If you want a better populace, you're going to need a better public school system that teaches students more than just numbers and facts. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to examine the world around them, and how to leverage the internet as a nearly unlimited resource, while being wary of the ability for any random jack-hole to post some spurious shit on their blog.
Our public school system was NEVER designed to do such things. As someone who has actually taught within it, I know the history. It was designed to train obedient factory workers -- seriously, timed classes with students responding to bells? Look back at some sources from the early 1900s, and you'll see people explicitly talking about how the system was designed to imitate factories. Real in-depth learning doesn't take place in neatly managed 45-minute blocks, sounded to an end by a buzzer.
At first, this sort of thing was just about primary education -- train kids with basic reading and math skills; enough to survive as a basic factory worker. (The huge influx of immigrants in the late 1800s, many of whom didn't have the tradition of going to grammar schools that was already in place in the U.S. even in the early 1800s, led to these reforms.)
But then it spread to secondary schools. Why? Because of the problem of dangerous "young radicals." Kids back in the early 1900s, like teenagers in any era, tend to be more rebellious. You had a LOT of young folks taking up with socialist causes, unions, etc. in the 1910s and 1920s, so suddenly we had compulsory education laws requiring kids to attend school beyond primary level. (Before the 1930s or so, it was pretty common in most of the U.S. for working-class kids to leave school at somewhere between 4th and 6th grade.) And the Great Depression that followed led a bunch of kids to "stay in school" in an attempt to get better educational credentials for jobs -- sound familiar??
So, what do we do with these "young radicals"? Increasing child labor laws and protections for young workers forced them out of jobs even before the Depression, so you end up with a bunch of idle teenagers who are bound to get up to all sorts of mischief. So, we get them off the streets and force them into classrooms, where we can indoctrinate them with good social values like civil obedience. Around this time, we also see the proliferation of alternative high school curricula -- for vocational or technical tracks. Previously, almost all secondary schools in the U.S. had been centered around "deeper learning" as part of a college-prep curriculum.
Oh yeah, there were other goals in educational reform too... some quite noble. But we tend to forget that the design of public education was never about "advanced learning." Take a look at the high-school curricula from the late 1800s sometime, before the movement for mass secondary ed. The standards were a LOT higher, and they continued to be high in the 20th century in private academies and such. The new PUBLIC schools were mostly designed to get the rest of the riff-raff off the streets and get them to submit to authority.
Now, in that context, you can understand why all of the rhetoric about "teaching critical thinking" in public schools has been an uphill battle. The whole system was originally rigged against that... it wasn't designed to promote "free thinking," because that's antithetical to many of the primary goals of the system.
I'm definitely NOT a Trump supporter, however, I'd qualify your claims a bit:
Racism - he's cool with it
Actually, I'm reasonably certain when asked in an interview about it, he turned to the camera and said "STOP IT." And his spokespeople keep denouncing it. On the other hand, he's appointing Bannon, and he's avoided directly denouncing the more "white nationalist" elements of the alt-right. (Let's not rehash the arguments over with Bannon is or isn't actually racist, okay? Let's just note that there's a significant group of people associated with some of Bannon's causes who DO encourage and use racist rhetoric, so his appointment will inevitably be construed by some of those supporters as condoning such rhetoric..)
But anyhow, whatever you get from this confusing set of signals, I'm pretty sure this isn't ANY different from how Trump acted in his campaign. He'd say he wasn't racist while at the same time waffling and hedging when someone suggested that he was supported by David Duke or others. The general gist of his campaign seemed to be, "I'm not overtly supporting racism, and I may not big a huge fan of it, but I'll take the support from wherever it comes and won't go out of my way to denounce my racist supporters."
Far from being a "lie" -- I think Trump is basically maintaining that same line now.
Make America Great Again - he hates the first amendment, hence his badgering & blocking the media - they shame him w his own words.
I'm not sure that Trump has so far proven much worse in terms of the First Amendment than many recent presidents. ("Free speech zones," anyone?) And there have been plenty of wars with the press in previous administrations, generally over publication of "secret" stuff, which generally ended up embarrassing to the government.
The main difference with Trump, as you note, is that he (1) tweets nasty things about the media, and (2) seems to avoid talking to them (which you call "blocking"). But (1) is actually his First Amendment right. And (2) is also his prerogative -- previous administrations tended to have a cozy relationship with the press, but there's no mandate (from the First Amendment or elsewhere) that he communicate with the press in those ways.
Personally, I think it's a VERY bad sign if he refuses to do so, because it short-circuits opportunity for debate, and his proposal to ban reporters from the press corps is VERY disturbing (depending on the criteria he uses to do it). But doing so is no violation of the 1st Amendment, nor is it somehow infringing on 1st Amendment rights to refuse to talk to the press or allow a representative into the White House or whatever. The press has every right to publish what it wants, but they have no right to automatically get a seat in the White House press room.
If Trump starts going around and shutting down newspapers or silencing media outlets, THEN we have a 1st Amendment issue. But just refusing to talk to them, or let some reporter into his press corps? There's nothing in the Constitution that requires him to do so.
Now, if Trump follows through with his threats to "open up libel laws" (whatever that means), I suppose that could be a threat to 1st Amendment rights. But ultimately that's a matter for the courts to decide. We used to have lower standards for libel in the U.S., but they were raised through a series of SCOTUS rulings.
And even most of the conservative justices on the court would be loathe to overturn the current "actual malice" standard, so I doubt Trump would make any headway here, even if he got to appoint a couple justices.
Finally, again -- I don't think Trump "lied" on this point. His loathing of the press has been clear throughout his campaign. Precisely how did he "backpedal" on this stuff?
No, it's a good deal for sports fans if everybody else helps pay for it.
Agreed. While I suppose anything's possible, I cannot imagine that Amazon could keep the price of a Prime membership at $99 and ADD live sports (unless it gutted existing stuff included in Prime). Sports channels usually cost more than any other service in existing cable packages -- ESPN alone now charges about $7 per month from cable companies from subscribers. (Note that the MEDIAN fee per channel is about 15 cents.) And ESPN has huge ad revenue too. Is Prime going to make widespread use of ads too?
I know that the sports licensing folks are probably eager to reach cord-cutters, but I can't imagine they're going to settle for a fraction of what ESPN pulls in now... which means either Amazon's Prime cost goes way up to subsidize the sports package, or Amazon begins to offer a separate "Prime + Sports" package that costs more... perhaps double (or more) the current Prime cost.
If you get invited to an orgy and visit the orgy, there should be the assumption that you are there for sex.
You're shifting the goalposts from our previous discussion. An "orgy" is different from someone "offering sex" which is different from randomly grabbing the crotch of a stranger without permission. Let's try to be clear about what we're talking about.
If you don't want sexual contact, you would not be at the orgy. It is your decision to be there, and your decision to stay.
Agreed. Completely different situation from walking up to a stranger and grabbing their crotch.
I have been hit on by women who want things. It was my choice to accept or rebuke the offers
Did they randomly walk up to you and grab your crotch? Or when you say "hit on," do you mean something more like verbal cues, maybe a little "dirty talk" or innuendo, smiles, maybe a touch on a shoulder or hand or some reasonable part of your body that acquaintances might occasionally touch? That's quite different from grabbing a stranger's genitals.
You are a liar if you have never heard "guy talk" or "girl talk, unless perhaps you grew up a eunuch in a monastery.
Huh? Where did I say I've never heard "guy talk"? If you want to believe Trump's comments were just bragging about stuff that didn't happen, or exaggerating, or whatever, that's fine. I'd prefer it if my president didn't say such things where he might be recorded, but whatever. (You hadn't previously taken the argument that way -- that changes the interpretation significantly, if you're not taking Trump's words literally.)
BUT if what he literally said is true, and he walked up and grabbed genitals of women who were not previously known to him, that's concerning.
I quoted him exactly near the end of my post. I have no idea if he ACTUALLY committed sexual assault (though there clearly are some women who have accused him of it). But the way he phrased it strongly implies that he did, or at least that he was okay with it.
OR all he said was just "locker room talk" and bragging about stuff he never actually did. Which is fine (I guess), if that's what you believe. But if you take what he said literally, it's disturbing.
And oh -- I also was REPLYING to another post by the way. My post wasn't only about Trump. In general, I think the whole concept that "I think she wanted it" when she doesn't say so has historically been used to excuse way more cases of sexual abuse (or at best, unwanted sexual advances that a woman just "went along with") than it has been for cases of women who want a man to "take charge."
Finally, keep in mind that we're talking about encounters apparently between strangers. It's definitely different if you're in a relationship already with someone and sexual "touching" is okay to try to get someone in the mood or whatever. With a stranger -- particularly if you're in a position of power -- you want some sign of approval or permission before grabbing genitals. Sorry, that's not only the moral but the legal thing to do... whether you're Trump or anyone else.
(I frankly cannot believe I actually had to say that to someone.)
Thank you for your post. Sincerely. It's one of the best written things I've read here on this topic, as it has been rehashed dozens of times over the past couple weeks.
People seem to want to focus all the attention on potentially biased news sources or whatever, but as you rightly point out, there are HUGE amounts of actual, literally FAKE news -- where everything in the story is false -- circulating and being passed around. Some of it is from trolls. Some of it is people writing parodies and hoaxes. Some of it is from propagandists on one side or the other. But a lot of it is actually FAKE. Not "biased" or "distorted" or "up for opinion" Literally asserting that things happened which did not (and the writer knows they did not).
But while we're all here debating the nuances of whether CNN or Fox or whatever is really all that bad -- this literal made-up crap is flying around the internet.
I'm NOT in favor of censorship. But should Google work to try to get this made-up junk that is LITERALLY FALSE from appearing in a "news feed"? Yes. Should we perhaps try to create some sort of tags for sites that are known "parody" or "hoax" sites, so people can ID them at the outset, rather than passing them around as if they were fact? Maybe. We all know about "The Onion," but there are plenty of other lesser known or more subtle sites like this, which we KNOW were sometimes passed around by prominent leaders in the past election cycle as if they were fact.
Don't censor the trolls. But for clear, egregious cases of outright falsehoods, I think at least labeling them somehow to make them easier to stop is perfectly reasonable.
A groupie hanging with musicians offering sex is not committing sexual assault any more than the musician who sleeps with the groupie.
Let's try again, shall we: If the groupie GRABS THE CROTCH of the musician WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION, that is sexual assault. Period.
"Offering sex" is different from literal unwanted physical sexual contact. When one says, "offering sex," that usually means something implies a verbal offer. Maybe a physical cue. Grabbing someone's genitals is MORE than merely "offering sex" -- it is acting with belief that the recipient already has approved the "offer."
"Offering sex" in an inappropriate context MIGHT constitute "sexual harassment" at best. And yes, in those situations, context may be much more ambiguous. But it is NOT sexual ASSAULT.
The fact that you seem unable to understand that distinction has gone beyond "logic failures." I'm actually disturbed by your willingness to excuse criminal behavior. I have no idea whether Trump actually committed sexual assault against any women, but IF he grabbed a stranger's genitals without her permission, he DID commit an assault. That's pretty much the legal definition of the term.
It's not sexual battery, it's normal human sexuality. Asking at every turn would turn off most women because it shows a lack of confidence.
Yeah, except when you are in a position of power over them, in which case you are using your position of power to force them to excuse your behavior.
Sorry, but when you have a power imbalance in a relationship, it's important to verify that what's happening is actually okay. Just assuming they'll "let you" is NOT appropriate. Forget about sexual assault for a moment -- have you never in your life been put into an awkward position by someone who had power over you, and you felt you couldn't "say no" or else risk something significant (e.g., job, money, etc.)? I certainly have.
Much more mundane example -- I've been in a few job interviews over the years, for example, where I was asked blatantly illegal questions. After I once answered such a question honestly, I was then asked to reveal that information in front of a larger interview panel at the outset of an interview, obviously meant to bias the panel against me. All very problematic.
But did I object when they asked me to talk about that? They job was a REALLY good one. What was I supposed to do if I wanted a chance at the job? At best, I hoped by going along with their request, I'd get the sympathy of some of the panel for the fact that some of their colleagues were doing something deliberately immoral (and indeed I did get some sympathy, as the interview turned very awkward).
But at what point do you "say no" in a situation where it could hurt your career?
Anyhow, now, imagine you're a young woman just starting a career and a powerful billionaire comes up to you and starts kissing you and grabbing your crotch. Your options are: (1) go along with it, (2) wriggle out of it as gently as possible and hope he just doesn't do it again, (3) reject him but say nothing and hope he goes away, or (4) reject him and file charges. No matter what goes on, it probably turns into a "he said/she said" media fiasco. So, (4) is a tough choice to make. Either (3) or (4) possibly has a negative impact on your career, due to this guy's power. So, if you really don't want it, but don't want to ruin your chances, at best you try (2). If you're willing to actually prostitute yourself, you do (1).
But in ALL FOUR SCENARIOS, you were basically assaulted, because you didn't want him touching you.
I cannot believe that people would defend such nonsense. Trump says explicitly "I don't even wait." Wait for what, exactly? Permission? A sign of interest? Nope -- "I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
Not they "want you" to do it. No, they "let you" do it. Which means it's more than likely that some of these women fall into one of the four categories I mentioned above.
Is a groupie guilty of sexual assault when they try to sleep with band members, actors, actresses?
Did the groupie grab the crotch of the band member/actor/actress without permission? Then, yes.
How about a more general woman who understands how to use sex appeal trying to sleep with people in power positions to get power?
Did the "more general woman" grab the crotch of someone "in power positions" without permission? Then, yes.
It is not a one sided issue, and you can't seem to follow a simple 30 second conversation.
No, it is you who seems interested in derailing a conversation by introducing irrelevant details into a conversation that's about something different. Yes, "sexual assault" might be ambiguous in some cases -- I don't think anyone here is denying that there can be ambiguity in personal interactions sometimes.
But you seem loathe to admit that if a person KNOWINGLY AND DELIBERATELY grabs someone else's crotch without their permission, that IS sexual assault. Period.
This is the same CNN site that declared math is racist
Really?? This again. Didn't we just have this discussion yesterday? Oh yeah, we did. And in the subsequent discussion, a bunch of people replied to you and said, "Actually, no, if you READ that story, that's NOT fake news -- CNN had a bad and inflammatory headline, but the content is pretty reasonable."
STOP IT. Yes, you can find stuff where CNN has bias or distortion. But you're doing precisely what the "fake news" headlines often do here -- you link to something with an incendiary headline betting that no one will actually read it. And the few people who do read a "fake news" article will often discover it doesn't quite make sense, or the headline was bad, or even that it's a complete parody.
There is actual "fake news" out there. Outright fabrications of events that never happened. Parodies and hoaxes. Your link -- whatever its problems -- isn't it.
For most everybody else though networking is their little way of telling the world here am I and these are my skills, recognition by other professionals is key to making a career.
The question is whether social media is actually effective "networking" for most people, and whether its networking benefits outweigh its dangers.
Social media kind of reminds me of what people used to do a couple decades ago in attending job fairs and some sort of "mixer" or party to "network" among peers and potential employers. (I assume some people still do that, too.)
Anyhow, while it is possible to make contacts at such things, the REAL networking takes place in private conversations. People you have coffee or lunch or drinks with. They actually get to know you a bit, and they'll support you for a job or promotion or mention your name when their buddy says, "Yeah, we have an opening looking for X."
How much of that actually happens from random Facebook friends or whatever? A prospective contact or whatever you "friended" after a 3-minute conversation at a party isn't going to recommend you on the basis of your cute cat pictures.
And, in fact, the OPPOSITE is more likely to be the case with social media, because it's NOT like going to some huge anonymous party and trying to mingle to "network." Instead, you tend to broadcast posts and tweets to huge numbers of people. One poorly thought out political post, and suddenly 30% of those "contacts" you've so carefully friended decide, "Huh... yeah, I don't like this person's views" and they won't be considering you for anything.
I am officially "friends" with a lot of professional colleagues on Facebook (where I almost never post anything), but what matters in terms of my career are the personal contacts I have with some subset of those people -- when I grab a drink with them on occasion or at a conference, when I seek out there advice or keep in touch about ongoing stuff in our careers. THAT is networking. Not friending or tweeting at people you barely know, expecting that they're going to want to employ you on the basis of your status updates.
In a world where YouTube "stars" earn six-figure salaries, and social media "celebrities" are earning far more than that, you're struggling as to how anyone would ever think that posting on social media could lead to anything in the first place??
It may be narcissistic and nonsensical, but recognize what society AND business actually reward these days related to social media. Cold hard cash is the justification, and that's hardly a strange premise.
Yeah, except compare the number of "YouTube sensations" to the number of posted videos never viewed by more than a few dozen people or whatever.
Becoming a "social media celebrity" is like becoming of pop music star. Yeah, it can happen, but for every person who "makes" it, there are 10,000 wannabes out there, doing karaoke at the local bar.
Is there money to be made in social media? Sure, but unless you find a very particular niche or a truly innovative thing to do with it, your chances of making it big are perhaps just a little better than playing the lottery. Merely posting random junk every hour like everyone else does on social media won't make you stand out... hence, I'm pretty sure the message of TFA was you have much better luck getting a job if you instead devote that time to developing actual skills.
I'm confused as to why the author would ever think that posting on social media could lead to anything in the first place. Very strange premise.
I could be reading it wrong, but I think this is sort of a spin on the old "networking" and contacts to get jobs trope. "It's not what you know, but who you know" and all that.
A social media presence keeps you in contact with lots of people, and I suppose the idea is that it's kind of like what people used to do in the old days -- going out and hanging out at the "right" parties, getting drinks with the "right" people, etc. Then when it comes time to get the job or the promotion or whatever, I guess everyone's supposed to say, "Gee, he posts great cat pictures! Let's give him the job!"
I jest a bit, but not much. I suppose if you're looking for a job that will involve posting on social media, then obviously having a social media presence might be important for getting that job. Otherwise, my experience is that any social media connections are generally much more shallow than even the staged dinners people used to hold (do they still?) for "networking" purposes. I absolutely agree that "knowing the right people" is important for finding a job -- but I have doubts that your social media presence is the way to do that. At best, you maintain some tenuous connection to a "friend" you've barely met, who might chuckle at your cat photo. At worst, you post some political story to your feed without thinking and end up alienating 30% of potential employers you took such care to "friend."
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I am officially "friends" through social media with many colleagues in my field (though I basically never post anything there), but the people who are actually going to help me if I want to get a different job or whatever are the people I talk to in person, the people I get coffee or lunch or drinks with, the people who actually KNOW me... not some online spectre of me.
Aristotle had it right -- moderation is critical. Personally, I participate very little in social media, and I have strong concerns (as do many people here) about stuff like Facebook's policies and agendas. That said, if you're willing to put up with that stuff, I don't see a problem with someone maintaining a social media account just to, for example, keep up with the activities of old friends and acquaintances. I know some people who don't even seem to know how to use email anymore, so this is the reality of the world we live in.
TFA is talking about a completely different scale of a social media use, which lamentably has become the norm for many people. There's this belief that activity on social media promotes your "personal brand" and that constant updating and activity is necessary.
But I agree with TFA that good, solid work comes from time, attention, and reflection. In an era of short tweets and Facebook/blog updates every hour, the person who can actually write something more than 140 characters coherently stands out. Someone who can make an argument in prose -- not just rehash existing stories like some bad computer algorithm -- they can get noticed. Perhaps not by the online rabble (who can't be bothered to read beyond a headline). But if you want to impress someone for a job or promotion, your want to stand out from the crowd, not join in its continuous ephemeral (and meaningless) din.
The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. "When you're on your fifth story of the day and there's no editor because the editor's been fired and there's no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don't have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up," she says.
So, this is it. Journalism is too tough because the business of news is too tough. Seriously?
Yeah, I have to agree that this excuse is pretty bad. What they're really saying is that reporters are incapable of fact checking themselves, which is truly sad because there's more info out there that is easily accessible than ever before in history.
Seriously. I do research on the internet all the time, both for part of my job and for other things where I'm just curious about stuff. There are resources at my fingertips now that reporters and fact-checkers could only dream about a few decades ago.
Yes, you need to use common sense, you need to have a good BS detector, and you need to learn what counts as a reputable source (hint: Wikipedia doesn't). But it's easier to find most information than it ever was throughout history.
So what's really the excuse here? Reporters are overworked and underfunded? I can believe that. But "so you have to Google it yourself and you don't have access to any academic journals or anything like that" is NOT an excuse for messing stuff up. (1) Google is an invaluable resource (as are some other more specialized search engines), which can lead you to other reputable databases or sources, (2) while lots of academic journals are paywalled, there's plenty of free stuff online (just try Google Scholar, as a start) particularly for older stuff, and for more recent stuff, more and more scholars are finding ways to archive pre-prints etc. online. And I could go on... but online research is pretty awesome these days if you know how to use it. I'm guessing the biggest problem is that people these days were never taught how to actually find things via search engines (using advanced search options and using verbatim full-text search to narrow things down). Unfortunately, the fact that most people can't use search engines efficiently has led Google and others to "dumb down" the way things work and try to give you what they "think you want" rather than the literal results of your exact query.
Still, even with such impediments, there's no excuse for not being able to find information these days.
His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
Exactly. Even before I could reach the closing sentence of the summary, I was trying to figure out what this situation had to do with "science" or even cryonics. This was just a dispute between parents over a kid. Nothing to see here.
I wouldn't exactly say it's "trashy, salacious gossip about actresses" when the actress herself is saying it. One might actually even question the slightly sexist assumption in the way you phrased that -- given that Ford apparently hasn't said anything yet to confirm or deny this, isn't this closer to "trashy, salacious gossip about an ACTOR"?!
Regardless -- whatever the exact level of "gossip" this falls under, it's still basically celebrity news and therefore I completely agree this has no business on Slashdot. I used to make jokes here about how we tend not to pay have stories about stuff most people seem to care most about -- and my classic examples were sports and celebrity gossip.
Depends more on the tea. If you're using fannings or broken leaves, then sure, you'll get sediment. If you're using whole-leaf, not as much, though the tendency for breakage depends on processing and drying.
I definitely get almost zero sediment with a high quality whole leaf such as white silver needle tea (Bai Hao Yinzhen White Tea).
Yeah, when you're using a style of tea that's minimally processed and dried directly (white tea) and specifically hand-plucked for large whole leaves (silver needle), then yeah, you won't get sediment. If you have a more heavily processed whole-leaf tea (e.g., most black teas) that go through a lot more oxidation and other chemical processes before drying, they'll be more fragile, and you'll likely end up with some sediment even from high quality teas unless you're careful to shake off the broken bits before brewing.
Are you talking about TFA at all? There was no "survey" here. And, as usual, the media headline exaggerates the research and distorts it. The original paper makes no claim about the "perfect" coffee, only modeling some of the extraction rates and coffee concentration (which they claim is related to "quality" but they don't describe that any further or specify which is "better").
You probably won't even be able to convince a large enough test group to validate the results anyway, and bringing math into the equation is as useless as bringing math into the bedroom.
I already linked the original article above and discussed it a bit. Frankly, this "study" sounds like what would happen if you took a couple beginning grad students in chemical engineering and put them in a room where they were so tired and caffeine deprived they started applying their diffusion models and mass transfer to coffee... and then a math grad student walked in and said, "Hey -- let's not use the numerical approximations... I can do some fancier symbolic stuff and get some cooler equations."
And suddenly you have 10 pages of complex equations to tell you that big grains don't extract as much coffee.
Well, I found the original article here. After skimming the PDF, it looks like they spent a whole bunch of time playing around with complex diffusion equations to model a very basic drip coffee setup. As they note in their conclusion, actually applying this model to actual drip coffee machines (which have various input methods for water), not to mention the varying geometry of drip coffee brewing apparatuses, would require a lot more complexity.
So, I still don't quite get what the big deal is, since this just models one not-quite-common-in-the-real-world scenario apparently with idealized geometry and other parameters... though I just skimmed the article. Perhaps someone else will find something more interesting from looking at this actual article link more closely.
We're reaching audiophile levels of absurdity when it comes to coffee preparation methods. I shouldn't have to do chemistry in order to drink coffee.
I don't know that anyone is suggesting that you have to "do chemistry" to drink coffee. If anything, at first glance, the approach from TFA sounds like a much more rational idea than advocated by many coffee aficionados (whom, I agree, can take this stuff to crazy levels).
I don't know the details, but it sounds like a really basic model that should be able to generate a basic table or something -- i.e., grind size X will have effect Y on coffee output, extraction time, perhaps component balance, etc.
That said, the way the article presents it is REALLY basic. it also sounds like these guys are quite naive. From TFA:
"The really surprising thing to us is that there are really two processes by which coffee is extracted from grains. There's a very quick process by which coffee's extracted from the surface of the grains. And then there's a slower tail-off where coffee comes out of the interior of the grains."
I get that these are MATH profs, not chemistry (or chemical engineering) profs, but have they not heard of basic fluid dynamics, diffusion, mass transfer, etc.? Is this "really surprising" that most extraction occurs quickly at the surface and takes longer to come from the interior? Even if you haven't taken a course that would cover such processes, surely this makes common sense?
What I frankly find "really surprising" is that work like this doesn't already exist. Surely with all the coffee brewing going on around the world, there must be oodles of studies in industrial food processing journals about optimizing coffee extraction rates. What's new here exactly? That a couple naive math professors decided to play around with their morning brew? Oh, they're doing drip filtering? What's so special about the math there?
(P.S. Maybe there is actually something novel here. But the BBC story frankly makes these "researchers" sound like naive idiots to anyone who knows anything about chemistry.)
This hasn't happened to me (that I know of), but I've definitely seen a number of reports of people ordering "true Amazon" products and getting what appears to be a product from a 3rd-party seller from their "fulfilled by Amazon" warehouse portion. I don't know how often it happens, but it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon tried stuff like this to increase efficiency in distribution and shipping.
As the summary notes, there's no way Amazon can police the system adequately with the way it currently functions. At best, it can hope to dissuade some counterfeiters through threat of litigation.
However, to my mind, the real problem is Amazon's lack of transparency when it comes to evaluating and purchasing products from 3rd-party sellers. Amazon will just default to a lower priced listing from some random company, and unless you're paying attention, you could end up purchasing from someone else. There should be a much stronger "flag" that goes up before you can do this -- otherwise, Amazon risks getting sued for liability when people think they're purchasing stuff "from Amazon" but they get defective crap from somewhere else.
But one further issue -- what about linking product reviews (particularly for "verified purchases") to SELLER? If I'm going to be purchasing a product X from company Y rather than Amazon, I should be able to -- in some easy fashion -- just get reviews of X from Y.
I'm sure we've all seen reviews on Amazon that say, "I purchased batteries from [this company], and they're fake!" It should be transparent to find such reviews. So even if the product X has 1000 reviews with an average of 4.5 stars, if the 20 reviews from company Y say, "Beware -- this thing is a piece of junk, not as advertised!" a customer has a chance of making a more informed decision.
(Obviously, lots of reviews on Amazon are fake anyway, and there's all sorts of problems there too. But this would at least be something a customer could try before just blindly purchasing a product from some random 3rd-party company.)
The media just keeps right on pouring gasoline on the fire so long as it sells news.
Of course they are. That's what they always do. How do you think it is that we ended up living in something closer to a police state in the past decade or so? Media and politicians playing up minimal terrorist threats to work the public into hysterics. Is anyone surprised that the media is fanning the flames now?
Speaking of which -- you know who is the master of "pouring gasoline on the fire" to get media coverage? Mr. Trump. We probably can look forward to at least 4 years of hysterics, perhaps from both sides.
He should be given the chance to lead and be judged on his actual decisions, not what we think he might do.
Agreed, and there has been a lot of hyperbole going around in the past week. HOWEVER, I think it's perfectly reasonable to judge Trump on the basis of previous statements, campaign statements about his intentions and policies, etc.
Most of the articles I've seen tend to take the worst things that Trump has actually said and assume he might actually do them. (You know, like we do with every other candidate.) Frankly, that should be fair game for a critique.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want a better populace, you're going to need a better public school system that teaches students more than just numbers and facts. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to examine the world around them, and how to leverage the internet as a nearly unlimited resource, while being wary of the ability for any random jack-hole to post some spurious shit on their blog.
Our public school system was NEVER designed to do such things. As someone who has actually taught within it, I know the history. It was designed to train obedient factory workers -- seriously, timed classes with students responding to bells? Look back at some sources from the early 1900s, and you'll see people explicitly talking about how the system was designed to imitate factories. Real in-depth learning doesn't take place in neatly managed 45-minute blocks, sounded to an end by a buzzer.
At first, this sort of thing was just about primary education -- train kids with basic reading and math skills; enough to survive as a basic factory worker. (The huge influx of immigrants in the late 1800s, many of whom didn't have the tradition of going to grammar schools that was already in place in the U.S. even in the early 1800s, led to these reforms.)
But then it spread to secondary schools. Why? Because of the problem of dangerous "young radicals." Kids back in the early 1900s, like teenagers in any era, tend to be more rebellious. You had a LOT of young folks taking up with socialist causes, unions, etc. in the 1910s and 1920s, so suddenly we had compulsory education laws requiring kids to attend school beyond primary level. (Before the 1930s or so, it was pretty common in most of the U.S. for working-class kids to leave school at somewhere between 4th and 6th grade.) And the Great Depression that followed led a bunch of kids to "stay in school" in an attempt to get better educational credentials for jobs -- sound familiar??
So, what do we do with these "young radicals"? Increasing child labor laws and protections for young workers forced them out of jobs even before the Depression, so you end up with a bunch of idle teenagers who are bound to get up to all sorts of mischief. So, we get them off the streets and force them into classrooms, where we can indoctrinate them with good social values like civil obedience. Around this time, we also see the proliferation of alternative high school curricula -- for vocational or technical tracks. Previously, almost all secondary schools in the U.S. had been centered around "deeper learning" as part of a college-prep curriculum.
Oh yeah, there were other goals in educational reform too... some quite noble. But we tend to forget that the design of public education was never about "advanced learning." Take a look at the high-school curricula from the late 1800s sometime, before the movement for mass secondary ed. The standards were a LOT higher, and they continued to be high in the 20th century in private academies and such. The new PUBLIC schools were mostly designed to get the rest of the riff-raff off the streets and get them to submit to authority.
Now, in that context, you can understand why all of the rhetoric about "teaching critical thinking" in public schools has been an uphill battle. The whole system was originally rigged against that... it wasn't designed to promote "free thinking," because that's antithetical to many of the primary goals of the system.
Racism - he's cool with it
Actually, I'm reasonably certain when asked in an interview about it, he turned to the camera and said "STOP IT." And his spokespeople keep denouncing it. On the other hand, he's appointing Bannon, and he's avoided directly denouncing the more "white nationalist" elements of the alt-right. (Let's not rehash the arguments over with Bannon is or isn't actually racist, okay? Let's just note that there's a significant group of people associated with some of Bannon's causes who DO encourage and use racist rhetoric, so his appointment will inevitably be construed by some of those supporters as condoning such rhetoric..)
But anyhow, whatever you get from this confusing set of signals, I'm pretty sure this isn't ANY different from how Trump acted in his campaign. He'd say he wasn't racist while at the same time waffling and hedging when someone suggested that he was supported by David Duke or others. The general gist of his campaign seemed to be, "I'm not overtly supporting racism, and I may not big a huge fan of it, but I'll take the support from wherever it comes and won't go out of my way to denounce my racist supporters."
Far from being a "lie" -- I think Trump is basically maintaining that same line now.
Make America Great Again - he hates the first amendment, hence his badgering & blocking the media - they shame him w his own words.
I'm not sure that Trump has so far proven much worse in terms of the First Amendment than many recent presidents. ("Free speech zones," anyone?) And there have been plenty of wars with the press in previous administrations, generally over publication of "secret" stuff, which generally ended up embarrassing to the government.
The main difference with Trump, as you note, is that he (1) tweets nasty things about the media, and (2) seems to avoid talking to them (which you call "blocking"). But (1) is actually his First Amendment right. And (2) is also his prerogative -- previous administrations tended to have a cozy relationship with the press, but there's no mandate (from the First Amendment or elsewhere) that he communicate with the press in those ways.
Personally, I think it's a VERY bad sign if he refuses to do so, because it short-circuits opportunity for debate, and his proposal to ban reporters from the press corps is VERY disturbing (depending on the criteria he uses to do it). But doing so is no violation of the 1st Amendment, nor is it somehow infringing on 1st Amendment rights to refuse to talk to the press or allow a representative into the White House or whatever. The press has every right to publish what it wants, but they have no right to automatically get a seat in the White House press room.
If Trump starts going around and shutting down newspapers or silencing media outlets, THEN we have a 1st Amendment issue. But just refusing to talk to them, or let some reporter into his press corps? There's nothing in the Constitution that requires him to do so.
Now, if Trump follows through with his threats to "open up libel laws" (whatever that means), I suppose that could be a threat to 1st Amendment rights. But ultimately that's a matter for the courts to decide. We used to have lower standards for libel in the U.S., but they were raised through a series of SCOTUS rulings.
And even most of the conservative justices on the court would be loathe to overturn the current "actual malice" standard, so I doubt Trump would make any headway here, even if he got to appoint a couple justices.
Finally, again -- I don't think Trump "lied" on this point. His loathing of the press has been clear throughout his campaign. Precisely how did he "backpedal" on this stuff?
No, it's a good deal for sports fans if everybody else helps pay for it.
Agreed. While I suppose anything's possible, I cannot imagine that Amazon could keep the price of a Prime membership at $99 and ADD live sports (unless it gutted existing stuff included in Prime). Sports channels usually cost more than any other service in existing cable packages -- ESPN alone now charges about $7 per month from cable companies from subscribers. (Note that the MEDIAN fee per channel is about 15 cents.) And ESPN has huge ad revenue too. Is Prime going to make widespread use of ads too?
I know that the sports licensing folks are probably eager to reach cord-cutters, but I can't imagine they're going to settle for a fraction of what ESPN pulls in now... which means either Amazon's Prime cost goes way up to subsidize the sports package, or Amazon begins to offer a separate "Prime + Sports" package that costs more... perhaps double (or more) the current Prime cost.
If you get invited to an orgy and visit the orgy, there should be the assumption that you are there for sex.
You're shifting the goalposts from our previous discussion. An "orgy" is different from someone "offering sex" which is different from randomly grabbing the crotch of a stranger without permission. Let's try to be clear about what we're talking about.
If you don't want sexual contact, you would not be at the orgy. It is your decision to be there, and your decision to stay.
Agreed. Completely different situation from walking up to a stranger and grabbing their crotch.
I have been hit on by women who want things. It was my choice to accept or rebuke the offers
Did they randomly walk up to you and grab your crotch? Or when you say "hit on," do you mean something more like verbal cues, maybe a little "dirty talk" or innuendo, smiles, maybe a touch on a shoulder or hand or some reasonable part of your body that acquaintances might occasionally touch? That's quite different from grabbing a stranger's genitals.
You are a liar if you have never heard "guy talk" or "girl talk, unless perhaps you grew up a eunuch in a monastery.
Huh? Where did I say I've never heard "guy talk"? If you want to believe Trump's comments were just bragging about stuff that didn't happen, or exaggerating, or whatever, that's fine. I'd prefer it if my president didn't say such things where he might be recorded, but whatever. (You hadn't previously taken the argument that way -- that changes the interpretation significantly, if you're not taking Trump's words literally.)
BUT if what he literally said is true, and he walked up and grabbed genitals of women who were not previously known to him, that's concerning.
How about you stick to what he says ?
I quoted him exactly near the end of my post. I have no idea if he ACTUALLY committed sexual assault (though there clearly are some women who have accused him of it). But the way he phrased it strongly implies that he did, or at least that he was okay with it.
OR all he said was just "locker room talk" and bragging about stuff he never actually did. Which is fine (I guess), if that's what you believe. But if you take what he said literally, it's disturbing.
And oh -- I also was REPLYING to another post by the way. My post wasn't only about Trump. In general, I think the whole concept that "I think she wanted it" when she doesn't say so has historically been used to excuse way more cases of sexual abuse (or at best, unwanted sexual advances that a woman just "went along with") than it has been for cases of women who want a man to "take charge."
Finally, keep in mind that we're talking about encounters apparently between strangers. It's definitely different if you're in a relationship already with someone and sexual "touching" is okay to try to get someone in the mood or whatever. With a stranger -- particularly if you're in a position of power -- you want some sign of approval or permission before grabbing genitals. Sorry, that's not only the moral but the legal thing to do... whether you're Trump or anyone else.
(I frankly cannot believe I actually had to say that to someone.)
Thank you for your post. Sincerely. It's one of the best written things I've read here on this topic, as it has been rehashed dozens of times over the past couple weeks.
People seem to want to focus all the attention on potentially biased news sources or whatever, but as you rightly point out, there are HUGE amounts of actual, literally FAKE news -- where everything in the story is false -- circulating and being passed around. Some of it is from trolls. Some of it is people writing parodies and hoaxes. Some of it is from propagandists on one side or the other. But a lot of it is actually FAKE. Not "biased" or "distorted" or "up for opinion" Literally asserting that things happened which did not (and the writer knows they did not).
But while we're all here debating the nuances of whether CNN or Fox or whatever is really all that bad -- this literal made-up crap is flying around the internet.
I'm NOT in favor of censorship. But should Google work to try to get this made-up junk that is LITERALLY FALSE from appearing in a "news feed"? Yes. Should we perhaps try to create some sort of tags for sites that are known "parody" or "hoax" sites, so people can ID them at the outset, rather than passing them around as if they were fact? Maybe. We all know about "The Onion," but there are plenty of other lesser known or more subtle sites like this, which we KNOW were sometimes passed around by prominent leaders in the past election cycle as if they were fact.
Don't censor the trolls. But for clear, egregious cases of outright falsehoods, I think at least labeling them somehow to make them easier to stop is perfectly reasonable.
A groupie hanging with musicians offering sex is not committing sexual assault any more than the musician who sleeps with the groupie.
Let's try again, shall we: If the groupie GRABS THE CROTCH of the musician WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION, that is sexual assault. Period.
"Offering sex" is different from literal unwanted physical sexual contact. When one says, "offering sex," that usually means something implies a verbal offer. Maybe a physical cue. Grabbing someone's genitals is MORE than merely "offering sex" -- it is acting with belief that the recipient already has approved the "offer."
"Offering sex" in an inappropriate context MIGHT constitute "sexual harassment" at best. And yes, in those situations, context may be much more ambiguous. But it is NOT sexual ASSAULT.
The fact that you seem unable to understand that distinction has gone beyond "logic failures." I'm actually disturbed by your willingness to excuse criminal behavior. I have no idea whether Trump actually committed sexual assault against any women, but IF he grabbed a stranger's genitals without her permission, he DID commit an assault. That's pretty much the legal definition of the term.
It's not sexual battery, it's normal human sexuality. Asking at every turn would turn off most women because it shows a lack of confidence.
Yeah, except when you are in a position of power over them, in which case you are using your position of power to force them to excuse your behavior.
Sorry, but when you have a power imbalance in a relationship, it's important to verify that what's happening is actually okay. Just assuming they'll "let you" is NOT appropriate. Forget about sexual assault for a moment -- have you never in your life been put into an awkward position by someone who had power over you, and you felt you couldn't "say no" or else risk something significant (e.g., job, money, etc.)? I certainly have.
Much more mundane example -- I've been in a few job interviews over the years, for example, where I was asked blatantly illegal questions. After I once answered such a question honestly, I was then asked to reveal that information in front of a larger interview panel at the outset of an interview, obviously meant to bias the panel against me. All very problematic.
But did I object when they asked me to talk about that? They job was a REALLY good one. What was I supposed to do if I wanted a chance at the job? At best, I hoped by going along with their request, I'd get the sympathy of some of the panel for the fact that some of their colleagues were doing something deliberately immoral (and indeed I did get some sympathy, as the interview turned very awkward).
But at what point do you "say no" in a situation where it could hurt your career?
Anyhow, now, imagine you're a young woman just starting a career and a powerful billionaire comes up to you and starts kissing you and grabbing your crotch. Your options are: (1) go along with it, (2) wriggle out of it as gently as possible and hope he just doesn't do it again, (3) reject him but say nothing and hope he goes away, or (4) reject him and file charges. No matter what goes on, it probably turns into a "he said/she said" media fiasco. So, (4) is a tough choice to make. Either (3) or (4) possibly has a negative impact on your career, due to this guy's power. So, if you really don't want it, but don't want to ruin your chances, at best you try (2). If you're willing to actually prostitute yourself, you do (1).
But in ALL FOUR SCENARIOS, you were basically assaulted, because you didn't want him touching you.
I cannot believe that people would defend such nonsense. Trump says explicitly "I don't even wait." Wait for what, exactly? Permission? A sign of interest? Nope -- "I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
Not they "want you" to do it. No, they "let you" do it. Which means it's more than likely that some of these women fall into one of the four categories I mentioned above.
Is a groupie guilty of sexual assault when they try to sleep with band members, actors, actresses?
Did the groupie grab the crotch of the band member/actor/actress without permission? Then, yes.
How about a more general woman who understands how to use sex appeal trying to sleep with people in power positions to get power?
Did the "more general woman" grab the crotch of someone "in power positions" without permission? Then, yes.
It is not a one sided issue, and you can't seem to follow a simple 30 second conversation.
No, it is you who seems interested in derailing a conversation by introducing irrelevant details into a conversation that's about something different. Yes, "sexual assault" might be ambiguous in some cases -- I don't think anyone here is denying that there can be ambiguity in personal interactions sometimes.
But you seem loathe to admit that if a person KNOWINGLY AND DELIBERATELY grabs someone else's crotch without their permission, that IS sexual assault. Period.
This is the same CNN site that declared math is racist
Really?? This again. Didn't we just have this discussion yesterday? Oh yeah, we did. And in the subsequent discussion, a bunch of people replied to you and said, "Actually, no, if you READ that story, that's NOT fake news -- CNN had a bad and inflammatory headline, but the content is pretty reasonable."
STOP IT. Yes, you can find stuff where CNN has bias or distortion. But you're doing precisely what the "fake news" headlines often do here -- you link to something with an incendiary headline betting that no one will actually read it. And the few people who do read a "fake news" article will often discover it doesn't quite make sense, or the headline was bad, or even that it's a complete parody.
There is actual "fake news" out there. Outright fabrications of events that never happened. Parodies and hoaxes. Your link -- whatever its problems -- isn't it.
For most everybody else though networking is their little way of telling the world here am I and these are my skills, recognition by other professionals is key to making a career.
The question is whether social media is actually effective "networking" for most people, and whether its networking benefits outweigh its dangers.
Social media kind of reminds me of what people used to do a couple decades ago in attending job fairs and some sort of "mixer" or party to "network" among peers and potential employers. (I assume some people still do that, too.)
Anyhow, while it is possible to make contacts at such things, the REAL networking takes place in private conversations. People you have coffee or lunch or drinks with. They actually get to know you a bit, and they'll support you for a job or promotion or mention your name when their buddy says, "Yeah, we have an opening looking for X."
How much of that actually happens from random Facebook friends or whatever? A prospective contact or whatever you "friended" after a 3-minute conversation at a party isn't going to recommend you on the basis of your cute cat pictures.
And, in fact, the OPPOSITE is more likely to be the case with social media, because it's NOT like going to some huge anonymous party and trying to mingle to "network." Instead, you tend to broadcast posts and tweets to huge numbers of people. One poorly thought out political post, and suddenly 30% of those "contacts" you've so carefully friended decide, "Huh... yeah, I don't like this person's views" and they won't be considering you for anything.
I am officially "friends" with a lot of professional colleagues on Facebook (where I almost never post anything), but what matters in terms of my career are the personal contacts I have with some subset of those people -- when I grab a drink with them on occasion or at a conference, when I seek out there advice or keep in touch about ongoing stuff in our careers. THAT is networking. Not friending or tweeting at people you barely know, expecting that they're going to want to employ you on the basis of your status updates.
In a world where YouTube "stars" earn six-figure salaries, and social media "celebrities" are earning far more than that, you're struggling as to how anyone would ever think that posting on social media could lead to anything in the first place??
It may be narcissistic and nonsensical, but recognize what society AND business actually reward these days related to social media. Cold hard cash is the justification, and that's hardly a strange premise.
Yeah, except compare the number of "YouTube sensations" to the number of posted videos never viewed by more than a few dozen people or whatever.
Becoming a "social media celebrity" is like becoming of pop music star. Yeah, it can happen, but for every person who "makes" it, there are 10,000 wannabes out there, doing karaoke at the local bar.
Is there money to be made in social media? Sure, but unless you find a very particular niche or a truly innovative thing to do with it, your chances of making it big are perhaps just a little better than playing the lottery. Merely posting random junk every hour like everyone else does on social media won't make you stand out... hence, I'm pretty sure the message of TFA was you have much better luck getting a job if you instead devote that time to developing actual skills.
I'm confused as to why the author would ever think that posting on social media could lead to anything in the first place. Very strange premise.
I could be reading it wrong, but I think this is sort of a spin on the old "networking" and contacts to get jobs trope. "It's not what you know, but who you know" and all that.
A social media presence keeps you in contact with lots of people, and I suppose the idea is that it's kind of like what people used to do in the old days -- going out and hanging out at the "right" parties, getting drinks with the "right" people, etc. Then when it comes time to get the job or the promotion or whatever, I guess everyone's supposed to say, "Gee, he posts great cat pictures! Let's give him the job!"
I jest a bit, but not much. I suppose if you're looking for a job that will involve posting on social media, then obviously having a social media presence might be important for getting that job. Otherwise, my experience is that any social media connections are generally much more shallow than even the staged dinners people used to hold (do they still?) for "networking" purposes. I absolutely agree that "knowing the right people" is important for finding a job -- but I have doubts that your social media presence is the way to do that. At best, you maintain some tenuous connection to a "friend" you've barely met, who might chuckle at your cat photo. At worst, you post some political story to your feed without thinking and end up alienating 30% of potential employers you took such care to "friend."
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I am officially "friends" through social media with many colleagues in my field (though I basically never post anything there), but the people who are actually going to help me if I want to get a different job or whatever are the people I talk to in person, the people I get coffee or lunch or drinks with, the people who actually KNOW me... not some online spectre of me.
Aristotle had it right -- moderation is critical. Personally, I participate very little in social media, and I have strong concerns (as do many people here) about stuff like Facebook's policies and agendas. That said, if you're willing to put up with that stuff, I don't see a problem with someone maintaining a social media account just to, for example, keep up with the activities of old friends and acquaintances. I know some people who don't even seem to know how to use email anymore, so this is the reality of the world we live in.
TFA is talking about a completely different scale of a social media use, which lamentably has become the norm for many people. There's this belief that activity on social media promotes your "personal brand" and that constant updating and activity is necessary.
But I agree with TFA that good, solid work comes from time, attention, and reflection. In an era of short tweets and Facebook/blog updates every hour, the person who can actually write something more than 140 characters coherently stands out. Someone who can make an argument in prose -- not just rehash existing stories like some bad computer algorithm -- they can get noticed. Perhaps not by the online rabble (who can't be bothered to read beyond a headline). But if you want to impress someone for a job or promotion, your want to stand out from the crowd, not join in its continuous ephemeral (and meaningless) din.
The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. "When you're on your fifth story of the day and there's no editor because the editor's been fired and there's no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don't have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up," she says.
So, this is it. Journalism is too tough because the business of news is too tough. Seriously?
Yeah, I have to agree that this excuse is pretty bad. What they're really saying is that reporters are incapable of fact checking themselves, which is truly sad because there's more info out there that is easily accessible than ever before in history.
Seriously. I do research on the internet all the time, both for part of my job and for other things where I'm just curious about stuff. There are resources at my fingertips now that reporters and fact-checkers could only dream about a few decades ago.
Yes, you need to use common sense, you need to have a good BS detector, and you need to learn what counts as a reputable source (hint: Wikipedia doesn't). But it's easier to find most information than it ever was throughout history.
So what's really the excuse here? Reporters are overworked and underfunded? I can believe that. But "so you have to Google it yourself and you don't have access to any academic journals or anything like that" is NOT an excuse for messing stuff up. (1) Google is an invaluable resource (as are some other more specialized search engines), which can lead you to other reputable databases or sources, (2) while lots of academic journals are paywalled, there's plenty of free stuff online (just try Google Scholar, as a start) particularly for older stuff, and for more recent stuff, more and more scholars are finding ways to archive pre-prints etc. online. And I could go on... but online research is pretty awesome these days if you know how to use it. I'm guessing the biggest problem is that people these days were never taught how to actually find things via search engines (using advanced search options and using verbatim full-text search to narrow things down). Unfortunately, the fact that most people can't use search engines efficiently has led Google and others to "dumb down" the way things work and try to give you what they "think you want" rather than the literal results of your exact query.
Still, even with such impediments, there's no excuse for not being able to find information these days.
His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
Exactly. Even before I could reach the closing sentence of the summary, I was trying to figure out what this situation had to do with "science" or even cryonics. This was just a dispute between parents over a kid. Nothing to see here.
I wouldn't exactly say it's "trashy, salacious gossip about actresses" when the actress herself is saying it. One might actually even question the slightly sexist assumption in the way you phrased that -- given that Ford apparently hasn't said anything yet to confirm or deny this, isn't this closer to "trashy, salacious gossip about an ACTOR"?!
Regardless -- whatever the exact level of "gossip" this falls under, it's still basically celebrity news and therefore I completely agree this has no business on Slashdot. I used to make jokes here about how we tend not to pay have stories about stuff most people seem to care most about -- and my classic examples were sports and celebrity gossip.
Guess I was wrong.
depends on how you filter the loose leaf tea.
Depends more on the tea. If you're using fannings or broken leaves, then sure, you'll get sediment. If you're using whole-leaf, not as much, though the tendency for breakage depends on processing and drying.
I definitely get almost zero sediment with a high quality whole leaf such as white silver needle tea (Bai Hao Yinzhen White Tea).
Yeah, when you're using a style of tea that's minimally processed and dried directly (white tea) and specifically hand-plucked for large whole leaves (silver needle), then yeah, you won't get sediment. If you have a more heavily processed whole-leaf tea (e.g., most black teas) that go through a lot more oxidation and other chemical processes before drying, they'll be more fragile, and you'll likely end up with some sediment even from high quality teas unless you're careful to shake off the broken bits before brewing.
Pointless bullshit surveys are pointless.
Are you talking about TFA at all? There was no "survey" here. And, as usual, the media headline exaggerates the research and distorts it. The original paper makes no claim about the "perfect" coffee, only modeling some of the extraction rates and coffee concentration (which they claim is related to "quality" but they don't describe that any further or specify which is "better").
You probably won't even be able to convince a large enough test group to validate the results anyway, and bringing math into the equation is as useless as bringing math into the bedroom.
I already linked the original article above and discussed it a bit. Frankly, this "study" sounds like what would happen if you took a couple beginning grad students in chemical engineering and put them in a room where they were so tired and caffeine deprived they started applying their diffusion models and mass transfer to coffee... and then a math grad student walked in and said, "Hey -- let's not use the numerical approximations... I can do some fancier symbolic stuff and get some cooler equations."
And suddenly you have 10 pages of complex equations to tell you that big grains don't extract as much coffee.
Well, I found the original article here. After skimming the PDF, it looks like they spent a whole bunch of time playing around with complex diffusion equations to model a very basic drip coffee setup. As they note in their conclusion, actually applying this model to actual drip coffee machines (which have various input methods for water), not to mention the varying geometry of drip coffee brewing apparatuses, would require a lot more complexity.
So, I still don't quite get what the big deal is, since this just models one not-quite-common-in-the-real-world scenario apparently with idealized geometry and other parameters... though I just skimmed the article. Perhaps someone else will find something more interesting from looking at this actual article link more closely.
We're reaching audiophile levels of absurdity when it comes to coffee preparation methods. I shouldn't have to do chemistry in order to drink coffee.
I don't know that anyone is suggesting that you have to "do chemistry" to drink coffee. If anything, at first glance, the approach from TFA sounds like a much more rational idea than advocated by many coffee aficionados (whom, I agree, can take this stuff to crazy levels).
I don't know the details, but it sounds like a really basic model that should be able to generate a basic table or something -- i.e., grind size X will have effect Y on coffee output, extraction time, perhaps component balance, etc.
That said, the way the article presents it is REALLY basic. it also sounds like these guys are quite naive. From TFA:
"The really surprising thing to us is that there are really two processes by which coffee is extracted from grains. There's a very quick process by which coffee's extracted from the surface of the grains. And then there's a slower tail-off where coffee comes out of the interior of the grains."
I get that these are MATH profs, not chemistry (or chemical engineering) profs, but have they not heard of basic fluid dynamics, diffusion, mass transfer, etc.? Is this "really surprising" that most extraction occurs quickly at the surface and takes longer to come from the interior? Even if you haven't taken a course that would cover such processes, surely this makes common sense?
What I frankly find "really surprising" is that work like this doesn't already exist. Surely with all the coffee brewing going on around the world, there must be oodles of studies in industrial food processing journals about optimizing coffee extraction rates. What's new here exactly? That a couple naive math professors decided to play around with their morning brew? Oh, they're doing drip filtering? What's so special about the math there?
(P.S. Maybe there is actually something novel here. But the BBC story frankly makes these "researchers" sound like naive idiots to anyone who knows anything about chemistry.)
This hasn't happened to me (that I know of), but I've definitely seen a number of reports of people ordering "true Amazon" products and getting what appears to be a product from a 3rd-party seller from their "fulfilled by Amazon" warehouse portion. I don't know how often it happens, but it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon tried stuff like this to increase efficiency in distribution and shipping.
As the summary notes, there's no way Amazon can police the system adequately with the way it currently functions. At best, it can hope to dissuade some counterfeiters through threat of litigation.
However, to my mind, the real problem is Amazon's lack of transparency when it comes to evaluating and purchasing products from 3rd-party sellers. Amazon will just default to a lower priced listing from some random company, and unless you're paying attention, you could end up purchasing from someone else. There should be a much stronger "flag" that goes up before you can do this -- otherwise, Amazon risks getting sued for liability when people think they're purchasing stuff "from Amazon" but they get defective crap from somewhere else.
But one further issue -- what about linking product reviews (particularly for "verified purchases") to SELLER? If I'm going to be purchasing a product X from company Y rather than Amazon, I should be able to -- in some easy fashion -- just get reviews of X from Y.
I'm sure we've all seen reviews on Amazon that say, "I purchased batteries from [this company], and they're fake!" It should be transparent to find such reviews. So even if the product X has 1000 reviews with an average of 4.5 stars, if the 20 reviews from company Y say, "Beware -- this thing is a piece of junk, not as advertised!" a customer has a chance of making a more informed decision.
(Obviously, lots of reviews on Amazon are fake anyway, and there's all sorts of problems there too. But this would at least be something a customer could try before just blindly purchasing a product from some random 3rd-party company.)
The media just keeps right on pouring gasoline on the fire so long as it sells news.
Of course they are. That's what they always do. How do you think it is that we ended up living in something closer to a police state in the past decade or so? Media and politicians playing up minimal terrorist threats to work the public into hysterics. Is anyone surprised that the media is fanning the flames now?
Speaking of which -- you know who is the master of "pouring gasoline on the fire" to get media coverage? Mr. Trump. We probably can look forward to at least 4 years of hysterics, perhaps from both sides.
He should be given the chance to lead and be judged on his actual decisions, not what we think he might do.
Agreed, and there has been a lot of hyperbole going around in the past week. HOWEVER, I think it's perfectly reasonable to judge Trump on the basis of previous statements, campaign statements about his intentions and policies, etc.
Most of the articles I've seen tend to take the worst things that Trump has actually said and assume he might actually do them. (You know, like we do with every other candidate.) Frankly, that should be fair game for a critique.