Calculus may not be directly useful in many fields but it trains one to approach problem solving in an organized way and with attention to detail.
Even if "training [people] to approach problem-solving in an organized way and with attention to detail" is an important goal for math education, it used to be accomplished in high school geometry with the study of formal proofs, a task that teaches a much more structured way of approaching problem-solving. In many school curricula, that goal for geometry is largely dead.
Calculus is a collection of useful tools, whose theoretical basis is generally poorly understood except by those who take even more advanced math. It's not about solving problems in an organized or structured way: it's about finding the right "tool" for the problem at hand. And the further you get along in a "practical" calculus curriculum (e.g., one oriented toward engineers) rather than a "theoretical" calculus curriculum, the further you often get into mathematical "hacks" and "tricks" designed to solve specific types of problems. (See, in particular, most differential equations courses.)
I don't at mean to demean an engineer's approach to calculus -- those courses are taught the way they are to given practical tools useful in many situations. There's no reason why most engineers need to be familiar with all of the structured theoretical underpinnings of the math tools they use.
But I'd hardly say that most calculus courses taught today (usually emphasizing practical applications of a limited set of tools) are anything special in teaching "organization" and "attention to detail" in problem solving. Why is taking a calculus course any different from taking, say, another semester or two of algebra... or programming... or physics... or accounting... or, well, anything that causes you to have to solve problems involving more than a few steps at a time?
"The iPad is among the recent panaceas being peddled to schools..."
Now get the new and improved panacea that I personally endorse. That other panacea is crap.
I think that's more than a bit unfair as a characterization of the argument here.
iPads have been getting a lot of hype from the media, from school districts, etc. for years as something that will "revolutionize" education or something, i.e., a panacea that will make it easier for student to learn, will solve numerous problems with education, will make classrooms full of happy unicorns and rainbows, etc.
The present article is NOT claiming that the TI-83 has anywhere near that (supposed) revolutionary educational value for iPads. It's a specific critique of a specific feature absent from iPad-like technologies, namely the ability for students to play with programming their devices easily -- and, on a broader scale, just having a more "open" culture for being able to interact with a device, rather than just getting pre-packaged educational "modules" approved through some sort of hierarchy or authority.
I don't get the sense that the author here thinks that iPad technologies can't have some significant benefits. He's just proposing that adding on the ability to do X with educational technologies in general (note: no specific one offered as a "panacea") might create even more educational possibilities.
> Gnostic Atheist
That is total oxymoron of terms. Either you have knowledge or you don't. There is no inbetween.
A gnostic atheist has the knowledge that there is no god. (they do have knowledge, or at least think they do)
I think the confusion here is that the vast majority of people who use the word Gnostic are referring to a sect of people a couple thousand years ago who had very specific religious beliefs, including special "knowledge" (from Greek "gnosis") about divinity.
On the other hand, Thomas Huxley coined agnostic a century or so ago using that same Greek root, but in a broader sense of not having certain "knowledge" about such divine questions in general.
It's a relatively recent development to use the word "gnostic" in the general sense of the opposite of "agnostic," rather than referring to the Gnostic earlier religious sects.
That's why some people can be confused. A couple decades ago, a "Gnostic atheist" would have been an oxymoron. Now that fewer people seem to know anything history and particularly early Christian sects, some people have appropriated the term "gnostic" to mean something else.
Class action lawsuits are not designed to provide restitution to members of the class, just to punish the party being sued and to prevent similar action in the future. This is very basic.
This is absolute nonsense. One of the primary aims of class action suits is to provide members of a class with a means to recover relatively small sums. Since the cost of any type of lawyer -- let alone depositions, sorting through evidence and paperwork, etc. -- would be prohibitively expensive even in small claims court, no one would ever try to bring a suit against a big corporation with a legal team unless they were going to win many thousands of dollars.
If the average person was only wronged by losing $10 or $50 or even $500, the cost of litigation is often prohibitively high. Class action lawsuits are certainly a means allowing such people to band together and use a collective legal team to recover damages.
Wikipedia is not the best resource for legal advice, but it gets it right here under "advantages" for class actions:
[A] class action may overcome "the problem that small recoveries do not provide the incentive for any individual to bring a solo action prosecuting his or her rights." Amchem Prods., Inc. v. Windsor, 521 U.S. 591, 617 (1997) (quoting Mace v. Van Ru Credit Corp., 109 F.3d 388, 344 (7th Cir. 1997)). "A class action solves this problem by aggregating the relatively paltry potential recoveries into something worth someone's (usually an attorney's) labor." Amchem Prods., Inc., 521 U.S. at 617 (quoting Mace, 109 F.3d at 344). In other words, a class action ensures that a defendant who engages in widespread harm - but does so minimally against each individual plaintiff - must compensate those individuals for their injuries. For example, thousands of shareholders of a public company may have losses too small to justify separate lawsuits, but a class action can be brought efficiently on behalf of all shareholders. Perhaps even more important than compensation is that class treatment of claims may be the only way to impose the costs of wrongdoing on the wrongdoer, thus deterring future wrongdoing.
So, yes, at the end of this quotation, you see the issue that punishing the offender is important, but that doesn't mean that recovery of damages isn't actually a major goal of class action suits... as you claim.
Forget Right or Left, you are in the camp of ignorance.
Next time try knowing what you're talking about before you start calling other people names.
If your psyche can't properly handle a "slick" looking chart or info-graphic
Poor choice of words in the summary perhaps. But the larger point is that people can't help looking at graphical representations of data without making loads of assumptions... particularly if it looks at all "professional."
But this is no different than the kinds of graphical games used to misrepresent data that have been used for a century or more. You can even fake "professional" statistics with no graph at all. "85.7% of men preferred our brand of shaving cream!" A number like 85.7% sounds very exact -- must be a professional survey of a large number of people. Or, well, it could just be that they asked only 7 guys who worked at the company, and 6 of them (85.7%) said they like the shaving cream.
I sincerely doubt that people are making any more mistaken assumptions -- or any significantly new types -- from new graphs than they were when "How to Lie With Statistics" was published in 1954. The only difference is that more people can make more graphs with ease. The problems of interpretation are not new.
The summary is problematic. The alligator example is interesting, but the later examples in the article are better. Most of them don't depend on "imagination" or "creativity" or whatever to answer the question, or on a large bank of cultural knowledge, but only a basic knowledge of what words mean in relationship to each other. Yet AI would often fail these tests.
People are irrational. They ask stupid questions that make no sense.
While this is true, it has little bearing on the issues raised in TFA. It's also unclear what you mean by things that "make no sense." If you mean that literally, as in mentally challenged people babbling nonsense, then I do not expect a computer to be able to answer nonsense anymore than a normal person could. If 99% of adult native English-speakers without severe mental problems can answer a simple question correctly, I expect a computer that is said to "understand English" to be able to do the same.
If you mean -- as many geeks do when complaining about language imprecision -- that people ask questions without the precision used in formal made-up languages (like programming languages or stereotyped logic statements), well that's a hopelessly incomplete view of what "meaning" is. We use natural language despite its seeming imprecision because it actually can convey incredibly complex webs of meanings rather efficiently, instead of only allowing a specified small set of particular relationships that formal "rational" languages can use to produce a very limited set of meanings.
"Irrationality" and "making no sense" don't matter if 99% of native speakers can answer a simple question without hesitation. That means the the question seems both perfectly "rational" and "makes sense" to English speakers, and the same should be required of any computer said to do the same thing.
They use slang that confuses the communication. They have horrible grammar and spelling.
Again, a separate problem that's not very relevant to the concerns in TFA. As we've seen with improvements in Google search corrections, autocorrect technologies, etc., these issues are probably relatively minor to deal with compared to understanding the underlying meaning of standard natural language.
And overseeing it all is a language fraught with multiple meanings for words depending on the context, which may well include sentences and paragraphs leading up to the sentence being analyzed.
The examples given in TFA are things like simple 2-3 sentence scenarios where all the required information is contained in those sentences. The answer required is often a simple multiple-choice.
For example: "Joan made sure to thank Susan for all the help she had given. Who had given the help? a) Joan b) Susan"
Yes, you're talking about a much larger issue of context, but the examples in TFA pinpoint much smaller-scale failures to comprehend natural language. Many of the questions depend on simple patterns where 3 or 4 words used together in a sentence establish particular relationships among those words that any native speaker would get. Being able to parse those connections is what it actually would take to understand what those 3 or 4 words "mean."
Meaning is not atomic, and it is not only based in single words (which is your point). It exists in everything from phonemes and parts of words like prefixes, roots, and suffixes (that establish potential associations from sounds and grammatical clues about how the word functions) through phrases, sentences, and entire paragraphs.
But this is not a failure of language. It is how language fundamentally works. Words don't really have "multiple meanings": they only come to mean anything when connected with other words. We only have the illusion that individual words have specified meanings because dictionaries have been constructed along that model. It's a useful way to think about meaning, but it has little t
Out of every 1,000,000 people, 29.4 of them will be white murder victims, 168.4 will be black, and 7.8 will be other....
To word this more precisely, what I meant to say is "out of every 1,000,000 white people, 29.4 of them will be murder victims, out of every 1,000,000 black people, 168.4 will be murder victims," etc.
This should probably be clear from the way I present the stats, but I just wanted to avoid ambiguity.
When you screen huge masses of people needlessly, almost all to all of your hits are going to be incorrect.
Yes, this is something that apparently even most doctors don't understand. Suppose who had a simple problem like this:
1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?
The correct answer (calculated from Bayes' Theorem, or simple logic) is 7.8%. Most doctors cannot do this problem, and that not only get the answer wrong, but they often get it wildly off -- estimating the answer to be much greater than 50% (often 70% or so, probably from simply subtracting the two numbers).
If you don't believe me, have a look at this link. As the author says there:
usually, only around 15% of doctors get it right. ("Really? 15%? Is that a real number, or an urban legend based on an Internet poll?" It's a real number. See Casscells, Schoenberger, and Grayboys 1978; Eddy 1982; Gigerenzer and Hoffrage 1995; and many other studies. It's a surprising result which is easy to replicate, so it's been extensively replicated.)
The author here is being generous. I looked at these studies years ago, and many of them show only 5-10% getting the answer to such problems correct.
And if this is true of physicians, it's probably true of just about anyone else who encounters a lot of false positives and isn't used to thinking statistically. That means most people are very likely to draw incorrect conclusions about the prevalence of something when the false-positive rate is high... making those using the methodology assume that (1) their methodology is better than it is, and (2) that with more "assumed positives" from incorrect logic, the incidence of whatever they're looking for in the population is higher than it is.
If you read the numbers, it must be pretty close to equal: 49% of murder victims are white, 49% of murder victims are black, and the remaining 2% are of other racial backgrounds. Among murderers, 51% are black, 46% are white, and the remaining 3% are of other racial backgrounds.
If you're going to quote "actual statistics," you need to know how to use them. These stats are relatively useless when making comparisons between murder rates among races, since they don't take into account the actual population size of various races.
The white population is roughly 6 times the size of the black population in the U.S. (72.4% vs. 12.6% vs. 15% other). Using these statistics (which admittedly are 2010, instead of 2009, which is the year of your crime stats), we get an estimate of actual rates within the population:
Out of every 1,000,000 people, 29.4 of them will be white murder victims, 168.4 will be black, and 7.8 will be other. Out of every 1,000,000 people, 23.6 of them will be white murderers, 151.3 will be black, and 5.3 will be other.
To break this down by victim:
(Please note that the following stats given much lower rates than above, because BOTH offender and victim race are identified in only about half of the statistics given in the source.)
If the victim is white, per million people, 13.2 murderers will be white, 2 will be black, and 0.2 will be other.
If the victim is black, per million people, 5.4 murderers will be white, 66.9 will be black, and 0.3 will be other.
If the victim is other, per million people, 1.1 will be white, 0.6 will be black, and 2.2 will be other.
That's not to say that murder is OK, but it's hardly a situation in which black people are murdering white people left and right while white people are just innocent victims.
Agreed. However, when you compare actual murder rates rather than percentages from unequal population sizes, you can actually get an answer to the question you want. Basically, if all races were equally distributed, a black-murdering-white crime is about 2.6 times as likely as a white-murdering-black crime.
Of course that isn't the real shocking figure here. The shocking figure should be that black-on-black murders are 5 TIMES more prevalent than white-on-white murders. So, the conclusion shouldn't be that blacks are murdering innocent white people, but rather that the murder rate is a lot greater among blacks in general, and when that violence spreads outside the black community, white people are involved somewhat more often... compared to when white violence is perpetrated on blacks.
(I'm not trying to make any sort of racial judgment here at all, just to interpret the statistics you quoted fairly. Honestly, all murders are terrible, and we need to work to curb all of this violence... regardless of the races of victim or perpetrator.)
I've always believed that one should not ever brandish a firearm in a confrontation unless they're prepared to use it to cause harm.
"Prepared to use it"? Definitely. Already decided to shoot before they even grabbed the weapon? I would hope only in the most dire of circumstances.
Warning shot? No. If you think you can fire a warning shot and "scare someone away," then you've still got other less-lethal methods of handling the situation.
Yes, like firing a warning shot -- that is in fact a less-lethal method than shooting someone, if it indeed scares the attacker away.
Look -- a lot of people don't want to shoot other people. Some of them, though, might still buy a gun for protection, or it might be given to them. They might hesitate when pulling out the weapon, and the attacker will likely sense that. A warning shot in some situations may in fact convince the attacker that the victim is serious and force the attacker to back down.
If you are a confident man who clearly knows his gun and what to do, you're absolutely right that a warning shot would rarely make sense for you. Your confidence will probably clearly tell your attacker your intent, and if that doesn't stop the confrontation, you're going to have to shoot him.
On the other hand, I can imagine a lot of unsure women, particularly in domestic confrontations where they are threatened, and yet they may hesitate. In such a situation, something to demonstrate actual confidence in shooting might convince the attacker that the victim is serious... and it could satisfy your non-lethal preference for resolution.
Brandishing a gun may actually be enough to get someone to back down. Cops do it all the time. I assume every time they do so, they are prepared to shoot if necessary. I sincerely hope in most situations that they haven't already decided to shoot. If you're not a cop and don't exude confidence, in some situations you may need to convince the attacker that you will actually shoot... this particularly goes for domestic situations with a pre-existing power and emotional structure that the victim needs to overcome psychologically. Just because the victim prefers not to inflict lethal harm on the attacker shouldn't lead to the conclusion that the victim wasn't in a dire situation.
A secondary turning point was the passage of the income tax, where the power of the states was drastically reduced, because the federal money started collecting significan taxes directly. There are many others. [snip] Direct election of Senators, however, was another major turning point. Again this increased the power of the federal government relative to the state governments.
Umm, you do realize that the federal income tax and popular election on senators were both put into effect by Constitutional amendment, right?
And the passage of a Constitutional amendment requires 3/4 of states to vote for it, correct?
In other words, you may be right that an increase in federal power has caused many problems. But some of the examples you bring up are cases where the states clearly -- and by a great supermajority -- decided that they wanted the federal government to have this power. So if you truly believe that these things took power away from the states, the states actually must have wanted that power taken away. And if you're going to argue that somehow the states who voted on these things were corrupt or influenced in some bad way or whatever, well, then I suppose you'd have to argue that state and local authority aren't as great a check against corruption and abuse of power as you want to claim.
If you want to tell this tale -- the real turning point for your story should be the New Deal, and the "Switch in Time that Saved Nine", where SCOTUS suddenly decided that just about anything the federal government wanted to do was de facto okay, whether or not it was listed among the enumerated powers in the Constitution.
Before that, federal power did get greater and was abused (particularly during wars), but then it was generally reined in again. Since the New Deal and the complete about-face in Supreme Court jurisprudence, the original doctrine of federalism has really been dead, though.
Even if it had happened before the development of writing, you would think it would be the sort of thing that would have a major impact on legends across all world cultures. So my best guess is that from the span of time from, let's say, 3000BC to 2013AD, this has happened exactly once.
Okay, first off, if we're talking about legends and mythology, there's enough ambiguity about all sorts of tales that have to do with sky phenomena or gods/heroes/whatever who interact with stuff in the sky that there could very well be accounts buried somewhere in those mythical stories... we just can't separate them out from all of the other weirdness.
Even among Norse mythology, where you'd expect at least some significant discussion of aurora phenomena given where they lived, historians aren't even sure what -- if anything -- may be referencing auroras in those legends.
And if we're talking about recorded history, there are a lot of "lights in the sky" kind of events, with Chinese records in particular going back thousands of years. Figuring out whether such things could be supernovas or comets or perhaps auroras is often not easy -- descriptions can be ambiguous. And events that were visible globally often weren't recorded with the same detail -- for example, the Chinese clearly record the apparently significant appearance in 1054 C.E. of the supernova that has led to the Crab Nebula, but I don't think anyone has found a clear reference to that in European astronomical records.
In sum, whether we're talking about history or pre-history, there's plenty of stuff that went on up in the sky, and plenty of stories about it. But I don't think we can come anywhere close to saying for certain that no one observed unusual auroras or whatever due to some event like this in the entire history of civilization.
the main detractors have been NIMBYs who do not want change.
Regarding the GP's argument, you may want to note the meaning of your acronyms: NIMBY = "Not in my back yard." Exactly right. Most people who actually have back yards don't want giant dense towers built in them. They would like their back yards, which proves the GP's point.
What's really happening here is that people want to move into these areas because of the type of people who already live there -- i.e., the "cool" people, often rich, who have back yards and single family homes (or small multiple family homes).
These people -- often rightly so -- often sense that what makes their neighborhood so highly desirable is that it actually has good stuff going on and it's not full of giant condo buildings.
A lot of people -- particularly "adults" with families -- would generally prefer to have a single family home with a yard somewhere rather than a small condo on the 8th floor in a giant complex. Many only choose the condo because their job requires them to be close or because they like the other stuff in the area, not because they want to live in a cramped apartment.
Look at just about every city in the U.S. that grew up since the 1920s or 1930s. Almost every single one of them is spread out, with residential areas mostly consisting of individual homes with yards, etc., even when those residential areas are very close to downtown. When cars allowed people to have a choice to decide where to live (without being a country bumpkin who only could "come to town" with their horse once every couple weeks), a LOT of them chose to move to less dense situations.
I'm not saying that NO ONE wants to live in high-rise condos over a house in the suburbs. But empirical evidence suggests that a large portion of the population actually does want a back yard... and they don't want you or your girlfriend building a high-rise condo building in the middle of it.
I'd rather pay 1500 a month for a nice apartment near things to do and within walking distance of work. Hell, I'd probably pay twice that.
Not on the $30K the GP earns you wouldn't. And on that salary even $1500/month would leave you very little for even food, utilities, and necessities, let alone allowing you to enjoy any of the "things to do" that you're near.
For many people with lower salaries, that "nice apartment" that's near to everything in a major city actually isn't affordable, even with a job significantly above minimum wage. And even for the single people with $1500/month to spare now, the equation changes a lot if they have a family and especially kids.
Meanwhile, that guy out in NJ will probably own his home outright by the time the guy in the $1500/month apartment "grows up" and realizes that he can no longer afford a place like that with his family and has to move out into the suburbs, having thrown potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars away in rent before doing so.
There are definite benefits for living in the situation you describe when you're young and single and making enough money to afford a "nice apartment" in a big city. Not all people have those conditions or priorities in their lives.
"If they had to pick between a smartphone or a car, they would pick the phone." What sort of choice is that anyway? They aren't comparable. A phone is a few hundred dollars. A car is thousands. Why would you have to choose between them?
Most smartphone with data plans end up being at least about $100/month. If it's a premium plan, they need coverage for multiple devices (tablet, etc.), it may well be over $150/month.
The car payment on a relatively cheap used car -- such as the kind people in their 20s a generation ago would buy -- might be around $150/month, maybe even less.
These actually are roughly comparable expenses for many young people today. Add in various other technology "needs" for the younger generation (gadgets, high-speed internet at home, etc), and they're often paying as much as they would have for a car each month.
It says millennials don't care about *owning* cars.... My wife has a large circle of younger cousins (Catholic family) and they're all like this - All in their 20s and not one of them owns a car.
Is it that they don't care about owning cars, or is it that owning a car is too expensive for young people in a tough job market?
My sense is that in walkable/bikable areas (like large cities in the Northeast U.S.), many people don't own cars. This has been true for generations. And for those who do, they don't tend to buy one until they are older, have a family, become more established in their jobs, etc. With kids, they find a greater need for a car sometimes, and with a steady job for a few years, they might be able to afford insurance, maintenance, loans, etc. for a big purchase like a car.
When I lived in such a place for a while (and was in my 20s), I ended up getting rid of my car when I moved in with my wife. To family members and friends who lived elsewhere in the country, they thought this was a little weird if not insane -- "You won't have your own car anymore?" But my wife and both had cars, and the cost of insurance and maintenance for two cars in a walkable city just didn't make sense. So why would I keep owning one, let alone buying a new one?
Also, I really think the family angle needs to be highlighted -- for single "millennials" (or even couples) in their 20s, living without a car can seem easy. Once you're in your 30s or 40s and have kids to haul around, it can become a lot harder to live most places without a car. Single people I know in big cities often don't own a car, even in their 50s or 60s.
Maybe we're just seeing a trend where young people are putting off purchasing a car, even if they don't tend to live in a big city, for similar reasons in tough economic times. Rather that just "buy an old junker" like kids might have a generation or two ago, they just wait until they have the money and/or need it (like when they have a family).
Let's wait a decade or so until millennials actually "grow up" and see whether owning a car still is "not cool" to them.
As for calendars, not so much. There have been numerous attempts at calendar improvements but none stuck.
As I pointed out, the last serious attempt at calendar reform (i.e., one in which a government actually forced it on the people) was the French Revolution. The rest have pretty much been theoretical.
That's because they all fixed a perceived problem of the Julian calendar while introducing a new problem. Dividing 365.24 (and a bit) days in a neat amount of weeks and days without changing the length of the week or upsetting either workers or employers is a tough problem.
No, it isn't. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you want to keep the week length as 7 days (to not upset the workers). 28 * 13 = 364. That means you could easily have 13 months with 28 days each. Every year begins or ends with one "holiday" for everybody (two in leap years), and you're good to go. Suddenly you have all equal length months that line up precisely with weeks. (And you don't have to recite a stupid poem to remember how many days are in September.) Calculations from weeks to months to years are much easier, and you just leave out that one holiday.
That's just one possibility. If you allow different length weeks, you could even get "nicer" lengths (i.e., ones easier to math in your head than base 28), such as in the French Revolutionary calendar, which had 12 months of 30 days, each month divided into 3 weeks of 10 days each. The year ends or begins with 5/6 days of intercalation, probably holidays. Lots of countries already tend to have effective holidays between Christmas and New Year's, so this could be made official. Or put them in August, when half of Europe seems to be on holiday.
As for "upsetting the workers" -- have you ever heard mechanics curse about having to go get a set of metric wrenches? Any mass overhaul of our measurement system is going to inconvenience a lot of people and upset a lot of workers.
The end result inevitably is a complex system. And why replace a complex known system with a complex yet unknown system?
Because our current system is actually ridiculously complex and inconvenient -- weeks don't like up with months, weeks don't line up with years, and we have to memorize a poem to remember how long months are because it's so stupid and irregular. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just know that March 8 or July 4 or whatever ALWAYS falls on the same day of the week every year? Or if you're paying someone by the week to be able to quickly calculate how much you'd pay for 4 months or whatever, without having to go figure out how many days or how many weeks happen to be in a particular 4-month period? And all those "floating holidays" we have that are on the second Monday or fourth Thursday or whatever will always have the same date.
There have been plenty of calendar reform proposals that would solve most of these problems. But the adjustment would be inconvenient... just as the adjustment to a new measurement system in general.
How high does the average passenger jet fly?
You seem to miss the entire point of my post. What practical use does this information have to anyone other than a pilot or air traffic control person? 99.9% of Americans never need to know whether planes tend to fly at 15000 feet or 30000 feet or whether they fly at 2 miles or 7 miles up. And they certainly don't need to be able to convert between feet and miles here. (On the rare occasion that someone would even ask them the question, "We're at about 35000 feet, how may miles is that?" knowing that a mile is roughly 5000 feet is probably enough information to answer the question -- "About 7 miles.")
I'm not saying it's bad to know information like the answer to your question. And it's clearly useful to some people. But to the average American, the answer to your question is a meaningless number. All they n
You are almost certain to get a review from someone not in the target audience or who got over-ambitious and ended up not understanding the source material, a review from the author's brother in law just so it looks like people are buying etc.
This is true in many cases. That said, I only tend to write reviews of niche items, often books or things that I have some expertise on, but not officially "my field" (so I wouldn't tend to write a review elsewhere on these things).
Why would I bother writing another review to add to a chorus of thousands about a particular product? If I feel strongly about something I bought, I check to see if there are reviews. If not, or (more likely) I disagree with the few that are there, I write a detailed review, trying to be fair about positives even when I hate the thing (which is generally my reason for writing). Even though I've only written a couple dozen reviews over the past 4 years or so, I somehow ended up in the top few thousand reviewers... probably because I actually try to write useful reviews on things I know something about and which don't tend to have decent reviews already.
I know I'm in the minority (and would never be recruited for Amazon Vine because I tend to write detailed "most helpful" negative reviews that make it harder for Amazon to sell products). But instead of complaining, why not contribute? If you have some technical expertise, you really liked or hated a book or something, why not write about it and help either point your fellow humans to something of good quality or steer them away from a dud?
It's only "not the usual situation" if you willfully ignore the last 1000+ years of the Catholic Church's existence. The Church has been a power-hungry, money-grubbing, corrupt organization for most of its existence.
I'm not going to defend the Catholic Church here, but I'd like you to please name for me some organizations that have existed for the past 1000+ years -- or even the past 200 years -- that have NOT been "power-hungry, money-grubbing, corrupt" organizations for significant parts of their lifespans.
Just about every national government, old bank, old corporation, etc. has participated in numerous atrocities over the centuries, from genocide to slavery. From a historical standpoint, the Catholic Church is hardly unusual.
And from a modern standpoint, the recent child abuse scandals mostly stand out because the Catholic Church is one huge hierarchical organization that can be blamed for the abuse as a whole. Lots of child abuse has been perpetrated by teachers, ministers of other religions, scout masters, just about anyone in authority as well -- and they're probably about as likely overall to have been fired or asked to resign and sent on their way in the past rather than having suspicions reported to the police. But there's no overall hierarchy collecting this information in public schools or in many other churches, so it's harder to find a single organization to blame. And we likely haven't seen the same sort of mass lawsuits against other organizations for the same reasons. It doesn't mean abuse wasn't going on elsewhere as well... and much of it was also ignored.
Why should they "invest" in someone when the investment can just walk out the door whenever he/she pleases?
Welcome to civilization! Glad you could join us. Let me explain a simple concept that has helped civilization progress over the past 10,000 years: at some point, you need to trust someone else. At some point, you need to put some faith in someone else.
The whole point of organized society is -- if we work together, we all get more than your average hunter-gather alone in the wilderness. We depend on each other in fundamental ways, and we all benefit by mutually helping each other to build useful skills to society as a whole.
This is the big picture, and sure, most people are still selfish and try to get as much for themselves as they can. But the thing is -- you can actually get MORE for yourself often by helping out others. If all employers work to improve the skill-set of their employees, society as a whole benefits with better workers. If all employers refuse to help their employees at every turn, every year more employees will be stupider and have fewer skills.
In a market where most employers don't "invest," making a decision to do so maybe seems a bad idea. It might be more expensive, and you're worried that people will walk out the door. But if you're good to your employees, word gets around. That expensive training pays off if you get better quality employees who stick around... because they know you're treating them well.
If you live your life like everybody's going to screw you at every turn, they probably will. Being a jerk causes people around you to have a higher probability of acting like jerks (even if they aren't naturally jerks).
But the opposite is also true. It's not usually the slash-and-burn way of making the highest profits right now, but it's better in the long term. If you don't ever want to depend on anyone else in society or trust them, you might as well go back to the wilderness and become a lone hunter-gatherer again, because you're helping to drag the rest of society down. Take most of the alpha-male BS corporate execs with you too, since that's where most of them belong.
Invest in yourself then get a higher paying job.
The GGP did. College costs A LOT of money. There is absolutely no reason that 17 years of education shouldn't be enough to give someone the basic beginning skills to start an engineering job. (Unfortunately, I think there is a lot wrong with our educational system, and in an ideal world, this person would probably have been better off switching from a generalized curriculum to an engineering apprenticeship when he was 12-14, so he could actually be as knowledgeable and as skilled as most 30-year-old engineers are when he gets to be 20 years old... but that's a different story for a different post.)
Our educational system is screwed up and doesn't actually function in creating people ready to work right out of college, so the only choice is for companies to invest a little bit to get a functional employee. If done well, the majority of the time such investments will pay off.
On the other hand, if most employees are streaming out of your doors after you offered them a job and useful training, something else is probably wrong with your company.
You, yourself admitted that at least one item on Kr1ll1n (579971)'s list was reasonable.
Yes, I did. And if his post said, "Just to clarify, the summary is ambiguous -- it means Charleston, SC. We should be more careful about this because there's also one in WV that's pretty prominent, and Wikipedia notes that there are a lot of other localities with the same name worldwide (and here's a link...)."
That would be completely reasonable, and I would have applauded his efforts in trying to make Slashdot a better place.
Instead, he ripped out a bunch of names to places from a Wikipedia list without bothering to know anything about them, without even citing the page where he got the list (so we could actually find out about them). Aside from the two Charlestons I admit are reasonable interpretations, just about every one them are either ghost towns or have populations of a few hundred people (your TN location apparently has 651). A few towns have a few thousand people.
I hold to my statement that other than making a point about the WV location, including any of these other towns as "possible" referents is simply not a rational assumption -- it's as rational as the examples I gave of thinking that New York, TX or Los Angeles, TX are being referenced by a story about "New York" or "Los Angeles," even though the TX locations only contain a handful of people.
I supect you'll be surprised how many people who don't live in the US also don't find ANYTHING about which Charlston is largest obvious, and in fact you'll probably hear from people who only know of a handfull of the very largest cities in the US and have never heard of ANY Charleston.
Of course. Then again, they can simply enter "Charleston" into a search engine, which they would have to anyway. When I type "Charleston" into a search engine that does not filter results or personalize them, I don't see a link to any "Charleston" other than SC or WV in the top 20 (and WV only has 3 in the top 20, with the top one at #9).
All of this goes to show that again, it's slightly reasonable to ask for clarification here between SC and WV (as I admitted multiple times in my post), but beyond that I see only a handful of hits for the other "Charlestons" in even the top 100 of a non-filtered search.
Your claim that the mention of the general US Drug Enforcement Administration appearing in the summary invalidates all non-us locations is itself wrong (The US siezes assets in cases of INTERNATIONAL drug trafficing
Yes, yes, I thought of that. But did you bother to actually look up any of those other "Charlestons" from around the world? You'll find that they're all basically as insignificant as the U.S. locations other than SC and WV. It's not like the summary mentioned the DEA making a bust in "London" or "Berlin" or something while referring to the lesser known U.S. cities that have those names. The summary was discussing a U.S. agency acting in a city named X, where the only two relatively large cities named X happen to be in the U.S.
Yet despite those issues, you're still busting someone's chops.
No, I'm correcting a nitpicker. There's a difference. When you set yourself up as an authority to make a correction, you should take at least a little time to make sure your information is reasonably accurate. No matter what you say, it is simply not reasonable to assume that the summary was referencing a ghost town, and the fact that those names were included in the list showed that the GP did not do his homework before declaring the summary "Horrible" (see his subject line) and then nitpicking in his own way by pasting in a list he hadn't bothered to really look at in any detail.
You've jumped on somebody who 'obviously' took at least two minutes doing some research, to get the list you are declaring irrelevant.
Yeah... Nothing I enjoyed more than doing conversions of miles, feet, inches, tenths of inches, pounds, ounces (avoirdupois), gallons, fluid ounces
Umm, you're doing it wrong. Inches are most commonly divided into eighths or sixteenths, not tenths. (And, on occasion, even into 32nds or 64ths.) Americans like the more advanced binary systems of measurement, rather than some stupid 10-based system... [/sarcasm]
all the while there were these lovely decimal systems just itching to make everything much easier.
I'm definitely a fan of the metric system, but honestly I don't know if it's "much easier" in the days of calculators and computers that can do conversions easily -- heck, for many years your web browser has even been able to interpret unit names to do the conversion for you, so you don't even have to memorize it.
I'm not saying the old units make a lot of sense, but surely the math isn't that hard. Carrying a unit like "in." or "ft." or "lb." around with a number is equivalent in complexity to carrying around a pi or e or whatever and then plugging in 3.14 or 2.718 at the end.
Few people seem "itching" to make things "much easier" by converting time units to decimal (at least not since the French Revolution), so we live with base 60, base 12 and/or 24, base 7, and a completely irregular month system... why?
Same as GP's answer -- because it is a "working system," even if it's inefficient.
For the average Joe, he almost never has to convert miles to feet or gallons to ounces. About the only unit conversions average Americans ever have to think about on a regular basis are 12 inches = 1 foot and 3 feet = 1 yard. If you're ordering a steak or a hamburger, it might help to know that 16 ounces = 1 pound, and if you're ordering a beer, knowing the size of a pint might be helpful. That's about it for the average American. (Perhaps unfortunately...)
A mile could be 5280 feet or 5000 feet or 5347 feet for all most people care -- the exact amount is pretty irrelevant in everyday life. The units of miles and feet are so different in size that they only tend to occur in completely different contexts for most people. Very few people these days ever use the intermediate units like furlongs, chains, or rods, so complicated length conversions rarely are needed.
And that's true for most units. Different units may exist that are orders of magnitude apart, and from a practical everyday standpoint, you rarely need to know that some big unit converts to 5280 or 128 or 1728 or whatever of some smaller unit. You just use the appropriate unit in the first place. If you happen to be in some business or something where you actually need to convert hogsheads to pints or something on a regular basis, you get your spreadsheet or calculator to do it.
I'd be happy if the U.S. converted to metric, but the only people whose lives would be significantly easier would be scientists and engineers, and most of them use metric on an everyday basis already. For average Joe, unit conversions just don't impact his life so much.
Diminishing returns says the cost-effectiveness of improving mileage rapidly drops off above about 50 MPG.
No it doesn't "rapidly drop off" above any arbitrary dividing line. It's a smooth function, and there is no particular place where the "drop off" suddenly happens.
The gains in economy simply get less and less as you go higher. Going from 15 to 20 MPG is better than going from 20 to 25, which is better than 25 to 30, etc., etc., etc.
Going from 45 to 50 MPG, for example, is better than going from 50 to 55 MPG, but there's no sudden drop at 50 MPG.
If we want to reduce overall fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on ad campaigns to get people out of gas guzzlers into smaller cars. Not concentrating on designing ultra-high mileage vehicles.
Your own statistics say that if we got people who are now driving 50 MPG cars to drive 300 MPG cars -- and many of them might go for that if they were available, since most people who drive 50 MPG cars nowadays are already environmentally conscious -- it would save well over half as much as getting someone to switch from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG sedan, and it would save almost as much as getting a normal sedan owner to switch to a 50 MPG hybrid.
So, if a 250-300 MPG car were real (and I agree that such performance is currently doubtful), it would still be rather worthwhile to convince your average 50 MPG hybrid owner to switch to it.
The issue isn't that "concept cars" that make huge MPG advances couldn't make a worthwhile difference for a given owner -- it's that there simply are more people driving the gas guzzlers.
In other words, your argument is really just about targeting the largest group of consumers, not anything bad about concept cars per se (if they are really possible).
(Now, if we were talking about some sort of research hybrid making a small gain from 50 to 60 MPG or something, I'd absolutely agree that such a thing would be worthless compared to getting SUVs to switch to sedans, even if it "only" saves 10 MPG. But that's not what we're talking about here.)
He was using a hypothetical (meaning stop being pedantic) that few people wouldnt give up a fraction of their pay in the actual case it would help
I don't sense pedantry in the GP. More like pointing out a false analogy. The reason people wouldn't give up extra tax money to politicians isn't because they don't want to help or because they don't want change -- it's because they don't trust Congress (which has had ridiculously low approval ratings for years) to spend the money in any way that would actually help.
Now, if they thought giving up 1% of their pay would actually make a positive difference in the world, heck yeah, a lot of people would pay up, particularly conservatives. Lots of people, especially lots of Christian conservatives, practice tithing, i.e., giving up 10% of their income to help the church or sometimes other charitable causes. Conservatives, on average, give about 30% more than liberals, even though, on average conservatives households have a lower salary (contrary to popular belief). In fact, the working poor tend to give the most, percentage-wise.
I'm not a conservative, but I bring this up not only because of the strong tradition among many conservatives of giving a large portion of one's salary to worthy causes, but also because these same conservatives are more likely to participate in this giving action to various organizations that might make a difference, rather than simply raising taxes on everyone (as proposed in this thread).
Just because people wouldn't want their taxes raised by 1% doesn't mean that many people wouldn't shell out a lot of their cash if it could actually make a difference -- the difficulty is often creating a way for people to get that money to people or causes they actually believe in and are confident will make a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Calculus may not be directly useful in many fields but it trains one to approach problem solving in an organized way and with attention to detail.
Even if "training [people] to approach problem-solving in an organized way and with attention to detail" is an important goal for math education, it used to be accomplished in high school geometry with the study of formal proofs, a task that teaches a much more structured way of approaching problem-solving. In many school curricula, that goal for geometry is largely dead.
Calculus is a collection of useful tools, whose theoretical basis is generally poorly understood except by those who take even more advanced math. It's not about solving problems in an organized or structured way: it's about finding the right "tool" for the problem at hand. And the further you get along in a "practical" calculus curriculum (e.g., one oriented toward engineers) rather than a "theoretical" calculus curriculum, the further you often get into mathematical "hacks" and "tricks" designed to solve specific types of problems. (See, in particular, most differential equations courses.)
I don't at mean to demean an engineer's approach to calculus -- those courses are taught the way they are to given practical tools useful in many situations. There's no reason why most engineers need to be familiar with all of the structured theoretical underpinnings of the math tools they use.
But I'd hardly say that most calculus courses taught today (usually emphasizing practical applications of a limited set of tools) are anything special in teaching "organization" and "attention to detail" in problem solving. Why is taking a calculus course any different from taking, say, another semester or two of algebra... or programming... or physics... or accounting... or, well, anything that causes you to have to solve problems involving more than a few steps at a time?
"The iPad is among the recent panaceas being peddled to schools..."
Now get the new and improved panacea that I personally endorse. That other panacea is crap.
I think that's more than a bit unfair as a characterization of the argument here.
iPads have been getting a lot of hype from the media, from school districts, etc. for years as something that will "revolutionize" education or something, i.e., a panacea that will make it easier for student to learn, will solve numerous problems with education, will make classrooms full of happy unicorns and rainbows, etc.
The present article is NOT claiming that the TI-83 has anywhere near that (supposed) revolutionary educational value for iPads. It's a specific critique of a specific feature absent from iPad-like technologies, namely the ability for students to play with programming their devices easily -- and, on a broader scale, just having a more "open" culture for being able to interact with a device, rather than just getting pre-packaged educational "modules" approved through some sort of hierarchy or authority.
I don't get the sense that the author here thinks that iPad technologies can't have some significant benefits. He's just proposing that adding on the ability to do X with educational technologies in general (note: no specific one offered as a "panacea") might create even more educational possibilities.
> Gnostic Atheist That is total oxymoron of terms. Either you have knowledge or you don't. There is no inbetween.
A gnostic atheist has the knowledge that there is no god. (they do have knowledge, or at least think they do)
I think the confusion here is that the vast majority of people who use the word Gnostic are referring to a sect of people a couple thousand years ago who had very specific religious beliefs, including special "knowledge" (from Greek "gnosis") about divinity.
On the other hand, Thomas Huxley coined agnostic a century or so ago using that same Greek root, but in a broader sense of not having certain "knowledge" about such divine questions in general.
It's a relatively recent development to use the word "gnostic" in the general sense of the opposite of "agnostic," rather than referring to the Gnostic earlier religious sects.
That's why some people can be confused. A couple decades ago, a "Gnostic atheist" would have been an oxymoron. Now that fewer people seem to know anything history and particularly early Christian sects, some people have appropriated the term "gnostic" to mean something else.
Class action lawsuits are not designed to provide restitution to members of the class, just to punish the party being sued and to prevent similar action in the future. This is very basic.
This is absolute nonsense. One of the primary aims of class action suits is to provide members of a class with a means to recover relatively small sums. Since the cost of any type of lawyer -- let alone depositions, sorting through evidence and paperwork, etc. -- would be prohibitively expensive even in small claims court, no one would ever try to bring a suit against a big corporation with a legal team unless they were going to win many thousands of dollars.
If the average person was only wronged by losing $10 or $50 or even $500, the cost of litigation is often prohibitively high. Class action lawsuits are certainly a means allowing such people to band together and use a collective legal team to recover damages.
Wikipedia is not the best resource for legal advice, but it gets it right here under "advantages" for class actions:
[A] class action may overcome "the problem that small recoveries do not provide the incentive for any individual to bring a solo action prosecuting his or her rights." Amchem Prods., Inc. v. Windsor, 521 U.S. 591, 617 (1997) (quoting Mace v. Van Ru Credit Corp., 109 F.3d 388, 344 (7th Cir. 1997)). "A class action solves this problem by aggregating the relatively paltry potential recoveries into something worth someone's (usually an attorney's) labor." Amchem Prods., Inc., 521 U.S. at 617 (quoting Mace, 109 F.3d at 344). In other words, a class action ensures that a defendant who engages in widespread harm - but does so minimally against each individual plaintiff - must compensate those individuals for their injuries. For example, thousands of shareholders of a public company may have losses too small to justify separate lawsuits, but a class action can be brought efficiently on behalf of all shareholders. Perhaps even more important than compensation is that class treatment of claims may be the only way to impose the costs of wrongdoing on the wrongdoer, thus deterring future wrongdoing.
So, yes, at the end of this quotation, you see the issue that punishing the offender is important, but that doesn't mean that recovery of damages isn't actually a major goal of class action suits... as you claim.
Forget Right or Left, you are in the camp of ignorance.
Next time try knowing what you're talking about before you start calling other people names.
If your psyche can't properly handle a "slick" looking chart or info-graphic
Poor choice of words in the summary perhaps. But the larger point is that people can't help looking at graphical representations of data without making loads of assumptions... particularly if it looks at all "professional."
But this is no different than the kinds of graphical games used to misrepresent data that have been used for a century or more. You can even fake "professional" statistics with no graph at all. "85.7% of men preferred our brand of shaving cream!" A number like 85.7% sounds very exact -- must be a professional survey of a large number of people. Or, well, it could just be that they asked only 7 guys who worked at the company, and 6 of them (85.7%) said they like the shaving cream.
I sincerely doubt that people are making any more mistaken assumptions -- or any significantly new types -- from new graphs than they were when "How to Lie With Statistics" was published in 1954. The only difference is that more people can make more graphs with ease. The problems of interpretation are not new.
The summary is problematic. The alligator example is interesting, but the later examples in the article are better. Most of them don't depend on "imagination" or "creativity" or whatever to answer the question, or on a large bank of cultural knowledge, but only a basic knowledge of what words mean in relationship to each other. Yet AI would often fail these tests.
People are irrational. They ask stupid questions that make no sense.
While this is true, it has little bearing on the issues raised in TFA. It's also unclear what you mean by things that "make no sense." If you mean that literally, as in mentally challenged people babbling nonsense, then I do not expect a computer to be able to answer nonsense anymore than a normal person could. If 99% of adult native English-speakers without severe mental problems can answer a simple question correctly, I expect a computer that is said to "understand English" to be able to do the same.
If you mean -- as many geeks do when complaining about language imprecision -- that people ask questions without the precision used in formal made-up languages (like programming languages or stereotyped logic statements), well that's a hopelessly incomplete view of what "meaning" is. We use natural language despite its seeming imprecision because it actually can convey incredibly complex webs of meanings rather efficiently, instead of only allowing a specified small set of particular relationships that formal "rational" languages can use to produce a very limited set of meanings.
"Irrationality" and "making no sense" don't matter if 99% of native speakers can answer a simple question without hesitation. That means the the question seems both perfectly "rational" and "makes sense" to English speakers, and the same should be required of any computer said to do the same thing.
They use slang that confuses the communication. They have horrible grammar and spelling.
Again, a separate problem that's not very relevant to the concerns in TFA. As we've seen with improvements in Google search corrections, autocorrect technologies, etc., these issues are probably relatively minor to deal with compared to understanding the underlying meaning of standard natural language.
And overseeing it all is a language fraught with multiple meanings for words depending on the context, which may well include sentences and paragraphs leading up to the sentence being analyzed.
The examples given in TFA are things like simple 2-3 sentence scenarios where all the required information is contained in those sentences. The answer required is often a simple multiple-choice.
For example: "Joan made sure to thank Susan for all the help she had given. Who had given the help? a) Joan b) Susan"
Yes, you're talking about a much larger issue of context, but the examples in TFA pinpoint much smaller-scale failures to comprehend natural language. Many of the questions depend on simple patterns where 3 or 4 words used together in a sentence establish particular relationships among those words that any native speaker would get. Being able to parse those connections is what it actually would take to understand what those 3 or 4 words "mean."
Meaning is not atomic, and it is not only based in single words (which is your point). It exists in everything from phonemes and parts of words like prefixes, roots, and suffixes (that establish potential associations from sounds and grammatical clues about how the word functions) through phrases, sentences, and entire paragraphs.
But this is not a failure of language. It is how language fundamentally works. Words don't really have "multiple meanings": they only come to mean anything when connected with other words. We only have the illusion that individual words have specified meanings because dictionaries have been constructed along that model. It's a useful way to think about meaning, but it has little t
One other clarification in wording:
Out of every 1,000,000 people, 29.4 of them will be white murder victims, 168.4 will be black, and 7.8 will be other....
To word this more precisely, what I meant to say is "out of every 1,000,000 white people, 29.4 of them will be murder victims, out of every 1,000,000 black people, 168.4 will be murder victims," etc.
This should probably be clear from the way I present the stats, but I just wanted to avoid ambiguity.
When you screen huge masses of people needlessly, almost all to all of your hits are going to be incorrect.
Yes, this is something that apparently even most doctors don't understand. Suppose who had a simple problem like this:
1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?
The correct answer (calculated from Bayes' Theorem, or simple logic) is 7.8%. Most doctors cannot do this problem, and that not only get the answer wrong, but they often get it wildly off -- estimating the answer to be much greater than 50% (often 70% or so, probably from simply subtracting the two numbers).
If you don't believe me, have a look at this link. As the author says there:
usually, only around 15% of doctors get it right. ("Really? 15%? Is that a real number, or an urban legend based on an Internet poll?" It's a real number. See Casscells, Schoenberger, and Grayboys 1978; Eddy 1982; Gigerenzer and Hoffrage 1995; and many other studies. It's a surprising result which is easy to replicate, so it's been extensively replicated.)
The author here is being generous. I looked at these studies years ago, and many of them show only 5-10% getting the answer to such problems correct.
And if this is true of physicians, it's probably true of just about anyone else who encounters a lot of false positives and isn't used to thinking statistically. That means most people are very likely to draw incorrect conclusions about the prevalence of something when the false-positive rate is high... making those using the methodology assume that (1) their methodology is better than it is, and (2) that with more "assumed positives" from incorrect logic, the incidence of whatever they're looking for in the population is higher than it is.
Sorry, I forgot to put in the link to the demographic stats I used, which came from here, in case anyone wants to check the math.
If you read the numbers, it must be pretty close to equal: 49% of murder victims are white, 49% of murder victims are black, and the remaining 2% are of other racial backgrounds. Among murderers, 51% are black, 46% are white, and the remaining 3% are of other racial backgrounds.
If you're going to quote "actual statistics," you need to know how to use them. These stats are relatively useless when making comparisons between murder rates among races, since they don't take into account the actual population size of various races.
The white population is roughly 6 times the size of the black population in the U.S. (72.4% vs. 12.6% vs. 15% other). Using these statistics (which admittedly are 2010, instead of 2009, which is the year of your crime stats), we get an estimate of actual rates within the population:
Out of every 1,000,000 people, 29.4 of them will be white murder victims, 168.4 will be black, and 7.8 will be other. Out of every 1,000,000 people, 23.6 of them will be white murderers, 151.3 will be black, and 5.3 will be other.
To break this down by victim:
(Please note that the following stats given much lower rates than above, because BOTH offender and victim race are identified in only about half of the statistics given in the source.)
If the victim is white, per million people, 13.2 murderers will be white, 2 will be black, and 0.2 will be other.
If the victim is black, per million people, 5.4 murderers will be white, 66.9 will be black, and 0.3 will be other.
If the victim is other, per million people, 1.1 will be white, 0.6 will be black, and 2.2 will be other.
That's not to say that murder is OK, but it's hardly a situation in which black people are murdering white people left and right while white people are just innocent victims.
Agreed. However, when you compare actual murder rates rather than percentages from unequal population sizes, you can actually get an answer to the question you want. Basically, if all races were equally distributed, a black-murdering-white crime is about 2.6 times as likely as a white-murdering-black crime.
Of course that isn't the real shocking figure here. The shocking figure should be that black-on-black murders are 5 TIMES more prevalent than white-on-white murders. So, the conclusion shouldn't be that blacks are murdering innocent white people, but rather that the murder rate is a lot greater among blacks in general, and when that violence spreads outside the black community, white people are involved somewhat more often... compared to when white violence is perpetrated on blacks.
(I'm not trying to make any sort of racial judgment here at all, just to interpret the statistics you quoted fairly. Honestly, all murders are terrible, and we need to work to curb all of this violence... regardless of the races of victim or perpetrator.)
I've always believed that one should not ever brandish a firearm in a confrontation unless they're prepared to use it to cause harm.
"Prepared to use it"? Definitely. Already decided to shoot before they even grabbed the weapon? I would hope only in the most dire of circumstances.
Warning shot? No. If you think you can fire a warning shot and "scare someone away," then you've still got other less-lethal methods of handling the situation.
Yes, like firing a warning shot -- that is in fact a less-lethal method than shooting someone, if it indeed scares the attacker away.
Look -- a lot of people don't want to shoot other people. Some of them, though, might still buy a gun for protection, or it might be given to them. They might hesitate when pulling out the weapon, and the attacker will likely sense that. A warning shot in some situations may in fact convince the attacker that the victim is serious and force the attacker to back down.
If you are a confident man who clearly knows his gun and what to do, you're absolutely right that a warning shot would rarely make sense for you. Your confidence will probably clearly tell your attacker your intent, and if that doesn't stop the confrontation, you're going to have to shoot him.
On the other hand, I can imagine a lot of unsure women, particularly in domestic confrontations where they are threatened, and yet they may hesitate. In such a situation, something to demonstrate actual confidence in shooting might convince the attacker that the victim is serious... and it could satisfy your non-lethal preference for resolution.
Brandishing a gun may actually be enough to get someone to back down. Cops do it all the time. I assume every time they do so, they are prepared to shoot if necessary. I sincerely hope in most situations that they haven't already decided to shoot. If you're not a cop and don't exude confidence, in some situations you may need to convince the attacker that you will actually shoot... this particularly goes for domestic situations with a pre-existing power and emotional structure that the victim needs to overcome psychologically. Just because the victim prefers not to inflict lethal harm on the attacker shouldn't lead to the conclusion that the victim wasn't in a dire situation.
A secondary turning point was the passage of the income tax, where the power of the states was drastically reduced, because the federal money started collecting significan taxes directly. There are many others. [snip] Direct election of Senators, however, was another major turning point. Again this increased the power of the federal government relative to the state governments.
Umm, you do realize that the federal income tax and popular election on senators were both put into effect by Constitutional amendment, right?
And the passage of a Constitutional amendment requires 3/4 of states to vote for it, correct?
In other words, you may be right that an increase in federal power has caused many problems. But some of the examples you bring up are cases where the states clearly -- and by a great supermajority -- decided that they wanted the federal government to have this power. So if you truly believe that these things took power away from the states, the states actually must have wanted that power taken away. And if you're going to argue that somehow the states who voted on these things were corrupt or influenced in some bad way or whatever, well, then I suppose you'd have to argue that state and local authority aren't as great a check against corruption and abuse of power as you want to claim.
If you want to tell this tale -- the real turning point for your story should be the New Deal, and the "Switch in Time that Saved Nine", where SCOTUS suddenly decided that just about anything the federal government wanted to do was de facto okay, whether or not it was listed among the enumerated powers in the Constitution.
Before that, federal power did get greater and was abused (particularly during wars), but then it was generally reined in again. Since the New Deal and the complete about-face in Supreme Court jurisprudence, the original doctrine of federalism has really been dead, though.
Even if it had happened before the development of writing, you would think it would be the sort of thing that would have a major impact on legends across all world cultures. So my best guess is that from the span of time from, let's say, 3000BC to 2013AD, this has happened exactly once.
Okay, first off, if we're talking about legends and mythology, there's enough ambiguity about all sorts of tales that have to do with sky phenomena or gods/heroes/whatever who interact with stuff in the sky that there could very well be accounts buried somewhere in those mythical stories... we just can't separate them out from all of the other weirdness.
Even among Norse mythology, where you'd expect at least some significant discussion of aurora phenomena given where they lived, historians aren't even sure what -- if anything -- may be referencing auroras in those legends.
And if we're talking about recorded history, there are a lot of "lights in the sky" kind of events, with Chinese records in particular going back thousands of years. Figuring out whether such things could be supernovas or comets or perhaps auroras is often not easy -- descriptions can be ambiguous. And events that were visible globally often weren't recorded with the same detail -- for example, the Chinese clearly record the apparently significant appearance in 1054 C.E. of the supernova that has led to the Crab Nebula, but I don't think anyone has found a clear reference to that in European astronomical records.
In sum, whether we're talking about history or pre-history, there's plenty of stuff that went on up in the sky, and plenty of stories about it. But I don't think we can come anywhere close to saying for certain that no one observed unusual auroras or whatever due to some event like this in the entire history of civilization.
the main detractors have been NIMBYs who do not want change.
Regarding the GP's argument, you may want to note the meaning of your acronyms: NIMBY = "Not in my back yard." Exactly right. Most people who actually have back yards don't want giant dense towers built in them. They would like their back yards, which proves the GP's point.
What's really happening here is that people want to move into these areas because of the type of people who already live there -- i.e., the "cool" people, often rich, who have back yards and single family homes (or small multiple family homes).
These people -- often rightly so -- often sense that what makes their neighborhood so highly desirable is that it actually has good stuff going on and it's not full of giant condo buildings.
A lot of people -- particularly "adults" with families -- would generally prefer to have a single family home with a yard somewhere rather than a small condo on the 8th floor in a giant complex. Many only choose the condo because their job requires them to be close or because they like the other stuff in the area, not because they want to live in a cramped apartment.
Look at just about every city in the U.S. that grew up since the 1920s or 1930s. Almost every single one of them is spread out, with residential areas mostly consisting of individual homes with yards, etc., even when those residential areas are very close to downtown. When cars allowed people to have a choice to decide where to live (without being a country bumpkin who only could "come to town" with their horse once every couple weeks), a LOT of them chose to move to less dense situations.
I'm not saying that NO ONE wants to live in high-rise condos over a house in the suburbs. But empirical evidence suggests that a large portion of the population actually does want a back yard... and they don't want you or your girlfriend building a high-rise condo building in the middle of it.
I'd rather pay 1500 a month for a nice apartment near things to do and within walking distance of work. Hell, I'd probably pay twice that.
Not on the $30K the GP earns you wouldn't. And on that salary even $1500/month would leave you very little for even food, utilities, and necessities, let alone allowing you to enjoy any of the "things to do" that you're near.
For many people with lower salaries, that "nice apartment" that's near to everything in a major city actually isn't affordable, even with a job significantly above minimum wage. And even for the single people with $1500/month to spare now, the equation changes a lot if they have a family and especially kids.
Meanwhile, that guy out in NJ will probably own his home outright by the time the guy in the $1500/month apartment "grows up" and realizes that he can no longer afford a place like that with his family and has to move out into the suburbs, having thrown potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars away in rent before doing so.
There are definite benefits for living in the situation you describe when you're young and single and making enough money to afford a "nice apartment" in a big city. Not all people have those conditions or priorities in their lives.
"If they had to pick between a smartphone or a car, they would pick the phone." What sort of choice is that anyway? They aren't comparable. A phone is a few hundred dollars. A car is thousands. Why would you have to choose between them?
Most smartphone with data plans end up being at least about $100/month. If it's a premium plan, they need coverage for multiple devices (tablet, etc.), it may well be over $150/month.
The car payment on a relatively cheap used car -- such as the kind people in their 20s a generation ago would buy -- might be around $150/month, maybe even less.
These actually are roughly comparable expenses for many young people today. Add in various other technology "needs" for the younger generation (gadgets, high-speed internet at home, etc), and they're often paying as much as they would have for a car each month.
It says millennials don't care about *owning* cars. ... My wife has a large circle of younger cousins (Catholic family) and they're all like this - All in their 20s and not one of them owns a car.
Is it that they don't care about owning cars, or is it that owning a car is too expensive for young people in a tough job market?
My sense is that in walkable/bikable areas (like large cities in the Northeast U.S.), many people don't own cars. This has been true for generations. And for those who do, they don't tend to buy one until they are older, have a family, become more established in their jobs, etc. With kids, they find a greater need for a car sometimes, and with a steady job for a few years, they might be able to afford insurance, maintenance, loans, etc. for a big purchase like a car.
When I lived in such a place for a while (and was in my 20s), I ended up getting rid of my car when I moved in with my wife. To family members and friends who lived elsewhere in the country, they thought this was a little weird if not insane -- "You won't have your own car anymore?" But my wife and both had cars, and the cost of insurance and maintenance for two cars in a walkable city just didn't make sense. So why would I keep owning one, let alone buying a new one?
Also, I really think the family angle needs to be highlighted -- for single "millennials" (or even couples) in their 20s, living without a car can seem easy. Once you're in your 30s or 40s and have kids to haul around, it can become a lot harder to live most places without a car. Single people I know in big cities often don't own a car, even in their 50s or 60s.
Maybe we're just seeing a trend where young people are putting off purchasing a car, even if they don't tend to live in a big city, for similar reasons in tough economic times. Rather that just "buy an old junker" like kids might have a generation or two ago, they just wait until they have the money and/or need it (like when they have a family).
Let's wait a decade or so until millennials actually "grow up" and see whether owning a car still is "not cool" to them.
As for calendars, not so much. There have been numerous attempts at calendar improvements but none stuck.
As I pointed out, the last serious attempt at calendar reform (i.e., one in which a government actually forced it on the people) was the French Revolution. The rest have pretty much been theoretical.
That's because they all fixed a perceived problem of the Julian calendar while introducing a new problem. Dividing 365.24 (and a bit) days in a neat amount of weeks and days without changing the length of the week or upsetting either workers or employers is a tough problem.
No, it isn't. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you want to keep the week length as 7 days (to not upset the workers). 28 * 13 = 364. That means you could easily have 13 months with 28 days each. Every year begins or ends with one "holiday" for everybody (two in leap years), and you're good to go. Suddenly you have all equal length months that line up precisely with weeks. (And you don't have to recite a stupid poem to remember how many days are in September.) Calculations from weeks to months to years are much easier, and you just leave out that one holiday.
That's just one possibility. If you allow different length weeks, you could even get "nicer" lengths (i.e., ones easier to math in your head than base 28), such as in the French Revolutionary calendar, which had 12 months of 30 days, each month divided into 3 weeks of 10 days each. The year ends or begins with 5/6 days of intercalation, probably holidays. Lots of countries already tend to have effective holidays between Christmas and New Year's, so this could be made official. Or put them in August, when half of Europe seems to be on holiday.
As for "upsetting the workers" -- have you ever heard mechanics curse about having to go get a set of metric wrenches? Any mass overhaul of our measurement system is going to inconvenience a lot of people and upset a lot of workers.
The end result inevitably is a complex system. And why replace a complex known system with a complex yet unknown system?
Because our current system is actually ridiculously complex and inconvenient -- weeks don't like up with months, weeks don't line up with years, and we have to memorize a poem to remember how long months are because it's so stupid and irregular. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just know that March 8 or July 4 or whatever ALWAYS falls on the same day of the week every year? Or if you're paying someone by the week to be able to quickly calculate how much you'd pay for 4 months or whatever, without having to go figure out how many days or how many weeks happen to be in a particular 4-month period? And all those "floating holidays" we have that are on the second Monday or fourth Thursday or whatever will always have the same date.
There have been plenty of calendar reform proposals that would solve most of these problems. But the adjustment would be inconvenient... just as the adjustment to a new measurement system in general.
How high does the average passenger jet fly?
You seem to miss the entire point of my post. What practical use does this information have to anyone other than a pilot or air traffic control person? 99.9% of Americans never need to know whether planes tend to fly at 15000 feet or 30000 feet or whether they fly at 2 miles or 7 miles up. And they certainly don't need to be able to convert between feet and miles here. (On the rare occasion that someone would even ask them the question, "We're at about 35000 feet, how may miles is that?" knowing that a mile is roughly 5000 feet is probably enough information to answer the question -- "About 7 miles.")
I'm not saying it's bad to know information like the answer to your question. And it's clearly useful to some people. But to the average American, the answer to your question is a meaningless number. All they n
You are almost certain to get a review from someone not in the target audience or who got over-ambitious and ended up not understanding the source material, a review from the author's brother in law just so it looks like people are buying etc.
This is true in many cases. That said, I only tend to write reviews of niche items, often books or things that I have some expertise on, but not officially "my field" (so I wouldn't tend to write a review elsewhere on these things).
Why would I bother writing another review to add to a chorus of thousands about a particular product? If I feel strongly about something I bought, I check to see if there are reviews. If not, or (more likely) I disagree with the few that are there, I write a detailed review, trying to be fair about positives even when I hate the thing (which is generally my reason for writing). Even though I've only written a couple dozen reviews over the past 4 years or so, I somehow ended up in the top few thousand reviewers... probably because I actually try to write useful reviews on things I know something about and which don't tend to have decent reviews already.
I know I'm in the minority (and would never be recruited for Amazon Vine because I tend to write detailed "most helpful" negative reviews that make it harder for Amazon to sell products). But instead of complaining, why not contribute? If you have some technical expertise, you really liked or hated a book or something, why not write about it and help either point your fellow humans to something of good quality or steer them away from a dud?
It's only "not the usual situation" if you willfully ignore the last 1000+ years of the Catholic Church's existence. The Church has been a power-hungry, money-grubbing, corrupt organization for most of its existence.
I'm not going to defend the Catholic Church here, but I'd like you to please name for me some organizations that have existed for the past 1000+ years -- or even the past 200 years -- that have NOT been "power-hungry, money-grubbing, corrupt" organizations for significant parts of their lifespans.
Just about every national government, old bank, old corporation, etc. has participated in numerous atrocities over the centuries, from genocide to slavery. From a historical standpoint, the Catholic Church is hardly unusual.
And from a modern standpoint, the recent child abuse scandals mostly stand out because the Catholic Church is one huge hierarchical organization that can be blamed for the abuse as a whole. Lots of child abuse has been perpetrated by teachers, ministers of other religions, scout masters, just about anyone in authority as well -- and they're probably about as likely overall to have been fired or asked to resign and sent on their way in the past rather than having suspicions reported to the police. But there's no overall hierarchy collecting this information in public schools or in many other churches, so it's harder to find a single organization to blame. And we likely haven't seen the same sort of mass lawsuits against other organizations for the same reasons. It doesn't mean abuse wasn't going on elsewhere as well... and much of it was also ignored.
Why should they "invest" in someone when the investment can just walk out the door whenever he/she pleases?
Welcome to civilization! Glad you could join us. Let me explain a simple concept that has helped civilization progress over the past 10,000 years: at some point, you need to trust someone else. At some point, you need to put some faith in someone else.
The whole point of organized society is -- if we work together, we all get more than your average hunter-gather alone in the wilderness. We depend on each other in fundamental ways, and we all benefit by mutually helping each other to build useful skills to society as a whole.
This is the big picture, and sure, most people are still selfish and try to get as much for themselves as they can. But the thing is -- you can actually get MORE for yourself often by helping out others. If all employers work to improve the skill-set of their employees, society as a whole benefits with better workers. If all employers refuse to help their employees at every turn, every year more employees will be stupider and have fewer skills.
In a market where most employers don't "invest," making a decision to do so maybe seems a bad idea. It might be more expensive, and you're worried that people will walk out the door. But if you're good to your employees, word gets around. That expensive training pays off if you get better quality employees who stick around... because they know you're treating them well.
If you live your life like everybody's going to screw you at every turn, they probably will. Being a jerk causes people around you to have a higher probability of acting like jerks (even if they aren't naturally jerks).
But the opposite is also true. It's not usually the slash-and-burn way of making the highest profits right now, but it's better in the long term. If you don't ever want to depend on anyone else in society or trust them, you might as well go back to the wilderness and become a lone hunter-gatherer again, because you're helping to drag the rest of society down. Take most of the alpha-male BS corporate execs with you too, since that's where most of them belong.
Invest in yourself then get a higher paying job.
The GGP did. College costs A LOT of money. There is absolutely no reason that 17 years of education shouldn't be enough to give someone the basic beginning skills to start an engineering job. (Unfortunately, I think there is a lot wrong with our educational system, and in an ideal world, this person would probably have been better off switching from a generalized curriculum to an engineering apprenticeship when he was 12-14, so he could actually be as knowledgeable and as skilled as most 30-year-old engineers are when he gets to be 20 years old... but that's a different story for a different post.)
Our educational system is screwed up and doesn't actually function in creating people ready to work right out of college, so the only choice is for companies to invest a little bit to get a functional employee. If done well, the majority of the time such investments will pay off.
On the other hand, if most employees are streaming out of your doors after you offered them a job and useful training, something else is probably wrong with your company.
You, yourself admitted that at least one item on Kr1ll1n (579971)'s list was reasonable.
Yes, I did. And if his post said, "Just to clarify, the summary is ambiguous -- it means Charleston, SC. We should be more careful about this because there's also one in WV that's pretty prominent, and Wikipedia notes that there are a lot of other localities with the same name worldwide (and here's a link...)."
That would be completely reasonable, and I would have applauded his efforts in trying to make Slashdot a better place.
Instead, he ripped out a bunch of names to places from a Wikipedia list without bothering to know anything about them, without even citing the page where he got the list (so we could actually find out about them). Aside from the two Charlestons I admit are reasonable interpretations, just about every one them are either ghost towns or have populations of a few hundred people (your TN location apparently has 651). A few towns have a few thousand people.
I hold to my statement that other than making a point about the WV location, including any of these other towns as "possible" referents is simply not a rational assumption -- it's as rational as the examples I gave of thinking that New York, TX or Los Angeles, TX are being referenced by a story about "New York" or "Los Angeles," even though the TX locations only contain a handful of people.
I supect you'll be surprised how many people who don't live in the US also don't find ANYTHING about which Charlston is largest obvious, and in fact you'll probably hear from people who only know of a handfull of the very largest cities in the US and have never heard of ANY Charleston.
Of course. Then again, they can simply enter "Charleston" into a search engine, which they would have to anyway. When I type "Charleston" into a search engine that does not filter results or personalize them, I don't see a link to any "Charleston" other than SC or WV in the top 20 (and WV only has 3 in the top 20, with the top one at #9).
All of this goes to show that again, it's slightly reasonable to ask for clarification here between SC and WV (as I admitted multiple times in my post), but beyond that I see only a handful of hits for the other "Charlestons" in even the top 100 of a non-filtered search.
Your claim that the mention of the general US Drug Enforcement Administration appearing in the summary invalidates all non-us locations is itself wrong (The US siezes assets in cases of INTERNATIONAL drug trafficing
Yes, yes, I thought of that. But did you bother to actually look up any of those other "Charlestons" from around the world? You'll find that they're all basically as insignificant as the U.S. locations other than SC and WV. It's not like the summary mentioned the DEA making a bust in "London" or "Berlin" or something while referring to the lesser known U.S. cities that have those names. The summary was discussing a U.S. agency acting in a city named X, where the only two relatively large cities named X happen to be in the U.S.
Yet despite those issues, you're still busting someone's chops.
No, I'm correcting a nitpicker. There's a difference. When you set yourself up as an authority to make a correction, you should take at least a little time to make sure your information is reasonably accurate. No matter what you say, it is simply not reasonable to assume that the summary was referencing a ghost town, and the fact that those names were included in the list showed that the GP did not do his homework before declaring the summary "Horrible" (see his subject line) and then nitpicking in his own way by pasting in a list he hadn't bothered to really look at in any detail.
You've jumped on somebody who 'obviously' took at least two minutes doing some research, to get the list you are declaring irrelevant.
The list is irrelevant. It is
Yeah... Nothing I enjoyed more than doing conversions of miles, feet, inches, tenths of inches, pounds, ounces (avoirdupois), gallons, fluid ounces
Umm, you're doing it wrong. Inches are most commonly divided into eighths or sixteenths, not tenths. (And, on occasion, even into 32nds or 64ths.) Americans like the more advanced binary systems of measurement, rather than some stupid 10-based system... [/sarcasm]
all the while there were these lovely decimal systems just itching to make everything much easier.
I'm definitely a fan of the metric system, but honestly I don't know if it's "much easier" in the days of calculators and computers that can do conversions easily -- heck, for many years your web browser has even been able to interpret unit names to do the conversion for you, so you don't even have to memorize it.
I'm not saying the old units make a lot of sense, but surely the math isn't that hard. Carrying a unit like "in." or "ft." or "lb." around with a number is equivalent in complexity to carrying around a pi or e or whatever and then plugging in 3.14 or 2.718 at the end.
Few people seem "itching" to make things "much easier" by converting time units to decimal (at least not since the French Revolution), so we live with base 60, base 12 and/or 24, base 7, and a completely irregular month system... why?
Same as GP's answer -- because it is a "working system," even if it's inefficient.
For the average Joe, he almost never has to convert miles to feet or gallons to ounces. About the only unit conversions average Americans ever have to think about on a regular basis are 12 inches = 1 foot and 3 feet = 1 yard. If you're ordering a steak or a hamburger, it might help to know that 16 ounces = 1 pound, and if you're ordering a beer, knowing the size of a pint might be helpful. That's about it for the average American. (Perhaps unfortunately...)
A mile could be 5280 feet or 5000 feet or 5347 feet for all most people care -- the exact amount is pretty irrelevant in everyday life. The units of miles and feet are so different in size that they only tend to occur in completely different contexts for most people. Very few people these days ever use the intermediate units like furlongs, chains, or rods, so complicated length conversions rarely are needed.
And that's true for most units. Different units may exist that are orders of magnitude apart, and from a practical everyday standpoint, you rarely need to know that some big unit converts to 5280 or 128 or 1728 or whatever of some smaller unit. You just use the appropriate unit in the first place. If you happen to be in some business or something where you actually need to convert hogsheads to pints or something on a regular basis, you get your spreadsheet or calculator to do it.
I'd be happy if the U.S. converted to metric, but the only people whose lives would be significantly easier would be scientists and engineers, and most of them use metric on an everyday basis already. For average Joe, unit conversions just don't impact his life so much.
Diminishing returns says the cost-effectiveness of improving mileage rapidly drops off above about 50 MPG.
No it doesn't "rapidly drop off" above any arbitrary dividing line. It's a smooth function, and there is no particular place where the "drop off" suddenly happens.
The gains in economy simply get less and less as you go higher. Going from 15 to 20 MPG is better than going from 20 to 25, which is better than 25 to 30, etc., etc., etc.
Going from 45 to 50 MPG, for example, is better than going from 50 to 55 MPG, but there's no sudden drop at 50 MPG.
If we want to reduce overall fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on ad campaigns to get people out of gas guzzlers into smaller cars. Not concentrating on designing ultra-high mileage vehicles.
Your own statistics say that if we got people who are now driving 50 MPG cars to drive 300 MPG cars -- and many of them might go for that if they were available, since most people who drive 50 MPG cars nowadays are already environmentally conscious -- it would save well over half as much as getting someone to switch from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG sedan, and it would save almost as much as getting a normal sedan owner to switch to a 50 MPG hybrid.
So, if a 250-300 MPG car were real (and I agree that such performance is currently doubtful), it would still be rather worthwhile to convince your average 50 MPG hybrid owner to switch to it.
The issue isn't that "concept cars" that make huge MPG advances couldn't make a worthwhile difference for a given owner -- it's that there simply are more people driving the gas guzzlers.
In other words, your argument is really just about targeting the largest group of consumers, not anything bad about concept cars per se (if they are really possible).
(Now, if we were talking about some sort of research hybrid making a small gain from 50 to 60 MPG or something, I'd absolutely agree that such a thing would be worthless compared to getting SUVs to switch to sedans, even if it "only" saves 10 MPG. But that's not what we're talking about here.)
He was using a hypothetical (meaning stop being pedantic) that few people wouldnt give up a fraction of their pay in the actual case it would help
I don't sense pedantry in the GP. More like pointing out a false analogy. The reason people wouldn't give up extra tax money to politicians isn't because they don't want to help or because they don't want change -- it's because they don't trust Congress (which has had ridiculously low approval ratings for years) to spend the money in any way that would actually help.
Now, if they thought giving up 1% of their pay would actually make a positive difference in the world, heck yeah, a lot of people would pay up, particularly conservatives. Lots of people, especially lots of Christian conservatives, practice tithing, i.e., giving up 10% of their income to help the church or sometimes other charitable causes. Conservatives, on average, give about 30% more than liberals, even though, on average conservatives households have a lower salary (contrary to popular belief). In fact, the working poor tend to give the most, percentage-wise.
I'm not a conservative, but I bring this up not only because of the strong tradition among many conservatives of giving a large portion of one's salary to worthy causes, but also because these same conservatives are more likely to participate in this giving action to various organizations that might make a difference, rather than simply raising taxes on everyone (as proposed in this thread).
Just because people wouldn't want their taxes raised by 1% doesn't mean that many people wouldn't shell out a lot of their cash if it could actually make a difference -- the difficulty is often creating a way for people to get that money to people or causes they actually believe in and are confident will make a difference.