It's certainly not to protect the originator of these ideas : the researcher. All of the high-tiered journals I've published in have required a copyright sign-over to the publisher -- for free.
If you're allowed to sign over your copyright for free, you're in a relatively progressive discipline. I routinely pay $50-$250 per page, roughly $1000 per article, to get the publisher to accept those copyrights.
To be fair, the terms of the license the publisher wants vary quite widely. Many of them now ask only for non-exclusive copyrights; most will allow the author to include the work in his own Ph.D. thesis (which is convenient); and even without the law, some allow you to submit your work to public repositories (like PubMed Central) 6-12 months after the journal's publication. Curiously, my experience has been that "Society Organs" have been associated with the most restrictive copyright transfers, where "for profit" journals have been more responsive to author concerns.
As an academic and NIH scientist, I find it appalling that NIH funded research isn't openly accessible to the public -- I further believe that all academic publications should be free, but that's a different topic.
NIH already encourages authors to archive NIH-funded, accepted manuscripts in Pub Med Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ . Some journals do this automagically, some will encourage you to do it yourself, some will not mention PMC, but still allow authors to submit. Perhaps they haven't done so well publicizing this to their intramural scientists, but this is a great way to get federally funded research freely distributed through federally funded servers with enough of a time lag that mercenary journals can still retain some value in subscriptions.
Yup - why anybody would deposit more than $100k in a bank account is beyond me.
I suspect few of these $100k accounts are somebody's checking account. I suspect these are people who have several staggered, long-term certificates of deposit. eg: 5x$25,000 10 year CDs = $125k. This could be a conservative retirement investment, and someone not paying attention might think that "FDIC insured to $100,000" would apply to individual accounts and not the aggregate. Netbank's CDs probably paid around 5-6%, which is almost as good as a bond, and carries that magical FDIC insurance.
I hope [ING's] lending requirements are a little more solid (I hold an Electric Orange account there).
ING only bought the deposit accounts. Most of NetBank's mortgages are going to Everbank, apparently with the bad one staying with FDIC until they can find a sucker^wbuyer. In any event, deposits at NetBank are insured, so few account holders will lose money (the exceptions being about 1500 people who had more than $100,000 on deposit.
The FDIC has a whole list of failed banks. Apparently, it happens with some regularity, and it seems to be mostly a non-event for bank customers. Sucks for employees and shareholders, but that's business.
Why do so many seem so ready to buy into "the terrorists" as an organized force that can be fought and defeated?
"They caught us unprepared on 9/11" "*when* they decide to strike again" "we are fighting a drawn out conflict against a ruthless, clever, and stubborn enemy" "if they *could* have hit us again then they certainly would have"
There's always going to be someone angry at the US. There's people angry at Switzerland, for gods' sake, and they've been neutral forever. Terrorists are the national or political equivalent of celebrity stalkers. You can knock one down, but two more will spring up as a result of the publicity. Terrorists have been a fact of society as long as I can remember, and as long as I can remember, their actions have escalated. You know what? School violence has been escalating too. And TV violence. And the scandals perpetrated by politicians. And the fraud perpetrated by corporations. Escalation is also the nature of society. There are no conditions under which terrorists will go away, and it is certain that the WTC attack will one day be exceeded. The only questions are: in what kind of world would you like to live until the next atrocity? How much are you willing to suffer to delay that atrocity by one year? One day?
Airport security? Sure. Strip searches? No. Shoe searches? Not really. Knife ban? Yes. Water ban? No.
Let's take some reasonable precautions against the inevitable wack-os that populate the world, but let's not so restrict our society that we feel restrained from self-expression, or from making cool trinkets, or speaking our mind.
"Smart terrorists aren't going to bother with passenger planes anyway. The most you can do is blow up a plane, now."
Why exactly is that again? Sounds like a contradiction.
The 9/11 attacks were facilitated by airline policy regarding hijackings. ie: out of concern for passenger safety or fear of wrongful death lawsuits, airlines trained people to acquiesce to hijacker demands. After all, they just wanted to fly to Beirut and negotiate a prisoner swap. After 9/11, no pilot will allow a hijacker to take direct control of the plane, because they now recognize the risk to life is not restricted to people physically on board the plane.
Politicians will simply ignore the facts and press ahead.
Let's not pretend this behavior is limited to politicians. In my experience, most people, presented with a sound, logical argument having no supporting facts (or even counter-evidence) and a farfetched argument supported by great detail, will prefer the logical argument. People like for things to make sense more than they like them to be true.
A hectare (2.47 acres) of jatropha produces 1,892 liters (500 gallons) of fuel. 202 gallons per acre.
The US consumes about 400 million gallons of gas and 70 million gallons of diesel per day. At 200 gallons per acre per year, we'd need to plant 850 million acres of jatropha to replace petroleum. According to Google, that's about 1.3 million square miles, or about a third of the land area of the United States.
To use hemp ropes on ships, they had to coat it in tar across its entire surface just to keep it from rotting. Don't have to do that with manila rope
Hemp and manila traditionally served different roles on ship. Hemp was for the "standing rigging" that held the masts and yards together but was never manipulated. Tarring this rigging definitely helped preserve it-there are museum ships still using tarred hemp more than 50 years old--and the fact that the tar & service turned these ropes into inflexible, bar-like structures didn't matter. Manila was used for "running rigging" that had to be pulled or manipulated to steer the ship. This needed to be flexible and could not be tarred or served. Modern, traditional museum ships that don't sail but do use manila have to replace it at least every 5 years; a working ship "back in the day" would probably have replaced every manila rope once or twice a year.
They say America was formed through descent[sic]. That is not true. America was founded on revolution, not protests.
I suppose it depends on what aspect of America you mean. The people who emigrated to the colonies in 1650-1750 were dissenters of the Church of England, the arbitrary rule of the European monarchies, and the rigid social hierarchy or their mother countries.
They regularly protested excessive taxation, trade restrictions, and various other laws. The Revolution was a long time coming.
The people have not given up their protests, either. We have protested the keeping of slaves, the consumption of alcohol, the prohibition of alcohol, denying women a voice in government, every war ever fought, and the periodic failure of various government institutions to serve their purpose.
If there is one idea that our country holds above all else it is that "Everyone is entitled to his opinion." Everything after that is an attempt to reconcile the valid opinions of occasional wack-o's against the popular opinions of the rest of the sheep. Everything after that is an attempt to prevent dissent and protest from building up to a second Revolution.
Schooling is only 1 part of a much much much larger equation
Good schooling is about more than "book learning." Good schooling should also develop interpersonal skills, teamwork, leadership, and all of those hard-to-quantify skill that contribute to a successful, or at least adequate, life. Programs like NCLB, with their exclusive focus on test results, discount every skill that can not be measured by filling in circles on a multiple choice exam, and punish school systems for creating good citizens in favor of good mathematicians.
Like so many other government programs, NCLB answers the demand to "do something" with "This is something!" I am continually amazed by the calls for Federal government intervention (most recently: Tunnel inspection should be like bridge inspection). The historical strength of the US has been its ability to craft local policies that meet the local needs and values. I want my country back.
She rarely used the hospital but the last ~9 months of her life, we blew through ~900,000 not counting lost wages.
Not to be callous, but that's the case for most people. I've mislaid the source, but my recollection is that greater than 80% of medical costs are accumulated in the last 60 days of life. To me, as a still young, healthy person, this poses a real dilemma. Would I choose to spend my children's entire inheritance for one more day on a respirator? One more bed-ridden week during which they have to feed me, change the bed pan, and wipe vomit from my chin?
How sick do you have to be, and how expensive does it have to be, before you say my family are better off without me?
Since the blocks shift downwards when you step on them, walking across this floor would be equivalent to walking up a set of stairs, with each 'next' block higher than the one you are standing on.
They've got to be extremely small motions. If the floor moves down by half an inch, then walkers will be more likely to trip. If they're talking about displacements of 0.1" (2mm), then a single step might get them what, 1.5 J? You'd have to walk close to 300m to burn a single extra dietary calorie (kCal), and the place would have to be awfully crowded with very fidgety people to even power its own lights.
We are a constitutional democratic republic, and our leaders were elected according to our laws, and you need to respect that when you are out of our soil and not say things that can weaken the country.
The Logan act you cite prevents private citizens from negotiating with foreign nations. You know, like Carter's trip to North Korea, or Jesse Jackson's trip to Serbia. It doesn't say anywhere that an American citizen can't exercise his free speech on foreign soil. It's not my job, as a private citizen, to be part of the administration's propaganda machine.
if the houseing bubble bursts, I still have my house, with outrageously low interest rates
Then you're lucky enough to have bought a house you can afford while prices were going up. If everyone did that, there wouldn't be a bubble. What inflates the bubble is that people see prices going up quickly, buy more house than they can afford, using a back-loaded loan (with interest rate and payments subject to increase over time), with the expectation that they can always sell... Then the speculators come in, who aren't even interested in holding the house. Maybe try renting it for a while (until it turns out that tenants are assholes), but basically leverage their lives with the expectation to sell in a year and pocket $50k.
Those people are the ones who get hurt, because those are the people who are forced to sell when interest rates rise a little, and they're willing to take low prices just so they can stop bleeding money. Prices fall, the speculators get scared or can't get enough rent to cover the mortgage, and the whole thing spirals down as fast (or slowly, depending on your perspective) as it spiraled up.
Picking winners is bad enough in industrial policy but when you get Congress handing out money even indirectly through "top men" in grants for proposals, it is way too fraught with potential for institutionalizing the "search" for solutions rather than the achievement of solutions.
Make up lots of objective goals and make the prize awards really big because you can afford to since you're paying for results rather than mere proposals to achieve results.
By the time you know enough about a problem to know what the objective goals should be, you've got the problem pretty well solved. Ends driven research you describe is really well managed by private entities-drug cos, technology companies, power companies--based on their own profit motive. Basic research really can't be directed very well. You never know where the next big, generation-altering discovery will come from, but it probably won't be an "X-prize" like competition.
So, you've got to do basic research that offers no foreseeable, tangible result, but you don't want to just throw money at any crackpot with a perpetual motion machine. God knows, you don't want a bunch of elected lawyers to decide which scientific plans are most promising, which leave you with the infamous "panel of experts." It may not be a great system, but it's the least bad system for prioritizing research so basic that we barely know the right questions to ask. X-prize driven research is good for generating products, but it won't help you determine what the next prize should be for.
Oh, and it turns out that not very many basic scientists are even motivated by money. That's a pretty important point, because people doing research strictly for money are much more interested in getting the answer for which the funding agency is asking than in discovering the actual truth. Nevermind that people working for the strictly mercenary purpose of winning a prize are not likely to share their results-why give an advantage to the other teams? The milestone based research you describe shifts the financial risk of discovery from the government to the actual researchers. If you believe that it's in the nation's interest to promote discovery, then asking individual citizens to shoulder all of the financial risk for that discovery is probably not a sound long-term policy.
Yeah, Uniontown PD takes bad behavior in others very seriously. They're a little fuzzy on their own behavior, though. They were recently fined $400,000 for an astonishing string of events, including
[Police Chief] Wolf swore at [their only female officer] in public, including one incident Feb. 27 in which he pulled into a gas station in a ``sweat suit and slippers, (and) began to scream profanities at [the officer] while spitting in her face.''
With all these advancements we keep performing on mice, it's only a matter of time before we build a renegade breed of super-supergenius mice who become our leaders and take over the world.
I'm afraid you've missed the point. With the earth itself being little more than a computer designed by the mice in the first place, it's really only appropriate that we offer the benefits first to our lab-mouse overlords.
Cut out the publishing houses completely, organize peer review as a network of individual scientists. The big journals have long overdone their ripping of of the public.
And yet, the number of academic journals has grown exponentially over the past few decades and the business model shows no signs of weakness. Academics succeed through publication-in some places, a paper in Science or Nature as good as guarantees tenure. The power of those publications is entirely based on the reputation of the journal, often as quantified by ISI Citation Reports/Impact Factor. Today, no one would cite a web page in an academic journal, so no web-only journal can acquire an impact factor capable of attracting decent articles. Catch-22.
The other logical fallacy I see in your comment here is that "government" and "corporations" employ hundreds of millions of exactly the kind of "average people" you describe.
True. "Of the people, by the people, for the people". But the same could be said of communist China.
Actually, the same can not be said of communist China. In contrast to more democratic countries, like the US, one must be a Party member to even be considered for a spot on a ballot. Those who control the Party, in a very real sense, control the choices the People are presented. By offering only Party Faithful as candidates, they can be assured that their particular ideology is perpetuated.
Compare that with an open system in which anyone who meets specific criteria (generally a sufficient number of signatures or payment of a set fee) can run for any political office. This means that the People can, if they desire, un-elect officials who act against the interest of those people, who are corrupt, or who just fail to inspire.
This means that these soldiers wil need 3 to 7 pounds of excess body fat (more if the soldiers is expected to last several rounds of 5-day food deprivation).
"Normal" people have fat stores of ~11-15% body weight, in excess of the 3% (male) or 15% (female) essential body fat. For your basic 70kg marine, that means about 20 pounds of fat just waiting to be called up.
For comparison, over 4 million die yearly from getting a cold
No, 4 million children die of acute respiratory infections-cold, flu, pneumonia...
In other words, the death rate from the common cold is 0.6/1000, or a little more than 7% of total worldwide deaths.
You can't really believe that, can you? 1 in 14 people die of a cold? For comparison, cancer killed about 1.6/1000 (1988). Heart disease , about 1.9/1000. Do you really believe that cancer and CVD kill only 3x as many people as the cold each of us gets every year?
What gets me is they'll take a $5.50/hr programmer in India over one here in the U.S.
In the US, median income is $62,000/yr or $31/hr, so $5.50/hr in the US is essentially poverty and no one would code at that wage for a living. In India, the median income is Rs 54,000 = $1180/yr = $0.60/hr, so $5.50/hr has the purchasing power of $570,000/yr in the US.
even if you prevented the great lakes from evaporating, the only difference that would make would be: no more lake effect snow
Ever wonder why your local weather forecaster is wrong so often? Why he can't predict weather any further out that 3 days with better luck than my dog? Their climatological models ignore all the small stuff-like evaporation from small lakes--that end up having a distinct influence on climate, due to the nonlinearity of processes like evaporation and condensation.
This is one of the big contributors to loss of rainforest: if you clearcut a swath through the forest, you raise local temperature and reduce local evaporation. Reducing local evaporation means there's less water in the air flowing over the adjacent rainforest, and it doesn't rain in the forest. The newly dehydrated rainforest dies, and fails to provide water to forest further downwind, which dies...
If this stuff works as well as they claim, there will be huge incentives for every city, county and state (let alone desert country) to apply it to their watersheds. They may not be talking about literally covering the Great Lakes (although it would take only 130,000 gallons of this stuff to do so), but they are talking about covering vast and vastly distributed bodies of water.
Slashdot Mirror
under the false pretense of protecting copyrights
It's certainly not to protect the originator of these ideas : the researcher. All of the high-tiered journals I've published in have required a copyright sign-over to the publisher -- for free.
If you're allowed to sign over your copyright for free, you're in a relatively progressive discipline. I routinely pay $50-$250 per page, roughly $1000 per article, to get the publisher to accept those copyrights. To be fair, the terms of the license the publisher wants vary quite widely. Many of them now ask only for non-exclusive copyrights; most will allow the author to include the work in his own Ph.D. thesis (which is convenient); and even without the law, some allow you to submit your work to public repositories (like PubMed Central) 6-12 months after the journal's publication. Curiously, my experience has been that "Society Organs" have been associated with the most restrictive copyright transfers, where "for profit" journals have been more responsive to author concerns.
As an academic and NIH scientist, I find it appalling that NIH funded research isn't openly accessible to the public -- I further believe that all academic publications should be free, but that's a different topic. NIH already encourages authors to archive NIH-funded, accepted manuscripts in Pub Med Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ . Some journals do this automagically, some will encourage you to do it yourself, some will not mention PMC, but still allow authors to submit. Perhaps they haven't done so well publicizing this to their intramural scientists, but this is a great way to get federally funded research freely distributed through federally funded servers with enough of a time lag that mercenary journals can still retain some value in subscriptions.
Yup - why anybody would deposit more than $100k in a bank account is beyond me.
I suspect few of these $100k accounts are somebody's checking account. I suspect these are people who have several staggered, long-term certificates of deposit. eg: 5x$25,000 10 year CDs = $125k. This could be a conservative retirement investment, and someone not paying attention might think that "FDIC insured to $100,000" would apply to individual accounts and not the aggregate. Netbank's CDs probably paid around 5-6%, which is almost as good as a bond, and carries that magical FDIC insurance.
I hope [ING's] lending requirements are a little more solid (I hold an Electric Orange account there).
ING only bought the deposit accounts. Most of NetBank's mortgages are going to Everbank, apparently with the bad one staying with FDIC until they can find a sucker^wbuyer. In any event, deposits at NetBank are insured, so few account holders will lose money (the exceptions being about 1500 people who had more than $100,000 on deposit.
The FDIC has a whole list of failed banks. Apparently, it happens with some regularity, and it seems to be mostly a non-event for bank customers. Sucks for employees and shareholders, but that's business.
Why do so many seem so ready to buy into "the terrorists" as an organized force that can be fought and defeated?
"They caught us unprepared on 9/11"
"*when* they decide to strike again"
"we are fighting a drawn out conflict against a ruthless, clever, and stubborn enemy"
"if they *could* have hit us again then they certainly would have"
There's always going to be someone angry at the US. There's people angry at Switzerland, for gods' sake, and they've been neutral forever. Terrorists are the national or political equivalent of celebrity stalkers. You can knock one down, but two more will spring up as a result of the publicity. Terrorists have been a fact of society as long as I can remember, and as long as I can remember, their actions have escalated. You know what? School violence has been escalating too. And TV violence. And the scandals perpetrated by politicians. And the fraud perpetrated by corporations. Escalation is also the nature of society. There are no conditions under which terrorists will go away, and it is certain that the WTC attack will one day be exceeded. The only questions are: in what kind of world would you like to live until the next atrocity? How much are you willing to suffer to delay that atrocity by one year? One day?
Airport security? Sure. Strip searches? No. Shoe searches? Not really. Knife ban? Yes. Water ban? No.
Let's take some reasonable precautions against the inevitable wack-os that populate the world, but let's not so restrict our society that we feel restrained from self-expression, or from making cool trinkets, or speaking our mind.
The 9/11 attacks were facilitated by airline policy regarding hijackings. ie: out of concern for passenger safety or fear of wrongful death lawsuits, airlines trained people to acquiesce to hijacker demands. After all, they just wanted to fly to Beirut and negotiate a prisoner swap. After 9/11, no pilot will allow a hijacker to take direct control of the plane, because they now recognize the risk to life is not restricted to people physically on board the plane.
Politicians will simply ignore the facts and press ahead.
Let's not pretend this behavior is limited to politicians. In my experience, most people, presented with a sound, logical argument having no supporting facts (or even counter-evidence) and a farfetched argument supported by great detail, will prefer the logical argument. People like for things to make sense more than they like them to be true.
A hectare (2.47 acres) of jatropha produces 1,892 liters (500 gallons) of fuel. 202 gallons per acre.
The US consumes about 400 million gallons of gas and 70 million gallons of diesel per day. At 200 gallons per acre per year, we'd need to plant 850 million acres of jatropha to replace petroleum. According to Google, that's about 1.3 million square miles, or about a third of the land area of the United States.
Since we currently only cultivate 440 million acres[pdf], that would be a significant challenge.
To use hemp ropes on ships, they had to coat it in tar across its entire surface just to keep it from rotting. Don't have to do that with manila rope Hemp and manila traditionally served different roles on ship. Hemp was for the "standing rigging" that held the masts and yards together but was never manipulated. Tarring this rigging definitely helped preserve it-there are museum ships still using tarred hemp more than 50 years old--and the fact that the tar & service turned these ropes into inflexible, bar-like structures didn't matter. Manila was used for "running rigging" that had to be pulled or manipulated to steer the ship. This needed to be flexible and could not be tarred or served. Modern, traditional museum ships that don't sail but do use manila have to replace it at least every 5 years; a working ship "back in the day" would probably have replaced every manila rope once or twice a year.
They say America was formed through descent[sic]. That is not true. America was founded on revolution, not protests.
I suppose it depends on what aspect of America you mean. The people who emigrated to the colonies in 1650-1750 were dissenters of the Church of England, the arbitrary rule of the European monarchies, and the rigid social hierarchy or their mother countries.
They regularly protested excessive taxation, trade restrictions, and various other laws. The Revolution was a long time coming.
The people have not given up their protests, either. We have protested the keeping of slaves, the consumption of alcohol, the prohibition of alcohol, denying women a voice in government, every war ever fought, and the periodic failure of various government institutions to serve their purpose.
If there is one idea that our country holds above all else it is that "Everyone is entitled to his opinion." Everything after that is an attempt to reconcile the valid opinions of occasional wack-o's against the popular opinions of the rest of the sheep. Everything after that is an attempt to prevent dissent and protest from building up to a second Revolution.
Schooling is only 1 part of a much much much larger equation
Good schooling is about more than "book learning." Good schooling should also develop interpersonal skills, teamwork, leadership, and all of those hard-to-quantify skill that contribute to a successful, or at least adequate, life. Programs like NCLB, with their exclusive focus on test results, discount every skill that can not be measured by filling in circles on a multiple choice exam, and punish school systems for creating good citizens in favor of good mathematicians.
Like so many other government programs, NCLB answers the demand to "do something" with "This is something!" I am continually amazed by the calls for Federal government intervention (most recently: Tunnel inspection should be like bridge inspection). The historical strength of the US has been its ability to craft local policies that meet the local needs and values. I want my country back.
She rarely used the hospital but the last ~9 months of her life, we blew through ~900,000 not counting lost wages.
Not to be callous, but that's the case for most people. I've mislaid the source, but my recollection is that greater than 80% of medical costs are accumulated in the last 60 days of life. To me, as a still young, healthy person, this poses a real dilemma. Would I choose to spend my children's entire inheritance for one more day on a respirator? One more bed-ridden week during which they have to feed me, change the bed pan, and wipe vomit from my chin?
How sick do you have to be, and how expensive does it have to be, before you say my family are better off without me?
Since the blocks shift downwards when you step on them, walking across this floor would be equivalent to walking up a set of stairs, with each 'next' block higher than the one you are standing on.
They've got to be extremely small motions. If the floor moves down by half an inch, then walkers will be more likely to trip. If they're talking about displacements of 0.1" (2mm), then a single step might get them what, 1.5 J? You'd have to walk close to 300m to burn a single extra dietary calorie (kCal), and the place would have to be awfully crowded with very fidgety people to even power its own lights.
The Logan act you cite prevents private citizens from negotiating with foreign nations. You know, like Carter's trip to North Korea, or Jesse Jackson's trip to Serbia. It doesn't say anywhere that an American citizen can't exercise his free speech on foreign soil. It's not my job, as a private citizen, to be part of the administration's propaganda machine.
Then you're lucky enough to have bought a house you can afford while prices were going up. If everyone did that, there wouldn't be a bubble. What inflates the bubble is that people see prices going up quickly, buy more house than they can afford, using a back-loaded loan (with interest rate and payments subject to increase over time), with the expectation that they can always sell... Then the speculators come in, who aren't even interested in holding the house. Maybe try renting it for a while (until it turns out that tenants are assholes), but basically leverage their lives with the expectation to sell in a year and pocket $50k.
Those people are the ones who get hurt, because those are the people who are forced to sell when interest rates rise a little, and they're willing to take low prices just so they can stop bleeding money. Prices fall, the speculators get scared or can't get enough rent to cover the mortgage, and the whole thing spirals down as fast (or slowly, depending on your perspective) as it spiraled up.
Picking winners is bad enough in industrial policy but when you get Congress handing out money even indirectly through "top men" in grants for proposals, it is way too fraught with potential for institutionalizing the "search" for solutions rather than the achievement of solutions.
Make up lots of objective goals and make the prize awards really big because you can afford to since you're paying for results rather than mere proposals to achieve results.
By the time you know enough about a problem to know what the objective goals should be, you've got the problem pretty well solved. Ends driven research you describe is really well managed by private entities-drug cos, technology companies, power companies--based on their own profit motive. Basic research really can't be directed very well. You never know where the next big, generation-altering discovery will come from, but it probably won't be an "X-prize" like competition.
So, you've got to do basic research that offers no foreseeable, tangible result, but you don't want to just throw money at any crackpot with a perpetual motion machine. God knows, you don't want a bunch of elected lawyers to decide which scientific plans are most promising, which leave you with the infamous "panel of experts." It may not be a great system, but it's the least bad system for prioritizing research so basic that we barely know the right questions to ask. X-prize driven research is good for generating products, but it won't help you determine what the next prize should be for.
Oh, and it turns out that not very many basic scientists are even motivated by money. That's a pretty important point, because people doing research strictly for money are much more interested in getting the answer for which the funding agency is asking than in discovering the actual truth. Nevermind that people working for the strictly mercenary purpose of winning a prize are not likely to share their results-why give an advantage to the other teams? The milestone based research you describe shifts the financial risk of discovery from the government to the actual researchers. If you believe that it's in the nation's interest to promote discovery, then asking individual citizens to shoulder all of the financial risk for that discovery is probably not a sound long-term policy.
Yeah, Uniontown PD takes bad behavior in others very seriously. They're a little fuzzy on their own behavior, though. They were recently fined $400,000 for an astonishing string of events, including
9 761.htm
[Police Chief] Wolf swore at [their only female officer] in public, including one incident Feb. 27 in which he pulled into a gas station in a ``sweat suit and slippers, (and) began to scream profanities at [the officer] while spitting in her face.''
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/2005/12/17/news/1342
I'm afraid you've missed the point. With the earth itself being little more than a computer designed by the mice in the first place, it's really only appropriate that we offer the benefits first to our lab-mouse overlords.
And yet, the number of academic journals has grown exponentially over the past few decades and the business model shows no signs of weakness. Academics succeed through publication-in some places, a paper in Science or Nature as good as guarantees tenure. The power of those publications is entirely based on the reputation of the journal, often as quantified by ISI Citation Reports/Impact Factor. Today, no one would cite a web page in an academic journal, so no web-only journal can acquire an impact factor capable of attracting decent articles. Catch-22.
Actually, the same can not be said of communist China. In contrast to more democratic countries, like the US, one must be a Party member to even be considered for a spot on a ballot. Those who control the Party, in a very real sense, control the choices the People are presented. By offering only Party Faithful as candidates, they can be assured that their particular ideology is perpetuated.
Compare that with an open system in which anyone who meets specific criteria (generally a sufficient number of signatures or payment of a set fee) can run for any political office. This means that the People can, if they desire, un-elect officials who act against the interest of those people, who are corrupt, or who just fail to inspire.
"Normal" people have fat stores of ~11-15% body weight, in excess of the 3% (male) or 15% (female) essential body fat. For your basic 70kg marine, that means about 20 pounds of fat just waiting to be called up.
Doesn't "independent entity" imply "corporatation"?
No, 4 million children die of acute respiratory infections-cold, flu, pneumonia...
In other words, the death rate from the common cold is 0.6/1000, or a little more than 7% of total worldwide deaths.
You can't really believe that, can you? 1 in 14 people die of a cold? For comparison, cancer killed about 1.6/1000 (1988). Heart disease , about 1.9/1000. Do you really believe that cancer and CVD kill only 3x as many people as the cold each of us gets every year?
In the US, median income is $62,000/yr or $31/hr, so $5.50/hr in the US is essentially poverty and no one would code at that wage for a living. In India, the median income is Rs 54,000 = $1180/yr = $0.60/hr, so $5.50/hr has the purchasing power of $570,000/yr in the US.
even if you prevented the great lakes from evaporating, the only difference that would make would be: no more lake effect snow
Ever wonder why your local weather forecaster is wrong so often? Why he can't predict weather any further out that 3 days with better luck than my dog? Their climatological models ignore all the small stuff-like evaporation from small lakes--that end up having a distinct influence on climate, due to the nonlinearity of processes like evaporation and condensation.
This is one of the big contributors to loss of rainforest: if you clearcut a swath through the forest, you raise local temperature and reduce local evaporation. Reducing local evaporation means there's less water in the air flowing over the adjacent rainforest, and it doesn't rain in the forest. The newly dehydrated rainforest dies, and fails to provide water to forest further downwind, which dies...
If this stuff works as well as they claim, there will be huge incentives for every city, county and state (let alone desert country) to apply it to their watersheds. They may not be talking about literally covering the Great Lakes (although it would take only 130,000 gallons of this stuff to do so), but they are talking about covering vast and vastly distributed bodies of water.