Plan ahead of time on going to prison or don't be any kind of political activist. MLK knew he was going to be arrested a lot and knew he was going to be killed. So did most others.
So why are the current generation of so called hacktivists populated by these coward snitches like Sabu who start out talking all brave and tough but then get questioned by men in uniform and suddenly they turn completely against their crew and their side?
There have been betrayers and spies within every politically active group back to the Magna Carta. They're part of the reason MLK and John Lewis had to plan on going to jail (note: jail, not prison). It's shockingly difficult to stand up to the threats/pressure/mental anguish that Power is able to apply, and very few people are able to play Prisoner's Dilemma rationally when faced with actual, real-world penalties. Hate Sabu all you want, but don't pretend that you wouldn't sell out AnonFag342 in exchange for the chance to be present at your kid's graduation or wedding, unless you've had to make that choice.
It'd be far better if everyone wrote letters to their congressional representatives.
The Librarian of Congress is part of the Executive Branch and a Presidential appointee. That office is empowered by Congress to identify exemptions from the DMCA, independently of further action by Congress. The White House is the approptiate body to lobby in this case, because the President can instruct the Librarian to reconsider/revise his policy and restore the DMCA exemption for unlocking a phone after any service contract expires.
It's unfortunate that we seem to have so much trouble distinguishing laws enacted by congress and policies implemented by various executive branch bodies.
What steps has MIT taken to assure that publically funded research is published to the taxpaying public?
All NIH funded research is freely accessible to the public no more than 12 months after private publication. NSF requires something similar-but-different: that the raw data be made available for no more than incremental cost. The same publishers who run the biological journals run the non-bio journals, so similar arrangements could be made, but NSF has not forced it. Of course, the NIH budget is something like 5x the NSF budget (which is, in turn, about 3x DARPA), so the NIH policy means that the great majority of government-funded research must be made available to the public, for free.
You do realize that you're claiming that a new college teacher would be working 12 hour days, five days a week, at minimum? Up to almost seven days a week at the high end?
I spent a lot of time in college (attending and working), and the sight of a teacher - of any sort - working on campus during nights and weekends was rare indeed. Unless they were "counseling" a coed to improve her grades...
The buildings where faculty work are generally different from the buildings where students hang out. I can tell you that during my first 3 years, I took off 4 days for each Christmas, and was off campus 5 days each year for conferences. I got to campus around 6am, 7 days a week. On weekends, I did try to 'take it easy' a bit, and frequently left by 12 or 1pm, but weekdays it was just easier to work through until 6 or 7. Damn, there was a lot to do in those days, and no students or techs to do it for me, even if I'd have trusted them. I still look back on those as great times, because I was never more focused or more completely immersed in my work. The building was never empty of faculty.
It wasn't until a year or two after tenure that I made a conscious effort to take at least one day each week and not go on campus. My weeks average around 55 hours these days, but I have a team to do a lot of the physical work these days.
You don't have to work like that, and there are plenty of faculty whom I've never seen on a Sat/Sun. For the most part, though, what makes people successful in (research) academia is that they're obsessed with their work. Nobody tells them 'put in these hours or find another job,' they're putting in those hours because it's what they want to be doing.
The problem has two parts: mental illness and guns. In China, with no guns, a mentally ill guy assaults 20 people and none of them are dead. In the US, with prolific guns, a mentally ill guy assaults 28 people, and 26 are dead.
The knee-jerk suggestions for dealing with mental illness amount to preemptive jailing of a large number of people, the vast majority of whom will never assault anyone. The knee-jerk suggestions for dealing with guns amount to taking away tools, the vast majority of which will never be used in anger. Neither of those is right, but the best answer should include aspects of both. Hopefully, some reasonable people can work through the politics and come up with a reasonable solution that addresses not just extremely infrequent mass-violence, but individual shootings which have become so mundane we only hear about them when someone "interesting" is the victim.
You mean "People who buy insurance already pay for everyone else's emergency care." That turns out to be a horrible system: very few people actually need significant healthcare at any time, so it is in almost everyone's personal interest not to buy insurance (on which they will generally see negative return), and to wait until any problems become an emergency to seek care. Let the flu turn into pneumonia. Let the cut turn into gangrene.
Meanwhile, from a society perspective, it's vastly cheaper to treat emerging conditions before they become emergencies. From a society perspective, all care gets paid for by someone, and we ought to try to make that care as effective and inexpensive as possible. So, make everybody pay and make service available to everyone, and both the total societal cost of care and the individual cost of care will be lower.
"Measuring" them means figuring out what's important to them, which side of arguments they come out on, and what really pisses them off. It means figuring out how the "youth" segment is divided, and which subgroups are 1) fully committed to your party; 2) fully committed to opposing party; 3) subject to manipulation. It lets you tailor your message to emphasize things group 3 likes about your candidate and dislikes about opposing candidate. Get a few extra people interested enough in your candidate to actually go out and vote, and you win.
The people who are paying enough attention to notice things like "47%" and "You didn't build that" are already entrenched in groups 1 & 2. Those people don't matter.
If it were individual, it would be like a car salesman... attempting to charge the highest price, ask you to take out a loan and pay it.
Yes, but if you don't like the car salesman's deal, you have to take the bus. If you don't like the hearing aid salesman's price, you're deaf. If you don't like the surgeon's price, you're dead.
You can't negotiate healthcare on a level playing field, regardless of who writes the check.
Let's say you are hired at a great rate of pay (I'll just use 100k for this example). That's your pay when you work 40 hours. If you are working 80 hours without overtime, you are effectively cutting your rate in half.
Academia, especially academic research, is one of those places where people love what they do. Many of them would do their 'job' for free, and, in fact, many of them keep showing up at the office even after they retire, "emeritus." In a labor market, if you're competing with people who would pay the University for the privilege of working there, and you're not one of the people who loves what you're doing enough to be surprised by the sunrise every once in a while, you might be at a competitive disadvantage.
Who cares what your hourly wage is, unless you're being paid to sit in a specific place for a specific number of hours?
The real question is that, given that Wall Street is so volatile and disconnected from reality, why is its index still considered an important number in decision making?
Because it's where all the lawmakers and decision makers have their money.
The population of the 10th district, which Broun represents is only 700,000. It encompasses the University of Georgia, Augusta, and a slate of rural counties. About 65:35 Republican.
Not that much different from the rest of Georgia, but please don't imagine that anywhere close to 3 million people actually voted for him. Closer to 132,000
Sorry, it's this kind of bullshit contentless drivel that drives me nuts, that equally drove Feynman nuts BTW, and for a good reason. RJF hated elaborate abstract frameworks built up around trivial ideas, used for nothing else but aggrandizing the trivial ideas.
Maybe we should just return to the good old days when people used to put their ideas in Latin to make them sound important. I mean, how much smarter does "e pluribus, unum" sound than "we're all together?" Now imagine a whole spec written out in Latin, with dative on every line. Gregorian monks could chant the windows API for years.
Negative results are the fruit of good science just as much as positive results are. Screwing up the measurements in an experiment is simply bad science, or not science at all.
What planet are you from? I want to move to your planet, where science is so easy, and stuff always works unless it's "bad science," which apparently comes with a label so anybody can tell which is which.
Good science is designed so that even 'negative' results are reportable and interesting. Within many fields (eg, biology) few experiments are really designed that way. Many experimental designs are simple, two-factor designs such as [normal-population disease-population] X [placebo real-drug]. The outcome of this is: "Yes, the drug does something" or "We couldn't measure a significant effect." Failure to measure a significant effect is different from a negative result. Failure to measure a significant effect could be because the drug doesn't do anything, or it could be because there was more variability than expected, or the effect is smaller than you expected. It's generally harder to convince people of your failure-to-find, because ordinary designs are set up for a 5% chance of being wrong when you find an effect (p-value), but a 20% chance of being wrong when you fail-to-find (power). That's when anyone bothers to do an statistical design to determine sample size at all.
Good science is hard. It seems to be especially hard in the biological sciences, where technical inability to control things like transgene dose or knockdown efficiency lead to two-factor, two-level designs that only offer binary interpretation of outcomes. Or ethical concerns limit the number of samples you can collect. It turns out a lot of scientists are just sort of muddling through: every 3 years or so, a high-profile journal publishes a statistical or validation retrospective, and they always turn up about the same result: more than half of published papers turn out to be wrong.
[Curt Schilling] is vehemently opposed to government financial bailouts and stimulus funds, yet didn't bother to eschew a tax-payer backed state loan, let alone managed his company, from afar, in the same impetuous manner as those that required government aid in the first place.
Furthermore:
Schilling apparently regrets the decision to bet the company on an MMO game, but otherwise seems to accept little blame for the demise.
So, it seems, like many executives, Schilling is acutely aware that success of a business depends on the whole team's effort. Blame is distributed and diluted. While the company operated, Schilling (and all the employees) drew salaries off the government teat under a program specifically designed to foster entrepreneurship by reducing individual risk. Schilling's successes, though, are down to his personal leadership, ability to inspire his team members, and his own personal skills.
It's a very different story than the guy who mortgages his house to buy a Subway franchise, or to open his own small business. It emphasizes the difference in risk between "small businesses" with $10M payrolls, and small businesses in the individual entrepreneur sense. The former - call then $100M businesses - need some help getting started. Venture capital seems not to be willing to jump in early in the process, so government (either state or federal) loan programs really can foster startups. Those programs are practically only available to people who are already successful and at least moderately wealthy, because no one ever prepared a credible $100M business plan while living in his car. We should recognize that small business loan programs are a public support network for 'job creators' in exactly the same way that unemployment and food stamps are a support network for employees.
Small business success depends on taxpayer largesse and acceptance of occasional failure
To me, the bit which is most difficult to explain is that the last 328 months, planetwide, have been warmer than average Source. Temperatures have been above seasonal average since Feb 1985. I know "random" includes sometimes long streaks, but 328 is a long, long streak
I tend to hear things like "the customer service rep at ____ was an idiot! I'm never shopping there again!"
Interesting. I'm much more likely to hear "The customer service rep at Comcast was an idiot, but they're the only provider in my neighborhood." Or Verizon. Or ATT.
Re:Eucalyptus trees are a bio terror weapon
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Insects As Weapons
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Would I genocide mosquitoes? Absolutely. Ticks, leeches, basically any parasite, lamprays, and all sorts of other things that I'm very happy to exterminate. [...]
Sound extreme? It's really not. Some of these species have killed millions of people and even amongst the ones that haven't you're dealing with a whole branch of life that isn't our friend.
Parasites and other forms of competition kill off millions of weaker, less fit individuals, making it easier for the stronger, more fit individuals to survive and thrive. Take away the mosquitos, and we might still be stuck in the stone age. Or the Pleiocene. Evolution requires lots of death.
I hate mosquitos just as much as the next guy, but our competition with them makes us better
Your linux machine can be your WAP, too. hostapd is not hard to install, only moderately harder to configure than a consumer WAP, and it will let you unplug one more wallwart. If you're really ambitious, it will do much more complex authentication than your WAP.
For what I have needed, I have negotiated a lower cash price with the provider, because it saves them time and money to not deal with insurance. Often, the price I pay is less than a co-pay would be if I HAD insurance! For example, the plan I was offered has a co-pay of $50 for a chiropractic adjustment. That's what I pay directly in cash. So what's the fucking point of it?
So, I'm not costing anyone else anything.
So far. So far, you've been fortunate not to have any serious medical conditions or emergencies. So far, paying your own way has been to your benefit. Turns out, that's the way it works for most people: it really is only the rare individual who has multiple sclerosis (or even diabetes), so 9 times out of 10, you're better off not having insurance.
Same could be said for homeowner's insurance: your house will probably never burn down nor be swept away by a hurricane. If you don't have homeowner's insurance and your house burns down, you lose everything. The bank that owns your mortgage will still expect you to make mortgage payments. If you don't have health insurance and you have a stroke, you will get a ride in an ambulance, treatment in the emergency room, and a stay in intensive care. Dozens of highly skilled professionals will spend hours, if not days, making sure you survive, and few of them will listen if you say "no, don't treat me, I can't afford it." If you don't have insurance, you will be billed several tens of thousands of dollars, but the hospital will not seriously expect you to pay.
If you don't have homeowners insurance and something bad happens to your house, you bear the cost. It's roulette with your own money. If you don't have health insurance and something bad happens to you, a hospital bears the cost. It's roulette with other people's money.
A computer is not the same as a child. A child has the ability to think and reason for itself, independent of any specific instruction. Teaching a child provides a framework in which those thoughts can be interpreted and guidelines (not rigid rules) for communicating with other minds. "Teaching" a computer specifies exactly what information will be gathered, how it will be manipulated, and in what form it will be presented. The computer is incapable of doing anything other than what its programmers have specifically instructed, even if those specific instructions are a few steps removed from generation of the document in question. An hour-old child is capable of independent action and unpredictable reaction, and a 2 year old child is capable of shockingly original speech, including the creation of new words, and action.
I know that 'sentient' computers are a popular idea in fiction. Maybe it's even possible, by some as-yet-undiscovered technology. But to suggest that Google's computers, or Facebook's computers themselves bear direct responsibility for the creation and release of information assigns to those networks a level of autonomy far beyond reality. We need to distinguish between anthropomorphism and sentience. Maybe more importantly, we need to judge the world as it is, and not as it might possibly, sometime in the far future, turn out to be.
You could do it the way Kornberg's group did when isolating DNA synthase to begin with. Their paper is even online, for free. It amounts to growing a lot of e coli (or grinding up a bunch of thymus), reducing the DNA to its component monomers by digestion with DNAse extracted from pancreas and snake venom phosphodiesterase (although one could use alkaline hydrolysis, too), and purifying them by ion-exchange chromatography through a Dowex resin. None of that is especially hard, nor requiring of high-tech apparatus. Well, maybe if you want to get and verify that it's 99+% pure...
It's way more time consuming than calling Promega, but hobbyist endeavors are all characterized by having more time than money.
First, I'd say that fundamental advances are changes in the basic way we look at things. I think they happen most when someone is not encumbered by the existing dogma, and open whole new areas in which even professional scientists lack expertise. What were the limits of evolutionary biology before Darwin? Very little "science" actually happens that way - most of it is the somewhat plodding refinement and clarification of existing theory, and professional scientists are definitely better suited to make those kinds of advances. Of course, it's hard to distinguish "revolutionary" from "crackpot," and having a professional reputation helps in that distinction.
Second, I would say that it is not even important for a home scientist to make truly novel findings or advances. I think the principle value in home study of biology, or chemistry, or anything else, is to make that knowledge personal. If you think science is interesting, then go do it! Millions of people play basketball, despite having no chance of ever making it a career. Millions play guitar, or piano, without any ambition to give concerts. Or paint. Or write. We don't mock any of those people, or condescend to them like they're wasting their time. Or tell them they'd be better off reading reports of the NBA playoffs than actually going out on the court. Why should discovering the world around you be restricted to people who can push at the recognized boundaries of knowledge?
Slashdot Mirror
Rare as in compared to the number of calls of this nature cops go out on every day your odds of being shot are statistically zero.
Just exactly how often to you think SWAT is called out to raid a house?
Are they like traffic stops? Cuz I gotta say that if there are a dozen people accidentally shot each year by a cop during a traffic stop, then that's too many and not "statistically zero." I'm willing to bet that the number of SWAT raids is substantially less than the number of traffic stops, and the rate of accidental/unnecessary killings orders of magnitude higher.
In fact, why don't you have a look at this blog and think about the "statistically zero" chance of unnecessary deaths. Think about whether terrorists or SWAT kill more US civilians in a year.
Are you saying that if I was shooting up a mall, the police should kill me if they can't reasonably stop me?
If someone is actively firing rounds into a crowd, then violence may be the only answer and dispensing with a trial in the name of safety is probably justified. But how about if he's just got a gun in his hand? What if he's just pulling into the parking lot with a gun in the trunk? What if he's just passing tweets back and forth with some friends about going to buy a gun?
I don't think anyone's arguing against using drones in combat operations against military targets. I think the issue is that under the definition of "imminent threat," you could justify a drone strike on people talking about buying a gun and making a trip to the mall. Wouldn't you like to have that decision run by some third party who wasn't part of the decision to call those particular people "terrorists?" Just in case it's you or your angry brother? Or even just your weird neighbor, cuz if they drop a Hellfire next door, you better believe your property value is going to drop precipitously.
You cannot just declare it to be so and make it so - prestige is gained by a long track record of quality publications, and so cannot be gained overnight.
You would think, though, that the academic societies, many of whom run the prestigious journals, would be willing to consider converting to an Open model. I mean, those societies are funded by membership fees, they mostly profess a goal of education and advocacy, and should be highly responsive to the will of their academic community. But it doesn't happen very often. Some, like the Physiological Society (London) have made the decision to make all of their archival content (for J Physiol, back to 1878) free online, but most (eg, the American Physiological Society) prefer to leave it all behind paywalls, fought against the NIH's public repository, and generally seem as closed as any for-profit journal.
If you're an academic, ask your favorite society why their journal has not moved to an Open Access model.
If they want to get you they'll find something on you until they get you. The point is this, if you're a political activist then you gotta plan on getting got. Plan ahead of time on going to prison or don't be any kind of political activist. MLK knew he was going to be arrested a lot and knew he was going to be killed. So did most others.
So why are the current generation of so called hacktivists populated by these coward snitches like Sabu who start out talking all brave and tough but then get questioned by men in uniform and suddenly they turn completely against their crew and their side?
There have been betrayers and spies within every politically active group back to the Magna Carta. They're part of the reason MLK and John Lewis had to plan on going to jail (note: jail, not prison). It's shockingly difficult to stand up to the threats/pressure/mental anguish that Power is able to apply, and very few people are able to play Prisoner's Dilemma rationally when faced with actual, real-world penalties. Hate Sabu all you want, but don't pretend that you wouldn't sell out AnonFag342 in exchange for the chance to be present at your kid's graduation or wedding, unless you've had to make that choice.
It'd be far better if everyone wrote letters to their congressional representatives.
The Librarian of Congress is part of the Executive Branch and a Presidential appointee. That office is empowered by Congress to identify exemptions from the DMCA, independently of further action by Congress. The White House is the approptiate body to lobby in this case, because the President can instruct the Librarian to reconsider/revise his policy and restore the DMCA exemption for unlocking a phone after any service contract expires.
It's unfortunate that we seem to have so much trouble distinguishing laws enacted by congress and policies implemented by various executive branch bodies.
What steps has MIT taken to assure that publically funded research is published to the taxpaying public?
All NIH funded research is freely accessible to the public no more than 12 months after private publication. NSF requires something similar-but-different: that the raw data be made available for no more than incremental cost. The same publishers who run the biological journals run the non-bio journals, so similar arrangements could be made, but NSF has not forced it. Of course, the NIH budget is something like 5x the NSF budget (which is, in turn, about 3x DARPA), so the NIH policy means that the great majority of government-funded research must be made available to the public, for free.
You do realize that you're claiming that a new college teacher would be working 12 hour days, five days a week, at minimum? Up to almost seven days a week at the high end?
I spent a lot of time in college (attending and working), and the sight of a teacher - of any sort - working on campus during nights and weekends was rare indeed. Unless they were "counseling" a coed to improve her grades...
The buildings where faculty work are generally different from the buildings where students hang out. I can tell you that during my first 3 years, I took off 4 days for each Christmas, and was off campus 5 days each year for conferences. I got to campus around 6am, 7 days a week. On weekends, I did try to 'take it easy' a bit, and frequently left by 12 or 1pm, but weekdays it was just easier to work through until 6 or 7. Damn, there was a lot to do in those days, and no students or techs to do it for me, even if I'd have trusted them. I still look back on those as great times, because I was never more focused or more completely immersed in my work. The building was never empty of faculty.
It wasn't until a year or two after tenure that I made a conscious effort to take at least one day each week and not go on campus. My weeks average around 55 hours these days, but I have a team to do a lot of the physical work these days.
You don't have to work like that, and there are plenty of faculty whom I've never seen on a Sat/Sun. For the most part, though, what makes people successful in (research) academia is that they're obsessed with their work. Nobody tells them 'put in these hours or find another job,' they're putting in those hours because it's what they want to be doing.
The problem has two parts: mental illness and guns. In China, with no guns, a mentally ill guy assaults 20 people and none of them are dead. In the US, with prolific guns, a mentally ill guy assaults 28 people, and 26 are dead.
The knee-jerk suggestions for dealing with mental illness amount to preemptive jailing of a large number of people, the vast majority of whom will never assault anyone. The knee-jerk suggestions for dealing with guns amount to taking away tools, the vast majority of which will never be used in anger. Neither of those is right, but the best answer should include aspects of both. Hopefully, some reasonable people can work through the politics and come up with a reasonable solution that addresses not just extremely infrequent mass-violence, but individual shootings which have become so mundane we only hear about them when someone "interesting" is the victim.
We already give away emergency care.
You mean "People who buy insurance already pay for everyone else's emergency care." That turns out to be a horrible system: very few people actually need significant healthcare at any time, so it is in almost everyone's personal interest not to buy insurance (on which they will generally see negative return), and to wait until any problems become an emergency to seek care. Let the flu turn into pneumonia. Let the cut turn into gangrene.
Meanwhile, from a society perspective, it's vastly cheaper to treat emerging conditions before they become emergencies. From a society perspective, all care gets paid for by someone, and we ought to try to make that care as effective and inexpensive as possible. So, make everybody pay and make service available to everyone, and both the total societal cost of care and the individual cost of care will be lower.
"Measuring" them means figuring out what's important to them, which side of arguments they come out on, and what really pisses them off. It means figuring out how the "youth" segment is divided, and which subgroups are 1) fully committed to your party; 2) fully committed to opposing party; 3) subject to manipulation. It lets you tailor your message to emphasize things group 3 likes about your candidate and dislikes about opposing candidate. Get a few extra people interested enough in your candidate to actually go out and vote, and you win.
The people who are paying enough attention to notice things like "47%" and "You didn't build that" are already entrenched in groups 1 & 2. Those people don't matter.
If it were individual, it would be like a car salesman... attempting to charge the highest price, ask you to take out a loan and pay it.
Yes, but if you don't like the car salesman's deal, you have to take the bus. If you don't like the hearing aid salesman's price, you're deaf. If you don't like the surgeon's price, you're dead.
You can't negotiate healthcare on a level playing field, regardless of who writes the check.
Let's say you are hired at a great rate of pay (I'll just use 100k for this example). That's your pay when you work 40 hours. If you are working 80 hours without overtime, you are effectively cutting your rate in half.
Academia, especially academic research, is one of those places where people love what they do. Many of them would do their 'job' for free, and, in fact, many of them keep showing up at the office even after they retire, "emeritus." In a labor market, if you're competing with people who would pay the University for the privilege of working there, and you're not one of the people who loves what you're doing enough to be surprised by the sunrise every once in a while, you might be at a competitive disadvantage.
Who cares what your hourly wage is, unless you're being paid to sit in a specific place for a specific number of hours?
The real question is that, given that Wall Street is so volatile and disconnected from reality, why is its index still considered an important number in decision making?
Because it's where all the lawmakers and decision makers have their money.
The population of the 10th district, which Broun represents is only 700,000. It encompasses the University of Georgia, Augusta, and a slate of rural counties. About 65:35 Republican.
Not that much different from the rest of Georgia, but please don't imagine that anywhere close to 3 million people actually voted for him. Closer to 132,000
Sorry, it's this kind of bullshit contentless drivel that drives me nuts, that equally drove Feynman nuts BTW, and for a good reason. RJF hated elaborate abstract frameworks built up around trivial ideas, used for nothing else but aggrandizing the trivial ideas.
Maybe we should just return to the good old days when people used to put their ideas in Latin to make them sound important. I mean, how much smarter does "e pluribus, unum" sound than "we're all together?" Now imagine a whole spec written out in Latin, with dative on every line. Gregorian monks could chant the windows API for years.
Negative results are the fruit of good science just as much as positive results are. Screwing up the measurements in an experiment is simply bad science, or not science at all.
What planet are you from? I want to move to your planet, where science is so easy, and stuff always works unless it's "bad science," which apparently comes with a label so anybody can tell which is which.
Good science is designed so that even 'negative' results are reportable and interesting. Within many fields (eg, biology) few experiments are really designed that way. Many experimental designs are simple, two-factor designs such as [normal-population disease-population] X [placebo real-drug]. The outcome of this is: "Yes, the drug does something" or "We couldn't measure a significant effect." Failure to measure a significant effect is different from a negative result. Failure to measure a significant effect could be because the drug doesn't do anything, or it could be because there was more variability than expected, or the effect is smaller than you expected. It's generally harder to convince people of your failure-to-find, because ordinary designs are set up for a 5% chance of being wrong when you find an effect (p-value), but a 20% chance of being wrong when you fail-to-find (power). That's when anyone bothers to do an statistical design to determine sample size at all.
Good science is hard. It seems to be especially hard in the biological sciences, where technical inability to control things like transgene dose or knockdown efficiency lead to two-factor, two-level designs that only offer binary interpretation of outcomes. Or ethical concerns limit the number of samples you can collect. It turns out a lot of scientists are just sort of muddling through: every 3 years or so, a high-profile journal publishes a statistical or validation retrospective, and they always turn up about the same result: more than half of published papers turn out to be wrong.
[Curt Schilling] is vehemently opposed to government financial bailouts and stimulus funds, yet didn't bother to eschew a tax-payer backed state loan, let alone managed his company, from afar, in the same impetuous manner as those that required government aid in the first place.
Furthermore:
Schilling apparently regrets the decision to bet the company on an MMO game, but otherwise seems to accept little blame for the demise.
So, it seems, like many executives, Schilling is acutely aware that success of a business depends on the whole team's effort. Blame is distributed and diluted. While the company operated, Schilling (and all the employees) drew salaries off the government teat under a program specifically designed to foster entrepreneurship by reducing individual risk. Schilling's successes, though, are down to his personal leadership, ability to inspire his team members, and his own personal skills.
It's a very different story than the guy who mortgages his house to buy a Subway franchise, or to open his own small business. It emphasizes the difference in risk between "small businesses" with $10M payrolls, and small businesses in the individual entrepreneur sense. The former - call then $100M businesses - need some help getting started. Venture capital seems not to be willing to jump in early in the process, so government (either state or federal) loan programs really can foster startups. Those programs are practically only available to people who are already successful and at least moderately wealthy, because no one ever prepared a credible $100M business plan while living in his car. We should recognize that small business loan programs are a public support network for 'job creators' in exactly the same way that unemployment and food stamps are a support network for employees.
Small business success depends on taxpayer largesse and acceptance of occasional failure
To me, the bit which is most difficult to explain is that the last 328 months, planetwide, have been warmer than average Source. Temperatures have been above seasonal average since Feb 1985. I know "random" includes sometimes long streaks, but 328 is a long, long streak
I tend to hear things like "the customer service rep at ____ was an idiot! I'm never shopping there again!"
Interesting. I'm much more likely to hear "The customer service rep at Comcast was an idiot, but they're the only provider in my neighborhood." Or Verizon. Or ATT.
Would I genocide mosquitoes? Absolutely. Ticks, leeches, basically any parasite, lamprays, and all sorts of other things that I'm very happy to exterminate.
[...]
Sound extreme? It's really not. Some of these species have killed millions of people and even amongst the ones that haven't you're dealing with a whole branch of life that isn't our friend.
Parasites and other forms of competition kill off millions of weaker, less fit individuals, making it easier for the stronger, more fit individuals to survive and thrive. Take away the mosquitos, and we might still be stuck in the stone age. Or the Pleiocene. Evolution requires lots of death.
I hate mosquitos just as much as the next guy, but our competition with them makes us better
Your linux machine can be your WAP, too. hostapd is not hard to install, only moderately harder to configure than a consumer WAP, and it will let you unplug one more wallwart. If you're really ambitious, it will do much more complex authentication than your WAP.
For what I have needed, I have negotiated a lower cash price with the provider, because it saves them time and money to not deal with insurance. Often, the price I pay is less than a co-pay would be if I HAD insurance! For example, the plan I was offered has a co-pay of $50 for a chiropractic adjustment. That's what I pay directly in cash. So what's the fucking point of it?
So, I'm not costing anyone else anything.
So far. So far, you've been fortunate not to have any serious medical conditions or emergencies. So far, paying your own way has been to your benefit. Turns out, that's the way it works for most people: it really is only the rare individual who has multiple sclerosis (or even diabetes), so 9 times out of 10, you're better off not having insurance.
Same could be said for homeowner's insurance: your house will probably never burn down nor be swept away by a hurricane. If you don't have homeowner's insurance and your house burns down, you lose everything. The bank that owns your mortgage will still expect you to make mortgage payments. If you don't have health insurance and you have a stroke, you will get a ride in an ambulance, treatment in the emergency room, and a stay in intensive care. Dozens of highly skilled professionals will spend hours, if not days, making sure you survive, and few of them will listen if you say "no, don't treat me, I can't afford it." If you don't have insurance, you will be billed several tens of thousands of dollars, but the hospital will not seriously expect you to pay.
If you don't have homeowners insurance and something bad happens to your house, you bear the cost. It's roulette with your own money. If you don't have health insurance and something bad happens to you, a hospital bears the cost. It's roulette with other people's money.
A computer is not the same as a child. A child has the ability to think and reason for itself, independent of any specific instruction. Teaching a child provides a framework in which those thoughts can be interpreted and guidelines (not rigid rules) for communicating with other minds. "Teaching" a computer specifies exactly what information will be gathered, how it will be manipulated, and in what form it will be presented. The computer is incapable of doing anything other than what its programmers have specifically instructed, even if those specific instructions are a few steps removed from generation of the document in question. An hour-old child is capable of independent action and unpredictable reaction, and a 2 year old child is capable of shockingly original speech, including the creation of new words, and action.
I know that 'sentient' computers are a popular idea in fiction. Maybe it's even possible, by some as-yet-undiscovered technology. But to suggest that Google's computers, or Facebook's computers themselves bear direct responsibility for the creation and release of information assigns to those networks a level of autonomy far beyond reality. We need to distinguish between anthropomorphism and sentience. Maybe more importantly, we need to judge the world as it is, and not as it might possibly, sometime in the far future, turn out to be.
For instance, how does one purify dNTPs at home?
You could do it the way Kornberg's group did when isolating DNA synthase to begin with. Their paper is even online, for free. It amounts to growing a lot of e coli (or grinding up a bunch of thymus), reducing the DNA to its component monomers by digestion with DNAse extracted from pancreas and snake venom phosphodiesterase (although one could use alkaline hydrolysis, too), and purifying them by ion-exchange chromatography through a Dowex resin. None of that is especially hard, nor requiring of high-tech apparatus. Well, maybe if you want to get and verify that it's 99+% pure...
It's way more time consuming than calling Promega, but hobbyist endeavors are all characterized by having more time than money.
First, I'd say that fundamental advances are changes in the basic way we look at things. I think they happen most when someone is not encumbered by the existing dogma, and open whole new areas in which even professional scientists lack expertise. What were the limits of evolutionary biology before Darwin? Very little "science" actually happens that way - most of it is the somewhat plodding refinement and clarification of existing theory, and professional scientists are definitely better suited to make those kinds of advances. Of course, it's hard to distinguish "revolutionary" from "crackpot," and having a professional reputation helps in that distinction.
Second, I would say that it is not even important for a home scientist to make truly novel findings or advances. I think the principle value in home study of biology, or chemistry, or anything else, is to make that knowledge personal. If you think science is interesting, then go do it! Millions of people play basketball, despite having no chance of ever making it a career. Millions play guitar, or piano, without any ambition to give concerts. Or paint. Or write. We don't mock any of those people, or condescend to them like they're wasting their time. Or tell them they'd be better off reading reports of the NBA playoffs than actually going out on the court. Why should discovering the world around you be restricted to people who can push at the recognized boundaries of knowledge?